LISTEN. A good night's sleep, especially after a bad one, is restorative. Of perspective, and cheer, and gratitude. I got one last night. Thank goodness, or just good fortune. Either way, acknowledging and expressing gratitude is itself restorative, as I heard A.J. Jacobs saying in the middle of the night Saturday on my smart speaker when (I hypothesize) our Ubered Paneer Masala wasn't sitting quite right. Among the wise insights he shared with TED was the Jamesian psychology he paraphrased: it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than the reverse. Maybe that's how Augustine of Hippo finally consummated his conversion and stopped acting licentiously...
I'm grateful to Younger Daughter, may I say, for the exquisite crab boil she arranged for us this weekend. It was also a pleasure to revisit the charming toy store we used to habituate, and walk the dogs together Sunday morning. And I'm grateful for the mlb wildcard race my team's still in.
I also heard sage practical "health and wellbeing"advice on BBC 4, urging "small chunks of exercise across your day." Get up and move for five minutes, or ten, now and then. Take the stairs. Circle the building. Or, as I learned to do this summer when observing post-operative restrictions on my mobility, pace your driveway. Or your cell, if you're Boethius. It adds up. Might even set you free.
On a more somber note, with the 9/11 anniversary just behind us, the self-sacrifice of the FDNY heroes (and those at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania) twenty years ago is simply astonishing. And inspiring. We should all be grateful.
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LISTEN (9.20). Today in CoPhi we begin with Augustine and his famous pre-pious "ask" of God, for chastity later. Even Saints must sow their oats. His Manichaean "solution" to the problem of suffering, a less than omnipotent god who needs all the help He can get, still impresses me as more plausible than any standard Christian alternative. An all-hands account of how we can best counter the world's ills makes more sense and greater appeal than the claim that all's already right with the world. Clearly it's not.
The problem of suffering is the toughest nut for any conscientious person of faith to try and crack. Even if "moral evil" and the suffering it produces were entirely a product of human free will, and free will were a divine gift with no strings attached, there's still the sticky matter of natural geo-cataclysms. "Acts of God," in the insurers' responsibility-ducking argot, are not on us. Victim-blaming is no solution.
Then, Boethius in his prison cell yakking with Lady Philosophy. But where was Lady Theology? And why didn't he write The Consolation of Christianity?
If "God grasps everything in an instant" and "sees past, present and future as one," how does that make us free? How does timeless presence exculpate the all-seeing Omniscient One? People have tried to explain this to me for years, but I think He's still on the hook if He's anywhere or anywhen at all.
Do humans really have a transparently self-validating idea in mind of perfection, an idea so compelling that we have no choice but to acquiesce in its logical necessity? And what would that do to free will, Anselm?
Aquinas's (and Aristotle's) First Cause argument leaves inquiring minds wondering about its unasked and unanswered question, obvious even to a child... or to children like J.S. Mill and Bertrand Russell, at least: what caused the First Cause? Nothing? If the First Cause domino provides its own impulsion , then so can a universe. And anyway, the impulsive force need not be conceived as possessing personal or moral properties. It could just be The Force, neutral with respect to our notions of good and evil.
In Fantasyland it's time again to marvel at Ronald Reagan's duplicity or credulity (or both) in telling the legend of Thomas Jefferson's Constitutional Convention angel. When Drumpf tells a tale we all know he's bullshitting. Was Reagan? Or was he an even scarier sort of Confabulator in Chief, one who actually believed his own phantasms?
Cane Ridge, Kentucky, the 19th century Woodstock? A come-to-Jesus fest is not the Garden either Epicurus or CSNY had in mind, I think. It was suggested in class the other day, though, that some people attend Bonnaroo and Burning Man seeking refuge from the commercial and militarized mania of our workaday world. Not my idea of paradise, but to each her own.
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