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A Scholastic Halibut

This morning, still thinking about yesterday's sandstorm warning, I was driving all over town, looking for fresh halibut, which is no simple search, here in the Sonoran Desert, all the while listening to a carousel debate about same-sex marriage--around and around, up and down, going nowhere--and whether there even was such a thing as a same-sex marriage, or whether marriage was exclusively what might be called "a union" between one man and one woman, apparently because it was the only way to get on to the next generation.  I decided I was a union man, but not if another kid was the only reason for another union meeting.

 It made me think of a favorite quote, from Erasmus of Rotterdam, in which he described medieval scholastic thought:  
“There are innumerable quibblings . . . concerning instances and notions, and relations and formalitations, and quiddities and eccëities, which no one can follow out with the eyes, except a lynx, which is said to be able in the thickest darkness to see things which exist nowhere.”

 I grew up in a religious tradition shaped by medieval scholasticism.  The 17th century scholastics who shaped the religion I learned as a child.  They really did believe that if they could make the proper distinctions, and reason from the right principles, one could know "the truth".  They distinguished "the Law" from "the Gospel", the Old from the New Testament, dispensations from dispensations, faith from works, apples from oranges, wine from grape juice, Saturday sabbaths from Sunday Sabbaths, and why milking cows and preaching sermons did not violate the Sabbath.  I do not remember any truth about same-sex marriage.  I do know that divorce was worse than marital abuse, and that it was best not to say anything about relatives who "fooled around", which I think usually did not take the form of same-sex foolery:  that was best never mentioned, although it might be hinted at in the case of maiden aunts (another scholastic distinction, I suppose).  

 It is odd to hear a scholastic debate on a pickup radio.  It is like owning a time machine, like turning water into wine, and finding a halibut in the desert.  Halibut have both eyes on the same side of their heads, too.


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