Juno

If you haven't seen Juno yet, you must. Do not bring your children. Just bring your spouse/honey and any in uteros you may be carrying.

Contrary to Hollywood.com, whose reviewer can't believe any teen out there is having unprotected sex (?), this is a real film. I would even say more real than Bella.

My favorite bit to chew on at the moment is the social commentary on perpetual adolescence. The 16 year-old pregnant Juno finds her heroic little self through losing her little self. The 30 something almost-adoptive dad Mark loses his chance to lose himself and slips back into the pubescent dreamings of, well, most 30 somethings.

Preggers brain

It must be hormones. I can't think or even speak clearly.

But if it's the hormones this time, what was it all those years before I was pregnant? The thought baffles the mind.

Pascal was right: Behold the genius. Man! Master of nature! but do not be surprised if he cannot think right now. There is a fly buzzing about his ears...

Descartes was wrong. Reason does not rule absolutely. It is ruled.

Opiates

Second Terrace has an entertaining little number (see opiate number 3) on the true sources of cultural numbness, illiteracy, and general lack of reflection. Hint: it's not religion. But for all you moms and dads out there, seeking to minimize the opiates in your child's and your own lives (though "moderation in all things" is a good mantra), this is a good place to get some ideas.

January 28--St. Thomas Aquinas

John Paul II on the Angelic Doctor's invaluable contribution to our understanding of "faith and reason":

"In an age when Christian thinkers were rediscovering the treasures of ancient philosophy, and more particularly of Aristotle, Thomas had the great merit of giving pride of place to the harmony which exists between faith and reason. Both the light of reason and the light of faith come from God, he argued; hence there can be no contradiction between them.

"More radically, Thomas recognized that nature, philosophy's proper concern, could contribute to the understanding of divine Revelation. Faith therefore has no fear of reason, but seeks it out and has trust in it. Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfillment, so faith builds upon and perfects reason. Illumined by faith, reason is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God. Although he made much of the supernatural character of faith, the Angelic Doctor did not overlook the importance of its reasonableness; indeed he was able to plumb the depths and explain the meaning of this reasonableness. Faith is in a sense an “exercise of thought”; and human reason is neither annulled nor debased in assenting to the contents of faith, which are in any case attained by way of free and informed choice." ~Fides et Ratio, no.43

The problem of the good atheist

Fr. Neuhaus again, this time on atheism. Atheists have a hard time explaining why we should care about "humanity" or doing good things since life is ultimately meaningless. Enter the existentialists.

"Existentialism" gets a lot of press because it's so, well, comfortable. A basic thought-pattern of existentialism is that truth is one thing, but meaning is another. So, in atheistic terms: the truth is that human life is uncreated and finite; but we can give meaning to life by creating meaning. If I say life has meaning, then by golly, it does! Enter Father Neuhaus, commenting on popular atheist writer, Comte-Sponville:

"If we follow Comte-Sponville and reject the theological rationale for the unity of the universal and personal, can both survive? “All truth is universal,” he writes. Fair enough. But then the question follows immediately: “How can a truth belong to me personally?” His answer: “Things do not matter in and of themselves but only through the attention we bring to them and the love we bear them.” It’s a familiar and modern existentialist solution: Truth is truth, but then there is meaning, which is quite another matter. We serve truth but we make meaning. “We do not love an object because it is valuable; rather, our love confers value upon what we love.”

Perhaps Comte-Sponville will succeed in convincing his fellow atheists that humanity is to be loved even though our lives have no value. But one may be forgiven for entertaining doubts. The heyday of the modern existentialist approach was the 1930s, the decade before millions were killed in death camps, gulags, carpet bombing, and other horrors continuing into our time. It is not only in the horrors of history, however, but in the dark knowledge of our own hearts and in the irrepressible demands of reason that thoughtful people will find it implausible that the humanity we are to venerate is worthy of being venerated only because of our veneration. Andre Comte-Sponville’s “atheist spirituality” betrays a very large measure of the wishful thinking that he attributes to Christian faith.

"Comte-Sponville reminds us, however, that there is atheism and then there is atheism. This is a truth underscored by Father Ranier Cantalamessa, preacher to the papal household, in a recent essay:

“The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those who live painfully the situation of the silence of God, who do not believe in God but do not boast about it; rather they experience the existential anguish and the lack of meaning of everything: They too, in their own way, live in the dark night of the spirit. Albert Camus called them “the saints without God.” The mystics exist above all for them; they are their travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they “sat down at the table of sinners and ate with them” (see Luke 15:2). This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once converted, pore over the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J.K. Huysmans and so many others over the writings of Angela of Foligno; T.S. Eliot over those of Julian of Norwich. There they find again the same scenery that they had left, but this time illuminated by the sun. . . . The word “atheist” can have an active and a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also one who—at least so it seems to him—is rejected by God. In the first case, it is a blameworthy atheism (when it is not in good faith), in the second an atheism of sorrow or of expiation.”

Faith and Reason

A recent banner outside a Congregational Church in my hometown:

"Our faith is two thousand years old. Our thinking is not."

How cute.

The total divorce of faith from reason--and the resulting divorce of Christian from Christian--is nowhere more evident. I will have to extrapolate, of course, and guess that what the banner means is this: "We accept everyone regardless of race, creed, lifestyle, sexual orientation, etc., etc. Other Christians (whose thinking is still two thousand years old) do not. Our common faith in Jesus has no bearing on how we think about human behavior."

If what we believe (our faith) is so far removed from what or how we think, then we are truly fragmented creatures. Faith is simply a gift of God--"having the mind of Christ." It is a point from which we encounter and think about the world, ourselves, and our Creator. If faith does not inform our thinking, it is as dead as St. James's "faith without works." It's just a pacifier that makes us feel happy on Sundays.

Reason informed by faith, however, receives the gift of a new viewpoint: the world is finite, the Creator infinite; man is created, fallen, and redeemed; the virtues have meaning beyond "manners." All sorts of new possibilities open up to the human mind, including, I might add, modern science.

But if you refuse to let a two thousand year old faith inform your thought--fearing it might be "backwards"--you have also failed to truly believe that faith in the first place. The Christian faith came to the world two thousand years ago. Its truths, however, are yesterday, today, and forever.

Tranquility: St. Francis DeSales

I was just a bit frazzled at the thought of how the days fly by with nary a contemplative hour. The moments of quiet are too, too short. And then, this passage from Francis DeSales comes through:

In order to acquire tranquility in action it is necessary to carefully consider what we are capable of accomplishing and never to undertake more than that. It is self-love, ever more anxious to do much rather than to do well and this self-love that wishes to undertake everything and accomplishes nothing!

-- St. Francis DeSales

Amen, amen.