Category: Christianity generally

The Poetry of God

I don’t want to slime you on Sunday, but my lead item was a about a megachurch pastor, so it really was kinda slimy. Tune in tomorrow.

Let’s do something lovely instead. Like me getting out of the way (mostly) and letting Father Stephen Freeman talk about The Poetry of God.

My taste for poetry has grown year by year since I’ve become Orthodox and begun to learn that there’s just so much about God and about life that cannot so little about God that can be said discursively.

“When we include the fact that the bulk of Orthodox theology is to be found in the hymns of the Church, we have to admit that the heart of the poet and the heart of the theologian are much the same thing.” (Fr. Stephen) It hit me especially hard ten days ago when we celebrated the Entrance of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple (link will download a Word file with text marked for chanting). This is not prosaic hymnody.

For you Western Christians, have a blessed Advent and let me commend W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio for your Advent reading pleasure. It’s part of mine every year. I note that there’s even a YouTube video, though I’ve not watched it. Here’s a few other opinions about it, too: First, Second, Third, Fourth.

UPDATE: Reading this after publishing it, I realized how odd it would have sounded to me twenty years ago that “Orthodoxy” – an equivocal term I associated mostly with doctrinal exactness, not with the Church that received me four years later – does a lot of its theology in hymnody that’s not literal. But it now seems to me that poetic theology is right meet if only because it keeps God out of the “box” of prose, where we can (we delusionally think) examine him and study him in safety.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

More, obliquely, on The Common Core

I was assembling over several days some clippings for another set of Tasty Tidbits when I saw a common theme emerging from two of them. Truth has many facets.

1

Brave New World is a work of genius, a phrase almost in common coinage, and probably the only work for which Aldous Huxley will be remembered. He died the same day JFK was assassinated, a rather depressing anticipation of Timothy Leary, dropping acid on his death bed, his last 31 years never having come close to his magnificent 1932.

John Naughton thinks Huxley was a greater visionary than C.S. Lewis or George Orwell. As an admirer of Harrison Bergeron, I’d have to agree.

Revolutions have overthrown the grimmest real-world versions of 1984 and Animal Farm, and I don’t think that Lewis was aspiring to “visionary” so much as “reteller of sacramental myth” in his great That Hideous Strength (and it’s two prequels, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra).

For the sickness of Brave New World and Harrison Bergeron, there may be no cure.

Here endeth my book endorsements disguised as literary criticism.

2

[I]f you follow the fevered lamentations over the Common Core, look hard at some of the complaints from parents and teachers, and factor in the modern cult of self-esteem, you can guess what set Duncan off: a concern, wholly justified, that tougher instruction not be rejected simply because it makes children feel inadequate, and that the impulse to coddle kids not eclipse the imperative to challenge them.

The Common Core, a laudable set of guidelines that emphasize analytical thinking over rote memorization, has been adopted in more than 40 states. In instances its implementation has been flawed, and its accompanying emphasis on testing certainly warrants debate.

What’s not warranted is the welling hysteria: from right-wing alarmists, who hallucinate a federal takeover of education and the indoctrination of a next generation of government-loving liberals; from left-wing paranoiacs, who imagine some conspiracy to ultimately privatize education and create a new frontier of profits for money-mad plutocrats.

(Frank Bruni in the New York Times, with metered paywall)

There’s a lot to like about Bruni’s column. But he hasn’t engaged the sober, nonpartisan, humanistic concerns that militate against The Common Core – concerns I alluded to the other day and above, which Aldous Huxley understood imaginatively, C.S. Lewis understood both analytically and imaginatively, and Ross Douthat recalls in his separate metered paywall column.

3

Douthat links a Huxley page with the excerpt from Brave New World where the Savage and the Controller spar:

There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant. And as for doing things–Ford forbid that he should get the idea into his head. It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own.”

“What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you’d have a reason for self-denial.”

“But industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.”

“You’d have a reason for chastity!” said the Savage, blushing a little as he spoke the words.

“But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You can’t have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.”

“But God’s the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God …”

“My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that’s what soma is.”

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Church unity

This started as a “share” with an Orthodox group on Facebook, but outgrew it.

Frederica Mathewes-Green’s podcast thoughts on ecumenical Church unity, though gentle and irenic, amplify my own skepticism on the topic. Her primary focus is the desired unity between Roman Catholicism (the 800 pound gorilla) and Orthodoxy (America’s best-kept religious secret) — or at least the mutual recognition that disunity is a scandal.

So far, so good: disunity is a scandal; real unity would remove that scandal.

But the proposed terms of unity coming from Rome provoke not so much hostility – “Take this Olive branch and shove it!” – as indifference because Rome seems to desire a “unity” that’s strained, synthetic, and in many ways superficial compared to the unity of Orthodoxy.

Frederica nailed that one when she noted that we’re much more comfortable with the Oriental Orthodox than we are with Rome, which went into schism much more recently. The Oriental Orthodox could not agree with the Council of Chalcedon’s verbal formulation of how the two natures of Christ are united.

The Council of Chalcedon issued the ‘Chalcedonian Definition,’ which repudiated the notion of a single nature in Christ, and declared that he has two natures in one person and hypostasis; it also insisted on the completeness of his two natures: Godhead and manhood.
…
The Oriental Orthodox teach ‘one nature’ in Christ, “Jesus Christ, who is identical with the Son, is one person and one hypostasis in one nature: divine.”

(Wikipedia) But the Oriental Orthodox seem nonetheless to have “kept the same faith,” and I understand they feel the same toward us. It’s fair to say we long for a solution to the Chalcedonian conundrum.

Not so Rome. Their schism was more recent, but their drift after schism much greater. The Roman Catholic reflex seems to be that,

well, of course, being in communion with the Bishop of Rome is essential, and of course it must be on essentially Roman terms. After all, everyone knows you other guys are at fault. But we’re magnanimous, and we’ll let you keep your signature theological perspectives. That’s what “catholic” means: big tent.

That just leaves us cold. On the one hand, we don’t think we, the heirs of four of five pentarchs who remained in communion, are the schismatics. We think the fifth pentarch went into schism when, after we ignored his pretensions and affectation, he started getting too pushy to ignore.

Of course unity will bring us all into communion with one another, but it’s unlikely to happen on terms that signal even tacitly Orthodoxy’s admission of error on the filioque, universal direct jurisdiction of the Pope, infallibility and the other illicit dogmas of the West.

This is not for lack of considerable affection, at least on my own part. Rome has had a great run of Popes lately. John Paul II will be in my thoughts again today, as he was “dying on NPR” as we returned eastward across I74 from a visit to some friends Mrs. Tipsy and I are visiting again.

But even when John Paul II tried to reach out, he proved tone-deaf to a very fundamental matter, our different views of what salvation is:

The teaching of the Cappadocian Fathers on divinization passed into the tradition of all the Eastern Churches and is part of their common heritage. This can be summarized in the thought already expressed by Saint Irenaeus at the end of the second century: God passed into man so that man might pass over to God. This theology of divinization remains one of the achievements particularly dear to Eastern Christian thought.

(Orientale Lumen, italics added) That is a bad misquote, a demotion of the doctrine’s importance in the East, and as tone-deaf as a Protestant, courting Catholics or Orthodox, saying:

The teaching of the Early Fathers on communion passed into the tradition of all the “traditional” Churches as part of their common heritage. This can be summarized in the words of Jesus in the 6th chapter of the Gospel of John: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat bread symbolizing the flesh of the Son of man, and drink wine symbolizing his blood, ye have lowered your odds of having life in you.” This theology of transubstantiation remains one of the achievements particularly dear to “traditional” Christian thought.

The dogmatic differences are deep and perhaps intractable. But suppose we achieve agreement in principle. Having cleared away those stone cold deal killers, how would the rest of the deal look? It would be an awfully big tent that would accommodate the remaining, non-dogmatic differences.

But the Roman Catholic Church already looks to me (and I think to many other Orthodox) like multiple Christian traditions synthetically united though communion with the Pope.

Maybe I misunderstand “catholicity.” I mean that. I lived nearly 50 years where we didn’t give a hoot about that idea, and even now my view is colored by the seemingly intractable dogmatic differences. It’s hard to see clearly. Perhaps with the dogmatic differences out of the way, I could see a path to one big happy family.

But I’m not holding my breath.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.