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?)

Goodbye, Good Families

Not too long ago the New Yorker published a piece on court-appointed “guardians” who steal from the elderly (“How the Elderly Lose Their Rights”).  The article was full of heartbreaking personal stories and troubling legal shenanigans, many of them enabled by laws which seem to have been designed without the best interests of the elderly in mind.  As the story drew near its close, I found myself quickly reviewing where my and my husband’s grandparents lived, and how they were situated, and breathing a sigh of relief at the consideration that nothing like that was likely to happen to them.

But the piece was troubling to say the least; and for hours after I had set it aside, one lingering sentence struck me as especially poignant: the notion, trumpeted by a particularly appalling “guardian,” that family members, even when present in an elderly person’s life, were not to be trusted.  “They just want the money,” was the quote attributed to him.  (And guardians don’t?  Hm …)

Read the rest at the Register.

Of Lives Worth Living

“Je suis Charlie Hebdo,” said the signs.  Terrorism is indeed a terrible thing, and understandably calls out sentiments of solidarity.  I would not call the Charlie Gard case an instance of terrorism, but it terrifies me and, as a mother, it terrifies me on a personal level.  If a court in England can decide when someone’s child no longer has a quality of life worth preserving, how long before a court in America can make that decision?  And what if, God forbid, it were my child whose case the court was examining?  So, to co-opt a phrase, Je suis la mère de Charlie Gard.

*                      *                      *

The other day, as some of us were discussing the matter, lines sprang to mind, lines familiar from childhood, imprinted in the static-y tones of an old cassette tape.

“If someone loves a flower, one single blossom among all the millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy, just to look at the stars—because he can say to himself, ‘Somewhere, my flower is there.’  But if a sheep eats the flower, then in one moment for him all the stars will be darkened.  And you think this is not important?!”

It was hard at first to articulate why the lines felt relevant to the case of Charlie Gard; but I think I have an inkling now.

The proponents of euthanasia talk about quality of life, and occasionally about dignity.  But they define these terms narrowly: generally, by observation of the purely physical.  They talk of pain and comfort.  I cannot recall an instance where they talked of love.  But it is love which, as Saint-Exupéry reminds us, makes us happy—not to talk with the beloved, not even to be with the beloved, but simply to know that they exist.  “If someone loves a flower … it is enough to make him happy … [to] say to himself, ‘Somewhere, my flower is there.’”

I suppose someone might retort, “Yes, that’s all very well; but if the flower is unhappy, or the flower does not even know of its gardener’s existence, why bother so much about the gardener’s feelings?  Isn’t he a bit selfish to ask that his flower keep blooming while he, planets and planets away, looks smugly at his millions of stars?”

If one is asking about the flower of Saint-Exupéry, then my rejoinder is that one ought to read The Little Prince.  But of course, one would really be asking about Charlie Gard, and Terri Schiavo, and all the rest of us who may some day be in their condition, or have a loved one who is.  And to that question, my answer would be this:

There is an economy of love that knows next to nothing of the physical world.  If someone loves a flower, this is good for the flower too—yes, even if the flower is for the time being through some circumstance neither pruned nor sheltered nor watered nor smelled.  The flower too is happy, in the old sense related to “hap”; the flower is fortunate.  And not fortunate because of the good things it received in the past or may receive in the future, but fortunate because it is loved, even if it is ignorant of that fact.

No one can deny that being loved is good, as being healthy or rich is a good.  Health, however, is useless to a hypochondriac and riches are useless to a man who does not know that they are buried in his field.  Health and riches are good for use; they are good when they are enjoyed; their value lies in their employment in various activities.  But love and being loved are not good for activities; they are activities.  One does not speak of “enjoying” loving or being loved (except callously); certainly we would judge that anyone who speaks of “using” love does not know what the word means.  Other things are given a value by the human beings who have them: by the market, or the taste of the individual, or the customs of the country.  But love works in the other way: love cannot be made greater because human beings value it highly, nor can it be made less because human beings undervalue it; rather, love gives us value.  We are what we are because we have been loved: by our spouses, our parents, our children, our friends, the strangers who change our bedpans—and by God.  Most of all, by God.

I suppose to anyone who does not already take a supernatural interest in things, this will sound irrational.  I am afraid that even to anyone who agrees with my ethical concerns, it may appear hopelessly soppy.  But I do think that this is one of the true reasons why it is wrong to take an innocent life: because there is an intangible value to each person’s existence, making it in some perhaps mysterious wise worthwhile to them, due to the love they receive, an everlasting love which nevertheless bears up their existence in this brief particular moment of space and time.

Splinters of Love

This is the final part in a six-part series.  Read the first five parts here, here, here, here, and here.

This has been a series about love and consent.  Over the course of five rather meandering essays (I use the word in the humbler, Montaignean sense) I have attempted to argue that there is something confused in our modern American fixation on consent when considering questions of what once was called love.  In the last post on the matter, I suggested that one cause of the fixation has to do with forgetting the intellect’s role in advising the will.

Of course, in a healthy society or a health individual, both the intellect and the will operate in a person who loves.  The intellect sees the good and the will provides the necessary umph to pursue it.  Take away the intellect’s sight, and the will is not freed but blinded; take away the will’s drive and the intellect is not elevated but immobilized.  The latter problem is still well recognized, though not always stated in these terms.  We understand that the emotionless, the unempathetic, the disconnected souls have difficulty in navigating the world.  But we often do not give the rational man, or the rational part of man, its due.  We have a lamentable tendency to confuse the rational man with—stereotype him as?—the solely or excessively rational man, as if anyone whose intellect offers to guide his will is a self-admitted “sociopath” like the reimagined Sherlock Holmes.

On the other hand, having loosed the will from its proper intellectual mooring, we have become increasingly concerned about other undue influences on it.  And rightly so: if the will is not guided by the intellect, but left to the influence of its own drives and the suasions of others, we are in a bad way.  We begin to suspect, not with complete inaccuracy, that in rejecting the guidance of the intellect we have made a bargain for Esau.  We have sold our intellectual birthright for a mess of passionate pottage, and gained no liberty in the bargain, but rather found ourselves more tightly bound than before; for the intellect is a gentler master to the will than the will’s lower passions are to itself.

But for anyone with eyes to see, it is apparent that even the more powerful passions of the will are not sufficient to command choice in affairs of the heart.  It is evident, in other words, that the modern conceit of the will’s liberation from the intellect is false.  The simple evidence of this is the fact that sometimes people do choose to act against romantic passion.  Frequently, when a character in a story does this (e.g., the conclusion of LaLa Land) viewers judge that his or her passion was simply not that strong to begin with (and in the case of that film, I suspect the critical viewer would be right).

But the rejection of a passion does not always signal the passion’s weakness.  It is possible to experience powerful romantic love without capitulating to it.  The reason for failing to capitulate need only be stronger, or equally strong.  I am thinking at the moment of Deborah Kerr’s character in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.  The conclusion of the film illustrates the truth as well as anything could: that it is possible to be “in love,” and rather seriously so, and nevertheless decide not to follow that love.  In other words, it is possible to be in love, and free—not merely to have free will, but to be free to choose, indeed, free to choose the Other.

Source

If—SPOILER ALERT—you feel that Kerr’s character choice of

divine love over human is a cheater’s sort of example, perhaps because

it seems that she is following the stronger of two very powerful romantic entanglements

—well, I would respectfully disagree.  But for an alternate example, you might take a look,

caveat videntor!, at The Children’s Hour.  There’s a lovely romantic rejection

at the very end which, if my interpretation of the film is correct, has to do not

with choosing another lover but with (1) commemoration of a friend, and

(2) recognition of the flaws of the still-nevertheless-beloved.  In other words:

a character denies herself romantic fulfillment for non-romantic reasons.

Having recognized that modern love is a dish of pottage, and a dish moreover of which we have no obligation to partake, perhaps the reader is curious (as I am) to know how we got here historically.  If I am right that it is problematic to judge love healthy or otherwise on the basis of consent, and that consent is the one taboo left, and that this confusion about love is tied up with a rejection of the intellect’s role in choice, and that it was not always so—then what events, what thinkers got us here?

In a low aside of the previous post, I made voluntarism the perpetrator.  I was not entirely in jest.  But attractive as the writing of an intellectual history of the problem might be, I am underqualified to attempt the task of tracing love’s demise back to Ockham or anyone else, which would in any case involve a separate and lengthier discussion touching upon modern thought in general.  Before I finished, Kant, Hegel, and the Protestant work ethic would probably also be implicated.

Source

Only sort of kidding.

A more practical question to ask might be, given that modern America is possessed of a societal confusion about the nature of love, how does one go about fixing it?  Needless to say, I’m not qualified to answer that either.  In the previous post I waved away concrete solutions in favor of an abstract response: reintroduce the role of the intellect in the affairs of the heart.  I am not sure how much really practical wisdom I have to offer on the matter.  But I can at least dilate upon what the intellect could do for those in love; and perhaps the mere act of divisio will bring the particulars more into focus.

The intellect, as a sort of eye, discerns what is good.  Properly educated, it discerns many goods and their relative values amongst each other.  Some of those values are absolute: only a fool or a child thinks French Fries are better than music.  Some of the values are personal: the choice of Rally’s fries over those served at Chick-fil-A, while obvious to me, is far from obvious to certain acquaintances of mine; and my preference for Schumann’s Rhenish symphony over Schubert’s Unfinished is likewise not amenable to communication via persuasion.  The intellect tells us that Schubert and Schumann beat Rally’s and Chick-fil-A; it is largely our varied tastes that tell us which fries and which symphony we prefer.

Source

I would argue strongly that one can also make intellectual judgments about music,

but experience tells me that these require a tremendous degree of precision and

information and discipline amongst all the parties concerned.  And oftentimes

at the end of the day, such arguments conclude with a realization that

there are certain musical first principles upon which the parties of the argument

disagree—thus, in the end, reducing the arguments to taste,

or something equally incommunicable, after all.

Now obviously when it comes to passions for people, as opposed to fries and fiddles, one is in a different league of goods altogether.  The taste does not say smooth or rough, salty or spicy; nor does the intellect judge that the ear delivers more pleasure than the tongue.  A vast, seemingly endless array of goods opens up under the intellect’s piercing light.  Good humor, generosity, wit, kindness, magnanimity, drive, patience, cheerfulness, courage, status, providence, prudence, intelligence, fortitude … Love is blind to the beloved’s faults only because its eye is blinded by so many virtues!  And this endless array of goods calls forth an endless array of ways of loving: laughter, proximity, cooking dinner, sharing secrets, sharing work, sharing children, comforting, nursing, advising, rebuking, listening, defending … the list goes ever, ever on.  “Love is a many-splendored thing.”  Consent is but the tiniest splinter of the many-faceted jewel.  And if the whole jewel appears paradoxical to us, appears really splintered instead of faceted, it is partly because we have become used to operating in the single logic of consent, of choice, and neglecting all the variety of details that make a person, and make a person worth choosing.

The other reason that love and its qualities may appear paradoxical to us, is that our intellect is forced to grasp things discursively, in bits and pieces.  We feel we can grasp what things are, but hardly define them.  The more complex a thing, the more our logical brains have difficulty cataloguing its qualities.  Thus we have difficulty envisioning the unity behind “dirt” and “tree” or (heaven help us) “dog” and “man” or (heaven help us more) “justice” and “love”.  For most things, comprehension belongs less to the philosophers than to the masters of paradox, the poets.  Most people, for better or for worse, learn more about love, justice, man, the animals, and even vegetative creation from life and stories more than from philosophers and scientists.  And it is not because most people are too stupid for science and philosophy, but because science and philosophy are too slow for reality.

The paradigmatic case of this concerns the knowledge of the love of God.  St. Thomas remarks that we have revelation of truths knowable by philosophy because, while such truths are discoverable by human reason, they require so much precise and accurate rational activity that they could only be independently discovered by a few men after great effort and with much doubt.  Simply to know the love of God (that is, to know God, because—as St. John tells us—God is love) is impossible for the human intellect.  But the intellect might be able to see the shade of a shadow of the Love that is God, if steeled and schooled with a right understanding of human love.  If, on the other hand, we cannot accept the mysteries of human love, we will certainly be incapable of accepting its Divine form; we will, instead, fall into the terrible mistake of supposing that St. Teresa in her Ecstasy is a paramount case of Stockholm syndrome!

 

Source

I haven’t seen the article yet, but I’m sure it’s out there.

Rounding the circle and returning in the opposite direction, it is also an unfortunate fact that losing the fuller, poetical, paradoxical understanding of love not only erodes our understanding of God, but also our understanding of ourselves.  We are made in the image and likeness of God.  There is more than one possible interpretation of the phrase (some less legitimate, perhaps, than others); I would argue that one of the legitimate meanings is that, since God is love, and we are made in his image and likeness, somehow we too are all about love.  If that is so, then a flattened understanding and experience of love is not merely an incidental tragedy, one of the many casualties of the modern era.  It cuts to the core of what it means to be human.

This perhaps is part of why mean people often seem less human, less real: one-dimensional, and why kind people (if we get to know them properly) are interesting.  The cynics will say it is because we like the kind people and dislike the mean people that we attribute dullness to the latter and interestingness to the former.  But really, it is because the mean people have less going on inside them.  Their love includes only what interests them; their love, their self, is flattened.  Kind people’s love includes everything that interests those they love; it is eclectic because it is diffusive, but eclectic in the way that a good book is eclectic.  As a good book integrates many diverse characters in a unified story, so a good person integrates the many traits of those they know together, the unified story being love.

We have, of course, left behind the realm of romantic love at this point, and are swimming in even greater waters—great enough that my discursive mind is having a little trouble holding them together, and even my poetic mind is beginning to wear thin.  I have just enough vision left to sense that this is where a great many things come together: Aquinas’s fourth (?) way, Ubi Caritas et Amor, Blessed are the Pure of Heart, Dispersit superbos, questions concerning the nature of male and female and the family, and probably a great many other things which float dimly in the distance just beyond my mental horizon.

Source

Further Considerations Regarding Anger and Appetite

After more consideration of my query regarding Trump’s putative Shakespearianforbearers—if he took my (imaginary) Buzzfeed-style, PaulCantor-authored quiz, would he be Antony (eros) or Coriolanus (thumos)?—I have come to the tentative conclusion that he would be Coriolanus.

So yes, this is properly not an Unanswered Question post—

consider it more of a Tentative Answer post.

Hear me out, mon frères, because I know you’re shaking your heads; and remember that this is a dichotomous query: there’s no third box for Trump, to elevate or debase him beyond the given options.  After all, what is the internet about if not oversimplification in the interests of entertainment?

Trump’s great flaw, most people agree, is his ego; speaking on the bright side, his self-confidence is his greatest asset.  More specifically, he is braggadocious.  He wants to be seen as huge.  This contrasts one aspect of Coriolanus’s character—after all, the desire not to show off, not to be praised, is pivotal in the plot of Shakespeare’s play (as it was in Shakespeare’s source: Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus).  But as anyone who knows the play well will recall, Coriolanus’s modesty is actually a form of humble bragging: he doesn’t want to show off before the plebs because he thinks himself above even their praise.

Now obviously, that’s not Trump’s issue.  He does not seem to see himself as above, or above wooing, those who voted him into office.  But the very way he courted them, in loud, expressive terms, along with his avowed tendency to fight back at anyone who resists him, is thumotic.  And recall too that the great scandal of the presidential race for Trump involved bragging about being able to do something, and in a scenario were such bragging would increase his reputation.  Even his eros has thumos.

In contrast, consider his erstwhile opponent, Mrs. Clinton, and her husband, the former president.  The accusations against them have usually involved coverups of one sort or another, and coverups generally designed to conceal acquisition: of money, oftentimes; and for the former president, of affairs as well.  Their tendency to grasp—again, I am flattening everything to fit this dichotomy—is, in the broad sense of the words used here, erotic.  Their gods live mostly in their bellies.  Trump’s lives mostly in his chest.

That’s not a judgment about the morality or immorality of either, or a comparison of who’s worse or which ring in Dante’s hell they would go to (or, please God and allowing for deathbed conversations and all that, what respective rings on Mount Purgatory they’d find themselves on).  It’s simply an observation by a writer who tries to see things schematically: who likes to get the big washes of color down before filling in the details of the portraits that make people interesting, and (for better and for worse) human.