Joseph Ratzinger:

“The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow which has struck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound.”

[…]

In his characteristically rigorous thought, [Nicholas Cabasilas] distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge: knowledge through instruction which remains, so to speak, “second hand” and does not imply any direct contact with reality itself. The second type of knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge through personal experience, through a direct relationship with the reality. “Therefore we do not love it to the extent that it is a worthy object of love, and since we have not perceived the very form itself we do not experience its proper effect”. 

True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of Beauty that wounds man, moved by reality, “how it is Christ himself who is present and in an ineffable way disposes and forms the souls of men.”

[…]

Today … the message of beauty is thrown into complete doubt by the power of falsehood, seduction, violence and evil. Can the beautiful be genuine, or, in the end, is it only an illusion? Isn’t reality perhaps basically evil? The fear that in the end it is not the arrow of the beautiful that leads us to the truth, but that falsehood, all that is ugly and vulgar, may constitute the true “reality” has at all times caused people anguish. At present this has been expressed in the assertion that after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to write poetry; after Auschwitz it is no longer possible to speak of a God who is good. People wondered: where was God when the gas chambers were operating? This objection, which seemed reasonable enough before Auschwitz when one realized all the atrocities of history, shows that in any case a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough. It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity of the questioning about God, truth and beauty. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was “the God” and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as “the truly divine” is absolutely no longer sufficient. 

In this way, we return to the “two trumpets” of the Bible with which we started, to the paradox of being able to say of Christ: “You are the fairest of the children of men”, and: “He had no beauty, no majesty to draw our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him”. In the Passion of Christ the Greek aesthetic that deserves admiration for its perceived contact with the Divine but which remained inexpressible for it, in Christ’s passion is not removed but overcome. The experience of the beautiful has received new depth and new realism. The One who is the Beauty itself let himself be slapped in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns; the Shroud of Turin can help us imagine this in a realistic way. However, in his Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes “to the very end“; for this reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence. Whoever has perceived this beauty knows that truth, and not falsehood, is the real aspiration of the world. It is not the false that is “true”, but indeed, the Truth. It is, as it were, a new trick of what is false to present itself as “truth” and to say to us: over and above me there is basically nothing, stop seeking or even loving the truth; in doing so you are on the wrong track. The icon of the crucified Christ sets us free from this deception that is so widespread today. However it imposes a condition: that we let ourselves be wounded by him, and that we believe in the Love who can risk setting aside his external beauty to proclaim, in this way, the truth of the beautiful.

Flannery O’Connor, letter to “A”, 20 July 1955:

I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.

I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

You were very kind to write me and the measure of my appreciation must be to ask you to write me again. I would like to know who this is who understands my stories.

Patrick Joyce:

Peasants are among the closest of humankind to nature, knowing intimately and with great depth what nature is, even though their idea of nature is assuredly not ours. Perhaps we might even learn something from them, something about the ‘nature’ we think we know, and something about what we call progress has done to nature.

Peasants were, after all, right to distrust progress. We may all have to learn before too long how to be survivors, and peasants, the class of survivors, have things to teach us. They face extinction just as we may do. Peasants come from a world that in essence is not capitalist, although they have coexisted with capitalism for cen-turies. They do not conceive of a world of unlimited increase, the world of progress that is, for they know things are finite. Capitalism lives for unlimited increase, which it sees only by looking to the future, upon which it depends (credit always refers to future possibility). In its nature capitalism must erase the past to realize this future. Peasants hope for the future but do not forget the past.

 […]

John Berger wrote in 1987 that ‘very few peasants become artists—occasionally perhaps the son or daughter of peasants has done so.’ He writes about the lack of records of peasant experience — some songs, a few autobiographies, very little: “This lack means that the peasant’s soul is as unfamiliar or unknown to most urban people as are his physical inventories and the material conditions of his labour. This is so. But while Berger is right, it is only in part, for if the peasant’s own speaking voice is absent (there are in truth only a tiny few memoirs, given the peasant millions who have lived and died) there are many more than a few songs. And through ethnographic study we now know a great deal of much else. Yet this is almost always mediated knowledge — vastly illuminating, but often historically about things called the ‘folk’ and their ‘lore,’ these terms meaning nothing to peasants themselves. Knowledge from the outside, in other words. There is also the knowledge as well of tax collectors, policemen, lawyers, recruiting sergeants, land surveyors and many others of the ‘official world.’ So we interpret, hearing only the echoes of the soul.

David Moreau:

Salt to the Brain

As a rule we are not the brain surgeons
or the bridge builders. We did not figure
how to make water flow in a pipe
or keep airplanes stable in flight.
Instead, we stood in a circle and chanted,
“All praise to the most beautiful bridge,”
then walked across it.

As a rule we do not meet the payroll
or keep the factories open.
Others figured how enzymes work
and built hydraulic brakes.
Instead, we were the ones at the machines
whose idea it was to sing, “Happy Birthday,”
or “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

In this world the moneychangers change money.
The nurses nurse and the lawyers lawyer.
My mother feeds the stray cats that come
to the screen door of her house in Marion Oaks.
The orange tiger has a nasty scratch.
The poets take note,
add this small pinch of salt to the brain,
our gift to the taste of existence.

Wendell Berry:

One early morning last spring, I came and found the woods floor strewn with bluebells. In the cool sunlight and the lacy shadows of the spring woods the blueness of those flowers, their elegant shape, their delicate fresh scent kept me standing and looking. I found a delight in them that I cannot describe and that I will never forget. Though I had been familiar for years with most of the spring woods flowers, I had never seen these and had not known they were here. Looking at them, I felt a strange loss and sorrow that I had never seen them before. But I was also exultant that I saw them now — that they were here.

For me, in the thought of them will always be the sense of the joyful surprise with which I found them — the sense that came suddenly to me then that the world is blessed beyond my understanding, more abundantly than I will ever know. What lives are still ahead of me here to be discovered and exulted in, tomorrow, or in twenty years? What wonder will be found here on the morning after my death? Though as a man I inherit great evils and the possibility of great loss and suffering, I know that my life is blessed and graced by the yearly flowering of the bluebells. How perfect they are! In their presence I am humble and joyful. If I were given all the learning and all the methods of my race I could not make one of them, or even imagine one. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. It is the privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable.

And this is Berry 25 years later and 32 years ago, in one of his Sabbath Poems — 1994, VII:

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves,
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky 
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

I’m rereading some Wendell Berry, partly to bolster a feeling I need to finish a drafty post and partly because this is simply never a waste of time.

Yesterday, I noticed how Auden put a very fine point on the eternal command “Go play outside.” Berry, unsurprisingly, does so as well. But today, the specific (and eternal) command is to “Go pray outside”:

The Bible gives exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) attention to the organization of religion: the building and rebuilding of the Temple; its furnishings; the orders, duties, and paraphernalia of the priesthood; the orders of rituals and ceremonies. But that does not disguise the fact that the most significant religious events recounted in that book do not occur in “temples made with hands.” The most important religion in the Bible is unorganized, and is sometimes profoundly disruptive of organization. From Abraham to Jesus, the most important people are not priests, but shepherds, soldiers, men of property, craftsmen, housewives, queens and kings, manservants and maidservants, fishermen, prisoners, whores, even bureaucrats. The great visionary encounters did not take place in temples, but in sheep pastures, in the desert, in the wilderness, on mountains, by rivers and on beaches, in the middle of the sea; when there was no choice, they happened in prisons. However strenuously the divine voice prescribed rites and observances, it just as strenuously repudiated them when they were taken to be religion:

Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.
And when you spread forth your hands, I will hide mind eyes from you: yea, when you make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.

Religion, according to this view, is less to be celebrated in rituals than practiced in the world.

I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a “hypaethral book,” such as Thoreau talked about — a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. That is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold anc empty stellar distances, will hardly balk at the fuming of water into wine–which was. after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is fumed into grapes.

Slingshot Collective:

In Summer 2002, Slingshot published an article against the growing social dependency on cellular phones. There were no dumbphones at the time — a flip phone was only considered “dumb” not due to the supposed technological superiority of other devices on the market, but instead because of the things it fostered: isolation, dependency on the state and large corporations, ecocide in the Congo and across the world (yes, folks were talking about this decades ago), and a lack of autonomy and critical thinking skills for whoever was unfortunate enough to get sucked into buying one.

Today, the concept that a dumbphone would be “too much” for any consumer is widely considered laughable, if it is considered at all. Even in radical spaces, downgrading from a smartphone to something that has physical buttons and can’t access Instagram is just about the limit of peoples’ imaginations. What happened to the resistance to the steady invasion of these parasites into our lives? Have we been totally fooled?

Well, yes.

Also:

In our culture, no altar receives such fervent worship as that of the god of Convenience. Capitalism and its goons have turned our bodies, minds, time, and experiences into something that can be bought, sold and stolen not only by nameless conglomerates but also by each other. Every second not spent “bettering” ourselves or producing in some way is considered wasted. Naturally then, we have developed an insatiable hunger for optimizing every aspect of our lives. We trim the fat of life, even though it is the very thing that keeps us warm.

W. H. Auden:

Two comments from the same online magazine in the same week:

[So-and-so] is a libertarian for good and for ill—mostly for ill, as libertarians tend to be.

— Nick Catoggio

As a libertarian, I do spend some time sleepless at night, sometimes wondering why it is that literally every person who holds my ideas who gets elected to office is a schmuck.

— Kevin Williamson

As a Definitely Not Libertarian who definitely does not like or even believe in libertarianism, I do not lose sleep wondering about this. Libertarianism takes a reasonably good thing that exists (in unknown capacities) within much bigger and better things and makes it a “highest good” if not a stand-alone aim. And nothing — no history or anthropology or sociology or theology or desirable future — warrants that claim or aim.