Concerning Beatrice Fizzard

A letter from Sr. Mary Athanasius, O.P.

To the Editor of the Borges Review of Books,

The sisters and I read with interest the essays on Miss Beatrice Fizzard in Vol. 15, Issue 7 of the print edition of the Borges Review of Books but were disappointed to see so little of it available online for those who don’t receive the journal in the mail. We encourage you to post more!

As you know from our previous correspondence, writing commentaries on Fizzard’s work on St. Thomas has been the chief intellectual pursuit of my life. I believe she was the great theological mind of the last century and perhaps of the last five centuries. Some of her students are now sisters in this community, and their patient explanations have guided us all through the thornier passages of the Puella essays. I’m discovering that everything becomes simple and beautiful when you look at it from the proper height, but to ascend to the proper height can be perilous without a guide.

St. Dominic, pray for us.

I think your readers might like to hear about Beatrice’s brother Bill, a scholar in his own right. He devoted his life to thinking about names, their nature, syntax, and ontology. What interested him most were those cases when the name of a creator matched the name of his created object or the name of a creator matched the name of his created object and the “field of creation”. For this latter case he gave the example of the song “Bad Company” performed by the band Bad Company on the second side of their album “Bad Company”. His small home in St. Bride's, Newfoundland was filled with eponymous albums, books, paintings, and he had a long, fruitful correspondence with Simon Frederick St. George Kirke that lasted until Bill’s untimely death in 1997. His papers reside in the archives of the Canadian Onomastic Society (not to be confused with the Canadian Society for the Study of Names).

In Christ,

Sr. Mary Athanasius, O.P.