Waking Up to Attention

Nature and Revelation

What nature-lovers - whether they are Wordsworthians or people with "dark gods in their blood" - get from nature is an iconography, a language of images. I do not mean simply visual images; it is the "moods" or "spirits" themselves - the powerful expositions of terror, gloom, jocundity, cruelty, lust, innocence, purity - that are the images. In them each man can clothe his own belief. We must learn our theology or philosophy elsewhere (not surprisingly, we often learn them from theologians and philosophers).

But when I speak of "clothing" our belief in such images I do not mean anything like using nature for similes or metaphors in the manner of the poets. Indeed, I might have said "filling" or "incarnating" rather than clothing. Many people - I am one myself - would never, but for what nature does to us, have had any content to put into the words we use in confessing our faith. Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the "fear" of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the "love" of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.

Of course the fact that a Christian can so use nature is not even the beginning of a proof that Christianity is true. Those suffering from Dark Gods can equally use her (I suppose) for their creed. That is precisely the point. Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help us to show what it means.

-- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.

Stuart Kauffman

You can also find an article of his here. I would associate his "creativity" with Divine Activity, that is, the activity of the Spirit of God.

Objections to an Objectionable Objectivity

The liturgical texts and hymns of both Byzantine and Oriental Orthodox are the compositions of saints - men of renowned holiness of life who made the reading of the scriptures their daily practice, whose spiritual disciplines would seem to most inhabitants of the modern world as fanatical, who knew the biblical texts so well they felt to need to give citations and footnotes, whose deification was of such a high pitch that they are often remembered with stories of theurgic power.

To be initiated into the proper study of scripture it is necessary to be initiated into the spiritual disciplines which the scriptural typology figures forth for us, and which informs our liturgical and ascetical-spiritual practice, giving it structure, direction and overall sense. To be a theologian, to understand the scriptures or the liturgy, means to "suffer divine things," to acquire the sense of holy things that only an immersion into this living tradition can offer. 

It is noteworthy that the revised liturgical texts coming out of the 2nd Vatican Council were written by scholars, and not by saints.

Holiness is to be the result of an ascetical initiation into the Church's mystagogy ought to be productive of holy persons, of spiritual persons who know the "things of the Spirit of God;" such persons, knowing by their deification the truths which are bodied forth in scripture and the Church's mysteries, will be able to write about them, will be able -- if they are also graced with the charism to do so -- to write hymns of the Church's mysteries, being themselves initiated.

Scholars, however, taking a geneaological and legal approach to liturgical rites, will never be able to do anything but corrupt the Church's liturgy, seeking to "restore" rites to a supposedly available or reconstructible point of purity, which point of purity is had by way of a historical critical method. The legal approach works by way of attempting to grasp propositionally the "truths" which are bodied forth in the rite, as though the dogmatic truths are somehow separable from their liturgical expression, under the assumption that the form of a dogma's liturgical expression is fine as long as it satisfies some external criteria to make it "valid." 

If the Orthodox object to the modern Roman rite, it is because we suffer divine things, words of saints, the taste of which is familiar to us, and which we can sense also from Oriental Orthodox rites, but which seems absent from the modern Roman rite, which was not composed by saints, but by committees. Am I to assume that because of someone's office, because a collection of bishops who ostensibly hold to the teaching office of the Church, teach as "valid" a rite which does not taste as the rites of the saints do, that it is nonetheless valid because it was commended by a supposed Council? Am I to grant to a rite that tastes different than the rites of the saints is binding because the official officeholders have said it is so? And what am I to take from this? Likely the apostasy of the Roman Catholic system in its modern form from Catholicity. 

It may be objected that my presentation of Roman doctrine is misleading, that Roman bishops are not infallible, but the fact that the decisions of the bishops of the Council are considered obligatorily binding upon all faithful Roman Catholics by imposition of a rite whose sense is alien to the rites composed by the saints suggests that in practice, the truth -- while it may not be opposite -- is certainly something different. 

It suggests that the sense of the nature of the Church and her rites is fundamentally different between the Orthodox Catholic and the Roman Catholic. 

Good People All (Wexford Carol)

Good people all, this Christmas-time,
Consider well and bear in mind
What our good God for us has done
In sending his beloved Son.
With Mary holy we should pray
To God with love this Christmas day;
In Bethlehem upon that morn
There was a blessed Messiah born.

The night before that happy tide
The noble Virgin and her guide
Were long time seeking up and down
To find a lodging in the town.
But mark how all things came to pass;
From every door repelled alas!
As long foretold, their refuge all
Was but an humble ox's stall.

There were three wise men from afar
Directed by a glorious star,
And on they wandered night and day
Until they came where Jesus lay,
And when they came unto that place
Where our beloved Messiah was,
They humbly cast them at his feet,
With gifts of gold and incense sweet.

Near Bethlehem did shepherds
keepTheir flocks of lambs and
feeding sheep;
To whom God's angels did appear,
Which put the shepherds in great fear.
'Prepare and go', the angles said.
'To Bethlehem, be not afraid:
For there you'll find, this happy
morn,A princely babe, sweet Jesus
born.

With thankful heart and joyful mind,
The shepherds went the babe to find,
And as God's angel had foretold,
They did our saviour Christ behold.
Within a manger he was laid,
And by his side the virgin maid,
Attending on the Lord of life,
Who came on earth to end all strife.
    

Church of England pens prayer for the redundant

Tue Jan 6, 2009 11:37am EST

 

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LONDON (Reuters) - The Church of England published a prayer on Tuesday to help comfort Britons who lose their jobs in the financial crisis.

"Hear me as I cry out in confusion, help me to think clearly, and calm my soul," says the "Prayer On Being Made Redundant."

The church, part of the global Anglican church, also offered a prayer for those who keep their jobs but suffer stress and feelings of guilt when colleagues are fired.

"Who will be next? How will I cope with the increased pressure of work?" asks the "Prayer For Those Remaining In The Workplace."

As many as 600,000 Britons could lose their jobs this year, a report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development forecast last month.

(Reporting by Keith Weir; editing by Tim Castle, Tim Pearce)

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10875666

Paper!

Atom, Form, Chaos, Quantum

Atomists and Plato - there is no comment on Atomism in Plato, as Bremer says, because there can be no conversation between Atomists and Platonists. If explanation is reduction, you can never explain anything - either you will keep reducing ad infinitum, in which case you are always in need of the next level of reduction, and nothing ever gets truly explained, neither parts or wholes (or the Whole), or else you will hit bottom and be unable to reduce, and so unable to explain what lies at bottom. No, explanation lies in form - when I ask you what your fundamental particle(s) is/are, you explain with recourse to properties and behaviors - you explain according to form. What is this or that chemical? --it is such and such a composition of these elements, arranged according to this pattern. Instrumentally it works, and so we either have a useful instrumental fiction, or else we are actually explaining something (or explaining by approximating to the relevant reality). If a useful fiction we have, then reality is not really form at all, but form is rather something we impose upon what is essentially formless and chaotic, what does not at all approximate to our ordinary experience of the world. And then we might ask how such matter is able to give rise to the objects of our consciousness which have such properties, much less how the resulting concepts of these properties and other abstractions are able to approximate probabilistically the behavior and flow of the supposedly chaotic matter.

 

Nietzsche on Dionysius and Apollo - Apollo is the form we place on things, Dionysius is the actual nature of the world, the chaos of it.

 

If the reports I hear about Derrida are correct (I still have need to read the man), we might apply the same Nietzschean pattern to texts.

 

Quantum mechanics would seem to confirm the instrumentalist and Nietzschean vision of things on one hand - it seems that the particles in question do not obey laws or possess form the same way that ordinary objects do. This can be interpreted in several different ways - either we're imposing form on them, and they're ultimately chaotic quanta, or else they do possess this form in truth, and thus we can still talk about them, they still are explained by way of form.

 

I am told that the objection to deductions made on the basis of certain interpretations of quantum mechanics serve equally well to demonstrate the misplaced emphasis of Derrida and his school.

Adam's Body

The material world, is as it were, the swirling issue from the wound of Adam's exile, at once depravity and possibility, restoration and consequence. It is the medium of form, the medium of creation, the medium of the one. Characterized as posterior to Adam's Fall (and not Satan's), how can it be the receptacle of form, a prerequisite of creation, a thing enabling the multiplicity of creatures to be truly multiple, distinct from pure form, which is always perfectly unitary?

Regarding Gods and Services, ver.2

In Enuma Elish, the gods conquer the older generation of gods under the leadership of Marduk, who takes the corpse of the defeated goddess Tiamat and turns it into the world. Mortals are made from the defeated goddess' blood and dust from the ground by Marduk, and are made for the purpose of "the care and feeding of the gods," to tend to them and serve them.

If this sounds like a mythical manual for colonization and indentured servitude, you're listening properly (or else you've got a knot in your ear that hears that too eagerly, and were listening poorly anyway). Marduk is the mythical type for every warrior-king, throne-usurper and neighboring country-invader.

The role of the gods in society was alway indirect - they only appeared through their representatives, and though they were associated with the items of ordinary use (there may be a god or goddess who is patron of this or that activity), they were originally associated with natural phenomenon and the goods which life depended upon or was thwarted by - rain, vegetation, procreation, the hunt, animals, strength, health, good leadership, or else drought, etc. (droughts and whatnot were interestingly never seen as the presence of another god or goddess, as far as I can remember, but were the absence of something needed - the god or goddess was withholding or weak and needed to be supplicated). 

What struck me was that these roles are mirrored very closely by corporations, which never appear except for their putative effects and representatives and items owned. CEO's for chief priests and kings, administrators for priests and regional overseers, employees for slave labor and devotees, goods and services for grain and fair weather and natural phenomenon.

The person in this myth is not an end in himself or herself - they have their good in serving a function to assist in the care and feeding of the gods, or else in the furthering of the corporation's growth. The difficulties which Christians had in navigating pagan territory appears again afresh - perhaps a renewed monastic community, renewed intentional communities of worship and culture and frienship and protection are what is needed now. We need to start buying land and finding ways of creating good humanizing architecture and hosting events to bring money in, and to provide humanizing activities to those around us (worship will be of little to no interest to them, and we are to be a light to the world).

Alarming.

__________

11.6.08

As a post-script, a friend of mine noted to me the other day that Stephen King revealed his authorial method in a book about writing. He designs the characters first, without thought to a story, and then places them in various situations to see how they'll react, and how the story will play out. He admitted to suffering writer's block at one point only, during one point of The Stand, which he apparently was unable to surmount, until he decided that the problem was that there were too many characters, which he resolved by placing a bomb in a closet or a locker or whatever to finish off a number of them.

What interests me is that here, too, as in the houses of the gods or in corporations, the person is not a good in him or herself, but is only good for some larger good that trumps the worth of human persons - namely, the good of the story, or rather, perhaps, the good of the author's personal satisfaction at completing a project, or maybe ego, or perhaps his wallet. 

Frighteningly, this seems to be the method of proselytism endorsed by many, especially Protestants, but mirrored in the militant Atheist movement afoot. Did the Lord not warn against proselytism? "The Pharisees travel far and wide to make a proselyte...and then make them twice a child of Gehenna as themselves." There is no good above the person - in the opening Genesis mythos/poem, Adam is the place, palace and Temple of God's enthronement in the creation, his Sabbath Rest. There is no ideology or religion that is above Adam, only that Adam remain faithful to his nature, to flourish according to his kind, according to his humanity in communion with divinity, with the Breath of God. We are fallen from that.

Some may argue that this is an ideology, an icon of what man might or could be that is other than we are, and so merely a bludgeoning tool against man which is itself over him. But it is the good of each man which is intended by holding forth this image, and not merely of a group, and not merely of a religion or an ideology or a political or economic current. There is no canopy above man to which he must submit - not even God, for God is not a being, but the Being of beings, and so is not a "thing" held above man.