My family and I are reading “Anne of Green Gables” at night, now, and some wonderful quotes come back that I enjoyed as a child, reading this Canadian series about an orphan adopted by an older brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla, near the turn of the 20th century (@Christy and her family like this series, too, I think).
“Did you see all the diamonds those ladies wore?” sighed Jane. “They were simply dazzling. Wouldn’t you just love to be rich, girls?”
“We are rich,” said Anne staunchly. “Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we’re happy as queens, and we’ve all got imaginations, more or less. Look at that sea, girls–all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn’t enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds. You wouldn’t change into any of those women if you could. Would you want to be that white lace girl and wear a sour look all your life, as if you’d been born turning up your nose at the world? …Or even Mrs Evans, with that sad, sad look in her eyes? She must have been dreadfully unhappy sometime to have such a look. You know you wouldn’t, Jane Andrews!”
“I don’t know–exactly,” said Jane unconvinced. “I think diamonds would comfort a person for a good deal.”
“Well, I don’t want to be any one but myself, even if I go uncomforted by diamonds all my life…I’m quite content to be Anne of Green Gables, with my string of pearl beads. I know Matthew gave me as much love with them as ever went with Madame the Pink Lady’s jewels.”
I was just suggesting that it would be strange to regard just anyone using Latin who isn’t Roman Catholic as suspicious. It wasn’t all that long ago that someone couldn’t even get into many Lutheran or Episcopal seminaries without being able to pick up something by one of the Western Fathers in the original and just read it; I can think of a half dozen seminaries where it was just assumed that students could read theological Latin written anywhere right up to the Reformation, so professors included readings in Latin, Greek, and German right along with ones in English even as recently as the late 1990s.
I almost included the Methodists but my last knowledge of what was being required at Methodist seminaries is from about 1976, when at one seminary the ability to follow Latin (even if using an interlinear) was recommended but not required.
I’m not familiar with what you’re talking about here; the only Christians I’ve encountered in the last couple of decades who used Latin were talking philosophy and hardly qualified as conservative.
From what I recall Ignatius was that no one who is not fully united with Christ is really human.
Well, that “group” would be every human who ever lived, except those already dead – including us – and of course Jesus. Ignatius regarded his coming martyrdom as the point where he would finally be human because only in death do we escape this condition of being not fully united with the One Who made us for fellowship with Him.
This helps. Thanks.
What I have in mind is what I might call a christianized “pseudo-neo-classical” trend among many Christians in my circles these days. And it includes a reverence for Latin that I feel is based in tradition and reputation, rather than any peculiar value of the language or historical academic work written in it. Among the facets of this trend are so-called “classical academies” which are becoming very popular among the conservative denominations I know, at least in my region. The one I am most familiar with is marketed in opposition to a caricature of public schools.
Always love a good straw man.
This is as neutrally as I can frame the situation.
Except in Ignatius’ terms there isn’t anyone on the planet who is actually human; we are all outside the “truly human” category – and by his measure, the only ones on the planet who are even close to being truly human are those in the process of giving up their lives for Christ. It’s a bit hard to use the category of “not truly human” against others when one is part of that category!
Just BTW, this concept did get twisted a bit in a couple of different periods in church history when Christians went to great lengths to try to get martyred – enough so that some great Christian preachers spoke at length about how true martyrdom comes from living as a Christian so well that the powers of this world are offended and act to slay those with such bright lives/lights.
My dad used to take walks around the neighborhood every morning except Sunday, and on his way he would pick up any empty cans and bottles he came across, then cash them in and buy lottery tickets. One of his friends commented once, “You’re never going to win; why go to the effort?” My dad pointed out that a large portion of lottery money went to support our state parks, so he was “winning” in two ways every morning: getting good exercise and benefiting state parks.
Then he actually hit a winning ticket one morning and came back with a bemused look on his face. When our mom asked what had happened he just pulled a wad of $100 bills out and tossed it on the kitchen table – and that wasn’t all of it; since most of the cans he’d cashed in that morning had come from around the back of the YMCA (where kids hung out around and under the small skateboard half-tubes and every now and then engaged in serious drinking) he’d stopped at the Y on his way home and handed them a dozen $100s.
[We never got told how much he’d won but that was looked to have three dozen or more bills in it, which led us to conclude that he was one of the unnamed $4k - $5k winners in the area that week.]
I relate this to get to this point: if anyone had told dad he was suddenly rich due to winning ~$5k he would have said no, he was rich because he got to go on walks every morning and along the way help keep the neighborhood tidy (he picked up trash along the way as well), because most of the people in the world didn’t have such an opportunity to do good three ways at once (exercise, tidying the neighborhood, and supporting the state parks).
We live in a state where you cannot remain anonymous – I’ve joked that if we were supposed to win the lottery, I would pick up a winning ticket that blew across my path as litter. An 80 minute drive to a store in another state might be a possibility though, meanwhile enjoying the foliage through the hilly countryside this time of year. It wouldn’t be a bad outing.
A friend left the university we were at and attended a Roman Catholic “classical academy” in northern California that went farther than I suspect the ones you’re referring to did: when they read Aquinas, they read in Latin, and the same for other Western Christian authors; and when they read Euclid, they struggled through the Greek. They took the “back to the sources!” meme all the way back to the original languages. There was a “classical academy” in the next town that was run by Presbyterians and some other area churches that got the comment I heard when I visited him for a week once: “Amateurs!” from one of the RC students, which got affirmations from a half dozen other students.
Though really interestingly, some non-denominational churches in the area got together and organized a “classical academy” designed to get students able to read the classics in the original languages. Latin was introduced in the third grade and Greek in the sixth, so the plan was that in seventh grade courses of readings in Latin began and in ninth Greek readings would be added. I don’t know how it’s going now, but in their first year there were over two hundred applications for forty openings and somehow they managed to take a hundred and twenty students, and in the second year there were more than twice as many applications for a hundred and twenty openings and somehow they managed to take a hundred eighty.
Ah – I’ve encountered that sort of thing. A Lutheran church I attended for a couple of years ran a school, grades K-8, and my second year it turned out that the new vice-principal was an advocate for that sort of thing; he got fired shortly before Thanksgiving that year after four or five dozen kids’ parents informed the director that either that “charlatan” was going or their kids would be going to the public schools. I think that was the year that they partnered with another local Lutheran congregation to increase support for the school in order to add grade 9, and while the new partner congregation was practically YEC they had no tolerance for Christians talking crap about others even if it was the “heathen” public schools.
This reminds me of a jewish tale I’ve come across multiple times that goes like this:
Yankel, an old pious Jew, observant all his life and living a life of poverty, one day in his morning prayers petitions God. “God,” he rises and prays, “All my life I have been an observant Jew. I have lived according to your Torah and your commandments, faithfully praying every day, observing Shabbat and all the festivals, keeping strictly kosher, giving what I can in charity. I have lived my life as a poor person, I have never had much. And while I have always been grateful for what I do have, and I have never asked you for much, would it be possible, just once, as I near the end of my life, that I win the lottery?” And with that he sits down.
Every morning, Yankel offers up the same prayer to God, to win the lottery. And each evening he goes to sleep having not won.
Weeks and months pass, and the same routine. Yankel prays to win the lottery each morning, and goes to sleep each night having not won. His mood turns from hopeful, to disappointed, to angry.
On the anniversary of his request, Yankel angrily addresses God: “Ruler of the Universe! One year ago today and every day since I made a simple request! I never asked you for anything my whole life, and now, just once I ask you for something. Why have you denied me this? Why have you not allowed me to win the lottery?!”
A booming voice from Heaven calls out: “Nu, Yankel, buy a ticket!”
Like Yankel I shall never win a lottery the way your Dad did because I also regard it as a waste of time and resources. But at least I won’t be shaking my fist at God anytime soon.
Heh. But as I understand St. Ignatius’ point, it is when we die in Christ that we become fully alive, since in this life we are burdened by death in the form of our sins, known and unknown. As St. Francis of Assisi put it, it is in dying that we are born to eternal life – and so it is in becoming truly alive that we are “worth more (to God)”.
Food for thought from my between sleeps reading in Thr Matter With Things, on page 1948:
Though a belief in God or otherwise cannot be a matter of argument, there is nonetheless virtue in having a sort of scaffolding in place, even though it cannot reach heaven. The scaffolding won’t do the job, but it will be reassuring to those who are wont to arrive at truths by erecting scaffolding (or so they believe). People have to start from where they are at the time, and many can’t get past the first hurdle: that they believe the idea of God is an affront to the rational mind. But, though there are many paths that may lead to God, I can’t believe any of them does so in a coercive fashion – one that leads someone to say, ‘OK, I give in, there is a God’. That you must always be free to choose, and free to doubt, seems to me part of the deal. (If you believe we are not free, then beliefs, including that one, don’t matter, since they are merely predetermined.) What does love mean, to the lover or the one that is loved, if it is compelled?
That is a key question - maybe even more key than the existential one.
As one skeptical humorist wrote in his narrative commentary about one of his own fictional characters living in a world populated with a pantheon of gods … (to this effect)… “It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the gods existed; it was rather that he didn’t believe in the gods. Because they tended to show up drunk when they showed up at all.”
Underneath the humor, I think some serious religious commentary is going on here. We tend to think that merely believing in God’s existence (like the demons do), is what it means to “believe in” God. But thinking that something or someone exists is a still a far cry from trusting them. And if you are compelled to believe they are a monster, unworthy of any respect much less worship - that too is going to preclude any real relationship or love.
