Following the King's High Road

I just finished reading Charles Williams' book Many Dimensions -- he was a Christian writer, a friend of CS LEwis's and a member of the Inklings. Towards the end of the book he quotes John Braxton as saying:

Attribuat igitur Rex legi, quod Lex attribuit ei,videlicet dominationem et imperium. Non est enim Rex ubi dominatur voluntas, et non Lex.

He translates this as

"Therefore let the king attribute to the law that which the law attributes to him, namely, domination and power. For where the will rules and not the law is no king."

From what I understand, the context is British constitutional development -- this was the thought process that gave rise to the Magna Charta in England. It reminded me of Charlotte Mason who wrote much about the role of authority and how it relates to the role of parents.

During the summer I was blogging about Charlotte Mason's ideas on Habits. I planned to continue during the year, but as is typical, I got caught up in the practical details of homeschooling and couldn't keep both balls in the air at the same time. But going through Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Montessori ideas and seeing how they overlapped with some of CM's thoughts on child-raising made me get out my scuffed old copy of Home Education.

Also the Real Learning board has been hosting some discussions of habits in their various aspects: habits for kids, for teens, for the household, and for moms. It seems to me that perhaps the Ordinary Season between Christmas and Lent is a good time to think about these things. So I wanted to pick up the CM thoughts focusing mainly on her Volume 1 which focuses on children under the age of 9. This intersects nicely, it seems to me, with the Dorothy Canfield Fisher focus on children of preschool age.

Charlotte Mason talks about obedience in much more depth, and so it will probably come up again, but in the meantime, it's important to remember that we are talking about obedience in its highest sense, and that there are perils in trying to train mechanical, unreasonable obedience. Humans are not animals, not slaves, and they are not cogs in somebody else's system of order; Immanuel Kant, who got some other things wrong, got it right in saying:

"Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only."

I tend to be a rebel, temperamentally and naturally, as a melancholic (and as half Scottish Celt, as well). My first question when faced by a simple command or statement is always "Why should I?" or "Why should it be so?" This can manifest as both a strength AND a weakness. That's probably why I usually get reflexively stopped in my tracks whenever I see the word "obedience". On the other hand, say the words "loyalty" and "fidelity" and my heart rings. But in some ways, they are the same concepts at their core.

When I first read what Charlotte Mason said about the nobility of obedience, it came together as it never had before. I didn't have to impose servility on myself or on my children. Mothering was not a power struggle -- me asserting my will over that of my small, beautiful children.

Obedience was loyalty to the Good, True and Beautiful -- which can never be anything but expansive and ennobling. My only problem then was convincing my rather balky reason, will and body to fall into step together alongside of that glorious banner. ... and of course, to make clear to my children the high dignity of doing so and the fact that they are fellow soldiers or adventurers or questers after Beauty and Truth; not slaves.

Obedience is a virtue only to the extent that it is free. Perhaps if you think about it in terms of Pride and Dignity and the Chivalrous Temper, it makes this clearer. I think of King David, certainly a great man, whose "delight was in the law of the Lord". He did not think it was undignified or demeaning to follow another.

I mentioned this part once before on the blog. ...When I was reading the Catholic Catechism I found that the etymology of "obey" is from "audire" meaning to hear or hearken to. Here is Proverbs 22:17, in the same vein:

Incline thy ear, and hear the words of the wise: and apply thy heart to my knowledge.

In this respect, it can be the highest of human acts. There is something intrinsic to me, in that connection between listening -- hearkening -- and "logos" -- word, or reason. You have to listen in order to hear words. And the obedience bit is where one's will comes in; will implies voluntariness, as Charlotte Mason says:

let him (the child) know what a noble thing it is to be able to make himself do, in a minute, and brightly, the very thing he would rather not do.

My task as a mother got much easier when I realized that my authority as a mother was not a matter of my superior power of intelligence or physical strength (that seemed like tyranny to me) or even my superior virtue (because I, being older, had sinned more than my children). It was my role, insofar as I represented the Good. I had to represent something bigger than myself "what is right". It is a high responsibility but we are placed in that role by virtue of being parents. We all have to grow into it to some extent, I think.

Charlotte Mason writes in Home Education (Some Moral Habits)

Children must have the Desire to Obey.––It is only in proportion as the will of the child is in the act of obedience, and he obeys because his sense of right makes him desire to obey in spite of temptations to disobedience––not of constraint, but willingly––that the habit has been formed which will, hereafter, enable the child to use the strength of his will against his inclinations when these prompt him to lawless courses.

It is said that the children of parents who are most strict in exacting obedience often turn out ill; and that orphans and other poor waifs brought up under strict discipline only wait their opportunity to break into license. Exactly so; because, in these cases, there is no gradual training of the child in the habit of obedience; no gradual enlisting of his will on the side of sweet service and a free will offering of submission to the highest law: the poor children are simply bullied into submission to the will, that is, the wilfulness, of another; not at all, 'for it is right'; only because it is convenient.

If you notice, this implies that (1) the child's growing abilities to reason and will must be directed towards doing what is right and (2) that the parents and those in authority are entrusted with using their ability to lead in the way that is best for the children themselves. You don't want a child who disobeys whenever there is no one to look.

This is what Dorothy Canfield Fisher is saying, too ( I quoted her on that before). She points out that adults (hopefully) don't refrain from stealing or hurting simply because they are afraid they will go to prison. She points out that we don't want the obedience that would make things easy for a dictator like Hitler. We want free, reasoning consent to what is right.

The parents and the children should both be doing what is right. Their roles are not oppositional; they should be aimed in the same direction. The bigger role in one sense belongs to the parents -- to show the beauty and dignity of obedience to good things and that parents, too, are subject to what is right and ought to resist what is wrong.

Obedience is dignified by its very nature IF freely chosen and directed towards the right. Our obedience is a trust; it does not give us permission to do what is wrong. Similarly, and for the very same reason, authority is a trust. Think about it this way -- as Bob Dylan said, "You gotta serve somebody..." and there is solid truth in that. The person who does everything to please himself is a slave to whatever he is striving to please ... his appetites, his personal temperament. A person who does something only because he fears what will happen if he doesn't is a servant to fear or aversion.

Peacock's Trail

It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had happened in that fold or crack in the great gray hills except that the whole universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now. turned inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest all that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the colored Catholic imagery like a peacock's tail. (GK Chesterton, the Everlasting Man)

The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. Flannery O'Connor.

You probably already know of our family fondness for peacocks. Liam photographs them at his college, and has written one into a story he is working on. When I am talking to him on the phone on Sunday afternoons, while he strolls in the meadows below his campus, often the conversation is punctuated by comments like:

There's one up on the roof!
The others are looking up at it. They look concerned.
It looks concerned, too.
Now it's flying down.

Then you hear the background pea-chicken chorus that Flannery O'Connor transcribed like this:

Lee-yon, lee-yon,
Mee-yon, mee-yon!
Ee-e-oy ee-e-oy!
Ee-e-oy ee-e-oy!

She calls it a "chorus of jubilation" but filtered through a cell phone they always sound like cats yowling plaintively, to me.

For Flannery O'Connor they evoked mystery and manners. When I talked to the Dominican priest who lives near the peacocks on the campus, he told me that they like to perch on his roof and sometimes early in the morning, just as he is waking up, he hears them run heavily down the roof to land on the ground. The combination of respect for mystery and pained admiration for manners in his voice was quite indescribable.

I read in Stanley Jaki's book Savior of Science that Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend, Asa Grey:

"...and now trifling particulars of structure often make me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!"

This struck me quite forcibly, that his reaction was so different from the wonder and amusement that these pheasant-folk inspire in my children, one of my favorite writers, and the priest acquaintance.

I went on a "peacock trail" online and found this much more appreciative passage in Darwin's Descent of Man:

The Argus pheasant does not possess brilliant colours, so that his success in love appears to depend on the great size of his plumes, and on the elaboration of the most elegant patterns. Many will declare that it is utterly incredible that a female bird should be able to appreciate fine shading and exquisite patterns, It is undoubtedly a marvellous fact that she should possess this almost human degree of taste. He who thinks that he can safely gauge the discrimination and taste of the lower animals may deny that the female Argus pheasant can appreciate such refined beauty; but he will then be compelled to admit that the extraordinary attitudes assumed by the male during the act of courtship, by which the wonderful beauty of his plumage is fully displayed, are purposeless; and this is a conclusion which I for one will never admit.

While I was looking for more thoughts upon peacocks and evolution, I found this site called The Third Evolutionary Synthesis. It's interesting because it contains all sorts of evolution-related material, including some critiques. I haven't looked enough to see whether it is weird marginal stuff or not. More central to my topic are the peacock feathers on the page's banner and these postscripts of the review of Johnson's Darwin on Trial.

In the postscripts, the webmaster mentions that Johnson critiqued Darwin's views on peacocks and sexual selection.

(Quoting Johnson)"what I find intriguing is that Darwinists are not troubled by the unfitness of the peahen's sexual taste. Why would natural selection, which supposedly formed all birds from lowly predessors, produce a species whose females lust for males with life-threatening decorations?" (p.30).

Biologists now have good explanations for the peacock's tail. It is called the handicap principle. It is beautifully and accessibly described in a book by A. and A Zahavi(1997,1999) 'The Handicap Principle - A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle'. In short: the long tails of male birds reliably demonstrate to females that those males are healthy and can afford such handicap. It can only be a reliable signal when it is a handicap. Females prefer strong males because they produce healthy children.

The Handicap Principle -- hey, there is another peacock tail on the cover!

Some people apparently don't think the handicap principle explains things sufficiently. I followed the trail a bit further and found this book, displaying another peacock-tail decor on its cover: Darwin Misread Miss Peacock's Mind.



It apparently makes the case that the handicap principle or Darwin's aesthetic appreciation explanation is too much like anthropomorphism:

But beyond this, many present-day students still maintain that at least part of the explanation for the origin of fancy males involves female choice. In support of this, some authors resort to many highly convoluted anthropomorphic interpretations that outdo even those of Darwin. Birds are seen as possessing a knowledge of population genetics in near mystical proportions. The female can evaluate the "fitness genes" of a male on the basis of intricate plumage designs, following a principle of "handicaps."

Mr. Darwin Misread Miss Peacock's Mind develops the idea that attraction of a female to a male warrants a straightforward stimulus-response interpretation. The female is driven by response to a food stimulus. The food may be found in the territory of the male or may be pictorially represented on the plumage of the male. The female obeys the laws of plain, old-fashioned home economics! Courtship-feeding is seen as a method of bringing together creatures of similar tastes and physiologies. The ensuing mate selection results in genetic specialization to differing food niches, finally resulting in species formation.

Hmm, that seems stretched to me. Home economics? Isn't that anthropomorphizing a bit too?

A National Geographic article puts forth another explanation in: How Did the Peacock Get His Tail?

A study published earlier this year in the journal Behavioural Ecology shows that a male's plumage is a direct indicator of the strength of his immune system; a signal to females of his internal workings.

It goes on to say that showy feathering may show lack of parasitical infestation, a survival trait that will be passed on to Mrs. Peacock's sons and daughters. However, the article goes on to say that the evidence on this is inconclusive. Infested peacocks often continue to have showy plumage to the very end stages.

This post on Peacock's Feathers: Darwin's Nightmare has some spectacular pictures of albino peacocks, and makes the point that things like feathers and eyes seem to be "irreducible" -- it is difficult to even imagine them evolving in stages.

The peacock's tail remains a mystery even after it is analyzed, and a related but even more mysterious thing is the paradoxical power of the brown peahen. Even more mysterious and paradoxical is the power of that"galaxy of gazing, haloed suns" has for a human mind, not leastly Darwin's.

Wisdom Begins in Wonder

In lieu of a real post I thought I would put up John Senior's words on the value of the Good Books -- taken from this site called Great Books Academy, the quote is originally from a very thought-provoking book called Restoration of Christian Culture. Here is a review of the book from Alicia, who was the first to mention the book to me years and years ago:

"The Great Books movement of the last generation has not failed as much as fizzled, not because of any defect in the books - 'the best that has been thought and said,' in Matthew Arnold's phrase - but like good champagne in plastic bottles, they went flat.

To change the figure, the seeds are good but the cultural soil has been depleted; the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas thrive only in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, and adventures: the thousand books of Grimm, Anderson, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest.

Taking all that was best of the Greco-Roman world into itself, Western tradition has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great ones - and for all studies in the arts and sciences. Without them all studies are inhumane. The brutal athlete and the foppish aesthete suffer vices opposed to the virtue of Newman's gentleman. Anyone working at college, whether in the pure arts and sciences or the practical ones, will discover he has made a quantum leap when he gets even a small amount of cultural ground under him: he will grow up like an undernourished plant suddenly fertilized and watered.

Now just notice how that copia of metaphors -- champagne, soil and seedlings, quantam leaps -- still manage to evoke a unity. I think it's interesting how he brings in "quantam" when he discusses how even the scientific mind can benefit from the "cultural ground".

Albert Einstein said:

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking."

Other quotes on the value of imagination and fairy tales at Sur La Lune.

I went and hunted for the quote because of a discussion going on at Real Learning about the role of Great Books and Good Books in the high school years in the home school.

Oh, that's about all I have time or mental focus for right now. Aidan and Paddy are trying to play SET; Liam, who came home this weekend, is sitting opposite me in front of the fireplace with his laptop; Kieron is constructing with pattern beads; and everyone else seems to be asleep. Aidan's IEP is today. More little details of life in the homeschool over at Every Waking Hour.

"to invite reason continually to take up the pursuit of truth"

Pope Benedict on Academic Freedom

The matter is one of giving the right form to human freedom, which is always freedom in reciprocal communion: law is the condition for freedom, not its antagonist. But here the question immediately arises: How can the criteria of justice be identified that make possible a freedom that is lived together, and that help man to become good?

At this point we need to jump back into the present: the question is how a juridical norm can be found that guarantees the ordering of freedom, human dignity, and human rights. This is the question that occupies us today in the democratic processes of opinion formation, and that at the same time fills us with anxiety over the future of humanity.

In my view, Jürgen Habermas expresses a vast consensus in current thought when he says that the legitimacy of a constitutional charter, as the precondition for legality, is derived from two sources: from the egalitarian political participation of all citizens, and from the reasonable manner in which political disagreements are resolved.

Concerning this "reasonable manner," he notes that this cannot be solely a struggle for an arithmetical majority, but that it must characterize itself as a "process of argumentation sensitive to the truth" (wahrheitssensibles Argumentationsverfahren). This is well said, but it is a very difficult thing to transform into political practice. The representatives of that public "process of argumentation" are – we know – predominantly the political parties as the agents for shaping political will. In fact, these will unfailingly aim above all at attaining majorities, and in this they will almost inevitably pay attention to interests that they promise to satisfy; but these are often special interests and do not truly serve everyone. Sensitivity to the truth is constantly overruled by sensitivity toward interests. I find significant the fact that Habermas speaks of sensitivity to truth as an element necessary in the process of political argumentation, thus reinserting the concept of truth into philosophical and political debate.


But then the question of Pilate becomes inevitable: What is truth? And how is it recognized? If for this one turns back to "public reason," as John Rawls does, the question arises once again: What is reasonable? How does a form of reason demonstrate itself as true? In any case, on the basis of this it becomes clear that in the search for the right to freedom, for truth, for just coexistence, attention must be paid to voices different from those of political parties and interest groups, without wanting to contest their importance in the least.

Hilda Van Stockum and Trinity College

While I was looking for the picture of our "Little Kings" for my last Christmas post (our last name means little king and so for the purpose my daughter counts as a king too, and indeed why not?) -- I found this picture I took at Trinity College in Dublin last summer. It was absolutely pouring rain that day in June, and they didn't let you so much as bring out a camera inside the college, but I did get this one outside shot.

Since I know Love2Learn Mom likes Hilda van Stockum (our family is combination Irish Dutch just like theirs and HVS's) I thought she and perhaps some others of my Catholic and/or Irish and/or literature-loving friends would like this photo. Unfortunately, I must have had trouble maneuvering my umbrella so I didn't get a complete good shot of the insignia on this bench, but I guess you can abstract the universal from the 2 particulars, at least a bit. And you can click on the pictures to make them bigger.




You can see a photo of the wedding of Spike Marlin, who is memorialized here on the bench in the photo, and Hilda Van Stockum, in 1932 at Trinity College, if you go here (and scroll down a bit)

This has nothing much to do with Hilda Van Stockum, but outside of Trinity College I also got this extraordinary building title:


I had to get a picture of that, though I didn't know at the time that it is the oldest charity in Dublin (I'm thinking they mean the oldest bourgeoisie/layman operated one, or the oldest one still in existence).

To tie in the charity building photo with Van Stockum, here is a St Nicholas Day Message by Hilda Van Stockum. She writes (about the advertising /consumerist rush at Christmas, I suppose):

In a sense, how we use our money determines not only our own lives but those of others too. If we wish for foolish, vulgar or ugly objects, and make others want them, a certain number of people will spend their lives making them. What we ask for, will be supplied. What we make, others will be induced to ask for. But is there no place in these transactions for a thought as to their usefulness, or moral value?

This is a very complex and difficult question. What one person considers good and necessary, may be despised by another. There are no hard and fast rules. But I do suggest that this side of the matter is worthy of attention.

I think we all have a responsibility, whether we like it or not. We will be answerable one day, I believe, for the way in which we spent our money, or caused others to spend it.

Hilda van Stockum died only last year in 2006, on All Saints Day.

One of her six children remembers her saying:

'If you aren't hungry for an apple, you aren't hungry at all!'

That makes me laugh, because my mother used to say exactly the same thing to us.

She also loved dressing up as St Nicholas for his feastday, according to another one of her children.

And she thought the world needs more Catholic philosophers (I am just reading Pope John Paul II's Fides et Ratio which makes the same point!)

Here is a cute story about her conversion (she was brought up by atheists and became a Catholic after her marriage).

St. Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton, Fulton Sheen, Ronald Knox. but it was Arnold Lunn's "Now I See" that finally brought Mother to the Catholic Church. She always said that when she closed the book it suddenly hit her: "I'm not thinking about being a Catholic, I am a Catholic!" With that she went out into the street and asked the first passer-by "Where is the nearest Catholic Church?" She went up to the rectory door, knocked, and said to the priest who opened it: "I'm a Catholic and I want to be baptized!" After a few enquiries he said: "You're a case for Fr X." It turned out that this was an elderly priest, a bit confused, but eager to make converts. After talking to Daddy, Mother went through the classes and the time came for her to be received into the Catholic Church. "What about the children?" she asked. And Daddy said "You better look after them". So we were all baptized together. The priest was a bit harassed with three children and Mother to baptize, and in the end he asked anxiously: "Have I done them all, or have I done one twice?"

Memento Mori

"Remember that you must die."

I just finished reading Memento Mori by Muriel Spark. It has a retired detective, a parlor investigation, a murder and sinister telephone calls, but it is not a detective mystery except in the deeper sense that it is concerned with the mystery of death. As the retired inspector says:

"If I had my life to live over again, I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death . I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs."

"....The words, 'Remember you must die.' It is, you know, an excellent thing to remember this, for it is nothing more than the truth. To remember one's death is, in short, a way of life."

"To come to the point---" said Godfrey.

"Godfrey," said Charmian. "I am sure everyone is fascinated by what Henry is saying."

I enjoyed the book much more than I thought I would. It concerns the lives and secret, tangled pasts of a group of elderly English people, and their dealings to avoid or confront the thought of death. I found that I could identify in bits and pieces with the more "touchstone" characters, but even those are kept at a distance. There was a purgatorial, discomposed air to the episodes. The style was what I think they call "mordant" (I've always wanted to use that word somewhere).... precise, lowkey, with an edge to it.

Muriel Spark was Scottish, and a convert to Catholicism, according to Wikipedia. Evelyn Waugh encouraged her to write, Graham Greene enjoyed her writing. Penelope Fitzgerald, a novelist and contemporary, said that she:

"had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic ... that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do." ......

Spark said of her conversion and its effect on her writing:

"I was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that — would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion — whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know - but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence…"

Links

• This is a nice site with a scriptural rosary you can download, and a free illustrated e-book of the rosary.

• Also, I have just printed out the pages at Catholic Culture on Preschool Pedagogy -- there is a lot of information on starting out teaching the faith to a little one, and following the liturgical year in a simple way.