Music on My Mind

Taylor Swift, ft. The Civil Wars, "Safe & Sound". (ht)

Breastplate

I Bind Unto Myself Today
by Cecil Frances Alexander

I bind unto myself today
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three.

I bind this day to me for ever,
by power of faith, Christ's Incarnation;
his baptism in Jordan river;
his death on cross for my salvation;
his bursting from the spicèd tomb;
his riding up the heavenly way;
his coming at the day of doom:
I bind unto myself today.

I bind unto myself the power
of the great love of cherubim;
the sweet "Well done" in judgment hour;
the service of the seraphim;
confessors' faith, apostles' word,
the patriarchs' prayers, the prophets' scrolls;
all good deeds done unto the Lord,
and purity of virgin souls.

I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the starlit heaven
the glorious sun's life-giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind's tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea,
around the old eternal rocks.

I bind unto myself today
the power of God to hold and lead,
his eye to watch, his might to stay,
his ear to hearken, to my need;
the wisdom of my God to teach,
his hand to guide, his shield to ward;
the word of God to give me speech,
his heavenly host to be my guard.

Christ be with me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort
and restore me.
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of
all that love me,
Christ in mouth of
friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself today
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three.
Of whom all nature hath creation,
eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
praise to the Lord of my salvation,
salvation is of Christ the Lord.

This is a nineteenth-century version, made for singing, of the Lorica of St. Patrick, a poem attributed to St. Patrick that goes back to the eighth century in its current form, but that may indeed go back in original form to Patrick's time.

Chesterton for March XVII

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

Source: Twelve Types

Admin Note, Especially for German and Canadian Readers

I mentioned before that Google is restructuring Blogspot so that people from different countries are redirected to country-specific addresses; Australia and India were the first to undergo this treatment. New Zealand followed shortly after. I see from logs that this has now spread to Germany and Canada. I get almost no one from India or New Zealand, and only a small number of Australian readers, but Canada and Germany are third and fourth behind the U.S. and U.K. as source countries for my readers here, so this will have some effect.

The main effect, of course, is that Echo/JS-Kit comments, which I use, don't work well with this change; commenting is possible on the country-specific pages, but I have no moderation ability, the comments don't show up in my comments queue, and the comments don't synchronize with Blogger comments. I sent a tech support query to Echo about it, and the response I received was not only seven kinds of useless, it was pretty clear that they had no clue what I was talking about, and so I'm very sure they won't be fixing this issue at any point in the near future.

For the nonce, readers can get around this by using a No Country Redirect. Instead of going to the usual address, go to the following one:

http://branemrys.blogspot.com/ncr

That will keep you at the plain .com address. I could put code in the template to force NCR, but I'd have to do it for every single country Google does this for. And also the NCR is temporary fix: Google will certainly break it at some point.

In the meantime, though, if you are Australian, Canadian, German, or one of the very occasional Indians, please comment on the U.S. address (the plain .com) by using the NCR, if you can. If not, it's not a huge issue; I'll just probably not discover your comment for a considerable amount of time, unless I just happen to be nosing around the country-specific posts for your country at just the right time to catch it. (You also won't be able to see any comments on the plain .com version of the blog.)

ADDED LATER: Also, while UK readers don't currently seem to be undergoing forced redirect, I note that the branemrys.blogspot.co.uk version is already up and running, so it's only a matter of time.

ADDED LATER II: And it looks like it has started for the U.K., too. It looks Portugal is also one of the countries currently undergoing the redirect.

...And France.

Chesterton for March XVI

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

Source: The Club of Queer Trades

The Needle to the North Degree

The Martyrs
by Emily Dickinson

Through the straight pass of suffering
The martyrs even trod,
Their feet upon temptation,
Their faces upon God.

A stately, shriven company;
Convulsion playing round,
Harmless as streaks of meteor
Upon a planet's bound.

Their faith the everlasting troth;
Their expectation fair;
The needle to the north degree
Wades so, through polar air.

On Subsidiarity

Meghan Clark recently had an interesting post on subsidiarity at "Catholic Moral Theology" in which she shows the problem with a common understanding of the principle. In doing so, however, I think she overshoots and falls into another error of a similar sort.

The first thing to understand about the principle of subsidiarity, or the principle of subsidiary function, is that it gives exactly what the label says. It is, in Benedict XVI's words, "a form of assistance to the human person via the autonomy of intermediate bodies" (Caritas in Veritate). The word 'assistance' is key here; subsidiarity is literally helpfulness (subsidium is Latin for 'help, aid, assistance'), and if we didn't like the latinate name we could simply, and with complete accuracy, call it the Helpful Function Principle or the Helpfulness Principle. It's clearly this that's front and center with the famous passage from Quadragesimo Anno:

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.

In other words, no state, organization, or institution should destroy or weaken the natural and (to the extent that they support common good) customary governmental, organizational, and institutional expressions of human life that are potentially vulnerable to it. It should instead help them. The most obvious example of this is the family. The family as an organization is a natural outgrowth and expression of human nature, and has as a result a natural jurisdiction, so to speak, and the jurisdictional rights that go with it. It also accumulates, depending on the society, customary privileges and jurisdictional rights. Other jurisdictions, like the state, should leave room for the ordinary and reasonable outworking of these privileges and rights; these jurisdictions have no right to replace family functions. With regard to family life the function of the state (for instance) is to help and assist the family in its functions, because doing so is one of the key ways in which the state helps "the members of the body social" and failing to do so is one way that the state commits "grave evil" against persons under its jurisdiction. Acting according to the principle of subsidiarity furthers the common good of all persons in a society; not acting according to it is effectively an attack on common good.

The subsidiarity principle is often paired with the principle of solidarity, and there is a real connection between the two. Solidarity is the active sense of responsibility of each person for each person; it therefore requires the active and free assumption of responsibility for others. Subsidiarity, on the other hand, is the assistance of actual people through intermediary organizations; it therefore requires the active recognition of the free responsibilities of others. When applied to life in general, they are closely associated with the virtues that uphold civic friendship and civic order, respectively. When applied to Christian life specifically, solidarity is a principle the purest expression of which is the Passion of Christ, while subsidiarity is a principle the purest expression of which is divine Providence, and we are called to exhibit both, in higher and purer forms than mere natural friendship and mere natural prudence require, because as Christians we are called to participate in both Christ's Passion and God's Providence.

In this light one can see that Clark is quite right to reject the interpretation in which subsidiarity is just a way of saying that smaller is better; if one took the phrase "smaller is better" rather loosely, it could very well be applied to subsidiarity, but it's also potentially very misleading. What Clarke misses, though, is that her own preferred way of speaking, "decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary," runs into the same kinds of problems. Subsidiarity is no more (and no less) about height than it is about size. If we don't make too much of it (and understand "lowest level possible" and "highest level necessary" so that they end up being the same level, rather than two mutually exclusive levels), it can be an entirely reasonable approximation. But it's not what subsidiarity is about. What subsidiarity is about is recognizing what organizations express and further human personality and a truly human life in the most natural and basic and person-focused ways, and both not interfering with them to the exent that they do this and also actively furthering it. Subsidiarity will tend under common conditions to favor smaller organizations and certain levels of governance, but just as subsidiarity may actually require larger organizations to step in, or even to be created so that they can step in, so also subsidiarity may actually require that decisions be made at levels higher than necessary. Likewise, subsidiarity may at times require higher levels to make it possible for a lower level to make decisions that it would not otherwise be able to make. What really matters in subsidiarity is not size or level but active help for the true flourishing of each person through those institutions and organizations that make this flourishing possible. Clarke recognizes this point, saying that "Catholic social teaching’s principle of subsidiarity actually includes within it a strong sense of the responsibility of the government for creating the conditions of human flourishing," but does not, I think, see that this problematizes her own assumptions about subsidiarity as much as it does the assumptions she is criticizing.

It's because she does not see this, I think, that her application of the general idea to political life goes haywire. She says, for instance, "It is a mistake to approach the principle of subsidiarity within the context of the perennial American debate concerning the size and scope of government." What I want to insist is that this is simply incorrect. The American debate concerning the size and scope of government is perennial because it is one of the key debates out of which the actual governance of American society arises. Indeed, it is arguably the key debate out of which American governance arises. No principle can be applied to American government without passing through this debate. Thus claiming that it is a mistake to approach the principle of subsidiarity within the context of the debate is equivalent to saying that American society should not be governed according to the principle of subsidiarity, which both Clarke and I agree to be wrong. What we actually need in America is people from all sides of each political debate actively to communicate what they think subsidiarity implies in any given case in terms of their own political assumptions about the right scope and size of government for contributing to the good of each person in our society. In the United States we should precisely approach the principle of subsidiarity in terms of the size and scope of government (as well as in terms of every other significant debate about American governance); other societies will need to approach it in terms of the major discussions and expectations of their own societies. The reason for this is that both the customs and the overall structure of society will have a considerable influence (limited only by the limits of human nature and its needs) on what any given organization can effectively contribute to the good of the persons who compose that society, and equally considerable influence on how actual people further their good and the good of others through the institutions and organizations around them. But the principle of subsidiarity is about assisting this latter kind of activity, i.e., human persons pursuing their own flourishing and the flourishing of others through the institutions around them, and therefore how the principle of subsidiarity is applied depends very much (although not completely) on what the actual organizations of society are, and how they actually are able to operate.

Thus Clark is right that it is not about size of government. Consistent subsidiarists will support larger governmental structures where those structures will make it easier for actual people to do good for themselves and others through institutions like the family, churches, voluntary associations, etc. Consistent subsidiarists will also reject larger governmental structures where those structures make it harder for the people themselves to seek their own good and the good of others. Because there will be judgment calls on both sides, it is entirely possible to be a consistent conservative subsidiarist and equally possible to be a consistent liberal subsidiarist. For that matter, one can be a consistent libertarian subsidiarist or a consistent green subsidiarist. These political differences are different views about how the means available to a government relate to the common good. Subsidarity places only one constraint on these views: that the means actually chosen are chosen so as to help actual human persons by helping organizations intermediate between those people and their government to perform their functions in ways that help each person to flourish more. That is, it requires that the end (common good) be recognized to include the actual ability of persons to pursue excellence of life for themselves and others, and that the jurisdictional functions of intermediate organizations be respected and actively supported as a means to this end. Anything more precise will have to be worked out for each society on its own terms through the actual politics of society, within the constraints created by natural rights and the reasonable functioning of institutions like the family, neighborhoods or villages, or churches/synagogues/temples that are established by nature or by second nature as basic to that society.