The Temptation of Christ by the Devil by Félix Joseph Barrias
A poem I began writing on March 16th and completed on March 21 of this year:
“We assign to things whatever meaning we choose,
All events, all values weighed in our minds are without depth.
The subject determines the object, so ready your noose!
Banish love from your hearts and deny the ‘consummatum est’.”
Such as fools err; as we cannot imagine nothingness’ abyss
To see good or bad in anything is something that we cannot dismiss.
Let language here corroborate; does any word go undefined?
Since even meaningless means, their words show themselves blind.
Just as nothing’s road never was, and never can be
So too then must the road of meaninglessness not be.
Where does meaning’s road come to?
From He who said “EGO SUM QUI SUM”.
For through Him all things were made,
And through His Son flesh became,
And through His Spirit Blest sets hearts aflame.
Self commentary:
The first paragraph is a summation of the opinions and conclusions of those who deny the existence of objective meaning, and rather say that we “create” meaning through our perceptions. Thus this view renders meaning mostly worthless since, according to its principles, all of our interpretations of meaning are without objective truth. The most heinous of these conclusions to deny the value of the Crucifixion and Death of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Then the speaker (yours truly) goes on to refute these claims, taking inspiration from the poem Truth by the Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea and the enlightening words of Bishop Williamson from his many conferences on Modernism. To say that we “construct” meaning is to essentially make a meaning construct in of itself, and such an act also dances around the objective truth that there is an objective means of interpreting events, otherwise language itself would be useless since we would not be able to agree on words having definitions and connotations.
The part of Parmenides’ poem that best summarizes what I got out of it is this excerpt:
(B2) But come now, I will tell you — and you, when you have heard the story, bring it safely
away —
which are the only routes of inquiry that are
for thinking:
the one, that is and that it is not possible for
it not to be,
is the path of Persuasion (for it attends upon
Truth),
the other, that is is not and that it is right that
it not be,
this indeed I declare to you a path
entirely unable to be investigated:
For neither can you know what is not (for it is
not to be accomplished)
nor can you declare it.
(Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus 1.345.18 lines 3-8: Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 116.28; tmpc)
From page 27 of the book Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, from Thales to Aristotle, edited by S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, and C.D.C. Reeve.
This poem reaches its climax with a forceful highlighting of the importance of God and His relationship to being. He is both infinitely greater than man but is also infinitely simple, as His declaration to Moses on Mount Sinai indicates. He is also the source of all being, and all meaning.
I was inspired to make this connection, and I credit Fr. Gregory Hesse with providing me with the wisdom to in some part understand this holy mystery. Specifically I refer to the conference entitled The Proof of God and His One True Church.
This poem then ends with a praise of the Holy Trinity, tying It to the Oneness of God brought up in the previous two lines. I attempted to demonstrate the distinctness of each Person of the Trinity in these three lines; perhaps I may have erred in making the association of the Father with the creation of all things as strong as it is, as if to push aside the involvement of the Son and the Holy Ghost in the Creation. I did not mean for such an interpretation, I just wished to be general here as to attempt to highlight the truth that each of the Three Persons are distinct yet make up a society of One God. I used terza rima here, as it is said that Dante invented this style to honor the Blessed Trinity. It is both a tribute to the Holy Trinity but also, in a lesser way, to the Catholic genius of Dante Alighieri.