St. Ephrem and the Probing Mind

Saint Ephraem, celebrated on June 9th, was a deacon and a doctor of the Church, who first exercised the office of preaching and of handing on sacred doctrine. He fulfilled his office through discourses and writings and in austerity of life, and so singular was he in doctrine that the exquisite hymns he composed merited for him the title “harp of the Holy Spirit.”

The above description is paraphrased from the one on the Bishop’s website. All his compositions were written in verse form. A few minutes on the web yielded the following stanza from an unpublished translation of his work, tantalizingly entitled TSF45.

How the eye detests that which makes it itch!
Curiosity irritates the mind,
as a crumb the eye, spoiling everything
and perverting thought, always.
Poking fingers hurt eyes and help them not.
Probing thinkers, too, harm their powers of thought.

Is St. Ephraem an old fuddy-duddy afraid of the new or does he have a point?

Wisdom from N. T. Wright

Reason is in short supply right now, and that is always dangerous. When everybody feels strongly that they know what to do, but nobody stops to think, you will sometimes find that common sense is prevailing; but you may also get lynchings, racist attacks and the cheerful abolition of ancient rights.

Reason is on the side of the angels. When someone says in a debate, What I feel is […]," the chair ought to intervene. What people feel is neither here nor there in a debate. If someone says "I like salt" and someone else says "I like pepper", they are not having a debate.

What matters is what they think. Sadly, it is possible for many people to feel strongly something which comes to be recognized as dangerous nonsense. The 20th century should have taught us that, if nothing else. Feelings are hugely important, but if we rely on them as our guid, we might as well take a compass bearing on a wild goat. When feelings rule, debaters become demagogues.

Much of our contemporary discourse – I sat through two days of general synod a week ago – had degenerated into a competition between the relative woundedness of people's feelings. I am not saying that wounded feelings do not matter, only that saying "I'm more hurt than you are" cannot settle and argument on a point of principle. Unfortunately, since victimhood is the only high moral ground left after the collapse of reasoned discourse, speeches become harangues, nae-calling replaces respectful engagement and party spirit trumps public wisdom. […]

There is a lot about postmodernism I like, but when it comes to the law of the land, I want words that say what they mean and mean what they say. This is necessary in order to build a society – or, indeed, a church – of trust, the precondition of genuine debate. You have to trust your opponents to say what they mean and mean what they say, and you have to earn their trust by doing the same.

Here again, contemporary culture lets us down. The hermeneutic of suspicion has become our default mode, encouraging us to lump issues into bundles and people into camps. It is much easier that way: it stops you have to think, or engage in real debate.

The Church desperately needs to learn once more the gentle art of reasoned discourse, of respectful engagement, of real debate. It is a better way to be Christian; it is a better way to be human. As Snoopy might have said, clarity ain't everything, but unclarity ain't anything.

--N. T. Wright

The gift of the poet

I rant at the TV news, bemoan the antics of our politicians and generally lament the world we adults are leaving our children. I spew it out in that old neighborhood, midwestern way of speaking, colorfully pepperd with an occasional expletive. When I'm done I just raise up my arms and say, "I hope the Holy Spirit knows what she's doing!."

This Saturday morning though, not having any children to define my schedule and turning a blind eye to all the work that needs to be done around the house, I grabbed a anthology of poetry, "Grace Notes". I think the author, Joseph Bottum, in his poem, Easer Morning, is lamenting as well though much more eloquently. Has he found hope in the promise of Easter?

These are the last three stanzas of his poem.

Touch-me-nots among the stones,
bluebells and sorrels, solomon’s seal.
Every spring pretends a pity
for all the pretty, short-lived things.
Last night I watched the fire zones,
the bombing plumes, the tracer rounds:
blooms of war on the TV news.
and now in these green trees I see
the graves of gods and a grove of bones

History labors – a worn machine
sick with torsion, ill-meshed ----
and every repair of an old fault
ruptures something new. The sacred
knife and prey are gone from the woods,
but winter’s blood still springs refreshed
and an altered world still summons death.
As long as we endure ourselves,
Innocence will come to grief
And mercy must remain unfleshed.

The parish bells begin their carols ---
Down through the trees like flourished prayer;
The Easter call resounding. Time
reaches forward, hungry for winter,
and what will save my daughter when even
hope is caught in the ancient snare?
A cold fear waits --- till all that had fallen,
all that was lost, rudely broken,
crossed in love, comes rising, rising
on the breath of the new spring air.

Hans is Back

After forays into Islam and Andre Dubus, I’m back to Balthasar and volume five of his trilogy (I’m still working on that Swiss math). Here he is talking about the thinking of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was a German philosopher who turned philosopher after rejecting theology and Catholicism. Balthasar describes his thoughts on suffering. The philosopher can’t leave the path of Christian thought before taking some fork in the road that leads back to the main Christian highway.


“In the cycle of grace and homage to grace, everything is structured towards a dominant … love …. This dominant love is groundless self –giving, self-expending. … the simplicity of the one thing necessary … the need that is fulfilled in the freedom of sacrifice. Sacrifice … is raised above all compulsion because it emerges from the depths of freedom. In sacrifice there occurs a concealed act of giving thanks. Therefore sacrifice can tolerate no calculation, by which it can be judged only in terms of usefulness or uselessness, whether its aims are noble or base. … The self-giving of Being unquestionably has no justification but that alone which it derives from itself.”

The philosopher Heidegger prefers the term “Being” rather than the theological term “God”. The byway of Christian thought is clear however. In his writings, Heidegger quotes lines from Angelus Silesius, a 17th century Catholic mystic and poet.

The rose has no why and wherefore:

It blooms because it blooms,

And has no regard for itself, and does not ask

If  it is being looked at.

Love Pure and Impure

What with the sexual scandals of various leaders (Schwarzenegger, the IMF assistant director, etc.) one might ask, can we come up with better advice than "keep your pants zipped." I offer this from the first letter of Peter (1:22): "Since you have purified yourselves by obedience to the truth for sincere mutual love, love one another intensely from a pure heart."

So the recommendation (command) is purity, and then love can be real and even intense. May we all accept this advice!

A Conserver of All Things

To listen to Stephen Hawking, one would have to conclude that it is necessary to choose between reason and faith. The two means of understanding our position in the world point in two directions. This is not the Church's view. Quite the opposite. The Church argues that truth can never contradict truth. Here is what the Catechism teaches at Sec. 159:

"Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth." "Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are."

A conservator is defined in the American Heritage dictionary as "Someone who conserves or preserves from injury, violation, or infraction; a protector." In law, a conservator is "a guardian, a keeper."

So both the scientist and the person of faith rely on the protecting hand of God for the success of their ventures. The pain and suffering of life may tempt us to turn away from seeing this. But as is written in 2 Peter at v. 19: "[We] will do well to be attentive to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in [our] hearts."

More on Hawking

It is worth commenting further on Hawking's approach to reality. I would like to describe it as "reductionistic" and reference an interesting review article of the work of another mathematician describing this approach and why it is erroneous. The mathematician is Gian Carlo-Rota, and his book is called Indiscrete Thoughts. The review article is by Robert Sokolowski. Here is what Sokolowski writes:

"Another theme developed by Rota is that of 'Fundierung.' He shows that throughout our experience we encounter things that exist only as founded upon other things: a checkmate is founded upon moving certain peices of chess, which in turn are founded upon certain peices of wood or plastic. An insult is founded upon certain words being spoken, an act of generosity is founded upon something's being handed over. In perception, for example, the evidence that occurs to us goes beyond the physical impact on our sensory organs even though it is founded upon it; what we see is far more than meets the eye.

"Rota gives striking examples to bring out this relationship of founding, which he takes as a logical relationship, containing all the force of logical necessity. His point is strongly anti-reductionist. Reductionism is the inclination to see as 'real' only the foundation, the substrate of things (the piece of wood in chess, the physical exchange in a social phenomenon, and especially the brain as founding the mind) and to deny the true existence of that which is founded.

"Rota's arguments against reductionism, along with his colorful examples, are a marvelous philosophical therapy for the debilitating illness of reductionism that so pervades our culture and our educational systems, leading us to deny things we all know to be true, such as the reality of choice, or intelligence, or emotive insight, and spiritual understanding. He shows that ontological reductionism and the prejudice for axiomatic systems are both escapes from reality, attempts to substitute something automatic, manageable, and packaged, something coercive, in place of the human situation, which we all acknowledge by the way we live, even as we deny it in our theories."

Certainly, as Hawking points out, our life is built upon a foundation of our body, which includes our brain. But as Sokolowski explains, reductionism is the inclination to see as "real" only the foundation, the substrate of things, and to deny the true existence of that which is founded. Hawking seems to be doing exactly that when he claims that our minds are simply a function of our machine-like brain. Luckily, reality is much fuller, and more mysterious, than Hawking will admit. And the philosophical analysis provided by Carlo-Roti, as explained by Sokolowski, should give us some assurance that Hawking's views are much too constricted to be accepted as true.