Читать книгу Man Virtues - Robert P. Lockwood - Страница 10

Chapter One

Prudence

Prudence: the virtue of using intellect and conscience to search out the true good in every circumstance and to choose the morally licit means of achieving that good. It is the virtue of divorcing personal desire from the judgment of whether an act is right or wrong. It is seeing truth and pursuing it. Prudence is reason and discernment made in kindness and truth.

•••

Dave Swallow expected a catastrophe to occur when the clock would strike the New Year on January 1, 2000. He wanted to be prepared. And he was prepared as no Boy Scout ever dreamed.

Dave was from Fort Wayne, Indiana. His story was told in a late-September 1999 issue of The Fort Wayne News Sentinel, just a few months before the second millennium ground to a halt. He was caught up in the Y2K end-times scare.

We were warned that as the curtains closed on the twentieth century, all hell would break loose. With computers running our lives, as well as our cars, and with all of them programmed only through the year 1999, everything subject to their electronic razzle-dazzle would fizzle out like a flat beer. Planes wouldn’t fly, the power company would collapse, coffee makers would quit — really apocalyptic stuff.

The Y2K scare created its own little boom in the waning months of the second millennium, based on a mixture of theological millennialism and pseudoscientific harum-scarum. It created a subculture in America, with suckers waiting to get soaked and the soakers waiting for the suckers.

Dave lived by himself in a pleasant enough middle-class home in Middle America. It was a home with a lot of room to spare for just one guy. That’s the space Dave converted into a Y2K storehouse that would make a paranoiac snug and smug. He was prepared for a Cormac McCarthy novel. If the end of civilization was coming after the first New Year’s kiss, Dave was not going to be caught short on the necessities.

According to the newspaper story, Dave had crammed his house with, among other things, more than 1,000 cans of food, 18 boxes of Band-Aids, at least a ton of charcoal briquettes, 1,500 pounds of propane, shelf after shelf of toilet paper, 9,500 plastic cups, 268 rolls of paper towels, a mountain of disposable razor blades, gallons of mouthwash, and 216 cases of beer — all the flotsam and jetsam of modern American life, crammed into one little home on a corner at a busy intersection.

Dave was on a trip with a friend the summer of 1999. They had just enjoyed a solid Midwest breakfast together. As they walked back to his truck, Dave suddenly keeled over. He was as dead as a doornail before he hit the ground, victim of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three. Which is a reminder that the old rock song warning “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” can be overstated.

Dave needed a little touch of prudence.

Dear Prudence

Prudence has taken on a certain meaning in our times different from the classical sense. Contemporary conversation defines prudence as an older aunt in comfortable shoes making choices that are so sensible that they ooze boredom. The word then gets tossed together with prudery, and that aunt takes on a disdainful pucker while she frets about hemlines and pick-up lines.

Prudence is actually a very straightforward guy’s virtue. It means living in the truth, not as a self-righteous jerk but as a guy who wants to look at himself in the mirror every morning without fearing that he’s sold-out. Prudence doesn’t mean living on a prudish straight and narrow with visors on, but it does mean living in society and culture by thought-out, reasoned principles that don’t fall prey to conventional wisdom. A prudent man looks for truth, finds truth, and lives truth. No matter where it leads him.

It’s easier said than done, my friends. It can even make watching football a challenge.

I’m thinking back to one of the most well-known moments in the history of the Super Bowl, and I’m not referring to David Tyree gluing a pass from Eli Manning to the side of his helmet to set up the Giants’ upset of the New England Patriots in 2008. I’m referring instead to singer Justin Timberlake’s tearing off part of Janet Jackson’s outfit during their halftime songfest at the 2004 Super Bowl. This momentarily revealed Ms. Jackson’s breast, on live network television, to a legion of football fans who had not sensibly retreated to the kitchen for beer and pizza during the game’s intermission.

Mr. Timberlake explained — in a line perilously close to the late Ron Ziegler’s claim that certain Watergate explanations from the Nixon White House were “no longer operative” — that a “wardrobe malfunction” caused the overexposure. Ms. Jackson later admitted it was a prearranged malfunction. Which seemed obvious, as Mr. Timberlake crooned these immortal lines just before tearing her outfit: “I’ll have you naked by the end of this song.”

The producers of the halftime show issued the ubiquitous nonapologetic apology for tastelessness: “We apologize to anyone who was offended.” Which implies, of course, that the offense was merely in the perception, not in the act itself. A coward’s apology if there ever was one. Ms. Jackson and Mr. Timberlake’s little show was tastelessness forced on an unsuspecting audience that included a lot of children.

Bad taste has become virtually epidemic in American culture. Parameters are now defined by the unrestrained libido of a male high school sophomore and the sense of humor of a six-year-old enchanted by scatological jokes. If you watch television, it can seem that the most highly paid, creative minds in America offer a celebration of our culture centered on underwear fetishes, sex, and intestinal gas, in no particular order.

We see an intentional coarsening of our culture, time and time again proving that we have defined deviancy down. One former television executive was arguing after the wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl that this was a tempest in a teapot. “After all,” he said, “it’s not like child pornography or … uh, uh, uh …” He was stuck. Other than blatant child pornography, he was hard-pressed to define what exactly we should consider offensive anymore on television. That’s the sinister aspect of all this. The culture keeps defining deviancy down, and after a while there’s nothing left to define as deviant — including child pornography.

At some point the prudent man has to make choices.

Prudent Saints

Cradle Catholics grew up with the saints. At least they did when I was growing up, just prior to electricity and running water. Converts might think that this familiarity with the saints was a good thing, but it had its drawbacks. Bad enough when your mother asked why you couldn’t be more like your brother, your cousin, or that annoying kid right up the street with the perfect grades. We also got, “Why can’t you be more like Saint Francis of Assisi?”

But somewhere along the line, the saints got sidetracked in our lives — or, at least, in my life. Perhaps the good sisters idealized them so much that I forgot that they were real flesh-and-blood people. But the older I get, the smarter those good sisters look, and I’ve gone to school again on the saints.

Bear with me for a brief history lesson.

In the sixteenth century, the testosterone level of King Henry VIII led to the near destruction of Catholicism in England. Henry moved from wife to wife, hoping to sire a male heir, and ended up in schism from the Church. Saint Thomas More faced martyrdom under Henry.

But it was really under Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I that England codified the first modern police state aimed specifically at eliminating Catholics and their priests. The Catholic faith, which had been at the heart of English life at the beginning of the sixteenth century, nearly disappeared in a wave of persecution and harassment from the government and its spy network. By the 1570s any observer of the English Catholic scene would have agreed that the Church was dying.

It was death by a thousand cuts, caused by Elizabeth’s policy of isolating the Catholic community, denying it priests to celebrate the sacraments, and imposing a host of fines and humiliations that left it leaderless and apathetic. For all intents and purposes, Catholicism in England had become criminal.

But a backlash was coming. A devoted group of young Catholic men were considering a mission to their own land, even if it meant torture and death upon capture by the authorities. Many would cross the channel to Europe to study for the priesthood, vowing to return to invigorate and renew the Catholic faithful of England. One of them wrote in the late 1570s:

Listen to our heavenly Father asking back his talents with usury; listen to the Church, the mother that bore us and nursed us, imploring our help; listen to the pitiful cries of our neighbours in danger of spiritual starvation; listen to the howling of the wolves that are spoiling the flock. The glory of your Father, the preservation of your mother, your own salvation, the safety of your brethren, are in jeopardy, and you can stand idle? … [S]leep not while the enemy watches; play not while he devours his prey; relax not in idleness and vanity while he is dabbling in your brother’s blood!⁶

That was straight from the pen of a youthful Edmund Campion.

A Champion of Truth

As a brilliant young student at Oxford, Campion had caught the eye of Queen Elizabeth, and it appeared he was on the path to glory: a high rank in the Church of England and perhaps a sterling career in government or law. In 1568 Campion was ordained to the Church of England, a first step on this path.

But Edmund’s conscience intervened. Within four years, the young man with an established reputation as a scholar and writer, and with an assured position in the new Church hierarchy, threw it all away. He would become a Catholic priest and commit himself to rejuvenating the Catholics of England as a member of the newly founded Jesuit order.

In 1580 Father Campion returned to England. He was told to serve the Catholic faithful there and have nothing to do with battling those who persecuted the Church. And his arrival was instantly invigorating. He created “buzz,” this bright young star, both within the Catholic community and in government circles that feared these dedicated Catholics returning to their homeland. They particularly feared this “one above the rest notorious for impudency and audacity, named Campion.”⁷

The life of these new missionaries could not have been more difficult. They hid from house to house, celebrating clandestine Masses, while spies were constantly tracking their movements, the law always on their heels. Catholic homes included “priest holes,” small openings behind walls into which a priest could be stuffed at a moment’s notice when the law came banging at the door. To this day, restoration workers in old English Catholic homes stumble across sixteenth-century hiding places that had been forgotten to time.

But Father Campion longed to do battle. In a letter to government officials, he begged for the opportunity to defend the Faith in order “to win you to heaven, or to die upon your pikes.”⁸

To Catholics it was a stirring call to hope; to the government it was a war cry, and Campion’s was a voice to be silenced at all costs. Finally he was caught, uncovered when a local authority found loose plaster in a Catholic home and took a crowbar to it.

Taken to London under armed escort, Campion went to trial four months later, charged in a trumped-up plot of mass conspiracy to murder. It was a calculated attempt by the government to avoid any intellectual or theological arguments with the learned Campion. But who knows if he could have responded? He had been tortured on the rack while confined to the Tower, so much so that at his trial he was unable to raise his hands to take an oath.

The results were a foregone conclusion. Campion was found guilty. Led from the Tower along the muddy streets of London in a driving rain, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered before the assembled crowds. He was forty-one years old. He was canonized as a martyr for the Faith on October 25, 1970.

Saint Edmund, and many of his fellow martyrs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, saw a Catholic faithful that had been beaten down by a propaganda machine that painted Catholics and the Catholic Church as the very enemies of enlightened English culture. And that’s what they wanted to answer, at the risk of their lives. They did it for one reason: to save souls. They had to stand up for truth, no matter the cost.

They were prudent.

Contrapasso with Dante

When I was a kid, I had fantasies of being a basketball player. And I mean fantasies. I was the shortest kid in class — girls included — and would have been one of the shortest in the class behind me at Christ the King School in Yonkers, New York. But I ate and drank basketball.

Day in and day out, winter, spring, summer, or fall, I was out there shooting baskets. A right-hander, I’d practice for at least one day a week using only my left hand. I’d shoot shot after shot, dribble forward, backward, side to side. Layups, hook shots, set shots, and free throws — I’d shoot twenty-five of each at a time. As a result of all that work, I almost reached average, which was pretty good for a kid who hadn’t hit sixty inches in height by eighth grade.

Basketball became such an obsession that I would actually dream of it. And the dream was always the same, like that college dream of showing up for a final in a class you had forgotten to take. I would be on the court, right under the basket. Everybody else would be all the way up at the other end. They would throw a pass down to me, and there I would be, all alone, looking at a simple layup. I’d shoot it as I had practiced a million times before in my driveway, and the ball would bounce off the rim, back into my hands. I’d shoot it again and bang it off the backboard. A third shot would miss, and, desperate, I’d take a final shot before being enveloped by a horde of defenders. And miss again. Four of the easiest shots in the world, and I couldn’t put it in the basket. I’d wake up with the sweats, and decades later I can remember that sense of helplessness.

I didn’t realize that I was dreaming Dante’s Inferno. In the Divine Comedy Dante punishes sinners by contrapasso. The punishment mirrors — or counterbalances — the sin committed in life. As Charles Dickens put it in A Christmas Carol, “we wear the chains we forged in life.” My little basketball hell was standing under the basket with a wide-open shot and missing it for all eternity.

Just outside the first circle of hell, Dante positions those who “lived / a life worthy of neither blame nor praise.”⁹ These souls are so unreflective, so lacking in passion, that neither heaven nor hell will accept them. They spent their lives refusing to take any sides, to mount any battles, to live for any cause. Not only did they fail to search for truth; they refused to recognize its existence. Their lives reflect benign mediocrity.

Dante describes the monster Geryon, the personification of fraud:

His face was the face of any honest man,

it shone with such a look of benediction;

and all the rest of him was serpentine.¹⁰

Such are the opposite of prudent men. They refuse to seek out the truth, and their own desires — even if those desires are to spend a lifetime laying low — are their only true quest. Dante condemns them contrapasso, to an eternity of running back and forth, chasing a banner they will never catch.

Prudent men are those willing to live and die by truth, particularly in the overpowering and overwhelming world of contemporary culture, where deviancy is defined ever downward. They refuse to live in the mire of a benign mediocrity. Prudent men are stand-up guys when the rest of the world is sitting down.

A Little Scripture

Dante describes one poor wretch among those who make up that babble of benign mediocrity chasing banners for all eternity. He calls him “the coward who had made the great refusal.” We meet him in the Gospels.

Matthew tells us that after Jesus was betrayed, the Sanhedrin arraigned him before Pilate, the Roman procurator. They wanted him dead, and only a conviction by the Roman authorities could accomplish that. He was charged with plotting to become the “King of the Jews,” which meant his business was insurrection. Roman justice would be swift and merciless if he was convicted.

Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?” (Mt 27:11). We can imagine him sounding almost bored. In the Gospel of John, Jesus answers, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice” (18:37).

“What is truth?” Pilate answers for two thousand years of a cynical humanity (Jn 18:38).

The rest of the story is straightforward. Pilate has Jesus scourged and claims he finds no guilt in the man — at least, not enough to have him crucified. But the crowd wants blood and even refuses Pilate’s offer to free Jesus, calling instead for the freedom of the troublemaker Barabbas. Pilate’s wife warns him, “Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream” (Mt 27:19).

Pilate turns from Truth. The innocent man will die, he decides, if only to keep the peace. Seems like a small price to pay.

Pilate makes one last dramatic gesture, perhaps to clear his conscience but more likely as an act of near-perfect cynicism. Calling for a bowl of water, he washes his hands in front of the crowd and declares, “I am innocent of this righteous man’s blood; see to it yourselves” (Mt 27:24). And forevermore he will be “the coward who had made the great refusal.” Because he couldn’t recognize Truth standing right in front of him.

Speaking of Truth

After four decades of driving, I received my first traffic ticket, courtesy of a Pennsylvania state trooper. Sure, I had gotten a few parking tickets, but they were back in my salad days in New York, for violating the “alternate side of the street” parking restrictions. You needed a Harvard law degree to understand those rules, so those tickets don’t count. And anyway, they weren’t moving violations.

My crime was exceeding an alleged fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit on a minuscule stretch of a road that was sixty-five miles per hour before and after. You know where this is going. When the cop wrote out the ticket, it was rationalization time.

Like every guy in the joint, I was convinced I was an innocent man, a victim of circumstances. The next day I checked the road signs, checked where the lower speed limit began and where it ended. And I was guilty as sin. No doubt singing along with an old Beatles’ tune on the radio at the time, I had breezed through the restricted zone well over the speed limit. I could claim I never saw the signs, wrapped up in the moment of “Hey Jude.” But the truth was plain to see, no matter whether I saw it or not. And that’s pretty much a fact of life for all of us.

When Frank Conroy, jazz pianist and author of the award-winning “Stop-Time,” died in 2005, there was a long profile of him by James Salter in the Sunday New York Times book review section. Conroy was a legend among American writers, head of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa for eighteen years. He died at the age of sixty-nine — cancer.

Salter told this story about Conroy:

Objectivity came up more than once and the existence of truth, or God’s truth, as Frank called it. No one could know that, the complete truth. It was too vast and complex. “All we know is what we think we know,” he said; there was really no such thing as truth or fact. He told me he had written that his mother and stepfather had gone to Cuba to buy a piano or something — actually it was for her to have an abortion. But what he wrote was what he thought was true. “For me it was true,” he said.¹¹

If Salter’s recollection is correct, in one sense old Frank Conroy was right. There’s a difference between God’s truth and what can pass for our phony ideas of truth. But Salter seems to imply Conroy’s great insight is that truth is simply what we think, no matter what the reality might be. Because the truth itself — God’s truth — can’t be known. Which is downright silly.

Conroy lost an innocent sibling, no matter what he believed, no matter what he wrote. Truth exists, and it can be known. God’s truth exists, and it can be known. For if God’s truth can’t be known or understood, then there is no truth at all. And God becomes pointless in our lives. It is that kind of thinking that is at the root of contemporary humanity’s despair.

Nothing new here, of course. Thomas Aquinas described the evident source of truth: “What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do; Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.”¹²

A Stranger in a Strange Land

There are times in life when we are hit with change, fundamental change. There are the obvious moments, of course: the principal shaking your hand for the first time because he knows he will never see you again as you accept your high school diploma; the priest pronouncing you married; the doctor saying, “It’s a girl!” But there are the less obvious moments, or at least those moments obvious to you if not to everyone around you. Yet they still mean things have changed fundamentally and won’t ever be the same. Maybe it’s the first time your knee hurts when you try to run full speed, or when The Three Stooges just don’t seem as funny as they did before.

My day of reckoning was a softball game in my early thirties. I was playing right field when a fly ball was hit my way, curving toward the foul line. I started to run for it.

There’s a feeling that anyone who has ever played the outfield knows. It’s an actual physical sensation that you are going to catch the ball, as if the brain has done the geometry of the angles and the physics of your speed and is letting you know everything is fine. It had never failed me in decades of playing. I stretched out my glove, and I knew the ball would be there. And it wasn’t. I was a half-step short. I stood there, staring at my glove as if it had done something wrong.

And then I knew. I knew it in my soul before my brain realized it. I had started to get old.

I was sitting at a high school graduation a number of years ago next to an older couple. The valedictorian was giving a speech laced with references to Forrest Gump, at the time a hugely popular movie with Tom Hanks playing a dim-witted savant. It became obvious that the older couple was without a clue. Not having been aware of the phenomenon of Forrest Gump, they found all the allusions to the movie — like life being a box of chocolates — incomprehensible. The valedictorian’s speech might as well have been in Portuguese.

My time will come, if it is not already here. I have no idea what the top songs are today, have no desire to see the movies that are consistently grabbing the coveted eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old market, and wear essentially the same style of clothes that I wore twenty years ago. Every joke I know I heard no later than my senior year of college.

The final indignity is realizing that there is an entire nostalgia industry based on cultural detritus accumulated twenty-five years after I was born. Adults are fondly recalling things from their childhood that are meaningless to me because I was grown up when they were kids.

I’m a stranger in a strange land.

There is a lesson in all this. Perhaps it is a reminder that the ephemeral is really ephemeral. After all, the older couple clueless about Forrest Gump seemed none the worse for that, and what possible difference could it make today? We invest a great deal in the passing parade, the bread and circuses of our lives. Maybe prudence also means a better understanding that there are things worth knowing about and many things not worth knowing about. Wisdom is knowing the difference.

Shopping for Truth?

As anyone could tell from my lack of sartorial splendor, I’m not exactly a clothes hound. And the usual baubles that might appeal to your normal American male — power tools, golf clubs, and fishing gear — hold no attraction for me. Tools are a mystery, golf numbers eight on my personal list of the seven deadly sins, and fishing is about as electrifying to me as a fabric store is to an eight-year-old boy.

But I go shopping because my wife enjoys going from time to time, and I like being with my wife. It makes for a nice afternoon together, and if I don’t pout and whine, she lets me get junk food at the end of the day. Every man has his price, and mine is a slice of greasy pepperoni pizza.

So we were out shopping, taking a little break to watch the world go by. I commenced with the speech.

“You know, the kids all look the same. Throw the teenage girls in a sack, and I could still describe any one of them: blonde-streaked hair, white shirt with the navel peeking out like a third eye, low-slung, hip-hugging jeans, and clunky, oversized shoes,” I harrumphed.

“And then there are the guys: backward baseball cap, oversized pro basketball shirt, and sneakers. And those baggy short pants that go to the mid-calf — or are they long pants that are too short? — with a sag in the crotch that gives them enough room to hide a watermelon between the knees.”

“Wait till we get home, old man,” she said.

Once there, she pulled out a photo album that my mother had put together, documenting my life and hard times from bare-bottomed infancy to college graduation day. The wife thumbed through, stopped at a particular, and handed it to me. “Take a look,” she said.

There I was with my old buddy Ed, in a shot taken at Cape Cod the summer of my fifteenth year. I had to admit, I was very cool. I was dressed in what we called a pea coat — a woolen navy blue jacket — with the cuffs unbuttoned, cut-off shorts that I had trimmed from old jeans, and a pair of sneakers sans socks. A shock of unruly blonde hair fell over one eye, as I looked into the camera with an insouciant grin.

“You should have known me then,” I said with a sly chuckle.

She said, “Take a look at your buddy.”

Ed was dressed in a pea coat with the cuffs unbuttoned, cutoff shorts that he had trimmed from old jeans, and a pair of sneakers sans socks. A shock of unruly red hair fell over one eye, as he looked into the camera with an insouciant grin.

So it goes.

Life is a search for a lot of things, often contradictory. We try to understand who we are as living, breathing individuals; yet we latch on to the crowd to blend in as best we can to an amorphous definition of humanity. We proclaim the freedom of our intellects but get most of our ideas secondhand from the daily bombardment of the cultural propaganda machine.

Pope John Paul II had it right. He viewed the status of contemporary man and saw the great cause of our fear and anxiety in the struggle to find out who we are and to define our lives. The twentieth century gave us a lot of bad answers to those fundamental questions. Among other things it offered race, sex, gender, nation, economic class, and consumerism as the answer. The Holy Father said that the answer is right in front of us. It is Christ. In him we find who we are and what our life means. We find Truth.

Prudence is recognizing that truth and living by it. Even when we are shopping.

And in the End

Going to a small Catholic high school, I thought I had a shot at the basketball team. But I didn’t make the freshman team. In sophomore year, I didn’t make the cut for the junior varsity. Ditto junior year.

But I kept honing my skills with intramural ball and my parish CYO league. Like a ballplayer in Triple-A who could never cut it in the majors, I did pretty well in these games, playing to no crowds in endless shirts-and-skins games.

But the dreams end at some point. I had my final failure trying out for varsity senior year — thanks, but no thanks. Our high school team fared pretty well in the Catholic league that year, but I watched the games from the bleachers. Another desultory year of intramural ball, and I was done.

Our yearbook, passed out just before graduation, included a little “biography” under each senior’s picture. I remember standing in the school hallway, getting my first read of the yearbook staff’s summation of my life. Along with a quite reasonably short listing of my academic achievements and a notice of the college I would be attending, I was described as a “successful foul shooter.” It might sound like chump change, but I appreciated it.

The reporter who did the Dave Swallow story gave him the benefit of the doubt. He described Dave as kind of a loner, but not the kind who becomes the Tapioca Killer or a stalker of late-night talk show hosts.

Dave had centered his life for many years around his mother. They would do almost everything together. A special treat was looking for small town eateries where they enjoyed their dinner together, a middle-aged single man with his elderly mother.

When his mother’s health began to go in her eighties, it was Dave who took care of her. When she died, Dave mourned deeply. At some point soon after he buried her, the Y2K obsession took hold.