Second Terrace

Marching Orders, 2: No Carryon Luggage

Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and salute no one on the road. (Luke 10.3-4).

“Take no bag -- no suitcase, no wardrobe, no overnight bag, no garment bag of extra suits of clothing for various occasions.”

In going on the way, as lambs in time and the world, there is only one occasion.

The logic behind the giving up of bags is bracingly simple: without the ability to change into different sets of clothing, if one is but a lamb, he must stay a lamb, even in the face of the modern synaxis of wolves.

I’m going to stick with my allegorical interpretation of “the wolves” as the persistent rogues gallery of heresies with which the Church has had to attend. The Gnostics are here again, but after all they’ve never left us. So are the Sabellians (i.e., pentecostalists) and the Arians (i.e., mainliners). 

I suppose you could make a case that every single anathematized group cataloged in our conciliar history has its reincarnation padding around like feral cats today. Our Lord’s question, “Who do you think I am?” seems to allow only a few trite possibilities: “You’re not divine”; or “You’re not human”; or, as I averred in the last post, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Did you ever wonder how heretics grow up? From harboring little dangerous opinions (if only to be creative and authentic), to blossoming into a full-blown wearer of an orange clergy shirt sporting a rainbow montage on a burlap stole?

Our stock response to this question usually involves patristic word pictures, like the example of a mosaic: keep the whole (i.e., kata-holos) mosaic intact and you can see the beautiful meaning ... but remove the tiles of the mosaic for your convenience, and you deconstruct the design and are left with shards of glass.

This is a very nice and true description. It is clinical in that it describes the symptoms of heresy, and probably its prognosis. But it fails in etiology, which is the story of how it came to be.

Some of my students claim, in Church History, that heresy produces disunity. They look at the abysmal schismatic array of religious declarations of independence (i.e., “autocephaly” or “self-rule”) -- from Novatian to the non-Chalcedonians to 1053 to the pounding of 95 theses on an old wooden door to the rather boorish nitwit jungle that is American religion today ... and they conclude that behind every schism is a heresy.

Well, that’s about half right. But I suggest to them that the converse may be more robust as a historical analysis: behind every heresy is a self-absorbed divorce from fellowship.

Every heretic feels sorry for himself.

Every heresy is rooted in disunity and passion.

Wolves make for a scary scene for lambs -- a metaphor for innocence, yes, but also an image of all the psychic vulnerability that is mandated by the Good Shepherd. Just to underline this point, our Lord imaged us, in His rhetoric, as “poor in spirit,” as “meek,” as “innocent doves,” as “children.” The apologetical works of the second century insist that the world has nothing to fear from the Church -- whereas the Church might have a lot to be afraid of. She must constantly remind herself, in the Trinitarian vision of apostolic succession and the Eucharistic predicate of worship, that “we are more than conquerors through Him that loves us” ... and “I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me” ... and “Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.” 

These are affirmations that make sense only for lambs, not wolves.

But lambs get worried, if not panicked, when they meander away from the Shepherd. There is no courage or peace outside of the deifying and dogmatic Apostolic fellowship -- a fellowship that persists through history as “succession.”

In the face of wolves, and in the fear of death, the mind is thrown over. Thoughts disorganize and turn into a rout. Peace and courage vanish.

And in its egotistical self-enclosure, the soul manufactures pseudo-doctrine based on pride and fear, and takes as a template (actually, a die) the image of the wolf. “But when he succumbed to discontent he ceased to mind the things of God, he ceased to be content with heavenly things” -- Tertullian, in De Patientia.

Discontent is not the only cause of heresy, and disunion. The terrifying largeness of the universe, and the mindbending probabilities of quantum mechanics are enough for many to wad up the Nicene Creed and to adopt an anti-theological pantheism. Chesterton was not bothered by the possibility of quasars billions of light years away: he averred that the possibility was quite the cozy thing.

But most of us sheep cannot stand the implications of another planetary system, much less another galaxy and curved space.

To modify the words of the genial J. B. Phillips: "Your God is too small, and your universe is too large."

In discontent and fear, then, the soul reaches into its wardrobe bag, and in moral cowardice, the sheep puts on wolf’s clothing.

"Carrying no bag" means remaining in the vulnerable immediacy of the Apostolic fellowship. It means receiving the concrete gifts and holy mysteries of the Trinity. It means repenting, rather than extrapolating a doctrinal trajectory from a constellation of lust, anger, pride, gloom or acquisition. It means praying without vain repetition and in terms of salvation. It means childlike humility and meekness instead of fashionability.

It means taking the risk that you might get called names: horrible names, even, like "irrevelant" ... "fundamentalistic" ... "obsolete" ... "out of the mainstream" ... "patriarchal and homophobic" ... "socialist" ... "environmentalist" ... "creationist."

It means also, and foremost, recognizing the wolf as a wolf and not as a drinking buddy or prodigal friend, who is waiting to help you spend, in riotous living, your inheritance.

Carry no bag of extra suits of clothing. Wear the baptismal garb you have. It is enough. 

Marching Orders, 1: Bad Money

Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and salute no one on the road. (Luke 10.3-4).

In the too-often scheduled summer meetings of the Church (aka: synods, councils, conferences, consultations, conventions), proposals and programs inflate the agenda like larvae in a carcass on a muggy day in July.

Budgets are passed and stewardship programs are solemnly mandated. Powerpoint presentations are festooned with motivational soundtracks and narrative voices that could have come out of the NFL films.

The question is that we need to do something, and before something is done, something is needed that we do not have.

The tenth chapter of Luke is refreshing, in this light. The Lord is sending out His Apostles on a new “program,” if you will. 

And while we might go about a new enterprise by checking off a list of prerequisites like line items and policy committee recommendations, the Lord seems to be going the other way in the Gospel text.

Get rid of stuff, He says. In a manner reminiscent of Gideon’s infamous austerity measures, He requires the surrender of all rabbit’s feet and insurance policies.

So the hermeneutical thinking goes: in the usual parochial homily, our “salt and light” vocation cannot be delayed by worldly “hedges” against contingencies -- like rainy-day funds, esoteric fraternal orders and life insurance policies. The evangel and theosis cannot be delayed for the burial of fathers, and for the saying of all the necessary goodbyes (i.e., “Lord I will follow you when I have all my affairs set in order," like Constantine waiting for in extremis before he cramped his style with baptism).

But this is not the usual parochial homily. It’s a blog not a homily, for one thing. And I am not concerned here so much for virtue in an individual’s relationships as for virtue in the business of dioceses and metropolia.

For to them I would suggest that they are weighed down by excess baggage. 

I would think that the act of ridding oneself of weight should be a liberating experience. On the Laurel Ridge Trail, whenever I would set down my 70 lb backpack and prop it up against my walking stick, the immediate relief was nothing less than ecstatic. I would think the shedding of excess baggage should ever be a joy.

It turns out, for judicatories and metropolia, dioceses and directorates and chanceries, that the letting go of dead weight is more resisted than the adoption of a new path that is more straight.

In this context, let’s look again at the marching orders: Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and salute no one on the road.

“Go your way” is the sending of the Church into world and through time. And when I say “Church,” I mean of course the Eucharistically-founded fellowship that coheres with Holy Tradition. And by “world” I mean the whole human experience, and not just some gathering of academic constructs or demotic habits of knowledge and behavior. And by “time” I don’t mean what passes for history.

“Lambs in the midst of wolves” points out, emphatically, the miserable failure of any attempt on the Church’s part to become the State. The Church should be meek and innocent as lambs -- you may laugh at this, and the reason why you’re laughing is not because of the impossibility of this characterization, but because wolves have been running a fancy-dress ball for centuries, and they haven’t been wearing costumes of pirates or clowns.

The “wolves” here are heresies. One wolf likes to deny the divinity of Christ ... another wolf likes to deny His humanity. A new wolf is howling: and that one advertises, on Twitter and YouTube and important opinions, that there is no God and there is no past, that the world is imagined without religion.

Stop and take a breather here. Notice that Jesus does not bother saying anything about getting rid of heresy. Heresy is the wolf, not dead weight. One shouldn’t have to get rid of heresy mainly because one should never have been beset with it.

“Carry no purse.” Now there’s something to imagine. Immediately all sorts of counter-examples spring to mind. Diocesan programs need their line items, and budgets and actual spending should be out in the open and susceptible to independent audits: yes, yes, I vote for all that. I think that the troubling example of Iscariot embezzling the poor box of Jesus should be reason enough for every parish and diocese keeping open books, and only one set of them.

But that is a commonplace. It is a simplicity that admits to cursory notice. And it is not enough to stop the interpretation at the level of boring interminable stewardship reports that make me nostalgic for my eighth grade civics class with Mr. Maize (a flat-topped jarhead that never lost his Camel-cigarette-cured gunny-sergeant command voice of terror).

No: “carry no purse” also means “don’t keep bad money.” This is not just “more money than what you need.” It is “money that is a bad seed.” 

In the year 144, the wealthy shipper Marcion was kicked out of the church at Rome because of his rather entertaining doctrines. Prior to this, he had donated 22,000 sesterces to the church -- a princely sum that is at least equivalent to a nobleman’s salary.

When they excommunicated Marcion, the church fathers returned all 22,000 sesterces to him.

The reason for this odd behavior can be found in that famously unpopular tome, The Apostolic Constitutions: "It is better to die of want, than to receive gifts from the ungodly and the wicked ... If such gifts are received ignorantly and unintentionally, they should be used for fuel, for it is fitting that fire should consume the gifts of the ungodly.”

Can you imagine bringing back this practice? I can see it now: “Oh, Brother Jim-Bob, you haven’t received the Eucharist in a blue moon and you haven’t attended here for ten Christmases and you don’t believe in Confession, and now you are here with a check for two thousand dollars? No thanks. Why don’t you save your soul first?”

Of course, that’s just silly. Unless, maybe, there really is something to the fact that the morality of the giver affects the substance (not just material) of the gift.

Now if that were to be the case, then the story of Ananias and Sapphira would make a lot more sense.

There are more things to give up. I will attend to them. Here’s a program (and allegorical guide) for things to come:

“No bag”: get rid of fashionabiity (and I do not mean clothes).

“No sandals”: de-program yourself from the rabid dionysiac cult of denunciation.

“No salutations”: quit looking for fellow travelers. 

If a Church can empty its satchel of these extraneous burdens, then maybe there will be space enough in the bag for peace enough to give.

That is the one real export of the Church to the world in time: peace.

And if the Church has no peace to give, it is only because there is, among other things, too much bad money, trendiness, denunciation, and ecumenical salutation.

Fourteen big ideas

The Atlantic -- another magazine that shows up in my box every month -- has published its annual list of ideas.

Here are this year's fourteen "intellectual trends that, for better or worse, are shaping America now." They are listed in "countdown" inverse order:

14.  The Green Revolution is Neither. "Being really green, we're finding out, is even harder than it sounds."

13. The Maniac will be Televised. "... agitation pays when it comes to maintaining a high profile in our seething media environment."

12. The Players Own the Game. "The players [i.e., like LeBron James] are becoming the owners now. This is just the beginning." Well (it must be said) so what.

11. Gay is the New Normal. Jonathan Rauch, an Atlantic contributing editor, notes with heaping teaspoons of scorn this paragraph: "In a country where evangelicals outnumber self-identified gays by at least 10 to 1, and where anti-gay bullying is endemic in schools, and where same-sex couples cannot marry in 45 states ... here, we're supposed to believe that gays are the bullies? Get used to it. This is the script of culture wars to come." I would suggest to Messrs. Rauch et al. that the eschatological trumpet-call of normalcy, once achieved for gayness, may end up robbing gayness of its panache.

10.  Bonds are Dead. "It couldn't last, and it hasn't."

9.  The Next War will be Digitized. "Grand-scale geostrategy has always involved locating the opponent's choke points and vulnerabilities, where concentrated damage can produce widespread harm. That once meant harbors, railroads, ball-bearing works, airports. Now, it's what comes through the USB connector and the Ethernet port."

8.  Grandma's in the Basement (and Junior's in the Attic). "Recent census data show that the number of Americans ages 25 to 34 living with their parents has jumped to about 5.5 million -- a figure that accounts for roughly 13 percent of that age range. Compounding this full-house phenomenon, the grandparent generation is "doubling up" too ..." I will add that the Church is going to be forced, by these circumstances, to give up the hemi-pseudo-segmentation of ecclesial life (i.e., "youth ministries" and "senior ministries") that it adopted, unreflectively, from the protestants). And that may not be a bad thing.

7.  Public Employee, Public Enemy. "... public-employee unions emerged from a sleepy little corner [into] the demonology of American conservative thought to briefly occupy the role of villainus maximus in an ideology-laden fight over the soul of the American workforce."

6.  Wall Street: Same as It Ever Was. "Meanwhile, Wall Street pay is back at record highs -- that didn't take long ..." And people wonder why some people turn marxist. See #3.

5.  The Arab Spring is a Jobs Crisis. "No country now in transition will be able to accommodate demands for either economic security or social justice anytime soon."

4.  Elections Work. "... those who discount the power of voters to talk back do so at their own peril. Elections matter."

3.  The Rich are Different from You and Me. "The reality today is that the rich -- especially the very, very rich -- are vaulting ahead of everyone else ... They [i.e., the "global super-rich"] have more in common with one another than with the folks in the hinterland back home, and increasingly, they are forming a nation unto themselves." I guess we should pray for them as St. Paul commands, since they, probably, are our real lords. And people wonder why some people turn marxist. See #6.

2.  Nothing Stays Secret. "After all, international relaitons based on secret-keeping -- like relations between people who have something to hide -- are inherently fragile." You can say that again. Just ask certain Orthodox jurisdictions about the ability of speakeasy councils and furtive emails to stay in the dark.

1.  The Rise of the Middle Class -- Just Not Ours. "The middle class in America (and Europe) is suffering, but that's only half the tale. In the past decade, income per capita in the so-called 'BRICS' (Brazil, Russia, India and China) has surged, as the middle classes in those countries have expanded in a striking clip."

You can read the whole article (and I recommend that you do) here.

 

Patristic Weltanschauung

Today is the Eve of Pentecost. Next Thursday (6/16) is Bloomsday. I don't think you can take both.

Joyce's Ulysses is an intentionally obscure, too long escapade of a modern man's single day journey.

It is a journey that is only secondarily located in Dublin, and only incidentally (so I suggest) characterized by Leopold Bloom (hence Bloomsday). Primarily it is everyman -- and this itself is comically ironic, for Leopold's archetype is supposed to be Ulysses, who is not at all as dithering and self-absorbed as the novel's non-hero.

Primarily, the location is the consciousness, and the many reveries traveled by the ego to either run away from or find rest in the moment. It is not at all certain whether the real existence of other egos really matter: the possibility of "essence" is nowhere to be found in Joyce's verbal magisterium.

I will let go the siren call that beckons me down the maelstrom of Charybdis -- the inviting whirlpool of another "adversus" against the egoist culture. I will not ask what profit there is in authenticity, or in the business of thinking on da-sein: are we less anxious? Neither will I ask whether the meaning is ever to be found in self-exploration, when the soul is no longer seen as the Temple, or whether the soul is seen at all. 

I will look instead at the Pentecostal icon. The apostles are arrayed, like a synthrenon, around the Theotokos, and they are looking down in condescending compassion upon a king, holding a mantle, in the darkness of the world.

I like this scene, despite the many incongruities between too much history and this transcendent reality -- which remains just as factual.

The Pentecost vignette in Paradise, which is depicted on the icon, reverses the violent narrative of Babel. The dark tower on the Plain of Shinar broadcasts them all out into the grey void: echoes of blasted friendships; inhumane opinions (that turn into asinine political movements); egotistical bankruptcies (that turn into despair or psychosis or both); oppressions and pollutions; vagrancies, peccadillos, romances that displace religion.

"Your young men shall dream dreams, and your old men shall see visions," so said the Prophet Joel about Pentecost, and the new condition of the Church. The dreams are "extra-egotistical." The visions extend far beyond the choked squalid realm of authenticity. "Dream" and "vision" are realities that import transcendent meaning into thought and language -- a unified language of the New Eden that heals the alienation of demonic contempt -- a contempt, I must tell you, that waits with baited breath for any actualizing vocalization of a real human pharanx vibrating through the sinus and glottis and quivering tongue, palate, teeth and lips of real human speech.

But dream and vision echo with the sound of Eden and the brightness of theoria. Paradise, and its arcadian lyric, embraces our particularities and concreteness ... it is incarnate, but it leaps like a living fountain up into the stars.

Imagine that the Artist of the sunrise, wind and rain is the friend of your heart. Imagine and know.

This is what the Theotokos remembered, with the poignancy of a piercing sword. This is what the Apostles remembered in anamnesis, and what they insisted upon in the transmission of Eucharist and ethos.

Peace and beauty in the clear water, cool sunrise and the wind whispering far off waterfalls in the summer leaves.

Christ is beauty, beauty Christ, that is all behind the cruciform condescension of the synthrenon, looking down in love upon the bleak world, still in thrall to the Dark Tower of Babel ... a darkness wherein the Leopolds of the age play like Odysseus, wishing they were better men, but knowing better.

Only Christ can make a man. Only Christ can be the object of a woman's love in a man that will requite.

The king stands for a single long generation of humanity that persists from Pentecost to the Parousia: "these latter days." The apostles and the Theotokos are seated in eternity: the world spins into retrograde.

Leopold Bloom mourns without knowing what he is grieving for: into his responses to Molly and Hugh, the Citizen and Stephen, he tries to synthesize meaning out of meaninglessness.

Only the Word will do when confronted by the Scylla of death.

Here is something helpful from St. Ignatius, a most pugnacious Father, who testifies of another, more profitable worldview:

... be eager for more frequent gatherings for thanksgiving [i.e., the Eucharist] to God and for His glory. For when you meet frequently the forces of Satan are annulled and his destructive power is cancelled in the concord of your faith [from the Epistle to the Ephesians, xiii].

I do not think the worldview of modernism (and its mutant child post-modernism) works at all. Mene, mene tekel upharsin.

Still, the Apostles and the Lady pray.

Primitive frisson (or, more nut and gristle)

Just a small appendix to dangle from the end of the last post -- something on the order of what is called, amusingly, a "thought experiment":

Take down all your textbooks on ethics, Orthodox or otherwise.

Review each one. If your author was nice, he provided you with an index for your ease.

Look specifically for references to the following Scripture texts. See if there are any (probably not).

Here are some odd Scripture texts that describe a neglected dimension to our thoughts on ethics in general, and Christian morality in particular:

1 Corinthians 11.10: That is why a woman ought to have a veil [of authority] on her head, because of the angels. 

1 Timothy 5.21: In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of the elect angels I charge you to keep these rules without favor, doing nothing from partiality.

Hebrews 1.14: Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to serve, for the sake of those who are to obtain salvation?

1 Peter 5.8: Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour.

James 4.7: Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

These are a few Apostolic references that are part of what I like to call the "metaphysical predicate of Orthodox ethics." In this predicate -- call it "worldview" if you must -- our thoughts, passions and actions are freely chosen and powerfully influenced within a culture that is much higher, wider and deeper than our immediate physical experience.

Many have attempted to soften the insult of these Apostolic references. In the name of politeness, these references are usually allegorized: they are fixed in a Platonic schematic through some Origenistic literary apparatus. More likely today, they are processed through the mill of John Howard Yoder and Walter Wink: they are rendered into sociological structures. 

The other extreme is even less feasible. On one hand you have pentecostalists finding and blaming demons for anything. On another hand, you have hyper-earnest priests (even) warning their Sunday School children about demons swinging on the chandelier in the nave.

No. Man is always a free moral agent, no matter how weak he would like to make himself to be. I think, without getting too far off the subject, that all forms of anthropological determinism stem from shyness, and a craven avoidance of chores.

So I don't see dark furry creatures like some of the spiritual writers did, and I do not expect to. 

Neither do I try to amputate hypostasis from the angel or the demon, as I'm pretty sure Yoder and Wink have set out to do (in the name of politeness). For it is rude and messy to have a world where spiritual creatures are bigger and independent of the mind of man. It would be much better philosophically if there were only God and physical creation -- but that is certainly not the case with the Apostles and all Holy Tradition.

My point is this: ever since we have isolated Orthodox Ethics as a field of study, we have neglected the wider context of the bodiless realm -- especially as the powers impinge upon our coherence with God's Will. Setting aside the problem of Paul's view of women: look at his rationale, by itself: because of the angels (1 Corinthians 11.10).

Here is another example: in the Gospels and in some of the epistles (especially James), there is a seemingly disproportionate concern about "verbal sin," especially swearing (and even vulgarity). Why so much interest in mere speech? Especially when compared to egregious actions like adultery and swindling?

I suggest that this concern about language makes sense, ethically, only when ethics is re-contextualized in a wider, bodiless world.

It goes without saying that the existentialist argot of some contemporary modern Orthodox ethicists is not up to the task in this new context.

Perhaps they are afraid, or spooked. After all, what do you do with this line from the Lord Himself?

Luke 11.24-26: When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest; and finding none he says, 'I will return to my house from which I came.' And when he comes he finds it swept and put in order. Then he goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.

Nut and gristle

Here's a nut to crack, or a gristle to chew on.

At the commencement exercises of Holy Cross just a few weeks ago, Dr. Christos Yannaras delivered a very important address. You can read it here.

I am sure that my sympathy for the good doctor's ethical announcements is not up to par. He warns against zealots, who -- judging from his earnest tone -- must be like the proverbial barbarians at the gate against which we should all take up emotional arms. I suppose that by "zealot" he means the ever-threatening fundamentalists here, who are plagued with "certainties" like buboes.

I do not argue with Yannaras on his intended proposition -- that we ought not oppose Western Christianity on the basis of of a simplistic catalog of poorly studied Councils and over-extrapolated statements of elders.

In fact -- despite my many misgivings about his own simplistic understanding of pietism -- I find myself unwillingly agreeing with this poignant flourish:

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, and closely related to them in the language of art, Baudelaire, Kafka, Bergman, and Fellini: All those who have proclaimed painfully that the alienating transformation of a relationship with God into ideology and legalism has led to the death of God - the God of individual "convictions" and crutch of egocentric Morality has died: "we are all his murderers" - Wir haben ihn ge late t, wir aile sind seine Marder [sic]!

Yannaras lists here some people of less than stellar character. I suppose from their perspective, they profited from a close view of the lower infrastructures of the age. That they "proclaimed painfully that the alienating transformation of a relationship with God into ideology and legalism has led to the death of God" is the best face one could put on this gaggle of nazi-sympathizers and ennui-addicts.

I am not so sure that the so-called "death of God" can be laid at the feet of pietists and "ego-centric" moralists, or "zealots." I have heard this before. It put me off then, and I am still peeved.

One can say that the idea of a voluntarist God darkened the revelation of perichoresis. One can say that consequently, a deterministic distortion of divine economy desiccated the meaning of divine and human love. One can say that a deterministic sub-theology produced a heretically-mandated system of usury that flies under the colors of hyper-capitalism.

But one cannot say, as Yannaras seems to, that fundies killed God. No they did not. Academics did. Rich men did. Poor revivalists and baptists did not, thank you very much.

Yet, Yannaras is correct in agreeing with these critiques against the modern Hegelian project. If he wants to read more of Baudelaire and watch more of Fellini in order to feel more confident against modernism, then he can knock himself out and have at it: it's a pretty harsh diet -- rather like a gallon of acidic koolaid. 

I wish, however, Yannaras (and his friends) were not so reverent toward Heidegger.

So let's look at the scoreboard thus far. I agree with Yannaras' main contention about the insufficiency of the usual blah-blah complaints against the West. But I disagree with his insufferable and more prominent (though logically secondary) complaints against fundamentalists -- who, I suspect, are whoever Yannaras (and his friends) finds outré, those bumpkins who come early and earnest on Sunday mornings. 

This is old stuff dealt with in prior snit fits and will be, I'm sure, taken up in future misgivings.

But for today, I have a hickory nut for the author of The Freedom of Morality. And a piece of connective tissue in a cheap cut of beef.

First, the nut. What does Yannaras do with the devil? Is he, or isn't he? I could get along better with Yannaras (and all his friends and his philosophical agencies and really all ethical programmes) if Boethius' theory of evil were sufficient. It would be nice to say that evil is meon and nothingness, and the decay of substance into such perversity.

And while this is true in eternity, it is not sufficient in experience. Boethius is good for philosophy, but not for history. Experience insists, painfully, that evil has entelechy, whether substantial or no. It acts with intelligence and seems to violate Providence and Divine Will not just occasionally but frequently.

The presence of evil is insufficiently explained by Yannaras' system too, just as evil is insufficiently accounted for by almost every other philosophical programme. The postmodern ethic cannot tolerate the idea of the Evil One, and has nothing at all to say about the etiology or nature of the antichrist.

Oddly enough, the error of postmodernism may turn out to be that it blames man for too much evil: man is not as inherently bad as Derrida or Calvin says he is. I am anxious that modern Orthodox thinking jumps down the same rabbit hole.

Second, the gristle. Just as Yannaras ignores the devil, he also cannot account for the present. The entire postmodern project complained about the insufficiency of the Hegelian narrative. Heidegger and company are just as lacking (and even more culpable, since they judged first).

Yannaras' ethical critique does not account sufficiently for the miasma of moral ambiguity in which we American Orthodox find ourselves -- perhaps we are noticing this better than anyone else (and that is no commendation). The great problem, or moral challenge, is really not informed by the terms of "personal ontology," much as I wish it was. 

It is not enough for life to be authentic. Sincerity, by itself, is a distortion and in isolation soon turns meaningless and ego-centric.

Saints are holy, not authentic (certainly not in the Sartrean sense). Their becoming "persons" only because the Trinity is Personal should highlight the need for holiness, not the meaning of "personhood."

Holiness has more to do with obedience than Yannaras would like to think, I think.

Not only does this ethical critique fail to account for the current ethos, the moral status quo of our Orthodox culture. It also does not point the way out.

There is no solution in morality understood as existential freedom. There is philosophical comfort, and some vague aesthetic pleasure I'm sure. But no answer.

As a pastor, I can readily and tragically attest to the fact that this moral miasma is everyday experienced by Orthodox adherents. They feel it keenly as misery, anxiety and guilt. Most of the time, they (and I) deserve it, for our souls have been tempted and we gave assent, and passions grew and darkened.

You know what I worry about? Call me neurotic if you will, but I wonder about the virtual life of my community. At any moment, there are broadcasts of wretched trials of adolescent mothers, accounts of children sexting because their sophomoric national leaders must twitter their groins, adolescents using video-controllers fashioned as pistol grips and slaughtering hundreds of virtual antagonists.

You know what I hope is not is not the case? What if the words of our Lord applied to these virtual displays: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart (Matthew 5.28).

Modern (or postmodern) ethics has little to offer here. It is not enough for ethicists to be studious. They have a prophetic task that may not be shirked ... and new sins cannot displace the old ones.

It would be nicer had we paid more attention to the Decalogue and the Lord's moral legislations in the Sermon on the Mount and that troublesome, sawdusty book of James. Then we wouldn't have shirked our duties to the poor around us and in our families. Then we wouldn't have experimented with eros outside the marriage crown. Then we wouldn't have blown off the mountaintops of the poorest state population (ever notice that this practice is not done in the Berkshires, or wonder why?). Then we wouldn't have rebelled against decent clergy ... or as clergy, we wouldn't have acted like simpering and closeted fools. Then we wouldn't have continued the use of foreign language to keep out the unwashed and hoi polloi. Then we wouldn't have grown men throwing histrionic fits or sending crazy emails. Then we wouldn't have violated old-fashioned precepts against lying, stealing, gossip, adultery, vulgarity, swearing, usury, moving boundary stones.

Maybe then, if we'd have been a little more old-fashioned in our ethics, instead of attempting a narrative that is more amenable to sophisticated sensibilities, then we could recognize the prowling lion better, and understand that he is real.

A nice hymn for episcopal meetings

O God of earth and altar,
bow down and hear our cry,
our earthly rulers falter,
our people drift and die;
the walls of gold entomb us,
the swords of scorn divide,
take not thy thunder from us,
but take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,
from lies of tongue and pen,
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men,
from sale and profanation
of honor, and the sword,
from sleep and from damnation,
deliver us, good Lord!

Tie in a living tether
the prince and priest and thrall,
bind all our lives together,
smite us and save us all;
in ire and exultation
aflame with faith, and free,
lift up a living nation, 
a single sword to thee.

The tune selected for this hymn (by GK, no less) is "The King's Lynn" -- which is a very nice melody in that masterpiece of hymnody, The English Hymnal of 1906. I wouldn't know which of the eight tones would fit. It is clearly idiomela.

I have all kinds of hymnals in my library, including some spiral-ring bound scripture-and-praise chorus sets from the ebullient 70s and some gaither anthologies from indeterminate metaphysical spaces. I have some soft bound shaped notes and southern gospel collections, too.

But I would really like this particular English Hymnal in question. It is hard to find. Later on, it was edited in 1933 by one of my five favorite composers, Ralph Vaughn Williams: in one volume some of the best parings of lyric and music are bound together.

Imagine singing hymns drawn from Tallis' Canon, as opposed to some jury-rigged escapade from "Hymns of Praise," in which the "Skaters' Waltz" by Émile Waldteufel is somehow enjoined to an eschatological ditty (i.e., "maybe morning, maybe noon, maybe evening and maybe soon").

Au contraire. The true sort of hymn above is entitled, endearingly, "O God of Earth and Altar." Its lyrics are trenchant, perhaps too much so, for the softened tastes of today. Years and decades of unremitting linguistic decline in Biblical and liturgical translation have done this.

I suppose the intentions were good. We wanted something the "common people" -- whoever they were -- could easily understand. So under the rubric of the vernacular, and occasionally calling up the legacy of Saints Cyril and Methodios, we rendered sacred text into lines that were at least mundane, if not downright pedestrian. 

It is because of the state of our language that our God is too small. He (or She or It or whatever is voted on as God for the day) is barely more than an extrapolation of American psychotherapy, but is nevertheless blamed for disappointment and grievance.

The smallness of our language, too, partly accounts for the shabbiness of our working faith. We cannot piously choose and follow leaders. We haven't a clue how to lead and serve this country with winsome confidence and humble authority. We are stymied by the dichotomous choice of either marching for a Palin or a Santorum, or drearily giving assent to statism and redefinitions of marriage.

Language, today, is a shallow pool. It is pretty on a nice day, but it scatters when windblown and disappears under a sheet of dead leaves.

Thus, Twitter politicians of all stripes, and regrettable. Thus even Orthodoxy mediated by androgynous committees, hiding behind acronyms just like corporations learned to replace surnames with no-names.

Thunder. Damnation. Terror. Drift and die. 

How long has it been since you've sung these words, or even mentioned them, except in the schoolboy rush of forbidden vulgarity -- and the erstwhile "forbiddenness" is quickly evaporating?

How about a sword? 

But no, I forget myself: the church is but a hospital, and does not talk like that. Perhaps that is why we eschew the annunciation of the Apocalypse in the Liturgy.

We are far more interested in disciplining children and leaping upon stock opportunities than in noticing the encroaching "walls of gold," and the mortifying "easy speeches that comfort cruel men."

Our modern man language helps us nicely forget what pains us to know.

To counteract this morphine OD, let us sing:

O God of earth and altar,
bow down and hear our cry,
our earthly rulers falter,
our people drift and die;
the walls of gold entomb us,
the swords of scorn divide,
take not thy thunder from us,
but take away our pride.

Loose Proust

Ah Proust. You've probably guessed by now that I'm not a fan.

One cannot besmirch his skills with a pen: he can turn out a sentence -- rather, a paragraph -- as attractive as one of those petites madeleines he goes on (and on and on) about.

And yes, he is able to describe reverie, and the melange of thoughts and feelings through which he passes as he tries to preserve his delicate and pretty structure of self-absorption -- a structure I rather think is nothing much better than a tottering house of cards.

I have harbored misgivings about Proust for some time. Reading him is like louching absinthe: his words intoxicate like the famous green fairy, and are meant to draw you into the ever-approaching but never attaining zero-limit of autonomy.

Though his clones and zombies cannot come close to wriggling the plume with his adroitness, Proust is the model literateur of this "present," this metaphysical zone (which smarter men used to call the zeitgeist), this post-industrial POW camp we unknowing live in and which was gushingly cheered on by Marcel himself.

Proust is the reason, I think, why adolescents are forced to read not literature but self-involved crap in high school. Proust is the reason, too, why I think that poetry has been expunged from real, immediate culture -- and all that remains is free verse and stuff that can (and should) be splayed on greeting cards (which themselves descend from a pedestrian history). The fact of Proust is why novels, and "important" poetry, must always be predicated on the erotic -- but an erotic that is debased as the puerile self-discovery of puberty, extrapolated into the void of adult decadence.

I would like to fix the blame for TV on Proust, but I haven't figured out a way to do so. Yet.

Perhaps this self-report of Marcel Proust might be enlightening. This was a questionnaire handed to him in 1891. Questionnaires of this sort were all the rage in the "gay nineties" (and they seem to be rather "of the people" now).

The queries are listed in the margin. Proust's answers are given in regular text after the ellipses (...). My occasional and simpering comments are sandwiched between brackets [ ].

Here goes:

Favourite: bird ... The swallow [really? couldn't have guessed]
-- names ... I only have one at a time
-- qualities in a man ... Feminine charm
-- qualities in a woman ... A man's virtues, and frankness in friendship
-- occupation ... Loving
-- colour ... Beauty lies not in colours but in their harmony [for God's sake man, pick red or blue]
-- flower ... Hers -- but, that apart -- all [I like the roses I tend in my backyard the best: beware of anyone who universalizes on their favorite, and cannot settle for the particular!]
-- prose writers ... At the moment, Anatole France & Pierre Loti
-- poets ... Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny [I take a man's favorite poet to be even more significant, in an Adlerian sense, than his earliest recollection -- and in this instance, the selection explains much]
-- composers ... Beethoven, Wagner, Shuhmann [sic]
-- painters ... Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt
-- heroes in real life ... Monsieur Darlu, Monsieur Boutroux
-- heroes in history ... Cleopatra [what? not Christ?]
-- hero in fiction ... Hamlet [see "poets"]
-- heroines in fiction ... Phedre, Berenice [the first name is struck through]

What is your motto? ... I prefer not to say, in case it brings me bad luck [he cannot believe in the substantial God, but he believes fanatically in luck -- a neurotic condition that obtains in this zone, and that too is probably his fault ... my motto, should you care to hear it, is "What must I do to be saved?"]

What is your dream of happiness? ... Not, I fear, a very elevated one. I really haven't the courage to say what it is, and if I did, I should probably destroy it by the mere fact of putting it in to words [behind every linguistic virtuoso flourish of false reticence like this, there is fear concealed: "do I dare to eat a peach?" Proust would have been helped if he would have believed less in the power of his own words and actions]

Greatest of misfortunes ... Never to have known my mother or grandmother

You would like to be? ... Myself -- as those whom I admire would like me like to be

In what country would you like to be? ... One where certain things that I want would be realized, and where feelings of tenderness would always be reciprocated

You most dislike ... My own worst traits

Faults you most indulge ... Those that I understand

Your principal defect ... Lack of understanding; weakness of will

Despised historical figure ... I am  not sufficiently educated to say [actually, this is a good answer]

Would like to die ... A better man than I am, and much loved

What is your present state of mind? ... Annoyance at having to think about myself in order to answer these questions [well now, he wasn't sufficiently annoyed to prevent himself from writing his hyper-analyses of remembrances]

Natural gift you'd like ... Will-power and irresistible charm [hah]

Admired military event ... My own enlistment as a volunteer! [I prevent myself from a very long and sardonic comment]

Your most marked characteristic? ... A craving to be loved, or, to be more precise, to be caressed and spoiled rather than to be admired [some people insist that Proust meant this ironically: I, obviously, do not, and take it for its full meaning]

What do you most value in your friends? ... Tenderness -- provided they possess a physical charm which makes their tenderness worth having [Res ipsa loquitur]

Reform you most admire ... [no answer]

-- adapted from Andre Maurois, The Quest for Proust (1949), quoted in Ben Schott's inestimable Quintessential Miscellany, which is not yet available in the US.

C. S. Lewis once suggested that to have a "self-consciousness," one must first be aware of "the other" by which to sense "self" by contrast. I rather like this idea, because it lends itself to the self-consciousness of the Trinity (if such a thing could be said) as predicated on love, kenosis and co-inherence.

But I do not think that Lewis could admit the severe and hypertrophied sense of the self in modernity, as is celebrated (in a rather auto-erotic sense) in a Remembrance of Things Past (or, what have you, In Search of Lost Time).

I wonder. I wonder if the self has become so large that consciousness feels no need, anymore, of "the other," or anything, for contrast?

This all boils down to the place of memory in our hearts. Proust likes to think that memory is to be searched for traces of the self, as though the Self were the Other.

Can you not hear the echo? -- For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation ... I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. (Isaiah xiv)

But what is memory, but the response of the heart to the Word? What is memory but the traces of Time? What is memory for but anamnesis? Are you not called to look for, instead of self, but the single Christ Who alone can heal the self from its self-ness?

The antichristic spirit is no fancy, romanticized anti-hero like Milton's superhero that landed on dirt with a clang.

It is instead the simpering spirit of complaint, a whining half-manned desire to be caressed and tenderized. 

Instead of liturgy and prayer, which is the true love of "the Other," it is a search of lost time for the precious self.

Too, too Tutu

Other people harbor guilty pleasures like dancing to Disco Duck, stashing KitKat bars under the nightstand, or slinking off to Monster Truck shows.

I respond, sometimes, to drudgeries on HuffPost and DrudgePost. I am, after all, equal opportunity in this atmosphere of totalitarian tolerance.

(sorry, my alliteration is getting as bad as Swinburne's -- and that should be enough to frighten anyone)

Bishop Desmond Tutu came out with another paean to ur-religion in the frippish Huffington Post recently: entitled, glaringly, "God is Not a Christian."

You might want to read it yourself, since I don't think I am all that fair in my remarks below.

I pass these remarks on to you, since my comments at Huffington are probably not cherished, and sometimes do not pass muster with their particular editorial standards:

"God is not a Christian," so says his grace, Bishop Desmond.

Well, of course God is not an adherent of the religion He establishes. Why would He enlist as a worshipper of Himself?

But Bp Desmond's statement is false. That God is not a Christian means, for Tutu, that other religions share equal validity with Christianity. 

That is an interesting idea, and a trite one, for it has been suggested many times before (and with much better argument). 

That said, you cannot mutate Christianity into a nice polite religion that shares the stage with all the other nice polite religions -- if any are so nice and polite. First of all, Christianity is not that nice and polite. It happens to say imperious things like "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life -- no man cometh unto the Father except through Me." 

Islam is just as fastidious. I cannot imagine the Prophet holding hands with Buddha.

Why Bp Desmond and so many others wish fervently for an inter-religious kum ba yah campfire I do not know. Perhaps it is that Bp Desmond would like all religion to pass into equal meaninglessness -- for this is exactly what should happen if all religions were equally valid.

Then, as Tutu must wish, we wouldn't have to put up with all those nasty religious obligations, like repentance and acceptance of dogma. We could just pare down all religions into a nice mush of getting along and recycling our trash.

I think it is important to get along and recycle our trash. But these are simple things that everyone knows without the revelation of religion. Christianity says that there is a particular God, that He is Triune in Himself, and that He is revealed in history by Jesus Christ -- and by no other. 

It is not enough for Bp Desmond to wish for peace on earth. He must make peace with that impolitic fact of his own religion.

What does it mean, that He is still flesh?

What does it mean, that He is still flesh?

That He ascended into heaven,
having been apprehended, sensually, by us and the rest?

Prayer, even that of the poor undefended,
unsponsored by the powers and the philosophers
and the celebrated, heard

By a human nature transfigured?

Scars in a palm, in a vulnerable side,
in a Divine stone in the wilderness of totality
desiccated in death, shriveled in ash,
the Rock springs and the desert blooms,
Rain, rain and spring, sunrise and the cool breeze
that chases death down to the event horizon.

The smart ones have never once defined prayer,
for prayer, heard by God enfleshed, incarnadine,
is always about the moving of mountains,
which, if you must know, is time itself,
is.

What does it mean, ascended flesh, still? 

It means simply this:

That beauty will persist.

Thank God.