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. 

For a younger priest, who asked me to comment on on recent catastrophic election:

Let us remember the teaching of the holy neo-martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that grace is without price but not without cost. Ours is an apocalyptic faith, which regards times of crisis as times of grace. The End, in fact, is near. Only a fool would predict the final outcome of the current crisis. Whatever it may be, the world as it has been has ended. Platitudes about the sun still coming up are meaningless. [The sun rose every day over Auschwitz — situated, by the way, in a lovely place]. Nevertheless, we understand hope to mean that whatever happens Divine Love is ultimately victorious.

This does not mean that the United States of America will continue as it has been — or even at all. Self-congratulatory faith in America as the “last best hope" is also fatuous. 3,000 years ago the psalmist advised  “put not your trust in princes.” For us, that means not to place our faith in the American experiment, however noble we may imagine it to be. But we can trust in the abundance of grace, costly grace.

Signs of this grace appear all around. Be vigilant for them. Remember the Buffalo herd that came to visit the protectors at Standing Rock. God is with the just. That doesn’t mean success in the short term. It doesn’t mean we will not lose everything. Whatever happens, let us remember that, as long as we are genuinely on the side of the poor, God is with us, because God dwells among them. Fifteen legions of angles fight with us.

Meanwhile, we must not simply wait to see what happens. We must grieve — for a time — but grief can turn into a form of depression. Let us remember Joe Hill’s last words before he was murdered by the State of Utah more than 100 years ago: DON’T MOURN — ORGANIZE! It is time to get busy. Go to meetings. Go to demonstrations. Give whatever you can to organized non-violence resistance. I would say that qualifies as almsgiving, because the end is the defense of the poor and helpless. Intensify all your practices of spiritual warfare, because our struggle is with "spiritual wickedness in high places." So, give alms, fast and pray. Fast twice a week and give the money you save to the poor or to those who defend them. Increase your time -commitment to prayer, standing (or sitting) with the mind and the heart before God. Invoke the Holy Name of Jesus with respirations. And then go out and join the organizing.

We may do all of this in a spirit of joy and gentleness, because we cannot lose. I don’t mean that we MUST not lose, but that we literally CANNOT  lose, because our Divine Savior has already won. Even If We Die, His Victory is our victory.

Yesterday, I promised a Somali friend that if they came to get him, they would have to take me too. As you may know, Trump came to Minneapolis specifically to threaten our Somali community. We had better not imagine that this will never happen. The unthinkable has already happened.

Our apocalyptic roots can serve us well in this evil hour. Whatever the cost, we may lift up our heads and rejoice because our redemption is drawing near.

Blessed are they who consider the poor and needy,

The Lord will deliver them in the time of trouble.

                                                               - Ps. 41

Top of Form

Response to a friend on supporting Hillary or Bernie

Ben Kreilkamp,

I would like to congratulate you on the grace and forebearance you have displayed in these conversations, even when your views have been characterized by what appears to me to be sheer projection on the part of the critics. I will try to avoid that as I express my own disagreement. I recognize that we want the same thing, and that our disagreement is strategic.

1) It is far from settled historical fact that the anti-war movement prolonged the Vietnam war. Let's remember that this was the first presidential election after LBJ bid goodbye to the South "for a generation" (it has turned out to be longer), upon passage of civil rights legislation. Except for Texas, the entire South voted for Nixon OR for George Wallace. CA was still firmly in R control. (TX and CA have since changed places, but I expect to see TX flip in my lifetime.) If you look at the popular vote totals, the Wallace vote more than makes up the difference between Nixon and Humphrey. Outside the South, that's white, blue-collar men (AND women) who would have ordinarily voted Dem and could not yet bring themselves to vote Rep. Here is the electoral map and statistics. Let's also remember that Humphrey was forbidden by LBJ to promise a policy change, on pain of Presidential denunciation, Meanwhile, Nixon promised a "secret plan" to end the war.

2) The impatient hippies in Grant Park got their heads and bones fractured by the normal political process of Daley's Chicago - the worst kind of lawless bossism that characterized the politics of our largest cities at the time. Credentialed press and McCarthy delegates got similar treatment in the Convention hall itself. The silly, impatient youth were tired of getting drafted to die in Vietnam. The candidate most likely to change that had been murdered a couple of months before. And a month before that MLK, who was by then the other powerful voice against the war. There was no reason to expect the Center to change that any time soon. As John Kerry was later to ask Congress "how do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?" I find it hard to dismiss Impatience regarding that request as mere naïveté.

3) The counsel of patience - "wait" - may not be so realistic. Consider that great document of American History, "Letter from Birmingham Jail." King had to answer colleagues and even supporters for precisely the kind of impatience that you appear to find foolish and counterproductive. If our history shows us anything, it is that significant change does not come as a result of waiting.

4) You observe that peaceniks do not win presidential elections. As I wipe the dew from my impatient eyes, I cannot help but notice that the same is true of women and African Americans - until they do. To say that something won't happen because it hasn't happened yet strikes me as dogmatic conservativism, not realism. The only kind of dogma I like is theological. (My faith, by the way, teaches me to "put not [my] trust in princes." Francis Bacon, as a skeptical empiricist, may have found hope an unsatisfying supper; the hope that I try to practice refers to ultimate, cosmic matters and not to the political fortunes of dying empires.)

5) I take your point about the Herculean labor of weaning us from the military-industrial complex. I concede that you may be right about this. The question is whether I should trust a Prince not just BECAUSE of what she says, but IN SPITE of what she says. I continue in amazement that someone with your awful experience wants my enthusiastic support for an admirer of Henry Kissinger. If anyone prolonged the war, it was he. I will support her as a matter of necessity, but without any trace of enthusiasm. That is asking too much. I will, however, hope (in the "unsatisfying-supper" and not the theological sense) that you are right about her intentions, secret though they be. I will grasp at any straw available. Might as well. But without enthusiasm or joy.

6) Finally, about reality and political possibility, I find it interesting to notice the constant expression of surprise from sophisticated and knowledgeable realists, typified by "The New York Times" and the "Washington Post," about the Sanders campaign. ["Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"] The universe of "mainstream," "insider," or "establishment" political imagination was not prepared for this new reality. When has it ever been? Sanders has forced the expansion of this imagination. So observes Steve Phillips (Brown is the New White), whom you have quoted with approval. I think that you are right about the future significance of this campaign, which I regard as prophetic rather than quixotic.

Forgiveness and Deliverance from Evil

The tradition speaks of sin as a “contagion”. We are so used to thinking of sin as individual transgression, that we miss the point. As individual transgressors, we ARE all forgiven. That is what for-giveness means. Any debt we think we have incurred by our immoral actions has been forgiven before we were born. The Sin that is “contagious” is a condition – like a disease – that infects us all.

          This is why Sin seems – in some mysterious sense – to be external to ourselves (“The good that I would I do not, the evil that I would not, that I do”). Tradition calls it The Evil One. It is the “Evil’, from which our Lord taught is to pray for deliverance: not a person, like us, but a mysterious fact about us, which Augustine called the mysterium iniquitatis. It is what causes people to do things they never thought they would or even could do. It takes over completely in the chaos of war, when perfectly decent men and women do indescribable things. It is manifest in blood-lust, rape, and torture. But it is present, in principle, whenever one group defines another as alien, whenever one person judges another, whenever an unkind word is spoken, whenever a thought less than charitable is entertained. The difference between these “little sins” and the Nazi annihilation camps is only a difference of degree.

In the face of this horror we have some choice: we can excuse ourselves. “It wasn’t me; I wasn’t in my right mind”. In other words, “the devil made me do it”. And, in a sense, we are right. “The devil” is the condition  in which we all participate, whether we want to or not.   Or we can also seek to justify ourselves, which is worse: “they had it coming”. [This kind of thinking still dominates the American narrative concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]

But there is another choice. Not every soldier becomes a rapist. Not every injured person seeks revenge. We do not have to return evil for evil. In fact Christians are commanded not to do so, and, rather, to love our enemies. As human beings, our life is communal. If we damage another, we damage ourselves; if we condemn another, we condemn ourselves; if we bless and forgive another, we bless and forgive ourselves. Not to do so is to acquiesce in slavery to the mysterium iniquitatis.

          Our Divine Savior has broken the hold of evil on us. When He forgave his executioners, He destroyed the power of the mystery of evil. He also added that the soldiers “(knew) not what they (did)”. They did it, but “the devil made them do it”.  They had been forgiven from before the foundation of the world. The Lord’s prayer for the soldiers was for our edification. Forgiveness of real injury may seem superhuman, but that’s just an excuse – especially for those who look to the Cross for salvation. The Godman’s victory over the Evil One enables us to forgive as He forgave.

          And forgive we must if we are to be delivered from the Evil One – because forgiveness – our forgiveness of our enemies – IS deliverance from evil. That is why the petition for deliverance follows the petition for forgiveness. One leads to the other. In the act of forgiving those who sin against us, we are delivered from the power of evil.* And right after we say the Lord’s Prayer we receive the Blood “which was shed for you and for all, that sins may be forgiven”. By taking Christ’s Death into ourselves in Holy Communion, we receive not God’s forgiveness of our own sins, but the power to forgive those who sin against us. And that divine power destroys the power of evil.

*[NOTE: Hebrew poetry, as in the psalms, relied on repetition and paraphrase. To say “thy will be done” is to say “thy Kingdom come” in another way. Perhaps also, to say “deliver us from evil” is to repeat the petition about forgiveness.]