Literally: that which stands beneath

I tried asking Fr. John today why hypostasis is so important in Orthodox theology. He got kind of excited, and said that way long ago it meant nature, but St. Basil the Great, in an extremely important act of theological genius (those weren’t his words, but he was very excited at this point; something about it being the most important meaning change in history) changed the meaning to person, because we do not and cannot know the nature of a being in the abstract, but only as manifested in particular persons. So Christ is a hypostatic union of humanity and divinity because he inseparably unites human and divine nature in a single person. But that’s still mysterious – perhaps necessarily so – hence, being an enigmatic rather than neglected word. One of these days I should find out what it was St. Basil wrote where he talked about that stuff.

This is the root of hesychism: keeping silence. Usually quite a lot. Not just externally, but also in mind. It usually goes with nepsis: watchfulness. Hesychia, then, is attentive listening: usually listening to silence, in silence. A hesychist might go out into the wilderness and begin by saying a short prayer more or less continually, like “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!” – and then eventually simply contemplate God in watchful silence. But hesychia isn’t only important for hermits. Even if the rest of us never advance very far in hesychism, at the least we can work on all the unhelpful thoughts that constantly distract us from listening to God – who tends to speak mostly through silence. And many – perhaps most – of the things we think or speak about throughout the day aren’t necessary or even important – they’re there so that we don’t have to deal with undistracted silence; because we’re unused to it, and it’s uncomfortable to us. But it’s also when we’re most likely to hear God. To review: A person might undertake the unmercinary podvig of hesychia in order to cleanse the nous from logismoi so as to encounter God apaphatically in the process of theosis. There will be a quiz worth 20 points on Monday. Extra credit for correct spelling in Greek and Cyrillic.

So… today’s my birthday! I’m 23! I’m not sure that there’s much difference between 22 and 23. Not like there supposedly is between, say, 20 and 21. It sounds just as silly to say “I’m all of 23 and haven’t done anything with my life!” Or even “I’m only 23: why should anyone expect me to have done anything with my life?” In any event, that’s my announcement.

Before taking my review seriously, you might want to know that I am unqualified to review any movie at all, and this movie in particular, as I remember neither the book nor what it’s like to be a child especially well. So I obviously am working from an uninformed opinion in saying that I disagree that this movie is too scary for children, but that nevertheless I doubt that it’s really a children’s movie. Mostly children might find it boring. Except for the beautiful visuals, interesting soundtrack, and good leading child actor, I found it boring myself. But it really is an artistically beautiful film, which made it worth watching. The really peculiar thing about this movie is that it’s all about the psychological insecurities, manipulations, upheavals, and other instabilities of children and monsters who act like children: the plot is seeing what those instabilities look like in the absence of any parents or plot to function as a distraction. Upon leaving the theatre I’m left with the impressions: “that was lovely!” and “immature friendships can be wretched!” I’m not sure that’s sufficient to make this movie worth watching.

We’re coming up on mid-terms, which means that I’ll be exchanging the politics seminar for a preceptorial on War and Peace. I’m excited for the precept, but will miss the seminar group – more so the tutors and students than the readings. I’m also still deeply ambivalent about politics in general, and American politics in particular. I was sitting on the bus today, listening to liberal talk radio (where the host was complaining about how republicans monopolize the media – which I found amusing, since it’s exactly the complaint conservative hosts have against the democrats), and reading Karl Marx. While I don’t agree with Marx’s solution, I can sympathize with his problem – the same one confronting Dickens, in his way – of looking at a situation where some people were working 12 or even 16 hour days and barely making enough to feed themselves and their children, who also had to work at the youngest possible age. Not that it’s especially helpful to turn a bad situation into an epic of class warfare in which revolution is the only viable solution. But the problem he faced was, and sometimes is, problematic. The step seems surprisingly short, however, from “as a society we’re not going to let people starve or freeze” to “as a society we’re not going to let people be uncomfortable,” which seems to be the direction of the past half century or so.

While I consider the separation of the sacred and the secular into different realms of existence as faulty theology and anthropology, even so it does seem to lead to less harmful political systems. In our readings there seem to be two basic outlooks on politics: on the one hand are people like Plato and, to an extent, Aristotle and Aquinas, who see politics as being an important part of attaining goodness in human relations, and on the other side are people like Hobbs and Machiavelli, who don’t suppose that a government can be more than tolerable, but at least it can perhaps prevent life from being a war of “all against all,” as Hobbs says – and perhaps under a good government there’s less opportunity for widespread misery and terror. At first I wanted to say that liberals are more in the first camp, and conservatives in the second, but perhaps it would be truer to say that most everyone is in the second camp, but we have different understandings of what constitutes widespread misery. Conservatives tend to see a state where “everything is possibility and nothing is necessity” (death and taxes excepted) as a potentially greater misery than being in some danger of losing one’s fortune, or having to deal with unwanted necessities. I think perhaps that while nobody at all wants everything to be necessity, and nothing possibility, liberals see us as being in some danger of that becoming the case, because they seem to see more things as necessary, like certain dubious freedoms (the freedom to not have a child, the freedom to marry whomever we wish, the freedom to smoke pot in public, for instance), and certain likewise dubious impositions (usually associated with an attempt to preserve health), as well as a proliferation of material goods and services.

Another word that has been so thoroughly neglected these past few centuries there isn’t even an exact equivalent for it. Theosis is “the process of being engodened.” There’s no such word as engodened, you say? Exactly the difficulty! Theosis is pretty easy to remember, though: Theo- being God, and -osis being a kind of process, like in osmosis. “Engodened” is the way Bishop Basil apparently translates it – being infused with the uncreated energy of God, just as to be enlivened is to be infused with new life. I suppose the closest English terms might be sanctification and glorification, but it’s up for debate to what extent either of those are an ongoing process, and to what extent they mean becoming like God. So for that there’s theosis, which is very clear on both counts. Hence, its usefulness – and its centrality in Greek theology.

An interesting thing about the way Fr. John teaches is that I don’t think I’ve ever heard him give a sermon, talk, or anything else on ethics. Lots on theology, parables, and saints – ethics, no. He does do a version of Basic Gospel Stuff – in a way. It involves an hour and a half every Saturday afternoon for much of the year, and a lot of Greek words written on a white board. He assumes a certain familiarity with the standard American presentation of the Gospel, and uses that to explain what he is and is not saying. For good or ill, if you don’t know what you ought to do or not do you probably won’t find out from a Holy Trinity homily.

This week’s homily, for instance, could have been titled reasons to love Luke the Evangelist. The summary goes something like this: Luke’s a doctor, painter, apostle, and writer! Many believe he was among the 70 Apostles; perhaps the man at the end of his gospel who met Christ walking down the road with that other fellow (Cleophas?)! He painted the first icon of Mary! And just look at his gospel! It’s so good! There are really good things in there that are in no other gospel! Like the parable of the prodigal son – we could learn everything necessary about the Fall, God, Man, heaven, hell, and unrighteous judgment from that one parable alone; the parable of the prodigal son – we’re all that man, beat up by the passions, and Christ is the outcast who brings us into the Church, and pours in wine and oil; the story of Zaccheus; the words of Mary at the Annunciation – Luke must have interviewed her later in life, and like a good doctor been kind and loving listening to her reveal her part of the story; meeting Christ after the Resurrection, when he opened his followers’ eyes to the meaning of the prophecies! How impoverished we would be had Luke not listened to and followed after Christ! Main point to remember: Luke is a really cool saint! I found it quite sweet and amusing.

I’m convinced that nine times out of ten if the homily were to be given a “practical application,” it would amount to “Rejoice!” The Incarnation is fantastic: rejoice! It’s possible to know everything, including death, as means of communion with God: rejoice! God’s planting in your soul, and there shall soon be a harvest; perhaps there is even now: rejoice! Christ is a hypostatic union between Godhood and Humanity, and in him the two are indissolubly, eternally linked: rejoice! We can be engodened: rejoice! The Theotokos is fantastic: rejoice! It would be easy for this to be really cheesy, and yet it isn’t – somehow it seems to work.

There seem to be two sides to the Church: personal and ecclesial, or romantic and structured, or relational and religious, depending on how you want to put things – I’m going with the second pairing, more or less arbitrarily. Anyway, among evangelicals and others who are intensely interested in the romantic side of Christianity, there is often a great discomfort,  I almost want to say fear – at the least a desire to demote – the structured side. There’s a suggestion that they cannot both be held and held strongly at the same time, hence phrases like “it’s a relationship, not a religion!” that supposes the alternative to be a religion, not a relationship.

It’s easy enough to say, no, that’s wrong, it’s both – but that might not be so helpful without considering why “organized religion” is so often considered dangerous in the first place. Why not have both? Well, Christianity, especially in the West, and more especially Protestantism seems to have a tendency to be a bit bipolar. I think that tendency is exacerbated, or perhaps even created, by the relative ease of forming a new denomination in opposition to the old one. At least in Catholicism if a person is possessed of a very legal mind he can go off and study Aquinas, and if he’s very emotive he can go contemplate the uncreated, and if he’s not at an extreme he can just go to an ordinary sort of church, and none of them can say that the other is altogether wrong, provided he doesn’t disagree with the Catholic Church on matters of doctrine, or do anything really crazy. But a nondenominational Protestant doesn’t really have to do that, so instead of forming orders or rites, they form entire new denominations, or unaffiliated churches, or whatever else. That being the case the legal sorts of folks can have a church all to themselves in which to lay down a bunch of laws on what a person can and cannot do in order to be a member, in finer and finer detail: don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t dance, don’t play cards, don’t cook with olive oil during Lent, etc. On the other hand, people who are of a more romantic bent can form a church that’s always railing against the legalists, enthusing about their relationships, and singing sentimental soft rock songs. More importantly, if a person is temperamentally incompatible with the church he was raised in, he can just go and find a church that suits his personality. It’s ruinous!

So it appears that there are only two alternatives: Law or Relationship. Kind of like when it comes to faith and work it’s often looked at as faith or works. And, furthermore, orderly liturgics and hierarchy are likewise seen in opposition to Relationship, and either tolerated from necessity, or hardly tolerated at all. There are probably also churches that are fed up with what they see as the disorder and self-indulgence of the relational folks that they go way too far into the legal aspect of things – I just haven’t personally been to one of those. There are also some churches that go for a bit of a mean – I think the Lutherans may do that – a certain amount of order (but not so much as those papists!) and a certain emphasis on the personal. Well, there are certainly worse things – but there are also better things. The Catholics (when they’re at their best – which unfortunately isn’t always the case) and Orthodox have a different idea – to be both unashamedly liturgical and enthusiastically personal. The Liturgy (or Mass) is, I suspect, what holds these two positions together: be as formal, unbending, and elaborate as you like – we’re eating and drinking the flesh of God! and that can’t not be massively both personal and communal. So you’ve got the liturgics, which are basically theology and history in music, and you’ve got things like the Jesus Prayer and an incredibly relational Trinitarian/Incarnational theology, which are held together by common faith and the certainty that it would be very wrong for a group of people who want to emphasize the one thing at the expense of the other to go off and start their own “denomination” (AKA schismatic group); like cutting off a foot or a hand and expecting it to go off and fend for itself. In that sense Tradition works like a bridle, keeping the age of the personalities of the congregants from having their head and careening off in these zig-zags of: Too much Law! Too little structure! Legalism! Emotionalism! Fear! Self-indulgence! And so on and on and on. Ultimately, it’s a very bad idea for a church or denomination to set itself up so that unity relies on compatible temperment and taste.

Practical Wisdom in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics*

Since virtue, for Aristotle, is the mean between an excess and a deficiency, in accordance with right reason (1138b:20), it would seem to be essential to have this right reason available to one, especially in matters concerning particulars, in order to properly exercise virtue. When applied to matters that admit being other than they are, Aristotle names this right reason “practical wisdom” (phron•sis). While being so necessary to the exercise of virtue in everyday affairs, Aristotle is not so clear on how it is gained or used as he is about the moral virtues. In this essay I wish to consider how a man might acquire and then exercise practical wisdom in his affairs.

At the beginning of book six Aristotle says that practical wisdom belongs, first, to the rational part of the soul, and also to the calculative or deliberative, which he contrasts with the scientific. Whereas the scientific element is concerned with those things that cannot be other than they are, the deliberative element is concerned with things that can be other than they are, and therefore may be changed by action. Furthermore, practical wisdom is the excellence of this deliberative element of the soul: “truth in harmony with correct desire” (1138a:20). Being deliberative, practical wisdom is then concerned with the process of deliberation, more than with the choice made at its conclusion, yet also implies right action, as when Aristotle explains that practical wisdom is not an art because “production has an end other than itself, but action does not: good action is itself an end” (1140b:5). In this it is distinguished from the arts, where the excellence lies in the product rather than the process taken to achieve it.

Furthermore, in order to operate properly, practical wisdom requires intuitive intelligence (nous) combined with experience in order to be able to perceive both what is good and bad for man, and what the case is in a particular situation. The necessity of intuitive intelligence might present a difficulty for someone who seeks to attain practical wisdom, because rather than being based in habit like moral virtue, and therefore something that can be acquired through consistent choice, intelligence is either present or not present by nature. “Although no one is provided with theoretical wisdom by nature, we do think that men have good sense, understanding, and intelligence by nature. An indication of this is that we think of these characteristics as depending on different stages of life, and that at a given stage of life a person acquires intelligence and good sense: the implication is that nature is the cause.” While it may be the case that some people acquire these things with time, not everybody does, nor to an equal degree; “therefore, we ought to pay as much attention to the sayings and opinions, undemonstrated though they are, of wise and experienced older men as we do to demonstrated truths. For experience has given such men an eye with which they can see correctly. (1143b:10)” It’s a little perplexing that after stating that it is nature which, after some experience has been acquired, gives men this mental “eye,” Aristotle then says that it is experience. At the very least he mentions in the Politics that women and natural slaves have only partial reason, so that they might be able to perceive the right reasoning of others and act upon that, they will never, no matter their experience, be able to so use reason themselves. So he must instead be emphasizing that in people to whom nature has given the capacity, its full use only comes with experience.

It was striking with what force Aristotle endorsed the “sayings and opinion” of those men who have this experience and intelligence that can perceive both the first principles and the particulars of a situation: we ought pay as much attention to them as to demonstrated truths. It must be the case that while practical wisdom is achieved by a different method than scientific wisdom, and cannot be taught as the other can, yet it is of equal importance, and perhaps equal certainty. Wise old men might not be able to demonstrate their opinions as true, but they can see it. How is that compatible with being a rational deliberative process? That must be where being able to know and understand the particulars of a situation becomes most important. For: “deliberation operates in matters that hold good as a general rule, but whose outcome is unpredictable, and in cases in which an indeterminate element is involved” (1112b:10), and the less comprehensive our understanding of an area of action is, the greater the need for deliberation. For instance, people might deliberate less about athletic training than about navigation, because of the greater number of variables which effect the latter.

Additionally, deliberation (and by extension practical wisdom) must be at least as much rational as intuitive, because in describing the process of how someone might deliberate, he says that, taking the end for granted, and deliberating on how it may be achieved, “if it becomes apparent that there is more than one means by which it can be attained, we look for the easiest and best; if it can be realized by one means only, we consider the best manner it can be realized by that means, and how that means can be achieved in its turn. We continue the process until we come to the first link in the chain of causation, which is the last step in the order of discovery” (1112b:18). Therefore the deliberative process, while relying on the intelligence to provide the proper end and the particulars of the case, then proceeds in an orderly fashion which seems to be describable and thus teachable, and not only by experience. In that case, when Aristotle says that “practical wisdom is a truthful rational characteristic of acting in matters involving what is good for man” (1140b:20), he is speaking of not only an excellence of the deliberative process, as mentioned at the beginning of book six, but that process where the proper ends and facts of the case are determined by a true intelligence. So if a man were trying to become practically wise he might learn the deliberative process, but then would need to wait on the formation of this perceptive intelligence, which can see what the truth of the case is, and is formed by experience.

Might that explain why we should listen so closely to those who are old and wise? Because while any rational person might use the proper process of deliberation, not every person, or a person at any stage of life, has an understanding of the proper ends and facts to use in that process, but may be able to borrow, as it were, that knowledge from those who do already have it. Is that something Aristotle is trying to do in the Ethics, as when he examines virtue by first looking at when virtuous men have done? At some point someone has perceived, with experienced intelligence, that a certain action like being courageous or doing magnanimous deeds is excellent, and has likewise seen that perhaps financing a tragic chorus is properly magnanimous, whereas clothing comedians in purple is merely in bad taste, and we can see that to be the case and emulate him. So even if a man’s own intelligence is incomplete – as it is bound to be – it may be good enough to see who has better or worse judgment than himself, and  to emulate or seek the advice of the former, while avoiding the actions of the latter; for it may be easier to discern intelligent understanding in the pattern of a man’s whole life than in any given particular of the moment, and then to see how such a wise man dealt with a similar situation, or achieved a similar excellence. Even in asking about what practical wisdom is, he begins by looking at those we consider to be practically wise, and then asks what it is about them that makes them so, rather than starting from some first principle. It is thus less important to question how there came to be good men in the first place – for Aristotle’s conception of intelligence is rather mysterious; it is either formed by nature and experience, or not, or imperfectly, and there isn’t much a person seems to be able to do about the intelligence alloted to him – than to look at those who have it in a particularly high degree and treat their insights with the same respect due to scientific deduction.

For a man to exercise practical wisdom in his affairs, then, he would need to, first, either be able to perceive proper ends and facts himself, or rely partly on his own perception and partly on observing those wiser than himself, and then apply that understanding to the deliberative process. As mentioned, that process seems to be at least partially teachable, the way that processes like the scientific method are: if a man has no sense whatever he will never be able to practice it, but most will be able to do so, more or less well depending on his rational abilities. The method outlined by Aristotle being to begin with knowing the end one means to achieve, and then to work backwards and outline all the steps that must be taken to achieve that end, before beginning to act upon them. And while a man’s ability to use practical wisdom is in part determined by nature and formed through experience, it is also partly in his power to practice a rational method of deliberation, and rely on those wiser than himself in matters about which he is uncertain.

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* As translated by Ostwald, Martin (1999). Library of Liberal Arts

Because The Shack (Wm. Paul Young, 2007) has been such a popular and influential novel the past couple of years, I’d decided to read it while procrastinating from writing an Aristotle essay (my preferred form of multi-tasking). It is more interesting as a thinly disguised theological treatise than as a novel. Examined as a novel, the plot is weak, the characters bland, and nearly every scene for two thirds of the book is allegory followed by exposition. Of the four major characters, three are theological constructs who act and speak like, well, theological constructs, and one is a human who acts and speaks like another hypothetical construct, which is a pity because Young’s main concerns are with relationship and person-hood, which becomes strained when Mack, the only character with the potential to be an interesting human person, is so flat. On the other hand, Young has a strong descriptive ability and his style is comfortably fluent.

It seems to be the case that in writing a story about (rather than simply involving) the nature of the Trinity and how that effects the nature of Creation and man in it, one runs the risk of either altogether confusing the reader and failing to make your point (to the extent that you have one), or relying too much on exposition and boring him. The Shack errs on the second count; it is perfectly comprehensible, but at the cost of assuming Mack and us to be kind of dense. It can of course be argued that Mack has gone through severe emotional trauma and has a right to be a bit dense. Yes, he does: it just doesn’t do much for him being a character I can be very interested in. The opposite fault is the sort of writer who, like Charles Williams, hopes that we’re well enough informed in theology and philosophy and a number of other things as well, and clever enough, to keep up with him. As a result his novels are terribly suggestive, but also very perplexing. Because of the sacrifice of mystery and movement for clarity, as a novel The Shack is decent but nothing special.

It is, however, more theological than narrative in nature, and is more interesting when read as such. In that respect I’m having a bit of a difficulty determining its merit, because nothing in it is especially new or unusual to my sensibilities – simply a collection of decent Trinitarian relational theology, tolerable theodicy, and a dreary lack of theology concerning the Church (is that ecclesiastical theology?) set in some fairly striking allegorical scenes. However, I am apparently the exception in that, and I don’t want to discount the possibility that for someone who thinks primarily in terms of a judicial understanding of God’s relations to humanity it could be quite helpful in suggesting other possibilities.

If I were giving out stars The Shack would probably be 3/5 – three because it’s well written and thought provoking, and only three because it fails (perhaps it never tries) to transcend a narrowly prescribed readership of people who misunderstand Christian theology, but are interested enough in it to bear with shoddy plot and character development in its’ favor.