Film Recommendation

Peronal note: My post on Christian unity is taking a little longer to gel than I had hoped. In the meantime I thought I'd offer a recommendation.

Last Monday, I was fotunate to attend a preview of a film called Bella. It won the 2006 Toronto Film festival. I can understand why: the story, direction, and acting were all excellent. It really makes you realize how precious life is.

I can't find the general release date online, but I seem to recall that the filmmakers said March 2007. It's a film worth going way out of your way to see.

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IMDB entry

Here's a clip of reviews from the Wikipedia entry:

ABC NEWS: A romantic drama….Mexican director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's Bella tells the story of two people whose lives converge and turn upside down on a single day in New York. It has won the People's Choice Award, which is often an indicator of future Academy Award nominations.

INCONTENTION.com (An Oscar Website) Bella marks the debut feature of Alejandro Gomez Monteverde, a truly humble man in awe of the fact that he's actually made it here. It's better to know as little as possible about this film before going into it but let me tell you that it feels both sincere and loving. It's great to see a film that legitimately moves the viewer without being drowned in sap. And it does this in just 90 minutes. If it comes your way, see it. You won't regret it.

FOX NEWS: I am very pleased that the Toronto Film Festival chose Bella to win their top audience award over the weekend…. It's incredibly charming, with terrific performances by Tammy Blanchard and Mexican star Eduardo Verastegui and Manny Perez. It's directed by Alejandro Gomez Monteverde. It's too easy to say this is the "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" of this season, because "Bella" is far more complex and sophisticated while losing none of the humor. Whoever decides to release Bella will have a nice little hit on their hands. The freshness and lack of affectation in Bella must have appealed to audiences who had to endure a number of big-name films that seemed contrived, stale or calculated.

Right to Life

I'm posting today because tomorrow morning I depart for Washington, D.C., where I will participate in the March for Life. (See below for other noteworthy pro-life sites.)

The entire current issue of Touchstone revolves around the right to life and includes many excellent articles. Among them is "The Silent Witness Speaks: Abortion & Richard Hays’s Moral Ambiguity" by W. Ross Blackburn. The nub of the article is captured in the following selection:

In Scripture, people are distinguished (or categorized) in a number of ways: as Jew or Gentile, master or slave, male or female, and even in terms of their stage in life, as children, young men, men, widows, elders, young women/virgins, and so forth. However, nowhere in Scripture is the unborn child distinguished from other children. Nowhere is he set apart as a separate category.

In other words, there is no word for “fetus” in the Bible. The observation is crucial, for this imposition of the category “fetus” upon the Scriptures is the foundation of Hays’s [pro-abortion] position.

Also noteworthy on abortion and politics is an article in The Atlantic Monthly, "Closing the God Gap" by Hanna Rosin, which traces the electoral success of Democrats who are Christians to a firm called "Common Good," headed by Mara Vanderslice and Eric Sapp. The basic idea, as expressed in the concluding paragraph, is good:

At the very least, such a change [shift of religious voters to the Democrats] might take the sting out of the culture wars. If religious voters come up for grabs nationally, both parties will have to try to win them over the old-fashioned way: using substance and politics instead of just rhetoric.

I wholeheartedly endorse this sentiment, but it rings rather hollow, given the content of the article, in particular:

Vanderslice and Sapp helped the candidates create a new language to use in talking about faith and values, aimed in part at neutralizing hot-button issues. On abortion, for instance, they banned the word choice and pushed reduction, going one step further with Clinton’s idea that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare”: “We must work together across our differences to reduce the need and numbers of abortions by reducing unplanned pregnancies and helping women and families get the support they need when facing a crisis pregnancy,” read a brochure for Sherrod Brown, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio.

(Say, empty rhetoric like repackaging "choice" as "reduction"?)

Given the whispered report that many people who claim to be anti-abortion have a secret desire to preserve the "right to choice" as an escape plan for their sexually promiscuous lives, it seems tragically plausible that Christian voters will let themselves be seduced by such insincerity.

Tomorrow I'm flying, which is to say, entering the maw of the national-security apparatus (ah, the joys of the TSA sock hop!), an Atlantic article on the past-glamour of flight hit close to home, and contained a penetrating insight into the chimerical nature of glamour:

Today air travel is just a more or less enjoyable way to get from place to place, not an emotionally resonant symbol of something greater than itself. We frequent flyers forget how unnatural it is to zoom through the air in a metal tube, and we imagine that airline glamour was all about real silverware and perfectly coiffed stewardesses—the experience on the plane. But glamour is always an illusion, an imaginative picture with the blemishes removed. With experience comes disillusionment, no matter how luxurious the reality may be.

I'm reminded of the question in the renewal of baptismal promises, "Do you reject the glamor of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin?" The attraction of glamour, like that of evil itself, is an illusion. Evil has its day, but it too will pass. The laws of this nation will not forever sanction the killing of the unborn.

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W. Ross Blackburn, "The Silent Witness Speaks: Abortion & Richard Hays’s Moral Ambiguity," Touchstone (January/February 2007), 39.

Hanna Rosin, "Closing the God Gap," The Atlantic (January/February 2007), 39. [subscription required for full text access]

Virginia Postrel, "Up, Up, and Away," The Atlantic (January/February 2007), 161. [subscription required for full text access]

Noteworthy pro-life sites:
Silent No More
Black Genocide
Canadian Center for Bio-ethical Reform

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Note:I apologize for not having a more original post this week. Next week my post will be substantial and on the subject of Christian unity, the octave dedicated to which we are celebrating now.

God's Resplendence in Creation

The faith that I love the best, says God, is hope.
 

Faith doesn't surprise me.

lt's not surprising.

I am so resplendent in my creation.

In the sun and the moon and in the stars.

In all of my creatures.

In the stars of the firmament and in the fish of the sea.

In the universe of my creatures.

Upon the face of the earth and upon the face of the waters.

In the movements of the stars in heaven.

In the wind that blows upon the sea and in the wind that blows in the valley.

In the peaceful valley.

In the hushed and hidden valley.

In the plants and in the beasts and in the beasts of the forest.

And in man.

My creature.

In peoples and in men and in kings and in peoples.

In man and in woman his companion.

And especially in children.

My creatures.

In the gaze and in the voice of children.

Because children are more my creatures.
Than men are.

They haven't yet been defeated by life.
On earth.

And of them all they are my servants.
Above all.

And the voice of children is purer than the voice of the wind in the calm of the valley.

In the hushed and hidden valley.

And the gaze of children is purer than the blue of the sky, than the milky sky, and than a star's rays in the peaceful night.

Yes, I am so resplendent in my creation.

Upon the face of the mountains and on the face of the plains.

In bread and in wine and in the man who tills and in the man who sows and in the harvest of grain and in the harvest of grapes.

In the light and in the darkness.

And in the heart of man, which is what is most profound in the world.

The created world.

So profound it is impenetrable to all eyes.

Except my own.

In the tempest that rocks the waves and in the tempest that shakes the leaves.

The leaves of the trees in the forest.

And conversely in the calm of a beautiful evening.

In the sands of the sea and in the stars that are grains of sand in the sky.

In the stone of the threshold and in the stone of the hearth and in the stone of the altar.

In prayer and in sacraments.

In men's houses and in the church that is my house on earth.

In my creature the eagle who flies upon the peaks.

The kingly eagle who has a wingspan of at least two meters and sometimes three.

And in my creature the ant who creeps and who hoards pettily.

In the ground.

In the ant, my servant.

And even in the serpent.

In my servant the ant, my tiny servant, who hoards greedily like a miser.

Who works like one unhappy and who has no break and who has no rest.

But death and but the long sleep of winter.
 

shrugging his shoulders from so much evidence
before so much evidence

I am so resplendent in all of my creation.

In the tiny one, in my tiny creature, in my tiny servant, in the tiny ant.

Who hoards greedily, like man.

Like tiny man.

And who digs tunnels in the dirt.

In the cellars of the earth.

For stingily gathering his treasures.

His worldly treasures.

Pitifully.

And even in the serpent.

Who tricked the woman and who for that crawls on his belly.

And who is my creature and who is my servant.

The serpent who tricked the woman.

My servant.

Who tricked man my servant.

I am so resplendent in my creation.

In all that happens to men and to peoples, and to the poor.

And even to the rich.

Who don't want to be my creatures.

And who take refuge.

From being my servants.

In all the good and evil that man has done and undone.

(And I am above it all, because I am the master, and I do what he has undone and I undo what he has done.)

And unto the temptation to sin.

Even.

And in all that happened to my son.

Because of man.

My creature.

Whom I had created.

In the conception, in the birth and in the life and in the death of my son.

And in the holy sacrifice of the Mass.
 

In every birth and in every life.

And in every death.

And in eternal life that will never end.

That will overcome all death.
 

I am so resplendent in my creation.
 

That in order really not to see me these poor people would have to be blind.
 

Charity, says God, that doesn't surprise me.

It's not surprising.

These poor creatures are so miserable that unless they had a heart of stone, how could they not have love for each other.

How could they not love their brothers.

How could they not take the bread from their own mouth, their daily bread, in order to give it to the unhappy children who pass by.

And my son had such a love for them.
 

My son their brother.

Such a great love.
 

But hope, says God, that is something that surprises 'me.

Even me.

That is surprising.
 

Charles Peguy, Portal of the Mystery of Hope trans. David Louis Schindler, Jr. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdman's, 1996), 3-6. Another edition available here.

The Reality of Non-physical Causes

There are three parts to this post. First I want to explain the four ways we speak of causes. Second I want to relate these four ways to the causes that are the subject of modern science. Third, we will see how it is possible for God to act in ways to which modern science modern science cannot even relate, let alone comprehend.

First: there are four ways that we speak of causes or explanations. The goal of science (in both the broad and narrow senses) is to explain, and to explain is to discover causes. Aristotle observed that four general categories of cause are present in all changes of our everyday experience. This will be clearer with an example. To explain the existence of a lamp, we need to know

1. what is it made of? —brass (material cause)
2. what or who made it? —the lamp maker (efficient cause)
3. what is it? —a lamp (formal cause)
4. what is it for? —to illuminate the room (final cause–purpose, end, goal)

The material, efficient, formal, and final causes are just a more systematic way to use ordinary language, the possible exception being the formal cause, which may seem so obvious as to be pointless. But it is important to clarify: the formal cause is not just the shape of the thing, but something much more radical: it is what the thing is. In common experience, lamps come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but yet they all possess a commonality we’ll call “lampness” that we all know and recognize but could never capture in a drawing.

As Aristotle says, humans and their human productions are a subset of natural things, so it makes sense to ask analogous questions about nature. In nature, the four causes are more difficult to distinguish. We find that the agent that makes a natural thing is the thing itself. The tomato plant as a whole itself gathers the elements (solar energy, water, and carbon dioxide) and assembles them into itself. Likewise the purpose of a natural thing is the thing itself, for example, the purpose of the reddening of a tomato is the redness itself. (This coincidence of the formal and final causes fits nicely with the theology of Genesis, where God declares his creation, “Good,” that is, fulfilling its purpose simply by existing.)

Higher in the hierarchy of being, we find increasingly articulate manifestations of teleology or purpose. Purpose in human action is the most obvious, because it is external to the agent, e.g., a man saves money to buy a house. It’s also not too hard to see that other living things also act for ends. The roots of a tomato plant take up water and magnesium from the soil in order for photosynthesis to take place in the leaves. What almost everyone misses is that purpose extends even deeper. In the most basic sense, the very regularities of nature manifest purpose. That confetti is always attracted to the static electric charge on a balloon shows the order and purpose of nature. Teleology or purpose is not limited to the immediate action of intelligence, but has deep roots that penetrate all creation.

Now that you (hopefully) understand Aristotle's four causes, we will turn to understanding how modern science deals with but a very limited part of this schema. Michael J. Dodds's explanation is without peer:

The noton of "action" can be ascribed not only to efficient cause, but also to formal and final causes. In Aquinas' understanding, to act means "to make something to be in act." This can happen in a number of ways. When the artist shapes the clay into a ball, we can say that the artist (the efficient cause) makes the clay round. But we can also say the form of "roundness" makes the clay actually round. For all the artist's efforts, the clay will remain only potentially round until it possess that form or shape. We can also say that the final cause or end "acts" on the agent or "moves" the agent to act. If the artist works in order to make money, money (as a good to be attained) somehow induces the artist to work.

The action of an efficient cause may sometimes, but not always, be described in terms of quantitative force. The action of an artist on a block of clay, for instance, can be described in terms of how many pounds of pressure per square inch is exerted on it. The efficient causality of the teacher in directing the activity of the artist, however, cannot be so described.

Formal and final causality can never be described as quantitative force. The formal cause acts on the clay to make it actually round, but it does not act as a quantitative force. The clay is not actually round until is possesses the form or shape of "roundness," and that form in some way makes it actually found. But it does not make it round by exerting any sort of force on it. It acts according to the mode of formal causality by causing something (in this case the clay sphere) to be actual. Its action is quite different from that of efficient causality, especially from that brand of efficient causality known as "force."

The final cause acts on the agent to influence or induce her to act. If the artist works "to make money," making money is in some way the cause of her action. But we cannot describe this influence in terms of quantitative force. The final cause acts, but it acts according to the mode of final causality, as an end or good that induces the efficient cause to act. The mode of causality proper to the final cause cannot itself be reduced to efficient causality, much less to the mode of efficient causality we call "force."

...

Of the four causes in the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, only the efficient cause remains in Newtonian science. The formal and final causes disappear since they can neither be quantified nor empirically observed. Matter is not viewed as a "cause" or anything so unmeasurable as a principle of "possibility." Instead, it is viewed as the fundamental actuality or "stuff" of the universe (the atoms or ultimate particles). Only the efficient cause remains since it alone can be empirically observed, quantitatively represented, and experimentally manipulated.

We have seen causes completely beyond the ken of modern science, so now we can turn to explanations of how God acts in such ways. One type of formal cause is the exemplary cause. In terms of the sculpture analogy, the exemplary cause is the idea of the formed sculpture in the mind of the artist. Similarly, the exemplary cause of the universe is the form of creation in the mind of its Creator.

In the context of Christian theology, the mind of God is the Logos, the Word¹ of God, which St. John identifies with Jesus. This is clearly what St. John intends in the prologue of his Gospel, "In the beginning was the Word...," which parallels the beginning of Genesis ("In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.... And God said"). God's speech or Word, not only made the universe, but also made it intelligible.²

Beside exemplary causality, there are other ways invisible to modern science that God is a cause. God acts as an efficient, though non-physical, cause. As St. Augustine says, God created time along with the universe. Science can only measure (and treat) movable things, that is, things that exist in time, so we know that God must act as an efficient cause that cannot be measured by modern science. Additionally, he is the ultimate final cause ("the Omega" of Revelation) for which everything acts, the ultimate good that all creation seeks. There is no need for special scientific methods to see the signs of God’s rational power, as the world manifests it to all, as St. Paul says in Romans 1:20.

It strikes me that today's Christians shouldn't fall into the trap of letting the secular world dictate the terms of discussion. Instead of letting God be boxed into the Enlightenment's one-dimensional notion of causation, modern Christians should reclaim their ancient patrimony in which God (through Jesus Christ) is the atemporal cause of all that is temporal, the reason by which anything is intelligible, by which everything is, and for which it exists.

Notes

1. Jaroslav Pelikan lists several other meanings of the Greek Logos: mind, power, deed, reason, structure, purpose (58). The ideas of creatures within the Logos are the logoi. See the book cited below for a great exposition of the history of notions of the Cosmic Christ.

2. Cf. Col 1:15-19; John Paul II, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 3: "Eternally begotten and eternally loved by the Father, as God from God and Light from Light, he is the principle and archetype of everything created by God in time."

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Mortimer J. Adler, "The Four Causes," (chapter 6) Aristotle for Everybody.

Michael J. Dodds, "Science, Causality And Divine Action: Classical Principles For Contemporary Challenges," CTNS Bulletin 21:1 (Winter 2001), 3-12.

Jaroslav Pelikan, "The Cosmic Christ," (chapter 5) Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture

Salvo Magazine

I received a complimentary copy of the premier issue of Salvo (autumn 2006). The publication is associated with the Fellowship of St. James, the folks who publish Touchstone, and similarly hopes to defend Christianity from the attacks of secularism. The mission statement from the masthead reads:

Salvo is dedicated to debunking the cultural myths that have undercut human dignity, all but destroyed notions of virtue and morality, and slowly eroded our appetite for transcendence. It also seeks to recover the one worldview that actually works.

A worthy mission indeed! This first issue focusses on dethroning science. I found it somewhat disappointing, but with some interesting features to recommend it and obvious promise to become a much better publication.

The visual busy-ness of the magazine indicates it is intended to acquaint a younger audience to the landscape of the cultural battleground. (But then how many young people need to have the identity of the "Borg" explained to them, as on p. 50?) In any event, I'm pretty certain the publication is not directed at supercilious physicists with training in philosophy (i.e., me), so please keep this in mind while reading this critique.

My overall impression of the publication is that there are too many graphic designers involved, and too few (thoughtful) editors. The pages are littered with pretty photos and informational text boxes. There are big photos that take up most of a single page or that even span two pages. Without the photos, the issue's 96 pages would probably be more like 64. It's all very pretty and very professionally laid out. But I found myself frustrated with the constant barrage of new visual elements, which made me feel as if I were trying to watch an educational television program while a channel-surfing teenager controls the remote.

The issue gets off to a rather poor start with the cover headline: "The Ghost in the MACHINE: Science dismisses it—but at what price?" The problem with the statement is its implicit dualism: it gives the idea that instead of a body-soul composite, we really are two unrelated substances, body and soul, as philosophy after Rene Descartes would have us believe. Ironically, this dualism is precisely what has allowed modern science to cast religion as irrelevant in the first place. The magazine actually explains Cartesian dualism in a helpful textbox on p. 48. But I'm still left wondering about the point of the title. Why poison your audience at the outset and then hope that they manage to stumble across the antidote inside? The only thing I can figure is that, with the word machine in all caps under the image of a bunch of umbilicals and computer connections painfully piercing the back of a young man's head, the title is perhaps trying to evoke something like "Rage Against the Machine."

The contents of the issue include a number of informational items helpful for those not knowledgeable of the culture war. While "Seven Things You Can't Do as a Moral Relativist" (p. 30) is probably something you could have picked up from the smart conservative kid in your freshman dorm (but too few don't), "Decode: Homophobia" (61) is a useful examination of a carelessly coined term. The "Passwords" section at the beginning (8) of the issue is likely to help those less familiar with the terminology to get up to speed.

For me, the most valuable article was "Out on a Limb" by Whitney Archer, about people who suffer from "a strong desire for elective amputation of an otherwise healthy limb." The condition is called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) or apotemnophilia. Several years ago that U.S. News columnist John Leo mentioned the condition in a column about transexuals. Mr. Archer's article fails to make that connection, but recounts the stories of several sufferers and does make other worthy points, including:

The apotemnophiliac demands amputation on the grounds that he owns his body and so can do anything he wants with it. And such sentiments are prety much ubiquitous these days, used to justify everything from sexual preference to suicide. Indeed, one could argue that there exists a continuum of contemporary behaviors, all predicated upon ostensibly "inborn" desires that do no harm to others...

The magazine also tackles such issues as nanotechnology (p. 13), Darwinism (14), genomic mapping and eugenics (24), moral relativism (30), reductionism (34), cloning (36), transhumanism (46), Darwinism and education (54), euthanasia (56), cosmetic surgery and Brave New World (62), Intelligent Design and Darwinism (76), Intelligent Design and Darwinism (80), Darwinism (84), lefist dominance of academia (86), and the shoddy state of science reporting (93). Speaking of issues, did I mention Darwinism?

Hugh Ross's "How Intelligent Design [ID] Advocates Have Undermined Their Own Cause" was interesting. Dr. Ross disagrees with the purely negative approach of criticizing Darwinism and advocates coming up with a "credible creation/ID model" alternative. Others, including yours truly, argue that the most meritorious element of the ID movement is the critique of Darwinism. Positive ID proposals fall prey to the same fallacy that plagues Darwinism: that divine influence has to operate extrinsically, as if God sticks his finger into the world, instead of working within his creation. Dr. Ross acknowledges his approach can fall into a "god-of-the-gaps" fallacy (though he proposes a work-around, one that I find unsatisfying¹). What most shakes the confidence of the hard-core atheistic Darwinist is the discovery of an actual mechanism of evolution. In a previous post, I explained Rick Sternberg's observation that atheistic Darwinists dogmatically oppose discovery of order in nature. I recounted in a another post Mark Ryland's observation that Darwinism is simply the biological consummation of the Cartesian-Newtonian view of the world, for which order can only be imposed from outside. ID theorists take up this mechanistic worldview uncritically. Despite their healthy intentions, the positive proposals of ID-proponents ally them with atheistic Darwinists in denying order within nature; by neglecting to examine their own presuppositions, they actually promote the dualism that scientism, including Darwinism, feeds on.

There are many more things I could write about, but you can take a look at the "Dispatches" (features?) on the Salvo homepage for yourself. (Other articles are available only in physical issue.)

The most manifestly problematic item in the issue was on page 16, "Trust Issues: No Offence, Science, but Can We Get a Second Opinion?", which contrasts scientific opinion "Then" with "Now". One item says that scientific opinion now says, "[D]on't drink fluids when you're sick." Hello? That's news to me! My mother is a nurse and has never deviated from enjoining me to drink fluids for colds. My skepticism found further support in the January 2007 issue of Consumer Reports, which advises treating cold-caused congestion to "[d]rink plenty of fluids, including chicken soup, which may help fight inflamation and the cold virus itself" (p. 47). The source is uncited, but maybe the Salvo author bases his statements on a single news item or study. Science doesn't turn on a dime. It takes more than a single study to change the medical consensus. Beside spreading medical misinformation, the tenor of the piece exacerbates what Hugh Ross elsewhere in the issue calls "the wearisome 'us versus them' hostilities" between theists and scientists (p. 82).

Indeed this sense of being an outsider's critique pervades the entire issue of Salvo. But I suppose that such a blemish is all but inevitable given that the criticism comes from a group that as far as I can tell includes very few scientists. William Dembski, who is on the editorial advisory board, is the only identifiable scientist besides Hugh Ross. To be truly effective, a real critique of science needs to come from an intimate knowledge of science, and yet maintain contact with a larger view of the world that predates its ascendance. Sadly, precious few people have access to either knowledge base, let alone to both.

The magazine seems to be aimed at informing a younger or less knowledgeable audience about the issues behind the culture wars, and this purpose is eminently valuable. Hopefully the publication will not only improve, but also play to the writers' strengths in future. The final page advertises the theme of the second issue as "Sexual Healing."

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Notes

1. Dr. Ross writes:

We can use current gaps in understanding to test whether a "god-of-the-gaps" or a "naturalism-of-the-gaps" fallacy is in play. Here's the test: If, from a naturalistic perspective, a gap gets wider and wider as scientists learn more and more about a phenomenon, then a miraculous explanation for the gap becomes increasingly justified. If the gap gets narrower and narrower as the database increases, then a naturalistic explanation becomes increasingly justified

Certainly, Dr. Ross is correct about whether a miraculous or naturalistic explanation appears more justified. But why does the opposition have to be between miracle and naturalism? Why is God's action confined to the miraculous? The fact that there is order at all in nature testify to God's action; St. Paul certainly thinks so, as he writes in his letter to the Romans (1:20). Additionally, Ross has confined discovery of divine action to the provisional mode of discovery of modern science; a gap that is widening today may be narrowing tomorrow. Ross seems unaware that his proposal needlessly hands the advantage to the atheistic naturalists.

Silence and Light

We've passed the solstice and light has begun to reclaim our days. A recent Catholic News Agency story tells us that a universal indult for use of the traditional Latin Rite is imminent: mid- to late-January.

The winter issue of Latin Mass magazine featured Peter A. Kwasniewski's wonderful article on the goodness of the emptiness of the sanctuary in traditionally appointed churches, and the goodness of the silences throughout the Traditional Rite.

May darkness, silence, and emptiness reign in our hearts this Christmas so that our Lord may find room to stay with us.

Darkness

This morning I rose especially early and managed to make it to church several minutes before anyone else (the church is in a safe area, so it's left unlocked). It was wonderful to pray in the darkness with only the company of the vigil lamp and our Lord. Eventually others filtered in, but what really ruined the solitude was the old guy who switches on the lights. I'm sure he does it in all innocence. In our electrified world, no one remembers the value of darkness.

Having just posted on nothingness, it is appropriate to ponder darkness. Today, December 21st, is the winter solstice, the day that the sun stands still and turns back from its southward journey to begin its climb to the north. The day is shortest and the night longest. NPR had a great little segment this morning on our civilization's lamentable eradication of darkness:

Our brighter world also affects sleep patterns. Ekirch says the standard of eight continuous hours is a modern invention. Before artificial light, he says, Western Europeans slept in stages.

"The average person slept for three or four hours, awoke for an hour or more of quiet wakefulness and then returned for a second round of sleep, he says.

That wakeful period provided a time to think, or pray, or ponder dreams while they were still vivid, Ekirch says.

Artificial light also can affect hormones. For example, it can suppress the production of melatonin, which seems to affect both sleep and the immune system

Given this interstitial period of wakefulness, rising to pray the office of Vigils wouldn't have been violent to natural sleep patterns as it might seem at first glance.

In the usual traditional symbolism (exemplified in St. John's writings), light symbolizes goodness and darkness evil.¹ But like any analogy, it has its limits. There are ways in which darkness is superior to light. Darkness allows us to push away the distractions and busy-ness of life and to focus on what's most important. In Charles Peguy's Portal of the Mystery of Hope, God praises his creation Night²:

Night is what is continuous. Night is the fabric
Of time, the reservoir of being.

....

O Night, o my daughter Night, the most religious of all my daughters.

The most reverent.

Of all my daughters, of all my creatures, the most abandoned into my hands.

You glorify me in Sleep even more than your Brother, Day, glorifies me in Work.

Because in work, man only glorifies me in his work.

Whereas in sleep it is I who glorify myself by man's surrender.

....

O beautiful night, night of the great mantle, my daughter of the starry mantle

You remind me, myself, you remind me of the great silence that existed

Before I had unlocked the firmament of ingratitude.

And you proclaim, even to me, you herald to me the silence that will exist

After the end of man's reign, when I will have reclaimed my scepter.

And sometimes I think about it ahead of time, because this man really makes a lot of noise.

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Notes

1. There are of course exceptions in which darkness has a connection with God, as in Psalm 18. Not to mention the "still, small voice" that Elijah recognizes as the Lord's.

2. This section of the poem is so lovely that at some point I'll have to post a longer excerpt. Maybe next year.

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Jon Hamilton, "Is a Brighter Earth a Better One?" NPR Morning Edition (December 21, 2006).

Charles Peguy, Portal of the Mystery of Hope trans. David Louis Schindler, Jr. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdman's, 1996), 130, 132, 136. Another edition available here.