Forty-Seven Years Ago Today

President John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley died on the same day, the assassination of the former overshadowing the other two.

On Creation and the Music of the Spheres

God created the heavens and the earth, but not only half-He created all the heavens and all the earth, creating the essence with the form. For he is not an inventor of figures, but the creator even of the essence of beings.-St. Basil of Caesarea, The Hexameron


But the soul receives the sweetest harmonies and numbers through the ears, and by these echoes is reminded and aroused to the divine music which may be heard by the more subtle and penetrating sense of mind. According to the followers of Plato, divine music is twofold. One kind, they say, exists entirely in the eternal mind of God. The second is in the motions and order of the heavens, by which the heavenly spheres and their orbits make a marvellous harmony. In both of these our soul took part before it was imprisoned in our bodies. But it uses the ears as messengers, as though they were chinks in this darkness. By the ears, as I have already said, the soul receives the echoes of that incomparable music, by which it is led back to the deep and silent memory of the harmony which it previously enjoyed. The whole soul then kindles with desire to fly back to (Fruatur, ad sedes) its rightful home, so that it may enjoy that true music again.-Marsilio Ficino, De divino furore (On Divine Frenzy)

St. Martin of Tours

 
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On this Armistice Day, we honour a saint who had been a soldier of the Roman Army, and whose life gained greater fame as Christ's soldier, as a missionary bishop in a hostile Gallic land.


O man of worth past telling, whom labour could not conquer, nor death discomfit; who neither feared to die, nor refused to live. -Third Antiphon for Lauds for the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, from the Monastic Diurnal

Here's his vita from The Golden Legend

Attack Ads Ca. 1800

Hat tip: John Beeler

The Late, Great Sobran on Patriotism vs. Nationalism

from The Western Confucian


 The Late Joseph Sobran hits the mark on an issue I have written about before. Here it is, in his own words:

Patriotism is like family love. You love your family just for being your family, not for being “the greatest family on earth” (whatever that might mean) or for being “better” than other families. You don’t feel threatened when other people love their families the same way. On the contrary, you respect their love, and you take comfort in knowing they respect yours. You don’t feel your family is enhanced by feuding with other families.

While patriotism is a form of affection, nationalism, it has often been said, is grounded in resentment and rivalry; it’s often defined by its enemies and traitors, real or supposed. It is militant by nature, and its typical style is belligerent. Patriotism, by contrast, is peaceful until forced to fight.

The patriot differs from the nationalist in this respect too: he can laugh at his country, the way members of a family can laugh at each other’s foibles. Affection takes for granted the imperfection of those it loves; the patriotic Irishman thinks Ireland is hilarious, whereas the Irish nationalist sees nothing to laugh about.

The nationalist has to prove his country is always right. He reduces his country to an idea, a perfect abstraction, rather than a mere home. He may even find the patriot’s irreverent humor annoying.
                                                                                                           

All Saints Day

An old article by Huw Raphael

IZ THAT Time of the year again when many folks will gang up on – really – those who let their kids dress up silly on 31 October. We will be bombarded with bad history and bad social science and bad theology. I won’t even bother to link to the most common Christian “proof sheet” that takes the Irish name of the holiday (Samhain) and makes it into a god’s name – a god to whom human sacrifices were offered. This deity never existed. Samhain is simply Irish gaelic meaning “End of Summer”. It is still the name of the Month of November in the Irish language. I will also not bother to link to sources produced by Modern Neopagans who get their history all wrong, too. This holiday was not stolen by the Church from them. Firstly because their patterns are modern – based on a Christian culture – so their patterns are not the “real, ancient practice” of any people. Secondly because their ancient feasts were not celebrated on fixed calendars. After ten-plus years as a pagan and twenty plus years as a Christian I’m just annoyed by all the politically-biased claims out there. Maybe some totally non-caustic and totally non-National Enquirer-worthy research and experience can add a little leaven to the discussion (doubt it).

Read the rest here.

Barbara Billingsley, +Requiescat in Pace

The Beaver's mother passed last Friday. +May her memory be eternal!!!

Here's a clip from the comedic film "Airplane" (1980), where she is...well...talking jive:



Impressive! I must say I only talk jive in Latin.

+May she rest in peace!

Hat tip: John Beeler

"Kids Today": Gavin McInnes on Today's Youth culture and Boomer Hypocrisy

From Taki's Mag

I have always been a bit of a "fogey": from my late teens to about 35 I could qualify as a "young fogey," and now that I'm settling into middle-age fogeyhood, it won't be long before the adjetive "old" will apply. The common denominator, of course, is "fogey."

My taste in clothing has always ranged between 1925 and 1960. I prefer wearing fedoras and donegals depending on what suit or tweed coat I'm wearing, and my "casual" clothes are casual by 1945-1955 standards: button-down shirts, sweaters (depending on the weather), . My taste in music ranges between Gregorian and Byzantine/Slavic chant and Renaissance sacred polyphony, to Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, with a good rendezvous through the Big Bands: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington. I also have a good, soft spot for Cole Porter.

But I also have some interest in what my students are up to. My students tend to be conservative, but by far not unaffected by contemporary youth culture (college coeds all) and articles like this one by Gavin McInnes peak my interest.

For the most part, he is spot-on. Many Boomer "critics" of modern youth culture complain about how "kids today" are so "materialistic" and "culturally void," but in reality they're just pursuing the same things they did: sex, more sex, some drugs, more sex, music, sex, music, more music, and then more sex. They are about what youth movements since the sixties have always been about.

This gem is my favorite from Mr. McInnes' article. He, as a participant in a panel discussion at UCLA on youth culture, tears into Professor Corey's own presentation, "The History of Cool," where she talks about the "White Negro," "Bourgeois" appropration of  lower class culture, and how youth culture has (again, bourgeois in it's essence" has always been stealing from the poor. Here's where he let's her have it:

"I interrupted her by asking if there was anything more bourgeois than being a professor—being paid to pontificate about leisure movements and then taking off every seventh year to go ruminate in Paris. Hearing today’s kids called mindless consumers drives me nuts. They get their clothes at secondhand shops, and the ones they do buy have fewer logos than when I was their age. They don’t buy music. They steal it. They can create their own band out of nothing by mixing samples and genres and new instruments, and they get these songs to their fans without a record label. They’re not stealing anything from blacks. They are black. Mailer’s essay is a half-century old, and today’s incarnation of cool is more inclusive than any before it. We all know how misogynist the hippies really were. The Free Love movement was only a groovy way to take advantage of women. Punk pretended to be open to everyone, but an Afro Mohawk was about as common as a well-respected white rapper. Today’s kids couldn’t care less who’s black, gay, rich, or poor.

Spot on, indeed!

Read the whole article here.

Thomas and Mencius on "Unintended Consequences"

The ethical problem posed by the spur and the fat man.

Thomas Aquinas and Mencius on unintended consequences and "collateral damage."


Read the whole article here

Hat tip: The Western Confucian

The Legacy of Joseph Sobran, Heir to Russell Kirk

New blog: The Rambling Medievalist

I have created a new blog, where many of my thoughts on medieval studies will be presented in rough form and will be developed for publication. My first post is from an abstract of my dissertation.

Here is the link: gregoriusmagnus.blogspot.com.

The text as performance

From Arturo Vasquez's blog:

Jorge Luis Borges, in his short essay, El culto del libro , writes that a watershed moment in the history of human thought is when St. Augustine found that St. Ambrose could read a text without moving his lips or reading aloud. Being a man of the world, one could only assume that St. Augustine found this to be an unusual skill. But to be mentioned in St. Augustine’s Confessions, it has to be more significant than just a cheap parlor trick. Borges explains:

Aquel hombre pasaba directamente del signo de escritura a la intuición, omitiendo el signo sonoro; el extraño arte que iniciaba, el arte de leer en voz baja, conduciría a consecuencias maravillosas. Conduciría, cumplidos muchos años, al concepto del libro como fin, no como instrumento de un fin.

(That man passed directly from the written sign to the intuition, omitting the audible sign; the strange art that it initiated, the art of reading to oneself, would lead to marvelous consequences. It would lead, after many years, to the concept of the book as an end, and not a means to an end.)

Read the rest here.

Vincent Price on Racial and Religious Prejudice

Not PC, just good common sense and decency from an American actor who was a class act.

Hat tip: John Beeler

Per Signum Crucis

Per signum crucis de inimicis nostris libera nos, Domine!

We praise the, O Lord, and we bless thee, for by thy Holy Cross thou hast redeemed the world!

Mark Shea: "The Economy is so bad that..."

From Mark Shea's blog

The economy is really bad!

How bad is it, Lou?

It's so bad that....

I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

I ordered a burger at McDonald's, and the kid behind the counter asked, "Can you afford fries with that?"

CEO's are now playing miniature golf.

If the bank returns your check marked "Insufficient Funds," you have to call them and ask if they mean you or them .

Hot Wheels and Matchbox stocks are trading higher than GM.

McDonald's is selling the 1/4 'ouncer'.

For more gems, read here.

Claus Philipp Maria Justinian Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, Hitler's Would-Be Assasin. RIP.

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Sixty-three years ago yesterday, this man, along with two other German army officers, Henning von Treskow and Hans Oster, attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler and the High Command of the Wehrmacht and remove the Nazis from power. He and his cohorts, Catholic aristocrats and lovers of their land, desired to save Germany from the devastating war Hitler had doomed the nation into, and saw it as their duty to bring this murderous regime to an end. They almost succeeded.

The plan was to have Colonel von Stauffenberg, chief of the army reserve, to plant a suitcase with a bomb inside at Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair), five miles east of the East Prussian town Rastenberg (now Kertzyn, Poland), one of Hitler's many command posts. Once the bomb would have done its work in desposing of Hitler, Operation Valkyrie would be put into action: overthrow the central government in Berlin, and make peace with the Allies. The conspirators had an inside man in Berlin-General Olbricht-who would coordinate the operations in the top command.

All went awry, when the suitcase was removed several feet away from Hitler. It went off, but Hitler suffered minor injuries. In the meantime, von Stauffenberg was on his way to Berlin to carry out Operation Valkyrie, and he and General Olbricht arrested some top officials, inlcuding General Fromm, commander of the reserves, until word came back to them that Hitler was alive. Fromm was released, with the understanding he would support the conspiracy, but in the end, he turned on them. Staufenberg and Olbricht were shot the next day, Oster and Treskow were arrested and executed the following week, along with seven-thousand Germans suspected of conspiracy to assassinate Hitler (including German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel).

The plot failed, but the name of Claus von Stauffenberg is perhaps the most beloved and revered name in Germany, giving proof to many Germans that even in that darkest hour of their history, chivalry, honor and goodness were not lacking.

May Claus von Stauffenberg's memory be eternal! May God grant him rest eternal.

And may He also grant rest to his co-conspirators, Hening von Treskow and Hans Oster, as well as to Pastor Bonhoeffer and Field Marshal Rommel, and to all Germans of good will who died wanting to save their nation from a fiendish and monstrous regime.

Tsar Nicholas II

July 17, 1918. 92 years ago, a horrific crime was committed in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg, in a house called the Ipatiev House. A man was brutally shot along with his whole family- wife, four daughters, and a son-shot dead by men who were self-styled "lovers of humanity". With Tsar Nicholas II, the rule of the Romanovs came to a violent and brutal end.

His abdication a year prior was greeted with joy by liberals and socialists in France, Britain and the United States. President Wilson felt that with the removal of the Tsar, the world was that much closer to being made "safe for democracy." What resulted? 70 years of the most brutal tyranny the world had ever witnessed. In Central Europe, the eradication of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies resulted in the rise of National Socialism. So much for making the world "safe for democracy."

No, he was not a perfect ruler. He had some black marls against him in terms of his political career, to be sure, but one thing is very certain: he loved his people, and his abdication showed how far he was willing to go to make sure his people didn't suffer from the ravages of civil war.

May their prayers in heaven, and those of all the New Martyrs of Russia, win for the Russian people peace, prosperity, and most importantly, a new zeal for the faith of their ancestors!

Bastile Day is Bunk

Read Article here

From TakiMag.com


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It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy. 0h, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.”-Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

The Aunt from Chicago

Greek comedy, ca. 1957, about a middle-aged man with four daughters, whose conservative life is disrupted by his sister, who visits from Chicago, and has some zany ideas about how to get her nieces married. Clue: clay jars. In Greek with no subtitles, but I think you'll get the gist of what's going on.

St. John the Baptist: Last of the Old Testament Prophets

A Sermon by St. Augustine of Hippo:

The Church observes the birth of John as in some way sacred; and you will not find any other of the great men of old whose birth we celebrate officially. We celebrate John’s, as we celebrate Christ’s. This point cannot be passed over in silence, and if I may not perhaps be able to explain it in the way that such an important matter deserves, it is still worth thinking about it a little more deeply and fruitfully than usual.

John is born of an old woman who is barren; Christ is born of a young woman who is a virgin. That John will be born is not believed, and his father is struck dumb; that Christ will be born is believed, and he is conceived by faith.

I have proposed some matters for inquiry, and listed in advance some things that need to be discussed. I have introduced these points even if we are not up to examining all the twists and turns of such a great mystery, either for lack of capacity or for lack of time. You will be taught much better by the one who speaks in you even when I am not here; the one about whom you think loving thoughts, the one whom you have taken into your hearts and whose temple you have become.

John, it seems, has been inserted as a kind of boundary between the two Testaments, the Old and the New. That he is somehow or other a boundary is something that the Lord himself indicates when he says, The Law and the prophets were until John. So he represents the old and heralds the new. Because he represents the old, he is born of an elderly couple; because he represents the new, he is revealed as a prophet in his mother’s womb. You will remember that, before he was born, at Mary’s arrival he leapt in his mother’s womb. Already he had been marked out there, designated before he was born; it was already shown whose forerunner he would be, even before he saw him. These are divine matters, and exceed the measure of human frailty. Finally, he is born, he receives a name, and his father’s tongue is loosed.

Zachary is struck dumb and loses his voice, until John, the Lord’s forerunner, is born and releases his voice for him. What does Zachary’s silence mean, but that prophecy was obscure and, before the proclamation of Christ, somehow concealed and shut up? It is released and opened up by his arrival, it becomes clear when the one who was being prophesied is about to come. The releasing of Zachary’s voice at the birth of John has the same significance as the tearing of the veil of the Temple at the crucifixion of Christ. If John were meant to proclaim himself, he would not be opening Zachary’s mouth. The tongue is released because a voice is being born – for when John was already heralding the Lord, he was asked, Who are you and he replied I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

John is the voice, but the Lord in the beginning was the Word. John is a voice for a time, but Christ is the eternal Word from the beginning.