I meant to write a review of the new Prince Caspian movie last week when it was actually, you know, new. By now my review would be old news, but I’ll offer a few remarks anyway because it’s good material for a larger theme that’s close to my heart: why do moviemakers have to botch adventure stories so badly these days?

A few days after seeing Prince Caspian, we went to see the new Indiana Jones movie. It was fun. Not quite Raiders of the Lost Ark good, but pretty good. I can enjoy a good shoot ‘em up popcorn movie just as well as the next guy (or girl) — what I don’t understand is why every story involving shooting (or jabbing, as the case may be) must be turned into an Indiana Jones-level popcorn movie. Fluffy and feel-good action adventure is all right some of the time, but adventure stories can also be more than that. In Hollywood there seems to be an unspoken law that they can’t be.

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One of the things which I love about the old Catholic Encyclopedia is that the biographical entries rarely lack sympathetic authors. It frequently happens that in reading some such entry you discover that character x, of whom you had never previously heard, is regarded (or ought to be regarded!) as one of the greatest lights Christendom has ever produced. My favorite example is that of the entry for Pope St. Gregory VII, “one of the most remarkable men of all times.”

I had another such experience today when I discovered – I should properly say “rediscovered” (and I’ll explain why) – François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. As I might have expected, Fénelon’s biographer says of him: “he remains one of the most attractive, brilliant, and puzzling figures that the Catholic Church has ever produced.” Probably had never heard of the guy before today, right?

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The Early Papacy to the Synod of Chalcedon in 451 by Adrian Fortescue is now in it’s fourth edition. The fourth edition came out from Ignatius Press in 2008 and is edited by Alcuin Reid. I picked up the slender volume at the bookstore the other day and was hooked after a few pages. Prior to reading this book, my feeling was that Ronald Knox in his The Belief of Catholics did the best job (as far as my knowledge of apologetic literature goes) of presenting the Catholic case vis-a-vis a moderate protestant position. Now, if I have to recommend a book to an inquiring and serious protestant, it will probably be this volume by Fortescue.

The work originated as a series of articles which appeared in The Tablet in 1919. Fortescue revised them and published them as a book in 1920. The purpose of the articles was to answer the protestants who say that the “Church” to which they owe allegiance (to which we all owe allegiance) is that Church which existed up until some time shortly after 451. Anything that was said or done by the “Catholic” guys at that date and earlier is a-okay. As a corollary, these protestants deny that the modern papacy is anything like (in the relevant Vatican I terms) the papacy at and before 451. Back then, so they claim, the pope was only one of many bishops, even though somewhat more preeminent.

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Happy feast of Corpus Christi! Mine was made very happy by this news from Rome, that the Holy Father celebrated the day with a Mass at which all the faithful were expected to kneel to receive Communion. Excellent! Nice to see that the Holy Father is soldiering ahead with his liturgical reforms, setting an example for the rest of the Church to see and consider. Several weeks ago we had the Mass in the Sistine Chapel ad orientem. Now this. All I can say is: may the Lord grant him long life! He is steering the Church in the right direction, and I only pray that he will have time to steer it a good way before claiming his eternal reward.

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I’ve heard a rumor that my “Gifts of the Holy Spirit” posts were somewhat heavy sledding for the casual reader, so I thought maybe I’d try to offer something a little lighter. I say a little… but not too much lighter, because today’s topic is in fact quite a serious business. I want to say a few words about the heinous evil wrought on our society by that modernist monstrosity, the metric system. (I dedicate this post to the good Catharina Senensis, since we were unable to finish our conversation on this fascinating topic, but also to my high school friends, with whom I doggedly pursued it on many happy occasions.)

All through my grade school days I was regularly told about the wonderfulness of the metric system. So civilized! So easy to convert! The enlightened Europeans have taken to using it everywhere, don’t you know, and isn’t it a shame that we backwards Americans insist on clinging to our anachronistic old English (this must be said with the emphasis on “old”) units? As school children we were indoctrinated into the pro-metric camp through conversion worksheets designed to teach us how much “easier” metric really was. On one side, we were asked to make various conversions using the Imperial units; on the other side we were asked to do similar conversions using metric. “Don’t you see,” our teachers would ask when we were finished, “how much easier things would be if our whole country would use metric?”

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This brief interview caught my eye partly because of the year that I spent in Hebrew and Jewish studies at Oxford, partly because it is an attack on Joseph Ratzinger’s scholarship. While at Oxford, I never had the pleasure of taking a course with Professor Vermes, but I certainly came to know his reputation. I have no difficulty in crediting his claim that the Holy Father’s knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and other Semitic languages might be better than it is. But I think that it is a mistake when Prof. Vermes, perhaps as a deliberate slight, attributes a lack of knowledge about Biblical scholarship later than 1970 to Benedict XVI. I don’t know if Papa Ratzinger is the most scholarly of popes since Papa Lambertini, but it wouldn’t be a far-fetched claim.

Prof. Vermes seems to think that the consensus of certain contemporary scholars amounts to the fact of matter; so Benedict, by defending orthodoxy, has written a book which will pressure Catholic biblical scholars to deny the facts before their eyes. This is really a ludicrous position. In order to assess the worth of any consensus, one first needs to know who the scholars are that make up the consensus. Especially in a field of study as controversial and hotly debated as Biblical and New Testament studies, I think that we can never ignore the pre-scholarly, as it were, bias of the investigators. The one solid fact of the matter in this case is that the evidence can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Just as in philosophy, what we first of all need to consider is whether the scholar has a made a case consistent with the facts; we ask whether his account is internally coherent. Then we look at the “costs” and benefits of maintaining that consistent account; we hesitate to commit to neat solutions in one area that require us to make ridiculous conclusions in another area.
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The Good Samaritan story with an Ithacan twist:

The Ithaca Police Department is investigating an assault that occurred this morning (May 19, 2008) at approximately 4:26 a.m. in the 400 block of Dryden Road. The assault victim came upon an apparently unconscious male on the sidewalk. The victim attempted to give aid to that subject, when another unknown male grabbed the victim and threw him to the ground, causing the victim to suffer a head injury. The victim was taken to Cayuga Medical Center for treatment.

Does Christ’s parable allow for the possibility that the wounded man is actually one of a gang of robbers setting up an elaborate trap on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho?

In reading the words of the saints on the Gift of Wisdom, two things are mentioned perhaps more frequently than any other. First, wisdom is often compared to a tasting of the sweetness of the divine. Second, wisdom is said to be the Gift that corresponds to, and arises from, the virtue of charity. Wisdom is charity’s counterpart, and like charity, it conforms our souls to God’s image, and prepares us for the blessedness of the life to come.

As usual, it is the Angelic Doctor who describes the Gift in the clearest way, by comparing it to other things that have already been explained. Like the Gift of understanding, wisdom concerns itself with the highest and holiest of things, most especially with God Himself. However, where understanding looks only to penetrate these great mysteries, wisdom also judges, determining which things should be sought and in what way. In this respect, it is like the Gift of knowledge, but unlike knowledge, it is not limited to the realm of created things.

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By the time we reach the Gift of knowledge, we are mostly just impatient to get on to the summit, as represented by the Gift of wisdom. Even our Doctors seem to be feeling this, because their treatment of this Gift is briefer than any of the others. But actually, that impulse to rush along may not be such a bad thing, because the Gift of knowledge is in many ways best understood as the Last Lap towards Wisdom. Yesterday I wrote about the Gift of understanding, by which the interior natures of things are grasped. Knowledge is the Gift by which we use that understanding in order to decide which ends should be pursued, and which should be avoided. However, as the penultimate Gift, knowledge does not make these decisions with respect to divine things. Rather, it chooses with respect to created things, which it understands precisely as things created by God.

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Among the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, only two relate to the speculative power of the mind, and the first of these is the Gift of understanding. This is the Gift by which the intellect penetrates and grasps those holy things that could not be grasped without the special help of divine grace. Happily, this may be one case in which the natural connotations of the English word really do point us in the right direction, because the Gift of understanding does seem to relate to that seeing-within, or that ah ha! feeling, that we associate with the verb ‘to understand.’ St. Thomas speaks of the necessity of seeing what “lies hidden” beneath the external appearances of things — this is what happens when we understand.

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