O Devourer of Souls, Come

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Away in a feedbox…the little Lord Jesus set down His head

As we draw near the feast of God’s Nativity, we commonly hear about the unexpected or discordant images associated with the familiar tale. His birth is the occasion of a great massacre of children in the hope of killing him. The newborn child is given gifts for a king and yet also for a man who is going to die. He is placed in an animal’s feedbox, prefiguring the way He will become food for His people who are often referred to as sheep.

Meditating on the infinite might of a newborn, and likewise how He will die, should I think disturb the mind. And yet we cannot but hear The Story already knowing Its end, an end that runs right up through our own present moment and beyond into eternity. This is a Child-King, a Child-God, a Child-Savior whose precious Child-Face shows the outline of the face that will look down from the Cross. We try sometimes to see Him only as an innocent child with blissfully happy parents so as to avoid this unpleasant thought about the future, but we cannot do that without also losing sight of the eternity of His perfect rule and our own salvation. Disturbing images are I think an unavoidable part of our meditation on God’s Nativity. That is Unbounded Eternity in that feedbox, after all.

In that same spirit here is another of St. Gregory’s unsettling image adaptations, with a few additional flourishes inspired by him. Let us imagine Christ not as the provender nor as the shepherd, but as the beast that comes to feed from that rough box. What He feeds on is us, for how else would a living thing become part of the Body of another living thing? We are the ones in the manger; we are why He is setting down His head there.

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Delectatio, Gaudium, Fruitio

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A few weeks ago I read an article written about a decade ago by Daniel De Haan on kinds of “pleasure” in Aquinas (h/t Brandon). De Haan’s claim in that article is that Aquinas uses the words delectatio, gaudium, and fruitio to identify three different kinds of pleasure corresponding with three different kinds of knowledge. He takes delectatio to be the pleasure that comes from externally sensed goods, gaudium to be the pleasure arising from internally sensed goods, and fruitio to be the the pleasure arising from intellectually sensed goods.

I think De Haan has dug up a very nice insight out of something that is not at all clear in Aquinas. I also think what he proposes is an eminently reasonable way to make sense of human experience. But at the risk of playing the insufferable “my Thomism is better than your Thomism” game, not to mention punching up at a wildly successful professional philosopher teaching at Oxford, I have some objections to this as a reading of Aquinas and (I think) some improvements to suggest.

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The Point of ST I-II Q6 a1

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ST I-II Q6 a1, on whether the voluntary is found in human acts, is my starting text for my Ethics class each year. I chose it almost on a whim in my second year of teaching and have since become something like the man who has practiced the same kick 10,000 times. It is a rich text that has never stopped rewarding my analysis even after almost twenty years. But no matter how many fruitful issues it raises and how many lenses we can bring to bear on it, this text does have a main point. It’s just a bit hard to see what it is at first, not only because there are so many other things going on in the text, but also because the wording of the article’s question does not immediately expose the issue (and standard English translations don’t do us any favors in this regard either).

When Aquinas asks “whether the voluntary is found in human acts,” he not asking if humans have will (voluntas) or free-will (liberum arbitrium). He has already addressed this at length in Prima Pars when he discusses the human soul as well as in the very first question of Prima Secundae, just a few questions before this text. What he is asking, as is often the case in the Summa, must be clarified by the objections he raises.

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Memory of Pain

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A few months ago I had the truly humbling experience of being laid low by a kidney stone. I got to discover first-hand what people mean when they say it is the worst pain you can ever imagine, and since I did not get it correctly diagnosed until I had nearly passed the stone (I thought I had merely injured myself swimming) I got to experience the progression of that pain over the course of two weeks without the benefit of any painkillers stronger than a mild muscle relaxer and Tylenol.

There is no point in trying to describe the pain to people, just like there is no point in trying to explain how much having children will change your life. You’ll know once you’re doing it and you’ll never understand it until you are. Unlike having children, I sincerely hope that no one else ever comes to know the pain of kidney stones. Some things we should know by faith alone. This is one of them. Trust me. Also trust this: get it diagnosed immediately and say yes to the narcotic painkillers.

In the week or two after the ordeal, I felt like I had caught a glimpse of several important things about the nature of pain and suffering. I imagined I would write about them, at least for myself. But one of the interesting things about it all is just how quickly the experience became a fading memory, not to mention just how little time I had to write about anything while I worked to get the train of my life back on the rails.

Still, I have to write about something if I’m to return to writing at all. And they do say write what you know. Luckily the transitory nature of pain and its meaning is something I’ve always intended to write about anyway. So here are a few reflections on pain, my pain, and the memories thereof.

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Gregorian Theodicy

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Theodicy (lit. “God justice”) is Leibniz’s fancy way to name a family of questions and concerns about divine providence, specifically the problems related to evil. Why do the good suffer and the wicked prosper? Why does the Supreme Good create a universe with so much (or indeed any!) pain, suffering, and wickedness? Why is God invisible to our sense and experience? If He’s in charge of everything, where is He and why is it all going to hell in a handbasket?

Perhaps nothing in St. Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job tickles me as much as his eclectic statements on theodicy. At a really basic level I love his commentary because it does not limit Job to a meditation on the problem of human suffering as much modern commentary does. The Moralia is a vast, sweeping commentary that takes Job to be something like a meta-prophet of eternity who reveals the entire scope of salvation history; the book touches upon anything and everything, often in very surprising ways. And yet despite this Gregory does return quite often to questions about theodicy and divine providence throughout the commentary. Job may not only be about theodicy, especially once you look to the spiritual senses, but it certainly is concerned with these questions.

What Gregory does not do, and bless him for it, is give “the” answer to the problems of suffering and divine hiddenness. His wide array of answers range from the boringly traditional to the completely unexpected and darkly amusing. I doubt the answers he gives could all be reconciled into a tidy system, which is perhaps why later commentators on St. Gregory omitted some of them. Here’s a non-exhaustive look at just a few of them, of course leaving out boring stuff like the distinction between ordaining and permissive will. We can write a little primer on that another day.

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Psychomachia VII: Pax Concordia

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The climactic battle may have been decided by the crushing grip of charitable Operatio, but the poem is not quite over yet. We already took a quick look at the final conflict when we discussed the role of Fides in the first post: as the virtues return from the battle, Discordia backstabs Concordia and is quickly slain by Queen Fides. For our final post in this series, we will take a look at how Prudentius describes Pax and Concordia, and what the virtues do when the war with vice is over.

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Psychomachia VI: Ratio and Operatio

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“…neque est violentius ullum/terrarum Vitium, quod tantis cladibus aevum/mundani involvat populi damnetque gehennae” (line 494-495).

Nor is there any vice in all the world more violent which wraps the entire life of worldly people in such disasters and damns them to Gehenna.

The last and greatest of the battles in the war for the soul begins immediately after the fall of Luxuria, while her spoils still spin and rattle to the ground. It turns out there is one more vice even more deadly than Luxuria. Prudentius exposes something terribly important about this vice and why she is so deadly to the soul, so deadly as to be rightly described as victrix orbis: conqueress of the world. She is Avaritia, and like her fallen predecessor she has wiles to bring the virtues to the very brink of defeat. If Superbia was Col. Jessup’s “You need me on that wall” courtroom speech, Avaritia is surely Gordon Gecko confidently explaining that greed is good.

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Psychomachia V: Sobrietas

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After four crushing defeats at the hands of the conquering virtues, the vices turn to a new champion with a very different strategy. In the fifth battle (lines 310-453) there enters the fray a vice quite unlike the previous four. She is the antithesis of Superbia, completely uninterested in war or glory and having no shame for her bumbling, disgusting condition. She is just as contemptibly soft and base as Superbia accuses the virtues of being. She is Luxuria (Self-indulgence) and with her arrival the virtues finally face a serious test to which they nearly succumb. Only the timely intervention of Sobrietas saves the day and puts the war for the human soul back on track.

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Dreaming vs. Reasoning

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Brandon suggests that reflection on the “truth of dreams” is our first step into understanding domains of truth: truth in reality, truth in a story, truth in a scientific model, etc. To press the point a bit further: it’s quite interesting to think that our sub-rational experience of dreaming actually primes us for the rational activity of theorizing and inventing and in some ways facing the world more rationally. It seems like there is a natural intersection between our experience of dreaming and our first baby steps into the realm of rational operation.

One of my most deeply-held philosophical beliefs is that when we dream–set aside lucid dreaming for a moment–we are experiencing the world more or less the way dogs do. Well, any higher mammal, really. The powers of the rational soul are put to rest but the animal soul churns on, allowing us to experience a kind of memory-imagination hybrid of sense data. It is the peculiar state of having loosely-unified sensory experience that makes no sense at all while at the same time seeming perfectly normal. The conjunctions of things masquerading in the dream as cause and effect are often unrelated or even impossible in the real world, but without the operation of the rational powers we cannot actually judge this. Any “before and after” or “this and that” is as good as another in this state, no matter how impossible or absurd or unrelated we would see them to be while awake. This is why it is so hard to put into words the oddness of dreams, the what-it-was-like of dreaming, and yet still be understood by the human who is listening to you. They too have dreamed such dreams! If you can get really good at capturing this weird, disorienting experience of dreaming, you can try to make a living selling your stories like Stephen King did.

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Psychomachia IV: Mens Humilis

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The fourth combat of “Psychomachia,” the one at the very center of the soul-war between virtue and vice, is nearly twice as long as the the previous one (lines 178-309). While there are several things worthy of note, there is no question that the most important part of this battle is the unbelievably compelling speech that Superbia (Pride) gives when she takes the field against Mens Humilis (Humility). This speech contains arguably the most profound statement on vice that Prudentius makes in the poem (although the battle with Avaritia will have something to say about that).

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