Parenting a la Rossini

It has been some time since I've posted a MidWeekMuse, so this might be considered … an easing back into the habit?

It came to mind the other day because, well, some days parenting looks like this film, 3:12-6:45.

Then your other half comes home, and it looks more like 7:25-8:49.

Then you try to put the children to bed, and it looks like 18:56-20:51.

Then when they're asleep … I'll let you select your favorite part of the conclusion.  Zitti, ziti, piano, piano?  Or Amore e fede eterna si vegga in voi regnar?

Oh, and, fwiw,"Who's Afraid of Opera" is a great series for kids.

This Alone

"... Anyone of whom it could be said at the end of his life--'he did the will of God'--is perfect.

"And we must be clear about this; there is no other way of being perfect.  All the exercises of religion we have mentioned--prayer, reading, the sacraments, dialing Communion, the Mass--however holy in themselves, are only means to an end.  Their use and practice, however frequent and fervent, do not constitute holiness.  They are a great help to holiness, but holiness itself is something quite different.  Holiness is something which affects every moment of our life, something which is rooted in the depths of our being.  It is a permanent union with God, a constant abiding in Christ by lovingly doing His will, always and in all things.

"This alone will make our life fruitful.  We see the saints praised for their great works; we are told of their great talents, their organizing ability, their keenness of intellect, their excellence of judgment, their literary skill, and their extensive learning.  They are famous for their ingenuity, their originality, their initiative, their miracles, their apostolic success, their power over souls.  In a word, they are presented to us as great men and women.  And we are tempted to think that the possession or the achievement of such greatness, if it is not holiness itself, is at least an essential part of it.  The truth is quite otherwise."

               ~~Boylan, This Tremendous Lover, ch. 15.

Patria

At Mass yesterday Monsignor made the observation (based on his welcome upon his first visit to Italy) that home is not so much where one is born and raised as where one feels most at home; the paradigmatic case of this truth, he added, is that earth is less our home than the heaven that we have never seen.

Thomas Aquinas, of course, calls heaven “patria,” the homeland or, more literally, the fatherland.  For the Jews there was the promised land of Israel, for the Romans the patria—that is, Rome and its Empire.  Christianity, adopting the eschatological significance of Jerusalem and the Roman term patria considered its true home to be heaven.

But the pull of earth is strong, and the desire for patria remains even amongst those who have left Christianity behind.  Thus, of course, the Nazi conception of Vaterland took on a salvific edge that the Romans, to whom the Nazis preferred to liken themselves, surely never included in their thoughts.  Thus the mild error of many nations, of crediting their earthly polities with more longevity and significance than belongs to any institution of human nature, was taken to a deadly extreme.

There is, of course, an equal and opposite error (as Aristotle and C.S. Lewis would surely remind us), perhaps more common in the West today, of insisting that there be no human patria.  Mostly people label this as a liberal or progressive or leftist or globalist error, even as people consider too excessive devotion to the human patria to be a vice of the right.  What people tend to forget is that—as the former U.S.S.R. showed—the “liberal” error can be just as deadly.

I suspect it is not a coincidence that Stalinists and Nazis produced more horrific versions of their respective errors than, say, the Whigs and the Tories, or than anything we have see yet in America today.  The Whigs and the Tories were still Christian, by culture at least, and the idea of the heavenly patria hovered in the air they breathed like a friendly miasma, an inoculation of sorts against too great an excitement at secular political solutions.  America today, in contrast, is post-Christian, and while the heavenly patria is a legend for most and a fact for only a few, it is not a real rival to secular ideals; American secularists on either side of the aisle have no great religious concept of patria on which to model their acceptance or rejection of nationhood.  It was only the age that actively rejected Christianity that saw both the exaltation and the negation of political patria take on a demonic shade.  Whether the rejection and the demonization (demonification?) were effect and cause, and which was which, or whether both were caused by some third thing, I cannot guess; but surely the coincidence was no accident.

In any case, history would seem to suggest that the rejection of Christianity, far from being a purely liberalizing phenomenon, comes with its own problems.  And anyone concerned over the return of an unhealthy nationalism would be wise to make Christianity their friend rather than their enemy; for in a right understanding, nothing could be more salutary in adjusting notions of the human patria than a firm belief in and a rightly ordered love of the patria that is the Christian heaven.

To Understand All

It is a drunk undergraduate who spouts the maxim “To understand all is to forgive all” in Evelyn Waugh’s masterful Brideshead Revisited.  If memory serves, the young man is hauling away Sebastian from Charles Ryder’s window, the former having just leaned across the sill to deliver what should never have come up outside his insides.  Sebastian, of course, makes an elegant apology to Charles, and so the friendship begins.

So, when I found the phrase again in Boylan some time ago, it had a familiar ring to it.  Boylan takes the phrase quite literally, and treats it as a good thing: if we understand our fellow men, he suggests, we will be charitably forgiving towards them.  This was more or less the way I understood the phrase in Waugh (and, indeed, perhaps before Waugh: for I fancy it was familiar even before that, though I could not name an earlier encounter).

Thus it was with some surprise that, googling the origins of the line (“a French proverb”), I found that two of my top results were denials of the very charity I had thought was central to its meaning.  An academic questions whether the old saw is true, with regard to ourselves or our neighbors; and Rod Dreher considers it “a warning about the dangers of too much empathy.”  Now it must be admitted that, in the context in which Dreher wrote those words, it is definitely possible to imagine an excess of empathy.  But I am not sure that the maxim is really about empathy at all.

To empathize, the dictionary tells us, is to participate in another’s feelings or ideas.  And one can certainly envision a naughty Frenchman suggesting, with a wink and a nod, that anyone who felt the way a certain young man is feeling would no doubt act as the young man acts—and suggest, accordingly, that anyone who feels with the young man ought to forgive him.  But of course, as Dreher points out, this would be wrong; and, as the psychologist suggests, we are not usually persuaded by such “arguments” anyway.  We are, fortunately, upright hypocrites.  In the words of W.S. Gilbert:

Oh I was like that as a lad!

A shocking young scamp of a rover!
I behaved like a regular cad.
But that sort of thing is all over!
I am now a respectable chap,
And shine with a virtue resplendent;
And therefore I haven’t a rap
Of sympathy with the defendant.

Knowing how bad a person is, because we were just as bad, really doesn’t—at least, really shouldn’t—lead forgiving them, much less to ignoring their faults (which is different from forgiving).  Parents do not stop disciplining their children because they remember what it felt like to throw a temper tantrum—au contraire, the better the memory, the more firm and consistent (not the more harsh or strict) the discipline will be.

But there is a difference between empathizing and understanding.  Understanding is a broader word, and in some senses means much the same as empathizing; but its particular sense, at least as Boylan uses it and as I understood it—the only sense in which the line “To understand all is to forgive all” has a really positive and moral content—is “to grasp the meaning of.”

Things have meaning with respect to a larger situation.  To ask “what does this mean” is to point away from the this, the boy, the sunset, or the street, at something larger: the ways of the city, in themselves and as they lead to larger cities; the revolution of the seasons and the growth of crops and warmth and an end to hunger at the close of the day; the desires of the father and mother and the perpetuity of the family and love and Socrates and immortality itself.  That is what we mean when we ask for meaning.  We want to know were we stand with respect to the whole.

The largest whole of all of course is God.  Dante’s picture gives us that, and intuition, and the Renaissance saw beloved of Browne that God is “a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”  And so understanding—distinct from wisdom, which is of God, and knowledge, which is of truths in general—is that kind of human thinking which connects the things of earth to the things of God.  Synoptic.  Shakespearean.  Chestertonian.

And this is the sort of thing, I think, that can and should forgive badness, when Dreher’s “empathy” does but should not.  For understanding, true understanding that does not put oneself in relation to the sin, but puts the sin in relation to God, can at one and the same time estimate it at its true horror, and forgive.  For God alone has the synoptic vision that can make even sins “behovable”; and only in God can we forgive some things.  Indeed, it is perhaps only in God that we ought to forgive anything.

~~~

When I was thirteen, Mrs. Bennet was the most insufferable literary creation in the library.  Now that I am past thirty, I feel a good deal more forgiving towards her.  And I haven’t even a marriageable daughter!

Now that is understanding.

Every Single Thing that Happens

"From this point of view every single thing that happens to us carries in some way the mark of the choice of God.  Logically we must extend that even to our sins, inasmuch as God chooses a universe in which He permits it to happen that certain sins are committed.  It is true, the will responsible for this particular sin is this particular created will which decides to sin, and thereby offends God and incurs the guilt of sin.  Nevertheless, if it afterwards identify itself with God's will by repentance and by accepting the divinely willed consequences of its sin, it can apply to itself St. Paul's principle, To them that love God, all things work together for good."
               ~~Boylan, This Tremendous Lover.