Glints and Gledes: Waning Crescent Moon In Cancer
I can now witness from personal experience that the owl of Minerva flies also at dawn.
I have been taught the script of stones, and I know the tongue of the wave.
Vernon Watkins
Even deeper than “let this cup pass from me” is “let this cup pass from the one I love.” Prayer like blood.
Where is the Christianity that arises from the other mind, the mythopoetic mind? Where and what is the Christianity that is genuinely prophetic, genuinely inspired, not a matter of creed and dogma? Emphatically I do not mean a bibliolatry that is just another logocentrism, one even more deeply impoverished than the tradition against which it sets itself.
Spent a day in Laguna Beach. Reminded me of Johnstown, Pennsylvania in the 90s: a city apparently its polar opposite — a poor Euro melting pot proleville given over to post-industrial decay, versus a wealthy, utterly deracinated cosmopolitan playground of dully aspirational hedonism.
Yet they’re fundamentally the same: human wastelands built in places of deep natural beauty. In both places, with effort, one can see through to that beauty, somehow feel the earth, sea, and sky behind and beneath the wasteland.
But in Laguna the wasteland is so congenial to the baser instincts of human pleasure-seeking that it becomes a strangely intense spiritual effort to bracket it and see past it; in Johnstown, the cancer of Rust Belt decay confined itself to the crater of the city proper, and as soon as you got outside it into the mountains, your vision became clearer, which is why hunting was probably the best antidote to opiate addiction. In Laguna the cancer has metastasized — this is the “success” of American (now global) consumer capitalism. It doesn’t confine itself to a downtown; it’s not a tumor confined to one place in the body. It penetrates every cell of the body of human experience, it has become legion.
We are hell-bent on incarnating our dreams into physical reality without being able to determine beforehand what is dream and what is nightmare. Or perhaps I should say: these days, the dreams are all personal, but the nightmares are all collective, and therefore vastly more powerful in their realization in the waking world.
My father never understood my love for this music, but once, in the last summer of his life, we sat and listened to this record, this heart of my heart and soul of my soul, and he said, “I feel the longing in it.”
I love Tolkien for exactly the same reason I love the Gospel, this should not be hard to understand.
When you see that people are living out archetypes, it really helps you have compassion on them. It also makes you more interested in studying them and less interested in arguing with them.
I am not sure I agree about myth as human creation. I think of myth not as something we construct, but as something we inhabit, something that is given to us, that we discover. So willy nilly, we are living in myth; the question for me is the relation of critical reason and myth. Perhaps — myths are things we construct; myth is the depth dimension of experiential reality. But “myths” in that sense just means “stories.”
But what is the spring from which the stories issue? We can only know it through the stories, but the stories come from elsewhere, this is their whole pathos, this is why we tell them, isn’t it? Isn’t Frankenstein itself more than a mere veneer? And it’s right at the source of modernity so to speak, right at the place where modernity emerges into light.
But in terms of orientation, and I mean above all moral orientation, “what then shall we do?” — critical reason is a power of discernment — but in itself it does what I feel it doing in your post above — dissolving, dissociating, that is its pure effect, the source of its salutary power and its destructiveness as well. Yet myth in itself is perhaps the opposite tendency, blurring finally the distinction of good and evil; why I reach a point of frustration with Jung. Critical consciousness brings discernment to myth, myth brings life to critical consciousness, they require each other, each alone is intolerable and destructive, yet they can’t coexist, or rather, they coexist, but with inescapable conflict. Modernity is not so much non-mythic — it is alive and therefore lives from myth inescapably — as it is anti-mythic, struggling against its own roots. Not severed from them, because it can’t be as long as it exists, but at war with them. And yet it’s a praiseworthy war, the human heart rebels against the darkness myth has wrought on human life, at the same time that it feels a deathly thirst when it refuses to drink from the mythic well.
Alexei Losev in the conclusion to his enormous work on ancient philosophy and mythology:
Perhaps from some point of view it would be simpler and more reasonable to find oneself only in eternity and not in time, to avoid following all the endless zigzags of the historical process. But what can you do? That’s life.
Our poverty makes us dream of abundance, but the abundance of which we dream, when we dream it into an absolute, devours the concrete reality in which any meaning could become known. If consolation is final and perfect, we are annihilated.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Our poverty is the human tzimtzum which responds to the divine tzimtzum that opened the space in which we could be. Our response, once we are, is to open a space in ourselves in which God can be — or else not to open this space. This is the victory of the Fiat of the Mother of God.
A cette aube de l’an 2000, Dieu, plus que jamais, s’est évanoui dans l’Infini. Et si nous n’avons plus de Père, nous n’avons plus de Mère : nous ne pouvons plus compter sur la Nature. L’homme est adulte; il doit désormais penser et décider par lui-même. Mais est-il de force à se supporter orphelin?
And again… “What room is left for freedom in this machine, geared from the outset to arrive at the Absolute? I shall be told that I am simplifying the Father's thought; but if he does happen to mention freedom in passing, in some recess of his fresco, at what point does he ever insist on its central and tragically decisive character? What depth, what seriousness, belongs to a freedom that no longer has to dread losing itself utterly, whose risks are thus covered by the immense net that God and the Cosmos stretch between it and the abyss? Like all systems of justification designed to reassure our weakness, Fr. Teilhard's can only be a source of immobility: of spiritual and practical conformism.”
Charbonneau has me thinking, thinking… about the parallel movement of modernity, away from divine transcendence and away from nature. Such a reversal; I am used to diagnosing the opposite, that divine transcendence is what drives the eclipse of nature… but I feel this. That it is not so much that the Absolute devours Nature, as that the infinite devours God; and this infinite that devours God is the “bad infinity,” it is the infinity of the world, and when the transcendent is gone and only the world is left — when the Father is gone, then it is that the world ceases to be Mother.
Can’t quite grasp this reversal. One of those shifts of perspective that changes everything. In this light I see how in a sense personalism is the most radical reaction and I mean “reaction” in a positive sense (being something of a reactionary myself, really).
The real question is whether this vanishing of God into the Infinite is a betrayal of classical/philosophical theism, or its consummation…
On imagination in prayer: the rational mind and imagination are inseparable. Not to mention that the Lord Himself invited our imagination when he counseled us to “consider the lilies” in their physical absence, as indeed we do every time we sit in a chair and read that text when there are no nearby lilies for us to see with our physical eyes. The rigorist reading is clearly just ludicrous and impossibly wrong.
“Seventy times seven must thou forgive thy brother, for sinful words are found even among the prophets sanctified by the Holy Ghost.”
Thus, Jerome’s preservation of an agraphon in his Dialogue Against the Pelagians. Corroborated by notes in a family of Greek minuscule texts which include readings attributed to “the Jewish Gospel.”
Sermo peccati / λόγος ἁμαρτίας is not idiomatic in either Latin or Greek. Both look like calques on a Semitic construction where דבר carries “word / matter / thing,” yielding “something sinful was found in them” rather than “a sinful utterance.”
At any rate — so much for bibliolatry. The Gospel > the Canon.
I reflect that contra-Pelagian sentiment should include not merely the idea that human religious self-sufficiency carries the risk of justifying excessive self-indulgence; it carries the risk also of excessive self-constraint. The fact that semi-Pelagian Irish Christianity gave us the Penitentials and through missionary zeal spread them throughout Europe and fundamentally infected its reception of Christianity with hyper-Augustinian anthropological pessimism should be confirmation enough of this observation.
“The New Testament is full of the presence of angels, announcing the Incarnation, praising God at the birth of the Redeemer, helping Jesus at the time of temptation and coming to his assistance in the Agony in the Garden — that eternal moment of divine unmanning when ‘horror and dismay came over him.’
“A great and terrifying work is being accomplished in the darkness of this cosmos, and we are all part of it. We are all menaced by unthinkably powerful forces of darkness, and the more deeply we enter this world the more we need help from the heavenly presences and messengers. I am convinced they are at hand to help us, convinced that they are with us every single day, and at every moment of every day. The servant is not greater that his master. If the Christ needed this help, much more do I need it. Never is this help more present than when my countenance mirrors however dimly that Dark Ikon that is the suffering Christ, who triumphs over the cosmos by filling it with the glory of his love, and the power of his Resurrection.”
Fr Noel Dermot O’Donoghue
Revelation is the seed, the human heart is the soil, prophetic imagination is the rain.
Rationalism is nothing but the flight from eros.
Music is more true than speech. Tolkien’s cosmogony, in which the Ainur sing the world into being, is a revelation, the homage of language to music, the homage of the river and the rain to the sea. We can’t regain the Gospel with the written text of the Gospel alone.
Whales are Gaia’s cosmic shamans singing epic tales and upholding the soul of the earth.
The problem with all philosophized Christianity is that is has no salting of magic. Every strain of actually existing Christianity that’s really alive has magic, has strangeness, has daring doctrines that it asserts out of a superabundance of wonder and inspiration, not out of reason, even when they’re clothed in reason with a kind of shyness and modesty that hesitates to assert the wonder nakedly.
Every orthodoxy is an attempt to free Jesus from some preceding orthodoxy. “Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.”
She gave herself without reproach, She kissed without a word. — How deep the dark sea is, How the edges of the clouds draw breath!
She did not repeat, “No, don’t,” She waited for no vows. — How sweetly the cool air breathes, How the evening mist dissolves!
She did not dread retribution, She had no fear of loss. — How wondrously the constellations shine, How the stars burn, deathless!
(Konstantin Balmont)
Everything I write is a love note to my little in case I die before I can somehow tell her what fills my heart.
I want to live in the timeline where Russian Symbolists spearheaded a successful reformation of Orthodoxy.
We are always, on a micro level, a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, and so are all our cultures — especially our religious cultures.
Ramblings before liturgy.
I have to say in the end, after all the fever of metaphysical-speculation-cum-subterranean-wishful-thinking-and-fear-of-death, that classical theism’s God is simply not credible in the face of the depth of suffering in the world. None of the explanations that rescue belief in a God who is genuinely capable of intervening to avert or lessen this suffering, and doesn’t do so, work.
I think mostly, those who think these explanations do work succeed in holding that view by turning their face from the enormity and absurdity and soul-crushing, desolating cruelty of the way the universe actually unfolds: or at least, by doing so in the moment they’re making the argument, whatever they think and feel during moments of inward and hidden prayer.
One would have to believe that God set all this in motion knowing the depth of violence, torment, cruelty, and darkness that would reign in the created order, and “trust” that the outcome he saw would somehow outweigh it all — for me, nope — I return the ticket.
Somehow God must be the kind of God who cannot so intervene, whose power is simply not the kind of power that operates in such a way. That is, God can’t be a superperson who refrains from intervention for this or that reason.
Either God’s power is, as construed by process thought, persuasive, that is, God acts by offering beings the lure of a future, but does not exercise efficient causation — or, God is indeed a being among many competing supernatural beings who are at war with one another, a great cosmic war is going on, and God’s power is fundamentally causally efficacious, but is limited by the causally efficacious power of adverse beings, there is a real contest going on.
Something to be said for both of these views. But on balance I think I favor the former. The former gives me the peace of believing that in my heart’s highest perception of values, in the purest vision I can muster in the most fiery crucible of longing or suffering or joy, I am in harmony with the deepest truth of the universe and not merely in harmony with a particular power operative in the universe.
Some might argue that both of these positions might be true: there might be a real transcendent Deity of the process sort who is oriented to the good, and there might also be finite supernatural beings at war with one another and human beings be caught in the crossfire, with various “rescue missions” underway (Jesus would be one of these of course).
But you know, looking at the world as it is, that panoply of warring powers seems to be one in which the good and the evil are pretty evenly matched. I see no evidence of the overpowering “might” of the God of Israel. I’d rather just chuck the whole thing than believe I am a cringing worm on a battlefield of gods and angels, and this is pretty much the perspective taken by modernity.
Metaphorically, yes of course, it all makes sense, it’s a cool story, this hypostatization of natural forces into warring deities, makes for great myth that conveys some wise existential counsel for living. But it doesn’t finally get me anywhere, in terms of inward peace, whereas a process monotheism does.
And that same process monotheism gives me other benefits, for example, a warm liberality combined with a sober skepticism about all absolute claims of religious truth. God is leading us, always and ever by appealing to the depths of our hearts, and no understanding we ever have is final or complete. Life is an adventure, both for God and for us.
Lazy day with the little. Reading Charlotte’s Web. A mention of crickets made me say, Let’s go for a walk at “cricket time.” Let’s always call that time “cricket time.”
And suddenly, strangely, I thought, I want to meet Jesus walking to me at “cricket time,” the cricket time I know in the body of my life, my whole body of memory and feeling — I want him to walk out of the world of ancient Israel, out of the world of the Church, out of the world of Christian history, out of all the worlds where others have tried to possess him and ensnare him — I want to meet him walking out of those worlds, and into my world, on a mountain road at dusk, at cricket time.
A long sorrow, culminating at its very summit in an unearthly joy — this is Christianity. The black color, at its very crown, suddenly turns to white. Christianity teaches definitely and indisputably that all of life is sin, is the anti-divine, is sin and death: and yet, after death — a white radiance, eternal life, the vision of God. The monastery, with its bright, joyful painting, is only one of several parallel rays going in this same direction.
But here is another: the whole of monasticism — in black mantles and cowls (night), without a single white, or grey, or colored stripe in its dress; but the one in whom monasticism is crowned and in whom the whole solidly black hierarchy of the Church culminates — puts upon his head a pure white cowl, while the rest of his vestments remain black (the vesture of a metropolitan, and probably of patriarchs).
By what instinct did this arrangement of garments come about? No one deliberately put this thought into it. Yet it “came out” so that the thought was legible even in the clothing. A blade goes forth, but it has an edge. The whole blade of Christianity is black; but the edge is white. And so it is everywhere, from the painting to the vestments, from the division of the clergy into black and white, to the day and night services, to the division of all Christian time into black fasts, crowned by the triumph of Pascha, of the Nativity, of the Dormition.
This is not a dogma. Where is such a dogma? But this is far more than dogma, for it pierces through the whole fabric of Christianity, from foundation to summit, and forms its very soul. Yet this “leitmotif” has no formula at all: no definite teaching about it whatever. Ask any theologian about this, and he will answer: “I don’t know, it never occurred to me; this is not on the list of questions [we address].”
Sometimes it seems that Christianity lives not at all by the theses it pronounces aloud, but truly lives by those theses which it never utters, and which, consciously, reflectively, it does not even know it holds — though all hearts beat in time with them.
Vassily Rozanov
Rozanov on the personal character of starchestvo (eldership) as a deepening response to the homogenization of monasticism:
Eldership [starchestvo], now mightily risen throughout Russia — for there is scarcely a good monastery without its own “elder” — represents precisely a resurrection of the person within monasticism, and at the same time a deepening of it, a subjectivism, a shedding of officialdom’s burdensome features.
Such, too, were the very earliest “hermits,” of the second and third centuries — without “tonsure,” without office, free in inspiration and in feat. But in the fourth, fifth, and later centuries there arose a desire to further raise up, shape, and “perfect” this powerful phenomenon still further. The “rule” surpassed the hermit-life — and there arose the “monastery” as a uniform, impersonal cohabitation of many, whose life henceforth flowed in the strictest submission to minutely detailed regulations.
Eldership, before our own eyes, has appeared as a reaction toward that most ancient, free, and personal feat (podvig). Just as the monastery cannot but be bound up with the notion of “brethren,” so eldership, the elders, cannot be imagined as many together.
Thus, though eldership clusters around monasteries, and the elders themselves belong to the order of monks and hieromonks, they nonetheless show forth, in themselves, an unnoticed and quiet, yet at the same time mighty and evidently victorious, kind of antagonism toward the monastery as statute and form — a transformation of both its forms and its spirit.
Rozanov on St Seraphim of Sarov, and the grace of the eremetical life:
At the time when Pushkin was writing “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” when the Decembrists were poring over Lamartine and Byron was singing “Childe Harold,” in the age of the congresses, of Metternich, in the age of a beginning social ferment — in these forests there lived a man who showed an astonishing resurrection of those quiet, contemplative souls who, in the second, third, and fourth centuries of our era, lived in the deserts of Libya, Sinai, Syria.
No saint of the Russian land has ever, without any deliberate intent, so repeated those great figures on whom, properly, as on a bridge on its piles, Christianity itself rests. And what special words did they have? what teaching? They left no volumes: though in the trembling memory of posterity two or three, five or six of their sayings, their “utterances,” have been preserved. Where, then, is their hidden power? Untraceable. But heaven said something to them. A mark of heaven lay upon their brow. Everyone felt this; and again: how they felt it, through what — impossible to trace! But everyone remembered, everyone marked it.
Everyone has come here ever since. This is a special place, a special face, not to be confused with the wise men, with the great raisers of history’s will, like Hus, Jerome of Prague, Luther. Here — all is quiet. Was there here even the least untruth, such as exists everywhere, in everything on earth, through human weakness, through human sin?
It seems to me that the essence of “hermit-life,” in its first and purest phase, lay precisely in the desire to “flee from sin.” For “sin” always arises from a confusion of circumstances, from their collision with a man’s own person, and of a man’s person with them.
Withdraw into solitude — and you will become a little better. Withdraw for a long time — and the soul will grow calm. On this rest the religious ideas of rest, of a feast (a noiseless one), and of peace. Finally, go away for your whole life into the forests, to the stars, to the morning sun, to the life-giving dew; pass your hand across this cold dew at dawn, or, climbing a hillock, watch the sun set into the crowns of the trees — and so today, tomorrow, always — and the soul will grow clear, will become transparent, like a teardrop of dew on the grass, without murk in itself, without dust on itself. It will merge with nature, become indistinguishable from it. And nature will, as it were, already in life absorb such a man into itself, as it absorbs everyone after death. And then animals will come to such a man, unafraid of him, even loving him, even somehow understanding him — and he will comprehend them with a new comprehension.
There were souls with an original aversion, within themselves, to multiplicity, to diversity, with an original, strong, and somewhat monotonous disposition of soul. Among us, four writers — Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and, somewhat less, Tolstoy — can very readily be imagined as monks; Pushkin — impossible, even though he wrote “The Desert Fathers.” A man of diversity and instability of soul does not fit for monkhood at all. So then — the style of souls, monotonously strong, imperceptibly took hold of the original seed of the Gospel and gave it its own exclusive working-out. For both “Christian society” and “the Christian family” are problems, not facts. But the monastery — this is a fact, and moreover a long-ripened one. Christianity ripened only in the monastery. Here is its indisputable summit, its point: family, society, the state and its institutions — all this is simply a phenomenon of the pagan order, to which the Gospel has never really attached itself, and which has never really attached itself, fitted itself, to the Gospel.
Vassily Rozanov
In monasticism Christianity acquired for itself a style — that is, acquired that “taste” which governs the innumerable particulars of religious expression.
This is more important than dogma, immeasurably more important! Dogma is thought, knowledge, cognition; but religion, in any case, is not cognition but the beating of a heart — grieving, moved, or living through a thousand other feelings! It is eternal in man.
Every man, almost every man, is the center of a tiny religion, particular, mysterious, his own; and only because people in general are not dissimilar, because they link together into masses, do these tiny religions flow together into one great one.
There are not, properly speaking, two people with an absolutely identical religion, whose “faith” would resemble each other as “a” and “a” in algebra. Nor is this needed; it would be the death of religion as man’s eternal companion on earth, the “ark” of his soul, which he carries through the vanity of life as the Jews carried their national ark through the desert.
Vassily Rozanov
“Where is the Christianity that arises from the other mind, the mythopoetic mind?” - not within a day of Laguna Beach, mon frere