The Spirit Room

2011-02-14T23:08:00.001-08:00

THE WORLD IS COMING

high and wide, in the vacant air . . .

straight through the four white walls of the real

until it no longer appears

different

from what the eye sees.

(Ronald Johnson, "Poem," Poetry, 120 (1972), p 144)

Unitarian Easter

2011-02-08T13:18:00.000-08:00

Entering here, I hope the confetti
Can jazz up a burden

The pastor, for instance, calling birds, head back,
Or dancing an old French dance, hopping and kicking.

And now the congregation winds around the chancel,
Carrying damp, strapping forsythia sprigs, slanting them into a vase
Beside the kotoist, her song plucked and bent, a few blossoms raining on the strings.

God's weather today—sandals in puddles.
The moment of silence—raindrops on the roof, no comment
On the matter of God.

Sandra McPherson

Captain Beefheart's Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing

2011-01-01T05:57:00.000-08:00

1. Listen to the birds
That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere.

2. Your guitar is not really a guitar
Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one.

3. Practice in front of a bush
Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread.

4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're brining over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.

5. If you're guilty of thinking, you're out
If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.

6. Never point your guitar at anyone
Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.

7. Always carry a church key
That's your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He's one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song "I Need a Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he's doing it.

8. Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument
You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.

9. Keep your guitar in a dark placeWhen you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.

10. You gotta have a hood for your engine
Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.

How not to worship . . .

2010-10-18T19:26:00.000-07:00

You have felt, doubtless, at least those of you who have been brought up in any habit of reverence, that every time when I in this letter have used an American expression, or aught like one, there came upon you a sense of sudden wrong — the darting through you of acute cold. I mean you to feel that: for it is the essential function of America to make us all feel that. It is the new skill they have found there; — this skill of degradation; others they have, which other nations had before them, from whom they have learned all they know, and among whom they must travel, still, to see any human work worth seeing. But this is their specialty, this their one gift to their race, — to show men how not to worship, — how never to be ashamed in the presence of anything.

John Ruskin

Fors Clavigera, vol I, 1871, letter 12

a parable ...

2009-02-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

PART I

A PARABLE

I am today twenty-five hundred years old. I have been dead for nearly as many years. My place of birth was Athens; my grave was not far from those of Xenophon and Plato, within view of the white glory of Athens and the shimmering waters of the Aegean sea.

After sleeping in my grave for many centuries I awoke suddenly—I cannot tell how nor why—and was transported by a force beyond my control to this new day and this new city. I arrived here at daybreak, when the sky was still dull and drowsy. As I approached the city I heard bells ringing, and a little later I found the streets astir with throngs of well dressed people in family groups wending their way hither and thither. Evidently they were not going to work, for they were accompanied by their children in their best clothes, and a pleasant expression was upon their faces.

"This must be a day of festival and worship, devoted to one of their gods," I murmured to myself. Looking about me I saw a gentleman in a neat black dress, smiling, and his hand extended to me with great cordiality. He must have realized I was a stranger and wished to tender his hospitality to me. I accepted it gratefully. I clasped his hand. He pressed mine. We gazed for a moment into each other's eyes. He understood my bewilderment amid my novel surroundings, and offered to enlighten me. He explained to me the ringing of the bells and meaning of the holiday crowds moving in the streets. It was Sunday—Sunday before Christmas, and the people were going to "the House of God."

"Of course you are going there, too," I said to my friendly guide.

"Yes," he answered, "I conduct the worship. I am a priest."

"A priest of Apollo?" I interrogated.

"No, no," he replied, raising his hand to command silence, "Apollo is not a god; he was only an idol."

"An idol?" I whispered, taken by surprise.

"I perceive you are a Greek," he said to me, "and the Greeks," he continued, "notwithstanding their distinguished accomplishments, were an idolatrous people. They worshipped gods that did not exist. They built temples to divinities which were merely empty names—empty names," he repeated. "Apollo and Athene—and the entire Olympian lot were no more than inventions of the fancy."

"But the Greeks loved their gods," I protested, my heart clamoring in my breast.

"They were not gods, they were idols, and the difference between a god and an idol is this: an idol is a thing; God is a living being. When you cannot prove the existence of your god, when you have never seen him, nor heard his voice, nor touched him -- when you have nothing provable about him, he is an idol. Have you seen Apollo? Have you heard him? Have you touched him?"

"No," I said, in a low voice.

"Do you know of any one who has?"

I had to admit that I did not.

"He was an idol, then, and not a god."

"But many of us Greeks," I said, "have felt Apollo in our hearts and have been inspired by him."

"You imagine you have," returned my guide. "If he were really divine be would be living to this day."

Is he, then, dead?" I asked.

"He never lived; and for the last two thousand years or more his temple has been a heap of ruins."

I wept to hear that Apollo, the god of light and music, was no more—that his fair temple had fallen into ruins and the fire upon his altar had been extinguished; then, wiping a tear from my eyes, I said, "Oh, but our gods were fair and beautiful; our religion was rich and picturesque. It made the Greeks a nation of poets, orators, artists, warriors, thinkers. It made Athens a city of light; it created the beautiful, the true, the good—yes, our religion was divine."

"It had only one fault"' interrupted my guide.

"What was that?" I inquired, without knowing what his answer would be.

"It was not true."

"But I still believe in Apollo," I exclaimed; "he is not dead, I know he is alive."

"Prove it," he said to me; then, pausing for a moment, "if you produce him," he said, "we shall all fall down and worship him. Produce Apollo and be shall be our god."

"Produce him!" I whispered to myself. "What blasphemy!" Then, taking heart, I told my guide how more than once I had felt Apollo's radiant presence in my heart, and told him of the immortal lines of Homer concerning the divine Apollo.

"Do you doubt Homer?" I said to him; "Homer, the inspired bard? Homer, whose ink-well was as big as the sea; whose imperishable page was Time? Homer, whose every word was a drop of light?" Then I proceeded to quote from Homer's Iliad, the Greek Bible, worshipped by all the Hellenes as the rarest Manuscript between heaven and earth. I quoted his description of Apollo, than whose lyre nothing is more musical, than whose speech even honey is not sweeter. I recited how his mother went from town to town to select a worthy place to give birth to the young god, son of Zeus, the Supreme Being, and how he was born and cradled amid the ministrations of all the goddesses, who bathed him in the running stream and fed him with nectar and ambrosia from Olympus. Then I recited the lines which picture Apollo bursting his bands, leaping forth from his cradle, and spreading his wings like a swan, soaring sun-ward, declaring that he had come to announce to mortals the will of God. "Is it possible," I asked, "that all this is pure fabrication, a fantasy of the brain, as unsubstantial as the air? No, no, Apollo is not an idol. He is a god, and the son of a god. The whole Greek world will bear me witness that I am telling the truth." Then I looked at my guide to see what impression this outburst of sincere enthusiasm had produced upon him, and I saw a cold smile upon his lips that cut me to the heart. It seemed as if he wished to say to me, "You poor deluded pagan! You are not intelligent enough to know that Homer was only a mortal after all, and that he was writing a play in which he manufactured the gods of whom he sang—that these gods existed only in his imagination, and that today they are as dead as is their inventer[sic]—the poet."

By this time we stood at the entrance of a large edifice which my guide said was "the House of God." As we walked in I saw innumerable little lights blinking and winking all over the spacious interior. There were, besides, pictures, altars and images all around me. The air was heavy with incense; a number of men in gorgeous vestments were passing to and fro, bowing and kneeling before the various lights and images. The audience was upon its knees enveloped in silence —a silence so solemn that it awed me. Observing my anxiety to understand the meaning of all this, my guide took me aside and in a whisper told me that the people were celebrating the anniversary of the birthday of their beautiful Savior—Jesus, the Son of God.

"So was Apollo the son of God," I replied, thinking perhaps that after all we might find ourselves in agreement with one another.

"Forget Apollo," he said, with a suggestion of severity in his voice. "There is no such person. He was only an idol. If you were to search for Apollo in all the universe you would never find any one answering to his name or description. Jesus," he resumed, "is the Son of God. He came to our earth and was born of a virgin." Again I was tempted to tell my guide that that was how Apollo became incarnate; but I restrained myself.

"Then Jesus grew up to be a man," continued my guide, "performing unheard-of wonders, such as treading the seas, giving sight, hearing and speech to the blind, the deaf and the dumb, converting water into wine, feeding the multitudes miraculously, predicting coming events and resurrecting the dead."

"Of course, of your gods, too," he added, "it is claimed that they performed miracles, and of your oracles that they foretold the future, but there is this difference -- the things related of your gods are a fiction, the things told of Jesus are a fact, and the difference between Paganism and Christianity is the difference between fiction and fact."

Just then I heard a wave of murmur, like the rustling of leaves in a forest, sweep over the bowed audience. I turned about and unconsciously, my Greek curiosity impelling me, I pushed forward toward where the greater candle lights were blazing. I felt that perhaps the commotion in the house was the announcement that the God Jesus was about to make his appearance, and I wanted to see him. I wanted to touch him, or, if the crowd were too large to allow me that privilege, I wanted, at least, to hear his voice. I, who had never seen a god, never touched one, never heard one speak, I who had believed in Apollo without ever having known anything provable about him, I wanted to see the real God, Jesus.

But my guide placed his hand quickly upon my shoulder, and held me back.

"I want to see Jesus," I hastened, turning toward him. I said this reverently and in good faith. "Will he not be here this morning? Will he not speak to his worshippers?" I asked again. "Will he not permit them to touch him, to caress his hand, to clasp his divine feet, to inhale the ambrosial fragrance of his breath, to bask in the golden light of his eyes, to hear the music of his immaculate accents? Let me, too, see Jesus," I pleaded.

"You cannot see him," answered my guide, with a trace of embarrassment in his voice. "He does not show himself any more."

I was too much surprised at this to make any immediate reply.

"For the last two thousand years," my guide continued, "it has not pleased Jesus to show himself to any one; neither has he been heard from for the same number of years."

"For two thousand years no one has either seen or heard Jesus?" I asked, my eyes filled with wonder and my voice quivering with excitement.

"No," he answered.

"Would not that, then," I ventured to ask, impatiently, "make Jesus as much of an idol as Apollo? And are not these people on their knees before a god of whose existence they are as much in the dark as were the Greeks of fair Apollo, and of whose past they have only rumors such as Homer reports of our Olympian gods—as idolatrous as the Athenians? What would you say," I asked my guide, "if I were to demand that you should produce Jesus and prove him to my eyes and ears as you have asked me to produce and prove Apollo? What is the difference between a ceremony performed in honor of Apollo and one performed in honor of Jesus, since it is as impossible to give oracular demonstration of the existence of the one as of the other? If Jesus is alive and a god, and Apollo is an idol and dead, what is the evidence, since the one is as invisible, as inaccessible, and as unproducible as the other? And, if faith that Jesus is a god proves him a god, why will not faith in Apollo make him a god? But if worshipping Jesus, whom for the best part of the last two thousand years no man has seen, heard or touched; if building temples to him, burning incense upon his altars, bowing at his shrine and calling him "God," is not idolatry, neither is it idolatry to kindle fire upon the luminous altars of the Greek Apollo,—God of the dawn, master of the enchanted lyre—he with the bow and arrow tipped with fire! I am not denying," I said, "that Jesus ever lived. He may have been alive two thousand years ago, but if he has not been heard from since, if the same thing that happened to the people living at the time he lived has happened to him, namely—if he is dead, then you are worshipping the dead, which fact stamps your religion as idolatrous." And, then, remembering what he had said to me about the Greek mythology being beautiful but not true, I said to him: "Your temples are indeed gorgeous and costly; your music is grand your altars are superb; your litany is exquisite; your chants are melting; your incense, and bells and flowers, your gold and silver vessels are all in rare taste, and I dare say your dogmas are subtle and your preachers eloquent, but your religion has one fault—it is not true."

M.M. Mangasairian
The Truth About Jesus
(Introduction)
1909

an Ambrose Bierce keeper . . .

2009-01-17T19:30:00.000-08:00

I keep an Ambrose Bierce quote widget over on my other blog. I wanted to keep this particular quote handy because I think it relates to some of the things I have been thinking and blogging about lately.

"There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know."

(We just don't know that we don't know them).

2 bits - Ken Kesey on the function of the artist ...

2008-12-31T19:19:00.000-08:00

[...] from Shakespeare [...] get an audience [...] he went around in front of them and he'd grab them by the ears and he'd say,

— you listen to me!

That's what the artists have to do. There in public. Otherwise you'll be watching MTV and reading Ditmer's guide and drinking CocaCola. As I've often told Ginsberg, you can't blame the president for the state of the country. It's always the poet's fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision. They don't have it in them. The poets have to come up with a vision and they have to turn it on so that it sparks ... and catches on.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

What's the job [...] of the writer in contemporary America?
Right now.
Hmm. I'm not sure.
But here I'll give you an example[...]

You're gonna be walking along one day and suddenly there's gonna be a light. You're gonna look across the street, and on the corner over there, God is gonna be standing there.
And you're gonna know it's God because it's gonna have this beautiful curly hair that sticks up through his halo like Jesus. He's got little slitty eyes like Buddha. He's got a lot of swords in his belt like Mohammed.

And he's saying:

— Come . . . . to me.
— Come across the street to me.
— O, come to me.
— I will have the muses whisper in your ear. You will be the greatest writer. You will be better than Shakespeare.
— They will have melon breasts and blackberry nipples.
— Come to me.
— All you have to do is say my praises.

The writers job is to say:

— Fuck you, God! Fuck you!
— Fuck you! Fuck you!

'Cause nobody else is going to say it. Our politicians aren't going to say it. Nobody but the writer is going to say it. There's a time in history when it's time to praise God, but now is not the time. Now is the time to say:

— Fuck you!
— I don't care who your daddy was! Fuck you.

... and get back our job of writing.

24th October 1989
at a Reality Club presentation
.

Philip Wylie on religions

2008-08-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

XII

It will be said that, for a man so intent on morals, I have been hard on the church. I would be harder; I would do away with it. This institution, this school for hypocrites and university of ignorance, has resisted attacks from myriad sane and decent quarters since the time it was divinely guided by a witchman with a drum and until the reign of the current Pope. Men of enormous good will, and hope, too--even men within the church, like Emerson--have shaken every timber of its moribund architecture. Yet it does not fall. It has a sinister viability. The church is like the Hydra that guards Hell’s Gate: whenever a successful cut is made at it, a head falls, whereupon two replace it. Let a dissenter penetrate some ignominious churchly superstition and so deprive the parent body of members and behold, one-two-ten denominations are founded on the objection.

Perhaps the old legend--the old archetype--is worth laboring a little farther. Hercules found, when he finally slew the serpent, that if the wounds were cauterized, they seized to breed the devilish double-domes. Some cautery is needed today, some fire of truth, some means of burning away the fission in the serpent's cells.

The church (as I have indicated earlier in this essay), almost any church and nearly every church, is a foundation designed to maintain a particular body of legends. According to the Jungian hypothesis, legends are the tangible forms which instinct takes in man, an inherent property of him and the inherent property of his subjectivity, generating themselves spontaneously in all places and at all times, peopled by resembling characters and telling parallel tales. So this viability of churches is explained by any sect and every sect. Instinctual man is under the necessity of giving some expressed form or other to the opposing forces from which consciousness has gradually emerged.

Out of their mysterious compulsions--will to live and wish to die, urge to procreate and dread of succession--even those island people I imagined as reared without benefit of man would slowly invent legends and archetypes. And until more analytical men discovered what it was they all were doing--how they were merely articulating their animal natures in the very attempt to deny them (by claims of being heroes and owning gods and possessing immortal shades) --the transcendental effort would constantly obscure their true transcendental possibilities. Their “shades” --their souls--would remain but shadows of egos which had taken on the garment of some godliness or other and thereby cast into darkness all view of the eternal time of instinct.

The love and the fear of gods, the adoration and the dread, our fundamental qualities of the interior man--his “religious nature”--blind to itself until his insight becomes pure enough, or scientific enough--if you prefer--to scorch away his old ego and the public estimate of man's importances. In the legendary, the religious patterns, forms themselves are all possessive. Until a man sees that agony and glory, the reasons and the emotions of living, the panoply of his own evolution and of the blazing universe by truth discovered repose in his instinct, the instinct will possess the man and he will generally seek a repository for it. Each church is such a repository; each religion therefore must contain the exalted and the cruel, the noble and the vicious, the pure ideal and the heathen applications. And if a somewhat reasonable man be argued out of one church, he generally must needs join another. He is but converted back and forth among archetypes. He eschews this sect because he has discovered it is too ritualistic, primitive, incredible or barbaric; he has debunked it; then he accepts a new faith which is more up-to-date but no less irrational in that it closes his mind some other way. Or, he wearies of pure reason’s syllogisms, of being a modern man without a god, and the instinctual core of him responds to the drumming of organs and choirs and the holding up of symbols which are not anti-septic but venerable; he is “convinced” by the strength of very real instinctual impressions; and then your liberal atheist is suddenly become a Roman Catholic.

The “need for God” is real to the vanity. It is a need of gods. Of names to put on instincts and on patterns--of a legendary to quiet the questions asked by the mind of the aspiring or the downcast nerves. Why do I do this? Why did I refuse? Why do I feel angry when I should be at peace--happy, when I should be ashamed? The “I” demands descriptions and definitions; these must be commensurate not only with the interior pressures but with whatever altitude of regard “I” has for itself. That is why rich people own such enormous gods. Who else needs or could temple them adequately or support delegated authority enough--the requisite priesthood? The unlonely poor have still small voices. And associations of people organize empires for their gods--states within states--supported by contribution everywhere in the earth-- and their gods can thunder loud enough to quake governments. This gives them all, rich or poor, a collective arrogance in the ego that is great enough to hold instincts everywhere in check, or stasis, or seeming balance, sometimes for generation after generation.

The godmen fear the atheist who, somehow peacefully and with a good demeanor, takes a small, solitary stand in the cosmos without assistance of one of their societies. But most, they fear the individual whose private authenticity has found them out—whose up-winging wisdom commences to descry there fettered situation and to detect in the heavens the more-enveloping pattern and to live in liberty by itself. The man of God and the soaring man are both ruled by instinct; one knows, the others do not. So it becomes the necessary self protective instinct of the mass to try to shoot down this individual. Wherever, in society, any process starts which might tend to undo the blunder of forebears who crept down from trees and slunk through the bushes with dangling arms--whenever there is a sign that the instinct of some man or men is about to investigate itself--the churches unite against the event, be it in pamphlet, a nudist colony, or science itself. For the sake of the peace of mind of all who are compelled, that which compels them must somehow be kept in shadow, where they deem their shades to be--and rightly. This is the explanation of persecution, office of churches, and the so-called will of God.

Since the churches the repository of instinct, it becomes administrator of it--and the archetypal theorem's established again by the shortest search for proof of this in any holy apparatus. One finds among naked savages, and the nearly-as-naked savages on Park Avenue in New York City, that religion owns and controls all human biological procedure. When a man is born, the church must baptize him. When he is adolescent, the church must confirm the baptism. When he mates, the church must marry him. When he reproduces, the church must be handed the offspring, that the cycle start again. If he would put his wife away from himself, the church must assent--or refuse to assent. If he sins, the church must forgive him. If he is sick, the church must take the advantages of comfort. If he is dying, the church must supply prayers and unctions. And when he dies, the church must bury him. Each of these steps costs money. A benediction will stoop to extort a farthing. And after a man is dead, the church expects a portion of his estate. Some churches put a posthumous levy on the entrance of Heaven. The sumptuousness of these offices is scaled by price; there is every class of baptism, wedding and funeral--even two-pants suits for the dead, one to wear in the church and a more durable pair evidently needed for a head start on eternity, in the grave. Though here, I do believe, it is the mortician who exploits the human vanity.

This is a Christian nation, where Sabbath is holiday, the property of churches is not assessed, untaxed donations to God (up to ten percent of income) are permitted by the revenue collector, money bears the name of the Lord, the witness to crime is sworn on the Bible, most violations of the Ten Commandments are punishable by law, and statesmen say grace. Yet there are enough different kinds of Christian churches here to convince any Buddhist or any worshiper of Baal or any Martian that the Christians themselves have no idea what Christianity means or what it intends that they should do.

It is generally asserted that Christians are monotheists but it is hardly possible to find a sect, as I have said elsewhere, which has not split its God into parts and sexes; some, in the person of saints, have as many holy characters as all the other pagans, heathens and idolaters. The clergy produces on-demand definitions of the gods to fit most purses and points of view. In many Christian churches the gods and their symbols are intellectualizations nowadays; but in some, they are still plaster, like any Hindu frieze. In all of them, a cruel creed of crucifixion (and a process of psychological resurrection which may lift the animal some few steps in instinctual awareness and is real to that extent) is offered in counterbalance to the American world and its main excesses. A little psychic pain at Easter, if not every Sunday, compensates the conscience for another year of the hundred and fifty in which we have nervously enjoyed an American Spree.

Half of the nation has little or nothing to do with churches and assumes that “religious freedom” implies freedom of their irreligiousness. It does not. America tolerates all churches. But no church tolerates unchurchliness; because of that, the free mind of the nation is disenfranchised without knowing it. We are enslaved by religions even when we will have none of them. They are one when one of them is criticized. Indeed, the pressure of sanity against them today is driving their sects toward physical reunion.

Liberty--the room for honesty--is everywhere a confining chamber, the theory but not much a practice, a condition believed to exist hugely until its measurements are examined. The intolerant churches have compressed it. Or they have kept it from expanding. This is an incessant catastrophe; it has given the churches their power-- swelled up religious pride where freedom ought to grow--and slain conscience everywhere in the name of Christ. Challenge of the fact is labeled hellish automatically (and, lately, ”communist”). Millions of Christians do not just rage defensively at honest men, but weep in the pity of piety for them, which is the more appealing instinct and attracts new sentimentalists to the altar--for a blindfolding or, more generally, for having the last of their weak sight put out. By now, every industry and profession and nearly every classroom in America has been corrupted to this purpose of the churches: to keep liberty from becoming extensive.

It is possible, in the United States of America, to publish such an essay as this in a book. And that is the outside dimension of the room here for freedom. As a book, it will be stolen from libraries by persons who disagree with what it says--which is not a service to truth but the very exercise of fear and an act of panic. Angered men, who do not like to have their natures or the etiology of their God disclosed, may attempt to confiscate this book by purchase from local stores or to have it banned from State courts. They have done as much before. People may throw copies of it on bonfires--as they have other books--and this, too, is a ritual of assuagement.

But I could not express such thoughts as these on the American radio or by motion pictures or printed in the newspapers or get them published in the magazines. No business has sponsored an atheist on the air--its gross would drop too suddenly and too much. Theoretically, the atheist has as much “right” to argue as the Baptist. Actually, he has no opportunity. The “good” people in our society choke him. For justice, they have absolute contempt. They already “know” that they are “right” and will not hear anything further or permit the public to listen to a syllable of dissent!

In the dominions-- the immense realms--where the church administers instinct, this perfidious circumstance has driven what we know so far away from what we pretend that we are all disoriented, whether we profess God and sit in the Sunday bench, or mock even at morals, and tee off every Sunday morning with a ritualistic oath in warrant of an imperial irresponsibility for man. We have gone insane. We are all mad.

The use of reason has provided us with a world which only reason can use. But not priest or scientist or any layman betwixt them can expose our secrets, separate the collisions, and assembled the schisms, to see what the use ought to be, or to be becoming. The instincts are confused on all sides. The codes that were sufficient for Jerusalem and Rome and Venice-high in for all the artisans and handworkers of time--have become irrelevant or manifestly in error. The new codes of communal association or corporate state breed frenzy. The original incentive of easy riches expires with the gutting of our continent. Nothing suffices. But no one is allowed by the churches to consult with the people on any moral matter in other-than-churchly terms. Examples are endless.

Birth control. Here is a discovery of our biology as fundamental of the learning of the art of fire. It means we must decide in our minds concerning what churches profess to own. Do the radio networks explain it and discuss it, as it revolutionizes man?

Evolution. Is this great discovery of human origin--the only proper introduction to learning--the schoolboy's first course?

Ethnology. Here is the science of tolerance among men, for it proves they are one--not cousins--but the same blood. Where Phoenicia mined tin, Semites bred with the natives. Where the Iberians halted, they brought the Negro stream, through African Moors, and Spanish Moors, with whom they'd lived. Each snobbish Anglo-Saxon may be part a Jew and part a colored man. Has this inexorable circumstance been made clear to every moppet old enough to clutch the Star-Spangled Banner? And does he also know what a torrent of Asia beats in his veins?

A book could be written of the mere lists of truths some men know that all should know, which it is forbidden to speak about in the presence of the general public.

Who forbids it? The church.

The gods and their arrogant servants, the men of God.

It is a pea-soup world. Truth hacks a hole, goes on, and the fog fingers of self-assessed virtue close up the place. The minister intones. The flabby lips of the priest moisten with a smile. The density is restored. The Republic's safe behind its clerical cloak, safe in the arms of Jesus-- that sad and terrible new erotic who have so little insight into himself, such giant ego, and yet such an intuition of the archetypes.

Ye shall know the truth.

Love one another.

Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.

Suffer little children to come unto me . . . for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom of God is within you.

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed.

For whoever hath, to him shall be given . . . but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Even the words of this man, spoken two ignorant thousand years ago, burn like the phrase at Belshazzar’s feast on the walls of every standing church today. These Christians have had that long to add to wisdom and every century they have moved a little farther away from it.

You cannot, today, even mention the sanctified repositories by name in the free press and the other free media of this great, free nation. The right of simple criticism is stopped up. The right to ridicule lies beyond editorial thought. Whatever it is that half the citizens ponder with their free minds, it cannot be constellated or directed toward an inquiry on churches or the correction of a church. England is freer. The English name names and assert critique, lambaste, enjoy the public literature of a liberty that has been murdered here.

You will find--for example--that ninety-odd percent of your fellows in this republic hold the late Mary Baker Eddy to have been part abomination and part fool, a quack in the science of applied psychology, a fat Coué; and yet, were have you seen or heard of a man allowed to dissect the sophistries of Christian Scientists in the public prints? It is tabu. It is a fruitful forest our tribe is not allowed to enter.

The objection to the Church of Rome is also mighty. This House of God has existed for a thousand years on the bodies of exploited human beings. In symbols and rituals it contains just enough awareness of instinct to bury deliberately continents and ages of the human mind. Its mechanics give it an access to that kingdom of heaven which is the human child, and it understands archetypes enough so to indoctrinate him that even though he forgets the experience he will respond to it the rest of his days and beg extreme supreme unction to ready himself even for a gangster's funeral. Freud explained it. Freud's patients, like Catholics, had been bent to their shape in the years of infancy. So with most crooked personalities. Instinct-- instinct. What ways it turns and how man holds the mold!

Wherever in the nation the Roman Catholic Church is able to grasp the public instinct, freedom dies, a tyranny is set up over the citizens to conform with the spiritual and temporal tyranny of this church, and cathedrals flourish while the people grow poor. A night of ignorance is walled around them like a sheepfold. The clergy fleshes up. Science is extinguished as a light among the laity and handed over to the Jesuits who have so employed it that their name of Jesus is a synonym for intrigue. Wherever truth of science interferes with hierachy, it can be rationalized or set aside or put out again.

That the church may seize the human conscience from the man, the Catholic confessional is held. And that the drive of sex may be channeled for the uses of popes and cardinals and bishops, the fear-engendering, worship-provoking symbol of chastity is kept incarnate in living men and women--in priests and nuns--who walk among the contemporary people wearing the garments of their death, the evidence they have married God and Church.

What other proof of instinct do you need?

Only a little while ago, this organism proclaimed (in the Vatican's own press) that a world horrified by the atomic bomb was a world which would at last understand why the Roman Catholic Church had fought science through the centuries. These words of the church's own confession of its central crime.

I know, good reader, my own hazard here, of being called anti-Catholic, or an anti-Christian Scientist, if there be such a term. I know it will be said that I am inconsistent to attack intolerance and speak against sects in the same arguments. I know that it will be said I have seemed to defend Jews while I assailed Protestants. These are the tags of entrenched bigotry by which they dislodge the judgment even of those who strive to be fair-minded. But remember how I began this chapter.

I am against no man on earth, but in a passion for the gain of understanding in every man.

I am against no special church, but all churches, because they employ the instinct of man above all else to maintain themselves, and because they do not preach or even pretend to own the morality of the Jesus they profess. And they do not even vaguely comprehend the overwhelming meaning of his institutions.

I am not an agnostic or an atheist--one who thinks the truth is unknowable or protests there is no God. My sense of truth in the matter is different; I acknowledge there is validity--however savagely distorted--in all these gods.

And I am against the distortion.

Let me be plainer. To every man who believes he knows the True God: I am against his God. For of each God, and then make the gods that render us mad to destroy us--the various Christ-Gods and all the antithetical gods that Christians fear and deplore (and court in secret) --Mammon, for example, and Venus.

Idols in the mind are identical with mud idols and merely look better to people were slightly aware they have minds. But we have at long last learned enough to be done with this one more appalling institution in man's story-- the peonage of the conscience--the church.

Let us make a place in the news of our society, then, for the exposition--lest present scourges, and the eternal advocacy of the idolaters, demolish that small chamber from which our bravest forebears intended such mighty liberties to come for. These Christians! They are at the wheels of every war. They are at the helm of monopoly. They lie in labor's dirtiest ditches. The American mom belongs to Jesus. As statesmen, a trade away humanity through the centuries like strings of beads and barrels of vegetables. These shining Christians! Their holy gleam, on close inspection, proves almost always to be the phosphore of putrescence.

Every man of honesty knows that we human beings are in the primary school of truth: we have barely learned how to learn. What we can find out concerning the nature of Nature, of the universe and of ourselves will inevitably show how stupid and overweaning are the Beliefs of this day. We should hold them ready, always, for surrender. That is bravery. That is greatness. To be foresworn to a dogma is to be shackled and it is also to be made the own worst enemy of one's self, for the part of the mind able to learn more, whenever it stands in the presence of new truth, will hate the part that is pledged to learn no more--even though both parts maintain the bond of the obscene loyalty. This is the thickness of thieves and the fierce, compulsory fealty of conspirators. The man steals from an self and conspires against himself and hence from the whole world when he says, “I know it all”--especially concerning God. If what men have claimed for God were the truth, the world would have been different long ago. So I oppose the claim. To the sincerely reverent, the somewhat honest, this opposition will seem painful. I am sorry. To the hypocrites-- the religionistic professionals--it will be infuriating. I am unmoved. My own pain to reach these conclusions was long and unexpressible; in the description of them my heart holds the steadiest good cheer and only the intellect is sometimes moved to anger as it speaks to the reader for liberty of the mind and equally against all anarchy and all tyranny.

The churches have dug the public habits full of channels to divert all civilized contemplation of themselves. When one churches taken to task, they say that all are being defiled and every Holy Name of God as well. Religious criticism from outside the church, they hold an expression of ignorance and the shameful occupation. It is a Sign of Communism, or anything else the majority despises: a sign of neurosis or sexual perversion. It is, the churches add, a violation of the Constitution, which grants men the right to worship as they please--a vicious national act, un-American in fact and intent. This habitual translation of the Constitution as a red-white-and-blue curtain over religious affairs is their favorite; it influences the most weak minds and has most deprived the nation of the fresh air of reality, fact, truth, and the equal rights of free speech that would oppose bigotry. For the Constitution gives no minority the power to interfere with the individual or his honorable opinions or his press or his legislature.

But the American churches do not hesitate--whenever other measures seem inadequate--to resort to blackmail, extortion, intimidation of free men, threat of assault in the pocketbook--all brands of Godly robbery. And so dear has property become to Americans that those who do not kneel to a creed, do kneel to property--kneel--and crawl when it is invoked by sanctimonious dastards. We will withdraw our advertising, the churches say to the editor. We will refuse en masse to subscribe. If you say anything about us that is not for us, we will boycott you. Print this praise we have written of ourselves. Cut out that speech. It happens every day to the Free Press: the hinting minister--the smiling, apologetic priest--the little talk--and the crime against man's completed in the name of God. I've seen it enough times in the managing editor's office and I have watched it originate in the churches to which I once belonged.

What dirty citizens such people make!

What cowards they are--for their own sakes which they call the sake of Christ.

Because of them, the radio is neuter.

Because of them, the motion picture industries maintain an office headed by some man of prominence check each foot of film against the avalanche of each day's bigotries--how long a skirt may be, how deep a neck this year, how wide a dancer may swing her hips for the Mormons, what double meaning some obscure theology might find in the dialogue, the date when Methodists rescind a taboo on the word screwy, the forbidden chuckle about bishops and all moral significances--that virtue triumph, that never a man or woman lie together unmarried with pleasure and sans punishment, death preferred--and so on and on and on to the outermost reaches of every filthy, sick imagination that has exalted itself in vice for the glory of God.

In sex, especially, and “sex morals”, the churches clench the dominion.

When life and death are not problems of the immediate moment, the problem of man and woman is greatest--as Freud found, and as I have said here, and as every asylum keeper knows. All that man does and is--his family, seen toward ancestors and progeny, the art of himself and his arts--has flowed from the duality of sex since the protoplasm remembereth not when. Thus, if the church cannot order and command the archetypes that represent the myriad opposites in sexuality, the church cannot endure. So its principal energy--its organizational libido--is directed to this end in ten thousand disguises and also by such psychological stratagems as I have already cited: the voluntary self-castration of a holy class of men and women for example--a violence upon life proportionate to the violence of sex instinct itself and cunningly intended to interfere with every private inkling of independence and of real purity, so that the individual will commit himself to the church, awed by this evidence of what seems inhuman might.

Ah! The dreadful crosses Ego invents to spare itself from the sight of instinct!

The church has such a necessity of possessing the public attitudes towards sex that hardly any thought foreign to any religious system is allowed a good expression and in this sense we could call ourselves a Roman Catholic nation, or Methodist, since what offends these is carefully concealed from all. Churchly control of the rules for sex behavior is of such ecclesiastical importance that its exercise has cost the general intelligence all common touch with morals. “Morals” mean sex morals to the masses, and not ethics. That fact provides many incidental conveniences to the church, for it can set up exact rules of sex biology, administer them immaculately, and divided the rest of ethics to suit property--allowing the secret, cheatful doctrines of business holy ascent, and confining virtue to certain alms, the support of arrogant meddling by missionaries, tithes for a new edifice, endowment of parochial schools, and the like.

Morals confused--sometimes unconsciously, but more often deliberately, methodically! Morals without reference to any knowledge that has appeared in the world since Babylon!

In the last half-century, the science of sexuality has been originated. At the same time, our technical society has found various means to prevent conception and has learned ways both to inhibit and to cure venereal disease. The sex instinct is now beginning to be understood. The physical fears--exploited by churches since the Stone Age--are banished. Everything that man knew about his sexual nature is changed and all he has done this subject to revision. The crisis in morals is more desperate here than elsewhere for this is the center of ordinary rally. Dilemma blazes in our promiscuous conduct; yet the brains and integrity of our society are not allowed to be brought to bear upon it--for impartial, public discussion is all but tabu.

Here, in all these churches, these religions, is the collective parallel for the process by which the individual falls blind prey to his own instinct. He imports to his ego every advantage that can be seized or mirrored from objectivity, to be convinced that he is not an animal but more than an animal--and he exports, by the act, all awareness of archetypal opposition, all contact with time and truth. The groups of the godly build their gods to shield the fact that they are animals. They eschew the reason in their heads and the dignities in their hearts, as the price. They will not treat with Nature evenly; Nature is too honest for them--as pure virtuousness and naught else--so they must forever lie. But they cannot be forgiven any longer on the grounds that they know not what they do.

It is possible, now, for them to know.

An Essay on Morals
1947

closing remarks . . .

2008-04-18T20:41:00.000-07:00

The following are the closing remarks of Jeffrey Shallit during a recent debate with Kirk Durston.

Friends.

We live in exciting and dangerous times. Exciting because today we understand so much more about the world than we ever have before. We live in an immense cosmos 13.7 billion years old — I feel like Carl Sagan—a cosmos that's made up of an enormous number of fundamental particles. The particles come together and form about a hundred chemical elements that make up everything in this room and everything in your bodies. We live in a solar system that came into being from the ashes of dead starts 4.5 billion years ago. Earth, our home, orbits a sun that warms us through the reactions of nuclear fusion. —he sun is a mass of incandescent gas— and will continue to do so for billions of years. All life is intimately related. Isn't that great?
Having descended from a single life form that rose about three billion years ago. We and the apes share a common ancestor that lived in Africa about 5 million years ago. All people are truly brothers and sisters, sharing the same genetic heritage.

Now, we know these things.
How do we know them?
We know them not because of prayer, or religious revelation, or sacred texts, or meditation, or sacrificing of goats, or altered states of consciousness. We know these because generations of scientists weren't afraid to question the dogmas of their previous generations. Sometimes losing their lives or their liberties in the process. Our scientific picture of the universe is now far grander and subtler than that anything conceived by the authors of the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the Quran. And there's so much more waiting to be discovered.

But, we live in dangerous times too. We're now confronted with threats more serious than ever before. The threat of global climate change, bringing significant disruption to our lives, hangs over us. The plague of AIDS, threatens to wipe out the entire continent of Africa. Nuclear proliferation brings the specter of mass destruction, or a dirty bomb that could render a major city unlivable for hundreds or thousands of years. Faced with these threats, what does fundamentalist religion really offer? My opponent offers us the absurd and grotesque image of a supposed-created of the universe, the inventor of everything that ever was or will be, unwilling to aid us with these threats, these significant threats to our survival, but ready to subdue aggressive bulls or bring rabbits back to life for the cost of a brief prayer.

The fundamentalist God is one that is obsessively and intrusively concerned with our sex lives, but apparently unwilling to allow us to perform experiments on stem-cells to make life better for sufferers of disease.

I am a provisional non-theist, someone who has not yet been convinced by the arguments for the existence of gods of Christians, Jews , or Muslims, but I'm not the enemy of theists. On the contrary, if yours is a theism that is willing to acknowledge that your conception of God might be wrong, that your belief in a supreme being doesn't create any obligation on the part of non-believers, that your holy books are human artifacts that may be read metaphorically or might contain errors, that we should behave charitably toward our fellow humans because it's the right thing to do and not because of threats of eternal torment, then you are my brothers and sisters. Let us go and solve our problems by reasoning together without relying on the dogmas of past ages. But if your sect is the enemy of rationalism, if it requires that evolution be false or homosexuals be stoned or shunned, forbidden to teach elementary school or adopt children, if you agree with Martin Luther that a lie that serves the church is ethically acceptable or, as my opponent admitted here at the University of Waterloo, just a few months ago, that genocide is perfectly okay, if God wills it, that it's perfectly okay to kill me and everyone in this room if God told him to do it—and he was sure.

Then you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.

So the question remains, will we remain as children, consoled by the false promises of fundamentalist religion, slavishly adhering to dogma blindly following the prejudices and bigotry of past ages, or will we go forward together as adults to stand on our own, ready to face the future with reason and courage?

Let's all pray we make the right choice.

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

religion as a biological organ . . .

2007-12-10T17:39:00.000-08:00

Man is always concerned about his destiny—that is to say, his position and rôle in the universe, and how he is to maintain that position and fulfill that rôle. All societies of man developed some sort of organs for coping with this problem—organs for orientating their ideas and emotions and for constructing attitudes of mind and patterns of belief and behavior in relation to their conception of their destiny. All of the social organs concerned with destiny can, I think, properly he included under the head of religions. Even if some of them are exceedingly primitive and consist of little but magic rituals, while others are highly developed and claimed to be entirely rational, they are all, from Haitian voodoo to Roman Catholicism, from neolithic fertility religions to Marxist Communism, concerned with the same general function. In the same sort of way, the tube-feet of a starfish, the legs of a horse, the pseudopods of an amoeba, and the wings of a bird, though profoundly different organs from each other, are all animal organs concerned with the same general function of locomotion.

Julian Huxley
Religion Without Revelation
1957

Hertha

2007-12-10T01:00:00.000-08:00

I that saw where ye trod
     The dim paths of the night,
Set the shadow called God
     In your sky to give light;
But the morning of manhood is risen, and the
     shadowless soul is in sight.

The tree many-rooted
     That swells to the sky,
With frondage red-fruited
     The life-tree am I;
In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves; ye
     shall live and not die.

But the Gods of your fashion
     That take and that give,
In their pity and passion
     That scourge and forgive,
They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off;
     they shall die and not live.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne

on idolatrous foolishness ...

2007-11-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

" ... the inadequacy of the explanation does not invalidate the reality of the experience. Paul, like anyone who dares to speak of God, discovered that there is no such thing as a god language with which to process a God experience. The language we use is human, culturally conditioned, and incapable of doing more than pointing to that which it can never fully embrace. To attribute ultimate reality to the constructs of our language, to make religious claims for the human explanations for the God experience is to become idolatrous, and foolish. ...[...] ... The church must recognize that its first-century biblical explanations, its fourth and fifth-century creedal explanations and its later developing system of doctrines and dogmas are human creations, not divine revelations and none of them is either finally true or eternally valid ... [...] ... The ultimate heresy of Christianity lies not in its inability to explain adequately the Christ experience. It lies in the claim uttered through the ages that human words could not only define for all time something called orthodoxy, but that the ultimate and saving truth of the God experience could actually reside in the theological explanations."

J.S. Spong
"A Christianity for Tomorrow"
The Once and Future Faith
2001

watch that first step (it's a doozy)

2007-11-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

I
The Meaning of "God"

Knowing what one is talking about is of inestimable value in any dialogue, so the theist, before he sets out to explain why we should believe in god, must first explain what he means by the word "god". What is the theist attempting to establish the existence of? What is the nature of god? How are we to identify him (or it)? At least some of the attributes of this supposed creature must be known before anything can be considered relevant to establishing his existence. As one theist puts it, "With no description or definition to work from, we will literally fail to know what we are talking about." For example, consider the following dialogue:

Mr Jones: "A unie exists."
Mr White: "Prove it."
Mr Jones: "It has rained for three consecutive days—that is my proof."

If this exchange is less than satisfactory, much of the blame rests with Mr. White: his demand for proof is immature. Mr. Jones has not specified what an "unie" is; until and unless he does so, "unie" is nothing but a meaningless sound, and Mr. Jones is uttering nonsense. Without some description of an "unie," the alleged proof for its existence is incoherent.

When confronted with a claim that a god exists, the person who immediately demands proof commits the same error as does Mr. White. His first response should be, "What is it for which you are claiming existence?" The theist must present an intelligible description of god. Until he does so, "god" makes no more sense than "unie"; both are cognitively empty, and any attempt at proof is logically absurd. Nothing can qualify as evidence for the existence of a god unless we have some idea of what we are searching for. Even if it is demanded that the existence of god be accepted on faith, we still must know what it is that we are required to have faith in. As W.T. Blackstone puts it,

Until the content of a belief is made clear, the appeal to accept the belief is beside the point, for one would not know what one has accepted. The request for the meaning of a religious belief is logically prior to the question of accepting that belief on faith or to the question of whether that belief constitutes knowledge.

from Atheism: The Case Against God
by George H. Smith
1979

Einstein's world . . .

2007-10-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

The Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

Of Wealth

I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it.

Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Ghandi armed with the money-bags of Carnagie?

Christianity and Judaism

If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching that is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity.

It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.

Education and Educators

Dear Miss —

I have read about sixteen pages of your manuscript and it made me—smile. It is clever, well observed, honest, it stands on its own feet up to a point, and yet it is so typically feminine, by which I mean derrivative and vitiated by personal rancour. I suffered exactly the same treatment at the hands of my teachers, who disliked me for my independence and passed me over when they wanted assistants (I must admit that I was somewhat less of a model student than you). But it would not have been worth my while to write anything about my school life, still less would I have liked to be responsible for anyone's printing or actually reading it. Besides, one always cuts a poor figure if one complains about others who are struggling for their place in the sun too after their own fashion.

Therefore, pocket your temperament and keep your manuscript for your sons and daughters, in order that they might derive consolation from it and—not give a damn for what their teachers tell them or think about them.

Incidentally I am only coming to Princeton to research, not to teach. There is too much education altogether, especially in American schools. The only rational way of educating is to be an example—of what to avoid, if one can't be the other sort.

from The World As I See It.

This I Believe

2007-09-20T02:25:00.000-07:00

In every one of the higher religions there is a strain of infinite optimism on the one hand, and on the other, of a profound pessimism. In the depths of our being, they all teach, there is an inner light, but an inner light which our egotism keeps for most of the time in a state of more or less complete eclipse. If, however, it so desires, the ego can get out of the way, so to speak, can dis-eclipse the light and become identified with its divine source, hence the traditional optimism of the traditional religions. Their pessimism springs from the observed fact that, though all are called, few are chosen for the sufficient reason that few choose to be chosen. To me this older conception of man's nature and destiny seems more realistic, more nearly in accord with the given facts than any form of modern utopianism. In the lord's prayer we are taught to ask for the blessing which consists in not being led into temptation. The reason is only too obvious. When temptations are very great or unduly prolonged, most persons succumb to them. To devise a perfect social order is probably beyond our powers, but I believe that it is perfectly possible for us to reduce the number of dangerous temptations to a level far below that which is tolerated at the present time. A society so arranged that there should be a minimum of dangerous temptations, this is the end towards which as a citizen I have to strive. In my efforts to achieve that end, I can make use of a great variety of means. Do good ends justify the use of intrinsically bad means? On the level of theory, the point can be argued indefinitely. In practice, meanwhile, I find that the means employed invariably determine the nature of the end achieved. Indeed, as Mahatma Ghandi was never tired of insisting, the means ARE the end in its preliminary stages. Men have put forth enormous efforts to make their world a better place to live in, but except in regard to gadgets, plumbing and hygiene, their success has been pathetically small. Hell, as the proverb has it, is paved with good intentions, and so long as we go on trying to realize our ideals by bad or merely inappropriate means, our good intentions will come to the same bad ends. In this consists the tragedy and irony of history. Can I as an individual do anything to make future history a little less tragic and less ironic than history past and present? I believe I can. As as citizen, I can use all my intelligence and all my good will to develop political means that shall be of the same kind and quality as the ideal aims which I am trying to achieve. And as a person, as a psycho-physical organism, I can learn how to get out of the way, so that the divine source of my life and consciousness can come out of eclipse and shine through me.

Aldous Huxley
from original 1950s series, "This I Believe"

the unitary executive in the 1930s . . .

2007-09-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

Vive le Roi!

this is deliciously tongue-in-cheek

The abdication of Congress is certainly not as overt and abject as that of the German Reichstag or the Italian Parliamento; nevertheless, it has gone so far that the constitutional potency of the legislative arm is reduced to what the lawyers call a nuisance value. The two Houses can still make faces at Dr. Roosevelt, and when a strong body of public opinion happens to stand behind them they can even force him, in this detail or that, into a kind of accounting, but it must be manifest that if they tried to impose their will upon him in any major matter he could beat them easily. The only will left in the national government is his will. To all intents and purposes he is the state.

We have thus come to a sort of antithesis of the English system, under which Parliament is omnipotent and the King is only a falseface. It would be rather absurd to call the charge revolutionary, for it has been under way for more than a hundred years. Since Jackson's first election, in fact, Congress has always knuckled down to the President in times of national emergency. After 1863 Lincoln ruled like an Oriental despot, and after 1917, Wilson set himself up, not only as Emperor, but also as Pope. In 1864, as antiquaries familiar with Ex parte Merryman will recall, the Supreme Court undertook to bring old Abe to book, but as the same antiquaries know, it had to confess in the end that it could do nothing.

There is no likelihood that it will intervene in the present situation. For one thing, there seems to be no public demand that it do so. For another thing, judges as a class are naturally sympathetic toward arbitrary power, for their own authority rests upon it. Thus there seems to be every probability that Dr. Roosevelt will continue to operate as an absolute monarch, at least for some time to come. If the schemes of salvation concocted by his Brain Trust, i.e., by the King In Council, appear to be working, then no one save a few touchy senators will want to depose him. And if we continue wandering in the wilderness, with our shirttails out and the hot sun scorching our necks, then most Americans will probably hold that it is better to go on following one leader, however bad, than to start scrambling after a couple of hundred of them, each with a different compass.

My gifts as a constructive critic are of low visibility, but the state of affairs thus confronting the country prompts me to make a simple suggestion. It is that a convention be called under Article V of the Constitution, and that it consider the desirability of making Dr. Roosevelt King in name as well as in fact. There is no Constitutional impediment to such a change, and it would thus not amount to a revolution. The people of the United States are quite as free, under Article V, to establish a monarchy as they were to give the vote to women. Even if they held, as some argue, that the Bill of Rights is inviolable and cannot be changed by constitutional amendment, it may be answered that there is nothing in the Bill of Rights requiring that the national government shall be republican in form.

The advantages that lie in making Dr. Roosevelt King must be plain to everyone. His great difficulty today is that he is a candidate for reëlection in 1936, and must shape all his acts with that embarrassing fact in mind. Even with a docile Congress awaiting his orders he cannot carry on with a really free hand, for there remains a moniroty in that Congress which may, son or late, by the arts of the demagogue, convince the public, or a large part of it, that wahat he is doing is dangerous, and so his reëlection may be imperiled. To meet and circumvent this peril he must play the demagogue himself, which is to say, he must only too often subordinate what he believes to be wise to what he believes to be popular.

It is a cruel burden to lay upon a man facing a multitude of appaling problems, some of them probably next door to insoluble. No other man of genuine responsibility under our system of government is called upon to bear it. It lies, to be sure, upon Congressmen, but Congressmen, after all, are minor functuaries, and no one has expected them, these hundred years past, to be wise. We try to lighten it for Senators, who are a cut higher, by giving them six-year terms and so postponing their ordeal by ballot, and we remove it altogether for Federal judges by letting them sit during good behavior. But the President has to go on the auction block every four years, and the fact fills his mind and limits his freedom of action from the moment he takes the oath of office.

I am not a Roosevelt fanatic, certainly, though I voted for the right hon. gentleman last November, and even printed a few discreet pieces arguing that he might be worse. But it must be manifest that, in any situation as full of dynamite as the present one, it is a great advantage to have a leader who can devote his whole time and thought to the problems before him, without any consideration of extraneous matters. Yet that is precisely what, under our present system, a president cannot do. He is forced, at every moment of his first term, to remember that he may be thrown out at the end of it, and it is thus no wonder that his concern often wobbles him, and makes him a too-easy mark for the political blackmailers who constantly threaten him

If his term were unlimited, or limited only by his good behavior—in brief, if he were in the position of an elected King—he would get rid of all this nuisance, and be free to apply himself to his business. I believe that any man, under such circumstances, would do immensely better than he could possibly do under the present system. And I believe that Dr. Roosevelt, in particular, would be worth at least ten times what he is worth now, for he is a good enough politician to know that his current high and feverish popularity cannot last, democracy being what it is, and that the only way he can save himself in 1936 is by forgetting the Depression once or twice a day, and applying himself to very practical politics.

What this division of aim and interest amounts to is shown brilliantly by some of his appointments. He has made a plain effort to surround himself with men in whose competence and good faith he can put his trust, but he has been forced by the exigencies of his uncomfortable situation to give a number of important posts to political plugs of the most depressing sort. These plugs were too powerful to be flouted, and now that they are in office they are even more powerful than before. If they remain, they will disgrace the administration soon or late, and if they are turned out, they will imperil it in 1936. An elected King could rid himself of them at once, and they could do him no damage, now or hereafter.

The objections to monarchy are mainly sentimental, and do not bear well under inspection. I shall rehearse some of them at length in a future article, and try to show how hollow they are. Suffice it for the moment to glance at a few of them. One is the objection that a King, once in office, can't be got rid of. The answer is that Kings are got rid of very often, and usually very easily, and that the same constitutional convention which provided one for the United States might also provide for his ready impeachment and removal, and even for his lawful and Christian execution.

Another objection is that the problem of the succession is hard to solve, and that any King that we set up would probably want his son to succeed him, and would root for that son exactly as President in his first term now roots for himself, and in his second term for some favorite in his entourage. Well, why not? I believe that a Crown Price, brought up in his father's office, is likely to make at least as good a King as any other fellow. Moreover, is it so soon forgotten that Dr. Roosevelt himself came in as a sort of Crown Prince?—though I should add that he was challenged by a Legitimist party led de jure by the Young Pretender, Prince Theodore Minor, and de facto by Princess Alice. If His Excellency's name were Kelly, or Kraus or Kaminsky would he be in the White House today? To ask the question is to answer it. Despite the theory that Americans fear and abhor the hereditary principle they have elected one President's son to the Presidency, one President's grandson and one President's cousin, and in at least two other instances they have made motions in the same direction. This is five times in thirty-one times at the bat, or nearly one in six.

But the succession is really a minor matter. I see no objection to letting the sitting King nominate three candidates, and then choosing between them, by plebiscite, at his death. His nominations, at worst, would be far better than any that professional politicians could or would make, and three nominees would give the voters sufficient choice. There remains the problem of starting the ball rolling. But that problem, as I have sought to show, is already solved. We have a King in the White House at this minute, and he is quite as much of the Blood Royal as George V. All that remains is to call a constitutional convention, and, as it were, make an honest woman of him.

H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun
1 May 1933

J. Huxley on the Trinity . . .

2006-09-30T14:53:00.000-07:00

Chapter 2
A Preliminary Interpretation

If what I have said in the preceding chapter is in principle correct (In which he professes a disbelief in either revelation or prophecy or the supernatural), then current theology requires re-interpretation. It is also evident that many differences of details would be possible in the interpretation, according both to the church or the sect chosen and to the individual temperament of the interpreter. That elasticity of framework which has made it possible for Christianity to appeal to men of all grades of culture and to societies in all stages of developments is one of the most noticeable facts about it. God the Father, for instance, must wear very different aspects to a Catholic mystic and a Hell-fire revivalist preacher.

But the broad outlines of the picture were drawn alike for all by the council of Nicæa, when it laid down the doctrine of the Trinity with its three co-equal persons. That doctrine, inspite of occasional intellectual revolts from its incomprehensibility, has appealed to the European mind for so many centuries that even the most bigoted opponent of Christianity would have to admit that the doctrine satisfies certain human needs and corresponds in some way with reality.

As I see it broadly, 'God the Father' is a personification of the forces of non-human nature; 'God the Holy Ghost' represents all ideals; and 'God the Son' personifies human nature at its highest, as actually incarnate in bodies and organised in minds, bridging the gulf between the other two, and between each of them and every day human life. And the unity of the three persons as 'One God' represents the fact that all these aspects of reality are inextricably interconnected.

The First Person of the Trinity, on this view, would be the theological name for the outer force and law which surround man whether he likes it or not. There may be mind and spirit behind these powers, but there is none in them. The powers thus symbolised are strange, often seeming definitely alien, or even hostile to man and his desires. They go their ways inevitably, without regard for human emotions or wishes. They constitute the mysterium tremendum of religion. On the other hand, they are not always hostile or alien. The spring follows the winter; nature may bring the storm and the flood, but she also blesses with abundance; the powers of nature kill and terrify, but they also bring the sun to shine, and the breeze to blow, and the birds to sing; they are powers of generation as well as of death.

In general, the forces and powers personified as the First Person are those which affect human life not only with their inevitability, but also with their quality of being entirely outside man. They may influence and subdue man, or man may influence them and control them; they and man's mind may be fused in experience; but in themselves thay are not only given, but external.

The realities symbolised in the Third Person of the Trinity, however, if my reading of theology is at all correct, are those which are equally given, but, from the point of view of humanity as a whole, internal. From the point of view of the individual man, on the other hand, they have the peculiar quality of being felt as partly internal, immanent, belonging to the self; partly external, transcendent, and far greater than the personal self. They are ideals of value, and are inevitable to an organism which like man has reached the level of conceptual thought.

Once general ideals are possible, they come to include abstract ideas and ideals. If I can make use of conceptual thought at all, I can have the general idea of truth in the same way as I can have the general ideas of circularity or hardness. But the general idea of circularity embraces not only the individual circular objects I have known, but includes them all in and refers them all to an abstract idea of perfect circularity, to which only approximations can ever in actual fact be made. So, with even more force, as regards hardness; and so with truth. Truth includes not only all the true propositions that I know and their individual if partial trueness, but also the ideal of complete and absolute truth by which every proposition must be judged as to its individual truth. And the same is the case with the moral virtues like mercy or courage or justice, with the ethical virtues of righteousness, with the æsthetic virtue of beauty. As soon as we begin to think at all, we perceive there is an ideal beyond every actual; and the more we think, the higher and the more extensive does that ideal become.

As we advance in experience, we find that our own discoveries, however intense, are but a limited and minute fraction of those that are possible; our knowledge of the actual and our conception of the ideal both enlarge enormously as a result of discovering the discoveries of others. With this the ideal becomes less merely personal, and is discovered as coextensive with humanity and thus, while losing nothing of its height, acquires new vastness of extension.

The rôle [sic] of different ideals within that sphere of reality which has been personified as the Holy Spirit has differed enormously in different ages and in different individuals and sects. It differs according to the scale of values which is adopted.

To take a few extreme cases, partly from other fields, there have been artists to whom æsthetic truth, artistic rightness of perception and expression, have been infinitely more important , more valuable to them, than intellectual truth or any moral qualities. Their contemporaries have generally rebrobated them, but posterity has been blessed in their achievements. In precisely the same way the man of science may live mainly and chiefly for the discovery of new truth, and put that at the top of his pyramid of values, neglecting beauty and the more human and domestic virtues. Or, finally, there have been many religious men and women who have found the assurance of salvation, the sense of righteousness, or the delights of religious contemplation, so far more valuable than anything else that they have 'made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake' or in other ways expressed their asceticism and their contempt for so-called earthly values, or have given themselves up so completely to the mystic life, neglecting good works and ordinary religious observance as well as secular values, that they have become objects of scandal even to the faithful.

In general, however, the ideals enshrined in the conception of the Holy Ghost include in the highest rank those of Righteousness with special reference to purity, and of Truth with special reference to the sense of illumination, though they, of course, include many others as well. But it should not be supposed that the reality behind the Third Person of the Trinity consists solely of ideals. It includes also all those 'winds of the spirit' which appear to come from some extra-personal region to fill the sails of the mind. We all know well enough that we may perceive an ideal, understand that it should be followed, and yet draw on no interior force which enables us to live by it or through it; and equally that we may be seized and possessed by spiritual forces which we do not recognise as having previously been part of our personality, uprushing we know not whence to drive us onwards in the service of some ideal. This, in some form or another, appears to be the almost universal experience of those who in obedience to their temperament and gifts have devoted themselves to pure art, pure science, pure philosophy, or pure religion: they seem when most successful in their work to be least personal. The same in its degree is true of all of us in our everyday life. General Booth once said that religion was something that came to us from outside: this is a singularly unsatisfactory definition, since it would apply equally well to a dozen other activities of the mind -- we have only to recollect what we experienced when we first fell in love, or when we performed some action in obedience to a sense of inward compulsion, but against all the feelings of our everyday personality.

The reality behind all these cases of irruptive spiritual force is constituted by those parts of the inborn capacities of mind and soul which have not been utilised in the building-up of personality. These inborn capacities of men, theirs through no merit or fault of their own, are given to them once and for all by heredity and early environment. The utmost that we, as individuals and persons, can do is to utilise fully the capacities which are thus presented for our use; we often do not even use them, but leave them to rust.

The contemplation of our own selves and human nature, the miracle of its existence as a product of natural evolution, the amazing fact that a man is a mere portion of the common and universal substance of the world, but so organised as to be able to know truth, will the control of nature, aspire to goodness, and experience unutterable beauty -- that is perhaps the fullest way in which the givenness of our capacities comes home to us. But it is not everyone who is prone to contemplation. To most people the two chief ways in which this reality (which I have assumed to be one basis for the doctrine for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit) becomes realised are in the irruption into conscious life of mental powers not at all or not fully utilised in the building up of personality, and in the swallowing up of self or personality in the consciousness of something larger and more embracing. The building up of personality consists in adjusting the wholly or partially disconnected instincts and tendencies with which we are born into a connected whole in which the parts are in organic relation with each other; to this we are forced by experience, by the outer and inner conflicts which naturally occur but must be adjusted if we are to lead a life worth living, and by the light of reason which confronts the actual with the possible and the ideal.

This organised mutual relation of mental capacities and tendencies, each adjusted in some measure to the rest, and each thus becoming not merely one in a sum of properties, but an essential part of an organic unity, is what we call the personal self. But it is by no means necessary that all our capacities should be early or indeed ever thus organised, they remain outside the self, outside the personality. On the other hand, it is always possible for some experience to bring any such disconnected portion of our mental and spiritual outfit into connection with the organised part, and for this connection to be not merely a transitory one, but to remain, and to involve the permanent addition of something new to the personal organism. Whether the connection be permanent or merely temporary, it is often experienced as the irruption of something outside the self into the self; it is also often experienced as a recognition of mental forces within the self which had previously been unrecognised -- a bewildering sense of powers which seem at the same time immanent and transcendent in regard to the self. Both these ways of experience will be realised to be perfectly natural if the principle which I have outlined of the upbuilding of personality is accepted. There must always be a fringe of faculty only in part and dimly connected with the strongly personal central core where organisation has proceeded furthest. There may also be wholly untapped regions, or, more frequently, minor systems which are definitely kept apart from the majority by the psychological forces of repression. The more apart or the more unrealised the faculty has been, the more its recognition will come as a sense of an external gift: the more it has been un subconscious connection with the rest, the more it will appear as immanent. But in most cases at least the experience will combine the two at first sight incompatible notions of invasion of the self from outside, and the discovery of powers that are permanently and inevitably immanent within the self.

The other aspect of this problem to which I referred consists in the process, in a sense opposite to that we have just been considering, in which the personality, instead of adding to itself, has the sensation of being swallowed up in something larger than personality. This, however, will occur naturally whenever the pursuit of some ideal comes to dominate strongly over the immediate interests of the self. Any ideal, by its very nature, is beyond the limitations of the individual, beyond the particulars of place or time: and yet, or course, the ideal in any actual case is grasped and acted upon by an individual personality. Here again, therefore, there comes in the double sense of internal and external, immanence and transcendence in combination. Complete absorption in a mathematical problem, complete disregard of danger in the wish to save a child from a burning house, complete neglect of all the ordinary business of life by the man or woman in love, complete oblivion of the outer world in mystical contemplation, whether religious or æsthetic -- in all such occasions self is forgotten, the ordinary interests of the personality are swallowed up and dominated by a supra-personal interest which yet is organically connected with the personality.

In all cases, in our attempt to translate the terms of Christian theology into terms of our own, we may say that what has been described as the Holy Spirit is that part of human nature which impresses by its givenness, by its transcendence of the personal self regarded as a self-centered mental organisation, and by its compulsive power of driving human nature on towards an ideal.

Finally, there remains the second person, the Logos, the Son. In order not to be misinterpreted, let me remind my readers at the outset that orthodox theology, in regard to the Second Person of the Trinity, presents us with a doctrine far from simple, the result of a long process of development. The original idea of a temporal Messiah, destined in his lifetime to lead the chosen people to success, soon gave place to that of a Messiah shortly to come again in glory and bring the end of the world and the justification of the elect. As time went slowly by and the Second Coming tarried, this idea too faded, and the messianic idea was transferred more and more to the kingdom that is within, to the problem of personal salvation. Here it made intimate contact with various of the existing mystery religions, which, long before the birth of Jesus, were built upon the idea od worshippers obtaining holiness through some form of mystical communion with the god, and upon the possibility of transfering sacredness from god to man; Christianity both borrowed and lent to these, on the whole receiving more than it gave. In the first few centuries of its existence (almost one century, actually; the earliest fragment of an NT manuscript that we have - a fragment of the Gospel of John, a work which begins with this concept of the Logos which Philo had previously described in the forties - a decade before Saul of Tarsus wrote his surviving letters - dates to circa 125 c.e. - ed.) it also made intimate contact with the Judaised Greek philosophy of which Philo is the most celebrated representative. Here it encountered the idea of the Logos and eventually incorporated it, in a way peculiarly its own, with the messianic idea, both of course being linked with the historical figure of Jesus. But even so, the doctrine of the Second Person was by no means established. As everyone who has an elementary acquaintance with Church history is aware, the full divinity of the Son -- Messiah-Logos-Jesus -- was long in dispute. For a large and important body, Christ was definitely less than divine, subordinate to God; and it was only after three centuries of theological dispute and development that the council of Nicea gave Christianity the doctrine of Christ as co-equal with God the Father, which it has retained with little or no modification to the present day.

When I speak of the Second Person of the Trinity, therefore, I am not referring to the historical Jesus, nor to the idea of Jesus which was present to the minds of the twelve apostles or the early church, but to this complex idea, as presented in the Nicene creed and subsequent theology, deriving from Jewish and pagan religious sources, from Greek philosophy, and from patristic theology, as well as from the man Jesus, the facts of his life and death, and the legends associated with him.

Ad this, I make bold to say, embodies the fundamental reality that only through human nature, through personalities with all their limitations, is the infinite of the ideal made finite and actual, is the potential which we have recognized behind the term Holy Spirit realised in the world, is the apparently discontinuity between matter and spirit bridged over. Modern science is able in one not unimportant particular to amplify the original doctrine. Through our knowledge of evolutionary biology, we can see that human nature is not, as a matter of fact, alone in this; but that human nature merely does more efficiently, more completely, consciously, and on a definitely higher plane, what other life had been doing gropingly, unconsciously, and partially for æons before man ever was. We can therefore say that the nature which finds its highest expression in human nature constitutes this bridge; since, however, it is, so far as we know, only human nature which mediates fully, or indeed at all in certain domains, between ideal and actual, between spiritual and material, it is only human nature which need be fully considered, although the evolutionary background lends a richness and solidity of foundation to all the conceptions involved.

This same conception, of human nature being in its highest aspects divine, is found in many places. It animates the myth of Prometheus who stole divine fire from heaven for man. It underlies the frequent deification, usually after death, of heroes and great men. Even in our own days there has been a definite cult of Lenin in Russia, his picture taking precisely the same place in some households which the sacred ikons do in others; and Mussolini was known as 'the Myth' by the more enthusiatic of his followers. It is at the root of Blake's allegorical mysticiam, and Wordsworth's famous Ode. It made possible the existence and power of such ideas as the divine right of kings or the infallibility and supreme power of the popes, as well as the actual deification and worship of the Roman Emperors during their lifetime.

To me it is simply the obverse of the ideas which have already been considered in relation to the Christian doctrine of the Holy Ghost. It is a matter of plain fact that all the faculties of human nature which seem most obviously immanent, yet posses in some degree the property of transcendence, in the same way in which the reverse was also found true. And this, as I have already tried to indicate, follows inevitably from the human faculty of conceptual thought, the concept always, by its mere nature, transcending every particular in general, and automatically providing an ideal goal for every direction and every striving.

Orthodox theology, naturally moving within the bounds of the theistic conception, prefers to interpret these facts by saying that God was incarnated in human nature in the person of Jesus; and, when both liberal and logical, by admitting also that God is partially incarnated in all human beings.

I prefer to say that the spiritual elements which are usually styled divine are part and parcel of human nature. Thus, the reality personified as the Second Person of the Trinity becomes to our re-interpretation the mediating faculty of human persons between the infinity of the ideal and the finite actuality of existence.

Finally, there remains the relation between the three persons of the Trinity, regarded as personifications of three aspects of reality. It has been in one sense the great triumph of Christianity to have built up this elastic and vital doctrine of the Trinity, in spite of its apparent incomprehensibility. This doctrine, for instance, made it clear that the object of worship was not merely external power which must be feared or loved as the case may be, but also internal power, immanent in or at least entering into human nature, and operating through and by means of human nature. In thus combining external and internal, it has been at a considerable advantage over completely monotheistic religions like Islam, which inevitably lay too much stress upon external power, and also over non-theistic religions like pure Buddhism, which inevitably lay too much stress upon the inner life and divorce it as far as possible from outer realities. It also, through having the three persons combined into an indivisible whole, has been at an advantage over all polytheistic religions (Santeria? - ed), in which various aspects of reality are inevitably given too great sharpness and independence of each other.

In our task of re-interpretation, we must ask what is the reality which is symbolised by the union of the three persons in one God. It is in this aspect of theology that I think the facts of science may be seen to have the greatest value. Science has gone a very long way towards providing an essential unity of all phenomena. It has at least provided a strong basis for a reasonable belief in their unity and continuity, which, in the way in which it formulates itself to me personally, I will do my best to summarise here.

I personally believe in the uniformity of nature, in other words, that Nature is seen to be orderly once we take the trouble to find out the way of her orderliness, and that there are not two realms of reality, one natural, the other supernatural and from time to time invading and altering the course of events in the natural.

I believe also in the unity of nature. Scientific discovery has tended without ceasing to reduce the number of substances with which we have to deal. There exist a milliom different species of animals and plants, each chemically different from the rest; each species contains thousands or millions of chemically different individuals; there exist almost an equally unlimited number of separate and different substances of non-living matter. Yet all these, whether alive or not, work with the same energy, are built up out of the same matter, resolvable into the same few score elements, and these very elements in their turn (so the physicists tell us) are merely so many different quantitative arrangements of two kind of units, of positive and negative electricity. If the trend of discovery continue, we shall eventually be enabled to see these positive and negative electricities as two modifications of the same basic unitary substance.

I believe in unity by continuity. Matter does not appear or disappear, nor do living things arise except from previously existing things essentially like themselves. The more complex matter that is alive must at some time have originated from matter that was not alive, but again by gradual continuity, so that only by comparing the last stage with the first could one see how considerable had been the achievement. I believe in the continuity of all matter, living or non-living; and I believe also in the continuity of mind. If, as is the case, mind and matter coexist in the higher animals and man; and if, as is now certain, the higher animals and man are descended from lower animals, and these in their turn from lifeless matter, then there seems no escape from the belief that all reality has both a material and a mental side, however rudimentary and below the level of anything like our consciousness that mental side may be.

In any case, I believe in the unity of mind and matterin the one ultimate world-substance, as two of its aspects. Such a view makes it unnecessary and ideed impossible to ask the question whether matter can have a direct effect on mind or mind on matter. I believe that whenever a thought passes in the mind, it is accompanied by a definite physical change in the brain. That particular physical change could no more happen without the passage of that particular thought than vise versa. When we say that a drug affects the mind, we mean that the drug affects the physical brain-process, and therefore the thought. When we say that the will affects the body, we mean that the body could only be affected in that particular way by a mental process called willing together with its necessary physical accompaniment. Mental and material are thus, to my belief, but two aspects of one reality, two abstractions made by us from the concrete ground of experience; they cannot really be separated, and it is false philosophy to try to think them apart.

This does not, of course, imply that the mental side of one process of reality may not be negligible, while in some other process it overshadows the material; any more than that it is impossible for one aspect of the material side--say the mechanical--to preponderate in one process, another--say the chemical--in another.

All reality then consists, as Whitehead put it, of events. The events are all the events in the history of a single substance. The events looked at from outside are matter; experienced from inside, they are mind.

These assurances of unity, uniformity, and continuity, derived from the discoveries of physico-chemical science and evolutionary biology were not available to the intellectual enquirers of earlier ages, who could thus only guess in the dark. The speculations of the Greek philosophers, for instance, as to the ultimate elements out of which the world is built and as to the evolution of life are in no way comparable to the view of science to-day. The one can rightly be described as a set of philosophic myths, while the other reposes upon tested and organised experience.

Utilising these assurances as part of our background, we can then proceed to envisage the relation between the three aspects of the unity of nature symbolised as the three persons of the Trinity somewhat as follows. The first person represents the power and externality of matter and material law, given and inexplicable. The third person represents the illumination and compulsive power of thought, feeling, will--thefaculties of mind in its highest ranges and at the level when it deals with universals; these are also inexplicable, but must be accepted as given. The second person is the link between the other two; it is life, in concrete actuality, mediating between ideal and practice, incarnating (in perfectly literal phrase) more and more of spirit in matter. This progressive incarnation may be unconscious, as appears to be the case with organic evolution, or conscious, as in the deliberate attempt in man to realise his visions.

And all non-living nature is one matter; all life is constructed of and sprung from this same matter. Further, all thought and emotion, even the highest, spring from natural mind, whose slow development can be traced in life's evolution, so that life in general and man in particular are those parts of the world substance in which the latent mental properties are revealed to their fullest extent. Thus, the three apects of reality, so separate at first glance, are in point of fact genetically related in a single unity.

On the Moral side too this unity underlying apparent diversity can also be traced. It may not solve the problem of evil, which is probably insoluble in the form in which it is usually stated, but it does contribute to the idea of a moral unity when movements and actions which at first sight seem neutral or evil are found on analysis to be inextricably part and parcel of a larger movement towards good. This is quite definitely so in regard to biological progress, and is also a commonplace of the human moralist.

***

Julian Huxley
from
Religion Without Revelation
1957

deva ju all over again . . . ?

2006-08-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

How did the colonies win the war?

Does this sound familiar? The world's most powerful nation is caught up in a war against a small guerrilla army. This superpower must resupply its troops from thousands of miles away, a costly endeavor, and support for the war at home is tentative, dividing the nation's people and leadership. The rebels also receive financial and military support from the superpower's chief military and political antagonist. As the war drags on and casualties mount, generals are disgraced, and the rebels gain momentum, even in defeat.

The United States in Vietnam? It could be. But it is also the story of the British loss of the American colonies. There are numerous parallels between the two conflicts. For the United States, substitute England under George III, the dominant world power of the day, but caught up in a draining colonial conflict that stretches its resources. For the Vietcong, substitute the colonial army under Washington, a ragtag collection if ever there was one, who used such unheard-of tactics as disguising themselves in British uniforms and attacking from the rear. British generals, accustomed to precisely drawn battle formations, were completely taken aback, just as American commanders schooled in the tank warfare of World War II were unprepared for the jungles of Vietnam. For foreign support, substitute England's chief European adversary, France (as well as Spain and the Netherlands) for the Soviet (and the Red Chinese) supplying the Vietcong.

There can be no question that without France's armies, money, and supplies (as much as 90% of the American gunpowder used in the war came from France), the American forces could not have won. Why did the French do it? Certainly King Louis XVI and his charming wife, Marie Antoinette, had no particular sympathy for anti-monarchist, democratic rabble. Their motive, actually the strategy of a pro-American minister, the Comte de Vergennes, was simple: to bloody England's nose in any way they could and perhaps even win back some of the territory lost after the Seven Years War. Had the monarchy and aristocracy of France known that their own subjects would be greatly inspired by the American Revolution a few years later, the French royalty might have thought the matter over a bit longer. An American loss might have saved their necks. C'est la vie!

Equally important to America's victory was the consistent bungling of the British high command, which treated the war as an intolerable inconvenience. At any number of points in the fighting, particularly in the early years, before France was fully committed, aggressive generalship from various British commanders might have turned the tide.

If Washington's army had been destroyed after Long Island or Germantown . . .

If Congress had been captured and shipped off to England for trial -- and most likely the noose . . .

And what if England had "won"? Could it possibly have maintained sovereignty over a large, prosperous, diverse, and expanding America, a vast territory far richer in resources than England? It is unlikely. Independence was a historical inevitability, in one form or another. It was simply an idea whose (sic) time had come, and America was not alone, as the revolutions that followed in Europe would prove.

The British had to weigh the costs of maintaining their dominance against its returns. They would have seen, as America did in Vietnam, and as the Soviets did more recently in Afghanistan, that the cost of such wars of colonial domination are usually more than a nation is willing or able to bear.

It's a pity that America's military and political leaders never learned a lesson from our own past, a fact that speaks volumes about the arrogance of power.

The preceding paragraphs comprise the closing section of the chapter on the American Revolution in Kenneth C. Davis' Don't Know Much About History: Everything you need to learn about American history but never learned.

The need for a Vatican III

2006-08-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

The following is a speech given by James Caroll, the author of Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, upon receiving the Melcher Book Award from the Unitarian Universalist Association for that best-selling work at a Cambridge Forum on Thursday, April 18, 2002. The book is a powerful and disturbing analysis of the history of Christian, especially Roman Catholic, anti-semitism. In it he argues that Christians took anti-Semitic forks in the road when they might well have written a less tragic history by following another road. Carroll depicts Christian attitudes towards Jews as grudging acceptance at best, a general hostility, and a long series of atrocities culminating in the shoah, Hitler's 'final solution.'

No peace.
No peace among nations without peace among religions. No peace among religions without serious religious dialogue. No serious religious dialogue without basic investigations and corrections of foundational assumptions.

A paraphrase of the great mantra of our contemporary public life - who'd have thought it - from Hans Kung, the great contemporary Swiss Roman Catholic theologian. Constantine's Sword is a history of Christian anti-semitism, culminating, of course, in the great revelation of its inexorable dynamic that was the holocaust, and at the conclusion of Constantine's Sword, in a way the most controversial portion of this book, I draw conclusions from the history that require fundamental correction of basic assumptions of my own Roman Catholic tradition, and in this evening's observance, I presume to read one argument for correction that was a conclusion of my study of Christian anti-semitism culminating in the holocaust and the reason I am reading it is because of its evident relevance to the broad present crisis in Roman Catholicism having nothing to do with anti-semitism that has gripped the public imagination so powerfully in recent months. Aware of the poignant, shameful and tragic fact that what the holocaust failed to do, [that is, to ] evoke a broad and urgent sense of the need for reform in the Catholic people, the priestly sex abuse scandal has done quite powerfully in a very short time. The broad urgent sense of the need for reform in the Catholic people and beyond the Catholic people of this institution. At the end of Constantine's Sword, I propose that many Catholics of my kind long for a third Vatican council, a fundamental institutional act of correction - self criticism - and I presume to read for you this evening, because of its present relevance, what I call Agenda Item 4 of my proposal for Vatican III, "The holiness of democracy", an agenda item prompted in this book by the history of Christian anti-semitism, but clearly called for by the urgent present crisis.

So, agenda item #4 for this dreamed third Vatican council:

The holiness of Democracy

My dear fellow citizens;
For forty years on this day you have heard from my predecessors the same thing in a number of variations, how our country is flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produce, how happy we all are, how we trust our government and what bright prospects lie ahead of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I too should lie to you.

So began the address with which the playright and dissident Václav Havel assumed the presidency of Czechoslovakia. The speech was delivered on that first day of 1990. The momentuous events of the previous months in the nations of eastern Europe symbolized by the breaching of the Berlin wall in November of 1989 had amounted to an unpredicted outbreak of democratic fervor, as Havel put it, humanistic and democratic traditions about which there had been so much idle talk did after all slumber in the unconscious of our nations and our national minorities. In that short period the social structures of totalitarianism were transformed, not only in the satellite states of the Soviet Union, but in Russia itself, not only in Europe but in South Africa, and the dramatic changes came about almost completely without blood in the streets because the masses of ordinary people in many nations discovered within themselves an irresistible civic identification, an urge to participate in the public life of society, a readiness to claim those nations as their own. Citizens of western Europe and of America, where democratic traditions were already established, could only behold the political transformation of the velvet revolution with an unbridled sense of wonder. What we saw played out again and again in those years, acts of staggering courage, Havel declining a strings-attached release from prison, Lech Wałęsa openly convening meetings of the outlawed Solidarity, Boris Yeltzin standing on that Russian tank saying, in effect, you will have to kill me to do this. What we saw played out was the drama of democracy itself, entire peoples taking responsibility for themselves and for their societies. We in the west had never seen before so clearly how the political system under which we lived and which we took for granted counted as a moral absolute. Democracy was a value of the highest order, and the impulse to embrace it, at great cost, lived unquenchably in the human heart. Beginning in 1989, the world beheld something sacred and the business of a third Vatican council must be to honor that sacredness. Vatican III must end the church tradition of opposition to, or at best ambivalence about, democracy. Vatican III, that is, must celebrate the dignity of every human life. Vatican II must uphold the importance of treating each one equally. Vatican III must affirm the holiness of democracy.

To their everlasting credit the Christian churches of Europe supported and in some instances sponsored the 1980s' flowering of democratic spirit. The churches were especially helpful in keeping violence at bay. Lutheran pastors in east Germany played crucial roles in challenging the German democratic republic and the Catholic church especially in Poland was a source of spiritual and at times political inspiration and sustenance to the dissidents and pope John Paul II himself was an avatar of anti-communist resistance. His biographers uniformly credit him sometimes with Ronald Reagan as the man who did the most to bring down the totalitarian system that he had opposed since his youth in Krakow. Opposition to Stalinism is not the same thing, however, as support for the principle of constitutional democracy, and the Roman Catholic church has yet to shed its suspicion of, and even its hostility to governments that invest the people with ultimacy, or rather, governments in which the people do the investing. This has been especially true in the Vatican suppression of liberation theology, which is a religious affirmation of the politican ideal of "rights for all". Thus, in opposing Soviet totalitarianism, the Catholic church nevertheless maintained its internal commitment to methods that undergird totalitarianism, which was why, even as the system crumbled, the church was doing its part to support Latin American oligarchies. The same John Paul II who sponsored the most politically engaged Catholic church of modern times in Poland, even to the extent of funneling large sums of money from the Vatican to Solidarity condemned, silenced, and disciplined priests and nuns in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Haiti, and Mexico because of their so-called political activity. The pope who wants to make Pius XII a saint is reticent about Oscar Romero, the bishop of El Salvador who was slain at the altar. The pope who rallied against the ruthless dictators of communism was the first and only head of state in the world to recognize the legitimacy of the military junta that overthrew the democratically elected president of Haiti and former priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide. I say "so-called" political activity because the priests and nuns of the liberation insisted that their actions had more to do with their reading of the gospel than any political tract. Observers of the difference between the Catholic hierarchy in, say, Poland where the church lent support to Solidarity, and in Nicaragua, where the church was a [pititive] channel of money from the CIA during Reagan's Contra war, were left with the feeling that it was not totalitarianism as such that the church opposed, only totalitarianism that was unfriendly to the church. It was one thing for pope Innocent III to declare the Magna Carta null and void in 1215 bacause it violated the divinely instituted order of hierarchy, and it was quite another for the Vatican to equate pluralism with marxism as it did in 1999. It is impossible to reconcile a rejection of pluralism with an authentic commitment to democracy, and a Catholic devotion to the eradication of pluralism remains dangerous. Internal church policies have relevance here, because the use of anathemas, bannings, and excommunications to enforce a rigidly controlled intellectual discipline inside the church reveals an institution that has yet to come to terms with basic ideas like freedom of conscience and the dialectical nature of rational inquiry. As we saw in our consideration of Spinoza, the very idea of constitutional democracy begins with the insight that government exists to protect the interior freedom of citizens to be different from one another an to cling if they choose to opposite notions of truth. The political implementation of this insight requires a separation of church and state, since the state's purpose is to shield the citizen's conscience from impositions by any religious entity, and we saw that Spinoza's arrival at this position came as a direct consequence of his family's experience with the inquisition. The Roman Catholic church has repudiated the inquisition but it continues to hold ideas that produced it. The Vatican's panic-driven sequence of condemnations in the 19th century, condemnations of socialism, communism, rationalism, pantheism, subjectivism, modernism, even of Americanism, added up to a resolute denunciation of everything that we mean by democracy. From the standpoint of the hill overlooking the Tiber all of this was simply an effort to defend the key idea that the worlds of science, culture, politics, and learning, all worlds that could easily be associated with jews, were apparently conspiring to attack. Spinoza himself had seemed to attack it, the idea that there is one objective and absolute truth, and that its custodian is the Catholic church. Again, we think of the papal apology of March 2000. That was the beginning of a process, not the completion of one, because while John Paul II confessed the sin of "the use of violence that some have resorted to in the service of the truth" (thinking of the inquisition), the apology did not confront the implications of the still-maintained idea of the truth. Universalist claims for Jesus as the embodiment of the one objective and absolute truth launched from the battlement-like pulpits of the basilicas have landed with explosions in the streets for centuries. Nothing demonstrates the link joining philosophical assumptions, esoteric theology, and political conflict better than the course of the church's own christology, its thoelogy of Jesus. The violence of heresy hunts in the 4th and 5th centuries is tied to that story, the theology of Jesus, and so at its other end is the violence of Europe's imperial colonizers who even into the 20th century felt free to decimate native populations, poor devils, because they were heathens. Hanging from the line joining those two posts, in addition to the inquisition, are the religious wars waged in the name of Jesus not only against heathens and against jews but against other christians who believed, but wrongly. Underlying all of this is a question that the Roman Catholic church has yet to confront and that the third Vatican Council must confront, a question the answer to which shapes attitudes toward democracy, a question the answer to which has profound relevance to the churche's past and future relations with jews. It is a question to which jews themselves must respond in regarding new corrections of their own attitudes of monotheism, election, and chosenness equivalent to the Catholic correction required by the church's self-understanding in Carl Reiner's phrase "as itself as the absolute religion". It is the question that was put most famously by Pontius Pilate in the Pilate-exonerating Gospel of St. John. This was an instance before Pilate told the Jews that Jesus was innocent, preparing the ground for the Jewish condemnation and the permanent Jewish bloodguilt: "Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice," Jesus told Pilate, to which the Roman replied, "What is truth?" Latin philosophy had long answered that question by appealing to an objective and external order. We have seen that various traditions claiming Plato and Aristotle as patrons gave shape to the Christian theologies. The dualism of Christian platonism posited a divide between nature and grace, with grace the realm of truth, approachable only through faith. The more rationalistic tradition of Thomas Aquinas affirmed the compatability of nature and grace. The knowability of God through reason. But in asserting the absolute character of truth, Thomas Aquinas took note of the problem that occurs when a contingent nature-bound creature attempts to perceive the truth. Truth, he said, is perceived in the mode of the perceiver; human perception can take in absolute truth, but not absolutely. Thus Thomas makes a modest claim for human knowing, with room for ambiguity, which means with room for diverse claims made in the name of truth. Alas, this aspect of Thomas Aquinas' subtlety would be lost to the Catholic church in the rigidities to the response to the reformation.

Religious pluralism, which is the ground of democracy, begins with the acknowledgement of the universal impossibility of direct knowledge of God. The immediate consequence of this universal ignorance is that we should regard each other respectfully and lovingly, but our clear statement of christian openness to the other is its own revelation. In the Epistle of John God is defined as, most simply, love, but it is also true that that epistle is attributed to the author of the fourth gospel. The fourth gospel was written apparently about the turn of the first century. It was addressed to Christian communities that were riven with the dusputes that had come after the destruction of the temple, and with the first serious conflict between what was becoming known as "the Church" and the synagogue. This plea, that we think of God as love, whatever else it referred to, concerned the tragedy that was then beginning to unfold and it concerned the tragedy that was embodied above all in the Gospel of John, for it was that gospel which more than any other demonized the Jews and the tragedy is underscored further by the fact that in that same letter of John, as if understanding what was already at stake in this conflict berween the followers of Jesus who identified themselves as Jews and those who had begun to identify themselves as something else. John begged hi readers to not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and who murdered his brother. Why did he murder his brother? Because of his own deeds which were evil and his brothers' were righteous. This tragedy, in other words, of murder must forever warn us of cheap talk of love. It is all too soon and all too easily that the followers of Jesus were able and ready to identify themselves as the sons of Able and to identify Cain with Jews. That sin, embedded in the gospel itself, is proof of why the Christian church in general and the Catholic church in particular needs democracy, for the assumption of democratic politics, in addition to the assumption that all citizens can contribute to the truth-seeking conversation, is that all citizens also are constitutionally incapable of truth-seeking and steadfast loving. God may be love, but the polis is not, and neither is the church.

So we come full circle and we recall that the language of love is often used by those who are in power while the language of justice is used by those who suffer the abuse of power. The language of love is not enough because the language of love does not protect us from our failures to love. Only the language of justice does that. Democracy assumes that a clear-headed assesment of the flaws of members extends to everyone, but even leaders of democracies, especially in the United States perhaps, salt their speeches with Christian chauvinism, with an excluding religiosity, assuming that a democratic polity could be called univical (no voices, that is) for religious minorities or those of no religion. And that, finally, is why a democracy assumes that everyone must be protected from the unchecked, uncritized, unregulated power of everybody else, including the well-meaning leader. The universal experience of imperfection, cynitude and self-centeredness is the pessimistic ground of democratic hope. We saw that in Spinoza's story, which was after all the story of a man constructing the democratic ideal out of the cruelties that were inflicted in the name of God. The church's own experience, in particular its gravest sin in relation to love, proves how desperately in need of democratic reform the Catholic church is. Vatican III must therefore turn the church away from monarchy and toward democracy, as the Roman Catholic people have, in fact, already done. Vatican III must restore the broken authority of the church by locating authority in the place where it belongs, which is with the people, through whom in this faith the holy spirit breathes. Vatican III must affirm that democracy itself is the lates gift from God, who operates in history, and the only way for the church to affirm democracy is by embracing it. The old disputes between popes and kings over who appoints bishops was resolved in favor of the pope, but bishops now should be chosen by the people they serve. The clerical caste, a vestige of the medieval court, should be eliminated. Vatican III must establish equal rights for women in every sphere, a system of checks and balances, due process, legislative norms designed to assure equality for all instead of superiority for some, freedom of expression, and above all, freedom of conscience. All of this must be established within the church, not because the time of liberalism has arrived, but because this long and sorry story of church hatred of Jews only lays bare the structures of oppression that must be dismantled once and for all, and not only the sad and sorry story of the hatred of Jews.

Thank you.

two short poems

2006-02-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream-
ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beau-
tiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little
ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

------------------------

A Knock On The Door

They ask me if I've ever thought about the end of
the world, and I say, "Come in, come in, let me
give you some lunch, for God's sake." After a few
bites it's the afterlife they want to talk about.
"Ouch," I say, "did you see that grape leaf
skeletonizer?" Then they're talking about
redemption and the chosen few sitting right by
His side. "Doing what?" I ask. "Just sitting?" I
am surrounded by burned up zombies. "Let's
have some lemon chiffon pie I bought yesterday
at the 3 Dog Bakery." But they want to talk about
my soul. I'm getting drowsy and see butterflies
everywhere. "Would you gentlemen like to take a
nap, I know I would." They stand and back away
from me, out the door, walking toward my
neighbors, a black cloud over their heads and
they see nothing without end.

James Tate

For Warmth

2006-01-30T03:22:00.000-08:00

I hold my face in my two hands.
No, I am not crying.
I hold my face in my two hands
to keep the loneliness warm:
two hands protecting,
two hands nourishing,
two hands preventing
my soul from leaving me
in anger!

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh

Nice People

2005-11-10T02:05:00.000-08:00

I intent to write an article in praise of nice people. But the reader may wish to know first who are the people that I consider nice. To get at their essential quality may perhaps be a little difficult, so I will begin by enumerating certain types who come under the heading. Maiden aunts are invariably nice, especially, of course, when they are rich; ministers of religion are nice, except those rare cases in which they elope to South Africa with a member of the choir after pretending to commit suicide. Young girls, I regret to say, are seldom nice nowadays. When I was young most of them were quite nice -- that is to say, they shared their mother's opinions, not only about topics, but what is more remarkable, about individuals, even young men; they said, "Yes, Mamma," and, "No, Mamma" at the appropriate moments; they loved their father because it was their duty to do so, and their mother because she preserved them from the slightest hint of wrongdoing. When they became engaged to be married they fell in love with decorous moderation; being married, they recognized it as a duty to love their husbands but gave other women to understand that it was a duty they performed with great difficulty. They behaved nicely to their parents-in-law, while making it clear that any less dutiful person would not have done so; they did not speak spitefully about other women but pursed up their lips in such a way as to let it be seen what they might have said but for their angelic charitableness. This type is what is called a pure and noble woman. The type, alas, now hardly exists except among the old.

Mercifully the survivors still have great power: they control education, where they endeavor, not without success, to preserve a Victorian standard of hypocrisy; they control legislation on what are called "moral issues", and have thereby created and endowed the great profession of bootlegging; they ensure that the young men who write for the newspapers shall express the opinions of the nice old ladies rather than their own, thereby enlarging the scope of the young men's style and the variety of their psychological imagination. They keep alive innumerable pleasures which otherwise would be quickly ended by a surfeit; for example, the pleasure of hearing bad language on a stage, or of seeing there a slightly larger amount of bare skin than is customary. Above all, they keep alive the pleasures of the hunt. In a homogeneous country population, such as that of the English shire, people are condemmed to hunt foxes; this is expensive and sometimes even dangerous. Moreover, the fox cannot explain very clearly how much he dislikes being hunted. In all these respects the hunting of human beings is better sport, but, if it were not for the nice people, it would be difficult to hunt human beings with a good conscience. Those whom the nice people condemn are fair game; at their call of "Tallyho" the hunt assembles, and the victim is pursued to prison or death. It is especially good sport when the victim is a woman, since it gratifies the jealousy of the women and the sadism of the men. I know at this moment a foreign woman living in England, in happy though extra-legal union with a man whom she loves and who loves her; unfortunately, her political opinions are not so conservative as could be wished, though they are merely opinions, about which she does nothing. The nice people, however, have used this excuse to set Scotland Yard upon their scent, and she is to be sent back to her native country to strave. In England, as in America, the foreigner is a morally degrading influence, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to the police for the care which they take to see that only exceptionally virtuous foreigners are allowed to reside among us.

It must not be supposed that all nice people are women, though, of course, it is much commoner for a woman to be nice than for a man. Apart from ministers of religion, there are many other nice men. For example: those who have made large fortunes and have now retired from business to spend their fortunes on charity; magistrates are also almost invariably nice men. It cannot, however, be said that all supporters of law and order are nice men. When I was young, I remember hearing it advanced by a nice woman, as an argument against capital punishment, that the hangman could hardly be a nice man. I have never known any hangmen personally, so I have not been able to test this argument empirically. I knew a lady, however, who met the hangman in the train without knowing who he was, and when she offered him a rug, the weather being cold, he said, "Ah, Madam, you wouldn't do that if you knew who I am," which seems to show that he was a nice man after all. This, however, must have been exceptional. The hangman in Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, who is emphatically not a nice man, is probably more typical.

I do not think, however, that we ought to agree with the nice woman I quoted a moment ago in condemming capital punishment merely because the hangman is not likely to be nice. To be a nice person, it is necessary to be protected from crude contact with reality, and those who do the protecting cannot be expected to share the niceness that they preserve. Imagine, for example, a wreck on a liner which is transporting a number of colored laborers; the first-class female passengeres, all of whom are presumably nice women, will be saved first; but in order that this may happen, there must be men who keep the colored laborers from swamping the boat, and it is unlikely that these men will be able to succeed by nice methods. The women who have been saved, as soon as they are safe, will begin to feel sorry for the poor laborers who were drowned, but their tender hearts are rendered possible only by the rough men who defended them.

In general, nice people leave the policing of the world to hirelings because they feel the work to be not such as a person who is nice would wish to undertake. There is, however, one department which they do not delegate -- namely, the department of backbiting and scandal. People can be placed in a hierarchy of niceness by the power of their tongues. If A talks against B, and B talks against A, it will generally be agreed by the society in which they live that one of them is exercising a public duty, while the other is actuated by spite; the one who is exercising the public duty is the one who is the nicer of the two. Thus, for example, a headmistress in a school is nicer than an assistant mistress, but a lady who is on the school board is nicer than either. Well-directed tittle-tattle may easily cause its victim to lose his or her livelihood, and even when this extreme result is not achieved, it may turn a person into a pariah. It is, therefore, a great force for good, and we ought to be thankful that it is the nice people who wield it.

The chief characteristics of nice people is the laudable practice of improvement upon reality. God made the world, but nice people feel that they could have done the job better. There are many things in the Divine handiwork which, while it would be blasphemous to wish them otherwise, it would be by no means nice to mention. Divines have held that if our first parents had not eaten the apple the human race would have been replenished by some innocent mode of vegetation, as Gibbon calls it. The Divine plan in this respect is certainly mysterious. It is all very well to regard it, as the aforesaid divines do, in the light of a punishment of sin, but the trouble with this view is that while it may be a punishment for the nice people, the others, alas, find it quite pleasant. It would seem, therefore, as if the punishment had been made to fall in the wrong quarter. One of the main purposes of the nice people is to redress no doubt this unintended injustice. They endeavor to secure that the biologically ordained mode of vegetation shall be practiced either furtively or frigidly, and that those who practice it furtively shall, when found out, be in the power of the nice people, owing to the damage that may be done to them by scandal. They endeavor to ensure also that as little as possible shall be known on the subjectin a decent way; they try to get the censor to forbid books and plays which represent the matter otherwise than as an occasion for sniggering nastiness; in this they are successful wherever and in so far as they control the laws and the police. It is not known why the Lord made the human body as he did, since one must suppose that omnipotence could have made it such as would not have shocked the nice people. Perhaps, however, there was a good reason. There has been in England, ever since the rise of the textile industry in Lancashire, a close alliance between missionaries and the cotton trade, for missionaries teach the savages to cover up the human body and thereby increase the demand for cotton goods. If there had been nothing shameful about the human body, the textile trade would have lost this source of profit. This instance shows that we need never be afraid lest the spread of virtue should diminish our profits.

Whoever invented the phrase "the naked truth" had perceived an important connection. Nakedness is shocking to all right-minded people, and so is truth. It metters little with what department you are connected; you will soon find that rtuth is such as nice people will not admit into their consciousness. Whenever it has been my ill fortune to be present in court during the hearing of a case about which I had some first-hand knowledge, I have been struck by the fact that no crude truth is allowed to penetrate within those august portals. The truth that gets into a law court is not the naked truth but the truth in court dress, with all its less decent portions concealed. I do not say that this applies to the trial of straightforward crimes, such as murder or theft, but it applies to all those into which an element of prejudice enters, such as political trials, or trials for obscenity. I believe that in this respect England is worse than America, for England has brought to perfection the almost invisible and half-conscious control of everything unpleasant by means of feelings of decency. If you wish to mention in a law court any unassimilable fact, you will find that it is contrary to the laws of evidence to do so, and that not only the judge and the opposing counsel but also cousel on your side will prevent the said fact from coming out.

The same sort of reality pervades politics, owing to the feelings of nice people. If you attempt to persuade any nice person that a politician of his own party is an ordinary mortal no better than the mass of mankind, he will indignantly repudiate the suggestion. Consequently it is necessary to politicians to appear immaculate. At most times the politicians of all parties tacitly combine to prevent anything damaging to the profession from getting known, for difference of party usually does less to divide politicians than identity of profession does to unite them. In this way the nice people are able to preserve their fancy picture of the nation's great men, and school children can be made to believe that eminence is to be achieved only by the highest virtue. There are, it is true, exceptional times when politics become really bitter, and at all times there are politicians who are not considered sufficiently respectable to belong to the informal trade-union. Parnell, for example, was first unsuccessfully accused of co-operation with murderers and then successfully convicted of an offense against morality, such as, of course, none of his accusers would have dreamed of committing. In our own day Communists in Europe and extreme Radicals and labor agitators in America are outside the pale; no large body of nice people admires them, and if the offend against the conventional code they can expect no mercy. In this way the immovable moral convictions of nice people become linked with the defense of property, and thus once more prove their inestimable worth.

Nice people very properly suspect pleasure wherever they see it. They know that he who increaseth wisdom increaseth sorrow, and they infer that he that increaseth sorrow increaseth wisdom. They therefore feel that in spreading sorrow they are spreading wisdom; since wisdom is more precious than rubies, they are justified in feeling that they are conferring a great benefit in so doing. They will, for example, make a public playground for children in order to persuade themselves that they are philanthropic and then impose so many regulations upon its use that no child can be as happy there as in the streets. They will do their best to prevent playgrounds, theaters, etc., from being open on a Sunday, because that is the day when they might be enjoyed. Young women in their employment are prevented so far as possible from talking with young men. The nicest people I have known carried this attitude into the bosom of the family and made their children play only instructive games. This degree of niceness, however, I regret to say, is becoming less common than it was. In the old days children were taught that

One stroke of His almighty rod
Can send young sinners quick to Hell,

and it was understood that this was likely to happen if children became boisterous or indulged in any activity such as was not calculated to fit them for the ministry. The education based upon this point of view is set forth in The Fairchild Family, an invaluable work on how to produce nice people. I know few parents, however, in the present day who live up to this standard. It has become sadly common to wish children to enjoy themselves, and it is to be feared that those who have been educated on these lax principles will not display adequate horror of pleasure when they grow up.

The day of nice poeple, I fear, is nearly over; two things are killing it. The first is the belief that there is no harm in being happy, provided no one else is the worse for it; the second is the dislike of humbug, a dislike which is quite as much æsthetic as moral. Both these results were encouraged by the War, when the nice people in all countries were securely in control, and in the name of the highest morality induced the young people to slaughter one another. When it was all over the survivors began to wonder whether lies and misery inspired by hatred constituted the highest virtue. I am afraid it may be some time before they can again be induced to accept this fundamental doctrine of every lofty ethic.

The essence of nice people is that they hate life as manifested in tendencies to co-operation, and in the boisterousness of children, and above all in sex, with the thought of which they are obsessed. In a word, nice people are those who have nasty minds.

Bertrand Russell
1931

Rhetoric

2005-10-10T04:42:00.000-07:00

I assume that we are talking about saving a few good men from suicide and a few others from becoming cops or firemen. I have in mind those who commit suicide out of disgust, because they find that others own too large a share of them.

To them one should say: at least let the minority within you have the right to speak. Be poets. They will answer: but it is especially there, it is always there that I feel others within me, when I try to express myself, I am unable to do so. Words are ready-made and express themselves: they do not express me. Once again, I find myself suffocating.

At that moment, teaching the art of resisting words becomes useful, the art of saying only what one wants to say, the art of doing them violence, of forcing them to submit. In short, it is a matter of public safety to found a rhetoric, or rather, to teach everyone to found his own rhetoric.

This saves those few, those rare individuals who must be saved: those who are aware, and who are troubled and disgusted by the others within them.

Those individuals who make the mind progress, and who are, strictly speaking, capable of changing the reality of things.

Francis Ponge
trans. Serge Gavronsky

From theRandom House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry

two by fire . . .

2005-08-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

I am dying
because you have not
died for me
and the world
still loves you

I write this because I know
that your kisses are born blind
on the songs that touch you

I don't want a purpose
in your life
I want to be the last among
your thoughts
The way you listen to New York City
when you fall asleep

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There are no traitors among women
even the mother does not tell the son
they do not wish us well

She cannot be tamed by conversation
Absence is the only weapon
against the arsenal of her body

She reserves a special contempt
for the slaves of beauty
She lets them watch her die

Forgive me, partisans,
I only sing this for the ones
who do not care who wins the war

Leonard Cohen
The Energy of Slaves

Goethe's recipe . . .

2005-08-03T07:06:00.000-07:00

Nine requisites for contented living:
Health enough to make work a pleasure.
Wealth enough to support your needs.
Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them.
Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them.
Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished.
Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor.
Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others.
Faith enough to make real the things of God.
Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

deja vu?

2005-07-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

There are, indeed, many among us who find justification of the present war in the plea that its motive is to give independence to the people of Cuba, long burdened by the oppresive and corrupt rule of Spain, and especially to relieve the multitudes deprived of their homes and of means of subsistence by the cruel policy of the general who exercised for a time a practical dictatorship over the island. The plea so far as it is genuine deserves the respect due to every humane sentiment. But independence secured for Cuba by forcible overthrow of the Spanish rule means either practical anarchy or the substitution of the United States for that of Spain. Either alternative might well give us pause. And as for the relief of suffering, surely, it is a strange procedure to begin by inflicting worse suffering still. It is fighting the devil with his own arms. That the ends justify the means is a dangerous doctrine, and no wise man will adivse doing evil for the sake of an uncertain good. But the plea that the better government of Cuba and the relief of the reconcentrados could only be secured by war is the plea of either ignorance or of hypocrisy.

But the war is declared; and on all hands we hear the cry that he is no patriot who fails to shout for it, and to urge the youth of the country to enlist, and to rejoice that they are called to the service of their native land. The sober cousels that were appropriate before the war was entered upon must give way to blind enthusiasm, and the voice of condemnation must be silenced by the thunders of the guns and the hurrahs of the crowd. Stop! A declaration of war does not change the moral law. (blogger's emphasis) 'The Ten Commandments will not budge' at a joint resolve of Congress. Was James Russell Lowe aught but a good patriot when during the Mexican war he sent the stinging shafts of his matchless satire at the heart of the monstruous iniquity, or when, years afterward, he declared that he thought at the time and that he still thought that the Mexican war was a national crime? Did John Bright ever render greater service to his country than when, during the Crimean war, he denounced the administration which had plunged England into it, and employed magnificent power of earnest and incisive speech in the endeavor to repress the evil spirit which it evoked in the heart of the nation? No! The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent and spite of obloquy, misrepresentation and abuse, to insist on being heard, and with sober counsel to maintain the everlasting validity of the principles of the moral law.

So confused are men by false teaching in regard to national honor and the duty of the citizen that it is easy to fall into the error of holding a declaration of war, however brought about, as a sacred decision of the national will, and to fancy that call to arms from the Administration has the force of a call from the lips of the country, from the America to whom all her sons are ready to pay the full measure of devotion. This is indeed a natural and for many a youth, not a discreditable error. But if the nominal, though authorized, representatives of the country have brought us into a war that might and should have been avoided, and which consequently is an unrighteous war, then, so long as the safety of the state is not at risk (blogger's note . . . . spurious claims to self defense against imagined stockpiled munitions, anyone?), the duty of a good citizen is plain. He is to help to provide the Administration responsible for the conduct of the war with every means that may serve to bring it to the speediest end. He is to do this alike so that the immediate evils of the war be as brief and as few as possible, and also that its miserable train of after evils may be diminished and the vicious passions excited by it be the sooner allayed. Men, money, must be abundantly supplied. But, must he himself enlist or quicken the ardent youth to enter service in such a cause? The need is not yet. The country is in no peril. There is always in a vast population like ours an immense, a sufficient supply of material of a fighting order, often of a heroic courage, ready and eager for the excitement of battle, filled with the old notion that patriotism is best expressed in readiness to fight for our country, be she right or wrong. Better the paying of bounties to such men to fill the ranks than they should be filled by those whose higher duty is to fit themselves to the service of their country in the patriotic labors of peace. We mourn the deaths of our noble youth fallen in the cause of their country when she stands for the right; but we may mourn with a deeper sadness for those who have fallen in a cause which their generous hearts mistook for one worthy of the last sacrifice.

Charles Elliot Norton
1898

In the above essay, substitute the word "Iraq" for the word "Cuba" and the name "Saddam Hussein" for the word "Spain" and it becomes eeriely clear how little we've learned the lessons of history. Over a hundred years have passed since this was written and we are still behaving like amoral scoundrels . . . of course with the added irony that the administration involved has taken the position of insisting that it is they who have the moral higer ground. (don't you just love sophistry?). Shame on them. Not even Jesus was sacred to them in their desire to go after Iraq; they waved his name like a filthy flag to rally people to their wicked cause (and during the last campaign to secure four more years of their villainous greed), used it like a bugle call. Shame on them for pushing this war on us and shame on us for taking it like docile idiots. For transforming a great republic into a rogue state with imperial delusions.

It seems to me a really bad idea to go into the empire business without having one's heart into it. That seems to me the main difference with this empire; it's one that we don't even want to admit having or even to want to have. It's like a bizarre grotesque.

art for the layman . . .

2005-07-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

On one of my many rummagings through thrift stores and suchlike, I came upon an old dilapidated tome called simply The Arts. There's a certain intrinsic weight, a gravity, that an old thick volume like this has. Published in New York in 1937, its pages have changed color, taking on the inevitable grey-yellow tint of time. It even smells like an old forgotten artifact! The author was a Dutch gentleman who was born in 1885. On the page before an elegant frontispiece, more or less as a kind of explanatory note or a declaration of intent, he writes:

This book was written and illustrated by
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
to give the general reader
(who perhaps had always considered
this a rather remote subject)
a better understanding and a greater appreciation
of everything that has been done within the
realm of painting and architecture and
music and sculpture and the theater
and most of the so-called minor
arts from the beginning of
time until the moment we
come so close to them that
we begin to lose our perspective.

I just love the florid language he employs throughout this didactic treatise on the history of the arts. His archaic phrasings are vestiges, I'm sure,of some long-gone-by victorian elsewhere. I also love that it's a book that comes with instructions on how to use it! (charming).

633 pages later . . . he attaches to this ambitious opus a closing essay which I think nicely touches on the significance which we bestow upon the phenomenon of art and its influence on our lives. It moved me enough to decide to transcribe it so that I may share it with others online.
peace
ó

an afterthought

On How to Use this Book

I did not write this book to give you a lot of facts, for the facts I mention have all of them been known for quite a long time and they are to be found in any volume devoted to architecture or painting or music. I merely gathered them together because I thought that would be the best way to give the reader a feeling for the "universality" that underlies all of the arts. Neither did I write these pages to air a few of my own esthetic theories and hobbies. Some of these have, of course, crept in, but try and keep them out in a discussion of anything as completely personal as a philosophical contemplation of the arts!

Then why did I take the trouble to write this vast tract and why did I want you to read it?

Merely to invite you to join us and by "us" I mean all those who feel that we can occasionally do without dinner or breakfast, but that life without a few extra dishes of music or painting is hardly worthwhile.

Now that sort of statement (like all more or less rhetorical utterances) is apt to be most beautifully distorted and misunderstood. For it comes very close to that terrible old slogan of "art for art's sake," which has ruined more careers than I care to think of. The last thing I want to do, is to take you away from a comfortable and decent mode of making a living and then turn you loose upon a cold and indifferent world, to spend the rest of your days as disgruntled and indifferent pseudo artists, spending miserable days and nights in an uncomfortable old attic, subsisting on stale spaghetti and contemplating the glorious revolution that will at last bring you recognition. The revolution may come, but it will hardly bring you the recognition you so eagerly desire. On the contrary, it is more likely to put a pickax in your hands and to tell you to make yourself useful digging sewers for the benefit of your less fortunate neighbors. Of course, should you really have been touched by the divine fire and should the good Lord in His wisdom have chosen you among His anointed few, then the urge to create will be so strong that nothing between Heaven and Hell can stop you. In that case, the cold attic and the stale spaghetti are of no consequence. You will take them in your stride, for you are kept warm by the fire that is burning inside your heart and a crust of bread, devoured before your easel, will taste better than all the delicacies of old Raymond Orteig's most excellent cuisine. That, however, is a matter you will have to decide for yourself and I carefully refrain from all advice.

But there is a sort of compromise and since all of life is bound to end in a compromise, I want to draw your attention to the way in which you can bring yourself much closer to the delightful garden of the Muses (and it is indeed a most delectable garden) than you had ever thought possible before this matter was brought to your attention.

There must be something you like to do and can do. You may like to draw or to sing or to play the piano or go in for dramatics. Is there any reason why you shouldn't do so if it adds to the fun of being alive? I don't know of any.

Provided that you realize your own limitations. We live, unfortunately, in a country of competition and publicity. I have known perfectly good, average tennis or golf players who could have derived great pleasure from playing a reasonably good game, but they were unhappy all their livelong days because they could not play their games as well as Bill Tilden or Walter Hagen. I don't know Hagen but I do know Tilden and he would be the last person in the world to encourage you in such a belief. He would tell you to go out and get the exercise and do as well as you could and not worry when you have to accept the brutal fact that that rather unpleasant Jones girl next door can beat you every time you give her a chance. He might even suggest that you would learn more from getting beaten, playing against a really good player, than by being victorious against a weaker competitor and coming home with a perfect score.

Now the arts and sport have a great deal in common. I shall never forget one evening in my own home when Ty Cobb and Knute Rockne got engaged in a discussion on some obscure point in the noble craft of base sliding and the two of them, in their eagerness to prove that they were right, went through a sort of slow-motion demonstration of their respective schools of sliding and the show they put on was as good as the best Russian ballet I have ever seen. And I am sure that I never quite understood the real beauty of greek sculpture until I saw the Babe knock out a home run in the last inning of a very important game. George may not be particularly interested in the Elgin Marbles (he may even think that they are something he used to play with as a boy) but he came as close to being a living reincarnation of some of the best work of classical Greece as anything that was ever brought to my attention. Perhaps the diving boys in the harbor of Honolulu were his nearest competitors for such high honors. I am not quite sure but then it really does not matter, for the point I want to make is this: you need not be as good as the best professional in any of the arts to be still a very decent artist in your own right, just as you need not be an automobile racer to get a lot of fun out of the old flivver. But you can and will lead an infinitely happier and fuller existence if you adopt one of the arts as your stepchild and you will be surprised how far you can get by devoting a few of your leisure moments to the practice of whatever art you have chosen, whether it be photography or cooking or painting or etching or making stage models.

Of course, keep this fact firmly in mind -- in the arts (just as in nature) there are no short-cuts. Success is not a matter of inspiration but a matter of patience and more patience and then still more patience. Without inspiration, you may never be able to scale the greatest heights, but all the inspiration in this entire inspired universe will not do you any good without a vast amount of very hard work and slow painstaking and conscientious work, at that.

So much for the general theory and now for a few practical hints. In the first place, do not think it necessary to specialize. All the arts (as you must have learned from this book) have but one single purpose, to contribute to the art of living and therefore they are closely related to each other and support each other and help each other out, like the members of a well-balanced family. You will be a much better draftsman for knowing something about the structure of a symphony. At the age of fifty-five I still patiently play my part in an orchestra. It takes a lot of time but it is the most practical way for me to learn a great deal about the structure of some music with which I am not yet familiar, and that again helps me in understanding how I should draw my pictures.

For years I have had my etching press, just a small one but good enough for my own simple needs. I don't expect to become a professional etcher. I shall never sell any of the products of my press. But my own struggles with copperplates and with acids and with different ink mixtures make it possible for me to realize infinitely better than I could ever hope to do in any other way just what the most successful etchers of the past have tried to accomplish.

The same holds true for a personal and intimate study of the works of the great masters of the past. I do not mean in a merely imitative manner. You may have seen the copyists in our museums painting away at their pitiful daubs, and you may well have asked yourself, "What is the use of all this wasted effort? These poor devils had better go out and milk a cow or do something a little more useful.!"

Again I agree, but that is not what I meant by "studying the masters of the past." You should do this merely for your own entertainment and instruction. Once you taken the trouble to copy in your own way some drawing by Dürer or to dissect a painting of some very complicated artist like El Greco, you will (for the moment at least) creep into the skin of those incredibly competent craftsmen and then you may at last begin to suspect something of what was in their minds when they themselves struggled with the unwilling material and the awkwardness of the human hand.

You will tell me that you cannot do this because art books are very expensive and you cannot afford them. Who said that you should buy those twenty- and thirty-dollar volumes which look so tempting in the windows of our bookstores? You can get catalogues in museums for nothing, or next to nothing. A good picture postal card is often quite as instructive as an expensive reproduction.

The same holds good for music. Our modern phonographs are about as perfect as anything mechanical can ever hope to be. Save those dollars which you would otherwise spend on something that is not really very important (you will be surprised how much cash you waste everyday on useless gadgets) and start a record collection of your own. And listen to them too, for if you want to be a good amateur musician , you should be thoroughly familiar with everything the great composers of the past have written, just as you should know a few of the gambits of Marshall or Capablanca, if you are a devotee of chess. Knowing their gambits won't, of course, make you a Marshall or a Capablanca, but they will make it possible for you to play a much better game than you had ever done before.

And now another practical hint. If you have taken one of the arts as your hobby, it is not enough to practice it once in a while, on alternate Saturdays and Sundays in Lent. You should make your hobby your steady companion as if it were a pet dog.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by this rather cryptic statement.

Somewhere in this book there is a picture of the old Brooklyn Bridge, proving that in its own way it is quite as beautiful as the Taj Mahal. You may never see the Taj Mahal but you probably catch a glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge (or some other bridge or building) every morning you go to your office. In those days when I worked downtown in New York I always traveled by the elevated. During a short twenty-minute trip I saw enough sights to provide me with ideas for pictures for at least an entire fortnight. I did not have the time to draw them in detail (no more than you) but this was no labor lost, for something remained behind all those many impressions and something that I could use afterwards in any number of ways.

I realize that all this is not easy to do. As a nation we are rather self-conscious when it comes to any of the arts and I know businessmen who carefully hide their love for music or for some form of literature for fear that their neighbors will laugh at them. We simply shall have to get over that feeling or we shall never get anywhere at all.

You may not want to be a martyr for the good cause but if, for example, you are interested in drawing, do as I have always done. Carry a few small cards in your pocket and when nobody's looking, make a short pictorial note of what you have just seen. Those notes will never find their way to a museum, to be exposed next to the sketches which poor Rembrandt drew on the backs of his unpaid bills, but they will teach you an amazing amount of detail and will sharpen your powers of observationto a point you had never deemed possible.

And when you have a chance, experiment with all sorts of media, for every new approach (oil, pastel, ink) makes you familiar with an entirely different technique and it is really like visiting so many foreign countries. Don't be afraid of the expense. No need of buying yourself one of those sixty-dollar contraptions filled with all the colors of the rainbow and with brushes at a dollar per. You will be astonished how much you can do with the little box of pencils which your small son discarded as one of his less welcome Christmas presents (he really wanted a flying machine, just as next year he will want those pencils!), and water-color boxes, sufficient for your needs and within the reach of your purse, can be had in any toy store.

As for the amateur musicians, if possible they should practice every day with the same regularity with which they take their morning's exercices. Once they get into the habit (if only for fifteen minutes a day) those minutes will soon grow into hours. The piano is the handiest of all instruments because it gives you the best chance to study orchestral compositions. But the piano is not the only instrument in the world.

For example, should you be an amateur fiddler, you will discover that there is a lot of fun in nosing around in the hock shops. Some day you may really find something really good. The chances are about one to ten thousand, but these are less than the chances you take when you put your money on a ticket in the Irish sweepstakes, so why not try?

I must not make this chapter any longer than I can help but I am sure you are beginning to realize what I am driving at. When it comes to the details of such a "plan of campaign" I cannot really be of any help to you or give you any definite advice. There are two thousand million people in this world and there are , therefore, two thousand million different tastes. You will have to decide what you want to do for and by yourself but whether you go in for making ship models or writing songs or spending your summer vacation painting the rocks of Maine or laying out a small suburban garden, enlist right away among the humble followers of the Muses. They are very exacting teachers. But they are the most satisfactory of friends, for in return for your devotion and loyalty they will ocassionally let you stroll into their own private garden and then you will catch a glimpse of a world of such beauty and such perfection that those few moments will most fully compensate you for any pains you may have taken to become one of the elect who have come to understand the true meaning of life at its best.

Lucas Point,
Old Greenwich, Conn.
May 8, 1937

oh, yes

2005-07-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late.

a Charles Bukowski poem

Dalí top ten . . .

2005-06-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

Ten rules for him who wishes to be a painter

Painter, it is better to be rich than poor; so learn how to make gold and precious stones come out of your brush.
Don't be afraid of perfection: you'll never attain it!
Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.
Don't throw to the dogs either your eye or your hand or your brain, for you will need them all if you are to be a painter.
If you are one of those who believe that modern art has surpassed Vermeer and Raphael, don't read this book, just go right on in your blissful idiocy.
Don't vomit on your picture, because it is the picture which can vomit on you after you are dead.
No lazy masterpieces!
Painter, paint!
Painter, don't drink alcohol, and chew hashish only five times in your life.
If painting doesn't love you, all your love for her will be unavailing.

from 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship by Salvador Dalí
1948

. . . the sound of music

2005-06-08T04:18:00.000-07:00

How technology has transformed the sound of music.

. . . . . . . The principal irony of phonograph history is that the machine was not invented with music in mind. Edison conceived of his cylinder as a tool for business communication: it would replace the costly, imperfect practice of stenography, and would have the added virtue of preserving in perpetuity the voices of the deceased. In an 1878 essay, Edison (or his ghostwriter) proclaimed portentously that his invention would “annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man.” Annihilation is, of course, an ambiguous figure of speech. Recording broke down barriers between cultures, but it also placed more archaic musical forms in danger of extinction. In the early years of the century, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, and Percy Grainger used phonographs to preserve the voices of elderly folksingers whose timeless ways were being stamped out by the advance of modern life. And what was helping to stamp them out? The phonograph, with its international hit tunes and standardized popular dances. . . . . .

. . . . . . With the arrival of magnetic tape, the relationship between performer and medium became ever more complex. German engineers perfected the magnetic tape recorder, or Magnetophon, during the Second World War. Late one night, an audio expert turned serviceman named Jack Mullin was monitoring German radio when he noticed that an overnight orchestral broadcast was astonishingly clear: it sounded “live,” yet not even at Hitler’s whim could the orchestra have been playing Bruckner in the middle of the night. After the war was over, Mullin tracked down a Magnetophon and brought it to America. He demonstrated it to Bing Crosby, who used it to tape his broadcasts in advance. Crosby was a pioneer of perhaps the most famous of all technological effects, the croon. Magnetic tape meant that Bing could practically whisper into the microphone and still be heard across America; a marked drop-off in surface noise meant that vocal murmurs could register as vividly as Louis Armstrong’s pealing trumpet.

Magnetic tape also meant that performers could invent their own reality in the studio. Errors could be corrected by splicing together bits of different takes. In the sixties, the Beatles and the Beach Boys, following in the wake of electronic compositions by Cage and Stockhausen, began constructing intricate studio soundscapes that they never could have replicated onstage; even Glenn Gould would have had trouble executing the mechanically accelerated keyboard solo in “In My Life.” The great rock debate about authenticity began. Were the Beatles pushing the art forward by reinventing it in the studio? Or were they losing touch with the earthy intelligence of folk, blues, and rock traditions? Bob Dylan stood at a craggy opposite extreme, turning out records in a few days’ time and avoiding any vocal overdubs until “Blood on the Tracks,” the fourteenth record of his career. Yet frills-free, “lo-fi” recording has no special claim on musical truth; indeed, it easily becomes another phonograph effect, the effect of no effect. Even Dylan cannot escape the fictions of the medium, as he well knows: “I’m gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel / And I know no one can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell.”

In the nineteen-eighties, as Dutch and Japanese engineers introduced digital recording in the CD format, the saga of the phonograph experienced a final twist. Katz, in the last chapters of his book, delights in following the winding path from Germany in the nineteen-twenties to the South Bronx in the nineteen-seventies, where the turntable became an instrument once again. D.j.s like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash used turntables to create a hurtling collage of phonograph effects—loops, breaks, beats, scratches. The silently observing machine was shoved into the middle of the party. It was assumed at first that this recording-driven music could never be recorded itself: the art of the d.j. was all about fast moves over long duration, stamina and virtuosity combined. As Jeff Chang notes in his new book “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation” (St. Martin’s; $27.95), serious young d.j.s like Chuck D, on Long Island, laughed when a resourceful record company put out a rap novelty single called “Rapper’s Delight.” How could a single record do justice to those endless parties in the Bronx where, in a multimedia rage of beats, tunes, raps, dances, and spray-painted images, kids managed to forget for a while that their neighborhood had become a smoldering ruin? The record labels found a way, of course, and a monster industry was born. Nowadays, hip-hop fans are apt to claim that live shows are dead experiences, messy reënactments of pristine studio creations.

Recording has the unsettling power to transform any kind of music, no matter how unruly or how sublime, into a collectible object, which becomes décor for the lonely modern soul. It thrives on the buzz of the new, but it also breeds nostalgia, a state of melancholy remembrance and, with that, indifference to the present; you can start to feel nostalgic for the opening riff of a new favorite song even before you reach the end. Thomas Mann described the phonograph’s ambiguous enchantments in the “Fullness of Harmony” chapter of “The Magic Mountain,” published in 1924. When a deluxe gramophone arrives at the Berghof sanitarium, it sends mixed messages to the young man who operates it. At times it sings “a new word of love” (shades of Robert Johnson’s “Phonograph Blues”), at times it exudes “sympathy for death.” At the end of the novel, the hero goes marching toward an inferno of trench warfare, obliviously chanting the Schubert tune that the gramophone taught him. These days, he’d be rapping. . . . . .

. . . . . In 1964, Glenn Gould made a famous decision to renounce live performance. In an essay published two years later, “The Prospects of Recording,” he predicted that the concert would eventually die out, to be replaced by a purely electronic music culture. He may still be proved right. For now, live performance clings to life, and, in tandem, the classical-music tradition that could hardly exist without it. As the years go by, Gould’s line of argument, which served to explain his decision to abandon the concert stage, seems ever more misguided and dangerous. Gould praised recordings for their vast archival possibilities, for their ability to supply on demand a bassoon sonata by Hindemith or a motet by Buxtehude. He gloried in the extraordinary interpretive control that studio conditions allowed him. He took it for granted that the taste for Buxtehude motets or for surprising new approaches to Bach could survive the death of the concert—that somehow new electronic avenues could be found to spread the word about old and unusual music. Gould’s thesis is annulled by cold statistics: classical-record sales have plunged, while concert attendance is anxiously holding steady. Ironically, Gould himself remains, posthumously, one of the last blockbuster classical recording artists: Sony Classical’s recent rerelease of his two interpretations of Bach’s Goldberg Variations sold two hundred thousand copies. That’s surely not what Gould had in mind for the future of the medium.

A few months after Gould published his essay, the Beatles, in a presumably unrelated development, played their last live show, in San Francisco. They spent the rest of their short career working in the recording studio. They proved, as did Gould, that the studio breeds startlingly original ideas; they also proved, as did Gould, that it breeds a certain kind of madness. I’ll take “Rubber Soul” over “Sgt. Pepper’s,” and Gould’s 1955 Goldbergs over his 1981 version, because the first recording in each pair is the more robust, the more generous, the more casually sublime. The fact that the Beatles broke up three years after they disappeared into the studio, and the fact that Gould died in strange psychic shape at the age of fifty, may tell us all we need to know about the seductions and sorrows of the art of recording.

from The New Yorker
Issue of 2005-06-06
THE RECORD EFFECT
by Alex Ross

a quickening . . .

2005-05-31T12:16:00.000-07:00

Martha Graham performing some of her own work at Mili Studio

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening
that is translated into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.

If you block it,
it will never exist through any other medium
and be lost.
The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is;
nor how valuable it is;
nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly,
to keep the channel open.

You do not have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly
to the urges that motivate you.

Keep the channel open.
No artist is pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others.

Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille

apologetics: ¿a polemic?

2005-05-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

In 1998, a debate on the resurrection was held in Chicago between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan, moderated by William F. Buckley. It was published some time later by Baker Books Press and the resulting volume contained some appendixes, responses to the debate from a few distinguished scholars in the field. The following is one of those appendixes (chapter 7, titled What Do Stories About Resurrection(s) Prove?). It is in my opinion a very well constructed and thought out response from Robert J. Miller. While the debate itself was interesting enough, this essay is the real gem in the book, getting right down to the heart of the function of apologetics in general.

The debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan is about the historical accuracy of the resurrection stories in the Gospels. Craig maintains that these stories are evidence that the resurrection is literally true (that is, that Jesus' corpse came back to life and left the tomb). Crossan believes in Jesus' resurrection, but believes that the Gospel stories do not provide evidence that the resurrection is historically true in the literal sense.

I agree with Crossan. However, instead of responding directly to Craig's argument, I will step back from it and analyze its format, message, and audience. I take this approach because Craig's message about the resurrection and the way he communicates it to his audience are similar in some very important ways to the message of the Gospels and the way they convey it to their audience. Understanding Craig's method and message can thus clarify our understanding of the meaning of the resurrection stories in the Gospels.

In the first part of my essay I analyze Craig's attempt to persuade us that Jesus' resurrection is a historical fact. I pay special attention to how and for whom this kind of persuasion works. Then I will use these insights to analyze the resurrection stories in the Gospel of Matthew. My aim is to discern what Matthew thought he was doing in telling these stories in just the way he did and how his audience understood them.

Apologetics and Outsiders

Craig's central thesis is that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is a fact that can be demonstrated by historical evidence and sound reasoning. According to Craig, we don't really need faith to affirm the resurrection; we need only think clearly and objectively about the evidence and draw unbiased conclusions. Craig's argument is an apology for Jesus' resurrection. The term apology here has nothing to do with saying that one is sorry. In the sense the term has here, an apology is a rational defense for a certain belief. In general, an apology for the resurrection is an argument that it is reasonable to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, though Craig's apology goes beyond this. He not only argues that belief in the resurrection is a rational option, he argues that it is the only reasonable option, and thus it would be irrational not to believe in it.

Craig presents his apology in a debate with Crossan, which is confusing since Crossan also believes in the resurrection. Two people cannot debate an issue on which they agree. Craig's argument appears to be designed for a debate with someone other than Crossan, someone who does not believe in the resurrection. ¹ That is how apologies in general seem to work: they seem to be addressed to outsiders (those who do not share the belief being defended). They look like attempts to persuade others to change their minds and adopt new beliefs. But is this understanding accurate? Are apologies really meant for outsiders? This is an extremely important question. The way we anwer it determines how we approach the whole issue of the historical accuracy of the Gospel stories.

For whom are apologies really intended? In this case, the Craig-Crossan debate took place at Moody Memorial Church in Chicago. What percentage of that audience was non-Christian? How many of the listeners were outsiders in the sense that they did not share the belief that Craig defended? And what percentage of the readers of this book published by Baker Book House will be non-Christian? The answer to all these questions is the same: very, very few, if any at all.

In the few cases when outsiders do read or listen to apologies, they seldom take them seriously (i.e., in the spirit in which they present themselves). Outsiders approach apologies with caution, for the simple reason that apologies ask them to change their beliefs. Most outsiders assume that apologies are greatly biased, that they tell only one side of the story. Outsiders read apologies more often out of curiosity or out of a desire to figure out how to refute them than out of a willingness to give up their own beliefs. ² (You can check this by asking whether in reading literature from the Hare Krishna movement you would seriously open your heart and mind to the possibility that Krishna is the Supreme Lord of the Universe.)

An Apology for Islam

We can get a feel for how outsiders regard apologetics by briefly considering an apology for a religion other than Christianity. Islam is an interesting case for Christians to consider because both Christians and Muslims believe that their religions originated through the direct intervention of God, through a divine miracle that is unparalleled and unsurpassable. Both believe that God had intervened at various times in the past to reveal his will for humanity, but that those revelations were provisional and incomplete. Both Christians and Muslims believe that God finally intervened with a perfect revelation that gives us everything we need to know to do his will and find salvation. For Christians, this miracle of perfect revelation is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For Muslims, this miracle is the Qur'an revealed through the prophet Muhammad.

Muslim apologists maintain that unbiased consideration of the evidence confirms the belief that Islam was established by God through the miracle of the Qur'an. Although this miracle was not in itself public (there was nothing to see), reason can nonetheless confirm it by assesing its effects. That is, the divine origin of the Qur'an is the only rational explanation for a number of otherwise inexplicable realities.

First, the Qur'an is completely inerrant. It contains no contradictions and no errors of any kind, not even scientific ones. In fact, some of its descriptions of natural phenomena are consistent with scientific discoveries made centuries after Muhammad.

Second, the Qur'an is unsurpassed in the beauty of its poetry and the grandeur of its language (which can be fully appreciated only in Arabic). The Qur'an even challenges those who do not believe in its divine origin to create a chapter, or even one verse, that compares with it. The Qur'an is a literary masterpiece, yet Muhammad was uneducated and illiterate.

Third, the Qur'an has great spiritual power. It had a profound effect on those who first heard it, moving them deeply and leading many to immediately convert to Islam.

Fourth, the Qur'an's sublime monotheism and its elevated moral teaching were far ahead of the time and place of its earthly origin. Seveth-century Arabia was a place of deeply rooted polytheism and of rampant violence, widespread vice, and harsh social oppresion. The Qur'an's uncompromising monotheism and its demand for social justice and strict personal morality were utterly foreign to its environment.

Finally, Muhammed never wavered in his claim that the Qur'an was from God and not from him. This claim reflects his sincere belief, for Muhammad was neither a liar nor a megalomaniac nor delusional. He was famous for his honesty; even his enemies admired his integrity. far from being a megalomaniac, his lifestyle was modest and unassuming, and he drew a strict distinction between the times he was relaying revelation and the times he was expressing his own thoughts. Neither was Muhammad delusional. His enormous successes as a social reformer and as a political and military leader amply demonstrate his keen grasp of reality.

Further evidence for the divine origin of Islam is the speed at which it grew in a time and place that were hostile to it. Nothing in the culture of seventh-century Arabia favored Islam's monotheism or its elevated and demanding morality. In fact, there were powerful religious, economic, social, and political forces arrayed against it. Muhammad's first followers in Mecca were cruelly persecuted, and his fledgling community in Medina was attacked by vastly superior military forces. Islam not only survived, but spread so rapidly that by the time of Muhammad's death just two years after his return to Mecca, virtually all of Arabia had embraced Islam.

Please bear in mind that all this is merely the rough sketch of an apology for Islam. A muslim scholar of Islam (which I am not) could present these ideas and others with much more force and eloquence. Yet even if this apology were laid out with far greater skill than I can manage, how convincing do you think it would be to Christians? How many Christians would it convince that Islam is the religion God intends for all humanity? How seriously does it make you question your beliefs?

Muslim apologists maintain that the Qur'an would not be so inerrant, profound, beautiful, and compelling if God were not its author, and that Islam would not have been accepted by so many so quickly unless it were divinely guided. Muslims find this line of argument utterly convincing. Non-Muslims, however, will not be persuaded, even if they do not know how to explain the admirable qualities of the Qur'an or the impressive growth of early Islam. They will assume that even if they themselves do not know how to refute the apology, there are experts who do. Similarly, many readers of this book are confident that even if they personally cannot answer Crossan's arguments, surely someone like Craig can.

Outsiders seldom read apologies and seldom take them seriously when they do. As for the few non-Christians who do read an apology like Craig's and do give it serious consideration, how many are actually persuaded by it? Again the answer is very, very few, if any at all.³

Looking at the Resurrection from the Outside

Having considered how an apology for some other religion looks to us (for the sake of the argument I am assuming that my readers are Christian), we can round out the process with a "thought experiment." Imagine that you are not a Christian, but that you've come across Craig's apology for the literal historicity of Jesus' resurrection. For whetever reason, you take it seriously and decide to make a careful study of the relevant Gospel stories. As you read the stories about the empty tomb and the appearances, you notice again and again how different they are from Gospel to Gospel. So you construct charts that lay out the similarities and differences.

figure 1 Empty Tomb Stories
	Mark	Matthew	Luke	John
Time	sunrise	before dawn	daybreak	still dark
Persons involved	Mary Magdalene, Mary James' mother, Salome	Mary Magdalene, the other Mary	Mary Magdalene, Mary James' mother, Joanna, other women	Mary Magdalene
Position of stone	stone already moved away	stone rolled away by an angel during an earthquake	stone already rolled away	stone already rolled away
Guards	no	yes	no	no
Figures at the tomb	a young man sitting inside the tomb	an angel sitting on the stone outside the tomb	no one at first, then two men	two angels sitting inside the tomb
Message	"Tell the disciples to go to Galilee"	"Tell the disciples to go to Galilee"	"Remember that Jesus told you all this would happen"
Reaction	fear	fear and great joy		Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener, but recognizes him when he says her name
Response	the women tell no one	the women tell other disciples	the women tell the apostles (Peter comes to the tomb and sees the linen wrappings)	Mary tells the other disciples

figure 2 Easter Appearance Stories
	Matt. 28:9-10	Luke 24:13-33	Luke 24:34	Luke 24:36-51	John 20:19-23
Persons involved	the women who came to the tomb	two disciples	Simon	the Eleven and others	disciples
Place	between the tomb and hideout	on the road to Emmaus	?	a room in Jerusalem	a room in Jerusalem
Reaction	worship	non- recognition	?	fear; they mistake Jesus for a ghost; "they believe for joy"	gladness
Confirmation			?	Jesus invites them to touch him; he eats fish	Jesus shows them his hands and side
Message	"Tell the disciples to go to Galilee"	(Jesus interprets scripture)	?	(Jesus interprets scripture and commissions them to preach repentance and forgiveness in his name)	(conferral of the Holy Spirit and authority to forgive and retain sins)
Conclusion		they recognize him as he breaks bread; he vanishes; they return to Jerusalem	?	Jesus leads them to Bethany and ascends into heaven (end of Gospel)

figure 3 Post-Easter Appearance Stories
	Matt. 28:16-20	John 20:26-29	John 21	Acts 1:1-11
Time	?	one week later	some time later	over a forty day period
Persons involved	the Eleven	disciples (including Thomas)	seven disciples	the apostles
Place	a mountain in Galilee	a room in Jerusalem	the Sea of Tiberias	Jerusalem
Reaction	some worship him; some don't		recognition
Confirmation		Jesus invites Thomas to touch him
Message	the Great Commission	blessing on those who believe without seeing	"feed my lambs (to Peter)"; discussion of the fate of the beloved disciple
Conclusion	(end of Gospel)		(end of Gospel)	Jesus ascends into heaven

It is natural for outsiders to focus on differences and the historical problems they create. But what about insiders? Do they grow skeptical when they reflect on all the differences among the resurrection stories? A few might begin to have some doubts, but the vast majority of insiders are not bothered by the disparities. Insiders seldom notice them; if they do, they do not regard them as real inconsistencies. In fact, some apologists even flip these differences over to increase insiders' confidence in the historical reliability of the stories. They do this by arguing that, even with all the disparities, the versions all still agree that some followers of Jesus found his tomb empty.

The point I want to make is that while insiders and outsiders may read the same stories, they will use very different standards in evaluating their historical reliability. Imagine that another religion had a story of how God had worked mighty miracles that demonstrated the truth of that religion. Imagine also that there were several versions of this story and that these versions had numerous discrepancies, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Wouldn't you, a Christian and thus an outsider to this religion, point to those disparities as evidence for the unreliability of the stories? People are naturally more charitably inclined to their own stories than they are to those of outsiders.

To consider a specific example, how many non-Mormons take seriously the story about Joseph Smith discovering the golden tablets that contained the Book of Mormon and deciphering them with spectacles made of stone? Non-Mormons find this story unbelievable if not mildly amusing. But most Mormons find it easy to believe, and those few with doubts can overcome them by strengthening their faith through prayer. Why should non-Mormons find the story hard to believe? After all, it is no more implausible than dozens of stories in the Bible (for example, Jonah and the whale) that many Christians believe with no difficulty at all. The difference has very little to do with the stories themselves and a great deal to do with whether one approaches them as an insider or an outsider. To put it a bit crudely perhaps, stories about our miracles are easy to believe because they're true; stories about their miracles are easy to dismiss because they are far-fetched and fictitious.

Why Doesn't Apologetics Succeed

Why is it that very few, if any, outsiders will be persuaded by Craig's apology? From the way he presents it, we get the impression the he thinks that nobody who is informed, rational, and sincere could disagree with it. So why doesn't it work? There are really only two alternatives: the apology fails to convince either because it is unpersuasive, or because outsiders miss the truth, usually by reasoning incorrectly and drawing the wrong conclusion, or by seeing the truth but not accepting it. In other words, there is a defect either in the apology or in the "apologee," and, since few apologists present an argument they believe is defective, they are more or less forced to blame the apologee for failing to see, or to admit, the truth. ⁴

The problem with blaming the apologee is that not only is that self-serving, it is also gratuitous. What evidence is there that the apologee is not smart enough to follow the apologist's reasoning, or not sincere enough to want to know the truth, or not honest enough to admit it? The only answer the apologist gives is that if the apologee were really rational and well intentioned, he would agree with the apologist. Needless to say, most people are not impressed by this line of reasoning.

I used to think this way myself when I was a fervent believer in the power of apologetics. I was a philosophy major at a Catholic college. I was utterly convinced not only that Christianity was the one true religion that God intended for all humanity, but also that the Catholic Church was the one true church that Christ intended for all Christians. From my study of Thomas Aquinas and modern Christian apologists, I clearly saw that the central truths of Christianity (and of catholicism) could be grasped by reason if only one was sincerely seeking God's truth, was humble enough to accept it, and took the time to inform oneself and follow the arguments.

All of this made perfect sense to me, and none of my teachers or fellow students (all of whom were catholics) gave me any reason to question it. I tried out various apologetic arguments on my like-minded friends, who found them quite convincing. Occasionally they suggested improvements in my arguments, but none of us doubted the effectiveness of apologetics. The only real puzzle in my mind was this: since the truths of Christianity and Catholicism are so evident, why are they not more universally recognized? I concluded that those outside my religion or my church just did not know or did not understand these apologetic arguments, or that they were not completely sincere about seeking the truth. It amazes me now that I believed this without any feelings of superiority or smugness. I was sincerely grateful to God for the blessing of having been raised in the Christian religion and the one true church, and I prayed for the wisdom and the courage to be able to help others to see the truth as clearly as I did.

This mind-set held together until I went to graduate school at secular universities and got to know people who had different religions. For the first time in my life, I got to know people who took other religions as seriously as I took mine. I knew these people were well educated and highly rational, and I could tell from our conversations that they were sincere. A few were people of great goodness and spiritual depth. Yet none of them was persuaded by my apologetics. It took several years, but gradually I accepted the fact that informed, intelligent, sincere, and spiritual people are almost never persuaded by apologetics to change their core beliefs. Looking back, I can now see that a big reason for this is that most apologists use assumptions that only insiders take for granted. It is usually only from an outsider's perspective that one can see how problematic these assumptions really are.

In summary, apologies almost never reach outsiders. When they do, they are almost never taken seriously; when they are, they are almost never persuasive. So if the purpose of apologetics is to convince outsiders to adopt new beliefs, then apologetics are almost always abject failures. They fail, not because their authors are inept (like Craig, many of them are intelligent and capable writers), but because it is practically impossible to argue people into giving up their religious beliefs and adopting new ones.

However, there is another, more promising way to evaluate the apologetic genre. We can determine its audience, not by whom it seems to be aimed at, but by who actually reads it. And we can determine its purpose, not by what the author seems to intend, but by how it actually functions. If we proceed like this, we reach two important findings: (1) the audience for an apology is insiders; (2) its function is to support what the audience already believes.

This is nothing new to apologists, who know full well that their audiences are insiders. (Why else would Craig speak at Moody Memorial Church or write for Baker Book House?) So why do apologists write as though they were addressing outsiders? They do that, not because they are mistaken about their audience, but because that is the convention of the apologetic genre. An apt comparison is the genre of the open letter. An open letter may begin, "To the President of the United States," but both author and readers understand that the real audience is the general public. Readers don't think they are reading the president's mail. Everyone knows the difference between an open letter and a personal letter that is leaked to the press. The general public knows the letter is intended for them, even though it is addressed to the president. Every genre has its own conventions. Authors of fables write about talking animals because that is how fables go, not because anyone thinks that animals really talk.

Aquaintance with the conventions of apologetics makes a difference because it helps us understand what Craig's writing is really about. Since it is meant for insiders, even though it seems to be addressed to outsiders, we have to distinguish its message (that is, its message to its real audience) from its content. It's content is an argument aimed at convincing outsiders that they should believe in the resurrection literally because that is the rational thing to do; indeed, to do otherwise would be irrational. But the message to the real audience is that their belief in Jesus is far more than wishful thinking; it is founded on solid evidence and can be defended by someone with impressive academic credentials against an eloquent detractor. (There is, then, a mismatch in the Crossan-Craig debate. Crossan does not deny the resurrection, though he does deny that the Gospel stories about it are literally true - a position Craig ridicules as "Peter Pan theology.")

The Audience of the Gospels

It should now be clear that in order to understand what a text is really about, we need to take into account who its audience is and how it functions for that audience. Only after we figure out these elements can we make an informed judgment about what the message of the text is. Let's look, as an example, at the resurrection stories in the Gospels.⁵ Who is the audience for these stories? What did their authors think they were doing in writing what they did? And how did these stories function for their audience?

Craig treats the Gospel stories as literal accounts of what really happened. For him these are stories about how faith in the resurrection got started: the earliest Christians believed that Jesus was raised because some of them had actually seen him in his physical body after his death. Craig argues that if people today properly understand these stories, they will conclude that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, and from this they will conclude that Jesus is God. Craig folds these Gospel stories into his own argument, which seems aimed at outsiders but is actually for believers. Craig's argument thus appears to be intended to induce faith, but it actually functions to confirm the faith of those who already believe.

We need to ask: Who is the audience of the Gospels? For whom did the Evangelists write? The answer is clear: the Gospels were written for Christians. They presuppose that their audiences already believe in Jesus. Although a few outsiders may read the Gospels, it is most unlikely that any of them will come to believe in Jesus by reading that text. That is especially so in the case of the resurrection stories. How likely is it that a Jew or a pagan would read one of these stories and then conclude that Jesus had been physically raised from the dead and that therefore he is God? No, the resurrection stories presume a friendly audience, people who already believe that Jesus has risen. The stories presuppose and build on that belief in order to teach about the meaning of Jesus' resurrection and its implications for the Christian life.

The Resurrection of the Righteous Jews

To get specific about what the Evangelists are trying to communicate in the resurrection stories, we need to focus on one specific Gospel as an example. Any one will do, but Matthew is especially appropriate because some features unique to this Gospel give us strong clues as to its author's intentions.

A fascinating peculiarity of Matthew is that he tells of other resurrections in addition to Jesus'. According to Matthew, many righteous Jews were raised from the dead along with Jesus. At the very moment that Jesus died,

the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many (Matt.27:51-53 NSRV)

What should we make of this strange story? Did it really happen? And what does it mean?

We need to take a close look at this brief account because it can tell us a great deal about what Matthew thought he was writing and what his audience thought they were reading. The first question we have to tackle is whether the story is historical.

To put it bluntly, there is no good reason to think that this event really happened. For it is mentioned nowhere else - not in another Gospel, not in any other Christian writing, not in the writings of Josephus (a well-informed and meticulous Jewish historian of the time). In most cases it is invalid to conclude that an event did not happen because it is mentioned in only one source -- after all, lots of things occur that are not recorded even once. But this story is a very special exception because it narrates what by any measure has to be the most amazing event of all time: large numbers of dead people coming to life and appearing to large numbers of witnesses. It is inconceivable that an event so sensational and of such magnitude would not be noticed by the historians of the day. It's especially inconceivable that no other Christian source would mention it.⁶ The people who had left their tombs on Easter would have been hugely famous among Christians. A few lucky disciples could claim to have seen the risen Jesus, but these people were even more privileged: they had been raised from the dead along with Jesus. Yet their story left no trace anywhere outside these three short verses in Matthew.

Unless one is committed to belief in the literal historicity of every passage in the Bible, there is no basis for taking Matthew 27:51-53 to be the report of an actual event. Does this mean that Matthew was misinformed or that he was lying? Not at all. Matthew never intended this account to be taken literally. He assumed that his audience would take it symbolically and understand its message accordingly.

What is that message? Two features of this brief narrative furnish clues that would have been clear to Matthew's readers: the earthquake and the way that Matthew characterizes those who rise. Both features told Matthew's readers that the death/resurrection of Jesus is the decisive event in salvation history, the event that ushers in the time time of the fulfilment of God's plans for humanity. This account has the same message as do twelve others in which Matthew interrupts the Gospel narrative to tell the readers that a certain event fulfils what was foretold by the prophets - that God's promises to Israel are coming true in Jesus, that Jesus (in his birth, life, death, and resurrection) is the culmination of Israel's hopes and of God's plans for his people.

One feature in 27:51-53 that conveys Matthew's message is how he describes those who are raised from the dead: he calles them "holy ones" or "saints" (hagioi in Greek). This designation is important because early Christians and most Jews believed that those who had lived in obedience to God's will would be raised from the dead on the Last Day. Matthew 27:51-53 thus sends the message that Jesus' death and resurrection were the beginning of the End, the apocalyptic turning point in salvation history. ⁷

The earthquake is the other feature that conveys Matthew's message. Earthquakes are one of the disasters that prophetic and apocalyptic writings associate with the arrival of the End. These cataclysmic events are used to symbolize the enormous importance and consequences of God's intervention in our history. (We still use this imagery in much the same way today when we speak of an "earth-shaking" event. Everyone knows we we are not referring to a literal earthquake.) Matthew's mention of an earthquake also helps him explain how the tombs were opened. He uses this symbol again at the scene on Easter morning (28:2), even though he does not need it to explain how Jesus' tomb was opened. As Matthew tells it, an angel rolled away the stone, but Matthew adds the earthquake nonetheless, thereby linking Jesus' resurrection with those in 27:51-53. Jesus' tomb was already empty, so the earthquake was doubly unnecessary here. Its sole function in 28:2 is as an apocalyptic symbol.

Biblical authors intentionally used disasters like earthquakes as symbols. This can be seen clearly in Acts 2, where Luke tells the story of the first Pentecost. People are amazed that they each hear the apostles' preaching in their own language (Acts 2:5-12). Peter explains that what is happening is fulfilling the prophecy of Joel. Peter then quotes a long passage from Joel, part of which reads: "I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day" (Acts 2:19-20 NRSV, quoting Joel 2:30-31). Note that Peter claims that Joel's prophecy is being fulfilled in the events of Pentecost, not that it will be fulfilled at some future date. Obviously, Peter was not asserting that the moon was literally turning into blood as he spoke, or that the sun was being darkened by actual smoke. Peter assumed that his audience would understand these apocalyptic descriptions symbolically, and Luke expects his readers to do so as well.

Historians have no real choice but to conclude that the resurrections mentioned in Matthew 27:51-53 did not really happen. Of course, there are some Christians who reason that since everything in the Bible is historically true, this story must be historically true as well. Laypersons are free to believe anything they want, but historians are not free to claim that something happened simply because they want it to be so - just as juries are not free to reach any verdict they want. Historians and juries must be guided by evidence. And in this case there is no objective evidence for the historicity of the event. Except for those already committed to literalism, very, very few biblical scholars would argue that Matthew 27:51-53 is historical. (It would be interesting to learn Craig's position on this and his reasons for it.)

To sum up, we can reach the same conclusion on the historicity of Matthew 27:51-53 from two directions. On the one hand, we have no objective basis for claiming that the event really happened. On the other hand, we have strong clues from the way Matthew writes the story that he never intended it to be taken literally.

What Did Matthew Think He Was Writing?

If Matthew can create historical fiction like the resurrection of the righteous Jews, what does that mean for the other stories in his Gospel? Perhaps Matthew 27:51-53 is an anomaly, a passage where Matthew proceeds in a way totally unlike the way he writes in the rest of his Gospel. If so, it can tell us nothing about the Evangelists' overall perspective on the kind of truth they intended to communicate. But since there is no good reason to regard Matthew as an anomaly, we have to assume that it can help us understand Matthew's (and other Evangelists') perspective on the historical value of the stories in the Gospel.

To gauge how Matthew regarded the historicity of the events he narrates, we have to keep in mind that Matthew relies on Mark as one of his sources. Sometimes he virtually copies from Mark, sometimes he paraphrases. Sometimes he abbreviates Mark's narrative, deleting nonessential detail while retaining the substance of the story. At other times, though, Matthew deliberately alters Mark. He does not simply reword the account, but he changes its content in such a way as to alter Mark's meaning - sometimes a little, sometimes a lot; sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously.

An unusually clear clear example is the way in which Matthew 20:20-23 alters Mark 10:35-40. Mark tells of Jesus teaching his disciples that he will be put to death in Jerusalem (Mark 10:33-34). James and John the approach Jesus with the request that he grant them the places of highest honor when he comes into his glory. Because they had just heard Jesus' prediction of his passion, their request appears incredibly crass and shows that James and John totally failed to grasp the meaning of Jesus' teaching. When Matthew tells this story, he has the mother of James and John make the brazen request on behalf of her sons (Matt. 20:20). Why did Matthew make this change? Did he think that Mark was historically wrong at this point and that he had the real story of what had actually happened? There is not the slightest indication that Matthew made this change to set the record straight. Mark has a number of other scenes in which the disciples act stupidly or selfishly, and each time Matthew alters the scene in such a way that the disciples act wisely and behave as role models for Christians (cf., e.g., the disciples' response to Jesus in Mark 6:51-52 and in Matt. 14:32-33). In the present scene Matthew's small but significant modification enables him to retain the valuable lesson the scene teaches but without besmirching the reputaion of the two famous apostles.

There are dozens and dozens of places where Matthew alters Mark. Careful analysis of these changes (a process called redaction criticism) helps us to understand the messages Matthew is communicating through his distinctive version of the words and deeds of Jesus. These changes show beyond the shadow of a doubt that Matthew felt free to change Mark's story when he did not agree with some aspect of its message. These changes show either that Matthew did not regard Mark's Gospel as a literal report of actual events or that he did not care one way or the other. For Matthew (and, by extrapolation, all the Evangelists), facts were far less important than the meanings the expressed. After all, the facts could be changed to enhance the message.

Turning to the Easter stories, we can see how Matthew has altered Mark's version of the scene at the empty tomb. Two women (not three, as in Mark) go to see the tomb (not to annoint the body) before sunrise (not after). As they arrive, there is an earthquake, during which and angel rolls away the stone, terrifying the guards. (In Mark the women find the stone already rolled away when they arrive; Mark mentions neither an earthquake, nor an angel, nor guards.) Matthew's angel speaks to the women from outside the tomb; in Mark a young man speaks to them after they step inside. The scene in Matthew concludes when the women, instead of fleeing in fear and telling no one (as in Mark), depart in fear and great joy" and tell the disciples.

Matthew does not think mark was misinformed. He is not setting the record straight. It is not a question of whether Matthewis right and Mark is wrong or vice versa. Matthew obviously does not think that Mark gave a literal report of an actual event, and there's no good reason for us to think that Matthew considered his own version to be a literal report either.

Matthew did not write his own account to prove that Jesus' resurrection is a fact of history. Did Matthew believe that there was a historical kernel to his story that was literally true - that Jesus had in fact been buried, that people knew where, and that some women had discovered the tomb to be empty? We really don't know, and there is no way of telling from the Gospel he wrote some fifty years after Jesus' death. All we know is that Matthew inherited this story from Mark and felt free to alter it considerably in order to proclaim his faith in Jesus' resurrection. And that, it seems to me, is the key: faith. The Evangelists are interested in faith far more than in facts. We also know that they felt free to invent "facts" by creating stories out of whole cloth if this would enhance their proclamation of faith.

Can Fiction Express Truth?

Our consideration of the story about the earthquake and the rising of the Jewish saints in Matthew 27:51-53 leads to the conclusion that it is not the report of an actual event, that Matthew did not intend it to be, and that his ancient audience understood that. So is the story false? That depends on the precise meaning of the question. If it means, "Is the story a fiction, a narrative of an event that did not in fact happen?" the answer is "Yes, it is false." But if the question means, "Is what the author intends to communicate false?" then we have to ask a more basic question: Is Matthew's message false simply because the story he used to convey it is not historical? Matthew's meaning is that the death and resurrection of Jesus are the turning point in savation history, God's decisive intervention in human affairs. Are we guilty of what Craig derisively calls Peter Pan theology if we profess the truth of Matthew's message and acknowledge that Matthew 27:52-53 is not historical?

Well, millions of Christians believe Matthew's message without actually knowing the story of Matthew 27:51-53. (In my long experience as a Bible teacher, many Christians are surprised when they encounter this story. Even those well acquainted with the Bible say thing like, "I don't remember reading this before.") This was all the more so in the first century, when very few Christians had access to Matthew's Gospel. Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and the other New testament authors surely agreed with Matthew that Jesus' death and resurrection were God's decisive act in salvation history, even though nothing indicates that they knew the story related in Matthew 27:51-53.

Another way of getting at the issue is to ask, Which came first, the story or the belief in its message? Does Matthew's story provide the basis for the belief that Jesus' death and resurrection are the dicisive event in salvation history, or does the story express this belief? In other words, what caused what? Did the story give rise to the belief, or did the belief give rise to the story? In light of our historical considerations, the answer is clear: the story presumes and expresses the belief in its message. Matthew (or someone in his tradition) created the story to express faith in the supreme spiritual importance of Jesus' death and resurrection. The story is addressed to an audience that believes in Jesus and so understands and believes its message.

Considering the matter from another direction also shows that the story presupposed, rather than gave rise to, faith in Jesus. At the time Matthew wrote his Gospel, Jesus was a very controversial figure. Most Jews rejected the claim that he was the Messiah, a few accepted it (i.e., the Christian Jews, or Jewish Christians - either label will do), but nobody was neutral about Jesus. How could one be? There is no middle ground. It is inconceivable that a serious Jew could have said, "Maybe Jesus is the Messiah, and maybe he isn't; either way is all right with me." Because of the polarized religious situation, Jews who were not followers of Jesus were hostile toward what they thought he stood for and toward his disciples, whose movement posed a threat to Judaism. Now what are the realistic chances that someone like this would read or hear the story in Matthew 27:51-53 and as a result conclude that Jesus must have been the one through whom God had decisively intervened in human history? The odds of that happening are even lower than the ods that any reader will be converted to Islam by reading the Muslim apologetic that I so clumsily outlined above. ⁸ Mathew's story would simply not persuade outsiders. They would understand its message, but they would reject it on the spot because they would have no prior belief in Jesus. In fact, Matthew 28:11-15 explains why many of those who knew Jesus' tomb was empty did not believe in his resurrection.

What Does an Empty Tomb Prove?

Try to see the situation from a Jewish perspective. Matthew 28:11-15 reflects Matthew's bitter animosity toward the Jewish leaders, to who he here imputes corrupt and deceitful motives. But if we step back from Matthew's extremely one-sided perspective, we realize that all that most Jews knew was that followers of Jesus claimed that he had risen from the dead. To get some idea of how this must have sounded to Jews of the time, imagine our response to reports bu some members of a cult that their recently deceased leader (whom they had buried) had risen. Their reports that his grave was empty would hardly persuade many. Even if it was confirmed that the grave where they claim he was buried was empty, what would that prove? Nothing. We would conclude either that they had removed the body or that he was never buried there in the first place. Suppose they told stories of seeing angels at the empty grave or of the grave being opened by an earthquake. Suppose that they claimed that our leaders were involved in a conspiracy to cover up the truth about the resurrection of their master. Suppose they told of having seen him alive, of having spoken and eaten with him. And (though I can't imagine how this would come about in our society) suppose that some of these witnesses were willing to die for their belief in their leader.

What would we make of such people and their belief in their messiah? Probably something similar to what ancient people made of the earliest Christians. (As a thought experiment, ask yourself what it would take to convince you that this cult leader had truly risen from the dead.)

Empty tombs don't prove anything, except to insiders. Nor do reports of appearances of risen leaders. In the Gospels the risen Jesus appears only to those who already believe in him. Those who see him after his resurrection are those who followed him during his lifetime. John's Gospel originally ended with a blessing for those who believe in Jesus without needing to see him firsthand. ⁹ The implication was that it took little faith to believe when one had actually seen the risen Lord. Matthew, however, does not agree. At the very end of Matthew's Gospel is a fascinating and unexpected statement. He reports that even some of the apostles who saw the risen Jesus in person had their doubts. Just before Jesus sent forth the Eleven with the Great Commission, they prostrated themselves before Jesus, "but some doubted" (Matt. 28:17). This Gospel thus closes with a cryptic admission that even some of these ultimate insiders were not convinced by a face-to-face encounter with the risen Lord. Matthew's abrupt comment comes as a complete surpise, and its precise meaning is puzzling. But this much at least is clear: Whatever else the Gospels may teach about the resurrection, faith in the risen Jesus requires more than stories about him - no matter how convincing these stories may be to insiders.

Robert J. Miller is associate professor or religion and philosophy at Midway College in Midway, Kentucky.

Socrates' prayer

2005-05-24T20:06:00.000-07:00

This passage is the conclusion to the Phaedrus of Plato. It's one of the most charming, most complete prayers ever uttered.

Socrates: Shouldn't we first offer a prayer?

Phaedrus: Of course.

Socrates: Dear Pan, and all you other gods who live here, grant that I may become beautiful within, and that whatever outward things I have may be in harmony with the spirit inside me. May I understand that it is only the wise who are rich, and may I have only as much money as a temperate person needs. -- Is there anything else that we can ask for, Phaedrus? For me, that prayer is enough.

Phaedrus: Make it a prayer for me too, since friends have all things in common.

Socrates: Let's be going.

some more WmCWms . . .

2005-05-24T18:58:00.000-07:00

There is a woman in our town
walks rapidly, flat bellied

in worn slacks upon the street
where I saw her.

Neither short
nor tall, nor old nor young
her
. . face would attract no

adolescent. Grey eyes looked
straight before her.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Her
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . hair
was gathered simply behind the
ears under a shapeless hat.

Her
. . . . . hips were narrow, her
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .legs
thin and straight. She stopped

me in my tracks -- until I saw
her
. . . disappear in the crowd.

An inconspicuous decoration
made of sombre cloth,
meant
I think to be a flower, was
pinned flat to her
. . . . . . . . . .right

breast -- any woman might have
done the same to
say she was a woman and warn
us of her mood. Otherwise

she was dressed in male attire,
as much as to say to hell

with you. Her
. . . . . . . . . . . expression was
seious, her
. . . . . . . . feet were small.

And she was gone!

.. . . if I ever see you again
as I have sought you
daily without success

I'll speak to you, alas
too late! ask,
What are you doing on the

streets of Paterson? a
thousand questions:
Are you married? Have you any

children? And most important,
your NAME! which
of course she may not

give me -- though
I cannot conceive it
in such a lonely and

intelligent woman

William Carlos Williams
from Paterson:
Book Five (1958)

woman is the nigger of the world

2005-05-23T06:20:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from Book II (1948) of William Carlos Williams' poetic masterpiece, Paterson:

My attitude toward woman's wretched position in society and my ideas about all the changes necessary there, were interesting to you, weren't they, in so far as they made for literature? That my particular emotional orientation, in wrenching myself free from patterned stardardized feminine feelings enabled me to do some passably good work with poetry -- that was all fine, wasn't it -- something for you to sit up and take notice of! And you saw in one of my first letters to you (the one you had wanted to make use of, then, in the Introduction to your Paterson) an indication that my thoughts were to be taken seriously, because that too could be turned by you into literature, as something disconnected from life.

But when my actual personal life crept in, stamped all over with the very same attitudes and sensibilities and preoccupations that you found quite admirable as literature -- that was an entirely different matter, wasn't it? No longer admirable, but, on the contrary, deplorable, annoying, stupid, or in some way unpardonable; because those very ideas and feelings which make one a writer with some kind of new vision, are often the very same ones which, in living itself, make one clumsy, awkward, absurd, ungrateful, confidential where most people are reticent, and reticent where one should be confidential, and which cause one, all too often, to step on the toes of other people's sensitive egos as a result of one's stumbling earnestness or honesty carried too far. And that they are the very same ones -- that's important, something to be remembered at all times, especially by writers like yourself who are so sheltered from life in the raw by the glass-walled conditions of their own safe lives.

Only my writing (when I write) is myself: only that is the real me in any essential way. Not because I bring to literature and to life two different inconsistent sets of values, as you do. No, I don't do that; and I feel that when anyone does do it, literature is turned into just so much intellectual excrement fit for the same stinking hole as any other kind.

But in writing (as in all forms of creative art) one derives one's unity of being and one's freedom to be one's self, from one's relationship to those particular externals (language, clay, paints, et cetera) over which one has complete control and the shaping of which lies entirely in one's own power; whereas in living, one's shaping of the externals involved there (of one's friendships, the structure of society, et cetera) is no longer entirely within one's own power but requires the cooperation and the understanding and the humanity of others in order to bring out what is best and most real in one's self.

That's why all that fine talk of yours about woman's need to "sail free in her own element" as a poet, becomes nothing but empty rhetoric in the light of your behavior towards me. No woman will ever be able to do that, completely, until she is able first to "sail free in her own element" in living itself -- which means in her relationships with men even before she can do so in her relationships with other women. The members of any underprivileged class distrust and hate the "outsider" who is one of them, and women therefore -- women in general -- will never be content with their lot until the light seeps down on them, not from one of their own, but from the eyes of changed male attitudes toward them -- so that in the meantime, the problems and awareness of a woman like myself are looked upon even more unsympathetically by other women than by men.

And that, my dear doctor, is another reason why I needed of you a very different kind of friendship from the one you offered me.

I still don't know of course the specific thing that caused the cooling of your friendliness toward me. But I do know that if you were going to bother with me at all, there were only two things for you to have considered: (1) that I was, as I still am, a woman dying of loneliness -- yes, really dying of it almost in the same way that people die slowly of cancer or consumption or any other such disease (and with all my efficiency in the practical world continually undermined by that loneliness); and (2) that I needed desperately, and still do, some ways and means of leading a writer's life, either by securing some sort of writer's job (or any other job having to do with my cultural interests) or else through some kind of literary journalism such as the book reviews -- because only in work and jobs of that kind, can I turn into assets what are liabilities for me in jobs of a different kind.

Those were the two problems of mine that you continually and almost deliberately placed in the background of your attempts to help me. And yet they were, and remain, much greater than whether or not I get my poetry published. I didn't need the publication of my poetry with your name lent to it, in order to go on writing poetry, half as much as I needed your friendship in other ways (the very ways you ignored) in order to write it. I couldn't, for that reason, have brought the kind of responsiveness and appreciation that you expected of me (not with any real honesty) to the kind of help from you which I needed so much less than the kind you withheld.

Your whole relationship with me amounted to pretty much the same thing as your trying to come to the aid of a patient suffering from pneumonia by handing her a box of aspirin or Grove's cold pills and a glass of hot lemonade. I couldn't tell you that outright. And how were you, a man of letters, to have realized it, when the imagination, so quick to assert itself most powerfully in the creation of a piece of literature, seems to have no power at all in enabling writers in your circumstances to fully understand the maladjustment and impotencies of a woman in my position?

When you wrote to me up in W. about that possible censor job, it seemed a very simple matter to you, didn't it, for me to make all the necessary inquiries about the job, arrange for the necessary interviews, start work (if I was hired) with all the necessary living conditions for holding down such a job, and thus find my life all straightened out in its practical aspects, at least -- as if by magic?

But it's never so simple as that to get on one's feet even in the most ordinary practical ways, for anyone on my side of the railroad tracks -- which isn't your side, nor the side of your great admirer Miss Fleming, nor even the side of those well cared for people like S.T. and S.S. who've spent most of their lives with some Clara or some Jeanne to look after them even when they themselves have been flat broke.

A completely down and out person with months of stripped, bare hardship behind him needs all kinds of things to even get himself in shape for looking for a respectable, important white-collar job. And when he needs ample funds for eating and sleeping and keeping up appearances (especially the latter) while going around for various interviews involved. And even if and when a job of that kind is obtained, he still needs the eating and the sleeping and the carfares and the keeping up of appearances and what not, waiting for his first pay check and even perhaps for the second pay check since the first one might have to go almost entirely for back rent or something else of that sort.

And all that takes a hell of a lot of money (especially for a woman) -- a lot more than ten dollars or twenty five dollars. Or else it takes the kind of very close friends at whose apartment one is quite welcome to stay for a month or two, and whose typewriter one can use in getting off some of the required letters asking for interviews, and whose electric iron one can use in keeping one's clothes pressed, et cetera -- the kind of close friends that I don't have and never have had, for reasons which you know.

Naturally, I couldn't turn to you, a stranger, for any such practical help on so large a scale; and it was stupid of me to have minimized the extent of help I needed when I asked you for that first money order that got stolen and later for the second twenty five dollars -- stupid because it was misleading. But the different kind of help I asked for, finally (and which you placed in the background) would have been an adequate substitute, because I could have carried out those plans which I mentioned to you in the late fall (the book reviews, supplemented by almost any kind of part-time job, and later some articles, and maybe a month at Yaddo this summer) without what it takes to get on one's feet in other very different ways. And then, eventually, the very fact that my name had appeared here and there in the book review sections of a few publications (I'd prefer not to use poetry that way) would have enabled me to obtain certain kinds of jobs (such as an O.W.I. job for instance) without all that red tape which affects only obscure, unknown people.

The anger and the indignation which I feel towards you now has served to pierce through the rough ice of that congealment which my creative faculties began to suffer from as a result of that last note from you. I find myself thinking and feeling in terms of poetry again. But over and against that is the fact that I'm even more lacking in anchorage of any kind than when I first got to know you. My loneliness is a million fathoms deeper, and my physical energies even more seriously sapped by it; and my economic situation is naturally worse, with living costs so terribly high now, and with my contact with your friend Miss X having come off so badly.

However, she may have had another reason for paying no attention to that note of mine -- perhaps the reason of having found out that your friendliness toward me had cooled -- which would have made a difference to her, I suppose, since she is such a great "admirer" of yours. But I don't know. That I'm in the dark about, too; and when I went up to the "Times" last week, to try, on my own, to get some of ther fiction reviews (the "Times" publishes so many of those), nothing came of that either. And it's writing that I want to do -- not operating a machine or a lathe, because with literature more and more tied up with the social problems and social progress (for me, in my way of thinking) any contribution I might be able to make to the welfare of humanity (in war-time or peace-time) would have to be as a writer, not as a factory worker.

When I was very young, ridiculously young (of school-girl age) for a critical role, with my mind not at all developed and all my ideas in a state of first-week embryonic formlessness, I was able to obtain book-reviews from any number of magazines without any difficulty -- and all of them books by writers of accepted importance (such as Cummings, Babette Deutsch, H.D.) whereas now when my ideas have matured, and when I really have something to say, I can get no work of that kind at all. And why is that? It's because in all those intervening years, I have been forced, as a woman not content with woman's position in the world, to do a lot of pioneer living which writers of your sex and with your particular social background do not have thrust upon them, and which the members of my own sex frown upon (for reasons I've already referred to) -- so that at the very moment when I wanted to return to writing from living (with my ideas clarified and enriched by living) there I was (and still am) -- because of that living -- completely in exile socially.

I glossed over and treated very lightly (in my first conversation with you) those literary activities of my early girlhood, because the work itself was not much better than that which any talented college freshman or precocious prep-school senior contributes to her school paper. But, after all, that work, instead of appearing in a school paper where it belonged, was taken so seriously by editors of the acceptably important literary publications of that time, that I was able to average as much as $15 a week, very easily, from it. And I go into that now and stress it here; because you can better imagine, in the light of that, just how I feel in realizing that on the basis of just a few superficials (such as posessing a lot of appealingly youthful sex-appeal and getting in with the right set) I was able to maintain my personal identity as a writer in my relationship to the world, whereas now I am cut off from doing so because it was necessary for me in my living, to strip myself of those superficials.

You've never had to live, Dr. P -- not in any of the by-ways and dark underground passages where life so often has to be tested. The very circumstances of your birth and social background provided you with an escape from life in the raw; and you confuse that protection from life with an inability to live -- and are thus able to regard literature as nothing more than a desperate last extremity resulting from that illusionary inability to live. (I've been looking at some of your autobiographical works, as this indicates.)

But living (unsafe living, I mean) isn't something one just sits back and decides about. It happens to one, in a small way, like measles; or in a big way, like a leaking boat or an earthquake. Or else it doesn't happen. And when it does, then one must bring, as I must, one's life to literature; and when it doesn't then one brings to life (as you do) purely literary sympathies and understandings, the insights and humanity of words on paper only -- and also, alas, the ego of the literary man which most likely played an important part in the change of your attitude toward me. That literary man's ego wanted to help me in such a way, I think, that my own achievments might serve as a flower in his buttonhole, if that kind of help had been enough to make me bloom.

But I have no blossoms to bring to any man in the way of either love or friendship. That's one of the reasons why I didn't want that introduction to my poems. And I'm not wanting to be nasty or sarcastic in the last lines of this letter. On the contrary a feeling of profound sadness has replaced now the anger and the indignation with which I started to write all this. I wanted your friendship more than I ever wanted anything else (yes, more, and I've wanted other things badly). I wanted it desperately, not because I have a single thing with which to adorn any man's pride -- but just because I haven't.

Yes, the anger which I imagined myself to feel on all the previous pages, was false. I am too unhappy and too lonely to be angry; and if some of the things to which I have called your attention here should cause any change of heart in you regarding me, that would be just about the only thing I can conceive of as occuring in my life right now.

La votre
C.

P.S. That I'm back here at 21 Pine Street causes me to add that that mystery as to who forged the "Cress" on the money order and also took one of Brown's checks (though his was not cashed, and therefore replaced later) never did get cleared up. And the janitor who was here at the time, is dead now. I don't think it was he took any of the money. But still I was rather glad that the postoffice didn't follow it through because just in case Bob did have something to do with it, he would have gotten into serious trouble -- which I shouldn't have welcomed, because he was one of those miserably underpaid negroes and an awful decent human being in lots of ways. But now I wish it had been followed through after he died (which was over two months ago) because the crooks may have been those low vile upstate farm people whose year-round exploitation of down and out farm help ought to be brought to light in some fashion, and because if they did steal the money order and were arrested for it, that in itself would have brought the attention of the proper authorities all their other illegal activities as well: And yet that kind of justice doesn't interest me greatly. What's at the root of this or that crime or antisocial act, both psychologically and environmentally, always interests me more. But as I make that last statement, I'm reminded of how much I'd like to do a lot of things with people in some prose -- some stories, maybe a novel. I can't tell you how much I want the living which I need in order to write. And I simply can't achieve them entirely alone. I don't even posess a typewriter now, nor have even a rented one -- and I can't think properly except on a typewriter. But that of course is the least of my problems -- the typewriter; at least the easiest to do something about.

* * *
Dear P.:

This is the simplest, most outright letter I've ever written to you; and you ought to read it all the way through, and carefully, because it's about you, as a writer, and about the ideas regarding women that you expressed in your article on A.N., and because in regard to myself, it contains certain information which I did not think it necessary to give you before, and which I do think now you ought to have. And if my anger in the beginning makes you too angry to go on from there -- well, that anger of mine isn't there in the last part, now as I attach this post-script.

And if you don't feel like reading it even for those reasons, will you then do so, please, merely out of fairness to me -- much time and much thought and much unhappiness having gone into those pages.

fragments from Meister Eckhart

2005-05-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

Meister Eckhart said: We should contrive not to need to pray to God, asking for his grace and divine goodness . . . but take it without asking . . .

Meister Eckhart said: I shall never pray that God give me himself. I shall pray that he make me pure, for if I am pure, God must give himself and dwell in me, because it is his peculiar nature to do so.

What is truth? Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep to the truth and let God go.

Speaking of knowledge and love: knowledge is better than love but the two together are better than one of them, for knowledge really contains love. Love may be fooled by goodness, depending on it, so that when I love I hang on to the gate, blind to the truth about my acquaintance. Even a stone has love - for the ground! if I depend on goodness, which is God's first proffer, and accept God only as he is good to me, I am content with the gate but I do not get to God. Thus knowledge is better, for it leads love. Love has to do with desire and purpose, whereas knowledge is no particular thought, but rather, it peels off all [coverings] and is disinterested and runs naked to God, until it touches him and grasps him.

In limpid souls God beholds his own image; he rests in them and they in him.
As I have often said, I like best those things in which I see most clearly the likeness of God. Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.

Envoi
Meister Eckhart's good friends bade him, "since you are going to leave us, give us one last word."

"I will give you," he replied, "a rule which is the stronghold of all I have ever said, in which are lodged all the truths to be discussed or put into practice."

It often happens that what seems trivial to us is more important to God than what we think important. Therefore, we ought to take everything God puts on us evenly, not comparing and wondering which is more important, or higher, or best. We ought simply to follow where God leads, that is, to do what we are most inclined to do, to go where we are repeatedly admonished to go - to where we feel most drawn. If we do that, God gives us his greatest in our least and never fails.

Now, some people despise the little things of life. It is their mistake, for they thus prevent themselves from getting God's greatness out of these little things. God is every way, evenly in all ways, to him who has the eyes to see. But sometimes it is hard to know whether one's inclinations come from God or not, but that can be decided this way: if you find yourself possesed of a knowledge or intimation of God's will, which you obey before everything else, because you feel urged to obey it and the urge is frequent, then you may know that it is from God.

Some people want to recognize God in some pleasant enlightenment -- and then they get pleasure and enlightenment but not God. Somewhere it is written that God shines in the darkness where every now and then we get a glimpse of him. More often, God is where his light is least apparent. Therefore we ought to expect God in all manners and all things evenly.

Someone may now say: I should be glad to look for God evenly in all shapes and things, but my mind does not always work the same way -- and then, not as well with this as with that. To which I reply: That is too bad! All paths lead to God and he is on them all evenly, to him who knows. I am well aware that a person may get more out of one technique than another but it is not best so. God responds to all techniques evenly to a knowing man. Such and such may be the way, but it is not God.

But even if God is in all ways and all things evenly, do I not still need a special way to get to him? Let us see. Whatever the way that leads you most frequently to awareness of God, follow that way; and if another way appears, different from the first, and you quit the first and take the second, and the second works, it is all right. It would be nobler and better, however, to achieve rest and security through evenness, by which one might take God and enjoy him in any manner, in any thing, and not have to delay and hunt around for your special way: that has been my joy! To this end all kinds of activities may contribute and any work may be a help; but if it does not, let it go!

Exclusivity and Particularity

2005-05-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

The following passage is John Dominic Crossan's response to a collection of articles in which exclusivity is seen as the principal obstacle to earnest and useful ecumenical dialogue.

Several of the authors spoke of the imperial exclusivity so characteristic of Christianity. For José Ignacio Cabezón, "What Buddhists find objectionable is (a) the Christian characterization of the deity whose manifestation Jesus is said to be, and (b) the claim that Jesus is unique in being such a manifestation". For Bokin Kim, "most Christians hold to an exclusive view of Christ that claims his uniqueness". For Rita Gross, "the exclusive claims made on behalf of Jesus by Christians appalled me even as a teenager, and my repugnance for exclusive truth claims on the part of religions - any religion - has not diminished since. Thus, part of my journey is working out both a theory and a praxis of religious pluralism that is neither relativistic nor universalistic, that encourages both commitment to one tradition and appreciation of other traditions." I myself find such exclusivistic claims by Christianity, or any other religion, insulting in theory and lethal in practice, objectionable in history and obscene in theology. They are implicitly genocidal even if political impotence limits the divine ethnic cleansing they imagine. But how, as Gross repeats, does one establish "a position that is neither relativistic, not exclusivistic"? My own answer is particularity, but I must explain that in terms of my understanding of Trinity, divinity, and particularity.

Trinity seems a particularly and peculiarly Christian understanding of God, but my proposal is that the structure of the Holy is Trinitarian in all religions that I know about and even in all those I can imagine. I speak very deliberately about the Holy (not about God) as the infinite mystery that surrounds and supports, fascinates and terrifies us. It is that against which we interact as meaning-seeking beings. Be it absolute open meaninglessness or absolute univocal meaning, our interaction with it does not seem to be an option but a necessity. And my point is that the Holy is Trinitarian in structure. It is not just on the one hand that religion is Trinitarian in structure. But it is not on the other hand that the Holy in itself and apart from us is Trinitarian in structure. It is, I propose, that the Holy in itself as seen by us across the spectrum of world religious experience is Trinitarian in structure. That trinity involve, first, ultimate metaphor, that foundational image that imagines the Holy as, for example, power, person, state, or order, as nature, god/goddess, nirvana, or mandate of heaven. It involves, second, material manifestation, some physical object in which that metaphorical vision is peculiarly, specially, or even uniquely incarnated, some person, place or thing, some individual or collectivity, some cave or shrine or temple, some clearing in the forest or tree in the desert where the ultimate referent is encountered and experienced. It involves, finally, preliminary preparation, for there must be at least one believer to begin with and eventually more to end with, But, as there are always nonbelievers as well, some prior affinity must exist, as it were, between this metaphor rather than that, this manifestation rather than that, and this believer rather than that. For me, therefore, all faith and all religion, not just my own Christianity, is Trinitarian in structure and that structure seems to inhere in the Holy itself, at least insofar as we can see it. For me, therefore, Christianity and Buddhism differ most profoundly on their ultimate metaphor for the Holy: it is person (God) for the former but state (nirvana) for the latter. In Christianity, of course, our ultimate metaphor is rather overinvested: it it person; and that person is parent; and that parent is father. But I leave those specifications aside for the moment.

Divinity is the term I use for any material manifestation. By calling such manifestations divine I mean precicely that a religion's ultimate metaphor is experienced by believers as peculiarly, specially, or even uniquely present in that physical phenomenon. In that sense I understand both Christ and the Buddha to be divine in exactly the same way - that is, as incarnations of the Holy but within different ultimate metaphors. Christ did not have a monopoly on the Kingdom of God but invited others to enter it just as he had done. So just as there is the Buddha and the bodhisattva, there is also the Christ and the 'Christisattva'. And just as the Buddha does not negate the bodhisattva, so neither does the 'Christisattva' negate the Christ. It is, in all cases, a question of lived lives and, sometimes, however unfortunately, of accepted martyrdoms. But those last words emphasize a crucial difference between the Christ and the Buddha, and José Ignacio Cabezón underlined it in his article: "Unlike Jesus, the Buddha was not a peasant; his followers seem to have been principally middle- and upper-middle-class men and women, as was his principal audience; and his criticisms were primarily directed at the Brahminical religious beliefs and practices prevalent in his day, not at the social structures that marginalized and oppressed men and women in Ancient India . . . The Buddha opened up the religious life (and therefore the possibility of salvation) to members of society that that hitherto been denied it: members of the lowest castes and women especially . . . Nonetheless, as a program of social reform, Jesus' must be recognized as being the more radical and far reaching, and this no doubt is why the Christian tradition to this day, even when impeded by its own institutional forms, has been at the forefront of social transformation." In this response I focus only on exclusivity and particularity, but this is another major focus for Buddhist-Christian discussion. It is a question of the divergent social class of the Christ and the Buddha. It is the difference between justice and compassion. It is the question of suffering outside the palace created from inside the palace itself. But, for here and now. I leave those questions aside to return to those terms I used twice already, "peculiarly, specially, or even uniquely present," terms that I sum up by the word particularity.

Particularity is, for me, the most universal aspect of our humanity. It is what rules us whenever we touch on anything most precious, personal, or profound. Examples may help. Suppose I awoke tomorrow morning beside my wife Sarah and announced, "If I had not met you, fallen in love with you, and married you, I would have met, loved, and married someone else and be waking up next to them this morning." That is, of course, a very bad way to start the day. But it is both absolutely true and absolutely inhuman. If it is true, then why is it most imprudent to start the day with this announcement? Particularity is the answer. One experiences and must experience a beloved spouse as "peculiarly, specially, or even uniquely" destined for that relationship and not as an interchangeable cog in a relational machine. As with human love, so is it also - and even more profoundly - with divine faith. It must be experienced as "peculiarly, specially, or even uniquely" right, true, valid, and correct. In anything that is of supreme importance to us, be it spouse or family, hobby or passion, job or profession, language or country, there is an inevitable slippage from a to the. But out of the corner of our minds we recognize that a has become the, and we know that this is perfectly human and presents no problem - unless it is taken literally and the equally relative absolutes of others are negated. So it is, also or especially, with one's faith or one's religion. It must be experienced as a manifestation of the Holy, but we must never forget or deny that it is actually a manifestation for me and for us. To be human is to live in a as the; to be inhuman is to deny that necessary slippage.

John Dominic Crossan
2000
DePaul University

To The States

2005-05-20T00:20:00.000-07:00

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist
much, obey little,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward
resumes its liberty.

-- Walt Whitman

on "Christian" art . . .

2005-05-18T22:47:00.000-07:00

I found the following paragraph in the introduction to the Oxford History of Christianity recently:

Christianity is a religion of the word -- the 'Word made Flesh', the word preached, the word written to record the story of God's intervention in history. Every story needs a picture. Pope Gregory the Great defined the role of the artist thus: 'painting can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who can read'. Augustine had gone further in praise of music: written words are in themselves inadequate -- 'language is too poor to speak of God . . . yet you do not like to be silent. What is left for you but to sing in jubilation'. The visual artist as well as the musician is entitled to the benefit of the Augustinian argument. Words constitute a record exerting a long-term pressure: a work of art has an instantaneous impact. It bridges the gap between cultures with a simple gesture with an immediacy denied to translations of the record. Whatever the culture from which it derives, a great work of art is a potential source of spiritual insight, falling short of words in the power of syllogistic argument and even in the ability to suggest the content of the imagination's inward eye, but far superior in the evocative power to haunt and illuminate. Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract painting, who published a study of The Spiritual in Art in 1912, spoke of art as resembling religion in taking what is known and transforming it, showing it 'in new perspectives and in a blinding light'. Some of the masterpieces of painting and sculpture in the Christian tradition have been produced by artists whose status as believers is doubtful. In Kandinsky's view of the breakthrough to spiritual perception, this is no paradox. 'It is safer to turn to geniuses without faith than to believers without talent' (blogger's emphasis), said the French Dominican Marie-Alain Couturier -- an aphorism which he tested by persuading Matisse, Braque, Chagall, and other great names of the day to do work for the church of Assy in the French Alps. Couturier was not subordinating religious considerations to élitism; to him, 'all great art is spiritual since the genius of the artist lies in the depths, the secret inner being from whence faith also springs'. Jacques Maritain has drawn out a further implication of the supposition of the unity of all spiritual experience. To the Christian who wishes his art to reflect his religious convictions he says: keep this desire out of the forefront of the mind, and simply 'strive to make a work of beauty in which your entire heart lies.' (blogger's emphasis)

John M^cManners
1990

Huxley on silence

2005-05-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire -- we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but usually create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ear, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego's core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose -- to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its Divine Ground.

— from Silence, Liberty, and Peace
Aldous Huxley
(1946)

explanatory note

2005-05-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this blog will be to archive and possibly comment on some passages that have touched me in some profound way or another. Some will be complete pieces and others will be fragmentary.

peace

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