Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Last Days, Last Things

What better way to spend one's last days than by deep inquiry into the Last Things?

Would that not be a better use of time than gambling and fox hunting, and the other examples of Pascalian divertissement?

You will soon be embarking nolens volens for a permanent stay in a foreign destination, departure date unknown. Are your affairs in order?

For a good old introduction to the traditional Roman Catholic doctrine on death, the intermediate state, resurrection, judgment, and eternity, see Romano Guardini, The Last Things. 

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Bill Vallicella

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16 responses to “Last Days, Last Things”

  1. DaveB Avatar
    DaveB

    I’ve been reading his “The End of The Modern World” and on first reading found it well-written and respectful to Scripture. I will find the volume you mentioned.

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  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    It’s available via Amazon, Dave.

    Reply
  3. trudy vandermolen Avatar
    trudy vandermolen

    Interesting — I’ve also been reading on Last Things. The next book for me will be William Hendrickson’s *The Bible on the Life Hereafter.* It was printed in its un- polished form.

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Trudy,
    I will be interested in hearing from you about the Calvinist take on the Last Things this Sunday.

    Reply
  5. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    A “deep inquiry into the Last Things” is certainly a wiser way of passing the final days of life than one devoted to avoiding the truth of our soon or later arriving deaths. And so, in these the last years of my life (I turned 79 in December), I too seek out books that reflect on death, judgement, heaven, and hell. These include everything from philosophical discussions of the great mysteries of existence, to theological reflections on the same, to inquires of varying value into preternatural and supernatural phenomena, and although I have found some of what I read of value, if only because it has focused my mind on the inevitable end point of my earthly existence, my reading has left me, finally, with a stronger sense of the gap or space between what is believed or claimed to be known and the mysterious reality of death itself. It is this gap or space that now holds my attention, since its radical otherness exceeds all our efforts to grasp or come to terms with it. I suppose this is the primary reason why many people turn to scripture, which advances truths that transcend our cognitive faculties, and take solace from it, since it lessens the mystery for them. Some go so far as to claim that they face death without anxiety or fear, and perhaps what they say is true for them, although I tend to doubt it. I deny nothing in the NT concerning the Last Things, but here too we find only vague hints and promises, and the meditations, some wise and some excessive, that grew out of these passages in the following centuries do not really advance beyond them, however sophisticated their concepts or language. In the end, I believe that I know no more about death now than at the beginning of my intellectual quest to make some sense of it, and so on many days, I embrace one or another of the divertissements that Pascal knew were simultaneously salutary and senseless.
    Vito

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  6. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito,
    A little divertissement never hurt anybody. Presumably not fox hunting in your case. Atlantic City?

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  7. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    No, Atlantic City is about a half hour away, but I never venture there: nothing of interest for me and rather dangerous. My divertissements are more solitary: novels (harder and harder to find), films (one every evening), chess (occasionally; I am terrible at it), listening to music, playing with my dog-like Snowshoe cat, and walking (by the Ocean if possible): the pastimes of un vecchio.
    Vito

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  8. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito,
    I was joking as you probably guessed.
    As for novels, I’d wager you’ve read one or more by Cesare Pavese. Like ’em? What a character he was!
    Ever read Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina?
    It’s not a novel, but A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography may capture your attention, as it did mine.
    I’ll bet you’ve read one or more of Cheever’s novels. Which did you like most? I recently finished the fascinating The Journals of John Cheever. How he reconciles his Catholicism with his bi-sexual cocksmanship I do not understand.
    As for chess, I recommend the excellent free site, lichess: https://lichess.org/

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  9. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    Yes, I realized that you were joking about AC, which you have to see to believe.
    I am not very partial to the novels of Cheever or his Journals, but I do like some of his short stories. I am aware of his bisexual inclinations, and, yes, they are irreconcilable with Catholicism, but I have known bi-sexual or gay guys like him from my parish in Greenwich Village during the period 1980-2001 who, sanctioned by its NO progressive clergy, all found ways to excuse such mortal sin, while receiving the Eucharist. As you know, real Catholicism, is a hard, demanding road, even for someone who is heterosexual, both outside and within marriage. It’s a complex subject, but the proposed models of absolute abstinence before marriage, given the passions of youth, and the curtailments by act and timing of sexual activity after marriage bumps against certain ontological realities. Now I am old, so it is all behind me, but it is, as I said, a hard, perhaps rather too abstract road, the sort of thing that is neatly argued but that raises endless difficulties in life.
    I have not read Pavese in many years, but I would pick The Moon and the Bonfires. I Don’t know Andric.
    Thank you for the chess site, which is new to me. I have been using Chess.com, but it free features are limited.
    Vito

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  10. BV Avatar
    BV

    >>It’s a complex subject, but the proposed models of absolute abstinence before marriage, given the passions of youth, and the curtailments by act and timing of sexual activity after marriage bumps against certain ontological realities.<< Yes, especially for the Boomer cohort (1946-1964) and later generational groups. You just made the Boomer cut. I'm four years younger. Our experiences are probably very similar. Cognitive dissonance loomed large for me in my teen and early adult years. 'Society' preached one thing, the trad pre-Vat II RCC quite another. You and I were attuned to the Zeitgeist. But we also, unlike many of our classmates, took the trad rel teachings very seriously. Hence the Cog Diss. The obtrusiveness and ubiquity of the new media (and its portability, e.g., the transistor radio) made it practically impossible to resist the siren songs from below the belt and below the earth. You catch my drift no doubt. Tom Merton too, born in 1915, and despite his monastic enclosure, was attuned to that same Zeitgeist and got caught in the cog-diss crossfire. (This partially explains my fascination with TM.) Now the world -- in St Paul's sense -- has always been with us, but, post-WWII, it has become more worldly, more ensnaring, harder to resist. Related topics for discussion: Chastity in marriage and whether anyone now faithfully observes it. I mean: anyone now who is sexually vigorous. Sexual fidelity is easy by comparison, though not easy sans phrase.
    Is celibacy for priests an impossible ideal at the present time given the toxic social climate that cannot be kept out of even monasteries? Can an impossible ideal be an ideal? Must the preaching of the ideal lead to hypocrisy?
    Should any homosexuals be allowed into RCC seminaries, even those who do not practice their perversion? And is it a perversion? I am inclined to a No and a Yes.

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  11. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    I agree that “the world — in St Paul’s sense — has always been with us, but, post-WWII, it has become more worldly, more ensnaring, harder to resist.” And this reality, the end product of the transformational events of the last several centuries that undermined traditional forms of life in the West, appears to be permanent. The cognitive dissonance that you and I experienced was, as you suggest, a transitory historical phenomenon, since we, already a minority among our peers, were members of the last generations to be taught the traditional faith of the Church and to be brought up in families or communities, many those of Catholic immigrants or of their offspring, which, if for nothing but custom, were formed by it. I doubt that it exists in an anything but an absolutely marginal way today.
    Yes, almost no one faithfully practices chastity in marriage, as is reflected the almost universal use of birth control by spouses, who can’t fathom the notion of restricting sexual intercourse to assumed infertile periods. Arguments to the contrary, such as Anscombe’s “Contraception and Chastity,” whatever their orthodoxy or intellectual rigor, exist now only as cultural curiosities of a bygone age. I just reread her essay, Bernard Williams and Michael Tanner’s critique of it, and her response (https://global.uwi.edu/sites/default/files/bnccde/PH19B/conchastity.html), and I can’t say that Anscombe is entirely convincing. Is there something faulty in the ontology and anthropology underlies the call to celibacy in marriage? Do you have any posts on this question?
    I don’t deny that celibacy for priests is possible, but the notion of such a life is absolutely alien to my nature and experience. In general, I would say that only the truly spiritually enlightened, a tiny minority of mankind, are able to live without sex, so to take the model of the holy or saintly as a general requirement seems, particularly in these times, rather utopian.
    As for homosexuals, even chaste ones, in seminaries, I agree with you, since it places such men in situations that are omnipresent “near occasions for sin.” As for homosexuality as a perversion, one can speak of it in that way, although to be consistent one would then have to place under the same rubric a variety of sexual acts now commonplace among retrosexuals, the married included.
    Vito

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  12. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito,
    It is interesting that, while cognitive dissonance is probably a permanent feature of human psychology, the forms it takes are transient and historically relative. So the form of cog diss I mention above will most likely expire when the the last of our cohort does — which won’t be long.
    >>I don’t deny that celibacy for priests is possible, but the notion of such a life is absolutely alien to my nature and experience.<< To your experience, I understand, but absolutely alien to your nature? You never at all felt the call to an ascetic way of life? I would say that a certain Platonic-Plotinian-Augustinian asceticism is an essential element in Xianity -- not of course to the Simon Stylites extreme. This is connected with the gnostic element in Xianity which complements (contradicts?) the Judaic, this-worldly element. Here is where the question whether and to what extent Xianity is anti-natalist finds purchase. More later if time permits.

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  13. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    “You never at all felt the call to an ascetic way of life?”
    I wish that I could say yes, for it would probably mean that I possess a greater spiritual depth. As a boy and adolescent, I did have fleeting ascetic impulses, but these never really took hold in me. I don’t deny the merits of an ascetic way of life, but I was never attracted it. Even today, I am bewildered that a young man would choose to become a monk, and not only because of a life without les filles but also because of the (assumed) certainty about the mysteries of existence that motivates this choice, one which involves the renunciation of all the richness and pleasures of the only reality that we really have any sustained contact with, not denying that another may exist. Since belief is not knowledge, the ascetic way of life has always been, for me, just too radical a path.
    Vito

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  14. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito,
    The thing about the trad pre-Vat II RCC doctrine, if you really take it seriously, which of course few do, is that it leads straight to the monastery and its contemptus mundi. You may remember that some years back I recommended to you the book by John Tettemer (1876-1949), I Was a Monk. This book illustrates my point very well. The career of Thomas Merton (1915-1968) does so as well. The Seven Storey Mountain tells the tale of the hipster and worldling who, not content merely to ‘get religion’ or even to become a Catholic priest, entered what at the time (early ’40s) was one of the strictest of monastic orders, the Trappists.
    Well, if the trad RCC doctrine is true, then this world is next-to-nothing in comparison to the world to come, and the logical course for those who really believe in God and the soul would be to give one’s whole effort to attaining a Good inconceivably greater than any paltry and transient earthly good.
    (The same all-or-nothing logic applies also in other religions such as Islam and Buddhism.)
    >>Even today, I am bewildered that a young man would choose to become a monk, and not only because of a life without les filles but also because of the (assumed) certainty about the mysteries of existence that motivates this choice, one which involves the renunciation of all the richness and pleasures of the only reality that we really have any sustained contact with, not denying that another may exist.<< Here you put your finger on the problem. The glimpses and intimations of Metaphysical Elsewhere are faint, few, and far-between -- assuming that one receives these hints and glimpses beyond the veil at all -- and they are no match for the brutal obtrusiveness of the world of the senses, a world that slaps one in the face at every turn. By fallen nature -- assuming that nature is fallen -- we are concupiscent 24/7 (waking and sleeping) from our eye balls to the balls between our legs. Things are made worse by the decadence of our society. (I believe Steve Allen, a hipster of sorts, referred to it as an "open sewer" in response to that NY shock jock whose name escapes me at the moment.) Are you really "bewildered" by the young man who enters a monastery in good faith? You can see things from his POV, right? You just don't feel it from his POV. You are after all, not a wholly benighted secularist like Plato's cave-dwellers who are COCKSURE that their cave reality is plenary reality. I'd say their cocks make them sure-- sounding the concuspiscence theme again. I could go on, but it is time for Laura Ingraham. Trump has made the nightly news great again.

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  15. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    The young man and I affirm many of the same beliefs, but in his case they exert a far more powerful psychological and emotional force, one so great that he is willing to stake his earthly life on them. So, while I certainly do not believe that our “cave reality is plenary reality,” I lack his certainty that this is so. So, yes I can’t “feel” what he does.
    Vito

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  16. BV Avatar
    BV

    The above Anscombe link is busted. This should work: https://global.uwi.edu/sites/default/files/bnccde/PH19B/conchastity.html
    Thanks for the stimulating discussion, Vito. I’ll take up cognate topics in subsequent posts.

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