In a conversation with Cassie the other night, a fantastic RA in her own right, she asked what I felt was the most rewarding experience from being an RA this past year. To be honest, I was initially caught off guard with her question which sort of surprised me as I had been thinking over the past week how much I loved being an RA and looked forward to coming back as the student house director next year. I realized that it was not so much the question that caught me off guard, but the "where do I even begin?" response.
You really have to want to be an RA. The money is nice, but definitely not worth it if you are doing a good job and enjoying the benefits it offers. There is no way you could put a quantitative amount of compensation on a job in which the best rewards are unable to be measured by any artificial, empirical standard.
With that said, I learned this year how to listen on a fundamental level. Not listening for what I want to hear, but to actually hear what is being said and communicated. This is a simple part of conversation but is badly missing from our culture today. I learned how to care for the guys regardless of their attitude, grades, fraternity association, etc. I did not do this perfectly and this is something I want to improve on next year. But the best way I can serve them is by first caring for them. Finally, I most enjoyed watching freshmen grow over the course of a year. Many of them changed so much and became much more the human beings they are meant to be. What a privilege and honor to experience that journey with so many special guys.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Don't Immanentize the Eschaton!
Immanentize the Eschaton (try saying that ten times fast). This ridiculous sounding phrase has changed my life considerably since the first time I heard it used in Dr. Gamble's Intellectual History of the United States. I knew right then and there that I was way over my head. But there was meaning behind the expression, and the past few years (and a few more semesters with Dr. Gamble) helped me see why immanentizing the eschaton is a very bad thing....
This intense looking fellow, Eric Voegelin, is the one who coined this fanciful sounding way of saying "bringing the kingdom of God to earth." "Eschaton" is a theological term referring to the kingdom of God and to "immanentize" something is to make it happen immediately. What is wrong with bringing the kingdom of God to earth? Isn't that what Christ came to do, and what we are commanded to do by the Great Commission, and what we ask in the Lord's prayer? Understanding the fault in immanentizing the eschaton requires a better understanding of Voegelin.
For centuries Christians have understood St. Augustine's famous work, The City of God, to be the best understanding of the relationship between our life in heaven and our life on earth. John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress also plays on this theme reminding the Christian that we are pilgrims, living in a world that is not our eternal home. Our final resting place is in heaven, where there is true perfection and true happiness. These things can never be attained on earth for we are inherently sinful human beings. St. Augustine describes the City of God as heaven and the City of Man as the world we live in. This dichotomy is helpful in understanding the tensions between living here on earth in the temporary and seeking what is in permanent in heaven.
Eric Voegelin was a strict Augustinian in his understanding of the two cities. A harsh critic of modernity and liberalism, Voegelin suggests that the drive by many within modern times to create perfection on earth was a violation of Augustine's dichotomy. Indeed all ideology is an attempt by man to bring to earth what cannot be brought to earth. Many other thinkers agree. C.S. Lewis warns about making the "earthly" into something "transcendent." Similarly Russell Kirk criticizes those who try to create"earthly paradises" always resulting in "terrestrial hells." The 20th century, as stated in the previous post, has been the century of terrestrial hell. According to Voegelin, ideologues were men who confused what belonged in the City of God as something to be obtained in the City of Man.
Voegelin accuses modernists of stealing the symbols and myths of Christiainity. By breaking down the sacred and the secular, Christian teachings like the City of God and the City of Man mean nothing to those who have no respect for orthodox Christianity. Thus, those who immanentize the eschaton, do so with secularized assumptions. Whatever original meaning bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth once possessed, has been robed by those who think nothing of the things of God. Those who seek to immanentize the eschaton look different depending on the situation. They might be harmless utopians or tyrannical dictators. Regardless, all of them as T.S. Eliot writes, "Dream of systems so perfect, man will no longer need to be good."
For the Christian we understood that there are things that are permanent and timeless that occur on earth, but they never manifest in an ideology. Christians know the kingdom of God is something realized in a spiritual sense, not politically or materially. And only the King Himself is able to bring about that which He wills, not what man desires to make. A proper understanding of orthodox Christian theology is the surest safeguard to attempting to immanentize the eschaton.
This intense looking fellow, Eric Voegelin, is the one who coined this fanciful sounding way of saying "bringing the kingdom of God to earth." "Eschaton" is a theological term referring to the kingdom of God and to "immanentize" something is to make it happen immediately. What is wrong with bringing the kingdom of God to earth? Isn't that what Christ came to do, and what we are commanded to do by the Great Commission, and what we ask in the Lord's prayer? Understanding the fault in immanentizing the eschaton requires a better understanding of Voegelin.
For centuries Christians have understood St. Augustine's famous work, The City of God, to be the best understanding of the relationship between our life in heaven and our life on earth. John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress also plays on this theme reminding the Christian that we are pilgrims, living in a world that is not our eternal home. Our final resting place is in heaven, where there is true perfection and true happiness. These things can never be attained on earth for we are inherently sinful human beings. St. Augustine describes the City of God as heaven and the City of Man as the world we live in. This dichotomy is helpful in understanding the tensions between living here on earth in the temporary and seeking what is in permanent in heaven.
Eric Voegelin was a strict Augustinian in his understanding of the two cities. A harsh critic of modernity and liberalism, Voegelin suggests that the drive by many within modern times to create perfection on earth was a violation of Augustine's dichotomy. Indeed all ideology is an attempt by man to bring to earth what cannot be brought to earth. Many other thinkers agree. C.S. Lewis warns about making the "earthly" into something "transcendent." Similarly Russell Kirk criticizes those who try to create"earthly paradises" always resulting in "terrestrial hells." The 20th century, as stated in the previous post, has been the century of terrestrial hell. According to Voegelin, ideologues were men who confused what belonged in the City of God as something to be obtained in the City of Man.
Voegelin accuses modernists of stealing the symbols and myths of Christiainity. By breaking down the sacred and the secular, Christian teachings like the City of God and the City of Man mean nothing to those who have no respect for orthodox Christianity. Thus, those who immanentize the eschaton, do so with secularized assumptions. Whatever original meaning bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth once possessed, has been robed by those who think nothing of the things of God. Those who seek to immanentize the eschaton look different depending on the situation. They might be harmless utopians or tyrannical dictators. Regardless, all of them as T.S. Eliot writes, "Dream of systems so perfect, man will no longer need to be good."
For the Christian we understood that there are things that are permanent and timeless that occur on earth, but they never manifest in an ideology. Christians know the kingdom of God is something realized in a spiritual sense, not politically or materially. And only the King Himself is able to bring about that which He wills, not what man desires to make. A proper understanding of orthodox Christian theology is the surest safeguard to attempting to immanentize the eschaton.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Some Thoughts on Modernity
Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in his "Notes From the Underground"
After all, we don't even know where 'real life' is lived nowadays, or what it is, what name it goes by. Leave us to ourselves, without our books, and at once we get into a muddle and lose our way- we don't know whose side to be on or where to give our allegiance, what to love and what to hate, what to respect, and what to despise. We even find it difficult to be human beings, men with real flesh and blood of our own; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace, and are always striving to be some unprecedented kind of generalized human being. We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; and we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea....
[Emphasis added]
Dostoevsky brilliantly recognizes what modernity or life in the modern times has done to man. By mechanizing him as nothing more than an animal or a machine, man has lost not only his humanity, but his entire connection to imagination and myth, tradition, and fundamental institutions including family and community.
Indeed modernity is a term almost impossible to define in what I hope to be a fairly small blog post ;). Historians cite different events that triggered the beginning of modernity. To generalize, I'm understanding modernity as the advent of secular humanism and ideology that coincided with the triumph of empirical science, rational Christianity, and utilitarian and pragmatic philosophy. Roughly speaking, this started with the Enlightenment and culminated in the late 19th century. Modern thinkers include Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Spencer, Dewey, and of course the ultimate modern Karl Marx. These men and others convinced of their own righteousness, attempted to create the world as they would like it. Believing their assumptions about the most fundamental questions of humanity including what is God, what is man, and what is man's place in the order of things to be the most correct, ideologues and other moderns attempted to implement their system to fix the "problems" they identified in the world.
These systems, eventually given names like "Marxism," "Fascism," "Nazism," and "Communism," would have only one end to their schemes. Death--- in the form of 205 million lives lost in the 20th century. The so called "century of progress" is not marked by man's technology, but by the gas chamber, the gulag, and the death camp.
All this because man has misidentified both himself and his God choosing instead to act as "rational" creatures, born of ideas and ideologies. And so modernity, divorcing itself from all that is good, chose to compartmentalize the world into boxes so as to examine all the pieces and create the system that will finally get it right. This confusion of the universal with the particular, shatters the imagination which can no longer see the complexity within each and every man in history-- which is the story of man.
Whether or not we are in an age of post-modernity almost seems irrelevant. The blood of millions upon millions of people, many of them brothers and sisters in Christ, lies almost ignored in a world of chaos, death, and suffering. What does any of this matter to those of us in America, materially blessed and spiritually apathetic to our own ideologies of "liberalism" and "conservatism." The effects of modernism in America have seeped into nearly every aspect of American life- our familes, churches, schools, communities, etc all live and breath the language thoughts and ideas of modernity.
Is there a way to escape this?
Christopher Dawson offers one possible option:
“The only remedy is to be found in that spiritual force by which the humility of God conquers the pride of the evil one. Hence the spiritual reformer cannot expect to have the majority on his side. He must be prepared to stand alone like Ezekiael and Jeremy. He must take as his example St. Augustine besieged by the Vandals at Hippo, or St. Gregory preaching at Rome with the Lombards at the gates. For the true helpers of the world are the poor in spirit, the men who bear the sign of the cross on their foreheads, who refused to be overcome by the triumph of injustice and put their sole trust in the salvation of God.”
In an age of darkness, those like Dawson provide some hope admist a battle that seems all but lost.
After all, we don't even know where 'real life' is lived nowadays, or what it is, what name it goes by. Leave us to ourselves, without our books, and at once we get into a muddle and lose our way- we don't know whose side to be on or where to give our allegiance, what to love and what to hate, what to respect, and what to despise. We even find it difficult to be human beings, men with real flesh and blood of our own; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace, and are always striving to be some unprecedented kind of generalized human being. We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; and we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea....
[Emphasis added]
Dostoevsky brilliantly recognizes what modernity or life in the modern times has done to man. By mechanizing him as nothing more than an animal or a machine, man has lost not only his humanity, but his entire connection to imagination and myth, tradition, and fundamental institutions including family and community.
Indeed modernity is a term almost impossible to define in what I hope to be a fairly small blog post ;). Historians cite different events that triggered the beginning of modernity. To generalize, I'm understanding modernity as the advent of secular humanism and ideology that coincided with the triumph of empirical science, rational Christianity, and utilitarian and pragmatic philosophy. Roughly speaking, this started with the Enlightenment and culminated in the late 19th century. Modern thinkers include Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Spencer, Dewey, and of course the ultimate modern Karl Marx. These men and others convinced of their own righteousness, attempted to create the world as they would like it. Believing their assumptions about the most fundamental questions of humanity including what is God, what is man, and what is man's place in the order of things to be the most correct, ideologues and other moderns attempted to implement their system to fix the "problems" they identified in the world.
These systems, eventually given names like "Marxism," "Fascism," "Nazism," and "Communism," would have only one end to their schemes. Death--- in the form of 205 million lives lost in the 20th century. The so called "century of progress" is not marked by man's technology, but by the gas chamber, the gulag, and the death camp.
All this because man has misidentified both himself and his God choosing instead to act as "rational" creatures, born of ideas and ideologies. And so modernity, divorcing itself from all that is good, chose to compartmentalize the world into boxes so as to examine all the pieces and create the system that will finally get it right. This confusion of the universal with the particular, shatters the imagination which can no longer see the complexity within each and every man in history-- which is the story of man.
Whether or not we are in an age of post-modernity almost seems irrelevant. The blood of millions upon millions of people, many of them brothers and sisters in Christ, lies almost ignored in a world of chaos, death, and suffering. What does any of this matter to those of us in America, materially blessed and spiritually apathetic to our own ideologies of "liberalism" and "conservatism." The effects of modernism in America have seeped into nearly every aspect of American life- our familes, churches, schools, communities, etc all live and breath the language thoughts and ideas of modernity.
Is there a way to escape this?
Christopher Dawson offers one possible option:
“The only remedy is to be found in that spiritual force by which the humility of God conquers the pride of the evil one. Hence the spiritual reformer cannot expect to have the majority on his side. He must be prepared to stand alone like Ezekiael and Jeremy. He must take as his example St. Augustine besieged by the Vandals at Hippo, or St. Gregory preaching at Rome with the Lombards at the gates. For the true helpers of the world are the poor in spirit, the men who bear the sign of the cross on their foreheads, who refused to be overcome by the triumph of injustice and put their sole trust in the salvation of God.”
In an age of darkness, those like Dawson provide some hope admist a battle that seems all but lost.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
C.S. Lewis on Friendship
I figured I might blog about some of the big ideas I've been wrestling with the past few years in college. It is impossible to record completely the many things I have learned. And the motivation might not be there while I am in D.C. or even back at school again. Who knows if anyone will read this anyways? But perhaps this is something worth doing for its own sake. Tonight, I'll start with what God has taught me regarding friendship.
Learning to take friendship seriously has been one of the most important journeys I have traveled during my time at college. Friendship was always something secondary to me, in that I viewed as necessary because of the benefits it might offer me. It seemed as if everyone had friends, which is why I also needed to have friends. No one wants to be friendless. There's a normalcy to friendship that humans seem to crave. Going to college introduced me to many wonderful friends. Every year I get what I believe is a clearer picture of what true friendship is. I thought I'd share some of my observations with the help of C.S. Lewis, whose chapter on Friendship in the Four Loves, remains one of the most influential writings in my life today.
Lewis distinguishes four primary loves, affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Of all these, he considers friendship the least necessary. After all, no one would exist without eros, nor would be properly cared for without affection. It is for this reason that friendship fails to receive any attention in the modern world, although Aristotle considered it a virtue, and Cicero wrote a book on it.
But as Lewis points out, few people value friendship because few experience it! There are many reasons for this, and Lewis meticulously explains why he believes few understand the true nature of friendship. He blames the suspicion that arouses when the collective sees the growth of individual friendships, an envious "democratic" sentiment that grows jealous when one may not be the friend of someone else, and the accusation that homosexuality may underlie deep friendships among the same gender. Lewis also clarifies the difference between companionship and friendship. For many people, those whom they would consider "friends" are simply "companions." Friendship is more than just sharing something in common. According to Lewis, it is a "shared vision" able to produce "an immense solitude." Friendship must be ABOUT something, friends must seek the same truth for it to be more than affection or companionship.
Lewis also suggests that friendship always desires to grow among others unlike eros, which needs to stay between two people, friendship always longs for new friends. The qualification to join, is the pursuit of a common interest, a transcendent truth that allows friends to look ahead at what they seek. Friends together seek something "more inward, less widely shared, and less easily defined." Continuing, Lewis beautifully writes, "we picture lovers face to face but friends side by side; their eyes look ahead."
Yet what are the rewards of true friendship according to Lewis? Lewis describes true friendship as "that luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen.... This alone of all the loves seemed to raise you to the level of gods or angels." It is this type of love that is "even as great a love as eros." It is not self-conscious for "eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities." This type of love is meant for its own sake. Writes Lewis
I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
Lewis also warns against the dangers of friendship, specifically pride and the type of exclusivity that exist so that we may bask "in the moonshine of our collective self-approval." Rather the true purpose of friendship is found within God's sovereign plan so that we might know Him better.
Friendship is not a reward for or discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good friendship, increased by Him through the friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing.
I have been so blessed by not only these insights from Lewis, but the pictures of friendship God has shown me over the past three years. I can only hope that as I strive to be a better friend to those whom God has called me to love and serve, that the love I have for my friends, will be a shadow like that which exists between the angels.
Learning to take friendship seriously has been one of the most important journeys I have traveled during my time at college. Friendship was always something secondary to me, in that I viewed as necessary because of the benefits it might offer me. It seemed as if everyone had friends, which is why I also needed to have friends. No one wants to be friendless. There's a normalcy to friendship that humans seem to crave. Going to college introduced me to many wonderful friends. Every year I get what I believe is a clearer picture of what true friendship is. I thought I'd share some of my observations with the help of C.S. Lewis, whose chapter on Friendship in the Four Loves, remains one of the most influential writings in my life today.
Lewis distinguishes four primary loves, affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Of all these, he considers friendship the least necessary. After all, no one would exist without eros, nor would be properly cared for without affection. It is for this reason that friendship fails to receive any attention in the modern world, although Aristotle considered it a virtue, and Cicero wrote a book on it.
But as Lewis points out, few people value friendship because few experience it! There are many reasons for this, and Lewis meticulously explains why he believes few understand the true nature of friendship. He blames the suspicion that arouses when the collective sees the growth of individual friendships, an envious "democratic" sentiment that grows jealous when one may not be the friend of someone else, and the accusation that homosexuality may underlie deep friendships among the same gender. Lewis also clarifies the difference between companionship and friendship. For many people, those whom they would consider "friends" are simply "companions." Friendship is more than just sharing something in common. According to Lewis, it is a "shared vision" able to produce "an immense solitude." Friendship must be ABOUT something, friends must seek the same truth for it to be more than affection or companionship.
Lewis also suggests that friendship always desires to grow among others unlike eros, which needs to stay between two people, friendship always longs for new friends. The qualification to join, is the pursuit of a common interest, a transcendent truth that allows friends to look ahead at what they seek. Friends together seek something "more inward, less widely shared, and less easily defined." Continuing, Lewis beautifully writes, "we picture lovers face to face but friends side by side; their eyes look ahead."
Yet what are the rewards of true friendship according to Lewis? Lewis describes true friendship as "that luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen.... This alone of all the loves seemed to raise you to the level of gods or angels." It is this type of love that is "even as great a love as eros." It is not self-conscious for "eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities." This type of love is meant for its own sake. Writes Lewis
I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
Lewis also warns against the dangers of friendship, specifically pride and the type of exclusivity that exist so that we may bask "in the moonshine of our collective self-approval." Rather the true purpose of friendship is found within God's sovereign plan so that we might know Him better.
Friendship is not a reward for or discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good friendship, increased by Him through the friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing.
I have been so blessed by not only these insights from Lewis, but the pictures of friendship God has shown me over the past three years. I can only hope that as I strive to be a better friend to those whom God has called me to love and serve, that the love I have for my friends, will be a shadow like that which exists between the angels.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Thoughts on Junior Year
I believe learned more about life this past year than ever before. I still am unable to get over how fast the year went, but I am thankful it is finished. I will miss many friends, however, especially the seniors who were such an incredible part of my college community and are now moving on to other things. I am excited for this summer, the opportunity to go to Washington D.C. and spend some time with friends down there. I've compiled a list of sorts of some of the highlights of this past year along with a few quotations at the end which I think best summarize the important things I have learned.
*I took the best, most influential, and most difficult classes of my life this past year. Last fall I took Dr. Birzer's Sectionalism and Civil War remains my favorite history class at Hillsdale. I also took Dr. Westblade's Seminar on the Life of Jonathan Edwards which was not only a great spiritual blessing, but it provided me with a senior thesis topic on the Edwards's covenant theology. Both classes I took with Dr. Gamble this past year reintroduced me to St. Augustine's City of God and helped me understand the danger of the earthly borrowing from the transcendent in relation to America's religious identity.
*This spring I took Dr. Birzer's American Order and Disorder which focused on the problems of modernity, the error of humanism divorced from Christianity, and the power of the imagination as a means to understanding myth and the revealed Logos in history. From Russell Kirk to Eric Voegelin, I understand the reasons why modernity can never fulfill what it promises. Also, the lectures on T.S. Eliot forever changed my life and the way I view the world. I also took the "capstone" Hillsdale class, Artes Liberales. The class is taught by two professors, Dr. Whalen a professor of English and our associate provost, and Dr. Kalthoff our outgoing Dean of Faculty and current Chair of the History Department. For three hours on Wednesday afternoons, we talked about the importance of a liberal education, why and how one could pursue it, and the insufficiencies of modern day education, of vocational training, specialization, and practical knowledge. Liberal education is a lifestyle, a way to live with a well-ordered soul. This class tied in many of the big ideas that I had long been wrestling with, and synthesized great thinkers of the western tradition from Plato, to Aristotle, to Cicero, to Augustine, to Aquinas, to Melanchton, through many of the founders of the American Republic.
*I grew closer to many of my professors. I enjoyed many lunches and dinners with Dr. Gamble, Dr. Westblade, and Dr. Birzer. What a blessing to be at a school where the professors care about the spiritual and intellectual lives of their students!
*It was a blessing to see the growth of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the community that Rev. Henes and his family worked to build among the students.
*I had an awesome year as an RA and was blessed with some of the most wonderful guys on campus. I also developed very close friendships, and strengthened many existing ones. I look forward to returning as the student house director of my dorm in the fall.
*Revived interest in the American Studies major at Hillsdale. I was elected president of the American Studies Honorary, Delta Pi Nu, and look forward to the coming year to recruiting new members and promoting stimulating intellectual discussion around campus.
*Building a campfire in the middle of winter, and reading G.K. Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse" by the light of the fire.
*The many great nights of reading the Bible, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, and other great authors out loud in the dorm.
*Delicious taco nights at the Ramp with four amazing girls, Hannah, Elyse, Bethany, and Jami, three of whom graduated this past weekend.
*Many many many fun times. Dances, concerts, Michigan Football game, Detroit Tigers game, chilling at the Donnybrook (off-campus house with a number of good friends), fall break in Chicago, Spring Break in NYC, etc. It was the most stressful academic year, but there was also time for plenty of fun!
Here are some great quotations that changed my life and only begin to summarize this past year:
At the back of every discussion of the good society lies this question, What is the object of human life? The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is
competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes, instead, that the object of life is Love. He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt. He has learnt that Love is the source of all being, and that Hell itself is ordained by Love. He understands that Death, when we have finished the part that was assigned to us, is the reward of Love. And he apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death.
---Russell Kirk
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
--- T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding" from the Four Quartets
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
--- T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.
Knowledge is most truly free when it is philosophical knowledge...
--- John Henry Newman, Idea of a University, Discourse V.
Leisure, then as a condition of the soul-... is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion- in the real.
--- Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture
*I took the best, most influential, and most difficult classes of my life this past year. Last fall I took Dr. Birzer's Sectionalism and Civil War remains my favorite history class at Hillsdale. I also took Dr. Westblade's Seminar on the Life of Jonathan Edwards which was not only a great spiritual blessing, but it provided me with a senior thesis topic on the Edwards's covenant theology. Both classes I took with Dr. Gamble this past year reintroduced me to St. Augustine's City of God and helped me understand the danger of the earthly borrowing from the transcendent in relation to America's religious identity.
*This spring I took Dr. Birzer's American Order and Disorder which focused on the problems of modernity, the error of humanism divorced from Christianity, and the power of the imagination as a means to understanding myth and the revealed Logos in history. From Russell Kirk to Eric Voegelin, I understand the reasons why modernity can never fulfill what it promises. Also, the lectures on T.S. Eliot forever changed my life and the way I view the world. I also took the "capstone" Hillsdale class, Artes Liberales. The class is taught by two professors, Dr. Whalen a professor of English and our associate provost, and Dr. Kalthoff our outgoing Dean of Faculty and current Chair of the History Department. For three hours on Wednesday afternoons, we talked about the importance of a liberal education, why and how one could pursue it, and the insufficiencies of modern day education, of vocational training, specialization, and practical knowledge. Liberal education is a lifestyle, a way to live with a well-ordered soul. This class tied in many of the big ideas that I had long been wrestling with, and synthesized great thinkers of the western tradition from Plato, to Aristotle, to Cicero, to Augustine, to Aquinas, to Melanchton, through many of the founders of the American Republic.
*I grew closer to many of my professors. I enjoyed many lunches and dinners with Dr. Gamble, Dr. Westblade, and Dr. Birzer. What a blessing to be at a school where the professors care about the spiritual and intellectual lives of their students!
*It was a blessing to see the growth of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the community that Rev. Henes and his family worked to build among the students.
*I had an awesome year as an RA and was blessed with some of the most wonderful guys on campus. I also developed very close friendships, and strengthened many existing ones. I look forward to returning as the student house director of my dorm in the fall.
*Revived interest in the American Studies major at Hillsdale. I was elected president of the American Studies Honorary, Delta Pi Nu, and look forward to the coming year to recruiting new members and promoting stimulating intellectual discussion around campus.
*Building a campfire in the middle of winter, and reading G.K. Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse" by the light of the fire.
*The many great nights of reading the Bible, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, and other great authors out loud in the dorm.
*Delicious taco nights at the Ramp with four amazing girls, Hannah, Elyse, Bethany, and Jami, three of whom graduated this past weekend.
*Many many many fun times. Dances, concerts, Michigan Football game, Detroit Tigers game, chilling at the Donnybrook (off-campus house with a number of good friends), fall break in Chicago, Spring Break in NYC, etc. It was the most stressful academic year, but there was also time for plenty of fun!
Here are some great quotations that changed my life and only begin to summarize this past year:
At the back of every discussion of the good society lies this question, What is the object of human life? The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is
competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes, instead, that the object of life is Love. He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt. He has learnt that Love is the source of all being, and that Hell itself is ordained by Love. He understands that Death, when we have finished the part that was assigned to us, is the reward of Love. And he apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death.
---Russell Kirk
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
--- T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding" from the Four Quartets
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
--- T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.
Knowledge is most truly free when it is philosophical knowledge...
--- John Henry Newman, Idea of a University, Discourse V.
Leisure, then as a condition of the soul-... is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion- in the real.
--- Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture
Sunday, January 4, 2009
A new way of looking at things...
You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Psalm 16:11
"You made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace till they rest in you."
"You are my God, my Life, my holy Delight..."
"Confessions" St. Augustine
"That God in seeking his glory, therein seeks the good of his creatures: because the emanation of his glory (which he seeks and delights in, as he delights in himself and his own eternal glory) implies the communicated excellency and happiness of his creature. And that in communicating his fullness for them, he does it for himself: because their good, which he seeks, is so much in union and communion with himself. God is their good. Their excellency and happiness is nothing but the emanation and expression of God's glory: God in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself: and in seeking himself, i.e. himself diffused and expressed (which he delights in, as he delights in his own beauty and fullness), he seeks their glory and happiness."
"The End Which God Created the World"- Jonathan Edwards
"God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake... We were made not primarily that we may love God (although we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well-pleased.'"
"The Problem of Pain"- C.S. Lewis
Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created.
Revelation 4:11
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Psalm 16:11
"You made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace till they rest in you."
"You are my God, my Life, my holy Delight..."
"Confessions" St. Augustine
"That God in seeking his glory, therein seeks the good of his creatures: because the emanation of his glory (which he seeks and delights in, as he delights in himself and his own eternal glory) implies the communicated excellency and happiness of his creature. And that in communicating his fullness for them, he does it for himself: because their good, which he seeks, is so much in union and communion with himself. God is their good. Their excellency and happiness is nothing but the emanation and expression of God's glory: God in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself: and in seeking himself, i.e. himself diffused and expressed (which he delights in, as he delights in his own beauty and fullness), he seeks their glory and happiness."
"The End Which God Created the World"- Jonathan Edwards
"God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake... We were made not primarily that we may love God (although we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well-pleased.'"
"The Problem of Pain"- C.S. Lewis
Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created.
Revelation 4:11
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