Fr. Ayre started a twitter thread on the misapprehension of sacramentality like this:

(Read it all for context. Also, in this post all references to The Church are to the fullest sense of The Church, i.e. the mystical body of Christ, i.e. all people, angels, etc. who in the end love God including those who may only come to know Christ after their death, such as Abraham or Moses and we hope as stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church all those who through no fault of their own do not know Christ or his church but following the dictates of their conscience sincerely seek God.)

I think a lot of the problem is that the Church is necessary as a mediatrix for a full relationship with Christ, but not for just any relationship with Christ. That is to say, a relationship with Christ is not only through his Church. You can see this in the prayer which Christ himself gave us. It begins “Πάτερ ἡμῶν.” Literally: “Father ours”. Jesus himself taught us to pray directly to the father. Our primarily relationship is directly with God. But, our secondary relationship is indicated in that second word: ours. We are to pray directly to God, with our fellow creatures, that is, with the Church.

However, in the modern era, only one one of those two words is deeply felt. And this is all the more so because we live in a polyculture. Human beings by nature live in small family groups; we’re not made for widespread dissension. Some of us are better at handling it than others, but most aren’t good at it and so naturally try to compromise. That is, they try to find common ground, or put more depressingly, they try to go to the lowest common denominator. The extreme of this is atheism, where people figure that everyone agrees on secular things, at least, so let’s just get rid of the spiritual part and all agree. Within Christianity and especially in America we’re plagued with Protestantism; people’s natural desire to compromise in the practical sense leads people to compromise in the worse sense of damage.

This is especially the case given that what many protestants believe is some variant of Believe or Burn. Long story short: Martin Luther turned faith from living according to truth into an abstract pledge of allegiance to Christ in theory but (often) in practice to the dominant culture. The Church as mediatrix is—if one isn’t paying attention—awfully close to “pledge allegiance to the group or burn in hell”. This makes unmediated relationship with Christ all the more attractive, since believe-or-burn is repulsive.

But I think all this points to the way to recover sacramentality. Jesus said that he came that we might have life and have it to the full, not merely that we might just barely scrape by. The natural virtue people in the modern age most need to develop is courage. It takes courage to strive for living to the full instead of just scraping by. Scraping by is safe precisely because it is minimal. The less you do, the less you can do wrong. We need to remind people that the less that they do, the less that they do right, and life is fundamentally about doing right and only incidentally about not doing wrong.

I think that in this, too, humor might be helpful. What are we to make of a man who is willing to be tortured and executed for Christ, but can’t bring himself to tell his sins to a priest? What are we to make of a man who is willing to be beaten instead of renounce the name of Christ, but isn’t willing to listen to a few bad hymns in order to eat his body and drink his blood? What are we to make of a man who won’t judge a woman who abandoned her husband and children to take up with her new lover, but who will judge someone for gossiping about that woman?

So in conclusion, that I think that reinforcing the sense of the Church as mediatrix of Christ will be done most effectively by calling on people to be courageous. I don’t think anyone really objects to loving their fellow man in principle, I think that most of the time they’re just too scared.

Though like all things it traces its origin back to having faith—that is, trust—in God. Our fellow men are imperfect, and if we pray with them they may screw up our prayers. If we use the sacraments, we may have to wait or get them before we understand or all manner of imperfections. At the end of the day, like in all things, the only solution is to do our best and trust the rest to God. And in this specific case, if we trust God, what have we to fear from our fellow men?

Over on his blog, Brian Niemeier comments on a video talking about the rise and fall of The Simpsons. This to me is the crux:

…The Simpsons was a reaction against a long-gone age that would have eventually exhausted its fuel supply, anyway.

Matt Groening & co. set out to deconstruct the conservative establishment’s vision of post-Reagan America. Along the way they became the establishment, which is always fatal to subversive projects.

The lesson for writers: undermining traditional culture can be good for a quick buck and fleeting fame.

This stands (somewhat) in contrast to the video which Brian describes, in which (at the end) Super Eyepatch Wolf says:

And that’s what The Simpsons is: one of the purest and most raw expressions of social and political unrest… and despite what it’s become and how it’s all ended, I can’t help be so glad that we got those early seasons. It was a show that shaped a generation and transformed entertainment as we know it.

I think that of the two, Brian is far more correct. And I think that Super Eyepatch Wolf is actually rather dangerously wrong. Satire is a nice vacation from the main work of fiction, but it should never be the main work of fiction. I shudder to think what a generation shaped by satire would be like, though in a sense we’re living it out. It’s the spiritual equivalent of people who grew up eating nothing but frosted donuts: lazy, flabby, and useless, they’re terribly warped versions of what a human being should be.

Actually, rather ironically, The Simpsons later years is described as “Zombie Simpsons,” but this seems largely to be what became of people who grew up on The Simpsons. Unable think or feel anything sincerely, they know nothing but a desire to destroy those who can think. Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise that zombie shows are extremely popular these days; it’s a metaphor for what a generation who grew up on tearing down ideals became. I was recently in a discussion about the live action Beauty and the Beast where someone mentioned that the live action movie would probably have had to be darker for it to be something that a modern writer could write and have it work. I asked, something like this (paraphrased from memory, embellished a bit):

Gaston introduces Belle to heroin and she gets hooked. She falls in love with The Beast who tries to help her kick her addiction but she can’t and eventually goes back to Gaston, who pimps her out to pay for her heroin. She’s eventually killed by a customer and the Beast, learning about this, kills Gaston in a murderous rage, then commits suicide before the police arrive. The last part is witnessed by a pretty young girl who just arrived in the city looking to become an actress, and she asks a man nearby who turns out to be the brother of Gaston what happened, and he charmingly comforts her from the scene and invites her out to coffee. As the movie closes, we get the sense that the story will be played out again, no one having learned anything.

Here was Russell’s response:

In a sense he’s right; that’s part of why I like cheerful, adventurous fiction: I’m very familiar with dark. But the thing is, dark is really easy. It’s practically no work at all. Just start telling a story and keep making it go wrong. You could almost train a monkey to do it. Everyplace there is order, break it. Everywhere there is hope, crush it. The only thing approximating creativity in going dark is figuring out how to prolong things before you kill everyone except for the people who most deserve it. Given that most dark works seem to contain plot holes anyway, this is the epitome of easy; it only pretends to be hard because there’s a constant sense of violation of decency that requires a certain amount of willpower (or sheer degeneracy) to continually violate.

This is the problem with growing up on satire; it’s too easy. It trains people to not do the hard work of having a good time.

As you may know, I’ve got a podcast version of my youtube channel where I extract the audio and put it up. Specifically, I use the wordpress functionality to have a category dedicated to the podcast where I embed the audio which wordpress.com hosts on my account and the RSS feed of that category is the podcast.

Putting up each episode is some work and I’m both lazy and a programmer so I’ve written a perl script to use ffmpeg to extract the audio into an mp3 file then upload it to my wordpress blog. I don’t have it actually composing the post yet, but I might add that later, depending on whether it seems like less work, given that each episode does need a description and a link to the original video.

If you’re in this exact situation, feel free to hit me up for the script. It’s in perl and you need to run CPAN to install XML::RPC, but that’s really easy.

Since I love to talk about timely things, I figured I’d bring up whether there was any way the Star Wars prequels could have been saved with less than a near-total rewrite. My position, though I’m not completely certain of this, is: no.

I say near-total rewrite because I did think that two things were done well in the prequels:

1. Anakin Skywalker as a nine year old was portrayed as very kind-hearted and generous. This was a great contrast to who he would become.
2. The fall of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader was far more realistic than it was believable.

That aside, I don’t think anything in the Prequels which wasn’t necessitated by the original trilogy is salvageable. For example:

1. Episode 1 was about a trade embargo on an insignificant planet. Given that the Republican Senate represented so many planets that it was impossible to see all of the senators in the same shot, this is the wrong scale to start the empire on.
2. The virgin birth of Anakin Skywalker. No. Put down the Joseph Campbell until you’re old enough to know how much of it is just Campbell trying to excuse himself from being Christian.
3. The insanely coincidental nature of the Jedi meeting Anakin Skywalker at all. You only get to base your plots on coincidences this unlikely if you are explicit God is behind it or if you’re writing history not fiction. The principle is the same: the only author who gets to do highly unlikely coincidences is the author of all that is.
4. A midichlorianometer: absolutely not under any circumstances. Space  wizards do not use anything-ometers.
5. Anakin as most powerful Jedi ever: this makes no sense with Darth Vader basically being an enforcer for the Emperor and taking orders from grand admirals.
6. The Jedi council won’t train Anakin, the most powerful force user of all time: no one is this stupid.
7. Qui Gonn has Obi-Wan promise to train Anakin: Nope. Watch the original movies again. Training Anakin was an act of hubris, not duty.
8. Defeating the Trade Alliance by a slapstick accident: no.
9. All robots fall down when the central computer explodes: no.
10. Anakin as an angsty teenager: no. You do not set the fall of a good character to an evil character in his teenage years because he was manipulated as a child by a parental figure.
11. Anakin as an angsty teenager: no. he’s a space wizard who routinely fights assassins as part of an organized military. He does not have typical high-school woes. His life has meaning and purpose which is obvious to him since he’s not being kept as a neotenic child long past physical maturity.
12. Anakin as angsty teenager: no. When you have the potential to be the most powerful force user of all times and are a member of an order of space wizards, you focus on developing your power, you don’t whine constantly.
13. Anakin as angsty teenager: still no. This is a story for an audience, we don’t need to pay money to hear teenagers complain about how their lives aren’t perfect. There’s a good change we’re at the movies to get a few blessed hours relief from hearing that.
14. Anakin as continual rebel who doesn’t fit in: Maybe, but not this way. People who don’t fit in because they are loners don’t just sign up to be a lackey in the opposite cause.
15. Anakin in love with Padme: the age difference is way too big at their age, there’s no reason she waited for him, and she never showed any interest in him. Having been established as a woman of deep devotion to duty, she would have had more respect for his vows, even if he didn’t, especially given that she didn’t seem to find him attractive and those two people having a romance was insane.
16. Anakin’s arm getting cut off: No. That sort of thing doesn’t run in the family. Stupid callback.
17. Anakin’s arm getting cut off: No. If you’re building the character up to fall from grace due to pride, you don’t teach him humility partway through.
18. A completely unexplained clone army. Thanks!: No. No one is this stupid.
19. [stuff so boring I cant even remember it]: no.
20. Anakin Skywalker kills the kiddies while storm troopers handle the adult Jedi: Are you kidding me? What’s the point of making him the most powerful Jedi ever if he never actually fights any Jedi?
21. “Give up, Anakin, I’ve got the high ground.”: No. This means nothing to people who can force jump over 50 feet in the air and even with normal swords and no force jumping in no way makes up for Anakin being a massively better sword fighter and more powerful force user. Plus is the high ground even an advantage with light sabers? The lower Jedi can defend everything the higher Jedi can reach, but can attack the ankles of the higher Jedi. It’s much harder to fight with recently amputated feet.
22. Obi-Wan can defeat Darth Vader: Well then what was all that stuff about virgin birth and off-the-scale midichlorian count about? At the end of the third movie Anakin accomplished nothing that other Jedi couldn’t have bested. And the storm troopers murdered the Jedi instead of Darth Vader helping to hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights? There’s no way to make this compatible with the best of the original trilogy.

But perhaps the least salvageable part of the prequels was the way that the Jedi Knights were turned into Lawful Neutral Buudddhiiiiistttsssss Iiiiiiiiiiiin Spaaaaaaaaace. You can’t be the guardians of peace and order and be lawful neutral. You can’t be a guardian of what you don’t value. Yoda’s famous line, “War not make one great” means nothing if that’s just because Yoda doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as greatness. In short, the prequels make a complete mess of the original trilogy by making the Jedi order something so awful that it should have been extinguished. There’s simply nothing you can do with that.

Yesterday on Twitter Russell Newquist and I had an interesting conversation about Beauty and the Beast (which branched off an interesting conversation with the publisher of Cirsova Magazine—if you’re on twitter, you can see the start here). Russell and I disagreed on some specifics, but we did agree that the Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast was set in a historical context but written to modern sensibilities. Twitter doesn’t make nuanced argument easy, so I’m going to present my take as a coherent idea here and invite Russell to give his more-than-140-characters-at-a-time take in response. (Though if you’re looking forward to that as much as I am steel yourself for possible disappointment—he seems to think that being the father of four young children and working a full time job and running two businesses is some sort of excuse for not blogging about everything I’d like to read.)

It is my contention that in the animated movie Gaston is a proud man. Now, I mean that in the sense of the vice of pride, i.e. of having a wrong opinion of the importance of the self. Pride is often confused with vanity and arrogance, as well as—most frustratingly—with a proper opinion of the self in defiance of excessive modesty. That last one is actually properly described as humility, and if it is counter-intuitive that it can require humility to be immodest, none the less it is true. Vanity is an excessive care for what others think of oneself, and obvious Gaston is a vain man, but that’s not relevant to the moment. Vanity can be highly functional in social circumstances, so it’s very hard to disentangle from a reasonable concern for the implications of the perceptions of others. Let’s just set that aside. Arrogance is acting as if one is superior, but it is only a social sin if one really is superior. Beauty and the Beast makes it fairly clear that Gaston really is superior in the ways in which he acts like he’s superior—it is reasonably established that in a wrestling match no one can bite like Gaston, etc. But the proud aspect is that Gaston acts like he’s royalty, when he’s as much a peasant as anyone else in the village. This is somewhat difficult to pin down, exactly, since Beauty and the Beast seems to be set in an early 19th century village in the late medieval period. (By which I mean: it’s anachronistic.) Still, there is the strong suggestion of feudalism and no hint of upward social mobility, which makes Gaston’s thinking of himself like royalty as highly misplaced. Even remarkable peasants are still peasants.

This is a complicated matter, but relates to the way in which european aristocracies were never thought, within Christendom, to be moral aristocracies. As such, a man who was specially brave or strong or what-have-you was not out of place by being a commoner, and this did not entitle him to higher rank. That the members of his village don’t resent him thinking himself so far above them is an aspect of our modern sensibilities. We’re used to the idea of a meritocracy along the lines of economic output, while the peasants of Gaston’s time should have been more resentful at him thinking himself so high above people he was born equal to. (Not that there was no social mobility, but it was very uncommon and was won on the battlefield in extremis.) That said, the people of the village don’t seem to mind.

As such, by any worldly estimation, Gaston is quite a catch for a young woman. He would clearly be a good provider as well as raise his wife’s social status. He was good looking and confident, so he would be attractive. And yet Belle wasn’t interested in him. Why?

There are two possible explanations, the likely one and the one I prefer. The likely one is that the writers need Belle to not be together with Gaston so they tip their hand and wink at the audience and show that he’s actually unlikable. Gaston is depicted with tell-tale signs that he’s going to end up a fat slob in a soiled white a-shirt reminiscing about how great he was back in highschool. Granted, none of that fits in with the story at all, but it’s clearly the archetype being referenced. I picked “no one bites like Gaston” up above for a reason: this is one of the ways in which the writers tip us off that Gaston is really awful. Why on earth would he cheat in wrestling? That the people singing his praises sing his praises about this too turns them into toadies whose high opinion of Gaston is worthless. Also the gulf between Gaston and LeFou—his closest friend and a bumbling fool who worships the ground Gaston walks on—tells us that Gaston is actually insecure and constantly needs to reassure himself he’s actually worthwhile at all. Those are very recognizable signs; we’ve all seen them in dozens of utterly unrealistic high school football player bullies.

The reason Belle isn’t interesting in Gaston that I like is that she’s a young woman who studied during a time in which much of what there was to read was religious. Specifically: Christian. Being an intelligent young woman of learning, she’d be well aware that pride is the deadliest of the sins, and that the purpose of marriage is to get to heaven while raising saints. Not how most people in her time would have thought of it, but very reasonably how a well educated person of her time would have thought of it. Now if you cast your mind over the story of saints, and especially of female saints, a woman who refused an advantageous marriage because the offered husband was a bad man who loved himself more than God would not be out of place. Saints’ stories are unusual, but Belle was an unusual woman.

And it is in the sense of my preferred interpretation of why Belle is not interested in Gaston that I hold that Beauty and the Beast is written to modern sensibilities: the modern world doesn’t understand pride or even sin in general and nor does it understand trying to avoid sin.

As an addendum, on the subject of whether Gaston would have been attractive to Belle, Gaston’s pride might would come off as confidence in one or a small number of meetings, and as the PUA who lurk in the shadows of the internet like to say: women are attracted to confidence. But PUA spend most of their time in clubs and other venues where everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Gaston would be known to Belle for many years and years of acquaintance tend to erase the confusion of outward similarities. A proud man eventually gives himself away over the course of months, let alone years. Further, given that Gaston does not seem to be a man of strong moral character, it is likely that he would have danced in the hay with the young women of the village who whole-heartedly sang Gaston’s praises, which to a woman of character and Christian principle would have reduced Gaston’s appeal as the years wore on. This would, perhaps, make Belle an exception to the general behavior of fallen humanity, but the whole reason we’re watching a movie about her is that her story is exceptional.

I’m going to tell the story of when one friend helped out another despite there being several years and over 300 miles between action and effect. (I’m going to use pseudonyms because why trespass on someone’s privacy needlessly? They’ll recognize this story, but they already know it.)

I’ll call my friends Lucybelle and Beatrice. Lucybelle and Beatrice met each other swing dancing. Lucybelle had been swing dancing for a number of years when Beatrice started, and she was quite good at it and widely admired. She was also an enthusiastic, generous person who loved to help newcomers to the lindy hop scene. She was also a very positive person: she tended to appreciate the awkward, self-conscious dancing of people in their first year or two of lindy hop more than the beginners did themselves. Now, you might think that this was a beginner’s dream, but in fact the combination often seemed too good to be true. How could the best dancer in the scene possibly enjoy watching you dance when your dancing feels nothing like what you feel like when you watch her dance? The same also applied to male dancers; how could the best female dancer in the room actually enjoy dancing with a beginner like me when she can have her pick of skilled partners?

These doubts were natural on the part of beginners of both sexes, but Lucybelle would eventually win everyone over with persistence. Over time, her actions were consistent with her professions and not really with any other explanation, so one came to believe that she was sincere. Which she was. All things in this world eventually come to an end, however, and after a few years both Lucybelle and Beatrice moved away to different places and didn’t really keep in touch.

Several years after that, Beatrice was progressing in a team sport, building up her strength and skill. As it happened, there was a highly skilled player on the team, who had played for many years before Beatrice, and who was, like Lucybelle, a very enthusiastic person who was very encouraging of people less skilled than her. I’ll call her Celerity. But again, the same problem emerged: Celerity was so good, and she was so positive, surely she couldn’t think anyone who wasn’t on her level any good and surely she didn’t mean any of her compliments? Surely she was just a nice person who wanted to make other people feel good?

As Beatrice was telling me about this one day, I reminded her of Lucybelle. She thought the same things about Lucybelle, at first, didn’t she? And she turned out to be wrong because Lucybelle wasn’t trying to blow sunshine up anybody’s orifices, she simply took the trouble to say the good things she thought where most people don’t give themselves that trouble. We all notice when others do things well, but most of the time it would be awkward or unusual to say anything, and in any event expressing an opinion exposes one to the risk of being thought foolish for that opinion. When something’s really bad it’s easy to complain about it, but if things are going well, it’s easy to tell ourselves that people already know that they’re doing a good job so why should we expose ourselves to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by drawing attention to ourselves with speech. Lucybelle had the courage to open her mouth when she had good things to say, I pointed out to Beatrice, and if you think about it, doesn’t that sound true of Celerity, too?

Beatrice thought about it and admitted that I was right, and finally accepted the compliments from Celerity. Lucybelle had ended up helping Beatrice to be happy, though she hadn’t seen her in years and had no way of knowing that any such thing would ever happen.

In general, I think most people recognize that we plant seeds which may one day sprout. But equally important—perhaps more important—is that we sometimes till the soil so that someone else can plant a seed that would never have taken in hard ground. Planting a seed is the work of a moment, but tilling is a long effort. We’d all like to see the fruits of our labor, but I think it’s important to remember that most of us are not harvesters. We usually don’t see the fruits of our labors, but that’s only because we’ve moved on to tilling a different field by the time the crops have grown.