Gloria Mundi : Bad Latin

As Hilary and I were taking our usual walk around the block this morning the phrase that came to my mind was "Gloria Mundi." I heard it often during my church-going years, as I recall, and had a strong hunch that it referred to Jesus, describing him as the glory of the world. Wrong. Thomas à Kempis, in his 1418 work The Imitation of Christ, wrote: "O quam cito transit gloria mundi" ("How quickly the glory of the world passes away.") At that moment I was feeling the tremendous beauty of a cool spring morning before sunrise, not concerned about how soon it would pass, but rather, giddy with excitement and gratitude that it was present. A great-crested flycatcher whooped in an elm to our right. Three geese flew by, silhouetted high against the pale blue sky, and at one point I made a slight jog in my path to avoid walking directly under a fat robin sitting just overhead on a wire that crossed the road.

It's been a spring full of such moments, for me at any rate. Fresh plants returning, cool air, wonderful morning light day after day. I've long since resigned myself to the loss of a few shrubs to the starving winter rabbits (though I'm a bit disturbed that they're already nibbling on the hostas), and we've been consulting catalogs and gardening books for ideas about how to fill in gaps and liven things up.

Yesterday I had lunch with an old friend in the wide-open garage door of a restaurant called A Side Publichouse, located in a converted fire station near West Seventh in St. Paul. It was a sparking morning, marred only by the man next door who spent a good half hour out in his front yard—and sidewalk—sending elm seeds and cottonwood cotton our way with a very loud leaf-blower. To me the neighborhood seemed remote and exotic, but my friend told me that he visits it often; three of his grand-kids go to a school nearby where Latin is part of the standard curriculum.

That reminded me of a phrase I'd come across the previous afternoon while dipping into Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Poststript. Of course I couldn't remember it, but I did make the effort when I originally came across it to consult the notes and find out what it meant.

I looked it up again this morning: quidquid cognoscitur, per modum cognoscentis cognioscitur. I admit, this doesn't have quite the ring of Veni. Vidi. Vici.  It means: Whatever is known is known in the mode of the knower. To me this notion takes us halfway toward the New Age nostrum that "we make our own reality." Which isn't exactly true. (If it were, we'd all be billionaires.) But it is certainly true that the way we process experience is colored by our temperament. This may be what Heraclitus was getting at when he remarked, "A man's character is his guardian divinity."

That is not, however, the point that Kierkegaard seems to be making. He argues that the understanding of the phrase "must be so expanded as to make room for a mode of knowing in which the knower fails to know any­thing at all, or has all his knowledge reduced to an illusion. In the case of a kind of observation where it is requisite that the observer should be in a specific condition, it naturally follows that if he is not in this condition, he will observe nothing."

Does this mean that in order to fully grasp the beauty of the morning, one must already be in a blissful condition? Kierkegaard, who's addressing a slightly different (but perhaps not so different) issue may be trying to say that those who smugly take their Christianity for granted will never arrive at the condition of doubt, anxiety, and dread required to recognize how fraught with uncertainty their ultimate fate remains.   

There is something wayward and perverse about Kierkegaard's approach to things, and I have come around to the conclusion that he should be read in the same way we read Tristram Shandy. Both authors are masters of irony, the difference being that Sterne's novel concerns itself with trivialities, whereas Kierkegaard's work concerns itself with exploring the prospects for eternal salvation.

I'm not concerned about anything much at all right now, just throwing out a few scraps of ephemera before breakfast, like elm seeds carried by the wind.