Sunday, 7/6/25

Quest for certainty

The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

If I were inclined to doubt this analysis, I’d only need to think of the ubiquitous Evangelical insistence that real Christians have assurance of salvation and “eternal security,” whereas I have fear and trembling as I work out my salvation.

Orestes Brownson on “Bible alone”

Orestes Brownson, who was on the verge of leaving behind a checkered career as Protestant, freethinker, and transcendentalist for the Roman Catholic Church, issued a challenge to American Bible-believers in his new role as a Catholic apologist: “We are … never in a condition to rely on the Bible alone. We never go to it wholly devoid of preliminary instructions, and therefore of prepossessions.” Given this circumstance, as Brownson saw the matter, “for the most part, when we do come to study the Bible, we find little else in it than the faith, we have brought to it, so that we may be said to put our faith into the Bible, not to obtain our faith from it.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Brash Jimmy Swaggart

Swaggart’s empire, with receipts of over $150 million annually, fell suddenly in 1989 when he was found with a prostitute in a Baton Rouge motel, caught by a rival preacher whose adultery Swaggart had challenged. Swaggart’s denomination, the Assemblies of God, put him on a on disciplinary probation, which he initially accepted, admitting to decades of sexual struggles, but later rejected when it was prolonged. Instead, he effusively and tearfully on television admitted he had sinned, and then he resumed his ministry. But his church emptied, the dollars shrank, the television contracts ended. He was again discovered with a prostitute in 1991, after which he offered no public apologies. He was still doing the Lord’s work. Swaggart embodied the growing rejection of denominations by increasingly individualistic American Christians. Before the internet, there was television ministry, which made denominations, and even physical church, seem inconsequential to many.

Mark Tooley, Jimmy Swaggart & Brash USA Christianity (bold added)

Unlike some of my acquaintances, I was never a Swaggart devoteé. I was aware of him; he bought (or was given) air time on a Christian Radio station I listened to during a part-time desk job, but he wasn’t why I tuned in — more a bug than a feature (J. Vernon McGee was the feature).

My priors about southern charismatics left me unsurprised at his Fall, though his emotionalism was very skillful and even convincing at times, unlike, say, Jim and Tammy Fay.

God is, as always, merciful and loves humankind. Requiescat in pace, y’all.

Another take on Swaggart

Rod Dreher encountered Jimmy Swaggart after Swaggart’s first unmasking as a user of prostitutes:

I was there, at the Family Worship Center, for this electrifying sermon. I was a student at LSU, and a writer for the campus newspaper. Swaggart had been under fire, and word got out that he was going to make a big announcement on Sunday morning. I went to hear it. I was not a Christian then, in any real sense, though I was making my way towards the faith. I certainly had nothing but contempt for the man back then.

But a strange thing happened to me as I heard his sermon. I was sitting up in the rafters, and expected to feel a sense of Schadenfreude over the fire-and-brimstone televangelist’s downfall. In the moment, though, I looked around me, and saw a crowd of broken people. They were crying, or at least sitting there in shock and disbelief. I noticed that these were not well-dressed people, but men and women wearing the clothes of working-class and lower middle class folks. The kind of people that I came from. And they were in pain.

I didn’t stick around. I remember walking out to my car, feeling awful. I had no sympathy at all for Swaggart, but I felt bad for all those who had believed in him, and been conned. This surprised me. It’s one thing to see a man one regarded as a religious charlatan brought low, but to see the pain of simple people in the face of their spiritual leader’s unmasking? Well, it made my liberal triumphalism seem like a shameful, immature thing. I didn’t know what to do with that.

I’m not convinced that Swaggart was a charlatan insofar as that implies conscious deception at a pretty deep level. I’ve got too many incidents of my own I’d be mortified to have brought under bright lights. You probably do, too. But I don’t think that made me a charlatan. It just proved that I was spiritually immature and formed in part by what my particular Christian upbringing legalistically forbade – and what it thereby tacitly allowed. Imagine growing up with Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley as cousins.

I’ll stop there lest I lapse into a confessional essay that would do nobody any good.

The oneness of God

One might say that while for the Greeks there is one God because there is one Father, for the Latins there is one God because there is one Essence, one divine and entirely simple Being.

It can now be seen how, as the presuppositions of the respective views of the Latins and Greeks differed, so did their ways of envisaging the ‘structure’ of the Trinity; and how, further, given the ‘absoluteness’ of these presuppositions, the rival representations of the Trinity which derived from them must also appear absolute. If the Greeks assumed as axiomatic, first, their understanding of the Essence; second, their understanding of the distinction between the Essence and the powers and energies of the Divinity, and hence between the Essence and hypostatic powers of each Person of the Trinity; and, third, their idea that the cause and principle of being in the Trinity is the hypostasis of the Father, it was impossible for them to admit that the Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son, for this would have implied a violation of their axioms. In the same way, if the Latins took as axiomatic the idea that Essence and Being and power form a single and entirely simple divine nature, it was impossible for them not to conclude that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Philip Sherrar, The Greek East and the Latin West, p. 70

American efficiency

What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in 250 years of persecution (destroy Japanese Christianity) American Christians did in 9 seconds.

Gary G. Kohls, MD, Unwelcome Truths for Church and State Concerning the Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945

Discerning Christ in the Old Testament

What was the mind that could see Christ in the Passover Lamb? Indeed, what was the mind that could see Christ’s death and resurrection as a fulfillment of Passover itself? Beneath the letter of the Old Testament, beneath the surface of its poetry, its historical stories, its prophetic works, the primitive Church discerned Christ Himself and the shape of the story which we now know as the gospel.

The shape of the gospel story is not derived from the Old Testament. It is discerned within the Old Testament, after the resurrection of Christ and His subsequent teaching …

For example, that “Christ died for our sins,” is not obvious. It can be discerned in the Old Testament if one comes to understand, for example, that the “Servant Songs” in Isaiah are actually referencing Christ. … When that tradition is accepted and “received” (more about this in a moment), then passages like the Servant Songs begin to open up and yield their deeper meaning.

When a gospel writer shares a story about Christ and adds, “This was done that the saying in Isaiah might be fulfilled…,” we are reading the tradition in its operation. But the passages in Isaiah do not themselves give a clue for their interpretation. …

The giving of this tradition is described in Luke 24:44-48:

Then He said to them, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” And He opened their understanding [nous], that they might comprehend the Scriptures. Then He said to them, “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, “and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. “And you are witnesses of these things. (Luke 24:44-48)

It is important to see that this new insight into the Scriptures is described as a noetic event. It is not described as technique or style of interpretation that is taught and learned. It is specifically referred to as a change of the nous. In the same manner, the continued understanding of the gospel is, properly, a noetic exercise.

That noetic perception is the common thread of the liturgical texts and hymns of the Orthodox faith. The liturgical life of the Church has a two-fold purpose: the worship of God and the spiritual formation of the people of God. As cited earlier, there must be a movement from “flesh and blood” to “spirit and life.” It is this spiritual transfiguration that is operative in the life of the Church.

This is the same reason that I have written against popular notions of morality. The Christian life does not consist of flesh and blood struggling to behave better. Rather, it is the transformation of flesh and blood into spirit and life. Only a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17) sees and understands and lives the new life of the resurrected Christ.

This spiritual ability to see beneath the letter and perceive the truth continues in the life of the Church, unabated. It is particularly evident in the dogmatic formulations of subsequent centuries. Only a nous, properly illumined, could learn to profess the Trinity in the fullness of its mystery. The same is true of Christ’s God/Manhood and the nature of our salvation through the Divine Union.

Fr. Stephen Freeman.

In the Orthodox Church, the story of Christ’s resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus is a frequent reading. The thing that rivets me is that Christ had to walk through the Old Testament with his disciples, teaching them about the “things concerning Himself.” They weren’t all obvious, but they were precious. And oddly enough, they never were systematically enscripturated. But the Church knows them deep in its bones now.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Winter’s reprise, 2024

We got 5 inches of snow yesterday and it’s icy roads today. Next week, we’re expected to get into the upper 50s.

Culture

Why we read

We read to know we’re not alone.

C.S. Lewis via Douglas Murray

Murry continues:

When people wonder or worry about AI, and how it might one day eclipse the human brain, I think of poetry, the arts. The computer brain may be able to store an infinite amount of information, but it cannot have the sense of memory that we humans can. It will not refine its translations of Byron in the Gulag or write poems on a scaffold. It will not be able to leave a few lines that say: “I was here, too.”

So long as we do these things, and remember these things, the beating human heart will never be burned up utterly.

The inevitability of choice

I think I’ve mentioned dropping Rod Dreher’s Substack, though I’ve been a fan of his since Crunchy Cons. I probably used phrases like logorrhea and low signal-to-noise ratio. The first would come as no surprise to Dreher; the latter may just mean that I’ve read much of his signal multiple times over 18 years and it’s not worth the effort to filter out the noise to read it once more.

But I’ll say this for him: he’s still capable of good writing that’s not overly-larded with catastrophism, as witness this column in the European Conservative, by the reading of which I feel less alone (see preceding item):

[A]ll traditionalism in our wretched age is a bit fake. How could it not be? The fundamental experience of modernity is the shattering of all authoritative traditions and narratives. We can’t escape that. As Charles Taylor, pre-eminently among many others, has observed, even when we affirm tradition today, we do so with the knowledge that we could do otherwise.

I saw this play out in my own family, when as a young man I told my father that I was going to convert to Catholicism. He was dumbstruck by the thought. “But the Drehers have always been Methodist!” he protested. In fact, the first Drehers to move to North America were Lutherans, and not too many generations before that, were Catholics. And for that matter, my dad rarely went to church, which sent a signal to me about how lightly he took his Methodism.

Decades later, having left Catholicism for Orthodoxy in part because I was seeking even deeper roots in tradition, I had to face the fact that my father had a more traditional mindset, and I was, paradoxically, the modernist. That is, my father may not have had much belief in Methodist Christianity, but he accepted that Methodism was part of our collective identity. The Drehers rarely go to church, and the church they rarely go to is the Methodist church, because that’s how it has always been.

What my late father, who was born in 1934, failed to understand is that his children were born into a world that takes almost nothing for granted. His son, in his mid-twenties, was becoming Catholic because he had become more serious about the Christian faith, and had come to believe that the pursuit of truth led him in this direction. Yet when I took up the practice of the Catholic faith, for a long time I felt like an impostor, performing rituals that did not come naturally to me, though they would in time.

It was even more radical when I lost my Catholic faith, and was rescued by Orthodoxy, a form of Christianity that is alien to the West. A well-known Orthodox theologian once, in my presence, called us converts fake—as if Orthodoxy was something that you had to be born into. This is an absurd position for a theologian of a universalist religion that spreads by evangelism to take.

… it’s the LARPers, the eccentrics, and all others willing to be criticized as ‘fake’ are the very people whose devotion to tradition, however skewed and silly, will carry us through the darkness and confusion of the present moment.

(Emphasis added)

An earlier draft included my interjection after the first paragraph, but on second thought, Dreher makes my point better in his remaining paragraphs. The European Conservative brings out the better in him.

Can’t or Won’t?

We live in comforts that the richest of aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child or two, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Scamify

I’ve griped a lot about the fake artists problem at Spotify. It’s like a stone in my shoe, and just gets worse and worse.

I’m especially alarmed by those strange playlists—filled with mysterious artists who may not really exist, or almost identical tracks circulating under dozens of different names.

Here’s a new example—a 20 hour playlist called “Jazz for Reading.”

I’m supposed to be a jazz expert. So why haven’t I heard of these artists? And why is it so hard to find photos of these musicians online?

I’m supposed to be a jazz expert. So why haven’t I heard of these artists? And why is it so hard to find photos of these musicians online?

I listened to twenty different tracks. There’s some superficial variety in the music, but each track I heard had the same piano tone and touch. Even the reverb sounds the same.

…

When Spotify first listed its shares on the stock exchange, I expressed skepticism about its business model—declaring that “streaming economics are broken.”

I did the math. The numbers told me that you simply can’t offer unlimited music for $9.99 per month. Somebody would get squeezed—probably the musicians (for a start).

And now?

I note that Spotify has sharply increased its subscription price and recently laid off 1,500 employees.

But the company released quarterly earnings this week—and it is still losing money!

Meanwhile the CEO continues to sell his shares—another $57.5 million in the last few days.

Let me put this into perspective: Spotify was founded in 2006, and has now been operating for almost 18 years. It has 236 million subscribers in 184 countries. But the business still isn’t profitable.

Ted Gioia

Maybe one path to profitability is to pass off royalty-free AI Muzak as easy-listening jazz. It used to be a mild insult to call any work of art “derivative,” but with AI, it’s turtles all the way down.

Civilization

To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.

Joseph Schumpeter, third- or fourth-hand

From the same Damon Linker post that quotes Schumpeter:

Niebuhr rightly remarked that Americans nearly always mean well when they act in the world. Our moral perils are thus “not those of conscious malice or the explicit lust for power.” Yet the rules of the world are such that good intentions—even our own—often lead to unintended bad consequences. This is a lesson we seem incapable of learning, or remembering, so eager are we to deny that the actions of even “the best men and nations” are “curious compounds of good and evil.”

…

The danger of crafting policy and acting in the world on the basis of an overly exalted view of our ourselves isn’t just that we’ll make foolish decisions that lead to immense suffering and harmful setbacks to our broader strategic aims. It’s also that in raising and dashing lofty expectations, we run the risk of inadvertently inspiring the cynicism to which Niebuhr also thought we were prone, as the inverse of our over-confident moralism.

This happened on the left during the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam debacle, with George McGovern’s call for America to “come home” after its ruinous misadventure in southeast Asia. And it’s happening in our own time on the right, after George W. Bush displayed hubris in deciding to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein and then adopted an unmodulated form of theologically infused American exceptionalism to justify the policy once its original rationale (ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction it didn’t possess) crumbled to dust. (If you’ve forgotten its details, I urge you to read Bush’s 2005 Inaugural Address, with its 50-odd invocations of “freedom” or “liberty,” and jaw-dropping declaration that the ultimate goal of American foreign policy is nothing less than “ending tyranny in our world.”)

The instant before that “jaw-dropping declaration” was my last as a Republican, as I’ve written about before.

World Affairs

Made in America

Only naive arrogance can lead Westerners to assume that non-Westerners will become “Westernized” by acquiring Western goods. What, indeed, does it tell the world about the West when Westerners identify their civilization with fizzy liquids, faded pants, and fatty foods?

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Rulers

It pains me to channel this, but Dreher’s right, at least up to the break:

Whatever you think of Vladimir Putin, who is ten years younger than Biden, he is vigorous, sharp, and combative. He gave his American interlocutor a coherent lesson on the past thousand years of Russian history, and hesitated only to tell the Yank to hush, and let him finish. Meanwhile, in Washington yesterday, Joe Biden confused President Sisi of Egypt with the leader of Mexico.

Toggling back and forth online from the Carlson interview to the Biden press conference, staged to address the humiliating Special Counsel’s report, was like moving out on a frail, narrow footbridge over a chasm. It is truly terrifying to consider that the feeble, senile old man desperately trying to rebut charges of dementia is what the U.S. sends to “battle” against a man like Putin.

Even worse, nobody doubts that Putin, for better or for worse, governs Russia. Who is governing America from the White House? Because it is not Joe Biden, that’s for sure.

…

It is hard for many Europeans to understand, but Americans scarcely know what happened in our country more than five minutes ago. And we only seem to care about it insofar as we can cite history as a reason to justify whatever it is that we want to do now. This is why Americans are living through the catastrophic, indeed totalitarian, leftist stripping of significant historical figures from public life—taking down their monuments, expelling a considered, nuanced treatment of them from history books—without protest. Too few Americans understand why this matters, and why they should care.

Isn’t Vladimir Putin doing the same thing—putting history to use to justify his attack on Ukraine? Yes, but there’s a difference. Russia really does have this incredibly long, dense, and difficult history with the territory we now call Ukraine. One does not have to accept Putin’s conclusion at the end of the story—‘therefore, Russia had to invade’—or accept his version of historical events to grasp that history matters to him in ways that many Americans will fail to appreciate.

National Affairs

Now and then

Is the New York Times suffering cognitive decline?

Memory Loss Requires Careful Diagnosis, Scientists Say – The New York Times February 9, 2024
Trump Is Mentally Unfit, No Exam Needed – The New York Times October 11, 2019

A tip of the tendentious hat to Nellie Bowles.

What’s wrong with the GOP?

As I frequently remind readers, I’m a former conservative who hasn’t voted for the GOP since 2002. Why?

Because I think the Republican Party and its right-wing media allies intentionally spew demagogic toxins into the civic atmosphere of the nation for the sake of political gain.
Because that isn’t going to change. (Like a three-pack-a-day smoker waiving away the possibility of lung cancer even after symptoms of serious illness have appeared, Republican voters have become addicted to the poison and demand more of it with each new election.)
And most of all, because, like a highly skilled conman/drug pusher, Donald Trump deepens the deadly addiction every day, along with posing a potentially fatal threat to the country’s democratic institutions.

Damon Linker

Another reason to despise the GOP

Republicans vs. property rights: Democrats in Minnesota, including Ilhan Omar, are supporting a new bill that would ban something called parking minimums. Parking minimums require property owners and developers to include a certain number of parking spots per apartment or business, and it was useful in the 1950s construction boom but it’s now one of the ways the government forces everyone into sprawling, low-density communities that rely on cars. Left to the free market, people often freely choose to live close together. They like it. I like it! Ever wonder why Paris and London are so charming? Anyway, I’m for freedom and so I err on the side of people being able to do more of what they want with their land, especially when parking lots are genuinely ugly. So oddly enough, when it comes to parking minimums, I’m with Ilhan Omar. The Republican opposition to the bill—again, which would limit the power of government and give property owners more rights to do what they want—goes something like this:

Right. That’s exactly how communism works.

Nellie Bowles

Apart from the knee-jerk response of “freedom,” which ought to resonate with a Republican (at least as I remember the party), removing that impediments to higher-density living arrangements is the right policy because it promotes more sustainable living.

Another good one steps away from DC

Another respected Republican, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, also revealed she will retire at the year’s end, despite being the chair of the influential House Energy and Commerce Committee. The 54-year-old lawmaker from Washington state has served in Congress since 2005. McMorris Rodgers and Gallagher join a growing exodus of members of both parties who are leaving Congress frustrated that political infighting has made legislating harder than usual.

Dispatch Politics

Rep. Rodgers is one of a few candidates I supported financially (1) because she was endorsed by the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List and (2) then-35 year-old Rodgers looked electable. I am grateful that she has never engaged in the kind of jackassery that would make me regret my support.

Too many other SBA List endorsees who got elected have turned into embarrassments. One of them was foregrounded at new Speaker Mike Johnson’s coming out party snarling “SHUT UP!” at a reporter for asking an obvious and appropriate question.

I don’t look at SBA List endorsements any more.

Separating the man from the movement

Trigger Warning: If you don’t want to see anything about DJT here, stop. I’m quoting this because the mention of him is incidental to a more important point about how to heal our politics:

I think I detest Donald Trump as much as the next guy, but Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach; the need to preserve social cohesion amid mass migration; the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.

The struggle against Trump the man is a good-versus-bad struggle between democracy and narcissistic authoritarianism, but the struggle between liberalism and Trumpian populism is a wrestling match over how to balance legitimate concerns.

David Brooks, The Cure for What Ails Our Democracy – The New York Times (italics added). This column is so good (edifying good, not trolling good) that I’m using one of my ten monthly New York Times shareable links for it.

Yes, I suppose this is another insouciant assumption that there can be Trumpism without Trump. But we ignore populism’s legitimate values, we’ll see other demagogues arise to exploit them when Trump’s gone.

Resolute yet humble

Isaiah Berlin, concluded one of his most famous essays by quoting an observation by political economist Joseph Schumpeter: “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” This is also what distinguished postwar liberals such as Berlin and literary critic Lionel Trilling (the subject of this series’ second post) from just about everyone writing and thinking about politics today.

Damon Linker

ICMY, I think he called “just about everyone writing and thinking about politics today” barbarian, and I won’t disagree if one allows for a bit of hyperbole in “just about everyone.”

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?