Romantic courtesy is a liturgy of service which springs from the veneration of the Lady.   Its goal is simply the lady’s felicity,  and her looks and gestures are signs of acceptable service.   All veneration is a selfless art, requiring patience, constancy, and discipline — in short, virtue.    Eros may or may not attend.

The high art of courtesy requires, above all, a gentle heart, but this “aristocracy of the gentle heart” is not passivity. Rather, it is an honoring of the fair sweetheart by carefulness with subtleties — carefulness and rapt attention.  The tone is attention, rather than the languor of the bower.

The lady owes similar carefulness to her lord, and will seek his felicity.  However, our written records of chivalry omit her devotion and may allow a one sided view to be taken for an entire relationship.

There is also a kind of courtesy, called by Maurice Valency “heroic”, which resembles in some language and externals the romantic kind, but is quite different.   This “courtesy” is actually courtship,  a mutual negotiation of the terms of erotic pleasure,  and so has gratification as its object.  It is hardly selfless.   Disciplined devotion may be required to overcome the coquetry of the lady,  but we all know how easily this devotion is killed by both success and failure.

We are snobs by nature. If salvation had ever depended on us, we would never have deigned to redeem the world by entering its sordid mangers.

Even when we come for a moment under the spell of the fairy-tale peasant who becomes king, the slave who delivers the city, the cinder girl who marries the prince — after all that, when left to ourselves, we regress to our native snobbery.    Like all snobs, we look down at the office of the helpers.

We think of “helping” as the inferior role, or as a downward movement.  And we feel any downward movement as a theft of our rightful dignity.

Here is the root flawed in the fallen vision:  to  think that helping someone do a thing is subordinated to the doing of the thing.  But this is not God’s view.  He was the King, yet He helped us, and in helping was glorified.  He sees helping as a role distinct unto itself; so distinct, in fact, it requires the most exquisite and refined skill set of all. His view is the revolutionary one, while ours is wholly conventional.

This is really something to stop and think about, because it is in such simple language it is easy to miss  just how  completely it upends the universe.  So, stop right here: the helper of the gardener is not less than the gardener. The helper does not derive meaning from the helped, or from the work of the helped; the act of helping has its intrinsic and underived glory. Underived.

When Eve was appointed helper of Adam, she became something that Adam was not.  Her charism is a unique and noble charism,  and there is nothing over top of it in some hierarchy.

Indeed, the distinction of the helping office derives from the Godhead, who has named one of His Persons the Helper.

The unbaptized mind mocks this, and sees here a conspiracy to trick it with fancy words into slavery. It is suspicious of the father himself. I think the lack of a father’s love makes it hard to trust enough to find dignity in helping. The inability to trust is the unhappiness of the world.

The unbaptized mind scoffs, but the true loss of dignity is in the gasping, desperate clawing to move up. Because it is such an insult to our dignity, Jesus constantly condemns the upward ambition. Jesus constantly pictures His kingdom as a mirror image of the world’s.

The feminist objection to traditionalist gender conceptions is rooted in this snobbery. There is an embarrassment about not being the primary.  This is an inability to trust, a scar from a primordial insult.

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This is just my observation from life… the more responsible and caring a woman’s husband is, the more likely she will read the NT submission passages literally. The more passive or mean or noncommunicative her husband is, the less she will be able to comfortably imagine that God really made gender as a functional heirarchy. And “imagine” is indeed the right verb. Our vision of marriage comes from our experience of our parents’ marriage and of our marriage. Vision first, before we even approach the texts. So if Paul’s comments jar us, we either respond as if he represents God’s view and therefore that his vision is right, no matter what ours is, or we look for some exegetical trick to make his vision like ours.

Universality is a handy exegetical diluter. It works like this:  If you can find a passage that connects a word to everyone, you can use it to modify a more specific passage.  You just brush off the more specific language as if it does not actually say anything. So, submission: because Paul tells the married couple in one place to submit to one another, the other places where he tells the wife to submit to her husband do not actually mean anything additional. (Which means, of course, the more specific application is redundant.)

In this way, the several plain and simple passages describing a submissive wife are reconciled with a highly personal idiosyncratic imagination.

The unique thing about flesh-and-blood people (as opposed to people in, say, political discourse) is that they are simultaneously good and bad.  An artist might paint brilliant dogs yet kick his actual dog.   One might serve soup to the homeless by day yet be unfaithful to the spouse by night.   There are men who have charged enemy guns in valor, and then abandoned their children.   This is not right, it is tragic.  But it is.

Every time a prominent person dies we have arguments over whether he / she was good or bad.   Some say “good”, some say “bad”.   Such a silly argument, based on a paper-mache notion of what a person is.   He was certainly both.

Let’s imagine a public figure who just died…I originally wrote this on the death of David Brudnoy, the Boston radio personality, whose program I enjoyed in my earphones during long, lonely night runs while training for a marathon.   He was an extraordinary intellect and a grace-filled conversationalist.   He was actually interested in his guests without coddling them.   He had a rare ability to ask pointed, critical questions while remaining utterly polite.   He had as clear a consent-based criterion for public morals as any thinker I’ve ever heard.    These qualities are as rare as a Red Sox pennant.

He was homosexual, and died from the sequelae of AIDS.   On my side of the religious aisle,  that lifestyle is regarded as immoral.  So what? It matters, but it does not cancel out his good qualities by some tit-for-tat arithmetic.   The good is, and the bad is.

Civilized people don’t go to wakes and trot out a naughty list and a nice list and calculate a net present value.  The reason we don’t is that it is mental health for mortals to focus on the good and let God judge the bad.   Whatever else should be said,  God will say, without my help.

It is not metaphysical doubt or moral relativism to speak only well of the flawed dead.   It is, rather, certainty that I am not the Judge.

The Internet Monk is told he needs to smile more. Comments follow. I like mine the best:

Everyone is right, of course, to say that an insincere smile is bad, and right that just smiling alot is not a useful goal in itself. But there is a common assumption in all this that is not false but just not true enough — the assumption that your smile is true if you feel happy, false if you do not. No, it’s not always just about you.

Your face, I mean. It’s not just about you. It’s not just an instrument of self-expression; it is also an instrument of community. So a smile can be a sincere liturgical act even when you are inwardly sad. A liturgical act, I mean, in the sense of an authentic ritual performed to make a connection with another person.

WE — we post-evangelicals — have all had such awakenings in recent years that formal, planned acts in worship can not only be real, but can be blessed. The liturgy delivers us from the murk of our own subjectivity — Yeats’ “rag and bone yard of the heart” — into the clear, bracing air of the community. We pray what the church prays. We sing what the church sings. And then, like a grace, we disover we feel what the church feels. The act first, then the feeling.

Why is a smile any different?
We teach children to shake hands, don’t we? We teach them to open doors? Have you ever told your child to “smile at the nice lady, and say thank you”? What would you answer if he replied “I don’t feel it.”? A good father would say “I don’t care. It is an obligation of love. Smile, and mean it.”

In none of this am I defending Joel Osteen, car dealers, or other fake smilers. I hate fake smiles. But these fakers fail in their smiles not for smiling too much, but for smiling too superficial. Think final cause instead of material cause: just like a written, liturgical prayer can be become authentic if the one praying brings his whole intention into the act, so a smile, acted in the face first but sincerely, will lead to its final cause: a connection between persons.

So, maybe, Michael, what the lady at the post office is TRYING to say — admittedly, poorly — is “you are not connecting with me, and I’d like us to connect.”

Jesus smiled on us when we hated Him, and I very seriously doubt He “felt” it.

Men fantasize about sex, women fantasize about romance.

These are both idols that sully, equally, the image of the real husband or the real wife.

Peter Leithart, on Milbank on Maritain:

Leithart.com

…knowledge pertains not to information, nor to representation, but rather to a particular state of being in which a creature, while remaining entirely within herself, is nonetheless so directly present to another creature that she in some sense becomes this other, while inversely, the other that was once materially embodied, embarks within the mind of the knower upon a new purely intellectual existence.