Letters

Christian Arabic

Onsi Kamel’s article (“Arabic, A Christian Language,” August/September) reminded me of an experience I had while I was a high school student at the American School of Kuwait.

The Kuwait Ministry of Education required all non-Arabic-speaking students in the school to take Arabic as a foreign language. Early on in my experience, our Arabic teacher, a Palestinian-Arab gentleman by the name of Mr. Deeb, wrote the days of the week on the chalkboard. As Arab countries have been dominated by Islam for some time, he listed the days of the week starting with Friday (the Muslim day of worship) and ending on Thursday.

When I wrote these in my notebook, I, being used to thinking of the days of the week starting with Sunday and ending on Saturday, recorded them in this fashion:

Sunday           الأحد       al’ahad

Monday          الاثنين     aliathnayn

Tuesday         الثلاثاء     althulatha’

Wednesday  الأربعاء    al’arbiea’

Thursday      الخميس    alkhamis

Friday             جمعة       jumea

Saturday.       السبت      alsabt

In Arabic, the days of the week are named after the numbers one through seven, starting from Sunday, which is named after the Arabic for the number “one” as such:

one                 واحد        wahid

two                 اثنين        aithnayn

three              ثلاثة        thalatha

four                أربعة‘      arbaea

five                 خمسة       khamsa

six                  ستة          sita

seven            سبعة         sabea

This should not have been a surprise to me, as I knew from grade-school history that Islam was much younger than Arabic, but it was still a surprise to see this illustrated so dramatically. Indeed, as Onsi Kamel points out, Arabic was spoken by Christians long before Islam existed.

Richard Bonomo
madison, wisconsin

Eastern Rites

I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion of “The Future of the Catholic Church” (August/September). My only (mildly) critical comment would be to note the absence of any mention of the Eastern Catholic liturgies in the otherwise insightful article by Jarosław Kupczak. Given it was Pope St. John Paul II who famously urged the Church to breathe with both Eastern and Western lungs, the absence of references to the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom or the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil (which predate the Tridentine Mass by almost a millennia) is an oversight.

This is not to suggest that Roman Rite Catholics desiring a more coherent, beautiful, and doctrinally clear liturgy ought to throw up their hands and attend their friendly neighborhood Eastern Catholic church. However, I might suggest that failing to seriously consider what it means to have multiple Rites within the Catholic Church—particularly in the liturgical context—relegates the Eastern Catholic churches to the status of curiosities as opposed to churches of equal dignity and status as the Roman churches.

Fr. Dcn. Christopher Todd detailed this unfortunate tendency in his book Reclaiming Our Inheritance After Vatican II. Further, the Eastern Catholic churches have practiced a true synodality for centuries that is grounded in orthodoxy, humility, and the Magisterium. They may have something to offer by way of example that would help to correct some of the seeming excesses of centralization so prevalent in recent times. In short, failing to include the Eastern Catholic churches in these discussions not only risks an uncharitable disregard for equal members of the Catholic Church but may also be leaving to the side a model for church governance and liturgy needed for such a time as this. Slava Isusu Christu!

John M. Fuchko
dalton, georgia

No More Liberalisms

I fear that the narrative in John M. Owen IV’s “Liberalism’s Fourth Turning” (August/September) only convinces liberalism’s skeptics. After showing how each of three phases of liberalism responded to the failures of the previous version, one is left wondering why we would want a fourth turning.

Skeptics are left asking whether liberalism’s benefits outweigh the costs of “freedom” from those unchosen bonds that confer purpose and make life worth living—Church, work, family, nation, and increasingly reality itself—and the isolation that the individual experiences as a result of this supposed freedom. Unfortunately, answers to questions like these are absent from Owen’s treatment, as are the fundamental questions about whether the conception of freedom used by liberals (in any and all ages) is valid. Should freedom from our unchosen bonds be our ultimate aim? Or, as in Chesterton’s metaphor of the island, does freedom come only with boundaries—like those limitations inherent in the unchosen bonds that liberalism has sought to destroy?

The essay’s retelling of the history of American liberalism also discounts both the extent and the concomitant negative effects of the state’s expansion to secure the freedoms it has. As Christopher Caldwell and others remind us, the state’s role in economic affairs did not diminish during the period of open liberalism; rather, new agencies—which never seem to shrink—were created to set the regulations that companies pay to enforce on themselves. If open liberalism failed to produce economic freedom, then in what sense has freedom progressed?

There are also practical issues with the application of the pluralistic liberalism prescribed in the essay. If pluralistic liberalism is successful in giving people the choice to self-select into smaller and smaller communities, does this process not end with the isolation of the individual from the wider community? Moreover, how can any consensus on giving people such choices be achieved if the terms of the debate are framed increasingly as one side demanding that the other (“existential threat”) cease to exist?

In the end, the appeal for a pluralistic liberalism ultimately seems to rest on an undue faith in liberalism—one that is not supported by the narrative presented. Absent further explanation, one must have a Whiggish faith in progress that ignores or outright denies the costs of liberalism to aspire for yet another version.

Christopher Raymond
columbia, missouri

John M. Owen IV (“Liberalism’s Fourth Turning,” August/September) helps us organize our thinking about America’s past and present as they relate to the future. He provides a useful and necessary corrective to our tendency to view the present as uniquely troubled.

However, we find ourselves wondering: Given society’s predominately secular mindset, what is to stop events from evolving into a fifth or sixth liberal turning, or even reverting back to an earlier model? But ours is not a closed political system of cause and effect. Nor is it merely cyclical. Therefore, we respectfully submit that Owens’s formulation would be more complete if it included the eschatological, what the Apostle Paul calls “the blessed hope”—namely, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus (Titus 2:13). We anticipate the return of history’s Lord when, to use N. T. Wright’s frequent phrase, he will set the world to rights. It will be the actual end and final judgment of our liberal order.

We recall the first editorial in First Things (March 1990) where the editors spelled out the purpose of the journal. Here are some excerpts: “The first meaning of First Things is that, for the sake of both religion and public life, religion must be given priority. . . . Authentic religion keeps the political enterprise humble by reminding it that it is not the first thing. By directing us to the ultimate, religion defines the limits of the penultimate. By illumining our highest purpose, all lesser purposes are brought under transcendent judgment.”

So, yes, we hope for liberalism’s “fourth turning”—and others, perhaps, if Christ tarries. Amid all such turnings, “the distant triumph song” continues to inspire and fortify the Church militant.

Philip Siebbeles
harrells, north carolina

Paul Stallsworth
wilson, north carolina

Mozart’s Gift

Thank you for Richard Bratby’s “Mozart’s God,” (August/September). Describing Mozart’s talent as a gift from God seems the only adequate account—all the more so given the vulgarities he expressed in private conversations and letters. Those may even have been his way of “getting them out of his system” so they would not infect his masterpieces.

The most moving tribute to Mozart that I’ve read is by the late British philosopher Roger Scruton, who despised the reductionist secularism of our time while never entirely making his peace with organized religion. At the end of his essay “My Mozart,” he writes:

What I would emphasize, since it has been borne in on me in my own life and through my encounters with his music, is that there is, in Mozart, a purity which is at once musical and spiritual. No musical pollution, and no spiritual pollution, sounds through his music. It is angelic in the true sense of the word: a visitation from another and higher sphere, and we listen to it exactly as though it had a message of eternal validity. This music is not of mortal provenance: nor, it says, are we.

Richard M. Doerflinger
la conner, washington

Richard Bratby replies:

I thank Richard Doerflinger for his kind comments, with which, as you can imagine, I am in full agreement. I do not think we should read too much into Mozart’s profanities. He lived his short life to the full, in a milieu in which a robust, sometimes earthy humor was a widely accepted norm. It is another facet of his humanity: Mozart’s playfulness is an essential part of his character. During Carnival season in Vienna, he attended dances dressed as Harlequin.

But while Mozart was never as overt in his devotion as his great friend and mentor Joseph Haydn (who prayed each day before starting composition), his writings leave little doubt that he believed his genius to be a gift from God. No worldly music (or so it seems to me) brings us mortals quite so close to the Maker of all harmony—and all melody, too. Didn’t Tchaikovsky call Mozart “the Christ of music”?

Materialism Must Go

Stephen M. Barr gave Robert M. Sapolsky’s scientistic attack on free will a well-informed kicking (“Feel Free,” August/September). I disagree with your reviewer, though, when he writes that the absence of quantum indeterminacy in human neuronal signaling would present a “formidable” argument against free will. This argument suggests that Barr relies on quantum mechanical uncertainty to smuggle liberty into our otherwise captive brains.

Such an appeal to Heisenberg underestimates materialism’s threat to freedom. A truly free will, acting rationally and of its own accord, can no more depend on unpredictable natural causes than it can on predictable ones. Chance is an antidote to inevitability, but it is toxic to reason, a quality of free will upon which Barr rightly insists and which cannot arise from stochastic fluctuations of matter and energy.

To save free will, materialism must go, but causality need not. The human person, corporeal and spiritual, stands at the start of each consciously determined chain of events. Our neurons fire as we will. Materialists complain that they cannot measure the effects of the immaterial self—but they should see us, my thoughts moving through my fingers and into your eyes to be judged by your rational soul. An everyday miracle!

James P. McEvoy
chertsey, united kingdom

War Machines

Like Ephraim Radner (“Prayer in a Time of War,” August/September), I cannot understand war.

I was born, as my grandfather once reminded me, only five years after the end of a catastrophic world war, one which shattered his world. Although it ultimately enriched the United States with hundreds of thousands of European refugees, for most of them the price of safety and freedom was high: the gradual but definitive separation of their families from their cultures, languages, and religions. At the same time, their homelands lost much of their cultural and intellectual elite.

Radner is right, of course, in pointing out war’s moral ambiguities. They were evident in the German-occupied, American-bombed France that he refers to. They were evident in my grandfather’s Eastern Galicia, where totalitarian occupiers succeeded one another.

But war is a dappled landscape, with patches of moral clarity amid the swamp of ambiguity. Surely the equities were clear when the Allies liberated the inmates of Nazi concentration camps.At that moment, the Allies were the “good guys.”

The equities are also clear today, when the successors of the Red Army that drove my grandfather from his land are giving the Ukrainians the same options as in 1944: servitude, death, or emigration. In both cases, a nation faces erasure, whether on its own territory or through mass displacement.

Thus, I cannot concur with Radner’s statement that “we all deserve what we get,” unless he means it in some ultimate, cosmic sense. The Jews did not deserve what they got during the Holocaust. The Ukrainians do not deserve what they are getting now. While Ephraim Radner’s sensitive, nuanced reflections on the moral and ethical muddle of war deserve our deep consideration, they should not cloud our vision.

The essence of war is the destruction of human beings—civilians as well as combatants, not only armies but entire societies. It is, in effect, humanity’s self-annihilation. That is why I cannot understand it.

Andrew Sorokowski
sonoma, california

Image by Thomas Eakins, in the public domain. Image cropped.