How Can I Take My Life Back From My Phone?

C.J.S. Hayward
C.J.S. Hayward Publications
979-8354818877
$19.99 Hardcover/$11.99 Paper/$2.99 Kindle
https://cjshayward.com/phone/

"We have created a situation where it is possible for ordinary people to casually and without malice kill innocent lives. If we return to the three ethical questions, namely how ships can avoid bumping into each other, how they can internally stay shipshape, and what destination they are meant to reach, we are seeing terrible collisions that sink ships because unrestrained and trusting use of cell phones has devastated what little was left of their being shipshape."

How Can I Take My Life Back From My Phone? A Guidebook for Orthodox and Others is about pursuing life outside of technology. It is highly recommended reading for any modern person who would link theological thinking to the dilemmas of managing modern devices that both distract and offer a form of engagement that's often the antithesis of spiritual reflection.

What do ethical and religious questions have to do with technological use? They translate more reasoned purpose into device usage, creating a dialogue that stems from Hayward's exploration of "What kind of guidance would someone like St. John Chrysostom offer in using technology, if our technology were around in his day?"

From philosophical and historical citation and reflection to guidelines for employing technology in a more positive, purposeful manner that doesn't put it in the driver's seat of decision-making, Hayward provides a thought-provoking discourse that will especially lend to book club and discussion group pursuit.

Chapters tackle everything from Internet porn to missed connections and the altered states of mind and soul created by addiction to all kinds of screens: "He asked me if I had ever observed that an hour after seeing a movie, I felt depressed. I had not made any connection of that sort, even if now it seems predictable from the pleasure-pain syndrome. Now I very rarely see movies, precisely because the special effects and other such tweaks are stronger than I am accustomed to seeing; they go like a stiff drink to the head of the teetotaler. The little pleasures of life are lost on someone used to a rising standard of special effects, and the little pleasures of life are more wholesome than special effects."

C.S.J. Hayward has produced many a thought-provoking work, but How Can I Take My Life Back From My Phone? may arguably be one of his best.

This is because he links a modern social, psychological, and spiritual issue to guidelines on how better to take charge of that technological lure that too often creates in its user an emotional and spiritual void.

These topics wind neatly into Biblical passages, analytical reflections on the Word of God, and notes and footnoted references to a wide range of religious thinking that contrasts nicely with the ethical and spiritual topics under consideration.

Hayward also adds autobiographical notes into the inspection. This personalizes his citations and the experiences of loosening technology's allure and distractions.

The result is both a how-to guide and a spiritual work of Christian Orthodoxy which holds the rare power to reach beyond Orthodox audiences alone and into the general public. This topic should hold widespread interest, and ideally will be debated and discussed among many circles.

Christian libraries, in particular, will find How Can I Take My Life Back From My Phone? a thought-provoking reflection and a "must have" addition.

Own it in Paper!

I thank Thee, O my God,
For all that Thou hast done,
And all that Thou hast given me.

I thank Thee for Fr. Seraphim's militants,
Whose response to The Seraphinians: "Blessed Seraphim Rose" and His Axe-Wielding Western Converts,
Did not stop in a forum at harassment,
But show ongoing vindictiveness,
Not satisfied with one-star ratings to that title,
But see to it that positive reviews of all my works on Amazon,
If they can be dislodged,
Are taken down quickly,
Presenting readers with a review profile that gives every impression of copious mediocrity.
I thank thee for the revenge that still attacks me.

I thank Thee for Amazon's censorship,
That of the Classic Orthodox Bible,
Blessed by my heirarch out of kindness,
Though prior single-volume publications remain live,
A Bible publishing friend's advice,
To break it in multiple volumes and be easier on the books' spine,
With repetition the New Testament's Gospel and Epistles were approved at $15 each;
The whole Old Testament, Law, Historical Books, Wisdom Literature, and Prophets must elsewhere be sought, $40 apiece.

I thank Thee for Fr. Seraphfim's axe-wielding converts,
For know I not all the Reason in Thy Providence,
Yet I note a few guesses:
That by them Thou savest me from full-blown fame too soon,
And if they hit me in my pocketbook thus,
Thou givest what money I need,
Not all of my wants.

And for such things the Sermon on the Mount bids me rejoice,
And the Sermon on the Plain positively bids me leap for joy,
So truly, rejoicing is fit,
For dishonor at the hands of men on earth,
Is one mark of honor in the life to come.

I thank Thee for this transcendently important life,
Birth and death, says St. Luke, are an inch apart,
While the ticker tape goes on forever.
After death, the blessed may rise from glory to glory:
In this life alone may we repent,
In this life alone may we choose between Heaven and Hell,
Life is the dress rehearsal,
And through eternity we will live the rôle we have chosen on earth.

The devil, God's buffoon, God's jester in fact,
Announced to all Heaven St. Job a mere mercenary,
Honoring God,
So said the slanderer, only for his wealth,
And when the devil's slander proved utterly false,
The devil, who hath not power over swine except that God permit,
Slandered the saint again, shifting his slander to Job's health,
A second time struck him,
And was a second time made a buffoon.

St. Job, the blameless worshiper of God,
A title given a scant handful of times in the entire scripture,
Stands a prince to God's right hand,
Part of the great cloud of witnesses,
Victors who have run the race, fought the good fight, kept the faith;
Crowned and cheering those of us who still run the race.
St. Job's being struck down and rising up less than an inch apart,
His glory as a blameless worshiper of God lasts forever,
And following St. John Chrysostom, I proclaim him victor,
Not from when God restored his fortunes double,
But because when stricken, he answered,
"The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away:
As it seemed good to the Lord, so hath it come to pass;
Blessed be the Name of the Lord."
Shaking the very foundation of Hell,
A work not begun only after Christ's most blameless worshiper answered,
"Behold the slave of the Lord;
Be it unto me according to thy word."
And both blameless worshipers of God cheer me,
I who in whose suffering St. Job might see,
A faint glimmer of his own in mine,
Depression, and cancer, and so.

I thank me for providers past,
One on intake gave my dosing the benefit of the doubt,
But ere too long set their hearts on improving and regulating my dosing,
Ignoring my cries that I was incapacitated when they had gone halfway to their goal,
Genuinely saddened to see me in declining health when they reached their goal,
But not considering that their victory was costing me my life;
Under that shadow and that uncertainty I wrote,
The Consolation of Theology.
And finally, they decided that their preferred dosing,
Was not quite as important as my life.

I thank thee for providers now,
Who took me in as a refugee from a provider trying to improve my dosing,
But have decided that come spring,
They have their own new quest to improve my dosing.

I have not the right to complain,
I have not reason to complain,
And not just because Orthodox see next to nothing in terms of rights,
My life is at God's disposal:
I have never gone to sleep knowing I would ever wake,
Nor can I deny,
That this may be precisely,
How the Lord sees me off to glory.

Under this shadow,
If it really is a shadow at all,
I thank God for everything.
Glory to God for all things!

I thank God for my ranking 7th in a nationwide math contest,
For seeing me to repentance for thus defining myself,
For letting me write Profoundly Gifted Survival Guide,
A note that others may learn things I learned at dearer price.

I thank God for all things material,
For food enough even in a fast,
For bedding, for electricity, Internet access;
For clothing to spare, and Paleo food to spare;
For every flash of lightning,
Every weather called fair or foul;
For a universe which announces Thy wonder,
For Heavens that declare Thy glory:

For the phenomenon I write about in Zeitgeist and Giftedness,
My coincidences of skating ahead of the Zeitgeist,
And my hope that we may indeed be at the doors of a renaissance of Orthodoxy,
That I may witness to, living or departed.

I thank Thee for my difficulties in communicating,
With autism or without;
(For profoundly gifted traits may explain things,
Without the question of autism needed.)
I thank Thee that I have needed to struggle to communicate,
And that Thou hast been with me,
Guiding me still,

I thank Thee that Thou hast placed me,
Where Fr. Seraphim's followers have seen Creation Science as just legitimate, non-doctrinally biased "science,"
And not a massive import of Protestant belief and practice to Orthodoxy where it belongeth not,
Such things are a first domino to fall,
A second domino contrarian virtue signalling by asserting Flat Earth and the like,
Perhaps a third, to take a contrarian attitude to minor things "everybody knows" the Church asserts,
A fourth, to take a seemingly discerning exception to the deity of Christ or God's redeeming love for all sinners,
I thank Thee for when and where Thou hast placed me,
And in Thy sovereign Love.

I thank Thee for a monastery at all—
Let alone a monastery such as this,
Unworthy son and brother though I may be.

I thank Thee for the Metropolitan Abbot—
Far in excess of what rights I might construe myself;
I thank Thee for the brotherhood, both for its many kindnesses and occasional friction;
Few are wise to enter hermitage directly,
And most of us if we seek monasticism are advised to the life together,
Where even frictions are part of how the Holy Spirit works on us.

I thank Thee that I have lived in the time of Covid,
And the cyber-quarantine which makes my The Luddite's Guide to Technology all the more to the point:
I thank Thee for the many places I have landed in the right time at the right time,
I would be foolish indeed to think I earned but a sliver, if any, by my own merits.

I thank Thee that I got into the web,
Within a year or two of its foundation;
I thank Thee for my website,
For every post Thou hast given me space to write,
For every help Thou hast given me,
For awards won, whether or not they were rightly sought.

I thank Thee for the Philokalia,
And an Abbot wise enough to assign me humbler fare;
I thank Thee both for his blessings to read things he thinks would fit me now,
And his refraining from offering a blessing when I might better be served by something else:
I thank Thee that I have in him a physician,
To free me from self-will, a gate of Hell;
I thank Thee for each brother;
Perhaps even it may be said, as Ransom spoke in That Hideous Strength:
"You never chose me. I never chose you."
And if I live in times resonant with That Hideous Strength's ills,
I thank Thee for the compliment Thou hast given me,
Unworthy of it though I may ever be:
For Thou hast not placed me, as in Narnia,
Where peaceful reign followed peaceful reign,
Until there was hardly anything to be put in history books.

I thank Thee for the many good things I do not even think to thank Thee for;
To be placed in such a Creation,
And under a God the Spiritual Father,
Where everything that happens,
Is said to be a blessing from God,
Or a temptation allowed for our strengthening.
I thank thee for my Abbot,
Who like any good Abbot rejoices in the creation of immortal gods:
And Thou Thyself who guidest him,
And makes his work a participation that both represents and embodies,
Thine own Work,
In the Creation of immortal gods.

I thank Thee for marriage,
And the many who find life in its blessed estate;
I thank Thee that my parents are still married to each other;
I thank Thee both for what they did wisely,
And where you have given me something to outgrow.

I thank Thee for my teachers and mine education;
For blessings and temptations for my strength;
I thank Thee that my Abbot has clarified,
That I am no longer an academic,
And has set me on a start of obediences,
To help me grow, as he seeks for each brother.

I thank Thee for the Hieromonk,
Who met me briefly on a pilgrimage elsewhere,
I hope I have not embarrassed him,
For he has done much to help me.

I thank Thee for each brother,
Child though I may be,
And their patience towards me.

I thank Thee for a 3D printer,
Both when it worked and now,
In the giving and the taking a lesson alike,
I thank Thee for what I have owned,
And what I have never owned.

I thank Thee that by Archimandrite Zacharias's writing, blessed by my Abbot,
I have been given a glimpse,
Of being a monk,
Identifying with all Adam,
Repenting, if Thou allowest,
To the benefit of all Adam.

And I thank Thee that I am a novice now,
"Bishops wish they were novices!"
And I thank Thee for Thy Holy Cross Hermitage,
And the welcome they gave me,
And the friendship that continues.

I am unworthy to thank Thee,
But I thank Thee still;
Thou art beyond all that even can be thought,
And yet Thou offerest to be our God, and my God.

If I carry a calm with me,
And am proven to be a calming presence,
I thank Thee for that,
And for seeing me through struggles that it took.

I thank you for words about arrogance in The Consolation of Theology:

A Hymn to Arrogance.

The Saint opened his Golden Mouth and sang,
'There be no war in Heaven,
Not now, at very least,
And not ere were created,
The royal race of mankind.
Put on your feet the Gospel of peace,
And pray, a-stomping down the gates of Hell.
There were war in Heaven but ever brief,
The Archangel Saint Michael,
Commander of the bodiless hosts,
Said but his name, "Michael,"
Which is, being interpreted,
"Who is like God?"
With that the rebellion were cast down from Heaven,
Sore losers one and all.
They remain to sharpen the faithful,
God useth them to train and make strength.
Shall the axe boast itself against him that heweth therewith?
Or shall the saw magnify itself against him that shaketh it?
As if the rod should shake itself against them that lift it up,
Or as if the staff should lift up itself,
As if it were no wood.
Therefore be not dismayed,
If one book of Holy Scripture state,
That the Devil incited King David to a census,
And another sayeth that God did so,
For God permitted it to happen by the Devil,
As he that heweth lifteth an axe,
And God gave to David a second opportunity,
In the holy words of Joab.
Think thou not that God and the Devil are equal,
Learnest thou enough of doctrine,
To know that God is greater than can be thought,
And hath neither equal nor opposite,
The Devil is if anything the opposite,
Of Michael, the Captain of the angels,
Though truth be told,
In the contest between Michael and the Devil,
The Devil fared him not well.
The dragon wert as a little boy,
Standing outside an Emperor's palace,
Shooting spitwads with a peashooter,
Because that wert the greatest harm,
That he saweth how to do.
The Orthodox Church knoweth well enough,
'The feeble audacity of the demons.'
Read thou well how the Devil crowned St. Job,
The Devil and the devils aren't much,
Without the divine permission,
And truth be told,
Ain't much with it either:
God alloweth temptations to strengthen;
St. Job the Much-Suffering emerged in triumph.
A novice told of an odd clatter in a courtyard,
Asked the Abbot what he should do:
"It is just the demons.
Pay it no mind," came the answer.
Every devil is on a leash,
And the devout are immune to magic.
Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder:
The young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.
The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.
Wherefore be thou not arrogant towards men,
But be ever more arrogant towards devils and the Devil himself:
"Blow, and spit on him."'

And if I, utterly unworthy to give Thee thanks, may make so bold to make a request:

May you raise me up to pen a fitting word about humility?

Glory to God for all things!

Thy most unworthy slave,
Br. Christos

Upon investigation, what was found was that it makes a profound difference for the taste of frozen food whether it is frozen at relatively high temperatures in the frozen range such as Western frozen food was until then, versus frozen food that is frozen at much bitterly colder temperatures than had been so far been used in Western freezing of foods.

As to why fish tasted different when it was deep frozen versus when it was put into freezers just barely below the freezing point, the bitter cold created lots of small ice crystals in the freezing fish very quickly, and these crystals were too small to generally rupture cell walls. When fish is frozen just a small amount below the freezing point, a few ice crystals form very quickly, and they grow large and rupture cell walls. Upon being taken out of freezing temperatures and cooked, fish frozen in bitter cold had intact cells that tasted like fresh food with intact cell walls, while fish frozen in temperatures just cold enough to freeze had cell walls torn by large ice crystals, to the effect of tasting much inferior to fish that was either fresh and never frozen, or quickly frozen in a deep freeze.

There is one sense in which a philosophical bent can look at frozen food with ice crystals big and small, and analyze from then on, but "common sense philosophy" is such a rarity, almost a contradiction in terms, because the philosopher seeks the simplicity of a single or a few large ice crystals that turn out to break cell walls in their crystalline clarity. People who have claim a "common sense" philosophy seem to have an inevitable caveat: hence Bishop Berkeley offers or at least claims smooth sailing with common sense, but only if you accept his "idealism," which bears no particular connection to the common label of "idealism" conveying a sense of a naive purism absent in many who are more experienced, but instead transfers the concept of the object from the subject to the object, in the term C.S. Lewis used in The Discarded Image, where it makes sense to speak of a rock, but by "rock" one does not mean that there is some kind of physical item that has any form of existence outside of minds, but only the sensation and presence of the minds of men and of God. In a philosophy TA who argued this, there are rooms that stop existing once you leave them, those one moves through in a dream, and rooms that don't stop existing when you leave them are only barely more real than the items we hallucinate in dreams.

One webpage written by a non-philosopher venturing into philosophy said that all we experience is an illusion (one could say a hallucination as much as dreams), but behind the illusion of a brick is (drum roll please) a brick. And Berkeleyan philosophy retains the illusion, the shared waking hallucination as well as the individual hallucination in dreams, but dispenses with a concept that there is an extra-mental brick that gives the illusion of a brick.

A visit to Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A History of Idolatry would see an opening point to say that a rainbow can be seen but is not a discrete physical items as far as atomized physics would understand things, and then goes on to say the same must apply to our experience of a tree. It could help some people see how speaking of a brick incorporates some social construction. To someone who has grown up in the West, there is a distinct concept of a brick (as opposed to, for instance, uncut stone) which has the shape of a rectangular prism with some holes (in an unglamarous version of "strong but light"er technology), and is ordinarily used in building walls in construction. Someone who has grown up in purely aboriginal environments will not likely perceive a brick wall as a regular geometric pattern of bricks and mortar used to build what is conceptualized as a "wall"; a person not exposed to such has no reason to have a concept of what the rest of a brick would look like upon merely seeing one side incorporated into a wall.

Though, it might be added with reference to the nature connection movement or the defiling read of Wizard of the Upper Amazon, people in aboriginal settings will come upon a natural scene and at a glance see things an urban person could not be led to see even with much effort. Something analogous is discussed in Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge, where an adult inculturated in Western middle class culture can look at X-rays and see things leap out at a glance that people outside the culture of expert practice could not be led to see. And this is for Westerners who began to read X-rays as adults. It is a capital error to conceive of primitive people as simply a modern person, perhaps a dumber modern person, with a great many points of knowledge subtracted. Primitive literacy in the surrounding environment, such as one can get late, remedial ABC's for in the nature connection movement, means taking in a wealth of things that most of us reared in civilization could not even imagine.

I hesitate to speak of astrology because it is one of the things that has come out, and it does not offer the same merely academic specimen it may have had in ages past. I regret choosing alchemy as an example to open The Horn of Joy. My conscience forbade me to read Planet Narnia which I understand to unfold the characteristics and qualities of the seven astrological planets in the seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia. However, I wish to declare at least one brief claim about astrology, suggested by some to be a precursor to today's scientific determinism.

I do not believe the alignments of stars and planets in any way influence us, I said "Not for purposes of astrology!" when someone asked me to confirm my birthdate and provice where I was born, and I do not believe we have business with astrology. However, I do believe that the time of year one is born could influence one's initial experiences, including adult behaviors, and there would be positive selection in a folk system like astrology, and I would furthermore posit that as a theory the descriptions of any astrological sign describes any person than behaviorism, a cell-rupturing crystal in which, to cite The Discarded Image, the appearance of subjectivity is transferred from the object to the subject. Astrology cannot afford to rupture the cell membranes of common sense too badly, or people will reject it. Behaviorism is like much of philosophy in that it does rupture cells and produces a flat picture which, perhaps, describes no one better than any astrological assertion of personality type. Even if we restrict our attention to bird brains, it is unclear to an uninitiate like me how one would use behaviorism to explain bird brains’ well-documented ability to give GPS a run for its money in their homing! (I rather suspect that behaviorism draws one’s eyes away from asking or really seeing such questions.)

In C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, right after Ransom (the Director) has raised a philosopher's objection to MacPhee's assumptions, is found the following:

"The question is worth raising, Mr. Director," said MacPhee, "because I submit that it points to an essential falsity in the whole system of this place."...

"How do you mean, MacPhee?" asked the Director.

"I mean that there is a half-hearted attempt to adopt an attitude towards irrational creatures which cannot consistently be maintained. And I’ll do the justice to say you’ve never tried. The [tame] bear [kept as a pet] is kept in the house and given apples and golden syrup till it’s near bursting—"...

"The bear, as I was observing," said MacPhee, "is kept in the house and pampered. The pigs are kept in a stye and killed for bacon. I would be interested to know the philosophical rationale of the distinction."...

MacPhee made a little stamp of impatience and said something which was drowned first by Ransom’s laughter and then by a great clap of wind which shook the window as if it would blow it in.

MacPhee is complaining that he can not find a single (large) crystal that would contain both the keeping of pets and the use of animals for meat. But Ransom has not succeeded at placing both in the same large crystal; both coexist in his mind in a number of small crystals that keep cell membranes intact.

The suggestion I offer here is philosophical in character, and I am not using "philosophy" with the common meaning of "my philosophy," where the phrase "my opinion," or "my approach," would be more appropriate, along with a suggestion that a non-philosopher's "my philosophy" is almost never the sort of thing a philosopher trades in. But I would call my suggestion here philosophical without being offered as a part or aspect of an encompassing philosophy. I would call it philosophical, at least up to a point, without being the sort of thing that qualifies as a philosophy. And suggest that common sense philosophy, so much as one may speak of, might sacrifice the philosopher's few large crystals for eclectic common sense's avoidance of rupturing cell membranes. (And remind the reader that in Orthodoxy, attempting to endow the Orthodox Church with its first systematic theology is asking for a heresy trial.)

Orthodoxy extends in another direction away from mere common sense, offering foothills and peaks of mysticism, but the more spiritually advanced do not find bigger crystals; if they depart from a close map of small crystals, they depart in the direction of the living flesh of a live organism.

But that is the topic of another article entirely, and one which I might or might not write.

The tweet treated the French leader as so obviously out of touch with reality that further comment was not even offered. But I'd like to talk a bit about my own education to say why there was a problem, not with the French leader, but the twit.

I have had about as much education in mathematics and STEM as there is to be had, though I did not end up with a PhD, and about as much education in academic theology as there is to be had, thought I did not end up with a PhD there either, and read Latin and Greek at a significant level, and for that matter spent a semester at the Sorbonne (I am the local francophone at my monastery). And I believe studying Latin and Greek is relevant, or at least reading classics in translation (I have read little beyond the Bible in Latin or Greek). And I believe a knowledge of the world's classics, such as one can find in the Norton Anthology of World Literature (beginnings to 1650, 1650 to present).

My six best works, or at least those that have most met with profound reader approval, are those in C.J.S. Hayward in Under 99 Pages:

• An inversion of C.S. Lewis's most famous work in The Angelic Letters.
• A paradoxically meditative poem in A Canticle to Holy, Blessed Solipsism.
• A nontechnical version of what I had hoped to argue in my PhD thesis in theology, "Religion and Science" Is Not Just Intelligent Design vs. Evolution.
• A very light adaptation of Plato's most famous allegory in Plato: The Allegory of the... Flickering Screen?
• A hymn of glory in Doxology.
• The book people ask why St. Boethius did not write: The Consolation of Theology. (St. Boethius instead wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, neo-Platonism's finest little gem.)

And just for the record, I have not read Plato in Greek nor St. Boethius in Latin, and I am on the whole not a literary Weird Al Yankovic; it's just that my best works seem to go further when I am leaning on a past giant. Also, for what it's worth, I have worked in PHP, JavaScript, and Python, the last of which is my favorite (computer) language.

My first and less serious objection to the perspective in the tweet has to do with how I talked my way out of candidacy for a dream job. My interviewer said I would have my complete choice of languages and platform, and the core of the job and its description was to program a payment gateway that would take about a million people's membership fees. I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain one Information Technology manager's published opinion that ten years prior, IT work was "build, build, build", but then, even then, it was "Partner before buy; buy before build." And it wouldn't just be faster and cheaper to zero in on a good, vetted, mature open source project that could handle the collection of annual membership fees; it would have been hands down more secure. For me to give my interviewer what he thought he wanted would have been to put both of us in a situation where a routine programming error could jeopardize a million people's finances, and I would have had no other programmer in the organization to ask to review my code. A business analyst would not have boiled down "collect membership fees" to "write a program from scratch to collect membership fees;" a more obvious interpretation of the situation would have been to "identify and acquire a secure software solution appropriate to collecting membership fees." By that time, the wheel had already been reinvented many different ways, and so had the internal combustion engine. And I do not say that Python etc. skills are irrelevant; when I had trouble with WordPress I circumvented the issue by implementing a simple content management system in Python, and that has generated a site that I'm building. But the number of people who really need to know these languages is small and shrinking. I think Python is a particularly good choice for people interested in recreational and hobbyist programming, but I do not think it is beneficial across the board to expand primary education to cover the five R's of Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and Ruby on Rails.

But here is my more serious concern. My prior spiritual director, before this monastery, looked at what I talked about and had written and said that my primary contribution seemed to be talking about Orthodoxy and technology. And that is work where a deep and sensitive understanding of METS issues is essential, but the heavy lifting is all done on humanities's power. And in terms of the liberal arts ideal, and educating an informed public, Latin and Greek in middle school makes sense. It sounds like an informed opinion, and not only makes classics more available to the general public, but provide an environment where French intellectual giants will grow up with the languages of most of the heavy lifting in humanities in the history of Western culture. Proficiencies in classical languages will also age and mature well compared to computer languages in particular. Someone who learned to read classics in Latin and Greek twenty years ago will have much profitable reading available today; but someone who had learned C, C++ and Java ten years ago, and has not kept up with the risings and fallings of programming languages, will be considered a dinosaur today. Classics age better than fashion.

"Conversation is like texting for adults"

There is a sort of chauvinism I have encountered, not least in my advisor saying, "Do you make allowances for greater ignorance in the past?" to which I coolly answered, "I do not make allowances for greater ignorance in the past. Allowances for different ignorance in the past are more negotiable." I refrained from saying that I make allowances for greater ignorance in the present. But I get ahead of myself.

Today's youth are not even learning face-to-face social skills, and still we have a chauvinism that we assume the competencies of our predecessors without needing to acquire these competencies as our predecessors have. Thomas Kuhn's post-truth account of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, says that after a heavily political revolution has occurred, history is rewritten so as to provide an additive picture where the history of related developments adds increases of knowledge when the change is not additive, but ecological. I have studied, though I find it very hard to put into words, what was lost in the founding of Western science. (The best indication I can easily give is to look at what C.S. Lewis says about science/magic in the final third of The Abolition of Man, and dig deeper in Mary Midgley's Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning, and perhaps my "Physics", which may or may not help.) But there is some real merit in what a friend wrote:

Learning with your whole body

I'm assuming that most of you have been to college. Even if you haven't, you've been learning for 12 years in an institution that has taught you that learning is done with the brain, that it comes from words written on screens or paper, and that the way you show what you've learned is to write intelligent words on screens or paper.

Here is the first thing I need you to understand: out here in the garden, you do not learn with your brain. You learn with your hands and with your eyes and with your whole body. Your brain is involved, sure. But don't let it take over. Don't separate "learning" and "working." Every moment you're in this teaching garden, and even a lot of the time you're working in other parts of the farm, if you pay attention you can be learning constantly.

School teaches us to think of learning as information. It's such a mistake! Yes, there is information that will help you learn to garden, and I'll teach you some of it—but if you don't learn it with your body, it won't be much use to you.

You're going to need educated eyes—you're going to need the ability to look at a plant and know if it's thriving, to look at a little seedling and be able to see in your mind how big it'll be so you can give it enough space, to look at a patch of weeds and have a sense of how much bigger it'll be next week if you don't kill it now. (The most advanced skill, which I'm still learning, is looking at a row of green beans and estimating—from how thick the blossoms & small beans on it are—how much it's going to produce over the next couple weeks.) You need educated hands—you need to be able to feel, when you're swinging a hoe, whether you're really biting into the roots of the weeds, and you need hands that know how to weed fast and effectively, and how to use a pitchfork, etc, etc. And you need instincts, too—when you've just transplanted a plant, you need to have the instinct to check on it till it's established, same as people have the instinct to check on a baby.

And you learn all that by experience. Writing it down won't help. Doing it while being aware of it is what helps. Be in the moment, don't be thinking of something else while you work. (Well, maybe when you're weeding strawberries!) Get your hands in the dirt and feel it, compare it with how it felt last week, watch and observe the plants as they grow—and watch the weeds as they die! Watch how much quicker they die on a sunny or a windy day, watch how they re-root themselves even from a lying-down position if it's too wet. At some point it all comes together and you start to develop a sort of instinctive understanding of the garden as a natural system. I've been doing this for five years now—I knew next to nothing about gardening before that—and I have a sense now of how all the pieces work together, not in theory but what's happening in real time in my own garden, and it's such a pleasure. It has been such a pleasure to go from someone who learned things only with her brain, to someone with hands and eyes that understand my garden.

I know some of what I'm saying you may already know, but I still think it's worth saying at the start here. I've just seen so often how hard it is to get rid of the idea that reality is in our heads or on paper and start focusing on the reality that's under our feet—to stop going on what you think is supposed to happen instead of looking at what really happens. I know it took me a lot longer than it should have. I still remember my breakthrough moment. I was using the push-cultivator—which I'll teach you how to use—and it was a new tool for us at that point so I didn't know its capabilites. The thing is that when the weeds get to a certain height, the push-cultivator doesn't kill them anymore—you have to use a hoe. But I would push the cultivator on down the row and it would kill a few weeds and knock down the rest and cover them with dirt so the row looked clean, and I never noticed that their roots were still in the soil, and in my head I would make a little check mark—well that row's done. The next week, we'd be looking through the garden to see what needed doing, and there would be a bunch of weeds in that row again, and I'd go, "Wow! They came back fast!" and cultivate again. I still remember the day the little lightbulb came on in my head and I realized I'd never killed those weeds at all. I felt so dumb. That was the day I learned to look at what I was doing. Not just at what I thought I was doing.

And that's a lot of what is involved in learning a skill—not just knowing "how" but involving your hands and eyes and brain all together in the process, so that you can feel how the motion is working and you can see whether it's working—and you remember to double-check the next day whether it worked!

Okay, I have one more story. This one taught me so much. We had a temporary volunteer in the garden for three days. He was this guy who, if you told him how to do something, would look annoyed as if you were patronizing him or something. Because, you know, everybody knows how to hoe, right? Well, I got embarrassed by him being offended and figured he was right, maybe it was rude to try and tell someone how to do such simple stuff. I was a beginner too, at the time. Erin told us to hoe a certain section, and we did it. And we did it backwards. We started at the back of the section and walked backwards to the front as we hoed, so that all the plants we hoed up ended up in a pile in the next bit we had to hoe, covering the weeds there. The result was that at the end of our work all you could see was a pile of dead plants, so it looked great, it looked done. And the next day when those dead plants had dried up and withered away, what you could see was a section that looked like someone had hit it a few times here and there with a hoe—at least half of the weeds were still alive and kicking. The next day Erin took me aside and showed me how to hoe for real: you move forward, and you hoe up every inch of the soil, whether you see a plant there or not. And I've never felt embarrassed to teach anyone to hoe since then. It's a skill.

It's a huge mistake to think of any part of farming as unskilled labor. A skilled worker can weed about five times as fast as a beginner—if not more. Farming is skilled, complicated, grounded work that involves your hands and your eyes and your brain and your whole body—and at some point you may find it starts to involve your heart. You're learning something this year that you can be proud of.

(Heather Munn)

In other conversation, she said that people seem to assume that low-prestige work doesn't require skill. And this is, if you will, one case of our chauvinism in assuming we have the knowledge of prior ages without any attempt to learn it, because we're making progress or whatever.

Before zeroing in on one case study, let me underscore one quote by General Omar Bradley that I will also quote below:

We have too many men of science; too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

A Deliberate and Studied Ignorance

I would like to quote Un-man's Tales: C.S. Lewis's Perelandra, Fairy Tales, and Feminism in full:

Own it in Paper!

A first clue to something big, tucked into a choice of children's books

I was once part of a group dedicated to reading children's stories (primarily fantasy) aloud. At one point the group decided to read Patricia Wrede's Dealing with Dragons. I had a visceral reaction to the book as something warped, but when I tried to explain it to the group by saying that it was like the Un-man in Perelandra, I was met with severe resistance from two men in the group. Despite this, and after lengthy further discussions, I was able to persuade them that the analogy was at least the best I could manage in a tight time slot.

I was puzzled at some mysterious slippage that had intelligent Christians who appreciated good literature magnetized by works that were, well... warped. And that mysterious slippage seemed to keep cropping up at other times and circumstances.

Why the big deal? I will get to the Un-man's message in a moment, but for now let me say that little girls are sexist way too romantic. And this being sexist way too romantic motivates girls to want fairy tales, to want some knight in shining armor or some prince to sweep her off her feet. And seeing how this sexist deeply romantic desire cannot easily be ground out of them, feminists have written their own fairy tales, but...

To speak from my own experience, I never realized how straight traditional fairy tales were until I met feminist fairy tales. And by 'straight' I am not exactly meaning the opposite of queer (though that is close at hand), but the opposite of twisted and warped, like Do You Want to Date My Avatar? (I never knew how witchcraft could be considered unnatural vice until I read the witches' apologetic in Terry Pratchett's incredibly warped The Wee Free Men.) There is something warped in these tales that is not covered by saying that Dealing with Dragons has a heroine who delights only in what is forbidden, rejects marriage for the company of dragons, and ridicules every time its pariahs say something just isn't done. Seeing as how rooting out from the desire for fairy tales from little girls and little kids in general, authors have presented warped anti-fairy tales.

Ella Enchanted makes it plain: for a girl or woman to be under obedience is an unmixed curse. There is no place for "love, honor, and obey."

The commercials for Tangled leave some doubt about whether the heroine sings a Snow White-style "Some day my prince will come."

The Un-man's own tales

Perelandra has a protagonist who visits Venus or Perelandra, where an unfallen Eve is joined first by him and then by the antagonist, called the Un-man because he moves from prelest or spiritual illusion to calling demons or the Devil into himself and then letting his body be used as a demonic puppet.

How does the Un-man try to tempt this story's Eve?

[The Lady said:] "I will think more of this. I will get the King to make me older about it."

[The Un-man answered:] "How greatly I desire to meet this King of yours! But in the matter of Stories he may be no older than you himself."

"That saying of yours is like a tree with no fruit. The King is always older than I, and about all things."...

[The Lady said,] "What are [women on earth] like?"

[The Un-man answered,] "They are of great spirit. They always reach out their hands for the new and unexpected good, and see that it is good long before the men understand it. Their minds run ahead of what Maleldil has told them. They do not need to wait for Him to tell them what is good, but know it for themselves as He does..."

...The Lady seemed to be saying very little. [The Un-man]'s voice was speaking gently and continuously. It was not talking about the Fixed Land nor even about Maleldil. It appeared to be telling, with extreme beauty and pathos, a number of stories, and at first Ransom could not perceive any connecting link between them. They wre all about women, but women who had apparently lived at different periods of the world's history and in quiet differences. From the Lady's replies it appeared that the stories contained much that she did not understand; but oddly enough the Un-man did not mind. If the questions aroused by any one story proved at all difficult to answer, the speaker simply dropped that story and instantly began another. The heroines of the stories seemed all to have suffered a great deal—they had been oppressed by their fathers, cast off by husbands, deserted by lovers. Their children had risen up against them and society had driven them out. But the stories all ended, in a sense, hapily: sometimes with honours and praises to a heroine still living, more often by tardy acknowledgment and unavailing tears after her death. As the endless speech proceeded, the Lady's questions grew always fewer...

The expression on [the Lady's] face, revealed in the sudden light, was one that [Ransom] had not seen there before. Her eyes were not fixed on the narrator; as far as that went, her thoughts might have been a thousand miles away. Her lips were shut and a little pursed. Her eyebrows were slightly raised. He had not yet seen her look so like a woman of our own race; and yet her expression was one he had not very often met on earth—except, as he realized with a shock, on the stage. "Like a tragedy queen" was the disgusting comparison that arose in his mind. Of course it was a gross exaggeration. It was an insult for which he could not forgive himself. And yet... and yet... the tableau revealed by the lightning had photographed itself on his brain. Do what he would, he found it impossible not to think of that new look in her face. A very good tragedy queen, no doubt, very nobly played by an actress who was a good woman in real life...

A moment later [the Un-man] was explaining that men like Ransom in his own world—men of that intensely male and backward-looking type who always shrank away from the new good—had continuously laboured to keep women down to mere childbearing and to ignore the high destiny for which Maleldil had actually created her...

The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy's true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Lady is complementarian to the point where one wonders if the label 'complementarian' is sufficient, and the demon or Devil using the Un-man's body is doing his treacherous worst to convert her to feminism. Hooper says he is trying to make her fall by transgressing one commandment, and that is true, but the entire substance of the attack to make her fall is by seducing her to feminism.

A strange silence in the criticism

Walter Hooper's C.S. Lewis: Companion and Guide treats this dialogue in detail but without the faintest passing reference to feminism, men and women, sex roles, or anything else in that nexus. It does, however, treat the next and final book in the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, and defend Lewis from "anti-feminism" in a character who was a woman trying to do a dissertation on Milton: Lewis, it is revealed, had originally intended her to be doing a dissertation on biochemistry, but found that he was not in a position to make that part of the story compelling, and so set a character whose interests more closely paralleled his own. So the issue of feminism was on his radar, possibly looming large. But, and this is a common thread with other examples, he exhibits a mysterious slippage. His account gets too many things right to be dismissed on the ground that he doesn't know how to read such literature, but it also leaves too much out, mysteriously, to conclude that he gave anything like such a scholar's disinterested best in explaining the text. (It is my own opinion that Hooper in fact does know how to read; he just mysteriously sets this ability aside when Lewis counters feminism.) And this slippage keeps happening in other places and context, always mysterious on the hypothesis that the errors are just errors of disinterested, honest scholarship.

Jerry Root, in his own treatment in C.S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil: An Investigation of a Pervasive Theme, treats subjectivism as spiritual poison and problem of evil Lewis attacks in his different works: Root argues it to be the prime unifying theme in Lewis). But with slight irony, Root seems to turn subjectivistic, or at least disturbing, precisely where his book touches gender roles and egalitarianism. In his comments on The Great Divorce's greatest saint-figure, a woman, Susan Smith, is slighted: among other remarks, he quotes someone as saying that women in C.S. Lewis's stories are "he neglects any intellectual virtue in his female characters," and this is particularly applied to Sarah Smith. When he defends Lewis, after a fashion, Root volunteers, "a book written in the 1940s will lack some accommodations to the culture of the twenty-first century." But this section is among the gooiest logic in Root's entire text, speaking with a quasi-psychoanalytic Freudian or Jungian outlook of "a kind of fertile mother-image and nature-goddess," that is without other parallel and certainly does not infect the discussion of Lewis's parents, who well enough loom large at points, but not in any psychoanalytic fashion. Root's entire treatment at this point has an "I can't put my finger on it, but—" resemblance to feminists disarming and neutralizing any claim that the Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary could in any way, shape, or form contribute to the well-standing of women: one author, pointing out the difficulty of a woman today being both a virgin and a mother, used that as a pretext to entirely dismiss the idea that She could be a model for woman or a token of woman's good estate, thus throwing out the baby, the bathwater, and indeed the tub. The Mother of God is She who answered, Be it unto me according to thy word, an answer that may be echoed whether or not one is a virgin, a mother, or for that matter a woman.

The critique Root repeats, on reflection, may meet an Orthodox response of "Huh?", or more devastatingly, "Yes, but what's your point?", not because Lewis portrays a saint as "no model of intellectual virtue," but because Orthodox sainthood is not a matter of intellectual virtue. Among its rich collection of many saints there are very few models of intellectual virtue, admittedly mostly men, and usually having received their formation outside the Orthodox Church: St. John Chrysostom was called "Chrysostom" or "Golden-Mouth" because of his formation and mastery of pagan rhetoric. But intellectual virtue as a whole is not a central force in the saints, and Bertrand Russell's observation that in the Gospels not one word is put in praise of intelligence might be accepted, not as a weakness of the Gospel, but as a clarification of what is and is not central to Christian faith. And in terms of what is truly important, we would do well to recall the story of St. Zosima and St. Mary of Egypt. If Lewis's image of sainthood is a woman who is not an academic, this is not an embarrassment to explain away, but a finger on the pulse of what does and does not matter for sainthood.

Root mentions the Un-man briefly, and gives heavy attention to the man who would become the Un-man as he appears in the prior book in the trilogy, but does not reference or suggest a connection between the Un-man and feminism. Root became an egalitarian, and shifts in his book from speaking of "men" to saying "humankind". And this is far from one scholar's idiosyncracy; a look at the World Evangelical Alliance's online bookstore as I was involved with it showed this mysterious slippage not as something you find a little here, a little there, but as endemic and without any effective opposition.

Un-man's tales for Grown-Ups

During my time as webmaster to the World Evangelical Alliance, the one truly depressing part of my work was getting the bookstore online. Something like eighty to ninety percent of the work was titles like Women as Risk-Takers for God which were Un-man's tales for adults. I was depressed that the World Evangelical Alliance didn't seem to have anything else to say on its bookshelves: not only was there a dearth of complementarian "opposing views" works like Man and Woman in Christ, but there was a dearth of anything besides Un-man's tales. The same mysterious phenomenon was not limited to a ragtag group of friends, or individual scholars; it was dominant at the highest level in one of the most important parachurch organizations around, and not one that, like Christians for Biblical Equality, had a charter of egalitarian or feminist concerns and priorities.

Conclusion

G.K. Chesterton said, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed." That might hold for Chesterton's day, and classics like Grimm and MacDonald today, but today's fairy tales, or rather Un-man's tales, do not tell children the dragons can be killed. Children already know that deep down inside. They tell children dragons can be befriended and that dragons may make excellent company. For another title of the myriad represented by Dealing with Dragons, look at the tale of cross-cultural friendship one may look for in The Dragon and the George. When first published, Dealing with Dragons might have been provocative. Now Tangled is not. And reading Perelandra leaves one with an uncomfortable sense that C.S. Lewis apparently plagiarized, in the Un-man's tales, works written decades after his death.

This issue is substantial, and Lewis's sensitivity to it is almost prophetic: sensibilities may have changed, but only in the direction of our needing to hear the warning more. And it is one Christians seem to be blind to: complementarianism seems less wrong than petty, making a mountain out of a molehill. But the core issue is already a mountain, not a molehill.

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Aim for something better than Un-man's Tales.

What is this mysterious slippage?

One of the two men who shut me down completely when I compared Dealing with Dragons with Un-man's tales, told me when I spoke with him a reason why my comparison was out of bounds: it provoked "a strong emotional reaction" to compare the book the group had chosen to Un-man's tales, and so I was making a problematic comparison. With his efforts to waft away and disable my reaction, I zeroed back in on the center: first, that the style of telling the tales was exactly the same between the Un-man and Patricia Wrede, and second, the content of the tales was exactly the same. But let me take a step further back.

That man was my best friend, and there was one time where he went away for a weekend and had a conversation with me the like of which I have not seen before or since. He gave extremely forceful and heavily loaded language indicating that "there is no... male nor female" mean as much as possible (he did not honestly admit that included was that "no male nor female" mean as much as possible what a feminist would want it to mean), and the question remains of what to do with passages that "appear to say" (always, and with another friend who found her way into the gender rainbow, heavy verbal stress on "appear" for any inconvenient passage) something contrary, and tried to neutralize the claim that the husband is the head of his wife by saying that in Greek the term "head" need not mean "boss" but can also mean "source," as in that "the head of a stream is where the stream came from (he never explained why the assertion that "head" means "source" diminished the authority of a husband).

I took a bit before responding, "That's loaded language!," followed by suggesting that he might repeat what he said with the language loaded in the opposite direction.

That conversation, with a man whose character was gentleness, honesty, and truth, left me mystified: why is it that feminism is always advanced by slimy language? This might be a worst example in my life (at least apart from the text I analyzed in my diploma thesis, Craig Keener's Paul, Women, and Wives: Marriage and Woman's Ministry in the Letters of Paul), but it is far from an only example in my life, and since I started paying attention to the matter I have never noticed an attempt to advance feminism that was not slippery in rhetoric. The jarring blow helped me move from sitting on the fence between egalitarianism and complementarianism (and not considering the question important), to the belief that feminism is bankrupt enough that it cannot convincingly be advanced through clean methods of persuasion. My question was initially one of rhetoric alone, but my concern grew to encompass a movement that needs to use such language to recruit, and needed to use such language when feminism was widely held to be the moral high ground over complementarianism, and there was an incredible hegemony to the belief that if you want to advance the good of woman, you do so by promoting feminism. This was years and almost decades before I would quip, "He for She. Because feminism knows it is sinking."

My advisor on that dissertation, incidentally, has been a plenary speaker at a Christians for Biblical Equality ("well, I suppose one in three is not bad") conference. And he did not hinder me from a conservative thesis; Cambridge professors do not normally take out their differences on students. But he did try to recruit me. One example was, "And what about Biblical Egalitarians, who believe 'In Christ, there is no male nor female'?"

I responded by dismantling the missile: I first commented that in English language idiom, talking about the group who does such-and-such idiomatically means that the unshared, distinguishing feature of that group is such-and-such, and his assertion communicates that feminists and Biblical Egalitarians believe that "In Christ, there is no male nor female" and their opponents do not, where one conservative response might be, "The same God inspired passages feminists like and passages they don't like, and if your interpretation needs to neutralize one to make room for the other, your interpretation is broken." I do not ever recall a conservative rejection or attack on "In Christ there is no male nor female," because complementarians also believe, really and truly, that "In Christ there is no male nor female" is as much part of divine revelation as passages feminists attack.

Then I drew attention to a hidden payload: "In Christ there is no male nor female" was assumed to mean as much as possible what a feminist would want it to mean, an identical legal franchise extended to both male and female. If it is hard to see anything else, I would add a passing reference to St. Maximus the Confessor, who said that in hesychasm monks know what temptation is coming by what image they see: if a man's face who had wronged us appeared imagination, there was a temptation to anger coming, and if a woman's face appeared, a temptation to lust was coming, and in Christ there is no male nor female, meaning neither anger nor lust. Now I don't believe this is a complete interpretation; if it is truth, it has the truth of a layer, and there are other things on other levels that "In Christ there is no male nor female" should mean. But I reference St. Maximus the Confessor to give an example of what besides a feminist goal of equal legal-style franchise "In Christ there is no male nor female" could mean.

And this happened easily a couple of dozen times: he asked, regarding inclusive language in translation, if I thought Greek or English language conventions should be followed in Bible translations, and I said, "You're begging the question!" because he used "English language conventions" to automatically mean belabored inclusive language instead of naturally inclusive language, when the very point under consideration was whether a New Testament written in naturally inclusive language should be most faithfully translated by exchanging the naturally inclusive Greek for belabored inclusive English. At some point, after a great deal of this, he got discouraged and tried to recruit me less often.

I would suggest that feminism represents a deliberate and chosen ignorance that needs to reach out and dupe others. The verse in Genesis that declares the image of God also says what may more picturesquely be stated as, "Prong and tunnel He created them." And feminism is devoted to annihilating what in society that works out, just as its rhetoric is post-truth, the rhetoric of the assassin's guide to making foul rhetoric.

The most politically incorrect passage in Scripture: Romans 1

For the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: who changed the truth of God into a lie, and venerated and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

Some people have said this reads as a description of today, and I used to agree with that.* I quote the passage because it is explicitly an assessment of a deliberate and chosen ignorance.

* What's the asterisk for? Simply put, we've managed to go farther. What used to be called LBG has now become "the alphabet people," because they keep adding letters in a brainstorm of sexualities (or numbers, as in 2-S). (As a techie, I think /L.*/ is appropriate for LGBTQ+, and which people are actively working on expanding to LGBTQP+.)

Furthermore, there was a moralist injunction regarding SecondLife, saying, "Fornicate using your OWN genitals!" The technological nexus we live in has had a breach with natural living. Our ancestors devised one kind of artificial environment to be in, namely indoors most of the time, and we've taken artificiality to a next level unimaginable in St. Paul's day. Committing sexual vice in person, which is all the Apostle imagined, suggests face-to-face social skills. "Chang[ing] the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things," has been superceded for changing the glory of God for monsters that don't exist except as created by man: Pokemon is "in" as I write. Pokemon trainers do things St. Paul never imagined. Again, let me quote General Omar Bradley about one single dimension of our chosen ignorance, and that before technology that must be taken for granted today:

We have too many men of science; too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

You can read my work Origins Questions if you like. I have raised concerns loud and long about The Seraphinians who have imported Protestant beliefs and practice into Orthodoxy by their young earth "Creation 'Science'". But there are serious humanist objections to the theory of evolution as well, and I have written about the theory of evolution from a humanist's eye.

Much as C.S. Lewis points out in The Abolition of Man that the popular impression that magic was the old medieval thing and science was the new thing that swept it away, when in fact there was very little magic in the Middle Ages and science was born around the high noon of magic, Darwinism arose in the same nexus as eugenics and respectable racism which treated it as a problem to show human compassion to other races. Though I don't think this is what St. Paul had in mind, we have traded in human life in the image of God to human life in the image of mere animals, and lost a sense of special obligation to other people. Some people admit of finally getting that the Creation account in Genesis 1 means that all of us are family, a very different picture from the idea that the races can and should be in ruthless and violent competition. Darwin and Galton were cousins, and the former created a theory of evolution very different from what scientists call "evolution" today, while Galton used his concept of IQ to push eugenics.

The ignorance we have today is a hydra. We have phones to turn our brains into tapioca, and in the case of The Damned Backswing, we are using Zoom to connect to people all over the world, people which we could only once in a blue moon meet with face to face. In recent history, Google scanned books and made them available, and has now confiscated access to priceless classics. Today Zoom makes things easy in terms of connecting with others, but that can be whisked away too. And at some point we will stop meeting our neighbors face-to-face, even worse than the present conditions that have led a religious leader to tell America "You can put a man on the moon but you do not meet your neighbors face-to-face." And the time will come when people stop meeting together.

Then the end will come.

Own it in Paper!

There was one LinkedIn conversation that was bigger than what I realized. One man asked a question of how to handle the fact that he was not in a position to advance professionally and had no meaningful freedom.

I suggested something like,

Let's look at a position where you have as little freedom as possible, and ask if there can be any meaningful freedom. You can probably think of some pretty gruesome examples; I would like to look at Nazi concentration camps and ask, "Is there any way to have real freedom in a Nazi concentration camp?"

One person who answered "Yes"to that question was Victor Frankl, Jewish psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote Man's Search for Meaning."

If you are not in a position to advance professionally and don't see yourself as having any real freedom, you are in an excellent position to profit from Man's Search for Meaning."

(I've got to read the book directly and not just be going off of other people's summaries!)

That hit a nerve, although my correspondent was in every sense gracious. I was unwittingly corresponding with the Jewish son of a Jewish survivor of Hitler's concentration camps, and seared by the stories. There was nothing academic to him in the example I chose. He was very gentle about his response, and he was appreciative at my suggestion that if he was in the position he said he was in, he had a great deal of meaningful freedom, and perhaps at my pointer to Man's Search for Meaning.

The core point attributed to Frankl is that we do not automatically go from stimulus to response; we go from stimulus to free choice to response, even if we are unaware of our birthright. Such an insight is also at the core of the Philokalia of the Niptic Fathers, with "nipsis" referring to an inner spiritual watchfulness. It is something like the core of what classical Buddhism has to offer as well. My dear Abbot condensed it to one line. He has said and underscored, "Never react. Never resent. Keep inner stillness."

Enjoying the here and now is a choice. Our surroundings may seem like something to escape, but that is a spiritual trap, the core response in the Philokalia being to just keep on praying until the "demon of noonday" has passed. It is a crushing experience, but over time we can learn to crush it.

Most of our surroundings are beautiful, but we can become immune to the beauty of a wooden floor, an off-white wall. But we can choose to be awake to this beauty to which we have fallen asleep. We can choose to be grateful, and by the way positive psychology is squarely on target that we should be grateful for. Mindfulness also helps; it used to be considered "paying attention" and part of politeness to the boomers, and we are seeking mindfulness from the East because we have rejected it in the West. But gratitude and mindfulness are both choices, as is enjoying beauty. A Russian proverb answers the questions by saying, "When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?" with, "There is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing is to do good for the One Who is standing at your side." Today this is recognized as profound mindfulness. It is still also manners at their best, and something that goes beyond manners.

There is also what St. John Chrysostom referred to as "healing an eye". Lust, classic Fathers say, has the characteristic of a lion who looks at a deer and sees only meat. And, perhaps I might add, meat that is rarely enough and does not engender any form of permanent satisfaction. It has been called the disenchantment of the entire universe. But a man looking at a woman has a choice to see an integral and beautiful whole: a spirit adorned with a body and a body adorned with clothing. C.S. Lewis, telling an imagined story with the saints in paradise in The Great Divorce, said,

Long after that I saw people coming to meet us. Because they were bright I saw them when they were still very distant, and at first I did not know they were people at all. Mile after mile they grew nearer. The earth shook under their tread as their strong feet sank into the wet turf. A tiny haze and a sweet smell went up where they had crushed the grass and scattered the dew. Some were naked, some robed. But the naked ones did not seem less adorned, and the robes did not disguise in those who wore them the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh.

We are not ready for such things now and C.S. Lewis offered only an imagination. Or, if you prefer Wendy Shalit's A Return to Modesty, we can be "naked and bored." But there is great deal of benefit in seeing an integrated whole, a spirit adorned with a body and a body adorned with clothing.

More broadly though, our healed eyes can sense beauty, and in rough circumstances, bleeding and in an ER, I know one who was able to see the beauty of a hospital curtain and wait in satisfaction.

It is not easy. But counselors tell those fighting various addictions, "You have more power than you think." Nipsis or spiritual watchfulness extinguishes sparks before they become a fire. If your house is on fire you can call the fire department, and they may salvage surprisingly much. If your chair is on fire a fire extinguisher may see that a fire that started on a chair, stays only with that chair. But the best option is to stomp out the first spark before it has set the rug on fire. Or if I may take the bull by the hand to mix metaphors, don't go near the bait; just ignore it and let it pass by.

Never react. Never resent. Keep inner stillness.

Happiness in the here and now is a choice, and we have more power than most of us think. When there is a little spark, dash it against the rock. But the metaphor is strained because the best solution is not to engage it and not give it the fuel of your attention.

Happiness is also a by-product of what positive psychology calls "the meaningful life," and there are other things to being healthy in your heart of hearts and having a good condition. A healthy (such as Paleo) diet / exercise / sleep can also make a big difference. But the biggest difference is always in our heart of hearts. Part of that is that we can savor the here and now and be aware of its beauty.

You can choose to be happy in the here and now.

A passionate homemaker explains.

In Lewis Caroll’s children’s books, we find a clearly articulated principle that words can do more work as long as they’re adequately compensated. ‘Vaccine’ has been cleverly redefined so that it now includes not only inoculation from a weakened or dead bacterial culture, but also an experimental genetic therapy whose long term effects are not only unknown but scarcely even guessed at. And a placebo is the kind of thing that will work almost for free.

A philosopher of science comments further.

When DDT came out, it stopped an epidemic in its tracks, and equally stopped the lingering menace of malaria that was killing more US soldiers in Vietnam than anything else. After these coups, a pesticide that is highly effective at killing insects and is still not known to cause any serious or direct harm to humans was unimpeachable as something which you could not seriously criticize in any public setting.

Peter Kreeft commented that the prophet sees through a glass, darkly, but the archivist sees through a microscope, sharply. In retrospect there was some serious “philosophical noise,” a faint societal and philosophical static, that we should have heeded but didn’t. Just a few lone naturalists noticed that the frogs in the creeks weren’t singing, and then they noticed fish kill, too, but great DDT was not the sort of thing one could fault for a problem. You could not speak ill of DDT!

Here and now we have philosophical noise at the scale of an out-of-control rock concert. It is, as chivalric literature would say, “passing strange” that FEMA so much wants to cook the books that they’re actually offering a $9,000 bribe if a death certificate says a COVID death. It is also passing illiberal that Americans who need a heart transplant are taken off the wait list entirely if they refuse to be fully injected. Or that diabetics who decline injections once presented as optional are being deprived of treatment that will prevent purely preventable amputation of their feet. Or employers mandatory vaccine requirement for remote employees who never have and never intend to set foot on an employer’s campus. Or…

COVID injections: The greatest breakthrough in human health since DDT!

A passerby interjected.

Vaccines are safe, or at least that’s what it said on one propaganda sheet meant to quell public hysteria. But why then, not long after being even partially vaccinated, did I have blood clotting that would be fatal if untreated, and why did I have to be put on “the Cadillac of blood thinners” which meant that a bad cut could cause me to bleed to death and left the ER asking of my bleeding what had happened when a four by four inch gauze pad was soaked in less than an hour, with my blood dripping on the floor?

“So,” said a grassroots community organizer,

We’re beyond rock concert levels of noise. It’s a “WTF?” in 15 foot high blinking neon. But there’s something else at play. If a word can be redefined after it was taking traction that experimental and untested COVID gene therapy injections simply were not meaningfully vaccines, they decided to redefine “vaccine” to include experimental gene therapy and make “vaccine” and “vax” the word of the year.

The precedent has been set, and now we are redefining “vaccine” at a grass level to the time-tested remedy of a saline placebo: an injection along with the doctor saying “Here is an injection based on a time-tested and powerful principle. Congratulations! You are now fully vaccinated!”

An armchair historian mused:

2022, also callable as 2020 Part Deux, looks like quite a year. We’ve come a long way since The Medieval Experience: Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity developed cubism, for instance, within a generation. Now we seem to be in a Kali-yuga, and things which would have been astonishing in a generation are happening within a year, on top of a financial crisis that escapes by the year. We’ve left the comparably merry “decade from Hell” in the dust… Islamic ascendency, BLM, new installments of demographics that have to be in a politically correct picture, gay marriage, transgender in the limelight, friends forbidden physical affection such as hugs to try and fight COVID, injections, needing booster shots and being told “not to have a false sense of security” just because you’re fully vaccinated—we’ve left cubism in the dust. And in six months to a year, maybe less, people may be able to date my words closely by key new features of the future landscape cannot now even hint at. (Is the Antichrist out yet? Or are we just working on a Matrixy realization that we are “already in the Metaverse?”)

Today is kind of like you’re a little kid and you’ve been engaged in playing outside in the snow and your parents make you come in, and it stings and you don’t want to come in however much you want. You don’t realize how frozen and numb you are until you are shocked by the pain.

And all this without a discussion of whether Romans 1 applies today.

A skeptic in the crowd asked, “Do you think a simple change in words will help?” And a monastic aspirant answered:

The people in power certainly expect as much, and it bothered them that they were losing a debate about whether COVID injections really were in fact vaccines at all. But come, let us dig deeper.

Make peace with yourself, and ten thousand around will be saved.
Save yourself and Heaven and Earth will make peace with you.

Someone I know wrote The Consolation of Theology does include A Hymn to Arrogance, and it is well worth reading.

And perhaps there are greater concerns than who assigns the definition of “vaccine.”

I quote my original review below.

My conclusion is incorrect because I was judging Matthieu Pageau’s work by the standards of patristic theology. He is in fact not writing patristic theology and not attempting to write patristic theology; his work as reflected in this book represents a handmaiden of theology, as good philosophy has (also) been called, and it is quite a helpful handmaiden at that.

The book reads well given that adjustment and clarification.

Great Expectations

“I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu. “When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island. I am not so old now as I was then. Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the Sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age. And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth’s eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance.”

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.“

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, as quoted in "Physics"

The reader is now thinking about evolution. He is wondering whether Genesis 1 is right, and evolution is simply wrong, or whether evolution is right, and Genesis 1 is a myth that may be inspiring enough but does not actually tell how the world was created.

All of this is because of a culture phenomenally influenced by scientism and science. The theory of evolution is an attempt to map out, in terms appropriate to scientific dialogue, just what organisms occurred, when, and what mechanism led there to be new kinds of organisms that did not exist before. Therefore, nearly all Evangelicals assumed, Genesis 1 must be the Christian substitute for evolution. Its purpose must also be to map out what occurred when, to provide the same sort of mechanism. In short, if Genesis 1 is true, then it must be trying to answer the same question as evolution, only answering it differently.

Darwinian evolution is not a true answer to the question, “Why is there life as we know it?” Evolution is on philosophical grounds not a true answer to that question, because it is not an answer to that question at all. Even if it is true, evolution is only an answer to the question, “How is there life as we know it?” If someone asks, “Why is there this life that we see?” and someone answers, “Evolution,” it is like someone saying, “Why is the kitchen light on?” and someone else answering, “Because the switch is in the on position, thereby closing the electrical circuit and allowing current to flow through the bulb, which grows hot and produces light.”

Where the reader only sees one question, an ancient reader saw at least two other questions that are invisible to the present reader. As well as the question of “How?” that evolution addresses, there is the question of “Why?” and “What function does it serve?” These two questions are very important, and are not even considered when people are only trying to work out the antagonism between creationism and evolutionism.

The Commentary, on Genesis 1

I was enthusiastically introduced to Matthieu Pageau, The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, and enthusiastically looking forward to posting a review saying, "I speak of answering the question, "Why?" as is neglected in science, but in occasional hints and riddles. This is a full and direct treatment of the matter."

The snake in the ointment

I viewed a podcast with the author, and on rational grounds this looks interesting. The best books to me are ones that challenge me enough to cause culture shock, and this did cause culture shock, and was as different and concerned with the question, "Why?" as I respected.

About two thirds of the way through the book, though, I put my finger on something I'd been ignoring to be able to see other things: reading the book was not prayerful. When my abbot loaned me a manuscript he asked feedback for, the most vital feedback I could give him was that when I began it reading was deliberative information processing, but well before the end reading was prayer, and good theology leads you into the presence of God. As a relatively minor symptom, the comments on divination were all secular in character, and though forbidding divination was mentioned at least once, it was never discussed as an evil sin and a shameful error that opens a gateway to demonic possession. The concepts of 'space' and 'time', put in quotes in the text itself to indicate a usage very different from any mainstream usage, brought the kind of interesting culture shock produced by good science fiction and fantasy, a bit like The Dark Tower that C.S. Lewis wisely refrained from publishing. Also somewhat unusual for an author presented as Orthodox is a claim to "carves Eastern Orthodox and other traditional images." And the book freely refers to later parts of the Old Testament, but never the New Testament or the Church as realities shadowed in the Old Law.

A more serious problem is that the book tastes to me too much like Jung, and was recommended to me by a good friend in the process of leaving Jung behind. Carl Jung has been called the greatest threat to the Church since Julian the Apostate, and some people have said that at the beginning of every failed clerical career known to the speaker came finding insights in Jung. I do not object to a portrait of archetypes as such; I trade in archetypes myself and would never want to leave them behind. But whether this is a fruitful engagement... it is a hint and a riddle to point out that the book briefly mentions alchemy as something you'd never guess by studying today's chemistry. It doesn't mention alchemy as offering a shortcut by technique for inner transformation that all of the major world religions are inclined to answer, "Sorry, kid. You need elbow grease." Even if conservative Protestants may be very eager to clarify that they believe you are sanctified by faith alone and not by elbow grease, they are also usually quite clear in a belief that if you have a living and a healthy faith and relevant opportunity, you had better be producing elbow grease. (Possibly Taoism is an exception? The Buddha left an interlocking eightfold path of ways to produce elbow grease.) But Pageau's book never talks about alchemy as a cheap shortcut, and if you are going to declare that alchemy is different from anything you'd guess from looking at chemistry, you would do awfully well to say its techniques for producing spiritual transformation are shallow and flat next to any proper religious tradition.

There was one conversation I had with a famous egalitarian when I mentioned enthusiastically about John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, and he pointed out how the book was Jungian. And that was the hook when I swallowed a bait of quasi-traditional teaching about men and women at a time when live proponents of the position were few and far between.

I don't want to repeat that error here, and I speak no words of ill-will if my friends fell for something I fell for hook, line, and sinker. But the book pulls off a reconceptualization big enough to provoke culture shock, and a many-layered understanding of symbol, but for all that it I found very little, if anything, that constituted a specifically patristic way of opening up the Old Testament to unhide the New, and while the book mentions details like alchemy and Tarot, I searched and failed to find mention of "Jesus," "Christ," "Church," and so on.

I deem this book a failure, but I would really like to read another book that would succeed where it had failed.

Readers interested in Matthieu Pageau might like The Sign of the Grail, Unashamed, and Orthodox Theology and Technology: A Profoundly Gifted Autobiography.