Merchant of Venice: Excellent Exegesis

What if the triune God never revealed Himself? Who would I worship?

Probably Virginia. Even if Virginia only included Augusta, Rockbridge, and Botetourt Counties, I would worship it. But it includes all the other counties, too! Especially Franklin and Henry.

Godlike in splendor. Idolizable if anything ever was.

…Had the opportunity to see a performance of Merchant of Venice at the American Shakespeare Center. The company executed the task with the usual aplomb. If they camped it up a bit, or indulged in tasteless physical comedy, they only did it to try to convey the humor of the text to their predominantly high-school-age audience.

The company also over-indulged, I think, in actually spitting on Shylock and Tubal. Does Shakespeare direct the actors to spit? No. The on-stage spittle only distracted us audience peoples. (Overheard in the bathroom: “Do they get paid extra since they spit on them?”)

The words, my friends! The words have more than enough bitterness of their own. The imprecations savor with plenty of verbal venom. Frinstance:

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart:
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

or

Let me say ‘amen’ betimes, lest the devil cross my
prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew.

The key to the play? The fact that it explains the Parable of the Unforgiving Steward. (It explains the whole New Testament pretty well.) And Shylock’s humanity.

The usurer’s avarice, his malice against Antonio, his stubbornness: none of these are literally monstrous. His daughter breaks his heart by eloping–and taking the family jewels with her. He rails against the monetary loss with a lump in his throat. What really pains him? Jessica’s betrayal. And the fact that none of the other Venetian fathers can be bothered to give him the tiniest doit of commiseration. They think nothing of treating the Jew with hard-hearted contempt.

Of course, Shylock’s heart hardens to stone. His maniacal craze for vindication—for justice! my bond!—paints the perfect caricature of blinkered, zealous man: Absolutely dead to rights, within the point-of-view of the rifle-sight. Shylock’s bond has all the force of law, and who could really gainsay his legal reasoning?

But, outside what the scope takes in: an agent of justice stands with an axe, an axe that will fall on me, and his claim on me has much more to it than my claim does.

Where did the Venetian hard-heartedness begin? Did Shylock wrong a Christian first, or did a Christian wrong him first? The profoundest truth of the play rests on the fact that it has no interest whatsoever in answering this question.

In the end, the ladies turned lawyers, Portia and Nerissa, manage to turn the central theme of the tragedy—just retribution—into comedy. Their men, who protest their honor too much, wind up reduced to unimpressive and unconvincing stammerings to explain their own untruth.

Justice? Please. For man it is impossible. Better to try to make friends. With unassuming gentleness. Maybe even love.

Cosmas and Damian’s Justice and Temperance

Saints Cosmas and Damien were brothers, Arabians, physicians. During the persecution of Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century, they were beheaded. Their relics were eventually brought to Rome, where Pope St. Felix transformed an ancient pagan temple in the Forum into their church. The names of Cosmas and Damian are invoked in the ancient prayer of the Roman church.

The apse of their basilica has a famous mosaic, depicting Saints Peter and Paul presenting the martyrs Cosmas and Damian to Christ.

King Solomon prayed that the Lord would spare him both poverty and superfluity. “Provide me only with the food I need” (Proverbs 30:8). Better to have only the necessities, with nothing added. After all, the Lord told us to “take nothing for the journey” (Luke 9:3).

Wise king Solomon wanted to focus on other things than his material needs and desires. Namely, praising God and seeking the truth. Saints Cosmas and Damian offered medical treatment for free. Because of this, everyone knew them. When the persecution came to Asia Minor, the gun-sights were immediately trained on the magnanimous Christian doctors of Cilicia.

Seems to me that three key points emerge:

1. The Lord provides enough for everyone to eat and drink, and not starve, and not freeze to death in the cold. He has no plan for anyone to luxuriate in this world. Not because He doesn’t want us to be happy; He actually has better things planned for us than bon-bons on the divan.

2. The wise person cultivates the cardinal virtue of temperance. The temperate person fasts and feasts, according to reason, proportion, “appropriateness.” Temperance allows us to focus on spiritual pursuits, leaving us to eat, drink, sleep, exercise, and have sex according to what makes sense, given the realities of our particular individual lives.

3. In the mosaic in Rome, Saints Cosmas and Damien hold their crowns in their hands as Saints Peter and Paul present them to Christ, waiting for Christ Himself to place the crowns on their heads. The crowns Cosmas and Damian hold are crowns of martyrdom. But, of course, they only became crowns of martyrdom because of external events beyond the saints’ control. The generous physicians would have been glad to continue to try to heal the sick on earth, if such had been the divine will.

If we hold in our hands crowns of justice and temperance, if our consciences do not accuse us of self-indulgence or abuse of this world’s goods, then we can stand up straight before the Lord and live the life He gives us to live. We can say to St. Peter and St. Paul, to St. Joseph, St. Francis, and all the saints: “Denizens of the court of heaven, I stand ready to serve. Please present me to Christ. If it be His will that I remain on earth today, then give me the grace to serve well here. If today is my day to suffer death, let it come.”

The just, temperate person can live life as God made us to live, starting now, and never ending.

Lazarus and Dives

Even Simsanity cannot altogether prevent death.

Christ’s Church proposes for our faith the articles of the Creed. And God gives us the grace to believe them.

Many of our experiences help us to believe the Christian faith. Perhaps the most decisive experience, when it comes to moving us toward the faith of the Church, is this: We observe that everyone dies.

Everyone dies sooner or later, without exception. No exquisite diet, or comfortable wardrobe, or plush accommodation can prevent death. No spa has ever been built where people can go to live and never die. No bank holds monetary instruments which can pay off the Grim Reaper and keep him at bay forever.

Someday Prince Harry of England will die. Someday Peyton Manning will die. Someday Warren Buffett will die, and Jennifer Lopez, too.

Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Steve Jobs already did die, just like Abraham Lincoln, Mozart, and Alexander the Great.

Dead. Sooner or later. Everyone.

Makes the Creed a lot more interesting. We believe that dead Abraham actually lives in Christ’s kingdom.

Here’s another observation about life on earth. Everyone dies. Also, it’s not fair.

Life isn’t fair. Some useless oafs have 40-foot yachts. Some brilliant minds dwell in third-world slums. Good people get cancer, and crack mamas keep getting pregnant. No good deed goes unpunished, and rogues win elections with lies. Silly people get their pictures taken on Hollywood red carpets, and serious people can’t make a living.

Unfair.

Will justice ever be done? Of course. Is there a fair country somewhere? A place where cheaters never get away with it, everyone gets measured by the content of their character, and no one has to scrap and struggle just to avoid having to live in a refrigerator box? Yes. There is such a country.

God is just. He knows all and holds all in His sway.

Our days are numbered. Death will bring them to an end.

Then the door of everlasting truth opens, and Lazarus is poor no longer.

The Verdict

God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him…

And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. (John 3:16-19)

“This is the verdict.”

Can it be a co-incidence that when we come to church this week, when our national airwaves are full of justice finally being done on our enemy, we hear the most famous verses of the Bible, and one of the verses is: “This is the verdict.”

Verdict. Verum dictum. True word.

The truth harries a man who has done evil. We can run; we can blind ourselves; we can fill our heads with noise to provide a distraction. But the truth will not go away. The truth waits. It is patient. He is patient.

Christ came as the light of the world. He came to restore us to our original dignity. The dignity of man is to be a flute that harmonizes with the divine orchestra in a springtime fantasia. The dignity of man is to abide in peace with everything that is beautiful and true.

But Christ is patient about shining His light of truth. He let His life be snuffed out by evil men.

The truth is patient. He can afford to be.

May God Lay Aside the Violence

Jonah by Michelangelo

Jonah went to the enormous city of Nineveh and informed the people that the Lord intended to destroy the place in forty days. In other words, the prophet presented himself as a sign to the Ninevites, a sign of the transcendent justice of Almighty God.

The king of Nineveh saw the sign and believed. Speaking on behalf of the whole city, the king repented of his injustice and declared that all the Ninevites would lay aside the violence that each had in hand.

The king took for granted that he and all his people had violence in hand. This was a fair assumption. One does not like to generalize, but we can safely say of ourselves that we sinners generally have some kind of violence in hand. Maybe not shedding blood. But violence to someone’s good name, or violence to someone’s vulnerable feelings, or violence to good order and someone’s rightful place. Our egos are voracious; they make us do violence, often under-cover.

So, talk about a good thing to do for Lent: to recognize the violence I have in hand for what it is, and lay it aside. Because look at what happened next in the Book of Jonah: When the Ninevites laid aside the violence they had in hand, the Lord laid aside the violence He had in hand.

We know the Lord is meek and gentle. But we also know that He is unfailingly righteous. He is perfect peace in Himself. But His omnipotent truth and justice destroys evil and deceit. Do we think the tsunami in Japan was a formidable force? The truth of God will roll like a tsunami over all lies, and it will make the north of Japan look like a kiddie pool. God does not will violence, but His willing of peace does violence to disorder, selfishness, and pride.

So, dear brothers and sisters, let us lay aside the violence we have in hand—the jealousy, grudges, turf wars, one-upmanship, gossip, selfishness, pettiness, meanness—let’s lay it all aside and beg God with desperate hearts:

Easter time. Something to look forward to.

Lord, we know that in justice we deserve condemnation, but have mercy on us anyway, forgive us, and help us!

…In the first game of the NCAA tournament, four players fouled out. Sportscaster lingo: “DQ” for disqualified. Five fouls? Dairy Queen.

By the by, the Dairy Queen density of southwest Virginny crushes the DQ density of metro Washington. Not even close. At this moment, there are 16 DQs within twenty miles. (Total number of Dairy Queen in the Archdiocese of Washington? Five.) Cannot wait for Lent to be over.

The Virtue of Justice

'Aristotle with a Bust of Homer' by Rembrandt

Ah…March enters like a dewy lamb. Nice change from last year, when I had to wear my sailboat cufflinks for 38 consecutive days just to keep hope alive for sunshine.

…An admirable man once told me that he reads Aristotle’s Ethics every spring.

Book V of Nichomachean Ethics concerns justice. In one sense of the term, to be ‘just’ means to be virtuous, law-abiding, fair. It means “doing the right thing.”

There always is a ‘right thing.’ This is one of the metaphysical principles of morals. Doing right harmonizes us with the symphony of goodness which is infinitely greater than ourselves. But discordant notes also sound in this world: there are evil powers greater than us, and we, too, are not purely good. From this metaphysical state–i.e., that the right thing can be done, or not done–morals arise.

In this sense of the word justice, the ‘just’ person is prudent about doing right by others; he is temperate so as not to wrong others; he is brave for other’s good.

(Justice also has a more precise meaning. We will come back to that.)

Aristotle quotes one of the “Seven Sages” of Greece, who asserted: “Office reveals the man.”

To hold an office puts a person in a relationship with other people. An official bears the burden of responsibility for the welfare of others; therefore, he must be just. I think we can say that the primordial ‘office’ is parenthood. We show our true colors by how we treat those for whom we bear some responsibility.

This helps us perceive, I think, another foundation of morals. Our moral choices are framed by the particular responsibilities we have. In order to be a moral person, a just person, a virtuous person–in order to attain maturity as a moral individual–a person must be ready and willing to hear and follow a summons to particular responsibilities. To be a virtous youth is to be ready to take on an office. To be a virtuous adult is to be faithful to one’s office and its duties.

Perhaps I have bored you. Next week we will have the Big East tournament to keep us diverted.

More of Holy Father’s Message…

We can detect…a permanent temptation within man: to situate the origin of evil in an exterior cause. Many modern ideologies deep down have this presupposition: since injustice comes “from outside,” in order for justice to reign, it is sufficient to remove the exterior causes…

This way of thinking – Jesus warns – is…shortsighted. Injustice, the fruit of evil, does not have exclusively external roots; its origin lies in the human heart, where the seeds are found of a mysterious cooperation with evil.

“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps 51,7).

Indeed, man is weakened by an intense influence, which wounds his capacity to enter into communion with the other. By nature, he is open to sharing freely, but he finds in his being a strange force of gravity that makes him turn in and affirm himself above and against others: this is egoism, the result of original sin.

Adam and Eve, seduced by Satan’s lie, snatching the mysterious fruit against the divine command, replaced the logic of trusting in Love with that of suspicion and competition; the logic of receiving and trustfully expecting from the Other with anxiously seizing and doing on one’s own (cf. Gn 3, 1-6), experiencing, as a consequence, a sense of disquiet and uncertainty. How can man free himself from this selfish influence and open himself to love?

…Conversion to Christ, believing in the Gospel, ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order to discover and accept one’s own need – the need of others and God, the need of His forgiveness and His friendship. So we understand how faith is altogether different from a natural, good-feeling, obvious fact: humility is required to accept that I need Another to free me from “what is mine,” to give me gratuitously “what is His.”

May we all humble ourselves, and accept the salvation won for us by so generous and sweet a Savior!

Punishment May Be Slow, But…

Roman poet Horace

I neglected something very important in my earlier account of the martyrdom of the prophet Zechariah, son of Jehoiada.

(By the way, it is not the same person as the prophet Zechariah who has his own book in the Old Testament, or the priest Zechariah, father of John the Baptist. There are three different Zechariahs in the Scriptures.)

Anyway, I failed to recount Zechariah’s dying words, which he uttered as King Joash’s henchmen were killing him in the Temple:

“May the Lord see and avenge.”

Just in case you don’t remember Horace’s Third Ode word-for-word, allow me to call these lines to mind:

raro antecedentem scelestum
deseruit pede Poena claudo

“Although punishment may walk with a lame foot, she rarely allows the guilty man to run ahead.” (Tip of the hat to Fr. Haydock.)

May God give us the grace to repent of our sins and escape liability for the blood of the prophets! May His mercy allow us to run ahead of the punishment we deserve!

Also: If you missed it last year, click here for a message on the occasion of the Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.

Architecture Day

I was always against the Twin Towers, architecturally speaking.

I thought they looked like the effluvia of an intergalactic spaceship the size of Iowa that had stopped over lower Manhattan to deposit its waste in two briquettes, pinched out squarely from its enormous wrought-iron rectum.

I didn’t like the idea of the Death Star going to the bathroom in the middle of one of our grandest cities of Earth.

That said, when I visited my brother in New York in 2002, and I laid eyes on the lower Manhattan skyline, I was mad as hell. The ugly towers–fixtures of life, my old friends–were gone. The enemy had attacked our home, knocked down our buildings, and killed our people.

I still miss the hideous buildings. Isn’t it strange that, after eight years, justice has yet to be done? The perpetrators of the attack went to judgment in the course of their murderous rage, of course. But what about the mastermind? I do not wish him damned; I do not want revenge. But he must face justice.

…I have had the opportunity to kneel and pray a few times in the abbey church of New Melleray, outside Dubuque, Iowa. It is the most peaceful place I have ever been. When I get to heaven, please God, I hope the Lord will let me spend it in this church.

It is simply the most perfect church on earth. But I knew from the first moment I spent there that there was something about the location of its windows that was in fact too perfect to be the result of human design.

It turns out that the walls of this perfect church were originally built to house a dormitory. It used to be a two-story residence for the monks. Then, when they built other buildings, and completed their cloister, they removed the floor separating the first and the second storeys of this part, and turned it into their church. Amazing.

(N.B. The tabernacle is within the wooden structure behind the altar. This aspect of the church is odd, I grant. I also wish the altar were wider. And of course if the Lord let me spend eternity there, he would also let me say Mass facing east. But the walls and windows are perfect as is.)

Russell Files #3: The Ravisher Condemned

With our present industrial technique we can, if we choose, provide a tolerable subsistence for everybody. We could also secure that the world’s population should be stationary if we were not prevented by the political influence of the churches which prefer war, pestilence, and famine to contraception.

The knowledge exists by which universal happiness can be secured; the chief obstacle to its utilization for that purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment.

It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion…

…There is reason to suppose that a hundred years hence Catholciism will be the only effective representative of the Christian faith…

–Bertrand Russell, “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” 1930.

As we can see, Bertrand Russell was a ravisher of altars, intellectually speaking. We should credit him with forthrightness–most of the enemies of the faith clothe themselves in sheep’s garments.

The question is: Should Russell have been prohibited from teaching at the City College of New York by the Supreme Court of the state of New York? This is exactly what happened in 1940.

Judge John E. McGeehan acknowledged that no written law empowered him to grant relief to a concerned mother who sued the New York Board of Higher Education. The judge ruled under “the law of nature and nature’s God.” A miscreant like Russell could not be permitted to teach. His teaching the young–at taxpayer expense–would constitute an injustice to the God-fearing citizens of the state.

Judge McGeehan rightfully pointed out that teachers exercise an influence over the whole of their students’ lives. It was a red herring for Russell’s defenders to claim that as a philosopher of science he could not influence his students’ morals.

We also have to note Judge McGeehan’s empathy with the aggrieved taxpayer. He was on to something here: A judge who refuses to understand written laws by the light of the higher law of truth and justice will fail in his duty to the poor and defenseless.

Russell dismissed Judge McGeehan’s ruling as the ravings of a benighted, prejudiced, parochial Catholic mind.

Nonetheless, the judge was no friend of justice in this case. He did an injustice to Bertrand Russell. I will explain myself next time.