And there you are, those were my only three opportunities, which, in fact, were not opportunities at all, but just false hopes, about as reliable as a cloud in the sky. Afterward, I didn’t even get this.
I went from office to office, from one man to another, but I got nowhere. Nobody was ever available. Minor officials heard me with boredom and disinterest, with blank looks, without even malice.
I spent hours sitting in waiting rooms, but those for whom I was waiting never appeared. They’d either crept in through the window or flown in like birds or were invisible, or perhaps there was some secret underground entrance that defended them from those of us who existed in a state of waiting.
My words sounded tired, my story tedious. People were bored at the sight of me. I’d become a man asking a favor, the lowest form of life on earth. There’s nothing lower.
Gradually, despite my efforts to avoid it, I began to feel a wall around me, invisible but impenetrable. It stood there like a fortress, without exit or approach. I was constantly beating my head against a brick wall. I was battered, bloody, covered in lumps and bruises, but I didn’t cease trying. For there always seemed to be a way round it. There had to be a crack somewhere; it couldn’t all be wall. And I wouldn’t give in to being walled up like this, as if I were a living shadow whom none could see but who saw all. Who talked in vain, shouted in vain, unheard, a nothing. It didn’t need much before they’d begin walking through me, as if I were made of air, or wading through me, as if I were water.
I felt fear. How could they have killed me like this? I was not wounded, no one had killed me, I was not dead, but I didn’t exist. “For God’s sake, people, can’t you see me?” I’d say. “Can’t you hear me?” I’d say. But my face did not enter their vision, nor my voice their ear.
I did not exist.
Or was I dreaming this impossible situation that defied experience? For I was alive, I moved, I knew what I wanted.
I refused to be nonexistent. They could beat me, shut me away; they could kill me; hadn’t they killed enough people for no reason at all? But had they made a ghost of me? Why had they deprived me of my ability to fight?
I wanted to be a man! Let me fight like a man!
Useless!
The empty space around me grew ever emptier, my ridiculous rebellion ever quieter.
the supernatural state of nature
The worries that de Lubac’s opponents presented about a natural desire for the supernatural can be addressed. For one thing, nature itself is already an entirely gratuitous gift. Creation is the gift that invents its recipient. To any attempt to rope off the natural from the supernatural we can reply “Too late!” To risk an understatement, the creation of everything out of nothing is not something that belongs to nature. At the outset, creation has the character of superfluity and excess that we otherwise associate with miracle and grace. […]
Taking a step back again and thinking again about the foundations of our theme in terms of the words we use, de Lubac has yet more to offer. He was keen that we should use the words “nature” and “supernatural.” That’s not two nouns (nature and supernature), or even two adjectives (natural and supernatural). It’s a noun and an adjective. De Lubac’s idea was that we are only ever talking about what God makes (nature) and the state to which God might elevate it (a supernatural state). God does not make a new and independent sort of thing (supernature); he takes what he has made and pours his grace upon it. God takes what he has created and while leaving it still entirely created, raises it up. That elevation doesn’t turn nature into something else, as if it were no longer nature. God doesn’t erase anything and start again.
WWLD
The Tipsy Teetotaler ن:
One of the battles in many if not most Supreme Court cases is the “level of generality” of the “question presented.” The higher the level of generality, the more the court can just make up answers.
In the article linked in this reply, for instance, the discussion is about the court in Obergefell (the same-sex marriage case) deciding that the case was about a very-high-generality “fundamental right to marry,” concluding that there was such a right and that the meaning of marriage had expanded to include spouses of the same sex. But It could have asked, at lower level of generality, “is there a fundamental constitutional right to marry a person of the same sex?” That would have tended to throw it back into how marriage was understood at the founding and the adoption of relevant constitutional amendments, with a likely opposite holding.
That “the prime directive of the Constitution is liberty” feels like the ne plus ultra of high generality – so high a level as to be useless or to moot the whole text of the Constitution in favor of WWLD – what would Liberty do?
democratic decay
Five years ago, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, I helped write a rather anodyne statement in defense of open inquiry, signed by more than 150 writers, artists, and intellectuals. Without using the phrase, it criticized cancel culture. Almost immediately upon its publication in Harper’s, the statement became the “notorious” Harper’s Letter—the object of furious condemnation by journalists and academics as the pearl-clutching of elites and an excuse for bigotry. This torrent of abuse came from the left, which no longer believed in open inquiry. Those on the right raged against left-wing puritans and declared themselves militants for free speech, even—especially—hatred and lies.
Since Trump’s return to office, and with Kirk’s murder, the roles have completely reversed. The left, which not long ago perfected mob-sponsored silencing, is (rightly) outraged at the Trump administration’s top-down cancel culture. Meanwhile, those former free-speech absolutists Trump, Vance, and Stephen Miller have become lord high executioners of thought crime. If a new Harper’s Letter defending the value of open inquiry were written today, many of the original letter’s fiercest critics would rush to sign it. Free-speech hypocrisy is a symptom of the democratic decay that makes authoritarianism possible.
“we are using them as they were designed to be used”
Wendell Berry (1987):
I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.
Nicholas Carr (2015):
While the presentation of text on shared computer networks does open up a vast territory for comment, what [Alan] Jacobs terms “digital textuality” is hardly promoting the kind of self-effacing commentary he yearns for. The two essential innovations of computerized writing and reading — the word processor’s cut-and-paste function and the hypertext of the web — make text malleable and provisional. Presented on a computer, the written work is no longer an artifact to be contemplated and pondered but rather raw material to be worked over by the creative I — not a sculpture but a gob of clay. Reading becomes a means of re-writing. Textual technologies make text submissive and subservient to the reader, not the other way around. They encourage, toward the text, not the posture of the monk but the posture of the graffiti artist. Is it any wonder that most online comments feel as though they were written in spray paint?
I’m exaggerating, a bit. It’s possible to sketch out an alternative history of the net in which thoughtful reading and commentary play a bigger role. In its original form, the blog, or web log, was more a reader’s medium than a writer’s medium. And one can, without too much work, find deeply considered comment threads spinning out from online writings. But the blog turned into a writer’s medium, and readerly comments remain the exception, as both Jacobs and [Andrew] Piper agree. One of the dreams for the web, expressed through a computer metaphor, was that it would be a “read-write” medium rather than a “read-only” medium. In reality, the web is more of a write-only medium, with the desire for self-expression largely subsuming the act of reading. So I’m doubtful about Jacobs’s suggestion that the potential of our new textual technologies is being frustrated by our cultural tendencies. The technologies and the culture seem of a piece. We’re not resisting the tools; we’re using them as they were designed to be used.
I can see Wendell Berry now, kicked back in his chair, pencil and notebook in hand, thoughts coming and going through a large multi-pane window, just out of ear-shot of this whole conversation.
historical immersion: the good, grounded, despairing revolt
If the demand for ties is nothing more than a demand for an artificial order in obedience to authority and written law, the real task is being evaded, the [result] being that the unconditioned becomes impossible and freedom is paralysed. Man, therefore, is faced by two alternatives. Either he must seek to calm his self-forgetful life by a return to authoritative forms which can sanctify the apparatus for supplying the elementary needs of human life; or else, as an individual, he must grasp the very foundations by building upon which an exclusive unconditioned always determines life. […]
Historical Immersion. He only who freely enters into ties is thereby endowed with the power of revolting despairingly against himself. The unfulfillable and yet only task left for contemporary man as man, has been, in the face of Nothingness, to find the true path at his own risk, the path on which life will once more become a whole, notwithstanding all its dispersal in the restlessness of prevailing commotions. As in the days of the mythical heroes of antiquity, everything seems thrust back upon the individual.
But what is requisite is that a man, in conjunction with other men, should merge himself in the world as a historically concrete entity, so that, amid the universal homelessness, he may win for himself a new home. His remoteness from the world sets him free to immerse his being. This remoteness is not achievable by an intellectualist abstraction, but only through a simultaneous getting into touch with all reality. The immersion is not a visible act of one who plumes himself on it, but is effected in a tranquil unconditionedness. Remoteness from the world gives an inward distinction; but immersion, on the other hand, awakens all that is human in selfhood. The former demands self-discipline; but the latter is love.
angel services
When I pace back and forth in my cell, three steps forward and three steps back, hands in irons, ahead of me an unknown destiny, I understand very differently than before those ancient promises of the coming Lord who will redeem us and set us free. And, along with these thoughts, comes the memory of the angel that a good person gave me for Advent two years ago. It held a banner: “Rejoice, for the Lord is near.” A bomb destroyed the angel. A bomb killed the good person, and I often sense that she continues to do angel-services for me.…
And it is… knowledge of the quiet angels of annunciation, who speak their message of blessing into the distress and scatter their seeds of the blessing that will begin to grow in the middle of the night. These are not yet the loud angels of public jubilation and fulfillment, these angels of Advent. Silently and unnoticed, they come into private rooms and appear before our hearts as they did long ago.…
Advent, despite all earnestness, is a time of refuge because it has received a message. Oh, if people know nothing about the message and the promises anymore, if they only experience the four walls and the prison windows of their gray days, and no longer perceive the quiet footsteps of the announcing angels, if the angels’ murmured word does not simultaneously shake us to the depths and lift up our souls – then it is over for us. Then we are living wasted time, and we are dead, long before they do anything to us.
“look well to your sweeping and garnishing”
‘Be ye perfect even as your Father who is in heaven ’ Love in the same way as the sun gives light. Love has to be brought back to ourselves in order that it may be shed on all things. God alone loves all things and he only loves himself.
To love in God is far more difficult than we think.
[…]We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly’.
And, for all of us, the question is not at all to ascertain how much or how little corruption there is in human nature; but to ascertain whether, out of all the mass of that nature, we are of the sheep or the goat breed; whether we are people of upright heart, being shot at, or people of crooked heart, shooting. And, of all the texts bearing on the subject, this, which is a quite simple and practical order, is the one you have chiefly to hold in mind. “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”
LUCILLA. And yet, how inconsistent the texts seem!
L. Nonsense, Lucilla! do you think the universe is bound to look consistent to a girl of fifteen? Look up at your own room window; —you can just see it from where you sit. I’m glad that it is left open, as it ought to be, in so fine a day. But do you see what a black spot it looks, in the sunlighted wall?LUCILLA. Yes, it looks as black as ink.
L. Yet you know it is a very bright room when you are inside of it; quite as bright as there is any occasion for it to be, that its little lady may see to keep it tidy. Well, it is very probable, also, that if you could look into your heart from the sun’s point of view, it might appear a very black hole indeed: nay, the sun may sometimes think good to tell you that it looks so to Him; but He will come into it, and make it very cheerful for you, for all that, if you don’t put the shutters up. And the one question for YOU, remember, is not “dark or light?” but “tidy or untidy?” Look well to your sweeping and garnishing; and be sure it is only the banished spirit, or some of the seven wickeder ones at his back, who will still whisper to you that it is all black.
porcupine Bereans
But the way in which common people read their Bibles is just like the way that the old monks thought hedgehogs ate grapes. They rolled themselves (it was said), over and over, where the grapes lay on the ground. What fruit stuck to their spines, they carried off, and ate. So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture, and that nothing else is.
Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own…
honest unironic love
[Erik] Varden did not write only about Daniélou; that bit was part of a fuller meditation on chastity, in which he also wrote: “Only what I love will change me beautifully.” You cannot really love, I think, without being honest. Love requires a willing, enthusiastic force behind it, a fullness that cannot form if the germ of the feeling is cocooned in layers of irony. Perhaps that’s why a child’s sense of love of the small things of the world, of this teddy bear or this doll, is so heartwarming to us: They do not care if it is cool, or if anyone is watching. They are simply honest in their love.