Harry Veryser’s It Didn’t Have to Be This Way: Why Boom and Bust is Unnecessary and How the Austrian School of Economics Breaks the Cycle (Culture of Enterprise)

I recently posted  an article about Fr Robert Sirico’s book in which he presented a moral case for the free economy, here. This provoked as strong a reaction as any I have posted. Many of the criticisms, it seemed to me, were aimed at views that we were assumed to hold (presumably because they imagine that everyone who was in favour of the free economy would think these things) even though it was not the case. For example, some suggested that Fr Sirico’s book and my article were undermined by the fact that John Paul II and others have argued for a just wage. Nowhere did I, and to the best of my recollection nowhere in his book, neither did Fr Sirico say anything to undermine the principle of justice in general or  just wages in particular. In fact the opposite is true, right through the book it is apparent that the basic needs of the human person especially the poor are right at the forefront of Fr Sirico’s concerns. Speaking for myself, I do not want to see unjust wages at all. Some seemed to suggest that there is an inherent contradiction between a just wage and the free economy and whether we knew it or not, acceptance of the free economy was a rejection of a just wage.…

Here are some neo-Coptic icons  at the Coptic Cathedral of St George at Stevenage in England.

I discovered this by trying to get hold of pictures of art by an English-Egyptian icon painter called Fadi Mikhail. He trained at the Slade art school in London and then did an apprenticeship with an icon painter in California, called Isaac Fanous. His website is here. I would have included more pictures of his work, but his website doesn’t allow me to copy and save the images. Here’s a tip for artists out there. You may worry about people making use of images by barring the copying, but you also stop people who are very happy to promote your work from doing so effectively! i think that in the end the artist loses more than he gains by doing this. So in the end I took some examples from the cathedral website. But Fadi, if you’re reading, I like your work and would have happily featured more if I could have done!

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It may seem an impertinence to say so, but Pope Leo the Great seems to think so

Catholics are used to the idea that Our Lady is higher than the angels, but is it true for the rest of us? Here is what Pope Leo the Great has to say on the matter. It was surprising to me.

‘The blessed apostles together with all the others had been intimidated by the catastrophe of the cross, and their faith in the resurrection had been uncertain; but now they were so strengthened by the evident truth that when their Lord ascended into heaven, far from feeling any sadness, they were filled with great joy. Indeed that blessed company had a great and inexpressible cause for joy when it saw man’s nature rising above the dignity of the whole heavenly creation, above the ranks of angels, above the exalted status of archangels. Nor would there be any limit to its upward course until humanity was admitted to a seat at the right hand of the eternal Father, to be enthroned at last in the glory of him to whose nature it was wedded in the person of the Son.’ [Excerpt from a sermon by Pope Saint Leo the Great (Sermo 1 de Ascensione, 2-4: PL 54, 305-396) taken from the Office of Readings for Wednesday of the Sixth week of Easter]

If I am understanding this correctly then he is say we can be by grace  at our final end in heaven be raised up as high as it possible to be, seated next to the Son, participating in mystery of the Trinity.…

If every person is beautiful by virtue of being human, why do some people look ugly to me? (And presumably I look ugly to some people too!)

We know objectively that man is the most beautiful of God’s creatures. Every person is beautiful by virtue of being human. Yet, we don’t always see this. We can look around us and we see people whom we think are ugly, (although we might hesitate to tell anyone so). Just as with the recognition of all beauty, the lack here is in the one who looks, who cannot see all people around him as they really are, because he lacks love.

Some however reconcile this by looking for two beauties within each person, one physical and the other spiritual. Those who do so would say that if the physical beauty is lacking it is because there is a spiritual beauty that is invisible and it is this that we miss. I feel that this explanation creates a dualism – a separation of body and soul – that is wrong. As I see it, there is no inner beauty that is in contradiction with the outer ugliness; neither is there the converse an outer beauty that masks the inner ugliness. This duality is a fiction. That is not to say that there very often does appear to be such a disparity as in Oscar Wilde’s character Dorian Grey. Rather, that if this is the appearance, we know that the lack is our ability to see or our judgment of the sanctity of the person.…

I recently posted an article about Russian statuettes of saints at the Museum of Russian Icons. I discussed how surprised I was to see statues in Russia. Generally the iconographic tradition doesn’t allow for anything more than relief sculpture. In response to this a reader sent me information about a collection of much larger and more three-dimensional statues that is in the city of Perm in the Urals. I was fascinated by these and posted. They seem to date from 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and have the look of Western gothic imagery. The link through to the museum is here. Once again I can’t really explain these and suspect that Russian iconographers of the strict observance would feel that these are not genuinely worthy of veneration.

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 An education in truths that cannot be expressed in words 

In his book, the Love of Learning and the Desire for God, Jean Leclerq describes various tensions playing out in education in the medieval period.

One arises from the love of beautiful literature, poetic or prosaic, that is not explicitly sacred. The danger is that at some point the beauty of these works is so compelling that it hampers the spiritual development of the individual, because ‘Virgil might outshine Holy Scripture in the monk’s esteem because of the perfection of his style’[1]. A properly ordered asceticism in this area consisted in a harmonization of sources and sometimes the more humbly written simple prose divinely inspired Scripture is necessary for us so that we focus on the beauty of what it directs us to, he says.

The second tension that Leclercq describes relates to the study of logic, or sometimes called dialectic, which is another of the first three liberal arts that together comprise the trivium. As such it requires an understanding the technical language of logic. It is necessary in order to study philosophy and theology. The difference arose between two different sorts of school, the monastic and the town scholastic schools. The word scholastic is derived from the Latin word meaning ‘school’ and is applied to distinguish it from the monastic setting.

One the one hand is the more traditional monastic school that is more literary, drawing on Biblical language and traditional literary forms.…

A case for making an education in beauty with the liturgy at its heart part of everybody’s education I was intrigued by the following passage written by St Augustine in which he talks of communication of truth beyond words. What he is describing is how the beauty of expression in a full integration of form and content adds something that words alone cannot say. As an expression rooted in love it is the fullest form of truth. He is talking specifically about music, but what he says applies just as much, it occurs to me, to sacred art and architecture. Their beauty speaks to us of something that words cannot say. The painting of a saint or of the key truths of a feast speaks to us through the harmonious relationships between its parts, by gesture and expression of figures portrayed, for example.

It occurs to me that this communication goes both ways. So not only is beautiful liturgy the fullest way of communicating in love our praise for God, when that beauty is integrated with it in liturgical music and art it is teaching us as we pray, at the deepest level, the truths that are contained within.

This is something that educators should note, I suggest. If what Augustine says it true, then the wisdom that is the goal of education  cannot be offered by book study alone but only by placing it in the context of a liturgical life for there is much to learn that is ‘beyond words’.…

I have recently created an icon corner in my home as a focus for our family prayer. I try to sing the Liturgy of the Hours every day. We didn’t have a lot of room and the place I live in is rented and I am not allowed to bang nails into the wall – which means I can’t hang many or heavy pictures. So I had to keep it simple.

The bare bones of an icon corner is a cross with the suffering Christ at the centre, a picture of Our Lady on the left and a face of Christ on the right. I have added to it St Isaias and St John the Baptist. I have tried to arrange them so that each is through the line of vision pointing to Our Lady who in turn is presenting to us  her Son. John as the closest in time and the greatest man born of woman apart from Our Lord is placed closest

I have put a little print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus there too. At the end of every Hour that I pray as a personal devotion I always invoke the Sacred Heart and ask for mercy. On the horizontal surface I have a St Benedict medal and a little container with some relics that were given to me when I was confirmed at Farm St Church in London.

I have tried to make this the most brightly coloured part of the room so that it is the main visual focus when you walk in.…

The cursing psalms are not in the modern divine office  - how does this omission affect the psychology of  those in the Church? I was recently given a copy of the St Dunstan’s Psalter. It contains a 16th century arrangement of the psalms set to modal tones set to an English text. The tones are taken directly from the traditional English pre-reformation liturgy.

This has been a great resource for me. As a result I now have a source of over one hundred psalm tones that are traditionally English. Some are unique to the traditional English Church and have  such as ‘Gisburn’ and ‘Gloucester.’ The allocation of psalm tones – which mode and which particular tone is appropriate for a particular psalm – is in accordance with the traditional English form as well. There is an appendix that lists all 150 psalms along with its own tone. They are called Sarum tones after the ancient English Sarum liturgy. Sarum is the old name for the town of Salisbury. The introduction says that the allocation of the tones is in accordance with the ancient and illustrious churches of Salisbury and York.

As a consequence I have now adapted each of these tones to the Clayton Psalm Tone method of pointing. This means that you can point any English text of the psalms that you have and then sing these tones to it. If you learn to sing just one tone, you will be able to point (ie mark emphasised syllables) any of the 150 psalms and apply the tone to it.…

What should I read to understand this? In my last posting I suggested that I think that social and economic conditions need not be such an influential factor on the culture as some suggest. My sense is that the form of the liturgy and the liturgical forms being produced now that are the driving force for a wider culture of beauty…or of ugliness.

I am not a trained economist and so have tried to do some reading recently to try to understand more how this might work. It is important to try to understand this. If we want to create a culture of beauty for the New Evangelisation then we need to understand what influences culture and how in order to try to redress the balance today. furthermore, anyone who wishes the production of beautiful art to be a vibrant force in the modern world must, I suggest, try to understand how this can be funded. Should it be left to free market forces? Or should we seek to subsidize favoured artists for the good of society? I thought I would pass on where my reading has taken me.

It seemed to me that there are two things that I need to have clear in my mind in trying to understand this field. The first is what is the just society that we are seeking to move towards. There are many aspects of what this might be, but in terms of social conditions the encyclicals of the Church of the last 120 years seem most applicable.…