THE LAND OF UNLIKENESS

It should be obvious that we must think of infinity here as other than an infinite succession or series. We must think of qualitative inexhaustibility rather than quantitative accumulation and summation. In a sense, such qualitative inexhaustibility is more than humans can think. And yet we can truthfully point to manifestations or images of such inexhaustibility in our human habitation of the middle. We divine it in the greatness of an unsurpassable artist, in the incalculable nobility of ethical heroism, in the measureless profundity of religious holiness. We praise its creative power when we celebrate being itself as agapeic.

-William Desmond, Being and the Between

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Here is the second installment of my paper on a mutually enriching conversation between Maximus Confessor’s theological vision and the Christian tradition of hospitality; a scaled down version of which I recently presented at the Pappas Conference on the Church Fathers at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary. The section of the paper below follows upon my previous post and an exploration of Maximus’ Christology (which I am not posting on TLOU). Thank you for your attention and any thoughts you may have… Continue reading ‘St. Maximus Confessor and Christian Hospitality II’

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Like Mercy

This poem came out of studying The Cappadocians, three men and one woman who were 4th centery Eastern, Greek speaking xtians who had a huge part in the formation of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. They were affirming the goodness of Creation in the midst of all the muck and dung that we seem to endlessly make out of our lives and world. This has often been a great struggle for me. So there are Hebrew and Greek words referring to various human, social realities. Nietzsche has breathed in my ear in times of agnostic, nihilistic struggle in the past so he shows up dueling with Macrina. I wrote it during a rain storm outside the GF Java Cafe in my hometown of Jamestown, TN. Continue reading ‘Like Mercy’

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The Watchmen: a film about castration, a film in which each super-hero is made into a superb failure. Written during a time of success (Reagan’s era, we didn’t even know how much money we would make) it can only be fit for the general public at a time when the failure is right in our faces, like a CEO in a $10,000 suit complemented by handcuffs, as the cock of Dr. Manhattan faces us flacidly the whole movie through. As Seinfeld says, “That’s just not something you want to see.” We don’t want to see this failure hanging off the body of the most powerful super-hero of them all. Several times during the film the director has the audacity to show us the erect (Twin!) Towers glooming on the Manhattan Skyline. Luckily, he has the original comic script to blame it on. Those erect towers are now simply wrecked. They have failed, just like the ability of Dr. Manhattan to please a woman, even when he has more than one body. More than one body, more than one tower; it doesn’t matter, the terror and the truth will take them all down. Dan (Nite Owl) also has a moment of failure (with the same woman), which he fixes by trying to save the world. It is only when that fails irrevocably is he able to perform again, on his comfortable, small scale. Bourgeois, attractive. It is a failure which keeps desire alive, and mankind is no happier than when the ultimate goal (peace on earth) is both an utter success (in that Russia and U.S.A become common enemies of the imp Manhattan) and complete fiasco (in that Manhattan is innocent).

So here is how I hash out the failures: Ozymandias, which is pretty obvious, in that he sacrifices the city of New York, and its anonymous millions, for a supposedly secure peace on earth. It is peace based on a lie, but it is the best we can hope for: the logic of sacrifice. It is realistic. This is the failure of ratiocination.

Manhattan, even though he can meld and mold matter at will, ultimately agrees with the unconscionable act of Ozymandias, and departs, a lame duck of a super-hero to “create other galaxies” or some bullshit like that. He condones the murder of millions and departs never having known love. His departure seals the peace. His truth seals the lie. This is the failure of scientia.

The Silk Spectre, the only prominent woman, fails in a fit of sentimentality, for she actually weeps when Dr. Manhattan tells her he is going on his venture of creation without love. She is turned on by the idea of it, and this way, as she’s making love to Dan in their suburban hovel, she might think of these creations millions of light years away and work herself up to an orgasm. This is the failure of concupiscence.

Dan, Nite Owl, he is the big nerd who actually has big muscles, kind of like a boy ugly duckling. He has a fit of conscience when he sees what Ozymandias is doing, but he only gets angry for a little bit, and then realizes that what is realistic for him is just to settle down, fight crime on the weekends, and bone his wife in the ship on the way home. This is the failure of common sense.

Rohrshach. O, how close we came to a hero here. For he was the one who tracked down Ozymandias, he was the one who would never back down to a suburban existence, who would never let the truth be trampled by such a thing as peace. But in the end he is only seeking suicide. He is only seeking death as an escape from a world of people whom he hates. He holds onto the truth, but he has no love for it -  just as Dr. Manhattan has knowledge to create without love, so Rohrschach has truth but without compassion for his fellows.

There is no super-hero here, but its funny that we’re left with a pretty super movie. It was noted a couple nights ago that the best candidate for hero in this story is actually Rohrschach’s journal, which, because of the intractable rapacity of the media will have a chance to see the light of day, to open up the possibility of Ozymandias’ guilty, to re-introduce the threat of nuclear war between earthly enemies – but it is possible that Rohrschach loved his journal, and if he did, the truth there will most suredly see its day.

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The following is a paper that is in progress.  Any comments or criticisms are welcomed. Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, composed in 1930 for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 50^th anniversary, is in the vein of some of his earlier works, such as his groundbreaking and controversial The Rite of Spring.  But Stravinsky’s symphony is doing more than reminding the listener of his earlier work.  Rather it plays against and challenges rigid distinctions between sacred and secular music and gives insight into not only his approach to this dichotomy as a composer but may also reveal hints of his own spiritual complexity and ambiguity. Continue reading ‘Igor Stravinsky and sacred/secular music’

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“I say theological and political (or theopolitical) to signal that my claim calls for analyses of the problem of race (and, relatedly, of the Jewish question) that explore the senses in which such a discourse is bound to the nature and practice of modern politics and thereby indelibly tied to what is religious about modernity and the way it parodies theology at the same time that it cloaks this fact. The discourse of race is critical to the cloaking process and thus functions as a vital cog within modernity’s own religious and quasi-theological machinery, a machinery intent, as the quotation by Étienne Balibar that opens this chapter alerts us, on producing bodies and people, but bodies and people of a particular sort. It produces bodies and people that can populate an enlightened, global, and cosmopolitan social order, the domain of civil society. The people produced is the modern citizenry; the body, that of the modern citizen; and the social order enacted and perpetuated, that of the modern (nation-)state. Given this, the politics of race and the politics of the modern state are of a piece, for both are religious or pseudotheological in character. Failing to reckon with this fact not only leaves the problem of modern racial reasoning inadequately understood but also can yield responses that risk–unwittingly, no doubt–reinhabiting, at the politically unconscious, theopolitical level, the very problem that needs overcoming.”- J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 40.

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These posts are portions of an, as yet, unpublished paper I did recently for a doctoral class on “spiritual practices.” This will the first of a multi-post installment. The project ventures drawing from the well of the cosmic theological vision of St. Maximus the Confessor as a vital resource for the articulation of a theological rationale undergirding the practice of Christian hospitality. I hope that it may also be a fruitful addition for the recent “retrieval” theme on TLOU in which figures like Bulgakov and Chesterton have been explored…

 St. Maximus Confessor and Christian Hospitality

Introduction

St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662 A.D.) understands the cosmos through a theological ontology of Love. All creatures in creation are unified through participation in the ecstatic Love that is the life of the Trinity. Participation in this Love unifies the difference of creatures into a harmony. As such this love is the “reason” or “logos” of creatures. With the fall of humanity this love is disrupted cosmically. The fall of humanity is key in this “cosmic tragedy” for humanity is the microcosm (micros-kosmos or “little cosmos”), which participates in the sensuous, creaturely dimension of being and the rational-spiritual dimension of the hierarchy of being. Humanity, the microcosm, is the center or crux of the hierarchy of being as it co-inheres in the second person of the Trinity, the Logos. It is the crossing of the divine and the sensuous dimensions of the hierarchy of being. Consequently, when humanity falls the harmony of creation is disrupted. This disruption or discord is healed or re-harmonized in the Incarnation of the Second person of the Trinity. In the Incarnation of the Logos in Christ the Love which orders the cosmos is shown or made concrete and the healing of humanity, the ‘microcosmic mediator,’ is accomplished; thus the goal (telos) of Creation, which the Triune God has desired from the beginning, is realized and made possible. Continue reading ‘St. Maximus Confessor and Christian Hospitality’

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“How does it stand with philosophy, if we are open to the ultimate claim that being religious may make on us? I am not countering philosophical reason with an opposing irrationalistic fideism. My purpose is to pose a question to philosophical thinking at certain limits. While I will make assertions and even suggestions about the direction the question points us, the main difficulty is to hear this question, for some of our characteristic ways of thinking deafen us to it. How deafen? We philosophers think we have already heard and answered the question. My argument will be that there is another question that has not been heard, or only rarrely or sporadically, and that this further question solicits a new origination of philosophy: a post-philosophical reverence that yet is philosophical through and through; a reverence that perhaps some philosophers once knew, maybe sometimes in a taken for granted way, when religious reverence was also taken for granted.”

William Desmond, “Religion and the Poverty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Religion in German Idealism (2004).

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Those of you in DC might know that I’m having a very expectant advent right now.

You all know that I don’t forward emails or post silly stuff here (I don’t know why I make these caveats, but I feel compelled to nonetheless), but I thought that those of you that are intentional about resisting certain rather unhealthy aspects of the seasonal buzz might find this bit encouraging. And I’m all about encouragement here.

From the Sojourners daily email.

Have Yourself a Peace and Justice Christmas

Have yourself a peace and justice Christmas,
Set your heart a-right.
Flee the malls and focus on Christ’s guiding light.

Have yourself a peace and justice Christmas,
Give your time a way.
Share God’s love, And serve “the least of these” today.

Here we are, as we pray for peace,
We’ll live simply and give more.
We care for those far and near to us,
Which brings cheer to us, once more.

God brings down
The haughty from high places,
And lifts up the low.
God cares for the hungry and the humble, so –
Forget the stress and let the peace and justice flow!

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The following is an *under construction* excerpt from a paper that is even more in the works than the excerpt. I’m sharing it as is because of a comment Matslacker made in the pervious post from AD, regarding orienting ourselves to the Spirit through activities like catechumenate that seek not necessarily for intelligibility but rather for points of connection “between dogma and life through the difficult practice of amending one’s life, of practicing humility, prayer, virtue in general, that is, of attaining purity of heart and thereby attracting the life-creating Spirit, whereby one’s “eyes” might truly “see”–even the eyes of the simple (cf. here the catechesis of Paul the Simple as an extreme case–or Aquinas’ last considerations upon his theologizing).” I thought his point was great, and happened to be a line of thought I’m trying to pursue in my own work. I heartily recommend that you read his comment, and offer the following only as an inchoate step toward a “systematic” account of the role of church practice.

As a philosophical historian of ethics, Alasdair seems almost obsessively concerned with recounting the development of practical rationality through the emergence of late modern liberalism. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre argues that the loss of a teleological orientation in the account of social formation necessarily results in competing practical rationalities. Pursuant to which, modern social science lacks the ability to recognize much less help redress the fracture in practice and rationality caused by the loss of ends-based reasoning. Continue reading ‘An ill-formed Primer on “practice” in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre’

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