Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha is depicted here in the mosaics at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, along with Saints Isaac Jogues and René Goupil. Saint Catherine, known as the Lily of the Mohawks, was canonized on Sunday by Pope Benedict, who speaks about here:



Click here for the text of his homily.

“The Lost Tools of Learning”

“HAVE YOU EVER, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning

So we read in the late Miss Sayers' essay on classical education, first given in 1947, a passage that seems to be rather relevant during this political season.

I found the link to this essay on the website of Our Lady of Lourdes School, in Denver, Colorado, which lately has found much success in its adoption of classical methods of education, namely, the trivium, which emphasizes the foundation of all learning. From the school's website:

One of the most important goals of education is to teach students how to learn. This goal can become lost in a mirage of textbooks that oversimplify and remove the traditional classical method of mental discipline to students. The classical method of education not only provides academic rigor, it also instructs and prepares the students to become independent thinkers based on their knowledge of grammar, logic and rhetoric. In short, classical education prepares and equips students to be leaders in the community with their ability to communicate logically with their peers and colleagues.

The roots of the classical tradition of learning are lost to history, but they crystallized in ancient Athens, in the mystical yet mathematical school of Pythagoras, and in the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle, following the master Socrates. While we don't know how much of this knowledge was perceived by these Greeks alone, we do know that they also passed down wisdom from Egypt and the East. These methods became the standard of good education in the Roman Empire, as we find in the books of the architect Vitruvius, and were retained through the middle ages and beyond, rendering it the ultimate “multicultural” curriculum, finding favor with Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagans over thousands of years.

While modern pedagogy has emphasized the learning of useful facts or political propaganda (or nowadays, passing standardized tests), the classical model instead narrowly encourages a high level of language skills, logical thinking, and the ability to communicate persuasively. This is the foundation for a liberal education, that is, an education proper to a person who is free and not a slave. It is assumed that children who have these educational tools will freely learn throughout their lifetimes, and will have little need to be specifically taught various subjects, for they will eagerly learn these things on their own.

This is a two-edged sword: for the Catholic schools, a classically educated child can either end up to be an ardent defender of the Faith or a formidable arch-heretic, for it produces children who are either hot or cold, but not lukewarm. I think for this reason, our public schools (which by the way, have compulsory attendance) tend to produce children who are lukewarm, while remaining curiously inarticulate about the malaise of their lives, leading to either self-destructive pleasure-seeking or to violence. Therefore it is not surprising that the education which is forced upon children is not a liberal education, but rather is the education of a slave.

Fall Colors

At my parents' house.



Trees above sandstone mines in Pacific, Missouri.

Night Photos at the Shaw Nature Reserve

AT THE LAST FULL MOON, I was invited to go on a special night hike at the Shaw Nature Reserve in Gray Summit, Missouri, which is located off of Interstate 44, west of Saint Louis. I took my camera to show some of the sights.



Cypress trees grow next to a pond.

Formerly called The Arboretum, the initial acreage of Shaw Nature Reserve was purchased by the Missouri Botanical Garden during the 1920s. Air pollution in Saint Louis, due to the burning of soft coal for heating, caused so much airborne ash as to threaten the plants at the garden, most especially its orchid collection. The plan was to relocate the botanical garden to the countryside: however, when the city switched to cleaner-burning anthracite coal, the move was abandoned.



Part of the Reserve is actively managed to be a large, pleasant garden, as seen here, very much in the English tradition. This tradition makes an interesting distinction: a garden is designed to exclude animals (especially herbivores who might eat vegetables and flowers), while a park is designed to attract animals, especially deer and other game animals. This front area includes a high fence to exclude deer: a large wildflower garden, not seen in these photos, is nearby. Deer roam freely in the back area of the Reserve.



A stand of trees reflected in Pinetum Lake against the late afternoon sky.

The English landscaping tradition was brought to the United States by colonists. The full intellectual flowering of this tradition occurred during the Victorian period, when the Missouri Botanical Garden was established. During this time, garden and park design was influenced by long experience and by innumerable authorities from antiquity, the middle ages, and later periods, as well as taking into consideration knowledge gained from other cultures.

See the article Photos of Tower Grove Park, which includes links to primary sources used by garden and park designers of the late 19^th century.



A glorious sunset, and the hike was soon to begin, led by an expert guide.

But the Victorian period was the twilight of the living landscape tradition. The idea that a landscape ought to be both useful and beautiful was in decline; in England, the Enclosure Acts and subsequent urbanization meant that the gardening tradition could only be practiced by a fortunate few instead of by the many. The advent of Modernism caused a divorce between agriculture and gardening. Farms became enormous in size and boring to look at due to monoculture, forests were managed to merely optimize the production of wood, with an emphasis on fire suppression, and odd modern theories of aesthetics led to gardens and parks that were often unpleasant and had little if any vegetation.



While the front part of the Reserve is managed to resemble a traditional English-style garden or park, the other parts are managed so as to restore the forest and prairies as they existed at the time of the initial European settlement of this area. Here is a large restored prairie area, and two primitive prairie-style homes are found here, including this teepee, and a nearby sod house — although our guide told us that these homes were not used in this part of the country, but rather two or three hundred miles to the west of here, in the Great Plains.

The earliest explorers of North America found that it resembled a large park in the English or European tradition. The explorers here found wide grasslands, appearing to be vast gardens, with vistas of wildflowers like an ocean of color, surrounded by forests of tall, ancient trees, with open ground below allowing for long views in all directions. Like a traditional European park, game was plentiful, and like a good garden, useful, edible, and beautiful plants were found everywhere.

But this was forgotten, and then dense, impenetrable forests soon grew throughout much of the territory of the United States. During this time of forestation, when Romanticism was the intellectual fad, there developed the misguided theory that the American Indians were noble savages, living lightly off the land, being “transparent in the landscape.” This ought to be contrasted with the earlier Enlightenment view of the Indians as being sub-human, only useful, if at all, as slaves. This false theory was revived after Darwinism, much to the detriment of those peoples subsequently, and the equally false noble savage theory regained prominence later, coinciding with the Environmentalist movement.



Dwelling illumined only by the full moon, with stars in the background sky. The image is a bit blurry because I didn't have a tripod with me for stability.

The word teepee (or tipi or tepee) comes from the Lakota word thipi, which derives from a plural form of the verb ‘to dewll.’ These were developed after European colonization, when the Indians obtained horses and found that they had to move more frequently to survive.

As it turns out, the Indians did not tred lightly on the land, but instead altered it greatly, often by using fire. There is no “natural landscape” of North America, especially since what came before was destroyed by the Ice Age; humanity came with the retreating glaciers and gardened the whole of the land. The natives used fire extensively to encourage game animals, promote growth of desirable vegetation, and for other purposes, producing a landscape that was simultaneously beautiful and fecund, far more than a land without man. This fact only became apparent by the 1970s; fire subsequently was recognized to be an essential ingredient of landscaping, and is used frequently at the Reserve.

We find the same thing in Europe where the tradition holds sway: fertile, beautiful landscapes that have an organic unity despite being heavily altered by man over the millennia, as can be seen in some remarkable photographs taken in Moravia and Tuscany here.

Indian culture, like all cultures, was problematic due to the effects of original sin. But the Indians were perhaps closer to orthodoxy than are modern men, the Indians retaining a memory of the order of the cosmos, natural law, and how things ought to be, all things which modernity rejects. The traditional gardening practices of the Indians show a largely orthodox understanding: man's dominion over nature, as found in Genesis, does not equate to either a libertarian or socialistic totalitarian dominance over nature, nor does it show a gnostic-like hatred of nature, neither a world divided between man and nature with a high wall of separation between them. Rather, man is recognized as being at the summit of nature while sharing a close kinship with it; this nature is a gift to man deserving of thanksgiving, and man owes obedience to that which is above. Not surprisingly, the Indians became exemplary Catholics, and Catholic priests accompanied their sorrowful flocks to the reservations. Sadly, since then, both the state and commerce have aggressively pursued their modernization.



This not an impressionistic painting of the prairie, but rather a greatly underexposed photograph, with lots of Photoshop used to brighten it, reduce digital noise, and otherwise improve it. My techniques can be found here.

Since this was a long hike, and my tripod is quite heavy, I didn't carry it with me. As dusk ended, I attempted to take photos by hand, even though the camera's exposure meter said it was inadvisable. Now, I don't have one of those newer cameras which have great light-amplifying power, so I had to push the camera to the limits of its performance, and clean up the mess afterwards on the computer. I find that these photos resemble paintings in some ways. I find great inspiration in the art of painting: sometimes reality is unrealistic, and so the more-abstracted and freer art of painting can give a better impression than a photograph. Were I to have used a tripod, this scene would have been nearly indistinguishable from broad daylight; rather, this image maybe gives a better representation of the prairie road under the moonlight.



This is the sod-house, located on the prairie. This is just about at the limit of what you can do with a camera and still call it photography. During the time I was making this image, I was reading about the Japanese notan principle of design, which uses only a few levels of tones to produce a flat-looking image which emphasizes edges.



I found this lone tree interesting. Were it not for the other hikers disappearing off into the distance, leaving us behind, I would have stayed longer with this subject.

The emphasis of photography these days tends to be highly modernistic, desiring high technical image quality and realistic rendering. But it was not always so: an earlier photographic movement, called Pictorialism, instead emphasized the human impression of a scene as well as the expression of beauty, making photos more works of manual art, with a spiritual dimension, rather than mere products of technology. Perhaps these low-quality images can be seen in this light.

Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary / Our Lady of Victories

OCTOBER 7^th is the feast day of the Blessed Virgin and the Rosary prayer in honor of her. That this day was at one time called Our Lady of Victories is telling: the Rosary is recognized to be a weapon in spiritual warfare.

The word ‘Rosary’ comes from the middle English word for a rose garden, that in turn comes from the Latin word rosarium, meaning the same thing. Gardens have a typological or analogical meaning: while some have said that the Rosary is like a private chapel of the soul, it is perhaps better seen as a pleasant private garden, where the soul can retreat for a while and achieve a certain rest from the worries of the world. Let us recall that while roses are beautiful and fragrant, they also have thorns which can pierce the flesh. Beauty and suffering go together in this world, as the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary remind us. However all of the mysteries have both a joyful and a sorrowful component to them.

As a devotion, the Rosary signifies much of Latin Catholicism, especially of the more traditional sort:

• It is a physical sacramental; an actual chain of beads is blessed by a cleric and is used in the prayer.
• The prayer addresses many persons: God the Father and God the Son individually, the Trinity, and Mary, the Mother of God.
• It has an essential feminine aspect to it, like the churches of old which were adorned like a bride for her wedding.While we are not surprised by a young mother praying the Rosary while suckling her infant, we can be quite edified by a soldier on a battlefield doing the same.
• It has developed over a very long time, and many regional and linguistic variations can be found.
• It is an exceedingly humble prayer, especially since it is simple and mainly addressed to Mary. The proud reject the Rosary.
• The Rosary incorporates number symbolism in its counting and repetition of the prayers, including the number 3, a symbol of the Trinity and the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love; the number 5, a symbol of the Virgin Mary, and the number 10, a symbol of the human body with its ten fingers and toes. Many other symbolic interconnections among the mysteries and number can be elaborated.
• It incorporates the human imagination, especially when meditating on the various mysteries. The rhythm of the Rosary helps encourage a meditative state.
• It can be prayed individually, but just as easily in community.
• The prayers in both Latin and the vernacular are familiar, even in our present day.

If ever you see the beads in a bad Hollywood film, know that soon some evil-but-pious Catholic is about to strangle someone with them. But simple experience will show that most Rosary chains are easily breakable. The Rosary is a weapon, but of the spiritual and not material kind.

Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Supremi Apostolatus Officio, greatly recommends the Rosary, especially in its use against the evils of heresy and aggression:

There is none among you, venerable brethren, who will not remember how great trouble and grief God's Holy Church suffered from the Albigensian heretics, who sprung from the sect of the later Manicheans, and who filled the South of France and other portions of the Latin world with their pernicious errors, and carrying everywhere the terror of their arms, strove far and wide to rule by massacre and ruin. Our merciful God, as you know, raised up against these most direful enemies a most holy man, the illustrious parent and founder of the Dominican Order. Great in the integrity of his doctrine, in his example of virtue, and by his apostolic labours, he proceeded undauntedly to attack the enemies of the Catholic Church, not by force of arms; but trusting wholly to that devotion which he was the first to institute under the name of the Holy Rosary, which was disseminated through the length and breadth of the earth by him and his pupils. Guided, in fact, by divine inspiration and grace, he foresaw that this devotion, like a most powerful warlike weapon, would be the means of putting the enemy to flight, and of confounding their audacity and mad impiety. Such was indeed its result. Thanks to this new method of prayer-when adopted and properly carried out as instituted by the Holy Father St. Dominic-piety, faith, and union began to return, and the projects and devices of the heretics to fall to pieces. Many wanderers also returned to the way of salvation, and the wrath of the impious was restrained by the arms of those Catholics who had determined to repel their violence.

The efficacy and power of this devotion was also wondrously exhibited in the sixteenth century, when the vast forces of the Turks threatened to impose on nearly the whole of Europe the yoke of superstition and barbarism. At that time the Supreme Pontiff, St. Pius V., after rousing the sentiment of a common defence among all the Christian princes, strove, above all, with the greatest zeal, to obtain for Christendom the favour of the most powerful Mother of God. So noble an example offered to heaven and earth in those times rallied around him all the minds and hearts of the age. And thus Christ's faithful warriors, prepared to sacrifice their life and blood for the salvation of their faith and their country, proceeded undauntedly to meet their foe near the Gulf of Corinth, while those who were unable to take part formed a pious band of supplicants, who called on Mary, and unitedly saluted her again and again in the words of the Rosary, imploring her to grant the victory to their companions engaged in battle. Our Sovereign Lady did grant her aid; for in the naval battle by the Echinades Islands, the Christian fleet gained a magnificent victory, with no great loss to itself, in which the enemy were routed with great slaughter. And it was to preserve the memory of this great boon thus granted, that the same Most Holy Pontiff desired that a feast in honour of Our Lady of Victories should celebrate the anniversary of so memorable a struggle, the feast which Gregory XIII. dedicated under the title of “The Holy Rosary.” Similarly, important successes were in the last century gained over the Turks at Temeswar, in Pannonia, and at Corfu; and in both cases these engagements coincided with feasts of the Blessed Virgin and with the conclusion of public devotions of the Rosary. And this led our predecessor, Clement XL, in his gratitude, to decree that the Blessed Mother of God should every year be especially honoured in her Rosary by the whole Church.

It is significant that the Saint Dominic's Order of Preachers, known for their philosophy, are also known for the humble Rosary — but isn't that fitting? If you want to master worldly learning, you ought to be humble in matters spiritual, otherwise pride will destroy you.

We find further recommendation in the encyclical Rosarium Virginis Mariæ by Pope John Paul II:

A number of historical circumstances also make a revival of the Rosary quite timely. First of all, the need to implore from God the gift of peace. The Rosary has many times been proposed by my predecessors and myself as a prayer for peace. At the start of a millennium which began with the terrifying attacks of 11 September 2001, a millennium which witnesses every day innumerous parts of the world fresh scenes of bloodshed and violence, to rediscover the Rosary means to immerse oneself in contemplation of the mystery of Christ who “is our peace”, since he made “the two of us one, and broke down the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph 2:14). Consequently, one cannot recite the Rosary without feeling caught up in a clear commitment to advancing peace, especially in the land of Jesus, still so sorely afflicted and so close to the heart of every Christian.

A similar need for commitment and prayer arises in relation to another critical contemporary issue: the family, the primary cell of society, increasingly menaced by forces of disintegration on both the ideological and practical planes, so as to make us fear for the future of this fundamental and indispensable institution and, with it, for the future of society as a whole. The revival of the Rosary in Christian families, within the context of a broader pastoral ministry to the family, will be an effective aid to countering the devastating effects of this crisis typical of our age.

Amen.