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.

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.”