Looting for Ideas 28/02/2025
Ash Wednesday, Liberty as license, Ideas blind, Lent reading list, Personal canon, Enjoy the moment
The Ideas in Brief
Ash Wednesday is on Wednesday
Liberty as license leads to destruction
Ideas illuminate but blind as well
Compiling a Lent reading list is a great idea
Compiling a personal canon is a great idea
Enjoy things in the moment
The Main Ideas
The Big Idea
Ash Wednesday is this coming Wednesday. Somehow it snuck up on me even though Lent begins fairly late this year. Now is the time to identify what Mass to attend, and to carve that time out of my schedule.
If you have not been to Mass in a long time, or have never been, Ash Wednesday is very good one to attend.
Something I Watched
The Love Witch (2016) Directed by Anna Biller
Liberty as license leads to destruction
Elaine (the love witch) desires love. She would do well to read The Four Loves, for her understanding of love is disordered. Regardless, in a scene in a park Elaine spots a man speaking to another woman and decides to take him. She does so by giving him what his passions desire. In the following scene she asks him if he is a libertine, and he enthusiastically states that he is. Elaine then proceeds to give the libertine a superabundance of exactly what he wants. Spoiler: the man dies shortly afterwards, and Elaine is disappointed the man did not survive her love magic.
Who destroyed the man? The answer is clear. The man destroyed himself. He indulged his libertinism and it broke him. When Elaine meets the man, he is portrayed as attractive, charming, interesting, and desirable. After she overwhelms his desires, he is not even pathetic. He is contemptible. The man thought that an unrestricted indulgence in his desires would bring happiness. Instead it destroyed him.
The presence of magic in the film, such as it is, tempts the viewer to blame Elaine. She intended to gratify his desires, and it would be easy to blame the hallucinogenic potion as the cause of the man’s death. Elaine was up front about everything she did, however, and the man responded enthusiastically when he learned he had been drugged. Elaine is interested in loving another person, but misunderstands it and pursues it in a disordered way. I found her a pitiable character. The man, on the other hand, expresses his contempt for other women and in so doing indicates that he has not even a disordered love for another. His self-love, turbocharged by Elaine, leaves him incapable of action, let alone of loving, and he withers and dies.
Ideas illuminate but blind as well
Elaine meets the man who initiated her into Love Magic in a burlesque show. The strange looking man, accompanied by a woman who eased Elaine into the rites, looks obviously and ridiculously like a cult leader. As Elaine speaks with the cult leader, the camera cuts periodically to a woman dancing and disrobing on stage and to a small group of drunk, creepy, awkward men leering at this woman. In this context it is revealed that Elaine is not the cult leader’s only meeting.
Two young sisters, with blonde plaited hair and wearing white modest frocks, stand next to the cult leader. They are oblivious to the dissonance of their innocence in the burlesque parlor, even as the audience will immediately recognize it as the camera cuts between figures in this seedy den. The cult leader proceeds to extol the feminine power of sex magic to these two young girls, pointing to the nearly naked dancer as evidence. “Making” the men leer and lust demonstrates her power. The young girls drink his words without confusion or objection.
The cult leader presents the idea of sex magic, but rather than illuminating the minds of the two young girls it blinds them to the reality of their situation. The girls are unable to see the obvious because they are enchanted by the promise of power. Again, the girls are pitiable. We see two young girls captivated by a predatory, perverted older man who weaves the idea of empowerment with a distorted notion of love to blind his victims to the way he (and other men) use and abuse them.
Something(s) I Read
Compiling a Lent reading list is a great idea
At
the authors compiled a list of their favorite Lent reads. I recommend reading their post, as there are some very good suggestions on their list(s).It seemed like a good idea, for my own spiritual health, to compile my own list of books which help produce a fruitful Lent. I will no doubt come back to this quote from AG Sertillanges, OP, frequently, but it is too beautiful to omit:
Each one should watch himself, note what helps him, keep at hand together his remedies for the sicknesses of the soul and not hesitate to go back and back to the same cordial or the same antidote until these have utterly lost their efficacy. (The Intellectual Life, 155)
This applies equally well to persevering in one’s intellectual vocation and to strengthening the soul. It may be that some of my favorite Lent reads will be beneficial to someone who pops into the Neo-Scholastic Playground, so on Sunday I will post a list of my favorite Lent reads for anyone who may be seeking one.
Compiling a personal canon is a great idea
Unfortunately I seem to have lost the Substack post which gave me the idea for this. I dislike it when I am unable to point to sources for my ideas. It is not that I feel a compulsion to point to an authority, but rather that when I find something interesting I suspect that other people will find it interesting as well and want to send readers to the source. So my sincere apologies to whoever had this idea. It is a great one.
Creating a go-to list of books and essays which have shaped my thinking and provide ever-ready wellsprings of inspiration is something I have groped towards for some time but never actually done. At some point in the coming months I will make this and post it. Currently I am not sure precisely what my criteria will be, or how I will format it.
Beyond my own use and interest, I think this is a good idea to help facilitate conversation across significant differences. Even if no one reads all (or any) of the books on my personal canon, it will reveal something of the way I think and who I am. So I would be very interested to learn about the books in other people’s personal canons as well.
Something I Heard
I did not hear anything this week that prompted me to snatch an idea. That seems absurd as I type it. I have listened to interesting podcasts this week, from the Rest is History and from the Pillar Podcast.
I guess the idea I will abstract, rather than extract, is that I would do well not to instrumentalize everything I do. Sometimes it is best to be present and enjoy things in the moment, rather than always keeping one eye on a future unrelated task.
Books I’m Reading
Questioning God, by Timothy Radcliffe and Lukasz Popko
Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians, by Fergus Kerr OP
The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, by Anthony Kaldellis
Foundations of Systematic Theology, by Thomas G Guarino
Till We Have Faces, by CS Lewis
Books I’ve Finished Recently (Don’t put in bullet points)
Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith, by Avery Cardinal Dulles S.J.
Community Building
What books or films should I take a look at?
Have you seen The Love Witch? What did you think?
You should check out Viper's Tangle by François Mauriac. It was a pretty quick read but worth it.
I like the idea of the personal canon; it would be a good exercise to put together a list. Rilke goes to the top.
My own Lenten reading goal: returning to (and this time finishing!) Patitsas' The Ethics of Beauty