Levavi oculos meos in montes

 There are a few things about the idea of "development of doctrine" that confuse me.  On the face of it, the idea is simple enough to be a truism.   Of course, if you take God's truth, ie revelation, and move with it through 2 millenia, putting it in encounter with many historical events and social trends, not to mention people of genius not just in philosophy and theology but in linguistics, art, music and poetry -- you are going to have something that has built up many -- let's say branches? -- or maybe facets? that may not have been necessary or explicitly evident to our ancestors in the faith.     On the other hand, except in a kind of analogical sense it doesn't seem to be true that we "know" more now than we did then.   We moderns tend to say and think that we "know" more than our forefathers, meaning that the human race has a more scientific understanding of physical laws and can do various technological things that would have astounde...

Pope Benedict XVI: Thus, by inner necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the word or – as Jean Leclercq put it: eschatology and grammar are intimately connected with one another in Western monasticism (cf. L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu). The longing for God, the désir de Dieu, includes amour des lettres, love of the word, exploration of all its dimensions. Because in the biblical word God comes towards us and we towards him, we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand it in its construction and in the manner of its expression. A word denotes action or being or something to do with one of those things.   A sentence is a judgment (or I suppose, a question, but let's just focus on declarative sentences).  You are saying something about something.    A sentence, to be a sentence, has to link being with action or at least with existence or definition.   A group of sentences -- a paragraph or longer -- are an argume...

 “So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings.”.  A narrative is any account of a set of related events or experiences, most often related in chronological or some other order of sequence.  It can be fictional or nonfictional, written or oral.    It implies both a narrator and a receiver, though I think in psychology the narrator and the hearer can be the same person.   Narrative psychology deals with what has been called the "storied nature of human conduct", that is, how human beings deal with experience by observing stories and listening to the stories of others. Operating under the assumption that human activity and experience are filled with "meaning" and stories, rather than lawful formulations, narrative psychology is the study of how human beings construct stories to deal with experiences. Consider Gollum's narrative.   He saw his friend holding on to his birthday present, the ring.   He killed his friend...

 Because today is Ash Wednesday, I'm thinking about Lenten penances, if that is the word.   From St Benedict's Rule chapter 49 : During these days.....we will add to the usual measure of our service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food or drink, so that each of us will have something above the assigned measure to offer God of his own will with the joy of the Holy Spirit (1 Thess 1:6). JD Flynn of The Pillar had a couple of ideas for Lent that I liked:  Each Lent, I try to take up the spiritual discipline of hand-copying Scripture, which I find to be both edifying and demanding — especially the needed fortitude to stick with it through the course of Lent. I also aim to better commit to my promises of intercessory prayer for other people. I’ve always been struck by the discipline of St. John Henry Newman on this. Insisting that intercessory prayer is the ordinary duty of the Christian, Newman was good about carrying with him his long list of peop...

 This morning I went looking on the internet for Joshua Hren's book Contemplative Realism, which is described at Church Life Journal as: ....a subspecies of literary realism whose characteristics have been embryonically or potentially present in realist movements from the beginning, but which was first named as such by Joshua Hren in Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto. Some salient features of contemplative realism include the acceptance of the seen and the unseen as equally valid sources of experience, knowledge, and insight, and a simultaneous close attention and high valuation of life’s sensory and material experiences as somehow reflective or communicative of the spiritual. Contemplative realism endorses, and seeks to ratify through the concrete execution of art, the view of St. Thomas Aquinas that truth is the adequation of the mind to reality, rather than the sum of observations extrapolated from purely subjective experience. This contemplative reali...

 In his own words, this is Cardinal Newman's  Theory of Development of Doctrine   (from  Newman Reader  ) that the increase and expansion of the Christian Creed and Ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart , and has had any wide or extended dominion;   that from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas ;  and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation .  (emphasis and numbering are mine) Newman is making th...

 It is difficult to summarize Cardinal Newman's thought -- at least it is to me, and when I read summaries of his works and then read the work itself I realize that the summaries hardly prepared me for the original.   From Chapter 1 of Essay on Development of Doctrine  -- this excerpt comes from Section 1 paragraph 4: When an idea , whether real or not, is of a nature to arrest and possess the mind, it may be said to have life , that is, to live in the mind which is its recipient. Thus mathematical ideas, real as they are, can hardly properly be called living, at least ordinarily. But, when some great enunciation, whether true or false, about human nature, or present good, or government, or duty, or religion, is carried forward into the public throng of men and draws attention, then it is not merely received passively in this or that form into many minds, but it becomes an active principle within them, leading them to an ever-new contemplation of itself, to an appli...

 I'm following up on my last post which talked a bit about the psychology of groups especially as it shows on the internet.   My main focus was on discourse and how one's language and syntax tends to show what group one belongs to, or aspires to belong to. This is part of a broader thought, that since the internet operates by means of language and imagery it has to convey meaning mostly through symbols rather than things themselves.   In one way it is clearer and more direct than real life.  In another way, it has already been curated for you to some extent in the exact same way that literature and visual and dramatic arts convey meaning to you.    In my view, this is one reason the internet is so attractive, and indeed almost addictive to some people.  You can practically mainline the creativity of other people, and even interact with and respond to it in real time. The interactive possibilities make the internet representations much more f...

This weekend I spent several hours working through dozens of screenshots of old books, trimming them and putting them through the sketch filter of a photo editor to make them black and white, then pasting them into documents so they are readable and printable.   This is one of the ways I take notes on books I have read, similar to the highlighting function on the Kindle but way less efficient.    I had a back-log of these from reading over the last year and it was a fairly soothing project to sit down in between going to monastic high mass, playing a boardgame called Nemesis 2 with my family, and talking to granddaughters who were here overnight.   Many of the books I annotated this way were about the Vatican II Council and its aftermath, some were about theology, and almost all of them mentioned Cardinal Newman somewhere.    I'll probably have more to say about them as I go through them more carefully now that they are easier to read.  Some ...

It is Candlemas , the feast of the Presentation: Lord, now you let your servant go in peace; your word has been fulfilled: my own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of every people: a light to reveal you to the nations and the glory of your people Israel. ------------------ Quotes: There is a story about Newman that I like very much. In his room he had a picture – I think his landlady had given it to him – of the Blessed in Paradise praising God, and every time he came in and out, he used to smile at it and say, 'What! Still at it?'" -  In This House of Brede , by Rumer Godden. I was late in finding the Rosary, and it has been in addition a great delight to know that others whose virtue and learning is far above mine are companions. I began to use it only after hearing [Ronald] Knox (on a private occasion) say: ‘Personally I do not like the Rosary, but I have a suspicion that Our Lady does.’ Very Knox.  - JRR Tolkien in a letter to Austin and...

 In a reflection on Mending the Soil , Abbott Philip Anderson of Clear Creek quotes John Senior whose centenary was last year: Culture, as in “agriculture,” is the cultivation of the soil from which men grow. To determine proper methods, we must have a clear idea of the crop. “What is man?” the Penny Catechism asks, and answers: “A creature made in the image and likeness of God, to know, love and serve Him.” Culture, therefore, clearly has this simple end, no matter how complex or difficult the means. Our happiness consists in a perfection that is no mere endless hedonistic whoosh through space and time, but the achievement of that definite love and knowledge which is final and complete. All the paraphernalia of our lives, intellectual, moral, social, psychological, and physical, has this end: Christian culture is the cultivation of saints ( John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978), p. 8). With the perspective of the monk who works the...