some preliminary roughings out of my thesis


since the very dawn of philosophy, man has looked to mathematics to describe the world accurately. we rely on math for certainty. 


in chimes the frenchman. 
"we are not merely skeptics, nor only mathematicians. we are Christians. we can not only doubt, we may not only affirm. we must, somewhere, submit." - pascal, in a rough paraphrase of pensée 201.

 in the Christian cosmos, then, what abides? where can we stand? what abides? 


the jew. 
"So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love." - st. paul, 1 cor. 13:13
              
faith                 hope                          love                          -- normative aspect: philosophy of math
   |                       |                                 |
knowledge      truth                         wisdom                      -- situational aspect: physics (math applied)
   |                       |                                 |
grammar         logic                         rhetoric                     -- existential aspect: teaching math
   |                       |                                 |
   |                       |                                 |
   |                       |                                 |
arithmetic     algebra              quantum theory                   -- the kinds of mathematics we learn
                     calculus      non-euclidean geometries


math, at its foundation, is faith
               we have faith in God as the Creator, as the Constant One, the Righteous one. math is trustworthy not because it is self-evident, it is trustworthy because God is; because He loves us and does not lie to us. 2+2=4 because He is forever 1 which is always 3. 

math next is hope
               we hope to one day have dominion over creation. the Creator has hidden glories everywhere for us to search out. this means that when we do a calculus problem involving a decreasing mass, increasing acceleration, highly variable friction, and decreasing gravitational force, we simply hope that our rocket will actually escape the atmosphere. we have faith in the numbers working out, but there is only hope that it will actually describe the world. we hope in the righteousness, the trustworthiness of our God. 


and the greatest of these is love. 
               mathematics is the meter of creation, which was sung by God. and He is love. mathematics, then, is the meter chosen by love. and so, to choose the right meter, we must be loving. i declare to you a mystery. force is nothing more or less than the mass of a thing times its acceleration. always. most of the time. unless you're not on earth. then, at least you can be sure that the energy is equal to the mass of the thing counted as many times as light is fast squared. except, that's not really how it works all the time. because turns out there's something faster than light on the universe. truly, a great mystery, yet i give you a greater. my mother's forehead wrinkled between her eyebrows. it was a wednesday. my father says, "come on, let's grab lunch quick. you're getting a headache from not eating, aren't you?" my mother's forehead wrinkled between her eyebrows. this time it was a thursday. my father says, "hey let's get out of here. you're worried about eating too much. so let's go." 
               here is the riddle's heart, here the knot of the mystery: for the creation is our bride, and we are her husband. we must know her parts well enough to know which language we use to speak to her. we should love creation enough to know that the language of newton's calculus is wonderful, but creation doesn't like that language when we're speaking about black holes and electrons. what will happen on the day that we actually love the handiwork of our Creator? i daresay we'll fly faster than light, fall upwards, and burn things without them being consumed. i dare, even, to say that we shall be creators ourselves. that we shall give life at last, and not death. then, death, thou too shall die. 

via dilbert

But the unique position of man in the universe is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him. He alone is to respond to God's blessing with his blessing.

alexander schmemann, for the life of the world, ch.1.2, p.15

The difference between scholastic theology and monastic theology corresponds to the differences between the two states of life: the state of Christian life in the world and the state of Christian life in the religious life. The latter was what was, in fact, until the end of the twelfth century, unanimously called the 'contemplative life.' It was contemplateive because of its organization and orientation, even if some of those who led it also took part - to a greater or lesser extent depending on the time and the region - in some active service for the Church.

leclercq, the love of learning, p.196

i think if we fully realized the magnitude of God's constant interest in every molecule of this universe our heads would explode. God continually speaks every molecule of ink in every word on every page of every grocery store novel? the snow that randomly fell down the back of my neck friday went there because He was continually speaking water molecules in the icey-snow mode in the key of sliding-due-to-gravity. awesome doesn't begin to describe it.

For every one of us, living in this world

means waiting for our end. Let whoever can

win glory before death.

beowulf, 1386-1388

In my judgment (if my view is not mistaken) it is a more serious thing to be stripped of resources than to be killed. That is true at least if death entirely removes our perception of evil, while a life of poverty produces endless misfortune - claims which, as you know, are frequently found in literature. It is a more serious matter to live a life full of evils than to put an end to those evils by dying.

nectarius, letter 103 to augustine, p.9

telling that this is how the roman world thought. nectarius, a pagan, lives in a culture of death. death is less evil than an impoverished life. we say that death is a shadow and to bow to it a crime. perhaps, like chesterton would say, nectarius is just bored with the world.

But at the same time the Cross blocks the road backwards towards any of these streams [of speech] ... The modern Greeks, i.e., the physicists, and the modern Jews, i.e., the Zionists, certainly are not the Greeks or Jews of antiquity. The Greeks glorified the beauties of the cosmos; our physicists empty it of meaning. The Jews glorified nothing but God. The Zionists have built a university in Jerusalem, as their first communal building. This road-block of the Word, then, is a fact.

rosenstock-huessy, fruit of lips, p.9

Instead of a mere harmony of the Gospels, I have asked: Are they movements of a symphony? Of course they are. And he who climbs this stair of the wondrous four events, called the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, understands again the wondrous 'Anno Domini' by which we count the stepping stones of the incarnation of the Christian era.

eugen rosenstock-huessy, fruit of lips, preface.xxi

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

augustine, confessions, x.38

this passage is to my soul what bright light is after hours in the pitch black. after 1700 years, augustine's love for God is as fiery in the darkness of the world as it was while rome crumbled into black ruins. this has made me create a new category for the common-blog: "most beautiful things ever written."

For you evil does not exist at all, and not only for you but for your created universe, because there is nothing outside it which could break in and destroy the order which you have imposed upon it. But in the parts of the universe, there are certain elements which are thought evil because of a conflict of interest.... All these elements which have some mutual conflict of interest are congruous with the inferior part of the universe which we call earth.... Because my soul did not dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to you whatever was displeasing. Hence it came to adopt the opinion that there are two substances.

augustine, confessions, vii.19

fragmentary thoughts on an aesthetic

"Augustine wants to praise God, but he has to know what God is to praise Him... Augustine must speak, and he can't speak."

dr. mac in traditio lecture on augustine's confessions, 24 jan 2011.

we here, in this world, need tension in our art: pain, suffering, some acknowledgment of evil. unless the artist shows us both the already and the not yet, we feel cheated. tragedies move us but so do comedies, and how does this make since unless we agree that both are in a sense true? the already is comedic, that Christ has already taken the world back, that knees everywhere already bow to Him, that the victory has been won. yet here we are, and the kingdom has not come on earth as it is in heaven. the not yet, the tragic, must be present in our work. more importantly, it must be taken seriously in our art. this can obviously be done either by writing hamlet or a modest proposal. both acknowledge tragedy, only the latter makes it conspicuous by its absence.

unless our beauty is pained, it rings hollow as long as we dwell here in the vale of tears.

and this makes me all the more excited and sure that we shall have an eternity of creativity when there is no more not yet. think of the comedy we can write when there is no more need for sadness. no really. no more deep longing in our souls, no more nameless void left unfilled. Christ seen as He is and all thereby made right. i think shakespeare will have himself a hell of a time.

Some weeks I think I have it tough.. but then I think.. "at least I don't have a maggot living in my head." It's all a matter of perspective.

this exactly captures my thoughts for this week so much better than i ever could have.

quoted from erin h

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

robert anson heinlein

via 1001 rules for my unborn son

via ckck

A Mid-February Sky Dance

Dance toward me, please, as


if you were a star


with light-years piled


on top of your hair,


smiling,

and I will dance toward you


as if I were darkness


with bats piled like a hat


on top of my head.


~Richard Brautigan

via stillbeating

Beach Attitudes

Blessed is the beach, survivor of tides.



And blessed the litter of crown conchs and pen shells, the dead


blue crab in all its electric raiment.



Blessed the nunneries of skimmers,


scuttering and rising, wheeling and falling and settling, ruffling


their red and black-and-white habits.


And blessed be the pacemakers and the peacemakers,



the slow striders, the arthritic joggers, scarred and bent under


their histories, for they’re here at last by the sunlit sea.



Blessed Peoria and Manhattan, Ottowa and Green Bay, Pittsburgh,


Dresden.



And blessed their children.



And blessed the lovers for they shall have one perfect day.



Blessed be the dolphin out beyond the furthest buoy,


slaughtering the bright leapers,


for they shall have full bellies.



Blessed, too, the cormorant and the osprey and the pelican


for they are the cherubim and seraphim and archangel.



And blessed be the gull, open throated, screeching, scolding


me to my face,



for he shall have his own place returned to him.


And the glossy lip of the long wave shall have the last kiss.

— Robert Dana

via among the pines

Here come old flattop, he come grooving up slowly

He got joo-joo eyeball, he one holy roller

He got hair down to his knee

Got to be a joker he just do what he please

He wear no shoeshine, he got toe-jam football

He got monkey finger, he shoot coca-cola

He say "I know you, you know me"

One thing I can tell you is you got to be free

Come together right now over me

He bag production, he got walrus gumboot

He got Ono sideboard, he one spinal cracker

He got feet down below his knee

Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease

Come together right now over me

[Right!

Come, oh, come, come, come.]

He roller-coaster, he got early warning

He got muddy water, he one mojo filter

He say "One and one and one is three"

Got to be good-looking cos he's so hard to see

Come together right now over me

Oh

Come together

Yeah come together

Yeah come together

Yeah come together

Yeah come together

Yeah come together

Yeah come together

Yeah oh

Come together

Yeah come together

come together

lennon/mccartney

until you've heard joe cocker sing this at twelve fifteen on a friday morning when you've not slept enough in a week and not worked enough quite yet; until you've watched two men dance like boys in a kitchen full of chocolate and cream and blessing; until you've lived a week with tk, tank, bobstar, and raab, you haven't lived at'all.

you have to go on and be crazy. craziness is like heaven.

jimi hendrix

here's to friday nights full of smoke and flame and friends and laughter.

here's to ch, lr, se, bh, mh, mm, rm, jf, jw, ta, tk, and rn.

here's to trucks skimming across snow and down hills.

here's to ash.

via Ash H

Joy

Who could need more proof than honey—



How the bees with such skill and purpose


enter flower after flower


sing their way home


to create and cap the new honey


just to get through the flowerless winter.



And how the bear with intention and cunning


raids the hive


shovels pawful after pawful into his happy mouth


bats away indignant bees


stumbles off in a stupor of satiation and stickiness.



And how we humans can’t resist its viscosity


its taste of clover and wind


its metaphorical power:


don’t we yearn for a land of milk and honey?


don’t we call our loved ones “honey?”



all because bees just do, over and over again, what they were made to do.



Oh, who could need more proof than honey


to know that our world 


was meant to be


and 



was meant to be


sweet?

—Julie Cadwallader Staub

via among the pines

MINISTRY TO DEATH, MINISTRY OF LIFE

by Dr. Peter Leithart

Pastors are specialists in death. Wherever death is, pastors are: Waiting beside the hospital bed, sharing a couple’s bewilderment over their third late miscarriage, reading Psalm 23 as the earth swallows up the casket.

But the pastor’s ministry to death doesn’t stop with the obvious. As a marriage disintegrates, as two who have been one split in two again, trust and love die, and it’s only a matter of time before hope too is a corpse. The Dow plummets, and before they know what happened a couple on the verge of retirement finds a lifetime of restraint and prudence deleted. A company downsizes, and a man whose identity has been bound up with his work stumbles around to find a new self to replace the one he lost. A child’s apostasy wounds more deeply than death.

Whatever form they take, crises are deaths, and to this we can add all the daily deaths that flesh is heir to. Pastors are wherever death is, and in our world death is everywhere.

In all these circumstances, the pastor brings a word of life. To be a real gospel, good news for a world of death, that word has to be a promise of life on the far side of death – or, more properly, the promise of life throughdeath. A message of life that skirts the edge of the grave is not the gospel of Jesus because it is not the gospel of the cross. The word we speak is good news that the Father of Jesus is faithful even to the grave, and yet again faithful. But it has to be at least about God’s faithfulness to death.

Pastoral ministry has a Eucharistic shape: We offer the Bread of life, but only after the bread is broken, after the blood is poured. The Bread of life is the bread that proclaims the Lord’s death until He comes.

At the beginning of Matthew’s Passion narrative, a woman pours oil over Jesus’ head (26:7). It is an anointing, acclaiming Jesus as King and Priest, but Jesus says that it is in preparation for His burial. Jesus is ordained for the grave, anointed to pass through death and out the other end.

This is the great privilege of pastoral ministry, to follow Jesus into the tombs that litter our world to announce the triumph of life.

via Credenda/Agenda