New Year's Resolutions

I can't find it anywhere, but I'm sure I've posted the GKC essay on New Year's Resolutions somewhere before. He says that the object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year; it is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

This seems spot on to me, and I enjoy making and keeping (with various success) New Year's resolutions more with each passing year. Among others, here's what I have for 2015:

1) Iron my pants. 2015 is the year I will turn 30, which I suppose means that I am officially an adult. And adults probably need to get up early enough and somehow suffer through the extraordinary inconvenience of locating and plugging in the iron to iron their wrinkly shirts and pants. If I were feeling particularly ambitious I could just iron my clothes after they come out of the dryer, but maybe we'll save that one for 2016. Anyhow, if you see me with a wrinkled tie, shirt, or pants in 2015, please remind me that I am failing in my New Year's resolution. And then say something to make me feel properly ashamed.

2) Learn how the boy's car seats actually work. This one is from J. I asked her a few days ago whether she had any New Year's resolutions that she was thinking of for me, and she answered that "I think it's sort of dangerous to make suggestions like that for someone else." And I told her "Yes, but if you don't give me a New Year's resolutions the it would be rude of me to give you all the good ones I came up with for you." The car seat resolution is a good one. Whenever I have to put a car seat in or take it out of the car I inevitably bring a webby, buckly, half-knotted mess back to her to figure out for me. If she were ever gone when I needed to switch a seat or if something were to happen to her, the boys would be in trouble.

3) Get up a half hour earlier. The hour and a half to two hours that I have before the boys get up is the time when I get done all the things that I would usually resolve to do on New Year's--reading, exercising, balancing the checkbook, writing, translating. But 6:00 to 7:30 goes by too soon...I'm going to aim for 5:30 this year.

4) Learn how to cook two more meals decently well. Because if J were ever gone for a week or if something happened to her, the boys would probably want to eat something besides pancakes and Spanish rice.

5) Ask people more questions. The people with whom I have the best sorts of conversation and the most natural social grace are the sorts of people who are constantly asking me (and everyone else) genuinely interesting questions. And the people with whom conversation is a either a mild bore or an outright challenge tend to redirect any social traffic back towards statements about themselves.

In the spirit of Resolution 5, does anyone have any Resolutions of their own that they'd like to share?

Image, Symbol, and Idol

One of the projects I’ve been engaged in recently is a commentary on the book of Romans with my father-in-law, brother-in-law, and wife, exploring the book verse by verse for one theological reason, but finding, of course, a wealth of topics unrelated to our original purposes. In reading Romans 1 I was struck for the first time how important the sin of idolatry is to all Paul writes about the pagan Gentiles in vv.18-32. If you’d asked me six years or even six months ago whether there was any special significance to idolatry over and against any other sin in Paul’s argument I probably wouldn’t have seen anything. If there was a charge of special importance, I probably would have thought it vv. 24-27, with idolatry being something of an undesirable norm for the pagans in the way that slight speeding and overeating are for Americans.

Yet on this re-reading it struck me how in Paul’s theology and in the structure of his argument pagan idolatry is the arch-sin, the sin which leads vv. 24-27. This is not because idolatry is bad for you but it can lead to something worse; rather, 24-27 is both the consequence and the judicial sentence of idolatry: humanity lost. Or to put it another way, the imago Dei drive into exile.

In typically Pauline fashion, his syllogistic philosophy evokes the Israel story. I long failed to understand in my reading of the Old Testament why idolatry was so gravely important. Israel might be full of murder, adultery, and oppression, but it was always idolatry that called down judgment, and somehow these other sins were all expressed in the language of idolatrous unfaithfulness. The people are idolatrous and the glory is taken from the temple; the people are idolatrous and receive ignominious defeat at the hands of their enemies; the people are idolatrous and forfeit their inheritance, ultimately led off into exile. In Romans 1, this pattern is echoed powerfully in Paul’s indictment of Pagan humanity’s failure.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, since every vice can be somehow expressed as a form of idolatry—little bronze statues aren’t required. Chesterton speaks somewhere of how most religious error is preferring the symbol of something over the reality which that symbol represents. For example, a man prefers the image of the cross over the divine mercy of which the cross is a symbol, and he takes a sword to his enemies. He prefers the image of the hymnal over the praise to which the hymnal is an aid, and is no longer able to open his mouth. He prefers money itself, which is just green paper and metal discs, over the healthy things which money ought to represent, like wine and horses. The image of a woman is loved more than the love of a woman, and the image of one’s self is nurtured more carefully than the virtue, manner, and health which actually is one’s self. In advocating the realities of things over their images, I begin to sound like a Platonist!

It was Neil Postman who first pointed out to me how apart from all the other ancient peoples, the Jews alone did not depict their God, and even received specific instructions—over Thou Shalt Not Murder and many others more important—that they were not to do so. First came monotheism, and then the imagelessness of God, of which they were so respectful that they would neither write down nor speak Yahweh’s name.

The creator God would not be symbolized, imaged, or depicted in something created.

Remembering this truth helps one to realize afresh how spectacular the incarnation is, for after thousands of years of keeping—albeit with various success—this commandment, God finally acts for his people, and in doing so, he gives them the long withheld image. In other words, Jesus fulfills the second commandment, for now there is an image of Israel’s God, and he is come down form Galilee.

In light of this, I’m afraid that Protestantism might have been overhasty in reacting against the rich iconography of the Roman and Eastern churches. Yes, there is of course a danger in such ornate images, but there is also a danger in lack of images. Jesus came, and he was seen by men. There must be some way, and I’m very much open for suggestions, on how we can celebrate the way in which God’s image was uniquely revealed in him without slipping into pseudo-paganism on the one hand, or on the other hand preferring the barren ugliness of Protestant churches.

There’s much more to be said, from Plato to Wittgenstein—whose work I’ve recently started on—about the relation of real things to the symbols we use to represent them. This conversation not only includes images, but is deeply concerned with language. This probably means that it’s getting beyond me and it’s time for me to start writing about classical music again.

Aquinas

Saturday was the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas has been a daily companion of mine for several years. I'm currently translating the Summa Contra, and read a translation of the the Summa Theologica before that. I'm always shocked by how little of St. Thomas is read in seminaries, for his method and philosophy seem to be exactly the salve needed for so many postmodern irritations. The educated churchman knows something about Aquinas' five proofs, and perhaps recalls that he wrote a good bit about angels. On the whole, though, he is condemned part and parcel with the scholastic movement as a severe and inhuman logic-chopper, in contrast to the more presentable St. Francis, who had the good sense to be something of an environmentalist, and is thus given admission to favor. (I paraphrase the form of Chesterton's biography, as will be obvious to anyone who has read it.)

Despite the caricatures, Aquinas was a patient and beneficent man, the son of aristocratic parents whom he scandalized by entering monastic orders. His professional life was as a rationalist, but he was the sort of man who wrote openly amor Dei melior est quam cognitio. He is credited with baptizing the works of Aristotle, and his metaphysics are, as far as I can tell, unanswerable even after Kant, Hume, and Wittgenstein. Aquinas is most beneficial, however, despite what one who had only heard of the five proofs would think, not as a missionary to heathens who need reasoning with but to Christians who need Christianizing. By bringing Aristotle into Christendom he makes it more Christian, especially in a world gone wild with unreason.

The greatest good a re-reading of Aquinas might work would be to re-unite the substance of the Trinity against even those Orthodox who would insist on dividing God the purifying and saving spirit from God the creator. A great deal of Evangelical fervor is so committed to the salvation God works that it might have forgotten what is the good which God would save. If one can get through the rather long first portions of his books--for Aquinas always insists on starting at the very beginning, and never hurries through any argument--one discovers that this God of pure act, being-as-goodness, etc., is in his transcendent way rather surprisingly involved in solid and dirty things like soil and bushes and human beings.

Aquinas is also as polite as he is patient in his argument. He takes for granted that to argue with a man means to argue with him on his own grounds, and every chapter of the Summa begins with a shocking sentence such as "It seems there is no God..." which would then be answered by the things men hold in common (facts, accepted propositions, they manner in which these facts relate rationally to one another), and last of all, yet somehow without disrespect, some sentence along the lines of, "Holy Scripture also confirms this." In short, he always allows that there are several paths to the truth, precisely because there is only one truth, a truth of which he is never afraid.

The trouble about St. Aquinas is that he is a brilliantly simple author who translates dreadfully. A second year Latin student could read him with ease in his own tongue, but it takes someone with extraordinary English and exceptional concentration to read him translated. This morning I read the sentence: Adhuc, Si ens in potentia, inquantum huiusmodi, natum est moveri, quia quod potest esse potest non esse; sequitur ulterius divinam voluntatem esse variabilem. That's a fairly straightforward sentence in Latin words; but in English words, the clearest it might be rendered would be To this, if being is in potency, in so far as of this sort, it is made to be moved, since what is able to be is able not to be; which would follow last the divine will to be variable.

(Don't worry, St. Thomas rebuts this idea this in the next paragraph)

We lift our glasses, rationally, to the Dumb Ox.


This is, by the way, a very good wine.