bearing blog

History and poetry.

In honor of yesterday's Feast of the Holy Rosary (née Our Lady of Victory), Donald McClarey of The American Catholic reposts part of Chesterton's classic poem Lepanto and links to a book review (by Victor Davis Hansen) of a one-volume history of that October 7, 1571 battle.  

Why not celebrate a feast day by reading history, and dabbling in poetry?  Sounds appropriate to me.

As I noted in the comments on McClarey's post, I first encountered Lepanto in the form of these four lines:

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath


(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)


And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,


Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain...

which were printed as part of the foreword of a paperback edition of Don Quixote that I read at age 14.  I didn't remember who wrote them, and I didn't know who Don John was, but they stuck in my memory and years later I was delighted to discover that Chesterton was the author, and with that discovery the rest of the poem.  I am a sucker for anything written in such a steady meter, I suppose.

Blogging Daughter Zion: Part II.

An intriguing turn of phrase:

...the covenant relation of Yahweh to Israel is a covenant of marital love, which---as in Hosea's magnificent vision---moves and stirs Yahweh himself to his heart.  He has loved the young maiden Israel with a love that has proved to be indestructible, eternal.  He can be angry with the wife of his youth on account of her adultery.  He can punish her, but all this is simultaneously directed against himself and pains him, the lover, whose "bowels churn."  He cannot repudiate her without rendering judgment against himself.  It is on this, on his personal, innermost bewilderment as lover, that the covenant's eternal and irrevocable character is based.

Emphasis mine.   God cannot do something without rendering judgment against himself?  This is, then, what covenant means:  a promise so unbreakable, it acts to restrain Omnipotence Himself.  That single sentence in its context was for me a whole day's worth of pondering.

To place it more in context, after Ratzinger has used the book of Hosea as above to establish the significance of covenant, he goes on to show the part Mary plays as Israel's representative:

...the relationship between God and Israel includes not only God but Israel as woman... for this reason the covenant, which forms the very basis of the existence of Israel as a nation and the existence of each individual as an Israelite, is expressed interpersonally in the fidelity of the marriage covenant and no other way....But above all, this also means that to God, the One, is joined, not a goddess, but, as in his historical revelation, the chosen creature, Israel, the daughter Zion, the woman...

In the women of Israel, the mothers [e.g., Sarah, Rachel, Hannah] and saviors [e.g., Esther, Judith, Deborah], in their fruitful infertility is expressed most purely and most profoundly what creation is and what election is, what "Israel" is as God's people....

Emphasis mine again.  "Fruitful infertility" is an expression of creation (something from nothing) and election (saving the un-saveable).  Again, there is something to chew on for a long time.

Of course, this line of development...acquires its definitive meaning for the first time in the New Testament:  in the woman who is herself described as the true holy remnant, as the authentic daughter Zion...

He is setting up Mary as a type, as a representative or personification of Israel-as-woman, indeed of all creation as woman (or Woman), the one whose life is the perfect response. 

Incidentally, on the next page Ratzinger begins to discuss the feminine figure of Wisdom in the Old Testament, and offers this striking descriptive definition of Wisdom (Sophia) that is no doubt intended to be thematically linked to the previous: 

"Wisdom" appears ... as God's first creature in whom both the pure, primordial form of his creative will and the pure answer, which he discovers, find their expression; indeed one can say that precisely this concept of the answer is formative for the Old Testament idea of wisdom.  Creation answers, and the answer is as close to God as a playmate, as a lover.

All this is in the space of a couple of pages.

Blogging Daughter Zion. Part I.

I recently picked up the 1983 Ratzinger book Daughter Zion (Die Tochter Zion appeared in 1977), hoping it would be a quick read at only 82 pages.  I read about a quarter of it this morning over my eggs Havana and coffee, and can report that (for Ratzinger!) it's really very accessible. 

It helps that I'm familiar with the basics of Marian theology.  I haven't read nearly enough of his stuff, but my impression so far is that his great gift is in explaining very difficult concepts with clarity and precision.  Not that you don't need to think hard about what you're reading -- the concepts are, as I said, difficult -- but his language is so transparent that you don't have to waste any brainpower wondering what he meant by this or that.  (Maybe a little bit of brainpower is expended untangling sentences with many modifiers.  I suspect this of being an artifact of German.)

Anyway, Daughter Zion is subtitled Meditations on the Church's Marian Belief, but I wouldn't call it "meditations" at all.  That word calls to mind, at worst, "365 Daily Meditations" type books, and at best calls to mind lectio divina, the prayerful consideration of perhaps a very short passage in order to internalize its full depth.  This book is a theological explication that was originally a series of lectures.  However, I suppose that there are not very many Catholics -- or anybody else for that matter -- who will gladly pay $7.oo to be "lectured" by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger a.k.a. Benedict XVI.   Yes, I know you would.  So would I!   I'm assuming that Ignatius Press employs at least one reasonably foresighted person in Marketing.  The Pope Lectures You On Mary won't fly very far.

So what is Daughter Zion?

"This will not be a Mariology constructed piece by piece out of its New Testament components," says Ratzinger (p. 33).  Instead, in Daughter Zion he describes the "distinctive structures of the Marian dogmas" which, he says, "cannot be deduced from individal texts of the New Testament; instead they express the broad perspective embracing the unity of both Testaments."

When I am reading anything, I tend to mutter to myself.  For instance, wham! when I come across a phrase or sentence that hits me, so to speak.   Reading Ratzinger causes me to attract attention in restaurants if I'm not careful.  Anyway, I thought it would be fun to share some of the whams. 

Here's the first one, from page 13.

Marian piety and theology is fundamentally based upon the Old Testament's deeply anchored theology of woman, a theology indispensable to its entire structure.  Contrary to a widespread prejudice, the figure of woman occupies an irreplaceable place in the overall texture of Old Testament faith and piety.  Consequently, a one-sided reading of the Old Testament can open no door for an understanding of the Marian element in the Church of the New Testament.  Usually only one side is taken into consideration:  the prophets conducted a relentless battle for the uniqueness of God against the temptation to polytheism, and as matters then stood this was a battle against the goddess of heaven, a battle against the fertility religion, which imagined God to be man and woman.  In practice this was a resolute battle against the cultic representation of the divine woman in temple prostitution, a battle against a cult which celebrated fertility by imitating it in ritual fornication.

(This part I knew already:  the religion in the background, against which the Old Testament prophets were fighting to keep Israel's faith distinct.)

From this point of view, idolatry is usually referred to in the literature of the Old Testament as "fornication."  The rejection of these representations apparently led to the result that Israel's cult is primarily an affair of men, since the women certainly stay in the outer court of the temple.

That I didn't consider.  Interesting!  Ratzinger goes on to explain that one error that has arisen from this is the conclusion that "women had no role at all in the faith of the Old Testament... that there is and can be no theology of woman because the Old Testament's chief concern is to exclude woman from theo-logy, from the language of God.  This would then mean that Mariology de facto could only be seen as the infiltration of a non-biblical model."

If you or someone you know tends to think of Mariology as non-biblical, could it be because of this error?