Isaac of Nineveh for Lent II

Moderation adorns all things; for without moderation, even things deemed good become harmful.

Homily 1

Isaac of Nineveh for Lent I

The fear of God is the beginning of virtue, and it is said to be the offspring of faith. It is sown in the heart when a man withdraws his mind from attractions of the world to collect its thoughts, wandering about from distraction, into reflection upon the restitution to come.

To lay the foundation of virtue, nothing is better than for a man to contain himself by means of flight from the affairs of life, and to persevere in the illumined word of those straight and holy paths, even that word which in the Spirit the Psalmist named a lamp.

Homily I (p. 113).

[Isaac of Nineveh, The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, trs. Revised 2nd edition. Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston: 2011).]

Isaac of Nineveh

For Lent I will be posting little excerpts from Saint Isaac of Nineveh, so I thought I would say something about him first.

Isaac of Nineveh, or Isaac the Syrian, is a seventh-century saint with an interesting distinction: he is the latest saint, historically speaking, to be commemorated on the liturgical calendars of the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Oriental Orthodox Churches. (The Church of the East did not accept the Council of Ephesus and the Oriental Churches did not accept the Council of Chalcedon.) That is to say, he is recognized canonically as a saint by every apostolic church accepting the Nicene Creed, and this despite the fact that the Church of the East and Oriental Orthodox split off from the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox two hundred years before he was born. His feast day is January 28.

Relatively little is known of his life. He was born in Beth Qatraye, somewhere around modern-day Qatar, in the early seventh century. In the year 676, he was ordained Bishop of the important See of Nineveh, which was in modern-day Iraq. (Nineveh, in fact, is on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul, which was one of the oldest bastions of Christianity in Mesopotamia until last June, when ISIS took hold of it and turned the last of its dwindling Christian population into fleeing refugees.) Isaac does not seem to have found himself suitable for the task, although we do not know why. After a few months, he withdrew from the episcopacy and lived the solitary life on Mount Matout, and later, in his old age, a monk at a monastery at Shabar. He wrote in Syriac, but his writings were quickly translated after his death into Greek and thence into Latin, Amharic, and Slavonic, and thus he became widely read throughout the Christian world.

The primary source of texts I will be using for Mar Isaac is The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, trs., Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston, MA: 2011).

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During Lent I will also be going through the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, for those who are interested. I see that D. G. D. Davidson will also be doing the Meditations for his Lenten Read-a-thon this year, so all the cool kids are doing it.

Epictetus, Encheiridion

If one were to attempt to identify a universal guide to Stoic philosophy, you could not do better than The Handbook (Encheiridion) of Epictetus. Epictetus lived from about AD 50 to about AD 130 and would be a significant influence on all later Stoics; he has a genius for distilling its basic ideas, especially its ethical ideas, into practical recommendations; and the Encheiridion is to Epictetus himself exactly what its title says it is -- a handbook, a brief guide, a short distillation for practical purposes.

Epictetus, of course, wrote nothing. The primary work for his philosophy is the collection of the Discourses of Epictetus collected by Arrian, one of his students. The exact relation of the Encheiridion to the Discourses is unclear. It would be plausible to think of it as an abstract of the ideas of the Discourses, but not all of the content of the Encheiridion finds any clear correlation with ideas in the Discourses. This may be because we are missing some of the books of the Discourses (we have four books, and there are some indications that there were originally eight). Or it may be that the relation between the two is a bit more complicated than has usually been assumed.

You can read the Encheiridion online in English in the eighteenthicentury translation by Elizabeth Carter or in the nineteenth-century translation by George Long at the Perseus Project. Perhaps the most important commentary on the Encheiridion is that of Simplicius, which can also be found online.

The Thought

(1) Some things are in your power and some things are not. The very first sentence of the Handbook gives us one of its major themes. Some things are up to us -- our opinions, judgments, desires, aversions -- and some things are not up to us -- our bodies, our possessions, our reputations. Being able to distinguish between the two is a considerable part of freedom. Misfortune is not getting what you desire, so the person who is free of desire for things not up to him is someone who can never be unfortunate, "but if you are averse to illness or death or poverty, you will meet misfortune" (#2), because these things are not up to you. Because of this, whether your life is a good one depends in great measure on accepting that things outside your power really are outside your power: "Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well" (#8). If you go lame, it is your limb, which is not up to you, that has been interfered with; your will, which is up to you, is still intact (#9).

Likewise with everything around you: "You are foolish if you want your children and your wife and your friends to live forever, since you are wanting things to be up to you that are not up to you, and things to be yours that are not yours" (#14). We should act as if we were at a banquet (#14), not constantly reaching out our hands toward everything, but simply letting it come to us, if it does. Likewise with your role in society. We should be like actors in plays (#17), playing whatever role is assigned, and doing it according to our own skill, because we are not the ones who write the parts. (It is always worth remembering that Epictetus began his life as a slave.) And it is only by giving up on trying to control things we cannot control that we free ourselves of envy and live unconquered lives (#19).

As far as the things we cannot control go, everything happens as it should: targets are not set up to be missed (#27) and piety toward the gods requires acquiescing in what happens (#28). Impiety follows, in fact, from taking our good or bad to lie in things that are not up to us. Likewise, if people treat you badly, you need to remember that they cannot see things as they appear to you, but only as things appear to themselves (#42), and it is not you who are actually harmed by it. You should simply not worry about what others say about you, because this is not up to you (#50). You would recognize the absurdity of someone turning over your body to be tormented by anyone who came along, so why would you go about turning over your own mind to be tormented by anyone who came along, just because he insults you (#28)? No one can do you harm unless you turn your mind over them to be harmed (#30).

(2) Appearance is not reality. Our connection to the world is mediated by phantasia, appearance or impression, the sense and feel of it, so to speak. But appearance is not reality. Thus, when faced with an appearance, we should recognize that it is not the thing that appears. Instead of going how things appear, we should use reason to take into account the way they really are. Much of human misery comes from being carried away by appearance, in a way not appropriate to, or even inconsistent with, reality. Whenever we are faced with some sign usually taken to be of something bad (Epictetus uses omens as his example, but obviously applies to any kind of sign), we should recognize that the sign is a matter of appearances, for the use of things external to us, like our body or our property, or other people (#18). Whether it is really of something bad depends entirely on us, because, whatever it may signify, we may make the choices that allow us to benefit from it, no matter what it is -- and so it is in our power to make all omens good omens.

If something makes you afraid or miserable, it is your own opinion that makes it fearful or terrible; you have only yourself to blame if you are afraid or miserable. If you put your joy in a matter that is not up to you, like the beauty of your horse (#6), you are treating something over which you have no power as having power over you, and so you are enslaved. When someone is grieved by the loss of property or the death of a child, what actually weighs them down is their judgment about what has happened, which is based on the appearances (#16). If another person irritates or insults you, avoid being carried away by appearances by delaying your response until you can control yourself (#20). And we should be careful of insinuating our evaluations into things. If someone drinks a massive amount of wine, we should simply say that he drinks a lot of wine, not that he does badly; whether or not he does badly can only be determined on the basis of his judgment or actual decision, not on the basis of the appearances (#45).

We learn to recognize the will of nature, as opposed to appearance, by universalizing (#26). If someone else accidentally breaks a cup, we can all recognize that this is just a thing that happens, and one must bear it; so we should learn that this is true if we break our own cup. If a stranger's child dies, we recognize the awfulness of the appearance, but we are not carried away by it; we recognize that it is the way of things. And so, too, we should remember this when we face our own losses. But the same is true for pleasant appearances; they too must not be allowed to carry us away. Here we should also wait for an appropriate time, and delay our actions until we can control ourselves (#34).

(3) The philosophical life is a life of internals. All of this directly establishes that the philosophical life focuses on the internal rather than the external. We should not be concerned about what other people think about our choosing to live philosophically; we should rather simply do it so that we may have freedom and self-respect. When we consider something that we'd like, we should think it through. Suppose, for example, that you want to be victorious at the Olympic games (#29). You should not simply consider the victory but what leads up to it -- the discipline, the difficulty, the work -- and what may follow from it -- injury, losing -- and make your decision in light of that. You cannot be a philosopher by imitating philosophers as if you were a monkey; you must understand what is involved in it and act accordingly. Too many people hear or read some philosopher and think that if they imitate the way a philosopher talks that they have become a philosopher. Far from it! This is like thinking you can be victorious in the pentathlon without any training. To be a philosopher, you must be willing to trade everything you might lose -- honor, public office, reputation, wealth, or whatever -- for the freedom and tranquility of rational life. If you focus on the externals of philosophy, this is precisely what it is not to be a philosopher. The philosopher looks for benefit or harm to come from himself, not from anything outside (#48). If you want to be a philosopher, practice philosophy, not something else.

We should indeed take Socrates as our model, not in externals, but in his attitude toward things. If we want to know how to deal with a situation, we should ask what Socrates would do (#33). Socrates shows us that death is not dreadful in itself, by the way he died (#5). If we are looking for signs, we should approach them as Socrates would, giving priority to reason and only using them as supplements (#32). If you visit someone important, you should already be reconciled to the possibility of not meeting them (#33). Like Socrates, we should not make any ostentatious display of how philosophical we are; he was so far from ostentation that when other people asked him to introduce them to philosophers, he did not put himself forward, but took them to other people (#46). With anything that comes up, we should recognize that in our lives we are like athletes in a great contest and that every moment in the game matters. Socrates did this and became perfect in his own way; if we are not like Socrates, we should nonetheless live like people who want to be like Socrates (#51).

The Handbook ends with four quotations that Epictetus recommends that we keep in mind at all times. The first is from the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes:

Conduct me, Zeus, and thou, O Destiny,
Wherever your decrees have fixed my lot.
I follow cheerfully; and, did I not,
Wicked and wretched, I must follow still.

The second is from Euripides, that very philosophical writer of tragedies:

Whoe'er yields properly to Fate is deemed
Wise among men, and knows the laws of Heaven.

And the third and fourth are from Plato's Socrates (the Crito and the Apology, respectively):

O Crito, if it thus pleases the gods, thus let it be.

Anytus and Melitus may kill me indeed; but hurt me they cannot.

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Quotations are from Epictetus, The Handbook, Nicholas P. White, tr., Hackett (Indianapolis: 1983), except for the quotations at the end, which are from the Higginson translation at Perseus Project.

Fortnightly Book, February 15

Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.

Lloyd Cassel Douglas (1877-1951) was born Doya Douglas in Columbia City, Indiana to a Lutheran family. Douglas began to follow in the footsteps of his father, who was a Lutheran pastor, but at some point, for reasons unknown, became a Congregationalist. Around about the age of 50 he began writing a novel, Magnificent Obsession, which was published in 1929 and slowly became a major bestseller; Publisher's Weekly lists it as the #8 bestseller of 1932 and the #4 bestseller of 1933. It would be made into a blockbuster movie in 1935 (which would be remade into an even more massive blockbuster in 1954 starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman) and was adapted into radio by Lux Radio Theater in 1937 (and again in 1944), and by the Screen Guild Theater in 1941, and by the Screen Director's Playhouse in 1949. From then on out, Douglas was assured a place on the bestseller lists; Forgive Us Our Trespassers was the #6 bestseller of 1933; The Green Light was #1 in 1935; White Banners was #6 in 1936; Disputed Passage was #6 in 1939; The Robe (his most famous novel) was #7 in 1942 and #1 in 1943 and #2 in 1944 and 1945 and #1 again in 1953 due to the blockbuster movie; The Big Fisherman was #1 in 1948 and #2 in 1949. Douglas himself died in 1951 in California and is laid to rest in Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

For this fortnightly book we go back to the beginning, with Magnificent Obsession, the tale of a man who receives a coded journal from a highly successful surgeon, Dr. Hudson, that has hidden within it the secret to greatness and power; he, too, becomes caught up in Dr. Hudson's curious obsession. But the obsession is not quite what you might think. And the book as a whole is structured as a mystery and riddle, with the answer almost, but not quite, stated.

Given that I like classic radio and this book resulted in several notable radio versions, I'll certainly also listen to one or two of them -- at least the 1937 Lux Radio Theater version starring Irene Dunn and Robert Taylor (who were in the 1935 movie) and guest-starring Lloyd C. Douglas himself, but probably also, if I have the time, the 1941 Screen Guild Theater version starring Myrna Loy and Don Ameche, and the others if I have time. It will be interesting to see how close they are to the original; like most episodes of these series, the immediate predecessor of the radio version is the film rather than the book, and Hollywood in this era tends to up the romance and downplay almost everything else.

Not Like Other Men

James Chastek has an excellent post on Pharisaism and religion:

These might be what Christ was speaking about with “if your hand offend you… if your eye offend you..etc.” The hand is the organ of manipulation of the world, and so speaks to the practical life, just as the eye speaks to the life of understanding. But both praxis and theoria have ways of insinuating themselves into religion so as to become substitutes for it. It’s hard to know when exactly the rot sets in, but presumably we know we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere when we find our religion defined by the way in which we are thankful that we are not like other men: like the liberals, the wingnuts, the clown-massers, the racist bigots, the America haters, Nominalists, the dry manual Scholastics, etc.

Go and read the whole thing.

Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

Introduction

Opening Passage:

He arrived at our home on a Sunday of November, 189-. I still say 'our home,' although the house no longer belogns to us. We left that part of the country nearly fifteen years ago and shall certainly never go back to it.

Summary: Le Grand Meaulnes is a nostalgic work; but this is perhaps not to convey entirely how thoroughly permeated with nostalgia it is. 'Wistful' is perhaps the best word for it. It is also a melancholy work, in which happiness is always somewhere else and our knowledge of it is never of happiness itself but only of a memory of a promise of it. At one point, Yvonne de Galais asks sadly, "can the past come to life again?" The answer given by Meaulnes is, "Who knows?" But the truth of the matter is that there is only one answer to that question, and it is No. The opportunity, once lost, stays lost; the day, once wasted, is wasted forever; our stumbling cannot be undone. It is a truth as obvious as the air we breathe, and yet sometimes as invisible.

François Seurel, the narrator, tells us of his friend Augustin Meaulnes, a boy who had an adventure. He found himself at a strange party, thrown by a young wealthy man, Frantz de Galais, who has gone to bring back the woman he will marry and wants the house to be in celebration at his return. Alas, though, the fiance has fled, and Frantz will run away. At the party, Meaulnes meets Yvonne de Galais, and becomes obsessed with finding her again, but all for nothing, so that he will despair of finding her again. By chance, however, Seurel will find her years later, and now everything can be put to right and Meaulnes can marry Yvonne -- and yet, of course, years are not as they seem to be in a story, just splices between paragraphs and pages; the things that have happened in the meantime, out of Seurel's eye, change the texture of everything. Failure, ruin, attempted suicide, death, loss: they are around every turn.

This could have very well been an extremely brutal novel; the heavier hands of most novelists would likely have made it so. But it is saved from such coarseness by its innocence. It borders quite close to sentimentalism; but innocence again keeps it from falling into maudlin melodrama. Nothing is played for the mere drama of it. Events are not intensified for excitement. Sometimes we human beings just have impossible dreams. Sometimes our paths tangle up tragically with other paths. There is nothing much to be done about it. Sometimes the best we can do with our lives is shrug sadly and say, "If we had only known...." But it is these very things that make up the adventures of our lives. Like the house mentioned in the very first sentence of the story, our past is ours, though we will never go back to it again.

Favorite Passage:

But while I hope thus and am enraptured, I unexpectedly come out into a clearing, which is simply a meadow. Without giving it a thought, I have reached the other side of the Commons, which I had always imagined a very long way off. And there, on my right, in between stacks of logs, and astir with life in the shade, stands the forester's house. Two pairs of stockings are drying on the window-sill. In previous years, whenever we had reached the entrance of the wood, we used to point to a patch of light at the end of a long, dark avenue, and say: 'That house out there, that's the forester's cottage, Baladier's.' But we had never pushed on as far as that. We had often heard people say, as if referring to some extraordinary venture, 'He's been as far as the forester's cottage!...'

This time, I have been as far as Baladier's cottage, and I found nothing.

Recommendation: Recommended. But this is my first time reading it, and I suspect that this is also one of those novels that becomes better the more one reads it.