....
Days after his son was killed in action on the Balkan front of WWI, Durkheim wrote to his nephew Mauss, “life triumphs over death.” He told Mauss that his grandmother, after her son had died, spent a week mourning, but on the eighth day couldn’t stop herself from asking about neighborhood gossip. She had not forgotten her grief—but to be alive is ever to be pulled away from reckoning one’s own pains and pleasures and to be drawn into the lives of others. What seem like the hardest things religion can demand—the overcoming of self-interestedness and of the terror of death—are in fact sublimely ordinary.
Every feature of human nature that might inspire hope, Durkheim knew, can be put to evil use. Our desire to stand together in a comprehensible world, our longing for community, and our readiness to project idealized visions over unsatisfactory realities may lead us to commit horrible deeds. But it is these enduring emotional structures that also lead us to connection with other people and offer the only possible foundation for a decent political order.
(Blake Smith, The Religion of Liberal Democracy)
Friday, November 15, 2019
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
DBH on Gnosticism
.... certain motifs and turns of phrase that can be found in both
“gnostic” texts and the writings of patristic universalists are
similar to one another not because the former influenced the latter,
but because both derive their terms directly from the New Testament.
What we call the “gnostic” schools should probably be seen as extreme
expressions—bedizened with often tediously opulent mythologies, some
perhaps only allegorical, many probably not—of a dualistic theological
register that is already present, in an only slightly more muted and
qualified form, in the earliest Christian documents, and that is
especially conspicuous in the Pauline corpus and in the fourth Gospel.
As does much of the New Testament, the “gnostic” narrative tells of a
cosmic dispensation under the reign of the god of this aeon (2
Corinthians 4:4) or the Archon of this cosmos (John 14:30; Ephesians
2:2), and of spiritual beings hopelessly immured within heavenly
spheres thronged by hostile archons and powers and principalities and
daemons (Romans 8:3, 39; 1 Corinthians 10:20-21; 15:24; Ephesians
1:21; etc.), bound under and cursed by a law that was in fact ordained
by lesser, merely angelic or archontic powers (Galatians 3:10-11,
19-20). Into this prison of spirits, this darkness that knows nothing
of the true light (John 1:5), a divine savior descends from the aeon
above (John 3:31; 8:23; etc.), bringing with him a wisdom that has
been hidden from before the ages (Romans 16:25-26; Galatians 1:12;
Ephesians 3:3-9; Colossians 1:26), a secret wisdom unknown even to
“the archons of this cosmos” (1 Corinthians 2:7-8) that has the power
to liberate fallen spirits (John 8:31-32, etc.). Now those blessed
persons who possess “gnosis” (1 Corinthians 8:7; 13:2) constitute
something of an exceptional company, “spiritual persons”
(πνευματικοί), who enjoy a knowledge of the truth denied to the merely
“psychical” (ψυχικοί) among us (1 Corinthians 14:36; Galatians 6:1;
Jude 19). By his triumph over the cosmic archons, moreover, this
savior has opened a pathway through the planetary spheres, the
encompassing heavens, the armies of the air and the potentates on
high, so that now “neither death nor life nor angels nor Archons nor
things present nor things imminent nor Powers nor height nor depth nor
any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God”
(Romans 8:38-39).
Where the so-called “gnostic” systems, then, clearly depart from this
more general narrative morphology is not in the room they make for
universalism. Quite the reverse. It is in their willingness to amplify
the provisional or qualified dualism implicit in this vision of things
into a complete ontological schism, such that creation is conceived of
as having no natural relation to God at all, even in his eternal
intentions. Not only is lower reality the work of a lesser or
intermediary kind of divinity; it is wholly the product of an
alienation from God. As a result, here in the land of unlikeness,
below the turning spheres of the planetary heavens, all is governed by
cosmic fate, εἱμαρμένη, rather than by divine providence; and, far
from achieving his essence through creation, in time, by way of a fall
and return, the true God is so far beyond the reach of cosmic
eventuality that this world has no ontological relation to him at all,
not even of the most tenuously analogical variety. In place, then, of
the metaphysics of participation adopted by “orthodox” tradition,
these schools provided only a mediating mythology of absolute
estrangement, a grand epic of exile and ruin followed by rescue and
restoration. At least, so we are told by contemporary sources, and so
their own literary remains largely seem to confirm (though who can
tell how much of this language is ultimately figural?). Still,
throughout the whole of that tale, in every school, God—hidden forever
in his hyperouranian and inaccessible light, infinitely removed from
time and nature and history—is eternally the same. It is not his
story. He has no story.
All of which is only to say, again, that the notion of a secret
gnostic current in Christian thought extending from Valentinus (c.
100-c. 160) to Böhme is a fantasy.
“gnostic” texts and the writings of patristic universalists are
similar to one another not because the former influenced the latter,
but because both derive their terms directly from the New Testament.
What we call the “gnostic” schools should probably be seen as extreme
expressions—bedizened with often tediously opulent mythologies, some
perhaps only allegorical, many probably not—of a dualistic theological
register that is already present, in an only slightly more muted and
qualified form, in the earliest Christian documents, and that is
especially conspicuous in the Pauline corpus and in the fourth Gospel.
As does much of the New Testament, the “gnostic” narrative tells of a
cosmic dispensation under the reign of the god of this aeon (2
Corinthians 4:4) or the Archon of this cosmos (John 14:30; Ephesians
2:2), and of spiritual beings hopelessly immured within heavenly
spheres thronged by hostile archons and powers and principalities and
daemons (Romans 8:3, 39; 1 Corinthians 10:20-21; 15:24; Ephesians
1:21; etc.), bound under and cursed by a law that was in fact ordained
by lesser, merely angelic or archontic powers (Galatians 3:10-11,
19-20). Into this prison of spirits, this darkness that knows nothing
of the true light (John 1:5), a divine savior descends from the aeon
above (John 3:31; 8:23; etc.), bringing with him a wisdom that has
been hidden from before the ages (Romans 16:25-26; Galatians 1:12;
Ephesians 3:3-9; Colossians 1:26), a secret wisdom unknown even to
“the archons of this cosmos” (1 Corinthians 2:7-8) that has the power
to liberate fallen spirits (John 8:31-32, etc.). Now those blessed
persons who possess “gnosis” (1 Corinthians 8:7; 13:2) constitute
something of an exceptional company, “spiritual persons”
(πνευματικοί), who enjoy a knowledge of the truth denied to the merely
“psychical” (ψυχικοί) among us (1 Corinthians 14:36; Galatians 6:1;
Jude 19). By his triumph over the cosmic archons, moreover, this
savior has opened a pathway through the planetary spheres, the
encompassing heavens, the armies of the air and the potentates on
high, so that now “neither death nor life nor angels nor Archons nor
things present nor things imminent nor Powers nor height nor depth nor
any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God”
(Romans 8:38-39).
Where the so-called “gnostic” systems, then, clearly depart from this
more general narrative morphology is not in the room they make for
universalism. Quite the reverse. It is in their willingness to amplify
the provisional or qualified dualism implicit in this vision of things
into a complete ontological schism, such that creation is conceived of
as having no natural relation to God at all, even in his eternal
intentions. Not only is lower reality the work of a lesser or
intermediary kind of divinity; it is wholly the product of an
alienation from God. As a result, here in the land of unlikeness,
below the turning spheres of the planetary heavens, all is governed by
cosmic fate, εἱμαρμένη, rather than by divine providence; and, far
from achieving his essence through creation, in time, by way of a fall
and return, the true God is so far beyond the reach of cosmic
eventuality that this world has no ontological relation to him at all,
not even of the most tenuously analogical variety. In place, then, of
the metaphysics of participation adopted by “orthodox” tradition,
these schools provided only a mediating mythology of absolute
estrangement, a grand epic of exile and ruin followed by rescue and
restoration. At least, so we are told by contemporary sources, and so
their own literary remains largely seem to confirm (though who can
tell how much of this language is ultimately figural?). Still,
throughout the whole of that tale, in every school, God—hidden forever
in his hyperouranian and inaccessible light, infinitely removed from
time and nature and history—is eternally the same. It is not his
story. He has no story.
All of which is only to say, again, that the notion of a secret
gnostic current in Christian thought extending from Valentinus (c.
100-c. 160) to Böhme is a fantasy.
,,,, In one series of experiments, Elizabeth Krumrei Mancuso of
Pepperdine University scored volunteers on a measure of what she
called intellectual humility — an awareness of how incomplete and
fallible their views on political and social issues were. This kind of
humility was not related to I.Q. measures or political affiliation,
she found; it was strongly linked to curiosity, reflection and
open-mindedness....
Pepperdine University scored volunteers on a measure of what she
called intellectual humility — an awareness of how incomplete and
fallible their views on political and social issues were. This kind of
humility was not related to I.Q. measures or political affiliation,
she found; it was strongly linked to curiosity, reflection and
open-mindedness....
....Disciples of Jesus wrestle every day with the demands of discipleship as articulated in the Sermon of the Mount. Does God expect us to embrace an absolute pacifism or to give all of our wealth to the poor? It’s easy enough to verbally affirm that he does, but what if we are responsible for spouses and children? These are not easy questions for those of us who have not been called to the monastic life. Harlotry seems to be inevitable. The Spirit has been poured out, yet the historical conditions of violence and privation still obtain. We live under the judgment of the cross. Lord, have mercy.
Fr Aidan Kimel
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