“Because there was no room for them at the inn.”

Those words, some of the most poignant in all of Western literature, words which have inspired countless treasures of music and iconography and devotion, may be a mistranslation.

That is the suggestion of Ian Paul, an Anglican theologian who argues that the Greek word kataluma which St. Jerome rendered diversorium and most English Bibles translate “inn” may well mean simply, as it does elsewhere in the Gospels, “upper room.”

… the actual design of Palestinian homes (even to the present day) makes sense of the whole story. … most families would live in a single-room house, with a lower compartment for animals to be brought in at night, and either a room at the back for visitors, or space on the roof. The family living area would usually have hollows in the ground, filled with straw, in the living area, where the animals would feed.

—mangers, that is, which would provide a natural place to rest a baby.

Paul provides a few other reasons, aside from the philological one, as to why the traditional picture of the Holy Family alone in a stable or cave may be lacking in historical accuracy: most notably, the hospitality customs of the Middle East would have made it nearly impossible for St. Joseph not to have been received by some of his relatives.

Read the rest at the Register.

Not the Perfect Family

Not the Perfect Family

At Mass Saturday night Father chanced to remark that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are referred to as “the Holy Family” rather than “the Perfect Family.”

The principle can, of course, be taken too far.  “Perfect” in its Latin root means thoroughly or completely made—as we might say in modern English, “finished” or perhaps “perfected.”  And in that sense, the Holy Family was quite likely the most perfect family in history, because they totally fulfilled their roles (to use traditional terminology) or totally fulfilled themselves (as we have said since the sixties)—which, if both phrases be rightly understood, comes to the same thing.

But of course, not every family looks like the Holy Family.  Indeed, they had what might well be described as a nontraditional arrangement, inasmuch as Joseph was Jesus’s foster father, etc., etc.  And from that fact, broken and blended families can take heart.  There is a normal, a normative arrangement of father, mother, and biological children; but exigencies ranging from death to any number of lesser evils can change that shape.  And when need imposes a different order upon a given family, it is comforting to think that they still have as good a chance (speaking supernaturally, though certainly not by nature) of being a “perfect family.”  Not the “perfect” arrangement of a father, mother, and two or twelve children; but perfect in the way that the Holy Family was perfect: in their dedication to “My Father’s business” which is summed up in that other line: “Little Children, love one another.”

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.

The Death Penalty and the Nature of Human Government

As the Register has reported, Pope Francis’s recent request for a reformulation of the catechism’s language on the death penalty (as relayed in the official CDF letter, which can be read here) has met with both cheers and concern among faithful Catholics.  While theologians and philosophers debate the proposed change and its implications for understanding the Church’s development of doctrine, a certain amount of confusion has arisen among ordinary lay Catholics due to the language used in the letter.  The key paragraph (#2) gives three reasons for revising the Church’s standard language on the death penalty.

If, in fact, the political and social situation of the past made the death penalty an acceptable means for the protection of the common good, today [1] the increasing understanding that the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes, [2] the deepened understanding of the significance of penal sanctions applied by the State, and [3] the development of more efficacious detention systems that guarantee the due protection of citizens have given rise to a new awareness that recognizes the inadmissibility of the death penalty and, therefore, calling for its abolition.

The third reason is one that applies to modern states (if not, perhaps, to some third world countries), and constitutes a simple reiteration of an argument made by many Catholics, including notably Pope John Paul II — namely, that modern prisons being more or less break-proof and humane, the common good is equally protected by the incarceration of criminals as by their execution.  This is a prudential judgment—a claim that the death penalty is not necessary, rather than that it is absolutely wrong—and as such is readily aligned with previous generations of Catholic teaching.

The first reason is more complicated.  The wording—“the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes”—presumes (a) that the death penalty necessarily is more contrary to human dignity than life imprisonment and (b) that there is only one sense of human dignity.  It is largely on these two points that theologians and philosophers have their debates; and as I am only an amateur on this topic, I will not venture into that minefield.

The second reason, however, is a matter of history; and here I have something to suggest.  The CDF letter says that today we have gained a “deepened understanding of the significance of penal sanctions applied by the State.”  The words are vague.  One plausible reading is that we now realize (based on new psychological studies, etc.) that penalties such as life in prison are in fact appropriate and sufficient responses to crimes such as murder, while the penalty of execution is excessively cruel.  (Of course, what constitutes the appropriateness of a punishment is another question—one to which, again, the professional philosophers and theologians are welcome.)

There is, however, another sense in which the modern mind has gained a new notion of the state’s penal sanctions; and it has to do with our understanding of the nature of the state.

Read the rest at the Register.

Why the Martyr Wears a Crown

At the end of June and beginning of July the calendar of the universal Church is marked by the feasts of a number of well-known martyr-saints.  June 29th marks the solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, preceded on the 28th by Irenaeus and followed on the 30th by the First Martyrs of Rome; Thomas More and John Fisher had their feast the previous week; Oliver Plunket, Thomas the Apostle, and Maria Goretti the following week.  Mid and late July is thinner, but the little-known bishop St. Apollinaris has his feast on the 20th, and St. James on the 25th.

The presence on the calendar of so many martyrs raises the question—more striking with the martyrs of more recent eras—of the martyr’s crown.  The phrase is a familiar one, and the concept is old: a fifth-century fresco from the catacomb of St. Gennaro (unfortunately under copyright) shows Sts. Peter and Paul carrying their crown of martyrdom in their hands.

The crown is perhaps a puzzling symbol in our day and age.  The martyr’s palm is more easily explained: the palm branches from Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, linked to the suffering and the victory of his passion and death, makes their association with the martyr’s sufferings commonsensical.  But in our (almost) post-royalty age, the martyr’s crown may seem outdated: a relic of times when we thought leaders of countries required a shiny thing on their heads to impress their subjects, or possibly to mark them out in battle.

I would not deny that a crown serves those functions as well: like any singular article of clothing, it marks its wearer out.  But there is a significance to decorating, indeed, to glorifying the head, which goes beyond mere convenience.  The head contains the brain, the seat of the mind; it is associated with wisdom, insight, good judgment … Perhaps the king wore a crown not merely to impress, but to remind his people and himself that his job was above all to be wise, to rule justly, to judge with “epikeia” (roughly: “reasonableness”).  That perhaps is part of the reason why English judges long retained the practice of wearing enormous and ridiculous wigs: because (on some unconscious level) people felt that they looked more impressive and specifically more wise and therefore worthier to be judges.

Read the rest at the Register.

Homo Erectus

My long-running obsession with justice and judgment (fed by the current dissertation chapter) has made the words pop out everywhere; Scripture, of course, is full of the ideas.  And in mulling over the Hosea reading mentioned in my last post, it occurred to me that the obsession may appear a little grisly to anyone not writing an academic chapter focused on the topic.  “Justice” brings to mind such disturbing phrases as “the justice system” or “Justice Kavanaugh”; our ear catches at a word and surrounds it with the auras of other words with which we are used to hearing it matched.  Nor is it of any help if our mind interposes the more apropos phrase “a just God,” for it is generally uttered these days in doubt or mockery or, at best, when trying to lay doubt and mockery to rest.  Justice sounds like a sham; and if it dares enter our heads to think of real justice, most of us (we tell ourselves rightly) tremble.

I think it need not and ought not to be that way.  The Hosea reading suggests that there is a sort of incipient “justice” we human beings should cultivate in our lives on earth; if we do that, we need not fear when Divine Justice rains down.  But I think one can go farther than the cryptic metaphors of the Old testament prophet.  His image of our justice springing up to meet Another’s coming down, with its insistence on the perpendicularity of the arrangement, calls to mind another common translation of whatever biblical word is being rendered in English as “just”: upright.

Just, upright, erect.  The former two are synonyms, as are the latter two, although the first and the third do not share a common meaning.  But with good reason Hosea calls up the image of grain growing erect towards the sky: there is a coordination between standing erect and being just, an inherent symbolism that is not a merely human invention.  The etymology tells the story: the thing that we call just is also called being upright; to be just is our birthright as human beings, and what distinguishes us from other animals; it is no terrifying external imposition; it is as natural to us (in one sense) spiritually as walking erect is physically.  We stand erect because that is an image of how we ought to stand internally: upright.  To be upright, that is, pointing up at the sun, is natural for flowers that draw from its rays their strength.  In an upright human being who does the same, we say briefly and without comprehension that he is “just.”  What we really mean is that, like the sunflower, he stretches naturally towards the Sun of Justice from which all the rectitude of his nature comes.

Sanctity Has a Beauty that Will Save the World

The Tuesday, July 3 edition of NPR’s “All Things Considered” celebrated the anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae with the headline “50 Years Ago, The Pope Called Birth Control ‘Intrinsically Wrong.’”  The story focuses on how the Church’s stance on contraception has led Catholics to contravene Church authority.  Sources include a Jesuit at Boston College (whose Jesuitical charism enables him to twist the Thomistic insight that “‘bad law … breeds contempt for good law’”); a Georgetown researcher; a baby boomer puzzled by how contraception offends God; a millennial who equates NFP with “the ‘rhythm method’”; a divorced mother of seven; a divorced female lay minister; and a priest who finds the word “believe” problematic.

To believe NPR, pro-encyclical representatives have little to say for themselves: Mary Eberstadt is quoted in generalities, an archbishop talks about a desire to retain the Church’s “uniqueness,” and a lay Catholic is concerned about the dilution of an unspecified “‘message.’”  But such “revisionist” views are, according to NPR, in evidence only among “some Catholic conservatives” reacting to “the move toward a more tolerant approach under Pope Francis.”  The piece ends by noting that American Catholics mostly don’t accept the prohibition on contraception, and (according to the Georgetown researcher) “‘The American Catholic church is assimilating ever further into American culture.’”

It is hardly accidental that the piece ran a day before July 4: it reads like a veritable declaration of independence from Church teaching.  Superficially, the main teaching in question is contraception.  But disagreement about artificial birth control is not really the heart of the matter.  What is at stake is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the family.

For the NPRs of the world, the family is defined by the individuals who make it up.  Every family, they argue, is like every person unique: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”

On the other side, followers of Pope Paul VI share Leo Tolstoy’s belief that happy families are all alike.  This does not imply that happy families fit a certain rigid structure, that they all practice the same hobbies, or include a certain number of children.  Tolstoy’s axiom suggests rather that there are certain important factors upon which the happiness of a family depends.  According to this viewpoint, while families possess their own unique cultures, a “family” must meet certain baseline criteria in order to be happy—and, to extend the principle, a family must meet a certain baseline definition in order to be a family at all.  This view defines a family in the strict sense as a man and a woman who live together in a way such as is liable to produce children.

That is where the orthodox Catholic’s quarrel with NPR truly lies.  That definition of family is the root matter in dispute when arguments about contraception, IVF, donor babies, divorce, abortion, polygamy, transgenderism, or gay marriage surface.  Sister Lucia of Fatima wrote that “the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family."  If she was correct, then NPR’s latest sally is but one of many in this long-drawn-out war.

But why is there a war at all?

Read the rest at the Register.

Who's to Judge?

At Mass recently we heard a famous passage, recognizable even to many a non-Christian.  Pope Francis has riffed on it, and it is a familiar element in the arsenal of moralists of the ilk of retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Jesus said to his disciples: “Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.”  (Matt. 7:1-5)

The common interpretation of the passage assumes that recognizing that an action is bad is identical to “judging.”  According to this interpretation, it would be “judgmental” to inform the alcoholic that his addiction is compromising to himself and his family!  The absurdity of that reading—obvious in the case of such an example—makes for an easy target; and it is healthy to occasionally remind ourselves and our friends that fraternal correction is not per se wrong.

But that is only a negative interpretation; what the passage does not mean.  It does not mean that we should gloss over sin.  But on the other hand, it clearly refers to a real problem (why else would the Holy Spirit have seen to it that those particular words were recorded?).  And I suspect that, as with much of the Gospel’s advice, the words hit closer to home than most of us would like to acknowledge.  Arguing about what the words mean for our current politico-social debates is safer than considering how they apply to our day-to-day lives with family and friends.

Read the rest at the Register.

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/feingold/whos-to-judge

Happy Lent

Every now and then in signing off on an email, one Catholic to another, I have to restrain myself from employing the phrase “Happy Lent!” as a complimentary close.  “Happy Easter” most people understand; but the idea of Lent as “happy” sounds off, at least in modern English.  Since most people would take it as sarcasm, I usually refrain.  But really, Lent is happy.

Mind you, I am not an utter barbarian: I would no more wish anyone a “Merry Lent” than I would express hope for their “merry death.”  That’s not just because “Merry Christmas” has different associations than the more solemn “Happy Easter.”  It’s because “merry” and “happy” actually have different connotations, even different meanings once word detection scrapes beneath the surface.  The first sense that the OED gives for “merry” is “That causes pleasure,” and most of the derivative senses of the word involve “pleasant” or “pleasing.”  The second major sense of “merry” is “Characterized by happiness or joy”—which makes sense, since “happy” and “merry” are sometimes treated as synonyms. 

Similarly, the secondary senses of “happy” “relat[e] to pleasing appropriateness or aptness” (italics added).  But the first senses of “happy” are those “related to good fortune.”  It is under this sense that the Beatitudes are sometimes translated with the word “happy,” even though that leads to some rather curious and (ahem) infelicitous combinations, e.g., “Happy are they that mourn.”  (Or, in the Old Testament, “Happy the man whom God chastises.”)  It is probably better on the whole, modern English being what it is, that “blessed” has been almost universally adopted instead; like “consubstantial,” it has the advantage of being a word that we all know we don’t quite understand, and thus cuts down on more serious misunderstanding.

But etymologically “happy” does suggest what the word “blessed” also aims to convey: the idea that one is fortunate.  It comes from the same root hap that yielded “happen” and “happenstance.”  Originally, all three were relatively neutral words relating to luck, lot, or chance.  But somewhere along the way some bright people (who were almost certainly Christian, and might recently have been discussing Romans 8:28) got the notion that, Providence being what it was, every hap that happened to a man was ultimately for his good.  So “happy” came to mean not merely “eventful” or “having stuff happen” but specifically “having good stuff happen, fortunate.”

Read the rest at the Register.

On Being Fair

A recent foray into the world of parenting books led me to the painfully familiar concept of being “fair.”  While this is not (yet) a personal concern, I can well remember times growing up when things seemed “unfair” amongst my siblings.  Without doubting that our parents intended the best for all of us, it was easy to feel that they had on this or that occasion made a mistake.  More mature years sometimes corrected that impression by validating the parental point of view; at other times, not.  In either case, the fact stands: however good the parents are as parents, their children will oftentimes think them unfair.

The parenting expert whose work I was reading encouraged parents not to worry about this—in fact, he made it a life lesson for the children.  Parents, he wrote, should tell their children from an early age that they (the parents) will not always be fair—indeed, when children complained, he suggested that the parents flaunt their “unfairness” rather than back down.  After all, the expert observed, parents are better judges of situations than children; and anyway, quite frankly, life itself is not fair, so the kids should get used to it!

Interestingly enough, in the concrete examples the expert gave, he did not actually suggest unfairness.  In counseling a couple with two boys, he proposed that one week they buy shoes for one and next week a shirt for the other; another time they might choose to take one boy out bowling, and a few days later take the other out to the movies.  Depending upon which boy coveted which item or experience more, this behavior still might be perceived as unfair by the boys.  But it was quite evident that the expert was concerned that there should be no real inequality between the children in terms parental treatment.  He was advocating tough rhetoric, but not meanness in action (which is, whatever else one may say about it, a better balance than the reverse).

The curious thing about this subterranean fairness is that the expert ignored the possibility (which he elsewhere acknowledges) that sometimes children really shouldn’t get comparable things from their parents (much less the same things at the same time).  And this apparent unfairness may actually be fair.  If, for example, one child shows a real talent for music and a willingness to work hard at it, must you ensure that his sibling has an equivalent hobby, even if that sibling has shown less interest, aptitude, and enthusiasm?  This goes still more for academic expertise: some kids are smarter than others, and it’s not unreasonable for parents to invest more in the schooling of those who take to schooling.  Similarly in sports, it is not necessarily the case, though one child is on a team K through twelve, that every other child must also be, in Fairness’ Name.  To be sure, the parents may decide that two or three years of a sport or instrument are necessary enrichment, and that all their children must finish high school.  But it hardly follows that that every child needs to get the same amount of “enrichment points” (assuming that those could be accurately calculated, which I rather doubt).

This may not feel fair when you seem to have gotten the short end of a particular stick.  But maybe a short stick was all you were equipped for—maybe you really didn’t have the talent for a longer one.  And if so, the unfairness is God’s fault (pardon the expression), not your parents’.

This is all sounding rather harsh; let me put it another way.  Consider the etymology of the word “fair.”  Recall how Tolkien uses it.  “Fair” in older literature (or literature which adopts an older style) does not mean “just.”  Indeed, the first sense of “fair” given by the Oxford English Dictionary is “Beautiful, agreeable” (AI); secondarily, fair means “Beautiful to the eye; of attractive appearance; good-looking” (AI1).  It is only after a long series of applications of this sense of fair to various objects, from women to animals to words, that we arrive at AII, where “fair” is defined as “Favourable; benign; unobstructed,” e.g., “fair weather” or “fair circumstances.”  All the way down at AII14 we get the modern sense of “fair”: “Of conduct, actions, methods, arguments, etc.: free from bias, fraud, or injustice; equitable; legitimate, valid, sound” (AII14.a.(a)); “Of a person: characterized by equitable or lawful conduct; honest, just; reasonable” (AII14.a.(b)); “Of conditions, circumstances, etc.: providing an equal chance of success to all; not unduly favourable or adverse to anyone” (AII14.b.).

This exercise is not designed to delegitimize the concept of fairness.  The point is rather its connection to the beautiful and the agreeable.  To understand what “fair” means in the modern sense, it is important to understand the older sense of the word, and thus also to understand what is meant by beauty.  Traditionally, beauty was defined in terms of proportionality, integrity, and clarity; the element of proportionality is most relevant here.  To be fair (old sense) was to have a proportionality, integrity, and clarity to one’s appearance or actions.  To be fair (new sense) is to act in a proportional way.  One does not give a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old the same size meal—that would not be proportional; it would not, in fact, be fair!  Admittedly, the five-year-old might complain that things are unfair when he sees big brother is getting two hamburgers and he only has one.  But the fact is (as his parents know) that if he starts with two hamburgers on his plate he’ll end up with a bellyache.

It’s easy to see this with respect to things like food, because the proportionality in terms of size is visible, tangible to even the most prosaic adult mind.  It’s harder, perhaps to see in other areas; but the fact of the need for proportionality is no less real.  The Communist dictum, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is as necessary in personal family dealings as it is damaging when applied to political life; for parents, unlike the government, are in a position to judge the abilities and needs of those whom they govern.  Perhaps they do not always do so perfectly, but they have both the right and the duty to make the attempt.  And if, at the end of the day, something truly disproportionate and unfair transpires … Well, kids, in the words of the expert, life isn’t fair.

Also, more importantly, your parents probably love you anyway.  And love from parents to children, beginning at birth and extending sometimes for far too long afterwards, is perhaps the ultimate case of unfairness, because it is frequently all out of proportion with the object’s just deserts.

I don't know about you, but I wanted to sit on the dog!

Source

Life

John 1:4:

“What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race.”

—from the USCCB readings for the Mass for Christmas Day.

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

—from the Douay-Rheims.

“In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum.”

—from the Vulgate.

“εν αυτω ζωη ην και η ζωη ην το φως των ανθρωπων.”

—from the Greek.

The precarious word here is “en” which, like a lot of Greek prepositions (and for that matter, English and Latin ones) is slippery in meaning.  It could stand for in, by, or with—and probably a lot of other things I don’t know about.  Jerome, obviously, chose to translate it “in.”  I suspect the USCCB translation is relying on the other meanings, especially “by”.  “By him was life” sounds very much like a clumsy or idiomatic way of saying “By his power, life came to be” (or, as the official translation says with more circumlocution, “What came to be through him was life”)—and this is especially true in the context of the preceding verse, where “He” is described as responsible for the making of all things.  So—with apologies once again to Jerome—“in him was life” is kind of weak sauce by comparison.

Why is this interesting?

Well, what does it mean to say that the Word of God, Who Is God—now incarnate as Jesus Christ—made life?  (Think for a moment about the curiosity that is life on the merely biological level, of its inexplicability; think too of the thing that we mean when we say “Now that’s really living life.”  This “life” is Divine in origin.  Explains quite a bit, doesn’t it?)

And further, what does it mean to say that the life that God created is “the light of men”?  (Light is that by which we see; it is also that by which we live, physically—not just because our sun happens to be hot and light coincidentally, but also because E=mcc and so forth.  That by which we live is also that by which we see; that by which we see how to live.  Is it too much to find in this line the seeds of the notion of natural law?)

A Story for Catholic Gentlemen (and Ladies Too)

As the Harvey Weinstein story continues to ripple outwards, the articles about the souring of our culture, particularly the souring of male-female relations, have flooded my newsfeed.  (If you haven’t been following the story, don’t bother: All you need to know is that a man in Hollywood took advantage of a number of aspiring actresses in the most abhorrent way.)

One effect of this scandal has been the appearance of #metoo across social media.  A number of my friends and acquaintances (mostly women, but some men as well) have put up the hashtag, many admitting publicly for the first time that they have dealt with some form of harassment or worse.

As I scrolled Facebook the day the hashtag peaked, I wondered whether it applied to me.  Two cases quickly came to mind, later a third … a fourth … a fifth … But all of them were so minor: guys, or even boys saying rude things that I didn’t for a moment take seriously.  And it seemed to me that it would be presumptuous, unhelpful, and ultimately untrue to type #metoo for a merely sassy remark when so many people have suffered truly serious injuries.

Of course, some would insist that these days even snark and sass need to be called out.  And it is true that language can be abusive, a sort of gateway drug to violence in a culture desperate for healing.  But then again, “pretty and smart” hardly rises to the level of abuse, any more than (in Shakespeare’s in Much Ado About Nothing) Benedick’s sneering at “My Lady Disdain” is cause for Beatrice to demand a duel.  There is a difference between harmless dumb jokes or rapier-like wit—and harassment.

Read the rest at the Register.

In Which We Wonder If Mass Is a Sacrament

Well.  That escalated … if not quickly, at any rate to a higher altitude than expected.  Apparently, at least over here at the Register, the topic of children’s liturgies is even hotter than Game of Thrones (pun obviously intended).  I don’t know whether to lament this as an instance of one of those regrettable skirmishes in the endless wars over religious nonessentials, or to take it as a net positive that people are more eager to defend their children’s souls than to defend their entertainment choices.  (Why not both?)

A few comments indicated points itching for clarification.  First, I confess that I have never attended or taught at a children’s liturgy—I’ve only watched the kids march out.  This does indeed preclude my critiquing children’s liturgies per se (although many of my readers, being more experienced, felt no such qualms).  But my point was not that children’s liturgies are bad (see disclaimers in the previous post) but rather that there are (at least for my family) better options.

Second, and more importantly, one commenter (“Sharon”) had this question:

Can I ask, though, in what way is Mass itself a sacrament?  I know we refer to the Blessed Sacrament, that comes to us at the Mass, but we don’t refer to the Holy Sacrament of the Mass.  I think I’m missing something, and I don’t like missing anything about what the Mass is!

Actually, I doubt Sharon is missing anything.  She was reacting to my statement that “The Mass is a sacrament—yes, even for those too young to receive Communion—and there’s an advantage to a young soul in being there, beginning to end, even if it isn’t always perfectly comprehensible to a young mind.”  That is, I think, substantially right; but Sharon is also right that we don’t speak of “the Holy Sacrament of the Mass.”

Read the rest at the Register.

The Count Is Seville

Today we got some fresh farmer’s market fruits and vegetables from a neighbor.  And today, researching how to use three enormous and very green oranges, I finally understood what had long been one of my favorite neglected Shakespearean lines.

It’s one of those difficult lines for actresses, thanks to pronunciation changes from Shakespeare’s day.  Any playgoer who consults his footnote will understand its meaning, but conveying the sense to a nube in the seats is nearly impossible.  It’s one of those fruity Shakespearean jokes that are, alas, ripe for the cutting.

In Much Ado About Nothing, poor Claudio has been informed that his Duke has stolen his girl Hero.  In fact, the Duke has interceded on Claudio’s behalf, and persuaded Hero to agree to marrying the handsome young soldier.  When Claudio’s friends go to collect him so that the Duke can break the good news, Claudio is, understandably, in a sour temper.  He puts on a show of indifference—after all, he can’t very well take a stand against his duke—but underneath he’s seething.  Hero’s cousin Beatrice explains Claudio’s ambiguous humor to the puzzled Duke in the following words:

The count is neither sad, nor sick, nor merry, nor

well; but civil count, civil as an orange, and

something of that jealous complexion.

The basic joke, as I mentioned, is explained in the footnote of any solid edition.  Beatrice is punning on the word “Seville,” which evidently in Shakespeare’s time must have sounded much closer to “civil” than it now does.  “Civil as an orange” would have been grasped by an audience as “Seville, like an orange,” the city in Spain being, presumably, known for oranges then as it is now.  (Incidentally, this is an interesting illustration of how changing vowel sounds are rarely so much of an issue as changing accents.  If, for example, we now pronounced “Seville” “SEE-vul,” the pun would still be easily rendered in speech.  The fact that we say “civil” “SIH-vul” and “Seville” “suh-VILL” is much more problematic.)

So much for the footnote.  Claudio is of the same jealous complexion as a Seville orange.  Recalling that jealousy is supposed to be green-eyed (itself a Shakespearean coinage—see Iago’s lines to Othello), one naturally supposes that Seville oranges must have arrived in England green, perhaps plucked green from trees by Spanish matadors in the off-season, and shipped to England unripe in order to survive the arduous voyage that even an Armada could not withstand.  Some tough fruit, that.

But no.  As I learned today, oranges are normally green.  I had only been getting half of Beatrice’s joke all these years.

The moral of this story?

(1)  Don’t put green oranges in the windowsill to ripen.

(2)  Never assume Beatrice is telling a lousy joke.

(3)  Always trust a duke named Pedro.

(4)  Shakespeare scholars don’t know everything, even the ones who get paid to write footnotes.

(5)  Someone should hire me to edit a new edition of Much Ado About Nothing.

(6)  We will never really see Shakespeare “the way his audiences saw him.”

(7)  Emma Thompson is an amazing actress.