Events in Matthew

The sequence of events in the Gospel According to St. Matthew may be instructive:

Peter’s Confession at Caesarea Philippi

Transfiguration

Various healings & “Who is the greatest?”

Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard

Departure from Galilee to Judea

Restoring of sight to the blind on the way to Judea

Pronouncements on the Law in Judea, controversy with religious authorities

Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem

Cleansing of the Temple [overturning conventions of finance and economic norms]

More controversy, no more healings.

Having revealed His divine Identity, Jesus makes fior Jerusalem, to complete the Exodus that He discussed with Moses and Elijah on Tabor.

The last parable describes the Kingdom (God’s will to be done by humans on earth as in heaven) as distribution of the fruits of production on the basis of need, not work: from each according to ability; to each according to need.

The restoration of sight could indicate a raising of consciousness, political as well as mystical.

The Cleansing of the Temple, under the authority of the Messiah, Who has just entered the City, is the first act of realizing the Reign of God on earth in economic terms. The healings and exorcisms “destroy the works of the devil” in disfiguring the image of God physically and spiritually. The Cleansing of the Temple undoes social and economic disfiguration.

An Analogy

ALLEGORY OF THE SUN

Let the sun represent God. The ancient hymn of St. Sophronius of Jerusalem (Phos hilaron) apostrophizes the Word as “Brightness of the Heavenly father’s face.” So the Son may be represented as  the brightnessof the sun. Pursuing the analogy, the Holy Spirit might be represented by the warmth of the sun.

The Wisdom of God could be the sky – the azure firmament. The Eastern, and especially Russian, distinction between the Son and Wisdom introduces a speculation about the nature of creation. While it may be heretical to say that creation is eternally co-existent with God, it may not be heretical to say that God has always comprised Wisdom, meaning not so much knowledge or understanding as Beauty.

Wisdom as Beauty is the creature of God, not only God’s attribute (like omnipotence or omniscience).Could we say that before the Act of creation, from all eternity, Holy Wisdom (Sophia) has been with God? Beauty as Objective Reality and not subjective feeling might be said to be co-eternal with God: not an attribute or aspect of God, but an Act of divine will prior to creation. In Wisdom have you you created all.

Response to John Brightly

Thank you, John. I find your questions eloquent, well-reasoned, and important. As for Vietnam, one has to ask what it means to fight heroically in an unjust cause, whether it is possible at all to commit a war crime honorably..

Americans were outraged at Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. No declaration of war. Like Japan, we never declared war on Vietnam.  What became know as "The Gulf of Tonkin Incident" took place on August 4-5, 1964. President Johnson deemed it a causus belli, and Congress agreed on August 7 in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. President Johnson signed it three days later, giving him authority to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." Unfortunately, the Resolution was based on misinformation -to  put the matter generously.

The US Naval Institute offers a detailed account of the Incident, based on material declassified in the '00s. The gist of the precise account  is summarized by Navy Commander James Stockdale, who " had no doubt about what had happened: 'We were about to launch a war under false pretenses, in the face of the on-scene military commander's advice to the contrary.' "  

In addition to the lying,  there is a question of international law. Although it was held to satisfy our own Constitutional requirements for Congressional approval, did the Resolution of August 7 constitute a declaration of war?  If not, McCain and the other participants in the bombing, like the Japanese pilots of the "Day of Infamy", were war criminals, whatever their targets. I would be interested in John Shattuck's opinion: did the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution amount to a declaration of war in international law?

On Sun, Sep 16, 2018 at 5:10 PM John Brightly <jbrightly@gmail.com> wrote:

Some people didn't get the attachment so I'm sending again..

-- 

Bill+  
****************************************************
GLORIA ENIM DEI  VIVENS HOMO ~ VITA AUTEM HOMINIS VISIO DEI   

                             - Irenaeus of Lyons, CIRCA AD  180    

Letting go is all we have to hold on to

                             - Gregg Eisenburg
Sermon Archives 

Commentary (personal blog)

Grail as the Vine Anew in the Kingdom

Vladika Seraphim (The Theology of Wonder) suggests that the Grail stories of the medieval romances are a figure of theosis. The Sacred Cup is the Eucharist after the Resurrection. This raises a question and a delightful expansion of the theology of the Eucharist.

An Orthodox monk once addressed the Yale Russian Chorus, when we visited Trinity-Sergievo Lavra in 1971, congratulating us on learning the language of the angels in heaven. For in eternity,all worship - including the Holy Eucharist - will be transcended (since we will be joined eternally in the Body of Christ, without need of sacraments) and we will simply sing God's praises. I remember that the monk was the choirmaster of the great monastic choir - the best in the world, in my opinion. So, perhaps Archimandrite Mattfey can be excused for forgetting the Lord's own promise to drink anew of the Vine in the Kingdom.

For that New Vintage - the Eucharist after the Resurrection - is what the Holy Grail signifies and represents. The Knights of the Grail are the heroic spiritual warriors, seeking theosis. And the divinization they seek is not for themselves alone, as individuals, but for the whole world. The divinization of the Cosmos is the goal.

Vladyka Serphim notes the forgotten author, Arthur Machen, who seems to have understood the matter. The Grail stories appear to have been an attempt to portray the Mystical side of Eucharistic theology, as the Schoolmen were describing it rationally. I can't help but consider this in conjunction with my reading of Submerged reality, a new study of Sophiology, by a Western medievalist, Michael Martin. The nominalists severed reason (science) from art and religion. The Romantics tried to reintegrate them (Goethe, &al.). A hundred years later, the Russian "silver age" produced Soloviev and Bulgakov and their Sophiology. [Something could be said, perhaps, from a Eurasianist perspective: the Russian contribution had roots slightly different from the Western Europeans. The Orthodox Slavs were already familiar with the Divine Feminine and the mysterious figure of Holy Wisdom.].  Could it be that the Grail as mystical transcendence is somehow related to Haighia Sophia, and that the Divine Liturgy, in its Eucharistic aspect, is also eternal?

The notion of a post-Resurrectional Eucharist seems to expand it from a Mystical re-presentation of Christ's Death "until I come again," to a Mystical entrance into the Resurrection itself, as with Christ we drink anew of the Vine in the Kingdom.

Class and Community

 Marketplace Weekend just aired a revealing segment on Gillette, WY (coal) where life depends on extraction and very un-deplorable people love Trump. They believe w/o him they would be a ghost town. They don't hate anybody; they love their community. I am afraid we liberals have bought into market-idolatry sufficiently to cause us to be too quick to say "just move to where the jobs are."

In other words, stable, human community is a lesser value. I have a theory that part of the medieval/modern paradigm shift was stability/mobility. For moderns/liberals, mobility is fundamental. Go West, Young Man. (Or as Paul Ehrlich put it ) 50 years ago, Foul your nest and move West!  [my emphasis] Geographical mobility served social mobility. I share this value, I must say. I believe in meritocracy. Part of me does. But I returned to MN in favor of stable community. In  that, I share something, I am afraid, with the Appalachian people who distrust education because it leads to children moving away!)

Even though it's fine to observe that the real cause for the decline in coal is not regulation, but cheaper natural gas, and that Gillette's days are numbered anyway, the deeper question for social policy, in my opinion,  is retraining. Turn WV into Silicon Valley. Bring the jobs to the community, rather than dissolving the community to go look for work elsewhere. This means way more economic planning than we are used to.

And this too  is fraught, of course. Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom is required reading; but his first dialectic of civic virtue is individual vs. totality. He knows Berdyaev well enough, perhaps, to recognize the importance of personal community, but the danger of reducing persons to commodities in service of the market must not be underestimated. The freedom to leave home to better oneself can turn into its own kind of slavery. This is a major theme for the  5% of Nashville output that is worth listening to. Among the classics:

What have they done to the old home place?

Why did they they tear it down?

Why did I leave the plow in the field,

  and look for a job in the town? 

It may be too easy to dismiss this as nostalgic sentimentality. It is a real lament for lost community.

To R. Moody on collusion - weekend of August 5, 2018

Hey Rick!

No doubt you are planning this, already, but there must be a ton of analysis about DT's admission that he "colluded" by getting "oppositional research" from a foreign power. The New Yorker thinks this is a real turning point.

My own two cents is that the  matter is just wonky enough to be obfuscatable, and DT is pushing the envelope. ["Everybody does it, it's legal." except it isn't when viewed as  campaign contribution from a foreigner, let alone from a hostile power.] It could be that DT is testing the waters to see how much more he can get away with. He has admitted to something not that different from shooting someone on 5th Avenue. In terms of illegality, it is just as brazen. 

As we know, fascism creeps up on a society. Small offenses become bigger and bigger ones, and we get inured to them. This month's New York Review of Books contains  a remark by a Dutch historian (in the article about global warming called, "the Great Melt") It seems the Dutch papers were full of alarm at the menace  of Nazism in 1933, but by 1938 there was hardly a mention anymore. People got tired of hearing about it. Nothing they could do about it anyway. A kind of variation, perhaps, on the  analogy of the frog in water slowly heating to the boiling point. 

I am nearing the end of Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom. If you haven't read it, please do. He draws on untranslated sources largely unknown in the West. he makes a convincing, and frightening case. Toward the end he predicts an attempted putsch to suspend the coming election. The voter fraud commission may be a trial balloon for that kind of thing, Fortunately, it didn't produce the results he desired.

Franken resignatiion

[A response to Kerri Miller's coverage]

Dirty tricks. Isn’t it conceivable that Franken was “swift-boated?”  The big beneficiaries are the authoritarian right, and the big losers are progressives. Several of Franken’s accusers are anonymous. The only documented accuser is herself a right-wing radio personality. Is this all meaningless coincidence? Are Bannon and Stone above a campaign of dirty tricks?

Quite a few of your respondents defended the notion of due process. What is that other than a hedge against false accusation? Isn’t that all the more necessary in a case such as Franken’s, where the political stakes are so high? Outrageous political smears are fairly common in our history. Are we not even to consider the possibility that it is happening here? The only allegation that Franken has admitted is Tweeden’s. There is a good deal more to say about that, including an investigation into the raunchy culture of the USO tour, in which she was a willing participant, as attested by the same roll of pictures in which she found the objectionable one.

One of your panelists rejoiced that the burden of proof had been transferred “from the accuser to the abuser.” Is that really what we want? You object to the term, but that sounds like 17^th century Salem mentality to me: any accusation is not only credible, but probative; those accused of witchcraft are guilty unless they can prove their innocence. Franken wanted a “trial” in the form of an ethics committee investigation; Tweeden did not. I would like to know why.

As it is, the most progressive (arguably) Senator has been driven from office on the basis of accusations, some anonymous, only one substantiated, at a time when an evenly-divided Senate faces unusually momentous decisions. I smell a rat. I consider it irresponsible simply to assume that this affair is nothing more than it appears to be. All the Franken accusations ought to be investigated thoroughly.