April 1995 Print

by Dr. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

When is a man old? George Burns tells us that a man is old when he stoops down to tie a shoe­ lace and then looks around to see if there is anything else on the floor that needs picking up. Burns ought to know: he claims to be ninety-eight years old. For my part, on my seventieth birth­day I noticed that I must be old because everybody new I met looked like somebody else I knew. Possibly a man is old when his remote past, his childhood and times long forgotten, now swarm back into memory to both trouble and bless his declining years. One truth does stand out. In our time age has become relative. I am reminded of Papa Joe. Papa was a flaming red-headed gentleman without a trace of grey in his hair. Certainly advanced in age, he owned and ran a fine little Italian restaurant not far from my home. Blue-eyed and blond of skin, he was born in Calabria in the deep south of the peninsula. He belied everything I knew about Italy south of Naples where the men are short and swarthy. Insisting, to my disbelief, that he had served in the Italian army in World War I as a trumpeter, he dispelled my doubts by showing me a fad­ed photograph of himself as a boy, trumpet in hand, and uniformed as they then were. He died the other day at age ninety-four and I don’t know and never will whether he was ever old at all. Then again, how many of us have known people who insisted that we guess their age and having done so discover that they are a good ten years older than we had estimated. This can be embarrassing as is indeed the fact itself of old age in our time.

Nobody wants to be old and the national obsession with diets and the rest bespeak a mas­sive attack against growing old gracefully, as it was once called. When we do honor age we do so by denying it. Witness the laudable efforts to remove the legal age limit on the time we can continue to work. What this does, in effect, is deny that a man is truly old, to assert that he can still keep up with the young in the marketplace. But to be honored simply because you are old seems foreign to the spirit of the time. The insurance gimmick projected on the television screen always shows a couple, arm in arm, facing the sunset as they fade into “The Golden Years.” She is always beautifully coiffured, if white haired; he is slender and athletic, looking as if he just left the bar­ber shop. There are a few wrinkles, of course, but the couple heads towards the hori­zon where they will do everything they always wanted to do: golf, swim, fish. The so­cial security is paid by the clock month after month. Pensions are good, investments secure. The swimming pool is trim and full. The Love Boat vacations are ahead and even death is thwarted of its sting because the funeral is already paid for, in advance.

How many of you, good readers, have known any such couples, a couple without cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and wheel-chairs? I am certain that a few such lucky folk are around but their very presence in our midst reminds us of their excep­tional good fortune. Absent from these televised visions of a felicitous and untroubled old age is not only infirmity and the degradation by which the old are often afflicted, but as well the subsequent humiliations that follow in their wake. Old age is indeed honored provided the old are able to pretend that they are young. Youth triumphant and exalted. Old age banished! This gnostic panacea promising a tardy heaven on earth is not only fed us daily, but it fattens the wallets of the purveyors of this earthly paradise. Were this dream removed, our economy would probably collapse in a matter of days.

I am not suggesting that the remedy for this shimmering and glittering lie consists in falling down and just giving in to the decrepitude that is the future of most of us. Youth needs no justification because it justifies itself. We all prefer youth to age. George Bernard Shaw once remarked that the only thing wrong with youth was that it was given to children, and in truth we find youth appreciated, even loved, when it is about to disappear.

The question we ought to ask is: does old age have anything of worth and dignity in itself which is not an imitation of youth or a prolongation of youth beyond its own normal span? Is there some kernel of goodness simply in being old which is not a repetition of what went before? If we try to answer the question restricting our consideration to the biological side of life we have to answer in the negative. Biologically, everything (or almost everything) good to be said lies on the side of full maturity which is not precisely youth but which is certainly as well not old age.

Our answer, if indeed we find one, must lie somewhere in the interior of the human soul, that which differentiates us from whatever animating forces can be found within the animal and vegetable world lying below us. Here I fix upon what might be the door o­pening into the depths of the spirit: memory. It would be absurd to assert as did the Cartesian mechanists that brute animals have no memory. Anybody who owns a pet dog or cat is soon aware of the power of animal memory. But memory in the living world beneath rationality consists in mere retention of past images and the experiences formed of them. Closely related to what Aristotle called “the estimative power” and what we call in modern English “instinct,” memory is never reflected upon and known to be a past, not a present. The past qui past is known only by the human intelli­gence, which has the power not only to retain the past but to fix it before a man who can evaluate it as a moment of time which once was but no longer is except, by defini­tion, in the cognitive act which thinks it in the now. Thus the scholastics wisely dis­tinguished between sense and intellectual memory. The first is a power of retention and the second is one of the many activities exercised by the mind. By a remarkable paradox, the past, what no longer is, now is again and made present to the soul as it lives a new life in the spirit, a new being.

By no means is this capacity to recapture the past a mere by-product or addendum to hu­man experience. On the contrary, memory is essential to the very development of the full life of both intelligence and will. We do not understand in a void, but in and through the sensorial world. This is so true that the Common Doctor insisted that the human soul in a purely natural state separat­ed from the body could learn nothing new; hence the mysterious conundrum of a soul separated from the body but without the supernatural life of Beatitude. What would it do?

Nowhere is this more powerfully experienced than in the case of amnesia, where the conti­nuity of life is sundered and men and women so afflicted have to begin all over again, without a name, with no remembered history. Such wounded people are shadows of what they once were. When this forgetfulness, a disease in the individual, has become a corporate infirmity, then society is truly sick.

We suffer nationally that sickness today. The time is gone when traditionalists such as Hilaire Belloc could complain that we live in an age when men and women no longer re­member their grandparents and do not even know the names of their great ­grandpar­ents. Today in the broad underworld of both slums and suburbia, they often do not even know the names of their fathers; and whatever dim memory some of these young­sters have of those who beget them is lost in the remote past of a childhood full of de­gradation and shame, poverty and abuse, of a time without love and better forgotten than remembered, for the memory thereof brings with it searing pain and adds to the hate and loneliness stalking the inner city.

The old are the custodians of the past. Let this not be considered merely as a pleasant relish to the salad of life. In a profound sense nobody–be he young or old–can live in the present because the present becomes a past the moment we think about it. The future, in turn, structures the direction of our past because we remember what is of use to our futures and discard the rest as useless baggage. Show me what a man recalls of his past and I will tell you, down almost to the last detail, what his future will be. Show me what a society remembers of its past and I can predict, with reasonable expectation, its future. If a civilization remembers its saints, its future will be full of saints. But who today remembers the saints? The very future even while it feeds off the past, struc­tures it. For this reason, we forget ninety-nine percent if not more of what happened to us in the past. No man can remember with accuracy more than a sliver of what he did yesterday, nor can a society. But that sliver makes the future even as it is recovered from oblivion by a decision made in the present.

Aristotle saw all this but he saw it dimly because he did not know the Incarnation. He told us that if we would exhort men to greatness and, a fortiori, the regimes in which they live, our statesmen must hold before us as paradigms tales of our heroes, as exam­ples urging us to greatness. The future as such is a total blank, sheer possibility and hence without existence. We act to shape it into being only with materials at our hand. These materials, by necessity, are experiences undergone in the past. As I once put it: we back into the future with our eyes riveted on the past. These eyes are the old, of those whose principal task in the years still given them is to remember and to teach what they remember, to weigh and evaluate the human condition for the sake of present action geared at forming into being a future.

The old can be geniuses and they can break through and go beyond the boundaries of knowledge hitherto possessed in science or philosophy, technology or art. But so, too, can the young: there are both old and young men of genius. The capacity to invent, to discover, to innovate, is not restricted to any age. Descartes invented analytic geome­try when he was a young man. Einstein already formulated his famous equation of mat­ter and energy before he was a young man employed by academia. Houseman wrote his best poetry when a young man employed in a post office. Then again Beethoven com­posed his finest music when he as a very old man. But what pertains to the old and to them in a pre-eminent degree is experience. From this field plowed by the years they bring forth the crop that makes the wine. Old age ought to be the harvesting time of the human spirit.

As grapes are gathered into presses and become wine and as the vintner weighs their worth and separates the bad from the indifferent, the indifferent from the good, and even the good from the very good and then bottles them all, labeling them in order of their excellence, so too the old measure the fruit of experience and thus offer their wisdom to the world.

We may come to the old out of pity because disease has racked their bodies and seared their spirit: we proffer the love of charity. We may come to the old because of their scien­tific knowledge or their mastery of some aspect of reality. When we do so we approach them as we would approach anybody else in order that we might be instructed. But when we come to the old because of their experience we approach them in that which precisely makes them the custodians of the wisdom of the race of men. They and they alone have the experience needed to make them wise.

Not all of the old are wise, but very many of them are. This wisdom transcends science and consists in a capacity to judge, a habit of evaluation, a knack for discerning the useless as well as the false. They place the lesser good in its proper place, neither adjudicating it to be better than it is nor worse than it is. They crown with their approbation the good and they bow down before the best. Aris­totle himself and Aquinas after him understood wisdom to be that supreme virtue of the intellect that orders everything we already understand and thus discovers order wher­ever it might exist and impose order wherever it is lacking. The first wisdom is the hab­it of being: metaphysics or first philosophy. The second, more to the point here, is the virtue of moral discernment, prudence. To this pertains history and our understanding of its import in the ebb and tide of human existence.

Senex, Age Senate: a gathering of the old, the body of men incarnating the experience and wisdom of a people. Every Senate, from its archetype in the old Roman Senate to its resonance in the capital of this nation bespeaks the essence of authority and a corporate recognition of the rights of truth in the public forum.

We come to the old who are wise because we seek instruction. In a sane society the ini­tiative does not come from the old but from everybody else. This search for truth bespeaks society’s recognition that the wise pos­sess a body of truths we need to know. We ask questions of them and they answer out of the fullness of their wisdom. As the eminent Dr. Alvaro d’Ors in Spain puts it: Soci­ety is empowered to question the authority of the wise and they, in turn, are thus au­thorized to answer, to speak. Often in the past this interplay of society and wisdom was institutionalized and crystallized politically. In every case this wisdom was recog­nized as living in a person, sons seeking counsel from fathers and in fathers seeking counsel from their fathers.

Contemporary society as we know it in the industrialized world is lacerated by more than one abomination. Among them all there does stand out a persistent, enduring refusal to honor age for what it is. By a curious irony, the old are often honored but always to the extent to which the old imitate the young, as I have pointed out. He doesn’t act his age! He is young enough to work a few more years! He is a graybeard but look how ag­ile he is! When the body creeks down and eventually collapses, modern medicine admi­rably bends its attention to palliating the attendant evils. But modern man is totally absent-minded about the claims of wisdom, found pre-eminently in the old, to be heard and heeded.

If we reflect upon this ingrained fallacy we can finger its flaws. In denying age any intrinsic worth, we thereby deny any intrinsic worth to that fullness of experience which is only possible to the old possibly because–in most cases–it takes plen­ty of time. From experience alone there emerges into existence that ordered memory from which we disengage principles capable of being crafted into premises from which moral conclusions are drawn. In a special way practical wisdom or prudence weighs the world and separates the wheat from the chaff. All old men do not possess wisdom. This is so obvious it is almost embarrassing to write it down. They are old fools. And all y­ounger men do not lack wisdom. There are men wise before their time. But such wisdom is found generally in the old and this suffices for my argument.

Two grave and possibly insurmountable roadblocks lie in the way today, preventing the wisdom of the old from playing a significant role in the society of our time: The first and more important is the decline of the family in the past quarter century: mothers without fathers; children without parents; rampant divorce and uncontrolla­ble sexual depravity. In some European countries where the family still retains a certain traditional stability, the family house–one owned and possessed free of crippling debt–remains the Locus, the Place, where all members of the family live well past childhood and until its younger members marry and set up a home of their own. Presiding over the family house, owned really by no one person but by the family as a unity, are the grandparents, and every familial decision demands, if not always their consent, then certainly their counsel. The old are listened to as a matter of course and the fruit of their long experience becomes a patrimony of the blood. (In old Basque law, for exam­ple, everything is owned familially and all properties are held in common.)

This daily proximity of the old, grandparents principally but aunts and uncles as well, renders it relatively easy to seek out their advice, to be instructed by their prudence. If the wisdom of the old must be heard in order that it might take on flesh, there is no better way to assure this than living together with young and old under the same roof. This prevents the isolation of young from mature, children from parents, and parents from grandparents.

Often Americans who know about this European situation complain about the lack of privacy with so many people hemmed into one building. But the com­plaint is without foundation. Those old European houses are large but are divided into many small rooms. The whole family gathers together at dinner, but has more privacy the rest of the day than we have in our houses dominated by a large “family” or “tele­vision” room which often prevents anybody from being alone at all. Granting the heavy leveling of European society in our time, the “generation gap” is avoided or at least attenuated.

This healthy social intercourse between all ages seems impossible in our country. Come graduation from high school, we all scatter and go our solitary ways. The aged too often find themselves alone, often shunted off to “residence homes” which are little more than hospitals for the sick and near prisons for the hearty who must “sign out” for a “pass” when they want to take a walk or go down­town for a beer or a show. The wisdom of the old thus withers in isolation from the young who need it but do not seek it.

Thus history is sliced horizontally in zones of time unrelated to one another. History as a vertical dimension of the spirit is lost. The old who could, for example, hand on their lived and seen experience are not there to do so. What most men today under seventy years old know about World War II they glean from television. They have no chance to sit down with the old and listen to them about the war or anything else. In terms of an example dear to the readers of The Angelus, we are fast approaching a time when the living memory of the old Latin Mass will have died, not because the Old Mass is so far distant in time, but because those under fifty or sixty years of age do not have any opportunity to talk to those who lived the better part of their lives in a Church still undisturbed by radical innovation and the flattening and debasing of its liturgy. The young could hear from those graybeards how they went “to the altar of God who gave joy to [their] youth.”

Only yesterday, just a few years gone by, the last living survivors of the War Between the States died. They, as children, could have talked to very old men and women who remembered the American Revolution. And on back–we are, after all, only some twenty very long generations from the Birth of Christ. This handing on of a history lived and remembered is truncated and even snuffed out by the isolation of the old from the rest of mankind. Thus the sap goes out of the life of everyone. Tales of heroes are not told to the young by the old. The sense of being born in the Great Depression and the internal agony suffered by a whole people is never heard about, never spoken of, because those who knew it–and they mount into the tens of millions–are not talked to by the majority of the nation. Tradition today is not something lived, but something we look up in a book at a library even as we are cut away from the living libraries walking about amongst us: the old.

One of the gems worked into the broach of wisdom is the awareness of contingency, of the fleetingness of things, of the precariousness and novelty of existence. In conventional iconography there figures a picture of an old man walking hand in hand with a child, his own grandchild. The old know what it is to be a contingent being: they have en­dured and still are. The prayer of thanksgiving is often on their lips as they bend their knees to pray. Paradoxically this experience of living in a contingent world unites the old to the very young, who also sense the world as perpetual novelty. The fishing pond down the road is exciting to grandfather because he knows he may not see it again. It is exciting to the child because he has never seen it.

They head down the road together, companions in their celebration of being. This awareness of contingency is dimmed as we grow older. It only comes back when we are old. Civ­ilization itself, at least in its material aspects, is an elaborate shield thrown up against contingency, all the way from traffic signals to medicine. Civilization is a trench we dig in order to hold off accidents and infirmity, decrepitude and death itself. But the new­ness of things, all fragile as chandeliers, suffuses the sensibility of children–and of old people as well. Children today are cheated in not knowing well their own grand­parents, and grandparents are cheated of their right to give to these children their wisdom, for it is better to give than to receive.

The second roadblock against recognizing and appropriating the wisdom of the old is political. In no way are they represented before the powers of government in any in­stitution which incarnates wisdom as a living voice to be heard for the common good of all of us. Given the present state of affairs it seems impossible that such a representa­tion could ever be achieved. This would demand a dismantling of every democratic constitution in the world. In this last “Year of the Family,” I have read many an excel­lent exhortation about the central role of the family in society, from authoritative dec­larations from the Vatican to reflections by bishops, laymen, and others, but nowhere have I read of the need to represent the family politically. The democratic presumption that only the individual be given the vote undercuts the laudable efforts to place fam­ily life at the heart of society.

The family is still marginated politically. There is a contradiction between the democratic principle–one man, one vote–and the role of the family. If only the individual is represented at the polling booth, if only representatives of indi­viduals (and parties) occupy positions of power, then all the talk about family “values” is so much guff. On the democratic presumption, only individuals exist politically. Were the family to be represented politically, considerable weight would have to be given the old as the presumed custodians of the wisdom of society. This will not happen however, not unless a Christian revolution would sweep away the past four hundred years.

But there is a sense deeper than all things political in which age imitates God Himself. We men, because we are temporal beings, have our very being parcelled out to us bit by bit. The past dies and it can only be retrieved by memory. I am substantially the same man I was at birth but this cannot quite be said of my being, my existence: otherwise the past–what no longer is–would be the present, a patent contradiction. Being, in turn, is always signified by the present sense, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us in his commentary on the Perihermeneas of Aristotle. We have already argued that this loss of the past is countered to a degree by memory and we have argued as well the proposition that the old are the guardians of memory. God, Whose Being is always a perpetual present, altogether without past or future, transcends the fleetingness of temporal existence. Were we eternal beings, our past would be our present and our future as well.

But we are not God Who is His Eternity. The Lord God remembers nothing becauseHe does not have to. This Eternity is not a long time but the fullness of that Being who said of Himself to Moses: “I Am Who Am” and Who told a crowd of incredulous Jews that “before Abraham was, I Am,” not a past or a future but a blazing flash of Existence, Eternal, ever new and ever old. St. Augustine, in his famous prayer on the beauty of God, did not write: “Oh, my Beauty, ever so New.” He could have done so and it would have been true. But what he actually wrote was: “Seri te amavi, O Pulchritudo, tam antiqua et tam nova, seri te amavi.” Too late have I loved Thee, O My Beauty, so ancient and so new, too late have I loved Thee.” God is thus imitated and honored not only by the youth of creation but by its antiquity. Since the future is a sheer blank it cannot honor God because the future as yet is noth­ing. But the past, as living again, in man, can offer Him glory in the new being given that past in us. Both young and old reflect Him, and that divine reflection by the old is their wisdom born and stirred in memory. And Wisdom too is a Divine Name.