tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2141889977443499982024-03-13T07:20:21.461-07:00From the HeightsA PLACE FOR POETRYMaximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-28392144850260492102018-03-11T16:44:00.000-07:002018-03-11T17:32:44.419-07:00Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union - A Review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h4>
<br />I</h4>
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Wolfram Kaiser's realm of expertise lies in the world of transnational politics, specifically those influenced by Catholic institutions. In editing collaborative works such as <i>Political Catholicism in Europe 1918-45</i>, Kaiser has proven himself a keen student of how the Catholic intellectual edifice has gradually come to a position of 'compromise,' as it were, or how it has reasserted itself in a political world increasingly shaped by democratic ideas.<br />
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The papacy of Pius IX, despite its rigidly reactionary character (see <a href="http://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius09/p9syll.htm">The Syllabus of Errors</a>), nevertheless acted as a key mobilizer for a rejuvenated Catholic demographic in Europe (see the 500,000 head Trier pilgrimage in 1844 to see the Holy Shroud of Jesus). According to scholars such as Kaiser, John Boyer, and Christopher Clark, it did this in three ways: (1) the centralization of hitherto disparate and diverse political actions into a unified 'matrix of power' to which the national Catholic oppositions could look for inspiration and cohesion; (2) the encouragement on the part of Pius IX and the Church hierarchy to the laity to engage in political disputes with the liberal and anticlerical factions, and to cross national divides to find further support; and (3) the concrete application of these 'new' strategies in the fight over the lost temporal powers of the church (1870) and in the culture wars all over Europe (Kaiser, pp. 12-13).<br />
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John Boyer has accurately described transnational political Catholicism at the end of the nineteenth century as 'a civilization... as a whole way of life involving many different folk communities, each having its own physical identity but bound together by a higher order... of shared legal and moral norms, sacred cultural rites and performances, overlapping forms' (Boyer, p. 22). This 'civilization' carried over into the 20th century, and it naturally meant an accompanying political or extrapolitical representation (the Catholic press, Catholic Action groups, confessional parties such as <i>Zentrum </i>and the Christian Socials, Catholic trade unions, etc.). The papacy of Leo XIII and its later influence, however, no longer meant a direct attack on the entire modern order, but rather an entry into party politics in the attempt to edify society from within its new social structures.<br />
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These initial movements and battlegrounds set the scene for the next phase, which was the formation and influence of the transnational Catholic groups that helped foster the creation of European union, something which Kaiser investigates in the present work.<br />
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<h4>
II</h4>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoM5FYxsAp6nI82qVAdFFr7ORKaqsHZBiZS_JNNQUEYWPeKzxYIlEHCPcm7-sLbKbYQ8dcSMTwAl06432EkcQOiA_-Zz5y8mNal899AmuAwN_3rp2vdQA_SAQZOPKhzvppL3WL1dROYL9W/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1070" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoM5FYxsAp6nI82qVAdFFr7ORKaqsHZBiZS_JNNQUEYWPeKzxYIlEHCPcm7-sLbKbYQ8dcSMTwAl06432EkcQOiA_-Zz5y8mNal899AmuAwN_3rp2vdQA_SAQZOPKhzvppL3WL1dROYL9W/s320/images.jpg" width="213" /></a>Whereas at the end of the nineteenth century Catholic transnationalism was still largely dominated by ultraconservative groups such as the Geneva Committee and the Union de Fribourg led by legitimist aristocrats, meaning that democracy and the parliamentary process was rejected <i>in toto</i>, deteriorating political circumstances demanded some measure of adaptation and evolution if Catholics were to remain a relevant social force in opposition to the surging liberal and socialist elements (Kaiser, p. 21). The polarizing tactics of Pius IX were obsolete in the increasingly exigent mission to unify all the different Catholic positions into a more compact, more cohesive identity; there was no room for marginalizing more progressive Catholics when the opposition could easily rally around key simple concepts in great numbers and when democratic society is conditioned and controlled by great numbers. Thus, the papal policy of <i>non expedit</i>, which restricted Catholics from voting, was amended in 1905 to allow Catholics to vote against a more extreme (socialist) politician, and finally annulled altogether in 1918.<br />
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Because of the emerging nationalist currents in 19th century Europe, Catholics were again subjected to the suspicions of their Protestant and secular neighbours. The fact that Catholics 'took their orders from Rome' precluded their full integration into the modern nation, which demands exactly that for its homogeneity, its unity (Ireland is an obvious exception where the Irish religion was subservient to its nationalist struggle to emancipate itself from Britain). This put any Catholic political activity on the defensive, where it tried to ensure the rights and privileges of its own, where it conceded to national demands in order to show that Catholics were indeed loyal citizens, and which ultimately killed the blossoming of any meaningful transnational growth because of the lack of proactive policy-making or long-term vision. These are things that the international socialist movements were more or less settled on, but which were still in the nascent stages of their development in Catholic movements.<br />
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This all changed after the Great War, however, which, while shattering the traditional transnational Catholic state of the Austrian Empire, opened new doors for emergent Catholic parties to forge their own transnational links. The Vatican was no longer totally opposed to the idea of political participation (in 1918 Pope Benedict XV finally allowed for the creation of an Italian Catholic Party, the Italian People's Party), which meant that Christian democrats could again look to it as a source of unity and guidance (Kaiser, p. 43). Meanwhile, the secularizing process hit Catholic cultures as well, meaning that their political parties could appeal to a broader range of interests, Catholic, Protestant, or secular (including lapsed Catholics who still felt connected to traditionally Christian sociopolitical ideals).<br />
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This wide appeal was not possible prior to WWI because of the stringent Catholic attitudes towards the democratic process and because of the defensive nature of Catholicism in general, which felt itself to be in the position of 'us against the (modern) world.' The political parties inspired by Catholic social teaching were now on the offensive, wielding fresh ideas about how to implement the core precepts of their faith in a secular, modernized setting. In spite of the variegated national conditions and histories of social division even within Catholic ranks, they did so with a remarkably unified spirit, drawing from their faith and their willingness to combat all manner of political heresy a 'Europe-wide sense of shared purpose and common identity' (Conway, '<i>Catholic Politics</i>,' p. 3).<br />
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All the same, differences persist, and even grow as the 20's become the 30's. Kaiser mentions how the Pius XI papacy advocates a form of corporatism over parliamentary democracy, which it is supposed to replace. This support was shared by right-wing Catholics all over Europe, who were altogether persuaded by the more regimented and authoritarian Catholic systems installed in Dolfuss's Austria and Salazar's Portugal and the regionally-oriented 'federalist personalism' of L'Ordre Nouveau. The ruinous economic climate of the 30's certainly facilitated such extreme reactions against the global liberal-capitalist order, and to a large extent vindicated them.<br />
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(Regardless of our own sympathies with these spirited efforts to recreate the hierarchical and organic values of traditional Europe, this is not the place to get into the problem of corporatism, however, especially since Kaiser himself does not spend much time on this temporary diversion in the development of political Catholicism. The fundamental point is that the economic crisis and the political extremes engulfing Europe, the Bolshevism of Russia and the Fascism of Italy, motivated many formerly centrist Catholics to join the latter as a defensive measure, certainly as the 'lesser of two evils.')<br />
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In spite of the resurgent fires of nationalism, the 20's and 30's also cultivated cross-border political and economic links between the nations, which is particularly important for Catholic parties, who never had the kind of international support that the socialists enjoyed, for example (Kaiser, pp. 60-61). The Internationale Democratique, for example, organized thousands of left-wing Catholics from all over, but especially from Germany and France. while the Secrétariat International des Partis Démocratiques d'Inspiration Chrétienne (SIPDIC, known today as the Centrist Democrat International) acted as the organizational centre for all European Christian democratic parties. The SIPDIC had the moral support of conscientious men like Konrad Adenauer, but it was the active participation of men like Joseph Joos and Robert Schuman who really defined the objectives of a 'Catholicized' democracy and paved the way for its realization in the political sphere (Kaiser, pp. 63-65).<br />
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These were the kinds of organizations that planted the roots for the plants of Christian democracy that would flourish in post-WWII Europe, a crucial one being the reconciliation and integration of Franco-German interests. Kaiser elaborates on the kind of foreign policy that the leaders of Christian democracy were considering for the European future, clearly revealing how much they owed to the ideals formulated in the Catholic social teaching of Popes like Leo XIII and Pius XI:<br />
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Joos shared most of the revisionist aims of German foreign policy (and the Centre Party), which largely remained geared towards re-establishing German hegemony over central Europe. He had a keen interest in Franco-German reconciliation, however, and established many contacts in France. Even at the height of the Ruhr conflict in 1923, he distanced himself in his articles for the <i>Westdeutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung</i> from the prevailing extreme nationalist fervour, denouncing nationalism as ‘a sin against the Holy Ghost’ in the German version of his contribution to the Europe-wide critical enquiry into nationalism, which the Catholic intellectual and journalist Vaussard put together for the French journal <i>Les Lettres</i>. Instead, he propagated the application of the ‘federalist principle’ to Europe’s future political organisation. This guiding idea – shared also by Adenauer, for example – reflected the traditional preference of Rhenish-Westfalian Catholicism for a more federal organisation of Germany with the aim of overcoming Prussian-Protestant hegemony. In the case of Joos, it also derived from the preference of Catholic social teaching for the application of the principle of subsidiarity in all social relations including the organisation of the state and international affairs. (Kaiser, pp. 93-94)</blockquote>
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Whereas Kaiser carefully, patiently unveils the progress of European union according to the foundations established by the Christian democrats, we ourselves do not have the interest or the patience to repeat the entire narrative. Suffice it to say that the author's thesis traces familiar ground in his explanation of how the victorious CD parties in post-war Europe solidified federalist policies, communicated Christian humanist ideas about the dignity of man, and promoted economic integration not only in public and private relations, but between nations as well. These things then contribute to the growing federalization of European political society to the Maastricht Treaty and beyond.<br />
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One more thing we will look into, however, is how the influence of Christian democracy lost its specifically <i>Christian </i>character. One may argue that this starts immediately after WWII when, out of an interest to attract the votes and membership of Protestant Germany, the explicitly Catholic German Centre Party effectively becomes the nonconfessional Christian Democratic Union. This nevertheless does not change the fact that the CD movement was essentially Catholic in form and content, with not only its most successful parties belonging to Catholic countries (and within Germany the CDU voter's base remained a largely Catholic demographic), but the principles remain centred around the Catholic Social Teaching that was crystallized during the interwar period. Their concern for the common good was manifest in their significant role in the expansion of the welfare state, while their insistence on the concept of subsidiarity informing all governmental action meant that state intervention was limited in the economy and in the daily life of the ordinary citizen. Above all this, of course, was the continued celebration of the family as the real social unit, the real social foundation.<br />
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This all changes with the process of secularization, which sped up dramatically during the 1960's. The next generation, the '68ers,' had rejected the 'bourgeois' values of family and religion of their fathers, and longed instead for a radical change in the social order, often along socialist or quasi-communist lines. In entering the period of detente, the anti-communism of Christian democracy no longer had its former importance as a rallying point for the various kinds of conservatism. The SPD in 1959 abandoned its Marxist rhetoric through its Godesberger Programm, making itself more attractive for Christian workers (Kaiser, pp. 306-8). Most crucially, with the loss of parish life as a source of networking and a fount of shared values, Christian democracy as it had existed for 15-20 years after the war drifted from its original vision of a Europe founded on and preserved by the Christian faith. Since religion was no longer the most decisive background for many people, political parties that were formed on religious principles had less and less meaning for them.<br />
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This crisis motivated new attitudes in Christian democrats who sought to generalize their ideas to make them appeal to a wider audience – which meant secularizing them. While a kind of secular humanism permeates their approach to the social questions of our times, from this point on Christian democracy in reality is more and more involved with economic liberalization and national integration into the European federal framework. Despite the Christian democrat's role in the moral and spiritual recovery of Europe in the initial postwar period, it is its economic role in this success that is most vividly remembered and commemorated. Regardless of the contrast and conflicts with British-style liberalism on the part of its supranational organizations, Christian democracy is nonetheless defined more by its neo-liberal convictions and policies than the social teachings of <i>Rerum novarum</i> and <i>Quadragesimo anno</i>. Thus, Christian democracy morphs into a standard centre-right party with faintly popular leanings, leaving behind the things which originally inspired its very name; thus Martin Conway is prompted to say that 'the age of Christian democracy in Europe has ended' ('Age,' p. 43).<br />
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<h4>
III</h4>
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By being acquainted with this history, it is easy to imagine how a neo-liberal archon such as Angela Merkel may have come to lead the Christian democrat party in her nation for nearly two decades. It is equally easy to understand how the EU developed from its origins as the implementation of Catholic Social Teaching and the pursuit of peace through international economic arrangements to the centralized neo-liberal conglomerate it is today. While we cannot minimize the great strides that the EU has made in terms of securing peace in Europe, raising living standards in the more primitive corners of the continent, and finally breaking down the belligerence of 19th century nationalism, we nevertheless have to question whether it has the spiritual and intellectual fortitude to preserve the unique traditions that characterize all its different members, or whether it really is just an agent of globalization as the populists fear.<br />
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In order for the European Union to succeed it cannot reduce itself to a provider role. It is true that European stability relies on the continued prosperity of all its member states, but just as the father has responsibilities to his children other than putting food on the table, the EU likewise owes its member states the protection of their common heritage, their very identity as Europeans. This identity does not come from abstract 'rights' such as 'liberty' or 'equality,' nor by the labour we sell; it comes from our cultural history, from our particular traditions and institutions that we must cultivate a certain way, and from our faith as Christians.<br />
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What are we to think, then, of the fact that over the past couple years millions of foreigners with no basis for integration into European culture were invited into Europe? Are we to suppose that a 'European' is simply someone who has European citizenship, or even simply lives in Europe? Such a definition necessarily ignores the crucial importance that our cultural traditions play in conditioning our identity over the generations, which is the true meaning of <i>ethnos</i>. The second and third generations of foreigners who arrive in Europe won't be integrated into the deeper nature of the European identity, nor are they likely to retain the traditions of their fathers; they will instead subscribe to the surface consumerism and lose themselves in whatever artificial subculture appeals to them. This is because true identity is cultivated over a sustained period of time, and because right now the true identity of Europeans themselves is in regression in the face of the levelling anti-culture currently demoralizing our civilization.<br />
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What makes the history of the European Union so fascinating is how its founding organizations and <br />
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agreements were able to overcome the nationalistic passions and divisions that had characterized European relations since the Thirty Years War and which had finally exhausted themselves in the two world wars. Supranationally organized 'communities' such as the ECSC and the EEC were effective in replacing them with a spirit of peace and unity through an almost imperial order that, in spite of its new democratic principles and institutions, cannot fail to remind the historian of the Habsburg Empire in a variety of ways. There are the structural parallels, for instance, with each territory being afforded room to follow its own independent political destiny and create its own identity.<br />
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More importantly there is the same commitment to the spiritual principles that are responsible for everything great about Europe, indeed for everything that Europeans really have in common. The Habsburg Emperor Charles V fought the German princes to preserve the religious unity of Christendom, and his House seldom wavered on questions of the faith till its downfall in 1918, being known as the penultimate 'reactionary' political presence in Europe. Likewise the key founders of European union, Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gaspari, were all devout Catholics with political visions shaped by their understanding of Catholic Social Teaching, specifically its principle of subsidiarity and the role of the family. They knew the responsibility they owed to the people of Europe to be bringers of peace and defenders of the faith.<br />
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Since the Maastricht Treaty, however, and the formation of the European Union we know today, these parallels have become increasingly obscured. The bureaucratic and centralized agents of Brussels nosily insert themselves into the economic and cultural realities of whatever member state may not be acting as they would like; the most obvious example of this is the migrant quotas where more prudent nations who would rather not invite thousands of foreigners into their lands are forced to do so anyway. As for the parallel of a Christian kinship, in all the documents and treaties involving the EU there is scarcely a mention of God, let alone the foundational religion that created what we know as 'Europe' and to which the majority of Europeans still adhere. Instead there is the creed of 'human rights,' which includes sexual rights, meaning that any advocates of the traditional Christian position on sexual deviancy are harassed as obsolete hate-mongers for their attempts to curtail the 'freedoms' inherent in the sexual rights of the EU citizen.<br />
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In conclusion, it is, we repeat, to our great benefit that we moved away from the bitter and 'heroic' nationalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; far from the life-affirming deeds valorized by its preachers, nationalism only resulted in the life-denying cataclysm of total war. The move towards supranational communities may have been inevitable in our progressively open and cosmopolitan world, but it nevertheless required the ability of men who could see beyond their own borders to realize them.<br />
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We must not let this move go too far, however, and eradicate all the particular idiosyncratic habits and customs that belong to the individual cultures and nations. Globalism is a very real threat because, having lapsed in our faith and having become sterile in the arts of civilization, we are so terrifyingly vulnerable to the alternatives of the monolithic anti-culture it pushes in our face. If European union is ever to realize its true self, as it was envisioned by many of the Christian democrats in the early postwar period, it can only do so by remembering the principles that sustained them through their trials and accomplishments, by protecting the small from the pressures of the great, and by cultivating the rich history of Europe in ways that apply to the 21st century.<br />
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If the ruling bodies continue to mechanically interfere in the affairs of the local bodies, continually manipulating them according to secret plans of the European Commission or other sinister institutions, then the European Union will find itself being no less totalitarian than the societies which men like Adenauer, de Gaspari, and Schuman led Europe out of, and all the good work achieved by Christian Democracy will have been for nothing.<br />
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Boyer, John W., ‘Catholics, Christians and the Challenges of Democracy: The Heritage of the Nineteenth Century,’ in Kaiser and Wohnout (eds.), <i>Political Catholicism</i>, 2004<br />
Conway, Martin, <i>Catholic Politics in Europe 1918-45</i>, 1997<br />
Conway, Martin, 'The Age of Christian Democracy. The Frontiers of Success and Failure,' in Conway and Gotovitch (eds.), <i>European Christian Democracy</i>, 2003<i> </i><br />
Kaiser, Wolfram, <i>Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union</i>, 2007<br />
<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-81508068918635526192018-01-28T14:30:00.002-08:002018-01-28T14:30:47.619-08:00Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time - A Review<br />
This is a book which I have known about for a long time, which I knew I would fully appreciate and learn from, but which I only finally got around to reading this past Spring (2017).<br />
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<h4>
I</h4>
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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (EKL) was an enormously erudite man, a claim which is supported by the mammoth bibliography provided at the back of this book. The author uses his extensive historical knowledge to show how liberty and equality are infact 'contradictory' (von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 3). He begins with an outline of his definition of liberty, which is not congruous 'with an unlimited capitalism of the Manchester school' (Ibid., p. 5), but instead refers simply to a condition of liberty; the 'liberal' in his sense is not tied to any specific political position, but loosely denotes a certain disposition towards a more meaningful sense of freedom: 'A liberal is a man or a woman who is interested in having people enjoy the greatest amount of liberty - and this regardless of the juridical type of government they are living under' (Ibid., p. 3).<br />
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For EKL, the 'type of government' which makes for the best conditions of liberty is not a democracy, but an aristocracy, or a monarchy supported by an aristocracy. In his arguments for this assertion he marks himself as the follower of Alexis de Tocqueville and William Edward Hartpole Lecky, who warned of the dangers to individual liberties that increasingly democratic policies may present, and the predecessor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who maintains that a monarchy is less offensive to the personal livelihood of the common man than the highly bureaucratized modern democracy. He goes further than all of them, however, in his defense of 'personal rule' and the old order, which he recognizes as far more natural to humanity; the personhood of the King, for example, recalls the character of the family patriarch, who in the ideal sense rules his household justly and with an eye to keeping the peace among all its parts. The relation of the king to his subject, says EKL, is that of an elder father to his mature son:<br />
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To the cultural anthropologist monarchy is a patriarchal institution. Its underlying ideology is thus “familistic.” The ideal monarch is a father – a concept expressed in the symbolic pictorial representation of kings and emperors. The king of the playing-cards, or of the illustrations in children’s stories, is usually a bearded, middle-aged or old man with eyes expressing a mixture of benevolence, jollity and occasional severity. He appears to be neither too young nor too smart – and he is decidedly not a superman. He exudes authority, but he nevertheless gives the impression that shrewder subjects would get the better of him. Now, a father in the narrower sense is a creator, a procreator with a subsequent evanescent authority; a father in a wider sense is a man with full responsibility over minors, and a position of respect, seniority and leadership in relation to mature persons. This relation is intimate, emotional and affectionate. There is a mutual interest which is partly personal and partly “generational,” i.e., directed towards the ruler’s family, and thus transferable to the heir. Baruch Spinoza thought that monarchy is a form of government in which subjects are treated like children, whereas tyrants treat them like slaves. Yet in a traditional monarchy the relationship between king and subject is that of a middle-aged father and his mature son, not that of a young father and an infant. In a similar way Dante saw (<i>De monarchia</i>, iii, 16) in the Holy Roman Emperor a “first-born son of the Pope,” who owes him reverence, but not secular obedience. (Kuehnelt-Leddihn, pp. 138-39)</blockquote>
<br />
A substantial portion of the book is dedicated to showing the 'democratic' nature of totalitarian societies, which have to gain and preserve power through the manipulation of public opinion. Given the natural inequalities between men and groups of men, the metapolitical doctrine of 'equality' has to either be reconciled with the hypocrisy of expounding an egalitarian principle while maintaining a polity filled with inequalities, or it has to be pummeled into society through coercive measures in the attempt to actually attain the dreamed-of equality. Thus Henri-Frederic Amiel says, 'The only counterpoise to pure equality is military discipline.... [I]s it not curious that the regime of individual right should lead to nothing but respect for brutal strength? Jacobinism brings with it Caesarism; the rule of the tongue leads to the rule of the sword. Democracy and liberty are not one but two' (Amiel, pp. 136-37).<br />
<br />
The hypocrisy of preaching equality but slyly allowing for the growth of inequality provides the best case scenario for the egalitarian creed, while the sincere pursuit of 'real equality' provides the experiences of Jacobinism, Communism, and National Socialism. The 'general will' is allegedly the bearer of universal equality, but in reality it only achieves its intent by subjecting those who do not conform to its common denominator to a crippling dehumanization – whether metaphorically in the sense of a superior living according to an inferior condition or literally under the guillotine. Thus, the ideas of 'democracy' and 'liberty' are indeed not synonymous or even sympathetic at all, but mutually opposed.<br />
<br />
In his program for a new order, Dostoyevsky's raving revolutionary Verhensky provides a chilling and rather prophetic exposition of the real dangers inherent in the arguments for the realization of equality in society:<br />
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Every member of the society spies on the others, and it’s his duty to inform against them. Every one belongs to all and all to every one. All are slaves and equal in their slavery. In extreme cases he advocates slander and murder, but the great thing about it is equality. To begin with, the level of education, science, and talents is lowered. A high level of education and science is only possible for great intellects, and they are not wanted. The great intellects have always seized the power and been despots. Great intellects cannot help being despots and they’ve always done more harm than good. They will be banished or put to death. Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned—that’s Shigalovism. Slaves are bound to be equal. There has never been either freedom or equality without despotism, but in the herd there is bound to be equality, and that’s Shigalovism! (Dostoevsky, Part II, Ch. VIII)</blockquote>
<br />
It is not, however, the 'totalitarian' state alone that exhibits the 'menace of the herd'; the so-called 'liberal democracy' (a <i>contradictio in adjecto</i> if there ever was one) is characterized by the same homogenizing and levelling tendencies of its Bolshevik and National Socialist rivals. These tendencies are no less destructive for the more permissive nature of representative democracy, but are infact in some ways more effective for it, since open repression has for a consequence the active resistance against it while a more subtle form of 'social planning' can silently change cultural mores and attitudes by instigating a desired public opinion without the citizenry ever noticing it. The freedom of original ideas to form in the West is constrained by the tyranny of majority rule, which dictates what is intellectually acceptable, what is 'politically correct.' De Tocqueville noticed this already in the middle of the nineteenth century: 'In America the majority builds an impregnable wall around the process of thinking. The Inquisition was never able to prevent the circulation in Spain of the books opposed to the religion of the majority. The majestic rule of the majority does better in the United States; it has removed even the thought of publishing them’ (quoted in Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 36).<br />
<br />
We must not forget, however, that the 'rule of the majority' is itself ruled by the intellectual and moral currents that are fed to it through the prevailing institutions of the day. Thus, under the disguise of the notion of 'progress,' which teaches that we must know more than our forefathers simply because we are older and more 'mature' as a civilization, the architects of public perception can slowly manipulate it into increasingly 'liberal' and 'tolerant' feelings towards things which express its degeneracy, e.g., sodomy masquerading as something normal, abortion, pornography, unchecked immigration under the philanthropic auspices of 'saving the less fortunate,' etc.<br />
<br />
The idea that our society is formed by the popular will is therefore only a half-truth, since the popular will is itself conditioned by what certain plutocratic 'elites' wish it to be. Through the media, education, entertainment, and a general sidelining of the traditional position of the father in the upbringing of the next generation, public opinion becomes the expression of an artificially-created ethos instead of the <i>authentic </i>popular will, which is best represented by the traditions and customs of the people as they have been cultivated for centuries.<br />
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This is not merely a circumstantial situation, either, something that happened as though by accident, but something that occurs as the natural result of a political order that relies on plebiscitarian consent for it to function. A democracy that requires the will of the people as such for its legislation and decision-making is highly vulnerable to the corruption that subverts the will of the people to the will of a cunning and flexible power base. This is because, especially in the age of the 'mass man' who is subject to a hundred different forces pulling him every which way, the people are as a whole a malleable entity, and will follow the fashion of the day or the first strongman who appears as Caesar here to save them; therefore Goethe says, ‘I have nothing at all against the masses; / But whenever they get into a tough spot / In order to protect themselves against the devil, / They call those scoundrels, the tyrants.’<br />
<br />
Despite the honest if naive convictions of the ideologues of equality, it is in the best interests of the grotesquely unequal that their egalitarian programs are realized and the privileges of the past are torn down. This is because it is far easier to control and dominate a protean mass of wage-slaves than a graded hierarchy in which the bulk of men know their rank and position and actually find meaning in their work, which is expressed as a vocation rather than as a 'job.' The intellectual and political responsibilities afforded to the common man have proven to be beyond him, who has shown himself to be more easily moved by the arts of propaganda and the false promises of consumerism than by the more serious and durable content of his culture. Therefore Nietzsche is able to say of him in <i>The Will to Power</i>: 'The distinctive quality of people in modern Europe lies in their ability to be easily trained and broken in; people who learn easily, obey easily, are the rule; a herd animal... has evolved. He who can give commands quickly finds those who are born to obey.'<br />
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<h4>
II</h4>
<br />
Before we conclude this review, we must go over the author's considerations of the different Christian religions and how they impact the social and political dimensions of the modern nation, for they comprise a substantial and rather important portion of the book.<br />
<br />
Since religion is the strongest 'of all the "external" elements shaping the character of individuals as well as of groups' (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 179), exploring the religious adherence of a particular nation is a crucial factor in understanding it. The truth of this is shown in the dramatic changes that take place upon the conversion of a people, as in Scotland or England before and after the Reformation, new Protestant countries who had to forcibly expunge the traditional Catholic elements from the populace over the course of centuries. It is also shown by a juxtaposition between two communities of the same country who hold different faiths; the cultural differences of Calvinist and Catholic Hungary, for instance, are sufficiently deep as to provoke the question whether they belong to the same nation at all. Of course, as the modern nations are increasingly secularized, these differences tend to wither away, but this is only because a new 'religious' creed is replacing the old ones, not because the differences were merely temporary or transitional. This point is important to keep in mind throughout EKL's thoughts on this matter, since religious attitudes have deteriorated as an influential force in Europe since the time of this book's composition (1952).<br />
<br />
EKL defines Catholic Europe as following 'a basically patriarchal pattern, characterized by a ubiquity of fatherhood which automatically fostered royal over republican institutions' (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 184). The progressive push for equality is not so keenly felt in Catholic countries, which have a tendency to cling to the old hierarchical modes of social structure. This is not to say that Catholic countries are necessarily 'elitist' by nature; the defense of the peasant and the rural way of life is almost invariably more vigorous in Catholic cultures than in Protestant ones, who are often in the vanguard of industrial and technological progress. EKL summarizes this phenomenon by saying that Catholic nations are 'demophile but not democratic' (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 186), and the Spanish proverb '<i>Tener un hijo, plantar un arbor, escribir un libro</i>' does even better in expressing their rooted, subdued, and organic way of life ('To have a son, to plant a tree, to write a book'). 'As for commercialism,' EKL says, 'it was never forgotten by Catholic nations that the merchants and money changers in the Temple were the only ones physically chastised by Our Lord' (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 185).<br />
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The Catholic religion can be generalized as being that which looks to preserve the traditions belonging to man wherever he is found, or at least to understand them in ways congenial to Christian reform without necessarily destroying or replacing them completely; the Catholic evangelical approach is synthetic rather than substitutive. In <i>Africae Munus</i>, the document addressing evangelization in Africa, Pope Benedict XVI said that it 'would help to manifest the treasures of the Church’s sacramental life and spirituality in all their depth and to pass them on more effectively in catechesis, if the Church were to carry out a theological study of those elements of the traditional African cultures in conformity with Christ’s teaching.' While certainly this document bears the signs of Vatican II's stress on ecumenical harmony, it is still essentially the same method that the Church has always prescribed: that which can be seamlessly reinterpreted in a Christian light may stay while everything injurious to the person or is otherwise contrary to natural law must be abandoned and forgotten.<br />
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There is moreover a general attempt to retain, or rather to respect, the essential conditions of man. This follows firstly from the realism of Catholic theology which, drawing from Plato and Aristotle, depends on a formal definition of reality. Briefly stated, this view regards certain things as immutable, or impossible to change; the passions or vices of a man are not something that can simply be eliminated once and for all, but they <i>can</i> be altered or sublimated into something that lives in harmony with the soul. Things have a certain <i>telos</i>, a reason for their existence, a final end that they must seek, and our task as individual and social humans is to determine those ends and ensure that they are fulfilled. For the culture informed by the Catholic faith, this philosophy results in a relatively stable order that is content with one compartment of society engaged in the life of the spirit (the City of God) while the other toils in the world (the City of Man), seeing no contradiction or hypocrisy in their co-existence, seeing no problem with the monk in his cloister praying for the shopkeeper in the villa.<br />
<br />
The 'Reformation' is aptly named, because it is at this time that radical ideas materialize into movements seeking the total reform of the old ways, which are seen as unsuited for a society truly in communion with Christ. Over the course of centuries the realism of the medieval era is replaced by the nominalism of the modern era, which no longer sees the universe as fixed and unchangeable but as something that can be shaped and conquered by the human will. Reform-minded Catholics like Savonarola in the 15th century and Charles Borromeo in the 16th century were instrumental in the attempt to fully 'Christianize' the peoples of Florence and Milan, both in the sense of purifying the ecclesial corruptions, which is normal, and of purifying the social body itself, which is something new.<br />
<br />
It was Lutheran and Calvinist theology, however, which, being influenced by the nominalism and voluntarism of late scholastics like William Ockham and Gabriel Biel, formed the real engines of change in Europe. In this perspective, since things in this world are not as they are because that's just how they are, but because they are <i>willed </i>to be so by God (or, in later understandings, by man), this allows for the possibility of change. The fallen nature of man must be at least masked if not totally transformed by the creation of holy societies, which, led by the 'Elect' who have a responsibility to manage the damned, will finally eradicate the poisons of the City of Man.<br />
<br />
Thus the Calvinist Jan Laski says that, in a truly reformed society, 'wars would cease among the nobility.... Virtue would be prized; vices corrected... brothels would be abolished; the poor would be cared for and all begging eliminated; the sick would be visited and consoled....' (Quoted in Taylor, pp. 105-6). A truly reformed society, in other words, would be heaven on earth, for all the things that characterize earthly existence would be abolished; man would be redeemed, not through the spiritual sense by which the medieval world typically understood redemption, but through a social organization that alleviated or even cured all of the ills born of the Fall.<br />
<br />
The Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist reactions against Rome also exemplify the revolutionary tendency to reject the given edifices of authority. Given the eschatological temperament that characterizes a great part of the Reformation, which sees its work as tearing down the 'Fourth Kingdom' foreseen by David, the Roman Catholic Church (also seen as the 'Whore of Babylon), it is a matter of necessity that the old religious structure give way to the new, as the New Jerusalem shall take the place of the old. Karl Marx himself saw this when he said in 1844 'Germany's revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation. At that time it was the <i>monk</i>, now it is the <i>philosopher</i>, in whose brain the revolution begins.' We can therefore see the contributions of the German Reformation to the democratic impetus in European history, a particular branch of which culminates in the revolutionary fervour of Marxian socialism. Eric Voegelin goes deeper into this connection:<br />
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<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
Luther's Reformation was the first step of a German revolution. He broke the faith in authority, but he put in its place the authority of faith. He liberated man from external religiousness but he made religiousness the substance of man. Protestantism, thus, has not brought the true solution, but it has revealed the true task, that is: the struggle against the priest. The struggle of the layman with the priest outside himself had been won; now the struggle has to be continued against the priest within man, against the priestly substance of man. "The most radical fact of German history," the Peasant War, broke against the wall of the new Protestant theology. Today, when this theology itself has broken down, the anachronistic, political state will be broken by the new philosophy. These passages show that Marx was perfectly aware of the connection between his own thought and German Protestantism. There is, indeed, an intelligible line of meaning running from Luther's destruction of ecclesiastical authority, through the destruction of dogmatic symbols in the generation of Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Feuerbach, to the destruction of "all the gods," that is of all authoritative order, in Marx. While it would be incorrect to say that the way of Protestantism leads with any inner necessity from Luther to Hegel and Marx, it is true that Marxism is the final product of disintegration in one branch of German, liberal Protestantism. (Voegelin, p. 283)</blockquote>
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We will get into more of this when we review Charles Taylor's <i>A Secular Age</i>, but it has relevance for our present subject in that EKL similarly attributes to Protestantism a forceful desire for <i>change</i>, for <i>willing </i>something to be something better. This explains the customary Protestant approach to education, for example. In its attempt to universally educate the masses, the Protestant mind believes that, for man to become better, that is, to improve himself in a fundamental way, all he needs to do is learn about the world, to know the things that the scholar knows, that the priest knows, the vocational and intellectual differences between a philosopher and a baker notwithstanding. Thus, in the Protestant trust in the Holy Spirit and the common man's reception to it, the Bible is given to him unreservedly, without any formal guidance whatsoever; 'he will understand it,' they say; 'the Holy Spirit assures us of that.'<br />
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As opposed to the traditional relationship between a scholarly clergy and an unlearned laity, or between an intellectual elite and an unwitting peasantry, the Protestant country typically takes a democratic approach to the question of education, and therefore seeks to remove these vital differences altogether. If everyone is literate, if everyone is well-versed in the classics, mathematics, the sciences, etc., there will no longer be a stark contrast between a 'patrician' and a 'plebeian'; all will be equal. EKL talks about 'good averages,' which is 'the optimum for a democracy' (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 189). As opposed to the Protestant-secular ideal of a race entirely composed of genius polymaths, the result inevitably tends to be something altogether lukewarm, mediocre. In trying to abolish the natural differences native to man, we do not suddenly find a fair and equal and homogeneous group of men uplifted to a loftier, nobler state; instead we find a group of men which is no longer marked by a few outstanding personalities, but by its faded, jaded uniformity. This is nevertheless a net positive for the democrat, since it is not really a profound individuation that represents the ideal citizen, but a willingness to conform (because homogeneity is equated with 'equality'):<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There is no doubt that the great pride of the democracies, compulsory education (and, to a lesser degree, conscription), is a prime factor in the process of forming the minds of citizens into a uniform pattern. It is obvious that the situation which existed in the Weimar period of the German Republic, when parties were totally unable to establish a real “dialogue,” had to lead to anarchy or to the iron rule of one victorious party.... (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 200)</blockquote>
During the Nuremberg Trials, EKL relates, Julius Streicher argued that, for his 'anti-Semitic' beliefs, Martin Luther would be among the accused were he alive today. He then recounts the similarities between Lutheranism and National Socialism, or rather contends how the former allows for the latter.<br />
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This starts with the Lutheran rejection of 'reason,' which in Protestant thought is generally established as a rival of faith, whereas Thomistic theology views them as allied, philosophy being the <i>ancilla theologiae</i>, the 'handmaiden' of theology. The fideism of the early Lutherans accords with the 'irrationalism' stressed by the National Socialists, who were not only reacting against the Enlightenment idea of reason, but against the entire Western tradition of Logos, dismissing not only Descartes and Locke but Plato and Aristotle as well. The 'Providence' that is frequently mentioned in <i>Mein Kampf</i> is not used in the normal meaning of the term, but as a special kind of megalomania that seems to tell us that Hitler really considers himself as 'blessed,' as chosen by God to redeem and restore the German people to their glory (see Richard Landes, <i>Heaven on Earth</i> for an admirable study on this).<br />
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The Lutheranism of Germany not only helped shape the ideology of the National Socialists, but equipped the German populace with a kind of fortitude that numbed them to the thought of resisting the regime. Luther may have rejected the authority of the Church, but he did no such thing in regards to the state: 'Even if the magistrate is wicked and unjust there should be no excuse for rioting or rebellion. For not everybody has the right to punish wickedness; only the secular authorities in the possession of the sword' (quoted in Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 223). This obeisant sturdiness, born and cultivated in Lutheran Prussia, which meekly bowed to the Hohenzollerns and Junkers for centuries, meant that the Protestant response to the National Socialist imposition on their religious freedoms, its subversion of their beliefs, its anti-Christian policies, and its attempts to altogether replace it via 'positive Christianity,' was muted indeed.<br />
<br />
The Catholic resistance was not on the whole very much better, but there was clearly a deepening tension between the Church and Hitler's regime as the German government continued to violate the Concordat, institute eugenic practises, and attack the clergy itself. Pope Pius XII himself maintained relations with German resistance groups, and his encyclical <i>Mystici corporis Christi</i> ranks alongside Bishop von Galen's homilies as outstanding intellectual comfort to those who felt a conscientious need to rebel against the regime. Moreover, in spite of the early National Socialist support around Munich, the decisive 1932 and 1933 elections clearly show a marked parallel between Protestant demographics and support for the NSDAP, while Catholic demographics largely remained loyal to Zentrum, the Catholic Centre party. This illustrates from the beginning a stronger antithesis between the National Socialist ethos and the Catholic religion, an antithesis which only grew as the regime established itself more deeply into German society.<br />
<br />
There is nevertheless also something of the Catholic religion in the National Socialist phenomenon, which is alleged to be<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></i>'the combination of the degenerative process of Protestantism with Catholic absolutism and extremism' (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 232); the number of lapsed Catholics in the upper echelons of the National Socialist hierarchy (Goebbels, Himmler, Hess, Goering, Hitler himself) only provide further support to the idea that the ideology and the political power are stimulated by the 'absolutist' and 'pseudo-monarchical' qualities inherent in the social understanding of the Catholic religion. If EKL is right, if the unified German state were wholly Protestant instead of being religiously mixed, the impact of the National Socialist regime on German society may well have been much milder, even if its intellectual content would be no less venemous. That is, of course, assuming that an entirely Protestant NSDAP would have the success that the historical NSDAP had.<br />
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As a final aside on this question, in view of the National Socialist treatment of 'minority' peoples, the very structure of democratic thought cannot consistently dispense real justice to the minorities of any which society, insofar as it presupposes a division between majority and minority in the management of the nation. Unless the polls are manipulated or coerced, which they very often are, the 'general will' or 'public opinion' is never unanimous; there is always going to be a minority dissent. This is merely the bad luck of the few, who, according to the democratic principle, must yield to the many. As opposed to the multi-ethnic empire, which is free from any such constraints and can consistently dispense justice to all its minorities, regardless of their prominence, the democratic regime, as the expression of the people's will, must do what the majority wishes (or what the regime supposes or imagines the majority's wish to be).<br />
<br />
Thus, Europe never knew the barbarism of compulsory displacement informed by popular ideologies prior to the democratic age, certainly not to the extent that the twentieth century was responsible for. EKL uses the example of the Ruthenian minority, comparing their relative security in the Austro-Hungarian Empire with their having to leave their homes according to the arbitrary notions of nationality of the Bolsheviks (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 314). This is not merely a symptom of totalitarian states, either, something to which the unfortunate saga of the Nisei in the United States testifies (though it should be noted that the use of Hollywood pictures to caricature Japanese-Americans as saboteurs is an instance of 'manufactured consent,' which is of course a key element of totalitarian society). While the democratic regime can slyly resort to the 'people's consensus' as an excuse for virtually any action, the monarchical state is subject to higher laws and principles, which recognize the claims to justice on the part of the many as well as of the few:<br />
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The monarch… is potentially the protector of minorities – especially the small, powerless and uninfluential minorities – just because he is “everybody’s monarch.” The very concept of a “minority” is non-monarchical and democratic. The constant counting and comparing of numbers characterizes all egalitarian-parliamentary regimes. The protective role of kingship is clearly seen in the oath of the Holy Roman Emperor. In democratic republics, on the other hand, we have always seen tiny, unpopular minorities being sacrificed to the whim of the majorities, who in times of stress blissfully disregard constitutional injunctions.... A monarch can, at least, be reminded of his coronation oath, but the citizenry stands under no special obligation or pressure – save from their weak and vacillating consciences. (Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 158)</blockquote>
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<h4>
III</h4>
<br />
<i>Liberty or Equality</i> is a diversely concentrated text that covers a broad portion of the intellectual and political landscape in the 1950's, but throughout the work there is a singular devotion to the freedom and the dignity of man. The democrat insists that equality and liberty are synonymous, but the history of democratic movements proves otherwise, especially in the 20th century. EKL carefully diagnoses the symptoms belonging to the majoritarian tumour, persuasively showing how the claims of the democrat to provide a fair and meaningful political existence to the citizen are increasingly unfounded in reality. With the aid of a wide array of social critics who are quoted extensively, the reader comes out of this book with a firmer idea of the inherent contradictions and the unsustainable presumptions in the modern order.<br />
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The clearest way that EKL clarifies this is in showing the profound division between the pre-modern and modern forms of government. In contrast to the impersonal democratic order of the West, which pretends to take seriously the meaningfulness of the ballot while its results are more the product of contrived public opinion than of the real wishes of the <i>demos</i>, EKL subscribes to the traditional idea of an organic social hierarchy wherein each and every individual is cohesively integrated into a purposeful whole. Moreover, even if the popular will <i>were </i>sincerely expressed, the millions upon millions of votes that are tallied in the hope of achieving a majority opinion on the future of the nation's leadership or on the legislation of a moral issue reduce the significance of the political action of casting a vote to such a degree that the voter can hardly be deemed to be a real participant – especially when his options are already effectively chosen for him through the partocratic system that merely crystallizes the ideological sentiments in vogue.<br />
<br />
In a democracy, a person is weighed mechanically, quantitatively, as though he were nothing but a number. Instead of the democratic slogan 'nobody is indispensable,' EKL substitutes the reassurance that 'Everybody is unique. Everybody is indispensable' (von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, p. 107). An honest political order recognizes both innate qualities and those which are won through personal accomplishment, and it aims to produce a <i>bonum commune</i> wherein every man participates in a world of his own making.<br />
<br />
Yet we cannot expect any 'soteriological' miracles from any system of government, which properly considered is more an agent of restraint than an agent of positive change. Recalling the 'Katechontism' of his contemporary Carl Schmitt, which redirects the Pauline concept of the <i>katechon </i>into a political repellent of chaotic revolution, EKL considers the fundamental aim of politics to be the cultivation of space for the individual to develop his own qualities, most especially those regarding his immortal soul. Families, for instance, which are likened as 'minor kingdoms' to the kingdom as a whole, are 'ideal spheres for the development of personality; and free societies always have strongly developed hierarchically built cells' (Ibid., p. 108).<br />
<br />
Thus, the multi-dimensional Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn belongs not only to the tradition of counter-revolutionary writers such as De Maistre and Donoso Cortes, and not only to the tradition of 'liberal conservatives' such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt, but also to the overarching domain of Catholic Social Teaching. This notion of the family as a microcosm of the polity, for instance, is preceded in Pope St. Leo XIII:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We say, "at least equal rights"; for, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. (Leo XIII, Article 13)</blockquote>
In <i>Liberty or Equality</i> we therefore encounter a rich political critique of the modern democratic creeds, which gather around immanent ideologies that pay no heed to the spiritual principles that played such an important role in the founding of our civilization. The problems are not laid out in a difficult, theoretical, or even a very in-depth way, but are presented as a matter of common sense with eminently practical consequences. The basis of the historical Western social organism is positively contrasted with an unrestrained pursuit of equality, with all its attendant symptoms. We come out of this text with an improved insight into how a rationalistic desire to 'improve' society often produces the opposite effects, as well as with a sense of urgency to cleanse our oldest institutions of all the intellectual bile and personal iniquity that currently occupy them.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Only love makes one truly liberal, for only love does not
separate right (rule) from duty (service), possession from being possessed, or
allowing oneself to be possessed. (Franz von Baader)</blockquote>
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Amiel, Henri-Frederic, <i>Amiel's Journal</i>, trans. Humphrey Ward (New York: Brentano, 1928)<br />
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, <i>The Possessed or, The Devils</i>, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Everyman's Library, 1931)<br />
Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik Ritter von <i>Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Times</i> (Auburn, AL: The
Mises Institute, 2014)<br />
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Leo XIII,<i> <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html">Rerum Novarum</a></i>, 1891 (vatican.va, accessed January 7th, 2018)<o:p></o:p><br />
Marx, Karl, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm" style="font-style: italic;">A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right</a>, 1844 (marxists.org, accessed January 28th, 2018) </div>
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Taylor, Charles, <i>A Secular Age</i> (London, 2007: Harvard University Press)<br />
Voegelin, Eric, <i>From Enlightenment to Revolution </i>(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press)</div>
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-5203036098539107162018-01-05T16:55:00.003-08:002018-01-10T11:43:58.802-08:00Eric Voegelin and the Liberal's 'Permanent Revolution' This excerpt from Eric Voegelin's book <i>From Enlightenment to Revolution</i> exposes the 'milder,' liberal counterpart of the fiery impulse of the radical revolutionary. Concerned about the dark 'passions' unleashed by the Jacobin type, PROGRESS must nevertheless be ever on the march, and it is at its most successful when it moves through soft, undulating waves of reform.<br />
<br />
This is what characterizes the 'permanent revolution' of liberalism, the work of 'democrats' and 'conservatives' alike to realize the future state of liberty, equality, and fraternity by means of minor increments. This is the meaning behind Chesterton's famous phrase: 'The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.'<br />
<br />
The permanent revolution succeeds where the revolutionary moment fails because the advance of the radical is invariably followed by the return of the reactionary. By foregoing a violent and instant revelation of the progressive destiny, the liberal can avoid the inevitable result of what happens when man goes too far - he ends up somewhere on the other side. By quietly introducing new acts and novel measures, which are cloaked beneath the rational disguise of 'changing with the times,' the liberal can slowly, peaceably undermine the traditions of his oppressor and replace them with the plants of progress, the garden of Eden that will at last erase our political animosity and difference. Then the Revolution will have finally reached its end, and it will have done so not with the sword but with the word.<br />
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<br />
<br />
Thus, Voegelin:<br />
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'A first answer to the
problem of the crisis is given by the liberals who wish to transform the
violent rhythm of Revolution and Restoration into a gentle undulation of
progressive reform. This idea was developed in the liberal periodical <i>Le Censeur</i> by its editors Charles Comte
and Charles Dunoyer, in 1815. Revolution is recognized as a necessity insofar
as it is required by the light of reason, but there are other revolutions which
are motivated by pride and ambition. The revolution which resulted in the liberal
monarchy of 1791 was commanded by reason while the Republic, the Consulate, as
well as the movements which tend to restore the ancient regime, belonged to the
second type. </div>
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There are two states which are equally bad for a society: complete
stagnation and prolonged, anarchical disorder. "The one clings too strongly
even to its most puerile customs, and to its most superstitious practices; the
other indulges in the disorderly movement of passions." Besides, the one state
produces the other. Anarchical revolution is inevitable when a regime insists
on its continuation against reason and history, while the reactionary despotism
of a Bonaparte will rise from anarchy. "There is only one means for nations to
prevent the great revolutions; that is, to put themselves into a state of
permanent and wisely regulated revolution." When a nation is guided
intelligently it is protected against all revolution, or rather its revolution
is "permanent, but slow and progressive, so that it follows without jolts the
progress of reason."<o:p></o:p></div>
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The
articles of Charles Comte and Dunoyer have their importance because the <i>Censeur</i> represents the liberal
restoration at its intellectual best. We see here developing an attitude toward
the crisis which remains typical in later liberalism and we can observe in its
origins the growth of an escapist cliché. The rhythm of Revolution and
Restoration is considered a stupid exaggeration of the process of social
reform, the violent swings of the pendulum ought to be toned down – under the
title of “permanent revolution” – to the gentle process that today is called "peaceful change." The problem of the crisis itself disappears and is swallowed
up by the category of progress under the guidance of reason. </div>
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We have
characterized this attitude as escapist because it skillfully dodges the real
issue of the crisis. A society is by definition in a state of crisis when its
remedial forces, while perhaps present, are socially ineffective. The social
problems which urgently require a solution cannot be solved because the
spiritual and moral strength for the task is lacking in the ruling group. In
this situation, the counsel to do what is not done because it cannot be done is
obviously vain. And the counsel is not only vain, it even adds to the gravity
of the crisis because it detracts attention from a true alternative. The
progressive counsel of Charles Comte and Dunoyer (and this has remained a
constant factor in the aggravation of the Western crisis) poses the alternative
of stagnation in the solution of social problems and intelligent gradual
reform. This alternative does not exist concretely; the fact of the tardiness
in the solution of explosive social problems is proof that on the level of
pragmatic politics the alternative of intelligent gradualism does not exist. </div>
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The true alternative would be the restoration of spiritual substance in the
ruling groups of a society, with the consequent restoration of the moral
strength in creating a just social order. The problem of the crisis must be stated
in the Platonic terms of spirit and power. The pragmatic value of this
alternative, as experience has shown, is not very high. The appearance of Plato
did not change the course of the Hellenic crisis, the case of Nietzsche did not
serve as a warning example for Germany nor did the appearance of Dostoievsky
make a dent in the tsarist system. Nevertheless, this is the true alternative;
and we must be clear on the point that a propaganda for gradualism which
ignores and obscures the true issue has become a serious factor in the
aggravation of the crisis.</div>
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The
idea which emerges from the articles of the <i>Censeur</i>
is so particularly grave in its consequences because it implies the further
fallacy that the abolition of a social injustice will automatically result in a
satisfactory stable order. The revolutionary abolition of a regime that is
experienced as oppressive by a powerful stratum of society will certainly satisfy the successful revolutionary group, but it is not at all a
guarantee that the new group will be more fit than the old one to discharge the
obligations of rulership competently. Spiritual disorder is not the privilege
of a ruling class; the revolutionary class which displaces it may be quite as
deficient in this point, and even more so. The spiritual and moral competence
of the bourgeoisie in handling problems posed by the industrial proletariat and
the growing lower middle class was certainly a match for the incompetence of
the pre-revolutionary aristocracy in handling the problem posed by the rising
bourgeoisie. The record of the German lower middle class in the National
Socialist revolution is no more edifying. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The worst problem in the dynamic of
the Western crisis is the fact that the resistance of the ruling class of the
moment against "peaceful change" can derive a<span lang="EN-US"> degree of
spiritual legitimacy from the qualities of the revolutionary groups. The
liberal and progressive idea of the “permanent revolution” of the editors of
the <i>Censeur</i> ignores this whole class
of problems, and it must ignore them because the spiritual problem of the
crisis is obscured for them by the enlightenment cliché of "reason." But the
light of reason is a dubious guide in the night of the spirit.'</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Eric Voegelin, <i>From Enlightenment to Revolution</i> </span>(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press 1975),<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span>Pp. 179-81</div>
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Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-66189936367812069302017-12-10T17:53:00.000-08:002018-01-10T11:45:34.183-08:00Poverty of the Soul and the Common GoodI recently (belatedly, really) read the rather brilliant article <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/html/what-poverty-11845.html">'What is Poverty?'</a> by 'Theodore Dalrymple.' Written all the way back in 1999 for the <i>City Journal</i>, this piece attacks the presumption that what ails the Western poor more than anything else is their poverty, and that their most positive improvement must come from ameliorating economic conditions. He makes the argument that, in spite of the massive progress in the living standards of the poor, the fundamental issues that afflicted the poor a century ago have not only not been eliminated, they have instead crystallized into deeper and more debilitating problems.<br />
<br />
Where do these problems come from? From an apathetic culture that rewards antisocial and nihilistic behaviour; from a philosophical tolerance that supposes every wrong to be not the fault of the individuals who make bad decisions, but of the social conditions in which those individuals were born and bred.<br />
<br />
To make his point, Dalrymple uses the example of doctors from vastly poorer countries such as India and the Philippines visiting the hospitals and streets of East London:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[T]hey are at first impressed that our care extends beyond the merely medical: that no one goes without food or clothing or shelter, or even entertainment. There seems to be a public agency to deal with every conceivable problem. For a couple of weeks, they think this all represents the acme of civilization, especially when they recall the horrors at home. Poverty—as they know it— has been abolished.</blockquote>
<br />
Their judgment changes, however, when the doctors become familiar with the kinds of problems the London hospitals try to resolve, and with the attitude of the patients, who exhibit no sense of thankfulness for the care they receive, but instead view it as their inviolable 'right,' something that they own by nature.<br />
<br />
Dalrymple tells the all-too-typical story of a young woman who has deliberately overdosed. When they interview her about her history, they learn that she has been robbed and beaten by her ex-boyfriend, whose unborn child she wants to abort. She has had two children from two other fathers, neither of whom she sees (one was a one-night-stand and the other she left because he had sex with 12-year old girls). After explaining what will happen to the depressed and damaged woman, namely that she will be moved to a new flat with all the 'necessary' amenities of our age, Dalrymple asks a doctor from Madras if he thinks this was 'poverty':<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
He said it was not: that her problem was that she accepted no limits to her own behavior, that she did not fear the possibility of hunger, the condemnation of her own parents or neighbors, or God. In other words, the squalor of England was not economic but spiritual, moral, and cultural.</blockquote>
<div>
It turns out that a culture that is based around individual desire, and is entirely neglectful of communal relationships, creates individuals who do not have any consideration for the community, or how their actions affect their fellow man. It is said that massive welfare programs create a sense of 'solidarity' among the different classes; how, then, does it happen that the recipients of this redistributed wealth are invested only with selfishness and a sense of ingratitude? People who are on the receiving end of benefits their entire life are not edified by any kind of social belonging; on the contrary, they are inculcated with the idea that society owes them more and more, regardless of their own contributions (or lack thereof) to their neighbours. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Dalrymple goes on, telling how he would walk with these foreign doctors through the 'neighbourhoods' instituted by social housing, which he describes as being full of litter, where even the private lawns are overgrown and cluttered with refuse. A doctor from Bombay asks, 'Why don't they tidy up their gardens?' </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A good question: after all, most of the houses contain at least one person with time on his or her hands. Whenever I have been able to ask the question, however, the answer has always been the same: I've told the council [the local government] about it, but they haven't come. As tenants, they feel it is the landlord's responsibility to keep their yards clean, and they are not prepared to do the council's work for it, even if it means wading through garbage—as it quite literally does. On the one hand, authority cannot tell them what to do; on the other, it has an infinitude of responsibilities towards them.</blockquote>
That is what happens in a society where there is no give-and-take, where there is infact only take (which applies to every social class, of course, albeit in different ways). The common good exists only as a spectre used to justify the parasitic activity of a growing underclass.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Another important point that Dalrymple makes is how all this trash that's tossed around as though the world is full of food is demonstrative of how the real problem is not 'poverty' at all. If people were truly impoverished, they would not be so carefree with the things that we really need to survive; they would infact cherish every meal as a gift from God. </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
I ask the doctors to compare the shops in areas inhabited by poor whites and those where poor Indian immigrants live. It is an instructive comparison. The shops the Indians frequent are piled high with all kinds of attractive fresh produce that, by supermarket standards, is astonishingly cheap. The women take immense trouble over their purchases and make subtle discriminations. There are no pre-cooked meals for them. By contrast, a shop that poor whites patronize offers a restricted choice, largely of relatively expensive prepared foods that at most require only the addition of hot water.</blockquote>
<br />
The fact that both groups are economically comparable means that the problem goes well beyond 'poverty'; it goes into how differently they approach the essentials of our world. People who come from a society where you have to do things yourself, where there are traditions of fellowship and community, tend to put more effort into the most important things intrinsic to our nature: food and drink, health, family, and the spiritual life. When you cut off your relations with the social whole, when your entire existence becomes centred around what you <i>want </i>and how much you can <i>get</i>, these things suffer proportionately.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilization. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidized apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries. They come to realize that a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes antisocial egotism. The spiritual impoverishment of the population seems to them worse than anything they have ever known in their own countries. And what they see is all the worse, of course, because it should be so much better. The wealth that enables everyone effortlessly to have enough food should be liberating, not imprisoning. Instead, it has created a large caste of people for whom life is, in effect, a limbo in which they have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It is a life emptied of meaning.</blockquote>
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<br />
Whatever merits that our material abundance afford to us, they cannot be worth the 'spiritual impoverishment' that accompanies it, nor can it be worth the fragmentation that occurs between the giving and the receiving classes. In the Middle Ages the beggar, who was truly in a state of poverty, responded to his benefactor by praying for his soul. Conversely, the giver, by his act of charity (his 'alms'), participates in the virtuous life thereby.<br />
<div>
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<div>
This relationship is reversed in the welfare state: the giver, the state, is virtuous only in the eyes of a socialist intelligentsia (which seldom gives its own money), and instead of prayers receives demands for more, while the receiver, the 'lumpenproletariat,' instead of being content with the basics of life grows increasingly covetous. What was once a very personal relationship imbuing both parties with a natural connection becomes a systematic process which dehumanizes the giver and the receiver. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
The article closes with Dalrymple revealing how he had the same experience as the Asian doctors, only from the opposite direction. When he was in Africa, specifically Tanzania, he was at first appalled by the physical conditions and the political corruption that ailed the country. Scarce food and medical care, rampant tuberculosis and various forms of cancer, children suffering and dying from snake bites, emaciated villagers and fat party men, these things characterized the African society, these things characterized <i>true </i>poverty. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.</blockquote>
<br />
If we are going to advance to a real understanding of what avails our civilization, we might start with our true impoverishment, which as Dalrymple says is more spiritual than material. We do not mean here merely to attack the lower classes, which, being destined to follow the intellectual and political currents of the day, are in truth those which possess the least moral and social agency. We mean to attack the culture emptied of real solidarity and community that allows rapacious overlords to charge their renters and patrons the most and pay their workers and employees the least amounts possible. They do this because they make more money this way, and our prevailing economic ethic presumes this to be a fundamental good. This is behaviour that is no less antisocial and even more reprehensible than the selfish and parasitic activity of what we might call the 'slave' classes of the corporate 'elite.'<br />
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<div>
There is no one villain in this story; the society we share is the product of a conspiracy of classes, all equally self-serving and insulated from one another. It is moreover the effect of a long intellectual tradition that subordinates the needs of the community and the common good to the 'rights' that allegedly belong inherently to human nature, 'rights' that increasingly look like desires. </div>
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<br /></div>
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When 'poverty' is defined as being drastically poorer than the wealthiest of their neighbours (who really exhibit an obscene state of luxury and should not be used as a frame of reference for anything) in a society which is enormously wealthier than anything else in human history, we lose the real meaning of the word. While the members of any community deserve to share in its success (and indeed there should be a reduction in the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest), it is futile and misleading to pretend that 'poverty' is our first concern when the richest nations in the world still exhibit all the symptoms of a diseased social body: suicides, drug dependency, illegitimate births, divorces, atheism, abortions, sodomy, low birth rates, etc.<br />
<br />
It is clear that, in spite of rising living conditions, state subsidies, and a more or less uninterrupted period of peace, modern and modernizing countries have only experienced a corresponding growth of the malignant tumours that attach to all our attempts to create a world without God at its centre. The crisis of 'poverty' is thus the ultimate red herring, because it distracts us from the real crises at work in our culture. To obsess over the 'miserable' state of the poor in our societies, to suppose that unconditionally sharing more and more wealth with them will do anything else than create further dependents on the productive classes, is to do the same thing as the laissez-faire capitalists do in reverse and consider society as first and foremost a product of merely economic relations.<br />
<br />
This attitude is in fundamental opposition to the common good, which, according to Pope St. John Paul II, 'is not simply the sum total of particular interests; rather it involves an assessment and integration of those interests on the basis of a balanced hierarchy of values.' This means that our own interests, which in the limited perspective of the individual usually amounts to an increase in wealth and social prestige, are subsumed into our <i>real </i>interests, which are ultimately communion with God and our fellow man. As men are made in the image of God, we intrinsically desire social justice (in the real sense of the term), however much this desire may be warped by our fallenness. Therefore, when people receive their 'just deserts,' whether great or small, we are inwardly satisfied, because justice has been done.<br />
<br />
When we operate according to our own interests alone, something which is vindicated by our utilitarian ethical system, the common good gives way to an irremediable conflict between different groups in society, which results in 'class warfare' and 'identity politics.' Each individual or group of individuals is imbued with a desire to gain more for themselves, irrespective of whether their increase is just or not, and irrespective of the effect that their actions may have on the whole.<br />
<br />
The fact is that total equality is just as much of a myth as is the total abolishment of poverty. This does not mean that we cease finding ways to palliate the conditions of the poor; far from it, acts of charity to the suffering are central to the social teaching of Christ's Church (something which the higher classes tend to be forgetful of in their lavish and frivolous spending).<br />
<br />
It does mean, however, that we cease chasing dreams of an equally privileged community based on a homogeneous distribution of wealth, not only because this is utopian, but because it completely misses the real errors of our age. We have established modes of living that have far surpassed anything we have known in history, that certain parts of the world still do not know. In doing so, however, in sating our most pressing physical needs, we have opened up new existential challenges that cannot be overcome by merely economic salves, but by radically reëvaluating our interior livelihood. This is why we have to stress the fact that it is not our material 'poverty' that is principally responsible for the malaise of our communities and the ejection of Christ from the social plane, but our poverty of the soul.<br />
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Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-60597457674265058862017-11-12T18:54:00.000-08:002018-01-10T11:46:53.540-08:00The Picture of Providence: Christopher Dawson and the Conversion of Scandinavia Upon reading Christopher Dawson's lectures on the development of the Christian religion in the early periods of European history, which are compiled in the text <i>Religion and the Rise of Western Culture</i>, I was particularly struck by the beauty of the passages on the conversion of the Scandinavian peoples. The splendour of God's work, in this case the increase of the Church's membership through the evangelization of the Northmen, attaches itself to anything that replicates it (in however diluted form), so it is in this spirit that I humbly submit my reading of Dawson's work.<br />
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While the plain logic of what transpired in this episode of Christian history according to Dawson leaves nothing to question, there is nevertheless a distinct providential aura about the series of events depicted. The frigid and most resolutely pagan regions of Europe went from being the most serious threat to the survival of the Christian faith in the British Isles, France, and the Germanies to a thriving Christian society alive with the liturgy of the Mass and informed by the lives of the Saints; they went from being constituted by a divisive array of warring tribes to being united in the form of kingdoms ruled by strengthened executive powers in the persons of their respective kings.<br />
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What gives this story another dimension, however, is that these were not defeated peoples succumbing to the religion of a foreign conqueror; the conversion of the Vikings happened more or less <i>internally</i>. The result of their contact with the monks and missionaries of the lands they raided led to an introspective change in the soul of the Northern man while his rule over subjected Christian nations left an indelible mark on his patterns of social and political behaviour. When Canute was recognized as King of England in 1016, 'he dismissed the Viking army and ruled England "under the laws of King Edgar" according to the traditions of Christian kingship' and committed himself to the patronage of Christian institutions. This radical shift is exemplified in his adorning the sepulchre of St. Alphege of Canterbury, whom his fervently pagan father had slain! </div>
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Thus, it was at the height of their power that the Vikings submitted to the God of their enemy. Dawson says that 'the incorporation of Scandinavia into Western Christendom was due, not as in Central Europe to the power and prestige of the Western Empire, but to the conquest of Christian England by the barbarian who brought back Christianity to the North with the other spoils of invasion.' The Northerners did not need a Charlemagne or a Cortes to forcefully initiate them into the Church; it was the work of their own heroic leaders, which included Canute in Denmark, St. Olaf in Norway and St. Vladimir in Russia. </div>
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The relationship between state and Church was hardly one way either; just as the extent of the Church was lengthened and deepened by the inclusion of the Northern converts and their lands, the formerly pagan kings were enabled by the universal power and prestige granted them by the Christian religion to consolidate their authority and attain the support of the provincial territories and their minor lords. </div>
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'In this way,' Dawson says, 'the victory of Christianity coincided with the attainment of national unity and was the culmination of the process of expansion and cultural interchange which had accompanied the Viking movement. The mixed culture of the Christian Viking states across the seas reacted on the culture of the Scandinavian homelands and led to the breaking down of local particularism alike in religion and politics. Indeed it seemed for a time as though the whole of the Nordic culture area from the British Isles to the Baltic would be united in a northern Christian empire under the sovereignty of the Danish king. Ruling from his court at Winchester, surrounded by English ecclesiastics, Scandinavian mercenaries and Icelandic poets, Canute brought the Northern lands for the first time into real contact with the international life of Western Christendom. The North had never before known a king so rich and so powerful. As Toraren the Icelander wrote: <i>Canute rules the land / As Christ, the shepherd of Greece, doth the heavens!</i>’ (p. 95)</div>
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It was not Canute, however, 'who became the type and representative of the new ideal of Christian kingship in the Northern lands.' While he was an excellent statesman and a veritable wizard in how he acquired and utilized financial resources, he was not a true hero in the old Northern sense. This role was instead fulfilled by Olaf Haroldson, who 'was an authentic representation of the Northern heroic tradition, like his predecessor Olaf Trygvason (995-1000). He completed the latter’s work of Christianizing Norway, breaking the stubborn resistance of the pagan chiefs and countryfolk with fire and sword, and died like the other Olaf in an heroic battle against hopeless odds. But the battle of Stiklestad (1030) differs from that of Svoldr (1000) in that it was a civil war against the king’s faithless subjects who had been bought by Canute’s English money. Thus it was an historical realization of the dominant motive of the old epic poetry – the tragedy of loyal heroism defeated by treachery and gold.' (pp. 95-96)</div>
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<i>There go the prince’s foes </i><i>Bringing their open purses,</i><i>Many bid dearly in metal</i><i>For the head of our king. </i> </blockquote>
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<i></i><i>Every man knows that he who sells </i><i>His own good lord for gold</i><i>Will end in black hell</i><i>And of such is he worthy</i>.<br />
~Olaf’s friend, the poet Sighvat </blockquote>
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There has never been a clearer example of the sublime synthesis between the transcendent truth crucified on the Cross and the natural truths belonging to all human order. The primitive, warrior spirit of the natives is elevated into the new context carried by the Gospel; the self-sacrifice of the warrior is universalized into the self-sacrifice of the God-man; the links between Odin and Baldar and Christ are immortalized. 'As Olaf’s retainers kept their faith with their lord, so Olaf himself kept faith with the Lord of Heaven. And thus the new religion became the object of a deeper loyalty than the religion of the old gods had ever evoked.' (p. 96)</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHGbJkPTnQ5Z31kHcIeYDCK_s4dSjcIS6zBhWuDsHR6wqjy-0n-x75qST-0freE6g5QwhBZrIklEEI_T1jncl0YwjSJzgS5tI7ZOBYol3TIPjmVsGXNk-QMAH-1JCwBEpOyVyofJR0P8em/s1600/729olaf11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="661" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHGbJkPTnQ5Z31kHcIeYDCK_s4dSjcIS6zBhWuDsHR6wqjy-0n-x75qST-0freE6g5QwhBZrIklEEI_T1jncl0YwjSJzgS5tI7ZOBYol3TIPjmVsGXNk-QMAH-1JCwBEpOyVyofJR0P8em/s320/729olaf11.jpg" width="193" /></a>What happened next defies the ideals of the kind of 'master morality' espoused by the likes of a Nietzsche or a 'Ragnar Redbeard' as well as those consecrated by the indigenous pagans. Instead of following the victor and celebrating the winner, the Northerners took the fallen St. Olaf for their patron and protector, and throughout Norway there are innumerable accounts of his miracles alongside the telling of his legendary end. The virtues of might and conquest are no longer absolute; there is a higher power in which heroic men like St. Olaf may participate in and share with their people. The glory of the warrior is aligned with Christ's glory. Dawson moreover tells us that 'Even [Olaf's] former enemies acknowledge this power and accepted him as the patron and guardian of the Norwegian monarchy, as we see in the fine poem called “The Song of the Sea Calm” which Canute’s court poet Toraren wrote only a few years later. Although the poem is dedicated to King Swein, the Danish usurper, its real hero is the dead king who still rules the land from his shrine at Nidaros': </div>
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<i>There he lies</i> </blockquote>
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<i>Whole and pure </i> </blockquote>
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<i>The high and praised king</i></blockquote>
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<i>There the bells </i> </blockquote>
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<i>May ring aloud </i></blockquote>
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<i>Of themselves, </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Above the shrine </i> </blockquote>
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<i>For every day </i> </blockquote>
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<i>The folk to hear </i> </blockquote>
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<i>The clanging bells </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Above the king. </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Hardly had Haroldson </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Got a home </i> </blockquote>
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<i>In the heavenly realm </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Ere he became </i> </blockquote>
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<i>A mighty man of peace. </i> </blockquote>
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<i>A host of men </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Where the holy king doth lie </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Kneel for help, </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Blind and dumb </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Seek the king, </i> </blockquote>
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<i>And home they go </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Their sickness healed. </i> </blockquote>
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<i>Pray thou to Olaf</i> </blockquote>
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<i>The man of God </i> </blockquote>
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<i>That he grant thee</i> </blockquote>
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<i>His holy spirit. </i> </blockquote>
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<i>With God himself </i> </blockquote>
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<i>He seeks</i> </blockquote>
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<i>Success and peace</i> </blockquote>
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<i>For all men. </i></blockquote>
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'Thus the popular canonization of St. Olaf in 1031 is important not only as one of the first and most spontaneous instances of the way in which the new peoples consecrated their nationality by adopting a royal saint as their national patron, but still more because it marks the final reconciliation between the Nordic and the Christian traditions. St. Olaf quickly took the place of Thor as the patron of the farmers, their champion against trolls and witches, and the ideal type of the Northern warrior. The national code of law became known as the laws of St. Olaf, and the kings of Norway were regarded as the heirs and representatives of St. Olaf, almost in the same way as the kings of Sweden in the heathen time had been the successors and representatives of the God Frey. The wholehearted acceptance of Christianity in Norway and Denmark gradually transformed the spirit of Scandinavian culture.' (p. 98)</blockquote>
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One of the most profound records of this 'spiritual transformation' is found in the <i>Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis</i> of Adam of Bremen, friend of Denmark's King Sweyn Estrithson, which reads: </div>
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'But after their acceptance of Christianity, they have become imbued with better principles and have now learned to love peace and truth and to be content with their poverty; even to distribute what they have stored up and not as aforetime to gather up what was scattered…. Of all men they are the most temperate in food and in their habits, loving above all things thrift and modesty. Yet so great is their veneration for priests and churches, that there is scarcely a Christian to be found who does not make an offering on every occasion that he hears Mass…. In many places of Norway and Sweden, the keepers of the flocks are men of noble rank, who after the manner of the patriarchs live by the work of their hands. But all who dwell in Norway are most Christian with the exception of those who dwell far off beside the Arctic Seas.' </blockquote>
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Adam later on expounds on the newfound 'charity' of the Northerners: </div>
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'Blessed is the people, say I, of whose poverty no one is envious, and most blessed in this – that they have now all put on Christianity. There is much that is remarkable in their manners, above all Charity, whence it comes that all things are common among them not only for the native population but also for the stranger. They treat their bishop as it were a king, for the whole people pay regard to his will, and whatever he ordains from God, from the scriptures and from the customs of other nations, they hold as law.' </blockquote>
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Finally, Dawson explains the aftermath and the profound contributions of the new Germanic converts to the spiritual and cultural climate of Christendom: </div>
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'With the fall of Anglo-Saxon culture, the Scandinavian world became the great representative of vernacular culture in Northern Europe. And it was, above all, in Iceland that the scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took up the tradition of King Alfred and founded the great school of vernacular historiography and archaeology to which we owe so much of our knowledge of the past. We are apt to regard medieval culture as intolerant of everything that lay outside the tradition of Latin Christendom. But we must not forget that the Northern Sagas are as much the creation of medieval Christendom as the <i>chansons de geste</i> and that it is to the priests and the schools of Christian Iceland that we are indebted for the preservation of the rich tradition of Northern mythology and poetry and saga.' (P. 100)</blockquote>
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Thus a very succinct history of the conversion of the Northmen to the faith of their erstwhile enemies. Even in this abbreviated form, however, the beauty, the mystery, the drama and most of all the providential character of the experience is patently evident, which is why I figured Dawson's rendition of events to be worth copying and sharing. In these dark times may the memory of our historical turning towards God help us return to him again.<br />
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As a bit of a post-script, we are reminded by the above of what Hilaire Belloc had to say of the Normans, that famous mingling between the Christian Gauls and their former Viking conquerors. This powerful new race, whose creation was made possible by the imprint of the Christian ethos on the once-marauding Northmen, left a remarkable impression on the structure of European civilization on multiple levels. We leave Belloc's commentary here as a very brief but still sufficient introduction to the character of the Norman race, a kind of parallel if more adventurous and impactful culture to the Danes and the Norwegians:<br />
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'These "North-men," the new and striking addition to the province, the Gallo-Romans called, as we have seen "Nordmanni." The Roman province, within the limits of which they were strictly settled, the second Lyonnese, came to be called "Normannia." For a century the slight admixture of new blood worked in the general Gallo-Roman mass of the province and, numerically small though it was, influenced its character, or rather produced a new thing; just as in certain chemical combinations the small admixture of a new element transforms the whole. With the beginning of the eleventh century, as everything was springing into new life, when the great saint who, from the chair of Peter, was to restore the Church was already born, when the advance of the Pyreneans against Islam was beginning to strike its decisive conquering blows, there appeared, a sudden phenomenon, this new thing—French in speech and habit and disposition of body, yet just differentiated from the rest of Frenchmen—<i>the Norman Race</i>.</blockquote>
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It possessed these characteristics—a great love of exact order, an alert military temper and a passion for reality which made its building even of ships (though it was not in the main seafaring) excellent, and of churches and of castles the most solid of its time.<br />
All the Normans' characteristics (once the race was formed), led them to advance. They conquered England and organized it; they conquered and organized Sicily and Southern Italy; they made of Normandy itself the model state in a confused time; they surveyed land; they developed a regular tactic for mailed cavalry. Yet they endured for but a hundred years, and after that brief coruscation they are wholly merged again in the mass of European things!</blockquote>
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You may take the first adventurous lords of the Cotentin in, say 1030, for the beginning of the Norman thing; you may take the Court of young Henry II. with his Southerners and his high culture in, say 1160, most certainly for the burial of it. During that little space of time the Norman had not only reintroduced exactitude in the government of men, he had also provided the sword of the new Papacy and he had furnished the framework of the crusading host. But before his adventure was done the French language and the writ of Rome ran from the Grampians to the Euphrates.' Hilaire Belloc, <i>Europe and the Faith</i></blockquote>
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All excerpts quoted from Christopher Dawson, <i>Religion and the Rise of Western Culture</i>
(1991, New York: Doubleday) and Hilaire Belloc, <i>Europe and the Faith</i> (2007, Cosimo)</div>
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Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-2949851282040539392017-07-13T22:30:00.001-07:002017-07-13T22:49:21.104-07:00Vladimir Putin: Rebuilding RussiaDisclaimer: I wrote this entry-level English essay for a Berkeley student in exchange for a few shekels. The directions were to argue an opinion over a controversial persona, so I chose Putin. As this was for a school highly Marxist school, and because I was getting the student in enough trouble by arguing <i>for </i>Putin, I took it a bit easy. I didn't press against homosexuals, for example, and neither did I press the (((ethnic))) character of either the Bolsheviks or the oligarchs who inherited their empire.<br />
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I also kept it very basic, meaning that I didn't go into the problems with the Moscow Patriarchate, but maintained a positive attitude towards Putin's cozy alliance with the newly powerful Russian church; neither did I go into Putin's friendship with the oligarchs of his own choosing, but restrained myself to lauding him for crushing the worst of them. The writing, the ideas, and even the format of this paper are basic as well, seeing as this was for a first year course.<br />
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I nevertheless stand by the essential idea of this paper, which is that Putin, despite his many issues, is fundamentally a force for good in the Russian universe, and that he really aims to institute a lot of Solzhenitsyn's ideas — that's why I decided to republish this here.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">‘Time has finally run out for communism. But its
concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. May we not be crushed beneath its rubble
instead of gaining liberty.’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">While Solzhenitsyn made the observation above in his
1990 essay <i>Rebuilding Russia</i>, it is
essentially as true as ever today. Sure, the ‘concrete edifice’ has made way
for something different thanks to more than two decades of kleptocratic practises
and democratic innovations in Russian politics, but the rubble remains. This is
evident not only in the continued corruption among the ruling classes (even if
they’re now private rather than public), but in the continued social mores of
the Russian and post-Soviet peoples. Abortion, alcoholism, divorce rates,
illegitimacy, etc., are all still highly prevalent factors in the Federation.
Moreover, while Russians have again identified as Orthodox after the fall of state
atheism, they have not fully returned to Orthodoxy in a meaningful way that
reflects a return to authentic belief; indeed, according to the Pew Research
Center, only 5% of men and 9% of women attend religious services at least once
a month. If Solzhenitsyn was right when he said that Bolshevism is an example
of what happens when men ‘forget God,’ it remains as crucial as ever that
Russia rediscover her Orthodox identify in order to prevent and finally reverse
the ills that currently afflict her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">It may be fortunate, then, that in Vladimir Putin
Russia has one of Solzhenitsyn’s most ardent admirers entrenched in the
Kremlin. Thanks to the Russian president’s efforts over the long course of his
rule, there are no fewer than three of Solzhenitsyn’s books that are currently
required reading in Russian schools, including <i>The Gulag Archipelago</i>. In 2006 Putin awarded the Nobel-prize
winning author the Russian Federation state decoration for outstanding
achievements in the cultural and educational spheres, and then met privately
with him in Solzhenitsyn’s own house, during which time Putin stressed the
ideological compatibility between himself and Solzhenitsyn wherever possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The relationship was not at all one-sided either, as
Solzhenitsyn, however reservedly, </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTq4Ag8JI_8N6UQCHL4Xo4b32Qt-HAYvbSMc7Qxu4oBg_CmdbO4WdZyI1Wjmb3WZr8TadM_2mDZbsIIRutTvksaFNMiZe9tu0cpezIiWb4EW39nsGdb68NzdOFrmQpMsuDzQiRrgfnige/s1600/Solzhenitsyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="259" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTq4Ag8JI_8N6UQCHL4Xo4b32Qt-HAYvbSMc7Qxu4oBg_CmdbO4WdZyI1Wjmb3WZr8TadM_2mDZbsIIRutTvksaFNMiZe9tu0cpezIiWb4EW39nsGdb68NzdOFrmQpMsuDzQiRrgfnige/s200/Solzhenitsyn.jpg" width="141" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">expressed praise for Vladimir Putin as well.
According to the former US ambassador to Russia William Burns, who visited with
the Soviet dissident months before the latter’s death, ‘Solzhenitsyn positively
contrasted the eight-year reign of Putin with those of Gorbachev and Yeltsin,
which he [Solzhenitsyn] said had “added to the damage done to the Russian state
by 70 years of communist rule.” Under Putin, the nation was rediscovering what
it was to be Russian, Solzhenitsyn thought.’ While he also conveyed criticism
of the nepotistic and plutocratic status of Russian corporations and big money
oligarchs, Solzhenitsyn clearly had favourable impressions of the way that
Putin’s Russia was going.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Contrary to the ongoing demonization of Vladimir Putin
in the West, there is little that connects him to the likes of Hitler or Stalin
that the media try and compare him to, certainly not in religious affairs. On
the contrary, Putin has improved the lot of his people in various ways, which
includes (1) the stabilization and the increase of influence of the Orthodox
Church in Russia; (2) the restoration of a semblance of an identity to the
Russian people that has been distorted and molested since the Petrine
Enlightenment; and (3) the cleaning up of the vampiric oligarchs that installed
themselves as quasi-rulers in Russian society during the Yeltsin era. None of
these things were achieved in a wholly positive nor even lawful fashion, and
infact they often meant compromising on crucial issues or resorting to plainly
barbaric actions. Nevertheless, the net result of Putin’s leadership has been a
serious improvement in areas that have long been debilitated, which has led to
a small revolution in terms of the moral and economic health of the nation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;">The Russian Orthodox Church suffered an unprecedented
trauma in the Soviet era, particularly under Lenin, pre-WWII Stalin, and
Khrushchev. The official ideology held that the Christian religion was a relic of
feudalism, and that the Orthodox Church was a superstitious institution that
preyed upon the Russian people. The advance of revolutionary socialism is
alleged to free the country from its priestly grip and share the enlightenment
of materialistic atheism with everyone. This led to the closing of churches,
the killing and torture of priests, and the banishment of Bibles everywhere;
the public space went from being littered with icons and host to regular
processions to a sea of red and gold in the form of Soviet banners and
propaganda posters. In a letter to Molotov in 1922, Lenin made the following
command: ‘The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary
bourgeoisie we manage to shoot on this occasion, the better.’ </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;">Many of us are familiar with how the state
attempted to indoctrinate the next generation at an early age. There is, for
example, the anecdote of Russian officials telling schoolchildren to ask God
for sweets and subsequently, when the sweets failed to materialize, telling them
to ask Stalin for the same thing. We can imagine their confusion, as well as
their delight, when all sorts of little treats were immediately brought in by
more Russian officials while their prayers achieved nothing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The Russia that Putin inherited may have started to
reassert its Orthodox identity on the surface, but it was far from doing so in
any meaningful way — something that he aims to rectify. From the beginning of
his rule Putin has trumpeted a ‘return to Christian values,’ and this has
accelerated with his resumption of the presidency in 2012, which has meant
censoring theatres showing plays at odds with Orthodox teachings, blocking
major porn sites from Russian servers, and reaffirming the traditional
Christian idea of marriage. In early
2013 Putin met with delegates to the Russian Orthodox Church’s Bishops’
Council, where he made the following statement that succinctly summarizes all
his efforts in the relationship between church and state: ‘We want to continue
our multifaceted and positive partnership with the Russian Orthodox Church and
will do everything we can to help the Church as it rebuilds itself. We will
work together to consolidate harmony in our society and strengthen our
country’s moral backbone.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Putin himself associates his political image with the
national religion. In May 2016, Putin and Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian
Orthodox Church, went together to the monasteries on Mt. Athos, one of the
holiest sites of Eastern Orthodoxy; the fervour that many in the East have for
Putin as a representative of their Christian culture is shown in the fact that
a shirt with Putin’s visage printed on it was selling fast at souvenir shops on
the mountain. While this image does not really correspond to the personal life
of Putin, who has likely been romantically involved with ex-gymnast Alina
Kabaeva for some time now, the fact that Putin is continually staging public
events at divine liturgies, alongside the visit to Mt. Athos, demonstrates his
desire to be seen as a leader with a strongly spiritual and devoted character —
because what Russian nationalism wants is a ‘holy leader.’ <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiREHqg5Jwrlt1VB9H3AR8MQlNFIL4w4fJEmPUEBJWa6dUlco9w6xcocWApj9z9ZzPOomDoS7AzwnwsCWwh39ZqGTZt9XauZGINzc8lPWdq7T0Tof2E3DrnIqxS2BVgC8UeoeKDZj6jATRN/s1600/1040425203.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="541" data-original-width="1000" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiREHqg5Jwrlt1VB9H3AR8MQlNFIL4w4fJEmPUEBJWa6dUlco9w6xcocWApj9z9ZzPOomDoS7AzwnwsCWwh39ZqGTZt9XauZGINzc8lPWdq7T0Tof2E3DrnIqxS2BVgC8UeoeKDZj6jATRN/s640/1040425203.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">There are more profound indicators of Putin’s effect
on Russian society. One of the most impressive is the decline of abortion over
the course of the ex-KGB man’s reign. While a disheartening ratio of 32% of all
pregnancies end in abortion as of 2014, this is roughly half as high as it was
when he first took over in 2000. Although this decline can certainly be
attributed to rising living standards, it’s also signalling the success of
Putin’s anti-abortion measures such as the one signed into law in October 2011,
which limited abortion to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. This correlates with
the rise of birth rates, which have risen significantly from an abysmal 1.2
(total fertility rate) in 2000 to 1.75 in 2014. In light of the falling birth
rates across the Western world, this is a substantial achievement, as the greater
the population growth, the less of a burden an aging population will be on the
next generations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">One constant complaint that the Western media makes of
Putin’s Russia is that it persecutes LGBT activists and homosexuals, but this
is only because Russia has been moving in an opposite direction than that of
the progressive West. As Putin himself says on several occasions, there is no
condemnation of homosexuals as such; in an interview with Oliver Stone Putin
says that ‘We have no restrictions or harassment based on gender. Moreover,
many people explicitly talk about their non-traditional sexual orientation. We
maintain relations with them and many of them achieve outstanding results in
their activity.’ The reason that Russia disallows homosexuals from getting
married is firstly because it goes against the religious values of the country,
and secondly because ‘same sex marriages will not produce any children.’ To
institute something foreign to both the culture of a nation as well as its
well-being cannot be said to be the mark of a strong and prudent leader. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The rediscovery of Russian religious identity goes
hand in hand with its rediscovery of national identity. While ethnos and
religion are synergistic in every people, it is particularly true of the
Russians, who are said to have a ‘messianic’ penchant that derives from their
capacity, their <i>hunger</i> for suffering;
Dostoevsky himself said that ‘the most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need
of the Russian people is the need for suffering.’ A suffering soul is a deep
soul, and this manifests in a vibrant and virile religious life, such as the
one that the Russian nation as a whole enjoyed prior to the Westernization that
occurred beneath Peter the Great. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">That Marxism and revolutionary socialism took such a
strong hold in Russia before any other developed nation, in spite of Marx’s
predictions that it would be England or Germany to turn first, can be
attributed to the innately religious character of revolutionary socialism
itself, which burns with a fire not unlike the spiritual fervour of fanatical
fundamentalists of various religions. It is for this reason that Dostoevsky
also said that ‘It’s easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone
else in the world.’ These kinds of paradoxes or apparent contradictions are
immersed deep within the Russian psyche, something that Nicolas Berdyaev
noticed when he said:</span> <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">‘The inconsistency
and complexity of the Russian soul may be due to the fact that in Russia two
streams of world history — East and West — jostle and influence one another…. Russia
is a complete section of the world — a colossal East-West. It unites two
worlds, and within the Russian soul two principles are always engaged in strife
— the Eastern and the Western.’ This can be plainly seen in the history of
Russia of the past five hundred years, with certain factions agitating for
stronger relations with the West while other, ‘Slavophiliac’ elements argued
for a retreat into the primordial depths of the Russian heritage. The consequence
of this debate resulted in the barbarity of the USSR, where the worst of both
worlds found their ultimate expression.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In order to recover from this calamity, and in order
to preclude any chance of it happening </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9GV8ucbCIkTObbgLn68a8L5Uw0SENUdpWx4DfHlBdMpoTsIs2-ApVPF0-myIIVri5S_SGmSqOEXxZXzyhPT05Sr5uBlgeXf1jDp_5Y5J6kDsRVJIyokHlqBM5cN5aWnD3DMgnktAec_9L/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1111" data-original-width="1600" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9GV8ucbCIkTObbgLn68a8L5Uw0SENUdpWx4DfHlBdMpoTsIs2-ApVPF0-myIIVri5S_SGmSqOEXxZXzyhPT05Sr5uBlgeXf1jDp_5Y5J6kDsRVJIyokHlqBM5cN5aWnD3DMgnktAec_9L/s320/maxresdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">again, the Russian character must come
to terms with itself. In the 1990’s Boris Yeltsin engaged in a mild,
all-encompassing sort of civic identity that brought in every different people
of the nation into one relation, simply that of being a citizen of the Russian
Federation. With the rise of Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, things have
begun to swing towards a more nationalistic determination. Whereas at first
Putin warned against ethnonationalism as ‘a bacillus’ that, if uncontrolled,
may destroy the Russian Federation as it destroyed the USSR, during Putin’s
third presidential term there’s been a clear progression towards emphasizing
the Russian ethnos as the ‘core’ of the country: ‘The core and the binding
fabric of this unique civilisation is the Russian people, Russian culture.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This trend has culminated in the aggression of the
Russian state towards Ukraine, which it feels to be fundamentally one with
itself by virtue of their common ethnocultural identity. The dangers of this
move consist in how the international community views the annexation of Crimea
and the Russian support of Ukrainian separatists in the Donbass as flagrant
actions in violation of international law. The benefits, however, not only
consist of the economic gains of uniting with the oil– and grain-rich Ukraine,
but also in forming a solid bloc constituted by people of highly similar
interests and characteristics. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In a nation as large and heterogeneously constituted
as Russia, however, there nevertheless has to be a project towards embracing
the outlier elements, the peoples who do not correspond to the traditional idea
of an ethnic Russian. It is for this reason that Putin has been adamant on
stressing unity throughout the nation, saying to a meeting of various members
of the Russian ethnic universe that ‘the question of finding and strengthening
national identity really is fundamental for Russia.’ Even as Putin emphasizes
the role of the ethnic Russian in the creation of the new republic, he’s also
drawing in other ethnicities to a central Russian identity that goes beyond
ethnos altogether. This is fully in accord with the traditional Russian idea of
an empire, which necessarily involves rule over multifarious peoples without treading
all over their own identities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This is the sum of the fine balancing act that Putin
engages in: celebrating the historical Russian people as the leaders of the
country without distancing other members from the central idea of what it means
to be <i>Russian</i>. The international
community has every right to be scandalized by any criminal actions on Putin’s
part against the sovereignty of nations like Ukraine, but from the Russian
perspective such actions are perfectly commensurate with its pursuit of a
‘Eurasian’ bloc that is politically and culturally unified. This is moreover in
line with the ideas of Putin’s ‘tutor’ Solzhenitsyn, who argued for the unity
between Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, saying that ‘We all together emerged from
the treasured Kyiv, “from which the Russian land began,” according to the
chronicle of Nestor.’ By reorienting Russian identity around this common
heritage, Russia may be taking one confident step towards reacquiring its
traditional character that preceded the Westernizing perversions and the
Asiatic backlashes that have characterized the country for the past several
centuries. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">One of the first defining moments of Putin’s Russia
was his disruption of the corrupt network of private businesses that benefitted
enormously from the privatization of ex-Soviet industries in the wake of the
USSR’s collapse, and of the subsequent economic development that occurred under
his watch. Numerous kleptocrats, who owned their own media that constantly
lambasted the positive moves of the Russian state out of Yeltsin’s crime-ridden
society, were jailed or exiled for illicit economic activities. Private
investors such as Boris Berezovsky who bought for a dollar and sold for
hundreds more meant that the Russian people footed the bill; the things which
were once basic commodities now became things to be exploited by those who
could make money off of them. Without any regulations watching over this
freshly freed market, vampires and vultures thrived in an economic wasteland. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Vladimir Putin’s regime was not supposed to hinder the
rule of the ‘New Russians,’ the oligarchs who were birthed by Gorbachev and
thrived under Yeltsin; he was supposed to be merely a continuation of the prior
weak government. Thus, it was to their immense surprise that he increasingly
instituted fairer systems that curtailed their ruthless exploitation. Through
the Federation Statute 95-FZ of 2003 all the little fiefdoms created by the
oligarchs were standardized, meaning that they were all subject to the same
federal law, meaning that they no longer had absolute control over what went on
in whatever regions they sucked dry. This not only led to increased consumer
spending, but also to an economy strong enough to pay off its debts; this meant
that Russia was able to pay off its IMF debt ahead of schedule in 2005 before
paying off the Paris Club in 2006 and the United States in 2007. That
debt-ridden Western governments can accuse Russia of ‘irresponsible spending’
involves no small measure of hypocrisy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">One more important aspect of the Russian economic
development under Putin is how fair it is to small businesses. This is again
something that Solzhenitsyn addressed in his final years: ‘Although many
fortunes were amassed in Yeltsin's times by ransacking, the only reasonable way
to correct the situation today is not to go after big businesses — the present
owners are trying to run them as effectively as they can — but to give
breathing room to medium and small businesses. That means protecting citizens
and small entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule and from corruption.’ Even as he
has had to rely on big business for support, especially in the early years, Vladimir
Putin has worked hard to be fair to small and medium businesses to ensure a
truly competitive market and to foster the growth of a genuine middle class. In
September 2016 he announced at the meeting of the Council on Strategic
Development and Priority Projects that ‘We should reach over the longer term
small business employment level and its GDP share comparable with indicators of
countries where businesses, small and medium-size ones in the first instance,
are the backbone of the economy.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Vladimir Putin is no saint — something that we know
for a fact due to the constant chirping of the Western media. There is always
another side to the story, however, and, as we have seen, this applies no less
to the current President of the Russian Federation. Vladimir Putin, in league
with the teachings of his ‘mentor’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, has helped to
transform the Russian state from a weak puppet of international, corporate, and
criminal interests into a powerful free agent that’s taking his country on a
new course. The Russian people are no longer subject to the persecutions of
state atheism and indoctrinated with communist ideas; they are instead exhorted
to rediscover their common Orthodox traditions and to practise Christian values.
They are no longer defined by an international idea of ‘Worker Solidarity’ nor
by the flimsy conception of ‘civic identity; they are being encouraged to
return to the organic national and ethnic parameters that define their history.
Finally, they are no longer victim of the conspiratorial capitalist oligarchs
that leeched off of an already languishing population; they are being helped by
a relatively benevolent state to create their own economic destiny. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">As Western cultures continue to get drawn into the
moral and philosophical abyss that’s been created through secular and
progressivist values, Putin’s Russia, with however many bumps along the way,
looks to a more solid past to ground itself for the future. Putin himself has a
response to the Western societies which unceasingly attack his government,
whose values led to a ‘rejection of their roots, including the Christian values
that constitute the basis of Western civilization. [Many Euro-Atlantic states]
are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national,
cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that put
same-sex partnerships on a par with large families; belief in Satan on a par
with the belief in God.’ From the words of the foremost Soviet dissident and
the policies of a former KGB man, it can safely be said that the Russian
Federation is moving away from the horrors of communism and towards a society
once more informed by the Orthodox spirit that created its people. While his
actions have often been more than questionable, and sometimes far from lawful,
there can be no doubting that Vladimir Putin has played a profound part in
rebuilding Russia from the ground up. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><u>Works
Cited</u><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Berdyaev, Nicolas.
<i>The Russian Idea</i>. New York, 1948<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Coalson,
Robert. "Is Putin 'Rebuilding Russia' According To Solzhenitsyn's
Design?" <i>RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty</i>.
02 Sept. 2014. Web. 07 July 2017. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Dostoevsky,
Fyodor. <i>The Idiot</i>. New York, 1913<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Eltsov, P. "What
Putin’s Favorite Guru Tells Us About His Next Target." <i>POLITICO Magazine</i>.
Politico, n.d., Web. 07 July 2017.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"Fertility
rate, total births per woman." <i>The
World Bank</i>. Data. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 July 2017<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Fitzpatrick,
Sheila. <i>The Russian Revolution</i>. New
York, 2001</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Goldman, Marshall
I. "Putin and the Oligarchs." Foreign Affairs. N.p., 28 Jan. 2009.
Web. 07 July 2017.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Historical
abortion statistics, Russia.” </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Johnstonsarchive.net</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">.
N.p., n.d. Web. 07 July 2017.</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Johnson,
Matthew Raphael. “Vladimir Putin’s War Against the Oligarchs: Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, Political Ideas and Yeltsin’s Legacy.” <i>Rusjournal.org</i>. N.p., May 2017. Web. 07 July 2017.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Kolstø,
Pål, and Blakkisrud, Helge. <i>The New
Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Imperialism 2000-2015</i>.
Edinburgh, 2016, pp. 255-57.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Liu,
Joseph. "Russians Return to Religion, But Not to Church." <i>Pew Research Center</i>. Pew Research
Center's Religion & Public Life Project, 10 Feb. 2014. Web. 07 July 2017.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">"Moscow
Cozies Up to the Right." </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Time</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">.
Time, n.d. Web. 07 July 2017.</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Neef,
Christian, and Schepp, Mathhias. "Interview With Alexander
Solzhenitsyn." <i>The New York Times</i>.
The New York Times, 23 July 2007. Web. 07 July 2017.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Rees, Laurence. </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin,
the Nazis and the West</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">. Pantheon Books, 2008</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Ries,
Nancy. <i>Russian Talk: Culture and
Conversation During Perestroika</i>. New York, 1997.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">"Vladimir
Putin: Inside His Pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain." </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Time</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">. Time, n.d. Web. 07 July 2017.</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"Vladimir
Putin met with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn." <i>en.kremlin.ru</i>, 12 June 2007. Web. 07 July 2017. </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/40495"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/40495</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-24161714829742178112017-01-21T07:04:00.000-08:002017-01-21T07:05:54.484-08:00Silence (2016)(Major spoilers)<br />
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As every review of <i>Silence </i>has already said, the film is very faithful to the book; the only significant <br />
differences I noticed were a livelier, more charismatic 'inquisitor' and that scene at the end where Rodriguez is holding a tiny cross.(1) So my thoughts are the same as my thoughts on the novel, namely that it depicts a very wretched time for Christians, and it does so without any romanticism: priests are apostatizing, laypeople are apostatizing, and they are being martyred anyway (leading to the question of whether it is really martyrdom then). The question of God's silence, his absence when so many of his people are dying for him is at the front of the film, far from being a damning look at Catholicism, as some claim, only illustrates a very painful truth. There <i>are </i>existential crises of faith in such times, and we don't glorify God by pretending that they do not exist.<br />
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One of the most beautiful moments of the film, however, <i>is </i>infact a kind of 'glorification' of martyrdom, albeit in a very tragic and awful sense. The original Japanese Catholics whom Fr. Rodriguez and Fr. Garupe meet in their search for Fr. Ferreira show fervent faith and devotion, inspiring and lending strength to their new priests. When the inquisitor comes to their village, however, he requires them to trample on the <i>fumie</i>, a board with an image of Christ, in order to show that they are not Christians. Fr. Rodriguez tells them that it is okay to do so, so they do. But when the inquisitor brings out a crucifix, telling them to spit on it and then say that the Blessed Virgin is a 'whore,' three of the Christians cannot do it. They are subjected to dying on crosses out in the water, where the constant waves and rising tide eventually drowns them over the course of several days. Right before the last one dies, he starts singing a hymn, a wonderful, pathetic hymn of sweet joy and brokenness that testifies to Christ's great love. It is a tribute in the traditional style to the faith of the martyrs.<br />
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As for the apostasy of Rodriguez, on the other hand, there is no singing, no secret reserves of strength enduring whatever the gentiles can throw at him - instead there is an engima. Is that voice that tells him to trample really God? or is it his conscience, or Satan? The voice later tells him that he was not silent, that he spoke through the suffering around him, so I am not one of those who think that this was Satan speaking now. But then there is the problem of trampling on the <i>fumie</i>, and how the cock crowed three times afterwards, likening Rodriguez's act to the betrayal of St. Peter. How can God tell Rodriguez to do something and then still call it betrayal? This is a highly ambiguous moment, of course, and leads to deep thinking in the seemingly hopeless effort to resolve it. Are we too weak to do God's will? does he forgive us for our failure? can it be a 'lawful betrayal' in that it was divinely commanded? do the lives of other human beings trump our faith? is it truly selfless to surrender our God in order to save other men and women? is that what Christ would do?<br />
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The best way to perceive these questions can be found in Kichijiro, the scraggly Smeagol figure who persistently betrays his fellow Christians and then confesses each time in order to be forgiven. One of the most profound lines of the novel reads: 'Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.' Rodriguez says this, he is <i>aware </i>of this, and yet he still treats the treacherous Kichijiro as vile, as unworthy of being part of humanity, and in so doing Rodriguez reveals that he is human himself, that he is not like Christ, that he is incapable of dying for the miserable and corrupt.<br />
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Kichijiro himself knows that he is a vile man, that he is weak, hence his invariable return for confession after every sin. He also asks the poignant question why he has to be born in such a time - many other men like himself are born in free, Christian countries and live good, Christian lives. But would they be so good if their faith was tested like Kichijiro's? It is unfair, he says, to be born when his weakness becomes a curse, and not when it would be a blessing. We are meant to identify with him in a way, wondering whether we, in our safe, comfortable, and (supposedly) Christian society where we are free to believe whatever we want, would be able to do better than Kichijiro, whether we would have the stuff for martyrdom or for betrayal and apostasy.<br />
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Rodriguez, until his own fall from grace, neither understands him nor takes pity on him. He treats Kichijiro as an enemy, giving him confession almost against his own will. This is a crucial point in the drama, because Kichijiro represents how we might look to God if he had merely human eyes. We continually sin against him; we betray his name; we say we will do good but we do evil; we abuse his teachings for our own ends; we sin and we sin again. If God were Rodriguez, he would be right to regard us as contemptible creatures, unworthy of salvation. But God is Christ, and Christ died for the 'miserable and corrupt.' In his trampling on the <i>fumie </i>Rodriguez appears to Christ as Kichijiro appears to Rodriguez - and Christ forgives him for it.<br />
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Fr. Garupe came the closest to being like Christ. Unlike Rodriguez, who permitted the Japanese <br />
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Christians to trample on the image of Christ, Fr. Garupe exhorted them not to, since they forfeit their relationship with Christ in doing so. When he is captured along with a group of peasants, we are told that the peasants have already apostatized, but will only be set free if Fr. Garupe apostatizes as well. The priest refuses to give in and swims out to the drowning peasants, dying as he tries heroically to save them. He was aware of their apostasy; he was aware of their weakness, their betrayal, but he died for them anyway. Like Christ, Fr. Garupe died for the miserable and corrupt. Even the Japanese samurai says that 'at least [Garupe] was clean,' whereas Rodriguez has 'no will.'<br />
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The theological validity of forgiveness for apostasy aside (we would have to go deep into the Donatist controversy), this film speaks to other powerful human and Christian themes, including both our understanding of God's will when everything points to its absence and the frailty of human nature. God speaks to us in obscure ways, and <i>Silence </i>makes the strong case that he speaks to us through our suffering, that he is right beside us when we suffer; Christ is the archetype of selfless suffering, and so is automatically joined to us when we share in his pain, especially when we suffer for him.<br />
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In Kichijiro we see fallen man in all his ugliness, his cowardly and vicious nature laid bare. Who can love a wretch like that? And yet it is always Kichijiro who cries out for forgiveness after, who feels the burden of sin every time he enters into a state of sin; it is Kichijiro, more than any other character, who acknowledges his weakness, and asks sorrowfully for confession. If Rodriguez and his apostate teacher Ferreira represent the idea that any man may fall, Kichijiro represents the idea that all men may repent, that all men <i>yearn </i>to repent, and that it is the only way for man to escape the sin which is native to him. The human condition is a series of spectacular falls, but it is also a redemption tale in which our quest for forgiveness ultimately leads to salvation through Christ's unlimited compassion.<br />
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It is perhaps best to think of this film as one that asks questions rather than answers them, allowing the viewer the freedom to meditate and ponder on the content of his own faith. Understood in that light, given its intense imagery and honest insight into deep moral problems, this film is yet another Scorsese triumph, and well-worth viewing for any Christian.<br />
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<i>And Jesus was a sailor </i></div>
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<i>When he walked upon the water </i></div>
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<i>And he spent a long time watching </i></div>
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<i>From his lonely wooden tower </i></div>
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<i>And when he knew for certain </i></div>
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<i>Only drowning men could see him </i></div>
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<i>He said "All men will be sailors then </i></div>
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<i>Until the sea shall free them"</i> </div>
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Leonard Cohen</div>
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(1) Bp. Barron <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Th7Tiz1cEk">astutely pointed out</a> that that image represents just what 'the powers that be' want our faith to be like. When our faith is 'deeply interior,' hidden from the world, ineffectual, innocuous, it makes no difference to the external culture; anti-Christian civilization does not care what our faith is, so long as our faith lets it do its business. This is as true for the Japanese pagans in the 17th Century as it is for the secularists today, who are all too happy to leave us be if our spiritual life is secondary to our life in their secular culture, which is, sadly, what the faith of the director of this film has been reduced to. </div>
Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-53757496759769358202016-05-06T19:29:00.000-07:002016-05-06T19:29:20.458-07:00Idea and Representation in Art: Satanic Black Metal and the Christian Listener<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The other day I encountered an interesting topic during my daily facebook scouting. It involved the question of a Christian being able to listen to bands who produce music with visually and morally questionable lyrical content, namely metal music with satanic and otherwise blasphemous themes. It is a discussion that I am well familiar with, given my history as both a Christian and someone very intimate with the metal underground. That it is a question of such burning relevance to what we have posted on this blog is what prompts me to recreate that conversation here, editing my thoughts on the matter to produce a more coherent result. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />Now, to the charge that the Christian cannot in good moral standing attend the works of blasphemous artists it will be answered that, insofar as the work is experienced in a purely aesthetic way, he can indeed do so, and our argument will involve three principal points: that (1) a work can represent an ugly thing beautifully; that (2) there is an artistic standard for all things made and an ethical standard, and that only the former is mandatory for something to be well-made; and (3) that the conscience of the individual is crucial, that the listening to such artists depends both on the listener's reasons for doing so and the degree to which his conscience will allow him to do so. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />It will be <a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2014/08/art-beauty-part-i-section-iii.html">remembered </a>that anything that is made is art as such. It is not merely the 'useless' arts, painting, poetry, film, etc., that are art, but also the crafts of textiles, cabinetry, infrastructure, ship-building, etc; there is traditionally no difference between the artist and the craftsman, between the 'fine' and 'rougher' arts, because this concept of art refers to everything that was made by human hands. Plato said that there is an idea, and the artisan, by a process called mimesis, imitated that idea through his work; the idea of a fireplace, for example, is subsequently represented by the building of an actual fireplace. That is what is called art.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The degree to which a thing is beautiful is the degree to which it is well-made, and the </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">degree to which a thing is well-made is the degree to which it accurately represents its idea. This is the basic standard of art, its first judgment. It follows from this that even ideas of ethically repugnant things, such as the Devil, can be represented beautifully, because it is not the thing represented that is being judged as good or bad, but its representation instead. This is exactly what St. Bonaventure argued, that an accurate representation of something ugly is infact beautiful:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">'[St. Bonaventure] distinguished two reasons for the beauty of an image, even when the object imitated was not beautiful in itself. An image, he said, was beautiful if it was well-constructed, and if it faithfully represented its object. "An image of the devil can be called 'beautiful' if it is a good representation of his foulness and thus foul itself." The image of something ugly is beautiful when it is "ugly" in a persuasive manner....' (Umberto Eco, <i>Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages</i>) </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />It is therefore easy to imagine how black metal, the best of black metal, that is, fulfills such requirements. The foulness of demons is wonderfully represented in the cold, vicious, dissonant, sad, and destructive tones of black metal; the tremolo guitars, the blast beat percussion, the shrieking vocals, the insane and vulgar blasphemies against Our Lord, all of this is conducive to creating in our minds the foulness of demons. The aspect of ugliness is effected, but it is founded on a solid artistic basis, on well-crafted songs written according to objective musical laws that accord with what is aesthetically pleasant and intellectually sound. The ugly idea is therefore shown as something ugly by strong, imaginative virtues of artistic creation; it is well-made, </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">therefore it is beautiful. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There is the question, however, of whether a piece of art is still beautiful if the artist represents the ugly idea, i.e., Satan, as something which is actually beautiful, that it is worth subscribing to, to indeed worshiping. If a Satanist band proclaims the glories of Satan, describes his great beauty and wisdom, and asks us to devote ourselves utterly to him, is their work still a beautiful work of art? If Satan is no longer professed as something foul and dark, but as something wondrous and enlightening to behold, is it no longer something that accurately represents its subject, and is therefore no longer a beautiful work of art?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It can firstly be answered that, in black metal, the musical ambiance remains the same: dark, screeching, violent, and tempestuous. The words might change, but the music remains truthful, loyal to the right representation. It is for this reason that Christian black metal, or 'unblack metal', is almost never successful; it is using a highly inappropriate medium for its content, namely the love and peace of Jesus Christ, which of course is highly misplaced in the swirling venom and uncompromising malice of black metal songwriting. It is only when exploring darker, more mystical themes that 'Christian black metal' can be salvaged, as these ideas are more consistent with the music which carries them (see: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnqD7jUAW90">Reverorum Ib Malacht</a>). Nevertheless, this answer being too easy, we shall use this as an excuse to endeavour to answer this interesting question by explaining the distinction between the artistic and the ethical standards of things made. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />The artistic standard has already been explained. To use <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/565541.Christian_and_Oriental_Philosophy_of_Art">Coomaraswamy's example</a>, the atom bomb that demolished Hiroshima is something beautiful because it did what it was designed to do; its representation perfectly matched its idea. The ethical standard, however, is whether that idea is good, and more critically of whether the thing made is good, in the sense of whether it is worth making at all. The nuclear bomb that demolished Hiroshima is infact something ethically monstrous, whatever its artistic qualities. In this case, the ethical negates the artistic, because there is no use for the artistic beauty of the nuclear weapon besides fulfilling its incredibly destructive <i>telos</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the modern aesthetic realm, however, where beauty has become its own end, a work of art does not necessarily have to be good in the ethical sense, as long as it is good in the artistic sense. This is because beauty, while principally dwelling in the ultimate Good, also extends to the beauty of this world. Part of that beauty is possessed by musical creation, so an artist may share in that beauty by composing something artistically good. The representation of demons, then, even as something positive, may ethically be written off as bad, but insofar as the music used to represent the subject is well-made and appropriately constructed for that subject, so that representation is <i>good</i>. The truly bad is something ugly, and something that is poorly made is ugly, and therefore bad, and therefore more truly of the Devil than a beautiful imitation of the Devil. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Good music produces beauty, regardless of its content. Therefore, where there is no healthy use for the atom bomb, there is a use for satanic black metal, because we get to experience its beauty in a way we never could with a nuclear weapon; we get to experience black metal sensually and intellectually, aesthetically delighting in it as an authentic portion of this world's beauty. The existence of black metal is therefore justified on artistic grounds.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As another challenge to our main thesis, it might be argued that pop music is a good representation of promiscuity and depraved antisocial behaviors and general moral degeneracy - does that mean that pop music is artistically beautiful? Moreover, it portrays such things as worthwhile pursuits, exhorting the listener to follow the artist's lead and dive into a feast of corruption and vice - does that not mean that pop music is ethically bad? This charge can be answered by simply stating that it is, with few exceptions, not good music; it may represent ugly things, but it does so with ugliness, and therefore cannot share in the beauty respective to the artistic standard. It thus fails both the artistic and the ethical judgments because it is bad music representing bad things. It is artistically ugly because bad music is never a good representation of anything other than the artist's own impotence, and it is ethically bad because of the moral dangers of creating that sort of popular music to negatively influence the masses who hear it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Now it must be mentioned that it is true that ideally the artistically beautiful and the </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">ethically beautiful are one and the same, that they cannot be separated - the works of Palestrina, the Gregorian liturgical chants of the Middle Ages, the masses of Haydn, the fugues of Bach all exceed the highest expectations of artistic and ethical judgments. These things are perfect inasmuch as they represent that which is most truly beautiful, and more importantly <i>represent </i>them beautifully. The contemporary gospel song claims to worship God, to portray him beautifully; the artists behind such a song allegedly have the highest ethical aims. Yet they fall flat on their face in the end, because they fail to represent God meaningfully, with power, with <i>beauty</i>, because they have no artistic quality. In this example we see that the thing which worships God is ugly, and the thing which worships Satan is beautiful, <i>as long as we remember that it is purely the aesthetic portrayal of satanic worship</i>, and not the real thing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This does not mean that the devout Catholic may be able to share in the appreciation of that beauty; it is more than understandable for him to be repulsed by such representations, for they offend his faith and his notion of goodness. That is all well and good; beauty is subjective to an extent, and for that person his taste is unable to comprehend the beauty of a foul thing. Yet this does not preclude the beauty of the thing in itself, nor does it preclude the possibility that we <i>may </i>delight in such a work of art. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As long as the music is listened to in the right light, with the right mentality, the dangers are mitigated; the influence of such dark themes is limited if we bear in mind only the beauty of the creation, and not the ugliness of the creation's subject, that we do not suppose that they are <i>both </i>beautiful. For the listener doing this will indeed be effected by it, because he has lost the idea of what is good. We see this most typically in the dissociated, confused youths who reach out to forlorn subcultures, desperate to attain some kind of meaning for themselves when the meaning of their education has failed them; the music becomes a superficial crutch for them, because they have supposed Satan for something he is not, namely a helper of Man. This is essentially nihilism, for in voiding the values of Christian society and adopting those of the Devil, the estranged soul betrays meaning altogether, because Satan is pure privation, lacking in all reality; he is the absence of the real. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is a fact that in the truly Christian city such music would be censored altogether, as it would play a disruptive influence upon an otherwise rightly ordered society, and would moreover have no use as a symbolic reflection of society's diabolical undertones. Nevertheless, given that our society is far from ideal, and certainly not Christian in any meaningful way, such music may indeed have a use to reflect those 'diabolical undertones' to the listener conscious of this significance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In order to listen to ethically questionable material, it is necessary to do a thorough search of one's conscience, to determine how deeply it affects him, and to aspire to listen to such music for the right reasons, which are purely aesthetic in the case of Satanic black metal. It is music that we listen to not for our edification, but for how it pleases our aesthetic faculties; it is music that we listen to not for the celebration of its subject, but for the contemplation of how that subject might be related to us and our world, to reality as a whole. Milton's Satan, for instance, is obviously an evil figure in his rejection of God and for the corruption of his fellow angels and especially of man. He is nevertheless a tragic figure, and says a great deal about the human character and the Christian narrative, so he should be contemplated in that light. The final word on this matter, however, is that if the conscience in any way feels burdened, it is the surest sign for the listener to put the music away - it is clearly not for him. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">That the vast majority of good art emerges from the secular world today should not be a prohibitive factor for us; it is simply our reality that the good, the true, and the beautiful are divorced, that the 'aesthetic' standard of the Middle Ages which marries all three is no longer upheld. It is an irony of some significance that beautiful music today is more often of dark things than of good things, for our age is itself dark; yet that does not negate a beautiful thing. We might listen to works that recreate darkness because that is what our present age is - an enslavement to the flesh, an engorgement of the self, the worship of demons. Such works do not have to be an encouragement to follow suit; they also have the potential to be contemplated indifferently, in a different way, namely to view them as the ethos of our age essentialized and purified into artistic form. Satanic, antichristian music possesses an extra power and relevance for modern man because modernity is satanic. Black metal music epitomizes and reflects the chaos of the <i>zeitgeist</i>, and insofar as that is true it truthfully represents its subject, and insofar as that is true it is beautiful. </span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6PvYoCVAgFg" width="420"></iframe>Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-80815629347925724602016-03-14T01:47:00.002-07:002016-03-14T01:47:46.742-07:00Culture & Race: A Confusion of Causes<br />
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The illusion of biological racism consists in its confusion of causes. The genetic, strictly physical nature of a race is supposed to be the primary cause of culture, of the entire range of expression that that race produces. The civilization that flowers forth from a race, in all of the diverse manifestations peculiar to it, is said to be rooted in the blood and soil of the people which created it. The intent of this brief essay will chiefly be to show three things: that race is not the primary cause of social phenomena, as the racists claim, but also that race is hardly negligible or meaningless, as the anti-racists claim, and finally how race has been traditionally understood.<br />
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The best way to think of the 'race question' is to do so in the light of Aristotelian theory of causation, his Four Causes: (1) material, the physical substance out of which something is made, (2) formal, the shape or form that the material is being arranged into, (3) efficient, the artisan or the mover of the material into the formal, and (4) final, the purpose for which the thing is made or for which an event happens. To put this into a 'for instance', consider the construction of a building. The material cause is the wood that will be the main ingredient in the building's formation; the formal cause is the blueprints, the style and type of building being made, in this case let's say a home; the efficient cause is the architect, the contractor, the homeowner, and anyone else who has a role in planning the house; and the final cause is to provide shelter and a place to live for a growing family, and the enhancement of the community.<br />
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Now, if we think of race in its strictly biological context, as the vast majority of racialists of the past two centuries are wont to do, every race has certain unique or semi-unique features that demarcate it from the others; it has a history and a nature that are expressed in the cultures in which they live and in its individual members. All of this is true so far, as even the most elementary and cursory glimpse into the physical nature of the various races show wide discrepancies in athletic performance, intellectual and medical achievements, responses to different diseases, and so forth, not to mention genetic variation between diverse haplogroups. (Whereas this was exaggerated and endlessly expounded upon in the positivistic 19th and early 20th centuries to a disturbing extent, particularly in Nazi Germany and WASP elites in the USA, in the last fifty years or so the genuine aspects of this science have been silenced in the name of 'political correctness', the social opiate that conceives of the differences between races consisting almost wholly of 'skin pigmentation').<br />
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Thus, biologically understood, race is, in the formation of human societies and civilizations, the material cause. Race subsists as an essentially physical substance that is composed of numerous material elements and relationships; it is moreover malleable, both within itself, as a racial nature can change over time and by interbreeding with other groups, and beyond itself, meaning that it can be altered into different forms 'from above', as it were, by an organizing principle distinct from the race in itself. Remember that we are considering race purely in terms of its physical constitution, its genetic make-up and so forth, so at no point does its sphere of influence extend beyond the material dimension. It is thus perfectly equivalent to the material used to build the house, as its influence is limited to interacting with other material things.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWBSAojSOYkwPA-aUVwf2ZzKyE3ieZZ-y0_jOf-_9o5ZxU7N08d178PpQdEgNYs00_-SQo0NSeIdZ7-ypzKu4-wzTriIvCc2fLDqDFrYILk-IH1qIHfqaHpPw0dv92-rUDvdx302n2WuE1/s1600/Ottawa_Rideau_Canal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWBSAojSOYkwPA-aUVwf2ZzKyE3ieZZ-y0_jOf-_9o5ZxU7N08d178PpQdEgNYs00_-SQo0NSeIdZ7-ypzKu4-wzTriIvCc2fLDqDFrYILk-IH1qIHfqaHpPw0dv92-rUDvdx302n2WuE1/s320/Ottawa_Rideau_Canal.jpg" width="320" /></a>The formal cause in the equation is the society or civilization that is formed from its racial constituencies. This could be as small and homogeneous as a tribe of African Basarwa or as massive and diverse as the country of Canada. It is the conceptual arrangement of the thing that is made, the 'Platonic idea' that is reflected in ordinary reality through its material completion. Race, or the <i>material </i>identity of the people, comprises the basic, physical nature of the society which it represents; the society itself is the form of what those people have been moulded into, like wood becomes a table or glass becomes a bottle.<br />
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The efficient cause is where the argument becomes clear, because rather than supposing, like racialists do, that racial, material quantities are the primary and fundamental causes of phenomena, we contend that intellectual, spiritual, and cultural qualities constitute that function. The ideas that come from these qualities, the truths that dictate the shape of society, are not dependent on the racial nature of those who create them; they are separate, existing in a transcendent realm which this world mirrors materially. While it is true that the members of a certain race are seemingly more capable of apperceiving such ideas than those of other races (mostly because of the difference in flourishing cultures and ones deprived of even the most basic cultural conditions), the ideas themselves exist in a separate space, and can more importantly be shared with other races, meaning that none of these ideas, in their most essential aspect, are totally isolated in this or that race. This is because every race shares in human nature, and every idea apposite to human nature is available to every human being. The ideas of justice, of monogamy, of what is beautiful, of everything that aggregates natural law, these are not dependent on race <i>per se</i> so much as on individual prophets of a particular race, and more importantly on the cultural traditions that such prophets both create and emerge from.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpyb-bo6Hf0-3QVJM82IZBRgznYGUTnufSHcan_3rbb9xI5MPvhd6gm-0x65hfSomBxcYyEOreQzp-Iim1eXGlBArsjWMLeRyTg8LwQoCaye0_Af6ch3FOX75swKOWTKSuXCABFu-_jLNE/s1600/heruli_people01_full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpyb-bo6Hf0-3QVJM82IZBRgznYGUTnufSHcan_3rbb9xI5MPvhd6gm-0x65hfSomBxcYyEOreQzp-Iim1eXGlBArsjWMLeRyTg8LwQoCaye0_Af6ch3FOX75swKOWTKSuXCABFu-_jLNE/s320/heruli_people01_full.jpg" width="320" /></a>To clarify what we are saying further, we can illustrate with examples. Consider the Celts and Germanics of the Classical era, their undeveloped culture, their simple means of life and unschooled systems of thought. Now consider them as they were gradually civilized by the Roman Empire, first in its pagan incarnation as the legions marched north, and then in its Christian form when the Catholic missionaries converted the British Isles and Scandinavia. The progression from barbarism to meaningful participation in European civilization did not happen as a result of <i>racial </i>genesis or awakening; it happened because they were gradually exposed to a superior order of being, and could start to share in a culture that was imposed upon them from above, and which ignited in them a more creative part of their soul that longed to express itself. We can observe the same thing in the pagan societies of America, namely the particularly primitive Aztecs, whose means of connecting to God included human sacrifice and the merciless oppression of neighboring tribes. This changed dramatically when they were conquered by colonial Europeans, who brought with them the crucifix and Catholic culture, thereby humanizing the continent and drastically hastening its ascent towards a genuinely civilized society. Yes, their racial nature changed somewhat with the incoming colonials, but the main part of the change was driven by the substitution of a cruel, dark religion with the creed of Christ; what happened was an improvement of efficient cause, switching one inferior order of ideas for one that is far superior.<br />
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Consider once more the metaphor of the building's construction and its analogy to our subject. The race is the material, which means that it has peculiar qualities of its own, which means that we cannot ignore the reality of race; it has its own importance, namely as the basic material which we use to make our world. Just as wood has its own distinct nature, so does the Latin race; just as stone has its own distinct nature, so do the Han people. The building made out of wood will look different than the one made out of stone; likewise the society composed of Germans will look different than the one composed of Slavs. This is because the racial identity of these peoples will understand the transcendent ideas, the eternal laws that are manifested through human culture, in different ways.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-Nr7Sj8KU1qLV_iuObPKWQFCYkkVQBg_dp8gIYbkEZayNU26p0mgh8jDlS97nNxJBRNIGMXO5mv_VwW4jsRnDD5qhfbuvT7QZ1eK3LDwwk1WQ_h18X1f13MyNqNHW-recZz2SBK-dxwAl/s1600/church-iconastasion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-Nr7Sj8KU1qLV_iuObPKWQFCYkkVQBg_dp8gIYbkEZayNU26p0mgh8jDlS97nNxJBRNIGMXO5mv_VwW4jsRnDD5qhfbuvT7QZ1eK3LDwwk1WQ_h18X1f13MyNqNHW-recZz2SBK-dxwAl/s320/church-iconastasion.jpg" width="320" /></a>The differences between the various Christian communities is evidence enough of this. Despite the shared culture and communion of transcendent ideas, which of course unite the different communities <i>spiritually</i>, there is a wealth of difference between, say, Irish Catholics and Mexican Catholics, just as there is a wealth of difference between Russian and Greek Orthodox. This is because the two cultures, the 'formal causes' of human society, are composed of different races, the 'material causes' of human society. Once more, the house made of stone, even if it shares in the same architectural ideas of the house made of wood, will nevertheless possess its own distinct identity, its own particular qualities that distinguish it from houses made of other materials.<br />
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To summarize this first segment, the efficient cause of culture and civilization is the <i>culture creators</i>, the elites of a race who are borne physically from its physical aspect, yes, but who are more importantly borne spiritually from its <i>spiritual </i>aspect, and are thus tempered by the traditions in which they were raised. The origins of true culture are transcendent, and given to man by God in order to maintain close proximity to him; this proximity is called the Sacred, and as the culture grows older, it loses sight of the Sacred even as it increases in other domains. Once it becomes crystallized with age, a culture requires a renewed connection to God, which only happens through exposure to elites who possess race in the <i>real </i>sense of the word, which brings us to our next segment.<br />
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II<br />
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19th Century racism derived from a positivistic mode of science employed by those who surfaced from the Enlightenment, or the worldview that there is nothing beyond the ratio-empirical reality of this world. The Enlightenment moreover revived Renaissance humanism, and further secularized it through deism and atheism to the point where man, and man <i>alone</i>, was celebrated as the master of the universe; through the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Bacon, the idea of God and of a transcendent realm of being were either discarded altogether or understood purely through the myopic lens of the 'human perspective'. The objective was rendered as reality only insofar as it was subject to the subjective.<br />
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It is from this intellectual milieu that the scientific naturalism of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer emerged. Now that it was widely conceived that our world, immunized from any kind of supernatural order or means of intervention, was dependent only on physical laws, it was assumed that the natural order was dominant, that 'nature knows best'. While this originally abrogated the Augustan humanism of the Enlightenment in the hands of the Romantics (perhaps best exemplified in Coleridge's albatross or Melville's whale), humanism made its recurrence in a strange fusion with naturalism, namely in the racist doctrines at the turn of the century, which supposed that all human history and behaviour could be explained in terms of race alone; like Gibbon before them analyzing history in terms of relative factors, Chamberlain, Gobineau, de Lapouge, etc. all championed a view of reality in which things were reduced to a biological context. This was then used as an instrument to superficially elevate the value of race, alleging that Whites, by virtue of their 'superior genetics' alone, had the natural right to dominate and subjugate other races. The humanism of the Enlightenment thus became the racism of the 19th Century, an ideological tool which enabled the Europeans to conscientiously conquer lesser lands not because of their superior culture, but because of their superior 'race'; they were, in other words, <i>more human </i>- that is, if we go by the secularist's idea of 'human'.<br />
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The demonstrably humanistic character of racialist thinking reached its zenith in the first half of the 20th Century, particularly in the voice of the National Socialists, where race was more and more attributed with greater, even <i>mystical </i>qualities. Where the Renaissance and especially the Enlightenment praised the reason of man to no end, National Socialism and its American and English counterparts limitlessly praised the <i>blood </i>of man; where man became the substitute for God in prior generations, race, as the highest and most fullest instance of man, likewise became a divine surrogate. The words of the 'neo-pagan' Alfred Rosenberg, for example, one of the primary ideologues of the regime, even shared many of the same cliched and monstrously untrue lies about medieval Christian society with the Enlightenment. The theories of Rosenberg and others did not exist in a vague, airy space, but actually deeply influenced the social policies of the Third Reich; the renewed <i>Kulturkampf </i>against German Catholics, for example, was a direct product of the monopolization over the German soul that its leaders sought. Many German Protestants were coerced into the state-promoted national church, into so-called 'Positive Christianity', a profoundly damaged church in which the Christian faith is 'Aryanized' in the bizarre attempt to eviscerate any semblance of its 'Jewishness'. The evidence of Hitler's own social darwinism is rife in his own book, as you can hardly turn the page without seeing some instance of his argument that man is determined above all by evolutionary methods, which are epitomized in the evolution of race.<br />
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So much for racialist history, which has overwhelmingly been of a biological and materialistic nature, despite whatever spiritualist, mystical glosses its bearers have superimposed on it. There is, however, an alternate perspective of race that has been too often ignored by those today who are preoccupied with immediate, symptomatic problems rather than systemic and fundamental ones. This perspective, which we hope to promote as a healthy contrast to what we have just explained, was perhaps best formulated by the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who elucidated the classical and medieval comprehension of race in the metaphysical context of the traditional school and of his own unique style. Evola taught a tripartite view of race in which each race has a 'body' and a 'soul' and, if it were healthy or 'pure' enough, a 'spirit', and the truly impure or mongrelized race would not necessarily be characterized by physical miscegenation, but rather by a disharmony of race within oneself:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'One's idea of race depends on one's idea of man: the nature of each racial doctrine is determined by its conceptualization of the human being. All distortions in the field of racism derive from a materialist view of man, a view informed by science and naturalism. By contrast, at the very basis of my racial doctrine I placed the traditional idea of man as a being comprised of three elements: body, character and spirit. I argued that an exhaustive racial theory has to take all three elements into account by examining race in its threefold manifestation: as race of the body, race of the character, and race of the spirit. Racial "purity" is found when these three races stand in harmonious balance with one another, each race shining through the other two.... The most unwelcome consequence of the various cases of miscegenation which have occurred during the historical development of human society is not the alteration of the physical race and psychosomatic type - what ordinary racism is chiefly concerned with - but, rather, the divide and contrast between the three kinds of races within the same individual. As a consequence of such miscegenation, one finds men whose body no longer reflects their character, and whose emotional, moral and volitional dispositions no longer agree with their spiritual inclinations. "Spirit" should here be distinguished from "character" as that component of man in touch with higher values that transcend life. In this sense, the "race of the spirit" manifests itself in the different approaches to the sacred, to destiny and to the question of life and death, as well as in world-views, religions, etc.'~Julius Evola, <i>The Path of Cinnabar</i></blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6MfnYbUQgwlqBft26M-aRVzV9qA8b2nHwX2Cwgr6rPRwl8C3S3_Cp3B88qD6wPup1udrSB4uNv_8oaMY0WPvl48NOZvBAFObO76l2SmYX8Yv8gWKNWqiWiu7WbaE6Cp1J5b2cOZS2yEnw/s1600/34_5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6MfnYbUQgwlqBft26M-aRVzV9qA8b2nHwX2Cwgr6rPRwl8C3S3_Cp3B88qD6wPup1udrSB4uNv_8oaMY0WPvl48NOZvBAFObO76l2SmYX8Yv8gWKNWqiWiu7WbaE6Cp1J5b2cOZS2yEnw/s320/34_5.jpg" width="235" /></a>The body, for Evola, is simply the physical phenotype to which any one race belongs; it is the <i>weltanschauung </i>that fostered a higher level of sanctity and imagination that is promulgated through all of a race's doings, even if only its elites were conscious of their spirit and its efficacy. Evola moreover differentiated between a race's inner quality and its outer quality, saying that the biological or mental characteristics of a race were only important insofar as they were subordinate to a race's essence, which was considered by Evola to be a kind of 'universal' in the Platonic sense: The spirit is how a race approached God, established a sacred order, and divulged a certain external form, the physical manifestation of a race's inner qualities. The forehead of a Nordic person, for instance, or the nose of a Semite, are peculiar to these races because they express something deeper within. The soul is the behavioural or mental inclinations that a race has, or how it performs things common to humanity in an uncommon way. This 'character' or 'style', as Evola called it, of doing things, i.e. how a race built cities, prayed to gods, made war, further delineated it from other races much like a man's personality sets him apart from his fellows.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'[The] inner race ought to be regarded as superior to the external and merely biological form. A similar approach called for a radical reassessment of the views of materialist racism, not least with respect to genetics and heredity. I rejected the fetish of merely physical racial purity, on the grounds that the purity of the external race of an individual is often preserved even when his inner race has dimmed or deteriorated (a common example of this is that of the Dutch and Scandinavians).... The notion of an "inner race", and of its pre-eminence over the external race, was particularly useful in two regards. On the one hand, from a moral point of view, this doctrine presented each race as an independent essence regarded as a universal in itself, almost as a Platonic "idea" - although each race might empirically be understood in conjunction to a given physical race, among a given people. A similar analysis could practically be applied to the use of the terms "Aryan" and "Jewish", here understood as indicative of a series of attitudes that may or may not be found among all people of Aryan or Jewish blood. Such a use of the two terms would have provided a safeguard against conceit and one-sidedness: for what ultimately counted the most, in my view, was the inner form of each individual.' Julius Evola, <i>The Path of Cinnabar</i></blockquote>
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By pointing out the essential archetype that persists within a certain race, Evola hearkens back to <a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2015/03/the-decline-of-west.html" target="_blank">Oswald Spengler's</a> argument of Cultures and Civilizations having underlying and fundamental qualities that are exclusively their own, and which have an organic Destiny to accomplish in this world before fading back into eternity. There is no room here for any kind of accidental or merely 'social' explanations of racial attitudes and behaviour in history because they derive not from chance, but from the actual nature of a race's being; every thing and every event has a cause, and while it might seem to be devoid of higher meaning by modern sociologists and historians trained in the Gibbon mould, a thing or an event inevitably has its roots in the suprabiological essence of the race which produced it.<br />
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To return to our earlier point, we can generate a parallel between Evola's notion of the 'inner race' and Aristotle's efficient cause, or our 'culture-creators'. The inner race, as the antecedent cause of more sensible phenomena such as a race's historical or biological characteristics, subsists in eternity, as it were, 'inner race' being a transcendent idea that motivates things in this world to conform to its image. This is less abstractly known as 'tradition', or the profound worldview that arranges a people's thoughts and actions through the mechanisms of religion, history, philosophy, art, education, various political edifices, and more recently the media. It is this tradition that performs the dominant role in the shaping of culture and ethnos, but it needs elites to thrive therein, elites who possess body, soul, and spirit in a harmonious relationship, and who are inspired by the ideal of their race which is actualized in their attitudes and worldly endeavours. This communion between tradition, the essential idea of a race, and its elites who make manifest that tradition, is what truly shapes a culture and a civilization:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Moreover, the notion of inner race implied the idea of race as a moulding energy. Thus, the development of a definite human type free of ethnic miscegenation might be explained on the grounds of an inner moulding power, which finds its most direct manifestation in a given civilization or tradition. A notable example of this phenomenon is provided by the Jewish people: originally lacking any ethnic unity (in a physical sense), the Jews came to possess recognizable hereditary traits thanks to their tradition, ultimately coming to embody one of the clearest historical examples of strenuous racial unity. A more recent example is that of North American society: for Americans have come to show rather constant racial traits (particularly in terms of inner race) thanks to the moulding power of their civilization, which has shaped an extraordinarily mixed ethnic whole. My approach, therefore, ruled out the possibility that populations might be conditioned by biological factors alone.'~Julius Evola, <i>The Path of Cinnabar</i></blockquote>
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III<br />
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The story of Western Civilization births the hubris that those who belong to it are innately superior to those who remain outside of it, or who belong to it only due to the charity of the West. The more nefarious form of this hubris comes in the shape of those who presume that the global domination and seemingly obvious 'cultural superiority' that the West has exerted over everyone else is due chiefly to the <i>racial </i>nature of those peoples who lead it. The reason why we have conquered the world, built the tallest buildings, accumulated the most wealth, explored the furthest reaches of the galaxy, written the most beautiful books, is because of our higher IQ, the 'Bell Curve', evolutionary development, a physically inherent moral sense - the reason why, in short, is because our brains and bodies are simply hard-wired better than those of others. It is the reasoning of a materialist.<br />
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While there is a degree of truth in this (because there is a difference in nature between races, it would be naive to suppose that there would not also be a difference in quality as well, just as there are different qualities of wood or stone), it is wrong to think this way for two reasons. The first is that something higher does not proceed from something lower; biological race cannot be a greater influence on society just as body cannot be a greater influence on a man than his mind or spirit. It is that way for an animal, but a man is organized by higher principles, and the healthier he is, the more he obeys them. It is the same for a society of men: the greater society will heed the higher laws, respond to a spiritual intuition, and practise its tradition; the lesser society will disregard all this because it is more strongly influenced by its instinctual impulses, and it will make war without justice, surrender to carnal passions, accumulate wealth disproportionate to one's needs, and generally be based around the pursuit of temporal gratification.<br />
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The truth of Western Civilization's superiority cannot be found in the racial constitution of its members, because body is something which is primarily used rather than something which is a primary user; it is an instrument which someone else plays. We can determine this by appraising our own history wherein we crawled from the remains of the Roman Empire, renewed it in a more glorious style, constructed a society organized around the laws of God, and existed as a European community as close to him as is possible since his Ascension. This was then followed by a steady retreat from him, drafting ideology after ideology that drew us further and further away from what we had attained, even as our global influence and practical accomplishments grew.<br />
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The glory of man waxed as that of God waned. The results were catastrophic war, apocalyptic weapons, 'Lebensunwertes Leben', concentration camps, collapse of the nuclear family, mass infanticide, and an overwhelming materialism that seeped into all aspects of life; the secularization of society, caused by 'humanism', meant man's dehumanization even as it exalted him as greater than God, who no longer existed as anything of meaning to us. From being as close to God as we were, we fell to being inconceivably distant from him. Is this ruin, then, also the result of race? If our triumphs can be attributed principally to race, surely logic would have it that our failures can as well:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'The racist argument that the whites, and among them the Europeans, have more genius than other races, obviously loses much of its value — to say the least — in the light of what we have said about humanism and its consequences; because it is all too evident that neither a hypertrophy nor a deviation constitutes an intrinsic superiority. Still, when considering genius under its natural and legitimate aspect, one has a right to ask whether this phenomenon is also met with among peoples without writing, given the fact that they do not seem to have any such examples to offer; we reply without hesitation that genius lies within human nature and that it must be possible for it to occur wherever there are men. Obviously, the manifestation of genius depends on such cultural materials as are at the disposal of a racial or ethnic group....' Frithjof Schuon, 'To Have a Center'</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoLEEnAc8Aar3hFOHD3Pas-nMjBzvLOmH2uHVNCIySfptUlxGvnIMI3jFKC62-uJdloAnhIK0BxwRJbMUk7_QftJV9LDPYlj1dUolsfFUmqx6hn_lzKNCVrh3IyY7wGqW-bgMoOAynoghN/s1600/Grande+Galerie+in+the+Louvre+in+Ruins_1796_Hubert+Robert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoLEEnAc8Aar3hFOHD3Pas-nMjBzvLOmH2uHVNCIySfptUlxGvnIMI3jFKC62-uJdloAnhIK0BxwRJbMUk7_QftJV9LDPYlj1dUolsfFUmqx6hn_lzKNCVrh3IyY7wGqW-bgMoOAynoghN/s320/Grande+Galerie+in+the+Louvre+in+Ruins_1796_Hubert+Robert.jpg" width="320" /></a>Clearly, then, considering the fact that our 'genius' has been exhausted or corrupted into vile, godless uses, it must have been of a relative value to begin with, and not absolute as the racialists claim. Race is relative to the force which puts it into motion, whether it is Evola's 'race of the spirit' or 'tradition' or the elites who comprise the creators of culture. Race is ideally the vassal of something transcendent which longs to be expressed in this world, and its prophets perform that mission to the best of their ability. After the transcendent or the ideal in a race has been lost, however, which Spengler says is as inevitable as the death of any organic life form, what remains is a shadow of its former self, either fading into oblivion or usurped into doing evil. It is not merely the 'Jews' or a select few 'traitors' who are responsible for the decline of the West; it is a collective effort on the part of its pseudo-elites, that is, the almost entirely gentile intellectuals and merchant caste and false nobility, to extinguish the flame of the West for their own personal 'benefit'.<br />
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(An aside: it is moreover intriguing to note how, in the chief cultural organ of the West, the Catholic Church, the alleged racial superiors, the Whites, are generally on the side of liberalism and the corruption of authentic European values, while the alleged racial inferiors, the Blacks - to say nothing of the Polish -, are overwhelmingly on the side of tradition and of the new, inspiring values of African culture. How could this be anything but an instance of how culture trumps race in the causal order? Despite the 'lesser genetics' and 'inferior IQ' and all the rest, the exemplars of African religion are far exceeding their White counterparts in the defense of the Roman Church and the core moral security of the West, whereas the White clergymen form almost the entirety of the assault upon it! The same thing is true, by the way, in the White parts of the Anglican church and the 'Global South', as recent debates on the issue of homosexuality threaten to divide the Anglican Communion along these lines.)<br />
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The second reason why it is wrong to think of ourselves as innately superior to the rest of the world is simply the <i>pride </i>of doing so. There is infact a certain legitimacy to such a claim, because God did not choose the Western world to bear his salvific message for no reason, as St. Paul hinted at: 'For both the Jews require signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom' (1 Corinthians 1:22). The Hebrews God chose to reveal himself to, the Greeks God used for their philosophy, and finally the Romans, the rightful rulers of this world, God used for their legal and political authority. The Europeans who were initially converted and soon comprised Christendom, such as the Franks and the Germans, likewise possessed special gifts which God providentially chose to use for the purposes of his Church. All things considered, it would be foolish indeed to suppose that these 'special gifts' were accidental, simply the results of circumstances outside of God's knowledge; it would be far more consistent to assume that they were implanted by God inside these peoples well ahead of their being utilized.<br />
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The problem with taking pride in such things, then, becomes analogous to the pride that a <br />
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professional athlete or a world-renowned chess player might take in their own achievements, simply for the fact that they are not using something which wholly belongs to them. The showy sportsman or egoistic chessmaster is right to celebrate his own excellence, but is absolutely wrong to take pride in it as something deriving purely from his own abilities, for doing so would suppose that he himself as a greater cause than he really is. The body that allows the sportsman to win, the mind that allows the chess player to win, these are carved for them long before they even make use of them. Yes, they exercise mind and body and make the best use of them, for which they deserve all the credit that they get from others, but the real and essential credit belongs to the God who created them, and the wisest players will recognize that and thank him for it.<br />
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It is the same thing with race: we are imbued with important qualities at birth that extend beyond our own generation. We take care of them, we recognize them, we make use of them; but God forbid we take <i>pride </i>in them as things which make us better than others or are the result of our own success. We share in a race, and yes, we love our race for it, and do our best to uphold the values which have made it what it is, but we do <i>not </i>suppose that race is separate from God, that race is separate from culture, that race is anything but a tool of God and culture. To do so is to suppose that race functions in a role higher than it really does, which is an error all the more grievous when we derive pride from it. It is the same kind of pride that 'humanists' commit when they glorify man's achievements when they more properly belong to God, and it is this pride that has driven us apart from him. When racialism reached its crescendo in the Third Reich, Pope Pius XI wrote the encyclical <i>Mit Brennender Sorge</i>, which attempted to curtail the growing worldview that considered the organization of a society around racial lines to be of the highest importance:<br />
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'Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.' Pope Pius XI, <i>Mit Brennender Sorge</i></blockquote>
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All this being said about the problem of racialism, it is nevertheless of relevance only to a small minority in contemporary schools of thought, which is due to a problem on the opposite side of the spectrum, namely the error that race does not exist <i>at all </i>in any meaningful capacity. Race exists, we say; that fact is increasingly undeniable, even as liberal outlets proceed to persecute any scientist who labours to present research supporting that fact. The underlying goal, of course, the fundamental reason for denying race, is the <i>standardisation of society</i>. While truly reality is made up along vertical and horizontal lines, a hidden hierarchy that the best of human communities emulate, ever since the Enlightenment and even earlier the aim has been to reduce everything which is raised up to a standardised level. Thus the Revolutionary calls of 'Liberty and Equality' of the French and 'All power to the Soviets!' of the Russians, which epitomize the destruction of hierarchy insofar as they stress the 'power of the people', the flattening of order by the removal of anything higher than that <br />
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standardized level. First the highest in the Chain of Being was eliminated, God, as man set up himself to rule in his place; then his Church as a participant of political significance in society; and then the political elites themselves were castrated, as the old nobility were stripped of land and title, and kings and queens were executed or reduced to merely ornamental figureheads.<br />
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All that remained once the hierarchy was paved down was 'democracy', 'communism', 'populism', 'totalitarianism', 'libertarianism', 'anarchism', seemingly disparate ideologies which were nevertheless united by one heresy: <i>materialism</i>. Once there is no longer comprehension of anything above itself, there can only be comprehension of something on its own level, which is why materialistic ideologies cannot conceive of things like hierarchy, an order of values, the distinction of vocations, the sanctity of what is Sacred. This is because these are all things which inherently mean something <i>transcendent</i>, something beyond the material plane and therefore beyond its comprehension. But just as the 'vertical' dimension is ignored, so too are differences along the 'horizontal' dimension, because these also fail to be understood by the myopia of modern ethnological methods.<br />
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'Races exist and we cannot ignore them, less than ever now that the time of closed universes has come to an end and with it the right to purely conventional simplifications; in any case what it is above all important to understand is that racial determination can only be relative, man thus determined never ceasing to be man as such. The modern movement towards uniformity, which causes the world to become smaller and smaller, seems able to attenuate racial differences, at any rate at the mental level and without speaking of ethnic mixtures. In this there is nothing surprising if one reflects that this standardizing civilization is at the opposite pole from any higher synthesis, based as it is solely on man's earthly needs; human animality provides in principle a rather facile ground for mutual understanding and favors the breaking down of traditional civilizations under auspices of a quantitative and spiritually inoperative "culture." But the fact of thus depending on what gives mankind a "low level solidarity" presupposes the detaching of the masses, who are intellectually passive and unconscious, from the elites who legitimately represent them and in consequence also incarnate both the tradition, insofar as it is adapted to a given race, and the genius of that race in the most lofty sense.' Frithjof Schuon, <i>Castes and Races</i></blockquote>
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So, not only is the <i>spiritual </i>aspect of race eliminated, but the <i>physical </i>differences are as well, because they interfere with the socio-political programmes of certain pseudo-elites whose designs require the utmost 'cohesion' between their subjects. The 'time of closed universes has come to an end', broken open by a 'multiculturalism' which infact means <i>monoculturalism</i>, the 'culture' of finance and utilitarianism. Whatever truths bonded a society prior to its infusion into the globalistic one are destroyed and forgotten; what replaces them are no longer of a transcendent nature, but subsist strictly on the human level. Avarice, gluttony, pride, and sloth are codified into a hidden system of values that drive the modern world; we are no longer authentically differentiated into various groups all striving after the same common, perennial truths because we are superficially conformed to a standard that 'unites' us all by the sins that we share. The Muslim moving into the West does not effectively evangelize the West, restoring a sense of the Sacred to it; the West evangelizes <i>him </i>by appealing to his lower instincts and thus compelling him to live in the same materialistic way his new neighbours live.<br />
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In the interests of creating vague mega-societies that are centred around nothing higher than a common pursuit of wealth and momentary pleasures, the pseudo-elites of the present are against the notion of race as a delimiting factor. It is for this reason that public education and Orwellian propaganda organs like Hollywood or VICE are constantly promoting sentimental attitudes toward race that target the audience's emotive faculties rather than his intellectual ones; we are supposed to <i>feel </i>something for the plight of others, and we are supposed to <i>want </i>racial harmony in our societies, so the misfortunes of non-Europeans and the contrived justice of 'getting along' with other races are pushed to no end. This happens at the same time as, in the real world, communities naturally segregate on racial lines, and members of different races get along with one another, but <i>without </i>the artificial sort of 'you are Black, I am White, together as friends we will overcome our differences and the hostile attitudes of others' sentiment. The result is nevertheless the breakdown of ethnic communities, as the culture of work and making money ultimately means more than the preservation of neighborhood and community; in North America, instead of which parish and which religious bloc you adhered to defining where you live, it is now where you are <i>employed </i>which is the deciding factor in an individual's or a family's choice of residence (which overwhelmingly is in the rootless, individualistic suburbs, thanks largely to the convenience of the automobile).<br />
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So, races exist and we cannot ignore them, because ours is the age of uniformity and standardization, wherein any authentic difference between us is seen as an 'evil' because it interferes with 'social cohesion', that is, the accumulation of wealth for corporate and political 'elites' (they are essentially the same oligarchical class). It is for this reason that ethnic mixtures in <i>today's </i>world are, certain exceptions notwithstanding, usually of a malign character, because, as Evola says, 'miscegenation certainly has negative consequences in those cases where the inner race is weak' (<i>The Path of Cinnabar</i>), and presently there are very few of us who can say that our 'inner race' is <i>strong</i>. Should our culture be of a higher order, should we still have <i>race </i>in the sincere use of the word, it would indeed be possible to miscegenate and propagate our superior order amongst the other peoples of the world. Contemporaneously, however, this is not so, and it is infact of the reverse situation, wherein those of less developed cultures are propagating <i>their </i>more barbaric worldviews and attitudes and behaviour on people of the West, people who are currently enduring a steep cultural decline. It was this way amongst the ancient Romans (in the era between when their paganism was virile and spiritual and when they were converted by the Christians), when their culture and ethnos suffered under the influx of barbaric Germans and other outsiders, thus degrading it and hastening its demise, from which it only recovered when a new cultural order was created and spread.<br />
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By acknowledging race, by accepting the racial discrepancies, even those merely of the bodily dimension, we are helping to fight against the standardizing influence which seeks to diminish all differences to a purely 'environmental' status. In this worldview, there is no such thing as a German or a Greek; there is no such thing as a White man or a Black man; there is only a 'human being', and his 'rights' are universally the same. This is a superficial kind of humanism which appeals to an abstraction of man rather than who he really is, i.e., a man of different parts and members. <i>Genuine </i>humanism is <i>Christian </i>humanism, because, yes, it too conceives of man in the universal sense: we are all embodied souls longing to share in communion with God, and thus have the same fundamental virtues and vices, inner strengths and inner weaknesses. We nevertheless recognize that we behave differently according to the many splendidly different natures that characterize the human species, across all its forms, and only try to unite them insofar as we believe in the eternity of souls and in the absolute necessity of elevating them to heaven. Here on earth, however, there is plenty of room to allow every racial constitution the space to express itself in its own unique way.<br />
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The perceptive reader might have noticed how we never finished relating Aristotle's Four Causes to how we conceive of race. Well, the fourth cause is the final cause, which is what makes it suitable for our concluding statements.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqG5Jct7F2TnxqOvDqTgnlXRmeCy_7LYG1YF1Kp2HWCqdiYhQZp6BeZSQon8xH18XbmBscld6CuKAzCxw1pyWSPngeH7JwkWAVUbzr0J7JijhPAun8j4EG3qOQ2uRdV9_qpdWnm_HXgPH/s1600/AnimalsAristotle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqG5Jct7F2TnxqOvDqTgnlXRmeCy_7LYG1YF1Kp2HWCqdiYhQZp6BeZSQon8xH18XbmBscld6CuKAzCxw1pyWSPngeH7JwkWAVUbzr0J7JijhPAun8j4EG3qOQ2uRdV9_qpdWnm_HXgPH/s320/AnimalsAristotle.jpg" width="320" /></a>If the material cause is the substance out of which a thing is made, and the formal cause is the form of the thing which is to be made, and the efficient cause is the thing's maker, the final cause is the <i>purpose </i>for which the thing is to be made. The final cause of a calculator is to swiftly answer mathematical equations, the final cause of a chair is to sit upon it, the final cause of a cinema is to view films inside of it, etc. Aristotle calls the final purpose a thing's <i>telos</i>, or end, or the reason for its existence. Thus, the reason for a caterpillar's existence is to become a butterfly, or the purpose of a seed falling into the ground is to become a tree; a thing's <i>telos </i>is intrinsically bound up with its being, meaning that it cannot exist separately from its final purpose, from what it is <i>supposed to be</i>. Furthermore, Aristotle says that, 'everything that Nature makes is a means to an end' (<i>Parts of Animals)</i>, because Nature itself is a means to an end, <i>man's </i>end. With this in mind, and bearing also in mind how Spengler's racial life-forms are emergent from organic forces, we can begin to see how race is purposed for a higher end than that which it has in itself.<br />
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Now, there are actually two different ends for the races of man, one natural and temporal, and the other supernatural and eternal. So, starting with the natural end, race is, once again, the material cause of the formal cause, which is society or civilization, which is created by the efficient cause, its outstanding members who apperceive eternal ideas transcendent of any single race and integrate them into their tradition (members who Evola more or less identify as the 'race of the spirit'). The final cause of this society or civilization is what Spengler calls its <i>Destiny</i>, its cultural narrative where the historical life-forces wax and wane as it is born, matures, and finally expires. It is the equivalent of a man who goes through his youth in a brazen flash of creativity, who enters his adulthood with greater power but decreasing intuition and energy, who then enters old age with superior knowledge and a wealth of recollection, but is overwhelmed by the weight of it and suffering from amnesia, forgetting that which made him great, and who finally dies, perhaps to be succeeded by his grandchildren. The final cause, then, is the same as that of an oak seed newly sprouted: <i>to become that which it really is.</i> Just as the seed is meant to become the tree, so the sons of Romulus are meant to become the Romans.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP2-9sFsknok2kHEWM8JYETJ0-y9ZmitDA1WasYOiTkYXYzn1DV0R2hCajVR4zkrhxTpJhU4xSpnlmVY8o6HPfqIsD1XVL6DZoUrvlKVTNqpu3gv_xSC_FIpHnDoa2623cWlZ40RS7BAwI/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP2-9sFsknok2kHEWM8JYETJ0-y9ZmitDA1WasYOiTkYXYzn1DV0R2hCajVR4zkrhxTpJhU4xSpnlmVY8o6HPfqIsD1XVL6DZoUrvlKVTNqpu3gv_xSC_FIpHnDoa2623cWlZ40RS7BAwI/s1600/images.jpg" /></a>The second or supernatural end of race is necessarily bound up with the end of mankind as a whole, there being absolutely no difference in the terminal and highest stages of human development, hence Galatians 3:28, which reads: 'There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.' There is likewise no difference between castes, which are actually of greater distinction than the difference of race (since they are vertically organized rather than horizontally), as Shankara reminds us when he asks: 'Is there any difference between the untouchable and the Brahmin in the eye of the knower of Truth?' Anyway, the second end of 'race', and now of course we would be more accurately speaking of entire cultures rather than races <i>per se</i>, the latter being bound up in the former, is really the end of <i>man</i>: the salvation of man's soul. Cultures which more closely connect us to God, cultures which engender a societal spirit that fosters greater understanding of God and his works, and cultures that ensure natural law is universally recognized and obeyed to the maximal extent, are more successful cultures insofar as they achieve what they are purposed for and therefore fulfil their final cause.<br />
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The aim of all culture, then, is ultimately to direct us toward God, the Heavens, and a more accurate understanding of ourselves and this world. This is hardly merely a Christian idea, either, as all traditional cultures have elaborate and inspired devotions to the deities which govern their existence; ordinary realities such as harvesting crops, crafting woodwork, bartering, eating, making war, making love were all analogous to the Divine, and were patronized by some deity thereof, thus elevating the ordinary to the <i>extraordinary</i>, and thereby achieving a higher meaning. Obviously this was not relegated to the merely 'religious' domain, either, as the entirety of their society was oriented around a pantheon that was replicated all around them, injecting them with a sort of 'sacramental' spirit even before they were given the Sacraments. In reality there was no 'religious domain', since their whole <i>world</i> was religious:<br />
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'Primitive man made no real distinction of sacred from secular: his weapons, clothing, vehicles and house were all of them imitations of divine prototypes, and were to him even more what they meant than what they were in themselves; he made them this ''more'' by incantation and by rites. Thus he fought with thunderbolts, put on celestial garments, rode in a chariot of fire, saw in his roof the starry sky, and in himself more than ''this man'' So-and-so.' (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, 'Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art')</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYl5L2ajY21KuVYNMkvhMVg4yv2f0nGpGP8wCThQFbAvvFpj2SeQp3SE4xBl9XmdBDLdYNtXxk2i4JkaA5OMdEf6YFOdAtGc4z2uKwL2gqN6R_-CCTmuSIL4Yhzbf0kMbwBcelUxiExVs4/s1600/SmlCanterburyCathedral2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYl5L2ajY21KuVYNMkvhMVg4yv2f0nGpGP8wCThQFbAvvFpj2SeQp3SE4xBl9XmdBDLdYNtXxk2i4JkaA5OMdEf6YFOdAtGc4z2uKwL2gqN6R_-CCTmuSIL4Yhzbf0kMbwBcelUxiExVs4/s320/SmlCanterburyCathedral2.jpg" width="320" /></a>That this was profoundly echoed and exceeded by virtue of the Christian light need not be given any more attention (we touch on the matter <a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2014/09/art-beauty-part-i-section-v-symbol-as.html" target="_blank">here</a>), as the central point is this: man's mission is to restore himself to his pristine, pre-fallen condition, and to do this he has to reconnect himself to the Divine, from which he is severed due to his own primordial error. This is apparent in Christian as well as pagan cultures, because it is deeply ingrained on our being, regardless of whether we profess a faith in the words of Genesis or not. While salvation is ultimately a matter of personal conviction and the individual courage of free will, there is no doubt that collective influence plays a key part in the success of the soul; the values of a man will almost definitely be inherited from those of his family and, by extension, the culture to which they belong. 'No man is an island', as Donne's cliche goes, and it certainly goes for the state of a soul, which is dependent on patient instruction and constant good influence to be kept in orderly and virtuous shape. The medievals created a world that was universally and mythically <i>symbolic</i>, meaning that everything they created or experienced here on earth had a divine image for its archetypal reference; the result was, despite the deficiencies in 'living conditions' and corruption which was not nearly as widespread as some historians have claimed, a culture that understood its role in seeing man as a spiritual animal, and that his real hunger was for things not of this world, but of this world's author:<br />
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'[Cathedrals] actualised a synthetic vision of man, of his history, of his relation to the universe.... In arranging this figurative discourse, the Gothic masters used the mechanism of allegory. The legibility of the signs which they employed was guaranteed by a solid sociological fact, namely, the medieval habit of grasping certain analogies, by interpreting signs and emblems in ways that tradition had determined, of translating images into their spiritual equivalents.' (Umberto Eco<i>, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ag</i>e) </blockquote>
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It is just as true in the opposite case, as the cultures of the present are making abundantly clear in the normalization of perversions, the illegitimate rule of the rich, the vulgarization of art, the evisceration of religion from society, and the destruction of the family. These are things with consequences, both temporal and eternal in nature, and they emanate from a culture that has been growing increasingly hollow and corrupt for centuries. Just as a culture which understands the nature of man and what we really need will normally condition man into someone who is virtuous, or at least someone who understands what virtue <i>is</i>, that which does not will likely condition man into a base and craven creature, obedient to his rulers only insofar as they supply him with his material demands, which grow in correspondence to his fall from the spiritual life. We can see this man today: bloated and tepid; materially healthy but never satisfied by it; more concerned with the trivial than the serious; ordinary not in the sense that <a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2012/11/a-chestertonian-thanksgiving.html" target="_blank">Chesterton meant it</a>, but <i>mediocre </i>in the sense of not excelling as a person; and most importantly he is <i>selfish</i>, as our individualistic ethos has taught him to prize the affairs of his own self above those of his fellows. even those whom he claims to love.<br />
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This man is modern man, and he is the fruit not of physical impurities, but of cultural death. He is the product of miscegenation, yes, but it is a miscegenation of spirit, namely the spiritual surrendering to the material, the inner race being suffocated and subsumed into the outer race. To have race, or to be 'racially pure', is not to possess an unblended ethnicity (if that even exists) stretching back centuries or millenia; to 'have race' means to possess in oneself all the defining characteristics that a man's race possesses as a <i>type</i>. That man need not even belong to that race on a biological level, since what counts as the principal cause is the man's spiritual conditioning, which is provided via his successful connection with the host race's culture (though this is an anomalous example, as most men will naturally be best suited for the race which matches them physically). The point is that today's Western man truly is without race, because he has become divided from what made his race great, from what his race really is.<br />
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(It is moreover true that he is in a way simultaneously ceasing to be <i>man</i>, since in ceasing to incarnate the defining qualities of his racial type, he is lowering himself to a undifferentiated state, not in the transcendent sense of the monastic who 'is no longer Gentile or Jew', but in the sense of <i>mass man</i>, who is in reality closer to an animal than a human properly considered.)<br />
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This essay has been our attempt at clarifying something that neither side of the modern political spectrum has grasped, namely that <i>race is relative</i>. It is not absolute like right-wing racialists claim, but neither is it relative merely to 'environmental conditioning', as though race is merely the byproduct of sun or snow, or of more or less arbitrary skin pigmentation, as the left-wing sociologists claim. Race is real, but it is relative to something <i>more</i> real, i.e., its <i>spirit</i>, or the tradition which births its best and most sanctified sons who keep that tradition strong. It is a debate which perhaps was most vibrant in the first half of the previous century, but certainly it still has relevance today, especially as we reach the zenith of the liberal <i>weltanschauung </i>and approach a changing paradigm. In order to influence this movement <i>positively</i>, its intellectual dimension must be first and foremost cleansed of all major errors, since any action on the behalf of false doctrine will only serve to aggravate the problems rather than solve them. This is why important subjects such as the question of race must be clarified. (We do not presume to have the gumption to suppose that we are in any way capable of performing this task, but to every man his duty, however small.)<br />
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So, in summation, race is the building blocks of a society, the material which forms its most basic foundations and colours it with idiosyncrasies particular to it. It is material shaped by a designer, however, the role of which is played by the best its 'inner race' has to offer; the culture-creators, the genius of any which race decide its form, which is sometimes subsumed into the form of a conquering culture. The racial matter corresponds to the wood or the stone of a building, and there are things which each possess in and of themselves. Let us say for simplicity's sake that the White races have certain qualities and behave in ways that are foreign to Black races - just as wood is of a certain nature and can do things that stone cannot do, and vice versa. The architect of a building, however, who corresponds to the inner genius and cultural tradition of a race, moulds the wood or stone as he sees fit to shape them in the best way possible <i>in respect to their actual nature</i>. The master-builder of a stave church, for example, uses wood, while that of a cathedral uses stone.<br />
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It is thus with racial material as well, which is all the more evident considering the splendid diversity <br />
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of forms certain ethnicities have produced beneath the Catholic cultural umbrella while nevertheless remaining true to the essence of the Church. The Church, traditionally the principal genius and agency of Western culture, shapes the races of men into their final forms according to their racial nature, and therefore the differences between Polish, Nigerian, and American Catholics. The final cause of culture and so of race is to bring man closer to God, and we do this by both mimetically recreating the Divine on earth and by observing natural law, which is implanted in humans by God.<br />
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So it is hopefully clear by now that just as a solid brick plays a crucial role in the construction of a castle, which is used to protect the people, so does a man who has race play an essential role in the perseverance of his society, which is used to glorify God and bring us closer to him. As long as we remember the proper causes of things, and never praise the wood when we should praise the carpenter, we will be drawn more nearly to Truth, and therefore more nearly to God.Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-84260994276972922292016-01-12T02:29:00.000-08:002016-01-12T02:29:02.536-08:00Faith in Profane Cinema<br /><br />This is the republication of a work written in a private forum by Bakhos Najm <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ3hdPVM8ND3ydzgTWZY2ViqSFrcR-yW8znXnumst5JbMESwRLK0IWoB04rSUhgvKlloTcWVwzu726VFsIkvR6VT0VCZgVWxGflsobx7hNmTpS1CtUnhREyz9-AxcEwarEr5OfQ08Ke5f7/s1600/0e75b06ba4d9fb291b3c6ce48a647ae6.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ3hdPVM8ND3ydzgTWZY2ViqSFrcR-yW8znXnumst5JbMESwRLK0IWoB04rSUhgvKlloTcWVwzu726VFsIkvR6VT0VCZgVWxGflsobx7hNmTpS1CtUnhREyz9-AxcEwarEr5OfQ08Ke5f7/s640/0e75b06ba4d9fb291b3c6ce48a647ae6.png" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div>
Philosopher and theologian Jacques Maritain once wrote, “By Christian art, I do not mean Church art… I mean Christian art in the sense of art which bears within it the character of Christianity (…) Everything belongs to it, the sacred as well as the profane. It is at home wherever the ingenuity and the joy of man extend. Symphony or ballet, film or novel, landscape or still-life, puppet-show libretto or opera, it can just as well appear in any of these as in the stained-glass windows and statues of churches.”</div>
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That being said, it is no surprise that, for the faithful –in this case, the Catholic faithful– observes the expressions of art seeking and detecting shadows that, in some way or another, manifest the Catholic “shape”. This essay will refer to the cinema of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, containing that “Catholicity” in their <i>profane </i>art. More specifically, it will examine the implicit ideas of Guilt and Redemption in Scorsese’s <i>Taxi Driver</i> and <i>Raging Bull</i>, whilst Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy culminates with the ideas of Grace and Hope.</div>
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It was pointed above that the believers will see through a subjective eye set by the Catholic culture and idiosyncrasy. It often happens that the spectator finds in films things that perhaps were not intended to be seen, or even misinterpret events (nothing grave), but this is not the case in the masterful filmography of Martin Scorsese and Francis F. Coppola. The first calls himself a lapsed Catholic; the later has always struggled with his Catholicism. In a 2007 interview, when asked whether he is an observant Catholic, Coppola replied, “I was raised as a Catholic, but I didn’t like the Catholic Church at all. I thought the nuns were mean.” But how theologically acute is the faith of the film directors is not important here. What matters is the fact that their Catholic backgrounds are passed along in their films, or at least, in those the essay refers to –which are arguably their most powerful gifts to Cinema.</div>
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Both Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola belong to the post-New Wave of American filmmakers. But they also share the Italian American milieu, typically Catholic. However, the differences are immediate almost everywhere between one director’s films and the other. The set for <i>The Godfather</i> is that of socially high ranking families and how they thoughtfully operate in the world of organised crime, and situations, such as the protection of family, end in harrowing acts of murder. Scorsese’s <i>Taxi Driver</i>, for example, is quite the contrary. Scorsese’s characters are the forgotten men, the socially unfit, victims of a world they didn’t choose.</div>
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Martin Scorsese is considered to be what in film criticism is known as <i>Auteur</i>. This theory of Auteurism, first advocated by François Truffaut, says that, in spite the industrial process that a films goes through, the signature, or influence, of its director still shines through. Scorsese is known for crafting world acclaimed films that still contain a very personal meaning for him, and for displaying a singular mise-en-scéne. Both narrative and aesthetics of <i>Taxi Driver</i> and <i>Raging Bull</i> are charged with those personal stages of Scorsese’s life, marked by an inescapable relationship with the Catholic Church. Unlike the influential personages of <i>The Godfather</i>, <i>Taxi Driver</i> is the story of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a mentally unstable Vietnam vet who struggles to live up a moral life in a terribly immoral world, leading him to nerve-racking violence he thought was the way to Redemption. </div>
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"All the animals come out at night: whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” That’s how Travis Bickle describes the hell he lives in. Martin Scorsese’s modernist cinema has the quality of portraying the world the main character perceives. Travis Bickle’s perception results from rejection. He is the loneliest of the lonely; he writes in his diary, “I am God’s lonely man”. This isolation makes him incapable of sustaining common social relations, including, of course, relations with the opposite sex.</div>
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Scorsese has always been haunted by Catholic Guilt, especially sexual guilt, also during his year in the seminary. And this is a theme explored in most of Scorsese’s films since his experimental feature <i>Who’s That Knocking At My Door?</i> Travis falls in love with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), described as a virginal image of women. She is dressed in white in her first apparition –in a cameo take where Martin Scorsese himself appears staring at her. She is blond, blue-eyed –an angelical figure– and caring in social and political matters of justice. Notice the contrast of Betsy with the hell of “whores”, “skunk pussies”, and “queens” Travis mentions first. Socially inept, Travis invites her to the movies to watch a Swedish porn film, at which Betsy feels gravely offended and leaves Travis alone in the theatre. “And it is guilt, conceived in masturbation and prolonged in maturer symptoms of sexual bad faith, that is a recurrent motif, perhaps the recurrent motif, in Scorsese’s life and art alike”, writes Lawrence S. Friedman in his book <i>The Cinema of Martin Scorsese</i>. </div>
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As previously said, Betsy is an activist concerned with social justice. That is explained in her support for president candidate Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris), an obvious Democrat. Travis Bickle, in a very Western fashion (the whole film is an allusion to John Ford’s <i>The Searchers</i>, a Western classic), prepares to attempt murdering Senator Palantine. His use of sleeve-gun becomes a device for his paranoid vigilante fantasies after Betsy had rejected him. The reasons for Travis to kill the Senator are debatable; some argue its a hint to the assassination of George Wallace by Arthur Bremer in 1972. But to put in in the film’s context of Travis Bickle’s mind, Palantine represented a potential rival to Travis’ love for Betsy. She described him as "a dynamic man, an intelligent, interesting, fresh, fascinating..”; then her friend, Tom (Albert Brooks), remarks, “You forgot sexy”, to what Betsy replies, “I did not forget sexy”. In a from-the-heart performance of De Niro, Bickle enters the office and confronts Betsy by yelling “You’re in hell! You’ll burn in hell!”. The fascination for religion in the script cannot go unnoticed.</div>
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Bickle, afflicted by the corruption of the city, was close to end up dragged by the mess he so much despises, as his attempt to assassinate Palantine is hindered by Secret Service agents. But the opposite happens, and it was through a highly graphic recreation of bloodshed in cinema by the times. During his insomniac ramblings in the cab, Travis drives a teenage prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster). She was escaping her pimp, Matthew “Sport” Higgins (Harvey Keitel). Depressed and increasingly paranoid, being rejected by Betsy made Bickle obsessed with rescuing young Iris. When he meets her in the room where they were supposed to have sex, he tells her he wants to take her away. When they are having breakfast in a coffee, he tells Iris, “You can't live like this. It's hell. Girls should live at home”, then Iris rises the question of her time, Women’s Liberation. Travis goes on to say, “What do you mean 'women's lib'? You sure are a young girl. You should be at home now. You should be dressed up. You should be goin' out with boys. You should be goin' to school. You know, that kind of stuff”. Travis is a Christian reactionary, opposing the cultural revolution of which he is cast away. But he is, also, in L.S. Friedman’s words, “mirroring the virgin-or-whore concept of women held by Scorsese’s alter ego in the Mean Street trilogy”.</div>
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Travis Bickle –nicknamed “Killer” by his cabbie mates– is determined to accomplish his quest to wash all the scum off the streets. Rescuing Iris means the action to redeem himself, and violence is the path chosen by this existential <i>hero</i>. Bickle approaches Sport, who stands as doorman of the brothel, and shoots him in the stomach, giving initiation to the slaughter. Among the countless qualities of filmmaking, there is the capacity to mimic dreams, to recreate and bring to light what is in the human unconscious. Like in dreams, the symbolic signifiers in films are not always substantiated by the common signified objects. Interpretation is wide open. The famous shoot-out sequence is displayed in an almost phantasmal manner. The sequence was shot in slow motion, an old bouncer is shot in one hand, and while the echo of his cry “I’ll kill you!” is loudly heard, a graffiti in a wall reads “Jesus loves you” while the carnage is still carried on. Travis draws a knife form his ankle and stabs the bouncer, this time in the other hand, in the opinion of some, alluding to the wounds of Christ. At the end of the massacre, Bickle wants to end his own life, the revolver is out of bullets, so he surrenders on a couch. When the police arrives, he places his finger on his head, gesturing a gun and pulling the trigger three times. In the final two takes, the camera travels from above, nightmarish harp and drum music play, putting forth the aftermath of such a slaughter, how hellish earthly life can be.</div>
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Iris returns home to her family, her father sends a thank-you letter to Travis. Newspaper regarded the one who wanted to kill Palantine as a model citizen, the self isolated was elevated to a hero by the media. But what happened to Bickle after the shootout remains a fascinating aspect of <i>Taxi Driver</i>.</div>
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Film critic and historian Roger Ebert wrote: </div>
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“There has been much discussion about the ending, in which we see newspaper clippings about Travis's ‘heroism’ of saving Iris, and then Betsy gets into his cab and seems to give him admiration instead of her earlier disgust. Is this a fantasy scene? Did Travis survive the shoot-out? Are we experiencing his dying thoughts? Can the sequence be accepted as literally true? ... I am not sure there can be an answer to these questions. The end sequence plays like music, not drama: It completes the story on an emotional, not a literal, level. We end not on carnage but on redemption, which is the goal of so many of Scorsese's characters.”</blockquote>
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But the film ends exactly as it started, with the jazz music of Bernard Herrmann again reaching gritty notes suggesting that threats will never end. Paul Schrader, script writer of <i>Taxi Driver</i> (and<i> Raging Bull</i>), said that the last frame "could be spliced to the first frame, and the movie started all over again.” In Taxi Driver, Redemption through self-destruction, but not Grace, is reached. </div>
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<i>Raging Bull</i> was released four years after <i>Taxi Driver</i>, but this time, the film is actually a personal work of Redemption for Martin Scorsese himself. In 1954, Scorsese studied one year at Cathedral College, seriously considering priesthood, “wanting that vocation, selfishly, so that I’d be saved… I wound up finding a vocation in making movies with the same kind of passion”, argued Marty. <i>Raging Bull</i> narrates the story of Italian American middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro), a champion in the ring, but, again, a character very difficult to grasp. Straightforwardly, he is a beast who acts out of his savage instincts. He is cursed with an insufferable personality, whose paranoid jealousy makes him incapable of articulating no word other than profanities. And when cornered in dialogue, he responds as in the ring: with his fists. </div>
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Mary Pat Kelly, in her book <i>Martin Scorsese: The First Decade</i>, writes: “The Jake LaMotta film. It’s called Raging Bull. It’s really a straight, simple story, almost linear, of a guy attaining something and loosing everything, and then redeeming himself. Spiritually.” And that was Scorsese himself, who, shortly after Taxi Driver, was heavily into the “high living”. By redeeming LaMotta in the ring, Scorsese redeems himself in life. Jake’s outmost desire was to defend his animalistic pride, symbolised in the belt. </div>
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To achieve it he had to gain the favour of the Mafia, which convinces him to loose against Billy Fox (Eddie Mustafa Muhammad). LaMotta was reluctant to fall, making the fix of the fight evident. While at the dressing room, the proud Bull breaks in tears, not for being suspended as much for not surrendering to his bodily necessity to strike back. This dependance on fighting made him interrupt his only moments of passion with Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), holding wisdom credence that sex slackens the fighter –“Maybe it’s because I’ve done bad things”, he argues after being defeated by Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes), the same day he had sexual relations with Vickie. The passional intimation between Jake and Vickie is watched by imposed crucifixes and Catholic iconography, a reminder of Scorsese’s mesmerism in Church imagery, and sexual guilt; it places the viewer in a position of shameful voyeurism.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In a very beautiful opening sequence, Jake LaMotta appears shadowboxing, dressed in a leopard cape, and surrounded by the ring ropes, giving the illusion of being an animal</td></tr>
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Jake’s acquaintance with young Vickie came to happen as the result of his infidelity to his first wife. Perhaps it is natural to a person to imagine things from their own personal experiences; if LaMotta was once irreparably infidel to his wife, he may as well think that his wife is cheating on him. But the problem goes further when this paranoid jealousy overwhelms the soul of a man whose concept of manliness is reduced to bestial rage, expressed both in and out of the boxing court. He does not comprehend the magnitude of his uncontrolled temper until he does thrash his brother, Joey LaMotta (Joe Pesci), and then blows his wife’s face. Add to it an evident masochism, the Bull willingly decides to embrace physical punishment for his rage. And so the film reaches its climatic point when Jake invites Sugar Ray to carry out his purgation. Joyce Carol Oates in her book On Boxing recalls Jake LaMotta as the fighters who:</div>
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“invite injury as a means of assuaging guilt, in a Dostoyevskian exchange of physical well being for peace of mind. Boxing is about being hit more than it is about hitting, rather just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning… The boxer prefers physical pain in the ring to the absence of pain that is ideally the condition of ordinary life. If one cannot hit, one can yet be hit, and know that one is alive.”</blockquote>
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The sequence was partially shot in a Scorsese’s trademark of slow-motion for climatic situations. LaMotta is washed with blood and water, in a very ritual sacrifice fashion. Robinson begins unstoppably hammering the face of the new champion while the spectators and camera flashes heat the circus; Jake clings with his arms to the ropes of the ring, again, alluding to the Crucifixion, as blood runs down through his legs. Vickie covers his eyes while Joey watches the cruel spectacle on television, and a sense of guilt is transmitted to all the viewers. A blowing right punch sprays with blood the faces of ring siders, making everyone accomplice in the suffering of LaMotta, a Christ-like image of passion. The scene is invariably distressing, and cruel. Although both Paul Schrader and the real Jake LaMotta had no religious purpose, the screenwriter does assist Scorsese’s redeeming aim when he wrote: “Yes, but redemption through physical pain, like the Stations of the Cross, one torment after another. Not redemption by having a view of salvation or by grace, but just redemption by death and suffering, which is the darker side of the Christian message.”</div>
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But that was not yet enough. While Sugar Ray Robinson is proclaimed winner and takes the middleweight title, beaten to bloody pulp, LaMotta taunts to Robinson the famous lines, “I never went down, man”, “You never got me down, Ray”. Five years pass, Robert De Niro is now a retired, obese Jake LaMotta. The man who had no oratory aptitudes is now a bar owner and stand-up comedian. His wife, Vickie, announces her decision to divorce him the morning after the 11th anniversary of their marriage. He is subsequently jailed for pandering. All this sequence of misfortunes were finally vented against the wall of his cell, he cries “Why?!” while punching the wall of concrete, as if attributing his pain to the hands that destroyed all his relations, especially with his wife, who had taken his three children. L.S. Friedman notes that, “As broken as the belt, the jailed LaMotta first rages, then weeps, ‘You’re so stupid…I am not an animal.’ Perhaps the admission of the first phrase justifies the denial of the second. If so, it may be the necessary preface to the redemptory text.” </div>
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The film goes back to where it started, the dressing room with Jake LaMotta rehearsing in front of the mirror the exact speech of Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in the 1954 film <i>On The Waterfront</i>, which says, “You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit…I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, Charley.” Thus, Jake manifests the emotional dependence he had on his brother, who mentored and advised him throughout his career, and life. </div>
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<i>Raging Bull</i>, regarded by many as Scorsese’s magnum opus, cuts to black with the sad and beautiful music of Pietro Mascagni, Intermezzo from <i>Cavalleria rusticana</i>, and quoting the Bible:</div>
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So, for the second time, [the Pharisees] summoned the man who had been blind and said:</div>
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"Speak the truth before God. We know this fellow is a sinner."<br />"Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know," the man replied.<br />"All I know is this: Once I was blind and now I can see."<br />John IX. 24–26, The New English Bible</blockquote>
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“Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”, is one of the lessons Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) provides to his heir son, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). Unlike the mentally unbalanced, deranged, and alienated protagonists of Scorsese, Coppola’s <i>The Godfather</i> trilogy follows the rise and decline of families whose members are, indeed, model characters of chasm, class, and acumen. Another luring quality of the trilogy is its portentous presentation of moral struggle. But morality here is not only the earthy meta-ethical pose bounding regular men and women of everywhere; the moral confrontational setting for <i>The Godfather</i> is that of the Catholic Church –distinctly, the pre-Vatican Two Catholic Church. Aside the fact that the first two films are universal masterpieces of cinema, the trilogy is actually a wonderful, profoundly Catholic work of art. </div>
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The Corleone’s way is deep-rooted in traditions, norms of genteel procedures, almost monarchical vogue, embraced from their homeland of Sicily. Thus, the Sicilian circle, although readily immersed in the underworld of crime, is based on rituals and rules only analogous to the reverence of the pre-Conciliar Church proper to Catholic Americans of the decades before the sixties. The mobsters of <i>The Godfather</i> are not the same of <i>Goodfellas</i>; depiction of prostitution, apology to gambling, or use of narcotics, are absent here. When interviewed by Deborah Solomon, Coppola is quoted affirming, “I think I am very religious… I was raised as a Catholic, but I didn’t like the Catholic Church at all. I thought the nuns were mean… I sort of think that the people I have loved and lost are somehow still there. I can’t believe that something so specific is gone”. And although the director ceased to practice the Faith, the sacramental beauty of the Church permeates everywhere in his gangster trilogy. The Catholic viewer will particularly feel appealed with the venerable display of baptisms, first communions, weddings, confessions, and funerals, elevated by Catholic iconography and Latin hymns. But the most prevalent Christian element in <i>The Godfather</i> is Sin, the deliberate and organised execution of murder. And it is the unforgettable Baptism in Part I that settles Michael Corleone in his dark path of sin and tribulation.</div>
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Michael Corleone was the outsider in his family, he had assured his first girlfriend, Kay Adams (Diane Keaton), that his was a different future, distanced from the <i>family business</i>. When Michael is aware of the fragile life of his father, hospitalised after being gunned down, he decides to retaliate. He bows to kiss his father’s hand, a ritual of spiritual submission and unfailing loyalty. Killing drug baron Virgil Sollozzo (Al Littieri) and NYCPD Captain Marc McCluskey by his own hands was his initiation as mafioso. </div>
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But his unbreakable pact with crime was sealed during the Baptism of his nephew, also named Michael. In the climatic sequence, D.W. Griffith’s technique of cross cutting to provoke suspense is mastered in the scenario of a High Church Catholic Baptism, and the assassination of the New York family dons and Moe Greene (Alex Rocco). Latin verses echo with the music of Church organ, announcing the parallel cosmical events that are going to take place. Salt, oil, and water, are prepared by the priest, Minister of Life; simultaneously, arms and weapons are prepared by Corleone’s <i>capos</i>, Ministers of Death. “Do you renounce Satan?”, “And all his works?”, “And all his pomps?”, the priest asks Michael, whose guilty gaze is shown replying “I do”, aware of his perpetrated crimes happening at those very minutes. The Baroque organ riches its highest pitches as the brutal killings occur. Michael affirms his baptism as cuts show the aftermath of the bloodshed. Cinematically, this scene is magnificent; narratively, long-lastingly chilling. Michael Corleone renewed his Catholic baptism, but also sealed his pact with crime, he has been baptised in blood. </div>
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The second key moment in the life of Michael Corleone comes in <i>The Godfather, Part II</i>. Frederico “Fredo” Corleone (John Cazale), is Michael’s older brother. He is the <i>suave </i>man, whose hedonist life and weakness of character, cast him away from the patriarchal order and more violent life of his brothers, the hot-head Santino “Sonny” Corleone (James Caan), and the cold minded Michael. His imprudence served the Jewish businessman Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), an old –but untrusted– business partner of the Corleone family. As the Sicilian code of honour –or Omertà– rules, a betrayer must pay with with his own life. At one evening, Fredo shares his secret for a satisfactory fishing, which is to pray one Hail Mary before each try, with Anthony (James Gounaris), Michael’s son. Anthony is called apart, so Fredo goes fishing with caporegime Al Neri (Richard Bright). Frame is set on a middle wide shot, then camera travels toward Fredo, reciting “Holy Mary, Mother of God”, then cut to Michael, who contemplates from the boathouse, as audience is left to finish the prayer, “now and at the hour of our death. Amen”, Neri shoots. The sky is gloomy, and only the silhouette of Neri is seen. </div>
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In the first film, Michael Corleone marries Apollonia Vitelli (Simonetta Stefanelli), who died in an explosion intended to kill him. This is the first bitter loss that Michael bears on his back; that fact that it happened in Sicily is important, because Sicily was supposed to be the place where Michael would find safety, his voyage to his homeland would grant him a second chance. Instead, he learns that the burdens of his sins followed him even there. In the second film, an evolving, cold minded, frightening Don Michael Corleone, capable of handling intricate situations, has a hard time dealing with family issues. His second wife, Kay Adams, had undergone an unholy abortion as she did not want another son of Michael to be born, touching the sore of Michael’s vulnerability, his children. She then divorces and abandons him, but he keeps their two children with him. His sister, Constanza “Connie” Corleone (Talia Shire), had chosen a life of eccentricities, “Michael, I hated you for so many years. I think that I did things to myself, to hurt myself so that you'd know - that I could hurt you”, are the words of his sister, who pleads him to forgive Fredo. But when honour and pride posses men, they lead to tragical actions, and so does Michael killing his own brother, a decision that would burden him for the rest of his life, as shown in the third film.</div>
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Financial circumstances compelled Coppola to direct the third instalment,<i> The Godfather, Part III</i> was released in 1990, 16 years after part II, receiving mixed reviews. But this was the chance for the director to make Michael pay for his sins. The scene of Michael’s confession to Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Vallone) is particularly appealing for the Catholic viewer, not only for being a not-so-frequent case of Hollywood portraying an honest (Catholic) clergyman, but also because it tells that even the gravest offences are forgiven by God’s mercy, when the soul is surrendered to Him. Michael admits that “it’s been 30 years”, since his last confession; but for the cardinal, the Laws of the Church are timeless, “I always have time to save souls”, he replies. After saying that he betrayed his wife, betrayed himself, Michael breaks in tears, and finally confesses, “I killed my mother’s son, I killed my father’s son.” He prays before the corpse of Don Tommasino (Vittorio Duse), “I swear on the lives of my children, give me a chance to redeem myself and I will sin no more.” God’s Grace worked on Michael’s soul.</div>
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However, it seems that the purgation of the Soul sometimes begins on Earth. Anthony Corleone <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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(Franc D’Ambrosio), Michael’s son, performs a magnificent debut as an opera singer in Palermo –during which killings are executed, again, surrounded by religious aura. When the family is leaving Teatro Massimo, and Michael’s daughter, (played by the director’s daughter, Sofia Coppola), Mary Corleone, is following her father asking for answers, hitman Mosca, disguised as a priest draws a gun and shoots twice, intending to kill Michael. Mary is hit by accident, and she mutters “Dad”, before falling dead in front of her father. He is witness of his last and most bitter loss. The scene, which closes with Mascagni’s <i>Intermezzo </i>–as with Raging Bull– is beautiful, sad, memorable. The shock painfully hits everyone, but not as hard as Michael. Al Pacino here offered an outstanding performance of sorrow and grief from a man who carried all the weight of guilt upon himself. He received his most painful punishment, and his unforgettable scream attests for it. A montage shows Michael with all the women he had lost in his life, then a dissolve transition reveals an old, half-blind, and lonely man. It is perhaps ironic that he would not <i>die by the sword</i>, but for a man who sincerely performed the Sacrament of Confession, and paid the highest price with the death of his daughter, Michael Corleone is reconciled with God, and dies peacefully in his homeland.</div>
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Catholicism in cinema is an inexhaustible theme in film literature, needless to say, there’s all time classics about specifically Catholic references. But what fascinates about profane filmmaking is that they respond to the regular viewer’s conscious and unconscious. Not romanticising about the infinite mercy of <i>this </i>saint, or the unbearable passion of <i>that </i>martyr, profane films with Catholic themes manifest our own fragilities, weakness, societal and spiritual anxieties. The epigraph for <i>Taxi Driver</i> quotes Thomas Wolfe in his unpublished essay, <i>God’s Lonely Man</i>, saying, “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” While <i>Taxi Driver</i> talks to everyman, <i>Raging Bull</i> is Scorsese’s own story of Guilt and Redemption, conceived by his Catholic background. When talking about his <i>The Last Temptation of Christ</i>, Scorsese explains, “My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else”. Francis Ford Coppola, in setting the highest standards for gang films, directed what could be considered a marvellous Catholic work of art. Perhaps the iconoclasm of Protestantism could not offer the mystic beauty and luring darkness that permeates <i>The Godfather trilogy</i>, ironic as it may seem, Catholics can make better mobsters. But what Coppola also shared with his audience was the Catholic Hope in the Sacrament of Confession, where even the most heinous sins cannot exhaust God’s desire to forgive. </div>
Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-69250975876144062402015-09-28T17:19:00.000-07:002015-09-28T17:22:48.013-07:00Christianity and the Doctrine of Non-Dualism Though born Alphonse Levée, and called Brother Elias by his fellow monastics, the author of <i>Christianity and the Doctrine of Non-Dualism</i> identifies himself as 'A Monk of the West'. This is an act of defiance against the 'cult of personality' that defines the modern academic environment; it is first and foremost a statement of anonymity that evinces the writer's earnest motive to put 'theory into practise'. It is a traditional act insofar as his work is accomplished not by Alphonse Levée, born in Paris in the year 1911, but by his inner vocation: '[It] is not inasmuch as he is ''such and such a person'' that the artifex produces his work, but inasmuch as he fulfils a certain ''function'' that is properly ''organic'' and not ''mechanical"' (René Guénon, <i>The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times</i>, p. 64).<br />
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It is not coincidental that we quote Guénon here, for this entire endeavour is in no small part indebted<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYhl2EJahkcjthX38g6SVz31iSiSO7YRfghYB-IRzC9uRrzEUArliWc3QXPJXipoYdvPRYOfg1T4G5jKyjbNwFzLXVDcE2M5Y3PTAV9q6zM2eotsWE0u0hh4q2_NgLQ0Q_TOVxzsKMPPAl/s1600/Ren%25C3%25A9-Gu%25C3%25A9non-Cairo-1950.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYhl2EJahkcjthX38g6SVz31iSiSO7YRfghYB-IRzC9uRrzEUArliWc3QXPJXipoYdvPRYOfg1T4G5jKyjbNwFzLXVDcE2M5Y3PTAV9q6zM2eotsWE0u0hh4q2_NgLQ0Q_TOVxzsKMPPAl/s320/Ren%25C3%25A9-Gu%25C3%25A9non-Cairo-1950.jpg" width="199" /></a>to the French metaphysician. Throughout the 20th Century there was no philosopher or theologian more committed to both the inner conciliation of East and West, and to the intellectual reorientation of the West through the rediscovery of her traditional principles. In Guénon's view this would take place through an authentic understanding of Eastern ideas: 'In the first period it is by the study of Eastern doctrines, more than by any other means, that those who are destined to belong to this elite will be able to develop and acquire in themselves pure intellectuality, since they cannot possibly find it in the West. It is also only by this study that they will be able to learn what a traditional civilization is in its various elements, for it is only a knowledge as direct as possible that has any value in such a case, and there is no place for mere book-learning, which is of no use by itself for the end that we have in view' (René Guénon, <i>East and West</i>, pp. 145-6). It is this 'elite' to which A Monk of the West belongs, and, inspired by Guénon, his studies of Eastern spirituality have compelled him to seek their concordance with Christianity, the tradition of the West.<br />
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An additional reason for Brother Elias electing anonymity is to emphasize his subordinate position in the ecclesial hierarchy, as well as in the intellectual domain itself. He repeats on several occasions the fact that his thoughts are hardly authoritative: '[We] do not have the authority to make final judgments in these matters, and we now leave the last word to judges of greater competence and authority' (A Monk of the West, <i>Christianity and the Doctrine of Non-Dualism</i>, p. 136). This text is indeed nothing more than a <i>speculative insight</i> into possible fundamental agreements between Christianity and <i>Advaita Vedanta</i>, and there is no pretense as to it being otherwise. The thoughts and the opinions of the author are properly relegated to the realm of the layman, and not to official sacral positions.<br />
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That is, however, no reason to discount them. Indeed, given the present crisis of the Church and its swift falling away from knowledge of itself, the studies of a layman, provided that they are performed in the appropriate manner and with the right mentality, might even be considered to be of greater value than something produced by more conventional channels. In any case, or rather in the <i>present </i>case, <i>Christianity and the Doctrine of Non-Dualism </i>(<i>CDND</i>) is an exquisite example of a private study that nevertheless recognizes its subordinate place in the greater scheme of things; it is intuitive, erudite, insightful, poetic at times, but above all this text is respectful of higher knowledge, final authority, and of the near certainty that it does not and will not have the last word.<br />
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<i>CDND </i>is essentially organized around four or five main metaphors, and it is around these that we shall conceive of this review's remainder. To begin, however, it will be necessary to revisit a basic principle in order to fully understand what follows. God is perfect Being; that is to say, God is <i>wholly </i>Being, which means that nothing outside of God has full existence; instead, everything outside of God has only <i>partial </i>existence insofar as everything outside of God has only partial Being (namely the part it receives from God, from sharing in His nature). This is due to the fact that anything that goes out from God goes into the void of Becoming, and thereby ceases to be fully divine; if God went into the void and remained fully Himself there would be no creation, for there would simply be God, uncreated and universal. Creation presupposes a diminution of divinity, for creation in itself has no Being of its own (and thus can only offer a <i>lack </i>or a <i>want</i>). This means that everything that exists is borne purely of God, the First Cause, even actions which we might ignorantly consider our own:<br />
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'The creature does not belong to himself, but all save the intelligent creature are ignorant of this. We emphasize: this is true first of all of his free acts in themselves which are certainly personal and responsible acts, but in no way being his own acts, being also - we should say being first - acts of God, the universal First Cause. In reality I have as my own only the interior act by which I adhere to evil recognized as such.... It is nonetheless true that God does everything because evil as such has no <i>being</i>, and "everything that happens is worthy of adoration".' (Ibid, p. 15)</blockquote>
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'Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.' (Matthew 10:29)</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO9pgM844j_POIfhWyrb5z096VuAY0iEBKKQuOJ6ai89Na4onzSWMsASnuZlTKAXq0mF-CtBM3RhWV7gG00H4uHXs6Inf07Vv5V-g15YcnQgkSKp2pQT8KJkX4aLWYNwt5ZhHeFwJhRKo_/s1600/hindu+temple.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO9pgM844j_POIfhWyrb5z096VuAY0iEBKKQuOJ6ai89Na4onzSWMsASnuZlTKAXq0mF-CtBM3RhWV7gG00H4uHXs6Inf07Vv5V-g15YcnQgkSKp2pQT8KJkX4aLWYNwt5ZhHeFwJhRKo_/s320/hindu+temple.jpg" width="320" /></a>God is real; evil is unreal. The only acts that are properly our own are those which are evil, because they are not acts of God; if they were good acts they would belong to God. We can see already, then, that our means of attaining realness, of attaining <i>being</i>, is through acting like God. When we act like God, we become like God, and by becoming like God we become more real. Conversely, when we act viciously, we act more like 'ourselves', i.e., like persons divorced from God - 'independent', but only in the sense that we derive and base our actions in a lesser, polluted source. In the end, however, because we are made in the 'Image of God', when we act like God we are <i>more truly ourself</i>: 'True man is <i>actually </i>relative to the Creator-Agent, and this actuality of the relationship which places him in existence, makes him essentially an image of God' (<i>CDND</i>, p. 16). Etienne Gilson likewise says, 'Image - the greater man's resemblance, the more he is himself'. This is because at the heart of man is the thing which created us - God's love. The more we become like the Creator, the more we become like the creature we are made to be.<br />
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The first metaphor that the monk introduces us to is that of the sun reflecting on the water. The essential idea of this is not dissimilar to that of Plato's cave, namely that the true reality is only vaguely reproduced in sensible impressions, viz., via the shadows on the wall or the reflections on the water. The first point that the author dwells on, however, is that the images on the water are not unreal <i>in themselves</i>, but only in relation to the sun which creates them; it is true that they are not the final form and the first cause, that they are but a secondary product of something superior, and yet they are nevertheless existing by virtue of that superior source:<br />
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'As the reflection of the sun in the water is illusory with regard to the real sun although in itself is a real reflection, so the contingent being is illusory with regard to real (divine) Being although in itself it is a real contingent being.... Just as the reflection of the sun is at once real and illusory, so contingent being is both real and illusory. If we attempted to isolate the image from the object and to reduce it to itself, it would immediately cease to be, since it is solely the actual relationship to the real object which makes it a real reflection.... Thus the world understood as the totality of existents is simultaneously reality and illusion (<i>māyā</i>), <i>reality in itself</i>, illusion with regard to the Supreme Reality in which everything that has any reality participates and without which there is nothing whatsoever. It must be understood, however, that nothing is illusory in itself. The illusion is entirely in the one who takes the reflection for the sun in itself, or the world for Reality; Illusion is Ignorance.' (Ibid, pp. 17-8)</blockquote>
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The things which we see using our senses are therefore not unreal - they are there by virtue of their participation <i>in</i> the Real. They are only unreal in relation to the divine archetypes which they reflect visibly, materially, and the only illusion possible is when we take their material forms for their final forms. This is moreover true <i>a fortiori </i>of man himself: illusory in regard to the Supreme Reality, from which all his being proceeds, but real in regard to himself (by virtue of that being proceeding from the Supreme Reality). He is not the Divine, but he is made of the Divine. There is nevertheless a principal difference between man and other existents, namely that he is called for something higher; he is called to <i>be </i>the Supreme Reality:<br />
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'[Man] is directly called to union (<i>yoga</i>) wherein the Delivered (<i>mukta</i>) realizes or, more precisely, verifies - for there is no change - the illusory or entirely dependent character of his existence, "having no other being of its own than this dependence" of the human individual vis-à-vis the Supreme Self (<i>Paramātmā</i>), which is true and total Being. Rather, it is Beyond Being, entirely free from every condition of limitative determination whatsoever: He alone is who is the very Being of Himself and of all beings, Deity beyond Being.' (Ibid., pp. 19-20)</blockquote>
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The real Being, therefore, <i>is even beyond Being</i>, for Being presupposes some kind of limitative delineation, even if a purely intellectual and metaphysical one. The real Being is beyond even that, for the real Being is <i>Ātmā</i>, the Self which transcends the personal, creator God (<i>Brahmā</i>) and whose only likeness is the supreme, uncreated God (<i>Brahma</i>):<br />
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'Neither the higher intellect (<i>buddhi</i>), nor the mental (<i>manas</i>), nor the sense of self... none of these is the Self. Strictly speaking, it should be said that <i>Ātmā </i>is nothing, nothing that can be perceived, nothing that can be conceived or known in any manner whatsoever. Like Brahma, <i>Ātmā </i>is "Non-Being", which is not to say "nothingness", but, on the contrary... we would be tempted to say that <i>Ātmā is what escapes determination altogether</i>, including the first determination which is that of pure Being itself. <i>Ātmā </i>is beyond all perception, conception, or experience in general, beyond all things implying subject and object; beyond all existence and essence, even beyond pure Being, as we said, and therefore beyond Unity, with which Being is coextensive; in short, beyond God (<i>Ishvara </i>or <i>Brahmā).'</i> (Ibid. p.42)</blockquote>
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This does not render the 'creator, personal God' (<i>Brahmā</i>) unnecessary, from a religious point of view or otherwise; infact, <i>Brahmā </i>is pivotal for the worshiper, constrained as he is by the existence necessitated by <i>māyā</i> and its nebulous and imprecise forms. The devotion to <i>Brahmā </i>(called the 'divine energies' by Eastern orthodoxy and 'God' by Meister Eckhart)<i> </i>signifies a devotion to Brahma (called the 'divine essence' and the 'Godhead' by the same) in his personal, apparent aspect; it is necessary to venerate and submit to something personal insofar as it is impossible to do the same for the <i>impersonal</i>. It is moreover by the awareness of distinctions that we perfect our knowledge of the <i>lack </i>of inner distinctions:<br />
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'If you want to know the Absolute, invoke this Brahman with attributes who hears your prayers, and it is He who will make you know the Absolute. <i>For He who is Brahman with attributes is also Brahma without attributes. Distinctions make for the perfection of knowledge.</i>' (Ramakrishna, <i>L'Enseignment</i>, no. 1262)</blockquote>
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The second main metaphor is one of the most familiar in the Vedic tradition, namely that of the rope and the serpent, where the rope is confused for a rope by a man in ignorance: 'The rope is supposed to be the snake only so long as the mistake lasts, and there is no more illusion when the snake vanishes' (Sankara, <i>Vivekachudamani</i>, v. 197). The principal idea of the metaphor is similar to the previous one, viz., it shows reality to be twofold: the one part which is Supreme and the part which is only a semblance of the Supreme, the part that we experience 'ordinarily', 'sensibly'. The rope is Brahman, the underlying reality, and the snake is the mundane reality - which only exists because of our illusion as to the real nature of what we experience.<br />
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Initially this may sound dualistic - which seems to be a contradiction considering that <i>advaita </i>means 'not dual'. This is easily cleared up, however, when we consider that that second part, the 'serpent', is just an illusion, which has no existence of its own. Its being is facile, and totally dependent on a confusion between real and not-real. The rope is Brahman, and as such it is the only thing that is real, and how can the only thing that is real have a true opposite? Anything that is unreal cannot rightly said to be anything - it is simply illusion and void. There is only one thing that exists, which is God, possessor and purveyor of Being:<br />
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'Again, what is God? That without which nothing exists. It is as impossible for anything to exist without Him as it is for Him to exist without Himself: He is to Himself as He is to everything, and thus, in a certain way, He alone is who is the very Being of Himself and of everything.' (St. Bernard of Clairvaux, <i>De consideratione</i>, v, 6, 13) </blockquote>
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This is naturally the source of the accusations of Vedanta's 'pantheism', something that Brother Elias pays a lot of attention to in refuting it. There is a much more intricate and involved argument employed in his work, but the basic idea comes down to a semantic confusion, or how we understand the term. In the sense that the word 'pantheism' (all-god) simply means that God is all, there is no problem, no suspicion of heresy, and even no discordance between Vedanta and traditional Christian theology; as we have already seen, God really <i>is </i>all, because God is pure Being, and outside of God there is necessarily something that is not as real as He is: 'By what could Brahma be hidden since nothing other than Brahma exists?' (Sankara, <i>Vivekachudamani</i>, v. 570) And: 'He who would add the entire world to God would have nothing more than if he had God alone. Without God all creatures have no more being than a midge; without God, exactly as much, neither more nor less' (Meister Eckhart, <i>Omne datum optimum</i>). On the other hand. if we understand pantheism to mean that 'God is everywhere' in the sense that we impart things that have no ontological value with the quality of being 'divine', then we are indeed adopting the false, heretical doctrine, for that would assume that <i>māyā</i> has a divinity and a reality that proceeds from <i>herself</i>. In assigning the nebulous and the mundane with a wholly divine quality we are subject to a grave error of ignorance, of confusing the natural with the supernatural; we are infact guilty of confusing the rope for the serpent.<br />
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The third metaphor is that of the man looking at himself in the mirror. He sees two forms, both himself and his reflection, but of course realizes they are but one. This is to convey the truth that the 'Delivered while living' (<i>jivan-mukta</i>) knows that 'the "produced beings" have no other reality than that which is communicated by Himself, which [is] an exact expression of the doctrine of cosmic Illusion...' (<i>CDND</i>, p. 95). This is again touching on familiar ground: the forms we see around us are but the reflections of something interior, beyond the sensible domain; the divine archetypes are produced in this world as though it were a mirror, reflecting them back, albeit in new, inferior shapes.<br />
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The second part of this metaphor is utilized to illustrate the perspective of God (<i>Ishvara</i>) in his creative function. In contrast to the prior two metaphors, where the observer or the participant was 'deluded' and belonged to the domain of the <i>reflection</i>, in this situation the observer is identified with the object in itself, that is to say, the <i>real </i>object, while the exterior is the plane upon which the secondary reality presents itself. God the Producer can therefore perceive the divine objects not in themselves, as they exist inside of him, but as reflected in a different arena; his divinity is promulgated into a new, external sphere where it takes on the diverse (and not unwelcome) forms of materiality:<br />
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'God (<i>al-Haqq</i>) wished to see the essences (<i>a'yān</i>) of His most perfect Names... in an all encompassing object which, being endowed with existence, epitomizes the entire divine order thereby manifesting His mystery to Himself. For the vision that a being has of itself in itself is not the same as that provided by another reality which serves it as a mirror. There it manifests itself in the form determined by the "place" of the vision; the latter would not exist without the "plane of reflection" and the ray that is reflected therein.' (Ibn 'Arabi, <i>Sagesse des Prophetes</i>)</blockquote>
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The fourth and final metaphor is likewise constituent of two parts, both of which revolve around the image of the 'dreamer'. When we sleep, we dream, and in dreams we imagine an artificial world, a world which might share characteristics with the real world but one which is nevertheless false - it is an illusion. At the same time, however, we project things which are true into this world; the dream, in Jung's words, 'is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material' (Psychology of the Unconscious). The dream is unreal, but it is informed by things which <i>are </i>real. It is thus a powerful metaphor for the nature of <i>māyā</i>, of the mundane. There are moreover two types of dreamers: the one who is unaware that he is dreaming and the one who is aware. The first is of course deluded, and as such he 'imputes the nature of the ego to the Self, just as the sleeper identifies himself with only one of the mental forms of his dream to the exclusion of others' (<i>CDND</i>, p. 97). This type is caught in his own projected reality, completely ignorant of its falseness and what lies behind it. The second type, the one who is aware of the fact that he is dreaming, is certainly not 'deluded' insofar as he has realized the transitory, secondary nature of the dream. The second dreamer 'is in the situation of the man who looks at his own image in a mirror knowing that the image is "he", with the difference that here the "forms" that are viewed, instead of being exterior and sensible, are interior and mental' (<i>Ibid</i>. p. 97). He has realized that the things which he sees in the dream are merely impressions of his own inner state; he is like the God (<i>al-Haqq</i>) of Ibn 'Arabi's description, extending his essential nature into an exterior plane.<br />
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The second type is nevertheless still caught in a limited dimension insofar as he remains immersed inside a world of his own production. There is something higher yet, namely the dimension of unlimited freedom, which we enter into when we <i>wake up</i>. Once the dream ends, the whole array of false images and disparate narratives comes to an end, leaving the individual with reality <i>as it really is: </i>'It is only when he is fully awake that the images dissipate and only the pure Self remains, free, unconditioned, unlimited, as in reality it has always been. All distinctions will then be extinguished. For Him, henceforth identified with the Supreme (<i>Parabrahma</i>), there will be neither "outside" nor "inside", neither "Producer "(<i>Brahmā)</i>, nor "produced", neither "Creator" nor "creatures", neither "Truth" nor "illusion", neither "Liberation" nor "servitude",<i> under their aspects of distinct realities</i>, but only THAT, the Supreme, totally unlimited' (Ibid. p. 97). Upon waking, like Plato's philosopher emerging from the cave, the shadows disappear, and the viewer beholds only <i>himself</i>: 'Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes' (C.G. Jung). His reality has been transformed from something transient and illusory to the Ultimate Reality wherein all things are indistinct windows looking right into God. There is no longer anything intermediate; there is only you and God, both become one: 'It is therefore by his <i>incorporation </i>in Christ and his participation in the Paschal mystery that man would receive the <i>possibility </i>of verifying the Supreme Identity in his person' (<i>CDND</i>, p. 117).<br />
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That is the fundamental message of this astute and extremely useful text, namely to illustrate how essentially the same metaphysical insight is shared across traditions, from Shankara to Plato to Ss. Paul and Thomas Aquinas. There is also, however, a more muted but equally important message, one which is sent to our own troubled tradition, that of modernity and the crisis of contemporary existence, of which Brother Elias accuses of having neglected God's wisdom for man's hubris: 'Blinded by the separative illusion, we attempt to make man's world closed and autonomous, but one which nevertheless continues to exist, as if a room could still retain the light of the sun for a single instant within its closed walls after the shutters had been closed! The world is not "autonomous", but "theonomous", God-governed. Whether man in his profane blindness knows this or not, changes nothing. Nothing escapes the sovereign domain of God' (<i>CDND</i>, p. 124). Our humanistic pride has assumed that reality proceeds from our own nature or that of the physical world, but, as we have seen, these are but fragments of the ultimate reality, the being and beyond being which sustains all life; they are shadows of the <i>real </i>world, the eternal, infinite, and absolute hypostasis that subsists at the root of everything. We might describe it as <i>sat-chit-ananda</i> or as the most perfect Love (1 Corinthians 13:7), but the essence is the same, and it is one which we, the global community, have as a whole forgotten. This final excerpt, which is reminiscent of Guénon's mission, suggests how our Western civilization might rediscover our roots, namely by curing our amnesia through the revelation that Western and Eastern wisdom have a common source:<br />
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'If the closing twentieth century has been that of "socialization" and "technicization", may corroborating indications lead us to think that the first century of the third millenium may be, at least for some, of whom the number is growing, that of the quest for lost identity. Is it not precisely this which explains why contemporary young people with their "hunger for the absolute" (which, although too often mixed with elements that are more than suspect, is undeniably characteristic of them), turn so readily toward the non-Christian east to try to discover what Christianity no longer, or seems no longer, to offer them? Is not one of the most notable services which the Orient could render Christianity today, to oblige it to return to its own center instead of seeming to wish to dilute its identity in a hollow and vacuous world where all interiority, all solitude, all silence, all recollection have been banished?' (<i>CDND</i>, pp. 124-5)</blockquote>
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-5514571467190210152015-07-07T20:54:00.001-07:002015-07-07T20:54:19.182-07:00Love Loses: The False Union of Sodomitical Sex Disclaimer: We are writing this short, introductory article on Love and its subversion by the modern ethos not because we are 'disappointed' or in any way scandalized by the recent SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage; we accept this event as something of an inevitability, a kind of 'symbol' in Spengler's meaning of the ever-hastening decay of Western Civilization. We have long come to terms with the fallenness of the West and, save for the intervention of supernatural sources, with the impossibility of its salvation or the retrieval of its earlier health. We are simply using this event as an excuse to proliferate an essential critique of homosexual perversions, to investigate how the phenomenon of gay marriage symbolizes or indeed epitomizes the modern <i>weltanschauung</i>, and finally to reinforce the traditional, supramoral perspective on Love.<br />
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Secondly, while we understand the definition of sodomy to be every sexual act that is not conducive to procreation, we will be using it to refer exclusively to the sex acts waged between the same sex. This is because, while certainly masturbation, fellatio, and especially anal sex between a man and a woman are perversions, acts performed between members of the same sex are particularly devious deviations from the normal order and thus most representative of what we will be speaking about: it is the sin of sodomy between men, after all, that 'cries out to Heaven for vengeance'.<br />
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'<i>Here is the key to all the metaphysics of sex: Through the Dyad toward the Unity.</i>' ~Julius Evola</blockquote>
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To really understand something physical we must understand the metaphysical. Man in his original, higher form is a sexually undifferentiated being. His ontological state in this primordial perfection is one of absolute unity, possessing within him both male and female principles coherently organized and whole in themselves. It is only as a result of being in creation, of participating in the world of regeneration where things are characterized by their multiplicity and duality rather than their unity or oneness, that male and female forms eventuated: 'Brought low by the gulf of his sin, man suffered the division of his nature into masculine and feminine, and because he was unwilling to use the heavenly mode of propagation, a just judgment reduced him to animal-like and corruptible multiplicity, consisting of male and female' (John Scotus Eriugena, <i>De Divisione Naturae</i>). The Fall mythologized in Genesis depicts the descent of originally integrated man into two separate beings who, while certainly able to recreate after a fashion their former unity through mutual love, are nevertheless doomed to continually engender separated beings through their copulation. This unending division of man represents his division from God, whose likeness man in his wholeness bears:<br />
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'God created his image and likeness in a single man. Adam was a man and also a woman... for God did not in the beginning make man and woman, he did not create them at the same time, because the life in which the two properties of masculine and feminine are united in one, constitutes man in the image of God.' (Jacob Boehme, <i>Mysterium Magnum</i>)</blockquote>
Man and woman are therefore two halves of a whole, dissociated from one another in every conceivable way. They are as two opposite poles on a metaphysical spectrum, with the principle of masculinity standing for creativity and leadership while that of femininity stands for fertility and submission: 'The male represents the specific form; the female represents the matter, being passive insofar as she is female, whereas the male is active' (Aristotle, <i>De Generatione Animalium</i>). In 'ordinary reality', i.e., the realm of multiplicity, these two poles constitute a Dyad that defines all material creation; this duality is expressed symbolically, such as the sun and the element of fire symbolizing maleness while the moon and the element of water symbolize femaleness.<br />
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This extends to all traditional metaphysics; just as the Western peripatetic schools considered form as masculine and matter as feminine, the Vedic system comprehended <i>purusha </i>(spirit) as masculine and <i>prakriti </i>(nature) as feminine. In the Upanishads, <i>purusha </i>is the immaterial creative principle which expresses itself through <i>prakriti</i>, the mutable material; and in the Tantras the principled, motionless entity is the god Shiva, whose 'emanation' in the Blakean sense is the goddess Shakti, who orbits Shiva and allows his hypostatic nature to manifest itself in creation. In 'The Great Treatise', one of the main commentaries of the I Ching, the same formula is expressed thusly: 'The male acts according to the way of the creative, whereas the female operates according to the way of the receptive' (<i>T Chuan</i>, I, s. 4). From the Hellenic and Roman rituals that associated masculinity with fire and femininity with water to the Kabbalah concepts of <i>dubrah </i>and <i>nubkah </i>(God and his Shekinah), every traditional metaphysic intuited the same fundamental reality: the male is creative and the female is receptive, and together they are necessary for the sustenance of life as we know it. They are two parts of one whole (hence the hermaphroditic Shiva, Ardhanarishvara, who represents the synthetic whole of Shiva and Shakti).<br />
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The concept of <i>yin </i>and <i>yang </i>is an especially useful example in that it precisely explains the interdependence of the male and female principles and the necessity of their union. Again, all reality is conditioned and conceived in terms of male and female, <i>yang </i>and <i>yin</i>: 'All phenomena, form, beings, and changes of the universe are considered at the level of various encounters and combinations of the <i>yin </i>and <i>yang</i>.... From their dynamic aspect <i>yang </i>and <i>yin </i>are opposed but also complementary forces. The light and the sun have a <i>yang </i>quality, whereas shadow and moon have a <i>yin </i>quality' (Julius Evola,<i> Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex). </i>Male and female belong to the same order of ideas as virility and fertility, activity and passivity, spirit and nature; they are all analogous to one another, each representing in a different form what the others also represent. They essentially represent the principle duality that intrudes upon all created reality; they represent what the Pythagoreans called the 'Dyad', the law of opposition that defines everything which is manifested.<br />
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It is also in accordance with this law that each principle requires and desires its opposite, for in its differentiated state it is useless: what is creativity without material to use for creation? what is virility when everything is barren? Just as we cannot reproduce without partnership with the opposite sex, so we cannot recover our whole self without participation in 'the other', in whatever it is that we do not ourselves possess. Plato himself says that 'each person without any hesitation would deem that he had finally heard expressed what had certainly been his desire for a long time, namely to be united and fused with his beloved so as to form one single nature from two distinct beings. Now, the cause of this desire is to be sought in the fact that this was indeed our primitive nature when we constituted one unit which was still whole; it is really the burning longing for this unity which bears the name of love' (Plato, <i>The Symposium</i>). All creation desires wholeness insofar as all creation desires to return to its original, preconditioned form.<br />
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'In its most profound aspect, eros embodies an impulse to overcome the consequences of the Fall, to leave the restrictive world of duality, to restore the primordial state, to surmount the condition of dual existentiality broken and conditioned by the "other".' (Julius Evola,<i> Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex)</i></blockquote>
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This brings us to our proper subject. As Plato says above, Love is the means by which we achieve this wholeness, our union with ourselves. When we strongly desire something, we see in that object some parcel of Heaven, of the intelligible reality, and most of all of who we essentially are: 'Love, thus, is ever intent upon that other loveliness, and exists to be the medium between desire and that object of desire. It is the eye of the desirer; by its power what loves is able to see the loved thing' (Plotinus, <i>The Enneads</i>, III, v, 2). That initial pain we feel when this love is awakened is evidence of our new cognizance of our lacking a piece of ourself; it is as a hungry person becomes keenly, tortuously aware of his hunger when he sees and smells something delicious, only a thousand times more agonizing due to the far greater need for spiritual than physical satisfaction. Solovyov agrees that man in his 'empirical nature' is filled with this constant state of want, and purports that the aim of Love is to reintegrate him with his 'missing parts':<br />
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'The peculiar character of [our spiritual nature] consists just in a human being's ability, while remaining the selfsame human being, to accommodate absolute content in his own proper form, to become an absolute personality. But in order to be filled with absolute content... that same human must be restored in its entirety (integrated). In the empirical nature of the human being, as such, this is by no means so - he exists only in a specific onesidedness and finiteness, as a male or female individuality. However, a true human in the fulness of his ideal personality... cannot be merely male or merely female, but must be the higher unity of both. To realize this unity, to create the true human being as a free unity of the male and female principles, preserving their formal individualization but having surmounted their essential separateness and divergence - this is the proper immediate<i> task</i> of love.' (Vladimir Solovyov, <i>The Meaning of Love</i>)</blockquote>
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The reconciliation of male with female individuality is necessary for the formation of true personality. This is true because man in his essence is not either one of these: he is both. Otto Weininger surmised that we are naturally attracted to, even in the psychosomatic sense, individuals who possess a substance which we do not: '[All] individuals have as much femininity as they lack masculinity. If they are completely male they will desire a completely female counterpart, and if they are completely female, a completely male. If, however, they contain a somewhat larger proportion of Man and another, by no means negligible, proportion of Woman, they will demand an individual who will complement them and their fragmentary masculinity to form a whole; at the same time, their proportion of femininity will be completed in the same way' (Otto Weininger, <i>Sex and Character</i>). Thus, someone who is, for example, '75% male' will naturally be most attracted to a woman who is '75% female', and vice versa, because it is in this way that both individuals best complete themselves; they are fulfilling what each of them lack inside of them. The law of 'opposites attract' has never been clearer. There is moreover no such thing as someone who is 'transgender', because insofar as we are born male or female we will <i>always </i>have a higher portion of that principle whose sexual representation we are born as. Even if someone is merely '51%' male (and thus '49% female'), he is authentically male, and no amount of surgery or drugs will alter his inner nature. This is because things are manifested according to their metaphysical principles, and thus not subject to chance but causal authority:<br />
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'If birth is not a matter of chance, then it is not a coincidence for a being to "awaken" to itself in the body of a man or a woman. Here too, the physical difference should be viewed as the equivalent of a spiritual difference; hence a being is a man or a woman in a physical way only because a being is either masculine or feminine in a transcendental way; sexual differentiation, far from being an irrelevant factor in relation to the spirit, is the sign that points to a particular vocation and to a distinctive dharma.... [Man] and woman are two different types; those who are born as men must realize themselves as men, while those who are born as women must realize themselves as women, overcoming any mixture and promiscuity of vocations' (Julius Evola, <i>Revolt Against the Modern World</i>).</blockquote>
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We can already guess what this means for 'homosexual' activity, and indeed Weininger goes on to say that the great majority of homosexual relationships occur where the partners are intermediately differentiated, meaning that they possess high proportions of M and W and thus desire fellow beings who are also intermediately differentiated; the man who has 49% of W in him will have far more of an attraction to a man of like proportion than a man who is 80 or 90% M will. This explains the very high ratio of homosexual men and women who also identify themselves as 'bisexual', or are at least not averse to normal sexual relations. Evola also supports this, but adds that 'when homosexuality is not "natural" [meaning according to the theory of middling sexual differentiation just explained] or else cannot be explained in terms of incomplete inborn forms of sexual developments, it must have the character of a deviation, a vice, or a perversion' (Julius Evola, <i>Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex). </i>So, in our society, for instance, where spiritual and mental disorders (the ones which are not psychiatric make-believe, that is) resulting from the dissolution of the family, the community, and the entire socio-political realm are more pervasive than ever before, it is altogether to be expected that the rate of sodomitical sex is as high as it is, certainly much higher than it otherwise would be if it were limited to partners who were on the border of being '50% M' and '50% W'.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG9KhTU7hSErOy9p5-PTA7khwZuBj8lr5DTh-eXWtLk2oFScDDykrmwrZDRRWNlcClga5n5Pgul_zi9VoGPMZ1RwBuFzQeZae6hAFt2svuJyi6TwtwHdc0yG7zZTcr17H0QsjTGCGOJbqD/s1600/nut+and+geb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG9KhTU7hSErOy9p5-PTA7khwZuBj8lr5DTh-eXWtLk2oFScDDykrmwrZDRRWNlcClga5n5Pgul_zi9VoGPMZ1RwBuFzQeZae6hAFt2svuJyi6TwtwHdc0yG7zZTcr17H0QsjTGCGOJbqD/s320/nut+and+geb.jpg" width="320" /></a>The real crime of homosexual activity consists simply in its complete inversion of the normal interaction of the sexes. The metaphysical traditions which we outlined above are not theoretical abstractions that exist in an 'intellectual void'; they are that which is <i>fundamentally real</i>, in comparison to which this created world, the 'veil of Maya', is but an illusory distortion. They profoundly influence this world because <i>they are this world</i> in its truest, most articulate form. In the performance of copulative union, for example, man and woman recreate the genesis of the world; they merge together and create not only a life of their own, a <i>new world</i>, but they <i>create themselves</i> through their erotic synthesis of each other: 'Each of the two sexes is an image of the power and tenderness of God, with equal dignity though in a different way. The union of man and woman in marriage is a way of imitating in the flesh the Creator's generosity and fecundity' (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2335). Man becomes truly man, woman becomes truly woman, and together they become the new Adam: 'And they two shall be in one flesh. Therefore they are not now two, but one flesh' (Mark 10:8). The Fall is conquered by their physical union which, sacramentally, also has the nature of a <i>mystical </i>union; where they were formerly opposed to one another, the dual principles (<i>yin</i> and <i>yang</i>, Shiva and Shakti, Nut and Geb) are now intimately combined in the maximal expression of their essential nature and in their relations to each other:<br />
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'If the root of false existence consists in impenetrability, i.e., in the mutual exclusion of beings by each other, then true life is to live in another as in oneself, or to find in another the positive and absolute fulfillment of one's own being. The basis and type of this true life remains and always will remain sexual or conjugal love.... True union presupposes the true separateness of those being united, i.e., a separateness by power of which they do not exclude, but mutually replenish each other, each finding in the other the fulness of his own proper life.' (Vladimir Solovyov, <i>The Meaning of Love</i>)</blockquote>
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Sodomy receives no such justifications or blessings; there is no <i>telos </i>whatsoever to its practise: '[Homosexual acts] are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity' (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2357). This unbridgeable dispute between sodomitical activity and man and woman as they really are is what makes it unnatural in both a metaphysical and a physical sense. Indeed, it is <i>because </i>there is no metaphysical legitimacy to homosexual relations that there is no physical legitimacy: the copulation of man with woman results in the birth of a new life because of their union on a higher level (at least <i>in potentia</i>; procreation that is the consequence of extramarital sex is still natural, but it is divorced from the sacrament of marriage, hence it is of a lesser quality due to the absence of a sacral authority blessing the union).<br />
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The copulation of man with man and of woman with woman, on the other hand, bears no such fruit because of their incompatibility in the principial realm. The principle of maleness only acts according to its nature when it is associated with the principle of femaleness, which correspondingly acts according to its nature; that which is virile and creative naturally desires that which will bring out these qualities in it, which is of course the fertility and the passivity of its female counterpart. By reneging on this primordial agreement and a metaphysical law, homosexual 'union' condemns itself to a fruitless pursuit of something that it longs for but is looking in the completely wrong place; it is a sacrilegious caricature of supreme union, and makes something which is ideally spiritual and sacred into something strictly physical and therefore ugly. Instead of the satisfaction felt when something smoothly falls into place, like pouring wine into a glass, the homosexual act consists essentially of the frustration involved in pouring water into a sieve, because there is zero complementarity between two active or two passive principles: male and female create a self-sufficient whole that completes each other while male and male or female and female are doomed to wander alone, unredeemed, and separated from themselves.<br />
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'All the natural loves, all that serve the ends of Nature, are good.... Those forms that do not serve the purposes of Nature are merely accidents attending on perversion: in no sense are they Real-Beings or even manifestations of any reality; for they are no true issue of Soul; they are merely accompaniments of a spiritual flaw which the Soul automatically exhibits in the total of disposition and conduct.' (Plotinus, <i>The Enneads, </i>III, v, 7)</blockquote>
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If the aim of all human life is to become reintegrated as a whole person in the manner of Adam prior to his Fall, it cannot follow that establishing an erotic relationship with a woman is necessary for this end, for that would mean the futility of all ascetics and holy men and other such types who have surely come nearer to this reality than the vast majority of married men and women. The truth is that the capacity for reintegration subsists in the depth of our <i>own </i>self: the potential to become whole is already within us. To love a female is simply the most direct means available because it is neatly aligned with our libidinous appetites, but it is hardly the only one, as the various spiritual or yogic paths to self-completion are manifestly singular by nature, oriented around the fulfilment of one's inner nature or <i>dharma</i>. Infact, even in loving a woman what we are really doing is <i>loving ourselves</i>; the presence of another person is merely the object which sparks in man a desire for some element of himself shown in a separate individual. The truth of this should already be apparent by virtue of our earlier arguments, that male and female are really one entity, and that males and females inherently pursue beings whose natures correspond to what they are lacking in an effort to create a whole; thus, if we really do feel love as a burning desire to restore ourself to an earlier state of integration, it would make sense to see in our beloved simply the other half of what we once were.<br />
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It is crucial not to be confused by what we mean by 'loving oneself'. We certainly do not mean that we are engaged in an auto-erotic narcissism wherein we idolize our ego or the shadowy fragments of our malleable personality; what we <i>do</i> mean is the love of who we are as a composite whole, of our self as a personhood composed of both male and female harmoniously organized. In our love of another person we see ourselves as perfected: 'Whenever a man loves, he loves only himself. Not his subjectivity, not what he actually represents as a being tainted with every weakness and baseness, every gracelessness and pettiness, but what he wants to be completely and what he ought to be completely, his most personal and most profound intelligible nature, free from any scrap of necessity and from any residue of his earthly nature' (Otto Weininger, <i>Sex and Character</i>). The disturbed and amorphous constitution of ordinary reality and of our conscious minds is suddenly clarified into something so solid and true that we cannot help but pour our hearts into it, feeling our beloved as something absolutely <i>necessary </i>to our being: 'It is not for love of woman that woman is desired by man, but rather for love of the <i>atman</i>' (<i>Brihadaranyaka Upanishad</i>, IV). The <i>atman </i>is the highest principle of Self, pristinely real and unadulterated by the conditional factors (such as space and time) of the created world, and it is that which we see in what we love. Shakespeare beautifully expresses this idea in a sonnet:<br />
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'Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me<br />Are windows to my breast, wherethrough the sun<br />Delights to peep, to gaze therein on me.' (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 24)</blockquote>
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The neoplatonist French poet Antoine Hermoet is equally sublime in his description of the same thing:<br />
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'[I meditated upon] how our hearts, bent on "death",<br />Revived one another;<br />How mine, loving his,<br />Transformed itself into his without changing.' (Antoine Heroet, <i>La Parfaicte Amye</i>)</blockquote>
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So, again, in stark contrast to the normal order of things, homosexual relations are founded not on a spiritual love of Self conceived as a perfect whole comprised of both male and female, but on a purely physical love of self. The sex act of the sodomite is not something that symbolizes the harmonization of male and female into one flesh and one soul, but something that represents the man's <i>false </i>love for himself; it is not the <i>atman </i>which he 'loves', because that would imply a reconciliation of opposites into one Self, but merely his own lust and ouroboric desire and possibly his own demented personality. It is infact not even an entrance into the Other: for in copulating with another man (or woman with woman) he is copulating with <i>himself</i>; while they are ostensibly two different persons, both members of the act derive from the same principle of maleness, and thus metaphysically correspond to the selfsame individual. It is as though Shiva were to try to act through Shiva instead of his Shakti; the world would go uncreated, and he would never be reunited in himself.<br />
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The sin of sodomy is the worst instance of onanism possible because it simultaneously satirizes the holy union of male and female and projects upon another person one's own failings; while this is so in all extramarital intercourse, it is manifestly and monstrously worse in this case by virtue of the involvement of a more extreme narcissism, psychic and spiritual disorders that take pleasure from abnormal practises, the confusion of one's principial maleness or femaleness (i.e., their natural desire to be with the other), and the complete absence of any natural end to the event. Once more, it is essentially characterized by self-love: 'Perversion may be defined as the diversion of sexual desire from a person of the opposite sex to a body of the opposite sex... or to a person of the same sex... or to an inanimate thing (fetishism). At the root of all forms of perversion is self-love, the utilization of another, who... is seen as no more than an instrument for one's pleasure (or pain)' (Vladimir Moss, <i>The Theology of Eros</i>). The extent of how morally and spiritually adverse this kind of behaviour is, inasmuch as it is not self-evident, is illuminated all the more by comparison with normal sexual behaviour:<br />
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'Man should help woman to free herself from her womanliness (as incompleteness), and woman, in turn, should help man, so that in both of them the full primal image of man will inwardly merge again. Both of them, instead of being half-men, will become whole men once again, i.e., Christians. For the expressions: to have become a Christian, to be born again, and to have recovered integrity of human nature are synonymous.' (Franz Xaver von Baader, <i>Werke</i>)</blockquote>
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In the crisis of the modern world, the principles that were once intimately known and even taken for granted are entirely obscured by both an exclusively empirical and positivistic understanding of reality that determines everything according to its <i>material </i>nature, and a falsely 'humanistic' crusade for 'human rights' to the point that the instinctual and temporal desires of the individual, regardless of how perverse, matter more than either the health of his soul or of the community at large. It is in this environment that the 'cult of the body', exemplified by the 'Sexual Revolution' in the middle of the previous century, has been able to flourish, for it is only in the absence of the intellect and moral awareness that the sensual impulses are able to riot uninhibited by their normal constraints. Evola is right in attributing this to the lateness of our civilization's current cycle, for, like any organism in nature, our culture is an old and dying animal: '[It] remains true that a universal and feverish interest in sex and woman is the mark of every twilight period and that this phenomenon today is among the many signs that this epoch is the terminal phase of a regressive process.... It is clear that today by regression we are living in a civilization whose predominant interest is neither intellectual, spiritual, nor heroic, nor even directed to the higher forms of emotion. Rather the subpersonal - sex and the belly - are idolized....' (Julius Evola, <i>Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex). </i>It is exactly this, the <i>subpersonal</i>, that motivates such notions as homosexual nuptials (or even the normalization of paedophilia, as the 'slippery slope' proceeds apace), for real personhood consists not of realizing one's sexual fantasies in another individual, but in identifying <i>who you are</i>, which invariably means a reconciliation of the male and the female inside of you.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn7WZznvrak0NAmjxgPELdlMptHdCzPINbMYMX17EDa0nxMvWirFyu4mClewrF3eNEdUe0buq8vuLQfYRc0aEpWJ63AqUReXdmFsJCkV9AH7iQfRviDP-lJv7sq_7OgCY4PVPZTOXKxwKV/s1600/whirlwind+of+lovers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn7WZznvrak0NAmjxgPELdlMptHdCzPINbMYMX17EDa0nxMvWirFyu4mClewrF3eNEdUe0buq8vuLQfYRc0aEpWJ63AqUReXdmFsJCkV9AH7iQfRviDP-lJv7sq_7OgCY4PVPZTOXKxwKV/s320/whirlwind+of+lovers.jpg" width="320" /></a>As the demonstrably false phenomenon of 'gay marriage' spreads to those places in the West which most accurately mimic the ethos of modernity, it is crucial to remember that fraternal love, or <i>sincere </i>love between men, is entirely possible - provided that such relationships remain celibate. We need only to bring the reader's attention to such practises of <i>adelphopoiesis</i> in the Byzantine Church, which ritualized an extraordinary friendship between men, or of the blood-brotherhood of the Norse society and the Scythians which united men into something much more than friends. The difference, of course, consists in the modernist's permissiveness in the sexual realm, where everything is allowed so long as it remains a 'victimless crime' (a terrible vacuity when considering the spiritual damage such acts lead to); the 'gay' man becomes gay not merely by his perverse sexual habits, <i>but by his very identity.</i> One's gayness marks him out as who he is more than any other facet of his character, thereby epitomizing the modern's purely physical comprehension of reality, where nothing exists other than what we can <i>touch </i>and <i>feel</i>.<i> </i>Indeed, the rather ridiculous idea of 'gay pride' serves as an inordinately transparent symbol of modern man's hubris: we are not merely permitting our regression into worse forms of barbarity, we are <i>proud </i>of it, as though we are calling God out to destroy Babel once again, daring him to smite us. <br />
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In deep contradistinction to this is the traditional worldview, according to which the spiritual is not only real, but it is <i>more real</i> than the physical. Man is called not to 'be who he is' in the vulgar sense, but to become who he is <i>essentially</i>; which means the reconciliation of the sexes, which means becoming like unfallen man, which means becoming like God. Yes, this can be achieved through the special love between man and woman; but it can even more strongly be achieved through a direct unity between man and God: '[There] is need for the blessed passion of holy eros; it binds the mind to spiritual objects and persuades it to prefer the immaterial over the material, the intelligible and the divine to the sensible' (St. Maximus the Confessor, <i>On Charity</i>). The 'passion of holy eros' is an excellent way to describe man's fervour for God; in the place of a woman who inspires him to find his Self, man starts to see God, who will help him in that regard more than anything else. By imitating God, man becomes like God: 'For the Son of God became man so that we might become God' (St. Athanasius, <i>De Incarnatione</i>). The love between a man and a woman is but a reflection of the love which God has for his children, and those who love him in return are guaranteed salvation: 'I love them that love me: and they that in the morning early watch for me, shall find me' (Proverbs 8:17). Love loses when it is reduced to something physical, to something that makes a mockery out of God's laws and tries to marry two things which are already one; love wins when two different beings come together out of separate, solitary lives to form one whole. For love exists not to divide us or to join us to our basest elements; love exists to unify us.<br />
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<i>'I am you and you in me mutual in love divine.' ~</i>William Blake<i>, Jerusalem</i></blockquote>
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Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-24752582621019551622015-03-30T19:14:00.002-07:002015-03-30T19:14:30.580-07:00The Decline of the WestUpon reading Spengler's magnum opus <i>The Decline of the West</i> for the third time (in three days this time, because I have no life), and feeling as though this was the first time I more or less completely understood it, it behooves us to draft a brief tribute to the text, which truly is one of the most important narratives of the 20th Century.<br />
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Perhaps Spengler's greatest quality consists in his scathing polemic against the myopic, atomized, causal, linear perspective of modernist history that ruled with particular dominance in the rationalistic 17th and 18th centuries. He had determined that this was a superficial reading of history that accounted merely for circumstantial, incidental happenings, and failed to take stock of what was <i>really </i>going on: 'there can be no question of taking spiritual-political events, such as they become visible day by day on the surface, at their face value, and arranging them in a series of "causes" or "effects" and following them up in the obvious and intellectually easy directions. Such a "pragmatic" handling of history would be nothing but a piece of "natural science" in disguise... (<i>The Decline of the West</i>, p. 6).'<br />
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As a counter-attack to this elementary outlook, Spengler proceeds with an intuition into Destiny and Time, into history conceived not merely as a chain of events related only by their causal connections, but as ideas and events that are expressive of greater, deeper cosmic motions that subsist beneath human social activity. Spengler suggests that Cultures are not the arbitrary results of disparate communities, but their own organisms, their own individuals with a certain constitution not fundamentally unlike any other living thing; he peers into the cyclic nature of reality wherein organisms are born, thrive into manhood, linger into old age, and finally die. Spengler argues that Cultures/Civilizations are not specially fixed to progress indefinitely, immune to the biological decay every life form faces, but are uniquely shaped by their own inner identities and therefore subject to their own higher <i>telos</i>:<br />
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'I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only by shutting one's eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling; its own death.... Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves - but there is no aging "Mankind". Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return.... These Cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding onto itself one epoch after another.' (<i>Decline</i>, pp. 17-8)</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIoOHUkxzOyg00TA7igp1isCUdYJhFOCWUbMxOGZq3teOn8ZCuXnzrLQYvut4HkAMsfmA_6cmYRs2-4NWBe-C9YPIqe90cLEtcSGOwjhX6D8x7T_ge20JOcdEOtjr8m13ZgDQ1uMmhba1Y/s1600/spengler21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIoOHUkxzOyg00TA7igp1isCUdYJhFOCWUbMxOGZq3teOn8ZCuXnzrLQYvut4HkAMsfmA_6cmYRs2-4NWBe-C9YPIqe90cLEtcSGOwjhX6D8x7T_ge20JOcdEOtjr8m13ZgDQ1uMmhba1Y/s1600/spengler21.jpg" height="320" width="211" /></a><i>The Decline of the West</i> comprehensively answers all of the major questions of the Faustian soul, and unveils who we are as Westerners, as a distinct Culture (or presently a Civilization, as all Cultures must become as they are petrified into something increasingly lifeless). To provide one of many possible examples, whereas the Classical man is preoccupied with the community, with how man relates to the world at large (hence their conception of the <i>persona</i>, the mask we present ourselves in to face our fellows), Faustian man is singularly concerned with <i>himself</i>, with how he relates to the cosmos beyond, to <i>Infinity</i> and the impossible loneliness therein: 'here infinite solitude is felt as the home of the Faustian soul. Siegfried, Parzifal, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust, are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram's Parzifal. The love of wild nature, the mysterious compassion, the ineffable sense of forsakenness - it is all Faustian and only Faustian' (<i>Decline</i>, p. 99).<br />
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Spengler is equally keen in his insights into who we will become, even from the unsettled vantage of a century ago. While emerging sooner than he anticipated, Spengler's idea of 'Caesarism' became manifest even in his lifetime with the ascent of Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, etc. The masses were congealed beneath a great personality, a masterful dictator who mustered all the historical energy peculiar to his time and threw it upon Civilization as was his destiny. Spengler is able to envision this because he is not limited to a narrow mindset which sees history purely as sequences of cause and effect, but as a manifestation of something much deeper, the very soul of a Culture, the inner fountainhead of what that Culture brings forth. By studying and juxtaposing one Culture upon another, patterns become present, patterns which can even be used to forecast the future insofar as the future will necessarily correspond in some analogical way to a different Culture, to the <i>model </i>of how Cultures develop and recede. This is precisely what linear, modernistic historical thought fails to do because it is concerned not with the essential, but with the accidental, and treats a Culture not as an organism unto itself, but rather as another step in an arbitrary ladder reaching up into nowhere:<br />
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'We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species. No one, looking at the oak, with its millennial life, daresay that at this moment, now, is about to start on its true and proper course.... In the case of higher human history, however, we [i.e., the Gibbon-type historians] take our ideas as to the course of the future with an unbridled optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e. organic experience, and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof but on predilection.' (<i>Decline</i>, pp.16-7)</blockquote>
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By peering into the 'platonic idea' of what a Culture is essentially, Spengler can analogically relate one Culture to another, and thereby determine what is particular to that particular Culture, and what is universal to all Culture, i.e., the inherent nature of what a human Culture is as a <i>genus</i>. Just as there are different trees with their own unique qualities, so too are there self-contained Cultures possessing their own unique qualities; but insofar as both are organisms, both are destined to live and die accordingly. By realizing the nature of the species, in other words, Spengler can reveal the nature of the individual organism in an acutely visionary manner that is impossible to attain otherwise. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2S0xAN-90sKWAeArvIQ87-L0wdxpJ7pdXRESVwSuUolEewS_pWTMfaWmBXudrV9oAh0TOcD6si5Lz1Z-slGDcEdW5jDESlUk9cWcrMUk0zYo-gPbDDj4Y1nDsdMwPE-btxgCVQvowqVYs/s1600/apocalypse-doomsday-destruction-31051741-1680-1050.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2S0xAN-90sKWAeArvIQ87-L0wdxpJ7pdXRESVwSuUolEewS_pWTMfaWmBXudrV9oAh0TOcD6si5Lz1Z-slGDcEdW5jDESlUk9cWcrMUk0zYo-gPbDDj4Y1nDsdMwPE-btxgCVQvowqVYs/s1600/apocalypse-doomsday-destruction-31051741-1680-1050.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a>Spengler is moreover deeply conscious of the falling quality of our Civilization, hence the title of this book. With the fading of Culture, which is itself caused by the fulfilment of more and more of its possibilities and therefore by the exhaustion of its inner energy, first religion, the realm of spirit is distorted into new, hostile forms; Protestantism and puritanism, driven by a specially Faustian rationalism, disturb the old order, and limit the creative impetus and unity of the spiritual dimension. Then art, once subordinated to socio-religious organization, emancipates itself in a new fury of polyphony and counterpoint, of <i>Sturm und Drang</i>, until it too exhausts itself; the life of an artistic tradition, such as that experienced by Beethoven and Weber and Schubert, provides a superfluity of inspired production to artists in this period, but by the time of Wagner it dries up, forcing the artist in his period to work especially hard to achieve anything. In the political realm, grand politics and the organic State soon submit to abstract ideals such as 'human rights', 'world peace', and finally something exclusively economic wherein all that matters is the material: 'Politics sacrifice men for an idea, they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. In war life is elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, vulgar and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for one's life under which the higher form-world of a Culture miserably collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts begins' (<i>Decline</i>, p. 400). In all things, where one cultural facet flares up and succeeds gloriously, where all the historical power of a Culture in that instant is concentrated, it is expressive of the Culture's interior character; but these things all must perish, too, and in their decline they open up further possibilities through which the dying Culture gradually reveals itself.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTYY4z62Nf0H6GixVqSvUEBGbr1YD2KeFanJZHDwUFkdALU_GXhAapc1LxI9fk8Zp1UjBIxoAPBU1Pb57VscK1VhOi1jNtCQPgHp5HVzSxyEenR4l5XAInn4aPq2k6YbxrVmriR4thS3My/s1600/wandering_jew_b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTYY4z62Nf0H6GixVqSvUEBGbr1YD2KeFanJZHDwUFkdALU_GXhAapc1LxI9fk8Zp1UjBIxoAPBU1Pb57VscK1VhOi1jNtCQPgHp5HVzSxyEenR4l5XAInn4aPq2k6YbxrVmriR4thS3My/s1600/wandering_jew_b.png" height="320" width="259" /></a>As a Culture goes through its motions. spending its last imaginative impulses before nestling into bleak, urbanized, bloated, mercantile, and mechanical Civilization, it comes closer and closer to its Destiny, to what its purpose was in the cosmos. As it proceeds thus, the Culture is defined less by those specific qualities that once differentiated it from other Cultures and more by those qualities that define every Civilization in steep decline: an orientation around the practical, a 'moral' coldness toward 'the good life', a lapse in true hierarchy, and especially a sovereign interest in <i>business</i>, in manipulating the material world for selfish ends. Spengler claims that all Civilizations in their Winter seasons are characterized by these symptoms, and especially when they are removed from their homeland, citing such examples of the Chinese in California in the 19th Century, the Indian trader in East Africa, and of course the Wandering Jew. This is because these are all <i>ahistorical </i>peoples, ahistorical because they have already accomplished their work in this world - they are essentially dead, having no remaining vital role to play, and doomed to simply subsist amongst other Cultures until they might inseminate the earth with the seed of the next Culture. This is exactly what is happening to the West: we are dying, we approach the fulfilment of our Destiny, and as we die we become closer in spirit (or rather by our mutual lack of spirit) to the Jew to the point where neither of us will be recognizable, because we are both <i>historically extinguished</i>:<br />
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'Today this Magian nation, with its ghetto and its religion, itself is in danger of disappearing - not because the metaphysics of the two Cultures come closer to one another, but because the intellectualized upper stratum of each side is ceasing to be metaphysical at all. It has lost every kind of inward cohesion, and what remains is simply a cohesion for practical questions. The lead that this [Jewish / Magian] nation has enjoyed from its long habituation to thinking in business terms becomes ever less and less (<i>vis-a-vis</i> the American, it has almost already gone), and with the loss of it will go the last potent means of keeping up a Consensus that has fallen regionally into parts. In the moment when the civilized methods of the European-American world-cities shall have arrived at full maturity, the destiny of Jewry... will be accomplished.' (<i>Decline</i>, p. 353)</blockquote>
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With these tremendously valuable contributions that Spengler has produced being mentioned, we are obliged to bring up our complaints with his opus, of which there are two main ones. The first is that which we share with Julius Evola, who lamented the fact that Spengler had no clear comprehension of the 'transcendent' portion of a Culture's identity: 'A sense of the metaphysical dimension or of transcendence, which represents the essence of all true <i>Kultur</i>, was completely lacking in [Spengler]' (Julius Evola, <i>The Path of Cinnabar</i>, p. 179). This is true in that Spengler, for all his concern with the philosophical and intellectual and even spiritual qualities of the man of any which Culture, approaches these questions from a typically modern <i>immanent </i>position; much like C.G. Jung confuses the mythical creations and rituals of primitive man for existing purely in the psyche, Spengler does the same, only he places these higher elements in the <i>psyche of the Culture</i>.<br />
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There is no truly transcendent character in Spengler's cultural world-soul, because everything is subordinated to the organic process, to the organism's cyclic existence, to its strictly <i>this-world</i> nature. While Spengler undoubtedly critiques Civilization, he does this in the same way as a doctor would critique a man in old age, that is to say, from a purely relative, immanent perspective. This absence of a true metaphysic leaves Spengler with no other objective criterion with which to judge a Culture, whereas Evola and the other traditionalists offer something more substantial in their suggestion of a 'world of Tradition', which is rigidly organized around a Culture's metaphysical principles (they also suggest its antithesis, the 'modern world', which is not organized at all in the proper sense, and is responsible for the downward, telluric tendencies of a Culture).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmGL-Emnv_ByDRumQTzh2KsTe0xwo7zMyNTbxDrSt0AZbZ2gCWLRIXz6YJKr9EEIvFQoRYjeD_GGjNXww0LxkOxtVg2a7zH72iD2tT_3B2J2rE4zbYygmbswvkU1VmOEWY6Hc47VgOd-XI/s1600/incarnation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmGL-Emnv_ByDRumQTzh2KsTe0xwo7zMyNTbxDrSt0AZbZ2gCWLRIXz6YJKr9EEIvFQoRYjeD_GGjNXww0LxkOxtVg2a7zH72iD2tT_3B2J2rE4zbYygmbswvkU1VmOEWY6Hc47VgOd-XI/s1600/incarnation.jpg" height="320" width="248" /></a>The second major complaint consists in our reaction to Spengler's claim that these Cultures are wholly self-contained, that they are perfectly isolated from either previous or succeeding Cultures, and from neighboring Cultures. While still rejecting the idea of a linear historical narrative, it is nevertheless true that prior Cultures play a decisive role in the Becoming of the following Culture. What would Western Culture be, for example, without the twin genii of Plato and Aristotle? the wisdom of the Old Testament? the Hellenic-Hebraic synthesis of the New Testament, the Incarnation of <i>Christ</i>? the materially fading but symbolically supernatural power of the Late Roman Empire? the technical and philosophical gifts of the Arabian? While doubtless these were all uniquely understood in the fashion of Faustian man, these were powerful, virile seeds that were planted by 'Classical' and 'Magian' man even at their waning in the world, and at the very least serve as crucial links between these superior world-souls.<br />
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Oswald Spengler possessed a perilous, incendiary insight which mastered the world's attention. He corrected some deeply erroneous methods of the modern historian by supplanting them with a radical new perspective of his own (though we could have done without him mentioning the novelty of his work every so often). His awareness of the morphological structure of history, and especially of the underlying forces that motivate the Cultures that constitute history, breathes new life into modern historical consciousness which has grown stale and placid. His is a relentless polemic that mercilessly scythes down many of our most beloved and most facile notions (his precise, destructive summary of democracy and freedom of the press is unsurpassed), and suggesting instead of an inexorable progress an inevitable <i>death</i>. 'Optimism is cowardice', Spengler famously writes, urging us instead to look at the facts in themselves, even if they incline us to a miserable pessimism. But then, Spengler surprises us once more toward the end of <i>Decline:</i> while the 'powers that be' will fight their wars over the ore and fuel and gold of the mundane, and the Culture at large will present no real value to the discriminating individual, there is nevertheless hope for him, a kind of transcendent peace that was not possible to any of his forefathers, living as they were in a Culture in the throes of Becoming. For this is the peace of Destiny, available to the man who realizes the fulfilment thereof, to the man who sits and contemplates not the misery of the world around him, but the fact that he sits at the peak of an entire historical organism. He dwells at the end of the line, and possesses the special consciousness of having realized the whole of history, of Becoming finally <i>Become</i>:<br />
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'With the formed state having finished its course, high history also lays down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring.... And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts forever. There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual - and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of a grand History does holy, still Being reappear.' (<i>Decline</i>, p.381)</blockquote>
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-35117252393630057832015-03-07T06:32:00.000-08:002015-03-07T07:04:45.887-08:00Woman, Weininger, and Lars von Trier: A Review of NymphomaniacAs Lars von Trier is one of my favourite directors, and as he covers themes closest to my heart and to my sphere of knowledge, it surprises me that it took this long to write a full review of one of his films. While I cannot promise anything, it would be really interesting to write another one at some later stage of the 'Golden Hearts' trilogy, with <i>Dancer in the Dark</i> forming the focus of it as <i>Nymphomaniac </i>is the focus of this review. (I have structured this review so that only minor spoilers are revealed for the bulk of it, with all major ones being used in the final portion in the effort to allow those who have not yet seen this film the glorious opportunity to read what is surely a masterwork of cinematic criticism.)<br />
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<span style="font-weight: normal;">As one final foreword before entering the review, the medium of this film, which is essentially a pornographic film with an actual narrative built into it, automatically inspires apprehension on the part of viewers with a stronger moral sense than myself. Without defending this style of presentation, I will only say that the aesthetics of the Middle Ages, while superior in the most meaningful ways, with its sense of beauty built directly into a piece's moral and intellectual worth, is not the aesthetics of the Modern Ages; we must in certain respects live according to the times, and this may mean, at least to the ironical, undisciplined, unserious aesthete, surrendering some of our ethical condemnations of things which speak of more important things than even morality. It is a given, then, that, in order to properly enjoy this film (in a way other than one would enjoy a more purposefully pornographic film, that is), it is necessary to silence all moral sensibilities, and to view this film in as detached and desensitized way as possible. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: normal;">So, while a 'purification of the means' may have indeed been preferable (the penis montage in V.I and the miscegenation in V.II were especially unsavoury), I am not going to utilize a moralistic judgment of this film when I knew all about it going into the film. Moreover, I actually sensed a strong familiarity between the film's pornography and the explicit imagery that any quality horror movie uses in achieving its own end goals; both of which ultimately aim at repulsing the viewer (even if this sometimes manages the opposite effect), because what they are showing is <i>supposed to be repulsive</i>. Infact I think that showing the realistic murder such as you see in any high-budget war film is just as 'pornographic' in a sense as anything you see in <i>Nymphomaniac</i>: somehow the sexual attains an added portion of scandal when it is shown. At any rate, the purpose of such 'shocking' scenery is <i>not </i>to simply shock the viewer, but to demonstrate something shocking about it, to show <i>why </i>it is shocking. With that in mind, I hope that I myself have demonstrated what makes <i>Nymphomaniac </i>worth viewing in respect to the human, and specifically the <i>female </i>condition.... adieu. </span><br />
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Introduction to Weininger and Lars von Trier</h4>
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<i>Perhaps the only difference between me and the other people, is that I have always demanded more from the sunset....</i></div>
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In the now hugely accomplished filmography of the Danish director Lars von Trier, there are a multitude of themes that are continuously explored; the baseless, meddling idealism, for example, that characterizes the protagonists of <i>Europa</i> and <i>Manderlay</i>, or the almost invariable resolution of any which story into something satisfyingly <i>tragic, </i>or the tremendous individualism that pits a person alone against the world in order to show at once his or her <i>humanity</i>, in a depraved sense or otherwise. There are a myriad of such ways in which LvT conveys his distinctly German grasp of romanticism, but there is perhaps no stronger one than his persistent investigations of the female character, chiefly in the <i>manner </i>in which these investigations are performed. This is true principally in the burning duality that presents itself over the course of LvT's work: woman is at one point elevated to Byronic heights while at another she comes crashing down to depths more familiar to the scribbling of Schopenhauer. LvT is not interested in sentimental generalizations or abstract scientific theorems; he is interested in the actual reality of womanhood, of how woman is in the <i>essential</i>, and of how Woman is defined as a type (W), segregated from that of Man (M).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1pFneDDiH9yZvj480ScL-LYc-SSoVz-cJP4m2G_QOZUDyI6TwjgNLZZ8xWcqYmmuAk_OwIMUeMG-ub9a7312rnno5x9J6ZhAd0yyR6FxfcgFMZ0A28gshUnbhPnIpyPg_MM79dSbnW6D4/s1600/otto-weininger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1pFneDDiH9yZvj480ScL-LYc-SSoVz-cJP4m2G_QOZUDyI6TwjgNLZZ8xWcqYmmuAk_OwIMUeMG-ub9a7312rnno5x9J6ZhAd0yyR6FxfcgFMZ0A28gshUnbhPnIpyPg_MM79dSbnW6D4/s1600/otto-weininger.jpg" height="320" width="195" /></a>There is one philosopher more than any other of whom we are reminded in this connection: Otto Weininger. Ostensibly more of a psychologist than a philosopher, out of respect for the man it would be wiser to name him by the latter vocation (as we would C.G. Jung), especially considering his contributions were of far greater worth in the more universal fields of philosophy than in any technical, scientific one. Otto Weininger was the man of whom August Strindberg had said 'solved the hardest of all life's problems', and <a href="http://www.theabsolute.net/ottow/ottoinfo.html">in a letter</a> to Weininger himself he expressed gratitude for solving the 'Woman Problem'. Weininger's opus <i>Sex and Character</i> has been widely interpreted as a radical episode in misogyny and misunderstanding, and not without reason: at one point Weininger supposes women to be ontologically inferior to animal and even plant life, while at another he claims that it is impossible to conceive of a female counterpart to the criminal, since woman is not even on the moral spectrum - she is capable of being neither moral nor immoral, for she is entirely non-moral. Notwithstanding such hyperbole or nonsense, Weininger's primary endeavour, simply that of understanding W (Woman) as she is, removed of all bias and prejudice, goes a long distance in this regard, and helps shed light on other phenomena as well. That he does exaggerate sometimes should not distract the discerning reader so much as to help delineate the diametrically opposed definitions of W and M in themselves, despite how commingled they appear in our immediate reality, in <i>particular </i>men and women.<br />
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'[There is] an ideal Man M and an ideal Woman W, neither of whom exist, as sexual types.... The type, the platonic idea, is not only the object of art but also that of science.... [There] are any number of intermediate stages, between the complete Man and the complete Woman, which may both be approximated but which are never experienced as such in reality.'(Otto Weininger, <i>Sex and Character</i>, p.13)</blockquote>
LvT shares much of this ambiguity (at least on the surface), and this comes from his methodology: rather than studying W as a whole in any individual film, or conversely studying women as removed from any understanding of W, LvT studies the various facets of W through many of her different representations. Katherina, the powerful, oddly rational 'heroine' of <i>Europa</i>, for instance, has as little to do with the sweet naivety of <i>Dogville</i>'s Grace as the loving Bess of <i>Breaking the Waves</i> has to do with the initial bourgeois rigour of <i>Melancholia</i>'s Claire. These are hardly contradictions of LvT's comprehension of W; they are the different avenues through which W is manifested, the different forms that she shapes herself in. Together they create a unified vision into the deepest parts of W by examining her at her most extreme, by isolating certain of her subtypes (idealist, governess, maiden, <i>femme fatale</i>, mother, gorgon, etc) to expose who she is essentially. It is quite likely impossible to unravel the unfathomable vastness of W at all, nevermind all at once; but in searching through the various ways she makes herself known we can identify patterns and underlying commonalities that at least hint at their source.<br />
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Weininger understood more than most the typological classifications of humanity, and exemplifies this understanding in his decisive split of the two F archetypes: Mother and Prostitute. Like M and W, the Mother and the Prostitute are platonic ideas, and therefore impossible to encounter in themselves in ordinary reality; but, like M and W, they are organic defaults imprinted on this woman or that woman, and so also impossible to be neither one nor the other: 'a being is a man or a woman in a physical way only because a being is either masculine or feminine in a transcendental way; sexual differentiation, far from being an irrelevant factor in relation to the spirit, is the sign that points to a particular vocation and to a distinctive <i>dharma</i>' (Julius Evola, <i>Revolt Against the Modern World</i>, p. 158). Just as, excepting extraordinary circumstances, one is born either as a man or a woman, so too is a woman born as either a Mother or a Prostitute, though always containing a complementary portion of whichever she is not. Briefly summarized, the Mother in Weininger's eyes was the optimistic preserver of the race whose primary instincts consisted of serving the child first and foremost; she also has the tendency to treat her man as another child, which lends her a matronly disposition in whatever relationship she finds herself in. The Mother is commonly held as more estimable, but Weininger deems that her love for her family and especially her children is conditional on their being hers; she is, in other words, a slave to her maternal instincts, and thus deserves no ethical credit in the way that a man might in showing courage on the battlefield: 'Maternal love is non-moral because it has no relation to the individuality of the being on which it is bestowed, and there can be an ethical relation only between two individualities. The relation between mother and child is always a kind of physical reflex' (Weininger, p.225). The Prostitute, on the other hand, is equally selfish, but whose instincts are to please the man instead of the child. She is of a greater intellectual calibre, and she is someone who tends toward cowardice and fear rather than the maternal hope; she is moreover prone to electing socially unfavourable or dissipated men as opposed to the more political, opportunistic Mother type who chooses men based on how far they can advance her family in the world. While both, being W, are wholly sexual in their nature (more on that immediately), it is naturally the Prostitute who is more intimately associated with sexual energy, as her <i>raison d'être</i> is to please herself in pleasing men rather than being motivated by the procreative necessity as is that of the Mother.<br />
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<i>Nymphomaniac </i>is quite naturally, then, a film about the Prostitute type, and of a highly advanced instance of it. According to Weininger, W is, unlike M who is driven by ethical, artistic, and religious motivations, possessed purely by sexual inclinations, which define her entire existence: 'For Woman the state of sexual arousal only means the greatest intensification of her whole existence, which is always and absolutely sexual. W's existence revolves entirely around her sexual life, the sphere of copulation and reproduction, i.e., in her relationship with a man and her children, and her existence is totally absorbed by these things, while M is <i>not only</i> sexual' (Ibid., p.79). While M is individuated and capable of self-consciousness, W is ruled firmly by the cosmic organization that demands the persistence of our species; she is at once tied to the infallible order of nature and the chaotic acts of spontaneity that often define the realm of nature. W is incapable of real order, for that means transcending the purely natural in an act only the personal, masculine spirit can achieve, so she is by turns taken by an organic rhythm and by the chaos affiliated with nature and therefore with her sex.<br />
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<h4>
Body (only minor spoilers henceforth)</h4>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The secret ingredient to sex, is love....</i></div>
</blockquote>
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<i>Nymphomaniac </i>is the third film in LvT's 'Depression' trilogy; it is its triumphant conclusion, incorporating themes from the first two but striking more resolutely, more <i>comprehensively </i>into the inner workings of the female psyche. We will not say that it is better than or even the equal of the two prior parts, but we will say that it offers the more complete angle for looking into W. There is also, rather than the limited, compact social dynamics of the previous two, the additional advantage of covering a greater range of characters, allowing them a hitherto unenjoyed freedom of expression which opens up many different aspects. More to the point, <i>Nymphomaniac </i>is concerned above all else with the erotic impulses of W, her most pressing demands, rather than the other two which prioritized more incidental factors.<br />
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<i><br /></i>The first film in the trilogy<i>, Antichrist, </i>gained notoriety for its unashamed discovery of W's connection to nature, specifically the sinister side of nature: frequent invocations of witchcraft and devilry emerge as the wife (superbly played by the inimitable Charlotte Gainsbourg, who plays a central role in each of these three films) submits to the same 'misogyny' she was supposed to refute. Overcome by the death of her son, the wife falls apart; whatever rational fibres she had developed over the years implode on her, twisting into a new destructive current that bring her nearer and nearer to the beastly barbarism of the natural world: that surreal, unforgettable moment when the fox says into the screen, <i>Chaos reigns</i>, epitomizes in no uncertain terms the truth of what was happening. Subsequently, the symbol of masculinity <i>par excellence</i> is literally smashed in a telluric, earthly revolt against the intellectual and spiritual organization that would 'shackle' the natural world, that would make order from chaos. <i>Antichrist </i>is basically the articulation of the overwhelming emotional trauma that occurs when nature's logical patterns (that of a mother raising the next generation) are suddenly undermined; upon this occurrence nature's spontaneity overturns whatever rational shields woman has built, and so <i>chaos reigns</i>.<br />
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The second film, <i>Melancholia</i>, inspects an inner apocalypse in the face of an outer apocalypse. The different responses to the world's impending death represent the different psychic states on the part of the two women, Justine and Claire. The former is the more obviously disorderly, unable to maintain any kind of reasonable social discourse, mocking the nuptial rituals, even scorning her newly married husband for a lay with a coworker who means practically nothing to her - not in any bed, either, but directly on the grass. Severely depressed from the beginning, she is unable to enjoy her favourite food: 'It tastes like ashes'. At one point she goes down to the river in the night, completely naked, and in that moment she becomes identified with the raw beauty of nature, becoming one with her as though she were the silver moon shining brilliantly on an open, cloudless, Summer night; this is a reflection of her immersion into a conscious longing for unconsciousness, the desperate desire to cease sentience. Claire, on the other hand, at first displays a normalcy becoming to any bourgeois lady of the house, but this gives way to a nervous frailty that quivers in the face of impending global destruction; associated with the outer world, she falls apart as the world falls apart. Justine, meanwhile, handles this much more readily, suggesting not merely her delight in the prospect of her own death, but of the death of the <i>whole </i>exterior realm with which she can no longer relate at all. <i>Melancholia </i>is basically an interview between the internal and external positions of self, a glimpse into the psychological tremors felt throughout one's being upon the collapse of either/or. Justine could not find any field in which to plant her teeming inner energy, while Claire in the absence of any seed possessed only the field. The destruction of the world releases both of them from their isolation, and combines them together: '[The two sisters] melt together', <a href="http://www.melancholiathemovie.com/#_interview">LvT says</a>, 'they have been two, and they become one'.<br />
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So while <i>Antichrist </i>is concerned with the emotional and matronly values of W corrupted into a defiant organic impulse, and <i>Melancholia </i>with the more mental difficulties that emerge from a failure to synthesize W's inner and outer lives (note: Weininger would likely recognize in Justine more qualities of M rather than of W), <i>Nymphomaniac </i>completes the circle by its concentration on the locus of femininity, the plot of psychic space wherein all of W's motivations are said to derive: the erotic centre. This is not to say that the other elements are not present (as we will see), but that the focus is now absolutely on the sexual quotient; W is now approached where she is at her most honest, her most typical state, because she is now the closest as any individual in ordinary reality can get to the 'platonic idea' of W. This, as much as anything else, is why <i>Nymphomaniac </i>should be the final part, because it contains all other parts in its witnessing to the actual identity of W, for everything in her is produced from her sexual aspect, which is to say <i>her entire self</i>. <br />
<br />
Joe the nymphomaniac is indubitably of the Prostitute type; so far as our knowledge goes, there is no clearer instance of this type in all of film. She fulfills not only the obvious physical necessities, such as the chronic masturbation as a youth and the early discovery of ways to please herself (such as 'playing frogs' in the bathroom), but virtually every other as well. The scene on the train, for example, after the decidedly <i>anti</i>-romantic loss of her virginity at age 15, displays Joe's completely promiscuous nature, her complete disavowal of all social standards in her pursuit of pleasure ('she is not ashamed of her shamelessness' (Ibid., p.228)). The competition between her and her friend 'B' is to copulate with as many men as possible until the train reached its destination, and the winner receives the rather meaningless prize of a bag of candy, which is meaningless because the sex is the end in itself: 'The [Prostitute] is ready to yield herself to any man who stimulates her erotic desires; that is her only object'. (Ibid., p.220) Joe manifests her deceitful nature most openly and cleverly through her manipulation of her sexual lovers, just as a Mother type would manipulate a more accomplished man into marriage purely for the benefit of her children; Joe continually fakes having 'first orgasms', pretends to love men, and even decides on how to respond to her various lovers based on the throwing of dice ('Cunning, calculation, "cleverness", are much more usual and constant in the woman than in the man, if there is a personal, selfish end in view.... One of the deepest problems of woman is her absolute duplicity' (Ibid., p. 253, 260)). There is no individuality, no personal relations in her affairs; everything is conditioned by her insatiable appetite, which prevents her from attaining real personhood.<br />
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When in college, Joe and B form a club called 'The Little Flock'. This was the first sign of the underlying satanic nature of Joe's doings, as the club ritualistically inverted the Catholic mass; instead of Christ's body they celebrated their own (<i>mea vulva, mea maxima vulva</i>), and instead of sharing in the spirit they shared in the flesh, masturbating amongst one another. The use of the tri-tone, historically associated with the demonic (it was called the 'devil's note', as any Black Sabbath fan knows), completes the 'black mass'. The purpose of the group beyond this was a rebellion against love: 'we were committed to combat the love-fixated society'. No member was allowed to sleep with a man more than once, which eventuates in B's falling out with Joe, but not before telling her that 'the secret ingredient to sex, is love'. The club disintegrates as all but the strongest fall away into normal society; Joe remains individually dedicated to the principles of The Little Flock, for she is nearest to the absolute W. She singly represents the symbolic import of the club's founding ethos and its praxis, which is the anti-hierarchical domination of the spiritual by the natural, of form being moulded by matter: '[The] relationship between male and female is by nature such that the male is higher, the female lower, that the male rules and the female is ruled' (Aristotle, <i>Politics</i>, 1254b). That this is inverted by Joe's relations with men, whereupon she assumes the higher role, displays the extent of her psychic disorder:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'[The results of woman's emancipation] have been the degeneration of the feminine type even in her somatic characteristics, the atrophy of her natural possibilities, the suppression of her unique inner life. Hence the types of the woman-<i>garconne </i>and the shallow and vain woman, incapable of any elan beyond herself, utterly inadequate so far as sensuality and sinfulness are concerned because to the modern woman the possibilities of physical love are not as interesting to the narcissistic cult of her body.... Now when a woman, before consecrating herself to a man, pretends that he belongs to her body and soul, not only has she already "humanized" and impoverished her offering, but worse yet, she has begun to betray the pure essence of femininity in order to borrow characteristics of the male nature - and possibly the lowest of these: the yearning to possess and lay claims over another person, and the pride of the ego... Eventually, because of woman's increased egocentrism, men will no longer be of interest to her; she will only care about what they will be able to offer to satisfy her pleasure or her vanity.' (Evola, p. 164-5)</blockquote>
Joe therefore also typifies the 'modern, emancipated woman', which we will have to discuss in some other article, as what LvT might be saying about modern society as a whole rather than one particular human being is too vague at this point. What Evola remarks on comes true for Joe, as her incessant sexual adventures have rendered her joyless and loveless. Leaving college, Joe happens to work for the man to whom she lost her virginity some years ago, Jerôme. After an initial, surprising, and highly meaningful rejection, Joe comes to feel something for Jerôme, and it is essential to recall exactly what she says of him: 'I could suddenly see a kind of order in the mess.... I wanted to be one of Jerôme's things. I wanted to be picked up, and put down, again and again. I wanted to be treated by his hands according to some sophisticated principle that I could not understand'. This is one of those rare moments in the film where Joe shows her <i>positive </i>femininity, that is femininity undisturbed by its own cthonic nature, femininity ameliorated by its relation with masculinity. Joe finally succumbs to something higher; she, as matter is defined by form, succumbs to Jerôme who, most likely due to the fact that he was the one who took her virginity and therefore 'owned her' in a certain primal sense, enacts the male principle of order, 'some sophisticated principle that [woman] could not understand'.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGEYwVn_8CSIhjD5s_cv5DSD0fZX4qOiiM39jaC67Ig3AX8KxGj224YvS6EPkUiW8PKMw9Sl9iZUVx70JC5oKlIWRnOmuVqihZwyKJbRveeVLH7tp7nmXb4ex4Oeb7s8zL9jaQH9gzwEwT/s1600/Nymphomaniac-008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGEYwVn_8CSIhjD5s_cv5DSD0fZX4qOiiM39jaC67Ig3AX8KxGj224YvS6EPkUiW8PKMw9Sl9iZUVx70JC5oKlIWRnOmuVqihZwyKJbRveeVLH7tp7nmXb4ex4Oeb7s8zL9jaQH9gzwEwT/s1600/Nymphomaniac-008.jpg" height="192" width="320" /></a>By the wildest coincidence (LvT frequently foregoes realism to present a more pressing point, such as Uma Thurman's cameo role as a hyperbolic mother character whose family has been destroyed by Joe's manipulations: 'Would it be alright if I showed the children the whoring bed?'), Joe comes across Jerôme again some time later, and they instantly become intimate. The sex scene is the most intensely romantic of the film so far; there is passionate kissing, and a frenetic energy that suggests a will to union beyond the physical. The problem, however, is that Joe soon realizes that she 'doesn't feel anything'. Her constant infidelity and unremitting pursuit of satisfying her desire has entirely desensitized her to the act, and precisely when it is most important: B's final words, the secret ingredient, become impractical because sex has become utterly compromised by its physical aspect. There can be no synthesis of love and lust upon the isolation of one from the other: 'The external union, earthly and in particular physical, does not possess any specific relation to love.... It is necessary for love, not as its indispensable condition and independent end, but only as its final realization. If this realization is set as the end in itself, ahead of the ideal concern of love, it ruins the love' (Vladimir Solovyov, <i>The Meaning of Love</i>, p. 64). In Joe's case, she cannot obey both masters, because she is already enslaved to the one by her youthful consecrations to purely somatic delights. When she finally does experience something resembling love, she cannot fully enjoy it because of her disconnect between the two masters; the 'secret ingredient' means nothing to her, because she has already severed the link between love and sex, and therefore precluded the potentiality of their ever being truly entwined. This is perfectly epitomized in the scene after she tries to make love with Jerôme in which Joe tries to masturbate and, still feeling nothing, proceeds to hit her vagina as though it were a physical problem and not a psycho-spiritual one.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'The [Prostitute], for whom the act is everything, the compression and end of all life, is never satisfied, never to be satisfied, were she visited by all the men in the world'. (Weininger, p. 232)</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5VyuGm080vsSdeGh2iLoM7CicHLvbGtyiF09yxfd_MotOWwjbfEO8wbGkonrvri4vpgzF6JvqN-wMbmYxJCojKb5JBDO_rQN4olisgYZeehPZ9Bn5557_zR1AI-et9c3gf1A1kEWlz1Mz/s1600/nymphomaniac-volume-2-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5VyuGm080vsSdeGh2iLoM7CicHLvbGtyiF09yxfd_MotOWwjbfEO8wbGkonrvri4vpgzF6JvqN-wMbmYxJCojKb5JBDO_rQN4olisgYZeehPZ9Bn5557_zR1AI-et9c3gf1A1kEWlz1Mz/s1600/nymphomaniac-volume-2-1.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a>This was the turning point of Joe's story at which she finally has some elementary level of introspection; 'fill all my holes', she says to Jerôme during sex, craving not only physical fulfillment, of course, but <i>complete </i>existential fulfillment as she realizes her emptiness more and more. Unable to keep up with her, Jerôme actually comes up with the idea of getting him 'some help with the feeding'. Joe soon returns to her polyamorous lifestyle, even as she births Jerôme's son, Marcel. Then, <i>still </i>unsatisfied, she searches for more extreme alternatives to restore her earlier sensations, like the drug addict who takes stronger and stronger doses in the futile effort to recreate his original high. This leads eventually to masochism, which is the nadir of W's sexual devolution insofar as she can no longer acquire pleasure through pleasure, but through indirect, demented means, namely pleasure through <i>pain</i>. Joe lubricates before even getting struck, which, as the film clearly explains, is meaningful in that her body thinks that it will be having intercourse when she knows in her mind that she will not be. Any pretense of love, even the vaguest pretense which the simple act of man copulating with women provides, is now dispensed with in her descent into perversion, which is the complete denial of the other: 'At the root of all forms of perversion is self-love, the utilization of another, who... is seen as no more than an instrument for one's pleasure (or pain)' (Vladimir Moss, <i>The Theology of Eros</i>, p. 123). The perception of Joe as Prostitute is also at its most transparent at this time. As she must go out at night, staying at the sadist's place between 2 and 6 A.M., Joe is sometimes forced to abandon her son. One night, Jerôme comes home to find Marcel exposed on the apartment balcony and then confronts Joe when she returns; reminiscent of <i>Antichrist</i>, the mother is again distracted by sex as her child is at risk. Faced with Jerôme's ultimatum of choosing her family or her sexual longings, Joe has no choice at all, and rips herself from her son in a wash of tears. In the choice between stimulating her own wants and those of her blood, there is zero confusion on the part of the Prostitute:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'The absolute mother, who thinks only about the child, would become a mother by any man.... The absolute prostitute, on the other hand, even when she is still a child, dislikes children; later on, she may pretend to care for them as a means to attract men through the idea of mother and child. She is the woman whose desire is to please all men....' (Weininger, p. 221)</blockquote>
Now constantly bleeding from her orifices due to the constant beatings and other abuse she subjected herself to over the years, Joe eventually puts her sexual experience and knowledge to use as a debt collector. This is where she perfects her sadistic side, though it is doubtful that she enjoys it like she did any of her earlier exploits; this new, more direct power over men is not unwelcome, but it fails to excite her in the same way that subtly ruling men excited her by means of more feminine devices. This is as far as we can go in the plot for the present, and the main ways in which Joe exemplifies the Woman and Prostitute types are, at any rate, now exhausted.<br />
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So far all that we have told does not occur in the present, but in the form of a series of flashbacks that the present Joe is telling as her life story. The film actually opens with an atheistic Jew by the name of Seligman finding Joe, who is unconscious and lying in the street. Though covered in cuts and bruises, she denies Seligman's offer to call an ambulance, though not his invitation to come to his place for tea. So, while Joe is telling the story we just highlighted to Seligman (who happens to be a virgin), the film continually cuts back to the present to reveal how both of them think of what is happening. LvT normally makes his male characters auxiliary pieces in the drama, and that is no different here, as Seligman's role is simply to offer learned digressions that sometimes help us understand Joe's narrative in a mythical and symbolic light, or are simply that, useless digressions that mean nothing, that are simply the virginal Seligman's attempts to contextualize in a way that he understands things in which he has zero experience. So, digressions like making apt but apparently meaningless fishing allegories out of Joe's train ride seductions, or relating the knots which the sadist K used to tie Joe up to a random invention where a mountaineer creates a knot that saves his life ('that was your weakest digression yet', Joe says), add nothing to our understanding of Joe, but they <i>do</i> add something to our understanding of Seligman, whose life seemingly consists of nothing but learning and loneliness.<br />
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At other times, however, Seligman's learning offers a tremendous help, especially if the viewer is ignorant of mythical data and how to extract it from the film's narrative and imagery. LvT is unique in that he actually takes pains to explain a lot of these more obscure elements in his films, and yet leaves plenty of room in which we can look for ourselves as to how these symbols are connected and what they reveal about the idea of the film. It is Seligman who brings to our attention that what the 'Vacuum Cleaner', the pianist in The Little Flock's black mass liturgies, is playing is actually the tritone, the 'devil's note'. In relating her memory or waking dream of levitating off the field, and having two women on either side of her, it is Seligman who notes who they are: Messalina, the notoriously promiscuous wife of Emperor Claudius, and the Whore of Babylon. Her ascent off the grass is a flagrant mockery of Christ's transfiguration. In the birth of Marcel, too, Joe, who feels like the child is not even her own (this is telling both of the Prostitute type and of satanic lore), tells Seligman that she felt as though the child was laughing when she first sees him. Seligman informs her that this was a sign of Antichrist. All of this reinforces the implicit intimacy that exists between Joe's nature and behaviour, and the activity of Satan; old texts of Church Fathers are recalled in which woman is identified as a conduit for evil, a medium through which Satan acts:<br />
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'You are the devil's gateway; you are she who violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God. It was you who coaxed your way around him whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: Man! Because of the death you merited, even the Son of God had to die.... Woman, you are the gate to hell.' (Tertullian, *On the Apparel of Women*)</blockquote>
This connection is hardly unintended. Through all of the implications and references made thus far, LvT clearly designed that we should conceive of woman's diabolical potential. In Weininger's dualistic system, though he explicitly denies that women have any spiritual agency ('the prostitute is no diabolic destroyer of the idea, but only a corrupter of empirical phenomena' (Weininger, p. 234), that woman is related with object and matter is to equate her with the 'demiurgic' reality, that is to say the temporal realm that has no actuality except inasmuch as it receives actuality from the eternal realm, the 'world of ideas'. This is symbolically construed in satanic terms, for Satan represents the rebellion of non-being against being, of nothingness against <i>somethingness</i>; W's negative nature, her intrinsically material nature, precludes her from the life of the spirit and associates her with the anti-life of the adversary. Joe continually reflects these imaginations as she refuses to desist in the wild embrace of her lowest impulses, despite the obvious harm that she is causing amongst those around her and eventually even herself.<br />
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Simply because they are peripheral, however, does not mean that LvT's male characters are not essential. Joe's father, for instance, provides an important part of the drama in that he is virtually the only thing about her that is untainted by her sexual feelings. When he is teaching her about the trees in the forest, about how the ash trees are the most beautiful of all the trees, there is a fragment of <br />
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innocence that survives throughout the film as a single preserved memory of a non-sexual state. That Joe has not found her 'soul tree' as her father did is crucial in her character development; she has not matured enough to the point where she is able to discern what her soul looks like, because it is not quite yet winter for her. Her father explains: 'It's actually the souls of the trees that we see in the winter.... They do look like human souls. Twisted souls, regular souls, crazy souls; all depending on the kind of lives human beings lead'. This is the closest that the film comes to enunciating a specifically Christian or at least Socratic perspective, describing that our inner life is shaped by our outer life (and vice versa).<br />
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Seligman, too, offers something besides both his useful and his useless learning. As Joe unleashes her existential burdens upon him, unafraid now to admit guilt and responsibility for all the hurt that she has inflicted, Seligman offers a sounding board for Joe's confessions; he does more than listen and bolster what she says with intellectual insights, he tries to soften her shame (for it is shame at the present, shame at her lifetime of shamelessness) with the sentimentality of the modern ethos which ultimately deems no one morally culpable. Whenever Joe explains how much evil she has done, how much others have suffered on her account, Seligman tries to counter with an unconvincing apology for her. In an early scene, for instance, after a passenger on the train (who bails the two girls out from paying for their train tickets) denies their initial seductions, Joe presses him further, learns that the man is saving his semen for this particular night, when the doctor says it is likeliest for his wife to be able to conceive. Joe presses him further, oblivious to the man's greater arc, and he is unable to resist as she gives him head, thereby stealing that precious energy which he was preserving for this very night. Seligman supplies the half-witted argument that the semen dies if it stays within for too long, and so the couple might very well have a thriving child of their own after all. This is typical of his persistent attempts to wean away her guilt, and it is typical of our modern irresponsibility, of our utter failure to assume accountability, regardless of what the other circumstances might involve.<br />
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Finale (major spoilers henceforth)</h4>
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<i>At this moment, my addiction is very clear to me....</i></div>
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The first chapter of <i>Nymphomaniac'</i>s second volume is called The Western and the Eastern Church, an idea that opens up an endless number of possible interpretations, but which most importantly introduces the religious reality, which will be essential for our understanding of the film's foremost conceptions. Seligman explains to Joe that going East from Rome is like leaving a world of 'guilt and pain towards joy and light'. Joe inquires: 'But you said you didn't believe in God'. Seligman answers: 'Ah but the concept of religion is interesting, like the concept of sex. But you won't find me on my knees with regard to either'. This as much as anything else displays the fundamental divide between the two characters, a divide deeper even than their respective sexual proclivities. Seligman and Joe are opposites in the realm of innocence and experience, of abstract opinions and lived realities; Seligman knows what he knows from reading about something, Joe from <i>living through</i> something. Seligman cannot believe in something so real as God or act in something so real as sex, because his flaw is a cowardly indifference to the world, the very opposite sin of Joe's, which is well and truly articulated by now.<br />
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LvT does not make obscure his own conviction as to which is superior, to try and fail or to not try at all, and he publishes it in two dramatic ways. The first consists of Joe's first attempts to cure her addiction, which, according to the addicts anonymous club she is forced to attend, do not make her different from them; they are all the same insofar as they are all addicts, that they are all <i>alike</i>. She is told by the leader to rid herself of anything which reminds her of sex, which of course includes just about everything; we see her tape all of the door knobs, the tub handles, plaster the windows with newspapers, paint over the mirror, wearing heavy mittens. She turns to her book of leaves to distract herself from anything sexual, to remind of her only innocent memories, but she fails when she licks her fingers to turn the pages. When she returns to one of the meetings, prepared to tell of how she is a sex addict and how she has achieved abstinence for a few weeks, she suddenly sees herself as a child in the mirror, and is reminded of her real nature. She tears up her notes, and furiously erupts as her real self comes to the foreground: 'I am definitely not like you', she says to the leader, 'That empathy you claim is a lie. Because all you are is society's morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick. I am not like you. I am a nymphomaniac, and I love myself for being one.' Beyond this added validation of her shamelessness in the manner of the Prostitute, she identifies strongly with her nature at the expense of conforming to social standards; the false morality projected by an AA authority scratches merely the surface of the problem, when what is needed is a sincerely interior transformation. The AA leader is a believer in abstractions like Seligman, while Joe, the human subject, has to live on the front lines.<br />
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The second way that LvT shows this happens when Joe is doing her debt collecting work. There is this one man who will not pay, no matter how much he is threatened or how much of his property is destroyed. So Joe tries to infiltrate his sexual life, tries to detect some kind of vulnerability. She removes his pants and launches a series of particularly perverted sexual stories, seeing which might arouse him and therefore expose his weakness. It is only on the last effort, however, as Joe tells of a little boy who wants to go home with the man, that his member starts to ascend. Joe moves in for the kill, and finally forces him to concede, saying that he will pay if she simply stops talking about it. Then Joe astonishingly performs fellatio on the man, at which point Seligman interjects, utterly bemused: 'You did what?' (This is one of the rare occasions where he comes close to <i>judging </i>her.) 'I took pity on him', she responds. 'This is a man who succeeded in repressing his own desire.... He had lived a life full of denial, and had never hurt a soul.' Seligman refuses to comprehend this, while Joe, with her own experiences, is perfectly capable of empathising with a man who was able to do what she could not: control his sexual desire. She shows him genuine empathy, while the AA 'morality police' leader and the bookish Seligman cannot because they only know what they are taught in abstractions, removed from human existence.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbQGT6Ic6OVJXwHcoAtXYfB8WT49RifZhHkTcc-dqZLCUsE6Ht6ZYHeME5GcH4eQWGyLuh4vaYYfIn5EN6Bl-8XR4vzPNUr6d6E4Me5TFVsyywy8qrz0GqT4ir3GCOUQbnqsQUTACJMky2/s1600/1387385396762_0570x0320_1387385429240.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbQGT6Ic6OVJXwHcoAtXYfB8WT49RifZhHkTcc-dqZLCUsE6Ht6ZYHeME5GcH4eQWGyLuh4vaYYfIn5EN6Bl-8XR4vzPNUr6d6E4Me5TFVsyywy8qrz0GqT4ir3GCOUQbnqsQUTACJMky2/s1600/1387385396762_0570x0320_1387385429240.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a>As he says himself at one point, Seligman's name means 'happiness', something which is obviously not irrelevant; that there is also a behavioural psychologist by the same name who teaches a kind of therapeutic happiness is possibly also of importance. The irony is that, despite his saying otherwise, Seligman is <i>not </i>happy; he cannot be happy because he cannot broach the outside world. Having retreated inside his own personal space, lacking family and friends, he has not even really explored his inner life either. He is not happy, but he is not exactly unhappy either: he does not know happiness as either an affirmation or a negation because his fear of uncharted territory prevents him from learning about it. So he learns about life from the safety of a library. So he forms the opposite end of the dialectic with Joe, whose intense unhappiness is the result of demanding more from life, from demanding 'more from the sunset'.<br />
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Joe says that her path does not, as Seligman said of the one leaving Rome, grow in joy and light, but the opposite, toward the suffering of the Western Church, and so it does. In her position as a debt collector, Joe is compelled to take on a successor, 'P', a young, lonely girl with a deformed ear who she must love as a daughter in order to maximize her protege's love for her. They end up sharing a homosexual relationship in a perverted mockery of a real mother-daughter connection, or of real friendship. To accelerate the plot, on one bit of business, another one of LvT's unbelievable coincidences materializes: the debtor whom they must collect from is none other than Jerôme. Taken by surprise, both at the fact that it was Jerôme and the bubbling forth of some feeling for him, she insists that P do her first job, and that she doesn't 'want anybody hurt'. Moving along, Joe discovers Jerôme and P have arranged their own sexual partnership, and she removes herself from the city, travelling through nature alone. It is winter now, both seasonally and existentially: Joe finds her soul-tree. It is crooked, narrow, and slanted with minimal limbs - and it is alone. Atop the mountain, her soul tree stands aloof from everything else, precisely as she has been her entire life. We recall when Joe tells of a childhood operation: 'It was as if I had to pass through an impenetrable gate all by myself. It was as if I was completely alone in the universe, as if my whole body was filled with loneliness and tears.' Now that her old lover and her pseudo-daughter were involved together, Joe feels more alone than ever, and she enters her winter, when the soul becomes visible - in all of its defects.<br />
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Returning to the city, Joe plans to kill Jerôme, and possibly P as well; having found her soul tree and come face to face with her inmost self, she decides that she has no option now but to follow through on her newest desire, which is the destruction of a human being. In failing to rack her gun, however, which Seligman supposes was indicative of her subconscious desire to <i>not </i>murder her former love, Jerôme beats Joe in the street, then humiliates her by making love to P in the exact same way as he took her virginity: thrusting three times in the front, five times from the rear (both numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, Seligman uselessly points out). P then completes the embarrassment by urinating on Joe, who lies there until Seligman finds her. Whether Seligman is right in that Joe never truly meant to kill Jerôme or that it was simply chance, in either event she is unable to achieve what she thought she desired; for once she has come up empty, and it means everything.<br />
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The problem with Weininger, for all of the genius shown here and elsewhere, is that his is not the full vision of the Christian Church, but something closer to the dualistic worldview of the Manichean; he cannot view matter as something inherently good as the orthodox Christian does, so in his equation of W with matter she is also equated with something inherently negative. Nikolai Berdyaev, though full of praise for Weininger, also <a href="http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1909_157_4.html">corrects him</a>: 'If Weininger were to have come to the Christian consciousness through modern philosophy, he would then have surmounted this dualism, and his spiritualism would become monistic, not denying the flesh, but spiritising rather the flesh'. The truth is that M and W are opposed as principles, but not as mortal enemies; W has a reality of her own, separate from that of M, even if she can never have the same subjective and intellectual strength and his level of individuation. Woman is still matter, but matter that has the potential for growth and redemption, matter that is <i>good</i>; she is not necessarily the 'gateway to hell', as Tertullian would have it, but often one's help to heaven; W is not only Medusa or Calypso, but Penelope and Beatrice as well. Weininger says: 'No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them' (Weininger, p.236). It is clear that LvT has thought a lot about woman, and while he certainly shares a a good deal of Weininger's pessimism about the sex, he also posits her as possessing a resolute independence, certainly different from that of man, but also having her own qualities that are <i>not </i>purely negative. Actually, so far as <i>Nymphomaniac </i>is concerned, Weininger's maxim is reversed: we are initially repulsed by the actions of Joe as we would be repulsed by those of the lowest, most deceitful and blasphemous whore, but as the story progresses, and as we learn more of her inner character, we finally come to sympathize or possibly <i>empathize </i>with her in a way which would never have thought possible. We have <i>seen </i>woman, and we rejoice with her as fellow tragic pilgrims in the human experiment.<br />
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Joe moves toward Rome from her once lofty illusions about the rebellion of lust against love; she realizes more and more her own shame and thereby sublimates more of the Prostitute into what we might call a third, 'inorganic' type, one which we mature to rather than are born with, a type we might as well call the 'Forgiven'. Where Seligman would have her move toward the Church of 'joy and light', and therefore celebrate who she is no matter <i>what </i>she is, Joe is more honest, and metaphorically crawls toward the Church of suffering and pain, the Church which emphasizes the <i>crucifixion </i>in its icons. By finding her soul-tree, by being utterly vanquished in the street, beaten and humiliated like the Christ, and by sharing her confessions to Seligman as she would to a priest, Joe experiences a kind of sacramental relief in which her burdens are lifted; all those symbolic associations with the Whore of Babylon and with the mother of Antichrist are long forgotten as Joe fights off her last demons. Seligman's final argument, a pathetic string of feministic cliches about how her struggles have been the result of male oppression, are shrugged off by Joe, who, though 'predisposed to knock holes in [his] arguments', is simply too tired (thus representing a superiority of knowledge, a peaceful transcending of Seligman's faulty dialectic). Before falling asleep, however, she says with the utmost clarity:<br />
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'At this moment, my addiction is very clear to me, and I have come to a decision: even though only one in a million, as my dubious therapist said, succeed in mentally, bodily, and in her heart ridding herself of her sexuality, this is now my goal.... It's the only way I can live [my life]. I will struggle against all odds, just like a deformed tree on a hill.'</blockquote>
This is the ultimate confession of the Prostitute turned into the Forgiven, or more simply the Sinner turned into the Redeemed. That she really means this is obvious, for, immediately after expressing her burning gratitude for not being a murderer, she kills Seligman for trying to steal what thousands had already tasted. She would rather be a murderer than surrender what is now her only reason to live. Seligman, for once in his life, strayed outside of his comfort zone, and was abruptly punished for it: he cannot have what he has not been allowed to have. While his story ends in the swift flash of a gunshot, Joe's story, in which her newfound sanctification and precious sense of self-worth have given her a reason to live, is just beginning. For the human life, even the <i>woman's</i> life, starts not with a corrupted nature and ends in it; we live in sin, but we are redeemed by grace. This is what makes Nymphomaniac a more hopeful film, and this is what makes it a more than satisfying conclusion to the 'Depression' trilogy. LvT leaves us not with something unbearably distressing; he leaves us with the surprising prospects of recovery and redemption; he leaves us with the possibility that even those who demand more from the sunset might actually receive it, even if it comes in surprising new forms.<br />
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-33265412972726782342015-02-09T20:11:00.000-08:002015-02-09T20:11:51.588-08:00Across the River (working title for my dumb stupid gay novel)PROLOGUE<br />
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The hard, malevolent rain slammed into the river like so many stones freed from their mountainous moorings. Illuminated only by the distant light of a sun struggling beyond a carpet of clouds, the black water swelled beneath this late Summer tempest. Far from being discouraged by the storm, the river rejoiced in its newfound source, crying out with an inexhaustible energy after being oppressed for months by a demagogic sun. The shackles of the season were being loosed, and the bold currents sought to be the first to escape. No longer could the town's children free from school dive off of her cliffs into mild, temperate pools; no longer could picnicking families row their boats to the other side in search of Sunday idleness. The river embraced the approaching change, and smiled furiously as she rushed to nowhere in particular.<br />
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Michael Leitner, however, was not smiling, nor was he furious. What characterized his expression as he watched the river drive endlessly on was closer to a despairing grimace -a pained, empty, lost grimace that denoted slow, passive suffering rather than open agony or torment. It was the face of nothingness, a lively soul given over to a nervous disquiet and a waste of unfeeling. It was not a mask, but a direct image of what really was within him. It was moreover demarcated by that unmistakable mark of heartless derision, that cool perception of his surroundings with blank yet keenly observant eyes. For though he could not claim to receive power from an abundance of life, he could very well receive it from an <i>absence </i>of life - a greater, more malignant power, seemingly, for life is vulnerable where death is invincible.<br />
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This is not to say that Michael despised life, that he stood there with hate in his eyes and his lips creased by scorn; he was not predisposed to hatred, for he was not predisposed to feeling at all. Life had given him nothing, so he felt obliged to give nothing in return. The world before him was a blank space, a wilderness of meaning, a collision of colours and shapes and ideas, but it was still just a place, some strange place little identity and less order. If there were some architect on high, his design must be inspired by indifference, or created through malice; there could be no other reason for this reality if not a fundamental boredom or wicked sadism on the part of its maker. For why else manufacture a universe where the only constant is change, where sentience is its own torture, where violence is rewarded while peace is so terribly finite? The only good, it often occurred to Michael Leitner, is that life itself is finite, that we are mercifully relieved of our duty here in time - if we can bear the time.<br />
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The rain and the thick, ghostly fog rising from the water conspired to obscure the one shore from the other, but it was not a very wide river and the outline of a troop of trees could be vaguely made out on the other side. They towered imperiously over the landscape, great, stern evergreens looking sagely across the river. Between their trunks dwelled softer undergrowth, lowly leafy minions, all manner of subordinates to the forest; upon their strong, extended limbs several legions of underlings made their homes, raising their children and storing food for the future. <i>To what end?</i><br />
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Michael's unkempt chestnut hair was now thoroughly blackened, sticking to his scalp; torrents of water streamed down his cheeks. He quietly reveled in this, inwardly welcoming the assault as he was smothered by the rain. This is where he came to be alone, to retreat from the perpetual barrage of questions, complaints, exhortations, and well-wishes of whoever it was that claimed to know him. He usually walked here in the middle of the night, stumbling along beneath the moonlight, but this storm served him just as well; nobody would be here in this weather; he was alone. He experienced a kind of dark euphoria, an ecstatic release from previous pains and responsibilities that weighed on him.<br />
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He had already been enrolled in post-secondary education for four years, but Michael had completed not even a half of his program in all that time - a program that is supposed to be completed within four years, or at least five. Between dropping classes, failing classes, and simply not going to classes, his student life suffered accordingly, and he barely managed to sustain a sufficient GPA to to remain in school. His few scholarships having dried up long ago, Michael's schooling was provided for by his affluent family, who fortunately knew little of the extent of his mediocre academic efforts. By this point, however, Michael no longer cared much about the success or lack thereof of his education; he was resolutely and irredeemably <i>bored</i>, and thought next to nothing of what happened to him next.<br />
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Michael's work experience looked equally bleak. Unable to persevere for more than a few months at any which job, his resume was littered with numerous employments, none of which had paid him much more than minimum wage, and none of which proved satisfying on any level other than procuring a bit of pocket money. They consisted either of retail positions, which he could not abide for their orientation around dealing with irate, fastidious, and generally unsavoury customers, or menial labour, which invariably dulled him to the point of walking out of a job in the middle of a shift. Michael often pondered entering a life of criminal activity; it seemed to offer at least a glimpse of something exciting, though he had no idea how to get into it given that what few friends he had were nowhere near those circles prone to acting outside the law. This was probably for the best, too, as Michael doubted he possessed the necessarily qualities for such a life. The same applied to applying to the military, whenever he considered doing so at any length.<br />
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There was a wooden rowboat docked on a small pier below where Michael stood. It was used to bear families to the other side of the river on clear Summer days. There had been several occasions, however, when it was taken by inebriated or otherwise impetuous teens and returned in a state of dramatic disrepair, if it was returned at all. Nevertheless, this neighborhood was under the stewardship of perhaps a dozen men who belonged to a fading genteel class, and they obstinately ensured by their own hands that there was always a boat available in the Spring and Summer months. They were working men, that was clear, and yet they exuded a sense of nobility that belied their blue-collar mannerisms and dress.<br />
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Michael admired that. Michael admired that because he envied them. He had grown up here, in this rural community; he had served as a farm hand, had made his best friends playing street hockey, had nursed a crush on the pastor's daughter that lasted almost throughout grade school. He knew everyone here, and everyone knew him, but when he looked at the men of his father's generation he felt that he did not know them at all. They possessed something that he did not, something that divided him from them. While Michael did not know exactly what that was, he knew that he suffered from its absence, and <i>yearned </i>for it to be fulfilled.<br />
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Nobody inspired Michael's admiration and envy more than his own father, Richard Leitner. While he was certainly one of the wealthier people in their town, nobody questioned that Richard had earned his position; he had been a plumber his whole life and now owned the most successful company in that field outside of the city. He had worked for his wealth; he was an honest man, a respected man who had no want for friends either at home or abroad. In a word, Richard epitomized the American ideal of the self-made man: strong, charitable, financially independent, and the owner of a hardy work ethic. He seemed to step right out of a family film made in the 50's, except that his qualities of self-assurance and communal fealty were not the products of a parochial cinematic idealization demanded by popular opinion; they were real.<br />
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There was one memory that was indelibly imprinted upon his consciousness. It was from when he was ten or eleven years old, and his father was picking him up from school On the way home, however, they passed a friend who was putting up a fence around his property in an effort to protect a new garden he was planting. Richard knew the man, of course, but they were not particularly close; it would infact be nearer to the truth to say that they were acquaintances rather than friends. This did not stop him from pulling over and insisting on helping to finish the job, despite Michael's open agitations to go home. Instead, Richard gave Michael the option of helping as well, or taking some money to go get a pop from down the road. Michael took the bill, and hated himself for it ever since.<br />
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So far as he could tell, then, this division between himself and those whom he most admired consisted in his more acute sense of self, or possibly his more <i>avaricious </i>sense of self. Whereas a man like Richard Leitner can find it in him to go out of his way to perform an act of service on some selfless whim, his son, who at heart wants nothing more than to follow suit, is at a loss to so much as embrace a fellow human being. Michael felt so immersed in his own psyche that he sometimes figured that there was nothing outside of it; his understanding of the world beyond was filtered through a twisted lens which distorted the image into something that no longer had autonomy of its own because its entire meaning consisted in how it related to <i>himself alone</i>.<br />
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Reality seemed to be one magnificent dream, alive with a splendour of symbols and images that transmitted messages to him, but which he could never relay in return, which he could never respond to. He wondered what it was like to step beyond himself, to extend a hand and help someone to his feet. A sharp wave of terror passed over Michael; he shivered beneath the warm Summer rain. He thought abstractly of the sun high above, of its failure to pierce through the canopy of clouds that hid him from its great heat. He thought of the sunless sky as one limitless expanse, a field at war with itself in its twisted overgrowth; he thought of the sun's death.<br />
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Michael blundered his way in the horrifying half-light down to the rowboat. The seats were soaked, naturally, but so was he; his clothes clung to him heavily, weighing him down. He worried at the knots, his grip almost futile against the slimy cords which adhered to one another in a dark, damp conspiracy to hold tight. Michael eventually managed to loosen them, cursing out loud all the while; his mood was steadily declining after his earlier euphoria in the deluge. His grimace grew deeper, his eyes seeming to sink further inside their sockets, burrowing away from the world beyond.<br />
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The boat was soon free of the knots, however, and Michael pushed off from the pier. At first he did not bother rowing; he simply sat there, absent-mindedly holding the roars aloft, allowing the river to take him wherever it would. Michael listened to the thunder roaring distantly, ferociously, as though threatening to devour the earth. He submitted idly to its power, closing his eyes as he visualized the sound as some pagan god's ravenous growling. He sat there listening, supposing that if he were too weak to pray, to talk to God, perhaps God would talk to him.<br />
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Michael finally pushed the oars into the water and started to row back upstream. Thinking of God always troubled him. The idea of an omnipotent, benevolent being seemed at once tremendously ridiculous and the most logical idea of all. All matter, all human and animal behaviour, all apparent reality pointed at both God's truth and his farce; surely a being that massive, that important would communicate more intelligibly and more directly the fact of his existence than this treasure hunt he's left our meagre humanity. But then, what else could reside at the depths of this beautiful, bountiful, <i>broken </i>cosmos than a divine fount? What else could sustain these sights, these sounds, these thoughts if not an almighty God? Should our image be of ourselves rather than of God, what else would we be if not isolated, wandering deserters floating vaguely upon some random rock?<br />
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The cold seared through Michael, who shivered mercilessly. Somehow the idea of God's existence frightened him more than the supposition that he was a complete counterfeit. For if God were infact a fact, that would only confirm Michael's utter separation from him; he would be singularly estranged from something which ought to be the thing to which he is nearest. Moreover, if God did not exist, at least Michael could find consolation that he was no further away from God than anyone else; he could find comfort in solidarity with his fellow tragic brothers, with a godless mankind that really has no fundamental right to be here. Michael considered the possibility of an absolute good to be of infinitely greater horror than of no good at all, for good is necessarily accompanied by evil, and to be evil frightened Michael more than anything else he could ever imagine.<br />
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The current was stronger than it was normally at this time of year, but Michael managed to row his way back with some effort. By the time he returned to the point where he was once again in line with the pier, however, he was as drenched as could be and exhausted besides; he debated with himself whether to approach the other side or admit defeat and go home. Furiously, Michael decided the latter, and reclined into a renewed despair of bitter self-contempt. Nothing scarred him more than failing to accomplish what he had set out to accomplish - he was concealed beneath more of these scars than he could count, hiding his humanity like the tattoos of a muscle-bound prison fiend. He pitied himself, which only bolstered his contempt.<br />
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<i>This world will be engulfed by the sea, and I will be the first to drown.</i><br />
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Michael pulled up alongside the dock and hauled himself ashore. He started to tie the cords again, fidgeting angrily with them, but it was no use; his best knot would hold the boat there for no more than a couple hours. Michael kicked at his wooden vessel, allowing it to slip away down the river. He looked after it longingly, watching it fall away in the miserable mist as though it were his own soul abandoning him. Anguish, hate, hopelessness, envy and malice vied competitively with one another for domination: whichever won out, Michael was the loser. Where he had earlier been stranded by a total lack of feeling, presently Michael was overwhelmed by the entire arsenal of feeling that his beleaguered, tortured psyche had unleashed upon him.<br />
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Michael crawled his way up the slope, slipping wildly in the fresh mud. The rain continued to pour down; the thunder continued to shout. He wondered cynically where the lightning was: <i>would it be too much to have any light at all, even for an instant?</i> The evening sky only proceeded to darken, compelled by the fleeing sun, the dying sun. Michael gained solid ground above the river bank, and headed home. Feeling more pathetic and wretched than he had ever remembered, Michael made the following resolution to himself:<br />
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<i>If by the end of this school year, by the end of April, I have not made something of myself, if I have only entrenched my despair rather than alleviating it, if I have not found a home in this world, if I have not determined who I am, and finally if I have not created a meaning to live by I will have found one to die by. If I fail I will kill myself. </i><br />
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-21523096710184990612014-12-28T13:59:00.001-08:002014-12-28T13:59:57.080-08:00Freedom from Fate Pt. II: The Redeemed HeroWhere the Hellenic <i>weltanschauung </i>found its greatness and its vitality in the dynamic of man vs. gods, the finality of fate, and the triumph of tragedy, the Christian one finds its own in man's <i>moksha</i>, his overcoming of an ouroboric cosmos, and the reversal of death into eternal life; where the Christian dies to himself and the world in order to be re-integrated into redeemed man, the pagan dies only to be re-inserted into the world of becoming and the '<a href="http://johnpickard.co.uk/works/programmenotes/spindle-of-necessity/">Spindle of Necessity</a>'.<br />
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This difference partly derives from a fundamental disagreement over the nature of man, namely in regard to the doctrine of Original Sin. Because we have all inherited Adam's crime we are by default members of a fallen species, of a being less than what it was; but because of Christ's crucifixion we are also members of a <i>redeemed </i>species, which means we can be <i>more </i>than anything we ever were before: <i>felix culpa</i>, happy fault. For the pagan the tragedy was the fact of man's inevitable death, his incessant re-entry into a cosmos he cannot perfectly understand. Thus it was possible for Nietzsche, expressing the sad wisdom of the Greeks, to say to man: 'What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to <i>be</i>, to be <i>nothing</i>. But the second best for you is - to die soon' (<i>The Birth of Tragedy</i>).<br />
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For the Christian, however, <i>the tragedy already happened</i>; Adam partook of the forbidden knowledge, allowed sin to corrupt him, and therefore entered the world of death. We are living in the reality of that tragedy every day, but, because of Christ, we do not die in it. The victory of the Messiah consists in his triumph over death, his descent into hell, his destruction of sin's permanence in our soul, and therefore his redemption of man. His life is defined no longer by a bitter, heroic, futile defiance of fate but by an obedience to God and the pursuit of joy; the end for man is no longer death but life.<br />
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<i>The Holy Sinner</i> is not one of Thomas Mann's greatest books. It lacks the philosophic existentialism of <i>The Magic Mountain</i>, the bold familial honesty of <i>Buddenbrooks</i>, and the mythic grandeur of <i>Joseph and His Brothers</i>; but is also lacks their ambition, and does not deserve to be critiqued on the same metric as those books are. There is certainly a more amiable, lighthearted impression with this one, something that is generated by the proxy narrator, a Benedictine monk by the name of Clemens whose function in the story is to convey a sense of medieval historicity, which Mann good-naturedly satirizes. Poor pious Clemens, for example, is clearly uneasy when describing sexual events, which through Mann's playful prose come across as endearing rather than contemptuous, as it might otherwise if it were another, more draconian monastic brother.<br />
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There is little that is objectively historical about <i>The Holy Sinner</i>, of course, with its narrative ostensibly belonging to the Dark Ages but is nevertheless infused with chivalric elements of the medieval era (the original story belongs to the German poet <a href="http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07146c.htm">Hartmann von Aue</a>). This is consciously, <i>ironically </i>done, and is of no significance in relation to the broader point, which is to propose a suprahistorical myth that expresses a relevant truth to the contemporary reader. Mann's objective is to present modern questions through a medieval perspective, showing a human need for grace and forgiveness; this is so particularly from a German point of view in the aftermath of World War II, when the entire nation felt burdened from the calamity of the war, from bearing responsibility for it. Without bothering with some of Mann's anti-clerical points, which are typical of the modern novelist, we will extract from this text what is germane to our own subjects of fate and original sin and show that, while Mann is foolhardy in attacking the Christian institution, he is adept in articulating the Christian spirit.<br />
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The Holy Sinner bears in certain obvious respects a resemblance to <i>The Oedipus Cycle</i>. The hero, like Oedipus, is born of incest and is prophetically destined to perform the same perversity which created him. Like Jocasta, Mann's mother character Sibylla fails to subdue her love and compassion in sending her cursed son into exile rather than killing him, attaching a tablet detailing the wretched circumstances of how he had come to be to the raft that carried him to sea. So he is raised in the home of a fisherman and under the tutelage of a monastery, the Abbott of which recognizes in him a trace of latent greatness or some ordained mission. When Gregorious (the name given to the castaway by the monk who found him) leaves the monastery, however, it is not as a monastic himself as the Abbott had hoped, but as a young adventurer hoping to be knighted. He learns who he really is when the Abbott lets him read the tablet, but instead of seeking refuge in the cloister as he had hoped, Gregorious seeks all the more to venture into the world:<br />
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'I must seek [my parents] through all the world, until I find them and tell them that I will forgive them. Then will God forgive them, probably He is only waiting for that. But I, according to all that I know of divinity, I who am only a poor monster will through pardon win humanity.'</blockquote>
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The result of this departure, however, turns out to be devastatingly different. Using more trickery than a warrior's prowess, Gregorious is able to defeat a Duke who is besieging the city of Bruges in single combat, and relieves the kingdom thereby. He falls in love with the ruling Queen and marries her - the Queen who is none other than his own mother. Now, a key difference between Sophocles' story and Mann's rendition becomes plain. While Oedipus had no idea that the woman he had wived was also the woman who birthed him, Gregorious is keenly aware of that dual relationship as he daily reads his tablet, miserably weeping each time, confessing his sins privately but unable to cease doing them.<br />
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As a microcosm of humanity, an archetypal representation of fallen man, Mann's hero becomes something altogether more depraved and far less heroic than that of Sophocles; Gregorious takes a <br />
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long leap away from the Aristotelian ideal by admitting a serious flaw. This shows us how man is not merely a passive participant in original sin, a stigma or misfortune indelibly stamped on him through no fault of his own, but an actor in his own right; the fault comes by his own volition. This reinforces our comprehension of how man is more responsible in Christian cosmology; he is an active player, the principle determinant in what happens to him rather than exterior entities such as fortune or fate. Yes, man unwittingly bears original sin as he is born, but it is through his own actions that he is really burdened; the cross he bears is the accumulation of his failure rather than his inheritance.<br />
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In time, after the birth of two daughters, Sibylla comes to learn of her husband's real identity, and recognizes him as the 'dragon' in the dream she had after giving birth to Gregorious: the dragon which tore out of her womb only to return later and cause even greater pain. When her misery becomes too much for Gregorious to bear, the truth of it all comes out, and Gregorious finally confronts himself as 'a man sinful not only as all the world is but whose flesh and bones consist entirely in sin', and embarks to do penance worthy of his state. Through the assistance of a cynical fisherman who is distrusting of his humility, Gregorious imprisons himself on an island, where he lives for seventeen years, sustained only by a strange, mythical nourishment that comes out of the rock. He has thrown aside his own way in the world, of being monk or knight, and decided that his will shall be one with that of God - but is that not itself an act of will, to freely align human will with that of the Divine? God preserves Gregorious through a miraculous sustenance much like he preserved the Hebrews after they escaped Egypt with the manna that fell from Heaven.<br />
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Gregorious is eventually discovered by two Roman clergymen who have been shown prophetic visions of the future Pope, the saviour of Rome, but he has wasted away to the size of a 'hedgehog', and slipped off of the shackles which bound him. His humanity has fallen away, but with it has his sin as well, both that which was with him at birth and that which he confessed to God. Upon eating of the bread and wine, however, his first real meal in seventeen years, Gregorious partakes in the Eucharist, and therefore resumes the full form of humanity, his strength and size restored to health. Upon leaving Sibylla at the start of his penitence, Gregorious says: 'Not for naught have I studied Divinitatem in the cloister of God's Passion. I learned that He takes true contrition as atonement for all sins'.<br />
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To his mother he also advises: 'Then descend from your seat and practise humility.... [Have] an asylum built built from your jointure, on the high road, for the homeless, the old, the sickly, the halt and crippled. There shall you preside, in the grey robe, lave the sick, wash their wounds, bathe and cover them, and give to wandering beggars, washing their feet. I have naught against it if you take in beggars'. So Gregorious practises penance, performing the fullest form of faith that accords entirely with the will of God, allowing his life to be entirely in God's hands, whereas Sibylla practises humility, expressing her own penance through the performance of good works and seeking to salve her soul thereby.<br />
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That Gregorious becomes Pope, and a saintly Pope at that (we are ignoring some of Mann's liberties in poking fun at dogmatic Catholicism for our own purposes), expresses the converse of our agency in the world, the power and the freedom of our will: by choosing to ignore reality, to refuse facing the consequences of our actions, we are only pushing ourselves deeper into delusion and therefore strengthening sin. Doing something we know is wrong only worsens our situation, even if it seems to be the easier option. By acknowledging the debts that we owe, however, we approach the part that we play, our role in reality, and can therefore begin to <i>influence </i>it in a more constructive way. Genuine progress in the future can only occur by our understanding of, and atoning for, the past. Gregorious was dealt a poor hand, to be sure, but he made it worse by following through on the sin of incest out of a misplaced love; in fully recognizing that, and making up for it in his extreme contrition, he was introduced to a supreme joy and the life of a holy man, the life wholly ordered by God.<br />
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Again, we can juxtapose this with Sophocles. The character of Oedipus was one which was adversely affected by fate, by fortune, by things mostly beyond his control; he was born of incest, he killed his father whom he did not recognize, he married his mother whom he did not recognize. The gods, the world acted on him, and the only thing which he could do in response was to kill himself, to quit playing altogether. The weight of his tragedy was simply too much to bear so long as he continued to draw breath, so he shrugged it off via suicide, in accordance with what the gods wanted. The arguments of his companions were only words, small comforts through which he could not truly escape; there could only be one thing to do in his position, the only logical thing to do in pre-Christian civilization, and that was to die.<br />
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The character of Gregorious, on the other hand, was one which was equally affected by the cruelty of chance or the hardness of fate, but also by the grievous errors of his own choices; yes, he was born of incest, yes he incredibly met and fell in love with his mother, but what made his state truly wretched was that he pursued and wedded her anyway, despite the fact that Gregorious 'very well knew that it was his mother whom he loved'. Fate had acted on him, and he responded according to the fallen nature of man, and doomed himself - or would do, if it were pagan Greece and not Christian Europe. For unlike the typical protagonist of noble, sad, tragic Hellas, Gregorious had alternatives to suicide, simply because the weight that had so oppressed Oedipus was already carried by Christ, who shrugged it off on the Cross.<br />
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By imitating Christ, the ultimate 'tragic hero', Gregorious could not only relieve himself of the sin through suffering, he could even convert it into something else; the Abbott, for example, muses wisely: 'Very well can love come out of evil, and out of disorder something ordered for the best'. The sinner is sublimated into saint by his active involvement in reality, by becoming like the God-man who forever altered the way in which we interact with reality, <i>by submitting to the Divine will </i>in a way the Greeks never could. The holy sinner is made so not by submitting to the laws of men, but to the laws of God, which command that we die to this world that we might live again in <i>his </i>world.<br />
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In one of the most profound moments of all Classical art, sweet, beautiful, virtuous, <i>blameless</i><br />
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Antigone died for the sins of her family. The curse of her grandfather ended with her, because she chose to obey the divine will rather than that of men, who executed her: 'Your edict, King, was strong. But all your strength is weakness itself against the immortal unrecorded laws of God'. Only the most prejudiced of readers could not perceive this as a presentiment of Christ's story. The only real difference, the one that makes the whole thing so crucial, is that Christ did not just die for his family, but for <i>God's family</i>, that is, all the children of Man. Just as Antigone died for the sins of Laius, Christ died for the sins of Adam. The wisdom of the Greeks interlaced with the traditions of the Judaens to host God's Incarnation, the apotheosis and salvation of man.<br />
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The Gospels, upon their exegesis by the developing Christian tradition, also solved the problem of fate and chance as outlined in<a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2014/12/freedom-from-fate-pt-i-tragic-hero.html"> Part I</a>. Where the pagan was increasingly frustrated by life's apparent randomness, or anguished by the seemingly malevolent nature of fate which too frequently rewarded bad men while punishing good men, the Christian reconciled the problem by establishing a doctrine of providence. The fact of the matter is that we do not, we <i>cannot </i>understand God's will, at least not at once; sometimes it becomes evident with time, sometimes it is never evident, but we know that there is indeed a reason for everything. This world is not perfectly ordered; it leaves room for pain, blood, rape, disease, war, natural disasters. Why should not the bad man delight in his chances in this world, even as the good one suffers? His affairs are those of this world, while the Christian's lie in another, which <i>is</i> perfectly ordered.<br />
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The Christian's suffering, so long as he can endure it, makes him stronger, and, in opening himself to God, gives him real hope: 'we glory also in tribulations, knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience trial; and trial hope; And hope confoundeth not: because the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us' (Romans 3:3-5). The Christian's suffering not only leads to strength in this world, but gives him also the promise of reward in the next: 'For I reckon that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, that shall be revealed in us' (Romans 8:18). Like Job, Aeneas, and Oedipus, the Christian subscribes to the will of God, and accepts his sufferings as temporal, as something to be endured as a conduit to a greater glory. Fate therefore seems to be less of a malicious ploy meant to plague man on the part of the gods, but more of a tribulation that man must struggle through in order for him to grow, to show himself <i>worthy of being man</i>.<br />
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The Roman philosopher Boethius formulated something of a template for the Christian doctrine of providence even while never explicitly making use of the Christian religion; <i>The Consolation of Philosophy</i> became a cornerstone of Christian theology in the Middle Ages despite its occasional pagan tendencies. He says, for example:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'In the high citadel of its oneness, the mind of God has set up a plan for the multitude of events. When this plan is thought of as in the purity of God's understanding, it is called Providence, and when it is thought of with reference to all things,whose motion and order it controls, it is called by the same name the ancients gave it, Fate.... Providence is the divine reason itself. It is set at the head of all things and disposes all things. Fate, on the other hand, is the planned order inherent in things subject to change through the medium of which Providence binds everything in its own allotted place. Providence includes all things at the same time, however diverse or infinite, while Fate controls the motion of different individual things in different places and in different times. So this unfolding of the plan in time when brought together as a unified whole in the foresight of God's mind is Providence; and the same unified whole when dissolved and unfolded in the course of time is Fate' (<i>The Consolation of Philosophy</i>, 4:6).</blockquote>
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Boethius goes on to explain how God is the divine architect, the mind which creates the craft, and how the blueprint is providence; fate, on the other hand, is the instrument, the means by which the plan is carried out in time and space. So it is as we said: we cannot know providence, the divine reason, except through fate, which only conveys the part of truth we can know through experience. There is a vast divide between the being of God and the beings which comprise our cosmos. We are on two different scales, therefore we can only know God in an 'analogical' sense, where he can be compared to perfect goodness and perfect truth but is nevertheless impossible to comprehend due to our incapability, limited beings as we are, to comprehend real perfection. This explains the necessity of fate, since God can hardly interact with us on his level; he needs to act within the temporal realm, and to do this he needs to use limited measures, hence fate, the machinations of time and space to serve greater ends. If he were to <i>really </i>enter our world, aside from isolated miracles and specific acts of providence, it would cease to be defined by space and time because it would be incorporated into the eternal. That will happen at the end of time, but only after man has played himself out.<br />
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To live inside fate and only catching glimpses of the divine providence behind it is rather like being in the middle of a novel: the hero is increasingly trialed and troubled by various events, and you can sometimes guess at the way the story is going to go, but you can very rarely be sure of it. If the novel is any good at all, however, there are reasons behind the struggles the hero goes through, even if neither he nor the reader know them yet. Everything happens for a reason, whether it be an incidental or an essential one. To fixate upon the misery of something happening means a failure to recognize the greater picture, to neglect the concourse of the story where events and thoughts and hopes meet to form the whole; it means a failure to 'see the forest for the trees', as it were. This is exactly what Mann's monastic narrator says as he tells the deeply providential story of Gregorious: 'But human reckoning does not go far, except in the narrator's case, who knows the whole story up to its wondrous ending and as it were shares in the divine providence - a unique privilege and one actually not proper to the human being.' Only God knows the full content of any man's life because only he can see his beginning and end as one wholly congruous entity; because only God can read his story from front to back instantaneously.<br />
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This relates also to the problem of free will, obviously, for if God knows everything that has happened right up to the end, how can we possibly dictate anything on our own? We return to Boethius for the answer:<br />
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'Since, therefore, all judgement comprehends those things that are subject to it according to its own nature, and since the state of God is ever that of an eternal presence, His knowledge, too, transcends all temporal change and abides in the immediacy of His presence. It embraces all the infinite recesses of past and future and views them in the immediacy of its knowing as though they are happening in the present. If you wish to consider, then, then the foreknowledge or prevision by which He discovers all things, it will be more correct to think of it not as a kind of foreknowledge of the future, but as the knowledge of a never ending presence. So that it is better called providence or "looking forth" than prevision or "seeing beforehand". For it is far removed from matters below and looks forth at all things as though from a lofty peak above them. Why, then, do you insist that all that is scanned by the sight of God becomes necessary? Men see things but this certainly doesn't make them necessary. And your seeing them doesn't impose any necessity on the things you see present.... And if human and divine present may be compared, just as you see certain things in this your present time so God sees all things in His eternal present. So that this divine foreknowledge does not change the nature and property of things; it simply sees things present to it exactly as they will happen at some time as future events' (<i>The Consolation of Philosophy</i>, 5:6).</blockquote>
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The nature of things in the temporal realm precludes them from understanding how things operate in the eternal realm, just as the nature of beasts preclude them from understanding how humans operate. The present for a being in time is categorically different from the present of a being in eternity, who sees things as they happen in time <i>all at once</i>. Thus the agency of the human will is kept free, for man is still a cause unto himself, able to decide upon one option and not another, for God in his omniscience sees the action which man chooses; he saw it all along, but from the lens of eternity, which means that he only saw it because man chose it 'first' (obviously the notion of 'happening first' does not exist in eternity, the <i>nunc stans</i>, the eternal present). This is mysterious to us, but only because time can never comprehend the eternal; he can dream of it, see glimpses of it, rationalize about it, but it will never be wholly understood so long as his present belongs in time and therefore below eternity, for the lower can never understand the higher. So God established this world of causal determinism, of things which all happen for precise, defined reasons, but he places us in it as the sole free actors to play in it. We are dreadfully influenced by a great many things, but there is always the opportunity for our choice, there is always our own sanctified volition, without which the whole endeavour would be fruitless, for both ourselves and for God, who wants not automatons predestined to hell or heaven, but autonomous beings capable of choosing either-or. We are indeed characters in a story set by someone else, but we are characters created semi-independently of the writer; we choose what to do in this drama, but real freedom consists in doing what the writer advises, for only he knows the designs of providence.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw9v3vKbstGyM6k8InVhyphenhyphenr3uN_Cc5tpaz_-RlTv0ogemU8kQaqxr5KYjg-N8nrbYBT2XZfkmuxUckavhouT-zRVDVfcVxYfqSzcX94YxpRuxIUfwKSOLa7GDqGtrnm31LdLI4uXyC6sv6O/s1600/aeneas+leaving+dido.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw9v3vKbstGyM6k8InVhyphenhyphenr3uN_Cc5tpaz_-RlTv0ogemU8kQaqxr5KYjg-N8nrbYBT2XZfkmuxUckavhouT-zRVDVfcVxYfqSzcX94YxpRuxIUfwKSOLa7GDqGtrnm31LdLI4uXyC6sv6O/s1600/aeneas+leaving+dido.jpg" /></a>This is what Aeneas does upon leaving Carthage, saying to his beloved Dido as he leaves her: 'I set sail for Italy - all against my will'. His duty to the high god Jove is more important than even his love for the Queen of Carthage, and he ends up fathering a son not to her, but to Italy, a son that would conquer the known world. Real freedom consists in aligning our will with God's will. Oedipus was inextricably tied to a fate which he could not possibly avoid, not for all his trying and willing. After denying his culpability in what had happened early on in <i>Oedipus at Colonus</i>, Oedipus finally admits who he is and his guilt upon realizing that the grove he has wandered into, that his daughter Antigone has led him into, is that sacred grove which the oracle had foretold would be the place of his death. His death is now a divine blessing to any city which hosts his corpse, but he dies in that grove instead; that it is not a painful, miserable death, but something easy, graceful, even miraculous by another character's account, is indicative that his life is redeemed. God granted him gentle passage and a boon to posterity because he had succumbed to his will, that he had proclaimed his guilt and then died in the place chosen by fate.<br />
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Poor Gregorious was fated to be born of incestuous parents, and then fated to meet and wed his mother. He did not try to avoid his fate, like Oedipus did, but plunged into the world to try to <i>absolve </i>his fate, to forgive the sin of his family, a noble, godly aim. He was hardly strong enough, however, and upon meeting his mother he fell hopelessly in love with her; his will was separated from that of God's, and he suffered for it. His penance on the island, however, represented a total submission to God, who then rewarded him not only with the mysterious sustenance that preserved his lowly life, but raised him up into the highest position of ecclesial power. Again, we can only see how fate works out in retrospect, upon seeing something as a whole; only by seeing life from above can we see it <i>providentially</i>, how fate works to perform the designs of God. It may be wondered if Christ himself knew the full import of his work as he wept to his Father in Gethsemane, but he said anyway: 'My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice fall from me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt' (Matthew 26:39). Providence was accomplished by Christ's submission to God's will.<br />
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<a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2014/12/freedom-from-fate-pt-i-tragic-hero.html">In Part I</a> we described how the ancient world was conflicted about the role of fate and man's relationship with the gods; they were capricious, claimed the pagans, rewarding bad men while punishing the good. Sophocles, Aeschylus, Plato, Virgil, Cicero, Epictetus all had greater or lesser inklings of the resolution, but it was only finally formulated in the Gospels, that tremendous statement on man and how he became one with God. The answer consists not in following fate blindly, losing one's will in a slavish servility to a capriciously organized cosmos, but in confessing one's frailty, his guilt, his crimes, his <i>dependence </i>on someone besides himself; the escape from our travails does not reside in our world or our will but in <i>God's</i>. Man is fallen, and is therefore in need of saving; that accounts for the 'randomness' of this life, for the fact that bad things <i>do</i> happen to good men. The pagans looked for a sinless man to whom bad things happened for the essence of tragedy - they looked for it in Oedipus and Antigone, but it was only found in Christ.<br />
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This was the sudden change in direction, in perspective: man was no longer someone who feared the gods, who feared and could not explain fate; man was someone who loved God, who submitted to him in the hope of redemption, who could explain fate as the simple fact that this world is not wholly comprehensible except through the eyes of providence, the eyes of God, the eyes of someone who has read the whole story. Oedipus had to literally die because the pagan had no other way to really redeem someone; Gregorious had only to die to <i>this</i> world, because the Christian understands that the soul is already redeemed by Christ's action, and we need only act on it. Christ died literally so we could all die <i>spiritually</i>; we are each of us a tragic hero, with all of our own sins, our own 'incests', and to find the peace of Oedipus in the sacred grove or the wisdom of Gregorious on the chair of St. Peter we need only do as they did, to submit our will to the will of God. To surrender one's will to the highest will is the truest freedom of all, for in so doing we no longer serve the slave of our self but the master of all - and thereby become masters ourselves: 'God became man that we might become a god' (St. Athanasius, <i>On the Incarnation</i>).<br />
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The freedom from fate means to understand that nothing that ever happens is a meaningless event or a random dead-end that signifies a disorderly cosmos, but a piece of a puzzle that has not been figured out yet, a part of the story that has not been fully told yet; the freedom from fate means to surrender our understanding to God's understanding, meekly knowing that our reckoning cannot compare with the one who made not only ourselves, but everyone and everything around us in this beautifully, blissfully created universe. The freedom from fate ultimately means the freedom from this world, for with Christ we transcend death and the ouroboric cycle of rebirth; with Christ we live as eternal beings no longer subject to the mysteries of fate but to the shining truths of providence.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.' (Galatians 5:1)</blockquote>
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-1802235201634917952014-12-15T00:05:00.000-08:002014-12-15T03:26:21.561-08:00Freedom from Fate Pt I: The Tragic Hero<br />
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The mythological <i>Moira</i>, or the three Fates of Greek Wisdom, were responsible for assigning to each man his destiny, the fixed course to which his life would follow. According to Plato, these were the daughters of <i>Ananke</i>, Necessity, the symbol <i>par excellence</i> of the orderliness of the cosmic order, and who maintained the laws that control our reality. This was the rigidity of their cosmological vision, something very logical and very just, but for those reasons also very harsh, unforgiving. Man struggled to find freedom in a world dictated purely by law and order, and where often those very ideals were undermined by the frequent occurrence of seemingly random or arbitrary events that worked to dispel the conviction of the world being lawful at all. Why should a good man suffer, they justly asked, and a bad man receive fortune? The following essay will seek to show in two parts how the best of the pagan world coped with this issue, but more importantly how the Christian world <i>solved </i>this issue, with particular respect paid to the questions of tragedy, fate, and free will.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live' (Marcus Aurelius, <i>Meditations</i>).</blockquote>
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Prior to the Gospels which triumphantly announced God's Incarnation in our presence, the civilized world was muddled and confused. Hints of Christ's coming manifested themselves in Hellenic philosophy, in Virgil, in Cicero, in the life of Caesar Augustus, but this happened as the spiritual climate was being seduced by superstitions and overrun by a sentimental hedonism masquerading as mystical cults. Without the universal belief in a transcendent benevolence that organized the higher principles of reality, there was a general distrust of the Classical deities, which were more often things to be placated or warded off than truly worshiped or loved. The same could be said for the multitude of Eastern creeds which were imported, most of which failing to survive more than a few generations. Whatever genuine initiatic practises these religions once possessed were degenerated and obsolete, leaving their adherents with a mystical shell that was completely hollow, completely empty of spiritual life.<br />
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There was moreover a growing and seemingly irreconcilable divide between Fate and Chance, a philosophical problem that exemplified the pagan frustrations in determining the role of the divine in the domains of men. Is it the will of the gods, they asked, that men should suffer so, or is it just the arbitrary cruelty of a fundamentally disorganized cosmos? Furthermore, it was undecided whether it was better to submit to divine will, it being of a superior nature, or whether to fight against it, since fate frequently revealed itself to be as capricious as the laws of a godless, atomized universe would be. By ascribing so much of our activity to the agency of fate and fortune, the ancients denied man a large part of his personal responsibility, his freedom - something happened either because it was destined to happen, or because it happened by chance, and not because man <i>chose</i> for it to happen. An interesting exception to this, the proto-Miltonian myth of <i>Prometheus Bound</i>, is a telling example of how the will of the gods is separate from the welfare of man, and how the defiance of a divine ruling, rather than being seen with contempt, becomes instead something heroic and tragic.<br />
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Fate was viewed with deathly reverence by the Graeco-Roman civilization, largely because it was <br />
commonly equated with death. To 'meet your fate' more often than not meant to 'die with dignity'; to cowardly avoid death meant the surrender of one's honour, like Paris retreating before Menelaus to comfort himself in the arms of a woman. He chose lust over dignity, and, instead of dying in a duel, Paris was more ignominiously vanquished by the poison of an arrow. To the ancients, fate was something implacable, inexorable, something which you could not avert; you could either embrace it stoically and heroically, or you could run from it until it inevitably catches you, weeping and alone. Every man has an end, a fate, a death; what defined a man to posterity and possibly in the afterlife depended on how he responded to his fate, his response to what the gods had decreed.<br />
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Death was moreover classically perceived as a 'cleansing', as something that purifies ignoble conduct or the soul of a man tied to a terrible fate. If a man's life has left him with a permanent stain of wretchedness, the natural action, the only action that could yet salvage some fragment of his self-worth, would be suicide. This would lend to his story a satisfying pathos that shows those who would judge him that he at the very least realized the extent of his shame and did the right thing at the last, like a Samurai committing Seppuku upon the loss of his honour. Suicide therefore served as a willingness to meet the gods of judgment on his own terms, that they did not have to chase after him like a miserable thief. Such a man dies, and thereby helps the abrogation of his shame by the radical decision to terminate his life; he has already judged himself, making anyone else's judgment seem superfluous.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9lmqBHQqMqBdD-svmJ9V1djCEltGqULjuoom5hR7VbL70wLvjguOOgeiENbImOuD5Bnonztt33RH-hkP427ILZyLpXYM3RSdrjwkPOdjmptGJmNl5p3KdC0AOQVh-eoew0cEralxaxOWi/s1600/Oedipus-and-the-Sphinx-by-Francois-Xavier-Fabre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9lmqBHQqMqBdD-svmJ9V1djCEltGqULjuoom5hR7VbL70wLvjguOOgeiENbImOuD5Bnonztt33RH-hkP427ILZyLpXYM3RSdrjwkPOdjmptGJmNl5p3KdC0AOQVh-eoew0cEralxaxOWi/s1600/Oedipus-and-the-Sphinx-by-Francois-Xavier-Fabre.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a>There is no clearer example of this than in Greek tragedy, where death is the natural consequence of just about anything, virtue or vice, but it is especially reserved for the expiation of guilt. In Sophocles's <i>Oedipus Cycle</i>, for instance, the twin themes of fate and death are horribly intertwined, the one intersecting with the other in a deviously symbiotic relationship. As the story goes, an oracle unveils the fate of Oedipus to his parents, that he will kill his father and marry his mother. They make an effort to kill him and preclude the prophecy from coming to pass, and live for a time in the belief that <i>chance </i>rules this world, not fate. That Oedipus survives, however, means that the entire prophecy becomes reality. Fate had ruled that these grievous errors must happen, and that their final consequence could only be death. Antigone in the third drama laments its invincibility: 'dreadful is the mysterious power of fate - there is no deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by towered city, or dark, sea-beaten ships'. The will of the cosmos, whether governed by gods or something less personal, was unchanging and cruel, immune to the tragedies and sorrows of its inhabitants, no matter how they pleaded for mercy.<br />
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It is for this reason significant to note how the major players of this play are rather the <i>victims </i>of fate than the autonomous causes of their own ruin. As with the sons of Atreus, the cursed house that stretched back to Tantalus, Laius dooms his own family by violating the sacred laws of hospitality in sodomizing the son of King Pelops, his host. His wife and children and his children's children are all made to pay for Laius's crime while they are, to varying degrees, innocent. In learning of his son's destiny, Laius orders his wife Jocasta to kill Oedipus, who reluctantly obeys, only to lack the will to do it herself, which of course leads to his survival. Oedipus himself is wholly ignorant of who he is, and is not morally culpable for the killing of his father, who provoked the incident, or for the incestuous relationship with his mother, of whose real nature he is unaware. Oedipus is made to pay not for his own sins, but for the sins of his father. While in <i>Oedipus Rex</i> he takes responsibility for what he has done, exiling himself in a frenzy of grief, in <i>Oedipus at Colonus</i> he is more reflective, and eschews his guilt by the argument that he had done what any man would have done with the knowledge he had: 'I slew who else would me have slain; I slew without intent, a wretch, but innocent in the law's eye I stand, without a stain'. Oedipus further rationalizes what he has done by the plea that no man in history has averted the course of fate, and seeks to thereby remove himself from personal responsibility for his actions.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWZV4wsslkms8nplWHefZkEVMk6SWReKLfAcT20BQdKJ45e2dcCsJel7gZZ_irFXxS1nbMqhDSKGrCOysN6Ln-__CoHyTj4x_WkwHI307aj_9YSWRE27E9Vz6AmmRfSvzmRIzejEJvjyff/s1600/Cabanel_Oedipus_Separating_from_Jocasta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWZV4wsslkms8nplWHefZkEVMk6SWReKLfAcT20BQdKJ45e2dcCsJel7gZZ_irFXxS1nbMqhDSKGrCOysN6Ln-__CoHyTj4x_WkwHI307aj_9YSWRE27E9Vz6AmmRfSvzmRIzejEJvjyff/s1600/Cabanel_Oedipus_Separating_from_Jocasta.jpg" height="155" width="200" /></a>His attempts, however, are ultimately ineffectual in cleansing his reputation in the public perception and in the eyes of the gods; the sins of patricide and incest are simply too powerful to slip off by his own cogitation, regardless of how much truth there might be in it. There needs to be penance paid for what he has done, at least in the pagan understanding of 'penance', especially if Oedipus honestly seeks absolution for forgiveness from posterity as well as the end of his family's suffering for Laius's crime. His exile from Thebes and the sufferings that accompanied it accounts for some of this, but only his death could possibly atone for his wretched life; dying would moreover be a boon to whichever city he was buried in, assuring it a divine protection. This represents the pagan philosophy <i>par excellence</i>, or at least the one in which the wisest action consists in submitting to fate, corresponding to one's destiny, kneeling to the gods who rule. Fate's final favour to Oedipus, providing he performs the sacred rituals and offers his life to Zeus's tempest that signals his time to die, is to convert the terrible ignominy of his life into a sacrificial heroism that shines all the more brilliantly for his tragic destiny. Oedipus's end is illustrative of this redemption: 'there fell no fiery bold that reft him in that hour, Nor whirlwind from the sea, but he was taken. It was a messenger from heaven, or else some gentle, painless cleaving of earth's base; For without wailing or disease or pain He passed away - an end most marvelous'. Like the ascension of a Biblical prophet, Oedipus departs this world in a passage of mystery and salving light.<br />
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<i>The Oedipus Cycle</i> serves as an exemplary instance of Classical fatalism. First of all, it is clear that Sophocles swiftly disposes of the notion that chance dictates the course of reality; Jocasta desperately holds on to this belief, but more out of her desire to delude herself, to avoid the consequences of what has transpired. The fact that she pleads with her husband/son to forsake his search for the truth corroborates this claim: Jocasta becomes increasingly aware that that the oracle's prophecy is coming true and, out of her inability to face reality, clings to the futile hope that chance overrules destiny. When this fantasy is shattered, when the tyrannical arm of fate shows itself to be the sole authority, Jocasta has nowhere to flee - except into the empty haven of death. According to Sophocles, the failure to recognize the role that fate plays in our lives only contributes to the crushing pain that must eventually arrive; whatever illusions we create to comfort us instead become our enemies when we collide with objective <i>fact</i>.<br />
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More importantly, Sophocles constructs a fatalistic dynamic in which the question is raised whether man has any choice whatsoever in the determination of his fate - Oedipus becomes aware of his prophecy and yet, in spite of the radical decisions he makes to prevent it from happening, unwittingly fulfills it. This initially encourages the conviction that we do not have any freedom at all, but subsequently, in <i>Oedipus at Colonus</i>, Oedipus finally realizes that only death can be the payment for his life - this is a conscious choice he has made, but it is in accordance with his fate, and he is redeemed for it. Our freedom consists in according with fate. Whereas in the first drama Oedipus quite naturally did his utmost to change his destiny, and failed miserably, in the second he succumbed to it, and succeeded beautifully. This is how he becomes the paragon of Aristotle's tragic hero: the harsh circumstances that defined the crucial period of his life were unavoidable, and represented the cruelty that is often imposed on seemingly innocent human beings through the misfortunes of life; by accepting the necessity and even the blessing of his dying, Oedipus met his fate manfully and heroically. Ignorance led him to disastrous consequences, but enlightenment enabled Oedipus to see the path he needed to take, and took it.<br />
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When Christ was crucified and rose again two things happened: (1) Death was conquered, and, no longer having dominion over the possession of souls, was made into a servant of life, not something to be feared but understood as the natural conclusion of this life and the gateway to the next; and (2) the ally of Death, Sin, was overthrown, its authority in the world of men was no longer absolute. Christ descended into hell, but death has no power over the deathless, and it could not receive him. Sin likewise cannot afflict one who does not willfully give into its temptation, and it too was forced away. In his sacrifice upon the cross, Christ freed man from the totalitarian bonds of Death and Sin, and ensured that he shall have the liberty to join him in Paradise. The fallen Adam caused man to slip into the shackles of the serpent; the risen Christ broke the chains and crushed the serpent:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman [St. Mary],<br />
and between your seed and her seed [Christ];<br />
he shall bruise your head,<br />
and you shall bruise his heel.' (Genesis 3:15)</blockquote>
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For all of the proto-Christian elements that peek out of Grecian arts, philosophy, and religion, the fact remains that the Athenian dramas were still fundamentally pagan, an admirable but inseparable part of the Classical epoch. The Aristotelian ideal, for example, that claims how the hero of any which tragedy should be innocent might accord with the Book of Job, in which God's most faithful servant is tested in the most crippling ways, but that accordance ends in the aftermath of the Incarnation and the introduction of the New Testament. Jesus Christ fulfilled what both Plato and Aristotle proclaimed: he was the perfectly just, blameless man who was executed for the crimes of others. He is perfect Love, perfect Justice. He is the ultimate tragic hero, surpassing Prometheus, Orpheus, and Oedipus, who showed glimpses of the coming Messiah but never his wholeness. Christ simultaneously completed and made obsolete the Classical idea of the Classical hero: 'The Gospels are the last and most marvelous expression of Greek genius, as the <i>Iliad</i> is its first expression' (Simone Weil). From the New Testament emerged the blueprint for Christian idea of the <i>suffering hero</i>, the man who suffers not because he is innocent, but because he is <i>guilty</i>.<br />
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The Christian tradition formulated the doctrine of Original Sin, which explained that men are fallen creatures, isolated from a state of grace but innately yearning to return to it: 'Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men for all men have sinned' (Romans 5:12). As Adam brought sin and therefore death into the world, so Christ, in eschewing sin and therefore destroying death, is able to offer us eternal life. He achieved this by <i>suffering</i>, by the purely selfless act of sacrificing himself for the errors of someone else; even though he was himself without sin, Christ accepted the burden of humanity and died for it. The stench of sin persists so long as we are immortal beings dwelling in a mortal world, defining us into conflicted, struggling, adversarial creatures, but spiritually there is now a certain freedom, one that consists in the awareness of one's own sin and the potential to transcend it. The old fear of death has been converted into a hope for life.<br />
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While Christ represents the extraordinary reality of being at once God and Man, and therefore not subject to the sin that adheres to the fallen part of our nature, his story nevertheless provides the template for the post-pagan 'suffering hero'. Christ may not have possessed our sin, but he was most assuredly human, and was thereby able to show sinful man the path to absolution and redemption: through a violently submissive meekness, through a painful contrition for our wrongs. The ugliness of our selfhood must be submerged into selflessness; the self must kneel before the Other. This cannot be something predetermined, something dictated by the forces of fate or the caprice of chance, but a conscious choice to make one decision and not another; if Christ fell in the desert or succumbed in Gethsemane the selfhood would remain intact and death undefeated. But Christ did not fall; he yielded his will to the will of God, and that is the <i>freest</i>, most powerfully independent choice possible. This is what Sophocles inherently understood when Oedipus and finally blameless Antigone died to this world in accordance with the will of God, but which was not fully recognized until Christ performed his work, until Christ <i>lived</i> the tragedy himself.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'I cannot of myself do any thing. As I hear, so I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not my own will, but the will of him that sent me' (John 5:30).</blockquote>
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-14531309420063570712014-09-15T03:13:00.000-07:002014-09-15T03:13:26.033-07:00Art & Beauty Part I, Section VI: A Creating Creature<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'The artist is not a special kind of person, but every man is a special kind of artist' (Ananda Coomaraswamy).</blockquote>
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If art traditionally understood is something much different than our contemporary understanding of art, naturally the artist was equally someone very different than that person whom we currently call an 'artist'. First of all, as we have already touched on, the world of tradition was something hierarchically organized; just as a work of art has its own specific <i>telos</i> or purpose, so too does man have his particular vocation for which he is best suited, for which he is <i>made</i>: 'In the normal society envisaged by Plato, or realized in a feudal social order or caste system, occupation is vocational, and usually hereditary; it is intended at least that every man shall be engaged in the useful occupation for which he is best fitted by nature, and in which therefore he can best serve the society to which he belongs and at the same time realize his own perfection' (Coomaraswamy, 'Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art', p.67). Thus conceived, man is not dissimilar from a work of art himself, and indeed he is precisely that, a creature created by God. Like any work of art, he has a first and a second perfection, a <i>telos</i> for which he is made, and a capability to achieve that <i>telos</i>; unlike any work of art, however, he himself is the artist <i>and</i> artwork, the free agent who seeks to realize his own perfection and place in the world.<br />
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As we mentioned at the beginning of <a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2014/08/art-beauty-part-i-section-iii.html">Section III</a>, the artist was actually an artisan, a craftsman, simply a man who played a part in the making of things. A blacksmith was as much of an artist as an architect or a poet, and all of them were vocations to which men suited to those positions naturally found themselves, either hereditarily or by apprenticeship and guilds or some other circumstance; while in feudal society there was not a great amount of movement vertically, say from serfdom to landed gentry, but horizontally there were great opportunities of someone of any social standing to gravitate towards the vocation for which he was created. This was possible because this was a society that recognized the indispensable value of <i>becoming what one is;</i> in order to direct the talents of men toward their maximum potential, men needed to be doing what they do best, even if that meant the majority of men need to be doing something as 'mundane' as tilling a field or fishing the shores.<br />
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The purpose of the artist, then, was hardly to 'express himself', to proudly put himself forward as someone specially important or unique, but simply to locate himself in the world as a willing and productive member of its community - and find contentment therein. By working according to one's vocation, man inserts himself as a functioning, meaningful contributor to society, and 'perfects' himself thereby; he becomes the piece of the cosmic puzzle for which he was born, and attains that perfection that every work of art aspires to be: 'The man devoted to his own vocation finds perfection.... That man whose prayer and praise of God are in the doing of his own work perfects himself' (<i>Bhagavad Gita</i> XVIII). Man therefore is not simply an artist, but a work of art as well, one which he himself can perfect by the accomplishment of God's will.<br />
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In this way, the artist becomes someone 'anonymous'. This is because, unlike modern artists who reach celebrity status for their acclaimed 'genius' (often after they die for some morbid reason) and the charm of their personality, the artist is seamlessly ingrained into society as merely someone else who is doing his work successfully. In the Medieval era, aside from a few of the more prominent architects and poets, there is a remarkable absence of known medieval artists, which is due to this fact, that his work was ultimately no more or less important than that of the burgher or the baker. Everyone has work to perform, and every vocation is essential to the fluidity of social life: '[It] is not inasmuch as he is ''such and such a person'' that the artifex produces his work, but inasmuch as he fulfils a certain ''function'' that is properly ''organic'' and not ''mechanical''....' (Rene Guenon, <i>The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times</i>, p.64). (There is a definite reason for the deification of 'celebrity artists', namely that the artist has in some ways been the modern substitute for the priest, a point which demands additional explanation at some later date.)<br />
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Nevertheless, despite this character of 'anonymity', the artist, along with any other productive member of traditional civilization, possessed a <i>personal</i> identity, which was the representation of who he really was: 'the ''person'' is that which man presents concretely and sensibly in the world, in the position he occupies, <i>but always signifying a form of expression and manifestation of a higher principle in which the true center of being is to be recognized</i>' (Julius Evola, <i>Ride the Tiger</i>, p.109). Man is, in pagan society, the living symbol of some archetype; insofar as man succeeds as a person he succeeds in representing something impersonal, the immutability of which provides him with the meaning that he craves. The traditional person is therefore in stark contrast with the modern individual: 'So man as person is already differentiated thereby from the mere individual; he has a form, is himself, and belongs to himself.... Unlike the individual, the person i<i>s not closed to the above</i>. The personal being is <i>not</i> himself, but has himself' (Ibid.). The personal being is more than himself because he is privy to something transcendent, which allows him to 'possess' himself in a sort of self-understanding that eludes the chaotic grasping of the rootless individual.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9F0XmSN4ycqvUvgq0CNkNjysJM5Rw7vl0Cj2fHPsDu4CDHlD4NvZhH_9JLWrv3ctVQl9dZyCMJiPsknbR6Iv9_nS-_ACH-QF29EpQUOnkAb4fPzdT-pASUUAf3LnrLCkP2ewj_iDXgjcf/s1600/asccension_ressurection_Jesus+Christ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9F0XmSN4ycqvUvgq0CNkNjysJM5Rw7vl0Cj2fHPsDu4CDHlD4NvZhH_9JLWrv3ctVQl9dZyCMJiPsknbR6Iv9_nS-_ACH-QF29EpQUOnkAb4fPzdT-pASUUAf3LnrLCkP2ewj_iDXgjcf/s1600/asccension_ressurection_Jesus+Christ.jpg" height="320" width="235" /></a>While this was unquestionably true in the ancient world prior to Christ's arrival, this was one of the things which the Incarnation changed on a fundamentally metaphysical level. In pagan society man is reduced to being essentially nothing more than any of the works of art, a walking, breathing, bipedic mimesis, the mere imitation of a form he is incapable of fully understanding; this was necessary, this was the perfectly organic means of attaining order in a chaotic cosmos. But what Evola failed to understand was that Christ changed everything, or <i>how</i> Christ changed everything. Man was no longer a 'persona', a mask of some god or rigid archetype as the word's etymology defines it; man is the <i>Imago Dei</i>, the embodied image of God himself. The person was no longer a servant of something impersonal; the person became a child of something <i>superpersonal</i>. To paraphrase Chesterton, God is not, like the pagans of every race have always thought, incomprehensible because he is impersonal; God is incomprehensible because he is superpersonal. God is too personal for us to comprehend, much like his mirth is too great for us to enjoy:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear' (G.K. Chesterton, <i>Orthodoxy</i>).</blockquote>
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We do not, of course, mean to equate the personal with the vagaries of what one might call 'personality', but with the totality of the human being, the <i>gestalt</i> of his psyche, the very essence of what makes man himself. The true nature of personality is not the malleable, protean shape of the human character as he makes his way through life; personality is the inner determinant that shapes the human character. Personality is not conditioned; personality conditions. Personality is not altered; it is discovered: 'Personality is spirit embodied in nature' (Georg Nicolaus, <i>C.G. Jung and Nikolai Berdyaev: Individuation and the Person</i>, p.34), which means that personality is the link connecting us to the spiritual and to God. Being made in God's image, we share in his spiritual completion at the core of our being. But we are also fallen, which means that that completeness is disintegrated, and from the deepest provinces of our soul we yearn to be complete again: 'Personality... is God's idea of man, and that idea is the <i>Gestalt</i> man is called to realize, not a general idea, but an absolutely unique and yet universal content' (Ibid., p.58). If we are made in the image of God, and that image is the Person, then God must indeed be personal himself. God is not impersonal, not suprapersonal, but <i>super</i>personal<i> - </i>a being so like ourselves we cannot quite recognize him.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBGYVcqw0FP9XLaf9HY2cgoLTp8cIQHzy5XH2GsEtrv1USR4OxML888NpXiljfw0niNQwsETf2clVDwKUKlvJSaEr-JbrJsuHY3QDwV4btlQtqq275_YIYTLFcaAMTeAPouBNowMqkJdX4/s1600/masaccio.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBGYVcqw0FP9XLaf9HY2cgoLTp8cIQHzy5XH2GsEtrv1USR4OxML888NpXiljfw0niNQwsETf2clVDwKUKlvJSaEr-JbrJsuHY3QDwV4btlQtqq275_YIYTLFcaAMTeAPouBNowMqkJdX4/s1600/masaccio.gif" height="320" width="135" /></a>Evola is right when he says that 'the person needs a reference to something that is more than personal' (Evola, <i>Tiger</i>, p.109), but he is wrong in that the reference needs to be something impersonal. The human experience is necessarily founded on the subject, the inner consciousness that conditions our perception of reality - of what use is it to the needs of the subject to refer to something fundamentally objective? Man needs to integrate the objective into himself, not vice versa. If man is indeed the image of God, it follows that any 'reference to the above' means a reference to God; it follows that the health of the subject depends on our imitation of the Subject, the omnipotent mind whence we roughly, distantly, but assuredly do derive. It is the power of the subject, the power of the person that enables us to unite objective reality with ourselves. We exist in a world of objects, an inescapable matrix that conditions us in unpredictable channels, but the world of objects exists also in us; the way that we engage with them depends on how much of a hold they have over us, and how much of God, the supreme Subject, we have in us.<br />
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We bring God into us by imitating him. Now, the foremost activity that pertains to God is love, for the crux of his relationship with us is a 'going out of himself', and that is the essential definition of love. The result of this love is creation, for something needs to be outside of God for him to really love it; in his love, in his emergence beyond himself, he creates a necessarily imperfect mirror that is the world. He does this because it is his nature to love selflessly. Strictly speaking, he does not <i>need</i> us, since he is self-sufficient; God created us out of a divinely mysterious charity and an incomprehensibly free will, We, and everything else we see or know in the world, are the consequence of love; creation is the consequence. Love equals creation, so imitating God is simple: I love, therefore I create.<br />
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This is where the personal dimension in the artist is felt: in the recreation of God's most personal act, which is the continual creation of the world we live in. As we discussed in <a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2014/08/art-beauty-part-i-section-ii-intellect.html">Section II</a>, however, we create in different ways: God creates <i>ex nihilo</i>, he creates something from nothing whereas we can only mould the raw, primal matter of his creation into something worthier both of ourselves and of God. He sets everything up, provides us with a virtually infinite array of material, and we are tasked with the art of putting it all together according to the ideas of order and beauty that are imprinted in our mind. Despite this difference, the imitation is intact; we lack the might of God, so we act in the way that we can, in respect of our own limited technique. There is one further difference. In creating something, we proceed out of a love that is simultaneously selfish and selfless. It is selfish in that we create so that we may see an inner part of ourselves in projection in a fruitful attempt to capture the other part of ourself and thereby achieve completion; it is selfless in that it is a genuine going out of oneself, an earnest love that unites the thinking, feeling subject with the beauty that we perceive in the objective, outside world. In the selfish creation we reveal our human restrictions, but in our selfless creativity we reveal that we are indeed the children of God.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipPrZJjAToOlQovnMxdzvIDGJipEr-j8J0QmRA7SnUccEd5vRZlDfWMhyOqbV3vD3ZfGqRUbxLnU3s6e43UhtSwlkZOrLHOCp_ve6kIXxACaXEkwYbcdR1ibHPPqept2O1GlITH7hOFEy3/s1600/st-francis-receiving-the-stigmata.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipPrZJjAToOlQovnMxdzvIDGJipEr-j8J0QmRA7SnUccEd5vRZlDfWMhyOqbV3vD3ZfGqRUbxLnU3s6e43UhtSwlkZOrLHOCp_ve6kIXxACaXEkwYbcdR1ibHPPqept2O1GlITH7hOFEy3/s1600/st-francis-receiving-the-stigmata.jpg" height="276" width="320" /></a>As this was all well understood in the Christian tradition, art (or what we would call 'fine art') was naturally substantiated with the unequivocally <i>personal</i>, the unprecedentedly <i>human</i> character that graced the Gospels. The stories of saints became legends of mythical truth, endearing figures worth appealing to in prayer and in song; the icons of Christ and his apostles were concentrated into an intensely personal characterization, warm images of human virtue at the moment of its victory over sin; the liturgy something serenely evocative of heaven's splendour, using exclusively human voices to sing hymns and Holy Writ; cathedrals were each the entire Church in themselves, united congregations sharing communion with God and each other in a fraternal joy; saints like St. Francis personified the natural world, calling the sparrow his sister and the crow his brother. Nature was no longer something for man to identify with or recoil from or possibly lose himself in; it was something that man could enjoy to the full, because he recognized his place above it in the Chain of Being.<br />
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The only distinction to be made between the 'sacred' and the 'secular' was in the former being used to designate those deeply, vocationally involved in ecclesiastic life, while the latter designated the laity. In the modern use of the word, there was no such thing as the 'secular', because the sacred permeated everything, lathering the entire society with the brilliant array of colours that the medievals loved so well. Yes, of course there were atrocities and all sorts of the moral abuses such as you would find in any society, but the medieval world was naive enough to love man and yet humble enough to recognize the extent of his depravity. Earth was sanctified by man's presence, who referred to God's wonder through the natural world, adapting her own beauty to create a vivid and dynamic symbolism in which they housed God's Word. We had received the New Testament, the poetry of God, and we responded to the best of our ability - we responded with Boethius and Dante, Ss. Dominic and Francis, and all the men in between who conspired to make their home worthy of its Creator.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFHRjVcZBCZ-6AQZPQJkPjgEdCbg_MnmWvDZ6Sp8V-sk0VjvDVheaMlr5eqlctTtZudJAizd4bNvgMLmxfq0c0sI-b1T_9m07maFL-MiZTb6mfRqN9yq9hsnUfq4qEi5Bajc-sv7Sk_VTF/s1600/Murillo_Bartolome_Esteban-ZZZ-Crucifixion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFHRjVcZBCZ-6AQZPQJkPjgEdCbg_MnmWvDZ6Sp8V-sk0VjvDVheaMlr5eqlctTtZudJAizd4bNvgMLmxfq0c0sI-b1T_9m07maFL-MiZTb6mfRqN9yq9hsnUfq4qEi5Bajc-sv7Sk_VTF/s1600/Murillo_Bartolome_Esteban-ZZZ-Crucifixion.jpg" height="320" width="196" /></a>Every man is creative <i>in potentia</i> because to create is man's foremost need. The impulse to create springs from the existential well of man's soul; the obedience of these impulses determines what or who a man will be. Man's central, most persistent desire is to complete himself, but to complete himself he must create himself; to create himself he must love, and to love he must imitate God. The imitation of God is the key to the re-integration of man with himself. Creativity is the perfection of the person, because it is the sincere appeal to the perfect Person; to share and participate in the love of the objective world is to make abstract ideals one's own pillars of personality. Christ is the symbol <i>par excellence</i> of this fact because he represents the bridge between God and man, between subject and object: 'God does not mingle himself with man, it is uniquely by means of Love... that there is dialogue and intercourse between the gods and men' (Plato, <i>Symposium</i>). Plato did not conceive of God's humanity, or how it was possible for God to also be man, but he nevertheless spoke the truth, a truth that Christ, whom Plato called Love, fulfilled. Christ, the God-man, suffered the weight of the world out of love for us, and created that selfsame bridge that allows us actual union with God. It is his example of love that we must imitate to fulfil the most urgent needs of the human experience; we show this love through creativity, through acting in the world to redeem the world.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Man's creativeness is his duty before God and the fulfilment of his will: not to be creator and not to live creatively, not to take part in God's unceasing creative action in the world, is disobedience to God, and in the last resort rebellion against him' (Evgueny Lampert, <i>Berdyaev and the New Middle Ages</i>, p. 48).</blockquote>
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Every man, therefore, is an artist; every man needs to create for his own sake as well as that of God. Whether it be the creation of an English madrigal, inter-city highways, a hearty breakfast, a half-dozen children, or simply a monastic silence, so long as it is done out of love man comes through creation to a profound satisfaction. The fundamental vocation of our species is a contribution to the reality in which we participate, which includes its spiritual <i>as well as</i> its physical dimensions. Guenon, Coomaraswamy, the Greek and Hindoo platonists were all right when they said that man is only man when he acts in the world according to his corresponding vocation (and remains 'anonymous'); Evola was right when said that man was only truly alive and truly personal when his life corresponds to something above himself. But all of this is only really brought together when we remember that we are all made in God's image, and purposed to do his will, and what is <i>God's</i> vocation? What is God's will? Simply, to Be, which evidently means also to create, or none of us would exist. The true vocation for any child of God, therefore, is to do as his Father does - to <i>create</i>.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect; the Man or Woman who is not one of these things is not a Christian' (William Blake).</blockquote>
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-25330278982810054542014-09-06T00:22:00.000-07:002014-09-06T00:22:26.641-07:00Fall through the Ceiling<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>'And where sin abounded, grace did more abound' (Romans 5:20)</i></blockquote>
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The tragic life is a fallen dove,<br />
A thousand wars ruthlessly raged,<br />
A thousand hawks wrathfully caged,<br />
The submission to a foreign love.<br />
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The spirit is drenched in bloody rage,<br />
A rising chaos left alone,<br />
A king without a throne,<br />
Impossible to assuage.<br />
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The body is a store of youth and lust,<br />
Nervously tending its nervous wares,<br />
Quietly counting its precious fares,<br />
Dreading the day it all turns to rust.<br />
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The heart is an inept, fragile thing,<br />
Sworn to others but possessed by one,<br />
Pierced from without but is undone<br />
By the mind's lonely wondering.<br />
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The story is yet to be truly told<br />
Till we have reached the full extent,<br />
Till our passions been wholly spent,<br />
Our limbs exhausted, our soul sold.<br />
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The storm will continue unabated<br />
Till we yield to its embrace,<br />
Take up a tempestuous grace,<br />
And find our hungers sated.<br />
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The babe is torn from mother's womb,<br />
A seething scoop of skin;<br />
But the father, old and thin,<br />
Is gently laid in his good tomb.<br />
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Oh, a thousand sins and sorrows,<br />
This old tale is said anew<br />
With ev'ry world that's born true,<br />
With the sun and all the morrows.<br />
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We are placed here in pain and pleasure;<br />
Whatever the prudent path,<br />
Whatever our personal wrath,<br />
To do anything is itself a treasure.<br />
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To feel forgiveness we first feel guilt:<br />
Felix culpa! O happy fall!<br />
We crouch lowly and small,<br />
Crawling through flowers that cannot wilt.<br />
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Defilement is sanctity's price;<br />
The immersion in sins<br />
Is where holiness begins:<br />
The strongest virtue was once vice.<br />
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Even pride's thunder must finally give way;<br />
Take me back, I beseech thee,<br />
Proclaim everlasting mercy<br />
And I fall in your soft arms to stay.<br />
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The blessed life is a risen dove,<br />
A thousand wrongs made entirely right,<br />
A thousand shadows shown under light,<br />
The submission to an inner love.<br />
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-88845663111525241842014-09-01T17:15:00.001-07:002014-09-01T17:15:32.854-07:00Art & Beauty - Part I, Section V: The Symbol as Man's Overcoming TimeNow that we have an idea of what symbolism is on the theoretical level, it is necessary to discuss what symbolism is on the practical level, or how man has traditionally used the symbol. Since we are inhabitants of the 'profane' world, mired in a temporal, mundane reality, we are fixated upon time, upon the historically and physically exigent dimensions of the world that relentlessly pressure us into thinking that that is all there is. Caught in time, we lose sight of what governs us, of what remains when all else retreats: 'there is no greater obstacle to Union with God than Time' (Meister Eckhart). In time, we are disconnected from eternity, and we acutely, existentially feel that disconnect; it is this lapse from the transcendent, or rather our need to fill that lapse, that determines our deepest, most persistent problems. It is what drives our search for meaning; it is what compels us through so many wrong turns in life, if only in the quest for something that truly stills our soul, quiets our conscience. There are ways to do that, too, even in our restless realm of chaos and fragmentation; there are ways to access the eternal.<br />
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The principal way is that of mythology, and its actualization in the recurrent use of rituals, which includes of course the telling of myths at certain appropriate times in the annual cycle. The creation of myth is important in many ways: (1) it bonds a society of humans together, acting as a further adhesive that strengthens the community which lives by the myths, not only with the living but also with the dead and those yet to be born through the tradition that is remembered; (2) it enables us to experience elements in reality in a more essential form, uplifting accidental aspects into their real, archetypal identity by seeing them dramatized in story; (3) and most importantly myth solidifies, crystallizes something that only exists in sensible reality in its mythic shape, and that is the Sacred, the untouchable, invisible inferno of truth that nourishes us more than food or drink because it satisfies the spirit. The myths, and the sacred vehicles we create to host them, to transport them to living consciousness, are precisely what reconnect us with the eternal; they bring the prodigal son back home:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'[The] myths are true because they are sacred, because they tell [man] about sacred beings and events. Consequently, in reciting or listening to a myth, one resumes contact with the sacred and with reality, and in so doing one transcends the profane condition, the ''historical situation''.... The periodic recitation of the myths breaks through the barriers built up by profane existence. The myth continually reactualises the Great Time, and in so doing raises the human to a superhuman and suprahistorical plane; which, among other things, enables him to approach a Reality that is inaccessible at the level of profane, individual existence' (Mircea Eliade, <i>Images and Symbols</i>, p. 59).</blockquote>
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So myth is the tangible reflection of what is <i>a priori</i> intangible: 'A myth represents in this world the realities which transcend the world; it brings two worlds together in images and symbols' (Evgueny Lampert). The symbol, then, is a unit of mythology, one which is used by a specific myth to convey a specific truth. While the symbol is in a sense subordinate to the myth as a whole, it contains in itself its own metaphysic, its own idea: the symbol is the microcosm to the myth's macrocosm.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlIJRpRgYH_i9NB-ZVIchTn3LLWJizgmgg4l1AS-yxXE1yLHP-6G34irdpJ5kDQfLuHO-s1M0D8CiZHUtpBcjVbZAxVdf1HRufXqEmoH7yZRM4tUpUTYDOsh6DbM3tEsHoY6cA6SqDpVqQ/s1600/Marco_palmezzano,_crocifissione_degli_Uffizi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlIJRpRgYH_i9NB-ZVIchTn3LLWJizgmgg4l1AS-yxXE1yLHP-6G34irdpJ5kDQfLuHO-s1M0D8CiZHUtpBcjVbZAxVdf1HRufXqEmoH7yZRM4tUpUTYDOsh6DbM3tEsHoY6cA6SqDpVqQ/s1600/Marco_palmezzano,_crocifissione_degli_Uffizi.jpg" height="320" width="260" /></a>The most obvious example of this is that of the Crucifix, whose part it plays in the supreme myth of the Incarnation is indispensable as the sacrificial instrument, but whose symbolic character is equally important as something in itself. The intersection of the horizontal and vertical beams represents the collision of the mundane and sacred worlds respectively, and the perfectly good and just man dead upon it represents the historical <i>and</i> mythical triumph over time and space. The communication between man and God, between earth and heaven is established via the erection of the Cross, the pre-eminent 'Cosmic Tree' that completes every other mythical image of that sort (i.e. Yggdrasil). The 'ontologization' of time, the transformation of becoming into <i>being</i>, is thus accomplished by the eternal nature of the symbol of the Cross and by the event actually happening in the flux of time; by acting <i>through</i> time, God has <i>redeemed</i> time, and thus saved man from its ouroboric labyrinths.<br />
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This is practically managed through the creation of religion. Because man is a fallen being, he is necessarily a religious being; if he were not fallen, there would be no need for religion, because he would already be in full communion with the divine and the fullness of his own nature. The religious institution, as the exterior (<i>and</i> interior) organization of mythology into something available to any man, is the means by which man strives to remember and redeem himself, to counteract the Fall, and to establish a genuine relationship with God and therefore finally overcome time. Since this is far and away the most important endeavour for man in this world, religion becomes our greatest tool, our most prized possession, the thing of the greatest <i>use</i>. Remembering what we said in Section III, then, and Aquinas's 'functionalist theory of beauty' (where the useful is equated with the beautiful), it follows that religion is also of the greatest beauty, which helps explain why it has traditionally been the single greatest patron of the arts in Western Civilization; in the Medieval era, of course, right through the Renaissance and beyond, the Catholic Church dictated European culture, promoting the artistic talents of its members to this religious end. This was most powerfully expressed in the stunning cathedrals that dominated both urban and rural landscapes:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Artistic allegory reached its apotheosis with the maturity of Gothic art.... The cathedrals, the highest artistic achievement of medieval civilization, became a surrogate for nature, a veritable <i>liber et pictura</i>, although organised in accordance with rules of interpretation which were in fact not wholly applicable to nature.... cathedrals actualised a synthetic vision of man, of his history, of his relation to the universe.... In arranging this figurative discourse, the Gothic masters used the mechanism of allegory. The legibility of the signs which they employed was guaranteed by a solid sociological fact, namely, the medieval habit of grasping certain analogies, by interpreting signs and emblems in ways that tradition had determined, of translating images into their spiritual equivalents' (Umberto Eco, <i>Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages</i>, pp. 61-2).</blockquote>
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What this was was the 'power of symbolism', the directly intuitive relation between man and the consensual cosmology society creates to better understand our world. Art is objectively the communication of intelligibility, and it does this through utilizing symbolism, the personification and materialization of profound ideas in forms that we can easily comprehend and which deeply attract us: 'The Medievals inhabited a world filled with references, reminders, and overtones of divinity, manifestations of God in things. Nature spoke to them heraldically: lions or nut-trees were more than they seemed; griffins were just as real as lions because, like them, they were signs of a higher truth' (Eco, p. 53). The symbol was moreover not merely a secondary imitation a la Plato's theory of mimesis, but something which had a lasting value in itself, because it was the means by which man interacted with those things that are not directly found in sensible reality.<br />
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Beyond the obvious connotations that a lion, for example, offers in itself, such as the connection between its golden colour and the gold of royalty, tradition carries with it an 'hieratic language', a lexicon of symbols and allusions that anyone educated and participating in that tradition can share in. So the lion, as per the Proverbs, is said to be a symbol of the virtue of courage, and the Medievals, as an emphatically Christian civilization, exploited this symbol in their heraldry as well as in their literature. The Bible was indeed the principal source for this allegorical and symbolic material, offering an imaginative cosmology from the moral parables to the anagogical horrors of Hell; it was the root of everything definitively Medieval and the touchstone by which everything of pagan origins was judged. This included the living folk legends, for instance, which were duly and organically incorporated into the Catholic consciousness. This great symbolic <i>weltanschauung</i> imbued all poetry, all songcraft, all of the plastic arts, all religious artefacts, even seemingly innocuous household items with a decisive, universal power that enlivened the ordinary, making the natural into something <i>supernatural</i>.<br />
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In pagan societies, too, everything that pertained to a man's reality was useful in a way that was more than its mechanical use - as we said in Section III, a man's shovel was not only something with which he planted vegetables, it was equally a symbol of the direct connection between himself and his forefathers and the perennial continuity of the harvest. This not only 'enlivened the ordinary', making his world something so much brighter and adventurous than it might otherwise seem by a purely economical perspective, but it attached him both to the the land which he shared with his ancestors and to their common faith. This symbolic lens allowed him to view 'beyond time' and experience the immediate connection between himself and his fathers who shared his trade, and between himself and the gods, who were expressed through specific rites of the harvest; everything in this world contained something more of <i>that</i> world, that divine dimension to which any healthy society adheres:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Primitive man made no real distinction of sacred from secular: his weapons, clothing, vehicles and house were all of them imitations of divine prototypes, and were to him even more what they meant than what they were in themselves; he made them this ''more'' by incantation and by rites. Thus he fought with thunderbolts, put on celestial garments, rode in a chariot of fire, saw in his roof the starry sky, and in himself more than ''this man'' So-and-so' (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, 'Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art', p.32).</blockquote>
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The Medieval man retained much of this as well, but superimposed upon it the the stamp of a monotheistic, transcendent God who was nevertheless immanent, present and working in the world. This was expressed via the miraculous stories of the saints, including the 'cephalophore', or a beheaded martyr who carries his head as he continues to preach post-mortem. The most famous example is St. Denis, who, according to the <i>Golden Legend</i>, journeyed over ten kilometres with his head in his arms to his burial site, which became the Basilica of St. Denis. Whether this was <i>historically</i> true or not was a concern for the Church hierarchy to determine, but to the common man it made little difference; such events were mythical, which meant that they held greater importance as legends of a superior nature, as examples of God's holiness at work in the world, of his making exceptions to the laws of his own creation. There was thus a lively mythos at play in Medieval society, one which did not (usually) compete with the Church, but subsisted beneath it, providing it with a grounded mythology that satisfied the inherent demands of man's imagination.<br />
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Just as Christ came and fulfilled the Mosaic Law, so did the Church Militant conquer the pagan mythology, ameliorating its darker substance with the light of the sacred heart; it came to provide the fullness that the pagans had only been hinting at all along. The antecedent mythical force, however, was preserved, only it was 'christened by Christ', as it were, in which the vestigial heathen elements were cleansed and sublimated into the redemptive authority of the Roman Church. The sites of old pagan shrines, for example, were sustained for their primeval power, for their <i>genius loci</i>, for their being 'magical centres' at the soul of primitive man; but these were invariably purified by the Cross, whose soldiers built churches of their own over these locations, and often named them after St. Michael (who is typically known as a 'demon-slayer') to represent Christ's triumph over the natural world even as he dwells in it. By the unification given to the European nations by the Christian tradition, they all received a 'common denominator' that exalted the truth of the Incarnation yet preserved and dignified the indigenous traditions themselves:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'By the fact of their Christianisation, the gods and the sacred places of the whole of Europe not only received common names but rediscovered, in a sense, their own archetypes and therefore their universal valencies: a fountain in Gaul, regarded as sacred ever since prehistoric times, but sanctified by the presence of a divine local or regional figure, became sacred <i>for</i> <i>Christianity as a whole</i> after its consecration to the Virgin Mary. All the slayers of dragons were assimilated to Saint George or some other Christian hero; all the gods of the storm to holy Elijah. From having been regional and provincial, the popular mythology became ecumenical. It is, above all, through the creation of a new mythological language common to all the populations who remained attached to their soil... that the civilising mission of Christianity has been so remarkable. For, by Christianising the ancient European religious heritage, it not only purified the latter, but took up, into the new spiritual dispensation of mankind, all that deserved to be ''saved'' of the old practises, beliefs and hopes of pre-Christian man' (Mircea Eliade, <i>Images and Symbols</i>, p. 175).</blockquote>
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With the Bible as the revelational source, the tradition of the Early Church, the philosophical and political vestiges of Classical Greece and Rome, and the basic legends of the European people were thus synthesized into an organic worldview that, just like Coomaraswamy's 'primitive man', failed to separate in any meaningful way the sacred from the profane; just as their artwork was the integration of the useful and the beautiful, so their religious life was fully integrated into their work and play: '[In the Medieval civilization] secular art hardly exists, or rather the distinction between the sacred and the profane is immaterial since everything proceeds from Christ' (Ernst Kitzinger, <i>Early Medieval Art</i>, p. 92). On the micro level, this was all connected by their shared network of symbols, and the existential contentment that they derived from them - but fundamentally, from daily Mass to the urban marketplace to the potato fields, everything was motivated by a love for God. This profound integration allowed for an easier ontological transition from one world to the next:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'All of the exterior life was a rite, namely, an approximation, more or less efficacious and depending on individuals and groups, to a truth that the exterior life cannot produce by itself, but that allows a person to realize one's self in part or entirely, provided it is lived in a saintly way. These people lived the same life that they had for centuries; they made of this world a ladder in order to achieve liberation. These peoples used to think, to act, to love, to hate, and to wage war on each other in a saintly way; they had erected the one temple among a great number of other temples through which the stream of the waters ran. This temple was the bed of the river, the traditional truth, the holy syllable in the heart of the world' (Guido de Giorgio, 'Action and Contemplation').</blockquote>
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The symbolic function is that ladder, the spiritual highway on which man drives his soul to higher planes of being according to his own inner vocation. By providing anything and everything with a symbolic reality, with an identity that transcends something considered merely as a material or historical fact, traditional man remained in touch with the sacred; all of life could in this way be conceived as a clear reflection of the higher or primal life. The old wars, for example, were never just about familial pride or economical gain or even religious dominance. War was <i>essentially </i>the opportunity for man to express both his love for <i>patria</i> and his pent-up destructive energies in a creative manner, in a manner that agrees with providence or divine destiny; Roman society figured that a war was already lost when its generals forsook the necessary sacrifices, failed to make the proper prayers. Serfdom, merchants, nobles, even prostitutes all had symbolic equivalents that made their occupations in the world <i>more</i> than what they were in an economic or sociological sense; they made them direct participants in the timeless reality by their connections to eternal vocations. This was truest of the priestly and kingly functions, of which Evola has the following to say:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'In the world of tradition the most important function of the authority and of the right of kings and chiefs, and the reason why they were obeyed, feared, and venerated, was essentially their transcendent and nonhuman quality. This quality was not artificial, but a powerful reality to be feared.... Traditional civilizations... completely ignored the merely political dimension of supreme authority as well as the idea that the roots of authority as well as the idea that the roots of authority lay in mere strength, violence, or natural and secular qualities such as intelligence, wisdom, physical courage, and a minute concern for the collective well-being. The roots of authority, on the contrary, always had a metaphysical character.... The root of every temporal power was spiritual authority, which was almost a "divine nature disguised in human form"'(Julius Evola, <i>Revolt Against the Modern World</i>, pp. 7-8).</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1yxCzdmlXG1o3SHbrg6Ga3-ku9AUMZxH4O4HFwnWoFP-JLxZ94sdTZeOocCjUI3I7TcV5S1fdUFLxF6v-_jPbK01wHJ6Ok28IZtsO2KyuhoN4jkDb9JTK93VeNjpbCPX7uH5pWTo2gbDI/s1600/barbarossa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1yxCzdmlXG1o3SHbrg6Ga3-ku9AUMZxH4O4HFwnWoFP-JLxZ94sdTZeOocCjUI3I7TcV5S1fdUFLxF6v-_jPbK01wHJ6Ok28IZtsO2KyuhoN4jkDb9JTK93VeNjpbCPX7uH5pWTo2gbDI/s1600/barbarossa.jpg" /></a>The symbol is precisely the effect of that relationship - it is 'divine nature disguised in human form'. The traditional understanding of kingship, which considered the royal power as something very near or identical with the divine power, possesses the symbolic function <i>par excellence</i>; he is the active, temporal centre of civilization, whereas the pope or high priest is its contemplative, eternal centre. Joseph de Maistre says that 'God makes kings in the literal sense. He prepares royal races; maturing them under a cloud which conceals their origin. They appear at length crowned with glory and honour.... The truth is that they arise as it were of themselves, without violence on their part, and without marked deliberation on the other: it is a species of magnificent tranquility....' (de Maistre, 'Essay on the Generative Principle of Constitutions'). The idea of being a king is manifest in the king, the human form who bears the divine ideal of kingship; he himself becomes something eminently symbolic, a direct correspondence to the transcendent reality here on earth. This is important of course for his own vocation, but how much more so for his subjects who rally to that temporal centre! The necessity of a king becomes obvious once we realize both the need for a pseudo-divine personhood that rules in God's place in the world, and the need for the natural hierarchy of man. In this emphatically symbolic political organization, man can be taught to realize that this world is indeed not the end, but that it is the place through which the divine expresses itself, with or without our help.<br />
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If the symbol is fully utilized in the active arena, it most certainly is in the religious one, which brings us back to the beginning of this Section. It is important at this point, however, to distinguish between a strictly utilitarian judgment of art and the complete judgment of art, which includes not only the use of a thing but the good of a thing as well. The former pertains to the analysis of a work of art according to its purpose alone, i.e., a land mine is a good work of art if it performs its intended function, which is the destruction of anyone or thing that triggers it. The complete judgment of art, however, might state that such an instrument is ethically criminal, that it has no place in Christian society, especially if it is used against fellow Christians. This is why the Catholic Church, the traditional arbiter of culture in European history, outlawed the use of crossbows amongst the Christian nations - a crossbow might be well-made, it might even be beautiful from a certain point of view, but it was morally repulsive, and thus could not be <i>completely</i> beautiful. The strictly artistic judgment pertains to what <i>is</i> made; the complete judgment pertains to what <i>ought or ought not</i> to be made.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi78cKIKz0-y5tFTi96oBy1wH7hJrXjy6qrdlLMCoTbmyj4bj3fexMQ900HUvUQcoUtOlyBBNrQ3z41gGRAvPsVV5bUQxmIgXlZ8IBlEkx63gQIAntxiXomBspponzdXt7W_eVv3-jkpTa7/s1600/St.+Mary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi78cKIKz0-y5tFTi96oBy1wH7hJrXjy6qrdlLMCoTbmyj4bj3fexMQ900HUvUQcoUtOlyBBNrQ3z41gGRAvPsVV5bUQxmIgXlZ8IBlEkx63gQIAntxiXomBspponzdXt7W_eVv3-jkpTa7/s1600/St.+Mary.jpg" height="320" width="234" /></a>Conversely, if a work of art has highly noble content for its subject matter, it by no means attains to a greater artistic judgment; regardless of how well it may meet our moral demands, if such a work fails to express its idea in an artistically captivating and vigorous way, it can only qualify as something in the lower order, because 'expression in art proceeds from the work itself and the means employed and not from the subject portrayed' (Jacques Maritain). A monument sculpted in loving imitation of St. Mary, for instance, is nevertheless something quite classless if it is discoloured or misshapen or bland or otherwise deficient in form. Friedrich Schiller explains: 'In a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, the form everything; for the wholeness of Man is affected by the form alone, and only individual powers by the content'. The content exists as a kind of neutral, malleable matter that is controlled by form; it can be moulded into something great like Palestrina's <i>Missa Papae Marcelli</i> or it can devolve into something like the average 'Christian' radio-rock song. In the first example the content becomes so much more compelling because of the form which wonderfully propels it; the listener is profoundly stirred by the beauty of the sacred words all the more due to the purity and elegance of their expression - according to Schiller, the 'whole of Man' is successfully moved. In the second unfortunate example, the content subsists merely as something sentimental, attracting the listener by means of secondary, non-musical kinships (the relationship between man and his faith), and not by the art itself, with which the listener would be entirely estranged if it were not for its need to invoke <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38V8jnN1Kpw">'Awesome God'</a> in its lyrics. The man as a whole has failed to be moved; it is only a vague emotional attachment that has responded to the music, and this cannot be called the complete artistic experience.<br />
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So any religious art if it is to be worth its name must avoid the fault of being beautiful in its concept, but sterile in its form. That this is one of the principal difficulties is obvious, because most of religious art is going to be an effort at representing the deeply spiritual, the invisibly sacred that requires our utmost reverence as servants of God; most of religious art is going to be 'conceptually beautiful', because the sacred cannot be conceived as anything but the highest degree of beauty. This sword is doubly edged, however, because if it is vulnerable to portraying a terrific image in a boring language, religious art is also privy to a vast host of terrific images that earnestly plead with us to be revealed in a thunderous communication; the march of the Saints, the Passion of the Christ, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary are all inimitable moments that nevertheless await imitation by our best artists. Due at once to the objective beauty of their relationship to the fallen world and to the inheritance of our own religious tradition, such moments offer an inexhaustible supply of artistic subject matter, and, from the humble iconography and engravings of the early Medievals to the sweeping splendour of the Baroque period, Europeans have been perfectly eager to utilize it. Art is a natural ally to religion:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Art creates beauty. The beautiful is a transcendental of being, and to approach being as such is always to reach the threshold of the sacred.... The beautiful is... the most modest of all those modalities of being, since it is merely the good of sensible apperception of being, when there is conformity between the object of sense and the sensibility of an intelligent subject.... So also, religion mobilizes all the arts to press them into the service of the deity. Only, they themselves are not religion, and they first have to be art in order to serve any conceivable cause. And art should be at its best when the cause to be served is religion' (Etienne Gilson, <i>The Arts of the Beautiful</i>, p. 182).</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCn-rRhZSshbfLBoT6oVqTp0fKZhG8rs-O-mFTxwcGphw7tx5dsg5kUYaCmi5arSRueustvgXR5USa7KOz74VM6Qrd1HI36BlTW282UHoAZiTrAEjCfjYf7kI36uc1f30saiuam4I1Htfe/s1600/feastRUBEN.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCn-rRhZSshbfLBoT6oVqTp0fKZhG8rs-O-mFTxwcGphw7tx5dsg5kUYaCmi5arSRueustvgXR5USa7KOz74VM6Qrd1HI36BlTW282UHoAZiTrAEjCfjYf7kI36uc1f30saiuam4I1Htfe/s1600/feastRUBEN.jpg" height="198" width="320" /></a>Beauty serves as the gateway to the truth. Insofar as the arts capture and signify something true, they express something beautiful. As God possesses the highest, fullest degree of truth, naturally he commands the most beauty; as religion aims to unite man with God, naturally it demands its own beauty, which the arts hasten to provide. Genuine religion is something true, so likewise it requires its own 'gateway', and this has historically been supplied firstly in the shape of the Sacraments, but also in the creation and ornamentation of the Cathedrals, the hagiographies of the Saints, the poetic homilies that spiritually sustain the masses year after year after year. In several interesting studies using censors and surveys that were described in his book <i>The Catholic Imagination</i>, Andrew Greeley outlines the difference between Catholics and Protestants in regard to their perception of the arts, which is namely that 'Catholics are more interested in the fine arts than Protestants, and those Catholics who go to church regularly are the most likely to be interested in the fine arts.... Among Catholics the correlation between graceful imagery and regular churchgoing is positive. Among Protestants it is negative' (p.44). Greeley goes on to argue convincingly that it is the Catholic ideals of community, festivity, as well as their greater emphasis on a gracious, loving God are all part of what causes this divide. This hardly required a modern, empirical study to be observed, however, as the Protestant vision has historically been scornful of the material world, which included its representations of the spiritual world; the bold extravagance (even sometimes to excess) of the art of the Counter Reformation serves as proof enough of this, as Catholics sought to display the intrinsic truth of their faith through the unquestionable beauty of the material world. They did this through Bernini, Rembrant, Veronese, Rubens; they did this through art.<br />
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In conclusion, the symbol, as the <i>gestalt</i> of the relationship between the spiritual idea and the material expression, is the crucial element in any work of art, because it is the point where invisible concept and visible form meet in union; it is that crucible that makes known the unknown, and this in a specially inspired way that meets both our aesthetic and intellectual demands. The symbol is in any healthy society organically installed at every level in the hierarchy through an elaborate complex of colour and images that signify to man that he is not only an integral part of the workings of this world, but also of the other world as well. This is chiefly done through the religious arts, which enlist the symbolic function in their 'beautification' of the universe; all reality becomes something more than what it seems due to the symbolism achieved by pen, brush, hammer, and voice. Mythology and the religion which carries it offer an abundance of symbolic wealth because they are what help man out of his anxiety in time and into the security of eternity; the Gospels are the symbolic vision <i>par excellence</i> because God's Word is not only the theandric energy that sustains the universe, it is equally the success of the convergence between the mythical and the historical, and the consequent redemption of time. Through the Cross time becomes eternity - <i>nunc fluens </i>becomes <i>nunc stans</i>.<br />
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The Cross stands triumphant over hell because of what Christ performed, but the Cross stands over the earth because of what the Church performed and continues to perform - and not the least part of that conquest is thanks to the artistic enterprises of its membership. We end this Section with a highly apropos prayer for the restoration of sacral art:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'There is one thing which I would like and which I pray for; that everything beautiful be recovered for God and serve His praise. All that we see in creatures and in creation must be brought back to Him, and my sorrow is to see His Spouse, our holy mother the Church apparelled in hideousness. All her outward manifestation is so ugly, she that is so fair within; every effort is to make a fright of her; at the outset her body was bare, made over to beasts; now then artists set their souls to her adornment, next vanity, and last of all the trade, butts in, and so caparisoned, she is given up to ridicule' (Marie-Charles Dulac). </blockquote>
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-17787501506192628332014-08-30T01:12:00.000-07:002014-08-30T01:12:00.948-07:00True Detective: Light Versus Dark<h4>
Disclaimer: spoilers are in full effect for this review!</h4>
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Like so many other HBO shows in the last fifteen years, <i>True Detective</i> is awash in flesh, drugs, violence, and the various other vulgarities that simultaneously repulse us from the labyrinths of sin and yet draw us deeper inside. Like the rest of them it is set on exploring the dark under-belly of humanity, and like the rest of them it rivals the massive production values of the average Hollywood film. <i>Unlike</i> the typical HBO series, however, <i>True Detective</i> is decidedly unique in that it is essentially a story of 'Good Versus Evil'. Now, is it a traditional one, no, it cannot be; the increasingly tired use of the 'anti-hero' in contemporary storytelling prevents that from being true, with the two <i>TD</i> protagonists being as 'anti-heroic' as you might find anywhere in television today. And yet there is a definite warmth in them that develops in a way that comes across as more authentic than in the usual 'mysterious' bad man who is supposed to appeal to the viewer for his negative qualities instead of his 'good' ones, which commonly consist merely in being rather less negative than those of the antagonist. The generic anti-hero is simply an evil character whose particular form of evil resonates with the audience. Rust Cohle and Martin Hart, being <i>atypical</i> anti-heroes, fight evil not because they are merely less evil, but because they are fundamentally good men afflicted by evil; in a word, the detectives fight evil because they are <i>human</i>, party to devils and angels alike.<br />
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Before traversing the more crucial and frankly more interesting subject of the two main characters, it would behoove us to discuss the environment in which they act, and the atmosphere which they oftentimes strive against. It is the first test of a cinematic artwork to convey a setting as though it were alive, with its own identity, its own heartbeat; as though it were a <i>real </i>place, a new, foreign world waiting to be opened, its stories waiting to be told. Unlike the novel, where the writer is allowed by the nature of his art a certain liberty in the expression of his work, leaving the reader a measure of interpretation of events, people, places, the director of a film (or TV show) is in nowise so free; what he creates on the screen, what is captured on video, that is what <i>everyone </i>who watches the screen sees. There is no room for interpretation in that way, so he must invent room in other ways - this is what is known as 'cinematography' in the more specific sense, or the art of creating a mood or a vision by showing something happen in a particular light, in one way and not another. The choice of what is shown, the construction of sets, the addition of a soundtrack, and so on, all contribute to this one principal aim - the creation of a <i>universally understood</i> atmosphere that serves a purpose in the overall production.<br />
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In the case of <i>True Detective</i>, that atmosphere is most of all of a dark, dangerous beauty. In the portrayal of the long, absent landscapes and natural spectacles, for example, the atmosphere is something that is indeed beautiful in its Edenic, wild allure, but also one that the viewer wonders is not also conducive to the wickedness of man. Did not the serpent, after all, quietly emerge from the tangled trees of Paradise? Certainly the evil elements in this show seem to be the most at home in the undergrowth of the terrain, far removed from civilization; the invocation of the American literary mythology of 'Carcosa', too, and the distinctly pagan, superstitious charms ('devil-nests', the antlers affixed to the dead, etc.) used to present it to us, is unquestionably of something primeval, of something terrifyingly <i>natural</i>.<br />
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While the truly evil powers retreat to the wilderness to practise their madness, the atmosphere that issues from the scenes set in 'civilized' locales possesses a darkness of its own. From whores exiting trucks as they finish sessions to grizzled, impenetrable biker bars to a short but intensely fascinating war in the Negro neighborhood, it is clear that human development carries with it its own peculiar malice; in this there is a different but even more threatening sense of evil because it strikes nearer to the normal human, guilty as he is of wants and perversions even if he is not prone to the murder and rape of children like the serial killers are. It is moreover in the churches set up by a 'Christian' organization, ostensibly a force of civilization, that spawned these enemies of civilization, and possibly allowed them a greater freedom in their activities.<br />
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In a more neutral sense, however, the atmosphere succeeds wonderfully in enlivening the locations that this story is immersed in. Like <i>Breaking Bad</i> introducing the arid, toxic dimensions of New Mexico in a way that enriched the show's content, making the environment an integrated element in the story's development, <i>True Detective</i> likewise establishes a lush, <i>sincere</i> atmosphere that invites the viewer to engage with it. The lively, green stretches of sparsely populated land imbue their own sense of hostility that matches the savages to whom it plays host; yet we cannot help but delight in this profoundly natural aura, where life and death are weighed so precariously, almost arbitrarily. The music, from the mood-setting theme song that captures the sinister, bucolic tone of the show to the minimalistic motifs that invariably afford a stoic bleakness to any which scene, is invaluable in this unforgiving presentation of unforgiving Louisiana, providing as it does that singularly pensive, melancholic attitude that really defines this show. The human element, too, in the interviews with the various residents and related characters, is faintly reminiscent of <i>As I Lay Dying</i>; the rustic honesty and graceful, familial issues that persist through generations are present in <i>TD</i>, even if Faulkner's depth is deeper. The Gothic motifs of Lovecraft and Poe are likewise invoked through the aforementioned references to something occult and otherworldly, and add colour and substance to an already mythical setting.<br />
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It is worth noting as a solitary complaint that, purely in terms of pacing and quality of narrative, the first five <br />
episodes far exceed the final three. The tension and the excitement of the pursuit of the original suspect, Reggie Ledoux, are extremely high: we experience the rising action in the first few leads as the struggle consists not only against the criminals but also those who try to cover their identities; we experience the most insightful dialogues between Rust and Marty as their two characters are excellently juxtaposed over the backdrop of a confusing, seemingly vicious reality; we experience Rust at his most comfortable, sinking to the bleary lowliness of human corruption in defiance of his own mental health (or lack thereof); and we experience a terrific line of action that runs from infiltrating a seedy biker gang to stirring up trouble in the Projects to hunting the Ledoux cousins in their own property. This more or less perfect pacing is then interrupted by a lacklustre aftermath; the 'intermission', as it were, trips up the gallop, and the level of excitement is never again reached in the same way, even as the hunt for 'Lawnmower Man' reaches its conclusion. The eccentricity of Cohle's crusade to catch the one they missed does not garner enough interest; what the two Black detectives have to reveal about the case does not keep the viewer watching, desperately awaiting the answers, eagerly turning the next episode on as he did during the first five.<br />
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That the story does go on, that it indeed <i>needs </i>to go on, is due to the personal resolutions of the detectives' storylines. The characters demand closure. Rust Cohle, for starters, has been established to be an intensely disillusioned person, tormented by the death of his daughter and the dissolution of his marriage. He has crafted a frightening pessimism from his heightened reason, uncaring introversion, and past experiences, and which pushes most people away from him. His weakness is naturally that of liquor, which allows him to retreat from the pounding in his head, the unenviable answers to life's most pertinent problems, the existential crisis of an intellect mutated into hatred and futility. For all of his intelligence, however, the best that he can come up with for Marty's precise question of 'why get out of bed in the morning' is either (non-verbatim), 'I lack the constitution required for suicide' or 'I am not strong enough to overcome my programming'. This is not good enough. This tells us that he lacks the full balance of such a broken worldview, that there is something else that commands him to go on. He caustically questions the institutions of religion and state and family, turning his hatred for life and consciousness into a deadly cynicism for anything that emerges from life and consciousness; and yet his criticisms are shallow, hollow, trite, and we become aware that these are not his essential positions, that they are more the result of bitterness than of genuine contemplation.<br />
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Whereas Cohle represents a figure of lonely pessimism, a conscientious objector, an eminently <i>individual </i>player, Martin Hart roughly corresponds to his opposite, a defender of community and the every-day, healthy values that the community espouses but which Cohle claims to see through. Marty says himself, 'I'm just a normal guy... with a big-ass dick', which contrasts wildly but usefully with how Cohle describes himself, which takes place through his dark musings about the nature of reality. The high school stereotypes of the jock and the nerd come immediately to mind. We may learn about Cohle through his thoughts first, but we learn about Marty through his actions, whose own weakness is women. While his strength <i>should</i> come from the women of his family, instead he loses himself in two mistresses at two different points during the course of the series. He defends these lapses as the need to nourish the family's health, to prevent them from receiving all the pent-up negatives of his work: 'You gotta take your release where you can find it... for the good of the family'. These rationalizations come across as equally hollow as those of Rust, and amount to the same thing, namely a failure to realize one's most inner needs in the chaos of ordinary life. Marty at heart loves his wife, his family, and he knows at heart that he fails them in these adulterous excursions; but he only truly realizes this when he comes face to face with their consequences.<br />
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The biggest success of <i>True Detective</i> consists in its character development, and how the two detectives interact with one another. This is where the show actually says something about the human condition, and which therefore constitutes its real value. While they are both coming from two very different places, ultimately both detectives are seeking the same thing: to be at peace with themselves. This search manifests itself in Marty in the ongoing problems with his wife Maggie and their two daughters; the resolution of this fault, we feel, seems to be the resolution of Marty as a person. It is never a problem of whether he loves her or not; we recall when he asks Cohle whether a man can love two women, for example. The 'love' for the other woman is of course not the true love a man feels for the one to whom he is married, but something else, something symbolic. Both mistresses are younger, and reminiscent of a young Maggie. Combined with the revealed hints of Marty's dissatisfaction with his aging, we can read into this a 'terror of time': he feels the irrevocable presence of time closing in, and lashes out by pursuing someone who reminds him of his youth, and vicariously experiences it thereby. It is in those moments when Maggie distances herself from him, however, that Marty is at his most expressive, his most violent, which again reveals his intimate connection with his family, even if at times he feels it growing cold. His truest, internal life is found in his family, which makes him a part of something. When he is deprived of that, he is deprived of reality, specifically of the reality he <i>wants</i> to believe in. Without his family he is reduced to the loneliness of whiskey and Match.com; without his family he is no longer a part of something.<br />
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This search reveals itself in Cohle through his oddly brilliant but nevertheless self-defeating monologues. With Marty in their car or the two detectives interrogating him, Cohle discusses everything from how it is 'hubristic' to create a child, to raise a soul from the depths of nothingness to the 'meat' of humanity, to the idea of eternal recurrence, of time perpetuating itself in a circle so that nothing we do matters because it will all happen again and again. That latter point was made in a particular period in the show which was supposed to be a moment of victory, right after the justice meted out to the evil Ledoux cousins. This was the nadir of the series in an existential sense; right when we are supposed to be rejoicing in triumph, we sink lower into the mire of Cohle's impossible nihilism, and it was sincerely, completely depressing. We realize at this point just how hostile he is to the potentials of joy and reconciliation; he is almost Calvinistic in this crazed detachment from the world, in this gnostic sort of disbelief in any goodness that is here. By the end of the series we can indeed recognize this as a 'false victory', because there were others out there whom they had not caught. This argument is falsified, however, when we witness the finale, in which a genuine sense of victory is enjoyed despite the fact that there were still a host of men like the Ledoux cousins and Errol Childress, even in relation to the Louisiana serial murders. The truth is that Cohle had not yet experienced his inner crisis of faith, his revelation at death's door, that lifelong obstacle which halted him from the opportunity of living life with love. This prevents him from being at peace with life's terrors, with the reality that there will always be evil. You cannot fight evil purely for the sake of destroying evil; you have to fight evil for the sake of love.<br />
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Cohle's heartfelt antithesis to the possibility of love is again made clear in one of his conversations with Marty, in which he bluntly says, 'I don't think that man can love, at least not the way that he means. Inadequacies of reality always set in'. So the irresolvable divide between an ideal and a fact prevents that ideal from being true; it prevents a man from being able to love. We say that it is a 'heartfelt' antithesis because what drives Cohle as a character is his innate love for his deceased daughter, even if he does not recognize it consciously. His relentless pursuit of the evil men, who have punished numerous little girls themselves, when everyone else are all too inclined to give up, suggests an affinity between Cohle and the murdered girls; that the show repeatedly pictures him driving past that billboard which reads, 'Do you know who killed me?' is significant in that it is both a reminder to him to discern the truth and a clue to his own state of mind, that his vindication possibly resides in tracking the killer down, in <i>knowing who killed her</i>. This is exemplary of what connects him to his daughter, the death of whom he places at the hands of God or simply a cruel, inchoate reality. However much he might deny it through his vague, heart-rending suppositions about the total lack of meaning in the universe, Cohle is driven by the death of his daughter, who represents a part of himself that he is struggling violently to reintegrate into his psyche. That explains the passion of his hunt for the killers, and the lives saved thereby, and that is what throws his entire life-negating philosophy into open contradiction. He unconsciously feels a latent love, but his experiences and his own genius steer him clear of recognizing it in favour of a warped cynicism that redirects that love into a disingenuous, bewildered hatred.<br />
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This contradiction reveals itself in other ways, namely in Rust's attempts to help Marty with his infidelity. In Episode Three, for example, knowing that Marty is having an affair, Rust visits his wife and cuts their grass. In doing this, Marty's position as patriarch is undermined, and he can catch a glimpse of what he has to lose. Rust wittingly shows Marty what he has taken for granted in the hope that he sees the faulty choices he has made. Marty is angered by this, of course, and yet does not realize the deeper meaning of what Rust is trying to say. This subtle piece of compassion for his partner is surprising, but it would not make any sense at all if Rust were not inwardly motivated by something more than what he lets us on to, something more than his esoteric, despondent, drawling nihilism allows for.<br />
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Now, to return to our original thesis, what makes <i>True Detective</i> special is that, to an extent, its characters actually find what they are looking for. In other, lesser shows writers are often content to leave the 'heroes' as they were, still struggling with inner conflict, claiming in their defense (not without reason, mind) that the human condition is something naturally conflicted, that it is more honest to leave characters in a state of crisis or some mild form of self-appeasement. In <i>True Detective</i>, on the other hand, that search to be at peace with the world and with oneself is actually satisfied. There is a genuine resolution that not only flies in the face of current trends in the medium of film, but in the context of the series itself; the heavy, oppressive atmosphere, the persistence of moral weakness in the protagonists, the terrible scale of evil manifest in the antagonists, and the truly disheartening <i>weltanschauung</i> expressed by Rust Cohle all prepare the viewer for an inevitable victory for the darkness. Was there anyone watching who expected <i>both</i> Rust and Marty to survive the final skirmish with Childress in 'Carcosa'? The fact that they did serves the purpose of the show far more than if they did not - death might offer a dramatic denouement and a heightened confession of pathos that profoundly touches the audience, but in this case it would be a convenience, an escape for the writers in that they would not have to resolve these two elaborate, sympathetic, and patently <i>real </i>characters that they have been patiently, lovingly constructing this whole time.<br />
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So they had to survive, and this survival was twofold: one in the literal sense, that they did not die in fighting Childress, and secondly in the <i>personal </i>sense, that they survived the two main existential crises of their storylines. First we see Marty recovering in the hospital, surrounded by his ex-wife and his two daughters. He dissolves into tears in their company, stirred into a frenetic activity of the heart as he approaches what he has been searching for, namely that intimacy between himself and those whom he loves. This is also how he is finally able to see himself as a 'good man', in his strength as the family leader. There is a recurring question for Marty, one which he directly asks Rust: 'Do you ever wonder if you're a bad man?' Marty struggles with seeing himself as a good person, which is what he yearns to be; his wife tells him multiple times that he was a better man when he married her, and this helps provoke his infidelity. The second mistress, Beth, says to him in Episode 6, 'You're a good man; anyone can see that'. She seduces Marty not so much through her body, but through her validation of Marty as a person, as 'a good man'. That he is left wanting after the fact is evident both through his body language and the focus on a couple ornaments in her room, an angel and a demon, with the latter being the prominent figure. Now, whether Maggie actually reunites with her husband as with the time they took down the Ledoux cousins, is left unknown, and is more or less insignificant anyway. The point is clear: he sees his wife and his daughters, whom he has loved and created, and can finally see himself as a good man. He has destroyed another pillar of evil in Errol Childress, he has made a family, and he sees enough in that to vindicate his place in the world. His connection to the reality he wants to live in is reëstablished.<br />
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The existential survival of Rust Cohle is understandably a much different affair. This is firstly true in its taking place in a spiritual revelation while he was immersed in the darkness of a coma. Rust describes it, through stuttering though perfectly comfortable tears, as a 'vague awareness' where he feels his 'definitions', all his abstract musings about the world, his definition of himself possibly, fading away, becoming meaningless as he nears the ultimate meaning. There is a deeper darkness yet, but it is warm, and he feels, finally he <i>feels </i>a substance in that darkness: his daughter. He feels as though he were 'a part of everything I ever loved' in that black space. That love that lurked in the shadows of his soul, that flickered here and there throughout the series but was always masked by a veil of invincible cynicism, shows itself to him in its wholeness, its necessity, its grace; that love has filled in the lonesome cavern which was once the source of all his bitterness. Where Marty required outward validation to confront and overcome his personal conflicts, Rust had to descend into the kingdoms within himself to defeat his own - but the result is essentially the same. They both sought a bond to reality, a way to intimate themselves with the world they lived in, for otherwise they were lost to whatever their respective frailties of conscience and introspection revealed - and they both found it.<br />
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It is fitting that the finest, most endearing lines of the series are reserved for the final conversation. After all the philosophical bleakness and haughty condemnations of various ideas that the common man values, it is absolutely natural that this is all reversed in a new, precious insight that is paradoxically as unlike the Cohle we know as it is like him. Marty brings up when Rust told him about how he looked up at the stars as a boy, and made up stories, but Rust presently says, 'There is only one story: Light versus Dark'. If that is true of <i>this</i> story, the two detectives can only be representatives of the Light; they can only be good guys. This is the moment of the show that defines the show, brings everything into focus, and reveals to us finally that it was all along Good Versus Evil. The evil is obviously apparent in the varying villains that are overthrown, but the evil in themselves is just as manifest, and arguably just as repulsive in a more intimate sense as the serial murderers are in the most basic sense. Both characters had to defeat the darkness inside of them at the same time as defeating the darkness walking the world, which acted to symbolize in an ugly, horrifying way the depths of depravity present in us as a species, as individuals. The terrors are real and universal and fully capable of subverting our human authority, even to the point of driving us to hopelessness; and yet, as Rust says, 'Once there was only dark [in the sky]; if you ask me the light's winning'. This is a radical change from when he advocated the idea of eternal recurrence, in which nothing we do matters because it all happens <i>ad infinitum</i>. Now there is a linear creation, a cosmic warfare between principalities that we directly participate in; now there is beauty, and a purpose to our actions. Now there is light where once there was none, and now there is love where once there was none.<br />
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In summary, then, <i>True Detective</i> was wildly fascinating from the start. The smoldering intensity of Rust's convictions, the struggle against the disintegration of Marty's family life, the sudden changes in pace between meditative reflection and resplendent acts of violence, the organic, frightening atmosphere that purposefully pervades the entire story were all sufficient in captivating my attention to what I thought was a real good show; but what captivated my deeper interest and what makes it a truly <i>exceptional </i>show was only conveyed in the final episode, when the myriad of personal problems are finally solved in a way that makes them seem so much more <i>real</i>, so much more humanely gratifying than you often find in the cultural vacuum of modern art. Beneath the depressive, heartless atmosphere and the stench of Babylon and human weakness, there is a delightfully subtle narrative that opposes the darkness with a quiet light, that brings the chaos into context. Prior to the final scene, there were only two guys riddled with crises, overcome by chaos, inspiring not confidence in humanity but contempt; but after the final scene there was sublime catharsis and a supremely articulate <i>hope</i>. For there really is only one story, and it is the one that we all live within ourselves and in the world: it is Light Versus Dark, Good Versus Evil, and the greatest hope inheres in our faith that Good really does trump Evil, that the Light of eternity presides when even the blackest void has succumbed.<br />
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-38235128684356357832014-08-21T22:04:00.000-07:002014-08-21T22:04:53.876-07:00Art & Beauty - Part I, Section IV: Symbolism & the Imaginative PowerThe essential part of any work of art is its symbolic component. We have discussed the pressing need to know the specific nature of an artwork, its first and second perfections, its formal and intellectual qualities, and so forth. But while all of this is useful and important for conceptual reasons, in order to attain a full understanding of art as it operates in the world we must first understand its actual role in the mind of man, and to do this we must know the value of the symbol.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdbE2y4QVK0zl4y_hdMlSjL_2OZYF9sJZeNFmx30YtZp3eJkd3i8bz7zjFNdv2vaHkveDLQgUjOzx0WhLLjVpOz8kXhLa-_o0STWAidtj7jDLIj63j7IXhToCL9mG_xQnL-FwuBcvc2KnV/s1600/The_Parthenon_Athens.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdbE2y4QVK0zl4y_hdMlSjL_2OZYF9sJZeNFmx30YtZp3eJkd3i8bz7zjFNdv2vaHkveDLQgUjOzx0WhLLjVpOz8kXhLa-_o0STWAidtj7jDLIj63j7IXhToCL9mG_xQnL-FwuBcvc2KnV/s1600/The_Parthenon_Athens.jpg" height="210" width="320" /></a>First of all, as we will discuss at greater length in the next Part, the symbol is often seen as something 'illusory', as an image meant to distract from the thing in itself - and is therefore considered to be 'unreal'. What this perspective fails to account for is the precise relationship between the formal thing and its symbolic representative, which consists in the idea dressing itself in the garments that sensible reality offers it and thereby creates the symbol. The idea is not 'obscured' in this operation, nor does it remain an abstraction; on the contrary, in partaking of the material substance and participating in reality as we see it, the idea is elevated in a way that it could not be if it had remained aloof from the sensible domain. The matter <i>contains</i> the idea in a symbiotic relationship that at once presents the formal thing in a concrete, tangible shape, and imbues the material with the principled organization that allows it a real identity. The idea of the Parthenon, insofar as it remains unmade, is virtually unreal, existing as a concept alone; the matter of the Parthenon would likewise remain a mass of marble and stone if these materials were not used to make that idea a fact in every sense of the word. The Parthenon as a construction is a symbol at once of itself, of the idea of the Parthenon, but even more it is a symbol of at first the Greek Goddess Athena, and later the Holy Theotokos, the Mother of God, because that was its ordained function.<br />
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We can see, then, how this relates to what we have already discussed concerning Plato's theory of mimesis, albeit with more of an Aristotelian angle. What we mean by 'symbol', however, is more directly influential in human society, because it is something that is made exclusively by humans; the symbol is the principal way by which we establish contact with the transcendentals and, eventually, with God. We cannot understand a transcendental except insofar as it reveals itself in <i>this</i> world, dressed in this world's attire; the creation of symbols is our way of dressing these ideals, specifically in the garments germane to our own particular traditions, whatever they may be. The Christian virtues of love, mercy, forgiveness, etc., are therefore given symbolic form in ecclesiastic iconography much like the Indian concepts of detachment, inner peace, and the outer wars of this world are given symbolic form via their own colourful mythologies. The symbol does not distract or detract from the ideal, but offers us a clarity and a tangibility through which we can approach that ideal:<br />
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'[It] is easy to see in a general way that in a civilization [the arts] have a character all the more manifestly symbolic as the civilization itself is more strictly traditional, for their true value lies less in what they are in themselves than in the possibilities of expression which they afford, beyond those to which ordinary language is confined. In a word, their productions are above all destined to serve as ''supports'' for meditation, and as foundations for as deep and extensive an understanding as possible, which is the very <i>raison d'etre</i> of all symbolism....' (Rene Guenon, 'The Arts and their Traditional Conception').</blockquote>
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All symbolism, and by extension all art, is therefore more of a means than an end; a symbol is the visible and comprehensible image through which the invisible and incomprehensible presents itself. The contemplation of that image, whether through story, music, painting, or the ornamentation of a cathedral, leads one to a more immediate and impacting grasp of the idea behind the image. This is useful because we cannot wholly understand something without the aid of our other faculties; the consequence of trying to do so is the separation of mind from body, which means an empty abstraction on the rational side and an unrefined materialism on the sensible side. The symbol is what connects the mind to the senses - it connects what we see to what we know; and, from the perspective of the artist, it connects what he knows to what others see and therefore know.<br />
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Kant proclaimed that the <i>noumenal</i>, conceptual domain was something isolated, that we cannot truly access the 'thing-in-itself' except as it appears to us through the phenomenal domain, when it ceases to be the 'thing-in-itself'. This is similar to what we have spoken of as Plato's metaphysics, but is different in that Kant believes these things to be inaccessible by reason, while Plato of course is confident in the ability of disinterested discursive power to attain sufficient knowledge on a level independent of mind and matter. Kant's argument makes reality into something that is represented by one's mind, by one's perspective of it; Plato considers reality as something independent of how anyone perceives it. The Good exists regardless of whether we know it or not, but the point is that we <i>can</i> know it, even in its 'pure' state thanks to the capability of discursive knowledge.<br />
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While this is all very well in theory, this line of thinking, particularly Kant's with his more solid disconnect between knowable things and unknowable things, tends to become dried out with the dust that abstraction brings. The <i>noumena</i> are lost, distant principles that, because they cannot be known, are sufficient in philosophical terms but vague and remote on any other terms; Kant was little more than a skeptic in this way, for, while he did suppose that there was something that caused the appearances which the skeptics thought was the entirety of reality, he nevertheless left that something unqualified and doomed to remain in doubt due to the limitations of our understanding. By reducing reality to the confines of our perception, Kant and the other idealists shut us out from self-transcendence, from the authentic overcoming of the human condition and the fallen world which we inhabit; this conception is unable to lift itself beyond the sphere of the immanent, which makes its claims about the 'ultimate reality' mere abstractions, and which causes Charles Taylor to ask: 'how does a Hegelian philosopher <i>pray</i>? ....What he can do is contemplate his identity with cosmic spirit, which is something quite different' (Charles Taylor, <i>Hegel</i>, 1975). Without a truly transcendent entity, there can be no faith.<br />
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Contrary to the idealist's belief that we are hopelessly cut off from the underlying reality, traditional philosophy in the West has ever maintained a strong balance between a reason capable of the apperception of being and an intuition capable of experiencing being. Not only can we know to a certain degree Kant's 'external' reality, but we can also <i>live</i> it in a way. This is essentially what the Christian tradition has achieved, in the theoretical sense in the Scholastic classrooms, but more tangibly in its ecclesiastic life, where the living stream of religious consciousness is imbued upon those willing to receive it. This is where symbolic knowledge comes alive. The things which are taught and conceived rationalistically are thereafter introduced as new avenues for man to understand them in their fullness: 'Symbolism alone, by a delimitation of the spheres of spirit and nature, by putting a barrier to the competence of rational knowledge, and by opening up new ways of knowledge, safeguards the inalienable rights and the eternal truths of religious life' (Nikolai Berdyaev, <i>Freedom and the Spirit</i>, 1935).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigupiyQxI7oCkH_lk5VJ09EcONPsenlY6SS7FkuK-CJmLmLMSdVfi6rUqyfTA1_txr8UzMSVLIWlkIsoV1yaITKpwIPhkqp4s9lEv9Z9FNgmbhoHwVc6tSbMLUHnYSqGZJs-5eF8CkHuk2/s1600/classroom+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigupiyQxI7oCkH_lk5VJ09EcONPsenlY6SS7FkuK-CJmLmLMSdVfi6rUqyfTA1_txr8UzMSVLIWlkIsoV1yaITKpwIPhkqp4s9lEv9Z9FNgmbhoHwVc6tSbMLUHnYSqGZJs-5eF8CkHuk2/s1600/classroom+2.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a>One can never make a spiritual ethos out of the immanent, objective, viscerally arid philosophy of Immanuel Kant; to do so would result in the same abstractions, the same ouroboric circling that results from Cartesian philosophy. The rationale of these systems does not allow for them to have true, existential life, because their epistemology is a cul-de-sac. What breaks that dead-end wide open is firstly the existence of a reality independent of our individual representations of it, and then the symbolic understanding that enables us to perceive that reality without in any way diluting it to our consciousness; as a matter of fact, as the idea is transformed into the vivid, visually incisive allure of the symbol, it actually attains a greater meaning for us than if it were to remain in its purely intellectual form. The idea is comprehended in the symbol in its complete form, because it is perceived from every angle of the human person who now understands the idea as part of <i>himself</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Rational knowing operates with concepts, and presupposes the intentional abstraction of the knower from his subjectivity, whereas the participatory knowledge of existential knowledge presupposes a basis in metaphor and symbol, and can only come about where the whole person as thinking, feeling and willing subject is totally involved' (Georg Nicolaus, <i>C.G. Jung and Nikolai Berdyaev: Individuation and the Person</i>, p. 91).</blockquote>
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Symbolic understanding is moreover important because of its location at the core of the human person. It is at the centre of everything, lying in the 'middle' of the senses, the memory, the imagination, and the intellect. It is not a faculty in itself, but is rather the conduit through which every other faculty receives and utilizes its information. Language itself is a form of 'symbolic understanding' because of how we use it to communicate what would otherwise be abstract, intangible concepts. Every word is a sign of something else, and a series of words are strung together to form a composite whole that allows us to understand one another in a relatively fluid manner. The arts are simply a more eloquent expression of this; Aristotle called this 'rhetoric', the pleasing patina of something that is meant to provide it with a more effectively persuasive character. The arts, when properly constructed and received, are indeed the 'language of the gods', the means by which the divine can communicate with the human, and vice versa. The delight we take in Hesiod's epic myths or in the fugues of Bach is this very process of communication; the portions of reality that were seized on by such artists and represented in musical and poetic form are conveyed to us in these forms which are innately delightful to men of sensibility. This supreme pleasure is innate because of our intuitive yearning for <i>the real, </i>and this yearning is therein satisfied because of the intensely real nature of such arts.<br />
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When we perceive something of symbolic value, identifying it with something we already know, identifying it as something true, we experience the real pleasure of art, which is as we have already explained at once intellectual and sensual. This is what happens when we call something created <i>ex materia</i> beautiful: we sensually perceive the object, intellectually recognize its form, and unite the two together symbolically to thereby complete the experience. We not only gain moral and metaphysical knowledge through the contemplation of symbols, we do it in such a way that the whole human person engages in the experience, which makes it the most complete means by which we view the world. The intellectual and sensible functions share equally; the entire soul rejoices.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'In principle everything in the realm of existence is a symbol of a reality above, the only exception being the Divine Principle which is only itself and not the symbol of anything else. This doctrine also deals with the process whereby symbols descend from the purely intelligible realm... through the power of creative imagination to their manifestation in an external form' (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, foreword to <i>Every Man an Artist,</i> ix-x).</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbHCv41oOEBmvUTAvUM5TLYvP3wDhg62aA1d6ib3A9HwgJfy0QcNhRBfqwH3ZERGSnj2fo_5U_iCPtNb_GOfXfDe75Gn3uy7ypHxcaBbxcoSyWi9wlWocPkZpVjEBP8jn_h_we7r0Zttx_/s1600/matejko.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbHCv41oOEBmvUTAvUM5TLYvP3wDhg62aA1d6ib3A9HwgJfy0QcNhRBfqwH3ZERGSnj2fo_5U_iCPtNb_GOfXfDe75Gn3uy7ypHxcaBbxcoSyWi9wlWocPkZpVjEBP8jn_h_we7r0Zttx_/s1600/matejko.jpg" height="136" width="320" /></a>This brings us to the most important component of the creation of a symbolic lexicon, namely, the imagination. When we perceive something, say a sword on the ground, we potentially see two things: the first is that it is simply a steel sword lying where it should not be, with its hilt extended away from us; the second is that of a cross, with the cross-guard forming the intersection between the hilt and the blade. The first is strictly empirical or ratiocinative or literal reasoning, the act of determining what the thing is based only on what our memory and inductive knowledge tell us what it is; the second is an act of the imagination, speculating what the thing could <i>also</i> be based on the creative part of our intellect. This again hearkens back to the dual uses of our instruments, how something used for one specific thing could also be symbolically considered as something very different; it is no coincidence that the Crusaders venturing into the Middle East bore broadswords that resembled the religious image of their spiritual leader <i>par excellence</i>. Or maybe it was coincidence at first, but it is an indisputable fact that these soldiers saw in their weapons something useful for destroying their enemy - and something explicitly <i>Christian</i> in their imaginative figuring. Julius Evola makes this very observation in <i>Revolt Against the Modern World</i>:<br />
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'In the Middle Ages we witness a blossoming of treatises in which every weapon of the knight was portrayed as a symbol of spiritual or ethical virtues; symbols that were almost intended to remind him of these virtues in a visible way and to connect any chivalrous deed with an inner action' (Julius Evola, <i>Revolt Against the Modern World</i>, p. 84).</blockquote>
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In order for art to create a valid symbolism, the artist needs to possess a thriving imagination, because it is by this tool that he 'connects the dots', so to speak, this tool by which he can sensibly express what he apperceives on the intelligible level. It is one thing to claim to reveal the nature of feminine beauty by drawing a beautiful woman, and that is well enough; but it is something else, something more subtly poetic, to reveal that nature by the exposition of lunar or oceanic splendour; in focussing on these other things, which are virtually omnipresent characteristics of femininity in traditional symbolism, he can directly unveil his thesis with more rhetorical conviction, and he can directly approach those things which are the <i>essential</i> qualities of feminine beauty. Her grace, her fluidity, her nocturnal dependence, etc., are all explicated in this symbolic artwork.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9COZbhITOjWUfXVzxU7V1dU2CQvzbuXvEZsh_rDUh4PjVg6nfyqpj-bT_bUSWIDsRF3D7iBybK6X_eWO-PbzaBqT2DKMk-oK3o_uCr5vsHwP9xUTNm6y7zxipzFSAX3YHHrNQUnbv7hbU/s1600/vestal_virgins_hi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9COZbhITOjWUfXVzxU7V1dU2CQvzbuXvEZsh_rDUh4PjVg6nfyqpj-bT_bUSWIDsRF3D7iBybK6X_eWO-PbzaBqT2DKMk-oK3o_uCr5vsHwP9xUTNm6y7zxipzFSAX3YHHrNQUnbv7hbU/s1600/vestal_virgins_hi.jpg" height="320" width="255" /></a>There is moreover the tendency to represent archetypal feminine qualities through the mythological creation of female gods who express these qualities; these include, for example, the goddess Freyja, who in the Norse vision symbolized the pre-eminent feminine quality of fertility, and the goddess Diana in Roman mythology who was the personification of the relationship woman has with nature, sharing the same passivity and unpredictability that characterizes the elemental dimension. This was sometimes even made literal, an historical presence, as in the Vestal Virgins who fuelled the spiritual fires of Rome, or in the Christian convents which served as pillars of chastity, and whose inhabitants had love only for God. This reflected not only the healthy relationship that man had with the divine, but also that he felt the need to 'sacralize' his world by making it into something of a mirror image of the heavens; he did this through symbolism, the medium by which archetypal ideas are given material life, and through the imagination, the faculty by which we can visualize things that cannot be seen or heard by our eyes or ears.<br />
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The imagination is not only needed for the creation of symbols, but also in our understanding of symbols. It would indeed be futile for the artist to create a whole pantheon of accurate and endearing symbols only for them to be misinterpreted or missed altogether by the intended viewer. Like the artist, the viewer must also 'connect the dots'; in order to understand the work he must be mindful of the tradition in which the artist is working, of the transcendental things as eternal and influential objects, of their metaphorical values, and finally of how they are all connected inside the work. He does this chiefly through that part of the intellect called the imagination, or the picturing of things which have no direct equivalent in sensible, mundane reality. There are no positivistic properties that suggest the inherent royalty of the sun; but nevertheless traditions from time immemorial have attached kingship to the sun, from the Egyptian God-man called Pharaoh to the universal God-man called Jesus Christ ('But unto you that fear my name, the Sun of righteousness will arise, with health in his wings', Malachi 4:2). They do this by the natural spiritual associations these things have with one another, associations that are more real than the empirical fact that rocks are associated with the quality of being hard or with shades of grey. The imagination is the retrieval of these spiritual associations within the inner confines of man's being; he reaches deep into his 'psyche' and locates what every man possesses by the right of his being another member of the human species. The organization of this imaginative process is <i>mythology</i>, the stuff that the great religions are composed of.<br />
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When we experience a work of symbolic art, it is our imagination that can gaze beyond the immediate meaning of the work and comprehend their full meaning. Our sense of storytelling, the healthy pleasure that we take from the narrative is no doubt important, but this is a pleasure that exists at first only on the literal, surface level; the real pleasure is the intellectual one that emerges when we finally understand the symbolic import of the story, its meaning as a whole, and how the artist has managed to convey all of this with the material he has at his disposal. There is in this respect the Medieval theory of the 'four-fold' or 'polysemous allegory', which refers to the four ways in which a work of art communicates its ideas. The first is the literal meaning, which is simply what the text means in the most concrete way, for example, 'the bird escaped its cage and flew out of the window' means that the bird literally flew out of the window. The second is the allegorical (or <i>typological</i>) meaning, which is a connection made between two natural or visible things; the bird fleeing his cage might allegorically mean, in the context of the story, the future progression of a child character growing into adulthood and leaving the house of his family. The third is the moral (or <i>tropological</i>) meaning, which is of course the moral significance of an event; again depending on the context of the entire story, the bird flying out of the window could either be a warning to the character, say, to not disobey his family, or it could be an encouragement, an optimistic sign prodding him to make his own way. The fourth and most important meaning is the <i>anagogical</i>, which is like allegory except that it signifies transcendent reality, not natural reality; the bird fleeing the cage could be anagogically understood as the ascension of man towards the heavenly, as the triumph of the character's will to vanquish his worldly constraints and advance into the freedom of God. This whole act, both the creation of the story and its fourfold understanding, is effectively an example of symbolism; the bird and its escape scene forms a symbolic impression on the mind of the viewer via his imagination because of all that it represents.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'The first [sense of a text] is called the literal, and it is the one that extends no further than the letter as it stands; the second is called the allegorical, and is the one that hides itself under the mantle of these tales, and is a truth hidden under beauteous fiction. As when Ovid says that Orpheus with his lyre made wild beasts tame and made trees and rocks approach him; which would say that the wise man with the instruments of his voice maketh cruel hearts tender and humble; and moveth to his will such as have not the life of science and art; for they that have not the rational life are as good as stones.... The third sense is called moral.... Thus we may note in the Gospel, when Christ ascended the mountain for the transfiguration, that of the twelve apostles he took with him but three; wherein the moral may be understood that in the most secret things we should have but few companions. The fourth sense is called the anagogical, that is to say ''above the sense''; and this is when a scripture is spiritually expounded which even in the literal sense, by the very things it signifies, signifies again some portion of the supernal things of eternal glory; as may be seen in that song of the prophet which saith that when the people of Israel came out of Egypt, Judea was made whole and free. Which although it may be manifestly true according to the letter is none the less true in its spiritual intention; to wit, that when the soul goeth forth out of sin, it is made holy and free in its power' (Dante, <i>The</i> <i>Convivio</i>, Second Treatise, Chapter I).</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzRJqotEkhnRTOMGReHK1GwYlCgix1z_0vHT5bULpNYMGuxN3k9miJYlHjyChp6YnFWNPLuttM_OCnodzDfo1Z_DEOQzOlMeL7BlYYPxo2bCdI76QT28Kphnn8HbN-mRs9MmM7NTny9lSO/s1600/800px-William_Blake_006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzRJqotEkhnRTOMGReHK1GwYlCgix1z_0vHT5bULpNYMGuxN3k9miJYlHjyChp6YnFWNPLuttM_OCnodzDfo1Z_DEOQzOlMeL7BlYYPxo2bCdI76QT28Kphnn8HbN-mRs9MmM7NTny9lSO/s1600/800px-William_Blake_006.jpg" height="236" width="320" /></a>William Blake said that 'Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is only a faint shadow'. The imagination is what Blake calls the anagogical method of communication; they both refer to how we understand the 'real and eternal world', namely, by wrapping the eternal things in the guise of things wholly durable. Dante's <i>Commedia,</i> perhaps the finest example of the 'fourfold allegory', conceives of the cosmos in this way by telling a story that expresses all of the above but none quite so well as the anagogical; every other element, the literal, moral, and allegorical meanings, are there merely to support the fundamental conclusion conveyed by the anagogical reality. The collapse of the self into the dungeons of hell, and the slow but inexorable progression back into the warmth of love and heaven, anagogically reveals the quintessential story of the human being and more or less everything in between; we are shown the overpowering <i>realness </i>of the transcendent through the ebb and flow of the story, through the particular events that take place as short but archetypal examples of the human experience.<br />
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William Blake does the same thing in his own poetry, in which he says, 'All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination'. His cosmology (one could arguably call it a <i>mythology</i>, even) seeks to express eternity through his heroes and villains, gods and devils, his whole array of characters who wage war over the soul of fallen man. The most important to him, however, is Los, the symbolic figure of the imagination who fights his rational counterpart Urizen, who in turn strives to dominate man. Los is envisioned as working in the furnaces of the world, tirelessly creating things to combat the strict, ratiocinative control of the tyrant; creative energy is thus supposed to be the true fount of human health, not a merely empirical reason that governs by looking downwards instead of upwards. He is right, too, for reason as such must be subservient to the objective demands of the eternal reality; if it considers only the literal and historical dimensions, it fails in its role, it cannot understand the higher dimensions. If it is enlightened by a creative intuition and an active imagination, on the other hand, the intellect will be able to symbolically reconstruct the cosmos in a meaningful, concrete, and decidedly non-abstract way. It will be able to understand the world in which we live in every aspect. Through the imagination we can conceive of things in their eternal sense and communicate that conception in a language that appeals to the inner compartments of our being: 'Around the Throne Heaven is open'd; the Nature of Eternal Things Display'd, All Springing from the Divine Humanity. All beams from him'.<br />
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In conclusion, then, the symbol is the most important piece of any work of art because it unites the sacred with the mundane, a union whereby man man can easily comprehend how and <i>why</i> he exists in what might otherwise seem to be a chaotic and random universe. The imagination, as the creative part of the intellect, is precisely how the symbol is created and comprehended; by picturing things that have little material relevance but whose spiritual associations are of the most fraternal nature, man can unveil those deeper parts of his nature that connect him to the whole of humanity in ways that all those other particular, fragmentary things cannot. The mystical significance of how we grasp the eternal truly goes beyond language, art, politics, all culture; being dependent only upon God, the forms exist independently of all that. The way that we interpret them might be different on a superficial level, but at the heart of the matter traditional man in whatever society is united in that he shares a common language of the transcendental, which he called mythical truth. <br />
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In a word, the Imagination is the visualization of the divine in all the shining sensibility of the material world - its quintessential result is the Symbol, which breathes life into remote concepts to familiarize ourselves with their total meaning.<br />
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-16337767150860590682014-08-14T18:16:00.002-07:002014-08-14T18:16:57.163-07:00Art & Beauty - Part I, Section III: An Integrated Art and the Metaphysics of BeautyIt is a rarely acknowledged fact that the difference between a craftsman and an artist as he is defined today is a fully modern one. <i>Poiesis</i>, for example, originally referred simply to 'making', which applied to the arrangement of all sorts of material things as well as to the art of poetry itself; <i>mousike</i> likewise referred not only to the composition of sounds, but to mathematical harmony as a principle, whether it was found in song, dance, poetry, or in the metaphysical order of the universe. Any art was simply something that was made, whether with a hammer or a lyre.<br />
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From Classical Greece to Imperial Rome through the whole of the Middle Ages there was an integration between what today might be distinguished as the 'rougher' and 'finer' arts; there was very little value placed on such a distinction in those societies, because they were both equally involved in the making of something. While there were several reasons for this, the chief one, especially during the Medieval era, was that the inhabitants of that period tended to view reality itself as something integrated, as something which really is the expression of a good and loving God; reality itself is something that is true, good, and beautiful, so naturally the difference between what we call a fine art and anything else was not nearly so obvious for the Medieval man as it is for the Modern man. The created world was already beautiful, it was already 'fine':<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'[The Medievals] found it extremely difficult to separate the two realms of value [beauty and utility / goodness], not because of some defect in their critical sense, but because of the unity of their moral and aesthetic responses to things. Life appeared to them as something wholly integrated' (Eco, p. 16).</blockquote>
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The world is good, and therefore beautiful - this is because it is the reflection of the ideal beauty of its Creator, at least according to the Medievals, who saw that their environment was one sustained only by Jesus Christ and His creative love. All art, therefore, from the simplest icon to the great buttresses of the cathedral, selflessly pronounced this love as the highest <i>telos </i>of its being; but these things were not 'works of art' <i>per se</i>, at least not as we Moderns define something as a work of art. These were fixed into the fabric of society as so many indispensable threads that informed the commoner no less than the nobleman of the sacred character that was their foundation and sustenance; these were as necessary for the Medieval as gasoline and the internet are seen as necessary for us, but neither worldview refers to these things as 'fine art'.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe-5Ubq9KT-xXA5Oov22hcXP7WT74NE0ZXixo5pMxTdoF8Zs8Bi322jguRmecLYqm_Jp7Yos9om-mCAQ-jGCzhIYV1Q8_oKtLk-P6Dml0N54sQnHefCyuTng0NYFXEDjQuritCly-oicjE/s1600/gothic-cathedral-.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe-5Ubq9KT-xXA5Oov22hcXP7WT74NE0ZXixo5pMxTdoF8Zs8Bi322jguRmecLYqm_Jp7Yos9om-mCAQ-jGCzhIYV1Q8_oKtLk-P6Dml0N54sQnHefCyuTng0NYFXEDjQuritCly-oicjE/s1600/gothic-cathedral-.png" height="240" width="320" /></a>The function of art in this period, then, was not something luxurious, something that enclosed beauty and isolated it from the world, but was universally of an ecclesiastic or didactic nature: 'Painting... is the literature of the laity'. What Honorius the Theologian means here is that even those who cannot read can be taught what is right, particularly via the icons of saints and the paintings of Biblical history that adorned the insides of the country parish. This is all part of the Catholic tradition, the backbone of the Medieval civilization, and which explicates the truth of the Word and of the Incarnation through whatever worldly means it may possibly act through. Despite some enthusiastic demands for a more austere, 'humble' atmosphere in the Church from men like St. Bernard, the opinion that worldly beauty, as a glorious glimpse of heavenly beauty, should strengthen ecclesiastic life prevailed:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Thus, when - out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God - the loveliness of the many-coloured gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner' (Abbot Suger).</blockquote>
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A work of art was therefore of a didactic nature, because it was something composed to improve man's spiritual and moral welfare, to help him into heaven. Because a work of art had to be true in order also to be beautiful, its enlistment in this effort was inevitable. Man was educated by art, which itself was a servant of the Church. For any work of art to be admitted into church life and Medieval society as a whole, it had to be of greater use than merely something nice to look at or pleasing to listen to; it also had to reveal something true. It had to direct the viewer to a particular reaction, whether to encourage him in one way or discourage him in another. Art was above all a means to an end, which was ultimately the salvation of souls.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'For the Medievals, a thing was ugly if it did not relate to a hierarchy of ends centred on man and his supernatural destiny.... It was a type of integrated sensibility which made it hard for Medievals to experience aesthetic pleasure in anything which fell short of their ethical ideals; and conversely, whatever gave aesthetic pleasure was also morally justified....' (Eco, p.80).</blockquote>
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So a work of art was always subordinate to something else - its purpose depended upon what that something else needed it for (recall Aquinas's 'second perfection'). A work of art was nothing in itself, for its <i>telos </i>needed the broader framework of society to be properly unfolded. A choral composition, for example, was not primarily judged on its merits independent of its utility, but on what it was used for, on how useful it was as something to be inserted into the Catholic liturgy or a monastic hymn. Licentious songs, rhythms, and aggressive dances that stir the blood, sexually lurid paintings, etc., regardless of how well these artifacts perform their task, i.e., how well they excite the passions of their audience, have no place in a monastic abbey, but they might have one in a lonely rural inn or a city brothel. Everything was directed to its proper end, just as Aristotle prescribed in ancient Athens, and the proper end for Medieval man was the saving of his soul. The <i>final</i> judgment of any work of art can essentially be traced to how well it worked to this end.<br />
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We can see, then, how there was no distinct separation between something beautiful and something useful; they were both one and the same thing. This was true to the degree where the thing's beauty depended on its use. If a thing was useless, it was fundamentally ugly; but if a thing performed as it was designed to perform, then it was beautiful. A work of art traditionally conveys both something specifically sacred and something<br />
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specifically domestic or mundane: '[From] the stone age onwards, everything made by man, under whatever conditions of hardship or poverty, has been made by art to serve a double purpose, at once utilitarian and ideological' (Coomaraswamy, 'What is the Use of Art, Anyway?'). A tool was never 'just a tool', but something which symbolically connected man to such primordial acts as tilling the fertile field which he saw as a divine gift, or fishing in the local stream which he equally saw as a divine gift. The tools were themselves crucial for the cultivation of these godly gifts. Whatever their sacred import, however, the shovel and the net were designed for two specific utilities and nothing else:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'If indeed we divert the work of art to some other than its original use, then, in the first place, its original beauty will be correspondingly diminished, for, as St. Thomas says... "if they are applied to another use or end, their harmony and therefore their beauty is no longer maintained", and, in the second place, even though we may derive a certain pleasure from the work which has been torn from its context, to rest in this pleasure will be a sin in terms of Augustine's definitions "to enjoy what we should use"....' (Coomaraswamy, 'Beauty and Truth').</blockquote>
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If the fishing net were used to try and dig out the soil, or if the shovel were used to try and smash the heads of the fish in the water, the use of these things would dramatically decrease, and therefore also their beauty, despite whatever amusements we might derive from switching their roles (this applies also to fetishes and other sexual disorders, where the genitalia are used for activities other than their purposed ones). It is interesting to note, as a general rule, that the functional capacity of a thing largely corresponds to its aesthetic value; the better a thing operates, in other words, the more value we place on it as an artistic artifact. The armoured vehicles of WWI, for example, were clunky, block-shaped, prone to mechanical failure, and for the most part simply ineffectual. The tanks of WWII, on the other hand, developed into sleek, streamlined panzers with sloped, deflective armour, and which were much more effective. As they continue to develop into the 21st Century, they increasingly exude a more satisfactorily aesthetic outline alongside their capacity as useful fighting units; their aesthetic value correlates with their utilitarian value. While this is also true of swords and fighter jets and all sorts of other things, it is not an authentic rule to subscribe to since the number of exceptions to it are too many to discount; there is, to name but one of them, a more demonstrably aesthetic superiority in classic steam-engine trains than to the more effective electrically-powered 'bullet trains' of Japan. There is nevertheless, as the great millenia of human history evinces, something in this idea that utility and aesthesis should be kept bonded as closely as possible. We must also remember that the purely aesthetic content of a thing has remarkably little to do with its artistic value as such, that is, with the 'two perfections' we referred to in <a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2014/08/art-beauty-part-i-section-ii-intellect.html">Section II</a>.<br />
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It is, at any rate, important to note that this effectively meant that 'beauty' was indeed not the final aim of the artist, except as an 'accident', as it were, something which proceeds from art rightly made, and which may help us understand and enjoy a particular work of art: 'Beauty has nothing to do with art.... The object of art is right making. If things rightly made impress us as beautiful, well and good and so much the better....[But beauty] is an accident of right making. Beauty is that which attracts us to the truth or whatnot, just as beauty in cooking attracts us to good food and just as beauty in physical sensation attracts us to good action' (Eric Gill, 'Of Beauty'). The virtue of something made according to its end is going to bear its due proportions, and will therefore emanate something which we perceive as beautiful, because we naturally crave for order and we recognize the formal dimensions that reside behind the aesthetic experience. The proportions of something well-made, both in itself and in what it is used for, fulfil these cravings, and so we call it 'beautiful'.<br />
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To elucidate this point even further, beauty proceeds from something that we perceive as pleasing with our senses, and more emphatically something that we contemplate as true with our intellect. If something is truly made, it will consequently possess a degree of beauty, but beauty was never the aim; it was a happy accident: 'Beauty is the splendour of truth' (Plato). The beauty of something will attract us to it because we are not just mind, but mind <i>and</i> body, which means the only way to <i>fully</i> enjoy something is to enjoy both its intellectual quality and the sensible quality which comes from the formal organization of matter. The intellectual quality is the form, the proportions of the thing made to the thing imitated, and its purpose in the world; our comprehension of this and how it relates to our self is an example of participating in the beautiful, which is to say our participating in the <i>real</i>. The sensible quality likewise propagates the beauty of something rightly made, and the pleasure that we indulge in thereof is also a participation in the beautiful / real: '<i>id quom visum placet</i>' ('that which being seen pleases', Aquinas).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8R4f4HWyewAV3jQmSWkm_olmQevhVbSPzSDbqOwYAd4ellMQJ-5InbA5yZcZnpKh5M8Eol2Zj8PpPgdHdyQc1r0s3U5Kt5p3ZXxkSu_G6fSVNm1cggowAqnbsBxEVrzPCjDhGvDOLQ7p7/s1600/marriage-at-cana-1561.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8R4f4HWyewAV3jQmSWkm_olmQevhVbSPzSDbqOwYAd4ellMQJ-5InbA5yZcZnpKh5M8Eol2Zj8PpPgdHdyQc1r0s3U5Kt5p3ZXxkSu_G6fSVNm1cggowAqnbsBxEVrzPCjDhGvDOLQ7p7/s1600/marriage-at-cana-1561.jpg" height="232" width="320" /></a>Sensual pleasure is something real in itself for any being with an animal nature, which of course includes the human being. We sensually take pleasure in sexual intercourse, regardless of whether we love our companion or not; we sensually take pleasure in food, regardless of whether it is good for our body or even made well; and sometimes we sensually take pleasure in music, even if it is of a feeble, mindless nature. But, whether they are morally incriminating or made up of relatively harmless vices, all of these pleasures are restricted to the realm of sensation; the joy we derive from them is of a transient type. This is because, like everything else belonging to the purely material domain, they lack <i>form</i>, that precisely intellectual, that precisely <i>human</i> principle that organizes otherwise inchoate matter into something that corresponds to the fundamental order of the universe. All pleasures, following their appropriate organization, then become joys of the <i>enduring </i>type; they become something pleasurable not only in the physical sense, but in the intellectual as well. This is what satisfies both, which is what makes it the union of mind and body; this is what ultimately satisfies the human spirit, which consists of both.<br />
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The relationship between beauty and the intelligible is almost exactly identical, except that beauty persists where even sensual pleasure cannot go. The intelligible produces beauty, and the intellect apperceives beauty through the senses; like those physical pleasures which are properly ordered through the imposition of form and creative love upon matter, beauty is the natural consequence of the same imposition, only it lingers in the mind as an example of the enjoyment we possess as a result of that 'connaturality' between the understanding and the world that we also discussed in <a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2014/08/art-beauty-part-i-section-ii-intellect.html">Section II</a>. Moreover, memory and the imagination help this form of enjoyment endure in ways that go beyond the immediate experience, the purely sensual delight. Beauty is therefore in the subjective sense dependent on both the sensual data, because this is how it is originally perceived, and on the intellectual power, which alone can enjoy beauty apart from its physical dimensions; but beauty is also independent of either in the objective sense, because truth exists regardless of man's recognizance of it - or lack thereof. Beauty is only ever totally dependent on God, who alone is at once wholly Subject and wholly Object, and because only God is wholly true, wholly good, and therefore wholly beautiful.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhitunCbNpUB4qeGbaD6rrJazrL_oDzfU27C9ywyfmTbG9yMaF226FcGwEj-CJiSenEIKaaG2l1y3j9TD0s31sn9dDVpTqNxGul38tm4a7tHnVdhybIDh1NF0bmK04tA2BEI_1m6Cq8fvGz/s1600/Dante's%2Bmonument%2Bin%2BFlorence.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhitunCbNpUB4qeGbaD6rrJazrL_oDzfU27C9ywyfmTbG9yMaF226FcGwEj-CJiSenEIKaaG2l1y3j9TD0s31sn9dDVpTqNxGul38tm4a7tHnVdhybIDh1NF0bmK04tA2BEI_1m6Cq8fvGz/s1600/Dante's%2Bmonument%2Bin%2BFlorence.jpg" height="320" width="206" /></a>The artistic doctrine we have outlined thus far necessarily precludes the modern aesthetic philosophy summarized by the maxim '<i>l'art pour l'art'</i>, a philosophy which seeks to isolate art and beauty from their true ends in order to concentrate purely on their aesthetic content. As we already know, traditional art theory teaches that art is something made in the service of something else, something that contributes towards the wider, public interests which were historically much more cohesive than those of our own cosmopolitan, culturally diverse societies. Today it is difficult to harness artistic beauty for greater ends because of this diversity and fragmentation - to the point where sometimes art becomes a mere tool for state propaganda. A religious painting for a cathedral, for instance, served a more communal interest than a contemporary painting which is destined for some obscure public gallery for the benefit of intellectual aesthetes alone. Another example might be the construction of a monument: in medieval society, the monument would commemorate what a great king or saint had done for the <i>whole</i> of his people, whereas in modern society the monument would commemorate some <i>private</i> party, whether it would be the Communist Lenin or the National Socialist Adolf Hitler; in the first example the statue lasts centuries, in the second the statue lasts only until another private party abolishes its predecessor, regardless of his successes or lack thereof. A specific ideology therefore trumps the <i>actual</i> health of the nation. The point of is that the beauty of art, which we must remember includes anything that is made by human hands, derives not only from the work <i>per se</i> but more importantly from the purpose it serves; its full significance is an objective, social one. It cannot only be a private relationship between artist and audience, because man as an individual has an extensive palate that includes many deformities and perversions, whereas man who is organically connected to his fellows is someone more deeply informed of the reality in which he lives.<br />
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That art is objective as well as subjective is self-evident according to these propositions that art is principally an imitation of something, and that it is meant for some purpose other than the mere pleasure of experiencing it on aesthetic grounds. Art, as Ruskin said, is more 'theoretic' than 'aesthetic'; it exists more in the eternal ideas than in the pleasant sounds and sights of human bodies or works of art. This is once again manifest from <a href="http://xaviersthrone.blogspot.ca/2014/08/art-beauty-part-i-section-ii-intellect.html">Section II</a>, in which we discussed the fundamentally intellectual character of art, that art is the construction of a specific idea through the means of worldly matter. Art cannot be whatever one interprets it to be; any good art is something definite, because it proceeds from something definite. 'Non-representational art' is a contradiction in terms, for all art represents something. There is of course room for subjective experience of a thing, but only within the broad understanding of what a thing is in its essence. The meaning of a song about the death of one's beloved, for example, might very well be stretched to include the heartbreak involved in the rending of any relationship, but it surely cannot be understood as something expressing nuptial joy! The closer one approaches the objective quality of a song, the more that song will mean for him; the subject and object therefore become entwined, which is really the purpose of all human life and its search for meaning. Scruton describes what we are trying to say here with superior eloquence:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'We know what it is to love and be rejected, and thereafter to wander in the world infected by a bleak passivity. This experience, in all its messiness and arbitrariness, is one that most of us must undergo. But when Schubert, in <i>Die Winterreise</i>, explores it in song, finding exquisite melodies to illuminate one after another the many secret corners of a desolated heart, we are granted an insight of another order. Loss ceases to be an accident, and becomes instead an archetype, rendered beautiful beyond words by the music that contains it, moving under the impulse of melody and harmony to a conclusion that has a compelling artistic logic. It is as though we looked through the contingent song-cycle's protagonist to another kind of loss altogether: a <i>necessary</i> loss, whose rightness resides in its completeness. Beauty reaches to the underlying truth of a human experience, by showing it <i>under the aspect of necessity</i>' (Roger Scruton, <i>Beauty</i>, p.129).</blockquote>
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To summarize this Section, art in the traditional (Medieval) world was constructed according to a hierarchy of ends which all served the society of man and the worship of God; it was not principally concerned with beauty <i>per se</i>, but with the making of things in respect to their destined <i>telos</i>. Beauty emerges afterwards as the 'happy accident' that yields a closer relationship between ourselves and the objective quality of the art. Beauty is at first the sensible experience in the natural good of the material world, i.e., in bright colours and visceral sounds; then it is the the intellectual experience in realizing the inherent kinship between our interior / subjective understanding and the exterior / objective world, viz. the realization of the connection between <i>who we are</i> and <i>what the work of art is.</i> Works of traditional art undoubtedly led to these experiences, which are indeed invaluable for the human condition, but that was not the real point. What they essentially sought was simply to instruct, to worship, and to recreate the world of God in the world of men, all in the deeper soteriological interest of reversing the Fall and moving man to a state of Grace. Being true to that higher purpose, and lacking the insidious separation of 'fine art' from utility, is what made it a more successfully artistic epoch than that of modernity.<br />
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-42231274059122794882014-08-07T02:06:00.000-07:002014-08-07T02:35:25.648-07:00Art & Beauty - Part I, Section II: The Intellect & Our Experience of Beauty<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGxrFE3cY-AScIIBp6q2O0oumQrszGzoDlMB7yQskG_cbei6lkDXGqhe6nO64k8lcLqtZ2QILb4eLab6pVyKtJ7D1ngFJ8TYx1Pws6dFuJK3JX3HvSAJsZWjth-bQmcBJz0CCF7up07wMV/s1600/Robert_Hubert-ZZZ-Colosseum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGxrFE3cY-AScIIBp6q2O0oumQrszGzoDlMB7yQskG_cbei6lkDXGqhe6nO64k8lcLqtZ2QILb4eLab6pVyKtJ7D1ngFJ8TYx1Pws6dFuJK3JX3HvSAJsZWjth-bQmcBJz0CCF7up07wMV/s1600/Robert_Hubert-ZZZ-Colosseum.jpg" height="232" width="320" /></a>In the pre-modern era, the construction, as well as the perception, of any work of art was something intellectual before anything else. In creating and apperceiving something, the intellect plays the crucial role in the operation; it possesses sovereignty over every other faculty involved because the intellect is responsible for comprehension, and the aim of art is to communicate something comprehensible. Jacques Maritain says that, '[the artistic] action consists in impressing an idea upon a material: therefore it resides in the <i>artifex</i>'. This hearkens back to Plato and Aristotle and the mimetic doctrine we already glanced at, namely that the thing to be made must first be conceived. The creation already occurs in the mind - it is only acted out materially as a consequence of this first perception. St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between two 'perfections' in the act of creation, the first being the perfection of a thing according to its proper end or nature, while the second is the perfection of its operation in the world, and therefore regulates the first perfection. The first perfection is the form of a thing and how it is perfect in itself, while the second perfection consists in how that form operates in the world; the function of a thing must accord with how it is used. The first perfection of a paint brush, for instance, is in its use as a tool to paint something, because that is what it is and what it is meant to do; using the paint brush as a broom to sweep off a driveway, on the other hand, would be an imperfection, because it is not used according to the second perfection of a thing, which is its use.<br />
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The thing made therefore always has an intellectual character, not only because it is the sensible image of something intelligible, but because of the precise proportions of that image, and how they relate to its archetype; only the intellect is capable of determining these facts. Aquinas says, 'everything in nature has a certain end, and a fixed rule of size and growth....'. The teleological system applies to understanding the making of things as it does to biology (God's making of things) because any species has a specific nature and range, and the determination of what belongs to what species depends upon the knowledge of both and how they relate to one another. The dachshund, for example, in spite of the myriad differences between it and the greyhound, nevertheless shares a common species with it because they have the same fundamental nature. The same phenomenon applies to art (man's making of things), because knowing how a particular chair <i>is</i> a chair is essential if we are not going to classify it as a table or a sofa. Every thing has its <i>telos</i>, its intellectual property and purpose, and any art is the unfolding of something's intellectual quality into something with a material quality: 'Art was not expresssion, but construction, an operation aiming at a certain result' (Umberto Eco, <i>Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages</i>, p. 93).<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'The work of Art has been thought out before being made, it has been kneaded and prepared... ripened in a <i>reason</i> before pressing into matter. And there it will keep for ever the colour and the savour of the mind. Its formal element, that which constitutes it in its category and makes it what it is, is its regulation by the understanding.... The <i>work to be done</i> is only the material of Art, its form is <i>right reason.</i>... <i>Art is the right deduction from things to be made</i>' (Jacques Maritain, <i>Art and Scholasticism</i>).</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZtVgxG3XY1Tr0wGWWs2EmJb6oUbZJOW9lSSIQNssNpKEzvrv4oWE0nuOLaaQZF7yHJDOB_ouLW78-oPrRY2Ekv5hOpZVNOaFX6B8rwU8siHaGpu0KK1XhT4eWqqrSmrTyRf1hGcoMxdRD/s1600/angel+crown+of+thorns.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZtVgxG3XY1Tr0wGWWs2EmJb6oUbZJOW9lSSIQNssNpKEzvrv4oWE0nuOLaaQZF7yHJDOB_ouLW78-oPrRY2Ekv5hOpZVNOaFX6B8rwU8siHaGpu0KK1XhT4eWqqrSmrTyRf1hGcoMxdRD/s1600/angel+crown+of+thorns.png" style="cursor: move;" /></a>If the nature of a work of art is above all something intellectual, the relation between the art work and one who experiences it is equally of an intellectual quality: 'The pleasure experienced in perception is a free pleasure, the pleasure of contemplation free from desire and content with the perfection which it admires. Beauty is what pleases when it is seen, not because it is intuited without effort, but because it is through effort that it is won, and when the effort is successful it is enjoyed' (Eco, p. 82). There is in this something of Schopenhauer's aesthetics wherein the 'pleasure' of art is a momentary relief from the world's pain, but Aquinas's profound, Aristotelian respect for the empirical functions already tells us that there is an important distinction between the two philosophies. Where the aesthetic experience was for Schopenhauer a temporary reprieve from the pain of existing, for Aquinas it is a joyous reminder that the world is something good; it was not the 'negation of a negation' as it perhaps was for Schopenhauer, but rather the affirmation of something absolutely affirmed.<br />
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Contemplation, at any rate, is at the root of the so-called 'aesthetic' experience; one's foremost pleasure in a work of art consists in his understanding of what it is and how it accords to reality, to the cosmic order or even to chaos. Moreover, we identify with something most powerfully when we apperceive how the work contains something within ourselves; the fact that an inner idea or secret knowledge of our own nature is made into something concretely beautiful and eminently sensible fills us with joy: 'The understanding enjoys the beautiful because in it it finds and recognizes itself, and gets contact with its own light' (Maritain). This is reminiscent of Plato's 'Myth of Er', and of his theory of knowledge as outlined in the <i>Meno</i>, where all learning is really the soul's recollection of its past life, in which it knew of the forms. The difference in Maritain's statement, which has its origins in St. Augustine, is that there is no 'recollection' <i>per se</i>; there is no awakened memory of a previous life, but simply the recognizance of what already exists in the soul. We rejoice when our conscious mind learns something which we already knew, something which was hitherto hidden in the depths of our soul.<br />
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The central artistic experience in the Christian tradition that transcends all others is the Eucharist. This is due to its sacred mystery, to the incomprehensible simultaneity of spiritual and material presence that occurs through the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood. In the Eucharist, the 'dullness' of the ordinary world is swept away by something which accords with our soul; the dull reality becomes transfigured as our soul tastes the redemption that was offered us. The Eucharist is the mystical union of God and man, the purest connection between humanity and divinity since Christ's Incarnation. Our fallen nature is infused into the divine, and is redeemed thereby. This is an experience that every faculty celebrates, but most of all our intellectual one, because it is the intellect that truly understands the fallen-ness of our nature and its need for reintegration, not only with the divine, but with itself - which is precisely what happens during the Eucharist. It is the intellect that bears the 'image of God', and can therefore delight in the communion with its original Mind; it is the intellect that can contemplate the event in its entirety and all that it means for us. There is in the Eucharist the act of <i>anamnesis</i>, which means the memorial event of Christ's crucifixion; this is where the intellect engages with its own disintegration, and fights against it via the inner memory of Christ's work. This is essentially where the intellect works to lift itself into spirit, and to thereby complete the integration of the self: heart, mind, and soul are together entwined into one complete whole. At this point we remember God, and forget our own spiritual maladies: we rejoice in joining with the New Adam.<br />
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This becomes clearer when we remember that the intellect constitutes more than what the rationalists call 'reason', more than the quantitative logic that determines the world around us on an exclusively sensible basis, with no recourse to a thing's intelligible quality. The intellect is the point where the human consciousness can meet the intelligible, and thereby be satisfied in the understanding that such a meeting gives us; as such, the intellect has in its employ the entire range of human faculties, which include the senses, intuitive knowledge, memory, imagination, reason itself. The intellect connects us with the transcendental (re: intelligible) domain because it has the transcendentals imprinted upon it, and this is what connects us with God and our redeemed selves: 'As soon as one touches a transcendental, one touches Being itself, a likeness of God, an absolute, the nobility and joy of our life; one enters the domain of the spirit' (Maritain). Fed by the information provided by the senses, the intellect (and the person as a whole) is glad when that information accords with its own understanding; the beauty of the world is only comprehensively appreciated by the intellect because it alone comprehends the source and preserver of that beauty and how He makes Himself known:<br />
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'When we reflect upon the objective and rule-governed character of perceived phenomena, we discover our own connaturality with their proportions, that there are properties also in ourselves. Thus proportion is conceived of as something objective, something realized on an infinite number of levels, and something which finally coincides with the cosmic proportions of an ordered universe' (Eco, p.77).</blockquote>
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Now, there is of course an enormous amount of sensual information imparted to us on a daily basis, but obviously not all of it is what we would normally call 'beautiful', especially if we discount natural beauty, the 'artwork of God'. Technically, all sensual information is 'beautiful' inasmuch as it connotes experience with reality and inasmuch as reality is good - but clearly we desire and infact need more than this, which is why there is human art; every culture ever known has been compelled to create things which they have deemed, in various ways, 'beautiful'. This is mainly the consequence of two facts (1) the <i>Imago Dei,</i> which motivates us to creativity in imitation of our Master, to make things that are at once useful and beautiful; and (2) our inherent hunger for beauty which extends beyond the natural world - we are not satisfied with merely wondering at the world, we want to <i>engage</i> with it in a way that meets the demands of the human spirit. This is why there is the production of art, and why it categorically differs in our experience to our relationship with nature, with God's art. The working of the intellect upon matter organizes the material to meet our own specific ends, whether it be the construction of planes to cross oceans or a simple poem that tells a story.<br />
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'Theophilus wrote that, since man is created in the image of God, he has the power to give life to forms. He discovers his need for beauty both by chance and by reflection on his own soul, and by practice and endeavour he develops his artistic powers. He finds in the Scriptures a divine commandment on art where David sings, ''Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy house''. These words are a clear directive; the artist must work in humility, inspired by the Holy Spirit, for without this inspiration he could not attempt his work. Anything that he can invent or learn or understand about art is the fruit of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit' (Eco, p.100).</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51T2KMc8X73fVjydTJYohmqpMVU2oS2rjdqC5ALvlKXkBqglX3fDO83YiDqlDVgnaGTAyF_YFpftLmOf9gvtvwd7t5tDzJukf4G7EFaafwNUC6UlChFRHhu7U-XvH86v0TlkU3oEHxQ53/s1600/Anne-Francois-Louis-Janmot-xx-The-Poem-of-the-Soul-Divine-Genesis-xx-Musee-des-Beaux-Arts-Lyon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51T2KMc8X73fVjydTJYohmqpMVU2oS2rjdqC5ALvlKXkBqglX3fDO83YiDqlDVgnaGTAyF_YFpftLmOf9gvtvwd7t5tDzJukf4G7EFaafwNUC6UlChFRHhu7U-XvH86v0TlkU3oEHxQ53/s1600/Anne-Francois-Louis-Janmot-xx-The-Poem-of-the-Soul-Divine-Genesis-xx-Musee-des-Beaux-Arts-Lyon.jpg" height="156" width="200" /></a>Strictly speaking, we never <i>truly</i> create anything, for only God is capable of making something from nothing: 'The soul can make new compositions, but it cannot make new things' (St. Bonaventure). Nevertheless, as Theophilus was suggesting, we are able and indeed <i>required</i> to adapt material to at once make life better for ourselves and to imitate God in doing so; we are compelled to 'give life to forms', which is what we might call the 'sub-creation' of matter in the attempt to make it good and beautiful - God's creativity is <i>ex nihilo</i>, while our own is <i>ex materia</i>. Admitting that there is a fundamental difference in the pleasure we derive from each type of creation, the source for either is nonetheless the very same: God created and sustained the material which we then re-arrange by impressing upon it the power of <i>our</i> intellect, which is done out of love for God. God is both the source of our efforts and the port to which all things return.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYbdN49lS-CjfvPYGuLuE5kYvr3qANtwZS6FBY7F445sP18_Tg5OiEFho0EF066hRBY3LRFeA_Yorukx6S_WqrkEqraAsz8TqRrOFSt2DXrto3haGkPTpWhBTTWA1_pARs6zhViEgVmEb9/s1600/david.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYbdN49lS-CjfvPYGuLuE5kYvr3qANtwZS6FBY7F445sP18_Tg5OiEFho0EF066hRBY3LRFeA_Yorukx6S_WqrkEqraAsz8TqRrOFSt2DXrto3haGkPTpWhBTTWA1_pARs6zhViEgVmEb9/s1600/david.jpg" height="320" width="169" /></a>To clarify, John Dewey states that, 'Through art, meanings of objects that are otherwise dumb, inchoate, restricted, and resisted are clarified and concentrated.... But whatever path the work of art pursues, it, just because it is a full and intense experience, keeps alive the power to experience the common world in its fullness. It does so by reducing the raw materials of that experience to matter ordered through form' (Dewey, <i>Art as Experience</i>, p. 133). The natural world is very often a disorganized mass, offering limited beauty to us because there is no apparent or immediate form for the intellect to behold; this is where human creativity fills the void, namely by organizing that mass into shapes and figures that correspond with our innate knowledge of form and which manifestly heightens our experience of the world. Before Michelangelo sculpted it into <i>David</i>, the material of the statue was a dull, lifeless marble. After being artistically formulated, however, it became one of the greatest and most recognizable artefacts of the Renaissance, because it was something that readily appeals to man's intellectual and aesthetic sense of beauty.<br />
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By imitating the transcendentals or forms, God's highest creations, we perform His work on earth (we are indeed the only known being capable of doing so); by helping our world become more 'real' and more beautiful, we execute God's will, whether we acknowledge it or not. This plays a significant role in why the experience of being alone at the top of a mountain and the experience of a Beethoven symphony are different for us; whereas we play the part of the passive beneficiary of God's creative splendour in the first instance, in the second we celebrate the triumph of man's creativity, shouting back at God in the spirit of worship. In either case the intellect is active - it revels in the magnificence that the senses have gifted it because it understands the intelligible foundation behind the sensual data, whether it be of a divine or a human origin.<br />
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So, because it has an innate (if often obscured) knowledge of the transcendentals, the intellect has an objective appreciation of form, which is the principal quality of all art: 'The operative intellect preconceives the form of what is made; it possesses the form of the thing imitated as an idea' (Aquinas). The one who receives the art work shares in this conception, because he is likewise able to apperceive the form that is imitated. As the sole faculty capable of deductive reasoning, the intellect alone is able to deduce firstly the formal perfection of the thing imitated, and secondly the proportions of the imitation to the form, its mimetic quality, its <i>integritas</i>: '...people may differ from another in size and shape, but if the variations go beyond certain limits there is no longer a true and proper human nature, but abnormality instead. This kind of perfection is related to another criterion of beauty, integrity. <i>Integritas</i> means the absence of an organic whole of all the parts which concur in defining it as that which it is' (Eco, p. 78). In the traditional civilization, especially that of the medievals, wholeness was crucial. If something was imperfectly whole, if it lacked something, or if it was not ordered to its proper end, that thing was faulty, and therefore ugly.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2f3CW6AKtYpaQh4ip-lTk_1CX9faf_t97gfYgelVBusBVzBzrNdNZ2Ec3CvXF1YZg0mDIl7-mC7NS1rTbn9HM-TVTcFe7d9_pZrIvmr2dnwdtOpAdIRz5qagYPChH3t56134abZu-psJE/s1600/Young-Woman-with-a-Dove.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2f3CW6AKtYpaQh4ip-lTk_1CX9faf_t97gfYgelVBusBVzBzrNdNZ2Ec3CvXF1YZg0mDIl7-mC7NS1rTbn9HM-TVTcFe7d9_pZrIvmr2dnwdtOpAdIRz5qagYPChH3t56134abZu-psJE/s1600/Young-Woman-with-a-Dove.jpg" height="200" width="165" /></a>The intellect alone can totally appreciate beauty because we cannot 'feel' form, only understand it. If the reader will permit a vulgar example, consider the difference between copulating with one's beloved and with a complete stranger who happens to be remarkably corpulent; allowing for the extra flesh, the sensual impact is fundamentally identical, but the experiences taken in their entirety are, at least to the normal man, wildly opposed. This is true because, in the first instance, we love one woman and not the other; love is in part an intellectual action that sees in the beloved something which he himself is lacking in, and wants to fulfil. It is an intuitive going out of oneself in order to complete oneself. More to the point, this is true because the beloved is closer to the human form because she is not obese; whereas <i>she</i> is loved in part for her natural, objective beauty, conversely the stranger loses her beauty when she abandons the human form due to her gluttony. The one is more beautiful because she more closely resembles the ideal human form, while the other has moved away from it. In copulating with the beautiful woman, our sensual experience is heightened because it is enlivened by our intuitive, intellectual understanding that she is profoundly human, and therefore <i>what she is supposed to be</i>; she has come closer to her <i>telos</i> than the other, who lacks form for her decision to be more like an animal. Although in a more coincidental respect, this is true also of losing a limb or some other integral part of the human body: 'we call mutilated people ugly, for they lack the required proportion of parts to the whole' (Aquinas).<br />
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To conclude, the senses inform us of the matter and aesthetically enjoy doing so, but it is the intellect that delights in the totality of the experience. The former is intimate with the temporal, and is gratified by it; but it is the latter that touches on the eternal, on the things that transcend momentary pleasure. This is due to the joy that we possess when we comprehend the unity of the exterior world with our interior self; it is the unity between what we see and what we know, between what is without and within, that makes the beautiful so necessary for the human experience. It unifies the fragments, awakens us to truth, and stirs again the thought of being complete. The sensual and the intellectual joys are alike essential to the fullness of beauty because together they represent the connection between ourselves and what we have lost:<br />
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'[Man] may doubtless enjoy purely intellectual beauty, but the beauty <i>connatural</i> to man is that which touches the understanding with delight through the senses and their intuition. Such also is the beauty proper to art, which works upon the sensible material so as to give joy to the mind. Thus would it persuade itself that paradise is not lost. It has the relish of the earthly paradise because it restores, for an instant, the peace and delectation at once of understanding and of sense.... Without doubt all sensuous beauty demands a certain delectation of the eye itself or the ear or of the imagination; but there is no beauty unless the intelligence also in some way rejoices' (Jacques Maritain, <i>Art and Scholasticism</i>).</blockquote>
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214188997744349998.post-88469813910281024692014-07-31T09:38:00.000-07:002014-07-31T09:59:50.108-07:00Art & Beauty - Part I, Section I: Formal Foundations<h4>
Preliminary note: <span style="font-weight: normal;">The following six Sections that constitute the first Part in what will eventually be a trilogy are the result of on and off studies in the past couple years on art theory, particularly from the perspective of the 'traditional world'. I have happily grown acquainted with many stalwart thinkers who have increased my knowledge not only of art, but of history, ethics, theology, and assorted metaphysical premises as well. This knowledge has in turn helped organize my own worldview, which I hope has produced a more involved, intimate report, and not merely the imitation of a textbook. </span></h4>
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This sixfold Part will cover the more principal bases of art philosophy, dealing with such elementary things as mimesis, symbolism, myth, and creativity. We will discuss the traditional art-world not so much in contrast with contemporary theories & practises, but in itself; we will thereby gain a surer footing when we confront the second Part, in which we will investigate how art theory has devolved from its original foundations to the chaotic and arbitrary phenomena that emerges from modern theories of art. The third Part will then utilize what we have discussed in the first two Parts to take a more hands-on approach to art, concerning ourselves with particular artistic material in recent history, and more importantly looking at how to impose on new art the steady principles of the old art. This ambition consists in neither a nostalgic idolization of the orderly ancients nor a categorical condemnation of the impetuous moderns; it will, on the other hand, hopefully consist in a helpful integration of the two, wherein we might find the creative business of the modern mind backed by the eternal traditions of the classical mind.<br />
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The first Part is already written; we will post its six Sections on here in intervals of roughly one week. The next two Parts will, God willing, be written some time in 2015, as I have other plans for writing material in the remainder of 2014. Thank you for taking the time to read what is really a labour of love, and I earnestly hope that you might glean something from it.<br />
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Formal Foundations</h3>
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It is impossible to understand the arts of creation without understanding Plato's doctrine of <i>mimesis</i> and Aristotle's contributions and counterpart to it, and how a unique synthesis of the two philosophers came to dominate medieval artistic theory and practise. So, naturally, as the foundation for all that came afterwards, this will be our starting point as well. As an introductory chapter, there will be several ideas in this Section which will be mere glimpses of their more complete development at later stages in this project. This is also the Section in which anyone studied in classical philosophy will be the most familiar with, as these ideas are all elementary ones, and they are for that reason necessary.<br />
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First of all, as an example of the philosopher's consistency and thoroughly integrated worldview, Plato's doctrine on art derives from his metaphysics, his doctrine on the fundamentals of reality. Plato supposed that there are two realms that make up our universe: the tangible, 'every-day reality' which is made up of senses and is therefore called the 'sensible realm', and the intangible, conceptual realm that represents the primal reality, and is called the 'intelligible realm'.<br />
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These two principles are often criticized as a nefarious 'duality', an intransigent system of opposites with no apparent solution. What it really is, however, is an accurate model of our reality, and suggests the necessary divide that derives from 'the Fall', from the disintegration of original, paradisal man; what is more, the two are coöperative, so that the duality is not so much an antithetical opposition as one of a quasi-harmonious relationship. The intelligible realm is immaterial, but without it the sensible realm would be completely disorganized, a purely chaotic state in which nothing would be recognizable or capable of definition, because that would require the power of conceptual organization. Everything that we experience on a sensual level is accompanied by a mental experience; they are infact one experience. That we do distinguish between them is due to the fact that we have a thinking mind and sensitive nerves, i.e. two valves for the same source.<br />
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In the <i>Republic</i>, Plato provides us with the famous example of the table to account for the existence of things according to this model. There can conceivably be, he says, a very wide range of different tables that we can make and use, but, regardless of whether they have four or eight or twenty legs, we will recognize every one of them as a table. This is thanks to our conception of the table and our agreed understanding of what a table is. We have a general consensus that (1) the table is something raised from the floor on however many legs, (2) is typically used to support someone who needs to sit down to work or eat or play, (3) is something which is universally recognized by all members of our civilization to be a table; but even beyond this there is the Idea of the table that exists intelligibly whether we perceive it or not, whether we make a table or not. There are many kinds of tables, but they all share in the same form, which we call 'table'. Insofar as a table is a table, it has 'tablehood'; it participates in the intelligible that Plato calls the 'table itself'.<br />
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Plato and many after him taught that a thing well-made materially will correspond directly to its idea, and the thing which is made best will be the thing which most resembles our idea of 'table', i.e., which table performs its 'tableness' best. Thus, insofar as a table does what we ask of it to do, as it does what a table is <i>meant</i> to do, it will be well-made, something whose sensible nature corresponds to its intelligible nature. If the table is inadequately made, however, for example if it wobbles on its feet or if it has an uneven number of legs on either side to the effect that the table's top board is sloped, it will be lacking sufficient 'tableness' to be truly called as such. It is an impaired product, something which is not perfectly represented materially as it is in the intelligible world. It is a broken table, and, strictly speaking, not really a table at all.<br />
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This is where we can apply Plato's metaphysics to the traditional understanding of art, which holds an integrated position on the quality of a work of art as something simultaneously good and beautiful. Just as the Vedic maxim <i>Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram</i> synthesizes into one trinity the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and as Plotinus suggests their inherent complicity in the <i>Enneads</i>, the Medievals interpreted this quite directly, their art being at once something good and true and therefore beautiful; if a thing was not good and true, it could not possibly be really beautiful. Something was good if it performed its proper function, and it was true if it was an accurate material representation of its formal nature - we can presently perceive how this relates to Plato's example of the table. Studying St. Thomas Aquinas, Umberto Eco elaborates for us, and therein offers a more Aristotelian perspective:<br />
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'The efficient cause constructs a thing in accordance with its end. For this reason, a work of art is beautiful if it is functional, if its form is adequate to its scope. ''Every craftsman aims to produce the best work that he can, not in a simple manner, but by reference to the end''[Aquinas]. If an artist made a saw out of glass it would be ugly despite the beauty of its appearance, because it could not fulfil its cutting function' (Umberto Eco, <i>Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages</i>, p. 78)</blockquote>
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Every thing has its <i>telos</i>, its specific end to which it is destined to be; if a thing is made with its <i>telos</i> in mind, and it is made perfectly, it is good and therefore beautiful. But if a thing is made with some other purpose, say a boat made of red brick, it is dysfunctional, and therefore bad, and therefore ugly. This applies equally to the 'fine arts', something which we will return to later in this Section. In the meanwhile, Plato also offers us the essential points by which we must judge music (and by extension art in general):<br />
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'[He] who must be a competent judge must possess three things; - he must know, in the first place, of what the imitation is; secondly, he must know that it is true; and finally, that it has been well-executed in words and melodies and rhythms' (Plato, <i>Laws</i>, 669a-b)</blockquote>
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This substantiates what we have already covered. The artist is imitating something, whether it be a high ethical ideal, an historical event, or what have you, and the judge must know both what it is, and whether it is <i>true</i> or not; the judge must determine whether such an ethical ideal is good and whether it actually exists, or that the historical event is not merely some fantastic patriotic revisionism. Finally, he must judge whether such an ideal is imitated <i>correctly</i> - if it is the masculine virtue of bravery being imitated, the work of art must <br />
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necessarily be suggestive of bravery; if it is comprised instead of a weepy, sentimental melody or languishing female chorales, the work has been a failure. This is the fundamental theory of art in the traditional world, a theory which is concerned not merely with something's 'beauty' or its 'aesthetic' qualities, but with how beauty proceeds from something rightly and truly made. This is moreover expressed in the Book of Exodus ('Lo, make all things in accordance with the pattern that was shown thee upon the mount', 25:40) and in the Aitareya Brahmana ('It is in imitation of the divine forms that any human form is invented here', VI. 27), which helps show the underlying concordance between not only the philosophy of Classical Greece and Hebrew scripture, but between the seemingly estranged traditions of East and West as well.<br />
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It should not go unsaid that Plato himself is often castigated for his apparently negative and dismissive treatment of poetry, which comes from his infamous advice to remove the poets from his <i>sancta civitas</i>, his ideal Republic. This is somewhat unfair, and is deserving of an explanation, however brief, on our part on why that is. Plato's problem emerges not so much with the poetry, which he sometimes calls 'divine madness' since it comes from the gods, but with the irrational poets who do not know what to do with this 'madness', and more often than not abuse its power instead of directing it reasonably. The problem is not with the poetry, but with bad poets, who in turn make bad poetry out of good. Sir Philip Sidney said: 'So as Plato, banishing the abuse [of poetry], not the thing, not banishing [poetry] but giving due honour unto it....'. It is only when the pleasures of art are corrupted into serving illicit, immoral, and anti-social ends that the artists are to be exiled, for they have betrayed the legitimate end of art, which is moral instruction. For the ideal city, art that distracts from the good for merely delectable delights is a negative influence; it acts as a harmful opposition to the righteous education of the city's teachers, and for that reason it is banished:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'[When] any one says that music is to be judged of by pleasure, his doctrine cannot be admitted; and if there be any music of which pleasure is the criterion, such music is not to be sought out or deemed to have any real excellence, but only that other kind of music which is the imitation of the good....' (Plato, <i>Laws</i>, 668a)</blockquote>
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In Julius A. Elias's estimable book, <i>Plato's Defence of Poetry</i>, the author demonstrates with sufficient credibility that Plato answers his own critique of poetry through several poetically-infused myths that nevertheless teach a high moral or metaphysical point. The problem of the fickle, all-too-human poets transmitting the messages of the divine is solved by the philosopher's own myths, which Josef Pieper, following St. Augustine, believed to be directly inspired by God. For Plato, 'inspiration may propose, but reason disposes; it is the naive poet's uncritical and undifferentiated acceptance of his inspiration that is offensive, not the fact of inspiration itself' (Elias, p. 212). It is what the poet does with what his muse gives him that we must celebrate or more often criticize; the honest and helpful poet will transmit the message in ways not conducive to the merely pleasant portion of his art or his selfish well-being, but in ways that genuinely ameliorate the welfare of his fellow man. Plato defends against his own attack by being that poet he wants to see in the world: the philosopher who acts as poet <i>and </i>philosopher receives the divine message and presents it with all of the genius that his own intellect affords him. Again, Sidney leaps to the defense of the 'philosopher-poet': 'Plato's name is laid upon me, whom, I must confess, of all philosophers I have ever esteemed most worthy of reverence, and with good reason: since of all philosophers he is the most poetical'.<br />
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Plato's theory of mimesis started out as a theory against poetry, because he argued that the 'fine arts' could only be an imitation of an imitation; thus, he asks, why bother painting a picture of a table when the table is already an imitation? It would be merely the imitation of an imitation! This is where Aristotle stepped in to fill some of the gaps that Plato left open, especially in his <i>Poetics</i>, in which he answers Plato's question by supposing that man is a mimetic being by nature, and consequently needs to recreate things in reality to fulfil his inner artistic needs, namely the need to create. Aristotle led the way in a long line of learned men to eventually complete the traditional Western understanding of art that culminated in the end of the scholastic era; Plotinus, Ss. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and numerous other schoolmen were all positive contributors to this tradition, but it all really started with Plato, who in turn was the legitimate successor to Pythagoras. It is the complementary partnership of Plato and Aristotle, however, that did more for Western Civilization than any other two men with the solitary exception of the holy friendship between Jesus Christ and St. Peter.<br />
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<br />Maximus Meyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02742158668734361245noreply@blogger.com0