Our speaker this evening is a Professor Emeritus at Hillsdale College in Michigan, where he taught for 35 years. For 15 of those years, he had the distinguished Russell Amos Kirk chair in American Intellectual History, and for 10 years he served as the Governor's Board Member to the Michigan Council for the Humanities and an equal amount of time as Committee Member for the National Endowment for the Humanities and also for the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the second recipient of the Emily Dautry Teaching Award and the first Senior Faculty Member to so be honored. And he was a four-time nominee for a Professor of the Year, an honor that he respectfully declined each time.
He's the author of three books, All Out of Print, the second of those books won the National Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, and he's also been widely published over the years with numerous articles most recently on the early 19th century theologian, Oreste Bronson, another on T.S. Elliott. He had a great one that I read recently on St. John Henry Newman's Two Conversion novels, and actually a good place to go.
Those is the imaginative conservative is where you want to Google to go read those articles. I'm very good. I highly recommend reading them. And add to that a variety of book reviews, poems by the batch about a dozen chapters from a memoir that's currently in progress, and I love the title, The Man Who Wore a Teacup on His Ed, Turtles and Other Slow Moving Creatures I Have Known.
And before his retirement, he also on behalf of his college lecturer, Ditter and Dither, including on Jim Charleston, Beaufort, Savannah, and many other parts of the country I remember singing in Tucson, Arizona once. And Professor Sundalt is as Norwegian as pickled herring. He's a Scandinavian by mood and temperament and as such is a card-carrying introvert. And he and his spouse Ellen living career with two purebred mackerel cats, one very well-behaved chocolate lab, and he occasionally fishes, and he's a fly fisherman, which I know nothing about but would like to.
And he's also, he claims not a very good golfer, but I played with him yesterday and he's pretty good. So I am going to pass over to him, and I'm looking forward to listening to him. So Dr. Daniel Sundalt.
He liked me. He told me this was going to be an older crowd. You know, young. I lectured some time at the La Wobak at St.
Mary's on religious liberty in the public square, and I came about as a result of Father Tomlinson's urgings. You know that his urgings can become very urgent. So after that, he asked me again, he said, what would you like to do next? And so I was known plus because I thought that once was enough.
And I said to him, I said, do you know Father Smith oftentimes references modernism in his homilies, but he does know as a word itself leaves a distaste in his mouth and rightly so. And I added to that that it is much like you Father Tomlinson, and you mentioned the word existentialism. These are words that tend, as far as you're concerned, to bring unchoking spells. So I said to him, I said, I will then, after urging to do something on modernism and its cultural context.
I said it would not veer into the church's post-Vatican II reproachment with modernism because I said that's the business of those who wear the collar. So let me make a point and that is I am not an advocate of modernism decadence, and I believe that it is created a moral wasteland with hosts and hosts of intemperate minds. So there'll be some tough moments when I discuss Sigmund Freud, John Paul Sartre and Joseph Fletcher. And I want to make it the job of redeeming the time is an immense one and it's going to require a moral imagination and to do so is not going to lead to any glittering prizes.
Conscience is going to be the authority wrote in 1846 as will be the Bible and the church and all of the hereditary lessons we learn from antiquity. So folks, redeem the time, redeem the unread vision in the higher dream where jeweled unicorns draw the guilty curse. Those are lines that come from T.S. Eliot's home match Wednesday.
For years I taught great books as modern man's spiritual and intellectual inheritance of my college. It was called the Western tradition and it was the pillars in general education. So inheritance I always thought the pretty darn good word and the emphasis by the way was always moral which was stated in my college mission statement with that phrase in local parentus which means acting in the place of a parent and based in common law. Which means if I have the number right and I acted as a certain parent to over 6,000 young men in my years as a professor.
I'm grateful for all those memories but I don't relish the grading. So the first five weeks now of every semester the students read selected books from the Old Testament and the New Testament among which were Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, a good selection of Psalms, Job, always a confusing favorite, Matthew, Romans and then Hebrews. It was important for the students to perceive the visual aspects of the story as to including that dramatic moment in Mount Sinai when Moses receives the Ten Commandments and which led then with the students to a large lecture on the moral aspects of those Ten Commandments and then moved into small group discussions. Now by visual I don't mean then a flannel board with cartoon-like cut-out pictures of an ark with animals, parading up and down a gangplank.
But here's what I wanted them to do. I wanted them to see the stories as cultural masterpieces as did Rembrandt among many, many other great artists. Now it seems simple was actually very difficult because most of these days equate morality with public acts which at times are switched on and switched off between public occurrences which require moral choices. But if there is a grain to moral life it must be written in our minds and hearts and it must be continually active.
A contemplative attitude which also requires a moral language suffered and offered by others. So the Ten Commandments and the language then are placed in front of us but not simply as laws to be obeyed and public like stop and yield signs but they are therefore contemplation. So the reason is that we have a common but fallen human nature with propensity-storched disorder. So morality as an actualizing ideal must always be renewed since order is the very first need of all.
So the point was biblical realism and the process was dialectical with a series of generalizations such as whether or not moral order is the first need of all and whether without moral order is life tolerable and if not what is order anyway. And that led to discussions with the students then on natural law, common law, covenant theory, reason and revelation. That was for five weeks before we then turned our attention to the Greeks. So I remember on an otherwise good Friday afternoon when an 18-year-old young man from Chicago slouched into my office.
He saw the pile of essays on my desks on my desk ladder and asked if I had read his essay. I lied to him. I said I had not actually had. He then vouched to me.
He said, well, we have a problem. And so from his essay I assumed such. He said first of all that he wasn't aware that he had enrolled at a Christian college which led him to note that he believed such was intolerant to his more secular concerns. He said he had enrolled what he thought was a conservative college.
He was especially though concerned with my lecture topics. There exists an enduring moral order which is made for man and that man is interned made for it. Human nature is constant. Moral truths are permanent.
The word order signifies a harmony both for the inner order of the soul and the outer order of the commonwealth which suggests that the commonwealth body, social, is a kind of spiritual corporation which when added together then is part of political philosophy which these days is confused with political science. So I had also lectured that our morality is descriptive which means we cannot make or brave new discoveries in morality based upon personal taste. Given that it would be perilous to make moral decisions on the basis of private judgment or private rationality. A abide by precedent I said or live in disorder or chaos.
Well his further Friday after an argument was that someone with an ounce of understanding must be aware that such stuff from long ago is no longer relative. No longer abiding upon us. How do we after all not know that those stone tablets even existed and maybe the story is a hoax and why do we have to read these old books anyway? Why don't we read something a little bit more modern?
I had to my misfortune to see Rouste's temper. Here was a young man who believed that his opinions and his interpretations should be validated since he has rights. He is entitled and I should be less dramatic and more objective. I think about that young man now and again as one of my failures and for which I'm most likely a total.
Well I hope you can see now at the beginning here my point about what modern is is about rejection and in place of being rejected something else something relative something situational something progressively new and all at the expense of tradition that now obsolete culture of the past which has become the chef of parody because to venerate the past is to hold that progress. Journalism and progressivism seem to go along hand in hand even if that thinking is permissive or based upon current judicial interpretations of medical science. So now I recall also for a moment from August 1965 the day that my own father took me to college and for the first two weeks of football pre-season practice before classes began. So we sat now in his car for a long period of time because I knew he was ruminating forming words in his mind that would become the father's advice to his only son.
Finally he looked at me and he said promise me only one thing. I was in a hurry so I said I would. He said promise me you won't do anything to embarrass your mother. And he spoke those words as if he were uttering the 12th commandment.
Now to move along then with this evening's topic we need to do something strategic. We need to classify history according to ethics and to periods. So we begin then way back in the recesses of time to a 3000 BC and then come forward reading again these old books the Old Testament the New Testament but also Greek and Roman history Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Thucydides, the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Virtual, just to name a few. We would call these first centuries then the classical period and for the sake of historical hygiene we then say that that period comes to a conclusion in 430 AD with the death of Saint Augustine and when those Aryan vandals then descended from the north and Rome fell.
What follows then is the medieval period which is book ended between say the fifth and the 15th centuries and we read another writings to Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Dante all of whom own characteristics that are characteristic of that period. We follow that with the Renaissance or the Age of Discovery. This is the time then of Petrach, Pico della Melandero and others including Shakespeare and a man by then inferences Bacon was very very famous for his scientific method which included by the way freezing a chicken. And which so goes the argument changed the entire world.
The nuances in history. So then it goes after that we will find our way into the Enlightenment and it goes along with this academic slicing and dicing down through the history one epic following another epic come to the romantic period followed by the era of realism and naturalism and eventually we get then to our own age unless we switch to the space of postmodernism or the twilight of modernism. So what's the purpose then in a survey like this organizing history into epics. These historical changes always occur when a following age is an ideological reaction against the previous age which so goes the argument the previous age had false ideas about life.
So the romantic period is an ideological reaction against the Enlightenment because the romantic period is believed all of those figures believed in the cold rational hand of the age of reason. And so by ideology I mean ideas that come about prevalent during a period of time which may then become pervasive for a period of time. And so there are words for this like determinism or socialism or Darwinism or Freudianism and so on. All of these are styles of thought like modernism or Freudianism and they are styles of thought then and we note that these styles of thought are often in disagreement with other styles of thought even to the point in history during which other styles of thought one style of thought even attempts to liquidate the other.
So it's theorizing or visionary or impractical in nature but usually by those we know who are opportunistic but with sophistic language aiming to bring one and all underneath or into their great big internet tent. Ideology can mangle morality and is very often insensitive to counter evidence. So more so ideologies then can become aggressive so as to make the politics of what is possible impossible. So one wonders these days by watching the political theater you see on the daily news is whether the ferocious factionalism we see is about to end in slaughter.
Bowie knives to the tropes of those who disagree with corrupting power. Old Edmond Burke reminds us that the ideologue is he who inhabits the antagonistic world which often time owns a cold blooded brutal view of life. So one can embrace all of these new ideas systems or argue for immutable first principles which in mathematics are called axioms but in philosophy are called self-evident assumptions that cannot be deduced from any other proposition. So it's called metaphysics and if we were in the third century now you were students at Hillsborough College you would then be meandering around a book by Aristotle titled the metaphysics which gives an account then of how we come to understand first principles, universals which are also dividing values of natural law.
So more on metaphysics when I get near the end of this lecture but now let me quote Genesis the sixth day when God sees that what has been made is good and then says that wonderful phrase let us make man in our image after our own likeness. This is a phrase then again repeated in the New Testament but renewed in true righteousness to Adam's here then good and image both of which are metaphysical that with more study can be likened to what we know as theological which what we draw when we get to St. Thomas Aquinas. Now so with these ethics then new explanations replacing old explanations which would collapse and with that collapse then the result is oftentimes something that can be traumatic such then is the case with the modern era which is close to us since we reckon it owning fixed points.
So there are arguments that we are still in the era postmodernism. So here's where we start we would begin with the modern essay by the late Victorian novelist Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown and here we write or find her facetiously writing that on or about December 1910 human nature changed and although she never specified what the causes of that changed facetiously her point was that since human character changed everything changed in this brand new modern era.
How we represent human character changed and by character now I mean we understand how human nature but noting for the moment that we are now far far removed from that moment in Genesis and we end up with something like this. Sigma and Freud. So my thematic point modernism is an historical period with an ideology rejecting what came prior because what came prior owned false views of human character and life. So for the sake of a beginning point on or about 1910 the era began because human character changed and how we represented that human character also changed and by represent I mean how we understand human character.
So again to whom can we point this getting modernism that changed in ideology what we point to segment Freud a man who had theories which led to an extraordinary influence on modern life to the point in which the language we use to understand life also changed drastically. So here's the point then about this new human character. Deep psychological energy is driven by libido a mental state in every person which deals with our desires. Prior to Freud's use of that word libido it was a word that would have been known only to a very very select few of Latin scholars and even then for those scholars the term likely would have meant just in eagerness or wronging.
The scholars interested in what are called pyruts argue that the words origin is actually L-U-B-H-U-B which by the time comes by at one time just simply meant love. Love gets translated into libido. Which began now to argue that human character or personality another word with a change in meaning to it is divided into two main parts the conscious and the unconscious. The former like the tip of an iceberg while the latter is the huge expanse underneath the tip of the left.
So Freud and theory then divided human character personality into three major components and again this is language common to all of us. The ego in the super ego. Then he made the argument that no single person owns a stable personality and we are all driven and thither by irrational impulses and badly at that. So if I wish to understand modernism I need to read the major influential books by Sigmund Freud which include his studies in hysteria, interpretation of dreams, psychotepology of everyday life and his three essays on the theory of sexuality.
All of which would be then good background reading if we really want to understand that television program, Seinfeld. The television program about nothing. So according to Freud both neuroses and psychoses then disturb a person's relation to reality which is then avoided. The consequence is that that person then develops a fantasy world into which he or she takes refuge which is more satisfying since it does not all involve the repressive restraints of the actual world like my mother.
Because of these symptoms and especially those of neuroses which vary in severity these dis-eases interfere with the important aspects of life and lead them to diminished moral insight which means equally diminished moral responsibility because of the lack of moral insight. So what's the consequence? Apart from religion according to Freud being an element of that fantasy world we don't need to go too far to suggest that in varying degrees there are some disturbing qualities. One which would be a lack of empathy for others, chronic deceitfulness, insusceptibility to shame or remorse or regret, manipulativeness, brando self-image, superficial relations with those with whom one would be closest and all of which are just for a inability to form accurate moral beliefs among which is compassion.
Which one of my favorites here now novelist and philosopher Dean Iris Murdoch argued is the capacity to love which is really really since she says liberates the soul from fantasy. And by the way Murdoch does use the word soul in her philosophy and like a good classical philosopher thinks that the word love is an attention to the good. So one I therefore get to sub-tile the age of modernism as the age of Freud because psychology is a virgin. Once it was given birth by Freud and his disciples and among whom of course are young, Adler, Skinner, Reich, Mazzarov, all of whom were involved in the argument that we rarely give true accounts of our motivation because we are all adept at self-deception with subtle camouflaging of the hidden structures and processes of personality all of which again are the result of re-cranched memories.
So if I wish to me enter that area of philosophy I would discover also that modern philosophy then undertakes the theories of Freud into what is now known as existentialism. It would add that to the complexity such that other areas of thought know including literature including theology and sociology and history and biography and so on. They would all be motivated to adopt existentialism as the modus upper endi with all kinds of cross-fertilization. So we have another point of reference then for understanding the modern era and another synonym by referring to it as the age of existentialism and we find that such as historical convenience of ideas that were shared by large numbers of people including, sorry, including Elvick Camus, including the theologian Paul Tilick and others who shared the idea that existence precedes essence.
So such becomes then a term that belongs to intellectual history and one of his historical convenience but what is interesting is how we had achieved dissemination through the modern period and here we would best begin to start by reading his book, Nausea, Being and Nothingness or Todiloft to the Theatre for another performance of his play, No Exit. We find that often quoted for A's, Hell is Other People which start once argued means that we are unable to escape the washful gaze of everyone around us. It's a phenomenon even if it became a parody in those films by Woody Allen. So existentialism then you see, foster the language of slogans with this particular theme of alienation and estrangement from the ancient notion of creation in which human beings have a well-ordered place which is where three slogans then rejected arguing that the modern experiences lived in an absurd and meaningless universe.
So I came alive in the 1960s and I remember alienation in the strange, my father was very confused with what I was talking about. So again, I want you to mention a novel here and that is Gotcha and the Ride by J. D. Selenjian and a character in that novel whose name is Holden Caulfield and it's all about rejecting life and the book leads to nothing more than nothing less than pathos.
So it means that we, through our own consciousness, create our own values and we determine our own meaning in our lives apart from normative ethics, those thou shalt and thou shalt not commence. That might seem small but it is opposed to the de judeo Christian perspective that life's meaning is based on the fulfillment of God's commandments. Rather than posing a belief that essence precedes existence which is revealed in Genesis, the order is reversed and now existence precedes essence. And essence is not spiritual but congenial to depth psychology which owns a passionate dislike for metaphysics as a guy in tomorrow's.
So we all, all of this to start. Philosophy which one stands in contrast to traditional established principles of metaphysics and second begins with the proposition that a human's being's life at the beginning does not possess any kind of inherent potential which means it's not really a life until it's born. And what follows is the argument that identity always has to be created subjectively for every person over time if they desire to make their existence and then their essence significant. There's a metaphor from the Greeks that comes from this and it's called the myth of sicidness.
Existential life means that we push and haul this big rock up to the top of the hill. It rolls down. We haul it back up. It rolls down.
And the argument is that this is the way life is and then all of life is meaningless. We do this on and on and on and on until we die. Also goes the argument commit suicide which says all is absurd is a rational act. It's a very far far removed from what you find in Dante's Purgatorio.
So my point again is that if human character did change on or about December 1910 with that change comes a change in how we view moral imperatives. If we can no longer master hauling that big rock up to the top of the hill, if ironically we can no longer master the situations in our lives. According to the argument there seems to be no exit and suicide is a rational act. All of this is background where it came to be known again as the numerality which in the 1920s glorified youth and personal freedom and which became over the decades an extraordinary change in the concept of morality and brought about very different ideas.
One particular and that is how we think these days about marriage. So conservatives describe the agents permissive. Liberals describe the agents one of the emancipation and progressivism. They agree once said in response, they got to have mercy on our souls.
The theologian Martin Marty once asked whether men had become a hedonistic pleasure loving self-en He argued that we are just now beginning to discover what morality is all about. So there's another phrase now for the numerality which is situation ethics and another which is called values clarification. Here's the phrase. My argument is that it has become an ideological perversion since the consequences led to difficulties in discussing moral questions in terms of right or wrong or even to ask questions posed by say John Dydian, now deceased, the author of a book called Slouching Torbethli him where you find the phrase what makes the novel evil?
Some people ask, I no longer ask. So unless morality and ethics are not absolute but relative, progressive any of all of you. So we're here this evening. Many of us have come of age in the modern era in which the independence of the individual self has been given complete warrant and interpreted as the most important facet of morality which is now always dependent upon the situation in which the individual freely lives.
Here's Joseph Fletcher, an American college professor who founded the theory of situation ethics in the 1960s. Here's the offer of a book called Situation Ethics the New Morality which came out in 1966. It's about believing that moral decision making is always dependent upon the circumstances. The framework for moral decision making is acting, he says in the most loving way to maximize harmony, reduce discord and enrich human existence because as the Beatles song goes, all we need is love.
All we need is love is all we need and I sing like a frog. Which sounds fine. And that is until we come to understand that Fletcher is objecting to moral absoluteness. There are no fixed moral principles that have binding authority in all circumstances.
In truth, if that's the right word, to hold that there are absolutes is callous and in humane. The situations in which we live are way way too complex making a decision as to what we should do. More so, he says there are no normative guidelines but only individual judgments concerning particular cases. No moral justification for evaluating that one moral claim is being actually superior to another.
It's a little bit like saying there are no such thing as facts, only interpretations. Now I'll return to this business a little while later because Christian Mark, a brotherly log which he argued, is expressed in a different way in different situations. So if we expand this issue then of situation ethics and numerality to realms apart from theology, we know the impact Fletcher thought actually on Christian thought because we find our ways into what is known as bioethics which addresses a huge swath of human nature and inquiry including by the way the morality of medical treatments. So by definition bioethics aim to discover life at its basic biological processes and seeks them to enable their propagation meaning cloning, genetic engineering and so on.
So what? Well this concerns then the boundaries of life which range between abortion on one side and euthanasia or eugenics on the other side. No other books to create apologetic rationalizations supporting that morality. The such rationale then will be something like this.
According to Fylchert, given the notion of brotherly love, situationally it becomes an ethical value because the act owns pragmatic value. The greatest good, the greatest number also called utilitarianism. Here's Fletcher on this particular notion. We need to educate people to the idea that the quality of life is more important than mere length of life.
Our cultural tradition holds that life has absolute value but that is really not any good anymore. Sometimes no life is better. People with a down syndrome child have no reason to feel guilty about putting a down syndrome baby away whether it's put away in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible lethal sense. It is sad, yes, it is dreadful but it carries no guilt.
True guilt arises only from an offense against a person and a down is not a person. The keywords here are responsible and educated. Here's another book in which she refers to all of this as reproductive remit. He calls for a change also in our legal system.
Fletcher argues to the American Law Institute that law should favor the living, not mere life. His point was in 1968 that it's high time our legal system takes constructive guidance from the numerality from situation ethics. The result now is if you're following along with me some of five years later, Roe v. Wade became the law of the land.
With our modernism then, we have new views of human freedom where the end is structured by the means. But apart from all of this is scientific ignorance and taboos about the underlying mystique of life. It is after all superstitious to assert that life begins a conception. To keep a perspective, Mongoloid Shire would be alive which would come about as medical science asserts.
The simple deformation of the 47th chromosome is to make ourselves accessories in what is really just a monstrous accident. So here's what it was called as constructive guidance and it became part of a first humanist manifesto which appeared then in 1933 with the argument that humanism offers a consensus that can be used to serve present day needs and guide mankind toward the future by extending the scientific method both from the hard sciences and the soft sciences. So the problem, the humanist manifesto argues that religions are obstacles to human progress since religious morality denies humanity and appreciation of their own responsibilities. Morality is situational and arises from human experience and needs no religious action.
Morality stems only from human need and interest. So what appeared then in 1933 seems old hat but the entire thing is revisited in 2016 with these new arguments. Humans are an integral part of nature the result of unguided evolutionary change. The new 2016 manifesto wishes then to guide evolutionary change.
So the numerality situation ethics argue that science is the best method for establishing a critical intelligence for solving problems. Science will guide us into that future yet to be known but always in the context of scientific guided evolutionary change. How do we understand this business which proliferates in our culture today? Recall I said at the very beginning that the undergrading to the numerality of situation ethics is brotherly love.
So the claim is that the numerality is actually sanctioned by Christ. So the evidence in part to let your argument. Decess came to the defense of his disciples when changes were brought against him by the Pharisees for eating grain on the Sabbath. And since the disciples then had to pluck the grain, rub it in their hands to separate the grain from the chaff that was work and a violation of the moral edict end of not working on the Sabbath.
According to the new moralist situations, Jesus is actually a forerunner of the new morality when he vindicated his disciples for plucking grain on the Sabbath. And his approval also of David ranking the law when he ate the chugrin. So Christ formed the argument that human welfare has preference over the laws of God and thus a precedent for all time. And this is what these days is called critical thinking.
It's the result of reasoning and critical intelligence and it's also something much adored these days in academic circles. What do you people engage in? We engage in teaching students critical thinking. When Fletcher argues for brotherly love, he means neighborly love, the second table of the law.
But he rejects the first table which is love of God, which is primary telling us that we cannot love our neighbor properly without first loving God and showing our love to God by obeying his commandments, both tables of the law, along with the 12th commandment, which I mentioned to you earlier is you never ever do anything to embarrass your mother. So the embarcy, the rebel grows that yes, yes, but God is love. And one could quickly when you find yourself in these arguments, it began to sort of be a blustering sputtering. But my sense is that the emphasis on love in very current Christian ethics is a misunderstanding of love because of the sentimental perversion of Christ's moral behavior and simply reduces the gospel then to a sort of summary image for the moral life which is the same goes all we need is love.
What we forget there are the brutal facts which are terrifying. That we cannot remove as an important aspect of Christian existence and I use that word pointably because it follows essence. Thus merely to appeal to love is but to blur the pain and the glory of living morally in his life. Right hold neighbor once said to me at lunch that the greatest enemy of the Christian life is not self-interest, but sentimentality.
And so say merely that God is love is an insufficient proposition, albeit it's a modern cultural piety which has become immune from criticism and thus difficult to disagree with, which is the case with most latitudes. So the business is much more difficult than what is presumed in the abstraction of God's love, which makes Christ into a kind of moralistic, Emily post. So the gospel has become trivialized and with that the story of Christ's life becomes trivialized. We need to recall the kind of love found in Christ's eternal act of sacrifice as well as the notion that holds every one of us and everything together with the extraordinary stress that is the grace of God.
It's stress that moves outward from the act of creation into which the poet Hopkins again writes is a blissful agony, God forcing out drops of sweat and blood which embody in spirit. It's love combined with truth which owns the outstressing of justice and which can be terrifying but mitigated by grace of bounding. But briefly add something here of an alternative. For 12 years, Marianne Long of Kentucky was cared for by the Dominican nuns of our Lady of Perpetual Help Home in Atlanta.
It's a shelter for those with incurable cancer and to our indigent. Marianne had a disfiguring incurable cancer on her face. She had this end, the doctors said she would die in six months. When she was four, she came to live with the nuns.
She died in 1959 living at the Our Lady of Perpetual Help for 12 years. The nuns so cared for her recorded all of her stories that make up the memoir of Marianne Long. When you read this memoir, the story of this vibrant spirit with this increasing tumor on her face is a story of lightheartedness, joyful of amdance, charity, innocence and love embodied in the essence of the Christian spirit. Flannery O'Connor edited the manuscript removing parts that she said were too gussied up, too many halos, way too many heavenly scented smells.
What's left is the story of Christian realism with suffering but also victory and insights into the interior life of beauty of Marianne's spirit which overrode all of the disfiguring aspect of her cancer. The book is available but is a rare book and hard, hard, hard to find. So I have my copy here. If at the end of all of this you want me to read a small portion from it.
I'd like to please. So by comparison, now what I have been talking about and trying to make clear in this lecture is that what has become pervasive with the numerality and situation ethics is a polarization of Christian ethics and Christian realism. It becomes an ethic suffering from the vice of humanistic subjectivism which fails to recognize the sinful weakness in human nature. The numerality of situation ethics obscures right and wrong, replacing those standards then with the phrase it depends.
And by doing so, licenses would be known in the 1960s, my era, doing one's own thing. One should rather rapturously proclaim with the poissomis collovius thy law. It is my meditation all the day. So is metaphysics that a guy tomorrow?
You want to recall my reference of the beginning here to the years in which I taught the students what they called the greats. And among it again, we're selection from Aristotle. His metaphysics, his nickel mocking ethics, and a very interesting one called the anima or on the soul. Aristotle was promoting again what is discriminating in the human mind, matters of ultimate concern, and sovereign obligations.
Aristotle argued that there are ethical ideals that exist in the use of the phrase they're a a priori, forms of knowledge, independent and prior to our particular experiences. It would not be remiss to define these forms as essences that actually precede our existence. First principles, the permanent things are what we like to call the e-term verities. And if these ideals then exist prior to our particular experiences, they are metaphysical, which means transcending nature.
The ideals are also goods, which means we are to pursue them if we are to lead order lives. What conversation purposes in Aristotle would do something like this, he would ask questions such as, is tenaciousness a good? Is moral strength a good? Is self-control a good?
But are these goods then true in themselves, and thus apart from mere opinion? Next question, how do you go about realizing these goods? Aristotle said there is education and imitation. With the latter, Aristotle means the argument that we have within our self and in nature for imitation.
So if we have, he says, modeled around us, tenaciousness, moral strength and self-control, then rationally we would do everything possible to attempt to bring those goods into our own lives, realizing their essences. So I hold my father in high, high estimation because what I observed in his life were those disciplined ethics, tenaciousness, moral strength and self-control. The same for my mother, who was very forgiving when I embarrassed him. So it's true knowledge now, unadulterated by situation or relativity.
But the truth is now philosophy only goes so far, and it tells us though that without an understanding of something like cause and effect, there would be no field of action upon which we would understand how to live our daily lives. The Greeks had this philosophy, but they did not have his revelation from Genesis, which tells us we are a priori made in the image of God, which also means we have, innately, inside of ourselves, personality, which becomes unintelligible unless it is understood as being religious at its foundation. Surely we would agree with Aristotle that we are called to be tenacious, morally strong, and self-control. But we are also called to a supernatural destiny because since we are created in the image of God, we have by creation the first principle of eternity in our minds and hearts.
And since we believe that that's true, the drama of our human lives is far far removed from that myth of sisitus, that drama of absurdity and frankly brutality. But there's also this, which is the twofold sort of wound because Christian really argues that sin is not only personal, but every sin manifests itself in the social world around us. So it's the mightiest of man's problems of all of history in that part of the incarnation and after the incarnation. But there's an important aspect of that time in history because as I figure it, the incarnation came about with this much growing birth after the creation in Genesis, so cited by the Victorian poet Hopkins, God himself, selling in creation great blobs of blood.
So Christian realism sees the abysses of sin, but in the light of hope and greater than any evil, Christ after redemption destroys sin and death and grabs unto us a new life, but not without that searing, searing pain of love. So thanks to you all for coming and listening to me. And I hope Abbot has had anything to do with deserving to anyone.