Our pro-life president

http://www.lifenews.com/nat4757.html


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090121/pl_nm/us_obama_regulations

http://lifenews.com/nat4893.html

http://www.twincities.com/ci_11856742

W.H. Auden and the Imago Dei

"With Auden's turn to Christianity after his emigration to the United States in 1939, his poetic theory took on a vocabulary drawn less from psychology and more from theology. But he consistently described poetry in ways that suggest he saw it as modelling a non-coercive love only theoretically possible in social bonds or actual personal relationships. 'In a successful poem,' he wrote in 'The Virgin and the Dynamo,' 'society and community are one order and the system may love itself because the feelings which it embodies are all members of the same community, loving each other and it.' (DH, p69). Behind this proposition would seem to be the notion that poetic form can exemplify a reconciliation of human sameness and difference through its negotiation of the semantic multiplicity of language itself and the emotional multiplicity of the poet. Were such patterned arrangements carried out in society, Auden acknowledges, the result would be totalitarianism, but precisely because art is gratuitous - pointless, unnecessary - it provides what he calls an 'analogy' to 'paradise' or 'the forgiveness of sins.' Poetry, in other words, is an emblem of what Auden liked to term 'the City' in Augustine's sense - the City of God. Such verbal and emotional orders, however, are radically at odds with modernity, which the later Auden habitually attacks for the destructive sameness compelled by totalitarian systems and capitalist mass culture. Poetry's voice may amount to no more than that of a 'suburb of dissent,' but it marginality makes possible an intimacy that modern mass society would not otherwise tolerate. Ultimately, for Auden, Eros and Agape seem to merge in his views of poetry. In Secondary Worlds (1968), he defined poetic meaning as 'the outcome of a dialogue between the words o the poem and the response of whoever is listening to them,' a deeply interpersonal process yielding 'the kind of knowledge implied by the biblical phrase "Then Adam knew Eve his Wife": knowing is inseparable from being known' (SW, p.114). From this angle, all poetry can be read as love poetry, for all poems bear the potential for intimate self-revelation, by both poet and reader.'

- Richard R. Bozorth, "Auden: Love Sexuality and Desire." From the Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden


I recently had a fruitful exchange with the Ochlophobist on the topic of Auden's poetry, and after reading this essay, I am even more convinced that the Ochlophobist's insights on Auden are correct. Bozorth's thesis is itself not particularly interesting - he spends most of the essay exploring Auden's career through the lens of gay/lesbian studies, and ends up expressing deep confusion over the tension between Auden's semi-public homosexuality and his persistent attitude that "homosexuality was psychologically or morally suspect." But I find it interesting that even through such distorted lenses, Bozorth seems to glimpse the deeper aesthetic that drive's Auden's work, particularly in his concept of poetry's gratuitousness and its capacity for revelation. Pace Bozorth, however, I would argue that for Auden, poetry is gratuitous, not because it is pointless or useless, but because the Latin root of 'gratuitous' points us towards an object which can help us ascend to a higher plane than the visible and material, perhaps even to that Augustinian City which Bozorth invokes. Similarly, I would argue that for Auden, poetry succeeds not because it is a revelation of the Self, but because it reveals the human person. I am fascinated by Auden because I think he sees in the human person a glimpse of the imago dei, and the entire story of Creation contained therein. Thus Auden sees clearly the modern distortions the imago as well as the possibility of its redemption, via the ascent of eros into agape that Bozorth describes. In his poetry and apparently in his life also, Auden captures the tension between the reality of that distortion and the possibility of that redemption which characterizes human existence this side of the Eschaton. It is this tension that Bozorth cannot see, and which causes him such critical confusion. It is also what makes Auden a deeply Christian poet and worthy of regular reading.

Ross Douthat on RJN

"Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things. I don't know exactly when my family began subscribing, but I know it was before we became Catholics - and I know that long before I could quite figure out exactly what, say, Rene Girard meant when he talked about mimesis and the crucifixion, I was reading Neuhaus' sprawling "Public Square" column every month. I would call it a proto-blog, that feature, with its mix of long and short material, and its cover-the-waterfront feel, but that does it an injustice: The very best bloggers strain and fail to achieve the mix of range and rigor that seemed effortless for Neuhaus, and the ease with which he moved between esoteric theological disputes and the latest culture-war fracas. Richard Dawkins likes to say that Charles Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Month after month, issue after issue, Richard John Neuhaus - through his writing, and also through the writers he cultivated - demonstrated to my adolescent and early-twentysomething self that it was possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian."


My sentiments exactly.

Richard John Neuhaus 1936 - 2009

There simply are not enough words, and if there were, I could not put them in the right order, to fully express the intellectual and spiritual debt which I owe to Fr. Neuhaus. It sounds strange to say such a thing about a man I never met, but it is nonetheless true. Looking back, I can see that it was my regular encounter with his work in First Things that started to prepare me for my intellectual and spiritual journey into the Church. It seems ridiculous to think that reading a public policy journal could lead one into the greatest spiritual adventure of one's life, but there it is. I do not see how I would have been reconciled to the Church had Father Neuhaus not been such a faithful servant in the tasks of public life to which he was given. Earlier tonight I put my three sons to bed and it gave me pause to wonder at how different it all could have been had I not absorbed the joyful sense of spiritual and intellectual adventure that permeated Fr Neuhaus' writing. It was from Fr Neuhaus that I first glimpsed the deep beauty of the Catholic teaching on the married state, and of the joy that comes from faithfully living one's vocation in life. It was from Fr Neuhaus that I learned to appreciate the simple and humble blessedness that comes from spiritual fidelity to one's state in life, be it great or small. And as a man given to deeply-held prejudices and hasty judgments in intellectual discourse, I learned from Fr Neuhaus the virtue of the old Thomistic saw - "Seldom affirm, never deny, always distinguish." Requiescat, RJN.

Mother of God

For the most part, I think the various critiques of the Ordinary Form of the mass made by traditionalists are silly and overblown. But every once in a while, I encounter liturgical errors that are downright preposterous, and I start to wonder if there isn't something more to their argument. Today's solemnity supplies a good example:

From the concluding prayer at today's mass, the 1973 ICEL translation is as follows:

Father,
as we proclaim the Virgin Mary
to be the mother of Christ and the mother of the Church,
may our communion with her Son
bring us to salvation.


Now the entire purpose of today's mass was to celebrate the title "Mother of God," a theological formula explicitly affirmed in contradiction to the Nestorian title "Mother of Christ." Ending a mass dedicated to a specific orthodox theological formula by invoking the precise opposite of that formula is very, very bad liturgical form, to say the least. One's sympathies for the SSPX begin to warm ever so slightly....

Gregory of Nyssa and the Doctrine of Analogy

To me, something like the following is signified through this verse: the unlimited [divine] nature cannot be accurately contained by a name; rather, every capacity for concepts and every form of words and names, even if they seem to contain something great and befitting God's glory, are unable to grasp his reality. But starting from certain traces and sparks, as it were, our words aim at the unknown, and from what we can grasp we make conjectures by a kind of analogy about the ungraspable. Whatever name we may adopt to signify the perfume of divinity, it is not the perfume itself which we signify by our expressions.; rather, we reveal just the slightest trace of the divine odor by means of our theological terms. As in the case of jars from which perfume has been poured out, the perfume's own nature is not known. But from the slight traces left from the vapors in the jar, we get some idea about the perfume that has been emptied out. Hence, we learn that the perfume of divinity, whatever it is in its essence, transcends every name and thought. However, the wonders visible in the universe give material for the theological terms by which we call God wise, powerful, good, holy, blessed, eternal, judge, savior, and so forth. All these give some indication of the divine perfume's quality. Creation retains the traces of this divine perfume through its visible wonders as in the example of a perfume jar.

- First Homily on the Song of Songs



We should not proceed without considering why the king does not use gold as his ornament but images of gold; and not silver, but studs impressed from this material in the likeness of silver. We understand this as follows: every teaching concerning the ineffable nature of God, even if it seems to reveal the best and highest possible understanding, is the likeness of gold, not gold itself, for the good transcending the human mind cannot be accurately presented. Even if someone like St Paul was initiated into the ineffable mysteries of paradise and heard words not to be spoken, any understanding of God remains unutterable. Paul himself says that such conceptions are ineffable. Those persons, therefore, who offer us any good thoughts about these mysteries, are unable to state anything regarding the divine nature. Rather, they speak of the splendor of God's glory, the stamp of his Nature, the form of God, the Word in the beginning, the Word being God. All these expressions seem to us who have not seen the divine nature as gold from that treasure. But for those capable of looking on the truth, they are likenesses of gold and not gold shining in the delicate studs of silver. Silver is the meaning of these words as scripture says: "The tongue of the just is a fire-tried silver." [Prov 10:20]

The revelation presented here says that the divine nature transcends every conception which tries to grasp it. Our understanding of the divine nature resembles what we seek. It does not show its form, which no one has seen or can see, but through a mirror and a riddle it provides a reflection of the thing sought, that is, a reflection present in the soul by a certain likeness. Every word signifying these conceptions is like a point lacking extension since it cannot show what is present in the mind. Thus every thought of ours falls short of the comprehension of God. Every word which tries to explain God seems to be a little dot incapable of being coextensive with the breadth of the conception. Thus the soul led through such conceptions to comprehend what cannot be laid hold of except by faith must establish in itself a nature transcending every intelligence.

- Third Homily on the Song of Songs

Last Things

While I have generally resisted the tide of growing pessimism that has been reflected in various corners of blog-world regarding the state of our society, I think it's safe to say that, when the normally-sanguine Richard John Neuhaus starts openly discussing Kulturkampf, then things are very bad indeed.

For myself, I think Cardinal Stafford's recent remarks at CUA are a comprehensive summary of why we as a society have lost our way, and why there very well may be no return. I recommend reading the entirety of his remarks, and reflecting on them in conjunction with the close of the liturgical year.