There has never been but one true Passover, which the Savior celebrated when he hung upon the cross.

-- Socrates Scholasticus, on Origen

For not one member, but the whole entire body throughout was made an object of insolence; the head through the crown, and the reed, and the buffeting; the face, being spit upon; the cheeks, being smitten with the palms of the hands; the whole body by the stripes, by being wrapped in the robe, and by the pretended worship; the hand by the reed, which they gave him to hold instead of a sceptre; the mouth again by the offering of the vinegar.  What could be more grievous than these things?  What more insulting? ...

Considering then all these things, control yourself.  For what do you suffer like what your Lord suffered?  Were you publicly insulted?  But not like these things.  Are you mocked?  Yet not your whole body, not being thus scourged, and stripped.  And even if you were buffeted, yet not like this.

-- Chrysostom, Homily 87 on Matthew

Some people tell me that my book about the meaning of sex should have discussed disordered sex.  I understand their view.  What the old baptismal vows called “the glamour of evil” shimmers all around us, taking the word in its original sense of a deception or enchantment.

But I don’t agree.  The only way to get a bad thing is to take a good thing and ruin it.  It follows that one understands the bad from what is good, not the good from what is bad.  Once sexuality is understood, the problem with disordered sex becomes obvious, and the need to discuss diminishes.  If one does so anyway, one may lose everything, because the jarring encounter with ugliness overshadows everything else.

In this as in many things, there is a mean.  There is a right time to discuss the misery and the shame of the bad.  But not always.  Not while discussing the joy and the glory of the good.

Question:

Everyone makes mistakes and reconsiders.  You’ve mentioned your own former errors and reconsiderations from time to time.  What does a scholar – any scholar -- do about that sort of thing?  Have you ever considered going over your past work and composing a book of second thoughts, like St. Augustine in his Retractationes or Corrections?

Reply:

The great Western saint wrote a book of second thoughts because his vast outpouring of thought had been important to so many people.  A pipsqueak like me might want to write such a book – after all, even if only the occasional haunter of libraries comes across my mistakes, I don’t want to make him stumble.  But if I did write one, no one would read it.

Perhaps some day a scholar like me will be able to send abroad something like T-cells and macrophages, those useful critters in the immune system that seek out, engulf, and digest cells that aren’t behaving.  A reader opens one of my early books to the beginning of Chapter 3.  The paper begins to shrivel, and a warning voice intones, “Sir or madame.  Please move your hands away from the page.  The author has reconsidered and revised.”  The shriveled page crumbles into dust, and a new one grows into its place, expressing what I would have said then if only I had known what I know now.

I can’t do that, and it probably wouldn’t be a good idea anyway.  What I can do is what you’ve noticed:  When I reconsider an argument I have published previously, I can say so.  When I talk about a previous book, I can mention its faults.  When I discover something faulty in this blog, I can put it in order right away and advise readers of the change.

For my penance, I try to do better, so that perhaps, if all goes well, I will leave behind some little thing worth knowing.

Since this is the day of rest, here is something I love from G.K. Chesterton:

“[W]hen we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough.  A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon.  But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.  Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales -- because they find them romantic.  In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him.  This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement.  These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green.  They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. ...

“All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten.  All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.”