Redeem the Time

Recently left comments here and here. Both blogs are well worth checking out.

OK, actually I lied in the title but you all might still find this interesting. Shockingly, every once in a while the Washington Post actually publishes things worth reading, like this essay, which helps debunk the assinine idea that science is always at war with religion. The author is writing a book on some of the history of geology:

What about that most contentious of issues — Genesis? Biblical scholars such as the 17th-century Anglican archbishop James Ussher had deduced from Scripture that the world was about 6,000 years old. Some observers at the time were indeed nervous that the earth’s layers might reveal a much longer history. Young Earth creationists today refuse to countenance any deviation from Ussher’s figure. But for mainstream 17th-century Christians, it was a non-issue. Allegorical interpretations of Genesis had been relatively uncontroversial at least since the time of Saint Augustine.

What was controversial was not the numerical date of creation, but whether there had been creation at all — or if the earth and its inhabitants were eternal, as some radical philosophers asserted. For orthodox Christians, the eternalist heresy was scary indeed: No creation, no Creator; no Creator, no religion.

But geology, even if it stretched time, seemed to show a progression of fossils and rock types, not endless cycles of the same things. This meshed well enough with Christian doctrine to keep most believers from getting too upset as scientists rewrote the earth’s history. Even fundamentalists in the early 20th century were unperturbed about the demise of biblical chronology. William Bell Riley, one of the fundamentalist movement’s founders, declared that there was not “an intelligent fundamentalist who claims that the earth was made six thousand years ago, and the Bible never taught any such thing.”

Maybe this TAC-grad mineral guy will be the only other person interested, but Thomas Jefferson talks about minerals, geology, fossils and the flood in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Its all worth reading, if only in order to get a glimpse of a fascinating mind, but scroll down to page 154-156 where he says:
Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s hope the redneckgrammarcop keeps on posting.

Go help the Shulamite celebrate his 500th post. May they keep marching into battle well into the thousands. I don’t know anyone who posts anywhere near the quantity he does with anywhere near as much quality…keeping the eternal revolution of tradition against the world live nearly every day.

In celebration, I punched 500 into the old Google image searcher and soon beheld this manmade artifice of beauty, the 67 Ford Mustang Shelby GT-500:

Read through this work, and ponder—our nation was created by many such men. Our Founders were liberally educated gentleman of practical experience. I mean, just read this wisdom:

Let us proceed then to make a few observations upon the Discourses of Plato and Polybius, and shew how forcibly they prove the necessity of permanent laws, to restrain the passions and vices of men, and to secure to the citizens the blessings of society, in the peaceable enjoyment of their lives, liberties, and properties; and the necessity of different orders of men, with various and opposite powers, prerogatives, and privileges, to watch over one another, to balance each other, and to compel each other at all times to be real guardians of the laws.

Every citizen must look up to the laws, as his master, his guardian, and his friend; and whenever any of his fellow citizens, whether magistrates or subjects, attempt to deprive him of his right, he must appeal to the laws; if the aristocracy encroach, he must appeal to the democracy; if they are divided, he must appeal to the monarchical power to decide between them, by joining with that which adheres to the laws; if the democracy is on the scramble for power, he must appeal to the aristocracy, and the monarchy, which by uniting may restrain it. If the regal authority presumes too far, he must appeal to the other two. Without three divisions of power, stationed to watch each other, and compare each other’s conduct with the laws, it will be impossible that the laws should at all times preserve their authority, and govern all men.

Plato has sufficiently asserted the honour of the laws, and the necessity of proper guardians of them; but has no where delineated the various orders of guardians, and the necessity of a balance between them: he has, nevertheless, given us premises from whence the absolute necessity of such orders and equipoises may be inferred; he has shewn how naturally every simple species of government degenerates. The aristocracy, or ambitious republic, becomes immediately an oligarchy — What shall be done to prevent it? Place two guardians of the laws to watch the aristocracy: one, in the shape of a king, on one side of it; another, in the shape of a democratical assembly, on the other side. The aristocracy, become an oligarchy, changes into a democracy — How shall it be prevented? By giving the natural aristocracy in society its rational and just weight, and by giving it a regal power to appeal to, against the madness of the people. Democracy becomes a tyranny — How shall this be prevented? By giving it an able independent ally in an aristocratical assembly, with whom it may unite against the unjust and illegal designs of any one man.

More of interest here—caution, this website is full of the best commentary on the Constitution ever written—enter at your own risk.

The Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture has a cool page full of examples of “the good guys” of this last century. I particularly like Ralph McInerny’s short profiles of Thomists who lived up to the name. No one of them was without flaws, but all of them shared a passion for the sort of truth which perfects us.

Josef Pieper should be on anyone’s top 5 list for the last century. The fact that few know Pieper’s name, while almost everyone recognizes his older, fellow German contemporary, Martin Heidegger, is a sad reflection of the strained relation between Wisdom and the human race. Judging in accordance with the “by their fruits ye shall know them” principle: Pieper was persecuted by the Nazis for his writings; Heidegger was a Nazi. I don’t say this in order to denigrate Heidegger so much as to elevate Pieper. Why isn’t Pieper as well known?

A big part of the answer is that he spoke so clearly—he wasn’t a petty scholar or a charismatic egoist, and petty scholars and charismatic egoists have a poor historical track record when it comes to embracing their unobscure opposite. God himself did not just speak in parables—and it was the theologians and the “wise” of his time that hated him the most—and for whom He had the harshest words. Socrates was about as clear as a human being can be, used no technical jargon, and, like Christ, didn’t write anything—yet the people who got paid to teach weren’t very fond of him, nor, in the end, were many of his fellow citizens.

The dirty truth is that people like obscurity mixed in with their philosophy and theology like they enjoy sugar and cream with their coffee. It helps disguise the sometimes bitter taste of truth and it gives both the buyer and seller a lot more leeway to sell and buy almost anything—or nothing. In other words, obscurity lets those professing-to-know sound smart without being wise, and it lets everyone else be as lazy as they want: whether they join in the word games or they give up and say “I’m not smart enough” or “I’m not interested.” This last effect is what I hate the most—instead of pointing others towards the eternal truth, philosophers and theologians often prevent anyone else from getting close to that ocean of Beauty* while they themselves wallow in their own jealously guarded, self-made, shallow pools of mud.

Philosophers—the ones still read after hundreds and thousands of years, at any rate—speak to every human being who knows that by their very nature they are ordered to the truth—and they try to get everyone else to see and acknowledge that they are so ordered. Again, by their fruits you shall know them—the Good is diffusive of itself, and if you truly possess a good you will seek to share it. Philosophers begin from the common experience, common knowledge, and common sense we all share and argue to what isn’t as apparent but is nonetheless true, explaining reality to anyone with the same passion and dedication they have to know what is. They may not be popular writers but they sure as hell are never merely technical scholars nor arrogant creators of their own philosophic universes.

As McInerny says:

There have been many who have sought to develop the relevance of Thomas for issues of our time and there have been some who addressed the general reading public. But no on has done either as effectively and habitually as Josef Pieper…

The professional scholar, the accomplished Thomist, reads Pieper with amazement. It is not simply that Pieper can popularize the technical and difficult; one finds in his little books fundamental contributions to ongoing learned disputes. No one has written more wisely on the relation between thinking and doing than Pieper, yet there are no obstacles of erudition between the reader and the presentation.

How does he do it? All philosophers long to be intelligible, yet become accustomed to the glazed eyes of listeners when they try to convey what it is they are working on. Suddenly it seems so remote and irrelevant to ordinary life. Yet here is Pieper, making those difficult things intelligible without in any way trivializing them.

C.S. Lewis had a similar knack but his works do not have the ranger Pieper’s do…

First Things ran a great obituary for him here.

Do a search for Josef Pieper over at Ignatius Press and buy anything he wrote. Or scroll down to the “P” section over at St. Augustine’s Press and check out their selection. Of course, Amazon.com has the master list of the translated works of this master of St. Thomas Aquinas. Buy anything and and read—it’s Wisdom, pure and simple—and thanks to the free market it only costs a couple bucks. Hopefully all his stuff will be translated in our lifetime.
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*JPII borrow’s Plato’s famous phrase in this letter.

God bless David Joyce for putting up the best online version of Euclid’s Elements. Poke around at both sites for all manner of interesting links.

This site combines Joyce’s online edition with the strange beauty of an old edition of the Elements that relies on colorful drawings:

That site has a few more oddities here. More good Euclid linkage collected by one Donald Lancon, Jr. here. Of course there is always the Wikipedia for a short list of links—try this entry.

By “Euclid,” I do not mean: the EUropean Cooperation for LIghtning Detection whose mission is “to benefit the members by interconnecting national lightning detection networks existing in various countries in Europe,” the IT Management company, the town in Ohio, or the street in your town.

[This post brought to you by a few free moments on a Saturday afternoon, complements of G-OCD (Google Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). I know I'm not the only one with G-OCD. Please feel free share any and all links you think my many, many readers and I would enjoy by sending an email to redeemthetime -at- gmail -dot- com.]

Now it’s for reals. As I mentioned below, Achilles is back at it—his anger is aroused by a snide piece attacking conservative intellectuals Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield on sex and women in the online Slate magazine. The article, titled “Theories of the Erotic: Male traditionalists wring their hands at the ‘grim’ lives of young women,” was written by Slate’s female culture editor, Meghan O’Rourke.

Achilles hurls his ashen bronze thusly:

O’Rourke demonstrates that she has fallen victim to one of Freud’s great lies: that sexual desire is mollified by sexual activity. A brief rebuttal to this great deception goes something like this:

Human action is charactized by habit. The desires of men and women inform the repetition of certain types of activities, which in turn informs the establishment of habit. Sex is no exception to this rule – in fact, perhaps more than any other human activity, sex exemplifies this rule. Sexual desires increase and develop when sexual behavior is entertained both in imagination and in act. Sexual acts, committed frequently and under the same psychological conditions, lead to sexual habits. Consequently, it is the height of absurdity to maintain that engaging in sexual activities short of intercourse relieve the desires to engage in full intercourse. I cannot imagine a single individual of either gender who would characterize habitual oral sex as an effective method of ridding oneself of the desire to engage in full intercourse. Perhaps at the time of oral gratification the desire for intercourse diminishes, just as at the time of shooting heroin the desire to shoot again diminishes; but it does not establish habits of purity and chastity. The suggestion is prima facie laughable.

This is your weekend homework.

Its a grandslam of an essay.

OK, so I don’t have much material to give these days.

But I always liked this post—it really had some promise to it.