From the Catacombs - Archives

Conversion

2007-11-30T11:35:00.000-08:00

Reflections on my journey to Rome

In medias res

October 9 -2005
The holy tears . . . Today at Mass at St. Colman's. I had attended Quaker Meeting at 10 AM at Radnor and then went to the 12 Noon Mass at St. Colman's. My feelings about the Quakers are complicated, but it is now certain that while their intentions are pure, and I appreciate their anti-militarism, these virtues alone are not sufficient. This protestantized world seems so sad, with people lacking access to the Holy Ritual to take them out of themselves. Thank God no one mentioned the Catholic Scandals in today's Meeting: I don't think I could have stood it. I have avoided going to the Meeting ever since the Scandals broke, and the newspaper has been full of it. Today a few people shared good feelings - I mean, one mentioned that it was the time of Ramadan and Rosh Hashanah, and the recent earthquake which killed 20,000 people in Kashmir... and then another woman mentioned a recent religious event where a priest, a rabbi and an imam had all gotten together and affirmed that they all worshipped the One God, and how inspiring that was for her. I was reminded of a passage I had underlined in Georges Bernanos' book, The Diary of a Country Priest---
"Comforting truths, they call it! Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards. Besides, you've no right to call that sort of thing comfort. Might as well talk about condolences! The Word of God is a red-hot iron..."
The speaker, the Curé of Torcy, describes the kind of priest who preaches the "comforting truths" -- "who descends from his pulpit...with a mouth like a hen's vent, a little hot but pleased with himself, he's not been preaching: at best he's been purring like a tabby-cat." Most of the Quaker witness I have heard this past year have been little more than the purrings of a tabby-cat. Is it any wonder that I have sought the Catholics?

Radnor Meeting is a beautiful old meeting house in the suburban green land, with a hillside full of graves behind it and well-tended trees. St. Colman's, by contrast, is in Ardmore - a beautiful old church, to be sure, but with no green around it, only pavement and parking lot, and across the street a string of automobile sales yards, the new and used cars sporting American flags. Certainly this is no beautiful setting. But to enter this Church and attend this Mass is to be in another order of reality altogether. It felt to be not only in a different world from the Quakers, but on a different planet. And yet this is not true, for the Quaker Meeting and the Catholic Mass exist or rather co-exist in this world and in this same city.

Two weeks ago, when the Grand Jury report was put out and the Philadelphia Inquirer leapt at the opportunity it provided to -- once again -- take up the cudgels against the Catholic Faith, Father Tadeusz Pacholoczyk conducted the Mass. He gave a long homily, first apologizing --"for I have much to share with you today." His talk was pew-gripping intelligent -- not glossing over the problems of the sexual abuse scandals, but not omitting mention either of the anti- Catholic sentiments fomented in the way the press handled them. He managed to weave a good bit of history and theology into his remarks; I felt I was witness of a long and ongoing drama, of a story that had been told before, confronted before, atoned before. "Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church..." The Catholic Church has always known itself to be the Church of sinners: it has always clasped this knowledge of human negation, so to speak, to itself. It was something the Jews refused to grasp, and the Protestants negated. Protestantism is thus, in a manner of speaking, a kind of double negation. It is primarily a negation of Catholicism, and, being in effect a form of negation, it let slip the firewalls which Catholicism had erected concerning the knowledge of sin -- the original negation. A double negative is thus not a positive; it is only a contortion. I think this explains many of our woes today, from the abuse of our land to the abuses of our politics. More on these matters in time.

I was, in fact, overwhelmed, by Father Tad's homily; and afterwards, when we were streaming out, I gripped his hand and practically shouted in his face: "Wonderful, wonderful! I felt like clapping!" He was at first taken aback but then he smiled when he understood my import, and gave me his blessing.

Indeed this young priest -- he is perhaps 35 or 40 -- is a star -- or so I feel the term is not amiss when describing the presence of a spiritualized intelligence. Father Tad, Ph.D. is on the staff of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, and lives, when in Philadelphia, at the St. Colman's Rectory. Indeed, St. Colman's is richly blessed in its priests. Father Sherwood is often present at the RCIA sessions which I attend, conducted by Deacon Shaeffer and his wife. There is in addition Father Wright, who is retired, but still conducts Masses; and a Father Maloney who assists on weekends. All of these priests, as well as the Deacon and his wife, as well as the women lay readers during the services, impress me with their devotion and faithfulness. No one has ever struck a false note or said a false thing. Every Mass I have attended has been conducted with beauty, truthful simplicity and honor.

In short, I have found a faithful Catholic parish two miles from my home. I am utterly thankful for this miracle.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity -- an important book in my conversion stages. Some quotes:

... The most fundamental feature of Christian faith ...is,namely, its personal character. Christian faith is more than the option in favor of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not 'I believe in something,' but 'I believe in you.'

...Christianity... put itself resolutely on the side of truth and turned its back on a conception of religion satisfied to be mere outward ceremonial that in the end can be interpreted to mean anything one fancies... what can go on existing only through interpretation has in reality ceased to exist... The logos of the whole world, the creative original thought, is at the same time love; in fact this thought is creative because, as thought, it is love, and, as love, it is thought. It becomes apparent that truth and love are originally identical; that where they are completely realized they are not two parallel or even opposing realities but one, the one and only absolute... To this extent one could very well describe Christianity as a philosophy of freedom... the Christian option for the logos means an option for the personal, creative meaning [and] ... at the same time an option for the primacy of the particular as against the universal. . . But if the logos of all being, the being that upholds and encompasses everything, is consciousness, freedom, and love, then it follows... that the supreme factor in the world is not cosmic necessity but freedom. The implications of this are very extensive. For this leads to the conclusion that freedom is evidently the necessary structure of the world... and this again means that one can only comprehend the world as incomprehensible...For if the supreme point in the world's design is a freedom that upholds, wills, knows, and loves... then this means that together with freedom the incalculability implicit in it is an essential part of the world.. With the boldness and greatness of a world defined by the structure of freedom there comes also the somber mystery of the demonic, which emerges from it to meet us...As the arena of love [the world] is also the playground of freedom and also incurs the risk of evil. It accepts the mystery of darkness for the sake of the greater light constituted by freedom and love . . .

... The doctrine of the Trinity did not arise out of speculation about God.... it developed out of the effort to digest historical experience. ..God stands above singular and plural. he bursts both categories... To him who believes in God as tri-une, the highest unity is not the unity of inflexible monotony...... When it becomes clear that the being of Jesus as Christ is a completely open being, a being 'from' and 'toward,' which nowhere clings to itself and nowhere stands on its own, then it is also clear at the same time that this being is pure relation (not substantiality) and, as pure relation, pure unity..... The 'I' is simultaneously what I have completely and what least of all belongs to me...

...to understand him as the Christ means to be convinced that he has put himself into his word... he has identified himself so closely with his word that 'I' and word are indistinguishable; he is word. In the same way, his work is nothing else than the unreserved way in which he merges himself into this very work; he performs himself and gives himself; his work is the giving of himself...

... From the point of view of the Christian faith, man comes in the most profound sense to himself, not through what he does, but through what he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift. It cannot be 'made' on own's own, without anyone else; one must wait for it, let it be given to one. And one cannot become wholly man in any other way than by being loved, by letting oneself be loved...If he declines to let himself be presented with this gift, then he destroys himself.Activity that makes itself into an absolute, that aims at achieving humanity by its own efforts alone, is in contradiction with man's being... The primacy of acceptance is not meant to condemn man to passivity... On the contrary, it alone makes it possible to do the things of this world in a spirit of responsibility, yet at the same time in an uncramped, cheerful, free way, and to put them at the service of redemptive love.

The disinterested character of simple adoration is man's highest possibility; it alone forms his true and final liberation.

Cor ad cor loquitur

October, 2005

"Heart unto heart speaketh . . ." This is how to call a posting about the Jews. Only the deepest to the deepest, truth to truth.

Last summer I had a short-term employment as an editor in a college publications office. On my first day L. showed me around campus. We got to talking about city life. He was concerned about the education of his children, so he and his wife and family had moved to the suburbs, although they preferred living in the city. "You wouldn't consider a Catholic school?" I murmured. He seemed to start inwardly, "No... we are Jewish," he remarked, as if to say that being Jewish meant that the idea of sending one's kids to a Catholic school was simply unthinkable, beyond any bounds of possibility.

My position, although temporary, turned out to be even more temporary than I had thought. I was hired for four weeks and fired after two weeks. My boss, a Swiss woman living in the U.S., went seemingly overnight from an encouraging and friendly colleague to a venomous and heartless tyrant. To this day I still have no idea what I did to displease her so. At the final meeting, L. was in the room, and I recall whispering half-aloud - while this woman boss was sitting across from me, lashing me for my mistakes and saying how she didn't have the time for me -- "It is God's will." I don't know why I said it but I felt, rather than saw, L., sitting to my left, make an inward shudder, a gesture of recognition, of hearing, of assent. I felt a deep bond with him - a bond I have so often felt with truly faithful Jews.

These two reactions are very charcteristic. In the first, L. could not conceive of his Jewishness other than as a form of ethnicity. In the second case, he experienced the reality of the God in whom both Christians and Jews believe. The first case was ideological, a kind of programmed ethnicity; the second case was real and experiential. It had burst the bounds of the program to touch his deepest heart. It was real life, heart speaking to heart.

These two experiences describe for me the paradoxical nature of the Jews. Perhaps the Jewish heaviness is indeed, being divided between these two alternatives, and being unable to find the true third way, the mediating way - of being true to oneself without becoming frozen into the mold of ethnicity. Zionism has exploited this sad contradiction and irresolution of Jews to declare who they are. Lack of clarity and spiritual purpose always leaves one open to the invasion of demonic beings, and in this case the invading being is perhaps one of the worst, perhaps the worst. Zionism is the worst of both worlds -- the secularized Jew who does not want to be set-aside in an ethnic ghetto, and a religious Jew who has been unable to find the true religion and has been fashioning a religion of himself, his race, his nation, his people, complete with historical footnotes, victimology, suffering.

Once the Jew ceased to universalize his God and share him with all people, this God went inside and turned into Satan. The Jew suffers from a periodic, recurrent, historic inability to be true to himself. But when they do waken to themselves and are faithful, they can be counted among the very greatest of souls.

Whole and part

Catholics tell me that Catholicism is the 'fullness' of Christian truth, the 'fullness' of the faith. I was pondering this as I sat today in a weekday Mass. If you take a drop of water or a grain of salt and split the water-drop or slice through the grain, the molecular structure remains intact, and it is not true to say that half the water-drop or a fragment of salt is less than water or less than salt. This is the nature of matter or of material substance.

But the same is not true of spiritual truth - and the echo of this can be heard in the oath that is sworn in a court of law, "the truth, the whole truth, so help me God." It is not possible to take away anything from truth and have it maintain its character as truth. To remove the slightest bit of it, to twist a word from a plain meaning to an obscure one, to add something to it which does not belong to it, to shade the context with diverting or irrelevant details or aspersions of bad faith, covert motives, interests not subjected to open inquiry -- all these things undermine the possibility of truth. And actually truth remains in a mysterious ether, an atmosphere or aura of good faith between men - or at least the possibility of this good faith. Ultimately spiritual truth is bathed in this aura of Mystery - and even the truth, the whole truth, the truth of the material witness, the truth of the material world - depends upon it.

Men think that by stripping away to the very roots of the material world they will arrive at the truth they seek. Our culture has been consecrated, so to speak, to this task. But it is actually an anti-consecration, a kind of cursing of matter, a condemnation of matter to material disintegration. What this act of anti-consecration means is that modern men have lost the flexibility of thought to move from the material to the immaterial realm. Thinking is a spiritual act, and they have the spiritual means of thinking but they have lost all knowledge of the guidance of a spiritual force. So a spiritual force not guided by spiritual principles becomes anti-spiritual. It becomes demonic.

Before the splitting of the atom in 1945, I believe that the material world lay under a kind of protection, so that the despiritualization of human thinking did not penetrate to the roots of life. But now we are in the midst of this despiritualization. The havoc lies all around us, in our culture, our landscape, our politics, our lack of loyalty to anything. There are times when I come close to a great despair in humanity. It's not that no one cares. They care, but they cannot listen. They don't know how. The instrument of thinking has to be attuned to the ether in order for listening to become possible - somewhere, deep within man, this instrument has to vibrate with the whole truth. This is not to say that the 'whole truth' can be known. But somehow it must be felt, or believed, in a living core of incorruptible faith. But this living core has been squelched for modern man. Perhaps this is the real meaning of Modernity - that the core of faith should be shut up in a dank basement labelled the 'Unconscious,' full of unclean spirits that feed off of it in the darkness.

It is not by unburying the Unconscious that we reclaim the whole of ourselves but by the restoration of the fullness at the core of faith.

"The renunciation of truth does not heal man."--Benedict XVI, Truth and Tolerance

"...The teachers of the Church unfold the classic view...of the fact that man was not shut out from the Tree of Life until after he had maneuvered himself into a position that was not appropriate by eating from the Tree of Knowledge... for man to be immortal in this condition would indeed be perdition... There are indeed final boundaries we cannot cross without turning into agents of the destruction of creation itself." God and the World

"...when Christianity is taken away, archaic powers of evil that had been banished by Christianity suddenly break loose again." Salt of the Earth (1996)

Santayana on the Spirit: "...the Nicene Creed tells us the Son was begotten not made, that is to say, came through an inner impulse, without plan or foresight, from the substance of the Father... ... the novel fact of human existence is passion of the spirit. "This passion would certainly not have overcome the spirit in heaven, where the harmony between powers and form is perfect, and life is ever at its topmost, ecstasy - as in the God of Aristotle. But that is sheer myth; and as matter can exist only in some form , so Spirit can exist only incarnate in the flux of matter and form... Passion is therefore inseparable from Spirit in its actual existence, and exposes it to perpetual obscuration and suffering."

Its degradation: "Obscuration and suffering bring temptations with them, and spirit is tempted... to love evil and be content with lies... to deny matter; to despise form; and to pose itself the only power... and arbiter of truth...But this is itself the greatest of lies and the sin of the spirit against its own vocation. Spirit proceeds, and is always proceeding, from the Father and the Son . . . It was not the Holy ghost that denied his dependence on the Father and the Son; it was Lucifer. and Lucifer merely lost his brightness and became Satan..."

Salvation

Vere dignum et justum est, æquum et salutáre
-"It is truly meet and just, right and for our salvation"

- What is salvation?-- October 15, 2005

Salvation! What a load of history this word bears for Western man - as though salvation or the desire for it were the very engine of our history itself. True, the horizon of salvation, or rather the thirst for salvation, has been gradually disappearing in modern times. Modernity is the desire for salvation and history to coincide, which is to say, modernity is the ambition to do away with the supernatural horizon of salvation, or to empty salvation of its supernatural content. The traditional anchors of this supernatural content, Hell, Heaven, and Limbo, have been pushed beneath the frontiers of consciousness. They no longer correspond to any real sense of place in the cosmos, but they do continue to eke out a small living in the moral sphere, like the Salvation Army.

It is an interesting question, and one asked by far better minds than my own, whether history can continue to exist unless it can coexist with a concept of salvation which is beyond history, outside of history. That is to say, can man continue to exist as man unless he also coexists? This seems to be the battle arena of our time. As Pope Benedict XVI once wrote, "Even Adorno said that there can be justice only if there is a resurrection of the dead, so that past wrongs can be settled retroactively, as it were. There must, in other words, somewhere, somehow, be a settling of injustices, the victory of justice." [From his conversation with Peter Seewald, in Salt of the Earth,1996.]

Putting the same thing more boldly and dramatically, George Bernanos once commented that "the thirst for justice will lay waste the world." That is because man's thirst for justice refers to the coexisting supernatural in him. Take away the supernatural coexistent and all that frustrated energy pours into the heart and soul of man, creating rancorous reverberations and resonances at every turn.

We live in such society now,which George Orwell depicted as the "Two-Minute Hate" of the totalitarian tyranny of 1984. We see the "Two-Minute Hate" principle applied to Catholics as a matter of course, and other targets and groups as needed. We have in this world a media, television and newspapers, which can disseminate these rancorous messages all day every day - although they are not called rancorous messages but "news." This is old hat. But it is always good to get reminders, such as Simone Weil's "The whole intellectual climate of our age favors the growth and multiplication of vacuous entities," or her comment on the intellectual decadence of our civilization: we are "almost incapable of applying elementary principles of rational thought -- e.g. loss of use of the elements of intelligence: ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends."

The loss of the idea of salvation has often been correlated with the rise of ideological this-world salvational movements --e.g. "Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God it becomes, not divine, but demonic." [Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance] But too few people correlate the loss of the supernatural with the decline of thinking. This is because the people who do the thinking in society have no interest in such pursuits. For "... the intellectuals, especially academics, are fascinated by power," Paul Johnson reminds us, in his book Intellectuals(1988).

Intellectual man is the heir of religious man. But he would rather not be an heir but a ruler in his own right, dispelling all secrets [cf. Johnson: "It is one of the characteristics of the intellectual to believe that secrets, especially in sexual matters, are harmful."] with the exception of the shameful -- to him - secret of his own origin.

Declaration and Commemoration

November 20, 2005.

Today at Radnor Friends Meeting I made my announcement or declaration that I was taking steps to become a member of the Roman Catholic Faith. While sitting in the silent meeting meditating about what I would say, or whether indeed I would get up to say anything, I felt some fear and uncertainty. I knew that there was some anti-Catholic sentiment in at least a few of the Friends, though more as a subcurrent or mood than as a conscious or principled decision. Indeed, anti-Catholicism is the subcurrent mood of Protestant or ex-Protestant society in general; the general tenor was established in the 1550's and only increased in the revolutionary events of the 1600's and the so-called Enlightenment. It seemed to be the craze to subtract from God or from all the things that had heretofore carried society, as if by a process of subtraction and denigration, an addition and heightening of mankind would mysteriously turn up on the other side of the equation.

One has to ask: was it necessary, in the development of rationality and science, for this absurd balance-sheet attitude toward the relation of God and man to have gotten started? For the experiment is still going on, although it has entered a self-contradictory and even suicidal phase. Perhaps in essence that is what 'rationality' is: it is that in us which always sails perilously close to fixation, and it is only through a conversion experience of some kind that we escape shipwreck.

Still, I need not have worried about speaking. Afterwards a number of people came up to me and said how much they appreciated my sharing my religious journey. "That's what it's about - sharing the journey, walking the talk." The Quakers proved themselves most worthy of their name -Friends.

I should not fail to mention also that after I had spoken, another Friend got up to add on to what I had said. I had never seen this lady before; apparently, she was a visitor. She spoke most intelligently and appropriately about how the outlawing of Catholic churches in England in the 1500's had created a number of people who felt a loss, who felt that they missed the old services, and that George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, had perhaps appealed to these lost former Catholics in his message and preaching. This made complete sense to me; in fact, I wondered that I had not thought of it before. It seemed providential in a way that this lady had visited the Radnor congregation today - she was from Ithaca, New York. How do you explain that my message of conversion to Catholicism was received with all cordiality of spirit amongst these people, and that in fact it found an answering chord in this visitor who just happened to be present on this day?

I learned in Meeting today that our Radnor Friend, and my personal friend, Louis Hepburn, had died. There is to be a memorial service for him this afternoon. Louis was a warm presence in that meeting and a welcoming person to me. I had looked for him when I came in this morning.

Invasion of the Ultra-Subtle
October 25 - 2005

One purpose of cultivating true religion is to teach instincts how to function as protections, so that souls may turn the invasions of the ultra-subtle to learning moments rather than occasions for hapless subjection. The ultra-subtle rains continually into human life like cosmic dust, and for the most part these invasions are absorbed without conscious awareness. This arena of spiritual battle has been tucked away out of sight nowadays -- we call it the "Unconscious," and thus feel we have earned the right to ignore it. Or we pay Psychology and the Scalpels of Science explore it. Thus we relinquish our knightly task - the part of us that needs to be awake, the part that needs to fight and oppose -- the part that needs to keep the sword ever sharp and at the ready. Thus we abandon huge areas of our human experience and leave them open to the forces of devastation.

I wish to describe an infinitely small incident yesterday that took place in the question and answer session following a talk on the "ghostly tales" of Russell Kirk. An academic scholar read a long paper, lasting an hour, about Russell Kirk's literary side, and he used the term "experiments" to describe Kirk's ventures into supernatural fiction. This academic paper, competent and detailed though it was, seemed long. The mood lightened considerably when Dr. Kirk's widow spoke, telling stories and filling in some of the human background of her life with Russell Kirk, and some of the characters in his stories.

During the questions, I raised my hand and indicated that I was directing my comment to the scholar. I mentioned that I had read Kirk's Lord of the Hollow Dark, a novel of supernaturalism inspired by T.,S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland, also Watchers of the Strait Gate, a collection of short stories. I recalled having read Dr. Kirk's introduction to said stories, in which he made the point that such fictions were "experiential." That was to say or to affirm that the encounters with mystery and supernatural were, for Russell Kirk, real experiences -- not mere "experiments."

A kind of icy shudder held for a split second, while the professor appeared to wrestle with my comment as with an invisible opponent, finally throwing it down upon the ground in a gesture of spurning rejection. I don't know if was anything that he said, or indeed if he said anything. I attest to feeling a sense of panic, fear, or rejection emanating from him. For if what I said was true, then all the professor's careful delimitation of Kirk's supernaturalism could not be true. For how can a "ghostly tale" be a mere experiment, given what Kirk himself had written, and given the premise of his tales? This premise was well stated by T.S. Eliot when he wrote something to the effect that that the authentication of religion lies in the fact that, for mankind, spiritual reality is a discovery, not an invention. An "experiment" is an invention; an experience is a discovery. The whole intellectual world stands or falls on this distinction, that is, whether or not the intellectual life is is authentic and valid. I think that the professor knew this -- "subliminally," not consciously -- and that he was profoundly chagrined that my question had "exposed" him. My question forced him for a moment to war with himself.

Mrs. Kirk, true to her Catholic upbringing and gracious sense, decisively saved the moment soon after by remarking, "That is a good point," and a palpable sigh of relief seemed to move through the room like a lifting shadow. She took the professor's own muteness from him, and rode the reproach of his unsaid words to joyous victory.

More and more I am convinced that our ultimate human fate will depend on whether or not we succeed in wresting the intellectual life from the professoriate. I believe that in this little tiny incident, Satan, or one of his minions, had come to call -- that he left us his calling card in that momentary ice, that hushed uncertainty and fearful anticipation. The moment called for a decision, and the execution of such decision is only possible for someone with trained instincts. The human and gracious religiously-cultivated goodwill of Mrs. Annette Kirk was able to cut through the fog of the soul of a man dangling in the pride of Satan - which is to say, a man unwilling to renounce his pride.

Above all Satan wants to gird the wall of intellectualism round about the experience of the spiritual world, so that there will be no intercommunion, no two-way traffic.

Much today depends upon whether the Catholics, trained in the Holy Obedience, can win through to the Holy Initiative - and whether they are truly attuned to the invasions of the ultra-subtle even in their own midst.

My 1989 and 1993 reviews of Russell Kirk's Watchers at the Strait Gate and Lord of the Hollow Dark, have been posted to the Sword in the Mouth website.

New World Order

2007-11-30T10:44:00.000-08:00

Friday, December 01, 2006
The New Sabbatarianism - Part One
I plan to resume my postings on the Soul, but in the meantime interrupt these reflections with an update of the latest developments here in Philadelphia.This past week, the Philadelphia Business Journal published a front-page and several accompanying page articles about the casino industry. They begin their front page encomium with the words, “It is exceedingly rare that a state would create an entirely new industry.” Another article begins: “With two casino projects totaling at least $700 million in combined development costs looming on the horizon in Philadelphia, local builders are poised to get a piece of the action once a winning project is selected.” The article went on to report that these projects far outstrip recent major developments in Philadelphia construction history, including the $543 million international airport terminal. Still another article reports that casino operations are pledged to support nonprofit institutions, making the following statement without any apparent irony: “At the same time, statistics and experience suggest that the new gaming halls will create new compulsive gamblers, some of whom will turn to nonprofits for help.”Tax relief experts are not far behind in chiming the advantages to Philadelphia. Bernard Anderson, a professor at Penn, enthuses that "the arrival of casinos in Philadelphia is going to be the [city's] most important economic development venture in the last half century." Then he adds, as if the absurdity of it suddenly broke through his trance: "I really believe that." Other articles intone that “slots save[d] racetracks from ruin” and that local law firms are lining up for a chunk of the goods through the granting of gaming licenses. Likewise, the workforce will benefit from the manna of gaming. “We are talking to all the local universities about not only training, but ongoing course work that will start to create a pipeline of qualified applicants as we become bigger in the future,” said Philadelphia Park CEO David Jonas. Finally, to top the pie-in-the-sky, it was learned that Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell signed into law a provision that will allow casinos to serve free drinks to customers.In another local development, the employees of the Philadelphia Inquirer are currently on strike because the new owners insist that 190 jobs must be cut because the paper has not been bringing in adequate advertising revenues. Owners blame the Internet for cutting into newspaper advertising sales, but apparently never mention the news side of the affair. I mean, do people read newspapers to get news? Brian Tierney, the new owner of the Inquirer, is partnered with an associate of the Toll Housing empire (all those huge plywood mansions in fake English styles sprouting up in formerly productive meadows and fields, and which people now are starting to evince a disinclination to buy) and came into great fanfare, when he bought the paper, as a “Local Owner” (as opposed to absentee ownership) even though many people criticized him because he is Catholic. (The preponderant Jewish ownership of the American media somehow escapes the radar screen.)Whether Catholic or not, Brian Tierney apparently believes in the Market Gospel with all of his heart, mind and soul. It does not seem to have elicited his interest that the Philadelphia Inquirer is a mediocre paper that degrades and ill-serves this once-great city, the founding city of American Constitutional government. Few people complained when the Philly Inquirer joined the anti-Catholic crusade against molesting priests, a campaign fomented by District of Attorney Lynne Abraham, a member of Planned Parenthood and the Anti-Defamation League. Priests who had been accused but not convicted of sexual misdemeanors had their faces and biographies published on the Inquirer website week after week -–a good example of how readily the management of that paper was willing to throw the Catholic Church to the mob. Nobody seems to object when fanatic neocons like Charles Krauthammer regularly publish their crusading tirades or when “neoliberal” economists like the recent writer from Pat Robertson’s Regent University published an op-ed steaming with fetid falsehoods concerning the public debt. Few people dissented when the Inquirer ecstatically greeted the ignorant and stupendously misinformed opinion of Judge Jones, of Dover fame, in his ruling against the Intelligent Design movement. Likewise, the Inquirer's positive spin on the Franklin Museum's grisly display of human corpses in the plastination exhibit "Body Worlds" hardly elicited a murmur of dissent, and Penn "bioethicists" like Arthur Kaplan or Paul Wolpe can always find editorial space to tout the "educational value" of such exhibitions, or the magical possibilities of high-tech cannibalism, i.e. embryonic stem-cell research. [1]These are just a few of the turds left behind in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s steady march to the drumbeat of the New World Order, in which all standards of decency and civilized thought are sacrificed to the God of the Market. But at least with the Inquirer, one may discuss the corruption of business, whereas with the arrival of the gambling casino “industry,” we have to do with the business of corruption. It is, so to speak, a neat turn, and one that Americans have been performing with agility and near-invisibility on the world stage for a quarter-century. However, it seems to have escaped the perceptual capacity or analytic ability of Inquirer editors even to question the ruling regime's total commitment to mammonism with its distortions of truth, subversion of the public good, and insouciant disregard for humane, civilizational, or ecological values all across the spectrum of life. After all, such analysis does not compute in the "advertising revenues," and perpetual mediocrity assures steady sales. The hollowing out of the American economy seems rarely to occupy the minds of the Inquirer's economics editor, and the deeper question of what "productivity" is, even in economic terms, is simply beneath notice. The "life on the ground," as with those poor Inquirer employees who are about to lose their jobs -- as again with the thousands recently laid off by the Ford Motor Company -- is no longer real to the pundits, who have likewise abandoned the first duty of reason, which is, to connect thought with life.Given this situation, it is perhaps not surprising that the Philadelphia Business Journal has now appeared with an issue in our midst extolling the casino "industry."I wrote the following letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Business Journal:Dear---I have a strong objection to your glowing review of gambling as an “industry.”Gambling is a predatory activity that particularly negatively impacts the poor. It fosters illusionism, the idea that you can get something for nothing, and the get-rich-quick mentality.All of these have had a devastating effect upon the American character – and economy.I think your fatuous coverage of gambling in Philadelphia was socially destructive, irresponsible,short-sighted, superficial, poorly thought out, and lacking in social and moral insight.Sincerely,Etc.~~ And received the following genial reply from “Bernie”: “I'm happy to run this. Thanks for your opinion. Typically a letter would run with a place of residence under the author's name. Can you provide that please?”Hey, Bernie, always glad to oblige.[1] This is a list of complaints against the Inquirer's coverage of local issues and also the Inquirer's propensity to showcase neoconservatives in its op-ed columns. However, the Inquirer has not seemed to me to be rabidly pro-war in its own editorials, and the excellent work of Inquirer foreign correspondent, Trudy Rubin, has always elicited my appreciation and respect. The new owner of the Inquirer does not seem to appreciate the value of foreign correspondents. Rubin reports today that Brian Tierney remarked to a Washington Post media critic that, "I can get what's going on in Iraq online. What I can't get is what's happening in this region." ("The latest casualty: detailed foreign news," Sunday, Dec. 3) Tierney's concern for regional focus is not to be deplored, but why the zero-sum mentality, why the idea that good international coverage means less regional coverage? Rubin remarks that mid-sized papers all over the country are shutting down their foreign news bureaus, but that "As you look back at the coverage of the Iraq story,... you'll see that some of the bravest, most informative analysis was done by correspondents from mid-size papers." The commitment to excellence and quality news reporting is what will bring the Inquirer back from the grave. "Quality" is not a materialized entity like "sales," although quality is ultimately the driver of sales. "Quality" is a spiritual value, a vertical or hierarchical concept that diffuses from the coherence of commitment. The inability of corporate managers to think dynamically, that is, in terms of interacting vertical and horizontal considerations, is the ultimate cause of poor business performance and "flat" sales.
posted by Caryl at 1:28 PM 4 comments

Saturday, December 02, 2006
The New Sabbatarianism - Part Two
Illustration: Diplodocus carnegiiCourtesy Michael Skrepnick, @1988http://www.ucmp.berkeley/edu/diapsids/dinosaur.html"And it came to pass, that he went through the corn fields on the sabbath day; and his disciples began, as they went, to pluck the ears of corn.And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold. Why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful?And he said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need and was an hungered, he, and they that were with him?How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shew-bread which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him?And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.Mark 2: 23-28Review: John McMurtry-- Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy. 2002. John McMurtry is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada."The unseen moral syntax" of the New World Order is the subject of John McMurtry’s astonishingly important book, Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy,published in 2002 by Pluto Press of London and Sterling, Va. If there is one book which readers of this site are urged to read, it is this, because it connects the dots of the globalization movement in terms of its values, presuppositions and preferences - rather than its presumed goals and ideals. This distinction is important, for values and assumptions occur both above and below the normal registers of awareness and perception. Analysis at the level of nearly pre-conscious or emotional adherence is infrequently recognized, much less attempted. Such analysis brings up issues such as zeitgeist, group-mind or collective consciousness -- which are difficult for modern people, steeped in the culture of the psychological 'Unconscious' even when they don't believe it. For some reason, taking responsibility for, or even acknowledging the existence of, a group-mind is, for many, a trespass against the sacred concept of individualism.McMurtry eschews both ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘power politics’ as models of explanation for globalist-New World Order agenda thinking. He rejects the presumed ‘value neutral’ or ‘ethical neutrality’ stance of modern philosophical, scientific and economic thinking. In fact, he states, "lines of force follow lines of value," (his emphasis) and it is the deep structure of values, choices and consequences in which are to be sought the causes of our increasingly dysfunctional economic thinking. Only an acute value-system analysis is capable of penetrating the sludge of lies, evasions, deceptions, and rationalizations which now form the standard operating procedure of the "Infotainment State." What is repressed from view in the jigsaw-puzzle cascade of "news and events" is precisely the "absolutist value-set" and the "a priori prescriptions" which drive the transnational money-sequencing that increasingly rules the world. These hidden values and presuppositions have not been considered to be matters of philosophical importance, thus by stealthy means "economic laws" slide into the slot occupied by "laws of nature"-- the human factor of choice and decision of the former meanwhile overlooked entirely. The human will, now occupying a position more arbitrary and less appeasable than the gods of old, escapes the scrutiny of people who might be sensitive to issues like fate, determinism, or superstition. Ideological global oligopoly is both deterministic and superstitious, but by avoiding the traditional carriers of these intellectual poisons, it appears both "modern" and "progressive."McMurtry argues that the evidence of shocking ecological and economic disasters, corporate swindles like Enron, tax invasions of poor countries and their mounting "endebtification" are all the results of an essentially emotional and pre-conscious value set which, in the last two decades, has become ever more fanatical. It is locked into a repetitive self-identification and self-affirmation of itself as the ‘Good,’ which is also, simultaneously, ‘historically necessary’ and even ‘historically inevitable.’ McMurtry analysis penetrates this new variant of economic-historic determinism to uncover what are actually its human and political decision-points, choices, and preferences.It is important to recall, for example, that prior to 9/11 there was a rising global movement of disquiet at the disastrous results of the globalization movement on the world’s ecosystems and peoples. The popular movements of resistance are a matter of documented record – not only Seattle, but also Genoa in the summer before 9/11, in which more than 350,000 people protested the unaccountable actions and decisions of transnational corporate bodies. As McMurtry puts it, "The attempts to portray young and socially conscientious citizens in protest as worthy of mass gassings and cagings had failed." Something more was needed to justify the systematic prescriptions for economic restructuring, deregulation and privatization of public wealth. The ongoing march of secretive economic bodies to override accountable controls by governments needed a new charter – or shall we say carte blanche or cause célèbre? The events of 9/11 imposed a convenient and timely "global amnesia" upon public perceptions about how the system for corporate rule was losing public legitimacy. [1]It is important to review some of the facts regarding the "new freedom" ushered in by neoliberal (sometimes called neoclassical; see note 2) economic practices. Since the Reaganite 1980’s, the top 10% of the U.S. population saw their incomes double within five years. By 2000, the top 1% in the U.S. had more wealth than 95% of the U.S. population. Poverty in Eastern Europe increased sevenfold from 1988 ‘under Soviet domination’ to 1994 with ascension to the ‘Free World.’ More than 100 developing nations "suffered disastrous failures in growth and more prolonged cuts in living standards than industrial countries in the Great Depression." (UN Development Report, 1997) These ‘structural adjustments' and 'painful sacrifices' demanded by economic doctrine are the costs of the ‘Free Market,’ which in fact is not free at all but consists of a global oligopoly system in which "over 60% of international trade is between offices of the same firms or interlocked partners," not to mention the considerable assistance from government tax policies and subsidies as well.Hardly ever in the mass media from 1985-2002 was the global market experiment raised as an issue of concern. Instead, evangelical certitudes plastered over the evidence of the senses and quashed contrary perceptions. The repetitions involved torturously contradictory assertions claiming that "oligopoly is free competition," "leveraged money demand with no production of real goods means moral justification, i.e., market success"; "catastrophic ecological and social results mean necessary economic reforms," and "bombing poor civilians and destroying their life infrastructure means humanitarian interventions."As a corollary to this iron-clad rule by fist economy and fiat money, it is sadly instructive to note how Western intellectual elites abandoned their former commitments to "free inquiry," "free will" or "freedom of choice," "rule of law," etc – such as existed in the most longstanding critiques of Soviet-style socialist systems. Academic postmodernism was a frivolous intellectual movement unmoored from real life, but fostered an attitude of devaluation and mockery in the belief of the value of truth. In the past few years we have seen increasingly shrill and indeed fanatic attacks on religion and ethics from media and NWO-favored intellectuals like Dennett, Dawkins, and Singer and their followers in the Darwinian and "bioethics" camps. "Evolutionary psychology" becomes the new breeding-ground for intellectuals who have lost their religion, like John Derbyshire, and the scientistic establishment and their impacted constituencies in universities, government, pharmaceutical and agricultural laboratories are wedded to the proposition of changing whatever is natural into a saleable commodity. All of these capitulations of what was once an independent sphere of intellectual life represent the marriage of the unthinkable with the unstoppable – epitomized by the remarks of the Tony Blair, the boy ruler of Britain – "These forces of change driving the future don’t stop at national boundaries. Don’t respect tradition. They wait for no one and no nation. They are universal."The net effect of these accumulating determinisms is to drive barriers between perception and reality, action and responsibility, thought and life, not to mention further eroding the institutions of society that provide accountability. The deepest and most interior cause of this continuing moral brutalization is the severance of intellect from life. But this spiritual "cause" goes deep into history and indeed it initiates that history from the very first pages of the Creation story in Genesis, when the Tree of Knowledge is separated from the Tree of Life. In the Genesis story, the Tree of Life is guarded by the Cherubim with the flaming sword, because it was recognized that if man with unspiritualized intellect invades the sphere of life, universal destruction would result.The New World Order could be called an accelerated program for breaking and entering the realm of the Cherubim – that is, subverting what has hitherto provided a ring of protection around the Tree of Life. This is why Henry Makow, the Canadian author of "Save the Males" website, writes that the NWO program functions to strip citizens of their identity in race, tribe, nationality, culture, tradition, law, sexuality, religion – leaving them utterly pliable and ductile in the hands of the transnational money regime. Whether to "strip" people of these attributes or to distort their consciousness of such attributes through multiculturalist exaggerations is equally useful, for in either case a tradition or state of being that might have provided a barrier to the commodification of life is rendered null and impotent, and all sense for mutual common interests in society is destroyed.As McMurtry puts it, "… the ineluctable destiny of all peoples on earth to compete to succeed in serving transnational investors is the ultimate given of social value… What peoples had long set their souls against – an order imposed on them by wheels of a higher, inexorable power – is now prescribed as every society’s final meaning."McMurtry’s analysis of the causes for the wars on Yugoslavia and Iraq is the most compelling that I have read. Quite simply, Yugoslavia and Iraq had to be converted to "corporate feeding cycles" because by 1991 they were "the last resource-rich functioning socialist resource economies in the world." Indeed,
...What is not ‘open to the free market’ is any society, however peaceful,with developed social sectors and publicly owned resources closed to foreigncorporate expansion and exploitation… The Yugoslav and Iraqi societies were nottargeted in spite of their regionally advanced social systems, but because ofthem."
For bear in mind, that it is the preeminent goal for the system of global determinism that there should be no alternative. Neither Iraq nor Yugoslavia wished to re-travel the route of re-colonization, and in both societies there was a high level of worker income security, health care and education and public ownership of key resources. In other words, both nations had a successfully functioning life-economy – in contrast to the USA, where neither libraries nor public transit can be assured of funding, in fact suffer continual funding cuts, where health care is a spoils system of gargantuan inefficiency, and where the phrase ‘public good’ carries an antiquarian flavor, along with all the others like good manners, clear thinking, honest debate, checks and balances, life and liberty, rule of law, balanced reporting, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, etc. etc. ad infinitum. Even lower on the scale of meaningful content are slogans with "democracy, "freedom," "compassion," "equality," etc. – such phrases and slogans are never employed with limiting or relational concepts, or in any meaningful historical context. They may thus be taken as signposts of continuing assault on the ability to think coherently - not exactly a prized quality for citizens who are being programmed into consumers.For it is ultimately the colonization and occupation of the mind that feeds the money sequence regime. The results are particularly apparent in the American mass media, which has totally abandoned its mandate to provide a fair account of world events. The mass media outlets are merely sluices for advertising, through which disjunct, atomized, and uncontexted bits of "news" occasionally pass. It is true that this has not escaped the more discerning members of the population. But still the deeper concepts are lacking. The transition from a productive to a predatory economy has been occurring in the USA at an uneven pace, but in the last few years it has accelerated to the point of garishness – as described in my previous post regarding gambling casinos. The "new Sabbatarianism" of the modern economic machine seems the precise opposite of that pharisaical obsession with "keeping the Sabbath" mentioned at the head of this post, yet opposites merge after all. In the old Sabbath, nothing was to be done; in the new, nothing is to be left undone. Cessation has been replaced by incessancy, but both doctrines claim an unshakable authority and a fanatical adherence. The new, modernized, and streamlined economic doctrine that has come to rule the world is a sort of secularized Darwinian theocracy, where the "losers" are the economically unfit (or the theologically out of grace). Stability is derided, traditions are destroyed, and neither borders nor laws possess any restraining action to the ‘free flow of capital.’The dragons have returned from the abyss of time in the form of a fanatical economic determinism. A society without accountability, without countervailing authorities of restraint and decision-making, is a society on the way to barbarism. The advocates of the global money regime enjoy what civilized life has made possible while betraying or subverting civilized standards at every turn. A system of thought so estranged from life and sustainability comes to resemble a reptilian fate. But the question in the end is whether the reptilian fate is to be that of the corporation or of mankind itself.As a final note, the last half of McMurtry’s book explores the entirely feasible ways in which society may move towards restoring life-economy goals. I will not undertake to review these here, except to note that, despite many reasons to be pessimistic, there are always grounds for hope. Once the deterministic trance is broken and values, decisions and preferences are exposed, real thinking will be possible again – that is, the connecting of thought with life that is the necessary condition of being human.[1] The author does not explore the 9/11 event in this book. Later reflections on this event can be found in his "9/11 & the 9/11 Wars: Understanding the Supreme Crimes," printed in the compendium of essays edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Vol. I) Olive Branch Press, @2006.[2] See "What we learn when we learn economics," Christopher Hayes, In These Times: "Neoclassical economics, as the Chicago School of thought is now called, has become an international elite consensus, one that provides the foundation for the entire global political economy." Article here .See also: a related article of interest posted previously on this website- "The Evaporation of Civilization" by Hugo Salinas Price (See "This Week’s Must-Read Article," Oct. 15)Note: I have ordered an additional copy of the book (which may be hard to obtain) for circulating purposes. Anyone who is interested may borrow it for three weeks, with the assurance of returning it and paying the freight of return postage.
Labels: economics, globalization, Henry Makow, Hugo Salinas Price, Iraq, John McMurtry, mass media, New World Order, predatory capitalism
posted by Caryl at 5:10 PM 5 comments

Catholicism and Islam

2007-11-30T10:36:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Regensburg vs. Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia - Lithograph, 1852. I have a high appreciation for Pope Benedict XVI, and his accession to the Papacy was a confirming sign that my decision to enter the Catholic Church was the right one.Nevertheless, I was disappointed in the Pope's speech at Regensburg. His reference to an obscure Byzantine Emperor's disparaging comments about Islam showed poor judgment, and unfortunately this comment overshadowed the good things that the Pope had to say in that speech. In my view, anything that directly or indirectly supports the neoconservative jihad against the Muslim world is to be deplored.The Chiesa website has undertaken to publish "Two Muslim Scholars Comment on the Papal Lecture" - which shows an admirable willingness to hear the other side. Aref Ali Nayed, the manager of a technology company and devout Sunni Muslim, made a number of cogent points:
"It is strange that Benedict XVI selected an admittedly 'marginal' point from an obscure medieval dialogue, written at a particularly abnormal and tense moment in history, to find a 'starting-point' for his reflections on 'faith and reason.' One could imagine an infinitely large number of possible, more direct and sensible, starting points..."When someone gratuitously invokes a very obscure text that expresses hateful things one has a moral obligation to explain why he goes out of his way to [invoke] it, and a further obligation to respond to it, and to dismiss the hate expressed in it. Otherwise, it is very reasonable to assume that the person invoking the hurtful text does mean it, and does share the views expressed in it... To claim that no hurtful intent was present, and that Muslims simply did not understand the text, agonizingly adds insult to injury..."The image of a non-violent hellenistically 'reasonable' Christianity contrasted to a violent unreasonable Islam is foundational for the lecture of Benedict XVI. This self-image is amazingly self-righteous and is oblivious to many painful historical facts. It is very important for our world that we all begin to see the poles that are in our own eyes, rather than focus on the specks in the eyes of our brethren..."
Nayed's essay was a long one, focusing on the Pope's concept of reason and bringing up many theological and historical objections. There was also a link, at the end of the article, to a Question-and-Answer session with "a Vatican official," Father Thomas Michel. In responding to a student, Aysha, who asked why, if the Pope didn't believe in the statement he quoted, why did he use it in his speech? Fr. Michel replied, "My own view is that whenever we use a negative example, we should take it from our own history rather than from someone else's. The Pope could have used the Crusades, for example, if he wanted to criticize religiously-inspired violence and it would not have given offence to others." Father Michel seconded my notion that the Pope's remarks "were not wise" and should have been vetted by someone in authority in the Vatican.Speaking of the Crusades, we ought to remember the Fourth Crusade and the final capture of Constantinople, when "... the crusaders inflicted a horrible and savage sacking on Constantinople for three days, during which many ancient and medieval Roman and Greek works were stolen or destroyed. Despite their oaths and the threat of excommunication, the Crusaders ruthlessly and systematically violated the city's holy sanctuaries, destroying, defiling, or stealing all they could lay hands on; according to Choniates a prostitute was even set up on the Patriarchal throne. When Innocent III heard of the conduct of his pilgrims, he was filled with shame and strongly rebuked them." (This is from Wikipedia)Herbert J. Muller describes the closing years of Christian Byzantine history in his book, The Uses of the Past:
“On the night before the final Turkish onslaught on Constantinople, in 1453, the Emperor Constantine Paleologus, the last of the Constantines, received communion in St. Sophia. Then, accompanied by the Patriarch and a large crowd, he proceeded to the church of St. Theodosia, to pray to this martyr…whose relics were famous for exceptionally miraculous powers. At dawn the next day, which was St. Theodosia’s day, he returned with a small band to the city walls, to fight and die gallantly. Most of his subjects spent the day in the churches…instead of aiding their emperor.When the Turks fought their way into Constantinople, they found ten thousand persons in St. Sophia, still praying….The fall of ‘New Rome’ made a terrible impression on Western Christendom, which had failed to come to the aid of its Eastern brethren…. Horror was intensified by fear of the advancing Turkish power, and by dismay at the loss of commercial privileges that Italians had enjoyed in Constantinople. For some ten years after the disaster prelates kept calling for another Crusade, to preserve Europe from the Turks...The excitement soon subsided however. Western Christendom was too absorbed in its own wars and commercial rivalries to keep worrying about the Turks, especially when the infidels permitted European merchants to trade in Constantinople again…Although the last Byzantine emperors, in their desperation, made sweeping concessions to the Papacy in hope of aid, the Orthodox masses stubbornly resisted the Roman heresy….[Although the Turks plastered over the mosaics in St. Sophia] more importantly, they preserved it for posterity by a thorough, skillful job of repair. For they respected the splendid capital of Eastern Christendom. They respected even the patriarchate, granting it religious freedom... Exemption from taxes, and civil authority over Orthodox Christians throughout the Ottoman Empire; by their conquests they gave it a wider jurisdiction than it had had in its heydey. The unwholesome moral is that in spite of their initial cruelties the terrible Turks were more civilized and humane than the Christians of the Fourth Crusade, who had captured Constantinople before them."
I think it is interesting that "the Orthodox masses stubbornly resisted the Roman heresy…." One of the great inheritances of Christianity is the mystical stream -- the Christianity of the Desert Fathers. This arose in the Eastern part of Christendom, and may perhaps represent the most advanced and deepest understanding of thinking that has ever been enunciated. It is the understanding of thinking as esoteric energy - human reason being the lowest level of contact with the Holy Trinity.The West, having lost this mystical inheritance, is now in the process of abandoning reason itself. There are many examples of this that the Pope could have used - and in fact, has used in previous lectures and writings. But it is above all that Western reason he come unmoored from its mystical and esoteric roots. This is the point that the Pope needed to address, and this is why his speech at Regensburg sounded so hollow.I believe and hope that this Pope can do better. Along these lines, Aref Nayed in his rebuttal of the Pope pointed out that "In Islam, just as in Christianity, it is not human calculative reason that is salvific, but rather the free undeserved grace of God. One of the many graces that God gives to human beings is the gift of reason... Reason as a gift from God can never be above God."Deciding the future of reason may be the historic task of the religions of Abraham. This future concerns us all. I hope this Pope's first misstep will not prove to be prophetic.
Labels: Islam, Logos, Pope Benedict XVI, reason, Regensburg
posted by Caryl at 5:10 PM 5 comments

Saturday, October 28, 2006
The Last Katechon
Icon at Hagia SophiaI am pleased and surprised at the response my previous post has generated, and wish to thank all who wrote in to comment. Evidently, the topic of the Islamic faith is an important topic, on the minds of many. Thanks, Andrew, for your cogent point that perhaps the Pope “intended to provoke a response from peaceful and reasonable Muslims…” This may have been so. And yet I will have to say that his example, taken from a Byzantine emperor under siege over a thousand years ago, is almost ludicrous, given the scale of devastation in Iraq, the cluster-and-carpet bombing of Lebanon, and the ongoing threats against Iran, Syria, and other Middle Eastern or Arabic nations. To discuss Muslim violence amidst these US-Israeli sponsored wars of annihilation and cultural nihilism directed against Muslims is a grave sin against the Holy Spirit – the one sin the Bible assures us cannot be forgiven. For the Holy Spirit is above all the spirit of truth, and the love of truth is the sole foundation for a life of reason.One can only mourn the passing of the love of the spirit of truth when reading material that now forms the tsunami of propagandistic hate directed at Muslims by neoconservatives and their allies. One of these, Rebecca Bynum, writes in the October issue of the New English Review:
“Consider the phrase, ‘truth and falsehood cannot coexist.’ This is a central concept in Islamic thought – that everything ‘false’ must be destroyed. Therefore, all other cultures, when having come under Islamic domination are eventually annihilated by Islam, including their art, music, books, cultural artifacts of any kind, and of course, history, all have been obliterated because these things are un-Islamic and are thus deemed worthless.”
Unfortunately, Miss Bynum has yet to have her mind enlightened by a study of something as inconvenient as historical facts. Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in tolerable amity for nearly five hundred years on the Iberian peninsula, from about 900-1500 AD. I invite Miss Bynum to google the words “toleration and Ottoman Empire,” where she will be treated to many Google entries on the subject, the second one reading: “One of the most noteworthy attributes of Ottoman Turkish rule was the Ottoman toleration of different religious beliefs.” This 4-page article on “Turkish toleration” notes that “The Turks of the Ottoman Empire were Muslims, but they did not force their religions on others.” And it ends with this: “The success of Ottoman tolerance can most easily been seen in the fact that large Christian and Jewish communities existed in the Ottoman lands until the end of the Empire. Then it was European intervention and European-style nationalism, not internal failure of the system, that destroyed the centuries-long peace between religions that had characterized the Ottoman system.”Miss Bynum ends her venomistic screed that extols the forked tongue with these words: “Those who think Islam provides some sort of comfort or consolation to its billion or so adherents should think again.” I dropped a message in Miss Bynum’s inbox to the effect that perhaps she should marry Ann Coulter. Those two feminist priestesses of war blood can then stimulate each other into an eternity of mutual Muslim-hatred. They should join the Israeli schoolgirls who scribbled messages on Israeli bombs intended for Lebanese children, who, I’m sure, they with dismembered legs and blown-off heads, would be only too glad to read them.Enough of these neocon harpies. The issue I brought forward is Pope Benedict’s speech about reason. I believe I understand why the Pope issued his appeal to “Hellenic reason” in Germany. This is an important element in Christianity, in Catholicism especially, but I don’t think it will suffice to win the minds of European secularists. We forget how long and how painful is the story of reason. “Reason” is something engaged in among equals, or near-equals. Those who are powerful have no need for it, as Thucydides put it and as the modern West is demonstrating. Western history is in many ways the story of various clashes of power, and reason as an ideal was to the mutual advantage of all. This ideal of reason also fitted in very well with the nature of Western society, in which people cohered less according to tribe and ethnicity than through the mutual forging of alliances, churches, intellectual allegiances, and the like.Reason in this sense is the fruit of a process of de-tribalization – a thought powerfully reinforced by Christianity, in which the concept of ethnicity also is alien. The ideal of reason formed for many centuries a kind a tribal substitute for Western peoples. This process has now been carried to its ultimate, in the sense that even the fragile tribal coherence of the West is breaking down. The first breakdown of the West was the devaluation of the Christian religion, and the second is happening in our time, with the devaluation of reason. The point is, the West no longer possesses the cultural integrity that forms the basis for reason. Culture has been displaced by the economy, and in this new dispensation reason no longer provides a motivating aspiration for Western people. Western leadership reveals this fact. Western leaders no longer really represent their “people,” which has become a multicultural mob, atomized and harassed by a political correctness that continually undermines and degrades the heritage of Western people while preaching the advantages of uncontrolled immigration. This doctrine emanates from the Western elites, which have increasingly pulled away from identification with their nations and people, and which enjoys life in the stratospheric circles of international finance and business. Western leaders like Tony Blair and George Bush have become mouthpieces for these powerful economic interests. Along with this, the Western mainstream media has abandoned investigative journalism, and especially in the United States, has virtually collapsed. A recent poll taken of the world press ranked the US as one of the least free and most conformist in the world.Thus the Pope’s appeal was understandable but, given the seriously unbalanced nature of Western life, it seems too little and too late. The West has degenerated past appeal to reason. Serious attention needs to be given to the matter of cultural (and personal) integrity, ecological sustainability of our economies, the need for the sense of limits, and respect for truth. Related issues concern the status of international law and sovereignty of nations – the U.S. and Israel (and perhaps China) being today the only de facto sovereign nations – as judged by their behavior and what they get away with. Without these foundations, an appeal to reason is nothing but an endorsement of the status quo: neither new to those who know the philosophical history of Catholicism, and not convincing to those who give no priority to reason.The problem of reason has long outgrown its medieval reason-faith synthesis. Today the problem is reason (intellect) in relation to life itself – or perhaps, more truly, the “Afterlife.” Men need a strong incentive to be reasonable, just as they need a strong motivation to act rightly and think justly, and if there is no judgment in this life or in the next, reason will degenerate into ideology and rule by the strong. The position of the Catholic Church, so admirable and firm when it comes to condemning the “Culture of Death” that results from a merely intellectualized and reductionist view of life, seems helpless to take the next step and take the bull by the horns, so to speak: grappling with the very intellect whose time, locus and symbol, Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, strikes at the very heart of its faith.For Western man has abandoned or outgrown the old teachings of Heaven and Hell and the afterlife and judgment. But we have no new teaching – such as reincarnation – to take its place. It is for this reason that the life of reason in the West is in “Limbo.” It is perhaps timely or ironic that this Pope “declassified” Limbo from the realm of theological purgatory. That is because “Limbo” has incarnated. We are already in it. Limbo is our now.(To be continued...)
Labels: Catholicism, Hagia Sophia, Islam, New English Review, New World Order, Pope Benedict XVI, reason, toleration
posted by Caryl at 1:40 PM 2 comments

Saturday, November 04, 2006
The Last Katechon - Part Two
Continuation from previous post...I don’t know much about Islam, but my natural inclination is to side with the underdog. “God is beautiful and loves beauty,” says one of the verses from the Prophet, and certainly even a superficial acquaintance with Islamic art would suffice to convince one of the high level of esthetic attainment in Islamic cultures. The picture on this post is courtesy of Linda Komaroff’s lectures on Islamic Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.I think in its esthetic reach Catholicism (and Orthodox Christianity) are closer to Islam than either the Protestant or Judaic sensibility. Even Dostoevsky admitted that “beauty will save the world,” and he was no esthete, but a deeply ethical man, deeply anguished by the human cruelties in the world. It was characteristic of a Protestant culture that caused a division to arise between the ethical and the esthetic, so well delineated in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The love of beauty assists the development of the higher mind and the practice of good. It is not a guarantee of it, but neither is virtue guaranteed when beauty is torn from religion. Sometimes, though, the radical simplifiers believe so, and there are radical simplifiers in Islam as in Christianity. Rules and austerity replace the “joyous simplicity,” and the somber-minded take over.I think that Christianity stands in the intermediate or mediating position between Judaism and Islam, and that in order for it to remain balanced it needs both the gravitas of the Old Testament – the Judaic side – as well as the esthetic and transcendent “Islamic” side. The Fathers of the Church were very aware of the gravitational influence of the Old Testament, and they repelled the efforts of the gnostics in the early Christian centuries to drop the Old Testament from the canon. Islam, of course, was not yet then in existence. It is for our time that the recognition of Islam – many would say the reckoning with it – has come. I believe this is the historic task that confronts us today.There are a few other things to note in the triumvirate Judaism-Christianity-Islam. The Holy Day of Islam is Friday, the day of Venus (vendredi) – goddess of love, and the day on which the Son of God, the manifestation of God’s love for humanity, was crucified. Thus both Christians and Muslims honor Friday as a day of love.The Jewish Holy Day is Saturday, the day of Saturn, who is Chronos in the Greek tradition, and a fierce and limiting cosmic Being in all sacred tradition. Without Saturn we would, figuratively speaking, have no bones. We would be dissolved, merely fluid and spineless beings. It is thanks to the very rigidity of Saturn that we can walk upright. And thanks to “Saturn,” too, that we age. The Judaic tradition exemplifies this “saturnine” quality and possesses its tendency to intellectual rigidity or materialism in thinking. I have written before of the intellectual materialism that was developing in Western culture from the end of the medieval period and beginnings of the Age of Science. Western man was already embarked on this path when he encountered, with the emancipation of the Jews in the 19th century, another great wave of cognitive materialism. The contribution of the Jews to the intellectual culture of the West is astounding and prolific, but at the same time it was a further development of what was already unfolding, not the initiation of a new direction. It was not the Catholic, mystical, esoteric or poetic stream that was revivified from the encounter with the Jews, but (primarily) the anti-philosophical and unesthetic impulse of Protestantism, commerce, and scientific reductionism already in motion.Alas, the West today is so thoroughly imbued with this way of thinking that the Islamic tradition does indeed appear even more distant and alien than it was already, with the embroidered fancies of the Arabian nights and magic carpets thrown in for good measure. Oil, of course, has changed the equation, if “equation” is the right word, and it is one of the mysteries of Divine Providence that the Arabian and Muslim nations occupy the lands sitting guard upon these treasures.This is not the place, nor do I have the learning, to embark on a discussion of Anglo-American policy with respect to Arabian oil. One would suppose that a purely self-interested regard for obtaining the black gold would lead Western policy makers to exercise a prudent diplomacy with respect to the Arab world. Perhaps, with many reservations, one may say this was the case up until 1950 or so. The emergence of Israel created an enormous counterweight to the practice of diplomatic prudence. “If Britain had limited herself, as she had promised, to ‘viewing with favour’ the Jewish home, instead of supporting it by force of arms, she might have retained that traditional friendship with the Arab and Muslim world which is so essential to her interests,” wrote Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb in his 1957 book, A Soldier with the Arabs. The key words here seem to me “as she had promised.” It would be revealing for Westerners to review the history of Anglo-American Arab relations in the light of broken promises, perfidious betrayal, and duplicity, practices deeply antithetical to the true spiritual inheritance of the West as well as to traditional Arab notions about honor.The Israeli counterweight has arisen not only out of the character of the Israeli state but because of the character of Western societies, which have been deeply penetrated by Jewish intellect, finance, and publicity (i.e., overwhelming Jewish dominance in the media and entertainment industries). To be modern is in some sense to be Jewish – as Yuri Slezkine declared in his book, The Jewish Century. The reader is invited to pursue on his own the many works detailing Jewish influence, many of them written by Jews. A short list would include Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion; Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique; Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: The Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History; Michael Neumann, The Case Against Israel; and the new book by James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States. This is but a small sample, and I have not read the last three mentioned. But I will have to say that it is not possible to be educated without a thorough grounding in Jewish history, and that it is highly imperative for Americans in particular to study this literature.As for myself, my 2000 book, Consecrated Venom: The Serpent and the Tree of Knowledge, was an admiring look of the Creation story in the Old Testament, which I have always regarded as perhaps the most sublime document in the history of the world. Yet, as I have since learned, the relationship of these Old Testament patriarchs, the Israelites, to modern Jews, is very problematic. The Creation story teaches of the Fall of Man, yet the translation of this concept into the doctrine of original sin was effected by Christians, not by Jewish theologians. I am uncertain as to whether Jews believe that they are affected by original sin or the Fall. The teaching on this point, as far as I can gather, is hazy. As one writer put it, the idea of a “Chosen People” is one thing in a nomadic and pastoral world of several millennia ago. It is quite another in context of a modern State armed with 600 nuclear warheads. Indeed, the persistence of Old Testament themes of chosen-ness, land ownership and conquest into the modern era is alarming, especially given the advocacy of Jewish lobbying groups against similar persistence of religious traditions in other peoples.Israel Shamir, the Russian Jewish convert to Christianity and author, believes that
“The ‘liberal democracy and human rights’ doctrine carried by US marines even across Tigris and Oxus is a crypto-religion, an extreme heretical form of Judaized Christianity… In my view, this new religion can be called Neo-Judaism: its adepts imitate classic Jewish attitudes; Jews often act as priests of the new faith and they are considered sacred by its adepts… Everybody can become one of the ‘Chosen’ of the new faith—the choice is yours: the Newest Covenant admits both Gentiles and Jews; worship Mammon, disregard Nature, Spirit, Beauty, Love; feel you’re belonging to a race apart, prove it by some this-worldly success – and you can enter it. On the other hand, every Jew can opt out of it; there is no biological guilt or virtue."
And again:
“Neo-Judaism is the unofficial faith of the American Empire, and the war in the Middle East is indeed the Neo-Judaic Jihad. It is intuited by millions: Tom Friedman of the NY Times wrote that the Iraqis call the American invaders ‘Jews.’ Neo-Judaism is the cult of globalism, neo-liberalism, destruction of the family and nature, anti-spiritual and anti-Christian.”
Shamir believes that Islam is to be viewed as a “branch” of Christianity: “… the Orthodox stress Christ Resurrected, the Catholics concentrate on Christ Crucified, and the Muslims follow the Holy Spirit… In my view…’Christianity’ includes Islam and the great Apostolic Churches of East and West.” Thus:“…. Islam is the last great reservoir of spirit, tradition and solidarity; and the Neo-Jews fight it with all the firepower at their disposal… [It] is the last katechon, in terms of St. Paul’s Second Letter to Thessalonians, the last defense of our sacral heritage…” [Italics mine]From his essay, “The Trefoil and the Cross,” on his website.Finally, there is Mark Glenn, a conservative Catholic who authors the Crescent and Cross website, an attempt to resist the demonization of Islam. He writes in one of his essays that
“…what exists in the Middle East, or in The Old World, as some would call it, is a culture that is still devoted to principles concerning basic moral values, values that have not yet surrendered to the corrupting influence of Western media or Western money. Within the last 50 years, every culture has fallen before this corrupting power that seeks to enslave all men in such a way that the individual is reduced to the value of what he produces and what he consumes, and in pursuit of that method, the individuals behind this program have quietly but decisively removed every obstacle in their way, be it religion, culture, morals, tradition, or world view, through the methods of media, academia, and finance; that is, except the culture encapsulated in the Arabic/Islamic World. By the description “Arabic/Islamic,” it should not be understood as solely a “Muslim” thing. The culture existing in the Arab world is held by both Christian and Muslim alike. Indeed, there are millions of Christians in the Middle East, who have in essence the same culture with their Muslim counterparts in much the same way as most Americans, regardless of religion, have the same culture. It is those Christians and Muslims alike who reject these “modern” notions such as abortion, birth control, sodomy, pornography, usury banking, and “market value” of services and resources. They still view the family, the traditional family, with all its traditional roles, as the most important building block of their society, and they take very seriously anything that threatens it. They recognize the value of their children, as well as how dangerous the moral relativism of the West has become, and whose ideology threatens the stability of society directly. They recognize that if their children and society as a whole are subjected to ideas that promote moral decay for an extended period of time, what will eventually and unavoidably be produced is national decay.”
From: See Crescent and Cross site for essays by Mark and several other writers alarmed by the neoconservative campaign against Islam. This is not a joke. Recently, on the Berkeley college campus, one Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Foundation, called for the "elimination" of "several hundred thousand Muslims." Islam is violent?One is not likely to encounter a defense of Islam in the Western press, which is more and more bent toward the promulgation of “Neo-Judaism,” as Shamir puts it. But we desperately need to balance our views of Islam and its societies before embarking upon any discussion about the nature of Islamic religion. The West used to be known for having esteem for impartiality and justice, and this esteem was the best fruit of its Christian (and classical) traditions. But the modern West appears to be jettisoning both of these traditions, and its new game of deadly self-righteousness is anything but appealing.
Labels: biblical epistemology, Catholicism, Islam, Israel, Israel Shamir, Jews, New World Order, oil policy
posted by Caryl at 2:33 PM 9 comments

Saturday, November 11, 2006
Return of the Republic?
I am feeling a little better since the elections, which seem to indicate a desire, on the part of the American electorate, for a return of the Republic. The real work will be a labor of generations, for the Nation has fallen into many bad habits, and the neoconservative-inspired orgy of arrogance and self-righteousness will not be easy to shake. Nevertheless, we can hope - and a thread of reasonable and realistic hope is far stronger than pillars of nationalistic rhetoric.I wish to complete this phase of my inquiry into the Islamic religion by mentioning Karen Armstrong's book, Islam, as a surprisingly fair-minded assessment. I say "surprisingly," because in the past I was not impressed by Karen Armstrong, this English ex-nun who wrote a very bad book about Genesis. Why is it that so many people in the West denigrate their own religious and cultural heritage and reduce it to trivial-mindedness? Such people surprise us when they exemplify the best of the Western tradition in their explorations of other traditions. I would not have expected from this author such a strong, concise, elegantly-written and informative history of Islam, but she has done it, and I am glad to say that my earlier negative view of Karen Armstrong was premature and unfair. The book has been included in the Modern Library series, which is some indication of its quality.Armstrong points out that, in the early days of the formation of Islam, this religion was actually a peaceful and unifying force among the warring Arabian tribes. She traces the ups and downs of this religious inspiration through many of the dynasties. No doubt the Mongol invasions (circa 1200's) had a bad effect, and caused a kind of retrenchment and narrowing of outlook. There is a militant stream in Islam, just as there is in Judaism and Christianity, yet in my cursory readings of the Koran this militancy did not strike me as more excessive or extreme than its counterparts in the other Abrahamic religions. At the time of these revelations, as now, the Arabic and Hebraic peoples were much entertwined, and perhaps the Prophet's message to the "Children of Israel" is just as relevant today as it was then: "Children of Israel, remember the favor I have bestowed upon you, and that I exalted you above the nations. Guard yourselves against the day on which no soul shall stand for another: when no intercession shall be accepted for it, no ransom be taken from it, no help be given it." I love this reminder of the presence of the intercessory spirit, and that in mutuality and co-inherence, all the Children of God stand together. These are the kinds of messages that must be heard today amidst the "warring tribes" of the present.Finally, we can recall that Islam means "submission," a word which often grates on Western ears. But again, before we rush to judgment, let us recall Jane Austen's wonderful novel, Persuasion, in which the theme of "submission" or "persuadability" is taken up most wonderfully. People who have read it will recall that the hero, Captain Wentworth, went through a change of mind on this issue. His lady, Anne Elliott, had been persuaded not to marry him, and he was much embittered because of this, being led in future to seek only "strong-minded characters." Yet in a subsequent flirtation with a stubborn and self-willed young lady, he began to see that the ability to be open to persuasion was not necessarily a sign of weakness, but rather of integrity and quiet strength.This novel has a timely message for American leadership today, for if we have had nothing else demonstrated, we can see how delusional it is to believe that recalcitrance to persuasion means strength. "Hardness of heart" and a narrow, self-willed stubbornness of mind has characterized our public persona and foreign policy for nigh to a decade, and it is the "elitist" camp followers of the neocons -- whether in First Things or the odious New English Review -- who have cheered and followed. It is good to see that apparently, the American people think otherwise -- more along the lines of a reformed Captain Wentworth who had the sense to catch his lady on a second try.Thus the "submission" which is Islam is not too distant from this literary portrait of it, or from Catholic "obediential potency" or even the Quaker "tenderness." It seems the glory of the Kingdom teaches spiritual surrender. But even the kingdoms of this world need some of it if they are to endure, and a "surrender" to the claims of truthfulness and the common good are much needed today. In this regard I would like also to mention Michael Kinsley's recent (Nov. 5) book review in the New York Times, where he says that the main problem in our society today is "intellectual dishonesty." I think this essay is a hopeful sign that perhaps a few in the pundit class are catching on. Deception and dishonesty are an inevitable part of human society, but to embrace them actively is to destroy it. The maggots and worms need to be exposed if we are to have a future.In other matters, I think the next area of my focus and interest will be an inquiry into the nature of the Soul. It seems to me we are in need of the soul, and of trying to gain an understanding of it, before we can understand other things, or talk about what is true, or even talk by means of the very Reason which presupposes it. The problem with our Western Reason today is that its presuppositional energy, that of the soul, is either nonexistent or poorly grasped. Accordingly, these will be my themes in upcoming posts.Thanks again to all who have written in. I encourage readers to add comments, as this increases the traffic and ratings of the blog.
Labels: 2006 mid-term elections, Catholicism, Islam, Karen Armstrong, New English Review, persuasion
posted by Caryl at 1:22 PM 8 comments

Sunday, November 19, 2006
Gadflies and Angry Hornets
I have been upsetting the hive of the web-based magazine, New English Review, and some of the angry bees have been buzzing around this website, although no one has yet, to my knowledge, left a comment. Some of their writers have been engaging in a form of dialogue with me on their website (in their favor, I should add that the New English Review allows for reader comments) and one of them remarked that my interpretation of Jane Austen's Persuasion was "topsy-turvy."While I will grant that my analogy between "persuasion" and Islamic "surrender" or "submission" was probably far-fetched - the former a secular, the latter a religious sensibility - I don't think my actual interpretation of the novel was incorrect.It would do well for Westerners to recall that Persuasion was a Greek goddess, yet Empedocles (ca. 450 BC) reminds us that : "It is not possible to bring God near within reach of our eyes, nor to grasp him with our hands, by which route the broadest road of Persuasion runs into the human mind." [1] His next verse recalls that it is the Mind, "holy and ineffable, which darts through the whole universe with its swift thoughts" - and yet, what is this Mind? This is hardly the intellectualized rationalism we have come to identify as the leading characteristic of Western thought, and which is trumpeted by Rebecca Bynum in one of her anti-Islam screeds [2]-- "And reason cannot compromise with unreason without destroying the basis for its existence. By the same token, unreason cannot become reasonable without destroying itself as well."I have thought a lot about this comment. Bynum's view of reason is the Kantian "pure reason" exaggerated to the point of caricature. I don't know on what plane of Olympianism she pronounces that "reason cannot compromise with unreason," but it is certainly not the plane of history or reality, or even the meaning of the word. First of all, reason, ratio, implies relation, or the relation of one thing to another, hence the strict opposition between "reason vs. unreason" is misleading if not false. To remove reason from the nexus of relations is to "idolize" it, to turn it into a mere abstraction that has no more practical or meaningful, soulful or worldly, dimension of energy or work. (In this regard, I note that the message I left in Bynum's Comment box was to the effect that "Reason has to compromise with unreason all the time - that is why it is called reason!) It just becomes another achievement, another "accomplishment," with which Westerners endlessly congratulate themselves for possessing. And because they already possess it, they never have to question what the use of it presumably entails. This is the a priori assumption of the reasonableness of the Western mind which fosters an irredeemable pride, unlike what might be considered an analogy from the Catechism of the Church - which may be equally formal and incontrovertible but at least has the avowed purpose of fostering humility.I am reminded once again of Simone Weil's comments on the Western reason - noted in 1937 - in her essay "The Power of Words": She writes that the glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence -- that "we are almost incapable of applying elementary principles of rational thought," as witnessed in the loss of the use of the elements of intelligence such as ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. The result is the "lethal absurdity" of our political universe which is peopled exclusively by" myths and monsters." And she concludes thus: "The whole intellectual climate of our age favors the growth and multiplication of vacuous entities." [3]It is my contention that a hothouse display of "vacuous entities" can be seen to proliferate in the digital pages of the New English Review, which, I think, consists of a panel of young and wet-behind-the-ears writers that have latched on to the luminous Theodore Dalrymple as a way of providing themselves with some legitimacy. That these writers come across as insufferably arrogant Brits is the least of it. No, the worst is the pretence of thinking - to put forth articles and opinions in the guise of rational language but without a glimmer of intellectual charity. The New English Review is a good example of Chesterton's point about the peril against which, rightly or wrongly, religious authority was reared as a barrier: "That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.""Religious authority" is perhaps not the only way one can protect oneself from this peril, but it has been proven to be a sure and lasting one. The other way is deeper and more difficult, and perhaps I will try to sketch out some of the lineaments of this "Way" in future posts dealing with the theme of the Soul. But I think it has something to do with what Empedocles, considered one of the "fathers of Western rationalism" said about the heart -- "[It is] nourished in the seas of blood which courses in two opposite directions; this is the place where is found for the most part what men call Thought; for the blood round the heart is Thought for mankind."[1] Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. ed. Kathleen Freeman, Harvard University Press, 1971.[2] Rebecca Bynum, "Islam, Predestination and Free Will" - November New English Review[3] From Simone Weil's Selected Essays, Oxford University Press, 1962.
Labels: Islam, New English Review, persuasion, pre-Socratics, Simone Weil, Theodore Dalrymple

Geocentrism

2007-11-27T13:19:00.000-08:00

Sunday, September 10, 2006
The Case for Geocentrism
My apologies to the readership for the long delay in posting. I have been involved in a monumental reading project -- "Galileo Was Wrong," by Robert Sungenis, Ph.D. This book, not yet available in print format, is available on CD from a website of that name. It is probably the most comprehensive, detailed, and meticulously documented survey of the geocentric theory available in the world today - over a thousand pages of discussion, argument, narrative and illustrative material elucidating the cosmic position of our earth in the universe.Not being a scientist, I am not qualified to comment in depth on the book's technical aspects. There is an enormous body of knowledge, scientific, historical, and theological, encompassed in its pages. I must admit I was quite surprised to learn, for example, that no one has ever actually "proved" that the earth moves. A large section of the book is devoted to the famous Michelson-Morley experiment(s) (1880's) which found that a light beam discharged in the direction of the Earth's assumed motion showed virtually no difference in speed from a light beam discharged north to south or south to north. Thus the experiment failed to detect the Earth moving in or against space.I was also intrigued to learn that astronomic findings have discovered that galaxies and quasars are arranged in periodic distributions around the Earth, and that the Earth sits at the center of the highest concentration of matter in the Universe. Tegmark, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania, discovered that there is a universal orientation around Earth's equatorial plane -- a finding labelled byte journal New Scientist as the "axis of evil" because it confounds the Copernican Principle. Jonathan Katz (2002) remarked that the Copernican or cosmological principle -- if averaged over a sufficiently large region, the properties of the universe are the same everywhere; our position is unremarkable-- "is the foundation of nearly all cosmology."This cosmological principle is a kind of astronomical uniformitarianism, and scientists did not welcome findings related to periodicity - whether of galaxies, quasars, gamma-ray bursts - because they showed evidence of Intelligent Design.Sungenis argues that the contortionist Relativity Theory of Einstein was basically the result of the failure to correctly interpret the findings of Michelson-Morley. One of the important issues of the time concerned the question of the ether - a postulated medium of space which would allow for the propagation of light and gravity. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity denied the ether, but some years later with the General Theory, the concept returned in some form. The discussion of the fate of the concept of the ether, and how it ties in with that of gravity, is fascinating.The concept of gravity is thoroughly explored, and Sungenis and his co-author venture to discuss what gravity is as opposed to merely how it can be described mathematically - an important distinction to bear in mind, given that one of Sungenis's main points is that moderncosmology has become a mathematical maze with ever-diminishing experimental evidence. One of the most fascinating sections of the book is Sungenis's discussion of the findings of Quantum Mechanics in relation to the teachings of Genesis about the 'firmament.' He argues that space is indeed a firmament, composed of a sort of lattice-like structure of stable electron-positron pairs that possesses a granularity and concentration far finer and denser than ordinary matter. He cites Menahem Simhony, who estimated that the number of these pairs in one cubic centimeter of space is 6x10 to the 30th power, with a binding energy of 27 quadrillion kilowatt hours - yet this energy is a million times smaller than the binding energy of the atomic nucleus. This is the "ether" that fills the so-called empty space within the atom. Thus, he explains:
"Since, however, the ether does not penetrate the atom's individual particles (protons, neutrons, etc.) these atomic particles thus account for a percentage of the mass of the atom. But since the atomic particles are less dense than the ether, yet they occupy space in the atom, this means that the total density within the atom will be slightly less than the density of ether outside the atom. This imbalance will cause what can best be described as a partial vacuum in the ether, and the ether will seek to correct the vacuum by attempting to come to equilibrium. Here is the key: the effort to correct the vacuum is the cause of gravity." [Emphasis his; p, 686]
There is no question that Sungenis is a biblicist, and relates the geocentric theory to the work of the Creator. Whether or not the geocentric view is correct, the deep interest this book affords is to look at modern cosmology from the perspective of geocentrism - and to look a number of scientists who go to great lengths to avoid it. Modern physics interprets the electropon lattice as "the creation and annihilation of matter," because it has been found that the application of sufficient energy will cause these electron-positron pairs to "pop out" and disappear. Somehow, the image of scientists shooting holes in the firmament sticks in one's mind. Surely, there is a better way!I hope to write more at length about this remarkable book in the future, In the meantime, see my related post: "An Earth-Centered Universe - Again?"
Labels: Galileo, geocentrism, Robert Sungenis
posted by Caryl at 9:27 AM 0 comments

Friday, September 22, 2006
Geocentrism Two: The Big Bang is a Big Bust

Galileo Was Wrong has three main themes: 1. Arguing the scientific respectability of geocentrism; 2. Presenting the Scriptural and ecclesiastical arguments for geocentrism (to be published in the second volume of the work); and 3. disproving Big Bang theory. Along with these three main themes there are two important sidelines: the explanation of gravity and the ether.
The first volume of the work contains the scientific, mathematical and physical arguments for geocentrism. Closely interwoven in these arguments, or rather in effect simultaneous with them, are disproofs for the Big Bang theory, since it was by means of Big Bang that scientists thought they would lay the ghost of Ptolemy forever to rest. It didn’t quite turn out that way, because one of the paradoxes of Relativity theory is that geocentrism emerges as a position equally valid as heliocentrism. It is possible to make what is called a ‘coordinate transformation’ by taking any point as the center of dynamics. The mathematics works out in both cases, whether one takes the Earth as stable and the heavens moving around it, or the Earth as moving and the heavens stable. [1]
Sungenis is particularly good at uncovering the “emotional atheism” of Copernicanism (rather ironic, as Copernicus himself was a canon of the Church and Kepler believed his harmonic heliocentric theories were in tune with the music of the Holy Ghost). This undertone led to the “principle of mediocrity,” which supposedly indicates “modesty.” Scientists never tire of repeating that it is more “modest” to believe that we occupy a minor planet in an indifferent part of the universe, whereas our arrogant forebears believed they inhabited the center. Actually, in the ancient system the earthly realm was, at least according to Aristotle, considered to be inferior to the heavenly spheres. The “sublunary” sphere was the sphere of imperfection and corruption; the celestial spheres, on the other hand, manifested the principle of perfection, as evidenced by their motion in perfect circles.
“Modesty” does not at any rate appear to be the outstanding characteristic of the devotees of Big Bang theory. Aside from their historical ignorance, they are also cavalier about facts. They would have us believe that the entire universe bloated up from a size less than a dot on this page in an instant of time, creating the massively organized and ordered structures out of an initial cosmic explosion. [2] It’s not science; it’s magic. It disregards the law of Entropy, one of science’s most respected laws, by pretending that order can magically distill out of chaos. Thus Big Bang theory is a sort of counterfeit creatio ex nihilo that makes a mockery of even the best fruits of genuine science – e.g. the discoveries of the laws of thermodynamics.
This “inflationary” scenario is the real emotional ground and tone of our era, providing not only a convenient model for capitalist expansionism, but also enabling a kind of infinite and indefinite moral postponement. One never has to reckon with anything, least of all limits, and why be bothered with stewardship or sustainability, since there is always new space being created? Not that it will help us much, but still the theory is attractive for those for whom “economy” means finance and “science” means getting grants. Somebody is always there to fork out the money. Big Bang means never having to call anywhere home, for future possibilities always beckon, and the so-called “facts” can always be made to conform to the promiscuous agenda. The theory gives employment to a lot of people who are good at math, but as astronomer Gerard de Vaucouleurs put it (1970), there has been a loss of empirical evidence and observational facts to accompany the multiplication of fictitious properties of ideal (i.e. nonexistent) universes.
So, although Sungenis is correct when he remarks about these BB theoreticians, “What a wonderful world they have created for themselves, a world in which they can be judged by nothing bigger than themselves,” this is true in the sense that these theoreticians have been busy getting God out of the picture and making matter either eternal or self-created. Yet, on the other hand, making a universe out of equations is not small potatoes either, and even the most self-inflated heads in the Big Bang establishment do have to produce papers that pass the peer-review muster. It may be a case of collective delusion, but it is a difficult and rarefied delusional world up to three, four, or ten decimal places that has to be dealt with. This illustrates the truth of the Chestertonian maxim: a madman is not one who has thrown out reason; it is a person who has thrown out everything except reason.
When Sungenis argues geocentrism he means geocentrism: i.e., the primacy of the creation of the Earth, and not some nebulous entity or force like light, quantum fluctuations, or energy. What he is less adept at doing, or perhaps does not even attempt to do, is to explain why we are thus saddled with this view of the world. Sungenis does not delve into the question of the evolution of consciousness or historic necessity. For, after all, we are indeed saddled with the Big Bang theory and it will not disappear without a struggle, although there are a lot of holes being nibbled out of its edges. He does make the compelling point that people believe that scientific progress is inevitable. Faith in “progress” has obscured the more difficult and skeptical achievement of realizing that people, and perhaps whole societies, can take a wrong turn, and that it may take years, even centuries, to get back on the right footing. Magic and self-assurance make a bad marriage, and conjuring the world to one’s liking is bound to prove fatal in the end.
Nevertheless, there has to be some divine reason for all this confusion. My take on this is as follows: We human beings are a part of the world, and there is a true, real, physical-energetic background for our emotional, intellectual and spiritual strivings. Now this background can probably be described in a number of different ways, but its discovery and description happens to coincide with human history, or rather takes place within it. It was probably bound to happen sooner or later that people would become enamored of their own intellectual powers, that they would discover the seemingly independent and self-compelling power of the intellect. From thence is but a short step to believing in its self-sufficiency – that is, the self-sufficiency of reason and (by extension) of humans themselves. That is to say, the fundamental irrelevance of God. Thus is born the inflationary self-conception, which is anything but modest, But the universe obliged us by providing at least a few tantalizing glimpses of how it might be true – such as the redshift factor [3] and the cosmic microwave background radiation. [4]
To continue with my psycho-somatic explanation: this process of enamourment, with its discoveries and assumptions, followed along the heels of the men of the 16th and 17th centuries who were developing the heliocentric theory. There is surely a genuine core of validity to heliocentrism to the degree that it represents the ‘solar Logos’ – that is, the ability to think dispassionately, the aspiration that human thinking should not only produce light but also radiate warmth, the ideal of an intellectual consciousness that is beneficiently and creatively centrally radiant rather than egotistically grasping and ultimately draining and depleting. These are ideals of heliocentrism that have very much to do with the attainment of true modesty, if not humility.
We all know the kinds of corruptions that have ensued. With heliocentrism, people took a historical step toward the grasp of thinking for its own sake, and the attack of the ‘Demons’ – within and without -- has not ceased since. If anything, the egocentrism has magnified to the point of making science almost unrecognizable. It has not been enough to banish God from the cosmos. The equivalent issue is the derision and demotion of truth. At some point heliocentrism and Big Bang must again yield – to a new willingness not only to consider the Earth and the Sun, but to accept the Moon – that is, symbolically, the feelings and less-conscious background of human life that give us our moral tone, our historical coloring, our dim but recurrent yearnings for deeper understanding. Pure sun-consciousness is too much; we need the dimmer light of the moon and of twilight, in order to 'dream through' our sensory impressions. And especially do we need to 'sleep them through' - we need the full depths of Night as well, to allow our impressions to go into the prelude of dreaming and thus to sink into forgetfulness. The correlatives for sleeping, dreaming, and waking are, cosmically, Earth, Moon and Sun.
Only when the manifold cosmos is balanced, like a stool, on the three cosmic objects of Earth, Sun, and Moon, can we begin to approach the Universe with the depth of soul and patiently-won humility that our human stature demands. Unless we can find our way to this understanding, we will continue to be the spectators and gullible victims of the increasingly ugly sport called "The Triviality and Tyranny of the Intellectuals."

[1] Cf. Bertrand Russell: “…all motion is relative…to say more for Copernicus is to assume absolute motion, which is a fiction.” (1958) Arthur Lynch: “The movements of the two bodies (i.e. sun and earth) are relative one to the other, and it is a matter of choice as to which we take as our place of observation.” The Case Against Einstein, [1930’s]. I. Bernard Cohen: “There is no planetary observation by which we on Earth can prove that the Earth is moving in an orbit around the Sun… Furthermore, the daily rotation of the heavens is communicated to the sun and planets, so that the earth neither rotates nor revolves in an orbit.” Birth of a new Physics, 1985.
[2] Philip Morrison: “It is deceptive to maintain for so long the very term that stood for a beginning out of nothing.” “The Big Bang: Wit or Wisdom?” Scientific American, Feb. 2001.
[3] Redshift refers to the observation that light from distant galaxies tends to redden, a phenomenon interpreted to mean recession velocity, i.e. that they are receding from us. This interpretation was given by Hubble, who discovered it, although he also maintained doubts about it – a fact often not mentioned. The recessional velocity theory became the keystone for the ‘exploding universe’ concept when it became apparent that it was not enough merely for the universe to be expanding – because, if that were the case, it would mean that the distant galaxies were flying away from us faster than the speed of light – another no-no according to Relativity. Thus ‘expansion’ became ‘explosion’ -- located in some conveniently distant past that you could sweep under a rug called ‘Singularity’ and more or less forget about. Astronomer Halton Arp challenged this interpretation arguing that higher redshift simply means younger matter. He reports his findings in his book, Seeing Red, and tells the story of the many obstacles placed in his path by the science establishment which is ferociously wedded to the concept of expansionary universe – Arp was denied use of the telescope, his articles were not reviewed or negatively reviewed and not published, and people dealt with his findings and ideas dismissively, etc. etc.
[4] The cosmic microwave background radiation was the most powerful predictive tool of Big Bang theory, which said that the universe should have a background temperature, although it did not specify what that temperature was. A problem for Big Bang, however, is the even-ness of the CMB- it hardly varies at all from 2.73°K. It’s hard to figure out how galaxies and other massive objects could form given this nearly invariant radiation temperature. Big Bangers postulate that the universe is “isotropic and homogeneous” when it suits them to deny certain facts about the Earth’s position, while in other situations the homogeneity and isotropy of the universe proves to be rather embarrassing. I hope in a future post to describe recent findings that argue that the CMB temperature, not far above absolute zero, is the boundary-interface between positive and negative energy in the universe – the portal to the etheric realm.
Labels: Big Bang, Galileo, geocentrism, Robert Sungenis

[Undated Post-October, 2006]
Rediscovering the Moral Law - through Physics (I)
In today’s post and several following I want to make the attempt to pull together several threads from scattered sources. I will discuss certain findings from challengers in physics, geocentric theory (Galileo Was Wrong), Dirac’s Equations, and the concepts of the ether, the firmament, negative energy and kenosis. I think there is a new understanding of the moral just beneath our fingertips, but it lies there like a faint gauze, a veil - not yet lifted into consciousness. People who are scientifically literate may cringe at my philosophical orientation, but perhaps there is a place for the person with the big picture, the synthesizing gaze. Metaphysics is the cosmic view, after all, and the astronomer George F. R. Ellis remarked that it is inescapably present in scientific theories about the universe. "What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that." (From the Profile: George F.R. Ellis, Scientific American, Oct. 1995) This message was not particularly welcome in the cosmological community, which apparently likes to think of itself as above such mortal considerations as philosophical preferences. I will discuss Dr. Ellis's findings later in this series.As readers to this site may know, I have posted two previous entries dealing with Robert Sungenis’s book, Galileo Was Wrong, which is shortly to be released in print. In accordance with his biblical and geocentric view, Mr. Sungenis argues that the “firmament” was created by God on the Second Day, as stated in Genesis:Gen.1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst ofthe waters; and let it divide the waters from the waters.1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters whichwere under the firmament from the waters which were above thefirmament: and it was so.1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening andthe morning were the second day.Sungenis argues that modern science is discovering that space is, indeed, “…filled with something. Not only is it ‘something,’ but because its dimensions are in infinitesimally small scales, it fulfills the definition of a ‘rigid body,’ and therefore allows for instantaneous transmission of any force.” Sungenis comments that it was Einstein’s failure not to consider the possibility of a ‘rigid body’ that led him down the wrong path to Relativity. Thus he was led to speculate that space was a vacuum and that gravity, for instance, was caused by the bending or distortion of the space around large bodies.On the contrary, Sungenis and geocentrist Gerardus Bouw argue that the extreme density of this infinitesimally small-scaled particle network enable it to act like a ‘frictionless fluid,’ hence objects – whether light or clusters of stars – can move through it with no resistance. Bouw writes: “The firmament is like a huge solid block… At the same time, its granularity is so superfine that it also behaves like a superfluid… Only on extremely small scales, distances on the order of a Planck length, does the firmament show through…It is a superdense, created medium which mimics a plenum. .. It reacts instantly to any changes within it... Material objects can only become vaguely aware of its existence on extremely large scales (of the order of the size of the universe) and on extremely small scales (of the order of sub-nuclear particles). …”A good part of the argument in Galileo Was Wrong correlates the findings of modern physics in the sub-nuclear realm with the fate of the concept of the ether, which, of course, in the discussions of modern physicists, had nothing to do with the geocentric theory. It is therefore necessary to discuss the “firmament” or ether concept as held by non-geocentric thinkers. Accordingly, we turn to one of these in the next segment of this paper.
Labels: Einstein, ether, firmament, Galileo, geocentrism, George F.R. Ellis (Astronomer), relativity, Robert Sungenis
posted by Caryl at 3:43 PM 3 comments

Rediscovering the Moral Law- (II)
D.L. Hotson’s "Dirac’s Equation and the Sea of Negative Energy," published in Infinite Energy (Part I: 43:2002; Part II, 44:2002)
Note: These articles are published on the Web. See note at end of article for site information.Don Hotson argues in these two superlatively written papers that physics got off track in 1934 with the "emasculation" of the equations of Paul Dirac (1902-1984). The solution to Dirac’s equation finds four different kinds of electron: an electron-positron pair with positive energy and an electron-positron pair of negative energy. The physics community could not accept the "politically incorrect" notion of negative energy, hence Dirac’s equation was truncated and the numbers were fudged to account for only the positive energy aspect of the equation. As Hotson puts it, "The Dirac equation was a direct threat to the reigning paradigm. As Dirac noted, physicists had always arbitrarily ignored the negative energy solutions. If they were real in some sense…they had all been mortifyingly, catastrophically wrong all these years, ignoring exactly half of reality. And that other half of reality, alarmingly, seemed to resemble the anathematized aether."What is "negative energy"? Hotson reminds us that it is thanks to Benjamin Franklin and his famous kite experiment that the electron, the very unit of electricity, was given a minus sign. Had Franklin assigned to what was flowing a positive sign, we might not have had such a hard time accepting the concept of ‘negative energy.’ "Matter(mass)," says Hotson,"is positive energy, [and] our reality has a large positive energy balance." We get by on "single entry bookkeeping" that treats positive energy as the only kind of energy.But we observe symmetry all throughout nature: charges come in positive and negative, particles are symmetric between matter and anti-matter. Only in energy do we deny that such a symmetry exists. The fundamental symmetry of nature comprises two basic forces: that which binds and coheres, and that which frees and loosens. One may call the first the impulse of generality, unity, relating, and the second the impulse of individualizing, distinguishing, and singling-out. In physics the binding or cohering forces saddled with the negative sign are gravitation, the strong nuclear force, and the Coulomb force between unlike charges. The loosening and explosive forces, on the other hand, carry the positive sign – notably the repulsive Coulomb force between like charges.Is not the whole ‘Big Bang’ theory in effect a declaration of the monopoly of the positive or explosive force? – a case of positive-energy explosive-individuation gone haywire. Accounting for the stability of the universe then becomes a problem, and how this high-temperature explosion settled down into the humdrum even temperature of space that we call the "cosmic background radiation" of 2.73˚K in a relatively few million years – well, this is not exactly clear.Now is the time to introduce a new player – the Bose-Einstein Condensate. What is referred to by this cumbrous piece of terminology is how things behave at very cold temperatures, such as 2.73˚K. It is what is called superconductivity – which is the state in which negative or binding energy overcomes the tiny residual positive or freeing energy so that all the particles are governed by the same wave function. The BEC "is a transition from an incoherent population to a coherent matter wave." (Nature, Sept 2006) As physicist Robert Laughlin put it: "The similarities between the vacuum of space and low-temperature phases of matter are legendary in physics...In fact, the more one studies the mathematical descriptions of cold phases, the more accustomed one gets to using the parallel terminologies of matter and space interchangeably." (From his book, A Different Universe, quoted in Galileo Was Wrong, p. 480.At these low-temperature states, matter "binds closer and closer together until it becomes all one thing." (Hotson) Every constituent of this so-called BEC is in the same state and acts as one. According to Hotson, this Bose-Einstein configuration is the negative-energy "sea" in which we are immersed. It is in the nature of the BEC configuration to expel all positive energy, which it cannot tolerate. Thus Hotson’s explanation for our life, with its large positive-energy balance, is that it is the "expulsion" – or less delicately, the "defecation" – from the configuration of negative energy that holds this universe together. It is not altogether an appealing image, although it does make intuitive sense.It might be possible to understand this state of matter in a "sleeping" state. When we are falling asleep, we must "expel" consciousness, which can be understood as a form of positive energy. When we are in deep sleep, we are perhaps in a type of Bose-Einstein state - or as near to it as is possible in human experience. In any case, it is fascinating to consider that the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation - about 2.7˚K - is approximately the boundary-state between positive and negative energy. This would explain the even spread of this temperature background much more compellingly than the idea of a rapid cooling-down from the Big Bang.Note: Infinite Energy magazine has a great website with all kind of articles. Don Hotson's articles are located at the following links: http://www.openseti.org/Docs/HotsonPart1.pdfand http://www.openseti.org/Docs/HotsonPart2.pdf . These links were sent to me by Don, who paid me the huge compliment of writing that "I have not seen a review or synopsis of the Dirac stuff as cogent and well-written as your blog." Pretty good for a gal whose knowledge of physics goes no further than F=ma! I don't know if these links are the same as the magazine website or different ones. Anyhow, for intellectually challenging reading material, these articles are a great!
Labels: Big Bang, Dirac's equations, Don Hotson, negative energy state, physics
posted by Caryl at 4:08 PM 1 comments

Friday, October 06, 2006
Rediscovering the Moral Law - (III)
Enter “The Electric Universe”There is another group of physicists whose work is now just beginning to penetrate mainstream science. This group, working in the area of what is call plasma physics, argue that the dynamic forces of electromagnetism play a much greater part in holding the universe together than gravitation. The universe is full of these “plasma clouds” – huge diffuse structures of ionized, or electrically charged, particles.The term “plasma” for these clouds was given because they arrange in life-like and self-organizing patterns – hence the term was borrowed from one of the constituents of blood. From a 2000 press release, “Immense flows of charged particles discovered between the stars,” more than 99% of all observable matter in the universe is in the plasma state. “In contrast to the first three states of matter most familiar to us on Earth: gases, liquids, and solids, plasmas generate and react strongly to electromagnetic fields. [They] are also prodigious producers of electromagnetic radiation. The Sun is a plasma, as are all the stars and interstellar space…” (The picture at left is a solar prominence, showing the plasma state.)We know of the plasma state on Earth in the form of lightning, fluorescent bulbs, flames, the flow of currents in conductors and semiconductors and the aurora. It is not without interest that some of the leading scientists in the plasma field were of Scandinavian origin, where aurora research has been carried on for years. One of these, the late Hannes Alfven, in his article, “Cosmology in the Plasma Universe: An Introductory Exposition” (IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science 18(1): Feb. 1990) brings us back to the Dirac Equation when he notes that it must be legitimate to ask whether the plasma universe is symmetric, or does it consist of exclusively ordinary matter. “As the second alternative is treated in a gigantic literature it is appropriate that we here concentrate on the first alternative. If this is correct, an unprecedented change in astrophysics would occur.” The question of “symmetry” here points to the Dirac “negative energy” concept, although Alfven is framing the question in terms of matter rather than energy.Nevertheless, a universe full of “living electricity,” where energy is transmitted over vast distances, is a very different picture from the idea of the universe we are accustomed to. A universe of stars and galaxies powered by electricity – “the stars are like streetlamps,” one writer remarked – is a very different place from the universe of Einsteinian-Big Bang cosmology powered by thermonuclear processes.Perhaps the outlines of a new cosmology is beginning to appear. The Sea of negative energy, ether, plasma universe – do not these things portend vitality, a quality sorely lacking from the science of the past 400 years? For it seems that with modern science, to understand something is to kill it. The universe, however, has been beyond our powers to destroy, so we have merely described the act of creation - “Big Bang” – in terms indistinguishable from an act of destruction.But how does the plasma concept fit in with the ether? I wrote Robert Sungenis, whose book, Galileo Was Wrong, discusses plasma cosmology in some detail. I asked him if plasma=ether=firmament, or whether they are different things. He wrote back, “As for the ether, it would be the physical substance of the firmament, but plasma is just a form of energy, fire being one of those forms.” To Don Hotson I addressed essentially the same question, leaving out the question of the firmament. I wrote, “Are the Dirac equations a further refinement, or presupposition of, the electric-universe-plasma physics model? And is this model of electron-positron pairs to be understood as the ether?”He wrote back: “I consider the Dirac findings to parallel and complement the electric/plasma universe. The unique behavior of plasma stems from its close connections to and regulation by the Big BEC. In this model, epos (i.e. electron-positron pairs) are themselves waves, and so must be considered to be waving in something (some medium) which would strictly speaking be ‘the ether’ as it determines the permittivity and permeability of ‘the vacuum, hence the velocity (‘c’) with which epo waves move, hence the velocity with which ‘light’ is carried by them.”Hotson and the plasma cosmologists are ‘steady-state’ theorists. Hotson thinks of 'our reality' as the ‘exhaust’ from the “sea” of negative energy that creates, powers, and maintains everything that is. We live in a positive-energy world, humanity being the chief representative of this. Within the human world, the capacity of intellect in particular is ‘positive’ – that is, seeking to individuate, distinguish, analyze, break apart, unbind. From this perspective, it is not difficult to see how a human consciousness exclusively oriented towards intellectual or mathematized analysis will lead over into a ‘Culture of Death.’ This is the real foundation for the social upheavals of our time, in which intellect has succeeded, like Einstein’s gravity, in ‘bending’ everything else in its sphere. But what it cannot do is bend itself. It cannot give convincing reasons for coherence, stability, union. Perhaps the intellect rejects 'negative energy' with as much vehemence as the Bose-Einstein Condensate rejects the positive energy.In the meantime, we discovered the physical electricity, so to speak, rather than its cosmic counterpart, and we proceeded to ‘electrify’ everything on earth. But you have to ask whether the ‘earthly electricity’ to which we have subjugated all of life is a true picture of the cosmic electrical universe, or whether it may be a ‘fallen’ picture of it. The ‘cosmic’ electricity is a study in life-forms, a living dynamic of energy. It represents the transfer of vital energies with life-sustaining powers over large distances. Here is the concept of positivity contained, balanced by all the other forces in the universe. Odd that we should have given such a transfer of energy a ‘negative’ sign!Whereas, on earth, the electricity that we harness and use is like an additional injection of ‘positive’ energy on an already positively-maximized human situation – it’s like injecting sugar into a diabetic. It is perhaps for this reason that Ernst Lehrs, author of Man or Matter, remarks that “…with every act of setting electromagnetic energies in motion we interfere with the… balance of our planet by turning part of the earth’s coherent substance into ‘dust.’ Thus we may say that whenever we generate electricity we speed up the earth’s process of cosmic ageing… It was man’s fate to remain unaware of this fact during the first phase of the electrification of his civilization; to continue now in this state of unawareness would spell peril for the human race.”I will continue with some of these themes in the next post.
posted by Caryl at 4:33 PM 0 comments

Saturday, October 07, 2006
Rediscovering the Moral Law - (IV)
The Moral Law, Negative Energy and KenosisLet this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God;But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men;And being found in fashion like a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death on the cross. Phil 2: 5-8 (King James)Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (Revised Standard)George F.R. Ellis is an astronomer and professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. During the period of his studies at the University of Cambridge in England – where he consorted with Fred Hoyle, Stephen Hawking and other luminaries – he left Anglicanism and became a convert to the Quaker faith (Religious Society of Friends). During the following years of his career in South Africa he has been active in the anti-apartheid movement and in other efforts for social justice.In 1978 Dr. Ellis published an article in New Scientist which caused a frisson in the Copernican Establishment – some saw it as an "earthquake." In a later review in Nature, P.C.W. Davies described Ellis’s theory as nothing less than an abandonment of "the entire conceptual and philosophical foundation of modern cosmology." Ellis had proposed a spherical dipole universe in which Earth occupies the South pole and the detritus from the Big Bang occupies the North pole. It was enough to set the Establishment’s teeth on edge, because, as Ellis had himself acknowledged, "it is believed to be unreasonable that we should be near the center of the Universe." Even though his article had not exactly argued that we are a center in the geocentric sense, the hint of even a "secondary" center was enough to set off a considerable gnashing and grinding of teeth. Interestingly, Ellis argued that our "centrality" (opposite the Big Bang pole) was for biological, not cosmological reasons. Life would arise in a part of the universe that was not too hot, and such was the part occupied by the Earth in the cosmos.In 1995, Scientific American published a profile of Dr. Ellis in their October issue. It described briefly some of his more recent work as a critic of the inflationary, or "critical density," model of the universe. In that model, the magical Big Bang pops into existence and blows up until it reaches a "critical density," at which point it will self-puncture and we all return to Valhalla.However, the bulk of the article was devoted to Dr. Ellis’s spiritual and ethical outlook. In contrast to evolutionary biologists and postmodernist philosophers, Ellis believes in the existence of a universal moral law. He takes the New Testament concept of kenosis as his central theme in arguing that "the foundational line of true ethical behavior… is the degree of freedom from self-centeredness of thought and behavior, and willingness freely to give up one’s own self-interest on behalf of others."The kenosis or self-emptying concept comprises a very small passage in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians. It is in its way a remarkable compression and condensation of the whole New Testament story of Jesus – it epitomizes the life of Jesus as, in turn, that Life epitomizes human life in general.I was struck by Dr. Ellis’s view and, not being afraid of audacity, I sent an e-mail to Dr. Ellis expressing my interest. In my unpublished novel, After the Crash, there is a short chapter that deals with the theme of kenosis. That novel, set in a not-too-distant future of fossil fuel depletion, sees the arrival of a certain type of person whom I call the "Silencer." Silencers are men (and there are reasons why only men can be Silencers) who have developed the faculty of empathic self-emptying love to an extraordinary degree, and they appear in a society where people are racked by voices in their head – tormented by the vocal remnants of the hydrocarbon era. I enclosed in my e-mail to Dr. Ellis this short chapter – being only 5 pages, it was not too lengthy to send as an attached file.Dr. Ellis kindly replied, and sent me his 10-page essay, "Kenosis as a Unifying Theme for Life and Cosmology." In this essay he argues that kenosis provides "the key to understanding the deep nature of creation, in the sense that it provides the metaphysical underpinnings of cosmology as well as ethics." He believes that the self-sacrificial love which kenosis teaches is a central element in the Christian religion, and probably a major strand in all religious traditions. In terms of cosmology, kenosis points to the fact that "the fundamental aim of loving action shapes the nature of creation and of transcendence in practice… Thus we take seriously the concept that the purpose of the universe is precisely to make this kind of sacrificial response possible." He says that the Creator could have ordered things differently, "but has voluntarily and specifically restricted the nature of creation to that required for this purpose. This states the metaphysical basis underlying cosmology and hence determining the nature of physics." But then follows a disappointing sentence: "Science cannot provide such a metaphysical basis."That science does not provide such a metaphysical basis I would agree. But to say that it cannot is to assume that science will never be able to advance beyond its present condition – or to assume that today’s science is the final word. But already the picture of the negative-energy universe energized by electrical or plasma phenomena opens a whole new window. Can the concept of kenosis fit in with this new picture?First of all, while the intellect may be understood as ‘positive,’ a more holistic view sees the positive intellect as but one part of human nature. There is an ‘integrative’ principle, or rather, state, towards which the intellect can act as a mirror, but which in itself it is unable to grasp. For this integrative state is indeed the issue of our very embodiment, our incarnation as individual men and women expressing the male or female side of ‘human nature.’Perhaps this integrative state is analogous to the negative energy concept, in the sense that it cannot be ‘seen’ or ‘weighed,’ but only measured by its effects. "Ye shall know them by their fruits." In what is called ‘negative energy’ we find the principle of coherence, that which causes things to bind and hold together, and it is a causative principle which does not allow things to be ‘taken apart,’ in intellect-fashion. In this negative energy condition, things can only be born and appear as wholes – and this idea reappears today in the Intelligent Design movement, which insists that manifestations of complex life could have only arisen in this fashion, and not in the Darwinian piecemeal manner.In order to ‘grasp’ the negative-energy state (and ‘grasp’ is not really the right word, for it implies the positive conceptual activity) the intellect must undergo a type of ‘kenosis,’ an emptying-out. It has to lose its ‘grasp’ in order to be able to experience the cohesion of things in its own being. This act of renunciation does not come easily, for the intellect at all times craves the fullness of its own productions – even if this fullness is artificial, and even if it knows that can only create an ‘artificial plenum.’ The idea of ‘emptiness,’ for intellect, is reprehensible and seemingly ‘unnatural.’A deeper look at human life shows, however, that ultimately man becomes dissatisfied with his artificial creations, whether of material goods or scientific paradigms. The past few hundred years of Western history have been characterized by a strong acclaim and emphasis upon man’s creativity – whether in art or science. Once nature was no longer seen as the manifestation of divine being, and imitation of nature no longer sufficed for an artistic principle, it was thought that human beings could, so to speak, reinvent it. We are living through the last phases of this theory of art – and perhaps the most toxic phase. For this notion of creativity has penetrated all the way to the genetic levels, and scientists and their funders and followers are eager to reinvent and correct what they see as nature’s shortcomings - for sale, of course.I doubt that this phase can endure if the human race is to continue. The rediscovery of the principle of renunciation, of the empty space that allows for the unfolding of events, of the ‘hollow zone’ which so much resembles a womb – these understandings will signify the real beginning to the practice of kenosis. For kenotic self-emptying makes possible the continuation of the life world, and it is ultimately (and intimately) allied with the concepts of participation and procreation. Only one who lives in this integrative state is truly capable of being there while not being there, of "is" and of "is-not," of being self while renouncing self. "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made." The gift of kenosis is what allows us a glimpse into the deep coherence of Creation.
Labels: developmental thinking, George F.R. Ellis (Astronomer), kenosis, moral law, negative energy state, participation, procreation
posted by Caryl at 5:10 PM 2 comments

Zionism

2007-11-27T13:16:00.000-08:00

Sunday, July 23, 2006
"Truth turns ashen"
Posted in memory of the blasted and charred children of Lebanon.
Choice of Weapon
Our world has been numbered by men with bombs,
And by the women who rule them with clipped
And merciless speech. They play at destruction;
Their gods are false; they are proud and heartless.
On the spit of their tongues truth turns ashen,
As it gets done.
posted by Caryl at 10:26 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 23, 2006
The Zionist Face of First Things
Destroying Christianity for Israel

The journal First Things, the premier religious journal in the USA, maintains a web log to which their contributors write. It does not, however, allow for the posting of comments by readers. Perhaps the editors of that magazine are unwilling to have readers challenge the neoconservatism which now passes for Christianity according to First Things.I wish to comment on Wilfred McClay’s recently posted piece (Aug.23) in which he derides David Ray Griffin’s new book, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, the Westminster Presbyterian Press for publishing it, the Catholic critiques of the Iraq war and American foreign policy, and everybody else who disagrees with the Bush Administration’s handling of world affairs. The enemies list is growing very long indeed, but the rhetorical skills of the neoconservative apologist seem to be growing rather dim.Indeed I was sorry to read this disparaging and in many ways incoherent piece by Wilfred McClay. He wrote an excellent essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson some years ago which showed great acumen, and I have always considered him a thoughtful writer.He begins by acknowledging his association with the Ethics and Public Policy Center of Washington, D.C., which was founded “to combat the perception that an intellectually and morally impoverished understanding of the dominant American religious traditions had rendered those traditions useless, or (as in the lamentable presidency of Jimmy Carter) worse than useless in guiding Americans’ thinking about a sensible and responsible foreign policy.”Whew. This is quite a mouthful. But what he seems to be saying is that dominant American Christianity was not quite committed to the project of Empire, and that the people at the Ethics and Public Policy Center were determined to rectify this mistake, perhaps by furthering the alliance with Zionism. But why the dig at Jimmy Carter? Mr. Carter was the last president we had who acknowledged limits to energy use – there was the famous scene where he spoke from the White House wearing a sweater, because he kept the thermostats down. Mr. Reagan tore down Mr. Carter’s solar panels upon arriving at the august office. So much for the turn to a modicum of energy realism.No doubt there were lamentable things that happened in Mr. Carter’s tenure, just as there have also been lamentable events in the presidencies before and after Mr. Carter -- but this snide disparagement of a good and decent man is wholly unwarranted.Mr. McClay then goes on to praise Mr. George Weigel “in stimulating valuable thinking about the nation-state, war, and peace that is both strategically sound and theologically informed.” Concerning this last point I must demur. Mr. Weigel claims to be a Catholic, but he evidently holds no respect for Catholic Just War teaching. Both Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI have condemned the Iraq invasion, but apparently this effort for peace means nothing to the Country Club neo-Catholicism of George Weigel.It gets worse. Mr. McClay describes the news that Westminster Presbyterian Press is publishing David Ray Griffin’s book as “jaw-dropping.” The book itself he refers to as “a crackpot September 11 conspiracy book.”Now it is one thing to describe Mr. Griffin’s thesis in that book as shocking – which it is. But it is quite another to dismiss it in the cavalier way that Mr. McClay does. I would just like to ask Mr. McClay if he has given any thought to how Building 7 came down? It was not hit, and collapsed in a matter of seconds. Such facts – and there are many – point to a raft of troubling issues not dealt with in the “secular press” or by the government’s report. But then Mr. McClay adds insult to injury when he says that the appearance of this book “underlines the more general point that the most important intellectual and institutional expressions of the Christian faith, including Rome and Canterbury, have found almost nothing of value to say about the current Middle East crisis..."”etc. The phrase "including Rome” is linked to an article in The Weekly Standard, neoconservative magazine sans pareil. This link consists of an article by neoconservative Joseph Bottum, “The Sodano Code: The Vatican’s stale policy on the Middle East,” which is a condemnation of the Vatican’s “functional pacifism.” Bottum writes that, “The Vatican was never anti-Israeli, and it certainly never condoned or praised terrorism. But, bit by bit, Rome’s advisers and experts on the Middle East came to be those whose first impulse was to take the Arab, and particularly the Palestinian, side in any dispute….”Imagine that – taking the Arab side! What an affront, even to acknowledge that there might be two sides to the conflict. Aside from the intellectual dishonesty of the Bottum piece, and its transparently Zionist bias, I find it amazing that McClay had the temerity to link to an article in the Weekly Standard as an index to Catholic thought. If this was not sufficient, however, McClay urges us to read the right sort of people – his people – Norman Podhoritz, Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, Christopher Hitchens – all of whom are neoconservative courtiers and who are foaming at the mouth against Islam. Finally, Mr. McClay concludes his little diatribe by taking shots at those who criticize the “Christian pretensions” of George Bush et al. Now some of these critics who worry about “theocracy” and the like are, I agree, a little over the top. But notice how McClay refuses to engage their arguments, saying that, because they disagree with the neoconservative dogma, they can be “safely ignored and dispensed with.”First Things had a great moment about a decade ago. It published a brave issue about “The End of Democracy?” which ruffled a lot of feathers in the Zionist sector which supports the magazine. Mrs. Gertrude Himmelfarb, for one, resigned her membership on the Board.Since that time First Things has settled down to be a reliable echo chamber for the doctrine that Might Makes Right and There Is to be No Discussion. And since that time its editor, Father R.J. Neuhaus, has converted to Catholicism. Despite this, I find it alarming that First Things has become the premier intellectual-Christian apologist for neoconservatism. I fear that Father Neuhaus has been swept up, not into Catholicism, but into the Zionist delusion, and that he is not aware that the Zionists now have set their sights on the Catholic Church. For the true teachings of the Catholic faith – and some renegade Presbyterians – are all that is left of Christianity’s retaining wall against the Zionist annihilation of American politics.Mr. McClay will be cheering it on, but for Father Neuhaus, a good and decent man, I tremble. It would have been better if he had remained a Lutheran, than to let these wolves into the fold! Labels: Christianity, First Things, Israel, Zionism posted by Caryl at 5:41 PM 1 comments

Monday, July 31, 2006
Israel Unconverted
Words cannot express the horror I feel at the killing fields of Lebanon. And words cannot express the horror I feel at the treacherous American enablers of Israeli savagery. It is impossible to see through the darkness that has descended upon us -- on the one hand the abandonment of any pretence of “just war,” the extinction of all criteria of restraint, proportion, international law and all canons of decency. And on the other: the unleashing of sheer bloodlust accompanied by the bellowing and braying of the triumphalists like Michael Barone. He was quoted recently by the Catholic blogger Oswald Sobrino: “…What Barone points out is that the Bush administration is right to do things differently this time: no pressuring of Israel to stop military action prematurely, no rushing to engage in shuttle diplomacy that is an unmistakable signal of weakness to the Middle Eastern mentality, and no more pleas for Israel to give up land. Appeasement did not work with Hitler because Hitler would never give up his ambition of conquering all of Europe. Appeasement does not work with those now attacking Israel because they will never give up their ambition to destroy Israel. That means that the table has to be overturned. The game as played for years now favors the irrational who seek the destruction of Israel. So it's time to turn the chess board over: to create a new playing board with new facts, not to stick to the same dysfunctional constraints and parameters of the past. That's a revolutionary approach. Let's call it a "paradigm shift" so as not to alarm unduly the academic types who pontificate over foreign affairs.” That a Catholic writer should be espousing this neoconservative doctrine of destruction is ignominious and shameful. I thought the authors of the Catholic Neocon Observer Blog should be aware of Mr. Sobrino’s change of allegiance from the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gospel of Pure Revolutionary Destruction, so I sent them an e-mail about it, as follows:Hey Tom,Instead of going after Stephen Hand, who is strongly anti-war, why not address the neocon Catholic Oswald Sobrino - at this link -http://catholicanalysis.blogspot.com/--I think you should challenge Mr. Sobrino, who quotes the self-intoxicated Charles Krauthammer about what a great thing to bomb the Lebanese people. In fact Mr. Sobrino seems to fall over himself to ingratiate himself with the barbaricons. Plus he quotes Michael Barone, Victor Hanson, and other neocon apologists ad nauseum about how the "Arabs only want to destroy Israel" and "no negotiation is possible" and let's have a complete paradigm shift, i.e., annihilate them! It is simply unbelievable to me that a man of Mr. Sobrino's intelligence can have absolutely no feeling for the Arab point of view and no willingness to try and enter into it. And I do believe that Mr. Sobrino is a good man, who has written some good pieces on Catholic theology. But I have stopped visiting his site because of the incredible sickening neocon self-righteousness which he parades as Deep Truth. This seems to me an utter betrayal of the Catholicism he claims to profess.Regards,CJ...I copied Mr. Sobrino to this message, and received a message from him:Dear Caryl Johnston,I strongly disagree with your personal attack on me! You have slandered and libelled me to others. You have given false witness against me to others. I have never said or written anywhere that we are to annihilate Arabs.I must vigorously correct and rebuke you. Please stop the false witness for your own sake. You are damaging yourself and failing to do good for anyone. State your views vigorously, but without slander or libel or personal attack. That's my honest advice and counsel to you.I hereby give you immediate notice to cease your slanders against me. Argue your case, but don't personally attack or defame me or others. You do not serve your cause in that way.Oswald Sobrino, J.D.CatholicAnalysis.blogspot.comTo which I responded in this wise:Dear Mr. Sobrino,Thank you for writing. I have not "slandered" you or personally attacked you. In fact, I complimented the quality of your theological reflections. I expressed strong disagreement with your alliance with the neoconservatives, who are brutal apostles of "Might Makes Right" and should have no place of esteem in the hearts of Catholics.Sincerely,Caryl JohnstonTo which Mr. Sobrino responded:You are wrong. You slandered me. Desist from hysterical outbursts and get yourself to a prudent and mature confessor as soon as possible.Oswald Sobrino CatholicAnalysis.blogspot.comIsn’t it amazing that someone who fills his website with the Culture-of-Death promoters and warmongers --Charles Krauthammer, Michael Barone, Victor Davis Hanson, etc. -- about how justified Israel is in bombing Lebanon into rubble, burning and decapitating children, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees and destroying civilian life, - well, isn’t it amazing that such a man is wholly unable to process the fact that someone disagrees with him? Mr. Sobrino in his replies certainly seems to reveal the profile of the coward/bully.I am very sorry to have to say it, because I did read Mr. Sobrino’s site in the past and often appreciated it. But after Katrina struck New Orleans I began to have doubts about Mr. Sobrino – a New Orleans native – who seemed to have nothing good to say about poor Ray Nagin and seemed to be endorsing the creative destruction of our government’s handling of the crisis. Perhaps Mr. Sobrino really does believe in Barbara Bush’s statement that the poor black people in that city really did appreciate being herded like animals into stadiums with dysfunctional plumbing and no water?I think that Mr. Sobrino would benefit from reading Toynbee – if indeed it was Toynbee who pointed out that no nation has survived the extinction of its ruling elite. The ruling elite in the USA was the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who have now, for all practical purposes, have become wholly allied with the Jews. In the meantime the Protestant Church has become a laughingstock. The Jewish-Protestant alliance has been building for a long time, but certainly since the Kennedy assassination. It was a Catholic Kennedy – flawed man though he was – who was disturbed by Israel’s nuclear ambitions and sought to curb them. This didn’t play well in Israel.Is Mr. Sobrino at all aware of the Jewish preponderance in the media and the popular culture venues (Hollywood)? I think not. Did Mr. Sobrino even mention that Pope Benedict XVI has called for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon? No sign of it. Has Mr. Sobrino a thought at all for the noble tradition of Catholic just war teachings? Apparently not.So I ask: who is Mr. Sobrino pretending to be? I think Mr. Sobrino is one of these Country Club Catholics who despises the liberal cafeteria Catholics for disregarding the teachings of the Church regarding sexual morality, while he himself despises and disregards Catholic teaching about war, economy, mercy, justice, proportionality.If he hopes to ingratiate himself with the Ruling Class he will soon find out that there is no Ruling Class worthy of the name left in this country – they have all become Israelophiles and disciples of the Deuteronomic doctrine of pure destruction: “…thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eyes shall have no pity upon them… the Lord thy God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed… And the Lord thy God shall destroy them with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed…” This is the kind of thing that caused Simone Weil to reject-- with utter loathing -- her Jewish heritage. The Old Testament, she said, was a "tissue of horrors.” The Judaism of Deuteronomy shows itself to be the only religious teaching in the world committed to absolute destruction – a commitment which, it is important to add, was perceived, and strongly condemned, disavowed in the prophetic tradition of Israel: “Hear the world of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.” Hosea 4:1 But modern Israel has spurned its ancient prophets. I have said it before, and I will say it again: in the havoc that Israel will unleash upon the world, there will be a remnant of the faithful Jews who will realize that Jesus Christ is the essence, justification and deliverance of Jewish history into God’s hands. Perhaps, in that late hour, their hearts will turn to conversion, and they will weep for the little children whose burned bodies lie on the hills of Lebanon, in silent testimony to the power of “Jewish vengeance.” posted by Caryl at 5:12 PM 1 comments

Toynbee

2007-11-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

The Universal State
Saturday January 13, 2007

In A Study of History, Arnold J. Toynbee [April 14, 1889 - October 22, 1975] studies the genesis, growths and breakdowns of world civilizations but ultimately pursues the question of the role of the higher religions in history. Writing in the middle of the 20th century after having witnessed two violent World Wars, Toynbee’s mind regarding the role of religion underwent a sharp metamorphosis from his earlier views, which were more in line with late 19th-century rationalism and optimism. Instead of seeing the reproduction of a civilization “as an end in itself,” he becomes converted to the view that civilizations play a secondary and subordinate role in the history of religion. The best fruit of a “Universal State” such as ancient Rome may have been that its existence made possible the arising of Christianity. That is, the importance of civilizations may lie in their effects upon Religion, and not the other way around. This view was held by the Church Fathers Ambrose and Augustine, and later argued by Bossuet, the French historian. Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, which argued that the collapse of Rome was “the triumph of barbarism and religion” – a view certainly not friendly to Christianity – helped to fuel the unfolding rationalism of post-Reformation Western society. Toynbee, looking at all of this from the perspective of the “last generation of Western neo-pagans” – those “rational, unenthusiastic and tolerant” men who were swept away in the cataclysms of the 20th century, finds Gibbon and his heirs mistaken. For the “Universal State” is already symptomatic of spiritual decline.[1] But that such a State should die fruitlessly – for such would its death be, if it were seen as an end in itself-- it would mean that human life was “a tragedy without a catharsis.”Toynbee thus turns his interest from seeing civilizations and their climactic “Universal States” not as ends, but as the means, through their agonies of dissolution, of giving birth to the Higher Religions. Such a view would not have been welcome in the high tide of Western post-Reformation civilization, riding high on its scientific discoveries [2] and in the process of re-instituting “the worship of Leviathan.” He comments that
Westerners of the writer’s generation not only took it for granted that the Christian Church had served its turn in bringing a new civilization to birthin the West; they looked upon this new civilization as having been immature so long as it had remained under Christian auspices; and after having waited with impatience for it to get through its medieval Christian childhood, and having joyfully greeted the repudiation of its Christian origins with which it had celebrated its coming of age, they had focussed their attention on the rise of a Modern Western secular way of life…(p. 446, vol VII)
But what if this secular movement that so elicited their admiration were merely one of “the vain repetitions of the heathens” – “an almost meaningless repetition of something that the Hellenes had done before them, and done supremely well – then the greatest new event in the historical background of a Modern Western Society would be seen to be … very different. The greatest new event would then not be the monotonous rise of yet another secular civilization out of the bosom of the Christian Church in the course of these latter centuries; it would still be the Crucifixion and the Crucifixion’s spiritual consequences.” [Italics mine]Perhaps the “agonies of dissolution” of Two World Wars made people in England and America momentarily receptive to Toynbee’s message -- as indicated by the cover of Time Magazine -- but I think his hope that it might strike a deeper root has gone unfulfilled. Toynbee’s encompassing yet detailed vision of human civilizations has been succeeded by the scrapings of little men and little women, generations of the small-minded, positivists, data-gatherers, pontificators of progress, anti-spiritual and anti-metaphysical to the bone. [3]Yet I think that Toynbee’s canvas is as large and as generous as the view of the world offered by Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, only it is more accessible than the latter because it is oriented towards the known world of history rather than the unknown realm of the occult and the spiritual. Yet both of these large canvasses, had they been received in the spirit in which they were offered, would have had the power to set Western culture upon a new path instead of the terrible hardening of the arteries and suicide of intelligence that are everywhere in evidence today. Fantasy and technology have come to occupy the niche formerly assigned to the operations of intelligence, and almost no subject in the so-called “human affairs” departments – which include everything from diplomacy to painting – has any grounding any more. Such departments of knowledge only exist in the sense of being related to words that once carried with them certain obligations about life and “deportment.” But all “deportment” has been vacated to the status of mere “departments,” and the message about how to live one’s life in these “departments” of knowledge has been lost.The generations of Western mankind have been succeeded by a generation of mayflies, all buzzing fretfully yet with zealous unanimity toward the creation of the Universal State of Incoherence… with the climate, politics, economy, and everything else not far behind. Truly, Toynbee came at a time and with the message of a pearl of great price – the pearl of wisdom gained through suffering. It was a rare, unique, and unrepeatable historical opportunity for Western man to expand, deepen and integrate his intelligence through a Christian re-appropriation of his history.It was an opportunity murdered, missed, lost, squandered, obliterated, buried -- as far as I can tell, for the past five decades in the history of the West, for now, and to all appearances for the foreseeable future. But whether that promise can reawaken remains the centrally important question of our being. This is the challenge buried in our souls and in our history that cries out for response.[1] “…universal states arise after, and not before, the breakdowns of the civilizations to whose bodies social they bring political unity. They are not summers, but ‘Indian Summers,’ masking autumn and presaging winter. In the second place, they are the products of dominant minorities: that is, of once creative minorities that have lost their creative power…Universal States are symptoms of social disintegration, yet at the same time they are attempts to check this disintegration and to defy it.” Pps.3, 4, vol VII][2] “One of Man’s fundamental and perennial errors – an error that is both an intellectual and a moral lapse – is to idolize discoveries of his own making that enhance his power.” P. 468][3] Such ones attacked Toynbee’s work as “metaphysical speculation dressed up as history” – the worst word in the modern vocabulary being, apparently, “metaphysical.”It is interesting that, of Western philosophers contemporary or later than Toynbee, only Ortega y Gasset really heard the message of life, and turned his philosophy to its good account in his essays on “vital reason.” Yet even Ortega was not wholly in Toynbee’s camp. He thought that Toynbee showed too little esteem in being English – and he thought it boded ill for the future of the world that such a man felt no particular partiality for his own people and nation. Kedourie, an economist, attacked Toynbee for not taking responsibility for the retreating British Empire and in failing to uphold democratic values in countries it had once controlled. But in the light of Toynbee’s view of “Universal States” and their imperialism, this criticism seems to beg the question of the very spiritual disintegration that A Study of History was in large part describing. But in a more particular sense, especially in relation to Palestine, this criticism does not seem just. Of Palestine, Toynbee remarked that it was not just a local tragedy, but “a tragedy for the world.” He was very aware of the menace to democratic values represented in the fate of Palestine. Perhaps Toynbee's views on this matter were especially unwelcome in the circles of our culture, which already viewed with distrust his comprehensive view of history, deeply informed by a Christianized intelligence.
Posted by Caryl at 6:08 PM 4 comments 4 comments:
kopylopi said...
Caryl,What are the benefits studying Rudolph Steiner? I ask because I am reading Barfield's Saving the Appearances and would like to try reading Steiner again. However, I am feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of his work and am put off by some of his bizarre theories.
2:25 AM
Caryl said...
Hi Peter-You have asked an important question, and one that would demand a posting, perhaps several, to answer. There is a mass of material in Rudolf Steiner's opus that is off-putting, bizarre, and all but inaccessible to the modern mind. Most of my reading of it, such as it was, occurred in an earlier phase of my life. In the years since I have been actively critical of many parts of it. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, my mind was greatly enriched by the encounter with Anthroposophy. This mental enrichment is a different category of "knowledge" from empirical, factual, true-false or other conventional approaches, and what it does is to build a sort of structure in the soul - a kind of echo-chamber for future growth. It is like a theory of "resonance," or something of the kind - which is very different from the more familiar "correspondence" test of cognition. "Resonance" in fact points to the existence of the etheric body, which is thought to be a supersensible medium of growth underlying the faculties of memory, imagination, regeneration,rejuvenation, healing, etc. Once you begin to sense that Anthroposophy aims to strengthen the etheric body rather than the intellectual faculty, you begin to get a sense for what it is about. Whether Steiner was "successful" or not is a different issue - perhaps he wasn't. But it's the only ball game in town, as far as I can tell - that is, in terms of its understanding of the nature of man and man's "supersensible" organism. But I know exactly what you are saying and feeling. I recommend reading Barfield, as you are doing, and also the priest of the Christian Community, Emil Bock, who wrote "The Three Years" (on the Life of Christ) and many other works on the Old and New Testaments. These two men are the best fruit of anthroposophicalpath and go far in explicating it and making it comprehensible.
8:42 AM
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1:09 PM
John Beck said...
Caryl, hi - thanks for this very interesting commentary. There is a point of connection between AJ Toynbee's crucifixion statement you quote, and an observation of Steiner's. He said that modern science reflected a reaching of the stage of Good Friday, and getting - for now - stuck there.I also feel your description of the effect of studying Steiner is very apt. His whole method was artistic, based on Goethe's legend/parable of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. I finally recognized that Steiner gathered up jewels of insight and made them available for us to put into the river of our pre-conscious mind, out of which a bridge to spiritual experience arises.Just from the quality of what you are sharing, I would say that Steiner succeeded. "Following" him was never the goal, becoming capable of following oneself is the goal.
11:40 AM

Labels: Anthroposophy, Arnold J. Toynbee, Christianity, Ortega y Gasset

A Study of History. Vol. VII Oxford, 1954.
Chapter Seven: Universal Churches

I have been reading in Arnold J. Toynbee’s magisterial A Study of History and wish to share some thoughts from his Chapter Seven, on “Universal Churches.” He argues that the four higher religions in the world today – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Mayahana Buddhism – were able to preserve the germ of life from a parent civilization in the process of collapse to the arising of a new one. He notes that in the time of his writing (~1952) all eight extant civilizations had in their background some universal church through which they were affiliated to a civilization of an older generation. After the stage of “Primitive Societies,” he names the “Primary Civilizations” (all derived from primitive societies) as the Egyptiac, Andean, Mayan, Sumeric, Indus Culture, Minoan, and Shang Culture. Secondary civilizations deriving from these are named as the Yucatec, Babylonic, Mexic, First Syriac, Hittite, Indic, Syriac-Hellenic, and Sinic.

The Higher Religions created, adapted, or adopted from the "internal proletariats” (abbreviated “i.p.”; about which more later) of the Secondary Civilizations are the following:
Judaism, Zoroastrianism (i.p. of the Babylonic)
Hinduism (i.p. Indus)
Islam (i.p. Syriac)
Isis-worship, Cybele-worship, Mithraism, Christianity, Manichaeism (all of these from the i.p. of Hellenic Civilization),
Neoplatonism (adapted by i.p. from philosophies of Hellenic dominant minority),
Mayahana (through Hellenic i.p. via philosophy of Indus dominant minority and adopted by Sinic i.p.),
Neo-Taoism (adapted by Sinic i.p. from one of the philosophies of Sinic dominant minority)

The third-generation or Tertiary Civilizations derived from the chrysalis churches constructed by their internal proletariats are primarily:

Hindu (derived from Indic through Hinduism)
Iranic~Arabic (derived from Syriac through Islam)

Western Christian
Orthodox Christian
Orthodox Russian Christian: all these derived from Hellenic through Christianity

Far Eastern, Korea, Japan: derived through Sinic through the Mayahana

Etherealization
Sunday, January 21, 2007

In A Study of History, AJT defines “etherealization” as the transference of words from a secular to a religious meaning and usage, a process which, he notes, may be considered as “a symptom of growth.” Toynbee’s inquiry, commencing with a study into the genesis, growths and breakdowns of world civilizations, leads to the question of the role of the higher religions in history. Writing in the middle of the 20th century after having witnessed two violent World Wars, Toynbee’s mind regarding the role of religion undergoes a sharp metamorphosis from his earlier views, which were more in line with late 19th-century rationalism and optimism. Instead of seeing the reproduction of a civilization “as an end in itself,” he becomes converted to the view that civilizations play a secondary and subordinate role in the history of religion, and that the best fruit of a “Universal State” such as ancient Rome may have been that its existence made possible the arising of Christianity. That is, the importance of civilizations may lie in their effects upon Religion, and not the other way around. This view was held by the Church Fathers Ambrose and Augustine, and later argued by Bossuet, the French historian. Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, which argued that the collapse of Rome was “the triumph of barbarism and religion” – a view certainly not friendly to Christianity – helped to fuel the unfolding rationalism of post-Reformation Western society. Toynbee, looking at all of this from the perspective of the “last generation of Western neo-pagans” – those “rational, unenthusiastic and tolerant” men who were swept away in the cataclysms of the 20th century, finds Gibbon and his heirs mistaken. For the “Universal State” is already symptomatic of spiritual decline.[1. “…universal states arise after, and not before, the breakdowns of the civilizations to whose bodies social they bring political unity. They are not summers, but ‘Indian Summers,’ masking autumn and presaging winter. In the second place, they are the products of dominant minorities: that is, of once creative minorities that have lost their creative power…Universal States are symptoms of social disintegration, yet at the same time they are attempts to check this disintegration and to defy it.” Pps.3, 4, vol VII] But that such a State should die fruitlessly – for such would its death be, if it were seen as an end in itself-- it would mean that human life was “a tragedy without a catharsis.”

Toynbee thus turns his interest from seeing civilizations and their climactic “Universal States” not as ends, but as the means, through their agonies of dissolution, of giving birth to the Higher Religions. Such a view would not have been welcome in the high tide of Western post-Reformation civilization, riding high on its scientific discoveries [2. “One of Man’s fundamental and perennial errors – an error that is both an intellectual and a moral lapse – is to idolize discoveries of his own making that enhance his power.” P. 468] and in the process of re-instituting “the worship of Leviathan.” He comments that

Westerners of the writer’s generation not only took it for granted that the
Christian Church had served its turn in bringing a new civilization to birth in theWest; they looked upon this new civilization as having been immature so long as it had remained under Christian auspices; and after having waited with impatience for it to get through its medieval Christian childhood, and having joyfully greeted the repudiation of its Christian origins with which it had celebrated its coming of age, they had focussed their attention on the rise of a Modern Western secular way of life…(p. 446)

But what if this secular movement that so elicited their admiration were merely one of “the vain repetitions of the heathens” – “an almost meaningless repetition of something that the Hellenes had done before them, and done supremely well – then the greatest new event in the historical background of a Modern Western Society would be seen to be … very different. The greatest new event would then not be the monotonous rise of yet another secular civilization out of the bosom of the Christian Church in the course of these latter centuries; it would still be the Crucifixion and the Crucifixion’s spiritual consequences.” [Italics mine]

Perhaps the “agonies of dissolution” of Two World Wars made people in England and America momentarily receptive to Toynbee’s message, but I think his hope that it might strike a deeper root has gone unfulfilled. Toynbee’s encompassing yet detailed vision of human civilizations has been succeeded by the scrapings of little men and little women, generations of the small-minded, positivists, data-gatherers, pontificators of progress, anti-spiritual and anti-metaphysical to the bone. [3. Such ones attacked Toynbee’s work as “metaphysical speculation dressed up as history” – the worst word in the modern vocabulary being, apparently, “metaphysical.”] Yet I think that Toynbee’s canvas is as large and as generous as the view of the world offered by Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, only it is better and more accessible because it is oriented towards the known world of history rather than the unknown realm of the occult and the spiritual. Yet both of these large canvasses, had they been received in the spirit in which they were offered, would have had the power to set Western culture upon a new path instead of the terrible hardening of the arteries and suicide of intelligence that are everywhere in evidence today. Fantasy and technology have come to occupy the niche formerly assigned to the operations of intelligence, and almost no subject in the so-called “human affairs” departments – which include everything from diplomacy to painting – has any grounding any more. Such departments of knowledge only exist in the sense of being related to words that once carried with them certain obligations about life and “deportment.” But all “deportment” has been vacated to the status of mere “departments,” and the message about how to live one’s life in the “departments” was lost. [4.] It is interesting that, of Western philosophers contemporary or later than Toynbee, only Ortega y Gasset really heard the message of life, and turned his philosophy to its good account in his essays on “vital reason.” Yet even Ortega was not wholly in Toynbee’s camp. He thought that Toynbee showed too little esteem in being English – and he thought it boded ill for the future of the world that such a man felt no particular partiality for his own people and nation. Kedourie, an economist, attacked Toynbee for not taking responsibility for the retreating British Empire and in failing to uphold democratic values in countries it had once controlled. But in the light of Toynbee’s view of “Universal States” and the likely connection of such States with imperialism, this seems to be an instance of the very spiritual disintegration that A Study of History was in large part describing. But the criticism was not just especially in relation to Palestine, which Toynbee remarked was not just a local tragedy, but “a tragedy for the world.” The question that this raises, uncomfortably, is that Toynbee views in general on history, and specifically on Palestine, would not be welcome in a Western culture becoming ever more “judaized.”

The generations of Western mankind have been succeeded by a generation of mayflies, all buzzing fretfully yet with zealous unanimity toward the creation of the Universal State of Incoherence… with the climate, politics, economy, and everything else not far behind. Truly, Toynbee came at a time and with the message of a pearl of great price – the pearl of wisdom gained through suffering. It was of the altogether rare, unique, unrepeatable historical opportunity available to Western man of deepening and integrating his intelligence through a Christian re-appropriation of his history. An opportunity missed, lost, squandered, as far as I can tell

Etherealization

Toynbee uses the word “etherealization” to describe the process of the transference of words from a secular to a religious usage, noting that this is a “symptom of growth.” In this post I want to record some of his examples, noting the secular derivations and the later religious meanings of the words, which we may call the “upslope.” On the “downslope,” the process is reversed: a religious or spiritual meaning loses its aura and sinks into materialization, if not materialism.

First, a brief remark about “etherealization.” “Ethereal” in common usage is associated with faintness or ghostliness, a not-quite-material presence, which is a very English, very empirical way of looking at it. It would be characteristic of the physical-science bent of the English mind to look at it that way – “ethereal” is less palpable, therefore “unreal.” It has a different connotation in the traditional meaning of the word, where “ethereal” is the but adjectival form of “ether,” a Greek-derived word for the heavenly realm – space or the “firmament.” Debate over the existence of an ether in space occupied much the early 20th century physics and astronomy, which culminated with Einstein. Though the debate seemed to have closed down for good – “No, Virginia, there is no ether in space” – in reality this may not be the case, and just what it is when we talk about “ether” remains something like an unwanted relative – the person you know you must invite to the family gathering, but for the life of you, you wish you didn’t have to.

The key to the “ether” is life – at least to the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner, which claims the existence of the etheric realm as the basis of the life-processes in plants, animals, and man. The “etheric body” is not exactly what we mean by a “body,” and it is only perceivable by a clairvoyant. And yet remembrances of this stratum of man’s being haunt us all through history. The halo, the crown, and the headdress are evocations of the “etheric body” which was once perceivable (in a visionary way) as protruding from the head. It is only when this living membrane “contracted” to the sphere of the brain, that mankind could be the possessor of thoughts in the modern (or even pre-modern,) sense.

This stupendous event of compression or contraction is commemorated in the story of Abraham, the First Patriarch, who, it is said, spent his early life in a “cave.” This was a way of sheltering himself from the purview of Nimrod, but the metaphoric connection of cave and brain is recognizable. The skullcap of latter-day Jews also hearkens to this compressive view of the etheric membrane, shrunken into the cranial cavern. This “compression” of the etheric to the brain and the removal of thoughts and feelings from the participatory life in nature has characterized the Jews all throughout their history.

In Steiner’s view of human developmental history, this contraction of the etheric body was a necessity for the arising of an independent life of thought and of the possibility for freedom of individual persons. But the process that Abraham initiated in circa 2000 B.C. has been turned around, today, circa 2000 A.D., to the opposite danger, which is an excessive “retreat” of the etheric into a ghostly intellectualized thinking. The modern West in particular exhibits this fatal danger of loss of vitality in thinking, partly because the science that the West has developed has never resolved its intrinsic conflict regarding its own method of knowing. Is knowledge to be viewed as an “alien” condition – that is, as non-participated, cut off from its life ground, and therefore “objectified,” or is it better understood as a process of participatory rationality, in which knower and known are in a dynamic of mutual relation? The rebels against the “alien” view were first numbered among the Romantic poets, and they have been joined in later years by some historians and even scientists. But the rebels have not yet succeeded in winning a decisive victory, and the Tower of Babel continues to mount. We can recall that before it was a story about language, the Tower of Babel was a story about the will to power and the imposition of a deadening uniformity that suffocates the diverse manifestations of human consciousness. We have that uniformity today in the form of mathematics, statistics, and reductionism – a universal language useful for science, but in the long run perhaps fatal for the sustenance of civilization.

But before going on to the meanings in language liberated through the process of “etherealization,” I would just add that the etheric realm is by no means confined to the process of generating thoughts or new meanings from words. Living processes, that is, forms of the etheric, underlie the faculties of memory and imagination as well. Their biological dimension in regeneration, rejuvenation, growth, and embryonic development, are now presenting themselves to the eye of science as externalized objects (or what could be called “objectified processes”) subject to manipulation. Modern-day ethics flails about these realities with limited success in curbing them but without seizing on the central issue, which is that the deadening materialization of human thought is now grasping into these dynamic processes as if unconsciously seeking to fulfill what it lacks. Being thus a form of “wish-fulfillment” rather than of moral growth, this modern technique is predatory and destructive. But if approached in a spirit of complementarity or marriage, the life-liberated consciousness of man could meet life’s unfolding stages more fruitfully – even “procreatively.” The unfolding stages of life would then be recognized as symbolizing definite stages of intellectual and spiritual growth in mankind, and their vulnerability would evoke a chivalrous spirit of protectiveness rather than the vindictive strain that has accompanied science like an undercurrent from its beginnings. [2]

The real discovery and perhaps even the harnessing of etheric forces awaits a more spiritualized thinking, a thinking in participation with life and not, as we have come to expect and dread, a thinking that is alienated from, and striving against, life. [3] Our time calls for a new Abraham, but one who will recapitulate the achievements of the first Abraham in reverse. That is, the “new Abraham” must embody a participatory rather than a separated rationality. Human thinking needs a regenerative act. It needs to acquire life-characteristics consciously. This will be very difficult, for it is a moral, not solely a cognitive task. Why? Because the “moral” is always embodied in particular circumstances, that is, the mores, the customs or ways of a particular part of mankind. These customs, habits, cultures, events and particular histories are what enable us to achieve thinking in the first place, and they presuppose and elicit our participation, yet modern science as it has come to be practiced today discourages this participatory outlook. A regenerative act of human thinking will mean a different view of science as well.

The particularity of words is a good place to start the discussion of “etherealization,” for in the process of the acquisition of a new meaning, or the liberation of a meaning to a religious or spiritual dimension, we are watching the historic occasion of the mind regenerating itself. It is man acquiring a new dimension of himself, and this is why Toynbee calls the process a “symptom of growth” – although I do not sense that he possessed an exact knowledge of the etheric process underlying the “symptom.”
Here are some words and their developments of meaning:
Ecclesia – in Athens, a general assembly of a citizen body meeting to transact political (as opposed to judicial) business. In Christian usage it came to mean both a local Christian community and the Church Universal.
Laity- archair Greek laos, for people, as distinct from those in authority
Clergy – Gk. kleros, “lot,” as e.g. an allotted share of an inherited estate – Christians adopted it to mean “the portion of the Christian community that God had allotted to Himself to serve in his professional priesthood.”
‘Orders’ –(ordines) politically privileged classes in the Roman State, e.g. ordo senatorius, ordo equestris
Overseers – episkopoi – Spartan State for members appointed to supreme executive office by election but who served as constitutional despots during their term of office
Scriptura - vocabulary of roman inland revenus, a tax payable for the right to graze cattle on certain public lands
Testaments – diathekai, Gk and L. testamenta, -- thought of as equivalent of legal instruments which God had declared in two installments
Ascetic – Gk. askesis, physical training of athletes
Anchorites – Gk. anachoresis – withdrawal from productive economic activity as protest against heavy taxations
Solitaries, monks, monachoi – a creative contradiction, a society of solitaries. In previous Latin usage the word meant something combining the meanings of a quarter sessions and a chamber of commerce
Liturgy – Gk. leutourgia – ‘public service,’ when originally informal proceedings had crystallized into a ritual
Holy Communion – L. sacramentum, a pagan Roman rite in which a new recruit was ‘sworn in’ to the Roman Army. In the Latin Church this dual meaning, sacrament and military oath, was present from the beginning. In the Greek, koinonia (L. communio) both signified participation, but first and foremost membership in a political community
Transgression – Gk. parabasis, term of art in Attic drama meaning the parade of the chorus from one side of the theater to the other. In Christian language, a figurative ‘side-step’ in the spiritual sense of sin

In the downslope, meanings regress from a religious to a secular significance:

Cleric – to “clerk,” one who engages in minor office work (England) or store salesperson (US)
Communion- “waged in ever grosser terms for an ever more material stake.” In 14th c. Bohemia, the issue was Communion for both clergy and laity. By the 20th century it came to be associated with the struggle for economic equality in the adoption of the term ‘Communism.’
Conversion – no longer of souls but of coal, hydropower and oil. To a financier, conversion means the rate of interest on a loan to a lower rate than originally guaranteed. To a detective – the misappropriation of funds, “which distinctly indicated that funds were the commodity in which Modern Western Man had reinvested the treasure his Christian forebears had once placed in his soul.”
Salvation – salvage, rescue of junk; salve, an ointment; saved, savings – money deposited in a bank.
The older Latin meaning of Salvator was ‘conservator,’ for which our usages ‘a conservative estimate’ or ‘a conservative figure’ bear some faint lineage. But, Toynbee continues, “it would be difficult to whitewash the meaning of ‘conservative’ in 20th century politics – that is, a supporter of the political party devoted to defence of material vested interests.”

The “liberation” of meaning is also to be found in other fields. To take a random example, Kepler used the term ‘focus,’ [foci] from the Latin for ‘hearth’ or ‘fireplace,’ for the orientating points of his ellipses. The development of meaning through analogy and metaphor is a huge area of language and thought.

[1] See earlier post on research of Don Hotson and Dirac’s equations, “Rediscovering the Moral Law, Part III,” Oct 6, 2006.

[2] Once the religious factor was dismissed (i.e. awe at the divine handiwork of Nature) man could indulge simultaneously his resentment of Nature’s powers with his equal covetousness to acquire them.

[3]The field of modern economic thinking is the prime example of the suppression of the etheric or life-forces. See my review of John McMurtry’s Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy, in an earlier post, “The New Sabbatarianism, Part Two” (December 2, 2006).

Dissing Toynbee
February 8, 2007

Comments on H.R. Trevor-Roper’s “Arnold Toynbee’s Millennium,” Encounter, June, 1957.

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote a long dismissive piece on Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History for Encounter Magazine in June, 1957. This article may have done more to sink Toynbee’s reputation than any other critical notice, and as it is a window into the world we have today, it seemed to me of interest to discuss it.

First of all, I should say I have not read all of Toynbee’s twelve volumes, so I am at a disadvantage in commenting on Trevor-Roper’s criticisms. On the other hand, it is difficult to ascertain just what T-R’s criticisms consist of. He begins by asserting that Toynbee’s opus “has not been well received by professional historians,” with almost every chapter of it “shot to pieces by the experts,” but that he does not intend to discuss its historical truth or falsehood, its empirical validity or invalidity. We are thus given to understand that Toynbee has errors, but not just what those errors are. He finds it an interesting phenomenon of the time, and notes that Toynbee’s opus is popular with the masses – “as a dollar-earner, we are told, it ranks second only to whisky.”

The main charge that T-R levels against Toynbee is that Toynbee does not believe in rationalism. “In spite of its Hellenic training, his mind is fundamentally anti-rational and antiliberal.” Well and good. But it would have been more honest if T-R had stated more forthrightly, “I do not like it.” Instead, he charges Toynbee with an “obscurantist” message – which he likens, in a later passage, to Belloc and Chesterton. Chesterton “obscurantist” ? One may dislike Chesterton’s message – and if one is not Christian or Catholic, one will probably not like it – but it impossible to read Chesterton without getting his message. Chesterton is anything but “obscurantist.” My point is that T-R dislikes Toynbee, Belloc, and Chesterton, and he probably dislikes Christianity – although he doesn’t actually say so. But instead of owning to his dislike, he climbs a little platform called “rationalism” and from there, throws stones at Toynbee and the defenders of Christianity.

As for anti-rationalism: there is a difference between anti-rationalism and what I find in Toynbee, which might be called “integralism." The soul has many parts, and reason or rationalism has a place, but not pride of place. But that reason or rationalism should have a “place” is an idea inherently distasteful to the modernist mind-set of Trevor-Roper.[Milton’s Satan expresses this view of placeless, timeless, discarnate and ungrounded Reason when he enters Hell to take possession of it: “… and thou profoundest Hell/Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings/A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.” Paradise Lost, I, 251-3] But the second point to be noted about the modernist reason is, when it is not viewed like a Satanic machine – that is, not dependent upon the personal or the circumstantial, it can be deployed as a useful accusation to mask likes and dislikes. Trevor-Roper calls reason that which he likes, and he calls unreason or anti-rationalism that which he dislikes. For example, he accuses Toynbee of being “moved by a detestation of human reason and all its works.” This is a little hard to believe. Toynbee states at the outset of his investigations that he wants to bring forth an empirical study of the phenomenon of “human civilizations,” and he spends a great deal of time discussing the problem of how you can go about studying the empirical facts of something which has been known to occur only twenty-one times, or of which there are only seven living cases and fourteen extinct ones to be found - civilization having only been in existence for some 6,000 years. This is his thesis, which he presents through rational argument, narrative, example, illustration, description and the demonstration of concrete instances. In arguing this thesis – in a clear, though admittedly at times complex prose style - he discusses the laws of statistics, historical sources, theories of primitive or pre-civilizational man, sociality, race, environment, the views of scientists regarding the age of the earth and the cosmos – and all of this (hardly an exhaustive list of his “incidental” or supporting topics) merely in the first volume before he actually turns to discussing societies. This is “antirational”?

Evidently, T-R considers the vast foundation of Toynbee’s learning to be merely the normal acquirements of an Englishman of his time and class, and thus hardly meriting comment. Is this merely a historical blind spot or does it point to a deeper failure to grasp what is comprehended in the spiritual nature of man? An anthropologist once remarked that humanity is but one generation removed from barbarism The spiritual nature of man is the crux of Toynbee’s thesis, and goes far in explaining why civilization is a rare fruit on the human tree, and why it is perpetually in danger of being lost. My sense of Toynbee thus far is not that he welcomed the prospect of the defeat of Western civilization (his “messianic defeatism,” according to T-R) so much as he realized its uncertainty – its fragility. Sub specie eternitatis is, after all, only the consciousness of shipwreck. [Ortega y Gasset: “I am only interested in the thoughts of shipwrecked men.” A religious – as distinguished from a philosophical or even historical cast of mind.]

If nothing else, Toynbee’s emphasis on the importance of religion to civilization ought to serve as a warning to the danger that reason faces when reason becomes All in All. When Reason becomes God, it soon degenerates to Unreason and further into a crusading zeal for Destruction. We are seeing this dynamic play out today, with horrifying consequences.

All of this, of course, lies far into the future, at least where Trevor-Roper was concerned – though perhaps not too far. It seems to me a historian, like any student of human affairs, ought to examine first his own presuppositions and ask whether his own rationalism is reasonable, and secondly, whether his rationalism is merely a mask for his likes and dislikes. And on this point again Toynbee, who in one of his later volumes devotes quite a bit of discussion to the new researches of C.G. Jung and psychology, seems more integral – more developed and open than his critic. See, for example, the discussion in Volume Seven – “… for the Subconscious, not the Intellect, is the organ through which Man lives his spiritual life for good or evil. It is the fount of Poetry, Music, and the Visual Arts, and the channel through which the Soul is in communion with God when it does not steel itself against God’s influence…” pp500 et seq. It is not only that Hugh Trevor-Roper could not have written this. He appears unable even to appreciate it. And “appreciation” too is also an important part of the story of a reasonable rationalism, attesting to the capacity of reason to throw light onto hitherto neglected aspects of its comprehension, and thus setting out possibilities for future growth.

Toynbee may not have understood that the idea of the Subconscious from psychology would metamorphose into new dogmas of determinism – that it was not altogether the liberating idea it may have initially appeared to him to be. Nevertheless, Toynbee’s quest is keyed to the search for the whole man, the wholeness of the person who is more than an intellect wired to a body. It is only the human being in his wholeness who can create and sustain a civilization. In this sense Toynbee’s interest in what were, for his time, new discoveries in the field of psychology is understandable. They seemed to promise a way toward the whole in an era in which the Western mind was ferociously closing down all its options of being except the one offered by a monotonously intellective rationalism.

It is true that Toynbee and Trevor-Roper inhabit different universes. Toynbee is on a spiritual quest, and because his mind is oriented spiritually, he is not impressed by the things in which Trevor-Roper takes such pride – such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, modern science and modern rationalist civilization. Toynbee always looks above and below; Trevor-Roper looks straight ahead, and thus to Trevor-Roper, Toynbee’s attitude toward Western civilization was one of “messianic defeatism.” But blinders that serve a horse ill-serve man – though men of these latter days often conceive of themselves as beasts – though never beasts of burden but rather beasts of conquest. [3. A perhaps ironic culmination of Darwinianism.]

These are two different kinds of men: the man of the distance and the man of the age, and the tensions between these two different human types have long been a theme of history and myth and perhaps even politics – Cain and Abel, Prometheus and Epimetheus, liberal and conservative. [4. Toynbee’s work is rich with allusion and reflection on Greek mythology. In V. IX, pps 149 et seq he makes much Atlas and Anteaus. – the “Atlantean stance and the Antaean rebound”. Atlas has to hold up the weight of the Heavens upon his shoulders; Antaeus could not be defeated so long as he was able to evade his enemy’s grasp and touch the earth once again with his feet. Toynbee’s finds in these two contrary movements great meaning for the historical fate of civilizations responding to challenge. The danger of the Atlantean stance is to rigidify into “mimesis” and obsession. The Antaean rebound enables new beginnings, the reappropriation of culture from the depths.] This leads up to our final point.

Trevor-Roper’s essay is twenty pages long, and exactly half of it argues that Toynbee believed himself to be the Messiah of a new civilization that would arise in the decomposing heap of Western civilization. Since I have not read the tenth volume of A Study of History, in which according to T-R Toynbee reveals himself as said Messiah, I will wait to reserve judgment. But I think Trevor-Roper’s charge here is interesting for what it says about the psychology of “mass man” – the type of man of our time who resents the exceptional man, even the idea of superiority. I would go so far as to say that if even Toynbee thought of himself as a sort of new historic type – thus violating one of our most cherished beliefs, that of equality – that it is not in how he saw himself that is the issue, but how he saw everything else. The twelve volumes of A Study of History seem to me to justify the view that Toynbee was an exceptional soul. He is vastly learned, knowledgeable in several languages, in religion, mythology, literature, conversant with the science of his day, and attentive to a vast range of details of human societies in a cosmopolitan range of races, cultures, and circumstances. Given the generosity of his vision of civilization and his steadfast loyalty to the Christian – and Protestant – religion in which he was raised, I’d say that even a Toynbee claiming to be a Messiah is a better bargain than Trevor-Roper as a critic. Toynbee’s faults need to be measured against his striving to comprehend the supernatural in the context of the historical. His day is yet to come. Trevor-Roper’s day is over.

Para-doxa
Sunday, March 4, 2007

My nephew, Henry Johnston, a senior at Grove City College, has posted an interesting reflection on "The New Physics" (March 1, 2007) on his new blog, Reroute To Remain a.k.a. Wings Are Burning.

"I have been thinking recently about the implications of the New Physics (that which has come about in the 20th century) in the realm of philosophy. Of course physics and philosophy are really just two sides of the same coin, and have no business being separated. In a recent discussion over a certain theological point with an acquaintance of mine, I invoked the findings of modern physics in countering his argument. He stared at me blankly. For him, theological Truth sits in one little box and scientific Truth sits in another, and never the two shall meet. Modern physics, however, is confirming the cliché that 'it's all connected.' I am finding that this new paradigm is guiding my thought more and more…"

Henry brings up the point that the findings in quantum physics, that the position and momentum of a subparticle cannot be determined simultaneously was, from the standpoint of classical Newtonian physics, nonsensical or paradoxical. It would seem to undermine the most cherished claim of science, which is to discover and confirm predictable patterns in nature. Unpredictability in nature confronts science with the terrifying possibility that perhaps its methodology is not the infallible key to control that it is cracked up to be.

My purpose in this post is not to explore this particular issue, but rather to zigzag to a larger question relating to the nature of paradoxes. Skeat’s Etymological dictionary defines paradox as "that which is contrary to received opinion; strange, but true." From the Greek, para, beside + doxa, opinion or notion, from dokein, to seem. We may contrast "paradox" to "orthodox," that is, "of the right faith," from orthos, upright, right, true. Skeat’s links the Greek orthos to a cognate in Latin, arduus, meaning "high," from whence we must get arduous.

Orthodoxy is indeed an arduous path for many, especially when it concerns religion. But paradoxy is also difficult, perhaps for different reasons. Orthodoxy appears to be inherently more "sociable," having to do with our membership in a believing community. Paradoxy, on the other hand, suggests that kind of uncertainty inheres to existence itself through our thinking. Paradoxy prods us not to think too much of our own thinking; orthodoxy relieves us – not from thinking – but from thinking that thinking will bring salvation.

Perhaps I have just tricked myself – or you, dear reader. I have just said that, in effect, there is not much difference between the paradox and the orthodox. This is not exactly what I intended to say. What I intend to argue is that the orthodox, -- "rightly understood" – is the true home, haven, and goal of the paradox. The purpose of the orthodox is to free us for the paradox. The purpose of the paradox is to enable us to understand the orthodox.

What a muddle! I assure you, dear reader, that despite this inauspicious beginning, that I have a goal in mind, and a purpose for this post, which goal and purpose will ultimately have a bearing on both science and religion – perhaps even to E=mc2, the Uncertainty Principle, and the Virgin Birth. Well, maybe not E=mc2 . That may be more even I can manage! But at least to the other two. But let us start with the third of these propositions, the Virgin Birth.
Readers of this site should know by now of my fervent admiration of the work of Arnold J. Toynbee, historian, and of my desire to do all that I can to further his work, elevate his reputation, and encourage people to undertake reading his unabridged Study of History –a massive work of 12 volumes which in my opinion is the most spiritually prescient work of the 20th century and the true flower of the modern Western consciousness. Indeed, the eclipse if not sinking of Toynbee’s reputation is symptomatic of a West that has lost its bearings, its heroes, and sense of purpose. In A Study of History, the threads of all of human history and civilization were joined together into a coherent view of what constitutes human purpose and destiny. But joined-up threads do not yet make the fabric. Threads have to be pulled through the needle’s eye – the ever-difficult task of focussing vision to argument. The task involves the soul as well as the intellect, and that is what we experience as "depth." "Depth" is both personal and universal, particular and historical – the large understanding reflected in the glance of a detail.
Depth is what we are missing today in the life of Western societies. Our life today is merely intellectual – which is to say, shallow and propagandistic. But not even Toynbee was able to maintain this quality of depth in everything that he wrote. In his autobiographical book, Experiences (1969) Toynbee wrote an essay on Religion – "What I Believe and What I Disbelieve." It was for him a way of setting the record straight – that he was, despite his high estimation of religion all through A Study of History – a modern Western "agnostic." He writes – "When I was an undergraduate an Oxford I became an agnostic, and at first I concluded, from my loss of traditional Christian orthodox belief, that religion itself was an unimportant illusion. Now, more than half a century later, I am still an agnostic, as the sequel will show, but I have come to hold that religion is concerned with a reality, and that this reality is supremely important."
This essay is interesting from many points of view, but the section "My inability to pass the tests of religious orthodoxy," is curiously static – although perhaps the same could be said of some of the tenets of orthodoxy that Toynbee was unable to accept. Consider what he says of the Virgin Birth – "I reject[ed] the doctrine of the Virgin Birth because I could not reconcile it with an already established belief of mine in ‘the uniformity of Nature.’"
Given the purely physical facts of purely physical reproduction and a purely physical Nature, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth sounds absurd. It is, at the very least, a paradox – Virgin Birth, Virgin Mother.
I would like to suggest that the doctrine of Virgin Birth is a type of formulaic paradox – which, just because it was so paradoxical, had to find a home within orthodoxy if orthodoxy was to remain dynamic. Christianity, in fact, may be a religion of "formulaic paradoxes" precisely because of the momentous nature of its teaching: that is, the spiritual or the symbolical becoming actually historical. Christianity as a whole is a "Virgin Birth" in this sense.
But to begin to understand the precise doctrine of the "Virgin Birth" it is necessary to take yet another step.
We live on the physical plane; we speak and think on the symbolical plane. These two realities are so intertwined that we do not give them much thought, and the tendency of modern society for the past several hundred years has been increasingly to "collapse" the awareness of the symbolical plane into the literal dimension. We forget that, in every examination of the facts of the physical world, we are wielding symbolic concepts, judgments, living or dead metaphors, habits, assumptions and presuppositions.
The awareness of the symbolic dimension in which we think, speak, and understand, was certainly present to a much greater degree among the medieval and earlier societies. The human participation factor was part of the game. Yet it was not called the "human participation factor" – in the dry language of modern abstract thought. Rather, the world was a dynamically interconnected enterprise of spiritual agency or agencies, and human beings participated in this dynamic nexus by virtue of their cognizing consciousness. It was a world "within and without" – as the Book of Revelation puts it – and the withinness and withoutness were not so clearly marked as they are in post-Cartesian times. Thus, in the New Testament, pneuma means both "wind" (without) and "breath" (within). The dynamic principle was perceived – but it took form in both the outer as well as the inner world. The "spirit," which is yet a third meaning of this word, encompasses both the inner and outer meanings – "it goes where it wills." The Holy Spirit moves in the heart as in the world - in the inwardness of man and in the outwardness of events.
But to return to the Virgin Birth: I think that this doctrine can be accepted as "literally true" only in the symbolic, participated sense of reality. Whereas, if one sees the world in purely literal and physical terms, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth could not be understood except in a symbolic sense.
This gloss on the doctrine of the Virgin Birth may not be exactly orthodox in the strictly Catholic sense of the word – or it may be slightly to the paradoxical side of that orthodoxy. For I too understand in some sense the "agnosticism" which Toynbee confesses to be his default position. I was raised in anything but a religious environment, and the conversion to Catholicism would not have been predicted – to use that word – for one of my background. Yet, for me, accepting the truth of the Virgin Birth in its literal meaning has not been an obstacle for me – because my understanding of the world is highly charged with symbolism and participation. I have always been highly aware of words, and of the uses and senses we put to them, as well of their histories and connotations and the social and intellectual circumstances in which they came to birth, and thus I never could glide over the significance of using words to "get to" the literal truth of anything. "Literal truth" in that sense becomes a mere superstition, which is being entangled up in words without being aware of it – that is, without being aware of our own participation in them. Superstition, after all, is only the most enduring form of determinism – the view of the world with no freedom.
Science will devolve into mere superstition in the end unless scientists return to a sober study of philosophy and perhaps as well to the use of real, as distinguished from mathematical, language. There are already many dangerous signs that this regression into fatalism is occurring. The "Uncertainty Principle" may have been an early sign that modern science sensed this danger of fatalism – but in characteristically modern (i.e. nonparticipated) terms this insight was confined to the behavior of particles in the "outer" world. But of itself I do not think this is enough. The retreat into a mathematized, as distinguished from a real and participated, world, is a luxury we can no longer afford, because the effects of the mathematized science on the real and participated world have become acute, destructive and deleterious. But it only the real and participated world, and all of us who live in it, who can put some limits to the "will to power" which has become the trademark of modern science. The relationship between the will-to-power and the regression to fatalism have not been sufficiently explored – Lord Acton’s famous saying, "Power tends to corrupt" notwithstanding.
It was Toynbee’s great purpose in A Study of History to remind Western man of his religion and thus renew the possibility for new beginnings from within. It was thus he hoped to forestall what he saw as signs of sclerosis and fatalism in Western society. True, in his autobiographical essay he missed seeing the participatory-dynamic hidden within religious orthodoxy-paradoxy. But Toynbee’s failure in this instance should not cause us to allow his achievements to sink into oblivion. If anything, it should spur us to attempt to complete what even in twelve volumes he was unable to say.
We need to re-dynamize ourselves – by remembering the paradoxy in orthodoxy.
Posted by Caryl at 1:07 PM 3 comments 3 comments:
PCJ said...
We’ve talked about this before --- Ortega’s comment about Toynbee:"It seems as if in the heart of this man doubts have started to ferment about whether or not it makes sense to keep on being English. As these doubts cannot be attributed to trivial matters, or to topical or superficial causes, such as, for example, membership in the Communist party; and as, in addition, we find something similar in the hearts of the best Englishmen, we have the impression of having touched lightly one of the most delicate and perhaps most decisive facts of our age. We have to approach and understand with great respect this hidden spiritual state, ... because in it lies nothing less than a great secret about the future for all of us."Do you think that this comment is accurate, fair ? If it is accurate, then only with difficulty can one see Toynbee as anything but a symptom of a problem --- which problem I suppose would have to be labeled ‘‘demoralization of the European peoples.’’
6:42 AM
Caryl said...
Hi Pauley - What an honor to hear from you!I was aware of Ortega's judgment on Toynbee, and I discussed it with no less an authority than John Lukacs - who himself does not seem to be altogether pro-Toynbee. However, he said he thought Ortega's statements about Toynbee were "unfair."I don't think that Toynbee contributed to the "demoralization" of the West. People have criticized him on a number of issues. He became, in later life, a kind of "Green" - and attracted to Buddhism. He criticized the US for the Vietnam war. He criticized materialism and racism. Granted, some of these notions have been later misused, but I think that,whatever faults Toynbee may have had, the relative neglect of his work speaks much more to the demoralization of the West than what was actually in the work. A Study of History is a kind of large-minded poetic epic, in prose, of history - and Western society has become increasingly anti-poetic and small-minded in its attitudes.Toynbee is a great adventure. So, in this instance, I think Ortega may have been somewhat premature in his judgments. But this is the only instance I know of where Ortega y Gasset was possibly less than great.
5:02 PM
Henry Johnston said...
I think this is an extremely insightful post, one that I have been thinking about for a while now. I have wanted to comment, but frankly haven't been sure I have correctly oriented myself to what is being said here. I sense in the argument Caryl has laid out an important analysis of the categories we have been using in the post Cartesian world. If I understand correctly, Toynbee's dilemma of faith revolves around the modern tendency to attempt to analyze everything in terms of the physical plane even though the very mode in which our thought processes work cannot be separated from the symbolic. Perhaps therein lies the contradiction; thought which has to be symbolic in nature is using this very characteristic to discount the symbolic. I would love to hear more comments on this as well as a fuller explanation of the implications of this gloss on orthodoxy. This line of thinking appeals to me because I find myself sympathetic to Toynbee's seemingly reluctant agnosticism. I have for a long time been thinking that I am somehow missing something in my either/or categories.
5:19 PM

The Tears of Things
March 10, 2007

This post is a continuation of the dialogue that has begun on this website and continued, at a tangent, on my nephew’s website, http://wingsareburning.blogspot.com/ in reference to what could be called “the general will to life among Western Euro people.” The dialogue was sparked by Henry’s post “The Seeking of Asylum,” in which he writes: “I wish to speak about the propensity of the brightest and most capable young people of my generation to seek their place overseas and in other cultures.” He concludes that: “Perhaps the distant cultures are a refuge from the guilt-mongering, anti-vitality, anti-masculine, anti-culture nature of our present country. After all, we live in the most unnatural of conditions right now, where men are disparaged or simply poked fun at (have you seen how almost every single television commercial depicts men?), where white people are under a self-inflicted, suicidal attack from their own treasonous elite. It is perhaps the only culture where we are told to feel guilt at the circumstances surrounding the very founding of our country. Our folklore is scorned or forgotten. It seems that in the context of this homogenization/demoralization, we are being compelled to do what no human can ever do; namely live without a history, community, or sense or strength. And it is from this most unnatural circumstance that our youth flee. In a strange irony of the modern world, the adoption of an utterly alien culture is the only way to have an identity which we can be proud of, and communities that are not denigrated.”

Paul (my brother and Henry’s Dad) commented by picking up a conversation that had previously been unwinding on this site in reference to Toynbee: “There is so much in it to comment upon that I hardly know where to start. I’m tempted to drag out yet again Ortega’s comment about Arnold Toynbee ---- ‘It seems as if in the heart of this man doubts have started to ferment about whether or not it makes sense to keep on being English......’ and further on ‘... we have to approach and understand with great respect this hidden spiritual state, ... because in it lies nothing less than a great secret about the future for all of us.’ I asked Caryl about this, and she replied: ‘I was aware of Ortega's judgment on Toynbee, and I discussed it with no less an authority than John Lukacs - who himself does not seem to be altogether pro-Toynbee. However, he said he thought Ortega's statements about Toynbee were ‘unfair.’”

In this post I want to talk about a few aspects of Toynbee’s biography that may have given Ortega y Gasset the sense that in Toynbee’s work there was percolating a spiritual undertone of “demoralization,” specifically in relation to “being English.” While I do not agree with Ortega’s specific charge, I do think that there are currents in the Toynbee phenomenon taken as a whole – the life and the work - which raise questions about being Western and modern – and what being Western and modern means in relation to Christianity. These questions may be subtle, but I think they are also important, and perhaps by addressing them we can get another handle on the questions raised by Henry’s post.

The first thing to note is how frequently in his letters, and also in The Study of History, Toynbee alludes to the First World War and the fact that half of his classmates and school fellows lost their lives in that conflagration. Toynbee’s own exemption from military service was owing to an episode of dysentery he had contracted while travelling abroad. There was in Toynbee a strain of “survivor’s guilt,” of which he seemed to be aware, and which was later exacerbated during his divorce from Rosalind Murray. In a bad moment, she had accused him, on another issue, of “cowardice” – but it seemed to touch upon this former one.

Toynbee had been much in love with the aristocratic Rosalind, the daughter of Gilbert Murray, the classicist. Perhaps he had indeed treated her too much as a “goddess” – as his father-in-law once told him. Three sons were born of their union – Tony, Philip and Lawrence. Toynbee was not a “hands-on” father – if not absent, he was frequently absorbed by his work. His son Philip later wrote in a memoir: “[Toynbee] simply had no understanding of children and young people, and no great interest in them either. My two brothers and I attracted his attention largely as nuisances. How clearly, even today, I can see his head poking out of the window of his study, his face a mask of nervous irritation, as he sternly reproved us for making too much noise.” The oldest son, Tony, shot himself “in a fit of pique,” and died a few days later on 15 March 1939. Philip was devastated and considered putting an end to his own life as well. But after a youthful fling with Communism he settled down eventually into a writing career. Both sons married and produced, between the two of them, eleven grandchildren – all girls with the exception of one male grandchild.

Lawrence, the youngest, had always been Rosalind’s favorite. When she converted to Catholicism in 1932, she brought Lawrence with her into the fold. Lawrence was educated at Ampleforth Abbey, a Benedictine establishment. While visiting Ampleforth in 1936, Toynbee met Fr. Columba Cary-Elwes, a monk with whom he carried on a correspondence lasting for 39 years. These letters, gathered into the volume An Historian’s Conscience: The Correspondence of Arnold J. Toynbee and Columba Cary-Elwes, Monk of Ampleforth, (Beacon Press, 1986) form an illuminating record of this time – full of upheavals both historical and spiritual. And by no means are all the “illuminations” those of Toynbee himself. Fr. Columba’s side of the correspondence illuminate some of the weaknesses in Toynbee’s philosophy as well. This loyal son of the Church was unable to convert Toynbee to Catholic Christianity but his penetrating comments helped to ensure a strong Catholic “presence” in The Study of History.

In 1937 Toynbee stated his mission: “I am trying to digest a large lump of modern knowledge and understanding of the material world which has grown up (so vigorously but yet so lopsidedly and without deep roots) during the last 250 years, and to re-place it in the Christian setting from which it has broken out.”

Fr. Columba was a great admirer of The Study of History, comparing it both to the Civitate Dei of St. Augustine and the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. But, he wrote – “You have not yet made the deepest synthesis of all – that between faith and reason, and the message will be blurred.” He believed that modern humanity was “too smug” in not baptizing science as St. Thomas baptized Aristotle. He disagreed with Toynbee on the matter of “assertiveness.” Toynbee had written that “Wherever one sees self-assertiveness, one can be sure one is not in God’s presence.” Fr. Columba pointed out that “a Truth may be asserted for its own sake, or because it is your Truth. In the latter case you have pride, in the former not.” Not to assert Truth, in fact, is to “fail in charity” – for “good diffuses itself.”

Fr. Columba’s learned to appreciate Toynbee’s “ecumenical” approach to religion, but he also noted: “You are trying to be fair to all religions. One tends on those occasions to be unfair to one’s own (family) (religion).” Toynbee acknowledged the justice of this remark – “What you say about leaning over backwards from one’s own religion in trying to be fair to the others is very true.” In 1959 Toynbee confessed that the “uniqueness” of Christianity was, for him, the stumbling-block. In a revealing comment, he once wrote that “Our spiritual vocabulary is entirely analogical (e.g. spirit = breath). This is why I believe the different descriptions refer to identical experiences.” This remark puts me in mind of something Owen Barfield once said about language - in connection with translation, what is of interest is the slightly different thing that is said. For example, tree, arbre, Baum, all refer to the same thing, but are they really the same? Where the Englishman sees primarily the trunk, the Frenchman emphasizes the boughs and the German sees the root. It is the same with spiritual language, only in this case there can be no “identical experiences” if spiritual reality concerns spiritual Beings.

Something of this notion comes through in Fr. Columba’s reply, when he pointed out that the language used to describe spiritual reality refers to different “levels.” The question of the different “levels of Being” may essentially demarcate the Protestant from the Catholic sensibility. Rosalind Toynbee, in her book written after her conversion about her agnostic father, The Good Pagan’s Failure, “… attributed the triumph of barbarism and egalitarianism in the late 1930’s to the abandonment of the Catholic view of the human and celestial hierarchy.”

Toynbee occupied a middle ground – or perhaps a no-man’s land – between a secular-academic world that criticized him for his view of faith and religious imagery (Pieter Geyl, the Dutch historian, wrote: “God became man in Christ is to him the veritable sense of history”; the views of Hugh Trevor-Roper have been previously described in an earlier post) and a Catholic sensibility which may have felt at times that Toynbee’s religion amounted to no more than “an eradicable belief in his own religiousness.”) (The quote is from George Gissing’s description of an Englishman’s religion; cited by Maurice Samuels, The Professor and the Fossil (1956). Toynbee’s book did not win many friends among the Jewish community because he believed that Judaism was a “fossilized” religion.)

Perhaps it is owing to the fact that The Study of History occupied a kind of “nebulous” area, failing to commit itself wholly to one side or another, that Toynbee himself finally saw his work as “really a myth about the meaning of history.” Yet it is just in the sense of “mythology” that I find Toynbee’s History so appealing. For what kind of mythology will become possible for mankind in the modern, modernist, and postmodern dispensation? What kind of zest for life or raison d’être is possible for us, who have lost all of our “naïve beliefs” and unself-conscious hopes and strivings?

In this respect, Toynbee’s encounter with Henry Luce is revealing. Toynbee’s work was initially highly favored by Luce and Time Magazine. But the two men had their differences. Luce said: “Toynbee regarded America as simply a peripheral part of European civilization. I regarded America as a special dispensation – under Providence – and I said so. My spiritual pastors shake their heads about this view of mine. They say it tends to idolatry – to idolatry of a nation. I knew well the dangers of that sin. But I say we must have courage to face objective facts under Providence.”

So I want to conclude with two remarks. I think that Toynbee did have conflicts about being a man, a father, a Christian, and about rationalism, science, and maybe even “being English.” But believing in being what one is – English or American – is a danger when this self-belief is disconnected from the kind of “pastoral counsel” that Henry Luce alluded to. I think that Ortega criticized Toynbee’s weakening of self-belief without seeing how The Study of History was an attempt to counterbalance and to overcome it. The Study of History is in fact an enormous attempt at “pastoral counsel” by reminding Western mankind of its origins and also, about the nature of the historical enterprise itself. The mythos comprises the poetic language – and scholarly bulk – of the work itself. The lesson is lacrimae rerum - the “tears of things.” It is this lesson which we Americans, in our reckless march to Empire, seem unable to hear.

Anthroposophy & Versalvere

2007-11-27T13:02:00.000-08:00

Hanging Man
July 2006
Valentin Tomberg once wrote that the spiritual counter-truth to the phrase "Nature abhors a vacuum" is "the Spirit abhors fullness."
He mentions that it is the "empty spaces" in or between things that are usable by us - e.g., doors, windows, vessels, the spokes of a wheel.
Like many insights from the field of spiritual research, Tomberg's comment presumes that the part of mankind to which it is addressed is "normal" -- or "natural" or at least "sane."
But what if the words of spiritual understanding fall upon the ears of people who are not "normal" -- people who are, in some sense, subnormal, unnatural, insane? Then the words would have to be turned into their opposites and inside-out in order to express reality. In this case the Spirit would merely be a vacuum and Nature would be a fullness experienced as something abhorrent.
I believe that we have arrived at this situation today. Americans seem hardly to tolerate the touch of anything "natural." The American obsession with sanitation began in the early 20th century and has been escalating ever since, to where we now have kitchen cleansers the equivalent of antibiotic steroids and rubber gloves that must be worn at all times by food preparers. "Nature" has become so abhorrent that it has become fashionable among certain sectors of youth to go to elaborate lengths to alter their biological gender, and modern medicine for years has been doing battle with mere "mortality," as if the human condition itself were something shameful and obscene. Biology has become allied to a politics of the annihilation of the natural.
In this way anything "natural," i.e. not subjected to human choice, has been moved into the area of the despised and the contemptible.
As for the Spirit: the Spirit today manifests as the relentless pressure to maintain fullness and satiety, the relentless pressure to forestall any movement into emptiness, incertitude, self-questioning. This "pressure" is the obverse of the operations of the vacuum, which is suctional. Today's spirit is thus anti-Spirit -- pressure rather than suction.
Thus American life swings back and forth continually between pressure and suction, fullness and vacuum, with the concepts "Nature" and "Spirit" completely reversed.This swinging back-and-forth may be pictured as the shadow of a hanging man. Only we cannot see the corpse. Those of us who are positioned on the ground watch the events unfold by means of the Internet - which is to say, we watch not so much with eyes as with thoughts.
The shadow passes and re-passes above our heads - is it merely a dead man swinging, or perhaps a lynched nation? But whatever it is, the pendulum swing never stops or comes to rest to where we might get a purchase on it or cut it down. How could there be anything so paradoxical --at the same time so helpless and mechanical? How can anything that "exists" -- and which, for that reason, must be considered "real" -- so resemble an inanimate object in that it apparently lacks the power to suffer from within and can only be acted upon from without?
For along with everything else, the helpless mechanism has swept up the meaning of passion into its diabolic paradox. Passion has come to mean lust, and instead of the renunciation of power which is the real secret of the nascent, of creativity in history, the shadows of the hanging man sweep the landscape with a ghastly and monotonous phosphorescent glow. Those of us still standing are choking in the fumes of a "Christian civilization" that has been completely gutted. The smell of sulphur is unmistakable.

Notes and Annotations:

[1] Valentin Tomberg [1900-1979] Russian anthroposophist and student of the philosophy of law who converted to Catholicism. His book, Meditations on the Tarot, [by "Anonymous"] was once pictured in a photograph of Pope John Paul II.spiritual research: spiritual science, or Anthroposophy. Founded by Rudolf Steiner [1861-1925]. We will have occasion in this blogspot to refer frequently to Anthroposophy, which is an enormous body of work that points the way to the spiritualization of the intelligence of Western man.

[2] "...the words of spiritual understanding fall upon the ears of people who are not 'normal' -- compare Jacob Needleman, from his book, Lost Christianity: "... Sensitivity to qualities of energy is the one and only touchstone for determining the level or authenticity of Christian practices….Throughout history as we know it, the very first idea that disappears from tradition when it begins to lose its power is this teaching about gradations of the being of man…And from this point of view, the distinction between nature and grace must be read to position our present level as not even at the level of natural men. We are subnatural men…"

[3] "...helpless and mechanical": Compare G.K.Chesterton, from his book, Orthodoxy: "The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself."

[4] "...the renunciation of power which is the real secret of the nascent, of creativity in history..." cf. Caryl Johnston, from an essay entitled "Truth and Reconciliation," published at http://tcrnews2.com/GuestFeature.html "Science has had its share of creative failure, as any human enterprise does; but what it does not have is a philosophy of its own history that embraces anything other than progress and conquest. Perhaps this is one reason why our views today about ourselves are so one-sided, for we consult science when we want to consult anything relating to truth. Christianity, too, has had its share of conquest and progress, but in its depths it teaches the mysterious history-stirring power of the creative failure, the shame, the depths, the abstentions, the restraints. And because we no longer provoke our thoughts to ponder where we might desist, or consider where we might refrain rather than to act, our history has become large, brutal, and hollow. We have the forms of creativity still, but whether we still have the essence is debatable."

[6] monotonous phosphorescent glow. See Jeff Wells, "The Monotony of Evil" [July 18, 2006]--at this link: http://rigint.blogspot.com/. We will also in this blog have occasion to mention Simone Weil, about whom I have frequently written. I don't agree with Jeff that she was a socialist mystic. But he is right to call attention to the work of this great and lucid soul:
"These are, after all, Simone Weil's times. Evil, wrote the socialist mystic, is monotonous: there is "never anything new, everything about it is equivalent.... It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part." This seems counterintuitive, or perhaps simply wrong, because the world today appears full of often lamentable novelty. But the novelty, evil's artifact, is an illusion. .."
posted by Caryl at 7:58 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Challenging Materialistic Science
An interesting passage from Rudolf Steiner's book, Man: Hieroglyph of the Universe:"... Now if the European and American civilizations were to retain their present character, adhering only to the materialistic, Copernican view of the Universe --with its off-shoot, the Kant-Laplace theory -- a materialistic cosmogony must necessarily arise concerning earthly phenomena, biological, physical and chemical. It would be impossible for a cosmogony of this kind to include the moral world order in its structure. It could not embrace the Christ-Event, for it is impossible to be a believer in the materialistic view of the world and at the same time a Christian: that is an inner lie, it is something that cannot be, if one is honest and upright. Hence it was inevitable that the practical consequences should be seen in European and American culture, of the split between materialism on the one hand and a moral cosmogony on the other... This result was evidenced by the fact that men who had no external reason for being inwardly dishonest, threw faith overboard, and established a materialistic cosmogony for human life also. Thereby the materialistic cosmogony became a social cosmogony. This would however have the further consequence for our European and American civilization that man would have a materialistic cosmogony only and would know nothing of the Earth's connection with cosmic powers, in the sense that we have described it. Within a certain caste, however, the knowledge of the connection with cosmogony would remain, just as the Egyptian priests kept [i.e. withheld; my note] the knowledge of the Platonic year, the great cosmic year and the great cosmic day; and such circles could hope then to rule the people who under materialism degenerate into barbarism."[Italics mine]And in a later passage in the same chapter he contrasts the teachings of materialistic science (his example is the Kant-Laplace theory of galaxy formation, but a more contemporary example might as well be Big Bang theory) and says that "... it is much less evil when a lie is consciously accepted, than when it takes shape unconsciously, and degrades Man and drags him down. For if we consider a lie as it appears in a man's consciousness, every time he falls asleep it leaves his physical and etheric bodies with his consciousness, and lives on in a spaceless, timeless being, in the eternal being, while Man is in a dreamless sleep. There is prepared all which can result from the lie in the future; that is, everything is made ready to correct it, if it is in the consciousness. But if it is in the unconscious, it remains with the physical and etheric bodies lying in bed. When Man is not occupying those bodies, it then belongs to the Cosmos, and not to the earthly Cosmos alone, but to the whole Cosmos; there it works for the destruction of the Cosmos; above all for the destruction of the whole of humanity, for this destruction begins in humanity itself."So it is important not only to study the challengers of materialistic science. Study the geocentrists who challenge the Big Bang and Copernicus; study the plasma cosmologists who challenge the purely mechanistic, gravity-dominated universe. Study homeopathy, which challenges Pharmaceutical Science, and study Intelligent Design, which challenges materialistic Darwinism. But if you do not wish to study, and you prefer to side with the status quo - make sure you do it consciously, and register and attend very carefully to every blaring and breathless announcement you receive from the media, the pulpits, the judges, the op-ed writers, the blockbuster books and the Dennetts, Dawkins, and Derbyshires of our world. For all these people have a stake in keeping you stupid. The least you can do to resist them is to remain awake.
Labels: Anthroposophy, mass media, materialistic thinking, Rudolf Steiner
posted by Caryl at 5:44 PM 0 comments

VERSALVERE
Thursday, June 29, 2006

“Through the indwelling of the Logos the capacity of cognition has been given to us.” Georg Kühlewind, Becoming Aware of the Logos, 1985

The journey that led to the poems began with an act of violent disagreement. I was, in those days – 1984 – still living in the Berkshires and my main circle of friends and interests revolved around the work of Rudolf Steiner – Anthroposophy – which had been built up in the area. There were a couple of Waldorf Schools nearby, several farms, and many business, artistic and educational initiatives arising out of this deep local interest in anthroposophy.

I recall attending a lecture, at the Waldorf School in Harlemville, NY – just across the Massachusetts border – given by one Georg Kühlewind, who was a rising star in the anthroposophical lecture circuit. Dr. Kühlewind was a native of Czechoslovakia – I believe – or perhaps of Hungary – and he was a scientist by profession but pursued Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology as a path of philosophical and spiritual deepening. The name “Cool Wind,” was a pseudonym, formed as a protective camouflage against the Soviet bureaucracy. The “Wall” still existed in those days.

Dr. Kühlewind gave a very interesting talk on these epistemological themes and interests, a talk well received by the attentive audience. I did not, I could not, disagree! And in truth I did not – for who can disagree with the call to make the act of thinking experiential - and for the recognition of a superconscious dimension to the mind?" Logos is not word, law, sense, reason, measure, etc. It is everything that makes these possible: a common relationship to the world, a common world. It is the connecting element..." I do not and did not disagree with this characterization of the Logos from Becoming Aware of the Logos: The Way of St. John the Evangelist --the title of Dr.Kühlewind's book and which I imagine was pretty much the substance of what he spoke about that night. And yet, my first reaction was to break away from this common world. Something stung me – like a burr in my hair or a catch in my throat, or a rash – a violent reaction, one might say, to an idea – which I do not even remember what it was and which, to be perfectly candid, was in all probability, completely unexceptionable.

The lecturer was staying at the home of Christopher Bamford, head of the Anthroposophic Press, and I recall the next day, in a state of continuing agitation, I called Chris’s home and asked to speak to Dr. Kühlewind. I first thanked him profusely for his talk and went on to raise the point that was simmering in my mind in such apparent turmoil – a point which, as I say, I now have no recollection at all. I doubt I made any sense. I may have been completely incoherent. The word may be "inchoate."

If I had been older and wiser I might have known that I was having an emotional reaction rather than a philosophical contention. Perhaps one's first reaction to a powerful idea comes about in this seemingly perverse form? - a "turning against" before there can be a "turning around"? Dr. Kühlewind was perhaps surprised at this excited caller. He remained noncommittally polite, as I recall.

A sentence from Dr. Kühlewind’s book forms the epigram or motto to the poems which followed... so many years later: “Through the indwelling of the Logos the capacity of cognition has been given to us.” To explicate each of these terms – ‘indwelling,’ ‘Logos,’ ‘capacity of cognition,’ ‘ has been given…’ would take volumes, maybe multivolumes – and then, such explanations would leave the reader cold who has not had a corresponding experience whereby the words and concepts would gain meaning for him.

Some time after - I do not know when it began - I commenced regular sessions of what I called "recreational visualizations." My notes of these initial experiences are unfortunately lying in an Archive in Birmingham, Alabama, and whether I will be able to recover them is as yet an open question. But it was during these sessions that the Beings who later took the form in the poems first appeared. I would go into a state of waking sleep, and after each session I recorded my thoughts and experiences in a journal. The Beings who came, came as they were named. The Name and the Being corresponded. But the question that never ceased to occupy me was this: in what sense are these Beings "real"?

posted by Lyrac 2:49 PM 0 comments

Friday, June 30, 2006
What is a gloss?

If anyone is curious about what this blog is about, he or she could do no better than read friend Andrew’s response, which I also reproduce below. Andrew states succinctly what these explorations are about:

“Well, a good place to begin seems to be the fact that the word 'poetry'—derived from the Greek word poema < href="http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495ki/poetryplot/id7.html">http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495ki/poetryplot/id7.html
Monday, July 03, 2006
What’s Not So Good about Dr. Cool Wind

Dr. Cool Wind’s first book was Stages of Consciousness. Here are a couple of quotes from it:
“All our knowledge and information result from and are generated by our activity of thinking and can only be retained, expressed, and communicated in the form of thoughts” (p. 38) and “Thought is not produced out of and through feeling. On the contrary, one has thoughts and these evoke a feeling through their inner content.” (p. 53)
Both of these statements seem to me simply wrong. 'Thought' seems to mean everything, and if thought is everything, it is nothing. And it also seems to me indisputable that feelings and emotions stimulate and provoke thinking – indeed, real thinking may have an emotional undertone - almost like a keynote.
Confusions like these seem to have been somewhat mitigated by Dr. Cool Wind's second book, by which time he begins to acknowledge the existence of wordless thoughts. But it was clearly in opposition to the anthroposophical over-emphasis of the cognitive sphere that my first poem was launched – “Grandmother Funda.” I did not know at the time that the fundus was part of the womb- n : (anatomy) the base of a hollow organ or that part farthest from its opening; "the uterine fundus" –someone later pointed this out to me. But if there is a “sensibility” to be communicated about Grandmother Funda, it is the idea that consciousness is, well, gestational. The nurturing of experiences, feelings, memories, conversations, etc., distil, ultimately, to “ideas,” which are modes of ordering and vision. An “idea,” from the Greek idein, is after all only a “window” – a seeing-into. Over-emphasis on “ideas” leads to extreme idealism. An insufficiency of the ideal realm, on the other hand, can lead to over-submergence in experience and absence of ordering vision. We need “ideas” to light the way down, the path of winding down, to recollection of concrete experiences. Thanks to this “motion,” movement – thanks to this “emotion” -- we can remember.
Most emphatically I reject the notion that “To have the world before it as an object was given naturally to humanity” – though whether that statement was from his first or second book I cannot recall. On the contrary: we are not presented with an “object.” We are presented with the grey lady ---

Call her
The grey lady of the summer,
A sudden clearing in a swift rain
Or wakeful remembrance in a green wood
Whose paths wind down, always down,
Into the heart of past seasons . . .
It is actually the Grey Lady who calls us. To be a human being is to be called; there is no mere “natural development.” And that moment in the composition of this poem when I changed the first line introducing Grandmother Funda by means of a bland description to that of the imperative – “Call her” – marked a signal moment for me with this poem. It is imperative. It is urgent. And the urgency of the imperative is the epic tone: “Sing to the goddess, O Muse!” Great things are at stake.
And why “grey”? I suppose because all of our experiences ultimately come to be revealed in the “crown of age,”- and even when we are young, we are building up this crown of grey hairs.
The “grey lady” brings forth from the chaos of gestational experience the ordering relationships, provided we have accompanied her down into the heart of past seasons. This is my living and poetic reproach against all Cool Windian “deadness” of the past – a point he never tires of hammering because he always wishes to emphasize the “present” or “presence” when the act of thinking is living – or should I say, when thinking is in act. But it does not follow: the “presence” of thinking in act does not mean that the past is “dead.” For it is by means of this past experience that it becomes possible to think at all – to take and transform what has heretofore been gained up into a new level. Rather than “dead,” one should say that the “past” has not been adequately gestated – that is, remembered, awakened, summoned, made conscious. It means we have refused to offer hospitality to the Grey Lady – and thereby have not fully accompanied the Logos into our past.
Spiritually, the past is all we have. It is the past in which we have endured repetitions, and repetitions of repetitions – which we call learning:

You have been here so many times
You cannot even recall them,
For the words of remembrance
Entered your body long ago:
They came into your secret stillness,
And by means of learning, memories:

Flushed from Grandmother Funda’s lap,
A covey of pictures, greetings, signatures,
That she released to you:
At first
She held them up, and you merely gazed –
While she held them between her two fingers,
To the light, so: and whispering
(As the rain, as the wind, whispers)
Remember me.
First of all you need to get to the place of beholding. Being able to see, mark, name, observe, perceive, these experiences, etc. is the first stage, the indispensable beginning to being able to become a knower, that is, a keeper, a steward of ideas. And remember, too, that everything you “hold up to the light” also has the rain and the wind: that is, a certain emotional tone and force. The Grey Lady is a seasonal being -- as all the beings in these poems have their seasons -- of Summer: for at the season of maximum fruitfulness there is also a relinquishing:
Thus they fell
To you: she gave them over, made them yours,
While she passed beyond into them:
“Beyond into” – the mystery of the relationship words. But soon it will be your turn to make fruitful and to relinquish. For by being an individual rememberer, in a specific time and place, there will be – inevitably, I should think – grief and loss.
The inner experience of entropy has accompanied human experience in all times and places, but I think since the Industrial Revolution and most particularly since the Oil Age, ushering in the era of Moloch – whether of ideology or economy - this feeling has only grown in intensity. Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory describes this sense of loss from the Russian angle when he writes that, “I would… submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known.”
“Hoarding up impressions” is something of the activity of the soul under the tutelage of the Grey Lady. But she also teaches us how to let go, with feeling:
Now it is your turn –
And you, lingering,
Press them into your mind, crying
“This is all I have left of her!-
This is all I have!”
In a handkerchief wet with your tears
Crumpled in the bottom of the garden.
This opening piece of “Grandmother Funda” seems to me remarkable in that it was inspired by Cool Wind and yet was wholly oppositional to his way of viewing consciousness and thinking.
The Grey Lady subsists in every human experience that manages to integrate feeling, memory and ideas. Recollection of the grandmotherly aspect of experience is the emotional and concrete counterpart to “becoming aware of the Logos.”
Overall, concerning the poems in general: in contrast with many modern poets, who seem to have little philosophy but much complexity and difficulty in their language, I have much philosophy but at the same time, great simplicity and directness in diction and language. I would like to say that in these poems I discovered and was able to bring forth music from thinking, or music in thinking – if it did not sound so immodest. So let me be immodest! – if it means standing for great things!
But I have given myself permission-- in these talk-writings, to be proud and reckless. Let others shoot me down – if they wish!
posted by Lyrac 8:31 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 04, 2006
ii. A VisitOn a cool summer afternoonI came to Grandmother Funda’s house.She opened the door to me, I walkedDown the long hall to her drawing room.There we drank tea, and had some cakes,While with the chill of evening coming onThe hearth fire hissed and cracked,Long into the afternoon and past,Until night’s shadows rose up in our minds.She roseTo ring the butler’s bell, but changed --Herself so strange -- to a lizard, sliver-green,Regarding me from the couch, intent. I blinked;Again she changed, and now a lounging youthIn heavy boots and smoking on a tarLeered at me from the easy chair.I asked herWhat she meant -- she made as if to speak --But paused: her being formed into a domeCurved from hearing into remembrance --It was a chime of echoes, a ruin of footfalls,The wrangle of deed with consequenceThat she consented to listen to;To all of this she at last agreed;She came to herself because she heard.It was night by now,-- And with such effort as now required,Not hearing her across from meBut myself her means of soundingThere -- I fell asleep:While sparksWent humming beyond my mind into the fire,And I too dwindled like that emberCarried by the oval flame of summer night.
___________________________________________________

Notes: The human ear:
from Portrait of a Man Standing by Salvador de Madariaga –"The ear is perhaps the most mathematical of all biological machines. The laws of optics show what an admirable degree of geometrical perfection the human eye has reached; but the ear may be more perfect still, for it is able to place in outer space the sound it perceives in its own inner space. In order to achieve this natural miracle, the ear registers the three coordinates of the spot where the sound vibrated, by means of the three planes into which the inner ear is shaped; and in order to achieve this astounding result the brain instantaneously resolves three differential equations… Musical perception is based on logorithmic laws, the basis for which is established by auditive consciousness. "

From a Notebook (Nov, 2000) I wrote: "Stages from experience to art: the 'meditations' that formed the basis for Pictures from the Speaking Stillness. Clearly, a different order of experience from so-called normal consciousness, but jumbled, confused, and chaotic. Order defined itself as a Being. The second stage: remembering and writing down. Another stage of loss, degradation of energy, inevitable distortion. Filling up notebook pages. Then the thought comes (it was not there in the beginning) to recast all of this into poetry. So after 12 years it emerges with a kind of clarity it never had in its origins."

In this second portion of the Grandmother Funda sequence I seem to be struggling to define or characterize a modern form of 'participation.' The 'transformations' are an old theme of spiritual experience and literature, and it is almost as if I had to note this 'classical' form of myth or spiritual experience before launching into the new thing that this poem tries to express. That Grandmother Funda may have momentarily been a lizard or a smoking youth is a thing of less wonder than this new thing which is expressed in the following lines: the 'being' formed as the curvature of hearing from remembrance, and the fact that this being, too, must wrestle with physical and moral facts, and the interpenetration of spiritual and physical and moral, in her 'consent' she gives to being. Through this active wrestling and inner consent she 'comes to herself.' And now it is I who must deal with these same physical and moral facts. She is actually and physically 'across from me' but inwardly and really I become, through her deed, her means of sounding there. It is thus that we become, for one another, 'means of sounding.' It takes an effort, so much so that I am unable to maintain myself in awakeness. But the night and the sparks take us both up into itself.

posted by Lyrac 2:19 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
TowardsVersalvereKathleen Raine visited the Berkshires in the early 1980’s, when I was living there. I had the inestimable privilege of hearing her read her poetry at Christopher Bamford’s house in West Stockbridge. Perhaps it was Kathleen Raine who inspired my image of the "Grey Lady." If so, it was her appearance of grace and wisdom, and the beauty of her poetry – rather than to the torments of her inner life which she chronicled in her autobiographies and about which I have written elsewhere – http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495ki/poetryplot/id2.htmlRaine’s book, Defending Ancient Springs, the scholarly manifesto of the visionary poet, was published in 1985. A few passages:
"True art is at once the embodiment and the normal means of transmission ofimaginative knowledge. But to this study of those works which embody andtransmit the hidden order of the soul all great poets must come in theirmaturity; it is the secret language of the initiates…
"The imagination does not see different things, but sees things differently…
"The great gulf lies not between tradition and the visionary, but between tradition and vision on the one hand, and positivism in all its manifestations, whether academic or revolutionary, on the other…Visionaries are not iconoclasts…."
"Above all, the voice of true imagination is never ironic; that is the mark of a divided mind, whereas the imagination is above all at one with itself, the principle of unification and harmony."
If I mention Kathleen Raine now, it is because the turmoil of her inner life, which she chronicled in her autobiographies, reminds us that the path of the visionary poet is often marked by a form of spiritual suffering unknown to the apologists of materialism. To cherish the vision is to announce to the Gods a certain willingness to suffer – one’s conviction that life is a book to be read and understand in one's heart -- not merely skimmed -- ". . . not just leafing through."I don’t know if anyone has exactly and precisely correlated materialism with triviality. But I am sure that we awaken from the superstition of materialism to the degree that we allow ourselves to be moved – to be changed – to hear – and to suffer. Is this not to tell the will not to will? No wonder that the first step towards Versalvere is often accompanied by the experience of resistance –Guards closed round me the last time I came.Who are these "guards"? Perhaps the resistance of my own self to going deeper, perhaps some kind of vengeful god of materialism demanding tribute.
Loudly they enfolded me, demanding: but I foundOn the edge of each clutch of pages that they heldA path of signatures:
The "signatures," as any adept in the art of the book will know, are the letters at the bottom of each group of pages to mark the sequence in a sewn volume.
"I am heading for what is dear to me,that I may read and understand,"Said I, "and not just leafing through."
The materialists give themselves away – the order of the world defies their central dogma, and they are unable to reason without self-contradiction. Just yesterday I saw George Gilder's superb refutation of Darwinian materialism, in which he draws attention to this self-contradicting nature of materialist thought, quoting the biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true, and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms." But even more to the point was Dr. J. Budziszewski's essay, "Escape from Nihilism," where he reminds us about the central flaw of modern ethics: "it assumes that the problem of human sin is mainy cognitive - that it has to do with the state of our knowledge. In other words, it holds that we really don't know what's right and wrong and that we are trying to find out. Actually the problem is volitional - it has to do with the state of our will." It is this idea that underlies the statement that the journey to Versalvere must at some point or another encounter the guards, resistance, the sense of hostile or oppressive figures, without or within. The problem is volitional. But likewise they can be surmounted if the will is pure:
And they closed behind to let me pass.
There are storms in the natural world as in the spiritual, and the dogma of materialism will leave chaos in its wake:
But Oh! The house was dark, the shutters torn,And glass of shattered windows on the grass!~The door was swinging on its hinge, the squealOf scraping iron: I ran and saw my aged friendCurled upon her couch. "I had a storm,"She said, "Or was had by one," and smiled ~
But Grandmother Funda is irreducibly "herself" –
She arose from her shawls and stood beforeThe empty gaping windows and expelled a breath;They were paned again by means of glowing air.
And it is now that this Being, Grandmother Funda, begins to wax and increase into truly awesome dimensions:
"There are words to use for all of this," she said,"Trying to sleep awake."
Grandmother Funda affirms the Logos, the ordering principle, and in so doing grows beyond mere philosophy into religion or possibly even beneficent magic:
She turned aroundAnd raised her arms, pointing, peristrephic,And hallowed all the earthdrow, blessing it,And all that moved upon it by meaning of the fireglow.
"Peristrephic" -- to turn around, revolving, rotatory. And what is "earthdrow" but "earth-word" – that is, all that is created upon the earth by means of the Word – encompassing "breath" as well as "fire"? It is movement not by mere means but by meaning of – perhaps this would lead to a theory of motion yet to be elucidated.
And then she begins her lesson, the teaching she gives to me, and which essentially forms the inner teaching of all these poems:
"You have dead habits of perceiving," she resumed,And she taught me keening: mournful seeking sharpnessFrom the knees, kneeling:This I did according to her word,
"Keening" – the Logos in thinking as in perception. As I wrote before: to bring thought-content into poetry and pictures into thought, leading to a deeper affirmation of things through re-experiencing how we come initially to experience them:
Inspiralling the sonic shadows, keening Versalvere,While luminous in stillness the Wordmage posed unspokenly.
The shadows of our separation are "sonic" – not only in the sense of the music in verse, but because echoes of participation and relation accompany us through all phases of our separations, and it is our task to "inspiral" them – to restore a luminous motion to the world. And this task involves overcoming "dead habits of perceiving."
And the summation of the experience? Already, with the last two lines, I seem to be looking into a "past" which is simultaneously "the way things are" or the ways things now and newly are. The names are no longer solely "attached," as it were, to the "things." They have become the periphery, the circumference of the world:
And the names of the things were written into the ovalLight, and the name of the place was Versalvere.

Thursday, July 06, 2006
In the GardenHere is the fourth and concluding section of Grandmother Funda. The entire poem is posted to the poetry website at: http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495ki/poetryplot/id9.htmlGrandmother Funda's flower is the bergamot - but I believe the wild, not the cultivated, variety. I don't know why, but at some point during the composition of the poem I met up with a wild bergamot, in Boston no less, and I am sure I knew Grandmother Funda was winking at me.We will continue with these reflections tomorrow or soon, meeting other strange and marvellous Beings in the course of our journey.
From my window I glimpsed the bergamot;Its pungent scent, though faint, had woken me.I saw Grandmother Funda walking in the garden;She carried clippers and wore gardening glovesTo gather flowers for her table: wild daisies,Black-eyed Susans, blue irisesAnd widow’s tears. She gazed longAnd thoughtfully upon her growing ones;The air was fluid and clear, with scintillasOf light and scrolls of dew ever spirallingAround her: it was hers, the moving light,The draught of liquid of a summer morning;It was what she poured out into the garden,In the summer morning of the freshest rain.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Moral Motion

In a Notebook (2000) I remarked on "the internal energy crisis… the ceaseless extraction of wonder from the cosmos and its conversion into knowledge."

One of the major turning points of this process was the extraction of the concept of motion from the participatory nexus in which it had been metaphysically embedded. This new concept of motion led to the modern or Newtonian concept of gravitation – which, ironically, leads to a certain feeling about motion as stability. I mean, don't we all rather think of the "stars in their courses' as stable and in a sense, immovable? The new concept of Motion came about through the overthrow of the Aristotelian concept of the Mover. Motion thus came to ‘rest’ in a universe deprived of a Mover, of the animating principle of desire.

This new and strangely immobilized modern concept of motion taught us how things remain but not, perhaps, how they sustain, how they can be sustained. Did the metaphysical Motion have to die in order for the technological dynamism to arise? These are the kinds of interesting historical questions that few people seem to ask, but which seem to me utterly significant and important.

In any case, the ‘remains’ of the Scientific Revolution lie all around us -- in machines which have harnessed dynamic Motion. Our modern civilization has completely overhauled (if not killed off) metaphysical motion only to turn it into its opposite – that is, to make the dynamic inert. Making motion stable, static, and predictable, it is perhaps not surprising that the study of metaphysics has lost caste. In past ages it was not 'motion' that was considered the stabilizing principle, but metaphysics. I believe it had this meaning up until the time of Kant, and that perhaps even Kant thought of metaphysics in this 'stable' way. As we know, Kant’s "dogmatic slumber" was challenged by Hume’s assertion that it is merely thanks to habit that we put notions together like causality, relation, etc. Hence he questioned such concepts as metaphysical realities. Kant, as we know, attempted to resuscitate thinking philosophy and metaphysics from this accusation of ‘lethargy of custom,’ as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it. Kant attempted to restablize metaphysics after Hume had toppled it.

But beneath the stabilizing concept of metaphysics there is perhaps another, and more radical notion, lurking beneath the surface – a notion I may have stumbled upon in a journal entry of Jan. 7, 2000: "I define metaphysics as that which seeks to suspend or disrupt what is purely automatic in us." Perhaps Hume did not think of this? Hume said we cannot metaphysically validate seeing because of habits. But the poet's answer is to crawl underneath the habits and discover, not a rationalizing but a motional metaphysics. The seer and the thing seen are on a journey together in a moving world. Perhaps this is the effort to reconvert knowledge to wonder.
I'm not sure, but I think that is a large part of the effort of these poems.

We will continue with these notions - and motions - in due season.

Saturday, July 15, 2006
Are the Beings of Recreational Visualizations Physically Describable?

I was having lunch with some colleagues the other day and I began telling them of my new poetry blog, and how it came about that I "met" the Beings that I later cast into poetry. They found the idea intriguing, and Kaye asked if I could tell what these Beings looked like, if they were describable. I found the question oddly hard to answer -- odd first of all because the experience of these Beings was entirely "inward," and secondly because the overwhelming impression I had of them was that their being corresponded to their name. The correspondence of Name and Being was the true key or index of description. "Physical description" as such played a minor role. I suppose that in these poetic pursuits I was more like a medieval Scholastic than a modern scientist.

Owen Barfield writes, in his chapter "The Texture of Medieval Thought," in his astonishingly important book, Saving the Appearances, that "'Knowledge,' for such a consciousness (i.e. the Scholastic) was conceived of as the perfection or completion of the 'naming' process of thought... for all creatures were in a greater or lesser degree images or representations, or 'names' of God." And in the next chapter he says: "Compared with us, they felt themselves and the objects around them and the words that expressed those objects, immersed together in something like a clear lake of -- what shall we say?-- of 'meaning,' if you choose. It seems the most adequate word. Aquinas's verbum intellectus was tanquam speculum, in quo res cernitur - 'like a mirror in which the object is discerned."

But now that I think of Kaye's question, it seems to me that the series of poems describes Beings in a diminishing scale of "describable." The first of them, Grandmother Funda, is eminently describable. She is my grandmother, your grandmother, grandmotherness itself.

"Asa," the second in the series - to which we will come shortly - is loveliness itself, the feminine in its full blush of beauty and grandeur. She was clothed in a "very velvet gown," and of course, she was tall, and perhaps dark-haired, although the poem does not get to that level of description.

The third of the series, the Ringbinder, concerns Hovering Black, who has something to do with preserving memories. I picture Hovering as rather slender and rather shy and perhaps a bit whimsical - though these last two qualities have left the realm of physical description altogether.

The fourth poem concerned a being easy to describe - my cat. Pangur jumped into this series of poems a bit unlawfully. All I can say is that I took a bit of liberty here.

"Bettina Piccolo" - is any description necessary? Don't you already know, just from her name, what she is? Bettina Piccolo's little poem is just a thread inserted into the fabric.

"Maiden Glass" is a beam of light shining through a window pane -- Made-in-Glass. "Th'Emagdrow," reverse speech for "Wordgame," is a type of beast who rages through your mind when it is dancing. He is impossible, of course, full of slipshod punning, endless jokes, manias of significance (and insignificance) and besides, he eats up all your citations. But such is the price of life fermented in words. Emagdrow is very fat, and terribly shapeless.

"Frank Key" is the mysterious man who summarizes the whole and who has no physical description whatsoever. In "The Gravity Robe" the reflective poetry seems to leave the physical world altogether and encounter gravity from the inside of it. The Gravity Robe is perhaps physically describable as the swell of the sea.

Sunday, July 16, 2006
Mysterious Visitations

"In modern times, the ability to produce truth out of oneself is revealed in the abstract capacity to work out the abstract truths of mathematics and pure physics quite independently of sense-perception and experiment. This procedure - which may be traced back to Newton originally - produced the conceptual scaffolding and outlook fundamental to all the natural sciences. Such pure thinking, if applied to other fields, could create the possibility of thinking with mathematical precision about spiritual realities. Thereby the activity of the Spirit in man would truly begin... Perceiving the Logos, the spirit could assume its true function: to investigate the obstacles which stand in the way of realizing consciousness-in-the-present... For the spirit of the Comforter does not yet dwell in man. To dwell and to remain are one word in Greek: menein. To remain, in the Greek sense, meant: enduring presence, real living, not just 'visiting.' In modern man, the spirit acts like a 'visitor.'... But, since the intuition does not remain, but blazes up and goes out, man does not live, i.e., experience, the spirit which is active in the intellectual intuition. The spirit's remaining or dwelling would be an experience which continues in time. It would mean that one remains in the spirit, that one lives in the 'super-worldly' realm, in living thinking, i.e., life."

George Kuhlewind, Becoming Aware of the Logos, p. 90-91.

It is deeply interesting to ponder the above words in the light of the Christian teaching about grace. Men fought for centuries to define it, or if not to define it, to define the conditions of its appearance and action. The "living thinking" of anthroposophical epistemology is not exactly grace, although I believe that some anthroposophists may hope that it is possible to live 'in a state of grace' insofar as one's cognitive activity meets the requirements of pure sense-free thinking. Although this may be an over-estimation of human possibility, I believe the anthroposophists are right to pinpoint thinking and cognition as the important battleground of the present - and future - of the action of grace. They are right to say that it is essential to become conscious of one's thinking. Or as John Lukacs put it - we need to "think about thinking."

The first question I would raise here is whether it is possible to identify so closely the Holy Spirit with cognitive activity as such. Jacob Needleman, in his worthy study of the Eastern Fathers, Lost Christianity, remarks somewhere in that amazing book that cognitive activity is only the lowest rung of the ladder. It is not actually the Spirit, or Holy Spirit - indeed, the disciplined devotions of the Early Fathers were directed to finding "the place of the heart" - where the real work of contacting the Holy Spirit begins. This astonished Needleman, who says that the most important aspect of their research was embedded in the simple words about "finding the place of the heart." What appeared to be simple and obvious was, in fact, the most difficult and elusive of all. (If I can find my copy of the book I will try to provide exact quotation.)

My second reservation has to do with the anthroposophist's insistence on "pure sense-free" thinking. For this argument I turn to Salvador de Madariaga once again, whose book, Portrait of a Man Standing, provides a sharp corner, or perhaps, course-correction, and which, besides, is full of graceful and sharp insight. In this book he contrasts the vertical and horizontal tendencies in man, having begun his discourse with a close look at a tree and a cow: "The tree and the cow, the vertical and the horizontal, remain the two coordinates of man's life. They command the primary impulses behind his doing, thinking, feeling... The vertical urge which is man... is after all incarnated in an animal and belongs, therefore, to a species that, as such, is under the sway of a horizontal impulse on which it depends for its life, and therefore, for that of its individuals... For the species to remain and endure, animal, collective, horizontal tendencies are indispensable in order to counterbalance the urge skyward. Man lives thus in a continuous dynamic equilibrium between his vertical and his horizontal worlds, between solitude and multitude."

This Spanish grundwelt gravitates the anthroposophical pitch skyward. But it is in particular de Madariaga's next point which I want to emphasize:

“…And here we come across one of those paradoxes of which nature seems to be so fond. yes, the vertical posture has separated the several vital levels, but the vertical impulse that caused it tends to keep them united, threaded together... while there lives in man, even when decanted into several levels, a definite horizontal tendency... that incites him to live flat along every one of his 'storeys,' or in other words, to accept the decantation and separation of his several levels with cowish placidity...[but] it is a fact, though perhaps paradoxical and odd at first, that life will be more fully human if and when the individual succeeds in preserving at each level the taste and touch of the other ones."

This is a long and roundabout way of saying that the anthroposophical thinker runs the risk of living in his head. He pours all of his energy and enthusiasm into exalting the 'vertical' impulse of cognition while his life-energies, so to speak, drain out of a hole in the bottom. Thus has it happened that followers of anthroposophy are sometimes to be recognized by their lack of spontaneity, their dampened personalities, their obliviousness to race, religion, nation, history, politics, and all 'personal' or even sometimes stubbornly moral expression. According to de Madariaga's analysis, all this verticality lands one in a new horizontal plane. "Epistemology is destiny" indeed!

It is thus I have some deep reservations about this anthroposophical exaltation of "sense-free" thinking. I believe I wrote these poems out of a deep disagreement with the "sense-free" dogma of anthroposophical thinking -- while holding on loyally to the anthroposophical valuation of thinking as indispensable to the path of spiritual development. Thus agreeing, I found I disagreed; and yet though disagreeing, I continued to agree. Or to put it another way: I walked with the anthroposophists until I turned a corner, and then I lost them. Or they failed to run after me.

I know not if there are readers who would have an interest in subtle disagreements at this level. But thinking is an act of minute perturbations. Only that which is minutely felt and followed can vitalize our other levels - taste, touch, feeling, sight, the moments of life. Only thinking - being 'spiritual' - can penetrate.

On this note I close for the day -- this philosophical prologue to the next poem, "Asa," which will follow in a day or two.

posted by Lyrac 12:42 PM 0 comments

July 17 2006
ASA

Grandmother Funda arises from the depths, but Asa is a being of the heights:

Asa stepped through folds of blue,
walked majestic on columns of air
curling and uncurling, up and down,
like children's paper whistle toys;

Asa is the closest I have ever come to experiencing a Greek Goddess. Her name, the same spelled backwards as forwards, is also expressive of her 'Greek' character. Asa is spatial and a-temporal, where Grandmother Funda is intimately connected with time and the past. As is present, pure presence, continually in the act of 'descending' –

she ranged down the solid draughts
of atmosphere, textural and felt,
like her own very velvet gown,
and slipped between the old and the new
of moments coming, but never there,
and passing by before they're known;

--Asa is the presence between one moment and the next:

but Asa stood present in each one:
she trod the moments like a stair,
descending, always coming down,
holding endless banisters of air.

Asa's natural stance is aloft, and it is only with difficulty that one gets a glimpse of her between the moments. But the effort to maintain alertness in the presence of this 'grandeur' - the grandeur of the minute, amidst the slightest perturbations of thought or of consciousness - can perhaps also be -- for less fine-grained beings like ourselves, tiring:

I leaned my head against the sofa
tired from seeking Versalvere,
when Asa came down the curving stair
bringing from her attic what she called
a coat for moments never worn;
It fit every time I tried it on.

Here is some wordplay. Is the coat never worn or the moments 'never worn' - unexperienced, newly arising? Why does it fit 'every time I tried it on'? And why I am tired from 'seeking Versalvere' - am I not 'already there'? Poetry puts certain questions to us, only it answers them in a different way from philosophy or discursive thought:

It was in a style of patterns culled
from voices racing past us in the sky;
we stood upon the terrace watching
their cloud-hung faces scudding by ~
they looked at us, statuesque and still,
when all at once I turned and fell . . .
I stumbled back into the room;
my moment coat had made me full.

And now, with my 'moment coat' and the fullness it gives me,with Asa experience dissolves into feelings, colors, sensations -- though 'dissolving' is perhaps not the right word, because things are things, things are what they are, things are:

O, such feelings did I do that noon!~
I clasped the chairs, loving the waves
the ribbings made in cushioned corduroy,
the ridges rising through my hands;
in smooth and darkening softened octaves
Asa moved through velvet-curtained sounds,
retreating from my fingers' press:
now lifting, they felt a brighter joy
of cotton - it was the shirt I wore~
and my feet, hatching in their nest
of woollen socks, stood up at last:

I have often thought of these lines as a tribute to a mentally damaged boy I knew when I worked at Berkshire Children's Community, a home for retarded children. Eric could say only a few words, and two of his main activities were riffling the pages of a telephone book or fingering the corduroy ridges of his pants. All day, to run his fingers along the corduroy ridges.

with Asa, before the time was past,
riding majestic on folds of blue,
slipping between the old and the new.

posted by Lyrac 5:11 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 23, 2006
What is Thinking? (i) or, Coexistence as a Principle

In 1997 I was reading Ortega y Gasset, and I was beginning to view Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology through the lens of Ortega y Gasset's notes on the history of philosophy. Here is a note from my journal on January 11th of that year:

“…Ortega’s critique of Descartes: ...that he discovered the indubitable reality of thought, but could not rest content with this, but had to push on to make thought a “substance,” a res cogitans. Had he rested within thought he might have discovered that thought includes both subject and object: world and thinker are linked together. Instead, he liberated thought and then enclosed it in a cocoon. Modern idealism, subjectivity, thus drags hermetism and docetism in its wake. Cf. Rudolf Steiner: “The only knowledge which satisfies us is one which is subject to no external standards but springs from the inner life of the personality.” (p. xxvii, Philosophy of Freedom). This is pure hermetism, pure subjectivity.

The anthroposophists believe that Steiner overcame Cartesian dualism when he said that “Thinking produces the ideas of subject and object just as it produces all others.” It is true that Steiner grounds his philosophy in the indubitable act of thinking. But how then does he get to the world? This is still unclear to me. It is significant that Rudolf Steiner says that thinking “produces” the subject and object, where Ortega says that thinking presupposes subject and object.

That is: thinking exists. I am thinking about a table. This thinking-about the table says nothing about the real existence of any specific table, only that real tables exist somewhere, and that I am thinking of one: these are both true and included within my thought. My real existence and the table’s real existence are both presupposed. “… I am that which sees the world and the world is that which is seen by me… If there were no things to be seen, thought about, and imagined, I would not see, think, or imagine; that is to say, I would not exist.”

It is true that Rudolf Steiner does come close to this thought when he says: “The reason why we do not observe the thinking that goes on in our ordinary life is none other than this, that it is due to our own activity. Whatever I do not myself produce, appears in my field of observation as an object; I find myself confronted by it as something that has come about independently of me. It comes to meet me. I must accept it as something that precedes my thinking process, as a premiss. While I am reflecting upon the object, I am occupied with it, my attention is focussed upon it. To be thus occupied is precisely to contemplate by thinking. I attend, not to my activity, but to the object of this activity. In other words, while I am thinking I pay no heed to my thinking, which is of my own making, but only to the object of my thinking, which is not of my making.” But Steiner draws near only to skirt away again. It may be said in justification that Rudolf Steiner’s purpose with his epistemology is not to establish the mutual reality of thinking and world but to establish thinking as a primary organ of the spirit and so effect a rescue from materialism. The point is well taken -- The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (preferred to the title Philosophy of Freedom) was published in 1899, and thus followed upon the high tide of 19th century materialism.

Steiner stressed that thinking is the “unobserved” element in our knowledge, and in this I believe he was correct. “We must first consider thinking quite impartially, without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object. For both subject and object are concepts formed by thinking. There is no denying that before anything else can be understood, thinking must be understood.” (p. 35) But how is it possible to understand thinking apart from some specific content? Even in my "recreational visualizations" there was some specific content, or 'input,' or 'experience,' in the form of Beings whose generalized, and at first hazy, 'presences' ultimately crystallized in the poems.

On the other hand, though I raise this question of Steiner, I am quite willing to suppose that the ultimate 'Stuff' of the Universe is, in fact, thought. But there is a big difference in holding this idea as a belief, or as a possibility, and actually arguing it successfully in philosophy. This is just the type of question that ought to exercise those in the field of Intelligent Design - the kind of thing that would need to be argued with full intellectual detachments, each having stores of powder and armory to lay against the sodden foundations of positivist-postmodernist naturalism. And in some of those stores and armory, I think, there needs to be a reserve of ammunition-- for imagination.

The pictorial qualities of thought need to be addressed. We live in a world where pictures - manufactured images - have all but driven away thought. But the human capacity to imagine, to produce pictures of one's own, has correspondingly become extremely impoverished, along with the capacity for empathy and understanding. Truly, philosophy for the future needs a 'therapeutic' mission - to rescue the life in thought by integrating rational thought with the pictorial imagination.

Next, Rudolf Steiner remarks: “Thinking lies beyond subject and object. It produces these two concepts just as it produces all others.” (p. 43) But I find this hairsplitting. Let us grant that thinking “produces” the concept, object, but it does not “produce” table in the same direct way which Ortega describes, and which Steiner himself acknowledged in the previous passage where he admits that things simply appear in his field of observation.

Where Descartes “substantialized” thinking, Steiner seems to “spiritualize” it. According to Olin Wannamaker’s commentary on Steiner's epistemology, [it] “… places the human spirit in the act of thinking within the sphere of objective spiritual reality.” And: “thinking, free from preconceptions… leads to the knowledge that man lives in a true spiritual world.”

My journal entry continues in this wise: “I was profoundly influenced by the importance that Rudolf Steiner gives to the act of thinking. That thinking is a path to the truth, to the spirit... this was extremely important to me. Rudolf Steiner’s path gave me a spiritual world, it is true – but I wanted a real world. I did not want spirit as a substitute for the world; I wanted the spirit of truth to penetrate the world, be in it, realize itself in it… Yet this idea – thinking-as-spirit – is tremendously fruitful, perhaps the only real genesis of fruitfulness – as proved by all that Steiner was able to do with it… "

In the list of real-world problems and concerns, the question of whether thinking includes subject and object or produces them must rate pretty low on the scale. And yet, isn’t it just here that, by really thinking the matter through, and what is more, really feeling it as a life-issue, feeling dissatisfied with a lack of clarity on this issue – would not this elastic dissatisfaction be enough to propel one into an altogether different philosophical world?

Probably one advances in philosophy to the extent that such elastic dissatisfactions cause one to grasp the tiny corner of a single philosophical problem – a tiny part that, for some reason, really matters to me.

In any event, it was startling to move from the world of Steiner to that of Ortega, who could have been addressing Steiner with the following: “… the first thing we do about something can never be thinking about it; in order for me to engage in this peculiar activity, the thing I deal with must have been involved in a previous relationship with me, which was not merely a matter of thinking about it.” Some Lessons in Metaphysics, p. 79

Ortega says that the root assumption of the modern age is that our primary relationship with things is thinking about them; that therefore things are what they are when we think them. On the contrary, he says, things are what they are when we are not thinking about them, when we are simply counting on them, taking them for granted, living them.

Which is why, for Ortega, the chief philosophical issue, problem, reality, etc. is life itself -- and not 'spirit,' 'thinking,' 'science,' 'knowledge,' etc. For what good are all these to us if -- as it says in the last book of the Bible - 'You have a name, and you are alive, but in reality you are dead'?

Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Meeting Richard Wilbur

I met the American poet Richard Wilbur many years ago in Savannah. I was eighteen; I believe Mr. Wilbur at the time was about thirty-five. He had come to Savannah to address the Savannah Poetry Society, a wonderful organization which I hope is still in existence. I met Mr. Wilbur and made some flippant or theatrical remark; he seized my hand and kissed it.

I have always ever since held Mr. Richard Wilbur in the highest annals of Honor. I have also thought he was one of the few American poets to achieve recognition who did not sell his talent to cheap fads.

Some years later a little exchange occurred on an Owen Barfield e-list, and someone quoted two lines from Wilbur's poem, "Epistemology" --

"We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."

To which I answered in kind:

But the cream of the matter--
there's no other udder.

I indulge in these faint recollections to make a little interval, a bridge, from our ponderous reflections on Epistemology to take up the next aspect of the soul - Memory - to follow in a few days.

Friday, July 28, 2006
Is Complementarity the Same Thing as Coexistence?

No.

The next poem-discussion is coming soon, but before we get there, I wanted to make a note on something I said in the post-before-last.

I was reading Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence, where he is talking about "The Perversity of Physics" (his Chapter Two). He is discussing the famous Uncertainty Principle, or Principle of Complementarity, where sometimes a particle acts like a wave, or a wave sometimes acts like a particle, and he quoted Werner Heisenberg, who discovered, or enunciated this principle:

"The concept of complementarity is meant to describe a situation in which we can look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference. These two frames mutually exclude each other, but they also complement each other, and only the juxtaposition of these contradictory frames provides an exhaustive view of the appearances of the phenomena."

Certainly the principle is useful, if only to remind us that an event may be viewed in different perspectives. What is interesting is to see how perspective itself was being incorporated into the very structure of science. But then Heisenberg goes on to say that,

"What the Copenhagen School calls complementarity accords very neatly with the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind."

But this is just what it does not do - or rather, it seems to me an unjustifiable leap from the principle of complementarity applied to the fundamentals of reality to a philosophical discussion about matter and mind. Is he suggesting that the wave-like state is mental and the particle-like state is matter? Indeed it is "neat" - it is in fact too "neat." Because by saying that complementarity accords with the matter vs. mind distinction, he has thereby abolished complementarity itself, or he is rendered it useless by removing its sting and its power to surprise. Complementarity itself, both in its wave-like and particle-like aspects, belongs to the "matter" side, in the sense that it is the mind's construction or interpretation about what it sees.

Complementarity says that now the mind "sees double" where before it reduced everything to the purely material entities -- "of single vision and Newton's sleep."

In this sense the complementarity idea has failed to live up to its promise. The most startling thing one can learn from the principle of complementarity is that there is dynamism inherent in perceiving-thinking itself. One should say - "This is what thinking looks like - from the outside." In essence, complementarity is a perceiving of thinking - but I wonder if this has even been realized. What is left for a thinking that thus so dramatically... sees itself revolving between act and process?

The same old dead cognitive habits, the same dead dessicated intellectualism - which came perilously and gloriously close, in the Principle of Complementarity, to the living picture, of life in the form of Mind. But turned aside in the end -- because these old habits were not up tothe new revelation. Instead of making thinking more dynamic, complementarity only contributed to making the picture of the world less rational.

The Principle of Complementarity should have been a feast for kings. Instead, it was thrown to the dogs.

The point of this little essay being, when you think about thinking, even something as mundane as the proper places of subject and object therein, the world begins to whisper its secrets to you.

posted by Lyrac 7:06 PM 0 comments

Saturday, August 05, 2006
Heisenberg Revisited

Concerning my last post: I had the feeling that the quote from Heisenberg regarding the indeterminancy principle as an illustration of Cartesian dualism might have been something the great physicist tossed off in a careless moment. This sense has been reinforced today, for I was just reading John Lukacs' chapter "History and Physics," from Historical Consciousness, where he quotes Heisenberg:

"...Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning. This was a possibility of which Descartes could not have thought but it makes the sharp separation between the world and the I impossible..."

Heisenberg then makes the comment that the Cartesian partition has penetrated very deeply into the human mind over the past few centuries, and that "it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality."

To which John Lukacs assents: "We cannot avoid the condition of our participation." I have always thought that this great book, Historical Consciousness, originally published in 1968, was a signal moment in our intellectual life. In its densely interwoven arguments about the nature of history and thinking, the participation idea returns after a prolonged sleep since the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. There - according to Owen Barfield, whose inspiration is very evident in John Lukacs' pages - "In the work of Thomas Aquinas, in particular, the word participate or participation occurs almost on every page, and a whole book could be written - indeed one has been written - on the uses he makes of it. It is not a technical term of philosophy and he is no more concerned to define it than a modern philosopher would be, to define some such common tool of his thought as, say, the word compare. " Barfield, Saving the Appearances (1965) p. 89.

I have had a very interesting correspondence this week regarding Owen Barfield and participation. I submitted an essay on Barfield to an interdenominational Christian magazine whose editors have a strong and unquenchable interest in C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield's good friend. The editor to whom I sent the piece seemed initially favorable to it, but the verdict from his circle of reviewers nixed any hope of seeing it published. While most of this negative reaction was probably due to my shortcomings as a writer combined with the difficulty of the subject, I have to wonder whether some of that negative reaction was due to the challenge that the idea of participation presents to the entrenched Cartesian dualism. Christianity has had a century of struggle with Darwinism, but to Cartesianism it seems to have accomodated itself without much of a murmur. Barfield's argument in Saving the Appearances shows the links between the materialism of Darwin and the dualism of Descartes.

It's a big challenge, and people don't want to hear it, I guess. They don't want to go back that far into scientific and philosophical disagreements. But then comes a great work like Historical Consciousness, which lifts the whole debate into a new arena - that of history. And participation is becoming now a vital question for history. The participation idea faded from men's minds coincident with the rise of science, and its disappearance certainly facilitated the "manipulative" attitude towards nature that obtains today. This manipulative and controlling attitude is still much in evidence in our scientific and technological society. But it has also come to a certain place of limits - perhaps even of diminishing returns. We are running close to the energy limits. But the people who know it or who pretend not to know it have no plans to subject the domineering attitude to a radical self-questioning. Instead, they have other plans. History is their new field of operation. How much can you stagemanage events, wars, assassinations, financial catastrophes, invasions, subversions and the endless parading of thoughtless, corrupted, contemptible and deceiving people in the leadership spotlight of the world? How far can you go in casting out the participation of decent people? When do you reach the moral limits?

These are the kinds of questions that arise in any consideration of participation - which begins, for us, with its presence or absence in political affairs and then becomes a larger, or deeper, question about how we perceive, how we configure sensations into things, and occurrences into 'events.' It becomes a question of what we are and how we think and act - a question of historical consciousness. Today, it is becoming the question of how - if - history will continue.