Hard and Heavy Questions from Pseudonoma

I’m still considering these questions that relate to the small constellation of quotations in my post below, but thought they deserved a post of their own meanwhile. I’ve been thinking towards a response along a number of potentially fruitful lines. In the mean time anyone else equal (more or less) to the challenge is welcome to step forth:

“How is equality in any ways to be associated with liberal education? Does it characterize the manner in which such an education can be received? Is it an expectation to be set upon the availability of such an education? Does it refer to the manner in which the fruits of such an education are to be distributed or attained? Or is it because liberal education has been all too readily associated with equality that it finds itself yoked with the misbegotten task of rescuing culture, or embarrassingly handed over as an ornament to a political purpose?

I do not intend a merely rhetorical flippancy here, but it seems that what is sacred in this world of its own accord constellates a hierarchy among those who would receive it. Otherwise it is given in a way that this world as such does not yet recognize.”

“and we are here because the liberal arts are taught here in a distinctive manner”

Reading the school’s first newsletter, it was apparent to me in a beautiful way that the TMC enterprise was meant from the beginning as a communal adventure in which teachers, administrators, students (and alumni by extension) are called to be, each in their own way, equal sharers and stewards of a common vision. To deny the share of any of these is to attack the vision as a whole.

Read it here.

“The Board of Trustees alone, rather than the alumni or any other entity or persons, has the duty of governance, and … the Report therefore cannot be an invitation to continual dialogue.”
–The Special Committee of the Thomas More College Board of Trustees

“Such a view neglected one truth revealed by Christ: that equality is part of the good.”
–Dr. Peter V. Sampo

“It has escaped you that a geometric equality holds great sway among gods and men, but you suppose it is necessary to overreach others.”
–Socrates

Another Reflection on Lucretius

The Poetry of Lucretius’ Invitation to Accept “Mater Rebus Certa”

In lines 188-198 of the first book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes the implications of there being a “semine certo”, a definite seed for every kind of thing, that each thing has “sua … materia.” His particular concerns in this passage are: that the developement of things from their seed is gradual (188-90), that they need constant nurture to survive and germinate (192-5), and that such a constant nurture maintains for them their constant (or gradually developing) nature (190). Things have their “principiis” (198), their first beginnings, ever present within them; every stage of their development is part of a process from, yet without leaving behind, their origin of life, their “materia” (191), the mother-substance from which they are continually in the process of being born i.e. “natura” (194). Lucretius invites his prospective student to take comfort in this constant mother-presence which grounds the stable nature of the cosmos in an uninterrupted chain of organic causes (196-7). The calming words of Lucretius thus sound within a mother’s womb that the uncanny can never enter (198) – a womb that one never exits, it is also a tomb (202-4). But it is a tomb so homely and familiar that death is no longer something to be feared, but, rather, its dissolution is only one more stage of a seed’s natural development.

approach to meaning restores the experience/ in a different form

John Donne:

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

T.S. Eliot:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfillment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—

try and understand me …

I want to praise a book—A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler—but I cannot at this moment find the right words to do justice to the object of my admiration.

Instead, I’ll give an example of what I admire (which incidentally confirms and elucidates one of my long and vehemently held beliefs):

try. The idiom t. and do something is described as colloquial for t. to do. It’s use is probably commonest in exhortations and promises: Do t. and stop coughing; I will t. and have it ready for you. And it is hardly applicable to past time or to negative sentences, He tried and made the best of it is not English in the sense required, nor is It is no use to t. and make the best of it; but He did t. and make the best of it will pass, especially if the did is emphatic. It is, therefore, colloquial, if that means specially appropriate to actual speech; but not if colloquial means below the proper standard of literary dignity. Though t. to do can always be substituted for t. and do, the latter has a shade of meaning that justifies its existence; in exhortations it implies encouragement—the effort will succeed—; in promises it implies assurance—the effort shall succeed. It is an idiom that should not be discountenanced, but used when it comes natural.”

I would actually argue that It is no use to t. and make the best of it does work as a kind of indirect discourse where the to t. and make the best of it is the, possibly ironic, presentation of a point of view held by another as held by another. However, I think you can see why this kind of description of usage is helpful, illuminating, delightful, and expresses a true friendship with the language.

That A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is described by the author as “the last fruit of the partnership [with his late brother] that began 1903 with our translation of Lucian” suggests further that it is not just the record of a friendship with language, but also a disclosure of the true and noble human friendship which exists in language.

and the winners are …

Izzy P will receive the complete (to date) three volumes of the Grub Street Grackle!
Tomas will receive a subscription!
Kateri, Melissa A, and Becca will each receive their choice of any issue of the Grackle (past, present, or future)!

I will send the Grackles to you or a friend of your choice. Skreak about it! Be a bad bird!

To the 25 losers: you took a risk, your chances were good, you elected not to bribe me, you lost. Too bad for both of our sakes.

The good news is that the eye of the Grackle is on you … and you cannot escape! The grackle sizes its prey from afar, looks alternately with the horror of tragedy, the world-restoring laughter of comedy, and the hyperbolic pretenses of mock mock epic; you cannot escape in sleepy back-water towns, littered back-alleys, or the midnight underground where the brotherhood of genres shake hands on their clandestine swaps and bargains over whiskey and a battered deck of cards, for the grackle follows the elusive scent of the ninja on the invisible thread that winds story into story.

In short, you may pay the token fee to subscribe, but in your heart of hearts already you’re an addict, you’ve already committed the crime or whispered the magic phrase, … you’ve taken that whatever secret step that makes you a bad bird as well!

My Aim

In his beautiful reflection on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition given at Regensburg Pope Benedict affirms the “profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the Biblical understanding of faith in God.” He points to this “profound harmony” at work in the beginning of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning was the logos.” This logos, he explains, “means both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason.” The Catholic Tradition, then, affirms that the independence of human reason, in its will to embrace truth according the inherent logic of its various modes of understanding, is essential to the response that God desires from man. By giving his own reason to us, not as simple authority or power, but “precisely as reason,” God reveals his desire to relate to human understanding, not as a master to a slave, but as a partner in the action of truth.

By implication the ways of knowing inherent in the Western Intellectual Tradition – poetic, philosophic, theological – have an essential calling to develop as independent disciplines co-equal in the action of truth. Only when the reason is free to question, to doubt, and to engage the truth according to its natural order will Faith become that dialogue of mutual love and understanding to which God invites his creature. The precious dignity of human things is protected, then, when properly situated within the context of the Catholic Faith. And it is precisely that protection of human dignity which gives the University of Dallas its unique beauty among universities today. Its dedication to inquiring into the divine order of creation and history as reason fosters the reading of poetry as poetry, of philosophy as philosophy, and affirms the distinct and precious mode of each of the liberal arts without which no human life can be complete. I hope to pursue my study in the IPS program, then, because with Pope Benedict I believe that only by entering into free and independent dialogue, with God and with each other, can we realize his commandment to love.

The Regensburg Address

pray for my alma

I just wanted to put it out there that a number of us alums of Thomas More are praying a novena for the school beginning on March 19th. Anyone and everyone, please join in. From the Alumni Facebook group:

“We could start on the feast of St. Joseph ( March 19) and do three Hail Mary’s or Our Father’s or -yay- both, if you have the time. Tell other alums, friends of TMC and convince your spouse, children, parents, friends, anyone you can think of who is holy enough–haha– to join us and we will ask that prudence, justice, temperence, (I’ll just throw in fortitude–or it’d feel left out.) and charity will be served in the current situation. Who is in??”

The Voice of the Athenian: the city begins where the city ends, part ii

I wanted to give my post below as an example of the scenario I was trying (and failing) to articulate last fall. In this scenario, the failure of a speaker’s effort – an effort that up to this point seems determine the meaning of a conversation relative to a certain goal of longed-for persuasion or reconciliation – opens a deeper significance, a deeper communion, to those who choose to hang on to it after its immediate ends have become impossible; it sounds in and reveals the wider forum in which it has indeed already been secretly speaking.

The pressing ends (demanding heart and will) that govern our relation to the immediate, historical city collapse, and at that very moment an encompassing “city in speech” is revealed.

Hence my question of October which I hope sounds a little bit clearer now:

“What city begins where the city ends?”

Does this make more sense?

another angle on cosmos

At the tail end of prosecuting his interlocutor Callicles, who has scorned his offer of friendship, balked at his refutations, and threatened him with murder, Socrates withdraws for a moment from the struggle of argument, having won something like the moment of calm perception that an exhausted warrior receives beside the ongoing fray, seeing the potential futility of his efforts set within a more abiding scale, and as he does so he reveals an alternate view of the world, one whose appeal has already possessed his heart:

To me, of course, this seems to be the mark on which we must set our eyes throughout life, devoting and constraining all our own actions and those of the polis toward the single purpose that justice and temperance dwell in anyone who would be truly happy. One should not allow his desires to become wanton and undertake to fulfill them, leading the life of a pirate – an illimited evil. You see, such a person would be friendly with neither another human being nor a god; he would not have the power of acting in common, and without acting in common can be no friendship. Wise men say, Callicles, that acting in common and friendship and self-restraint and orderliness and justice hold heaven and earth and gods and human beings together, and on account of these they call this whole an ordered beauty — a cosmos — my friend, and not a disorder or wantonness. But you do not seem to me to apply your mind to these things, even though you are wise concerning them; it has escaped you that a geometric equality holds great sway among gods and humans, but you think it is necessary to overreach others. You see, you are careless of geometry. So be it.