By Joseph R. Wood
"Everything changes," exclaimed an elderly woman in Sydney with a broad Australian accent. She was expecting Mass at a church when the COVID-19 restrictions had just been lifted. But this particular church had shut again due to virus exposure among the priests there.
She was agreeing (maybe unintentionally) with the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, who argued that everything is "flux." He focused on the material world that changes constantly. He was known as the "philosopher of tears," given to melancholy.
This moment has run through my mind as I again enjoy the privilege of teaching at George Weigel's Tertio Millennio Seminar in Kraków, Poland. I'll move on shortly to Slovakia, where I'll join our editor-in-chief, Robert Royal, for the Free Society Seminar.
These seminars assemble groups of very bright, faithful Catholics in their 20s and 30s, mostly European and American but occasionally from beyond, for an intensive examination of Catholic truth and contemporary problems confronting the Church's teaching. And there's plenty of wonderful conversation where real philosophy - seeking wisdom - emerges.
The seminars were started by Michael Novak of blessed memory, a prolific advocate of free markets and liberally-grounded political institutions regularly mentioned on this website, which he also helped found. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Novak hoped the seminars would help a new generation of Central European Catholics learn the habits and ideas that their countries would need as they moved out of the dark decades of Communism.
The Americans would discover the depth of Catholic tradition and faith that had been brought here centuries before, survived the Communist era, and might animate the future of the region and the West.
Novak was no "philosopher of tears."
But in recent seminars, I've been struck by the changes since the students began coming decades ago. These changes can bring out the weeping Heraclitus in me.
The political and economic institutions that defeated Communism, or at least let it defeat itself, are no longer attractive to many in the West, or to many in Central Europe who see totalitarian Communism as having been replaced by something offering homo economicus and moral relativism as the fullness of being human.
Amid all the changes is a sense of instability, that truth doesn't exist or can't be found because everything changes anyway. That has yielded a widespread loss of hope accompanied by forgetting that suffering is part of life, that it has meaning, and that while it should be reduced where possible, it also brings those of us with faith to the greatest possible joy.
The students at these seminars are looking for, and finding, truths that, unlike the seasons or political institutions or social fashions or popular opinion, don't change.
I've experimented here with an ancient source, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was a scholar-historian and a man of action, a general. He writes of the 5th-century B.C. wars, primarily between Athens and Sparta, that hastened the decline of the Greek cities as a dominant and sometimes successful political form.
That was a century when "revolutions broke out in city after city," and events in one place caused in others "still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal. . .[with] an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge."
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as courage; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character. . . .Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. . . .Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted. . . .In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one's blow in first against someone who was going to ...
