America: What Would Aristotle Do?
When it comes to describing the American founding, lots of people love to play a “gotcha” game of intellectual history. For instance, many people talk about Locke, the English thinker, a lot more than the founders did while they ignore all the other thinkers the founders mention. There are an infinite number of ways to judge and characterize the American regime that are similarly misleading. These people ignore what ought to be the most significant way to understand the American regime—to consider its founding and/or form in the context of political philosophy.
Of course, in order to do this one must understand the founding, and this is where everyone gets lost in the “who influenced who” problems that immediately arise if we take up this task. Aristotle famously put together a collection of constitutions for a reason. Given what Aristotle wrote about politics, I think that if Aristotle wanted to judge the American regime the first thing he would do is read the Declaration and the Constitution and inquire about the historical facts that relate to them. Regardless of culture, the plain words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution remain, and if we take their author’s words and the plain history of their creation seriously we should regard these documents as expressing what America is regardless of all the thoughts and schools of thought that may or may not have gone into their making.
St. Thomas Aquinas Reconsidered, Part I
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.
(Before?) The Flood
This is fascinating:
Though the dinosaurs might find it crass to say so, the late Cretaceous cataclysm that did them in was a planetary bad hair day compared to the mass extinction that occurred some 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period. The Permian event is probably the closest that life on Earth ever came to being completely extinguished. Around 95 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrates were wiped out — a greater percentage of the Earth’s species than the next two largest mass extinctions combined. The break in the fossil record at the Permian boundary is so severe that 19th-century geologists saw it as evidence of two completely separate creations of life.
Men in Graduate School
No morning news today, because I don’t feel like it and I don’t see anything interesting.
However, I did hear an interesting thought this weekend. A woman told my wife and I that too much time in graduate school takes a toll on men. The longer guys are in school, she said, the more they become inable to make decisions, obsessive-compulsive, perfectionist, insecure, overly-sensitive, and generally unhappy. Why? The reasons she gave included: graduate students are low on the totem pole and no one cares what they think; of the writing of papers and dissertations there is no end (or clear deadlines); and perhaps most significant, men in graduate school are completely beholden to others for everything. They are not providing for themselves or their families and are wholly dependent on the recognition and sustenance of others.
Heh. There is a lot more that could be said along these lines, but I think there is a lot of truth to this.
The Academy
Trust me, I know how painful it is to read this stuff: but I like to remind readers that our worst societal problems are coming from the academy as often as I can. The academy, along with the Church, is supposed to provide Americans with so much that is essential for civilization, nevermind the promulgation of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Instead, right under our noses, billions of dollars are wasted and millions of souls rubbed in ugliness, error, and evil.
For instance, I got an invitation from the “Institute for Signifying Scriptures” to a “Brown Bag Lunch Discussion” recently. I’m not exactly sure what the talk was about, as the email only gave the title, which deserves to win some kind of award:
Queering the Beast: The Antichrists’ Gay Wedding
The lecture is being given by an Assistant Profesor of Religious Studies at the 6th highest ranked liberal arts college in the nation.
Cookie Monster Death Metal
I found this article to be fascinating on many levels. I’ll just let it speak for itself:
It’s not easy to determine where and how Cookie Monster singing actually began. Early death-metal bands such as Death and Morbid Angel that emerged from Florida in the mid-’80s helped create the musical template that characterized the blasting sound as well as that of its Satan- and occult-obsessed sibling, black metal: fast, relentless drumming often featuring two bass drums; grinding, rapid-fire chording on guitars; squealing guitar solos; muted electric bass; unexpected sudden tempo changes; and a sense of theatricality that’s inevitably threatening–”a horror film put to music” is how Monte Conner, a vice president at Roadrunner Records, sees it.
But while the vocals in early death metal are low, raspy and aggressive, not unlike the vocals by, say, Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, that extreme degree of Cookieness is missing.
To be a true Cookie Monster vocal, said Mr. Conner, who signed some of the subgenre’s biggest bands, including Sepultura and Fear Factory, “it’s got to be really, really guttural. It should sound like they’re gargling glass.”
UPDATE I
Speaking of satanic music, my old post on Depeche Mode and John the Revelator has some comments worth reading.
UPDATE II
I wanted to quote the “gargling glass” bit above because it is very similar to a point the shulamite made in an old post quoting Dante on “the song of the sullen” in hell:
“This canticle they gargle in their throats,
as if they sang, unable to speak whole words”
What it is ain’t exactly clear…
Are there always new schools springing up like these, or is something happening here?
Southern Catholic College
John Paul the Great Catholic University
Transfiguration College and blog.
I’m know I’m missing a bunch of others (feel free to name them off in the comments), but these are the newest ones I know of.
More Christianity and Capitalism
More critiques of Stark’s book and the “Christianity and Capitalism” thesis over at the Acton Institute blog here.
