Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Jottings

Natural contemplation, the meaning of creatures, and the end of the virtues

When I initially read Cassian’s first Conference, I found the discussion there of the goal (scopos) and end (telos) of the monk to be interesting but not particular engaging on a personal level. Over the years, as I re-read it, it occurred to me that the problem was the entire worldview that formed me. This worldview sees no goals to anything in the cosmos, depicting it as the open-ended development of initial conditions and inputs of force and motion. That matter and energy happened to produce human beings, gemstones, scorpions and tornadoes is a quirky and ultimately inexplicable part of this random development.

It was through reading Dante, Charles Williams, Chesterton and MacIntyre that I gradually came to understand the perfections of creatures, first on an intellectual level of assent, and eventually at the level of the heart, of appreciation and gratitude. This helped to open up for me what Evagrius calls natural contemplation: the graced ability to see creatures from the spiritual perspective, the perspective of God and the angels, the perspective of eternity.

Natural contemplation means accepting that creatures have meaning. They have ways of flourishing and ways of failing to flourish. We participate in God’s life-giving grace when we work towards this flourishing—or even simply allow it to happen, take note of it, and give God glory.

An example that I have frequently used to illustrate this is that knives are meant for cutting things, and they work best when we understand the type of knife that we are holding. When we use a serrated knife with the right pressure, allowing the blade to gain purchase on the bread crust, we can gently guide it, according to its nature, through the bread. But when we use it like a guillotine, pressing straight down until the piece of food pops apart, the knife, as if objecting to being handled incorrectly, issues a loud report from the plate (which is perhaps also objecting to our misuse of its nature).

We go a step further when we use a knife as if it were a screwdriver or prybar. Sadly, this is a common mistake, to judge by the number of knives in our kitchen that are missing tips. But it is an outgrowth, even if a somewhat trivial one, of a worldview that gives objects no meaning, no goal, no nature. Since they have no inherent telos, we are free to make use of them as our wills desire. And so a knife becomes a screwdriver, and in secular culture men become women and women men.

If we lack the ability to be receptive to the goal or end of other creatures, is it really a surprise that we struggle to see our own lives as goal-driven? Human beings flourish in predictable ways. We will move toward this type of flourishing life not by examining our inner movements, but by attending to objective standards like the virtues.

All of the activities of the monastery gain their worth from what they contribute to a growth in virtue and an awareness of our final destination. At the judgement, God will not ask us if we got our work done on such and such a date, but if we labored to serve our neighbor in love, or if we sacrificed ourselves for the poor. We will not be asked if we were true to ourselves, because who we are in Christ is something beyond our ability to discern at the moment.

Fr. Timothy recently mentioned a reading from Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She says that, at the end times, God will reveal our proper name to us: we won’t understand fully who we are until then. But virtue will help offer us glimpses along the way. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to understand creatures from a proper theological perspective. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to be asked to step out of our present comfort zone and take up a task that will stretch us, perhaps quite a lot. But if we lack virtue, others will be reluctant to give us those opportunities to learn whether we have the skill to serve the community and the Church at a new level.

Conference: The Common Good

I will begin with three quotes.

In illo Uno unum (“in that One, one”, the motto of Pope Leo XIV)

Pope Leo XIV is widely understood to be a peacemaker and bridgebuilder, who aspires to build up the unity of the Church. He does this by pointing us to our final end and the true common good that we all seek to enjoy: Christ Himself. Because of the Incarnation, we experience this unity first of all in creatures. This is the common world that God gave us, and it is a check on singularity and idiosyncrasy.

A monk is one who is both separated from all and yet united with all. (Evagrius of Pontus)

Our withdrawal from the world does not mean that we monks do not continue to find Christ in our neighbor. It is a recognition that there are other forms of unity which are corrupted by sin. Today, the Church even speaks of “structures of sin”. These give us a false sense of unity. Our true unity in Christ is a transcendent goal that goes beyond what our senses can perceive. It requires a purification of sense and a purification of our relationships by a certain planned abstention from speech, fraternization, and the like.

The anchoritic life is somewhat rare, perhaps more so today than at other periods of the Church’s history. Saint Benedict offers us the pedagogy of the cenobium. I will focus on this reality in the second half of my conference.

Where brothers live in unity, they give glory to God, for there the Lord gives His blessing. (Magnificat antiphon, Memorial of Saint Pachomius)

Our prayer in the liturgy will be all the more efficacious and sanctifying to the extent that we come to Mass and the office reconciled to each other through our daily acts of self-denial and patient forgiveness of each of our brothers. We will experience God’s blessings to the extent that we seek this unity. It is not a result of our work, but a gift offered us to be sought out in its fullness. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” says Our Lord. Saint Benedict would have us seek and strive after this very Pax as our way of seeking God and seeking what is above.

To be in Christ is to be united to all the baptized, and, in some sense, to all creatures infused by the Logos. But I wish to focus on a few specific aspects of the cenobitic life and the common good to be found there as foundational to our sanctification.

The common good is the good that each of us enjoys precisely with the other members of the community. It is our common flourishing. It is a good, which means that we can enjoy it like any other good—to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how much we desire it and seek it.

I once visited Gloucester cathedral in Great Britain with a monk of our province who is also an artist. Fr. Stephen could enjoy the stone in a way that I could not. It wasn’t that I couldn’t enjoy the beauty and holiness of the cathedral, nor that I lacked any ability at all to learn to see the specific beauty and goodness of the stone. But truly coming to enjoy the stone as he did would have required me to want this and then to take steps to educate myself in its appreciation.

Furthermore, as an artist, Fr. Stephen was able to reproduce the goodness of stone in watercolor. Although I couldn’t do this either, I could enjoy his work at its completion, and even enjoy his enjoyment of painting.

So, too, with the common good of the monastic community. Some of us will be better at seeing it, enjoying it, and contributing to it. This doesn’t mean that others do not enjoy the actual common good and do not contribute to it. But the more we seek it—again by self-denial and preferring what is good for my brother, rather than what is good for myself—the more we will enjoy it.

The common good requires that each of us be our true selves in Christ. This is to say that the common good is in no way detrimental to my personal good. In fact, human beings can’t fully flourish unless they belong to communities of some kind, and contribute to the common good of these communities. Nor can communities truly flourish except when the brothers within flourish as themselves. So there is no competition between my good and that of the community.

Similarly, our community will flourish to the extent that we become our corporate selves within the larger communities of our neighborhood, our Province and Congregation, and the Archdiocese.

The faith of a child

Many years ago, when I was a young adult and attending a family event at my grandparents’, I had an amusing “discussion” with my four- or five-year-old cousin. He had just discovered the word “why” and was asking me an endless stream of questions. “The sky is blue. Why?” When I gave whatever answer seemed suitable for his age, he repeated what I said, and then added, “Why?” I found the exchange rather enjoyable, at least for awhile. I can’t quite remember, but I expect that the conversation ended at the point that I decided to say, “Just because,”…and that was good enough for him. An adult said so.

Faith is the virtue of allowing God to propose to us ideas and plans of action for which the question, “Why?” is more or less irrelevant, at least for the moment. To a child, what I understand about the color of the sky (electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency causing corresponding events in the cones of my eye and brain) is well beyond his cognitive ability at that age. Imagine how much more God knows—He Who knows everything that ever was or will be—than even the most intelligent human. It is clear that sometimes when we ask God, “Why?” He can only respond, “Just because; trust me!”

“Unless you become like a child, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” May we have that serene and childlike trust in our heavenly Father that Jesus did.

Thoughts, prayers, and actions

Shortly after I entered the Monastery, a man approached me after Mass one day. He invited me to join him to sit in protest, praying outside an abortion clinic. Since I was not allowed to leave the cloister without permission, I explained to him that I was not able to join him, but that I would pray for him. He was clearly disappointed. I suspect that he thought I was offering an excuse and simply didn’t care to go.

Episodes like this raise the entire question of the efficacy of prayer. One commonly sees Christians called out in the media for offering “thoughts and prayers” at a time of tragedy. Indeed, it’s painless to post such sentiments on social media, and so it’s perhaps good that Christians are challenged to demonstrate meaningful actions that back up such words. Offering “thoughts” really does open one to criticism. My thoughts accomplish little as long as they remain inside my head.

Prayer, on the other hand, always involves an Other—God. The truth is that prayer is an action. Praying well, with real faith and devotion, is not always easy. By inviting God into a situation, we bring the potential of new types of insights.  And these, in turn, can lead to new types of actions.

Ritual: Social Control? Or Liberation for Love?

Catholic and Orthodox believers are sometimes criticized because of the weight of ritualized behavior at worship and elsewhere: rote prayers, signs of the Cross, and so on. Ritual appears to be a form of social control that interferes with personal authenticity. Of course, what ‘authenticity’ means or whether it is an unambiguous good is not often examined, in my experience.

The fact is that we depend on ritualized behavior every day. Many, if not most, social interactions depend on ritualized behavior. I arrive at the train station at 7:05 and meet the train there at that time. I use the same desk everyday at work, and I expect that when I go to my superior’s office, he will be there and not someone else. Conversations make use of stock phrases, particularly at the beginning and end, and not to make use of these can be a sign of hostility. I turn on the television at a certain time, and at the same time, the people in the news studio begin to talk into a camera. The range of options for my clothing is limited by ritualistic restraints.

By following ritualized behavior, I help to create and sustain a sense of the ‘normal’, and make social life possible by making my behavior predictable to others in crucial ways. By steady adherence to such behavior, I demonstrate my dependability and make possible deeper levels of interaction by showing my trustworthiness. Ritual, it turns out, is in some measure the condition of commitment to others, even to love. It is a sign of my willingness to put others’ needs and expectations before my own at certain crucial times.

Of course, opening ourselves to this sort of basic love, as is the case with any kind of love, is a risk. Social rituals can be manipulated and the good faith of persons can be preyed upon by those with some control over rituals who do not have the common good at heart.

Listening and Literacy

One of the techniques I like to use when teaching chant, especially complex chants that have many notes per syllable, is to simplify the chant by assigning one key note to each syllable, and then building up gradually to the full complement of notes.  The advantage of this is the highlighting of the ornamental (i.e. non-melodic/structural) nature of Gregorian chant.  This keeps things closer to the text and helps us work against the tendency to invest every note with a formal weight that the early monks clearly did not intend.

The disadvantage to this approach is that it requires the singers to put their books down and learn by listening and repetition.  I say that this is a disadvantage because when I say to most people, “Alright, listen and repeat after me,” they are simply lost, no matter how simple (in my mind, at least) is the phrase that I am giving them.  Yes, sometimes it is a problem of Latin; but from watching how people from all walks of life dearly resist putting down the book—the authority!—in order to enter into an oral mode of acting, I think that the problem is at least heightened by our emphasis on literacy.  As I say, the book is the authority, and I am merely one interpreter, who obviously just learned this from the book.

Literacy is a great gift, of course, and allows us access to all kinds of cultural riches that are denied those who cannot read.  But as we move further and further away from oral modes of learning and interacting, the disadvantages to a strictly text-based mode emerge.  We can easily fool ourselves, by our reliance on texts, into thinking that we have learned something, when we have learned a simulacrum instead.  We all know how a good professor can make a subject come alive; I’ve encountered persons recently who dismiss out of hand great philosophers simply on the basis of having read them and not liked them.  There is no sense of the cultural embeddedness one needs to have to appreciate certain authors.  This embeddedness is greatly enhanced by having it modeled by another human being.  Someone who speaks passionately about Plato or Beethoven or Botticelli or the varieties of birdsong or human dialect can suddenly make an abstract idea one of real flesh and blood.

Literacy gives us the illusion of being self-sufficient, particularly as more and more texts become more available on the internet and elsewhere.  Oral learning stresses our dependence on the experience of another.

In this way, the loss of music in school curricula is particularly to be lamented.  My own love of oral/aural learning certainly comes from my musical background, which while literate, makes use of a lot of oral tradition.  I learned German/American folk dances from simply playing along at family gatherings in my grandparents’ house.  I learned guitar from friends (“Here is how you do the left hand for the opening chord in “Purple Haze”), and from listening to the radio and old vinyl albums.  I played in a number of bands where learning a song meant sitting across from the songwriter, having him say, “OK, after that chord, this one for three beats, then a hit over here…”  Even in classical music, I have long stressed the important sense of tradition that one must have.  You can pick up a book of songs by Fauré and sing them correctly, note-for-note, and very easily miss the whole point of singing songs by Fauré.  To really understand them requires some kind of mentorship, listening to a master sing and imitating what he or she is doing (in this case, Elly Ameling and Gérard Souzay, if you were wondering!).

This difficulty is an important one for us as Benedictines to be aware of.  While we like to boast of the emphasis that Saint Benedict places on literacy in his Rule, we should always remember the word with which it opens: “Listen!”

Of Vacations and Vocations

At a discussion with university students and others this past Saturday, the young daughter of the man overseeing the event asked me if monks ever go on vacation. I answered, as I normally do, that, no, we are always monks even when we travel. We get this question frequently, normally from adults. Hearing the question from a youngster, however, brought out for me the inadequacy of my pat response. So, in the hopes that her father may share this more considered response, and that it may be of some use to others who may happen upon it, I set down here what I would have liked to have said to her then.

When your family goes on vacation, your father may be taking time away from work, and so is on vacation from his job. But he is not on vacation from being your father. In fact, he takes you and the whole family with him, and he serves you as a father wherever you go. And if he should have to travel without the family, it is not really a vacation because he is not with his family any more. Yet, as he is traveling, he is still your father, thinking about you, doing the things he needs to do to support you and the whole family. And he does this because he loves you, and your mother, and your brothers and sisters.

So it is that we never take a vacation from serving those whom we love. And so it is with the monk, whose love has been pledged to God instead of to a family. No matter where a monk travels, he does not take a vacation from serving God Whom he loves. If he has to travel somewhere in support of the monastery, to do business with worldly men and women for the sake of the monastery, he is still a monk, thinking about God, doing the things he needs to do to support his brothers who are also pledged to the love of God.

In fact, there is a kind of ongoing vacation that we all experience when we are together with those whom we love. The word “vacation” simply means “making space,” being free of manual work. The monk makes space for listening to God every day, as we should for those whom we love. When we love someone, we want to know how they feel, what happened in their day, and we want to share ourselves with them as well. As often as a family sits down to dinner and shares time together, they are sharing a miniature “vacation” (at least until it’s time to do dishes!). Everyone at the table is making time to be together and to relax a bit away from work. When we go away for vacation, this is to remind ourselves that we need this time each day, that our routine should never dull us to the great gift we have of each other, which often needs rediscovering. Now the monk, having been called out of the world to a life in solitude with God, is, in some ways, always on vacation, for he is striving to clear away as much as he can of anything that separates him from God. He is trying to make as much space in his day and in his heart as he can, for the Friend he is hoping to welcome, Whose voice he is seeking, exceeds all that we can love and desire. But, as I have already shared with you, I believe that family life has many of these same qualities, when we are striving to love one another. This is not always easy–believe me, I know this! But I also know that that love of our parents, sisters, and brothers is very much like the love of God–Jesus Himself said so! And so we are all, each in our own way, striving to grow in love by making space for others in our lives, and being welcomed by them into their hearts as well.

Reason and Faith

I was a big science fiction fan as a kid. I read everything I could find by Isaac Asimov, and I memorized episodes of Star Trek. In high school, I subscribed to Asimov magazine, and it was from reading the short stories and novellas therein that I came to the realization that the Golden Age of science fiction was long gone. So I was somewhat prepared to be cynical when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted my senior year.

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”–Isaac Asimov

On the whole, I enjoyed the show, but a comparison between the two Star Treks at the time confirmed for me that the adventure, mystery, and humanity of the original was losing out to militarism, expertise, and a kind of bureaucratic stuffiness in the new series. Later seasons managed to fix many of the glaring problems of the early seasons, but I had lost interest by then, and was devoting my creative energies to music and Shakespeare.

One episode summarized the problems for me. All I can remember about it was that some kind of tear had opened up in the space-time continuum (!), and if the Starship Enterprise couldn’t get there and knit it up somehow, that reality would cease to exist. No pressure! Beneath the surface of this implausible plot device, it would appear that human beings have become responsible for literally everything. 

And isn’t this how we all feel sometimes? We are urged to feel simultaneously responsible for:

Reducing global temperatures
Every questionable thing the President says or Tweets
Making sure people in Michigan don’t die of COVID-19
Figuring out how to get our two-year-olds into Stanford
Ending terrorism (or evil itself, if George W. Bush is to be heeded)
Getting the bishops to be more disciplined
Making sure no kids anywhere get bullied
Donating to groups fighting cancer, Alzheimers, et al
Ending poverty
Murder Hornets

Now I assume that, most of the time, our conscious minds understand that we can’t do everything. But the cumulative effect of the impulse to solve every problem is chronic anxiety. As I wrote in the previous post, this is, in fact, a recipe for irrationality. To assume responsibility for all of the world’s problems is fundamentally unreasonable, but we rarely permit ourselves to admit this squarely. The result is a worldview with a large, false supposition built in.

According to family systems therapy, stress is not produced by overwork. Rather, overwork is one symptom of stress that has its roots in being overly responsible. Our present stressed-out overfunctioning is further fueled by a simplistic notion that our American political system is a democracy. It’s not, in fact. We live in a representative democracy, more formally called a republic. The reason I point this out is that a flat ideology of “democracy,” suggests that we are all responsible for everything in our country, and that the only way to address this responsibility is through constant monitoring of the news and constant argument. And it’s exhausting!

What if we’re not responsible for all that other stuff? Who might be? What if we felt that, behind it all, the maintenance of the space-time continuum was God’s prerogative and not ours? I often find that God raises up ingenious and courageous helpers at fortuitous moments. These helpers see the same problems I see, but have the intelligence, experience, and resources that I lack. It’s always possible, too, that a problem can’t be solved immediately. I will return to that possibility below.

“We feel that we must disagree with those prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster.”–Pope Saint John XXIII

Pope Saint John XXIII offered this prayer each night before bed: “Well Lord, it’s your Church, you take care of it; I’m going to sleep.” Similarly, when Napoleon Bonaparte confronted Cardinal Consalvi and threatened to destroy the Catholic Church, the Cardinal’s response was, “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

These are quotes by men of deep faith, but they are also clear-eyed realists. There’s nothing childish about this faith. It’s an acknowledgement that there are powers at work in the world well beyond what we can touch. Our task is to figure out our assignment and then resolve to stay at our posts. The pagan heroes of old understood that fate was not something that they could determine. It was, however, theirs either to reject or to accept nobly and graciously. By accepting fate, heroes also accepted the relatively confined spheres of action in which it is enacted. Beowulf died slaying the dragon that was threatening his native Geatland (southern Sweden), but the dragon never was a serious threat to the lands of most other contemporary peoples. Peruvian dragons were, presumably, for Peruvian heroes to deal with. And in heaven, the great band of dragon-slayers will have its own special space at the bar where they will hang out and share stories from every corner of the globe.

Realism is central to thinking rationally about our options for acting. Hyper-responsibility inclines us either to grandiose, impossible projects, or to paralysis. Bipolar disorder happens when someone oscillates between these two unrealistic options. Some choose to escape this oscillation by a strategic retreat into chronic complaint. None of these approaches are reasonable, nor are they mature. Hidden fears are continuing to contaminate our thinking.

Faith is a gift from God. This gift frees us from fear, and it frees us to risk the good even when we might suffer for it. In our present climate, I suspect that many of us are tempted to choose lesser goods because, in a highly polarized environment, we fear failure, rejection, and ostracization. If we remember that our Leader leads by way of the Cross, we can let go of the notion that the suffering we experience is a sign of God’s rejection or our failure. Nor is it our responsibility even to change those who cause us suffering, any more than Christ felt it important to win over Pilate and the Sanhedrin.

Faith is often presented as the opposite of reason, but this is a mistake. The opposite of reason is reactive fear. Faith is the friend of reason. In fact, it is the precondition for the full flowering of reason.

Christmas and Peace

I didn’t much like the song “The Little Drummer Boy” when I was young, finding it a bit trite, even contrived. Then I heard this version.

That might be the best track off of the amazing 1966 “Noel” album that Baez recorded with, of all people, Peter Schickele, better known for his PDQ Bach hilarity. It was conceived as a protest against the Vietnam War. The collaboration was such a musical success that Baez and Schickele combined for two more recordings.

Why a Christmas album for peace? I haven’t come across any interviews where Baez explains this choice. She had been, and would continue to be, outspoken against all war. She wrote many songs protesting injustice, and she recorded many songs of other writers on related topics. She could have made virtually any of her albums into statements for peace. But she chose to sing about Jesus Christ. She could have written songs using the teaching of Gandhi, who was a strong influence on her decision to found the Institute for the Study of Non-Violence. But she sang about the Prince of Peace.

So sand the prophet Isaiah, in another time of great turmoil and distress, while Jerusalem was under threat by the powerful Assyrian empire:

For every boot that tramped in battle,
every cloak rolled in blood,
will be burned as fuel for fire.

For a child is born to us, a son is given to us;
upon his shoulder dominion rests.

They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero,
Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.

His dominion is vast
and forever peaceful,

Upon David’s throne, and over his kingdom,
which he confirms and sustains
By judgment and justice,
both now and forever.

The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this!

[Isaiah 9: 4-6]

Socrates vs. Nietzsche

[Note: The following is the first entry in my new category of “jottings.” These are totally random observations based in my reading for larger projects. They will probably be, for the most part, either technical or expansively allusive in character and unapologetically so. Regular readers might choose to skip these, but they are intended to provide background for what I hope will be more popular writing in the main posts of this blog.]

Plato and Aristotle, the central figures in "The School of Athens."

Plato and Aristotle, the central figures in “The School of Athens.”

Studies in classical philosophy often contrast Plato with Aristotle. Raphael’s School of Athens shows Plato pointing up toward transcendent reality, the realm of the forms, more real than what senses can perceive. Aristotle, while not exactly pointing down, does appear to be tethering the conversation to what “common sense” can perceive of the only world that we can be confident of sharing with other rational beings. Students of these two philosophers often take sides, preferring one to the other, as though Plato’s greatest student, Aristotle, either refuted or strongly corrected his teacher, or, on the contrary, sadly eliminated all transcendent reference from the joy of philosophizing.

The truth is more complex. What I would like to note is that champions of Aristotle, who use the great man’s teachings against Plato and Socrates, surely do so unjustly. Let me focus on the figure of Socrates, as he is known to us from Plato’s writings about him. When Socrates came on the scene in Athens, he posed himself as an opponent of “common sense.” Yes. But why? I think there were two related reasons. First of all, he opposed a complacent, unexamined use of what passed as common knowledge. This was highly problematic in the quickly changing political atmosphere of his time. Outdated and worn-out ideas lazily copped from Homer’s two masterpieces, The Iliad and The Odyssey did not fit the reality of a budding urban empire.

Socrates also recognized that such complacency in the world of ideas left the people of Athens open to manipulation by demagogues. Such manipulation was openly practiced by the Sophists, the loose school of rhetoricians who “made the worse appear the better reason.” Now, so as not to be too hard on the Sophists, let us note that among the changes in Athenian culture from the heroic age of Homer to the progressive world of Socrates’s day, was a growth in the use of impersonal law to settle disputes. The problems with the legal culture will be a later target of Plato’s, in one of his non-Socratic dialogues. In Socrates’s immediate context, he saw that this reliance upon customary law was not conducive to any attempt to examine truth itself. Many of Plato’s dialogues rehearse Socrates’s method: pick a fight with a Sophist and demonstrate that the Sophist can’t produce a coherent explanation of the actual meaning of the words he is using. In other words, demonstrate that the Sophist tendency is to use words as tools for the achievement of personal goals by using them to manipulate his hearers.

Now let me note here that the theme of manipulation is of a piece with emotivism. Alasdair MacIntyre says that emotivism entails that there be no distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative relationships. That is to say, in our world, sophistry has returned largely unopposed, though we are not often aware of it.

Back to my narrative: Plato recorded and inherited Socrates’s technique and attempted to further the pursuit of truth in his own way. His painstaking accounts of the drama of Socrates’s life and the drama of Athenian society did much to clear away the fog of fuzzy, self-serving, manipulative reasoning. Perhaps he faltered a bit when trying to pin the idea of truth to the transcendent realm of forms. But his work made possible Aristotle’s astounding success in generating a durable realism, or at least something like a technique for separating specious claims about the world from more verifiable claims.

Thus began the arc of Western philosophy, and it apparently continued until the advent of Friedrich Nietzsche. He set the tone for the dismantling of Western philosophy with his remarkable work The Birth of Tragedy. Historians criticize his handling of materials, but he was astute enough to vilify Socrates and locate a turning point in Socrates’s Athens. In Nietzsche’s understanding, Socrates’s thirst for genuine truth was either pie-in-the-sky naivete or perhaps a cynical manipulation that claimed for itself the mantle of truth–which at least the Sophists generally had the good taste to avoid. For Nietzsche, Socrates inaugurated a long desert in which Western culture imagined itself bound by truth, but in fact deluded by this claim into a hideous blindness.

I believe that Nietzsche was perceptive in this claim, though not in the way that he intended. His “Hermeneutic of Suspicion” and “unmasking” of the hidden motives behind appeals to “truth” accurately described, not Western philosophy as such, but rather the particular situation of late nineteenth-century European academe. In other words, Nietzsche was, quite against his intentions, calling attention to the fact that European philosophy had fallen away from its traditional vocation of furthering the durable realism that the founders–Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle–had initiated. And desiring to call a spade a spade, Nietzsche proposed that we go back to acknowledging that rhetorical manipulations are all that we have.

As I suggested, my belief is that Nietzsche perceived that claims to truth by his contemporaries in philosophy really were infected with the complacency that Socrates opposed. How did this happen? It was a slow process, but my own biases lean toward pinpointing the nominalist revolution of the fourteenth century as the beginning. I would also note that this has its roots in the thinking of William of Ockham, who is generally considered to be one of the originators of nominalism. This was at a time when the connection between the liturgical life and the university life was considerably weakened. I don’t exactly like to blame William, since he inherited a number of tricky problems that resulted from institutionalized in-fighting between Dominicans and Franciscans in the early fourteenth-century university. But it does seem here that the first break between words and durable meaning is introduced.

Leo XIII

Leo XIII

It is worth noting that Pope Leo XIII seemed to have a similar intuition as Nietzsche, and perhaps a more accurate awareness of the reality of the breakdown in philosophy. In his encyclical Aeterni Patris, he insisted that seminary education return to Thomas Aquinas, two or more generations before Ockham. This set the stage for the amazing insights of the “New Theology” of the early twentieth century. Alas, just as we were reaping the fruits of this greater theological realism, seminary educators turned their back again on Thomas (who is regarded even by the non-theologically inclined, as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the interpreters of Aristotle). I am not advocating freezing philosophy in one thinker or time period; ironically what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas offer, if correctly understood, is not a complacent position of authoritative power, but a humble method for uprooting the false and lazy assumptions that steer us from the truth. And lazy thinking leaves us open yet again to manipulation by potentially unfriendly powers.