Wherein Nietzsche Compliments Classical Students

Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous—excepting, perhaps, the amiable "Idealists," who are enthusiastic about the good, true, and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley, coarse, and good-natured desirabilities swim about promiscuously in their pond. ~Beyond Good & Evil, "The Free Spirit," 39.

Nietzsche further says happiness and virtue are no arguments (but he also says consequences are the only test of value--go figure), but that's less interesting to me than just what he says in this quotation. I think he is articulating that by letting "swim promiscuously in their pond," "all kinds of motley, coarse, and good-natured desirabilities," the "amiable 'Idealists' who are enthusiastic about the good, true, and beautiful" don't discriminate about the material sources of these values. They take in all kinds.

Classical students promote the search for the transcendentals (goodness, truth, beauty) wherever they might be strewn about. We are some of those "amiable idealists" (I'm going to keep that one). Our collection is often eclectic. We're happy to let ol' toadie Voltaire sit on his lily pad while electric eel Luther lurks in the depths below; provided that whatever hangs about possesses something true, good, or beautiful in some way, shape, or form.

Perhaps Nietzsche would consider such a pond too polluted for swimming in himself. The hoi polloi koi swimming in the murky waters might offend his arboreal kookaburra spirit. But then again, a pond full of various life forms tends to be the healthiest and most lively. There's even room for a loud-mouthed, territorial bird, when the right alarums need to be sounded.

Isocrates on Using Judgment

The quote below, by Isocrates, appears to claim that each age deserves to be judged by its own opinion (or, at least, the opinion of its intelligent members). Is this an example of the "golden rule"?

"It is reasonable that we judge events in our own time according to our own opinions, but for events that are so ancient, it is fitting that we show ourselves to be like-minded with the intelligent people of that time." from Isocrates's Encomium of Helen in reference to judging the virtue of Theseus as a basis for judging the virtue of Helen, whom he admired and abducted.

The Loss of Glory

From Harry Blamires's book, The Christian Mind:

Men are less prepared than they were to stub their toes against unpalatable objective truth, to measure their littleness against high objective values, to discipline themselves for a test of strength in a rigorous objective examination. This is because a secular tradition has now fully established itself which teaches that man’s fulfillment and success lie, not in screwing himself up to the demands of a high vocation, but in moulding all that he encounters in service to his needs. As long as man’s destiny is seen in terms of mastery, we shall suffer from this debased tradition.

A world where man's sets the standards of worth at his own comforts is a world without glory.

The Christian Mind quotation #2

The Christian mind recognizes that youth's instinct to envelop the experiences of music, sex, and communal adventure, with deep, passionate significance is fundamentally healthy. Youth's tendency to idealize--even to idealize the pop-singer and the film-star--springs from the instinct to spiritualize earthly experience, which is part of redeemed mankind's divine endowment. It is therefore logical and necessary that the fact of youthful romanticism should be subsumed into the theology of divine creation, incarnation, redemption, and salvation. ~Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind, (1963), p. 181.

The Christian Mind quotation

But whatever the quality of twentieth-century Christians, the Church remains unalterably secure. And no Christian who understands the Church's true nature can talk of the Church being in danger of being engulfed. It is too late for the world to destroy the Church, two thousand years too late. The world had its chance and did its best--and its worst--on Calvary. God answered with a body of men and women against whom the gates of Hell shall not prevail. We have his word for it. And if the gates of Hell shall not prevail, need we worry unduly about the latest secularist estimate of the Church's statistical manpower or the jibes of shallow brains-trust intellectuals who have yet to find their peace? ~Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind, (1963), p. 153. 

Technopoly Quotation

Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, we are awash in information. And all the sorcerer has left us is a broom. Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose. 

All of this has called into being a new world. . . .It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, an many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms. (Postman, Technopoly 69-70)

The most striking thing about Postman's quote is not its perfection or infallible accuracy (it has some places where it could be nuanced or refracted more clearly in retrospect), but the fact that he wrote it in 1992!

Michael Sacasas offers a very brief, but helpful summary of Postman's definitions of technocracy and technopoly for those in need of some context.

The Intellectual Life, #10

A quote that encapsulates the effort of all classical education:

Study must be an act of life, must serve life, must feel itself impregnated with life. Of the two kinds of men, those who endeavor to know something, and those who try to be someone, the palm is to the second. What we know is like a beginning, a rough sketch only; the man is the finished work.

The Intellectual Life, #9

Ariel one day asked himself in his Journal: "Why are you weak? Because times without number you have given in. So you have become the plaything of circumstances. It is you who have made them strong, not they who have made you weak."

The Intellectual Life, #8

A brilliant chreia, and all too often advice not followed:

When Edison was asked one day to say to a child something that he might remember, the great inventor uttered with a smile the words: "My boy, don't keep your eye on the clock."

The Intellectual Life, #7

As true now as when Sertillanges first penned it in 1921:

Many writers today have a system: every system is a pose, and every pose is an insult to beauty.

The Intellectual Life, #6

Following immediately after the previous quote that gives a warning, Sertillanges provide the positive image of what the writer should be:

Seated at your writing table and in the solitude in which God speaks to the heart, you should listen as a child listens and write as a child speaks. The child is simple and detached because he has yet no self-will, no pre-established positions, no artificial desires, no passions. His naïve confidence and direct speech have an immense interest for us. A mature man, enriched by experience, who should yet preserve this simplicity of the child would be an admirable repository of truth, and his voice would reecho in the souls of his fellow men.

If you are suspicious of Sertillanges' statements about the nature of the child, try to put aside as a "given" those self-centered attributes that all men possess by virtue of the Fall, and think only of the child's natural proclivities on the basis of his very limited knowledge and very open curiosity. The child does not ask or speak out on the basis of calculation of how it will affect his self-image or reputation. The child doesn't offer observations in order to garner support for an ideology. The child doesn't offer his own opinion in order to please others so as to be accepted in their company. He has no acquired tastes for which all of his words and actions are bent toward serving. It will not take a child long to learn each of these vices, but in his natural capacity they are harder for him to come by than the mature human soul. Therefore, the more the mature human soul can seek to recapture the relative innocence of the child's ability to speak from his plain and shameless ignorance, the more the mature human soul will be able to avoid the shamelessness of serving his refined, self-centered pretensions.

The Intellectual Life, #5

The following advice from Sertillanges is good for all, but especially good for the self-conscious rhetorician:

This perverse world loves, at bottom, only saints; this cowardly world dreams of heroes; Roger Bontemps [An easy-living, happy-go-lucky person] grows grave when he sees an ascetic. In such a world you must not yield to public opinion and write as if humanity were looking over your shoulder. You must shake yourself free of other people, as well as yourself. In the intellectual domain as in every other, to rise above man is to prepare wondrous things, for it is opening the way to the Spirit.

The Intellectual Life, #4

In an age where "critical thinking" is valorized with little or no distinction, the following words are a breath of fresh air:

An essential condition for profiting by our reading, whether of ordinary books or those of  writers of genius, is to tend always to reconcile our authors instead of setting one against another. The critical spirit has its place; we may have to disentangle opinions and classify men; the method of contrast is then admissible and needs only not to be forced. But when the aim is formation of the mind, personal profit, or even a teacher's exposition, it is quite a different matter. In these cases it is not the thoughts, but the truths, that interest us; not men's disputes, but their work and what is lasting in it. It is futile to linger endlessly over differences; the fruitful research is to look for points of contact.

The Intellectual Life, #3

Even when reading "hostile" works, one must be willing to seek out the Truth that comes unbidden from them:

Truth will not give itself to us unless we are first rid of self and resolved that it shall suffice us. The intelligence which does not submit is in a state of skepticism, and the skeptic is ill-prepared for truth. Discovery is the result of sympathy; and sympathy is the gift of self.

The Intellectual Life, #2

I mentioned in my last post, that I am working slowly through A.G. Sertillanges' book, The Intellectual Life. Here is another gem:

Our soul does not age; it is always growing; in regard to truth it is always a child; we who have charge of its permanent education must not, as far as possible, leave any of the problems arising in the course of our work unresolved, or any of our investigations without an appropriate conclusion. Let the man of study then be perpetually listening for the truth.

The Intellectual Life, #1

I'm slowly making my way through a book by a French Dominican friar, A.G. Sertillanges: The Intellectual Life. The book is chocked full of good quotations. I'll be posting some periodically. Here is one:

"Do what you ought and must; if your human perfection requires it, the different demands it makes will find their own balance. The good is the brother of the true: it will help its brother. To be where we ought to be, to do what we ought to do, disposes us for contemplation, and feeds it; it is leaving God for God, according to the saying of St. Bernard."

The Liberating Effect of Education

From Dave Hicks, via Circe Institute.

A “rigorous” education is for me one that saves souls one at a time and pulls that soul out of his socio-economic context, whatever that is, and gives him an “out of body” experience, so to speak. It frees him from his passions or at least puts him at odds with them, makes him aware of the assumptions underlying the arguments swirling around him, causes him to recognize and detest cant and mediocrity, and establishes in him an insatiable hunger for whatever is good and true and beautiful. It gives him a star to follow, whatever the crowd is doing. Makes him a Magus.

 The italicized portion is, for me, the primary and most difficult aim of education. Plato sought it, Augustine sought it, Calvin sought it, and all wise educators today seek it.

Chesterton on the Family

"When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale." ~Chesterton, Heretics

In Chapter XIV of his book Heretics, G.K. Chesterton takes modern writers to task for their take on the institution of the family. Many Evangelical Christians today might assume that on the basis of Chesterton's Christianity and their own antithetical stance toward modern views on the family they and Chesterton would be fitting bedfellows. On the contrary, Chesterton's brief essay should make the typical evangelical uncomfortable, and in just the right way.

He begins, as Chesterton so often does, by turning several ideas on their head. Some suppose that the family or the small community is too narrow, but Chesterton argues that it is actually broader than what most men choose to seek outside of the small community. Men naturally choose to avoid the unpleasantness of differences, and so seek society with those with whom they are most like. The small community destroys this possibility, because there are few who are alike, despite their general similarities. Brother Bill hates what I love, Cousin Kitty is just odd, and Uncle Bob has untidy political views. Neighbor Joe never "minds his own business," which is to say that he is minding his own business quite well, and is too full of life to be interested only in himself and wants to know more about me.

When a man is not free to choose his own clique, he is forced to learn to be in society, a society much broader and more potent than the small universe he would create for himself to serve his own predilections and myopic desires. The small community, and more particularly the family, requires submission to the Divine Will that is so inscrutable to our meagre rational powers and limited capacity for knowledge.

Chesterton does not, however, argue that the desire to be free from the overwhelming vivacity of the neighborhood is a bad thing. What he challenges is the notion that it is a noble thing, or even more acutely, that it is a source of strength. Nietzsche laments with beautiful language the commonness of the herd, but his desire to escape it does not show his great strength and vigor of life, but rather his great impotency and weakness to be immersed in life. The man who desires freedom from the neighborhood and considers it a virtue has a nihilistic bent, a being for death--that most narrow and empty slice of human existence toward which we all turn, but from which we will all be raised to new life (or second death, which is Hell itself).

Chesterton goes on to make a poetic plea for the romantic and interesting life of the neighborhood and the family--where one may be renewed by the endless novelty, variety, and surprise that awaits at every strange turn of human will in each other with whom one lives in that uncomfortable intimacy of the small community. What may be gained for oneself is not only romantic, however, but quite vivifying to the soul--for the being-for-self is by nature consumptive of resources, whereas the being-for-others is pouring forth of its resources. That doesn't sound vivifying, except when one adopts the Christ-like maxim that losing one's life is how it may be saved, that through sacrifice comes bounty, that by burying one's seed into the soil of other souls it may produce fruit pressed down, shaken, and multiplied a hundredfold. The exciting possibilities of such investment in other souls requires the faith that rests upon the limitless bounty of the God who has Created, sustains, and shall renew all that He has made; not the faith that rests upon the very limited resources of one's own finite soul.

When one meekly abandons himself to the Providence of the Father in Heaven, one opens himself to Good Surprises beyond anything he can imagine. All it takes is loving one's neighbor as oneself, which, if is not yet obvious to say, requires one live, truly live, amongst one's neighbors.

Pascal on belief

Pascal once coined a phrase that has become a rather popular maxim used in answer to those who would question why people choose to love as they love: "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."

However, the original context of the phrase is notably different:

"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways. I say that it is natural for the heart to love the universal being or itself, according to its allegiance, and it hardens itself against either as it chooses. You have rejected one and kept the other. Is it reason that makes you love yourself?"

In other words, it is not by some rational demonstration that one's will or affections are directed at one thing or another, though it is possible (in some cases) to provide a rational demonstration of what follows from that initial choice.

Man's first principle is always a choice between believing in himself, or in something infinitely greater than himself, and he cannot, out of the stores of his own rationality, demonstrate why he chooses himself rather than the Infinite.

Luther on "grace" and "gift"; with a homily on electing love

Between grace and gift there is this difference. Grace means properly God's favor, or the good-will God bears us, by which He is disposed to give us Christ and to pour into us the Holy Ghost, with His gifts. This is clear from chapter 5 [of Romans], where He speaks of "the grace and gift in Christ." The gifts and the Spirit increase in us every day, though they are not yet perfect, and there remain in us the evil lust and sin that war against the Spirit, as Paul says in Romans 7 and Galatians 5, and the quarrel between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent is foretold in Genesis 3. Nevertheless, grace does so much that we are accounted wholly righteous before God. For His grace is not divided or broken up, as are the gifts, but it takes us entirely into favor, for the sake of Christ our Intercessor and Mediator, and because of that the gifts are begun in us.

What follows is one part appreciation for Luther's quote, and many parts tangential appreciation for something a bit different.

Martin Luther provides a helpful distinction between grace, defined as God's favor, and gift, which is an expression (but not the entire expression) of that same favor. An analogous distinction could be made between Law, defined as God's order, and precept, which is the expression (but not the entire expression) of God's order.

Apart from being an excellent distinction between grace and gift, Luther's quotation provokes an interesting question: How is it that God's grace--the electing grace of which Luther speaks here--how is it that this grace is distributed equally and universally to all saints, whereas God's gifts are distributed unequally and particularly? The answer, I think, exhibits the harmony of unity and diversity, of the One and the Many. Grace is the unifying principle, the One Thing that binds all of God's redemptive activity toward Creation; and gift is the distributive principle, the Many Things that declare in innumerable ways the multi-faceted, varied character of God's redemptive activity toward Creation. The summary term for all of these details concerning grace and gift is Electing Love.

We have access to God's gifts by God's grace, and our access to God's grace is through our union with Christ, who is Himself the Elect Son of God, and the Elect Man of God, from before the foundation of the world.

There is a sense in which there are only two individuals considered in the decree of predestination and election. There is the First Man, Adam, in whom the decree of reprobation is represented (whether or not the individual man, Adam, is elect or reprobate; since Adam's own representation need not remain in himself, though it remains in those who follow from him by natural generation), and the Last Man, Christ, in whom the decree of redemption is represented (whether or not the individual man, Christ, requires redemption, since his own representative status does not depend upon--indeed, rather would be destroyed by--his own possession of the condition of sin).

Now it is quite true that every human being has been decreed unto reprobation or redemption, individually. However, one of the key issues that people have with election is that it occurs apart from any individual's own contribution (we might say, his own merit). How is it, it is asked, that any one person should be redeemed or reprobated apart from consideration of his or her own choices, which make up his or her identity? Must not the individual be free from any compulsion, so that, by one's own choosing, he or she may love the God who gave His Son to redeem man from sin?

The unquestioned assumption in the question is that one's own identity is something determined by one's own choices. This is the Existentialist philosophy of "Existence precedes Essence," or "I am what I do," or "I am that I choose." Rather, we should recognize that an individual's choices are a result of his or her identity, not a cause of it. An empirical examination does not seem to justify this claim, since we often discover that who we thought we were is different than what we think as a result of some choice or action. "I never though I could do X" seems to support the idea that my choices determine what I am. However, our identity is not made up of our self-knowledge, for, as the Apostle John declares, "we do not yet know what we will be" (1 Jn. 3:2). That our choices reveal to us an identity that heretofore was unknown does not prove that choice determines identity, but rather it shows the limitations of human knowledge. We may know ourselves truly, yet not completely--our identity is being shaped, but not by our choices.

What then shapes our individual identities, of which our choices are but partial revelations?

God's omnipotence entails that no power, indeed, not even the power of an individual human will, is constituted or made effectual apart from God's will. What I choose, what you choose, what anyone chooses according to the liberty of our highest affection, depends upon the exertion of God's power entirely. What I choose on the basis of, that is, my identity, rests entirely upon the favorable or disfavorable willing of God. God wills unto one's good, or one's ill, and the choices one makes reveal to himself and the world whether he or she has God's favor or not (though the full revelation of individuals is obscured in large part until the consummation of the Age and the Return of the Son in Judgment).

On what basis then does God constitute Those Favored and Those Unfavored?

Since it is God's will that constitutes these two groups, there is no higher standard to which God could appeal, no standard upon which He could examine whether to choose X for reprobation and Y for redemption. Since no individual human will can act upon from God prior determination of that will, it is by God's will alone that any subsequent will, wills. Therefore God's will alone factors in the equation. The choice, for God, is arbitrary without being capricious. That is, God is free to choose without doing injustice in however He chooses.

Despite the arbitrary nature of God's constituting the reprobate and the redeemed, there is another factor that liberates God from the charge of injustice, or even of unmitigated self-interest. The decree to elect and reprobate is not undirected, but has its end in the honoring of the Eternally Begotten Son. The Eternal Father desires to offer His Eternal Son an inheritance, therefore He elects unto the Son a people for Him to provide for, protect, and to glorify into His own image, just as the Eternal Son is the image of the Eternal Father. The Father is reproducing in giving His Son an inheritance what the Son will reproduce in His that inheritance--an honorable, glorifying imitation, which is the essence of divine love, which is the Holy Spirit (so much more could be said to unravel this seamless garment!).

The glorification of the Son, and consequently of the Father, is such that there must be an Enemy; an Enemy who possesses his own people to become an unholy imitation of his blasphemous nature. Such unholy anti-love is but the antithesis, the contrastive highlighting, of Divine Love. The darker the shadow of Satanic opposition, the brighter the light of the Son's glorification.

The failure to appreciate the beauty of election is not due to any lack of aesthetic sensibility or faculty of recognition--for in nature, in artistic imitation, the use and appreciation for contrast is so universal as to be an unmistakable principle of beauty, even when it is not considered the sum and whole. No painter can achieve plays of light apart from contrasts in darkness. No musician can achieve the heights of a major tone apart from the lows of a minor. There can be no "is" without there also being an "is not."

No, the rejection of God's electing love (which include reprobation) stems from the universal recognition of one's own status as one of the condemned. Each convict rails against the Just Judge, not because the convict can ultimately deny the justice of the verdict, or the power of the Judge to execute the sentence, but rather from the convict's own dissatisfaction that he, the convict, cannot be, himself, the Judge. That motive characterizes the "old man," "the flesh," the child of darkness, the Satanic being--a motive that can only accuse the Maker of All Things of not doing everything according to the command of the Made.

But to those who have been constituted in Christ, and have been realized as such in history (i.e. the Spirit of adoption has testified to their spirit that they are indeed, sons of God with the Son), there is all of joy and marvel at the beauty of God's electing Love--that He would include such lowly and dependent creatures in the glorification of the Most Exalted and Eternal Son! Had God wanted to, it would have been enough for Him to have allowed all humanity to enjoy the few years of pleasure on this most magnificent orb of joyous beauty--even that much would be more than we deserve as His enemies. Yet even the joys of earth were not enough an expression of the Love of Our Great God, who was neither so mean nor so impoverished as to keep even the most self-debasing and rebellious of His creatures from participating, after their own creaturely fashion, in the Divine nature.

Christian, what can you but do than exclaim, "Marvelous! Wonderful! All Too High and Lofty Design! O, Beauty and Love Immeasurable Great! Worthy, Worthy, O Most Worthy God; Holy Father, Holy Son, and Holy Spirit! Amen!"