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Weeping Prophet or Weeping God?

Who is weeping in Jeremiah 9:1?

This weekend I will be preaching on Jeremiah 8:19-9:1. It’s been a long time since I’ve preached a poetic text from the prophets, and it’s been a joy jumping into the text this week and interacting with great commentaries. In this post I wanted to collect some choice quotes around the question of voice in this text.

One of the most difficult aspects of interpreting the passage is determining who is speaking when. In the span of a few verses, depending on how you read it, the voice moves between Jeremiah, the people, and God. Of particular interest on the question of voice is Jeremiah 9:1:

Oh that my head were waters,

and my eyes a fountain of tears,

that I might weep day and night

for the slain of the daughter of my people!

Many take the speaker to be Jeremiah, and this is one of the verses from which he earns his reputation as the weeping prophet. But others take the speaker to be Yahweh who weeps over his people. One interesting thread in the commentaries is the idea of the interchangeability of the voice of the prophet and the voice of the Lord, so that Jeremiah’s expression of grief is also the expression of the Lord’s grief, and vice versa.

“This poetic unit is one of the most powerful in the Jeremiah tradition. It is also one of the most pathos-filled….This is poetry that penetrates God’s heart. That heart is marked by God’s deep grief. God’s anger is audible here, but it is largely subordinated to the hurt God experiences in the unnecessary death of God’s people. God would not have it so, but the waywardness of Israel has taken every alternative response away from Yahweh.” Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 91-92.

“We must not think, for example, that if God is grieved by our sin he cannot also be angry about it or punish us for it. On the contrary, the very nature of the relationship is such that terrible anger and desperate grief are both simultaneously appropriate reactions, as those who have experienced or witnessed a marriage breakdown will immediately agree. Jeremiah has already portrayed the relationship between YHWH and Israel as a marriage that began with a honeymoon and ended in divorce. Anger and tears? Absolutely.” Christopher Wright, The Message of Jeremiah

“The identification of the speaker(s) in these verses is difficult. The questioning laments of the people in v. 19b (quoted by the speaker of v. 19a) seem clear enough, as does v. 20 (NRSV places both in quotation marks; NAB only the second; REB only the first). It is possible that v. 22a is also spoken by the people, but that is less certain. A more difficult task for the interpreter is to sort out the speaker in the remaining verses. Is it God or Jeremiah or both? Divine speech markers appear at 8:17 and 9:3, but it is difficult to know to which verses they refer. God is clearly the speaker of v. 19c (NRSV places it in parentheses). It has been usual for interpreters to name Jeremiah as the speaker of the other verses, probably for theological reasons, namely, hesitance or refusal to ascribe grief and hurt to God. A few scholars now name God as the speaker of most if not all of these verses. (See especially Kathleen O’Connor, “The Tears of God and Divine Character in Jeremiah 2–9,” God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann, ed. T. Linafelt and T. Beal Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998, 172-85; Mark Biddle, Polyphony and Symphony in Prophetic Literature: Rereading Jeremiah 7–20 Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1996, 28-31.) I have suggested that readers are not asked to make a sharp distinction between the voice of prophet and the voice of God in these and other lamenting texts; in them we can hear the language of both. (T. Fretheim, The Suffering of God, 160-62.) Yet, the voice of God is primary; if Jeremiah speaks these words, it is because God first speaks them. The lamenting prophet embodies the words of a lamenting God. For other texts wherein the mourning of God and prophet are overlaid, see 4:19-21; 10:19-20; 13:17-19; 14:17-18. It is likely that all the protagonists in this situation—people, prophet, and God—voice their laments. The interweaving of speakers gives the text a certain liturgical character, but it may be more accurate to say that we hear a cacophony of mourning at Israel’s destruction.” Terence E. Fretheim, Jeremiah: Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary

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The Mission of the Church: Moving Into and Through History

Further reflections on Balthasar’s essay, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves”

In the last post I looked at Balthasar’s image of the tree of culture from his essay “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves. On the basis of this image, I described his admonition to receive from the past without overly romanticizing any given period, age, or thinker. In sum Balthasar argued, “Don’t so long for the past that you forget the moment that you actually live in.”

In this post I want to look at the same article and examine the larger argument he makes about the three great periods of Christianity, the patristic age, the scholastic age, and the modern age. In proposing this three fold division, Balthasar seeks to articulate what he discerns to be the inner core of each period. As he puts it, he wants, “To press on past all external and superficial features of each epoch, to focus on its innermost structural law, and then to measure each respective formal law according to the structural law of what is essentially Christian as we encounter this norm in the Gospel” (352).

Setting aside whether or not such a goal is even possible, especially in the span of a short essay, if we take his methodology at face value, the most important thing to determine is what he means by the “norm of the Gospel”. So what is the norm of the Gospel? It is that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and because the norm of the gospel is the Incarnation itself, it can never be an abstract principle. By extension this norm, “expresses itself in the level of history in ever-new forms without out being able thereby to call any one of these forms the absolute one” (352). Again he emphasizes that each age has sought to articulate the gospel faithfully, but even faithful articulation is never absolute. History changes so the forms the gospel takes must change too. So whether he fairly represents each period is in one sense slightly beside the point because his primary point has to do with the relationship between the Incarnation and history, a theme I wrote about in an earlier post about his book A Theology of History.

One form the gospel has taken on are the reigning philosophical systems of a given era. That the theology of the church takes on philosophic forms is both a kind of truism and a matter of heated debate. Everyone agrees that is does happen, but not everyone agrees to what extent it is a good or bad thing. Balthasar seems to argue that in one sense it must happen. The norm of the gospel must take on a form: “The Church has been sent to all peoples and to all times; and since she is expressly meant to speak in the form of the visible and the natural, she is also directed to take on the kaleidoscopic variety of the different situations of those times and peoples. Every epoch has its own language, world view, perspective; and the Church must make use of all these in order ’to become all things to all men and so to win all for Christ” (367). The “ever-new forms” include appropriating philosophical systems and concepts in order to articulate the Gospel. For him John’s use of the Logos concept to describe the Incarnation is the prime example of using this appropriation well.

Philosophical systems, such as Platonism for the Fathers and Aristotelianism for the Scholastics, are forms that theologians take on in order to articulate the gospel terms that make sense to a given culture, to a particular time and place. There are dangers in this, and Balthasar acknowledges this. With Platonism there is the possible danger of other worldliness, of escape from creation, and there is the possible danger of pantheism. With the Scholastics the danger is to naturalize everything. But this does not mean that the theologians of the those eras were wrong to adopt these forms.

Problems only arise when the philosophical appropriation becomes untethered from the Incarnation. And the temptation to untether is the problem of the Garden extending through history. The sin of Eden is for Balthasar the desire to ascend to God on our own terms, and philosophical forms can become just that. Gnosticism is the example par excellence. But that does not mean that using Platonic forms is inherently wrong or will inevitably lead to Gnosticism.

It comes back again and again as it so often does for Balthasar to the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh. Christ as the concrete universal, the form of forms by which we measure all other forms. And the movement of Christ into history becomes the norm of the church’s mission. The Incarnation is the movement of the Logos into history, the Word becoming flesh, and as Christ’s body the movement of the Church is into history, into the particulars of each time and place that she find herself in. The Church moves into and through history, not soaring above it or standing beside it, but into the midst of it. From the Garden onward we have tried to ascend to God on our own terms, but the scandal of the Gospel is that God descends to creation, enters history, and embraces the particularity of the human form.

It is worth keeping in mind that for Balthasar it is the perennial temptation to ascend to God on our own terms that most corrupts the gospel rather than a particular philosophical form per se. When we think about philosophical and psychological and cultural forms on offer in our day, using the norm of Gospel in the Incarnation can be an extremely helpful way to determine whether we are trying to ascend to God on our own terms or to descend with him into the particulars of history.

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No Golden Age? No problem.

There is no golden age, and that is a good thing.

“We are living in a time when the images of the gods and idols are crashing all 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.”

So begins Hans Urs von Balthasar’s essay, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves”, an essay where Balthasar examines those specifically Christian streams of thinking, writing, reflection, and prayer that have nourished the tree of culture in the past.

But this opening points to something that is especially worth taking to heart: Look at the tree, he says. Stop looking at the dead leaves on the ground. Stop lamenting that you live in autumn. Look up. Though the season speaks of coming death, the tree isn’t going anywhere.

The point is worth taking because looking at the tree and rightly discerning the season in which we live helps us guard against a temptation Balthasar readily describes, namely the temptation to return to some golden era, some previous age that is imagined to be better and purer simply because it was prior. First is best, we might say. Earlier is purer. And because of this temptation we might lament living through autumn rather than spring. He argues that we are especially prone to look back to the Patristic period with “Romantic longing”. Why? Because the Fathers were first and are therefore purer. But to return to the image of the tree, the argument of first is best, first is purer, is like saying “I would rather have a sapling than a redwood.”

To be clear Balthasar notes the ways in which there is a purity to Patristic thinking, a spring time newness to things. And there is a sense in which what they faithfully did, what they thought and what they died for, set the parameters and the terms of the conversation that continued in their wake. But they have not said everything. We must keep this in mind because of this temptation to look back on a particular historical moment or a particular thinker and believe that their way is the way, that their way is the only way to approach things.

This does not mean that we don’t have anything to learn from earlier ages and earlier thinkers. Quite the contrary. Take the example of Paul, though we must begin with understanding him in his context in order to faithfully preach what he preached, it is not enough to simply say,this is what Paul said, and then imagine that we have said everything there is to say. We must move to the next step, which is coming to terms with what Paul is saying to us in our time and in our place. Now what Paul is saying will not wholly contradict what Paul said. Remember the primary metaphors Balthasar employs are organic—the tree, the stream—so this is not about radical discontinuity and rupture. But being faithful to the word is something more than being able to say, this is what it meant. We have to be able to say also this is what it meant then, and this is what it means now, because the word of revelation is a living word.

I find Balthasar’s point about avoiding a naive nostalgia about the past especially interesting because I grew up in a context where the church of the book of Acts was held up as the golden age of the church. It was a variation on the argument that first is best, that first is purest. And Balthasar will have none of that thinking. I know people, and I myself have been guilty of this, who have traded the church of Acts as the ideal for the theology of the Fathers as the ideal, but Balthasar challenges both ways of thinking and says, yes, looking back is part of being faithful, and s we should look back, and we should read and learn and understand, but not so that we can perfectly replicate what they did in their time and place, but so that it might source our own faithful expression in our own time and place.

An historical example, he says, is only ever an analogy, and for him the inner paradox of analogy is that for all the similarity, there is always the ever greater difference, which means that we can glean things, yes, but we cannot perfectly replicate them, nor should we try. Take for example an argument that I hear a lot, namely that the time in which we are living in is like the fall of Rome. There is something to this argument that resonates with people, and we can readily find touch points, and it is a reason that some many are finding great nourishment in returning to Augustine and The City of God. Though we should read Augustine and learn what he is saying to us now, the analogy is never perfect. As Balthasar puts it, theology at its best in a given era is the the light of Truth breaking through “a vast number of mosaic shards of broken and smokey glass: in the thousands of many forms in which it is announced, systematized, humanized” (369). Which means that even in autumn, and even in a coming winter, the light comes and is coming into the world, and though we might only be a shard of broken glass, we are still able to let the light shine through. So the question becomes what might it mean to faithfully speak the living word in the midst of an autumn?

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Does theology have anything to do with holiness?

In this post and in the next few posts, I want to explore some of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reflections on the relationship between theology and spirituality, or what he tends to call the relationship between theology and sanctity, what we might now call the relationship between theology and holiness.

Now these two words, theology and holiness, might seem a curious pairing to us, and this is precisely the issue Balthasar hopes to address. Theology/holiness, contemplation/action, believing/living—we tend to see these more as dichotomies and dilemmas rather than as dynamically related and mutually informing realties. But the two absolutely belong together, and the fact that they aren’t seen as belonging together is for Balthasar a story of decline and a story of divorce. Their separation is therefore grievous and unnatural. To illustrate Balthasar offers this striking image in the essay “Theology and Sanctity”, saying that theology without sanctity is “bones without flesh” and that sanctity (spirituality) without theology is “flesh without bones”.

Taking this image of the body, we might say that what results from the separation of theology and sanctity is a kind of formlessness, something incomplete and not wholly itself. As he concludes, “Only the two together (corresponding to the prototype of revelation in scripture) constitute the unique ‘form’ capable of being ‘seen’ in the light of faith by the believer, a unique testimony, invisible to the world, and a ‘scandal’ to it.”

Thinking of scripture as offering the prototype, I was put in mind first of Paul, and the way the opening prayers in his epistles are so often road maps to his theological reflections, and the ways, like in Romans 8, that his theological reflections are transposed into prayer and doxology.

I was also put in mind of Augustine and how so much of his work is either actually prayer or is suffused, surrounded by, steeped in, prayer. The Confessions are of course a famous example of this, but you can see it throughout his work. Here is a portion of a prayer from the end of The Trinity that nicely captures Augustine’s deep desire not simply to understand something, or to explain something, but rather to see and be transformed by what he has sought to understand:

“Do Thou give strength to seek, who has made me find You, and has given the hope of finding You more and more. My strength and my infirmity are in Your sight: preserve the one, and heal the other. My knowledge and my ignorance are in Your sight; where You have opened to me, receive me as I enter; where You have closed, open to me as I knock. May I remember You, understand You, love You. Increase these things in me, until You renew me wholly. “

The Trinity, XV.28, taken from http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130115.htm

As another example, I think of Anselm who calls his work the Monologium “an example of meditation on the grounds of faith.” In other words, to use a more famous phrase of his, he is engaged in “faith seeking understanding”, and this prayer from the Prosologium illustrates how central prayer is to that larger quest of knowing God:

“I pray, 0 God, to know you, to love you, that I may rejoice in you. And if I cannot attain to full joy in this life may I at least advance from day to day, until that joy shall come to the full. Let the knowledge of you advance in me here, and there be made full. Let the love of you increase, and there let it be full, that here my joy may be great in hope, and there full in truth. Lord, through your Son you do command, nay, you do counsel us to ask; and you do promise that we shall receive, that our joy may be full. I ask, O Lord, as you do counsel through our wonderful Counsellor. I will receive what you do promise by virtue of your truth, that my joy may be full. Faithful God, I ask. I will receive, that my joy may be full. Meanwhile, let my mind meditate upon it; let my tongue speak of it. Let my heart love it; let my mouth talk of it. Let my soul hunger for it; let my flesh thirst for it; let my whole being desire it, until I enter into your joy, O Lord, who are the Three and the One God, blessed for ever and ever. Amen.”

Prologium, CHAPTER XXVI. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/anselm-proslogium.asp

In these prayers both Augustine and Anselm assume not only a relationship between theology and holiness, meaning that what they believe ought to have some effect on how they live, but also the relationship between love and knowledge, that what they know of God moves them to deeper love of God, and deeper love moves them to deeper knowledge. The divorce between love and knowledge is the deeper issue faced by theologians today, and in my mind it is only in restoring that relationship that we can then heal the divide between theology and holiness. This is why Sertillanges and Griffiths are both such important voices in their respective descriptions of the intellectual life. They both understand the vocation in terms of love and desire. I pray that the same would be true for me and for a whole generation of theologians who hope to serve the church with theology.

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A Saint: Both an Answer and a Contradiction

“The Spirit meets the burning questions of the age with an utterance that is the key-word, the answer to the riddle.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History

If there is such a thing as revelation, if God has made himself known in various times and ways and has made himself supremely known in his Son, then at some point every person who takes these things seriously has to attempt to answer some version of the following questions. How does the life of Christ come into the world now? What does Christ’s life have to do with our lives in the present? What does his work have to do with our work? How does his mission become our mission? We might simply call these questions of application or livability. I believe the gospel. I believe the creed. I believe in the risen and ascended Lord, but how do I live like it’s true? Or to put the question in Han Urs von Balthasar’s terms from his book A Theology of History, how does the norm of Christ come to norm our own lives?

In a chapter called, “Christ the Norm of History”, Balthasar proposes three ways the norm of Christ becomes our norm: Ascension, sacrament, and mission. Ascension, sacrament, and mission are all Spirit permeated, Spirit mediated realties that bring Christ’s time into our time and can make his norm our norm. To briefly sum these up, first, Christ’s time does not simply wait for us in the future, but by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit permeates the now, and this is for Balthasar the ongoing meaning of the Ascension. Second, the sacraments are means of grace precisely because the Holy Spirit makes sacramental presence a reality. The sacramental life nourishes the life of the Church, making life under the norm of Christ both a possibility and a reality . Third, the Church as the Spirit-filled body is called to mission and empowered to do so by the Holy Spirit.

To push the third point a little further, through the Church the Spirit bring Christ’s time, Christ’s norm into the world. In this context Balthasar argues that the mission of the church finds its most concrete expression through the saints, holy ones made holy by the Holy Spirit. Here is a long and beautiful quote to that effect:

“Whenever the Spirit takes the Church by surprise with these gifts it is going to be, in the main, by the proclamation of some truth which has a far-reaching meaning for the particular age to which it is given, in both Church history and world history. The Spirit meets the burning questions of the age with an utterance that is the key-word, the answer to the riddle. Never in the form of an abstract statement (that being something that it is man’s business to draw up); almost always in the form of a new, concrete supernatural mission: the creation of a new saint whose life is a presentation to his own age of the message that heaven is sending to it, a man who is, here and now, the right and relevant interpretation of the Gospel, who is given to this particular age as its way of approach to the perennial truth of Christ. How else can life be expounded except by living? The saints are tradition at its most living, tradition as the word is meant whenever Scripture speaks of the unfolding of the riches of Christ, and the application to history of the norm which is Christ. Their missions are so exactly the answer from above to the questions from below that their immediate effect is often one of unintelligibility; they are signs to be contradicted in the name of every kind of right-thinking —until the proof of their power is brought forth. Saint Bernard and Saint Francis, Saint Ignatius and Saint Teresa were all of them proofs of that order: they were like volcanoes pouring forth molten fire from the inmost depths of Revelation; they were irrefutable proof, all horizontal tradition notwithstanding, of the vertical presence of the living Kyrios here, now and today.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History

Saints are those who are so formed by the norm of Christ that their lives are at one and the same time an answer to the deepest questions of an age and a living contradiction to that age. G.K. Chesterton makes a similar point in his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, but he emphasizes how saintly contradiction can expand beyond the age in which it emerged and begin to convert another age too. In speaking of the Victorian fascination with all things medieval and with St. Francis in particular, Chesterton points to the enduring power of contradiction:“Therefore it is a paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.” G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas

We need such saints, these living answers and contradictions. And we don’t just need those who have gone before, but more desperately, we need the Spirit to form and empower such people now. To take one of a thousand possible examples, as much as we can and should learn from St. Augustine, we should also pray for ones like St. Augustine to emerge. We don’t just need the St. Augustine, we need our own St. Augustine, one uniquely formed and trained to speak to the burning questions of our time. And my conviction is that we should pray like such things are possible. We should pray like such people can and should exist. We should pray like such people are not fixtures of the past but possibilities of the present. We should pray that in the power of the Spirit we might become such people ourselves. To put it in a pithy, and possibly snarky form, we don’t simply need a Benedict Option, we need a St. Benedict to enact a way of living that brings the life Christ, by the power of Spirit, into our time.

Here is my question, in all honesty, and I would love to invite conversation around it—who are the people who stand in contradiction to our age? Who says a simultaneous no to the world and a yes to Christ? Who stands in contradiction, not in simple and oppositional belligerence, but as a counter-witness, as a beckon of light amidst the darkness? Who are those that point in word and deed to higher and clearer and deeper things?

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Originality is Overrated

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

In this post I want to continue diving into Paul Griffiths’ book The Intellectual Appetite and say one more thing about his discussion of curiosity as a vice in the intellectual life. I’m specifically interested in his notion that curiosity is the desire to possess or own knowledge. This is in contrast to the virtue of studiousness, which is about receiving knowledge rather than taking knowledge.

In his discussion Griffiths links the desire for ownership with the obsession in academic theology for originality. Speaking of his own approach to the topic of originality, Griffiths does not think of his own intellectual contributions in terms of ownership. He thinks more in terms of stewardship. Even in using the curiosity/studiousness paradigm, he acknowledges that he is not saying anything new or original to him. Rather, he says, “The definitions that follow are concordant with those found in the Christian tradition, but are not identical with any of them. I give them not in an exegetical spirit, but rather as a contributor to a tradition of thought whose authority I accept, and that I consider it a privilege to speak out of and thereby to extend” (20).

Notice that the goal is to contribute by extension rather than by novelty. Notice also that there is a strong sense of continuity, but continuity is not the same thing as exact replication. It is a conversation that moves forward, not because every conversant says the same thing in the same way, but because every conversant is committed to having the same conversation.

Sertillanges made a similar point , saying that what we might call originality is the convergence of a unique someone speaking something true in a true way. What is unique is the individual rather than the idea or concept. Now this does not mean that there are not such things as breakthroughs or new ways of thinking about things or paradigm shifts, but first, by and large all such shifts come from speaking within an existing paradigm or tradition.

In a recent email exchange, with a friend of mine, Christopher Benson, I tackled the same topic in a similar way. In that context I said:

Novelty has its place in theology, but it can’t be the driving force. In my mind the theologian is primarily a steward, first of divine revelation, and second of the tradition of the church. Jesus says something similar to the scribes: “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt. 13:52). Notice that there are new things to bring out, yes, but novelty isn’t the goal. The goal is properly stewarding the house.

The theologian usually doesn’t say new things. The theologian is more a steward of memory and reminds the church what she has forgotten.”

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On Receiving vs. Taking – Eucharistic Knowing

I want to continue exploring ideas around the intellectual life and specifically the vocation of Christian theology by looking at The Intellectual Appetite by Paul J. Griffiths. (See my posts on Sertillanges and The Intellectual Life here.)

Whereas The Intellectual Life used the metaphor of questing for Truth to describe the intellectual vocation, Griffiths uses the metaphor of appetite. In the chapter I want to look at, he distinguishes between curiositas as a vice and studiousness as a virtue on the basis of appetite. Curiositas is an appetite “to extinguish all unknowns”, and studiousness is an appetite “to come to love” is known. With studiousness the desire is “to share in” and “to show” what is learned and known. For the studious knowledge is something to be “loved and contemplated”, but for the curious knowledge is something to be attained and to be owned.

The primary motivator for the studious is love. The primary motivator for the curious is hate, specifically hatred for the unknown. Another motivator for the curious is the desire “to control, dominate, or make a private possession of” knowledge (20). But the studious seek to receive rather than take. Receiving vs. taking points to the deepest difference between the two: “But the deepest contrast between curiosity and studiousness has to do with the kind of world the seeker for and professor of each inhabits. The curious inhabit a world of objects, which can be sequestered and possessed; the studious inhabit a world of gifts, given things, which can be known by participation, but which, because of their very natures can never be possessed” (22).

The studious, in other words, treat the world and what can be known like a communicant at the altar. The studious kneel and cup empty hands in order to receive a gift. Such postures train the studious to live in a gifted world and to receive all the world has to offer as such, to treat the world as daily bread. Esther Meek, in her wonderful book Loving to Know, says of the Eucharist that “it is the most effective epistemological therapy and strategy”. Why? Because in offering himself to us in bread and wine, Christ teaches us what all of creation is and how to receive it as well. The Eucharist is “a gracious invasion of the real.” The Eucharist is therefore a school for our appetites that can move us from being the curious to being the studious, from being those that take to those that receive.

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Style and Truth – What Self-Expression Really Means

Some of my doctoral research concerns the question of style, specifically what Hans Urs von Balthasar means by the idea of theological style. So I was stuck by Sertillanges’s thoughts on the subject of style as it relates to the intellectual life and to the quest for truth. (See previous posts on The Intellectual Life here)

As always Sertillanges relates the question of style to the broader themes of the book, namely that style must serve truth and express truth truly. But style also must express the self: “My style, my pen, is the intellectual instrument which I use to express myself and to tell others what I understand of eternal truth. This instrument is a quality of my being, an interior bent, a disposition of the living brain, that is, it is a particular evolution of my style” (201). I find this fascinating because clearly style is more than self expression, but it is for Sertillanges nothing less than self expression either. Style at its best expresses both truth and the self, because within the vocation of the intellectual life the ultimate desire is that the self would conform to truth. So his version of “express yourself” is not the trope that launched a thousand self-help books because he is not saying that if I have expressed myself then I have expressed truth. Self-expression as an end in itself is at best a minimal standard for truth, namely the ideal of “my truth”, and at worst it is an imposter for the kind of truth Sertillanges commends. Rather he is saying that there is a possible harmony and correspondence between self and truth, and style is meant to express this correspondence.

One interesting implication: as long as there are selves seeking to express truth, there will always be interesting, creative, and original things to read and to wrestle with because, one, no self is the same, and, two, no one, not even Thomas Aquinas himself, can comprehensively express truth. In this regard, he says something about originality akin to C.S. Lewis, namely that aiming at originality is a fool’s errand and that originality emerges in the midst of seeking to represent truth truly.

Honestly, the best way to get a sense of what he means by style is to read the book. It is truly a pleasure to read and exemplifies many of the things he commends. For example, reading this description of style made me think of his own book: “Style excludes everything useless; it is strict economy in the midst of riches; it spends whatever is necessary, saves in one place by skillful arrangement, and lavishes its resources elsewhere for the glory of truth. Its role is not to shine, but to set off the matter; it must efface itself, and it is then that its own glory appears.” Style is about what to say and what not say, what to leave in and what to take out. It is about patience. Like music, it is about dynamics, and requires listening. Listening first to the material, listening to that which we desire to express, and listening too at the level of language, to the ways words sound against each other and how they sound in the whole sequence of words.

A couple of other things to note. First, he commends taking up the pen earlier rather than later because it is through writing itself that thoughts are expressed and are sharpened. It is through the practice of writing that one develops certain habits of thinking, and it is in thinking that one pursues truth. There is an iterative circle, thinking produces writing, which in turn produces thinking, which in turn, one hopes, moves one closer and closer to truth. Second, I don’t take this as a prescription for all kinds of writing. Remember he is considering everything under the heading of the intellectual life, which he sees as a particular vocation, so he is discussing writing in these vocational terms. On the other hand though, it is not bad advice for poets, novelists, or even, dare I say, bloggers.

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Learning the Wrong Lesson from the Amish – Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism

Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World offers a digital detoxification program for the harried and distracted. In addition to providing a step-by-step guide for fasting from technology, he also offers ways for thinking through what technologies and platforms we use and why. I’m drawn to the way he thinks about technology, especially the downsides of social media, and I’ve learned a lot form his blog and especially from his book Deep Work. It was in Deep Work where I first encountered The Intellectual Life by Sertillanges, and that book has been the subject of my last few blog posts. There are many helpful things in Digital Minimalism, many practical things to think about, and as always with Newport, nice summative aphorisms, like “clutter is costly”, that help drive the message home.

However, reading Newport’s assessment of the Amish community and their approach to technology struck me as symptomatic of some of the problems with books like this. To put a name to it, most books like this speak in terms both grand and vague about personal values and how discerning and living by these values is the golden key that unlocks every door. It is through the lens of values that Newport reads the Amish community’s approach to technology, saying, “The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.”

What I find interesting in his analysis is that he places the emphasis on the values, rather on the community itself because for him the community is mostly problematic. While he discerns that there is something to learn from the Amish about approaching technology, he ends by hedging his bets. At the end of the discussion, Newport wonders “whether this value persists even when we eliminate the more authoritarian impulses of these communities”. And this is exactly where I would have liked him to push further. The threat of the authoritarian clouds his vision, I think, from what is really interesting in the example, which is not values themselves, but the thickness of community itself. Newport hopes to extract all the possible benefits of communal discernment, and to eliminate all possible, and probably very real down sides. Speaking like a true individualist, he looks past the meaning of community itself and the possibility of discerning together, and concludes instead “the sense of meaning…comes from acting with intention” (56). But in the Amish community, the willingness to surrender certain technologies is not intended to pursue a sense of meaning or to live by values in the abstract, but to enact an already present sense of belonging.

His approach assumes that values are free floating, that they are not embedded in communities themselves, and as free floating they can theoretically be extricated from one context and simply applied in another. But the reality of community is that values are not abstractions, and they are not self-determined. Rather they are woven into the community itself. And, yes, this can have a dark side, and yes there is the possibility of authoritarianism, but such is the risk of community itself. For good or for ill, depending on your perspective, the community itself speaks into the life of the individual. These things are not determined in isolation, and this can of course bring comfort and clarity, but it also means that the community may very well, and most certainly does, say no to things that you as an individual might say yes to.

It is not just a they who discern, but a we who not only discern, but more simply live the values. It is a communal act, and moreover, the values are not piecemeal, the values themselves are communal, they are a shared horizon to navigate by. But here is the rub, in the Newport model, I determine my own horizon, and I’m supposed to say no to myself simply on the basis of my own values, which are self-determined. But I know for myself, and assume for most others, such values are often not really enough of a reason to say no to myself. How thin is a self-determined value?

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Virtues and Vices of the Intellectual Life: Or Why Curiosity Might Kill the Intellectual

Sertillanges begins his refections on virtue and vice by observing, “The intellect is only a tool; the handling of it determines the nature of its effects” (17). And how should one handle the intellect? With virtue, of course. And while all the classic virtues apply to the intellectual life, there is also “the virtue proper to the intellectual” and that is studiousness (25). Sertillanges says studiousness is related to temperance, which has to do with focusing on the right things in the right way for the right amount of time. It’s what he calls “the wise application of energy.” (See this post for more on energy.)

Studiousness also has to do with humility. Humility in the intellectual life means, among other things, honest self-understanding and a clear-eyed assessment of the limits of ones own gifts. As he puts it, “What wisdom and what virtue there is in judging oneself truly and in remaining oneself! You have a part that only you can play; and your business is to play it to perfection, instead of trying to force fortune. Our lives are not interchangeable. Equally by aiming too high and by falling too low, one misses the path to the goal. Go straight ahead, in your own way, with God for guide” (28). Sertillanges says in effect, I’m not St. Thomas and neither are you, but that doesn’t mean that we all shouldn’t use our gifts to the fullest that we can. To use the fullness of our gifts without resentment for who we are not is an act of gratitude. And as Hans Urs von Balthasar puts the same point, “the only gratitude for a gift is to be fruitful with the gift” (from The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 5).

If there are intellectual virtues, what then are the intellectual vices? “To the virtue of studiousness, two vices are opposed: negligence on the one hand, vain curiosity on the other” (25). Here Sertillanges speaks from the depths of the Christian tradition, particularly from the Augustinian tradition, when we speaks of curiosity as a vice. Curiosity is untempered, unfettered knowing, it is knowing for the sake of knowing, not for the sake of truth. Paul Griffiths discusses curiosity as vice in depth in the book The Intellectual Appetite, a book I plan to write some things about in the future. One of the things that defines curiosity for Griffiths is that it is often motivated by the hatred of not knowing. Nothing could be further from the love of truth than the hatred of not knowing. To hate the unknown is to be motivated by fear, fear of what one does not know and fear of being found out as ignorant or incompetent. These are selfish motivations, whereas the love of truth is selfless.

One other thing to note from this section, is that for all the talk of virtue and vice within the classical Christian tradition, it is amazing how contemporary and practical some of his advice seems. He says certain things that you might read on a productivity blog, things like eat well, sleep enough, exercise, spend time outdoors. The continuity of his advice with both our time and with Thomas’s speaks on one level to the perennial relevance of real wisdom and to paying attention to every aspect of the human person. Thomas is no kind of dualist, and neither is Sertillanges, so he does no separate the mind from the body. To cultivate the life of the mind, one must take care of the body. But I know that I’m continually looking for a different answer, as if sleep, exercise, food, proper rest and leisure, being outside, etc. weren’t really the majority of what I or anybody else needed.