Links for Noting

* Bruce Chalton quotes a discussion by Tolkien of the differences between the evil of Morgoth and the evil of Sauron and reflects on it.

* Jason Zarri, A Dilemma for Dialetheism

* The Stained Glass Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

* Jean-Luc Marion on Christian Philosophy

* I once, a long time ago, noted a relatively new phenomenon in the internet, the Cause for Canonization website, and made a list of a number of them. Here's one for Catherine of Aragon.

* Very much in agreement with this post at DarwinCatholic.

* Lucy Knisley sums up the Twilight series (second comic on the page), so that you will never have to read it.

* Henry Karlson has a good post on Maximus of Tyre.

Stein on Holy Realism

The example of the saints demonstrates to [other believers] how things should actually be: where there is genuine, lively faith, there the doctrine of faith and the "tremendous deeds" of God are the content of life. All else steps aside for it and is determined by it. This is holy realism: the original inner receptivity of the soul reborn in the Holy Spirit. Whatever the soul encounters is received in an appropriate manner and with corresponding depth, and finds in the soul a living, mobile, docile energy that allows itself to be easily and joyfully led and molded by that which it has received, unhampered by any mistaken inhibitions and rigidity. Such realism, when it leads a holy soul to accept the truths of faith, becomes the science of the saints. If the mystery of the cross becomes its inner form, it turns into a science of the cross.

Holy realism has a certain affinity with the realism of the child who receives and responds to impressions with unimpaired vigor and vitality, and with uninhibited simplicity.

St. Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross, Koeppel, tr., ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 2002) pp. 10-11. She goes on to note that, as with the realism of the child, this vivid and intimate acquaintance with the foundations doesn't protect one from error; indeed, may lead to highly unreasonable responses. As with the realism of children, however, a good environment can correct, limit, and compensate for any likely illusions or errors that may arise.

The point is quite an important one. One of the things you note very quickly if you do much reading in Catholic theologians discussing mystical theology is a common and repeated emphasis on the need for context. John of the Cross (about whom Stein is writing here), Teresa of Avila, John of Avila, and others repeatedly advise people not to put a great emphasis on flashier kinds of religious experience, not because there is nothing that can be learned from them, but because handling them properly is very difficult. One and all they insist that people focus on basic truths and reasonable responses, only paying attention to religious experiences to the extent that they genuinely help you to be a better person more capable of loving God and neighbor, and the reason is precisely the point Stein notes here: what matters far more than the experiences we have is the maturity of insight we apply to them, and the latter must be developed by discipline. It is a truth whose value and importance extends far beyond the confines of religious experiences. Nonetheless, it is also true that the intensity and intimacy of our interactions, the realism with which we approach things, plays an important role, too: developing a mature insight into any kind of experience is very difficult if your standpoint on it is abstracted and aloof to begin with. Such "inhibitions and rigidity" can be a source of error and mistake on their own; we need to be teachable ("docile," to use the word in the quotation above) and that requires a certain sort of active energy. Becoming an adult, with adult judgment and sensibility, requires simultaneously throwing ourselves into the world around us ("realism" in the sense of a receptive response to the world as it is and seems to be rather than a philosophical position) and immersing ourselves in an environment that can keep us from going astray, whether by misleading external influences or by misleading internal biases.

Stein on the Practical Knowledge of the Artist

If we now examine more closely what happens on the part of the artist, we find--as was emphasized earlier--that the "emergence" of the "idea" is more in the nature of receiving than of creation.... The human intellect does not call ideas into Dasein; it calls works into Dasein which it fashions upon the model of ideas. We are then dealing with a special kind of knowledge, a comprehension of "meaningful forms" [Sinngebilde] which "manifest" themselves to the intellect and stimulate its activity. But these forms do not manifest themselves immediately in full clarity and intelligibility but rather in a veiled and indistinct manner. Therefore, the first operation which the mind is required to perform is a purely intellectual one, namely, that of making the idea stand out clearly. And for a "genuine" or "true" work of art it is of the utmost importance that nothing be done aimlessly or capriciously lest the inner organic laws of the formal structure be disturbed by any arbitrary additions, omissions, or distortions.

When we say that this purely intellectual operation must come "first," we do not mean to imply that this operation must be completed before the work of execution can begin. Rather, the clarification takes place step by step during and concomitantly with the execution of the work, so that the expression "practical knowledge" applies here in a true and literal sense.

Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 2002), pp. 301-302.

Edith Stein

The insistence that the sexual differences are "stipulated by the body alone" is questionable from various points of view. 1) If anima=forma corporis, then bodily differentiation constitutes an index of differentiation in the spirit. 2) Matter serves form, not the reverse. That strongly suggests that the difference in the psyche is the primary one. Thorough consideration must be given, of course, to the question: To what extent can and should growth into the supernatural be a growing beyond the differences endowed by nature?

[Edith Stein, letter to Sr. Callista Kopf, OP, 8 August 1931, in Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942, Gelben & Leuven, eds. ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 1993) p. 99.]

Today is the Feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, better known as Edith Stein. Edith Stein was born October 12, 1891 to a Jewish family in Breslau. Her family was observant, but Edith became an atheist in her teenage years. She went on to study philosophy at the University of Göttingen, and there became not just a student of Husserl, but in a sense the student of Husserl: with Heidegger she edited Husserl's papers, and actually drafted, on the basis of Husserl's notes and conversations, a number of passages that made it into Husserl's posthumous Ideen II. Like many of Husserl's students at the time, Stein was interested in the implications of Husserl's phenomenology for areas of life like ethics, law, and politics.

In the 1920s, after reading Teresa of Avila's Life, she converted to Catholicism and began to teach at a girls' school run by the Dominicans, during which she began an intensive study of Thomistic philosophy, starting with a translation of Aquinas's De Veritate. She found St. Thomas somewhat confusing at first -- unlike phenomenology, which is all about proper method, Aquinas has no single method for handling philosophical problems, and this more free-wheeling philosophical style took some adjustment. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute of Pedagogy of Münster, but changes were coming: she was forced to resign the next year as the Nazis passed anti-Semitic laws restricting teaching positions. She joined the Carmelites in 1933, and took the name Teresa (or Teresia) Benedicta a Cruce. There she began work on what would become her major philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being, an attempt to address scholastic questions phenomenologically.

As the National Socialists grew in power, the Carmelites moved Teresa Benedicta, along with other Jewish converts, to the Netherlands in the hope that they would be better protected there. It was in the Netherlands that she wrote her major theological work, Studies on John of the Cross: The Science of the Cross (the two phrases are sometimes reversed). Unfortunately, the attempt to protect her failed. The Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940; the next year, they began anti-Semitic purges, at first on a small scale. The Dutch did not take it lying down; there was a nationwide strike. The Nazis, however, only became pushier. Eventually the bishops of the Catholic Church of the Netherlands published a letter of protest, which they required all priests to read at Sunday service. The Nazis retaliated by rounding up all Jewish-background Catholics they could find, as well as any priests or religious they found obstructive, and sending them off to concentration camps. Edith and her sister Rosa were shipped to Auschwitz, where they were gassed on or around August 9, 1942.

Henry Karlson has a post on Edith Stein's feminism, which is an interesting subject. In the letter quoted above, she notes that she had once considered herself a radical feminist, but for a number of reasons had come to a position she considered less subjective and more objective; her position, which would not be popular today among most feminists, was that there were was an objective core to masculinity and femininity, each of which contributed distinctive (albeit at times overlapping) values to the human race. Much of her work on the subject is devoted to the role of women as teachers, and can be found collected in Essays on Woman, volume 2 in the ICS translation of her works.

Butler on Party Spirit

And as to the spirit of party, which unhappily prevails amongst mankind, whatever are the distinctions which serve for a supply to it, some or other of which have obtained in all ages and countries; one who is thus friendly to his kind, will immediately make due allowances for it, as what cannot but be amongst such creatures as men, in such a world as this. And as wrath and fury and overbearing upon these occasions proceed, as I may speak, from men's feeling only on their own side; so a common feeling, for others as well as for ourselves, would render us sensible to this truth, which it is strange can have so little influence; that we ourselves differ from others, just as much as they do from us. I put the matter in this way, because it can scarce be expected that the generality of men should see, that those things which are made the occasions of dissension and fomenting the party spirit, are really nothing at all: but it may be expected from all people, how much soever they are in earnest about their respective peculiarities, that humanity, and common good will to their fellow creatures, should moderate and restrain that wretched spirit.

Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons, Sermon XII. It is indeed a little strange how we so often tend to treat disagreement as asymmetrical, when in reality we differ from others as much as they differ from us. It doesn't follow, of course, that the disagreement is insignificant; but it does show a way in which it is silly to be annoyed merely at the disagreement.

To-morrow Some New Light Will Shine

The Truth
by Archibald Lampman

Friend, though thy soul should burn thee, yet be still
Thoughts were not meant for strife, nor tongues for swords,
He that sees clear is gentlest of his words,
And that's not truth that hath the heart to kill.
The whole world's thought shall not one truth fulfil.
Dull in our age, and passionate in youth,
No mind of man hath found the perfect truth,
Nor shalt thou find it; therefore, friend, be still.

Watch and be still, nor hearken to the fool,
The babbler of consistency and rule:
Wisest is he, who, never quite secure,
Changes his thoughts for better day by day:
To-morrow some new light will shine, be sure,
And thou shalt see thy thought another way.

Perfect Age

I accidentally turned thirty-three today, a happening that falls on everyone at some point or another, however unexpectedly, and thus I have achieved the perfect age. The ancients tended to see life as divided up into eras, the ages of man. These schemes vary considerably, but they tend to agree that after childhood we enter a period of adolescentia, an age of life whose boundaries are somewhat imprecise, but which roughly occupies us from fourteen to twenty-eight. Thus, for instance, when Augustine talks about the sins of his adolescentia, he is talking about a much longer period of time than is covered by our word 'adolescence'. After adolescentia, a man enters iuventus, whose boundaries are also imprecise, but which covers the thirties and then some of the forties -- different authors disagree about how much, with Isidore, I think, putting it as far as forty-eight, after which one enters senectus. Iuventus is often translated as 'youth'; a translation which requires making a shift to a somewhat different conception of youth than is common among us. But iuventus, regardless of how one translates it, is the fruition of life: with luck and discipline, the period before it excels in body, and (also with luck and discipline) the period after it excels in mind, but iuventus excels in the integration of the two.

Of course, one doesn't reach full fruition all at once: there is a process, and a period of time it takes. The summit of life -- the best of all parts of life, to the extent that they can be all had together -- occurs somewhere in iuventus, but how far in does one reach the completion of one's potential as a full adult? The authors disagree here, as well, but the two ages that are proposed most as the (approximate) points of completion are the ages of thirty, and, even more popularly (in part because of the influence of Peter Lombard), thirty-three. Thirty-three, then, is the age of perfection, 'perfection' originally meaning 'completion'. At roughly thirty-three we become perfect in the sense that we are finally complete as integrated human beings. The rest of iuventus involves living out what it is to be such a complete human being. So that's what's in the future for me, deo volente.

Of course, ages flow into ages, so each age is a preparation for the next. Adolescentia, our foolish years of indiscretions and stupid mistakes and imbalances, are well-lived when we cultivate the kind of life and experience that teaches us discipline, reason, virtue, so that we are able to handle the distinctive problems of iuventus when we come to it. In short: we learn the skills we will need when we are no longer stupid. Iuventus, too, is a preparation, in this case for the seniority of senectus, and it is well-lived when we cultivate the kind of life and experience that teaches us to see the true value of understanding and cultivate it, thus making us able to handle the distinctive problems of senectus, in which the body slowly but steadily become less manageable and those aspects of the mind most dependent on the body may become less reliable, but in which genuine tranquillity of understanding becomes more consistently possible. The ancients, people like Aristotle, thought that that age (senectus) was the only age at which one could become a philosopher in the full and proper sense; everyone before that time was, so to speak, just studying for it, merely practicing at philosophizing. Having attained a sort of completeness of life in iuventus, one is then prepared to begin the difficult work of attaining in senectus transcendence over it.

So, having attained the perfect age and entered the perfect years, the task in front is simply to become wise. Nothing is more human, and nothing more godlike, than that. Exciting times.