Hopefully the title of this site at least…well…intimates.  By this I mean that whatever contributions may herein follow, I suffer no illusion that I and others are doing anything but struggling.  But for what are we struggling?  To effect a turning, a metanoia.   To avert our gaze from what, in our heart of hearts, we know to be mere shadows, shadows nowadays lengthening and darkening, shadows nowadays more and more disorienting.

For the moment, though – and striking a less ominous note – I wish to introduce or rather re-introduce a set of writings now over 20 years old.  It is a set of writings the limited-publication of which once set the present author’s world on end.  Indeed it shattered that world.  Yet I mention this not to indulge memories of battles won and more often lost but rather to indicate something else:  acquaintance with these writings will place the reader in an unpleasant if not untenable situation.  Desire it or not, consideration of these writings – collectively known as The Book of Leo – will compel the careful reader to render a Choice.

Hence Viewer Discretion is Advised.

At the top of this blog, on the horizontal bar thereof, you will find individual tabs denoting various sections of The Book of Leo.  Click on any of these and you will be taken to the designated chapter.  Additional chapters will follow as time allows (ours is a re-typing-in-progress).  It should be noted, furthermore, that The Book was written in both passion and haste.  In fact it was completed in a mere two weeks.  In consequence, and insofar as all was composed in an as-it-were white heat, its writing is remarkably free of studied ambiguity and scholarly cant.  Indeed, quite the contrary. Instead you will find a work intentionally provacative, and yet one which, for the most part, is remarkably clear, insistent, short and to the point.  Lastly – and like it or not – you will also find its is an argument uncompromising in its demand that one get off the fence.

After its limited publication and distribution, The Book was immediately confiscated from students on campus.  I know.  Crazy.  But this was the reaction not of the College as such but of individuals acting outside their proper authority.  Still, in truth the confiscation was somewhat justified.  After all The Book is indeed more dangerous than, say, Machiavelli’s Prince or Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Nietzsche’s  Zarathustra – all of which works, by the way, continue to form part of the curriculum at the College.  And The Book is more dangerous because it calls into question the very meaning of the Human and the final Home thereof.  It is more dangerous because – let’s face it – it breaths a genuine spiritus contra mundum.  And once a man has contracted this particular spirit or dis-ease, there is no telling what he will do.  He might go so far as  to look into the eyes of the present world – with all of its prevailing conventions, platitudes and attitudes – and calmly say, No.  Worse yet, he might break out into uncontrollable laughter at the seemingly never-ending parade of intellectual and moral grotesqueries.

And this is unacceptable, right?

For those who would enjoy a little background by way of the author’s personal rumination, you may want to peruse Parts II and III of this post.  They offer an admittedly impressionistic if not rambling recitation of how The Book came to be, as well as a few observations on the meaning of the entire fiasco.  As such these parts possess scant interest for those investigating larger questions regarding political legitimacy and psychological integrity.  Nevertheless I offer this recitation for those who might have been present on campus twenty-some years ago (a refresher course); or for those who wish to hear another side of this bizarre story; or for those who have heard of this tale through the grapevine and might be interested in a first-hand (albeit admittedly subjective) account.  I offer it also – and perhaps most importantly – as a way of clearing the head and thereby allowing for greater precision of thought going forward.

This being the case, feel free to ignore Parts II and III below and go directly to various chapters of The Book of Leo above.

Simply Click and Scream.

Background

A little over 20 years ago some acquaintances of mine – I was then teaching at a small Catholic college – witnessed a long-tenured professor publicly pervert the words of a long-deceased Pontiff.  This perversion – these individuals and I were convinced – amounted to nothing less than a knowing and bald-faced lie.  To make matters worse, the lie concerned a question architectonic.   More precisely it concerned a question of allegiance to what may be called the American Regime.  This question of allegiance in turn fomented further queries about how this regime stood, both principially and practically, to the demands of the Catholic Faith.

Of course distortion of the Catholic Faith is nothing new.  It happens all the time and with numbing regularity.  In fact nowadays it usually elicits little more than a yawn, at least from most of us.

But that time on that campus was unlike our own time on our own turf.  And the people of whom I write were not like most of us.  For want of a more apt phrase, they did not entirely fit in.  And this “ill-fittedness”, this “mis-fittedness”, constituted for them a precious albeit oftentimes painful grace.

It was a grace because it had prepared them for what Hilaire Belloc had foreseen almost a century prior:  an Era Terribilis and fast approaching, one in fact now upon us.  It is an era threatening the faculty of reason itself.  It is therefore an era incrementally laying waste the integrity of the human and the veracity of self-understanding.  As it progresses it overwhelms the majority of individuals.  Through indifference or fear they succumb to its regnant cultural, political and theological soma.  Knowingly or not, they enter a compact wherein all that is required of them is psycho-spiritual suicide.

Only the socially marginalized if not legally criminalized stand a chance.

The chance of which I speak is a chance to remain human.  It is a chance to remain a Wayfarer.  It is a chance to insist, if only to oneself, that the human cannot truly be at peace with anything this world has to offer – even free tickets to Disneyland.

But seeing and understanding this – Belloc argued – requires antecedent alienation.  It requires alienation from the trinket-offerings of the terrestrial.  It requires alienation from the lure of the tired myth of self-sufficiency on the one hand, and from the false security of murderous collectivism on the other.  It requires alienation from the back-slapping and glad-handing of Elliot’s Hollow Men, “their heads filled with straw.”

Enter the aforementioned socially marginalized and legally criminalized.  Only they, generally speaking, are truly alienated.  For whatever reasons – and reasons are Legion – they know it is all a sham.  They intuit how the trinkets, myths, Walmart smiley-faces, muzak-ed airwaves, talking heads gigantic on television screens, faceless voices yammering through radios and earplugs, financial and political elites oozing smug self-satisfaction, their academic serfs, bought and paid for, snidely chastising serious interlocutors…ad hominem after ad hominem after ad hominem…non mea culpa, non mea culpa, non mea maxima culpa…paraplegics pleading with cops breaking bones, doctors snuffing the innocent and the incurable and the insane, mothers rebuked for feeding, mothers rebuked for being mothers, millions educated in monstrosities, doctorates of vanity…herds of independent thinkers, mobs of free-thinkers all freely thinking alike, judgments against judging, murder as mercy, truth termed tyranny, good called evil, evil good, ideologies of nothingness, systems of non sequiturs, mantras manufacturing madness… whitened teeth, stretched skin, hair plugs, wardrobe malfunctions…mindless celebrations of mindless celebrities, multitudes living vicariously in veneration of vacuous homunculi… all and more, all and much much more, combine tsunami-like to overwhelm, to inundate, to sicken all sense and sensibility.

Forget questions of truth and goodness.  The aesthetics alone nauseate.

In this experience of revulsion certain men find themselves backing toward the exits.  In time they find themselves standing on the edge of the crowd.  Eventually they choose, under some strange if not other-worldly compulsion, to turn around, to present their backs, to walk away, to prefer solitude to insanity.

For many such individuals this isolation amidst the madding crowd intensifies.  It agonizes.  Yet some-such men inchoately believe it necessary.  Some sense it is required for Seeing.  Believe it is precondition and prelude for Seeing More.  Perceive they are in a desert.  Yet they know also that in a desert they see further than anywhere else.  And in consequence they conclude, somehow, some way, that all this is but sine qua non for the long-sought Lightning Strike.

Do not mistake:  the people of whom I speak sensed all the above.  They were alienated.  They were loners.  But they were also intellectually brilliant.  As a group if not individually I have known none more gifted.  But they also differed from their peers in another respect, one utterly unique.

Their uniqueness derived from an understanding that was not merely notional and book-learned but increasingly real and life-lived.  These colleagues did not analyze, say, the notion of righteous indignation.  They actually possessed it.  They did not scrutinize aspects of the sensus fidei.  They lived them.  They had within them no sense of compromise regarding that which makes us human.  I suspect some would read the story of the Rich Young Man and shake their heads.  “What was he thinking?” they must have sighed.

Stated otherwise:  these were men interiorly On Fire.

Men of this temper are not anything if not impulsive.  And persevering.  And should occasion warrant, angry.  Having witnessed what they judged a lying attack on Eternal Truth itself, these men were possessed by all the above.  Hence they were hankering for a fight.

So was I.

Beginning of the End

I remember the day was unseasonably cold.  An early spring rain, long and heavy, had been drumming for hours on the galvanized steel roof of my office trailer.  Decades earlier the college had rented this trailer as temporary housing for the younger faculty.  It was now something they had apparently forgotten about.  It was therefore something permanent by default – at least until reality had its way and the creaking edifice finally fell apart.

This office trailer was something into which, four years earlier, delivery people had unceremoniously plopped me and my boxes of coffee-stained books.  But today all that was unremembered.  Today repeated blasts of wind, screeching, were driving a torrential downpour horizontally.  It was raining sideways.  Sitting quietly in my desk chair, listening to the storm hammer the trailer – itself swaying slightly – and looking through the yellowed pane of the window into the grey flood beyond, I glimpsed blurred outlines of hundred-year-old oak trees blasted and bent a few yards distant.  All was shadow and froth.  And the rain was seeping through the foam insulation that clung, more or less, to the aluminum-framed window through which I peered.

There was a musty smell in the office.  The cheap faux wood paneling beneath the window was soaked and dripping.  On the floor this constant drip-drip-drip had formed a puddle of dirty water.  For now this shallow pool was the size of a dinner plate.  But it was growing imperceptibly.  Every few minutes I glanced over to see how far it had progressed toward the middle of the floor.  In my imagination I saw it – some mutant Biologic from a B-horror movie – taking possession of the nondescript linoleum.  If one could ever be grateful to something inanimate, I hypothesized, I would be obliged every day to say Thank You to this tar and polycarbonate covering.  I knew the ancient linoleum – with its remarkable tensile strength – served day after day a thankless task.  I knew it alone kept me and my rare guests from plunging through the spongy chip-board of the sub-flooring.  It alone saved  innocents the embarrassment of lying prostrate in the mud of the crawl space below, cursing under breath while wiping spider webs from eyes and clawing ill-smelling wood chips from hair.

I leaned back and lit a cigarette. I inhaled deeply and held it.  This recurring and very un-PC ritual was not undertaken simply to satisfy an ever-present nicotine craving – although it did do so marvelously well.  But I had also discovered how the sweet smelling swirl of smoke, smoke rising hypnotically from the glowing tip of the Winston, hid a barely perceptible whiff of mold.  This dankness was always present during the rainy season and it emanated – among other places – from the wall beneath the window.  I could see part of the mold every day.  Every day its shadow peered out on reconnaissance from the edges of the quarter-round trim.  I suspected it was also overhead.  Should someone have offered to bet otherwise – and nobody ever did – I immediately would have slapped down a ten-spot.  As a fellow who had grown up in the construction industry and had put himself through college and graduate school with the skills learned therein, I had had enough experience to know the stuff was up there.  It was hiding atop water-stained acoustical tiles, tiles hanging limp within the metal brackets of the sagging false ceiling.

But while aware of all of this, I was not dwelling on it.  My mind was entirely elsewhere.  I was wondering how I was going to feed my family in the upcoming year.

“Why Don’t You Just Leave the Country?!”

It was a question a student had not so much asked as shouted.  It had been directed towards myself.  It had been posed a week earlier in the Commons Room – an ugly cafeteria setting and one, on that particular day, crowded – and it was intended to be overheard by everyone present.  It was.

The student was red in the face; and his face, contorted, was only a few inches from my own.  That a student dared address a faculty member thus – on any campus, really – shows how that faculty member’s days are numbered.  It shows the word is out and the gig is up.  It shows how faculty members have broken protocol, have let intra-faculty disputes overflow into the student population.  In this instance it also meant the lines of battle that had preoccupied the teaching staff were now crowded with members of the student body itself.  The trenches were filling up.  Ammo boxes were being passed along.  Listen carefully and you can hear mags slamming into receivers and bolts shoving cartridges into the breech.  And you just know all safeties are Off.

The entire college was in an uproar.  The entire college was now – gasp! – “polarized.”  And it was mostly my fault.

In retrospect I confess this was not my intention.  But in retrospect I also confess that, well, at least I accomplished something while there.

This something was to raise a simple question:  Is the American Regime conducive to human happiness?

Note all the questions lurking behind or within this original:  What is the American Regime?  What is meant by the word conducive?  What is happiness?  What is the meaning of the human?  Is there an ultimate goal or telos of the human?

On more than one occasion a certain fellow by the name of Aristotle had insisted that we begin our query for truth by seeking definitions.  He had learned this, presumably,via stories about his philosophical grandfather, Socrates.  And for his part Socrates had learned – the hard way – that the most dangerous question to ask is one beginning with the words, Ti esti…What is…? 

To ask “what is?” is to ask for a definition.  To ask for a definition is often to ask for a re-definition.  To ask for a re-definition is to ask for reflection, for self-criticism, for questioning long-accepted truisms.  But to question long-accepted truisms – e.g., “America’s the best damn’d country in the hist’ry of the whole damn’d wooooorld!” – is to question their truthfulness.

In this case I might just as well have asked if our national mother were an intoxicated libertine – to put it euphemistically.

But some are compelled to ask – no merit to themselves – even if they know the FedEx truck is due on campus later that day with the monthly shipment of hemlock.

“So Mac, I read The Book.  What the hell’s the problem?”

The question crackled at me through a telephone that had a bad connection.  The voice was deep, gravelly, aged and that of a former United States marine who had served his country honorably in WWII.  It was also the voice of the retired first president and co-founder of the most esteemed Catholic Great Books college in the United States – or in the world, for that matter.  It was the voice of the now deceased Dr. Ron MacArthur.

After over twenty years I still remember how the sound of his voice and the matter-of-fact approach to life it exuded (he once calmly accused an entire class of intellectual masturbation and then walked out) led me almost always to smile if not guffaw.  With Ron there was no room for pretense.  When you found yourself with this towering figure (around 6′ 5″), one sporting a disheveled shock of thick silver-white hair, itself crowning a massive and granite-like visage (think Michelangelo’sMoses, albeit much thinner, more haggard, and with a pronounced cast in the left eye), you were compelled to be yourself.  Anything other, any false show, carried a burden of shame.  With him you sensed something more dear than human genius (almost always over-rated).  You sensed a bulwark of Integrity.

One sign of this integrity was Ron’s laughter.  It was not that it was heart-felt and belly-deep, although it always was.  It was not that it was uninhibited by self-consciousness, although it always was that as well.  It was that it was most heart-felt and deep and uninhibited when directed at himself alone, at his own foibles and comic miscues, all endearing.

Another sign of his integrity – more sobering – revealed itself in a private moment between ourselves.  As a new teacher I had found myself the object of a theo-philosophical power struggle.  Certain faculty members with Modernist tendencies had approached me for the sake of co-opting me.  At the time I confess I knew little of co-optation and still less about Modernism.  In truth I was vain and flattered by the attention.  I was also young and wet behind the ears and culpably naive.  Moreover my training had been focused on political philosophy, not theology.   And while I now know how Marxism contributes much to the Modernist mindset, it is not Modernism as such.  Hence Modernism had not yet entered my intellectual lexicon.

However those seeking my co-optation underestimated me in one crucial respect:  they had no idea of how stupid I was.  By this I mean I was also dumb, as in mostly silent.  In their presence I indulged this silence as an expression of polite discomfort.  In other words I was quiet because overawed and confused.  But my interlocutors apparently mistook silence as signifying consent.  Hence they spoke their minds readily and openly.  Perhaps they were unconsciously recalling the old legal maxim, Qui tacet consentire.  Whatever the case, in my naivete and confusion I subsequently asked others what they thought about Dr. X’s or Dr. Y’s sentiments.  At the time I was seeking clarification.  In my obtuseness I had no idea I was mindlessly kicking dirt off a buried IED.  But I was.

Eventually Ron heard of this.  He approached me one day on the park-like expanse of the college campus.  We were between classes.  It was afternoon, and a soft light lent the grasses and trees a mesmerizing glow.  We found ourselves ambling amongst the stuccoed buildings, and we were alone.  He stopped and turned.  Without preamble – Ron always got to the point – he asked if Dr. X had to me expressed such-and-such views.  (By this time I had succeeded in scrambling up a steep theological learning curve, and I now knew how such views contradicted the founding principles of the College.  They also contradicted the meaning of the Faith Itself.)  I told him Yes.  Ron, a man who had long before befriended Dr. X and and had helped nurture his career, fell silent.  Presently his eyes began glistening.  And then, with a slight nod of acknowledgment and without another word, he turned and walked slowly away.

He was not angry.  But in this exchange I glimpsed a profound sorrow.  It is the kind accompanying realization that one’s friend is not one’s friend at all but something quite the opposite.

Some of Ron’s peers – very few, but some – did not respect him intellectually.  In their estimation he was too “blunt,” too “coarse,” too lacking in “notional refinement.”  To my mind the reverse was the case.  Ron MacArthur was not blunt but bold.  He was not coarse but common-sensical.  And if he lacked notional refinement – whateverthat means – I always saw such locutions as defensive responses to Ron’s manliness.  His was a manliness which towered, like his own physical being, above the “merely male” condition of all Modernists.  His was a manliness impatient with whining, impatient with equivocation, impatient with prevarication, impatient with bullshit.

Of course use of such a word is verboten in the world of Academe.  Were the case otherwise, too much might be revealed too quickly; too many sophisms and false world views stripped of all credibility; too many students freed from illusion and un-enrolling from their respective pseudo-academies; and in consequence of all the above, too many hordes of panic-stricken educational bureaucrats out on the street, humbled and forced actually to work for a living.

When alone and relaxed with Ron, though, on more than one occasion I found myself involuntarily reverting to original vulgar form.  (You can take the man out of the rock quarry but you can’t take the rock quarry out of the man.)  Hence in moments of anger I would sometimes let slip this verbal dog of war – and there would be no whistling it back.  Invariably the brute escaped while I ranted about Marxists or Modernists or American Bishops.  On one particular occasion I followed the word bullshit with insistence that “the bishops have no balls.”  I then caught myself, blushed, and stammered an immediate apology.  For his part Ron arched his eyebrows, leaned forward, and then stared silently at me in a mock attitude of genteel shock.  And then, having watched me squirm for what he considered long enough, he burst into laughter.  He then noted how the three aforementioned categories (Marxists, Modernists, American Bishops) were not exclusive to each other but oftentimes completely coincided.  “Oh, and you’re right,” he added, relaxing back into his chair.  “The bishops have no balls.”

This was part of what I loved about the man.  He could shepherd a class through the obscurities of a medieval text, perhaps pausing to parse the Latin or to ask a probing question and yet…and yet never lose sight of himself or the nature of his own times.  And he never fell prey to the old academic trap.

This is the trap wherein the teacher forgets first principles.  He neglects the law of non-contradiction.  He ignores the law of identity.  He exiles the law of excluded middle.  In the absence of such steady friends he begins to fill the void by obsessing over the academic robes and conventions of an English country squire.  In time he acquires the lisp and lolling gait of of a man aspiring to ape upper-class charm and thereby put all guests at ease.  Above all he loves never-ending dialogue, for this is the best way to keep the party going and to bury the truth.  He detests open contradiction of any kind inasmuch as contradiction is the road to clarity and thus to The Burden.  And the nature of this Burden?  The responsibility of choosing between good and evil – and all the dangers attending such a choice.  Hence to the contemporary academic the only intolerable position is one positing some things as intolerable – and this he will not tolerate.

At length, and governed as he is by love of approval and fear of unpleasantness,  the modern academic ends his days affecting the manners of an old caretaker of a three-star English Bed and Breakfast.  (You know the type of tourist trap:  drafty old castles made barely livable via modern plumbing, hideous shag carpeting, and flat-screen TVs offering BBC propaganda and late night porn.)  As proprietor of such, the modern academic reigns supreme in a mansion built long ago.  And yet when asked about the origins of the impressive edifice, his memory appears to fail.  For the life of him he cannot recall how his mansion was in truth built with philosophic stones and intellectual wealth stolen.  And all was stolen from a nearby and now utterly destroyed Catholic monastery.

Stated otherwise:  the modern (or post-modern) academic is neglectful of the past and solicitous of the present.  He neglects  the past because he dreads confronting an Eternal Law.  He is solicitous of the present because he fears forfeiting a Temporal Position.  Never will he consider how honorable if not holy predecessors have been killed and their properties confiscated – not merely figuratively but also factually – to his own benefit.  Should someone dare to point this out to him, he will deny it.  He will not admit such thievery ever occurred.  He will not confess such men ever lived.  And he will never acknowledge the existence of such men lest the principles animating them be themselves remember’d and, in the harsh glare of their searching Light, his own works and person be found wanting.

Yet these principles survive nonetheless.  There is no escaping them.  They dwell in anyone who would ask such questions as “Who am I? What am I?  What is True?  What is Good?  What is Beautiful?”  Moreover should these rare people seek help in divining answers to such questions, they can always search the historical horizon.  There, also, these principles live.  They reside at the edge of Academe’s carefully manicured lawn.  Be patient and look closely.  See?  They are just beyond the rail fencing, and they inhabit the cool shadows of that ancient and majestic philosophic forest.

From time to time, and quite unexpectedly, these principles race out of those woods like frolicking and deathless Robin Hoods.  They leap if not kick over the fences.  They intrude upon polite conversations and make sport of the pretensions and platitudes and fashionable mores of this world’s seeming intellectual victors.  They have no regard for etiquette but only for Truth.  Hence they dash about raucously as they crash the proprietor’s carefully prepared lawn party.  With impertinent questions – almost always asked with a feigned Irish brogue – they invoke the law of non-contradiction:  “Can a professor be both an ass and not an ass at the same time and in the same respect?”  In so doing they shock the sensibilities of the guests and make the host’s bowels shrivel.

Seeing this, these frolickers seem only to hasten their speed and augment their mischievousness.  Singing and laughing they now scamper amongst the dignitaries, reckless with swords stabbing summertime air and careless with arrows that turn watermelons on tables into over-sized pin cushions.   Sometimes these principles skewer a professor’s powdered wig:  “Is there a difference between Yes and No, between hairy and bald?”  Sometimes they slash the landlord’s lacings so that his trousers fall about his ankles:  “If it is true that ‘all things are relative’, would it not be true that this last statement is stated not relatively but absolutely?  And that therefore you deny in act what you affirm in word and hence…ahem… manifestly fall short of hitting the mark?”  But then, hearing the galloping approach of the Sheriff’s deputies, they dip hats into bowls of wine, drink deeply and – eyeing a notable guest of French origin – shout “I drink therefore I am!”  They then compliment the steward, make the sign of the cross over the body of the now thoroughly sickened host (himself quivering in the fetal position beneath a picnic table), bow low to all and dart off into their beloved forest.  From the shadows thereof can then be heard snatches of laughter.  It is these same Robin Hoods now contesting each other with outrageously tall tales about this, their latest foray, while awaiting yet another time for more of their riotous revelry.

And all the while the honored guests gasp wordlessly and stare.

But for overworked servants witnessing this, servants poor and miserable and barely alive to any hope in this world whatsoever… and for landless peasants to whom later they whisper the tale… Something Awakens.  They sense stirrings of Deep Memory and a once-forgotten Love.  Will it or not, and finding themselves standing a bit more erect, they remember that while battles may be lost or won, the War itself never ends.  This is a War to which each of them is called, and called by name.  And they intuit how this Calling to this War is the highest and most noble of all Callings.  For this is not a War between contending kings and petty prince-lings and failing empires –Remember Man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return – but between Light and dark, between Truth and falsehood, between celestial Laughter and diabolical despair.  It is a War about Things Transcendent, Things Everlasting, Things Secretly and Ever-Longed-For.  Hence it is a War the Doom of which spells lasting Glory or Ignominy for each and all.  And because it is a War fated to endure beyond the comings and goings of any individual actors on this worldly stage, it is therefore a War – and the only War – wherein one’s own Self is fully and forever defined.

But it is a War, these servants and peasants smile finally to recall, which will endure only until at last the Prophecy is fulfilled, and the world itself rolled up like a scroll and burnt to a penitential ash.

“Do you want me to come down there?”

Ron MacArthur was one of those people who, while often amongst the Academic guests at the country squire’s shin-dig, was not of those guests.  He was an interloper.  Yes, he had an engraved invitation.  Yes, he had the intellectual pedigree and the required social standing.  But he was an outsider.  He was a counter-revolutionary.  He was usually the one singling out servants for praise and offering a word of encouragement.  He was usually the one then signalling the men in the woods (first principles) that now is the time for some marvelous mayhem.

He was all the above because first and foremost a devout Roman Catholic.  He was a devout Roman Catholic because first and foremost a genuine man.  He was one of whom some are tempted to say, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.”

But what is a man?  (Ron MacArthur would love this question, so pay attention.  Here comes the judo-throw.)  The answer to the question “What is a man?” is revealed in the very act of asking it.

Res cognoscitur inquantum in actu est.  A thing is known insofar as it is in act.  Thus taught – over an over again – another man who, like Ron MacArthur, was both physically towering and slightly mischievous.  He was also a man – and here Ron would blush before punching me for daring the comparison – whom at one time certain contemporaries did not respect intellectually.  In fact they went so far as to dub him the Dumb Ox.  And his name was Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas taught that the first rational division of any and all Being is the division between potency and act.  It is this distinction and this distinction only which frees us from the quandary of Zeno’s Paradox (for some reason swift-footed Achilles will never catch that damned tortoise, right?) and prevents us from having to choose sides in the intellectual fist-fight between Heraclitus and Parmenides.

You remember that fight.  It was the fight, the boxing match of the Pre-Socratic age:

“Ladies…and…Gentlemen!  In this corner, flowing before you at slightly less than four cubits of depth and weighing in at a little over ten talents (we can never be quite sure inasmuch as he never pours across the same scale twice!) we have, from the great city of Ephesus, the ever slippery and always changing and never to be held Heraclitus the Human Hurricane, Mr. Becoming Only!  [Rapturous Applause].  While in the opposite corner – motionless and sporting a glare that will brook no contradiction – and standing in at a little less than eleven cubits (he was actually born that tall!) and always weighing slightly more and absolutely no more or less than ten and one-half talents (again, from birth!  His poor mother!), we have – immovable before us – the Rock Himself, Mr. Unchangeable, the pride of Elea, Parmenides the Imperturbable, Mr. Being Only!  [More Rapturous Applause].”

In other words the distinction between potency and act allows us to account for both being and becoming.  It allows us to make sense of a world of actual-beings-actually-in-motion, of beings that both are and yet are also becoming something more or something else.  This distinction allows us intellectually to account for the fact that Achilles does indeed pass the dumb tortoise.  (In fact he does more than pass him; he leaves him as road kill.)  And it allows Heraclitus and Parmenides to shake hands, escape to a quiet bar, and share a wine-skin together.

Confused?  My bad.  Well, this will surely help:  Consider the platypus.  No, seriously.  Consider. The. Platypus.

Ornithorhynchus anatinus, a.k.a. the duck-billed platypus, is one weird animal indeed.  It has the bill and the feet of a duck, the tail of a beaver, the body of an otter.  The male sports a spur in the ankles of its hind legs, a spur by which it injects a deadly venom – like a viperous snake – into anything threatening it.  It does not give live-birth but rather lays eggs – as do birds and reptiles.  It hunts its prey in the water with its eyes, ears and nose closed.  In lieu of these, and to detect its prey, it employs electroreceptors – as do sharks.

What is it?

In this case you cannot rely upon the mere appearance.  If you do you’ll go nuts.  No, if you’re a good biologist you will look at one thing and one thing only:  you will look at how it functions.  You will look at how it acts.  And in so looking you will discover it engages in a very important and, indeed, defining act:  it gives milk to its young.

So again:  what is it?  That’s right, you Genius.  It’s a mammal.

Now let’s look at something more weird than even a platypus.  Let’s look at Man.

Here you have a creature ever changing.  One day he is a warrior, the next a committed pacifist.  At one time he bends his knee toward a king on a dais.  At another he genuflects before his own image in a mirror.  Some of this species are fascinated with the making of music.  Others with the killing of those making music.  Some insist there is one God, some many, others none.  Some have shaven heads, some will never let a shear near themselves.  Some remain rooted on land, some insist upon sailing upon the waves, still others will be content nowhere but above the clouds or even orbiting another planet altogether.  They laugh.  They cry.  They build remarkable nests.  They are born, they mature, they decline, they die.  Different religions abound, different philosophies are promulgated, different sports teams venerated.  This is a creature whom one of their own – a blind Greek by the name of Homer – called polutropos, “many turned.”  He is a creature potentially turning in many directions, sometimes confusedly, sometimes knowingly, almost always determinedly.  And perhaps most remarkable of all, virtually each of the males of this species – even or especially the strongest and most powerful – upon entering its own dwelling proceeds to flatter if not cringe before its female mate.

What is it?  Yes, I know.  A mammal.  But specify further.  Define it.  Answer the question, What is a man?

Here we return to the notion of act.  Yes, all of the actions above seem to point to a different creature.  The different objects of the different actors seem to specify a different species or class of animal.

(Here one cannot help but think of the late Herr Karl Marx.  On what is his insistence of unending and uncompromising warfare between different classes if not insistence – in principle – of unending and uncompromising warfare between different species? Hence his insistence – logical within his materialist framework – of the complete liquidation of all but one particular class or species, i.e., the proletarian class or species.  The same is true, in principle, of Islamic anthropology.  Those outside dar al Islam are not viewed, strictly speaking, as human.  Hence the determination forever to wage war upon such for the sake of either conversion, enslavement or destruction.)

But we digress.  Multitudinous as are the various activities or interests of these various classes or seeming species, polutropos or many-turned as are the various individuals thereof, still there remains a defining activity.  And this defining activity is that whereby each individual, at one time or another, whether frequently or infrequently, Asks Questions.

No other terrestrial animal does such.  So, in keeping with this last-noted and quite specifying activity, we ask still another question:  What is a Question?

Here we feel like children staring at the page of a Where’s Waldo? book.  It turns out that the answer to the question is found in the question itself.  Or rather it is in the very word, Question. 

A question is a Quest.  What kind of a Quest?  Verbal.  And one undertaken within a community (for we ask questions or engage in verbal quests with others, that is, within a community).  And for what are we Quest-ing?  An answer.  Just any kind of answer?  No.  We want the Truth.

It turns out that this thing we call Man is the Truth-Questing or Truth-Seeking Animal.  Or as that old fogey, Aristotle, would say:  Man is the Rational Animal.

III.  Re-Entering the Fray, Pt. 3