The BetterPears Podcast

Quests, questions, queries, and nearly all the Latin interrogatives, quis, quem, quando, quo, and one suspects, cur and cui as well, either point to a seeking, refer to a petition, or, as in the case of “quietus,” the object or desired state of our inquiet appetite. Referring back to St. Augustine’s salvo and salve from Book I, Chapter 1 of his Confessions, “Cor nostrum est inquietum donec requiescat in te,” the desired end of our heart is quiet, “inquietum” is a lack of requiesces, itself a resting back or resting again from the ill-wrought labors of our will and not His being done.

The fundamental nature of rest is not without dispute: whether it is a pouring out of the self, perhaps into the ground as with interment for a beating heart is necessarily inquiet, or the pouring out of the soul into its source, remaining distinctly individual in being and essence yet perfectly, in accord with our nature, satisfied. Are we but the Lucretian swerve? Are our quarrelsome quests and queries but a cascading, conglomerating glitch in a material matrix? Is “death nothing to us” at the expense of vacating the meaning and purpose of any underlying us? On the contrary, it does seem illogical, that is, inconsistent that the soul, as soul, if indeed it is merely an epiphenomenon of matter, to behave strictly materially. Would it not be more consistent for the soul, as soul, even as the result of amalgamated matter, to tend toward a spiritual, that is, an immaterial end and perfection? Furthermore, our experience of an animated intelligence is one of an insatiable appetite to know. We observe this quizzical, if not quixotic, appetite in children. We mourn its loss in adults, either partially or in toto. An adult man or woman without interests ceases to be interesting, both in the sense of being set apart from his or her peers and also in the sense of degraded life, mere life, apart from the good life and good living. Such stunted individuals, for rarely does this occur in vibrant community, such individuals often become modern Lotus-eaters.

 In antiquity, the Lotus-eaters gave into the temptation to chemically satisfy their unmet desires or queries by eliminating or reducing this appetite through the readily available φαρμακεία of choice.  In our times, the phantasmorphic “doom scroll” or algorithmic queue animating screened-in life keeps all genuine queries related to our deeper satisfaction subdued. One paradigmatic result of this palliative decline is that rest or leisure is viewed as a cessation, a reprieve from our hustle, an idleness, which becomes an idol to the genuinely (or rather ingenuinely) inquiet slave. Such idleness is the fruit of ill-gotten, sub-standard pears, but the observation of our wretched state does not per se prepare us for the first fruit from the Father’s orchard.

When we bid that the beloved dead may rest in peace, requiescat in pace, we must re-envision the reality of participating most fully in the God who is pure act. The Beatific Vision is not merely a beauteous vision but one in which we who are blessed to behold it become beautiful, that is, formed and hence the suffix “-fic.” This beauty so informed is perfectly in accord with the soul, that is, “to its cor,” and after the resurrection, the body, as well. To behold the Beatific Vision is to become in a perpetual state of becoming fully alive. The rest in His peace to which our restless heart, our cor inquietum quests, is not the sundrenched Floridian cabana but the burning Son Himself, His Sacred Heart, wed to our flourishing, quenching every query, every inquietude of our mind, heart, soul, and strength the moment it appears, living with the authority of the auctor of all creation.

Such peace, so real and hence regal, if we can envision it, if we can raise our standard as His, inoculates the paltry presentations of the World in the pejorative sense. The allure of satisfaction on demand both through technological means in the case of robotics paired with so-called artificial intelligence and furthermore through oppressive means in which the many are violently subjugated for the extreme benefit of the few, such allure falls short of drawing its beneficiaries toward the maximalization of their final end, the full flourishing of their human nature. The cracks in this faulty foundation are now revealed. Never more connected globally, we are lonelier than ever. Never more comfortable against the demands of nature, we have corrupted and jettisoned our own. Above the din, the cacophony of motors, machinations, and mood music, St. Augustine’s words resonate across the aeons and algos: “Tu fecisti nos ad te, et cor nostrum est inquietum donec requiescat in te.”

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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Amid a world of euphemisms and circumlocutions, “addiction” is a taxonomy which accurately pins down a malady both relationally and clinically. Perhaps it is our American proclivity to err on the side of licentiousness in the expression of liberty which causes an almost reflexive denial when confronted by the wreckage of our lives or the intervention of friends and family concerning the addiction in dictatorial control of our lives. “Addiction” is rooted in “dicere” the Latin verb meaning “to say, speak,” but here as a perfect passive participle converted into a 3rd declension noun. To be “addictus” or to have an “addictio” is to be spoken for, that is, not to speak for one’s self, a surrender of self agency or rather often an abdication.

It should be noted to us in the modern milieu that self-agency, self-advocacy is not always and everywhere a good for us. Indeed, there is perhaps no surer path to the formation of a genuine hellion that to grant a young human being such undue authority and autonomy. Childhood is a certain natural slavery due to our unfitness at birth and for a considerable time afterward to care for our basic and developmental needs. This tutelage of parental custody, which indeed is designed to keep us safe, is often filled with instruction in familial and social norms and compulsory education. In times of old, when children were seen and not heard, the presumption was that someone, the father unless absent, spoke for his children. He would answer for them and be answerable for their behavior in courts of law and the court of public opinion. He had after all given over to his progeny his surname, the cognomen by which their collective lots were bound in the lottery of birth.

While the jurisprudence of legal courts has been eroded both at the legislative and juridical levels and the court of the courtier and courtesan remains modeled to the same modern mode, there remains at least one juridical relation obsessed with juridical authority, with who speaks for whom, with addiction in its literal and common parlance, a relation absent charity and grace, adhering to the law alone. I am referring here of the demonic and the claims of demons for the domain of persons, places, and things. Of all beings great and small, the demons, the great bane of our first parents, recognize the spiritual headship of husbands and fathers in any claim to exorcize possession, an extreme form of addiction, from wife or child. A father handing his daughter over to the bridegroom and a father accepting his child on his knees is not just accepting the obligation for physical provision and protection but also spiritual defense and flourishing. Beyond even this status of paternal authority, the demonic so revealed themselves acknowledge the apostolic authority of the bishop, the local ordinary, deputed to the appointed priestly exorcist. In this way, the legal rigidity of demons serves to affirm the apostolic truth of the Catholic Church in a most unexpected way.

Demonic possession, again, is an extreme degree of addiction in the literal sense. Returning to addiction more broadly understood, most addictions are classified by their undue desire or cupidity toward some substance, that is, for its effect on the mind or body, or toward some behavior for its similar short-lived psychosomatic effect. For such addicts, their lives have become unmanageable and their autonomy has been replaced by a certain powerlessness to their addiction. The admission of this reality is the foundational first step in the 12-step recovery process pioneered by the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. Today 12-step recovery extends the wide spectrum of addiction to substances such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Over-eaters Anonymous, and addiction to behaviors such as Sexaholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous, and Al Anon. As the names of these programs suggest, these 12-step recovery groups are intentional about the anonymity of their members. Traditionally, members identify themselves only by first name.

From what has been explored above, this anonymity appears discordant with the restoration of paternal protection, whether at the natural level of the family or the ecclesial level under apostolic authority. This oxymoronic juxtaposition of anonymity seeking restoration is clarified by steps 2 and 3, which both recognize the healing authority of God as higher power and an act of faith in asking God to restore health, that is, sanity to the addict. The success of anonymous 12-step recovery in providing healing for those hurting under addiction is an appeal to a nomen more common than a cognomen, an appeal to the sender, the ἀποστέλλων of the apostles. Our addictions fall mute before the Immutable. Desires which speak for their powerless victims fall impotent before the victorious Sire who spoke us into being.

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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Oft overlooked within his corpus in lieu of his Confessions or the monumental De Civitate Dei, St. Augustine’s De Magistro or On the Teacher is a subtle treasure, a dialogue between father and son, Aurelius and Adeodatus. The matter at hand, all prestidigitation aside, is whether knowledge can be taught. Without betraying the force and fitness of the work itself, two of its conclusions are fruitful for our present query into cryptography, composed of “writing” from the Greek “γράφω” and “to cover” or “hide” from the equally Greek “κρύπτω.” First, a distinction is made early in De Magistro among spoken words, written words, and what might be termed inner words, what some might term verbal thoughts. The second conclusion is that Christ is the true teacher of the inner word connecting for each person, in every instance of the intellect, the word as sign to its meaning and truth.

The evangelium or εὐαγγέλιον of the early Church grasped well the fluidity of these distinctions in that on account of the Christ, the Word Incarnate, the good news or Gospel advanced on the lips of the Apostles and, eventually,  the script of their hands. The truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life was offered to all and the early Church strove to make it thus accessible.

Sacra Scriptura, the biblical canon, became the regula fidei, the rule of faith, the measure against which sacred doctrine including the liturgical life of the Church could be measured. While still under persecution by the Romans, these sacred texts bore the patent expression of what Christians believed, while the Church’s arcana, the sacramental rites for which they maintained a duty to protect from profanation and sacrilege remained hidden from those not yet initiated. Signs on doorposts became the σύμβολα of the faith prior to the credo of Nicaea and conveyed the truth of the mysteries or sacraments to those without eyes to see and ears to hear.

Our topic at present, cryptography, is a juxtaposition of hiding or secreting and an act that is, at its core, communicative. Open writing is sufficiently difficult with the likes of Big Lexi, the lexicography cartel, stifling the connectivity of definitions. To make latent or hidden meanings for an act of writing which is fundamentally patent requires an overriding or overwriting purpose. While much could be discussed concerning the martial use of cryptography or cryptographic ledger technology for the securitization of assets and intelligence, our present focus remains on the use of cryptography in civil discourse, as it relates to both our present epoch and the early persecution of the Church.

When a society on the whole is seeking honor and promoting virtue, vices must be hidden. When a society has slid into open vice, thoughts virtuous and true tend to be hidden. The direction or misdirection toward these two foci, virtue and vice, are the great turning points of culture which have been cast and casted upon the stage of the West throughout its history. Perhaps we attend too much to the shock and horror of Nicaea and its aftermath, how the world awoke to find itself Arian, diverging from orthodoxy on the foundational matter of creation’s founder, the divinity of Christ. It was not as if overnight or in the expanse of a few years the faithful and their shepherds were turned away from the spiritual patrimony of Jesus Christ through the teaching of the Apostles. No, the Creed of Nicaea, reaffirmed at Constantinople, brought a preexisting disparity of belief to light, exposed a latent heresy by a public profession.

Herein lies the principal difference between the cult of the Church and the occult, which by name and practice has long sought to thwart the consummation of the great mystery between the Bridegroom and His Bride. The sacred secret, the sacramental mysteries of the Church find their end in claritas, the clarity of truth now and in its fullness on the Last Day. The occult, contrarily, can only obscure its defeat as fait accompli, present obstacles to the genuine culture and flourishing of the Genitor. In the end, the tentacles of tenebrae are overcome, in the language of St. John, by the light of the world.

Yet the so-called illumination of the occult imperils souls. While some Arians perhaps knew no better, had never received the Gospel of Jesus’ divinity, many likely adopted the more palatable position of Jesus as a demigod within the pagan pantheon of the pre-Constantinian political circus. It was these latter players, both political and potentates, who pursued, that is, persecuted the patriarch Athanasius of Alexandria then. Persecutors now  today likewise seek out our Christian “deathless” in the digital desert of ideas. Free speech is everywhere under attack. The spoken and written word is impugned as a proxy pugnation against the inner word and its Teacher, the Word Eternal. Once veiled in the flesh of a low-born babe, veiled under the appearance of bread and wine, veiled in the vellum of Sacred Script, the Word of Truth and Life is unveiled and thus revealed in the martyrs, the witnesses, whose baptismal candles are not found wickless as the light of baptism can only be self-extinguished, though the body may be silenced or severed from the soul for a time. May we live in interesting times. May that difference be the martyrdom of the faithful, though a third of the stars fall from the heavens, lest even the rocks cry out in our stead.

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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The Latin adjective “honestus” bears a primary meaning of “honorable” and only perhaps by extension that trait “honest” in the way the English cognate conveys the teller of truth. “Honestus” seems, to one who would dare, a perfect passive participle lent by some verb or action involving “honor” or “honos, honoris.” The passivity of the word seems appropriate for the honorable is so honored by another external to him or herself. Self-honor is fashioned proud, hubristic, contrarily as the Christian vice and even self-interest forfeiting pagan magnanimity, pegging itself below its one-time pinnacle.

The Hellenistic perspective on the matter is rather entwined with “κλέος” meaning “glory” and “renown” centered on the duty or responsibility to carry forth the name of one’s father as in a patronymic such as Achilles Pelides or “son of Peleus” and Odysseus Laertiades after old Laërtes. The names Patroklos and Cleopatra are both compounds of this pursuit of paternal glory and honor. Surnames and cognomen now occupy this fastidious fashioning. Τιμή understood as honor is the dignity or recognition bestowed on one in response to extending well the κλέος of one’s house—a kindness to one’s kin woven by good works and knit neat in Penny’s funeral pall.

τιμή as an abstract quality was often manifested in the bestowal of tangible gifts of great worth or scarcity. Such τιμή or its slighting is the fulcrum upon which the wrath of Achilles tilts in the first book of Homer’s Iliad. The chieftain Agamemnon’s claim to Briseus, previously allotted to Achilles as a spoil of war is triggered by Agamemnon’s own loss of outward esteem before men in the likewise brokered return of Chryseis. Again, for the great heroes of the Achaeans and the Trojans at the onset of the epic poem, all κλέος and τιμή, governing and ordered by the status of each man was signified externally by wealth from the division of spoils, the very supplies, armament, and labor which perpetuated their campaigns and alliances. The complaint of Achilles and his subsequent protestation by disengagement invites the listener or, indeed now, the reader to consider glory, renown, and the more Latinate honor beyond dependency on the caprice of others including the Olympian gods and even one’s self.

Is honor necessarily, that is, essentially something given or can it exist and be enjoyed by some other operation or act? Perhaps a solution of sorts is to be found in a connection between “honor” and “onus,” the latter being the Latin word for “weight” or “burden.” In this view, truly heavy is the head which wears the crown, bears the burden of state with due honor. That which is honorable is oft burdened with resistance from what is alternatively more expedient or acceptably sub-optimal. Crafty counselors perceive the honorable prince a fool or, worse, weak. The burden of honesty is a tell-tale heart, the weight of the Tempter now found Accuser spewing fork-tongued fallacies and the father’s faults detracting from the forgiveness offered by the fallen yet risen Lord. As Aeneas ferried father Anchises beyond the wreckage of windy Troy and bore the household gods into Latium, so too do children bear the weight, the regrets, the resentments of their fathers still today. Yet not all these burdens are worth their berth.  Contra the Bard’s Antonius, it is the evil not that good which must be interred with the father’s bones by those who live on after them, for the propagation of the good is burden enough.

Still what discernment of τιμή remains possible? Perhaps Timothy, Τιμόθεος, the honor of God, can, as St. Paul suggests, serve as more that a guide (See 1 Cor. 4:17). What is the honor, the glory of God, for it seems that good Christians everywhere are set on magnifying this glory? Yet the magnification cannot be required by God and its lessening considered a deficiency in He Who is the Creator of all things. No, as St. Irenaeus of Lyons offers, “The Glory of God is man fully alive,” a common embellishment of “Gloria enim Dei vivens homo.” At its core, the idea is that the glory of God is His creation in conformity to His Will and precisely that rebellious creature Man repenting, being renewed in intellect and will and even the body as living sacrifice, a living being no longer profane but made holy (See Romans 12:1–2).  

This conformity of wills, this perfection of God’s order and justice will occur, in truth, at the end of all things, on the Last Day without end, and so there is nothing lacking to His glory which was not preordained. Still, we are called to participate in this glory, lowly though we are, by taking up the burden of the cross in this life. The Christian cursus honorum or “course of honors” turned on its Petrine head passes through the ignominy of the world to enter one’s name in the Book of Life of the world to come.

In Memoriam
Leslie Mamoru Fugikawa
1944–2026

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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This episode concerns sitting and looking, two rather innocuous acts which become adversarial and at times morally dubious with the addition of that hereby impugned prefix “in.” It should be noted from the onset that spaces between letters are something of a late luxury to script no longer written on dried parchment, pressed papyri, or even processed wood pulp. The shift for a language such as Latin from prefix to preposition and its added space was not without it merits as verbs often compounded with prefixes would shift their vowels, not only phonetically—beware the great vowel shift—but also typographically, for example “capio” becomes “incipio”, “cado” becomes “occido”, and “teneo” becomes “contineo”.

These caveats aside, the prefix “in” bears a fundamental sense of movement toward an object unimpeded by the outer limit of that object. Imagine a pugilist punching toward his adversary. The punch, qua punch, is ordered to ending not at the perimeter of the opponent’s head but in, indeed into, the space currently occupied by that head itself. From this the primary meaning of “in” includes “into” and even the adversative “against,” which is only a step away from the negative meaning of “in” as in “incoherent” (Cf. “Catholic Heresy”). The progression of meanings for “in” is not without its pitfalls. We are looking at you “inflammable,” which means both “able” and “not able to catch fire.” Nevertheless, it is the extended meaning of “in,” the adversative meaning “against” which animates or perhaps defines sitting and looking for the words “insidious” and “invidious” respectively.

The illiberal serf to Big Lexi, the lexicography cartel, will look up the Latin noun “insidia” and be satisfied with a meaning of “ambush or trap.” Little thought, if any, will be given to the very act of carrying out an ambush, particularly such treachery against one whom a declaration of war or open feud has not yet been declared. Few who have not themselves done so consider what it takes to sit and wait, to draw out your opponent from his quotidian life in order to irrevocably alter it, through such a deplorable act, an act which cowered to be performed with honor on a field of combat. To stand against, instare, an adversary is one thing, to sit against, insidere, feigning passivity for a surprise attack, is quite another.

The painting Cicero Denounces Catiline by Cesare Maccari conveys like little else the disintegration of fellowship, of civil order by insidious sedition. The context of the painting is the late Roman Republic in 63 B.C., the year in which Marcus Tullius Cicero as consul uncovered a plot to overthrow the previous election by a political coup led by the senator Catiline. Cicero had hard evidence to prosecute the members of this conspiracy but he was uncertain of its extent. If a formal trial had been conducted in the Senate, perhaps the conspirators in this coniuratio would have outnumber those outside of it, in which case the Republic would already be lost. Fearful of this political trap and continued assassination attempts on his life, Cicero instead had five of the conspirators, senators of Rome, summarily executed, that is, without trial. In doing so, Cicero likely saved the Republic which would be lost in only another two decades. His career was forever marked with favor or disfavor by the consequences of such sedition and insidia.

Perhaps our modern disjunct or rather disconnection on this matter stems from our companionship, sharing bread together, holding table fellowship enclosed and therefore facing one another. Long gone are the days, and perhaps for good reason, of being served at table by waitstaff who needed ready access to you, as with the ancient Mediterranean triclinium or even Da Vinci’s Last Supper. To sit aside and abreast one another is to take in the goods of this world together and together to confront its perils. To sit opposing one another is to sit in opposition, for example, in a chess match. Modern romantic dinner dates do not so much get off on the wrong foot as the do the wrong, adversarial seat. Praise be to the opera box, the horse drawn carriage, and the rotational movement of paired dance to correct this callused calumny.

While where one sits and against what or whom one sits requires our attention, our eyes also convey and betray the disposition of the heart. Invidious invidia is currently all the rage, in markets and the public square, and likely its source. There is a difference between looking at or into someone as an adequation of the other as object or subject and looking against someone as an object of contempt or malice. Invidere, to look against, is the linguistic and ontological source of envy. Such envy precludes the sympathetic tasting of the sapiential tradition (See “Taste and See”). Envy is traditionally green, in French “vert,” because, perhaps, it asserts its own truth “veritas” or its own verdant growth—a vice, vitium, posing as life, vita (See “Two Iotas of a Difference”). In envy, the prefix “in” assimilated to “en” is both an adversarial looking against another, hating the goods another enjoys relative to the absence of those goods for oneself, the covetousness of the latter Commandments, and a looking into one’s self for justice or rather justification for this inimical animus.

Envy robs gratitude from grace received and pollutes grace given by keeping score, by focusing on want and not what waxes. By perverting the genuine, verdant gifts of God in one’s own life by a fixation on the inequity of blessings bestowed on another in the name of truth and, by extension, justice, the invidious harm not only themselves but the common good by their iniquity.

Envy is the poisoned ivy that creeps along the social lattice until the walls, moenia, and offices, munera, are engulfed in self-serving and sedition. It was for envy that Catiline conspired a conjuratio against the late republic, for envy that each Roman Triumvirate collapsed into bellum civile, for envy that the traitorous and so-called Great, Herod, so incensed by his rightful rival did command and effect the death of holy innocents.

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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Modern readers of Sacred Script seeking both timely and timeless wisdom in their native tongue can, with well-founded faith, trust that their translations and the translators behind them will fail to capture much of the weight and wonder present in the original Hebrew or Greek. Given this context, the maligned status of “traduttore, traditore,” that is, “the translator, traitor,” it is no little wonder that the diction of Luke 23:43 has, for the most part, been presented quite faithfully in the Anglosphere. From the Cross, Jesus consoles the repentant thief, whom the tradition identifies as St. Dysmas, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” The Greek witness here is “ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ,” which the lexicography cartel or Big Lexi will spin as synonymous with “heaven.”  Precisely at this moment in salvation history, however, Jesus, with respect to His human nature will not be in heaven as heaven is more broadly understood. His soul and His body will be rent apart by His death on the Cross. His body, though still united with His Divinity, will be entombed. His human soul, also united to His Divinity, will, by the time of Easter Sunday, have harrowed hell and rescued the righteous who died before His advent.

The Lenten longing of Isaiah’s messiah awaited for centuries of woe and wrath is fulfilled between a darkened Friday afternoon and the rolling stone of the week’s first day. What a wonder to see something new under the Sun’s Day, a New Adam, a restored Eve, untouched in a garden, “noli me tangere” (Jn. 20:17). What a wonder that at least in Luke 23:43, the translators do not ruin the scandal of the Cross.

Broadly speaking, the scandal is that the God of Life allowed Himself to die to save us, His creatures. More acutely here, the scandal is that Christ’s words are true in the very telling. Paradise is a para-dise, or to be alongside God. The path from the Greek “παράδεισος” to the Latin “Para Deum” heads east to the Persian “pairidaeza” meaning “walled park” or “enclosed garden” reserved for nobility. Such nobles have this exclusive land on account of their wealth. In Latin the adjective for wealthy or fertile, “dives, divitis” was later shortened to “dis, ditis,” and became caught up in the confusion over whether Pluto is rich, perhaps from the wealth of the dead, or rather whether there exists yet of another pagan god of the underworld, Dis, which is also the name of the infernal city in Dante’s Divine Comedy encompassing the sixth through ninth rings.

In any case, the association of the Greek “παράδεισος” with heaven seems fundamentally connected to the wealth and abundance which only God, in this case, the true God become true man can provide. Heaven is specifically paradise because it is where God and not merely His wealth abides, affirmed by the frequent use of the Greek verb “μένω”in Jesus’s Last Supper discourse recounted in John 15.

“Para,” it should also be mentioned, signifies being “alongside” something such as with a parabola, that is, being alongside the motion of ballistic flight and a paragraph being the ¶ symbol alongside a block of manuscript text which alerted the typesetter of bygone years to make an indent. “Para” as a word coming to us from both Greek and Latin may be related to the Latin root “par” meaning “equal” or “even,” hence people alongside each other or abreast are considered equals.

Such was the case on that small hill outside Jerusalem and fittingly so. To enter into Christ, to become a Christian is to endure the death of the Cross, not alone, but alongside Him who suffered for us, before us. To become a Christian is to harrow hell or at least those enslaved to hell on earth, to make fertile infernum, a harvest of those hopeful souls packed down, otherwise lost, perditi (See Season 2, Episode 10 “Perdition”), save for the grace of God. To become a Christian is to believe that death can no longer obliterate the bonds of family and fellowship. My intercessory prayer that God’s Will be done for those sick and dying in my life does not efficaciously end at the mere circumstance of their death. My love, my desire for their good, their highest good, refined, purged of all hinderances, rightly persists after death. Indeed, it is death which will be forgotten, that is, obliterated, and lost by perdition on the Last Day. To become a Christian means never having to leave His side, to remain, in this sense, through all the hardship and toil of a life yet to be lived in paradise. We pray for the courage to so abide.

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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Ask the rara avis of our modern epoch, the well-catechized Catholic, concerning the meaning of that identifier and Third Mark of the Church, Catholic, and you are likely to hear how the Catholic Church is universal. This is generally understood in spatial or geographic terms complementing the temporal claims of the Fourth Mark, apostolic. Perhaps the more subtle of respondents will note that while historically the Church began in Jerusalem on Pentecost and, therefore, was not accessible to those, who would believe upon hearing the Gospel, until the feet of those carrying the εὐαγγέλιον reached them, yet in principle and potency the Catholic Church remained open and eager to welcome them into God’s grace.

There is, however, that other and more fundamental meaning of Catholic or καθολικός befitting its canonization in the Creed of Nicaea. The word “creed” is derived from the Latin “credo,” the “I believe” at the beginning of such a profession of faith. The Greek term for such a profession is “σύμβολον,” which we recognize as “symbol” as in the Symbol of Faith in English. To the ancient Greek practice and imagination of the 4th Century A.D., the σύμβολον was a token such as a coin, or ceramic object that had been broken in two and distributed to members of the underground Church. By producing and pairing or throwing “βάλλω,” together “σύν” or here “σύμ-” these pieces held by strangers to a particular community could prove their authenticity of belief as the many irregular fractures and curves of the broken edge met their complements. This is not unlike the pairing of public and private keys on the Bitcoin Ledger which are needed to access and direct encrypted wallets.

The Catholic σύμβολον or Creed was a list and profession of the core beliefs that all Christians held καθολικός or “according to” from the Greek “κατά” or here “καθ-” and “the whole or entirety” from the Greek “ὅλος.” On this account of core Christian belief complete fidelity was and is required. The modern 80/20 rule of business or even Meatloaf’s “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” would not suffice for the Church of the catacombs and Colosseum. In horror, then, did the Church arise from the catacombs after the Edict of Milan in the year 313, and realize that there were Arians in their midst and a confrontation with the Trinitarian Heresies upon them.

Heresy strikes the ear as a charged word despite functioning as an arbitrary phonetic construct for most. Culturally it bears with it a pejorative connotation, something accusatory to make the hair on your arms stick up, and yet sticking in the other sense is more on the mark and yet off this Third Mark. “Heresy” is derived from the Greek “αἱρέω” meaning “to take, seize, or grasp” and the nuanced Latin “haereo” meaning “to stick, cling, or attach oneself to.” Heresies from a doctrinal or credal perspective are adherences to certain doctrines to the exclusion of others. Arius clung to the Unity of God to the point of denying the full Divinity of Jesus Christ. Later the Docetists would stick to the Divinity of Christ to the point of denying His Passion and full humanity, teaching that He only appeared to eat, walk among us, suffer, and die. The Montanists would focus entirely on a singular baptism for the forgiveness of sins and ignore the reconciliation of Peter to Christ after the former’s denials, his dramatic, if not formal, apostasy, (cf. John 21:15–19) and the authority to forgive sins bestowed upon the Apostles in the Upper Room (cf. John 20:19–23).

Christian heresy cannot exist in isolation. It can only exist as a part to a greater whole. The doctrines and sacraments form a festal feast for Catholics arising from a fixed menu of courses, distinctly above particular devotions, in which all offered is tasted and received. The tenets of such a faith are not an al a carte buffet of disjointed dishes connected more by the fear of dining alone than as the curated nourishment which has been preordained and revealed to us in and through Jesus Christ. Furthermore, those not purporting to be Christian cannot be Christian heretics. To present no symbol of the Christian faith is distinct from presenting one incomplete or erroneous. To believe in the entirety of the Catholic faith and to hold as mandatory additional beliefs is to transgress the authority of the Church, becoming one’s own magisterium or teaching authority either individually or in conspiratorial communion.

What then is the earnest Catholic Christian to do when orthodoxy is pain, that is, a cross and everyone telling us otherwise is trying to sell us something? We ardently desire the peace that only Jesus Christ can give, yet He informs His disciples in Mt 10:34 that he came to sow or literally throw, here “βάλλω,” not peace but a sword. The unity of the Symbol of Faith is achieved through the division apart from what persists contrary to its fullness. The arbiter of this division, however, is The Way, The Truth, and The Life, not a collection of doctrines but a Person who founded and sustains His people as their priest, prophet, and king. Further, He has initiated all the baptized into these offices or munera (See, Season 1, Episode 6, “Community”), and to a distinct degree those men anointed into His ministerial priesthood, beyond the fruit of theological pundits and their punditries. In the oft overlooked 1 Corinthians 4, St. Paul remarks how the Church of Corinth has many podcasters, or rather guides, but that they have few spiritual fathers, for which he, Paul, is sending them Timothy at significant personal sacrifice. Ours is the age of clinging to spiritual fathers, a new Patristic Age late born. Such pastors of the Good Pastor give pasture through the Pasch. Ours is the age of prudence in probity, of cruciform trust entrussed to proven men, of grave burdens and enlightened yokes, that become a certain surprising, jocund levity.

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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The use of the term “decimation” reveals something of the barometric pressure placed upon a society to employ polysyllabic words without once reflecting on them. “Decimation” has become synonymous with “annihilation,” the removal of something from existence, literally “to nothing” and “obliteration” which is rooted in a removal from memory, collective or otherwise. “Decimation” is literally a “ten-ing” or “tenth-ing” from the Latin number “decem” meaning “ten.”

As an ancient Roman practice, decimation was the penalty levied against military units for cowardice in battle. Lots would be drawn at a ratio of 9:1 and the losing “tenth” faction would be beaten to death by their own brothers-in-arms. While our purpose here is not to analyze or otherwise judge the effectiveness of this practice in restoring morale or even begin to assess the psychological trauma for those surviving, it is important for our present inquiry to recognize that decimation did not entail nor intend the destruction of its object. The loss of one tenth, though severe, was not considered an insurmountable deficit to remedy deficient courage.

For all its faults, the discipline of Roman military decimation is, nevertheless, a pagan echo of the tithe due to God, an act of faith in the Father’s fruition rather than the ferocity of ferrum. While Abel gave the first fruits of his flocks, it was Abram, later Abraham, who first offers a tenth of his spoils from battle and the earth’s bounty to the priest of God Most High and King of Salem, Melchizedek (cf. Gen. 14:20). Before Moriah with “the fire and the knife” (Gen 22:6), Abraham offered a tenth of his spoils and harvest, trusting in the Lord’s main clause to Adam, “you shall eat,” despite the perspired condition of his brow (Gen 3.19).

Perhaps this piety of tenths played a part in the mind of J. R. R. Tolkien at the bridge of Khazad-dûm in another Moria (cf. Season 2, Episode 11, “Altum”) when the grey servant of the secret fire cuts off the passage to all pursuers and costs the fellowship a ninth of its number, a tenth if we do not discount the pity of Bilbo. Piety and pity are not mere sentiments but dignum et justum. In the mid-20th Century, Jacques Maritain developed the principles behind the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom (1965). The success and, one might add, truth, of these documents hinges on the grounding of human dignity, not in the normative recognition of the common humanity of individuals and peoples, but the fundamental recognition by God which pre-exists and endures beyond all human recognition. Dignity is not so much a popularity contest and as it is exclusively an authority contest, for it is the author of all beings, who affirms all contested dignity on the Last Day to the rise and fall of many (cf. Luke 2:34)

Dignity at its core is a certain pointing with a “digitus,” from Latin meaning, “finger (or thumb).” Distinct from the Greek ἄνθρωπος (cf. Season 1, Episode 4, “Anthropos”), the Latin word for human being “homo, hominis,” possibly comes to us from the Greek ὁμός, meaning “the same” or “common,” reverberating philologically the remark of Adam to the embodied rational creature fashioned from his rib, who was unlike any other creature that God had made, “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23) and, we might add, knower of language.

The greater part of “love thy neighbor” is simply identifying the common dignity, pointing with one finger, declaring, “this is my brother or sister,” and defending him or her with all ten curled into firsts against all comers, knowing full well that if your fists and composite fingers shall fail and those of all other men, likewise, fall away, Our Father in Heaven still affirms, indeed, underwrites our indelible human dignity. This is not to conclude that humans are unable to act in ways contrary to their dignity. A certain translational mischief was spread across the anglophonic world through the translation of Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him…” (RSVCE). The mischief is the false impression that our current created state is the perfection or end state of our creation. The Latin of the Biblia Vulgata, which informed St. Thomas Aquinas’s thought, puts the “imago Dei” in the accusative case after the preposition “ad,” rendered, “ad imaginem Dei” or “to the image of God,” presuming movement in either the locomotive or metaphysical sense. Similarly, the Greek Septuagint renders the “εἰκών θεοῦ” instead with the preposition “κατά” meaning “down from” or “according to,” thus “κατ᾽ εἰκόνα θεοῦ,” meaning “from the image of God,” and in this way signifies creation flowing from the image of God, again, as a distinct and necessarily imperfect reality.

Therefore, being created “in the image of God,” “to the image of God,” and “from the image of God,” similar to our baptismal character is neither immutable immunity from the Eternal Law nor license to become anything less than a saint, a holy one of God, fit and fitted in dignity for the wedding feast of Christ and His Bride, the Church, from whom tithing and decimation have been woven into her founding and flourishing.

Although Frodo Baggins loses a tenth of his digits at the end of all things, a wound which never quite heals, our Lord and Savior lost a tenth of his disciples over Good Friday—Judas entirely by his betrayal and Peter by his denial through the three watches of the night versus the twelve hours of the day or one-fifth of Good Friday. Although His five wounds remain, His Twelve are restored to our Easter Joy and Pentecostal ardor.

Furthermore, the humble tithes, the one-tenth sacrifices, of countless Christians, yet countable and accounted by God, has not fettered the faithful into shuddering subservience. It has fostered courage at kitchen tables across time and continents as endless bills surpass the means to pay them. It should be noted once again, that tithing, the tenth due to God, is offered to Him freely for our good and bounteous benefit. When other agents such as the modern state and private usurers demand more than this divine limit, it offends our dignity by that injustice which is injury. “Courage” is a certain possession of heart, from the French “coeur,” and yet it arises in Christians, oddly through a certain rendering of heart, one’s core to God. As the Prince and princes of this world desire and enforce to take beyond this limit established by God and so woven into the story of our redemption, we may very well see in our own days the rendering to Caesar become the rending of. 

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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Previously on The BetterPears Podcast, I promised to address the Eucharist, and so it is perhaps fitting to begin now with two reflections on the Thanksgiving Holiday or Holy Day as it is celebrated in these United States. As a professional educator engaged in a partnership with parents who are themselves the primary educators of their progeny, I have long taught the Justice of Thanksgiving Dinner. However troublesome a student is in the classroom (or parents in collaborations), it is the parental primacy which must either endure or delight in not only the full-grown child but his or her romantic partners throughout Thanksgiving dinners well past my retirement. This is the Justice of Thanksgiving Dinner and an admonition to cultivate children fit for pan and company.

The Injustice of Thanksgiving Dinner is the singular Thanksgiving visit in the life of a student who has gone off to college in the fall and has yet to be humbled by final exams. During this visit, he or she is, perhaps, the most brilliant that he or she has ever been. The Injustice exists between the student’s estimation of his or her intellectual acumen and the reality that one philosophy course does not a philosopher make—Deo gratias.

One contributing culprit in this disjunct between student and stupefaction is the seemingly innocuous word “hylomorphism” which was likely taught in the context of human nature composed of both matter from the Latin “materia” and Greek “ὕλη” and form from the Latin “forma” and Greek “μορφή”. Not just human nature but all material substances, that indeed exist, are composed of structure, that is, form, and stuff, that is, matter. “Structure” is a helpful term for our modern minds suited to think of building blueprints, 3-D printing schematics, and molecular manipulatives. “Stuff” is equally well suited for precisely the same reason why our grammar school teachers persuaded us from ever using the term as a descriptor. Stuff has no apparent structure. The burning bag left at your doorstep is full of stuff until your stomping clarifies the composition or decomposition there-in.

Just to be clear, unlike many a talented or talent-thrift college freshman, even though hylomorphic, that is, material substances are composed of matter and form, I have never properly seen or otherwise sensed one. I have only ever sensed their accidents, their phenomenal appearances. “Phenomenal” is derived from the Greek “φαίνω,” which in its active, passive, and middle voices, modulates the revealing and perceiving epistemological dance of object and subject respectively through the media of accidents. This distinction between accidents in the phenomenal realm and substances in the noumenal realm was all the rage in the early modern period by those such as Immanuel Kant, who among other things sought to end wars of religion by triumphing practical reason informed by the phenomenal over pure reason based on the noumenal but succeeded, instead, in ending insomnia. Kant possessed, no doubt, a first-rate intellect, but the subterranean radices of theoria cannot be extirpated from practica, even with great skill and nuance. For our present purpose, the distinct entitative realities of substances and accidents will be pivotal in our conclusory insights on transubstantiation. Before that, however, we must still consider matter and form, separately and in composition.

A signature feature of our denatured epoch has been the rise of various “Such and Such Lives Matter” organizations. The oxymoronic aspect of these groups and their underlying tribal movements is that life, the embodiment of the soul as the form indeed of the body, is not properly material, is not itself matter. The term “matter,” here, is being employed to signify something of the ponderance or moral weight ascribed to the health and continued existence of a certain people or demographic group. What we may comfortably assume was unbeknownst to such organizations is that the informing of matter, matter opening itself, in some sense under the accidents, to receive such differentiating formation is absolutely necessary for material existence. All matter, materia, and matres, for that matter, exist and come to be as the result of some pre-existing or concurrent structure or formation differentiating and idiomizing what followed. Matter holds, therefore, a history, a continuity between what was, is, and will be.

Form can be easily transmitted, reproduced, replicated. Wood turners the world around have fashioned axes for crosses and crucifixes, yet only the True Cross inserted long ago like a key into the earth once turned or, rather, returned the world to its Master. Despite the various formal combinations and recombinations of the double helix in the nucleus of human cells, there appears only one mitochondrial Eve whose material connections bind our fractured human family more than might often seem. Matter must receive its particular form, and yet a form, perfect and perfecting or defective and destroying, must in turn be given by something beyond what is itself material.

“Where does the form of Sacred Scripture most properly exist?” was a thought experiment pressed upon me by a learned priest in the course of my formal studies. The answer to the priest’s question, after much conjecture by the studentry, was the Mind of God, the Divine Ideas. This Divine Intellect was not merely the collection of the Bible’s form, nor even a collection of all various forms of existing and non-existing beings. No, the Divine Ideas is not a multiplicity as with Plato’s forms but rather the Divine Unity, the Divine Essence, undifferentiated from which all differentiated forms participate. The degree and perfection of this participation certainly varies within the subset of creation, but the divine source of all forms, structures, and natures is likely what Gerald Manley Hopkins meant when he penned, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” All of creation is teeming with God’s creative spark, His speaking forth into existence what once did not exist and would not persist in existence without the endurance, the patience, and, we would discover, suffering of His Word.

Human agency and instrumentation fall within this grand teleological design and Incarnational rescue mission. We are called to further participate in the repentant renewal of the human family and the restoration of all material creation. Matter and form exist, then, in the most foundational sense, not by any action of themselves but as the frontline enactment of God’s “plan of sheer goodness” (CCC, 1). The very scandal of the Incarnation cannot be understated here. As St. Augustine remarks on the Nativity that the uncircumscribed God became contained in swaddling clothes. He who fed from His Blessed Mother’s breast offers His own Body and Blood as wayfarer’s fare.

Now this food for this participatory pilgrimage, this counter-rebellion of the resurrected king is the Eucharist, in which Jesus Christ is truly present, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. Our final task at hand is not to detail the various modes under which the whole of Christ is present in the sacrament but to focus on the “hoc est enim corpus meum” of this sacrament, that is, the transubstantial change resulting in the Real Presence of Christ.

Similar to the doctrine of the Trinity, transubstantiation, as the metaphysical explanation for the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, enjoys the rhetorical advantage of not being the conclusion of focus groups or otherwise an attempt at a syncretic religion. Arius of Antioch’s errant claim of Jesus’s diminutive sonship relative to the Father is certainly more palatable to a Mediterranean world with a polytheistic pantheon. A Triune God revealing Himself as such to the one religious tradition in the ancient world zealously devoted, with good historical reason, to the Oneness of God can only be the result of marketing madmen or a proprium probatum.

In a similar way, transubstantiation will win no prizes for its ease of articulation or conformity to similar analogues. The change of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is not a transformation like an acorn becoming an oak tree with material continuity. It is also not a transmaterialization such as an oak tree becoming petrified over time, swapping lignum for inorganic sediment, while retaining the form of a tree. No, transubstantiation is the change of the entire substance of bread and wine into the respective Body and Blood of Christ by the power of the sacrament, specifically by the power of the words articulated in the sacrament and formally defining it.

Granted, this substantial change occurs under the veil of the accidents, which miraculously remain despite no longer adhering to their proper substances. Further, Christ’s Real Presence in the sacrament is not according to His proper nature but according to a sacramental mode, which is as metaphysically unsatisfying to the intellect as the sacrament is spiritually satisfying to the wayfaring pilgrim. The Eucharist strikes us as a rupture in the very rules of verity. The gift of table fellowship, the bonds of companions and comites is brought to bear, to bend, to break, even, over the concomitant presence of the giver of all gifts.

In choosing to address the rather normative, internal, composite causes of material beings, i.e. matter and form, through a discourse on the extreme case of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, I have sought to upset our collective and selective complacency with sustained existence. Pace Aristotle, no substance except God contains the principle of its own existence. Perhaps the constancy and benevolence of God, at times, lulls us into forgetting this grand theo-drama of salvation history, which cannot be separated from historical creation. God the playwright has now entered the play to mend it from within. He came not to fulfill merely the script or laws and commute a mutinous cast but also, in the finale, to refabricate the wardrobe, the skylights, and the entire earthen stage into a beauteous vision by His vision beatific.

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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Classical metaphysics, distinct from the occult masquerading as metaphysics in many modern bookstores, is, despite being fretful of whatsoever divides philosophy from revealed theology, indebted to the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the distinctions made in the explanation of transubstantiation for the enduring interest in the four causes after the modern philosophical assault on teleology and even free will agency by the scientific materialists born from the divorce of Empiricism and Rationalism. The indebted interest for this classical remnant is not without its cautions as transubstantiation is an extreme circumstance in which not just the form or just the matter but the whole substance of a thing is changed instantaneously. Extreme cases make bad laws (and perhaps brief podcast episodes on metaphysics).

The fruit of this insight however so offered by the Eucharist in particular will be addressed in the next episode on matter and form. At present, the epistemologically prior aspect of agency and instrumental efficient causality in the sacramental order in general will take to the fore and provide an advantageous expository bridge in the causal chain from origin and end, that dual dimension of τέλος and terminus, to the manifestation of what is intended in an external substance, the “ex + facere” of efficient causality, or in more reflexive cases the coming to exist in a different mode or way of being. Whereas teleology asks, “Why anything at all?” efficient causality asks “How does anything come to be—absolutely, in mode and manner, through primary and secondary causes?”

The case of reflexive change betrays the paucity of our mother tongue regarding the broader complexity of efficient causality. English, in its contemporary parlance, masks the middle voice amid propagating the active voice over the passive in all but the academic journals and for the humans who still write in them. The middle voice is a boon and delight for the reflective student of Ancient Greek, expressing either reflexive action upon the subject’s self or in the interest of the subject, for example, when ordering servants to perform a task benefiting the master.

Thus creation, all contingent being, is properly indicated in the middle voice insofar as it occurs within God’s plan of sheer goodness (CCC, 1; see also “Τέλος Terminus”) and terminates in His glory when the order of His creation most perfectly participates in His Divine Life and Will. Perhaps the clearest example of this is in the middle voice verbal form ἐγένετο in John 1:14, “ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο,” often translated in English as “the Word became flesh.” The Anglophonic intellect correspondingly perceives the Incarnation as a rather passive act. The Incarnation, however, is a miraculous and therefore Divine Act performed by the very Eternal Word assuming our human nature through the consent and, by extension, agency of Mary, who further nourished and succored her Savior with her very body, while even still it would be His Body and Blood which would nourish her in the Eucharist. Marvelous Marian middles indeed.

Returning to the sacraments, Catholics understand them to be visible signs instituted by Christ which bestow grace. The metaphysical problem that had arisen by the 13th Century was the principle rooted in the teachings of St. Augustine that only God causes grace. How then are the sacraments, created signs distinct from God, able to bestow grace? The prevailing theory at that time, as a young friar Thomas from Aquino was rising through the ranks of the University of Paris, was termed dispositive causality and held that the minister of each sacrament merely disposed matter, that is, the sacramental signs to which God in a distinct and separate act bestowed sacramental grace upon the sacrament’s recipient.

Human conception stands as the standard metaphysical precedent for dispositive causality, in that the material contribution of the father and mother toward the begetting of offspring merely disposes or puts in place conjoined gametes which receive the newly created human soul infused by God alone and immediately either at what is now known to be conception or what was previously understood as the quickening. Without the disposition of matter by the parents, there was no natural context for the infusion of a new human soul into a body. Similarly with sacramental dispositive causality, without the enactment of sacramental signs the Divine Act of bestowing sacramental grace would be absent.

The sacraments in this paradigm of dispositive causality uphold St. Augustine’s principle that only God bestows grace, but leaves the sacramental signs as merely concurrent symbols in the natural world in a way superfluous to the underlying supernatural giving of grace and other effects of the sacraments despite some thinkers emphasizing more the necessity of such disposition.

At some point after St. Thomas completed his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and before his completion of the famously incomplete third part of his Summa Theologiae, he had a profound reflection on the account of Christ’s miracles in the Gospels, in particular, Jesus’ healing of the man born blind in John’s Gospel, “As he said this, he spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle and anointed the man’s eyes with the clay, saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Silo′am’ (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing” (Jn. 9:6–7). As God, Jesus is the author of all that is and could have healed the blindness as a direct act of His Divine Will.

This miraculous healing, however, occurs both through the Incarnation, the human nature of Christ and the mundane mundum mixed with His saliva. The poet’s task is to make every word tell. The Poet of All Poesis tells in both words and deeds (cf. Dei Verbum, 2). What St. Thomas saw in this miracle became the basis of his sacramental system of instrumental efficient causality which exists not as some specialized branch of theology but connects all Sacred Scripture and Doctrine to the purpose of God’s plan of sheer goodness—the great drama of our lives and all living beings.

Our focus at present, however, is the manifestation of an intended end, τέλος, from the intellect of the one intending to reality external to the intender. In the case of the sacraments, how does God make His grace, a certain participation in His Divine Life, present in the souls of those following him? Through the sacraments, God as principal efficient cause works through the human nature of Christ, hypostatically united to the Second Person of the Trinity, as a united instrumental efficient cause and furthermore, through the particular sacramental signs, such as bread, wine, water, oil, or the human minister as separate instrumental efficient causes to bestow the grace of a particular sacrament on its recipient.

Unlike dispositive efficient causality, St. Thomas’s mature teaching on sacramental instrumental efficient causality holds that the divine authority to bestow grace works through created realities as signifying and ministerial instruments to bring about the desired end of God as principal cause, both final and efficient. The point, the purpose, the beating heart of this distinction is that all existence is either the Creator or a creature of the Creator. Whatever rebellion each member of the human family has fomented against God the Creator, that defect in us could have been immediately restored by divine fiat instead of “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” (Luke 1:38). The word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), so that we might come ourselves to know and abide in Him in this life and the life to come. Not only this, but we through our sacramental initiation are deputed to the service of receiving and bestowing grace (cf. St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 63, a. 2). We are not merely creatures, recipients of God’s goodness, but also instruments of His grace, His goodness, His eucatastrophic gladness.

Jason Fugikawa, Ph.D.

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