More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
R.J. Snell
Read between
March 4 - March 31, 2019
the judge who lays claim to them all. Just as his appearance in the desert, the entire history of Judge Holden is strange; in fact, he seems to not have a past so much as to endlessly recur. At one point the gang returns to Chihuahua to receive payment for their trophies of war. As each goes to the public baths to wash away the gory remnants of their exploits, they descend “one by one into the waters . . . all tattooed, branded, sutured . . . some deformed,
Moderns are tempted to consider the world as what Heidegger termed “standing reserve,” an undifferentiated set of resources awaiting our use.
We live in a time of open revolt against God’s law—a time of sloth. Rather than causing delight and comfort, the story God tells of creation is thought repugnant to our autonomy, and we insist that we are suzerains, those rulers countermanding all other laws, even the rule of God. Limits of body, sexuality, death, or life, all are thought obstacles to overcome rather than considered the graciousness of being. At war with God, we scratch out his creation, especially the weak and fragile, fearing that anything outside our control threatens our freedom.
We are to fill, but also to keep the garden—how? As explained by Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, Genesis 2:15 provides two distinct tasks, cultivation and guarding (tilling and keeping):
But there is also the task of “‘le-ovdah’ (to cultivate it), which is essentially creative: to develop, to work, to innovate.”14 How are these to be balanced?
The comprehensive trajectory of these mandates can be differentiated by three tests of good work: (1)Respect for the integrity of things, or Remember You are Dust; (2)Respect for the integrity of systemic emergence, or Build Soil; (3)Proper direction, or Fill the Temple.
(1) Does it respect the integrity of things, including the integrity of the worker? (2) Does it contribute to the capacity of the created order, including the human person, for dynamic development and intelligent progress? (3) Does the work suit the feasting halls of New Jerusalem or the gluttonous meals of Babylon?
a culture of freedom without truth, a culture where freedom is unchecked by the good of being, becomes a culture of death. Our bored culture is a culture actively engaging in a revolt against limits, place, order, and thus willing to harm and kill our world, each other—especially the weakest among us—in a pique of freedom.
it also casts us adrift existentially, morally, and spiritually. “What are we to do?” “What are we for?” “What is the good life?”—these and other questions are directionless in a culture where freedom itself is a final authority,
we hate any answer that might compel us to limit our empty freedom and actually attain the good.
A feeling of alienation from the work, place, and community often follows, accompanied by a feeling of disgust and revulsion, culminating in a desire to escape from the cloister and the monastic life entirely.11
In sloth, we abhor what is there; we abhor what is; we abhor limits, place, order, being. Our misguided addiction to freedom without truth is a revolt of the self against any charged world which might demand attendance, care, obligation, or respect, and certainly any mandate of working to fill God’s beautiful kingdom.
The best remedy against sloth, at least according to Evagrius, is a remedy our freedom would find disgusting, for keeping yoked, remaining faithful, is unbearable to us who are unbearably light.13
Evagrius claims, in fact, that the slothful are often in a frenzy of action—now this, now that—in their disgust and abhorrence at what God mandates. We might actually anticipate the slothful individual and culture to be very busy, and, as the purposelessness and arbitrary nature of their business is revealed, to be ever more distracted, exhausted, and bitter in the unending attempt to express and display freedom without humility before the yokes of place, limits, order.
First, you see a trendsetter wearing the item, but it seems outlandish and even ugly—it is most definitely not “you.” Second, ordinary people are wearing the fashion—it is still not you, but the item is something and without it you are beginning to recede into noughtness. Third, you try it on. The clerk says, “it’s so you,” and you begin to perceive that it could be you. Fourth, it is purchased. It is you, and with great conspicuousness you wear it for the first time, aware that everyone finally sees you. Fifth, it becomes usual, everyday. You are beginning to devour its being. Sixth, it is
...more
There is a sense that our freedom came at a cost, namely the loss of a higher purpose, of anything worth living for, and so the only remainder is a “centring on the self.”48 And since the world is devoid of thick meaning, the world itself loses depth, sinking to the level of mere resource for our use and abuse in pursuit of our own, rather shallow, comfort.49
Boredom is a heresy, declaring God was wrong when he saw the goodness of the world. God “looks the world into loveliness,”
everything God made was good and thus evil was no-thing; evil was a privation and deprivation of the good, but was no real thing.8
Rather than the attunement of wonder or love, the modern theoretical project, as against the radical openness of the older theoria, “would submit it to torture and in a wracking inquisition extract” answers from it.
“But if we confine our attention to any thing as if it were simply an object, it cannot be loved as beautiful.”34 Objects become beautiful if they please us, according to our subjective taste, rather than demanding our delight as a matter of justice; objects become good if they serve us, according to our subjective purposes, rather than demand our willing them in keeping with God’s own judgment and instruction.
Freedom becomes superiority, an act of agency against the world, a declaration of emancipation from membership in the assembly.
Sex without fertility is sex without much need for thought, ceding responsibility for sexuality to the specialists.
Absent the context of the household and its concrete economy, sexual morality itself becomes commodified, for the body becomes property over which one has a right to use and exploit as one wishes.
What is horrifying is not that we are relying so exclusively on a technology of birth control that is still experimental, but that we are using it casually, in utter cultural nakedness, unceremoniously, without sufficient understanding, and as a substitute for cultural solutions—exactly as we now employ the technology of land use. And to promote these means without cultural and ecological insight, as merely a way to divorce sexuality from fertility, pleasure from responsibility—or to sell them that way for ulterior “moral” motives—is to try to cure a disease by another disease.(129–130)
The slothful, however, (1) abhor the real, (2) have a repugnance (sadness) at their own purpose, and (3) are incapable of acting in keeping with their own proper good, a profound self-contradiction and alienation.
In the end, they would rather be untethered and “free” than happy, rejecting anything which might prevent “man’s true and divinized self from falling prey to forgetfulness” in a “decision in favor of . . . hatred for the divine in man.”
sloth, as Josef Pieper reminds us: (1) lacks magnanimity and the courage to accept the great dignity to which God has called us;4 (2) “does not wish to be what [it] really, fundamentally, is;”5 and (3) perverts humility, rejecting our greatness because loathing friendship with God and its concomitant obligations.
Sloth’s opposite is to will (approve/love/affirm) our proper work and dignity.
Sloth is overcome when we affirm the goodness of the world, just as God does.
This is not really Christian, however, for there “is nothing, no substance, no power, no faculty, in man that is in itself bad.”
Sin impairs but does not destroy our nature; furthermore, in the Incarnation, “our Lord assumed our nature in its entirety, and . . . whatever belongs to our nature was in Him,” and since he cannot enter into union with anything inherently evil, there is nothing of our nature itself which is evil per se.
As vice, sloth is a failure of love—an aversion to being, a sadness at the good, and an inability to act well. Sloth is not overcome by non-sloth but by the fullness of virtue, by approving or affirming the world, seeing it as God sees it.
Matthew Richey liked this
Two errors tempt us: the first lowers our vision and considers natural goods ultimate, while the second wishes to cast off this mortal coil as nothing more than a distraction, maybe even evil, turning only to the supernatural good.
grace “does not annihilate but presupposes and perfects human nature.”
We stay in the cell in very concrete ways—keeping the prayers, finishing the report, paying our bills on time, wiping away childish tears, doing the dishes, cleaning the car, caring for our tools—through staying in the quotidian, the mundane ordinary work.25
