Second Terrace

Christian Conservative, not Right, not Republican

A few weeks ago, Rev. S. Hutchins of Touchstone announced that his magazine is not conservative. Christian, yes, but not conservative.

I did not find this announcement, or the essay that followed, to be helpful. If the writer is troubled by the ambiguity of the term "conservative," then he should be appalled at the practical meaninglessness of the word "Christian." All sorts of people and ideas trumpet themselves under this rubric. The word "Christian" cannot ever be used as a clarification.

Anti-Nicene (not ante-nicene) unitarians, gnostics and libertines regularly flash "Christian" as their ID badge for admission into ecumenical shindigs at the neighborhood cathedral. Some years ago, I had been elected (under no little duress) to attend a "Christian Unity" service/event/happening/hoedown (since it had tambourines, bongos and the ubiquitous sappy youth ensemble) at the big church downtown. We Orthodox were attired black in somber cassocks: everyone else had on their baptismal whites with rainbow stoles: flamboyance kissed kindergarten burlap chic that day in the liturgical arts.

After my eyes refocused from the haze of kumbayah and willing suspension of belief, my gaze was assaulted by the stole of a priest/minister/shaman standing next to me, whose cloth was spangled with crosses, stars of david, buddhist wheels and yins and yangs (along with other characters I know not what of -- I'm sure Wicca and the Golden Dawn were represented somewhere along the strip).

"What are you doing here?" I asked in my most genteel ecumenical tone (you know, velvet, metrosexual, urbane, glossed with that sherry and canapé cachet).

"Oh, I'm Unitarian you know," he avowed (or averred, I'm not sure which), "and I'm here because this is Ecumenical, you know, and that means that we Christians should all be here." He framed this in a big warm church growth smile. "Isn't this great?"

Then we traipsed off, with the rest of the big happy's, into the galleria of unity, gluing ourselves linguistically together with litanies that announced our position on hunger and war (we were against them), and how we were just very upset by prejudice against blacks and women ("here here" gushed the distaff rev's). The service was topped off by a postmodern sermon (replete with lots of "awesome" this and that's) by the city's assembly of god minister, who was sporting a nice suit from Target (i.e., evangelical vestments).

That service is what "Christian" means today, so no, I don't think it is helpful to call Touchstone or any of us conservatives "Christian."

But Rev. Hutchins is correct in his complaint that the word "conservative" suffers from some lexical neglect. And despite the fact that in these virtual pages, I have written several times on its meaning, I will again have a dash at defining it, at least in my favored (and dyspeptic) apophatic manner:

"Conservative" is not Ayn Rand. What complete rot. Ayn Rand was or is an individualist libertine and an inhumane moral nutter. Think Nietzsche trying to fawn and pander at the exurban country club ("thanks, cool guys, for letting me in").

"Conservative" is not Republican laissez-faire economicism. A thousand years ago, the theocratic societies of the Christian East and West would never have tolerated an ecumen dominated by secular capital and multi-national wealth-production hegemonies. "Laissez faire" in Republicanism means "hands-off" for large business, but not for everyone else.

"Conservative" is not the prosecution of an undeclared war. It is not the demonic Clauswitzian meaning of war as an extension of the national interest (an expedient categaroy that subsumes business interests under a political rubric). Conservatives get a migraine when politics and business interests are conflated, especially for the preservation of usury, especially in labyrinthine rationales for war.

"Conservative" is not the consumption of Creation, or its raping and pillaging under the rubric of property rights or the Rapture. Neither is it the distortion of human or any nature whether by "therapeutic" behavior mod from Madison Ave, manipulation of DNA, slicing and dicing of embryos (i.e., "new from K-TEL!"), or by the splitting of atoms and calling it -- and thus blaspheming -- "Trinity."

"Conservative" is not the identification of "Israel" with the geopolitical institution marked by international boundary. Neither is it the exploitation of hackneyed chiliasm for the aims of geopolitical/economic hegemony (aka "neoconservatism"). Conservatives do not understand the notion of a dual covenant, especially when spiced up with liberal doses of dispensational eschatology and served up to international affairs.

“Conservative” is not revolutionary linguistics. It finds the playground pranksterism of Derrida and Clinton distasteful at the least. It does not permit the usage of words like “whites,” “blacks,” “hardworking whites,” “bluecollar” or vagrant (and awkward) participles like “evil-doers.” It does not permit the substitution of “celebration” for “liturgy,” “worship center” for “church,” “consensus” for “dogma,” “music ministry” for “punishment.”

"Conservative" is neither sociological or revolutionary. It puts no faith in mortal princes, and is ready to be disappointed by all campaign promises but is ready to pray for our leaders anyway, and to forgive. So you're right, Keith Olberman, President Bush is despairingly cretin in appearance (and cynically Borgia, I think, at base): but your diatribes against our king are impious, and they're getting on my nerves. Anyways, a conservative knows that the most boorish of patriots can be found in the precincts of both right and left. Liberals can be quite patriotic -- one need look in Napoleonic France to see a whole quivering mass of revolutionary patriots. Outside America, we can see this clearly, but we call them "nationalists" instead.

Conservatives are loyal and even embrace the myth of America. They worry, though, about the fantasy side of "lapel pin patriotism," whose narratives distort the real virtues of the West into small-minded notions of imperium. I prefer the West as a superior Christian culture, but I have no affinity with the EU, opting instead for the more conservative Christianity of the sub-40's. I love America, its land and deep culture, but I cannot stand the violent marketing of its commercial avatar. If you mean by patriot the likes of Lincoln, then yes I am a patriot, but not if you mean anything like Halliburton or Exxon.

"Conservative" is neither right nor left. I think this is where Rev. Hutchins went wrong. He meant to say that his magazine is not "rightist," and that is a good thing to say. The "right" in modern geopolitics usually connotes an alignment with the political party that holds military power. The Christian Church has always shown a critical ambivalence toward militarism, and that is why the term "Christian Right" is so very nauseating. I have been accused of being an intolerant anti-feminist, anti-abortion radical, a homophobe, and an anti-evolutionary flat-earther: but I will not tolerate being called "Right." Well, it depends on what you mean by that.

"Conservative" is not the mindless explosion of any article of the Bill of Rights into absolute status. Neither the Bill of Rights nor the Constitution is identical to or coterminous with Natural Law. The Constitution is, as Justice Antonin Scalia says, a dead document. Natural Law, however, is immutable but ever new, and is seething and pregnant with consequences.

That said, "free speech" cannot be mutated to mean license to spit out the "F-word" whenever an uneducated mind has run out of its 50-word vocabulary. "Free speech" does not mean the depiction of glossy breasts and pects as come-ons for cars and toilet bowl cleaners; neither does it mean the display of genitalia and groin-squatting as airdoll stand-ins for selfless love.

"Free religion" does not mean state religion -- so I shouldn't have evolution stuffed into my brain at every turn, no? Neither does it mean that I have to agree, like Huxley's Soma crowd, that "we all worship the same God." No, we don't. The Holy Trinity of Christianity is not the Allah of Islam. Neither does it mean that I have to bow before the Iron Crown of secularization.

"Free gun" means that I can have a rifle slung above my door, ready for the hunt, for the guard of my house, and for the militia. It does not mean AK-47s, Uzi's, Glocks, or any weapon meant for the destruction of human life. Sports, yes, hunting, yes, protection, yes, but never, ever assault.

"Conservative" is not commodification. The chief stupidity of the Republican Party is that it has used economic value to obliterate real difference in substance. The value of Land is delimited to a mere monetary price. The value of human life is fixed on actuarial charts. "Conservative" is not Democrat, to be sure, and we all knew this already. But "Conservative" is also not Republican, and that is getting clearer everyday.

Peggy Noonan wrote a fine article in WSJ today (May 16th) about the death of the Republican Party. Her trenchant analysis chronicles the steady loss of power since the Republican high water mark some years ago -- a loss I am tempted to ascribe to divine judgment. I would add to Noonan's explication that the Über-PAC (for that is what it is now) is dying chiefly because its main business is business, and not conservatism, and definitely not Christianity.

Real conservatives should find economics rather much of a yawner, a necessary evil. Something that must be discussed as part of the bourgeois fallen world, but then off to the better things of beauty, truth and the good of custom and hearth, heart and earth.

And now for the cataphasis: "Conservative" is the cultural articulation of Natural Law. It distrusts civilization. It uses sociology as history, but despises it as a philosophy. It yearns for the Gospel as it narrates human nature and the rest of nature. It seeks friends, not allies. It mourns the loss of friendship. It understands tragedy and true comedy. It does not, and will not ever, understand the words "coalition" and "expedience" or even "party." That fact alone could be the main reason why the Republican Party as a conservative group is withering: conservatives are simply no good at playing the internecine political game. The process of politics promotes mode over substance, method over discrimination, gesture over craft, movement and association over home and town. A conservative cannot do this long without getting sick at heart.

The conservative knows that true history is nearly elusive a subject as Being. A conservative can live and pray, breathe air and drink water, sing old songs and embrace with love, without beginning to understand life, nature, poetry and the grace of the Trinity.

"Conservative" is really -- despite the "ecumenical" obfuscations -- orthodox Christian (with a small “o,” but better with a big one). Conservative clarifies the term Christian, and vice versa.

Soon and very soon

Soon, my office window filled with a bare dogwood, I will go out and prune the tree. The pussy willows need looked at for Palm Sunday a month away. The detritus from the dead November winds should be raked away. Soon.

It is hard to believe in Spring. A succession of winters will do that: bury the evidence, the actual experience of surprise, the burst of April scattering the remnants of January. Not only do the slate horizons of winter dull memories of Spring, but so also the Sirius heat of August. Somewhere lost in the familiarities of gray chill and bronze burn is the cool, fresh brightness, the juvenescence of lilac, honeysuckle, lilies and apple blossoms whispering, sighing in the first pleasant evening, when I can walk hand-in-hand in the soft darkness on our brick lane. Soon.

But now, coke trains lumber on the long viaduct to the Edgar Thomson No. 1 & No. 3 blast furnaces in Braddock, past the empty hulks of the interminable Westinghouse plant, the background of my foreground dogwood tree. We hear them day and night, and the Port Authority buses that growl night and day, coaching the workers in and out of the City. These are the sounds of death and heat, inhumane necessities, wrath and want. Whitman was off by a long shot in his versification of industry: the sounds do not cheer me, they do not betoken human activity. They, too, obscure the Spring. Which is to come. Soon.

There are white women who bemoan black men, and wars waged for increasingly arcane, industrial reasons. There are hierarchs who have forgotten meekness and have remembered lesser rubrics at the expense of the greater dogmas. There are webmasters who knit shawls at guillotines, despots who assign guardian angels and saints to nukes, revisionists who would be happy to refashion a dusty old patriarchal hasbeen church into their own egalitarian, professional, uptodate image, where every bishop will answer to an oversight committee. There are 1 in 4 female adolescents stricken with STDs, fired admirals, embarrassed governors, shuttered McMansions, unpopular embattled Orthodox, Creed-ignorant ecstaticians.

These are the sounds of death and heat. They, too, obscure the Spring. Which is to come. Soon.

Only a community that is apostolic in sacrament and mystical work can sustain the life of Christian dogma through history. In other words, the Gospel of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation – theology and economy proper – can only be articulated through a Body that actually believes this Gospel. Such a Body is led through history by bishops that see, with their hearts, the apostolic vision: they, and their clergy and faithful, can do this only through knowledge mediated by grace and works, in fear and trembling.

Time corrodes – as is characteristic of all Grace – all attempts outside the veil, or the “covering” of the sacred order, the authority of the Pillar of Truth. Bishops can be bishops, Church can be Church, only in the Biblical, Patristic sense – through ascesis, kenosis, the radically conservative Gospel revolution, mystical charisma. If otherwise, as has been seen too often in the deathworks, then these men and institutions will tend, inexorably and carnally, toward the abysmal poles of mainline (and sidelined) American anti-nomianism; or neo-Borgia-Medici-Frankish statism; or quasi-caesaro-papism that yearns for a third Rome. There is Rome enough, and that one is in Italy. There was once a New Rome: it did its ordained work of establishing Orthodoxy. It is gone. There was, and is, and will be, no other.

There is the state, of course, and I am not at all sure anymore that I know what, or where, it is. But it sure makes lots of money.

Culture has never been so loud and empty, so strident in its obfuscation, its mystification, its blinding and whining. It has a million ways to stand between the soul and the appearances, a million virtualities.

The Trinity, though, is beautiful. Christ is beautiful. Man finds his beauty (that is, meaning) in the redemption won by Christ. Church is this beauty, and redemption is Spring. Soon.

I have been despondent over death, and I have felt the winter as I have felt no other. But I remember the beauty of mercy this first week of the Fast, in the Canon. And I remember the Spring.

Soon.

Like it or not, Witness to the Truth

It is difficult, and will become more difficult, to teach God's Word to the world. That is the task of the entire Orthodox Church, clergy and laity alike. And that is the most important leadership task of the Bishop.

I believe two things about the episcopacy. One is that the episcopacy is absolutely essential for Orthodoxy. There is no such thing as a protestant form of Orthodoxy, for such a thing runs the risk of jumping outside of succession. Moreover, such a “congregational” pop-polity distorts the mystical vision that constitutes our ecclesial epistemology, and ends up obstructing theoria. Most of this essay is about the importance of the episcopacy.

But that episcopacy must be nothing less than an icon of Christ, and it must orient its aspirations completely toward theosis. The Beatitudes is the standard, or the ethic, of episcopal behavior and “values” (if I must use that term). There must be more meekness at the level of bishop, more hunger for righteousness, more spiritual poverty, more mercy.

This is not to say that there shouldn’t be a love for the grand spectacle, golden chalices and fine vestments. I have no problem whatsoever with the glorious apparel of the Church. I think it takes humility to become overwhelmed aesthetically by the image of heavenly worship and the glory of Liturgy: conversely, it takes pride of the first order to contemptuously glory in minimalism, and complain that the proceeds should have been given to the poor.

But it should be that the Bishop, as the successor to the Apostles, as one who is breathed upon by Christ with the Spirit, under the voice of the Father – it should be that one is a type of the Good Shepherd who is so meek that he will not discard a damaged reed.

We need such an episcopacy in a time that doesn’t like the Trinity, or the truth of man, now more than ever.

John Henry Cardinal Newman once wrote that the ministry of the Church is divided into three categories: theology, devotion, and government. The Bishop must be preeminently a theologian as he is president of the Church: and for him to know theology and to teach theology well, he must be a man of devotion and prayer. Disaster and disappointment always strike when any Christian attempts Orthodoxy without prayer: and nowhere is this more tragic than when a bishop attempts to do so.

St. Clement of Rome, in writing (about AD 85) on the necessity to appoint bishops who would directly succeed the Apostles, wrote that such men should have "ministered to the flock of Christ without blame, humbly, peaceably and with dignity, and who have for many years received the commendations of all" (Letter to the Corinthians).

In the doctrine of the Church, the Bishop -- as the successor of the Apostles -- is expected to be the keenest witness of Holy Tradition to the present generation. St. Dionysios the Areopagite made this expectation clear, and for a particular reason. He stated, without apology or reservation, that the episcopacy should have attained the highest levels of morality and spirituality. Having attained this, the episcopacy is able then—and only then—to apprehend the mystical truth of theology.

This highest stage is that of mystical union with Christ, and St. Dionysios identified this stage with the episcopacy. In this stage, the Christian is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and he experiences “theoria,” or the “vision of theology.” He is given a profound awareness of the present, ongoing voice of apostolic tradition. Indeed, this is the very reason why we recognize the episcopacy as the vessel of the unbroken, continued presence of apodosis, or the apostolic witness of Holy Tradition.

Of course, it should be said that this schema of St. Dionysios does not discount the fact that there are many Christians who have been purified, illumined, or given the grace of theoria. Neither does it discount the tragic possibility that some bishops, priests and deacons may not have attained the sanctification that is necessary to their office.

The schema of St. Dionysios leaves us with one very clear point: the leadership of the Church must experience the vision of theology, in its most mystical meaning, or else the Church will founder in "the winds of doctrine as children, vulnerable to the trickery of men and the deceit of conspiracies" (Ephesians 4.14).

The process of deification, which figures as the single, all-encompassing imperative of the undivided Church, inducts the Christian -- especially the Bishop -- into a truly ecclesial epistemology. In such an epistemology, the soul has achieved independence from the passionate distortions of the world, which so often confuse and darken discernment. The soul has been enabled to take a truly realistic view of the world and its members. It is unhindered by completing philosophies or “spirits,” whether these are consciously learned or tacitly accepted. It apprehends reality directly and accurately, and is not distressed by contemporary values that are irrational, nor is the soul conditioned or determined by contemporary forces. Finally, the sanctified soul communes with the Holy Fellowship of the Trinity and the Church, the mystical Body of Christ. It hears the contemporary voice of Holy Tradition, and the Spirit’s trenchant criticism of society at present.

In short, deification alone prepares the soul for theology. Deification -- neither mere academic achievement, nor cultural and rubrical finesse -- is what makes the Bishop the Defender and Speaker of the Truth.

For this reason, St. Maximos the Confessor called this true theology nothing less than the mystical vision of the Trinity … it is unforgettable spiritual knowledge, written into the very summa of the servant-hierarchy of the Church.

The Bishop occupies a perspective that is more perilous and terrifying that what is commonly known. He is aware of the grim realities of spiritual evil, the "roaring lion who walks about seeking whom he may devour" (1 Peter 5.8). He is painfully aware of the dark labyrinth of the human soul, and the gravity of sin and denial of Christ. He is sensitive to the allergy of the modern age to the message and the very presence of the Orthodox Church. He knows that America and Europe do not want to hear that the Bible is sacred, perfect and mysterious.

These Western nations do not want to hear that God the Father created, maintains, and will consummate the seen and unseen worlds, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. They do not want their myths of evolution and materialism challenged, nor do they want to hear that human nature is understood only in the wisdom of Holy Tradition, and not by Freud, Jung or Maslow. They, and really all the world, do not want their behavior and opinions confronted by the demands of Natural Law and Christian charity.

The Bishop, as the Defender and Teacher of the Truth, knows first hand and more profoundly than any other, that "the house of God, which is the church of the living God, is the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3.15). He knows, from the experience of prayer, asceticism, study and communion, the supreme truth of the words from the Synodikon of the Seventh Ecumenical Council: “This is the faith of the Apostles. This is the faith of the Fathers. This is the faith of the Orthodox. This is the faith that upholds the universe!” This is not a mere figure of speech: the Church actualls preserves the world and illumines it, just as our Lord described His followers as "salt and light" (Matthew 5.13-14).

The Bishop knows -- because he should have experienced it, the Apostolic Vision -- the objective fact that "the grace of truth has shone forth upon us ... the Church is clothed in a beauty that surpasses all things earthly" (Vespers for the Sunday of Orthodoxy). And because of this revealed truth that surpasses the intellectual powers of philosophers, but is experienced through Orthodox sanctification, "the Church of Christ is delivered from the dark despondency of heresy: she puts on a robe of gladness, and is clothed in the light of divine grace" (Matins for the Sunday of Orthodoxy).

The Bishop knows that there is darkness in the world, and that darkness will become eternal. But far better is his confidence that there is salvation in the Church, and the darkness "will not comprehend it" or engulf it, but instead that Uncreated Light will shine supreme at the end of the age.

God desires "all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2.4). The bishop is ordained by God to participate in this plan of salvation. The bishop is assisted by his priests, who are the extension of his archpriestly office. He is also assisted and represented by all the faithful of the diocese, his eucharistic fellowship. The faithful Orthodox Christian not only practices the virtues that are described in the Beatitudes: he also proclaims in his testimony the contents of the Creed.

There is heartbreak all around the Church because prodigals suffer from homesickness for their Father's house. There are broken minds and broken philosophies, because pagans and heretics suffer the lack of knowledge of God.

They are all lost sheep, waiting for the Prophet, the Saint, the Apostle, the Bishop and his flock who are sanctified, to come and lead them in true knowledge through the storm and back home to the Father's House.

This is the fervent plea, written in the ancient prayer of Consecration to the Episcopacy. The bishop-elect kneels before the consecrating bishops, holding the pastoral staff in his hand, and with his hand upon the candidate's head, the chief consecrating bishop prays these words: "O Lord, make this, Your servant, who has been declared a steward of episcopal grace, to be an imitator of You, the True Shepherd, Who laid down Your life for Your sheep; to be a leader of the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor of the unwise, a teacher of the young, a lamp to the world; that having perfected the souls entrusted to him in the present life, he may stand unashamed before Your Throne and receive the great reward which You have prepared for those who have contended valiantly for the preaching of the Gospel ..."

American climacteric

Strange days, indeed, are upon us. Here are a few signs:

1. The Great Fast is about to begin, and here in Pennsylvania, we will be visited upon by the additional Lenten struggle of a Democratic street brawl. Our Primary's spoils will be fought over as never before. The actual vote will take place on Holy Thursday. I will be busy reading the Twelve Passion Gospels. I will fail to vote that day, voting instead for the Cross, since I put my faith in no mortal princes.
2. I did not know this, but I was unaware that sexism is worse than racism -- or so I've been told by feminists who had been rankled at the success of an African-American. When I questioned this comparison, I was lectured on the fact that African-Americans got the vote decades before women did, and that ongoing gender discrimination is worse than racial discrimination. I did not know this. I still do not know this. I am afraid that I will flunk my egalitarian finals: I will try for the real paradise instead.
3. China and India will take over the world economy soon, if such a circumstance is not already a fait accompli. Gasoline will soon hit $4 per barrel. McMansions are being shuttered by foreclosure, and pretty vinyl-sided housing developments are being vandalized by copper thieves. (Still, Fox newsmen drone, the economy's pretty good.)
   
4. The March issue of The Atlantic opines that the winner of the clash of civilizations or religions will be neither Christianity nor Islam. Instead, Alan Wolfe breathlessly reports, it will be a secularized version of both of them, each rendered into a commercialized and individualized philosophy of "personal empowerment," all in the context of "wider bourgeois virtues of thrift and responsibility." Alan Wolfe is obviously thrilled with this prospect. And he is correct in his analysis: secularism will triumph, if finance capitalism is not disrupted by a cataclysm. He is correct, and I agree with him. But there we part company. He is happy about this. I am dismayed.
5. As I've said before, I'll say it again: Christendom, if it ever existed, existed mainly to foster the religion of the Holy Trinity. When that religion is abdicated philosophically or -- as is happening now -- reviled as something to be merely tolerated, then that culture or civilization will decline. Energy will fade at the center. The West does not exist as a sandbox for financiers: once upon a time it had a higher purpose: it cannot long abide for anything lower. This is another of many definitions of decadence -- the water in which we swim like fish.
6. Abdicate the culture of the Trinity, and one renounces the life that sustains the culture. If a person forgets the Trinity and the Son Who saves, then his mind will be overthrown, and he will grasp at any flotsam to save himself in the tempest. (Another word for flotsam is "idea," "philosophy," or "art.") If a couple (married or otherwise) forgets the Trinity and the Son Who blesses, then their love will lose metaphysical reference, and eros will devolve into lust, time will pass into separated moments, dustmotes in the sun. If a Church forgets the Trinity and the Son Who constitutes it, then its mind will be overthrown, its hierarchs will become gilded executives or red-eyed executors, its seminaries will become modernist (and moral) brothels, its people will become oppressed bitter constituencies, its life a mere sociological phenomenon, liable to and fully explicated by political analysis and marketing trends.
7. This is happening. Not everywhere, thank Heaven. But at the moment when America needs Trinitarian and Christological Orthodoxy most, Orthodoxy is preoccupied with disruptions in pastoral leadership, ethnic identity, and modernist issues. True ecclesial authority has been, of late, distorted into rather worldly models of capricious autocracy. The reaction is no better: the political movement against this tragic despotism has been little more than a revolutionary contempt for Orthodox ecclesiology, a mere agenda for protestant innovation.
   
8. America needs, at this climacteric moment, the true philosophy of Orthodoxy Trinitarianism and Christology (true philosophy is nothing else). It needs at this moment the true community of the Christian sobor, the koinonia of the Apostles -- a society and consciousness that is framed by the mystic fellowship of the Saints. America needs the witness of the Apostolic theoria, the common vision of the Prophets, the Apostles, the Fathers, Saints and Bishops. It needs an ethic drawn from this theoria (not from science), articulated by Bishops and Priests who are holy, Christlike, divinized -- not acclimatized to the age. America needs Orthodoxy as other civilizations will take center stage: and perhaps then, Orthodoxy can render to America its greatest gift -- the knowledge of its logos, its true beauty, its God-created past and depth of present.
   
9. America will not get this gift from quasi-religions that are oriented toward self-fulfillment, personal empowerment, a "purpose-driven life." Religions of personal fulfillment -- that is, those self-help systems souped up with God-talk -- only possess credence in the framework of an industrialized system, especially if that system is doing all it can to emulate "developed" economies. But what currency would Rick Warren's "theology" have in the catacombs? What possible Christian meaning would a "purpose-driven life" possess in a world-wide China -- a prospect that is not inconceivable? What use is ecstasy, or mystical experience, speaking in tongues, words of knowledge, rubrical correctness, mission statements (ick and uber-ick), even social consciousness and charity, if the content of experience and community is devoid of Trinity?  What use is the mega-church unless its denizens can recite the Nicene Creed?
10. America will certainly not get the gift of logos from Democrats or Republicans, Obama, Clinton, or McCain (or Limbaugh, or Air America). It will not get it from preoccupations with arcane rubrics, or from any Third Rome, or from any revised standard version of Church, from any experiments in ecclesial theory of cultural relativity, Walter Mitty dreams of contemporary popularity and egalitarian science fictions (e.g., non-ontological post-lapsarian gender ideologies).
    
    Logos can come for America only from what is Old, and from what is New.

Two Brothers Worry About Hell

RE: your recent complaint about cybernautics

Jonathan,
I once thought of hell as an endless casino
filled by old ladies mindlessly pulling the lever
on the slot machine.
Looks like I'm going to have to update it.
That is the future I dread.

Benjamin,
it is a sad thing that our visions of the future
(prior to the Last Day, of course) approach ever closer
the anti-mythical reality of an intermediate state.

It used to be bad enough imagining
polyester-clad Budweiser-sotted
grandchildren-evading
Hasselhoff-fantasizing sexagenarians huddling,
under walpurgisnacht-fluorescence,
over dinging, ringing, flashing incubi dressed up like teletubbies,
leering for quarters thrust in their slots.

It was bad enough when we had to drive
our bored grandmothers "over there,"
to wherever this hell was,
across the Styx into New Jersey,
over the Desert of Sin for forty years to Las Vegas,
or to the pre-Dead Sea happy sodom city of Monte Carlo,
the perfected mass opiate consciousness of Marx,
Groucho and Karl.

But now there is no there anymore.
In the cyber den, virtuality has no here or where.
The Hades of Nowadays requires no trip,
no regrettable bus ride with sour things dying
behind the mysterious back door,
no need for a free roll of quarters
and a musty ham sandwich with chips on the parkway,
and the obligatory stop at Bus City
with a million bus bays and gas for all,
and the pall of fumes, toxic gray,
humid fly-strewn cloying hot.

No need for that now.
You don't need to "go" "there".
There has come to here.
"There" has plunged, like a silver needle
into your prefrontal cortex,
a "no place" filled with pretty, glowy things
that you reach for, but cannot grasp.

Tell me what,
before we got so befuddled by photons and microvolts,
what we used to call that condition.
Tell me what it is.
Tell me where.

Better not Shout, Better not Pout, Better have (Virtual) Fun

Some time ago, the good folk over at Again Magazine asked me to write something on technology. In particular, it was framed within a launch of a new think tank headed up by Fr. Hans Jacobse and Fr. John Schroedel. They wrote some very nice pieces on bioethics, especially in the dystopian scariness raised by the prospects of human engineering.

My article, I think, went off topic, because I tried to shove the spade in the soil beneath the brier patch of technophilia -- a nettlesome culture that sucks on every new gizmo (with an aural fixation) that beams in from the Q Continuum. You know the programme at the Big Brother Theater: "Progress is Holiness." "Virtual is Scriptural." "No Blueness in Newness." "Device is Nice." "Perpetuity in Microcircuitry."

I'm afraid my piece was a tad disappointing. I doubted, publicly, that technological innovation was inherently neutral, and that the particular use and purpose of the technology was the only ethical meaning that could be associated with a technology. I said terrible things about Second Life and MySpace. In the aftermath, I was surprised at how protective people are about their doodads.

And I implicitly excoriated the idea of a virtual Orthodox Church, erected in Second Life or in any other virtual place.

(I cannot believe I just wrote that last sentence in the English language. The very syntax establishes more than one oxymoron -- with those last two syllables pointing in my direction: let me list them -- "virtual Orthodox," not to be confused with "virtuous"; "second life"; "virtual place"; and, embarrassingly, "implicit excoriation." That very phrase -- "virtual place" -- constitutes a linguistic Burma Shave sign denoting the absurdist, tragicomic decadence of our conversation in the public square: just as an aside nested in a bigger aside -- when Neuhaus complains that the public square is naked, I don't think he appreciates the fact that it is not only denuded of churches and synagogues, but human brains are already milling around, ickily, au naturel.)

I hearby remove the implication, and make my complaint explicit. The Orthodox Church can set up social networks on the internet, and can probably profit from doing so, although there are some dangers that ought to be considered. (On the positive side, the OrthodoXCircle is a very nice thing, with about 4000 people online.)

But there can be no Temple, no chapel, no porch, nave or sanctuary, on the blasted net. You can't put a church in hades, I think, by definition. You can print "Jesus Saves" and "Amen" in cyberspace (whatever that is or is not), but you cannot commune or converse. You can post a jpeg or tiff file, and manage a java script, but your efforts will not constitute an icon.

Simply put, where there cannot be the Eucharist, there cannot be a Church. Christians can write letters over snail mail, e-mail, fax machines, phones and social networks: but communication does not constitute fellowship or friendship. Fellowship, koinonia, sobernost, requires the exchange of molecules.

We must wage a holy materialism against this new outgassing of gnosticism -- which is the new uber-church on the Internet, if you ask me. In that cause, our skepticism about technology in general, and virtuality in particular, should increase. We should consult the likes of Wendell Berry and Philip Sherrard more, not less.

Cyberspace is a place of idiotic contradiction, and I intend the full etymology of the term. It fosters the half-baked discount day-old bakery of misspelled, fragmented, text-message-thumb-spelled devolution of the English language. Its culture, worldview and philosophy are extrapolated from an unbearable lightness of a junior hi mind. It has refused the catechism of the Word of the Trinity, and has thrown itself into the tattered-bannered Vestibule of Dante's Inferno, just bad in a pimply manner, not grown up enough to be evil, just bounced out of heaven and hell into an insubstantiality of a swarm of gnats.

Here's this from Abe Greenwald at Jewcy.com, commenting on Diane West's recent book on The Death of the Grown-Up (this book is about as scary as the third secret of Fatima). Greenwald reminds us of a recent milestone in entertainment history: in the video game boys' room chucklehouse of Spike TV, there is the contradiction of antiwar shibboleths on one side, but on the other side an Amen-choir for shoot-em-up virtual reality sorties against Quake  and Doom demons and arab-looking bad guys.

Let's see if I can figure this out: the more we train ourselves (and stultify our sensibilities and ratchet our passion-stimuli even higher) in the virtual hell of phosphorescence, the less likely we are to wage war?

Really?

When a friend of mine would return to camp from his patrol in Fallujah, he and his crew would usually sit down, network their laptops, and go back out on patrol, this time in the cyber den of Halo. "We got really good," he told me.

There's the death of English for you: "Really good." Eternal memory.

Baseball has not been very good to me

Senator Mitchell has confirmed our suspicions about baseball. It is no longer a sport but a swamp, gassed and flooded by the sewer of human engineering, celebrity creep and arithmetic on crack.

Major League Baseball is now, and will continue to be, a performance-enhancement production of cyborgs. How are we to ever know, in the future near and far, whether a pitcher or a slugger is not tweaked with some nano-device or fetal-tissue-substance? Every performance departure from the standard deviation will become suspect, as it already is.

Then there is the tiring, and dejecting, Vegas-style showmanship of baseball TV. The bad thing, nowadays, is that TV is no longer limited to the television screen in the den: the stadium experience itself has become TV, with the ultimate widescreen now taking the place of the scoreboard, and regrettable club-lizard dance music pounded from the ubiquitous sound system. Cigarettes have been expunged from ballparks. Techno-kitsch, so much better for us, has taken its place.

Then there is baseball math, which is the uproariously comic Mad magazine version of statistics. The only math more ludicrous than baseball statistics is the numeric freemasonry practiced in that thing called the “social sciences.” I think these two maths are kissing cousins: something incestuous is implied. Of course, statistics is nothing so sinful as the frenetic abacus slapping of racketeering owners and millionaire players.

If you plop all this stuff together in a single bucket, what you have is the seething, cynical mass called Major League Baseball, all strumped up and gamblified, cokified, crackified, steriodified, hormonified, and cashified. Today’s Major League Baseball is the Wednesday's child produced from breeding Wall Street and sport.

Baseball was the American pastime. That used to mean something. But now the phrase shrivels into absurdity on two ends. The first is plain enough. No one has simple fun anymore at the park. It is all a complete rush of soap-opera superstars and rocket-sounding slides on the scoreboard that splay salaries, batting averages and private thoughts of ballplayers. It is all an amazing bargain for the bottom line (not mine), in which I am expected to pay $30 so that I may experience the “entertainment” of nonstop marketing of shirts, caps and unfortunate foodstuffs, priced to make them seem valuable, all to the accompaniment of pirohi races, scrofulous hot dogs launched high into the crowd by overstuffed birdmen accompanied by the obligatory scanty-clad nymphs.

I think that the real reason for pirohi races and birdman-howitzers is that this distracts us from the track-lit martini loges, waited on breathlessly, for the pashas and doges.

Gone is the simple boredom, punctuated by glory and memory. Gone is the mélange of peanuts, beer, and popcorn breezes, mixed with the vapors of cigarettes and cigars. Gone is the tinny voice of the man upstairs, telling you things you already knew. Gone is the slap of the ball into the catcher’s dust and leather, and the crack of ash into the sky. Gone is the anticipation drummed by baseball cards, ticking the spokes. Gone is the quiet and the noise, in union without confusion, and the pencil on the newsprint scorecard, the Starspangled Banner sung plain and hard from the blue-collar stands.

(God save us from divas at ballparks. I guess that's the only way the elite can take their patriotism, whined out and transmogrified in pseudo-operatic tremolo.)

This is the first fall from nobility to absurdity. The second has to do with "pastime" itself. There is now, in America, no such thing as pastime. There is no such thing as fun.

Fun, simple happiness that accepts the intervals of quiet, no longer exists. Low-grade pleasure, of which very little is demanded, has been transmuted into serious regard. Sex is no longer fun but is now a professional, academicized science of technique. Drinking is no longer fun but is now either an Animal House necromancy of idiocy, or an effete contrivance of dilettante airs. Games are no longer fun but are now corrupted, by Sauron’s eye, with solipsistic virtuality and imprisoned in microcircuits and programmed logic.

Fun was gentle, kind, never serious. It counted on surprise, under cover of the afternoon.

Sports have become extreme, no longer a place for sportsmen or sportsmanship. Fun has become manufactured into an object, a goal, a commodity. Despite the fact that there can be no demand, ever, in the calculus of joy, there is now a consumerist demand for -- and a self-consciousness of -- the condition of "being entertained." And the tragedy here is that whatever is experienced in that condition of "entertainment" is mistaken for happiness and joy. People say that they "enjoyed" something, when very often their experience was nothing like joy. Perhaps a dose of adrenalin. Perhaps a titillation. Perhaps frenzy.

But happiness? The fun that accrues from childlike things like hopscotch and hoops, jacks and kick the can, and a ghost runner on first?

Fun is childlike, and not bestial, not like Major League Baseball. Patrick Lyons cleverly suggests (with no small bias) that the Yankees should give up their 2000 Series title to the Mets.

Yes, but I go a couple of steps further. Let's nationalize the National League and americanize the American League. Let's make cities own their own teams since they're already taxing for them, and let's cap the salaries at a paltry $100, 000. Then, only sportsmen will be interested in the game: no one will want to "grow up and become a sports celebrity." Everyone will remember that only boys can play baseball: grown men and businessmen must become like a child to enter this kingdom -- if they don't, they'll corrupt the game.

As they have.

Who mourns for baseball? I do, and come spring at fifty, I will oil my glove again and play catch with my brother and dad. The ball will go from glove to glove (one hopes), in the sun, without math, TV or enhancements. We will give up our demands to be entertained. We will expect nothing more than the happiness of a simple beauty, the goodness of the arc and capture, the leaves in sun and the breeze of June, with the grill sputtering with hot red coals ... the truth of time in pastime.

Major League Baseball, once drugged and paid for, has become a vaudeville of ghosts and slot machines. But it became that way long ago, when pastime fell out of the dictionary, and entertainment took its place.

Prudery, Inc.

Recently, it was brought to my attention that my latest crankiness about an American Journal of Public Health article suggests at least a mild, and backward, prudery on my part.

I am not sorry for this, neither am I proud. Forlorn is more the word.

I will continue sounding prudish and moralistic. I will even risk sounding pietistic (though I am sure Yannaras errs in his estimations), not because I am offended by sin or phobic about it, but because I believe without a doubt that it kills and passion destroys. It is time to be more moralistic, not less.

In the same way, I will continue sounding exclusivistic and insensitive, and very much too dogmatic for the tastes of most gnostic ecumenicists. I do not do this to protect my worldview, which is completely unimportant and ultimately irrelevant.

I am exclusive about Orthodox Christianity because I know, and am persuaded, that any consciousness leading away from the Nicene theoria of the Holy Trinity must lead to insanity, and metaphysical anguish.

I will not, nor can I, apologize for my old-fashioned and revivalistic concern about my own people and for you, dear reader: I want you saved.

It is all because Heaven is by definition a public place. The other place is quite private, as it is the very definition of privation and despair. It is possible there to pretend disbelief forever, and to refuse the Grace that will have become, in that place, corrosive fire.

Here is a passage from the beautiful, priestly heart of +Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), that might give a clue to the wisdom of prudery today:

If contemporary pastors dare to take upon themselves the responsibility before God of admitting them to Communion, then it is in view of the general corruption of Christian morals and the Christian way of life, which has made the struggle with sin incomparably harder for the sons of the Church than it was before, when there was a general zeal for salvation, when people stimulated each other to moral struggles and were ashamed of their sins before each other. Now society's attitude to sins and virtues is exactly the opposite, and so it is already necessary somewhat to soften the requirements of the book of penances, but only within certain limits, lest the priest should also burn in the same flames as the sinners he had unlawfully admitted to Communion.

(from Confession: a series of lectures on the mystery of repentance, 1983)

I read this with fear and trembling, but as priests generally do, we will take the risk of offering Communion when we are all unworthy. That is a much greater danger.

Compared to this mortal danger, being called a prude is nothing. Nothing at all.

New title needed for sex article

Reuters has just published an article with a title that says a lot more than its content.

I didn’t like the title, obviously, which goes like this: “Losing virginity early or late tied to health risks.”

Well, we could have guessed the first part, but the second part – which leads to the equivalent secular perdition of “health risks” (the only modern hell there is) – is really interesting.

We’ll work from the study itself, and then to the questionable inferential process (while taking a gander at the even more questionable "inferrer"), and then see if there is any merit to the title as given by the good and unbiased people at Reuters Health.

First of all, the data is culled from a rather mildewed 1996 survey of 8000 adults. Apparently, they were all asked when they started to “have sex” (I used to know what that meant, but since the nineties, that term has become ambiguous: "have sex" as actual coitus? only once or a lot?). The average answer was around the ages of 17 or 18. Those who had their first sexual encounter at the age of around 14 were considered “early starters.” Those who started at age 22 or older were considered, you guessed it, “late starters.”

Then, the study ran a few statistical runs on the computer, using, I guess, some sort of correlation algorithm.

As one might expect, the statistical report showed that the “early starters” were “more likely to have certain risk factors for sexually transmitted diseases (STD) – including a high number of sexual partners and a history of having sex under the influence of alcohol.”

This is not surprising. But what is surprising is that the report in the American Journal of Public Health re-labeled STD under an even worse secular heading – “sexual dysfunction.”

“Sexual dysfunction” is a curious category, because it includes, on one hand, STD’s, and on the other hand, impotence and difficulty in reaching orgasm. It should not surprise anyone, given the inherent bias of the report, that “late starters” had to be indicted for some form of “health risk.” So that abstinence education would not be handed such a silver-platter endorsement by a public health institution, a “health risk” had to be found for “late starters” (i.e., virgins who waited until marriage) to achieve rhetorical symmetry with the bleak and undeniable threat to the “early starters”: all that could be found in the statistical matrix was a questionable correlation between “late-starting” and male impotence/orgasmic response.

[BTW, did anyone in Columbia check to see whether "late-starters" were also more likely to resist "self-reporting," especially about phenomena as intimate as erectile efficiency and excitation intervals? But I digress.]

“Sexual dysfunction,” as operationally defined by Dr. Theo G. M. Sandfort of Columbia and his crew, is also curious in that it excludes other clearly observable (and lamentable) dysfunctions, namely extra-marital sexual activity and non-heterosexual activity. I consider homosexual activity and extra-marital sexual activity just as “dysfunctional” as impotence. I would bet serious money that a fair study would reveal a strong correlation between “early-starting” and these particular dysfunctional activities.

It looks, nowadays, that the value of “healthy sexual activity” has been redefined operationally to mean “frequent sexual activity” that is unrestrained by sacrament or by gender.

The only sexual evil that remains in the West is physiological failure.

Here is what the study purports to have found:

Early-starters (i.e., those who have sex starting around 14) are more likely to have a high number of sexual partners, to have sex under the influence of alcohol, and to contract STD’s in the course of these behaviors. They, too, can expect a greater risk of impotence and orgasmic dysfunction.

Late-starters (i.e., those who have sex starting around 22) are more likely to have a greater risk of impotence and orgasmic dysfunction.

One might expect, from these findings, that abstinence-until-marriage programs should be given a real shot in the arm. It would appear, on the face of the data, that public policy would find it worthwhile to take the less damaging risk of late-starting and focus on abstinence, if only to avoid the certainly and more profoundly damaging risk of "early-starting."

But that's just me. I am obviously not on par with Dr. Sandfort, because it must have been a heart-breaking step for him to say something negative about "early-starting." It should be remembered that this academician wrote, in 1981, an infamous tract entitled Boys on their Contacts with Men - A Study of Sexually Expressed Friendships.

For that 1981 report, and as the co-director of the research program of the Department of Gay and Lesbian Studies at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, Dr. Sandfort interviewed 25 boys aged 10 to 16 who were currently involved in sexual relationships with adult men. The interviews took place in the homes of the men.

[This means, by the way, that the N was 25, and that the interviews/observations were done in a corrupted environment, where the boundaries of the variables were completely "interpermeated" (to put the best face on things) ... And we have this same "researcher" forging public policy with similar small-N crap-studies. I guess his inferences drawn from correlative measures should be seen as an improvement from his earlier "groundbreaking" tenure-establishing N=25 study, so we should all be happy. But I digress.]

According to Sandfort, "For virtually all the boys ... the sexual contact itself was experienced positively..." Could an adult-child sexual contact, then, truly be called positive for the child? Based on the research presented, Sandfort answered that question in the affirmative.

Not to be outdone by reality this time, especially since the data did the discourteous thing by showing that bad things happen when children have sex, the research team leader Dr. Sandfort drew this inference instead (demonstrating the utility of operational definitions, and paying no attention to the real ones):

He and his team wrote that their findings "only partially support" abstinence-only sex education -- which encourages teenagers to save sex for marriage.

"Although our findings support an association between early initiation and long-term (STD) risk, they also suggest a more complicated picture of sexual functioning."

And just in case we didn’t get the point, they added that delaying sexual activity may even "create health risks by impeding development of the emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal skills that are crucial to satisfactory sexual functioning and general well-being."

The line of reasoning in that last paragraph seems to run like this:

1. Waiting too long for sexual activity impedes your development of the emotional, cognitive and interpersonal skills.

2. Somehow, these social skills that are picked up during sexual activity between the ages of 17 and 22 are crucial to "satisfactory sexual functioning" – that is, freedom from impotence and orgasmic poverty.

3. And “satisfactory sexual functioning” produces “general well-being” – the only “salvation” that is known in the modern world.

So, we are left with the more-than-implicit conclusion that our young people had better “have sex” at 17 or 18 in one form or another, preferably with another human being (or two or three). Any earlier might carry a few risks like an STD here and there (and maybe serial sex and abortions, but what’s wrong with that?).

But whatever they do, they shouldn’t wait until 22 (or, worse yet, marriage), because they might turn out impotent. And impotence, as the good people at Columbia want us to know, might interfere with our “general well-being.”

Viagra is the new sacrament. And the sooner you know this, the better.

At least, that’s what they should have stated in the title.

INTERMISSION

Part 2

"Come, let us reason," it says somewhere by Someone. Let us look carefully at this  secular gospel of "general well-being," and the ascetical actions and sacraments that are necessary for its actualization.

Is "well-being" produced by sexual experience? Is "mental health" -- even as impoverishly defined in the secular therapeutic culture -- a result of the "iconic" and "liturgical" activity as depicted in pornography and erotica?

Is there peace at the end of an X-rated movie? Can there be a happily-ever-after, ever, when an erotic narrative finally shuts down? Or is there only objectivization, bondage? Only an increasingly duller response, and a never-ending quest to find a more potent stimulus?

Is a man really "better off" only when he is "potent"? A woman when she is "responsive" or "orgasmic"?

Is it possible that impotence is significantly correlated with the predominance of pornography, and its presence and availability in everyday culture? That Viagra sales depend on Hustler and cyber-porn subscriptions?

Or, can a woman even survive being non-orgasmic? Can a man ever be a real man, even a happy man, if he is impotent?

This boils down to a question that tells you what time it is on the civilization clock: can a person be honored for his or her celibacy?

Or even this: can the Church say, any longer, that "it is better for a man not to touch a woman"? That celibacy is not just an equally valid calling, but an even higher one?

I am all for happy sexual activity within the confines of Christian marriage, not before or outside. I believe, like Victor Frankl, that the best love is made when one is "dereflecting," and not looking at himself (in demonic mirrors) or focusing on his own experience.

Sandfort's (and his friend Dr. Money's) "sexology" invention is doomed to comic frustration as is the hunt for a greased pig: love, not even its iconic and physical endeavor, cannot be the object of science. Once put under the microscope, the reality is affected by the observation itself, just like quantum mechanics.

Love shrivels under the dessicating heat lamp of self.

I believe, instead, that the best love is made when self is forgotten, when pleasure is not demanded, when a man can truly tell a woman "I love you no matter what I get in return."

Men and women were created with charisms, or gifts that are peculiar to their gender, and these gifts are celebrated in the Feasts of the Church. For women, of course, the Feasts that celebrate and sanctify them eucharistically are all the Lady Days of the Theotokos. She is the one who shows the way of Proverbs 31, who prays, loves and heals, fills and serves.

The Feast of Men is Good Friday, gentlemen, and that's what makes you gentle and a man.

I believe that the only way to grow men and women like this is to grow them up in virginity, and chastity, even risking those terrible scares of impotence and performance anxiety. Is it such a terrible thing that one cannot perform? That sexual activity is put away, shelved in memory or regretted as a vocation that never was? Is that possibility so unthinkable, so even blasphemous?

If one had to choose, is it not better to take the ecstasy of communion over the ecstasy of physical union?

Is it not better to love than to experience?

Better that than the potency, and fire, of spiritual STD.

A Republican Confession

This Thursday (12/6, St. Nicholas Day on the revised calendar), Republican Candidate Mitt Romney is going to give his religion speech in Texas. It is meant to do the same job that JFK's speech did, when that candidate had to allay the fears of a predominantly protestant America about the candidacy of a Roman Catholic.

Mr. Romney will do two things. He will talk about the history of America's freedom of religion (which is becoming more and more freedom from religion). He will say nice things about how religious he is, and how pro-family he is, but also about how his Mormonism will have nothing to do, explicitly, with his presidency.

He will also talk about how Christian Mormonism is. He will remind us that he uses the same Bible and prays to the same God.

He will say a lot about these two things. I doubt, however, that he will say anything about the Holy Trinity. He cannot say much about the Trinity simply because he is a Mormon. Perhaps the Mormons have added a lot more obfuscation and intellectual iron-maiden work to their R.E. programs: if that is the case, then he will be able to say "I believe in the Trinity" without being in the least bit Trinitarian. (I think that's been done before.)

I fully expect Romney to convince himself that he is Christian because he "values" the Bible as most other Christians do.

Here is what will bother me -- and the bother will have nothing to do with Romney's Mormonism. What will bother me is that Romney will get up on his pulpit -- his "techno-ambon" -- and he will prove his Christianity without so much a nod to the Trinity.

And no one will bat an eye. The fundamentalists (except Bob Jones, who loves him) will make like a Martian listening to Slim Whitman when they remember that sola scriptura usually doesn't include the Book of Moroni. Mainliners will remember that Mormons only got around to reading the Emancipation Proclamation in 1978.

But no one will notice that Romney doesn't know about the Trinity, except, perhaps, as a shibboleth.

On Thursday, Romney will confess that he is a Christian. And the tragedy on that day will be -- especially for Mitt -- that no one will disagree for the right reason.

No Magic in Potter-land

[My apologies and prayers for everyone in southern California and north Georgia: this whole discussion must sound disagreeably irrelevant to you: May the Lord's graceful rain fall gently upon you, and bring solace to your forests and your land.]

Hey, everyone, (note the element of fatigue and cheerful aggravation) I did not get in this to argue about Dumbledore with the fandom. The blogosphere sounds like a bunch of angry villagers at a certain lightning-prone laboratory -- especially if one is attempting to steer a course via media.

I am neither endorsing Harry or condemning him. His books were entertaining, but I would not go to the Rowling texts to pan for nuggets of meaning. That would be like forcing poor Bertie Wooster into some loopy postmodern theory, or -- worse -- a special session at the MLA walpurgisnacht shindig.

I'll wager that at the Chicago MLA Convention at the end of this December, there will be more than one presentation on Rowling that focuses on some sort of faddish theory found hidden in her pages.

One goes to great books for meaning. One finds symbols in literature: metaphors are not all that hard. Heavens, even I can make a metaphor. But a real symbol is a hard thing to make, and takes greatness. Symbols make for great literature. Entertaining books are fun, and a lot better than video games and virtual reality, but it's a stretch to call them "meaningful."

It's true that I don't like it that JK said that the "father figure" is gay. That makes me neither anti-Potterian nor homophobic. And it doesn't matter one bit when and how and in what context applause after the Carnegie announcement was made. I don't want to talk about applause or Dumbledore's celibacy. It's getting a little ripe, n'est-ce pas?, when we surmise the unknown, unreported, unwritten inclinations of a fictional character. I don't know what "gay" means here, but I note that she didn't say "I've always thought that Dumbledore was a celibate gay." Did I miss the author's qualification that the gay-ness was a non-active gay-ness?

Here in my last post on Potter (I think), I will state my main and darkest suspicion about what happened to the Potter stories -- a set of tales I found thoroughly entertaining, though increasingly not so meaningful. While others find signs of Austen, narrative misdirection, Florentine alchemy and symbol, and Christian themes in Rowling, I find mostly, by the end, the influence of Judy Blume and Jung.

The Rowling partisans buoy themselves with the discovery of Christian symbols and themes, and induce the conclusion that this makes for a Christian book, or an okey-dokey book. It is true that there are Christian elements in Rowling's canon: but the same can be said for most, if not all, of Western literature, whether great or otherwise. For that matter, I can also find a good deal of Norse elements in Tolkien, Buddhist in Eliot, even Arab in Narnia, but that does not make these great writers anything but Christian. Furthermore, there is a lot of regrettable ilk written and marketed under the rubric of "Christian book" that can be described as "book" only because there are pages between two covers, but cannot be called "Christian" at all, even with a surfeit of Christian ingredients.

The purpose of fantasy in a Christian story is to pronounce, in human language, the usually unpronounceable things of the bodiless worlds. Christian fantasy takes magic seriously, because it finds magic and the larger world of the spirit quite real. The Good is painfully beautiful and bright. The Evil is demonic, decadent and decayed, always declining toward the satanic.

I strongly suspect that Rowling really doesn't believe in magic at all. I, on the other hand, believe it exists as a realization of the way things really are, as I hope to be more certain of spiritual realities than the physical ones. I am especially happier that miracles and "eu-catastrophes" exist.

I am afraid, though, that the magic of Rowling is the tiresome business of Jungian extrapolation from intra-psychic phenomena.

If that is so, there is no mythopoeia in Rowling. Mythopoeia depends on symbol -- each symbol linking, in one phenomenon, this world and the greater one. Rowling has all sorts of metaphor and metonymy, I'll give her that. But not transcendent symbol that speaks with a still small voice of the other side of appearances.

I wish (along with Fr. Stephen) that children could have their stories and the hearth would be safe from blood-sucking hyper-modernity, the firelight shutting out the dark and cold. They should be told of monsters, and not of gruesomely maudlin cutesiacs like Elmo, and certainly not of Freudian deconstructions like Bettelheim's Red Riding Hood, or of Jungian constructs like dementors and bogeys.

They should be told, in  good story, the honest truth that monsters are evil. They should be told, by a home fire that crackles merrily, about the heroes and angels that always win, because they always have and always will.

They should be told of fantasy that is true, instead of "fantasy" that is utilized only as instrumental narrative.

They should be told that God and the saints are always violating man's crummy prejudices about nature: the rules of science are always being broken, as time itself shatters science with every advance into the next moment. That single reason is why magic is really no big deal.

They should be told that sometimes, the hero does not come back except upon his shield. They should not be discouraged with that modernistic nonsense that the hero's victory over evil is merely a metaphor for puberty or growing up. No, no, and a thousand no's. The hero's victory is over a real external psyche, and the whole real world has changed accordingly. Things are really better because a good thing was done in history.

The hero doesn't get "well-adjusted," nor does he become a more complex person (which is the psychobabble heaven of Blume's Fudge and Forever): the hero in a good story journeys, fights and slays a real dragon. Other real people in the real village are saved, even if the hero dies.

When the "happily ever after" is only a showing up at home after a devil has been bound, and normal boredom has been restored, then things are neither happy, nor are they "ever after." It is likely that the return of the status quo ante to the stage deflates the mythic Journey and the Battle down to the gray, psychotherapeutic meanings of Judy Blume, or the dread angst of Leopold Bloom.

For my part, I think that a hero who fights death in the crisis really needs to go to the Home of which his hearth and heart were gleaming symbols. The community is healed, because he, as a saint, "filled up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in the flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church" (Colossians 1.24, KJV).

That's what should happen in the stories we tell our children. We should give talk show psychotherapy and guerrilla-egalitarianism a miss. Instead, we should revel in spooky magic and thrilling fantasy. We should read out loud to ourselves and our children stories that illumine our landscapes from within and haunt our consciousness with good ghosts.

My business with Rowling, which is now at an end, finishes with a "whatever" shrugging of the shoulders: she is neither magic nor fantasy, but at heart, only that other dismal stuff.

No magic, because there are, in the Potter-lands, no bigger worlds.

What about Dumbledore?

Dear JK,

I’ve been peckish about your last book, since I read the last few words of your epilogue, “Nineteen Years After.”

And that was before I found out, from you, that Dumbledore is/was gay. Others suspected it: they more astute than I could ever be. My gaydar is not good at all. It turns out that Grindelwald was more than just a pal.

That was a neat trick, JK. You turned Dumbledore into a hero for zillions of kids. You waited until the book sales smashed one superlative after another, and the Brinks trucks lined the drive of your post-welfare mansion.

Then, after the kids (and priests like me) were lined up in your palm, eating out of your hand, you squeezed the bird, Slytherin-like. You seemed to really mean the "Christian parallels" and "obvious religious meaning," and we (myself included) were very happy.

But then Dumbledore the hero, the wise man, the quasi-Christ-figure, you outed. Gay, despite no real narrative logic that demanded him to be so.

The gayness of Dumbledore is only a useless appendix (though, doubtless, quite a profitable one: now that the family market has been exhausted, this latest revelation opens up the new über-rich childless childish gold-vein of the self-involved, who practice their simultaneous (not mutual) communion before the Mirror of Erised).

Ex post facto, and clearly tangential to the story line, you announced this hero as a homosexual. The syllogism is neat, I have to admit. To bring out of the closet what had been squirreled away inside, the argument goes something like this in the daylight:

• Major Premise: I admire Dumbledore the powerful and wise and mostly good …
• Minor Premise: Dumbledore is gay …
• Conclusion: therefore all gays are powerful and wise and mostly good and I must admire them.

Especially if I’m a kid, and especially if Dumbledore’s been fashioned, over the last decade, like a golem into the only father-image left in the West: theoretically good-intentioned, calm and detached except for exceptional moments, absent at other exceptional moments, frustrating, goofy, manipulative, proficient at visiting infirmaries and at making incomplete revelations.

Now that’s a Dad – the product of bourgeois post-childhood psychotherapy.

Well, JK, enough of Dumbledore. I suppose you and your associates at Scholastic saw an opportunity to ram home a score for the home team under the rubric of tolerance. Is that what you think evil is? Is that the sum and range of Voldemort’s deviltry – just a cheap, sniveling, nitwit bigotry? That Voldemort is evil because he murders people on one hand, and on the other and sinister hand, because he is intolerant?

I realize now that there was something I clearly missed in my earlier missive to you. Then, I was concerned mainly about the quality of the hero. I asked you then to make of Harry a real hero that could no longer remain mundane, that could not rest in the familiar world. In the revolution wrought by a hero in his land, his translation to the higher worlds impels the narrative toward tragedy.

I mean romantic tragedy, not the effluvial ironic tragedy of modernistic scapegoats like Willy Loman. The real death of Harry would have wrought redemption for your storied world.

As it turned out, there was no death. No, I’m serious, neither he nor Mr. Voldemort really died while Harry was clutching that stupid resurrection stone (did you mean a Christian resonance here? … the very fact of its Gospel echo makes its hollowness all the more awkward). That particular “deathly hallow” was one of the dumbest and cheapest deus ex machina maneuvers of all time: “I’m technically dead, Voldy, so I did that self-sacrifice thing so your Deathly Stick is bootless … but, mind you, I’m not really dead as I'm up here in the White Light chatting with Dumbledore who’s telling me everything while we’re watching you gross us out with your naked self … and since I’ve got this neato magic rock with me, I’m going to use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card and play dead until I can really fight you at the end by making you curse me and then bounce the curse back on you.”

That’s quite a complicated programme, JK, and you have millions of pre-pubescents and adolescents and adults (refugees from the modern important literature of free association and inverted commas) arguing over the ins and outs of your metaphysics like a mystical soap opera.

That is the best thing that can be said of your piece. You tied up all the important loose strings (leaving enough untied to make space for further “non-plot-advancing” additions to the canon). You had them all marked out in your spiral-ringed college-ruled notebooks: character vectors, slope lines for plots and formulae for their intersections, chronology marching along the x-axis.

It was a neat geometry, Ms. Rowling, and that’s what soap operas do.

I am afraid that this method of storytelling – this iron maiden of your geometrical notebooks – is the culprit behind Harry stripped of heroism, Voldemort disrobed as a pulp novel nutcase, Dumbledore denatured and disoriented by the white light, and the whole story denuded as merely a graphic novel with no pictures.

You dropped the ball, JK. You tried to have it both ways, the cutting and eating of the cake. You wanted to marry Harry off to someone (it might as well have been Ron’s sister) and land him into domesticity with three kids, nodding cursorily to Draco at the Hogwarts Express. You desperately – and, might I add, naively – scrabbled to punch down the hero back into his mundane loaf pan. And in tethering Harry back to the pre-lapsarian world, you demoted him from hero to Mr. K. in The Castle.

You made his heroism ironic because his death was ironic. Jesus' was real.

I know why Harry couldn’t rise to the occasion. It is because his sub-creator (that would be you, JK) could not rise to the challenge of evil. I don’t expect much, if any, of today’s literature to treat goodness with much respect: but I continue to think that evil ought to be dealt with in concrete and vivid detail. God knows we’ve seen enough of evil to write expertly about it.

You never adequately explained why Voldemort was so wicked. You explained his madness, perhaps, with all that stuff about being lonely and weird, cursed by a mean father, burdened with a wretched mother, damned to a boarding school like Dotheboys. You built up a case for a psychopath: you cobbled together an explanation that would have suited a school shooter like the ones at Columbine or VT.

I wouldn't be so strident here if you had left the villain as a crazed Gadarene -- evil yes but also stupid. It is possible for the protagonist, after beating such a knave, to return back like Odysseus after planting his oar to some sort of normalcy (with even that normalcy renewed and restored).

But villains who are not crazy, who want power and state, language and meaning, time and space -- these villains are much more than demons. When you so darkly moved your Harry from the precincts of fairy tale to necromancy ... when you settled the cloud of 1984 and Goebbels on the Ministry of Magic and Hogwarts itself, you incarnated Voldemort and shifted him from the dastardly to the satanic.

And when you do this, the hero who conquers can never go home (unless you capitalize the "h"). Returning him home is like Frodo pretending he can stay in the Shire. Or, it is like suggesting that the Theotokos and Joseph had kids after the Crisis, like any other family.

Voldemort was more than sorcerer or demon: he orchestrated revolution to usurp the order and he commanded destruction of the good: this is not the work of a bulleyed boy who was misunderstood, but of someone who was more likely to have been pampered and permitted the full exercise of his prurient demands. School shooters may be produced by bullies at school, but mass-murdering despots are produced by rather cushy church-less upbringings. They are too intelligent, too focused and aware of what they want, too well brought up.

Voldemort, as your character, is a slander to all the orphans and nerds and marginalized bullied kids. Isolation and nerdification do not a devil make. God-denying does.

Lessee, how to really make a Voldemort, instead of your way JK? Deny the Trinity. Lie about the good. Sever the sign from its meaning. Objectify the people around you. Construct your own world and populate it with yourself. Sanctify your auto-eroticisms. Revile the Cross. Time-travel to alternative universes to run away from the Cross.

That, by the way, is exactly what real monsters like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible, and Robespierre did: revolution toward an alternative, non-Created, universe. It was their way of reading Hegel, after all.

That is what I missed in my last letter. For a Hero, you’ve got to deal with Evil. And to deal with Evil, you've got to know that there are worse things than death, slavery or even intolerance ... and you’ve got to believe in God.

And that is what you missed, JK. You tried to take the Cross out of the Christian myth, and update it for the neo-mythic post-ironic age. It doesn’t work, mainly because the age is still ironic and always will be (sorry Northrop). You made of the devil a silly tawdry villain, who busies himself with tying up maidens on the railroad track, caring nothing about perdition.

For a while, while I was captivated by your tale (until that disastrous ending and farcical Carnegie  announcement), I fancied that in you we might have another Tolkien or Lewis, to help our souls stave off the Camazotz tide of IT. Certainly not them, but a shadow at least, more at the level of L’Engle. Surely, I thought, you can pull off something like that (maybe you did, time will tell).

But you never really pulled off a good story. A decent tale, yes, but neither tragedy nor comedy wherein reality is explored, God is perceived, evil is fought. There was in your tale neither Christ nor Antichrist. A lot of goodness to be sure, but even more badness that remains unrecognizable, free-floating, and unsecured to a reference of meaning.

A good Christian story like The Lord of the Rings will have saints and orcs, the genesis and future of light, along with the ringlore of evil. It will not be permitted in Sunday School, as good stories often cannot be. But it will be enshrined in Christian imagination.

You took fragments of the Christian story, but you fashioned them into another shape. Because of this (and not because of Dumbledore's irrational gayness) it will not fit into a Christian imagination. Not for long.

Accordingly, you might be a protestant author, but you’re not a Christian one.

Chapter 2 (the final one).

Can Orthodox and Muslims Get Along?

The inane complaint that “religion causes conflict and wars” is not produced by the wars themselves. The wars of the twentieth century were not produced by religion. They are the fault of radically secularist and totalitarian ideologies. This theory – if it can be called that – is produced by anti-religious rhetoric, and is shared by both those who oppose the occupation of Iraq and those who support it (e.g., Christopher Hitchens).

There is a valid critique here which should be raised in the context of war. The Middle East is ablaze with turmoil mostly because of the corrupt dismantling of the Ottoman Empire – the region was redesigned with little respect for native custom, but mostly with regard for the economic advantage of a few interests. That there are conflicts, wars and “clashes” there can be no doubt. But it should be very clear that the popular idea that the strife is due to religion is vile propaganda.

The problem in the Middle East is not due to a clash of civilizations or to a conflict between religions. It is due mainly to a conflict between two political ideologies: a radical secularism that denies natural law, and a just as radical jihadism that cynically denies its own koranic humanism. Both ideologies have gone to war and have resorted to genocide for oil, and will continue to do so.

I mention this because the issue of Middle East turmoil distorts the whole issue of “Muslim/Christian relations.” It is a suspiciously useful platitude to say that the conflict is rooted in the relationship of the two religions: those who utilize this platitude are doing so to mask the real culprit. It is also useful to say that the conflict is between the West and resurgent Islam. Once again, while everyone is blaming truly religious folk on both sides, and true conservatives in the West and in the Islamic world, the real culprits are waging old fashioned war for old fashioned resources.

Imagine what it would be like if the subject of “Muslim/Christian relations” could be explored without the violent mass of opinions that have aggregated upon the Middle East. It is likely that the subject would become less difficult. The Orthodox Church would affirm love and forgiveness to Muslims in other nations and in our neighborhoods. It would affirm their civil rights in a pluralistic society. It would affirm the traditions of natural law which it shares with the Islamic world. It would affirm the rich cultural traditions of beauty, goodness and truth that are liberally strewn throughout Muslim society. Without a doubt, it would certainly affirm the indubitable fact that every Muslim is made in the image of God.

However, the Orthodox Church would also affirm that the predestination for every Muslim (as it is for all humankind) is theosis, particularly in the image of Jesus Christ. In that regard, the Orthodox Church not only does not affirm, but it crucially denies that Allah is the same as the Trinitarian God. It denies that Mohammad is any prophet at all, but instead is a heretic at best. It denies that Islam is a religion of peace, but is instead a religion of surrender to a god whose nature is not love. If there is any prayer in the Muslim world, it is prayer that is accepted by Jesus Christ, in spite of the fact that it is conditioned by a false prophet.

Talk of this sort usually invokes howls of protest, and accusations of vilification and even "demonization" from the more positive-thinking crew. But this sequence of denials regarding Islam is not at all a vilification or demonization. Demonization is appropriate only for demons, and they have surely been at work – often quite outside the expected precincts of religious conflict. Vilification occurs when my enemy has something that I want, and consequently I render my enemy less than human to make it easier to murder him and take his goods.

I am doing neither thing. I call a Muslim a heretic, but I love him as I ought to love all my fellow man. I am quite willing to converse with him, even convivially, about the rich banquet of natural law and especially Rumi, Omar Khayyam and even Orhan Pamuk (you have to give points to a Turk who publicly mentions a certain genocide).

The Muslim has, however, nothing to say to me theologically, as “theology” is particularly understood in the Orthodox Church.

While I am pleased that Mohammed was willing to categorize Christians along with the Jews as “People of the Book,” I am not at all inclined to return the favor. Both Jews and Christians posit a God Whose nature is love. The same should not be said of Islam. Christians and Jews want peace, and the peace they want is “shalom” – which connotes wholeness, freedom and servanthood. The peace of Islam is significantly conflated with “surrender” (the real meaning of “Islam”). Muslim “peace” is politically expressed as an imposed totalitarianism called sharia, established by the sword, which can now be previewed in Nigeria, other African and Indonesian regions, and in the wahhabist doctrines of al-Qaeda.

The history of those who have enjoyed “People of the Book” status is not a happy one. I mention this because we may work diligently at dialogue with our Muslim counterparts, and engage in what I think would be profitable discussions (along the lines described above). But all the while, the parties who are making the issue so violent are not talking to each other, and they probably will never talk to us. I am not speaking here of the nice imams who go out of their way to affirm the peaceableness of Islam and the humanism of Muhammad. I am speaking here, rather, of jihadists who are exploiting the decadence of the West for their own material gain. I am speaking also of Muslim clergy who pursue a well-defined koranic hermeneutic that impels the establishment of sharia in all human society.

I am speaking here, too, of so-called “neo-cons” who assume that the post-Christendom (if not anti-Christian) Western society is any better than that envisioned by the radical imam. Our problem with the Iraq War is not that our nation went to war against an enemy, but that it went to war to preserve a libertine way of life that may not have been worth the cost of blood.

There is no clash of civilizations in Western Europe or in the Middle East. Such a clash assumes the existence of civilization: there is very little of that on either side. Civility is stifled by totalitarianism and libertinism. A society built on sharia law is horrifying, and is so inhumane that “civilization” – a word whose cognate is civitas – cannot be used to describe it.  But Islam is succeeding in Europe mainly because there is so little to succeed. The reason why the concept of “clash of civilizations” is so bankrupt a concept is that Islam is simply establishing itself in a wasteland. The libertine materialism that is the aspiration of the West nowadays is impotent in the face of radical Islam. One of the reasons why Islam succeeded in its first few centuries is because much of the Byzantine population was oppressed by rife taxation and debt. It will succeed in Europe because it gives hope to an oppressed population, and it offers a meaningful worldview to significant societal segments who will not join a Europe that rejects natural law.

A fraternal, accommodating Orthodoxy that dialogues with liberal Muslim scholars will do nothing to save the West. Liberal Islam – if such a thing is possible – will be dismissed by other imams as a transient Western phenomenon.

But an Orthodoxy that calls for peace instead of “neo-con” war will save. An Orthodoxy that complains about environment-destroying economic structures, and that protests against inhumane jihadists and the demonism of sharia law, will establish justice. An Orthodoxy that identifies a science of natural law shared in common with the Muslim world will help preserve culture. An Orthodoxy that insists on the exclusive meaning of theology as Trinitarian and Christological will reaffirm truth, which is what every Muslim needs the most.

And an Orthodoxy that calls for repentance in Europe, and a return to Nicene Christianity from the miasma of transgressive materialism is the only response to the looming array of Islam, which is soon to become the principal religious culture there – the others (Orthodoxy included) are passing into virtual dhimmitude above the fortieth parallel.

The easier dichotomies

Which is easier, to say “Your sins are forgiven you,” or to say, “Rise up and walk”?

Which is easier, to say “Peace be unto you,” or to say, “And with your spirit”?

Which is easier, to say “Forgive us our trespasses,” or to say, “As we forgive those who trespass against us”?

Which is easier, to forgive or to forget? Are you sure?

Which is easier, to enter the Temple, or to emerge back into the world?

Which is easier, to ask or to thank? To knock or to enter? To seek or to find?

Which is easier, to run from the Fish like a coward, or to run toward the Father like a fool?

Which is easier, to receive Communion, to give Communion, or to be in Communion?

Which is easier, to hold all things together, or to walk on water?

Which is easier, to say “Let there be light,” or to say, “Let him who is thirsty come”?

Which is easier, to make a man fearfully and wonderfully, or to bring that good work to completion?

Which is easier, to hear the heathen rage about god, supergod and superduper god and hope for their repentance, or to save me who knows better, but sins all the same?

Which is easier, to love the real atheist who doesn’t give a damn about truth and goodness, beauty and infinity, while he rehearses his next peccadilloes on couch and screen, or to dwell amongst us Trinitarians who exorcise the Holy Spirit from kitchens and boardrooms, chatrooms and mail lists, Saturday nights and crypto-cohabitations, hot dogs on Friday and curse words on Thursday, conniption fits at the spouse and kids, divorce and divorce and a house of steps, dissertations that applaud Weinberg and Dawkins and throw just enough jabs at those crazy fundies, magazine pieces that fawn over the newest outgassing from the industrial tower, big donations from agri-businesses and left-or-right of center foundations?

Which is easier, to say "Silver or gold have I none," or to say "Such as I have I give thee"?

Which is easier, to believe “Your sins are forgiven you,” or to get up when He says, “Rise up and walk”?

Which is easier, to pray or to breathe?

What was not said (part 2)

Gone are the days when homilists could play with time, when the Golden Mouthed one could exposite verse by verse, illuminating each event or logion with Trinitarian back-light and mystical analogy.

Today there are watches, and watchers of the big sweeping radius approaching north (i.e., noon). There is heat, no AC (we are, after all, Slavic), and thus we are more uncomfortable than the ancients. There are other things to do, promises to keep, many miles before (well, already) one sleeps.

So homilies are really introductions today, and rarely proceed beyond the proem. There is much that is left unsaid, just because it’s time.

So at Graduation on Sunday, here is what was not said. It’s probably a good thing it remained unsaid: don’t tell anyone I told you.

There’s war in the heavens, between Church and University. This may as well be said out loud, plain and right. The old liberal conversation in the public square, presided over by Rome, has deteriorated into a multiplicity of liberation narratives. The only academic language left is not the grammar of the liberal arts, but the newspeak patois of egalitarian pragmatique. It is very hard -- and more likely impossible -- to do philosophy in a contemporary dialect where even helper verbs are run into dispute.

There is no real quarrel between the Church (“apostolic,” that is) and the segment of the University culture that does more thinking than politicking. But there is an increasing divide between the ecclesial culture of Holy Tradition, and the abstractionist social engineering departments whose agenda collide and roil in the Petri dish of the colleges. True religion is now the only place where philosophy is intuited, and worked out in craft.

A generation ago was a piteous attempt at a non-religious craft. There was the secularist enterprise of modern art, which attempted to replace religion with an agnostic mysticism, comprised of exploded shapes, colors and lines: witness its disarray in absurdity, spinning in the white porcelain maelstrom of millionaire philistinism.

The main reason why there is diminishing polite conversation between Church and School is not only that the Gospel is the rhetoric of peace and not a triumphalist dialectic (apologetics is dead), but mostly because the School has no philosophy to talk about. Just as psychologists no longer, as a whole, believe in the soul, so also philosophers are no longer lovers of wisdom. They are partakers of theory, yes, if not veritable partisans: but not lovers, and not wise. The newly departed Richard Rorty was one of these.

Is it possible for a rejecter of trans-species evolution to win tenure at a major university science faculty, or to be appointed as director of a significant institution?

Is it possible for a president of an important university to express non-egalitarian opinions and keep his/her job?

Is it possible that the MLA would permit an encomium for patriarchal language and culture, at its annual maypole dance?

Is it possible that a seminary, tied up bound and gagged to a major university, could ever state that Christianity is the only salvation? Could it, dare it, ever say that homosexuality is framed by the first chapter of Romans? Can it even pronounce the word “reprobation” anymore?

The answer to all these questions is simple, of course, and it is “no.”

Of course, there are miraculous exceptions, but they truly are miracles – especially as miracles are defined by those who do not believe in them: an “interruption in the continuum of usual expectations.”

It is embarrassing to complain about academic unfriendliness. It has happened before, especially when the Church was rightly seen as atheistical by the pagan cognoscenti. The Christian Gospel then was relegated to "hick" stature -- surely, a position that resonated through St. Paul's discussion of the foolishness of the Cross. This antipathy from the learned, with its more recent history of traison de clerc, can hardly be called persecution.

But it is opposition nonetheless. This year’s graduates will feel the press of the number of the Beast. Today, you cannot make money or gain prestige in academia without some denial of Creation and the Creator. Today, in order to buy and sell, one must subscribe to the new and improved anthropology, sworn to by the right hand, or better, internally scribed, like a lobotomy, on the brow.

This leads me to the real persecution that may be lurking below the world’s edge. It is not in the colleges, where the worst that can happen is dismissal and ridicule. These are the petrushka tactics of thespians, who still believe themselves to sit, sophistically, in the seats of principalities and powers.

Their crowns are paper, of course. The grantors of tenure and sheepskin dither about the manufacture of God in their own images of convenience. But this is not the conversation that matters in the world. Real power is not marked by deconstruction -- this is only a tool, a mystifying agitprop to keep the histrionic sophomores of academe at bay.

Real power is clear in its own house, and doesn't waste time with mystification. Its conversation does not now, nor did it ever, dither about the Truth of the Gospel -- it knew, without a doubt, the reality of God from empirical evidence, from its own direct experience of perdition.

God no longer matters in the conversation of humans (clearly, an achievement of the principalities). He only matters in His Church, as this is why the Church has always existed. But the silence about God in the agora is the simple reason why the Great Conversation has sputtered into silence.

Philosophy without God is nothing more than the chattering, fly-specked vestibule of Dante.

But what does matter to the principalities (whose crowns are real) is the re-invention of man. It is anthropology, not theology, that you can get killed for even today (just ask the victims of infanticide and geriatricide). Man is to be understood as an individual, and as a spot on the matrices of actuaries. He is to be quantified as a profile of five super-factors of personality and genetic markers. He is to be valued as a resource and an income. He is to become a proper contributor to the growing capital of society. He is to be a consumer, not a craftsman: a user (especially a hyper-user or "addict"), not a maker, definitely not a steward. He is to be seen as a life form on the continuum of non-discrete evolutionary processes that may be tinkered with, modified, and terminated if he becomes too inconvenient to himself, and especially to others.

Much, much can be done in the course of human events if man can be found to not have a soul.

Or, at least, re-defined as soul-less.

Especially Image-less.

As my graduates proceed into this graduated, post-God world, they will never be asked what they believe about God, as the ancient martyrs were.

They will be asked, rather, about man and who they really are.

If they say, as we have taught them, that they are sinners saved by grace, creatures of God, and immortal, then I will be proud of them.

But I will fear for them, for the world's aversion is looming against this stumbling stone -- a scandal for the world that could just about ruin everything in the end.

What was said (part 1)

Yesterday was Graduate Sunday, and our annual hymn to the gathering of the Carpatho-Russian saints (despite being too poor and politically naïve to keep a country, there turned out to be quite a few of these).

The homily was the usual stuff about staying true to the faith, and not jumpin