Cato the Elder

"The Victorious Cause pleased the Gods. The Defeated Cause pleased Cato." The quote is from a long, long Poem by a Roman called Lucan. The Cato in question was Cato the Elder, or Marcus Porcius Cato. He was a genuine Roman, not one of those Post Republic Caesar worshiping types who sucked up to Emperors and the wealthy. He was a man who believed in the Senate, thought Greeks were Street Corner Hoodlums, and Carthaginians were dangerous lunatics. Hannah Arendt mentioned him in her book, The Human Condition, and in her book, The Life of the Mind.  Why? For Arendt it had to do with Judgement and what it was to hold a firm opinion and stick to it through thick and thin. For Cato there was often more honor to be had from standing with the losing side. Same with the French Foreign Legionnaires. 

Transcendental Idealism?

What did Kant mean? I’ll tell ya. Transcendent means above ordinary experience. Kant saw structures dominating our minds, he put us at the service of those structures, and he referred to the study of those structures as Transcendental Idealism. It was fairly comfortable, a bit too safe, a tad fatalistic but he was able to say we were reasonable beings, because that's how we were structured, and that Morality, for example, was a product of one of those structures which in his view meant that somewhere in the mist there was a categorical Imperative which while it might not be able to tell us what being moral and upright actually was, nonetheless we people were leaning toward what Dr Martin Luther King later called Justice. This cozy sense of predestination was roundly, and in my view constructively rejected by Postmodernist thinkers. 

Saint Augustine's People Part Two

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674)

In the early days of the Christian Church in Europe the Augustinians were a loose collection of free wheeling and independent Hermits similar to the Carmelites. The Carmelites were originally from Mount Carmel in Palestine, the Augustinian Order of Friars were originally from the hills of Tuscany in Italy. Like the Carmelites, in the eleventh or twelfth or maybe the thirteenth century the Augustinians found it necessary to curry favor with the fellas in the Christian Church who had the money and political contacts, and who were led by an elected official called The Pope who still humbly bears the job title of God's Representative Here on Earth. For a bunch of religious nuts from Tuscany to be taken seriously by the business side of Western Christianity they needed to demonstrate their provenance. In the Augustinian ranks there was a folk memory of a Saint Augustine of Hippo, who certainly did not make a virtue out of poverty and had admitted to God in several letters that he found it very difficult to take a vow of chastity seriously, but who in around 400 had written a book called the Rule of Augustine on how a religious community should manage itself. The Pope still had a copy of this book, and was interested. Tuscany's Augustinians pulled out all the stops, called in favors and forged documentary evidence that they weren't some fly by night bunch of mountain bandits, their order went all the way back almost a thousand years to the North African Saint Augustine who was of Berber and Roman origin and in fact their order had been founded by the great man but they'd been forced to leave North Africa following the Sack Of Hippo by the Vandals in 431.       

Saint Augustine of Hippo's People

 

The words Counter and Reformation when combined is when groups of people decide to go backwards and maybe try to start again. In the Catholic Tradition descriptions of counter reformations usually include the words Mendicant and discalced. Mendicant is a posh word for begging, relying on alms and charity. The primary mission of mendicants is to spread the Gospel. Discalced means to be barefooted or sandal wearing. The Vow of Poverty is a calling and in times of Counter Reformation within the Catholic Church, Discalced Mendicants were a refreshing sign of faith and trust in the Lord, they were the street musicians of hope. Following the Protestant Reformation inspired by Martin Luther, who was an Augustinian Friar, the Augustinian Order produced a Counter Reformation of Augustinian Mendicants.