9 march: song of two saints

awakened by moonlight, i boil water, dress, pulling my hood over my cap and my mantle over both, carrying my coffee through the crunch of last fall's needles to my vantage point on the edge of the void, beneath the tall pines. the not-quite-full moon on this not-quite-spring not-quite morning gives not quite enough light to see the not-quite-blooming forsythia to my right, but i imagine at least that i feel the yellow promises.

i sit here with the moon's brightness and the pines' darkness,trying to sing a songs of the saints of god. i want it to be a simple song, but the saints are thomas acquinas and gregory of nyssa, and i think it may be all day long before i can quite harmonize them, if at all.

thinking of them takes me back forty-four years to the fall i acknowledged myself a wise fool. that semester was plato's. yes. sign me up. i want to be a philosopher king. let me out of this cave. spring brought aristotle, whom i found to be a bit pedantic. the following year was to have been thomas acquinas, but the thomas-professor went off to yale, and i suppose found fame, while i went off to roosevelt and such second lights as ernst cassirer and teilhard de chardin and obscurantism. i never read st. thomas.

ah, but gregory of nyssa: his works, some of them anyway, i have read. sign me up. i want to see the world his way. cappadocia may be a land of caves, but gregory saw the light. his moses is no charlston heston, projected into the cave by phantoms, climbing a fake mountain with a fake beard as edgar robinson shows aaron how to make a molten calf. gregory's moses shines in the pure light of mount tabor.

somehow i was able to separate thomas whom i knew as the angelic poet of pange linguam and verbum supernum from the doctor of the summa. but i sat under the pine trees this morning after having read, well, not st. thomas on his feast yesterday, but chesterton's dumb ox biography of acqinas, and i was reminded both that, as plato had recognized, kings may pretend to be philosophers, but philosophers do not want to be kings, and that the methods of the enemy are subtle and pervasive even when simple: julius caesar has taught well; divide and conquer. i am easily carried along by the prejudices of my ignorant times even as i flatter myself that i work against them.

i find a friend who is opposed to private confession caught up in the lutheran heresy because her reason to reject that sacrament is that "roman catholics do it," but i never see past the log in my eye that keeps me from reading thomas because i have swallowed the more respectable heresy of hegelianism, never even tasting its bitterness amongst the sugars of modernism.

i was reminded of my dismissal of acquinas' thought as pedantic aristotelianism in a wonderful way this morning. pedantic is, after all, a sort of pun, combining the pedestrianism of walking with the pediatrics of childhood. the moon's brilliance was obscured by clouds as that lesser light approached the horizon. then, i could see more stars, stars which i wanted to place in constellations, but could not because of the pine trees. then, in the great darkness before the dawn, i began to hear the foot-fall, the pedantry, of a doe and her fawns browsing on the forest flood. i could even see ever so slightly the forms of the forsythia blossoms. the pines lost what chesterton might call, even if i do think wrongly, their byzantine flatness.

how easy it is not to see the pine trees for the stars.