God’s Blessings to you on this the fifth day of February in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

I recorded a video today which I hope to get up about the asymmetry between good and evil. It’s a curious thing which occurred to me recently because some people mistakenly say that we need evil in order to appreciate good. That’s not true, since evil is the privation of good (privation comes from the same root as deprivation; it means that evil is the absence of good where there should be good; evil is like a shadow—it looks like something, but that’s an illusion caused by the things that do exist around it). But there is, therefore, this asymmetry: you can consider good without thinking of evil, because good has a positive existence, but you can’t consider evil without thinking of good, because evil is defined only by where good should be, but isn’t.

Glory to God in the highest.

God’s Blessings to you on this the fourth day of February in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017. When I was young, there was a TV show I sometimes watched called Movie Magic. It was about special effects in particular, but it could have been a much more general title, because everything about movies has a certain magic to it.

As I write this, I’m watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode for the movie The Dead Talk Back. According to Wikipedia, it was filmed in 1957 but never screened. It eventually was found in a warehouse and went direct-to-video in 1993, and appeared on MST3K a year later. I wouldn’t call it a good movie, but I sometimes put it on in the background while I’m programming because I find it works well for that. (I can only watch movies I’ve seen more than once before while programming or I find them distracting. I never do this with really good movies because I don’t want to ruin my appreciation of them.) It’s a murder mystery, which I love dearly, and all of the production elements were decent but not good. The acting was OK, the cameraman filmed it so the people were reasonably large in the shots, it was lit so that you could see what was being filmed, etc. The story itself is, while not great, at least coherent and the pacing isn’t bad. And I’ve found that this is what really makes for the best MST3K episodes; the underlying episode needs to be relatively watchable. (I say this as someone who owns more than 20 boxed DVD sets of MST3K.) I very rarely re-watch episodes where the underlying movie was unwatchable.

I’m going to write more about this in depth some day, but I think that the basic underlying reason for it is that MST3K is fundamentally most enjoyable to people who are—fundamentally—laughing at themselves by proxy. It’s great to people who intuitively understand the magic of movies, and would love to be a part of it in making a movie (or TV, etc.; same basic thing for my purpose here). Those of us who do understand just how willing we’d be to take short-cuts if it meant the difference between coming in under-budget with a movie, versus going over-budget and having to shut down production with nothing. Like is Plan 9 From Outer Space, if you have everything set up and need to get the shot now or give up because you don’t have the budget for another day’s shooting, who wouldn’t just shrug their shoulders at the wrinkle in the blue sheet used to represent the sky behind the colonel giving the orders to shoot? The set used to represent an airplane’s cockpit is absurd, but it does at least remind one, if only a little, of the cockpit of an airplane, and that’s a lot better than (1) nothing in the form of sitting at a desk in a cafeteria or (2) nothing in the form of no movie. B movies might have as their theme song repeating the phrase “don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good” repeated like a mantra. But of course these aren’t good movies. And that’s unfortunate, but in a sense OK. And that’s why MST3K is so funny. Because it is pointing out these two truths which are hard to hold simultaneously: these aren’t good movies, and all being, as such, is good. Also, they’re not really bad movies. If you want truly bad movies, watch wretched things like The House on the Edge of the Park or Slave of the Cannibal God. I learned early that when you want to watch bad movies to make fun of them with your friends, you need to be very careful, because there’s another barrel buried deep in the ground underneath the barrel that Plan 9 From Outer Space at the bottom of.

Anyway, that juxtaposition of truths which are hard to hold at the same time is perhaps the easiest to notice in movies which aren’t good, but are close to good, hence movies like The Dead Talk Back. But I’ve noticed this in other contexts, too. If you want to make fun of things for humor, don’t look for the worst things there are, because no one can stand them even to laugh at them. Pick things that are nearly good but not quite.

And there are exceptions to the rule about B movies, by the way. Gunslinger was on an MST3K episode, and it was actually a good movie. Low budget, to be sure, but a plot worthy of a greek tragedy and with decent enough acting to make it believable. One of the later scenes involves a man and a woman who’ve fallen in love but are on opposite sides of the law professing their love for each other as they shoot at each other, and when the woman hits the man, she rushes over to cradle him in her arms as he dies (which he does). That’s the thing about fiction; no matter what signifiers of quality it comes with, you can never quite be sure what you’re going to find.

Glory to God in the highest.

God’s blessings to you on this the third day of February in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

Like a lot of people, I read about the violence used to shut down a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos. And like a lot of people, I’ve seen more than a few instances of left-wingers on twitter applauding this violence or defending the idea of punching people they designate as Nazis. It is upsetting, but I think it is upsetting in disproportion to how significant it really is. There is a great deal of human evil in the world, and while we should do what we can to prevent and counteract it, what we can actually do about almost all the evil in the world is, basically, nothing. This is just common sense; there is no way I can prevent the murder of people I don’t even know in a country I don’t live in; and so it goes for nearly everything.

Of course, newspapers and later TV news specialized in telling me about things I cannot control as if somehow, by knowing about them, I could in fact control them. This is obvious nonsense. In some vague theoretical sense, knowing about some problem in Australia means that I could give up my life in the United States and travel to Australia to right that wrong, except that (1) I probably can’t and (2) I would be committing a much graver injustice against my family by abandoning them than I have any real chance of doing good in Australia. (And apart from that, one may not do evil that good will result. So abandoning my family is right out.) I think that the usual dodge is that I can call my congressman and senators and tell them how important fixing whatever it is that’s going on in Australia is. Except, let us be honest, American congressmen and senators are not going to actually drop their pressing American concerns to—do what? They could declare war on Australia, I suppose. Establishing burdensome trade restrictions which mostly hurt innocent people would also be doable, I suppose. But even there, it would only work if more than one congressman and two senators were in favor of it, and I have even less influence over congress critters I don’t vote for. And what’s extraordinarily true of events in other countries is only marginally less true of events within my own country. Countries are big places, and the United States is one of the bigger countries.

And, in fact, when looked at realistically, my sphere of influence drops off to almost 100% uninfluential pretty rapidly; most of what’s in it are my family, friends, and co-workers. In fact, a cynical man might conclude that this is why Christ talked so much about neighbors and so little about society.

Anyway, there’s another phenomenon I’ve noticed, which is that if you talk with most liberals—or at least when I do, with the ones in my life—they don’t tend to know a lot about the extreme left wingers that I read about a lot. Now, you can call them useful idiots if you like, and there may even be an element of that going on, but at the same time I’m not very familiar with whoever the extremists on my side are supposed to be, such as David Duke, the Westboro Baptist Church, Sean Spencer, etc. It’s not that I literally have no idea who they are (since liberals bring them up all the time) but that I pay no attention to them because they’re minority idiots. And rightly or wrongly, that’s how the liberals in my life tend to view many of the worst leftists. There is an asymmetry, to be sure, because some awful leftists are quite mainstream to the point where it’s impolite to point out how awful they are, but none the less, when it comes to things like punching Nazis, that doesn’t appear to be a mainstream thing. And to be fair there was a bunch of rather shameful celebrating of the guy who punched Spencer—with ritual incantations of “I don’t condone violence” as if that makes celebrating it harmless.

So, yeah, I don’t know. I was going to say that both sides cherry-pick the worst of the other side, which gives both sides a skewed view of the other side, especially when it comes to the ordinary people who aren’t so involved, but I don’t know any more.

Hopefully I’m just having a bad day, but in any event it’s a damn good thing that God is in charge of the world and not people.

Glory to God in the highest.

In case you’re interested, Russell Newquist and I recently had a long conversation about the state of social media up to the present, and the future of it. Plus other things, because no conversation I’m in is ever free from digressions. But at least they’re all interesting! 🙂

Recently, John C. Wright blogged about the formula used by Lester Dent to write the Doc Savage stories. He began his post with this defense of writing formulas:

There are people who object to formula fiction. Myself, I like formula fiction much better than experimental fiction, because the formula at least means the story will be workmanlike. Some complain formulas make yarns too predictable. But that is like saying the recipe for cheesecake is predictable: depends on well the cook uses the recipe, does it not?

As a small aside, though in the main Mr. Wright’s point about cheesecake is well made, there are—I get the impression—far more people who like to be surprised by fiction than like to be surprised by food. This may be related to the relative difficulty of finding new fiction to finding new foods, but at least I’ve never encountered a restaurant review which gave spoiler warnings so one could avoid hearing about what the food tastes like. Or perhaps a better analogy would be that very few people go to a winery and refuse to avoid the wine tastings because they don’t want to tarnish the experience of drinking the wine they are going to buy with the knowledge of what it tastes like. For people who thus primarily enjoy surprise in fiction, formula fiction is somewhat poorly suited. Being more a re-reader than a reader of new things I’m not very familiar with this, but I’ve heard that there are such people in the world—from their own lips, on some occasions.

Not long after Mr. Wright published his post, Brian Niemeier blogged about writing formulas, linking Mr. Wright’s blog post. Something in it caught my eye, and seemed related to what Mr. Wright said:

A long-running controversy in writing circles rages around the validity of formulas. Keep in mind that I don’t mean formulaic writing, which is just predictable and derivative.

The interplay of the two is this: formulas that work to make enjoyable stories will—with certainty, and possibly of necessity—result in more stories which are predictable and derivative. It will do this because it will result in more stories by fixing other aspects of the stories that otherwise would have died still-born on their author’s fingers or the editor’s in-box. This is in no way a criticism of formulas, but rather an entry-point into considering what it is that formulas actually do.

There are many ways in which a story can be good or bad. One dimension of good stories is characters. Specifically, are they interesting people? Does the story show off their virtues realistically? The wrong character in an interesting situation will be uninteresting because none of their virtues (especially natural virtues) will be relevant and they will remain background non-entities or automatons moved about because the plot requires it and for no other reason. A formula is not likely to help much with this.

Another dimension of good stories is the narration. A good narrator makes observations about human nature that are interesting to read. A formula will not help with this at all, and this is perhaps one of the most neglected aspects of story telling. But consider such amazing narration as you find in Pride & Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Or again:

“[Miss Bingley speaking at length to Mr. Darcy, criticizing every feature of Elizabeth.]”

Persuaded as Miss Bingley was that Darcy admired Elizabeth, this was not the best method of recommending herself; but angry people are not always wise; and in seeing him at last look somewhat nettled, she had all the success she expected.

Or again:

Miss Darcy and her brother appeared, and this formidable introduction took place. With astonishment did Elizabeth see that her new acquaintance was at least as much embarrassed as herself. Since her being at Lambton, she had heard that Miss Darcy was exceedingly proud; but the observation of a very few minutes convinced her that she was only exceedingly shy.

Fresh observations on human nature cannot be taught by formula, but only by extensive education and observation.

Another dimension of good stories is expression. This can be word choice, but it also is related to the judgment of what to describe and what not to; using an apt quotation in place of a lengthy explanation. Formulas cannot teach one a wealth of quotations and which are apt, and when a character might use a quotation rather than an explanation.

Another dimension of writing quality is whether the author as written something the reader did not expect. As Chesterton observed (I can’t find the quote with more than a little googling, unfortunately), the only reason to read anything is to read something one did not expect to read. I think in the original context he said that the only reason to listen to a man is because one expects him to say something one did not expect him to say. Otherwise you could leave off listening and still know what he said. This is why I find it so annoying whenever a hero has been all but utterly defeated by insurmountable numbers of enemies and all he has is a baseball bat and his baseball bat just broke. We know that on the next page—since it is not the last page—that either his friends will show up or the magic amulet he’s been wearing will start to glow and imbue him with the power to defeat all his foes, depending on whether he’s been wearing a magic amulet. This is why I think it’s such a mistake to raise the stakes so much that they die of asphyxiation. The corpse of the stakes is very predictable, in the sense that one need not see how the author wrote the story to know how it was written. There was only one way to write it, excepting a deus-ex-machina which is pure cheating and worse than the predictable next scene. Formulas can help with this, in that a well-designed formula can keep a writer from getting into a situation in which there is only one way out, but it needs to be a very well designed formula to do that. And as a practical matter, it should be noted that formulas do seem especially attractive to people who have a hard time thinking of one way out of the situations they’ve gotten their characters into, but that’s just from my personal experience of a not very representative sample of people.

And finally one dimension of good writing is a plot that holds together. A series of events with no rational relationship to each other is not interesting to read, at least for those who are sober. There is nothing in them to engage the rational mind. And this is where a formula can greatly improve writing. Formulas can help a great deal with structure, and keep the author from writing the protagonist into a corner, and thus keep the author from merely teleporting the protagonist to a new location. I mean a good formula, of course. A bad formula will not keep the author from writing the protagonist into a corner, but then a bad crutch will not support a man’s weight. That does not mean that crutches are a bad idea for a man with a broken leg, and equally it doesn’t mean that formulas are a bad idea for a writer. All tools must be judged by good examples of the tool, not the worst versions of them. Judging all formulas by a bad formula is as much a mistake as judging all saws by a dull saw.

But human nature being what it is, the ability to make a story good in several dimensions tends to go together. This is related in part to the many effects of intelligence and education, but in any event it will be rare to find a man who can write excellent characters, can write fascinating insights into human nature, can do all this with language that is well suited to the needs of the moment (tight in action, luxurious in moments of leisure, and so on), and can always foresee the possibilities of his present course to ensure that there are always multiple viable paths ahead, but who can’t for the life of him come up with a way to get his characters to do what they need to do. Such a man is not impossible, but he is uncommon. By contrast, a man who can’t write characters very well, can’t say much about human nature worth reading, can barely put words together grammatically, to say nothing of concisely and clearly, and who can’t foresee the present course enough to stock the future with possibilities, but who can follow a formula in order to come up with a plot that at least has his characters acting like human beings and connecting his scenes in some sort of rational way—such a man is far more common.

The upshot of this is that if good writing formulas are well known and widely used, it will result in writing which is more predictable and derivative, because while it will elevate the occasional good writing into very good writing, and some mediocre writing into good writing, it will elevate far more bad writing into mediocre writing. And the thing is—contrary to what snobs say—mediocre is not the same thing as bad, and mediocre writing is worth reading.

Now, it should be noted that I am not at all saying that formulas will turn good writing into mediocre writing. Such a thing is, I suppose, not entirely outside of the realm of possibility, but I think it very unlikely. My point is that writing formulas, by their very function of improving writing, will—because they improve it unevenly—result in more mediocre writing. But, like the doctrine of purgatory carves a chunk of hell off and results in fewer people being damned—if, in a sense, it does lower the average quality of the blessed—a writing formula which improves writing will carve a chunk out of terrible writing and make it mediocre. This is in no way a criticism of writing formulas, but instead a studious in how counter-intuitive results can be. Perhaps it can be called a study in the law of unintended consequences.

So again, to be crystal clear—since writing formulas come under a lot of probably undeserved criticism—nothing in what I said is an argument against using writing formulas. At most, it is an argument for trying to improve one’s writing in more ways than just using a writing formula. And that, I suspect, no fool ever doubted. And certainly the men whose blog posts I linked above are no fools.

Glory to God in the highest.

God’s blessings to you on this the eighteenth day of January in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

There’s a really interesting question in why it is that we teach children to say “thank you” even when they don’t “mean it,” by which we mean, that it’s something done by choice or habit rather than a spontaneous outpouring of gratitude. When a child says “thank you” without meaning it, it is an acknowledgement of a situation in which something was done for them which they were not owed. They may not recognize this in the moment, but the acknowledgement still exists, and is something which they can contemplate (unconsciously) as time permits. A great deal of childhood is the building up of data to be understood later, even if not consciously recalled later, and taking a physical action (like speaking) to recognize something that has happened makes it far more memorable. This gets to the incarnational nature of human beings; we are body and soul united, not merely joined.

The “cartesian dualism” which predates Descartes by quite a bit—the gnostic divided soul and body, and were not the first to do so either—is an interesting thing. It seems to be very natural to our fallen nature to turn this distinction into a division. In some sense I suppose that this is inevitable because our souls can survive the death of our bodies, so the things are in fact divisible, but fallen humanity seems to want to divide them earlier than necessary. I’ve noticed that in other places, too, where people seem to want to die before they’re dead. A person having an identity is an example of that. You’ll have an identity after you’re dead. Right now, you’re a work in progress and might end up being anything. I wonder if this isn’t a fear of making choices. Making choices means that we can make bad choices, and the reality of that can be scary. It might also be related to how many people like to make the world comprehensible by reductionism. People, as origins of causality, make the world horribly complicated. Far too complicated for our finite minds to comprehend. It might be something else too; it’s an interesting question to contemplate, anyway. (Usually things don’t have single causes but are caused by multiple threads intertwining; this is especially true when multiple people do the same thing, with different threads having different amounts of influence in each person.)

In other news, I finally put up my interview with professional science fiction and horror author Brian Niemeier:

We talk about writing, fiction, theology, and more. It’s almost three hours long, but I found it very interesting when I was in it, and when I listened to it afterwards during editing. 🙂

Glory to God in the highest.

God’s blessing to you on this the sixteenth day of January in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

So a twitter atheist I was talking to for weeks went silent. To sum up the backstory, he discovered me because of my alinguism tweets, and then we tangled when I pointed out that “morality is subjective” just means “there is no such thing as morality” (when it isn’t just a clumsy way of saying that it depends on the circumstances; e.g. plunging a sharp piece of metal into someone is right or wrong depending on whether you’re a surgeon cutting out a cancer or a street-tough murdering someone for his shoes). Then he started asking me questions, and said that he wanted to understand what I thought. Later on, he suggested a very stupid interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac where he was trying to show that God had to know the choices men would make without men ever making those choices. His eventual goal was to show how God shouldn’t have created people who would end up in hell because he would know before they rejected salvation that they would. Except that “before” in this case means “logically prior”, since I had explained that God is not inside of time, and so what he was trying to claim was that God should have known what choices people would have made had they existed and made choices. That is, he’s the latest person in a long line of people who deny the existence of free will and consequently the reality of human life. (Though he generally denied it when it was put that bluntly.) And when I pointed out that his interpretation of the (almost) sacrifice of Isaac is very stupid, he criticized me by saying that calling it stupid doesn’t help prove my claims about God. (I did also point out that under his interpretation, it should be described as “the pretend test of Abraham”, since according to him the test ended before anything was actually proved anyway, and therefore the entire thing just makes no sense; why go part-way through a charade which doesn’t prove anything to anyone? As saint Augustine advised to some monks who were questioning free will, interpretations of scripture which make scripture very stupid are bad interpretations.)

Anyway, I re-iterated that I wasn’t trying to prove anything to him. He wanted to know what I thought, so I told him. And that his interpretation of the test of Abraham was stupid was one of the things I thought. I haven’t heard from him since. Perhaps I will again, we’ve had several day lulls before. But in any event it comes back to something I’ve noticed with twitter and youtube atheists. They really, really want their interactions with Christians to be Christopher Hitchens style debates. Or perhaps even more, they really, really want a Christian to be trying to convince them that God exists so they can criticize the attempt. Now, I appreciate artistic heckling as much as the next guy. Probably more, considering how many boxed sets of Mystery Science Theater 3000 I own. But like most things it’s best done honestly. Honestly both in terms of being open about what you’re doing, and honestly in terms of giving credit where credit is due and not merely refusing to be pleased at everything. There’s a great line in The Importance of Being Earnest where John Worthing was asked if he could deny that his name was John. He replied, “I could deny it, if I liked. I could deny anything, if I liked. But I won’t. It certainly is John and has always been John.” I wonder if there were people who were surprised by Oscar Wilde’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Presumably not. After all, he gave one of the highest praises I’ve ever heard of the catholic church:

The Catholic church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people, the Anglican church will do.

Glory to God in the highest.

God’s blessing to you on this the fifteenth day of January in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

John C. Wright posted recently about the villains in Ayn Rand’s novels, giving them more praise than I’ve generally seen, but for a somewhat plausible reason. And in fairness I’ve seen an interesting argument that Ayn Rand is a sci-fi author. Certainly her plot seems to involve technologies far beyond what we have at present. At the very least rearden metal is closer to Star Trek’s duranium than it is to anything we have at present.

Anyway, I do have to concur that my favorite villains are true villains, who have made bad decisions, and not merely misunderstood good guys. This takes skill to write, since reasonably successful people who have made bad decisions tend to generally make good decisions and to have their bad decisions somewhat constrained in scope. That is to say, realistic characters aren’t easy to write. Big surprise.

I think that the most successful of these was Shakespeare’s Iago, the main villain from Othello. Iago is a soldier under Othello’s command, and has taken a hatred to Othello for promoting someone else over him. So he is out to ruin the other fellow and Othello, and has chosen to do this by convincing Othello that his wife is cheating on him with the fellow he promoted. But the real cunning of the plan is that he gets Othello to force him to plant this idea in his head. Having given Othello the idea that he (Iago) has some suspicion, he then becomes coy and refuses to divulge it, and Othello is asking for it. Then Iago says:

Good my lord, pardon me,

Though I am bound to every act of duty

I am not bound to that all slaves are free to.

Utter my thoughts? Why, say they are vile and false,

As where’s that palace whereinto foul things

Sometimes intrude not? Who has that breast so pure

Wherein uncleanly apprehensions

Keep leets and law-days and in sessions sit

With meditations lawful?

I do beseech you,

Though I perchance am vicious in my guess,

As, I confess, it is my nature’s plague

To spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy

Shapes faults that are not, that your wisdom,

From one that so imperfectly conceits,

Would take no notice, nor build yourself a trouble

Out of his scattering and unsure observance.

It were not for your quiet nor your good,

Nor for my manhood, honesty, and wisdom

To let you know my thoughts.

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls.

Who steals my purse steals trash. ‘Tis something, nothing:

‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him

And makes me poor indeed.

Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy!

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock

The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss

Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger,

But, oh, what damnèd minutes tells he o’er

Who dotes, yet doubts— suspects, yet soundly loves!

…

Poor and content is rich, and rich enough,

But riches fineless is as poor as winter

To him that ever fears he shall be poor.

Good heaven, the souls of all my tribe defend

From jealousy!

God’s blessings to you on this the fourteenth day of January in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

I managed to get to the monthly meeting of my local Chesterton society. It’s a chapter of the American Chesterton Society, and if you’re at all interested in G. K. Chesterton’s writings and would enjoy talking about them with other people who do as well, I suggest checking the website to see if there’s a chapter near you.

In other news, I recently was reminded of the concept of “custody of the eyes”.  Throwing that phrase into google I get about 8.5 million results, so there’s plenty of reading material on it, virtually all of which I haven’t read. But the basic idea is to look at one chooses to look at, rather than merely letting one’s eyes wander. Properly speaking it’s a form of Christian asceticism, but it must be remembered that the point of Christian asceticism—unlike most other forms—is not to conquer the body but to rightly order it. One of the more pressing problems addressed by custody of the eyes is that the body naturally reacts to the sight of attractive people by getting excited. In itself this is natural and not a problem, but since we are fallen creatures who do not rightly order ourselves with our reason in charge of our passions, allowing this to happen can lead us into trouble because though the initial reaction is natural, what follows (in this case, lust) is not natural. What should have happened is that the intellect notices the excitement and merely takes it in as information and does nothing else with it (where sexual excitement is inappropriate, of course; a husband and wife in their bedroom may properly cooperate with this excitement and encourage it).

There are two big points to note. The first is that the degree to which one should guard against this sort of reaction is of course commensurate with the degree to which one is liable to fall into error. Those who are very excitable must be very careful; those less so need not be as careful. For example, most doctors have no trouble examining the bodies of people of the opposite sex, so there’s no call for them to avert their eyes while doing so, and obvious reasons that they should look at their patients. As a counterpoint, of course, it’s easy to suppose one is less tempted than one is, but the chief point here is realism, not blind adherence to general rule. (Realism in fallen creatures must always include caution, of course.) But it is important to note that since we cannot know to what degree our fellow creatures are tempted by what they see, we are in no position to judge whether they are being careless or properly cautious. And advice which assumes that people will always err in one direction and so the advice itself errs in the other direction must always be taken with a grain of salt. Practical advice should never be confused with theoretical truths.

The other big point to note is that lust is only one vice to which we can be tempted by looking at things which we have no good reason to look at. To dwell upon someone’s fatness or ugliness is a temptation to judgement and pride. Even looking too long at one pretty thing may make us ignore all of the other beauty around us; we can get so enamored of paintings that we forget to enjoy trees.

Now, of course all of this is supposed to be in service of becoming perfect. Of always doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, for the right reasons. And if we do that, we shall be immensely happy, because one of the primary purposes for which God made us was to enjoy his goodness. In our disordered state we are far too prone to enjoy some small thing instead of enjoying better things, so we should be on our guard against getting caught in these small traps. But if we do nothing but worry about avoiding traps, we’ve only traded one form of focusing on creation to the exclusion of God for another. The Catholic Church has tended to be legalistic (in practice, rather than in theory) because the people in its care want it to be legalistic; rules are much easier to follow for many people than a wholesale dedication of one’s every thought to God and to his creation in light of Him. Because legalism is basically a series of sign posts warning you that you’re off the trail; when regarded properly legalism is entirely compatible with being a saint; a saint will follow all the laws without thinking of them as laws because he sees the reason for their existence. And many people have trouble seeing that connection, but can see the sign posts and so go right by avoiding the sign posts saying that they’re off the trail they have trouble seeing. As long as one never forgets that the sign posts are an aid to walking the trail, and are not the trail itself, all will be well. Alas, it’s a thing too often forgotten and all too often not even taught to children because it’s harder, and children are exhausting.

And of course as with all attempts to be perfect, it’s important to remember that we do not achieve perfection through our own efforts, but by God’s grace, so however often we fail, God has more than enough grace to make up for our deficiencies. All we have to do is the best that we possibly can; God will make up the difference between that and what’s needed. And when we fail, it is well to remember that actions can fail but a man cannot be a failure so long as he’s alive because he’s not finished yet. It is utterly pointless to attempt to judge a work in progress. If it’s a bad idea to judge a book by its cover, it’s a worse idea to judge a book only by its front cover because there’s no back cover yet.

Glory to God in the highest.

God’s blessings to you on this the eighth day of January in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

I was talking on twitter with someone recently who apparently hadn’t encountered the idea of aeviternity. It’s a scholastic term (scholasticism being most closely associated with Saint Thomas Aquinas) which denotes a created eternity. And eternity refers to, not an infinite amount of time, but timelessness. We live in linear time, that is, we exist in a succession of moments , one after another, which have no access to each other except that each is causally related to the moment directly following. Thus our existence is spread over a collection of moments we have no access to; we are not so much beings as becomings. We are continually coming into being, but at the same time, departing from it; what we are is, at any given moment, a razor-thin slice. Though our memory we remember the past, that is, we re-member it, but this is only calling it to mind and does not make it any more real, but it does enable us to forget how our being is scattered over myriad moments we have no control of.

By contrast, eternity is an eternal present, where there is neither coming into being nor fading out of being, but the fullness of being. You can spell it with a capital B, i.e. Being, if you like; but it’s what our memory integrating our past moments merely hints at. Since eternity is not a succession of moments, it does not interact with us as if it were a succession of moments, but rather it interacts with all of our moments simultaneously—from eternity’s perspective. Of course from our perspective, which consists of nothing but moments, eternity interacts with us moment by moment. But it has this advantage over us: since our future is equally present to eternity as our now is and our past is, eternity can foretell our future (where our future is not disturbed by this revelation).

A common analogy for this interaction of eternity with time is an author writing a book. It’s far from perfect because human authors exist in linear time, but they at least exist in a different linear time from the sequence of events which takes place in the book they’re writing. Thus they can put foreshadowing or even prophecy of events to come into the earlier parts of books because they’ve already read the later parts of the book. This is also not a great analogy because characters in a book don’t really have free will—though, I will say, having written several novels by now, it can really feel like they have free will to the author. I’ve had characters decide to do things that I never meant for them to do, and even a few times didn’t want them to do. I don’t mean that this feeling proves that they have free will—I don’t think that they do. I’m just noting it in case I’m somehow wrong, and they in fact do. 🙂

When I had explained this, my interlocutor brought up a curious objection I hadn’t heard before:

[The idea of aeviternity] negates the punishment of Satan somewhat. He is in hell forever, but also enjoying his actions as a sinner forever as well.

Of course my first thought is, “who cares?” I mean, given that separation from God is the worst possible thing, if there were some minor consolation, well, why would one begrudge that to Satan? Doesn’t vindictiveness miss the point? But then a moment’s actual consideration shows that to be anthropomorphising Satan. In particular, thinking of him as being in time. It is invoking the separation between sin and action which is possible to creatures in time but not creatures out of time. Because for those of us in time, sin is said to be pleasurable not in itself, but because of its effects. The pleasurable effects are, themselves, good. The pleasure “of sin” is thus derived from natural goods which were used incorrectly.

This will be easiest to explain by example. Take adultery. When a man cheats on his wife and has sex with another woman, this is both sinful and pleasurable. But it is the cheating which is sinful and the sex which is pleasurable. The sex is, in itself, good, and so in the moment when the sex is happening it is this good which is enjoyed. Sex, whether in wedlock or not, is cooperating with God in the creation of new people, and our bodies know this. Or rather they presume it, because of course we can use contraceptives and lie to our bodies, etc. (Sex during infertile periods is still ordered towards procreation, even if it doesn’t achieve it, and thus is still taking part in the goodness from which the pleasure is naturally derived.) The main problem with this procreation is that the man is in no position to be a good father to any children which he engenders, and further that if he does engender children he will cease to be a good father to the children he has made with his wife—if he ever was a good father to them. There are other damages which it causes, though most of them are dependent on this (whether the people so injured understand it as such or not). The sin consists in the damage caused (or very technically, in the good not participated in), and since no one can take pleasure in harming his children, it is clear, I think, that the pleasure of this sin is not in the sin, but in the goodness which is obtained sinfully. This is possible only because the good obtained and the damage caused are separated by time; even in more direct cases the good obtained and the knowledge of the damage caused are separated by time such that it is possible to enjoy the goodness before receiving the knowledge of the evil caused by taking the good incorrectly.

This is not possible for an aeviternal being; there can be no separation between a good participated in and the damage caused by it such that there is space between them to enable the enjoyment of that good. Aeviternal creatures can sin by looking for good in the wrong place, but unlike temporal sinners they can’t be temporarily mistaken about whether they’ve found it. Satan may sin, but he can’t be sinning by obtaining illicit pleasure. He must be doing it for some other reason than that.

And while concupiscence (basically, inordinate desire) may be why many human beings sin, it cannot be why angels sin. For anyone who is confused at this point how an angel can sin, then, it might help to remember that there are other deadly sins besides lust, greed, and gluttony.

Glory to God in the highest.