The Leisure to Be Dead

One of the pleasures of reading the old writers of the supernatural is that, even if a story doesn't wind up being as scary as you hoped, you will invariably be treated to some wonderful examples of style. This was the case in Ambrose Bierce's "A Jug of Sirup" (from Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce).

Bierce develops an entire story from one captivating turn of phrase: "... well within a month Mr. Deemer made it plain that he had not the leisure to be dead." The irony of the story is that Mr. Deemer does not have the leisure to be dead because he never had (or permitted himself) the leisure to be truly alive. In fact, his ghostly appearance is little different than his living appearance: In both cases, he is utterly absorbed in the clerical work of running his general store. The story has a comic element in the mob that storms the store when it becomes known that a specter is appearing within. No one paid much attention to Mr Deemer when he was alive; now that he's dead, people fight for the chance to get a glimpse of him, a glimpse that is indistinguishable from the thousands of glimpses they had of him while he was alive. The crowd has no time for the substantial appearance of an ordinary man; it is only when he is a shadow of his former self that he generates any interest. Why do men prefer the ethereal to the substantial? Perhaps this is a form of original sin, since to prefer evil to good is to prefer the less substantial to the more substantial.

The deadly sins kill supernatural life, so the man who succumbs to a sin like sloth (as Mr. Deemer has) is already dead in the only way that matters. When he finally dies a bodily death, his existence is not substantially changed; for him, perhaps, he does not even notice that he is dead. The story shows two forms of sloth: The man entirely immersed in the cares of the world (Luke 10:41-42), and the crowd captivated by the phenomenal at the expense of the enduring.

Fixing What Isn't Broken

Enough with philosophy, let's talk about something important: The travesty that is the new packaging for Fig Newtons.

I've been eating Fig Newtons for more than forty years, and as anyone who knows me knows, there isn't much about food I'm passionate about other than Figgies. I am proud to be the inventor, as far as I know, of the excellent combination of Fig Newtons and Cheese. Anyway, Fig Newtons have had the same packaging for as long as I can remember, and there wasn't a thing wrong with it.

But I suppose the new MBAs at Nabisco needed to justify their existence by being "innovative", so they innovated a major backwards step in the Fig Newton experience. Why did they have to pick on my poor Figgies? Could they have at least thought a little before destroying the packaging?

The first time I saw the new packaging, I got a sick feeling in my stomach; the same feeling I got when I first encountered "fat-free" Fig Newtons. And just as my early-warning radar was right with respect to disgusting fat-free Figgies, so it was with the "improved" packaging. The stupid rip open, allegedly resealable top is too sticky and gloms onto my hand when I'm reaching for a cookie. The opening itself is too small, so I have the choice of either destroying several cookies to make room to reach the others, or ripping the packaging so the reseal is broken. The old Fig Newton "stacks" were handy to carry around; a stack was just the right size for a teenage snack (or a 40-year old snack, for that matter). The stack packaging could be manipulated with one hand, so you could handle the cookies and the TV remote at the same time. The packaging was about as efficient as possible since it barely took more space than the cookies themselves. Now I've got to deal with the decision of carrying around a handful of free-floating cookies or the entire monstrosity of packaging.

This is not progress.

Clive Cussler

I used to read Clive Cussler novels back in high school, and happened to see one of his latest, The Navigator (The Numa Files), while walking through the library the other day. So I checked it out to see how Cussler has stood up over thirty years. One Cussler pleasure I had forgotten was the occasional unintentional hilarity of sentences like this:

"The small-arms fire was constant but sporadic."

Logical vs Metaphysical Necessity

One of the problems I have with analytical philosophy is the tendency to fail to distinguish between logical and metaphysical necessity. Or, more precisely, it is to invert the priority of being and logic.

The Maverick Philosopher wrote a post the necessity of God that exemplifies this tendency.

The MP refers to "philosophers in the tradition of Anselm and Aquinas" who define God as a necessary being, and he takes them both to mean the same thing - logical necessity. But St. Thomas rejected Anselm's Ontological Argument precisely because he understood the necessity of God to be a metaphysical necessity, not a logical necessity.

Logical necessity refers to the relationships of the terms of propositions to each other. Thus a "logically possible world" is one that involves no propositional self-contradiction. No logically possible world can contain married bachelors, because bachelors are by definition not married. But there is no self-contradiction in supposing that a body can be at two different places at the same time; for example, that you could be in Boston and Binghamton simultaneously. That it is not possible for you to be in both Boston and Binghamton at the same time is a consequence of your incarnate nature; it is the nature of bodies as such that they occupy one and only one place. It is a metaphysical necessity. Thus "John is in Binghamton and in Boston" is logically possible, but metaphysically impossible.

When Thomists discuss the necessity of God, they mean that God is metaphysically necessary, not logically necessary. There is no logical contradiction involved in denying the existence of God. But it is to assert a metaphysical impossibility. The Thomistic arguments for God are all different ways of revealing this metaphysical necessity.

Why We Fail to Understand Islamists

I found a Moslem service called dirty or disgusting because it involved the idea of blood. A few hundred years ago we should have realized that our own religion involved the idea of blood. But we have got further away from understanding their religion by ceasing to understand our own.

- G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, 1908-1910: 28, May 9, 1908.

Chesterton on Thriving Religion

One of my favorite pastimes is reading at random through Chesterton's old Illustrated London News columns, which have been collected by Ignatius Press. They are always worth reading for the style, and every so often you come across a gem... like his column for January 11, 1908, "The Survival of Christmas."

Just like today, the skeptics back in 1908 were predicting the imminent demise of Christianity, including the celebration of Christmas.

I have been reminded of all this by the inevitable discussions in the current papers about whether the keeping of Christmas is destined to die out, whether Christmas itself will disappear.

GKC immediately answers with one of his trademark paradoxes:

Of course, Christmas will not disappear. Christmas is one of those very strong things that can afford to boast of its own approaching disappearance.

Chesterton never writes like this merely to be clever. He uses the startling paradox as a way to shake the reader out of his common (and probably modernist) preconceptions, and open him to a deeper point. The point in this column is, I think, the supernatural life that animates the Christian religion.

How is this supernatural life made manifest? One way might be the way of direct supernatural glory, as in the voice of God emanating from a burning bush or the Lord transfigured in a supernatural light. But there is another way, a via negativa, that reveals supernatural life paradoxically in that which should die, but doesn't. The supreme example is, of course, Christ, who should be dead and buried forever in His tomb, but nonetheless appears alive in the Resurrection. Christ sets the pattern for everything Christian. The Christian can boast of the impending demise of Christmas because, by all natural reason, it should disappear, as all natural traditions inevitably disappear; yet the Christian knows through faith that Christmas will never disappear because its life is not really that of a natural tradition, despite appearances. In general, Chesterton tells us in a wonderful turn of phrase, Christianity "could thrive as a continual failure." (Chesterton speaks here in terms of Christianity rather than the Catholic Church because this was written prior to his conversion.) It is this thriving in failure that paradoxically reveals the hidden supernatural life in the Church.

What is the consequence of this supernatural life? The philosopher seeks happiness, but Christianity, Chesterton says, asks a man not if he is happy, but if he is alive.

Philosophers are happy; saints have a jolly time. The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one's heart or thickening one's head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter, and a kind of young reverence. This is why religion always insists on special days like Christmas, while philosophy always tends to despise them. Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things, whether he blinks in a blinding light or laughs when he is tickled. That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort. The Christian customs destroy the human habits. And while customs are generally unselfish, habits are nearly always selfish. The object of the religious festival is, as I have said, to find out if a happy man is still alive. A man can smile when he is dead.

That last image of the smiling dead man is one of the elements that makes Chesterton so worth reading. Chesterton is sometimes accused of being glib or superficially clever, or dismissed for not brooding on the darker side of life as is the modern fashion. But the image of the smiling dead man is as horrifying as anything in M.R. James, and all the more effective for coming on the reader all of a sudden; at least in James, we expect and are indeed hoping for the disturbing specter. This dark undercurrent is a subtle but pervasive presence in GKC's writing, and is worth more than thousands of pages of existential angst from someone like Sartre.

Only the Holy Spirit Can Save the Church

Peggy Noonan has an article today in the Wall Street Journal, entitled How to Save the Catholic Church.

There is only one Person Who can save the Church - the Holy Spirit. If the Church is not guided and protected by the Holy Spirit, then she won't and shouldn't survive, for she is a fraud. If she is guided by the Holy Spirit, then why doesn't Ms. Noonan mention Him? Her article bears no reference at all to the transcendent. The sort of worldly thinking it embodies is nothing but a temptation.

It is naive to think that shuffling personnel and bringing in "new blood" will "fix" the problem in the Church that led to the scandals. Is the younger generation somehow protected from sin in a way that the older generation was not? The only thing bringing in new blood will do is bring in new sins. Ironically, it's worldly thinking that got the Church in trouble in the first place. Bishops treated grievous sins against nature as matters for therapy or, as Noonan mentions, "quirks." The answer isn't to work better to get the worldly thinking right, as though the problem is purely one of organization, but to recognize once again the truly horrible power and reach of sin, and that only through the power of the Spirit can we ever face it.