Outward Journey / Inward Journey

And what is the object of my love?  I asked the earth and it said: ‘It is not I.’  I asked all that is in it; they made the same confession.  I asked the sea, the deeps the living creatures that creep, and they responded: ‘We are not your God, look beyond us.’  I asked the breezes which blow and the entire air with its inhabitants said: ‘Anaximenes was mistaken; I am not God.’  I asked heaven, sun, moon, and stars; they said: ‘Nor are we the God whom you seek.’  And I said to all these things in my external environment: ‘Tell me of my God who you are not, tell me something about him.’  And with a great voice they cried out: ‘He made us’.  My question was the attention I gave to them, and their response was their beauty.

-Augustine of Hippo (397) Confesssons, Book X, vi (9a).  Trans. by Henry Chadwick (1991).  Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 183.

With the mind and intellect which you have given them, they [philosophers] investigate these matters [measuring the constellations, tracing the paths of the stars].  They have found out much.  Many years beforehand they have predicted eclipses of sun and moon, foretelling the day, the hour, and whether total or partial.  And their calculation has not been wrong.  It has turned out just as they predicted.  They have put the rules which they discovered into books which are read to this day.  On this basis prediction can be made of the year, the month of the year, the day of the month, the hour of the day, and what proportion of light will be eclipsed in the case of either sun or moon; and it happens exactly as predicted.  People who have no understanding of these things are amazed and stupefied.  Those who know are exultant and are admired.  Their irreligious pride makes them withdraw from you and eclipse your great light from reaching themselves.  They can foresee a future eclipse of the sun, but do not perceive their own eclipse of the present.  For they do not in a religious spirit investigate the source of the intelligence with which they research into these matters.  Moreover, when they do discover that you are their Maker, they do not give themselves to you so that they may preserve what you have made.  They do not slay in sacrifice to you what they have made themselves to be.  They do not kill their own pride like high-flying birds, their curiosity like ‘fishes of the sea’ and their sexual indulgence like ‘the beasts of the field’, so that you, God, who are a devouring fire, may consume their mortal concerns and recreate them for immortality.

-Augustine of Hippo (397) Confesssons, Book V, i (4).  Trans. by Henry Chadwick (1991).  Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 74.

Maturity in our relation to our parents consists in going beyond both a belief in their omniscience and a disdain for their weakness, to an understanding and a gratitude for their decisive part in that ongoing process in which now we, too, must take our place, as heirs and yet free.  So it must be with our relation to our spiritual and intellectual parentage, our tradition.  An abstract concept of parenthood is no substitute for our real parents, an abstract cosmopolitanism no substitute for our real traditions.  Jerusalem truly is “the mother of us all,” or perhaps more precisely the grandmother of us all, with Athens as our other grandmother (since everyone is entitled to two grandmothers).  The tension and complementarity between Athens and Jerusalem has been a recurring theme, a sort of melodic counterpart, of our tradition.  And it still must be, for us as descendants of those two grandmothers, with that melody that we learn to sing, and from that counterpoint that we go on to compose melodies of our own.  To be tone-deaf to the tradition is, therefore, to be unable to hear to voices of the past or the present–or of the future.

-Jaroslav Pelikan (1984) The Vindication of Tradition.  Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 54.

A particular situation has placed me in circumstances that have allowed me to devote a large amount of time reading during the past couple of weeks, and one of the books I’ve read was Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  As I expected, it is atrociously sentimental and the characters are one-dimensional; but the book serves its purpose in being viciously abolitionist. Thank heavens it was written.  It occasionally yields nuggets of commentary on American life that are relevant through to today.  This one made me giggle:

["]Well, now, but I’m not sure, after all, about this religion,” said he, the old wicked expression returning to his eye; “the country is almost ruined with pious white people; such pious politicians as we have just before elections,–such pious goings on in all departments of church and state, that a fellow does not know who’ll cheat him next.  I don’t know, either, about a religion’s being up in the market, just now.["]
-Augustine St. Clare, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chapter XIV, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852).

For one example of pious goings-on in all departments of state, read a piece by Dahlia Lithwick, a columnist for The Washington Post, published earlier this month, here.