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.