mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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Your search for canticle returned 5 posts.
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Hildegard of Bingen - O tu suavissima virga

Sydney’s child Vera was born on September 17, and because I’m fond of coincidence -though not credulous about its purported meaning, numerological or astrological or otherwise- I was eager to learn what resonances that date might have.

As it happens, it is the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen, a venerated and polymathic mystic, composer, scholar, artist, and theologian who died in 1179. Particularly for a woman in the Catholic church of the 12th century but indeed by all standards, her life was remarkable.

Hildegard in the Liber Scivias.

Among other distinctions, she is the earliest known composer whose music we possess, making her a mythical figure in the classical canon which would soon exclude women. In addition we have much of her writing, an invented language (possibly the first constructed language, alphabet below), illustrations, and stories of her spiritual intensity and strong will.

Happy, Raynor?

I first learned of Hildegard of Bingen in a class I took on Julian of Norwich, the 15th century English anchoress and mystic. For many Christian women of the Catholic or Anglican churches, they are among the most beloved figures, alongside Saint Teresa of Avila and Mary. In her life, Hildegard corresponded with popes and men like Suger, considered by many the main source of the Gothic style in architecture; she is even listed in the Roman Martyrology, the 16th century list of Catholic saints published by the Church, although she has not been officially canonized in the current process.

“Universal Man” illumination from the Liber Divinorum Operum.

While I share a birthday with Joseph Goebbels, Vera’s birthday is intertwined with Hildegard, whose music I listen to on occasion and who wrote that

“Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.”

Happy birthday, Vera, and congratulations, Syd and Q!

Tags: hildegard of bingen music religion
“By her own request there will be no funeral, no service, no one is invited, and she will be cremated, probably tomorrow. Neither condolences nor floral offerings (or any other kind) will be accepted. If you want to do a good deed, kiss an enemy. She hasn’t gone anywhere. She ‘is that which you see before you; begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.’”
Walter Miller Jr., author of A Canticle for Leibowitz (each discussed previously), announcing the death of his wife of “fifty years, two months, and five days.” He attributed the quote at the end to the Chinese Zen Buddhist Huang-Po.
The ruins of the oldest monastery in the Western world, destroyed by allied bombing during the Battle of Monte Cassino. The novelist Walter Miller, who participated in the destruction of the abbey where St. Benedict first organized monastic life in 524 CE, despaired for the rest of his life over our tendency to grind into dust all that we cherish with our periodic wars and our ever-advancing technology. In addition to writing the remarkable A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller practiced Catholicism for many years, and his novel proposes that the role of religion is to preserve the human -the individual- from the indifferent tyranny of history, politics, and “just” wars. That religion is often part of history, politics, and wars is a problem of its practitioners. Miller opposed, then committed, suicide: another illustration of the tensions between belief and practice, tragic and archetypal. Whether wars are just or not is an unanswerable question; every war is just to some participants, unjust to others, and a catastrophe for all, whether they know it or not. This is neither to say that no wars should be fought or that all wars are equally justifiable; it is merely a fact that all humans believe in their moral code, will kill for it even, and do not care in the inevitable conflicts about the opposing moral codes of their enemies (which they will accuse of incoherence, disingenuousness, or brutality but which are no less felt). Everyone can be given a hypothetical to which they will answer: “Yes, kill, kill!” All there is to say about war is that we are sorry that history and circumstance and the deeds of the dead place us in opposition to one another, that our memories of slaughtered kin compel us to seek revenge, that it is impossible to establish the point at which the acts of entities like armies and governments can be repaid on individuals, that this world has innumerable conflicts without solutions and that history says only power resolves these by annihilating disagreement, and that our nature ensures all this more or less in perpetuity. The destruction of the abbey turned out to have been a mistake, an unnecessary poetic flourish to a forgotten part of World War II. As with most mistakes, it tells more about us than the well-executed parts of our hideous plans: While the original manuscripts and rare artifacts were safely removed from the site, there were several sick and bed-ridden monks and nuns who remained in the monastery. Several of the healthier nuns refused to leave the bedsides of the sick unless they too could be removed. After very limited, unsuccessful attempts by German officers to have the healthier nuns evacuate, German forces retreated down the north side of the mountain late on May 11, leaving the ill nuns in the complex. Several Catholic German soldiers protested this order, but it was ironically a 36-year old Lutheran Obergefreiter of the German 305th Infantry Division, 305th Artillery Regiment who defied the order to abandon the nuns. Eugen Schmid of Stuttgart, a veteran of the Battle of Stalingrad who was one of the few surviving members of the 305th to return to action, told his superior officers that he could not in good conscience let the ill nuns succumb to bombing. German officers refused to give Schmid any motorized equipment or personnel assistance, telling him that he would undertake the operation solo and at his own risk. At around 0100 on May 12, Schmid borrowed a rickety, wooden cart and horse from a nearby farmer and defiantly organized a squad of mostly privates to accompany him to the monastery. Once at the top, Schmid pleaded with the nuns to come, telling them that he brought a cart to evacuate the ill monks and nuns, along with each of the attending nuns. Schmid and his team carried the ill nuns and monks to the cart. They slowly started down the mountain, reaching the north side of Monte Cassino by around 0700 on May 12. Schmid was given no decorations by German authorities for his daring rescue, but received a centuries-old, gold medal bearing the likeness of St. Benedict from the Mother Superior of Monte Cassino, who placed the medal around his neck and said a short prayer with him and his volunteers. She wished for them health and safety, and that they each return home with God’s will and with the praise and thanks of each of the nuns and brothers of Monte Cassino. There were doubtless other acts of heroism, of decency across national, ethnic, and linguistic lines, and of sacrifice beyond that compelled by hatred and strife. There was also a bear…

The ruins of the oldest monastery in the Western world, destroyed by allied bombing during the Battle of Monte Cassino.

The novelist Walter Miller, who participated in the destruction of the abbey where St. Benedict first organized monastic life in 524 CE, despaired for the rest of his life over our tendency to grind into dust all that we cherish with our periodic wars and our ever-advancing technology. In addition to writing the remarkable A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller practiced Catholicism for many years, and his novel proposes that the role of religion is to preserve the human -the individual- from the indifferent tyranny of history, politics, and “just” wars. That religion is often part of history, politics, and wars is a problem of its practitioners. Miller opposed, then committed, suicide: another illustration of the tensions between belief and practice, tragic and archetypal.

Whether wars are just or not is an unanswerable question; every war is just to some participants, unjust to others, and a catastrophe for all, whether they know it or not. This is neither to say that no wars should be fought or that all wars are equally justifiable; it is merely a fact that all humans believe in their moral code, will kill for it even, and do not care in the inevitable conflicts about the opposing moral codes of their enemies (which they will accuse of incoherence, disingenuousness, or brutality but which are no less felt). Everyone can be given a hypothetical to which they will answer: “Yes, kill, kill!”

All there is to say about war is that we are sorry that history and circumstance and the deeds of the dead place us in opposition to one another, that our memories of slaughtered kin compel us to seek revenge, that it is impossible to establish the point at which the acts of entities like armies and governments can be repaid on individuals, that this world has innumerable conflicts without solutions and that history says only power resolves these by annihilating disagreement, and that our nature ensures all this more or less in perpetuity.

The destruction of the abbey turned out to have been a mistake, an unnecessary poetic flourish to a forgotten part of World War II. As with most mistakes, it tells more about us than the well-executed parts of our hideous plans:

While the original manuscripts and rare artifacts were safely removed from the site, there were several sick and bed-ridden monks and nuns who remained in the monastery. Several of the healthier nuns refused to leave the bedsides of the sick unless they too could be removed. After very limited, unsuccessful attempts by German officers to have the healthier nuns evacuate, German forces retreated down the north side of the mountain late on May 11, leaving the ill nuns in the complex. Several Catholic German soldiers protested this order, but it was ironically a 36-year old Lutheran Obergefreiter of the German 305th Infantry Division, 305th Artillery Regiment who defied the order to abandon the nuns. Eugen Schmid of Stuttgart, a veteran of the Battle of Stalingrad who was one of the few surviving members of the 305th to return to action, told his superior officers that he could not in good conscience let the ill nuns succumb to bombing. German officers refused to give Schmid any motorized equipment or personnel assistance, telling him that he would undertake the operation solo and at his own risk. At around 0100 on May 12, Schmid borrowed a rickety, wooden cart and horse from a nearby farmer and defiantly organized a squad of mostly privates to accompany him to the monastery. Once at the top, Schmid pleaded with the nuns to come, telling them that he brought a cart to evacuate the ill monks and nuns, along with each of the attending nuns. Schmid and his team carried the ill nuns and monks to the cart. They slowly started down the mountain, reaching the north side of Monte Cassino by around 0700 on May 12. Schmid was given no decorations by German authorities for his daring rescue, but received a centuries-old, gold medal bearing the likeness of St. Benedict from the Mother Superior of Monte Cassino, who placed the medal around his neck and said a short prayer with him and his volunteers. She wished for them health and safety, and that they each return home with God’s will and with the praise and thanks of each of the nuns and brothers of Monte Cassino.

There were doubtless other acts of heroism, of decency across national, ethnic, and linguistic lines, and of sacrifice beyond that compelled by hatred and strife. There was also a bear…

Tags: history morality politics war religion

(This relevant part of the above clip -a cartoon about how to survive a nuclear attack- is about 5:20 into it).

Frank loaned me the absolutely amazing The Atomic Cafe, a movie which -because a nuclear holocaust did not come to pass in the Cold War- veers wildly from dark comedy to terrible tragedy. Like any movie or novel worth a damn, it resists synopsis or encapsulation, and I’m loathe to post a clip at all because no ten-minute segment can convey how skillfully assembled, how humorous, how frightening, or how sad the total work is.

However, reading A Canticle for Leibowtiz and now revisiting Solzhenitsyn’s work has brought the Cold War to mind, and not merely in a historical sense. Like any historical situation, the Cold War tells us as much about the future and about our nature as it does about the past.

The filmmakers, while obviously capable of seeing the comedy in profiteers outfitting tract homes with dubiously useful fallout shelters and the ubiquitous cartoons advising children and soldiers what to do if they should suddenly see the flash of an atomic blast, also show the serious and moral preoccupations of the leaders of the US and the USSR, and the effects that their decisions had on the national psyche.

I highly recommend it; it’s both funny and quite sobering. The entirety of the film can be viewed on YouTube, although this leaves much to be desired; here is the complete film in segments.

Some other good excerpts are here and here, but I’d recommend watching it seriously on DVD.

Tags: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I don’t generally recommend books; there are far too many to recommend, and what can one say about a wonderful book that the book itself doesn’t say better anyway (I don’t mean to disparage criticism or exegesis, which can be wonderful; perhaps I just know my limits). I thought I’d mention, however, that I really and truly loved A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller Jr. (who participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino), and would recommend it unreservedly; of course, many do already: it won a Hugo Award and was praised by Walker Percy and CS Lewis. Some say that it’s lost resonance now that the world no longer waits, as it did daily when the book was published in 1960, for complete nuclear annihilation. Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but I see nothing in humanity to suggest that we’ve done more than defer that potentiality. Indeed, I’m often amazed at how quickly the world has come to believe that the ~25,000 nuclear warheads presently in existence will simply never be used, that somehow humanity’s penchant for self-immolation is no longer extant. Our world reminds me, in some ways, of the Vienna described by Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities: before World War I, obsessed with crime and entertainment, it had no idea it was to hurl itself into a continental conflagration that would itself lead quickly to an even greater paroxysm of violence. When have our weapons gone unused indefinitely?  And who can look at the nations of the world today and not think that another world war, fought in part by those without fear of nuclear armageddon, awaits? Anyway: it was an enormously affecting work in its treatment of the state and religion, of knowledge and purpose, of history and power, and it was ludicrously engaging as well.

I don’t generally recommend books; there are far too many to recommend, and what can one say about a wonderful book that the book itself doesn’t say better anyway (I don’t mean to disparage criticism or exegesis, which can be wonderful; perhaps I just know my limits).

I thought I’d mention, however, that I really and truly loved A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller Jr. (who participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino), and would recommend it unreservedly; of course, many do already: it won a Hugo Award and was praised by Walker Percy and CS Lewis.

Some say that it’s lost resonance now that the world no longer waits, as it did daily when the book was published in 1960, for complete nuclear annihilation. Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but I see nothing in humanity to suggest that we’ve done more than defer that potentiality.

Indeed, I’m often amazed at how quickly the world has come to believe that the ~25,000 nuclear warheads presently in existence will simply never be used, that somehow humanity’s penchant for self-immolation is no longer extant. Our world reminds me, in some ways, of the Vienna described by Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities: before World War I, obsessed with crime and entertainment, it had no idea it was to hurl itself into a continental conflagration that would itself lead quickly to an even greater paroxysm of violence.

When have our weapons gone unused indefinitely?  And who can look at the nations of the world today and not think that another world war, fought in part by those without fear of nuclear armageddon, awaits?

Anyway: it was an enormously affecting work in its treatment of the state and religion, of knowledge and purpose, of history and power, and it was ludicrously engaging as well.

Tags: literature religion walter m miller walker percy