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.

Putin, Clinton, and Trump

As a lover of Russia - and a student of Russian history, frequent visitor, and a Russian speaker - I want to say that I find merit in both sides of this debate. Stephen Cohen of The Nation makes a case for the Russia-bashing predilection of Clinton and others. On the other hand, Masha Gessen of the New York Times is to be carefully heeded. However wicked Clinton is, the fact remains that Russia has become a "mafia state."

Putin has brought the mafia and the oligarchy under his control. Those who resisted - like Khodorkovsky - have been jailed or just killed. No one disputes that Politkovskaya, Nemstov, and Litvinenko were all murdered. Some think Berezovsky was, too. These matters do not make neo-liberal Russophobia any less odious. [For example, a good case can be made for the annexation of the Crimea; a little less good one for the donbas, which had been the industrial heartland of Russia (think Erie, Pa through Gary, IN), since Russia started having industries. The borders of modern Ukraine were drawn by Stalin, as Commissar of Nationalities under Lenin, precisely to include lots of ethnic Russians and thereby to complicate nationalist separatism.]

So I suspect those who get all righteous about it, like Clinton. I will not forget that as Secretary of State, she assured the Security Council that Qaddafi was not the target of the intervention it authorized. This secured the abstention of China and Russia (2011). Then he was killed and Mrs. Clinton said on TV "We came, we saw, he died. Ha Ha!" She actually laughed. This was a big mistake. Within days, Putin - who may have felt conned - had ordered a review of military and nuclear policy. The eventual result was the move in the Crimea and donbas (2014).

This doesn't mean that Putin is not an asshole, but that fact doesn't argue that his worst enemy (Clinton et al) isn't one too! I happen to think both of them are. Whomever you may dislike, their enemy is not necessarily your friend.

One more historical detail: the Russians may not have invented political deception, but "dezinformatsia" is a Russian word, and they refined it to a high art in the Soviet period. Even though McCarthy was a much greater threat to our democracy than Communism ever was, the fact remains that the Soviets were masters at the game. They were masters at recruiting stooges in the West, and their cultivation of a warm relationship with Donald Trump is a textbook example: FSB (KGB) fingerprints all over it. Just read Luke Harding's book. He is a little too much given to Russia-bashing for my taste [he seems to accept that Russia has no legitimate claim to the Crimea] but his "Collusion" still serves well as a compendium of actual facts - as known or alleged by very reliable sources.

To be sure, the evidence is mostly circumstantial, but as Thoreau observed: "Sometimes circumstantial evidence is convincing - as when you find a trout in the milk!"

KEEP AND BEAR ARMS

Kerri,

Congratuations on Flyover – great program. One fact, which I have yet to hear mentioned in the discussion of the tomorrow’s question, is the medieval restriction of arms to the upper classes. Like wearing fur, riding horses, and hunting, carrying a sword was forbidden to the peasants. Only the King, his Knights and later the gentry were permitted to bear arms. This is not commonly remembered now, but it surely was in the 18^th Century. I propose that is how the importance of an individual right to bear arms got into our national DNA: it was the sign of a free and equal citizen, not necessarily of an insurrectionist mentality.

As Mr. Justice Breyer has pointed out, the historical context of the Second Amendment is a widespread fear that the new Federal government would suppress the state militias. Mr. Justice Stevens (in his dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller) argued that the phrase “to keep and bear arms” referred to these militias and to the legal requirement of 1792 that men keep a rifle for that purpose. As the nation expanded to places where the rule of law was unreliable, the private bearing of arms became a matter of self defense. This frontier mythology, much celebrated in the movies, is now also in our nation DNA, unfortunately.

In Defense of Our Revolution

“Go out and make me do it.”

-          FDR

As a socialist, a proud constituent of Keith Ellison, a Sanders supporter in the primary, and a contributor to Our Revolution, I have been challenged by recent articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post, recently included in Clippings from N. Boulder indivisible. They have caused me to think about the principles and practicalities of threatening with primary challenges Democratic incumbents who will not say they support single-payer health care now. I have also heard the views of close friends, who have dedicated their lives to public service, who share the perspective of these articles. I have the deepest respect for their views and I want to say that I think they may be right, and that I may be mistaken in what follows.

The disagreement is over strategy not principle. We all share the goal of universal, government-sponsored health care. Frankly, I like the idea of Medicaid for everybody, as advanced by Prof. Sparer [what a delightful aptonym!]. The question is how to get there.

Pressuring sitting senators and representatives sounds reckless, but is it? It wouldn’t be that hard for such people to “take the pledge” and then to negotiate a compromise. Their position would be all the stronger for their ability to point to the significant proportion of their constituents demanding real advancement toward universal health care. Negotiations could also take place with the Our Revolution wing in terms of tactics (timing, alternative proposals, practical realities).  Congressional members who took the pledge but did not perform to Our Revolution’s standards would then be primaried  two years later – or not – depending on how persuasive they could be about the practicalities.

In terms of practical realities, one remembers FDR’s famous request of A. Randolph Philips: “I agree with you completely: now go out and make me do it!“ I offer the attached article by Peter Dreier on the importance of this kind of pressure and “taking it to the streets.” [Although dated – about Obama in 2009 – it can be translated easily by reading “Democratic incumbent” for “Obama.”] The historical section about FDR in the middle of the piece is especially interesting in our moment. Here’s the conclusion.

Like any successful politician, Obama is constantly evaluating the political climate and testing the nation’s appetite for change. Like FDR, he will be bold when he thinks the political climate is ready for bold action. The unions, community organizing groups, netroots groups, environmental and gay rights groups need to create a climate that will make it easier for Obama and Congress to be bold. As FDR said, their job is to “go out and make me do it.”

Could that be precisely what Our Revolution is trying to do?

******************************

As a postscript, I would express slight neuralgia about the tone of the Post op-ed. [I recommend to everyone an essay by Thomas Frank, which appeared just before last November’s disastrous election: “Swat Team – the media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders – and real reform”, Harpers, November 2016. The criticism is mostly based on Post coverage of the primary campaign.] That exasperated tone communicates the view that we on the left  should just shut up and go play in our sandbox while the adults figure out what to do. The prospect of our “going out and making (Congress) do it” is impertinent and wrongheaded.

But what is our alternative? I have suggested one above, but I have the feeling (and it is mostly a feeling) the centrist wing of the Party seems to want us to become back-bench centrists, and to forget about the amazing hope and sense of possibility the Sanders campaign engendered among the young. It is not at all clear to me that this is the best way forward form progressives. [In fairness to the Post it also reported that “In the 2016 campaign, Sanders won more votes among those under age 30 than the two presumptive major-party presidential nominees combined. And it wasn't close.” - “The Fix,” June, 2016.]

My problem with the “adults in the room” is that not only can their experience provide practical insight, but it can also make it difficult to imagine a fundamentally new situation. As James Russell Lowell wrote in 1845, “time makes ancient good uncouth.” On the other hand, those with political experience know that the center is not fixed: it has moved to the right significantly in our own time. It may be big mistake to imagine that the point triangulated by the New Democrat neo-liberalism 25 years ago is still the center. There is no reason to expect even sympathetic elected leaders to move left without our willingness to “go out and make them do it.”

God commends David for considering building a house for Him, but tells him to leave it to his son. So Solomon builds the Temple, the House for the Glory of God to dwell in. But God's words to David, though literally and historically fulfilled by his son, Solomon, were also a type — a pattern — for something later to be revealed.

The son of David, who would build a new house was Joachim, the father of the Blessed Virgin Mary. For Mary's body — the Temple not made with hands — became the dwelling place for the Glory of God, Jesus Christ, God With Us.

The Son of David is also  Jesus Christ, Himself, Who, in His turn, would build yet another house: the universal church, the New Israel, welcoming all humanity and all creation into the Covenant. In this extended typology, Mary is the Ark of the Covenant, hidden out of sight in the Holy of Holkies, and herself the Throne of the Presence of God.

HAMLET, INCEST, AND ELIZABETH I

[Notes on a conversation with sharif Graham]

I thought you would like this,, remembering our conversation about Hamlet. BTW, I meant to mention that it occurred to me that Hamlet's harping on "incest" was an exercise in political-correctness, since Elizabeth I's legitimacy rested on the incestuous nature of her father's first marriage. (Catherine of Aragon had previously been married to prince Arthur, who died shortly thereafter. Henry VII quickly married her off to his second son, who became Henry VIII. This would have been incestuous, according to the same ecclesiastical norm that concerned Hamlet. Catherine, however claimed that her first marriage had never been consummated, and hence was itself a nullity, so her marriage to Prince Henry was NOT invalid.) There was, of course, no way to prove her claim, but - as my professor Edward Rochie Hardy observed - "She ought to have known!" So an important part of subsequent English history is entailed in this strange canon law. I think Hamlet's insistence on the "one flesh" business (Claudius as his "mother") maybe the clue to the Church's thinking: the dominical pronouncement on marriage ("...the two become one flesh, therefore what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder") would seem to imply that your sister-in-law becomes your own sister, for purposes of consanguinity.

When centrism beconess "alternative reality"

A response to one of Rick Moody's valuable digests on resisting Trump.

I want to reiterate how much I appreciate this service. Also, to respond to a particular article about losing our mind on the left. I think it is particularly important for two reasons, tending somewhat in opposite directions:

1) it seems to me that spreading "alternative realities" serves only the adversary. It may feel good at the moment, but it helps to prepare one of the fundamental preconditions of totalitarianism, that reality is a matter of the will.

2) Another way of denying basic reality is simply to line up all the perspectives and allegations - from left to right and select only the "center" as trustworthy. In other words if an assertion is far enough out of the mainstream consensus, it must be crackpot.   Although this may usually be true, it is not always true, and it is another way of saying that reality — like faith — is a matter of the will. However rarely, it is nevertheless true that "sometimes the tin hat fits."

I am afraid that most of us who  [unlike Michael Moore] were surprised at the Trump victory fell into this trap to some extent. Habitual centrists tend to view Moore as a crackpot, don't they?  In my opinion, the arbiters of fact, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Los Angeles times can be trusted in the facts that they report  [most of the time - see below about Gary Webb]. They are not quite so trustworthy and the facts they decide are not "fit to print."

My own deeper experience of this, from 30 years ago, has to do with CIA cooperation with international drug trafficking. [I am afraid this is still going on: the price of heroin continues to decline and right now it is never been cheaper. Meanwhile, truckloads of manufactured heroin roll from Afghanistan across the big, new, four-lane bridge I saw being built by the USA from Afghanistan to Tajikistan in 2006].

In the '80s,  The Times &al. did not exactly suppress this kind of news, but it did minimize it, relegating it to the back pages. In my opinion that is because it's was so explosive. Powerful interests do have a say. Even the extremely circumspect report of the Kerry subcommittee on the subject, which corroborated the outlines and many of the details of this malfeasance, was reported briefly and then forgotten. There was simply no appetite to kick this hornets' nest.

Then there is the more recent case of Gary Webb ["Dark Alliance"]. The three great newspapers pilloried him as an irresponsible crackpot. Sadly, it appears that he was unstable, and he ended up taking his own life. But that does not obviate the fact that the three major newspapers all misreported the contents of his book. "Dark Alliance" gave the details of the findings behind the Kerry Report. [I considered them rather old news, because I was involved in researching the subject in the early '90s, and most of it was right in the congressional report.] The Times &al, reported that Webb had alleged that the CIA had deliberately targeted African-American communities. That was 

not true.

These communities, themselves, said so — loudly — but Webb had never alleged that. It was a conclusion from his work drawn by the people themselves. At most, Webb documented what might be called "depraved indifference" on the part of the CIA. I believe the rather hysterical reporting of the three major newspapers arose out of their own interest in defending their previous coverage of the matter. They had dropped the ball. They never exactly lied, but they prescinded from the more explosive leads. So,Webb had to be a crackpot.

All this is a long way of saying that we would be well advised to keep a skeptical eye on the arbiters of centrist consensus. As we used to say, "just because you're paranoid does not mean They are not out to get you!"

Response in NYT blog about CIA torture (6/21/17) to a comment that we critics will miss no opportunity to "take down the USA"

It is the torturers who take down the USA, not those who understand that we must never permit it. In my opinion, those who commit these crimes - and those who defend them - do our enemies' work for them by forsaking the values that we are supposed to be defending. If anything is un-American, this is it. If we let enemies scare us into it, America is finished and Al-Qaeda or ISIL don't have to lift a finger. It would be exactly what Osama bin Laden predicted would happen, and we would have become what he said we were. Decadence and moral collapse are what he expected, and he believed he could goad us into it. The torturers hand him the victory.

Gnostic sympathy

For transparently political reasons, Pagels, Meier, &co. find gnostic literature useful. Postmodern critical methodology encourages the conclusion that the Great Church omitted gnostic literature from its account of Jesus as a result of a patriarchal tendenz.  This leaves aside any conclusions about what Jesus might actually have taught, and whose tradition is closer. Such “essentialist” considerations are fruitless, since all we can know is what various groups found congenial for their own reasons.

Many find it congenial to entertain the idea that there is a certain pattern: a sapiential teacher delivers wisdom; his/her disciples eventually and inevitably get it wrong in the transmission, somewhere down the line, and correction is needed. This is the Protestant paradigm. In the name of the original purity of teaching, the tradition must be revised. The pattern resembles the gnostic creation myths: the Demiurge (or his mother, Sophia) got it wrong and the result is the flawed world as we know it. Likewise, genuine wisdom is garbled in human institutions. Periodic revision/purification is necessary. This seems also to be the Muslim paradigm. Moses and Jesus were genuine Messengers, but their followers got it wrong.

Underlying this view is the fundamental presupposition that the human predicament is ignorance. Creation is the work of a half-wit and we are stuck in the darkness of his imperfect product. We are saved by learning the Truth. The world is not to be saved, but individual spirits, imprisoned in ignorance, are to be set free by the infusion of Wisdom. Unfortunately, just as the Demiurge wrought a defective cosmos, so saving wisdom is garbled in the transmission, so it has to be sent repeatedly. Nobody wants this to happen, but we don’t know any better. The problem is located not in our will but in our intellect. Our problem is not sin, but ignorance.

Therefore, the Cross is useless, except insofar as it may be a teaching aid. The Death and Resurrection of Christ make no change in the cosmos. In fact, for some gnostics – as for the Qur’an – Jesus Christ was not even crucified: another died in His place. Pagels attests to her own aversion for the Cross. The modern scholars of gnostic texts – especially the popularizing ones – are frank enemies of the notion that salvation is through the Cross. On the contrary,  salvation is through the teaching of wisdom.

Stalker as Spiritual guide

Star’ets in Russian means spiritual guide (literally, “elder”). In Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker is the slang term for another kind of guide. In a future dystopia, possibly post-nuclear, there is an off-limits area called the Zone. Stalker is a play on star’ets. It is possible to interpret the film as a reference to mystical ascent, through the fallen world, under the guidance of a spiritual master.

An icon well known in Russia (not so well in the West) depicts this ascent as described by St. John Climacus (John of the ladder, 7^th C., Sinai). Figures climb the ladder propped against the wall. Many fall to their doom even from the top rungs. The spiritual path is dangerous. An experienced guide is indispensable. Even the most experienced can fall. Stalker, like any Russian star’ets, is an ascetic who cares nothing for the things of this world. Comfort, reputation and wealth do not interest him: only the Zone. The Zone is this world transfigured. (Filmed in vivid color as opposed to the depressing sepia/gray of the ordinary world.) Because of his contempt for ordinary life, Stalker appears to worldly people as a misfit or a freak. One of his clients, Writer, even calls him yurodiviy, referring to a specific kind of Russian saint: the “Fool for Christ” or “Holy Fool.” Little-known in the West since the Middle Ages, this particular kind of saint appears in Russia to this day. An apparent idiot (cf.: Dostoyevsky’s great novel), the yurodiviy has gifts of prophecy and clairvoyance, and a fearless willingness to rebuke the powerful. The great church on Red Square is named for such a one: Basil the Blessed, who alone was able to subdue the syphilitic rages of Ivan the Terrible.

The ordinary preoccupations of worldly people, represented by Stalker’s clients, Writer and Professor, are of no importance to Stalker. Or rather they are obstacles to be overcome. Both of these clients are intellectuals, and both skeptics but they are men of different spiritual temperaments. Professor is a scientist, a materialist for whom only the sensible is real. The triumph of scientific reasoning will bring universal peace and happiness. Professor is the best of the Soviet system, which erected an enormous sign across the river from St. Basil’s proclaiming “Literacy + Electrification = Communism.” Science and technology will cure human misery.

Writer scoffs at Professor’s materialism as a naïve illusion. Writer has thought everything through to the end. Having begun with compassion for humanity, he has lost all hope. He is a nihilist: comfortable, but bored to death. Writer is to Professor as Ivan Karamazov is to Dimitri. The man of letters versus the man of action, the mental versus the physical side of human nature. Stalker could be compared to Alyosha Karamazov, or to the latter's star’ets, Fr. Zossima.

Professor and Writer are passionate. That is, they suffer insatiable desire. This must be purged if they are to survive the spiritual journey — climbing the Ladder of mystical ascent, up through the Zone, to its central feature, a ruined building with the proportions (though not the domes) of a pre-Mongol, Russian church. It is the task of the spiritual guide to help them shed their dangerous delusions [prelest], and to lead them on the path that will strip them of their passions. Because, if their passions do not destroy them on the way (Writer’s liquor and his gun, Professor’s preoccupation with his knapsack), they will certainly annihilate them if they reach their destination with them. Stalker himself is utterly humble, without self-regard, but fierce in his insistence on the correct path. He has reached the level Orthodox mystics call apatheia, passionlessness. Like an actual star’ets, Stalker prays for his disciples with profound compassion. They have to be purified by water and fire. He addresses his prayers to the bottom of a well.

This feminine symbol, rooted in pre-Christian religion, persists in Russian Orthodoxy. Many churches and monasteries have holy wells, adorned with icons of the Mother of God overseeing the fountain of the Water of Life. The water of these wells is drunk and carried home by the faithful. The water into which Stalker speaks his prayers reflects his own face, and beneath the surface is an icon of the Savior. When the nihilistic Writer produces a pistol, the gentle Stalker violently wrestles it out of his hands and throws it into the well. Water is a key element in Tarkovsky’s cinematic vocabulary, especially indoor rain (cf.: Nostalghia, 1983), and water sometimes catches the light in such a way as to appear to be liquid gold. (Cf.: the final shot in Sacrifice, 1986, Tarkovsky’s last film) . In iconography, gold signifies divinity — the Uncreated Light. Golden rain might be interpreted as the water of Baptism, which the Orthodox call Illumination. Water suffused with Light, water joined with fire.

Stalker’s clients must complete purification in this Water of Light before they can reach their goal, inside the House. There, a golden rain falls across the threshold of a Room, in which those who enter realize their innermost wish (cf.: Solyaris). The trouble is that one may not be aware of one’s own innermost wishes. Stalker’s own guide, whose name was “Teacher” and who Stalker says “opened my eyes”, entered the room wishing for world peace. When he returned to the sepia world, however, all he got was money, and — like the one Russians remember as the lover of money, Judas — he hanged himself. After this incident, no stalker had ever entered the Room, and Teacher was remembered as “Porcupine.”

In order to enter the Room of realization, one must pass through a rain of gold, which separates the Room from the rest of the House. Professor and Writer wonder why Stalker will not go. “I am fine as I am,” he answers. Perhaps he has no desires to realize, so there is no point in entering the Room; or maybe he remembers Porcupine and fears his own subconscious. Writer and Professor turn out to be afraid to enter the Room, too, because they have begun to sense  that they are not free of passion, and they might realize something they might not like. (A similar theme is found in Tarkovsky’s earlier film, Solyaris, 1972).

Professor’s knapsack turns out to contain a nuclear device with which to blow up the Room, and thereby to free humanity from the dangers of its innermost wishes – along with access to unseen Reality. [The materialist would destroy the numinous.] But something about the journey has changed him. Although he fends off Stalker's repeated attempts to wrestle the bomb away from him, in the end, Professor dismantles it and throws it into the golden water.

Writer, too, cynical as ever, has to admit that there is something he does not know, namely his own innermost desire. Stalker's guidance has taught him at least enough humility to make him afraid to enter the Room. He announces that he will go back to his villa and drink himself to death.

Stalker himself returns to his own miserable house, where his wife comforts him as he lies on the floor, commenting on his own exhaustion. In the last scene, his daughter sits at a table. The sepia-world regards her as defective in some way, mental or physical. The film closes as she moves a glass of wine across the table without touching it. Her superior consciousness, regarded by the world as an infirmity, actually dominates the “reality”  of material appearance. 

Meanwhile, supernatural Reality, blazes away, unseen, in the transfigured Zone. The numinous is not entirely absent from the world.  It is Forbidden, however, and the authorities of dystopian, sepia-world do everything they can to hide it and to keep people away from it. 

PARTICIPATION

I saw a headline last week alerting me to “ World cup fever” What can account for it? Why do Brazilian adults still weep over a single goal made decades  ago? Maybe it has to do with our innate human need to identify with something bigger. We must be part of a greater whole. We want to participate. This word, part has opposite meanings. It can mean something separate and cut-off – something apart, till death us do part – or it can mean something that is not alone and cut off, but part of whole, as our various body parts are part of the body. [We also call these different parts members – hold on to that for later]. So a part is something small and cut- off, but it is also something that participates in that of which it is a part. Maybe that’s why people get world-cup fever or go to concerts in the same sports arenas. Or go to Church.

Participation, likewise, has a couple of senses. It can mean taking part in some activity – as a player participates in a performance, playing her part, or a soldier participates in a battle. But it can also mean something deeper, more abstract: something having to do with who or what the participant is.  The world-cup fans participate not merely in that they attend or listen to the games, but in that they identify themselves as fans of particular teams. That’s who they are. The notion of participation as shared being is ancient and important and very much with us. If we participate in a community of any kind, we identify ourselves as members of it. In some way, we share in the being of the community.

In Church, we call this Communion, and it means participation, in the sense of being part of the Body of Christ. Members of His Body. I think it instructive that in some languages, the word for receiving Holy Communion is participation. Indeed, Holy Communion is all about participation. In both senses: we participate by action of eating and drinking, and thereby we become participants in the Divine Life. Our separate life is incorporated into the shared Life of the Most Holy Trinity. The consecrated elements of Bread and Wine make it so. Let us consider them.

We make bread from flour and water and yeast. The flour is lots of grains of wheat, which we grind up and mix with water and yeast and then bake. The finished loaf participates in the species of wheat, water, and yeast.  But the countless grains of wheat that make up a loaf also participate in the plants that produced them, and these plants participate in the nutrients they drew from the soil, and in the seed that sprouted them in the first place. But that wasn’t really the first place, because those seeds were grains from other wheat plants and so on back to pre-history, as wheat gradually evolved – under human cultivation. Wheat doesn’t occur in the wild. In a sense, wheat and humanity evolved together. Wheat participates in human civilization. So, more obviously, do bread and wine.

I once saw a brewmaster wearing a T-shirt that said fermentation is a sign of civilization. And that is true. Nomads and hunter-gatherers don’t have bread and wine. They are the product of cities, the fruit of complex systems of human co-operation. Bread and wine are human artifacts. They are not found in nature. But they are more than signs. They not only signify civilization, in the sense that they are evidence of it, but they are part of it, in the sense of belonging to it. Bread and wine belong to civilization. Signs they are, but they are more, because bread and wine participate in the life of the City.

It is easy to see that the ingredients of bread represent the three kingdoms: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Wheat represents the vegetable kingdom, water the mineral kingdom, and yeast the animal kingdom. They are not, however, only representatives, but participants in their respective kingdoms in the sense of shared being. The water we add to the flour comes out of the ground or river, having fallen as rain somewhere else, maybe thousands of years ago. The microbes of yeast have their own chain of evolution, sharing in millions of years of life. Human art puts them together to make something new, something not found in creation, the product of the City.

But not only the City: bread and wine are the products of agriculture, the prerequisite for civilization, and they also participate in the evolutionary chain of plant life going back before the appearance of humankind. Bread and wine participate in that too. As do we. A human being participates in the life of her parents and also in the lives of her children – speaking now in the biological sense, and not only in the social. In that sense we all participate in the life of our original ancestors and in the earlier life-forms from which they emerged. And so we also participate in the biological lives of all other human beings – indeed of all life on the planet. This is not merely symbolic; it is the reality the ancients called participation.

So the bread and wine that Jesus took as supper was ending are representatives and signs of the whole created order and of human civilization – but more than signs, more than representatives, they are participants: they are the natural creation as molded by human civilization. The Divine Word that called them into being in the beginning now speaks again, calling them His Body and Blood. In so doing, the Godman does not merely apply a new label, but He changes them in the essence of their being. The Bread and Wine now participate in His own Body and Blood. They participate in His Life. And since His Life is divine as well as human, the Bread and Wine are too. This is more than symbolism: it is sacramental Reality, because sacraments participate in the Reality they symbolize.  By His Word, God re-created the cosmos – by virtue of participation, He incorporated all that is into His own Divine Life. This happened before He gave His Body and Blood to the Apostles to eat and drink.

Our personal participation in the Sacrament  –  our Communion – is something additional. We call it the pledge of our redemption. In this sense, perhaps, it is a sign. Our eating and drinking of His Body and Blood signifies to us the stupendous and incomprehensible Reality of the Redemption of the world, and of ourselves as part of the world. He gave His Body and Blood to us with the commandment to “Do this in remembrance of Me.” As Dom Gregory Dix observed, never has any commandment been so widely obeyed – to the extent now that there is probably not a moment in any Day – with the possible exception of Good Friday and Holy Saturday – in which it is not fulfilled on earth. God’s kingdom come on earth as in heaven.

When we eat His Body and Drink His Blood, He lives in us and we in Him – we participate in Him and in one another consciously. To some extent, we are also conscious of this incomprehensible new Reality. And that, perhaps, is what our personal participation adds to the objective Redemption of the New Creation. All creation and all people participate in the New Creation by His pronouncement that Bread is His Body and Wine His Blood. We who eat and drink, however,  enter eternal life here and now in the sense that we are conscious of it.

This may be what He meant by saying Do this in remembrance of Me. Remembrance, anamnesis, amnesia negated, unforgetting – these all have to do with consciousness. We may not be able to comprehend what we are doing when we consume his Flesh and Blood, but we can be conscious of it. In any case, the commandment of anamnesis  - to unforget Him - is not a commission to form a historical society. This memorial is vaster, a kind of mystical consciousness that has to do with participation, conscious participation. 

It is tempting to pun on the English word remembrance, which sounds like it might have something to do with members­ or parts of the Body, but it doesn’t.  Too bad, since that is what memorial means in the context of the Holy Eucharist – it means calling to mind the fact that we are participants in the life of Christ. We also participate in creation and in civilization. Through us, all that is participates in that Divine Life. We eat His Body and drink His Blood so that , as He said, we “will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

BBC on Nicene Creed

Interesting panel on Nicene Creed in BBC podcast. If you scroll down through "related" items you'll find more. It was particularly interesting to me, because one of the panel is Martin Palmer, who wrote the book I am now reading on 7th C. Taoist Christianity in China, The Jesus Sutras. He is a Chinese scholar, who translated them back into Modern English. (Holy Spirit is Pure Wind.)

Shostakovitch/Trifonov

Daniil Trifonov is a 25 years old genius. Here he is playing Shostakovich's Piano Concerto #1 in Paris. Russia-born, he now lives in New York.

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE FALL

Who told you that you were naked?

The effect of eating the forbidden fruit was self-consciousness. Before humanity ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we were in what Tillich called a state of “dreaming innocence.” I suppose what that means is the unselfconscious innocence of an infant or toddler. A condition of undifferentiated unity with everything. Part of us will always want to get back to that state. But that’s a mistake. We can’t, and we are better off that we can’t. O Felix Culpa - O happy fault! As Augustine exclaimed.

Adam and Eve suddenly knew that we were naked. That is, they became conscious of themselves as individuals. They knew that They were lacking something. They knew good and evil. I used to think that this was a reference to the ability to tell right from wrong. Maybe that's part of it, but maybe there’s something even deeper in the myth: something related to the sense of the word knowledge as intimate relationship. By knowing good and evil, we became participants, partakers of everything in the world. Devouring the fruit is a perfect symbol for that — an ante-type of Holy Communion — humanity joined itself to good and evil, became a participant in the conflict between them, just as we, who devour the Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, become participants in His Resurrection.

But first, we knew that we were naked. We knew that we lacked something — something very important. And we were ashamed. Our sense of lack, deprivation, is our consciousness of separation from all others — separation from all that is not “I.”  We moderns are inclined to call this sense of separation Ego. We knew that we were naked. Ego is that knowledge. And we were ashamed. We felt that we were lacking something really important.

The first thing that happens is that we begin to alienate everything else — to regard everything else as other, and not at all in a positive way:. “The Woman, whom You gave me, is to blame.” “The Serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” Everybody starts blaming some other — even to the extreme of blaming God — not just recognizing their otherness, but regarding it negatively, as the cause of all their problems.

So how can this be a “Happy Fault?” Augustine says it’s because it made necessary the Divine Redeemer. Let’s unpack that. The Knowledge of Good and Evil is, after all the knowledge of good. When humanity becomes self-conscious, it is conscious of the great and wonderful and indescribable and infinite goodness of all that God has made. When we become conscious as all animals are conscious, we experience God’s goodness, but in a very limited sense: we feel it, we sense it, but we don’t know it. The forbidden fruit takes our consciousness further by making us conscious of Goodness — and of ourselves as imperfect. That is the dark side of the fruit's effects. “Who told you that you were naked?”

Augustine, and following him all Western theologians, regard evil as a nullity — nothing, in itself, but only a privation or diminution of the real. Evil is a kind of parasite, that ceases to exist when its host dies. By analogy, let us think of an apple that is blemished and beginning to rot. The fact that it is there at all, as an apple, is good. [Everything that God made was very good.] The mar, the blemish, the incipient process of rotting is what we call evil. In this view, the rot itself has no being: it is a process, a process of dying, of tending toward non-being. When complete, there is nothing left at all, not even the rot. Stated theologically, “evil has no substance.”

So, evil is not the opposite of good, nor is evil necessary — as some would say — for us to recognize good, but evil is the privation of good. When humanity became individually self-conscious, we knew goodness in a new way a higher way. That is why it was a “happy fault.” But along with it came the consciousness of our own imperfection: we became aware that we were naked. And we were ashamed.

ARIZONA – 2017

January 1 — 

Lovely evening, beginning with mass at St. Michael’s, where I connected with Peter Medine. Then dinner at one of my favorites: Los Mariscos de Chihuahua. Now, Chihuahua is landlocked, so where do the mariscos come from?  Well, the story is that somewhere (probably Nogales) there is a grocery store called Chihuahua, and right next door a little fish restaurant. The restaurant was simply called Los Mariscos, and everybody just added the name of its bigger neighbor to identify it. It is now a successful local chain here in Tucson. They have a fabulous sauce called culichi, a green cheese sauce. It is quite mild but there must be some pepper in it, because it has a little bit of tang. Tonight, their homemade salsa was a lovely golden color! I thought it might have something to do with holiday festivities, but my waiter assured me that it was only because the tomatoes weren’t very red!

There is a spectacular display in the sky tonight: the crescent of the waxing new Moon is conjoined with an unbelievably-bright Venus. Positively Islamic!

January 10 — 

I ran across a really interesting book called the Jesus Sutras, by Martin Palmer. He seems to be a respectable scholar and authority on both China and Christian history. He is well acquainted with Eastern Orthodoxy and its art. The gist is that Christians came across the silk Road to China sometime in the seventh century will, maybe even before. He found an 80 foot pagoda, which locals believe to have been built by “monks from the West.” A Japanese archaeologist had called it Da Qi, meaning “Monastery of the Westerners." Palmer hypothesizes a kind of Taoist Christianity.

This is fascinating for many reasons. The monks in question would have been Syrian or Chaldean Christians, probably Nestorians. They would have recognized Jesus as a Supreme Teacher, with a unique relationship to God, but their idea of Incarnation differed from Mediterranean orthodoxy, both Eastern and Western. From the Council of Ephesus (ad431) their notion was regarded as heretical: that Jesus had two natures (human and divine) expressed by two personæ, joined only by unity of will. It will be interesting to see how this Christology may have facilitated a Taoist/Christian/Buddhist synthesis.

Meanwhile, the development of Greek and Latin Christianity agreed upon the two natures expressed by one Person, both divine and human. [Council of Chalcedon, ad451.] Could it be that the Nestorian view permitted them to regard Jesus as a Sage — perhaps the greatest, but still one among many. In that case, their good news might be more intelligible, in Chinese culture, than the Chalcedonian orthodoxy. This may have some relevance to our own time. It raises the question of the Work of Christ, what English speakers call the doctrine of the Atonement.

What did Jesus accomplish for us? It will be interesting to see what the Taoist Christians thought. And how does this all relate to the Pauline epistles, and the Mystery of the Cross? The Chinese context might have developed  in a way different from the Roman/hellenistic context.