Of Memory

So, this is a short story I wrote the other day, tell me what you think of it:

Time is the only reality of life, yet it is a strangely nonexistent reality: it constantly dissolves life in a past which no longer is, and in a future which always leads to death.By itself, time is nothing but a line of telegraph poles strung into the distance and at some point along the way is our death.

-Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World-

OF MEMORY

Time has a funny way of galloping by in great chunks while simultaneously creeping, moment to moment; whole epochs exist in the quivering of the longer hand. Anyone who has ever mowed a lawn knows what I mean by this. Medius Harper’s lawn mower sputtered to a halt. He turned to survey his handy work and saw all of the perfect, uniform eighteen inch lines robing his yard with verdant dignity. The funny thing was, he couldn’t remember having mowed any of the lines. Yet there they were, stretched out in front of him. He looked at the fence line which needed weed-eating, but decided that the newest episode of that great new cop thriller show on that one station with the letters was more appealing.

He climbed the sun faded steps of his wooden porch, and opened the sliding glass door into the family room. He made a mental note to power wash the steps next weekend and re-treat them with weather sealant. He remembered to take off his shoes and socks and carry them into the laundry room, taking caution not to drop grass on the carpet. He mounted the stairs to the top floor and entered the master bathroom. He hesitated before entering the shower, debating that question which always presents itself to the one who has engaged in manual labor: hot or cold shower? Hot will relax the muscles, but cold will reinvigorate the spirit. Medius opted for the former, as one always does, preferring comfort to stimulation.

Usually, when a person stinks of body odor, he is unaware of it. Because the smell is emanating from his own body and because it builds up steadily over time, he is inoculated by the smell. It creeps up on him, not presenting itself immediately to his consciousness but infecting the air around him. This is not the case when he has been mowing the lawn. The noxious smell of petrol-fuels mingles with the sweet yet sharp, untamed smell of fresh-cut grass and the whole thing is undergirded by a repugnant, sticky, well-earned sweat.

Medius emerged from the shower and went into his walk-in closet; the light flickered on automatically as he opened the door. He dressed himself quickly opting for jeans and a polo. He descended the stair stopping briefly in the kitchen to heat his microwavable meal and grab a few beers. He trudged to the basement, flopping himself on the micro-fiber, malaise green couch. He scooped up four different remotes and with deft skill brought the world in front of him to life. The cop show was proceeded by that hilarious new sitcom with that girl from the old hilarious sitcom, which coincidentally, was being shown on the channel Medius flipped to when there was a commercial. The news followed the sitcom and Medius switched remotes and pulled a recording of his favorite reality show from the memory banks of his cyber-friend.

After three episodes, Medius began to yawn, and figured now was as good a time as any for bed. He said good night and mounted the stairs. He detoured into the kitchen depositing the empty plastic tray from his dinner in the trash and the beer bottles in the recycling bin. He grabbed the package of processed cookies and headed for bed, taking a glass of milk with him.

Between the Egyptian cotton sheets, Medius picked up his ultra-compact notebook and caught up on his social life while munching on cookies before switching off the lights.

When he woke in the morning, Medius looked out his picture window as he stretched. The window overlooked his back yard: there were those damned lines alternating shades of green, perfect, uniform. How did they get there?

The Good Life

Here is yet another one of my papers. It is a little longer, but I think you will enjoy it, and it is certainly an important question: what is the good life?
Nathan Farris
12/10/09
The Good Life
Dr. Yonan
THE GOOD LIFE
From the beginning of time, man has asked the question why am I here. This is one of the enduring questions of mankind–what is a good life. It resonates so deeply because humans are purpose seekers. This question starts as a basic ethical question but quickly finds itself saturated in the spiritual and political. It has been pursued by the greatest minds in history, and they have come to different conclusions. But there is one that stands above the rest: the Westminster Catechism. It states that a good life is one that “glorifies God and enjoys Him Forever.”
The question of the good life is really a question of purpose. It asks why am I here, what is it that gives my life meaning, what makes it good. The ancient Greeks have a useful word in the discussion of the good life: telos. A telos is the end of any object or process. For example, the telos of a phone is to make calls. Aristotle calls this the final cause, “something’s end—i.e. what it is for—is its cause” (Physics 194b 30). Every object has a telos: a phone calls, a refrigerator cools, and a towel dries.
In the same way that every object has a telos, so does every human. An object or person is only good if it moves toward its telos, just as a phone is only good if it makes calls. Therefore, the answer to the question what is the human telos is the answer to the question what is the good life. Ethics are derived from teleology; the phone is only good if it accomplishes its telos. If it does not accomplish its telos it is a bad or unethical phone. The same is true of humans; a good human is one who moves toward his telos.
This view of teleology necessitates that the good life is universal. If human ethics are determined by our telos, and our telos is the same, then the good life is the same for every person. It is widely accepted that different humans have different ends, but this is preposterous. If you change the end of something, it is no longer that thing. If the purpose of a phone changes such that it is now meant to play compact disks, then it is no longer a phone, it is a compact disk player. Mortimer Adler points out the very thing that makes us human is that we have common goods; we share common purposes, “I can make, I think, moral judgments about what every human being ought to seek and ought to do, that I think can be shown to be true and true for all men everywhere” (Adler, 195). Dr. Adler is saying is the very thing that makes us human is our telos; thus we all have the same ultimate good. To say this human has a different telos than that human is to say that this human is a different species than this one.
If the good life is bound up in accomplishing our telos, and our telos is universal, then what is our telos? What is it that all of our actions and thoughts should lead us to? The Church father Boethius says, “all the striving of human nature directs itself toward true happiness” (Consolation of Philosophy, IV.p2.10). The ultimate goal of every human life is to be happy, to be completely satisfied. Augustine points out God “hast made us for [Himself] and our hearts are restless until they find rest in [Him]” (Confessions 1.1.1). The only way anyone will ever be happy is to rest in God. Our telos is to know God and thus fulfilled in Him.
This is still a very ambiguous definition of the good life. But as God is the ultimate goal of all humans, further discussion of how to glorify God may paint a better picture of the Good life. Christians paint this picture within the context of the Gospel, the story of God’s interactions with humans. This story determines the ethics of Christians, and can be broken into four acts: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.
In creation, God creates a good creation and intentions into it the telos of glorifying Him. The crowning piece of this creation is humans, who are imprinted with the very image of God. This image makes us superior to all other forms of creation by making us self- aware, reasonable, and free to make decisions. We alone among God’s creatures can ask a question like what is the good life. Our ability to reason allows us to think about such questions as well as to subdue all of nature and bring it under our dominion. But most importantly, we are given freedom to choose our own actions. This special status given to us by God gives us the unique ability to glorify God more fully than any of the created things:
Since God made the Heavens and the Earth, which do not feel the happiness of their existence, He wanted to make beings who would understand it and compose a body of thinking members (Pensees, 104, S392).
God gave humans alone the gift of knowing happiness in the achievement of our telos.
However, because we are free to chose God and thus glorify Him, we are also free to not choose Him. In the fall, humans chose to rebel against our Creator and our telos. We determined that we could be happy without God. We boldly proclaimed that we were self-sufficient, capable of being good without God. This rebellion against our created order is called sin. This thing called sin has made it impossible for us to reach our telos. We have been estranged from God by our free choices. Cornelius Plantiga says, “We once had a choice,” but with the first act of rebellion the snow ball started rolling, “We now have a near compulsion” (Engaging God’s World, 50). Our sin caused something to go deeply wrong, and we are now incapable of fixing it. The effects of sin are not well hidden--we need only turn on a T.V. to see we live in a world that “has long ago lost its Eden, a world that is now ruined by billions of bad choices” (Ibid). Our free will has buried us in a mountain of sin, and we have no way of being good.
But the story does not end here; in the greatest act of love ever, God sent His Son into the World. The Creator became part of the creation in order that He might redeem it (John 1:1-5, 3:16-21). The incarnate God suffered and was crucified as punishment for our sin. After three days, He rose from the dead. Through this act of extraordinary love, God provided a way for us to be reconciled to Him. As the great Hymn proclaims, “For God the just is satisfied/ To look on Him and pardon me” (“Before the Throne of God Above,” Bentencroft).
Without Christ, no one can be happy. We were created by God for Him and can only be happy in Him. Sin separates us from God; it precludes us from knowing God. Sin is a universal affliction. Thus, we all need Jesus to reach our telos. To be human is to be in need of Jesus. This is why Christianity claims to have the answer to the world’s problems; it is for this reason we claim the universality of our doctrine. It is not some vain ego trip, nor an attempt to win a competition (although plenty of Christians say otherwise). Our quest for truth is not some devious plot to win the “cosmic battle of ideas.” It is an attempt to help the lost and broken. If we have the truth and do not share it, then we rob others of their humanity by robbing them of the only thing that can make them happy.
The final act of the Christian story is restoration. This is the process by which we are re-created; we are restored to our original created order. It is through this re-creation that we can reach our telos; it is through this re-creation that we can be happy. It is in this act we currently find ourselves, and it is in this act that we must pursue our telos. This pursuit involves three key elements: humility, desire, and love.
In order to know God and be happy in Him, we must rightly understand our relationship to Him. This correct assessment of our standing with God is called humility. Humility is often thought of as making ourselves smaller than we are or not being prideful in our abilities. But when we compare ourselves to God, neither of these is a problem. The person who honestly sees God for who He is will see how very wretched he is. This is why Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount by saying, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:3 New Revised Standard Version). Humility is not so much a low opinion of ourselves as it is a high opinion of God. It is helpful to think of humility as making space for God. It means recognizing that since God will make us happy it would be best to have a lot of room for Him.
After understanding our relationship to God and making space for Him, we have to desire God. It is one thing to know that God is good, but it is another to want Him. The Greeks use the word eros which is translated love but should be desire. This is the subject of Plato’s Symposium. He claims that eros always desires the good. What varies is the “good” which eros desires. Eros is the fuel of our actions. We do not move towards anything unless we desire it. A good life must not only recognize God as Good, it must desire God.
At the end of Symposium, Plato introduces Alcibiades who embodies incontinence. Incontinence is the state of knowing what the Good is but not choosing to pursue it. The incontinent person is lacking in eros. Alcibiades enters just after Socrates has given a speech naming the telos as beauty found through contemplation. Alcibiades concedes that Socrates is right about the ultimate good being found in contemplation. But Alcibiades explains that while he knows the Good, he finds himself dragged down by the allure of physical pleasures. The problem of incontinence is puzzling not only to Plato but also to Aristotle. How can someone know the Good and not choose it?
The Christian narrative has no problem explaining this phenomenon. Augustine says that our will is in bondage, “Yet habit had grown stronger against me by my own act, since I had come willingly where I did not now will to be” (Confessions, VIII.V.11). We may be able to know the Good on a rational level, but, as a result of the fall, our will is naturally bent toward sin. We have, as Plantiga says, a “compulsion” for sin. Even if we are shown that God is our telos, our will will lead us away from God. The only way our will can escape its bonds is in Christ. Christ frees our will to pursue God. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, our will can be restored, and we can once again point our eros in the right direction.
Finally to live a good life, we must love those around us. We must attempt to treat them with the care and respect God has shown for us. We must reflect the love of Christ: “let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16, NRSV). In order to truly live, we must serve others by loving them, “Only as we learn to love God and others do we gain real freedom and autonomy” (To Love as God Loves,10). If we are to truly free our will, we must serve others. If we are to know the true fulfillment God intends for our lives, we must live in harmony with others; we must value them. We are created to be in community with one another--it is an integral part of our happiness. Remember what Pascal says, “[God] wanted to make beings who would understand [happiness] and compose a body of thinking members” (Pensees, 104, S392, emphasis mine). God wanted to create us to know happiness as a community and this means loving one another.
While Christians agree with the Greek idea of teleology, there are some differences. The Greeks believed that an active life was not necessary to reach the telos. For Plato and Socrates the telos could be achieved by contemplating the divine. Socrates says that the person who reaches his telos most perfectly is he “who approaches the object with thought alone” (Phaedo, 66A). The telos can be reached without any actions on the part of the seeker. Socrates is arguing that there is no political side to a good life. In other words, a person could be stuck in a windowless room, with no one around, and still reach his telos because he can contemplate the divine.
This denunciation of the active life comes from Socrates and Plato’s rejection of the physical world. They do not believe that the physical world is good. In fact they call the body the prison of the soul “we shall escape the contamination of the body’s folly” (Phaedo, 67A). They speak of the physical with disdain, “as long as we have a body and our soul is fused with such an evil we shall never adequately attain what we desire” (Phaedo, 66A). The good life stands apart from anything in the physical world; therefore, the active life has no role to play in the good life. This point is driven home by Socrates in the Phaedo where, though in prison and facing execution, he is happy. Socrates is unflappable in the face of death because nothing done to his physical body can take the Good from him. As he says in his Apology, “a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death” (Apology, 41d).
However Plato and Socrates are ambivalent on the subject. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” argues the need for education, which is both political and active. He sets up a scenario where people are trapped in a cave and unaware of the real world outside. Plato shows it is the duty of those who have come out of the cave to go back and rescue those still trapped there. He calls this downward movement education (Republic, 517). Plato shows that only people who have come out of the cave are fit to lead those in the cave “the uneducated who have no experience of the truth would never govern a city satisfactorily” (Republic, 519c). However, there is a problem, the people who have seen the outside of the cave will not want to go back to lead those who are still in it. Plato asks if it would do those who have been outside of the cave, “an injustice by making them live a worse life when they could live a better one?”(Republic, 519E). Does asking the contemplative life to become active preclude it from being good? According to Plato:
we shall not be doing an injustice to those who have become philosophers... when we compel them to care for and to guard the others... [philosophers] are better and more completely educated than those others, and [philosophers] are better able to share in both kinds of life. Therefore [philosophers] must each in turn go down to live with other men (Republic 520 b-c).
But how can this not be injustice? Why should anyone be forced to live the active life? The active life does not appear to impede the good life; in fact, it appears to be necessary to it. Plato says, “[philosophers] are better able to share in both kinds of life” (Republic, 520C). The contemplative life precedes the active life and better equips a person to live the active life, but the active life is still a necessary part of the good life.
Christians reject that a good life only encompasses contemplation and maintain that those who have been reconciled to God must tell others about it. Just as those who have come out of the cave must go down to bring others out, so people who have been rescued by the work of Christ must attempt to rescue others. Plato calls it education, Christians call it evangelism. Since all people need Jesus to fulfill our telos, and Christians are concerned for the welfare of all people, it is incumbent upon every Christian to share the Gospel. As the Apostle Paul says:
How are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have not heard? And how are they to believe without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news?”
(Romans 10:13-15, NRSV).
The active life of evangelism is a good life.
Christians are not so willing as Plato and Socrates to renounce the physical world. We believe the active life, which is part of the good life, is more than evangelism. The physical world is good because God created it, “God’s original judgment on creation was that it was ‘good’, even ‘very good’. God made a paradise and we can still find signs of it” (Engaging God’s World, 47). The physical things all around us declare the goodness of God. We can glorify God more by looking at a mountain than by thinking about a mountain. C.S. Lewis argues in “Men Without Chests” that objects “demand a certain response from us, whether we make it or not” (The Abolition of Man, 31). The mountain is beautiful whether we recognize it or not. Lewis says that we must have “magnanimity” towards objects, that this “good will” towards beautiful objects is good. In other words, glorifying God demands enjoying what He has created.
Conversely, there are things, which God has not created, that do not demand our magnanimity. In fact, they deserve our bad will. In order to live a good life we must recognize that a mountain is beautiful, and that strip mining is not.
The active life has two essential components: work and enjoyment. The active life enjoys the good things which God created and works to reproduce them. It strives to dam the effects of the fall. The Apostle Paul gives a shining defense of the active life in Romans 12; he sums up the whole argument in the last clause, “overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:36b, NRSV). Christians see that activity predates the fall and thus must be good. Humans were meant to work to produce good and beautiful things. It is a part of our telos to be active.
This is how a Christian can work to end world hunger and still enjoy a great ice cream sundae. It is good to correct injustice; it is good to work against the uncreated things which harm others. It is right for a Christian to be repulsed by the fact that a child dies every five seconds of hunger. This is not the way God created the world, and it is certainly not good. But the ice cream sundae is good, and to not enjoy it is to not fully live the good life. Similarly to enjoy the ice cream sundae while remaining inactive in the face of injustice is to miss the good life.
Psalms tells us to “taste and see that the Lord is Good” (Psalms 34:8, NRSV). This verse creates a beautiful tension between the active and the contemplative life. Tasting is associated with the physical (the ice cream sundae) and seeing is associated with contemplation. So, the good life encompasses both the active and the contemplative life. The contemplative life is necessary for the active life. It allows us to think about the beauty of God. The active life is worthless unless it moves us toward our telos. The active life needs the contemplative life to direct it toward our telos. But there is no substitute for actually seeing the mountain; no amount of reason can produce good will for the mountain. However, the active life threatens to trap us by making us forget that the mountain is not the good but rather something that moves us toward the good. The active life tempts us to worship the mountain or the ice cream rather than the Creator.
If the active life is not available to a person, they are not incapable of living a good life. The active life necessitates freedom; a person thrown in jail is incapable of the active life. They are still capable of contemplation and thus can still rest assured in the promise of Christ. However, man is by nature a free creature and restriction of his freedom is not ultimately to his benefit. The man in jail is not worried because he knows God is in charge and that He will right all the wrongs (Romans 8: 18-25). In the end he knows that no man can take from him what God gave him. This is different from Socrates; a good man cannot be harmed only because Christ promises resurrection of the body. The destruction of the body and subsequent restriction of freedom is bad. Where freedom is available, the active life is necessary. Where freedom is restricted, the contemplative life plus the promise of future freedom is enough.
There are myriad other views of the good life. Eryximachus argues that the good life is found in the balance of opposites. He claims that there is good love and bad love; good love is desirable and bad love is not. He says good love creates harmony of opposing forces. A balance between hot and cold makes pleasant temperatures, and in the same way, a balance between poverty and wealth makes a good life. The good life is achieved by maximizing good love and minimizing bad love (Symposium 186A-189D).
Others, like Aristophanes, perorate that love is the answer. Aristophanes tells a story in which humans are created as a whole but have been split apart; each of us is only half of our original self. The good life is finding our other half. We are completed by loving our other half (Symposium, 189E-194E).
Another view of the good life is encapsulated in Fortune, who tells us that the good life is found in obtaining wealth, power, and pleasure. She allures us with the promise of riches, might, and fame (Consolation of Philosophy, II, p1). This view tells us that happiness is found in controlling things and people.
At this point, we find the need for another crucial element of the good life: wisdom. Wisdom is our good guide who helps us to distinguish the truth by adding to us the sum total of human experience. Wisdom has seen all of human history and has heard all of its lies. She can help us to see that Eriximachus would like balance in everything but good love and bad love. Or that Aristophanes has made the telos easily achieved; what happens after we have found our other half? Wisdom will show us that the things Fortune promises us will be taken from us. Fortune attempts to satisfy our infinite desires with finite things. Wisdom helps us to debunk false views of the good life.
Wisdom not only shows us what the good life is, but how to live it. She shows us that humility is still the foundation of the good life, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalms 111:10, NRSV). Wisdom helps us to see that both the active and the contemplative life are necessary for a good life. Wisdom is also that aspect of the contemplative life which guides the actions of the active life.
Wisdom also knows that the process by which we come to know and live the good life is important. In Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Wisdom does not tell Boethius what the good life is, but rather she questions him. She leads him to the truth without telling it to him. This may seem like an insignificant distinction because the end result is the same. But Wisdom knows that the end does not justify the means. The Spanish language has two words for the English verb to know: saber, which has to do with head knowledge, and conocer, which means to know something intimately, to be familiar with it. Saber is used for things that you know in your mind where as conocer is used for things that you know by experience. Wisdom guides us in such a way that we will conocer God, by making us walk the path to Him.
The answer to the question why am I here is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. The Good life is found in glorifying God. The way to live a good life is summed up beautifully by John Piper, “the deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God” (Desiring God, 28). The good life cannot be separated from God; it cannot even be found through God. It must come in God. We become happy only as we move closer to God, and moving closer to God means emptying ourselves of ourselves in order to make space for God. Piper amends the Westminster Catechism slightly to reflect this truth, “man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever” (Desiring God, 18). We are creatures of a Good Creator who desires for us to be happy. He wants to give us the very best things that will most eternally satisfy us. And as the greatest thing is Himself, He provides for us most completely by creating us for Himself. God loves us so much that he orders that:
Just as a fire’s flames always rise up,
Inspired by its own nature to ascend,
Seeking to be in its own element,

just so, the captive soul begins its quest,
the spiritual movement of its love,
not resting till the thing loved is enjoyed(Purgatory, XVIII 28-33).