On the seventeenth of August, at the Atlantic strand of Old Dominion, a curiously well-informed dolphin spoke whilst leaping into the blue light of the oceanic sun.
I will translate his four-pointed address:
POWER/REVOLUTION
Production and money do not determine politics. Politics determines economics, and politics is determined by religion, which in turn is determined by the bodiless powers. "Economy is the secular image of religious conviction."
Religious conviction is especially acute (and pernicious) when it acts under the mask of secularism. Few prophets are more fundamentalistic than are the imams of scientific materialism.
Today's economy destroys homes and families, folk groups, folk-ways and folk-churches (leaving only anti-folk industrial constructs in its wake, burning à la auto da fé the hardback hymnals of more faithful times), and militates profoundly against personhood. Two careers in the agora are now necessary to keep up with the prurient commands of the Sekhmetian American Dream (i.e., "sad"), and the children are left in the care of surrogates. The preponderance of divorce, the packing of nursing homes, the ubiquity of ADHD and the epidemic of autism should be enough to indict industrialism. But the court that could have adjudicated my complaint has been long adjourned (since WWI).
A nation sins, as a whole, if it destroys nature, especially human nature. A nation sins when it pollutes the earth, to be sure. Atoms should not be ripped apart to unleash satanic destruction. Polar bears and Amazonian botanicals should not be extinguished. Artificial hills should not be erected out of immortal disposables, diapers and twinkies.
But human nature is the crown of material Creation, and it is most sinful to pollute this ecology. Human and diabolical oppression violates human nature, to be sure, but so does licentiousness, slander, and libertinism. What is more, human nature cannot be isolated in the individual: this is the mistake of most so-called "ethics," and that is the main reason why this word and enterprise ought to be retired in the dustbin of worn-out sciences, where phrenology, spontaneous generation and abiogenesis are already mouldering.
Human nature embraces persons and people, a celibate, a family, a sobor and koinonia, and a city. It may extend farther than that to a "people" or a "nation." But it may turn out that democracy cannot obtain any further than the extent of the old polis: a nationalized democracy is an important myth in modern history, but it may turn out to be fantasia. Certainly, internationalized democracy, or any virtualized "community" (which is the appearance any so-called community larger than a polis must take) is a particularly heinous fad.
In any case, persons and people together comprise human nature. And when a nation corrodes or destroys nature, there'll be hell to pay. When children suffer the slings and arrows of parents who enshrine their self-determined "needs" higher than the icon of Christ -- which shines everywhere in the home and its faces -- then not only are the parents invoking the winds of perdition, but so is the nation that cut those winds loose, as did the shipmates of Odysseus with the bag of Aeolus.
The winds scatter everywhere, and drives every ship and soul nowhere toward safe harbor, instead only to founder on the shores of Circe, where men are transmuted into the shape of their passions, or directly into the maws of Scylla and Charybdis, even down to Erebus itself. A man sits at night with the keyboard, and calls up, from the grave, succubi leering in tumescent phosphorescence: he assumes, as a fool, that he is only being aroused temporarily and privately, but has no inkling that hell thunders with derision, because his holy intercourse and authority have been stained, and he has been unmanned (it is idiotic for him to think that he was rendered impotent, or emasculated, by his wife: self-willed pornography had stunted him long before). Subsequently, a woman leaves her children, not out of the tragic necessity to fend off starvation, but to "improve herself," and to demonstrate her likeness with man. And she, like Electra, calls her rejection of the Marian chrism "feminism" and "egalitarianism": she, too, has no inkling that she has demythologized fatherhood and motherhood, and the children are consigned to androgyny.
These winds, among many others wafted from Cocytus, were all done in the name of the nation, you must know, because as Coolidge once did say, apocalyptically, "The business of America is business." When did Americans become so foolish as to accept this traitorous calumny?
But it is not completely the fault of men:
Politics is no longer determined by the nation: America is no longer ruled by the USA. The eutectic rhetoric of Lincoln and the humanistic analysis of de Tocqueville are both predicated on a moral ecosystem (the only meaning of "culture") that no longer obtains. The powers-that-be are not the President, the Congress or the Supreme Court: instead, they are networked coalitions that transcend nation-state borders. They themselves, the powers-that-be, are ruled in turn, perhaps unknowingly, by the powers-that-are.
Which are, of course, the determiners of the first (i.e., pre-Christian) and third (contemporary transgressive) worlds. They are the dictators (via mechanistic inspiration) of type-written world-narratives, the tenure-bestowers to their priests and priestesses, who in turn intone the ritual epistemological chant of Creation-destroying and deconstructionist necromancy.
Who decides to revolutionize culture, to replace one order with another? To descend into a more lurid, fetid milieu of consciousness-fragmentation and materialistic demonism?
It is not the stock market, as this is only the offering collected at the temple.
It is not the celebrities (whether on the vaudevillian stage or in the goblin peep show of politics), as these are only the fetish-dolls of the tantric-rites of the new ishtarian pieties (the pertinent religious tracts at the grocery racks, whether they give the histories of stars or soap operas, are the same and should not believed, because the truth is worse).
It is not the hieratic/academic deathworkers (i.e., deathwork bards, or deconstructionist new prophets of Baal) (2nd i.e., these are probably represented by Harry Potter’s death-eaters) as these are only the epistemological factotums employed by the powers-that-are. The suixante huitards, now in their flannels and walkers, who won the war quite prettily for the university, really hoped they were heroes, but knew deep down they were only plagiarizing Epeius on the whim of Athena (who despises the sacred order).
Too many so-called "conservatives" are conservative only because they seek to conserve (or renovate) their own obsolete privileges. These are not true conservatives. They are only bourgeois wannabe aristocrats -- and the world has had enough of both. True conservatives save the good from inferno, and preserve the sacred order.
Revolution is inevitable insofar as the rumor of war and evil permeate the fallen world. All revolution, especially the French one and this present, begins in Tartarus.
This is the proper interpretation of "revolution" -- that is, as a cataclysmic social renunciation of the sacred order. It is often masked by a well-intended appeal to democracy ("man as passive bovine will become, if bothered enough, the Minotaur"): but the mask is always lifted to reveal the furious face and leprous of Alecto. Sekhmet's hunger must be assuaged, her breath must be expelled: no barn has been better stocked for these First World entities than the foodstuff larder harvested by the Third.
The sacramental, apostolic church is the only defense against this chthonic scourge. The last revolution, consuming the last men described by Zarathustra, will precede immediately the Last Day.
NATURE/TIME
Dolphins know that time is not a member or constituent of nature (as is assumed by most physics): rather, it is the other way around. Nature-as-Creation is a member of time, as it is based on time.
Truth is coherence with time and nature. Untruth is digression from time and nature, and will inevitably produce regression from consciousness -- which is also known as death.
Consciousness is the intersection (or, rather, interaction) of the soul with time, because Time is a Grace, a Rhetoric Divine. The other word for "consciousness" here is "nous."
Between and above the poles of chaos and determinism rises Personhood. One cannot help but to predicate all consciousness on his own personhood. That is why the Lord said that a man will never fail to love himself. But a man can fail to love others and God. Likewise, he can ignore personhood outside himself. Consequently, this deliberate ignorance produces a stilted view of the psychic landscape -- a Stygian topology, if you will. He who allows no personhood but his own will see Chaos above him, so that nothing can oppose his own deity (which is the only personhood he now understands -- the word for this is "Self"). And below him -- the chain of being that he assigns the status of consequentiality -- is determinism. The rejection of personhood, beyond the cold walls of Self, is the vocation of the overman. This construct can exist only if the natural view of Creation is eclipsed, like windows curtained to keep out the morning -- a common occurrence in the age which has lurched from industrialism to virtualism.
If he cannot grasp this Nietzschean brass ring of homo superior, then he would rather dismiss the world as unreal if he thinks at all.
Thus are the anti-natural schools of the existentialist, who wraps himself in Chaos, and the Übermensch, who crowns himself with the Darwinian scepter of self-determinism. Both have a vested interest in obliterating any vestige of the Person, especially the Three Persons in One Essence from Whom all personhood flows.
Most materialistic observers of persons assume that a biological phenomenon, if observed, must lie at the basis of behavior. Instead, many biological phenomena occur as a result of free decisions (a passionate man will produce, in himself, a genetic and biochemical complex that will accommodate his self-determination).
Of course, the unnatural character of much of human behavior and experience cannot completely be explained by self-determination. There are effects caused by completely external factors, whether by the destruction waged by other people (consciously evil or not), environmental catastrophes, or completely meaningless/"chance" occurrences (such as the debilitation of certain genes or developmental milestones that produce congenital defects, or physiological determinisms that appear later in life -- cerebral palsy is an instance of the former; heart disease is an example of the latter).
Also of course, of all the non-self-determined evils waged on existence, the inheritance of death and the legacy of the preponderance of orientation-to-sin is the greatest of injustices. The customary assignment of blame to God for this is the greatest darkness of the Western mind, and persists in the cultural cousins of reformed theology and atheism.
Too much time is wasted on fixing blame for sin and pain.
On the other hand, persons, who don't waste time complaining, are restored by gardens and sacraments. Such is the anamnesis of Paradise, the irony of the shield of Achilles, the lesson of Odysseus' olive tree. It is especially the vision of beauty and the peace of the Eucharist: no Christian can complain of injustice at the Table of Divine Conviviality. One Word at the Feast silences the totality of demonic noise ... one Song at Sion's Festival, under the Tree of Life, resolves the aggregate threat of meon.
PRAYER/PARTICULARITY
Good stories -- that is, stories that should be told or read, as opposed to many stories that should be ignored or immediately regretted as having been ever told or written (and especially, grievously read and cathected) -- good stories should be like trees that are lovelier than poems, grown from the ground of person and place, watered by memory, pulled up by the love of the tri-hypostatic sun.
Prayer must be like story in this way, rooted in heart, in hearth and earth ... "Pray Thyself in me" is the Trinitarian way of understanding this wise nut that is hard to crack.
Some people say that history must be “dealt with” in prayer (but they use the institutionalized corporate term "engaged with" for "dealt with" -- don't trust those talking heads that can't speak English). That is all fine and good if one means by "history" the prophetic and apocalyptic sense of the past. But alas, that is never meant this way: it is more likely that what is meant by "history" is the acceptance of self-serving and cultural self-justifying myths fabricated about the past, not from the past. One cannot pray if one's dogma is sociologically informed: Christian prayer is predicated on dogma that is theological.
Prayer, of course, must be rooted in memory and real theology (the only philosophy that can survive the Resurrection of Christ) -- this is the mustard seed of faith that is alone efficacious enough to move mountains and sharp enough to squeeze through the eye of a needle.
Only persons can pray. Persons are inspired, through eros, to pray as oak leaves yearn toward the sun. They learn, through ascesis, to pray in faith only through Tradition and Liturgy, never ever through the lesser erotics of entertainment. This is why the historic institutional Orthodox Church exists today. This is also why it can never attract popularity. It will always indict the industrialized cows of Bashan, because it must always cleave to the House of Prayer.
Prayer that is non-environmentalist (and insensible to global warming) must needs be gnostic, and should be heartily eschewed. Prayer that is non-personal is calvinist and therefore jovian, not Trinitarian. Prayer that is simple and fervent, orthodox and childlike, winsome and importunate, unencumbered by and liberated from the chains of Job-ian theodicy-obfuscations, illuminated by ecclesial vision and charged with joy, buoyed up by peace – that sort of prayer is simply prayer that is prayer.
Orthodox prayer that is efficacious must be relieved of the weights of churchmanship and bureaucracy. If Orthodoxy has been hobbled at all in the modern age, it has been handicapped by the customs of ecclesial politics siphoned off from Rome and the Franks: if institutional Orthodox ever sputters, it is only when the ecclesiastics have little to do with ekklesia. Bureaucratic prayer (a difficult phrase, if not impossible) distributes men on ladders of importance: the Pharisee, sniffing at the Republican, did such a thing, and it was adjudicated as judgmental, not justified.
Prayers that are not simple, that fail to be Orthodox, are inarticulate groans in the night, but are heard anyways, because God is always forbearing to deficiencies of doctrine: whenever mercy is truly begged for, God turns aside and anoints with Samaritan oil. Count on it -- especially if you, on the way to Jericho, have fallen among the thieves.
It is always better to opt for God as a Divine Neighbor than a philosophical construct. Any flower or tree, mountain or sea, if properly looked at, will keep one from knowing about God rather than knowing Him. One cannot denature the Apostolic Vision into propositions. One cannot subject theology to philosophical categorization, simply because theology is not an intellectual object: as it is the empirical experience of God's Uncreated Energies, it is above all academic captures and caricatures.
Perhaps in the West it is permitted to define theology as "a word about God," but not in the East. Theology is the experience of Triune energies, the apostolic vision of the Uncreated Light: any intellectualized confinement of "theology" -- especially in a dialectic manner -- is a diminution of the term. The intellectual prejudice against experience is the reason why St. Paul's rhetoric at Mars Hill was a mixed success. St. Dionysios heard and received the Word -- not because he was an intellectual, but because he was willing to be called a fool for a bright enough light.
Prayer has been wounded by the Reformation. And since Prayer must live, the Reformation will continue to fade. What will not fade is the world militated against Prayer. Since Prayer will live, the third world of transgression will become more shrill: atheism, more and more, will be outed as a sheer cover for passion, a rejection of repentance. There will be those, as there are already, who will pledge themselves to the rooting out of every vestige of Christianity. Christianity can co-exist with non-Christians. The reverse will become ever less likely.
As Christendom is deconstructed, culture declines and love will grow cold. The rumors of war will become pronounced. Many will come in His Name and lead some of the elect astray. Words will become completely unmoored from the other side of appearances. Symbols cannot survive in a virtualized "world," where what purports to be real is directly perceived, and nothing is represented by the appearance. Prayer -- which is the communication with reality that is beyond appearances -- relies upon the symbolic. Deconstruction and virtualization (the twin demons of unleashed by industrialism) choke symbols, and wage war against prayer. When words lose all symbolic dimension, and become cardboard posturings for power, then the last man will have finally, and completely, forgotten how to pray. Then it will be truly night, and the Thief will come.
Language and culture are free "sub-creations" by man of the White Tower of Prayer. Prayer is the ultimate aim of language and the zenith of culture. The neglect of this truth is the chief pathology of civilization, the engine of decadence, and the only fact that sociology can accurately observe.
HEROES/BEAST
The utterance “Thy will be done” is the most liberationist, consciousness-raising, promethean statement of all, and can only be pronounced by free people, i.e. “saints” who are sinners who still call sin “sin,” and do not seek political endorsement of sin for an aggrandized self-awareness, but seek salvation instead from the isolation of self-awareness – a self-awareness from which Sartre found no exit.
But the heroes who are the saints and the persons, alone can see others as the persons they are because they are no longer self-determined by sin. They can see beauty because they believe in the Three Persons in One Essence, and they see beauty reverberate in all Creation. They return their cathected images of real beauty over the distance to the Creator in thanks, and thus they turn the world upside down.
This is the true power of man. Saints are the only real magicians (i.e., changers of their phenomena), as Love may proceed from Persons alone. The lesser magicians and tyrants of the age, the warlords and corporate moguls, are puppets of goblins. Satanists, manipulators of goetia and crystal-mongers, burning-man orgiasts, jihadists and skull-and-bones-tycoons are afflicted with the same pneumopathology: they entertain themselves with reveries of independent power until the next mood hits, and they lurch off, bidden, to the next diablerie of war.
That power is the mere vandal power of deathwork, like toilet paper on college nights, graffiti in the sky, orcs cutting down the trees. It is not, and never has been, the true power of Love.
Sacraments can only be agrarian (and Patriarchal and Trinitarian, scandalously exclusive and conservative), and cannot help but revile the industrial religion of the Beast. Religion cannot survive the virtualized ringwraith world of technology. There is art and there is craft, and in each there is a sub-creator and his tools. But there is the shadow world of technology, into which individuals lurch, deceived into the night: and of this world it is well said, "one to rule them all and in the darkness binds them."
This must be the theme of any Christian enchiridion for survival in the new globalization prophesied by that quintessential testament of Mammon, “novus ordo seclorum”.
All youth workers and seminary professors and clerics must wrestle with this fact, or they will become obscurantists at best, or emergent megachurcher multistaffers at likeliest. Cowardice in this matter produces heterodox clerisy (i.e., mainline "egalitarian" elitism).
There is no unseen conspiracy. The blueprint of the Beast is written on every dollar bill for all to see: his narrative has long been plainly published. The dichotomy “You cannot serve God and Mammon” will become more literalized with every passing year of this virtualized age.
And when the culture of the antichrist is accomplished atop the new Dark Tower of Babel (being erected, like Baradur, in the cyber-den of virtual Dis), the number of the Beast will be revealed, finally (and simply) as line 37 of the 1040 tax return.
With that, the dolphin, on purpose, vanished into the looming, arching wave.
That dolphin's day was one that made the adjective "halcyon" concrete. The fetch of the sea was frothed in mirth, not unsettled, but laughing with its cousin, the azure firmament. The sun gleamed blue and silver, and the tangible light called up the crest, racing toward the strand in imposing, impossible arches of childlike complexity. Every wave is magic manifest. Every gleam and song is a fairy tale come true. The old bedtime stories were not false. They were simply not true enough.
"You, modern friend, should learn the discipline of staying calm through the storm. Your generation of Orthodox Christians is singularly maladroit at sea. Listen for peace through the groaning of Creation: the storm is only the protest against antichrist. Look for the sun in the darkness ..."
