which we can begin to understand by thinking about the prayer,
Glory Be:
Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
as it was in the beginning, is now
and ever shall be world without end. Amen.
Levinas explains in Otherwise Than Being (pp. 144ff.) how “Glory is
that which manifests the unmanifest even in its unmanifestness.”
So each day in communion we would give glory to God and
experience the glory of God by knowing God’s love more dearly.
Each day in communion it would become manifest to us
that Jesus who had died for us was now living within us.
So in communion we went through a mourning process
in which the lost, dead Jesus would be found alive within us.
As we were nourished day by day in communion the Love
that is God became more and more manifest to us even
though it remained beyond us in its mysterious unmanifestness.
The manifest is that which we can hold fast in our hand
or even in our mouth as we held Jesus in holy communion.
No matter which of our loved ones dies our mourning
for them through prayer and communion lets them be present.
I,3 Growing Intellectually in That Seminary Seed-Bed
I,3.1 Nourishing Agape with the Trivium
In the seminary our alma mater constantly cultivated within us
the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity and we came to see
how the intellectual virtues of science, art, practical wisdom,
intuitive reason, and philosophic wisdom aided the theological virtues.
Growing in the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love contributed
greatly to understanding agape and its various sublimations.
Right from the beginning in the minor seminary our teachers
began to train us in the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
In our first year Father Louis taught us Latin and in our
second year Father Ambrose started us with German while
we continued with Latin and we studied English in both years.
So we began to get a very good training in the basics of grammar.
During our third year we were also being trained in the rhetorical arts
of expressing ourselves in both writing and in public speaking.
In English we learned to write an essay with an introduction, a body
with three parts, and a conclusion and we talked about defending
a thesis with demonstration, definitions, distinctions, and dialectics.
We were also introduced to public speaking and down in the Little
Gym we began to see fourth-year students address an audience
in a speech contest and we knew that next year we would do the same.
We would not study logic in depth until our sixth year
but we knew and were friends with the logicians and looked
forward to learning both the traditional and the new mathematical logic.
We came to understand how our study of algebra, of geometry,
and of trigonometry was already introducing us to logical thinking.
When we got our report cards in November of my second year
I received 89 in Latin II, 84 in German I, 81 in Geometry
and 84 in Chant II, plus 95 in Religion II, 95 in English II,
and 98 in World History and when Father Ambrose gave me my
report card he said I could do better and I believed him.
I,3.2 Nourishing Agapeic Affection with Grammar
That conversation with Father Ambrose about my report card
started a mysterious new phase of my life in the seminary.
In January I got basically the same grades and I even fell
from 84 to 81 in German, which he was teaching me.
But he must have inspired me to a New Year’s resolution
because by June all my grades were much higher and
I went from 81 in German to 92 and he was pleased.
From then on I got good grades and I continued to talk with
Father Ambrose and I told him about my troubles with celibacy.
In my third year we decided together that he would be my confessor.
And so once a week I went to his office, knelt before him,
and confessed my sins and somehow as long as he was my
confessor and spiritual advisor I never committed another sexual sin.
He was as affectionate to me as was my own father who,
when I was in the third grade, worked hard with me to keep
my grades up and it was as if they were parallel events.
It seems that Father Ambrose with his celibate life had sublimated
his erotic passion in such a way that it even gave him the power
of a sublimated agapeic affection and a sublimated friendship.
Because Father Ambrose was celibate with no wife or children
of his own he could be affectionate and friendly toward each of us.
Somehow the power of his celibate agape even let me be
celibate and to become a much better student with that new
concentrated and passionate energy channeled over from
the black horse to the white horse and the charioteer.
Father Ambrose was my German teacher and all the intricacies
of grammar were becoming clear to me as I declined nouns
and conjugated verbs in both Latin and German and started
learning the tenses and voices of the verbs and the nominative,
genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative roles of the noun.
Growth in attention to grammatical structures increased loving attention.
I,3.3 Nourishing Agapeic Eros with Rhetoric
Perhaps Father Ambrose’s sex drive was quite strong and thus
the sublimation of his eros into agape could be so powerful
that I could identify with it and be graced with celibacy myself.
Up at Sun Valley where I worked during the summer and Christmas
vacation there was a beautiful waitress by the name of Myrna.
I remember wishing that she and Father Ambrose could meet and marry.
She was a very devout lady who would go to daily Mass each
Tuesday and Friday and I felt a reverent love