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ElvishWanderer87
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Name: Brad
Country: United States
Birthday: 11/24/1987
Gender: Male
Interests: Abelard, Anselm, Aquinas, Boethius, Dionysius, Kierkegaard, Leithart, Name of the Rose, Nevin, Ockham, Schaff, Scotus, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Wilson, Wright, Eastern Orthodoxy, Latin...yeah, you get the idea.
"This is the extreme of human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God." --Aquinas
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
Member Since:
6/16/2004
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| An Ode to St. PeterHe’s got no bishops’ mitre, nor no fancy purple cloak
He’s got no golden crucifix, and his chanting often croaks,
He’s got no halo on his head, though his crown shines bright and bare,
His gravity has pulled it down—now his chin has all the hair!
His bright eyes flicker through the windows of his spectacles,
They’ve grown to be a part of him, the rims that frame his soul,
Still fastened on his nose, even when he sleeps or has to sneeze,
A symbiotic fixture, like the lichens on the trees.
But his mouth’s his greatest feature, from which floods of wisdom flow;
He stammers and he mumbles, but you know he always knows
You raise your hand; he searches through the bookshelves of his mind
He takes one down, and opens it, finds the page that’s underlined.
His namesake an apostle, you’d expect a saintly air,
His wisdom and kind counsel leave no disappointment there;
But I wonder if St. Peter ever leaned back on one chair leg
I wonder if he giggled or drank coffee by the keg.
Our Muscovite St. Peter might not be the average breed
You wouldn’t find him in an abbey, or on the pages of St. Bede,
But his twinkling eye, his coffee mug, his humble stammering tongue
Are the better parts of sainthood, which alas oft go unsung.
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| Poem #1: Little Gray MenLittle Gray Men
A little gray man stands in front of me,
He holds his short gray sword up high—
A stubby little thing, a hobbit-sword, like Sting;
No one would wield a sword that short.
He thrusts it forward, over his head—
An awkward position, no good for stabbing—
You could never stab someone that way.
Perhaps he’s pointing the way to something:
“The enemy are over there!”
But maybe not. He seems more like a statue than a soldier.
But after all, he was cheap, and his rugged simplicity
Has something to be said for it.
Another little gray man (but a different gray)
Stands fierce at the head of his fellows
On my living room floor.
“Charge!” he yells, his lips parted,
From which a wispy beard hangs
like overgrown moss
off a gray rock.
He too holds a sword above his head,
But swinging it like a scythe,
ready to lop the feather off his ridiculous hat.
Like a firecracker ready to explode, not the rugged old statue—
this one was worth every penny.
And a whole host of little gray men
Stand sentinel on their beach bluff
They sit tight in their trenches, waiting for warriors
To jump out, firing, from boats below—blasting their flamethrowers.
Alas, I am too old now for these two-inch soldiers;
(at least, so I am told)
Their battle-worn faces, so familiar now, must lie forgotten,
Collecting dust in a dingy basement—
Perhaps someday my son will want to play.
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| Big Ben strikes again"Bernanke also addressed inflation today, which rose by 4.1% in 2007.
"Overall and core inflation should moderate this year and next, so long as the public's confidence in the Federal Reserve's commitment to price stability is unshaken," said Bernanke. "
Haha! Too late. | | |
| Watch Dr. Leithart kick buttI exhort you all to go check out the official Federal Vision discussion on De Regno Christi. Dr. Leithart is spectacular as usual. He's got a particularly interesting breed of opponent this time--the raving-lunatic-uber Presbyterian type, that is, Darryl Hart. I particularly appreciated this comment of Hart's:
"as anti-ecumenical as it sounds, a Reformed Christian’s first identity is Reformed and then Christian."
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| I Bruise My Body and Make it My SlaveMy second composition for Mr. Jones--this one on a topic of my own choosing, in a totally different style. (with typos and formatting unfixed)
“But I bruise my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.” said St. Paul to the immoral Corinthian Christians.
“Well, that’s very noble of you and all, Paul, but doesn’t that seem a little extreme…a little Gnostic, even, Paul?” So we might be tempted to say. Well, maybe we wouldn’t be quite so pert as to accuse the venerable Apostle with Gnosticism; we would quickly correct ourselves, “Well, not that you’re being Gnostic yourself, Paul. No, of course not. But, you gotta be careful what you say. People might take that the wrong way. It sounds like you’re acting like the body is a bad, sinful thing, and that we can fix sin by disciplining our bodies and controlling our external actions. Of course, I know that you know sin is a heart and will thing, and the body is just a metaphor and all here. But, you gotta be careful what you say, you know. That’s the kind of talk that gives us monks and asceticism and flagellants and stuff. So, you know, try not to sound too Gnostic.”
I’m sure the Apostle would appreciate the helpful hint. But, did it ever occur to us, perhaps, that we’re the Gnostics? That maybe the all those medieval maniacs had something right? That maybe St. Cuthbert, standing chest-deep in the icy waters of the North Sea for an all-night prayer vigil knew something we didn’t? Or St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers, camping out in the middle of nowhere, refusing sex and food and sleep in their quest for righteousness? Did it ever occur to us that all those Benedictine monks with their slim diets and fat rule-books weren’t just papist hypocrites, that maybe they have something to tell us about the quest for virtue? Well, maybe it didn’t ever occur to us. But let’s shut up and listen up for a moment, and see what they have to tell us about how to overcome sin. After all, it doesn’t look like we, in all our modern wisdom amidst all of our self-help and spiritual discipline books, have exactly “nailed the lid on sin’s coffin” (a chapter title from one such book) when it comes to anger or gluttony or sloth or porn. So, like I said, let’s shut up and listen up.
“If we wish to dwell in the tent of [Christ’s] kingdom, we will never arrive unless we run there by doing good deeds,” Benedict admonishes his fellow-monks in the prologue to his Monastic Rule.
“Hold up there! That’s works-salvation!”
“Renounce yourself in order to follow Christ; discipline your body; do not pamper yourself, but love fasting. You must relieve the lot of the poor, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and bury the dead. Go to help the troubled and console the sorrowing.”
“Yes, yes, that’s all well and good, but any hypocrite can do that. You must remind them, Benedict, that it’s really a right heart and will that matter.”
Yes, Benedict knows that: “This very obedience, however, will be acceptable to God and agreeable to men only if compliance with what is commanded is not cringing or sluggish or half-hearted, but free from any grumbling or any reaction of unwillingness.” But, unfortunately, his confession that heart-obedience is important doesn’t seem to stop him from putting an awful lot of emphasis on external actions. In discussing humility, a thoroughly internal virtue, he describes the capstone of humility as follows: “that a monk always manifests humility in his bearing no less than in his heart, so that it is evident at the Work of God, in the oratory, the monastery or the garden, on a journey, or in the field, or anywhere else. Whether he sits, walks or stands, his head must be bowed and his eyes cast down.”
Benedict goes on, in his Rule, which he offers as the “tools for the cultivation of virtues” (73), to tell his brothers how much they ought to talk, what kind of bedding and what kind of sandals they ought to use, and how many ounces of bread they can have per day.
“Well, really, Benedict, we understand that any organization like yours must have its rules, but if you’re trying to cultivate virtue, are you really going about it in the best way? Shouldn’t you have spent more time talking about private prayer and meditation, inward wrestling and vigilance of the soul and all that? That’s what John Owen talks about when he talks about the Mortification of Sin.”
Oh yeah, John Owen did write a book called that. I’m sure it has some helpful stuff to say on this topic—let’s investigate.
Well, it seems he has a clear mind on the issue. Paul says we need to “mortify the deeds of the body,” yes, but obviously, “though the outward deeds are here only expressed, yet the inward and next causes are chiefly intended; the ‘axe is to be laid to the root of the tree,’—the deeds of the flesh are to be mortified in their causes, from whence they spring.” (8) From this we see clearly that those dirty Papists (may they rot in their graves) were sadly misguided. Yes, poor folks. Too bad those Catholics don’t understand sin. All those “rough garments, their vows, penances, disciplines, their course of monastical life…are sundry self-vexations insisted upon by others,” (17) Owen informs us. He further summarizes,
“In a word, they have sundry means to mortify the natural man, as to the natural life we lead; none to mortify lust or corruption. This is the general mistake of men ignorant of the gospel about this thing; and it lies at the bottom of very much of that superstition and will-worship that hath been brought into the world. What horrible self-macerations were practised by some of the ancient authors of monastical devotion! what violence did they offer to nature! what extremity of sufferings did they put themselves upon! Search their ways and principles to the bottom, and you will find that it had no other root but this mistake, namely, that attempting rigid mortification, they fell upon the natural man instead of the corrupt old man—upon the body wherein we live instead of the body of death.” (18)
As Protestants, we know better, thankfully. Owen has nine principles for us as to how to go about mortifying sin: 1. Analyze the nature of the sin; 2. Meditate on the danger of the sin; 3. Make yourself feel guilty; 4. Make yourself desire deliverance; 5. Analyze whether your natural temperament exacerbates the sin; 6. Prevent the occasions of the sin; 7. Oppose the first actions of the sin when they appear; 8. Think of the excellence of God; 9. Do not speak peace to the sin until God does first. Of these nine, only two (6 and 7) refer in any way to bodily actions, and these are quickly summarized in a paragraph each. Other than that, Owens’s ninety-page treatise steers clear of specific directives about external behaviour.
Owens’s counsel has been weighed in the balance by modern Reformed pastors, and found “masterful”—so masterful, in fact, that we get to have it distilled, in a pedestrian, easy-to-read format for us moderns by Kris Lundgaard’s The Enemy Within. This book kindly reminds us that sin is all about the “consent of the will,” and gives us the key to resisting it: “Fill your affections with the cross of Christ, and there will be no room for sin. Then, when the flesh fishes for your affections, you’ll spit on its pretty lures.” Our weapon against sin, we are advised, is meditation, in three forms: “Meditate on God with God,” “Meditate on the Word in the Word,” “Meditate on your self in the Word and with God.” Benedict might reply, “Shouldn’t we also focus on doing our duties of fasting, serving others, and doing what God says with our bodies? Shouldn’t we cultivate a routine of obedience?” Well, uh, no—actually those are two of the three behaviours Lundgaard lists as “The Flesh’s Counteroffensive.” (This particularly spiritual guidebook is published by the illustrious P&R Publishing House.)
Thus it is that a modern counselor, addressing young men with porn problems, might exhort them to “focus on loving God rather than self,” to “analyze the nature of the sin” or “meditate on the danger of the sin,” as Owens would suggest. What about, maybe, not hanging out at home alone with their computers? Or not watching R-rated movies? Or surrounding themselves with virtuous friends to keep them accountable? Or maybe even fasting to help discipline their bodily desires? No, we wouldn’t want to suggest that, because we need to get to the heart of the problem, the problem of a corrupt will.
But that’s not, it seems, how St. Anthony felt. Tormented by the temptations of lust in youth, but determined to discipline himself to virtue, “Anthony, having learned from the Scriptures that the devices of the devil are many, zealously continued the discipline, reckoning that though the devil had not been able to deceive his heart by bodily pleasure, he would endeavour to ensnare him by other means. For the demon loves sin. Wherefore more and more he repressed the body and kept it in subjection, lest haply having conquered on one side, he should be dragged down on the other. He therefore planned to accustom himself to a severer mode of life. And many marvelled, but he himself used to bear the labour easily; for the eagerness of soul, through the length of time it had abode in him, had wrought a good habit in him, so that taking but little initiation from others he showed great zeal in this matter. He kept vigil to such an extent that he often continued the whole night without sleep; and this not once but often, to the marvel of others. He ate once a day, after sunset, sometimes once in two days, and often even in four. His food was bread and salt, his drink, water only. Of flesh and wine it is superfluous even to speak, since no such thing was found with the other earnest men. A rush mat served him to sleep upon, but for the most part he lay upon the bare ground. He would not anoint himself with oil, saying it behoved young men to be earnest in training and not to seek what would enervate the body; but thy must accustom it to labour, mindful of the apostle’s words, ‘when I am weak, then I am strong.’ ‘For,’ said he, ‘the fibre of the soul is then sound when the pleasures of the body are diminished.’ ”
Well, good for Anthony, bravo and all that, but again, we want to say, isn’t this rather Gnostic? Well, to be sure, it was in some ways, but perhaps now it will be apparent why I suggested that we moderns are the real Gnostics. We think that we can abstract the soul from the body, that we can deal with sin by looking within, rather than by fixing what we do outwardly. Of course sin is buried deep within the heart, but it is also engrained in our bodily habits. Those who do the deeds of their father the devil will perish with him, but those who do the deeds of Christ our Lord will be conformed to his image. The ancient fathers, Benedict and Anthony, Bede, Athanasius, Johannes Climacus, and Augustine, understood if we bruised our bodies and made them our slaves, then we grow not merely in outward righteousness, but in the virtue of the soul; if we submitted our bodies, to God, our souls would follow suit.
Peter Brown summarizes this far more aptly than ever I could, speaking of the zealous asceticism of Anthony and the Desert Fathers:
In the desert tradition, the body was allowed to become the discreet mentor of the proud soul. No longer was the ascetic formed, as had been the case in pagan circles, by the unceasing vigilance of his mind alone. The rhythms of the body and, with the body, his concrete social relations determined the life of the monk: his continued economic dependence on the settled world for food, the hard school of day-to-day collaboration with his fellow-ascetics in shared rhythms of labor, and mutual exhortation in the monasteries slowly changed his personality. The material conditions of the monk’s life were held capable of altering the consciousness itself. Of all the lessons of the desert to a late antique thinker, what was most ‘truly astonishing’ was ‘that the immortal spirit can be purified and refined by clay.’
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