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Among the remaindered
books I read in Florida over the winter holidays was one called
Selkirk's Island by Diana Souhami. Selkirk was a sailor
from Scotland and the island was Juan Fernandez, off the coast
of Chile. Marooned there by his shipmates, Selkirk lived on
the island all alone for four years and four months. His experience
inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe.
The author herself
spent much time on the island, she provides the reader with
needed background material, and she transfers to Selkirk her
own somewhat mystical fascination with the island. No doubt
we end knowing more about how the island mesmerized Souhami
than what Selkirk's owe thoughts were. The author's attitude
can almost be captured by the familiar lines "where every
prospect pleases and only man is vile." The cruel and motley
bunch of mariners we meet in the course of the narrative certainly
does not elevate one's estimate of the species, but to go
from there to the "green" conclusion that the world would
be a nice place but for man is too great a leap.
Man is the aim,
the telos, of the world, that toward which the whole of nature
tends. But, as Cardinal Newman noted, we cannot help sense
that there has been some aboriginal catastrophe that makes
history a largely irrational sequence. It is man's natural
glory, his reason and will, which lift him above every other
species; but his freedom also makes it possible that he will
go wrong. The chance that man will pursue and achieve his
natural end is the point of the cosmos: the soul's cognitive
grasp of the whole and its cause conquers time and space.
The story of a marooned sailor brings home the need for community
to achieve that end; it is after all a shared good. But it
is man's supernatural end, union with God beyond the dreams
of philosophy, that redeems the fallen world. Meanwhile, it
is man who says Benedicite omnia opera domini domino.
A world from which such prayer is absent would be essentially
incomplete.
Ralph McInerny |
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