Austin Hall Library

New Arrivals in the Library

I am behind on my reading as usual but I cannot help pushing a couple of recent arrivals to the top of my list. After a long delay, I finally purchased Roy Deferrari's twelve hundred page Lexicon of St. Thomas Aquinas. Originally published in 1948, it is based on the greatest of Aquinas's work, Summa Theologica, and provides a ready guide to help understand the original text of that work without having always to depend on someone else’s translation. The book is in Latin and it analyzes every word of the Summa Theologica, as well as terms from other of the angelic doctor’s works. My knowledge of Ecclesiastical Latin is virtually non-existent, but I couldn't wait any longer for a miracle. I had to begin wading through this important book now.

In the same order, I also received Denzinger's Sources of Catholic Dogma, which is an English translation of Heinrich Denzinger's great Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum. It is a collection (enchiridion) of articles (symbols) of faith and morals that includes articles and creeds of the Catholic Faith beginning with that of the twelve apostles, all dogmatic definitions stamped with the Petrine authority of the apostolic See (ex cathedra), decrees of the solemn magisterium, papal bulls, encyclicals and letters, as well as some of the more weighty decisions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office) prior to 1957. It is a great book for anyone interested in historical theology. I begin this week to teach a small class on Church History, so Denzinger's book is an invaluable resource.

Question Authority?

Some ideas seem to stand as manifestos for entire generations. Perhaps there is no idea more powerful for the generation born in the baby-boom years than the idea that authority is inherently suspect--nobody should have the right to tell another person how to think or act.

Along with the idea that unrestricted choice is a good thing, the idea that authority should be questioned are the two dominant social ideas of my generation. And the signs that these ideas are ruining us are everywhere. For unsettling illustrations, spend an hour observing classes in a public school, visit a local church, or invite a family with young children home for dinner. I can still remember my shock when years ago I moved to a Western state to find that parents there uniformly taught their children to refer to adults by their first names. I didn't analyze it at the time, but it just seemed so subversive.

Where inherent suspicion of authority and the enshrinement of individual choice began is difficult to say, but Robert Paul Wolff's landmark book In Defense of Anarchism, written originally in 1970, seemed to form the modern theoretical/philosophical basis for a denial of the legitimacy of authority. "The primary obligation of man," Wolff asserted, "is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled."

Ideas obviously begin in a mind somewhere. Often without regard to whether they comport with reality, they eventually find a legitimization and theoretical defense in the work of an academic. But, they do not really take hold until they spill over into popular culture--often through the media. For example, the enormously influential 1955 James Dean movie, Rebel Without a Cause, was the first time American popular culture was faced with the idea that juvenile delinquency was the apparent result of a lack of communication between parents and children and a failure of parents to listen to their children. It caught on like wildfire.

The 1987 Robin Williams film, Dead Poets Society, took this idea to new heights and captured the  imagination of scores of young people and adults (I continue to hear it referred to as a favorite film of members of my generation). Williams played the role of a prep school teacher of the 50s who brings tragedy (in the literary sense) by challenging mean and misguided authority figures--the school's headmaster and the father of a talented drama student. The message of this movie is clear and powerful. The affirming community of individual thinkers is rare, fragile, and beautiful. And, authority is its enemy. So intoxicated with this idea were the powers behind this film that they even glorified youthful suicide in the process of advancing it. This deeply disturbing movie in 1987 catered to the growing mortal fear (by that time) of seemingly arbitrary rules and authority figures--particularly fathers (portrayed as tyrants).   

The unraveling of culture, at its source, is so simple. Today, my generation (and subsequent generations) worships unrestricted individual choice and what is seen as the intrinsic right (sometimes duty) to question and deny authority. It probably all began with a simple moral problem--some creative person somewhere wanted to do something of questionable moral legitimacy. And the prevailing authority supported the belief that such an action was illegitimate. So, the idea, as a proposition, was born--that authority is inherently suspect, and unrestricted individual choice is the only moral imperative. 

Too Much Noise

I recently ran across Teresa Tomeo's Noise: How Our Media-saturated Culture Dominates Lives and Dismantles Families and I read it last weekend. A more popular treatment of the subject than Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which I have previously mentioned here, Tomeo focuses on the negative ways in which the popular media impacts the family. It is an up-to-date analysis of the mind-numbing impact of one aspect of modern culture. The book is full of stats and may be particularly helpful in assisting parents of Christian faith come to grips with the fact that too much media is not a friend of the family.

There is a great quote by Pope Benedict XVI on the front cover of the book: "Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God . . . There are too many different frequencies filling our ears."

Lewis on Time

It may have been C.S. Lewis, although I am not certain, who first introduced me to the question of the nature of time. In his well-known and popular book, Mere Christianity, Lewis mentions, almost in passing, that God's life almost certainly does not consist of moments following one another. He says, "All the days are 'Now' for Him." His point was that God does not have eras; he doesn't have history. All time is present to him. That's perhaps why in Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy could step through the wardrobe into Narnia, be in the wardrobe for less than a minute by her siblings' time, and claim she had been in Narnia for hours. There is a world not subject to a time system.

I think this idea, or at least this discussion about the temporal/non-temporal nature of time, is Aristotelian (time as the measurement of motion or change). Aristotle discussed the nature of time at length in Book 4 of his Physics. Augustine, in Book X of his Confessions, has an interesting but confusing (to me) discussion about time (not its nature), in which he addresses the question of how we can consistently speak about temporal being in a language primarily oriented to talk about permanent beings. He points out that the things we normally talk about as existing in time, despite their apparent permanence, are not at all permanent in their being.

What is temporal can be measured by time because it is subject to motion or change. What is eternal cannot be measured by time because, by definition, it is a permanent entity rather that a successive entity. The permanent doesn't have eras or history. All its days are "Now." Although such thinking may seem impractical, it is helpful in conceptualizing ideas beyond our temporal selves--heaven, hell, purgatory, eternity--and in concluding that only hubris prevents us from thinking about a world beyond our own. 

C.S. Lewis and Faith

I awoke to thoughts on the writings of C.S. Lewis--for no apparent reason. His Abolition of Man had a significant impact on my thought. It is the book I most often recommend by Lewis. The series of short lectures do not make up a work of academic philosophy, but they do accurately describe the loss of any objective transcendent moral standards in modern man, substituted for the most part by mere statements of subjective feeling. Contrary to the opinions of some, the book is not an apologetic for Christianity. Rather, it is a subtle and popular treatment of principles engraved upon the hearts of all men, whether outwardly "religious" or not.

As for Lewis's faith, he said he came to believe Christianity was true by the   usual combination of authority, reason, and experience. He indicated that he decided to accept the authority of many wise people in different times and places who taught the reality of the spiritual world. And, his reason eventually convinced him that it was more far-fetched to cling to his materialism than to believe in a spiritual reality. He believed feelings alone were totally inadequate reasons to accept or reject anything as true. The practical purpose of faith, according to Lewis, is to retain our hold upon the truth that seems irresistible and obvious during times of special grace, but which seems more or less unclear at ordinary times (Kathryn Lindskoog's observation about Lewis).