Some Boethius

Boethius was an early medieval philosopher and was thus heavily into Aristotle and Plato as well as the Church Fathers probably. I really want to read his work "The Consolation of Philosophy" and whilst trying to find a copy online free (I couldn't), I found this beautiful excerpt:

"So sinks the mind in deep despair
And sight grows dim; when the storms of life
Blow surging up the weight of care,
It banishes its inward light
And turns in trust to the dark without.

This was the man who once was free
To climb the sky with zeal devout
To contemplate the crimson sun,
The frozen fairness of the moon --
Astronomer once used in joy
To comprehend and to commune
With planets on their wandering ways.

This man, this man sought out the source
Of storms that roar and rouse the seas;
The spirit that rotates the world,
The cause that translocates the sun
From shining East to watery West;
He sought the reason why spring hours
Are mild with flowers manifest,
And who enriched with swelling grapes
Ripe autumn at the full of year.

Now see that mind that searched and made
All Nature's hidden secrets clear
Lie prostrate prisoner of the night.
His neck bends low in shackles thrust,
And he is forced beneath the weight
To contemplate -- the lowly dust." - Boethius "The Consolation of Philosophy"

Everyone says I'm like Sam from Lord of the Rings and apparently most of Sam's proverbs came from Boethius. Hence my interest becomes evident

Unfathomed Sorrow and Music Great and Terrible

"He governs the flowing of all waters, and the ebbing, the courses of all rivers and the replenishment of springs, the distilling of all dews and rain in every land beneath the sky. In the deep places, He gives thought to music great and terrible; and the echo of that music runs through all the veins of the world in sorrow and in joy; for if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomed at the foundations of the Earth" - J.R.R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion, describing the god/demi-god of the sea: Ulmo.

"Melkor hated the Sea, for he could not subdue it." - Silmarillion (Melkor was a god who rebelled against the One God ie, the Satan figure).

I like this description of the ocean and the insights Tolkien creates about the divine, that from the same springs joy and unfathomed sorrow arise. A biographer of Tolkien once said that after his mother and father's deaths, for John (Tolkien) the crucifix remained the prime symbol of human existence, and reminded him that no life could occur without suffering, for God to become man it meant suffering, and so even at the moment of greatest victory - Christ's victory on the cross - there always remains sorrow.

It reminds me of a story of a man whose son had died long before him as a young man. The Author wrote that perhaps the scriptures say that no one can look into the face of God and live because he is so full of sorrow. We would see the infinite sadness and die.

For some reason I love that image. It's terrible - I really don't know why - but it reminds me of Jurgen Moltmann's comment that "A God who cannot suffer is poorer than any human being".

Theologically it's untenable, and I don't really believe it, but in my heart I tend to enjoy the anthropormism of such thoughts, they reflect the OT well when it says that "God regretted that he made man" etc. I think that emotion and suffering give us meaning in everyday life.

But I like Tolkien's writing because it gives you a sense of the greatness, the glory, the majesty, the Mysterium Tremendum of the entire Universe and the incomprehensibility of the Almighty, and the pettiness of humanity. About how man always wants to conquer, to fight for significance, but how much bigger the forces are around him.

Tolkien gets me through alot, he's one of my favourite authors, and Roman Catholics.

I love his phrases like "music great and terrible" - it reminds me of listening to classical music on a piano in a thunderstorm, or sitting in a small room in my house late at night listening to CBC radio and an opera or a symphony or a Nocturne.

You can get through life when it is great and terrible, it's monotony that kills us.

I love the term mysterium tremendum it comes from Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (which I really want to read) but I found a quote from his book that reminds me of all that I've been trying to say, he defines the great mystery as:

"The wholly other, that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible and the familiar, which . . . fills the mind with blank wonder and astonishment."

He says when people think about God, grace, salvation, etc the person,

"feels a something which captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often to the pitch of dizzying intoxication"

That's my spirituality I think, that's why I love the stars, that's why I love reading the Pantheists and Deists and Enlightenment philosophers, that's why I love Tolkien.

"Down below the broad, roaring waves of the sea break against the deep foundation of the rock. But high above the mountain, the sea, and the peaks of rock the eternal ornamentation blooms silently from the dark depths of the universe." - Rudolf Otto