Let’s Talk About Spaceships…

…Or anything except the Rona, masks, the economy, the Constitution, police, governors, etc.

I don’t want to add my thoughts to the CO-risis because I don’t have much of substance to add and it would probably just devolve into an unpleasant libertarian-leaning Murica rant that comes of differently than I intend.

BUT for some reason I can’t think of anything else, so I’ll try to share some thoughts while steering clear of non-philosophical politics [sidenote: Politics are supposed to be informed by legit, thoughtful philosophical understanding; it’s supposed to be the ideal that guides the practical, but, alas.]

I think a big part of what’s going on here is 1) information overload and 2) no coherent, consistent understanding of life to even begin to process the meaning of the information. 

For months and months,  we’ve gotten all kinds of statistics and studies and reports from all sides. WEAR MASKS! DON’T WEAR MASKS! NEW YORK IS A WARZONE! NEW YORK IS NOT AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT! ASYMPTOMATICS SPREAD IT WAIT THEY DON’T WAIT MAYBE THEY DO BUT DEFINITELY SURFACES DO WAIT THEY DON’T

It’s overwhelming. And we’ve never been able to follow a virus as closely as we’ve been able to follow this one- we are constantly updated on cases in each state and country. Graphs galore. BUT we don’t know what to DO with all that shtuff.

People, in general, are chronically woefully incapable of interpreting stats and graphs; we can decipher what they’re stating but not what they really mean. We see that cases skyrocket in a place but forget to ask if they suddenly cranked up their testing, which would make that relatively meaningless.

Also, traditionally, for thousands of years, you just had to go on the common sense and the collective wisdom of your family/village to react more or less prudently in crises. Whatever pops up in your tiny corner of the world, you deal with. But this has been a slow motion crisis, we have all kinds of info before anything tangible even happens to us personally. We had to constantly guess at what might be going on, and I don’t think humans are built for that. They seem to be breaking under the weight of it in this situation anyway.

So you have the unprecedented information overload. (I won’t mention the colossal disaster that is the media on top of that)

At the same time, you also have, in this largely post-Christian secular western world, no coherent philosophy of life to contextualize all that data that you also don’t really know how to interpret.

In the Christian understanding, death is not the worst thing. It’s power has been stamped out by Christ’s victory over the grave. So, sure, it’s still scary and still inevitable and still generally to be avoided, but you prepare yourself for it hopefully it turns out not all that bad. Even if it’s a terrible death, you get through it and hopefully you are ready for judgment. That’s the Christian story that guided Western civilization for centuries, and resulted in all the greatness of that greatest civilization.

As a whole, society doesn’t buy into that so much anymore. We prefer to pretend that we’re somehow going to progress our way past death, and when we can’t keep up that farce anymore, we either say “Whatever, it’s all meaningless, we just go out of existence when we die” or confidently predict some vaguely Christian-flavored fairytale of peace and clouds (based on very little actual Christian Tradition). BUT since we know we, as a society, have mostly rejected the Christian explanation of things, part of us that remains sane and intellectually honest, tiny as it may be, knows the Cloud Hammock of Eternal Peace is not a thing. So we panic in the face of death. [Tell me again why this is called “progress”?]

We panic because death has seemed to regain its power over us.

On the other hand, the oh-so-enlightened Nihilist side of things, which holds that when you die you just disappear from existence, doesn’t panic, exactly. It gets rather wigged out, but they respond by doing something. Stay Safe Stay Home. Call 911. Post a video of a heartwarming neighborhood singalong from a safe distance. It makes me think of the saying about arranging deck chairs on the Titanic– usually that image is used to illustrate utter futility, but in this circumstance I think of it as an exercise of nihilistic boredom. Ah this ship will probably sink anyway, in the meantime why not arrange the deck chairs into a cute and clever meme-able?

So… yeah. I mean, most things in life these days comes down to the sad emptiness and confusion of the horrific and devastating failure of an experiment that is the post-Christian, progressive, Sexually Revolutionized modern dying West. The COVID hysteria, as bad as the virus actually is, is just the latest and greatest glaring example of how messed up we’ve let ourselves become.

I will write one more thing related to the Rona, only because it explicates a Flannery quote that I felt was on to something but didn’t quite understand til now. That quote:

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from teh source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

More on that in a later post…

Art and Scholasticism #3

Check out parts 1 and 2

Oooh!

First of all, before I forget, I bought Art & Scholasticism from Cluny Media— definitely support those guys if you get a chance. I think they’re relatively new, family-owned nerdy lil operation. Beautiful, good Catholic books. With a ton of Sigrid Undset titles I had never heard of.

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, so, we’re on Chapter III. I wasn’t actually planning on going through every chapter, I really just want to talk about Chapter IV, BUT when I try to jump ahead, something from the chapter I’m trying to skip distracts me.

SO, CHAPTER III Making and Action

Okay, see? Already the first line is something I want to note.

“The Mind as a faculty is a complete self-subsisting whole, but it goes to work very differently according as it has knowledge for the sake of knowing or for the sake of doing.”

Basically, the mind is it’s own thing, but it works differently depending on if it’s trying to know something or do something.

The Mind-as-Knowing is fulfilled ultimately in the Beatific Vision- the knowing and loving of God face-to-face. It’s tied over for now by things like philosophy and theology and knowing stuff just because it is good to know stuff.

USUALLY, though, the mind is in Mind-as-Doing mode- it works to reason practically, figure out how to get from A to B, how to most rationally use the means I have to get to the end I want.

So we have Mind-Knowing and Mind-Doing – same thing, in different modes or orientations. [I use the word “mode” in my 90s kid context of video games… turbo mode, DK mode, etc. Haven’t thought much how that relates to the traditional academic philosophical use of the word…]

Mind-Doing is then further divided into Action Mode and Making Mode.

The Mind in Action Mode is focused on how to use Free Will to get to the good it desires. My Will is naturally oriented to some thing that is good-for-me, that fulfills some appetite or desire or love. Ideally, it’s all ultimately ordered to The Good (God). As Maritain explains, a freely willed action “is good if it conforms to the law governing all human acts and the true end of human life.” And if a man freely acts in conformity with the law, he is “himself good, purely and simply.” [‘the law’ is, of course, God’s law, revealed in Christ, Who emphasized the necessity of the interior actions of the heart to be in conformity with the law. Just to clarify that obviously a guy who does good stuff on the surface isn’t necessarily “good, purely and simply”].

SO, the Will is oriented to man’s good, and the mind turns that Will to actions that fulfill some desire/love for the good of man. THUS my favorite Augustine quote of all time:

Love God and do what you will.

We have a weird, mechanical kind of view of the will as some kind of tool we pick up and point at something, but really, according to Augustine anyway, it’s more of a disposition, determined by the sorts of things that you love. So when you will something, it’s an overflow or consequence of your love. That’s vaguely what I remember from my Auggie class at CUA anyway, based on a book by one of my early Ave days professor, Sarah Byers. If you have an extra $80 lying around, Byers is brilliant and it’s a very good book.

Anyway. The Mind in Action Mode is going to be operating in the world of Morality– the right and wrong use of the will. This is where everyone’s favorite virtue, Prudence, comes in. Maritain calls it “a virtue of practical intellect which keeps Action straight.”

Prudence keeps Action straight. I love that definition. Simple and handy.

Okay, so NOW we can get to Mind in Making Mode, which, you might guess, has more to do with Art, the supposed subject of these posts and this book.

While Action deals with what we do with our freedom, Making is judged by the thing or work itself. 

Action was good or bad based on if it conformed to the rules of human conduct, whether it led to or away from the Good. Making, on the other hand, is good or bad based on the good or perfection of the thing made.

Art, therefore, keeping Making straight and not Action, remains outside the line of human conduct, with an end, rules, values, which are not those of man, but of the work to be produced. That work is everything for art– one law only governs it– the exigencies and the good of the work.

Does this mean a 3D printer is as good an artist as Michelangelo? Ew, gross, no. Don’t even say that. Maritain also says

“if art is not human in the end which it pursues, it is human, essentially human, in its method of working. It involves the making of a man’s work, stamped with the character of man: animal rationale.

The work of art has been pondered before being made, has been kneaded and prepared, formed, brooded over, and matured in mind before emerging into matter. And there it will always retain the colour and the savour of the spirit.

Think about that in relation to God as Creator Artist…

Final note, which is the whole point of the chapter and one of his main things of the book, Maritain goes on to say that the work to be done is the matter, and undeviating reason is the form of art. If reason is off, the art will be off. The whole thing, while outside of human action and morality, is still directed by the mind, (which, of course, has to be in conformity with Truth to be worth anything).

So the modern BS of random self-expression on one hand, and gross political statement on the other, is stupid and dumb. Art is practical but outside the action/political realm, and is oriented to the objective thing made, not the maker, while still guided by that maker’s rational mind.

This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s “there’s no such thing as an immoral book” line – this was the point he was getting at. If a book is well-written it is “good” even if the subject matter is toxic and evil; a book is “bad” if poorly written, even if the subject matter is saintly. It’s an entirely unrelated (to art) question of whether or not this book is good-to-read or not. The Picture of Dorian Gray is very good to read, in my opinion, while the book within that book that corrupts the main character is, at least in the main character’s case, not good to read. That is a matter of prudence and Action Mode, though, not art itself.

That’s how Kendrick Lamar can have “good” music that you probably shouldn’t listen to, or at least shouldn’t blast at full volume going through a quiet neighborhood of impressionable youth.

Welp, I’ll end it there for today. Next time will finally be Chapter IV: Art: An Intellectual Virtue

p.s. Seriously, just look at these books

p.p.s. side note: philosophy and grammarly/spell check don’t get along. Yes, AI robot, that’s what I meant to write, leave me alone, you don’t really understand anything. Oh, and thanks for catching that I wrote butt instead of but, that was actually pretty helpful]

 

 

Public Service Announcement: Don’t Eff with Demons

PSA: Don’t Eff with demons.

Please and thank you.

Lately I seem to keep happening upon a lot of nonchalant messing where people shouldn’t be messing.

Apparently the guy who did the Watchmen comics- he thinks his drawings are spells or something creepy like that. And apparently people in general are just, “Oh cool, his art is an incantation, that’s cool, live your truth, man, sweet drawrings.”

Wut.

No, it’s not cool.

Demons are fallen angels. The primary significance of this metaphysical fact is not all the sweet tattoo and truck art you can make of bad angels (ugh). They’re evil.

Let’s review what an angel is real quick.

St. Thomas Aquinas is called the Angelic Doctor because he figured out so dang much about these spiritual creatures, and, as far as I know, not a whole lot more has been added to his insights in the centuries since he was on earth thinking about it. He talks about angels in Questions 50 – 64 of the Summa.

Backing up a second to creation in general according to Aquinas and the Tradition: the hierarchy of being: at the bottom you have lifeless stuff like rocks, then you have plants that can grow and reproduce and thus have some kind of soul (vegetative kind), move up another rung to animals, which have a little fancier souls, in that they have senses and memory and such, but they can’t engage in things like abstract reasoning or art or love. Continuing up the ladder, you have the good ol’ familiar body-and-soul humans, then above them are the angels, which are entirely spiritual- no bodies, (though occasionally, as recorded in the Old Testament, they sometimes assume a quasi-body so as to be seen by people and not freak us out.)

At the very top of the hierarchy of being is, of course, is God, source and summit, beginning and end, perfect Being with a capital B. Obviously there’s an increase in perfection as you move up from rocks to the divine, and none of those jumps are insignificant- you can’t make a plant out of however many of the best of rocks, you can’t blend up the right combo of plant souls to jump to animal life, the smartest gorilla/elephant/dolphin supergroup of animal geniuses still aren’t going to ever amount to the odd creature who can do things like have existential crises and read, write, and even sometimes understand poetry (even if he watches YouTube instead, which he can invent, but a pig never will).

Thus, even if we don’t know much about angels, it’s safe to say that they’re naturally significantly higher than us. Smarter, faster, stronger, better. Again, they don’t have bodies, so they know things more clearly and directly– not as we do, which is through the tricky and limited senses.

At one point, Thomas addresses the question of whether angels can read your mind and see the future, and the answer is kinda yes but no. NO, if by read your mind and know the future you mean in the same way God does. Angels are not omniscient and do not know everything BUT compared to us, they may as well. When you guess what your friend is thinking and they say “you read my mind!”– angels are really good at guessing like that. So good it’s not even really fair to call it guessing.

They can’t see into your heart and soul like God can, but they can see what you do, and they can get a pretty good idea of what you’re probably thinking and feeling. Similar deal with the future, they can see a lot more of what’s going on right at this moment than we can from the perspective of our limited bodies, and they can take all that info and do a lot of Sherlock elementarying with it to get a decently accurate picture of the future.

So, angels can almost-but-not-quite read your mind and almost-but-not-quite see the future because they know the present and past so dang well. Huh. I wonder whaaaat could possibly go wrong with some ill-willed, fallen angels literally hell-bent on your destruction with that kind of spiritual power? Surely they wouldn’t abuse that power and play on your puny human emotions in many and various ways…

Angels are higher than us by nature, and even when they fall, (as a third of them did when they had their one chance to choose God or self/nothing/hell) the demons are still way smarter than us. They can mess with us like we use laser pointers to mess with our cats and dogs. It’s no contest- their natures are simply way higher than ours. The end. So don’t go looking for your dear late grandma via a psychic, or with a demon-magnet diabolically marketed as a children’s toy, or with freaky open-to-the-spirits meditation. Because yeah, it’s real, but it’s not what you think it is. You might think you are a master red dot hunter, but you’re not; it’s a game and you’re not one of the players, you’re the dumb dog.

Now, there are stories of saints laughing at the devil when he shows up– St. Anthony the Great and St Teresa of Avila are known for it– but they were hard core SAINTS. Obviously demons are nothing compared to their Creator (the creator of their originally-perfectly-good-selves that they freely corrupted). A saint is someone who is so close to God that they can say, like a little kid wrapped around their dad’s leg or hanging on to their mom’s skirt- “Mr. Demon you’re just a big dumb meanie and you can’t hurt me.”

Now, am I that close to God? Are any of the people who I hear talking about weird crap that they’ve seen and been a part of, most of whom claim to be vaguely Christian but tend to live out some combo of agnostic and pagan tendencies in their day to day? I don’t know, I can’t judge, BUT the saints are overtly and definitively against the evil spirits, not trying to use them for some silly earthly objective, so even if the people who mess around with creepy spirit stuff they don’t understand are very close to God, they aren’t acting like it when they mess around with creepy spirit stuff. In those moments, anyway, they aren’t clinging to God like a Teresa or Anthony, they are playing in a busy street, lucky to not get run over.

Anyway… all I’m really tying to say is

Don’t

Mess

with Demons.

aka spirits aka ghosts aka dead relatives

The only unfinished business a dead guy is going to need help with is the business of getting purified for heaven, which mean prayers toward getting them out of Purgatory, so say some of those and wait til heaven to talk to them again. St Gertrude has a sweet prayer for that.

“Eternal Father,
I offer You the most precious blood
of thy Divine Son, Jesus,
in union with the Masses said
throughout the world today,
for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory,
for sinners everywhere,
for sinners in the universal Church,
for those in my own home,
and in my family. Amen.”

Also St. Michael, professional demon-conquerer, should be your buddy:

St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

That is all.

Oh, also, feel free to subscribe to all my PSAs and wondering-arounds by clicking something over there- a yellow button- on the right.

This post brought to you by a nice warm mug of hot honey water and cream and The Violent Femmes Blister in the Sun stuck in my head.

 

Art and Sch. etc. Part 2

The thing that struck me in this barely 2-page chapter was the reminder that “the object of the mind, as such, is simply and solely knowledge.” yes, yes, of course, of course, that’s the main thing I use my mind for, definitely…

How does that fit into the current way of things? Do we think of our minds having knowledge as it’s simple and sole object and live accordingly? Well, yeah, what else is a mind for? We like knowledge, we look stuff up all the time. We went to school to stock up on knowledge units, and we read articles and posts and books to get more knowledge units. I mean, 21st century Westerners are probably the knowledgeyest peoples ever, with our incredible amount of leisure time and insanely convenient access to basically an infinity of things-to-know [oh yes, we know sooo much. Just don’t make me take a 1900 8th grade final exam…]

BUT. Something still seems off to me.

Trying to think through exactly what that something off is, I remembered a very interesting course I took in grad school. I think it was called Environmental Ethics, but the first half of the semester was really a phenomenology of the body- thinking about what it is to be an incarnate creature, a soul-body-mess-of-a-thing. One of the highlights, besides the professor reaaally wanting to encourage us to not feel guilty about taking naps [never a problem for me, but I guess some personalities tend to think it a waste of time. Weird.] one of the highlights that I remember was the professor talking about beer [of course a highlight for the hobbit].

Specifically, good traditional beer versus American ‘beer’.

Traditionally, this prof argued, one was tempted to overindulge in a good thing, let the animal-pleasure-drivenness of fallen humanity take over. A man, who is definitely meant to enjoy a good ale, becomes an animal when he has too many. Today’s super-messed-up man, however, because of all kinds of post-Puritanical issues and other misguidedness and bad formation, doesn’t even make it to animal level, his sin is more machine-ish. He doesn’t overindulge in too much of a good thing, like a dog who busts open the kibbles bag–  he robotically inputs x number of Natty Lites into his system to get the desired effect. There’s no enjoyment, it’s crazy disordered from the start, from the moment the ingredients of the ungodly swill are thrown together.

So I wonder if our Wikipedia rabbit-hole adventures and constant trivial looking-things-up is a legitimate respect for the knowledge-orientation of the mind, or a mechanical, desperate reaction of a half-starved and malformed faculty…

Maritain quotes the Aristo-Thomistic understanding that in knowing stuff, “the mind becomes, itself, in a way, all things.” There’s a semester’s worth of Latin argumentations and explanations and guesses as to what exactly that means, what exactly goes on in the mind knowing a thing, BUT, Medieval Epistemology, with its phantasms and intellectual vision beams, was one of the primary reasons I failed out of PhD school. I’m sorry I just can’t caaaarrreeee.

That being said, it does make sense to me that the mind, in some sense, becomes what it knows. Hence the close connection between knowledge and love…

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In other news, it has been beautiful outside and for some reason, everyone who goes by wants to take a picture of the little purple flowers that have popped up in our yard. They are nice, and I’m cool with people instagraming my mystery flowers planted by the previous tenant’s sister-in-law [shout out to Sue] but I’m not sure what the big deal is. Winter wasn’t that long this year…

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Oh, also, the chapter was actually about the distinction between the speculative (deals with knowledge) and the practical (deals with doing and making, i.e. action)

“Art belongs to the Practical Order. Its orientation is towards doing, not to the pure inwardness of knowledge.”

“wherever you find art you find some action or operation to be contrived, some work to be done.”

Basically, Art is practical work.

Art & Scholasticism, Scholasticism & Art Part One

As mentioned in the last post, this early work of Maritain is a rejection of the silly Romantic views of Art and the Artist which have come to the modern world via the Renaissance and Enlightenment, namely that art is “self-expression” and the artist is a wild demi-god among men, and art is completely subjective and merely a vehicle for some contrived political message. The truth is much more humble, as Jacques will explain.

[Sidenote: kind of funny to hear a refutation of Romanticism from a guy who literally had a suicide pact with his wife (Raissa) — if they didn’t find the meaning of life within a year, there would be nothing left but to end it all. Luckily, they found the Church, entered it, and determined a better direction for their intensity.]

So, Chapter I.

Herein, Maritain basically explains his 20th century Thomist mission: go back to Thomas and the Schoolmen [ha, band name] and, from the questions they did directly address, and from all the implications, logical consequences, definitions, exceptions, etc., piece together what their answer to other questions would have been. For the Scholastics, Maritain says, were primarily absorbed by the demands of teaching, they didn’t have time or good reasons to wonder about stuff outside of their syllabi and lesson plans.

So it happens that the Scholastics argued a lot about Art in general, which included things like shipbuilding, and they of course talked about Beauty, but the Fine Arts as a distinct, beauty-oriented thing to work out and debate wasn’t really on their radar. But they talked about a lot of stuff that’s relevant to the discussion; the Scholastics were so good, they answered questions they hadn’t even thought of yet.

Here, one could say, “well dammit, if it’s not in the Summa, I don’t need to know about it!” 

Wellll, Thomas Aquinas thinks that’s dumb, so we’re not going to do that.

PRUDENCE, that virtue that judges how best to realize the ideal in particular circumstances, here and now, is kind of the key thing here, I think (which Maritain talks a lot about a couple chapters later).  I imagine if you told Thomas that you were going to mostly dismiss questions of your time because he didn’t happen to think of them first and give you an outline of how to address them, or they just don’t quite fit into the Scholastic framework, he would be pretty annoyed.

Or, more likely, he’d laugh a jolly Lewis-Chestertonian heavenly laugh and remind you that it’s all straw anyway- Love God and do what you will, says Augustine!

True, you could do much, much worse than only reading St. Thomas. But still.

Anyway, getting off track; I really just wanted to point out that in Chapter I Jacques talks about the “neo”-Thomist [he would prefer plain ol’ Thomist] way of running scholastics’ genius insights through the circumstances and difficulties of the situation today, [again, sounds like prudence…] and getting even more of their genius insights.

JM ends the chapter saying:

 [he hopes] that, despite their inadequacy, these observations apropos of and concerning the maxims of the Schools will draw attention to the utility of having recourse to the wisdom of Antiquity, as also to the possible interest of an exchange of views between philosophers and artists, at a time when the necessity of escaping from the vast intellectual confusion bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century and finding once more the spiritual conditions of work which shall be honest is everywhere felt.

Friggin 19th century.

That confusion, like a lot of confusions, comes down to a lack of proper context. “Art” in a world where nothing is transcendent and Beauty is subjective and meaningless, is going to be pretty messed up. A return to scholastic ideas brings back the proper context and orientation [i.e., God], enabling us to make some sense of things. So says Maritain.

I have some notes ready to go on the also very short chapter 2, but it shifts into totally different thought and this seems like enough for a late Saturday night and a dying laptop.

This post brought to you by:
~a lot of time in the sun- shine                                                                                    ~Winehaven Stinger Mead

p.s. I am hoping to fix up the layout and stuff around here soon. I just went with what I had while I was inspired before I got distracted away again.