It was actually semi-sweet to say goodbye to Out of the Silent Planet this week. In the final denouement we were treated to the foundational theology that will undergird Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Each planet is ruled by a particular eldil, or angel. In the case of Malacandra (Mars), on which this adventure takes place, the eldil is Oyarsa. The eldil who rules Thulcandra (or Earth), however, is bent, or evil. Whereas the communications between the other planets are faciliated by their angelic messengers/rulers, Thulcandra is the "silent planet." It's eldil contended against the other eldila in an age gone by, and drew down to Thulcandra (Earth) those with him. Since then, no communication has come from earth. Only God (Maleldil) knows what goes on. All else, to the rest of the beings of our solar system, is darkness and silence. Our evil eldil, obviously Satan, has drawn a hedge of darkness around our planet.
Oyarsa questions Ransom at length about this, though Lewis does not fully describe the exchange in the pages of the book. For Oyarsa, the ways that God has dealt with Earth are a mytery, terrible and wonderful at once.
In Out of the Silent Planet we have a description of a world of sentient beings who have never fallen. They are sinless. Interestingly, there is death on Malacandra, but it is done when Oyarsa determines to "unbody" these beings. But death is not full of fearful anticipation. Rather it is seen as a transition to a greater life. A life with which the universe pulsates. On the return trip home Ransom once again encounters the vastness of space not as "space" but as "the heavens," full of life and the boundless energies of God. Just as is all the universe, which he learns while on Malacandra.
It is interesting how Lewis retells the Christian story from the outside looking in. Scripture calls Satan the prince of the power of the air, so in Lewis' imaginative retelling, his authority over our "air" includes its being cut off from the rest of the living universe's eyes. Too, Satan is described as having been cast out from (or drawn down from) heave to earth, as though he has become weighted with the darkness with which he has wrapped the Earth.
So many interesting themes will get played out in the next book, Perelandra, but I'm going to try to do better about not anticipating ahead.
Out of the Silent Planet is much more tantalizing than I remember. Too short, it leaves as mere foreshadow many important themes. Just when the mythology gets interesting, Ransom is heading back to Earth, to keep an eye on Weston and Devine. Sigh. Now that I appreciate this first book more, it ends too soon.
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In the most recent issue of Touchstone magazine (Vol. 16: No. 5 [June] 2003, pp. 24-27), not yet online, is an article by Robbie Low entitled, "The Truth About Men and the Church." The article utilizes sociological data from Switzerland appearing as "The demographic characteristics of the linguistic and religious groups in Switzerland", by Werner Haug and Phillipe Warner, in the second volume of Population Studies No. 31 entitled The Demographic Characteristics of National Minorities in Certain European States, ed. by Werner Haug, et. al., and published in January 2000. (Whew!)
These are the highlights:
*If a father regularly attends church, then sixty-six to seventy-five percent of his children will either regularly or irregularly attend church, regardless of whether the mother regularly attends or not.
*If a father irregularly attends church, then fifty to sixty-six percent of his children will either regularly or irregularly attend church, again, regardless of whether the mother regularly attends or not.
*And if the father doesn't attend church, then sixty to eighty percent of his children will not attend either, whether the mother herself regularly attends church or not.
In short, the mother's affect on her children's church attendence, without fatherly support, will keep children who might otherwise be non-attending churchgoers as irregular church goers. In the sociological data, this was the most positive outcome of the mother's influence, considered by itself.
Thus, Low concludes, "It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children" (24).
This, to say the least, does not sit well with mainstream social thinking. But given that Americans and Europeans take sociological studies as more authoritative than the Christian Scriptures, it would seem that popular or no, these are facts that must be faced. Low admits that "The results are shocking, but they should not be surprising. They are about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be; but they simply confirm what psychologists, criminologists, educationalists, and traditional Christians know" (25).
Low points out that the primary role of the mother is one of intimacy, care and nuture. It is from the example of the father that the children (male and female) learn to engage the world outside the home, and which engagements are important. Where fathers are "indifferent, inadequate or absent," Low notes, this task is much harder.
So it is surprising that churches in the West are so keen to follow feminism's denigration of the male. From Murphy Brown to our own families, our society preaches fatherlessness as the norm. Men are expendable; at best, mere sperm donors. Nearly all the media examples of men and fathers show them to be ignorant, inattentive, and helpless.
And this teaching is having its impact. Low states that "we are ministering in churches that accepted fatherlessness as a norm, and even an ideal. Emasculated Liturgy, gender-free Bibles, and a fatherless flock are increasingly on offer. In response, these churches' decline has, unsurprisingly, accelerated" (25-26). It is among the conservative and evangelical churches, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims, which generally hold to traditional, partriarchal norms of family structure, where numerical growth is occurring. Given the data, this is to be expected. And Low continues, "The figures are in and will continue to come in. The churches are losing men, and, if the Swiss figures are correct, are therefore, losing children. You cannot feminize the church and keep the men, and you cannot keep the children if you do not keep the men" (27).
I say again, this will not sit well with the readers of my blog who resist the clear biblical teaching. But what do they have to offer? Anecdotal stories of chauvinism and purported violence. Where these incidences occur even once, they are to be deplored. But the fact of the matter is, the evidence contradicts these anecdotal stories. Partriarchal understandings of family are, in short, better for the religious faith of the children.
Low concludes, "A church that is conspiring against the blessings of patriarchy not only disfigures the icon of the First Person of the Trinity, effects disobedience to the example and teaching of the Second Person of the Trinity, and rejects the Pentecostal action of the Third Person of the Trinity, but more significantly for our society, flies in the face of the sociological evidence! No father--no family--no faith. Winning and keeping men is essential to the community of faith and vital to the work of all mothers and the future salvation of our children" (27).
Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
At work, one of my rather mindless tasks is to test books for pH levels. This requires the demanding duty of placing a small amount of water on the page of a book, and placing a sensor tube in the drop of water. Then I wait a few minutes until the pH level registers, and record that level on a piece of paper. However, despite this riveting work, I am able to read while I do it.
One of the books I've been reading lately is Victor Davis Hanson's Fields Without Dreams, in which Hanson, a classicist specializing in early Greek warfare and agriculture, describes the decline of his family's fruit tree farm and vineyard, and those of the surrounding area, near Alma, California. Reading that book really brought to mind my late grandfather, Clifton F. Healy.
Grandpa was, as far as the family knows, the third Clifton in a row in his family (after Clifton Dwight and Clifton Arthur, his grandfather and father, respectively). The pictures I've seen of grandpa as a young man, make me envy him. He was handsome, built and exuded masculinity. He was a farmer and known for his hard work and industry.
One of these pictures of grandpa show him holding my dad (Clifton Howard) in his arms. This was a shock to me when I first saw it. Not him holding my dad, but that he had two arms. I only knew grandpa with one arm. When my dad was eight or nine, he and grandpa were out in the field cutting corn, when the cutter got jammed. Grandpa stopped to clear the jam. For some reason or another, dad had gone off somewhere, likely to fetch some tools so grandpa could do the job right. In attempting to clear the cutter, grandpa's arm got drawn up into the machine, mangling the arm. He called for help, but over the noise of the engine, and being a distance away, dad didn't hear him. Then grandpa threw his cap up into the air. Dad saw it and turned the tractor around. (Yes, dad operated heavy farm machinery at eight or nine years old.) They got a friend to help, and dad accompanied grandpa, bleeding and fading fast, to the hospital.
But if there's one thing grandpa was, he was one stubborn cuss. They sowed his arm up. He recovered. And I got to join him on the farm in the summers. Having one arm didn't slow him down hardly at all. He just developed special helps and equipment to make the job a bit easier. I recall his knife/fork utensil he used for meals, and his special card rack he used for playing pinochle. And when this city kid had tried long enough to drive a fence post into dry Kansas soil, grandpa positioned the driver, and one-handed, in a matter of a few swings, drove that stake deep. But then again, I was only twelve.
Unfortunately, I didn't get as close to my grandpa as I now would wish. He was an imposing figure for me as a kid. And that respect didn't wear off when I hit my late teens and twenties, even though his physical presence was much more frail. Grandpa was the stereotypical uncommunicative midwestern farmer. And his legacy lives on in my dad and me. Neither of us are very good about sharing our inner selves. Though both of us are pretty good about giving out a piece of our mind. Despite his habitual stoic solemnity, grandpa was a fairly merciless tease. He'd goose grandma as she passed through the kitchen. Her exasperated, "Clifton!" still rings through my memory.
Grandpa wasn't, at least from what I knew as a kid, much of a churchgoer. His devotion to keeping the farm running was a seven-day job. But he and grandma read from the Bible often, and the good ol' King James cadences rolled from his tongue when he said grace around the family table.
I miss my grandfather. He lives in my memory as a responsible, hard-working man. Serious. At times playful. He raised food that people ate. He raised three kids whose own successes are witness to his legacy. He had his failures, as do we all. But he was a man. One to emulate.
I wrote this poem shortly after his funeral.
This week's installment was rich. Much good commentary on language, work and productivity, knowledge, and, mostly, angelology.
But what I found most intriguing was Hyoi's account of pleasure and memory. In a passage worthy of consideration alongside Aristotle's De Anima, Bk Gamma, Lewis writes of a conversation between Ransom and Hyoi. Ransom begins:
'If a thing is a pleasure, a hman [i. e., earthly human] wants it again. He might want the pleasure [of sexual intercourse] more often than the number of young that could be fed.'
It took Hyoi a long time to get the point.
'You mean,' he said slowly, 'that he might do it not only in one or two years of his life but again?'
'Yes.'
'But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand.'
'But dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?'
'But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.'
'But the pleasure he must be content to only remember?'
'That is like saying, "My food I must be content to eat."'
'I do not understand.'
'A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of the poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then--that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. . . .'
. . .
'And indeed,' he continued,'the poem is a good example. For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. You would kill it. . . .'
[p. 73]
Indeed.
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Well, about a month or so ago, Anna and I went on our first major baby-stuff buying outing. She got the crib set she wanted, clothes, and so forth. Heck, we even bought a diaper pail on the way home from Divine Liturgy on Mother's Day! Today was yet another installment of "There-goes-Clifton's-book-budget-money II (or III?): Carter's Outlet Revisited."
But lest you think I'm too terribly resistant to all this baby-product buying, I must make a public confession. As soon as I saw the Eric Carle "Hungry Caterpillar" diaper bag, I said to my wife (excitedly no less!): "There it is, hon!" and hustled over to the display rack. *Sigh* I'm a sucker fer kids' stuff now. My youthful days of carefree living are now behind me. Fatherhood descends.
I tell you what, it's a doggone good thing I got the complete works of Plato and Aristotle's four major works (Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, and Nichomachean Ethics; as well as a few others) in Greek. Not to mention my trusty LSJ lexicon (the Big Daddy), and several of the ancient commentators on Aristotle. Doesn't look like I'm going to be spending much on books here in less than two months. Dang! And I'd had my eye on the W D Ross Metaphysics two-volume text and commentary!
Last night was class two (of four) of our childbirth instruction. I swear by all that's good: if I see another video of a live birth, I'm going to quit. I mean it.
The first night was pretty much learning about the three stages of labor: early, middle and active. In husband terms: panic, confusion, and dear-God-don't-let-her-hit-me-again! We saw some video of live births. I winced and chewed my gum furiously.
Last night was more videos (How many women have let themselves be filmed while giving birth, anyway?! Sheesh!), but in addition to the "squeezing-a-watermelon-through-your-left-nostril"-cam shots of live births, we also got to learn about medications and medical procedures. My wife gets her choice of narcotics and a near-spinal-tap, and . . . you may have to cut where if the baby is slow in coming out?!!!
I swear to you, if I'd seen these videos in my junior high sex ed class, I would have been "scared celibate." Monastic vocation, here I come.
But I think the videos are softening me up. The more babies I saw laid on their mother's chest right after birth, the more I had to keep flicking away that darn dust speck that kept getting in my eyes. Yep, I'll either pass out or be a blubbering idiot. My poor wife.
[Part II of II]
I have taken some space--and even that is a much truncated summary--to describe some of the key aspects of Plato�s conception of the human soul, the city, and the relation of soul and city through formation. One need not subscribe to Plato�s model city, or even his tripartite conception of the soul to recognize that cities and souls are both shaped by and shape one another. Plato's Republic is not an historical analysis of how cities devolve from a pristine aristocratic state. Nor is his account completely compatible with the Christian understanding of sin and theosis. But in that it articulates the possible ways in which humans shape and misshape their communities and themselves, it is a valuable meditation, and warning, for us.
It seems to me that we Christians should first recognize the devolution of our own community to something resembling quite closely Plato's society of free-choice consumption. This social consumptive structure and its virtue of choice (that is to say, it's making a virtue of heresy) shapes us, and we continue that paradigm in our lives. Even and despite our faith and living.
While some, such as Frank Schaeffer, in his Dancing Alone, want to trace present-day U. S. relativistic pluaralism to the failures of the Protestant Reformation, here I merely want to agree with the diagnosis of where we're at, it not agree with the analysis of whence we've come. (Though I do agree with Schaeffer as to the remedy.)
We present-day U. S. citizens sit atop a culture suffused with death and exploitation. It is not too difficult to understand what's missing. Protestant Christians in general (and here I'm including mainline liberals with evangelical conservatives) find themselves, for various reaons, with an anemic incarnational doctrine, and the consequences are all around us.
What I mean is this: Whether it be the liberals who discount the Incarnation altogether, or the conservatives who hold to the Incarnation literally but primarily doctrinally, the full-blown understanding of the Incarnation remains absent from much of present-day Protestant Christianity. If one doesn�t even believe the Incarnation, then clearly the only alternative is this present existence. Liberal rejection of the Incarnation damns its adherents to a life of Qohelethical vanity.
However, just because one believes in the "literal" (i. e., real, historical) Incarnation, isn't enough. Many Protestants believe in the Incarnation in its actual sense (God become man and suffered, died and was buried, and rose again on the third day), but understand it almost exclusively in a juridical sense. That is to say, for many, the point of the Incarnation is justification. They would not deny the sanctifying results of the Incarnation, but these function less as a consequence of the Incarnation and more as a consequence of some sort of exclusively pneumatological event (in charismatic terms a second "baptism" or "the baptism of the Holy Spirit"). That is to say, justification gets us in the door, but after that, it's not so much Jesus with whom we have to do, but rather the Spirit. Aside from the Sabellian implications this has for Trinitarian theology, this dichotomy between Jesus as Savior and Spirit as Sanctifier is not only dangerous, but also as damning as the liberal rejection of the Incarnation altogether.
One of the ways this extremist understanding of salvation damns is that it removes God's energetic gracious operations from the created world. (It also makes of grace a created thing. This, too, has terrible implications.) So it is no surprise that Zwingli and others denied any sacramental reality to the Eucharist. Once one has done that, one has entered the world of Manichean Gnosticism: creation is evil, spirit is good. But if creation is denied the infilling of the God-Man through the Spirit, then man is split in his very being. Salvation need not touch his body. Salvation is about knowing and believing the right doctrines, and willing the right actions. The body is nothing more than a vessel and is unessential to salvation. (This, of course, is little more than Platonic/Augustinian/Cartesian dualistic heresy, and is not worthy of Christian belief. Yet, how many of us have heard these sentiments--freed from the prison of the body--at some funerals?)
The problem is, God created the cosmos to be sacramental. Reality, God-given reality, is at its core sacramental. The first humans were allowed to eat of all but one tree. In the first act of consumption, of pleonexia, they rejected that sacramental reality for Gnostic wisdom. But even though we still reject that sacramental reality, we do so by way of denial. For too many U. S. Christians, reality is spiritual, illusion is material. We forget the ancient biblical understanding that creation is spiritual in its very materiality. And that it is so by virtue of the fact of the Incarnation.
Though we reject the sacramental nature of creation, we nonetheless were made, as Fr. Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory in his book, For the Life of the World so excellently notes, to live in sacramental relationship with creation. So we cannot but help to still look to creation for a fulfillment that can only be had if we are in union with the one Person through whom creation is sanctified: Jesus Christ. Without cruciform allegiance to Christ our relationship to the created order, to other humans also, is one of exploitation. We use matter and persons in order to be wise; which is to say, in order to exercise power and control. We deny the spirit of the matter, and so attempt to fill the void of spirit with matter. We relive the original consumptive heresy of Adam and Eve.
It is so obvious as to be beyond denial, but present U. S. society is suffused with consumer heresy. Viewing matter as merely matter, and matter as all that is, we and our neighbors deny the Incarnation, and empty our relationship with matter and other humans of any Trinitarian life-giving content. We want the wisdom tree's fruit. And we are wiser, in a sense. Wiser about how to manipulate the created world to our own appetites. We have an end, a telos, a goal. And the one ineradicable instrument to that end, is choice, heresy.
So much of U. S. Christian worship, church planting, evangelism, is drenched in consumerist heresy. Newcomers are told that Church is about feeling comfortable. Worship services, newcomers are told, are our gift to you. Churches are marketed to groups. Teens, adults, young children, all have special niche programs created "just for them." The message: "We're here to fill up your emptiness." But the void is being filled, not with the life-giving Trinity, but with more emptiness. No sacramentality, no spirit.
The consumerist U. S. society creates consumers. And Christians are not immune. Christians are as formed by the consumptive heresy as are their secular neighbors. And it creeps into all things Christian. From the original purity of sacramental understanding, the U. S. Christian polis has devolved into the heretical consumer multiplex. Souls and bodies are shaped in a demonic paideia, and in turn shape their institutions. Pleonexia has become the consumer virtue--"never satisfied"--and Christians follow suit.
The remedy, of course, is to recover the full meaning of the Incarnation and its sacramentality. Bread and wine become Body and Blood. Oil reveals the descent of the Holy Spirit. Vestments become touchstones of prayer as the fingers of the faithful brush the hem of the garment. These are symbols, but not mere symbols. They are alive with energetic grace. Which is to say they are alive with the uncreated God.
But this takes more than mere intellectual instruction. Plato's model city, after all, trained the youth from birth, body and soul. This is what the Church has been called to do from the beginning. "You and all your household." "The home is a little Church." Babies are baptized, and taught by parental fiat and example that the Christian life is an agon, a struggle against, the flesh, against the consumptive heresy. It is a struggle to always remember that all of reality is suffused with the glory of the consequences of the Incarnation. All of reality is sacramental. The sweat-soaked marriage bed, undefiled, is a sacrament. The sleepy-eyed, tow-headed children risen from sleep to stand with parents before the icons in prayer is sacramental. The jar of Trader Joe's olive oil, poured into the vigil lamp and become by prayer a means of grace, speaks of sacrament. The heavens declare the glory of God, because his glory infuses all. Blessed water is holy not because some priest recited magic words, but because the foot of a man who is God once stepped into the Jordan River in the Middle East. These children, as also we, are formed and shaped by the movement of bodies kneeling, the rhythmic breathing of recited prayers, and the Trinitarian reality that suffuses these created things offered in faith to God.
And maybe, being shaped in sacrament, we, too, may shape our own society towards sacrament. Activism, politics, convention resolutions will not do this. Only the slow, steady drip of water on stone, of daily prayers and repentances passed on to children, will accomplish this. There is no program. There is only living Tradition, struggle. Are we conformed to the pattern of the world around us? Or are we transformed by ecclesial paideia?
[End]
[Note: This is Part I of II. Part I sets the terms and limits of the ideas I want to examine (namely, unbounded desire/consumerism, choice, and soul formation). Part II will make application.]
Those familiar with Plato's Republic will recall that it is a lengthy dialogue on justice. Indeed, some of the copies of the ancient manuscripts have "concerning justice" as a subtitle. Justices is explicitly the subject matter of the first four books, and the closing "Myth of Er" in Book X again brings the subject matter to the fore. In the first book, which many scholars think was written separately then woven into the text of the Republic, Socrates, Cephalus, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus try unsuccessfully to come to an understanding of what justice is. Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus take the argument further in Book II, but still end in failure. So they resolve to fashion a model city, a soul writ large, so that by its scope, its "large letters," they might be better able to "read" there what is justice.
But hardly do they being their work than they must discuss the sort of education which will be needed in their city. By education, however, we should understand the formation of a soul, paideia. The youth are to be shaped through physical training, music and poetry; shaped body and soul. The model city, it seems, is to be governed by those it shapes to govern well. The paradigm begun in Book II is brought to completion in Book VII, so that side-by-side--indeed, entwined with--the attempt to understand justice is the attempt to form a just soul.
We seek in Book IV the completion of the model city. There we learn the virtues which the model city exemplifies: wisdom, courage, and moderation. These virtues apply to the sectors of the population of the model city (the philosopher-kings, the warrior guardians, and the mercantile class, respectively), and, by analogous equation, to the aspects of the human soul they mirror: intellect (or reason), the spirited aspect, and the appetite. Justice, then, is the harmony, the balance of these virtues. That is to say, when wisdom governs spirit, and these together govern appetite, then a human soul is in the harmonious state which is justice. Mutatis mutandis, then, in the model city, the philosopher-kings govern the warrior guardians who together control the merchants. This harmony of classes and their virtues makes a city just.
This state of justice is instantiated in the aristocracy which is ruled by the philosopher-kings, who themselves exemplify just persons. But the character of a just city and a just man, being an hexis, or active condition of justice, may by gradual (or sudden) disintegration lose its harmony and become imbalanced, or unjust. Just as the model city was the soul of the philosopher-king magnified, so, too, the imbalanced cities-or more correctly, their politeia, or constitutions (constitution in the sense of the very character which makes these cities what they are)--have their concomitant rulers.
Having laid the foundation of the aristocracy governed by the philosopher-kings, the dialogue turns in Books VIII and IX to describe the timocracy, the oligarchy, the democracy, and the tyrannous state, with their respective rulers. Though Socrates admits that these deficient politeia are points on a spectrum, that many more examples could be described, these four deficient politeia may be considered representative of the decline from aristocracy. In any case, the ends of the spectrum are the aristocratic state and its mirror-image in the tyrannous state. Just as Plato spends the largest part of the Republic describing the model city and its philosopher-kings, so, too, the tyrant and his city received the most attention of the deficient politeia. In the case of the philosopher-king, Socrates and his interlocutors spend most of Books IV-VII discussing his character and formation. The tyrant receives the last part of Book VIII and all of Book IX in the description of his origin and lycanthropic character.
In the same way that the paideia, or formation, of the philosopher-king is intended to shape and form an active character, an hexis, so, too, the deficient constitutions are active states of injustice, disharmony, which form an unjust, disharmonious soul. The constitutions of these deficient cities are not constitutions in the documentary sense (though a constitutional document is not precluded), but are rather constitutions in the sense of character; i. e., "he has a strong constitution"). So it is that the descriptions of progressively worsening cities are paralleled by the sort of character they form and by which they are governed. That is to say, each politeia has its own paideia.
The beginning of the devolution from aristocracy, as it was for the kallipolis (which devolved into the swollen city, and from which swollen city the aristocracy arose), is pleonexia, the unbounded desire for more. Pleonexia is, in many ways, the Platonic "original sin." It is that which causes the kallipolis to devolve into the swollen city, and is that against which institutional restrictions must be directed such that the philosopher-kings neither own nor are able to acquire too much property. The philosopher-king's income is kept to maintenance levels. He and the other guardians have all things in comment, including women and children.
The failure of these restrictions to check pleonexia leads by gradations to tyranny and the tyrant. At first, certain of the philosopher-kings seek greater honor than their colleagues, and so begin to acquire more property and wealth than is legally allowed, and rule by way of a propertied timocratic class. Those with more wealth and more control begin to marginalize the other guardians, resulting in the rule by the wealthy few in the oligarchy. Having already left the harmonious balance of city and soul by devolution into the timocracy, the character of the polis and its rulers descends through ever-increasing instability. Reason is first dethroned by the spirited nature in the timocracy and gets worse in the oligarchy. This spirited nature will, in turn, be dethroned by appetite in the democracy until appetite rules by sole control, aided and abetted by the power of the spirited nature (the tyrant rules the warriors who do his bidding) in the tyranny.
In the devolution of the oligarchy, Plato describes the emergence of the democracy. Reason has given way to the spirited nature, and these have quickly granted control to the appetite. Not surprisingly, the origins of the democracy begin with the paideia of the young. Trained to desire more wealth, the young of the oligarchy are trained merely to want. The rulers take advantage of these desires, enslaving them by the indebtedness of exorbitant loans. Unable to repay their debts, their appetites still untrained, large portions of the polis are reduced to poverty and destitution. Of course, this leads to civil war. In this war, the indebted class overthrows their rulers, giving free rein to a culture of desire and consumption. In the democracy there remains still some vestiges of "good" and "bad" desires, but these distinctions quickly fade into mere licentiousness. That is to say, licentiousness in the etymological sense: freedom to choose to follow any desire whatsoever. This state will quickly devolve into rule by passion, but at this point, at least in the democracy, the key for understanding this is the term, choice (hairesis, heresy). One must be free to choose to follow one's appetites. Good, bad, indifferent. Appetites are the goal. Choice is the means. No one may interfere with choice.
[End Part I. Part II to follow.]
This week's Lewis readings put us smack in the middle of the story. Thank goodness we can leave 1940s science behind. Aside from eluding his Earthly captors, wandering, and discovering another form of Malacandrian life (aside from the sorns he has already seen), Ransom does little but learn about the hrossa and their language.
Well, that's not accurate. There are a couple of interesting things he does learn, but about which we readers aren't yet fully up to speed on. We learn of a being called Oyarsa, whom, it appears, is responsible for all that is. We learn about the eldil--shades of the zodiacal ruminations from last week's chapters!--and that, it appears, the only way the hrossa can cognitively understand evil and sin is to describe an evil person as bent. Very biblical, that. A righteous man, is, after all upright.
It is the "unseen" (to Ransom) eldil that the hrossa children ("pups") see that struck my imagination today. Yesterday, at the Divine Liturgy, we recited the words of the creed, "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all that is visible and invisible." Fr Patrick pointed out for us that "invisibile" is better understood as "unseen," not necessarily as not being able to be seen. He pointed out that of all of the reality that humans encounter--even from the strictly biological perspective--nearly all of it is "invisible" or unseen. Bacteria, viruses, the inner workings of our bodies, and so forth. Indeed, nearly all of humanity remains for us, unseen, as we have no daily encounters with the rest of the world outside our living. These are, for us, unseen.
So too, for Ransom, are the eldil. I'm not getting ahead of the story by noting that these are the angels in Lewis' space trilogy. Ransom, encumbered by sin, cannot see them. The hrossa children, apparently sinless, can see them. It is no secret that this child-innocence is approximated or regained in the saints of the Church. What seems to us miraculous powers of perception and insight, are, more accurately, what humans were intended to be. Do the stories of the saints and desert fathers and mothers strike us as "quaint" and "metaphorical"? Hardly. These men and women did indeed see angels and demons and the great spiritual warfare that we modern Christians relegate to the "fanciful" and "symbolic" because we have lulled ourselves into spiritual somnolence by our apathy and aversion for agonia, the life of the Christian which Paul indicates is normative.
I would pray that my own eyes might be opened to see all that is. But I'm afraid I'm far too flabby and none to eager for hardship. More's the pity. Indeed, I stand indicted.
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In the middle ages, occurred a development in philosophy that is with us, though in a more crude form, to this day. Among the Schoolmen there arose significant debate about the relationship between Universals (the class, say, of human beings) and Particulars (Joe, that specific member of the class of human beings). Proponents of one perspective of the debate declared that only Particulars are real. Universals are only invented names we give to those classes we create by way of rational inquiry. That is to say, there is no such thing, really, they said, as a human being. There are only Joe's and Nancy's, and so forth. Proponents of this view were called "nominalists."
Nominalism in today's world, particularly in today's Christian world, is alive and well, though it has changed a bit. Reality is still this particular existence with which each of us are familiar (he says, in universal terms). But nominalism today, rather than eschewing any commitment to the reality of things like classes, posits that we do indeed make real those things we name. Or, to say it much more crudely: Things are what we say they are. And yet, there are a whole bunch of contradictions that arise here. Not the least of which is that, unlike "classical" nominalism, modern-day nominalism demolishes the particular for the sake of the universal. Well, actually, not for the sake of the universal but for the sake of other paticulars.
The most obvious beginning point for what I mean can be seen in the fairly typical liberal Protestant and secular notions of God. Muslims and Jews teach--each by authority of their scriptures--that God is a radically monotheistic God. There is only one God, and he (and God is most emphatically a non-sexed "he" in these scriptures) contains no plurality. God is radically one. Furthermore, in Judaism, God is the God of the Covenant, utterly faithful and requiring the same unwavering faithfulness of his people. For Judaism, God enters history and changes destinies. God is personal. In Islam, God is utterly transcendant. God does not enter into human history, per se, but rather remains uncontaminated from human affairs, due to his greatness and glory. God has left a moral code, which Muslims are enjoined to follow, and at the end of life, one's deeds are weighed in the balance. If there is a covenant, it is only to a rigid code of behavior. Christianity, on the other differs from both of these faiths in its insistence that God is both one and three, unity and plurality at once without contradiction. God is personal, as in Judaism, but in contradistinction to Judaism, God has also joined to his divinity in hypostatic union, humankind--in the person of Jesus, the second figure of the Godhead. Christianity, too, has a moral code, and involves covenant faithfulness, struggle. But in differentiation with Judaism and Islam, Christianity preaches participation in the divine energies of God (not quite "union", but nonetheless a real joining of God and man as revealed and accomplish in Jesus Christ).
Clearly we have three different, indeed, contradictory Gods, right? Not for the modern-day nominalists. No, Allah equals Elohim equals Pater Noster. We're all talking about the same thing. This is more than manifest nonsense, it is fairly typical western liberal hubris. That is to say, "We enlighted purveyors of western civiliation and illumination know much better than you what you're talking about. When you say, "Pater Noster" or "Allah" what you really mean is . . . ." Muslims respond, "Uh . . .No! I mean Allah. Allah is not the Christian God." Jews say, "I'll second that. El Berith is most definitely not the Christian God, and sure doesn't look like Allah, either." Western illuminati, however, say, "Oh, come now. This is just like the three man and the elephant. One of you has the trunk, another the leg, and the other the tail. But it's all one elephant." This baffles these three adherents, however. How can the the Christian Three-in-One God be the same thing as the Only-One God, a personal God the same as an impersonal transcendant God? We are not talking about the same thing, these adherents claim. This is elephants and camels, say. Or it's at least three different elephants. We are not just talking about one elephant!
But Western elites, with the typical chauvinism granted them by their affluence and technical superiority, shake their heads knowing that in time everyone else will come around. But of course, that would take a conversion. And conversion is a break with one's previous convictions.
This sort of nominalism is played out in other contentious venues: abortion and human sexuality, to name two. All the vocabulary on the various sides of these debates "creates" the "realities" their proponents desire. A human baby can be killed. A fetus, however, is merely a vestigial "organ" one can "excise." Sex is biological, and clearly evident. Gender is a state of mind. You get the point.
But ultimately, when it comes to naming, it rests on the question of authority. Despite modern American notions of libertarianism and person autonomy, authority is a fact of human existence. It has been since the dawn of time and will be into eternity. Like it or not, authority is pervasive of the human experience. The only differences among humans is to what authority we subscribe, either consciously or unconsciously. Westerners have to quite consciously reject scientism as their authority, so pervasive is its influence in our society. We take polls. We do studies. We derive formulas. And we have authority, an authority more powerfully influential than the divine tablets brought down from the mountain top. That is, untill another poll, study or formula comes down the pike and discounts the previous poll, study or formula.
Christians, of course, are just as much influenced by scientism as their secular neighbors. We take it in with our mother's milk--er, excuse me, I mean formula. The difference for Christians, of course, is that we are called to reject this scientistic mindset. (Please note: Scientism does not equal science.) We are called to transformed minds, not conformed worldliness. We cannot bring the Gospel to the world, unless we stand apart from within it. We are to hate the world. Because hating the world is the only way to truly love it.
But once again, it boils down to authority. This calling is explicit in Scripture. Too many Christians, however, do not accept the authority of Scripture. For two reasons, it seems. First, it would require daily taking up one's cross. To put it more bluntly, it would demand of us the giving up of our favorite consumerist sins (such as lust, gluttony, pride). Secondly, it would require admitting we don't know as much as Scripture. Or, to put it a bit more plainly, it would demand rejecting the modern heresy that the youngest in time is the most wise and intelligent; it would mean admitting we don't know better than Paul.
We could multiply the issues, not the least in importance of which is: What is the Church? But since the Roman Catholics will come with papal infalliblity, the Protestants with their tens of thousands of authorities (convention resolutions, confessions of faith, scientific studies, commentaries, private interpretations, etc.), and the Orthodox with the infallibility of the Church, it does not seem to me that this disparate bunch will be able to, together, answer that question. We'll be talking camels and elephants. While the Western elites will be saying, "Ah, it's all the same anyway!"
Despite having forgotten to put C. S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet in my bookbag for the trip, and despite the fact that the El Paso Public Library did not have a copy at their main branch when I went there to study, I did complete my requisite first six chapters. I'm looking forward to the remainder of the book, and the trilogy, this summer, and the thoughts of my blog-o-verse friends who are journeying with me through the books.
It's been eight years since I last read the trilogy (back in May of 1995, when I was a "senior" pastor of a rural Illinois congregation). The first time I read the trilogy was in junior high after I'd received it as a gift from my parents. The first time I read it, I thought "blech!" I'd liked the Narnia stories a lot, but "honed" as my appetite had been on the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Star Wars, Lewis' Space trilogy didn't do much for me. (And Perelandra? C'mon! How boring. No action.) My reading in 1995 was much more appreciative, though I felt the last book in the series (That Hideous Strength) the best of the bunch.
This time around, my appreciation for the books grows yet a bit more.
Although Lewis' account suffers from the pre-lunar landing science of his day--the first six chapters' "science" are barely palatable--his gift for scene/mood and "yarn spinning" are already evident. In just six chapters, the pace has gone from the leisurely stroll of a walking journey, through a kidnapping, to hurtling through space in a spherical ship, to finally making the descent to Malacandra (which we later will learn is the planet Mars).
I've thankfully forgotten enough of the details since my last reading that the plot beckons me on. Yet I've retained just enough glimmers of memory to note the incidences of foreshadowing. Note, for instance, Ransom's ruminations that out in space the "truth" of the zodiac seems much more plausible. If I'm not misremembering, this zodiacal "truth" will lead us to the angelic watchers assigned to the various planets. Note also the couple of references to Ransom's being "called for" and Weston and Devine's discussion about an entity wanting "him," meaning Ransom.
The opening of the book with the walking tour is interesting. Though it's been a few years ago, I read in Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien that Lewis and Tolkien went on some walking tours (one of which is highlighted in the Tolkien biography). The description was much as is laid out in the first chapter. Sort of reminds me of my wife and I when we went tent camping from Chicago to Acadia National Forest in Maine in September of 2000; though we went by car, of course.
Sparking my philosophical interest was the early tension set between Weston's scientific program versus Ransom's "individualism." I noted with agreement the criticism made of this program's advancement over against and by way of exploitation of the masses and their traditions (even, one may note, the scientific mass and its traditions). Of course, Weston's program was for the "betterment of humankind," but surely also at its expense. It seems to me that this is the main temptation--and the concomitant demonic devolution--of all "causes," no matter how just or well-intentioned. This is the temptation for all activisim: the objectification and exploitation of the very ones it seeks to aid.
But lest I go too far in my soapbox polemics, I'll end this weekly Lewis post.
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Well, I'm apparently the last one in the world to do so, but last night I saw The Matrix Reloaded. Man, oh, man. A worthy sequel to the original, in my opinion. There were a couple of problems, for me. The technical effects were both not as flawless as the first movie (e. g., Neo vs. all the Agent Smiths--the CGI broke the suspension of disbelief at some points) and also much, much better (e. g., Morpheus and the agent fighting on top of the semi-trailer). The story line was a bit less mythical than the first, but philosophically more interesting. I thought the pace started too slow (and the Temple "orgy" and Neo/Trinity love scene just plain ol' unnecessary) at the beginning, but once the story finally picked up, much better. I don't know what to think about the reverence shown Neo--but I suppose that comes more from my Protestant background, than from the respect Orthodox have always shown the saints. Nor am I sure what I think about the scene with the Architect, though it definitely fit the theme of the plot.
Which brings me to what I like so much about the movie: its philosophical question of causality vs. free will. I've assiduously stayed away from the reviews so as not to accidentally read a "spoiler" before I saw the movie, but I know that some of the reviews are less than happy about the sequel. Perhaps this is why. If the first movie was "Plato's Cave," then this movie is the Timaeus (Plato's mythic account of cosmogony, with it's discussion of necessity).
To what extent are we constrained by the materiality of our being and to what extent are we free to rise above that materiality? Jurisprudence has necessarily assumed choice: those who violate the laws of the state are subject to the penalties associated with those violations. Ethical theory has similarly found it necessary to posit some sort of freedom of human will (cf. Aristotle in Bk VII of the Nicomachean Ethics and St. Thomas' "Treatise on Human Acts" (in the Summa). Modern psychology has increasingly diminished the notion of free will for more of a materialistic determinism, and to the degree that psychology has infiltrated jurisprudence and ethics, these, too, have softened on the concept of human freedom.
This discussion is extremely important in our culture. Witness the discussions regarding alcoholism, sexuality, and other matters. Though no scientific study has come up with a proven link between any genetic makeup and behavior, nonetheless it is almost always presumed. "This is how I was made. I can't help being who I am." So, too, one may say of "nurture" or sociocultural determinism. Thus, Paul couldn't help writing about the relationship between men and women as he did, because he was a product of his cultural era.
But to accept something of a sociocultural and/or materialistic determinism for behavior brings with it a host of problematic implications, not the least of which demean and dehumanize those who practice them. That is to say, if homosexuality is, indeed, thoroughly determined by genetic and other physical causes and/or sociocultural uprbringing, then gays and lesbians have no freedom of will in terms of their sexual practice. Nor do bisexuals, or heterosexuals, spouse abusers, sociopaths, alcoholics--and one might add, for consistency, heterosexual spouses who practice fidelity--and so forth.
But while eliminating free will in these matters also eliminates any moral culpability (or praise), it also reduces those lacking free will to the level of mere matter. It binds them to their bodies and/or their cultures, and eliminates any comparative worth. If we are all mere atoms and molecules, then no one has any intrinsic worth, or at least no more intrinsic worth than anything else. If modern American sexual mores are no better or worse than those obtaining in the Taliban--since we're all determined by our cultures--then, one can not be elevated nor condemned over another. In a universe of sociocultural, materialistic determinism, humans lack the freedom to choose, and therefore lack the ability to place value. And if we are so culturally and genetically determined, and so devalued, then crimes against one another's persons--even if on the basis of that materially bound person's nature or nurture--have no more standing over against the other. That is to say, there is no basis for hate crime laws, no basis for any law, save that of evolutionary determinism. And if Darwinian "social law"--based as it is on a materialistic deterministic worldview--obtains, then not only can there be no valid concept of personhood, indeed, the survival of the majority (insert behavior practice) over the minority (insert different practice) is an indifferent matter, in terms of value, but nonetheless an inescapable outworking of the material world.
Does anyone smell the smoke rising above Dachau?
Though the relationship between nature, nuture and choice is incredibly complex, still the implications attendent to the diminution of free will is why cultural and genetic determination in the discussion of human behavior, must, I repeat, must be rejected by Christians. Indeed, the Christian worldview necessitates free choice. By the Incarnation, we have been saved in our valued human bodies and cultures and freed from our sinful natures that are subject to the corruption and constraints of mortality. The Son of God became man, so that man might become God.
While The Matrix Reloaded seems to posit freedom over causality (the story is unfinished), it also seems to posit something of a Manichean or Zoroastrian worldview (we need the machines, the machines need us). So I'm not sure that what we see displayed is the Christian understanding of free will over the flesh.
But it's a dang good movie. Go see it. I'll be going to see it again.
Friday was an interesting and faith-invigorating day. Although it was a bit chilly and rain-threatening here in the Chicago area, I saw an interesting and well-done movie, bought a book I thought I'd never own, and got some good news on my immediate job needs and Anna shared her own news of a potential lead on a job.
I go for an interview this morning for another part-time position at another college library in Evanstion. The job would entail, for the summer, essentially data input to bring a "old-fashioned" card catalog system online, then later, once school has started, turn into your basic circulation clerk. It seems enough of my experience matches their needs, but we'll find out if my fall scheduling conflicts with their stated scheduling needs. I hope it can work out, since the other part-time position I'd been looking at fell through, and Anna and I need all the extra income I can bring in as we prepare for our baby's arrival.
Anna also got a serendipitous lead on another job. The pay would be a few thousand more per annum, would allow her to go to the conferences she often misses out on due to zero-sum library finances, gain her some publishing experience, and allow her to continue working with children's and young adult books. The main drawback: it would start 1 September, thus effectively eliminating maternity leave. NOT a good thing. Of course, Anna's qualifications, while good, nonetheless do not make this opportunity a shoo-in for her. And God may have other plans. We'll see.
I saw the movie "X2:X-Men United" Friday. Wow. The reviews are correct: much better than the first, which I thought was great too. I was extremely taken with the character of Nightcrawler (aka Kurt Wagner). His portrayal was among the most sensitive, sympathetic and realistc I've seen of a traditional catholic (and Roman Catholic) Christian. He gives Storm what-for by humbly yet confidently asserting that the Faith is the core of our lives. He's shown praying the rosary twice, and also praying the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23 (22 in the LXX/Vulgate). Though it's unclear whether his scarring is self-inflected or the mystical workings of angels, the message that what appears to be the ugliness of penance is actually the beauty of mercy and grace is thoroughly biblical. One might first be taken aback at his assertion that Christ is testing him by the tortuous control of Stryker, nonetheless it is the biblical precdent from Hebrews that in our sufferings God trains us as sons and daughters.
And all this from a script and story line that is hardly free of heresy. While I'll not assert that the X-Men movies and mythos lack any resonances with Christian faith (because it's not entirely true), nonetheless because it is based on the evolutionary faith's worldview it conflicts directly with the Christian faith. And that is what makes the character of Nightcrawler in the movie so surprising and interesting. It was odd and refreshing to have such a real Christian character portrayed where one would least expect it.
After the movie, I had an hour to kill while waiting for my wife to pick me up to go run some errands with her. And here's the capstone to a day filled with godly visitations. My original impulse was simply to cross the street from the theater and sip coffee at Borders and read. But for hardly conscious reasons, I decided not to. Instead, I thought I'd go to the library a few blocks away and read. But then I decided that would take away too much of my reading time to go there and walk back to our meeting spot. Barnes and Noble was a block closer, so I decided to hang out there, and I'd only be a block away from meeting Anna. But once inside Barnes and Noble, I didn't head to drink coffee. Despite my having purchased far more books than I probably needed this semester, and in a mood to definitely NOT buy any books, I nonetheless ended up browsing the shelves. I looked over philosophy, gave a glance at Christianity, and went to the Bible section (to vainly look for a KJV with Apocrypha). Then, with no real interest, I headed back to Christianity. After just a few minutes, I noticed the title Not of this World. It struck a chord, but until I picked it up and looked at it, I didn't know exactly why it seemed familiar. There it was: the out of print biography of Fr. Seraphim Rose.
One should understand that I couldn't even purchase this book from the publisher, let alone order it from one of the online distributors. It should also be noted that this comes from a small press, and is not likely to be found at a major retailer. Nor could Barnes and Noble have ordered it. My best bet had been to try to order it used through an online service. Yet here it was, in brand new condition. And I had come to Barnes and Noble aimlessly, and hardly with any intention of looking for it.
It reminded me of how my patron, St. Benedict of Nursia found me. I was in a conservative, evangelical seminary bookstore in central Illinois in the spring of 1990. There on the clearance rack was a small paperback edition of The Rule. I have been, in the last month or so, asking the intercessions of Fr. Seraphim, haivng found an affinity with him from reading his biography and most of his written works. It may well be that Friday's events, far from being merely fortuitous happenstance, was a confirmation that another patron had found me. Which means I'm either a very fortunate man, or a very great sinner.
Actually, I'm sure it means both.