Kenosis or Power?

There can be no vacuum in existence, so we are left with two metaphysical choices that can fill the void: Truth or Power. Truth, or more specifically kenosis, is a Relationship with the Divine that can only happen through our self-emptying. But relationships take time as we must build trust gradually in our all our interactions (vertical and horizontal). That’s probably why institutions, such as the Western Church, relied more on rules/ideas/rituals. These are more scalable for a culture; however, at a cost.

Unlike the late-Augustinian influenced Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church understood that Truth can be experienced genuinely in this life (and not the next). Eugene Webb makes an insightful point in his excellent book:

“Here we can see emerging in the different traditions of East and West two contrasting paradigms not only of authority but also of Christology, ecclesiology, and soteriology: one conceives the Church as the body of Christ, whose sonship to the Father is the true life in which all members participate, receiving the Spirit as Jesus himself did, and moved by the “Spirit of truth” (John 15:26) in their efforts to understand the Triune God from within by participation in Christ; the other conceives the Church as a society of obedient followers under tutelage, led by those who represent the various levels of authority in an official hierarchy under a God who is known from without through the mediation of that hierarchy. For the one, salvation consists of present participation in Christ’s life; for the other, it consists of the avoidance of punishment otherwise due for original sin and of the reward to be gained in return for obedience to God’s commands as relayed by the chain of authority.”

Things didn’t need to be grasped through legalism or rites, but “a mystery that can be approached through inward participation and the illumination of the Holy Spirit.” Yet, the Western Church was drawn more to its formalities around rules/ideas/rituals. While this scaled mimetically better than mysticism (often better suited for spiritual monastics and adepts), it also created a loss of a rich inner life for its laity. At best, the Church managed to offer a mirage of spiritual ascent through rote practices and sacraments, while keeping the laity bound to the material world. 

Not unexpectedly this approach allowed the Western Church to continue to fill much of the void with power, not just power of its dominating hierarchy which led to many historical transgressions, but also reinforcing the internal power dynamics we sinfully adhere to. This is not only taking on the power to stand in judgement over others, but to stand judgement over ourselves as well. While self-mastery requires constant discernment and repentance, it not about acquiring power for the self but preparing the self to receive a Relationship with God. 

For instance, believing yourself to be a good Catholic, spiritual person, or humanitarian because you’ve followed certain guidelines or acted virtuously can do more harm than good. You’ve hypnotized yourself into a kind of tunnel vision, ignoring some unconsciously repressed or negative feelings. As your positive self-regard grows, so does the negative (where one foot is in heaven, the other is in hell). Eventually this edifice collapses under its own façade. The control of one’s image (power) has not allowed one to see reality as it is in the image of God (kenosis).    

While the Eastern Church has affirmed kenosis over power more so than the West, Webb does not let either Church off the hook:

“A tradition of spiritual understanding and practice is not something that simply by its intrinsic merit can be a secure possession of the Christian East any more than of the West, and to the extent that its full depth and beauty become partially lost by either, they can also be regained, in the West as well as in the East—but only by self-emptying openness, serious intellectual labor, earnest moral and spiritual excavation, and perhaps painful repentance.”

In other words, no institution can save us. We must do the work for ourselves!

Backwards and Onwards

John Henry Newman said, “we walk to Heaven backwards.”

What he meant by this could be seen from a couple angles. First, we can only rest in the deeper nature of our innocence when we commune with the Divine. That requires us to step back from grasping on to the contents of our mind. It is almost like a falling back away from the conditional world while we become more rooted in an unconditional (heavenly) absolute.

The walk backwards could also mean the re-cognition of first principles. While there are no permanent outcomes, there are permanent values. Sometimes we need to go backward to go forward, and with this I believe Newman was espousing the value of (heavenly) tradition.

There are two countervailing impulses of human history: Arcadianism and Eutopianism. The view of Arcadia holds that everything was perfect in the beginning, such as the Biblical Eden, and that all corruption is the result of man's fall from original innocence. The project of Arcadianism then is to return everything to its original state, reverse the effects of the fall, and shed all of the accretions of the fallen world. We see this with traditionalists, eco-radicals, Romantics, perennialists, some eastern religions, etc.

The Eutopian view asserts that the situation was not ideal in the beginning, and that our focus must be on man's progress. The goal is therefore to build the Great City of Zion. The City of God is subsumed into the City of Man. We see this with modernists, evolutionists, Hegelians, some Judeo-Christian movements, etc.

As with most things, the truth is more nuanced than either of these impulses. We can’t resolve these tensions, but maybe we can inhabit them.

While things were probably never pristine by any stretch of the imagination assuming we could take a ride on the wayback machine, the sense of original purity is not to be dismissed. It points us to the deep feeling-sense that something is not quite right today. The real issue is when we compensate that vertical loss for some horizontal gain towards progress. We reject the transcendence for some false good to be immanentized in the world. But the sad truth is such a transformation can never be completed in history, but only in ourselves.

I believe evolution and progress should be seen more as man's progress towards Godliness. Man's salvation/liberation/sanctification is individual, happening to one person at a time, and constitutes a metamorphosis of the person into a more mature, God-like entity. Natural selection and civilized advancements are not the key factors here. The evolution of mankind as a species and life on Earth at large, in which natural selection and man-made advancements plays its real role, has to be understood in light of building up the City of God, a city fit for gods to inhabit.

Maybe we need to walk backwards first.

Modern Times, Better Times?

I came across an older post from David Bentley Hart chiming in about Steven Pinker's pollyannaish views on the Western Enlightenment. This post was a response to Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, although his follow-up book is in a similar vein.

Pinker obviously believes we live in better times, and in many regards he is correct. I am very happy that my dentist has novocaine or that I am not a slave to anyone but my mind parasites.

So while we cheerlead for Enlightenment ideas that made us seemingly more civil and advanced, maybe consideration is needed towards our simplistic notions around civility and progress. 

Hart notes, “It is perfectly fair for Pinker to call attention to the many brutal features of much of medieval life, but one would have more confidence in his evenhandedness if he acknowledged at least a few of the moral goods that medieval society achieved despite its material privations.”

And that's one good point: our ancestors achieved much (morally and socially) considering how little they had at their disposal.

When it comes to violent deaths, there are fewer when comparing the past to today as a percentage of global population.  Nevertheless, it is also about how we statistically view it. “Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens” (Hart).

In absolute numbers around the count of human massacre, we aren't doing that well. Let's recall how bloody the 20th century was. 

Lest we forget, while the gang of Bacon, Descartes, and Kant get much of the credit, “The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is the direct outgrowth of cosmological speculations in what we currently label the High Middle Ages — built upon the Christian theological insight that the universe God created must make sense” (Warren). 

But now we lack those Christian insights that once augmented the moral underpinnings to the scientific revolution. Western Enlightenment “reason” will only get you so far. As Thomas Merton once said, “the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice.” 

As with any meta-narrative, the shortcomings often come more with omission than commission. We can all point to the material prosperity that has ensued over the last couple centuries, but we should also not forget how our new era brought on many murderous secular ideologies, destructive and addictive technologies, and the continuing lapse of hard virtues.

We are probably better in some ways, but not as great as we'd like to believe. Perhaps that's partly due to the fact we have lost some of the depth that would have given us better standards to see that.

Byzantium Joy

Since Western civilization was founded on Judeo-Christian values and Greco-Roman law, we are fortunate that Constantine decided to shift the capital of his empire from Rome to Constantinople. At the time, Rome had become vulnerable to the barbarian tribes from the north. This move to an eastern capital allowed the Roman empire to last another thousand years. Constantinople was a fresh start, a city without a history, founded exclusively on the new religion. This is the place where Constantine would elevate Christianity from a persecuted sect to the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The Eastern part of the Roman Empire known as Byzantium mostly prospered, while the Western part of the empire eventually collapsed under the weight of the Germanic invasions. While this led to a Dark Age upon Europe, this was not the case with Byzantium. Unlike the Western Church, which struggled, but eventually thrived by engaging in worldly affairs, the Byzantine Church withdrew to more monastic and mystical affairs. This would eventually take root as the Orthodox tradition of the Christian faith.

As part of lent season, I am reading several Orthodox contemplative texts by Frederica Mathewes-Green, Kyriacos Markides, and Martin Laird. The appreciation you find with the Eastern Church is the deep and rich mystical tradition that allows for the experiential connection to God. Yet, we come to see God is beyond experience. I suppose if more westerners were aware of this historic thread, they would not necessarily seek out those other Eastern religious traditions. As Markides points out, “Christianity, a Catholic bishop in Maine once told me, has two lungs. One is Western, meaning rational and philosophical, and the other Eastern, meaning mystical and otherworldly.”

While the Church of Rome's focus on the rational and philosophical had its place, it was the Byzantium tradition that gave the Church its center. This lineage began with the Desert Fathers and Mothers who sought out loving communion with the silent depths of God. It was by centering in these depths, that a soul strength in the early Christians began to endure. Mathewes-Green notes, “How come Christians who lived in times of bloody persecution were so heroic, while we who live in safety are fretful and pudgy? How could the earlier saints “pray constantly,” while our minds dawdle over trivialities? How could they fast so valiantly, and we feel deprived if there's no cookie at the end of the in-flight meal? How could the martyrs forgive their torturers, but my friend's success makes me pouty? What did previous generations of Christians know that we don't?”

One such early practice from the Desert Father Evagrius of Pontus instructs the following: “Let him keep careful watch over his thoughts. Let him observe their intensity their periods of decline and follow them as they rise and fall.” As we go deeper into the cave of the heart, we can inquire: Are we these thoughts? Where do thoughts appear from? What is the nature of these thoughts, and who is aware of them?

Laird says,

“Precisely because our deepest identity grounding the personality is hidden with Christ in God and beyond the grasp of comprehension, the experience of this ground-identity that is one with God will register in our perception, if indeed it does register, as an experience of no particular thing, a great, flowing abyss, a depthless depth. To those who know only the discursive mind, this may seem a death-dealing terror or spinning vertigo. But for those whose thinking mind has expanded into heart-mind, it is an encounter brimming over with the flow of vast, open emptiness that is the ground of all. This "no thing," this "emptiness" is not an absence but a superabundance.”

While we can't escape metaphysics and discursive thinking, such reasoning can be in service of the whole. As Theophan noted in regards to thoughts about God only make God appear outside you, it is the Byzantium practices of the Eastern Church that allowed for the Kingdom of God to be within you.

“In an age when people claim to be "spiritual, not religious"—not really knowing what they mean by either—lack of proper motivation is common. We must long for truth, freedom, loving communion with the silent depths of God. (Laird)”

Four Inklings Walk Into a Bar...

Here's the scenario: you're a fly on a wall at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford on Thursday night, and you encounter J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams chatting about metaphysics. What do you say? Not much, since you're a fly after all. But even as a person, you would most likely be verklempt. In such fortune, enough satisfaction would come for the opportunity to at least eavesdrop.

Such was my experience to much extent reading The Fellowship. Lewis would coyly say, “We smoked, talked, argued, and drank together.” In a sense, that was all true. There was nothing fashionable about the Inklings. They were a small group of white men who got together to talk about religion, literature, and philology while smoking and eating unhealthy pub food. But I would have loved to have been a part of it!

Behind all the pub levity and intellectual quarreling, there was a intent of high aim through their writing. As the Zaleskis note, “their great hope was to restore Western culture to its religious roots, to unleash the powers of the imagination, to reenchant the world through Christian faith and pagan beauty.” This wasn't seen as a return to the past, as it was making the present more alive. These were challenging times with two major incessant wars that consumed their day. These men were restoring light through the darkness of modernity. Lewis, the former atheist, would go on the say, “Something inside me seems to be so intensely and burningly alive, and everything round me so starkly dead...” 

“The members' shared Christianity also included a wide spectrum of views. Tolkien was Catholic, Barfield, Anthroposophist; Lewis, a "mere Christian"; Charles Williams, Anglican with a dash of ritual magic. Differences notwithstanding, the members were glued together by shared adherence to the Nicene Creed... and a shared set of enemies, including atheists, totalitarians, modernists, and anyone with a shallow imagination.” As such, they had much to work with. 

Instead of being overly sanctimonious, these men worked with cultural forms they had at their disposal. Tolkien emphasized recovery, escape, and consolation as a model for his imaginary epic tails. Lewis approached his novels similarly, but also a defended Christianity in his other books in a straightforward, rational way that didn't echo the preachiness of early-day chaplains. Barfield carved out an evolutionary framework that bridged science and spirit. And Williams brought in aspects of occult and idiosyncratic interests that intrigued people more interested with Christian mysteries and orders. 

“That the Inklings may have been on the whole more decent and less vain than many other literary coteries can only be because they made a conscious effort to follow the path of real conversation.” And “the dispute over the exact nature of the Inklings —cabal or club?—has faded as history has stepped in with a third alternative: that whatever the Inklings may have been during their most clubbable years, today they constitute a major literary force, a movement of sorts.” Such movements may bring in something new, but as Lewis once said about humanity: “it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.”

Despite the happy endings they brought to their stories, they “were not optimists; they ... understood that sacrifices must be made and that not all wounds will be healed in this life. ... One may be as gloomy as Puddleglum or as convinced as Frodo that "All my choices have proved ill" without losing hope in a final redemption.” In the end, the only hope they could leave from a quaint pub to the modern world was a redemption of the Eternal. 

All in all, their prolific contributions were nothing less than extraordinary. I wish I knew them.

Patterns of Deceit

When we're orientating patterns in an historical-cultural context, we always have to be careful because the particulars do matter. While I've been drawn to meta-theories, like spiral dynamics, I do see more problems than good from them. First, historic paradigm shifts as not as clean as often depicted, such that many of these patterns overlap with prior epochs. These theories often privilege recent cultural trends over many of the high culture achievements in more pre-modern times, often dismissing these periods as "less-evolved" than ours. Moreover, these models often represent trends and patterns to justify speculative non-empirical outcomes.

When looking at a meta-view, I can empathize with the Levinas position that responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth". Or another way to consider this is while the part is always in the whole, the part always needs to be made whole.

Maybe that's why I prefer how Kreeft depicts these historical-cultural patterns, since he doesn't attempt to place them hierarchically. We can see how Kreeft draws on Christianity as a synthesis of virtue in theory (Hellenism) and practice (Hebraism): or the True and the Good.

He also sees the postmodern period as leading to a new axial age resulting from the Western Enlightenment and Continental Romanticism. I am not sure if it's a revival or a dead-end, but there many people attempting to grope for the next, new thing.

In the dead-end camp, David Bentley Hart eviscerates the notion that we have come up with a deeper ethical stance in our postmodern milieu... 

“Even when we have shed the moral and religious precepts of our ancestors, most of us try to be ethical and even, in many cases, “spiritual.” It is rare, however, that we are able to impose anything like a coherent pattern upon the somewhat haphazard collection of principles and practices by which we do this. Our ethics, especially, tends to be something of a continuous improvisation or bricolage: we assemble fragments of traditions we half remember, gather ethical maxims almost at random from the surrounding culture, attempt to find an inner equilibrium between tolerance and conviction, and so on, until we have knit together something like a code, suited to our needs, temperaments, capacities, and imaginations. We select the standards or values we find appealing from a larger market of moral options and then try to arrange them into some sort of tasteful harmony.”

And he also does a beautiful job deriding our approach to religion, and how cultural sophistication has undermined spiritual depth and rigor...

“As for our religion, much the same may be said: few of us really feel that the creeds we espouse are more important in giving shape to our ethical predispositions than are our own judgments. We certainly, at any rate, do not draw near to the “mystery of God” with anything like the fear and trembling of our ancestors, and when we tire of our devotions and drift away we do not expect to be pursued, either by the furies or by the hounds of conscience. This is especially obvious at modern Western religion’s pastel-tinged margins, in those realms of the New Age where the gods of the boutique hold uncontested sway. Here one may cultivate a private atmosphere of “spirituality” as undemanding and therapeutically comforting as one likes simply by purchasing a dream catcher, a few pretty crystals, some books on the goddess, a Tibetan prayer wheel, a volume of Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung or Robert Graves, a Nataraja figurine, a purse of tiles engraved with runes, a scattering of Pre-Raphaelite prints drenched in Celtic twilight, an Andean flute, and so forth, until this mounting congeries of string, worthless quartz, cheap joss sticks, baked clay, kitsch, borrowed iconography, and fraudulent scholarship reaches that mysterious point of saturation at which religion has become indistinguishable from interior decorating. Then one may either abandon one’s gods for something new or bide with them for a time, but in either case without any real reverence, love, or dread. There could scarcely be a more thoroughly modern form of religion than this. It certainly bears no resemblance to the genuine and honorable idolatries of old, or to the sort of ravenous religious eclecticism that characterized the late Roman Empire. The peoples of early and late antiquity actually believed in, adored, and feared their gods. No one really believes in the gods of the New Age; they are deities not of the celestial hierarchy above but of the ornamental étagère in the corner, and their only “divine” office is to give symbolic expression to the dreamier sides of their votaries’ personalities.” 

And in regards to our god(s) today...

“They are purchased gods, gods as accessories, and hence are merely masks by means of which the one true god—the will—at once conceals and reveals itself.”

Ouch! But probably more accurate than not. I often believe postmodernism is a result of modernity's tantrum with civilization than a true step forward. Patterns may emerge, but whether you see things progressing or not comes down to where (and how whole) you stand.

My Apologies Mr. Holmes

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

It's interesting that I named this blog as such as I did. I took it from a terrific William James's biography I read several years ago. In it, it mentioned how Mr. James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. would gather on the weekends to deliberate about their latest philosophical musings. Mr. Holmes would call their discussions twisting the tail of the cosmos (or twistlig the tail as they would say in old speak).

I fell in love with the phrase. It sort of encompassed what I wanted this blog to be about. Exploring truth (and beauty) and looking at it from a vast vantage point. 

But Mr. Holmes would not be a fan.

Mr. Holmes, one of our country's finest lawyers, Supreme Court justices and statesman, was also a polymath: well read in philosophy, economics, sociology, and literature. Having such breadth of knowledge allowed him to argue positions from many sides, without the need or desire to land anywhere.

In an article in the New York Times (from 1964), Alpheus Mason reviews some of Holmes's correspondence. Mason says, “Holmes's skepticism, ex­pressed in words that sometimes shock, belies deeply religious feeling. Awed by man's pro­found ignorance, he was hum­bled before the great mystery posed by the unknown and un­knowable. The assumption of absolute truth revealed arro­gance—the one sin he could never forgive. He hated the man who knows that he knows.”

And yet, there were some key principles Mr. Holmes knew that he knew.

In regards to natural rights, Mr. Holmes said, “I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.” And that “truth is simply the majority vote of the nation that could lick all the others.” Such statements reflects a man hell bent on denying any absolutes to the point of radical relativism.

So much for intellectual (or ontological) humility.

Truth is a tricky thing. We want to be open, but not so open that are minds fall apart. And we don't want to dismiss the paths of wisdom open to us, nor the source of that wisdom. In the process, we can make explicit our principles of Reality, because they are there whether we are aware of them or not.

Mr. Holmes was open to inquiry, but somewhere within the bounds of scientism and populism. As many in our era, it is part of our (post)modern disease.

He would consider this blog to be full of ontological arrogance (or at least arrogance he would not agree with), since my inquiry always hangs off God. As such, we never exclude anything in that inquiry, but put them in their proper order.

For that sir, I am sorry. But I do thank you for the phrase anyhow.

*          *          *

Postscript: I was recently contemplating Holmes's quote, “For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.” I would guess that even he was groping for some deeper faith beyond materialism to settle into.

Hamilton and Elitism

I finally finished the terrific Hamilton biography by Ron Chernow. Since this book inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda and I may never get to see his Broadway musical, I have to get what I can from this delightful read.

So when I read a long biography like this, there are just a couple big takeaways I can absorb beyond some fun facts and dates (which I will eventually forget in most cases). So a theme that came to me as I was reading was this notion of elitism. Why Alexander Hamilton and elitism? From the following excerpt it would seem Hamilton held a somewhat pessimistic view on the citizenry and our fledgling nation. Chernow says, 

“The intellectual spoilsport among the founding fathers, Hamilton never believed in the perfectibility of human nature and regularly violated what became the first commandment of American politics: thou shalt always be optimistic when addressing the electorate. He shrank from the campaign rhetoric that flattered Americans as the most wonderful, enlightened people on earth and denied that they had anything to learn from European societies. He was incapable of the resolutely uplifting themes that were to become mandatory in American politics. The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.”

Human nature being what it is, Hamilton did not get lost in rose colored glasses. He understood we have two natures, and as such, he valued the need to cultivate the rarity of excellence rather than take it for granted as a given. After all, that's why we fought for freedom from the Redcoats, as freedom is fundamental to our nature and necessary for exceptionalism to flourish. But Hamilton also knew this would not come without industriousness, perseverance, and sacrifice.
   
Hamilton, a poor immigrant from Saint Croix, rose to prominence based on own merit. Ironically, he “was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth,” when he was a fervent abolitionist unlike many of the slaveholding populists that occupied the presidency those first several decades of our nation's birth. Chernow states, “It was no coincidence that the allegedly aristocratic and reactionary Federalists contained the overwhelming majority of active abolitionists of the period. Elitists they might be, but they were an open, fluid elite, based on merit and money, not on birth and breeding— the antithesis of the southern plantation system.”

Hamilton lived a mostly dignified (as well as sometimes flawed) existence through his duel with Burr that abruptly brought his life to an end. Taking his life as a whole, he exemplified an excellence that gave elitism a respectful aspiration. 

So what can learn about Hamilton's notion of elitism that we have seem to have lost today? The elitism that Hamilton espoused is not the same elitism that antagonizes today's alt-right. While some of the outrage toward institutional cronyism does have merit, it does not negate the fact that some established experts do bring an excellence to their craft. After all, an elite is simply someone is better at doing the sorts of things within their respective peer category. They are not just better, but deservedly better, and should be respected as such. Hamilton, often labelled a monarchist by his adversaries, did acknowledge the need for elitism in government. This is also one of the reasons the founding fathers set up our governmental structure as a republic (representative democracy) over being a pure democracy. The latter would have brought on too much risk that the rule of majority could overtake the rights of the minority. Having representative elected officials would mitigate governing by mob rule. 

On the other side, the left has been guilty of marginalizing accomplished elitism by giving short shrift to liberty over equality. Equality, emphasized as outcome and not opportunity, can oppress success for the sake of a strict egalitarianism. In the end, this brings down the best in order to raise the "oppressed." The cost to culture is immense, as this creates its own form of state totalitarianism that stifles creativity and innovation. Moreover, institutions that emphasize equality will do little to allow those in power to be held accountable. Ultimately, that undermines any of the benefits brought to bear by elitism and creates a culture where mediocrity prevails.

Both sides of the political divide could learn from Hamilton's pride in true elitism, sans contempt from above and envy from below, so the desire to strive for and support excellence can bring about the best in a nation.

Speaking of a talented elite...