Classicism and Romaticism

This dichotomy has always been very interesting to me. It is not that people are one or the other; in fact the most interesting artists have had elements of both in their nature. Recently though I have been appreciating the differences between the two in terms of their respective approach to the place of feeling in the good life. The Romantic of course understands intense, volcanic emotions and feelings to lie at the heart of the good life. As Rousseau famously said, "I felt before I thought." It is the sheer joy of the intensity of being in love, of experiencing nature at her wildest. For the Classicist, feelings have their place to be sure but they are subordinated and channeled into something bigger. For the Classicist there is a horror to being a slave to emotions, or to let external realities dictate one's happiness. For a Classicist, happiness is not an accident of birth, wealth and so on, but a choice to be made.

These questions have come back to me in reading a charming book by Edith Hamilton called The Roman Way. She is comparing the poets Catullus and Horace. (To be fair, she doesn't apply the appelations of romantic or classic, that is my take on it.) For Catullus she writes,

In his space of 30 odd years he had felt more than most octogenarians... All things were always final with him and moderation in any shape or form impossible. One cannot think without profound weariness of his going on like that. To live perpetually at such an altitude is ont for humanity and Catullus would have been work out long before old age overtook him. Fate at the end was kind to him.

There is an odd trade off for the Romantic. On the one hand, obviously in his short life Catullus lived at a level few have, but on the other his happiness was entirely dependent on the whims and capricious choices made by his mistress Clodia (whom he names 'Lesbia' in his poems. Horace on the other hand had a different approach. He refuses to let his external circumstances dictate his happiness:

Do you know friend, what I feel, for what I pray? Not to waver to or fro, hanging upon the hope of the dubious hour. God may give this or that - life - wealth. I will my own self make my spirit undisturbed.

or

The fool finds fault with a place. The fault is not there but in the mind, and that can never escape from itself.

But the joy of this is that his attitude does not make his dreary. In fact, as Hamilton delightfully points out, Horace is the one you would have to have a glass of wine with:

He had that most delightful gift of enjoying keenly all life's simplest pleasures, a grassy bank by a river, a glowing fire on a cold night, a handful of ripe olives, the sky, the sunshine, the cooling wind... Who would not like to see Horace walk in through his door any day in the year? Immediately everything would seem more agreeable, the cocktails better flavoured, the armchairs softer, even the comfor of the warm sheltered room would take on the proportions of an active delight.

But can one be a Classicist in the 21st century without being a relic of the past? I have often thought not. I have wavered back and forth; it does seem that the 21st has its own set of terms. On the one hand it does seem that the dichotomy of classic and romantic don't apply. On the other hand, I am attracted to the idea that this is universal undulation in the human soul that we can find in many times and places, thought this may itself be romantic.

What has rekindled this debate for me has been found in all places a book on leadership in the business world. Stephen Covey writes in the spirit of Horace:

In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb. Reactive people make it a feeling. They're driven by feelings. Hollywood has generally scripted us to believe that we are not responsible, that we are a product of our feelings. But the Hollywood script does not describe the reality. If your feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.  Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do, the sacrifices you make, the giving of self… If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend of do not love in return… Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured.

Hamlet's Blackberry (isn't that a great title!)

I just finished a really helpful book called Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers. He begins by diagnosing a state of life that we are all very aware of. He calls it Digital Maximalism:

We've effectively been living by a philosophy, albeit an unconscious one. It holds that (1) connecting via screens is good, and (2) the more you connect, the better. I call it Digital Maximalism, because the goal is maximum screen time. Few of us have decided this is a wise approach to life, but let's face it, this is how we've been living.

Now this is nothing new, but it is what he does with it that is interesting. Books that I have read on the subject have tended to very grumpy on the subject of the overwhelming nature. For instance, I love Wendell Berry, and I believe that he has some profound thoughts on the subject, and yet I find that I cannot follow him. I use technology and I enjoy technology; but I do hate being overwhelmed by technology. This is why I enjoyed Powers’ book so much. At the heart of his book are seven or so thinkers throughout history who have stood at a threshold much like ours in terms of the creation of new technologies and created ways to manage it so that we can still lead intentional and reflective lives that are driven by us and not by other. He goes back to Plato, Seneca, Franklin, Thoreau and others.

The difficulty with technology is keeping it in its place. They are tools to be sure that quite effective in helping us to organize, to read, listen to music, communicate, and so on. But they are a tool that shapes our very mental space and that is where the caution lies. Powers’ main point is that they do not create meaning as we might hope that they could. Meaning is the same now as it has always been:

At the same time, they and their contemporaries yearned for all that we yearn for: time, space, tranquility and above all, depth. It's as if they say the future coming and, in a way, lived it. The world has changed hugely over the centuries, but the basic ingredients of human happiness haven't.

But the true need is that of depth, the ability to experience the world intentionally, slowly and with savour. He writes

The moments we enjoy most as they unfold, and that we treasure long afterward, are the ones we experience most deeply. Depth roots us in the world, gives life substance and wholeness. It enriches our work, our relationships, everything we do. It 's the essential ingredient of a good life and one of the qualities we most admire in others.

The problem is “The digital consciousness can't tolerate three minutes of pure focus.”

And yet it is focus that makes experience meaningful. What he does is to remind us what that looks like; or at worst, shows us for the first time.

A thought as to why the classics last...

There is always a debate about why the classics last. There are many ideas why, and the best answer is probably a combination of factors such as great writing, powerful metaphors and images and so on. But the aspect that has been particularly firing my imagination has been the fact that they do not necessarily resolve the tensions inherent in human nature, but rather do justice to the complexity of existence and moral wrestling. I found these quotes from Thornton's intro to the Classics that have helped me think through this:

In both epics, Homer describes an impressive depth and range of human behaviour and motivation. He also recognizes the contradictions and complexities of the soul and the tragic limitations of human existence. Finally, Homer is a fabulous storyteller whose diction, similes, imagery, precise and vivid description of action, and economy of narrative are still fresh and entertaining after 2700 years.

Virgil recognizes the necessity of order, including the political, yet at the same time he acknowledges the terrible price that often must be paid to achieve that order. he sees a cosmos riven from top to bottom by the intimate interplay of order and chaos, a vast conflict in which struggling mortals have a role to play and a burden to bear, often at great personal cost. This combination of optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, idealism and grim realism give the Aeneid its distinctive character.

I am more and more taken with the sheer complexity of the human soul. It is such a mix of forces such as language, upbringing, culture, experiences, choices made, desires, beliefs, habits, history, stage of maturity, nationality, temperament, biology, mental health, economic status and a certain something that just cannot be pinned down. There is no one thing that can pin it down. And from out of all this rises the human soul. What I personally love about a book is an author who can capture all of this in a memorable character and then weave around him or her a compelling story. That is a classic.

On the Integrated Life

It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that it is harder and harder to keep one’s work and one’s personal life separate. In his book on organizing in the Google Age, Douglas Merrill observes that,

The "work-life balance” is the ultimate goal many people have in mind when they think about getting organized. Given the world we live in today, however, it's usually an unrealistic goal. When most people talk about a "work-life balance" what they're really saying is that they want to work less. .. A more realistic goal is to integrate your work with your life in a way that reduces stress, boosts your productivity, and puts you more in sync with the joys and challenges of your life.

I see that in my own life as a parish priest. When I am at home I am often working on a sermon, or doing email or taking phone calls in the evening. And on the other hand, when I am at the office I am sometimes working on a personal project, or stopping in a book store after a visit to the hospital. It is difficult to say where the one ends and where the other begins. But the concept of integration scares me. I have this terrible image of me emailing on my blackberry where I am out at a restaurant with my family. There implication is that there does have to be a divide. So balance doesn’t work, but integration sounds more like work creep-ization into the home life. I think fragmentation is what is happening to so many.

I have also been meditating on these words from Poustinia in which the Catherine de Hueck Doherty observes’

It seems strange to say, but what can help modern man (sic) find the answers to his own mystery and the mystery of him in whose image he is created, is silence, solitude - in a word, the desert. Modern man needs these things more than the hermits of old.

If we are to witness to Christ in today's marketplaces, where there are constant demands on our whole person, we need silence. If we are to be always available, not only physically, but by empathy, sympathy, friendship, understanding and boundless caritas, we need silence. To be able to give joyous, unflagging hospitality, not only of house and food, but of mind, heart, body and soul, we need silence.

If I could extrapolate on this, I would hear her saying that in order to speak to a post-modern, fragmented world, a world in which so many are overworked, we need to be especially vigilant in keeping the radical discipline of silence and solitude. But this is neither balance, nor integration…what is it?

There goes the coffee mug...

From Cabin Fever by Tom Montgomery Fate (what a great name!):

And more than once I've been surprised at a stop sign, when a ceramic mug of hot coffee comes flying off the roof of my car, bounces off the hood and shatters on the street...


Yes, been there... seen that....

Thomas Merton, Platonism and the Rock

As an author, Thomas Merton has been one of my constant companions for years. I have always felt a special kinship with him. His books were instrumental in my coming back to Christianity, and I keep coming back to his writings whenever I wrestle with questions of faith, social justice, pluralism, contemplative living and worship. For me, his quest really embodied the special challenges of being a Christian in the 20^th century. But more than that, he has always seemed to speak directly to me even though he died five years before I was born.

I was delighted when I read that a traveling exhibit of some of his photography was going to be in a town just an hour away in Camrose, and that I would just happen to be in Camrose today to preside at a burial. Thomas Merton was a photographer because he loved capturing images of experience that is normally passed over. The exhibit was about thirty-five photos, all black and white, and all taken in the 60’s. They ranged from pictures of natural scenes from Kentucky, to scenes from around his hermitage.

One picture in particular caught me, a picture of some shadows falling across a rock. The rock was beautiful in particular because he captured well the roughness and weathered features of its surface, full of dark crags and intimating the passage of centuries. It seemed so real and concrete, and it hit me that this is what Plato missed, what he failed to see in his dazzling vision of eternity. Plato, for all his brilliance, ended up chasing a phantom, a form so abstract that it ceases to be have meaning. Whereas Merton saw that what was interesting was not a concept, but this particular rock. This rock sitting here at this time and in this place; this rock beautiful because it is matchless, irreplaceable. Don’t move on; don’t miss this moment the photograph seems to say. See the real; touch the real; feel the real… know you are part of the real.

This evening I had a vague recollection that Merton had commented on this, so I looked in my notes and sure enough I found this quote:

… the big sin of Platonism: the reduction of all reality to the level of pure abstraction, as if concrete, individual substances had no essential reality of their own, but were only shadows of some remote, universal, ideal essence filed away in a big card index somewhere in heaven, while the demiurges milled around the Logos piping their excitement in high, fluted, English intellectual tones.

Organizing the Google Way

Right now I am reading an interesting book called Getting Organized in the Google Era by Douglas Merrill. He used to be the Chief Information Officer at Google, and has written a useful book although it is very biased (shocking) towards Google products. But he isn't selling them; he truly believes in their usefulness. What I found helpful was his discussion on relying on the power of searching rather than the traditional disciplines of filing with concrete stuff or using multiple layers of folders on your computer. His argument is that this is too complicated, and the brain has to remember too many things, like where a document is. His answer is to rely heavily on searching programs on the net and on your computer and to become a better searcher.

But what caught my eye was his discussion as to the place of organization in our world today:

To put this all in perspective, concern about  being organized is a luxury - and a curse - of an affluent, technologically advanced society. Cave dwellers don't fret about being organized… Back in the 1850's, when the US was on the brink of the Civil War, everyday folks didn't wring their hands about being disorganized, either.

It got me thinking as to what it must have been like to have to organize a parish in the 1850's. My guess is that there would not have been nearly the number of meetings; there couldn't have been as many policies and procedures, and I can't imagine that they spent as much time with the budget and audits and so on. I do think that we probably do things better, especially in terms of policies such as volunteer screening and child protection. But it also makes the parish a much more complicated place, and as Merrill argues, the brain just can't hold all of the details. And thus we need organizations like Google and Microsoft to create systems to help us organize the information. This is not being ironic. I used to think I could get by without them. I don't any longer.