the Trinity: that friendship reifies the self
Feuerbach wrote that the Trinity “is the secret of the necessity of the ‘thou’ for an ‘I’; it is the truth that no being – be it man, God, mind or ego – is for itself alone a true, perfect, and absolute being, that truth and perfection are only the connection and unity of beings equal in their essence. The highest and last principle of philosophy is, therefore, the unity of men with men.”
Owen Barfield on the language of poetry
Leithart quoting Barfield. Bold is mine.
leithart.com » Blog Archive » Technical terms
They express, as nearly as any word can do, a concrete, particular thing, and not an abstract, generalized idea. . . .it may be worth pointing out here an instinctive tendency in poets, and others, to use general term of things which they are ignorant of or despise, or in which they can discern no poetic value, and particular – even technical – terms of things which really inspire them. Love is the begetter of intimate knowledge; for what we love it is not tedious, but delightful, to observe minutely.”
He continues: “No genuine lover of poetry and of words can pick up a book on, say, Botany or Metallurgy, and read of spores and capsules and lanceolate leaves, or pearly and adamantine lustres, without feeling poetically enriched by that section of the new vocabulary which actually impinges on his own present consciousness of Nature. Nor can he even listen to a circle of enthusiasts – sailors, golfers, wireless men, actors, and the like – riding, as they do, their special hobby-horses idiomatically over all departments of life, without being delighted, without being frappe (for a short time only) by the result.”
In the word, the thought
Athanasius:
“the Son is in the Father . . . because the whole being of the Son is proper to the Father’s ousia, as radiance from light and a stream from a fountain; so that whosoever sees the Son, sees what is proper to the Father and knows that the Son’s being, as from the Father, is the Father and is therefore in the Father. For the Father is in the Son, since the Son is what is from the Father and proper to him, as there is in the radiance the sun, and in the word the thought, and in the stream the fountain: for whoso thus contemplates the Son, contemplates what is proper to the Father’s ousia, and knows that the Father is in the Son.
Leithart quotes Athanasius, and finds the nugget phrase: “in the word, the thought”. Now that’s full, but you can’t draw a mental picture of it. If you came to this passage looking for a more clear spatial metaphor for your Trinity category, you didn’t get it.
When the Fathers are doing this thing, this attempt to exegete theology, they are not doing what we’ve been doing since the Scholastics, and doing feverishly since the Enlightenment. They are not trying to draw a diagram. What they are doing is poetry — but not what “poetry” means to you.
Not “poetry” in the sense of “expression of feeling as opposed to thought” or “escape from rationality into mysticism” (yuck.) These are modern dichotomies. These are post-line-of-despair categories (cf Frances Scheaffer).
They are doing poetry the way David Hart fills out the word “rhetoric”…RATIONALITY THAT IS SO FULL AND GLORIOUS IT MUST SPILL OVER THE STRUCTURES OF PROSE. So the theological work is not intended to give you a diagram, but it is meant to help you understand it better, by giving you the same truth in a different language.
If you know the English word for “tree”, and the elvish word for “tree”, you are able to see the tree better. The two words are not the same nominal sign, they are two signs to the one thing. So, poetry is not translatable into prose, and theology is not translatable into diagrams. This does not mean theology is not true — least of all does it mean theology is directed at “faith” instead of at “reason” (yuck.) — but that theology is directed at the synthetic faculty, as opposed to the analytical faculty. God is bigger than your mind, so to talk of Him we must rhapsodize, so that He is not falsified to your intellect.
Peter Leithart: Wedding Sermon
Peter Leithart: “Wedding Sermon” is just magnificent:
….As the Spirit joins Father and Son, so He joins fathers and sons across the gap of generations. No generation can be healthy if it is dominated by one spirit. A generation dominated by the spirit of sons breaks from the past in revolution, and a generation that drinks only of the spirit of the fathers is hidebound, and tyrannical. A healthy generation partakes of the spirit of the fathers and the spirit of sons, and must learn to join these spirits into one spirit. The Holy Spirit is the One Between who unifies the past and future. As the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, the Spirit joins the hearts of the fathers to sons, and of sons to the fathers….
….Our prayer for you, on this Saturday after Pentecost, is that the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the true Spirit of joviality, the One Between, will fill the gaps in you, in your marriage, and in your home, drawing you into the unity of the Son and the Father, from this day to your lives’ end. This is our prayer, because the success of your marriage depends entirely on the grace of God, the grace that is the Gift of God, the Gift that is the Spirit of God. You’ll find, if you are honest, that marriage is impossible, but our prayer is that that you will also find that with God the Spirit, the God in between, nothing is impossible.
Leithart: the hospitable society
In an election year, we remember that no political vision — left or right — reaches to the society God wants for us, which is found only in the Kingdom, which is seen in human history only in fleeting moments of the church.
I always recommend to you Peter Leithart:
Feasting and care for the poor have been polarized in contemporary culture. If you’re a “conservative,” you’re in favor of free trade, consumption without guilt, festivity without concern for those who can’t join you, who probably deserve their poverty anyway. If you’re a “liberal,” you renounce festivity because other people are hungry and how dare you eat when someone else isn’t.The Biblical prophets combine a promise of festivity with severe denunciation of greed, luxury, and oppression. But they combine the two seamlessly by emphasizing hospitality. The promise is a feast like the feasts of the Pentateuch, where the widow, stranger, and Levite are not forgotten but included as welcome guests.
Against both “conservative” indifference and liberal asceticism, the Bible presents the ideal of the hospitable society.
Modesty: the Awareness that Knowledge has a Time.
Leithart.com | Liturgical Thinking
The destruction of time meant the destruction of shame and modesty: “Shame is the soul’s garment against arbitrary and untimely knowledge: because timing is the condition in which alone the eternal may be revealed.” It takes time for a bride to know her lover, and modesty is the veil over that permits this time to occur; there is a time lag between convictions we come to and the proper time to speak, and shame is the cover for words that are not yet ready to be spoken. The Counter-Reformation again, eh claims, hardened and sterilized shame and modest: “If shame is not the expression of growth, it turns into a loveless, asocial, hard and fast thing.” But life requires being gazed upon by loving faces, since “God’s countenance cannot fasten on us unless His delegates, loving faces, are recognized as gateways to His face.”
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First they came for the gods, but I wasn’t one, so…
He adds, “In an essay called ‘The Empty Universe,’ C. S. Lewis, who understood intimately the cultural effects of the assumptions undergirding modern science, observed:’At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities. . . . [Yet] [t]he advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was imagined. . . . The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just as mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed “souls,” or “selves” or “minds” to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees. . . .’
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The Tears of Things
Leithart.com | Tears of things
…in those tears Virgil expresses the the painful recognition – perhaps just beginning to dawn in the Roman period – of the costs of a peace won through the blood of victims. Those tears express the sense of waste of pre-Christian civilization – the waste of defeated victims every bit as noble and skilled as the victors, the waste of a thousand thousand sacrifices, the untold gallons of blood shed on earth.Aeneas’s tears are tears of despair, but their despair hopes toward a peace that will pass human understanding. These tears do not take how the world goes for granted, as a simple given. They have been touched by a vision of a world at peace, and long for more. These are the tears of things, the tears of empire and temple, that John tells us will be wiped from every eye.
The short life of the nation-state: 1789 to 1918 (Peter Leithart)
Leithart.com | Pro Patria Mori
The history of the modern nation-state, and the disillusionment with it, can be told as the story of changing responses to Roman-inspired patriotism, tinged with the rhetoric of Christian martyrdom and sacrifice. Simplifying to an extreme, the story of modern politics is about the resurgence (in France in 1789 or thereabouts) and the retreat (in France in 1918 or thereabouts) of Horace’s poetic claim, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Odes, Book 3, Ode 2).
In America, Horace lived from 1776 till 1965.
“The other…embarks within the mind of the knower”
Peter Leithart, on Milbank on Maritain:
…knowledge pertains not to information, nor to representation, but rather to a particular state of being in which a creature, while remaining entirely within herself, is nonetheless so directly present to another creature that she in some sense becomes this other, while inversely, the other that was once materially embodied, embarks within the mind of the knower upon a new purely intellectual existence.
