Many of us could give a number of reasons for our faith.  These range from the deeply personal, like a conversion experience a la Tolstoy in William James, to the logical approach Sheldon Vanauken describes in A Severe Mercy where he assents rationally to Christian doctrine without any actual feeling of faith, without making the "leap of faith" that Kierkegaard describes.  I remember once defending Catholicism to a skeptical atheist on the grounds of its survival in the face of nearly impossible odds.  "Think of it," I'd urged as I paraphrased Pentecost, "11 uneducated blue-collar laborers running around claiming they'd found God!  Who would have listened?" without - I argued - the impetus of grace.

These reasons are all very well and good.  Today it is not-quite Christmas, and so I think it is appropriate to share some of the recent feelings I've had towards Christ.

In Brideshead Revisited, the following dialogue caught my attention:
“Is it [Catholicism] nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”
"But, my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all."
"Can't I?"
"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass."
"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."
"But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea."
"But I do. That's how I believe."

It is a lovely idea, indeed, to arrange a manger scene and show kings and mighty spirits bowing to the innocence of a baby.  A lovely idea, too, that we selfish small-souled people could turn our right cheek to someone who had struck our left.  That we could bless - or even be - the meek, the humble peace-makers.  That we would place others before ourselves; love our enemies; give our cloak to the one who had asked for our shirt; and cease to be Scrooges, even briefly.

How often do we do these things?

Not very, perhaps, and with the feast of Christmas arriving tomorrow it's a timely moment to re-read the Sermon on the Mount, arguably the most beautiful and utopian ideal for humanity that has ever been envisioned.  As Chesterton said, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."  This leads me, then, to a short passage from The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis that has somewhat defined my faith of late.  It is Puddleglum addressing the evil queen as she tries to convince the protagonists that no "over-world" exists, but only her own dark, underground kingdom.  Aslan is the Christ-figure in the books:

"One word, Ma’am . . .One word.  All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder.  I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst of things and then put the best face I can on it.  So I won’t deny any of what you said.  But there’s one thing more to be said, even so.  Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself.  Suppose we have.  Then all I can say is, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.  Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world.  Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it.  We’re just four babies making up a game, if you’re right.  But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.  That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world.  I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.  I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t any Narnia.  So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland.  Not that our lives will be very long, I should think, but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say."

And so goes our faith to an extent.  It is a lovely, beautiful, often-untried idea.  It seems so improbable, so impractical, so old in the midst of modernity.  But that Sermon on the Mount, and the personality and vision of Christ expressed in the Gospels, remain among the most objectively beautiful passages ever written.  Remain among the most compelling worldviews ever made.  And - with a nod to Pascal and his wager - I am going to live as much like a Christian as I can, even if there isn't any Christ or Heaven or Hell (although I believe that there is).  It's not a question, sometimes, of the truth of my faith or of my feeling secure in it.  It is a question of exquisite beauty, and this our faith possesses abundantly.

Merry Christmas and God bless us, everyone!

-LC

So one of my beloved mentors in this world is my high school history teacher, Dr. Christopher Colvin -- Yale-educated, intellectually cynical, curmudgeonly, beret-wearing, moustached, die-hard atheist extraordinaire.  It is to Colvin that I owe my first introduction to the "life of the mind," and without his pushing me to think more, broader, deeper in high school, I most likely would have ended up majoring in Biology at UChicago.  Yuck.  Here he is, albeit sans moustache.

Anyway, he and I have remained in touch, and get coffee (now drinks) every time I am home.  Most of our tete-a-tetes involve me word-chundering about my pseudo-dramatic life, and him commenting snarkily while shaking his head or furrowing his bushy 'stache.  When I went through my I'm-trying-to-be-a-daily-Mass-mantilla-wearing-conservative-Catholic-so-I-can't-party-or-remotely-enjoy-life, he just looked at me and grumbled, "Ratiu, you're pigging out at the conservative Catholic trough."  So.  I think that will suffice for an introduction, and put his comments on my thesis below in context.

I emailed him my thesis -- "T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens:  Supreme Being or Supreme Fiction?" -- the day after I turned it in (at 3:55, 5 minutes before the deadline, of course), but he hasn't commented on it until now.  Below is the email he sent me, and I was pleasantly surprised by how detailed his remarks were and flattered that a Renaissance man with a PhD in philosophy from Yale would be so intrigued by a college student's rather slipshod and hastily composed paper.  I hope that his comments stir up some conversation on the blog, as he brings up my favorite topic to gripe about -- moderrrrrnity -- but cloaks it in a much more sophisticated light than I ever did.  Reading his thoughts has really made me re-think how I view modernity, and perhaps, perhaps, distance myself from a fully MacIntyrean criticism toward a more reserved acceptance of the world for what it is, without falling either into naive nostalgia or cynical post-post-post modernism.  Will keep you updated...I'm still starry-eyed for ol' Alasdair!

A few notes about your paper.  Read them when you are in a more settled mood.  I am sorry it took me so long to get to it, but it was a rewarding read.  Thanks for the Wallace Stevens.  I had been ardent about “Sunday Morning” when a fellow boarding school student showed it to me, but had lost touch with Stevens thereafter.  So I found the discussion of him, his ideas and his poetry, both informative and interesting. 

The paper is a point-counterpoint composition with Stevens setting the themes and Eliot providing the melody.  I think the paper gets a bit cantankerous with Eliot, caricaturing him and using him as a club against the “usual suspects” (“scorn”, “disdain”, “rabid” etc.).  I would never have let you write, “a time when hordes of intellectuals were rebelling against secular society.”  An impossible phrase in every respect.  The sort of thing you would expect my persona “Colvin” to say in a history class.  Similarly, there is the claim that Eliot is the first since Dante to innovate a poetry of devotion.  What of his beloved John Donne?  Not to mention a host of poets between the 13th and 20th centuries (or was that six century period really barren of religious poets?).  Or the reactionary if somewhat plausible (in the 1920’s) quote from the old possum sneering at would-be critics of religion, or even more the unfunny, in fact vulgar, sneer against lazy “ordinary people.”  I think Obama rather more Christian when in his Pennsylvania speech he characterized “those who cling to guns and religion” and took seriously their anxieties and principles.  I should cite you Robert E. Lee on how one, as a gentleman, never plays the status card because, as a Christian, one never has that or any status. 

I must say I was amused by the “time warp” of the paper’s intellectual setting.  The variously figured contrasts of Nietzschean “Death of God”/modernity/spiritual loss vs. crisis of modernity/spiritual nostalgia/Eliotean piety and snobbery takes me back to the world of my professors, the world of the 50’s and 60’s.  (I cannot recommend too highly for this, “The Disinherited Mind” by Erich Heller, whom I revered at Northwestern.)  Your paper seems to take its bearings from those provincial times – for I do think the several modernist “narratives” of art and intellectual life that flourished in the 20th century (and yours is one of them) were rather more provincial than other seasons of history – which are, of course, also provincial.  Succinctly put: “people think history begins with their grandparents (Nietzsche).” 

It is now also less surprising to me that you might have had a “crisis of faith”, caught up as you were in this peculiar vortex of reactionary modernism.  This is no criticism of your work or interpretation (or of your crisis).  If it is a criticism, it is of your professors who either set this framework for you (because it is deeply reassuring to conservative Catholics? -- which it is) or did not challenge you to mover either forward or backward in history to gain some perspective on the era’s excessive self-dramatization. 

The binaries I suggested above break down rather quickly.  Nietzsche is far more of a profound critic of modernism than its celebrant, despairing of its nihilism.  Eliot is modernism personified, indeed he (& new criticism, which is old 18th century Cambridge Platonism) was one of the essential straw men that post-modernism used to define itself in the 70’s.  But then, as you have it, Eliot criticizes modern individualism in the spirit of the 20’s and 30’s when this was certainly the tune of nationalism, communism, and fascism, all of whom promoted some form of “collectivism” against “individualism.”  I think your American conservative friends would be very surprised to find you advocating a collectivism of “tradition.”  It is so confusing!  Indeed, pomos ran afoul of their own “post” status when it became clear that iconic modernists (Eliot, Picasso, Hemingway, Bauhaus) were already “post-modern” before the pomos.  Dang!  Post-toasted! 

On the other hand, by sweating through the research and writing of your treatise, you have acquired a sophisticated depth to appreciate much of 20th century art, literature, and intellectual debates.  That is not to be sneezed at.  Nor is it to be taken as settled. 

My two exhortations would be to continue to explore poetry and thought to gain perspective – forward and/or backward from the “crisis of modernity;” and (b), most important, try to avoid the historicizing hysteria of this framework (crisis this and crisis that) – it’s just lamentations over ephemerality: “But is there any comfort to be found? Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say? (Yeats.)  There is too much nostalgia (for the church!) in conservative Catholicism, but be a Roman Catholic, not an ultra-montanist. 

Quick update on my end:  I got offered a job at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton yesterday morning, and I move up there the end of January after taking a week-long road trip to DC (March for Life!), Philly (to see Fabio, of course), NYC, and Boston.  My official title is "Research Intern," and my first project is to compile the forthcoming Stem Cell report, a joint effort by The New Atlantis and the Witherspoon Council on the Integrity of Science and Ethics.  This report is targeted at students in the medical and life science professions, but I think all of you would be very interested to read it (and contribute to it through me!).  I am thrilled to be paid -- an exorbitant salary for most college grads! -- to read and write about the intersection of technology, science, and ethics.  And generally to be in Princeton.  In addition to this job, I will be attending lectures and conferences in the area (NYC, Princeton, Philly, DC), traveling to the ND medical ethics conference in March, and also working on an informal yet rigorous research program in moral philosophy and bioethics with Professor Robert George -- the emperor of the conservative Catholic mafia.  The purpose is to "get my feet wet" and focus my interest in bioethics in order to pursue it on a PhD level.  In the meantime, I am applying to MPhil programs at Oxford/Cambridge, and possibly a post-bacc in classics at Penn that might be necessary if I want to dabble in virtue ethics (I'd have to read Aristotle and Plato and Aquinas in Greek and Latin).  Annnd if I have any time leftover, I want to "shadow" my would-be husband Fabio's older brother, Tiberio, who is an internal medicine resident at St. Luke's in NYC just to keep the MD route open.  Who knows, I very well might end up going back to medical school after/if I get my PhD in order to just be a MD/PhD boss and fulfill my dreams of pretension.  In whatever free time, I'd like to do some introspection and reading/writing on my own, maybe some poetry.  I'm really into hot yoga (90 degree room, 60% humidity), and I'm re-reading the Tao te Ching and starting Sun Tzu's The Art of War.  My brother Victor quotes it all the time, and to shut me up sometimes he will calmly say, "Better a dagger in the dark, than a thousand swords at dawn."   

This is all to say that I have a few job offers still in my lap that I think some of you would be interested in.  I don't want to lay them all out here, but they are spread all over -- Phoenix, DC, New Orleans, and Wilmington, DE.  If you are job searching and would like an "in" to any of these places, I could definitely pull some strings to help a fellow PLSer out!  Call my unemployed ass anytime, and I'd be happy to talk!

Alright, better get back to watching White Christmas and getting ready for our siiiiick annual Christmas party that I invited you all to on Facebook!  I wish wish you could come, but fret not, I'll make sure to keep the wine in the fridge.  In the spirit of my official leave from school, I'll post both "Gap Yah" and Avicii's new single, "Fuck School, Let's Party."  And just to be obnoxious and a bit misogynistic, "Shit Girls Say." 

Tavs-out!  Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!  "God bless us, every one."  :)

It is useless and meaningless to tell a person, “Think for yourself.” The command is both impossible to obey, and impossible to disobey. If the person obeys the injunction, he or she has already disobeyed it by blindly following your advice. However, if the person decides to disobey the injunction, he or she must then obey it as a matter of course. Disobeying and obeying are joined seamlessly; each necessitates the other. This is a classic paradox; one side slides into the other seamlessly and eternally, forming a kind of Möbius loop, a surface with one continuous and endless side. (This is essentially the same as the paradox in Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus, which is a mind-bending read that I would highly recommend. It's the other half of the Kierkegaard edition we had to purchase for Sem. 5.)

If a person is to think for himself, the impetus must come from within himself; likewise, if a person is to not think for himself, no impetus must come from within himself. The mind is either active or passive; it either deliberates or it is acted upon, at any given moment. Our humanly existence consists in an unavoidable fluctuation between these two states, often in rapidly shifting and unpredictable patterns. If a person thinks that he always thinks for himself, then he is hopelessly arrogant and absurd. However, if a person thinks that he never thinks for himself, then he has already proven himself wrong. To never think for oneself would mean to have no self-consciousness, like animals and babies. Nevertheless, the task of a human is to increase the amount of time he spends thinking for himself—to increase more and more the ratio of active to passive mind, even if passive mind can never be completely eliminated. In this way, man more and more approximates Complete Knowing and Complete Self-knowing, which are one and the same thing. In this way, man becomes wise and approaches God.

But now I think I have left something out, because I started with a paradox and ended with a straightforward assertion; I started with a Möbius loop and ended up with a straight line. Is that because I straightened out the loop, untwisted the faulty language that caused the paradox to arise in the first place? Or is there another paradox here, in which active and passive mind are really one and the same, so that we ought to aim for both completely active and passive minds, or ought to aim for some ideal blend of the two?


-JMK

(This is excerpted from an email I wrote earlier this week.)


I don't know if I would say I'm "disillusioned" with journalism, because I don't think I came into it with that much illusion to begin with. I don't think I really had much of an opinion on it. Well, maybe I am a bit disillusioned; I guess journalism has sunk lower in my eyes since starting this job, or at least most types of journalism have. I think the idealistic image of journalism I had in my mind was of an investigative journalist who goes out and sort of snoops around and inconspicuously watches and observes everything until he kind of formulates the story, figures out what's really happening, and reveals to people the truth that was hidden to them before. Obviously I haven't gotten to do much of that (although the story I just wrote today was a little bit like that). I think there are those kind of journalists, but you have to work your way to the top before you have the freedom and expertise to write that kind of story. And of course, that ideal journalist I had in my mind would have been a reporter of complete integrity, loyal to no parties but the truth. The more I do this job, the more I see every day that everyone has their angle. It can be really disenchanting. It breaks down your sense of trust and makes you suspicious of everyone, which may be useful and necessary if you're to survive in the tough, hardened worlds of politics and business and media, but it seems harmful and degrading to one's humanity. It's almost like being a soldier...like you are forced to bite back the better instinct inside yourself in order to do your job, which may be a necessary and even noble sacrifice to make, but still, it's not good for you. Or like carrying the Ring of Power (if you think about it, the media is power...). I'm afraid of what would happen if I stayed in this job for a long, long time.

There is no objective journalism...which makes sense and is unavoidable, because no person can be completely objective. But what disturbs me is that it seems that virtually nobody's even trying to be objective anymore. It's like all the news places have just started letting their completely unobjectivity hang out, without any shame--often they even take pride in being biased. I'm just so not into the politics game, the power plays...I don't want anything to do with it. I'll support causes I think are just, but I feel like so many people in journalism are so caught up in politics, like that's all they can think about, as if it were the be-all and end-all of human action. Actually, the more I follow politics and the more I learn about how things are done in Washington, D.C., the more convinced I am that politics really does very little to help people. It's all a lot of grandstanding with very little actually accomplished. Beyond ensuring that the minimum conditions for security and commerce are met, providing a few basic services, and ensuring that all are treated with the minimum level of human decency, and the political system is pretty much impotent. I mean, it's impotent when it comes to actually making the world a better place. (But just so that you don't think I've gone Republican, so is the free market.)

-Joey