Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Vergil’s Messiah: The Pedagogical Use of Medieval Interpretations of Classical Texts

2012-01-21T15:44:00.000-05:00

Vergil and the Sybil receive
a vision of the Nativity of Christ.
From a 14th-cen. chronicle.

This week in the Humanities survey I am teaching this semester, we examined the imperial ideologies developed around Octavian/Augustus in the last decades before the birth of Christ (or dawn of the Common Era for the pedants). I had my freshmen read selections from Books VI and VIII of Vergil’s Aeneid and, more important, Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue. Written about the year 40 B.C. in the wake of Octavian and Antony’s victory over Caesar’s assassins at Philippi, but before the two Triumvirs descended once more into civil war, the poem expresses Vergil’s hopes for a coming age of restored peace to the Roman world. As we read through the poem in class, I encouraged the students to think about what the text’s prophetic words might remind them of; and after a few ponderous minutes, one student in each section managed to mutter some form of the name of Christ.

In the veiled language for which the ancient Sybils (as of that at Cumae) were famous, Vergil foresees the imminent birth of a child who shall walk amongst men and gods, returning to the Roman world a golden age of peace and prosperity lost since the beginnings of human culture in the time of Saturn:

Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus!
Non omnis arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae;
si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae.
Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo:    5
iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.
Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum
desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,
casta fave Lucina: tuus iam regnat Apollo.    10

Teque adeo decus hoc aevi te consule inibit,
Pollio, et incipient magni procedere menses.
te duce, si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri,
inrita perpetua solvent formidine terras.
ille deum vitam accipiet, divisque videbit    15
permixtos heroas, et ipse videbitur illis,
pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem.

Sicilian Muses, let us sing a nobler theme.
Orchards and humble tamarisk do not please all.
If we sing of woods, let them be woods fit for a consul.
The last age of the Cumaean Sybil's song has come.
The mighty sequence of ages is born and begins anew.    5
Now the Maiden returns. The reign of Saturn returns.
Now a new generation descends from heaven on high.
At the birth of the child in whose time the iron race
shall cease and a golden race inherit the whole earth,
smile, O chaste Lucina: now your Apollo reigns.    10

In your consulate this glorious age begins,
Pollio, and the mighty months begin their solemn march.
With you whatever traces of our guilt remain
will vanish and loose the world from its perpetual fear.
He will consort with the gods and see heroes mingling    15
with them and he himself will appear to heroes and gods
and rule a world his father's virtues have brought to peace.^[1]

The classical scholar in me will explain to you (as I explained to my students) that Vergil was deploying a sophisticated, Greco-Roman mythology of history whose strains can be found throughout the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. After Saturn was cast out of Olympus by his son, Jupiter, he settled in Hesperia (the ancient name for Italy), where he founded a golden age of prosperity. Later, this golden age of early man decayed; peoples scattered across the Mediterranean; and the simple life of humble shepherds was supplanted by the complexities of politics and war. The Golden Race of men decayed to silver, then to bronze, and finally to basest iron: hard, unrefined, rusty, and dark.

Exhausted by decades of civil war waged across the Roman world, of Roman blood spilt by Roman hands, Vergil places his hope for an end to this barbarism upon the shoulders of the young Octavian. Though there would be more bloodshed to come (as, indeed, lines 31 to 36 of Eclogue IV adumbrate), when Vergil set his pen to the Aeneid some eleven years later, Octavian—soon to be hailed Augustus—had subdued the monsters more than civil (to paraphrase Lucan) and renewed the prospects for a pax Augusta

Vergil’s hope, however, is not just for peace, but for something far grander. In hearkening back to the halcyon days of Hesperia’s Saturn, he sees Octavian Augustus as their cyclical heir. The old Roman values of hard work and robust virtue—celebrated in the dusty hands of the Italian farmer, the hero of the Georgics—had been lost to the decadence and decay of eastern potentates. As depicted in Aeneas’ shield in Book VIII of the Aeneid, it is the battle between the noble Roman gods led by Apollo and the slinking, dog-headed beasts and monsters of Egypt, led by their seductress queen and the great Roman Antony she wrapped around her fingers. Augustus’ appointed task—fated, as Aeneas’ was—is to restore the Roman world from iron barbarism to golden pietas, a restoration of human virtue reflected in the restoration of natural wonders:

At tibi prima, puer, nullo munuscula cultu
errantis hederas passim cum baccare tellus
mixtaque ridenti colocasia fundet acantho.    20
Ipsae lacte domum referent distenta capellae
ubera, nec magnos metuent armenta leones;
ipsa tibi blandos fundent cunabula flores,
occidet et serpens, et fallax herba veneni
occidet, Assyrium volgo nascetur amomum.    25
at simul heroum laudes et facta parentis
iam legere et quae sit poteris cognoscere virtus,
molli paulatim flavescet campus arista,
incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva,
et durae quercus sudabunt roscida mella.    30

For you, little child, spontaneously, as first gifts,
the earth will lavish creeping ivy and foxglove,
everywhere, and Egyptian lilies with smiling acanthus.   20
Goats will come home by themselves with udders full
of milk, nor will the oxen fear the lion's might.
Your very cradle will flower with buds to caress you.
The serpent will die as well as poison's treacherous plant,
and everywhere Assyrian balsam will come to bloom.   25
And when you have learned to read the praises of heroes and deeds
of your own father and know what manhood is, the plain,
little by little, will grow gold with waving grain,
and grapes will redden on the untended vine of the thorn,
and the hard oaks distill honeydew from their barks.    30

Having explained all of this, however, I took the class one step further, one which probably makes the classicists shudder. For when I goaded the class to connect Vergil’s words to phrases more familiar, I intentionally pushed them to recall the prophecies of Isaiah, fresh in their memories from Advent and Christmas readings:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. (Isaiah 9:6-7)
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. (Isaiah 11:6-7)^[2]

The Sybil of Cumae, carved into
the stone floor of the Cathedral of Siena.

The medieval scholar now takes over. Four hundred years after Vergil’s death, St. Augustine suggested that Vergil’s boy was in fact Christ, his prophecies drawn from the famed Sybilline oracles. Amongst late-antique Christians, there was a firm belief that the ancient Greek and Roman Sybilline oracles were inspired by the God of Abraham. As He inspired the Hebrew prophets to tell of the coming of the Messiah to the Jews, so He inspired pagan prophets to prophesy the coming of Christ to the Gentiles. This remained tradition throughout the Middle Ages, and depictions of the ancient Sybils can be found on the carved stone floor of the Cathedral in Siena and intermingled with Old Testament prophets in Michaelangelo’s paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Fourth Eclogue’s supposed prophecy of Christ was a major factor in medieval veneration of Vergil as a “naturally Christian soul”, thus appearing as Dante’s guide through Inferno and Purgatorio in the Divine Comedy.

The teacher in me hopes that, when we get to Augustine’s theology of history in a few weeks, the students will recall this discussion of the Sybilline oracles; and that they will begin to develop an appreciation for the rich syntheses that medieval typologies could offer. I was also gratified to see them thinking through the material enough to see the verbal and ideological similarities; after all, a man as intellectually astute as Augustine made them, too.

But then there are those inevitable gasps of horror from the classicists, in whose ranks I was once (and still am?) numbered. For, as I was again careful to explain to my students, it is extremely unlikely that Vergil knew the prophecies of Isaiah. Although it is theoretically possible that the Septuagint was available in Rome during his lifetime, Vergil’s own culture combines with the political situation at the end of the Republic to fully explain the prophetic Fourth Eclogue without recourse to Judeo-Christian traditions. After all, Vergil would likely have dismissed the Jews as precisely those decadent easterners from which Octavian was appointed to save Rome.

It is, of course, in the nature of the modern academic to dismiss prima facie divine inspiration as a literary source. When we study Vergil, we look for those man-made cultural traditions that contributed to his writings. When we study late antique and medieval Christianity, however, we cannot simply dismiss their interpretations of Vergil. As a teacher, it is my fervent hope that allowing my students to arrive at some of those interpretive avenues on their own is beneficial to their learning. As an academic, I am pressed to wonder: could the extraordinary form of ecumenism that kept Vergil happily enlightened in the Middle Ages be useful today? As the fields of academe become more and more fractured, their discourses more and more specialized and thus alien to one another, could the synthetic approach to knowledge (and revelation) that was the hallmark of late antique and medieval discourses be beneficial to modern studies?

Notes
[1] Vergil's Eclogues, trans. Barbara Hughes Fowler, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 11-12. ↩
[2] I've used the King James Version because its phrases are so ingrained in our collective memories. Indeed, in class I recited Isaiah 9:6 (For unto us a child is born...) from long memories of listening to Handel's Messiah, and I saw a least one student mouthing it along with me. ↩

Hildegard of Bingen to be named Doctor of the Church

2011-12-16T15:28:00.000-05:00


Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen. Rupertsberg MS, fol. 1r.

Scholars and admirers of Hildegard of Bingen have for years dreamt that she might one day be declared a Doctor of the Church. Her visionary writings are amongst the most intensely daring and theologically innovative of the twelfth century, while her zeal for the reform of the Church could burst open the doors of cathedral and palace alike. But her bold tendencies, combined with the fact that she has never formally been canonized, have long made that dream seem distant and unattainable.

Not, it would seem, anymore. According to Vatican insiders, preparations are being made for Pope Benedict XVI formally to canonize Hildegard next year and to declare her a Doctor of the Church! In email correspondence, Sr. Phillipa Rath, O.S.B., of the Abbey of St. Hildegard in Eibingen, Germany, confirmed to me that preparations are underway for the declaration in October, 2012. Hildegard would become the thirty-fourth Doctor of the Church,^[1] and only the fourth woman, after Sts. Catherine of Siena, Theresa of Avila, and Therese of Lisieux.

Born in 1098 to a noble family of southern Germany, Hildegard entered at an early age the company of the recluse Jutta, cloistered at the monastery of St. Disibod. After Jutta’s death in 1136, Hildegard was elected magistra of the community of women that had developed around the recluse; and in the 1150’s she successfully battled the monks to have the community established in their own abbey on the Rupertsberg at Bingen on the Rhine river. Although she experienced visionary phenomena from an early age, she only felt confident to record the visions beginning in the 1140’s, when she received a divine command “to write down what you see and hear”. The result was the Scivias, the first of three great visionary works. As legend has it, St. Bernard of Clairvaux presented the half-finished work in 1147 to Pope Eugene III at a synod in Trier; after examination, the Pope is believed to have certified her visionary charism.

Hildegard’s gifts were celebrated across Christendom, and she corresponded with bishops and popes, princes and emperors. She felt compelled by her divine gifts of vision and prophecy to speak out against the corruptions of Church and Empire; and as schism grew between them in the 1160’s, her outlook grew increasingly fierce. In preaching tours undertaken in that decade and the one that followed, Hildegard repeatedly denounced the Cathar heresy in words of bold castigation and frightening prophecy. The visions of salvation history that mark her most complex work, the Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works), completed in 1172, place her warnings to an age of “womanly weakness” against a cosmic backdrop of divine proportions. In words that would maintain her celebrity for centuries, she prophesied of five coming ages that would cycle between holiness and corruption, capped off with the disestablishment of the Roman See before the coming of the Antichrist.

Of more interest to modern scholars has been Hildegard’s extraordinary corpus of musical compositions, amongst the greatest music and poetry to survive the Middle Ages. Both her music and her works of natural medicine have found a place amongst New Age spirituality; while feminists have found hers a powerful voice of feminine agency battling the complacency of patriarchal institutions in an age of profound misogyny.

After a long afterlife as a prophet of the end times, Hildegard of Bingen has enjoyed a renewed recognition as one of the most extraordinary women of the Middle Ages. Her accomplishments have, in the last few decades, been recognized by scholars as amongst the greatest of any man or woman of her time. And finally, under the first German pontiff in centuries, the “Sybil of the Rhine”, the “German prophetess” (prophetissa teutonica), shall be recognized for her unique contributions to Christian theology.

Notes
[1] Or thirty–fifth, depending on the status of St. John of Avila. Although the Pope announced during World Youth Day in August in Madrid that he would be declared a Doctor of the Church, no date has yet been set for the declaration. ↩

The “Nostradamus” Effect: Prophecy and Its Discontents

2011-11-02T15:27:00.000-04:00

Hildegard of Bingen, Illumination for
Scivias III.5 in the Rupertsberg MS.

The parched sands of the Middle East are dampened only by blood spilt in the ravages of war; the powerful and rich, their hearts enflamed by greed, drive their thirst ever harder with guiltless rapine; the Church, our Holy Virgin Mother, is raped and defiled by the lusts of her ministers. Corruption among men, even those supposed holy; floods and famine, quakes and drought, a natural world rent by disaster. These are times of crisis; but are they times of despair?

We might easily ask this question of today; but many throughout history have pondered the meaning of their own equally tumultuous times. I could have drawn these disasters and crises from the headlines of today’s newspapers and blogs; they are, in fact, just as much ripped from the anxious thoughts of women and men writing centuries ago. Colin Dickey’s recent account of the life and afterlife of Nostradamus (1503-1566) is just one of the more vivid examples of the latest revival of prophecy’s popular power. As Dickey explains, the mysterious grip these vague and ominous portents hold upon us is an expression of the anxieties we feel when the world around us feels out of control:

The more out of control we see events around us, the more willingly—and eagerly—we’ll see patterns that may or may not exist, hunting for a sense of meaning guiding events. (…) [T]he true significance of Nostradamus lies less in the future than in the present. After all, as detractors have pointed out, the Prophecies have never been used to predict the future; they are always cited after the fact as evidence of Nostradamus’ infallible accuracy. The legend of Nostradamus persists not because we want to understand what’s ahead, but because we want to believe—desperately—that some divinable order lies behind all the chaos.

He even offers the argument that we are biologically hard-wired to take seemingly random, chaotic, and senseless data and arrange them into a coherent order that provides meaning. I’ve discussed before the power of narrative as a pedagogical tool; it springs from our innate impulse to place ourselves within a teleologically ordered frame of time and space. It is this desire for meaningful order that drives the recurrent popularity of “prophecy”.

My own research work centers on the prophetic and apocalyptic offices of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), one of the most remarkable thinkers of her time. One of the images I alluded to in the beginning—of the Church raped by an (e)sc(h)atological mass—comes from her gripping visions of the end of time towards the end of her first work, the Scivias. The image above is the illustration of that vision from the Rupertsberg manuscript of the Scivias, most likely designed by Hildegard herself in the last decade of her life. Particularly striking is the complex interplay of optimism and pessimism that marks Hildegard’s more radical apocalyptic thought, especially since her wide reputation long rested on her gift of prophecy. Though today we read her wide-ranging works as a whole, from her death until well after the Reformation, she was primarily known in a redaction of her prophetic and apocalyptic writings executed in the 1220’s by Gebeno von Eberbach.^[1]

Hildegard’s vision of God’s plan for history and the Church’s role in carrying out that plan was one of the most remarkable of her age. Stretching the bounds of scriptural exegesis and prophetic revelation, she conceived of an extraordinary future for the Church: returning “to the first dawn of justice”, it was to become an apostolic Church stripped of the wealth and power of the world, invested with virtue and holiness. Her holistic notions of the integrity of natural creation, torn asunder by evil and restored by the Incarnate Christ, found expression in her music and visual image designs; while her contempt for corruption broke through the doors of palace and cathedral alike.^[2]

The age in which Hildegard lived was a time of both continuity and innovation in the history of Christian modes of apocalyptic thought. While receiving the Augustinian-Tyconian tradition of spiritualizing exegesis, some also explored a more concretized conception of God’s intervention into history and its revelation in Scripture. Many of the reformers of the twelfth-century church espoused radically revitalized notions of the church’s role in carrying out God’s plan. Theologians like Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, Gerhoch of Reichersberg, and Anselm of Havelberg developed increasingly complex theologies of history, a trend that would see its apogee in the extensive exegetical patterns of history enunciated by Joachim of Fiore at the end of the century.^[3]

Hildegard’s fame as an apocalyptic prophet, like that of Joachim and Nostradamus, spread in the centuries after her death. Her prophecies were applied to such disparate events as the arrival of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century and the rise (and downfall) of those “fire-brands” of Europe, the Jesuits, in the sixteenth century. But when we compare Hildegard’s own conception of her prophetic office with the use (and abuse) of her writings in the centuries after her death, we begin to see a change in what it meant to be a “prophet”.

In Hildegard’s own self-perception, to be a “prophet” is to be, first and foremost, the mouthpiece or “trumpet” of God. Prediction (or, as it usually is, the post facto imposition of long-ago uttered prophecies onto later events) is a neither primary nor necessary feature of prophecy. Indeed, it is beneath the office of the prophet to quibble away with God about mundane and irrelevant matters of the near-future, and Hildegard repeatedly refuses to rise to the bait when correspondents ask her for such predictions. No, Hildegard’s prophetic role is to reveal the Will of God, to warn and admonish, to “speak and write what you say and hear” from the Voice of the Living Light:

I am the Living Light, Who illuminates the darkness. The person [Hildegard] whom I have chosen and whom I have miraculously stricken as I willed, I have placed among great wonders, beyond the measure of the ancient people who saw in Me many secrets; but I have laid her low on the earth, that she might not set herself up in arrogance of mind. (…) Cry out and speak of the origin of pure salvation until those people are instructed, who, though they see the inmost contents of the Scriptures, do not wish to tell them or preach them, because they are lukewarm and sluggish in serving God’s justice. Unlock for them the enclosure of mysteries that they, timid as they are, conceal in a hidden and fruitless field. Burst forth into a fountain of abundance and overflow with mystical knowledge, until they who now think you contemptible because of Eve’s transgression are stirred up by the flood of your irrigation. For you have received your profound insight not from humans, but from the lofty and tremendous Judge on high, where this calmness will shine strongly with glorious light among the shining ones.
—Scivias, Protestificatio (Declaration) and Vision I ^[4]

Hildegard understood the entirety of her visionary revelations, all the words and images of the Living Light, to be “prophecy”. Her visionary corpus encompasses the whole of Christian theology and salvation history; while the visions she sometimes proffers in her letters can have more concrete monitions to the recipient. Thus, prophecy is God’s message to His people, a message that can both comfort and reassure with the promises of redemption, and admonish and castigate with the thunder of reformation.^[5]

It is only later, in the second decade of the thirteenth century, that this entire visionary edifice of salvation history from its beginning in creation to its end in judgment and new creation, gets whittled down for most of Hildegard’s readers into a compilation of material focused on her prophecies of the “five ages” to come from her time to the Antichrist. First enunciated in Scivias III.11, Hildegard expanded these in much greater detail in some of her letters (mainly those recording sermons she delivered) and in the final vision of the the Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works). Gebeno, a prior of Eberbach, compiled these visions in the 1220’s into the Pentachronon (Five Ages) or Speculum Futurorum Temporum (Mirror of Times to Come). Driven by rampant rumors of the Antichrist, Gebeno claims to set forth the true words of Hildegard to combat the “frivolous” ramblings of pseudo-prophets. Thus, Gebeno turns to Hildegard not for her words as a theologian of the Christian religion but as a predictor of the Antichrist.^[6]

Trinitarian Circles from
Joachim of Fiore's Liber Figurarum

A similar decontextualization and abuse began to occur in about the same time with the writings of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202). Joachim was an Italian monk and abbot (in Calabria, to be specific) who received two major visionary and revelatory experiences in 1183 and 1184. These led him to compose some of the most complete and complex visions of salvation history and its revelation in Scripture ever produced. His work, much more exegetically driven than Hildegard’s, plumbed every word and meaning of Scripture to reveal the multiple layers of “concordances” by which all of history lay therein revealed. Structured around three status or “ages” (approximately), he saw history as guided by predominant irruptions of God into created history: first the status of the Father, then that of the Son, and beginning with St. Benedict and culminating sometime after the end of Joachim’s life, the status of the Holy Spirit.^[7]

Joachim’s was, like Hildegard’s, an intensely mixed vision of both pessimistic and optimistic strains. On the one hand, he saw the world around him mired in corruption and sin. On the other, he held out extraordinary hope for the reformation of the world by a new order of spiritual men guided by the irruption of the Holy Spirit into history. Yet (despite his rather celebrated audiences with popes and King Richard the Lionhearted), Joachim probably never intended his “prophecies” to be read as specific predictions of specific events. Rather, like Hildegard, he offered a blueprint for how the world might be spiritually reformed, guided by the Spirit and enacted by the saints.

But again, as with Hildegard’s prophecies of this reformed and blessed future, Joachim’s were cut and snipped from their place within a comprehensive vision of the whole of salvation history and bandied about as divinely-proclaimed tickets to whatever their holders wanted from them. In this way, Hildegard’s denunciations of the Cathars before the clergy in Cologne became, in the hands of popular prophecy-mongers, denunciations of the Franciscans as they arrived in the city decades after her death. Likewise, Joachim’s vision of two new orders of spiritual men (an order of preachers and an order of hermits) became predictive of the Dominicans and Franciscans years after his death. And when, by the middle of the thirteenth century, the Franciscans had let down the more idealistic of their brethren, Joachite and pseudo-Joachite prophecies were volleyed back and forth between the Order and its Spirituals, some of whom were declared heretics for their trouble.^[8]

There seems to be a shift sometime around the end of the twelfth century (i.e. at the deaths of Hildegard and Joachim) from prophecy as the all-encompassing message of God to His people to prophecy as prediction of the future. The prophet’s office, stripped of its deeper anagogical and moral claims, moves to the wild-eyed fringes. As theology is sliced and diced by the scholastic masters at university, the prophet’s claim to theologian dwindles and soon evaporates. As the prophet’s words about the Antichrist and times to come take center stage, her words about the Church’s mission here and today are lost.

And the Church takes notice. As Barbara Newman has pointed out, there developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a clash between the theory of visions and prophecy and the devotional practices of holy women. The clash of theory and practice was most pointed in the case of (St.) Birgitta of Sweden, with powerful men on both sides playing as much a political game as a theological one in the fight over her visionary authority. Henry of Langenstein and Jean Gerson began explicitly to formulate the theological danger of “custom and habit” in the visionary experience. It is Gerson’s work that appears to spell the beginning of the end of cultivated visions recognized by the Church as revelatory. In effect, however, this appears to have been “to the ultimate advantage of lay visionaries,” as it freed the meditational practices from the thorny theological problems of authority and divine inspiration. While the truly divine revelation became more and more reserved for the completely “simple”, the cultivation of meditational vision by the laity was left free to prosper.^[9]

As the true office of prophet became more and more remote both from the Church’s approbation and the reality of devotional practice, the cunning delusions and crafted vagaries of Nostradamus become the norm for “prophecy” in the early modern era. The original contents of prophecy get emptied out and discarded, its shell left a void to be filled by whatever the probing and desperate mind can come up with. No longer is the prophet God’s trumpet; now he is a quack, the inventor of dreams and seducer of the rich and powerful. The Church maintains its distance, and the “prophet” tells the future for those who will pay.

Notes
[1] Gebeno’s redaction of Hildegard’s writings was the focus of my work on a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany; see especially my outline in “The General Plan”. ↩
[2] For more on Hildegard’s apocalypticism, see H. D. Rauh, Das Bild des Antichrist im Mittelälter: von Tyconius zum deutschen Symbolismus, (Münster, 1973), ch. VII; and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “A Return to ‘the First Dawn of Justice’: Hildegard’s Visions of Clerical Reform and the Eremitical Life,” American Benedictine Review 40 (1989), pp. 383-407; ibid., Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chs. 1 and 2; ibid., “Prophet and Reformer: ‘Smoke in the Vineyard’”, in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and her World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998), pp. 70-90. ↩
[3] For each of these writers, see the respective chapters in Rauh, Das Bild des Antichrist (as in n. 2); Wolfgang Beinert, Die Kirche—Gottes Heil in der Welt: Die Lehre von der Kirche nach den Schriften des Rupert von Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis und Gerhoch von Reichersberg (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge 13; Münster: Aschendorff, 1973); John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); W. Kahles, Geschichte als Liturgie: Die Geschichtstheologie des Rupertus von Deutz (Münster, 1960); Peter Classen, Gerhoch von Reichersberg. Eine Biographie (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1960); E. Meuthen, Kirche und Heilsgeschichte bei Gerhoh von Reichersberg (Leiden-Colgone, 1959); and W. Edyvean, Anselm of Havelberg and the Theology of History, (Rome, 1972). ↩
[4] From Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (The Classics of Western Spirituality; Paulist Press: New York, 1990), pp. 59-67. ↩
[5] See Robert Murray, “Prophecy in Hildegard”, in Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of her Thought and Art, ed. Charles Burnett and Peter Dronke (Warburg Institute Colloquia 4; London: Warburg Institute, 1998), pp. 81-88. ↩
[6] Gebeno von Eberbach, Speculum Futurorum Temporum (ed. Jose Carlos Santos Paz, [Florence, 2004]), Prologus (2): “Concerning the Antichrist there are many various people in our times setting forth various things, which they frivolously prophesy not through the Spirit of God but from their own heart: there are some that affirm he shall soon be born, others that affirm that he has now been conceived, and others no less still that he has already been born. I have heard, I confess, how so many are occupied by such cares. For in just the last three years, a certain abbot by the name of John, a religious man and learned enough in Divine Writings, coming from the area of Calabria, stayed at our cloister for more than two weeks and related to me privately that the Antichrist would in the immediate future be born. And although I was anxiously doubtful, he so concluded: ‘He has appeared alone to a certain Cardinal of great name in our area, and he has proven it with a clear sign.’ (…) In order to repress and overcome these pseudo-prophets, I have compiled this little book.” ↩
[7] Amongst the ever-growing literature, see Part III in Bernard McGinn’s Apocalyptic Spirituality, (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), pp. 97-148; and ibid., The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought, (New York: Macmillan, 1985). ↩
[8] On the aftermath of Joachim’s prophecies, see Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages. A Study in Joachimism, (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1979; reissued Notre Dame Press, 1993). ↩
[9] Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005), pp. 1-43. ↩

Can Faith and Science Coexist?

2011-10-28T14:04:00.000-04:00

"Galileo before the Holy Office"
by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury.
Image from WikiMedia.

Are the claims of modern science and of the Christian faith compatible? Can a practicing and faithful Christian trust the evidence gathered and digested by biologists and chemists and physicists today? Or does a narrowly-defined reading of the Book of Genesis demand that any whose allegiance is with God dismiss the conclusions of rational thought?

Let me state at the outset that I emphatically believe and, in fact, know that the truth of the Christian faith and the truth of scientific enquiry can be together held and neither need be nor are fundamentally opposed to each other. Perhaps I should have addressed this issue before now. But, prompted by a variety of events in the last few days, I am now beginning what will certainly be a much longer series of reflections on why it is that the gift of faith and the gift of reason are by nature companions and allies, not adversaries.

Last week’s newspaper included the “Kentucky Candidate Information Survey”, a series of questions posed to the Republican and Democratic candidates for statewide office in the upcoming election on November 8. As my wife and I reviewed each candidate’s answers and discussed whom we should vote for, several things became apparent about some of the Republican candidates. David Williams, running for Governor against Democratic incumbent Steve Beshear, said that he “STRONGLY DISAGREED” with the statement, “The General Assembly should acknowledge global warming and work to limit Kentucky’s contribution to it.” Later, he “STRONGLY AGREED” with the statement, “Schools should familiarize students with all sides of scientific debates on issues like evolution and global warming.”

On the Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Wednesday, Stewart offered two complimentary segments: first, on the paucity of media coverage of the recent results of an investigation into “Climategate”; and then a segment by Aasif Mandvi exploring in typical Daily Show style the absurd claims of a Republican strategist that scientists are untrustworthy and that ignorance at home should trump knowledge and learning at school. (Warning to my readers: Stewart uses adult language and sometimes crude jokes in his show.) In the first segment, Stewart highlights the recent report in the Wall Street Journal by Dr. Richard Muller, a physics professor at UC-Berkeley. Muller concludes that, after conducting a study financed by the Koch brothers, the evidence is clear: Global warming is real. (Lest you think that this study, like some of “Climategate”, was ideologically influenced: the Koch brothers are billionaire oilmen and ardent supporters of the Tea Party, home to many of the most vocal global warming skeptics.)

Let me say this again: Global warming is real. The overwhelming weight of all of the evidence is that the world is getting warmer. This is not something that some liberal scientists are making up out of dubious data. The data are not dubious, the evidence is clear. To be skeptical of these claims is to leave the realm of rational human observation and enter the kingdom of ideology and opinion.

Now, Muller is quite clear about the next step: “How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.” It is certainly still a matter of debate as to how much global warming is caused by human activity (although the preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that we are at least partially responsible). Likewise, what the effects of this warming will be is also not a settled conclusion (though again, the preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that some areas of the earth—not all—will experience adverse effects). What is not up for debate is that global warming is happening, even if David Williams, who wants to be governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, thinks otherwise.

The candidate’s idea about “familiarizing students with all sides of the debate”, while admirable at the initial and literal level, is troubling when we dig deeper. This idea that “all sides of the debate” hold equal weight is one of the more recent rhetorical moves made by those who question the theory of evolution and want Creationism taught at its side in public schools. Let me be very clear: there is no scientific debate about whether evolution is happening. It is. Every piece of biological data collected over the past century points to one incontrovertible conclusion: organisms evolve. How precisely this process occurs, and the variety of paths that evolution takes and has taken, are not settled questions. Indeed, there is not one but many evolutionary processes. Biological evolution is very complex, involving many factors and many effects. Yet, the work of modern biologists only makes sense in light of the theory of evolution.^[1]

Likewise, the ages of fossils, of the earth, of the universe, can be accurately measured through rational scientific processes. Carbon-dating and red-shift frequency measurements are not opinions, neither are they “unproven” theories. These are proven and reliablemeasurement techniques (within certain parameters of acceptable error). They show that humanoid fossils date back at least three million years; that dinosaur fossils date back between fifty and two-hundred fifty million years; and that the oldest organic life-forms on earth existed billions of years ago. Measurements of the light streaming in from outer space indicate that the universe has existed for approximately fourteen billion years.

In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, we are told that God created the universe, the earth, and all life upon it in six days and nights; and on the seventh, He rested. According to the Word of God, each plant and creature was made distinctly, one after the other; and humans he made in His own image and likeness. Careful calculations made on the various lifespans and generations given in Genesis and Exodus have produced estimates that the world is about six thousand years old, calculated from the day God created Adam and Eve, the first humans. At first sight, we are faced with a contradiction: the Book on which our faith is founded, the Book we know to be the infallible Word of God, says one thing; the observations of human reason seem to say something very different.

For more than a century, as scientific evidence has mounted that seems to contradict the literal picture we had long known in Scripture, clashes and battles have raged. To many Bible-believing Christians, it seems that science is out to persecute them. Faced with choosing between their literal understanding of Genesis and the human observations of science, many Christians have opted for their faith and denied science. The more enterprising have tried to promote new theories of “intelligent design” or “natural selection but not human evolution” that claim to offer scientific support for biblical letter. When these theories try to make themselves out as empirical sciences, however, they betray themselves to be simply bad science.

And when Creationism tries to make itself out as theology, it betrays itself as bad theology.

First, the narrowly literal reading of Genesis that forces us to choose between the six-thousand year-old world of revealed Scripture and the fourteen-billion year-old world that scientific observation reveals, beggars Scripture. It is either extraordinarily presumptuous or dangerously naïve to presume that there is only one, specific and finite way to understand the Word of God. Such a method of interpretation reduces God to a level of genius far lower than we ascribe to Milton and Shakespeare, whose works we explore for many layers and profound depths of multivalent meaning. But to God we will ascribe no such profundity, but only literal boorishness.

God has revealed Himself to us in the Word of God Incarnate, Jesus Christ, true God and true human. The intersection of the Word as God and the Word of God means that Holy Scripture is itself, in every word and every phrase, the most profound bearer of truth and meaning. The right theologian approaches the Bible in awe because of how much more it is than just human words. Every word of scripture reveals in its ontological complexity the super-reality of God Made Man. I’ve alluded to this idea before in discussing the vocation of the translator. Holy Scripture transcends the textures of human composition by as far as God the Infinite Creator transcends His finite creation. Yet, when Christ the Word became a human being, He made that Word of God a bridge between the infinite and finite. Thus, in every word of the Bible we find the depth and height by which we climb from mere creatures to Sons of God.

To reduce the infinite complexity of God’s Word to a simple, literal monotone is to reduce God to the simple, literal, monotonous dolt of which so many atheists are so dismissive. This is not God the infinite source of all goodness and being, but a tyrannical, limited despot made in our image. Indeed, such a confined literalness in reading the Bible has only become a widespread phenomenon amongst Christians in the last few centuries. For most of Christian history, exegetes approached Scripture with a deep respect and awe for how much it contains hidden beneath the literal word. Indeed, the fiercest realities revealed in the Bible are precisely those cloaked by the veil of the letter, to be understood in Christ not by that muddied, confused surface but by the spirit hidden beneath. Indeed, this view of Scripture as a reality hidden by the letter and revealed by Christ is fundamental to Paul’s exegesis of the Old Testament in his letters. Most succinctly he says of the rules of the Old Testament, “These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.” (Colossians 2:17) Paul follows this method of exegesis in Romans, I Corinthians, Galatians, and Hebrews in order to explain how Christ fulfills the words of Scripture, how its meaning so far surpasses the letter because it is spoken by the Word.

To insist that the words of Genesis must be read completely literally and in no other way; to deny any claim that God did not create the world in six, 24-hour days, as the earth made it 1/60 of the way around the sun; to belittle God’s Word by allowing it no depth of meaning beyond the letter, is bad theology. It’s applying to Genesis the same logic the Judaizers applied to circumcision in the early Church, and we all now how they fared under Paul’s disapprobation (see e.g. Galatians 3-4). It assumes that one man’s limited understanding of the Bible is the only understanding there can be. It places feeble and fallible human judgment upon God’s infinite being as revealed in His Word.

The second problem is Creationism’s demand that we dismiss the rational observations of science as misleading and even the phantom delusions of evil. When Genesis says that we are made “in the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26-27), one of the profound implications is that God endowed us with reason. Indeed, as medieval theologians were wont to describe, God reveals himself in multiple books: the Book of Scripture is one, but the Book of Nature is another. We find God revealed to us through the very world he created. He made in us a deep curiosity and intellectual desire to understand both Him (the impulse of faith) and the world in which we live (the impulse of scientific inquiry). To up and claim that we must dismiss all of the rational conclusions that scientific observation leads us to simply because some limited misapprehensions of Genesis seem to conflict, is to claim that we can trust none of our own observations of the world. Indeed, the claim against science quickly descends into a terrible paradox: for the very rational understanding that leads to scientific discoveries of evolution is also the rational process by which we read the Word of God. If we cannot trust that our observations of the natural world are, in aggregate and generally, sound (for while everyone makes mistakes, we do not all err all the time), then how can we trust ourselves to correctly interpret the Word of God?

We are guided by the Spirit, the theologians will rightly say. But how can we be so sure that scientists studying the world aren’t also guided by the spirit of creation’s Creator?

The fundamental principle of this blog is that faith can and should seek understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). Anselm of Canterbury, like so many of his medieval counterparts, understood intuitively that human reason is a powerful and divinely-given faculty. Not to exercise it, not to be curious about the world, not to strive to understand, is a presumptuous waste of that gift. God calls us to join Him in the creative discovery of knowledge. He created us to explore; it would be cheap and infantile indeed if He then consigned our explorations to the dustbin.

You can be sure by now that this is just my opening thoughts on this complex and thorny issue, even if my position in the debate is quite clear. With the support of the John Templeton Foundation, the good folks at the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour in Richmond, Kentucky, together with Berea College, will be commencing a 14-month series on Science and Faith this Sunday from 1-3pm. I encourage all of my readers in eastern Kentucky to try to attend what promises to be a fruitful and faithful exploration of how science and faith can work together to better the world. For more information, see their website: http://oursaviourky.org/science

Notes
[1] See Dobzhansky’s essay, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”, The American Biology Teacher, March 1973. In this essay, Dobzhansky argues for a synthetic understanding of faith and evolution in which the Bible is not “a primer on science” and science does not presume to explain the relationship between humans and God. ↩

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian

2011-10-25T09:34:00.000-04:00

Image from WikiCommons.

Today is indeed (or at least was, in the old calendar)^[1] the feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian. According to legend, they were on this day in A.D. 286 or 287 martyred under Diocletian and his co-emperor, Maximianus near Soissons in modern-day France. But this day in the English-speaking world shall always “be in our flowing cups freshly remember’d,” for on Crispin Crispinian in 1415, King Henry V defeated the French at Agincourt and ushered in a brief renewal of his crown’s hold upon France.

Considered one of the greatest speeches ever writ to rouse the troops before battle, Shakespeare’s version of Henry’s words is ofter known by the title of “St. Crispin’s Day Speech” as by a lesser appellation for the battle of Agincourt. “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention, / A kingdom for a state, princes to act / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!” And though this scaffold may be unworthy to bring forth so great an object, let your minds be carried to the vasty fields of France, and listen as King Harry bids you join his band of brothers:

KING HENRY V, Act IV, Scene iii:
What's he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Notes
[1] This is, of course, one of the biggest problems with the "new" calendar, from which the Feast of Ss. Crispin and Crispinian has been purged.. Most dates of any historical note throughout the Middle Ages and early modern era were recorded with reference to the feasts and fasts of the Church calendar. Imagine how impoverished our understanding of Henry's speech will be one day when sadly October 25 is no more remembered as Saint Crispin's day. ↩

Verbum de Verbo: On Translation and its Act of Faith

2011-10-20T12:36:00.000-04:00

Image from the Codex Sinaiticus.

Why translate again a work so often done already? Is there anything new to be gained by publishing another ream of Iliads, Homer’s epic whose number of translations (and transmutations) might come second only to the Bible? When The Economist’s recent review posed this question, it offered an oblique but important answer.

In finding Alice Oswald’s Memorial evocation the most satisfying of the newest breed (to be read alongside Lattimore’s classic rendition), the reviewer has noticed an essential aspect of the translator’s task:

Ms Oswald’s “Memorial” strips the “Iliad” down to its bare bones, capturing the terrifying brevity and brutality of the deaths (240 named, many more anonymous) that Homer depicted. With no gods in her version, it could seem rather bleak. And yet there is a liveliness to her poem—part elegy, part war memorial—that prevents it from becoming so.

Ms. Oswald has done what so many generations of poets and thinkers and humanity have done before her: return to a timeless work in search of answers to the anxieties that we all continually face. War, brutal and bloody, is still with us. And Homer’s reflections capture, in language stark but elegiac, the same mixed feelings we feel about the heroism and failure that feckless bloodshed and honorable service evoke.

The developers of humanities curricula know this fact well. They have their students read the great texts of past civilizations precisely because those works are valuably foreign and familiar. The same basic tensions that animated poets and philosophers long ago—between war and peace, love and hate, right and wrong, personal gain and social justice—still face us in crisis today. Yet, their responses have just enough alterity—they are just enough the Other—that they provoke us out of our own complacent worldviews into seeing the world from a different perspective. Certainly the writers of long ago had their own blindnesses that we see and ridicule today; but just as certainly are we blinded by our own faults, which might just be transparent to those men and women of an earlier age.^[1]

But the translator goes further. The translator’s task is not merely to make these books of other days and other tongues available to the people of our modern world—though certainly that is a most important job and the one for which they are most liable to be paid and considered productive members of the information economy. No, the translator approaches his work—or at least, ought to approach his work—ought of a deeper love, a deeper commitment to the entire textual edifice.

The translator finds in her work a stronger and sometimes stranger exploration of love and hate, vice and virtue, tenderness and cruelty, than is just available to the general reader, whether of the original language or of the translation. The true translator must first be a lover. She must love the text she is translating, for the relationship between her translation and the source text is the relationship between a mother and a child, and she is the surrogate. The translator must give birth to her translation and devote herself to it completely, nourishing it with tender affection lest her child be anything less than the greatest fruit of her deepest love.

Just as the progeny of man and woman combines the genes of both, so, too, is a translation a genetic marriage of the source language and the translator’s language. This is the second great truth to which a translator must cling: his work is literally to unite two disparate languages into one. In order to be successful, therefore, a translator must honor and reverence the language of his source just as deeply as he does his own language, for in his sweat and toil the two shall become one. Rudolf Pannwitz, a giant of German letters in the first half of the twentieth century, apprehended this truth well in his insightful work, Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur:^[2]

Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works (…). The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible, to what extent any language can be transformed, how language differs from language almost the way dialect differs from dialect; however, this last is true only if one takes language seriously enough, not if one takes it lightly.

The love of the translator for his text is far deeper than semantic and physical features—it reaches to the “pure language,” as Walter Benjamin calls it, that transcendental level where languages coalesce in the perfect harmony of pure expression: “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”^[3] The author of the original work calls on his translator to bear his words into the world, and it is the translator’s task to respond, “Behold, I am thy servant: be it done unto me according to thy words.”

This is no fanciful play on words: the task of the translator is truly one of faith that must take him to the deepest levels of his soul and to those heights from which he might glimpse, if only for a second, “the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages.”^[4] This becomes especially true for me as a translator of medieval texts, for they are the products of a worldview whose very foundations inhere in the nature of God as Word. In pricipio erat Verbum must be as much the translator’s creed as it is the Christian’s.

But even the translator of Homer is making the same act of faith: she pledges her belief in the power of human ideas to cross space and time and offer insight, solace, even indignation. The translator, whether consciously or not, submits himself to a higher plane of reality in which the barriers of human language dissolve in the face of the Word. As ambivalent as Benjamin’s relationship with the idealists was, his translator’s insight confirms the reality—or perhaps superreality—of the ideal. And it is no accident that Derrida turned to the philosophies of language propounded by Augustine and Scotus as the starting point of his own exploration of sign and signified.^[5] Whether Christian or not, the best translators succeed because they engage in their labors precisely in order to break the flimsy bonds of benighted human vision, driven by the desire to look up and behold the face of God. For reflected in His Word-made-flesh are the deepest pains and greatest joys the human can know. Translating is one task in which we can come closer to that most human reality.

Notes
[1] This idea is at the heart of C. S. Lewis’ argument for reading old books. ↩
[2] As quoted by Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens,” in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt and trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968) 80-1. It is more illustrative, I think, than ironic that I am using Zohn’s translation of Pannwitz’s German, as quoted by Benjamin. ↩
[3] Benjamin, 80. ↩
[4] Ibid., 75. ↩
[5] I understand that Augustine and Scotus were sometimes at opposites sides of philosophy, and that the neoplatonic ladder of being Augustine climbed was often quite different from Scotus’ later steps among the Aristotelian categories. The important thing to remember, however, is that for both men, the reality of the Logos, whether predestined absolutely or contingently incarnate, was of a higher and firmer ground than the vicissitudes of earthly shadows and dust. ↩

Book Review: Inventing the Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor

2011-10-14T13:13:00.000-04:00

Norman F. Cantor. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. New York: Morrow, 1991. 477 pp.

This is a moving, if idiosyncratic, historiographical meditation on the rise of "modern" medieval studies (to be distinguished from those of the nineteenth century). After a concise sketch of the broad strokes of medieval history and the movements of modern interpretation, Cantor dives into compelling portraits of the twenty medievalists who, in his opinion, "invented" the Middle Ages for the modern world of the twentieth century. Combining a standard academic's review of their works with an esteemed historian's synthetic stitching to tell the history of historians, Cantor attempts to understand not only what each of these men (and one woman) told us about the Middle Ages but also why they approached them the way they did.

The result is a mixed bag. On the one hand, he handles with skill and alacrity the various schools of ideas and approaches that these inventors either appropriated or crafted as their legacies; in this respect, this volume is a valuable precis for the modern student of how historians and, to a lesser extent, literary and art history scholars, have practiced their trades. On the other hand, Cantor clearly betrays his own academic pedigree and the prejudices it entails. His own political thoughts seem to be in line with the Wilsonian progressivism inherited from his own Doktorvater, J. R. Strayer (profiled, with appropriate stories from Cantor's grad school days, in Chapter Seven); while his sensitivities mark him as another "Knight of the Southern Round Table" (see pp. 359ff), even if his actual time spent with R. ("Dick") W. Southern while on a Rhodes was minimal. Cantor was clearly never a fan of the Marxist-influenced schools of thought that rose around the "martyred" Marc Bloch (Chapter Four) and other French intellectuals, and the only positive outcome, in his mind, of the tumultuous year 1968 was the disillusionment its failure produced (though he marks his chagrin that Wilsonian progressivism died, too). Some reviewers will take his ambivalence toward the "leftist" New Historicism as unrehabilitated conservativism; they would fail, in that conclusion, to understand the classically liberal idealism that, though perhaps faded and tarnished, still animates Cantor.

His strongest chapters are thus on those men whom he knew and under whose influence he has lived. He may be faulted for the starry-eyed encomium to Southern, the excesses of which extend to his idealistic frustration that Southern was never proactively ambitious enough; but he does, at least, acknowledge some of Southern's more obvious weaknesses as an historian, especially his ignorance of the world east of the Rhine and of women, admirably remedied by one of the "Knights", Peter Dronke (pp. 361-2). Cantor's wistful regret is that "Bloch's disciples have built vast power bases where they have done some good, but also much damage. Southern (...) turned away and made the 'great refusal'." (p. 351). The most moving portrait is also the most fragmented and tragic, of the outrider Theodor ("Ted) Ernst Mommsen (Chapter 10). Again, as one of Mommsen's students and friends and as the unique benefactor of Mommsen's library (p. 371), Cantor has a sympathetic and personal view of the man and allows the greatness that would be hidden from a more distant acquaintance to shine through. Indeed, despite the dismissive quality of the term "Outriders", Chapter Ten (Cantor's last) is the most poetically lyrical of the book.

The other best chapter is the third, on Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Kantorowicz ("The Nazi Twins"). Though most medievalists of any standing will have heard of the latter's The King's Two Bodies, and many may actually have read it, far fewer will be familiar with his far superior Frederick the Second; and only a small minority of American medievalists of today (as at Oxbridge at the time of Cantor's Rhodes work) will have the least acquaintance with Schramm's Kaiser, Rom, und Renovatio. I would recommend Cantor's study of the men to all, for the movements of pre-war German Geistesgeschichte (a tradition that Cantor managed to assimilate, to his benefit) are ignored by modern scholars to their peril.

As a work of medieval scholarship, this book is of uneven value. It is written from a certain old-fashioned stance that places it outside of the fashions of today's academe, though we should make two caveats. First, the book only ever claims to chronicle the great medievalists into the 1960's; as Cantor mentions multiple times (e.g. 156, 276-7, 364), the great era of "feminist" medieval scholarship, i.e. of women medievalists (the sneer is noted), only came into its own in the generations thereafter. Second, the book was written just at the end of the Cold War, under the first President Bush. The movements of medieval scholarship of the last twenty years are absent, and unfortunately for Cantor, they have not been in the direction he might have hoped. As just one example, in his "canonical" list of 125 key works in Medieval Studies, he appropriately includes Caroline Walker Bynum but only for Jesus as Mother. As absolutely fantastic as that book is, and essential on the bookshelf of anyone trying to understand the twelfth century, posterity has entered Holy Feast, Holy Fast into the pantheonic canon.

Where this book thoroughly shines is as the testament of a great observer of twentieth-century medieval studies. Cantor invested himself life and soul in this invention; these stories may be gossipy, but they are the stories of the very creation of the scholar and man Cantor understood himself to be. As biography, both of himself and of these medievalists, this book stands above. ( )

Curiosity in and out of the Classroom, Intellectual and Otherwise

2011-10-12T11:15:00.000-04:00

James Lang has a penetrating article over at The Chronicle of Higher Education this week exploring contemporary student culture outside of the classroom. Beginning, as many of us do, with fond memories of those late-night discussions of the grand meaning of it all when we were undergraduates--and how naively ambitious those discussions were!--he takes stock of where those discussions might be found today. It can be a depressing, if not altogether surprising, conclusion:

(...) most students do not have a curious and thriving intellectual life outside of their courses. The late-night discussions that I imagined my students having in their dorm rooms about the meaning of life, according to Small, are simply not happening.

And lest we vainly imagine that this reflects the class boundaries in higher education, Lang brings in Susan D. Blum's My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (Cornell, 2009) to show that this lack of intellectual engagement outside the classroom and--what's worse for many of us--the endemic moral ambivalence of plagiarism amongst today's students are to be found at the top of the ladder, too. Though in our arrogance, we delight to think that the provincial students of a Northern Arizona University just don't match up to our halcyon days at the nation's top (and most expensive) universities, it turns out that Blum's account is from one of those supposedly top schools, the University of Notre Dame.

Now, having done graduate work at Notre Dame, I can perhaps speak to part of that. The grassroots football culture at Notre Dame overpowers any attempt at intellectual inquiry outside the classroom (a fact that the New York Times finally realized in a January, 2012 look at How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life). I feared to be in the library on home football Saturdays lest I be accosted by drunken fans wanting to see the view from behind "Touchdown Jesus". The faculty labored most often in vain to combat this; and the University should get credit for trying to combine football and intellect with its Saturday Scholar series. But as anyone who has attended those lectures can attest, the several dozen or, if they're lucky, hundred people in the lecture hall are dwarfed by the roving hoards of thousands drinking themselves to oblivion and fed by the greasy drippings of the grill.

But I digress. After the depressing realization that our students are not the peripatetics we had always dreamt they could be, Lang does offer some rays of hope. As Blum recounts, the dashing of the ideal at least offers the solace of the real:

Knowing what college life is like now for many students at residential colleges explained a lot about my experience with students, and it has ended my tendency to get upset when students didn't seem to be focusing as much attention on their coursework as I thought appropriate. I think my expectations are much more realistic now, so the entire experience of teaching is less depressing than it was when I couldn't understand why I couldn't motivate students to be absorbed in their work.

And for those of us who still desire to cling to our ideals, there are still kernels of curiosity that can bloom, if we only learn to water them properly:

I have seen students get excited about things they are learning in their classes, whether it is a project they are working on or just a new way of thinking about the world. But I think we have to make the case for each subject. It can't just be fulfilling requirements, if we want it to matter to students. And we are bound to miss a number of them. We are kidding ourselves if we think that all students are likely to become intellectuals. But there are many ways to become moral, productive, contributing human beings besides through the life of academic pursuits.

I find that one of the more effective teaching methods for engaging the curiosity of the vast majority of students who aren't innately driven to live in the Ivory Tower is to tell stories. Story telling is the oldest form of human communication that connects both to the barest of lives and to the highest levels of intellectual inquiry. It's not for nothing that we still turn to Homer as much as to Heidegger.

By conceiving of the teaching profession as a common exploration with my students of the human story, I can exploit these human tendencies to craft narrative out of disparate details. Narrative gives meaning far more effectively than most any other form of presentation. Thus, I find that students are for more interested, for example, in the ideology of the Crusades when they can explore that through the concrete stories of men on armed pilgrimage, awash in blood at one moment and humbly bowed in worship the next. The conflicts and crises, joys and triumphs, of today echo anxieties and reliefs faced by countless generations before. If we can cast those stories in the vivid recounting of the poet rather than the dry and anemic prose of the tweed-encased academic, we can engage our students and enliven their curiosity.

Sunrise, Sunset

2011-10-11T13:43:00.001-04:00

Though today is overcast and cool, yesterday was one of those perfect examples of autumn: a warm, partly-cloudy day that opened and closed crisply with numinous light. This is sunrise from a hillock at the southern tip of the University of the Cumberlands campus:

And evening came: the eastward streaming light, kindling a farewell fire to echo the rays of morning as they had sought the skies from orient:

Sunset from our front porch, Oct. 10, 2011.

The Secrets of Medieval Cathedrals...

2011-10-10T13:27:00.000-04:00

…aren’t really all that secret. But if you’re an overzealous editor at NOVA, you might be tempted to invoke “secretly encoded” information in sacred architecture to drum up popular interest. When PBS last week reaired the series’ 2010 opener, “Building the Great Cathedrals”, it was apparent that even their high standards could sometimes be duped by that popular myth that codes, DaVinci or otherwise, are hidden all about those mysterious Middle Ages, just waiting for modern sleuths to expose the hidden past.

To be sure, the first two-thirds of the program were excellent. As we’ve come to expect from NOVA, they seamlessly wove excellent scholarship with lucid explanations of the main architectural feats and features of the great Gothic cathedrals. They use their profile of Frank Helmholz’s work in California to reconstruct the Cistercian chapter house William Randolph Hearst imported, piece-by-piece, from Europe, elegantly to explain the physics of the Gothic arch and flying buttress. Another team in France, led by Columbia’s Stephen Murray, uses precise laser scanners to analyze the problems facing the Cathedral at Amiens, problems long-evident and far worse at Beauvais. Likewise, modern stained glass blowers offer an excellent introduction to their medieval counterparts.

When they get to their final segment, however, the tendencies of the conspiracy theorist take over. Claiming to offer a “radical new theory”, they use handsome graphics and several art historians to discuss the use of sacred numbers “ripped” from the Bible as “blueprints” for the buildings. The narrator provokes: “Is there a hidden mathematical code that unlocks the secrets of the Gothic Cathedrals?”

The evidence:

Patterns of thirty and sixty units of measure (in this case, royal feet) in the structures of Notre Dame in Paris, measurements that correspond to the biblical description of the Temple of Solomon (1 [3] Kings 6).
The large space at the center of the transept and nave in Amiens is fifty roman feet square, a number derived from the measurements of Noah’s ark (Gen. 6:15).
The height from floor to vault keystones in Amiens is just about 144 roman feet (42.55 meters), the same as the measure of the New Jerusalem (in cubits) seen by John in the Apocalypse (Apoc./Rev. 21); and that passage was read by the bishop at the dedication of the cathedral!

To anyone at all familiar with the medieval mind, however, this seems rather more ordinary than extraordinary. Of course the architects of sacred spaces would look to Scripture for inspiration! Of course they would model the earthly tabernacle after its heavenly exemplar! Hugh of St. Victor went to extraordinary lengths to use the precise design of Noah’s Ark to explain all of salvation history and the theology therein revealed.(1) Exhaustively detailed typologies of every cubit of Solomon’s Temple abound, especially in twelfth-century exegesis and art, which had a predilection for diagrams.(2) The very Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor cited in the program isn’t exactly an obscure text. Written as a paraphrase of biblical and salvation history for students at Paris in the twelfth century, it was translated into every major vernacular and was one of the most widely read text of its type in the later Middle Ages.(3) At the end of that century, Joachim of Fiore would enumerate interpretations of scripture and history so bewilderingly complex that scholars still struggle to unravel it today.(4)

Is it important to our understanding of cathedral art and architecture to recognize this use of sacred geometry? Certainly; but that by no means implies that there are “hidden codes” to be revealed after the buildings have been “stripped to their bare bones”. Did the use of scriptural proportions “drive” medieval builders to “evermore dangerous heights”? Perhaps; but we need not sensationalize these facts in order to better understand. The great cathedrals are no less fascinating, no less wondrous, no less hauntingly beautiful, if we strip away the conspiracy theories and see through the veil to the reality beneath.

NOVA’s use of this particular rhetorical device is symptomatic of so much of the obfuscating penumbra that still surrounds popular conceptions of the Middle Ages. Brown’s supposed codes of templars and DaVinci are just one of the more spectacular examples. These misconceptions are also projected forward onto the contemporary Roman Catholic Church; a supposedly articulate commenter in a recent discussion of faith and politics made the specious claim that “Pope Ratzinger” was the “sociopath who helped elect George Bush in 2004.” Invoking such conspiracy theories and intimating hidden codes and shadowy agendas can, perhaps, add an exhilarating air of illicit discovery, but do little to illuminate the actual character of the Middle Ages.

Indeed, such radicalizing language strengthens the alterity of the Middle Ages, widening the gulf between us and them and making it ever harder to peer across it. As a medievalist, one of my primary goals is make those centuries more accessible, not less. I want to illuminate the past, not cloak it in vague claims of hidden secrets and mysterious figures. And while NOVA does an excellent job invoking the awe of a rural peasant, accustomed to low ceilings and dark rooms, gazing at the great walls of stained glass, it does the medieval artisans a disservice when it claims for them hidden secrets rather than sublime allegories. For the sacred geometry of these great cathedrals is not meant to hide and conspire but to reveal and display the numinous light of divine beauty. As the narrator rightly (and finally!) says, these were “sacred space[s] for transporting medieval minds from their daily lives of toil to the lofty heights of eternity.” Walls of glass and sparkling colors create a space that lifts the soul to God, whose eye pierces any cloak of secrecy. Beauty here is the truth, not false secrets.

Notes --Back to Text--
(1) ^ See Conrad Rudolph, “First, I Find the Center Point”: Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor’s ‘The Mystic Ark’. (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 94/4. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2006).
(2) See See Christiania Whitehead, “Temple”, pp. 7-27 in ibid., Castles of the Mind. A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003); and Michael Curschmann, “Texte - Bilder - Strukturen. Der 'Hortus deliciarum' und die frühmittelhochdeutsche Geistlichendichtung (mit 10 Abbildungen)”, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 55:3 (Oct. 1981), pp. 379-418.
(3) See See James H. Morey, “Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible.” Speculum 68:1 (Jan. 1993), pp. 6-35.
(4) See Amongst the ever-growing literature, see Part III in Bernard McGinn’s Apocalyptic Spirituality, (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), pp. 97-148; ibid., The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought, (New York: Macmillan, 1985); and Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

In novum statum: The Next Stage of Our Lives

2011-10-06T12:58:00.000-04:00

With the slight embarrassment that I am so tardy in sharing this news, I am nevertheless pleased to announce that my wife, Heather, and I have embarked on the next stage of our lives. Over the summer, Heather accepted a tenure-track position in the at the University of the Cumberlands. At the beginning of August, we packed a great U-Haul and made the eight-hour trek to settle into our new home: Williamsburg, Kentucky. Nestled in the western foothills of the Appalachian mountains and a bare eleven miles north of the Tennessee border, it has certainly marked a change of scenery from South Bend.

Sunrise over Williamsburg, Kentucky, Oct. 10, 2011

It is a great relief for both of us to once again be surrounded by … let’s call them tall hills. (Though the Appalachians may once have been taller, this child of the Rocky Mountains can’t quite bring himself to call our new surroundings “mountains”.) Heather has frequently been known to sigh whenever she sees a picture of mountains, and the depressing flatness of northern Indiana had failed frequently to satisfy my love of nature. To be sure, the grounds of the University of Notre Dame can be quite beautiful; but the Michiana plains lack a certain loftiness. When the sun breaks o’er the eastern ridge or sinks behind the west; when the misty banks of fog curl ‘round the valley bottoms; when the winding country roads bring vistas green and cozy little dales hid beneath mountain shadows; then daily I can find my breath catch in sighs in ways I had been missing.

As Heather has settled in at the University, I have developed a pleasant routine at home. I’ve my books to read and papers to write; and soon I will start working on a variety of translation works I’ve long projected but not ‘till now had the time to pursue. I have also been in touch with several area colleges about adjuncting in the Spring, with some promising leads. Despite some wariness at first, I’ve started to make inroads into the community. I’ve been welcomed as a volunteer at the Whitley County Public Library—I know that, given budget constraints, they can use all the help they can get.

There is a quiet, if sometimes almost desperate, perseverance about this community. It is a small town in a rural county, and the economic recession has hit it hard. While the odious tales of welfare-bilkers always make tongues wag, there is less self-pity and more gracious self-reliance here than I had found in South Bend. As a neighbor put it, “these are good Christian folk”. This peculiar usage of “Christian” might seem quaint or even offensive to the more urbane; but it is not meant to divide or cast aspersions. For this community, “Christian” describes the best virtues that humans cultivate, not the entrenched partisan blinders that drive so much ignorant bigotry. “Christians” here are charitable, not self-centered; but that charity is driven by the life-long ties that bind neighbor to neighbor in a tight-knit community.

Their seeming hesitancy to accept outsiders is often because outsiders seem to assume the worst about “good Christian folk.” Outsiders see these communities through the lens of the worst stereotypes of “rural Kentucky”: uneducated hicks, close-minded and bigoted. Are there problems in the education here? Certainly; Heather and I both cringed when the girl working the register at Dairy Queen couldn’t make change after mistyping the cash total into the machine. But it’s not because education is not valued, nor because “education” is a bad word. These communities are impoverished; they haven’t the resources to make schools the temples of learning that we all desire. Many high school students drop out not because they want to but because they have to—someone has to earn enough money to keep food on the table.

One of the faculty at Union College, a Methodist school about forty-five minutes northeast of here in Barbourville, offered a good analysis of the situation. When all the failures of the education system seem so daunting, when your students seem so utterly ill-prepared to be in your classroom and you’re tempted to quit it all for the enclaves of liberal learning in other parts of the country, you understand this: we have a moral obligation to be here to help them, not to flee in disgust.

When I started graduate school, I never dreamed I would end up living in rural Kentucky; it had no place in the fanciful Ivory Tower that I, like so many grad students, projected for myself. But here I am and here I realize the naïve elitism that drove those fancies. I am an educator. That vocation must be focused on my students, not on me. I can arrogantly claim that I am here magnanimously to lead these children out of their self-imposed tutelage. But I ought rather humbly to see that I am here to join their human journey. My academic training affords me certain insights into that journey, gathered from the journeys of so many pilgrims past. But these insights must work with, not against, the lives of my students, of this community. I have as much to learn from them as they can learn from me. I can put my skills to good use here; but to do so, I must put aside stereotyped preconceptions and let myself be a part of the community, not outside of it.

In Principio Novo: This Blog Returns to Life

2011-10-05T15:17:00.000-04:00

For several years now this blog has lain dormant. Originally conceived as a catch-all for whatI fancied were my more important thoughts as I began my senior year of college,it served its better times as a repository for my budding efforts as a medievalist and translator and as a travelogue of sorts during my year in Germany as aFulbright Scholar. During my time as agraduate student at the Medieval Institute it went fallow, except for scattered personal announcements and to post a rough paper or two. Certainly the demands of graduate work andfalling in love kept me from it; but far more, I think, did I forebear underthe realization of my own incompetencies. My graduate committee broke the pride of intellect; to my wife Iwillingly sacrificed the pride of soul.

It might seem presumptuous, then, that I should now attemptits revival. It is my certain hope (howvain is yet to be seen) that I can offer something worth while. When I recognize and shake my head at thenaïve arrogance I once put on display, I hope that some more years along haveleft me a clearer, more experienced lens. Wise it may not be, but at least a bit more prudent.

The drive to put down in writing the whirlwind of thoughtsand experiences, both quotidian and extraordinary, is as strong as ever. One good idea might occasionally escape inthat process by which the build-up of voice upon voice escalates until finally,from sheer dint of pressure, it is flung from the chaotic nebula of my head intothe galaxy of the world outside. But asChaucer noticed when he glimpsed this “Domus Dedaly / That Laboryntus clepedys” (House of Fame, 1920-1), not even in these nascentmoments of a story is truth purely found. The muddied waters of human expression are from their very source a mixtureof truth and falsehood. I cannot promisepure clarity, but only that in the process, the journey might be a little lessmurky than before.

Epistemological theorizing aside (for the moment), whatconcrete shape will this blog take? Ican refer you to its very first post years ago, for the motivations remain much thesame. As its title would indicate, itwill reflect the experiences of a man of faith seeking to understand that faithand the world in which he exercises it. I will strive to understand the grand ideas that animate the course ofhuman history, tempered by the practical limitations we face every day inliving out those grand claims we make in our more idealistic moments.

I am an academic; and the methods by which I explore thisjourney we call “life” will be, by and large, academic. I will read monographs and review them; scourthe medieval religious texts I study for clues; and attempt to reconstruct thethoughts and experiences of men and women who lived centuries ago. Some of this work may hopefully find its wayinto print; at the very least, I hope to make more medieval texts available inEnglish translation. As a teacher, mygoal is to help new generations explore and understand the human story, whoseconflicts and crises today echo anxieties faced by countless generationsbefore. At my best moments, I hope tobring these fascinating figures back to life; most of the time, I will considerit a success to have told a coherent tale.

But I must also be on guard lest I succumb to that dangerthat lurks in the path of any academic: the danger of becoming too ensconced inour Ivory Towers, reducing, as it were, the true complexity of the figures westudy to the merely academic and scholarly. As I was reminded a few years ago in a visit to the Abbey of St. Hildegard of Bingen, thereal rewards of our work should take us beyond the conferences and scholarlymonographs and journals. I met there,for example, an Italian-German woman whom we “scholars” would term an“amateur”, that is, whose interest in Hildegard is entirely practical. She studies Hildegard, spends time atHildegard’s abbey, and reads Hildegard’s works, not because that’s her job, butbecause she finds meaning for her own life in Hildegard’s. Hildegard’s writings on natural medicine arenot merely important as documents in the history of science; for her, theybecome actual tools in regulating the ailments of her own body. Likewise, Hildegard’s theology is not merelya collection of theoretical notions; rather, this woman has actually allowed herown spiritual life to be taught by Hildegard’s teachings.

The vitality of Hildegard’s personality in our age is theproduct not of our scholarly researches but of actual people and their realencounters with an extraordinary woman of an age gone by. It is thus for us, the academics, not merelyto write our books and give our lectures for the sake of other academics, butto realize that our profession, like all human activities, is meant to be forthe advancement of humanity—and that such advancement is not merely an abstractgoal of progress, but the concrete reality of people who live their lives inthe here and now, perhaps weighed down by the weariness of day-to-day drudgery,yet also lifted up by the simple joys of day-to-day life, well-lived.

In Memoriam

2009-08-09T15:52:00.006-04:00

Gloria Byrd Ristow
(May 15, 1938-August 1, 2009)

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.
—I Corinthians 15:26

My grandmother faced many enemies in her life, and overcame each one. The most notable was the battle she fought so long against her own body, against Schleroderma, an enemy that took from her some of her fingers; that took from her the healthy breath of her lungs; that ultimately took from her her life. Yet she fought with all the weapons she had. The physical ones we humorously referred to as “puff, pump, and circumstance.”

When the pulmonary hypertension that resulted from her disease had advanced far enough to make it difficult for her to breath, my grandmother went on oxygen. Though she had various devices over the years, the most enduring was the regulator that would issue small puffs of oxygen in tune with her breathing—the ubiquitous little “puff” sound was so much a part of her later years. Sometimes, out of pure enthusiasm and strength of will, she would knowingly disrupt the pattern, most notably when, moved by the Spirit, she would decide that she would sing a hymn in this very church. It often would happen when I was present to sing with her, and we would holler away at the top of our lungs—and then she would sit down and let the puffs catch up with her.

As her pulmonary hypertension continued to advance, she acquired “pump and circumstance.” “Pump” refers to the machine that would pump a once-experimental medication, Flolan, directly into her pulmonary artery via a direct line. Thus, she would go trolling along, with puff on one hip, pump on the other, and trailing behind would be “circumstance,” the large thermos bag that contained the extra and emergency supplies for her Flolan.

Her weapons, however, were not just physical. Indeed, her greatest asset of all was her faith in God. His grace, so wonderfully bestowed upon her, was truly what kept her going to the last. I remember as a child, during the sermon or such other “boring” part of the Mass each Sunday, she would sit on the floor with me here, just a few rows back, and tell me stories. My favorite seemed to be the story of my own birth. As many of you know, I was born quite a few weeks premature, and my hold on life was tenuous for a time. As a result, Fr. Nevels came to the hospital the very day of my birth to baptize me, lest I should die without the grace of that sacrament. My grandmother, who was to keep as near to a 24-hour vigil as her body and the hospital staff would allow, retrieved for him a paper cup with some water, which he blessed and with which he then baptized me. The water now being holy, however, it could not simply be thrown down an ordinary drain. My grandmother, having not the strength then to carry it from the upper floor of the NICU to the ground outside to pour it out, drank it instead. I’ve sworn in times since that it is because of that holy water that she remained so long alive.

Indeed, many of my fondest memories of my Nannie—a moniker for the grandmothers in her family going back several generations—are connected with this very church. She was for years the head of the altar guild, and I would often accompany her on Saturday mornings to help with the tasks of cleaning and preparing for the Sunday Mass. For many years, my special tasks on Holy Saturday as part of the preparations for Easter were to wash with soapy water the High Altar—climbing under which is a great adventure for a kid—and going around on my hands and knees with an iron and a roll of paper towels, meticulously drawing up from the floor of the sanctuary all of the candle wax that had been spilled in the course of the previous year. My favorite part of the Easter Vigil each year—probably what kept me awake for it—was the breaking of the silence at the great Gloria, for Nannie had a set of sleigh bells that usually would hang on her front door but which, for this occasion, would accompany her to the church just so that I could join in at the Gloria—a part of the Mass whose coincidence with her name has been the cause of many comments over the years, both punning and poignant. I also served as an acolyte in this parish from a young age, and Nannie took it upon herself to ensure that I had my own cassock and cotta; as a child, this meant sometimes yearly visits to Gerkens Liturgical Supply to be fitted for a new set. Given that my mother has headed the flower guild for nearly as many years, I probably hold the distinction of being the only boy in the history of this parish trained both as an acolyte and on the altar and flower guilds!

Such stories as these date back to that time when her health was fairer, before the puff and pump and circumstance—a time that seems sometimes today so long ago. But that was the time of my childhood, and I was blessed to have a grandmother—my Nannie—who lived a bare ten-minute drive away. We’d see her at least once a week, on Sundays here at St. Mary’s. But usually, I would see her far more often, especially in the summer when school was out. We would go to the movies together, or out for a treat; and I spent many a happy afternoon in the swimming pools at Heather Ridge Country Club, where she and Bob were members for many years. It was to her house that I went the day my younger brother was born; as many of you know, my mother used to do child care out of our home, and that day, she asked me to clean up the kitchen after lunch so she could sit down for a bit. Turned out, there was a good reason for her to sit down: Evan had decided that he needn’t hang around in the womb for another few weeks; February 19 seemed the day to come. So I went over to Nannie’s house to wait; though I have since in times of humor denied that I could so enthusiastically react, she told me quite clearly that she darn near had to scrape me off the ceiling when I was told that I had a baby brother.

It was not until I was older that I began to realize that it was not just that holy water from my baptism, however, that sustained my grandmother’s spirit. Her faith in God, a faith so profound and sure, was a witness to us all—and it was a faith that I did not begin fully to appreciate until I, too, began to mature in my faith during my first years in college. Most in this parish have seen and known the depth and character of her faith, for it has served this Church well. As a steward and warden of this parish, as an officer of this diocese, as a rock to this communion through years of plenty and years of dearth, her faith sustained us as much as it sustained her. When I entered college and found myself so far away from home for the first time, it was her counsel and guidance that helped me to tap my own heart and find Christ’s love there to guide me. Though we only rarely spoke directly and at length about such matters of faith in the years since, the silent bond of our shared faith served and strengthened us always. As my study of the history and theology of the catholic Christian faith progressed, I came better to understand the import of her profession as Sr. Mary Frances, a third order oblate of the Order of St. Benedict. I started making a point of calling her especially on her saint day, March 9, the Feast of St. Frances of Rome; and as I studied more and more the history of Christian spirituality, I began to understand why my grandmother had chosen the charism of St. Benedict: ora et labora, pray and do work.

Yet, the extraordinary strength of my grandmother’s faith could be at times discomfiting. Her confidence in me never wavered, but my own confidence in me did. She was always quite certain that when I stormed the gates of Heaven, my prayers were especially efficacious; I must confess that all too frequently, those prayers, when said at all, were far weaker than she seemed to think. The trouble, you see, with being the grandson of a saint is that I almost never even come within sight of living up to the standard which she has set. At the same time, of course, that standard becomes the spur not simply to fall under the weight of failing weakness but to turn once more to the Lord and to keep moving forward, if not confident of one’s own strength then certainly trusting in His.

Her trust in God’s grace and Spirit is what kept her going, despite the obstacles that this life placed before her; though physically frail, she knew more surely than any merely human knowledge can know that the Good Shepherd was her strength. It was from this utter solidity of her faith that so many of us have so often drawn our own strength and confidence in the help of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Our sorrow today is as much for the absence of this reassurance as it is for anything else. We feel that a long shadow is cast upon us—seemingly now the darkness of grief, the shadow of the valley of death, the absence of one so deeply loved. Yet, truly this shadow is not that of despair; rather, it is the shadow cast by a great soul now standing in the living and eternal light of God. The Lord has assuredly received her into the company of the saints and angels—for that she was a Servant of God I am most certain—and there shall she spend “ten thousand years / bright shining as the sun”. Her enemies are vanquished, her mortal toil has ended, and she lives now with Him who lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen.

This eulogy was delivered at Gloria's Requiem Mass at St. Mary's Anglican Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado, on Saturday, August 8.

We’re Engaged!

2009-05-28T17:34:00.005-04:00

I am very happy to announce that I and my girlfriend, Heather Eisler, are engaged. We were visiting my family in Colorado last weekend for my brother’s high school graduation, and on Sunday morning during the announcements at my home parish of St. Mary’s, I proposed and she accepted.

Heather and I both live in the graduate student apartments here at Notre Dame and we met last August at a beginning-of-the-year meet-and-greet at the community center. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, she was immediately taken with me and started to “lure me in,” as she puts it. After joining a Bible-study group with her and getting to know her, I ended up asking her out on a few dates without me realizing that they were, in fact, dates; I just assumed we were friends—but she had other ideas. Finally, during an election-watch party in the community center in November, she and her friends conspired first to get us sitting next to each other on the couch and then to pack the couch with more and more people until I had no choice but to put my arm around back to make more room. As her head settled onto my shoulder, it finally dawned on me.

We have grown far closer to each other and in a far shorter amount of time than either of us would have thought possible. Despite the fact that this has been a particularly stressful semester—not only is grad school hard, but she has spent the semester finishing her dissertation in biology—we have found that spending time with each other is both the best remedy against the stress and the part of the day we look forward to most. May has, in fact, been a particularly exciting month for us, as the Tuesday before last, Heather successfully defended her doctoral dissertation—as best as I understand, it is on the genetics/genomics of two related species of fruit flies; but for a real explanation, you’d have to ask her—and the correct form of address is now “Dr. Eisler”. Since I still have several more years to go in my program at Notre Dame, she has applied to do a post-doc in another one of the labs here—we should hear next month on whether the funding for the lab has come through.

Heather is one of the most deeply caring and thoughtful individuals I have ever known, and I find it impossible to think what my life would be like without her. God has graciously given us to each other, and I thank Him every day for letting us glimpse in our bond of love His own love for us. We are truly blessed to have found true love and we both look forward to spending our lives together.

Divine Love as both Creative and Rational: The Theophany of Caritas in Hildegard of Bingen's Liber Divinorum Operum

2009-02-14T08:17:00.002-05:00

“Love” today is often primarily understood to signify a passionate, sensual, or even creative feeling; when we think upon it further, we may discover deeper levels of connotation, but they still fall distinctly into the emotional, affective range—what we might call a “right-brained” conception of love rooted in the heart. This is the love that we often see at the center of human interaction, that indescribable and powerful connection that binds one human being to another—the love of neighbor enjoined in the Gospel. As Christians, we see the pinnacle of this Love expressed in the passion and death of Jesus on the Cross—an outpouring of Love in the most anguished moments of human pain and suffering, the humanity of Jesus in its sharpest and most brutal detail. On the other hand, we have the “first and great commandment” to love God with every fiber of our being—agape in Greek, caritas in Latin, from whence derives the English word “charity”. This is that Love that John identifies with God (1 John 4:16), whose pinnacle we also find in Jesus the Son of God, His Logos or Word. This is rational, intellectual Love—what we might call “left-brained” love rooted in the mind—and is often expressed by us in our love of learning, our “philosophy” or “Love of Wisdom.”

These two aspects of Love—the passionate, creative “right-brained” love and the logical, intellective “left-brained” love—rarely find themselves examined, understood, or even imagined together in our modern discourse; indeed, one might even say that they are seen not as two aspects of one Love but as two distinct types of love. When a man has fallen head-over-heels for his soul-mate, we rarely picture him exercising his rational and intellectual faculties in expressing his love for her; and when we imagine the philosopher sitting in his ivory tower contemplating the mysteries of the universe, it would seem almost absurd to think of him seething with fiery passion and uncontrollable sensuality. Because we see both of these aspects of Love embodied and fulfilled in Jesus, our supreme and perfect role model, it follows that we should be able not only to hold the two concepts together, but also to practice them utterly intertwined. But we don’t, even when contemplating Jesus as the paradigm of this Love: the Jesus we see in the prologue to John’s Gospel—the Word in the beginning with God—is, to our frail minds, at a great conceptual distance from the man we see scourged at the pillar and hung upon the Cross, His very flesh pierced by iron nails. What we lack is a vision of Love that can hold these two very different aspects together, uniting passion to reason, the mind to the heart.

The attempt to sketch such a vision has held the attention of thinkers in the West since at least the time of Plato, who sought to examine the concept of Love in his dialogue, the Symposium; to cite only one recent and notable attempt, I would point you to Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. Today, I would like to examine one of the most remarkable visions of Love that I have come across in the two-and-a-half millennia stretching from Plato to Benedict, offered by the 12th-century visionary abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Shortly before her death in 1179 at the age of 81, Hildegard described to her secretary, Guibert of Gembloux, the process by which she had experienced visions since her childhood. She did not suffer from ecstasy, she said, but saw all before her in her waking moments: yet it was not with the eyes of her body, but with the eyes of her soul that she experienced the umbra viventis lucis, the shadow or reflection of the Living Light. After publishing the Scivias, the first volume of her massive visionary trilogy, in 1151, Hildegard became an instant celebrity. Her visionary and prophetic powers, certified by Pope Eugenius III, made her a figure of wide renown and, most incredibly for a woman of that time, authority. She corresponded with other abbots and abbesses, and with popes, kings, and even the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa himself. At the age of 60 she embarked on the first of four preaching journeys. In addition to her great visionary writings, she composed numerous pieces of chant music and wrote several works on natural medicine and cures.

This may, in fact, not be the first time you have heard of her, for in our own time, Hildegard has again become quite the celebrity. Homeopathic medicine has embraced her for her knowledge of natural remedies, while New Age spirituality finds expression in the soaring melodies of her chant, and feminist movements have vaunted her for her “theology of the feminine” and as a great monument to the power of the feminine in an age of misogyny. Unfortunately, each of these appropriations of Hildegard by the modern world has tried to tear her from her own context and place her in its own, often distorting her thought to fit some modern agenda. Yet, we should not be deterred from letting the monumental power of Hildegard’s visionary genius speak to us, for I think there is much in her unique mode of seeing that could benefit us in our search for an integrated vision of Love.

The figure of Caritas or Divine Love is the central character in the vision that begins Hildegard’s last great work, the Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works), and she returns again and again throughout the other nine visions of the book, intertwined with the visions and allegories and figures that populate this grand, unified presentation of the history of salvation and the place of the human being within it. In an autobiographical passage, Hildegard tells us that the first indications of what was to become this massive edifice came to her in a vision meditating on the prologue of John’s Gospel:

At last in the time that followed I saw a mystic and wondrous vision (…). And from God’s inspiration as it were drops of gentle rain splashed into the knowledge of my soul, even as the Holy Spirit imbued John the Evangelist, when he sucked the deepest revelation from Jesus’ breast. At this his sense-perception was so touched by holy divinity that he laid open hidden mysteries and works, saying “In the beginning was the Word” and all that follows. For the Word which was without beginning, before creatures, and shall be after them without end, commanded all creatures to come forth, and produced its handiwork in the likeness of that command—as a craftsman makes his handiwork gleam—because what is in its predestination before the world now appeared. So man, with every creature, is the handiwork of God. But man is also the worker of divinity and the shadowing of the mysteries of divine being; and in all things he whom God made in accordance with His image and likeness must reveal the holy Trinity.(1)

As we can see from this description, even before Hildegard received the vision of Caritas that I will soon relate, she already perceived in the description of the Word by John the unity of rationality and creativity essential to the creation of the world; and furthermore, the special place of man within that creation as the microcosm of all creation, the mirror of the divine by virtue of being the image and likeness of God.

But to come to the vision of Love itself, which I have in the title of this essay called a “theophany”, that is, an appearance and revelation of the divine; as you will see, Hildegard takes the words from the First Letter of John—which we can see still fascinate, as indicated by Pope Benedict’s use of the them to title his own encyclical—quite literally and to their fullest extension: God and Love appear as identical. This is an illustration of the vision, from the Lucca manuscript of the Liber Divinorum Operum, which, though produced several decades after Hildegard’s death, probably preserves illustrations made under her guidance. She describes the vision thus:

And I saw as it were in the southern sky an image, beautiful and wonderful in the mystery of God, like the form of a human, whose face was of such beauty and clarity that I would easier look at the sun than at it; and a great circlet of golden colour surrounded its head. Above that head, moreover, in the same circlet, another face appeared like an old man, whose chin and beard touched the crown of the [lower] head. And from each side of its neck a single wing appeared, which rising up joined together above the aforementioned circlet. At the far point in the arc of the right wing I saw as it were the head of an eagle, which had eyes of fire, in which appeared the brilliance of the angels as in a mirror. But in the far point of the arc of the left wing there was as it were a human face, which shined like the radiance of the stars. And these faces were turned to the east. But also from each shoulder of this image a wing stretched forth down to its knees. It was clothed in a tunic like to the brilliance of the sun; and in its hands it held a lamb, shining like the light of day. The image was, moreover, treading with her feet a monster of horrible form, venomous and black in colour, and a certain serpent, which had fixed its mouth upon the right ear of the monster and, curving the rest of its body around the monster’s head, had stretched out his tail down the right side of the monster to its feet. (LDO I.I.1)

As you can see, this is a vision of cosmic proportions, enigmatic and even frightening in its details; we can pick out pieces here and there that recall biblical images: the face of the old man as the Ancient of Days, the lamb the image holds in its hands, the wings of the figure like the wings of the seraph, and perhaps the most prominent, the image treading upon the snake and clad with clothing “like to the brilliance of the sun”—calling to mind immediately the apocalyptic “woman clothed with the sun”, like this one from a manuscript produced almost contemporaneously with Hildegard’s vision under the direction of Herrad, abbess of Hohenbourg, an Augustinian community near Strasbourg (fol. 261v). Yet, for all of these reminiscences, the meaning of the vision remains just outside our grasp as it darts from point to point, alighting for a moment in one place before flitting off to another. But then, Hildegard hears the image speak:

I am the supreme and fiery force, who sets all living sparks alight and breaths forth no mortal things, but judges them as they are. Flying around the circling circle with my upper wings, that is, with wisdom, I have ordered all things rightly. But I am also the fiery life of the essence of divinity; I flame above the beauty of the fields and I shine in the waters and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind I rouse all things living with some invisible life, which sustains all things. For the air lives in fresh greenness and in the flowers, the waters flow as if they are alive, and the sun lives in its own light; and when the moon comes to its setting, it is kindled by the light of the sun so that it might as it were live anew; and the stars become bright and clear by living as it were in their own light. I have also established the pillars that contain the whole wide world, that is, the winds (…)
Therefore I, the fiery force, lie hidden in these things, and they blaze because of me, just as breath continually moves a human being and as a flickering flame exists within the fire. All of these things live in their essence and are not found in death, because I am life. I am also rationality, possessing the wind of the sounding Word, through which every created thing was made; and in all these things I blow, so that none of them might be in its nature mortal, because I am life. For I am life, pure and whole, which was not hewn from stone, neither blossomed from branches nor took root from man’s sexual power; but every living thing has taken root in me. For rationality is the root, and the sounding Word flourishes in it. (…)
But I also fulfil my office, since all living things are set ablaze from me; and I am uniform life in eternity, for neither have I arisen nor shall I come to an end. God is this life, working and moving itself, and yet this life is one in three forces. Therefore Eternity is called the Father, the Word is called the Son, and the breath connecting these two is called the Holy Spirit, just as God is also signified in man, in whom are body, soul, and rationality. Moreover, that I flame above the beauty of the fields, this is the earth, which is that material from which God made man; and that I shine in the waters, this is according to the soul, since just as water floods the whole earth, so the soul permeates the whole body. But that I burn in the sun and in the moon, this is rationality, and the countless stars are the words of rationality. And that with the airy wind I rouse all things living with some invisible life, which sustains all things, this because those vegetative things that grow incrementally subsist by the wind and the air, removed from nothing in that which they are. (LDO I.I.2)

As you can see, the words of the image become even more enigmatic than the description of the vision. She moves effortlessly from metaphor to metaphor, from one image to the next, never stopping in any one place long, yet often circling back around from a new direction. From this strange image of a woman shining with intense light, winged, crowned with the visage of an old man, and treading upon a monster and a serpent, Hildegard—or the voice of the Living Light speaking to her in her vision—constructs a vast and wide-ranging narrative, often more circular than linear, of the great drama of salvation history. And at center-stage of this drama is this figure of Caritas—Divine Love. She speaks to us in a jumble of different images, and identifies herself in a panoply of metaphors, some drawn from Scripture, some seemingly innovative, but all repeating again and again the formula of Exodus 3:14—“I AM…”

And who is this figure of Divine Love? She is the supreme and fiery force, the fiery life of the essence of divinity; she is life, pure and complete, and she is rationality, possessing the wind of the sounding Word and living as the root of all life. She is reflected in the fields and in the waters, and burns in the sun and moon and stars, and upholds the mighty winds. Yet, in a microcosm of this vast creation, she is reflected and fires the body, soul, and mind of man. In this flood of her words we see her at one time as the passionate, creative, fiery force driving the living forces of all creation; and at another we see her as the rationality of the Word of God, the Logos, that enforms and enlivens the human mind, the thought of God exercised in the thought of man.

Whereas in the beginning of this essay we were faced with the division between these modes of Love—fiery passion versus cerebral reason—we are now faced with a volatile whirlwind that seems to juggle so many different, contrasting, and even paradoxical images, keeping all of them in the air at once and letting none fall to the floor. On the one hand, it seems disordered, chaotic, even nonsensical—how are we to navigate such stormy waters as this jumble and juxtaposition of visionary moments? Yet, within the chaos we begin to discern order—but not order as we would have it in our everyday lives; no, in her inimitable and fascinating visionary style, Hildegard has succeeded in offering a glimpse, rarely in focus and always on the verge of slipping away, teetering on the edge of falling into the abyss, of an order that transcends any notion of order that our feeble minds can grasp. She achieves what Goethe called “true symbolism”—“the living momentary revelation of what is unanalysable.”(2) This, then, is the type of vision of Divine Love that I think might benefit us as we struggle in this modern world—a vision that leaves the confines of the strictly animalistic, the strictly rational, the strictly human, in order to fly away upward, striving to reach the heights of heaven where True Love dwells, from which seat can be glimpsed again what is truly creative, truly rational, truly human.

Notes
(1) Cited by Peter Dronke, “Introduction”, in CCCM 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), ix.
(2) Cited by Peter Dronke in “Arbor Caritatis,” in Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennet, ed. P.L. Heyworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 209.

[N.B. This is modified from a presentation I gave at the 2009 Edith Stein Conference.]

Some Scholarly Pet Peeves

2008-09-03T13:51:00.004-04:00

In some of the reading that I have been doing over the last few weeks, time and again I have run into some of those small practices that have been introduced in the name of “political correctness” that nevertheless are in fact more misleading in the context of medieval scholarship than are the more traditional (and less politically correct) practices.

For example, it seems to be the rage in the last decade or two among “scholars” to stop using that “confining” and “patriarchal” form of dating in which those years before the birth of Christ are “B.C.” and those afterwards “A.D.” (“Anno Domini,” “In the year of the Lord”). Instead, they have instituted a new nomenclature: B.C.E. (“Before the Common Era”) and C.E. (“Common Era”) – never mind the fact that they still use the birth of Christ as the Wendungspunkt (turning point) from before the common era to the common era; rather than be intellectually honest about our system of dating, however, they insist on covering it up, lest we offend by our honesty.

When it comes to studying the Christian Middle Ages, however, it seems absolutely absurd to reject the traditional Christian dating system in favor of the new-fangled, “culturally neutral” option. The Middle Ages weren’t culturally neutral – everything was, in fact, dated according to “the year of the Lord”. Why, then, do we feel compelled to “correct” the very culture and people whom we study?

Likewise, I find it even more ridiculous that the author of an article I recently read on the scriptoria in a twelfth century monastery/abbey insisted that when copying the Holy Scriptures, the scribes were copying “the books of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.” Look in any Christian biblical manuscript of the twelfth century (or, for that matter, of the fifth or fifteenth centuries) and you will find that none of them contain “the Hebrew Bible” – rather, they contain the “libri testamenti novi et veteris”, the “books of the Old and New Testament”. In fact, to say that the nuns in that scriptorium were copying “the Hebrew Bible” is downright misleading, for they were copying the Latin scriptures (the Vulgate) more or less compiled by Jerome, which not only contains some books that are either different from or even absent from the Hebrew Bible, but also has the books in a different order from the Hebrew Bible.

Speaking of “the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament” might be appropriate in certain modern contexts, but it is most certainly not appropriate in the context of the twelfth century. Why, then, do scholars insist on such horribly anachronistic and misleading terms? Lest they be “politically incorrect”, I suppose.

Interal Assessment

2008-07-18T10:19:00.006-04:00

As much as I would like this experience to continue—though perhaps Münster’s weather this week is an indication that it should come to an end: rainy and cold (60’s Fahrenheit)—my days left in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar are fast dwindling. On Tuesday past, my neighbors at the dorm had a farewell barbecue for me (fortunately, the rain held off until later in the night); last night, Jennifer Burkart and her husband, Jörg, hosted me, along with the Hoyes and my friend Timon, at their house for another farewell dinner; this morning I delivered the last part of my presentation on my work to the Hildegard seminar I have particpated in this semester, which itself met today for the last time. All good things must come to an end, or so I’ve been told. Before my time here fully runs out on Tuesday morning when I board a flight back to the States, however, I would like to evaluate and assess my work this year from a more concrete perspective than my musings offered earlier this week.

The area of my study this year has been the apocalyptic writings of St. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), with a specific focus on the influence of her writings in the centuries after her death as they were promulgated by the redaction executed by Gebeno von Eberbach in the 1220’s. My work has had three general phases. In the first few months, I was prompted by the early realization that I was, in fact, ill-prepared to investigate anything to do with medieval apocalypticism. Thus, I spent the majority of my time familarizing myself with the background of Christian apocalyticism as it developed from its roots in Jewish apocalyptic before the time of Christ through the Middle Ages, with an ever greater focus on the 12th century. This in itself was a fascinating entry into a way of looking at the world very different from modern perspectives. Though I had caught glimpses of the medieval outlook in my work before, and though their strangeness and otherness have always been tempered by a certain familiarity born of being raised in the Anglo-Catholic cultural tradition, this was nevertheless the first time that I had stepped so fully into that world.

Fundamental to this worldview is, first, that it was built upon the faith and expectations of a Christian people—and this in a way that we can hardly imagine today, for the people of medieval Europe (or as they called it, Christendom) were all, to a man, baptized in what was considered a single, universal Catholic Church (with the notable exceptions of Jewish and Islamic enclaves, which can for this purpose nevertheless be dismissed because of their legal innability to actually participate in the socio-political climate of the time); see John Van Engen, “Faith as a Concept of Order in Medieval Christendom”, Religion in the History of the Medieval West (Variorum Collected Studies Series, Ashgate Publishing: Burlington, VT, 2004), pp. VI:19-67. Second, it is key that they saw the will of God as essential in the playing out of history—salvation history, as the theologians call it. It is the concept that the course of history is divinely ordained, from the creation in the beginning to its height in the Incarnation of the Son of God, to its final, glorious, and terrible end in the Last Judgment. And finally, it is this expection of the inevitable End of Time that marks indelibly both the hopes and the fears of the medieval thinker like Hildegard: though it is not for anyone to know the exact time of the Second Coming, it was never conceived of as an impossibily far-off event. Rather, the End of Time was imminently present to the medieval Christian: it could come at any moment, and thus its shadow hung over all aspects of the Christian’s life.

Having established myself in this strangely alluring mileau, I turned next to a close reading of Hildegard’s apocalyptic and prophetic writings as collected and organized by Gebeno, a process that involved cross-referencing with the original contexts of each of the extracted passages in his collection. Thus, I found myself reading at one point or another much of Hildegard’s corpus in the attempt to wrap my arms around the sometimes truly fantastic nature of her writing and thought.

Finally, while my original intention had been to focus on the reception of her apocalyptic writings after her death, I discovered that it would first be necessary to understand the place of these writings in her own thought. Thus, the the final phase of my work has focused primarily on understanding and assessing the immediate context of Hildegard’s apocalyptic thought. This culminated in a lengthy presentation I prepared for the seminar on the visionary and scientific aspects of Hildegard’s thought that I mentioned above. Two weeks ago, I led a close reading with the other members of the seminar of the apocalyptic vision of Hildegard’s first major work, Scivias (Bk. 3, Vis. 11); today, I presented the context and development of her more advanced apocalyptic program, first in her preaching and finally in the lengthy final vision of her last work, the Liber Divinorum Operum (Bk. 3, Vis. 5).

Thus, while I have had the opportunity to make only cursory glances into the reception of Hildegard’s works in the later middle ages (noting, but not deeply exploring, such areas as her inclusion in standard collections of prophecies next to Joachim of Fiore, St. Cyril, Merlin, and the Sibyl; or her influence in the reformist ministries of the Wycliffites in England; or again, even her application to “the rise and fall of those firebrands of Europe, the Jesuits”), I have nevertheless had a very fruitful year exploring and familiarizing myself with Hildegard’s thought both generally and specifically apocalyptic, a necessary precursor to future work on her later influence.

Furthermore, the benefits to my professional development as an academic have been significant. I have spent the past 10 months learning an extraordinary amount of new information about my specific fields, deepening both my background knowledge and my facility and focusing and refining my understanding and interest within them. Furthermore, I have developed significant personal relationships with experts in my field. Finally, by swallowing my pride and admitting that I was ignorant of many of the important research tools and methods in my field, I have been able to learn from those same experts a great deal of the methodology and practical procedures that will be inherent in any future success I may have as an academic. Thus, as I head to the University of Notre Dame this fall to begin my work in the Masters / Ph.D. program at their Medieval Institute, I hope that the work I have done this year will form the intellectual foundation for my further study.

While my academic work was the primary focus of my year in Germany, I also want to reflect on my experiences outside of the classroom setting that have made this year both memorable and formative. Earlier in the year, during the height of the U.S. primary elections, one of the local newspapers interviewed me on what it was like to be living so far away during this historic election process. The newspaper was given my name by members of the Deutsch-Amerikansiche Gesellschaft, one of a number of various organizations and clubs that I have joined. Through these organizations, I have been able to attend lectures on topics such as the personal history of Henry Kissinger and his brother, Walter; the differences in the American and German school systems; the roots and history of anti-Americanism in Germany; and the lessons that Germany could learn in fighting terrorism from the British and their successful defeat of the IRA in Northern Ireland. Finally, I had the great fortune to be invited to attend a 3-day graduate symposium hosted by the University of Münster in April on the reception of classical culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In the same vein as these activities, it is interesting to note my experinces from a civic perspective, and especially those that have clarified my understanding of myself as an American. Each time a German (or a person of another nationality) asks me about America, it forces me to step back and reevaluate and reconfirm my own understanding of the processes involved. Not only have such experiences clarified my own thinking, but I have also been able to give the people that I talk to a better and clearer understanding of our political process. My Fulbright experience has certainly added qualitatively to my understanding and appreciation for the diversity of modern-day worldviews and the interactions between them—in interesting comparison and contrast to my work within the medieval worldview—especially in regards to the relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Translating and relating my experiences as an American to the people with whom I interact on a daily basis has formed a principal crucible both for the alloying and also for the annealing of my own understanding of that experience.

Perhaps one of the most significant openings created by my interaction with Germans is the situation that results when they discover that I supported George W. Bush in 2004—I am usually the first American they have ever met that had done so. Very early on, I discovered that many Germans suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. politics that then leads to faulty, often tragic, conclusions. For example, the vast majority of Germans thought that both Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 had a mortal lock on the U.S. elections; thus, when George W. Bush won each time, they were flabbergasted and unable to comprehend the result. As a result, many of their misconceptions of America and American culture were reenforced rather than dispelled.

Thus, in being able to openly explain and discuss the nature of U.S. politics, especially from a conservative perspective that is rarely presented to them in person, I have been able to honestly dispel the myths that are often at the root of anti-American conceptions among Germans. The key feature of this exchange is that I am able to offer a clear explanation of the U.S. political climate without the filter of spin-machines and the media. In thus providing a unmediated and, as it were, “common person” relation of my American experience, I have found that much of the distrust and outright hatred is quickly turned into common understanding. This is especially true when I am able to draw comparisons between U.S. politics and German politics that appear more clearly to me than they often do the Germans. (The problem, for which they are certainly not at fault and for which there may be no easy solution, is that Germans almost always view the U.S. political process merely from an international, foreign policy-based point of view; in thus neglecting the far more significant role that domestic issues play in the U.S. political process, they draw inherently faulty conclusions.) I have discovered that the role that American citizens play as unofficial ambassadors is often no more complicated than the simple explanation of and encounter with an actual American whose experiences are, in most significant ways, far more authentic, and therefore far more appealing, than the filtered reports of the international media.

Finally, I want to offer a brief and abbreviated comment on my spiritual growth this year. Better, perhaps, than anything I could write in this post now would be to take a look back through my blog posts throughout the year that have had significant spiritual components: The Difficult Mix of Religion and Politics Parts I and II, Making Saints, Puer Natus Est Nobis, Rome: Rediscovering a Personal Humanity, Pro-Life Prayer in Münster, and The Abbey of St. Hildegard. But to offer one final notice that is more than just a list of links, I should note that the sometimes bewildering but always fascinating journey that has been my academic relationship with Hildegard has left me more intrigued than ever by the medieval components of my own personal religion, whether they be those that still live on or those that have been lost. The question to ponder—that is, to accompany me long after I have posted this—is whether what has been lost was rightly jettisoned, or whether there would be something to be gained be reacquainting ourselves (or even just myself) with such traditions.

The “Human Rights” of Chimpanzees

2008-07-14T05:54:00.005-04:00

According to a recent article in the New York Times, a committee of the Spanish parliament last month voted to extend “limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans,” in accordance with the precepts of the Great Ape Project. The proposal would make it illegal in Spain “to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture, including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden.”

Other than the scattered voices of protest raised by Spain’s Catholic bishops, it seems that nobody is bothered by the cognitive dissonance that would ensue—namely, that under Spanish law, apes would have greater “human rights” than a human fetus. This is a topic that I have been mulling over for several months now, ever since I saw some animal rights protesters here in Münster whose signs said (in German), “Murderers have names and addresses,” referring, of course, to people in the fur industry. These signs provoked me to two thoughts: first, how is it logically valid to use a term (“murderer”), traditionally predicated on the taking of a human life, in regard to the taking of a non-human life? And second, if we are willing therefore to extend the application of “murder” to the taking of non-human life, then where does that leave the abortion doctor?

While this is, of course, a bit of generalization, I think it could nevertheless be generally observed that most ardent animal rights activists (e.g. the members of PETA), if questioned, would proclaim that their politics to fall to the left of center and that they are, in fact, pro-choice. The problem, of course, is immediately apparent: such an advocacy would have us treat chimpanzees and gorillas as more human than a human fetus. I will grant that the status of a human fetus as a human life is in dispute (however philosophically ridiculous such a dispute may be); but we can all at least agree that a human fetus will, if brought to term, be a real, live human being, whereas an ape, for all that studies have demonstrated of its “intelligence”, does not have the potential to become a human being (I speak here in terms of single lifespans—the debate over the evolution of homo sapiens from an ape-like common ancestor I leave, for the moment, to the side).

The protests of the Catholic bishops in Spain have primarily centered on the fact that there is a clear and unambiguous ontological distinction between humans and all other animals, namely, that humans have an eternal soul. Despite the firm philosophical (to leave aside the theological) foundation upon which such a conviction rests, many in today’s relativistic society will deny such a conviction, claiming it to be based purely on “religious opinion”, since its actual foundation in the natural law (philosophy quite independent of any revealed or “religious” truth) they deny just a strongly (never mind that such a philosohpher as Plato postulated the eternity of the soul).

I will, therefore, leave aside such an argument, for as much fun as it is to point out to people that to deny the natural law is to invalidate their very arguments of denial, there is in this case the much more potent concept enunciated above: a human fetus is at the very least still an organism of the species homo sapiens, while any type of great ape, fetal or full grown, is not. And yet, this proposed Spanish law would extend greater “human” rights to members of a lesser species than it does to members of our own species.

This is the primary logical conclusion of the proposed law. The practical conclusion should, in fact, be even more troubling to abortion supporters, as I have indicated above. If we are legally to extend to non-humans the same protections from intentional killing (would it be “animalicide”, or will we simply stop caring about cognitive dissonance and call it “homicide”?) as we offer to humans, then where does that leave the abortion debate? Given that we would now acknowledge the right to life of non-humans (or, as some seem to want to call the apes, “near-humans”), will supporters of abortion continue to deny the right to life of a human fetus? I confess that I am utterly baffled, but not in the least surprised, by the “logic” that would lead the government of Spain to do such a thing.

The Bells

2008-07-13T08:13:00.004-04:00

As I enter the final full week of my time here in Germany, it is only natural that I should be found in a pensive and reflective mood; as I’ve already noted some weeks ago, I will certainly miss this town.Later this week I will put together a post that reflects more concretely on my work this year; today, I would like to address a question that has often been put to me in recent weeks, namely, what will I miss most about being in Germany?

I could offer some rather glib answer like, “The beer,” (though the quality of the beer is certainly one great perk of living here); or I could offer the academic’s answer of, “My experiences with the scholars with whom I have worked.”

The answer I would most like to offer, however, is the one I am least able to put into words. I have often, I think, remarked in correspondence on the intangible yet astonishingly real quality that the long history of Europe has imbedded in the very cobblestones and bricks and leaded glass windows of its civilization. It was a quality I first noticed in Rome almost three years ago: the reverence with which one is compelled to walk along byways and through buildings and ruins where so long a stretch of humanity has lived. I remarked at the time: “Here have trod men like Caesar and Augustus, [St.] Peter and Constantine, Michelangelo and Paganini, Garibaldi and Mussolini…[a] city of political, religious, and artistic preeminence…” As a dear friend of mine wrote to me earlier this year, Europe is a place “where the cities themselves are redolent of another time, a slower time, of people greater than oneself who have walked these paths.”

It is, in fact, a numinous quality that lives in the very fabric of these cities and towns where I have lived, the residual effects of hundreds of past generations of people who have lived and worked, have rejoiced and grieved, have been born and have died, all in this very same places. It is most noticeable in the churches, a fact that was explained to me once by one of the Jesuits at Boston College: that distinct feeling of immanence evoked by merely entering one of the old churches here (whether a great cathedral or small village parish) is, in fact, the lasting effect of the prayers of so many pilgrims before you, imbuing the very stones of an edifice with their hallowed echoes across and thus outside of time.

There are, of course, places in the United States that have started to take on this special patina that is not so much the gift of history as the gift of the people who have lived through history—I think in particular of some of the places I have visited in Boston, like Old South Church—but it is still a very rare thing, given that the oldest settlements in the United States predate the Peace of Westphalia by only a few decades: still new, at least by European standards.

There is, however, one very tangible signifier that I might take to denote the whole of this living historical sense that I shall miss so much; and though there are some places again where this tangible effect might be found in the New World, it is, nevertheless, something that it is so wholly ubiquitious in the Old World that its enduring presence is a foundational part of the everday pattern of life that I shall leave behind in little more than one week’s time: the bells. Mostly hung in the steeples and towers of the numerous churches that dot the landscape, they ring at all hours of the day, whether to mark the time regularly or to call the faithful more specially to whatever is the appointed service of the moment. Thus, they serve not only as keepers of the relentless march of time but also as special reminders throughout that march of its ultimate goal. Thus, I leave you today with their hearty, homewards call:

Finalé, Whoa Oh Oh Oh!

2008-06-26T09:02:00.008-04:00

In their most stress-inducing performance yet, the German national team nevertheless managed to squeak through by the skin of their teeth last night to defeat Turkey 3-2 in the semifinal of the Euro2008 Championship.It would seem I’ve taken up some of my father’s habits for the viewing of sporting events, namely, to stay on my feet during the most critical points of the game, often shaking my head at the smallest mistakes, my hands clenching and unclenching, lambasting “my” team for their amateur, so-obviously avoidable mistakes.Two principal factors, however, distinguish my viewing of the game from my father’s, namely, I’m often more vocal than he is in expressing my displeasure, and I voice my concerns in a mixture of two languages (much to the amusement of both the Americans and the Germans surrounding me in the basement of that particular church last night).

And the German team did not fail to provide me with plenty of material for my querulous outbursts; at the same time, however, they did not fail to provide moments of pure excellence to be rewarded by ecstatic jubilation. You see, the German team has had a penchant during this tournament for playing rather schizophrenically, and last night, they reached heretofore unseen levels of ups and downs. When they were on (as, for example, during the drive that led to Schweinsteiger’s goal in the 26th minute), they were a marvel to behold. When they were off, however, it became exceedingly painful.

Take, for example, Lehmann’s flubbing with the ball during the excruciating milliseconds that led to the first Turkish goal. Yet, just moments later, he would execute a spectacularly on-form save during a Turkish penalty kick. Perhaps we should say this much in his favor: he has been consistently inconsistent throughout the tournament.

Indeed, the German side was almost completely ashambles in terms of organization in the first half; only on account of moments of shining individual excellence did they hold Turkey to just one goal in the first half. While the German came out after the break showing better overall organization, their gains were belied by their often ludicrously poor passing and ball-handling; it seemed that all the Turks had to do was give Germany the ball for a few seconds before they would find it wonderfully back in their own possession on account of the German players’ gross incompetence. All in all, the Germans were completely outmatched and outplayed by the Turks. Nevertheless, it was those individual moments of brilliance that eventually won the day with Lahm’s last minute goal; indeed, the three total goals scored in the last eleven minutes of regulation (two by Germany and one by Turkey) were enough to cause near-exhaustion on the part of their already thoroughly-stressed fans.

There was, however, another external factor that further aggravated the already frayed nerves of the German fans: early in the second half, the satellite feed out of Basel being used by ZDF (Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen), the German broadcaster of the game, was lost. For several minutes, we were simply faced with this screen, announcing that fact and asking for our “patience”. Eventually, they managed to restore the audio, so that the announcers could provide radio-style commentary, which would have worked much better if the ZDF didn’t employ commentators whose ramblings are best described by the German word blöd—I’ve struggled to come up with a good translation, and my best approximation would be “vacuously dim-witted and imbecilic”. Thus, we were all greatly relieved only to have to suffer through several minutes of their vapid drivel before they succeeded in sharing the Swiss television feed; the slight gap, however, between the German announcers’ audio feed and the Swiss visuals led to even more comical notes, and we all were better off on those occasions throughout most of the rest of the game when the audio would cut back out.

After the heart-pounding last few minutes of the game finally played out and Germany did, in fact, pull through to win, it was time to make the now-familiar trek to join the chaos of celebration in Ludgeriplatz. Part of me was slightly anxious as to the possibility of clashes breaking out between the Germans and the Turks in the streets, for the second half of the match had been especially nasty (triggered, one can imagine, by the blatant foul committed against Lahm at the beginning of the second half that was never called by the refs—my complaints in my last post as to the lackluster performance of the officials in this tournament stand), but nothing of the sort materialized. For the most part, the Turks appear to have avoided the celebrations entirely (certainly the most prudent move), but those who did join in (for there are certainly many of the Turks who bear as great a love for Germany as they do for Turkey) were welcomed most warmly by the German fans—a sign, I think, of the continued good-naturedness and goodwill that seemed to take the world slightly by surprise two years ago when they hosted the World Cup.

Rather than try to explain the atmosphere of the revelry (a task at which I failed also in my last post), I will offer instead some video of it (for I did remember my camera this time).

The above video illustrates several “standard” features of these celebrations, including some of the favored chants (e.g. “Super Deutschland” and “Finalé”), as well as this interesting phenomenon of “Hinsetzen!”. When the chant begins to permeate through the crowd (often instigated by one of the apparent “leaders” high atop the statues of Ludgeriplatz), it is an indication for all simply to sit down (= “hinsetzen”) on the ground. Once all are seated (“all” being a relative term), the chant leader will get on his bullhorn and start doing call-and-response with the seated fans. Though not apparent in this particular video, it would seem that cheerleading is another one of those areas of American global cultural hegemony, for one of their favorite call-and-response forms is “Give me a __!” followed, of course, by “__!”. Unfortunately, what exactly that was supposed to spell was never clear to me; I think it fell into that broad category of cultural norms (which included many of the chants last night) that I am simply not aware of as a foreigner, and which are very difficult for me to pick up, especially in such an atmosphere of celebratory fervor. Anyway, the cheerleader would eventually lead the seated assembly into a cheer that results in everybody jumping up and down with their arms in the air.

Other notable features of last night’s celebration included the scaling of lamp posts and street signs by the impetuous; the use of (certainly illegal) fireworks and flares; and the disassembling of the construction barricades. This final act (which will explain certain features of the second video above) requires a bit of explanation. In what is certainly not the first example of poor bureaucratic timing, road crews have this week surrounded large swaths of Ludgeriplatz with barricades, behind which they have proceeded to do a lot of digging. Drunken, exuberant fans will, of course, merely take this opportunity to open up the barricades and let themselves into the excavations, which can be seen in the above video by the fact that a large swath of the crowd is standing at a lower ground level. Finally, as they ought to have been expected to have done, some of the brawnier (and certainly more drunk) young men decided that crowd surfing takes on an additional dimension when executed standing atop one of the barricades. Needless to say, I kept my feet firmly planted on the ground.

I was glad to be able to partake in last night’s festivities (which good-naturedly continued on the bus, though I felt a bit sorry for the Korean who was simply trying to read a book), especially since they are unlikely to be repeated on Sunday night after the final. Germany’s performance last night was quite sub-par, their win more a fluke than the result of good playing. They won’t be able to count on such a fluke in the final match, for both Spain and Russia (the two teams vying in the other semifinal) are too good for it.

Germany Won, Austria Zero

2008-06-17T07:18:00.007-04:00

It took twice as long as normal for the bus to get from the train station to my dorm last night, principally due to the streets and traffic circles full of football fans (yes, I will use the British term, simply because that's what it's called here: "Fußball"), their car horns blaring and bicycle bells ringing. (It was quite a sight especially to see the packs of bicycles, decked out to the nines in their red, yellow, and black).

Although it had been literally decades since the Austrian national team had beaten the Germans, it was nevertheless a bit of a stressful match last night, given Germany's dreadful performance last week against Croatia, coupled with the Austrians' last minute draw with Poland (due to a pretty ridiculous penalty call--just one of many examples of the lackluster performance of the referees in this year's Euro2008 Championship--"EM" in German, for "Euromeisterschaft"). It was do-or-die for both teams, as an outright win was required for either of them to advance to the quarterfinal.

The game opened slowly, though the Germans did seem to be on better form than they were during Thursday's loss to Croatia. Germany's goalie, Jens Lehmann, had been very off in that game, and though he had his rough moments last night, he came through when we needed him. The Austrian goalie, Jürgen Macho, moreover, was in top shape. Thus, while the Germans managed to pretty much stiffle the Austrian attack in the first half, they themselves didn't do much better.

Indeed, the highlight of the first half occurred, in fact, off the field. Toward the end of the period, the Austrian coach, Josef Hickersberger, came over to the German side of the pitch and joined the German coach, Joachim Löw, in complaining when the fourth official tried to reign in both coaches' penchant for wandering the sidelines. Eventually, the official was prompted to eject them both. Thus, while play continued on the pitch, the cameras followed the sullen Löw's march off into the VIP box to sit next to his midfielder, Bastian Schweinsteiger, who was out for the game because of a last-minute red card in the Croatia match (in my opinion, another example of the ref's bad form in this tournament). The cameras left him marching up the stairs off the pitch and returned to the action on the field, but just a few seconds later, they returned to Löw--to find him in animated conference with a particular VIP in the front row, namely, Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor (who was wearing a hideous orange-brown suit jacket that looked like it had been recycled from some 1970's upholstrey).

Thus, the first half ended with the match scoreless. Soon after the second half started, however, Germany finally put it together when team captain Michael Ballack put a textbook zinger into the upper right corner of the Austrian net to put the Germans ahead. (Note: Chancellor Merkel was even stiff and uptight when celebrating her national team's goal--she stood and politely clapped, but had quite the off-put expression on her face when one of her ministers kissed her on both cheeks in celebration.) Despite a few tense moments here and there in the second half (the ball spent entirely way too much time in the Austrians' possession and on the German side of the field), the Germans held out to win the match. Truth be told, however, the most amusing parts of the second half were the repeated cutaways to Löw, who seemed to resemble nothing more or less than a petulant adolescent (he seemed to slouch lower and lower in his seat with every camera cutaway).

One final note: I joined one of the other Americans (Lindsey) to watch the match at an "Evangelische Gemeinde" (protestant church) that was showing it on a big LCD projector in their parish hall (I had watched the match against Croatia there on Thursday with my friend Timon, who had heard about it from one of his friends who is a member of the parish). At the door to room, I noticed a small poster hanging on the wall with a quote from E.B. Jung with which I'd like to close this post (my translation):

God loves fans. Especially His. Therefore, this fan package includes season tickets for the best season of all. Only one questions remains: how long does ninety minutes of eternity last?

"Klingender Dom" Choir Concert

2008-06-16T09:17:00.005-04:00

On Saturday evening, I had the opportunity to attend a truly extraordinary choral concert at the St. Paulus Dom (Cathedral) here in Münster. The concert, called "Klingender Dom" (roughly "Cathedral Full of Sound") involved the Domchor (Cathedral Choir) of Münster, performing together with the Mädchen- and Knabenkanotreien am Dom (Girls' and Boys' Cathedral Choir) and the Kammerchor Rheine (the Chamber Choir from the town of Rheine), accompanied by the Musica fiata from Cologne.

What made this concert truly spectacular, however, was the logistical set-up of the choirs. The Münster Domchor sang from risers set up in front of the high altar, while the Kammerchor Rheine stood on the steps that lead to the Westchor of the Cathedral, that is, at the opposite end of the Cathedral from the Domchor. Finally, risers were set up in the central bay of the northern side aisle, where either the children's choirs or a smaller choir composed of assorted members of the various choirs sang; a platform for the conductor was placed in the very center of the nave so that all three choirs could see him at once.

Thus, Saturday evening was truly a three-dimensional musical experience, as the sounds of the choirs came literally from every direction (for maximum effect, they decided to forgo the use of the electronic sound system, allowing rather the natural acoustics of the building to take over--something I wish they would do more often). Furthermore, their selection of music from the late Renaissance and early Baroque was tailored to exemplify what is known as the "Venetian polychoral" style; from the inside cover of the program:

This term designates a musical practice that arose in the middle of the 15th century during the late Italian Renaissance. At that time, Venice was a leading center of innovation in the area of music. The polychoral style was chiefly developed for liturgical works that would envelop the space in which they were performed. This effect was achieved by splitting up the music between two or more part-ensembles (so-called "choirs") that stood at various around the performance space; sometimes, the choirs would take turns "answering" each other (a style called "antiphony"), and other times they would join together in the "Tutti" passages and so fill the entire space with music. Fra Ruffino d'Assisi, the Cathedral Kapellmeister in Padua, was one of the first to develop this practice, writing ca. 1510-20 settings of the Psalms for eight voices "a coro spezzato ", i.e. for a separated choir or two choirs of four voices each. While the practice of switching at each verse between one choir and another had roots in the Middle Ages,Fra Ruffino added the innovation of switching between individual words and phrases within each verse, thus inventing the Coro spezzato technique. The technique was further refined by Adam Willaert in his "Salmi spezzati" for eight voices in the 1550's.
Since Giovanni Gabrieli (Kapellmeister from 1586 to 1612 at the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice), this Venetian style expanded quickly throughout the rest of Europe. Heinrich Schütz was a student of Gabrieli from 1609 to 1612 and became one of the most important "Venetian" representatives in the German-speaking world. Other important composers of this style were GregorAichinger (Augsburg), Samuel Scheidt (Halle/Salle), and Jakobus Gallus , who was born in modern-day Slovenia and worked in Prague. In parallel to this, the polychoral style was developed in Spain by Tomas Luis de Victoria; in contrast to Gabrieli and Schütz (whose polychoral compositions were often homophonically arranged), de Victoria remained faithful to the old classical vocal polyphony of Palestrina.

This polychoral effect of filling the space with music on all sides, as well as bouncing the sound back and forth in antiphony between the choirs, was demonstrated immediately by the first string of works by Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672). As you can see from the following video of the performance of his "Nun Lob, mein Seel, den Herren", it keeps the ear moving just as much as my camera did:

Unfortunately, the omnidirectional microphone in my camera does a very poor job of recording the stereophonic quality of the competing choirs (while the central choir, composed of basses and tenors from the Domchor and altos and sopranos from the boys' and girls' choirs, sang their sections alone, the two other choirs would echo each other during their parts). After the tour-de-force performance of such works, they scaled it back a bit, bringing the focus entirely onto the Domchor as they performed Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina's (1525-1594) "Lauda Sion Salvatorem":

Other works performed in the first half of the concert included Jakobus Gallus' (1550-1591) "Ascendo ad patrem meum", Giovanni Gabrielli's Canzon VIII a 8 (Sonate e Canzoni) (an instrumental work), the Kyrie and Gloria from Hans Leo Hassler's (1564-1612) "Missa secunda", and Gregor Aichinger's (1564-1628) "Laudate Dominum". This was the last piece in which the children's choirs had a part, and one could notice that they were ready to go home by the end of it.

The second part of the program opened with two pieces by the English composer Henry Purcell (1659-1695), "Hear my prayer, O Lord" and "Lord, how long wilt Thou be angry", performed by the Kammerchor Rheine; this was followed by a soothing instrumental interlude of three pieces by Samuel Scheidt. Next came another fantastic performance of the polychoral style in Scheidt's Magnificat, which was sung by the two large choirs at either end of the cathedral, interspersed with two soloist tenors, one in that central bay of the northern side aisle and the other across from him in the central bay of the southern aisle. The final two pieces of the night also involved choirs and instruments dispersed throughout the cathedral: Gallus' "Halleluja, cantate Domino" and Gabrieli's "Plaudite".

Indeed, it was an evening of music that truly praised God (as, I believe, it was intended to), and demonstrated the profound musical genius of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Finally, I should note that (for me at least) it came as a welcome respite from the modern, atonal drivel that the organist at the cathedral seems to favor for the Sunday masses. Hopefully, he noted how much more pleasing Saturday's program was to the ear, indeed, how much more spiritually moving, than are his adventures into modern oddity.

Encounters with the Romantic abound

2008-06-11T07:13:00.004-04:00

It would seem that my time here in Germany has been especially abundant in encounters with that peculiar sensibility which is associated with the poetry and art of the Romantic era (roughly the latter part of the 18th century and the early part of the 19th century). For those not familiar with this aesthetic, it is perhaps best understood with reference to the music of Beethoven and Schubert; the poetry of Hölderlin, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (in Germany), and Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron (in Britain); and in the realm of visual arts, the paintings especially of Caspar Friedrich David.

To illustrate my encounters with this sensibility in my time here in Germany, I will name just two examples. First, there was the boat cruise on the Rhine that I took last month while visiting the Abbey of St. Hildegard (for which see my blog post on the subject). Then, there was an experience today before lunch that has served as the actual impetus of this writing.

The weather has spent this morning turning stormy, with banks of dark grey clouds rolling in, threatening to burst their rain upon us at any moment, blowing with a chill wind--a setting to make any romantically-minded poet wax rhapsodic about the awesome and sublime power of nature, overwhelming man on the one hand and yet ennobling him in his experience of the its sublimity on the other (the concept of sublimity was very important to the Romantic aesthetic). And as I was walking along past the cathedral on my way from the library to my office, I was stopped in my tracks to behold a young man on the sidewalk playing the most pristine music on a beautiful, full-sized harp. The sublimity of the indifferent, even cruel, power of nature, and that of the delicate, inspired music: the juxtaposition was breathtaking.

As I've only got six weeks left here, the encounter has left me to realize how much I really am going to miss this place.

The Abbey of St. Hildegard

2008-05-28T10:29:00.019-04:00

Since North Rhine/Westphalia is a Catholic part of Germany, the week before last, being Whitsunweek (the week of Pentecost), was an official university holiday—their version of a mid-semester break, I suppose. Although my class schedule is hardly strenuous, and my free-time that week hardly greater therefore than normal, I nevertheless decided to take the opportunity to visit for a few days the Benedictine Abbey of St. Hildegard in Eibingen, a small town near Rüdesheim, on the northern bank of the Rhine river west of Mainz.

Two years ago, on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday of 2006, I had the opportunity the first time to visit the Abbey, though, because of the impromptu nature of that first visit, I was forced to stay in a hostel in Mainz and commute each day. This time, I thought to plan far enough in advance to secure several days in the guest quarters of the Abbey.

Thus, I boarded a train that Tuesday morning, and though it would have been faster to take an express train to Frankfurt and then connect down the river, I chose a more scenic route that took me first to Koblenz, and after changing trains, directly along the river upstream to Rüdesheim. By mid-afternoon, I stood on the train platform of Rüdesheim, and began the half-hour walk up to the Abbey, situated on the hill above the town. After wending through the narrow, tourist-crowded streets of Rüdesheim, one eventually comes out above the town but below the Abbey, for between then stand some of the Abbey’s many acres of grapevines; this Abbey is one of the last of the monastic wineries in this, the heart of the Rhineland’s vineyards. The last time I visited, it was the cold of winter, the vines lying bare under a soft dusting of snow; now, their green foliage was bright and young, the first buds of the grape flowers just starting to open. Though the weather that afternoon was perfect, the burden of my pack as I trod the paths through the vines left me sufficiently drenched in sweat upon arrival at the Abbey’s gates to require a bit of a break before actually ringing the bell at the gatehouse.

Though standing in the tradition of the abbey founded by St. Hildegard herself in the 1140’s, the modern estate is not, in fact, the same foundation. The community of women at whose head Hildegard found herself in the 1140’s had grown up around St. Jutta of Sponheim, an anchoress at the Disibodenberg (Mount St. Disibod), a men’s foundation nearer to Mainz. Finally, have outgrown their quarters, and on the instructions of the voice of the “Living Light” that guided Hildegard throughout her life, she moved to separate her community from the monks and found a new house in the town of Bingen, on the southern bank of the Rhine, about fifteen miles downstream from the Disibodenberg. Though at first opposed by several fronts, Hildegard eventually prevailed, and by ca. 1150, she and her nuns were established at the Rupertsberg (Mount St. Rupert). Yet, the community continued to grow, and eventually, she was forced to establish a daughter house across the river in Eibingen. The main house of the Rupertsberg was, alas, destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War, and the Eibingen house heavily damaged, and what that war did not destroy, the Napoleonic secularization confiscated. Yet, the spirit of Hildegard’s work was not to be deterred: at the turn of the 20^th century, a group of nuns founded a new house in Eibingen, a few hundred meters up the slope from the foundations of the old daughter house; and thus, an Abbey of St. Hildegard has grown up to carry on the traditions of the “Sibyl of the Rhine”, more than eight hundred years after her death.

After checking in at the Gatehouse, I was given a set of keys and lead around to the guest dormitories; unlike some abbeys and cloisters that are completely open to visitors, much of the Abbey of St. Hildegard, being the private areas of the cloistered nuns, are closed off to the public, seen by none not in habit. After bidding the sister who showed me to my room farewell, I contentedly removed and unpacked my bag, and took stock of my quarters. While the decoration might be considered spartan or even severe by those used to finer accommodations, I found the simplicity of the room appealing. The bed, being not too comfortable, was nevertheless sufficient; the bathroom, while small, yet needn’t have been any larger; the desk, on the other hand, was large and the lighting good; and best of all, the rocker was most perfectly suited to the reading that I had planned.

Yet, though I had brought a certain stack of books (mostly on Hildegard) to wile away the time, I had not come to the Abbey with any intention of imprinting my own schedule upon the time. Rather, I was seeking to envelop myself in a rhythm not of my own fashioning but rather that of the life of the nuns—the rhythm of ora et labora, “pray and work”, as embodied in that rule laid down some fifteen centuries ago by the hand of St. Benedict. I was leaving the world, as it were, even if only for a few days, leaving behind the hustle and bustle of everyday life (perhaps best exemplified by that nexus that seems to rule so many of our lives today: the personal computer), and embracing that lifestyle of simple service to God.

Yet, despite the fact that it is a lifestyle of καιρός and not χρόνος, it is a life that is nevertheless regimented—but the beats of that regimen are the very essence of that special rhythm, for the Benedictine life is structured around the services of psalm-singing, readings, and prayers that make up the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours. During the regular days of the week (for on Sundays and high feasts they follow a more elaborate liturgical schedule), the nuns arise at half past five each morning to sing Matins; although it was an option, and each of the mornings the bells calling them to the church at the appointed hour did rouse me, I nevertheless, weak as I am, chose to go back to sleep for another hour. Thus, the beginning of my days at the Abbey was marked by the call to Lauds at 7:30, followed directly by the Holy Mass. Only after breaking our fast properly by supping of the Body of Christ did the guests gather in the guest refectory for breakfast. The next point around which the day was structured was the mid-day prayer at noon, for which the nuns that week had chosen to sing the office of Nones; lunch followed. The bells would toll again to call us to Vespers at 5:30 in the afternoon, directly after which we would take our dinner. Finally, at 7:20, we would gather once again in the church for the singing of Compline, followed directly by the singing of Vigils.

Furthermore, I should note that the nuns of this particular Abbey sing each of the hours, with their appointed psalms, in the same way that Hildegard’s companions did eight centuries before them—in the same language (Latin), and to the same chant. This was the rhythm of my days at the Abbey, and it was one that I was sorry to leave that Friday.

I finally had the chance to meet some of the other guests at dinner that night; over the simple fair of bread and butter, with some meats and cheeses and a pasta salad, we made each other’s acquaintance, chatting away in German about what it was that brought us to the Abbey. There was the woman seven months’ pregnant, taking a few days at the Abbey to recollect herself; the Protestant school teacher in her early thirties who had nevertheless maintained the practice since her university days of visiting the Abbey on vacations a few times each year; the petite Italian-German Catholic in her fifties who was an amateur expert in Hildegard’s herbal and natural medicines; the recently retired professor of music from Munich who had for years now served as a tutor for the nuns in their Gregorian chant; and then there was the slim, silent woman with red hair and glasses sitting at the end of the table. As we all settled back down with bowls of pudding at dessert, she finally piped up.

“I’m very sorry,” came her lilting Scottish voice, “and I don’t mean to be rude, but I can’t speak any German.”

“Not a problem; we’ll speak English for a bit, then,” I replied. A look of great relief spread across Joan’s face to discover a fellow English speak in the lot. Yet, not to be left out, several of the others joined in according to their various abilities.

After clearing our dishes to the wash cart and making our way out of the refectory back into the courtyard of the Abbey church, Joan and I were joined by Tina, the German school teacher, whose English was, in fact, as good or better than my German (she had lived in an international dorm during her days at the University of Heidelberg, where English was often the language held most in common by the many nationalities). Our trio quickly became routine, forming a company in which to share the experiences of the next few days.

Thus ran our days, structured around the anchor-points of the bells that summoned us to each of the hours, our threads woven sometimes singly, sometimes together, into the tapestry of both individual and common experience. In the mornings after breakfast would be a nice, long walk, on Wednesday alone and on Thursday with Joan and Tina, up and around the top of the valley ridge, through the vineyards and the pastures, the fields of rape and the sheep paddocks. Here, Joan and I pose beneath a wonderfully-shaped tree that reminded us strongly of an ent. Afterwards, I’d find a spot on a bench in the courtyard of the church, passing the time with the pages of one of my books.

After lunch, I’d escape from the bright mid-day sun for a few hours in the rocker in my room, my books again before my eyes (though sometimes, a bit of a nap would accompany them). Later in the afternoon, our trio would come together again for a bit of an excursion from our hill-top refuge; on Wednesday, it was a visit to the parish church of Eibingen. Built over the foundations of the old daughter-house of the Rupertsberg, the church contains the remains of St. Hildegard, encased in a bejeweled casket of silver and gold, glittering in its display case behind the main altar. The church, which was destroyed by fire in the 1930’s, has been rebuilt in a thoroughly modern fashion; propriety will keep me from saying anything more on its art and architecture.

Our Thursday afternoon excursion was a bit more expansive: passing through the town, we came to the banks of the Rhine itself and clambered aboard one of the boats that cruise up and down this famous stretch of the river between Mainz and Koblenz so charmingly known as the “Romantic Rhine”. Indeed, the romantic notions that in the 19^th century drove the revival of the castles that dot the landscape seemed to be with us a bit that day, too, for the weather turned briskly stormy, the dark clouds rolling in with peals of thunder and splashes of rain spitting down upon us, the wind whipping along fiercely—yet, as any good Romantic would, we braved the weather (which forsooth was not so fierce nor so wet as to actually hinder us), reverently experiencing the sublimity of nature’s power.

Our boat’s particular charge was to travel about two hours round trip downstream and back up, highlighting some of the inspiring, oft-romantic castles that are scattered high above the banks on this most scenic section of the majestic flood. Some of them, like the Castle Ehrenfels, were true medieval fortifications that lie today in ruins, victims of later, more brutal methods of war (built in the 12^th century, the Ehrenfels was destroyed in the seventeenth). Others, though their first foundations might be medieval (like the 9^th century nucleus of the Castle Reichenstein), were continually rebuilt and expanded, often taking their final forms in the 19^th century as nobles, no longer in need of fortifications, nevertheless romantically took up the mantles of their medieval forebears. You may notice, for example, the neo-gothic chapel attached to the side of the Castle Reichenstein; the building continues to be used to this day—as a bed and breakfast.

The mixture of our company—Tina, Joan, and me—and our respective faith backgrounds added an additional layer to the complexity of our interactions. Tina, a Protestant, has nevertheless been coming to the Abbey for periods of vacation for years now and has developed close relationships with several of the nuns (as well as with the Italian cook who, alas, recently retired). And yet, although she attends each of the liturgies around which the Benedictine experience is structured, she noted her dissatisfaction with the Catholic form of the Mass; the focus in Protestant worship is on the reading and interpreting of Scripture, an activity she found lacking in the Catholic service, for ferial (week-day) Masses in Germany rarely contain a homily (though the priest will often offer a few introductory remarks at the opening of the service either illuminating the day’s readings or explaining the significance of the saint whose day it is). Joan, who was raised Protestant on the religious frontiers of Scotland—where the lines between Protestants and Catholics first begin to be drawn up, though with a cordialness foreign to the rougher relations found in Northern Ireland—no longer identifies with a particular Christian denomination and says that, if pressed to give it a name, her spirituality would align most closely with what one might call Taoism. Thus, the call to hospitality that is a hallmark of the Benedictine way of life allows for the extraordinary crossing of paths of many faiths; and while both the nuns and I certainly pray that God might work His grace for the conversion of the hearts of those who meet Him in the Abbey’s quiet confines, the focus for all of us is not the strict work of active evangelization but rather the via passiva of an encounter with other humans who, despite their various backgrounds, nevertheless sense the restlessness common to all humanity: et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te (St. Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1).

Unfortunately, this quiet interlude—a restive pause for weary pilgrims—came all too soon to an end, and Friday came, a day of departures. Joan left shortly after breakfast to catch a train to Passau to visit her son, who lives and works there as a translator; her farewell promise was to call again at the Abbey, and by that return to have learned some German. Though I was not to depart until the afternoon, I had to pack up and remove my luggage to the office in the Gatehouse in the morning to allow for the cleaning and preparation of my room for its next guest. I spent most of the morning, therefore, in the Klosterladen (“Cloister Shop”), browsing its many wares. I bought some herbal tea (by which Joan swears) for my mother and grandmother; a bottle of wine for a friend in Münster; and various postcards and notecards bearing images of the Abbey and its surroundings, or of some of the more famous illuminations from the manuscripts of Hildegard’s works.

Finally, my attention turned to the bookshelves. I had been hoping that they might carry, in addition to the various translations into German, English, and Italian, the actual critical editions of the Latin texts of Hildegard’s works, published over the course of the last two decades in various volumes of the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, a many-volumed series, published by Turnhout in Brepols, that is making its way through all of the important works of the Latin Middle Ages—a feat last attempted by the indefatigable Abbé Migne in the 19^th century, whose Patrologia Latina, though comprised of often lackluster and even erroneous editions, is still all too often our best (or even only) collection of so many medieval texts. I was hoping to add the CCCM editions, so well-known in their orange cloth bindings, to my collection of books, though knowing full well that they come not cheap—indeed, no normal bookshop, nor any of the various Amazon websites, carry them; the only recourse is often to antiquarian websites where prices quickly exit any reasonable range for my pocketbook. Alas, however, the bookstore did not keep them in stock (however expensive they might have been, I was hoping to find them at least conveniently collected in one place). I therefore contented myself to spend a still-significant amount of money filling my bag with various other books of Hildegardiana in both English and German, acquisitions that I know will very quickly justify their expense in the course of my studies.

As much as I was clinging to my time at the Abbey, however, those last remaining hours soon slipped away, and I found myself bidding farewell to the remaining guests at lunch and, after a few more fleeting moments caught on a bench under the eves of the gatehouse, I hoisted my pack upon my shoulders, with a large bag of my recent acquisitions in my hand, and made my way slowly down the mountain. I stopped in for one last look at the parish church of Eibingen, to make my farewells to Hildegard’s bones (as I had done before my departure two years previously), and to light a few candles for my special intentions. Though many of my prayers from two years ago had been answered and the requested guidance given, I had both some left to reiterate (the same petitions that, I imagine, I shall offer, in one form or other, until the day I die), and others to set anew before God, through the special intercession of His saints.

As I sat gazing out of the train window as the Rhine river zipped by on the way back to Koblenz, I fell again into a contemplative mood, searching with those inner eyes and ears that Hildegard so often mentions for one of those keys to unlock the experiences of the past few days; or rather, as is so often the task of the scholar, to find that one thread that runs through the whole tapestry, tying the disparate parts of random experience into a whole, meaningful picture. What, in hindsight, could I discern of the underlying meaning and structure of my visit? Just as the chanting of the canonical hours was the framework upon which was built the course of each day in that religious life, so also I was looking for the essence of that skeleton that made sense out of the ephemeral flashes of momentary experience.

I will not pretend that I had any great insights on that train, or at least, none greater than the standard connections we make as we survey each day of our lives, that is, in our quotidian mental activity of making what sense we can of it all. My conclusions were, therefore, often no more than simply the rehashing either of threads that I have already enumerated in this post, or of the threads that, more constantly and consistently, accompany me on my daily journey, the why’s and whither’s and what for’s that make up the bulk of human discernment.

There was one rather more special insight, however, that I would like to share. In encountering the other guests at the Abbey, each of whom had their own special reason and relationship with Hildegard, I was reminded once more not only of the manifold aspects of her life and work, but also of the great impact that each of those roles has on those of us today who encounter the “Sibyl of the Rhine”. Over the course of the months, I had begun, I realized, to succumb to that danger that lurks in the path of any academic: the danger of becoming too ensconced in our Ivory Towers, reducing, as it were, the true complexity of the figures we study to the merely academic and scholarly. My approach to Hildegard is (1) scholarly and (2) specifically theological, eschatological, and apocalyptic; and even when I step back from my specialty to survey the other fields of Hildegardiana—the music, the natural medicine, the theology not specifically eschatological—I nevertheless remain in that first mode of viewing, namely, the scholarly.

Yet, as I was reminded in those few days at the Abbey, Hildegard is to many much more than merely a topic of academic interest. I can look specifically to the Italian-German Catholic woman, whom we “scholars” would term an “amateur”, that is, whose interest in Hildegard is entirely practical. She studies Hildegard, spends time at Hildegard’s abbey, and reads Hildegard’s works, not because that’s her job, but because she finds meaning for her own life in Hildegard’s. Hildegard’s writings on natural medicine are not merely important as documents in the history of science; for her, they become actual tools in regulating the ailments of her own body. Likewise, Hildegard’s theology is not merely a collection of theoretical notions; rather, this woman has actually allowed her own spiritual life to be taught by Hildegard’s teachings. My time at the Abbey served as a great reminder to me that the vitality of Hildegard’s personality in our age is the product not of our scholarly researches but of actual people and their real encounters with an extraordinary woman of an age gone by. It is thus for us, the academics, not merely to write our books and give our lectures for the sake of other academics, but to realize that our profession, like all human activities, is meant to be for the advancement of humanity—and that such advancement is not merely an abstract goal of progress, but the concrete reality of people who live their lives in the here and now, perhaps weighed down by the weariness of day-to-day drudgery, yet also lifted up by the simple joys of day-to-day life, well-lived. Though we may use the language of us-versus-them, it is for us to recognize that, if we build the Ivory Tower and shut the world out, we but stifle and extinguish the vitality of our work. Let us, therefore, take as our example the Benedictine model: though we have our cloistered profession in which we trade in a commodity seemingly far removed from the lives of those outside the academic community, we must yet be open and, indeed, actively inviting to them; our principle should not be to close ourselves up, but to lay open the doors and take in our guests, providing them, in our own peculiar way, with refreshment in their lives—for it is the outsiders to our community who, in fact, provide our community with its own greatest rejuvenation.

In Festo Corporis Christi

2008-05-23T08:37:00.013-04:00

Some of you may recall the superlative-laced description I sent out as an email two years ago of the Corpus Christi procession held in the little town of Eichstätt in Bavaria, where I was studying at the time. Though I was led to believe then that the glittering performance, attended by the whole town, was an especially heightened peculiarity of the deep Catholic traditions in that town (called, by many, the “most Catholic town in Germany”), I discovered yesterday that it is rather a custom among all of the (what Anglicans would call “high church”) Roman Catholics in Germany.

Münster being a far larger city than Eichstätt, there were multiple celebrations of the Feast of Corpus Christi yesterday morning; I chose, as has been my wont throughout my time here, to join the high festivities of the Pontifical Mass at the Cathedral, which began at 8:30. As was the case in Bavaria, here also the Mass was specially attended by the honor guards of the various Societies, Sisterhoods and Brotherhoods, Guilds and Clubs of every shape and kind, all dressed to their German nines and with banners and flags and penants unfurled; the men of these guards (each society represented by their banner bearer and two attendants, girded with sabers and all) stood at attention throughout the Mass at either side of the Sanctuary, their banners dipping only to reverence the Eucharist at the Consecration and Communion.

So, at the end of the Mass, the procession began to form, as great (indeed greater in some respects) as that long parade in Eichstätt. It was led, as is customary, by the Crucifer, bearing a spectacularly gilded late-medieval processional Cross, and his attendants; these were followed by the Honor Guards and then the Cathedral Choir; next came the acolytes and then the nuns of the Klarissenkonvent (a convent specially attached to the Cathedral); these were followed by the extra clergy in attendence and then the Canons of the Cathedral Chapter, distinguished by their purple scapulars. Finally came the Thurifer leading the Sacred Ministers, in the midst of whom, decked out in cope and humeral veil, came the Bishop carrying the monstrance, his attendants and chaplain in tow. These then were followed, first by the resident Knights of Malta, and finally by the congregation itself. The following is a video of the great train as it passed me in the pew [NB: I apologize for my singing in the first part of the video; I’ve been struck with quite the head cold for the past few days; needless to say, once I realized my horrible inability to sing on key with such an impediment, I ceased my mangling of the tune]:

Soon after the Knights of Malta passed, we joined the great throng and passed slowly out the north portal of the Cathedral, singing hymns as we went (the entire order of the procession, including all of the hymns, is printed in a special 35-page booklet). While two years ago I had thought that the red-and-gold hangings that adorned the procession route were an homage to the heraldic colors of the town of Eichstätt, I realize now that they are, in fact, an intergral part of the liturgy of the procession, for our route yesterday was also lined with red and gold banners.

We made our way around the north side of the Cathedral, and finally came to a stop at the first of the processional altars, erected outside north side of the Cathedral’s apse. The Bishop settled the Holy Body in its monstrance upon the altar, and we commenced the ritual that was to be repeated at each of the three succeeding altars. First, the Deacon would read a passage from the Gospel detailing in some way the theology of the Eucharist and of the Incarnation (the Gospel at the fourth and final altar being the first fourteen verses of the Gospel of St. John, for example). Then, the Cathedral Choir would sing one of the traditional Latin Hymns appointed for the Corpus Christi procession; next, a cantor would sing the intercessions, to which the assembly would respond, first with “Erbarme dich unser” (“Have mercy on us”) after each call to Christ, and then with “Wir bitten dich, erhöre uns” (“We beseech thee to hear us”) after each petition. Finally, the Celebrant would cense the monstrance, and then, taking it up in his hands from the Deacon, offer the benediction. Finally, the procession would reform, and, singing still more hymns, move to the next altar.

The second altar was only a short way from the first, and it was there that I captured the following video of the Choir singing the Hymn:

The words of the hymn, composed by St. Thomas Aquinas, can be found, together with translation, here (the Choir only sang verses 1-2 and 6.)

After the rituals of Gospel, Hymn, Intercessions, and Blessing were repeated, we proceeded to the third altar, and then again to the fourth. At last, we returned, accompanied by the peals of the Cathedral’s bells in fanfare, to the Cathedral, where the festivities were to conclude. First, we sang antiphonally with the Choir the Te Deum, the congregation singing their parts according to the traditional chant, and the Choir their parts in beautiful polyphony. Finally, we sang the traditional Tantum ergo, and, after a final benediction, a rousing final hymn, “Ein Haus voll Glorie schauet” (“Behold, a house of glory full”) by Joseph Mohr (of “Silent Night” fame”), a tune that I’m almost certain I’ve sung in English before, though at the moment, I can’t seem to place the words.

Finally, I should note that, though the largest celebration seemed to belong to the Cathedral, other parishes had their own festivities scheduled. The Pfarrgemeinde of the Innenstadt, that is, the Parish of the inner-city, comprising the congregations of the Churches of St. Ludgerus, St. Lambertus, St. Aegidius, and St. Martin, held their High Mass at the Martinikirche at 9 o’clock, and then went in procession to altars at each of the other churches of the parish, as well as to an altar set up along the Prinzipalmarkt (Münster’s “Main Street” that leads to the Lambertikirche); one could hear the singing of their procession along the Prinzipalmarkt at the same time as the Cathedral’s procession was turning from its final altar back to the Cathedral. In fact, I caught up with their procession after I left the Cathedral, and discovered that their canopium was even more lavish than the Cathedral’s!

Finally, I would like to offer a note to my faithful readers, to whom I have promised a report (with photos!) of my time last week spent at the Abbey of St. Hildegard. I have not forgotten my promise, but have found myself otherwise occupied; I shall nevertheless attempt to get such a report composed and posted in the coming days—despite the chronological disorder so ensured by its posting after this current report.

The German Pope and His Visit to America

2008-04-23T05:11:00.006-04:00

As Pope Benedict XVI visited the United States last week, I followed the news of his trip eagerly through the American online press. I was surprised, however, to see the interest taken in his trip by the Germans I encounter in my daily life. During each of the six days of the Pope’s trip, one of the prayer intentions at Mass here was for his safety and for the efficacy of his pastoral visit to the United States. This was the first time (that I could remember) that a specific Mass intention was added during one of the Pontiff’s international trips.

Although that part of his visit that was the most astounding for me as an American (and this resonated surely in the American press) was his candid and repeated focus on the shameful tragedy of the sexual abuse scandal that erupted at the beginning of this decade, the German attention was more circumspect. It quickly became clear to me that the people here recognized that the pastoral importance and, indeed, necessity of the Pope’s mission—the prayers offered at Mass sought especially for the pastoral healing of the American flock; but the trigger of the American church’s crisis of faith, namely, the sexual abuse scandal, was not acknowledged as such. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to determine whether this results from a lack of awareness of the specific causes of the current American malady, or rather from a reticence to speak of the admittedly shameful specifics.

A further issue I have yet to fully understand is the impetus driving the Germans to take such an interest in this visit. Is it merely a by-product of the heightened interest they take in the papacy of the German Shepherd? Yet, I have seen a much keener attention to the Pope’s visit to the United States than to his other actions over the last half-year. Is it, rather, that Germans, and especially German Catholics (?), take a more pointed interest in the United States because of the intimate relationship between our two countries since the end of the Second World War?

Whatever the cause, it warmed my heart dearly this morning to find the following picture on the front page of the latest issue of Kirche+Leben (“Church+Life”), the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Münster:

Here is a translation of the article that accompanied the photo:

“Like the President: Cheers for the Pope”

It is no secret that Benedict XVI loves Italian, French, German, and of course Latin, but has no particularly intensive regard for the English language. These students from the Pope John Paul II High School in Nashville tried to accommodate the Pope in that regard when he visited Washington and New York last week: they waited for him with victory signs, thumbs-up, joyful faces, and signs in heartfelt, if not also completely correct, German. About 75 percent of Catholics and the majority of non-Catholics have a positive opinion of Benedict XVI, although 80 percent say that they “don’t know much” about him. Kirche+Leben will give a complete report of the Pope’s trip to the U.S. in the next issue.

[N.B. After following the Pope’s trip last week, I have to disagree with this newspaper’s account of his English; perhaps it was at one time true (I remember when I was in Rome two and half years ago, his English was almost incomprehensibly accented), but the Pope has clearly demonstrated that he has worked hard to improve his English, especially in preparation for his recent trip. Though I am still amused by his pronunciation of “country” as “cown-tree”.

Also, as to the “not completely correct” German: the signs should read “Wilkommen Heiliger Vater”.]

Pro-Life Prayer in Münster

2008-03-09T11:44:00.011-04:00

Yesterday afternoon, I participated in a Gebetszug or prayer procession here in Münster called “1000 Crosses for Life”. Organized by Euro Pro Life (European Voice of the Unborn Children: “Protect our Life”), it was one in a series of prayer marches that have been held by the organization throughout Europe. Founded a year and half ago, the organizers travel from country to country, a large white van in tow that contains one thousand white crosses, each about a meter tall and made of 1x4’s, weighing about ten pounds each. Although I would estimate only about three hundred people showed up for yesterday’s march, each of us bore a cross in hand to form what the organizers called “a moving cemetery” of the innocents. Although the organization is international, it was founded in Germany, and the inspiration for the 1,000 crosses comes from the fact that, on average, 1,000 unborn children die in abortion clinics in Germany each day.

The mustering of the march began in front of the Aegidiikirche at around half past three, and by shortly before four o’clock, we were formed in three single-file columns, each with a cross on our shoulders and led by an icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe (afterwards, the head of the march explained that, although the event was ecumenical, this icon was chosen because it represents the pregnant Mary praying to her Son—thus making her the ideal protectress of the unborn). We were instructed not to engage in conversation with passersby (though there were certain young people whose task it was to hand out explanatory leaflets), for this was primarily a time for prayer.

We set out singing the hymn “O komm herab, du Heiliger Geist” (“O come upon us, Thou Holy Ghost”), aided by the excellent male and female voices that were broadcast over a series of loudspeakers distributed throughout the train. After this hymn, we recited the “Way of the Blood of Christ”; this devotion involves seven stations (1: The Lord shed His Blood at His Circumcision; 2: The Lord shed His Blood in Prayer on the Mount of Olives; 3: The Lord shed His Blood at the Scourging at the Pillar; 4: The Lord shed His Blood at the Crowning of Thorns; 5: The Lord shed His Blood on the Way of the Cross; 6: The Lord shed His Blood at His Crucifixion; 7: The Lord shed His Blood and Water when His Side was Pierced), each of which begins with a passage from scripture and a meditation. The first six stations are followed by the recitation five times of the Lord’s Prayer, while the last station has four “Our Fathers”: the 34 total “Our Fathers” represent the thirty-three years of Christ’s life and the one year of His unborn life in Mary’s womb. Finally, each station was closed by the “Glory be”, sung in German to the tune of “Amazing Grace”. As we finished this devotion, we arrived in front of the Lambertikirche, where we halted (above photo). A meditation on the work of Blessed Clemens August Kardinal von Galen was read over the loudspeakers; Bl. Clemens August was the Bishop of Münster from 1933 until his death in 1946, and was beatified under Pope John Paul II. His motto, Nec laudibus nec timore (“Neither because of praises nor because of fear”), exemplified his stand against the oppression of the Nazis in his own time, and has become a watchword for the stand against the injustice of abortion today.

As we continued from the Lambertikirche, we sang two antiphons, Laudate omnes gentes, laudate Dominum (Psalm 117: “O praise the Lord, all ye nations”) and Misericordias Domini in aeterno cantabo (Psalm 89(88): “My song shall be always of the mercy of the Lord”); and we concluded with the Chaplet of Divine Mercy and a reprise of “O komm herab, du Heiliger Geist”. The entire procession took about two hours, winding its way throughout Münster and stopping up traffic at very points along the way. Most bystanders watched in respectful silence; some even joined us in reciting the Lord’s Prayer. A few teenagers and twenty-somethings either laughed at us or yelled at us about individual rights (the latter charge came from a group of punked-out homeless kids who routinely solicit money along the city’s streets).

Perhaps the most moving part of the experience, for me at least, was the little old lady who walked beside me the whole way. Though she must be in her seventies, she carted that cross the entire two hours, shuffling along with the rest of us, and never yielding to the oft-repeated offers to lighten her load. If the stiffness and aches in my limbs that greeted me when I awoke this morning are any indication, she truly bore her cross for Christ and for the unborn children yesterday.

At the end of the procession, which returned to the Aegidiikirche, the head organizer gave a short speech describing the efforts the group have undertaken in the past year, and inviting us to join them in their upcoming prayer marches throughout Europe. In addition to the events in Germany and Poland—yesterday’s march was cosponsored by “Adler”, a German-Polish youth group; I would estimate that up to a third of the marchers were of mixed stock, enough, at least, that one of the decades of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy was said in Polish—they have held marches in the Czech Republic and in Britain.

The lead organizer was especially keen to describe the march in London this past December 30, held to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the legalization of abortion in Great Britain. He traveled to London a few days before Christmas to make the final preparations, in which he was being aided by an English group called the Helpers of the Unborn Infants. They wanted to end the procession in front of Westminster Abbey; since they needed the cooperation of the Anglican Church for this, he needed to meet with the Dean of the Abbey. To the astonishment of all, within five minutes of arriving at the Abbey, he was in the Dean’s office being offered the complete cooperation of the Church of England. The Dean suggested that they finish the procession at the Memorial of the Innocents within the Abbey itself; when the chief organizer demurred, since this would require the hundreds of people to squeeze through the small side doors of the Abbey, the Dean had a ready solution. Thus, when the prayer march arrived at the Abbey on December 30, the uniformed guards of the Abbey solemnly opened its great front portal doors, the same doors through which Queen Elizabeth passed on the way to her coronation.

The power of this pro-life movement, however, far surpasses the abortion debate. After the march in London, an elderly English chap approached the German organizer (“he look a bit like Winston Churchill”) to express his thanks. “I’ve held a deep hatred against the Germans for a very long time,” the Englishman said. “They did some horrible things to me and to my family in the war. But today, during this march, that all changed. The hate melted away.” The Englishman then embraced the German, who was speechless and blurry-eyed.

If this movement, founded upon the Christ’s love for all humanity, including the unborn, can bring relief to the deep-seated prejudices of old, what power has it not? Dare we to hope that in this movement, the Orangemen and the Catholics in Northern Ireland might finally be able to come together in common to support the innocent lives of unborn children? Perhaps thus we can bring also the Serbs and Croats together?

A Religion of Peace?

2008-03-07T04:23:00.001-05:00

Yesterday in Jerusalem, an Islamic suicide terrorist walked into the library of the Mercaz Harav seminary, which was full of young Jewish men holding a celebratory feast in anticipation of the upcoming Jewish holiday of Purim, and proceeded to spray the room with bullets. As students ran to take cover behind tables and bookshelves, the gunman hunted them down, killing each student with a shot to the head at close range. Before the terrorist was brought down by a reserve paratrooper living next to the seminary, eight Israelis lay dead and another eight were seriously wounded. For those of you familiar with the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, nine years ago, the similarities are eerie: this, indeed, was Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Jerusalem.

I applaud Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for quickly condemning the massacre, and I know that many, many Muslims, including some whom I count my friends, are grieved at the continued, senseless loss of life. Yet, I am both astonished and horrified to note that President Abbas’ reaction was not shared by the inhabitants of Gaza, where news of the seminary killing was greeted with celebratory gunfire, cars honking their horns, and people passing out candy in the streets.

Islam, I am told, is supposed to be a religion of peace; indeed, the very root meaning of the word “Islam” is “peace”. I have met many devout Muslims in the United States and here in Europe who have expressed to me their abject horror and frustration that their faith has been hijacked by extremists to promulgate such vile, bloody, and inhuman acts as yesterday’s massacre.

Yet, these truly peace-loving Muslims whom I have met must, I fear, be counted themselves a minority among their religious brethren, for this is neither the first time, nor shall it be, I fear, the last when the tragic, truly evil murder of innocent human beings has been met in Muslim communities around the world with joy and celebration. No man’s death is occasion to celebrate, for every death is an evil, to be mourned either for the senseless loss of an innocent life or for that the death of a guilty man was made necessary in the first place.

I am forced, therefore, to ask this: can Islam today truly claim to be a religion of peace when so many of its followers rejoice at such evil? I wish it were not so; I wish with all my heart that every Muslim on this earth embraced the peaceful tenets of his or her religion and shunned any pretense to unholy violence in the name of God. Let us all, therefore, pray to God that He might effect a change in the hearts of men; that He might blot out with His Holy Light that restless shadow that overcasts their hearts and encourages them to revel in the evils of destruction; that he might bring peace to our time so that we might all greet one another in peace in His Holy Name, recognizing His image in each other, and embracing humanity according to the precepts of His Love.

On the Habit of Profligate Swearing

2008-03-06T05:27:00.006-05:00

Practically all of us either know or have met someone who engages in the practice of profligate swearing. In their everyday speech, such people can hardly finish half a phrase, let alone a complete sentence, without throwing in the “f-bomb” or one of its many derivatives. It is a “colloquial” style that, though abhorred by many, is often excused as relatively harmless, or worse, as the birthright of a certain class of citizens (in similar fashion is claimed exclusively to black Americans the birthright of using the “n-word” in everyday speech, a use whose proliferation now often rivals that of the “f-word”). It has become such a nuisance that the town of South Pasadena, California, has declared this week to be “No Cussing Week”.

These habits are often claimed to be either a demonstration of modernity freeing itself from the shackles of old-fashioned prudery (by those who excuse it); or again, an example of just how far not only our morals but also our respect for the English language (“the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible,” as Henry Higgins puts it) have fallen—this latter the claim of those who would see such profligacy of basest language banished. Yet, while reading yesterday John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (his spiritual autobiography, published in 1666), I was struck by how modern one of his experiences seemed (paragraphs 26-28):

Now therefore I went on in sin with great greediness of mind, still grudging that I could not be so satisfied with it as I would: this did continue with me about a moneth, or more. But one day, as I was standing at a Neighbours Shop-window, and there cursing and swearing, and playing the Mad-man, after my wonted manner, there sate within the woman of the house, and heard me; who, though she was a very loose and ungodly Wretch, yet protested that I swore and cursed at the most fearful rate, that she was made to tremble to hear me; And told me further, That I was the ungodliest Fellow for swearing that ever she heard in all her life; and that I, by thus doing, was able to spoile all the Youth in a whole Town, if they came but in my company.

At this reproof I was silenced, and put to secret shame; and that too, as I thought, before the God of Heaven: wherefore, while I stood there, and hanging down my head, I wished with all my heart that I might be a little childe again, that my Father might learn me to speak without this wicked way of swearing: for, thought I, I am so accustomed to it, that it is but in vain for me to think of a reformation, for I thought it could never be.

But how it came to pass I know not, I did from this time forward so leave my swearing, that it was a great wonder to my self to observe it; and whereas before I knew not how to speak unless I put an Oath before, and another behind, to make my words have authority, now, I could, without it, speak better, and with more pleasantness then ever I could before: all this while I knew not Jesus Christ, neither did I leave my sports and play.

I am hardly the first person ever to note that one of the qualities of great literature is its ability to endure and remain pertinent to the lives of its readers, even so many centuries after its composition. John Bunyan’s Puritan mindsight might seem, at first glance, so wholly foreign to modernity as to render his writings practically useless to the modern reader; and yet, one stumbles upon a passage like this and is forced but to recall the words of that Preacher some few dozens of centuries ago: “There is no new thing under the sun.”

A Question on the Source of a Cultural Reference

2008-03-05T08:03:00.005-05:00

In commenting on the impact of yesterday's primary election results in the United States, GOP strategist and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos noted the following:

Tomorrow, [John McCain] can get started. He'll have the [Republican National Committee] behind him. He'll have a broad base of financial support. It's a big step. Meanwhile, it looks like the Democrats are engaged in the land war across Russia, so he's got a big advantage now.

My question is this: in using the metaphor of a "land war across Russia", what is the direct background of Castellanos' cultural reference? I would argue that the final background is, indeed, the historical notion that a land war in Russia is about the hardest and most grueling thing a European army can attempt. However, is this also the direct background behind Castellanos' remark? Or is the direct cultural reference, which itself then refers to the historical background, Vizzini's remark in The Princess Bride that the most famous of the classic blunders "is never get involved in a land war in Asia"?

Snow at last!

2008-03-05T07:55:00.003-05:00

Throughout the past few months of winter, I have said repeatedly on this blog and in emails and other communications with many people, that it does not snow in Münster; it rains (often), sometimes this rain turns to sleet, and when temperatures drop below freezing, we often get frosts.

Last night, for the first time all winter, it did, however, snow. As I was walking to the train station to catch the train home, what began as rain turned into sleet; and then, as I glanced down at my coat while waiting for a traffic signal to change, I noticed that what had been dark, wet blotches had turned, incredibly and wonderfully, into flakes of white. A closer examination confirmed it: this was snow.

Thus, although it neither stuck nor accumulated, for approximately one hour last evening, it snowed in Münster. I had high hopes that we might awake this morning to at least some snow upon the ground; but alas, we experienced only another heavy frost. I must note with sorrow that this frost weighed heavy on the many wildflowers and bulb flowers that had, due to the recent weeks of warmer weather, begun to bloom. I set my hopes now that these flowers might, with the beautiful sunlight that has flooded us today, yet come back and continue to bloom.

Harry Potter and the Girl Who Takes Latin

2008-02-24T10:41:00.004-05:00

According to a recent story on MTV's website, a study submitted to the Journal of General Psychology by psychology professor Dr. Jeffrey Rudski and two of his undergrad students at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, shows that some 10% of Harry Potter fans exhibit symptoms of addiction to, and subsequent withdrawal from, Harry Potter. While this may come as no surprise to many of us who have followed the adventures of the Boy Who Lived for many years, what interests me is Dr. Rudski’s rationale for studying psychological pathologies of the followers of the Harry Potter a cultural phenomenon:

It was a toss-up for him between studying people's reaction to the end of "The Sopranos" and the end of Harry Potter, but ultimately, Rudski chose the boy wizard because his 15-year-old daughter is a fan — well, he calls her an addict but says her addiction has positive outlets. "She's picked up guitar because she wants to be in a wizard-rock band," he said. "She's studying Latin because she wants to better understand J.K. Rowling's choices of names for her characters. She started reading Stephen King and John Irving because they spoke with Rowling at Radio City two summers ago." If that's being an addict, he's down with it.

As some of you may know, more than five years ago, I wrote my high school senior thesis on “Classical References, Linguistic and Literary, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter”; the central thesis of the paper involved exploring and evaluating Rowling’s reasons for using classical languages, mythology, and history. I argued that her use of Latin could, in fact, spur a renewed interest in the Classics. It would seem that Dr. Rudski’s daughter has vindicated my thesis.

The General Plan

2008-02-22T09:14:00.008-05:00

It recently occurred to me that readers of this blog, whatever they may think of it, might be rather in the dark as to what exactly I’m doing this year in Germany. In my infinite wisdom, I have failed to write a post on the subject, despite the fact that I am already half-way through the ten-month Fulbright period. So to paraphrase the inimitable Sam Seaborne, let’s forget about the fact that I’m coming a little late to the party and embrace the idea that I showed up at all. Some of you will already be familiar with my work, and I would advise you not to waste your time reading further; this post is intended for the general reader who has not experienced first hand the trials and tribulations of the process that is applying for a Fulbright Grant. Thus, here follows the text of my Fulbright Project Statement as written more than a year ago:

“The 20th century has seen a revival of interest in many little-known medieval authors, especially in previously overlooked female writers. The journey of these authors from their time through to ours can be fascinating, and a study of the reception of their works through time can reveal much about each successive age.

One of the first major female authors to enjoy a resurgence of interest and scholarship was Hildegard von Bingen, an abbess and writer of the 12th century. Herbalists have embraced her for her works on natural medicine and cures, while New Age spirituality has found expression in the soaring melodies of her chant. Feminist movements have come to regard her as a monument to the power of the feminine in an age of misogyny. I myself discovered Hildegard one afternoon the summer after my sophomore year in college, while, working under an Advanced Study Grant from Boston College, I set about an introductory study of Medieval Latin literature and paleography.

In her own time, Hildegard was also well known as a visionary and prophet. She became a figure of wide renown after her powers were certified by Pope Eugenius III and she published in 1151 the first volume, Scivias, of her massive visionary trilogy. She corresponded with popes, kings, and even with Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. At the age of 60, remarkably for a woman of that time, she embarked on the first of four preaching journeys.

For the great stretch of history between her death in 1179 and her modern rediscovery, Hildegard continued to enjoy a wide reputation as a visionary whose apocalyptic writings have been held to prophesy a number of subsequent events: the rise of the mendicant orders and their battles with the papacy over apostolic poverty; the Protestant Reformation; the rise (and fall) of those firebrands of Europe, the Jesuits; and in every age generally, the coming of the Antichrist.

This reputation as primarily a visionary prophet owes much to the fact that for most of that time, Hildegard’s works were not known in the fullness of the originals, but through a redaction of her prophetic and apocalyptic writings executed in the 1220’s by the Cistercian prior Gebeno von Eberbach. In his Speculum futurorum temporum or Pentachronon Gebeno collected various prophetic excerpts from two of Hildegard’s three large visionary volumes, Scivias and Liber divinorum operum, and from her correspondence. In addition to collecting various prophecies, Gebeno provided a commentary on them and, more important, on Hildegard as a prophet of her age and of the times to come.

Gebeno’s own times were ones of religious and social upheaval in Europe. The previous decade had seen the rise of two great new religious orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans; the Fourth Lateran Council, which was a watershed mark in the definition of the medieval church; and the papacy of Innocent III, whose attempts to expand the worldly authority of the Church brought him into deep conflict with the secular leanings of the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich II (whom many would identify with the Antichrist). The following decade would see the beginning of the reign of St. Louis IX in France and the continued fracture between the Church and the Empire. It was also a time of unrest among the peasants, who, after the experience in the previous century of the heretical Cathars and their violent repression by the Church, were soon to be faced by even more heretical movements and their even more violent repression by the nascent Inquisition; reports of the coming of the Antichrist and of the End Times were constant.

Under these circumstances Gebeno set about compiling Hildegard’s prophecies, and it is this compilation that I propose to study under a Fulbright Grant for the full academic year beginning October, 2007. While some scholars have investigated the impact of Gebeno’s work on the reception of Hildegard’s writing, few have approached him as an author in his own right. Why did Gebeno put together this “Mirror of Times to Come”? How did he gather the texts? How was he introduced to Hildegard’s writings, and where did he find his sources? How did Gebeno deal with her cumbersome style, which suffers from redundancies, awkward constructions, and strange neologisms (as he himself noted, “Most people disdain and abhor the books of St. Hildegard, because she spoke obscurely and in an unfamiliar style”)? How did the people and events of his time affect his writing? What do we learn in the Pentachronon about Gebeno as a thinker, a believer, and a writer of Latin? In short, how did the Pentachronon take shape and develop, both in itself and as a product of an abbot writing in the 1220’s?

One leading scholar who has taken a serious look at some of these issues is Prof. Christel Meier-Staubach, the director of the Seminar für Lateinische Philologie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. Prof. Meier-Staubach has done extensive work on Hildegard, including an examination of Gebeno’s writings. If I were awarded a Fulbright Grant, I would study with her and her colleagues, not only researching the development of Gebeno’s book, but also enrolling in a variety of courses offered by the Seminar in a broader study of Medieval Latin literature and philology; Prof. Meier-Staubach has kindly offered to support me in my work. Because the Latin language was fundamental in defining mediæval European culture, I hope to come to a better understanding and appreciation of that culture through a study of its language and literature. By the end of the Fulbright year I intend to produce a paper on the development of Gebeno’s thought and writings which can serve as the foundation for a doctoral thesis as I pursue graduate studies on my return to the United States.

Some might be tempted to pose the question: why is the study of an obscure, 800 year-old collection of apocalyptic writings important to our modern world? Gebeno wrote in a time of great conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and the Church. The excommunications of Emperor Friedrich II in 1238 and of Friedrich Barbarossa the century before have long been wounds to the German cultural pride: Barbarossa is, after all, a great German hero. It was no accident that the Reformation occurred not in France or Italy but in Germany: the Germans have long had an uneasy relationship with the power and authority of the papacy, and this tension survives even today. An American might laugh at a headline that appeared after the election of Benedict XVI in 2005: “Wir sind Papst!”, but the irony was not lost on the Germans, for many of whom the papacy has long symbolized everything that can go wrong when fallible humans try to mediate the divine. It is telling that when Germans today look upon the magnificence of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, they often see past the gilded plaster to Rome’s attempts to finance the structure with German indulgence monies. As a religious 800 years ago, Gebeno was faced with similar disharmonies. In studying his work, therefore, I hope to learn how Gebeno dealt with the tensions between the civic, secular life of his countrymen and the sacred authority of the Church, for though on the surface our times are very different, the substance of the tensions that German Catholics still face today is similar. Indeed, such are also the tensions that resonate even in our own land, where the interplay between religious and secular identity, between the authority of the church and of the state, is an omnipresent issue. For the first time in history, the majority of the peoples of Western Europe and the United States primarily identify themselves not with a religious label but with a secular one, such as “American,” “Deutsche,” or “citoyen”. In a very broad but very real sense, the roots of this so-called “secularization” of Western culture lie in Gebeno’s own turbulent age, and so the crises of faith of his times might prove the key to beginning to understand the crises of faith of our own age.”

Thus I initially proposed. As I recently reflected on the state of my project midway through its implementation—a reflection carried out at the behest of the U.S. Student Fulbright Program—I rehashed this lengthy and embellished proposal into the statement of three goals:

1. To read the entire text of Gebeno von Eberbach’s "Pentachronon sive Speculum Futurorum Temporum" and catalogue the origin(s) of each of the prophecies.

2. To investigate the historical, social, political, religious, and literary context of Gebeno’s work.

3. To investigate the wider implications of the oft contentious relationship betweeen the German people and the hierarchy of the Roman church.

Finally, I was asked to evaluate my progress in achieving these three goals:

The most significant marker of my project’s progress to date would be my early realization that, despite significant progress on the microcosmic level of working directly with the text itself, I had so far neglected to properly prepare myself for the macrocosmic placement of the work in the wider context of medieval apocalyptic thought. Hence, in addition to my continuing work with the text (I have read and catalogued approximately the first half of the full text), I have undertaken at first a broad introduction to apocalyptic thought, which has gradually focused into in-depth reading on apocalypticism specific to the 12^th and 13^th centuries; in short, I have spent a lot of time with my nose buried in books. The result of this reading has been a recasting of my understanding of Hildegard’s role in 13^th-century apocalypticism; up until now, scholarship in this field has focused almost exclusively on the role of another 12^th-century thinker, Joachim of Fiore. Thus, while I am still making some progress on Goal #2 (Gebeno’s historical context), its importance has been subordinated to a new goal, namely, establishing the role of Hildegard (via Gebeno) in 13^th-century apocalypticism. Finally, my principal work on Goal #3 (the German relationship with the Papacy) has been my reading/study of other apocalyptic movements, especially the apocalyptic role of the papacy (e.g. the myths of the angelic pope and the papal antichrist) and its close relationship to the apocalyptic role of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Rather than spending any more time boring the lot of you with the tedious details of this academic’s arcane work, I think I’ll get back to doing what I do best: reading.

Respecting Life in All Its Forms

2008-02-21T09:39:00.004-05:00

In today’s issue of The Heights, Boston College’s student newspaper, Mr. Jon Sege, a member of the Global Justice Project (GJP), wrote an opinion column exploring the relationship between the university’s Catholic tradition and the GJP’s decision recently to protest the presence on campus of recruiters from the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), a private company that contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. The crux of Mr. Sege’s argument has to do with what he claims is the incongruity of allowing such recruiters on campus but denying access to abortion advocates.

While Mr. Sege has offered an eloquent and thought-provoking analysis of the implications of the right to life, his logic is nevertheless flawed in indicting abortion clinics and the U.S. military in the same breath.

The fact is that every one of the more than 1,000,000 children who were killed by abortion last year in the United States was an entirely innocent life, and as such, every one of their deaths was homicide. Hence, the practitioners of those homicides are morally culpable.

The U.S. military, on the other hand, derives the legitimate and moral authority from the lawful and sovereign government of the United States to defend the same. When they kill enemy combatants, they do so rightfully. Every fetus is innocent; the average enemy combatant is not. When innocent lives are lost in warfare, it is nevertheless a tragic injustice, and I have never yet met a soldier who contended otherwise. This is why the willful killing of innocent bystanders is punishable as homicide under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

When that loss of innocent life is, however, an unfortunate accident in the course of legitimate warfare, such moral culpability is not incurred, just as when someone dies in an auto accident that was truly an accident. We must also recognize that the enemy combatants we face in Iraq and Afghanistan often hide themselves among innocent people and use innocent civilians as “human shields”; hence, if anyone is to be held culpable for the deaths of innocents in such situations, it should be the cowardly enemy combatants, not the U.S. military.

Finally, while I am gladdened to see that Mr. Sege has recognized that Boston College’s Catholic tradition places a premium on the respect for all human life, I must unfortunately note that many members of the Global Justice Project do not share his views. One can often find links to Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups in their annual Freshman Disorientation Packet (go to page 32 and look under “women's liberation and women's rights”), and I have personally met GJP members who participate both in protests against the likes of Raytheon and JWAC, and in events put on by the Women’s Health Initiative that promote access to contraception and abortion. There was a time several years ago when the GJP and Boston College’s pro-life organizations were united in a Partnership for Life; I call on both sides to attempt to renew this partnership, to stand together in a commitment to promote life, and to make an unequivocal statement that we will not stand blithely by while the sanctity of innocent human life is violated, whether in the abortion clinic or on the streets of Baghdad.

A "Normal" Day

2008-02-13T07:34:00.007-05:00

As I seem to be asked the question, “What is it that you do all day, anyway?” by a significant number of people on both sides of the Atlantic, I thought I should give some description of what a “normal” day looks like for me. Before I describe my own routine, however, I should like to quote an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised By Joy, to give a sense of how nearly (and quite by accident) I seem to have struck at his own ideal academic day—an indication, perhaps, that there might exist a Platonic Idea of the academic life in which both Lewis and I have participated. This passage comes from a chapter called “The Great Knock,” which describes the time Lewis spent preparing for his university entrance exams with Mr. Kirkpatrick of Great Bookham in Surrey.

We now settled into a routine which has ever since served in my mind as an archetype, so that what I still mean when I speak of a “normal” day (and lament that normal days are so rare) is a day of the Bookham pattern. For if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there. I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better. A step or so out of doors for a pint of beer would not do quite so well; for a man does not want to drink alone and if you meet a friend in the tap-room the break is likely to be extended beyond its ten minutes. At one precisely lunch should be on the table; and by two at the latest I would be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the out-door world; and talking leads almost inevitable to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one…who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared. The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four. Tea should be taken in solitude, as I took it at Bookham on those (happily numerous) occasions when Mrs. Kirkpatrick was out; the Knock himself disdained this meal. For eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirable. Of course not all books are suitable for meal-time reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere. The ones I learned so to use at Bookham were Boswell, and a translation of Herodotus, and Lang’s History of English Literature. Tristram Shandy, Elia and the Anatomy of Melancholy are all good for the same purpose. At five a man should be at work again, and at it till seven. Then, at the evening meal and after, comes the time for talk, or, failing that, for lighter reading; and unless you are making a night of it with your cronies (and at Bookham I had none) there is no reason why you should ever be in bed later than eleven. But when is a man to write his letters? You forget that I am describing the happy life I led with Kirk or the ideal life I would live now if I could. And it is an essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman’s knock….Such is my ideal, and such then (almost) was the reality, of “settled, calm, Epicurean life”.

Thus Lewis. This Fulbright year is the equivalent of Lewis’ time at Bookham; thus, I need not yet (though certainly the time is coming) lament its rarity. Usually, I rise between seven and eight o’clock, shower, dress, and eat some breakfast. Somewhere between 8:30 and 9:15, I catch the bus and take it half-way from the dorm to the city. I then exit the bus and walk the remainder, typically about thirty minutes, to help get the blood flowing. I arrive in my office between 9:30 and 10:00, and, after setting up my laptop, I check my email and the news reports on CNN.com. Unfortunately, though the physical postman almost never knocks, his electronic counterpart throngs me incessantly, and I willingly oblige him. This is one of two facts that distinguish me considerably from Lewis. The other is my addiction to remaining connected with the news at home and around the world; by his own admission, Lewis never took a liking to reading the newspaper. Of course, he never had the Internet at his fingertips, though I hardly doubt that he would have scorned it with greatest obstinacy had it featured in his lifetime.

On particularly news-worthy days (such as today, being the day after an important number of primary elections in the United States) my perusal of the news sites may last until lunch time; if it doesn’t, then the remaining time until lunch is filled with reading of a more academic bent. Lunch is taken between 12:30 and 1:00 at the small Mensa (university-run cafeteria) a few blocks from my office in the basement of Fürstenberghaus, a building which houses the History and Archaeology departments, together with their respective libraries and several large lecture halls and smaller classrooms. After lunch and depending on the state of the weather (today’s dreary, damp, and cold overcast was not conducive), I may take anything from a short to a rather long walk; the shorter will accompany the worser weather and will be for the sake of renewing the blood flow; the longer will accompany better weather and will be for the sake of enjoying it. Upon returning to the office anywhere between 1:15 and 2:15, I settle in again with my books; depending on how I’m feeling, this may or may not be accompanied with a coffee, either the cheaper stuff from the Mensa or the more expensive fare from the coffee shop down the street.

This reading will take me until a quarter to six, at which time I will pack up my computer and whatever books I wish, and head down the street to the Lambertikirche, whose daily Mass runs approximately forty minutes from exactly six o’clock (the Germans being such punctual people, the priest has never failed to appear more than 10 seconds after the striking of the six o’clock bells). I then make the ten minute walk to the train station where I pick up the bus back to dorm, where I arrive at twenty minutes past seven. After fixing dinner, I eat while viewing an episode of The West Wing from my DVD collection, after which cleaning up the dishes will usually take me to about half past eight, at which time I put some good reading music on and settle into bed with a good book. Between 10:30 and 11:00, my eyes will begin to grow heavy, and I will close the book, turn off the computer and lights, and settle down to sleep.

It is as much for posterity’s sake as for anything else that I commit this mundane pattern to writing; I imagine that this time next year, I will look back fondly and nostalgically to this time of plenty of sleep, long walks for the sake of nature, and cozy reading unhurried by the demands of the graduate student’s schedule. For now, at least, I shall simply be content to pass the days whose abiding feature is best summed up with the German word Gemütlichkeit—an atmosphere of coziness, comfort, and contentment, of time passed without anxiety for the past or the future, of life lived according to its natural rhythms, free of stress and frenzy.

It's still a human fetus

2008-02-08T07:33:00.002-05:00

In an insightful and provocative story in this weekend’s issue, the New York Times Magazine examines the possible existence and extent of a fetus’ ability to suffer pain while in the womb. While approaching the topic initially from the perspective of fetal surgery (a fascinating and amazing example of the advance of medical technology), the article acknowledges and later examines the impact of the ability of a fetus to feel pain on the issue of legalized abortion. While I commend the entire article to my readers, I want to focus on an anecdote offered early in the article:

Most invasive of all is open fetal surgery, in which a pregnant woman’s uterus is cut open and the fetus exposed. Ray Paschall, an anesthesiologist at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, remembers one of the first times he provided anesthesia to the mother and minimally to the fetus in an open fetal operation, more than 10 years ago. When the surgeon lowered his scalpel to the 25-week-old fetus, Paschall saw the tiny figure recoil in what looked to him like pain. A few months later, he watched another fetus, this one 23 weeks old, flinch at the touch of the instrument. That was enough for Paschall. In consultation with the hospital’s pediatric pain specialist, “I tremendously upped the dose of anesthetic to make sure that wouldn’t happen again,” he says. In the more than 200 operations he has assisted in since then, not a single fetus has drawn back from the knife. “I don’t care how primitive the reaction is, it’s still a human reaction,” Paschall says. “And I don’t believe it’s right. I don’t want them to feel pain.”

Mr. Paschall is among several medical personnel quoted in the article (the most prominent being Kanwaljeet “Sunny” Anand, who has been a tireless advocate over the last three decades for infant and fetal pain management) who also support, at least in limited terms, a woman's right to have an abortion. Yet, what I find most provocative is Mr. Paschall's statement, “I don’t care how primitive the reaction is, it’s still a human reaction. And I don’t believe it’s right. I don’t want them to feel pain.” I would echo his words to say, no matter how primitive the fetus is, it’s still a human fetus.

This brings me, however, to a point on the debate over abortion that I've been meaning to make for quite a long time (and I should make clear before we start that in the following argument, I appeal only to human reason and the natural law; my conclusions do not rely on any revealed truths peculiar to Christianity). As I've alluded to previously, this year’s election once again represents a showdown between those who would protect human life at all stages of development (represented by their presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain), and those who insist that the government not guarantee the right to life that was once so eloquently named “inalienable.”

Supporters of candidates like Sen. Hillary Clinton will tout that she believes that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Yet, what they don't realize is the logical contradiction behind such a statement. If one believes that a human fetus is an innocent human life (N.B. the adjective innocent indicates that the fetus is guilty of nothing by which it would deserve punishment, an assumption that I hold to be self-evident), then the natural law that informs us that homicide is immoral also informs us that abortion is immoral. To put it into syllogistic form: (A1) It is immoral and legally punishable to purposely kill an innocent human life. (B1) A human fetus is an innocent human life. (C1) Therefore, abortion (the killing of a human fetus) is immoral and legally punishable.

(N.B. I have included the adjective "innocent" in the major premise because, at least according to the natural law, there are certain situations where it is morally and legally permissible to kill a human life, e.g. in warfare. The revealed beliefs of religion may place additional restrictions on these situations, but as I have said, I am arguing here from the natural law.)

The corollary to this syllogism is that if one believes that abortion should be legal, then one denies either one or both of the premises. Since I've yet to meet an abortion supporter who denies the major premise (indeed, many abortion supporters offer more comprehensive versions of the major premise than some pro-lifers do, i.e. they extend the immorality of killing to capital punishment and even to warfare), then it is clear that abortion supporters must deny the minor premise, namely, that a human fetus is an innocent human life. Furthermore, since I've also never met an abortion supporter who claims that a human fetus is a guilty human life, then it is also clear that abortion supporters deny that part of the minor premise that declares a fetus to be a human life.

If, therefore, one believes that a fetus is not a human life, that is, if one believes that the fetus is simply an extension of the body of the mother, and that the mother therefore exercises the full sovereign rights over the fetus that she exercises over the rest of her body, then one's moral judgement on abortion is reduced to a judgement concerning those sovereign rights. The syllogism would then follow: (A2) Without extenuating circumstances, a human being exercises personal sovereignty over his or her body. (B2) A fetus is a part of a woman's body. (C2) Therefore, a woman exercises personal sovereignty over her fetus.

If this is really what Sen. Hillary Clinton believes, then her position in favor of abortion is logical. What is not logical, however, is her claim that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." It is this last factor that leads her into trouble. She must have some reason for wanting abortion to be rare. Yet, as far her logical position is concerned, it shouldn't matter to her whether abortion is rare or not, just as it shouldn't matter to her whether a woman dyes her hair blond or black, or pierces her navel or her ears, or gets breast implants or breast reduction surgery. Each of these decisions are made out of the woman's sovereign rights over her body, and Sen. Clinton doesn't have anything to do with those decisions.

Yet, Sen. Clinton does say that she wants abortions to be rare. In fact, one is unlikely to meet any abortion advocate who claims that they don't want abortion to be rare. And the reason for this is simple: as much as abortion advocates try to delude themselves into believing their syllogism, they do not, in fact, actually hold to it. Despite their attempts to ignore the prods of the natural law, they do, in fact, conceive, at least subconsciously, of a moral dimension to the decision to have an abortion.

Where they in fact fail is in the first part of the major premise: Without extenuating circumstances. This caveat to the premise is necessary for its logical cohesion, because both individually and as a state we acknowledge that there are circumstances under which a human being does not exercice personal sovereignty over his or her body. For example, we place age restrictions on things like drinking and smoking and getting body piercings; we also admit that convicted criminals have abdicated, at least temporarily, certain of their rights, like the right of free movement; we even go so far as to refuse certain classes of the clinically and criminally insane of almost all their rights of personal sovereignty over their bodies.

For the abortion syllogism to hold, there must, therefore, be no extenuating circumstances. Yet, it is evident that there are extenuating circumstances when a woman is pregnant. Whether you believe that a fetus is a human life or not, we all agree that, if carried to term, it will be a living, breathing, moving baby. Furthermore, the woman cannot produce the fetus by herself; the fetus is as much the product of its father as it is the mother's. Finally, especially given our modern ability with ultrasound technology to visualize the fetus, we all do feel, despite our views on abortion, that twang of amazement, wonder, and awe when the fetus we have fathered or mothered sucks its thumb or kicks its foot in the womb.

The fact is, the natural law is squeezing its way into Sen. Clinton's views whether she likes it or not. What she doesn't realize is that in calling for abortion to be "rare", she admits that there are compelling reasons to discourage the practice. For these compelling reasons to exist, the logical syllogism that allows abortion to go unopposed falls apart. Sen. Clinton's own humanity undermines her support of abortion. Although abortion advocates will tell you that there is a grey area, they are simply trying a trick of sophistry in order to have their cake and eat it too. The choice is simple: either abortion has absolutely no moral consequences and should be perfectly legal; or abortion does have moral consequences, and the first syllogism that we proposed is the proper one. As we have shone the former conclusion to be false, there remains but one logically consistent, proper conclusion: (C1) Abortion (the killing of a human fetus) is immoral and legally punishable.

Sen. John McCain for President

2008-02-03T10:23:00.001-05:00

Many readers of this blog may know that a year ago, I was a passionate supporter of the Presidential Campaign of Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), and that I remained a passionate supporter of Sen. Brownback all the way until October 18, 2007, when he was forced by a “lack of funds” to drop out of the race. It was Sen. Brownback’s unflinching integrity in leading his life, both public and private, according to his Catholic faith that drew me to him from start to finish. This could be most clearly seen in his “pro-life, whole-life” stance: not only does he oppose abortion, but he opposes capital punishment, too; he doesn’t just want to shut down the abortion factories run by Planned Parenthood, he wants to replace them with pregnancy resource centers, so that women who thought that abortion was their only option can receive the resources and support they need to actually have the baby; he doesn’t just care about the human rights of the unborn fetus, but he is an enthusiastic, compassionate fighter for the poor and oppressed, the sick and the hungry, the disenfranchised and the downtrodden both at home and around the world.

Unfortunately, Sen. Brownback’s message never seemed to click with conservative voters (who flocked rather to Gov. Huckabee; I suspect that his Catholicism may have frightened them away), and he was unable to continue to carry this banner of true humanitarianism all the way to the White House. When he dropped out the race, most of his supporters made their way to Gov. Hucakbee’s camp; I, however, remained on the fence. And after the Governor’s disastrous response to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December (instead of talking about the national security implications of terrorism-induced chaos in a country armed with nuclear weapons, he talked about limiting the flow of immigrants from Pakistan), I got off the fence and threw my support instead to Sen. McCain—just like Sen. Brownback did.

Why, then, did I choose the man who has been decried by the conservative establishment as practically a Democrat? I finally started to see again the reasons why I wanted to vote for him in 2000 (if only I’d been old enough) and in 2004 (if only we hadn’t been beholden, lemming-like, to George W. Bush). He is, in fact, not only a true conservative (despite Rush Limbaugh’s bloviating to the contrary), but an honorable man, one of the last in a Washington which has descended into the bitterest, dirtiest, foulest mire of partisan hatred not for the sake of the issues but simply for the sake of partisanship.

The conservative “establishment” is trying its hardest these days to discredit Sen. McCain. They like to say that he is “pro-tax” because he voted against the Bush tax cuts. This is nonsense—the man’s a Republican, for gosh’s sake! Of course he’s anti-tax; he knew that the Bush tax cuts were going to pass, so he used his vote to lodge a protest against the fact that they didn’t contain any concomitant cuts in spending. In point of fact, Sen. McCain is far more the fiscal conservative than all of the Republicans who voted for the tax cuts without demanding spending cuts to go along with them, to say nothing of Gov. Romney, who actually tried to raise certain taxes while Governor of Massachusetts (though to his credit, he was carrying out the will of the people, for many Massachusetts Dems would prefer the French tax code to the American one).

Indeed, while Gov. Romney was promising to lavish more of the Federal budget on “old-economy” workers in Michigan whose jobs have been sent overseas (one wonders how the Governor will pay for his “job retraining assistance”—will he raise taxes, or will he simply drive us deeper in debt? One thing is certain: he will not show fiscal restraint.), Sen. McCain told them the economic truth: their jobs aren’t coming back. And he lost Michigan because of it. The decision, therefore, is between the Governor whose words will always twist themselves to please his audience, no matter what promises he must make and what positions he must “amend” to do it; and a Senator who tells the truth, even if the truth is not palatable to his audience’s ears. As a lover of the truth, it should be clear to whom my vote goes.

And on that single issue that matters to many of us more than any other because of what it tells us of a man’s whole outlook on the human condition, namely, his view on abortion? Sen. McCain has spent three decades in public service consistently voting and tirelessly fighting for the right to life; meanwhile, Gov. Romney was elected in Massachusetts because he was pro-abortion. He says he’s pro-life now, but how do we know he won’t change his mind again when it is politically expedient to do so? I rather suspect, especially since he’s a Mormon, among which religion's many failings a pro-death stance is not to be numbered, that he’s always been, at least privately, pro-life—and if I’m right, it unfortunately means that winning the governorship of Massachusetts was more important to him than his pro-life values.

What attracted me to Sen. Brownback more than the other “social conservatives” in the early days of the race, however, was not just that he was pro-life, but that he was “whole-life”; that is to say, Sen. Brownback lived out the implications of his belief in the value of human life to their logical conclusions by supporting human life across its whole spectrum, from conception to deathbed, and from poorhouse to mansion. Sen. McCain, though not perhaps always in the same ways or to the same extent, has shown the true compassion that Our Lord asks of us—at least, far more than I have ever seen (publicly, at least, for I dare not judge what is in a man’s heart) from Gov. Romney; and we need look no further than his (much ballyhooed and criticized, at least by the “conservative” pundits) plan to fix the immigration problem in America. Rather than treating illegal immigrants as wholly unworthy of the American Dream that we all so often and wonderfully enjoy (I’m speaking here as a man who has come from a lower middle-class family which has often struggled paycheck to paycheck, who is currently able to spend a year living in Germany and studying medieval literature, all because of the generous support of the American and German governments in the form of the Fulbright program), Sen. McCain recognized their humanity and, out of compassion for all that he shares with them (for in our common humanity, all partisan differences of political opinion become mere drops in the ocean of dignity and love that we share as creatures of God and co-heirs with Christ), he proposed that they be offered a path to citizenship, albeit a long and tough road of waiting periods and steep fines.

Another facet of his plan for immigration, however, is Sen. McCain’s recognition that our economy has become dependent on these men and women. While the rest of the Republican field throws out lofty rhetoric of sending the illegal immigrants packing, he realized that to do so would cripple our economy. So, together with the President, and though it made them unpopular with their own party and in the end failed for that same reason, he offered a plan that actually made sense and faced both the humanitarian and economic reality of immigration. Empty rhetoric that denies reality and abandons at the water’s edge the compassion so wonderfully resonant in the pro-life position, or a firm stance that recognizes our economic situation and extends compassion for human dignity even to those who have broken our laws: the choice should again be clear.

Sen. McCain has also demonstrated that, far from being a partisan and divisive figure, he can also reach across the aisle, while staying true to his conservative principles,; indeed, he is far more interested in effectively governing the country than in the partisan bickering and gridlock that seems to be Washington reality these days. With the President’s job approval ratings in the low 30’s, and with those of Congress usually even lower, it is clear that what the American people want now more than anything is someone who can bring them together and effectively govern the country—not another party hack spewing the same old message of partisan half-truths (or worse, a party hack claiming to be bipartisan, though in reality his bipartisanship is simply another partisan half-truth dressed up to hide that fact). While the “conservative” pundits have been trying to turn Sen. McCain’s bipartisanship into “treason”, it actually represents the fact that more than any other candidate, Sen. McCain will unite this country, if only we let him.

Indeed, the worst thing that could happen to this country in November would be to allow Sen. Hillary Clinton to win the presidency, for there is no more divisive figure in this election cycle than she. Yet, a nominating vote for Gov. Romney is the best thing a Republican voter can do to ensure a Clinton victory—too many Americans are too fed up with the Republican Party as the party of Pres. George W. Bush to vote for Gov. Romney. Sen. McCain, on the other hand, has exactly the broad-based appeal that will bring not only independent voters but even moderate Democrats on board. In short, Sen. McCain is the only Republican candidate who has a realistic chance of winning in November.

Yet, it is not merely for this banal reason of political reality that I am supporting Sen. McCain. Behind the quality of his stances on political issues (consistently conservative) stand his honesty and honor, integrity and humanity. Sen. McCain is a man that demands respect because he has lived a respectful and virtuous life, and it is this honesty and virtue (and not, as for some candidates, the malleable paths of political expediency and polling data) that form the basis for the political decisions he makes everyday; we should expect nothing less from the President of the United States.

On the Floor of the U.S. House of Representatives

2008-01-29T11:15:00.001-05:00

Edit: It turns out that this is actually an "extension of remarks", which means that Rep. Tancredo didn't actually say this whole spiel on the floor--rather, he had the full text added later to the Congressional Record. If you look at the actual pag e from the Congressional Record, you will notice that, in addition to his mention of me in the far right column, he congratulates another Fulbright recipient from his district in the far left column; a glance through the other pages of Monday's "Extension of Remarks" pages of the Record indicate that he congratulated all of the Fulbright recipients from his district; most likely, he mentioned us all together in his remarks on the actual floor of the House, and then had each of us separated out in the "Extension of Remarks" section of the record.

This was passed on to me by Prof. Don Hafner, the chair of the Political Science Dept. at Boston College; it is an entry from the Congressional Record recording a statement made yesterday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by my own congressman, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado):

CONGRATULATING NATHANIEL CAMPBELL
                                _______  

                 HON. THOMAS G. TANCREDO
                         of Colorado
               in the House of Representatives
                   Monday, January 28, 2008

     Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, I rise today
to pay tribute to one of my constituents, Mr. 
Nathaniel Campbell of Bailey, Colorado.
Mr. Campbell is a literature student at Boston
College and is a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright
Award. This grant is given to promising individuals
to aid them in their academic and cultural pursuits
abroad.
     The Fulbright Program was established by
Congress in 1946 and is sponsored by the U.S. State
Department. This program was designed to help
build mutual understanding between Americans
and the global community. Individuals who are
awarded this distinction have demonstrated
outstanding academic or professional achievement
and have proven themselves as leaders in their field.
     Madam Speaker, please join me in paying tribute to
Mr. Campbell and wishing him the best in his
future endeavors.

Rome: Rediscovering a Personal Humanity

2008-01-13T09:51:00.002-05:00

Day 1: Friday, January 4

At 2:00 a.m. last Friday morning, I boarded a train from Münster to Düsseldorf in the first leg of a long, early-morning journey. While catching snippets of sleep on trains, in an airport and on an airplane, I finally returned mid-morning to the sunshine and blue skies of the urbs aeterna, Rome—just one more in the great sea across time and space of pilgrims coming to this ancient city.

Yet, from the start, it was a journey filled with propitious occurrences whose import I only later would piece together. After disembarking from the plane at Rome’s Fiumcino airport, I struck up a conversation with another American who was on the plane with me while we were walking out to catch the train into the city, and in the course of our banter, it was revealed that he was the professor-in-charge at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies (known as the Centro) in 2001-2002, the same small center on the Janiculum hill where I spent the Fall Semester of my Junior Year (2005). Though he now serves as Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Prof. Bernie Frischer maintains his work in the field of Classical Studies, and inquired after several members of the Boston College Classics Department whom he knows. This chance encounter served as a timely reminder of the personal connections that span the globe, reducing the vast, cold anonymity of thousands of miles and billions of faceless strangers to the concrete imminence of personal interaction.

After taking the train from the airport to Termini, the main train station of Rome, I made my way on foot to the Sunshine Hostel by the Porta Maggiore in the south of the city; when Pete Heinlein and I visited Rome over Pentecost two years ago, we stayed at the same hostel, and since it was inexpensive and I was familiar with it, I decided to go with it again. Whereas my last visit occurred at the end of May during the beginnings of the busy tourist summer season, it turns out that the beginning of January is the slowest time of the year for tourism in Rome. Thus, I ended being the only person staying the hostel, not just the first night, but every night thereafter. It became a welcome place of quiet and solitude to which to escape at the end of each tiring day.

After unloading my great backpack and washing my face and brushing my teeth, I set out into the city. Lindsay Wilcox and Peter Stamm, friends of mine who are currently seniors at Boston College and whose pilgrimage these first two weeks of January to Assisi and Rome provided the impetus for my own journey, were not to return from Assisi until Saturday evening, so I had two full days on my own to fill—but in Rome, that is a very easy thing to do. First, I headed up to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (St. Mary Major), one of the four great basilicas of Rome, and the first major landmark between the hostel and the rest of the city. Though almost everything that I would visit over the course of the next six days would be something I had already seen, often several times, the fantastic beauty of Rome is that there’s always something more to be gained from visiting them again. In Santa Maria Maggiore, for example, the confessio under the high altar that holds the Nativity relics had been closed for renovation each of the previous times I had visited, but was now open again.

While kneeling for a moment in prayer before the reliquary, the entrance music for the 11:00 Mass in the Pauline Chapel began—Schubert’s Wiegenlied, played for the infant Jesus during Christmastide. Since I had no concrete plans (an excellent way, I discovered, to spend time in Rome when you’re not under the pressure of touristic expectations), I decided to attend the Mass. Although I know very little Italian, that which I did learn from attending Masses during my semester there two years ago came flooding back; of course, there is also the useful feature that the Catholic Mass, no matter the language or country, is the same the world over in structure and meaning.

After Mass, I made my way down the Forum Romanum to sit and eat the sandwich I had packed for lunch—hearkening back to my last day in Rome during my semester there, when I similarly ate my bagged lunch in the Forum. As the sky began to cloud over, I headed over the Capitoline hill and into the heart of the city to do some more church visiting, hitting mainly some old favorites—S. Maria Sopra Minerva, where the body of St. Catherine of Sienna lies entombed under the high altar; and the churches of S. Luigi dei Francesi (St. Louis IX of France) and S. Agostino (St. Augustine), both of which contain beautiful painting by Caravaggio. Unfortunately, as I was leaving S. Agostino, it started to rain; although I had brought an umbrella with me to Rome, I had left it at the hostel (remember, the skies were clear and sunny when I arrived). Since the rain was also accompanied by the afternoon siesta during which most of the churches would close, I retreated to the Piazza della Rotondo (the piazza in front of the Pantheon) to sit with some gelato and a much-needed café latte to wait out the rain. Several hours of people watching and a hundred pages of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (my current reading project) later, the rain had ceased, I had spent too much money on coffee and ice cream, and was feeling rejuvenated to continue my plodding around.

I decided to make for my old stomping grounds on the Gianicolo, and found myself an hour later in the Basilica of S. Pancrazio, a beautiful but oft-neglected church by the Centro where I had often said the rosary while living there. I stumbled in during Holy Hour, so I settled in to say again a rosary in those familiar confines. By the time the Benediction was given and I returned to the streets, darkness had fallen, and I cut a leisurely path over to the great statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi and the breath-taking views from its terrace across the whole of the city.

The reminiscences of times past continued as my stomach started to growl and I made my way to the Rosticceria-Pizzeria in the Piazza Rosolino Pilo that was well-known among the Centristi for its kebaps, and I made sure to get a picture of one of the owners, just to show my friends that the kebap place is still alive and well. After the kebap (which was just as good as I remembered it), the long hours and short sleep of the night before finally began to catch up with me, and I headed back to the hostel to get a good night’s sleep.

Day 2: Saturday, January 5

Saturday morning dawned grey and wet, weather which was to stay with us for several more days. After a cappuccino and chocolate-filled croissant at my favorite café near the basilica, I entered S. Maria Maggiore to find a place to say the rosary before the eleven o’clock Mass. I stumbled, as it seemed that I so often did, upon one about to start in the adoration chapel, and so I settled in the recite the Joyful Mysteries with the little old Italian ladies. It was over the course of the next hour (for the Italians, in fine Italian form, manage to stretch five decades over a whole hour through lengthy meditations and frequent opportunities for song) that I made my first reflection on the intensely personal connections at the center of the Catholic faith, despite the global scale of a Church of more than a billion people. As I mentioned in my Christmas message, the Incarnation of Our Lord is an incredibly astounding mystery because of its personal, historical nature. Jesus Christ is an actual person, and we as Christians can have actual, personal relationships with Him. Yet, the Christian religion is not just about the personal relationship between me and Him, but it also about the personal relationship between me and you. Another consequence of the Word-Made-Flesh is that the great society of humanity is connected not just as a giant organism, a statistical unity, but also at the fundamentally personal level of one human being connected concretely to another in a relationship of mutual, Christian love. The Personhood of Christ gives the deepest and richest meaning to the personhood of every human being. It occurred to me that I have often focused so much on my personal relationship with God that I have neglected to remember that I am also in a personal relationship with other Christians. The Italians in that chapel with me were not strangers, nor was I simply the odd man out. Far more important than the fact that I couldn’t understand what the priest was saying when he was meditating upon the Nativity was the fact that, because of the Nativity, I was connected through Christ in a very real and concrete way with each and every one of the fellow Christians who were praying with me that day. To remember this personal connection and to make it a focus of my remaining time in Rome became a very important part of the rest of my journey.

The Markets and Forum of Trajan

After Mass and lunch at a pizzeria near the Piazza Venezia, I decided to spend the afternoon at the newly-opened museum in the Markets and Forum of Trajan (a museum that didn’t exist when I was last in Rome). The major museum building is housed in the two levels of the great hall (Grande Aule), where the tabernae or shops have been converted into exhibits; between these and the tabernae reaching out from the great hall into the great hemicycle, the museum has more than two dozen rooms. The exhibits contain various pieces of statuary and architectural elements from the imperial fora, much of it unearthed in excavations in just the last decade. For example, this is a section from the frieze and architrave from the Temple of Venus Genetrix, which is the temple that Julius Caesar erected in his forum to Venus, the originator of his line (he claimed descent from Iulus, the son of Aeneas, the son of Venus and Anchises). The focus is on the For a of Trajan, Augustus, and Caesar, and the graphic displays do an excellent job of tracing the stages of the fora, from original construction to the Middle Ages and through the modern excavations, including an exhibit on the rooms’ use at one time by the nuns of St. Catherine’s Monastery. Besides the exhibitions, one the most exciting features of the museum is the chance to walk all throughout the multiple levels of the great hemicycle that backstops the Forum of Trajan, as well as on the actual floor of the forum itself.

Unfortunately, the museum has extensively pursued a policy of displaying modern sculptural “art” in the midst of the ancient monuments—a practice which not only distracts the viewer from the antiquities he has come to enjoy, but utterly discredits the “artistic” concept of the modern works by placing them in direct comparison with the beauty and splendor achieved by the Romans almost two millennia ago. These modern sculptors have chosen the most spectacularly inappropriate venue to display (and augment?) the abysmally dim value of their attempts at “art”; but I suppose their egos are stroked to fancy themselves worthy to be displayed among the ancient masterworks—though in this arena, no amount of wishing can make the silk purse of the sow’s ear.

The rain continued unabated throughout the afternoon, so I simply wiled away the hours wandering the cavernous halls of the markets until it was time to return to Santa Maria Maggiore to meet Lindsay and Peter. They had not had the chance that day to attend Mass yet, and were hoping to make it to a small church nestled in a back alley near the Ponte Cavour (in the neighborhood of the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Ara Pacis) that is affiliated with a group that both of them work with back in the states and which offers a Tridentine Rite Mass under the terms of the Pope’s motu proprio each evening at 6:30 p.m. Unfortunately, several wrong turns on the way over there left us hopelessly lost and too late, so we resolved instead to find a cozy restaurant near the Piazza Navonna to enjoy dinner and catch up. After dinner, we wandered over to the Pantheon and some good gelato, and then slowly made our way back up to the neighborhood around Termini, where they were staying Saturday and Sunday night.

Day 3: Sunday, January 6: The Feast of the Epiphany

We made an early start Sunday morning, for we hoped to attend the Papal Mass for the Feast of the Epiphany in St. Peter’s Basilica—the Mass started at 10:00 a.m., so we needed to arrive about eight o’clock to hope for anything nearing a good seat. Fortunately, it being the slow season for Roman tourism, the crowd gathered more slowly than we had expected, and we snatched excellent seats more than halfway up the length of the nave and less than a dozen chairs from the central aisle. Despite the continued cloud cover and rain outside, the Basilica was brilliantly lit by the great banks of lights installed along the ceiling, allowing our eyes to feast upon the endless detail of the hulking structure. Shortly before 10 o’clock, the Sistine Chapel Choir started the entrance hymn for the seating of the great number of prelates attending the Mass, and we sang Flos de radice Iesse, the Latin original of the well-beloved English hymn I Know a Rose Tree Springing. Then, at precisely 10 o’clock, the Pope arrived at the great doors of the Basilica and made his way down the central aisle as the choir sang his entrance antiphon: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam, the same words that ring the lower part of the great dome’s drum. The Mass was said in Latin, though of the Novus Ordo and not the Tridentine Rite, and was on the whole a more subdued affair (though with richer music) than the great outdoor papal Mass that I attended nearly two years ago in St. Peter’s Square for the Pentecost. After the pontifical blessing at the end of the Mass, the whole of the congregation pressed toward the barriers at the central aisle as Pope Benedict processed out, and I was able to capture this clear photograph of him as he passed us by.

We had hoped to stay in the Basilica after Mass to look around, but we were ushered out (probably so that they could clean up the chairs), so instead we joined the masses gathered outside in St. Peter’s Square for the Pope’s noon-time Angelus message and blessing—he must have been rather rushed to exist the Basilica, change, and hurry back to his rooms in the Apostolic Palace in time to give the Angelus. After his blessing, Italian police and firemen formed a cordon through the crowd, and through the space they opened up came processing the Three Kings bearing their gifts of Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh to be placed in the life-size Nativity in St. Peter’s Square at the base of the obelisk—this picture of the Nativity was taken later, but gives you a good idea of how impressive it is.

As the crowd began to break up, the hunger that the excitement of the whole experience had kept at bay now crept up on us with full force, and we stalked the streets to the northeast of the Vatican until we found a nice (reasonably priced) restaurant to grab some lunch. This would be a good time to note that throughout our visit, lunches and dinners were almost always leisurely affairs, owing to our generally chatty nature, the often tiring nature of our activities, as well as the generally relaxed pace that both Lindsay and Peter were pursuing—more on this a little later. After lunch, we set off on a meandering journey into the heart of the city, our only general goal being the Capitoline Hill, though with many pit-stops in between, including a long and quiet break sitting in a park near the Largo Argentine when we realized just how draining the experience of a papal Mass can really be. As evening came on, I led them on a tour of the imperial fora, and, passing the Colosseum, we ascended the Esquiline Hill to visit the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains), which houses the relics of the chains the bound St. Peter in prison, as well as the tomb of Pope Julius II, adorned with Michaelangelo’s famous Moses. My fellow parishoners at St. Mary’s might also recognize the figures used in this church’s Nativity scene, set before the reliquary holding St. Peter’s chains. Descending the Esquiline, we journeyed east again to our hostels to take an few hours’ rest before meeting again for dinner, which we found at an excellent restaurant in the vicinity of Santa Maria Maggiore.

Day 4: Monday, January 7

We met again Monday mid-morning in the Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore, Lindsay and Peter with their bags in tow, for they had checked out of their first hostel and were to move that afternoon to a B&B near the Vatican (on the other side of the city) that afternoon. Although I had conceived of several possible programs of sightseeing tours through the city, since I was simply along for ride and to offer my experience in Rome to Peter and Lindsay, I let them make the decisions as to their itinerary. At first, I was a little frustrated at their leisurely pace, but eventually I realized that their intentions were to be pilgrims, not tourists, and that this was not to be a whirlwind trip to see as much of Rome as possible in one week, but rather a reflective journey through the spiritual heartland of Catholic Christianity. Accordingly, our two major visits of the day were to be the Basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and St. John Lateran, two of the four major basilicas of Rome (the other two being St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls). We made our way with careful attention to every detail of the two basilicas, which are separated by just a half-hour’s walk along the Via Merulana. It was indeed refreshing and insightful for me, for though I had been often in both basilicas, I had never taken the opportunity to make such a thorough and introspective visit to either of them.

After lunch at a pizzeria near St. John Lateran (the cathedral church of Rome, that is, the official seat of the Pope as Bishop of Rome—the right to say Mass at the high altar is reserved to him alone), we hopped on the Metro to cross to the other side of town so that Lindsay and Peter could check in to their new lodging. While they were getting situated, I settled down on the steps of Bernini’s colonnade in St. Peter’s Square (the rain having stopped in the night, the sun that day had dried them off) to people-watch, read a bit more of St. Augustine, and observe the setting of the sun (often a beautiful experience behind the Basilica).

Shortly after six o’clock, we met again on the Ponte Cavour to attend the Tridentine Rite Mass at that small church we had tried to visit Saturday evening. This time, we did not get lost, and made it with plenty time to spare. This was, in fact, the first Tridentine Rite Mass that I had ever attended, despite my long work with the Latin language. I found it, however, neither strange nor difficult to follow, for the Tridentine Rite, especially in the Low Mass (as this was), is very, very near the Sarum Rite, from which the Anglican Rite used at St. Mary’s, my home parish in Denver, is directly taken. Hence, I was able to follow it very closely, for, other than some divergences in the prayers of the Canon of the Mass, it was an identical match to the Low Mass I have attended so many times at St. Mary’s. While Lindsay and Peter followed along in their Latin Missals, I simply followed along from memory, albeit in English rather than Latin. As the priest said most of the Mass sotto voce, and the congregation followed silently, with the server offering the responses on their behalf, there was no need for me to know the responses in Latin—though often enough, I did. Though I would not recommend the experience for everyone, I found it most contemplatively compelling, and the sight of a fiddleback chasuble and a maniple was one for sore eyes, indeed.

After Mass, we grabbed dinner at a pizzeria which Lindsay had found highly recommended in one of the guidebooks she brought, and it did not disappoint. After a jaunt around the Via del Corso to find some chocolate gelato and a brief visit to the Column of Marcus Aurelius (I wanted to show them the famous “Rain Miracle” during Marcus’ campaigns in Austria, which Dio Cassius says was popularly attributed to the intervention of “Christians”), we parted ways at the Metro stop at the Spanish Steps.

Day 5: Tuesday, January 8

We met Tuesday morning again under bright blue skies in St. Peter’s Square near the Nativity, for Peter and Lindsay wanted this day to explore every square inch (no mean task) of St. Peter’s Basilica. The “off-season” for tourists proved a blessing again as the line to go through the metal detectors to enter the Basilica was practically nonexistent. We stopped first for a length of reflection and prayer in the Adoration Chapel, and then began to make our way slowly around the massive footprint of the church that was long the largest in all Christendom (I believe it was recently eclipsed by a new, massive missionary work somewhere in Africa), and in the course of our wandering, we stumbled along things that I had never seen before—the same phenomenon as the previous day manifesting itself, as I had never properly taken the time to investigate each and every of the side chapels and altars. This being the heart of Catholic Christendom, it was no wonder that around each corner lurked a new and delightful surprise—the bones of St. Gregory the Great here, the relics of St. John Chrysostom there (and a delightful inscription noting that not twenty years ago, Pope John Paul II had donated some of them back to the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I).

After the floor of the Basilica, we made our way down into the grottoes beneath to visit the tombs of various popes housed there, including that of John Paul II and the window into the confessio holding the bones of St. Peter. Finally, we made the intrepid journey up the more than 1,000 steps to take us to the observation deck along the top of the dome’s cupola—unfortunately, we had little breath left for the views from up there to take from us. Upon our descent, we discovered we were in need of a break, for our legs were a bit wobbly after the whole ordeal, so we found another nice pizzeria off the Via della Conciliazione for lunch. After lunch, we took to people-watching in St. Peter’s Square for a while, until 4:30, when we met Msgr. Anthony McDade for some coffee. Msgr. McDade is a delightful Irishmen currently assigned to the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome; some years ago, he served with the Archdiocese of Denver, where he became good friends with Liz O'Malley, who also happens to be a good friend of my grandmother’s. When I left to study in Rome two years ago, Msgr. McDade’s name was passed along, and we’ve now managed to go three for three in visiting each other each time I have been in Rome.

After coffee with Msgr. McDade, we met again for Mass at that little church tucked away by the Ponte Cavour, and I discovered that this second time offered me a different experience with the Tridentine Rite. The previous night, I had gotten caught up in recognizing each element of the Mass so familiar to me from the Anglican Rite; this time, I was able to focus more on the uniqueness and beauty of the Latin Rite on its own terms.

We returned to the area on the west side of the river near Lindsay and Peter’s B&B for dinner, where we found a wonderful restaurant that looked far more expensive than it really was—brocaded tablecloths and charger plates on the tables, yet still within the price range of three college students. We also had a wonderfully inquisitive waiter who was quite curious to hear about various aspects of our lives in America (I saved the fellow the confusion of trying to explain my current residence in Germany). Finally, we parted company for the night and I hopped back on the Metro to return to my side of the city for my last night in Rome.

Day 6: Wednesday, January 9

I woke a little earlier on this, my last day in Rome, for I needed to pack everything back up and make sure I didn’t leave anything behind, for once I set out, I wouldn’t be returning to the hostel, or at least not during this trip to Rome. I met up with Peter and Lindsay once again in St. Peter’s Square, for this morning’s agenda was another thing which for me would be a new experience: attending the weekly General Audience of His Holiness Benedict XVI in the expansive Paul VI Auditorium situated to the south of St. Peter’s Basilica. It was again a sign of the “off-peak” season that the auditorium filled rather slowly and not, in fact, to capacity. The tickets for the audience, which are “entirely free”, as it says on them, we acquired the previous day when visiting the Basilica—after one passes through the metal detectors and before turning right to head up to the Basilica, one passes on the right the entrance to a large set of stairs and a great hallway leading back into the Apostolic Palace and guarded by Swiss Guards in their Technicolor garb; after gathering up the nerve and explaining your purpose to the police officers standing at the base of the stairs, one member of your group ascends and asks the Swiss Guard on the left for the tickets, which he will retrieve for you. A bit of a production, but completely worth it, as we discovered on Wednesday.

While waiting for the audience to begin, we took in the cavernous hall, the Nativity and Christmas Tree set up on the right of the stage (the tree’s lighting changed every few minutes, cycling through blue, red, yellow, green, and purple), and enjoyed the boisterous music performed by what turned out to be a group of Italians in native dress with drums and mandolins and tambourines. At 10:30 sharp (while most Italians seem to shy away from starting anything on time, the Pope’s schedule runs like clockwork—he is German, after all), Pope Benedict entered the hall to thunderous applause, and after an opening prayer and reading, he offered his address. Though it was in Italian, I was able to follow the general gist of the twenty-minute lecture (I continually felt the urge to take notes—I suppose you can take the Pope out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom of this Pope, at any rate), and my suspicions were confirmed when he offered brief three to five minute recapitulations in French, English, German, Spanish, and Polish (though the last was read for him by a Polish bishop): he gave us a general overview of the life and writings of St. Augustine, promising to use the African bishop as the baseline for his addresses in the weeks to come. While he read the English version verbatim from the paper in front of him, he took several detours from the script when proffering the German version, including several lighter moments (“The metropolitan in Africa called Augustine back to the see at Hippo because he was in need of good preachers, since he himself wasn’t one”). Before he offered his remarks in each language, he was introduced by a bishop or priest in that language, who also introduced the registered groups of pilgrims from that particular language area in attendance at the audience; after the English-speaking pilgrims were introduced, a church choir from Massachusetts sang a setting of the Angelus, for which the Holy Father later thanked them. After concluding his remarks, Pope Benedict led the hall in the recitation in Latin of the Our Father (printed on the back of the tickets for those who didn’t know it Latin), and offered a blessing that he extended to the families of all in attendance, with special intention for the sick and ailing.

Afterwards, he greeted several guests on the stage, and then waded into the crowd to visit with some of the pilgrim groups; unfortunately, he didn’t make it much past the first few rows, and after about twenty minutes he exited stage right to more applause and chants of “Benedetto!”

We made our way back into the sun-drenched expanse of St. Peter’s square, and as I had only about a half-hour before I had to leave for the airport, we grabbed some panini sandwiches from a street vendor and enjoyed our last few minutes together. We made our goodbyes, I wished them all the best on the rest of their pilgrimage (they will be in Rome through Sunday), and set off again for the airport, my Epiphany journey to praise the Lord together with Melchior, Caspar, and Balthasar complete.

Puer Natus Est Nobis

2007-12-25T13:13:00.001-05:00

Let us rejoice, for the Christ Child is born to us today!

We celebrate today the birth of Jesus Christ, the Immanuel, the Son of God; on this day some 2,000 years ago a virgin named Mary gave birth to Him, and wrapped in swaddling clothes he was lain in a manger. At the opening of the Midnight Mass in the Cathedral of St. Paul here in Münster, the cantor sang the announcement of the First Mass of Christmas taken from the Martyrologium Romanum, the medieval catalogue of the calendar of the Church’s feast days:

In the 5199^th year of the creation of the world, from the time when in the beginning God created heaven and earth; from the flood, the 2957^th year; from the birth of Abraham, the 2015^th year; from Moses and the going-out of the people of Israel from Egypt, the 1510^thyear; from the anointing of David as king, the 1032^nd year; in the 65^th week according tothe prophecy of Daniel; in the 194^th Olympiad; from the founding of the city of Rome, the 752^nd year; in the 42^nd year of the rule of Octavian Augustus, when the whole world was at peace, in the sixth age of the world: Jesus Christ, the eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to sanctify the world by His most merciful coming, having been conceived by the Holy Ghost, and nine months having passed since His conception was born in Bethlehem of Juda of the Virgin Mary, having become man. The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

As tedious as it might seem to define the day of Christ’s birth according to many historical references, the Martyrologium has a very good reason for its lengthy detail: the birth of Jesus Christ, the official revelation to the world of the Incarnation, the Word, the only-begotten Son of God before all ages of the world, now born of a virgin in a stable in Bethlehem—this birth was and is an historical event. Christ was born a man on an actual day in the actual history of the world. The Nativity of Christ is not just a story in a religious text, like so many stories in so many traditions around the world; no, He was a completely real person, like you or I, acting in the reality of history.

The incredible beauty and yet radical statement that is the mystery of the Incarnation is at the heart not only of the Christian religion but also the very existence of the world. Christ is “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made”: He is the very foundation of existence. Yet He also “for us men and for our salvation came down from Heaven: and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and became man”: He was (and is) an individual human being, walking upon the earth in an actual body composed of muscles and sinews and blood. If He missed a nail and hit His finger with a hammer in His carpenter’s workshop in Nazareth, he felt the same pain that you or I feel when we do the same. Indeed, He faced even greater pains than you or I are likely ever to face when He was “crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered, and was buried.”

And as radical as this idea may seem, that the immortal, invisible, omniscient and omnipresent God, Creator of all that is and was and ever shall be, was also a simple woodworker from a backwater town on the Sea of Galilee; as radical as this idea may seem, more radical yet is “what both educated and simple people [find] in Christ: he tells us who man truly is and what a man must do in order to be truly human.” (Spe Salvi 6). Not only did Christ the God become Christ the Man, the King who was made Sacrifice, but in doing so, He both renewed and further exalted the very humanity that we hold in common with Him, as we are reminded during the Preparation of the Gifts in the Mass:

Deus, qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti, et mirabilius reformasti: da nobis per huius aquae et vini mysterium, eius divinitatis esse consortes, qui humanitatis nostrae fieri dignatus est particeps, Iesus Christus.

O God, who didst wonderfully create, and yet more wonderfully renew the dignity of the nature of man: grant unto us, that through the mystery of this water and wine, we may be sharers in His divinity who vouchsafed to be made partaker of our humanity, Jesus Christ.

In the New Adam, the strength of humanity was made anew, perfected from the Fall of Adam but also excelling Adam even in his perfection; for though Adam was made in the image and likeness of God, yet God did not share with Adam yet his human nature. But now, in an act made out of His boundless love, His Son has taken up that nature, and in this mystery are opened unto us the true gates of righteousness. In Christ we may now share in the one divinity; Adam and Eve lusted after this, but it was not given them, for they knew not the mystery of the Son. But now, every one of us, every child who is born into the world just as was Christ 2,000 years ago, has received in His birth the opportunity to be co-heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven.

While this Mystery seems incomprehensible, it is yet the most accessible feature of the Christian religion, for in Christ we have been presented with a man, a simple man, a true person with whom we each can have a true, intimate, personal relationship. Christian spirituality is not an amorphous cloud; it is not some “feeling” that we have of joy or loftiness or nobility. It must not be confused with many modern ideas of spirituality that emphasize the temporal sensation or sentiment of some ill-defined “spiritual connection” to some higher being. No, Christian spirituality is concrete and is founded in the very personal, very real Person of Jesus. Without Jesus, without the Christ who was a real, historical, and finite man, and is also a real, eternal, infinite God, Christian spirituality is empty.

Furthermore, without this real encounter with the personhood of Christ, this whole life and world is left empty and dark, a mere wandering from a naked birth to a naked death. If one believes in no God, or even if one believes in a God who is but as the furthest twinkle of a star, beautiful perhaps but utterly distant and foreign, then there is left nothing in this world but the brief span of the insignificant life of a human, one of billions living but a snapshot of a world infinitely larger than any can comprehend. In the cold, materialistic worldview that knocks ever at the gates of one who despairs of the divine, life is nothing but “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Hobbes noted centuries ago.

But to this dark and dreary emptiness we are not bound, for the world is neither accident nor meaninglessness, but the very essence of the love of a personal God. As Pope Benedict says in his recent encyclical, Spe Salvi:

It is not the elemental spirits of the universe, the laws of matter, which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs…the universe; it is not the laws of matter and of evolution that have the final say, but reason, will, love—a Person. And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we are free. In ancient times, honest enquiring minds were aware of this. Heaven is not empty. Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love. (Spe Salvi 5)

Finally, as we look today upon the Incarnate Christ as an example of “who man truly is and what a man must do in order to be truly human,” we must realize that we are gazing this happy day upon a child lying in a manger, the food trough of farm animals, sheltered from the elements by a barn, “because there was no room for them at the inn.” (Luke 2:7); and though the Magi brought to Him the gold of Kingship and the frankincense of Divinity, these gifts acknowledged not His human destiny but His spiritual reality. Indeed, it was Balthazar’s gift of myrrh that spoke most clearly of the role that this man of the royal house of David was to play in human history: His sacrificial death. The truth of humanity’s lot in this world is not the gold of the king but the pain and sorrow of suffering. Yet the suffering that we see all around us every day is not the meaningless horror that it would seem, for all suffering finds it true meaning in the suffering of Him who should not have had to suffer at all, but yet suffered more than all.

The key to our humanity as revealed to us by the lowly babe in a manger is His humility. He is the Son of God, and yet he slept not on silk but straw; He is the Word by which all is made, and yet spoke not of his right to rule the world but of his choice to serve it; He is of the great “I AM” who commanded Moses to remove his sandals upon holy ground, and who yet Himself removed the sandals of others to wash their feet. A man must serve and not be served in order to be fully human. A man must lay himself down in order to be stood aright not by his own will by the will of God. Above all, a man must so love God and his neighbor that even death for them is but a pittance compared to this love.

If this sounds difficult or even impossible for the lost, wandering, selfish, poor being that is man, remember but this: “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:11)

Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis!

Christmastime in Münster

2007-12-23T08:51:00.001-05:00

A little over a week ago, freezing temperatures finally came to this city. Yet, it does not snow in Münster, though I’m not particularly sure why; instead, we have awoken each morning to a very heavy frost. Though the day may not end under a heavy fog, each morning almost invariably dawns beneath it, and as the air becomes colder, this mist clings to all in a crystalline coat. The sun might (or might not, as today) burn through it ere the noon bells ring, and sometimes (as I painfully discovered this morning), the blanket lies invisibly (and slickly) upon the sidewalks and pavement (a phenomenon called Glatteis, safety from which the celebrant wished us at the opening of this morning’s Mass). Drivers must scrape off their cars in the morning, while the grass (which has remained yet green, though rather the dark and toughened hue of the end of the season than the bright and vibrant color of its youth) is cloaked, and as one walks about, it shimmers dully between frosty white and dark green. The frost’s most magnificent vesture is, however, worn by the bare branches of the trees, covered in an icy film that grows ever thicker as the nights grow colder. When the skies of day are still overhung with the chilled and dreamy mists, the thin limbs of the trees slice through it with their cold filigree of silver; but when the darts of brilliant sunlight strike forth, oblique and always low on the horizon in these days, the branches glow with pale, white gold; but alas, it lasts only a short time, for soon they are reduced to the muddied browns and greys of wetted wood, the frost melted by the very rays that had illumined it.

Despite the deepening cold, however, the city’s most vibrant Christmas tradition has thronged apace: the Weihnachtsmarkt, or Christmas market. This tradition, found in towns great and small throughout Germany (the most famous is to be found in the great square of Nürnberg), came brilliantly to life in Münster at the beginning of Advent, and as the Day of Jubilee has drawn nearer, the booths have thronged ever more with jollity and merriment (and on the weekends, the whole of the markets are packed to overflowing with the Dutch, who come by the busload—it would seem that Amsterdam can’t match Münster for the holiday cheer). Because Münster’s greatest open space in the old city, the Domplatz (Cathedral Square) is reserved for the use of the great traveling market that comes every Wednesday and Friday year-round, the Weihnachtsmarkt has been shoehorned into little squares and courtyards throughout, so that one can walk from the Aegidiiplatz in the south to the Lambertikirche in the north, wending one’s way from one grouping of booths to the next.

Some of the booths offer various Christmas trinkets (from little wooden ornaments to various Santa hats—particularly popular this year seems to be the one that comes with two white braids hanging from it, in the style of Pippi Longstocking), but many are run by craftsmen offering various handcrafts in wood, ceramic, glass, or other materials. As numerous as the crafts, however, is the ubiquitous drink of the Weihnachtsmarkt: Glühwein, or spiced and mulled wine, a steaming drink to return warmth to the belly among the frigid mists of winter; and, of course, the many vittles offered to the crowds: the traditional (at least these days in northern Germany) Currywurst (sliced Bratwurst smothered in warm curry ketchup), and Pommes (French fries), with your choice of curry ketchup or Mayo (pronounced “my-oh” here) slathered on top; and for the sweet tooth, the Christmas confections of Lebkuchen (soft, spiced gingerbread) and gebrannte Mandeln (almonds “roasted” or caramelized in sugar with vanilla and cinnamon). Finally, strung throughout one will find musicians of all types (from adolescents with their flutes and clarinets trying to make some extra spending money, to the old hats who do this for a living) adding that final touch of Christmas cheer.

The street performers were not the only musical cheer that I have experienced this season in Münster. In my time over the last few years in Boston, I started to make it a tradition as a birthday present to attend a performance of Handel’s Messiah on or about my birthday (December 2), as the Handel & Haydn Society of Boston performs it several times annually on the first few weekends of December. Sometime in November, my grandmother asked me if I was going to continue the tradition, and I had to reply that alas, I would not, as I was unaware of any performances of the Messiah in Münster. But about a week before Thanksgiving, as I was glancing through a pamphlet at the Cathedral listing the various musical offerings around town for the Christmas season, lo and behold, I discovered that there would, in fact, be a performance of the aforesaid masterwork at the Apostelkirche (the main Protestant church in the city’s center, housed in a beautiful gothic structure that was once a Dominican parish before being confiscated during the secularization at the beginning of the 19^th century; when it was finally to be returned to religious hands, the Dominicans no longer had a stake for it and it, therefore, given as the first house of worship for Lutherans in this (still) predominantly Catholic town); furthermore, only two performances were to be offered, on the evenings of Saturday and Sunday, December 1 & 2 (and as I later discovered, it is by no means an annual performance; the last time it was performed was 1995!). Much to my delight, I rounded up my American friends here (Timon, who lives in my dorm complex, and David, both Americans studying at the university, and Jennifer and Jörg Burkart and Bill Hoye) and held a “birthday outing” on the evening of the second. Not only was I able to continue the nascent tradition, but I have now christened it a firm part of my birthday celebrations, for it has been followed not only in America but in Germany, too! The evening was, however, to have its own German twists: the oratorio was sung in German (not my accustomed English), and we headed to the Weihnachtsmarkt afterward for a nice round of Glühwein. The performance was overall good, though the trumpeter had a few missteps early on, but recovered well for his standout role in the latter third of the piece; and, unfortunately, they cut a few sections out for length, including “O death, where is they sting?”, a beautiful duet toward the end. But in the company of friends on the occasion of a birthday celebration, such deficiencies are easily overlooked.

Last week, on the third Sunday of Advent, I enjoyed another musical celebration of the season heralding Our Lord’s Birth, this time in the company of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Gesellshaft (the German-American Society of Münster). The afternoon began with an Advent Tea hosted by Heidi Wegmann at her beautiful home in Wolbeck, a southeastern suburb of the city. From there, as night descended (this far north, that begins at about 4:00 in the afternoon), we journeyed to the workshop of Friedrich Fleiter, Orgelbaumeister, whose family has specialized in the construction, maintenance, and repair of organs since 1872, to attend a concert benefiting a local charity, given annually on the Wurlitzer organ installed in the workshop. The organ, a “Hope-Jones Unit Orchestra, Made by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Co., Cincinnati”, was originally installed in a Hollywood movie theater in 1924. When the theater was renovated to be able to show movies with sound in the 1940’s, the organ was moved to a stage theater, also in Hollywood, where it remained until that theater closed in 1994, at which time Herr Fleiter’s company saved it from the trash heap and brought it to Münster. Designed to reproduce a full orchestra pit to accompany silent films, the organ has such ranks as a xylophone, snare drums, bells, and a cymbal. Befitting the Wurlitzer’s American origins, the concert began with a series of American pop songs from the 1950s – ‘70s, including “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To” and “Downtown” (I’ll admit, it was a bit odd to hear them on an organ, but fun nonetheless). This was followed by a screening from DVD of a silent Laurel & Hardy short, which the organist accompanied most excellently. The film, called “Big Business”, tells the story of Laurel and Hardy the Hollywood Christmas tree salesmen and their over-the-top exploits selling pine trees door-to-door on the balmy back lot. After an intermission (accompanied by a nice mug of Glühwein), the concert concluded with a great series of American Christmas songs (both traditional and popular).

Of course, all of these wonderful festivities have been but in preparation for the truly miraculous feast that commences tomorrow night: the Birth of Our Saviour, Jesus Christ. As we gather at midnight in the Cathedral to celebrate the coming of the Emmanuel, the God-with-us, to dance upon the dancing day for our True Love, we shall experience the fulfillment of all our expectant watching. The lamps of the Advent wreath have been lit, and await the Bridegroom’s march, as proclaimed to us by the watchmen on the heights. Then, no matter whether the mists continue to shroud the night or the stars twinkle and the moon sets to sparkling the frost-encrusted tangles of the hedges, the True Light, God’s Son, shall shine forth the brighter in our hearts.

"Do you believe every word of this book?"

2007-11-29T09:21:00.001-05:00

In reference to the Bible, this was one of the questions during yesterday's CNN/YouTube Republican Presidential Debate, and of the three candidates to answer the question (Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Gov. Mitt Romney, and Gov. Mike Huckabee), two of them had excellent answers, while one (Romney) fumbled the ball. You can see the video of their answers here.

The first to answer was Giuliani:

The reality is, I believe it, but I don't believe it's necessarily literally true in every single respect. I think there are parts of the Bible that are interpretive. I think there are parts of the Bible that are allegorical. I think there are parts of the Bible that are meant to be interpreted in a modern context.

So, yes, I believe it. I think it's the great book ever written. I read it frequently. I read it very frequently when I've gone through the bigger crises in my life, and I find great wisdom in it, and it does define to a very large extent my faith. But I don't believe every single thing in the literal sense of Jonah being in the belly of the whale, or, you know, there are some things in it that I think were put there as allegorical.

The mayor gave an answer that would be similar to my own answer to the question, which would have run something like this: "Yes, I believe that every word in the Bible is true. I do not, however, believe that a literal interpretation of every word is always the best interpretation. Rather, much of the Bible is to be understood either allegorically, that is, it speaks to us in metaphor and allegory; or anagogically, that is, it speaks to us about the being of God in analogy and metaphor; or tropologically, that is, it speaks to us in metaphor concerning our own morals and way of life. Do I believe that God created the world in seven, twenty-four hour days as we understand them? No. Do I believe that there is a wealth of meaning that could fill volumes and tell us many things about God, about ourselves, and about the world around us, all to be found in the metaphor that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh? Yes." Or something to that effect.

The best answer of this question, however, was given by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister who was most eloquent while at his most sincere:

Sure. I believe the Bible is exactly what it is. It's the word of revelation to us from God himself.
And the fact is that when people ask do we believe all of it, you either believe it or you don't believe it. But in the greater sense, I think what the question tried to make us feel like was that, well, if you believe the part that says "Go and pluck out your eye," well, none of us believe that we ought to go pluck out our eye. That obviously is allegorical.
But the Bible has some messages that nobody really can confuse and really not left up to interpretation. "Love your neighbor as yourself." And, "As much as you've done it to the least of these brethren, you've done it unto me." Until we get those simple, real easy things right, I'm not sure we ought to spend a whole lot of time fighting over the other parts that are a little bit complicated.
And as the only person here probably on the stage with a theology degree, there are parts of it I don't fully comprehend and understand, because the Bible is a revelation of an infinite God, and no finite person is ever going to fully understand it. If they do, their god is too small.

'Nuff said.

Two Thanksgivings in Germany

2007-11-26T07:34:00.001-05:00

I hope that all my friends and family back home had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend; I had the great fortune to be able to attend not one but two Thanksgiving dinners this past weekend. The first, organized by the German-American Society of Münster, was held on Thursday evening at Henry's Poltertenne, a wonderful, rustic event center on the outskirts of the city. I went with Jennifer Burkart, the former Boston College Fulbrighter, and her husband, Jörg (and had I known that the other American students walked (!) to the dinner, I would have asked Jennifer and Jörg to give them a ride!). The dinner was well-attended both by members of the society, Americans living, working, or studying in Münster, as well as many other friends of the States--including the Mayor of Münster himself, Hans Varnhagen!

All of the food except the turkey was provided potluck-style, and while--alas!--there were no mashed potatoes or gravy, there was an abundance of many different kinds of salads and casseroles and other side dishes that were just as delicious, if not quite as "traditional" to the Thanksgiving feast. Desserts also abounded, with various brownies and cookies and cakes and puddings and custards, all laid out in fine fashion. The crowning achievement was, however, the turkeys--I saw at least two, but there may have been more kept in the hotbox by the master carver beneath the table. Since I couldn't figure out how to say "dark meat" in German, I used the "grunt and point" method to indicate my choice, and when it became clear to me that I might just be able to have it, I asked "Darf ich das ganze haben?", and with a flourish, one of the great turkey legs graced my plate!

The conversation at our table was mainly focused on the goings on both past and present of the English classes taught at the Katholishe Fachhochschule (the equivalent of a community college), where Jennifer teaches, as we were joined by one of her current colleagues, as well as a former teacher there who splits his time now between Münster and his farm in upstate New York. A long focus of the discussion was his lament concerning the skills of German students in writing coherent, well-organized expository essays. It is not, he claimed, a fault of the German students that, when they arrive in his English classes, they cannot seem to write what in America would be the standard "5-paragraph essay" on which we are schooled from 6th grade on, nor that, given an essay, they seem unable to answer the question, "What is this essay about it? What is its topic sentence?" Indeed, he has found that 95% of his students, who were hopeless at the beginning, can after a few months of his instruction, construct a perfectly well-organized expository essay. The problem, he claims, is that the German teachers don't seem to think that such a skill should be (or can be) taught; indeed, his lament extended to the whole German philosophy of education, which he believes eschews the traditional rhetorical tradition, and therefore finds itself incapable of construction well-organized arguments. Though I thought that he went perhaps too far in his criticism, I have found in my experience in classes that German teachers do have tendency to wander from topic to topic in their lectures.

Though the evening came to an end far too soon (I would have liked to kibitz much longer, as is my wont), I had the opportunity for more lively discussion yesterday when I attended my second Thanksgiving dinner, this time hosted by the Fulbright Alumni Association of Nordrhein-Westfalen, in the house of Sigrid and Rainer Martin in Bochum, a city about 75 kilometers southwest of Münster. Most of the attendees were Fulbright alumni, i.e. Germans who had studied as Fulbrighters in the United States, but there was another current American Fulbrighter in attendance, Emily, a teaching assistant from Dallas, teaching English at a school about 30 kilometers south of Münster. Together, we engaged the Germans in a long evening of wonderful conversation. The evening began with snacks in the kitchen and a long and involved discussion with Roy Schuster, a delightful middle-aged German, covering the relationship between faith and reason, philosophy, science, and theology in the modern world. I tried as best I could in German (with a surprisingly large amount of success) to explain my own belief, founded in my Catholicism, in the inherent and necessary compatibility of faith and reason, and the ultimate mystery that even reason must admit exists at the end of the philosopher's search for truth. It was at this point that Emily joined the conversation, and for the rest of the evening we were engaged together in a spirited attempt to understand each other (Emily considers herself quite the skeptic when it comes to religion and quite the liberal when it comes to politics).

The discussion continued in this vein during the soup course (a wonderful pumpkin soup with the best attempt I've so far met in Germany at cornbread), now branching out into a discussion of the nature of art, music, genius, and the scientific explanations of the human genome (for the gist of my thoughts, see my post from last October). The conversation, which by now had been joined by several other Germans, passed into politics after we reseated ourselves in front of plates laden with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, and, for the German touch, red cabbage, and on then to the war in Iraq and the greater war on terror as we enjoyed pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Alas, by the end of the evening however, my wits dulled by a belly full of good food and good wine, the discussion began to slacken, and when with a shock Emily and I realized it was already 9:00 (both of us with about an hour's train ride home before us and both having classes this morning), we were regrettably obliged to take our leave. It was, nevertheless, a most wonderful evening, full of excellent food, good company, and most interesting interaction, and I shall look long upon the evening in Bochum with good and pleasant memories.