How one mentally approaches a difficult task can often determine eventual success or failure. For example, one of my brothers recently had to finish a long term paper over just a couple of days. He could not see himself successfully writing a sixteen-page paper in one weekend. But then he realized that he could write a two-page, single-spaced paper without too much difficulty, and his sixteen-page paper was really only eight pages single-spaced; so he really only had to write four two-page papers. Of course, in actuality the task before him was the same as it has always been, but, mentally, he had found a way to surmount what had seemed an impossible challenge.

To be happy one must be fully human. There is no shortcut. We cannot simply buy happiness. No one really believes the commercials that promise happiness through the latest slick commodity. Instead, happiness depends upon what we are. Since we are human beings, we can only be happy as humans, living in a way that is perfective of our human nature. In short, we must be virtuous.

Every so often the media stages a debate over whether America is still a Christian nation, as if asking the question were not already to answer it. America is not a Christian nation; it is an emerging pagan nation with a Christian past. Accordingly, we should expect it to become more and more pagan. Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that American soldiers will start riding chariots or begin wearing helmets with horse-hair crests, or that the next New York fashion trend will involve togas. Rather, I mean that the deeper and darker currents of ancient pagan culture will increasingly reappear in modern guise.

In Lent 2011, the Dominican student brothers gave a series of conferences, viewing the Cross from a number of different angles.

In the video below, Br. Boniface Endorf, O.P., reads Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Parker’s Back” in light of the transforming grace of Christ’s cross in his talk, “The Grotesque Iconography of Flannery O’Connor.”

Find the schedule and locations of student-brother conferences for Lent 2012 here.

The modern world is a materialistic one. Many of us can only believe in what we are able to quantify, what we can measure and put into mathematical formulae. Many think that no one truly knows a thing except through scientific experiment. Thus, studies continually come out attempting to prove what we already know: eating lots of fatty foods will make one fat; not getting enough sleep will make one less productive; spouses who constantly fight are more likely to divorce; people who work hard tend to make more money…

But is all knowledge reducible to the measurement of matter? Can we know more than what science and social science tell us?

All paganism ends in despair. Even the greatest pagan epic, Virgil’s Æneid, concludes its grand narrative of the founding of Rome with the inevitable descent into despair. The poem follows Aeneas’ escape from fallen Troy, his heroic journey to Italy, and his role in the founding of the Roman people. Aeneas is the perfect Roman: he gives up everything for the greater good of his family and nation. He carries his father out of burning Troy, taking with him his household gods. When at Carthage he falls in love with the queen Dido, he again places family and nation first and leaves her in order to establish Rome’s future. Dido, despondent, burns herself alive. No matter the cost, Aeneas is faithful.

But for what? < --more-->Rome is founded, but he is lost. The poem ends in this despair: Rome’s future is assured, but Aeneas has no salvation. The epic ends not with the glorious founding of Rome, but with Aeneas stuck in an impossibly ambiguous situation. Before him lies Turnus, a noble man worthy of respect, but also Aeneas’ adversary. Turnus had earlier killed Aeneas’ friend, and taken his belt; Aeneas swore to avenge his friend. With Turnus helpless before him, Aeneas has every reason to have mercy, but then he sees his slain friend’s belt now worn by Turnus. Aeneas should both spare and kill Turnus. Aeneas screams in anger, and runs his sword through noble Turnus’ breast, sending him to the depths below. The poem thus ends not with a glorious victory, a triumphant Aeneas, but with the vengeful slaying of an otherwise noble man. For Aeneas no peaceful Elysium awaits. He gave up everything for Rome, but in the end he is left with only his anger and the death he has dealt.

And so too all paganism ends in despair. Paganism is based on the works of man, for pagan idols are naught but the work of human hands. The Æneid follows the struggle of a noble man seeking to do what is right and to create a better world, for him the Roman Empire (Virgil writes at the start of the Pax Romana). But the achievements of man cannot save him—even the mighty Roman Empire collapsed. Having given up everything for the works of man, Aeneas finds that he has nothing, for in the end all things human pass away and are nothing. Aeneas was the perfection of Roman virtue and pagan piety, but that did not save him. Paganism will always end thusly—pagan gods cannot save.

And so too the modern world despairs, for it too is founded on the works of human hands. Modern attempts to build salvation have failed just as surely as the Roman Empire has fallen. The city of man is still unable to offer the salvation given by God. Modern man no longer trusts in God, but instead in his own works: technology, endless entertainment, science, politics, mother earth, and a legion more—a vast modern pantheon of gods that can only offer the pagans’ despair. If even noble and virtuous Aeneas ended in despair, then no modern pagan, however self-actualized or liberated, can hope for anything but that same fate.

What the modern world needs is the true God who offers true salvation. Until modern man looks beyond himself and his works, his lot will be despair. The true happiness that man longs for, salvation itself, is the only thing that can provide us with true hope. Aeneas’ gods were the works of human hands—are ours as well?

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Image: Capitoline Wolf, with Romulus and Remus

We all know people whom we admire and try to imitate, mentors who show us how to live well. And there are those whom we try not to follow. Most would call themselves just and fair: we know that is how we should be. The civil rights leaders were heroes because they stood up for justice; those who opposed them, those who defended racism, we know to have been wrong. We know it, we don’t just believe it. We know that it is better to be just than racist. The same goes for other values. It is better to be an honest person than a liar and a swindler. It is better to be temperate in food and drink than an addict. It is better to be courageous than cowardly. What father would want his son to be a thieving drug-addict, or a vicious criminal, or a racist propagandist, or an alcoholic? There are certain ways of living that all sane people recognize as ideal. Traditionally these are called the virtues: those character traits that mark out the good man.

The virtues are not arbitrary or culture-specific. They may take different forms within different cultures, but in essence they transcend the diversity of cultures. All legitimate cultures acclaim the just man and decry the liar, hail the hero and boo the coward, reward the wise and pity the foolhardy. The virtues are stable across their diverse cultural expressions because all cultures are united in one thing: they are composed of men. What unites all men is that we are human.

But some deny that we have human natures. Saying that I’m not human does not make me something else; it just makes me a fool. I can claim to be a jelly donut, but I am not thereby a donut, but a good applicant for a mental ward. To extol lies and injustice does not redefine justice, it just makes one dangerously wrong. In the words of a wise sailor: “I am what I am” (cf. 1 Cor 15:10).

But what does it mean to be something? It means that the meaning in our lives is linked to what we are. We are meant to be good humans—like dogs who fetch are good dogs, and cats who purr are good cats, and so on. We find fulfillment and happiness in being a good human, and being a good human means being virtuous. Just and honest men, wise men, men who can sleep at night knowing that they did what was right, are good and virtuous men. Denying that such is the case does not undo its truth, it only makes one ignorant. An evil man who rationalizes his evil, like a drug-dealer who claims that he is only giving people what they want, or a slaver who says that slaves aren’t really men, is still just evil. And those who claim that they create their own meaning in life are just as confused. We did not create ourselves, and did not make ourselves human, but that still is what we are.

The serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted Eve by telling her that “ye shall be as gods.” The same temptation exists today: that we can create ourselves and thus be as gods. But we did not create ourselves, and did not choose to be human. Yet that is what we are. We have been given the gift of existing and being human, and the meaning of our lives lies in fulfilling what we have been given. Ultimately that means being called to live with God in heaven, with Him who created us. The question is always the same: do we accept who we are, and live as God’s creatures in happiness, or do we deny God and the truth, and pretend to be as gods? Do we choose heaven or hell?

Image: Michelangelo, Atlas Slave

Some boast of chariots, and some of horses;
but we boast of the name of the Lord our God.
Psalm 20:7

The strength of man does not impress God. Our strength does not make us strong Christians, but rather the Lord, who is truly strong, makes us so. I write this because many people tend to despair over the decline of modern culture and society. For over a century the Church has lost, and is still in the process of losing, almost every cultural battle in the West. Should the collapse of modern culture lead to despair? No! Because what is certain is not that our feeble efforts will win the contemporary ‘culture wars,’ but that God’s providence will definitively triumph over all the forces of evil.

To see the big picture of providence, history helps; like standing on a tower to see the surrounding countryside, history provides a better vantage point from which to discern the workings of providence.

The most powerful Roman Emperor was Augustus, given the title ‘divus’ because he was worshiped as a god after his death. Yet he was not invincible; he tried to conquer Germany, but instead lost three whole Roman legions—all three ambushed and massacred in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. Augustus, as Suetonius reports, then spent months wandering the halls of his palace, his hair and beard growing long, striking his head against the wall and shouting, ‘Give me back my legions!’ Some god.

Those Germanic tribes would, centuries later, conquer the western Roman Empire. By then the Roman Empire had just converted to Christianity, so those early Christians saw the collapse of the empire as a catastrophe. Germanic tribes had defeated both pagan and Christian Rome in turn. The Christians of the time watched impotently as Rome collapsed. In Roman North Africa, St. Augustine of Hippo lay dying as the Vandals laid siege to Hippo: Augustine died shortly before the city, and all of North Africa, fell to them. Christianity appeared to have been snuffed out by the forces of violence and anarchy as one Roman province after another fell to the Germanic barbarians.

But God’s providence prevails. He was to conquer the pagan Germans; He would accomplish what man could not. The Germanic Angles and Saxons had conquered Roman Britain, pagans subjugating Christians. But Pope St. Gregory the Great sent St. Augustine of Canterbury (not Hippo) to convert them, and that he did. He was so successful that a few generations later those former pagans became monks and missionaries.

St. Boniface was one of them, returning to his ancestral homeland in Germany and converting it. His efforts brought Germany into the Church, laying the groundwork for Charlemagne to re-found the Roman Empire in the West—now the Holy Roman Empire. A region and peoples that were the scourge of civilization, the defeaters of ‘god-emperors’ and the western empire itself, were conquered by Christ and his missionaries, to become a central pillar of Christendom.

The brawn of Rome at her peak, even the mightiest Roman legions, could not conquer pagan Germany. But holy monks and preachers, unarmed and insignificant in terms of worldly power, did. The forces that vanquished the Roman Empire itself were bested by humble preachers! Monks coming from the ashes of a collapsed empire laid the foundation for medieval Christendom. God’s providence won.

We fight the good fight in our time and culture, but, now as then, any victory is through providence. Defeats now only set the stage for later and greater victories, victories we cannot yet see. St. Augustine of Hippo could not have seen that he stood at the end of the ancient world and on the threshold of the medieval world; he could only see the collapse of the Roman Empire to vicious barbarians. And yet, while this was a disaster from his view, it prepared the way for Christendom and the great faith of the Middle Ages. Those barbarians were defeated, but in God’s time and by His means, not ours. We fight, but only God conquers. The name of the Lord our God leads us to his victory in heaven.

 
Image: John Martin, Pandemonium

The other day I hiked the Antietam battlefield, the site of the bloodiest day in American history. Yet the actual field does little justice to the horrors of its past. The whole field is nondescript, just some generic East Coast farm. There is a corn field, wooden fences, a sunken road, a small river spanned by an old stone bridge. Except for a 1970s visitors’ center and monuments covering the landscape, one would never know that anything monumental or worth visiting had ever happened there.

But then why is it worth visiting? I could have stayed much closer to home to see cornfields and old sunken roads and bridges. Of course those other bridges never were the center of an epic fight; soldiers by the thousands were not slaughtered in attacking or defending those bridges. But now all that can be seen is the bridge, not the gallantry and tragedy, not the battle itself.

I tried to imagine the battle scenes, seeing the soldiers press onto the bridge under murderous fire, pushing forward while their comrades on the hills behind cheered them on, and while their enemies on the hills ahead worked furiously to kill them. But I could image that scene at almost any antique bridge. The actual landscape is surely more accurate for such a daydream, but that’s not why Antietam itself matters. It is not monumental or worth visiting simply because it is conducive to my imagination or remembrance of the battle.

Antietam is a particular place where a particular event took place. It was not some mythic event that resides only in the mind, and can be equally applied to any place the mind pleases, but one real event that happened at one and only one place. What makes Antietam important is not my thought about it, but the reality of the event that happened there. I went to Antietam not simply to remind myself of it, for which any Civil War history book would have sufficed, but to venerate the unique place where the battle actually took place.

Veneration is the key. The bridge is not important as a bridge, but as a direct physical link to the courage and sacrifice of those who gave their lives on that bridge. That bridge is as near as I could get to those soldiers’ physical acts of courage and sacrifice. That direct link is as close as anyone can get to the actual men who fought there, and thus affords the best approach for venerating those who fought there.

Similarly, pilgrims travel to the Holy Land to be in physical contact with the places where Jesus Himself lived, died, and rose. And the same for the relics of saints—the bones of St. Dominic are as close as we can get to the physical St. Dominic, the body of the man through whom God worked great deeds.

What is important about St. Dominic is surely not his physical body. Yet, as embodied creatures even our physicality gives glory to God. The Incarnation means that God works through matter, through the particular stuff of the physical world, as this bread and this wine become the very Body and Blood of Christ. And so a nondescript bridge allows us to approach the sacrifice of our forefathers with honor and reverence. And a relic of St. Dominic allows us to venerate God’s glory residing even in the dry bones of His saints.

Image: Kurz & Allison, Battle of Antietam