Two Poem Drafts

City Loop

The speeding cars upon the city loop,
self-moved but not self-moving, make their turns
and, heedless of the world, still make their laps
while time is lost and stormy sky is torn.
Can men who do not love the falling rain
take joy in life or walk the roads of grace?
So many human hearts will only run
on tar and stone, and never on wet grass;
they know no tempo but the running race,
and never meet another but to pass.
How can such people feel their hearts upraise?
Or know, not humming motor, but true peace?
But, as to far Damascus, still these streets
lead on to heaven's door with hurry straight.

Hurried Prayer

Creator of this ever-rolling orb,
the earth your footstool, all of space your robe,
as you have made this cosmos come to be,
so bring the waywardness of man to bay!
And work in me, most holy Lamb of God,
a power born of heaven, aimed toward good,
as you by greatest mercy have ransom brought
to all our race, and hope of glory bright.
And music Spirit, with your winds inspire
the souls of we who pray, and do not spare
one moment of delay, but to all who fear
descend in might and love and heaven's fire.
O God, three-personed, one in substance true,
redeem your slave-sold people in their tears,
and as you give from each to each again,
so give to us, that we might Godhead gain
and, though not Gods by right or nature born,
in you we may be Gods, in grace you bring.

Links for Thinking

* Steffen Ducheyne, Whewell's Tidal Researches: Scientific Practice and Philosophical Methodology (PDF) -- an excellent paper.

* Martha Nussbaum responds to some of her critics of her essay on banning the veil.

* Onora O'Neill discusses some of the difficulties that are intrinsic to assisted suicide legislation.

* A man in Bosnia has had to reinforce his roof with steel to protect his house from meteorites; it has been hit by meteorites six times in the past decade or so. He blames aliens; and under the circumstances I think everyone can be a bit sympathetic to his reasoning.

* And some YouTube finds. This has been going around because it is just a bit too true:



And several people have noticed this trailer for a cross-over film:



(And it is true that if anyone were to be the instigator, Lizzie would be.)

And another YouTube find:



Spektor is very uneven, but when she hits the ball, she hits it well. Samson and Us are also very good.

Experience vs. Pseudo-Idea

When I am speaking of a particular person and say, ‘If that person had been there, such a thing would not have happened; if it happened, it must be because that person was not there’, my ground for so speaking is a precise knowledge, or my claim to a precise knowledge, of the person in question. Nurse would have stopped the child from playing with the matches; which means, that she is prudent and careful, she can be trusted completely; she could not have let the child play with matches. But two suppositions are implied in this: first, that the person—the nurse in this case—does really exist; and secondly, that we know her so well that we can say what sort of person she is and what she would do in any given circumstances. The atheist, however, relies not on an experience but on an idea, or pseudo-idea, of God: if God existed, He would have such and such characteristics; but if He had those characteristics He could not allow etc. His judgment of incompatibility, in fact, is based on a judgment of implications. Or rather, what he wants to say is that if the word ‘God’ has any meaning—of which, indeed, we cannot be certain—it can be applied only to a being who is both completely good and completely powerful. This part of the argument might well be granted; but not so with what follows. When I am speaking of the nurse, I am relying on situations or circumstances which actually occurred, and in which she effectively demonstrated her prudence; or at least on an inner certainty of what I should have done in her place. But does such an assertion retain any meaning when it is applied to the behaviour of God? Whether those last words have any meaning at all and whether the idea of divine behaviour is not self-contradictory, is a very serious question, but we can leave that on one side for the moment. If I proceed to draw conclusions from what the divine behaviour has been in any particular historical instance, then I am ipso facto debarred from agreeing with what the atheist maintains. But is the alternative any better? Can I so put myself in the place of God as to be able to say how I should have behaved in any particular circumstances, what I should have allowed and what I should have forbidden? We may note that when we are speaking of an important public figure who is called upon to make a crucial decision, we often find it impossible to imagine ourselves in his place; in fact the very idea of doing so seems ridiculous. If we pursue that line of thought, we are obliged to recognize the absurdity of trying to put ourselves in God's place.

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. 1, Chapter V

Sin Crying Out

From an article on Newman by Anthony Kenny:

Well into the twentieth century, the Catholic Catechism listed “the sin of Sodom” – along with wilful murder, and defrauding the poor of their wages – as a “sin crying out to heaven for vengeance”.

It still does (1867):

The catechetical tradition also recalls that there are "sins that cry to heaven": the blood of Abel, The sin of the Sodomites, The cry of the people oppressed in Egypt, The cry of the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan, injustice to the wage earner.

The description is Biblical, so it's not surprising that it's still there. I suspect that if there's any difference, it's that Catholics would be more likely today to interpret the phrase "the sin of Sodom" as a species of rape. I've discussed the list briefly before.

Incidentally, these are the instructions for searching the text of the Catechism at the Holy See's own website:

To search for a word, e.g. "home":

* click on the letter in the alphabet list corresponding to the first letter of the word: e.g. "H"
* press the Control and F keys;
* type in the search word: e.g. "home"
* click on the "Find" button. (The button may have a different name in your browser )
The computer will find and highlight the word you are searching for. (If the word is not found, a message will appear).
* Now click on the word to access its concordance.

Which has to be the most dimwitted search function I've come across in recent times, particularly since you have to find the alphabetical word list first, which they don't make entirely easy; on the instructions that tell you to find the alphabetical list, they don't even bother to link to it! And surely it wouldn't be all that difficult to set up some sort of Google search for a reference as important as the Catechism?

Kenny's review is good, btw. I also recommend Eagleton's.

The Higher Life and the Wider Life

Throughout the history of moral ideas, in spite of constant change, we may nevertheless trace a certain persistent content. In each modification the new stage is not entirely new; it brings out more fully something that was already suggested at an earlier stage. It is a permanent characteristic of the moral consciousness to find value in certain kinds of experience rather than in other kinds. At every critical turn the moral judgment pronounces for the superiority of the spiritual to the material in life, and recognises the importance of social ends when confronted by the interests or apparent interests of the self-seeking individual. The higher life and the wider life—the life of spirit and the life for others—these the moral judgment approves with a constancy which is almost uniform. Perhaps it is entirely uniform. The valuation has indeed been rejected by individuals from time to time—as it was by Thrasymachus in the Republic, as it is at the present day by the followers of Nietzsche. But this rejection is not so much a different interpretation of the moral consciousness as a revolt against morality. It is a substitution of new values for old, like the magician's offer of new lamps for old in the Arabian tale. The new lamps did not fulfil the same function as the old lamp; nor do the new values serve instead of the old. For, when we examine them, we find that they are only measurements of strength—physical standards, therefore—and not criteria of value or moral standards. In spite of the contrasts which we may discover between the ways in which different men and times express these values, their essential nature remains the same. They cannot be understood if we start by denying in toto the validity of the moral consciousness. And a sane criticism will find both unity of spirit and a principle of growth in its varied manifestations.

W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God, Chapter 4.

Of Christianity

I notice a number of people are making more of this than it is, so I thought I would say something. Anne Rice, who, of course, converted or re-converted to Christianity a while ago, recently left three messages on her Facebook page:

Gandhi famously said: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” When does a word (Christian)become unusable? When does it become so burdened with history and horror that it cannot be evoked without destructive controversy?

and

For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

and, to explain,

As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

One can sympathize, and it's a moment many Christians have, and the reason it has sometimes been popular to say that Christianity as a religion is to be repudiated, and that one should only be Christian in the sense of having a relationship with Christ. Indeed, some of what she says is very much in that vein. And anyone who cannot have some sympathy for it does not pay much attention to life with others in Christ, because it goes back to the Apostolic generation itself, for the Apostles and their converts were indeed a quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and, yes, sometimes even deservedly infamous, group. But even they were not out to be Christians; they did not seek to belong to Christianity, that vague, abstract, collective label, but to follow the Way, to preach the Truth, to live the Life. And the Way, the Truth, and the Life were Christ. To be Christian, in some sense of a group membership, is next to nothing in value; to be Christ's -- that is something for which men and women have lived and died.

But I think it is in this we also see why things are not so simple. For the book of Acts tells us quite clearly how the followers of the Way became Christians, and in it is a lesson worth learning. It was in Antioch, it is said, where the disciples were first called Christians. But it is not a casual mention. The disagreements between the disciples and those around them had become violent, and blood had been shed. Stephen had fallen beneath the stones and a man named Saul, breathing murderous threats, began to drum up support for dragging all followers of the Way in chains before the authorities. Trying to destroy the assembly of the followers, he entered house after house, dragging out the men and women, and handing them over to be imprisoned. The persecutions grew fierce, and while a core group of followers remained in Jerusalem, most fled. They were scattered throughout the Roman empire, and some of these came to Antioch and proclaimed Christ to Gentile and Jew alike. Many believed.

And in the meantime, a new peace had come to the the community of the followers; and Saul himself, on the road to Damascus, fell down before Christ and began to preach the Way. And he was eventually brought by a close associate of the Apostles themselves, Barnabas, to Antioch. He and Barnabas taught the growing community at Antioch for a year; and it was there in Antioch that the followers of the Way were first called Christians. And at that time in Antioch, the community were moved to take thought for their fellow Christians in other places; the people, as they were able, gathered together their resources to help those in Judea who suffered from famine.

And that is why it is worth it to belong to Christianity, to hold to being a Christian, despite the fact that we are a quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and sometimes infamous people. Because ultimately, that name should never be given over. It was the name that marked the Church as standing together. They stood with the martyrs. They stood with the confessors. They stood with the apostles. They stood with the poor among them. And that was what made them Christian. And to be Christian is to hold together in persecution and in peace, and to commit to aiding those who also follow the Way when they are in need; it is to encourage each other in faithfulness, difficult as it may be, and to remain firm in heart. And it is not to be Novatianist or Donatist, demanding purity before association, but to keep in mind that Christ came not for the pure but for the disputatious, vexatious, hostile, quarrelsome, and, yes, deservedly infamous. It is to recognize that we are they; but that Christ is more.

But they did not join to join a club, and they did not sign on to belong to a group; they were, to use the phrase in the book of Acts, added to the Lord, and it was this that brought upon them the label Christian. We don't know all the details of how it arose; it may have been a name of mockery that came to be worn as a badge of honor, or it may have been something that some of them started calling themselves to affirm that they were added to the Lord. Whatever the reason, if, as I pray she is, Anne Rice really is committed to Christ, she's quit Christianity in the sense that everyone must, eventually, and she hasn't quit Christianity in the only sense that is important. I hope that she is not going to try to 'go it alone', as some try, the katharoi of every age; that way nothing lies but disaster. To associate with sinners is not really avoidable except by associating with no one; and associating with no one is no good for anyone. So I hope this is more like the Desert Fathers withdrawing from the cities in an attempt to follow a deeper and more faithful prayer and a more integral participation in the truly important work of the Church than any of the other interpretations that have been given to her words; and I hope she rediscovers that the label really is usable, regardless of frustration, because with it we stand with the apostles and martyrs and our brothers and sisters in need. But we are called not to a demographic, but (as we have always been) to the Way. Sooner or later, we must all learn: to love God is all, to love neighbor is all, the Lord to whom we are through the grace of God added (and not alone, never alone) is all in all; everything else is at most a hobby and at worst a dangerous distraction.

UPDATE: Added the first of the quotations above, which I think sheds a small bit of light on the ones that followed.

Admirable Activity of the Human Spirit

It seems to me, then, that knowledge, or perhaps we should rather say the activity of the mind which leads to knowledge, is good, not in the sense that human nature likes having it (although in fact most men do like having it), but in the sense that it is an admirable activity of the human spirit; that this activity owes its excellence not to our liking it, but to its being conducted according to its own proper principles, i.e. according to the principles discovered by logic; and that different instances of this activity are good in proportion as they are conducted according to these principles.

W. D. Ross, Foundations of Ethics, Chapter XI