Tantum Ergo

I woke around 3:30 last night with the opening words of a famous verse composed by Thomas Aquinas and sung at mass at the benediction of the Blessed Sacrament: Tantum ergo Sacraméntum. The meter, four-beats and then three-and-a-half, alternating, was also in my memory together with a vague sense of the music as well. That whole experience goes back roughly to my twelfth or thirteenth year of life.

So where did this come from suddenly? Questions of this kind can’t be precisely answered, but it occurred to me this morning that struggling with translating Latin into English four days ago may have set tendril of memory vibrating at an unaccustomed wavelength—right back to the time when I was studying Latin and, incidentally, singing hymns in Latin as well. It took a while, and I had to be asleep, before the answer echoed back—to a question I cannot formulate.

Herewith the two stanzas of Tantum Ergo—which conclude a much longer hymn called Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium. The translation is by Fr. Edward Caswall.

Tantum ergo Sacraméntum	Down in adoration falling,
Venerémur cérnui:	This great Sacrament we hail,
Et antíquum documéntum	O'er ancient forms of worship
Novo cedat rítui:	Newer rites of grace prevail;
Præstet fides suppleméntum	Faith will tell us Christ is present,
Sénsuum deféctui.	When our human senses fail.
Genitóri, Genitóque	To the Everlasting Father,
Laus et jubilátio,	And the Son who made us free
Salus, honor, virtus quoque	And the Spirit, God proceeding
Sit et benedíctio:	From them Each eternally,
Procedénti ab utróque	Be salvation, honour, blessing,
Compar sit laudátio.	Might and endless majesty.
Amen. Alleluja.	Amen. Alleluia.

What a glorious—and compressed sort—of language Latin is!

Future Findings now Foreshadowed

The Internet is not an environment directly comparable to—I’m searching for a phrase—“the pre-web world of books and readers.” But the web has masses of written materials intended to be read—and intended to be read in the same way as books or magazine articles were once written—namely with an expectation that they would get concentrated attention. The big difference is that all of the material on the web is held by computers. The environment is also interactive. In the old days authors did not have access to praise or vitriolic criticism jotted into margins. But precisely such interactions on the web could be tracked and studied. The resources we’re now accumulating may in the future give us insight not only into how the web performs as a medium of communications; the data may also illuminate how the “world of books and readers” once behaved. What it might show is that genuine readers—the kind that authors really write for—have always been and still remain a very tiny fraction. Rereading that last sentence, I think: “Yes, but that’s kind of obvious.” True. But sometimes the obvious is novel.

This came to mind yesterday. I visited the blog of the philosopher, Edward Feser. I’d been there before, but this time I followed a line of exposition across numerous posts and got a better feel. Feser’s is a genuinely popular blog with lots of comments—thus producing a wealth of material on its readers, those, at any rate, who spend time writing comments. Feser’s content is on a high level and his writing communicates with fluidity and grace. In the sequence of posts I read, Feser notes at intervals that his critics rarely seem to understand what he is saying—and do not read his or others’ writings with sufficient care to grasp the fundamentals. The comments—if one girds up the loins for the unpleasant task of reading them—largely confirm the charge.

In this family we are much taken with the concept of adequacy. We encountered it in E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed. (I’ve mentioned Schumacher before a number of times; to see earlier entries, please use the Index.) The concept goes deep into the past; it's also “obvious” and yet perpetually “young”; but the formulation which emphasizes adequacy comes from Thomas Aquinas in the context of truth. “Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus” On Truth, Q1, A1-3. Truth is the adequacy of the thing and the intellect. Put less mechanically, truth emerges when the intellect is adequate to the object it perceives. Schumacher quotes Plotinus (who goes back to the third century AD) as saying: “Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.” The intellect is personal. It develops over time. Adequacy grows as the organ is developed. Conversely, when some people do not “get it,” bad will may not be the cause. They may simply be inadequate.

We all know—and it is a matter common experience—that when something new emerges, be it good news or bad—those who hear it have an urge to share. Waiting for my daughter Michelle to be born, I fell asleep in the waiting room; I was all alone. It was the morning of November 24, 1963. I was awakened by a young black woman, a nurse’s aide, I think. I emphasize: she was quite young. She shook me, shook me awake. As my eyes opened, her face was in my face. “They shot him,” she said to me with evident emotion. “They shot him.” She held a little radio but did not wait for an answer. Having informed me, she was off, running down the empty corridor. I was, no doubt, the first human she had glimpsed after having heard the news—and she had to tell someone. Who had been shot? Lee Harvey Oswald.

The urge to communicate appears to be innate. The capacity to understand, however, depends on slow development; it grows slowly and over the years. The truth, therefore, presents the picture of a mountain that narrows as it rises to the heights, and as we ascend toward its peaks, the number of climbers diminishes in proportion to the height. The decillions of bytes held in computer memories across the world may someday be subjected to critical analysis by computers of the future; that analysis will then, I think, present a scientific proof of these musing. A handful of people then will understand the findings; lots of other people will hear of the news in a sound-byte or two and soon again forget.

Battle of Clerics

I came across some notes of mine from May 2005 titled “A Battle of Clerics.” My new look then at the subject of intelligent design (ID) must have been occasioned by some uproar. Indeed, checking back, it appears that around that time began a case later known as Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. in which the U.S. District Court held that teaching intelligent design in public school biology classes violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Intelligent design was held not to be science; the court also saw it as hopelessly entangled in a creationist belief.

I actually agreed with the U.S. District Court up to a point. I think that ID is a philosophical position—as is Darwinism. Neither is a “hard science.” Biology must remain, by its very nature, a soft or a “descriptive” science. The biological realm staunchly resists experimental approaches able to demonstrate how species may have been formed. The whole area is saturated with assumptions, hypotheses, theories, assertions, denials, and the rest—not one of which is capable of demonstration or falsification. A person may be persuaded of this or that, but the proofs are not compelling. We’re in the realm of natural philosophy here. Biology is no more a science than are cosmology, history, psychology, anthropology, or sociology. Science strictly construed is a term applicable, alas, only to physics and to chemistry. In the biological realm anatomy and medicine qualify up to a point, but even in medicine there are spooky areas that don’t fit the narrow gauge of experimental science (psychiatry, placebo effect, etc.).

What we see in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover is indeed a battle between clerics, thus between dogmatists. The matter cannot be resolved on merits. This is the sort of problem that E.F. Schumacher (A Guide for the Perplexed) labeled a “divergent” problem: the more you debate it, the greater the heat and the confusion. (“Convergent” problems, by contrast, produce solutions.) The matter therefore must be lifted to a higher level where another philosophical system, using its own definitions of value and its own transmission of holy writ, will decide who is right. Not in reality, to be sure, but in the social context that prevails.

The problem with ID, I think, is three-fold. First, it expends a lot of effort on showing something that is rather obvious to any open-minded observer. It is the teleological pattern that entirely soaks the biological realm. Purpose is present. You don’t need intricate researches to make it plain. I reached that conclusion very rapidly after studying biology for about three months in my adult years. I saw “technology” all over the place. I loved looking at the details of cells. It seemed to me self-evident—and if there was anything new there, it was that “As in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm.” Purpose is present.

Second, ID positions itself as science. This is in part visible in William A. Dembski’s work; Dembski relies heavily on mathematical approaches which, to me, are a clear indication of the clerical character of this battle in biology: modern science believes it offers irrefutable evidence when it offers it in the form of equations. And the public, which gets a real scare when it sees Greek letters and square-root symbols, is properly awed. Mind you, I have read Dembski—a lot of Dembski. Carefully. It’s not the work itself. It is its positioning and rhetorical uses that are the problem. The nature of biological evidence does not change just because we approach it with a transcendentalist assumption. What you see in biology is mechanism. That which is the real puzzle we can't access at all by any methodology that uses chemistry, dissection, equations, or fossils. The facts, as they appear to me, are that the life sciences must be approached by philosophical, transcendental means. They are inaccessible to science understood as a genuine explanatory methodology. Biology cannot be explained that way. Give me an equation for purpose…

Third, ID proponents take an adversarial position to conventional, neo-Darwinist approaches. This flows from the second error, the assumption that biology is a hard science where—if only the workers in the field were to use the right method—new answers would be possible. I don’t think so. At the same time, however, there is ample room for debating naturalism as an ideology. But that’s an entirely different enterprise. One doesn’t need the bacterial flagellum for that. Two thousand years worth of philosophical tooling is on hand and ready to be used in the usual way.

When clerics battle, don’t look for charm or inspiration. It’s the Pied Piper who attracts the children to follow him out of the city. The poets and the visionaries might lead us if inspiration strikes them. The clerics will just keep shouting—and nobody the wiser.