John Wesley:
To imagine none can teach you but those who are themselves saved from sin, is a very great and dangerous mistake. Give not place to it for a moment.
I know too many folks who think that only saints can teach them. (Of course, saints can teach, but not only saints can teach.)
One of the most fascinating claims of Orthodox Theology is that when we attempt to conceptualize God we invariably fashion an idol. I find that a dark saying, I admit; I have puzzled over it long and often. (I have spent much of my life waiting for the dawning of dark sayings.) But today I ran across this in Eckhart, and I take it to expand the dark saying (without, alas, making it brighter):
Man’s last and highest parting occurs when, for God’s sake, he takes leave of god. St. Paul took leave of god for God’s sake and gave up all that he might get from god, as well as all he might give–together with every idea of god. In parting with these, he parted with god for God’s sake and yet God remained to him as God is in his own nature–not as he is conceived by anyone to be–nor yet as something to be achieved–but more as an “is-ness”, as God really is.
Puzzle me that.
Browning from near the end of The Ring and the Book:
…learn one lesson hence
Of many which whatever lives should teach:
This lesson, that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.
Why take the artistic way to prove so much?
Because, it is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.
How look a brother in the face and say,
“Thy right is wrong, eyes has thou yet art blind;
Thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length:
And, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith!”
Say this as silvery as tongue can troll–
The anger of the man may be endured,
The shrug, the disappointed eyes of him
Are not so bad to bear–but here’s the plague
That all this trouble comes of telling truth.
Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false,
Seems to be just the thing it would supplant,
Nor recognizable by whom it left;
While falsehood would have done the work of truth.
But Art, –where in man nowise speaks to men,
Only to mankind, –Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.
So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall, —
So, note by note, bring music from your mind,
Deeper than ever e’en Beethoven dived,–
So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.
And now some of Kierkegaard, from The Point of View:
No, an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed. If it is an illusion that all are Christians–and if there is anything to be done about it, it must be done indirectly, not by one who vociferously proclaims himself an extraordinary Christian, but by one who, better instructed, is ready to declare that he is not a Christian at all. That is, one must approach from behind the person who is under an illusion. Instead of wishing to have the advantage of being oneself that rare thing, a Christian, one must let the prospective captive enjoy the advantage of being the Christian, and for one’s own part have resignation enough to be the one who is far behind him–otherwise one will certainly not get the man out of his illusion.
Supposing then that a religious writer has become profoundly attentive to this illusion, Christendom, and has resolved to attack it which all the might at his disposal (with God’s aid, be it noted)–what then is he to do. First and foremost, no impatience. If he because impatient, he will rush headlong against it and accomplish nothing. A direct attack only strengthens the person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing which requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is what a direct attack achieves, and it implies moreover the presumption of requiring a man to make to another person, or in his presence, an admission which he can make most profitably to himself privately. This is what is achieved by the indirect method, which, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God–that he has lived under an illusion.
The religious writer must, therefore, first get into touch with men. That is, he must begin with aesthetic achievement. This is earnest-money. The more brilliant the achievement, the better for him…Therefore, he must have everything in readiness, though without impatience, with a view to bringing forward the religious promptly, as soon as he perceives that he has his readers with him, so that with the momentum gained by devotion to the aesthetic they rush headlong into contact with the religious.
Comments to come.
A useful reminder.
The popular idea that Christianity says “human nature” is inherently bad is actually the opposite of what the earliest Christian theologians believed. This book challenges the popularized negative view by proposing a prophetic alternative grounded in early Greek Christian sources. It draws on the wealth of early theological reflection, the wisdom of the desert mothers and fathers, and the heritage of Eastern Christianity to discover what God has made us to be.
Nonna Verna Harrison, God’s Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation
This book arrived several months ago. I have dipped into it, and have wanted to get down to a serious reading of it many times, but let’s just say that other things have intervened. I don’t intend blogging on it in detail, worthwhile though that would be, because such an intention would no doubt simply go the way of all my other…
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Here are the opening lines of Browning’s awesome “Easter Day“. Although my primary intent is eventually to say something about the relationship between Browning’s dramatis personae and Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, I thought it might be useful to preface that with a bit of Browning speaking, as it were, in propria persona, and speaking in a way that, to anyone who knows Kierkegaard, will sound remarkably familiar. The poem is a dialectical tour de force, a deep and deepening investigation of all the ways in which faith is denatured, each a way of making it easy or easier to be a Christian.
Easter Day
HOW very hard it is to be
A Christian! Hard for you and me,
—Not the mere task of making real
That duty up to its ideal,
Effecting thus complete and whole,
A purpose or the human soul—
For that is always hard to do;
But hard, I mean, for me and you
To realise it, more or less,
With even the moderate success
Which commonly repays our strife
To carry out the aims of life.
“This aim is greater,” you may say,
“And so more arduous every way.”
—But the importance of the fruits
Still proves to man, in all pursuits,
Proportional encouragement.
“Then, what if it be God’s intent
“That labour to this one result
“Shall seem unduly difficult?”
—Ah, that’s a question in the dark—
And the sole thing that I remark
Upon the difficulty, this;
We do not see it where it is,
At the beginning of the race:
As we proceed, it shifts its place,
And where we looked for palms to fall,
We find the tug’s to come,—that’s all.
Edith Stein writes from beside the death-bed of her Sister Clara to her Sister Adelgundis, who was herself beside the death-bed of their teacher, Husserl:
Pax Christi!
Dear Sister Adelgundis,
Our greetings go from one death-bed to the other. Our Sister Clara departed today for eternity, very gently, after a year of suffering. I commended our dear Master [Husserl] to her often, and will do so again tonight at the wake. I believe one is well taken care of in her company. She was our eldest lay sister, tireless in the lowliest of tasks, but a strong and manly character who had grasped and lived the Carmelite ideal with complete determination. So faith turned it into a completely spiritual life. I am not at all worried about our dear Master. It has always been far from me to think that God’s mercy allows itself to be circumscribed by the visible church’s boundaries. God is truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not…
Most cordially, your
Teresa Benedicta a Cruce
Here are a few lines from Fr. Stephen Freeman, addressing place and stability:
In monastic tradition, a monk makes four vows: poverty, chastity, obedience and stability. Most people are familiar with the first three but not with the fourth. In classical monastic practice it meant that a monk stayed put: he did not move from monastery to monastery. It was not a new idea. Before this vow was formalized in various Rules, there was already the saying from the Desert: “Stay in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”
I have been lucky to have been able to stay put. Perhaps, if I had been more talented or more ambitious or both, I would not have stayed put. Perhaps I would have aimed more seriously at career upward mobility. But I was not more talented and was not and am not more ambitious. So, here I am. So, here I stay. Here I hope to stay–until I stay put permanently, resting, I hope, in peace.
When I got my job at Auburn, my teacher, Lewis White Beck, was very pleased. He grew up not far from here. His brother still lived (in those days) just north up 85, in Westpoint, Ga. (I used to visit him to hear stories of Lewis’ childhood.) Beck counseled me about Auburn: “Don’t go and leave. Stay and make it the kind of place where you want to be.” The philosophy department at Auburn has become that, although I deserve little of the credit. But I do think that staying has made me more of the person I have wanted to be. I do not mean I am not deeply flawed; of course I am, of course. Still, staying put has been a revelator and tutor: I have learnt something about fidelity and commitment, about what it means to work with others to build something bigger and better than the builders. I have learnt something about being unknown and unremarked, and about first being restively reconciled to it and later accepting it and still later coming to desire it. “Live hidden” is good advice. (Beck was once asked by the NYTimes (if I remember correctly) if they could do a feature on him, a sort of Elder Philosopher at Home bit. He declined, telling them that he was determined to enjoy “the beneficent obscurity of senectitude”. –Is that a line from Gibbon?) I guess I still have a few years before I enter my senectitude, but it is not too early for obscurity to be beneficent.
As I grow older, my classes and my students fascinate me more than ever before. Philosophical problems incarnate are now my meditation. Philosophical problems disincarnate no longer exert much pull on me. Perhaps what I have come to appreciate more fully is that there is a strict specificity about philosophical problems–they exist only in a specific person and they can be grappled with only in conjunction with that person and they can be solved–in whatever sense they are solved–only by that person. Where I am not that person, I can help or hurt (from the lectern, from the page); but I can only help or hurt; but I can no more solve the problem for him or her than I can be prudent for him or her. Philosophical problems arise from and are finally only responsive to the living experience of a specific person. I believe I have learnt that from Socrates–himself a master of staying put.
As Robert Frost once recommended: “Don’t get converted. Stay.”
It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them.
I consider my students and I consider myself–and I think: our problem is that we know heaps and heaps of things but we believe nothing, or almost nothing.
…
A friend of mine asked me the other day about Christian religious belief and being a good person, about whether you can be a good person and disbelieve. That sort of question I cannot answer formulaically, and would not, I hope, even if a formula came to mind. What I found myself saying was something like this:
We most of us have no real knowledge of what we believe or disbelieve, in the existentially indexed form of belief I take ultimately to be at issue in Christianity. What we believe or disbelieve is something that isn’t captured by putting a ‘T’ or an ‘F’ in the blank before, say, “There is a God”, on a True/False test. Perhaps living a good life–a genuinely good life, not a conventionally good one–is itself to believe. And perhaps living a bad life–a genuinely bad life, not a conventionally bad one–is to disbelieve.
What I said was something like that. At any rate, I reckon that someone who has a false understanding of Christ could disbelieve in that Christ without disbelieving in Christ. So too someone with a false understanding of Christ could believe in that Christ without believing in Christ. Kierkegaard somewhere attempts to elucidate Christian belief by talking about it as ultimately a matter of the imitation of Christ: imitation is the sincerest form of belief, we might say. Does imitation–in the sense at issue, whatever exactly that is–require that one know that one is imitating, who one is imitating?
“No one can come to the Father except through me”, “I am the door of the sheep”: couldn’t ‘going through’, ‘entering the door’, be a matter of what we are ontologically (salvation as theosis) and not, or not so much, a matter of what we are epistemologically, of what we believe in a non-existentially indexed sense? “Not everyone who saith unto me Lord, Lord shall enter into the kingdom of heaven…” Will non-existentially indexed denial prevent entrance?
What significance would all this have for the Church? Well, that is a huge topic. But Orthodoxy has taught me to believe that although we know where the Holy Spirit is (in the Church) we do not know where it isn’t. –What the Church does is to help us to live a good life, a genuinely good life, to live in imitation of Christ, deliberate imitation, and imitation of Christ truly understood.
Living a genuinely good life is far harder than we reckon it to be, I think, far harder; a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Both inside the Church and outside it, people underestimate how hard it is. Mea maxima culpa. And it is not just hard to live a genuinely good life, it is just as hard to figure out what one would be, what it would look like. Especially on your own, especially in situ. “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leads to life, and few there be that find it.” Travelling the way is hard, yes; but finding it is just as hard.
I know there is much to complain about here–but I am just thinking aloud, quasserting, not asserting.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 