Meditations on the rosary

Recently I started praying the rosary. That may not sound unusual, but it was something of a surprise to me, since I'm not a Catholic, nor a Christian (except in an attenuated, cultural sense), nor even a theist (that is, I don't believe in a personal God distinct from the world yet active in it). So why am I doing it?

The proximate cause was the power of context. Specifically, I was lucky enough to have time in the first couple months of this year to wander around some of the dozens of beautiful Gothic and baroque churches that are dotted around Munich and its environs. Poking my nose into the Theatinerkirche one day, I heard a prayer being recited over the loudspeaker, and I decided to sit for a while to figure out what it was.

It helped that it was in German, a language I thought I knew but was trying to get back up to speed with. It also helped (if that's the word), that six of the years since my last stint in Germany were in California, where I got deep into a hippy version of Buddhism.

The California hippy Buddhism I got deep into encouraged us to look at religious activity just as a kind of practice, and an experimental one at that. (Unlike Greco-Roman religion, it's not even 'orthopraxic,' since engaging in certain practices isn't seen as madatory.) 

After I'd recited a few hundred verses of Japanese (a language I really don't know) as a kind of psychological experiment on myself, I started looking at Christian worship with fresh eyes. Why couldn't I just look at Christian practices like the Eucharist as a practice, without getting into the question of whether the claims made about it were true?

Well, one of the reasons is that official Catholic teaching, in particular, requires you to believe certain claims in order to take part. That's an impasse I'll come back to in this post and, no doubt, on this blog. But nobody has questioned me on what's going through my mind as I work through the rosary, at least not so far.

One of them is that I don't believe some of the things I'm saying (like that Mary is the mother of God), though others strike me as possibly true (like that Jesus was crucified with a crown of thorns). But that's probably not the most interesting thought I've had praying the rosary (if it turns out it is, the rest of the post will offer you diminishing returns). Nor is the way I feel it's such an unexpected and interesting thing, something I need to explain (surely a product of being Protestant by upbringing, a kind of cultural identity it takes occasions like this for me to even notice, but is apparently there.)

A couple of other things have occurred to me too, in the odd way they seem to when you're engaged in a meditation practice focused on focusing on something else. So here are some rather secular meditations on the rosary, with hopes that Christian readers will forgive me.

One interesting thing about the rosary is how it features a combination of repetition and variation - variations on a theme, as it were. The main bit, the Ave Maria ('Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' etc.), is recited fifty times, but there are also five 'Our fathers' between each set of ten Ave Marias, and there's a distinct lead-in to the whole exercise. And on top of that, after each 'Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' there's a different descriptive phrase about Jesus which varies depending on what set of ten you're on, what day of the week, and can also vary depending on the season (Lent) say, and what specific tradition you're following.

Catholics will no doubt find all this pretty familiar and banal, but it's interesting to me as something you see in so many religious traditions - in fact, this combination of repetition and variation is basically what ritual of any sort boils down to. In the San Francisco Zen Center, I remember a lot of the California Buddhists offering explanations of that sort of thing in terms of mindfulness practice. (Justifications in terms of tradition didn't seem to have as much purchase in the Haight as in some other places I've lived.) Paying attention to bowing correctly was meant to snap you out of your thoughts and bring you back to the present moment.

But I'm also interested in how the variations might add to your attentiveness. It's something scholars used to write about poetry - that the slight variations poets introduced to regular metrical schemes kept the readers' attention. When you have to perform or recite something yourself, it makes you use that bit more cognitive energy. You could mindlessly recite the Ave Maria a hundred times, but whether you could do so while getting the added descriptive phrases about Jesus right is another question.

All this talk of Buddhist meditation has reminded me of another thing that caught my attention - the theory that this Christian form of devotion using a chain of beads might actually have originated in Buddhist practice. (I've also recited 'karmapa chenno' and such things with beads in Buddhist contexts.) I have no idea how respectable this theory is, and I can't find any solid evidence for it. But having recently read Thomas McEvilly's huge book on possible transmissions of philosophical and spiritual ideas from East to West, I do believe I'm credulous. 

The final thought, as often at the end of a meditation session, is a practical one. This time it isn't 'Right, I'm going to send him that email' or anything like that, but a modest proposal to the Catholic Church to transform the way it presents itself. More precisely and generally, I do wonder whether Christianity isn't losing out on a big opportunity.

There's an enormous market of attention for meditation in the West, and (as I exemplify) young people in the West are quite willing to recite things they don't believe, and seem alien to them, if it's presented as a way of calming the mind.

Personally, I believe that's actually the most honest way of presenting practices like the rosary, since I don't personally believe many of the religious claims that often go along with them (as with the rosary). But even if you do believe in those more concrete claims, presenting them as a practice others can share in might be an interesting way of reaching out, and of inviting outsiders into your own contemplative tradition.

Don't get me wrong: some people really believe what they're reciting, and I respect that. What isn't clear to me is what trouble it causes to have others who don't believe them reciting them for their own reasons. In any case, as I say, so far nobody has objected to me praying the rosary with my own funny thoughts in my head.

It's an interesting irony of my own spiritual life that I was raised in a tradition (Christianity) that has its own rich mystical history, but when I felt the need for contemplative experiences I headed increasingly Eastward (all the way, in fact, to California). Was that because hippies seemed more hip than Anglicans, and Buddhism more exotic? Yes. But it's also, I think, because Christian churches are, in my experience, oddly embarrassed about the more direct mystical strains that most of them have holed up, like eccentric elderly relatives, in their attics.

Epic drop

A few months ago, it was announced that Oxford is proposing to drop Homer's Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid as compulsory first-year texts. I found this particularly interesting, since I did Classics at Oxford, and hence studied the two texts in question in my first couple of terms. In fact, though by the time I started college (2002), I don't think we were required to read the whole of the Aeneid in Latin (only 8 books out of 12, if memory serves), the whole of the Iliad in Greek was still compulsory. I believe that requirement was watered down as well the following year, to 22 books out of 24. I'm thus one of the last hundred or so people to have read the whole of the Iliad at Oxford in my first term (and the following vacation - I have a bittersweet memory of working through Hector and Achilles' duel on Christmas Day). And I'm definitely among a dwindling number of people anywhere who've read the whole thing in the original. Looking back, I feel quite ambivalent about the whole experience, as I do about my degree as a whole.

First off, it's worth pointing out how unusual it is to read that much Greek these days. Even when I was doing my PhD exams in the US, we weren't asked to read either of the Homeric epics complete, only a few books. Some European Classics undergraduates from outside of Oxford will have read that much by the time they finish their first degrees, but not many, and North American Classics majors will be lucky to have read more than a couple books all the way through in Greek. Is this a boast? In part, yes. Reading the whole of the Iliad through took me a lot of time and effort - at least an hour a day for months. It did give me a deeper experience of the work; nothing quite brings home the futility and horror of war like reading through endless descriptions of pitiless bronze slicing through people's limbs. But it was also frustrating and deeply stupid.

That is, the way we were asked to do it was. One of the problems with Oxford's Classics course is that it's still slowly coming down from a 19th-century high in which it could be taken for granted that anybody embarking upon it would have spent the lion's share of their schooling on learning the living daylights out of Greek and Latin. (My favorite example of just how nuts they went on that is Aldous Huxley's reminiscence of spending a full day every week during his time at Eton just on Greek composition.) In those days, first-year undergraduates probably could just read through Homer without much help. (William Gladstone would later look down on the undergraduates who came after him for being able to have recourse to cribs like lexica - he, of course, improvised his own vocabulary lists, which built character.) Nowadays, things are different, even among the two hundred or so undergraduates who turn up having done A-Level Greek.

I know, since I was one of them. I turned up with an A (the top grade in those days!) and having read Iliad 16 as a set text, and...couldn't really read the Iliad to save my life. I did make use of all the aids I could find - lexica (sorry Gladstone), commentaries, and so on. But Homeric Greek is quite hard, and I still think it makes very little sense to ask first-year undergraduates to read more than half of it on their own. In fact, I'm increasingly convinced of that, since I've been teaching Greek to undergraduates for going on ten years now, and (somewhat to my relief), they find reading Greek hard too. They need a lot of help, and there are a lot of things you might well want to ask about or discuss along the way, so we tend to move through texts quite slowly.

So it might be all to the good to move the Iliad to the second part of the course ('Greats'), where students particularly keen on Homer can work on it with more attention, and with their Greek in a better state. (The old 'Early Greek Hexameter' course would seem to be just the place.) That would also give students more choice in general. There's a macro version of this point that's been ably put by Solveig Lucia Gold: the Oxford Classics course is in general quite narrow compared to North American-style à la carte degrees. I'm definitely among those who think UK degrees could and should become more like that; in the meantime (as Gold notes), both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.

One of the strengths of the European system is that it allows students who want to to specialize much more quickly, and to get a really solid grounding in what they've chosen to study. That's nowhere more evident than in the Oxford 'Literae Humaniores' course, in which reading the Iliad and Aeneid has always been only the first step in a very extensive tour of Greco-Roman culture (especially its literary texts). And if you want a really solid grounding in Greco-Roman culture, it makes an awful lot of sense to start by reading a lot of Homer, who was always seen by subsequent Greeks as both the first and the best of their poets. Homer may not have quite been their Bible or their Koran (though theological readings of Homer were a thing, his text wasn't the Revelation of a monotheistic religion); but he was their Chaucer and their Shakespeare at once. The best comparison is probably to say that he was like Dante for the Italians.

It's also nice, I might add, to read whole works. I don't know if this is a dirty secret, but this is getting to be something that classicists very rarely do, at least at undergraduate level. I know, because I'm one of the instructors failing to get through whole texts in the time allotted to me. But I don't blame myself - it takes time to prepare and discuss these texts, and that means it can be hard to get through even a play in a single, six- or seven-week block of classes. Arguably, though, it does make sense for people getting majors in Greek literature (or even Greek or Classics) to have read one or two works all the way through in the original language by the time they finish.

That, of course, needn't mean it's the Iliad students have to read all the way through. They could read one or two shorter works entire. And shorter works make up most of the rest of Greek literature, including, come to think of it, the Odyssey. Why didn't they make me read the Odyssey in my first term? The conventional answer is that the Iliad was always considered the weightier and greater work in antiquity, and while that may be true, the Odyssey was hardly straight-to-DVD either, at least not to the point of justifying me being made to read 24 books of one epic and 0 of the other.

This brings us to one of the reasons that Oxford has given for proposing this change. The main reason I've seen is that this will make things easier for female students, for a range of reasons. One is that they might be less into all the killing that takes place in the Iliad than the lads. I think that's true - after all, preference for rough-and-tumble play is one of the most well-documented of the many natural differences in interest and disposition between men and women, and that seems to be reflected in differing tastes for things like violent movies. The most I think this argument would justify, though, is for students to be given a choice between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then students, male or female, could choose to spend their time on what most called to them - the harrowing world of the Iliad, or the magical narratives of the Odyssey.

Oxford's main line of reasoning, though, appears to go as follows. More boys than girls take A-Level Greek and Latin. That's true, especially for Greek, with most of the 200 or so pupils who take A-Level Greek coming from all-male boarding schools (which was also, by the way, the case for me). Because of that, male students will on average have a big advantage in reading through the Iliad and the Aeneid in their first two terms. That's also true. Therefore, the argument runs, we shouldn't make understanding those two epics such a major part of the first phase of the degree ('Mods'). That's where I'm not so sure.

One reason is that if having done A-Level Greek gives you an advantage with Homer and Vergil, it'll also give you an advantage with all the other texts on the course (which has a lot to do with reading Greek and Latin texts). If students from certain schools have already read some Homer, students who haven't could be put at even more of a disadvantage by not having a thorough exposure to these fundamental works at an early stage. Besides, Oxford already has a series of variations of the traditional Classics course for students who've done A-Level Latin but not Greek, Greek but not Latin, or neither.

In the end, I don't really mind whether Homer and Vergil's martial epics remain compulsory for first-year students at Oxford. I don't think it would be a disaster if they didn't, and obviously there are bigger issues out there. But if the proposed change doesn't concern me all that much, some of the reasoning behind it does. In the end, it may be that reading Greek and Latin, like other advanced skills - chemistry, maths, or playing football or an instrument to a high level - is the kind of thing that you get better at if, for whatever reason, you've been able to spend more time on it. To what extent it might make sense to change the requirements of highly competitive training programmes for people who've done less of these things - well, that's a complicated topic, and one best left for another time. But the answer's probably not 'to an infinite extent.'

What are my chances like?

One evening in that bygone age known as a few weeks ago I was at a dinner party, and the conversation turned to this new virus everyone was making such a fuss about, the coronavirus (or the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19, to be completely accurate). Like a lot of other people, I'd looked at this breakdown by age groups of people who were known to have died from the virus in China. So I told the other people at the dinner party, 'In our age group, we have a 0.2% chance of death. You probably have about as much a chance of dying going scuba-diving or sky-diving - maybe even riding a motorcycle. We're just not that good at comparing risk.'

I was dead right about that last point, and I even managed to exemplify it in the examples I gave, which were, as I later discovered, well off the mark. It turns out that the 2-in-1000 chance you probably have of dying if you get coronavirus before your forties is much higher than the 1-in-about-34 000 chance you have of dying while scuba diving, or the roughly 1-in-100 000 chance you take skydiving. As for riding a motorcycle, it's only if you were doing it in a race that you'd approach the kind of danger you'd face as a thirty-year-old with coronavirus - with a 1 in 1000 chance, you'd only be about half as likely to die as a thirty-year old with Covid-19.

So what kind of thing does give you a 0.2% chance of dying? And, come to that, what sort of activity puts you at something less than a 1% chance of dying, which is starting to look like the best bet for the overall case fatality rate for Covid-19?

The best match for a 2-in-1000 chance (at least on this pretty well-sourced chart I found online) seems to be hang-gliding, whose 1-in-560 risk makes it just slightly less deadly than that. Four bouts as a boxer will get you somewhere near the same amount of risk.

(I'm assuming the chance accumulates when it comes to activities like this, rather than decreasing as it does in the case of multiple coin flips. Dying of a head injury is unfortunately something that increases the more times you get punched, whereas what side a coin lands on isn't affected by what side it fell on last time.)

The closest comparison for the less than 1% risk that a random person with Covid-19 has is Formula 1 racing, which 99 our of every 1000 people are also going to survive. (Of course, those figures likely apply to experienced race-car drivers - if you just jumped into a McLaren and had a go at the next Grand Prix your chances would probably be less than that.) Something that has about twice the risk factor as getting Covid-19 is base-jumping, which has about a 2% fatality rate.

So, if you're under 40, your chances of dying from Covid-19 if you get it are about the same as if you went hang-gliding once (probably assuming you've done it a few times before), or took part in four boxing matches (again, assuming you're not completely untrained). Across all age-groups, getting Covid-19 is about half as likely to kill you as jumping off a cliff or tall building (with a parachute), and presents you with something very like the risk that Lewis Hamilton faces every time he competes.

In conclusion, I clearly under-estimated the risk that even a 0.2% chance of death represents. It's a significantly bigger risk than something like going deep under water with an air-tank strapped to your back. Having said that, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's very dangerous - it may just mean that scuba-diving was even less of a risk than I'd previously thought it was. We don't call off motorcycle racing or Formula 1 because 0.1 or 1% of the competitors are probably going to die (although we have now called them off to stop the spread of Covid-19, interestingly).

Of course, it needs to be noted that these figures represent the (best guess at) the risk for someone who actually contracts the virus, and lots of people won't. (How may will and won't get it over the next few months is something else the experts aren't quite sure about, but I don't think anybody's predicting an 100% infection rate.) It's also worth bearing in mind that these are average figures, and your risk will be higher or lower depending on your other risk factors (especially if you already have other medical conditions).

But, on the whole, it's interesting to think that the overall chance of dying if you get Covid-19 is somewhere between a motorcycle racer's and a base-jumper's. Motorcycle racing and base-jumping aren't activities that we ban, though they're also things that you'd probably want to avoid, unless you were a bit foolhardy. And they, of course, don't really increase the death-risk for anybody else (except maybe rivals you might take out in a crash during your Superbike race).