This little gem of thought (Randall Smith's entire post) is both beautiful and deeply true:
The Active and Contemplative Life
"Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle seem to have considered
the contemplative life to be the highest human activity – the activity
by which the human person brings his or her mind into contact with the
highest principle of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. And yet, among such
Greek thinkers, the life of contemplation stood in stark contrast to the
life of servile labor. In the world of Plato and Aristotle, servants
worked, so that an elite few could live the “life of the mind” and spend
their time contemplating the highest things."
This particularly strikes me. It seems our culture now rejects BOTH of these activities. We seem, as a society, to want NEITHER ora (prayer) NOR labora (work). Our strongest desire seems to be to have enough money so that we can have the time and unlimited resources to sit around hypnotized by somebody else's notion of what we should consume on an electronic screen (Christian translation: we are being driven by--i.e., are slaves to--greed and sloth).
As a result of our avoidance of both meaningful contemplation (of anything) and meaningful work (engagement with the serving of others), we have either no notion of Truth, Goodness, or Beauty whatsoever, or a completely skewed notion of these things, increasingly deformed by the culture's deformed notion of them: that Truth is relative (which really means it is a phantom, it does not exist); that Goodness simply means not actively causing physical harm to another person (unless that person is currently living inside another's womb, in which case it's okay since you can't see them easily), which is of course not a positive notion, but simply a "definition" by exclusion (we don't know what it IS, but we think we know at least one thing it is NOT); that Beauty, like Truth, is whatever you think it is, which mostly translates into whatever the "movers and shakers" think it is, which mostly is a pathologically deformed idea (stemming from the dissolution of Truth) that results in things like visual art that is purposefully ugly/dis-ordered/broken/literally made of excrement but called beautiful, and standards of female beauty that overtly and obviously reflect states of physical illness (a post-pubertal human female 6 feet tall who purposefully maintains her weight at less than 120 pounds is, without question, endangering her health).
As long as we passively consume our culture's directions to allow ourselves to be driven by greed and sloth (we call it "The American Dream," God help us); as long as we obey our culture's ceaseless cry to stay distracted and not contemplate or meaningfully dwell upon or even attempt more than a soundbite's worth of rational thought, we continue to choose the "path of pain," to choose pathology, to choose illness, indeed (Christian translation) to CHOOSE DEATH, for our whole selves (body, psyche, and spirit).
Happy thoughts today. . . (not). Sorry.
The Active and Contemplative Life
 |
| St. Martin de Porres, with broom and cross |
"Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle seem to have considered
the contemplative life to be the highest human activity – the activity
by which the human person brings his or her mind into contact with the
highest principle of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. And yet, among such
Greek thinkers, the life of contemplation stood in stark contrast to the
life of servile labor. In the world of Plato and Aristotle, servants
worked, so that an elite few could live the “life of the mind” and spend
their time contemplating the highest things."
This particularly strikes me. It seems our culture now rejects BOTH of these activities. We seem, as a society, to want NEITHER ora (prayer) NOR labora (work). Our strongest desire seems to be to have enough money so that we can have the time and unlimited resources to sit around hypnotized by somebody else's notion of what we should consume on an electronic screen (Christian translation: we are being driven by--i.e., are slaves to--greed and sloth).
As a result of our avoidance of both meaningful contemplation (of anything) and meaningful work (engagement with the serving of others), we have either no notion of Truth, Goodness, or Beauty whatsoever, or a completely skewed notion of these things, increasingly deformed by the culture's deformed notion of them: that Truth is relative (which really means it is a phantom, it does not exist); that Goodness simply means not actively causing physical harm to another person (unless that person is currently living inside another's womb, in which case it's okay since you can't see them easily), which is of course not a positive notion, but simply a "definition" by exclusion (we don't know what it IS, but we think we know at least one thing it is NOT); that Beauty, like Truth, is whatever you think it is, which mostly translates into whatever the "movers and shakers" think it is, which mostly is a pathologically deformed idea (stemming from the dissolution of Truth) that results in things like visual art that is purposefully ugly/dis-ordered/broken/literally made of excrement but called beautiful, and standards of female beauty that overtly and obviously reflect states of physical illness (a post-pubertal human female 6 feet tall who purposefully maintains her weight at less than 120 pounds is, without question, endangering her health).
As long as we passively consume our culture's directions to allow ourselves to be driven by greed and sloth (we call it "The American Dream," God help us); as long as we obey our culture's ceaseless cry to stay distracted and not contemplate or meaningfully dwell upon or even attempt more than a soundbite's worth of rational thought, we continue to choose the "path of pain," to choose pathology, to choose illness, indeed (Christian translation) to CHOOSE DEATH, for our whole selves (body, psyche, and spirit).
Happy thoughts today. . . (not). Sorry.
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