Studia humaniora

Hola!

2011-01-27T11:32:00.000-08:00

Life used to be much worse.

Christ's resurrection was just his resurrection. But I've experienced something greater and more delighting. I've risen myself. Christ rose from death only to come back after few years and take revenge on those who killed him. He removed the first death and prepared something more grim- the second death, the lake of brimstone and fire for some nice people like you and me.

Christian orthodoxy is beaten. In fact, it is dead. The structures remain, liturgies are celebrated, popes get elected. It has no basis in real life. First, primitive kerygma, let alone teaching of Jesus cannot be seen as a first step towards development of almost any contemporary Christian theology. Traditional orthodox dogmatic Christianity is a living dead. Sure, the corpse is still very charming but it's only a corpse.

Yet, we can see the rise of postmodern and postorthodox Christianity. Sometimes people engaged in it are themselves engaged in historical Jesus research. So what, is Christianity possible or not? The Catholic Church, Oriental Orthodoxy and Southern Baptists aren't by any means. But communities like that of Marcus Borg are the future of the world.

I don't want to be a part of it however. You know, I had been trying to be a good orthodox Christian for my entire conscious life up the the point I realized it's very core is rotten and perverted. I could of course join an independent community and start to preach postmodern Gospel, but, I have to say, I'm really tired. And even more: I just don't care. Religion is still one of my favorite topics, I still love Latin Vulgate and the Gospels, but I've had enough. I'm tired with religion let alone my knowledge of historical Jesus that automatically makes orthodox Christianity impossible for me.

Oh, I've just noticed someone is following my blog. Thank you for your attention, it motivates me to do the thing.

The finest justification of Christianity ever

2010-09-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

Yeah. I've been not a Catholic for a year and a half approximately. I don't need to hate no one anymore. I see hatred towards the Church as an integral part of the deconversion process. Right now I feel I don't need it anymore. You know, today some people were demanding to enthrone Jesus Christ as the King of Poland just in the capital of the country I live in. There are various ways to interpret it, beginning with an epic scene from the battle between the forces of progress and defenders of obscurantism to a calm sociological and historical analysis of the survival of this particular preconciliar piety form in contemporary Central Europe. Choose what you want and enjoy the free market of ideas substituting Vatican central-planning. But I neither feel hatred towards those Catholic, nor would I like to purge my country of them. Not just because I believe in pluralism and don't care they oppose it. I think I've just found a pretty good justification for the existence of Christianity which has an advantage of being neither religious nor ethical.

Imagine a society which is absolutely atheistic. A society in which writing a doctoral thesis on the which hunting is equally emotionally engaging as graduating in physics. A society for which both Reformation and Greek mystery cults are honorable cultural artifacts deprived of any impact on the real life. If there was no Sacred Text you could find one day to be a man made thing, if there was no fellow believer of the former faith to suggest you you're making the biggest error in your life, if there was no hell you could prove nonexistence of, then what kind of joy would you have with all these things? The raison d'etre of Christianity is to make leaving Christianity possible, the authority of the councils enables a seeker of the truth to find they have no authority and so on. Isn't deconversion one of the most enjoyable things under the Sun? To remove religion is to remove this particular experience.

As to myself, I rejoice. I've became quite postmodern in last months and if you were to judge me from the very moral position I occupied 3 years earlier, I would definitely prove to be a whore. I'm gradually loosing the ability to see religion from an insider's perspective. I have to write it down somewhere to remind me the ways I had been walking before I found the life in the valley of death.

We tell you what is good, it's good, because we tell it's.

2010-06-23T09:55:00.000-07:00

It is common knowledge Catholic Church has banned contraception. She teaches it's a bad thing. Now, I'm not talking about any form of abortion, that's the real bad thing. I don't want to discern if contraception is bad or not. At least in this moment of my life. Why wouldn't I try to judge it myself? Well, tools have been taken away from me.

I've been exposed to the teaching of the Catholic Church for a decade. Enough time to make you so unsure if contraception itself is so bad or you have just been programmed by Church to see it that way. It goes like this: Pope declares: grass is blue. Then an army of Catholic theologian appear and they say: Well, the culture of death is trying to persuade you grass is green, but it's an illusion: the Church is clear on that. And man, you have no choice: obey or burn for ever. You can think Pope is wrong, but you have to think he's right. Deep in your heart you may be sure he's wrong, but you have to defend his teachings, preaching things you don't believe. I strongly believe Church in many cases creates good and evil rather than point's what's really good and what's not.

Empire strikes back

2010-06-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't been around for a year or so. The main reason is my preoccupation with my mental health. I've been suffering from OCD or the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder for a decade. Two treatments in a mental hospital, billions of grave sins in one minute, mental cut of my body from the waist down, because it was so unclean, worries about possible sacrilege each time after receiving Holy Communion, and when I could no longer receive the Sacraments without getting mad, the very possibility of going to hell after I die. And the possibility of eternal punishment of my parents, colleagues and neighbors the least significant to my own life, after I lost the very hope of heavenly joy for myself.

I strongly believe it wasn't just OCD. Or- in other words- I believe the Catholic religion itself, if taken seriously, must lead to a kind of mental illness. At the very time people glorify God at a mass, the Eschaton if being filled with cries of the damned. And no, you don't need to be a bad person to meet Gehenna. If death catches you while you're having premarital sex, sorry, but you will burn forever. And if not you, possibly your uncle who converted to Mormonism and hasn't ever confessed his sins to a Catholic priest. Or could it be your religiously indifferent first girlfriend, couldn't she? Someone has pointed out that the only thing worse than ending in Hell is spending one's eternity with God who permits Hell to exist.

If Christ failed to reconcile all the mankind with himself for ever, I have no reasonable reason to view him as a positive deity. And, oh, I've also learned that the very name Jesus Christ isn't actually a name, but a sentence: It is Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Christ, the Messiah. My study of historical Jesus has taken away much of fear from me: I don't have to fear the Judgment, since the man to perform it has never been the Judge of this eon, the Second Person of the Trinity, but merely a Jewish religious reformer who has actually had no interest in people like me and you, the so called New Israel, the Church made of pagans, but only in real sons of Abraham, the Jewish people. So many things to share with you. The time of our salvation is now. Quod dixi, dixi.

Alors, c'est Romania!

2008-11-02T10:51:00.000-08:00

While I'm going through my university Latin drills, I'm considering some aids that Latin gives to someone, who wants to learn Romance languages. Trying another language when you didn't master another yet may seem strange, but as I focus on reading skills, I just need to develop my English to the level of high fluency both in writing and speaking and to have sufficient reading knowledge of Romance and German. Latin and Greek are obvious.

So, what can I do with my not-so-bad Latin, ambiguous English and so much conservative Polish stuff? Quite much, I believe. The good news is that you can do pretty the same or even better with your English, My Dear Reader. As far as I can say, there are three main sources of the English vocabulary: obviously the Germanic basis, then many loans from Latin and Old French, the last being ultimately a rural cousin of the finest Ciceronian eloquence. Add some direct or indirect loans from Ancient Greek and you will find, that English vocabulary resembles rather the Île-de-France politeness and the imperial speech of the aethernal Rome than than dark forests of Tacitean Germania. But let the examples speak. Look at the very begging of the Italian Wikipedia article on Poland:

La Polonia (in polacco Rzeczpospolita Polska, Repubblica di Polonia) è uno stato dell'Europa centrale con 38.626.349 abitanti e una superficie di 312.685 km². La capitale è Varsavia.

Even without any knowledge of a different language than English, one can understand almost the whole text with ease. Compare:

Polonia = Poland
Repubblica = Republic
uno = one (meaning "a", the indefinite article)
stato = state
Europa = Europe
centrale = central
abitanti = inhabitants
superficie = surface (compare superficial)
capitale = capital
Varsavia = Warsaw.

The cognates are given just pro forma, everything here is intelligible. You already knows some Romance, don't you? : )

The same works with Spanish, French, Portuguese and other minor Romance languages. Romanian seems to be a quite different piece, but I'm not any kind of expert or trained Romance scholar. A switch from Romance to Latin could be somehow more harder, though I don't know anyone who tried this way. Nevertheless, Romance vocabulary is just the Latin one after some phonetic changes and very occasional loans from pre-Latin languages of Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula and few Germanic military terms. The only problem could be the Latin inflection system and some phenomena of syntax.

Burckhardt on the name of Greece

2008-07-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

Jacob Burckhard's main contribution to the humanities is his famous work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, first issued in 1860. But the culture historian, who drew the very suggestive image of the period, was active also in some other fields. I have recently found his Griechische Kulturgeschichte (A History of the Greek Civilization) online. In the first chapter, the author tries to guess, why Greeks call themselves Hellens . Although their name we use in English is common to all European languages (in Polish we call them with the name Grecy, the same as English Greeks), it is not their self-description even. This name comes for Latin, because Graeci was the name of the Greek tribe Romans first encountered, later applying it to the whole nation. But Hellens were, according to Burckhardt, a Greek tribe which was able to gain a chief position, perhaps the military position and expand their name not only to all its fellow, but even to the all country, Hellas.

It reminds me a similar case in the Polish history. One of West Slavic tribes, the Polans, gathered some other Slavic tribes under their rule. The name Poland (in Polish: Polska) is derived from them, even if their lands lost their chief role in country already in the XI century.

A few Sallustain annotations

2008-07-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, or simply Sallust, is a Roman historian of Golden Age Latin, known today mainly as an author of the two extant monographs: The Conspiracy of catiline and Jugurthine War. I often hear opinions setting him as an hard to read author. He is a strong archaist indeed, as far as I can say after passing through first six chapters of Catiline. His features I've noticed include the third person plural Perfect ending in -ere instead of the usual -erunt and some vowel alteration like "i" to "u", for example "maxumus", spelled usually "maximus".

Though he is considered a difficult author, Erasmus in his treaty On the method of studying recommends him as an early Latin reading among Caesar and Cicero.

As usual, Wikipedia has a complex article on our subject containing also links to the texts.

Finally!

2008-07-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

Well, I think it's the right time to change the shape of this blog a bit. It's because I am a student of Classics at last and I'm starting my university cursus honorum in October. In addition, I feel strongly disappointed with the Catholic Traditionalism and could describe my views as Erasmian rather than Tridentine at the moment. For Erasmus is one of the brightest figures in European history, I would say. So we will put more more stress on Classical topics, including all humanism revivals one can imagine and information about Classics in Poland, which is, as you could notice, deeply rooted in the classical tradition. Thus we are setting sail and praying for the safe journey. Dixi.

Introducing some of Dante

2008-06-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

I fell in love with Dante due to my current attempts to learn reading Italian. These are just very beginnings, so feel free to correct me if I understand something inaccurate. I recommend this scholarly site to you- it has an up to date text in Italian and an equally new translation. The translation tries to catch not only thoughts, but also exact words of Dante. Here I'm using the translation form the Wikisource.

The poem begins:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straight-forward pathway had been lost.

I believe la diritta via could be better rendered in English as the righteous pathway. Nevertheless, the situation is clear, at least to medieval readers- the forest suggests a state of being permanently involved in sin.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;

Dante's original talent is the ability of expressing ideas with the words that can do it best. The comparison is very intensive, but Dante knows also where to stop: he knows death is a very serious thing and has fortunately a careful diction; a Baroque poet would probably say: It was immensely more bitter than the most bitter death.

How I came to the Classics, part 1.

2008-05-29T14:45:00.000-07:00

If think it's the right time to include few very basic information about myself. Or, to be more precise, about my main inspiration. Special artistic and poetical content is a must, if I want to keep my Readers reading.

When the Communist Party came to power in Poland (which is probably the only country in all the history of the mankind, which as a participant of a winning coalition not only lost it's territory, but also independence) they violently closed all the high schools with a program basing on Greek and Latin classics. Replacing Latin by Russian, the lingua franca of the Soviet Empire, was necessary for future unification of the satellite states with the Sovereign. Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili is certainly much greater orator than Marcus Tullius Cicero and Soviet state of righteousness and welfare is much better example to imitate than all feudal and slavery based societies.

Poland regain independence about 20 years ago, but the classical education is still in great contempt. Dramatical mental pauperization of the intelligentsia results with millions of extremal ruddies with a university diploma. Well, to quote Polish statesman from 16th century, Jan Zamoyski, the republics are as good as the education of their youth.

Having say all this sad things about Poland, I must admit being a happy one. I've found the pearl of an unusual valor . My happiness traces back from a natural curiosity shown by children and a specific reading I had as a probably 11 years old schoolboy. The book included mainly pictures of Hans Holbein's the Younger Danse Macabre with some pieces of medieval Polish verses on the death. You can check Holbein here. For me, it was a key experience and centered my fascinations on the medieval literature.

I don't want to include too much private issues in a one post, obviously not all are interested in my life history. I hope the link to Holbein's Dance Macabre above is sufficient justification for this post. If it isn't, I beg your pardon then and add selection from a Polish verse on death, so called Conversation of a Master with Death, which I first met in the book with the Holbein's pictures:

De morte prologus
(Prologue on death)

Almighty God,
Greater than all creation,
Help me to compose this work,
So that I can carefully unfold it
For the extension of Your glory,
For the improvement of mankind!
Listen, everybody,
Learn about the cruelty of death! –
You who think little of her1
Will know her at the end of life.
Be he old or young,
No one will escape the mortal danger;
Death will strangle them all,
Everyone must attend her school;
She appears in a strange way to clerics,
She will deprive everyone of life.
I want to tell a story;
Listen to it, those who want to know!
Polycarpus, this was his name,
A great sage, illustrious master,
Earnestly asked God
To see Death in a visible form.
When he was praying intensely to God,
Left alone in the church,
He saw a naked being
Of the female gender,
With an awfully ugly appearance,
Wrapped up in a piece of cloth,
Skinny, pale, with a yellow face
Shining like a wash bowl;
The tip of her nose had fallen off;
Bloody ooze flowed from her eyes;
She wrapped her head with a kerchief
Looking wrymouthed like a man-eater;
No lips in her muzzle,
She gnashed her teeth yawning;
She cast her eyes around and turned,
With threatening scythe in her hand;
Bare-headed, stridently talking,
A hideous figure all around –
She stuck out her ribs and bones,
And slashed ominously without pity.
The Master, seeing this ugly figure,
Yellow eyes, pallid belly,
Became awfully frightened;
Down he fell and groaned.
When he lay on his back like a fool,
Death spoke to him: [...]

The excellent translation I use here is by Michael J. Mikoś and comes from the site Old Polish Literature , where you can read the entire poem. Please notice that while main text is in Old Polish, the author still feels it is good to do a Latin title and some other phrases. Also notice that Polish Death is female.

"Mother of God"- ancient Polish Marian hymn

2008-04-30T06:14:00.000-07:00

First, I would like to thank all my Readers for their patience, as they had to wait for this blog update quite long.

I'd like to introduce some informations about Polish classical literature. First thing to done is to specify what I call classical Polish literature. However the term "classical literature" can't be found in the Polish research, I'm going to apply it to medieval and early modern periods, which are commonly called Old Polish literature (Polish: Literatura staropolska).

Poland adopted Latin Christianity at the year 966. This date also marks beginning of Poles' Western mannered intellectual activities. The first pieces of literature were written in Latin, which remain a vehicle of artistic creativity up to the end of 18th century.

It is a very disputed among scholars question, if the first Polish vernacular chant comes from 11, 12 or even 13 century. I think the earlier dates are more correct, as the song is close related to Latin sequences, especially in the matter of rhymes. As it can be observed in some medieval Latin hymns, rhymes involve mainly vowels, as: Bogurodzica, dziewica/ Bogiem sławiena Maryja. What is specific, parts of the same verse rhyme with others. It is also a feature of medieval poetry.

English translation can be found here. English Wikipedia has also an entry, including the text in Old Polish, English and Latin.

Easter impressions

2008-03-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

Christus resurrexit! Resurrexit vere!

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!

I came back to my pretty small town for the Easter. I used to be involved here in a Dominican youth group. Dominican Order monks in Poland usually pay attention to proper forms of celebrating Mass. Indeed, I noticed some unusual features in yesterday Liturgy. First of all it was according to my best knowledge preserving rules of Roman Missal. No drums, no guitars, no holding hands together during Our Father prayer. But the best thing is it was very precise celebration , without any addition and self-invented texts.

I spoke later to that priest about liturgical abuses and Tridentine Mass. Of course he was not taught to celebrate in older rite. He also sees no serious difference between Tridnentine and Novus Ordo rites. Indeed, Eucharistic Christ is the same without any doubt but I wonder why almost none of nowadays priests can see the solemnity of old mass order.

From the other hand, I am to join the Dominican students group in Cracow where I study. We shall examine their doctrine, yesss... ;)

A little preface to the Reader

2008-03-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

Although I seriously wonder, if my level of language skills is sufficient, perspective of having a worldwide public seems to prevail definitely. So at this point I want to apologize you for all errors I will certainly make. Everyone must start someday and a proper usage of a foreign language is not a simple thing. But let's start!