I have not had much time recently for blogging, so I apologize for the recent hiatus. After a long work day, much of it spent in front of screens, blogging in low on the priority list for my free time. But here are some offerings from my archives for the edification of my faithful readers (totally random and with no thematic integration).
“Virtue and Classical Education,” from my 2017 archives:
Education should serve the dual purpose of cultivating dispositions attuned to what is good, true and beautiful in this world, while also cultivating a sense of holy discontent that refuses to be satisfied with anything but God Himself. The manifestation of what is good, true and beautiful in creation should be seen as an icon of the Eternal Good, Truth, and Beauty, but it is only an icon; the reality towards which these qualities point can only be found in the beatific vision. That is why the most moving poetry, the loveliest music, the most beautiful literature, always leave us slightly unsatisfied. The best art points beyond itself and awaken within us deep yearnings for something more.
Recall Plato’s wonderful allegory about the cave. A group of people have been chained to the wall of a cave for all their lives. Behind them is a fire that causes shadows from the outside world to be projected on the cave’s wall. These shadows make up the prisoners’ only experience of the outside world. But imagine that one of the prisoners is suddenly freed. At first the light of the sun will hurt his eyes, and he might long to return to the familiar world of shadows. To his unaccustomed eyes, the shadowy forms in the cave seem more substantial than the world from which the shadows are but a dim reflection. Perhaps he is dragged up a rough ascent and out into the sun. This would no doubt give him pain and make him angry, which would only intensify his reaction against the radiant light of the sun. His pain would confirm him in his preference for the bondage of the cave over the freedom of the sunlit lands.
Whatever else this story may have meant for Plato, it certainly functions on one level as an allegory of education, and the role that philosophers serve in pointing us to ultimate forms. For us today, the equivalent to Plato’s philosophers would be our parents, teachers, and clergy, who keep dragging us into the light, sometimes against our will. When our eyes are still unaccustomed to looking upon higher things, the transitory things of this world (e.g. things like fast-food, television, popular music, computer games) seem more real to us. And yet our teachers drag us away from these vanities into the world of liberal arts, a world that will be freeing if we surrender to it long enough for our eyes to become accustomed to its light. In a similar way, our parents force us to develop good habits—habits that seem monotonous and unexciting at times—in order that we may experience the liberating effects of virtue.
That is not all there is to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Once the liberated man can fully see and understand, he has pity for the remaining cave-dwellers. He returns to the cave with a message of liberation. He explains to the other prisoners that there is a reality for which the shadows on the wall are but a dim reflection. Yet unable to imagine anything beyond their present world of shadows, the prisoners prefer to remain in the cave. They have mistaken the world of appearance for the reality itself.
We do not live in a cave. We live in a world where we are surrounded by beauty and love, where every day we taste from heavenly blessings graciously bestowed on us by the Creator. Yet compared to the eternal realities awaiting us in the new heavens and the new earth, even these earthly blessings are but dim shadows. Our sin ties us to the bondage of chasing after shadows within the immanent sphere, rather than using these shadows as a ladder to ascend to the transcendent realities they reflect. This is a bondage from which we cannot escape ourselves. We are like prisoners chained to the cave, always dragged down by transient ends and transitory pleasures. Or, as St. Augustine eloquently put it in Book Two of The Confessions, “the soul commits fornication when she…seeks apart from thee what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to thee.” The solution to this—which Plato could not conceive even in his wildest dreams—is when the true form of The Good became enfleshed and entered into the cave with us, to free us and show us the way out. Thus, the ultimate answer to the problem of the cave is not in philosophy, as Plato thought, but it joining ourselves to the God-man and availing ourselves of His redemption.
One of the deepest theological reflections on Plato’s cave comes from the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore, and his posthumously published book The Rod, The Root and the Flower. Let me read you a passage from the book. “Plato’s cave of shadows is the most profound and simple statement of the relation of the natural to the spiritual life ever made. Men stand with their backs to the Sun, and they take the shadows cast by it upon the walls of their cavern for realities. The shadows, even, of heavenly realities are so alluring as to provoke ardent desires, but they cannot satisfy us. They mock us with unattainable good, and our natural and legitimate passions and instincts, in the absence of their true and substantial satisfactions, break forth into frantic disorders. If we want fruition we must turn our back to the shadows, and gaze on their realities in God.”
“Gratitude, Love, and the Struggle for Spiritual Emotion,” from my 2021 archives:
The hit songs on the Billboard Hot 100 for June and July, both performed by the South Korean boy band BTS, encapsulate how Millennials and the Generation Z have come to think about love. “Butter,” which topped America’s charts for June and the first half of July, describes love as something that easily happens to you and is “smooth like butter” – a force beyond yourself that effortlessly pulls you in. “Butter” was knocked out of first position by “Permission to Dance” from the same group, which was the “B side” of Butter. It also articulates the philosophy that the good life is easy: if we keep the right vibe and aren’t fazed by what’s standing in our way, then we can “break our plans and live just like we’re golden / and roll in like we’re dancing fools.”
By contrast, love songs in the past emphasized the lover’s struggle to obtain the beloved. Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet #116 celebrates the overcoming of tempests, time, and even “the edge of doom,” in order for the lover to obtain and keep the beloved. For Shakespeare, romance involves struggle and struggle is romantic. But struggle is not a generally welcome concept among digital natives, for whom the outside world has been mediated by Google and its ethic of instant gratification. The practice of struggle, like the concept of contemplative lingering, comes to be an anachronism in an age when more and more of our needs can instantly be satiated by algorithms.
This puts digital natives in a difficult position. Research shows that members of Generation Z have a deep longing for emotional connection, and love tops the list of reasons why they want to marry. Yet they are also unwilling to put in the work that makes lasting love possible, and are more likely to get an immediate fix through cohabitation or premarital sex.
David Masciotra and others have noted the precipitate decline of romance in film and popular culture. In Masciotra’s 2018 article, “How America Grew Bored With Love,” he refers to the work of the 20th century psychologist, Erich Fromm, who understood that a society that denigrates effort and struggle will eventually denigrate romance.
From my 2018 article, “Was Calvin a Nominalist? Part 3: Voluntarism, Nominalism and the Theology of Calvin“:
Within Calvin’s theological metaphysics, God’s sovereignty becomes acutely fragile, threatened by anything that might undermine the creational and soteriological monergism on which it precariously hinged. The result is that instead of God and nature being related analogically, there is a univocal freedom and a univocal glory that must be partitioned out between God and creatures. A concomitant of this nominalist dialectic is that meaning and teleology no longer reside in things themselves but are imposed from outside in ways that involve explicit incongruities. The incongruities arise at the point in which the divine will-acts, now broken down into separate modes, offer a competing teleology to the same object simultaneously. For example, the distinction between God’s revealed will and His hidden will forced Calvin to set in opposition the teleology that is normative for a subject with the teleology that God ultimately wills for the same subject. With respect to God’s revealed will, the telos of each and every individual includes eternal union with Him, but with respect to God’s hidden will, the telos of certain individuals includes eternal disunion with Him. (And by the way, this dual-telos is a necessary consequence of Calvin’s system regardless of whether one maintains he was a supralapsarian or an infralapsarian, and regardless of whether one holds that Calvin believed in single predestination or double predestination.) However, since God reveals Himself to humankind in terms of the first mode while relating to humankind in terms of the second, a radical discontinuity is set up between God as He is and God as human beings experience Him, between appearance and reality. Accordingly, the telos that is universally normative for all persons (i.e., that the final end of all men is to be united with Him) achieves its normativity purely through God naming it to be such, even though this naming-activity remains dislocated from the actual telos of God’s hidden will (i.e. that it is not the final end of all persons, but only some, to be united with Him). However, since Calvin could not completely abandon the quest for teleological unity, the hidden generally takes precedent over the revealed will, with the latter being reduced to mere accommodatio. (I have discussed the existential and devotional problems that this dual teleology creates in my article ‘Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 3): Calvinism Dislocates God From our Experience of Him.’)
It is undisputed that for men like Theodore Beza God’s hidden will takes precedent over His revealed will. However, Hans Boersma convincingly demonstrated that even in Calvin, the overarching emphasis remains fixed on God’s hidden will, with His revealed will being in some sense subordinate. The reduction of revealed truths to divine accommodation creates more than merely a quantitative distinction between appearance and reality, but throws into question any qualitative connection between divine revelation and ultimate reality. Any qualitative connection between grace and nature is also severed: divine grace proceeds out of the hidden will (the perspective of God), which remains distinct from, and in some cases at complete odds with, the revealed will by which God accommodates Himself to humankind in the realm of nature (the perspective of humankind). Further information about this dual-perspective can be found in Mary P. Engel’s John Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology. The end result of dislocating God as He is with God as He is revealed to us, is essentially a hidden God. Under the influence of what Susan Schreiner identified as “Scotist-nominalist categories”, Calvin essentially “posits a God hidden outside of nature, history, and Christ.”
From just last year, my movie review, “Why the New Bonhoeffer Movie is a Disappointment“:
Bonhoeffer’s greatest act against fascism was not his tangential involvement in the assassination plot (scholars remain uncertain how involved Bonhoeffer actually was, though it is likely he knew about the July 20 plot) but his refusal to succumb to the illusive clarity of the binary worldview offered by Fascism. A pacifist, Bonhoeffer didn’t even see the plot to assassinate Hitler as morally clear, and Mac Loftin reminds us that “in the hundreds of pages he wrote during his years in the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer adamantly warned that any sense of moral clarity we might feel is always an illusion.” Though Bonhoeffer was not a moral relativist, his ethical thinking had a strong prudential element that eschewed simplistic principles-based moralizing, while he continually acknowledged moral ambiguity (though this seems strange to us looking back on the events of WWII with the moral clarity of hindsight). Bonhoeffer’s tolerance for ambiguity, his awareness of moral complexity, and his refusal to sublimate morality to ideology, might be truly challenging to both the norms and epistemology of Trumpism with its low tolerance for complexity and binary view of the world.
Bonhoeffer’s message—one he returned to again and again throughout his corpus—is that there is a different way to be human, a different way of organizing society, than the tropes of worldly ideology, whether Fascism, Marxism, National Socialism, or any other type of ism that would bypass the message of Jesus in offering a short-cut to societal redemption. Bonhoeffer was particularly concerned with the damage to the church’s mission as German Christianity underwent a process of Nazification. Should we be equally concerned as American Christianity is becoming conflated with Trumpism in many people’s minds? To adequately address these questions requires wisdom, nuance and a capacity for complexity and deep reflection. Here Bonhoeffer might make a good dialogue partner, though you would never guess this from watching Angel Studio’s portrayal of him.
From my 2019 archives, “The Role of Stillness in Education and the Problem of Thinking Too Quickly“:
When I talk to the educators, the one thing they always lament is lack of time to cover everything they would like. Content, content, content – the more the better. Accordingly, curriculum is structured with the goal of cramming as much information into the students’ minds as possible. As inputs are continually increased, the outputs expected of the students also increase, with the result that little space is left for reflecting deeply on any one thing, let alone being still. Thus, from an early age students learn that success in life is directly correlative to the speed at which they can absorb inputs and produce outputs. When students are occasionally given time to reflect deeply on a single thing, their minds often find it difficult to adjust to the slower pace. When the freneticism of information overload is the norm, thinking deeply feels strangely uncomfortable, while stillness comes to feel unnatural, even frightening and disconcerting.
Because Valentine’s Day is around the corner, here are is something I wrote in my 2019, “A Valentine’s Day Meditation on Marriage and Love”
Properly understood, Valentine’s Day is the ultimate counter-cultural expression. As a 3rd century priest in the Roman empire, St. Valentine performed church weddings against an edict of Emperor Claudias, who had forbidden marriages on the assumption that unmarried soldiers made better fighters. St. Valentine was ultimately martyred for disrupting the culture’s idolatry with the gospel.
Although our society no longer denies people the right to marry, the celebration of St. Valentine’s legacy remains counter-cultural and disruptive. This can be seen in the antipathy against the celebration by much of the feminist establishment, which I have written about in my Salvo article ‘The Massacre of Valentine’s Day: Feminism’s V-Day Eliminates Men, Marriage & Romance—and Kills Sex‘. Even the simple celebration of romantic love between men and women, detached from the sacramental context of marriage as understood by St. Valentine, retains enough vestiges of God’s order to rile up the Androgyny Machine every February 14th. In more mainline culture, where heterosexual love is venerated and over-sexualized, the puritanical shadow of Emperor Claudias finds its tentacles in the unromantic–and ultimately de-sexualizing–tendencies towards which marriage outside Christianity ultimately drifts.
The persistence of Valentine’s Day in the face of these trends speaks to our abiding needs and desires as human beings. Today most people are lonely, and more young people than at any other time in history are looking for a soul-mate with whom they can share their innermost thoughts and feelings. Yet many people misunderstand what they are looking for, and so their God-given longings for stable attachment misfire onto false substitutes, such as mere sexual connection that leaves the basic loneliness unaddressed.
Also related to love and marriage, here is an offering from my 2011 archives, drawn from Richard Baxter’s “sub-directions for maintaining conjugal love”:
Choose one at first that is truly amiable, especially in the virtues of the mind.
Marry not till you are sure that you can love entirely. Be not drawn for sordid ends, to join with one that you have but ordinary affections for.
Be not too hasty, but know beforehand, all the imperfections, which may tempt you after wards to loathing. But if these duties have been sinfully neglected, yet
Remember that justice commandeth you to love one that hath, as it were, forsaken all the world for you, and is contented to be the companion of your labours and sufferings, and be an equal sharer in all conditions with you, and that must be your companion until death. It is worse than barbarous inhumanity to entice such a one into a bond of love, and society with you, and then to say, you cannot love her. This was by perfidiousness to draw her into a snare to her undoing. What comfort can she have in her converse with you, and care, and labour, and necessary sufferings, if you deny her conjugal love ? Especially, if she deny not love to you, the inhumanity is the greater.
Remember that women are ordinarily affectionate, passionate creatures, and as they love much themselves, so they expect much love from you. And when you joined yourself to such a nature, you obliged yourself to answerable duty: and if love cause not love, it is ungrateful and unjust contempt.
Remember that you are under God’s command ; and to deny conjugal love to your wives, is to deny a duty which God hath urgently imposed on you. Obedience therefore should command your love.
Remember that you are relatively, as it were, one flesh; you have drawn her to forsake father and mother, to cleave to you; you are conjoined for procreation of such children as must bear the image and nature of you both; your possessions and interests are in a manner the same. And therefore such nearness should command affection; they that are as yourselves, should be most easily loved as yourselves.
Take more notice of the good, that is in your wives, than of the evil. Let not the observation of their faults make you forget or overlook their virtues. Love is kindled by the sight of love or goodness.
Make not infirmities to seem odious faults, but excuse them as far as lawfully you may, by considering the frailty of the sex, and of their tempers, and considering also your own infirmities, and how much your wives must bear with you.
Stir up that most in them into exercise which is best, and stir not up that which is evil; and then the good will most appear, and the evil will be as buried, and you will more easily maintain your love. There is some uncleanness in the best on earth ; and if you will be daily stirring in the filth, no wonder if you have the annoyance ; and for that you may thank yourselves : draw out the fragrancy of that which is good and delectable in them, and do not by your own imprudence or peevishness stir up the worst, and then you shall find that even your faulty wives will appear more amiable to you.
Overcome them with love; and then whatever they are in themselves, they will be loving to you, and consequently lovely. Love will cause love, as fire kindleth fire. A good husband is the best means to make a good and loving wife. Make them not froward by your froward carriage, and then say, we cannot love them.
Give them examples of amiableness in yourselves; set them the pattern of a prudent, lowly, loving, meek, self-denying, patient, harmless, holy, heavenly life. Try this a while, and see whether it will not shame them from their faults, and make them walk more amiably themselves.
For history buffs, and because Russia’s war of aggression has continued into this year, here is something from my 2023 archives, “Putin Fabricates False History of Ukraine”
Russia’s sense of entitlement over Ukraine goes back to 1654 when the Ukrainian Cossacks sought protection from the Russian tsar following threats from Poland. But as is often the case with large empires and small nations on their borders, this led to Russian demands for hegemony. Thus there began a series of military incursions into Ukraine which, in the 18th century, included land confiscations and population displacements. The last remnants of Ukrainian autonomy were erased in 1764 under the expansionist policies of Catherine the Great (1729–96). But Russia was not content with mere political domination and began to demand cultural assimilation. For example, during the reign of Tsar Alexander II (1818–81), the tsarist government banned the publication of books and newspapers in the Ukrainian language while also forbidding the Ukrainian language to be used in schools. This long agenda of trying to force the Ukrainians to forget their own history (an agenda which Putin has now taken up with his revisionist history) was part of the impetus behind the 1862 poem that now forms the nation’s national anthem, “‘Ukraine has not yet perished.”
Even though Putin’s claims over Ukraine are in direct conflict with the historical record, his assertions are now widely repeated by his American sympathizers who have ideological reasons to support his attempts at territorial expansion. They will typically make much of the fact that the Kievan Rus originated in the area we now call Ukraine, as if this somehow vindicates Russian claims over the territory. Yet the Kievan Rus were originally distinct from the Muscovites who became the nucleus of the Russian state and sought to position themselves in the legacy of the Rus by calling themselves Russians. But historically the Rus cannot be collapsed into what we now call “Russians” as the two groups were distinct. The Kievan Rus emerged in the 9th century in the area we now call Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia, and gave rise to the Grand Princes of Kiev (one such Prince, Vladimir the Great, is responsible for bringing Orthodoxy to the region in the 10th century). By contrast, the Muscovites, only emerged as a dominant political and cultural force in the late medieval period and are associated with the Tsardom of Russia. Originally, the Tsardom of Russia was a weak and relatively minor principality compared to the Rus, though in time this was reversed, and by the 13th century the Rus had been destroyed through the invasion of the Mongols, internal conflicts, and threats from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. But the memory of the Rus remained a matter of nostalgia, which is why the Muscovites began calling themselves Rus during the reign of Ivan the Great (1440-1505) as he was seeking to position his kingdom as the successor to the ancient state in Kiev. Even then, the idea of “Russianness” would not emerge until the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), who used the concept to solidify power and expand the territory under his control.
And here are some tidbits from other platforms I’ve published with.
From my 2023 article for Orthodoxy & Heterodoxy, “How ‘Nous’ Became a Trojan Horse For Secularism, and Why it is So Difficult to Translate”
What gets entirely overlooked [in the theology of Fr. John Romanides] is the existence of an intelligible cosmic order that we can apprehend through objective knowing and that we can appeal to when establishing what is fitting for us as individuals and communities. When this intelligible cosmic order is lost—when, for example, even Christians no longer perceive a rightly ordered nature that stands antecedent to, and as the reason for, the commands that comprise our ethical obligations—then the raw will of God is the only mechanism left for asserting meaning. In such a case, we simply need to know what the rules are and to keep them, both in our capacity as individuals and in how we order our communities. As such, the Christian perspective on culture amounts to little more than colonizing isolated issues, which are then assessed in terms of a divine will that has already been partitioned off from larger questions of teleological purpose and ontological meaning. With this failure to recognize an inner logic within the world and human nature, Christian spokespersons become unable to point to the normativity of Christian moral order, or the fittingness of God’s commands, within any context antecedent to mere will. The result is that Christian contributions to the public discourse become largely unintelligible to those in different ideological communities.
Consequently, the realms of nature, society, and culture become essentially secular, with theism added on top of an order still conceived in spiritually passive terms. For a generation implicitly catechized under such assumptions, Christianity becomes less and less relevant while biblical ethics becomes more and more anachronistic, for both religion and ethics are conceived as an add-on to a world already understood in secularized terms.
Once the faith comes to have this type of extrinsic relation to the world, we can no longer rightly understand the work of the Spirit in our lives, which must be reduced to something mechanical and wholly extrinsic – a kind of throwback to the manualist model of grace in Second Scholasticism. Indeed, given the type of ontological chasm Fr. Romanides posited between the natural and the supernatural, it follows that the work of the Spirit in our lives and in the world can never rise above merely an extrinsic imposition onto a nature that is, in its primal condition, autonomous and non-teleological. Indeed, rather than grace liberating creatures to achieve what is already their natural end (for example, by redirecting the unquiet heart to that which is the origin and proper goal of our primal longings), this ontological division entails that God’s work in our lives through Purification, Illumination and Deification can only be related to the soul extrinsically. For once we acknowledge that our nature as rational beings includes an intrinsic ordination towards transcendental (and therefore uncreated) attributes of being such as goodness, truth, and beauty, it becomes impossible to continue maintaining the type of hermetic seal between what Romanides called “created truth” and “uncreated truth.”
From my 2020 book Gratitude in Life’s Trenches: How to Experience the Good Life Even When Everything is Going Wrong:
A strong and stable person is someone who knows his own strengths, which includes knowing the limits of those strengths. Thus, there is an important connection between self-confidence and self-knowledge. However, when our sense of self is hijacked by shame or by the type of learned helplessness that emerges from dysfunctional relationships, it can become very difficult to accurately assess our own strength. For example, a negative view of the self may result in underestimating our strength, but it can also result in the projection of a false strength, since we have learned to associate weakness with shame and guilt. If we lack basic self-knowledge, self-confidence, and self-acceptance, then the helplessness learned in dysfunctional relationships may simply be transferred to an inauthentic religious life, which will only mask rather than address our real spiritual needs.
From my 2024 article for the Circe Institute, “She Walks in Beauty: Lord Byron, Taylor Swift, and the Teacher’s Vocation”
We live at a time when advertising and media corrupt the imagination by portraying the disordered as beautiful, and presenting what is false as seductive and attractive. However, the central task of good education, as C.S. Lewis pointed out so masterfully in The Abolition of Man, is to reorder our affections so our souls become attuned to the beautiful and the good. This is not achieved through intellectual instruction alone, but through the education of our affections. Lewis was particularly aware of how good stories and poetry, as well as rightly-ordered habits of thinking and acting, can incubate within the student a longing for the beautiful and a delight in what is good. This, of course, is our aim as teachers. Our goal is to equip students to have an aesthetic as well as an ethical objection to actions and dispositions that misfit their nature, so they instinctively recoil at what is disordered and base.
Learning to delight in what is beautiful ultimately trains our hearts for the joys of heaven, as we are formed into men and women who can find the presence of God a joy rather than a torment. For just as we can acquire dispositions that enable us to delight in what is good, true, and beautiful (ultimately in God Himself), it is also possible to corrupt ourselves so that heavenly joys would be torment, like Milton’s Satan whose hatred of earthly beauty portended his much greater revulsion against heavenly joy.
With what delight could I have walked thee [earth] round,
If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange
Of Hill, and Vallie, Rivers, Woods and Plaines,
Now Land, now Sea, and Shores with Forrest crownd,
Rocks, Dens, and Caves; but I in none of these
Find place or refuge; and the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries; all good to me becomes
Bane, and in Heav’n much worse would be my state.
[Paradise Lost Book 9]Even though Milton’s Satan hated the beautiful hills, valleys, and rivers of his earthly exile, he nevertheless preferred these to the torment he would undergo if faced with the beauties of heaven. Paradise Lost, like C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, explores the paradox of a being who has become so corrupted that he prefers misery to the infinite pleasure of the beatific vision. The devil’s chief interest is to pass on this corruption to the human race, though this is rarely explored in resources on “spiritual warfare.”
It is naïve to discuss spiritual warfare without taking seriously how, in the contemporary world, the devil has an entire toolbox for corrupting our affections. The tools range from digital liturgies to music and advertisements that clothe a rival vision of the good life with a counterfeit beauty.
Finally, from my 2022 Touchstone article, “What’s the Use?”
The gratuitousness of the liberal arts—whether expressed in painting, literature, music, ballet, or philosophy—enables us to push back against being mere cogs in a system. As our imaginations become well-formed under the gentle tutelage of the liberal arts, we can begin perceiving the infrastructure of meaning that lies beneath the surface of things. This is precisely why the poetry of life, and the sense of wonder that keeps the imagination vivid, fresh, and restless, remains the constant enemy in the prosaic utopias that aim to convince citizens that there is nothing to live for beyond this life. Thus, for collectivist and totalitarian regimes to truly work, the first books to go must be those that have no obvious functional value but enable us to see the world in a fresh and wonder-filled light