What Neil Agius does, he does it for self-promotion – the antagonism of humility, of rootedness. And when sport is turned to stoop this low, then it is not sport, it is not sacred, it is not godly. It has been devoid of its purpose, of its primordial umbilical cord, which is attached to the sacred, to the divine.
The divine is eternal and infallible. Sports has been turned into another human institution and fallible. Neil Agius’ achievements are not directed spiritually and vertically, but for the material ego and horizontally. This is what shoots at me the minute I see him on the press and social media.
Vertical spirals towards God. Anything that is horizontal, spirals to the other side.
And Agius is promoted by the media, heavily. Anyone who is heavily promoted by the press is not to be trusted. According to Lovin Malta, “The nation erupted in support of Neil’s incredible feat, with people and politicians alike coming together to commend his superhuman physical and mental strength.”
Was there a prearrangement with the national media and politicians to push Agius?
Let us continue to analyse sports nowadays vis-a-vis the greater picture so that the readers can match Agius’ endeavours in light of this.
So far, it has been demonstrated that sport serves as a means of cultivating fundamental moral qualities and forging a bond between the corporeal and spiritual selves. Therefore, our next objective is to deepen this relationship, to open up a wider channel via which the transcendent comes when we play and compete.
First, we note that the line separating finiteness from the infinite emerges more clearly the more physically we offer, the more dedicated we are to finding our boundaries. We are faced with a stark realization of our limitations as we gasp for oxygen and experience a white vision, highlighting the vast amount of things that are beyond our reach. We are urged to explore this instant at the border of our existence and see what is beyond.
We have to release our attachment to the details of this earthly coil in order to get further into this spiritual encounter through the medium of sports. We can do this, in my opinion, by pursuing play, beauty, action, prayer, and letting go of any non-spiritual concerns like “purpose.”
According to Church doctrine, the pinnacle of sports points us in the direction of God and not to demons like sea goddesses and other of Agius’s hallucinations:
“The Church has been a sponsor of the beautiful in art, music and other areas of human activity throughout its history. This is ultimately because beauty comes from God, and therefore its appreciation is built into us as his beloved creatures. Sport can offer us a chance to take part in beautiful moments, or to see these take place. In this way, sport has the potential to remind us that beauty is one of the ways we can encounter God.” — Holy See, ‘Giving the best of oneself’
There is no need to justify beauty. It is a natural good. Pursuing it thus enables us to let go of incidental “purposes” that bind our actions to the world’s tangible concerns. As a result, we are invited to play without thinking about our earthly obligations and with complete lightness of being.
“Catholic liturgical theologian Romano Guardini agrees with Thomas Aquinas that play and contemplation share similarities. Indeed, in Guardini’s view, the liturgy itself is a kind of play. For him, the didactic aim of the liturgy is that of teaching the soul “not to see purposes everywhere.” In this sense, the liturgy is similar to the play of the child or the life of art: “It has no purpose, but it is full of profound meaning.” The soul must learn to abandon, at least in prayer, the restlessness of purposeful activity; it must learn to waste time for the sake of God, and to be prepared for the sacred game with sayings and thoughts and gestures, without always immediately asking “why?” and “wherefore?” It must learn not to be continually yearning to do something, to attack something, to accomplish something useful, but to play the divinely ordained game of the liturgy in liberty and beauty and holy joy before God.” — P. Kelly, ‘Catholic Perspectives on Sports’
Didn’t Agius want to accomplish something through his feat? Why didn’t he just seek the liberty and beauty and holy joy before God, through his sportive action?
In sports, the individual is “freely transformed into an element of solid action” in this lightening of circumstances. The heroic aspect of our souls is given the freedom to more fully express itself and lead us ahead in this absence of limitations from the world.
“The irrationality of impressions, visions, of inexplicable elan, and gratuitous acts of heroism urge man forward along ascending paths; thus, he eventually begins to act from an interior motive. It is in the context of the subconscious that he finds himself introduced to a wider reality through which he is transformed to a state of calmness, self-sufficiency, simplicity, purity. Moreover, he receives an almost supernatural inflow of energies that cannot be explained through the determinism of physiology. He also feels an indomitable will to keep on going, to commit himself again, to challenge new peaks, new abysses, new faces. It is precisely in this drive that we find inadequate the translation of the material action in regard to its meaning (the transcendence of the spiritual impulse in relation to external conditions), to the deeds, the visions, and the bold actions that have propagated its awakening…” — Julius Evola, ‘Meditations on the Peaks’
In these moments of ultimate physicality, we find an intense revelation of that which is beyond the physical. Our task is to embrace this contradictory principle and develop a certain amor fati, an embracing of the lightness of being, and to use this revelation to loosen our love of the physical world.
“In 1904, Pius X opened the doors of the Vatican to sport by hosting a youth gymnastics event. The chronicles of that time do not hide their amazement toward this gesture. A story is reported that in response to the question from a puzzled priest of the curia, ‘Where are we going to finish?’ Pius X replied, “My dear, in Paradise!” — Holy See, ‘Giving the best of oneself’
We can discover a passion for death in the exhilaration of sports. We catch a peek of what lies beyond the physical when we experience the intensity of a perfect moment of worshipful play and all nervousness is dulled. This gives us the strength to completely give up our earthly form.
Never had I discovered in physical action anything resembling the chilling, terrifying satisfaction afforded by intellectual adventure. Nor had I ever experienced in intellectual adventure the selfless heat, the hot darkness of physical action. Somewhere, the two must be connected. Where, though? Somewhere, there must be a realm between, a realm akin to that ultimate realm where motion becomes rest and rest motion… Somewhere, I told myself, there must be a higher principle that manages to bring the two together and reconcile them. That principle, it occurred to me, was death.” — Yukio Mishima, ‘Sun and Steel’
So, Paradise is the goal that every sport must pursue. The allure of the riskiest sports stems from our innate want to break away from the constraints of mankind. They live precisely on the brink of life and death, and the participant will finally emerge victorious and with honor, regardless of which side of that glimmering barrier he finds himself on.
“And what should I say when someone climbs almost vertical icy walls, where if two or three centimeters give way that is enough for him to fall to his death? And yet this may be one of the deepest aspects of the experience of mountain climbing: a kind of amor fati, to unite the excitement of the adventure with danger, to give in to trusting that which in our destiny is beyond human control.” — Julius Evola, ‘Meditations on the Peaks’
St. Paul did not think twice to allude to the way to paradise using analogies from sports. Let’s hope that when the time comes, we can also say:
“For I am even now ready to be sacrificed: and the time of my dissolution is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”
Competition and triumph have nothing to do with what Agius achieved. What he did is just a mockery of whatever he deems as sport and heroic. But it’s always the one who swims first to set the waves in motion in a pseudo-cheer. Let’s revere and continue ‘to humanoid’ ourselves in the ‘mechanicality‘ of the Dupe and Dope Show of the clipping of pseudoephedrine.