To give you a sense of what my life is currently like, I have to explain a little feature of the Trinity College academic system known as Examinations. As previously mentioned, Trinity College likes to think of itself at the Oxbridge of Ireland, hence the unwieldy trimester system. Along the same lines, most of a student’s grade depends upon the Exams written in May and June, with very little prior evaluation, even for classes which ended around Christmas. Much like you “read” a subject rather than “study” it on this side of the Pond, since reading is pretty much what you do here, you don’t “take” an Exam but rather “write” it, since you sit in an Exam hall with Invigilators for three hours and write essays until your hand falls off. The past ten years of Examinations are published on Trinity’s website, so I have about 70 questions per course to give me a rough idea of what I might be asked to expound upon. It’s a tough part of the term because I’ve been working hard all year but still haven’t really seen my work come to evaluative fruition (but really, that’s the least important kind).
So two weeks ago I made up a colour-coded ten week study schedule and have thus far successfully stuck to it. I study philosophy for 6-8 hours a day. I feel like a giant bat called Philosophy Finals swoops constantly around my shoulders trying to get its wings around my face, and to escape it I keep moving from study nook to coffee shop to library, trying to keep my focus. Some days it’s hideously boring. Some days I get so sick of words that all I want in the world is to lie on my back on a green hill and be engulfed in a brilliant red sunset and soak it up through my eyes and my skin and not think or speak about it. And some days I discover delightful things, like Heidegger’s Aristotelian tendencies.
Yes! In writing my last blessed paper this week (before I can really buckle down and give my full attention to Exams), for Continental Philosophy, I learned that Heidegger has an Aristotelian understanding of essence with a utilitarian twist. What the professor said was that in Dasein’s praxis with pragmata, Dasein is presented with all entities as equipment through circumspection. What she meant was that Heidegger thinks that the most basic way in which we all initially look at the world is as related to ourselves: the objects which surround us are tools for accomplishing our ends, for example, a pen is for writing, so that our dealings with things are all practical and a thing’s essence should be defined in terms of its usefulness for its end. A pen is for writing; in Aristotelian terms, that’s its telos, and writing is a human project ordered to some creative and communicative end. Delightful! I can’t decide whether it brilliantly breaks the world open by portraying our encounter with reality at its most fundamental level, so fundamental that we overlook the essential usefulness of the world most of the time, except for when things happen to disturb it, such as your pen running out of ink or me breaking my dominant arm; or whether it’s absurdly solipsistic and subjective and a perversion of Aristotle’s intellectual emanations of divine light. (Confession: despite my mother’s best efforts, I am generally an Aristotelian). Unfortunately, it all breaks down if you care about aesthetics, which I do very much, because of course art is made for direct contemplation, not circumspection, and you notice it because it’s meant to be noticed, not because there’s something wrong with it, so that its function is found in seeing and enjoying the thing itself directly.
This idea actually matters. Most of the time this year, it’s been hard to see or explain how any of the ideas in Analytic Philosophy or Phenomenology matter, but this one definitely does. Which is primary?: The scientific analysis of an object, accounting for its size, mass, and composition, done as if in a vacuum, isolated from the other objects of the world and from its significance to you? Or, the phenomenological analysis of an object, showing its significance in the world because of its useful relationship to you and your desires and goals, which it can only accomplish by being in relation to other objects which can also be viewed as tools to further your projects, so that the whole world works in concert? Is the world essentially a bunch of atoms arranged in a particular way whose energies interact to rearrange the atoms in an equally meaningless display? Or is the world an environment of distinguishable entities and populated by intellectual beings who uniquely have the capacity to distinguish between the objects and name them, picking them out as individuals and explaining their significance and potential in the whole scheme of things? Heidegger is a brilliant radical! He overturns thousands of years of intellectual history with this phenomenology stuff! From Parmenides to Husserl, philosophers and scientists have been isolating entities and studying them in abstract, reducing them to their physical properties, conceptualizing mathematical models for them, abstracting them from their human context, and forgetting themselves as the analyzers of the objects. Descartes with his piece of wax, Kepler with his astronomical ellipses, and Newton with his colliding, frictionless masses are all put back into their place. Well, that’s not quite fair. Neither the theoretical nor the practical way of viewing the world reveal it in its fullest reality; each obscures the other, but you have to try to hold both kinds of knowledge together to get the best picture, which is a way to describe in part why we’re not omniscient.
The great effect which good ideas have on my mood is absurd and always has been. Nevertheless, as I said, these days are long and it’s challenging to be grateful for every moment when most of them are filled with words like “Dasein”, “praxis”, “pragmata”, “thatness”, “worldishness”, “present-at-hand”, “ready-to-hand”, well, you get the idea. I miss studying philosophy at Notre Dame, where subject matter like this gave rise to endless inside jokes between myself and my classmates, and where three-hour group study sessions were the order of the day.
Studying philosophy in abstract for 6-8 hours a day is not the good life for me. I am an intellectual being made for a practical life. My less humble thesis is that studying philosophy for 6-8 hours a day is not the good life for Man. I dread the weekend all week long, because throughout the week I can dependably spend time with friends and enjoy their lives, but people travel on the weekend and it’s too easy for me to wind up shut up in the library all day and end up too burnt out to do anything but make dinner and go to bed when I come out of it. But the past two weekends have been surprisingly pleasant. I returned to Greystones last weekend to do my work in the public library there and walk on the beach, and when I got home all the year-long Notre Dame girls came over to my flat and we have a big potluck dinner and talked and giggled for hours. This weekend there was no escaping the library, because I needed some books which couldn’t be checked out, but I headed for the gym afterwards, which could have been the Rock for once, since apparently every other student in the library had the same idea I had, and showered and ate a carrot and went for a long walk and prayed in the chapel and came home to make dinner with Megan and Simone. And those are all characteristic instantiations of the good life for me.
I’ve got eight more weeks, and despite the toil, I still don’t want to leave.
I was lying in bed at 6:30 this morning when my alarm went off and I thought, rather irresponsibly, how much I’d rather just stay in bed than get up and go to the gym and shower and go to Mass and get back to studying. But then I was sitting alone in the chapel this morning (Mass attendance is thin in Ireland, even on a Friday) listening to the First Reading and I thought to myself, I’m really grateful that Paul got up that morning in Antioch 1,970 years ago and preached to the Jews in the synagogue there that God raised Christ from the dead in fulfillment of the Scriptures and Christ sent Paul and his friends to witness to the Good News. Because now I’ve heard the Good News and it gives me two good reasons to get up every morning: the News is Good, and I want other people to receive it too.
Pope Benedict has been in America this week witnessing to the same Good News and discoursing on how it is to be preached. St. Francis said “Preach the Gospel. Use words when necessary.” I wholeheartedly agree with that idea, and I hope I live it, but I also recognize the necessity of words for God-made creatures endowed with the great and terrible gift of the human intellect. After all, one of the great powers of that intellect is to recognize when words are useful and when they fail and the greatest thing you can offer is a life lived in love. Universally, the recognition of human limitations and weakness follows upon the discovery of our great power- it’s not just St. Francis: I wrote a paper this January for TCD on Wittgenstein’s reflections on the limits of human thought and language.
Pope Benedict himself started his address to Catholic educators in America with a quotation from Paul in Romans: “How beautiful are the footsteps of those who bring good news”. (Rom 10:15-17) It is beautiful! The question becomes, how do we welcome them? How do we welcome the Good News of the Gospel into our universities, the settings of our academic lives, and how do we take it up in whatever we study and pursue- in philosophy and theology, but also in engineering, architecture, mathematics, English, Irish, art, science, and business? And how do we live it in our dormitories and in the gym and at our club meetings? And how do the policies and practices of our university administrations carry the Good News?
I’ve been struck this year by how little of a sense of identity or purpose I have been able to grasp in the student body and administration of Trinity College. I honestly can’t figure out why my fellow students study philosophy here, or any other course for that matter. Many admit that they thought studying law or medicine or business would get them a good job, or that they earned enough points on their Leaving Cert to be admitted to the top faculties so they automatically signed up for that, but in general I have encountered a culture of intellectual aimlessness. Again, it’s not just in what people pursue in their studies or how the lecturers present the material, it’s in their very culture. It seems like university is just something to be gotten through, with some good nights out making it a passably enjoyable lifestyle for four years. I’ve never seen a copy of Trinity College’s mission statement, but if asked to guess what its contents include, I wouldn’t have a clue. There is no sense of an intellectual community pursuing a common purpose, let alone a purpose growing out of the life of the Gospel. And beyond the intellectual life of the university, there is no tradition of service or worship as I was immersed in at Notre Dame, which again points to a lack of positive culture. My experience at Notre Dame was that the Catholic intellectual community also naturally generated a social and liturgical community, calling us to live integrated lives. I think this is what Pope Benedict means when he says, “Truth means more than knowledge: knowing the truth leads us to discover the good. Truth speaks to the individual in his or her entirety, inviting us to respond with our whole being.”
My comments are not intended to demean Trinity College but to ask again, how do we welcome the footsteps of the Apostles, given our commitment to Catholic education at Notre Dame? I take the “why?” for granted; Pope Benedict says it eloquently in this week’s address: “God's desire to make himself known, and the innate desire of all human beings to know the truth, provides the context for human inquiry into the meaning of life. This unique encounter is sustained within our Christian community: the one who seeks the truth becomes the one who lives by faith (cf. Fides et Ratio, 31). It can be described as a move from "I" to "we", leading the individual to be numbered among God's people.” No true intellectual life can be lonely; the Christian intellectual life is another way to enter radically into communion with the other.
It is precisely because the intellectual life grows out of and sustains a community that it cannot be taken up from a sense of radical independence or rebellion. We belong to Christ, we belong to a Catholic university, and we belong to each other. We therefore have intellectual responsibilities to those parties and responsibilities of Charity. The latter must not be underrated. As Benedict says, “to lead the young to truth is nothing less than an act of love”. If the point of the endeavor is not love, then is it worth undertaking? We take up our inquiries from the standpoint of a faith commitment, the one which has Love at its source and summit. This is not to say that we go to university for indoctrination, but that ideally the values and guidelines for intellectual engagement within the university provide the setting in which our lives are intelligible, our questions are intelligible, and our mission is possible. Again, Pope Benedict: “Freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in - a participation in Being itself. Hence authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God. Such a choice would ultimately disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves.”
It is a beautiful truth, but I do not pretend it is simple. I have encountered the complexity of it in the genuine debates over maintaining Notre Dame’s Catholic character throughout the past few years, particularly pertaining to Catholic faculty hiring and academic freedom, and I have also encountered it in the classroom when reason seems to conflict with faith rather than strengthen it. Three years into a joint major in philosophy and theology haven’t produced any easy answers. Next year I will write my senior thesis on the philosophy of Catholic education, under the direction of Professor John Cavadini and Dr. Alfred Freddoso, and I am grateful for the opportunity to read some very wise reflections on the sort of education I have undertaken, but I also begin to suspect that the only answer I will have at the end is my life, lived, in love.
I’ve wasted a lot of words this year complaining about Trinity College. For once, instead, I want to talk about something at Trinity that I really love and will miss a lot next year: the Chaplaincy. TCD’s Chaplaincy was the first place on campus I felt I had a home. One Church of Ireland minister, Darren, and two Roman Catholic priests, Fr. Paddy and Fr. Kieran, make up the entire staff of the Trinity College Chaplaincy. They truly devote themselves to serving the students in as many different ways as they can come up with, to make the life of the church accessible to any student with an open heart.
Initially I was as bitter towards the Chaplaincy as every other aspect of life at TCD. I was appalled by Irish liturgical life and I held no hope of finding a place that felt spiritually comfortable here- I didn’t think I’d ever feel like Mass here was a celebration, I didn’t think I’d ever find other students outside of the Notre Dame community who took faith seriously, and I didn’t think I would ever stop feeling isolated and distant from the Church. The small Irish congregations are pretty unresponsive at Mass: they mutter the prayers under their breath faster than I can talk, they don’t sing, the priests often skip the second Reading, the homily, the prayer intentions, and the sign of peace, and the Church in Ireland has only just started developing a conception that the laity should have a stronger role in the life of the Church- that, in fact, the laity can do everything except perform certain sacraments. As an active lay woman who likes to sing a lot and as an American who likes to pray loudly and slowly, I felt very out of place. Daily Mass in Keough Hall at Notre Dame was the best part of my day as a freshman and sophomore, and I missed that horribly for the first couple of months here. I missed that the love and the warmth present in the Eucharist were palpable within the congregation, and I missed that the priest knew everyone by name, and I missed the energy, vibrancy, and reverence of so many of my friends at Mass. There are few things as moving to me as seeing my friends in prayer.
After I broke my arm I grudgingly made TCD’s 8:30 a.m. Mass a habit, since the gym was off-limits for two months, but quite honestly it made me almost physically uncomfortable, especially when I was the only one who showed up and I couldn’t stand the sound of my own ringing American accent. However, a great priest from Notre Dame kept encouraging me and insisted, “going to Mass even when it is dreary is a good thing, so hang in there!”
Our Notre Dame campus minister abroad keeps reminding us here that the difference between tourists and pilgrims is that tourists make demands whereas pilgrims give thanks, and we are called to be pilgrims, not tourists, during our time abroad. I think that attitude is an accurate diagnosis of my problem for the first few months here. I was demanding that liturgical life here look and feel like liturgical life at Notre Dame, which wasn’t going to happen anywhere else in the United States, let alone in Ireland. The differences automatically appeared as negatives to my mind, and I did not choose to see the blessings that might be here waiting for me. Happily, that has changed. I have changed.
I was never really involved in Campus Ministry back at Notre Dame, partly because I never felt like I had much to offer. I love music and I love singing, most of all at Mass, but Notre Dame is saturated with great musicians and singers. I auditioned for every Mass choir at Notre Dame when I was a freshman and got turned down by all of them. I’m not a bad singer, but I’m also not exceptional; singing just makes me happy. And I was really involved in the life of my Parish as a high school student, and I loved that, but then I came to Notre Dame and it was almost as if you had to have qualifications to lead retreats or organize prayer groups on campus, and I didn’t have any impressive qualifications or serious experience. But then I came to Dublin and I really discovered what a need there was for all of us to share our gifts. The Dublin Programme has just under forty students, so anyone who could play any instrument or wanted to sing got to, and I loved it.
In fact, I couldn’t get enough of it, so I started going to TCD’s Sunday Masses and approached one of the six people who sang in the little choir to ask if I could join them. I remember Cedric looking a little shocked. Since November, the choir has grown as much as I have. We’ve gone from seeing each other once a week to hanging out together after Mass, practicing every Friday afternoon, checking out other Masses around the city together, doing Taize prayer, and making meals together. They are fantastic: they are warm, friendly, and have great senses of humor. I’ve found people here who think as deeply about the liturgy as any of my Folk choir friends from Notre Dame. I love picking out the music with them for the next week after every Mass. We pour over the Readings, flip through stacks of mildewed hymnals, and bicker about whether a melody is well-known and sing-able enough to be good for the liturgy. And I’m definitely going to miss having the Irish language as a legitimate option for songs and prayers at Mass. The congregation is more likely to participate in the singing when the song is in Irish. Connor, the student who plays the organ at Mass every week, insisted on doing “Cead míle failte romhat, a Iosa” [A Hundred Thousand Welcomes to you, Jesus] this week, which, given that the choir is composed of one Irishman, two Americans, one Frenchman, and a Filipino, was surprisingly enough not a train wreck. Fr. Kieran said we all could at least manage a C on the Honors Irish Leaving Cert exam after that one!
Fr. Kieran and Fr. Paddy are two of the greatest priests I’ve ever known. We are so blessed to have them at Trinity. I really think Archbishop Diarmuid must have given us two of the best priests in Ireland; it hardly seems fair to the rest of the Church. Their homilies are fantastic, they’re great singers, they make themselves very available to students, they’re very personable, and they always make a point of expressing their gratitude to students for their participation in the life of the Church.
I’ve also really appreciated the Church of Ireland Chaplaincy. I was part of an “Agnostics Anonymous” group that Darren ran during Trinity Term to create an open forum for discussing questions which really challenge our faith. I wasn’t really sure what to expect the first time I went. As it turned out, I was the only person at the first meeting who wasn’t a member of the Church of Ireland choir (they’re really impressive: there are dozens of them, and they sing four-part harmony and wear special robes and fill the choir loft), [and here, in the spirit of ecumenism, I will resist the tempting joke about anonymous agnostics and Church of Ireland choristers being one and the same]. When I looked down at my fidgeting hands and noticed that I hadn’t taken my rosary off of my wrist in a week, I worried that visibly being the only Catholic there might put me out of place. As it turns out, the only thing that put me out of place was being American, as I fielded barbs every week about American politics, American consumerism, and American accents. Everyone in attendance was very intelligent and had insightful questions. A couple of them were also joint philosophy/theology students like myself. It was really refreshing to be having conversations like that on TCD’s campus, and not just in Notre Dame’s O’Connell House. Our last session of it was today, and we therefore partook of the very Anglican custom of enjoying wine with the discussion. The Church of Ireland has a sherry reception after all its prayer services and Chaplaincy events. That’s something the Catholics might strive to be more ecumenical about!
I got to meet up with both my Catholic friends and my Church of Ireland friends for an important Taize prayer service in the Procathedral in Dublin this weekend. My TCD choir friends are very keen on Taize and they had been looking forward to this event all term. Fr. Paddy and Darren do Taize at Trinity every Monday night, but I’d never been able to go before. It was beautiful. The Prior of Taize in France came to Dublin to lead the service, and they took all of the pews out of the Procathedral for it and put pillows down instead, and we had tapered candles and just sang the same few simple lines of prayer over and over. It was so peaceful. Afterwards, I ran into a couple of the priests who often celebrate Mass for the Dublin Programme on Tuesday nights in our little chapel at the O’Connell House. The whole evening made me reflect on the wonderful and unexpected opportunities I’ve had to develop my spiritual life abroad. I knew that Notre Dame’s Campus Ministry service abroad would be great, but I had not hoped to find any spiritual support outside of the Notre Dame Programme. But now I give thanks, because I found people at Trinity to pray with, and to share my life and faith with.
