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Favourite People: Peter Kreeft

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Today I wanted to honour another one of my favourite people. The person I would like to enthuse about today is Dr. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College and, quite frankly, one of the most intellectually engaging speakers I’ve ever heard.

Professor Kreeft first came to my attention when one of my friends mentioned in an email that she really liked his books. Up until that point, I had never heard of him. Following the recommendation, I went to his website and listened to some of his talks which are available online.

After listening to the first talk, I concluded what I almost always conclude after listening to one of his lectures: “I am so dumb! My mind is so dull!”. Like Grandpa Sheen, Kreeft has an amazing ability to forge links between ideas which I would never have considered to be even remotely connected.

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My Story: Called By Name

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In this post I would like to give a little bit of my testimony. The full story of my faith journey is obviously quite long, so today I would just like to share with you the genesis of my walk with God.

“In The Beginning…” – Genesis 1:1

I grew up in a home with a mother who was a practising Catholic and a father of somewhat nominal Anglican background. My mother took my sister and me to Mass every week and always encouraged both of us in our faith. At our parish, my sister sang in the choir and I was an altar server. Some of the most vivid memories of my childhood are of the three of us praying together at home and singing along in the car with Psalty the Singing Songbook … 🙂

As a teenager I never had any real rebellion against religion. Sure, I had some doubts at times, but on the whole I enjoyed going to Mass. I took my altar serving duties very seriously and enjoyed the stillness of the Saturday Vigil and the otherwordliness of the Sunday morning celebrations at the Abbey Church.

My “Tolle Lege”

I then went to University. Although I had been a believer up until this point and prayed pretty regularly, something was about to change…

In my second year of university I moved out of the campus accommodation into a house that was owned by, and situated next to, a Catholic church in the city. As well as having a student Mass, a prayer group was inaugurated shortly after my arrival by an Irish missionary named Maeve who played a significant role in my formation while at University. It was at one of these tiny prayer meetings, in the small back room of the church, that my faith was ignited.

The format of the prayer group was as follows. After an opening prayer, one of the Verbum Dei missionaries would give a short reflection on a particular topic, such as “The Holy Spirit” or “Faith”. Afterwards we would spend some time in silence reading a handout containing some verses of Scripture related to the topic for that week.

Called By Name

It was during one of these times of silence that my eyes came to rest upon the following passage from the prophet Jeremiah:

The word of the LORD came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

– Jeremiah 1:5

This wasn’t an unfamiliar passage to me – I had taken Religious Studies at school and learned a whole bunch of Scripture by heart for my exams. However, that night, those words had special power in them. This wasn’t just something God had said to Jeremiah in Judah in ~600 BC, but it was something that He was saying to me in that little room, that night, two and a half thousand years later.

Restless Heart

That night I truly knew that I was known by God and that my life had purpose. It was like someone had turned on a homing beacon inside of me. Sixteen hundred years earlier, St. Augustine wrote in his “Confessions”:

“You made us for Yourself O Lord, and our hearts will wander restless…until we rest in You”

That night I began to recognise the deep restlessness of my heart, and the space inside it that only God could fill. And so began my adult journey of faith and my love affair with Sacred Scripture. The Word is “alive” indeed…

The Great Divorce: Chapter 13

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Summary

The Dwarf struggles against joy. It “was not the meeting [the ghost] had pictured; he would not accept it”. He tugs at the chain and the Tragedian acts offended, saying, “It is fortunate that you give yourself no concern about my fate. Otherwise you might be sorry afterwards to think that you had driven me back to Hell”. The Lady replies “Dear, no one sends you back. Here is all joy. Everything bids you stay”. Saying this does no good –  the Tragedian says he still has some self-respect and the dwarf starts to shrink.

When the Lady tells the Dwarf to not “let it talk like that“, the “Tragedian caught her words greedily as a dog catches a bone”, complaining that she always had to be “sheltered”. The Lady explains that wasn’t what she meant, rather that she wanted him to “stop acting… He is killing you. Let go of that chain. Even now”.

Sarah tells Frank to stop “using…other people’s pity, in the wrong way…”. She explains that “Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it…can be used for a kind of blackmailing… [to] hold joy up to ransom”. This is something he did ever since he was a child. She asks him “Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenceless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed?” She explains that “you can no longer communicate your wretchedness… Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light”.

The Dwarf and the chain having disappeared, for the first time the Lady addresses the Tragedian, asking who he is and where Frank has gone. She invites him to stay, but the Tragedian vanishes. The lady returns to her retenue who begin to sing a song: “The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy…”

After departing, Lewis asks his teacher: “Is it really tolerable that she should be untouched by his misery, even his self-made misery?”. MacDonald asks him if he would prefer it if “he still had the power of tormenting her”. He talks about “The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned… to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy… that Hell should be able to veto Heaven… Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever… the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves”.

Lewis says he finds it horrible to say that pity must someday die. His teacher distinguishes between the action which will last forever and passion of pity which will come to the end. He says that the passion of pity “draws men to concede what should not be conceded” whereas the action “changes darkness into light and evil into good”. However, “we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice”.

Lewis once again asks why the Spirits don’t go down into Hell to rescue the damned. Going down on his knees and using a blade of grass as a pointer, MacDonald points to a tiny crack, saying, “…through a crack no bigger than that ye certainly came…”. The idea that the infinitely empty Grey Town is down in a little crack blows his mind, but Lewis now realizes that the Lady couldn’t even fit into Hell. MacDonald concurs that “Hell could not open its mouth wide enough”. Referring to Jesus, MacDonald says that “Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell…” Lewis asks if He ever will descend again, but MacDonald explains that time doesn’t work that way, but assures Lewis that “There is no spirit in prison to Whom He did not preach”.

Lewis asks MacDonald about his Universalist beliefs, but MacDonald says “it’s ill talking of such questions…because all answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time…the choice of ways is before you… But if ye are trying to leap on into eternity… then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see…something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all…[but] every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom”

Questions

Q1. Why does the ghost resist joy? What does the Tragedian threaten? How does the Lady respond?

Q2. What did the Tragedian hold love hostage? What does MacDonald say about pity?

Q3. How does the Lady respond to the Ghost’s disappearance? Why is Lewis troubled by her reaction?

Q4. What does Lewis find out about Hell from MacDonald? Why couldn’t the lady go there?

Q5. What does MacDonald say about time, freedom and predestination?

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Restless Heart: 7 – “Friends in high places”

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FriendsInHighPlaces

In this week’s episode, Nessa and I speak a little bit about Saints, and I share the story of one of my favourite Saints, the English Catholic Martyr, St. Edmund Campion.

Please subscribe to this podcast using iTunes and Google Play and if you have any feedback or would like to pose a question for an upcoming episode, you can send us a message from the website or tweet us at @davidandnessa.

Episode 7: Friends in high places (Download)

 

— Show Notes —

* Nessa’s video “My mother loves me” is available at the Agnus Dei Foundation Facebook page.

* The movie I mentioned at the beginning about the life of St. Francis was “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”.

The Four Loves – Chapter 5 (“Eros”)

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Four Loves 5

C.S. Lewis Doodle

Quotations

What is Eros?

…that state which we call “being in love”… Sexuality makes part of our subject only when it becomes an ingredient in the complex state of “being in love”. That sexual experience can occur without Eros… and that Eros includes other things besides sexual activity, I take for granted… The carnal or animally sexual element within Eros, I intend… to call Venus.

Eros, Venus and Morality

I am not at all subscribing to the popular idea that it is the absence or presence of Eros which makes the sexual act “impure” or “pure”… Most of our ancestors were married off in early youth to partners chosen by their parents on grounds that had nothing to do with Eros… Conversely, this act, done under the influence of a soaring and iridescent Eros which reduces the role of the senses to a minor consideration, may yet be plain adultery, may involve breaking a wife’s heart, deceiving a husband, betraying a friend, polluting hospitality; and deserting your children. It has not pleased God that the distinction between a sin and a duty should turn on fine feelings.

Love’s Contemplative

Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved – a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, “To go on thinking of her.” He is love’s contemplative.

… Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved…

The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one’s own body. We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman”. Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.

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