Learning to Create

One of the rules of good parenting seems to be to allow oneself to be interrupted.  I am not, of course, talking about permitting older children to blatantly interpose their questions and comments into the middle of adult conversations; rather, I am thinking of those moments in the day when one is in the middle of some household task—washing, weeding, folding, cleaning, cooking—and is asked to “Build somefing” or “Draw somefing.”  Sometimes it may be good for a child to learn to wait; but sometimes it is good to be a child with the child.

I recently realized, though, that while these requests are frequently vague invitations to companionship (make “somfing”), I rarely succumb to producing an offering of my own brain.  I do not, in other words, offer to draw a train, a car, or an airplane, or indeed any specific thing.  Rather, I say, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw it.”

I suppose the impulse was born of the tired creativity of a creative writer who needs some part of life to be mere direction-following.  It was certainly not intended to be a way of ensuring that the budding young artiste gets exactly what he or she wants.  But I realized recently that it had an unintended side effect.  Oftentimes, after hearing the magic words (“Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw it”), Young Monet will stand and contemplate for as long as a minute.  What does he want?  Then, usually, eventually he comes up with it, and it is drawn, to be further embellished with strokes from his own marker or chalk.

~~~

It struck me the other day that this is The Problem with higher education.  (I know it is as riddled with The Problems as a Swiss cheese with holes, but hear me out.)  For two years I taught Freshman composition at a moderately-sized university attended by above-average students.  My job was to teach them how to write.  Their job at the university, as far as they were concerned, was to get a diploma so they could get a job.  Usually after a day or so I had managed to convince the doubtful that learning to write was an important part of their twofold goal, so they were at least willing to try to succeed in my class.

Most of them didn’t.  I was not an exceptionally difficult instructor.  Nor am I willing to blame our materials, for though there were certain base level requirements that instructors were supposed to follow, we had a fair amount of leeway to tailor the class to our ideas of what would work.  Nothing did.  Oh, we all had splendid successes with a student here or there, and frequently small successes with the majority of our students.  But they could hardly be said, upon leaving the one-semester course, to be writers, let alone good writers.

Without a doubt, the single greatest issue was their inability to come up with stuff.  They simply had no ideas.  No matter how creative the prompt or assignment given to them, and no matter how interested they were in it, it failed to spark material of their own.  (The sole exception in my experience was a paper I gave instructing the students to write about some change in their childhood, such as moving, and explain the causes for it.  Well over a third of my students went with “moving,” and the cause was “divorce.”  Those papers could tell a sad story all of their own.)

Nor was the students’ inability to come up with ideas merely a benign problem.  All sorts of things are blamed for plagiarism: lack of time, lack of understanding of what constitutes academic dishonesty, lack of moral fiber.  In my experience—and, I think, that of most of the instructors I knew, including instructors in other subjects—the greatest cause is the student’s inability to have an idea of his own.  Lack of time may sometimes be the immediate cause, but even when that is the pressure-builder, it is usually not because the student cannot physically write the paper fast enough to turn something in, but because he cannot conceive of himself creating ideas fast enough.

Creating ideas is hard.  Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw it.

…

…

…

“A mowble home.”

“A mobile home?”

“OK.”

So we draw a mobile home.

Of course, Young Monet only knows about those from books or parents anyway: it is not as if he is creating the concept of “mobile home” de novo.  But he is creating an idea in the moment of what he wants to draw right now, by searching through his memories and deciding what should be produced from this blue chalk on this patch of concrete this morning … All creativity is combining what we already know.  The magic lies in the combinations.

But to learn to make those combinations, to tap what we know so as to make something quasi de novo, is a long and difficult process.  And I can only guess that most students, at least the students I saw as college Freshman, aren’t being put through the process often enough or early enough or consistently enough.

Maybe the fault is not enough free play, and too much structured learning.  Maybe it’s helicopter parents and teachers.  Maybe it’s video games and social media.  Maybe it’s an all-of-the-above cocktail.  Regardless, the solution seems clear.

Let the kids (at least partly) figure it out.  Let them be a little bored.  Don’t abandon them to their picture-less fate, of course (not if you want them to grow up human, anyway).  But do let them figure out how to fill the somefing-hole in their brains.  If they aren’t learning how to do it at two, how on earth will they learn to do it at twenty?

How to Say “Thanks” for that Honorary Degree

But it’s Wednesday, you’re saying.  But it’s time for MidWeekMuse!

Ah, mon frères, I am glad that you pay attention to these details.  It indeed time for midweek muse.  Today, it comes to you with a story.

When Johannes Brahms was in his late forties, the University of Breslau (now the University of Wrocław, Poland) awarded him an honorary doctorate of music.  “The degree came with a pompous Latin sentence describing Brahms as ‘the foremost composer of serious music in Germany today.’”  (Source.)

Usually these days one gets honorary degrees in return for speaking at a commencement or some such occasion, but Brahms was a composer, rather than a public speaker, so they expected him to do what he did best: write music.

“Apparently he initially wrote them a simple thank you note but the conductor Bernard Scholz, who had nominated him for the degree, convinced him that protocol required him to make a grander gesture of gratitude. The University expected nothing less than a musical offering from the composer. ‘Compose a fine symphony for us!’ Scholz wrote to Brahms. ‘But well orchestrated, old boy, not too uniformly thick!’” (Source.)

Can you imagine writing that to a world class composer, as if you were ordering up a pudding?  No, neither can I.

Alas, no new symphony was forthcoming.

“Rather than composing some ceremonial equivalent of Pomp and Circumstance—a more standard response—Brahms crafted what he described as a ‘rollicking potpourri of student songs,’ in this case mostly drinking songs. It is easy to imagine the amusement of the assembled students, as well as the somewhat less-amused reaction of the school dignitaries, to Brahms’s lighthearted caprice.

“The Academic Festival Overture showcases four beer-hall songs that were well known to German college students. … It was the first melody, however, that was most notorious in the composer’s day. ‘Wir hatten gebauet’ was the theme song of a student organization that advocated the unification of the dozens of independent German principalities. This cause was so objectionable to authorities that the song had been banned for decades. Although the proscription had been lifted in most regions by 1871, it was still in effect in Vienna when Brahms completed his overture. Because of this ban, police delayed the Viennese premiere of the Academic Festival Overture for two weeks, fearing the incitement of the students.”  (Souce.)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, what what?

Play by play of the songs (pun intended?) can be found here.

I’ve always (by which I mean, for at least a few years now) wanted to found my own university, which will be practically perfect in every way and one hundred percent free of politics and only hire my friends.  Now I have reached a further decision: Our graduates and deans and boards will never, never march to “Pomp and Circumstance.”  Gaudeamus juvenesdum summus!

And a final fun fact: This is the piece that is used as a leitmotiv for the delightful and very Chestertonian movie People Will Talk, which I described some time ago in another blog post.  (There, I called the music Beethovenian—my sincere apologies to both composers.)  If you haven’t seen the movie, find a copy—it is delightful.  Kitschy?  Only if you decide it’s kitsch as opposed to brilliance that you happen to enjoy.

And so it is with the Brahms.  Play on, Johannes.

Bonus on top of the boni: Bernstein a delight to watch.

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.

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.

To Live Is to Follow the Light

Christians throughout the world recently celebrated the feast of the Epiphany, some on the traditional date of Jan. 6 (the “Twelfth Night” of the twelve days of Christmas) and others on the nearest Sunday (this year, Jan. 7).  In many cultures, Epiphany is a little Christmas.  Just as Dec. 25 commemorates Jesus Christ’s manifestation to his own people, the Jews, so Epiphany commemorates his manifestation to the gentiles, in the person of the wise men whose arrival is recorded in the Gospel of Matthew.

The wise men or magi, sometimes called “kings” in reference to Old Testament prophecies of kings of the East visiting the Messiah, followed a star which led them to Bethlehem, to the house where Jesus lay.  They had some knowledge of astronomy, enough to know that the star was unusual; and the astrology to which the ancients gave credit led them to believe that this astronomical phenomenon heralded the birth of a new king of the Jews.

Still, they must have felt there was something more to the strange light than that.  After all, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar (as tradition names them) were not Jews themselves, and the Jewish people were not prominent in world affairs.  Why did the magi care about the birth of a new king in a minor foreign nation?  The star boded something more, suggested some ramifications personal to them, or larger than what they admitted to Herod.

Perhaps one indication of what they expected, or at least what they found, lies in the gospel for the earlier epiphany.

The Gospel for Christmas Mass during the Day does not come from the infancy narratives, but from John: “In the beginning was the Word …”  As John continues, clarifying the relation between the Messiah and God as one of identity, he adds the following:

“All things came to be through [the Word], and without him nothing came to be.  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.

John explains the Word’s creative role in terms of two fundamental things: life, and light.  Unfortunately, this is one of the many places where translation confuses.  The USCCB translation says that “What came to be through him was life,” but the Douay-Rheims has the more familiar “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”  This is a straightforward translation of the Vulgate, which reads “In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum.”

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.

Discerning Censorship

When I wrote my last post here some days ago, I did not expect it to be particularly controversial.  The point seemed straightforward: that it was healthy for people to take personal responsibility for actions done in their free time; specifically, that even seemingly neutral things like entertainment promote increased virtue or stagnation (and, as C.S. Lewis reminds us through the mouth of Screwtape, in the spiritual life stagnation means going downhill).

But the popularity of Game of Thrones is such that its trees rather overshadowed the aforementioned forest; and the post, though not designed to cast shade (pun intended) on fans of the show (who number such respectable Catholics as Ross Douthat), did have the aura of a minor condemnation.

Read the rest at the Register.

The Revelations of Carelessness

"In a pre-Cartesian world, where there was as yet no clear boundary between self and other ..." (Shagan, The Rule of Moderation, 34.)

It's tossed-off notions like this that make me doubt the word of otherwise obviously intelligent and diligent scholars (especially ones who elsewhere, with due humility and good humor, announce their design to refrain from "practicing philosophy without a license").

What does the sentence mean (beyond its rhetorical function of throwing shade on an already tenebrous pre-Cartesian landscape)?  It could point to the sort of clannishness that is epitomized in Romeo and Juliet, in which one's identity as Capulet is deemed to be at least as strong as one's personal desires, interests, and aspirations.  But "deemed to be" is key here: the story of Romeo and Juliet is precisely about the family feud's failure to prevent strong independent desires on the part of two scions of the houses involved.  Whatever the powers that be of R&J had imagined, the power of collective identity is proven to be not nearly so strong as it had been deemed to be.  And whether one speaks of desires, or thoughts, or opinions, or interests, or habits, there are plenty of instances in Early Modern England alone of individual independence thereof.  This was, after all, not only the era of growing European absolutism, but also the era of martyrdom.  One need not base one's personal epistemology in Cartesian doubt in order to be moved to question "ethical claims [that] routinely contained and implied claims of authority and control" (ibid.).

To be wholly fair, I'm sure Shagan knows this.  His book describes many instances of rebellion against the moderating actions of authority, indicating that he was fully aware of the possibility of individualizing thought.  But that careless clause, taken out of context, would suggest otherwise.

Well, let it be a lesson for my own writing.  Nothing does more damage to a good argument than the assumption of a broad principle that one doesn't even need picked up off-handedly from allies whose work one doesn't fully understand and presented to the wary reader whose trust one has yet to gain.

Wit Ipse, Whither?

A.P. Rossiter has a few choice words about Falstaff which struck a particular chord during my reading today.

The ‘moral-historical’ approach diminishes Falstaff as Wit, leaving him with little more than the rascally quick-wittedness which gets Eulenspiegels and Harlequins out of tight corners. Sir John is more.  He is not only witty in himself (No, I’m not going on with Familiar Quotations)—he is Wit ipse.  And wit is critically destructive—of ideal systems which assume that human nature is what it isn’t.

This is a fine example of why, although I greatly respect what I’ve read of Rossiter’s criticism, I tend ultimately to disagree with his conclusions.  I concur that a simple “‘moral-historical’ approach” flattens Falstaff deplorably—e.g., a recently encountered article that attempted to mash the Henriad into a humoral system, and in so doing put Falstaff down (against almost all reason) as the Phlegmatic Man!  This is moralizing Falstaff nearly out of existence, a blasphemy which would have been impossible to envision were it not for the inspiring skill of a certain flavor of academic.  Rossiter would never be guilty of such a thing.

But I do wonder, in identifying Falstaff as Wit Ipse, if Rossiter misses something even more important than Falstaff.  Falstaff if witty; so was Oscar Wilde; so was G.K. Chesterton; so are the Thin Man movies.  I enjoy all of this wittiness tremendously; and (as with Falstaff) the more tremendous the wit, the more I enjoy it.  But I wonder if we (people of the temper of Rossiter and me) don’t put too great a premium on wit or (to paucify the term, for clarity, or at least to gain what Rossiter might call a “two-eyed view”), on “being funny.”  Wit Ipse is a frightening great thing to contemplate, from one angle; from another, it is a great deal less than even a very dull man.  And of course, wit can destroy not only “ideal systems which assume that human nature is what it isn’t” but also ideal systems (like that held perhaps by the dull man) that see human nature for what it is.  Like all Platonic forms, it is simultaneously terrifying and—to use the word Rossiter uses above—diminished, diminishing: flat.  (This is something Charles Williams gets splendidly right about his unleashed Platonic forms in the otherwise neglibile The Place of the Lion.)

I am willing to stand corrected.  Perhaps there is something overwhelmingly glorious about wit, which would then justify the great stature Falstaff takes on in Rossiter’s schema.  But I am inclined to think that the really great and human thing is not wit but humor; and of humor I do not think it can be said that Falstaff is it, ipse.

But the precise distinction between wit and humor, palpable to anyone at home in English, is for me another one of those unanswered questions to which I referred the day before last.

Anger and Appetite

Paul Cantor's worthwhile lectures on Shakespeare's political plays have made good dinner-prep listening for me for the past month or so.  But they raised a complicated contemporary question in my mind.  According to Cantor (to whom, apologies, since I grossly simplify), the republican regime in Rome was characterized by thumos (see Coriolanus) and the imperial regime by eros (see Antony and Cleopatra).

Thus, the background.  So, my question:

Thinking back to the Platonic understanding of these terms, is Trump more chracterized by thumos or by eros?

Discuss.

The Heart Is ... Deep, Man

A few days ago we had this reading from Jeremias 17:

Thus says the LORD: Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the LORD. He is like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season, But stands in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth. Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose hope is the LORD. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: It fears not the heat when it comes, its leaves stay green; In the year of drought it shows no distress, but still bears fruit. More tortuous than all else is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it? I, the LORD, alone probe the mind and test the heart, To reward everyone according to his ways, according to the merit of his deeds.

I sat up at the bolded verse, because it was familiar, except for one troubling detail.  The word given in here as “tortuous” is rendered in the Douay as “deceitful”; I have also heard “wicked” and “perverse.”  It was always a negative term; “tortuous” is more observational, innocuous, innocent.  Usually I would shrug at an apparent example of the sort of “dumbing down” which troubles the depths of my literary and (I hope) spiritual soul.  But in this case, for whatever reason, my curiosity was aroused; and I went on a long hunt to solve the mystery, even going to the length of conscripting my husband as a sounding board and linguistic/internet consultant.  Spoiler alert: tortuous isn’t such a terrible translation after all.

First, I went to the Latin: “Pravum est cor omnium, et inscrutabile: quis cognoscet illud?”  “Pravus” is connected to our “depraved”; according to Lewis & Short it means “crooked, distorted, misshapen, deformed.”  So far, so sour.

I went next to the Greek: “βαθεῖα ἡ καρδία παρά πάντα, καὶ ἄνθρωπός ἐστι· καὶ τίς γνώσεται αὐτόν.”  The word we’re looking for is βαθεῖα/batheia, related to our words “bathos” and “bathetic” (thank you, Alexander Pope; and thank you, Dr. Wheatley, for making us read that work).  Bathetic literature (to put it crudely) tries to be awesome but totally flops.

In common speech we now use the word “pathetic” to refer to

much of what Pope called “bathetic”; if he used the word “pathetic,”

he would have probably intended to express actual sympathy

for something truly sad or sorrowful—

compare Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Pathétique.

~~~~~~~

Note, by the way, how far very little Greek gets me.  I located

the relevant clause using only (1) the ability to transliterate and

(2) knowledge of Greek roots used in English words. 

For the former, I have to thank a Politics class for which

I bought Aristotle’s work in the Loeb edition, which has

facing pages; for the former, I have my mother to thank,

who made sure that my siblings and I studied Greek

and Latin roots not once but twice between kindergarten and college.

~~~~~~~

This, by the by, is also one reason why, when Ben Jonson

says that Shakespeare had “little Latin and less Greek,”

I wouldn’t take it as meaning that Shakespeare was uneducated or

incapable of working his way around texts that came by his desk.

Basic skills and a wee bit of detective instinct can achieve βαθεῖα stuff. 

βαθεῖα was where I started to become truly interested.  The Vulgate has two words, “pravum” and “inscrutabile” where the Greek has only one: “batheia.”  I will go out on a limb and guess that this is one of those cases where St. Jerome exercised editorial license.  For some reason, he felt he needed two Latin words to convey one Greek word.  That suggests that “batheia” is somewhat more complex than my meager knowledge of Greek roots would imply.

You can look up the full entry for “bathys/batheia” here (thank you, Perseus/Tufts!); but I’ll summarize my findings for convenience.  The first meaning is “deep or high, acc. to one’s position”—it is thus akin to the Latin “altus”: both words convey a sense of distance from the viewer, without the context specifying whether that distance, up, down, or sideways.

The second meaning is “deep or thick in substance,” for example, a “deep” mist, “deep” ploughed land, “deep” woods; within this meaning, it can by analogy be applied to colors.

The third meaning is “of quality, strong, violent”; by extension, it can mean “generally, copious, abundant,” for example, the English phrases “a rich man,” “a heavy debt,” and “deep sleep” could all be rendered in Greek using the single adjective βαθύς.

The fourth meaning is specific to the mind; here βαθύς can refer to “the depths of the soul,” “a profound mind,” “more sedate natures,” “more recondite, i.e. civilized, manners,” and persons who are deep, crafty, or wise.  (There is a final, fifth meaning: with reference to time, βαθύς can mean dim or late.)

This is the word the Vulgate renders as “pravum et inscrutabile,” that is, “crooked-distorted-misshapen-deformed” and “inscrutable.”

Crawling further out on my limb, I’ll once again guess the mind of the Vulgate translator (assuming he was working from the Greek, and not a Hebrew or Aramaic text).  The ambiguity of βαθύς is perhaps why he chose to use two words to express it in Latin.  In so doing, however, he concretized the meaning, making it seem obvious to the reader that the human heart is definitively both “pravum” and “inscrutabile.”  Based on the various senses of βαθύς, it is possible that the human heart is neither.  The context will tell more about its meaning than the particular Latin word choice.

And the larger context of the passage is undeniably condemnatory (we are, after all, in the book of Jeremias, from whose name comes jeremiad), which is perhaps one reason why the Vulgate translator gave us “pravum.”  Chapter seventeen begins (Douay):

[1] The sin of Juda is written with a pen of iron, with the point of a diamond, it is graven upon the table of their heart, upon the horns of their altars. [2] When their children shall remember their altars, and their groves, and their green trees upon the high mountains, [3] Sacrificing in the field: I will give thy strength, and all thy treasures to the spoil, and thy high places for sin in all thy borders. [4] And thou shalt be left stripped of thy inheritance, which I gave thee: and I will make thee serve thy enemies in a land which thou knowest not: because thou hast kindled a fire in my wrath, it shall burn for ever. [5] Thus saith the Lord: Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord.  [6] For he shall be like tamaric [“A barren shrub that grows in the driest parts of the wilderness”] in the desert, and he shall not see when good shall come: but he shall dwell in dryness in the desert in a salt land, and not inhabited.

But then, before we come to the passage in question, there is a change in tone.

[7] Blessed be the man that trusteth in the Lord, and the Lord shall be his confidence. [8] And he shall be as a tree that is planted by the waters, that spreadeth out its roots towards moisture: and it shall not fear when the heat cometh. And the leaf thereof shall be green, and in the time of drought it shall not be solicitous, neither shall it cease at any time to bring forth fruit. [9] The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable [i.e., pravum … et inscrutabile, i.e., βαθεῖα], who can know it? [10] I am the Lord who search the heart and prove the reins: who give to every one according to his way, and according to the fruit of his devices.

If anything, the immediate context of βαθεῖα suggests that it should be rendered in one of the more positive meanings available—at least a neutral one—remember, wise, profound, sedate, recondite, civilized, and deep are all available; the only remotely negative mental sense at hand is crafty, which comes nowhere near the Latin pravum.  Credit where it is due—there may have been shadings to the word that a learned translator of a couple millennia ago knew which are not available to a half-baked scholar with the internet at her fingertips.  Still, I’m going to crawl further out on my limb and give grudging praise to the USCCB’s translation choices by admitting that tortuous is probably a better rendering of the word in question than perverse, wicked, etc., etc.

So what?

So then, this.  The passage changes from a meditation on mere human wickedness to something more interesting.  The meditation on human wickedness is certainly there—some people, Jeremias suggests, are wicked: they trust in their own strength, their hearts depart from God; like the barren tamaric bush they “do not see when good shall come: but … dwell in dryness in the desert in a salt land, and not inhabited.”  Could there be a more apt or terrifying description of the lonely individualist, who lacks the water of life, of grace, because he does not know how to recognize that it might come from anywhere but the depths of his soul?  Yes, a person like that could survive without such water for a long time, just as the tamaric does in the desert—but what a life!

Then, Jeremias suggests, there is another sort of man, who “trusteth in the Lord, and the Lord shall be his confidence.”  This man is like a tree that actually does look for water (if you will): it “spreadeth out its roots towards moisture”; its leaves are green; “and in the time of drought it shall not be solicitous” (is there a hint, here, of “Be not solicitous for the morrow”?).  Again, could there be a better description of the soul that knows it is thirsty, not for anything human, not even for its self, but for God? or a better description of how such a soul luxuriates in God when its roots (what a metaphor!) first touch, and then flow to their fill with what comes from God?

Enough of the fancy-schmancy rhetorical questions.  This is cool, neato, groovy … It’s one of those rare passages of spiritual writing that makes me actually, viscerally, want to be a saint.

So, having wound us all up like this, Jeremias goes on with the kicker verse.

βαθεῖα ἡ καρδία παρά πάντα, καὶ ἄνθρωπός ἐστι· καὶ τίς γνώσεται αὐτόν.

[Batheia e kardia para panta, kai anthropos esti, kai tis enousetai auton.]

[lit.:] Deep is the heart above all things, and is the man, and who can know him.

If we had hoped we were in the tree category, not with the tamaric, this verse is still a rude awakening.  Essentially, Jeremias seems to say: “Look, there are these two types of people: the tamarics and the trees, the bad and the good, those who fail to look for God and those who seek God out.  And you don’t know which one you are.  You can’t know which one you are.  You, your guts, your real self—‘the heart, the man’—is so deep and complex that no human being can really know which way a heart really tends.”  (Inscrutabile, by the way, in contrast to pravum, is looking like a pretty good descriptor.)

No human being can know which way the heart tends.  But “I am the Lord who search the heart and prove the reins …

[P]robans renes, “test/try/probe the kidneys” (cf. “renal disease”)—

an inner organ stands for the guts or viscera in general—and yes,

there could probably be another whole blog post on this word choice.

“I am the Lord who search the heart and prove the reins, who give to every one according to his way, and according to the fruit of his devices.”

I think I’m going to go chew on this for a while.

That’s all folks.