Redeem the Time

If we take “learning” in a general sense, it is true to say that we learn more from other people than we do from books.

Yet it is easy to forget this fact, most likely because it is so much a part of our daily lives. We cannot forget this, lest we fall into needless despair and hatred of our own kind.

Books are essential to the intellectual life because they allow for people to transmit their thoughts to others over great periods of time. Great books are like noble statutes, forever pointing to what truly is, forever spurring us onward and upward. They are written, explained, and pondered by people.

The rational, political animal, possessed of an eternal soul, is alive. Books are his lifeless product. Most of what one needs to know to understand books comes from what we learned from others.

Wisdom means loving people more than books, because truth is actually and properly in people—and only potentially and accidentally in books.

Consider that in the sense that the Son of God is a person, and the truth itself, this not only pertains to the second great commandment, but the first.

See also here, here, and here.

Read Xenophon’s description of Socrates and Euthydemus—a youth who “had formed a large collection of the works of celebrated poets and professors, and therefore supposed himself to be a prodigy of wisdom for his age, and was confident of surpassing all competitors in power of speech and action.”

Read also the second half of the Phaedrus:

…you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

***

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

***

Soc. Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power-a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?

Phaedr. Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?

Soc. I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.

Phaedr. You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which written word is properly no more than an image?

***

…even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness, and that such principles are a man’s own and his legitimate offspring;-being, in the first place, the word which he finds in his own bosom; secondly, the brethren and descendants and relations of his others;-and who cares for them and no others-this is the right sort of man; and you and I, Phaedrus, would pray that we may become like him.

There is a notion of the contemplative life that one could draw from modern undergraduate and graduate schools that is cartoonish and false. The implication is that contemplation looks down upon the active life and consists in scholarship that draws solely from a lifetime of quiet reception to wisdom. To be contemplative is defined in an extreme and negative way: it is seen as a life that is not active, whereas the so-called active life is seen to consist in politics, business, or the usual life of human beings in which they have to do lots of things other than study or navel gaze.

Part of the reason for this is that young people go to college and graduate school—young people who haven’t yet figured out exactly what they want to do with their lives—and thus they read what they perceive to be the various distinctions and differences of vocations and careers (that they are also ignorant of) into what the words “active” and “contemplative” mean. This is similar to the opinion of some of those who were against the early Dominican order.

According to Russell Hittinger, on page 270 of The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in the Post-Christian World (read a review here):

William of Saint-Amour, a doctor of the Sorbonne, charged that the “double spirit” of action and contemplation embodied by the mendicants was a novel way of life that perverted the principles of both civil and ecclesiastical society. The mendicants, he asserted: violate the principle of a society of contemplatives by seeking to act on others rather than being purely receptive of divine grace . . .

It is hardly ever appreciated that St. Thomas Aquinas lived and breathed in an order unlike most others. The more “contemplative orders” would not have allowed him to travel, teach, preach and write as he did. Hittinger continues on page 271 with a paragraph I wish every student of St. Thomas was required to understand:

Thomas contends that the “active life” consists of more than political rule and mercantile pursuits. Granted that religious are neither magistrates or businessmen, they are “active” in other ways, including the communication of knowledge and wisdom by teaching and preaching. The active life, generically understood, is the communication of gifts. In this, all agents imitate God. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a society that is in every aspect receptive. Although societas is an analogous term, every society, he argues, is constituted by “communications” whereby goods are given and received. In Thomas’s works, every analogous use of the word societas is mirrored by uses of the word communicatio: communicatio oeconomica, communicatio spiritualis, communicatio civilis, and so forth. The word communicatio simply means making something common, one rational agent participating in the life of another. Society, for Aquinas, is not a thing, but an activity.

Think about what St. Thomas actually did: he defended his order from those inside and outside the Church who hated it, wrote advice to political leaders, wrote a lengthy work of apologetics to convert Muslims, wrote commentaries about a philosopher almost completely new to the western world, wrote a “textbook” for beginning theology students, and generally sought and fought to answer the most pressing, cutting-edge theological and philosophical issues of his time. He did all this mostly by drawing on his vast knowledge of the Church Fathers and Sacred Scripture and employing the power of prayerful reasoning.

Again, when he wrote about Aristotle, and incorporated Aristotle’s thought into his own thinking, he was writing about something that was largely new to the western world. He made Aristotle part of the tradition again, because he dove headlong into the rancorous issues of his time and argued that Aristotle was largely right. To think we should imitate him in all ways is presumptous of both our abilities and our knowlege of our own time, but as he is one of the Saints and the Doctor of the Church his life and works ought to be taken as a sort of exemplar—particularly for those of us who wish to focus our lives on studying and teaching truth.

Briefly flitting around investigating issues brought up from the random cathartic regurgitated post below. This translation of Thomas Aquinas on 1st Corinthians is interesting for many reasons, including (way down the list) the manner in which he deals with rhetoric and related matters. Bedtime now, but the selection below is worth more than all the gold and precious stones that could be gathered:
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Step One
In regards to the discussion that began here, continued here and was last mentioned in the comments here . . . let this be the first step in clarifying things.

I think we all agree on this, right?

…there are certain more universal implications of the doctrines found in this, the first part of natural philosophy. If there is in fact no end or purpose in nature, then one natural being in whom we have particular interest, man, must arbitrarily choose an end to work toward, and there will be no reason to claim this or that end is to be preferred. For either the good is what really perfects the being for which it is a good, so that what is good for a thing is a consequence of the very nature of a thing, not of what the thing desires in abstraction from a consideration of its already determined nature, and so the thing is ordered to that good by nature, or else the good is not really perfective and so, though one may desire a thing, it is no more good really than its opposite, if one should happen to prefer that. All moral judgments would be perfectly subjective; the most heinous barbarities would be on the same moral level as the work of Mother Teresa. The doctrine of Aristotle, that there are objective goods in nature determined by the sorts of things in nature, is finally the only possible basis for ethics. Much of the debate over the real foundations of ethics is perhaps the result of a too simplistic acceptance of modern physics, with its abstraction from (not necessarily denial of) goods in nature. Where could one find a basis for ethics in a mathematical universe, when mathematics abstracts from the notion of the good? To maintain a sane view of the world, we must note that mathematical physics does not deny the existence of goods in the world, it simply does not depend on their existence for its arguments. This is no more a denial of the good than the plumber’s lack of interest in carpentry is a proof that wood does not exist.
—from page xix of R. Glen Coughlin’s introduction to his new translation of Aristotle’s Physics, or Natural Hearing

One of my all time favorite passages from one of the standard books that should be put on every student of truth’s bookshelf at a young age:

It will be understood that in these matters I speak as a fool; or, as our democratic cousins would say, a moron; anyhow as a man in the street; and the only object of this chapter is to show that the Thomist philosophy is nearer than most philosophies to the mind of the man in the street. I am not, like Father D’Arcy, whose admirable book on St. Thomas has illuminated many problems for me, a trained philosopher, acquainted with the technique of the trade. But I hope Father D’Arcy will forgive me if I take one example from his book, which exactly illustrates what I mean. He, being a trained philosopher, is naturally trained to put up with philosophers. Also, being a trained priest, he is naturally accustomed, not only to suffer fools gladly, but (what is sometimes even harder) to suffer clever people gladly. Above all, his wide reading in metaphysics has made him patient with clever people when they indulge in folly. The consequence is that he can write calmly and even blandly sentences like these. “A certain likeness can be detected between the aim and method of St. Thomas and those of Hegel. There are, however, also remarkable differences. For St. Thomas it is impossible that contradictories should exist together, and again reality and intelligibility correspond, but a thing must first be, to be intelligible.”

Let the man in the street be forgiven, if he adds that the “remarkable difference” seems to him to be that St. Thomas was sane and Hegel was mad. The moron refuses to admit that Hegel can both exist and not exist; or that it can be possible to understand Hegel, if there is no Hegel to understand. Yet Father D’Arcy mentions this Hegelian paradox as if it were all in the day’s work; and of course it is, if the work is reading all the modern philosophers as searchingly and sympathetically as he has done. And this is what I mean by saying that a modern philosophy starts with a stumbling-block. It is surely not too much to say that there seems to be a twist, in saying that contraries are not incompatible; or that a thing can “be” intelligible and not as yet “be” at all.

Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled egos by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.
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UPDATE

Accidental to the point of this post, but more on Hegel here (for one of the reasons he did and does catch on) and here (for one exact way in which Hegel still affects every single one of us today).

This should be everyone’s new favorite blog: The Scholasticum.

The character of Elderly Men-men who are past their prime-may be said to be formed for the most part of elements that are the contrary of all these. They have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business. The result is that they are sure about nothing and under-do everything. They ‘think’, but they never ‘know’; and because of their hesitation they always add a ‘possibly’or a ‘perhaps’, putting everything this way and nothing positively. They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worse construction on everything. Further, their experience makes them distrustful and therefore suspicious of evil. Consequently they neither love warmly nor hate bitterly, but following the hint of **** they love as though they will some day hate and hate as though they will some day love.
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Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of self-control. They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep-rooted, and are like sick people’s attacks of hunger and thirst. They are hot-tempered, and quick-tempered, and apt to give way to their anger; bad temper often gets the better of them, for owing to their love of honour they cannot bear being slighted, and are indignant if they imagine themselves unfairly treated. While they love honour, they love victory still more; for youth is eager for superiority over others, and victory is one form of this. They love both more than they love money, which indeed they love very little, not having yet learnt what it means to be without it-this is the point of ****’ remark about ****.
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