The Ark and The Dove

Woe is I me

Recently I have heard people criticize the venerable phrase "woe is me" without, I suspect, really understanding its origins and logic.  I have heard that there is even a grammar guide entitled "Woe is I."  I hope the author of the book intends the title of something of a joke, because to "correct" the phrase to "I" reflects an understanding of the English language but not of its roots in older languages, such as Greek, Latin, and German.

Many native speakers of English have an exaggerated horror of the word "me," no doubt because they have been corrected so many times by their mothers for saying something like "Me and Joey are going out to play" ('No, Joey and I are going out to play) and they are afraid that they will sound unintelligent if they say "me" when they should say "I."  As adults they "overcorrect" by incorrectly using "I" where "me" is called for, for instance "Joey gave the book to Mary and I" (hint - if you can't tell, try taking away the other person and see if you would still say "I").  I hear this mistake on NPR all the time.

But back to Greek and German.  English is descended from languages that have cases, but it only has vestigial remnants of case markers.  The distinction between "I" and "me" is one of these.  In languages that use cases, the word that means "I" is used for the nominative case, and there are other forms for the other cases.  In Latin, me covers all of the latter; German has mich and mir, which are both cognate with the English "me."  In all three of these languages there is a construction known as the "dative of possession."  It is very common in Greek and also is used in Latin and in German (see p.3).  Instead of using a preposition, you use a case-inflected form of the pronoun.  In effect, instead of saying, "I have X," you say "There is [to] me X."  In English this construction only survives in antiquated phrases, like "woe is me."

So the point of the phrase is not to use "is" as a linking verb to identify "woe" with the speaker.  The proper "translation" would not be "I am woe" but "I have woe."  But that would be prosaic.

The "hermeneutic of continuity"

It's about to happen, it seems.  About the 1962 Missal, I mean.

From what I've read from Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict, this is the frame I'm seeing it in, and why it's important for us, not just for people with a special devotion to the 1962 Missal:

Pope Benedict has long been a critic of the way of thinking about and interpreting the Second Vatican Council that he has called the "hermeneutic of discontinuity."  "Hermeneutic" is the Greek word for "interpretative [method]."  He is making an analogy to the interpretation of Scripture, where there are potentially a number of legitimate interpretations, but definitely very many wrong and false ones.  The devil can present his own deceptive interpretation of Scripture to vex and confuse as he tried to do to Jesus; so also people relying their own private judgment apart from the Church can decide on wrong and harmful interpretations, and they can be mistaken even when they feel like they are being led by the Spirit.

Specifically what the Pope criticizes is the interpretation of the Council that views it as a radical break with the past, a repudiation of the Tradition of the Church so as to start anew or recreate it as something different.  This has caused confusion by convincing people to interpret certain of the Church's developments so as to impose misguided innovations in the name of the Council such that many of the real reforms of the Council have actually not yet been carried out, and to mistakenly interpret some of the Church's actual reforms and developments as breaks or ruptures with the past.  The above link contains his own explanation and elaboration.

This mistaken interpretation of the Council is so embedded in our culture that many people take it for granted - they breathe it in and out without even noticing it.  They might think the (supposed) break with the past is really great, or they might think it's really terrible, but either way, if that's how they're thinking, they fail to understand their relationship with the Church (which will have a detrimental effect on their spiritual life).

So, why the action with the old (1962 Missal) Mass?  Well, seeing as how the Mass is the source and summit of the Christian life, and practically speaking is the main point of contact between most people and the Church, so long as people feel like the current state of affairs with the Mass is a radical break with the "pre-Vatican II Church," the pope can give speeches about hermeneutics of discontinuity all he likes without effecting any large-scale reform in people's thinking.  Because as long as he goes that route, pretty much the only people who are going to hear him are the sort of people who read the texts of addresses to the curia or Wednesday audiences - people who probably already know what he's saying and agree with him.  But - if instead of talking about how the Mass today (and by implication the whole life of the Church) isn't a break with the past [i.e. the period before the Council], he acts, and performs some powerful, impossible-to-ignore symbolic act that does the same thing, everyone will hear and get the message.  It doesn't matter if you or I or most people don't actually end up going to 1962-Missal Masses.  This is something so big and so obvious that even the New York Times and Time Magazine can't ignore it, and even though they will probably hardly be able to think outside of the box on this one (i.e. "turning back the clock," the Lefebvrists and whatnot), the people of the Church taken all together have a good theological sense and they will get it.

Oddness

I don't know what I come across like on the blog, but the sort of people Fr. Philip discusses in this post weirded me out when I was high-school age or so and made me not want to be around church.  I have had a very positive experience in college.

n.b. to Typepad

Your spellchecker, which I now can't ignore because it "helpfully" automatically red-underlines words it doesn't recognize, knows the word "millennial" and "millennium" but not "millennia," so it red-underlines it.  What word did you want me to use - "millenniums"?  Oh - apparently it likes that one. 

Also, somewhat ironically, it doesn't recognize the word "spellchecker" either.

The opposite problem

From the Fathers of the Church blog,

In the middle of the fourth century, St. Gregory of Nyssa gave in to a fit of complaint. Ordinary people, he said, were spending entirely too much time talking about theology. “Mere youths and tradesmen, off-hand dogmatists in theology, servants too, and slaves that have been flogged … are solemn with us and philosophical about things incomprehensible … If you ask for change someone philosophizes to you on the begotten and the unbegotten.”

And the problem followed poor Gregory all over the marketplace. If he asked the baker the price of his bread, he got Trinitarian doctrine instead. If he asked whether the bath was ready, he got still more speculation.

Gosh, times have changed. Not too long ago, a friend of mine ordered a Christmas cake to read “Happy birthday, Jesus,” and the baker asked her how that name was spelled.

Weirdness

If you know me you might guess that I'm a bit of a connoisseur of trivia and quiz games.  Yes, my favorite tv show is Jeopardy.  I'm such a nerd.

Anyway, playing a clumsily crafted trivia game about something you really care about is kind of odd.

First one: the other day some friends got me into a game that was basically trivial pursuit (not from that franchise) about Catholicism.  Of course I had fun with my friends, and enjoy being a know-it-all maybe a little too much, but the game had some maddening oddities due to the assumptions and ideologies of the editors, which I might call "80s triumphalism."  I'm not using the word the way you normally hear it, but in a sort of intra-Catholic way, to mean the triumphalism of the Eighties versus all of the preceding millennia of Catholicism, real Catholicism, where people knew what they were doing and did things right, didn't arrive until we came around, that is, the present day - the Eighties (the game was made in 1985).  This is the Catholic culture of my youth.  It was odd in the Eighties; it's even weirder to read such things from that period and mindset twenty years later.  I once read a biography of (of all people) Hilaire Belloc done by an "eighties triumphalist" who clearly tried very hard to be fair to Belloc but also was as emphatically eighties as slap bracelets, BetaMax, and Dino-Riders.  It involves a bizarre sort of cognitive dissonance: the combination of "start from scratch, because the past has nothing to teach us" with the necessity of paying homage to Catholic tradition from the Bible - Old and New Testaments - through the saints, martyrs, popes and Councils down to the present day.  Of which, of course the most important is the Second Vatican, which freed us from oppression by the past.  They got on my bad side to begin with by having a category called "Pre-Vatican II History," perpetrating the pretend Great Divide supposedly formed in the history of the Church by the Council, and made sure they stayed there with questions that made sure that such outdated things as Latin and spiritual bouquets and the like are pigeonholed securely in the "pre-Vatican II" category.  Earth to barbarians - I heard the pope on tv the other day and guess what language he was speaking?  Flagrant grammar errors in their Latin, too, but who would notice since nobody speaks it anymore anyway?

But that was just fine compared to "The Bible Game" Peter and I played for the express purpose of seeing just how silly it was going to be (and we knew it would be bad).  We had no idea.

What is "it"?

I guess I never really thought about it until I heard Scott Hahn's discussion of it, but when Jesus says from the Cross "It is finished," what is the antecedent of the pronoun?  The answer can't very well be "the work of redemption," because then you would be leaving the Resurrection out of it. 

The answer involves the Gospel of John and the Jewish Seder ritual.  Apparently (I wasn't aware of this - see how much I need to learn about the Old Covenant!) there are always four cups of wine in the Passover meal.  The third one is called the "blessing cup."  Remember the passage (Corinthians, I think) "Our blessing cup is a participation in the Blood of Christ"?  The third one is the one Jesus used in the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper.  But also remember that they didn't drink the fourth one.  Jesus says (if memory serves) that he would not taste the fruit of the vine until He drank it new in the Kingdom of Heaven, then left for the Mount of Olives, singing a hymn.  I suppose I took this as it came because I don't really know how Passover meals go besides the Mass, but Scott Hahn says that for someone familiar with the ritual this would be about as startling as it would be for us if a priest stopped Mass and left just before the communion rite.

From there He goes to Calvary.  Tellingly, Jesus is offered wine but refuses until the very end when He asks to drink it, then declares that "it" has been consummated and gives up His spirit.

The message is that the Last Supper and Calvary are one unified whole.  Fr. Bill has told us Maryland people this from the pulpit any number of times, and I didn't doubt it, but now I have been shown how it works that way in Scripture.

Pope on Essenes

Since we talked about them the other day, I thought I'd bring up that Pope Benedict gives them a mention:

[I]t appears that not only John the Baptist, but possibly Jesus and his family as well, were close to the Qumran community.  At any rate, there are numerous points of contact with the Christian message in the Qumran writings.  It is a reasonable hypothesis that John the Baptist lived for some time in this community and received part of his religious formation from it.

Jesus of Nazareth, p. 14

Thomist humor

Of course, I can't let a discussion like that of my last post go by without talking about the sense of humor of my favorite philosopher and theologian.

In conversation I mentioned to a friend about Quodlibetal Question 12.20 of St. Thomas Aquinas, lamenting that I couldn't find it on the internet anymore since the one link I knew of was down.  But today I found a site with the text (thank you to the writer of The Virtual Stoa), saving me the trouble of having to go to the university library, check out the book, translate from Latin, and type it in (which, for my readers, I would have considered doing).  He may feel obligated to qualify the phrase "Thomist humor" with "[sic]," but those words aren't a contradiction in terms, I promise - you just have to know how to recognize and appreciate it.

This article is my favorite example of his sense of humor making it into his work.  The way it came about is this: St. Thomas made it a point never to tell anyone that they asked a dumb question, even if they had, but rather to give it a thoughtful and respectful answer.  So what about at a Q&A session where people can ask whatever questions they want ("quodlibet" means "whatever," or "what pleases you") where some wag asks him a smart-alecky question (a question with a bit of notoriety in Christian intellectual history).  Does he say, "Come on, what kind of question is that?" Or "Next!"  Or...does he do something a little more sporting?  Now, it's pretty subtle, not guffaw-inducing funny.  But we're talking theology disputations here, not stand-up comedy.

In the extended post, St. Thomas Aquinas' answer, in disputation form, to the question "Whether truth is stronger than either wine, the king or woman?"

Humor in academic writing

As a reader for my own pleasure of a lot of things that most people only study when forced to, I like to think that I have a better-than-average appreciation for the subtle sense of humor that a writer can work into a "serious" scholarly work.  As G.K. Chesterton noted, serious and funny are not mutually exclusive, only funny and not funny.  Believe it or not, St. Augustine had a sense of humor, and even St. Jerome, and it comes out even in the midst of some of his strongest invectives, if you have eyes to see it.  It's not "comic relief" like in a movie, but it can help to relieve the tension and weight of the work in an analogous way.

In the course of reading two six-hundred-or-so page books of his, I came to appreciate N.T. Wright's brand of academic humor.  One little touch I remember is where, in talking about some structural feature of the Parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat (Mt. 13:24-30) he asks about whether "a redactor has done this."

I have a feeling that someday (I don't know how long), as he writes more and more of them Peter's natural wit and clever humor will become more integrated into his academic voice, so that his academic treatises and scholarly articles will be highly amusing as well as edifying.