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Crucifixion-Resurrection as a Pattern for Church – Michael Ramsey’s Ecclesial Vision

Sometimes I take up specific books for the seasons of Advent and Lent, but this past year I was still editing, finalizing, and defending my dissertation during those seasons. Instead, I took up a book for the season of Easter—Michael Ramsey’s The Resurrection of Christ. I chose this book for a few reasons. For one, I had recently read through Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church, and I was so struck by his ecclesial vision, which makes much of the cross and resurrection, that this book felt like a natural, easter-themed sequel. For another, I’ve long been struck by Ramsey’s ability to weave together biblical reflection with theological depth, and for me, he is a model of the best that the Anglican tradition has to offer in terms of deeply orthodox, but also deeply learned, pastor-theologians.

Throughout The Resurrection of Christ, Ramsey insists on the fundamental connection between the Church and the Resurrection, so much so that you might call his approach an Easter Ecclesiology. But that phrase wouldn’t quite capture it because for Ramsey wherever there is Resurrection, there is also the Cross, indeed wherever there is the Cross there is also the whole sweep of the Passion from death and burial on through Resurrection and Ascension. As he puts it,

“So it is that the centre of Apostolic Christianity is Crucifixion-Resurrection; not Crucifixion alone nor Resurrection alone, nor even Crucifixion as the prelude and Resurrection as the finale, but the blending of the two in a way that is as real to the Gospel as it is defiant to the world…For Life-through-death is the principle of Jesus’ whole life; it is the inward essence of the life of the Christians; and it is the unveiling of the glory of the eternal God. So utterly new and foreign to the expectations of men was this doctrine, that it seems hard to doubt that only historical events could have created it.”

Because the Church is always Christ’s body both crucified and resurrected , our ecclesial vision must be at one and the same time that of Crucifixion-Resurrection, a vision which insists on the pilgrim status of the people of God, making our way to Zion with our crosses in tow, but which simultaneously insists that we have been raised with Christ and are even now seated with him in the heavenly places. A church that is only cruciform might suffer well, and this is no small thing, but it will have little vision of hope, it will have a difficult time despising the shame if it forgets the hope set before it. Similarly a Church that only sees the victory and makes no room for what Frederick Buechner calls the “magnificent defeat”, will live with a naive triumphalism and so will always either ignore or explain away or vilify suffering.

The Church as Christ’s body, rises or falls on living within and out of this tension–pilgrim people, elect exiles, who are even now seated in the heavenly places. How could it be otherwise, if we are truly Christ’s body? As Ramsey puts it, “For Life-through-death is the principle of Jesus’ whole life; it is the inward essence of the life of Christians; and it is the unveiling of the glory of the eternal God.”

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Amalgamating Disparate Experience: John Donne and the Commonplace Book

“Amalgamating Disparate Experience”: John Donne and the Commonplace Book

I recently finished reading (really listening to) Katherine Rundell’s biography of John Donne, Super-Infinite. Having recently heard Rundell interviewed on Tyler Cowan’s podcast, I wish she would have narrated the audio book. The exuberance of her personality would have nicely matched her exuberant portrayal of Donne and his world.

I am working on idea for an essay about Donne and anthropology, but for now I wanted to note what Rundell has to say about Donne as keeper of a commonplace book. Donne was known as one of the great commonplacers of his age, and Rundell notes “that the first recorded use of the work ‘commonplacer’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is Donne’s.”

Here is how Rundell describes the commonplace book:

The commonplace book allowed readers to approach the world as a limitless resource; a kind of ever-ongoing harvesting. It was Erasmus, the Dutch scholar known as ‘the prince of the humanists’ who codified the practice. The compiler, he wrote, should ‘make himself as full a list of place-headings as possible’ to put at the top of each page: for instance, beauty, friendship, decorum, faith, hope, the vices and virtues. It was both a form of scholarship, and, too, a way of reminding yourself of what, as you moved through the world, you were to look out for: a list of priorities, of sparks and spurs and personal obsessions. Donne’s book must surely have had: angels, women, faith, stars, jealousy, gold, desire, dread, death.”

I’ve posted in the past about my own experience of keeping a commonplace book. What strikes me as completely true from her description is that knowing I had this book and a set of preoccupations helped me look at the world in a certain way. What I read, what I listened, what I watched, all had the potential to speak to me. The practice has always helped me foster some level of expectation and receptivity.

When I think back on the practice of commonplacing, I am sometimes even able to remember what I wrote down, even years ago, but more often than not the real benefit is reading back through what I have collected over the years. A few months ago I flipped through a set of notebooks from around ten years ago. There were all sorts of quotes about beauty, about perception, about epiphany, about the nature of divine revelation. Those quotes, I realize now, and the reading they represented were the seed bed of what became my doctoral work on theological aesthetics.

I used a horticultural image to describe commonplacing, but T.S. Eliot, speaking of Donne, uses more alchemical language, writing, “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.”

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Virgil and Daniel – Two Visions of Empire

“The search for God is not the search for comfort or tranquility, but for truth, for justice, faithfulness, integrity: these, as the prophets tirelessly reiterated, are the forms of God’s appearance in the world” from Nicholas Lash, “Creation, Courtesy, and Contemplation” in The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’

Does one read the Bible like any other book? R.W.L Moberly begins his The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith with this question. In exploring this question, Moberly works with a three-fold typology, based on what he takes to be the three main ways people read the bible–as history, as classic, and as Scripture. In each of the main chapters, Moberly offers comparative readings of the Aeneid, especially Book 1, and Daniel 7 as a way to explore these three approaches–history, classic, Scripture. So why is that we should read the Bible any differently than we read something like the Aeneid? It’s worth reading the whole book to see the ways he grapples with this question. Here I want summarize the contrastive reading he offers of Aeneid and Daniel 7 on the question of empire.

In Aeneid 1 Jupiter speaks of the coming Rome as a “limitless empire,” and in Daniel 7 the Ancient of Days promises “a kingdom that will not pass away.” So what is the difference? Moberly observes that Daniel’s vision stands in sharp contrast to the Roman vision of endless empire. In the vision of Daniel 7, the prophet beholds the bestial violence of earthly empires as they clash and jostle for supremacy. In contrast to this bestial violence, the promised “son of Man”, the truly human one, inherits a kingdom from the Ancient of Days. But in a strange ambiguity in the text, it seems that the kingdom entrusted to the son of man is then entrusted to holy ones, the saints of the earth. Because of their humanity these holy ones are able to resist the temptation to meet beastly force with beastly force. Beastly force must be met with a human serenity which itself rests on divine sovereignty.

The apocalyptic vision of Daniel 7 initially terrifies, both Daniel himself and any reader who dares to envision the horrifying parade of beastly empires. The horror and the violence these beasts perpetrate on the world and each other is all too real. It is precisely such bestial violence that Aeneid, if not commends (for Virgil is subtle in theses matters), at least inspired in Rome. For this reason the book of Daniel speaks acutely, both then and now, to the persecuted, to those who face the beastly. The encouragement is not to meet fire with fire, to fight a beast with beast, but to stay your eyes on true humanity, on the son of man, who resists the turn to the beastly, who refuses both coercion and violence.

As Moberly observes about Daniel, “the wider book portrays faithfulness and loyalty, and also wisdom, as the qualities of life expected for resisting the four beasts for as long as they have their dominion…A good case can be made for the thesis that the book of Daniel as a whole, in its own right, is subverting any straightforward notion of dominion and is reconceiving where, under the God of Israel, true power and dominion lie” (120;123).

And yet Christians have found the Virgilian vision of empire very tempting. In rehearsing the reception of Virgil by Christians, Moberly recognizes that throughout the history of the Church, “the vision of endless empire posed a particular temptation for Christians” (127). In other words there has always been a temptation to replace the Daniel 7 vision of human patience and faithfulness in the face of the beastly, with the Roman vision of conquering the world in the way of the beast.

But as Moberly rightly notes, these two visions cannot be conflated because they rest on different understandings of power:

“The ’unending dominion” of Daniel 7 thus is of a different order than the “limitless empire” of Aeneid 1, because Daniel 7 is not speaking of any prospect of power in the same way…The appeal of Daniel 7, however, appears to be less straightforward and more demanding. A positive appropriation of Daniel 7 would in principle entail a willingness at least to sympathize, and perhaps to identify, with a small and regularly oppressed people who have a strong commitment to faithfulness in adversity, and who through that faithfulness maintain confidence in the ultimate triumph of their vision of a just God" (128).

For the Christian the Daniel 7 vision of human resistance to the bestial forces of violence and coercion is only possible within a faithful community. It is only the faithful community, the church, who receives Daniel 7 as Scripture who can have any chance of living the kind of resistance it envisions. The Church, in other words, makes such living not only possible but first it makes it plausible. Using the Peter Berger’s sociological language of “plausibility structures,” with an ecclesial assist from Leslie Newbigin, Moberly describes the church as that faithful community: “The church functions as a plausibility structure not only through its contemporary witness but also through its persistence through the centuries in maintaining the importance of a particular way of God, the world, and ourselves” (156).

The church as plausibility structure is the place in which the Bible is received as Scripture. Though the Bible can be fruitfully read as history and as classic in virtually any context (even within the Church!), it can really only be read as Scripture within a communal context that not only receives it as Scripture but also tries to faithfully live it.

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The Gospels as a Field of Vision and Field of Play

In “The Gospels for the Life of the World”, Ben Quash focuses on the mediation of Christ by the Spirit through the Scriptures, giving special attention to the generative possibilities of fresh encounters with the Gospels. While the Spirit of Christ mediates the presence of Christ through the Scriptures and through the Gospels, people generally and the Church especially must accept the responsibility of faithfully receiving this mediation. The task of receiving the gospels and reading the gospels is an invitation into the on-going interpretation and enacting of the gospels.

The Spirit works to meditate and we must work to receive and interpret. The Spirit must continue the work of unfurling the meaning of the Gospels because their meaning is superabundant, both inexhaustible in themselves and in need of constant appropriation and reception in every time and place. As Quash puts it,

“We may expect certain qualities in the gospels in order that they will be suited to the Spirit’s work of gradual mediation. To lend themselves to the Spirit’s unfolding, they must first be, so to speak, folded texts. They must be texts that ‘keep on giving’ over time. They must be immensely, if not infinitely, generative of new and transformative insight: rich, dense, full of implications (implicatio being the Latin word for ‘foldedness’).”

The Gospels’ meaning was not locked in time for the people to whom they were initially addressed. To accept that the Spirit continues to unfold the meaning of the Gospels is to simultaneously accept that these texts are addressed to us and to those who will come after us just as much as they were addressed to those who first received them.

Moreover, in their superabundance the Gospels are both iconic and ironic. The gospels are first iconic because they display the multifarious glory of Christ. Using Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Glory, a tapestry that hangs in Coventry Cathedral, to illuminate this point, Quash argues that the four gospels must be taken together. In the tapestry, in accord with biblical imagery, the four beasts surrounding Christ represent the four gospels, and the space that they open up between them is the space in which we are able to behold Christ. While each individual gospel displays Christ, the four gospels taken together create an entire field of vision in which to behold him.

In addition to being a field of vision, it is also a field of play, for the four-fold witness of the gospels invites both interpretation and participation. The space they open between them, Quash says, pulling from Balthasar’s theodramatics, is a “Spielraum”–an acting area. It is not just a space of understanding, but a place of enactment, and more literally a space of play (spiel).

The gospels are also ironic because they, as Quash puts, “slip the frame”, they point beyond themselves as texts, and so invite generative encounter. Quash writes, “There is an apparent self-consciousness in the gospels by which they both acknowledge the specifics of an original narrative context and also anticipate an indeterminate number of future ones. They promise to seek ‘readers’ who will ‘understand’ wherever and whenever they may be.” The gospels wink at the reader, in other words, and that wink is an invitation to interpretation and participation. Rather than seeking to define once and for all the meaning of them within the world they came from, the task is to allow the gospels to slip out of themselves into the world we inhabit and so transform it.

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Not speed, not breadth, but purpose – On the Purposive Intellect of Abraham Lincoln

Not speed, not breadth, but purpose – On the Purposive Intellect of Abraham Lincoln

“The prime quality of his mind was not speed—which in the different world a century and more later would be thought to be almost the defining feature of intelligence. It also was not breadth—the embrace of the best that has been thought and said in the world of learned persons, which Thomas Jefferson aspired to—or instant knowledge of the inner details of public affairs of the twentieth-century policy wonk. Lincoln’s mind instead cut deeply, perhaps slowly or at least with effort and concentrated attention, into a relatively few subjects. It was purposive—personally, politically, morally.” Walter Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography

Discussing the value of reading biographies, Cal Newport recently mentioned this biography of Lincoln on his podcast. I was instantly intrigued by the idea of an ethical biography. More than offering yet another sketch of Lincoln’s life, Miller seeks to account for Lincoln’s moral formation and to explore the reasons for and the consequences of his moral choices. In the podcast Newport drew a parallel between Lincoln’s purposive intellect and the three principles of his model for deep productivity—do fewer things; do this work at a slower pace; obsess over quality.

I’m struck by the idea of a purposive intellect, particularly as it stands in contrast to a quick intellect. Miller observes that different ages value different dimensions of the intellect, and he is certainly right to say that our age most praises speed. If you asked me outright to say which of these three I aspired to, I would probably say that I desired breadth. But if you probed that answer just a bit further, you would find that what I really want is breadth quickly, to master a lot of material, yes, but to master it quickly. What I really value then is speed. The ultimate version of this to my mind is the gnostic fantasy about learning in The Matrix. That one could learn kung fu, or anything for that matter with the speed and ease of a download is nothing but fantasy, but that fantasy grows out of the idolization of not just speed but of computers as ideal minds. We want to learn the way a computer “learns.” A computer may be fast, but it cannot be purposive the way described here, no matter what one thinks of AI.

One consequence of idolizing the speed of a mind? If speed is the primary attribute we praise, then to admit slowness or to intentionally attempt slowness, as if it were good to slow down, amounts to a confession—I am not smart (at least in the way the age currently defines or values it). If the videos YouTube suggests to me about reading more, more quickly are any indication, I must have more than a passing interest in speed and the attendant anxiety that I am not fast enough. But a purposive mind is slow by design, or if not slow at least deliberate. It distrusts quickness for the sake of quickness.

What are the qualities of a purposive intellect? The purposive mind works like a plow. As Miller says of Lincoln, “His was a mind inclined to plow down to first principles and to hold to them—not as a metaphysician does, abstracting from particulars and spinning great webs of speculation, linking abstraction to abstraction, but as a lawyer, a politician, a moralist does at his or her best: by tenaciously analyzing one’s way through the particulars, seeking the nub of the matter.” Though this is true as far as it goes, I would push the image further. One does not plow simply to turn over the ground. One plows the earth in order to prepare it to bring forth new life. The plowman follows slowly as the the long steady furrows cut into the earth. With each step the earth turns up rich soil that can cradle and give life to a seed. The purposive mind is therefore generative. The purposive is also tenacious. As Lincoln said of himself, “My mind is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible thereafter to rub it out.”

Of course, these three qualities, speed, breadth, purpose, are not comprehensive, nor do they necessarily exclude each other. Think of a mind given to both speed and purpose. Mozart comes to mind as an example. He not only produced so much, so quickly but also so much of lasting value. Breadth and purpose readily also go together, while St. Thomas Aquinas seems to be a stunning example of someone who possessed all three. His was a mind that was quick and supple, a mind absolutely steeped in the breadth of the tradition, but also a mind that worked with great purpose.

(If you click the tag for intellectual life on this blog, you will find many posts dedicated to exploring various aspects of what the intellectual life is and what it entails, and more than a few posts sketching the main lines of The Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges.)

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Dissertation Done – Some Thoughts on Writing, pt. 1

I am finally coming out the other side of my dissertation. The submission and the defense await, but the final draft is in the hands of my advisor. One more pass through everything, maybe two, remains. Certainly some second guessing and a handful of last minute changes remain. But the bulk of the hard work is over. Even with the final, final edit and the defense remaining, I feel an enormous sense of relief. Coming out of the fog, I suddenly remembered that I used to keep a blog and had the thought that maybe I’d like to keep one again. So here we are.

When I was finishing my full-draft, I was surprised by how much left-over writing I had accumulated along the way. I compiled all of that excess writing into a document, and all told, it added up to 30,000 words or so, a full third of what turned out to be the final word count. It is probably a truism, but I was still surprised by how much writing it took to get to the writing that I finally ended up with. I even cut an entire chapter along the way. But I had to write that chapter before I could really know that I didn’t need it. That’s not quite right though. I needed the chapter, even though the project did not. I needed to write it to think through some problems I was having with the argument. But once I came to a solution, the chapter itself was no longer relevant.

That chapter still exists, because it’s hard to let go of the work. I couldn’t bring myself to fully discard it or any of the excess. There are reams of discarded prose hidden away, because when it came down to it, I couldn’t “kill my darlings”. Instead of killing them, I sent them to another room. I named that room, my file of excess, “cutting room floor”. When I named that file, I was not consciously thinking in terms of writing being like film editing, but that thought did occur to me as I was reading In the Blink of an Eye by film editor Edward Murch.

(Austin Kleon mentioned that Murch’s book taught him something about writing too. David Epstein makes a similar connection between writing and film editing in this post.)

As a film editor Murch has lots to say about film making specifically, but also a lot to say about creating in general, especially creating something cohesive and contained from an enormous amount of material, in his case from reams and reams of dailies. One of Murch’s animating questions as an editor is why do cuts work? How is it that a film can change perspectives, change distances, change locations, and still make a kind of sense? With all the jumps through space and time, how does a film when done well, along the viewer to simply slip along with the camera, accepting the cuts as a given? In exploring the question of why cuts work, Murch wonders if there is an analog to the cut in human experience. For him, it is blinking. Blinking, he argues, in addition to its physiological purpose for moistening, protecting, and cleaning the eyeball, serves a psychological purpose as well. We blink to moisten and clear our eyes, but we also blink to transition our thoughts. A blink is like a cut in our thought-scape. A blink can move our mind from one thing to another.

I came to think of cuts in writing on two levels. First, there is the necessary cutting away, the excess that ends up on the cutting room floor. Second, there are the internal cuts within the writing itself. Thinking of cuts within writing, I came to think of each sentence representing a kind of cut. Paragraphs, sections, chapters too are all kinds of cuts as well, movements within the thought-scape of the argument, jumps in space and time, in theme and tone. Thinking of “the cut” in terms of writing brings me to one of the best books I read on writing along the way—Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences on Writing . That book helped me start thinking of the space between a period and the beginning of the next sentence like a cut in a film.

Klinkenborg calls this space between sentences, when employed well, “the gap of a well-made ellipsis.” That space is a kind of cut. And such cuts are necessary for writing just as much as they are for film. No matter how closely related a sentence is to the sentence that precedes it or follows it, that sentence must have its own internal logic, its own reason for existing. To move from one sentence to another is to leap a gap. Sometimes that gap is tiny and sometimes it can be yawning, but the writer must consciously consider the reason for the gap, the rhythm of the gap, the rhetoric of the gap.

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Baptism as Boundary Crossing and Naming

At the church where I serve we’ve been preaching a sermon series on Christian basics, using Rowan William’s book Being Christian as a guide. I recently preached a sermon on baptism where I discussed the sacrament of initiation in terms of boundary crossing and naming.

Sermon in a nutshell: To pass through the waters of baptism is to pass from one realm to another, from one dominion, the dominion of darkness, into another dominion, the kingdom of the beloved Son (Col. 1:13). But to be baptized is also to be immersed into a new name and identity, the triune name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a name which summons the baptized to mission. Jesus’ baptism illustrates both of these dynamics. In his baptism he crosses the boundary line of the Jordan because he is the new Joshua coming out of the wilderness to enter the land of promise. But he is also named Beloved Son, and that naming is not incidental. The naming is anointing, an anointing which is not just calling but also empowerment for the mission ahead. For Rowan Williams this means that the baptized are those who are joined to the anointed one, and are therefore anointed into the priestly, prophetic, and kingly offices of the Beloved Son as well. Those who are immersed into the name of Father, Son, and Spirit, are named and then summoned, told to go and make disciples, and empower to do so by the Spirit.

The week after I preached that sermon a re-encountered a passage from a novel that beautifully encapsulates both dynamics of baptism as boundary crossing and baptism as naming. I’ve been listening A Wizard of Earthsea on Audible, performed by the wonderful Rob Inglis whose performance of The Lord of the Rings is simply stellar. I’ve read Le Guin’s enchanting book before, but I wish I would have remembered this lovely passage where the young Sparrowhawk is initiated into a new life by his master Ogion with a water rite and with a naming ritual, called “the ceremony of Passage”:

“On the day the boy was thirteen years old, a day in the early splendour of autumn while still the bright leaves are on the trees, Ogion returned to the village from his rovings over Gont Mountain, and the ceremony of Passage was held. The witch took from the boy his name Duny, the name his mother had given him as a baby. Nameless and naked he walked into the cold springs of the Ar where it rises among rocks under the high cliffs. As he entered the water clouds crossed the sun’s face and great shadows slid and mingled over the water of the pool about him. He crossed to the far bank, shuddering with cold but walking slow and erect as he should through that icy, living water. As he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boy’s arm whispered to him his true name: Ged.” A Wizard of Earthsea

Le Guin is not a Christian, and I can’t say with certainty that she has Christian baptism in mind with this passage, but she is certainly thinking in terms of initiation rites, and the potent imagery is alive with Christian implications. Duny goes in the water and Ged emerges. He passes through watery chaos and comes out the other side, stepping into a new world, stepping into a new identity.

The passage also speaks to another dynamic of Christian baptism. Baptism as clothing. Many of the earliest Christians also went into the baptismal waters naked, and when they emerged, they were clothed in white. Newly named, newly clothed, citizens of a new world. Baptism then is not just boundary crossing, not just naming, but investiture, putting on Christ as clothing, being clothed with power from on high.

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The Church in Hibernation?

“We are living in a time when the images of gods and idols are crashing about us. The spiritual and cultural traditions of vast regions of the West are increasingly being called into question; indeed, we can go even further and say they are being liquidated, quickly and relatively painlessly. Just as a tree in autumn drops its leaves without pain or regret in order to gather once more new strength from within, to renew its powers in hibernal peace, so too the tree of culture is now being stripped of its leaves. Of course, in this, the late autumn of our times, the leaves lie thickly under our feet—and the books thickly in the bookstores; but we aren’t deceived for a moment about that. This colorful yellow and red swarm of leaves is animated no longer by life but, if at all, only by the wind. A small regret might well be permitted us here, just as autumn is the time of the elegiac lyric, but who would want on that account to huddle up under the blankets of an eschatological pathos! We trust the power of nature, her wise economy and the laws of her renewal.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves”

Though Balthasar wrote these words in the lead up to WWII, I find them eerily prescient, and the image of the tree is quite striking. But what of it? If we could say that the Church in the West is truly in a time of hibernation, would that be a comfort? Is this a consolation? Does the knowledge that the tree is regathering its strength to bear fruit once again offer enough hope for us to persist?

Balthasar acknowledges the pull toward elegy in such times and there is part of me that would much prefer the “eschatological pathos” he mentions instead of the eschatological hysteria that seems to be our lot. Even so. I’m trying to take the point. I’m trying to learn to trust in the way he commends.

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Collecting Quotes – On Keeping a Commonplace Book

For the last few years, I’ve been using the Bullet Journal system with my notebooks to organize tasks, keep my calendar, take sermon notes, write down interesting things, jot down books to find and music to listen to, etc. In every notebook I always reserve ten pages or so in the back as a commonplace book where I can collect striking quotes, phrases, and ideas. Sometimes those quotes turn into a blog post. Sometimes they make their way into sermons or other writing. But sometimes they simply sit there, waiting for me find them, to be struck again by their beauty, to ponder their strangeness, to be challenged, or to wonder what possessed me to write it down in the first place!

As I’ve written before, a commonplace book is a great way to collect and capture quotations in one place. It also provides a snapshot of recurring themes and preoccupations over the lifespan of the notebook. If you look at the tags for this blog, you will not be surprised to see that the quotes are often about contemplation, beauty, the vocation of theology, and the necessity of Christian holiness.

This is what this looks like in my notebook. Good luck reading it! I like to write with nice pens, but that doesn’t mean that my handwriting is worthy of the pens I use!

Here is a picture of my commonplace book from my latest bullet journal.

(In case you are interested, I typically use the Leuchtturm 1917 notebook with the dot grid. These notebooks are especially suited for strict users of the Bullet Journal system, because the pages are numbered and there is a table of contents in the front where you can “index” your entries. But I have not been very diligent about keeping an index, and I like writing with fountain pens, so I am switching to this Rhodia notebook. The Leuchtturm works well with fountain pens, but Rhodia paper offers a completely other level of quality. If you want a great starter fountain pen, I especially like the Kaweco Sport. If I’m going to take the time to write things in my commonplace book, I want a good writing experience.)

When I finish each notebook, I like to also capture some of the best quotes here on the blog. Here are a few highlights from the notebook I just finished:

First, some obligatory Balthasar quotes:

“Let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty.” HUvB, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 3

“I have to say that for me the only truly interesting theologians are the saints: from Irenaeus through Augustine to Anselm to Bonaventure or figures that allow the radiation of holiness to show forth, such as Dante or Newman; one could also mention Kierkegaard or Soloyvov. I have actually never written because I wanted to achieve results, but in order to show individuals something that I think must be seen.” HUvB, from the interview “Spirit and Fire”

“Only an eye serenely at rest sees eternal patterns and intimations in earth’s passing forms, and only such an artistic eye can show in symbol what the world is capable of revealing to the gaze of contemplation.” HUvB, “On the Christian’s Capacity to See”

Other quotes on theology:

“A theologian is most highly honored and most ably put to use when named as a doctor of the sacred page.” Katherine Sonderegger, Doctrine of God

“Not all is Christology!” Katherine Sonderegger, Doctrine of God

“If writing is a mode of exposure to truth, then even failure can be exemplary.” Ben Myers, Christ the Stranger

“God is the grammar of holy lives, their dark and dazzling intelligibility.” Ben Myers, Christ the Stranger

“Only if there is…astonishment…can there be serious, fruitful, and edifying Christian thought and utterance.” Barth, CD IV/3

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On Feeling “Useless” in a Pandemic

“The reason why the philosopher can be compared to the poet is that both are concerned with wonder…” St. Thomas Aquinas

So goes the epigraph to the extraordinary chapter “The Philosophical Act” in Josef Pieper’s Leisure, The Basis of Culture.

Pieper’s book has been an absolute balm to me over the past few months. I will remember it, along with The Power and the Glory, as a book that helped me get through COVID-Tide. As I’ve written before, his discussion of the classical distinction between ratio and intellectus helped me name my own tendency, not to mention the broader cultural tendency, to not only privilege, but to live as if there is nothing but ratio, nothing but discourse, logic, practicality, nothing but total work. But Pieper’s book reminds us that not only is there something more than ratio, and the world of total work it brings in its wake, but that the contemplation and the leisure and the festivity of intellectus is what truly nourishes, what truly establishes culture.

There is indeed another “logic”, the logic of intellectus, which is the logic of wonder, the logic that fuels prayer, poetry, and philosophy, what Pieper collects together as the Philosophical Act.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

Feeling Useless

Though a balm the book has also caused more than a little of what Pieper calls “existential disturbance”, mostly because I didn’t realize the extent to which I am myself under the sway of “total work”. Until any sense of normal working hours/conditions was taken away from me, until the normal metrics of success were suddenly unavailable (and, yes, this is true for a minister too. Imagine that), I had not known my own tendency to measure myself in terms of usefulness. In fact, early in the pandemic a friend asked me how I was feeling and I said, “I feel useless.” Pieper helped me understand that what on the face of it seems like a totally irrational and overly dramatic thought was in fact a sign that I had surrendered to the “logic” of total work. It is in fact rational, in the sense of ratio, for me to measure myself in terms of usefulness.

Importantly, Pieper is not arguing that we should do away with ratio . He is rather arguing for the recovery of and primacy of intellectus. By primacy I mean that for Pieper, intellectus is both the beginning place—it must come first—and the source of what really matters in life. And this is important because the things that intellectus brings are in a sense “useless” too, in that they ultimately do not produce value, rather they have value in and of themselves. (I’ve written previously in praise of useless things, but I had not yet connected that thought to my own sense of uselessness.)

Prayer, Poetry, and Philosophy

Such “useless” things come to those who attend to the world and to those who cultivate the sense of wonder, in a word to those who contemplate. Pieper numbers prayer, poetry, and philosophy among these “useless” things. They are useless yet indispensable, and when engaged in as acts of wonder are means of transcending the everyday, the working world, the world that recognizes only ratio.

But the pull of total work is so powerful, its promises so seductive, that there are also false forms of each of these. There is pseudo-prayer which is concerned with self and not with God, pseudo-poetry which merely follows trends or is nothing more than eloquent narcissism, and pseudo-philosophy which has no sense of wonder. We all must beware of these.

So if you too have felt useless, allow yourself to reimagine that feeling as an opportunity or as invitation back to wonder. In service of such wonder, might I recommend The Overstory by Richard Powers. It is a book that deeply rewards attentive wonder. Here is a passage that captures that dynamic beautifully:

“Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same. Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes. As cool and composed as wood.”

Richard Powers, The Overstory