To recollect is to gather things
and take them back to the place
they should not have left.[1]
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
In This Chapter
Some distorted spirituality has turned recollection into a despicable pseudo-virtue. For many with this spirituality, a recollected man smiles next to a pious image with a holy-holy expression.
But for Dr. Plinio, recollection is the quality of the soul by which man’s attention is universal, analyzing the ensemble of things and scrutinizing them in due proportion to the degree they deserve.
For example, he does not shrink from grasping merely human aspects of this quality in non-typically religious personalities such as Bismarck, Adenauer, or Churchill. For him, recollection comes from collecting, and collecting is to gather scattered things.
[1] 4-29-67.
From left to right: Bismarck, Adenauer and Churchill
What Is Recollection?
Recollection is the quality of the soul by which man’s attention to the aggregate of things he analyzes is turned and fixed on each one in proportion to the degree it deserves. For example, in perfect recollection, an individual pays more attention to sublime things than to banal ones; he pays more attention to his own task than to the task of others; he pays more attention to serious things than to merely pleasant ones. Paying more attention to one thing than another shows selective attention; it is an excellence of the soul by which one can value things according to their hierarchical and architectonic order.
Recollection is an element of seriousness and not something distinct from it. It is a selective attention and effort of the intellect and, therefore, an integral element of seriousness. Another aspect of recollection is, when dealing with inferior things, seeking to relate them to higher ones and seeing higher things reflected in lower ones.
Dissipation, a Vice Opposite to Recollection
To collect is to gather scattered things and, even more, to bring them back to where they should not have left. It turns out that, by a defect of the human mind, a person not formed in this virtue has the vice of dissipation, which is the opposite of recollection.
What is dissipation? Dissipating consists of scattering things outside their proper place. To dissipate one’s patrimony, for example, means to place it in the wrong hands and lose it. It could be said of a family that dissipated itself over the years; it fell apart and lost its nexus with its pristine unity.
My attention is dissipated when, by sheer curiosity, it strays from the line of recollection, and I digress between one thing and another without a purpose. An example of dissipated reasoning: I see this silver chandelier, and my thought jumps to silver; the silver reminds me of the mines of Potosi; the mines of Potosi remind me of a man I knew who lived in those mines; he used to like blue ties. Thus, in a few moments, I got to think about blue ties. This is a typically dissipated thought with no direction, wandering stupidly from thing to thing.
To collect is to grab a dissipated thing and put it back. In this case, to exercise control and recollection upon our naturally dissipated attention. The underlying idea is that the human mind is naturally dissipated because of original sin. The virtue of recollection gathers it and ordains it in the direction it must take.
A Collected Mind Hierarchizes One’s Attention
A person with a recollected mind is not one who only pays attention to a single thing. He pays attention to everything but places them in the proper hierarchical order. He sees and notices everything but gives each thing its degree of importance. It is a manly and highly esteemable quality.
By recollecting, we acquire sufficient knowledge about some subjects and can concentrate our attention on others. It turns out that, from a certain age, people take all secondary things for granted and fix their attention almost exclusively on some main lines. He does see the rest, but it is as if he did not.
For example, when walking down the street, I will hardly pay attention to an ant, for I already know what I should know about it. I have already seen and analyzed it, and for me, it is done. But there was a time when I paid attention to it and the thousand things I mentioned in Ambiances, Customs, Civilizations.[1] I wrote about them because I paid attention to them.
I am as horrified of men who mutilate reality as lungs are horrified of stuffy air. Our head was made for the great open air of total reality, with all its winds.
Recollection in People with Special Vocations
Some saints had a special vocation to meditate exclusively on the things of Heaven. A saint went to the bottom of a well to spend his whole life praying there. It is a special vocation, not the common vocation of all men. What characterizes very special vocations is that they are sublime in individual cases but would lead to insanity if they were collective trends. If the Church were to promote a civilization in which all men plunged into wells to meditate, this would cause horror. It would also cause horror if everyone were to have the community of goods proper to Religious Orders. Why? Because they are exceptional examples, and turning the most sublime of exceptions into something ordinary produces a monstrosity.
Examples of Recollection: Bismarck,[2] Adenauer,[3] Churchill[4]
A distorted spirituality has made recollection into such an abject pseudo-virtue that we must seek a genuine image of recollection among nonreligious characters.
Bismarck, a horrific revolutionary, was highly recollected.
Adenauer was recollected and accomplished his perfection by dint of recollection. He was so recollected that even his mongoloid eyes rounded off.
Churchill is the masterpiece of secular recollection, a far more universal mind than Bismarck’s or Adenauer’s. He was a man who, passing by a street, could entertain himself with the heels of an old woman’s shoe, with a cat or an interesting detail of a stevedore at the docks. His whole life would go through Churchill’s mind as he meditated. For me, this is the nec plus ultra of recollection. He was a highly architectonic mind.[5]
The Medieval Paradigm
There was never as much activity, struggle and adventure as in the Middle Ages’ calm repose.[6] City streets were crowded and bubbling with activity. The ground floors of houses had trades and advertising banners. People shouting to sell goods, talking loud, arguing. While the streets were busy, if you were to enter a house on any side of the street, you would see that people psychologically stood a thousand miles from the street. They were not like today’s homes with a big window looking out the street, in which a person in his bedroom feels like he is in the street.
The houses’ thick walls had a tremendous psychological effect. They also had very long sill windows with a stool on both sides. They were meant to have cushions for people to sit down and enjoy the incoming light to read a book. Still on the window sill was a little flower pot and a few tulips. The street stood miles away…
The glass panes were green with round, “bottle-bottom” patterns, creating an intimate ambiance only a few feet from the street, where all the noise was going on. The nights were calm and very recollected.
Bandits rendered a service in that everyone was afraid to leave for fear of them and the lack of street lights. Outside, danger roared, but houses had doors with bolted locks. Outside, one could hear bandits and police in hot pursuit. However, people felt cozy inside, wearing a hood and drinking tea. Slippers were placed by the fireplace to warm up. One would read the story of his ancestors, something familiar even in plebeian families. Another would read the Gospel and the lives of the Saints.
People had a sense of tranquility in the silence of the night, as a guard would go down the street singing religious songs to let everyone know he was on patrol. I learned a German song as a child: “Listen, sir, and let me sing to you. Our clock has struck midnight. Twelve apostles in the world. O man, how much vigilance this beckons to your heart.” Up to ten minutes later, the last echoes of the song are still heard.
All this happened in the isolation of a home where many live, all closely knit by family solidarity. It was an atmosphere of coziness, warmth, and placidness, which is appropriately “repose” within family life. But a “repose” made of life, not death.
“Repose” in Medieval Towns and Castles
Another factor of “repose” is the city’s coziness. Walls with large locked doors surround it. There are sentinels; the enemy stands outside.
Located in a large field, the castle also had its own “repose.” Next to it, like fearful daughters around their mother, were the huts of farmers who worked during the day. Besides work, there was war, so frequent in the Middle Ages, with attacks that would send them running into the castle.
In this setting, the “repose” becomes delicious, full of human warmth and coziness. It is not made for the entire life; it is an alternative to combat, work, and adventure. They also embarked on huge journeys, crusades and adventures of all kinds.
Action, Recollection and Psychological Distance
In moments of repose, the sense of danger goes away, people relax, and things resume their proper hierarchy. For example, a merchant spends all day trading in his store. At night, his commercial activities close, and he enters a home environment so different from his store that he is forced to stop thinking about business. Trade vanishes, the hierarchy of values is re-established, and he can maintain his psychological distance. He who has no recollection nor “repose” has no psychological distance.
All this is very attractive. It shows balance, order, and affinity with human nature. Recollection is not the opposite of action but its source. Man’s great actions are accomplished in recollection. On the other hand, it is not an invitation to laziness but restores strength to continue the action.
A hen is a symbol of false recollection. When the chicken coop door opens and someone enters, the hen runs off stupidly in any direction and hides in a place that hides nothing. It is the most striking image of a stupid lack of recollection.[7]
Notes:
[1] “Ambiences, Customs, Civilizations,” a famous section published by Dr. Plinio in the monthly Catolicismo.
[2] Prince Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), Prussian statesman.
[3] Konrad Adenauer(1876-1967), Chancellor of West Germany.
[4] Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965), English statesman, a leading organizer of the victory over Hitler in World War II.
[5] Arquitectonic: conveying a superior meaning that suggests an architectural design.
[6] About the concept of “remanso,” see Chapter 6, “Psychological Distance.”
[7] 4-29-67.