Second Terrace

The hobbit returns

Finally. The Hobbit films are slated for release.

The first, "The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey," will be released in December 2012. And the second, "The Hobbit: There and Back Again," will be released the next December.

So it will be a wait.

You may watch the goings on from Director Peter Jackson's point of view at a video blog posted on his fb site. 

My feelings are different for the Hobbit than for the Lord of the Rings: and here I am speaking of the books rather than the films. The films, I think, will probably invite the same reaction: mostly positive, with some points of disappointment (i.e., the absence of Tom Bombadil, the Scouring of the Shire; the eroticizing of Arwen).

The texts are both great but completely different -- except for some common threads of narrative. The Hobbit is a child's story for adults. It has charm and homeliness (the older meaning, not the ugly new one). Goodness, it has cuff links that magically clasp themselves.

It also has trenchant comments by the grandfatherly narrator (who has disappeared, for the most part, in the later trilogy). In the unpleasant visit with the goblins in their subterranean corporate headquarters, the narrator suggests that it was the goblins who invented mechanical warfare and, perhaps, industrialism altogether.

That reason alone could warrant my affection for the Hobbit: and there are many, many others. I have already announced to my daughters my patriarchal right to read, aloud, the whole Tolkienian canon (with theatrical voices), to my future grandchildren.

The Lord of the Rings is a more Wagnerian affair, and I mean this substantively. I am not the first to detect a little of the Ring Cycle in the story. Still, there is homeliness and cheer, courtesy and friendship. But childlike delight has been replaced by terrible beauty. Happiness still reigns in the Shire, but it is surrounded and protected by the great powers of tragic joy.

I wonder what Jackson will do with the Hobbit?

We already know he expects these two movies to be a "prequel" (an ignominious word) to the film trilogy. Much will be said about the White Council (which got only a few lines in the book). More will be said about the Necromancer getting kicked out of Dol Gildur. I have always wanted to read more about this, but Tolkien seemed to think that it was not germane to the story.

But it will be germane to the films, and probably critically so.

And therein lies the problem. The films, including the Hobbit dyad, pursue a narrative that differs from the books.

Hmmm. I'll go see them anyways. 

Oysters once had heads

I am an unrepentant lover of the Authorized Version, commonly mistaken as the "King James Version." 

The goutish, rather ambidextrous majesty should not have had his name stamped on such an English testament, let alone Holy Writ.

Nevertheless, this translation is towering and establishes a memory of good language in the minds of Engish-speaking Christians.

So, I would rather chant "There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom Thou hast made to play therein" (Psalm 104.26 -- yes, I know, ciii).

Have pity on me, when I was forced to attend -- in a service in my native communion -- a very alternative reading: "There are boats floating on the big ocean, and the great fish that You made to have fun."

One cannot chant this mucous without coughing up.

Besides, the word "fun" is possessed of a long sordid past. It started its linguistic fetid life as a phoneme tied to counterfeiting and other such fooling enterprises. Dr. Johnson, blessed be he, stigmatized it forever as a "low cant word."

I prefer the homonym reading "can't" -- as in, "No, you can't use this word in Church or translation or anything that I am obliged to read silently or aloud."

Fun, especially linguistic fun, leads to degeneracy. Look at what the Living Bible (sic) did to the evangelicals: now they have megachurches. Look at what aggressive, rather histrionic (and frankly unmanly), web sites are doing now to us.

Invertebrates: that is the evolutionary goal, it seems.

But all is not lost: unlike the proverbial frog, we are noticing the water temperature approaching the boiling point. 

Here are some more passages from one of my new favorites:

On the quality of a nation's language depends to some extent the quality of its life and thought; and on the quality of its life and thought the quality of its language ...

Great writers [you may insert "Orthodox web-riders, pundits and episcopalian wannabe's" here] may better a language; but they cannot remake it ... Degeneration can go far. Modern Greek has lost its infinitive and its future (now replaced by awkward periphrases); and degraded three vowels and three diphthongs to a single sound -- 'ee'. So that the Goddess of Health -- 'Hygieia' -- has been reduced to the cacaphony of 'Ee-yee-ee-a'. Such indeed is the common law of life. It is only too easy to go downhill. Oysters and barnacles once had heads. (F. L. Lucas, Style, 1933, p37)

Gee whiz. If one extrapolates from the way we speak and write onto the quality of life, we are not standing up to the salt and light mark, aren't we?

If you want to see the trails of headless oysters, just google news and orthodox.

Style and the OCA

Orthodox Cyber-church of America, that is.

I wonder whose jurisdiction we’re in?

No matter, for it seems very egalitarian, in the inimitable manner of a late 18th century French salon.

Since there is no real presence, or exchange of substance (i.e., a communion of molecules), then for the first time on this ironic tragi-comedy we call history the Church is situated only in the interstitial spaces of rhetoric.

There is no hierarch here: there cannot be. There is no history either: only hyper-links to other links that may or may not be accurate, and are keyboarded in varying stages of physical and moral undress.

But that last complaint does not matter in the least. Only screen names and avatars count, not skin and bones, and who’s to say about souls?

What counts is how many times you’ve been friended (not “befriended,” which is too stuffy now), how many hits and unique visits your site has tallied up in the web wars.

It’s all rhetoric: and I mean no insignificance here, no diminution. In fact, I mean quite the opposite. It is all signification, this milieu of total communication and no substance.

Style matters. Even in days of yore, when words were splayed on pressed down wood pulp and carbon grease, or mediated through neurons and vocal cords, style mattered more than people cared to admit.

Take this from the inimitable F. L. Lucas (whose book Style is suspiciously out of print):

The gardens and porticoes of philosophy are hung with philosophers entangled in their own verbal cobwebs. Statesmen meet at Yalta or Potsdam to make agreements, about the meaning of which they then proceed to disagree. Employers and workers reach settlements that lead only to fresh unsettlement, because they misunderstand the understandings they themselves have made. Sharp legal minds spend their lives drafting documents in a verbose jargon of their own which shall be knave-proof and fool-proof; but it is seldom that other legal minds as sharp cannot find in those documents, if they try, some fruitful points for litigation ... Some adore ambiguity in poetry; in prose they can be a constant curse.

Lucas wrote this in 1955, long before the complete victory of anti-traditional slipthink decadence. It was a happier -- nay, less woe-begotten -- time.

Here in an age of celebrated depravity, it is only meet and right that we conjure up an Orthodox brand of cyber-church. Such a thing was bound to happen.

All we have in the cyber-church is style, in all its meanings: point, attack, rhetoric, pillar, stylus. There is no Bread. There is no memory.

I found this little ditty in my April issue of The New Criterion (a generally neocon tabloid but still quite genial). It, in turn, had been lifted out of the catalog for the College of Letters at Wesleyan University -- in particular, it is the description for an interesting and I’m sure very rewarding course entitled “Pornography: the Writing of Prostitutes.”

Here it is the course description, without further ado:

The pornography we study is an art of transgression which impels human sexuality toward, against, and beyond the limits which [sic] have traditionally defined civil discourses and practices -- defined, that is, by regimes of dominance and submission, inclusion or exclusion, in the domains of organ and emotional pleasure ...

Breath-taking, that. “Pornography as liberation” from “regimes of dominance and submission.” And just in case you don’t know what these regimes are, so you can curse them on academic blogs and facebook pages, the catalog explicitly identifies them in the next sentence as “the dominant white-heterosexual tradition.”

Yes, darn those white heterosexuals. As the great Bertie Wooster once averred, “Curse Shelley and all vegetables.”

In the realm of politics, I usually take exception to Mssrs. Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball: and that is especially true when they swarm to the defense of the anonymous corporate nouveau, et ancien, riche. One can detect not a little sycophancy in their attacks on tax for the very well-heeled.

Nevertheless, I am one with them in most matters of taste. And when it comes to their denunciation of depravity, I am standing in ovation:

In that essay [i.e., “Defining Deviancy Down,” in The American Scholar 1993], Senator Moynihan outlined some of the manifold ways in which our society has attempted to deny deviancy be redefining it as normal or even, in some instances, as glamorous. In case after case, he showed out behavior that would have been considered unacceptable just a few years ago is excused or championed as normal. The result has been a blunting of our sensibilities and an increasing impotence in the face of social breakdown. Inured to the outrageous, we can barely recognize deviance as such, much less take effective action against it.

Kramer and Kimball contend that under the rubric of “academic freedom,” academic culture has led the way as a bouncy cheerleader down the sidelines of depravity. They conclude:

... there is a moral and intellectual bubble evident in academia ... It is the bubble of decadence: that situation that ensues when an institution has abandoned or betrayed its defining principles and yet continues to mouth the rhetoric and enjoy the perquisites those principles bequeathed.

“Bubble of decadence.” Fancy that. For us, this phrase is too near and dear. For us, especially, who are stuck in our little history. Us, who are liberated by the stalinesque denunciation of old-fashioned “thou shalt not’s” ... and in this case, the rubric is not “Academic Freedom,” but the “Freedom of Morality.” Us, who have discovered facile imprimaturs for the libertine through tactics of obfuscation and generalization (under the rubrics of mysticism, apophaticism, and “all you need is love”). Us, who would rather string up a leader for financial malfeasance and corporate boorishness, than for violations of natural law. Us, who would rather impose psychological evaluations and testing instruments on hierarchical candidates, instead of coming to know them face to face in prayer and saintliness over time, in real communion.

We have joined the Orthodox Cyberchurch of America because it is much easier there to hide our transgressions and, more likely, our cowardice.

The internet church is just right for those with much to hide, and cannot afford being known face to face, who claim accountability, and yet cannot be so held.

“Mankind has not yet mastered language; often it has mastered them” -- so says, again, our good Dr. Lucas. Some web sites are bigger than their masters. 

“Bad company makes for bad manners” says St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15.33). And there are bad manners beyond count.

Maybe it’s time to take a look at our company, and see how far we have embraced ... well, complete the rhyme.

Bishops and the Apocalypse

Today is the day when the Rapture is supposed, again, to occur.

It has not and will not. The moment that Harold Camping and his cyberspace campmeeting have been huckstering has come and gone already in New Zealand.

200 million people have not started to disappear. The gobsmacking earthquake will not amputate California at 6 pm Pacific-time.

Once again, Christ is slandered, and the Church looks like a looney-bin.

At least, the chiliast Rapturists may have occasionally meant well, in their representation of Christianity as a Rankin-Bass cartoon. 

I cannot say the same of us who've done worse.

* * * * * * *

Rapture-events come and go with their multi-media frenzies and 10-pound Dake Bibles waved by double-knit revenants. Last night we thought there'd be extrusion-craters in a bunch of graves and disappeared jet pilots and unoccupied cars careening off the turnpike.

No. The green leaves rustle on my dogwoods and catulpas. The blue-tinged fescue needs mowing today.

God loves His world too much.

Prophecy-mavens and heretical bigots like Tim LaHaye sputter about chiliasm and socialistic black presidents, and leer about Slavs (that would be my folk) and Muslims teaming up to march into Israel under the banner of the Beast. Never mind that LaHaye knows nothing about socialism and is probably more socialistic than he'd ever own up to (he still uses the Post Office, I think, and doesn't oppose Medicare). Never mind that Gog and Magog in Ezekiel have nothing to do with Russia, or with the revivalist cartoon-world.

The sun dawned gold and cool today. And will continue to do so, despite the pre-trib exegesis.

God loves His world -- His creation and our environment, which these guys don't give a damn for -- too much.

I wouldn't blame Him if He'd rather rapture a lily or a sparrow than a creature like me. One flits between budding twigs and flies in four dimensions. The other knows enough to turn to the sun with an open heart and bloom. I, however, too often practice gloom.

Rapturology is a commercial venture and is just what the doctor ordered for profiteers. Grown men with homebound mothers have thrown their lifesavings into billboards for Camping's ravings: and will the revivalist preacher take care of Fitzpatrick tomorrow, on May 22nd? Or will he hide in seclusion, and let his lawyer announce to the paparozzi that he has no comment?

Someone's made money. They always do, even on top of gouging money from the working poor at the gas pump (and getting solemnly blessed by their dispensational acolytes in Congress). Even while evicting families from their ill-begotten McHouses as a melancholy sacrifice to Mammon. Even while blowing off mountain tops for coal, and playing bottom-line roulette with miners' families. If LaHaye really had something to say, he'd have Left Behind his books for free. But, torture-supporter that he is, "free" one cannot be, or do, it makes no difference either way in the cartoon revival world. Mammon commands, and you know, we only have one master.

It is almost noon today. The leaves still rustle and I know the wind is here, but I cannot predict its whence or whither. Providence, yes, but not provenance. The sun gleams.

No Rapture. Not ever until that Joy in the Last Morning when all shall gleam.

At the tribulation, the Lord wants His Christians to remain and stand, to help save His world as salt and light.

The world that He loves too much.

* * * * * * *

All eschatologies that replace the Orthodox Gospel are opiates. Chiliasm is. Marxism is. Corporate suckerism is ("buy this ... feel better ... be my indentured servant forever"). Celebratism is (in both idioms -- the celebrity-as-demigod cult and the neo-dionysiac cult of ecstasy-and-self-esteem). 

Each one of these false eschatologies has its own Rapture. Marx has his revolution. The corporate myth has its golden parachute and exclusive invitations at blueblood meets. Celebrities have their American Idols, sitcoms and Miley and Gaga concerts.

Megachurches (i.e., anything over 200) have their American Idols, sitcoms and Miley and Gaga concerts.

Meanwhile the dragon remains and obtains.

Meanwhile we, in the House of Reality, are watching video games of prelates and wannabe-prelates duking it out -- they and their surrogates counting pieces of silver to see who can get sent to Pilate for their comeuppance first.

Sadducees, the whole lot.

The dragon licks his chops.

For financial malfeasance is bad, yes, but its target has been writ so large that it eclipses worse, far more toxic passions of lust, gluttony, dejection, pride and anger.

The dragon stretches his leather wings, and the cold winds howl across the frozen lake of despond.

We look at our phosphorescent screens, point and click, roll up the score, and settle our affairs in ecclesiastical piss fights just like any other episode of Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Bang. Pow. Another one bites the dust.

The dragon takes off.

Unhindered, because the dweebs are rooted on their potato-couches.

* * * * * * *

The End is always around the next moment, just behind the mirror. 

Occasionally, history catches up and cultures convulse.

We are in such a time when the old bourgeois niceties cannot be counted on. The rich will get richer and fewer. The United States may not be first class much longer -- and will you still love America then, like I will, and like anyone else will who doesn't need the imperium to love the land?

The public square cannot be saved by simplistic marches and revivalist squawking. Salvation, in history, can only come through the Church -- a Church that will not want to escape the eschaton.

The eschaton, in its approach, will drive anyone crazy: an undisciplined mind and a passion-infested heart cannot tolerate the weight of glory, and the dread of everlasting. Peace is the community of Christ -- and it is the only possibility for facing the dragon and the abyss. Outside of this Peace there is only weeping and gnashing of teeth. Craziness, that is. The fleeing into degenerate eschatologies that are not so scary. The adoption of self-soothing hallucinations. The playing of video games.

Bishops must be those who lead because they are already capable of fighting the good fight, of facing the dragon, of confronting the abyss at four o'clock in the morning.

Such bishops can be the conduit of the Peace of Christ at four o'clock in the afternoon, even when we cowards have barred shut the doors and windows.

A bishop must be able to say and deliver and breathe the Peace of the Risen Christ.

If he cannot, well then, here we are.

* * * * * * *

After the Rapture came and went, Jesus sat down at a well on a hot afternoon.

The woman at the well was there, rehearsing her trite lines of self-soothing hallucinations, playing sectarian games: a refugee from singing "I wanna know what love is, I want you to tell me" and getting rather disappointed.

Jesus held out the satisfactory drink, provided she worshiped in Spirit and in Truth.

You know the drill, I'm sure. Unlike the Rapture, this Gospel happens this Sunday every year.

But I bet you didn't know who the Samaritan woman is.

Really.

We have met her.

She is us.

* * * * * * *

Still here.

High noon has come and gone. I've done my hospital calls.

Going out now to mow my lawn for the second time: that's how high the grass has grown.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.

God save the leaves. Protect the garden.

Here. And still.

Rescue O. from theory

Yes, yes, I know. Orthodoxy must have her allegorical reading. Whether we like it or not, and even after 553 (the Fifth Ecumenical Council), Origen's method of biblical interpretation is inescapable in our Eastern tradition.

My point in a former essay was not so much a complaint against allegory in general. I was complaining about what I thought was an arbitrary sort of allegorization in particular. I did not like the "reading into" (or "eisogesis") of Scripture -- that is, the imposition of pre-suppositions onto biblical interpretation.

It is well known that Harnack accused the Greek Fathers of "eisogeting" their Platonic and/or Aristotelian prejudices out of the biblical texts. Actually, he is quite wrong in this regard. The Greek Fathers can be accused of eisogesis, but in the opposite direction: they imposed their Apostolic beliefs (derived from the "Rule of Faith," ultimately theoria) onto the categories of the Academy.

I will take a step further here and defend even Origen from the charge of arbitrary allegorization. Scripture, for him, was like a man in that it is supposed to be made up of body, soul and spirit. The body is the literal, historical (or narrative) meaning. The soul corresponds to the moral meaning -- a meaning that is amenable to ethicists like the Judaic chroniclers and, interestingly, artists like Dante and Shakespeare.

The spirit is, as expected, the "allegorical sense." But it is not the sort of allegorical method that operates under that rubric today. Today, allegorical interpretation is the realistic description of postmodern theoretical interpretation. In this rubric, a body of literature is examined for indications of violent suppression of a strong class against the weak; or of a weak class struggling for liberation.

Thus, Shakespeare, quite unbeknownst to him, could be said to have written of class struggle in the setting of Romeo and Juliet. He surely did not intend this, but in this sort of allegorization, authorial intent is thrown out the window, and what really matters is the document as preserved and perpetuated by rescension and subsequent interpretive tradition. The critics and conventioneering philosophers rule.

I hope my sarcasm makes clear my dyspeptic position on marxist, feminist and queer theory.

But I want to make clear also the fact that Origen does not belong in this arbitrary camp. I think some legitimate complaints can be waged against him. His Trinitarianism fails in consubstantiality. Consequently, his Christology is deficient. His universalism fails the test of free will (and its everlasting consequences). He probably denies the meaning of history and Time.

That said, Origen's legacy of biblical interpretation is undeniable. His allegorization is not arbitrary. And neither does it admit the sort of willy-nilly imposition of faddish HuffPost opinionizing onto biblical texts. Origen is robustly faithful to a coherent, overarching Christocentric interpretive model in his allegorical method -- a method that is probably closer to "typology" than what we take for "allegory" today.

Origen and his school are being used to accomplish all sorts of ends -- many of which cohere with the aims of the "anti-patriarchal" and liberationist protocols that undergird literary "theory." Despite the fact that "theory" is shrinking back to a well-deserved "has-been" status in literary fashion, it is very chic in some sects of Christian literati, even in some Orthodox bluestocking circles.

Origen's name is huddled under, much as one enters under the sign of a diner wherein there is a smorgasbord. There, at the buffet steam table, the revisers and liberalizers take the spare ribs but leave off the brussel sprouts.

And in this allegory, the "brussel sprouts" is the Christocentric typology and the rather severe and traditional moralistic tone of Origen (which cannot be denied).

The "spare ribs" that everyone takes and heaps on the plate is the slippery plotinizing theology, where there is the sloppy notion of the pre-existence of souls, and the even sappier daydream of the provision of animal skins as denoting the incarnation and genderizing of humanity after the Fall.

Here, there is the breathless eschatology (this sort of moment is always to be expected in Christian knock-offs like marxist theory) of a devoutly-to-be-wished-for a-sexual humanity -- a post-genderized anthropology that has itself become the rubric for a revised canon for holy orders.

In other words, if gender is a consequence of the Fall, and if the Fall is transcended in Christ, then shouldn't ordination be predicated on a pre-lapsarian unity? Why shouldn't women be ordained?

Heck, why shouldn't homosexuality be admitted already? Didn't Boswell rather prove that the Church had ceremonies that fixed an imprimatur on these sort of arrangements?

No, he didn't. And Origen, for all his defective theologizing, cannot be blamed for immorality or post-modern revisionism in his allegorizing.

Poor, brilliant Origen. He was not well-served by his legacy. If he only heard what was being done in the name of his hermeneutic, he'd be doing the lateral spin.

Poor, brilliant Orthodoxy, for it, too, is being fracked by theory, much like the Marcellus Shale shelf is being fracked by reckless feckless commerce. Orthodoxy is being allegorized -- not like Origen, but by the arbitration of power-theory -- for expedient meaning.

Some want Orthodoxy to be the next Billy Graham crusade -- but this time even better, with smells and bells.

But others want Orthodoxy to be an esoteric, intellectual-friendly choice of any number of possible lineaments of spirituality. User-friendly. Up-to-date. Amenable to cultured despisers.

To these others especially I offer some words from Tolkien's great essay, "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics":

For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another. Noble animals, whose burbling is on occasion good to hear; but though their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short.

Hear, hear.

Chastened

Occasionally, events force me to be braver than I usually am and to take the hard step of reading what I've written in the past.

In an adolescent, thrill-seeking moment, I wrote this piece about the Egyptian uprising.

Since then, I've been chastened by wiser voices who have pointed out that this uprising may not be a good thing for our Christian brethren.

Sigh. History is hard on theory, and romance.

My feelings usually leap for the masses throwing off their chains. But those hangovers the next day bring, on the morning after, more complicated problems than the litter in the square, the detritus from the barricades.

Yes, all those Arabian and Persian moustachio'ed despots, who transported themselves around like disco despots (or the Baron Harkonnen), rather deserve their revolutions staffed by angry torch-bearing peasants.

But revolutions always get commandeered by quieter, more patient powers.

The Copts, I fear, will suffer more from the successors of Mubarak. The Christians in Iraq and Afghanistan have all suffered from our allies. The Arab Spring may turn out to be a long, hot and desiccating Summer for the Church in the Middle East.

But inasmuch as history is hard on theory, it is full of symbols, and can be read -- once in a while -- allegorically.

We have revolutions, too, over here, that are commandeered.

The one in July certainly was.

And even in our neighborhood, in our own house, there are surely some bad guys who should never have been where they have been. Surely, they were like the unjust servant who drew some unfortunate conclusions because the Lord missed His Rapture appointments:

But if that wicked servant says to himself, 'My Master is delayed,' and begins to beat his fellow servants, and eats and drinks with the drunken, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will punish him, and put him with the hypocrites; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. (Matthew 24.48-51)

Surely. But what comes after the protestant revolution that sweeps away these tyrants into the outer darkness?

Generally, after the climax and post-revolution and cigarette-smoking lassitude, there is always a Directorate of some sorts, where hard decisions and revisions will have to be made. A sort of chic stalinesque philosophy descends like a veil, and under the new rubrics that sound so very democratic, some new and abler tyrants take the reins. The reactionary old guard, the complainers of the Ancien Regime, must be "administered" for the good of everyone, yes?

Nibiru, Apophis and Singularities

In all likelihood, May 21^st will come and go the way of all freelance apocalypses. The expectorating revivalist prognosticators will go back to the drawing board. They will attend to their odd, slinky (and very liberal, if you ask me) mélange of numerology, Scofield-dispensational and conspiracy-junkie interpretations. I wouldn’t worry too much about men like Harold Camping, Timothy LaHaye, Hal Lindsay, and the late David Wilkerson: they won’t let a small thing like a late and delayed Rapture get in the way of their born-again horoscopes.

Rapturology is like the Brooklyn Dodgers of old: “Wait ‘til next year!”

At least, the chortling Harold Camping is waiting for something positive (and theoretically hopeful) like the Advent of Jesus. Cue the four-part Gaither track: “I shall see Him in the sky, as we fly to the bye and bye, we’ll shout and sing, hallelujah to the King!”

However, this is better, truth be told, than the secular sort of apocalypticism  that is standard fare on the Internet these latter days – a narrative that is dark, deadly and sterile as the Moon under full solar glare and toxic cosmic ray. There is no salvation, no victory (however two-dimensional in the chiliast rhetoric).

How can the world end? Let me list the ways:

The largest potential volcano in the world is the Yellowstone caldera, around Old Faithful (which isn’t so faithful anymore). The possible magma vent, I’ve heard, is over four hundred miles wide. You can watch this video from the BBC (and its next five parts), if you’ve a mind to. I want to sleep tonight, so I won’t.

In just about a year and a half, the Mayan calendar will shut down in December 2012. Apparently, they figured out that an astronomical event is slated to occur: the rather gloomy arrival of Planet X, otherwise known as Nibiru. Nibiru – an old name dug up out of the maggoty vaults of Sumer – is supposed to be sailing on an eccentric orbit lasting 6500 years around the sun. About every cataclysmic event in human and ecological history can be attributed to this irritating astronomical body – at least, this is what is clear to the good folk at “The Church of Critical Thinking,” which offers you its deep thoughts about the next visit of Planet X (you see, if I try hard, I really can be ecumenical). Some have even suggested that aliens setting out from this planet visited our world 300,000 years ago, and genetically modified the local primates and promoted them from apehood into the first proletariat pyramid-building mass of cheap labor (this suggests a postmodern Marxist reading of 2001: a Space Odyssey).

It goes without saying that in 2012, Nibiru will be bad news for the planet Earth. Its near approach will cause every kind of reality TV for disaster movies (you know, the kind with the shaky handheld cameras that go dark when the cameraman’s been swallowed by a gaping crevasse). Nibiru will even stop the earth on its rotational axis for three whole days – thus accounting for the three days of darkness in Revelation: somehow, contrary to all known laws of the physical universe, the earth will start its rotation again.

Then there’s 99942 Apophis. On April 13, 2036, this little 270-meter-wide asteroid has a 1 in 250,000 chance of hitting the Earth. Well, some say 1 in 48,000, which is scary, since (as the logic goes) you have a greater chance of getting hit by Apophis than your 1 in 354,319 chance of dying in an airplane accident. Here is a breathless, heavy metal version of Apophis hitting a bullseye (you will note, in this version, that the asteroid is rather larger than most estimates: I think some of the physics are rather odd, too, and have more to do with Ronnie James Dio than, say, high school astronomy). It seems that the heavy metal group is rather welcoming of the arrival of the titanic projectile. Still, the smaller asteroid would wreak a lot of damage, and leave a long killing winter in its wake.

In some scenarios, one doesn’t have to wait for astronomical coincidences. By 2045, “artificial intelligence” is supposed to have developed sufficient levels of complexity and volume that will enable it to outstrip human intelligence. (I do not think that this state of affairs is what Orthodox Tradition had in mind with the words “bodiless powers” – unless, of course, one takes into account the demonic, but I digress.) At least, this is what Raymond Kurzweil has in mind with his theory called “Singularity.” Now I hasten to add here that Kurzweil thinks this “evolution” is quite the positive thing. When Ken Jennings lost to IBM-Watson on Jeopardy, he wrote on his screen, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” It seems that Kurzweil takes this affection seriously, and suggests that the new overlords will help us with global warming, resource allocation, complicated things like the economy, and our general bad behavior.

On the more defensible side of things, Niall Ferguson has been saying, for the last few years, that America and the West have entered into a crisis of confidence, and are well on their way toward surrendering Master-of-the-Universe status to rising powers like China and Brazil (????). Others have said much the same thing. We conservative Orthodox and Catholics have said this for even longer (since the fourteenth century, actually).

What should we make of these apocalyptic scenarios?

For one thing, we can dispense with the drivel of chiliastic (i.e., pre-millennial or rapture) theories. These ideas (so shamefully many) are the usual product of inadequate doctrine and exclusion from communion. They are the results of histrionic quests for ecstasy and of an adolescent inability to take in reality and deal with it as it is. It is, if you think about it, a denial of history, anthropology and theology.

You might be surprised at this, but I put more stock in the “secular” apocalypses than the so-called “Biblical” ones. The latter are distortions of Biblical texts – and many of these texts have nothing to do with the Parousia, and none of them say anything at all about fictions like the “Rapture.”

The former secular visions, on the other hand, are based on a real sense of the frailty of the fallen world. Kurzweil knows, piteously, that human intelligence is not ready for the future. So he created a fantasy of artificial intelligence to “save” civilization from itself.

Apophis and Nibiru are probably not real threats: but they exist more immediately as projections of a threatening psychic realization – a realization that every human knows in his bones. This is the realization that the physical world as it is is not eternal, and cannot stand on its own. Everyone, even atheists, knows that nature withers when it is ripped out of the soil of communion with divinity. Atheists and scientists just don’t know the right words. At least they do not luxuriate in cardboard escape hatches.

Niall Ferguson and others foresee the decline of the West. Of course they do, for the West has been in decline for longer than they’ve noticed. Passion, since the ascendency of faithless reason and the leeching of love from the home, has taken the place of courage and wisdom.

Culture should produce persons: today, people gaze into the mirror and see a cartoon.

The sense of frailty is no respecter of religion, or intellect. This new, hyper-modern fear of death has unsettled secular ethics and has rattled down philosophy (and academia) into silly clubs. It has produced an array of esoteric cults on one hand (think of the Masons and Mayan-lovers here); and on the other hand, an even larger array of cults who are looking for esoteric cults (think of people who attribute Nibiru and everything else to the Masons and the Mayans -- watch this simply amazing and IQ-destroying video if you've got a few neurons to burn).

But worse, it has turned religion into a mass market for histrionics and hysteria. The Christian personality should be fortified enough, by doctrine and the Spirit, to withstand the terrible approach of the eschaton -- an approach that is psychically inescapable. But lesser, derivative practices of Christianity elect exercises in group ecstasy -- all of which are toxic and militate against theosis. I have long wondered why the mega-church exists. I know that its existence is the single most destructive factor against the Orthodox Church in America. But its existence -- despite its irreligion and dearth of doctrine -- is predicated clearly on the universal anxiety at the approach of a large and scary future. 

This same anxiety (accompanied a related deficiency of theoria) has turned, closer to home, even bishop against bishop, and has made denunciation the name of the game. When we needed calm wisdom the most, and an experience of Peace from the precincts of faith and Holy Tradition, we find instead the vagrancies of political maneuvering, wealth protection, and the burying of old moralities.

Materialism, for sure, does nothing to still the fear of death.

Neither does the cult of Orthodox denunciation.

Stay tuned: next up, "Bishops and the Apocalypse."

Behold what hath happened since: a more accurate apocalypse

In the face of a lot of silly (at best), if not malevolent (which is more likely), apocalyptic eruptions out in the marketplace, I thought it might be profitable to read a more traditional narrative. If you look closely, you can scry out a more accurate uncovering of present and near future realities -- of substance beyond the superficial categories.

Imagine yourself at a Notion Club meeting. A fire crackling in the hearth. No artificial lights: you can even sense that flourescence has never poisoned the oak floor, the fading oriental rug, the dark-brown-almost-black leather chairs. Pipe smoke, probably illegal since the room is in a public place.

In the dim light, an old shaky voice begins to read this:

Suddenly the sea became unquiet; it rose until it became like a mountain, and it rolled upon the land. The ships were lifted up, and cast far inland, and lay in the fields. Upon that ship which was cast highest and stood dry upon a hill there was a man, or one in man's shape, but greater than any even of the race of Numenor in stature.

He stood upon the rock and said: "This is done as a sign of power. For I am Sauron the mighty, servant of the Strong" (wherein he spoke darkly). "I have come. Be glad, men of Numenor, for I will take thy king to be my king, and the world shall be given into his hand."

And it seemed to men that Sauron was great; though they feared the sight of his eyes. To many he appeared fair, to others terrible; but to some evil. But they led him to the king, and he was humble before Tarkalion.

And behold what hath happened since, step by step. At first he revealed only secrets of craft, and taught the making of many things powerful and wonderful; and they seemed good. Our ships go now without the wind, and many are made of metal that sheareth rocks, and they sink not in calm or storm; but they are no longer fair to look upon. Our towers grow ever stronger and climb ever higher, but beauty they leave behind upon earth. We who have no foes are embattled with impregnable fortresses ... Our arms are multiplied as if for an agelong war, and men are ceasing to give love or care to the making of other things for use or delight. But our shields are impenetrable, our swords cannot be withstood, our darts are like thunder and pass over leagues unerring. Where are our enemies? We have begun to slay one another. For Numenor now seems narrow, that was so large. Men covet, therefore, the lands that other families have long possessed. They fret as men in chains ...

We had no temples. But now the Mountain is despoiled. Its trees are felled, and it stands naked; and upon its summit there is a Temple. It is of marble, and of gold, and of glass and steel, and is wonderful and terrible. No man prayeth there. It waiteth ...

Yet Morgoth cometh not. But his shadow hath come; it lieth upon the hearts and minds of men. It is between them and the Sun, and all that is beneath it.

"Is there a shadow?" said Herendil [his son]. "I have not seen it. But I have heard others speak of it; and they say it is the shadow of Death. But Sauron did not bring that; he promiseth that he will save us from it."

"There is a shadow, but it is the shadow of the fear of Death, and the shadow of greed."

-- from "The Lost Road," written sometime in the late 1920's or early 1930's, by J. R. R. Tolkien, in The Lost Road and Other Writings (edited by Christopher Tolkien, Del Rey, 1987).

This is a troubling passage from a man who is derided as a mere fantasy-writer. Too many Orthodox confuse the fantasy of this deeply Christian author with the fantasia that plagues so much of modern culture, including much of the idiom of "realistic" modern novel-writing.

Tolkien rightly felt, with increasing tragedy, the onset and complete victory of a shadow that has eviscerated men of their chests, and women of their theotokion image.

I have a melancholic relationship with this authority of mine. Apart from his masterful language (no one writes better, save masters on the level of the Bard, Dante, and perhaps Eliot, perhaps Milton), I can only follow sadly, with some covetous longing, his deft resuscitation of old languages and myth into contemporary airs.

There is no such counterpart of older and stronger myths, in this corner of the West. Our melting pot has boiled away all structuring myth, and has stripped bare the consciousness to the barbarous tempers of the moment. We are all individual members of a vast combine: we react, and mistake our reactions for philosophy, or originality, or independent action.

Sauron has probably come, but we were so inured to darkness we didn't notice it.

The simplistic, cardboard raptures of sweating, heaving tele-evangelists do not err for their practice of doom.

They err because their doom is not terrible enough.

Eschatological fruitcake

Part One: the Depressing Sunday

A billboard nearby, in the hot pentecostal exurbs of Pittsburgh, is clicking off the days until Saturday, May 21st. That day, as one particularly aroused web site announces, will be the end of the world. So says Harold Camping (who promised the same thing in 1994).

I grew up expecting this event around every temporal corner. Despite my former denomination's anabaptist roots, the revivalist segment of the group took to rapture theory and pre-millennial urgencies like new recruits at an Amway meeting.

"I'll See You in the Morning With a How Do You Do." "I'll Fly Away." "See You in the Rapture." "I Wish We'd All Been Ready."

I can still sing these rather rural troparia, with some nostalgia. I remember, of course, the obligatory movie, "A Thief in the Night" -- seeing it for the first time as unforgettable, fear-mongering sledge-hammer type drama ... years later, I saw it again, and thought how remarkably cheesy the bad guy was with his handlebar bad-guy mustache. 

Then, as you might remember, the tawdry "X Files Meets Billy Graham" series otherwise known as "Kirk Cameron Left Behind." I have already complained about Tim LaHaye's insistence on naming the Antichrist as Nicolae Carpathia: just to be sure you didn't miss it, my late bishop's name is Nicholas, and my diocese is Carpatho-Rusin. How LaHaye ever stumbled on that name, I do not know. One assumes that he had some passing knowledge that many Russians are called Nicolaj (he knows this from the Cold War), and that Dracula's home address is in the Carpathian Mountains.

Of course, all this Rapture stuff is straight from the dreck show.

I think I have eschatological PTSD. Let me tell you of my most traumatic rapture scare.

It was September 11th, 1988. I was an evangelical pastor at the time (this was before my psychotherapeutic days, and long before my Orthodox days). This day was my very first Sunday at a rural Maryland church, set up into the hills and firmly ensconced in the Bluegrass and Shaped Notes Gospel Music belt, where for revival services we commonly brought in special music that vacillated between barefoot bluegrass with banjos and zithers, and gospel quartets like the Cathedrals and lesser groups like the Gospel Four or Kingdom Five or Six Weavers for Jesus.

There, things were simple. Sunday School was much more important than the preaching service after, which was understood as just a shortened version of the revival soul-saving service on Sunday and Wednesday nights, outside of revival season (Spring and Fall).

Back to 9/11. 1988, that is. I had heard, in the months before my arrival, that a certain Edgar Whisenant was circulating in the Bible Lands (not Palestine, but the Southern Gospel pail) the indubitable news that Jesus was coming back on Rosh Hashanah 1988 -- which was Sunday, September 11th.

Amazingly, he had even fixed the time. 10:55 am, I think it was, which would have put the Parousia towards the end of the preaching service.

I remember speaking with Douglas, my well-meaning but overly-earnest church president. On the phone, a week before my first Sunday, I shyly brought up the difficult matter of salary and remuneration, which was $300 every other week.

He alarmed me (and my pregnant wife) when he said, "Oh, don't you worry about things like that, Pastor."

"Oh?" I said, with shock and awe.

"No, sir," he chuckled earnestly, "we're just not gonna be here. Jesus is coming back on Sunday."

Well, I don't need to tell you that there was a truckload of depression that descended, rather unlike Pentecost, on the congregation that day. The song "I'll Fly Away," sung with enthusiasm on the first verse, kind of died away that day into unkempt lawns, piles of dirty dishes, unpaid bills and Monday mornings at work (after some odd things had been said on Friday to the boss).

It is awkward, after all, when you tell the head honcho everything you always wanted to say to him because, heck, the world's going to end. And then the world doesn't. And you're still here, needing to feed your family and pay the mortgage.

Sometimes, eschatology is disappointing, especially the kind of eschatology that is wrapped up and processed commercially, the kind that seconds and confirms easy conventions. Eschatology disappoints, always, when eschatology is used for escapist myth.

I remember one earlier occasion, when I had just gotten off the bus coming home from our denominational youth convention. Early that morning, someone had stuffed a regrettable newspaper under my dorm room door. It was entitled, in garish Friday the Thirteenth font, "The Rapture News." The articles were all about zillions of people missing. Jet planes crashing into each other. Graves bursting open with revivified bodies shooting up into the air.

The title of the paper presented some paradoxical difficulties. Who would publish such a paper, had the event occurred? Especially with all the explanatory verses and tract-pieces from the good offices of Jack T. Chick?

But paradox is far away when you're fourteen. And, at fourteen, the last thing you needed to hear was the maudlin and R-rated images extrapolated from a fetid, disturbed mind onto a Sunday School rendition of Jeanne Dixon.

I heard about the Tribulation. Sure enough, it hared the skell out of me. So that night, I told my mom, who is an astute bibliophile in her own right, "Surely, Mom, Jesus will take us in the Rapture so we wouldn't go through the Tribulation."

She thought for a while, then she said, "But that didn't happen for the Chinese Christians. It didn't happen for the martyrs."

Not what I wanted to hear at that moment, but it was the thing needed to be heard.

Here is what I think, a Rapturology survivor: if the Rapture does occur on May 21st, the proper thing a Christian should do is to say, respectfully, to the Trumpet -- "Say, if it's all the same, please let me stay behind with the Suffering Body of Christ. The Tribulation is for Christians to save in, not to be saved from."

Stay tuned for Eschatological Fruitcake Part 2: Nibiru, Apophis, Mayans and Masons

In other places

Rubrics for other places:

1. Commemorate lesser synods, instead of the appropriate hierarch:

"For our God-loving (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) Lesser Synod, the Camazotz-IT behind our new arrangement (with bells and whistles, checks and balances, teeny, teeny-weeny and grand high poobah councils), let us pray to the Lord." Gospodi Pomiluj.

2. Establish certain web sites, authored by pyschiatric, legal and corporate authorities (instead of ecclesial), as epistemological standards.

3. Protect the dream of independence, the modernist bitch goddess of success.

4. Permit lesser, second-rate and ambiguously-oriented with tragedy-filled-basement-ecclesiarchs to squat squalidly behind the screens of congregationalistic statements of consensus and laugh-tracks for sincere Great Pumpkin patch-planters of old published retired deans, to defenestrate Orthodox hierarchy in deference to the breathless penchant for modern anthropology, freed from all interdiction. 

5. Use words like "conciliar" a lot, and "professionalism" and "consensus."

6. Keep saying that plain chant is Roman. Keep suggesting that the green patriarch is papist. Keep a candle burning for the third Rome.

Is this the best Orthodoxy in America can do?

God save us. Truly.

You've reached the end of the autonomous road, and it is no pleasant rest-stop. More like WalMart in a has-been neighborhood, and you're sitting on a stool with a happy-face badge.

You've experimented with Marx, come home.

You too, Rod.

Both sides: crunchy-cons and red tories.

Autocephaly, self-grasped, is damned.

Somewhere under the ice at Cocytus.

Oh, and another rubric: don't post on certain web sites (you know which): he'll hunt you down, in the name of financial and demogogical propriety. As Jane Eyre once noted, 

"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it." Better to invent action in the rubrics of yellow journalism, than to deal with one's conscience, the escapist inmate of Grace Poole.