Month: April 2021

On Looking Up Words

Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence is a man after my own mold:

When I encounter a new word, lengthy or not, I like to know what it means and where it comes from. I won’t necessarily use it, in writing or speech, but I’ve grown accustomed to plugging holes in my knowledge of the world. Plain speaking is essential but so, on the right occasions, are eloquence and verbal lushness. Part of linguistic effectiveness is sensitivity to context and audience. When it’s not mere showing off, deployment of obscure words adds a pleasurable texture to poetry and prose – one of many reasons we read Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne. A gifted writer commands styles and is not limited to one. In addition, what’s obscure or pretentious to you may be familiar and homely to me.

My sentiments exactly.

The blogosphere is vast, and she is deep. If the ordinary modes of human interaction have left you high and dry  in your quest for the like-minded, a little fishing in her vasty deeps should satisfy your needs.

The Joe Gould Story

Jack Kerouac, ON THE ROAD:

[…]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Substack latest: Even Misfits Find Their 'Fit'

The Philosopher Prays for Light, not Loot

We are grateful for this quotidian bread, Lord, but it is not for it that we pray. Grant us the panem supersubstantialis, the bread supersubstantial, that nourishes the mind and heart. It is for this bread that we must beg, unable as we are to secure it by our own powers. The daily bread that nourishes the flesh we can gain for ourselves.

……………..

For the theology behind the prayer, see "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread."

Why Do I Write about Political Topics?

People are increasingly 'siloed into' their positions. I don't write to change the minds of our political enemies. Why do I write, then?

First, to arrive at the truth as best I can for my own edification and enjoyment. People like me like to figure things out and understand things. On our good days we theoreticians approach the blissful self-sufficiency of Aristotle's NOESIS NOESEOS.

Second, to provide argumentative ammo to those on our side. The choir DOES need to be preached to, so as to be fortified, and provided with tools for ideological combat.

Third, to persuade fence-sitters, people with open minds who can be nudged one way or the other.

Fourth, to let our enemies know that they will be opposed, and their lies exposed. Enough of us protesting loudly, but with wit, style and solid arguments, can have an intimidating effect on our enemies.  Winning in a war requires intimidation. To intimidate is to induce a weakening fear in the enemy.

Fifth, because I'm a natural-born scribbler who takes great pleasure from writing and re-reading what he has written. The hunt for the incisive formulation that penetrates to the heart of the matter is a source of pleasure.

Back on the Rant

During Lent I was, in a manner of speaking, hors de combat, but of my own free will. But now the happy warrior is back in the Facebook trenches doing battle with our political enemies. No leftists need apply.  Fruitful discussion is possible only on the common ground of shared attitudes, values, presuppositions, and principles. That common ground no longer exists inasmuch as the Democrat Party is now an outlet of hard leftism to such an extent that our political opponents are now political enemies.

I am afraid Carl Schmitt is right: in the political sphere the defining opposition is that of Freund und Feind, friend and enemy.

Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body

For Cyrus

Ratzinger"I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." Thus ends the Apostles' Creed. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) addresses the meaning of this article of faith on pp. 347-359 of his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius Press, 2004). The book first appeared in German in 1968 long before Ratzinger became Pope.  Herewith, some interpretive notes and commentary.

1) Despite the undeniable Platonic elements in Christianity, to which Ratzinger is sensitive, the Biblical promise of immortality pertains to the whole man, not to a separated soul. Some, Lutherans in particular, recoiling from Platonic soul-body dualism, have gone so far as to maintain that the Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul is positively un-Christian. (347) This is going too far. It is clear, though, that on Christianity a man is not in his innermost essence a pure spirit like an angel; he is, by nature, a corporeal, embodied  being whose ultimate good is to live forever in an embodied, not an angelic, state.  'By nature' implies that we are not accidentally embodied, as on Platonism, but essentially embodied.

2) On the other hand, the idea of immortal (living) bodies, immortal animals, seems utterly absurd given what we know about the natural world, as Ratzinger admits (348).  Schopenhauer mocks this notion as immortality mit Haut und Haar, with skin and hair.  By contrast, the notion of human immortality as the immortality of a simple (metaphysically incomposite) soul substance is not absurd but defensible, even if not Christian. 

So we face a problem. Platonic dualism cannot do justice to our  unitary corporeal nature. It involves an ontological denigration of the body and of materiality in general.  The material world, however, created by God, is good, and not to be flown from in Platonic-Plotinian-gnostic fashion.  The body is not the prison-house of the soul, but something rather more positive: its necessary expression or realization.  But how on earth could the living bodies of humans live forever?

3) One solution that suggests itself  — call it the additive solution — is to add the Biblical notion of bodily resurrection to the Platonic notion of soulic immortality. When you die, soul and body separate: the soul continues to exist while the body returns to dust. ("Remember man, thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return . . .")  At the end of the world, the dead are raised and soul is reunited with its body, the same one it had on Earth, although presumably spiritualized and transformed or transfigured.  Although Ratzinger does not cite Aquinas in the stretch of text I am commenting on, the Angelic Doctor's view is additive.

On this view, (i) resurrection is resurrection of the (human) body, not of the whole man, and (ii) this resurrected body will be numerically identical to the body that lived and died on Earth. In other words, the pre-mortem and post-mortem bodies of a resurrected person are one and the same.  After the resurrection you will have the very same body that you have now. This is compatible with the resurrected body being property-wise different from the earthly body.   I take this same-body view to be the traditional view. We find it, for example, in Aquinas:

For we cannot call it resurrection unless the soul return to the same body, since resurrection is a second rising, and the same thing rises that falls; therefore resurrection regards the body which after death falls, rather than the soul which after death lives. And consequently if it is not the same body which the soul resumes, it will not be a resurrection, but rather the assuming of a new body. (1952, 952, quoted from here)

For the sake of concretion, let's assume the Aristotelian hylomorphic dualism of Aquinas according to which a human being is a composite of soul and body where the soul is the form of the body. For Aquinas, the soul continues to exist after the body ceases to exist, and resurrection is the uniting of that soul with its body, not some body or other, but its body, the same one it had on Earth, although perfected, subtilized, spiritualized, and rendered free of defects.

4) The Thomistic synthesis of the Greek and the Biblical is an uneasy one, fraught with difficulties. I'll mention just one.  On the Platonic view, salvation is salvation of the soul from the body; it is not the salvation of the whole, undivided, man.  The soul is a naturally immortal spiritual substance** that comes into its own only when freed from the evil predicament of embodiment.   Death, as separation of soul from body, is release and therefore something good.  The Biblical conception is very different: death is not good, but bad: the fitting punishment for Adam's sin. Death is not a welcome release from the material world, but the calamity of all calamities. We were intended by God to live forever in Paradise in an embodied, material form. But Adam (man) fell, and is now subject to sickness, old age, and death in a material world that is itself fallen and in which demonic agents are at play in various ways.

Now suppose you are a philosopher and a Christian who wants to find a way to accommodate man's essential corporeality. Following Aristotle, you bring Plato's Forms down to Earth where they cease to be substances in their own right and become factors in the ontological analysis of such sublunary substances (prote ousiai) as statues, horses — and humans.  Socrates, then, is not a naturally immortal soul accidentally attached to a perishable body, but a hylomorphic compound of form and (proximate) matter in which  anima forma corporis, the soul is the form of the body. 

The soul, which was a substance for Plato becomes in Aristotle a non-substantial 'principle' invoked in the analysis of genuine substances.  The I that thinks when Socrates thinks is then presumably not his soul but the whole man, the entire hylomorphic compound. That which thinks when Socrates thinks is Socrates, not the form of his body. For how could an enmattered form think?  How could it be the subject of thinking (of cogitationes in the broad Cartesian sense)? An enmattered form is a respect in which a sublunary substance is intelligible, but it is not intelligent, being merely one factor in the ontological analysis of a whole man who is the one doing the thinking.   A subject of thinking must be a substance, and on the Aristotelian analysis, the soul is not a substance but a form.

Might it be, contrary to what I have just maintained, that the soul is an enmattered form that is both intelligible and intelligent? If so, then the soul-form is what I refer to when I thoughtfully deploy the first-person singular pronoun, and not the whole man, body-cum-soul.  This seems to lead us back to the view according to which I am identical to my soul, and away from the Aristotelico-Thomist view according to which I am not identical to my soul, but identical to a composite of soul and body.

To state the problem succinctly, Thomas is an Aristotelian on Earth, but a Platonist in heaven, and he has to be both to satisfy simultaneously the exigencies of both Christianity and Aristotle. But the exigencies are in tension one with the other, a tension tantamount to contradiction. Thomas qua Christian needs a substantial soul capable of surviving bodily death, a soul that then 'waits' for its completion in the resurrection of the body.  Qua Aristotelian, however, the soul must be a form and not a substance.  The upshot is a contradictory construct: a form that is and is not a substance.  A soul-form which is not a substance but a principle when embodied,  becomes a substance on its own after death.

5) Ratzinger rejects the additive approach to resurrection. A restored body is not added to a post-mortem soul.  For "the biblical train of thought . . . presupposes the undivided unity of man." (349) Scripture speaks of "the awakening of the dead, not of bodies!" (349)  The "real heart of the faith in resurrection does not consist at all in the restoration of bodies . . . ." (349)  Man is not composed of body and soul with the soul the carrier of his immortality. If you start with that conception, then resurrection becomes the restoration of bodies, which are then added onto the souls which have been waiting  for their bodily completion. This scheme is precisely what Ratzinger is opposing. So how does he propose that we understand resurrection?

6) He speaks of a "dialogic immortality" that is an "awakening."(350) Man cannot "totally perish because he is known and loved by God." (350)  As against Platonism, there is nothing in man that is indestructible.  Man is saved from annihilation by being drawn into dialogue with the Creator. In this way the whole man, not just his soul, is awakened and brought to life.

From here on out the discussion tapers off into vagueness.  Resurrection is not a restoration of one's earthly body. The person "goes on existing because it lives in God's memory." (353)  To go on existing as a merely intentional object of someone's memory, even of God's, seems insufficient. I remember my mother, but does she live on in my memory? Such an afterlife would be a paltry thing indeed, and not just because my memories of her are both incomplete and in some respect erroneous.  The main problem is that an object of memory cannot be by being remembered be transformed from a non-living subject into a living one.  My memory cannot be constitutive of your subjectivity. But perhaps with God it is different . . . .

_______________________

*While man is not a pure spirit, the Christian worldview admits the existence of  finite pure spirits, namely angels and demons (fallen angels). Christianity is therefore not a materialist worldview: it does not hold that finite intelligence cannot occur except as physically realized or materially embodied. And of course God himself, the infinite, archetypal spirit, is a pure spirit, fully real, and fully concrete, despite being wholly immaterial.  Christianity is not materialism, but it does, in the teeth of Platonism, valorize the material world.

**An individual substance is definable as anything metaphysically capable of independent existence.

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, 1960. (Source)

Given what we know from yesterday's Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard's sense, and not ethical in the Dane's sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.

Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn't do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men's wives.  Am I being fair?

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies

Herewith, six definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs.

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he uses them to say something.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, Hear Me Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.  Harrison was the Beatle with depth. Lennon the radical, McCartney the romantic, Starr the regular guy.

John Updike’s Christianity

Gerald R. McDermott (emphases added):

In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth that the next life is simply this life in review, and from his Lutheranism, he wrote, “a rather antinomian Christianity”—the idea that there are no laws we should fear or live by—which he was “too timid to discard.” There is no hint of final judgment. Nor is there any imperative to repent or improve ourselves: in Begley’s words, “Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.” And if there was anything he learned from Barth, it was that all human efforts to save ourselves are wrongheaded and futile. As one critic summed it up, Updike “radically divorced” Christian theology from Christian ethics.

The upshot was a self-indulgent religion that basked in self-affirmation while running from voices that would challenge the self to change, particularly in ways that were not pleasant. It is telling that Updike’s last poem ends with words of self-assurance from Psalm 23: “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, forever.”

One cannot help thinking that Updike’s religion helped build the theological scaffolding for mainline Protestantism’s baptism of gay marriage. Updike wrote of mainline Protestants and their efforts to justify the sexual revolution. Although Updike himself regarded heterosexual sex as normative, his elevation of sex as a way to transcendence would prevent heterosexual Protestants from barring the door to other kinds of sex. Updike told the CBS reporter, “Sex is one of the means—maybe the foremost means—whereby the [moral and religious] search is conducted.” Once mainline America became persuaded—even in the absence of empirical evidence—that gays are born that way, how could they deny that their sex might be their way to the divine? Updike would surely have agreed. And millions of Updike readers could thank the novelist for helping them see that marriages defined by desire were not only a right but also a sacrament.

'See' is standardly employed as a verb of success. I wonder: does the author in his last sentence so intend it?  'Believe' would work better, no?

More importantly, it is just self-serving nonsense to view sex as the foremost means for conducting the moral and religious search. That sounds like a joke. I am put in mind of Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

We are concupiscent from the ground up. So it is no surprise that even Christianity can be so twisted as to serve the sex monkey by one who apparently was its slave.

But if truth be told, I just now ordered Couples to see how the brilliant Updike makes his case.  Updike is a master of social phenomenology as I discovered when I read Rabbit is Rich in the early '90s.

As for the radical divorce of theology and ethics, there cannot be anything salutary about splitting them asunder. But if split them you must, it would be better to jettison the theology and keep the ethics for the sake of our happiness in this world, which we know, as opposed to the next which we merely believe in.  It is an empirical question, but on balance the sexual revolution has not improved human eudaimonia. Our predicament post-pill is hardly a paradise.

Updike looks to be a poster boy for the false dichotomy of spirituality versus religion. 

Related: A Death Poem at Year's End.  I reproduce and comment on a fabulous Updike poem.

Updike Time