The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon

Nikolai Berdyaev (circa 1933):

The crisis of our time is to a remarkable degree begotten by technology, which man lacks the strength to deal with. And this crisis is first of all a spiritual one. It is important for [us] to emphasize that Christians have proven to be completely unprepared for an appraisal of technology and the machine, for an understanding of its place within life. The Christian consciousness does not know how to relate to the tremendous worldwide event connected with the introduction into human life of the machine and technology. The natural world, in which man was accustomed to live in the past, no longer still seems to be in the eternal order of things. Man lives in a new world, altogether quite different from that in which the Christian revelation occurred, in which lived the apostles, the teachers of the Church, the saints, all with which the symbolism of Christianity is connected. Christianity was very representative of a connection with the land, with a patriarchal order of life. But technology has torn man away from the soil [and] has with finality destroyed the patriarchal order…

For a long time [Christians] regarded technology as a most neutral sphere, something religiously indifferent, something furthermost removed from spiritual questions and therefore something innocent. But this period has passed, though not all have noticed it so. Technology has ceased to be neutral. The question about technology has become for us a spiritual question, a question about the fate of man, about his relationship to God.

Technology has immeasurably deeper a significance than ordinarily is thought. It possesses a cosmogonic significance, it creates a completely new actuality. It is a mistake to think, that the actuality, engendered by technology, is the old actuality of the physical world, a reality, studied by mechanics, physics and chemistry. This is an actuality, which did not exist in the history of the world until the discoveries and inventions, made by man. Man has succeeded in creating a new world. Within the machine is present the reasoning power of man, within it operates a teleological principle. Technology creates an atmosphere, saturated with energies, which earlier were hidden within the depths of nature. And man has no assurance that he is in a condition to breathe in the new atmosphere. He was in the past accustomed to breathe a different air than this. It is still inexplicable, what this electric atmosphere, into which he is cast, will produce for the human organism. Into the hands of man technology puts a terrible and unprecedented power, a power which can be to the destroying of mankind. The first tools, found in the hands of man, were relatively playthings. And it would be possible to regard them still as neutral. But when such a terrible power is given into the hands of man, then the fate of mankind depends upon the spiritual condition of man.

One already destructive aspect of technology is war, threatening almost cosmic a catastrophe, and it posits the spiritual problem of technology quite acutely. Technology is not only the power of man over nature, but also the power of man over man, power over the life of people…therein especially it is not neutral. And especially in our materialistic times everything acquires a spiritual significance, everything is set beneath the standard of the spirit. Technology, begotten by spirit, materializes life, but it can also indeed assist in the liberating of spirit, of liberation from the bounds of materio-organic life. It can enable also an in-spiriting.

Technology signifies the transfer of the whole of human existence from the organism to the organization. Man no longer lives in an organic order. Man is accustomed to live in an organic connection with the soil, with plants and animals. The great cultures of the past were still surrounded by nature, they loved their gardens, flowers and animals, they had not yet broken asunder from the rhythm of nature. The sense of the land begat a tellurgic mysticism...

Man came from the soil and he returns to the soil. With this is connected a profound religious symbolism. The vegetative cults have played a tremendous role. The organic life of man and of human societies presented itself as a life similar to that of plants. Organic was the life of the family, of the corporation, the state, the church. Society had resemblance to an organism. The romantics at the beginning of the XIX Century ascribed an especial significance to the organism and the organic. From them comes the idealization of everything organic and hostility towards the mechanical. The organism is born, and not made by man, it is begotten by nature, by cosmic life, in it the whole is not composed merely of parts, but rather precedes the parts and determines their life.

Technology tears man apart from the soil, carries him across the expanses of the world, and gives man the sensation of earth as a mere planet. Technology radically alters the attitude of man to space and to time. It is hostile to any organic embodiment. In the technological period of civilization man ceases to live amidst animals and plants, he is flung into a coldly-metallic medium, in which there is no longer any animal warmth, no warm-bloodedness. The might of technology bears with it an enfeebling of cordiality within human life, of cordial warmth, coziness, lyricism, sorrows, always connected with the emotion of soul, and not with spirit. Technology kills everything organic in life and sets it under the standard of the organization of the whole of human existence.

The inevitability of the transition from organism to organization is one of the sources of the contemporary crisis of the world. It is not so easy to be torn asunder from the organic. The machine with a cold ferocity rips the spirit from its intertwined organic flesh, from vegetative-animate life. And this expresses itself first of all in the weakening of the soul-emotive element within human life, in the dissociation of integral human feelings. We are entering upon a harsh epoch of spirit and technology. The soul, connected with organic life, has proven very fragile, it shrinks back from the fierce blows which the machine inflicts upon it, it flows with blood, and sometimes it seems, that it is dead. We perceive this as a fatal process of technization, mechanization, the materialization of life. But spirit can oppose this process, can master it, can enter into a new epoch of being victorious.

This is the fundamental problem. The organization into which the world is passing over, the organization of the enormous human masses, the organization of technical life, the organization of economics, the organization of scientific operations etc. is very burdensome for the soul-emotive life of man, for the intimate life of the person, and it begets the inner religious crisis. Elements of organization have existed since the very dawn of human civilization, just as always there have existed elements of technology, but never has the principle of technical organization been so dominating and all-extensive, always there remained much of the organic and vegetative condition. The organization, connected with technology, is a rationalization of life. But human life cannot be ultimately and without residue rationalized, always there remains an irrational element, always there remains a mystery. The universal principle of rationalization receives its just reward.

Rationalization, bereft of any higher spiritual principle, begets irrational consequences…the rationalization of life assumes forms reminiscent of collective madness. Universal rationalization, technical organization, the spurning of the mysterious foundations of life, beget a lost sense of the old meaning of life, and anguish, and the tendency towards suicide. Man is attracted by the technics created by him, but he himself cannot be transformed into a machine. Man is the organizer of life, but he himself in his depths cannot be the object of organization, within him himself there always remains an element of the organic, the irrational, the mysterious. The rationalization, the technization, the machinization of the whole of human life and of the human soul itself cannot but provoke a reaction against itself. This reaction existed during the XIX Century. The romantics always protested against the might of technology, the dissociating of the organic wholeness, and they appealed to nature, to the elemental foundation within man…

The romantic reaction against technology is understandable and even indispensable, but it is impotent, it either does not decide the problem or it resolves it too easily. To return to former times, to the organic lifestyle, to the patriarchal relationships, to the old forms of the familial economy and handicrafts, to the life with nature, with the land, with plants and animals, is impossible. And indeed this return would be undesirable, for it is connected with an exploitive use of people and animals. In this is the tragedy of the position. And it remains but for spirit creatively to define its own relationship towards technology and towards the new epoch, to master technology in the name of its own ends…Soulful emotionality cannot bear up under the harsh reality. Indifference is possible only for the hardened, the obdurate spirit. Spirit can be an organizer, it can master the technical for its own spiritual ends, but it would have to resist itself being turned into a tool of the organizing technical process. In this is the tragedy of spirit.

Travelin' Man

The Little Red Blog is currently vacationing in Buffalo, New York (with a weekend detour planned to Geneva, the Paris of the Finger Lakes region). Posting will be limited until I return home to Missoula in three weeks. 

For now, I would just like to suggest that whichever Democrat emerges with the presidential nomination a year from now should retain Marianne Williamson as Spiritual Advisor. I have no truck with Williamson's New Age spirituality, and she has no business being on the debate stage; but someone has to call out the "dark psychic energy" being unleashed on this country by the current President, and so far Ms. Williamson is the only one up to that task.

I should also mention that Montana Governor Steve Bullock, who apparently fared well in last night's debate, lost a lot of support from progressives in Big Sky country when he supinely allowed the Montana state legislature to gut funding for case management in the state's mental health system. If Governor Steve wouldn't stand up to that, why would anyone believe he'll stand up to Mitch McConnell? 

 

The World's Indifference (Part Two): The World as Plunder

In “The Phenomenon of the World’s Indifference,” Leszek Kolakowski is quick to note that indifference is by no means the entirety of our existence: “We all know that we live only thanks to various kinds of non-indifference in our encounters with people: thanks to solidarity, love, trust, and friendship. The phenomenon of the world’s indifference, revealed as a property of the whole, does not cancel, does not call upon us to ignore or treat as illusory all variants of non-indifference or human coexistence on which we all depend.” It may even be the case, Kolakowski suggests, that “the phenomenon of indifference, understood as the quidditas of the world, gives to the totality of human endeavors a common purpose…” Pitted against the implacably uncaring cosmos, we are all in this together.

Kolakowski sees this endless struggle against indifference as the primary motive underlying human achievements, especially those of modernity: “We strive to overcome the indifference of the world by a technological appropriation of objects, thanks to which they become obedient to us.” To paraphrase Marx, whereas myth offers an understanding of our ontological situation, technology is an attempt to change it. It is, says Kolakowski, a Promethean enterprise: “Due to the fact that to an ever-increasing extent we inhabit an environment which we have organized ourselves, so to an ever-increasing extent we feel free to ascribe to ourselves divine-like creative talents. The world has ceased to be raw nature, crushing in its insensitivity; it has almost become the emanation of our projects; vast areas of it, which constantly grow in extent, listen to our commands; it has become sensitive to our wishes.” Like the builders of Babel, we are determined to gain the world’s attention, and why not? If, as Kolakowski suggests, indifference is at the heart of suffering, who can blame us for wanting simply to be acknowledged?

Forcing, then, the world to submit, and “[forcing] upon things the gradual decrease of their incalculable intractability, so, appropriate to the level of obedience which things show us, the world turns into a domestic animal; the boundary between the efficiency of a machine and the friendly trust of a tamed animal begins to blur. Technological triumphs offer us the physical world fully humbled.”

For all that, the fundamental problem remains. “All our successes in controlling things are constantly accompanied by fears of unfulfillment. Technological culture enables us to grasp the world as plunder but it cannot abide its indifference; the taming of things is only apparent, the sense of an encounter with nature in reciprocity is illusory, like the love of a necrophiliac.”

Kolakowski elaborates on that last image and on the paradox that the more we humanize our environment, the more alien it seems:

A world saturated with traces of our technological activities, and therefore a world seemingly humanized, stamped in every detail with the intensity of our interventions, again begins to appear a nightmare. Why do we carefully preserve enclaves of natural growth between the lanes of our motorways; why should we be so concerned to preserve from annihilation the remnants of vanishing flor and fauna and to guard wild mountains against erosion; why in fact do we experience nostalgia for the primitive (or rather the more primitive) material environment; why the grotesque mass escapes into nature?

What is the real meaning of the hopeless complaints over the dehumanized machine era, which should surely be regarded as the era of the humanized object? Whence the fear of a world of robots, whence the visions of man humiliated by his own automata? What kind of strange reversal leads us to perceive a snow-covered forest or a mountain stream as a more human sight than the automated factory?

Technological modernity has committed itself to an endeavor as deeply unsatisfying as it is superficially successful, “because at every stage of technological success things are our plunder and not the fruit of a friendly fraternization”; we have forced ourselves upon the indifferent world rather than persuading it to be concerned with us. “We are unable…to achieve that intimacy with the material world in which the alchemists believed when they understood that world as a system of signs revealing through their meaningful qualities an entry into a secret reality which is different, truer, and not accessible directly.”

Again, we are up against what seems to be an unresolvable paradox: “Terrified by the unpredictability of the physical environment in which we experience its indifference, we later discover, as we conquer its whims, the same or even a more acute indifference in a world reduced to complete predictability, in a world of things that we can harness but never domesticate.” 

To quote Bob Dylan: “Anyone can fill his life up with things he can see but he just cannot touch.”  Our lives (those of us in the technologically developed West) are filled to the brim with just such things: inanimate, subservient, superficially responsive to our desires and yet fundamentally indifferent. “Alexa” and “Siri,” program them as you will, will never care about you; which is one more reason why it is absolutely necessary that we care about each other.       

The World's Indifference (Part One)

The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote THE PRESENCE OF MYTH in 1966, though it wasn’t published in English until 1989 (French and German translations appeared in the early 1970’s). As the author admitted in his Preface to the English edition, the book displayed an uncharacteristic “stylistic heaviness”; it is decidedly lacking in the elegant yet accessible prose one normally finds in Kolakowski’s work.

If PRESENCE OF MYTH, despite its brevity (135 pages), is a daunting read, it is nevertheless worth picking up and worth getting through.¹ Of particular value is the book’s Chapter Eight, “The Phenomenon of the World’s Indifference,” in which Kolakowski diagnoses the fundamental nature of the human dilemma.

Kolakowski’s continuing theme in the book is the human need for myth in response to unavoidable existential questions—questions of the meaning, purpose, and value of existence as a whole and of human existence specifically. Put another way, because we as humans recognize the contingency of our own existence, we seek (through myth) some Absolute, some way of anchoring ourselves against the flux of time and change. At the same time, however, many of us in the modern era resist the very idea of myths and Absolutes; we claim that existential courage consists in facing up to our situation without comforting illusions. We no longer believe in metaphysics or in a supernatural realm wherein the answers to our questions might reside.

In “The Phenomenon of the World’s Indifference,” Kolakowski cites depth psychology and its insights that humans, in various ways, seek either the oblivion of death or a return to the refuge of the womb; both options represent flight from life’s difficulties. Given that, Kolakowski asks, “What are we running away from?”

To which he replies: “The simplest answer is that we are running away from suffering.” This, however, says simultaneously too little and too much; suffering comes in many forms, it possesses a subjective element (what seems like suffering to one person may not seem so to another), and humans do not always run away from it. Kolakowski seeks to clarify:

What is common and identical in all suffering: in physical pain, in the sense of failure in life, in the fear of a task above one’s powers, in fear of one’s own death, in rejected love, in humiliation, in realizing the hopelessness of ambition, in the experience of impotence, and in unbearable loneliness? What is the experience which allows us to cover all these situations and thousands of others with one word? What is this “suffering” which in a variety of experiences is perceived as a single experience?

The various forms of suffering, says Kolakowski, can be apprehended as one thing:

That from which we flee is the experience of the world’s indifference, and attempts to overcome this indifference constitute the crucial meaning of human struggle with fate, both in its everyday and its extreme form.

Ernest Becker claimed that human cultural and creative energies stem from our “denial of death”; Kolakowski, while acknowledging the role played by our unique awareness of mortality, believes the real motive for our behavior is even deeper—it is an ongoing attempt to overcome “the world’s indifference,” to force the universe itself to take notice of us and to care about our existence.

What is “suffering,” asks Kolakowski, but our realization that we simply do not matter? He writes:

All negativities of life are explicable as manifestations of indifference…everything in our environment of things and people which frustrates our efforts or causes misery, reveals the world to us as an intolerably indifferent reality…we could, without self-deception, admit the contingency and fragmentariness of the phenomenon of indifference were it not for the experience of anticipating death. The anticipation of death discovers the phenomenon of indifference as the “quidditas” of the world, because it is precisely in it that the world as a whole, in all respects and to an extreme degree, is forced to reveal its indifference. From that moment, and on account of this [humanly] privileged experience, all partial revelations of this indifference in singular negativities cannot be regarded as accidents where the property of only a certain fragment of the world is revealed, but rather as imperfect glimpses of an homogenous whole.

This is where Kolakowski aligns with Becker: death is the extreme, universal, inescapable “manifestation” of our superfluity, and our awareness of death is simultaneously our discovery that the world is indifferent to us. The universe neither knows nor cares whether we live or die, whether we flourish or not: we die, the world barely shrugs, and existence goes on without us.

Kolakowski:

Since we already know that the world may show us complete indifference, and that it has to show it for certain [in death], we thereby know that the fragmentary experiences of indifference lead us into the true modus of our relations with the world—that is, it is not this or that person who through indifference causes us suffering, that it is not some particular state of affairs that gets the better of us, but that through this person and through this state of affairs the silence of the world seemingly speaks to us its “couldn’t-care-less” about our existence.

Like death, the world’s indifference to our existence is indiscriminately common yet experienced by us as frighteningly singular: “If it be so, why seems it so particular with thee?” “‘Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is; I know not seems.” 

I’ll continue this discussion in my next post.

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¹ THE PRESENCE OF MYTH is available to read online, for free, at Internet Archive: www.archive.org

Sunday Sermon

Bertrand Russell (from “A Free Man’s Worship”):

In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be--Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity--to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.

The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

Paul's Divine Invasion (Part Three)

What [Paul] wanted to talk about was the generation of an altogether new pneumatic world of eternal life in which everything that was tied to the lower elements of the present world of corruption and death would be transformed into a wholly different kind of heavenly existence, indeed, into an altogether different world. (Troels Enberg-Pederson, COSMOLOGY AND SELF IN THE APOSTLE PAUL)

 

As we saw, Paul experienced a revelation, an uncovering, of the “Christ” within him, and he was tasked directly by God to explain to the Gentiles that they, too, could be gifted with “Christ in them”. As Troels Engberg-Pederson makes clear, Paul meant all this very literally: “Christ” for him was a pneumatic being, and Paul had “a wholly concrete and bodily understanding of the pneuma…Paul conceived of the pneuma as a physical entity.”  

In his letters, Paul at times uses the metaphor of pregnancy, referring to the entire created order groaning in anticipation “as in the pains of childbirth”. Consider, too, that Paul often speaks of  “seed”: of planting the seed of the gospel, of promises made on behalf of Abraham’s seed, and of (crucially) the physical body as the seed which, upon death, is sown in the ground so that it will rise, eventually, as a new, spiritual creation. He writes to the Corinthians that “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body…flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” ¹

Putting all this together, it appears that, for Paul, having “Christ in us” amounted to what we might call a spiritual pregnancy, one which would come to term only upon Jesus’ return. It would be misleading, however, to apply to Paul our modern understanding of “spiritual”. We think of “spiritual” as meaning “insubstantial,” as opposed to material things which we term "substantial". Paul’s understanding, like that of his contemporaries, was that pneuma, or “spirit,” was a substance; in fact, it was a substance far superior to flesh and blood. In Paul's thought-world, spiritual creatures existed--not just Christ but angels and a host of malevolent entities; they possessed bodies, but bodies of an entirely different substance from ours. As Paul envisioned it, the bodies of the elect “in Christ” would someday be composed of just such spiritual substance, no longer subject to the indignities and limitations of the flesh.

To be pregnant with pneuma, then, meant that the seed of the spiritual body planted within a believer at baptism would grow if nurtured properly by holy living, prayer, and by being replenished in the Eucharist. Eventually (again, only at the Parousia, the return of Christ to claim God’s kingdom) the individual believer would be pneuma through and through, a new and immortal creation, capable, as Paul said, of judging angels. 

Here is Troels Engberg-Pederson on the Pauline concept:

[Paul’s] idea was the stark one that Christ-believers’ bodies of flesh and blood literally die—or atrophy—while they are living here on earth in order to become fit for the final transformation that will occur in the future. That dying is what is referred to by the talk of ‘sharing’ in Christ’s sufferings and becoming ‘conformed’ to his death.

The real starkness of Paul’s idea lies in the fact that he took the two processes of ‘becoming conformed to’ Christ’s death (in the sarx) and getting to know...the power of his (Christ’s) resurrection’ (in the pneuma) as taking place simultaneously in Paul’s body…his idea is that with the arrival of the pneuma, the body of flesh and blood is at one and the same time undergoing two opposed processes: dying (as flesh and blood) and coming to life (as a pneumatic body).

[Paul believed in] a striking co-presence in believers of a dying away of the physical body of flesh and blood in conformity with Christ’s suffering and dying—and a corresponding takeover of the same body by the pneuma, which will eventually lead to its final transformation into a body of glory. When that happens believers will literally come to shine like stars in heaven.

 

In the midst of life, we are in death. Expressions like “dying to self” or “dying to the world” were not, for Paul, mere figures of speech. They described a real process that was allegedly taking place within each believer, aimed at creating an unprecedented divine-human hybrid. When Paul insisted that "in Christ" there is "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female," he wasn't issuing a manifesto for social justice; he was describing an emerging ontological reality in which such divisions would literally no longer exist. 

 

That, I believe, is the staggering idea Paul preached, based on his own transformative experience; he himself was among the “first fruits” of God’s new family, brothers and sisters "in Christ" who would inherit and, with Christ, rule over God’s new creation.

 

Paul’s idea of “Christ in us” is echoed in the work of the late author Philip K. Dick, who also experienced (and wrote about) a “divine invasion”: a series of them, in fact, from which he, like Paul, developed his own esoteric exegesis. Here is one brief item from that exegesis:

“The Immortal One is a plásmate…a form of energy; it is living information.  A plásmate can crossbond with a human, creating what I call a homoplásmate. This annexes the mortal human permanently to the plásmate. We know this as the “birth from above” or “birth from the Spirit.” It was initiated by Christ…”

The kingdom of God is within you, and not just metaphorically.

If we’re going to take Paul seriously—and, for two thousand years, we have—we ought also to take Philip Dick and his cross-bonded "homoplasmate" seriously. I will have more to say about that another time. For now, I simply want to emphasize that Paul, whose writings have been the foundation of Christian theology for two millennia, preached a gospel the details of which most Christians would find bizarre; in fact, if Paul’s name were not attached to these dizzying speculations, Christians today would almost certainly reject them.

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¹ It would be wrong to think that Paul’s dismissal of “flesh and blood” means that he believed in a Platonic “immortal soul” as the mode of our eternal existence. For him, the opposite of “flesh and blood” was pneuma, a very different concept than that of the soul. Engberg-Pederson notes that Paul used Platonic rhetoric without endorsing Platonic ideas, one more sign of Paul’s instinctive eclectic genius—or, if you prefer, his confusion.

Paul's Divine Invasion (Part Two)

Before proceeding further with the implications of Paul’s “in Christ,” I should make it clear that the conclusions and speculations here are entirely mine and not Bruce Chilton’s, whose book RABBI PAUL I have been reading and to which I have referred. Chilton, in fact, doggedly attempts to reconcile Luke’s accounts (in Acts) with Paul’s own, whereas I dismiss Luke almost entirely.  

Consider, for example, the issue of Paul’s baptism. Bruce Chilton accepts Luke’s claim (as do most scholars, I concede) that Paul, after his “conversion” experience, was promptly baptized into the Jesus-movement. Luke says that Paul, having been struck blind by his encounter with the risen Jesus, was led into Damascus where a man named Ananias, after miraculously curing Paul’s blindness, baptized him. ¹ While Chilton acknowledges that “Paul never named the man who baptized him,” he nonetheless insists that said baptism must have taken place: “Obeying the apocalyptic voice [of Jesus] meant that Paul had to be baptized.” Baptism, says Chilton, was a “supernatural event [in which] the risen Jesus now drenched believers in the Holy Spirit”. It was also a requirement for anyone entering the Jesus-movement; therefore, Paul must have undergone it.

I don’t accept that claim.  Rather, I suggest that Paul, already “drenched” by his revelation/realization of the Christ within him, would not have sought out baptism; why should he, when he had been given a command by God himself to take the gospel to the Gentiles? ² Paul does not say he was told, “Go and be baptized, then preach to all nations in my name”; he had his revelation and his commission from God--what more did he need?

If Paul had been baptized, it seems logical that he would have mentioned it when listing, as he frequently did, his apostolic credentials; being able to name Ananias, the man who baptized him, would have solidified his standing in the communities he addressed. Instead, Paul very clearly says that, after his revelation, he did not “confer with flesh and blood” but went away into Arabia. Chilton claims that Paul here means “he did not have any human encounter that was important to him,” but that strikes me as undercutting the notion that Paul, before departing Damascus, had been baptized—wouldn’t that have been important to him? Wouldn’t regaining his sight have been important?

Paul’s failure to mention his baptism could simply reflect his focus on his prior revelatory experience, which was for him the source of his missionary zeal; it could also stem from his wanting to credit Christ and Christ alone with his spiritual transformation. Still, it would have been easy enough for Paul to have written “I did not consult with any man, but after being baptized I went immediately into Arabia…”  The fact that he did not so state cannot be ignored. 

I’m aware it is counterintuitive, perhaps even heretical, to assert that the greatest apostle of all was never baptized, but I can only repeat: I believe Paul felt himself to have been baptized directly by Christ, and thus not to have needed any additional ritual immersion. Bruce Chilton, in my view, works much too hard, here and elsewhere, at salvaging Luke’s account; the simplest explanation of why Paul didn’t mention his baptism at human hands is because it never happened.

Another case in point where Chilton and I differ: Chilton accepts Luke’s narrative that the newly baptized Paul, having regained his sight, immediately began preaching in the synagogues of Damascus, which led to his hurried flight from the city. Luke writes, “At once [Paul] began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God…Paul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving the Jesus is the Christ.”

Again, Paul says no such thing in his letters. Baptism aside, it is implausible that Paul, in the wake of a spiritually and existentially shattering revelation, should have proceeded in the way Luke describes. Paul would have needed time to make sense of what had happened to him; having been seized, as it were, by Christ, his life turned upside down, he would have needed time to regain his balance and to divine (as it were) his new course.

Here again we should take Paul at his word. After his revelation, Paul, as he says, “immediately” went off to Arabia to work out the implications of that event. How, he would have wondered, could he have been so wrong about Jesus and the Jesus-movement? How could he have failed to recognize Messiah? How could the Christ who now lived within him be reconciled with the Torah Paul had long revered? How could Paul’s new life be reconciled with his old one? What exactly did God want him to do?

Such questions would not have been resolved overnight. In wrestling with them, Paul eventually came up with answers whose radicalism has too often been concealed beneath Christian pieties for two thousand years; but it's still there for anyone willing to take Paul's words seriously, as my next post will explain.

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¹ Let’s be honest: Luke could not have been more heavy-handed in using the “Paul was blind but then he could see” trope. Luke’s having the scales fall from Paul’s eyes has given us an enduring metaphor, but it’s difficult to take the event literally. Bruce Chilton, however, ingeniously links Luke’s description to Paul’s famous “thorn in the flesh,” which has kept exegetes guessing for centuries.

Paul says (also in Galatians) that the members of the congregation had taken pity on him when he was ill; “If possible,” Paul reminds them, “you would have dug out your eyes to give me.” Based on this, Chilton concludes:

“A chronic visual disease seems most likely…the description comports well with an ailment produced by a virus that is activated by anxiety. [It] often lies dormant, later in life infecting the nervous system and provoking ‘shingles’ as well as the ballooning, scarring condition of the eye known as herpes zoster. When he was baptized,” Chilton asserts, “Paul was a stress machine…it is no surprise he had one of his attacks.”

Given the range of my own speculations, far be it from me to chide Chilton for being overly imaginative. Still, I don’t believe Luke’s account for a second.

² I am skeptical of Paul’s claim that he was commissioned to preach specifically to non-Jews. I think it far more likely that his mission to the Gentiles came about only after his gospel fell on deaf ears among his Jewish brethren; he then retroactively decided (and no doubt convinced himself) that God had intended him to go to “the nations” all along. 

Paul's Divine Invasion (Part One)

Please turn to Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Chapter 1, verses 11—16):  

“I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin.  I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.  But…God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles…” [emphasis added]

The concluding sentence in the above passage is frequently translated as “God…was pleased to reveal his Son to me…” [emphasis added]

As it turns out, much hinges on the difference between “revealed in me” and “revealed to me”.

I have been reading Bruce Chilton’s RABBI PAUL, and Chilton emphasizes the importance of getting, and understanding, the preposition properly:

God determined to “uncover his Son in” Paul. Conventional translations have stood in the way of what he clearly said [in Galatians]…these translations make readers think in terms of external stimuli coming to the seer like ordinary sense perceptions…the basic meaning of [Paul’s] language, however, is that a heavenly mystery has its cover taken off: the veil of circumstance is momentarily stripped from spiritual reality. Here the cover is removed from God’s Son, who is “in” Paul, within his consciousness in an experience uniquely his.

Paul’s experience was not of an objective event that other people witnessed with him…his brief reference in Galatians relates to a personal moment of disclosure, an unveiling of the divine.

In Paul’s words, the “Son” of God was disclosed [raging] inside him. ¹

It was no longer Paul who lived but Christ who lived in him.

Before analyzing the passage, we should first note that Chilton’s understanding of Paul’s language does away with Luke’s fanciful inventions in Acts: on the road to Damascus, traveling with companions, Paul (and the others?) saw a sudden blinding light, he was thrown to the ground, he (and the others?) heard a voice from heaven, etc. Paul himself never refers to any such incident; while an argument from omission is hardly airtight, it seems plausible enough in this instance—i.e. Paul never refers to such a dramatic (and public) incident because it never happened.

What did happen, though, was dramatic enough: enough to turn Paul’s life around and enough to alter the course, eventually, of Western culture.

Because the idea of Christ living “in” believers became central to Paul’s emerging theology and to the emerging Christian religion, it is essential to understand what he meant by it. "Christ in us"  was not a figure of speech: it was not just a poetic way of referring to a person being influenced by the example of Jesus, or to someone being inspired by the hope elicited by Jesus’ resurrection, or to going through one's life conscious of one's faith in Christ. For Paul, as we learn from his various writings on the subject, Christ was a new creation—an actual being, an entity, an organism—something unprecedented in the history of the cosmos.  It was not the idea of Christ that lived inside of Paul after his revelation; it was literally Christ himself.

Just as Christians came to believe (as many still do) that the bread and wine of the Eucharist became the literal body and blood of Christ—that is, the Eucharist is not merely a symbolic ritual but an actual transformation (transubstantiation) of physical elements—so too did Paul clearly teach that the “Christ in us” was not symbolic or notional but a real abiding spiritual presence.

Now, this claim could be understood in a Gnostic sense: each of us, Gnostics would say, has within us from birth the “Christ,” a spark of divinity that is ours by nature and which only requires that we become aware of its existence—that we wake from sleep, as Gnostics put it—for it to begin reshaping us into the divinities we are (or are meant to be). The Gnostic "Christ" lies dormant until we become spiritually aware.

Paul was not in that sense a Gnostic; rather, he believed himself to have been, in the event of revelation, entered  (“penetrated” or “invaded”) by the living Christ, after which God revealed to Paul his new identity. As Chilton says, God “uncovered” in Paul the Christ that now lived in him. Paul had been taken by force--not the external force Luke portrays, but a spiritual force within him--so that he could transmit (preach) the Christ to others.  It was no longer Paul who lived but Christ who lived in him; and it would be the privilege of others, upon hearing Paul’s gospel and upon believing in Christ, to experience that same “divine invasion”.

One believer at a time, a whole new race was being created, a race which was to humanity as the "new Adam" was to the "old Adam," and a race that would inherit the new earth that God was about to recreate and transform.

As my next two posts will explain, there were still more implications of "Christ in us".

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¹ Chilton’s choice of the word “raging” seems apt, given what we know of Paul’s single-minded and unflagging zeal for the gospel. “Christ” within him was a relentless engine, and Paul had no way (and no desire) to resist its compulsion.    

Blinks

{Some quick reads while you're waiting for Robert Mueller to say what he really thinks...}

At the Catholic/Jesuit publication America, Dean Dettloff quotes the late, saintly Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement:

“We are on the side of the revolution. We believe there must be new concepts of property, which is proper to [humanity], and that the new concept is not so new. There is a Christian communism and a Christian capitalism.”

Mr. Dettloff argues, not without an awareness of history, that communism ought to remain a viable option:

Communism has provided one of the few sustainable oppositions to capitalism, a global political order responsible for the ongoing suffering of millions. It is that suffering, reproduced by economic patterns that Marx and others tried to explain, and not the secret plot of atheism (as Day once argued), that motivates communists…Communists are not content with the back-and-forth of capitalist parties, who point fingers at one another while maintaining, jointly, a system that exploits multitudes of people, including their own constituents. Communists think we can build better ways of being together in society.

Even more controversially, Dettloff echoes Dorothy Day in linking communist ideals to Christianity:

Although the Catholic Church officially teaches that private property is a natural right, this teaching also comes with the proviso that private property is always subordinate to the common good. So subordinate, says Pope Francis in a truly radical moment in “Laudato Si’,” that “The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.”

What communists desire is an authentically common life together, and they think that can only happen by relativizing property in light of the good of everyone. Radical indeed, but certainly not all that shocking to people who remember when the Virgin Mary sang that God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty (Lk 1:53).

All I can say is, God bless America for printing “The Catholic Case for Communism”.

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/07/23/catholic-case-communism?utm_source=Newsletters&utm_campaign=a98524507d-DAILY_CAMPAIGN_2019_7_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0fe8ed70be-a98524507d-58666829

At Vox, Jane Coaston challenges conservatives to consider the following:

What if, in truth, the conservative movement’s inability to self-police itself against racism and establish firm guardrails against racists in the movement has resulted in an American right increasingly beholden to racism and racist arguments?

And what if, in truth, it’s the left that has seen this most clearly and that has been pointing it out again and again? Perhaps, if your movement has ultimately rallied around a racist, allegedly in response to being called racist, that’s evidence that the people who saw the power racist arguments held in your movement, and the frequency with which those views were referenced, were onto something all along.

Conservatives who lecture repeatedly on “personal responsibility” are surprisingly willing to blame the Left for “causing” people to espouse racist and nativist views or to vote for a demagogue like Donald Trump. Ms. Coaston believes conservative leaders need to be called to account for what she labels “right-leaning racism, weaponized”:

Instrumentalized racism did not originate within the right nor within conservatism. There is nothing within the philosophical undergirding of conservatism that requires it. But the right decided to embrace it, and has clutched it all the more tightly in response to concerns from political and cultural rivals and allies alike while excusing it as how “forgotten Americans” talk or what “real Americans” really think.   

I believe that Ms. Coaston’s challenge will be taken seriously by reasonable conservatives, assuming we can find any.

https://www.vox.com/2019/7/23/20697636/trump-race-gop-conservatism-racism

Finally, Faith Hill (at The Atlantic) ponders sympathetically the fate of secular churches:

Secular-community organizers are trying their hardest every day to prove that…their nonreligious congregations can provide the same fulfillment as religious ones. Some have spent time researching what makes a lasting religious community, hoping to reverse-engineer its machinery for secular use. Sunday Assembly’s Sanderson Jones, for example, has developed a framework of five core components in any congregation: “community life,” “transformational gatherings,” “personal growth,” “helping others,” and “changing the world.” This may sound like clumsy marketing-speak. It can feel awkward to watch a so-called atheist Church work out its evangelization strategy in real time. Then again, traditional religious groups have spent hundreds or thousands of years figuring out how to get people in the door. We just aren’t seeing the shaky early experiments happen in front of us.

Secularists have their work cut out for them in developing churches without God: “It might mean developing more rituals, or sharing more stories. It might mean that ideals they already espouse—such as helping others, or finding wonder in nature—get elevated to a sacred level. The irony is that to get away from religion, they may need to re-create it.”

I am not unsympathetic to the movement that Ms. Hill profiles, but I can't help but wonder: are there no Unitarian churches?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/secular-churches-rethink-their-sales-pitch/594109/

 

It's Culture, Not Color, Stupid!

After trying out several anti-immigration memes (They're terrorists! They're going to impose Sharia law! They’re taking our jobs! They’re bringing in drugs! They’re all murderers and rapists! They have infectious diseases!), the forces of America First have settled on one meme they believe should pass muster: They don’t fit in with our culture!

Setting aside for the moment the issue of how we go about defining “our culture,” let’s consider the inevitable consequence of making cultural homogeneity the measure for immigration. Professor Amy Wax, from the University of Pennsylvania, expresses it this way: looking strictly at “cultural affinities” of potential immigrants, we find that, lo and behold, and without ever considering race or color directly, America “will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Professor Wax and her defenders hasten to emphasize that both the “culture” criterion and the results (“more whites”) are entirely objective; just as the NBA draft lottery produces a preponderance of nonwhites, because they happen to fit the NBA culture, so too our immigration system, done rationally, will tend to exclude persons of color.

Professor Wax most recently put forth her theory at the National Conservatism Conference, where it attracted attention both positive and otherwise. Zach Beauchamp (at Vox) has taken issue with Ms. Wax, and he has in turn been engaged by her defenders. As Beauchamp explains, the pro-Wax view is that “it is not racist at all to argue that the country, in Wax’s words, ‘will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites,’ so long as you argue on cultural rather than biological grounds.” As Patrick Buchanan has long argued, it’s not about race; it’s about defending Western values/civilization from the barbaric hordes.

In an academic paper published in 2018, Professor Wax wrote:

The idea is that a shared American identity is essential to maintaining a common sense of purpose, trust, and community. A large influx of immigrants, especially from nations that do not share our cultural values and understandings, will undermine citizen morale, unity, and solidarity as well as the integrity of our institutions.  

Critics (like Beauchamp) point out that this very argument—based on “shared identity” and cultural cohesion—was used against previous immigrant groups as well: the Irish, the Italian, the Jews, the Chinese, etc. Professor Wax fears, as did many Americans in the past, that we may be overrun with unassimilable ethnics who, rather than adapting to our culture, will pollute it with theirs. While it would clearly be unacceptable to fret about “racial mongrelization,” Wax et al believe that it’s perfectly okay to resist “cultural mongrelization”.

The professor should be encouraged to know that she has the intellectual heavyweights at Fox & Friends on her side. Discussing the issue this morning, co-host Brian Kilmeade and guest Douglas Murray had the following exchange:

DOUGLAS MURRAY (HENRY JACKSON SOCIETY): The biggest problem on the migration question is that nobody wants to look at the deeper questions.

KILMEADE: Douglas, I'll play it out for you, because it's here. If you are against open borders or if you are concerned about immigration, you're [called] racist, sexist, misogynist, whatever. Which you're -- it doesn't matter -- we're not talking color, we're talking culture.

MURRAY: Right.

KILMEADE: You're in a country to keep that culture going. It's not a matter of the color of your skin, it's not your gender or your sexuality…We just don't want to destroy the color of -- the culture of the country.

Save for that Freudian blip at the end, Kilmeade and Murray have it down: “We’re not talking color, we’re talking culture.”

Meanwhile, over at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher ties himself in knots over the controversy:

It seems to me that Wax’s main premise is a cultural one: that the United States is a Western country that reasonably should want to maintain a Western culture. To achieve that goal, it will have to limit immigration from non-Western nations. This makes people uncomfortable because the effect would be racially disproportionate, falling heavily on excluding darker-skinned people from Third World countries. Therefore, respectable conservatives don’t talk about it. But, I hear Wax saying, they should talk about it, because there are compelling reasons to favor in immigration the kinds of people who share Western cultural values.

I don’t think it is inaccurate to say, as Beauchamp does, that “she is endorsing an immigration system that (in effect) prefers whites over non-whites.” It seems clear that she is doing exactly that. Beauchamp believes that alone is discrediting — which, if I’m reading this correctly, proves Wax’s point that it’s impossible to talk about the kind of immigration system that is culturally appropriate and wise for America to have, because of disproportionate racial impact. That is to say, the only fact that matters for critics is that such a system would disfavor non-whites, which, in their eyes, renders it wicked on its face.

Dreher obviously wants to jump on the Wax bandwagon but isn’t sure he can do so without incurring charges of being racist; on the other hand, such charges simply “prove Wax’s point” that the Left refuses to discuss the issue rationally and that it plays the race card from the bottom of the deck at the drop of a hat (i.e. whenever anyone says something racist).

What is a society to do when its culture is threatened by outsiders? Perhaps we should heed the warnings of a prominent 19^th-century native (or “nativist”?) who experienced that threat first-hand: “They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.” More to the point: “Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country.” As the Sioux and other native tribes on this continent learned to their dismay--here come the immigrants, there goes the neighborhood.

Culture is defined by the victors. Westerners have traveled the globe for centuries, planting flags and claiming land, insisting (at the point of a gun) on our divine right to export our culture, the very culture Professor Wax fears will be endangered if we allow in too many swarthy Others. Far be it from me to suggest that she has a strangely cramped view of  "American culture," or to suggest that "openness to others" is in fact one of our primary cultural values, or to point out that the very boast of American culture has always been its glorious "mongrelization". If she doesn't know that already, she won't believe it coming from me. Nor will Senator Josh Hawley and the rest of the "cultural cohesion" conservative contingent (aka "national conservatism"); they know what an American looks like when they see one, and what an American sounds like when they hear one.

Amy Wax is probably, I’m going to assume, an entirely decent human being; but she ought to be ashamed of herself for putting lipstick on this tired old nativist pig.

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/23/20679172/amy-wax-white-national-conservatism-yoram-hazony-racism

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/07/23/foxs-brian-kilmeade-fearmongers-immigration-will-destroy-color-culture-country/224301

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/was-amy-wax-speech-racist-immigration/

https://www.brainyquote.com/lists/authors/top_10_sitting_bull_quotes