From our "Bizarre" file

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how we'd been unfortunate enough to rent a movie with a preview for a little delicacy called "Drunken Jackasses: The Quest":

I leave it to your imagination to puzzle out what kind of a quest drunken jackasses would be on in Cabo San Lucas with five friends, four days, three nights, two dwarves, and one virgin.

Every now and then our site meter shows that we've received a hit from a search engine searching for the phrase "Drunken Jackasses". Is it that some on-and-off again reader can't remember the name "DarwinCatholic" and can only recall that he once read here about Drunken Jackasses? Perhaps that's the most memorable post ever written on this site? Some film aficionado searching for a review stumbles across us? The mind boggles....

Or maybe it's just Rick Lugari playing head games with us.

Pepe le Pew and the Parisian stink

Iowahawk is back with a news report about Pepe le Pew. Seems he's been injured in the French riots. Mee-yow!

Thinking For Yourself

An wonderful Evelyn Waugh quote, via Philokalia Republic:

Every effort was made to encourage the children at the public schools to "think for themselves." When they should have been whipped and taught Greek paradigms, they were set arguing about birth control and nationalization. Their crude little opinions were treated with respect. Preachers in the school chapel week after week entrusted the future to their hands. It is hardly surprising that they were Bolshevik at 18 and bored at 20.

Nature, Design, Architecture

A couple days ago Speculative Catholic linked to a four volume set The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe by Christopher Alexander.

The Nature of Order, Alexander's magnum opus, synthesizes the most provocative discoveries of 20th-century science — and lays them at the feet of aesthetic theory.

Alexander does for the 21st century what Roman author Vitruvius did for the first century B.C.: Write an account of how to build buildings by drawing from everything the culture knows about science. During the Renaissance, Italian author Leone Battista Alberti one-upped Vitruvius: where Vitruvius described, Alberti prescribed. Now Alexander is out to better Alberti.

Every millennium or so, architecture needs to assess its relationship to other branches of learning. Alexander's contribution to the millennial call is to give us four weighty tomes on how not to build buildings. Thou shalt not build to satisfy thy intellectual curiosity. Thou shalt not make design thy God.

Alexander argues with mind, heart and spirit that there is such a thing as an intuitive human need for beauty, order and harmony. Many traditional societies were in touch with that intuition that was fostered and nurtured by spiritual beliefs and practices. In the 20th century, this has been divorced from tasks like building edifices and cities. “Issues which were straightforward in other ages, such as spirit, are no longer part of our way of looking at the world,” Alexander writes in the prologue to the first book. If the human spirit is not on our minds, how can we build to nourish it?

It turns out that this more generally focused work follows several in which Alexander (described by the NY Times as "the zen master of home design") deals more directly with the practical elements of home, town and city design:

The Timeless Way of Building
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
The Oregon Experiment
The Production of Houses
A New Theory of Urban Design

There are, of course, too many interesting books in the world to make any pretense of reading all of them. Still, with the continuing Darwin-family grumbling about 'someday we'll build our own house', we'll have to keep our eyes open.

On Writing Music

Bernard of Pauca Lux Ex Oriente has put up another in his series on music, this one is: On Writing Music. Bernard is blessed, not merely with great musical ability (having heard him sing with the St. Andrew's choir), but also the ability to explain it to those of us who are comparatively (or indeed completely) lacking.

If you haven't seen them before, you may also wish to visit his posts On Reading Music and On Singing.

The Rhapsodic Theater, Part II

So what exactly is this Rhapsodic Theater that Karol Wojtyla (better known as Pope John Paul II) founded, and why should it have any bearing on his later work?

In short, the Rhapsodic Theater was focused on the "living human word."

What does this mean? Is not every theater a theater of the word? Does not the word consitute an essential, primary element of any theater? Undoubtedly it does. Nonetheless the position of the word in a theater is not always the same. As in life, the word can appear as an integral part of action, movement, and gesture, inseparable from all human practical activity; or it can appear as "song" -- separate, independent, intended only to contain and express thought,
to embrace and transmit a vision of the mind. In the latter aspect, or position, the word becomes "rhapsodic", and a theater based on such a concept of the word becomes a rhapsodic theater. And so without entering into deliberations on the primacy of word or movement in the art of the theater, we can safely assume that according to the rhapsodic principle, the word is a pre-element of theater.
(Karol Wojtyla, "On the Theater of the Word", from The Collected Plays and
Writings on Theater)

The word is significant because it is capable of conveying a problem -- not just a problem based in material realities (Where do all the missing socks go?) but a problem that is rooted in an idea: an acknowledgment that something is not as it should be. How should it be? What is preventing it from becoming that which it ought to be, and what can we do about it? The word fascinates Wojtyla because of its possibility to express the objective realities (the ideas) that order our existence and behavior, and which in the end bring us to an better understanding of God.

The fundamental element of dramatic art is the living human word. It is also the nucleus of drama, a leaven through with human deeds pass, and from which they derive their proper dynamics. ("Drama of Word and Gesture", from Collected Plays and Writings on Theater)

One of the philosophical underpinnings of Wojtyla's thought, both as a young actor and as bishop and Pope, is the proper relationship of action to idea. Action (a term that encompasses the range of physical behavior) finds its purpose through the ideas it embodies, though the ideas can be more fully articulated by words. Theater is a perfect medium for exploring the hierarchy of idea, word, and action -- a relationship that "doubtless reach[es] even further, in a sense beyond theater and into the philosophical concept of man and the world. The supremacy of word over gesture indirectly restores the supremacy of thought over movement and impulse in man" ("Drama of Word and Gesture"). Years later in his Theology of the Body talks, Pope John Paul would return to the objectivity of action in terms of the marital act, which is the embodiment of the idea of total self-giving. (Seen in this light, contraception falsifies the act because it negates the objective expression of self-giving. )

From the conception of the word as the bearer of idea comes Wojtyla's first meditation on the person as gift, an idea which comes to fruition in his later writings such as The Acting Person, Love and Responsibility, and Gaudium et Spes (the Vatican II document that Wojtyla helped to shape). The actor gives himself in service to the text so as to faithfully transmit its meaning, rhythms, and beauty to the audience. Instead of trying to impose his own personality onto the play (think of every bad adaptation of Shakespeare you've ever seen) the actor strives to bring into sharp focus the original intent of the playwright.

Because of the simplicity of its essential emphasis on the basic elements of actor, audience, and the spoken word as bond between them -- developed out of necessity in the cramped and sparse conditions of secret performances during the German Occupation of Poland in 1941 -- the Rhapsodic style wasn't suited for traditional theatrical performances that demand intricate plots, rich characterization, or massive set decor. However, it was an ideal style for exploring other works of literature -- books and epic poems. (In 1964, then-Cardinal Wojtyla was impressed by a Rhapsodic version of The Divine Comedy.)

In his later writings Wojtyla expanded this concept of self-giving to encompass more that just an actor's service to the audience. Love and Responsibility deals with a total giving of self in the context of marital and sexual ethics. The Acting Person, a dense and almost incomprehensible philosophical tome (over which, I freely confess, I fell asleep many a night during my semester of Philosophical Anthropology) expounds on the possession of self and the gift of self (how can one give away what one does not first possess?) and develops the concept of solidarity as the answer to the quandry of how free persons should relate to one another. Gaudium et Spes offers a much more concise formulation: "Man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself" (24).

To be continued.

Married to the Church: Round 1

I've been working my way through Raymond Hedin's Married to the Church (and really frustrated that Amazon hasn't shipped John Farrell's latest and the SAS programming manuals that I desperately need at work). It's in some ways an aggravating book, because Hedin so clearly doesn't get the Church. (Poor MrsDarwin is at times in danger of gnawing her arm off in frustration while reading over my shoulder.)

The first sections could alternatively have been titled "How Not to Educate a Seminarian" and focuses on the time that the author and his classmates spent in minor and major seminar in Milwaukee from 1957 to 1966. Clearly, Milwaukee has been ground zero for a lot of problems since the 60s, so it wouldn't surprise me if the seminary there was in some ways worse than most in the 50s and 60s, but in that sense it makes the book all the more interesting, in that it focuses on an extreme example.

A couple things that struck me:

-Minor seminaries just don't sound like the greatest idea. It's not so much that I doubt that a 14-year-old might well have a real vocation, as that it sounds like being on the road to being a priest for that long (14-27) in a closed environment.

-There's little worse than a mediocrity in education. The seminarians were taught in the scholastic tradition, which is good. But it sounds like their textbooks (2nd and 3rd degree removed texts written by American priests in Latin as basic trainers) weren't the best and they had very little familiarity with original texts. Everything I've ready by enthusiastic modern Thomists suggests that the Thomism of the 40s and 50s was generally ossified and seriously in need of a return to original sources. However, it sounds like as then seminary began to change in '65 and beyond, they simply dumped Thomism and the scholastic mindset as dead and outmoded, leaving the seminarians to believe (as the author seems to) that there simply wasn't anything to it in the first place. Huge loss.

-Dead monasticism. Maybe this was a function of having one long, closed seminary education from 14 till ordination, but the seminarians don't seem to have understood the semi-monastic discipline they were put under in major seminary as they prepared for the priesthood. Reading about the strictures as a 27-year-old adult in the working world (with kids and all) the idea of locking down to a routine of prayer, study, silence, mass, etc. sounds like it would be a wonderful way to get some spiritual discipline -- at least for a while. But for these college-age men, it sounds like it was mostly just an overly strict set of rules. It sounds like a lot of it stemmed from not having consciously chosen to live a life of discipline and asceticism for a while. According to the author, the feeling among the seminarians was very much that they were destined to be priests because they were simply the best that their parishes had put out. They were a cut above it all, and so they were intended to be priests. You don't get much of a feel (though I'm sure this is partly a result of the author being a lapsed Catholic) that this was seen as a genuinely religious calling which required a genuinely religious lifestyle including prayer and self-denial.

The good side:

On the positive side, although the feeling of being 'chosen' and above it all seems to have been bad for many of the seminarians, it sounds like their parishes did give a lot of positive reinforcement and encouragement to the seminarians they sent up to the diocese. Now admittedly, parishes these days are shorter on community feeling just generally, but even taking that into account, I know our parish as a whole (beyond his immediate friends and family) doesn't seem to pay much of any attention to the seminarian we currently have up at the diocesan seminary.

More to come...