My homeschooling (even pre-covid) high school freshman is wrapping up Latin I, using a curriculum called Latin for the New Millenium. It was recommended by Older Kid’s former Latin teacher (now occasional tutor, when needed. Probably more so with Latin II).
I’ve liked it all the way through, and now even more so with the last two chapters of the text.
Each chapter is introduced by a reading from an ancient, original-Latin text. It’s a way, of course, of introducing history and culture as well as language. Well, here we are with the final two chapters of the text, and the introductory reading for chapter 20 was from Augustine’s Confessions (pear tree incident) and for chapter 21, Boethius, Consolations of Philosophy.
Here’s the page with the Latin passage of Fortune speaking to the complaining human being. Here’s the translation from the teacher’s manual (translated for students with an eye towards teaching precise grammar, not graceful translation, of course)
You have received many things from me. I nourished you for a long time. You had riches and honors. You made a mistake. You thought you would always have those things given to you for the time being. But constancy is foreign to me. Always being about to go away, I gave you nothing. Eventually you were abandoned by me. Riches and honors departed together with me. Why do you rebuke me? I snatched from you nothing that was yours. You will not be able to accuse me of theft !
People have many things, but they possess nothing. I, Fortune, possess everything. If things will have been given to people by me/if things are given to people by me, I will take those things back afterward. For all those things are mine, not people’s. If a person will have been abandoned by me/If a person is abandoned by me, all things given to him will go away with me. I am the owner/mistress of all riches and all the external things that people have. I never stay always with any person, but all wealth and external things always remain with me.
Everything in the life of man/humans is always changing. People live as if on a huge wheel, which is always being turned around axle. Th is wheel is mine! A person who will have been lift ed up/is lift ed up in my wheel will afterward descend and fall for certain. Therefore a person who has wealth and honors ought to know for certain that he will finally leave those things.
As I have been observing the Church’s response to this pandemic – and the response of Church-y people, professional or not – I’ve been struck by how this situation has laid bare the impoverished character of contemporary faith and faith-talk. I have been saying for a long time that Christianity in every age works in a social and cultural milieu, fighting certain aspects and taking on others, working the tension between being understandable and accessible to the age, but not being co-opted by the age and its particular concerns.
And so in the 21st century West, we have assumed progress, health, relative material comfort and security and technological fixes when anything goes wrong. We also prioritize individual choice, mobility, achievement and “happiness.” And so Christian faith, as it is lived out and taught, reflects that. It is a message that, above all, meets the hearer in that place of individual choice in the midst of material security, sharing the Good News that sure, life is already really good, but if they choose to welcome God’s presence into their lives, that it will probably be better. Maybe! No judgment!
But now, here we are.
A strange illness threatening, massive, disastrous consequences coming at us from the attempts to fix the situation, plans upended, assumptions about the present and future shattered, institutions collapsed, the future uncertain.
Catholicism did a lot of things wrong in the 20th century (and in every century, of course), but the greatest categorical error, it seems to me, was to embrace that particular, progress-oriented optimism of modernity. This manifests itself in innumerable ways, too many to recount here, and we see the fruit in the confusion of the moment.
Yes, no matter what, it’s a confusing and disturbing time, but perhaps it would be less so if you’d been formed by a faith not so unmoored from a Tradition which had seen and lived through human suffering and joy for two thousand years and refracted that suffering through the lens of what God has revealed about all of it…
….If you’d not suddenly decided that it was the best thing to “Sing a New Church” into being and to get rid of all the depressing, judgmental stuff that is holding us back,and that being an Easter People meant that we shove the crucifix in the dumpster.
I ran across a discussion on some social media the other day in which people were discovering the Psalms. They were saying to each other, “Everything’s in here. The joy of human life, the sadness, the anger, the questions. How great to discover this!” Of course, the Psalms have never been excised from Catholic life, we sing them every day at Mass and in the Liturgy of the Hours, but somehow, the message – that this is life, and this is the life in which we meet God – had been forgotten.
It’s odd to me because every person who has experienced suffering, which is every person, knows this. And never stopped knowing this. I continue to be puzzled why institutional Western Christianity of all types has allowed itself to be reshaped by the ideology of progress and human improvement as the focus of faith and to reframe the “Good News” as : “Everything’s lovely, you’re lovely as you are, let’s be lovely together.”
But, the great correction seems to be occurring. I appreciate what. Fr. Dwight Longenecker said on this score last week:
But now there is a “new normal” and the new normal doesn’t simply have to do with a new economic and political reality. At its very heart the new normal is, in fact, the old normal. The “new normal” is the fact that we are all learning to live with that, at any moment, seemingly out of nowhere, we may develop a cough and a fever and in a matter of hours be struck down with a life threatening disease. We won’t know where we got it. We won’t know how we got it. We may do everything we know to remain healthy and build up a good immune system, but still you’re hit with it, and the fact is, you might die.
This is not the “new normal” this is the old normal. This is the way most of humanity for the vast majority of history in the whole world have spent their lives. Furthermore this is the way most of the people alive in the world today live their lives. For most human beings in most places in the world in every time period, life was short, dangerous and fragile. At any moment the barbarians might sweep down like wolves on the fold. Plague, natural disaster and calamity might destroy everything in a moment. The joy of a woman’s pregnancy was mingled with the real possibility that she might die giving birth. Horrible diseases like leprosy, tuberculosis, smallpox and measles ravaged humanity and people not only died, they died after a long, agonizing and terrible disease. Murder, war, revolution and counter revolution destroyed livelihoods, homes families and took millions of lives.
After we get over the initial shock and our economy is shaken to the roots we will struggle back to the “new normal” which is the old normal. It is very possible that a second or third wave will hit our frail human race. As we get back to work we will be struggling to establish a new way of life–a way of life which is now the old normal–a way of life which, in fact, has always been true but we constructed a wonderful fantasyland where we could push it all to one side. Now, however, we are strong and smart. We will learn to accept that in this life we are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. We will learn to live with this truth: that life is fleeting and always has been, that life is fragile and always has been, that life is short and always has been.
Charlotte was Both 