Missal of Bishop Antonio Scarampi (1567)
1. Essays et al: “Handmade Beauty” by Joshua Sturgill
This is a wonderful essay in defense of cursive, or on its demise and its relationship to beauty. Here’s a snippet from the middle of the essay:
The act of handwriting, its grounding in Beauty, is irreplaceable. Handwriting involves the collaboration of the individual creative mind with the whole of an ancient written language. It can become a craft and a relationship between a writer and reader. You might ask how this is different from sending an email—or reading a blog post. Besides the obvious—that handwriting leaves a mark on the physical world—I believe it also leaves a mark within the persons involved in the creation and communication of the writing.
When the Internet is down, I may still type on my computer. When the electricity is off, I may still write with pen and paper. If I have no paper, likely I still have graphite or ink. With none of these, I have nothing but my mind, my hand and perhaps a stretch of sand—or a piece of charcoal, or a stone and chisel.
What I am thinking of here is the possible series of interventions between myself and the result of my labor. The more interventions, the less the labor is mine and the more it belongs to the intervening media. This, I believe, is why television shows and commercials tend to be so much alike. Why canned food tastes canned. Why Google can give you a list of stock suggestions for email replies.
Here’s more, including a couple of sentences worthy of quotation in one of our forthcoming “Eighth Day Quotables” on Facebook (see preview at end of email):
To write a letter or a diary entry is to create a work of intimate art. An email, however, is grimly pragmatic. And a text message borders on the barbaric. I often think that our socially embedded image of the cave man grunting at his fellows has nothing to do with our ancestors and everything to do with our use of technology. We are becoming primitives who live in little hand-held caves and throw pictographs (emoticons) at each other with decreasing communicative effect.
Others are saying similar things right now. There are excellent books on the subjects of internet-brain, social-media-syndrome, teenage-cell-use. But I think the simplest, best sign of decay is the loss of the art of handwriting. Loss of literacy will follow. Then critical thinking. All of this is a flight from Beauty.
2. Books & Culture: “Beauty: A Very Short Introduction” by Roger Scruton
As some of you may know, I received the gift of being able to attend Scrutopia (Roger Scruton’s annual summer school) shortly before his death. Prior to that inimitable experience, I was only barely familiar with Scruton (solely through selling his books while working at Eighth Day Books). Had not an
Eighth Day Member
sent me on that pilgrimage, I don’t know when I would have finally realized how important Scruton is. I have dipped in and out of his books ever since and will eventually read them all cover to cover (and will provide book reviews). While in England I read his book
Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays
(
here’s a link to an issue of my Director’s Desk about arriving in England and reading that book).
3. Bible and Fathers: “Unrivaled Beauty as Source of All Beauty” by St. Gregory of Nyssa
St. Gregory of Nyssa (one of the three Cappadocian Fathers; brother of St. Basil the Great; died A.D. 394) reflects on the theme of beauty in his treatise On Virginity
(chapter 11). Here’s St. Gregory, with a reference to a ladder which happens to be the name of our headquarters (“The Ladder at Eighth Day Institute”):
As regards the inquiry into the nature of beauty, we see, again, that the man of half-grown intelligence, when he observes an object which is bathed in the glow of a seeming beauty, thinks that that object is in its essence beautiful, no matter what it is that so prepossesses him with the pleasure of the eye. He will not go deeper into the subject. But the other, whose mind’s eye is clear, and who can inspect such appearances, will neglect those elements which are the material only upon which the Form of Beauty works; to him they will be but the ladder by which he climbs to the prospect of that Intellectual Beauty, in accordance with their share in which all other beauties get their existence and their name.
More, this time on the path toward Beauty:
This, then, is the path to lead us to the discovery of the Beautiful. All other objects that attract men’s love, be they never so fashionable, be they prized never so much and embraced never so eagerly, must be left below us, as too low, too fleeting, to employ the powers of loving which we possess; not indeed that those powers are to be locked up within us unused and motionless; but only that they must first be cleansed from all lower longings; then we must lift them to that height to which sense can never reach. Admiration even of the beauty of the heavens, and of the dazzling sunbeams, and, indeed, of any fair phenomenon, will then cease. The beauty noticed there will be but as the hand to lead us to the love of the supernal Beauty whose glory the heavens and the firmament declare, and whose secret the whole creation sings.
And finally, a bit more on reliable guides to the “only absolute, and primal, and unrivalled Beauty and Goodness”:
there are those who, as might have been expected, wish to discover, if possible, a process by which we may be actually guided to it. Well, the Divine books are full of such instruction for our guidance; and besides that many of the Saints cast the refulgence of their own lives, like lamps, upon the path for those who are walking with God. But each may gather in abundance for himself suggestions towards this end out of either Covenant in the inspired writings; the Prophets and the Law are full of them; and also the Gospel and the Traditions of the Apostles. What we ourselves have conjectured in following out the thoughts of those inspired utterances is this.
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