Today is the third day of the Feast of Christmas. . . a day the Church chooses to remember Saint John the Evangelist and Apostle. Theologian, man of passions, and apostle, John is my favorite writer in the New Testament. He is easily the match for Plato in terms of complexity of thought. . . and the beauty of his Gospel is stunning. (See John 1:14 and John 3:16 if you doubt me!)

It is in John, his Gospel and his Revelation, that we can see the Love that moves the Stars combined with the rigors of theology. John is that rare man who could write with every part of his soul engaged . . . including the passions of the intellect. He was the apostle of love and of hell . . . the great theologian and the disciple Jesus loved. Few have ever reached his artistic genius.

If humans were not fallen, then perhaps God would more often reveal truth in a poetic science or scientific fairy tales. Great geniuses, like Dante, were able to write both the best science and the best poetry of their day simultaneously, but for the rest of us this side of paradise many tools that seem to give contradictory results will have to do. Nor is this a bad thing in humanities fallen state, but the divine mercy of Babel.

At the great Tower, as the tale goes, human language was divided to prevent men from stepping over the bounds that divine mercy had built for human protection. Language, whether mathematical or otherwise, is the greatest tool that humans have to describe reality. Divided languages produced divided disciplines and prevented too much power, too clear a picture of reality, from falling into broken, and wicked, human hands.
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The Holiday is not over! The Church is not stingy like the secular culture and knows better than to try to squeeze all the jollification we need into one day.

There are still ten days to go. . . but still St. Stephen’s Day can seem a bit pale. Many of us have to go back to work. . . and our secular culture strips the decorations down too quickly just as they put them up too quickly. What seemed possible on Christmas day, love and joy to the world, seems a bit less clear on St. Stephen’s Day. After, wasn’t Stephen the first martyr?

Traditional Christians understood that the joy of birth also reminds many of us, the next day in the hang over from the party (!), of the pain of death. How can we know? How can we hope that the promise of Christmas is real?

Opinion is easy to come by, knowledge hard. It took but a moment for me to type that a film that took years to make is bad. If this is mere opinion, then there is no particular reason to value it. Knowledge, if it can be obtained, would be preferable. People recognize this when it comes to medicine and nobody is shocked finding the truth is hard work when it comes to understanding nature.
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Nearly every culture dreamed of it: a virgin would conceive, a god would come to Earth and show us justice, and healing and peace would come at last to mankind.

Nobody could make all of the elements work into one great story, but humanity knew what we needed. We dreamed of it, longed for it, tasted it in the sweat of daily life.

Reality finally took a hand and the Love that undergirds everything made the dream real. Christmas is the beginning of it all. . . the solution dreamed of becoming fact. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth came to Earth because these Ideas exist in a Mind: the Mind of God . . . and that Mind is motivated by Love.

Christmas was better than our dreams, not just because it was real, but because God did the utterly unexpected and became fully Man. He brought Heaven back into union with Earth using a real Body, a real Human Soul, and His Divine Nature. He made them One in Himself without confusing them to fix them and make them right.

The beauty of Christmas is not just marketing, but real. That reality opens many doors . . . including helping us take our own stories seriously. The best are images of that great Image and so have something to teach.
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Happy endings require love, but the love folks are looking for is either in short supply or surprisingly unsatisfying when found. Christmas is a holiday for loving the movies tell us, but love is pretty hard to find.

As Love Actually points out “love is all around” in virtual reality, but there is too little love in reality and it is too limited scope. Instead of love being a means to a goal, it has become the goal.

We want the perfect holiday, but we actually search for the perfect “stuff” to give as gifts. We crave love, but the media has taught us that love is just sex. Dawkins and his merry band of atheists are often embraced by college students looking for liberation from “rules” . . . only to discover that love has been reduced to one selfish gene looking for another selfish gene to make it to the next generation and that free will has vanished.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Christmas always brings out the cynics in modern times and it is no wonder.

Children grow up watching Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or some other fairy tale, but seeing their parents divorce, political leaders lie, and hearing “grown up” media sneer at their movies. Disney promises that if they follow their heart, then all their dreams will come true. But even if they get what they want for Christmas, it is never as good as the advertisement. It is lie that all wishes come true and it is an even greater lie that it would be wonderful if they did. Kids don’t have to be very old to become cynics.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Note on the origins of the manuscript:

Yesterday I was working on a manuscript related to Plato’s view of time and eternity in Timaeus. My daughter was playing Christmas music in the other room just as I was translating the odd section on numbers that puzzled even A.E. Taylor. Mary Kate hit a chord . . . just as I was puzzling aloud about the text. As I spoke the following letter appeared on my computer screen. I don’t know what to think of it . . . and pass it on to you. I have not been able to duplicate the convergence that produced it . . . and so I assume that the proximate time and relationship to the winter solstice may have helped produce the result. We shall see next year.

(more at Middlebrow…)

The Conclusion of a Five Part Series based on a 11/06 ETS paper. (This section contains work also found in a paper on Mozart given to THI two yeas ago.)

West ends up taking young artists too seriously, empowering, hip-hop artists instead of educating them in better things. However, a “conservative” retreat from education and listening to the many, the heavy duties of servant-leadership, can amount to the same thing.

A great artist, Mozart, saw what Cornel West does not.

Failure to act ends up empowering the moral nihilism portrayed in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The role of a gentleman in society is central to the opera. Many of the Don’s victims cannot understand how a “nobleman” could be ignoble. Surely they are safe with such a great man! Both the noble ladies and the peasant women cannot understand how the Don could betray the Christian social order. Such a man either cannot really exist, surely the tales about him are rumors, or he must somehow be a great man in order to defy convention. Just as Milton’s Satan can appear to be a hero by the very boldness of his rebellion, so Giovanni is given undeserved admiration for the vastness of his crimes.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Our children, the greatest asset our society has, are given to the college and university system in part to produce leaders. America needs leaders . . . men and women of virtue and character who can make hard decisions and who will serve their fellow citizens.

Colleges and universities have a civic duty to produce such leaders . . . it is the right thing to do and if they don’t do it then their very right to exist may be threatened by the enemies of freedom.

Hugh Hewitt engaged in a conversation today with Larry Arn of the fine Hillsdale College and later with me. We discussed Torrey Honors at Biola University and the nature of American education.

Hugh is a brilliant communicator and engages daily in a defense of Western values. What school is most likely to produce friends and allies for Hugh Hewitt? Do we want to send our brightest and best to college to be mentored by men and women who share our values or pay to have our future leaders propagandized by those who reject any duty to civic service?

Listeners to his show need to ask this question before writing a check to a college, “Is this school engaged in its civic duty of training up leaders to defend the very values that make the school possible? Or does it attack those values daily?”

Is the school your child attending plainly on the side of Judeo-Christian virtues and the Western tradition of reason and liberty? Ask. Ask if the school hopes to teach virtue to its graduates. If not, and most schools gave up on this long ago in a mess of moral relativism, ask them what their liberal arts curriculum does? It was intended by the men and women who created it to teach character and service. If the college has given up on that, then what is it for?

Programs like Torrey at Biola University and Hillsdale College will teach your kid to think. They might not turn out as we would wish. . . we believe in liberty after all. However, if the college you are choosing has no intention of teaching character or service, then one can be sure of what they will not get.

These schools have the right to stop educating as C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers were educated. Classically trained graduates of schools like Torrey at Biola University and Hillsdale College would defend that right absolutely, but we have no obligation to support this failure of will and duty by sending our children and our hard earned treasure to schools that no longer do what they were founded to do.

My students have fun at college. . . but they are mostly here to work. They could have fun at home after all without the expensive tuition bill. We are fighting a global war against foes who hate liberty and the Western educational system. It is time to produce another greatest generation that has a serious minded goal of making a difference and defending those values.

If the school is best known for the football team, buy your kid a sweat shirt from that school, a Direct TV subscription to the college football package, and send them to Biola to work.

(more at Middlebrow…)

A Series of Posts Based on a Paper Given at the ETS 11/2006.

Cornel West with other modern Christian liberals has a problem.

He does not want to argue for passive non-involvement in politics, since he feels that great social change is needed. Most Americans are Christians and motivated by their Christianity, and as a prophet for change he obviously does not want to disenfranchise Christians. He quickly concedes that the American experience is deeply religious. Christians have always been an overwhelming majority of Americans and Christian ideas permeate American arts, thought, and philosophy. Most American leaders have professed some form of Christianity.

How to negotiate this?

He argues that good Christianity is “prophetic” and bad Christianity is “Constantinian.” Good Christians speak truth to power and bad Christians are co-opted by it.

(more at Middlebrow…)

A Series of Posts Based on a Paper Given at the ETS 11/2006.

Cornel West with other modern Christian liberals has a problem.

He does not want to argue for passive non-involvement in politics, since he feels that great social change is needed. Most Americans are Christians and motivated by their Christianity, and as a prophet for change he obviously does not want to disenfranchise Christians. He quickly concedes that the American experience is deeply religious. Christians have always been an overwhelming majority of Americans and Christian ideas permeate American arts, thought, and philosophy. Most American leaders have professed some form of Christianity.

How to negotiate this?

He argues that good Christianity is “prophetic” and bad Christianity is “Constantinian.” Good Christians speak truth to power and bad Christians are co-opted by it.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Based on a Paper Given at the ETS in 11/2006

Cornel West Tries to Attack Constantine . . .

III. Possible Definitions of Constantinianism

West uses the term “Constantinianism” throughout his book Democracy Matters. Over the course of the text, no formal definition is given, but West does give clues to what he means through his use of the term. For West “. . . the most profound, seminal teachings of Christianity, those being that we should live with humility, love our neighbors, and do unto others as we have them do unto us” are under assault from the “Constantinian religious right.” Oddly West has not taken into account the message of monotheism in the Old Testament (surely the “Hear O Israel” is seminal and the intolerance of other religions central) or the greatest commandment to love God with the totality of self.

West (and other critics) is right that Christians with access to power run the risk of worshipping that power, but that is uncontroversial. The fact that a thing can be abused is not sufficient reason to avoid since such goods as sexuality contain similar temptations to abuse. Both Dante and Augustine attacked the powers of the day, including Christians, while advocating the possibility of Christian emperors. It is not attack on an idea to point out the failures that have overcome some adherents. West must provide an alternative, but this he fails to do.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Part II of a Series based on a Paper Given at the 11/06 ETS

What about Constantine? Why is this Roman Emperor dragged into modern debate by writers like Cornel West?

Constantine was the Emperor who ended the official Roman persecution of the Church and favored Christianity in his public acts. While he did not make Christianity the state religion, he sponsored many Churches and encouraged others (such as his mother Helen) to build and endow many Christian institutions. Christianity had been growing for centuries and acquiring wealth, philosophical skill, and power. Sometimes this power was used well and sometimes badly, but Constantine marked the official acknowledgement by the Empire that Christianity had triumphed over persecution. Oddly, modern Christians such as West view this triumph in wholly negative terms.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Part I in a Series of Posts Based on an ETS paper of 11/2006:

Christendom is widely abandoned and ridiculed. Despite helping create the modern university, parliamentary forms of government, international law, world class arts and science, the vices of Christendom are more widely know than her virtues. Yet Christendom is a good model for Christian flourishing, the religious right in America (however flawed) is essentially a positive development, and attacks on it are flawed. Secularism in Western Europe and the United States has proven unable to sustain itself. It is not fecund in any way.

In a pluralistic society, the Christian family, culture of life, and evangelism will bring a gradual growth in influence for traditional Christians. While Christendom will never be identical to any state in this age, any state can associate with it.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Losing is no fun, but it points the way forward for traditional Christians who are also Republicans. First, there is no sense attacking the voters for their choice. In some cases the Republican candidate was tainted (Burns) or not really Republican (Chafee), but that is not enough to explain our losses. Good people lost, especially Santorum and Allen. They lost in part because the message of traditionalists is not being argued in a persuasive way.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Good news: many of the Democrats winning tonight in the House are mainstream. . . and not Pelosi Democrats.

Bad news: Pelosi will be majority leader.

I hoped to hold the House, but was wrong about both that and the Senate. Plainly the War and Republican party mistakes (Macca anyone?) destroyed hope for victory.

One thing I have learned: there is always another election. Ohio was toxic for Republicans due to local issues. New York is trending Democrat. . . and this was an off year. I think pro-war Republicans will have to accept that the war was a drag on the party. . . even if it was right.

We will see how the next two years go.

(more at Middlebrow…)