Church Chat II

The first edition of "Church Chat," in which I explained the meanings and etymologies of a number of Church-related words, was by far the most read post I've made on this site. Given its popularity, I thought it worthwhile to bring you another round of ecclesiastical vocabulary.

Confirmation -- from Latin confirmare, "to strengthen." In the Sacrament of Confirmation, we are strengthened in the gift of the Holy Spirit which we received at our Baptism. In the ancient world, oil was used to aid in healing injuries (as we still use ointments today for the same purpose); that is, it was used to make a sick person stronger. Sin is a sickness of the soul, and the anointing of this sacrament (as well as the Anointing of the Sick) acts as a sort of booster shot to fortify our our spiritual immune system. (This is not an exhaustive explanation of this sacrament, but it does describe an aspect of it.)

Grace -- from the Latin gratia, which, apart from itself meaning grace, means "favor, thanks, goodwill." The grace of God is not something I can adequately explain in a paragraph, but suffice it to say: it is God's sharing of His own life with us. It is His free gift to us, unearned and undeserved, a demonstration of His favor and goodwill. Here would need to follow a whole treatise on the distinction between earning and meriting, on how God's gracious action in us does not take away our freedom but rather grants freedom to us, and a host of other issues, but you might be better served by reading the section in the Catechism on grace. Say, that's a good one...

Catechism -- from the Greek katechesis, meaning "oral instruction," more literally "to sound down (into the ears)." Perhaps it's something of an oddity to use a word meaning "oral instruction" for a written text, but remember that the purpose of a catechetical text is use in teaching. This is much more evident in the format of past versions such as the Baltimore Catechism with its question-and-answer format. Catechisms are used in catechesis to hand on the faith. Say, that reminds me....

Tradition -- from the Latin tradere, "to hand over." Tradition, then, is that which is handed on, often used in a generational context: one generation bequeaths something to another. This word is used to describe the way in which the Christian faith is transmitted to succeeding generations, through teaching, example, and religious practice (especially the liturgy), and written works such as Scripture. (It seems to me that instead of drawing this divide between Scripture and Tradition, it would be more accurate to describe Scripture as part of and a product of the Tradition.) Note: The Latin word's flexibility allows it to mean both handing something on, like an heirloom, or handing someone over, as in betrayal. (If you look at the Latin text of the Mass, you'll see in the Eucharistic Prayers that when it says "on the night [Jesus] was betrayed" the Latin word is tradebatur, "he was handed over/betrayed.")

Reconciliation -- (I've mentioned this one in a previous post, but it's good enough to include again.) from Latin re-, "again," con-, "with," and cilia, "eyelash." To be reconciled, then, is to literally be eyelash to eyelash with someone once again. It is regaining a closeness you once had. And you can't be much closer to someone than having your eyelashes entangled. Think of a parent and child with their foreheads pressed together, or a couple kissing. That kind of intimate closeness. That's what reconciliation is about.

Saint -- from Latin sanctus, "holy." Like many Latin adjectives, sanctus is a verb form, the perfect passive participle. That fancy term means it's a word expressing an action that happened to a subject in the past, the effect of which continues into the present; in this case, sanctus is "one who has been made holy (and is still holy)." The saints are those who have received God's sanctifying grace and have cooperated with it and been made holy.

Liturgy -- from the Greek laos, "people," and ergon, "work." Liturgy is "the work of the people," or "a public service." Public services are done to satisfy obligations either owed to the people or required to be done by the people. We are obliged to worship God. But the obligation to worship God is not arbitrary or external, but necessary or internal. We need to worship God like we need to eat, or breath, or be with our loved ones. Too often, though, we substitute the good food of God for the junk food of lesser goods or goods twisted into evils (whether it be sleeping in rather than getting up and going to Mass, or seeking God's love through others via lust instead of self-giving love). We choose what might taste good for a moment, but will make us less healthy spiritually in the long run. This does give us what we need. The Mass, the Sacred Liturgy, is the pre-eminent place in which we get what we most need, for there we receive the true food, the Bread of Life and the Chalice of Salvation, the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. For unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood, we have no life within us.

The Meaning of Reconciliation

(This is a re-print from something I posted on my old blog, but I think folks might enjoy it....)

This might be a bold statement, but I’m going for it: the whole of salvation history is summed up in the word “reconciliation.”

What exactly does this word mean? I heard this from David Fagerberg, one of my former professors at Notre Dame: “cilia” is the Latin word for eyelash. So let’s piece it together: if “re” means “again,” and “con” means “with”, then “re-con-cilia-tion” is “to again be eyelash to eyelash with [someone].”

That’s about as close as you can get to a person; but notice, the emphasis is on regaining the closeness that you once had with someone.

We as human beings once had a great closeness with God, in the beginning. In their innocence, Adam and Eve stood uncovered before God, not needing to hide anything. God walked with them in the garden in the cool of evening, like you might do with an old friend after a big dinner --that’s closeness, being con-cilia. But we, in our forebears, separated ourselves from God by our pride, withdrew from that closeness, that intimacy, by wanting to change the nature of the relationship, by trying to be equal to God. Instead of being docile infants held in our Father’s arms, cheek to cheek, we were squirrely two-year olds who squirmed out. And when we realized what we did, we hid, we covered ourselves, and we couldn’t look God in the face anymore.

But God loved us and wanted us back. So He came among us as one of us, like to us in all things but sin—he had arms and legs, hands and feet, a heart and a mind… and eyelashes. Jesus came to sinners, to the afflicted, to the poor, and stood eye to eye with them and said: “Your sins are forgiven you.” And by His Cross, as man he stood eyelash to eyelash with God on our behalf and said, “Father, forgive them,” and as God could respond, “It is accomplished,” that is, our peace with God was restored.

And this is the Good News that the Apostles were sent to preach, as ambassadors for Christ, that “God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son, has reconciled himself to the world, and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.” And for the last two thousand years, the Church has brought God’s pardon and peace to us sinners, in the sacrament of baptism where the stain of original sin is washed clean, and in the sacrament of reconciliation, where the priest, speaking as Christ, says to us, “I absolve you of your sins.”

God wants nothing more than to hold us and say, “I love you.” May He grant us the grace not to squirm, but to coo with delight, and nuzzle the nose of our Father.

Four Ways of Speaking

Philosophy and theology deal with thick, heavy, dense subjects. It’s hard enough half the time to understand the question being asked, let alone the answer you get: “What is being? What is nature? What is the nature of being? What is essence of nature? What is the essence of God’s nature? Is existence itself God’s nature?” I’m guessing some of you went cross-eyed and passed out briefly mid-way through that series of questions. Hope you didn’t hit your head on anything. Point is: this stuff is hard.

Some people have a talent for engaging these topics in an easy and sensible way… and some do not. In reading different thinkers over the years, I’ve developed a theory:

There are four ways of communicating:

1. Speaking simply on simple matters. This is what most of our speech is like most of the time. Simple declarative statements: “She pushed me,” “God is good,” “That’s my coat,” or “Daniel Tosh isn’t funny.” No brain-busting concepts or unintelligible jargon.

2. Speaking complexly on simple matters. Here, though, we move to a level where we’re still not dealing with brain-busting concepts, but people for some reason feel the need to gussy it up; it’s the linguistic equivalent of wearing a tuxedo to a tailgate party. You’d find this exemplified by college sophomores:

Student: “Professor, can you elucidate for those of us currently present what precisely was the major precipitating factor for the conflict in question?”
Professor: “Do you mean, ‘How did the war start?’”

A more amusing example is found in this video, where Stephen Fry plays a bombastic barber.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J691coIfFvs

3. Speaking complexly on complex matters. Now we reach the level I was initially talking about. We’re dealing with brain-busting concepts, and for many it takes a boatload of special terms, words borrowed from other languages, and circumlocutions (i.e. “my father’s parents’ other son” instead of “my uncle”) to try to get the point across. For example:

“For the very early ancient Israelites, their Weltanschauung entailed a monolatric cosmology in which other deities were recognized while only one was honored with cultic worship.”

Now, there are simpler ways to say this (“The Israelites at first believed in a world where many gods existed, but they worshipped only one”), but they wouldn’t quite capture the content in the same way. It’s no crime to write or speak this way; most of us don’t have the ability to go beyond it. But some do….

4. Speaking simply on complex matters. This level is reserved for those true geniuses who are able to speak about difficult topics in a way that’s easy to understand without leaving out anything essential. Here are some of my favorite examples:
“Our hearts were made for you, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in thee.” St. Augustine captures the essence of human desire and God as the fulfillment of that desire in one simple and beautiful sentence.

“We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” C.S. Lewis here deftly points to a truth our politicians would do well to consider.

(I can’t leave out this example from Lewis, since it’s apropos to our subject: “Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”)

"When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." There are about 10 billion G.K. Chesterton quotes I could have chosen… so, yeah, I think we need a few more:

“To say that everybody is responsible means that nobody is responsible.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

"Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?" (on motherhood)

Anyway, you get the point, I hope. Be thankful when you come across those gifted people who are able to be so clear. They sure can make life easier.

You, Yes You, Are a Philosopher

I think for many people, the entry in their own mental dictionary for the term “philosophy” is something like this:

Philosophy (/fəˈläsəfē/):
1) a relatively useless undergraduate major populated by people who think they’re better than everyone else and whose personal hygiene leaves much to be desired, and who will most likely end up getting me a clean fork at a restaurant someday;
2) a relatively useless intellectual discipline where people use words to try to trick you into thinking whatever they want you to, or to split hairs and argue about things that don’t matter (see: sophistry).

I propose to you that your definition needs adjustment.

I propose that you, dear reader, are a philosopher and don’t realize it.

Have you ever used any of the following phrases:

--That’s not fair!
--How do you know?
--That doesn’t make sense.
--What is that?

Congratulations, you’re doing philosophy!

Each of these represents a different branch of philosophy.

“That’s not fair!” When we feel we’ve been treated unfairly, we’re assuming that we ought to be treated fairly, and that there is such a thing as fairness in the first place. It leads us to ask the question: what is fair? What do I owe other people? What do they owe me? What is justice? This is, in essence, the branch of philosophy known as ethics (from Greek ethos meaning “moral character”). We may not all use phrases like “categorical imperative” or “in medio virtus stat”, but every four-year old who’s had a toy taken from them, every person passed up for a promotion because the other guy golfs with the boss, in that moment becomes an ethicist.

“How do you know?” Every person wants to know the truth about things; not only that, they want to know how they can know the truth. How do we know things with any certainty? This is the branch of philosophy called epistemology (from the Greek episteme meaning “knowledge”). Any time you read the newspaper and try to sort out facts from opinions; any time you read anything from a statement of church doctrine to the results of a scientific study and wonder how we can know that; any time you do this, you’re engaged in epistemology—even if you aren’t using fancy phrases like “logical positivism” or “tabula rasa.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Human beings are reasoning creatures. We recognize that our reason is governed by certain rules or truisms or axioms that are the very foundation of our ability to think. For example: a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. If someone told you that they were both alive and not alive at the same time, you’d rightly say to them, “That’s nonsense.” Or, to borrow an example from Monty Python: All fish live in water. The mackerel is a fish. Therefore, the mackerel lives in water. The first two statements lead to the conclusion in the third statement. They do not lead to the conclusion that trout live in trees, or that if you buy sushi it will not rain, or that your wife doesn’t love you anymore. These are some basic uses of logic (from the Greek logos meaning “reason”). We may not all use specific terms like “fallacy of composition,” “major premise,” or “enthymeme,” but EVERBODY uses logic itself, and when they don’t, it only leads to trouble.

“What is that?” To ask this question is to invite the response: “This is X.” To say, “This is X” is to say, “This thing is something which has the nature of X, which can be identified by X.” The answer to the question makes a huge difference. “Oh, it’s a copperhead snake!” vs. “Oh, it’s a huge pile of cash!” This is one of the most basic questions we can ask about anything: what is the nature of this thing, and what is it like? What is it really like, beyond the nature we see? This is metaphysics (from the Greek meta “after, beyond” and physis “nature”), quite possibly the deepest of the philosophical branches because it is the most basic. We may not all use categories like “substance” or “accident,” or make distinctions between a thing’s essence and its existence like the professionals do, but we engage in this sort of thinking every day.

Now, as the fake dictionary entry above pointed out, there are people who abuse the philosophical disciplines. They use them to make arguments to please their listeners, persuade others to do what they want, or to ingratiate themselves to those in power, and not to seek the truth. These people Socrates called Sophists, and he despised them. There are an awful lot of Sophists running around in the world today, and we need to be on our guard against them. We need the right tools to do so.

Philosophy was born out of people making statements like the ones above and thinking about them in greater depth. They wanted to know what was true in life and what wasn't, in the hopes that it might help them to lead a good life and be happy. Philosophy at its linguistic root is “the love of wisdom,” or “wisdom, sought lovingly.” It is the pursuit of truth in its various forms and functions. It is something we all do. And if we’re going to do it well, it helps to be taught about it. If we’re going to be taught about it, it helps to have a teacher. If we want a teacher, someone has to go to school for it. That’s what I’m doing here at DSPT: preparing to make my own infinitesimally small contribution toward helping the world to think clearly.

Q&A: DSPT

What's DSPT stand for again?

The Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology.

Is it run by people from the Dominican Republic or something?

No, it's an apostolate of the Western province of the Order of Preachers, commonly known as the Dominicans.

Huh? what's an apostolate?

An "apostolate" is a term for an operation or place of ministry of a religious order, diocese, or other Church body. It comes from the Greek word meaning "to be sent out" that supplies the root for the word "apostle." This might help: the Latin equivalent word might be "missio," so think "mission" or "missionary" and you'll see.

OK. But why is this Order of Preachers called "Dominicans"?

After their founder, St. Dominic Guzman.

Wait, why are we talking about this guys? I thought we were talking about the school.

Well, since their name is in the school, and they founded it and run it, they're sort of important to the whole enterprise.

Do tell.

Well, way back in 1851, the Dominican Order founded a house of studies for their friars in Monterey, California.

(Wait, real quick: what's a friar?)

("Friar" is the term for their members used by orders like the Dominicans and Franciscans. It derives from the Latin word "frater" meaning "brother.")

(OK, thanks. Go on.)

That went along until 1932, when they moved the house to Oakland and incorporated it as the College of St. Albert the Great.

They moved the whole house!?

No, idiot, they moved their "house of studies." Think of the Earl of Grantham moving his "household" from the country to London for the season.

A. What are you, Bud Abbot? What are you calling me an idiot for? B. You've watched too much Downton Abbey.

A. You're right, I apologize. B. It is not possible to watch too much Downton Abbey. May I continue?

Please.

In 1962, the Graduate Theological Union formed, a consortium of small religious schools that combined in order to provide their students with more resources. The College of St. Albert joined the GTU in 1964, and received their accreditation from the state of California that same year.

What's all this College of St. Albert talk? Who's this St. Albert fellow when he's at home anyway?

The school officially changed its name in 1976 from the College of St. Albert the Great to the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. St. Albert the Great was a Dominican priest and later a bishop who lived in the 13th century. He was a great thinker of his time: philosopher, theologian, natural scientist. He is probably most famous for having been the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was through Albert's encouragement and recognition of Thomas's gifts that Thomas began to excel in his studies and became perhaps the greatest theologian in the Church's history.

The DSPT takes as its model for teaching that relationship between Albert and Thomas: personal, involved, open to investigating any question fully and fairly, always seeking the truth through the lights of human reason and divine revelation--fides quaerens intellectum, "faith seeking understanding."

Now I'll open the floor. Questions?