• About

Notes from the Wasteland

Notes from the Wasteland

Category Archives: Culture

The Supreme Court and Laudato Si’

27 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by Christopher Zehnder in Culture, Social justice, Theological musings

≈ 4 Comments

By Christopher Zehnder

When I first learned of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down statutes forbidding same-sex marriage, I felt neither surprise nor dismay. No surprise, for it was just what I had expected. No dismay, for I did not expect anything other from our society, or its government.

I did feel annoyed, however – for, like a vamp coming late to a party, the Supreme Court has drawn all eyes from the one who had been the belle of the ball: Pope Francis and his encyclical, Laudato Si’.

Yet, it is fitting, in a way, that the Supreme Court’s decision should so closely follow the pope’s encyclical, for the former brings into focus the major theme of the latter. That theme is not the threat of climate change, whatever those who want either to dismiss the encyclical or coöpt it say. A major – if not the major – theme of Laudato Si’ is that, both in the moral order and the natural order, everything is connected. How we treat the “environment” is how we will treat ourselves, and how we treat ourselves is how we will treat the natural world outside ourselves.

This point may not seem immediately obvious. After all, an industrialist who pours sludge into a river is not going to mix it into his coffee. And people will take the most assiduous care of their pets even while they ruin their constitutions with unhealthy eating. Everyone probably knows someone who lives with such contradictions in their souls – but this is merely to point out that human beings tend to be self-divided in a profound inconsistency between ideals and actions – or, even, between one ideal and another ideal.

Continue reading →

Were Medieval Germans Secret Pagans?

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by Christopher Zehnder in Culture, Theological musings

≈ Leave a comment

By Christopher Zehnder

Many years ago I read, in a history of the Holy Roman Empire (I think it was Friedrich Heer’s History of the Holy Roman Empire) a startling claim. The claim was that medieval Germans of Saxony had never abandoned paganism – and it was their fidelity to paganism that was the source of their infidelity to the Catholic Church in the 16th century.

According to Heer (if Heer it was), the conversion of the Saxons to the Christian Faith had never really taken. In the centuries after Charlemagne had made them pass through the waters, Saxon fathers had passed on to Saxon sons knowledge of where the ancient idols lay hidden, deep in the forest. Along with this lore, they had instilled in their boys a profound disdain for the Catholic Church, the religion they had been forced to embrace. So, when Luther came along, they were quite willing to cast off the old religion for the sake of the new.

Thus went the argument.

Continue reading →

Pity and Indignation in Dante’s Inferno

29 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Christopher Zehnder in Culture, Theological musings

≈ 5 Comments

By Christopher Zehnder

A profound tension between the movements of the heart and the demands of reason marks Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. This tension is felt in passages describing the pity Dante feels for the damned in Hell. Should Dante feel such pity? In one passage in Canto XX of the Inferno, the answer to this question seems to be a definite no. Dante has passed into the Fourth Bolgia of the fraudulent, where the shades of fortune tellers and diviners appear to him “hideously distorted,” their faces so twisted on their necks that “the tears that burst from their eyes ran down the cleft of the buttocks.” Seeing “the image of our humanity distorted,” Dante is overcome with weeping, for which Virgil rebukes him:

“Still? Still like the other fools,” says the stern Mantuan poet, the personification of reason:

“… There is no place

for pity here. Who is more arrogant
within his soul, who is more impious
than one who dares to sorrow at God’s judgment?”

To Virgil, Dante’s fault is nothing small. He is not merely guilty of some little weakness but of the impiety of questioning God’s justice. Virgil does not say how Dante should respond to the sufferings of the damned. Should he rejoice at their sufferings or simply look on with indifference? Yet, it seems, for Virgil, pity has no place in Hell.

Virgil’s rebuke  would seem to settle the question of the propriety of feeling pity for the damned. But only a few lines before Virgil’s rebuke, Dante appeals to the reader for understanding:

Reader, so may God grant you to understand
my poem and profit from it, ask yourself
how could I check my tears…

This is not the only place in the Inferno where Dante feels pity for the damned, nor where Virgil at least seems to countenance a more rigorous response. Yet, no where else does Virgil rebuke Dante for his pity; indeed, elsewhere in Hell, the Master not only commends attitudes consonant with pity but himself seemingly acts out of pity for the suffering souls.

That we may profit from Dante’s verse, it behoves us to seek a resolution to the dilemma — whether Dante’s responses of pity toward those suffering justly by God’s will were always or never proper. Or, perhaps they were proper sometimes but, other times, not? The queston of pity here, however, resolves itself into a larger question. One may feel other emotions that seemingly suggest a desire contrary to God’s will — sorrow, for instance, when a loved one dies or fear in the face of certain suffering, or a longing to escape it. Thus, we are led to ask a broader question — do we show impiety when, in the face of God’s certain providence, we feel anything else but joy, or, at least, indifference?

To answer this question with the goal, hopefully, of understanding the Divine Comedy better by answering it, we shall examine what Thomas Aquinas teaches about the proper relation of the passions to the will, and of both to reason. We shall ask whether Aquinas’ account resolves the dilemma posed by the Divine Comedy. We shall also look at an account of the relation of the emotions to the intellect and the will given by the 20th century philosopher, Dietrich von Hildebrand as a possible way of understanding the problem posed by Virgil’s stern “how dare you” and Dante’s plaintive “how could I not?”

Continue reading →

Newer posts →

Recent Posts

  • We’re Not in This Alone: The Common Good, Community, and the Image of God: Part 2
  • We’re Not in This Alone: the Common Good, Community, and the Image of God: Part 1
  • Of the Incarnation and Henry David Thoreau
  • More consumer than not: Why we skipped Thanksgiving this year
  • The anti-culture of America

Archives

  • August 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • March 2018
  • September 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • January 2013
  • May 2012
  • March 2012

Categories

  • Culture
  • Social justice
  • Theological musings
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×