Glints and Gledes: Waning Crescent Moon In Gemini

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To love life lustily in the face of death, isn’t this everything? Isn’t this victory? I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

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There is no life where there are no changes, no pulse. And it was in the sense of “pulse” that repentance and fasting, the desert and prayer, were needed. (Rozanov)

I would say following on this, that the ascetic discipline of the Church is a great structure — a breathing, tied to the physical, natural year and its rhythms — but there is also a rhythm to your own life, which you should not ignore by chaining yourself to the Church rhythm completely. You might have years, epochs of your life that are “fasting seasons,” you might have other years, other epochs that are “feasting seasons.”

The Church gives you a model, an instruction, an inspiration, a reminder, not a straightjacket.

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Thinking about pre-existence and creation.

Problems that trouble me if time is infinite in both directions. Why hasn’t everything already happened? How is genuine novelty possible rather than Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence? And if intelligences have progressed forever, why aren’t we already infinitely advanced — why isn’t the work finished?

Some responses:

On the infinite past. The worry that one can’t “traverse” an infinity to reach now (kalam, Craig) smuggles in a starting point, but a beginningless past has none. For any past moment, only finitely many moments separate it from the present, so every moment reaches now by a finite path. The infinitude is in the number of moments, not the length of any traversal.

On recurrence and novelty. Nietzsche’s argument runs on the hidden premise that there are finitely many possible states, but this fails. Cosmologically, the universe needn’t be a bounded box; it could expand, its phase space could grow. Metaphysically and more deeply: a recurring configuration of atoms is only a recurring world if physical configuration exhausts the state of the world. Deny that, include memory, accumulated relation, the growing depth of the past, and two physically identical moments remain inwardly distinct because they have different pasts behind them. The infinite past then doesn’t “spend down” novelty; it creates it. Every present is the first to have this much behind it.

On the unfinished telos. Two assumptions here. First, that every arc has run for infinite time: but this is false; your probation began; no runner has been running forever, so nothing has “already arrived.” Second, that there’s a finish line infinite time should have reached. Here St Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis dissolves the question: perfection is perpetual stretching into the inexhaustible, where never arriving is the point. An infinite end isn’t a finite quantity that ought by now to be used up.

Funny to be enlisting St Gregory in support of an essentially Mormon cosmology but there you are.

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Also still reflecting on Rozanov’s “pulse” — aeons of rest, aeons of work and growth, forever. Then faith is knowing that where we are in this cycle is something that we’ve accepted, we’ve accepted to have the veil over knowledge of premortal existence, for the sake of growth, for the sake of discovering, challenging, ourselves in our depths — “what would I be without the vision of God” is the same question as “What am I, really?”

What a venture of discovery and creation, in that view, we’ve undertaken. Very impressive, universe and fellow souls!

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“Have you asked your priest?” should be replaced with “Have you gotten drunk with your priest?”

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As much as a this-worldly spirituality is inescapable for me, I will say that having no perspective of another world embracing and exceeding this one would make life unbearable.

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The funny thing is that AI should make us marvel not at machines, but at humans.

There is nothing it spits out but subtle rearrangements of things human beings have already thought and written.

We’re amazing. We’re unfathomable. We have thought and felt so much and recorded it in language. That’s the message I take away from AI.

AI itself is a distraction, a search engine at best, a subtle temptation to avoid the sweat and blood and tears of thinking and feeling at worst. And worse for the young who don’t already have an inner infrastructure of sweat and blood and tears, and as a result of this, won’t build one unless they’re very wise and based and determined.

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You know, even a merely “aeonic” Hell would be something to assiduously avoid.

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My final opinion is that everything must be done in moderation: both sorrow and joy must be measured — first to one its turn and its law and then to the other its turn and its law, without any “dictation of terms” by either and with man having complete freedom of choice. (Rozanov)

Some strange percolation going on in my mind between this and eternal progression… could we really imagine an infinite and eternal beatitude? What if beatitude got boring? What if the endless feast of the Kingdom got… sickening, and we longed again for hunger and want? What if there were a yet higher Kingdom that we could not reach until getting dissatisfied with the Kingdom we were in — and initiating another round of the Fall? What if the universalists are right, aeonic means “age-long” and not eternal… and the criticism that then the Kingdom of Heaven is also “aeonic” falls flat, because… it must be?

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Thou who dancest with Me,

Look at thyself in Me;

And seeing what I do, be silent…

Learn in the dance

That I wish to suffer

With thy human suffering…

Who I am, thou wilt learn when I depart:

I am not He who I seem.

Acts of John

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Merezhkovsky records a tradition that when John the Theologian died, those who listened above his grave could still hear him breathing gently like a sleeping child, and that he will still be sleeping when the Lord comes again.

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I genuinely think this world is so agonizingly painful that human evil is largely just our writhing around in response to it, and thus we don’t really “love sin” as much as we live in terror of a death for which we are most definitely not responsible. We don’t need greater burdens and the Lord said he didn’t come to give such to us.

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A reference of Jesus to “my Mother, the Holy Spirit” is quoted from the lost Gospel of the Hebrews by both Origen and Jerome. Klijn comments:

“The idea that the Holy Spirit is a feminine being is well known in Hebrew and Syriac texts and this is also the reason why Jerome was interested in this passage. The second step is to conclude that the Spirit was ‘Mother.’ This may go back to pre-Christian Syriac or Mesopotamian sources, but it seems a logical conclusion. For example, we find in Philo, de ebr. 30 ‘One mentions father and mother together, but their significance is different. Thus we shall, for example, call the creator rightly also Father of what has come into existence, but Mother the knowledge of him who created. With her God has lived together and he has brought forth creation, but not in the way of men. She, however, received God’s seed and she brought forth the only beloved perceptible son, this world, as a ripe fruit with pains.’ This idea was taken over by Christian tradition. Wisdom is held to have sons not only in Sir. 4,11, but also according to Luke 7,35. The Syriac author Aphraates writes that as long as man is not married he loves God and he serves Him as his Father and the Holy Spirit as his Mother. In the Syriac Acts of Thomas the Holy Spirit is repeatedly called Mother.”

(I am not promoting Philo here. Philo, you do Philo.)

Merezhkovsky comments:

“Only here, outside the canon, as though outside the Church, though perhaps the Church is broader than she herself knows, is the dogma of the Trinity completed, the dogma of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit-Mother.”

So much to say here but I think I finally have the courage of my convictions to say — we have here the Christian Goddess, and the resonances of Ruach — Gaia — Mariam — Mother have yet to be brought forth.

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I love the vital, ecstatic inebriation of young people, but there is a sweetness and a tenderness that can come from life’s long defeat — the defeat of our dreams that is Providence’s gift of wakefulness and sobriety. A gentle seriousness that Kipling evokes — if we can “watch the things [we] gave [our] life to, broken, and stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.”

Without that gentleness, the fire is too fierce; but without that fire, the heart is cold. Perhaps this is one alchemy of life lived well, that is, a life of correct transformation, an alchemy of love: to make of life’s fire a hearth for the world and all her creatures.

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Where are the Wyrd Christian ascetic shaman visionaries to go to Muir’s fastnesses of northern mountains and waters, to speak to the spirits and preach them the Gospel?

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The Church as tradition is thus a world of memory, a space of memory, of anamnesis (the use of the term should indicate that I am not wholly off the rails here). This anamnesis gives shape to our intention and our tenderness — but it does not at all mean subservience to the ideology of others or acquiescence to propaganda, I wrote in this piece:

And Mormon theologian James Faulconer writes:

Recall is a psychological event. Memory is what we share and participate in. As such, it gives direction (intention) beyond our subjective intentions, often intentions we do not know. It also creates expectations of us that are beyond our will but are part of who we are.

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But best is the ferment of bees:

only their honey shall sweeten

the mead in the high cup.

Best for the honey-isle

a dragon who drinks deep of the draught.

Caitlin Matthews

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Tzimtzum — if God were obvious, we couldn’t be free. Works even for finitist theisms, for polytheisms. If deity is real, why is deity so hard to apprehend? Because if deity were blindingly obvious, we couldn’t exist.

“If there’s no room for doubt, there’s no room for me” — Beuchner.

“What will you make of yourself, of your soul, when what you do has to come from your own depths, when it is not compelled by the vision of Me?” — God

And if you are not really wrestling, if you are not really going to the roots to find and see and know what is good and true and beautiful, to know it because you know it, not because you’ve been told it — you are not on the God Train. Everyone on that train is my brother and sister, no matter what kind of maniac, no matter what kind of religious or irreligious opinion. Everyone on that train is looking for the face of Christ. That authenticity is what I am scenting as I seek, what I want in my fellow travellers — not adherence to dogma — as my friend Laeth says, that’s not a sin, but it is boring.

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I will not say that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to say that that it is my longing to live and to live forever that inspires these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in strengthening and sustaining this longing in another, perhaps when it was all but dead, then I shall have performed a man’s work, and, above all, I shall have lived.

Unamuno

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