Huh. I just had a thought. A Thought, if I be flamboyant enough to capitalize it. I've been unpacking after a tiring separation from my luggage for a day, resulting in me just getting it a little while ago.

In the background is Vienna Teng's oddly exultant "Augustine," which, as I mentioned earlier, had been the occasion for my and Mike's speaking to her a little after her concert in Milwaukee last month. The lyrics led me to think something about the phenomenon of undergoing a spiritual crisis – something that we do more than once in our lives. In the great saints and spiritual masters – as we see stetched out over a decade in Augustine himself, as related in his amazing Confessions – such spiritual crises end not in the defeat of faith, hope or love, but in sometimes astonishing transformations in grace. "The Dark Night of the Soul" and "the silence of God" are phenomena that one finds throughout spiritual experience, as far back as the Jewish prophets themselves.

And then here was my Thought: spiritual literature and scholarship has explored this "Dark Night" experience of feeling only an absence of God, and it is pretty sensibly understood, I think, by those wise in spiritual matters. But it just struck me that that is always dealt with in an individualistic manner: of speaking of God as interacting with an individual person for their spiritual benefit. What if, I suddenly thought, you could look at this as a social phenomenon as well? We speak of Modernity as a time of the fading of religion and highly-developed spirituality in the face of Secularistic philosophical movements like the European Enlightenment. But what if you could look this experience as a social or corporate experience of something similar to the "Dark Night" experience? I frequently speak in my Theology classes of the development of spiritual sensibilities on a corporate level: of the individual, almost childlike, spiritual encounter with God in the revelation to Abraham; of the development in Moses of the giving of the Law to the people of Israel, like a child gaining rules and chores as part of their development; and of the development after the revelation in Christ and Pentecost to young adulthood, of being sent out into the world with your own responsibilities for transforming it.

Well, I thought, what if one looked at Modernity and its challenges to faith as akin, on a societal level, to the individual experience of the "dark night of the soul" and that experience of the absence of God, with all its potential threats and benefits to spiritual growth? I've never heard an analysis of this sort. While I see obvious problems with it – it certainly indulges in generalization, of course – I still wonder whether such an exploration might be an interesting exercise in a kind of spiritual historiography. I've always found compelling the analogy that God relates to humanity through history like a parent or teacher, back since I found that argument or observation in Irenaeus of Lyon and his explanation of why God's approach to Israel or the Church or humanity seems to change and develop through history. On a personal level, the "Dark Night" experience is so critical for developing to a deeper level in faith, so why not the possibility of exploring that possibility on a wider, corporate level, too?

(Now if only it didn't take half an hour to type out an idea like that....)

Some four or five years ago, I had a long conversation with filmmaker magdalene1 that played for a while with the idea about how it would be fascinating to do a film adaptation of Augustine's Confessions. After all, a book that's still selling well and influential after 1600 years? That's a good book! And I've taught it a number of times, and been more and more amazed every time I read it. And so magdalene1 and I chatted about how you could adapt such a text, whether straight narrative, whether with the voice-over of Augustine's commentary looking back at his life across the years, or whether with some more artsy attempt with both the in-narrative Augustine and the invisible-to-the-narrative later Augustine together in the frame. We did agree on having Don Cheadle star in it, or a now somewhat younger Don Cheadle, which I still think would be amazingly bad-ass.

But then there's the other thought: filmmakers' (especially Hollywood's) constant desire to "improve" an historical story by spicing it up with extra action or skin, or worst of all, with their own contemporary worldviews transplanted back into the mouths of historical figures. Thus we have had Mel Gibson's William Wallace in Braveheart spouting about individual freedom as though he were Thomas Jefferson fresh from the 18th century. Similarly we have Orlando Bloom's Balian of Ibelin in Kingdom of Heaven righteously telling the [evil and ignorant] Bishop of Jerusalem that "you've taught me much about religion" at the end of the spiritual quest he had begun when he righteously murdered his [evil and ignorant] parish priest, as though being "spiritual but not religious" would have been anything but laughable before the Modern world. And of course, who could forget the self-described and much-trumpeted "historical" version of King Arthur in 2004? So, the thought of a film on Augustine? Maybe there's something to be feared in such a thing. In fact, as I just discovered through an accidental Google find, blogger Kevin Jones described in wry, blow-by-blow detail just how such a "Hollywood Augustine" might play out, making fun and making use of every painful stereotype of contemporary cinematic politics along the way. Funny stuff. And then there's the opposite worry of 1950s-style pious schmaltz....

But then here's the real news and point of this all: someone's gone and done it. I saw that an Augustine film had just been screened for our current-day theological giant (and Augustine scholar) Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI. Director Chrstian Duguay, whose action film The Art of War I remember enjoying, has helmed a mini-series titled Augustine: The Decline of the Roman Empire, produced by three production companies from Poland, Italy and Germany. So... what to think? The trailer has a certain amount of pure hype that I fear, but it's a trailer, of course. The few glimpses of the theology articulated by the characters are ambiguous: does my man Ambrose mean "we don't find Truth" or God in the sense that initiative is ultimately on God's side? I'll stand by that. Does he mean that theology and faith has no recourse or basis in reason and logic? Then that's entirely the opposite of what Ambrose would have said, and just more Modern anti-Christian propaganda straight from the 18th century Enlightenment that produced the United States shoved into the mouth of an historical character. The glimpse of the mystical experience Augustine and Monica share by the shore in Ostia sounds like it might be on target, so that gives me some hope: in the Confessions, that scene is hugely important, not least for showing that access to God is no elite matter, like for the Gnostics, but entirely open in grace, whether to the great genius of Augustine, or to the less-educated faith of his mother. So, basically, it looks like I'll just have to wait and see, as with any film. I do have to admit that I'm curious, in a simple way, just to see what's been done.

My former student and now friend Jessica sent out an email that I just got, wishing a bunch of us a happy Feast of Augustine, as today is the 1579th anniversary of his death in 430. As it turned out, I ran into our great Augustine scholar Professor Barnes this afternoon while picking up my syllabi and so ended up with dinner plans with him, which we took at the excellent Miss Katie's Diner, one of those classic American diners that happens to be just off of campus and is somehow entirely off the radar of Marquette undergrads. So we marked the Feast together by having good diner breakfasts for dinner. I've never gone to a place that gives you not just the token two pieces of bacon with your order of eggs, but a whole pile of bacon. Good stuff. So that was just the latest of the spontaneous invitations I've been getting since I returned from Boston, along with dinner with the Harrises at the Lloyds', coffee with Erin F. before she returns to the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, along with such tasks as getting my syllabus ready for the new school year.

Anyway, just thought it cool to get such a Feastday reminder from a student, period. I sat through Barnes' undergraduate Augustine course last spring with Jessica and other former students like David and Ryan, and it's cool to see people internalize something from that encounter with such a great personality, even across the continents, cultures and centuries.

I even learned something new today from Barnes, in finding out that Sebastiaan Tromp, who is a scholar I've encountered in my dissertation research, seems to have been responsible for single-handedly coining the understanding of Augustine's ecclesiology at the Second Vatican Council. And, as it turns out, that understanding was based on about five repeated quotations from Augustine, all taken out of context and applied to an understanding of the Holy Spirit that seems to have nothing to do with anything else Augustine ever wrote about the Trinity. What the effect of that has been, I'm not certain; but it certainly doesn't help us refine our understandings in the present when our scholars mess up their representations of the past upon which we are building. I'm always conscious, as an historian, of a responsibility to both the past and the present (and thereby the future, I guess) to try to make sure my characterizations are as correct as possible, regardless of any use I might have thought to make of history for some present cause.

Dinners have been my chief joy the last several days. I wasted an incredible amount of paperwork time nearly inheriting (again!) my grandmother's car from my cousin Jane, only to discover that there were some extra costs associated with my particular position, so much so that I could not afford to receive a free car. So I am restrained from committing the great Green sin for a while longer. I also found that I was the Last Man Standing for the Canadian professorship search I had been part of, only to have that Department re-assess their goals for the professorship having undergone the process, and deciding to re-write the job description and conduct the search again next year, which they invited me to take part in, should I still be on the job market. And so, with such seeming bonanzas sprouting wings and fluttering off at the last minute, the dinners I mentioned become the clear highlights of my week.

I started to play the game of "When do you have some free time?" with Jessica last Wednesday after Barnes's undergrad Augustine class (which I'm sitting in on), when I had the inspiration of then realizing that I could do dinner right then, which actually turned out to be one of the few openings in her schedule. She had never been to Zaffiro's Pizza and Bar, it turned out, which happened to be my craving of the moment. Since this is a Milwaukee classic, I came down somewhere between suggestion and insistence, and that's where we ended up. The fact that she's currently doing the vegetarian thing didn't end up being a problem, as they do a decent veggie pizza, too, and we compared pizzas of America, Italy and Ireland (not recommended!). This gave us more chance to talk about her engagement, and we talked criteria for deciding who you marry, and quite a bit about friendships attached to or affected by getting married. There was some particularly curiosity on her part about how I've stayed friends with people I've dated, and even been accepted as a friend by husbands of such. That her best friend is the ex of her fiancé is a juggling act in which she has found herself. So that lead to some interesting talk on balancing friendships with marriage.

Friday's gathering at the Lloyds' of the group felt especially good after having missed it the week before due to being sick. I started to share the news of Jessica's engagement (pretty much everyone knew her, even if they'd only met her once) but I found out that everyone already knew, Barnes having had his own dinner with her the night before. That most exciting bit of news out of the way, I played with the weird drama of "won but didn't win" in telling everyone about the Canadian professorship as we ate the fabulous ham dinner Amy had prepared. And Barnes shared the discussion that his undergraduate class had had on Wednesday about another thing I missed while sick, the consolatio-style talk that his friend Julia had had with the class about her upcoming death from cancer, as a lesson built off of the discussion of Augustine's friend's death in Book IV of The Confessions. Students had been reporting that that session was the singlemost important class they had ever attended, and spoke intensely about it for about 50 minutes before Barnes turned the class to a more text-based subject. I'll watch the recording of the session at the library soon. There was some talk then on Friday about how he came to schedule such an unorthodox event for the course, and how it was that he came to ask Julia to do this, both as much for her as for the students, he said.

Our BSG-watching that night proved to be very exciting as a lot of the hidden background history of the show was finally revealed as the story is coming to its conclusion, and it was a mercifully satisfying piece of writing. Talking about that gave way to general conversation that kept us all going until about 1am, when we all finally turned in, all of us again spending the night. I loitered around in the morning after the Harrises left, talking with Amy while playing cars and trains with Owen while Dan gave Anna a reading lesson, and chatting with Dan about Roman rhetoric and such random topics until he went in to the library around noon. While he worked on some research there, I took care of my business and then headed back to their place for another dinner invitation, this one over yummy meatloaf. I checked on the ride back to make sure that Dan remembered that this was Valentine's Day and that "Let's hang out with Mike!" wasn't a disaster in the making on his part, and was relieved when he said that, having to roll with their babysitter's schedule, he and Amy had dinner-out plans for the following night. So we were making up for a movie night invitation I had had to turn down earlier in the week as I was trying to make up for lost time with the dissertation. With Dan and Amy, we'll often go old-fashioned and do a "short" before the feature of the evening, often an episode of the hysterical Arrested Development, which I'd never seen until they started showing it to me. This night, instead, I had them watch the pilot of Everwood, which series I thought they might really enjoy together, since I thought it was an exceptionally-written multi-generational family drama, and is still one of my top-3 all time pieces of television. That went over well, with some interesting observations just about the nature of television pilots as a distinct sort of thing in themselves, and how you have to watch them with slightly different expectations than a series in the midst of production. We then went on to the Coen Brothers' recent comedy Burn After Reading which gave us plenty of laughs, though I observed that somehow their movies often seem more funny in their individual moments than they seem as a whole film.

Well, this bout with whatever-it-was is finally coming to an end. I kept saying that over the last few days, but it kept lingering, whether it was the Mother of All Chest Colds or perhaps a mild walking pneumonia. I've had the latter before, and it felt more like that, but I never had a fever that I noticed, and usually that infection provoked some kind of fever in the past.

So this has been the second night that I've gotten a long, productive run in on the dissertation, without being utterly baffled or hypnotized by the project. I'm currently analyzing the theology of charisms Sullivan has operating in his retreat notes of the 1970s, and will then run with that to see what impact/contrast it offers to the form of his final published work on the topic.

I ventured out today, although I'm still coughing and worried about being infectious, and I sat in on today's session of Barnes's undergraduate Augustine course, which I had been doing and recording up to this point. While the conversation was interesting on the "Narnia" of the Manicheans, the text known as The Hymn of the Pearl, I was really most excited by noticing during a whispered exchange with former student/current friend Jessica that she was now sporting a diamond on her left hand. When my eyes popped out as she was making some gesture, she nodded and whispered that she'd fill me in after the class concluded. Apparently Nathan proposed last weekend, having asked Jessica's Mom's permission over the Christmas break, when he visited Italy, which was the first time I'd heard that he'd made the trip. (That's what I get for having to cancel all my social plans for feeling crappy.) So she made a point of asking if I'd be available for a Marquette wedding on January 2nd, which I assured her would be no problem at all.

Travel arrangements have been made for my next interview, and I'm also lining up travel plans for heading down to the Cincinnati area to stand Godfather for my nephew Nathaniel Alan on the 22nd. Speaking of transportation, I'm about to join most self-proclaimed environmentalists in their hypocrisy and commit the ultimate Green sin: I've about to cave in after years of resistance and own my first car. I'm pretty embarrassed.

Today's the Feast of Lewis, being the 45th anniversary of his death, as well as those of Kennedy and Huxley.

My birth certificate showed up in the mail, which was a relief. My identity remains my own for another day. So all my paperwork is in order, and my files can be put away for another decade. The day was spent digging back into Chapter 1 of the dissertation, refreshing myself with what I had done there so that I could clarify in my mind what remained to do in this next chapter. I had a headache through most of Friday, though, which was discouraging. Still, over meals I watched a few episodes of the 1965 season of The Avengers, which I had found on sale the other day for a mere dollar. I hadn't seen these since I was in junior high, when they were my first exposure to quirky British television and intrinsic British coolness, as well as the more fundamental fascinations of Mrs. Emma Peel in a leather catsuit. The music, the camerawork, the locations: it was all great fun to watch now as an adult, and to remember 1965's contradictions from a 2008 perspective – of people who moved between upscale London buildings with their modern amenities and open-fire village pubs and houses, as both being "normal." The countryside village conditions, from my eye, though, were hardly removed from what I grew up considering "camping," they were so basic. Ireland was the last of the European nations to so modernize, with a lot of folks describing to me in 1997 how different things had been just a few years earlier, and how much more prosperous everyone was feeling in that "Celtic Tiger" economy as it made fundamental changes in the popular standard of living. So watching these were both fun "spy-fi" in themselves, as well as interesting historical documents in indirect ways.

The other morning I attended Fortunate's dissertation defense with Mike and Ellen, which was quite fun because this was one defense where I already knew the material in great depth, which is not often the case in our diverse and specialized dissertations. But Fortunate is an Augustine scholar, among other Early Christianity interests, who dissertated under Barnes, and did an historical project that he nevertheless tied in interesting ways to struggles today in divisions among African Christians, offering his work as a model of an historical pattern worth trying to avoid. The rest of the committee – Zemler-Cizewski, Dempsey, Johnson and Carey – all asked potent and interesting questions from their various specialties and perspectives. Mine was the only "public" question. In my own work, touching on the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, I had been struck by the fact that, as with many Church councils, no one had ever attended a council before, since there had been none in their lifetimes. So they sort of had to make up their own way of having a council. Since Fortunate's dissertation, and the faculty conversation regarding it, was more explicit about the African cultural elements Augustine and the other African council leaders were trying to rein in or modify, I asked about any particularly African characteristics in their councils themselves that Fortunate might have noticed. Most of that conversation seemed to stay in the moral mode, as well as mentioning the African concern with universal perspective or function in the Church, which one can see back to Cyprian in particular.

"Broken Nets": Augustine, Schisms, and Rejuvenating Councils in North Africa
Fortunate Ojiako, B.A., B.Th., M.A., M.A.
Marquette University, 2008.

This dissertation studies the schisms ("broken nets" according to Augustine) [he was using the image of the story of Jesus instructing disciples where to fish, with one casting of their nets resulting in a catch that burst the nets] that bedeviled the North African Church, as well as its moral conditions during the late fourth and early fifth centuries. This study equally shows the rejuvenating nature of the Aurelian/Augustinian councils. These councils sought to regenerate debased and erroneous aspects of North African customs. The sanative nature of the Aurelian/Augustinian councils is not only buttressed from Augustine's Letter 22, but also from the content of the conciliar decrees emanating from the North African councils. These reforms were liturgical, moral, as well as disciplinary in nature. In correcting the African Church customs, Augustine sought to align them with those of the universal church.

The trademark moral rigorism of the African Church that had dire consequence for her is likewise highlighted in this work. Rigorist views were espoused by Tertullian, Cyprian, the Donatists, and even Augustine's Catholic Church. Rigorism is also present in the consuetudo or the so-called African theology that sought exclusion for apostates and also rebaptized former heretics and schismatics. This work adumbrates that nets and broken nets were products of the time. While the Decian persecution of 251 AD gave rise to the lapsi, (and in extension Novatianism) the Diocletian persecution of 312 produced the traditores, which in turn aided the Donatist schism.

Part two of this work explores the state of the North African Church that Augustine and his cohorts sought through councils to reform. This section also examines the Cyprianic councils and the impact of customs and scriptural interpretations on the controversy in the North African Church.

The result of this dissertation will not only show the rejuvenating nature of the Aurelian and Augustinian councils, but also adds its voice to those among Augustinian scholarship that see a greater need and importance of studying Augustine more from his African environment. This is not in any way an attempt to discountenance the importance of other paradigms that go a long way toward a better understanding of Augustine.

I frequently find myself having to struggle to define "systematic theology" to people with no formal theological background. It's one of those terms for a subdivision within the field of theology, and it happens to be the aspect of theology in which I am primarily doing my doctoral work – my "major," as it were. I've been reading in Avery Cardinal Dulles' 1995 The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System tonight as part of my dissertation research, in which I am currently playing around with his theological language of "models" of the church, and I found a passage I thought said things neatly:

Systematic theology aspires to deal in a consistent way with all significant questions pertaining to Christian faith and to develop answers to each of these questions in correlation with all the others. A theological system, as an original construal of the meaning of Christianity, is a major achievement of the creative imagination. Faithful to the data of Scripture and tradition, as well as to all that is known from other sources, the systematician integrates all these manifold elements by means of certain overarching principles into a complex and unified whole. Thomas Aquinas and the great medieval doctors were systematicians in this sense. So were Calvin and Suarez. In our own century the same may be said of a few authors such as Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, and Wolfhart Pannenberg.

The greatest systematic theologians have always, in my estimation, been somewhat unsystematic. They have never been slaves to the logic of their system. Augustine never fully reconciled his Neoplatonic metaphysics with his commitment to the biblical vision of salvation through time and history. Thomas Aquinas, notwithstanding his preference for Aristotelian categories, never abandoned his attachment to Neoplatonism, even in the acute form represented by Pseudo-Dionysius. He interpreted Aristotle with extraordinary freedom and, when it suited him, shifted to biblical and juridical categories. Thus the method of models is helpful not only for mediating between different theological systems but for analyzing the inner tensions within a single theologian's work. No opposition exists between the approach through models and the practice of systematic theology.

I found myself a bit lost in time and space over the past several days. Last week, after typing up the story about the night on the lake with Becky, I had a long phone call with an old friend/girlfriend from my undergraduate days that hit me on so many levels that I found myself musing on one aspect or another of the conversation through the rest of the weekend. Part of it was just the normal catch-up, the what's-been-going-on in the months since we last spoke. But Angie had also been doing a lot of thinking about her past in that time, she said, and she wanted to let me know just how I had figured in her life.

It was kind of staggering to be given credit for long-ago kindnesses that helped lay a foundation for the life she has today with Chad and their girls. I'm an historian, and an Augustinian in so many ways, and I habitually follow Augustine in using my own life story as a ground for a spiritual reflection and insight in the way he demonstrated in The Confessions. If there's anything I love in teaching history, it's the moments where you can show students long chains of cause-and-effect: if 300 Spartans and their companions hadn't defended Thermopylae, no American Constitution twenty-two centuries later – that sort of thing. It was new, though, to hear something like those kind of long consequences drawn out from my own life. We dwell so much on that bad things that happen to us and to others. I know students resonate with the example of hearing a cruel word said about you in the high school hallways when I talk of historical chains of causality. I don't know that we so strongly realize the good things. It's like physical health: we recount episodes of being sick, but we don't keep a tally of days of health – we take those as "normal" or as our due, and all our blessings become hazy in memory. I've pointed that out in story before, echoing Tolkien in another observation: the evils that happen to us make for stories, while the days of goodness, while better to live, don't seem to be something we can easily turn into compelling stories. Would that that were somehow true: this entry might make more sense. Yet somehow these moments that Angie took to try to make me hear her, and to thank me, did in fact make that kind of impact.

She had continued in that kind of reflective mood afterward, writing a long addendum letter that shared some copies of mementos she had dug out that night, and following up on a few points. So that sent me for a further loop as I read it on Saturday, and re-read it Sunday on my way to Chicagoland for the nieces' dual birthday party. Theologically, of course, I suppose that this gets to the heart of what I think is ultimately true about reality: that at its foundation, it really is about Love, about a Triune God whose mode of existence is an interpersonal love, and that this base gives the rest of reality its character, from quantum physics to human psychology. And so here I'm given a chance to see that love continues, aways, to bear fruit, even the love of college friends who dated for a while and who now haven't seen one another in years. I can think of things that didn't go right, that I was young and immature and dorky when we dated (some would say "male"), but that part doesn't really matter anymore. Even the "dating" part isn't really a big deal: it's the strength of the friendship we offered underneath, and can continue to enjoy still today in some fashion. All the rest seems to fade. Angie's husband, Chad, is one of the coolest people ever, and has really welcomed me as a friend, too, as well as supporting Angie and me in continuing to be friends over the years – the foundation of Christianity in the friendship has allowed that kind of generosity, and made the fact that we once dated to be not an issue. But instead, whatever was done right in love, of seeing the beauty and what was to be loved in the other: those seem to be the things that continue to bear fruit in people's lives, that become part of us. Maybe love enables us to become what others see in us.

The students seemed to be having a largely uniform positive reaction to reading Julian of Norwich – those that did the first reading: I had an abnormally large number not do the reading, resulting in an abnormal amount of absurd answers to their quiz question on the material – and I was pleased to see how they were running with the material. I had them read the first 12 chapters of the Long Text of the Showings. There was the kind of environmentalist ethics take on some of the aspects of her "hazelnut" vision that I would assume and hope they would have, but also a number comments taking her in different directions. There were particularly interesting lines of conversation on the fragility and contingency of human life that intrigued and pleased me. I'm hoping to see that more of them are on task, though, for tomorrow's reading, which is chapters 27, 32 (building on the famed "All will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing shall be well" line she receives from God, which she thinks almost inexplicable in this world of trouble) and chapter 51, with its highly developed vision/allegory of the Master and the Servant.

Office hours were quiet today and, as I grabbed some beef and vegetable soup for a late lunch while I was there, I pulled down a book from Barnes' collection to read while I ate, since I can't do any "serious reading" while eating (as "serious" reading involves using a pen). I saw a title on Stoic psychology that grabbed my eye, having become much more aware of how Stoic thinking influenced early Christianity and my own thought through those writers and through some classical literature directly, as I studied history. These turned out to be the 1997 Gifford Lectures, a volume called Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation by one Richard Sorabji from Kings College, London. I hadn't heard of the book before, but it seemed sensible and direct and was great fun to read anything that wasn't for my own class or for my dissertation. I read two chapters, one in the middle more directly oriented toward the pagan Stoic authors themselves and then a later one discussing the absorption of the Stoic ideal of emotional management or "indifference" (to use that word in a very qualified and technical way) and its adaptation to Christian forms, where the relation to emotion – Love, for example – had to be modified before such apatheia could be considered a human ideal.

So I wanted to make a "note to self" about looking more closely at the text some time in the future. From my coursework here at Marquette, I came to appreciate, as I said, the far-ranging influence of Stoic thought both in antiquity and in my own thought. Much of what in Augustine has long been glibly identified as NeoPlatonism in his thought is actually Stoic, following in the mode of Cicero, the writer who had converted the young Augustine to the lifetime pursuit of wisdom we call Philosophy. And so I've come to have an increasing sympathy for kesil's self-conscious identification as a Stoic Christian, which just isn't a designation one hears nowadays.

Mickey and I happened to be walking the same way today as I was leaving from my office hours, and ended up talking for the next few hours, through giving his eldest son rides to and from a quick work shift and a good sit with drinks over at Alterra on Prospect. It was up in the low 70s for the first time today, sunny with a pretty strong wind, and it was good to get out to enjoy it. The last few days – finally without some annoying sniffle, cough, itch, ache, or any other kind of bug after three months' such drudgery – I've felt like a young god in comparison, and so it was fabulous to enjoy the freedom of spring, the warmth, and the cool refreshment of a fresh lemonade while we talked of academic life, of Luther as currently presented by Lutherans, the politics of identity, comparing problems in contemporary tendencies for Lutheranism and Judaism to be oppositional identities – defining themselves as over and against some other group: "not Catholic," "not Christian" – whether Julian of Norwich's "Christ as Mother" language was just descriptive of the economy (a metaphor for what Christ did) or whether the language was intended as describing something in the nature of the Trinity itself, and whether there was a real use for the human family as a model for the Trinitarian life. (Ancients and Medievals said "no," seeing it as a kind of naive biblical literalism regarding things like "Father and Son" language, or too misleading for its differences from the divine life in the human family being gendered, generational, causal, and the like.) Anyway, Mickey and I hadn't had a chance to hang in a long time – it's been nearly two years since I was his teaching assistant – and so it was fun to just catch up like this, to talk shop and what's the news with each of us.

History – personal or family history – keep rattling around in my brain. The previous few days were birthdays of the family members I've had the least chance to get to know: the 14th was the 101st of Grandpa Sweeney, the County Sligo teenage immigrant who died when I was only one, and who I therefore don't remember except through what stories I've gotten from people, and the 15th of my niece Sophia, who is now one year old herself and has only said "Hi!" and "Hey!" to me. (She's said those enthusiastically, I might say, though I've also gotten several looks from her that I'd guess translate best to "Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house?!") So that's a relationship with plenty of room for development, and we'll be celebrating her first birthday with the traditional bash this Saturday.

And of course I've had more good memories today as I've been thinking a lot of my "ten years ago" trip with Erik over the course of the last several days. Ten years ago today was our spectacular day exploring the ruins of ancient Carthage: starting on the high central hill now dominated by the no-longer functioning Cathedral of Saint Louis, to the ruins of the Basilica of Cyprian of Carthage, the layout of the streets and buildings of Roman Carthage, to excavated Punic settlements, the military seaport, the Amphitheatre of the Martyrs where Perpetua, Felicitas, Saturus and their friends were killed, and the Theatre of Carthage where Augustine felt he wasted too much of his youth. A cavalcade of glories and insights. Sunset came in the beautiful seaside town of Sidi Bou Said, and I look back now and can't imagine how I could have been so satiated at the end of it all.

Another one of the "Moments That Justify My Life."

All the images were at a boil in my head, and on my taped journal I was already starting to mumble lines built around my missing the girl I was dating at the time, and wishing she could see what I was seeing, under the phrase/question "Why does the world make me think of you?" I thought that that was a fairly universal experience, and one I could build on. All of that would come together on the flight home over the North Atlantic on the back of a Roman ATM slip, with Erik watching over my shoulder and offering good criticisms, as my song "Tunisian Blue." (Now available on iTunes! Sorry. I was contractually obligated to do that. For all three of you.)

Just in from the coffeehouse. Four hours of uninterrupted grading with concentration fully engaged: five papers graded.

Sigh.

Some good stuff, one with a sheer elegance that I much admired. And a bit of happy talk with Jessica as she was helping close the place down. But I had one epic one where a student tried to argue that The Confessions revealed that Augustine did nothing but what other people indicated throughout the course of his journey to Catholicism, revealing a pattern of continually co-dependent relationships. And almost every passage cited as evidence seemed to prove the opposite. I admired the ambition, but the attempt to demonstrate a thesis radical enough to overturn 1600 years' reading of a text might have been a bit ill-advised in a three-page paper. Or a 300-page one, for that matter. It made me recall how Erik used to complain about how many students in the Program of Liberal Studies at Notre Dame would waste class time trying to show that, after their one night's reading of Plato/Dante/Kant/Whoever, they were so much smarter than the obviously-stupid author....

One of the most remarkable documents I've ever read from the ancient world is The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. What makes this account of the martyrdom of a group of new Christians particularly noteworthy is that the text contains within it the journal that this 22 year-old woman, Perpetua, kept while she was in prison, awaiting her execution. We have virtually nothing written by women from the ancient world. And while she's educated, she seems to write in a more immediate style compared to other texts I've read from the period, one maybe less affected by current literary conventions, but perhaps for all that more to our own literary taste. For women's history, for early Christian history, for popular history – for all these areas of historical interest, her document is an absolute treasure, beyond price.

Hers is a robust, deeply-experiential Christianity: one given to the interpretation of dreams and the expectation of God speaking to them in visions. Early instances of prayer for the dead, of Christian visions of the afterlife, of the high status accorded to martyrs and the belief that their spiritual status and authority is one to which the bishops would appeal: all of these appear within the text. It is another side of the African Christianity that dominates Christianity's roots – Europe not becoming the intellectual center of Christianity until the Muslim invaders destroyed the bulk of African Christianity and culture in their invasions in the 7th century.

This is a text I had my high school Church History students read, their first experience at reading a primary source in my course. I toyed with the idea of pulling it out for my current Theology Through the Centuries course, but it didn't seem to fit as strongly as some other texts for our central "Trinity, Incarnation, Salvation" themes. Nevertheless, it remains a favourite of mine. Today is their feast day, the 1805th anniversary of their deaths. I try to make a point of remembering these people on this day: Vibia Perpetua, Felicitas, Revocatus, Saturninus, Secundulus and Saturus, their teacher who voluntarily joined them in prison so as to help see them through what lay ahead of them, and becoming, to my mind, perhaps the most dedicated teacher in Christian history.

Saturus is the most interesting figure in the text other than Perpetua and Felicity, and though he probably deserved his name in the title of the text, too, he has traditionally been overshadowed by the drama involved in the martyrdom of these young women. This was true even in antiquity, as I can see in the sermons Augustine annually preached on this day, commemorating the locally-popular heroes, which featured public readings of Perpetua's text. He too was, with the people, particularly focused on Perpetua and Felicitas. (Although Felicity is really the third most prominent figure in the text, I'd say, after the distant "second place" of Saturus.) And thus Augustine could ask, "For what could be more glorious than these women, whom men admire much more readily than they imitate?"

For me, personally, it was a tremendous afternoon when I had the chance to make a pilgrimage and visit the site of their martyrdom in the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre in ancient Carthage. I have a photo study of the Amphitheatre of the Martyrs here in my ScrapBook/Photo Album, if you are curious. More importantly, though, if you have the time or the interest, you might read the account, too. Perhaps as a Lenten moment. It seem to be winning more fans today, I see, with two recent novel/historical fiction adaptations, and even this attempt at translating the text into colloquial English (or this edited and less robust one).

The text leaves several images burned into my mind, not least of which is this final scene, reproduced here in this contemporary painting. The utter courage and faith of the woman, and maybe the wherewithal to still be challenging the jeering crowd, is here vividly and even brazenly demonstrated: she takes the sword of the freaked-out soldier (who understandably could be wavering, as he probably hadn't conceived of his role as a Roman soldier to be publicly stabbing young noblewomen) and guides it to her own throat in a final act of acceptance or defiance. Little wonder, then, that she still captures our memory and imagination today.

I received a kind of cool compliment today, particularly in light of my recent embarrassing moment of being asked to watch my language while I teach (a bit too casually Irish-American for some tastes, I'm afraid!). The Chair, Assistant Chair, and Director of Undergraduate Theology have asked me to lead a discussion for undergraduate Theology majors after the upcoming Père Marquette Lecture on March 9th. The annual Père Marquette Lecture is always the theological event of the year at Marquette. This year the speaker is Rev. Joseph A. Komonchak, the John and Gertrude Hubbard Chair in Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America, and co-editor of the magisterial five-volume History of Vatican II with Bologna's Giuseppe Alberigo that has produced some recent controversy.

According to the advance info, Fr. Komonchak’s address, "'Who Are the Church?', will explore the hypothesis that for every statement one makes about the Church, one should be ready to answer the question, 'Of whom am I speaking?' He supports his position with St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and relates his views to those of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J.." I will apparently help facilitate a gathering of undergraduate Theology majors afterwards in talking over what was presented at the Lecture. It's not a great deal of work on my part: as long as I can read it in advance – and Deirdre Dempsey, our assistant Chair and all-around cool person, assured me that I could get an advance copy of the book form of the Lecture – then I should have more than enough material to have the right kind of questions on hand to get the discussion rolling and to keep it going. Mostly I'm just pleased to be someone the Department thinks of turning to in order to contribute to undergraduate education when they so easily could have had a member of the faculty do this as well, since some of them will be present at the discussion, too.

Ugh. Feeling from bad to worse. What was a slightly-achey fluish thing yesterday is starting to feel like the real McCoy. I canceled my office hours this afternoon but I had to go over to the Dental School for bit to grab a new retainer that I found I needed after a bit of dental work in December. And while my fellow kept me sitting for a half-hour while he chatted with his professor, I could feel my head swelling like a balloon. I think I'll spend the rest of the day moaning. That's a plan.

Finishing Augustine's The Confessions with my Theology Through the Centuries class yesterday was interesting. It's at least the fifteenth time I've read the text, I figured that morning, (at least one student gasped when I said that) but it's such a rich text – one of the very richest – that I always find new things striking me and making me think in new ways. In this case, I was very much struck by his treatment of his mother, Monica, in Book IX, and for some reason the very last words of the autobiographical part of the text leapt out at me in a way they never had before: that the purpose of the text was not so much his life and conversion as such, but to immortalize the impact of her life, biological and spiritual, which resulted in his lift and – by the strength of her prayer life and spirituality – in his spiritual re-birth as well. Her final request of Augustine and his brother, "One thing only do I ask of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you may be." (IX, 11, 27) – pray for her at Mass – is now universalized through the book, as Augustine makes a request of the reader that, for the first time, sounded like it was supposed to to me – that it was being requested of me, the reader:

Inspire others, my Lord, my God, inspire your servants who are my brethren, your children who are my masters, whom I now serve with heart and voice and pen, that as many of them as read this may remember Monnica, your servant, at your altar, along with Patricius, sometime her husband. From their flesh you brought me into this life, though how I do not know. Let them remember with loving devotion these two who were my parents in this transitory light, but also were my brethren under you, our Father, within our mother the Catholic Church, and my fellow-citizens in the eternal Jerusalem, for which your people sighs with longing throughout its pilgrimage, from its setting out to its return. So may the last request she made of me be granted to her more abundantly by the prayers of many, evoked by my confessions, than by my prayers alone. (IX, 13, 37)

The students, most of them on their first encounter with the text, naturally talked about other aspects of Books VIII and IX, like the conversions scene itself, the models provided to Augustine of people like Marius Victorinus or Antony of Egypt, the question of the power of the will and Augustine's eventual rebirth not by will but by grace, or the mystical vision shared between Augustine and Monica in one of their last conversations. But this seemingly-little act of Augustine's request at the end was what really caught my imagination, as I realized that I was, in effect, reading a note from him to me, and getting a sense from it how it retroactively might change the entire flavour of the text.

I had dinner at the Lloyds' again the other night, with Anna and Owen treating me like their personal jungle-gym. I could almost start to suspect my friends of inviting me over just so that they can get a minute's breather from the energy of their kids. But after some work time, dinner, putting the kids down, and such, we finished a movie-set we'd begun the other week with The Prestigue with its brother-movie The Illusionist. (Yet another example, it seems, of how Hollywood, when it hears one studio is producing something, rushes similarly-themed movies into production: asteroid or comet-disaster movies; Joan of Arc movies; and here, magician movies.) The Prestigue being so good, was a hard act to follow, we figured, although I think that, had you seen them farther apart, you wouldn't be so compelled to compare the two. They both string you along nicely, and their plots really are diverse enough to avoid most obvious comparisons. Still, maybe that doesn't work anyway: the utterly-distinct The Emperors Club was still dismissed, over a decade later, as a Dead Poets Society rip-off, just because it was regarding an exceptional teacher in an East Coast prep school setting. Those stories couldn't have been more different, with DPS really being more facile in comparison to the other. For both The Prestigue and The Illusionist, the actors gave the surprises of the plot their strength: The Prestigue probably can be credited with the more creative plot and plot devices, but it also requires a greater "suspension of disbelief." But both were good fun, and worth whiling away a few hours with.

A late night's dinner out with Diane. Milwaukee was largely shut down because of the constant snowfall today, and we found ourselves at only the second occupied table over at Zaffiro's Pizza and Bar. This was the place Julie had introduced me to a few weeks ago, near her place, and as Diane's new apartment is right across the street from Julie's, it was convenient for us tonight, too. I ordered a large thin crust pizza for myself and she set into a salad and some cheese ravioli, as she's thinking of picking up her vegetarianism again. And so we caught up. Tim couldn't join us because he was working a day-long shift at Trocadero, though it was even more dead than Zaffiro's when we had stopped by, as I had shuttled a car over there for them, following Diane through the downtown streets and trying not to slide all over the place. I also took a peek at their new place and traded the volumes of Queen and Country I'd borrowed from her for the rest of her set, but otherwise we spent all the evening sitting at the dinner table, eating, drinking, and hearing one another's news and swapping ideas. She dug into my material on nature and grace – asking all the right questions – that I had mentioned discussing with my students today as we worked through Books V and VI of Augustine's Confessions, and I asked all about the drama of their moving in together. Good times. We were both pretty wiped out, though, and called it quits by eleven, and the shrieked with the cold as we scurried up Farwell to where her car was parked in a snowdrift.

So I've been back at home and doing a little of the graphics work I like to play with on my computer when I'm too zoned out to think about anything academic. As part of my ongoing project to digitize and backup old material, I'm now converting the videotape of the January 1996 tour of the Southeastern United States with the Notre Dame Folk Choir. The first clip I'm uploading is my favourite of the lot, the "video" Brett Boessen and I put together of what I guess is our only recording of the incredible "O Sifuni Mungu!" – an Swahili/English re-imagining of the old hymn "All Creatures of Our God and King," which is itself a re-imagining of Francis of Assisi's "Canticle of Brother Sun," the song that changed the Christian culture of Europe in opening up a new kind vision of nature as spiritual or as itself a sacrament of God. This is hardly the best possible sound recording, pulled from a videotape as it is, but it's such a great song that I'm very happy to have any copy of it. It features the amazing percussion arrangement of J.P. Hurt and Bryan Ball, and you can hear weaklingrecords on one of the opening solos and on the final verse solo, which is a fun key-change one. J.P. re-arranged those lines, trying to crank the energy up to "11," when I did that solo for the closer of the 1997 Easter Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. I loved doing this song as an offertory: it is about the purest sound of worship I've ever heard. And that sound also gave me a great image: I remember watching from the loft as we sang it, seeing Megan McDermott serving at the altar and just unobtrusively dancing to the music as the bread and wine were consecrated: that was as pure an image of worship as I've ever seen.

More than ever before, I think, I'm conscious of how much I miss what I could take for granted in Notre Dame/South Bend days and just isn't part of my life here: what I wouldn't give for a jam session right now, with people tossing out old and new songs, and with the musical synergy crackling and pulsing out of everyone. Mike needs to rock.

May and our gathering in Jackson Hole cannot come fast enough.

Okay, done checking mail and now it's back to Augustine. Book III of The Confessions rocks, too, but in a very different way.

One of the things that I have very much enjoyed about Benedict XVI is his Augustiniansim, that spirituality and theology so centered around Augustine of Hippo's strong and developed meditations on the nature of God revealed as Love Itself. catholic_heart  points out to me that Benedict has devoted three recent sessions of his Wednesday general audiences to talking with people about Augustine. This is particularly timely and interesting to me as I've begun exploring Augustine and his mighty work The Confessions with my own students.

So I'm copying here these first three audiences (though I see that the last, from this past Wednesday, has yet to be completely translated into English, which I'll update as it becomes available). The first is general biography tracing the rise of the great African teacher, and the second is similar but more focused on the end of Augustine's life and by extension to the ends of things and of life in general, while the third audience turns to that subject so near Benedict's heart here at the end of Modernity and the passage into whatever new phase of human history is before us: the relationship between faith and reason. Here he deals with that fusion in the passionate form Augustine gave to it.

(Updated)

 

( Read more... )

Yowch. I have got the most horrible headache, like my skullcap has been lopped off with an axe, and the ache extending down to my teeth. Thus I'm up at 3am, when I have to teach at 11.

I made it home around 11:30pm Monday night after moving my Mom from Verona down to Chicagoland, where she's now just a few miles from Leslie and Jim and the granddaughters. It was an exhausting run of packing, loading, driving the U-Haul and then unloading, which was only to be expected. I then added the adventure of eating something disagreeable after my class on Tuesday which has kept me messed up 'til today, apparently culminating in this headache. If only I could set the headache against the septic disaster of my intestines to see if they could destroy one another's evil....

Yay...

On the flipside, there was some good family-time to be had in all of this, of course. The nieces were shy at the party on Saturday up in Wisconsin, but more fun while having dinner at there house after unloading Mom's stuff. Sophia has taken to enthusiastic use of her first word – or maybe first two words – which are "Hi!" and "Hey!" both of which are usually accompanied by her face lighting up as she catches your eyes and her waving her hand at you. Fabulously adorable. I wish I had video of it to share here. Grace also dazzled me (not hard, I admit) by having copied out her entire kindergarten homework sheet on the word "for" (including the decorations on the photocopy) so that she could have preschooler sister Haley learn the lesson, too. (Think how long it took you to write a single letter at this age and you'll get how much work she put into it.) When I asked her if she thought maybe someday she'd be a teacher, she lit up and smiled, saying that maybe she would. When I asked her if she knew I was a teacher, she lit up even more, and smiled at me like I couldn't possibly be any cooler, since teaching and school were so clearly the most fun ever. Bliss.

So I'm uploading the entry I made over the weekend, at least, and maybe doing a bit of reading before trying to head back to bed. I've prepped the first book of Augustine's The Confessions for my students tomorrow, and I'm really interested to see if they'll be sold on the text. We're spending the most time on it of anything on the syllabus, reading the nine autobiographical books of the text over the next three weeks/six sessions. It took me a few readings before I really got how magnificent it was, before I found myself reading it with awe at the depth of its honesty, which is so much more profound an interior examination than any of our tell-all, self-parading books today.

Sunday, 27 January 2008

It’s been a busy week. I suppose all weeks are busy weeks, and so that was a stupid sentence to write. Oodles of paperwork for the Department. I spent Friday just doing administrative stuff, and not classroom-admin like grading, but just University forms. Blech.

The new rubric in my “Theology Through The Centuries” course still seems to be providing for a steady stream of conversation with students that is effortless for me: my only task is in managing discussion, really, while having to draw out students on the material has become a thing of the past. The core questions that they know they have to bring to the texts are more than sufficient to keep the class busy for the 75 minutes of our session. Reading Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word with the students has been really instructive for me, too. I don’t think I’ve read it since Notre Dame days – reading it brings a vision of sitting in a booth at the LaFortune Student Center saying “Oh, wow…” to myself as I read it – and I’ve come a long way since then theologically. When I have the text in front of me, I’ll have to try to set some of that down in print: I’m toting around Basil of Caesarea’s On the Holy Spirit right now in preparation for next week.

On Wednesday Julie and I finally watched Before Sunrise together after I had introduced her to the Irish fare at Brocach’s Pub. I had been wanting to show it to here since before last Christmas – thirteen months ago (and took the opportunity to razz her about how long it's taken). There was something about the combination of it and Before Sunset that really began to appeal to me then, moreso than when I had first seen them. The obvious appeal of the romantic story aside, there was also something Richard Linklater had achieved in the telling of this tale that captured something elemental – something about the occasionally deep human drama of just meeting another person. I also think that the combination of the two films reveals a unity of vision and execution in writing, directing and acting that brings out the contrasts of the characters from 1994 to 2003 in such a way that manages to be emblematic of these times without trying to carry the burden of being “the voice of their generation” or some such nonsense. The characters are real: interesting, limited, flawed, and beautiful in a way that I am forced to recognize in the people around me, captured in that kind of moment we may or may not recognize at the moment is one of the most significant of our lives. So I was delighted to finally share the film with Jules, too, and talk about these sorts of things with her. She paid me back after a few hours of conversation with a now very late-night viewing of the pilot for 1999’s Freaks and Geeks. I had heard of the series when it came out, was intrigued at a period piece that touched on my own childhood, but had no idea both how highly-regarded it was nor how brief it had been. So maybe some more on that later on. I borrowed the DVD set from her.

Been out in Verona and Madison all weekend, both celebrating my Mom’s retirement at a dual party for her and for my Aunt Pat’s 70th birthday, and then helping her finish her packing up for her move Monday. She had some really good years in that apartment, and while I love the fact that she’s going to be near Leslie and Jim and the girls, I’m going to miss going to Verona on holidays, and being easily near my cousins in Madison. We're spending this last night at Pat's, actually, since everything is packed up at Mom's now, including Mom's bed and Pat's old air mattress that I tried to use last night, but which deflated every two hours. Pat made a glorious feast for us this evening after a long day's work – roast pork tenderloin, baked potatoes, corn on the cob, applesause, and thick wonderful bread. Now it's just been a quiet evening with my Mom and my aunt, but a fitting way to close this period.

John Cavadini, my mentor as a Master's student at Notre Dame and now the Chair of the Department of Theology there, has written what Michel Barnes said might be the best thing he's ever written on Augustine. The two of them are both Augustine scholars, and John seems to be here in much the same L'Enfant terrible mode I've seen Barnes and his collaborator Lewis Ayres of Emory University: shaking up the field of Augustine studies by doing something startlingly radical – reading Augustine.

Seriously.

I was shocked to discover from studying with Barnes just how much this field – of the man arguably still the most foundational thinker in the West, even in our secularized thought-systems – has for decades been perpetuating inaccuracies due to the simple fact of scholars quoting one another rather than reading Augustine closely. Augustine was so huge, and so given to being summarized by other thinkers, that the accepted summaries really began to distort people's readings of the text. So the paradigms have been falling of late: Augustine the Neo-Platonist; Augustine the guy who made everything go wrong about sex in the West; and here with John, Augustine the founder of the Western notion of the Self. In Cavadini's "The Darkest Enigma: Reconsidering the Self in Augustine's Thought" in the last volume of Augustinian Studies, John challenged the standard "Augustine and the Creation of the Self" line which I too had obviously ingested over the years. Cavadini's attention to the detail of the Latin text, where I've generally been using the Boulding translation that makes use of the English word "self," was a great caution. There is no equivalent word to "self" in Latin. But the "English Augustine," where that word is written into texts, ends up lending Augustine's language to be related to Descartes and Locke and other modern theorists of the Self. My self. Your self. Our selves. The English gives a possessive note to it, too. And why not? Because everyone translating and reading has been told: Augustine creates this concept of the Self: so we expect to find it.

Enter Augustine: in the Latin, he speaks not of an "inner self," as the translations go, but of an "inner man," possessing five "inner" versions of our same senses. We translate this idea accurately in someone like Origen of Alexandria (d. 254), because we don't expect the "self" idea in him. Rather than concretizing a self that stands apart from the world and our actions, inviolable, Augustine actually portrays the "inner man" – humanity's innermost reality – as created and derivative of the existence of the Triune God who is living interpersonal Love. Flawed by sin, anything that appears to be an independent "Self" is in fact the decaying human beings who cut themselves off from the fundamental reality of God on which all people depend, whether they want to admit that or not. I was very interested to see Cavadini's attention to the program of the De Trinitate (Augustine's still brilliant and pertinent book on the Trinity), which gave me an increasing sense of the unity of the vision of Love in Augustine. That particular unity, I think, is going to be fertile ground for teaching, as a motif that I think students can apprehend and process profitably, that they can use as an organizing principle for Augustine's actual teaching, and use in comparison to other forms of thought or perspective.

Mike and Donna bought a place last year, a Milwaukee Bungalow in the Riverwest neighbourhood, that needed lots of work done on it in order to convert it from duplex to the single-family home that they wanted. Now, when I think of "fixing up" a place I move into, I'm thinking painting and maybe some very basic wood surface work. Mike, like Dan, has instead taken to tearing down walls, building new rooms and the like. They've raised and leveled the first floor over the last year, and yesterday, in prelude to tearing down a wall for the new kitchen-dining space that's coming, Mike, Donna, Dan, and I put up a 12-foot beam that will support the second floor in lieu of the soon-to-be-absent wall. Mike and Dan, naturally, did the bulk of the heavy lifting, which is the type of thing I'm not supposed to do after my adventures with steroids, and Donna and I swapped off on watching the kids. But I did lend a third set of hands in getting the thing into the room and in figuring out how to turn it so that it actually could get into the position intended: no mean trick given that the beam was longer than the room itself. Mike's losing a lot of study time to the project, but he and Donna should walk away from their time in Milwaukee with a profit on their living expenses, and I can't knock that. We had a dinner together of yummy homemade waffles with bacon, an unending stream of chatter from Renée, and odd moments of sound and expression from Zeke and Owen (Amy being off in NYC and NJ with Anna).

Friday night was Gallery Night in the Third Ward, and it was way bigger than I expected. Just the thing for a fun night out, if you could stand the crowds. I wandered a bit, but made my way before too long down to Artasia where I was meeting Diane prior to us watching Before Sunrise, which I've wanted her to check out for quite awhile. In fact, this was the third time in two weeks we'd made plans to see it, but things kept coming up, like the tragic collapse of her friend Robin last week. It turned out that the third time wasn't the charm here, either, as I thought she was getting off work around 8pm and it turned out she was going more toward midnight. I hung around the incredibly crowded shop, and look at some gift ideas, while getting the full tour of the wares from Diane, as well as meeting some of her coworkers that I'd long heard of, but never met. In time, her brother Dan showed up and between those two, and a pair of customers that I got into a long conversation with over wine, the night ended up being a blast. After running a car-shuffling errand, it was really too late to try to get the flick in, and so we grabbed a late dinner at Ma Fischer's, which I thought just the right way to end the night, being my favourite dive in town. As usual, the soup tasted incredible (New England Clam Chowder) and the potatoes remained the most disgusting instant sort. As, always, we had some great conversation that left me with a lot to think about.

I'm finally finishing a draft of a specific chapter after two months of just raw, unorganized writing on the dissertation. Now I'm stripping away things that I can save for later chapters and just seeing what I need for the biographical essay on Francis Sullivan. It's interesting to see it coming together, like I'm stepping back from a wall I've been building stone by stone, and can now start to see more of the whole. I'm not doing lots of free reading these days, other than the basket of books, magazines and catalogues I keep in the bathroom. I knocked off David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day at Julie's recommendation, which I thought got better as it went along, more pure wit and less snarkiness. I've been working for months on The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, and will likely take many more months to complete the three-volume set, the third volume of which I've yet to pick up. I confess that I love reading people's mail. Whether the earlier Letters of C. S. Lewis the letters of Augustine, or the Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo that Dad gave me for my birthday the other year, I find that I learn so much more about a thinker from this angle than I do by reading such masterpieces of self-consciousness as Augustine's The Confessions or Lewis' Surprised By Joy alone. This first volume, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931, is surprisingly painful at parts, to see the unedited tensions in his relationship with his father, and the dull shock of the decimated generation of young men that made it home from the World War I fields of France. But there's also the educational process going into the making of a great literary scholar and just the naked, sharp thinking and flair for illustration that would become his trademarks as an educator. In the back of my mind is lurking the Alan Jacobs essay that frey_at_last or amea did the great favour of pointing out to me, from First Things entitled "The Second Coming of C. S. Lewis" which does so well in pointing out the negative side of the "personality cult" that has evolved around Lewis in American evangelicalism. The unique factors of why Lewis, Tolkien and the other Inklings would appeal to this American audience are not going to be repeated in that way again, and the evangelical eyes that have kept looking for and announcing "the next C. S. Lewis" are doomed to disappointment, while in the meanwhile great theology and literature is being produced and could pass by relatively unnoticed since it didn't fulfill the expected form. The letters keep the reader focused instead on reality, with its triumphs and failures. I've been especially interested the last several days, hauling the book with me to the breakfast table and such, as I march through 1922 and a world so different, though still – astonishingly – in living memory....

I found myself breaking from my lesson plan on Wednesday while discussing Augustine's Confessions with the students (Book VIII – the build-up to the conversion scene). We had been discussing the role that other people have in conversion stories or in our spirituality/spiritual formation in general. Augustine's enthusiasm for the example of Marius Victorinus in the previous generation, or for his then-current discovery of Antony of Egypt, much less the significance of Ambrose of Milan and his preaching for Augustine's circle in Milan, highlights this role others take. I recalled a lesson with the late Catherine Mowry LaCugna in her Introduction to Systematic Theology course my first year at Notre Dame, where on or around the Feast of All Saints she asked us about "personal saints" in our own lives: what made them saints for us, what made them significant. I asked the students the same question, thinking to approach the previous question from this slightly different angle, which we did to the benefit of the classroom conversation.

A little later, on the bus heading to the East Side, I opened the issue of the Jesuits' journal of opinion, America, which I've repeatedly endorsed here. Much to my surprise, there was Catherine looking back at me, in an article on the upcoming 10th anniversary of her death from cancer written by Bob Krieg, my professor of Christology during my Master's, and the director of my Master's board of examiners. The article, "A Perfect End," isn't something – alas! – I am allowed to re-post here, given America's nature as a subscription magazine, and even my link will only work for subscribers, I believe. But I was much struck by Bob's description of her attitude toward these last days and last trials of hers. Our relationship was very much student/teacher and what friendship I came to enjoy with her was always very much of that formal sort: it was new to hear her in the kind of frankness she shared here with a real friend.

Although Catherine possessed a speculative mind, she knew its limits. As she struggled with cancer, she did not ask, “Why does God allow senseless suffering?” or “Why did this illness befall me?” Rather she observed, “I feel that a struggle between cancer and health, between evil and good, is taking place within me.” And she sought only to answer the question, “How can I cope with this illness so that I remain faithful to God, myself and others?”

My friend’s recognition that some questions cannot be satisfactorily answered in this life has a solid basis in the Bible. According to the Gospels, Jesus never explained why God allows evil. As Job had done, Jesus rejected the notion of divine retribution, for example, when he gave sight to the man who was blind from birth (John 9:3). Although Jesus was deeply saddened by suffering and death, as was evident when he wept at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11:35), he proposed no theory of evil. Rather Jesus taught by his example and his words how to live amid absurdity: have faith in “abba” (Mark 14:36), who will “rescue us from the evil one” (Matt 6:13); do not allow hardship and injustice to harden our hearts and dull our minds (Matt 5:1-10); do not return evil for evil (Matt 5:39); care for our neighbor in need, especially the poor (Matt 25:31-46); trust that our suffering in union with his is redemptive for all people (1 Cor 11:24; Mark 14:24).

The first lesson: The most fruitful question is, “How can I cope with this tragedy so that I remain faithful to God, myself and others?”

The article was preceded with another Easter-related meditation on what that article called that doctrine of Christianity most rejected by observant Christians: the resurrection of the body. It's certainly true that most people think Christianity as teaching the Greek philosophical idea of the Immortality of the Soul and not the Jewish revelation of the resurrection, and I hadn't really thought of that tendency in terms of a modern Gnostic tendency in people, though that seems fairly obvious once I thought about it. The resurrection of the body is actually a point I stress with my students for precisely that reason: the utter affirmation of matter that one finds in the Jewish-Christian tradition unlike almost all other human spirituality, and which has paid off in such diverse ways as even the rise of the modern physical sciences and their associated technologies. That article seemed a worthy prelude to the article on Catherine to me – an overture of the hope I have to hear my teacher again, speaking in healed voice from immortal body, a physical glory hinted at even in the words everyone cites, as Bob does in his article, of the words on Catherine's tombstone from her book God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life “We were created for the purpose of glorifying God by living in right relationship as Jesus Christ did, by becoming holy through the power of the Spirit of God, by existing as persons in communion with God and every other creature.”

I just finished writing up my notes and lesson plan for today's session of Introduction to Theology. For today they read the second half of Book VIII of The Confessions of Augustine: the conversion scene. Lots to talk about regarding the will, psychology in general, the interaction of grace and nature, and so forth.

But right now I'm just thinking, "I've been lugging this notebook around for quite awhile." I bought this old black notebook eleven years ago. The first pages are a journal from my Fall Break trip in October 1995 with Erik to the Abbey of Gethsemani, which was my first time there. We had just completed the Fall Break mini-tour in Chicago which was memorable for lots of reasons: my first time really hanging out at length with Folkheads; my utterly embarrassing myself by catching my foot on my serape and flipping over a fence I was vaulting, which embarrassment was gleefully captured on film by Erik and would become the emblematic headspiece of my then-new homepage; my first solo with the Folk Choir; and (of retroactive note) I think it was probably the first time I ever talked to Jen Sushinsky, who I vaguely remember hanging out with J.P. on the trip. Come to think of it, I also met Julie Vlaming that trip, too, who was hanging out with Erik, but who I didn't know at all, since she was a recently-graduated Folkhead, but it wasn't until the following Triduum that we met one another to make enough of an impression to start dating for a while.

But then the stay down in Kentucky – the first of many – was part of the early cementing of my sudden, unexpected and powerful friendship with Erik. We had debated also going out to Arches National Park in Utah, staying around Moab, and soaking in a reading of the Desert Fathers while camping in, and enjoying, the "magnificent desolation." But Gethsemani was the better choice for him since he was able to arrange an interview with Patrick Collins, O.C.S.O., Thomas Merton's former secretary, as he was researching his senior thesis on the True Self/False Self distinction in Merton's thought and spirituality. I had just begun reading Merton myself, as I was re-editing Merton's private journals from 1952-1960 for Larry Cunningham, whose graduate assistant I was that year. Larry had been working on the journals for two years and "could no longer see the mistakes," and so he handed over the lot to me to re-work, which turned out to be an amazing experience, for which I could never thank him enough. So the chance to talk with Brother Patrick was a real opportunity for me, too, although I certainly let Erik take the lead. The trip was also a treasure because it was my first time to meet and visit with Chrysogonus Waddell, O.C.S.O., the monk and composer of whom all the Folkhead/Freek lot were great fans.

So the black notebook's early pages are filled with an account of these days at Gethsemani, of entering into the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours for the first time, of reading and talking Merton, of silence, and of late-night, quiet soul-bearing talks with Erik over hot chocolate in the guests' dining room. Pages then give way to Christmas-gift notes on my sister-in-laws clothing sizes, sets of lyrics and lyrics ideas, notes for papers from the first few years of doctoral studies, and finally to its rear being filled with this year's lesson plans. I'm just struck by it this morning as one of those small treasures or artifacts that we carry through our lives, without thought, but which, when we really look at it, bears more precious history than we might ever imagine. I'm sure you have the like.

Nieces = Exhausting. Going to bed.

Random bits:

I ended up on what I mistakenly thought was my brother-in-law's Amazon Wish List, and blinked to see that Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion was on it, which would be very strange, to my mind. My brother-in-law is from a non-Christian cultural background and has never appeared to me to know much or be interested in much about the faith. But if he, or any educated reader, was looking at trying to draw some kind of "line in the sand" or to "hear both sides of the argument," I can't figure out why one would waste time reading Oxford's Dawkins. He may be a great biologist, but from everything of his I've read, he's strictly Amateur Night as a philosopher. Totally caught up in the silly American idea of the relationship between Science and Religion as reducible to that of Materialists versus Creationists, and mostly of the sneering, high school "religious people are so dumb" technique. "Holding religious believers to the high rational standards of scientists" doesn't look like something he's capable of doing, since he doesn't seem to understand or be able to present or interested in presenting the intellectual material of serious theologians, philosophers, and historians. I would think that the best educational route for authentically open-minded and intellectual atheists would be to work from the best of Christian scholarship: those guys will tell you exactly where their arguments are weakest. Certainly that's my own approach in my Intro to Theology class: I'd be humiliated as a teacher if I didn't produce the sharpest, best-informed atheists possible. And certainly I had very little to learn from atheists who were ill-informed or to only learn the arguments of atheism from believers who had never considered the possibility. Scratch Richard Dawkins and pick up something like the work of a philosopher like Oxford's Richard Swinburne, I would think, if you wanted to exercise yourself against serious thinking on the subject.

My students are starting to read Book VIII of Augustine's The Confessions for next week. I'm leery of them coming into the story so late in the text, and am wondering about how it will pick up at that point and what strategy I ought to follow for trying to facilitate the reading. I did the fourth century's Trinitarian Controversies on Friday. As though that isn't at the very least a semester's project in itself. I hate surveys for just that reason. Not only are we coming out of a philosophically- and theologically-repressed and stunted culture, but then the very structure of survey courses in our university system seem to conspire to keeping students from having the leisure proper to advanced reflection. I feel like my topic and my method are sometimes utterly at war.

And lastly, I grow tempted to upgrade. Is it time for the sixth Mac to enter my life? Ambrose has been slowing down ever since I did the OS 10.4 brain transplant....

Friday 21 July 2006, 8:40pm

Well, I'm on the train now, heading to Florence, just having pulled out of Bologna, and the hills are just starting to hide the sunset. It's getting really quiet and pretty outside. Not too bright. It was almost ferocious today: I'm pretty burned across the face.

Our first evening in Geneva was spent down by the shore of Lake Geneva, where much of the city comes out to socialize and enjoy the air and light. Erik and I had left the World Health Organization by around 6pm and took the bus into the city. Obviously, everything looked different than the mere shapes of the streets I'd become accustomed to on my guidebook map of the city, and so I was pretty thoroughly lost. We got off at the main train station and walked some five or six blocks to Erik's place. As it turned out, Erik had taken a room in the middle of Geneva's red light district, in the neighbourhood called Les Pâquis. It wasn't particularly poor or seedy-looking, but Erik indicated sadly where the prostitutes were already staking out street corners. For a few blocks around the place he lived, it seemed that everything was either a falafel/kebob place or a strip club. I was very grateful to be able to shower after now nearly two days, and we set out to initiate Mike into the local business life. Of the falafel, that is. It was somehow something that I'd never gotten around to trying, and I was a bit nervous as to how my digestive system would react to it, given its moodiness. We headed down to the lakeshore to eat and to look at the city.
It was low-key, but bright out and perfect for continuing to catch up. The rocky finger that passed for a beach was filled with sunbathers and some people were taking to the water. The Lake was generously sprinkled with sails. As the sun went down, we returned to his place, got ready and headed to the train stations with our bags to catch our 10:30 night train to Venice. We were the first in our compartment, although we were told by the conductor that we would be filling the place as we went along, and so we just quickly let down our bunks from the wall and went to sleep.


I woke up to the train this morning in the middle of the Po valley, running down it toward Venice, with the Italian hills beginning to glow off to the north. I cannot express the private joy I felt in the sight: this was a land I had crossed and re-crossed in thought through the years, with so much history I've studied that has passed this way. To see it with my own eyes – to just quietly take it in while Erik and the others still slept – was a simple kind of bliss. There was a young Indian couple sleeping in our carriage, and two hip girls from Korea, decked out in clothes proclaiming "Florida." It was kind of a strange approach: there was all this industry and you were never quite certain when you were going to see Venice or the water. I wasn't quite sure how thick all that industry was, although I expected it from the descriptions of the city in the guidebook I'd been studying. We were going past docked ships: freighters, ocean liners; industrial manufacturing places, chemical plants. We finally broke out over the causeway out to Venice with the Adriatic flat out to the horizon. We were able to dump our baggage in a room at the train station, and pay for that for the day. We also purchased our tickets for Florence that evening, after discovering that the last train that would work for us would leave Venice at 6:30pm rather than 9:30pm as we had expected. Obviously that meant less time in Venice, but we had decided to prioritize Florence by giving it two full days, and there was nothing to do about it. Everything we needed to do was settled pretty quickly and we got out on the streets.


Standing out in the piazza behind the train station, we took in our first view of the city. We've all seen it on film if never in real life: there's nothing like Venice. Even if this wasn't a particularly famed or memorable spot, it was already distinct in an unmistakable way. Unfortunately, I had not retained a great deal of my earlier study on the city. Florence was a place I'd studied since my undergraduate. Venice had seemed overwhelming just in the pages of my guidebook. I'd studied it first, in preparing for the trip, but right at that moment it seemed as though a lot of my reading on Venice had been washed away by my later weeks' study of Florence. So now Erik and I pulled out my guidebook and tried to work out a basic plan of attack for the city.


We grabbed a water taxi first thing, laughing at the competent irritation of a young blonde woman working there who seemed pretty fed up with the idiot questions of Americans, and we went the length of the Grand Canal, past San Marco to the next landing at San Zaccaria. We were taking photographs the whole way and just soaking in the sheer presence of the place. Everywhere we were under the eye of some version of the winged Gospel Lion of San Marco: reliefs, statues, paintings and the still-present flag of the Republic of Venice, a country now two centuries vanished. I was marking places in my head to come back to see, virtually all of which we failed to do, not coming anywhere near the places as we were wandering. Just entirely too much to see, too much to do. It ended up being somewhere where we were content to not do a whole lot. Erik called it "sampling," just scouting the place out for when we could really come and visit. "Sampling" was a good term.






We walked a ways further east along the canal from San Zaccaria on the Riva degli Schiavoni before turning north, up del Forno, I think, so that I could see the Carpaccios that I wanted to, especially the Augustine that I love, at the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. That was our only real flat-out disaster of the day. The church had shut its hours down from 3:30 to 5:30 and we were there at probably around 9am. Now, on our way to San Giorgio's, we had already happened by San Giovanni in Bragora, which was an accident, but we had ducked into this church to take in the Alvise Vivarini Resurrection, Cima da Conegliano's Baptism of Christ, the proudly-displayed body of one St. John the Almsgiver, of whom neither of us had heard (although that will likely be said of us, too, in time), and the interesting ships-keel ceiling and architecture of the church as a whole. After our dash through the tourist-strewn Grand Canal, it was refreshing to pause in this church where we were the only two visitors, with no feeling that that was going to change. Now, having been defeated by the closed Scuola di San Giorgio, we paused, and Erik shot back down the direction we had come, while I noted the old woman watching Erik setting up his shot. I then set up pretty much the same shot myself. The tower belongs, I believe to the church of San Antonio, and the canal before me is the Rio della Pieta, although behind me from that bridge it was called the Rio della Agostin. I'm not sure why. I would be surprised if it had anything to do with such a universally high regard for the Carpaccio portrayal of Augustine that I missed seeing just off that bridge. From that point, we started working our way over toward San Marco. I had already been looking in the mask shops. We found a very nice one, right as we had started up del Forno, and Erik had already started practicing patience with my time taking time to look at this particular Venetian art. The elaborate masked and costumed celebration of Carnival revived in Venice some decades ago, and the making of these masks has turned into a distinctive tourist craft. We ultimately ended up, without any intention, tripping our way right in front of one the most-recommended mask shops, Ca' del Sol, and so I had to stop in there to examine the wares and talk with the proprietors as best as I was able.


We worked our way around the front entrance to San Marco, walking around the Doge's Palace, past the Bridge of Sighs, and photographing parts of the façade and looking at large, posted diagrams about the construction going on outside of that area, which was devoted to reinforcing the seawall or improving drainage or somesuch. My eye was taken with the carvings on the row of pillars at the base of the façade, which is the beige building you see on the right of the photos taken from the canal, above, and which is set in front of the Basilica of San Marco. Each pillar featured a unique set of carvings, worth a study in themselves, but I was particularly taken with the medieval woman I captured in this shot, while Erik read the engineering displays behind me. We debated whether or not to head into the Doge's Palace for the tour, but decided to sacrifice this to the "sampling" of the city. We started making our way through the crowds of people (and the famed flocks of tourist-devouring pigeons) and into the Piazza San Marco. We had arrived too late to try to take in a morning Mass at the Basilica, which while originally the chapel of the Doge ("the largest private chapel in the world," one kept hearing, wondering why the Duke needed something that big if it was really to be thought of as "private") has now also been the Cathedral of the city for the last two centuries. Given the huge lines waiting to get in, and the very restricted tourist access to the Basilica (much more of it being able to be seen on its website, above), we decided that visiting the Basilica, too, would be sacrificed. I was disappointed, of course, as I'm somewhat fond of San Marco both because it was the seat of Angelo Roncalli as Patriarch of Venice before he was elected Pope John XXIII in 1958, and because I was born on the feast of Saint Mark: April 25th. But we took our time making a leisurely study of the façade of the church, which is composed of the most exquisite, delicately-shaded variety of colourful marbles I've ever seen, and which bears illustrations for stories such as the city's beloved theme of making off with the body of their patron, Saint Mark, from his original tomb in the Muslim-conquered city of Alexandria in Egypt, and burying it here at the Basilica for the protection and honour of the city. Although, as I said, we took our time with this, this was yet another thing that would reward hours of study while we were only able to give it perhaps a half-hour at most, as we worked our way around the building.



Erik suggested that we try to work our way back further into the city in order to try to find a place to order lunch, so as to try to work our way out of the crowds, and to do this a bit on the early side, so that we could eat and then come back to the Piazza in the heat of the lunch hour in hopes that we might find it thinned out as the bulk of the tourists went off in search of their own meals. So we worked our way vaguely northeast of San Marco's, pausing now and again to scan the prices listed on the menus outside various restaurants. In fact, it took us a while just to find one that would seat us as such an early hour. We finally did end up in a strange little place that said they'd start serving in ten minutes, and so we settled in. I call it strange because the help kept fluctuating between hospitable smiles and snarling at us like we were depraved killers out to give their establishment a bad name. I could also call the place a bit odd as I noticed that Erik was sitting under a wall devoted entirely to pictures of famed Disney dog Benji, while the wall behind me turned out (I noticed later) to be devoted to some equally-repulsive or ludicrous theme, but which I have blocked out of memory, unfortunately. It was just good, though, to get into a place with some air conditioning and to get out of the sun. I had already begun to turn lobster-red, and was more-or-less resigned to moving on to the next stage of peeling back to my Irish pale white, having not had the foresight to pack or buy any sunscreen. It was around 95ºF at its peak that day, in contrast to the relatively-cool high of 92º we had left behind in Geneva. (I had had the ill fortune to travel around the world in time with the heat wave that had been wracking the United States for the previous week.) So we had our tortellini bolognese and chattered away about what we had been seeing and what we ought to do next. I irritated Erik by taking bad pictures of him at the table, and we consumed vast amounts of bottled water for which we paid ridiculous prices, particularly so after Erik had noted the wait staff filling those bottles back up with tap water, apparently for subsequent customers.

Then it was afternoon and time for more adventures!


Go to: Venice: Part Two

I just got this from Michel Barnes, our Augustine scholar and my advisor/fellow geek culture enthusiast, who got it from his friend Lewis Ayres, who together are rocking their field. It highlights an absolutely gross dishonesty in the smarmy side of scholarship:


Forwarded for your edification:

From: Ayres
To: Barnes
Subject: Re: Daily Telegraph

This letter was in the Daily Telegraph a couple of months ago, I missed
it until now. lovely. very lovely INDEED.

L.

Sacred Mysteries
By Christopher Howse

A funny thing happened to me last week. Like a drama reviewer who makes a remark such as "hardly sparkling" and sees it on the billboard outside the theatre as "Sparkling", I discovered that two words had been pulled out of a book review I had written and displayed in lonely beauty.

The words were "refreshing originality", and they now appear on the cover of the paperback edition of an appallingly bad biography of St Augustine of Hippo by a militant anti-Christian called James J O'Donnell, of Georgetown University.

The context in which I used the words is the following:

"The first big surprise is that he spells 'god' with a small 'g'. That is, he says, to 'remind readers' of the risk 'of assuming that we know just what Augustine meant' by the word. The exercise immediately leads to difficulties, for in English the word 'God' is used as if it were the proper name of God. So it does not take the definite article. We say 'the dog is in the yard', but 'God is in his temple'. Out of similar motives of refreshing originality, O'Donnell always translates 'dominus' (referring to God) as 'master'. So he retranslates 'I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord' (Psalm 32) as 'I shall declare against myself what I have sinned against my master god'."

See? Professor O'Donnell's attempt at "refreshing originality" just made him come a cropper. I discovered that other reviewers had similar criticisms. "It is difficult to see why this book is called Augustine: Sinner and Saint," wrote Lucy Beckett in the Times Literary Supplement, "since it quickly becomes clear that neither word means anything to O'Donnell beyond their use as public relations signals, negative and positive.

"The word 'God' means even less to him, so he writes it as 'god' throughout. He says this is to 'remind readers' to avoid the danger of thinking they know what Augustine meant by 'God', but Augustine himself was acutely aware of this danger, and all 'god' does it to remind us constantly of O'Donnell's own perspective."

"It is to be hoped that no one will read O'Donnell as their first book on Augustine," Beckett concludes. "Towards the end, O'Donnell recommends 'the wisest' reader to 'go away from these pages to read Augustine unmediated', but presumably in the hope that confidence in him will have been sufficiently undermined for him to be regarded as no more than a historical and psychological curiosity. One would, however, back the Augustine of the Confessions roundly to defeat in a new reader's mind O'Donnell's preposterous claim that in that book Augustine 'undervalues the human personality'."

That is not all that Professor O'Donnell claims about that autobiographical classic, Augustine's Confessions. He claims they are intended to deceive, and he discounts them entirely in his own biography. Professor O'Donnell is not ignorant; he edited the Confessions in three volumes for the Oxford University Press. He just hates Augustine.

"Augustine was the first to admit his many shortcomings," noted G W Bowersock in a review in The New York Times, "most notoriously in the great chapter about his youthful arrival in Carthage, where he found himself in a cauldron of sex and loved nothing more than to be loved. O'Donnell's 'frying pan' for cauldron is a silly effort to be different. The real force of the Latin word 'sartago', normally rendered 'cauldron', is that it is a smart pun on the name of the city, Carthago." I can't see any publisher pulling out the words "silly effort to be different" for the dust jacket of the next edition.

"Sadly, O'Donnell rarely evinces the remotest sympathy for his subject's spiritual aspirations," wrote Murrough O'Brien in The Independent on Sunday. "In fact, he just doesn't seem to like him much. The title Saint and Sinner seems to hint that the 'saint' is going to get very little airtime. Augustine is seen as invariably self-serving. It can't be as simple as that."

No, it isn't. A recent unsilly view, from a scholar of North Africa in ancient times, is St Augustine by Serge Lancel (SCM, £25). I found parts badly translated from the French, but the odd linguistic hiccup is much to be preferred to constitutional perversity.

Finally was able to make some headway today and write a decent bit of commentary on the passage from Hilary of Poitiers' De Trinitate that I mentioned back on the 14th. Huh--nine days to really feel like I had a real handle on it! It looks like that Augustine mimicked the passage by way of correcting it: that Hilary in his attempt to understand what it meant that Jesus was "anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power" had inadvertently written the Holy Spirit more-or-less out of the program. What he's left with actually reads in a fairly binatarian way: that all we're really dealing with is a relationship between the Father and the Son. Augustine, in working on the nature of the Holy Spirit's relationship to the Father and the Son, realizes that the Spirit's role is actually central to not only who Jesus is but also to who we become in union with Christ, and sharing something of the same anointing. Augustine is able to give an intellectual or ontological, or even personal (Personal?) warrant for Christian spirituality--well, human spirituality--that Hilary has failed to perceive.

Dug around in the library to find that no one ever seems to have noticed what I've found in Augustine here, and only redeemed my time by possibly helping out classmate Lorelle of the Philosophy Department in realizing that one of our philosophy professors had been the recent translator of Augustine's letters. This was potentially useful because the apparently non-existent critical edition that she was looking for--or any version of such a beastie that might exist--could be in his possession, here conveniently on our campus.

Time to get out of town and go visit Mum for the holiday.

BOOYAH!!! Just when I thought I was done with looking for a relevant source for my Augustine passage in Hilary of Poitiers' The Trinity, I hit absolute paydirt: what seems to be a flat-out parallel passage, even if set in a different context and far more complex than Augustine's. This means absolutely nothing to y'all out there, of course, but for me it means that I'm onto something in my quest to re-construct one sliver of the intellectual/theological mindset of Augustine.

Now I just have to figure out what it all means....

For those of you bored and surfing, feel free to compare this passage from Augustine's De Trinitate, XV, 46 (c. 420AD) to what I just found in Hilary of Poitiers' De Trinitate, XI, 18-20 (c. 360).

Augustine:

That is why the Lord Jesus himself not only gave the Holy Spirit as God but also received him as man, and for that reason he was called full of grace. It is written of him more openly in the Acts of the Apostles, that God anointed him with the Holy Spirit, not of course with a visible oil but with the gift of grace which is signified by the chrism the Church anoints the baptized with. Nor, to be sure, was Christ only anointed with the Holy Spirit when the dove came down upon him at his baptism; what he was doing then was graciously prefiguring his body, that is his Church, in which it is particularly those who have just been baptized that receive the Holy Spirit. But we must realize that he was anointed with this mystical and invisible anointing when the Word of God became flesh, that is when a human nature without any antecedent merits of good works was coupled to the Word of God in the virgin's womb so as to become one person with him. This is why we confess that he was born of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary. It would be the height of absurdity to believe that he only received the Holy Spirit when he was already thirty years old--that was the age at which he was baptized by John; no, we must believe that just as he came to that baptism without any sin, so he came to it not without the Holy Spirit.

Hilary of Poitiers:

(18) The times or the ages do not cause a difference in the Spirit, so that there is not the same Christ Himself in the body who dwelt in the Prophets by the Spirit. When he declares through the mouth of patriarch David: ‘God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows,’ He did not say anything different according to the mystery than He said according to the dispensation of the body which He assumed. He who now confides to His brethren that their Father is His Father and their God His God, then declared that He was also anointed by His God above His fellows, so that, while there is no fellowship with the only-begotten Christ the Word of God, we realize that there is a fellowship with Him by that assumption in which He is flesh. That anointing did not procure any advantage for that blessed and incorrupt birth that abides in the nature of God, but for the mystery of the body and for the sanctification of the manhood which He took upon Himself, as the Apostle Peter testifies when he said: ‘For of a truth there assembled together in this city against thy holy Son Jesus, whom thou hast anointed.’ And again: “You know what took place throughout Judea; for he began in Galilee after the baptism preached by John: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power.’ Jesus, therefore, is anointed in the mystery of the flesh that was born again. And there is no difficulty in regard to the manner in which He was anointed by the Spirit and by the power of God, since at that moment when He comes up from Jordan the voice of God the Father is heard: ‘Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee,’ in order that the anointing of the spiritual power might be recognized through this testimony of the flesh that was sanctified in Him.
(19) Moreover, since God the Word was in the beginning with God, the anointing rejects any cause for or any description of His nature, about which nothing else is made known than that it was in the beginning. And certainly it was not necessary for God, who is the Spirit and the power of God, to be anointed by the Spirit and the power of God. Hence, God is anointed by His God above His fellows. And if many were anointed according to the Law before the bestowal of the flesh, then Christ, who is now anointed above His fellows, is later in time, although He is preferred before all of His companions who were anointed. Finally, that prophetic utterance revealed this later anointing when it declared: ‘Thou hast loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.’
A consequent and later cause is never made retroactive so that it becomes first, for to merit anything follows upon the existence of Him who is capable of meriting. To merit belongs to Him who is the cause of acquiring merit for Himself. If, therefore, we attribute the anointing to the birth of the only-begotten God, and this anointing has been granted in recognition of His love for justice and His hatred of iniquity, then it is to be understood that the only-begotten God was not born, but was brought forth by the anointing and now He will be made perfect as God through an increase and gain, since He was not born as God but was anointed into God because of His merits, and now He will be the God Christ as the result of a cause and the cause of all things will not be through the God Christ. What, then, is the meaning of the Apostle’s words: ‘All things through him and unto him, and he is before all, and in him all things hold together’? God the Lord Jesus Christ is not God because of some things or through some things, but was born as God. And He who is God by birth did not develop into God after His birth through some other cause, but because He was born He is nothing else by His birth than what God is. If He is anointed as the result of a cause, then the benefit of the anointing does not refer to that which does not need to grow but to that which needs the benefit of the anointing through an increase of the mystery, that is to say, through the anointing our man Christ appears as one sanctified. IF in the present instance, therefore, the dispensation of the slave is also pointed out by the Prophet because of which He is anointed by His God above His fellows, and accordingly He is anointed because He loved justice and hated iniquity, why will not the Propet’s words refer to that nature of Christ which we share with Him by His assumption of the flesh, since the Spirit of prophecy has exercised particular care in this way, that, while God is anointed by His God, He is His God in the dispensation of the anointing and He is God in the nature? Consequently, God is anointed, but I ask the question whether the Word that was in the beginning with God was anointed? By no means! The anointing is later than God. Since the birth of the Word was not anointed, because it was in the beginning with God, then that must have been anointed in God which comes afterwards in the dispensation, in so far as He is God. And since God is anointed by His God, then everything pertaining to a slave that He received in the mystery of the flesh is anointed.
(20) Let no one, therefore, desecrate the mystery of godliness, that was made known in the flesh, by a godless interpretation, and let no one place himself on an equality with the Only-begotten in the substance of the Godhead. Let Him be a brother to and sharer with us in so far as the Word made flesh dwelt among us, and in so far as the man Jesus Christ is the mediator of God and man. Let us as slaves have a common Father and a common God, and let Him be anointed above His fellows in that nature in which His fellows were anointed, even though He was anointed with a special privilege. In the mystery of the mediator let Him be a true man as well as the true God, the God Himself from God, who has a common Father and God with us in that fellowship by which He is our brother.

Just got this neat little note from Coffey, on a neat little note from Augustine: I thought they were worth reproducing here.

The text from Augustine [from Sermon 169, xi, 13] at the bottom of p. 166 is translated as follows:

He who made you without you [i.e. without your cooperation] will not justify you without you [i.e. without your cooperation]. He made you without your knowing [it], but he will not justify you without your willing [it] [i.e. your consent].

This is a typical Augustinian bon mot. Note the extreme terseness and brevity of expression along with the antitheses, the first theological and existential, and the second philosophical and existentiell, of creation and justification, and of knowing and willing.

Oh, and making my entry yesterday, I saw on the department website a statement Coffey just added about his "professional vision" which I found rather compelling. So I'm jotting that down, too.

Since theology is the intellectual dimension of faith, the Church has a serious responsibility to foster and encourage theology as part of its ministry to its members and to the world. Hence, in the Catholic Church, the existence of Catholic universities and of departments of theology within them. As Catholic theology must be both ecumenical and missionary to be authentically Catholic, departments of theology in Catholic universities rightly include non-Catholic professors and students, who also contribute to the overall project. Since research is essential to the maintenance of excellence, research and publication as well as teaching should feature prominently in Catholic theology departments. My own areas of specialization are chosen on one principal criterion: their centrality to Catholic and Christian faith. This criterion arises out of my conviction that the locus of theology is the faith community rather than the secular university, of which I also have had firsthand experience.

Hey folks,

Having a tough time keeping up with all the reading and writing and teaching and such lately: even communication with family and friends is suffering from the current workload: keeping up here is an unimaginable luxury. I type this note as I'm climbing into bed. Sucking up extra portions of time are fun things like Saturday's attendance of the Lumen Christi Institute of the University of Chicago's Reading Augustine, Reading Ourselves conference. A big bonus was that one of the three papers was delivered by John Cavadini, my mentor at Notre Dame and all-around candidate for sainthood. A big minus was that of the three people on the panel to respond to the papers at the end of the day, Professor Barnes (who invited me, Dan Lloyd, and Michael Harris to the conference and who rode down with us) was the only one of the three who turned out to be sane.

The first, a Jesuit priest from Mundelein, started yelling about Augustine being a book-burning Nazi and the paper-reader to whom he was responding being a Communist for having subscribed to the failed collectivist ideal by mentioning at some point some aspect of Augustine's concern for the community over the individual. This was the NeoCon crazy. After raging against his targets and being fantastically insulting to them (Prof. Joe Mueller, SJ of Marquette sat next to me and kept choking through the diatribe) we were then treated (as a matter of strange cosmic balance) to the ragings of a fairly new Ph.D. from Notre Dame who, once she warmed up, I recognized as having been crazy when she started grad school in South Bend back in the mid-90s. She provided strange cosmic balance by yelling largely about the need for a radical feminist re-reading of Genesis 3 (which although Augustine's exegesis of said chapter had profound influence, did not appear in our presented papers) and demanded immediate response on the audiences' part to her call for a crusade against the Patriot Act (again, absent from our earlier discussion of Augustine).

Thus a sort of far-left, far-right harmony was maintained, that being the only harmony. I don't imply that their politics made them crazy, it was just a nice touch. Well, his might have: she actually had a lot more manic behaviours that looked in need of professional help. Everyone was polite in the painfully quiet way you are around people who have irrevocably made a horrible impression. The presenters, who had remained impressively silent (and pained-looking) through about an hour of this, seemed rather relieved when Barnes implicitly conceded that the academic momentum was dead and offered a mere minute detailing two further points he thought worth investigation before concluding the proceedings. I asked Barnes later as we were heading into the Jesuit residence for a dinner reception (very fine, as all Jesuity board tends to be) what it implied that he had been lumped in with these other two as respondants.

I've never seen anything like it. Once in a while you'll get an idiosyncratic response. Very occasionally, a crazy one from some scholar whose reputation had not yet entirely commited suicide, but two crazies? Unheard of.

Had a fabulous talk yesterday afternoon with magdalene1 about adapting texts to film and my idea of how great an adaptation of Augustine's The Confessions could be if it preserved the writer's real content and his intent of the work being structured as a prayer, and yet could draw a modern audience into the natural drama of his story. It was such an involved discussion that we took some hours and I paid for it by having to read everything for today in a frantic rush, right up to the last minute. My mind is a strange whirl of esoteric Jewish texts of angels, the Angel of the Lord, the Watchers, and the divine spirit, whether that is the unrecognized or semi-recognized Holy Spirit or something/Someone else entirely. Mixing this Holy Spirit class and the Apocalyptic Literature class is going to get funky over the next few weeks. Jen's great intuitive casting choice for Augustine: Don Cheadle. Too old now to play the younger Augustine, I'm afraid, but a damned cool idea....

A most unparticularly-Irish St. Patrick's Day. I could at the very least wish for the standard Mass on the Feast of St. Patrick at Notre Dame. Classes sucked up a lot of the day, but were generally fun. The Augustine class was painfully quiet in face of some brutal conclusions from the Confessions. I mean, it was positively grim as Augustine came to the conclusion that the force of habit--the warping of our wills--could not be corrected simply by the exercise of that same will-power. I had to admit that I could understand the silence, in the sense that it was almost humiliating to have Augustine diagnose our collective weakness or corruption right in front of us. Then the ever-plucky Martha, who I'd gotten to know over at the Brew, popped up and said Augustine was just being weak and that he should and could fight the force of his bad sexual habits with the cultivating of positive, opposing habits. That got some things going in the class. We continued the discussion for a while even after things broke up. Fun.

I had forgotten that we were going over my John exegesis (in my March 4th entry) today in the Johannine Tradition class. Since I'd finished it and handed it out two weeks ago, it had slipped my mind until Shawnee mentioned it at the library last night. It seemed to be pretty well received: lots of compliments at my re-interpretation of the whole Thomas encounter, except for Zorhab, our Armenian Orthodox priest, who blasted me precisely for going against the traditional reading purely on account of it being the traditional reading. This was fascinating just for seeing the strength of tradition in exegesis in that Tradition: that continuity in reading the Scriptures had a power that was more than just what might be dismissed in the West as "inflexibility" or "a lack of openness to other possibilities." I guess I could see that in something that was of irreplaceable doctrinal significance, like the Prologue to the Gospel of John, but it was eye-opening and interesting here.

I got the best compliment of the afternoon/evening from the Rev. Amy Richter (who, I admit, I love calling "Father Amy"), who has been my classroom/whisper-in-the-corner buddy through Luke/Acts last spring and John this spring. She asked me if I'd preach on the text in the Easter season at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, where she is the Rector. I was a bit floored: there's an act of faith for you! But she said that she could tell from how I wrote it (and Fr. Kurz had some criticism of it lacking an academic tone at points) that I could deliver it well. And I admit that I wrote it to be spoken--to be heard as a lesson, since that's how I'm used to transmitting ideas. So that could be great fun. Preaching is the one thing that most attracts me to the priesthood when those random urges hit--the opportunity to teach in that moment of the homily, an opportunity that's lost all too often it seems to me in bad homilies. Now I'll have to put my money where my mouth is....

Other good points of the day, but those are perhaps the only (remotely) "newsworthy" ones. Michelle Dougherty defends her dissertation tomorrow and Friday night is set aside as a blow-out party to celebrate that. Good times. We already had some good feastings in preparation of it all....

Reprinted from a letter from this time:

The steroids (prednizone) have really kicked in today and I've been eating like it was going out of style. That has proved to be the bulk of my day, except for movie-watching. This is the first time I've actually entertained myself while home sick. Turner Movie Classics is going through this huge review of Oscar winners and Oscar-nominated films. I've watched a ton over the past five days, most of which I've never seen before.

These include:

Harvey
The Gorgeous Hussy
The Valley of Decision
Flight Command
The Great Ziegfeld
Unconquered
Casanova Brown
Mrs. Miniver
Lassie Come Home
Mystery Street
Oliver!
2001: A Space Odyssey
Sweethearts
Madame Bovary
The V.I.P.s
The Great Escape
The Magnificent Seven
How the West Was Won
West Side Story
Annie Was a Wonder
Julius Caesar
The Mark of Zorro
The Black Swan
The Guns of Navarone
The Pink Panther
and
What's New Pussycat?

The last I just finished at 10 and made myself a bowl of soup and here I am. In the midst of this quality entertainment, I also watched an episode of Voyager and The Maclaughlin Group this morning. But best of all, last night I left (missing the second half of Julius Caesar, which is great but I'd seen before) to go to Karen and Scott Kirner's place for dinner and some music afterwards. The chief delight of the night was the guest of honour: our own Chrysogonus Waddell, who was up for a conference in Chicago and stuck around to spend today with Steve confering about a project. Josh Warner was already there, Steve and Michelle showed up shortly having just flown in from a conference in Washington, D. C., and then later we were joined by Nathan Warner, who's home from the Manhattan School of Music on his two-week spring break. Erik stopped in later, having been out to eat already. The Warners left shortly after the food, alas, but the rest of us carried on.

Dinner was a wonderful Lasagna, with a successful use of Turkey Sausage by Scott. At the end of the dinner, though, we had a cake and ice cream (with Raspberry sauce) because somehow they'd discovered that Chrysogonus had just turned 70 on the 2nd of March. So we had a birthday party and Chrysogonus was terribly excited, as it was his first birthday party in over 50 years!

The conversation was great of course, and I got to hear of Chrysogonus' journeys this past summer in Kenya and Uganda, where he was speaking to a few gatherings and staying with Trappists in that area. He had lots of comments on the liturgies! Actually, he was surprised by how restrained they were, although they sounded like they let loose at the end! He and I then compared notes on Celtic sites and was asking me all sorts of questions about Skellig Michael, which he said would have terrified him since he was afraid of heights. We then got into these Celtic prayers that Karen and Scott have set to music and heard a fair sample of them. There was also a lot of talk about books, of course. Chrysogonus just recently discovered Madeleine L'Engle, actually, and wants to read all of her work. He said that he finds he's going back and re-reading lots of his favourite stories nowadays and that got me into The Lord of the Rings, which I myself just re-read, finishing that up in the midst of these movies. And we spoke of movies, too, including the great lengths he went to last spring, missing a Holy Saturday service in New York City to see Shakespeare in Love at the last place that it was being shown, with him rationalising to himself that he wouldn't get another chance to see it. He said he was then "punished" because it was the film on two of his next flights.

Wheeee! What fun! So we talked and played a little music until around eleven last night, at which point Chrysogonus had been up quite a while (and still needed to say his evening office.) He was also in a quandry because he was staying in the Bishop's Room in Corby Hall, which featured a well-stocked liquor cabinet, and which Chrysogonus was sure they'd be able to check and see how much he drank of what. This was to him no small quandry. And that was about the last I saw of him. He and Erik dropped me off and now I have to read Augustine for tomorrow.