We desire intimacy with human others but we must combine it with reserve.
And this for three reasons: out of respect for the Other and her inwardness; from a sober recognition of our fallen tendency to dominate; and out of a need to protect ourselves.
The wise do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, but neither do they suppress Bukowski's bluebird.
Ci sono domande senza alcuna risposta.
There are questions without any answer.
I linked recently to a piece hostile to Islam, "the saddest and poorest form of theism." (Schopenhauer) I now point out a problem with a rather happier and richer form of theism, that of the Roman Catholic Church. Here:
November is the month the Church especially dedicates to praying for the dead. To encourage this holy practice, the Church offers a daily plenary indulgence for the souls in Purgatory, under the usual conditions (right intention, confession, Communion, prayer for the intentions of the pope) to those who visit a cemetery in the period November 1-8. She offers a partial indulgence at other times.
Essential to anything worthy of the label 'religion' is the belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53.) (See The Essence of Religion for seven essential characteristics of religion.) What worries me, though, are those who claim to possess an exact cartography of the transcendent country beyond the senses and an exact understanding of the mechanics of salvation.
Purgatory is of course a sound and necessary idea within a classically theistic scheme inasmuch as almost none of us are worthy of immediate access to the Beatific Vision. (Besides, how many so-called Catholics would even want it? I suspect many of them believe in something along the lines of 'hillbilly heaven' complete with BBQs, fiddles and banjoes, cousin Jethro, and his old dog Blue.) Except for a few saints we will all need more or less purgation. For many this will take the form of a weaning-away from one's attachments to earthly loves and a gradual re-direction of one's misdirected desires upon the Absolute. Death will detach us physically from our bodies, but it is highly naive to think that it will thereby detach us spiritually from our earthly loves. It is a reasonable speculation that Hugh Hefner, if he survived his bodily death, is still lusting after nubile females; it is just that he no longer has the physical apparatus with which to implement his lust.
Now let's suppose that your child, who committed suicide, is in purgatory and that you are a Catholic. A plenary indulgence is a full or total indulgence: it is a get-out-of-purgatory-right-now card. So you do the things listed above, and your child is sprung from Purgatory.
But isn't this incredible? I at least find it hard to swallow. You could dismiss my misgivings as merely autobiographical remarks, but I suspect they are more.
What bothers me is the presumption on the part of the Church that it possesses exact knowledge of the afterlife and the mechanics of salvation. This pretense to detailed, indeed quantifiable, information about matters far, far beyond the human horizon strikes me as deeply dubious if not mendacious. Of course, there was something 'infinitely' worse, namely, the sale by greedy clerics of indulgences. That outrage, you will recall, was part of what fueled the protest of a certain failed monk by the name of Martin Luther.
How can I formulate my misgiving? What bothers me, I suppose, is the dogmatic over-specification of the Unseen Order. Its 'satellite mapping,' if you will is a sort of secularization of the trans-secular which does not respect the transcendence and mystery of the trans-secular. Appeal to mystery is often made by the Church in defense of doctrines (Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, et al.) that appear to flout the logical requirements of the discursive intellect; how does that appeal comport with the boringly prosaic 'green eyeshade' quantification and allotment of benefits and allowances pursuant upon so many Pater Nosters, this many Ave Marias, etc?
More later. There are a number of deep issues here.
Now, however, I have to take my wife, a good old-fashioned Catholic girl, God bless her, and an exemplar of the Eternal Feminine that leads us upward, to church. Why do I go to church given how screwed-up the Roman church and its clergy are (especially those of the American Catholic Bishops who are leftists first and Catholics second in emulation of their leader Bergoglio the Benighted?)
The highest human pursuit is the pursuit of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. One has to prosecute the pursuit in different ways. One is by working from within one's own tradition, despite its manifold limitations and defects, penetrating into it as deeply as possible, and taking what is good from it.
Addendum
John B. writes,
I read your two recent posts on indulgences, and I would like to offer a clarification: indulgences obtained for the souls in purgatory operate per modum suffragii. An indulgence obtained for the dead is seen as a prayer that the faithful can have special confidence in, since it is, after a fashion, an intercessory prayer made by the Church itself. But it remains a prayer and not a juridical act. The Church on earth does not claim to have jurisdiction over the souls of the dead.I doubt that this resolves all of the problems that indulgences present for you. There are still the questions surrounding indulgences for the living, after all. To be honest, I have a hard time with indulgences myself, for a few reasons, and I'm Catholic. But the clarification seemed worth making.Bernhard Poschmann's Penance and the Anointing of the Sick includes a very good chapter on indulgences if you want to read more on how they are understood and have been understood historically, and how they arose. The whole book is excellent, and at times surprising.
People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise, and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health. Underappreciated is a truth just as if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has its foods and its poisons just as the body does. This simple truth, known for centuries, goes unheeded while liberals fall all over each other climbing aboard the various environmental bandwagons.
Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons?
You 'liberals' are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.' But honest dissent you label as 'hate speech' and you shout down those who disagree with you.
You say you want an example of a cultural polluter? How about the 'comedian' Louis C. K.? I was blissfully unaware of this moral cretin until a few days ago. No, I won't link to any of his garbage. Obama, I understand, considers his stuff 'edgy,' as if it good to violate 'bourgeois' standards of moral decency.
'Liberals' have a strange tendency to conflate dissent with hate. Obviously, if I dissent from what you maintain, it does not follow that I hate you. And if I express my dissent in speech, it does not follow that my speech is 'hate speech.'
More here.
Memphis Minnie, I'm a Bad Luck Woman, 1936.
Lizzie Douglas (June 3, 1897 – August 6, 1973), known as Memphis Minnie, was a blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose recording career lasted from the 1920s to the 1950s. [. . .] She presented herself to the public as being feminine and ladylike, wearing expensive dresses and jewelry, but she was aggressive when she needed to be and was not shy when it came to fighting.[26] According to the blues musician Johnny Shines, "Any men fool with her she'd go for them right away. She didn't take no foolishness off them. Guitar, pocket knife, pistol, anything she get her hand on she'd use it".[4] (Wikipedia)
Tommy McClennan, Whisky-Headed Woman, 1939. Here is what Canned Heat make of it.
Robert Petway, Catfish Blues, 1941. An influential blues classic. Little is known of the man.
Elmore James, Dust My Broom
Elmore James, It Hurts Me Too
Robert Johnson, Sweet Home Chicago
Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, et al., Sweet Home Chicago. Looks like a Stratocaster festival. Only Johnny Winter is not playing a Strat.
Slim Harpo, Baby, Scratch My Back
Slim Harpo, Mohair Sam
Here is Epicurus as quoted by Pierre Hadot in a book I highly recommend, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell 1995, p. 87):
We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives.
He proposes a TETRAPHARMAKOS, a four-fold healing formula:
God presents no fears, death no worries. And while good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable.
This strikes me as just so much whistling in the dark. How can one be so cocksure that physical death is the annihilation of the self? Shakespeare's Hamlet, in his soliloquy, saw the difficulty:
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause . . . .
And is evil "readily endurable"? See for yourself whether that proposition stands up to a close reading of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or any other catalog of human horrors.
The Hellenistic systems, the systems of late antiquity (Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism), despite their riches and insights offer us no real solution to the human predicament, a fact of which Augustine was well aware.
Whether or not there is a cure, man cannot be his own doctor.
Not only are we slouching toward Gomorrah, we are sliding toward something like communism. Trump, I fear, is only a temporary brake. Excerpts from an article by Stella Morabito:
Erasure of collective memory. Another crime of radical education reform is its attack on the study of history, civics, and the classics of literature. Today we can see the bitter fruits of such 1960s radical education reform, which has roots going back to 1920s with John Dewey. If we are no longer able to place ourselves and society into the context of historical events, our vision going forward will be blurred at best.
It gets even worse if we don’t learn how our form of government functions. Today fewer and fewer college students have the capacity to understand that the First Amendment serves as a buffer against totalitarianism, not something to be abolished under the pretext of “hate speech.” And depriving students exposure to literary classics like Shakespeare (based on the charge that such works are “Western” and therefore ethnocentric) prevents them from discussing the universal human condition and our common humanity.
Instead, students are increasingly fed grievance studies and identity politics. As universities go this route, it trickles down to K-12 education. As a result, we are losing the social glue of our common traditions and heritage—not just as a nation, but as human beings. This cultivation of ignorance by the education establishment over the years compounds the isolating effect on people. It makes youth especially vulnerable to becoming fodder for power elites.
[ . . .]
Language manipulation. The whole point of the totalitarian abuse of language is to prevent independent thought, the subject of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” When people accept the abuse of language, and incorporate it into their own vocabularies without thinking about it, they can be easily ventriloquized by power elites.
Victor Klemperer addressed this phenomenon in his book “Language of the Third Reich.” His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into Nazis. He writes, “They found it difficult to think about life and morality in any other way. . . .Words are like tiny doses of arsenic, swallowed unnoticed, and then after a while the toxic reaction sets in.”
His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into Nazis.Consider all the weaponized memes and slogans we swallow today that shape how we think: “woke,” “bend the knee,” and “cisgender” are just a few. All are meant to modify our thoughts and behaviors in everyday life. An especially aggressive abuse of language are new laws that enforce strange pronoun usages that destabilize the structure of our language. By passing laws that punish the “misgendering” of someone as “hate speech,” we veer into kangaroo court territory, as well as force unnatural changes in our language.
. . . would this world and the people in it be as intellectually stimulating?
Men and women of my stripe love to beat their heads against puzzles, problems, mysteries, and every type of conundrum.
Well, Lord, you have certainly given us fodder for brain-bashing. And if this world is, as your top reps maintain, a divine fiction, one dependent in its Dasein and Sosein moment-by-moment, then I must say you have done a mighty fine job. It seems so bloody real and self-existent as to exclude you as author and itself as just divine text.
If to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and it is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another injuries (Schaden). The great Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical.
Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not a hateful emotion to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.
My translation of the Italian:
To feel envy is human, but to taste joy at the injury of others is diabolical.
From Karl White, esteemed cybernaut:
I found this topic from an online group interesting:
"I tried sharing and discussing my antinatalist beliefs with a Christian Anarchism group I'm a part of. My antinatalism comes directly and exclusively from my Christian faith, and I believe that any Christian who does not become an antinatalist after Bible study on the topic is an inconsistent, divided person. I wasn't met with any hostility. Most understood my stance, but likened my tone to depression (which might be the case).
Any Christian who brings life into this world while believing in the existence of hell and our need for salvation is a MONSTER."
Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.
Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.
The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.
Christianity blends motifs that are not obviously compatible. One is Platonic-Plotinian-Gnostic. Nietzsche was on to this when he remarked that Christianity is "Platonism for the people." (Beyond Good and Evil, preface) But if the central theme of Christianity is the Incarnation, then this implies a counter-Platonic valorization of this material world of time and change in which men are born and die. God entered this material world as a man, not as a purely spiritual redeemer. Born as a man among men, he valorized birth into a material world for all men. God is one of us, "a slob like one of us" in the words of a '90s song.
"Any Christian who brings life into this world while believing in the existence of hell and our need for salvation is a MONSTER."
I feel the young man's pain, but this is a sentiment that can be reasonably resisted.The Christian idea as I understand it is that by procreating, man participates in the divine creation of souls that have the capacity to share in the unending bliss of the divine life. Apart from the optional doctrine of predestination, souls are free to avoid hell.
Admittedly, my somewhat glib answer leaves us with questions. One is this: if God wanted to manifest his super-eminent glory and goodness, why didn't he create only angels? Why the need for this beautiful but horrifying meat grinder of a world? As Schopenhauer said, "The world is beautiful to behold, but terrible to be (a part of)." And as Kerouac asked, "How can one be clever in a meat grinder?' (Bang on the last link.)
Addendum
I wrote above that Christianity blends motifs that are not obviously compatible. One is Platonic-Plotinian. The other is Jewish-Aristotelian. Brushing with broad strokes we can say the the first motif is other-worldly while the second is this-worldly.
Theses motifs are pretty clearly in tension even if, in the end, they are not contradictory.
We find one indication of this tension in the Thomistic synthesis. Thomas adopts and extends Aristotle's hylomorphic constituent ontology according to which form and matter are not (primary) substances in their own right, but 'factors' or 'principles' invoked in the analysis of primary substances. Socrates, then, is a primary substance composed of substantial form and signate or designated matter (materia signata). But the dude is also alive and conscious. So we have the formula: Anima forma corporis: the soul (life principle) is the form of the body. Soul is to body as form is to matter. This is anti-Platonic. On the Platonic scheme a person is (identically) his soul, and his body is an accidental adjunct. If so, the death of my body is not the death of me. On the Aristotelian scheme, a person is a composite of two 'principles,' soul and body. If so, the death of my body is the death of me. Aristotelian forms are not substances in their own right. They are thus incapable of independent existence, existence apart from the thing of which they are the form.
Thomas adds a strange anti-Aristotelian twist in the case of humans: their souls, without ceasing to be forms, are capable of independent existence after the death of the human bodies of which they are the forms. For this and other reasons there is truth to the quip that Aquinas is an Aristotelian on earth but a Platonist in heaven. Thomas makes this move because he must somehow secure the identity and continuance of souls after death as they await the Resurrection of the body. But then, at least for a time, human souls are substances in their own right.
Despite the horrors of Soviet Communism, the Allied winners of World War II owed a great deal to the Russian people. Russia's male and female soldiers were most responsible for destroying Hitler's vast ground forces, having killed more than two-thirds of the German soldiers lost in the war.
The Soviet Union lost about 27 million soldiers and civilians — about 60 times more than America lost in the war.
