The Master of Those Who Know

Aristotle's Theology: The Primary Texts

Aristotle

Hackett Publishing Company

2022

Introduction

Aristotle is 

“the master of those who know” 

(as Dante puts it). 

This is his way of saying:  

compared to him, we’re all hacks.  

Early Intimations

Prayer is a sentence 

that is neither true nor false 

(it is something else).  

So, truth or falsity is 

not found in every sentence.  

The activities 

sans potentialities 

are very unique. 

They are designated as 

the primary substances. 

Ménage à Trois

Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict

Christiane Tietz

Oxford University Press

2021

"For this reason, too, We have had to give this exposition a somewhat didactic form and not to shrink from employing certain uncouth terms in use among the Modernists. And now, can anybody who takes a survey of the whole system be surprised that We should define it as the synthesis of all heresies?" (Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis).

Barthianism is Dialecticism dressed in Calvinist drag. And considering what Christiane Tietz has disclosed about Karl Barth's private life in her book Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict, we can no longer take his gesticulating with words at face value, let alone give him the benefit of the polygamous doubt. His thirty-year long deliberate engagement in adulterous spousal abuse (what Tietz describes as the troubling “Ménage à Trois” between him, his wife Nelly Barth, and his mistress Charlotte von Kirschbaum), is the reductio ad absurdum of the “White Whale” (his Kirchliche Dogmatik) that is now beached and continues to rot on the sinking sand of modern protestant theology.

In fact, Barth’s mother demonstrated far more theological discernment than he did when she confronted him about his domestic triangle and asked: “What good is the most discerning theology when it suffers a shipwreck in your own home?” His dialectical handwaving about what he called the notgemeinschaft (the "emergency association" between the three of them), and his all-too-convenient use of what he called an ethical “boundary case” as applied to the seventh commandment (neither marital fidelity nor adultery), clearly demonstrate that it is (almost) good for nothing, except perhaps to show how absurd it is.

For example, in a letter to Nelly where he attempts to explain how their notgemeinschaft is an instance of an ethical "boundary case" he writes: “each one - bound and not bound in a particular fashion with the other two - has a special place, a special security, but also a special burden and pressure, without having to end our marriage legally and outwardly, and without having to deny and suppress that which connects me to Lollo.” How sentimental of him ("Lollo" was his pet name for his mistress). And how dialectical of him (there is no either/or here, only neither/nor). I leave it to the reader to assess the persuasiveness of this disturbingly self-serving apologia for adultery. "Your problem does not become my emergency" comes readily to mind as the appropriate response. 

Barth tried and failed to rationalize the sinful horror of the "permanent crisis" he forced his wife and his mistress to endure for over thirty years while the three of them lived and moved and had their being under the same roof, along with his five children. And to add insult to injury, the three of them were ultimately buried together in the same "family” plot in the Hörnli Cemetery in Basel, Switzerland, according to Barth's wishes.

You shall know them by their fruits, and not by their own version of the Institutes (speaking of Calvinist drag). Of course, Barth's dogmatics is not the only protestant instance of the synthesis of all heresies. Tillich's apologetics also suffers from the same kind of absurdity in light of his deliberate engagement in adulterous sadomasochism (but I digress).

Corpus Dionysiacum I

The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite

Aeterna Press

2014

Acts 17:34

The Divine Names

Chapter One

1.

Only it alone 

gives an authoritative

account of itself. 

It is the syntactical

measure of all things measured. 

2.

Trying to apply 

The Divine Names and notions 

to God is nonsense.  

All that we can do is use 

theological grammar. 

3.

What is beyond thought 

and beyond being is the 

Source of every source.  

To those far away it calls 

them back to begin again.  

4.

The diversity 

of what we are leads us to 

divine unity.  

This explains the energy 

of our own fecundity.  

5.

It encompasses, 

circumscribes, and embraces 

each and everything.  

It also so eludes the 

grasp of each and everyone.  

6.

We praise the nameless 

by every name, knowing the

inner irony. 

Since it is so wonderful,

why do we seek to speak it? 

7.

The unnamed goodness 

causes all and contains all 

things within itself.  

This is why it transcends all 

and is named by all that is. 

8.

Hierarchical 

law leads as we study the 

conceptual names.  

The uninitiated 

remain in their lawlessness. 

Chapter Two

1.

Through perversity 

one denies that the grammar

shows the Deity.  

When it comes to scripture, it 

is all and nothing at all.

2.

When we watch over 

the scriptures, we are also 

watched over by them.  

By guarding them, we will be 

guarded and grounded in them.

3.

The unified names

are trinitarian in

their formal essence. 

All the transcendental terms
terminate in the Godhead. 

4.

Divine unity

and differentiation

must be understood. 

The total union of lights

does not contain confusion. 

5.

Theology deals

with what is beyond being,

life, wisdom, and gifts. 

Circles and seals are only

constructive comparisons. 

6.

The prime example 

of differentiation 

is the human Word.  

The Father and the Spirit 

simply do not share in it.  

7.

We are at a loss 

concerning the flowering 

of the transcendent.  

We can neither represent, 

let alone scent, its bouquet.  

A Quieter Revolution

Roberts Gallery

"A magnificent duty falls on us: history elects us to preserve the precious treasure it bequeaths."

(Paul-Émile Borduas)

For the past 75 years the Wildridge family has owned and operated the oldest and one of the most prestigious art galleries in Canada. They celebrated their diamond jubilee on Saturday June 10, 2023, in their new location at 631 Dupont Street in Toronto, Ontario. Paul Wildridge (the gallery Director) and his wife Charlene (the gallery Administrator) hosted the event, along with their daughter Allie, their son Tom, and their graphic designer and social media specialist Taya Dekker. 

Paul started working at the gallery in 1978, with Charlene joining him full-time in 2000. Allie and Tom have been part of the family business for over a decade as well, with Allie starting in 2012, and Tom joining two years later. Under Paul’s wise guidance, and informed by Charlene’s acute attention to detail, Allie and Tom currently share the responsibly for both preserving and promoting their vast collection of Historic and Contemporary Canadian art, and for supporting and representing some of the very best artists in Canada (and the world).  

Celebrating 75 Years

They used their annual Sketches Exhibition of Canadian Historical art to rightly showcase their own history. Their many friends and patrons that attended the show experienced a retrospective exhibition that served as a commentary on the historical context, the contemporary interest, and future significance of Roberts Gallery in Canadian art history.  

Much can be said about their contribution to this history. Indeed, a book could (and should) be written about it. Let the following two examples suffice (there are many). First, everyone knows and admires the reputation that Roberts Gallery has for exhibiting Canadian landscape painting through their close association with and support of the Group of Seven. But what might be less well known is the role they played (and continue to play) in the history of Canadian abstract painting. 

Roberts Gallery is the sine qua non of the success of the Painter’s Eleven precisely because they were the first gallery in Canada and the world to exhibit their work back in 1954. That show put Canadian abstract painting on the map. American art critics like Clement Greenberg took notice and were impressed enough to take it seriously. While Greenberg was distastefully wrong to criticize Kazuo Nakamura as being “just a bit too captured by oriental ‘taste’” to be of any abstract use, he was decisively right to recognize Nakamura's significance and the contribution he made to modern art in Canada. We have Roberts Gallery to thank for making this kind of international recognition possible.

Kazuo Nakamura | Forest, 1953

The second example concerns the circumstances that drew the famous French mime artist and actor Marcel Marceau into the gallery back in early 1970. Marceau was at the O’Keefe Center in Toronto for a week’s worth of mime performance shows. One day while he was on a long walk he ended up in front of Roberts Gallery. He looked into the window and saw a number of Japanese Kabuki actor pieces on display. Marceau went into the gallery and was blown away by them. He asked Jack Wildridge (the Director of the gallery) who the artist was, and Jack told him that it was John Gould. Marceau then asked him if there would be any way he could get in touch with the artist. Jack set up a meeting between the two of them. 

Marceau commissioned Gould to go to New York later that spring and draw him from backstage for eight days in a row while he was performing. Two years later (1972), the gallery had an exhibition of the sketches Gould made of that run of shows in New York. The significance here is that the gallery brought Marceau in, and Gould's art sought him out. Marceau had to do something in response. We have Roberts Gallery to thank for introducing these two artists, for the impact they had on each other's lives, and for the art they produced.

John Gould | Caligrapher, 1990

The history of Roberts Gallery began back in 1842 when William Pell, a gilder from London, England, established the gallery’s first location on King Street West in Toronto. That was 180 years ago. In 1870 a fine art dealer from England named Samuel E. Roberts (after whom the gallery is named) acquired the gallery from William Pell. For the next 78 years the Roberts family ran the gallery until 1948 when Paul’s grandfather Sidney Wildridge, along with Paul's father Jack Wildridge, acquired the gallery from the Roberts family and reopened it at 759 Yonge Street in Toronto. In 1961 they moved the gallery to 641 Yonge Street. After many years of doing business there, they eventually moved it to its present location on Dupont Street (saving the best location till last – but more on interior design later).

You cannot appreciate the significance of this history without mentioning the role that A.J. Casson played in its development. After Sydney Wildridge sadly passed away in the mid-1950s, Jack Wildridge took all that he had learned as Sydney’s young apprentice and applied it to running the gallery as a relatively young man in his late 20s. He had a level of ambitious maturity beyond his years that drew many of the Toronto artists of the time into the gallery’s orbit. Chief among these artists was Casson who had already come into his own as an artist of note. Casson was not only the founding member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1925, but also joined the Group of Seven painters in 1926 to replace Franz Johnston who had just resigned. Casson was 30 years Jack’s senior when they first met. And yet this age difference did not prevent Casson from seeing something significant in him, not only as a shrewd businessman, but also as a devoted family man.  

A.J. Casson | Church at Rosenthal, 1955

Not long after their first meeting Casson decided to entrust his career to Jack Wildridge by making Roberts Gallery his exclusive representative. This was a decisive stamp of approval both for the business and for Jack. Casson’s decision more than paid off for him. His first solo exhibition at Roberts Gallery in 1959 was the first of 11 more solo shows of his work (along with one more posthumous show in 1998 to mark the centenary of his birth). During this time Casson introduced Jack to other important artists, directors of public institutions, and influential art critics, thereby using his considerable influence to solidify Roberts Gallery’s already established business reputation within the art world.  

Throughout the years Casson and his wife Margaret Alexandria Petry became very close friends with the Wildridge family. To thank them for their friendship and support, Casson designed the Wildridge Coat of Arms and presented it to Jack and his wife Jennie as a surprise Christmas gift in 1972. The coat of arms remains as the gallery logo branding to this day, both in their signage and in their letterhead. It serves as a reminder that Roberts Gallery cannot be understood apart from its history.  

Coat of Arms

What is significant about this history, and why does it matter? Andy Warhol was perceptive enough to know that "good art is good business" (as he put it). What is good business? Through their own purposely understated and unspectacular hard work of running a successful art gallery for the past 75 years, the Wildridge family has given us a unique answer to this question: good business is family business. This is “the Wildridge way,” as Allie wisely reminds the family every so often when they discuss whether they should possibly change their successful business strategy in response to the latest consumer trends. 

Jack and Jennie Wildridge

Understanding the kind of man Jack Wildridge was gets to the heart of their strategy. I asked Charlene to describe him to me. She said that Jack was a gentleman, a very admired person, a very honest person, and someone you could trust. “I believe that Casson saw this in him,” Charlene went on to say. “He saw this young man, he got it, and he understood business.” Like father like son. 

Artists, art dealers, and clientele alike put their trust in Paul Wildridge for the same reason Casson put his trust in Jack. And like his father before him, Paul is a successful businessman because he is a devoted family man. They say you know you have lived a successful life when your children want to spend time with you when they get older. Success, indeed.

Paul's life embodies a philosophy of art that is the product of the values he received from his parents and siblings, values that he has passed on to his own family. What is this philosophy of art that has made the Wildridge way so successful? It is the philosophy of serious generosity: art worthy of the name is generous enough in that it invites you in to admire its beauty, but it is serious enough in that it demands something of you. And in this case, what is true of the art is true of the gallery.

When you walk into an art gallery you might feel what the poet Philip Larkin once described as an “awkward reverence.” Where there is art, there is reverence. No doubt. But in the case of Roberts Gallery there is this difference: the reverence is not awkward, but awakening. And this reverent sense of awakening is the result of how serious generosity informs every aspect of this gallery, including its interior design. 

When the gallery moved to its present location on Dupont street in 2020, Charlene designed a space that is based on the important architectural distinction between a building and a dwelling. A building is a space that you do things in, but a dwelling is a home where you become someone. While all dwellings are buildings, not all buildings are dwellings. Roberts Gallery is a building that is a dwelling. It is domestically designed around the art that it displays, expertly hung on its clean white walls by Allie (who has turned the functional technique of hanging art into an art form). 

Charlene's decision to design the gallery in this way is based on the aesthetic she used to design her own home. She told me that it is designed around a single painting by the Canadian abstract painter Paul-Émile Borduas. I asked Charlene what it is about this painting that deserves such attention. She talked about its beauty as a reason for its centrality, as well as its meaningful history with their family. She also talked about the importance of Borduas' role in the avant-garde Automatiste movement in Quebec, and how the Refus Global manifesto he authored in 1948 signaled the dawn of the Quiet Revolution. However, the influence that she takes from Borduas is less political, and far more personal. For her Borduas represents what can be called a Quieter Revolution that transpires within you in response to art that is before you. In this sense, Marcel Marceau was a silent revolutionary. 

Paul-Émile Borduas | Frou, Frou, Aigu, 1956

The aesthetics of Roberts Gallery is minimalism with a mission: it creates a dwelling that generously directs your attention to the art that it serves, in order to prepare you for what it seriously demands. Art demands your active attention and your existential reaction. The point is to reverently awaken you, to gently change you, to make you better than you were before you encountered it, and to inspire you to have the same kind of artistic influence in your dealings with others (family and friends alike). You need a home to help you become someone, and the gallery is designed with this in mind. It is a domestic family dwelling, the very thing we all want our homes to be.

Whether you are an artist who is represented by the gallery, a collector who is advised by the gallery, or (in my case) a fine art advisor who works with the gallery, everyone is made to feel like they are part of their extended family. Roberts Gallery is a second home for us. There is even a backyard outside of Paul's office, complete with a table, chairs, and an umbrella!

At the end of a very enjoyable discussion with Paul in his office, filled with lovely family anecdotes and informed artistic commentary, I asked Paul the following question: “What is the lasting legacy of Roberts Gallery?” Without hesitation he answered: “Respect.” Paul is not given to false modesty. He knows that he is the pater familias. And he is as confident as he is humble about his place in Canadian art history. His Lifetime Achievement Award from the Art Dealers Association of Canada in 2018 is a testament to his faithfulness in carrying out the magnificent duty that has fallen on him and his family: to preserve the precious treasure of art that history has bequeathed to them, and to us. Roberts Gallery has earned our respect. 

The Wildridge Family

Madness And Civilization I

The Sayings Of The Desert Fathers

Cistercian Publications

1975

"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, 'You are mad, you are not like us.'" (Abba Anthony)

Anthony the Great

1. Accidie

This is the question:

What must I do to be saved?

When Saint Anthony

experienced accidie

he asked it courageously. 

2. Attention

This is a question:

Why are there both rich and poor?

When Saint Anthony

received his answer to it,

he did not ask any more.

3. Ground

Have the grounding ground

under your feet at all times, 

live the sacred texts,

and do not easily leave

your heuristic hermitage.

4. Work

This is the great work:

take the blame for your faults and

expect temptation

to be your dark passenger

until the end of your days. 

5. Temptation

Experiencing

temptation in this life is

the sine qua non

of heavenly membership.

You can't have it without it. 

6. Control
Abba Pambo asked

the great Abba Anthony:

"What ought I to do?"

His three-fold answer ended

with emphasis on control. 

7. Humility

"Humility" was

the answer that a voice gave

to Anthony when

he (groaning) asked how to get

through all the enemy's snares. 

8. Discernment

Asceticism

without discernment keeps one

far away from God.

Somatic affliction is

only part of the process. 

9. Community

Gaining a brother

is the same as gaining God.

Sometimes hermitic

life can be meaningless if

cut off from community.

10. Intensity

The intensity

of hermitic life is lost

once solitary

being is slowly replaced

with secular loitering.

11. Desert

Hearing, speech, and sight

are the three conflicts that one

can simply avoid

by living in the desert

of their own isolation. 

12. Hermeneutics

Only Anthony

the Great could create something

from the nothingness

of their demonic visions. 

He knew his hermeneutics.

13. Brethren

The brethren will stretch

but not break only if their

own personal needs

are met by an elder who

is both older and wiser. 

14. Amends

We are not told what

sin the young monk committed

that caused him to weep. 

Sometimes God only gives us 

five days to make our amends. 

15. Better

Is it better to 

be thoroughly insulted

or sincerely praised?

If you are an empty cell,

then better does not matter. 

16. Hyperbole

What is great about

Saint Anthony is his use

of hyperbole. 

Of course he prays for the monk,

he just does it differently. 

17. Ignorance

It is not without

significance that Abba

Joseph did not know. 

Those so named have found the way

through semantic ignorance. 

18. Door

If you lack a door

then you do not have a cell

to be silent in. 

And if you have a door make

sure that it is always closed. 

19. Invalids

"We cannot do this

and we cannot do that" is

said by invalids. 

Invalidity of this

kind requires food and prayer.

20. Renunciation

To reject the world

requires a radical

renunciation. 

Pulling this off is next to

impossible, but worth it. 

21. Authority

Abba Anthony

sent the tempted monastic
back from where he came. 
Those monks who had cast him out
received him with guilt and shame. 

22. Movements

The natural and
gluttonous and demonic
movements must be known. 
They each affect us toward
bodily sin and evil. 

23. Weakness

If men were weak when

Saint Anthony was alive,

how weak are we now?

This question should humble us

and cause us to seek His grace. 

24. Equality

There was an urban

doctor who gave to the poor

and sang the Sanctus.

Even the Angels agreed

he was Anthony's equal. 

25. Sanity

The time is upon

us when the mad men think we

are out of our minds.

To protect our sanity

we enter cells and lock doors. 

26. Moses

Abba Anthony

went out into the desert

to talk with Moses.

He knew that the primary

of all sources would teach him. 

27. Enough

"It is enough for

me to see you, Father" said

the silent Father. 

This text allows us to see

how silence answers questions. 

Of Whom The World Was Not Worthy

The Wisdom Of The Desert
Thomas Merton
New Directions
1970

“Of whom the world was not worthy: wandering in deserts, in mountains and in dens and in caves of the earth.” 

(Hebrews 11:38) 

I.
What should he do now?
Don't place any confidence
in private virtue.
He must control his hunger,
and he must control his tongue.

II.
Sit in submission.
Live as clean as possible.
Always be thankful.
These are the ways to practice
the silent presence of God.

III.
Keeping his heart safe
can be done by faithfully
listening to it.
It alone knows what is best.
Only then can he do good.

IV.
There are more than three
wise men found in the Bible.
Noah, Job, Daniel
can be added to the list
of those who knew to adore.

V.

Hating vanity

and a very easy life:

the sine qua non

of freedom from distracting

communitarian strife. 

VI.

If Abbot Pambo

is right, then he won't even

begin to begin

at the beginning during

this life of obedience.

VII.

Brother to Elder:

"How is the fear of God gained?"

Elder to Brother:

"It is gained through poverty,

humility, and mercy."

VIII.

Hermit to Hermit:

"Be careful not to water

any vegetables."

The young cenobites could not

outwit these wise old serpents. 

IX.

This is the monk's work:

love the Lord and hate evil.

This is how it's done:

obeying, meditating,

and walking with Enoch's God. 

X.

He does not argue.

“You know what you are saying”

is the end of it. 

And if someone speaks the truth,

he simply lets his Yes be.

XI.

Determination

diminishes once his own

cell is abandoned. 

The no-longer-I reminds

him to remain where he is. 

XII.

First he must flee men,

then he can be led toward

his own salvation.

This penultimate step is

the rooting of not sinning. 

XIII.

If he asked Father

Moses of old for a good

word, would he tell him

to sit within his cell like

Abbot Moses in Scete?

XIV.

How does the elder

know that the laughter he hears

is not an answer

in the presence of the Lord

of the heavens and the earth?

XV.

If he thinks his tongue

is a stone within his mouth,

then he can carry

it easier than Abbot 

Agatho did for three years. 

XVI.

It is not anger

that is the matter with him,

but rather whether

it ever gets to his lips. 

Silence keeps demons afraid. 

XVII.

It was much better

for the brother not to sell

the book he stole from

Abbot Anastasius.

He returned then retained it.

XVIII.

If you lose yourself

through your anger while trying

to correct someone,

you only gratify your

own passionate ambition. 

XIX.

At least eating red

flesh and drinking fresh red wine

is not as bad as

devouring your brother

by detracting his person. 

XX.

It’s better to have 

a cellar cave in on you,

than participate 

in acts that violate your 

level of maturity.  

XXI.

The difference between 

a monk and a perfect one 

can be summed up thus: 

“...you would not even have looked 

...to see that we were women.” 

XXII.

The brother showed him

his lacerated body

that the dogs and birds

were both responsible for.

With devils its even worse. 

XXIII.

Abbot Macarius

spoke to Abbot Theodore

about the one thing

that is needful to truly

profit from his three good books. 

XXIV.

To pray for fourteen

years without ceasing to rid

oneself of anger

is to apply Ephesians
chapter four verse twenty six. 

XXV.

The most manual

monks are those intimately

tried by temptations.

The measure of their manner

is measured by their manners. 

XXVI.

Patiently knowing

one's working limitations

is the hidden key

to getting anywhere in

our own virtuous labours. 

XXVII.

Like a transplanted

tree that does not bear its fruit,

so is the moving

monk who does not remain still. 
He can never be planted. 

XXVIII.

Solitude is both

the furnace of Babylon

for those seeking God,

and an ancient pillar of

cloud for those God is seeking. 

XXIX.

The only response

to those who are traders in

words, and to those who

seek to glory in the words

of another, is silence.

XXX.

Once you put into

practice the things that you write

about, then further

hand waving with words is no

longer a necessity. 

XXXI.
Abbot Moses once

tried fooling a follower

into believing

that he was a heretic

in order to avoid him. 

XXXII.

There is gluttony
of the flesh and of the soul.

To overcome both

one must fast, but in two ways:

avoid food and avoid fools. 

XXXIII.
Martha embodied
Paul's pragmatic principle

"If any man will

not work, neither let him eat."
She's Mary's sine qua non:

there's no "best part" without her. 

XXXIV.

Serapion sold

his copy of the Gospels

and gave the money

to the poor because the book

told him to sell and to give. 

XXXV.
To pray "O God, we
worked hard for the food we eat,

so, thanks for nothing,"
is simply another way 

to pray like Abbot Sisois. 

XXXVI.
To attribute all

things, both good and evil, to

the dispensation

of God's wisdom is the way

that one turns the other cheek.

XXXVII.

"There once was a great

hermit in the mountains" is

all you need to know. 

Being touched by Poeman's words

is the basis for greatness. 

XXXVIII.

To pass through the gate

requires rejecting the

turn to the subject.

This makes you realize that no

one ever gets insulted. 

XXXIX.

Once upon a time

in the valley of the cells

a monk spoke vainly.

It is better to use salt

than it is to speak of it. 

XL.

Those who sin remain

within the monastery

of necessity.

Abbot Bessarion taught

as much when he walked away. 

XLI.

He carries on his 
back a basket full of holes

that sand falls out of. 

What is the basket, what are

the holes, and what is the sand?

XLII.
What do we do when
we lose our nerve when sitting
alone in our cells?

If we don't despise, condemn, 
nor rebuke, then God gives peace. 

XLIII.

He who said that "Thou

shall not fornicate" also

said "Thou shalt not judge."

Bourgeois hermits must show more

compassion toward themselves. 

XLIV.

Abbot Ammonas

said: "Sit in your cell and eat

a little each day."

In this way we ask the Lord

to be merciful to us. 

XLV.

Abbot John the Dwarf

became what he was because
he was no angel.

Dionysius taught us 
about the hierarchy. 

XLVI.

The thoughts in our heart

will rot from the inside out

if not acted on. 

This is a warning to those

called upon to contemplate. 

XLVII.

Tolstoy's Three Hermits
represent our silence and

sickness and service. 

They all prayed: "Three are you, three

are we, have mercy on us."

XLVIII.

When you try to drive
out malice with malice you

remain in the same. 
Abbot Pastor was very
pastoral with this wisdom. 

XLIX.

What does it mean to

be a true monk according

to Abbot Pastor?

Don't quarrel | Don't be angry |

Don't return evil in turn. 

L.

When distracting thoughts
appear our job is to say

no to each of them.

Trying to prevent them is

like trying to catch the wind. 

LI.

Discretion is like

an axe that cuts down a tree

with only one swing. 

Those who lack it hack away

until they are exhausted. 

The Vow

And Then There Were Three

"Rory picked himself up and looked down: his hands were full of gravel and blood...things were different now and he didn't know what to do about it." (Anna Jacobs)

He was on the side of a country road, sweating. It was unseasonably hot that night. His car was parked. He left his right blinker ticking. He had tried to determine what compelled him to pull his car over as he sat in silence listening to the metronome. “Philosophy begins in wonder,” he said as he pulled back the parking break, turned the ignition off, and opened the driver's side door.

With his head in his hands, and his hands in the dirt, he whispered his vow to the ground. He listened to the cooling pings of the hot engine beside him, and the condensation from the air-conditioner dripping onto the edge of the pavement. He was prostrate, but not religious. He thought of a picture he once saw of Thomas Merton in a book doing something similar in a monastery on a shining marble floor. He leafed through it once at a garage sale years ago when he was interested in self-improvement. 

A car drove by as he rose to his knees. It did not stop, but it did look familiar. He squinted and tried to identify the driver. All he saw was a rounded shadow offset by the headlights of an oncoming car. As he watched the car drive away into his small town, he noticed the fenced off country lot from across the road. It was covered over by old trees, wild grass, farm equipment long since abandoned, and a broken concrete remnant that once served as a foundation. 

...

He remembered the morning he heard the news that the three story farm house on that lot went up in flames. He eventually saw a picture of it in the local newspaper when the first news report was published. The least that most knew about it was that the oldest son of a family of five set fire to their country home, killing his father and younger brother late one summer evening in August. His mother and sister were on a vacation in Northern Ireland and were not expected home for another week. Despite a police investigation, no final report detailing the motive and the method of the crime was released to the public. Everyone in town felt the agony of not knowing. There was no closure.  

“I wonder how well my kids knew James,” he thought, as he sat beside the three of them during the memorial service in the local United Church. James was the younger brother who had caught the father’s attention, to the fatal chagrin of Charles his older brother. He looked at his kids and wondered if showing parental favoritism was a dishonest virtue or an honest vice. He did not know. He loved all three equally, in his fashion. 

By the time of the memorial there was conjecture about the why and the how, but nothing solid. Information was gained second hand from volunteer fire fighters who fought the blaze, and from the local police who spoke off the record over dinner with friends. The three surviving members of the family said nothing.

As the service began the oldest son was brought out in a wheel chair. He was covered in white bandages. His mother and younger sister walked behind him at a noticeable distance. They ignored him with civility. They both spoke at the service. The daughter first, then the mother. They shared words of daughterly love and maternal kindness. This was not the time for forensics. Charles was neither acknowledged nor mentioned. He sat still, mummified. 

...

A neighbor woke up to the sound of a raging storm. She looked out her window and saw the house on fire that summer night. She ran across her yard in her nightgown and saw Charles standing by the side of the house, delirious. “I need to put the fire out,” he said as he held a green garden hose in his hand. By this time the house was engulfed in flames. The neighbor took the hose out of his trembling hand and threw it on the ground. She grabbed him by the shoulders and screamed at him. “Charles, what happened?! Where is your father?! Where is James?!” With Thalesian indifference Charles kept mumbling, over and over again, “Why is there nothing rather than something?”

After the house had been watered down to its skeletal frame, the firefighters found the charred remains of James and his father sitting side by side on the floor behind a bathroom door. They were burned dead, not alive. The autopsy confirmed that they were killed before the fire was set.

“I wanted them to be together,” Charles told the police from his hospital bed, “they were always together.” Charles informed the hospital staff that he did not want any visitors. Gossip spreads like wild fire in small towns. Soon, Charles was on everyone’s lips. What price recognition? 

...

He thought of the vow he had made just moments before these memories came and went, a vow to live a life of moderate poverty, relative obscurity, physical distance, and virtual silence. It had possessed him long enough. What better place than this to exercise it, while looking across the road at a nothing that was once a something? And what better time than now, as the something that was once his happy life was slowly turning into nothing through the horror of denied betrayal? 

“The world is a rotten place,” he thought. Best to leave it alone by being alone. Alone, yes, but never alone, not really. A man still tries to befriend his broken places. He stood beside his car and brushed the dirt off his clothes. “Philosophy may begin in wonder,” he thought, “but it does not end there. It ends here.”

Sources

Anna Jacobs. Rory's Story: A Teenager's Story Of Loss. Hinton House Publishers Ltd., 2014.

Drawing With Light

Kilimanjaro (Gabriel Israel)

"You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved." 
(Ansel Adams). 

Gabriel Israel is a draughtsman. Like all talented artists his drawing skills are excellent, and appeared early. His chalk drawing of a Rembrandt painting made when he was a teenager illustrates the depth of his technical talent. The same can also be said of his early Michelangelo reproductions. That he describes the act of photography as "light drawing" is therefore not without significance. "That's what I do," Gabriel says. "Drawing with light. For me it's like art. You capture something, like a painting." He knows whereof he speaks.

Rembrandt Chalk Drawing (Gabriel Israel)

Street Scene, Venice, Italy (Gabriel Israel)

   
The High Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age are conspicuous by their influence in Gabriel's photography (at least by those who know their art history), and provide the artistic basis for his romantically realist philosophy of art. If philosophy begins in wonder (as Aristotle says), then so does photography, at least the kind that Gabriel has perfected through his body of work.

Art can be usefully described as a selective recreation of reality based on an artist's value judgements. The monetary value that collectors have rightly seen in Gabriel's recreations is rooted in his values as an artist. When I asked him to sum up his work in one word Gabriel immediately said "passion." It is the passion beneath, between, and behind Gabriel's photographic acts that makes his pictures not only well worth the taking, but also well worth the partaking in by those of us who are as serious about collecting great art as we are about confronting the reason why it matters.

The philosopher and the photographer do the same thing, but they do it in different ways: they recognize wonder in nature and try to give expression to it, in words and in images. What does this Aristotelian wonder consist in? Gabriel sheds light on the significance of this question by answering it in his drawings. They contain captured moments of absolute clarity. To encounter them is to have the silence of that attentive moment drown out the noise of the attenuating multitude. They help us feel rather than think by respecting and conveying the passion of lived-experience. In Gabriel the philosopher and photographer become one: to truly feel is to truly see. What is the eye that sees but is never itself seen? The answer to this koan is in the seeing (for the soul of the eye is seeing).

Lower Antelope Canyon Crystal Ball (Gabriel Israel)

Gabriel is a romantic. His romance consists in his technical ability to draw us in and make us wonder at the existence of the real world, frame by frame. To illustrate this point, Gabriel showed me a series of pictures he took of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario. "They get you thinking," he said. I asked him what he meant. "It's the power of this building," he answered, "the strong diagonal, the metal, the cold of the material." One picture in particular demonstrates what he means by the building's power. "The spiral tower has to be there," he said. "That is reality." He then drew my attention to the reflection in the window of the building. "The reflection looks like a painting." He then fell silent and let the picture do the talking.

Reflecting Dali, Royal Ontario Museum (Gabriel Israel)

        

Gabriel is disciplined enough to capture light as it draws it's natural patterns, without getting in its way. "My job is to focus on the composition," he said. And like his High Renaissance master, Gabriel is able to envision the "David" in every shot he takes. But it's not as if he does not have an active role to play giving compositional expression to his visions.

Gabriel knows that photography has grown as an art form, in no small measure due to the rise of modern technology. Given his penchant for the technical side of his craft (he has mastered the tools of his trade), it should come as no surprise to find out that Gabriel's background is in engineering.

He earned his BSc degree at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Industrial and Management Engineering. Since that time he has honed his technical skills in health care (where he produced the first Picture Archiving and Communicating (PAC) system for the imaging division in hospital operating rooms in Israel), in IT (where he held numerous Director and Vice Presidential roles in large corporations, from financial, client, and technology services to product management), in education (where he taught international professionals in the IT and financial sectors at a top Canadian university, along with his ongoing role as a photography instructor to a small group of talented and dedicated students), and through the creation and maintenance of his own full service IT consultancy company. As an artist he is a living example of Andy Warhol's claim that good art is good business.

This background informs why he champions digital photography, and how technology serves, not hinders, his art. "I think that back in the day, you clicked and that was it. Now, you click, but it is only when you press Save that you are finished." Between the Click and the Save you are able, through programs like Lightroom, to add more shadows and light until you feel your composition is finished.

The issue is not whether to manipulate a photograph. Manipulating a photograph is like drawing a picture. The trick is knowing when to stop. Less is more when it comes to manipulating High Dynamic Range (the ratio of light to dark in a photograph). Like great cooking, so great shooting: keep the essence of the natural ingredients and what they provide to the dish (a pinch of salt, a pinch of shadow). Gabriel has mastered the trick of his trade.

Hawaii Mountain (Gabriel Israel)

Gabriel is also a realist. It's what forces him to shy away from manipulating a photograph beyond its natural subject matter. This subject matter matters to him. He respects it for a reason. It serves a personal purpose.

Photography begins in wonder, but it does not end there. Gabriel is aware that the wonder that draws you in will have an impact on you. That is the point of great art. It changes lives by inspiring us to live with the same passion and integrity that created it. And I suggest that it is this demand that every person senses when they look at Gabriel 's art with the same amount of passion that produced it. His drawings are personal reminders that creating and collecting art is never shut off from the reality within which both activities take place. 

Collecting Gabriel's art matters because its all in the value (both financial and personal). Gabriel's values as an artist open up the space for us to confront the wonder of existence, the wonder that there is something rather than nothing, to contemplate the fact that we are alive rather than dead, and to create a life worth living in attentive response to the essence he has captured in his photographs.

A clue to what this means (for artist and collector alike) is found in what he finds most valuable in one of his modern influences. While he recognizes Ansel Adams' technical mastery (Gabriel explained to me how Adams produced one of his famous landscape pictures by using a red filter on black and white, which changed the blue into a very dark blue, thereby turning it into a dark grey in contrast with the mountains he shot), for Gabriel this is not what makes Adams so valuable as an artist.

"I love how Ansel Adams was able to get the people in his pictures to do what they did in order for him to get the shot," Gabriel told me. It was Adams' ability to relate to people and integrate them into his work that is the great inspiration. It is the story behind the picture that Gabriel picks up on, and derives inspiration from in turn.

I began this review with a photograph that Gabriel took of Mount Kilimanjaro. There is a story behind this shot. In order to take it Gabriel had to climb Kilimanjaro. This is no small achievement. He told me that it was one of the most, if not the most, significant milestones in his life, but for more reasons than one. Part of the motivation for him was to raise money for the MukiBaum Foundation (an organization that helps children and adults with mental disabilities). Gabriel produced a photobook of his journey and sold it at their annual gala in a silent auction. All of the proceeds of the sale when to the foundation.

"Lady In The Wind", Lower Antelope Canyon (Gabriel Israel)

Apart from Adams, comparisons to Peter Lik and Gerhard Richter come readily to mind. I am thinking not only about the obvious artistic quality of Gabriel's work in relation to theirs. Gabriel is that good. I am also thinking as a collector. Gaby's light drawings are Lik-like in what I call their wall power (they are an interior decorator's dream), and Richter-like in their large-scale and vibrantly hued abstract character. This two-fold likeness makes his photographs very easy to live with.

Abstract Triptych on wall (Gabriel Israel)

   
It takes more than just knowing about a camera's ISO, aperture, and shutter speed that goes into making a great photograph. The camera is merely a translation device for art. Adams was right when he spoke about what the act of photography is really about. You bring to this act all of the pictures you have seen, all of the books you have read, all of the music you have heard, and all of the people you have loved. In the light of Gabriel Israel's passionate drawings, I would add one more thing to Adams' list. Gabriel teaches us that to turn the act of photography into the act of art, an art that is "born as the echo of God's laughter, the art that creates that fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood," you must bring to it the most important thing of all: the life you have lived. 

Gabriel Israel

Sources

Gabriel Israel. Gabriel Israel Photography.
Judd Tully. "The Ascent Of Gerhard Richter." ART + AUCTION. June, 2012.
Milan Kundera. The Art Of The Novel. Grove Press Inc. 1988.

Stuttering The Unutterable

Karl Rahner, S.J.

"There is a thinking more rigorous than the conceptual."
(Martin Heidegger)

Martin Heidegger's 1966 essay "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" creates a "clearing" (Lichtung) that does not conceive of thinking as merely the utilitarian activity of asking a question and receiving an "answer" (a "propositional statement about a matter at stake," as Heidegger puts it). Thinking performs this task, to be sure, but should not be understood as limited to it. Heidegger was not a pragmatist.

Heidegger wrote this essay as part of his career-spanning attempt to understand the "cardinal problem" that he originally presented in his first and best known 1927 book Sein Und Zeit (Being And Time): the question of the meaning of Being. Beginning in 1930 and continuing to his death in 1976, Heidegger attempts to begin at the beginning again (and again) to phenomenologically examine this problem by turning the "task of thinking" from interrogating the metaphysics destructured in Being And Time, to inhabiting the poetics demarcated in his later 1972 collection of essays On Time And Being (in which "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" was published). 

On Time And Being

As a modern commentary on the ancient claim made by Heraclitus that "all is flux," what distinguishes Sein Und Zeit in the history of Western philosophy is the emphasis that it places on the word all. For Dasein (human beings for whom Being is an issue), to be-in-the-world (being) is to continually become in a world of constant change, a world that is both grounded in primordial-temporality (time) and experienced as the indefinitely continued progress-of-events (history). So, for Dasein to be-in-the-world is for Dasein to be-in-history (and no where else). This is true of all that is (without exception). Michel Foucault's important insight that we are all "historically condemned to history" is nothing but a footnote to Heidegger.

Sein Und Zeit presents the Being of this "condemnation" as the ground ("ἀρχής, αἴτιον, principle") for "the ontic causation of the actual, the transcendental making possible of the objectivity of objects, the dialectical mediation of the movement of absolute spirit and of the historical process of production, and the will to power positing values." Those who have read their philosophy know that this is Heidegger's way of name-dropping. Plato ("transcendental making"), Aristotle ("ontic causation"), Hegel ("dialectical mediation"), Marx ("historical process of production"), and Nietzsche ("the will to power") all find their respective place in this history of ontology. "Nietzsche's thought," Heidegger writes, "like all Western thought since Plato, is metaphysics."

Sein Und Zeit

Heidegger reiterates in his 1966 essay that to focus thinking on what gets grounded ("the ontology of the ancients") to the exclusion of the ontological grounding ground must be abandoned because of its disastrous consequences: it perpetuates the history of the forgetfulness (if not the complete oblivion) of Being by not considering Time as its only hermeneutical horizon (working out the temporality of being phenomenologically). In fact, by the time the essay was published Sein was a term Heidegger no longer liked to use precisely because of its ontic residue. He said that it had only been a "preliminary word" in the development of his thought.

Heidegger's "turn" (Kehre) here away from thinking as doing toward thinking as dwelling (Gelassenheit) informs his suggestion that the present age in which we "do our thinking" is the beginning of the end of Western philosophy. Insofar as we move away from thinking about Being toward being grasped by Being, Heidegger's philosophy should be understood as both a product of, and a contribution toward, the beginning of this end. 

Richard Rorty's response here that "Heideggerese is only Heidegger's gift to us, not Being's gift to Heidegger," is a pragmatic variant of this present age. It is what Blessed John Henry Newman once called a "notional apprehension" (a second-hand manipulation of words), as opposed to a "real apprehension" (a first-hand phenomenological encounter). Rorty could easily respond to this (in good Jamesian fashion) by asking whether there is "a difference that makes some difference" between Newman's "notional" and "real" apprehensions; and if not, then so much the better for our pragmatic age. Heidegger, however, was not a pragmatist precisely because he was not a modernist. 

In the light of this further turn away from the ontic residue of Being, and in the wake of his continued attempt to break through the conceptual surface of this history of forgetfulness, Heidegger is led to ask the following question: "What task is reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy?" (and by "end" he means termination, not telos). 

Heidegger never directly answered this question. However, he provided some indirect hints for those who would walk down the same path after him. He did this, in part, by describing "Being's poem" (Dasein) as the beings through which Being reveals (unconceals) itself. Dasein's role in this poetic disclosure is to create a clearing to simply let Being be in its finitude as a "call" to Dasein. In turn, Dasein responds to this call by shepherding the Being within human beings through acquiescing to Being-as-revelation. This Eckhart-like "potential receptivity" is what Heidegger refers to as "foundational thought."

Martin Heidegger

Karl Rahner's 1966 essay "Theology and Anthropology" encaptulates the transcendental basis for his theological answer to this philosophical question. It is not without significance that this essay was published in the same year as "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," precisely because it is the product of having walked down the same path after Heidegger, whom he not only called his "one and only teacher" and "master," but who also claimed that "present-day Catholic theology...is inconceivable without Martin Heidegger."

It is important to point out here that Heidegger neither broke with the Catholic faith and worldview of his youth, nor abandoned the Catholic church (his philosophical and political history notwithstanding). He even went so far as to tell a personal confidant near the end of his life: "Ich bin niemals aus der Kirche getretten." Rahner obviously knew whom he was following, and his answer is not only informed by his history with Heidegger, but it also assumes what he thinks is the one thing that Heidegger's history has taught each and everyone of us: "that everywhere and in everything we can and must seek out that unutterable mystery which disposes over us, even though we can hardly name it with words." 

While Heidegger has more than earned the philosophical luxury of abstaining from speech about this mystery by venturing "to step back out of philosophy into the thinking [dwelling] of Being," Rahner has the theological responsibility to utter (if not stutter) speech about it, especially since "the hesitant caution of philosophy cannot become a substitute for risking an understanding of existence which is always prior to philosophy." If theology is defined as the apophatic impossible possibility ("gesticulating with words," as Wittgenstein once put it), then Rahner is in the best position to answer his master's question given his duty as a Catholic and his ability as a theologian to gently and reverently gesticulate a thematic account of the hope that is within him (1 Pet. 3:15), knowing that "our human words always fall short of the mystery of God" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 42).

Rahner's apologia for both seeking and daring to hardly name this disposed "holy mystery" begins with his theological interpretation of the philosophical tradition that informs Heidegger's work. And like all good Thomistic theology (transcendental or otherwise), it begins with Aristotle.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Aristotle's Metaphysics makes Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence Of Christianity possible. When Feuerbach states that he differs from those philosophers "who pluck out their eyes that they may see better; for my thought I require the senses, especially sight," he is echoing Aristotle: "All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else." 

To therefore claim with Feuerbach that "theology is anthropology" is simply another way of saying with Aristotle that the essence of a thing is found in the form of the thing itself (and not merely in its matter): the form of the eye is seeing (one might say). It therefore turns out that not all philosophy is but footnotes to Plato. Feuerbach’s Essence is the exceptional exception here, especially since it provides the reason why Heidegger states in 1927 that you cannot ask the question of the meaning of Being without human beings: "In so far as Being constitutes what is asked about, and "Being" means the Being of entities, then entities themselves turn out to be what is interrogated." There is no Sein without Dasein.

Rahner appropriates his master's insight here by arguing that to carry out Feuerbach's program of reformulating dogmatic theology into theological anthropology does not necessarily mean that God gets atheistically reduced to man, since man is "the place where mystery is inscribed in the world" precisely because he is "the subject of unlimited transcendence, as the event of God's absolute and radical self-communication." In response to what Francis S. Fiorenza calls the "Kantian Problematic" (Kant's critique of both the transcendental ideal and the conceivability of an absolute necessary being), Rahner's interpretation and appropriation of Summa Theologiae, I, q. 84, art. 7 in his 1939 Geist in Welt provides the philosophical basis for this transcendental conclusion. 

Geist in Welt

It is possible to conclude otherwise. Karl Barth certainly did. But his reductive response to Feuerbach very well might be the result of a brand of Manichaeism produced through a thoroughly Protestant reading of Augustine (if anyone knows for sure it would be Hans Urs von Balthasar). For Rahner, to reject Feuerbach's reformulation as a false start is to forget about the only Aristotelian way to answer Heidegger's question: "As soon as man is understood as that being which has absolute transcendence toward God (and it is surely obvious that he is such), then anthropocentricity and theocentricity in theology are not contradictories but strictly one and the same thing seen from two difference aspects, and each aspect is unintelligible without the other."

"The Christian of the future," Rahner writes, "will be a mystic or not exist at all." This hints at how, in response to "a genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence,"  we must seek out that unutterable mystery which disposes over us (especially after philosophy has died the death of a million Heideggerian words). Being "historically condemned to history" brings into very clear relief the fact that seeking and speaking this out is done within a dynamic integration between two imperatives: "If we fail either to preserve or to change," Rahner writes, "we should betray the truth, either by falling into error or by failing to make the truth our own in a really existential way." There is no truthful doctrine without thoughtful development.

In the end, the task that is reserved for thinking within the midst of Rahner's Vorgriff is as revealing as it is rigorous: to silently dwell within the inscribed mystery of being-in-the-world during our own time and place (Being-as-revelation), while bearing sacramental witness to this preconceptual awareness (beings-as-shepherds) through stuttering the unutterable Word to a very forgetful world (Exodus 4:10).

For Fr. Michael Eades, Cong. Orat.

Sources

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2019.

Aristotle. Selections. Hackett Publishing Company, 1995.

Bernard Lonergan. Insight. University of Toronto Press, 1992.

Edward Feser. Aristotle's Revenge. Editiones Scholasticae, 2019.

Hans Urs von Balthasar. The Theology of Karl Barth. Ignatius Press, 1992.

John Henry Newman. An Essay In Aid Of A Grammar Of Assent. Aeterna Press, 2014.

Karl Rahner. Foundations Of Christian Faith. Herder & Herder, 1982.

Karl Rahner. Spirit In The World. Continuum, 1994.

Karl Rahner. The Content Of Faith. Herder & Herder, 2016.

Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence Of Christianity. Harper Torchbook, 1957.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Culture And Value. University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings. Routledge, 1993.

Martin Heidegger. Being And Time. Blackwell, 1962.

Martin Heidegger. Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic. Bloomsbury, 2018.

Martin Heidegger. On Time And Being. Harper & Row, 1972.

Meister Eckhart. The Complete Mystical Works Of Meister Eckhart. Herder & Herder, 2009.

Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Pantheon, 1972.

Richard Rorty. "Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language." Essays On Heidegger And Others. Cambridge University Press, 1991. 

Thomas Sheehan. Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations. Ohio University Press, 1987.

Thomas Sheehan. "Rahner's Transcendental Project." The Cambridge Companion To Karl Rahner. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Thomas Sheehan. "Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times." The Cambridge Companion To Heidegger. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Thomas Sheehan. "The Dream Of Karl Rahner." The New York Review Of Books, February 4, 1982.

Thomas Sheenan. "What If Heidegger Were A Phenomenologist?" The Cambridge Companion To Heidegger's Being And Time. Cambridge University Press, 2013. 

William J. Richardson. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology To Thought. Fordham University Press, 2003. 

William J. Richardson. "Heidegger And Theology." Theological Studies, February 01, 1965.

William James. Pragmatism. Dover Publications. 2018.