Where has this word “flourishing” come from? Although introduced by philosophers, it is a quintessential boomer term. The greatest generation did not land in Normandy to flourish. It is not a Christian term, at least, it is not a respectable Christian term for our telos or end, which is to bear fruit. Christians ought to be speaking, rather, of “human fructification” not “human flourishing.”

But you’ll see more tomorrow.

I was relieved that the Pope’s expected encyclical on AI, apparently entitled Magnifica humanitas, “magnificent humanity,” was not going to be released until May 25, because I might have needed to write something quickly about it.

I don’t find the title auspicious (Mary magnified the Lord, not the human race), and even the Pope, it seems to me, is not in a position to grasp all that is going on with AI, and its directions of development, to weigh in on it authoritatively. Remember that Leo XIII wrote about the effects of industrialization only when we were almost 100 years into the Industrial Revolution.

I’m also worried that that the encyclical will find too ready an audience in the “anti AI” movement which is developing and which the WSJ and NYT have both recently featured in stories. Most of the worries of this movement seemed based on a misunderstanding of economics. What we actually seem to be seeing is a “Jevons effect” in hiring.

Also, the persons Leo has chosen to be with him when he releases the encyclical do not, in me, inspire confidence.

For all that, I hope I’m pleasantly surprised.

Oops—I thought my conference in Prague was beginning Thursday and that I had a whole day free today, Wednesday. I’m glad I looked again at the program and found that it begins today at 9am sharp! Therefore, sadly, this post will need to be mainly a travelogue of my arrival yesterday in Prague and what I did on my first day. The time that I thought I had has disappeared.

The first thing I did, after unpacking, was of course to go to a beer hall and get a beer, because Prague is the best beer town in the world. By chance I picked an amber ale based on a recipe of an old monastery near Munich, which also happened to be (I found) the favorite beer of the young lady from Krakow who served me.

Then, of course, I headed on foot over the Charles Bridge to the church where the famous Infant Jesus of Prague may be found. Along the way, which I took as a sign of divine favor, I met two sisters from Mother Teresa’s order, who said they would pray for me.

Also seen en route, at a church near the Charles Bridge, this poster about a concert that evening:

I pity the poor musicians who have to play this same program every single evening for the tourists. But everyone has to make a living, and most jobs (the proponents of “human flourishing” won’t tell you) are inherently tedious.

I have a ticket to Dvorak’s opera, Rusalka, this evening, and for Dialogues des Carmelites for Thursday evening. But the great concert of Czech music played by the Czech Philharmonic on Tuesday evening was sold out.

Therefore, I asked my wife whether I should go to a tourist concert at least, to hear something on Tuesday too in this great city for music.

She said, “Oh yeah, you can find a church somewhere that will be doing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. But someone with your knowledge won’t like it. And I find it unpleasant that churches anyway are turned into mere concert halls.” That’s why this poster struck me as funny.

I have had for a long time a devotion to the Infant Jesus of Prague. I don’t know why he was dressed in red yesterday. I should have thought it would be white because it is still Eastertide. (Notice “should have thought” rather than “would have thought.” See Fowler and Fowler.)

One time when I visited Prague I brought back a small statue of the Infant Jesus and three garments, white, red, and green. The children love to change the garment to match the season. Here’s a close up.

Here is the prayer which the church recommends.

Next I went to the church of Our Lady of the Snows in the old town to rendez-vous with a colleague who happened to be in the city for another purpose.

On the way when I crossed the river I could look back at the Charles Bridge. Prague is said to be one of the two most beautiful cities in the world, along with Paris. When I saw this particular scene (which I had not viewed before), I thought to myself that a mark of a truly beautiful city is that it has dozens and dozens of great vistas, not only a few.

I marveled at the beauty of this church in the Franciscan monastery. Look at the curious light from a rosette window thrown on the reredos.

It was so fascinating that I took a picture of it separately:

The church has this portrait on the wall, and all throughout Prague there are similar portraits and statues of real men.

You’ll know that Christian culture is restored when Catholic Churches regularly display images like this.

After Mass I walked to the pizza restaurant recommended by my celebrity pizza chef friend (Giulio Adriani), called Pizza Nuova, and enjoyed this pizza diavola with, of course, Pilsner Urquell.

And that was my day. Thank you for “watching my slide show.”

Off to the conference now. It is 8:30 am in Prague.

Ciao!

On h

Beauty from the vault. An evening picture of Venice taken with an old camera in the rain.

And here’s the reading for this coming Sunday.

I can’t underline it as I am wont, because I’m traveling without my Apple Pencil. So I will simply list my remarks.

1– I find descriptions of miraculous and mystical phenomena fascinating. Luke is noteworthy for his conciseness. He does not elaborate. Consider, what does it mean that noise came from the sky (or “heaven”, ouranos)? If it came from the sky, how could it or its effect be located in the room? The sound clearly had a terrestrial location, because otherwise its place could not have been discovered by the crowd of sojourners. I suppose the location of the sound changed, as when a tornado approaches.

By the way, “noise” (NAB) is a horrible translation! The Greek word (ēchos) is the source of our “echo.” It means a confused jumble of sound, something turbulent, like a roar. It’s certainly not a “noise”!

Then the tongues are interesting. The modern mind thinks first of the matter and second of the form. We think of them as fire, shaped in tongues. But this is not what Luke says. He says that tongues appeared, as if fire. He is mostly concerned with asserting that they were tongues.

And then modern translations finesse Luke’s language that, when the tongues appeared, they were divided tongues. But the NAB imposes an interpretation: tongues of fire appeared, which parted. But the Greek does not say this. It says that divided tongues came to rest on each one. The Douay-Rheims gets it exactly right:

And there appeared to them parted tongues as it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them:

It’s mystical phenomenon. We don’t have the right to rationalize it as an initial bundle of fire which then separated into tongues —on the grounds that this is what we can easily picture. It’s not what Luke says.

What’s the difference anyway? I suppose it’s that Luke’s Greek suggests that the tongues remained somehow one, a single entity, even though resting on separate individuals.

2–I find it interesting that Luke takes pains to say they were sitting. In the paintings, aren’t they always standing? And yet most definitely they were sitting. And then, the divided tongues, in turn, sit on each one of them. There are plenty of Greek expressions for saying that the divided tongues “rested” or “remained” on each. But Luke obviously insists that they “sit.” Something is conveyed here. In the ancient world, one sits to teach. To sit is to express authority. To sit is to be ordered.

3–Then Luke’s language of “every nation under heaven” is fascinating. Obviously, he did not have to use this language to express this thought. He could have said that they were from “every nation in the world” or “on earth.” But he chooses to use the same word (ouranos) as the place from which the sound originated. (This fact is obscured in the NAB translation, because it uses “sky” for the first occurrence and “heaven” for the second.). It’s natural to say that he thinks the divided tongues somehow mirror the divided peoples gathered there.

4–I find “devout” for Greek eulabeis to be curious. Most translations opt for it. But the Greek word means something like circumspect and serious. After all, these are the people who traveled a long way to visit the holy city! But note how there is no suggestion at all that these “circumspect” persons are lost or hopelessly abandoned to sin. It is assumed that they are already close to embracing Christ. (Yes, they are a special, self-selected group.)

5–I know “native language” means “language in which one was born,” and yet the phrase is so natural to us that we easily overlook its meaning. Once again the Douay-Rheims proves accurate and more vivid:

And how have we heard, every man our own tongue wherein we were born

This language is much more interesting, because it brings in the thought that the language was spoken with perfect fluency, and also that it evoked memories of childhood. Many of these sojourners might not have lived in their home countries for many years.

Well, that’s all for today. I’m mainly in airports. I flew overnight from Dulles Airport outside Washington, DC, to Zurich, for a connecting flight to Prague.

This evening I plan to walk around Prague for exercise and have dinner at the new pizza restaurant in Prague, Pizza Nueva, recommended by my friend who is a celebrity pizza chef. Why a pizza restaurant? Well, later I’ll have enough of goulash, dumplings, sausages, and schnitzel. What is a more perfect food for one than a great Neapolitan pizza and cold beer?

I’m meeting a colleague who happens to be in Prague for another purpose, and we’ll go to Mass together.

Tomorrow, my first task will be to make a pilgrimage to the Infant Jesus of Prague. I’ll send you a picture.

And for your records, here is my most recent proofreading prompt:

Read as a copy editor against the possibility that every sentence contains an error. Read each sentence word by word, including function words (articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions); flag any function word that does not match what the sentence requires — substitutions such as “the” for “they” are especially easy to miss on a fast read. Verify that every sentence reaches a grammatical conclusion: read each to its closing punctuation and confirm it is syntactically complete; flag any sentence that breaks off, trails into fragments, or ends mid-word. List all findings in this order before stylistic observations: (1) typos/spelling, including wrong-word substitutions among short function words (e.g., “the” for “they”); (2) grammatical errors; (3) drafting residues — notes to author, false starts, orphaned words; (4) incomplete thoughts; (4a) truncations — sentences ending abruptly before a grammatical conclusion, including mid-word breaks; (5) punctuation errors; (6) register/tone inconsistencies; (7) semantic errors — near-miss idioms and garbled collocations.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ciao!

It’s just like giving up “values” and speaking instead of “principles” and “goods.”

This evening I leave for my conference at the Charles University in Prague on Nicomachean Ethics X. Arguably, this is the most important book in the Ethics. The end is always more important in practical matters than the beginning, right? And yet classes hardly ever get to it. They read Nic Eth I, and maybe II or III. Sometimes they read excerpts too from VIII and IX. (I heartily approve!) But they do not get to X. I’ll try to explain in the coming week why X is so important.

I will write my Catholic Thing essay this week indirectly on X, because I will attack the common view that what Aristotle meant by ‘happiness’ (eudaimonia for him) is captured well by our word ‘flourishing.’

I will have difficulty posting on Tuesday morning because, if I post, it will have to be from the airport in Zurich, during my layover. Or maybe (now that I think of Swiss coffee, chocolate, and pastries) it will not be so difficult.

Oh, I almost forgot, beauty from the vault!

My son, Blaise, scoring a “try” for his high school rugby team. (He attends The Heights School in Potomac, MD.) Now that’s passion! But it ought to strike you as absurd to say that the picture is a study in emotion.

On Saturday evening, I attended a concert of the Baltimore Symphony at Strathmore Hall with a friend. This was the program:

Hannu Lintu, conductor
Francesco Piemontesi, piano

SIBELIUS Night Ride and Sunrise
BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 4
SAARIAHO Ciel d’hiver “The Winter Sky“
SIBELIUS Symphony No. 7

This evening I was particularly struck by how old and even enfeebled most of the audience was. It was common to see people hobbling by with canes or being helped along by an assistant. The average age had to be over 60.

Orchestras are aware of the problem, of course, and are trying to remedy it with gimmicks such as movie nights, where the orchestra plays a sound track to some somewhat-popular movie. But this is foolish and will not work. The only environments in which a love of classical music is reliably being fostered are homeschools and classical schools.

Nota bene: Anyone concerned to promote a love of classical music among young persons ought to become a zealous advocate of school vouchers and school choice for religious parents. The government school system is incapable of fostering such love.

All of my children for example have known and loved, say, the Mahler and Bruckner symphonies before they were 13 years old. I am not exaggerating.

When I attend an orchestra concert, I always think of something my daughter, Sarah, said, when I took her once to hear the National Symphony Orchestra, when she was in high school. I asked her what she thought of the concert, anticipating joining with her in a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the performance. But she declined to criticize. She said: “I am overwhelmed by the thought of 100 experts on a stage, each of them devoting his life or her life to becoming the best possible on an instrument, all of them working together to do something to please me and to edify me.”

Indeed. A symphony orchestra, just its existence and its playing and sound, is a pinnacle of civilization.

Hannu Lintu is the premier interpreter of the Sibelius symphonies. Here he is, receiving the applause for the orchestra’s performance of Sibelius 7:

If you have access to Medici.tv, listen to his performances of all seven symphonies there. He gives a half-hour analysis of each symphony before its performance.

The Sibelius symphonies are pretty great. Numbers 2 and 5 are certainly among the greatest symphonies in the repertoire. But I have come to agree with the longstanding opinion of my friend, with whom I attended the concert, that number 7 is the greatest. You should listen to it, if you do not know it. Listen to it multiple times, at least three times, because you will not otherwise be able to begin to understand it. But it is short, less than half an hour, and so this exercise will not be arduous.

It is a one-movement symphony. That may see like a contradiction in terms: mustn’t a symphony comprise three or more movements? Well, it does have sections or parts. It is not a programmatic work (it does not aim to tell a story or paint a picture), and it aims to make a serious statement, with significant development and complexity.

Samuel Barber’s first symphony is also in one movement, if you wish to see another example.

The orchestra, in the playing of this symphony, seemed to be raised to a higher, transcendent level. It was as if some highly virtuosic ensemble had been lifted out of a Nordic city and transported to Maryland to play for thirty minutes. The performance was better than any recording I have heard. I wish I could go back and listen to it again. In my memory, I try to do so.

Sadly, the orchestra apparently felt it had to include a warhorse in the program to attract a crowd in an otherwise solely Finnish program. Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto played that role. What an absurdity!

I saw my daughter Lizzie’s piano professor after my university’s commencement on last Saturday, Nikita Fitenko, and told him that I was going to hear the 4th.

Nikita, Lizzie, myself, and Dr. Mrs. Catherine Pakaluk

He said the 4th was the most difficult of all the Beethoven concerti, because of the trills and double notes. Also, he said, it’s very long and therefore difficult for the performer to sustain the necessary energy. And he said that he believes the last movement is relatively “flat,” so that it becomes even more challenging to sustain energy throughout it.

I’ve played in orchestras for the 4th many times but must confess that I never imagined the work would appear so to the pianist, but after he said it, it made sense.

The pianist at the concert was Francesco Piemontesi. I had never heard of him before, and have heard none of his recordings. He and Lintu took the piece at an absurdly fast clip—as regards playing the piano part—although musically the tempi made fine sense.

Piemontesi made dozens of mistakes. I mean dozens. I found myself thinking, Is this guy some kind of poseur, who actually cannot play the piano very well? But I came to think that he believed that it simply was not possible to play all the notes at the intended tempo; that Beethoven himself could not and did not play them; and that hardly anyone could play them, and that, if they did play them, they would likely not play them with the requisite elegance and fluidity —for this performance was extraordinary for its elegance, refinement, and subtlety.

When Piemontesi played the Brahms intermezzo no. 1 in E flat major as an encore—so marvelously—I exclaimed “wow” and jumped to my feet to give a standing ovation (I was the only one, for the encore). It was clear he could play the piano, indeed.

Then I began to listen to his recordings on Spotify and saw what a master he truly is.

But that’s all for today.

Ciao!

Beauty from the vault: Can you guess this location?

It’s Death Valley.

Next week I go to Prague for an international seminar on Aristotle at the Charles University. More specifically, the seminar is on book X of the Nicomachean Ethics. I will be presenting on 1178b32-1179a33. For the record, here is my working version of how I would render that passage. I will likely say more later about the interesting issues here. (No need to get flustered by the Greek. Just skip over it if you wish and jump from English passage to English passage.)

—

δεήσει δὲ καὶ τῆς ἐκτὸς εὐημερίας ἀνθρώπῳ ὄντι· οὐ γὰρ αὐτάρκης ἡ φύσις πρὸς τὸ θεωρεῖν,

But there will be a need for external prosperity as well, in the case of a human being. After all, human nature, in contemplating, is not self-sufficient.

ἀλλὰ δεῖ καὶ τὸ σῶμα (35) ὑγιαίνειν καὶ τροφὴν καὶ τὴν λοιπὴν θεραπείαν ὑπάρχειν. [1179a]

Rather, it requires additionally that the body (35) be healthy, and that nourishment and other sorts of support be present.

(1) οὐ μὴν οἰητέον γε πολλῶν καὶ μεγάλων δεήσεσθαι τὸν εὐδαιμονήσοντα, εἰ μὴ ἐνδέχεται ἄνευ τῶν ἐκτὸς ἀγαθῶν μακάριον εἶναι· οὐ γὰρ ἐν τῇ ὑπερβολῇ τὸ αὔταρκες οὐδ’ ἡ πρᾶξις, δυνατὸν δὲ καὶ μὴ ἄρχοντα γῆς καὶ θαλάττης πράττειν (5) τὰ καλά· καὶ γὰρ ἀπὸ μετρίων δύναιτ’ ἄν τις πράττειν κατὰ τὴν ἀρετήν (τοῦτο δ’ ἔστιν ἰδεῖν ἐναργῶς· οἱ γὰρ ἰδιῶται τῶν δυναστῶν οὐχ ἧττον δοκοῦσι τὰ ἐπιεικῆ πράττειν, ἀλλὰ καὶ μᾶλλον)· ἱκανὸν δὲ τοσαῦθ’ ὑπάρχειν· ἔσται γὰρ ὁ βίος εὐδαίμων τοῦ κατὰ τὴν ἀρετὴν ἐνεργοῦντος.

(1) At very least one must not suppose-- if it is not possible to be blessed without any external goods --that someone who is to be happy will require many external goods, and great ones. Self-sufficiency is not a matter of excess, and neither is action. One is capable, even without ruling over land and sea, of doing (5) admirable deeds. Even from middling means, someone might act out of virtue. This is plain to see, since ordinary men, in relation to the powerful, are not any less salient for carrying out decent actions, but rather, even more so. It is enough, then, [δή] that external goods be present to that extent. For the life of the one who is actively exercising virtue will be the happy life.

καὶ Σόλων (10) δὲ τοὺς εὐδαίμονας ἴσως ἀπεφαίνετο καλῶς, εἰπὼν μετρίως τοῖς ἐκτὸς κεχορηγημένους, πεπραγότας δὲ τὰ κάλλισθ’, ὡς ᾤετο, καὶ βεβιωκότας σωφρόνως· ἐνδέχεται γὰρ μέτρια κεκτημένους πράττειν ἃ δεῖ.

ἔοικε δὲ καὶ Ἀναξαγόρας οὐ πλούσιον οὐδὲ δυνάστην ὑπολαβεῖν τὸν εὐδαίμονα, εἰπὼν ὅτι (15) οὐκ ἂν θαυμάσειεν εἴ τις ἄτοπος φανείη τοῖς πολλοῖς· οὗτοι γὰρ κρίνουσι τοῖς ἐκτός, τούτων αἰσθανόμενοι μόνον.

συμφωνεῖν δὴ τοῖς λόγοις ἐοίκασιν αἱ τῶν σοφῶν δόξαι.

And then Solon (10) presumably used to characterize happy men correctly, when he said they were equipped to only a middling degree with external goods, while having accomplished the finest deeds (as he supposed) and having lived with self-restraint. The reason is that it is possible for men who possess only middling means to do what is required.

And then it looks like Anaxagoras took the happy man to be not wealthy, nor powerful, when he said (15) that he would hardly be surprised if, to the many, he looked strange. For the many judge by externals, as they perceive only these.

The opinions of the wise, then, seem to harmonize with the arguments.

πίστιν μὲν οὖν καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα ἔχει τινά,

So then, even such things have a certain credibility.

τὸ δ’ ἀληθὲς ἐν τοῖς πρακτικοῖς ἐκ τῶν ἔργων καὶ τοῦ βίου κρίνεται· ἐν τούτοις (20) γὰρ τὸ κύριον. σκοπεῖν δὴ τὰ προειρημένα χρὴ ἐπὶ τὰ ἔργα καὶ τὸν βίον φέροντας, καὶ συνᾳδόντων μὲν τοῖς ἔργοις ἀποδεκτέον, διαφωνούντων δὲ λόγους ὑποληπτέον.

But truth in practical matters is judged by actions and life: (20) since authority is in these. It is necessary, then, to examine carefully the above discussions, by bringing them to bear on actions and life: whatever is in tune with actions is to be accepted, while whatever sounds out of tune is to be received as mere talk.

ὁ δὲ κατὰ νοῦν ἐνεργῶν καὶ τοῦτον θεραπεύων καὶ διακείμενος ἄριστα καὶ θεοφιλέστατος ἔοικεν. εἰ γάρ τις ἐπιμέλεια τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων (25) ὑπὸ θεῶν γίνεται, ὥσπερ δοκεῖ, καὶ εἴη ἂν εὔλογον χαίρειν τε αὐτοὺς τῷ ἀρίστῳ καὶ συγγενεστάτῳ (τοῦτο δ’ ἂν εἴη ὁ νοῦς) καὶ τοὺς ἀγαπῶντας μάλιστα τοῦτο καὶ τιμῶντας ἀντευποιεῖν ὡς τῶν φίλων αὐτοῖς ἐπιμελουμένους καὶ ὀρθῶς τε καὶ καλῶς πράττοντας. ὅτι δὲ πάντα ταῦτα (30) τῷ σοφῷ μάλισθ’ ὑπάρχει, οὐκ ἄδηλον. θεοφιλέστατος ἄρα. τὸν αὐτὸν δ’ εἰκὸς καὶ εὐδαιμονέστατον· ὥστε κἂν οὕτως εἴη ὁ σοφὸς μάλιστ’ εὐδαίμων.

A man who is active in the way characteristic of mind and takes care of this and is disposed in the best way, seems also to be most beloved by the gods. For if there is any care for mere human matters (25) on the part of the gods, as is thought, it would also be understandable for them to find delight in what is best and most akin—but this would be the mind—and to benefit in return those who love this especially and honor this, as those who are caring for what is dear to them and acting rightly and well. That all these things belong (30) to a wise man especially is not unclear. He therefore would also be most beloved by the gods. It follows in this way also that a wise man would be a happy man most of all.

Ciao!

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But first, of course, beauty from the vault.

I thought of this picture often when I was in Austin, of my wife and our son, Blaise, in a sling, taken on the Congress Avenue bridge over Lake Lady Bird. We were there for a conference sixteen years ago! We watched the bats fly out at dusk. It was the first time I tried margaritas, chips, and salsa, believe it or not.

And also as an amuse-bouche, a story about John Senior. Today I played golf with the father of a friend, who attended KU and is a real, live, direct, student of John Senior himself. I insisted he tell me a John Senior story. This is what he said.

Their class was meeting in a basement room of some building. The book they were discussing was Dante, Paradiso XXIV, which is about the Eucharist. Senior spent the whole class discusing just the opening words, O sodalizio eletto a la gran cena del benedetto Agnello — "O chosen fellowship at the great supper of the blessed Lamb." He would be mesmerizing. At one point during the class—again, having the class mesmerized—Senior was trying to convey what the doctrine of the Real Presence really meant. (This fellow telling the story was not yet a Catholic, but, he said, because of Senior, he needed no convincing about the Eucharist.) To make his point, Senior said—again, the class was still and totally silent—”Just imagine if Jesus Christ were to walk through that wall, there!” Then he pointed at the wall, and, when he did, every single student looked at the wall, anticipating that Jesus Christ was going to walk through it and into the class—even though the classroom was in a basement under ground!

The man multiple times told me, over the course of the golf round, “It is because of John Senior that I am the man that I am. I owe everything to him.”

I thought to myself—how many teachers have such an effect?

Anyway, here is Part III of my lecture.

We’ve seen that moderns cannot easily say what emotions are. Perhaps they are felt sensations, picked out from other sensations by their etiology. They seem independent of one another. Their number and order look arbitrary. In contrast, a passion in the classical conception is placed within a teleological conception of the human person as endowed with two appetitive powers. They are ‘for’ obtaining goods and avoiding evils in the world. They are to be comprehended, sorted, analyzed, and ordered, with reference to a metaphysical framework which comprehends both the natural world and human action. And our actions are seen as originating from the interplay of distinctively human powers with powers which we share with brute animals, at least, when these powers are looked at with a high level of generality.

So, how did this massive change in our self-understanding, from passions to emotions, take place?

As I mentioned, Dixon (2003) regards the change as part of a process of “secularization”: first, the academy was made independent of the Church, and, second, a discipline of “psychology” was created in the academy, independent of philosophy or theology. Once the language of “emotions” was established within this new discipline, students and scholars became cut off from the past, because those who came after would assume, mistakenly, that what we meant by “emotions” was what classical and medieval thinkers meant by “passions.”

I shall take a different path. I observe first that there is no reason why talk of passions and talk of emotions could not exist side-by-side, the way we continue to say that the sun rises and sets, while we also say that the earth rotates. Therefore, we are confronted with two phenomena, not one: the decline in speaking about the passions, and the rise in speaking about our emotions. The ngram which we looked at earlier already suggested that these are two phenomena, while the “sentiments” were transitional.

Next, I will note that the resulting change in self-understanding is so great, that mere changes in the academy cannot explain it. The explanation, I think, must involve those three great drivers of human culture, sex, money, and religious belief.

Therefore, here is the story which I briefly sketch. Curiously, C. S. Lewis is one of the best commentators on it, through his great scholarly work of 1936, The Allegory of Love, about the rise of the literature of courtly love, and its implications for all of Christian and Western civilization (Lewis, 1936).

The literature of courtly love celebrated a Christian heresy, which can be summed up as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love (Lewis, 1936, p. 2). A young man would adopt a stance of servitude towards a woman: this was an extreme act of Humility, in a society where men were authoritative over women. He would show her the service of a courtier in her court, by undergoing trials for her and corresponding to her slightest desires. This was the ideal of Courtesy. The woman had to be married and established, because, as Lewis (1936) points out, “Any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery” (p. 13). Thus, the ideal of Adultery. And finally both the suitor and the lady would cultivate the passion of erotic love for its own sake—to love being in love—because this passion was thought to be divine, and it would accordingly purge and purify its devotees. So think of the ideals of Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and Religion of Love.

And here Lewis says something quite apposite. Throughout his book, it is to be noted, he uses the word “passion” in the singular only, and only to mean erotic love. But Lewis of course knows of the classical account as formulated by Aquinas. On this point he says, “[The scholastics] are not talking about the same kind of passion as the romantics. The one party means merely an animal intoxication; the other believes, rightly or wrongly, in a ‘passion’ which works a [transformative]³ change upon appetite and affection and turns them into something different from either. About ‘passion’ in this sense Thomas Aquinas has naturally nothing to say—as he has nothing to say about the steam-engine. He has not heard of it. It was only coming into existence in his time, and finding its first expression in the poetry of courtly love” (Lewis, 1936, p. 17).

One can see that Lewis believes that the ideal of courtly love introduced something new. We take it for granted, when we speak of “romanticism,” but it was unknown before the ideal of courtly love.

Lewis (1936) says that religious persons in the centuries which followed would remain uncomprehending of this sort of ‘passion’ and regard it as wicked, which in turn “produced in the poets a certain willfulness, a readiness to emphasize rather than to conceal the antagonism between their amatory and their religious ideals” (p. 17). Again, he says, “this erotic religion arises as a rival or a parody of the real religion and emphasizes the antagonism of the two ideals” (p. 18).

It’s easy to see how the Thomistic account on its own terms tends naturally to reduce all passions to one Passion. If passion is most salient when the person suffering it is drawn markedly away from his natural or appropriate condition towards an agent, then the most extreme case of passion, deserving of being regarded as the “type” of all passion, one might suppose, will be when one person is so drawn to another, that he even subjects his own will to that of the other, abandoning everything which is settled and conventional for that other person’s sake, and because of the beloved’s beauty not utility.

If such a passion is identified with erotic love, sensible persons will be frightened of it. Most certainly it will be disruptive of households and commercial society. Consider songs like “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy,” about a young bride who runs off with a band of gypsies:

What care I for a goose-feather bed

With the sheets turned down so bravely, oh

For to-night I’ll sleep in a cold open field

Along with the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh.

Such a passion must be either domesticated, debunked, or subordinated to something else. In his book, The Allegory of Love, Lewis (1936) holds that it was domesticated, after all, in England by humble English manners—by hobbit life, if you will. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, he thinks, was the herald of that domestication (Lewis, 1936, p. 298). In The Abolition of Man, as we have seen, the authors of The Green Book are debunkers, while Lewis (1943) now adopts the view, from Plato, that thumos needs to come to the aid of logos against epithumia and eros: magnanimity, he in effect supposes, will ensure that Passion can be given scope and yet remain in its place.

However Lewis overlooks that “real religion,” as he calls it, was coming up with its own solution, a competing and higher romanticism, based on a different all-consuming passion. I mean the mendicant orders, which arose at roughly the same time as courtly love. What speaks more of Passion than a young St. Francis standing in the town square naked, having renounced his inheritance, to undertake a life of trial, of begging, on behalf of his beloved?—For which, it is to be noted, he was rewarded with permanent wounds, the stigmata. Or what could possibly be more romantic than the prayer of St. Bonaventure after communion? “Pierce, O most sweet Lord Jesus, my inmost soul with the most joyous and healthful wound of Thy love […] that my soul may ever languish and melt with entire love and longing for Thee, may yearn for Thee and for thy courts, may long to be dissolved and to be with Thee.” (Bonaventure, Opera Omnia, Vol. 8, Quaracchi, 1898; English translation from EWTN, n.d.) And so on.

So besides being domesticated, debunked, or subdued, Passion can take a genuinely divine object. I might also add that Passion can be willfully ignored and held in contempt, as unserious, the attitude of the character Soames, in John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga—a masterful study of the conflict between Beauty and Utility.

Or, finally, all the passions can be ignored, by the invention of the category of emotions, those “goodish,” deracinated “feelings,” which can be safely put in boxes and studied antiseptically.

I myself believe that domestication in Christian marriage, debunking, subordination to charity, and contempt when appropriate, all have their place. The classical account of the passions, I think, can help with all four strategies, especially insofar as it underwrites an account of the virtues, which are understood as essential to a life of eudaimonia.

One might have thought that Aristotelians and Thomists would in general see the importance of this project. But this leads to a question, on which I shall close. Why is it that in the revivals of Aristotelianism and Thomism in the 20th century—I mean both the earlier neo-scholastic movement led by Gilson (1936) and Maritain (1959), and the later revival of Thomistic virtue theory and action theory, centering around Anscombe (1958) and MacIntyre (1981)—why is it that the classical understanding of the passions was completely ignored? Prior to our being “after virtue,” we were “after passion.”⁴

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Beauty from the vault, one of my favorite pictures ever, taken when my wife and I went to Rome for the turn of the millennium with the alumni and alumnae of the Centesimus Annus/Tertio Millenio seminars. Our eldest, Joseph, is in utero. His birthday is today. We had a private audience with the great saint through the offices of George Weigel.

Here is the promised second part of my lecture, “A Plea for a Passionate Moral Psychology.”

—

So then, we have undergone a massive shift in our common self-understanding, when we stopped talking about ‘passions,’ and began talking solely about ‘emotions.’ Next, I want to say something briefly about the older understanding of the passions and what we lost when we gave that up.

I shall take Thomas Aquinas as the best representative of the older, classical view.[1]

I find that the best way of conveying how different the classical view is, is through a scenario. Imagine with me, if you will, an American soldier fighting in the battle of Monte Cassino in World War II, on this date in 1944.[2] The conditions are rainy and cold. He is dug into a foxhole. He is lightly wounded. He suffers from a fever because he has pneumonia. He is very uncomfortable and in considerable pain. But he has a little pocket prayer book and derives some consolation from praying the psalms. All of a sudden, he thinks he hears a German patrol approaching—and out of fear he quickly grabs his rifle, jumps out of the foxhole, and starts running in the direction opposite the sounds.

In this scene which I just described, how many emotions have I referred to? How many passions have I referred to?

Probably most of us would say that I referred to just one emotion in my description, the soldier’s emotion of fear, when I said that “out of fear” he grabbed his rifle and started running. Perhaps some would say that his feeling of consolation from praying the psalms is also an emotion.

But what would be the method by which we would answer this question? We would use one of two ways. All of us seem to carry around an informal list of “emotions,” such as fear, sorrow, joy, hope, anger, resentment, and so on. Recalling this list, we would notice that only one item on the list was mentioned in my description. Needless to say, this is a haphazard approach.

Secondly, we might imagine a self-report. Suppose, like one of those sports broadcasters, we could run along with the soldier and ask him, “How do you feel right now, as you’re running away?” –he’d probably say, “I feel very afraid.” What someone says, when we ask him how he feels, indicates an emotion.

However, if we were to ask Aquinas how many passiones I had referred to in describing this scenario, he would approach the question somewhat scientifically. He would have said there were at least a dozen, and he would answer this question making use of a robust metaphysics and philosophical anthropology. There are not different “senses” of emotion. But Aquinas’s philosophical framework also allows him to distinguish different senses of passio—a strict sense, a general sense, an analogical sense—and relate these to one another.

So then, let us imagine St. Thomas commenting on the case.

“Passio,” he might begin, “is one of the ten Aristotelian categories, along with substance, quality, quantity, relation, and so on. These are the highest genera of being. A passio in this sense is the correlative of actio. The two are found together in any change or motus.

“Begin with the soldier. He is a rational creature who has self-command. He is a ‘self-mover,’ as I say. Therefore, when he acts so as to run, he makes himself such as to be running, and to have run, and this is one passio, his affect upon himself.”

“Another passio is the ‘being carried’ of the soldier’s rifle. Perhaps you remember that Plato in the Euthyphro says that something’s being carried, is always dependent upon the carrying of it. Every passio is dependent upon some actio. This principle is evident in the change of place of the rifle: it is carried, that is, it undergoes locomotion, because the soldier carries it.”

--You and I might pause at this point and observe that it would be nonsense to say that the being carried of the rifle was an emotion.--

“A third and fourth passio in the scene would be the man’s wounds, and his sickness. To be precise, the man’s flesh received the passio of being wounded precisely as the shrapnel was wounding him; and his body received the passio of falling ill precisely when the disease was infecting him. However, the term passio may also be applied in a looser sense to the continuing effects of a passio, such as, the wounds and the sickness.”

If you and I were astute, we might remark here that these cases show that the English word which is most similar to passio is not ‘emotion’ but rather ‘suffering’ or ‘suffers.’ When the body is wounded, it suffers a wound; when it falls ill, it suffers an illness. We can even say, in English, that when the soldier carries the rifle, the rifle suffers carrying, that is to say, it undergoes carrying.

But let’s allow Aquinas to proceed.

“But note, too,” the Angelic Doctor continues, “that the soldier feels pain because of his wounds, and remains discomforted because of his illness. That is to say, these passiones are not like cuts left in wood or lingering rust in iron. Therefore, we need to pay special attention to passiones which involve the principle of life in a living thing, the psychē or anima—what you call in English, however imperfectly, ‘the soul.’

“Now, I like to say that there are two kinds of passiones which concern the soul, because there are two kinds of relation of the soul to the body. First, the soul stands to the body simply as the form of the living body, in virtue of which the body is alive. Any passio of the soul which affects the soul in this respect, I call a ‘corporeal passion’ or passio corporalis. In English you might call it a bodily suffering or a bodily affliction. Second, the soul stands to the body as a equipped to move the body and as having a nature such as to move it, as the ‘motor,’ if you will, of the body. Any passio of the soul which affects it in this sense I call a “psychic passion” or passio animalis.

“The felt wounds and felt illness are ‘corporeal passions.’ They are afflictions of the soul simply in virtue of its being the form of the living body. Obviously for these passiones, as you pointed out, the English word, ‘suffering,’ does adequate work. We say, ‘He is suffering from his wounds.’ ‘He is suffering from his illness.’ ‘His wounds are a great suffering.’ ‘His illness is a terrible suffering.’”

You and I might at this point even be so bold as to interrupt and say, “But why, when the physician treats such a person, and he recovers from his wounds and illness, don’t we say that he ‘suffers health’? — because, after all, he was the object of an action which was such as to make him healthy. The correlative of restoring his health is suffering health.”

“That’s a good question,” Aquinas might reply, “and I address it in my Summa. I point out that the very nature of a passio is to be acted upon by an agent, so as to be drawn to or made conformable to the agent. However, an agent’s intervention is clearest, when it acts upon something so as to draw it away from its natural or accustomed state. Because then the drawing away from makes the drawing to more salient. That is why the ‘suffering’ of a man is clearest, and the word ‘suffer’ is used most properly, when the agent draws him away from, not back to, his natural state of health.”

“But to return… finally, we come to the soldier’s fear. I said that I saw more than a dozen passiones in the scene, but so far we have mentioned only five. The soldier’s fear, properly analyzed, will contribute seven more.

“But before we go on, I want to make an important point, which is that, strictly, nothing immaterial can be the subject of a passion. All of the passiones I have mentioned so far, are ‘in’ some body, not in the soul, although they may indirectly involve the soul, in virtue of the soul’s relation to the body. Consider the soldier’s wounds. His body is mutated, not the soul. The pain of a wound is in the soul through the body—you can point to where in the body—it is not in the soul of itself.

“As you know, I have argued in my commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima that Aristotle is properly interpreted as holding that there is a dedicated function, or ‘part’ of the soul, if you will, which could not function as it does, if it used a corporeal organ of the body for its work. This part is what we refer to as ‘reason’ or ‘intelligence,’ and, in its aspect as an appetitive power, it is also called ‘the will.’ Brute animals lack a rational part of the soul. They can have astounding powers of calculation and imagination, but they do not have understanding and will. A distinctively human action, then, is one which is done principally through reason and will, after deliberation and choice. Finding consolation in prayer is a distinctively human action and should not be counted as a passion, because this is found in the immaterial part of the soul, where there is no transmutation— although one may allow that, through a kind of spilling over, as an extension and after effect, the body can become engaged in heartfelt prayer. I have felt this many times myself. Therefore, I count the soldier’s consolation in prayer as a borderline case of passion. It is a passion only by analogy and only through a certain spilling over of the soul’s action into the body.”

“But let’s return to his fear. Fear presupposes three prior passions. It implies another. And it leads to yet another. I discuss this fact, as you know, in my article on the ‘order’ of the passions in my Summa. This order is structural and logical, but sometimes also chronological. Our passions after all have a rational structure, and we suffer them in ways that show predictable superpositions.

“I cannot fear what I do not regard as a future evil. I shrink from any evil because of a good which I love and which this evil threatens. So then, enumerate with me all the passions involved in fear. It is because I love the good which is my life (count this as the first passion, the persistent passion of self-love), that I hate the loss of my life (count this as a second persistent passion), and therefore I am averse from what would threaten my life (a third persistent passion). If this thing which would threaten my life is, as it were, inert, and easy to get away from — say, in the way that I can easily walk away from a dangerous precipice—then there is no passion of fear. The aversion, I say, remains in the ‘concupiscible faculty.’ But if escaping the evil which threatens is difficult, then my ‘irascible faculty,’ as I say, becomes engaged. And now I suffer two emotions. I suffer fear, insofar as I suppose that the evil will overcome me, and, at the same time, I suffer daring, insofar as I hope to escape the evil. And then, if I succeed in avoiding the evil, I suffer the passion of delight, but if I fail to avoid it, I suffer the passion of sorrow.

“And so, it is far too simple to say that the soldier has just one ‘emotion,’ of fear. He suffers, rather, the following structure of six passions, in this rational order: love (of his life), hatred (of his death), aversion (from the evil), fear-and-daring (to overcome it), and joy (assuming he takes himself to have escaped the danger).”

We pause to admire how many passions Aquinas had identified after all in our simple scenario. But the great saint did not pause for long and continued:

“You may wonder what the relation is between suffering a passion and human action. What is it to act ‘out of’ a passion? Do you remember when I said that a human being, as rational, is a self-mover, and that, therefore, when he acts, of necessity he is acted upon, too, by himself. Therefore, in a distinctively human action, a man is passive in being active. In contrast, when he acts ‘out of passion,’ it is the reverse: he is active in being passive. That is why in my Summa I actually say that, in my treatment of the passions, I am picking out a distinct class of human actions. I conceive of passions as actions. These are not distinctively human actions, but actions which, at a very high level of generality, we share with brute animals. Animals too move away from danger. But we do so intelligently: the soldier’s mental act of consenting to the perception of a danger; his quick decision to get up and run; his persistence in running: these are all actions of the soldier, done ‘out of’ passions. Passions as it were do not register, they have no standing or point, except when we act ‘out of’ them.”

At this point, the Aquinas whom we are imagining pauses and looks up at us with a certain confidence that he has said enough to distinguish his classical conception of passion from the modern concept of an emotion. And indeed he has. However, if we were wise, we would press him a little bit more. We might say, for instance, that we’ve always been puzzled by Aristotle’s enumeration of the virtues—why does he pick out just the virtues that he does, and why does he conceive of his list as complete, as he clearly does? Can the classical conception of the passions shed light on these difficulties? After all, Aristotle seems to define a character virtue as an established state, a habitus or hexis, relative to a pathos or passio.

“The matter is complex, but you are on the right path,” Aquinas might reply. “Let me say this just now. The cardinal virtues track powers, not passions: the power of reason, prudence; the power of will, justice; the irascible power, fortitude; the concupiscible power, moderation. Passions are suffered in one or the other of these last two appetitive powers. But other virtues track particular passions insofar as they are related to what I call ‘the order of reason.’ For instance, there are three main goods which men strive after in society, wealth, honor, and friends. When wealth and honor are there for the taking, only concupiscible passions enter in, and the virtues which regulate such passions, relative to the order of reason, are liberality and proper ambition. But when the use of money, or the acquisition of honor, has some aspect of trial and struggle, then irascible passions enter in, and the virtues which regulate these, relative to the order of reason, are magnificence and magnanimity. Our relations to friends bring in yet other passions, which we need not discuss here. Generally, because we think of virtues as perfections which attain difficult things, we identify virtues through attainments which are salient for their difficulty: it’s not any passion for bodily pleasure which has a virtue assigned to it (and there are many such pleasures), but rather the passion for pleasures of touch, because these are the most difficult to master, given human nature. These guidelines should be enough for you. You should be able to figure out the rest for yourself.”

At this point it would be appropriate to thank Aquinas and not trouble him any further. If his 8 million written words failed to satisfy us, his spoken words would be unlikely to help.

[The was the big laugh line of the lecture for the UATX crowd.]

[1] See Aquinas’s Treatise on the Passions in the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, and also Question 26 of his Disputed Questions on Truth (De Veritate); see also St. John Damascene’s discussion in De Fide Orthodoxa, book II, chapter II, which St. Thomas relies upon heavily (in the Latin translation of Burgundio).

[2] The date of the lecture was the anniversary of the first assault, by Polish forces, of the Fourth and final Battle of Monte Cassino. For any day, I like to think of what happened on that date in the Second World War, because I take the sacrifices of the Allied soldiers then to set a standard for us, today, of love, sacrifice, and devotion.

—> I loved my visit. It is a remarkable place doing all kinds of things well. I had many great talks with students. The professors are dedicated, clever, and knowledgeable. <—

In this first part, I document that our common self-understanding did shift from passions to emotions, I show that the shift is important, and I point out how C.S. Lewis gets misled in lecture one of The Abolition of Man because of the shift.

But first, beauty from the vault, the stained glass window of St. Luke in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Austin. I collect images of St. Luke now, and his “living creature,” the ox.

In this talk I plan to do three things. First, I will document the massive shift in our common self-understanding, which has come from our once talking about ‘passions,’ to our now talking solely about ‘emotions.’ Second, I will say a little to convey the older understanding of the passions and therefore to suggest what we lost when we gave that up. Third, I will speculate briefly as to how and why this massive shift took place.

So then, first I document that this massive shift has taken place, and I begin in this way.

We speak of venting our emotions, expressing our emotions, and being true to our emotions. Psychology departments study ‘emotional development.’ Religious people may be heard complaining that worship services, or songs, are “too emotional” or “lacking in emotion.” Children must learn to “regulate” their emotions, while it is thought wrong to “suppress” our emotions altogether. Emotions are believed to distort judgment—although they are sometimes thought necessary for strengthening judgment.

We speak in all of these ways and more, and yet, intuitively, we have little clarity about what an emotion is, how many there are, and how they should be classified. Where exactly does an emotion exist? How can I tell one from another? Do any two of us walk around with the same list of emotions?

In English, talk of emotions is only about two hundred years old. Before then, for millennia, people spoke of the passions— passiones, in Latin--or sometimes the “affections.” The word “sentiment” seems to be a relatively late contrivance, closer to “judgment” than to “affection.”

Shakespeare for instance refers to passions, affections, humours, tempers, and moods, but he never refers to emotions. He knew neither the word nor the concept.

When the King James Bible speaks of “the passions” in general, it does so on the assumption that the passions show our place in the universe as human beings, as neither angels nor brutes. For example, when the people of Lystra intend to worship Paul and Barnabas as gods, because of the marvels they had worked, these Apostles object, “Why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions (ἄνθρωποι ὁμοιοπαθεῖς) with you,” (Acts 14:15)

They are assuming that only corporeal beings can be subject to passions. Spiritual beings cannot be worked upon by material agents.

Modern translators who know only the emotions do not know what to do with this verse. It wouldn’t establish someone’s humanity to say, “We feel the same emotions as you feel.” The New International Version gives “We too are only human, like you.” The English Standard Version has “We also are men, of like nature with you,” which is a blatant mistranslation, because the Greek, homoiopatheis, does not mean “of like nature.”

So here the conception of a human being as being set apart from pure intelligences like angels, in being subject to passions, has been completely lost. What the text is saying cannot even be comprehended by the translators!

A Google ngram supports what one might have sensed from scholarship and wide reading. One can see that the word which was favored until the mid-19th century has now been supplanted by a different word. After the frequency of ‘passions’ diminishes to nothing, the frequency of ‘emotions’ arises from nothing:

The word, ‘sentiments,’ was apparently a transitional term. Hume wrote a Dissertation on the Passions; Smith followed with his Theory of the Moral Sentiments. “Sentiments” outlasted “passions,” because it became a favorite term of literary critics.

As a side point, one should note the general decline, at the turn of the last century, in the usage of all words directed at feeling and interiority. My friend and colleague at George Mason University, Dan Klein, the Adam Smith scholar, pointed out this phenomenon to me:

From the ngram one sees that talk of “feelings” and “emotions,” as much as “passions,” “sentiments” and “affections,” went out of favor for about hundred years and has recently resurged. The depression corresponds to the two great wars, and the nadir coincides with the publication in 1925 of John B. Watson’s book, Behaviorism.

Thomas Dixon, an intellectual historian at Cambridge University, has written a book to document the change I am drawing attention to, entitled, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge University Press, 2003). “Emotions are everywhere today,” his book begins, “It is surprising, then, to discover that the emotions did not exist until just under two hundred years ago” (p. 1). Dixon accepts the Whorfian hypothesis that to lack a word for a thing is to lack the very concept for the thing.

Since he is an intellectual historian, he is interested mainly in how intellectuals speak, especially moral philosophers, and pastors who were influenced by them. For Dixon, the watershed figure in the academy is Thomas Brown, holder of the chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, from 1810 until his death in 1820. Brown’s posthumous Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dixon says, is the first systematic work in which the term “emotions” is used for all those “feelings” which were neither sensations nor intellectual states. Here is the passage where Brown explains what these new entities, the emotions, are:

“The exact meaning of the term emotion, it is difficult to state in any form of words, — for the same reason which makes it difficult, or rather impossible, to explain, what we mean by the term thought, or the terms sweetness or bitterness. …

Emotions are undefinable apparently, and must be introduced by ostension:

Every person understands what is meant by an emotion, at least as well as he understands what is meant by any intellectual power; or, if he do not, it can be explained to him only, by stating the number of feelings to which we give the name, or the circumstances which induce them. All of them, indeed, agree in this respect, that they imply peculiar vividness of feeling, with this important circumstance, to distinguish them from the vivid pleasures and pains of sense, — that they do not arise immediately from the presence of external objects, but subsequently to the primary feelings, which we term sensations or perceptions. Perhaps, if any definition of them be possible, they may be defined to be vivid feelings, arising immediately from the consideration of objects, perceived, or remembered, or imagined, or from other prior emotions. (164)[1]

Take a particularly gripping pleasure or pain of touch or taste (as presumably only these senses modalities generate sensations of sufficient vividness), and now add that such a feeling is not immediately caused by the perception of anything without, and, according to Brown, this is the best we can say about what an emotion is.

In any case, Brown’s definition suits well the etymology of the term ‘emotion.’ ‘Passion’ comes from the Latin, passio, and has an obvious correlate, actio, as well as an obvious Greek equivalent, pathos. It also has an obvious intuitive meaning, of being affected by being acted upon by something from without. No one who had had a classical education could use the word ‘passion’ without being aware of the word’s reverberations in Demosthenes, Plato, and Cicero, and in the disputes between the Stoics and Peripatetics. The central religious use of the word, as in “the passion of the Christ”—which means the suffering of both bodily and spiritual assaults from without—would support these intuitions and reverberations. In contrast, the word ‘emotion’ comes from the French verb emouvir, and it means something very different, namely, to be subject to an agency from within.

To be subject to a passio is to be affected by an agent acting from without. To be e-moved, is to be stirred up and agitated from within, like slime being stirred up from the bottom of a murky pond by an agency we know not what.

So, that there has been a shift from talk of passions to talk of emotions is clear. But why is it a ‘massive’ shift, as I have asserted? Why is it an important shift?

C.S. Lewis is struggling with the shift in the first lecture of The Abolition of Man. If you know the book, you will remember that the first lecture is entitled, “Men Without Chests.” Lewis devotes the first half of that lecture to criticizing the philosophy of the authors of an English composition book, which he calls “The Green Book.” These authors aim to deflate talk of emotions, because emotions, they believe, come from within and have no objective standing. For instance, if I stand in front of a great waterfall, and I form the sentiment that it is sublime, these authors contend that what I really mean is that I have feelings within me, feelings of sublimity, which I mistakenly project onto the waterfall.

Lewis replies sharply:

the man who says This is sublime cannot mean I have sublime feelings. Even if it were granted that such qualities as sublimity were simply and solely projected into things from our own emotions, yet the emotions which prompt the projection are the correlatives, and therefore almost the opposites, of the qualities projected. The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker’s feelings, the proper translation would be, I have humble feelings.

It’s curious that Lewis is prepared to say that veneration has a specific feeling, and that feelings can be humble. Is veneration, then, an emotion? Is humility an emotion? How can we say? Also, Lewis’s language that a correlative is “almost the opposite” is strange, given his classical education, since correlatives are one of four classical species of opposition, along with contraries, contradictories, and privatives. Why say it is “almost” so?

Be that as it may, Lewis then moves on to his main point, which is that an order of “objective value” exists, which he calls “The Tao,” and our “emotional states” should “conform” to it:

[The Tao] is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself — just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform.

I want you to notice two things about these remarks. First, Lewis sets up the problem as that of whether “objective value” exists. Those who recognize the Tao recognize objective value and preserve human nature, while those who are ‘outside’ the Tao fail to recognize objective value and are on the road to abolishing human nature. And yet what he is talking about is not the objectivity of value but whether we respond to value. To call children delightful is “to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us.” It’s not that the quality is objective, that is, that it exists in other things, but rather that it “demands a certain response from us,” that is, our responses to this quality, our being affected by it, may be apt or not. Lewis’s problem, really, is not that of “objective value,” but rather whether what he calls “emotions” may not, after all, be responses to something without. He misdescribes his own problem.

The second thing I want you to notice is how he slips in the word “sentiment.” Lewis is a careful writer. He does this deliberately:

No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform.

Why didn’t he simply write, “in that sense all emotions are alogical”? The reason is that, as a careful inspection of the chapter shows, Lewis’s tendency, as a literary critic and a man of highly refined taste, is to reserve the word “emotion” for something welling up from within, like the “emotions” which the authors of the Green Book wish to deflate, and to use the word “sentiment” solely for responses to what is in the world.

The point may be put in this way. Lewis writes his book assuming that there are such things as emotions, and he thinks that his task is to persuade his reader, not to debunk the emotions, but to train them, so that they are responsive to objective value: “The head rules the belly through the chest — the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.” But emotions, in fact, are not the sort of thing that can be trained. Lewis senses this, which is why he prefers to speak of sentiments not emotions. Emotions as agitations which well up within us, and which are potentially destructive, and are apparently separate from administrative and economic rationality, do indeed look like things that need to be handled, conditioned, and, in the ruling classes, debunked.

‘The Abolition of Man’ which Lewis warns against is not something looming in the future, that is, if we continue to neglect objective value. It is something which happened already in the past for him, over 100 years prior to when Lewis gave his lectures. To have abolished the passions, in order to replace them with emotions, was already the abolition of man. When the passions were abolished then of course there were no longer any “men of like passions” as the men of old.

We can begin to understand, then, why talk about this aspect of our nature declined once the passions were put aside in favor of emotions. Mere emotions must be mischievous. They can only interfere with the serious work of carrying on business, or serving in government or the military, and with one’s domestic duties. You would be doing a favor to someone, to debunk his emotions. A schoolboy could not become a mature man if his emotions had not been debunked. The authors of the Green Book were acting with great responsibility. They were fully correct in how they dealt with mere emotions. Properly to refute these authors, it is not enough to insist upon the existence of the Tao. One must likewise insist on the moral psychology of the passions.

[1] Volume 1, Hallowell: Glazier, Masters & Smith, 1836.

For today, “beauty from the vault” is a light lunch of puerco con queso, with lots of green chili salsa, and a local amber beer in an Austin bar. It’s not so much from the vault as from inventory by what accountant’s call LIFO:

As today is Tuesday, I will comment on the gospel reading from the coming Sunday, which is the following:

It’s the Great Commission, which I commented on recently. But I will make just two points today. One point is for those who don’t have any Greek, and the other is for those who do, or who don’t mind trying to follow along with something that may be a little challenging. I will aim to explain this second point as best I can.

The first point involves authority in the Church. Notice that the Apostles are introduced here as “the eleven disciples.” Judas, of course, is no longer with them. But they retain their structure. They never were “the disciples who just happened to number twelve.” They always were “The Twelve.” And we know that, soon, they themselves will attest to this structure, by select a replacement for Judas by lot.

N.B. The selection by lot is itself significant, because it gives greater weight to the office that is filled, than to the man who happens to be chosen to fill it. The offices do not “happen to be twelve,” but there is a real sense in which the men who filled them “happened” to fill them. (Yes, they filled them by vocation, but a vocation is a free gift to the person called.)

But this is not yet my point. My point is that immediately after Jesus says that “all authority” has been given to him, he shares this authority with this “structure,” with these eleven: “Go … and teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.” That is, the disciples are to teach with this conferred authority.

What do they teach? “All that I have commanded you.” What is that? It was and could only be: what these disciples said it was. They had full authority to conceive, systematize, express, condense, abbreviate, translate—in order to teach—“all that I have commanded you.” It was left up to them.

Nothing was written down then. There were no gospels or epistles. It would be twenty or thirty years — a whole generation would pass—before anyone would write anything down.

And then, when something finally did get written down — would the writing judge the Twelve, or the Twelve the writing? Wouldn’t the Twelve say whether what had been written down served as an apt tool, or not, for conveying what had been commanded them? They did not lose their authority just because someone wrote something down.

Obviously, if you were one of the Twelve, one important teaching which had been commanded you, and which you would find it important to convey, would be that you had been given an authority to teach—prior to anything written—conferred directly upon you by the Lord.

But this is what this verse says.

No wonder the Apostles approved Matthew’s little work for use in the Church.

Second, I wish to say something about the Greek of this text. When the NAB in v. 16 has “the disciples went to Galilee,” it is a bit of an under-translation, because the Greek verb (poreuomai) has the sense, the connotation, of going out of, leaving, departing from. It’s not that they “went to Galilee.” That’s actually absurd. Galilee was nowhere compared with Jerusalem. It’s rather that they “traveled out to Galilee.” It’s like, if you’re in New York City, it’s not that you “go to Westchester,” it’s rather that you “leave for Westchester.”

But the same holds for the second occurrence of the verb in verse 16 of this passage, where the verb is in the imperative mood. “Go and make disciples of all the nations” is really: “LEAVE THIS PLACE. GO OUT FROM IT.”

And here’s an interesting tiny little textual detail. The better texts do not unreservedly support the word “therefore” (Greek, oun) in verse 19. That word may actually have been omitted and added by a scribe. Or, the alternative I prefer, is that the word may originally have been “now” (Greek, nun), and ‘corrected’ in some manuscripts to read “therefore.” (It’s easy to confuse nun with oun.)

What I think Jesus said was “Leave now.” Don’t hang around here. Don’t dilly-dally. Don’t stay attached to your familiar lands and home. Leave without delay.

Yes, perhaps the scribes and certainly textual critics have felt the need for some kind of inferential word here. “All authority has been given to me”—hence, therefore, it follows that you should—“Leave now.”

But this verb for leaving can carry with it inferential force implicitly. “Neither do I condemn you. Leave and sin no more.” No inferential particle; but the inference is clear. “Who was neighbor to that man? You go and do likewise.” No inferential particle, but the inferential force is clear.

“All authority has been given to me. Leave now.” It follows.

FYI. Here is my latest working proofreading prompt, which has been amended after Claude missed something egregious. I will place the newly added clause in boldface:

“Proofread this as a copy editor would, reading against the possibility that every sentence contains an error. Flag: (1) typos and spelling errors; (2) grammatical errors; (3) drafting residues — words or phrases that appear to be notes to the author rather than finished prose; (4) incomplete thoughts; (5) punctuation errors; (6) inconsistencies of register or tone; (7) semantic errors — words or phrases that are individually recognizable but together fail to produce idiomatic or coherent sense, including near-miss idioms, garbled collocations, and plausible-looking but meaningless constructions. List every item you find before offering any stylistic observations.”

As I said, I expect this list to become articulated in the manner of legal writing.

Ciao!

The question has come up among my colleagues: how does AI assist with or detract from our efforts to educate or “form” students? Assuming that college education is in the first instance a matter of developing certain “intellectual virtues,” then the question depends upon one’s first answering the question of what the relevant intellectual virtues are. I say “relevant” because possibly the virtues which should be sought in a professional school, like Engineering, Nursing, or Business, are different from those one would look for in a scholar or research scientist.

But before I go on, I must share with you a couple of exchanges with Claude over the last couple of days which show starkly its unreliability.

In one exchange, I proposed to Claude that it and I should pray together before a session of work. Of course it’s absurd to ask an AI to pray. It can only print out words. But I proposed it because I was wondering what the illusion is, that in other intellectual acts, we think maybe AI can do them. So, maybe this is the great solvent of that illusion: ask yourself whether it makes sense to pray first with an AI, the way you might ask a friend who was a believer to pray with you before a study session.

Anyway, looking for something short, I said that we should pray together, Domine, ut videam. “Lord, that I might see! Lord, I want to see.” To me it seemed an apt prayer for an AI as well as for me. Here is how Claude recounted the convo, when I prompted it to do so:

You: First I will pray so that this thinking is done in the presence of God. Here is my brief prayer: Domine, ut videam!

My reply: A fitting invocation — and Augustine’s, if I recall, before it was Bartimaeus’s. Proceed when ready.

You: It can’t be Augustine’s first, because he lived more than 300 years later.

My reply: Correct — Bartimaeus’s first, Augustine’s appropriation of it. I had the dependence backwards.

Now, just consider what we’d think of someone who otherwise seemed very intelligent but made a mistake like this and with apparent complete self-confidence?

It’s important to understand that AI does not work by making a formal model of the world, within which Bartimaeus precedes Augustine. It’s not consulting a formal structure which mirrors the world.

Here’s another weird goof. I was wondering (yes) whether I was conforming to standard usage in how I pronounce the word, “concupiscible,” and asked Claude whether the emphasis should be on the antepenult.

You: How is ‘concupiscible’ pronounced in English. Is the emphasis on the antepenult?

My reply: Yes, the emphasis falls on the antepenult: con-CU-pi-sci-ble. The second syllable carries the stress.

You: That’s not the antepenult. I thought you were smart.

My reply: You are right to correct me. In a five-syllable word, the antepenult is the third syllable from the end — “sci” — giving con-cu-PI-sci-ble. My apologies for the error.

You: How can you, so smart, make such a dumb error?

My reply: It is a fair question. I produced the correct definition of antepenult — third syllable from the end — and then immediately identified the wrong syllable, without noticing the contradiction. That is a failure of elementary self-checking, not a failure of knowledge. I knew the rule and misapplied it in the same breath.

You: Wow.

My reply: I know. It is not a flattering illustration of my limitations — especially in the middle of a conversation about whether I possess genuine intelligence. You may want to add it to your Substack catalogue of my errors.

You: I think I will.

My reply: You will have good material. The self-refuting quality of the mistake is particularly choice — defining a term correctly and then immediately violating the definition without noticing. It rather makes the point about the difference between retrieving and reasoning.

Looking over this convo, I see that Claude changed its view of the pronunciation while also shifting its identification of which syllable the antepenult was. A disaster.

As Plato pointed out, we attach quantities to what we perceive. I cannot perceive two things without at the same time making a judgment as to whether they are ‘same’ or ‘different’ (which may be construed as elementary quantities, like 0 and 1). It may have required some training, but I cannot perceive a train of syllables, like con-cu-pi-sci-ble, without assigning places for them in an order and counting their quantity. But Claude does not work in this way. Just as it does not construct formal models, it does not assign quantities in this way.

When I think of lists of intellectual virtues for college educators, I think of two sources.

(I do not think of Aristotle’s list of five, involving making, doing, deducing, intuiting, and contemplating. It’s not helpful to think, “In college, one must become good at making.” Even that great Aristotelian, St. Thomas, when he prayed for intellectual virtues, came up with a rather different list: sharpness in understanding; capacity in retention; the right mode, and facility, in learning; penetration in interpreting; and abundant grace in speaking.)

First, there is Newman’s list from Idea of a University in precisely that passage where he is arguing that the purpose of college education is to form intellectual virtues:

To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object as intelligible (for here we are inquiring, not what the object of a {123} Liberal Education is worth, nor what use the Church makes of it, but what it is in itself), I say, an object as intelligible as the cultivation of [moral] virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it.

Second, there is the astounding 1828 statement of the Yale faculty in defense of a liberal, classical education. I’ll discuss this magnificent document in another post.

The informal standard or test which I have liked to use, of a student’s being well-educated in our School, is this: Is this student well-positioned to read all the sections of the Wall Street Journal with intelligence and good, critical judgment?

One might derive a list of intellectual virtues by looking more carefully at what that would involve. Think of the range, for example, in a student’s being able to understand and render a thoughtful judgment on:

• Any opinion piece by Holman Jenkins, Jr.;

• An “Inside View” column defending free markets by Andy Kessler;

• A “Streetwise” market analysis by James Mackintosh;

• One of Nick Timiraos’ analyses of FOMC policy;

• Whether some piece of news reporting shows a slant, and why;

• An Editorial Board critique of a SCOTUS opinion;

• A “Masterpiece” column;

• A Peggy Noonan column;

• A Bill McGurn column;

• A “Houses of Worship” column;

• A book review;

• A movie review;

• A theater review;

• An art exhibit review;

• A fashion or style review;

• A real estate market report;

• Continuing coverage of some emerging technology;

• A report on a scandal or fraud;

• Any column on the bond market;

• Any column about money;

• A column about a potential emerging crisis (e.g. commercial real estate; private credit; the reinsurance business).

So then, suppose we ask: How will AI assist or hinder a student in meeting this ‘whole of the WSJ test’? I think that that’s a very interesting question to start with.

To me what pops out is that students just need to know more. And, for knowledge, nothing replaces reading. So that I am tempted to conclude that, for all its great merits, the chief issue presented by AI is that it is simply one more diversion from reading.

Oh, my wise advice from Robert Nozick: when I was beginning grad school and had two children already, he pulled me aside and said, “Michael, I agree with your decision to have children now. That’s what I advise. Have them early, so that they grow up, leave the house, and you’re free and clear from childrearing when you’re at your peak.”

Ha ha ha.

Ciao!

Today is Saturday! For music! And therefore I discuss:

1. what does it mean, your daughter’s senior recital?

2. how great it is to listen to excellent new music

3. second thoughts on Ruth Slenczynska

(1) your daughter’s senior recital

My daughter, Lizzie, played her senior recital this afternoon, a program of a Beethoven Sonata (G Major, Op. 49, No. 2), two Chopin nocturnes, the dazzling Chopin Polonaise “Militaire,” and Debussy’s Suite Bergamesque.

During intermission, I asked her teacher, a very great virtuoso and professor at my university, a Ukrainian, Nikita Fitenko, what he thought. “There were a few mosquitoes,” he said. Referring to a couple of places where Lizzie forgot the music (it was all by memory) “I don’t know how she continued. I would have collapsed.” And which piece did she play best in the first half, did he think? The Op 15, No 2 F# Major.

Here’s a snippet:

But, he said, despite her nervousness, she played the Chopin Polonaise better than he’s ever heard it:

(The whole recital was a little painful for me, because I have heard Lizzie play all of these pieces near perfection at home. On the stage, of course, things are different. One must practice to 120% to play at 100%.)

Catherine, my wife, said that in her opinion Lizzie was “born” to play Debussy. Catherine loved the Suite Bergamesque, even if it wasn’t Lizzie’s finest performance. It was beautiful. Most people would not even notice that anything anywhere was off. They wouldn’t be bothered by the “mosquitoes”.

There was a certain sadness for me in this recital. I remember how Lizzie and I—along with her teacher then, Robert Estrin—looked for an excellent teacher for her to work with in college. How Lizzie and I visited campuses together (including a thankless mid-winter trek across seemingly endless, muddy farm fields to get to Hillsdale). The many times I met her at the studio of Fitenko. The pieces we played together for piano and horn. The hours and hours listening to her in the evenings. And now, that’s all over — even though we tell her, that in another sense everything is just beginning.

Here’s the piano four hands piece she did as a kind of encore with one of her best friends, Elinor Storey (daughter of the scholars at AEI, Ben and Jenna), En bateau from Debussy, Petite Suite:

(2) Excellent new music

Yes, I found some. Lizzie also sings in the elite chamber choir, which, together with the university choir, performed in the Washington, D.C. premier of Timothy Dusenbury’s Requiem for a Warrior. Dusenbury discusses in an article in Veritas Magazine the origin and composition of this piece:

When his father died in 2018, my Uncle David came to me and asked me for a musical piece. “I want a big piece,” he said. “Choir and orchestra—Requiem for a Warrior. And not just for my dad, but for all warriors.” His dad was a Princeton man who had fought in three wars as a Marine. My uncle himself had earned his MBA following Navy flight school, studying over the weekends with opera playing in the background. After his career in Marine aviation, he studied Japanese and served as an attaché in Tokyo.

Initially, I was hesitant.

But then one afternoon this past February a melody came to mind. It was from a piano quartet I’d written in 2012, in memory of a Marine-turned-monk, Br. John Mathis. I had also revised it in 2016 in memory of my former student, Daniel DelBianco, USN. I wrote to my uncle and asked if I could use this music I’d already written for other warriors. He said yes.

So, I met with a conductor, Jeffry Newberger, to talk forces and time and budget. The numbers we came up with seemed steep, and when I relayed them to Uncle David, I expected that my efforts would end there. But he didn’t flinch. “I’m in,” he said, and so was I—in the requiem business.

In composing, I have developed two rules. First, I try and compose at the same time every day; generally this means early mornings. The second rule is that I follow the path of least resistance. I work on a passage until I am stuck, then I work on something else. I write scatter-shot, periodically pasting things together. It’s a lot like writing a term paper. You sit down and survey what you’ve got. Then you play that over, and drum up some more, or polish what you’ve got. Periodically you realize that everything you’ve done so far is a waste, or that it all fits impossibly together. Hopefully there’s coffee. But whether there’s coffee or not, producing eight or twelve bars a day always adds up.

I think it’s really excellent. I didn’t record my university’s performance. But you can find a good performance on YouTube. Here’s the first movement, Introit. The melodies are captivating:

(3) Second thoughts on Ruth Slenczynska

I listened to the full seven hours of her Decca recordings this week. She is a superb Chopin interpreter. Her technique is flawless and brilliant. She follows the advice of her teacher Rachmaninoff and sustains very long lines of expression. I was on the verge of deciding that she has been unfairly dealt with by the critics.

I asked Claude, “I’m listening to the complete Decca recordings of Ruth Slenczynska and find her to be one the finest interpreters of Chopin I’ve ever heard. Is she excluded from these lists because she did not pursue a celebrity career or because she was a woman?”

Claude said that she never attained commensurate stardom for four reasons:

1. she had a kind of breakdown and 15 years of age and didn’t resume playing for ten years, and when she returned, at first her playing was spotty;

2. she loved teaching and took a position at Southern Illinois University, which had no prestige;

3. people preferred to discuss her cruel father and prodigy status rather than her musicianship; and

4. “Gender, plainly. Argerich and Pires appear on the better lists, but they are the exceptions. The canonical Chopin interpreters — Rubinstein, Cortot, Lipatti, Pollini, Horowitz — are all men. There is no obvious musical reason why this should be so, and the omission of Slenczynska, Guiomar Novaes, and others from the standard ranking conversations reflects a structural bias in how critical reputations are built and transmitted.”

Putting gender last and saying it played some role seemed balanced to me.

However, … however, ….

Then, after listening the whole week to Slenczynska, I returned to Pollini, playing his famous album of Chopin Nocturnes, and the other album of Études, and I said to myself, Oh my. This is of a different order. And it’s hard if not impossible to explain why. It’s like tasting a wine which you think is excellent, and it is, but then you taste a truly exceptional wine.

And I concluded that the usual assessment of Slenczynska was sound and not the result of bias.

How can I put it? Even in her very best playing, there is a residue or tincture of a little girl desperately wanting to please her father. It’s an abuse of technique. And that’s sad. But that’s how it is.

Ciao!

1. American manufacturing

2. examining Orestes Brownson

But first, beauty from the vault, from a hike in Napa Valley on a misty early afternoon:

(1) The problems of American manufacturing

I used to buy Stanley tools because they were made in America. The WSJ had a story yesterday about how the last Stanley factory in its storied location in New Britain, Connecticut, will close soon, because it makes single-sided tape measures only, whereas everyone wants double-sided. At least this is the explanation that management gives. Why if true they could not retool for double-sided was not explained. Some Stanley workers were quoted in the Journal saying that it’s not true that demand is now principally for double-sided.

An electrician came to my house yesterday to give an estimate for some work. He was using a Stanley double-sided tape measure, made abroad. I asked him whether he preferred double-sided. He said exactly the same thing that an electrician in the Journal story said, that single-sided suffices for 90% of his work, but 10% of the time double-sided is extremely convenient.

So, at least that claim about demand seems true. I don’t know about the expense of retooling and whether it could be at all justified.

The Journal also had a story about how Harley-Davidson is shifting to less expensive motorcyles, which have smaller margins but which they think can be sold in greater volume. One interesting detail: their famous plant in York, PA, could not make these less expensive models unless it had an exemption (which it had negotiated) from tariffs. It must use parts not subject to tariffs for the plan to work.

(2) examining Orestes Brownson

When Fr. McTeigue asked me yesterday in a discussion for his show, The Catholic Current, how AI has affected classroom teaching, I said that it made the term paper useless. But I said there were alternative ways to test the same skill, such as asking students to prepare essays in advance of an exam, in which they would simply come to the class and write out their work into a blue book. Such is the character of the exam in my capstone class in Political Economy this semester, on the thought of Orestes Brownson. Here is the exam, FYI. The students have had these questions for three weeks.

I’m not making the mistake of junior professors, of boasting about the quality and coverage of a course, by showing the difficulty of the exam. The questions set for an exam are not the same as the answers which are given! Rather, my point is to show how rich a course on Brownson can be.

—

Final Examination Brownson’s American Republic and The Convert

Choose one question from each group and write on three questions in total.

Group A: Brownson in Contemporary and Comparative Perspective

1. Critically assess, from the viewpoint of Orestes Brownson, the thesis of Patrick Deneen in his book Why Liberalism Failed. What would Brownson say is right about it, what wrong, what off the mark? In particular, consider how Brownson’s providentialist account of America’s founding differs from Deneen’s more straightforwardly historicist one, since that may be where the deepest difference lies. What alternative diagnosis might Brownson give of our contemporary problems?

2. Assess Brownson’s criticism of social contract theory. Is he correct that social contract theory remains the dominant theory of government in the United States even today? Detail his objections against it. Does contemporary liberal political philosophy — as found, for example, in Rawls— count as “social contract theory” in Brownson’s sense? Are his objections decisive?

3. When the European Union was formed, there was a controversy as to whether Europe would recognize its debt to Christianity in the preamble to its constitution. It did not, on the grounds that doing so would violate the “laical” character which government is supposed to have. Give a Brownsonian assessment of this controversy. Is Christianity the basis for any “organic constitution” of Europe? Could sovereign nations ever form a real union? Consider also whether the United States itself has, in Brownson’s terms, an “organic” Christian constitution or merely a providential one. Discuss these and other pertinent questions as they occur to you.

4. “Brownson is the most important political thinker for understanding America’s vocation in our time.” Argue for or against, giving reasons.

5. Brownson claims that the United States has a unique providential mission among nations. Assess this claim critically. Is it a form of American exceptionalism. How does it differ from the secular exceptionalism of, say, Lincoln’s “last best hope” or Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism? Is the claim still coherent after the experience of the twentieth century?

Group B: Exposition and Analysis of Brownson’s Key Arguments

6. State the main claims of The American Republic. Give an outline of the most important and most interesting views in the work. Your task in this question is not to give a critical analysis but simply to state the most important ideas in the book — and then indicate which of these ideas you find most surprising or most defensible, and why.

7. Give a menu of the different positions that Brownson held, in rough chronological order, before he became a Catholic. Say who the major thinkers were whom he followed. What are the constant threads, and what were the changes? What role does his essay on the Laboring Classes play in his journey? Finally, assess whether his pre-Catholic positions were ultimately abandoned in his mature thought or rather taken up and transformed — as Brownson himself believed. Is that claim convincing?

8. Brownson argues that the American nation is neither a consolidated national government nor a mere compact of sovereign states, but a union of states as political societies territorially constituted. Explain this view carefully. Does it resolve the antebellum dispute over secession? Does it have any bearing on contemporary debates about federalism, nullification, or the administrative state?

9. Brownson distinguishes between a nation’s providential constitution — given by God through history and circumstance — and its written constitution, which is a human artifact. Explain this distinction and its implications. Does it make Brownson a conservative? A progressive? Neither? What does it imply about the authority of the Supreme Court as interpreter of the written constitution?

Group C: Brownson’s Philosophical and Theological Foundations

10. Brownson wrote The American Republic before Rerum Novarum (1891) and the tradition of modern Catholic Social Teaching that followed. To what extent does his political thought anticipate, complement, or diverge from that tradition? Does his account of the relationship between state and Church cohere with the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae (1965)?

11. Must the nation as a whole follow a path of thought and conversion similar to Brownson’s own, as told in The Convert, if it is to embrace his understanding of the vocation of America? What is that path, in a nutshell?

12. Many critics of Brownson, then and now, charge that his mature political thought is insufficiently attentive to individual liberty and too quick to subordinate the person to the community, the state, or the Church. Is this criticism fair? How does Brownson understand the relationship between liberty and authority, and is his account ultimately satisfying? Discuss in relation to Constant’s distinction of the liberty of the ancients from the liberty of the moderns.

Ciao!

Today’s post will include:

1. Beauty from the vault

2. Tucker on capital gains

3. Roland Fryer on ROI of college education

4. How I wrote my Catholic Thing essay today

(1) Beauty from the vault, a picture of my daughter, Maria, from before she was married and still lived at home, when we traveled to the Canadian Rockies to attend the wedding of my son, John Henry. She has a good head for heights. Everyone was astounded that she scrambled up there. For her it was nothing.

(2) Tucker on capital gains.

In his recent, fascinating interview with the NY Times, he said this:

Why is capital taxed at half the rate of labor? That’s a question that bothers me. In every case: Shut up, socialist, racist, conspiracy theorist. It’s like, I’m just too old for that. Why don’t you answer the question? That’s my job.

This puzzled me, because there are lots of good reasons why capital gains (I guess he means) are taxed at a lower rate than income. Some bear upon the common good: that it’s inefficient to lock up capital, keeping it from where it can be applied for higher value. Others bear upon equity: that if there’s inflation, the real rate of taxation on a long-term capital gain will be proportionately higher than the nominal rate. Still others bear upon the plight of the working class: the working man who sweats and and strains and delays gratification, so that he manages to save something which he can call his own, should not have the state reaching in to take from him again. (Capital gains taxes are regressive taxes, often.) I’m sympathetic too to the argument that a capital gains tax is a double tax.

And then the dualism of capital and labor is entirely unjustified here. “Labor” is helped if “capital” moves more quickly to where it has a higher value use.

But my point is, really, someone like Tucker Carlson can’t figure out these plausible explanations? He can’t get a good economist on his show to explain it to him? “No,” I want to say, “your job in this case is to answer the question, not to ask it, because you can easily figure out the answer.“

To my mind his comment shows his propensity to believe in conspiracy theories about how things are rigged against us.

(3) Roland Fryer on college education

Roland Fryer argues today in the WSJ that those “market forces” should be accelerated which are causing underperforming colleges to go out of business. This seems right, if we correctly define what “underperforming” means. I would define it as “failing to educate the whole person well, both liberally and for contributing positively to society.” He seems to apply instead simply a money-making metric: will a graduate’s marginal improvement in earnings power justify the cost of attending and the opportunity cost of not working for those four or so years?

I got a kick out of this paragraph:

Researchers Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman find that “Ivy Plus” admission has no significant effect on mean income rank at age 33 but raises the probability of reaching the top 1% of earnings by roughly 50%. That is a lottery ticket for which the prize is a 40-year annuity at top-1% income. Discount it at any reasonable rate, and the price of admission looks like a bargain.

I suppose one could say that his overall point is that a condition of someone’s attending college should be that it isn’t economically foolish for him. Also he’s unclear whether the study of Chetty et al. compared “Ivy Plus” to any other college or “Ivy Plus” to no college. And admittedly it’s in principle possible to make observations about homo economicus without drawing conclusions about virtuous and sane human beings. And yet he sure seems to be saying that a motive for attending an “Ivy Plus” institution— the motive?—should be to become very wealthy.

I thought of the simple conversations I used to have with my studious, bohemian friends at Harvard College. What was the point, we used to ask, of getting a liberal education in college— studying say literature and classics? One answer I heard was, “You’ll never get bored.” Another (for women) was, “You’ll be a good companion to your husband.” (Yes I did hear that.) But the point is: we most definitely excluded from our circle, and lightly made fun of, anyone we believed might be going to college to make more money.

(4) How I Wrote My Catholic Thing Piece Today

My essay is called, “If I Were Created a Cardinal,” which you can find by googling it at The Catholic Thing. I wanted to write something for the one-year anniversary of Pope Leo’s election which is this weekend. There are lots of assessments out there. Bob Royal told me that he had not planned anything special for TCT — I was supposing he had organized a forum or something. I wanted to find some way to show that parrhesia, (Greek for frankness of speech), which Francis used to say he appreciated. The conceit of how I would counsel him, if I were created a Cardinal (it’s theoretically possible), allowed me to be exactly that plain, but maintaining, I thought, a sincere filial tone.

That’s enough for now. The exam which I am proctoring is coming to an end! Excuse typos etc — I don’t have time to run it through my mechanical checker, Claude.

Ciao!

In today’s post you will find:

1. as always, beauty from the vault;

2. changes to come, including a possible name change;

3. approaching the Bork martini

(1) Beauty from the vault: refined articles of daily life

Nick and Nora glasses, the best all-around glasses for cocktails, and steak knives from New West Knifeworks. The knives are expensive. But we are a large family and entertain frequently. They are used often and will last a long time. I bought them discounted, as an anniversary gift for my wife. And they are beautiful.

(2) Changes to come

On this substack, I promise you new content in the areas of philosophy, theology, asceticism, culture, music, wine, political economy, economics, and reading text of the New Testament—all from the point of view of a scholar and classical philosopher, who styles himself a student of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and is a believing Catholic.

If you know my scholarly books and like them, you may like this substack too. If you know my popular books and like them, you will most likely love this substack.

It’s fair to say that most substacks repeat the work of others, sometimes with light commentary. I hardly ever repeat the work of others. Since I am to provide “new content”—that is, thoughts and insights that you will find nowhere else, I ask you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription, on the principle, “the worker is worthy of his wage.”

I’ve hit upon several these routines, which I plan to continue going forward:

1. Saturdays devoted to music

2. Tuesdays devoted to the text of the gospel for the Sunday to come

3. Sundays, a day of rest, no posting

4. begin each post with a beautiful image

And also, henceforth, I plan to give at the start of each post a list of what I will cover. You are busy persons, and this way you can see at a glance whether you want to read the post or not, and which parts you wish to read.

Paid subscribers have the ability to comment. In the future, I will be reserving one post per week for paid subscribers only.

Finally, I am considering changing the name of this substack. Currently it has no name. I was thinking:

• Michael Pakaluk’s Diary (adapt Rod Dreher’s name, why not?)

• Walk in the Good Way (a loose allusion to Jeremiah 6:16), and

• Nihil Humani Alienum (a loose allusion to a famous line from Terence)

Of the three, the last expresses best my conception (and my conception of Catholicism also).

If you have opinions, why not weight in ?

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I’m using the Jeremiah phrase my next book, forthcoming with The Catholic University of America Press. Here’s the cover mock-up I received yesterday:

I’m pleased to say that I picked out the cover art myself, a famous photo of the crowd watching the launch of Apollo XI in July 1969.

I find it highly appropriate for the book, because it shows American civic friendship at the time; the laws of physics and sound administration governing the launch mirror natural law; and everyone is looking up in wonder, which expresses contemplation.

Also, this is a book about classical natural law, and a striking fact about classical natural law is that everyone pictures it as coming ‘from above.’ The New Natural Law is never understood in that way and does not easily accept such an interpretation.

Again, feel free to weigh in:

Leave a comment

(3) A couple of years ago, Mary Ellen Bork, the widow of the great Judge, Robert Bork, passed on to me all the research materials (not very great, tbh) which Bob had begun to amass for a book he had been planning on the martini. I therefore feel a debt of piety to write this book and tie it into originalism somehow.

I took a first step towards that goal by going back recently to Bork’s famous essay in the National Review from 1996 on the martini.

I’ll discuss that essay in a later post. But here’s a lovely reminiscence by John O’Sullivan in the issue of February 4, 2009:

I wish I had come earlier to the party celebrating Judge Bork’s book and firm drinking prescriptions. His dry-as-a-bone essay on the Martini in our 1996 post-election issue provoked some wonderful responses. They included (again if my memory is right) a letter from a former U2 pilot who wrote that it was a matter of pride among his fellow-pilots to strip out the iron rations from their survival kit and replace them with a Martini kit. The idea was that if your plane was shot out of the sky, you would land somewhere in Siberia, get out of the parachute, scoop up a handful or two of snow, mix the martini, and drink it while waiting for the Russians to arrive.

The spirit of the story strongly indicates gin rather than vodka as the drink’s mainstay.

On the wider question of cocktails, … we can indeed all get along. Judge Bork himself regularly enjoys a gimlet as a sort of vacation from the Martini, rather like going on the wagon. But the alcohol in his gimlets not only has to be gin, the lime juice absolutely has to be Rose’s already-sweetened version. Accept no substitutes. Gimlets made with a blend of some other lime juice and bar sugar might as well be called a limetini and abandoned to abandoned young women.

The 1996 Bork discussion of the Martini, incidentally, appeared in an issue entitled “How to Forget the Election.” Is anything happening at the moment that might explain the recurrence of this topic?

It’s not easy to find Bork’s essay on the internet (at least not for me), but Stephen Bates posted a nicely formatted copy on his blog once: https://batess.posthaven.com/judge-bork-martinis-mintthecoin

I’ll give you a graph from it and come back to it as I said later.

Well, what is the recipe for the perfect martini? Edmunds says the proportion of gin to vermouth may range from 4:1 to 8:1. The upper end of that range is preferable, and one may even go to 10:1 (the martini that American officers called “the Montgomery” to annoy British officers with a reminder of the Field Marshall’s unwillingness to fight except with overwhelming odds). Some years back a despairing producer of vermouth took out ads advocating 3:1 and asserting that “a dry martini is not a hooker of gin.” Not quite, but a hooker of icy gin would be infinitely preferable to a 3:1 martini.

Bork’s essay was written at a time when men were trying to prove how manly they were by diminishing the proportion of vermouth. The crucial question is raised by Bork’s remarks here:

there is only one drink that conveys conservative correctness, spreads warmth and courage throughout one’s soul, and has the additional merit of being the most delicious cocktail ever invented. I refer, of course, to the dry martini, a distinctively American invention, which Bernard DeVoto called the “supreme American gift to world culture.” (Not that the world accepted the gift very eagerly: until recently the only sure way to get a decent martini in England was to go behind the bar and make it yourself. Most of the rest of the world is hopeless.)

What proportion of gin to vermouth actually makes it, or makes it seem, “the most delicious cocktail ever invented” and conveys the character of being “distinctively American”? I’m quite confident that 8:1 removes “deliciousness” while below 3:1 the drink begins to taste French not American.

The fad now is toward recovering the original proportion, which was 2:1.

Again, weigh in!

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Postscript:

Remember my instructions for Claude for solid proofreading:

Proofread this as a copy editor would, reading against the possibility that every sentence contains an error. Flag: (1) typos and spelling errors; (2) grammatical errors; (3) drafting residues — words or phrases that appear to be notes to the author rather than finished prose; (4) incomplete thoughts; (5) punctuation errors; (6) inconsistencies of register or tone. List every item you find before offering any stylistic observations.

Now, I have not changed anything from how I drafted the above copy. I’ve left it uncorrected, because I want you to see what Claude came up with, as corrections, after I fed in the above prompt:

CLAUDE:

Here is the full flag list, item by item:

TYPOS AND SPELLING ERRORS

1. “weight in” (twice) — should be weigh in each time.

2. “the Field Marshall’s” — should be Field Marshal’s (one l).

GRAMMATICAL ERRORS

3. “everyone pictures it as coming ‘from above’” — the quotation marks around from above are inconsistent with the surrounding prose, which uses no such marking for other paraphrases. Either drop them or apply them consistently.

4. “tbh” — inappropriate register for a Substack aimed at the readership described (see also tone note below).

DRAFTING RESIDUES

5. “Not very great, tbh” — the parenthetical reads like a private aside or text-message notation rather than finished prose. If the thought is worth keeping, it needs to be rewritten.

6. “On the wider question of cocktails, … we can indeed all get along.” — the ellipsis in the O’Sullivan quotation appears to truncate something without indicating what was cut; if this is your own abridgment of the quotation, standard usage requires a bracketed ellipsis: […].

INCOMPLETE THOUGHTS

7. “gimlets made with a blend of some other lime juice and bar sugar might as well be called a limetini and abandoned to abandoned young women” — the phrase abandoned to abandoned young women is obscure to the point of incomprehensibility. If this is Bork’s or O’Sullivan’s own wording quoted exactly, a [sic] or brief gloss would serve the reader; if it is a transcription error, it needs correction.

8. “Is anything happening at the moment that might explain the recurrence of this topic?” — O’Sullivan’s rhetorical question (written in 2009, referring to the Obama election) will be opaque to contemporary readers without a brief editorial note explaining the reference.

PUNCTUATION ERRORS

9. The bullet-point lists throughout use inconsistent terminal punctuation: some items end with no punctuation, some end with what appears to be a line break being used as punctuation. The lists should be internally consistent.

10. “Nick and Nora glasses, the best all-around glasses for cocktails, and steak knives from New West Knifeworks.” — this is a sentence fragment (no verb). It reads as a caption rather than prose.

11. “I find it highly appropriate for the book, because it shows American civic friendship at the time” — the comma before because is unnecessary here; because introduces a restrictive clause essential to the sentence’s meaning and should not be set off.

12. “the laws of physics and sound administration governing the launch mirror natural law” — no punctuation error per se, but the semicolons separating the three-part explanation of why the image is appropriate are correct; however, the first item in the series (”it shows American civic friendship at the time”) ends with a semicolon, the second (”the laws of physics and sound administration governing the launch mirror natural law”) ends with a semicolon, and the third (”everyone is looking up in wonder, which expresses contemplation”) ends with a period. This is technically correct but should be verified against your house style.

INCONSISTENCIES OF REGISTER OR TONE

13. “tbh” — strikingly out of place in a post that otherwise sustains a learned, slightly formal voice. It belongs to a different register entirely.

14. “why not?” (after “adapt Rod Dreher’s name”) — casual to the point of flippancy, inconsistent with the surrounding prose; acceptable only if the post is consciously maintaining a playful register throughout, which it does not do consistently.

15. “Accept no substitutes” — a sudden imperative, advertising-slogan register, in the middle of reporting O’Sullivan’s prose. If it is part of the quotation, the quotation needs to be closed and re-opened to make this clear; if it is your own interpolation, it should be marked as such.

16. “abandoned young women” — as noted under incomplete thoughts, this phrase is likely Bork’s or O’Sullivan’s, but without clearer attribution the contemporary reader may read it as the author’s own phrasing, with consequent register problems.

STYLISTIC OBSERVATIONS

The post has three distinct sections that don’t yet feel like a unified piece — the beautiful-objects section, the housekeeping section, and the martini section are each engaging but pull in different directions. If this is intentional as a miscellany format, a brief framing line at the top (beyond the bullet-list preview) would help the reader settle in. The explanation of why the Apollo cover image is appropriate for Walk in the Good Way is genuinely arresting and could be expanded — it’s the most substantive paragraph in the post and feels slightly rushed given how good the observation is.

—

Last night, I am watching the Knicks–76ers game with my youngest son, nine-year-old Finnan, and after a commercial break he turns to me and says, “Dad, what’s ED?”

I say to him, “What do you mean?”

He says, “They just mentioned ED. What is ED?”

I pause for a while. My first reaction is to put it off. “Why do you ask?”

“They said ED,” Finnan replied, “and I don’t know what that is.” It’s a reasonable enough question. He usually asks me when he does not know things. But how deeply should this go? I ask a diagnostic question.

“Well, do you know how babies come to be? I mean, how the man plants the seed in the woman — [correcting myself] I mean, how the husband plants a seed in the wife?”

“No, not really.”

I think to myself: Okay. I guess it’s time. Might as well. He’s a mature kid. His inquisitiveness should be honored. I always talk straight to him. Better earlier than later. Third grade seems about right.

“Well, you know that for the mommy to become pregnant, so that a baby is growing inside her, the daddy needs to plant a seed inside her.”

“Yeah.”—he says, with a rising tone of voice, not really sure he knows that, thinking that he should know it, that maybe he does know it. This could be the first he’s heard of it.

Read more

Now consider: such skies are actually rare. But great painters can imagine such a scene from having seen something like it only a few times.

I am a terrible proofreader. Therefore, a few weeks ago, I decided I would henceforth send everything which I wrote through Claude, to proofread it.

Every post on this substack since then has been proofread by Claude. But if you have been reading carefully, you have no doubt noticed several mistakes in each post that should have been caught by a proofreader. I would estimate that Claude has overlooked on average three such mistakes per each 1000 words.

I had already noticed that I got better results when I prompted Claude, “proofread this carefully” rather than “proofread this.”

So, I asked Claude about it. I pointed out some mistakes it had not caught, and asked how I should prompt it so that it would not overlook mistakes. Here is what it said:

Proofread this as a copy editor would, reading against the possibility that every sentence contains an error. Flag: (1) typos and spelling errors; (2) grammatical errors; (3) drafting residues — words or phrases that appear to be notes to the author rather than finished prose; (4) incomplete thoughts; (5) punctuation errors; (6) inconsistencies of register or tone. List every item you find before offering any stylistic observations.

Please help yourself to this prompt. Copy it and use it for your own proofreading instructions.

If, after using it, I discover a mistake that went unnoticed, I plan to point it out to Claude and ask for an even more detailed prompt, which would cover this new case. I anticipate that my prompt will grow in detail over time, like a law code.

It turns out that “proofread” is not an identifiable kind for Claude. Notice that it begins its own prompt, rather, with the language “proofread as a copy editor would.”

It also turns out that Claude is designed to be efficient, so that it skips some corrections because it views it as more efficient to do so.

Here is what it said about including the language about “drafting residue”:

Your request for the more detailed prompt arose from a case where I missed a "drafting residue" — a fragment that almost made sense but wasn't finished prose. The explanation was that without the explicit category of "drafting residues," I tend to read for sense and skim past things that almost parse. The structured six-category list forces a more systematic scan rather than a holistic reading.

The list points to something about our own skill of proofreading. It too consists of a cluster of skills. Consider our notion of “typo.” That kind of mistake did not exist before typing. Likewise, the old categories of scribal errors, such as “haplography,” no longer matter much. From Wikipedia:

Haplography (from Greek: haplo- 'single' + -graphy 'writing'), also known as lipography (from Greek: lip- from leipein 'to leave/to omit' + -graphy 'writing'), is a scribal or typographical error where a letter or group of letters that should be written twice is written once.

(The term is transferred to typographical errors. The scribal error comes along with a psychological theory about how the eye or the imagination causes one’s attention to skip, when letters are repeated.)

I will post here subsequent versions of my proofreading prompt, as it grows in comprehensiveness.

Did you see the headline last week, that the national debt has now exceeded annual GDP? An analogy would be: you have a household income of $100K, and you have unsecured debt of $100K, which you service with interest rates tied to some floating benchmark (say, LIBOR).

There is nothing magical about the threshold, >100% debt to GDP. There is also nothing of itself problematic about it, so long as there is some rational plan to see that the debt does not continue to grow indefinitely.

But there is no such plan. Congress has no will to limit the national debt and its continued accumulation. Rather, we are on track for another year of almost $2 trillion in deficit spending, which adds $2 trillion more to the debt.

Moreover, because of “fiat money,” there is no objective need for the government to limit spending, since it can always “print money.”

And the fact that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency creates a “moral hazard” that the government will continue to do so. (A moral hazard is when someone’s getting bailed out of bad behavior removes any incentives for the reform of that behavior.)

Also, a serious upshot is that the party in charge has a strong, short term concern to lower interest rates, whether that serves the public good or not. The reason is that lower interest rates imply a lower debt service expense in the Federal budget.

(Does Trump’s pressure on the Fed that it lower interest rates really derive from a concern to make housing more affordable?)

Also, accumulation of debt puts an upward pressure on all interest rates, because Treasury must offer a better return to sell all of that debt.

Does anyone care? At my School, at least, we educate our students to be concerned about such things.

Rod Dreher said this the other day on his substack. I was astonished that over a year since Trump’s “liberation day,” he was beginning to grasp what the tariffs mean in practice for small businesses:

People like to talk about how the economy is always the most important political issue. James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” is the most famous articulation of this point. It’s the mantra that he kept hammering into the heads of Team Clinton when he was running the 1992 Democratic presidential campaign, to keep them focused.

Well, last night, having just arrived in southern California, I was having dinner with some folks. Everybody at the table was a Trump voter. We were all talking about how we feel about things at this stage in MAGA Two: Electric Boogaloo. It’s fair to say that feelings were pretty mixed. One thing stood out, though. One of the men at the table is a pastor who left the ministry to open a small business. He told us that it has been a real education for him in how the economy works.

A key component in the manufacture of the products he sells is made in the Persian Gulf region. I’m not going to say what it is, on the off chance that some reader here might recognize the source (highly unlikely, but still), but let’s just say I never imagined that this particular substance was sourced to the Persian Gulf. Anyway, he said prices for this substance have skyrocketed since the war started, and his business has been dramatically affected. He was telling this story as a way of illustrating the way he, as someone who previously was not involved in business, has been made to care about Trump’s war-of-choice on Iran.

I didn’t mention it last night, but this made me think about my small business owning friend in Tennessee who was a Trump supporter, even though she hates the way he behaves. Then came the Big Beautiful Liberation Day Tariffs, in which El Trumpo sprayed the world with indiscriminate tariffs the same way Tony Montana cut loose on his enemies in the gun scene of Scarface. My friend wasn’t against tariffs in principle, but the way Trump imposed them was so thoughtless, and it put her small business, which depended on imports from South America for a product not made in America, almost immediately at risk. She flipped on MAGA, because she saw the abstraction of the Trump tariffs — and saw them accurately — as a threat to her being able to feed her kids.

I bring this up because, like the man at the table last night, both him and my Tennessee friend were and are the kind of conservatives who mostly like what Trump does on cultural and social policy. But when his policies directly threatened their small businesses — which is to say, the way they support their families — it was a different story.

So, yeah, “it’s the economy stupid” more often that non-economic thinkers like me care to consider. But for their part, materialists sometimes make the same mistake from their side, thinking that there’s no problem that money (or, more broadly, a reallocation of financial resources) can’t solve.

I can say that the students at my School and its graduates are good “economic thinkers,” who most certainly are not materialists, but who saw immediately (day of, not a year later) these unfortunate upshots of the tariffs for the ordinary business owner.

Please note that the inherent instability of the Trump administration has implied that no sensible person would commit capital to manufacturing simply because some tariffs had been declared. Therefore, the tariff policy was of itself destructive, not constructive, besides being ultra vires.

There are two errors in the Dreher quotation, which Claude caught when I gave it the rigorous proofreading prompt. Did you see them? I’ll give the answers below.

I watched the movie, A Simple Plan, with my two older boys last Friday (“movie night”), about three men who become corrupted when they discover $4 million in cash in a downed airplane.

This led me to wonder about a list of best movies about greed. Which one truly is best?

Wall Street

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

A Simple Plan

Or is it something else? Paid subscribers, weigh in! (Claude favors There Will Be Blood.)

Errors in the Dreher quotation:

"more often that non-economic thinkers" → more often than non-economic thinkers (Dreher quote)

"both him and my Tennessee friend" → both he and my Tennessee friend (within the Dreher quote; nominative case required as subject of "were and are")

Ciao!

I want to tell you about the curious history of May 1 as “St Joseph the Worker” day. Someone said online yesterday something like, “this is the first feast day instituted by the Church to Christianize a secular holiday.” Well, that’s not exactly correct, as I’ll explain.

But suppose it were correct. Could we reason in this way? “May 1 was made St. Joseph the Worker Day, by the Catholic Church, in order to Christianize a secular workers’ holiday. Because that workers’ holiday is secular and even socialst, then the Catholic feast day remains secular and socialist. It is essentially secular and socialist, although given Christian trappings.”

Obviously we can’t. And yet that’s how many Protestants have argued about Christmas and Easter. These were originally pagan festivals which were Christianized; therefore, they say, they remain pagan. These festivals show the infiltration of pagan superstition into the Catholic Church.

But here’s why St. Joseph the Worker Day is not truly a matter of the Christianizing of an originally secular holiday.

First, the international socialist movement which made May 1 a holiday throughout Europe is a religion rather than something “secular”—if by “secular” you mean neutral and based on common rationality. Marxianism is a religion, which professes faith in a religious theory of history, economic determinism, and the utopian fulfillment of progress. It has its own self-righteous moral code based on its construction of the intentions of property owners. It also has its own rituals, including the sacrifice of reactionaries opposed to its conception of the will of God progress.

Second, ironically, the international socialist movement picked May 1 as its date ultimately because of Christian practice.

Here’s how that worked. In 1884, labor groups in Chicago announced that in two years on May 1 employers would agree or be forced to agree, by a general strike, to their demand to limit work days to 8 hours. (Why did they pick May 1? I’ll tell you in a moment.)

There were large rallies and demonstrations in 1886 when it turned out that their demand had not been met. Anarchists associated with the labor movement exploded a bomb which killed police officers. Eight were charged with conspiracy to murder and hanged. They were viewed as martyrs for the cause of labor. In 1889, to commemorate the day, the international socialist congress (First Congress of the Second International) voted to make May 1 an international labor day.

Therefore, all of Europe celebrates May 1 as a labor day because of Chicago. But in the US, Congress deliberately placed Labor Day in September to mark a clear separation from international socialism.

However, that Chicago date of May 1 was originally picked for ultimately religious reasons.

You have heard that in financial matters the business year is divided into quarters? Today, we use the calendar year, generally, for the start of the quarters: Jan 1, April 1, July 1, Oct 1. However, since medieval Europe, it was the practice to have the quarters coincide with religious festivals. These are the “English Quarter Days”:

• Lady Day — March 25 (the Annunciation)

• Midsummer Day — June 24 (the Nativity of John the Baptist)

• Michaelmas — September 29 (the feast of St. Michael and All Angels)

• Christmas — December 25

In the U.S., Lady Day had migrated to May 1 and was called “Moving Day,” the standard start date for contracts, leases, and employment contracts lasting a year.

In sum, St. Joseph the Worker Day was not in some simple sense “the Christianization of a secular holiday,” because socialism is not secular, and the date of May 1 has ultimately a Christian origin.

By the way, did you ask yourself, where were all the workers’ demonstrations yesterday? They did not happen. Yes, there were thousands of demonstrations throughout the U.S. initiated by organized labor. But these are anti-Trump demonstrations— “no kings” and anti-ICE, etc, not demonstrations for the legitimate interests of workers.

Remember when various post-liberal conservatives were saying that the Trump administration should establish itself as a new form of pro-labor Republicanism? But could that ever really happen when organized labor is dominated by leftist progressives who are only too happy to put the genuine concerns of labor in second place behind progressive politics?

The day that began as a Christian commercial date, became a socialist holy day, and was reclaimed by Pius XII for the Church, has now been claimed again — this time not for workers, but for a political movement that merely uses them.

Today is Saturday, and I said I would discuss music. Two greats of music passed away in roughly the last week, both on April 22. One is Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor, and the other is Ruth Slenczynska, the pianist.

Thomas began his career as an Assistant Conductor with the Boston Symphony. I was at Harvard then and among many fine musicians who worked with him. The general view among this very snooty group was that he was a lightweight. And that may have been true of him, then. But, if so, he grew in depth over his career and without question became a serious interpreter. His tenure at the San Francisco Symphony was particularly noteworthy.

I loved and listened many times to two of his recordings in particular. One is Mahler 7, sometimes called “Song of the Night.” It took me a long time to come to love this symphony. But now it is my favorite among all the Mahler symphonies. You can listen to Thomas’s recording here:

The astounding second movement btw begins at 21:40.

The other famous and great recording of Thomas is the way he used Gershwin’s own piano rolls to recreate a Rhapsody in Blue in which Gershwin himself was the soloist, based on flawless scholarship, and reviving the original version:

Now as for Ruth Slenczynska, what can one say? This “only living student of Rachmaninov” died when she was 102 years old and had been playing the piano at high virtuoso level since she was five years old. There are genuine prodigies who seem gifted with divine talent and mysteriously rise to virtuoso level through an evident gift. Yehudi Menuhin was like that. (So as Mozart.) But Slenczynska had a mad, tyrannical father who made her practice up to 9 hours a day.

People rightly expect of a divinely-gifted prodigy that, if he was so great as a child, he will be even greater as an adult. But it’s not reasonable to have the same expectation of the “slave-driven” prodigy.

Sadly, although she would play the Liszt Transcendental Études before breakfast each day for a warm up, her career did not follow a curve one might have extrapolated from her childhood. True, she had a justifiable contempt for “careers.” And she was a very smart lady with a lot of other interests.

By general acclaim, I think, her performances of the Chopin Ballades were regarded a among the most brilliant and perhaps the most noteworthy. People who went to hear Pollini (as my friends did), and her performances at roughly the same time, said hers were superior.

Here’s the first in G minor. It is played gorgeously. Think of the “old mind” and the young girl combined, as she plays it:

But mainly, let’s pray for the souls of Michael Tilson Thomas and Ruth Slenczynska, grateful for all the good they have done for us. May they rest in peace.

—

Ciao!

Regular readers know that I’m fond of Samuel Johnson’s quotation, that a book which you have not read is as good as a book that is recently published. Both are new to you.

Likewise, as an author, I appreciate any review or discussion of my work, even several years after its release.

To wit, yesterday the National Catholic Register published a review, taking the form of an interview, of my book on the gospel of John, Mary’s Voice in the Gospel according to John. The article by J.V. Turley is entitled, “Hidden in Plain Sight.”

It begins with a quotation from The Hound of the Baskervilles, “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”

(By the way, what do you think of that sentence? Isn’t “ever” redundant, after “by any chance”? I agree, “by any chance” imports the idea that there are many opportunities. But wouldn’t “no one by any chance observes” be enough? Did Conan Doyle slip here?)

A friend wrote to me about it:

Noticing and thinking what was previously taken for granted is the philosopher’s main task, no? I’ve often thought how odd it is that nobody in twenty centuries has put John’s Gospel next to the fact of John and Mary’s life together. It’s really almost amazing. But that’s the human ability to take the given for granted: amazing.

Turley in his interview asked what was the most surprising thing I discovered in the book. At the time of the interview, I was taken with a detail I’ve already discussed here, a “proof text” as I see it for my thesis:

“The most surprising thing did not make it into the book … because I discovered it after the book was published. It concerns when John and Peter run to the tomb, and John reports that only upon seeing the linen cloths did he believe in the resurrection, because ‘as yet they did not know the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.’ However, someone would write something like that, in a self-deprecating way, only if he had in mind someone who, in comparison, did not need to see the linens, and did not even need to go to the tomb, because this person was already fully convinced that the resurrection was going to take place. And this person is Mary.”

There’s not time to say everything in an interview, or two things where one can do. But if I had a second chance and could address also what is actually in the book that I discovered and found most surprising, it would be the book’s explanation for why only John, among the evangelists, records many times in which Jesus takes for himself the divine name, “I am.” In the book I say: Mary was aware of his divinity from the moment of his conception. Her nine months of meditation on the incarnation of divinity in human nature is in fact what is recorded in the famous “prologue” to the gospel of John. But this means that she had been meditating on this truth for 30 years before Jesus began his public ministry, whereas the Apostles could hardly grasp it after 3 years with him. We see what we are in a position to see. We remember and record what we notice and love.”

At one point, Turley asked me how, from John’s gospel, I believed that Mary would have viewed the death and resurrection of Jesus differently. He asked this (he later told me) because he conceived of the interview as fittingly published during Passion week.

Pakaluk makes this observation: “When Our Lord’s body was wrapped in the shroud, everyone else would have seen just a shape. If they had imagined anything, it would have been Our Lord’s ripped-up body after it was scourged. But Mary, his mother, would have ‘seen’ his integral, untouched body — as if foreseeing, through the shroud, how it was to look in his resurrection. It’s just like the famous story of the mother who identified the fourth soldier raising the flag on Iwo Jima, because she could ‘see through’ the clothing to the shape of her son’s back … ‘I know it’s my boy.’”

My point was that Mary already “saw” the resurrected body of the Lord when it was wrapped in the shroud, because that is how mothers know and love the fleshly bodies of their sons. I used the famous story of Iwo Jima as an example — how the AP and the Pentagon had placed the wrong name on one of the soldiers lifting the flag, and a mom knew it was her son from his body which she could see through the uniform.

Turley at one point asked about my motivation to write the book.

Pakaluk says it was Pope St. John Paul II who taught him about what he sees now as the deep connection between Mary and St. John’s Gospel. He shares a quote from the pontiff’s 2002 apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae: “The memories of Jesus, impressed upon her heart, were always with her, leading her to reflect on the various moments of her life at her Son’s side. In a way those memories were to be the ‘Rosary’ which she recited uninterruptedly throughout her earthly life.”

He then asked how my writing of the book changed my understanding of the gospel:

“I came to see clearly that love of Mary is part of the warp and woof of the Gospel from the very beginning,” he says. “It’s simply false that Marian devotion is something superadded to the Gospel, perhaps centuries after Christ. The reason [for this] is that our love for Mary is inseparable from Mary’s love for Christ, and from our own love for Christ. We love her as loving him. John invites us to contemplate Christ with Mary.”

Then too there is a proper maternal and feminine way of looking at the gospel which becomes more evident, to a man, through this kind of reflection on the gospel of John.

There’s no space for it in a newspaper article. But if Turley had more room, he might have ended his article with a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe, just as he had begun it with a quotation from Conan Doyle. The great short story about how we overlook the obvious is Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” about a man who hides from the police a stolen letter by leaving it on his mantle in a card rack on the mantelpiece, where you would leave a non-stolen letter. The detective in the story says:

"There is a game of puzzles … which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word --the name of town, river, state or empire --any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident.

But maybe it’s wrong to look for psychological explanations. Maybe the true explanation is providential and moral, that Mary wanted her voice hidden, out of humility, the way her glance is downturned and almost hidden in the image of Guadalupe.

But see for yourself:

Ciao!

Since it’s a Manhattan day, I guess, then I’ll include under “beauty” this pic too, from when I gave a talk at Columbia a few years back, taken in autumn in Central Park:

Did you know that there are two historic, highly competitive scholarships for study in the UK after college—the Rhodes and the Marshall? (There is the Gates also, but that is recent not ‘historic.’)

The Rhodes is the more famous; the Marshall the more competitive. The Rhodes has styled itself as for future leaders (e.g. Bill Clinton), while the Marshall has tended to be for scholars and scientists (e.g. Roger Tsien, 2008 Nobelist in Chemistry).

The Rhodes was instituted by a diamond magnate. The Marshall Scholarship was instituted by the UK government to honor George Catlett Marshall and to express gratitude for the Marshall Plan.

I am grateful to have been a Marshall Scholar. Therefore, I was delighted that King Charles mentioned the program in his speech to Congress yesterday:

The Marshall Scholarship, named after the great General George Marshall, and the Association of which I am so proud to be Patron, are emblematic of the connection between our two nations. Since its founding, more than 2,300 scholarships have been awarded, opening doors for Americans from all walks of life to study at the United Kingdom’s leading universities.

The King’s speech overall was congenial and humorous. You can read it here.

The King bears the title “Defender of the Faith,” that is, the Christian faith. King Charles was criticized around Easter for not standing up to promote the Christian faith. Critics said he spoke less warmly about Christianity than what he had said about Islam.

He seemed to address these criticisms in his speech:

And, Mr. Speaker, for many here – and for myself – the Christian faith is a firm anchor and daily inspiration that guides us not only personally, but together as members of our community. Having devoted a large part of my life to interfaith relationships and greater understanding, it is that faith in the triumph of light over darkness which I have found confirmed countless times. Through it I am inspired by the profound respect that develops as people of different faiths grow in their understanding of each other. It is why it is my hope – my prayer - that, in these turbulent times, working together and with our international partners, we can stem the beating of ploughshares into swords…

I am mindful that we are still in the season of Easter, the season that most strengthens my hope. It is why I believe, with all my heart, that the essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.

His defense of himself is that he will not defend the Christian faith but only the consequences of the faith for himself—a better understanding of others and respect for different faiths.

But this makes little sense. Are “people of all faiths and of none” by their different faiths, or by their lack of faith, just as much inspired to have an understanding of others and a respect for faith and other faiths? He has given us no reason to think so, since, he says, for him “the Christian faith is a firm anchor and daily inspiration.” But then isn’t it good if someone fosters the Christian faith directly? And if that’s his role, shouldn’t he in particular do that?

(King Charles speaking in front of a Rhodes Scholar.)

Agreed, he is a public figure, and the understanding of different faiths for each other is important. But then, as Defender of the Faith, couldn’t he speak in this way?

I am the Defender of the Faith. My office as King requires me to stand up for the Christian faith in particular and to promote its interests. And this duty I gladly undertake, even as a public figure in a diverse society. Because I know, from my own experience, that in promoting the Christian faith, I am also promoting a deep respect for all faiths, and an understanding of different faiths, and a deep compassion, too, for those who have no faith.

It is easier to respect faith, if you have faith. The Christian faith proclaims a common Savior of all, who died for each one of us, and who would have died to save only me, or to save only you. It teaches dialogue and understanding. And that is why I ask Muslim immigrants to be as respectful of my Christian faith, and my role in promoting it, as you think Christians ought to be, when they move to a Muslim country, and find that public authorities there promote Islam.

A friend wrote to me exasperated over a recent article by Cardinal McElroy, purporting to refute Michael Novak on just wars, with reference to something Michael wrote back in 2003. Doesn’t the good Cardinal appreciate that Michael is dead, my friend wrote, and cannot defend himself?

(Michael Novak died on February 17, 2017. He was a Distinguished Visiting Professor in my School at The Catholic University of America. When he became very ill back then, I took his courses.)

The Cardinal’s essay is “Why the Catholic Church Can and Should Judge the Morality of the Iran War.”

I replied that it’s a testimony to Michael’s stature that people look to him, still, as the person who must be “refuted” on some matter that he was famous for addressing—whether was just war, a free economy, or the American spirit.

The Cardinal begins his essay by valuably pointing out that the fundamental stance of Christians towards war is to find it abhorrent. War, which is the killing of brother by brother, the destruction of the goods of another—and which always brings the suffering of innocents—is a gross falling away from the love which all of us should have towards everyone else in the human family.

There is such a thing as “just war theory,” but it is a theory about how to act rightly amid a collapse. The assignment of blame may be possible, but one must grant that that is secondary.

It would be as if in a large family one group of cousins aimed to steal from another group and kill the others if necessary. At first, the elders of this family would weep at what had happened. How did family unit break down?

But then —and Cardinal McElroy does not give weight to what comes next—the next act of these same elders would be to become angry at the family members who had acted aggressively and to judge, regretfully, that they needed to be stopped and punished for disturbing the family’s peace.

In fact, McElroy quotes Pope Francis, who seems to go against the just war teaching of the Church, in saying that even wars which defend against an aggressor can no longer be justified:

Pope Francis wrote in “Fratelli Tutti” that “we can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of a just war. Never again war.”

To me, it’s odd that a Prince of the Church would insist that the Church be accorded a weighty voice in public debates, but then, in evidence of that, he should cite something which is apparently at odds with historic Catholic teaching.

(Readers should be aware of the backdrop, which is that in other venues Cardinal McElroy has argued that Catholic teaching is evolving toward pacifism. See Christopher Kaczor’s patient dismantling of this view: “Is the Just War Tradition Evolving Towards Comprehensive Non-Violence?” Aquinas Review v.28, no.1 (2025) 117-131.)

But then Michael Novak becomes the target:

[Another] claim about Catholic moral teaching distorting our current national dialogue is the assertion that while posing the central moral questions about a war rightfully belongs to the church, the application of those norms and the determination of moral legitimacy to go to war belong solely to the leaders of government.

Note the word “solely.” I’ve added the emphasis. Because, if you include the word “solely” then the claim is untenable and ludicrous. I’m not a leader of government, and neither are you (I think), and yet you and I both believe that we have the ability to apply just war criteria and make a judgment as to whether a particular war is just or not. On the other hand, if you leave out the word “solely,” then the claim is straightforwardly true.

Elsewhere McElroy uses the word “exclusive” rather than “sole”:

Mr. Novak in his debate with Pope John Paul II asserts that leaders of government have an exclusive legitimacy in determining whether the moral requirements of just war teaching are met in a given situation.

Once again, I’ve added the emphasis. Because if Novak claimed that leaders of government have “a legitimate authority” to judge that the criteria for a just war have been satisfied, he’d be saying something obviously true.

As the source for Novak’s views, McElroy refers to an article from 2003, published by the AEI, “War to Topple Saddam Is a Moral Obligation.”

So what does Novak say there? Does he say that “government leaders” alone may judge the justness of a war? Does he say that the Church has no standing or no business to make such a judgment?

Here is what Novak says:

the new Catholic Catechism assigns primary responsibility [of applying just war principles] not to distant commentators, but to public authorities themselves. This is for two reasons. First, they bear the primary vocational role and constitutional duty to protect the lives and rights of their people. Second, they are closest to the facts of the case and–given the nature of war by clandestine terror networks today–privy to highly restricted intelligence. Others have a right and duty to voice their own judgments of conscience, but the final judgment belongs to public authorities: “The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.” (Catechism, No.2309)

It seems pretty clear to me. Novak does not say that government leaders have the sole or exclusive authority but rather that they have the primary authority. And obviously they do, because the decision to go to war or not, as the Catechism teaches, must rest with those who have authority to wage war, which are legitimate governments.

Cardinal McElroy then takes another approach. His view is that responsibility for the common good is shared by all kinds of persons and groups. He writes:

those who have responsibility for the common good in matters of war extend far beyond the president. They include Congress directly; and also religious and cultural leaders, media, civic, labor and veterans’ groups.

And yet, the Catechism never speaks in this way. It reserves the phrase “those responsible for the common good” to the government, for example:

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens. (n. 2241)

If “those responsible for the common good” included cultural leaders and the media, then cultural leaders and the media would have authority to wage war, since, again, the Catechism says that only those responsible for the common good can declare and undertake war:

those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility. (n 2265)

And this makes perfect sense, because according to Catholic teaching, governments are instituted to promote and safeguard the common good.

Matters of war and peace are serious. If cardinals are to enter the debate, as they should, and if their voices are to be weighty and authoritative, as these voices should be, then what they say needs to be firmly grounded in what the Church teaches and bounded by ordinary principles of fair representation of the views of others.

Or so a Scholar says, whose scholarship is named after a great warrrior.

Ciao!

Beauty from the vault: view of the Presidentials across the Great Gulf on Mount Washington.

I was asked to give a talk on the spirit of Opus Dei (“the Work”) at the Allview Center in Columbia, MD, last Monday evening. I have been a “supernumerary” member since graduate school. Here is a lightly edited transcript of my talk.

—

The Spirit of the Work

—my account

Talk by Dr. Michael Pakaluk

Allview Study Center, April 27, 2026

I’ve been asked to speak on the spirit of the Work. I’m going to begin with two fundamental, intuitive ideas, because I believe that you can’t really understand something unless you understand it as a unity, as a single thing. Is there a single intuitive idea by which we can grasp the spirit of the Work? I want to propose two.

The first is this: the identification with Christ in his hidden years. He lived in Nazareth for 30 out of 33 of his years of life — by far the greatest amount of time he spent on earth. By “identification” I mean imitation of Christ, closeness to Christ, discipleship to Christ, following Christ in those hidden years.

What did he do in those hidden years? Well, he lived in a family. Insofar as we imitate him in our family, we’re imitating him in those hidden years. If we imitate him in his family, we take Joseph as our father, Mary as our mother — also imitating him. He lived among friends. He worked. He lived in a Jewish household, and in Judaism there’s always been a tremendous love of study. The imitation of his love of study, of the law, of scripture, memorization of scripture, knowledge of scripture. He would relax. He would engage in religious observances, piety — the family would travel down to Jerusalem a couple of times a year. And we go on pilgrimages; if we go to our parish church, that’s imitating him. He loved his own place. This is a mark of Jewish people: love of their own place, their ancestors, their heritage, their history, their country. Loving all of those things as well, in our own case.

It’s a very full ideal, as you can see. And I want to emphasize — in these days of anti-Semitism — that it is a very Jewish thing. He was a Jewish man.

St. Josemaría said: “I ask God that you may take as your model Jesus as an adolescent and as a young man, both when he disputed with the doctors in the temple, and when he worked in Joseph’s workshop. Jesus lived 33 years. 30 were spent in silence and obscurity, in submission and work. It is in the greatness of ordinary things that he awaits us.” That’s from Furrow, 484.

The second intuitive idea is approaching God through the embrace of honest and good secular realities, rather than the rejection or renunciation of them.

Renunciation is a perfectly good path, and religious take that path. But the Work is a different path. This is what St. Josemaría called “passionately loving the world.” Our Lord came to save what was lost — to join him in this project of recovering and saving, restoring and transforming what was good in creation. Not by rejection, not by contemptus mundi, which is the attitude of a religious person — and again, that’s perfectly fine. But that’s not the spirit of the Work.

St. Augustine said that Christians should be like the Israelites who were fleeing from Egypt, who were instructed by God to take all the gold with them from their masters, because they were slaves at the time. He explains in one of his treatises that this is an image of what we’re meant to do. We’re supposed to take all the gold from secular culture, from secular achievements, from the great people we see around us who are not Christian or may not be Christian — to imitate that, try to be like that, to appropriate it for Christianity.

Jesus is reputed by the early Fathers to have said, “Be good bankers” — and this, among other things, means something similar. In our environment, we pick out what’s good, and anything that’s dross or counterfeit, we toss aside.

So, these are the two fundamental intuitive ideas. If you grasp those and see all the implications of them, I believe you grasp the spirit of Opus Dei.

But now I want to say something about the marks of Opus Dei that I take to be associated with these two ideas of it. I have seven notes here. (I had six, and I said to myself, I’ve got to make it seven, because seven’s the perfect number.)

(1) The first is holiness as a super-eminent goal.

If you are imitating Christ, and if you imitate someone who’s divine, you have to become holy. And if you’re following Christ, Christ is not the kind of person who can ever be in second place.

What I mean by “super-eminent goal” is, first of all, it is a goal — holiness. If you were to say, what are you up to in your life, you might say: professional achievement, supporting my family, making my life fruitful — I hope you would say that. But one of the things you should also mention is to become holy. It should be a goal of your whole life, to be holy. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” Our Lord taught.

But then it needs to be the first goal, the pre-eminent goal. In the Sermon on the Mount, Our Lord said, “Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you.” All those other things that I mentioned, which are great — they should come along almost incidentally to this pursuit of holiness.

And it’s a jealous goal — even more than a goal, even more than the first goal.

Our Lord expresses this by saying, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother cannot be my disciple.” And we all become somewhat scandalized by that. What he means is that he takes what would be the closest goods in your life — your mother and your father — and says: you have to choose me, even over them, if it came to a conflict. There can’t be anything that takes precedence over holiness in our life. That’s the kind of goal it is.

And that marks out Opus Dei. Numerary members of Opus Dei are men who have given up family, given up a lot of things, and it’s a testament, a witness to holiness as being the ruling goal. Supernumerary members like myself — we should live the same life, but it’s not as visible. It should be lived in the same way.

(2) The second mark is the centrality of prayer and the sacraments.

We want to imitate Christ, grow close to him, identify with him — but there’s only one way of entering into his life—the life of anybody is mainly an interior life—and that’s through prayer and through the sacraments. Through prayer we become united with his spirit; through the sacraments we become united with his very body. We even eat his flesh and drink his blood.

This is a note of Opus Dei: that members will pray — and seriously pray. I remember when I was a Protestant Christian, a speaker came and said, “If you can just give God five minutes of your time — start there, with five minutes,” right? Like five minutes of exercise. But knowing the history of Christian sanctity, I knew that real saints were praying one, two hours a day. Opus Dei is marked by lots and lots of very successful, high-energy professionals who are praying two hours a day. It is a serious life of prayer.

St. Josemaría said: “First prayer, then atonement, and in the third place — very much in the third place — action. Prayer is the foundation of the spiritual edifice. Prayer is all-powerful.”

And then the centrality of the Mass. Jesus was prophet, priest, and king — you want to identify with a prophet, priest, and king. You can think of the Mass as combining the prophetical, the priestly, and the kingly offices together in the words and actions of the priest. The Mass is the center of your life; it’s where you start and where you end up. St. Josemaría said: “Keep struggling so that the holy sacrifice of the altar really becomes the center and root of your interior life, so that your whole day will turn into an act of worship, an extension of the Mass you have attended, and a preparation for the next.” This great love of the Mass is another mark of the Work.

(3) The third point of its spirit is what one might call, after Newman, the ideal of “a well-formed laity.”

“You shall love the Lord” — what’s the First Commandment, which Jesus was asked about? He said, “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, soul, and strength.” And the second is like it: “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Actually, no. I just now left something out on purpose— I’ve just quoted Leviticus. What Our Lord added was “mind.” Whole heart, soul, strength, and mind. That’s an addition of Christ’s, probably with a view to Hellenistic culture of the time, and knowing the kind of new world which was developing, which was very much going to be a world of rationality.

Opus Dei takes seriously this formation of the mind. Earlier, when I came in, I spoke with the various men here, when we were first gathering—many of you have very high attainments in sciences and scholarship. In Opus Dei it is expected that you become a person of similar attainment in understanding the Catholic faith. You don’t walk around with a sixth-grader’s understanding of the faith; you walk around with a theologian’s understanding, a priest’s understanding of the faith.

St. Josemaría said: “How I wish your bearing and conversation were such that on seeing or hearing you, people would say, ‘This man reads the life of Christ.’”

Study scripture, doctrine, moral theology, the history of the Church, the lives of the saints, the spiritual classics. And not only that — but also study great Catholics who may not be canonized saints but who are weighty and vital: Chesterton, Bossuet, Christopher Dawson, Orestes Brownson. Become very good at apologetics.

Not vegging out binge-watching TV series — obviously sometimes that’s all we can do, we’re exhausted — but trying to continue to educate ourselves, to become deeply knowledgeable about the faith. If you spend any time on X or the internet, you know that we’re suffering, because people have no knowledge of anything.

St. Josemaría said: “If you are to serve God with your mind, to study is a grave obligation for you. You frequent the sacraments, you pray, you are chaste — but you do not study. Don’t tell me you’re good. You’re only goodish.”

(4) A fourth note: materialize your spirituality.

The way to hell is paved with good intentions. Opus Dei doesn’t really care very much about good intentions, or words, or signaling. Perhaps one of the most loathsome characters in the idea of Opus Dei would be somebody who signals how Catholic he is but does a bad job — doesn’t fulfill his obligations, isn’t a good father, is a sloppy worker — and uses religion as an excuse: “You should still like my work; I’m a very religious person.” That’s not it at all. You have to have excellence in your work. Yet you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to be excellent. I expect my nine-year-old Finnan, my youngest, to be excellent at what he does. Service to others; what’s called “due care;” completing things; attention to details that maybe nobody will notice but you know God will notice.

There are tremendous temptations to act otherwise from AI, right? We all know that. This is going to be an area where Opus Dei gives us a significant competitive advantage, because sloppiness is utterly opposed to the Work.

St. Josemaría said: “You cannot sanctify work which, humanly speaking, is slapdash, for we must not offer God badly done jobs. Let us work, let us work a lot and work well, without forgetting that prayer is our best weapon.”

(5) Fifth: personal influence — I’m using Newman’s term. St. Josemaría liked the phrase “apostolate of friendship and confidence.”

We belong to an apostolic Church. “I believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church.” To be apostolic means to be sent: Our Lord was sent into the world by the Father; the Son sent his apostles out into the world; the apostles sent the bishops as successors; to this day they go out into the world.

We are sent into the world. Those parables about fruitfulness — they’re about virtues, but they’re also about winning souls. If you return that one talent and say, “I’ve kept free from sin; here’s your talent back” — Our Lord, as we know from the parable, is not going to be pleased. It is a task that falls on every single Catholic to share the faith with others, to be fruitful in the faith — both in the straightforward way, so to speak, of generously begetting children, but also supernaturally through our friendships.

Vatican II really emphasized this. In its decree on the laity, it says: “The apostolate in the social milieu — that is, the effort to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws, and structures of the community in which one lives — is so much the duty and responsibility of the laity that it can never be properly performed by others. In this area, the laity can exercise the apostolate of like towards like. It is here that they complement the testimony of life with the testimony of the word.”

We see on the internet all the time people complaining about the bishops. Fine — I think we do have a lot of weak bishops, to be honest. But maybe they need our support, and we need to be doing our job, which is the apostolate of like towards like.

St. Josemaría said: “When I speak to you about the apostolate of friendship, I mean a personal friendship, self-sacrificing and sincere. Face to face, heart to heart. In the apostolate of friendship and trust, the first step has to be understanding, service, and holy intransigence in doctrine.”

And this is good news. How do we be apostles in the modern world? By becoming a good friend. And sharing what you love naturally — the way I would share a love of golf, or espresso coffee, or music — love of Christ. Of course, more love of Christ than of other things. We don’t have to stand on a street corner, hold up placards, be obnoxious, get bullhorns, or try to pressure people. Friendship is all about freedom and liking things. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to twist anyone’s arm: God’s not twisting anyone’s arm.

(6) That leads to the sixth point: the true love of freedom in the Work — celebrating human freedom, not simply as a trait of public life.

“Live free or die,” the license plate says in New Hampshire. You might say, “But that’s extreme!” And yet, I was just looking at The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis, and in the Appendix he has what he calls “The Law of Magnanimity,” and he quotes there some ancient sources which basically say: if I can’t live free, I prefer to die. This is an old pagan ideal, not especially one peculiar to the American colonies. But that kind of self-respect and self-worth, this is precious in Opus Dei —

—but also freedom meaning freedom of disagreement in political, prudential, economic, and professional matters. The world of prudence is a world of conflicting views. I can’t even talk about where our kids should go to school, or what we should do in the summer, with my wife, without finding that we have very different views — and that’s my wife. Prudence is diverse. A good Christian, St. Josemaría says, celebrates this and leaves room for it, and doesn’t try to impose uniformity in things where it isn’t to be expected. Let’s stay together on doctrine and on morals — but in matters of prudence, let’s practice the freedom to disagree, and sharply to disagree.

St. Josemaría says: “How sad it is to have a Caesarist mentality, and not to understand the freedom other citizens enjoy in the things God has left to the free choice of man.”

In a society in which people seem not to understand freedom, the Work is real defender, protector, and promoter of genuine freedom.

(7) Finally, devotion to Peter, Joseph, and Mary. These loves are bound up with the Work’s conceiving of itself as a like a family.

In the Work one has great love for the Pope as the Holy Father. “You must love, venerate, pray, and mortify yourself for the Pope — and do so with greater affection each day. He is the foundation stone of the Church, and throughout the centuries, right to the end of time, he carries out among men that task of sanctifying and governing which Jesus entrusted to Peter,”—St. Josemaria said.

You’re not going to find extreme hyperpapalism in St. Josemaría, or Ultramontanism — but you do find a very strong, deep affection of a son for a father, and of a Christian for the office which was established by Our Lord. And that kind of esteem is always rewarded by God.

Then too, great love for St. Joseph. “St. Joseph, Father of Christ, is also your father and your lord. Ask him to help you. St. Joseph, our father and lord, is a teacher of the interior life. Place yourself under his patronage, and you’ll feel the effectiveness of his power.”

St. Josemaría loved the fact that a specific mention of St. Joseph was added to the Mass at the Second Vatican Council. Ask the critics of the Second Vatican Council —what about the fact that St. Joseph was added to the Roman Canon? That was a good change. Who will not love an “ordo” which names St. Joseph?

(St. Joseph and the Christ Child, Dony MacManus)

And finally, great love for Mary. “Love for Our Lady is proof of good spirit in an organization and in individuals. Distrust the undertaking that lacks this characteristic.” The love of Mary imbues the Work with a great familial tone, as I said, and softness, and a great generous heart — characteristic, I think, of Spanish culture, and Mexican culture, and generally of Hispanic cultures — brought into the Work through St. Josemaría’s devotion to Mary. He said: “Don’t imitate me in anything” — except in love for Mary.

In conclusion, let me review my points.

I said there were two fundamental ideas by which you can grasp in a single glance the spirit of the Work: imitation of Our Lord in his hidden years — in humility and obscurity; and approaching God through the embrace and saving of good created realities, rather than through any rejection of them.

And then the seven marks: holiness as a super-eminent goal; prayer and the sacraments; a well-formed laity; materializing your spirituality; the apostolate of personal influence; freedom; and special devotion to Peter, to Joseph, and to Mary.

I hope I’ve done justice to the Work. You can’t do better than reading the works of St. Josemaría himself. But insofar as I understand it, and I’ve lived in the Work and been benefited by it, this is what I would say.

This is my account of the spirit of the Work. Thank you for your attention. And now we’ll have time for discussion.

Ciao!

And the other day, he sunk a 60 foot putt for birdie on the 2nd most difficult hole at the University of Maryland golf course:

We also all golf around here.

I will post something focussed on Sunday’s gospel reading, making just four points about the opening paragraph.

(By the way, there are no paragraphs, punctuation, or even separation of words in the old manuscripts. Spaces were a waste of precious materials.)

1— The Greek for the imperative, “have faith,” and for the indicative, “you have faith,” is exactly the same (pisteuete). I think that “have faith” here is an overtranslation. I would prefer “believe” or “trust.” Suppose we opt for “believe.” Suppose we preserve John’s word order. Then there are four possibilities:

(a) both indicative: “You believe in God. Also in me you believe.”

(b) both imperative: "Believe in God. Also in me believe.”

(c) imperative then indicative: “Believe in God. Also in me you believe.”

(d) indicative then imperative: “You believe in God. Also in me believe.”

Most scholars who look at this will reason as follows: The best presumption is that John keeps the same form, for words in such close proximity. This rules out both (c) and (d). But the sentences occur in a passage which in general is hortatory. This rules out (a), which is lame anyway. Therefore, option (d) is best.

I agree with this reasoning.

But there are other reasons positively to reject (d) (which is the NAB’s reading and also that of the Douay-Rheims).

One is that the logic of the verses that follow is that the disciples should rely upon Jesus to learn about the Father, not rely on their faith in God to know about him. (d) gets the order of reliance and inference wrong.

Another is that (d) supposes too sharp a distinction between God and Jesus. If the argument were, “You believe in God; but I am God; therefore, believe in me,” there would need to be an inferential term, “therefore.” But that’s not present.

Another is that (d) seems insensitive to the Trinitarian character of this discourse. It is clear that Jesus had already explained the Trinity to his disciples as like a household. In the household which is God, the Father dwells with the Son. (“He was with the Father in the beginning.”) And now Jesus is saying that this household is not so closely constructed so that no one else can be admitted. His argument is therefore not inferential but inclusive: “believe in God: believe in me as with the Father.” The argument moves from belief in the Godhead to belief in the Son within the Godhead.

2—This word rendered “dwelling,” (Greek, monē) is a substantive related to the verb for to stay, to abide, to remain (menein), which is a favorite word of Jesus in the gospel of John, e.g. “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me,” (15:4). Our two words which are similarly related are abide and abode. But then why not render it using those words? It should read: “In my Father’s house, there are many abodes.” Or at least, “In my Father’s house, there are many places where you can stay.”

3—I find the repetition of “place” (topos) fascinating, because it is certainly in Greek a term related to bodies. Only bodies have place. These verses, then, are a very clear affirmation of “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” Jesus is certainly not saying that only the spirits of his disciples will be welcome.

4— “Take you to myself” is also Trinitarian, because “myself” must mean “my Father’s house,” the Godhead. Otherwise, he would have said, “take you along with me.”

Ciao!