"Pig" or "Cow"…

Two cars are travelling along a lonely country road, one driven by an impatient man, the other, in front by a woman admiring the scenery. As the man overtakes the woman's car, the woman winds her window down and screams out: "Pig!" The man in an instant shouts out his retort: "Cow!" A split second afterward, the man ploughs into a wild pig in the middle of road.

Ever since Robin Williams issued the Latin phrase "Carpe Diem", in the Academy Award nominated Dead Poets' Society, bumper stickers, school magazines and bathroom graffiti have continued to sponsor and echo the message around much of the western world. In graduation-day autograph books it has become the one phrase to utilize, when you have nothing else to impart. With the international marketing power of this phrase, one may feel genuine pity for the Ancient Roman poet Horace, who, alive today, would have assuredly been a billionaire had he copyrighted his most famous quote. Yet, passages misquoted, or half-quoted, serve a purpose far different from what their authors intended. Words lose their meaning when they are taken out of context, as the intemperate man on the country road discovered.

"Carpe Diem" is only a small part of Horace's sentence, and hence only a blur of the poet's intended meaning. The full text from Horace is: "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero". This means far more than "Seize the Day", sucking the marrow out of life; it is in fact an exhortation to live life as if there is no tomorrow, quite literally: "enjoy today, trusting little in tomorrow". Derivations of Horace's thought have come down to us in further adages as the well-known: "make hay while the sun shines" attests. Such advice is bad advice, running contrary to Christianity, if enjoying life means to live a life of reckless moral abandon, seeking the sensual or the temporal at any expense, moral, ethical or financial.

Horace's thought contains the underlying question as to what is life's meaning; if life is indeed short, how can the individual make best use of it?

St Thomas Aquinas

The Dominican theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, went to considerable lengths to debate the question as to life's meaning. According to Aquinas, the purpose of life was contained in achieving the maximum level of personal happiness. To be happy to the optimal level, one had to be able to satisfy the deepest yearning within the human person. Aquinas argued cases both for, and eventually conclusively against, the basic need of humanity being found in: wealth, honours, fame, power, or bodily pleasure. Aquinas concluded that the greatest happiness which an individual can obtain, is the vision of God, to be reconciled completely with the source of all life. All other sources of happiness are either temporary, constrained by time, or able to be destroyed, stolen or corroded. What Aquinas was reinforcing was St. Augustine's conclusion in the latter's Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

It was for this reason that just prior to the time when Aquinas' life came to its end, he saw a vision of God, and stopped writing, claiming: "that in comparison with what God had now revealed to him, all he had written seemed chaff". (McDermott, ed., Summa Theologiae, 1989, p. 601). The greatest philosopher of the Western Church, had glimpsed a mystery far greater than his own self, and in this glimpse, had experienced a happiness so profound that no tome he had written could adequately do the source of all happiness, justice.

How should the Christian interpret "Carpe Diem"?

So how should the Christian interpret "Carpe Diem"? The Gospel of St. Matthew offers the reader a near perfect gloss from which to receive instruction. Faced with a throng of people burdened by ill-health, misfortune and the daily travails of living, Christ expresses a teaching as simple as it is sublime. Let us take it out of context first, to be just to the misquoted Horace. Christ speaks: "So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today". (Matthew 6: 34, NRSV) It would seem that Christ is instructing us, to "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow may never come".

Yet most critically placed in context, this teaching by Christ has been preceded by a number of phrases, including: "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth". (Matthew 6: 24, NRSV)

Francesco Petrarca

Christ calls on us to seek the greatest happiness in the arms of God; not in the false glisten of gold, or the seductive lure of honours. Christ wishes us not to seize the day, for fear of the morrow never arriving, but as the prophets of old to "Choose Life" for your sake and for that of God. (Deuteronomy 30: 19) As Christians we are not to be lured by the moment, but to set a course for our entire lives, so that each of the many moments that comprise our lives may be fully seized. As Christ announced: "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly". (John 10: 10, NRSV)

On the 26th of April, 1336 the young Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, decided to fulfil a youthful ambition and climb to the summit of Mount Ventoux. Petrarca was inspired among other things, by the maxim of Horace. Yet what began as an exercise in doing things, for so doing, was rapidly to become one of the most famous spiritual lessons ever recorded. Reaching the summit of the mountain, Petrarca decided to celebrate his achievement by reading a random passage from St. Augustine.

Opening the Confessions, Petrarca was greeted with the words: "And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not". What Petrarca had discovered was that the journey of the spirit is one which requires not the impassioned climbing of high mountains, nor being frantically busy so as to utilise each hour, but the steady climb up the ladder of the spirit, so as to one day seize the highest rung, and by so doing, peep over the summit and see the face of God. Thus began the Renaissance, inspired not by one man's seizing the day, but by the seizing of a life. The same challenge lies ahead of us all.

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©2007 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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