Is it Chilly in Here? Scholastic Logic vs. Mystery

Anthony here. I have a friend who pitches his tent over in the Ukrainian Catholic branch of our universal Church, and we like to jab at each other about the relative merits of our respective traditions. He accuses the Roman tradition of being too scholastic, by which I think he means too exacting, too nitpicky, too coldly rational. The other day we had this little text exchange starting with the discussion of whether “gluten-free” hosts are valid matter:

Me: The USCCB approved some low gluten hosts. That’s probably what these are. Not truly gluten free but low enough not to cause a reaction.

Him: OK . . . this is all very scholastic for me. #leavened

Me: #scholasticsrock #gottabeexact #nofuzzylogic

Him: #mystery

Me: #touche

Now, I’ve heard before that Aquinas, the premier scholastic philosopher, is too coldly rational. But this has always puzzled me. My experience of scholasticism is of a great and thundering beauty, a profound insight into the Truth that underlies “life, the universe, and everything” (if I may use a Douglas Adams phrase for such a profound concept).

 

Fortunately it's more meaningful than this.

But then again, my first introduction to Aquinas came simultaneously with my first introduction to neoplatonism (Plato applied to Christianity) via C.S. Lewis, who is more an Augustinian than anything else. While I don’t find neoplatonism tenable when followed out to its greatest extent (it seems to lead to a denial of God’s freedom, concluding that he had to create because he pours out his being of necessity), it has a quality of transcendence (those wonderful Platonic forms!) that is beautiful and hits on an emotional level, especially when you relate it to God.

 

"I'm pointing up for a reason, you know."

We all long for some perfection, some ideal that we just can’t get on earth. Lewis delves into this in great depth with his concept of “Joy,” or sehnsucht, that piercing longing that is more wonderful than any other having, that comes unexpectedly and leaves almost instantly, but renders you breathless with wonder and clenched with aching loss all at the same time. It is brought on by little things – Lewis listed “the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan,’ the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves” (The Prilgrim’s Regress, afterward to the 3d edition) – but those things do not contain what you are longing for. They are shadows, reflections, pointers to some greater Ideal. Augustine’s insight was that this longing is ultimately for God. As he wrote, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

 

Restless heart.

Aquinas did not discard these beautiful insights of neoplatonism. On the contrary, his systematic explication of reality gives us logical reasons to believe that God really is our heart’s greatest longing. First he gives us insight into the nature of God, and then insight into our own nature, and we can see how these relate.

Aquinas demonstrates in his famous “Five Ways” not only that God exists, but what kind of a being he is. He is perfect being, complete in himself, relying on nothing else for his existence. For we humans, our nature does not include our existence. We could easily not exist. We receive existence from something outside of ourselves; it is added to our nature. But for God, his nature is existence. The two are one and the same. He is Being Himself.

It follows from this that he is also Goodness Himself. Goodness and being are the same thing. Evil is not a thing in itself but a lack of being, like a hole.

Not a thing.

When we say that a person is sick we are saying that their nature is impaired: they have a lack in their ability to operate as a human should. They lack the fullness of the being they are meant to have as a human. When we say that a human is evil we mean something similar: their human nature is impaired; they are not being all that they are meant to be. (This is because they are misusing free will to seek the wrong ends – I’ll get to that in a moment.) Goodness is being, so God, who simply is being rather than having being, also simply is goodness rather than having goodness.

God is also Truth Himself, because, as Aquinas says, “the truth is what is.” What is, is true, and what is not, is not true. “What is” is a definition of God, since his “is-ness,” his being, is his nature. What God is is Is. (That’s a fun sentence.) God’s “I am who Am” to Moses is an insight into his nature. So if God is Being Himself, or “Is-ness” Himself, then he must also be Truth Himself.

Definition of God.

Seeing the relationship of goodness and being and truth also helps us to understand beauty. As made famous by James Joyce, Aquinas said that beauty consists of integritas, consonatia, and claritas: integrity, proportionality, and clarity. Denis McNamara explains it succinctly in his book Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy:

In the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, a beautiful object is understood as one that gives the viewer knowledge of the inner logic of its being. As a quality of being, beauty is therefore not separated from being itself, and is made up of three constituent elements: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. Integritas, or wholeness, means that a beautiful thing has all it needs to have in order to be what it is. Otherwise it is deficient and less beautiful than it could otherwise be. Consonantia, or proportionality, speaks not only of the physical dimensions of a thing, but also of its correspondence to an ideal, most often to the “end” to which it is put, its purpose in being at all. Claritas speaks of the radiant clarity of a thing’s inner being, the power of a thing to impress knowledge of itself on the mind of a perceiver.

 

Integritas, consonantia, claritas.

If you want to know more about Aquinas’ thought on beauty there’s a more in-depth but still short and very plain-English explanation here.

As we can see, beauty can’t be separated from being. A beautiful thing is beautiful in that it has all of the being it needs to have for its nature, in proper proportion, thereby demonstrating that nature with a radiant clarity. I think we’ve all had the experience of “drinking in” something beautiful: a sunset, rolling surf, a mountain, a tree on a hill, a symphony, your wife’s beautiful face. You stare at it in a kind of awe and you even feel that it is speaking to you somehow; it is impressing you with its being, with its “it-ness.” You get a sense of what it is, what it truly is on a deeper level than would be explained by breaking it down and examining its parts (which is why modern reductionism tends to miss so much). It is precisely that “is-ness” of the thing that you are responding to.

(This is also why Mother Teresa was beautiful, even as a short, hunched woman in her eighties. I could do a whole post -- and probably will -- on why Mother Teresa, though lacking physical beauty, nevertheless had as a whole being more beauty than any modern supermodel or pop star. Bodily beauty is a real thing, but human beings are more than bodies and can be beautiful in more than physical ways.)

If beauty is directly related to being, then God, since he is Being Himself, must therefore also be Beauty Himself.

Aquinas is just as logical (and his logic just as surprising to modern minds) when talking about human nature. Starts with the concept of perfection. Perfection is a fullness or completeness of being according to the nature a thing has. So, for instance, an oak tree that grows to its full height and has a crown of leaves all busily carrying out photosynthesis while strong roots pull up water and nutrients from the soil, is fulfilling its nature as an oak tree. It is perfecting itself according to its nature. But an acorn that does not grow into a tree, or that grows into a stunted and unhealthy oak, is not fulfilling its nature to its fullest potentiality. It is imperfect.

 

Fulfilling its oak-ness.

Animals have more to their nature than plants. They are animated and sensory beings, that is, they are capable of moving about and of using their senses to perceive and to feel. An animal is perfected when all of the abilities of its nature are fully developed and operational. So an animal that is blind, or that has a lame leg, is suffering an imperfection.

Now, just as an animal has a nature with elements beyond what a plant has, a human being has a nature with elements beyond what an animal has, namely, the intellect and the will. Humans have the ability to reason, to abstract from particulars to universals. We also have the ability to freely choose between paths of action. Our perfection involves the development or “flowering” of both of these faculties. So an education is a good thing, as it develops our rational faculty. And the proper exercise of the will in choosing the good, i.e. virtue, is also necessary for our perfection.

Since God is both Truth Himself and Goodness Himself, he is the “final cause,” or ultimate end, of both the intellect and the will. He is what they are ultimately directed towards. And if our intellect and will are directed towards God, then they are also directed towards perfect Beauty, since God is perfect Beauty. So that glimpse of beauty that leaves us breathless, that moment of aching longing for some greater reality that gives the reality we see its beauty and goodness, is pointing us towards God. It is, as Tolkien said in Letter 89, a “sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê [constraint] of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.”

So yes, Aquinas is very systematic, very logical. But that logic is applied to our heart’s greatest longing. What Lewis had to say about "Joy" or sehnsucht matches what Augustine wrote about the longing for God ("our hearts are restless until they rest in thee") which in turn matches what Aquinas wrote about God being perfect Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. And it also means that truth and goodness and beauty are the same thing at the highest level. Which is why someone like Tolkien can so deeply demonstrate truth by entwining it with beauty. 

I think when my friend wrote "#mystery" he was not talking about a lack of knowledge, but that sense of a greater reality – call it Truth, Goodness, or Beauty, or simply God – that you can grasp or feel in a way that goes beyond reason. As Tolkien wrote in Letter 89,

I was riding along on a bicycle one day . . . when I had one of those sudden clarities which sometimes come in dreams. . . . I remember saying aloud with absolute conviction: 'But of course! Of course that's how things really do work'. But I could not reproduce any argument that had led to this, though the sensation was the same as having been convinced by reason (if without reasoning). And I have since thought that one of the reasons why one can't recapture the wonderful argument or secret when one wakes up is simply because there was not one: but there was (often maybe) a direct appreciation by the mind (sc. reason) but without the chain of argument we know in our time-serial life.

We might call this “apprehension via mystery,” a more direct apprehension of the reality underlying everything that exists than we normally get through a process of reason. But this apprehension is not opposed to reason; on the contrary it seems perfectly consonant with reason (which makes sense if it is an apprehension of something true, since reason’s goal is truth) though it was not arrived at through a process of reason.

For me, Aquinas’ rational explication does not diminish mystery in this sense, but offers an “apprehension via logic” that exists side-by-side with this “apprehension via mystery.” Suddenly I’m not feeling these things in a vacuum: I know what the feelings are and why I have them. I know what I long for. The longing is not any less beautiful, painful, or mysterious for the logical explanation; indeed it still transcends that explanation in a way that makes me think of Aquinas’ words after he had a mystical experience of God: “All that I have written is as straw compared to what I have seen.”

"Straw"

On his deathbed not long afterwards Aquinas asked that the Song of Songs be read to him. The greatest rational mind in history prepared himself for death with poetry.

This is my experience with the scholastic tradition. For me, it has always been mediated through imagination, visible in art, poetry, myth, and it appeals to me because of the beauty of both its flawless logic and what that logic gives insight to: my heart’s deepest longing.

No, I’ve never found Aquinas cold. 

Tolkien's Letter

So I've been re-reading the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien lately to prepare for the possibility of teaching a class on the great Catholic writer (pray for that to come to fruition!), and I came across one letter that moved me with its beauty and insight into so many things: the attention of God, guardian angels, miracles and "real life," happy endings, sanctity. The letter is so beautiful that I’m going to reproduce it here. Read slowly and savor it. :)

______________________________________

Letter 89   To Christopher Tolkien 7-8 November 1944 (FS 60)   20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

. . . . Your reference to the care of your guardian angel makes me fear that 'he' is being specially needed. I dare say it is so. . . . It also reminded me of a sudden vision (or perhaps apperception which at once turned itself into pictorial form in my mind) I had not long ago when spending half an hour in St Gregory's before the Blessed Sacrament when the Quarant’ Ore [Forty Hours Devotion] was being held there. I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it. (Not that there were individual rays issuing from the Light, but the mere existence of the mote and its position in relation to the Light was in itself a line, and the line was Light). And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God's very attention itself, personalized.

And I do not mean 'personified', by a mere figure of speech according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person. Thinking of it since – for the whole thing was very immediate, and not recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that accompanied it and the realization that the shining poised mote was myself (or any other human person that I might think of with love) – it has occurred to me that (I speak diffidently and have no idea whether such a notion is legitimate: it is at any rate quite separate from the vision of the Light and the poised mote) this is a finite parallel to the Infinite. As the love of the Father and Son (who are infinite and equal) is a Person, so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine: i.e. angelic. Anyway, dearest, I received comfort, part of which took this curious form, which I have (I fear) failed to convey: except that I have with me now a definite awareness of you poised and shining in the Light – though your face (as all our faces) is turned from it. But we might see the glimmer in the faces (and persons as apprehended in love) of others. . . . .

On Sunday Prisca and I cycled in wind and rain to St Gregory's. P. was battling with a cold and other disability, and it did not do her much immediate good, though she's better now; but we had one of Fr. C's best sermons (and longest). A wonderful commentary on the Gospel of the Sunday (healing of the woman and of Jairus' daughter), made intensely vivid by his comparison of the three evangelists. (P. was espec. amused by his remark that St Luke being a doctor himself did not like the suggestion that the poor woman was all the worse for them, so he toned that bit down). And also by his vivid illustrations from modern miracles. The similar case of a woman similarly afflicted (owing to a vast uterine tumour) who was cured instantly at Lourdes, so that the tumour could not be found, and her belt was twice too large.

Lourdes

And the most moving story of the little boy with tubercular peritonitis who was not healed, and was taken sadly away in the train by his parents, practically dying with 2 nurses attending him. As the train moved away it passed within sight of the Grotto. The little boy sat up. 'I want to go and talk to the little girl' – in the same train there was a little girl who had been healed. And he got up and walked there and played with the little girl; and then he came back, and he said 'I'm hungry now'. And they gave him cake and two bowls of chocolate and enormous potted meat sandwiches, and he ate them! (This was in 1927). So Our Lord told them to give the little daughter of Jairus something to eat.

"I'm hungry!"

So plain and matter of fact: for so miracles are. They are intrusions (as we say, erring) into real or ordinary life, but they do intrude into real life, and so need ordinary meals and other results. (Of course Fr. C could not resist adding: and there was also a Capuchin Friar who was mortally ill, & had eaten nothing for years, and he was cured, and he was so delighted about it that he rushed off and had two dinners, and that night he had not his old pains but an attack of plain ordinary indigestion). But at the story of the little boy (which is a fully attested fact of course) with its apparent sad ending and then its sudden unhoped for happy ending, I was deeply moved and had that peculiar emotion we all have – though not often. It is quite unlike any other sensation. And all of a sudden I realized what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and explain – in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you had read that I think I shall send it to you. For it I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (for which see the essay) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.

Eucatastrophe

Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. But since the author if it is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one was also made to Be, to be true on the Primary Plane. So that in the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian miracles too though less, you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us. I was riding along on a bicycle one day, not so long ago, past the Radcliffe Infirmary, when I had one of those sudden clarities which sometimes come in dreams (even anaesthetic-produced ones). I remember saying aloud with absolute conviction: 'But of course! Of course that's how things really do work'. But I could not reproduce any argument that had led to this, though the sensation was the same as having been convinced by reason (if without reasoning). And I have since thought that one of the reasons why one can't recapture the wonderful argument or secret when one wakes up is simply because there was not one: but there was (often maybe) a direct appreciation by the mind (sc. reason) but without the chain of argument we know in our time-serial life. However that's as may be. To descend to lesser things: I knew I had written a story of worth in 'The Hobbit' when reading it (after it was old enough to be detached from me) I had suddenly in a fairly strong measure the 'eucatastrophic' emotion at Bilbo's exclamation: "The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!'. . . . 

And in the last chapter of The Ring that I have yet written I hope you'll note, when you receive it (it'll soon be on its way) that Frodo's face goes livid and convinces Sam that he's dead, just when Sam gives up hope.

And while we are still, as it were, on the porch of St Gregory's on Sunday 5 Nov. I saw the most touching sight there. Leaning against the wall as we came out of church was an old tramp in rags, something like sandals tied on his feet with string, an old tin can on one wrist, and in his other hand a rough staff. He had a brown beard, and a curiously 'clean' face, with blue eyes, and he was gazing into the distance in some rapt thought not heeding any of the people, cert. not begging. I could not resist the impulse of offering him a small alms, and he took it with grave kindliness, and thanked me courteously, and then went back to his contemplation. Just for once I rather took Fr. C. aback by saying to him that I thought the old man looked a great deal more like St Joseph than the statue in the church – at any rate St Joseph on the way to Egypt.

He seems to be (and what a happy thought in these shabby days, where poverty seems only to bring sin and misery) a holy tramp! I could have sworn it anyway, but P. says Betty told her that he had been at the early mass, and had been to communion, and his devotion was plain to see, so plain that many were edified. I do not know just why, but I find that immensely comforting and pleasing. Fr. C says he turns up about once a year.

This is becoming a very peculiar letter! I hope it does not seem all very incomprehensible; for events have directed me to topics mat are not really treatable without erasions and re-writings, impossible in air letters ! . . . .

Your own father.

Beauty in Repetition

“All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. 

People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. 

But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. 

The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. 

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. 

It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. 

If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.”

~ G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

The Final Victory

Anthony here. I recently saw the movie The Hunger Games. I thought it was well done. Well acted. Very intense in parts. And quite true to the book.

I read the Hunger Games trilogy a few years ago, and thought the books were interesting. A lot of the themes, especially in the first book, made savvy points about our own culture’s love of spectacle, especially as exemplified by “reality” TV. We tend to filter out morality, to suspend our judgment of right and wrong in the service of a show. This has led people like Miley Cyrus to decide (not incorrectly) that what people want is spectacle, and remake themselves in that image.

Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games, also links her imaginary world to ancient Rome. The name of her country, Panem, is the Latin word for bread, a reference to the phrase “panem et circenses,” or “bread and circuses” — give the people food and entertainment, and you can effectively control them. As Bill Watterson observed when he turned Karl Marx’s famous phrase on its head: television is the opiate of the masses. In many way we have already descended to the level of ancient Rome.

Are you not entertained?

So I think that Suzanne Collins creates a very compelling dystopian future in which disturbing trends in our society are carried forward to a logical, and chilling, conclusion. Unfortunately, what Collins can’t give is any solution. At the end of the trilogy (SPOILER ALERT) no true victory is won. Katniss, the heroine, is a shell of her former self, slowly recovering after having gone almost insane. But there is no true recovery. The best she can do is fall back on her survival instinct. She will go on living because, hey, it’s what she’s good at. But she is thoroughly disillusioned. The new society is not any better than the old. She might have set them back a bit, but they have the same urges as the overthrown Capitol, the same darkness inside, and she knows that sooner or later it will come out again.

It is very bleak.

And I can’t help but contrast it to my favorite writer, J.R.R. Tolkien. A lot of what is presented in The Hunger Games Tolkien would have agreed with. He sensed that evil seems to constantly overpower what is good. He wrote in a letter, “I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat.’” In another letter, he expounded on the theme: “If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil . . . [E]vil labours with vast powers and perpetual success . . .”

Not exactly an optimist.

Vast powers and perpetual success. Observation would appear to bear this out. Evil seems more powerful than good. Good seems to be involved in a constant defensive struggle. A long defeat.

But I haven’t given you everything. In both those passages, Tolkien wrote more:

“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples of the final victory” (Letter 195).

“If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ‘causes’ and ‘effects.’ No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast powers and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in” (Letter 64).

It is this glimpse of the final victory that Tolkien has, and Suzanne Collins seems to lack. There is a moment in The Lord of the Rings in which we find Frodo and Sam struggling through the benighted, dying lands of Mordor, trying to accomplish a task so utterly beyond them that they have no room for hope. They keep going because to oppose evil is the right thing to do, even when victory seems impossible. They hide under some brambles against a rock face, and Frodo, weary from his burden, goes to sleep while Sam keeps watch. Struggling to stay awake, Sam looks out from the hiding place and glimpses, just for a moment, hope:

Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

That moment hits me hard every time I read it. I’m not sure there’s a more beautiful passage in all of fiction.

Ironically, what makes that passage possible is also what Tolkien’s critics have in mind when they speak of his story as being “simplistic” and “black and white.” They say that the characters are either all good or all evil, but this is manifestly untrue (Boromir, Denethor, Gollum . . .). So where does the accusation come from? From the fact that while the characters in Tolkien are not either all good or all evil, good and evil do exist (well, technically good exists – evil exists in the same manner that a hole does, as a lack or privation of some existing good. But that’s a topic for another post). Tolkien treats good and evil not as ideas that we create, but as objective, independent realities that we conform to. The characters in Tolkien’s story align themselves to these definite realities. So while a character might not be wholly good, he may still serve Good. And while a character might not be truly evil, he may still serve Evil. But this philosophy is alien to our modern world. The materialist worldview which characterizes modernity reduces everything to physical cause and effect, and thereby reduces good and evil to human ideas that do not correspond to any greater reality. In this worldview, to think too deeply about the human capacity for evil leads ultimately to nihilism. There is no solution, because there is no meaning at all.

Oh, the emptiness!

I don’t know Suzanne Collins’ background, but I suspect that she subscribes to this worldview. Most people do, to one extent or another, even if they don’t think about it directly, simply because it’s the dominant worldview of our time. Her story, especially in the final book, Mockingjay, conforms much more closely to the expectations of the critics of Tolkien: moral dilemmas without apparent answers, good characters doing evil things, et cetera. There doesn't seem to be a true, transcendent good that can be grasped and held onto, even in the midst of evil. Good is overpowered by darkness. That is why there is no transcendence or hope in the story. Ultimately, the best that the main character can do is simply survive. And even that’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Tolkien, on the other hand, believed in a final victory. While good appears to be fighting a defensive battle, it continually subverts evil, turning it to good in surprising moments. Tolkien coined a word: eucatastrophe, which he defined as a sudden happy turn from darkness to light, from defeat to victory, from sorrow to joy. The happy ending. In a letter to his son, Tolkien wrote:

“I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane . . . -- that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love" (Letter 89).

Eucatastrophe

Make no mistake: Tolkien understood evil. In The Lord of the Rings, even the victory over Sauron is just a respite. Sauron is defeated, but much good that existed before has been lost forever. Evil endures, and will rise in other places and other ways. But here’s the kicker: it will be defeated again. And again. And though it may seem that evil is constantly winning, still it will turn to good, again and again, until the final victory.

“Evil labours with vast powers and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.” Even if we suffer defeat now, even if we suffer it repeatedly, still we know that good will ultimately prevail. That may strike Tolkien’s nihilist critics as simplistic, but I, for one, am willing to live with it.

{teatime} What Are You Reading?

Via

Wow! Two posts in a day! Being sick makes one quite productive! :)

Here's a video response to Clare's teatime video posting at Come Further Up on the topic of "What are you reading?"

Until the next teatime!

Most Sincerely,

             Andrea Rose

Two Months of Marriage!

Anthony here. Andrea and I have been married for two months today! 

And what a busy two months they have been. :) We moved into a new apartment in a new town, we both started new jobs, and, best of all, we found out that we are expecting!

Our baby is almost an inch big!

What's amazing is how natural marriage feels. It's the biggest change of my life, but it feels very normal, very cozy, very right. I feel like I've been married for a lot longer than two months. This is life, and everything before it was in some way unreal. Before, I was missing something. Now, I am complete. 

It makes me wonder at all those poor guys these days who live with their girlfriends before getting married. Marriage should be a watershed moment. People nowadays kind of shuffle into marriage, with one eye always on the rearview mirror. They've been living together and sharing finances, and they've found that they can tolerate each other on the whole; might as well make it official. But the marriage marks no great change in their lives. Maybe the wife has more security now, because it'll be harder for the guy to extricate himself. Maybe the husband stops wondering about other girls, or going out as much with the guys. But nothing fundamental changes. They wake up the next morning to the same life, essentially, that they had before.

How humdrum.

Whereas in the old way of doing things, marriage is a crescendo. It is the grand finale of a symphony, the great crest of a breaking wave, the apogee of a thundering rocket. It is the climax of one story . . . and the beginning of another. The old way of viewing marriage sees it as the making of a new, greater reality, two becoming one. It's the start of a brand new life, a new kind of being for both spouses, with a new mission — a vocation, a great calling! As Chesterton wrote to his wife, "Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you.”

But I think that part of the reason for such a dull experience of marriage in our mundane modern age is that the vocational aspect has been lost. There's a perception these days that marriage is for yourself. It should serve you. So you test-drive your wife before you commit to her, and even your commitment comes with provisos. Find yourself regretting your choice? You can return your wife and look for a newer model. Kids, too, exist for your benefit. You have them on your timetable. If one comes when you do not want one, a few hundred bucks and an afternoon at Planned Parenthood (and maybe a little time spent pressuring your wife) is all that's needed to push the reset button. And why shouldn't we say that two people of the same sex can enter into the same self-centered relationship agreement? There's no good reason why not. 

I greatly prefer the Catholic position that marriage is not for you, but for the family, which means you are living for your spouse (and, later, kids as well) more than for yourself. You are no longer an individual, pursuing individual wants and whims. You are a part of a greater whole: a new family. You are a servant with a specific role, bound to that role by love — real love! Not self-serving emotion! Too many marriages end as soon as love ceases to act upon a heart that passively receives it, as a man passively receives entertainment in a movie theater. As soon as love demands that the man become the agent, active, willful in his love — a far more adventurous role! — too many men turn away, looking for another non-interactive love that will sate them without thought or effort. 

Granted, my idealism about love and marriage has not exactly been tested. I am, after all, married to the most beautiful woman in the world. Every day I am reminded by the mere sight of her just how lucky I am. But what a wonderful way to start a marriage! How much nicer this is than if we had spent two years living together and got married because it was convenient! I look at my wife, and I am filled with wonder. Her beauty leaves me astonished, babbling incomprehensible fragments of stillborn poetry in a fruitless attempt to capture in words something that exceeds words: the beauty of a human soul, the perfect design of a child a God, the wonder of eyes that contain a whole world, the marvelous otherness of her female nature, and the lovely herness of herself — and the startling, astonishing, impossible knowledge that all this has been given to me, to have and to hold, to guard and protect, to serve . . . and to love. 

This is marriage. 

All this, and yet this new beginning feels so natural and so right and so comfortable that I could have been married all my life. The newness of it helps me to see and to be astonished; the rightness of it makes me feel as though it is not new, but simply the way the universe is and has been since first the stars spun into being from the mind of God. Comfortable as an old sock; breathtaking as the first sunrise. It's a paradox that Chesterton would have delighted in — and probably did, since no man took up the adventure of marriage with more enthusiasm.

Think I'm over-idealistic? I've certainly been accused of that! Ask me in ten years, and I'm sure that my views on marriage will have developed. Developed, but not changed, not in their fundamentals. I will be wiser, the first rush of youthful enthusiasm will have been replaced by the steady appreciation of experience. But I will still believe the same. You see, the the nice thing about ideals is that even if you try and fail to meet them, you're still better off than if you have no ideals at all. And the nice thing about Catholicism is that it tells me that those ideals have a reality that does not depend upon me. Marriage is what it is. If I fail, it will be my own failure, not a failure of the reality of marriage itself. It will be because I fail to see and respond to the true nature and wonder of marriage, not because marriage lacks that reality. Because the ideal is the reality, and it is only we poor humans who fall short, whose blindness loses sight so quickly of the remarkable nature of marriage, the incredible gift of the other, the sheer awesomeness of God's plan. And that gives me the courage — not to mention to the access to grace! — not to fail. I have only to conform myself to reality rather than setting myself against it, to open my eyes repeatedly to the wonder of our marriage, and above all to place myself trustingly in the hands of the Love from whom that reality pours, and my poor, earthly, reflective love will be lifted up and brought into Love Himself, and fulfill its purpose.

Meantime, I get to be married to the most beautiful girl in the world. 

No exaggeration.

Am I lucky, or what?

Planting!

I had intended to create a terranium with a lid, but I couldn't find any pretty glass containers with lids! So I settled on these neat cylinder jars from Walmart. I placed some colorful rocks on the bottom, followed by potting soil and then put in the plant! It was super easy and I love the look! 

Geranium

I believe the back plant is a species of Dracena...

I think I may make a few more to place around the apartment.