Eucatastrophe

I've been thinking a lot about power and authority, as one does nowadays.   It's the meta-topic in many of the Catholic ecclesial struggles nowadays, of course.  I don't think anyone would dispute that, but it's odd how little it is actually mentioned specifically.    Maybe it's not odd.   Maybe the principles are simply assumed for the most part.  Today I looked up the Latin for "authority", specifically the Vulgate word used in the Luke 20:2 passage , which has been on my mind.    Here's the passage -- the pronoun refers to Jesus: One day as he was teaching the people in the temple area and proclaiming the good news, the chief priests and scribes, together with the elders, approached him 2 and said to him, “Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Or who is the one who gave you this authority?” The Latin word used i n the Vulgate is " potestas "   et aiunt dicentes ad illum dic nobis in qua potestate haec facis ...

"This is no cave!" -- Princess Leia  One facet of Cardinal Newman's perception in regard to Ideas and development of doctrine is that we who are downstream from the theologians and philosophers are given a language and a kind of mythology associated with that language, and these things comprise the tools we are able to use or sometimes transcend.     This seems to tie in a bit with what Bishop Varden said about generations in regard to the reception of Vatican II .   The first generation is in the middle of the event, the second generation is trying to consolidate or dispute that legacy, and the third generation is sometimes baffled by the preoccupations of their elders.   But they are still holders of the legacy the thing has left.   They have to decide what it is going to mean to them -- what is ephemeral, situational, and what is durable.     For example -- an example that comes to mind after reading various takes on Ne...

“I have not used ‘magic’ consistently, and indeed the Elven-queen Galadriel is obliged to remonstrate with the Hobbits on their confused use of the word both for the devices and operations of the Enemy, and for those of the Elves. I have not, because there is not a word for the latter (since all human stories have suffered the same confusion). Their 'magic’ is Art, delivered from many of its human limitations: more effortless, more quick, more complete (product, and vision in unflawed correspondence). And its object is Art not Power, sub-creation not domination and tyrannous re-forming of Creation. The 'Elves’ are 'immortal’, at least as far as this world goes: and hence are concerned rather with the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change, than with death. The Enemy in successive forms is always 'naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines; but the problem: that this frightful evil can and does arise from an apparent...

There was a recent commentary by Massimo Faggioli at Commonweal called Vatican II at Napa .   In the context of a somewhat critical look at the Napa conference, the article referenced the talk given by Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim , who is as Faggioli says  one of the most interesting figures in a European Catholicism that is emancipating itself from the dominance of the French, Belgian, and German conciliar theology. Here is the written version of Bishop Varden's talk .   Here is what he calls a brief antiphonal response of his to Faggioli's article.     Here is his conference on the Creed , which is as he notes the main feature of his attendance at the conference.... I think the comments on Vatican II were part of a panel he participated in ?   There are a few things that came to my mind when I was reading through this interchange. One is the civil tone between two Catholic thinkers who come from very different contexts.  ...

Substack is an interesting platform, and currently it is rather interesting to browse through the substacks of people who have ended up there -- sometimes, people whose writing I haven't seen for a long time.  Fr Fessio might be a good example of that.   But I am kind of stuck in the early 2000s, as far as social media goes, and I think I will have to stay here on Blogger with this site, and much as I admire focused blogs I don't think I can write one.   I think if I'm going to post with any kind of regularity, it will have to be a patchwork or a mosaic.   One of my earlier blogs I described as a commonplace book and some form of that is the most viable model, I think.     That actually brings to mind what I was reading this morning -- St Thomas Aquinas on Ideas -- this is from Msr Glenn's Tour of the Summa, which is available online.    He says: An idea or concept is the mind's grasp of an essence. It is the understanding o...

 I almost brought it up a few posts ago -- the question of how to read theology when one isn't a theologian.    The answer is that you read as a reader, and as a Christian, if you are one; at least, hopefully, you read as a truth-seeker.    Perhaps GK Chesterton's words apply here, as they so often do to so many situations in life: I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a Greek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going to abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well perhaps--I think, at any rate, it would do no harm--if he did know a little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar.      There's a more general point here.   Theology, the endeavor to know the truth of divine things, is too important to leave solely to theologians.  ...

 “Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.”   Diary of a Country Priest  was not what I expected.  I thought I had read it once before, but none of it seemed familiar.   The above quote reminds me of this one from CS Lewis' The Screwtape Letters : Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [the Enemy’s] efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a di...

 I suppose I kept the reading in Lent post noncommital enough so that I don't have to reframe my resolutions.   I said I was going to revisit some of my old sources, especially St Francis de Sales, and I am doing that, though slowly.        Then I mentioned that I was going to read A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, and After Aquinas by Fergus Kerr .   And I am/will be doing that too, but currently those books are both in hiatus. Instead, I took up Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians by Fergus Kerr, which is easier to read than After Aquinas.   Its focus is the theologians whose lives spanned the 20th century, more or less.   All of the ones discussed were somewhat controversial before Vatican II Council, and afterwards, they can be divided into basically two categories:   the ones whose work was more or less recognized and affirmed in the Council documents, and those who continued on a trajectory that eventual...

“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” Tolkien's Philosophy of Stories A couple of weeks ago, I sprained my foot badly  -- somehow I managed to make sitting in my study chair into a dangerous athletic endeavour, and tore at least a couple of ligaments while trying to stand up.    Also, our elderly car went back to the repair shop.    This has changed my Lent in several ways.  One of them is that I am sitting down a lot more than I had planned, especially considering that spring seems to have arrived here and there is a vegetable garden to plant.   And Lenten practices have to be the kind you can do wearing an air cast, meaning mostly sedentary. While sitting around, I started reading a large book, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor .   I got sidetracked, though, after I found an article by Fergus Kerr called Christians in a Secular Age .    This led me to his page on Academia , and then to his list of books.  ...

  Ash Wednesday  , where we reflect "thou art dust, and to dust thou must return" seems like a good day to think about Cardinal Newman's analogy of corruption :   To find then what a corruption or perversion of the truth is, let us inquire what the word means, when used literally of material substances. Now it is plain, first of all, that a corruption is a word attaching to organized matters only; a stone may be crushed to powder, but it cannot be corrupted. Corruption, on the contrary, is the breaking up of life, preparatory to its termination. This resolution of a body into its component parts is the stage before its dissolution; it begins when life has reached its perfection, and it is the sequel, or rather the continuation, of that process towards perfection, being at the same time the reversal and undoing of what went before. Till this point of regression is reached, the body has a function of its own, and a direction and aim in its action, and a nature with law...

A list, by no means comprehensive, of some Catholic authors who have had a large influence on my life in the 35 years since my conversion ( besides of course the Evangelists and Biblical authors): Augustine Benedict Thomas Aquinas Ignatius of Loyola St Francis de Sales In more modern times: Therese of Lisieux John Henry Newman GK Chesterton Josef Ratzinger/ Benedict XVI Ever since  Advent, I've been revisiting the works particularly of the pre-modern saints on this list, and even more particularly, the ones that specifically have designed methods or rules of life.  That would be:   St Benedict with his Rule for Monks; St Ignatius with his Spiritual Exercises; and St Francis de Sales with his "Introduction to the Devout Life".      During Lent I'm going to continue revisiting these works particularly.   I'm not commiting to reading through them (though as an oblate I read through the Rule 3 times a year, in daily installments -- it is not long...

“Why”—Leo’s eyes widened with delight—“it’s an engineering problem after all!” He hung limply in air, entranced; ....He yielded himself up to it without reservation. All. All. There was no limit to what one man might do, if he gave all, and held back nothing.  Falling Free I am reading through Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, the ones that are available in my library in digital form, at least.   Falling Free is labelled as the 4th in the series, though it is a standalone and technically a prequel, set 2 centuries before the main happenings in the saga.    It doesn't actually mention the Vorkosigans -- though apparently, somewhere in the later books, one of the main characters does encounter the descendants of the original "quaddies", the genetically modified people who are depicted in the book.   It makes me wonder -- what was happening 2 centuries before my lifetime, that would go on to intersect with my story much, much later? That would have ...

Another old post-- it is related to the earlier one mentioning Dietrich von Hildebrand's description of "superficial knowledge".   (By the way, the Catholic Thinkers site is a very good resource for learning or reviewing topics related to Catholic philosophy and theology.   It was a project of the prodigiously energetic  Dr Ralph McInerny .)  ----------------------- This quote is from Dr Andres'  first lesson on Logic at the Catholic Thinkers site .    Dr Andres writes: It might seem strange that we would need a part of logic devoted to understanding what is so simple, the bare idea of what something is, such as what a triangle is. But St. Thomas would respond that we begin with an indistinct understanding of what a triangle is, and that the idea of a triangle is perfected and made distinct when we find a definition of a triangle.  This is from  Lesson 2 , where he goes into detail about how and why we form definitions of words...

 I wrote the following some time ago but am posting it here even though it is kind of boring.   It seems to relate a bit to the last post on continuity.    ------------------------------ This seems like a pretty fair summary  of Dietrich von Hildebrand's  What is Philosophy ?   The author writes: [Hildebrand] seeks to investigate the phenomenology of knowing: to consider “what it is like” to know something, and to bring to light the essential structures of this fundamental act. Since we are all humans, any of us can consider from personal experience " what it is like " to know something.    Hildebrand starts with the act of "taking cognizance of" something.  That formulation sounds like it would read better in German or Greek, but he uses it to describe the initial act of knowledge, before judgment or assertion.    We come to know something by a receptive but not altogether passive process;  Knowing has an acti...

From excerpts of an article by Dietrich von Hildebrand, at New Liturgical Movement   -- three types of men or ways to live. I'm quoting it because it also seems to epitomize three different approaches to the internet, especially to the news cycle.   The first one seems like the default. If a man lived only in separate moments, without any link between them, if he did not know himself as the same being in the past and present, if all that he experienced and accomplished and all that was revealed to him sank back into nothingness before the actual contact with the new "now," he would be only a bundle of disconnected experiences. He would be deprived of the dimension of depth... There are unconscious men, always completely absorbed in the present moment. What has happened to them in the past, what moved and filled them, fades away as soon as a new, strong impression takes possession of them. They are capable of feeling these strong impressions, but these are not rooted in t...

 "Do you want to grasp the majesty of God?  First grasp the humility of God.....When you grasp the humility of God, then you will rise with Him."  St Augustine, Sermon 117 John Betz quotes this at the beginning of his article on The Humility of God .   His aim, as I mentioned in the last post , is to put the two theological positions, of Balthasar and contemporary Thomism, into conversation with each other.       He mentions Erich Przywara , specifically his work on the analogia entis , as a potential bridge between Balthasar's ideas on the humility of God and the concerns of Thomists on the subject.      Przywara was mentor to Balthasar and to Edith Stein, notably, but is no longer well known.     From the review on Betz's book on Przywara's thought: Przywara aims, ultimately, to defend philosophically a declaration of the Fourth Lateran Council: "Because a similitude between the creator and the creature cannot ...

  What then is humility? To be lowly minded. And he is lowly minded who humbles himself, not he who is lowly by necessity. To explain what I say; and do ye attend; he who is lowly minded, when he has it in his power to be high minded, is humble, but he who is so because he is not able to be high minded, is no longer humble. For instance, If a King subjects himself to his own officer, he is humble, for he descends from his high estate; but if an officer does so, he will not be lowly minded; for how? He has not humbled himself from any high estate. It is not possible to show humble-mindedness except it be in our power to do otherwise.    St John Chrysostom  Still thinking about the humility and kenosis of God .    John Chrysostom has a series of homilies on Philippians, and here is the one on the 2nd chapter .   Here is another .       Nova et Vetera turns out to have had a symposium on kenosis in its summer 2019 edit...