At one point in his Kenyon College Commencement Speech (embedded above; transcript here) David Foster Wallace describes in brilliantly vivid detail the frustrations of standing in line in a supermarket. Our default setting, he says is to burn with impotent rage against the dreariness, misery, and stupidity of the situation. But this is not the only option: Read the rest of this entry »
Father Benedict Ashley, O.P. notes in an autobiographical sketch that his vision of the relation between his Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and the sort of “natural science” that originated with Descartes et. al. changed over time. At first he took “modern natural science” to have basically zero philosophical significance; the task of the Aristotelian was simply to take the empirical discoveries of “modern science” and integrate them into the framework of Aristotelian cosmology: “In my first phase I saw the task mainly as one of filling in the details in a general plan already laid out. This may appear preposterous, but it really is not so difficult.” But then he slowly begins to think that “modern science” supports an insight of “modern philosophy” into the nature of reality itself — namely that reality is “historical.” This change came for him at the time of Vatican II, and it had the same effect on him that the Council had on many others: “This insight was a liberation, because it made it possible for me to see modern thought and modern culture much more sympathetically than before.” I wonder whether Ashley’s sense of liberation did not incline him to assent to what he saw as an insight more readily. Would he have been more hesitant to assent to his new ideas if they had been less in tune with his age? Read the rest of this entry »
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
Cross-posted from Goodreads. Rating: 4 of 5 stars
It takes a long time, and a certain amount of patience, but it is possible to finish Charles Taylor’s long, heavy book A Secular Age. And it’s really worth it. Taylor’s is in many ways the most insightful account of the genesis of modernity that I have ever read. For it is more than an examination of the “conditions of belief” in our age; it’s an examination of the way moderns see and imagine themselves and society and the universe, and how this way of seeing and imagining came about. A lot of goodreads reviews have complained about the sheer length, the meandering, and the repetitiveness of this work, but I found the length necessary to make his case, and the repetitions helpful to avoid getting lost. The meandering hesitating style seems to me to be used for rhetorical reasons. It a trifle irritating at times, but it allows Taylor to make his conclusions really plausible without having to prove them strictly. Read the rest of this entry »
In trying to explain the changes in the “conditions of belief” from the pre-modern to the modern (secular) age Charles Taylor makes a distinction between what he calls the “porous self” of pre-modernity and the “buffered self” of modernity. He distinguishes them in terms of the locus of “meaning;” for the buffered self “meaning” exists only in the mind not in external reality, whereas for the porous self meaning is already there in reality and can impinge on us from without. To clarify the distinction Taylor brings up an intriguing example– different views of melancholy: Read the rest of this entry »
I think that the carnival is an irrational institution, and that St Philip Neri was entirely right to try to abolish it. The irrationality is mostly limited to February, but in German-speaking parts it “officially” begins on the 11th of November. This is because of the confusion of the “little” pre-Advent carnival with the “big” pre-Lent carnival to form one giant “carnival Season”. Various rationalizations have been attempted for the carnival. What interests me about them is that they fall into basically two types, which correspond to the two accounts of the nature of jokes that I referred to in my last post as the Prussian and the Austrian view. Read the rest of this entry »
Surely Advent of all seasons is the time when one ought especially to remember St Benedict’s warning against “speech provoking to laughter,” (Regula Benedicti, VI) and yet seldom have I heard such uproarious laughter in the monastery as at chapter the other day. We were discussing the fact that during the recitation of the rosary some people omit the “Amen” after the Our Fathers. Now, in German the last petition of the Our Father runs “erlöse uns von dem Bösen. Amen”. (deliver us from evil. Amen.) One of my confreres (the venerable old man pictured above) recounted that as a child he always heard it (an therefore prayed it) as, ”erlöse uns von den bösen Damen”. (Deliver us from the evil ladies).
Why is it that on hearing really good jokes one immediately wants to tell them to others? Read the rest of this entry »
On a superficial level one can see the impact of […] Kantian ideas on the ethical discourse on the ethical discourse of modern Christians who now speak as much or more about “persons,” “dignity,” “rights,” and “respect” than about sin, redemption, compassion, Heaven, and hell. (Robert Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, p. 148)
I tried to see whether Kraynak’s “superficial level” could be graphed using the blunt instrument of Google Ngrams; this was the most interesting graph that I could come up with:
Note how “sin” suddenly spikes up at the beginning of the 19th century, and then declines again. This has to do with early Evangelicalism, the final phase of what Msgr. Knox calls “Enthusiasm:"
For a hundred and fifty years [Enthusiasm] becomes the major preoccupation of religious minds, obscuring from contemporary view the rise of atheism. (Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm, p. 4).
A teacher of mine likes to warn me against making the history of thought a system. The hap-hazard currents of the thoughts of men do not really follow the simplistic patterns that lazy generalization likes to see in them. This is all true enough, and yet I am sure that the patterns are not altogether imaginary. So it is always a delightful surprise to me when I find a a kind of microcosm of the history of philosophy, a single thinker who manifests a general pattern in the development of his own thought. When Arturo Vasquez commented on a post of mine I took him to be just one more boring Lefebvrist, but when I then took a look at his blog, from which it at first seemed that he was a Neoplatonist, I was astonished. It was like meeting someone whom one at first takes to be a Thackeray character only to find that he is really a Dickens character. (Was es alles gibt, I said to myself). But it was when I found that he had first tried to be a Thomist and that he is presently moving from Neoplatonism back to his original dialectical materialism that I really began to wonder (Das auch noch! I exclaimed to myself), for this is precisely the pattern that Charles De Koninck describes in his Letter to Mortimer Adler:
Greek philosophy started from naive materialism (Thales . . .), pass through a stage of mathematism (Pythag.-Plato), and finally reached metaphysics with Aristotle. These phases are of course statistical rather than clear-cut. Thanks to Christianity exerting a profound extrinsic influence on metaphysics, philosophy reached metaphysical maturity in s.Thomas. From that very moment we shift back into mathematism with Scotus, Suarez, Descartes, Leibniz etc. Kant is again definitely a scientist (I take “scientist” in its french meaning). The only solution to Hegel is Marx. We have rejoined materialism, but this time no naive materialism: but a perfectly conscious and mature materialism which defines the absolute just as we define prime matter.
What really made me laugh out loud though (no offense, Mr. Vasquez), was Vasquez’s characterization of Thomism:
It is also ironic that something that started out as a means to dialogue with the pagans and heretics (Thomist philosophy) itself became a doctrine foundational to Counter-Reformation Catholicism and a measure of orthodoxy itself. That is sort of the Zizekian vulgar core of Thomism: it is meant to convince only those who believe it that it it can convince the Other who does not believe it, all the while knowing that this isn’t really the case.
This is so ironic and funny on so many different levels. No one can read more than a few pages of S. Thomas without seeing how false it is of him. It is so clear that S. Thomas is concentrated on the reality that he is trying to understand. He developes his philosophy principally for the sake of knowing the truth, and it is only a secondary aim of some of his arguments to show how one might “dialogue” with unbelievers. Now, clearly Vasquez has Thomists in mind rather than S. Thomas himself when he says they are trying to convince their own that they can convince the Other, and perhaps this is true of some Thomists; but the great irony is that it is much more true of all the attempts that I know of trying to baptize dialectical materialism. They are all about justifying one’s belief to the Lacanian big Other (in this case “mainstream” philosophy) which doesn’t actually care about them. And thus it is precisely their “Zizekian vulgarity” which leads them to abandon Thomism. For true Thomism must always be hidden, to quote De Koninck again:
I think Thomism triumphs when it lives in our world today. But I am also convinced that its life must be hidden, because it is immanence in a world that has eyes only for pure extrinsecism. Thomism is not “foris”. There is a mass of Thomists today. But in this, because it is a mass, there is “malum ut in pluribus”: Thomism has reached therein one of its most profound forms of deformation. By this I do not mean that we should hide it: I mean that ipso facto it becomes hidden as we approach it more profoundly. The purer our Thomism is, and the better we speak of it, the less it is heard. [...] I insist that I am not pessimistic. I think it is enough that here and there is one who really devotes himself to the object.
The problem with most of those who try to synthesize Christianity with dialectical materialism is that they are not content with devoting themselves to the object, to reality, they cannot stand not to be heard.
Beati mundo corde: quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt. (Matt 5:8)
Brilliantly intelligent people are seldom very humble, and this is a great pity, for without humility no one can be wise. There is a wonderful reflection on this in Ratzinger’s book Auf Christus Schauen: the greatness of being only shows itself to the one who is humble before it, the one who is ready to submit himself to the majesty before which we are not judges (“critical thinkers”) but beggars. To me, as to so many of my fellow Thomas Aquinas College alumni, the great example of wisdom founded on deep humility as well as extraordinary intelligence was one of the founders of our alma mater, Marcus Berquist, who passed away on All Soul’s Day.
Glen Coughlin’s remark that he was “the teacher to whom I owe the most” is true for most of Mr. Berquist’s students. He was a great teacher, but not in an obvious superficial sense. He did not bubble over with excitement and energy. He had himself been a student of Charles De Koninck at Laval, but he was of a very different character from his teacher. De Koninck had a restless, adventurous mind, and used vehement rhetoric; Mr. Berquist was shy and soft spoken and had a very careful and methodical mind. He was a great teacher, but it took a while for his greatness to sink in. The first class that I had with him was on the atomic theory. I had known Mr. Berquist all my life (he is my Godfather) and I was expecting great things, but the class seemed kind of dull and plodding at first. His attention to the obvious seemed almost pedantic, and at he seemed to reign in the conversation whenever it got really interesting. It was was his keen sense of humor that began to win us over: it almost always shone through in the service of helping us to not forget the obvious. When we began to get excited about seeing the implications of Dalton’s law of multiple proportions, for instance, Mr. Berquist quoted an Ogden Nash poem (“Because it isn’t potash etcetera that makes people Republicans or Democrats or Ghibellines or Guelphs, It’s the natural perversity of the people themselfs…”) It was his great virtue to see the importance of looking careful at what is most known to us, and to move carefully from that to what was less known. He did not get carried away.
He was a great teacher, because he was a great learner. In his wonderful lecture “Learning and Discipleship” he talks about how all philosophical learning begins in wonder. A man with philosophical wonder (he explains) knows that there are things worth knowing, but which he does not know. He is filled with desire to know those things and willing to devote his life to searching for them. But he realizes that there is a great danger of error. His fear of error comes from the very experience that gives rise to wonder: he sees that the way he things at first seemed is not the way things actually are. But like Heraclitus he is sure that the hidden harmony is better than the apparent one, and he is resolved to find it. But if such a man looks to the philosophers to answer his questions what does he find? “A babble of discordant voices. There seems to be no philosophical issue about which men have not had the most profound disagreements” (p. 46). Faced with this dismal prospect the man of wonder has three options: he can become a skeptic, despairing of learning about the things themselves he will instead become a “connoisseur” of what men have said about things. Or he can become a Cartesian:
The Cartesian procedure is an attempt at a solution, but it is one that doesn’t work. It assumes that all philosophers hitherto have failed, but one can succeed if only one finds the right method; and that method is something mathematical or quasi-mathematical. [p.49; this is brilliantly explicated on pp. 47-49]
The last option is the one which Mr. Berquist himself takes– it is to become a disciple. A disciple is one who submits himself to a master whom he believes to have knowledge and the ability to lead others to attain that knowledge themselves. Thus the man of wonder tries to find someone among the babble of philosophical voices who actually knows. Mr. Berquist found this master in the human teacher whom the Church herself proposes: S. Thomas Aquinas, and in S. Thomas’s own philosophical master Aristotle.
This college, in leading its students in the quest for wisdom, is defined by discipleship [to Aristotle and S. Thomas]. For we do not think wisdom can be attained in any other way. (p. 53)
He wrote that out of true humility, knowing how improbable that is that man, whose mind is posterior to and measured by the things that it knows should attain wisdom. That Aristotle achieved some measure of it was due to a most extraordinary succession of masters and disciples: Socrates was (on his own admission) not wise, but he made a uniquely good beginning, and by extraordinary good fortune he was followed by disciples capaple of building on his foundation:
Had Socrates not been followed by Plato, and Plato by Aristotle, what would have come down to us? I shall make another assertion here, following Saint Thomas: what was begun in Socrates and was continued in Plato, was corrected and perfected in Aristotle. That is why Saint Thomas describes Aristotle not only as a philosopher, but as the Philosopher. But there never would have been an Aristotle without a Plato, and never a Plato without a Socrates. This shows even more clearly the improbability of a sufficient beginning. Never again will there be three such men in immediate succession. This is something we cannot expect or gamble on. Such a succession has apparently never occurred in the ages before, and it is not likely to occur again in the future. Furthermore, Plato was a disciple of Socrates—not just one who learned from him, but a disciple. And Aristotle was a disciple of Plato. […] Thus, it would seem, the great originals are not the greatest minds, and the greatest minds are not original. The former are unique and improbable beginnings; the latter bring philosophy to a certain perfection only by being at first diligent and attentive to their masters. (pp. 52-53)
Mr. Berquist himself is a luminous example of one who attained great wisdom through great docility to his master. One could apply to him the words which his own teacher, De Koninck, applied to their common master:
In St. Thomas we are constantly aware of a docility toward things, toward the shortcomings of his own mind, and toward that other source of philosophy, the great spirits who already know, and even those who have shown us what not to do.
He had a deep piety toward S. Thomas and Aristotle, but it was never exaggerated– he was keenly aware of their fallibility. He only used his them to approach reality itself, and never adopted their doctrine till he saw its truth. If he did not yet see how (or whether) something they said was true, he would patiently work at it for years at a time. “Where others quoted the great philosophers and theologians,” his fellow Thomas Aquinas College founder Ronald McArthur has said, “his whole intent was concentrated on the realities of which they spoke.” His piety toward his human masters was totally subordinate to his piety toward the Author of being Himself:
God cannot be deceived, He cannot be wrong. As the Act of Faith has it, He can neither deceive nor be deceived. Thus, for the learner to know what God says is to know the truth. With respect to a human teacher that is not so. To know what he says is one thing, but to know whether what he says is true is another. (p. 23)
What Bossuet says of the Prince de Condé could be said with much more justice of Marcus Berquist: “piety is the essence of the man.”
James Chastek writes of him, “His arguments had more clarity, force, simplicity, order and fidelity to St. Thomas than any contemporary Thomist I have ever known.” And it was indeed his fidelity to St. Thomas that gave his arguments their clarity, force, simplicity, and order. Particularly order. The chief office of the human teacher (Mr. Berqist often said, including in the above linked lecture pp. 11-18) is to provide the disciple with order. A human teacher (in contrast to God) always has to presuppose knowledge in the learner; he can only lead the learner from what the learner already knows to what he does not know. The human teacher is not the principle cause of the disciple’s learning. The disciple has to see what is virtually contained in the things he already knows by the power of his own mind. What the human teacher provides is order. He brings the student to consider the things he knows in a certain order, so that conclusions can be drawn from them. He leads the disciple to understand the unknown through its similitude to the known. Finally, the the teacher ought not merely to order the disciple’s thoughts with respect to a certain question; he ought to determine the order in which the learner takes up different questions:
[The teacher] tells you what you should think about now and what you should think about later, what you should investigate first, what you should investigate later. Because the mind is not equally disposed to all the objects that it might know, those objects have to be taken up in a certain order. If they are not taken up in that order, no one will learn anything of great significance. (“Learning and Discipleship” p. 16)
At this point in his argument Mr. Berquist pays a debt of gratitude to his own teachers:
One of the reasons I am profoundly grateful to my own teachers is that, when I was a beginner in philosophy, they directed me firmly with respect to such things. They told me, do not think about that now, think about this. For if you grow up in the modern intellectual milieu, almost as soon as you begin to study philosophy you are confronted with a number of difficulties that question the very possibility of knowledge, the reality of the external world, and other things which should be taken as given, especially by a beginner. And you can easily get lost in questions of that sort. So I am grateful to my teachers and pray for them every day of my life because they directed me away from such questions. They said, ‘‘Is that a problem for you out of your own experience?’’ I would say, ‘‘no.’’ ‘‘Why is it a problem for you?’’ ‘‘Because somebody said so.’’ ‘‘Leave it aside, wait until you are older and wiser; then you can fruitfully investigate those skeptical questions; they are not the beginning of philosophy. They pre-suppose that a great many things have been understood beforehand.’’ And if I had not been directed that way, I would be much worse off now. I would in fact be nowhere. (pp. 17-18)
It is a testimony that many could pay Mr. Berquist himself, and will continue to pay him, for this element of his teaching is embodied in the order of the curriculum at TAC, of which he was the main architect.
Mr. Berquist was not concerned with being original, but this did not prevent him from in fact discovering things truths which no one had ever seen before. He was, to take an example from the lowly realm of physics, the first to demonstrate that in any motion from rest speed cannot be proportional to distance. A truth which Galileo himself had been unable to prove, though he came to hold it (after initially holding the opposite; see this paper by Michael Augros pp. 7-8). But such discoveries where secondary to main aim of beholding the principles of things.
Anyone hearing him laying out (say) Aristotle’s account of the principles of nature, with the clarity and mastery of someone who knew it better than the back of his hand, might think that he never did anything other than read Aristotle, but this was far from true. I remember once asking him, “what are you going to read this summer, Mr. Berquist,” and he answered, “Oh, Aristotle and S. Thomas.” But he read a great many other things as well. He particularly loved to read comic novelists—especially Wodehouse and Orwell. “Bertie Wooster,” he would say, “is my favorite Wodehouse character: all the others are perfectly selfish, but Bertie is always getting into scrapes to help people.” He once invited a bunch of homeless tramps to his house for dinner, and drew them into a long conversation about Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. “They were excellent critics of it,” he recounted, “since they knew what he was taking about from experience.” He was tremendously well read, but never made a parade of his learning—when it came to the surface it was without design. I remember once, when the Berquists visited my family in Austria, that we were taking about the trees outside the window, and someone said, “that one is called an “Ulme” in German, but I’m not sure what that is in English. “Oh,” said Mr. Berquist, “probably an elm. You know, like in Virgil: In medio ramos annosaque brachia pandit ulmus opaca…”
I can scarcely think of anyone so gentle, humble, and mild as Berquist, and these things were the fruits of a deep life of prayer. He was a great example of prayer, and we should take that example and pray for him now. During his last illness he said that he offered up his sufferings for all the people who were praying for him, and I am sure that he is now interceding for all those who are praying for his soul. So, of your charity, pray for the repose of the soul Marcus Berquist.
Intellectual custom is a second nature. What we are accustomed to seems obvious to us. As Sean Collins has recently reminded us many things which the intellectual culture of our day takes as self-evident are in fact highly questionable positions introduced by the Enlightenment. One area in which this is particularly hard to spot is in our concept of number. Nothing seems so obvious and immediate to us as our idea of number, and yet the ancients had a very different idea of what numbers are than we. Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra tries to get to the root of that difference, and by so doing he gets to the roots of the transformation that gave us modern science and philosophy. Leo Strauss explains:
Nothing affected [Klein and me] as profoundly in the years in which our minds took their lasting directions as the thought of Heidegger. This is not the place for speaking of that thought and its effects in general. Only this much must be said: Heidegger, who surpasses in speculative intelligence all his contemporaries and is at the same time intellectually the counterpart to what Hitler was politically, attempts to go a way not trodden by anyone or rather to think in a way in which philosophers at any rate have never thought before. Certain it is that one has questioned the premise of philosophy as radically as Heidegger. While everyone else in the young generation who had ears to hear was either completely overwhelmed by Heidegger, or else, having been almost completely overwhelmed by him, engaged un well-intentioned but ineffective rearguard actions against him, Klein alone saw why Heidegger is truly important: by uprooting and not simply rejecting the tradition of philosophy, he made it possible for the first time after many centuries—one hesitates to say how many—to see the roots of the tradition as they are and thus perhaps to know, what so many merely believe, that those roots are the only natural and healthy roots. Superficially or sociologically speaking, Heidegger was the first great German philosopher who was a Catholic by origin and by training; he thus had from the outset a premodern familiarity with Aristotle; he thus was protected against the danger of trying to modernize Aristotle. But as a philosopher Heidegger was not a Christian: he thus was not tempted to understand Aristotle the light of Thomas Aquinas. Above all, his intention was to uproot Aristotle: he thus was compelled to disinter the roots, to bring them to light, to look at them with wonder. Klein was the first to understand the possibility which Heidegger had opened without intending it: the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy, to the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, a return with open eyes and in full clarity about the infinite difficulties which it entails. He turned to the study of classical philosophy with a devotion and a love of toil, a penetration and an intelligence, an intellectual probity and a sobriety in which no contemporary equals him. Out of that study grew his work which bears the title “Greek Logistics and the Genesis of Algebra.” No title could be less expressive of a man’s individuality and even of a man’s intentions; and yet if one knows Klein, the title expresses perfectly his individuality, his idiosyncrasy mentioned before. The work is much more than a historical study. But even if we take it as a purely historical work, there is not, in my opinion, a contemporary work in the history of philosophy or science or in “the history of ideas” generally speaking which in intrinsic worth comes within hailing distance of it. (Leo Strauss, “An Unspoken Prologue”)
It is interesting that Strauss sees Heidegger as having enabled Klein to go back to them without reading them through the lens of modern philosophy. In a brilliant letter to Mortimer Adler Charles De Koninck discusses the uselessness of trying to argue with modern philosophers. They have concealed the principles of their thought from themselves. They consider univocism, voluntarism, and nominalism, as simply given for reason; they do not consider that their view is in fact the result of a decision to pursue power instead of truth. Thus the true philosopher can never come to any real meeting of minds with his adversary. In an epilogue to a recent paper I argue that the very radicalism of certain contemporary philosophers allows for a possibility of a discussion which De Koninck did not anticipate. The philosophers I had in mind are certain contemporary “post-post-modern” theorists, but obviously they are all more or less influenced by the “intellectual counterpart of Hitler” who was of such decisive assistance to Klein.
