St. Cyril of Jerusalem and the Mystagogy of Baptism
Pentecost and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit
There are key moments in our own lives, stages of development and achievements worth remembering and celebrating. We can think here of birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and so forth. Something like this is true of the Church’s life as well. We can think of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Great Commission, and so on. But perhaps the most vital, the most defining, is an event we will soon celebrate: Pentecost. The first Pentecost is when the Church takes her first autonomous breath, as it were, when she takes her first steps in the world to continue the work of her divine Founder and Spouse.
What is so special about Pentecost? It is worth noting that it originated with the Jewish people. They would celebrate Pentecost (in Hebrew, Shavuot) in thanksgiving for the first fruits of the wheat harvest and, later, for the giving of the Mosaic Law at Mount Sinai. It was thus a time to celebrate God’s generosity both in the created order and in the order of salvation. The name “Pentecost” is of Greek origin and means “fiftieth.” In the context of the Jewish liturgical calendar, Pentecost was 50 days after Passover.
For Christians, Passover celebrates something even more profound. It is no longer reckoned according to Passover but according to Easter, the day on which the Lord our Pasch rose from the dead. And thus Passover for us is 50 days after Easter. It does not serve as the birthday of a nation, but rather as the birthday of the Church that calls out to all nations. The Holy Spirit comes upon Jesus’s followers, gathered together in one place, to empower them to preach the Gospel and administer the life-giving sacraments even to the ends of the earth. The invisible mission of the Holy Spirit, the graces and gifts He gives so as to enliven and encourage the Church, is sensibly signified by the tongues of fire that come to rest on each one present (see Acts 2).
In short, Pentecost is important for the Church, and consequently important for our lives as sons and daughters of the Church. At Pentecost we see the power of the Holy Spirit on full display. And that power does not cease in the Church but is on offer in every generation. Granted, the Apostles and first disciples had unique and irreplaceable roles to play in salvation history. Even still, the same Spirit lavishes His gifts upon us today. We think perhaps most readily of charismatic gifts such as prophecy and tongues. These are certainly “flashier,” one might say, even if they are not meant, contrary to popular opinion, for the sanctification of the recipient but for the edification of the Body of Christ. I would like instead to speak about what are traditionally called “the gifts of the Holy Spirit,” since these are more intimately bound up with Christian life and holiness. What are these gifts, and how can we acquire them? What role do they play in the Christian life?
We find the gifts of the Holy Spirit enumerated in Sacred Scripture. The primary place to go is Isaiah 11:1–3. The prophet is speaking of the Davidic Messiah-King upon whom the Spirit of God will rest. The gifts the Spirit imparts are Fear of the Lord, Fortitude, Piety, Counsel, Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom. My reflections will draw from a book I highly recommend by Archbishop Luis M. Martinez, The Sanctifier.
What are the gifts of the Holy Spirit? They are supernaturally infused habits or dispositions or instincts whereby we are apt to be moved directly by the Holy Spirit. At times they are compared to the sails of a ship. Sails exist to catch the wind so that the ship might arrive at its proper destination. Likewise, the gifts of the Spirit make the soul docile to the movement of the Holy Spirit as we journey to eternal life.
Fear of the Lord, to mention the first gift, means more than servile fear, the fear we have when we are afraid of just punishment. Fear of the Lord is born of reverence and love; it is like the filial fear a child has before the parent whom he hates to disappoint. “One who loves deeply,” Martinez writes, “has a fear that is above all other fears—fear of separation from the beloved. This is the gift of fear which is directed by the Holy Spirit.” This life is full of trials and difficulties. Without God’s help, these can be obstacles to holiness and eternal life. And thus God gives us the gift of Fortitude, which strengthens us in doing good and avoiding evil, especially when it is dangerous or difficult to do so. “It is a confidence, a security, that produces peace in our souls in the midst of dangers, in struggles, in all our tribulations.” As I mentioned before, we have a reverence and love for God because He is our loving Father. Piety, then, is the gift whereby the Holy Spirit moves us to revere God with filial affection, to worship and praise Him, and to act with limitless generosity to our brethren whom God likewise loves. “And when it is love, not duty, that inspires our actions, we pass all limits, we abandon all measures and generously pour out the love of our hearts. This is the gift of piety.”
The last four gifts pertain to the intellect. First, Counsel is the gift whereby God directs us in matters necessary for salvation. Human life, as I said before, and as we all know well, is full of trials and difficulties. Prudence, even supernatural prudence, would not be sufficient to guide our ship to port, given the complexity of human life. “But God, who never fails us in our needs, has given us a gift by which the Holy Spirit becomes our guide.” God Himself becomes our Helper and Counselor. Second, Knowledge is the gift whereby the Holy Spirit moves us to judge correctly about divine things and about how we ought to act. “It gives us an insight into the mysterious relationships between creatures, and particularly into the great, transcendental, relationship that creatures have with God.” With this gift of Knowledge, we lift ourselves from creatures to the Creator. Third, Understanding allows us a penetrating insight or gaze into the very heart of reality, especially of those things necessary for salvation. “By it the Holy Spirit moves us so that we can penetrate the depths of all supernatural truths and thus attain our eternal salvation.” Finally, Wisdom, which stems from charity and leads back to it, is the gift whereby the Holy Spirit moves us to taste the goodness of the Lord and to judge all other things accordingly. “The gift of wisdom gives to our souls this power to experience divine things, to taste them in the depths of our being and, by that pleasure and experience, to judge all things.” Wisdom is the greatest of the Spirit’s gifts; it directs all the others.
Perhaps you have celebrated Pentecost in the past without knowing about these wonderful gifts. The good news is that the Holy Spirit stands ready to lavish them upon all who ask in faith. This, then, is my advice to you all (and to myself): (1) Get to know these gifts more profoundly, and how the Holy Spirit can use them to sanctify your life. (2) Pray for these gifts daily. All those in a state of grace have them, but perhaps not all seek to receive them in greater abundance. (3) Teach your family members and friends about these invaluable gifts. Imagine a world in which men and women are profoundly open and docile to the movement of the Holy Spirit!
Liberalism and Its Discontents
We are by nature social or political animals. We find our full flourishing as human beings not in isolation but in communion with other persons. And so Christ’s injunction not to be of the world (Jn. 17) does not necessitate being some place other than the world in which we live and act. In short, Jesus’s words relate not to our origins but to our affections or desires. Being “not of this world” means seeking first God’s kingdom and His justice, confident that if we do, He will give us our temporal necessities also (Mt. 6:33). It is with this fundamental mentality that Christians, animated by the word of Christ, engage in temporal political affairs.
The problems of the modern age in general, and those of our contemporary socio-political context more particularly, call for well-wrought solutions. But where do we seek these solutions? Not, surely, in the pseudo-logic of momentary fads or of reactionary movements. Instead, we look to the wisdom of the past, to the paths trod by our ancestors. We do this not because our forebearers were perfect, but because human beings of every age seek the truth in part by appealing to a great tradition, which G.K. Chesterton strikingly called “the democracy of the dead.” More than this, as Catholics we appeal to the theological tradition as well as to the philosophical, to faith alongside reason. Why? Because the Church has a message not only about the natural moral law and about how we ought to act together for the sake of the common good of the social order naturally understood, although she does; the Church also has a supernatural message that ought to take root in the hearts of every human being and in every human community. The latter message purifies, perfects, and elevates the former message.
This explains, at least in part, our rationale for hosting the upcoming Faith & Culture Conference, to be held May 12–13 at the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Tulsa. We intend it to be a conversation between great minds, both local and national, about perennial principles and questions. The goal is not merely heady or academic. These conversations have real potential to change the political landscape for the better. An informed, conscientious populace can only conduce to a wiser and more just nation. I would like to discuss a subject that will inevitably color and animate many of the discussions at the May conference: liberalism. The term “liberal” can mean different things in different contexts. In an American context, liberal can designate someone left leaning politically, and thus it may prove a scornful term for those who are “conservative.” On the other hand, liberal is used as a term of praise by more traditionally minded folk when describing a particular notion and method of education. I am not using the term, therefore, to speak about liberal Democrats or about liberal arts education. I am using liberal here in a more general way to denote something that has been consistently rejected and condemned by the Church, nonetheless something that, to our detriment, permeates every aspect of our social or political life.
What is liberalism? Simply put, liberalism is the undue exaltation of freedom (libertas) above all other social or political goods. Liberalism makes human freedom the chief goal or end of political life. At root, it is based on a tendency, quintessentially modern, to make “will” (as opposed to intellect) the highest principle in human life. Human reason is a measured measure, by which I mean that it is the measure or rule of our actions, yes, but one that is measured or ruled by reality. It is only when we have conformed our minds to reality that we can reach out in love to the good. Or so it is when we properly order intellect and will. Liberalism, which exalts unfettered will and freedom, exists in the theological realm as well, and these two manifestations of liberalism are not unconnected, as Pope Leo XIII argues in his encyclical Libertas:
[F]ollowers of liberalism deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is the law to himself; from which arises that ethical system which they style independent morality, and which, under the guise of liberty, exonerates man from any obedience to the commands of God, and substitutes a boundless license. The end of all this it is not difficult to foresee, especially when society is in question. For, when once man is firmly persuaded that he is subject to no one, it follows that the efficient cause of the unity of civil society is not to be sought in any principle external to man, or superior to him, but simply in the free will of individuals; that the authority in the State comes from the people only; and that, just as every man's individual reason is his only rule of life, so the collective reason of the community should be the supreme guide in the management of all public affairs.
If you can easily see our own societal moment even in these words from 1888, it is because liberalism, just as Leo XIII describes, is the air we breathe, the water in which we swim, the inescapable presupposition to every political action we take. Bound up with liberalism is an understanding of human rights based not on the goods and ends of human nature, especially those goods we call “common” because they are communicable to many without diminution, but based on a negative precept never to violate the desires of another citizen. Notice that the legitimacy or illegitimacy, the uprightness or perversity, of these desires is immaterial. In a world in which will reigns supreme, it matters not what I have chosen or why; it matters simply that I, a free subject, have chosen it.
First, individual human freedom should not be elevated above all other goods, since the private good is always ordered to the common good, and since law itself as a principle of order in society is an ordinate of reason precisely for the common good. Second, however, the vision of freedom I just described is not the Catholic vision, nor a traditional vision of any kind. For freedom is always founded and grounded in the truth, in an understanding of the wise and good order that God has made and willed for us to inhabit. Human freedom blooms in the soil of truth and responsibility toward our neighbor, to say nothing of our responsibility to Almighty God. It does not grow or bloom in the soil of indifference and self-centeredness. Sometimes these competing visions of freedom are called “freedom for excellence” and “freedom of indifference” respectively. The former gives rise, when appropriated by the members of a nation, to more peace, more justice, more social solidarity. The latter gives rise, as we see daily in our own nation and abroad, to more violence, more malice, more social discord.
Because all interpersonal interactions in the modern world are suspected of being fronts for manipulation and the will to power, the social contract is thought to protect us and to ensure that our “rights” (whether rights in truth or mere licenses to do whatever we want) remain unviolated. However, this need not be the solution, in part because the premise on which it is based is false. True enough, human relationships in this fallen world are subject to abuse and manipulation. Even still, a reorienting of our fundamental narrative, one in which will is paramount, would do much to alleviate the ills of the modern age. Human beings are not political because the social contract is the only way to ensure that we do not routinely plunder and pillage one another. We are political because we have powers of intellect and will that impel and compel us to enter into relationships of knowledge and love with other persons. We find real fulfillment in these communions, even if we are ultimately called for supernatural communion with the Triune God and with those likewise joined to Him in faith and charity.
If casting off the chains of liberalism seems impossible or even undesirable, it is, again, because liberalism so profoundly characterizes the modern project. Voluntarism, nominalism, subjectivism, relativism—these are so many interdependent poisons that weaken us and our society. Granted that liberalism is but one “topic” among many, it is sure to make an appearance at the Alcuin Institute’s Faith & Culture Conference. If you are interested in learning more about the relationship between Church and state, between Catholic culture and (American) political life, do join us on May 12–13! We would appreciate your help in understanding the principles involved and in crafting practical solutions for living as Catholic citizens in a rapidly changing world.
The Four Types of Watchfulness
“Where did that thought come from?”
Have you ever experienced an intrusive thought, seemingly out of nowhere, and embarrassingly realized how evil it was? Or, after clenching your fists and grinding your teeth for five minutes, have you realized you had been internally contemplating a current event that caused you to lose your temper and unjustly lash out at someone? How do we combat these intrusive thoughts? How do we cultivate interior peace and guard our senses to quickly dismiss these thoughts when temptation arises? I would like to suggest that, in the face of evil thoughts and temptations, we should adopt a spirit of “watchfulness.” When accompanied by prayer, watchfulness is a spiritual practice that can lead us to one of the eight beatitudes, purity of heart (Matthew 5:8). This grace given by Christ frees us from impure thoughts, impassioned words, and evil actions. It strengthens our will to keep custody of our mind and guides us to a holy way of life. Watchfulness is the guard incessantly analyzing and halting thoughts at the entrance of our hearts. And this is of great importance since our Lord said that we would be judged not only by our deeds but by our thoughts: “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man” (Mark 7:21-23). Clearly, evil thoughts are dangerous when entertained and perversely cultivated. Four Types of Watchfulness St. Hesychios of Sinai is not a well-known saint, and nothing definite is known concerning his works, as only fragments remain. However, many ascetic monks commend his work on watchfulness, inner attentiveness, and the guarding of the heart. In his treatise On Watchfulness and Holiness, St. Hesychios instructs his readers to be aware of four types of watchfulness that can assist in purifying the heart and keeping the eyes fixed upon heaven.- Closely scrutinize every mental image or provocation. We are bombarded with thousands of images every day. Corporations pay top dollar to fight for your attention and put their logo, branding, and message in front of you. What we consume affects our behavior and memory. If we intentionally fill our minds with things of truth, goodness, and beauty, our minds will, in turn, be drawn toward and recollect these transcendentals. On the other hand, if we fill our minds with the contrary, it will dominate our being, darkening our intellect by violently pushing us further from reality. The darkened intellect reaches devastating power when the imagination has built a world in its own image and likeness, surrounded by restlessness and the deafening noise of nothingness. However, guarding the purity of our imagination serves our intellect and ensures that we see the world as it really is—a world in which we are made in God’s image and likeness and meant to rest in Him. Let us be watchful of the images we consume.
- Free the heart from all thoughts, keeping it profoundly silent and still in prayer. It is the contemplation of our Lord that bars entry to evil thoughts. Prayer quiets the mind, brings to light disordered attachments, draws the heart to higher goods, and reveals the need for reconciliation. In prayer, the soul can be still in the depths of simple and singular contemplations, quenching man's profound thirst to rest in his Creator. St. Hesychios states, “When the heart has acquired stillness, it will perceive the heights and depths of knowledge; and the ear of the still intellect will be made to hear marvelous things from God.” With Christ’s help, this watchfulness keeps sins from entering our minds and cuts off sinful thoughts that previously assaulted us. While this silent prayer can initially be intimidating or awkward, offer that awkwardness to our Lord, praying that you desire comfort and rest. Ask Him to bring to light the times you have carelessly entertained impure or unholy thoughts and beg for the strength and courage to mindfully guard your intellect. Watchfulness and prayer reinforce one another. Watchfulness purifies our prayers by revealing our daily struggles and asking the Divine Physician to heal us. Likewise, prayer bolsters our desire to purify our thoughts and to remain vigilant to approach our Lord in prayer with a clean and pure heart. Through prayer, we can judge our thoughts quickly, clinging to all that is holy and discarding what is not. Let us be watchful in prayer.
- Continually and humbly call upon the Lord Jesus Christ for help. It is impossible to cleanse our hearts from impure thoughts without the constant invocation of Jesus Christ. Cleansing the soul of impassioned thoughts makes room for the salvific name of Jesus, bringing the soul joy and peace. But this does not happen accidentally; we must develop the virtuous habit of calling upon our Lord throughout the day. In her great wisdom, the Church has provided us with a blueprint through a compilation of prayers called the Liturgy of the Hours. While the laity is encouraged but not required to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, the routine of praying morning, evening, and night can help us form the habit of turning to our Lord throughout the day. By developing this habit, we can be equipped when temptation knocks on our door, instinctively invoking the Holy Spirit for guidance, for the Spirit mystically confirms Christ’s presence in us. If we fail to do so, succumbing to temptation and falling into sin, we build a city of vanity and pride populated with unholy thoughts. We must beg our Lord and His Mother for a pure and contrite heart, tearing down the prideful city through the sacrament of confession, and begin again to build upon the foundation of sanctifying grace. Let us be watchful through the day and never tire of calling upon our Lord Jesus Christ for mercy and guidance.
- Always have the thought of death in one’s mind. An overemphasis on worldly security is compensation for losing the sense of our eternal end. Recalling that we are not made for this world but for the next reminds us that the world cannot truly satisfy our desires. Bringing our death to the forefront of our consciousness can order our thoughts to our ultimate purpose, namely that we are children of God and can find hope for eternal salvation in Christ’s death and resurrection. “In all you do, remember the end of your life, and then you will never sin.” (Sirach 7:36) Let us be watchful and remember we, too, will die.
Drawing People into the Very Mystery of Christ Himself
Of St. Ambrose’s many written works, his On the Mysteries and Treatise on the Sacraments are unique in that they are, principally, catechetical lectures intended for those who are converting to Christianity and seeking baptism. While the practice of bishops personally offering catechetical instruction to new converts may seem unusual to us today, it was a common occurrence in the early Church; St. Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem and also a revered Doctor of the Church, stands out as another example of this ancient practice.
Rather than making for dry reading, there is a great poeticism and tenderness with which Ambrose approaches his pupils in these catechetical lectures. Ambrose realizes that he is not simply imparting information, but drawing people into the very mystery of Christ Himself. Thus, Ambrose’s teaching in these works is mystagogical: he does not seek to teach mere “facts” about Christ and His Church (though his works do accomplish this)—rather, he desires to impart something of his own zeal and love of the Christian faith to those he is instructing.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ambrose’s teaching on the Eucharist. After explaining the manifold significance of baptismal washing, together with the anointing of Confirmation, Ambrose seeks to invite his flock into the very heart of the Church’s worship by explaining the meaning of the Mass and the Eucharistic sacrifice. While meditating upon the Lord’s Prayer, he answers a question that, no doubt, many a Christian has pondered: Why is it that, during the Mass, we still refer to the Eucharist as “bread” in the prayers of the Church? If we truly believe that the bread has already been miraculously transformed on the altar, why do we not say “give us this day the Body of Christ” during the Lord’s Prayer?
Ambrose explains that the Greek word epiousion means two things. First and foremost, it means “super-substantial”—that is, it is “super-natural” or “beyond all substance.” By referring to the Eucharist as “super-substantial bread,” Ambrose argues, we do not deny that the Eucharist is the true Body of Christ; in fact, by asking the Lord for super-substantial bread, we explicitly affirm our faith in the Eucharist as we ask not for “the kind of bread which passes into the body, but that ‘Bread of eternal Life’ which supports the substance of our soul.”
The second meaning of the word epiousion, as Ambrose explains, is “daily.” However, this meaning is not literal, but rather symbolic: it refers to the expression used by Greek Christians to refer to “the coming day” of Christ. And so the Church, in praying the Lord’s Prayer, does not ask for mere bread, but for super-substantial, life-giving bread; and She asks that God give this bread to Her daily.
St. Ambrose then, after meditating upon this deep truth, challenges his hearers and exhorts them to a form of Eucharistic devotion which should not be unfamiliar to us: “If this is indeed daily bread, then why do you take it only once a year? Take daily what profits you daily! Live your lives such that you may deserve to receive it daily!” Here, Ambrose recommends not only taking the Eucharist daily, but also living well so that we are free to receive it daily. Though the Church maintains that Catholics should (at minimum) receive the Eucharist once a year, Ambrose warns: “Whoever does not deserve to receive daily does not deserve to receive once a year.”
Such a claim, if it seems harsh, ought to be heavily considered: If we are unwilling to receive the Eucharist daily, why is this the case? Is it because we have legitimate duties and circumstances that would make daily Mass infeasible for us, or is it because we are secretly unwilling to heed Ambrose’s admonition to “live your lives such that you may deserve to receive it daily”?
Ambrose concludes this meditation by considering the example of Job, who “offered daily sacrifice for his sons, in case they had sinned in heart or word.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church (paras. 1362–1372; 1382–1395) reminds us that the Eucharist is truly a sacrifice—and as a sacrifice, the reception of the Eucharist unites us with Christ and forgives us of our venial sins. Thus, this daily and super-substantial Bread is, like the sacrifice of Job, able to forgive us of those small sins and imperfections which we may accrue throughout our day. Because of this, Ambrose compares the Eucharist to a form of medicine which we need daily: “He who has a wound needs medicine; our wound is sin, and the medicine is this heavenly and venerable Sacrament.”This daily medicine for our souls can then heal and preserve us from all forms of sin—especially grave and mortal sins, which must be taken to the Sacrament of Confession.
This is but a small example of the deep Eucharistic piety that can be found in St. Ambrose’s On the Mysteries and Treatise on the Sacraments. These texts are wonderfully accessible meditations on the worship of the Church, and would make wonderful spiritual reading for Lent, an Adoration hour, or those looking for a glimpse at the unity of the Church’s worship across the centuries. During this National Eucharistic Revival, may God grant that we all come to as deep a love and reverence for the Blessed Sacrament as St. Ambrose so dearly wished to impart to his own spiritual flock.
St. Ambrose of Milan, pray for us!
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St. Cyril of Jerusalem and the Mystagogy of Baptism
Pentecost and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit
There are key moments in our own lives, stages of development and achievements worth remembering and celebrating. We can think here of birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and so forth. Something like this is true of the Church’s life as well. We can think of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Great Commission, and so on. But perhaps the most vital, the most defining, is an event we will soon celebrate: Pentecost. The first Pentecost is when the Church takes her first autonomous breath, as it were, when she takes her first steps in the world to continue the work of her divine Founder and Spouse.
What is so special about Pentecost? It is worth noting that it originated with the Jewish people. They would celebrate Pentecost (in Hebrew, Shavuot) in thanksgiving for the first fruits of the wheat harvest and, later, for the giving of the Mosaic Law at Mount Sinai. It was thus a time to celebrate God’s generosity both in the created order and in the order of salvation. The name “Pentecost” is of Greek origin and means “fiftieth.” In the context of the Jewish liturgical calendar, Pentecost was 50 days after Passover.
For Christians, Passover celebrates something even more profound. It is no longer reckoned according to Passover but according to Easter, the day on which the Lord our Pasch rose from the dead. And thus Passover for us is 50 days after Easter. It does not serve as the birthday of a nation, but rather as the birthday of the Church that calls out to all nations. The Holy Spirit comes upon Jesus’s followers, gathered together in one place, to empower them to preach the Gospel and administer the life-giving sacraments even to the ends of the earth. The invisible mission of the Holy Spirit, the graces and gifts He gives so as to enliven and encourage the Church, is sensibly signified by the tongues of fire that come to rest on each one present (see Acts 2).
In short, Pentecost is important for the Church, and consequently important for our lives as sons and daughters of the Church. At Pentecost we see the power of the Holy Spirit on full display. And that power does not cease in the Church but is on offer in every generation. Granted, the Apostles and first disciples had unique and irreplaceable roles to play in salvation history. Even still, the same Spirit lavishes His gifts upon us today. We think perhaps most readily of charismatic gifts such as prophecy and tongues. These are certainly “flashier,” one might say, even if they are not meant, contrary to popular opinion, for the sanctification of the recipient but for the edification of the Body of Christ. I would like instead to speak about what are traditionally called “the gifts of the Holy Spirit,” since these are more intimately bound up with Christian life and holiness. What are these gifts, and how can we acquire them? What role do they play in the Christian life?
We find the gifts of the Holy Spirit enumerated in Sacred Scripture. The primary place to go is Isaiah 11:1–3. The prophet is speaking of the Davidic Messiah-King upon whom the Spirit of God will rest. The gifts the Spirit imparts are Fear of the Lord, Fortitude, Piety, Counsel, Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom. My reflections will draw from a book I highly recommend by Archbishop Luis M. Martinez, The Sanctifier.
What are the gifts of the Holy Spirit? They are supernaturally infused habits or dispositions or instincts whereby we are apt to be moved directly by the Holy Spirit. At times they are compared to the sails of a ship. Sails exist to catch the wind so that the ship might arrive at its proper destination. Likewise, the gifts of the Spirit make the soul docile to the movement of the Holy Spirit as we journey to eternal life.
Fear of the Lord, to mention the first gift, means more than servile fear, the fear we have when we are afraid of just punishment. Fear of the Lord is born of reverence and love; it is like the filial fear a child has before the parent whom he hates to disappoint. “One who loves deeply,” Martinez writes, “has a fear that is above all other fears—fear of separation from the beloved. This is the gift of fear which is directed by the Holy Spirit.” This life is full of trials and difficulties. Without God’s help, these can be obstacles to holiness and eternal life. And thus God gives us the gift of Fortitude, which strengthens us in doing good and avoiding evil, especially when it is dangerous or difficult to do so. “It is a confidence, a security, that produces peace in our souls in the midst of dangers, in struggles, in all our tribulations.” As I mentioned before, we have a reverence and love for God because He is our loving Father. Piety, then, is the gift whereby the Holy Spirit moves us to revere God with filial affection, to worship and praise Him, and to act with limitless generosity to our brethren whom God likewise loves. “And when it is love, not duty, that inspires our actions, we pass all limits, we abandon all measures and generously pour out the love of our hearts. This is the gift of piety.”
The last four gifts pertain to the intellect. First, Counsel is the gift whereby God directs us in matters necessary for salvation. Human life, as I said before, and as we all know well, is full of trials and difficulties. Prudence, even supernatural prudence, would not be sufficient to guide our ship to port, given the complexity of human life. “But God, who never fails us in our needs, has given us a gift by which the Holy Spirit becomes our guide.” God Himself becomes our Helper and Counselor. Second, Knowledge is the gift whereby the Holy Spirit moves us to judge correctly about divine things and about how we ought to act. “It gives us an insight into the mysterious relationships between creatures, and particularly into the great, transcendental, relationship that creatures have with God.” With this gift of Knowledge, we lift ourselves from creatures to the Creator. Third, Understanding allows us a penetrating insight or gaze into the very heart of reality, especially of those things necessary for salvation. “By it the Holy Spirit moves us so that we can penetrate the depths of all supernatural truths and thus attain our eternal salvation.” Finally, Wisdom, which stems from charity and leads back to it, is the gift whereby the Holy Spirit moves us to taste the goodness of the Lord and to judge all other things accordingly. “The gift of wisdom gives to our souls this power to experience divine things, to taste them in the depths of our being and, by that pleasure and experience, to judge all things.” Wisdom is the greatest of the Spirit’s gifts; it directs all the others.
Perhaps you have celebrated Pentecost in the past without knowing about these wonderful gifts. The good news is that the Holy Spirit stands ready to lavish them upon all who ask in faith. This, then, is my advice to you all (and to myself): (1) Get to know these gifts more profoundly, and how the Holy Spirit can use them to sanctify your life. (2) Pray for these gifts daily. All those in a state of grace have them, but perhaps not all seek to receive them in greater abundance. (3) Teach your family members and friends about these invaluable gifts. Imagine a world in which men and women are profoundly open and docile to the movement of the Holy Spirit!
Liberalism and Its Discontents
We are by nature social or political animals. We find our full flourishing as human beings not in isolation but in communion with other persons. And so Christ’s injunction not to be of the world (Jn. 17) does not necessitate being some place other than the world in which we live and act. In short, Jesus’s words relate not to our origins but to our affections or desires. Being “not of this world” means seeking first God’s kingdom and His justice, confident that if we do, He will give us our temporal necessities also (Mt. 6:33). It is with this fundamental mentality that Christians, animated by the word of Christ, engage in temporal political affairs.
The problems of the modern age in general, and those of our contemporary socio-political context more particularly, call for well-wrought solutions. But where do we seek these solutions? Not, surely, in the pseudo-logic of momentary fads or of reactionary movements. Instead, we look to the wisdom of the past, to the paths trod by our ancestors. We do this not because our forebearers were perfect, but because human beings of every age seek the truth in part by appealing to a great tradition, which G.K. Chesterton strikingly called “the democracy of the dead.” More than this, as Catholics we appeal to the theological tradition as well as to the philosophical, to faith alongside reason. Why? Because the Church has a message not only about the natural moral law and about how we ought to act together for the sake of the common good of the social order naturally understood, although she does; the Church also has a supernatural message that ought to take root in the hearts of every human being and in every human community. The latter message purifies, perfects, and elevates the former message.
This explains, at least in part, our rationale for hosting the upcoming Faith & Culture Conference, to be held May 12–13 at the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Tulsa. We intend it to be a conversation between great minds, both local and national, about perennial principles and questions. The goal is not merely heady or academic. These conversations have real potential to change the political landscape for the better. An informed, conscientious populace can only conduce to a wiser and more just nation. I would like to discuss a subject that will inevitably color and animate many of the discussions at the May conference: liberalism. The term “liberal” can mean different things in different contexts. In an American context, liberal can designate someone left leaning politically, and thus it may prove a scornful term for those who are “conservative.” On the other hand, liberal is used as a term of praise by more traditionally minded folk when describing a particular notion and method of education. I am not using the term, therefore, to speak about liberal Democrats or about liberal arts education. I am using liberal here in a more general way to denote something that has been consistently rejected and condemned by the Church, nonetheless something that, to our detriment, permeates every aspect of our social or political life.
What is liberalism? Simply put, liberalism is the undue exaltation of freedom (libertas) above all other social or political goods. Liberalism makes human freedom the chief goal or end of political life. At root, it is based on a tendency, quintessentially modern, to make “will” (as opposed to intellect) the highest principle in human life. Human reason is a measured measure, by which I mean that it is the measure or rule of our actions, yes, but one that is measured or ruled by reality. It is only when we have conformed our minds to reality that we can reach out in love to the good. Or so it is when we properly order intellect and will. Liberalism, which exalts unfettered will and freedom, exists in the theological realm as well, and these two manifestations of liberalism are not unconnected, as Pope Leo XIII argues in his encyclical Libertas:
[F]ollowers of liberalism deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is the law to himself; from which arises that ethical system which they style independent morality, and which, under the guise of liberty, exonerates man from any obedience to the commands of God, and substitutes a boundless license. The end of all this it is not difficult to foresee, especially when society is in question. For, when once man is firmly persuaded that he is subject to no one, it follows that the efficient cause of the unity of civil society is not to be sought in any principle external to man, or superior to him, but simply in the free will of individuals; that the authority in the State comes from the people only; and that, just as every man's individual reason is his only rule of life, so the collective reason of the community should be the supreme guide in the management of all public affairs.
If you can easily see our own societal moment even in these words from 1888, it is because liberalism, just as Leo XIII describes, is the air we breathe, the water in which we swim, the inescapable presupposition to every political action we take. Bound up with liberalism is an understanding of human rights based not on the goods and ends of human nature, especially those goods we call “common” because they are communicable to many without diminution, but based on a negative precept never to violate the desires of another citizen. Notice that the legitimacy or illegitimacy, the uprightness or perversity, of these desires is immaterial. In a world in which will reigns supreme, it matters not what I have chosen or why; it matters simply that I, a free subject, have chosen it.
First, individual human freedom should not be elevated above all other goods, since the private good is always ordered to the common good, and since law itself as a principle of order in society is an ordinate of reason precisely for the common good. Second, however, the vision of freedom I just described is not the Catholic vision, nor a traditional vision of any kind. For freedom is always founded and grounded in the truth, in an understanding of the wise and good order that God has made and willed for us to inhabit. Human freedom blooms in the soil of truth and responsibility toward our neighbor, to say nothing of our responsibility to Almighty God. It does not grow or bloom in the soil of indifference and self-centeredness. Sometimes these competing visions of freedom are called “freedom for excellence” and “freedom of indifference” respectively. The former gives rise, when appropriated by the members of a nation, to more peace, more justice, more social solidarity. The latter gives rise, as we see daily in our own nation and abroad, to more violence, more malice, more social discord.
Because all interpersonal interactions in the modern world are suspected of being fronts for manipulation and the will to power, the social contract is thought to protect us and to ensure that our “rights” (whether rights in truth or mere licenses to do whatever we want) remain unviolated. However, this need not be the solution, in part because the premise on which it is based is false. True enough, human relationships in this fallen world are subject to abuse and manipulation. Even still, a reorienting of our fundamental narrative, one in which will is paramount, would do much to alleviate the ills of the modern age. Human beings are not political because the social contract is the only way to ensure that we do not routinely plunder and pillage one another. We are political because we have powers of intellect and will that impel and compel us to enter into relationships of knowledge and love with other persons. We find real fulfillment in these communions, even if we are ultimately called for supernatural communion with the Triune God and with those likewise joined to Him in faith and charity.
If casting off the chains of liberalism seems impossible or even undesirable, it is, again, because liberalism so profoundly characterizes the modern project. Voluntarism, nominalism, subjectivism, relativism—these are so many interdependent poisons that weaken us and our society. Granted that liberalism is but one “topic” among many, it is sure to make an appearance at the Alcuin Institute’s Faith & Culture Conference. If you are interested in learning more about the relationship between Church and state, between Catholic culture and (American) political life, do join us on May 12–13! We would appreciate your help in understanding the principles involved and in crafting practical solutions for living as Catholic citizens in a rapidly changing world.
The Four Types of Watchfulness
“Where did that thought come from?”
Have you ever experienced an intrusive thought, seemingly out of nowhere, and embarrassingly realized how evil it was? Or, after clenching your fists and grinding your teeth for five minutes, have you realized you had been internally contemplating a current event that caused you to lose your temper and unjustly lash out at someone? How do we combat these intrusive thoughts? How do we cultivate interior peace and guard our senses to quickly dismiss these thoughts when temptation arises? I would like to suggest that, in the face of evil thoughts and temptations, we should adopt a spirit of “watchfulness.” When accompanied by prayer, watchfulness is a spiritual practice that can lead us to one of the eight beatitudes, purity of heart (Matthew 5:8). This grace given by Christ frees us from impure thoughts, impassioned words, and evil actions. It strengthens our will to keep custody of our mind and guides us to a holy way of life. Watchfulness is the guard incessantly analyzing and halting thoughts at the entrance of our hearts. And this is of great importance since our Lord said that we would be judged not only by our deeds but by our thoughts: “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man” (Mark 7:21-23). Clearly, evil thoughts are dangerous when entertained and perversely cultivated. Four Types of Watchfulness St. Hesychios of Sinai is not a well-known saint, and nothing definite is known concerning his works, as only fragments remain. However, many ascetic monks commend his work on watchfulness, inner attentiveness, and the guarding of the heart. In his treatise On Watchfulness and Holiness, St. Hesychios instructs his readers to be aware of four types of watchfulness that can assist in purifying the heart and keeping the eyes fixed upon heaven.- Closely scrutinize every mental image or provocation. We are bombarded with thousands of images every day. Corporations pay top dollar to fight for your attention and put their logo, branding, and message in front of you. What we consume affects our behavior and memory. If we intentionally fill our minds with things of truth, goodness, and beauty, our minds will, in turn, be drawn toward and recollect these transcendentals. On the other hand, if we fill our minds with the contrary, it will dominate our being, darkening our intellect by violently pushing us further from reality. The darkened intellect reaches devastating power when the imagination has built a world in its own image and likeness, surrounded by restlessness and the deafening noise of nothingness. However, guarding the purity of our imagination serves our intellect and ensures that we see the world as it really is—a world in which we are made in God’s image and likeness and meant to rest in Him. Let us be watchful of the images we consume.
- Free the heart from all thoughts, keeping it profoundly silent and still in prayer. It is the contemplation of our Lord that bars entry to evil thoughts. Prayer quiets the mind, brings to light disordered attachments, draws the heart to higher goods, and reveals the need for reconciliation. In prayer, the soul can be still in the depths of simple and singular contemplations, quenching man's profound thirst to rest in his Creator. St. Hesychios states, “When the heart has acquired stillness, it will perceive the heights and depths of knowledge; and the ear of the still intellect will be made to hear marvelous things from God.” With Christ’s help, this watchfulness keeps sins from entering our minds and cuts off sinful thoughts that previously assaulted us. While this silent prayer can initially be intimidating or awkward, offer that awkwardness to our Lord, praying that you desire comfort and rest. Ask Him to bring to light the times you have carelessly entertained impure or unholy thoughts and beg for the strength and courage to mindfully guard your intellect. Watchfulness and prayer reinforce one another. Watchfulness purifies our prayers by revealing our daily struggles and asking the Divine Physician to heal us. Likewise, prayer bolsters our desire to purify our thoughts and to remain vigilant to approach our Lord in prayer with a clean and pure heart. Through prayer, we can judge our thoughts quickly, clinging to all that is holy and discarding what is not. Let us be watchful in prayer.
- Continually and humbly call upon the Lord Jesus Christ for help. It is impossible to cleanse our hearts from impure thoughts without the constant invocation of Jesus Christ. Cleansing the soul of impassioned thoughts makes room for the salvific name of Jesus, bringing the soul joy and peace. But this does not happen accidentally; we must develop the virtuous habit of calling upon our Lord throughout the day. In her great wisdom, the Church has provided us with a blueprint through a compilation of prayers called the Liturgy of the Hours. While the laity is encouraged but not required to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, the routine of praying morning, evening, and night can help us form the habit of turning to our Lord throughout the day. By developing this habit, we can be equipped when temptation knocks on our door, instinctively invoking the Holy Spirit for guidance, for the Spirit mystically confirms Christ’s presence in us. If we fail to do so, succumbing to temptation and falling into sin, we build a city of vanity and pride populated with unholy thoughts. We must beg our Lord and His Mother for a pure and contrite heart, tearing down the prideful city through the sacrament of confession, and begin again to build upon the foundation of sanctifying grace. Let us be watchful through the day and never tire of calling upon our Lord Jesus Christ for mercy and guidance.
- Always have the thought of death in one’s mind. An overemphasis on worldly security is compensation for losing the sense of our eternal end. Recalling that we are not made for this world but for the next reminds us that the world cannot truly satisfy our desires. Bringing our death to the forefront of our consciousness can order our thoughts to our ultimate purpose, namely that we are children of God and can find hope for eternal salvation in Christ’s death and resurrection. “In all you do, remember the end of your life, and then you will never sin.” (Sirach 7:36) Let us be watchful and remember we, too, will die.
Drawing People into the Very Mystery of Christ Himself
Of St. Ambrose’s many written works, his On the Mysteries and Treatise on the Sacraments are unique in that they are, principally, catechetical lectures intended for those who are converting to Christianity and seeking baptism. While the practice of bishops personally offering catechetical instruction to new converts may seem unusual to us today, it was a common occurrence in the early Church; St. Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem and also a revered Doctor of the Church, stands out as another example of this ancient practice.
Rather than making for dry reading, there is a great poeticism and tenderness with which Ambrose approaches his pupils in these catechetical lectures. Ambrose realizes that he is not simply imparting information, but drawing people into the very mystery of Christ Himself. Thus, Ambrose’s teaching in these works is mystagogical: he does not seek to teach mere “facts” about Christ and His Church (though his works do accomplish this)—rather, he desires to impart something of his own zeal and love of the Christian faith to those he is instructing.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ambrose’s teaching on the Eucharist. After explaining the manifold significance of baptismal washing, together with the anointing of Confirmation, Ambrose seeks to invite his flock into the very heart of the Church’s worship by explaining the meaning of the Mass and the Eucharistic sacrifice. While meditating upon the Lord’s Prayer, he answers a question that, no doubt, many a Christian has pondered: Why is it that, during the Mass, we still refer to the Eucharist as “bread” in the prayers of the Church? If we truly believe that the bread has already been miraculously transformed on the altar, why do we not say “give us this day the Body of Christ” during the Lord’s Prayer?
Ambrose explains that the Greek word epiousion means two things. First and foremost, it means “super-substantial”—that is, it is “super-natural” or “beyond all substance.” By referring to the Eucharist as “super-substantial bread,” Ambrose argues, we do not deny that the Eucharist is the true Body of Christ; in fact, by asking the Lord for super-substantial bread, we explicitly affirm our faith in the Eucharist as we ask not for “the kind of bread which passes into the body, but that ‘Bread of eternal Life’ which supports the substance of our soul.”
The second meaning of the word epiousion, as Ambrose explains, is “daily.” However, this meaning is not literal, but rather symbolic: it refers to the expression used by Greek Christians to refer to “the coming day” of Christ. And so the Church, in praying the Lord’s Prayer, does not ask for mere bread, but for super-substantial, life-giving bread; and She asks that God give this bread to Her daily.
St. Ambrose then, after meditating upon this deep truth, challenges his hearers and exhorts them to a form of Eucharistic devotion which should not be unfamiliar to us: “If this is indeed daily bread, then why do you take it only once a year? Take daily what profits you daily! Live your lives such that you may deserve to receive it daily!” Here, Ambrose recommends not only taking the Eucharist daily, but also living well so that we are free to receive it daily. Though the Church maintains that Catholics should (at minimum) receive the Eucharist once a year, Ambrose warns: “Whoever does not deserve to receive daily does not deserve to receive once a year.”
Such a claim, if it seems harsh, ought to be heavily considered: If we are unwilling to receive the Eucharist daily, why is this the case? Is it because we have legitimate duties and circumstances that would make daily Mass infeasible for us, or is it because we are secretly unwilling to heed Ambrose’s admonition to “live your lives such that you may deserve to receive it daily”?
Ambrose concludes this meditation by considering the example of Job, who “offered daily sacrifice for his sons, in case they had sinned in heart or word.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church (paras. 1362–1372; 1382–1395) reminds us that the Eucharist is truly a sacrifice—and as a sacrifice, the reception of the Eucharist unites us with Christ and forgives us of our venial sins. Thus, this daily and super-substantial Bread is, like the sacrifice of Job, able to forgive us of those small sins and imperfections which we may accrue throughout our day. Because of this, Ambrose compares the Eucharist to a form of medicine which we need daily: “He who has a wound needs medicine; our wound is sin, and the medicine is this heavenly and venerable Sacrament.”This daily medicine for our souls can then heal and preserve us from all forms of sin—especially grave and mortal sins, which must be taken to the Sacrament of Confession.
This is but a small example of the deep Eucharistic piety that can be found in St. Ambrose’s On the Mysteries and Treatise on the Sacraments. These texts are wonderfully accessible meditations on the worship of the Church, and would make wonderful spiritual reading for Lent, an Adoration hour, or those looking for a glimpse at the unity of the Church’s worship across the centuries. During this National Eucharistic Revival, may God grant that we all come to as deep a love and reverence for the Blessed Sacrament as St. Ambrose so dearly wished to impart to his own spiritual flock.
St. Ambrose of Milan, pray for us!
Time Well Wasted
There is arguably a connection between growing levels of stress and anxiety, especially among young people, and a culture of hyperactivity. There is a tendency to think that a person is valuable only inasmuch as he or she is contributing in a tangible, calculable way to civil society or to the Church. This tendency is perhaps more widespread here in the United States than abroad, for as a people we tend to value hard work and grittiness, at least as a hypothetical or ideal. The truth is, though, that this way of seeing work and the human person, which absolutizes work and makes it that for the sake of which human beings exist, is misguided, and it results in less fulfilled persons and thus in a disordered society.
An alternative to this modern hyperactive model can be found in Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture. He wrote the book in the throes of the post-war period in Europe, when there was indeed much to be done, much to be (re-)built. If leisure, as opposed to work, say, seems like a peculiar foundation for culture, bear in mind that Pieper does not mean laziness (and certainly not the capital sin of sloth), nor does he mean the mere absence of work. Pieper points out that leisure has its origin in the Greek skole and the Latin scola, both of which we might render as school in English. Leisure might not immediately come to mind when we reflect on our own experience of school. In fact, thinking of school might raise our blood pressure and elicit anxiety as we remember the many assignments, exams, and late-night study sessions. But the school exists to form the human person, and in an integral or complete way. It exists for the purpose of human flourishing. That is why, as Pieper explains, leisure is so bound up with the intellectual life, since reason is the highest thing in man and thus that which demands above all else to be fulfilled or perfected.
What characterizes this intellectual life? First, because we are creatures bound up with time and contingency and matter, human knowing progresses step-by-step, as it were, discursively, as it is sometimes called. Second, however, as creatures endowed with intellect, we reach out “beyond” the “human” and touch on the purely spiritual. The first aspect of human knowing does require a certain amount of intellectual work. The second aspect, on the contrary, is characterized by lightness, effortlessness. It is much the same in human relationships. They take work and careful cultivation. They require action. At the same time, an essential element of all meaningful relationships, especially marriage, is a profound receptivity and openness to the being of the beloved, not a complicated equation or rational process but a simple beholding. In short, some things are considered primarily as products of man’s blood, sweat, and tears, while others seem as pure gifts. Pieper relates discursive thought and intellectual contemplation as toil and trouble to effortless possession. The latter is the higher and the more important element even in human relationships, to say nothing of the relationship we ought to have with the Triune God.
To use a famous example from Luke 10, both Mary and Martha serve our Lord when He dwells in their house, but one more perfectly. Martha is “distracted with much serving,” as the Evangelist puts it, and Jesus Himself recognizes that she is “anxious and troubled about many things.” Mary, on the contrary, recognizes the one thing needful and so sits at Christ’s feet and listens to His teaching. Because Mary has chosen to sit in loving contemplation, Jesus judges that she has “chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” Mary exemplifies for us the leisurely spirit, which again is not laziness or complacency but loving docility to being and to the Source of being.
This is precisely what we try to accomplish at the Alcuin Institute for Catholic Culture with our annual Great Books intensive courses and Catholic Imagination Fellowship, namely, to encourage and promote the oft-forsaken art of leisure. The classes are open to all, to the motivated high school student wanting college credit and to the retiree wanting to plunge more deeply into the life of the mind. The Fellowship is intended for college-aged students and is one of many ways the Alcuin Institute is trying to bolster Catholic culture in Eastern Oklahoma. The Fellowship in particular might seem to some like a waste of time. After all, while there are certainly books to be read and tasks to be completed, the goal of the program is not action but contemplation, not utility but the pursuit of that which is desirable in itself, for its own sake.
The Great Books allow one to enter into conversation and even communion with brilliant philosophical, theological, and literary minds, despite the considerable temporal distance. What makes this communion possible is truth itself, which has a universality and objectivity such that it transcends time and space. This runs contrary to a tendency, largely modern, to doubt whether our (intellectual) ancestors have anything at all to teach us. After all, the contemporary world is alive with its own unique problems and concerns. What, then, can a Greek man born before the time of Christ teach us about virtue and the good life? What can a fourteenth century Italian poem tell us about love and loss, heaven and hell? Reading the wisdom of the past quickly dispels this doubt, it seems to me. It is hard to read Plato’s Apology without seeking to emulate the great and noble Socrates; it is practically impossible to read Dante’s Inferno without gaining some insight into divine justice and the beauty of God’s providential plan. Entering into intellectual communion with great minds has the power to make us great likewise, if we are but willing to let ourselves be transformed.
The Catholic Imagination Fellowship includes these Great Books courses, along with prayer, service to the Diocese, and cultural excursions, all of which in their own manner complement the time spent in the classroom. We intend it to be an admixture of work and leisure, always aware that the latter is the higher and more important element.
Because, as I said at the beginning, we live in a culture that has forgotten its own basis or foundation, all this may appear wasteful. But what seems to some as a waste, as trash, should in truth be every person’s treasure. I invite all those interested to “waste” time with us this summer at the Catholic Imagination Fellowship. I promise that it will be time well wasted. Visit our Fellowship page for more information!
Avoiding the Unreal: How to Read the Great Books Well
I. Reclaim your Education
“We are concerned as anybody else at the headlong plunge into the abyss that Western civilization seems to be taking,” wrote Robert M. Hutchins, editor of the 1952 Great Books of the Western World.[1] In order to “recall the West to sanity,” Hutchins, and his associate editor Mortimer Adler, compiled the fifty-four volume Great Books of the Western World series representing the primary texts from the greatest intellects in Western history.[2] From Homer, to Dante, to Shakespeare, they saw these authors in a dialogue, a “Great Conversation,” that gave the West a distinctive character.[3] These authors, especially the ancient and medieval ones, had contributed to the rise of the liberal arts and to the belief that the liberally educated man was one who had disciplined his passions in pursuit of the good. As Hutchins observed, “the aim of liberal education is human excellence.”[4]
Yet, Hutchins saw the West as undergoing a practical book burning.[5] The great books were being removed from Western education and with them any semblance of a true liberal education. Today, the book burning continues. It is evident that modern education is more a training—it trains students for a societal function and delegates the holistic, human formation to a culture of relativism. A college graduate is no longer expected to be “acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition” nor the perennial questions into truth, beauty, or goodness.[6] We are deaf to the “Great Conversation.” We are cut off from the great treasury of our intellectual inheritance and only vaguely aware it even exists.
The great books are an invitation to reclaim your education. They are a remedy to the privations of modern education and a salvageable substitute for our lack of a robust liberal arts formation. As Hutchins advocated, in reading the authors of the great books “we are still in the ordinary world, but it is an ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius.”[7] We are invited to the Great Conversation, to listen, and to add our voice to the pursuit of truth.
There is a latent danger, however, in how one approaches the great books.
II. Avoid the Sins of your Age
In his 1647 masterpiece, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, the Spanish priest Baltasar Gracian, S.J., exhorted his audience to “avoid the faults of your nation.”[8] He explains: “Water shares the good or bad qualities of the strata through which it flows, and man those of the climate in which he is born.”[9] We live, as Cardinal Ratzinger observes, under a “dictatorship of relativism,”[10] and it contaminates every feature of our intellect. To have the requisite self-awareness and virtue to purge these impurities is a “triumph of cleverness.”[11] Whether we think of the ark of Noah, the compulsion out of Plato’s cave, or the angel that led Lot out of Sodom, the great books can help us escape the errors of our age. Writers like Aristotle or St. Boethius challenge our modern presumptions and stretch our imagination to encompass new perspectives on reality. We may better see our age for what it is and what led to our present culture (or anti-culture).
Relativism, however, is pernicious and infects even the remedies against it. We should observe that the authors of the great books disagree. In fact, many of the modern great books became “great” by being contrary to most all that had preceded them. The political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is a rejection of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. The understanding of history by Karl Marx is a revolution against over two thousand years of human observation, and Friedrich Nietzsche rejects everyone to wage war against Socrates and Jesus Christ. In short, the “great books” were chosen for their impact and not principally for their truth.
The latent danger in the great books is that one simply becomes a well-read relativist. Before us are the greatest minds in the West, these minds disagree, therefore there is no reasonable expectation of truth. Even so-called conservative great books projects will refrain from saying one great book is better than another—they denounce any type of guidance to the great books, favoring a pseudo-neutrality that places dialogue over truth.[12] As Patrick Deneen observes in his 2013 essay, “Against Great Books,” “I have come to suspect that the very source of the decline of the study of the great books comes not in spite of the lessons of the great books, but is to be found in the very arguments within a number of the great books.”[13] Many of the “great books” listed in the Great Books of the Western World are the same books that led to the crisis of education in the West. As Deneen notes, “the broader assault on the liberal arts derives much of its intellectual fuel from a number of the great books themselves.”[14] If applied incorrectly, the remedy for our failing liberal education, the “great books,” becomes part of the disease.
The great books can help us avoid the errors of our age, but we cannot approach them through those same errors. Approaching the great books as some cosmopolitan relativist bears a contrary purpose than that of the traditional liberal arts. If the great books are our answer to the collapse of the liberal arts, then the great books must echo the true purpose of the liberal arts.
III. Conform your Mind to Reality
In his 1946 classic, The Intellectual Life, the French Dominican A.G. Sertillanges lays out the simple purpose of study: “The order of the mind must correspond to the order of things.”[15] He is drawing from St. Thomas Aquinas, who teaches that truth is the conformity of the mind to reality.[16] This is the purpose of the liberal arts, of the great books, and of all study: the pursuit of truth. We must labor to conform our minds to the contours of reality. We aid one another in our pursuit of truth through our words, whether oral or written, for it is the purpose of our words to convey truth. How rich we are then to have the writings of such masters as St. Augustine to help guide us in this vocation of the intellect. As Sertillanges teaches, “books are signposts” on the movement of the mind toward truth.[17] We approach such authors as a student approaches a teacher—ready for a tutelage in what is real.
All things are judged good or bad according to their purpose (or telos, as the classical Greeks called it). I know a good knife must be sharp, because I understand its purpose is to cut. And because I know its purpose, I understand that the whetstone is good for the knife while its opposite would be bad. In sum, because I understand the purpose or telos of the thing, I can know whether the quality of that thing is good or bad—and also what is good or bad for that thing. So too is it for our intellect. If the purpose of our intellect is truth, then it is by that standard I judge what is good or bad for my intellect. Like a whetstone to the knife, a true great book will sharpen my mind’s understanding of reality. It is in obedience to this telos that we, like Sertillanges, judge our study and the study of the great books in particular. Not all great books meet this standard—as some are guides to the delineations of what is real, while others labor against it.
If we are to reclaim what was lost when the liberal arts fell, then the purpose of studying the great books must be the pursuit of truth. It was not relativistic dialogue that led Bl. Alcuin of York and Emperor Charlemagne to rebuild the West. Nor was it relativism that nurtured St. Thomas Aquinas or Dante. We are the inheritors of a robust pursuit of truth—a desire to satiate in the thickness of reality.
Yet, how does one judge what is true? In other words: how do we reconcile that we turn to the great books to teach us truth, yet we are to judge the great books by whether they teach truth? Are we the arbiter of what is real? What standards or principles should one bring to the study of the great books? What was the principle of truth amongst the liberal arts?
IV. Become a Student of the Logos
In his architectonic 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed, “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.”[18] His address—arguably one of the most important postconciliar papal teachings—submits that there is a profound harmony between Greek reason and Hebrew faith. The Greek philosophers, like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, sought the logos of reality. The Greek term logos means “the account of something” or the “ordering principle of a thing.” In Plato’s Republic, for example, Socrates is seeking the logos of justice—to know the reason and reality of what justice is. Aristotle speaks of logos as an argument that appeals to the intellect. The pursuit of the logos is part of our intellectual inheritance. It cultivated in the West the belief that nature, and all within it, bears a discoverable, rational order. It is at the heart of both our philosophy and our empirical sciences, as from logos we draw the word logic and the suffix –logy, as in biology (the account of life) or zoology (the account of animals). If truth, as aforementioned, is the conformity of the mind to reality, it was the concept of logos that taught the West that reality was an ordered, objective, and rational whole.
Greek reason and Hebrew faith began a dialogue hundreds of years prior to Christ. As Pope Benedict XVI observes, “despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature.” To the Holy Father’s point, one may compare the violent clash of Greeks and Hebrews in First and Second Maccabees with the notable influence of Greek thought upon the reflections on faith in the Book of Wisdom or Sirach. Moreover, it is notable that the first Old Testament canon, the Septuagint (c. 250 B.C.), was a Greek translation centered in Alexandria. In sum, Greek reason coupled with Hebrew faith under Roman order tilled the earth for the coming of Jesus Christ. As St. Paul teaches, our Lord came in the “fullness of time” (Gal 4:4).
The zenith of this harmony is provided by St. John, as he opens his Gospel with an allusion to Genesis: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” St. John notably gives the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity the name Logos. He further proclaims, “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14). Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, is the Logos of all creation—the ordering principle of reality itself. As Aristotle notes that logos can be a communication of reason, so too is the Logos the Word—the Word spoken by the Father in Genesis that structured the very order of being. The rational order of reality observed by the Greeks is the work of the Eternal Word, the Logos. As St. Paul teaches, in Jesus Christ “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… all things were created through him and for him” (Col 1:16). Note as well that the Logos not only created reality but continues to hold it in existence (Col 1:17). What the Greeks sought via reason and what the Hebrews sought via faith is revealed to be Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Eternal Logos.
Truth is the conformity of the mind to reality, because objects in reality have a logos—a rational order—to which the mind may adhere. Here, we may better understand why Christ proclaims He is the Truth (John 14:6). If Jesus is the Logosof all that is real, Reason-itself, the account of all creation, then to conform your mind to Him would be to contemplate the Truth of all things. He is not the logos of any particular thing, but the Logos of all—and in Him and through Him we may come to a better understanding of particulars. The liberal arts must be understood as a pursuit of the Logos. The student would undergo a disciplined order of knowledge that moved the intellect into conformity with reality. First, the student would learn grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the trivium), and then arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium). All of these, however, and such higher sciences as medicine or law, were subservient to and perfected by the queen of the sciences, theology. The liberal arts were a foundation to and an acknowledgment of the study of God by both reason and faith, as illuminated by the Logos. It is amongst the debris of what was such a time-tested tutelage in the real that we must return to the great books. Deprived of this education, we turn first to the teachers who may be called “the ancients,” the intellects from Homer to Dante, who built up such a rich treasury of education. It is by their observations on nature and revelation that we learn of the Logos.
We live in the age of the anti-logos. Modernity is a rejection. The second half of the great books, “the moderns,” from Machiavelli to present, largely represents a deconstruction of any belief in an ordered whole of creation. While there are certainly good modern thinkers, such as Cardinal Newman or Pope Benedict XVI, the main trait of our modern age is rejection. Man no longer turns to God, revelation, nature, or history for guidance, but rather these become malleable to man’s creative will. Each man becomes his own god, his own “Logos,” who believes reality should conform to the “truth” of his own imagination. We live in an anti-culture—our dominative tutelage in the unreal. We live in a post-Christian paganism that no longer even adheres to the natural logos of Socrates or Aristotle. The sin of our age, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI noted, is the sin against the Creator.[19] Man now makes his own reality and demands others adhere to it—the dictatorship of relativism.
Let us reclaim our culture. Let us reclaim our education by turning to the teachers of what is real, those who may help us—in this age of the unreal—conform our minds to Reason-itself, the Eternal Logos, Jesus Christ.
Cervantes and the Vice of Curiosity
In El Curioso Impertinente—“The Curious-Impertinent”—we meet Anselmo and Lothario, two dear friends since birth, close enough to be called “The Two Friends of Florence” by all who knew them. Anselmo, of a romantic nature, was always enamored of love and poetry, and so won the hand of one of the most beautiful and virtuous women of Florence, Camilla. Lothario, for his part, was a more practical man and devoted himself to study, hunting, and cultivating his administrative skills.
But soon, Anselmo becomes restless in his security, and begins to wonder how secure he truly is in his relationship with Camilla. As Anselmo confides his woes to Lothario, he expresses that he has been consumed by one question: whether Camilla’s chastity is by virtue of her inward moral purity, or simply the product of circumstance. Anselmo fears whether, if given the chance, Camilla would betray him and run off with another man. To satisfy his curiosity, and to assuage his fears, he asks Lothario for a favor: that Lothario try to seduce Camilla.
It is easy to imagine how Anselmo’s curiosity—along with his determination to satisfy it—ends up costing him dearly. What is less obvious is how much our own ill-tempered appetites for useless or harmful knowledge end up costing us. In an age saturated with smartphone notifications, clickbait, and social media, it may not seem apparent to us that we’ve become slaves to our curiosity.
St. Augustine, in Book 10 of his Confessions, laments our tendency to seek knowledge that is grotesque, harmful, or useless. “What pleasure is there to see, in a lacerated corpse, that which makes one shudder? And yet if it lie near, we flock there to be made sad and turn pale.” He goes on to explain that such knowledge has no use to it, and provides us with no benefit, spiritual or otherwise. “How many minute and contemptible things daily tempt our curiosity? And who can number the times we have succumbed? […] When this heart of ours is made the receptacle of these crowds of vanities, our prayers are often interrupted and disturbed by them.” By allowing our curiosity to run wild even some of the time, we unwittingly invite the distractions of idle thoughts and meaningless “wonderings” when we ought to be focusing the most—at work, with our families, and when praying at home or in the Mass.
El Curioso Impertinente, written during the Catholic Counter-Reformation, has proven to be prophetic. “Remove not the ancient boundary which your fathers have set” (Prov. 22:28). Cervantes saw, in his own time, the consequences of heedlessly pushing the boundaries against authority in the name of “knowledge” or “freedom.” Ever since then, Western society has been marked by curiosity (and its sister vice, acedia or “spiritual slothfulness”). From the Enlightenment’s proud champions of an anti-Catholic “science” and politics to today’s champions of sexual and gender experimentation, many of our sorrows can be traced back to the question, “Did God really say…?”
Some questions are not worth asking, and some ideas are too dangerous to entertain. Just as we must mortify our flesh to temper our physical appetites, so too must we control our intellectual appetites, and keep our thoughts on higher truths.
Baptism and the Salvation of Infants
The Church teaches that someone who is invincibly ignorant of God’s revelation concerning the necessity of baptism can be saved without the sacrament.[1] But this applies only to someone who has the use of intellect and will to seek truth and do the will of God in accord with their understanding of it.[2] So, the question is, “What happens to infants to who die without baptism? They don’t have the use of their intellect and will.”
Some theologians have proposed the idea of Limbo for the children, which is a state of the afterlife akin to that of the Old Testament righteous saints before they went to heaven—a state of natural bliss that is not heaven, hell, or purgatory (see Luke 16:19-31).
Traditionally, the Magisterium explicitly defended the doctrine of Limbo as a legitimate theological opinion. In his 1794 papal bull Auctorem Fidei, Pope Pius VI called the rejection of Limbo by the Jansenists “false, rash, and injurious to Catholic schools.”
Although the Magisterium has never rejected Limbo as an acceptable and legitimate teaching, it has more recently proposed another way to approach the topic of unbaptized infants. For example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God,” and then gives two reasons as to why we can “hope that there is a way of salvation” for these children: 1) God desires all men to be saved, and 2) Jesus was tender toward children (CCC 1261).
The bottom line is that the Church doesn’t know with certainty whether children who die without baptism receive the Beatific Vision or exist in Limbo. The simple reason for such agnosticism is that it’s not revealed to us. This testifies to the humility of the Church and her concern for preaching only what Christ has revealed. In the end, however, we do have reason to hope for the salvation of unbaptized infants. And that’s something that we can take comfort in.
[1] See Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 1260. [2] See Ibid.
Taylor Swift is Right: I’m the Problem
I will confess to all the “Swifties” out there that I am no expert on Taylor Swift or her music, and, in addition to possibly putting my ignorance of Taylor Swift on display, the fact that I am writing about her in my latest musing may be opening myself up to lots of future jokes from my colleagues in the Alcuin Institute. But that’s okay, full steam ahead. I should start by laying out the context of how this particular musing came about. Some time ago I was able to spend quality time with my nephew who is in eighth grade. Like many eighth graders, his world is one filled with music, movies, and pop culture. In one of our conversations, it came up that Taylor Swift had just released a new album (my nephew would want me to clarify at this point that he is not a “Swiftie” …we were discussing music in a general sense). So as a result of this conversation, I listened to the first song released called “Anti-Hero.” Thus, this musing.
What caught my attention were the lyrics. Maybe the words were simply creative songwriting, but they come across to the listener as being very personal insights into the life of Taylor Swift, confessional even. One particular line states, “I should not be left to my own devices, they come with prices and vices, I end up in crisis, tale as old as time.”[1] Now, anytime I hear “tale as old as time” tied to “vices,” my thoughts are immediately directed to the story of the Fall in Genesis.
It is a well-known story. Adam and Eve rejected God’s warning about eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and, left to their own devices, they ended up in a crisis. The price of their sin was death and separation from God. In the aftermath of recognizing their sinfulness they hide from God among the trees. When God asks, “Adam, where are you?” it is not that God doesn’t see them in hiding, or that He doesn’t know their location. He is asking the question out of love. God gives Adam the opportunity to confess the sin and make things right. Adam does not confess, rather he blames his sin on Eve and even God Himself since He gave Eve to be his wife. As the Easter Exsultet says, “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a redeemer!” Through the crucifixion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our sin has been forgiven and we are once again able to enter into a relationship with God.
Being sinners, we tend to fall back into sin over and over again. Because of this, the Church has been gifted with the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to this sacrament as the sacrament of forgiveness, “since by the priest’s sacramental absolution God grants the penitent ‘pardon and peace’” (CCC, 1449).
Back to Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift’s song ends with lyrics which insinuate that at her funeral, her family members will think that she is laughing at them in hell when they realize that she has left them nothing in the will. Now if this is some insight into Taylor Swift's self-perception and not just creative songwriting, this is heartbreaking. Taylor, it does not have to end this way. Just as in the case of Charles Dicken’s Ebenezer Scrooge, there is time for conversion. In fact, it is encouraging that, unlike Adam and Eve, who blame everyone but themselves, in the chorus of Taylor’s song there is a line which says, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”[2] There is no hiding in the trees here. In a world in which we like to make excuses for all of our sins and problems, this seems like a refreshingly honest confession. So, Taylor, forgive me, I don’t know much about you, but if you are reading my musings, I do have the answer to where you can find the peace you are seeking. If the lyrics of this song are your own struggles, you have the confession down, you should take it to Christ through the Sacrament of Confession. If you are Catholic, after confessing the priest will give you absolution; if not, you can also find healing and mercy in the conversation with the priest. The same goes for anyone else reading this article and carrying around the weight of your sins. Go to Confession, ask for forgiveness, be forgiven, and enter into the pardon and peace of Jesus Christ.
[1] Taylor Swift, “Anti-hero,” Midnights (New York: Republic Records, 2022). [2] Taylor Swift, “Anti-hero,” Midnights (New York: Republic Records, 2022).
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