By William Heald via the WayBack Machine.
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.
The Skeptic
The true skeptic does not deny truth. He is an inquirer who so loves truth that he will accept no substitutes, no easy answers, no comforting dogmatisms. That some skeptics become Pyrrhonian slackers is no argument against skepticism properly understood. The true skeptic is an inquirer, not a denier.
At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron
A Good Friday meditation at Substack.
Addendum 4/4/21. Vito Caiati writes,
I have been pondering the profound and poignant Good Friday meditation, “At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron,” that you just posted on Substack. The Weil text that inspired your post leaves me, nevertheless, with a tormenting question, one which arises from her conviction that when an iron spike rips through the flesh of a human hand, “The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation.” However, does the assumed equivalence between the overwhelming pain and suffering of human beings whose flesh is pierced by iron and that of Christ really hold, for it is the Second Person of the Trinity who is crucified and, as such, a Being who is omniscient? However the admixture of the divine and human natures of Christ are conjoined in his Person, we cannot assume, without falling in heresy, that one of those natures, with its inherent intellectual capacities, ceases to be operational at certain moments, so that on the Cross only the human nature is present. If both natures are present, than the divine nature of Christ faces death with the divine knowledge of those things that are hidden from other men, in particular the certainty of God’s existence and the knowledge of His nature, the destiny of the soul after death, its relation to God, and so on. Thus, while Christ’s physical suffering is comparable to ours, his emotional suffering is not: He is in a unique and privileged existential position, one that derives from his absolute knowledge of all things, which permits him to die without the terrors of the unknown that plagues us ordinary human beings. Thus, it would seem that the analogy of his suffering and ours holds but only to a certain point and not absolutely. Am I wrong on this?
Well, Vito, I can't say that you are wrong. Indeed, I think you are right about an implication of the orthodox and traditional "two natures, one person" understanding of the Incarnation. If Christ is one person with two natures, then both natures must be "operational" to use your word at all times during Christ's earthly sojourn. (What happens after the Ascension is a further question.) But if there is no 'switching off' of the divine nature during the Crucifixion, then how can Christ experience fully the human predicament in which the worst of suffering is not mere physical suffering but the latter together with the utter desolation of abandonment? Recall that the traditional understanding, hammered out over a number of Church councils, was that Christ is fully man, and of course fully God as well. And to experience fully the horror of the fallen human predicament, one would have to experience the spiritual and emotional agony of abandonment, and this to its highest degree. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Who is speaking here? Not the Second Person of the Trinity. A man is speaking, no ordinary man, of course, but a man nonetheless who came into the world in the usual way, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. There is no satisfactory clarification of this state of affairs, at least none satisfactory to the discursive intellect. This is because the Incarnation as traditionally understood is logically contradictory. I have discussed this many times. (See Trinity and Incarnation category.) In the present context, the contradiction takes the following form. The man dying on the cross is the God-Man; he is one person (hypostasis) in two (individual) natures. Now who cries out in extremis to the Father? Not a nature, hence not Christ's human nature. A nature can do no such thing. A person can. But there is only one person on the cross, the Logos Itself, the Word, God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. So the Second Person is crying to the First Person: Why have you forsaken me? That's absurd, i.e. logically impossible (given the background theological assumptions). God cannot forsake God. Don't forget: Trinity is not tritheism. God is one.
I would say that that the absurdity of the Incarnation, which was recognized by Tertullian, Kierkegaard, Shestov, et al. is what allows the heresies to arise such as the one espoused by Simone Weil. The heresies are attempts to make rational sense out of a combination of ideas unintelligible to the discursive intellect. They have a logic to them.
Could it be that some contradictions are true, and that the Incarnation is one of them? Call that the dialetheic way out. Or you might take the view that no contradictions are true, and that, in reality the Incarnation is non-contradictory; it is just that our cognitive architecture makes it impossible for such weak reeds as we are to understand how it is non-contradictory. Call that the mysterian way out. You could also ditch both Trinity and Incarnation (as traditionally understood) and go Unitarian.
On the Consolations of Tense Logic
What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been. What time has mothered, no future time can touch. What you were and that you were stand forever inscribed in the roster of being in indelible ink whether or not anyone will read the record. And all your deeds and misdeeds with you. You will die, but your having lived will never die. But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny! Time has made you and she will unmake you. In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux. Thanks a lot, bitch! You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.
………………….
The entry above, posted 10 March 2010, caught the sharp eye of Alan Rhoda who isolated the animating tense-logical principle:
You here express the tense-logical idea that p–>FPp, that if something is the case, then it will thereafter always be the case that it has been the case. In Latin, facta infecta fieri non possunt.
Believe it or not, this has been denied, by the famous Polish logician Lukasiewicz, no less. He seems to have accepted a version of presentism according to which (1) all (contingent) truths depend for their truth on what presently exists, and (2) what presently exists need not include anything that suffices to pick out a unique prior sequence of events as "the" actual past. Accordingly, truths about the past may cease to be true as the passage of time obliterates the traces of past events. Lukasiewicz apparently found this a comforting thought:
"There are hard moments of suffering and still harder ones of guilt in everyone’s life. We should be glad to be able to erase them not only from our memory but also from existence. We may believe that when all the effects of those fateful moments are exhausted, even should that happen only after our death, then their causes too will be effaced from the world of actuality and pass into the realm of possibility. Time calms our cares and brings us forgiveness." (Jan Lukasiewicz, "On Determinism" in Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, p. 128.)
This is an amazing passage from Lukasiewicz both because of his denial of what strikes me and Rhoda as a self-evident axiom of tense logic and because of the consolation he derives from its denial. (Is it really consolation if that from which it derives is false?)
I myself find it very hard to believe that there wasn't a unique actual past. And I find it impossible to believe that, with the passage of enough time, past events will somehow go from being actual to being merely possible.
What Lukasiewicz is maintaining is really quite preposterous. He is saying, in effect, that a past-tensed truth such as 'Poland was invaded by Hitler's Wehrmacht on 1 September 1939,' which is true now, and was true at every time after the event, will cease to be true in the future when all of the presently existing traces of the invasion have been obliterated. And surely such a time will come. When our sun goes supernova . . . .
Lukasiewicz is assuming that (a) contingent past-tensed truths need truth-makers, but (b) the only available truth-makers are presently existing causal traces of the events recorded by the past-tensed truths. (B) is a consequence of presentism, roughly, the view in the philosophy of time according to which the temporally present alone exists simpliciter, which implies that wholly past and wholly future times and events do not exist, and are now nothing at all. If so, actual past events and merely possible past events are on an equal ontological footing.
But to me it seems obvious, a plain datum, that there is an importance ontological difference between a past event such as Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, and a merely possible (past) event such as his marriage to her. Now that datum tells against presentism — unless you bring God into the picture.
This is what Rhoda does in an excellent article of his, Presentism, Truthmakers, and God.
Abstract: The truthmaker objection to presentism (the view that only what exists now exists simpliciter) is that it lacks sufficient metaphysical resources to ground truths about the past. In this paper I identify five constraints that an adequate presentist response must satisfy. [. . .] Consideration of how these responses fail, however, points toward a proposal that works, one that posits God’s memories as truthmakers for truths about the past. I conclude that presentists have, in the truthmaker objection, considerable incentive to endorse theism.
But if we don't put God to work, or find other ways to supply presently existing truth-makers for past-tensed truths, and want to hold to presentism, then we are stuck with the preposterous view that the passage of time will not only erase individual and collective memory of past events, but will also erase the events themselves, and, to add to the absurdity, transform their modal status from actual to merely possible.
The past is a realm of fact, not fiction, actuality, not mere possibility. What was. actually was, and will remain actual even though it is no longer present. The passage of time cannot alter the past. You may hope that your transgressions will be forgotten, but one cannot reasonably hope that they will cease to be. The waters of Lethe merely hide the past from view; they do not undo the past.
As for consolation, I hope we can agree that a view's being consoling or the opposite is irrelevant to the question whether it is true. If Lukasiewicz found consolation in his doctrine, that is no indicator of its truth since a doctrine doesn't have to be true to be consoling. It merely has to be believed. And if consolation were the touchstone of truth, then, the contradictory consolation deriving from p–>FPp would would cancel it out.
Logically, We are Poles Apart
What Lukasiewicz might have said to Lesniewski.
Cat Blogging!
I haven't done any cat blogging in a righteous spell. Call me a slacker. Friday is the official cat blogging day here at MavPhil and elsewhere in the blogosphere, but this Friday is Good Friday. Cat man Dave Bagwill sends this:
Could I Pass an Ideological Turing Test?
On 11 January 2017 I wrote a post that begins:
Could I present liberal-left ideas in such a way that the reader could not tell that I was not a liberal? Let me take a stab at this with respect to a few 'hot' topics. This won't be easy. I will have to present liberal-left ideas as plausible while avoiding all mention of their flaws. And all of this without sarcasm, parody, or irony. Each of these subheadings could be expanded into a separate essay. And of course there are many more subheadings that could be added.
The post attracted some very good comments. The consensus was that I flunked.
Four years have past since I made that entry. That is a long time in this age of social, political, and technological hyperkineticism. If I were to rewrite it today it would have to reflect the increasingly delusional quality of leftist 'thought' as we jerk, not merely accelerate, toward our cultural collapse.
Jerk?
Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating. But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking. After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven. No need to name names. You know who they are.
From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration. Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk. (I am not joking; look it up.) If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.
If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars. Each has a magnitude and a direction. This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.
The 'progressive' jerk too has its direction: the end of civilization as we know it.
A Tribute to Dallas Willard
My study of a fine article on Gustav Bergmann's assay of the act this afternoon led me to look up its author, Greg Jesson. Among other things, I found this tribute to Dallas Willard. My own little tribute to Willard is here.
Is it Wise to Speak Out?
To focus the question: is it prudent for conservative dissidents to speak out against 'woke' madness? That depends. This will help you think it through. I wrote below:
In the present political climate, if I exercise my right to free speech I may lose the right. Use it and lose it. This is because vast numbers nowadays do not recognize any such right. For these people, dissent is hate; so if your speech is dissenting speech it is hate speech, which cannot be tolerated. Dissent is hate, and hate is violence, and violence is racism! Of course, dissent is not hate, and hate is not violence, etc. but these truths are irrelevant in an age of groupthink and mass delusion. Truth is passé in the Age of Feeling. So if you speak your mind calmly, reasonably, and with attention to facts, but sail against the prevailing winds, you may find yourself de-platformed, 'cancelled,' and put on a watch list of dissidents, and perhaps a 'no fly' list. After all, conservatives are 'potential terrorists.' And white conservatives are of course 'white supremacists.'
On the other hand, if you don't exercise your rights, you may as well not have them.
There are ways between the horns of this dilemma but they will vary from case to case.
Try to become financially independent as soon as possible by a combination of hard work, frugal living, and wise saving and investing. Then the tyrants won't be able to 'cancel' your livelihood so easily. They can, of course, still 'cancel' your life. Would they? Well, if they have no problem stripping you of your livelihood because of the exercise of your rights, what is likely to stop them from going all the way?
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs
"A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia)
Sarah Vaughn, Broken Hearted Melody. YouTuber comment: "Late 1959. I was in 4th grade, listening to KFWB Los Angeles." Same here. Same year, same grade, same station, KFWB, Channel 98! Color Radio! My favorite deejay was B. Mitchel Reed. I learned 'semolian' and 'mishigas' from him. His real surname is 'Goldberg,' which means mountain of gold. I will say no more lest I provoke my alt-Right correspondents.
Timi Yuro, Hurt. When I first heard this I was sure she was black. I was wrong. She's Italian, and her real name is Rosemarie Timotea Auro. What pipes!
Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You
Roy Orbison, In Dreams
Peggy Lee, Oh You Crazy Moon
Ketty Lester, Love Letters
Etta James, At Last
Lenny Welch, Since I Fell for You
Sentimental you say? What would life be without sentiment? You say it's overdone? You suffer from an excess of cool. It's Saturday night, punch the clock, pour yourself a stiff one, and feel. Tonight we feel, tomorrow we think. About sentimentality and everything else under the sun.
Gerontocracy, Paedocracy, Xenocracy
Are the first two, in cahoots, pushing us toward the third? Run with it, bloggers!
Here, Thomas Sowell does a number on our favorite paedocrat.
Is There a Political ‘Use it or Lose it’ Principle?
If you want to maintain your physical fitness, you must exercise regularly. Use it or lose it! Not so long ago I thought that the same principle had a political application: if you want to maintain your freedoms, you must exercise them. Use 'em or lose 'em! But times have changed. And when times change, the wise re-evaluate. I'll give two examples.
In the present political climate, if I exercise my right to free speech I may lose the right. Use it and lose it. This is because vast numbers nowadays do not recognize any such right. For these people, dissent is hate; so if your speech is dissenting speech it is hate speech, which cannot be tolerated. Dissent is hate, and hate is violence, and violence is racism! Of course, dissent is not hate, and hate is not violence, etc. but these truths are irrelevant in an age of groupthink and mass delusion. Truth is passé in the Age of Feeling. So if you speak your mind calmly, reasonably, and with attention to facts, but sail against the prevailing winds, you may find yourself de-platformed, 'cancelled,' and put on a watch list of dissidents, and perhaps a 'no fly' list. After all, conservatives are 'potential terrorists.' And white conservatives are of course 'white supremacists.'
So here is my thought: The exercise of a right in a society in which that right is no longer widely recognized but is instead perceived as hurtful, hateful, 'racist,' etc. has no tendency to secure that right; on the contrary, the exercise of the right endangers both the right and the exerciser thereof. The same goes for the mere invocation or mention of the right.
Here we may have the makings of an argument against speaking out. But we will have to think about this some more. Civil courage is a beautiful virtue but it is sometimes trumped by that of prudence.
My second example is the right to keep and bear arms, an individual right, one that is protected and secured, but not conferred, by the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. To exercise this right openly, as by 'open carry,' is inadvisable. You may think that you are standing on your rights, and by exercising them securing them, but in a society dominated by group-thinking leftists, your constitutionally-guaranteed rights are not respected or even acknowledged. You are arguably undermining your rights and their exercise. You are reinforcing their mindless fears and fantasies. After all, prominent progressive politicians view the NRA as a domestic terrorist organization! What then will they think of you if they see you packing heat? It would be best to conceal both your weapons and your views.
The practice of ketman is advisable. Rod Dreher:
Ketman is the strategy that everyone in our society who isn’t a true believer in “social justice” and identity politics has to adopt to stay out of trouble. On Sunday, I heard about a professor in a large state university in a state that yesterday went for Trump, who is filled with constant anxiety. He believes that his interactions with colleagues and students are filled with the potential to destroy his career. Why? Because all it takes is an accusation of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry to wreck a lifetime of work. This is the world that the identity politics left has created for us.
More on ketman later.