Toward Attention

Freedom and Nihilism

Whatever comes after Modernity is not a paleo-whatever: it is something new that no one can now dream. Yet we have such weak imaginations that we cannot conceive of this.

I recently shared, with some friends, the quote from David Bentley Hart that I cited here several posts ago. I did not cite the quote to attack Modernity or Secularism or Secularity: I simply sought to describe its contours.

It is interesting that, for some reason, laying out the features of our Modern notion of freedom immediately provokes a kind of theatrical display of Jews, women, gays, and scientists as threatened by any return to "Christendom," which apparently is the only thing that a somewhat-pious person could possibly be interested in if he were to challenge the modern notions of freedom and law as intrinsically nihilistic, for the notion of the Good that they assume is generated from the appetites of men. One can criticize our modern idea of freedom without attacking our modern freedoms (they are not the same thing, even if closely related -- still, the modern freedoms may need a better home than the modern idea of freedom).

It seems that, to critique the modern notion of freedom as license cannot but prompt the alarms of Byzantine Emperors exiling the enemies of their preferred theological parties and Totalitarian regimes annihilating ethnic groups and persecuting those who engage in homoerotic acts. These do not lie behind my complaint, however: the inappropriate use of coercive power by past governments should not be confused with a criticism of the nihilistic tendencies in our modern Liberal polity.

The move to immediately consider women is apparently that they were not free -- not truly free -- before our modern Liberal polities.

The move to immediately consider Jews is apparently that they are always a remainder, and so any polity that does not make room for them is too homogenizing and Totalitarian.

The move to immediately consider homosexuals is apparently that whether or not homosexuality is legally allowed is a real test of whether our modern liberties are real or not.

The move to immediately consider scientists is apparently that science challenges authority with reason and is publicly verifiable, and that we should be critical of all authority, for it is so often private, irrational and arbitrary.

I don't know that any of these cases are as simple as the positions I've here described (I've only tried to sketch an outline of why these four are brought out on stage when the Modern notion of freedom is questioned), and I'm quite sure that in questioning Modernity I'm not pushing for a return to a religio-political model that yokes religious institutions to the State, giving them access to the sword. That works for Paganism just fine, and for Islam, and maybe even for Judaism (though less so): I don't think it can work for the Church. Christianity can't really be a very good religious backbone for an Empire.

It is interesting, though, how political academia is. It's not the place to go for free and open enquiry: it's the place to go to train for war.

Death and Families

I don't agree with her -- but I do. Read here.

Empirical Fidelity vs. Faithful Translation

One of the ways in which our modern preoccupation with rendering empirically accurate models is inappropriately brought into the study of ancient texts related to history is the way that we tend to judge the text based on whether it can supply a correspondence or be verified by other correspondences. This may not be the best way to approach the meaning and intention of ancient texts.

I am reading Anna Silvas' The Asketikon of St Basil the Great (New York: Oxford, 2005) right now for a paper on St. Gregory of Nyssa, and she cites a large chunk from St. Rufinus on his intentions in translating a work of St. Gregory's about another St. Gregory:

When experienced teachers of the Sacred Scriptures try to convey something from the Greek language for Latin ears, they take care not to translate word for word, but sense for sense. And well they might. For if Latin discourse intended to imitate the Greek idiom, it would quite choke both the rhythm of speech and the sense of meaning. And this is also true for us in translating the life of Gregory Thaumaturgus from Attic speech. In recasting what the holy Gregory of Nyssa composed in a foreign, that is, in the Greek tongue, we have made many additions and many omissions, as the most suitable meaning required, attending to the sense while fittingly accomodating Latin readers.

Silvas continues: "Rufinus, in short, sought to refashion his Greek source document as a Latin work of art in its own right." This freedom simply wasn't necessarily seen as deceptive, but could be an honest effort at faithfully translating the meaning of a text.

Think of what this means for the Gospels: we should not read them imagining them as corresponding empirically to things as though they were camcorder reels. That doesn't mean we shouldn't deal with the very concrete images of the text, but we shouldn't confuse that with history unless it intends us to locate the meaning in history, or in relation to history.

Back to Me

It happens, and perhaps is happening more and more often, that as I pursue a pressing question which I think is about truth or the world or about <<insert anything external to oneself>>, it turns out that the question and the answer are really about me. This is refreshing, in a sense, because it is a kind of answer to some questions, but it is always completely unexpected for some reason. I'm not sure whether I should feel ashamed or delighted by that.

There are some kinds of self-knowledge which only certain paths of inquiry can deliver, perhaps; or perhaps I am simply very late at coming to the beginnings of a kind of self-knowledge that others with healthier family homes and upbringings take for granted. I don't know. But oddly I don't really care.

A.N. Wilson's Return to Christ

I finally found a book on the "Nous" about a month ago (which I hoped would dispel so much of the nonsense that a certain variety of Protestant converts to Orthodoxy say about it), and thought it looked to be worth reading. Then I came across this piece (three years old) by the same author. I must say, that when he simply offers his intuitions, I agree with him, but when he starts making stronger arguments, I don't think they hold up, even if the intuition that prompted the position being argued for is correct. How many of us are like this, though? --do we know ourselves, and see what we are really doing?

I think he has the right intuitions about academics. Unfortunately, they never come to the foreground. You just have to feel them out.

Peter Berger on One Element of Protestantism's Contribution to Secularism

"If compared with the "fullness" of the Catholic universe, Protestantism appears as a radical truncation, a reduction to "essentials" at the expense of a vast wealth of religious contents. This is especially true of the Calvinist version of Protestantism, but to a considerable degree the same may be said of the Lutheran and even the Anglican Reformations. Our statement, of course, is merely descriptive -- we are not interested in whatever theological justifications there may be either for the Catholic pleroma or for the evangelical spareness of Protestantism. If we look at these two religious constellations more carefully, though, Protestantism may be described in terms of an immense shrinkage in the scope of the sacred in reality, as compared with its Catholic adversary. The sacramental apparatus is reduced to a minimum and, even there, divested of its more numinous qualities. The miracle of the mass disappears altogether. Less routine miracles, if not denied altogether, lose all real significance for the religious life. The immense network of intercession that unites the Catholic in this world with the saints and, indeed, with all departed souls disappears as well. Protestantism ceased praying for the dead. At the risk of some simplification, it can be said that Protestantism divested itself as much as possible from teh three most ancient and most powerful concomitants of the sacred -- mystery, miracle, and magic. This process has been aptly caught in the phrase disenchantment of the world." The Protestant believer no longer lives in a world ongoingly penetrated by sacred beings and forces. Reality is polarized between a radically transcendent divinity and a radically "fallen" humanity that, ipso facto, is devoid of sacred qualities. Between them lies an altogether "natural" universe, God's creation to be sure, but in itself bereft of numinosity. In other words, the radical transcendence of God confronts a universe of radical immanence, of "closed-ness" to the sacred. Religiously speaking, the world becomes very lonely indeed."

    "The Catholic lives in a world in which the sacred is mediated to him through a variety of channels -- the sacraments of the church, the intercession of the saints, the recurring eruption of the "supernatural" in miracles -- a vast continuity of being between the seen and the unseen. Protestantism abolished most of these mediations. It broke the continuity, cut the umbilical cord between heave and earth, and thereby threw man back upon himself in a historically unprecedented manner. Needless to say, this was not its intention. It only denuded the world of divinity in order to emphasize the terrible majesty of the transcendent God and it only threw man into total "fallenness" in order to make him open to the intervention of God's sovereign grace, the only true miracle in the Protestant universe. In doing this, however, it narrowed man's relationship to the sacred to the one exceedingly narrow channel that it called God's word (not to be identified with a fundamentalist conception of the Bible, but rather with the uniquely redemptive action of God's grace -- the Sola Gratia of the Lutheran confessions). As long as the plausibility of this conception was maintained, of course, secularization was effectively arrested, even though all its ingredients were already present in the Protestant universe. It needed only the cutting of this one narrow channel of mediation, though, to open the floodgates of secularization. In other words, with nothing remaining "in between" a radically transcendent God and a radically immanent human world except this one channel, the sinking o the latter into implausibility left an empirical reality in which, indeed, "God is dead." This reality then became amenable to the systematic, rational penetration, both in thought and in activity, which we associate with modern science and technology. A sky empty of angels becomes open to the intervention of the astronomer and, eventually, of the astronaut. It may be maintained, then, that Protestantism served as a historically decisive prelude to secularization, whatever may have been the importance of other factors."

Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1967), 111-113.

Quote From Jakob Böhme

"For he that will say, I have a Will, and would willingly do Good, but the earthly Flesh which I carry about me, keepeth me back, so that I cannot; yet I shall be saved by Grace, for the Merits of Christ. I comfort myself with his Merit and Sufferings; who will receive me of mere Grace, without any Merits of my own, and forgive me my Sins. Such a one, I say, is like a Man that knoweth what Food is good for his Health, yet will not eat of it, but eateth Poison instead thereof, from whence Sickness and Death, will certainly follow."

DBH on Modernity

"Modernity is secularization. It is, in its essence, a project of detaching moral, legal, and governmental reasoning from any authority transcendent of the state or the individual. It is the project of an ethics conformed not to divine justice but to human reason and popular consensus; of a politics authorized not by divine ordinance but by the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state; and of a model of freedom based not on the perfection of human nature but on the unconstrained liberty of individual will."

How to Make a Failed Attempt at Voting Saints Off the Island

So I was looking for St. Ambrose of Milan's commentary On the Song of Songs in English, but couldn't find it: I did find this, however.

I challenge the reader to tell me what's wrong with this sentence on this particular web-page:

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN COMMENTARY ON SCRIPTURE. Edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall. This will be a 27 volume series of Patristic Commentaries on the Old and New Testament. This series gives the commentaries of the Church Fathers, as well as ecclesiastical writers like Augustine, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, on the Holy Scriptures.

I get tired of seeing these little jabs. No one does this for St. Gregory of Nyssa. 

War is a Force that Gives us Meaning

As I was ranging over one of the courses I took this past semester, I thought about the title to a book that came out not too long ago: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. In the class I took, historical material was covered in the most superficial way, and contemporary texts (which were often enough nothing more than news-media articles about social justice issues) were brought in to supplement these and to give them historical "relevance."

It's this social justice element that caught my attention. I would have taught this class differently: the students would have been thinking about theology, and no women's rights or power-issues or whatever. They would have had a robust exposure to each period and the issues that were native to each context: I would not have used these ancient writers as a foil for reinforcing and clarifying pre-existent prejudices.

Then I realized: it's war. The social-justicy stuff is simply a conflict to amp-up emotional force to keep some kind of motive power up so that the institution can justify itself. It gives a sense of meaning.

This gave me a window into modern sports culture and reality TV: in the absence of real meaning, people line up behind their favorite sports team or their TV idol to emotionally invest, not in the cause, but in the team or individual's conflicts. Meaning is simple, and is determined by the projected goal of victory.

Then I realized that although the monastic ideal sits rather precariously within the context of the modern academy, which has no ethical commitments or ascetical practices or spiritual ideals, a particular form of the monastic ideal does lie at the root of all of our modern forms of academic pursuit; without this foundation, however, the abandoned child of the academy can only seek shelter in the adopted arms of industry, or else adopt social justice as its pet ascesis, or as its ascetical chatter.