The issue of fame
Leonard Nimoy, in I Am Spock, states that there were teachers in Hollywood for practically any additional skill an actor would need to portray a character in a movie. I don't remember exactly what his list was, but this would include riding horseback, handling an ancient or modern weapon, using some particular musical instrument, speaking in some particular accent correctly, juggling or illusionist skills, various trades, some approach to singing and dancing not already known to the performer, and so on and so forth: I got the impression was that pretty much every skill you could name was covered, and a number of skills you wouldn't think to name.
With one exception.
Nimoy said that there was one thing that was needed in Hollywood but did not have a single teacher: handling fame.
He talked, for instance, about creative ways of sneaking into a restaurant through the kitchen because a public commotion would happen if one person saw Spock trying to quietly walk into a restaurant's front door. I've heard it said of one cast member of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 that he dresses and acts flamboyantly and strikingly in front of the camera as he should, but consciously turns that off and acts much more nondescriptly in public is usually not noticed. But Mystery Science Theatre 3000 has a smaller audience and is less mainstream; I'm no student of fashion history but a Google image search for Spock shows a consistent haircut, and one that looks to me like it was meant to be distinctive. (One would suspect that TV producers using humans to portray alien races would want actors to sport a distinctive look.)
"Fame Lite"
I might suggest that my own experience is of having some degree of fame, but to a degree that has mostly been a privilege where a much greater amount of fame would bring much more obnoxious difficulties.
I've had someone call out, "That's Jonathan Hayward!" Like a TV actor. Once.
I've also had someone ask for my autograph. Once.
I also have paper and Kindle books on Amazon that bring me a symbolic level of monthly income. It's not on par with the income for working part-time flipping burgers, but it is still more than most authors ever see.
I've also repeatedly encountered people who knew me by my writing.
This might be called "sheltered fame," or "mini-fame", or "fame lite", or "fame à la carte", and I am glad I don't enjoy a far greater degree of fame. If I were more famous, I might be able to support myself just by writing, but I regard that as being beside the point: I am seeking monasticism on the Holy Mountain, where my job will be to pray and do the obediences assigned by an Elder and be challenged at the level of parents of a first newborn. Or more. The obediences will be meant to free me from my weaknesses: but I will in a very sense not be my own man, even if my Elder's entire goal in dealing with me is to do whatever is necessary to make me my own God-man in a fuller sense than I could possibly get on my own.
For a last detail of my miniature fame, I receive correspondence from readers, and so far I have been fortunate to be able to respond to every reader email I really can. C.S. Lewis may not have been Orthodox, and he may sound very faithful to the Greek Fathers until you recognize that Mere Christianity marks him as one of the major architects of the ecumenism as we know it today, and ecumenism was formally anathematized by several bishops in the eighties and some serious Orthodox have called ecumenism the ecclesiological heresy of our day. But I want to single out one point about C.S. Lewis's personal life that is relevant: he made a practice of answering every reader who wrote him, even though that resulted him spending much of his later life answering essentially pastoral correspondence. And on that point I consider myself particularly privileged to be entrusted with some correspondence, but not need nearly enough interactions to the point that it is a heavy ascesis to answer people who write me.
All of this says that I may share in fame in one sense, but I really do not know in the sense that stems from direct personal experience what fame is to household names. I believe that this may be changing. But for now I would like to distance myself from claims to insider status as far as extreme fame goes. My degree of fame, as privilege, is comparable in giftedness to being somewhere a bit below the lower boundary of the range of socially optimal intelligence.
The reason for this piece: Everyman
There is a medieval play, which I have read of but not read, called Everyman. The character is not an individual "me, myself, and I" as is much more common in today's novels, but a representative of all that is human.
That basic approach to writing was fairly mainstream; perhaps the most famous tale of Everyman is Pilgrim's Progress, which is a tale of the only way Everyman can be saved. The pilgrim is not characterized as an individual with individual tastes, interests, hobbies (though perhaps expecting hobbies would be anachronistic). He represents in a sort of abstracted form the common story of how one may be saved as understood in the Reformation.
Today that basic approach has mostly fallen out of fashion (or perhaps has some revival I do not know about), but it is not quite dead and perhaps can never die. The assumption in an Amazon review of consumer electronics is that the review should not be about "me, myself, and I" so much as a "what's ahead" notice to Everyman, meaning other consumers, who are contemplating purchasing that item. Reviews are ideally written from Everyman to Everyman.
This work is intended to be written by and to Everyman, even if that Everyman represents a narrower demographic than the whole of humanity. Significant, and in large measure unique, details are included on the theory that "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The assumption is that a specific picture in living color exposes the rhyme much more readily than a colorless abstraction that is propositionally true for all it treats, but lacks a pulse. It is an established finding in psychology that people are recognized more quickly from a sketched caricature than from an accurate photograph. I do not knowingly offer caricature in this work as such, but I do try to avoid bleeding out colors into abstraction, however correct, unless there are privacy concerns.
Danger! Beware of pedestal.
There is a quotation I've heard attributed to Gandhi, running something like, "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." At a brief check Snopes marks this as misattributed, and speaking as someone who spent considerable time perusing All Men Are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi, as Told In His Own Words, this simply doesn't sound like something Gandhi would have ever said; its presence in the chapter "Ahimse or the way of nonviolence" would have been as obtrusive as Gandhi taking a brief moment to endorse some particular brand of toothpaste. Note that decent people do make attributions that are wrong; my Uncle Mark was a tremendously well-loved and respected schoolteacher, and more specifically a history teacher. He would open the day with some particular thought, from eclectic sources ranging over the Bible, Ben Franklin, and other historical figures, and after his passing, one student who had written down these thoughts posted pictures of her notes, and they were really quite a treasure. But one of them attributed "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt" to Mark Twain. Sorry, but No. Without looking up exact dates, I believe Mark Twain's lifetime overlapped those of the founders of modern psychology. The "shock-denial-blah-blah-blah-resignation-acceptance" grieving process could conceivably have been formulated in the nineteenth century, although it doesn't sound like Freud to me, or any other nineteenth century psychologist I'm aware of. Kind of like how Freud's various complexes don't sound like something a behaviorist like Skinner would develop. However, even if we ascribe The Grieving Process to 19th century psychologists, these are technical terms in an obscure discipline, and would have been less-well-known than unconventional approaches to pig breeding or knowledge of how the results different knot techniques vary with different kinds of rope. The Grieving Process of "shock-denial-blah-blah-blah-resignation-acceptance" could absolutely not have been a lapidary part of pop culture that pops up in a remark by an unruly six-year-old boy in Calvin and Hobbes, or where saying "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt" instantly telegraphs its intended meaning.
But let's return to the pseudo-Ghandian quotation regardless of source: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win." As a sloppy sketch, this might be true, but there is a caveat that eviscerates the whole triumphal gist: The last step might not be, "You win." The last step might be, "They install you on a pedestal." The difference between winning and being installed on a pedestal is the difference between diamond and diamond-back.
There is a source I read decades back; the book title and even the name of the figure escapes me beyond that he was a scholar of Confucius and perhaps others, Chinese by nationality, and he meticulously documented how, after "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you.", the last step was "Then they install you on a pedestal." And he documented how for a figure he studied how people went from hindering and hampering him by opposing him, to hindering and hampering him by launching him on a high pedestal. And the front matter, from a Western scholar and/or translator, said that the pedestal effect he documented in fact played out in the scholar's own life; he spent the rest of his life trying to achieve constructive results despite the pedestal that he was forever stuck with.
Fr. Seraphim's unwanted pedestal
I've personally raised serious concerns about Fr. Seraphim of Plantina, and it is my considered judgment that he has been harmful and a cause of arrested spiritual development among his Western convert followers. (He is also deeply respected in some Orthodox lands, but I get the impression that a Russian or Greek admirer has a more balanced diet of spiritual reading.) Do Western followers, of the kind who relate to all outsiders as superiors guiding subordinates and often teaching humility first of all, distort Fr. Seraphim? My suspicion is that they fail to live up to Fr. Seraphim's guidance on some point, and on other points show problems that are 100% faithful to his trajectory. One of the central tenets of what has been called "Orthodox fundamentalism" is that the world is literally about 6,000 years old, and a "Creation Science" lifted from Protestants of yesteryear who were not scientists is the true and final science that proves that. That deeply entrenched feature is one where they are following the Master's lead. I've read Fr. Seraphim charge his readers to straighten out the backwards scientific misunderstandings of people who believe in an ancient universe and either evolution or progressive creation. If this is a pattern, it is not a simple case of ideological hijacking; practically all I have critiqued in The Seraphinians: "Blessed Seraphim Rose" and His Axe-Wielding Western Converts: A Glimpse into the Soul of Orthodox Fundamentalism remains faithful to the Master's guidance. Possibly they exaggerate the importance of Fr. Seraphim's position on origins; somehow God comes out second banana next to Young Earth Creationism, but if they exaggerated, they took something big and made it even bigger. Whether or not they pushed things further than they should, for to have someone who is a nonscientist (and, at least as I've found, wouldn't recognize even an unsubtle scientific argument at all, even if it bit him on the arse!), gently asks "Have I cornered you?" when the other person is frustrated by a Seraphinian inability to even recognize a scientific argument, diplomatically and gently offer to straighten out a biology PhD's backwards understanding of science (perhaps by dropping Einsteins' name and giving an example of how "pilots experience time differently when they're traveling above the speed of sound"; one friend, on hearing this "example," winced, slowly gulped, and said, "That's not even wrong.")... Someone who does every single one of these things is following in the Master's footsteps and living up to his exhortations.
There are other points where no matter what harassment I have met from his evangelists, I believe they weren't faithful to Fr. Seraphim, or at least weren't faithful to what he hoped for. Probably the kindest remark to him that I can genuinely respect is, "Fr Seraphim (Rose) is included in the mix of folks who tried to explain to folks they were sinners, but were still put on a pedestal anyway." I have not seriously investigated the contours of Fr. Seraphim as regards guruism, but my understanding is that he would had a very simple answer: "No." Or maybe he wrote at length about why guruism is toxic. At any rate, he now stands on a very cruel pedestal for a monastic who tried to free people from the idolatry of inordinately focusing on a single charismatic personality. And it seems that there is cruelty to Fr. Seraphim himself, of the sort one would associate with vengeful, schadenfreude-laden claims of poetic justice, except that it was quite the opposite of poetic justice: he challenged guruism, and did his best to dodge it, but his standing today is that of a polestar of a guru who serves as a primary orienting figure to a significant following of Orthodox Christians (you can call them "Orthodox fundamentalists") where the sun rises and sets on the Master's teachings.
This is a cruel pedestal, as it would be cruel to celebrate an environmentalist hero by starting many forest fires (in non-pyrogenic ecosystems) to celebrate by the beauty of great leaping flames. I have not read what Fr. Seraphim's response to his pedestal actually was, but the image comes to mind of Francis of Assisi returning to his movement's apparent success and being a lone dissent who was utterly aghast that the "success" that had been achieved was his followers' desertion of his, and their, ever-faithful Lady Poverty.
"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."
I would like to modify a position I strongly endorsed, albeit in a way some might call superficial.
Dorothy Sayers wrote about how, in recent centuries in the West, there has been a belief that "ideas grow rust like machines and need to be replaced." And that deliberately crude image spoke to me. Ideas may be wrong from the very beginning and need to be replaced; but the quote "an idea whose time has come" embodies something very strange. The doctrine of progress is tied to this, so that each new idea whose time has come improves the overall picture.
That much I still hold fast to, but with a caveat. I do not believe in progress (one friend summarized the academy as saying "We've progressed enough not to believe in progress"), but I do believe that fashion exists and can sometimes have a spooky effect. Mathematicians are well-advised, if they find a solution to a major unsolved problem, to submit it as soon as possible. The core reason is that it is a historically common phenomenon for a question in mathematics to be unsolved for quite some time, and then be solved by several mathematicians independently. And on this count, mathematics would be expected to be perhaps the least Zeitgeist-shaken academic discipline. There are some things that change over time; the standard of mathematical rigor was rising when I was studying it, and the history of the parallel postulate in geometry shows a now-respected mathematician as working out an entirely valid non-Euclidean geometry and then publishing work under the title Euclid Freed From Every Flaw, is not today's mindset. However, as a general rule, theorems do not go out of fashion. And still mathematics, relatively free from Zeitgeist fashions as it might be, manifests a phenomenon where major problems remain unsolved for a considerable time and then simultaneously be solved by multiple mathematicians. The same has been observed in other areas as well; Nobel Prizes are given to two or three people who make the same discovery almost simultaneously, and independently.
The question of when the automobile was invented is messy and is not "Why, Henry Ford!" even if Henry Ford invented a mass production that drastically reduced the price of an automobile. There is a similar simultaneity, and I've read an author enumerate a dozen mechanical inventions, all of them an automobile or something like an automobile, in the West over a short period of time. Questions come into play of, "Where do you draw the line?" and there are what might be called shades of grey or judgment calls. I'm not saying that there can be no decisive resolution to these questions, but unless you settle on the oldest, incomplete candidate, answering "When was the automobile invented?" in a responsible hinges on looking at several vehicles or devices, that were automotive at least in part, and were invented in a surprisingly close interval of time.
Fashions
I would like to illustrate a particular point, and clarify what modification I mean to a standard trope. Phrases like "An idea whose time have come" partly describe a pattern of trends and partly frames things in terms of progress: "An idea whose time has come" is always a gain and never a loss. By contrast, I have come to share belief in the pattern of trends, but in place of framing things as progress, I suggest they be framed in terms of fashion. No one seems to consider that "an idea whose time has come" might be a bad idea that is worse than whatever it replaces. Nor am I the first or only one to frame things in terms of fashion (though my hybrid position might be new, for all I know).
One psychiatrist recounted how the professional community once believed that divorce was so terrible to children that except in the worst and most pathological casess it was worth keeping an very unhappy marriage together so as to avoid inflicting the pain of divorce on the children. Then the psychological community said it progressed to believing that really if a marriage is Hell on earth, the children are really better off with a divorce however nasty divorce may be. Then they claimed to have progressed to realize that an unhappy marriage was horrid, but however horrid it might be on the kids, it really is best to keep the marriage together if possible. His point in this tale of heroism and magic was that the shifts that occurred, both ones he agreed with and ones he didn't, didn't represent progress. They represented fashion, and I could envisage him using a term I heard from a quite different figure: "the herd of free thinkers." Progress, or what at least is labeled as progress, is really more accurately understood as current trends within "the herd of free thinkers.
An example of my own
When I was at Cambridge and my pre-master's diploma was winding down, I was looking for a topic for a master's thesis. I wanted to study the holy kiss, and my advisor ridiculed the question and me with it. He asked sarcastic rhetorical questions like "Can we find justification to only kiss the pretty people at church?" When I persisted, he consulted with another scholar and came back, without ridicule, saying the question was under-studied. (This is, by the way, an extreme rarity in academic theology; usually scholars try to find some vestige of unexplored turf and when they fail at that, write things like rehabilitating a founder of heresy, as the Archdruid of Canterbury has done with Arius the father of all heretics.) Furthermore, things never sat well with the department, which kept pushing my work into the pigeonhole of what German scholars called Realia, meaning physical details (other examples of questions of Realia might be what kind of arms and armor a first Christian would have seen a Roman soldier carry, and would have given shape to the words by which St. Paul closes the letter to the Ephesians, or what kind of house would provide the backdrop to Christ's words in the Sermon on the Mount about putting a lamp where it will illuminate the whole house. I am not aware of any Cambridge faculty member who was open to the idea that the "divine kiss" (as St. Dionysius the Areopagite called it) might be studied under the rubric of liturgical or sacramental theology.
My desire and interest was a doctrinal study, and my advisor there, who was Orthodox, kept pushing what I was doing into an unedifying sociological study of kissing that involved a great deal of Too Much Information, with lowlights such as the assigned Foucault's The History of Sexuality. I tried to draw a line in the sand, saying that I wanted to do "a doctrinal study." He immediately laid down the law: "The best way to do that is to do a cultural study and let any doctrines arise." Other help that he offered was to suggest that narrowing scope would be helpful, and suggested that it would be a good bailiwick to study "differences between Christian and Jewish understanding of kissing in the Song of Songs." I held my tongue at saying, "That's impressive. Not only is that not what I wanted, but that doesn't overlap with what I wanted." And then, two thirds of the way through the year, the department decided that my study of the holy kiss was off-topic for the Philosophy of Religion seminar that had been selected for me, and I pulled out all the stops to write, as was demanded, a vastly different Artificial Intelligence as an Arena for Magical Thinking Among Skepticsthat left all my prior thesis work as wasted.
So what's out there? What did my research turn up?
What kind of doctrines did I pull up? Someone, perhaps with wishful thinking, who wanted the holy kiss to be important might try to attach it somewhere under the rubric of Holy Communion. The last prayer before Holy Communion does the opposite: it places Holy Communion under the heading of the holy kiss. How? "Neither like Judas will I give Thee a kiss:" neither like Judas will I give you a hollow kiss, betraying this kiss and you yourself by receiving the Holy Mysteries and then not even try to live a holy life. Incidentally, although there are ancient precursors, it is remarkably recent, 20th century or possibly 19th if I recall correctly, that the ethical concern represented by "a kiss can be seductive" appears in Orthodox theology. In the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collections, the kiss that is wrong is pre-eminently a kiss like that of Judas, the kiss of betrayal which Orthodox remember by fasting on Wednesdays, and was a double-layered betrayal: a betrayal of the Lord first of all, and with it a betrayal of everything a kiss, of all things, should be. In patristic times the holy kiss was a kiss on the mouth, and this is doctrinally significant. A Psalm prayed in preparation for Communion says, "Who is this King of Glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty in war. Lift up your gates, O ye princes; and be lifted up, ye everlasting gates, and the Lord, the King of Glory, shall enter in." St. John Chrysostom drives home the implication: "But about this holy kiss somewhat else may yet be said. To what effect? We are the temple of Christ; we kiss then the porch and entrance of the temple when we kiss each other." If, in my present locale, the holy kiss is three kisses on alternate cheeks, the underlying reality is unchanged: a liturgical kiss, on the cheek, is always by implication a kiss on the mouth, on the gates that receive the Lord. And indeed St. Ambrose pushes further in his remarkable letter to his sister, discussing how we can kiss Christ: part of the unfolding truth is, "We kiss Christ, then, with the kiss of communion." There is a very tight tie between the holy kiss and Holy Communion, and while there may be much greater laxity about a closed holy kiss than a closed Chalice, according to strict interpretation of the rules a holy kiss is only ever between two canonical Orthodox Christians. In ancient times the closed holy kiss represented an additional boundary besides a closed Communion after the catechumens actually departed. But even today I have heard a priest lightheartedly say after a convert's chrismation, "You may kiss the convert." Something of that essence is here, even though nobody I have met makes a big deal about the enforcement of that rule. One last note here, which may be most of benefit to Catholics: In Rome, there is a sharp "do not cross" line between between the sacraments, including Holy Communion, and what are called "sacramentals", which include the holy kiss. Sacraments are something that Christ might as well have personally etched in diamond; sacramentals are things the Church worked out that are a different sort of thing that is far below Christ's sacraments. The Orthodox usually list seven sacraments, and they are in general recognizable in relation to the Roman list of sacraments (overall but not in every detail), but the difference between a sacrament and a sacramental is only a difference of degree, not of kind, and people can say things like, "You can say there is only one sacrament, or that there are a million of them." If there is one sacrament, it is a Holy Communion where nothing else comes close, but the sacramental of the holy kiss is tied to Holy Communion in multiple ways and participates in its essence. My main, brief work on this topic was in fact called The Eighth Sacrament. The title is provocative, but not daring. For one final point on the holy kiss, at least one aspect of a Protestant framing on worship is that worship is something you do with your spirit; there's a fairly strong association between worship and singing, or worship and listening to a pastor, perhaps, but worship is contained by the spirit alone. The Orthodox understanding, besides recognizing that it is not a slight to Christ to show reverence to His Mother, refers to an act of adoration that is done with spirit and body alike. As to what the act of adoration that encompasses the body, there are variations and some ambiguity, but the Greek πρσκεω refers to bowing or kissing, usually with some ambiguity as to which physical act completes the adoration. The worship due to the Lord is in some measure to kiss him, and there is a profound tie, even if there are important differences too, between worship of Christ expressed by kissing his icon, and worship of Christ expressed by kissing a fellow Orthodox Christian as so much an icon of Christ that he is defined as being built in the image of the whole Trinity. (I find such things as these loads more interested than sociological investigation of kissing as such.)
(Some people may find an irony between my efforts to study the holy kiss that Judas betrayed, and Cambridge University's constant "improvements" to how I was approaching that study.)
What it was that I pulled up eventually found a home in fiction in The Sign of the Grail, which is presently one of my top-selling titles on Amazon and top fictional work. I will not attempt to reproduce the material here, beyond saying that it is in fact a doctrinal study, that a number of primary sources can be found in a brief search of the Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collections, and to the person who read The Eighth Sacrament and asked didn't I know there was more, I said that there was much more but that represented my attempt to crystallize something in a tight format.
But what I would point to is this: I am not, to my knowledge, a cardinal influencer in what happened. I presumably influenced someone, somewhere, but what was met with repeated hostility became something mainstream. I don't think that I was a primary influence in that I met with people who never seemed to recognize me as a pioneer or having already made serious investigation. My suspicion is that had I never touched the matter, it would have still been explored; I may have been the first person to publicly note one particular point, that the holy kiss is the only act the Bible calls holy, but had I never investigated the topic at all, other people would have, and my suspicion is that without me the holy kiss is still a sacramental that would have been studied as doctrinally significant and seen in continuity with sacramental and liturgical theology, and that none of the dubious help I received at Cambridge (such as classifying the holy kiss as Realia and therefore not rightfully subject to direct doctrinal investigations) would have been the last word. I think my inbox has been quiet on this topic for a few years, but when I was getting people contacting me and wanting to inform me about the holy kiss, we were usually on the same page. (I do not recall any nonscholar trying to steer the conversation to fit under the heading of Realia.)
And I would suggest that this basic plot and pattern of events are more or less generic. First I was rudely dismissed, then people kept more rudely pushing my work away from what I asked explicitly, and then some years later when I had practically forgotten the discussion, I was caught off guard by people opening up conversations about the holy kiss. And I may not have "won" in the sense of acquiring a pedestal (good riddance!), but the subject was no longer met with hostility such as was first faced, and some people found it to be of interest. (I have never gotten a disrespectful response on the topic after the point where people started to contact me on the topic.)
It is my general experience that gifted and profoundly gifted people are not, in fact, unaffected by the Zeitgeist. Often they may want to challenge the Zeitgeist, but it is not characteristic to rise above it, and the more common pattern is to concentrate the Zeitgeist and to run ahead of it, perhaps getting into the game when it is greeted with hostility. In this case, I was disappointed when I realized the topic of the holy kiss had reached the status of being more or less fashionable. I felt, if anything, violated that I had channelled the Zeitgeist, a Zeitgeist that had spoken through my mouth.
While the classification is essentially as irrefutable as Berkeley's arguments, famously said to "admit no answer and produce no conviction," I don't find it helpful to say, "If your birthday falls before this year, you are ancient; if your birthday falls in this range, you are medieval; if your birthday falls in this range, you are a modern; if your birthday falls after that range, you are a postmodern." Some people have noted that not only are engineers modern, but they probably do not know a postmodern, even though postmodern students are easily enough found in other fields. Speaking personally, I've been wary of postmodernism, but I have recognized points of overlap. I have been interested in thick description for more than a decade before I heard the term, and what I most want to know in history is "the way it really was," which is a boilerplate postmodern desire as far as history goes. The postmodern figures I know could justifiably regard me as making an undue claim to insider status if I claimed to also be a postmodern, but I see more continuities now than I would like, or that I did before.
(I might briefly point out that "thick description" and "the way it really was" remains fundamental and guiding principles in the endeavor of this article, where a synopsis would be much easier to write, much briefer, and much easier to read. I could simply state that I pursued scholarly research into the holy kiss years before it was fashionable to do so, and that I sought a doctrinal, and sacramental or liturgical, study of the holy kiss where a respected Orthodox scholar only saw legitimate room for a secular history of kissing. That much is true, but it is a sketched outline where my hope is to portray something in depth and full living color.)
Other examples
One friend talked about how a boy entered an Orthodox altar to serve as an acolyte, and the priest brusquely told him to unvest, leave the altar, take off his tie, and come back without his tie; the stated reason was, "You are not a slave!"
This was presented as counter-cultural, and it may have been such at some point. However, it fits with another conversation where a business owner had individual contributors wear ties, managers wear a suit and tie, and the owner wore a suit and no tie. Last I seriously checked in, the professional jobseeker fashion was for men not to wear ties.
I might mention, by the way, that when something is taking credit for being countercultural, it's usually a mainstream fashion before too long.
Last example for now: it is presented that violin-making is a "fossil trade." This trade may be mostly or exclusively practiced by violinists; I doubt I could produce a decent violin personally unless I had enough exposure to recognize good and bad-quality violins. Possibly I could learn enough to be a luthier without developing the level of skill appropriate to public performance; but I rather guess that takes less practice to be able to perform well in public than to be in a position to make a good violin. And on that score, I met or heard of one luthier, introducing violin-making as a "fossil trade", and then the count quickly escalated to something like half a dozen. On which point I suggest that it's a turn in fashion, and the number of people embracing the new fashion is chiefly limited by the fact that most people have never been trained to play a violin. (I've never, to my recollection, heard a musician say, "I play the violin but I am not interested in becoming a luthier.")
Icon and Idol
There is something about the theology of icons in Orthodoxy that looms so large that I missed something.
In one passage that I have never heard Orthodox quote, Herod dressed royally, gave a stunningly good speech, and the people who were listening shouted "The voice of a god and not a man!" and when he accepts this praise and fails to give God glory, God infests him with worms and kills him.
This is as good a place as any I see to introduce the distinction between an icon and an idol. And please do not see the distinction in terms of "If an Orthodox Christian makes it with paint and gold on wood it is an icon, and if a Hindu makes it a statue with many arms it is an idol." I don't remember what they are, but I've heard from Hindus some very nuanced thoughts about god(s) and idols. For that matter, I don't especially wish to discuss idols in relation to Graeco-Roman paganism, even though they, and Old Testament ancestors, form the basis for the universal Orthodox condemnation of idolatry. I wish to articulate a distinction, not from comparative religion as such, but as a distinction within Christianity.
Probably the #1 metaphorical name for icons is "windows to Heaven", and the theology that St. John the Damascene among others articulated is that the honor paid to an icon passes on to the prototype. Honor to an icon of a saint honors the saint; honoring the saint honors Christ. While I am not aware of people using the term "icon" in reference to the saints' lives, reading the saints' lives is strongly encouraged for beginner and expert alike, and what it is that's really worth reading in saints' lives is that you see to a small degree the face of Christ, otherwise it's not worth reading. This theology undergirds structures, and supports an understanding of the human person as made in the image of God, which I have not seen disowned in Western Christianity, but it grows on poor soil. Although terms like 'icon' and 'image' are not used in this specific passage, looking on and treating people as the image of Christ is given a chillingly sharp edge in Matthew 25:
When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, â"Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me." Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, "Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?" And the King shall answer and say unto them, "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, "Depart from me, ye who are damned, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not." Then shall they also answer him, saying, "Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not serve thee?" Then shall he answer them, saying, "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."
The damned are damned because they failed to love and honor the icon of Christ, and the insult might have as well been made to Christ personally. That's how he felt it.
With all of these things said, and I am really not trying to shoehorn a place to save the Greek fathers' teaching that we should become divine, Herod was not destroyed because he allowed himself to divine honor. He was destroyed because, receiving divine honor, he failed to pass it on to God whom it properly belonged to. Given the choice between letting honor pass on through him to the creator, and keeping it to himself, he chose to stop the honor from rising higher, and that is the difference between being an icon and being an idol.
Orthodox who like me (or for that matter Orthodox who don't like me, but are choosing to be polite) pay a respect whose contours are set by the Orthodox theology of icon and image: I am respected for being made in the image of God, not for being godlike on my own. Respect for my writing has drawn, if I may mention my most-cherished compliment, "You write verbal icons!" The respect paid to my writing is a subordinate respect to works that salute One greater than them, and the respect paid to me is a subordinate respect that salutes One greater than me. I am respected for being to some degree divine by grace (people wanting a Biblical proof-text may cite 2 Peter 1:4 which dares to call us "partakers of the divine nature"); I am not in any sense honored as being a god in some sense independent of the Creator or stopping with me instead of referring glory to the Creator. Evangelicals often like my works, and while they may not have the doctrine of the image of God defined in such articulate and sharp contours, there is some continuity in respect I have received. Specifically, it is practically always a subordinate respect, and my works are praised as drawing them to God. There is a tale, true or apocryphal, of a visiting African pastor who came to the U.S., and after observing things, said, "It is amazing what you can do without the Holy Spirit!" Evangelicals have never praised me for being great without needing God's help, and if they did it would most likely be sarcasm or a stinging rebuke, almost on par with saying that something is "more important than God." Among both Orthodox and Evangelicals, whatever the differences may be, to be great is to be permeated by God's grace.
I will comment briefly, for the sake of completeness, on one point where I am just a beginner. The saints do not seek ordinate human honor; they usually try to dodge all human honor at all whether or not that honor is ultimately referred to God, and some among them have immediately left town, without any sort of modern vehicle, if that is what it took to dodge human honor after their gifts had been discovered. I am not at the stature to do that, at least not yet. However, hostility and abuse come quickly nipping at the heels of honor, and I am trying to progressively restrain searching for human honor or accepting unsought human honor. My author bio has become progressively shorter, and at present the main glory I claim is that of a member of the royal human race. The more time passes, the more I think that seeking human honor is a fundamental error, a way of "drinking out of the toilet" that deserves a section in A Pet Owner's Rules as something that, if you know what you're doing, you really, really don't want to do. On that score, I count myself fortunate that, while I was a forerunner who ran ahead of the Zeitgeist in study of the holy kiss as a legitimate matter of doctrinal study, I didn't acquire a pedestal in reward for my endeavors. That's about as much winning as I'd ask.
And there is one other point to mention: usually, people who have respected me have respected me like some minor icon. I had guessed, with excusable but near-disastrous naïvete, that if in the future I am put on a pedestal, I will receive more of the same and I will serve as an icon in not the best position. Now I believe it far more likely for me to put on a pedestal as an idol rather than an icon. The Church does legitimately place people on pedestals as icons; I believe that the practice of choosing bishops from the pool of monks is, without judgement against the married, a good monastic may have a fighting chance of surviving and functioning effectively in an ordeal where the title of "Bishop" has a job description of, "Whole burnt-offering without remainder."
The Orthodox Church can, at least sometimes, put an icon on a pedestal...
...but the Zeitgeist only knows one trick: putting an idol on a pedestal, adapting an icon to function as an idol if need be.
A cloud the size of a man's hand
St. James, the brother of the Lord, wrote, "Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit." This is extraordinarily terse compared to the Old Testament narrative, albeit completely faithful. But I would like to give just one vignette not unfolded in this shorthand reminder about the story: it has been a long time since it rained, and there is a deep famine, and there has been an ongoing rivalry with multiple dimensions between the wicked King Ahab and St. Elias. There is the great contest with the prophets of Ba'al; St. Elias, who has suggested that (in modern terms) "Maybe Ba'al isn't answering your hours of frenzied prayer because he just can't come into the phone now," asks that his one prophet's sacrifice to the God of Israel be drenched with excessive /mounts of water. (Saltwater, perhaps: freshwater may have been extremely hard to come by, and rare enough to make a terrible famine, but any time during the famine you could go to the Red Sea and take as much particularly salty saltwater as you could carry.) After Ba'al had already failed to get off his porcelain throne, St. Elias makes one single prayer and calls down fire from Heaven that consumes his entire dripping sacrifice.
That story is famous; but there is a slightly less famous dramatic detail that is worth noting. St. Elias told his servant to go and look out by the sea. The servant comes back, and says, "I see nothing." St. Elias, who had told the servants to pour water on his sacrifice again after it was already quite wet, and then for good measure asked for water to be poured a third time on already drenched it again. But for the servant, he goes six times reporting nothing, anad the seventh time he barely says, "I see a cloud the size of a man's hand." At that point St. Elias sends his servant to tell King Ahab to get in his chariot and get back to his castle before he would be trapped in mire by the deluge.
If you are profoundly gifted, and you think of or take a position that is attacked and ridiculed beyond due measure (and, honestly, make a good allowance for due measure), it is my suspicion that the opinion you are ridiculed for will be the fashion in 5-10 years, or longer if it's something profound. I try to respectfully welcome visitors to my website, although some people have clearly stated that I have failed in that measure, but I pay particular attention to profoundly gifted who contact me, not because they are better than other visitors, but out of survival instinct (and recognition of a shared experience, a bit like another actor who had the cumbersome side of equal fame would be on the same page as Leonard Nimoy about sneaking into restaurants by the kitchen, and that I had better therefore try to listen hospitably). Those emails usually provide an advisory that's a bit like insider trading, though I have never made a financial decision that was influenced by the outcome of such conversation. They, in essence, by running ahead of the Zeitgeist, let you know what's coming. And the profoundly gifted I meet usually see something that I don't.
Chris Langan, considered the most gifted member in almost all ultra-high-IQ society (or some might give that accolade to Paul Cooijmans), has worked on a CTMU or "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe", pronounced "cat-moo" by insiders, with homepage at CTMU.org, which I don't agree with: one conversation helped me see the need to write works such as "Religion and Science" Is Not Just Intelligent Design vs. Evolution after I left him flabbergasted by saying I was not interested in cosmology. (Note: In the years after I wrote "Religion and Science" Not Just Intelligent Design vs. Evolution, things have shifted almost to a point that alleging some opponent of "scientism" is in and of itself halfway there to, "A hit, a very palpable hit!" And again I am not a prime actor.) However, I am inclined to regard Chris Langan's CTMU as significant on the evidence by how hard people fight against it alone. I know that some profoundly gifted individuals suffer from mental illness, and in fact I believe mental illness is significantly more likely among the profoundly gifted than otherwise. He is called a crackpot, but meeting him face-to-face and conversing via email do not give me any reason for agreeing with the label about him as a person. Every interaction I've had with him has had him looking brilliant and in touch with reality. It's possible enough to be brilliant, in touch with reality, and wrong, but I have not heard of any critic recognize one point which is consensus under the tail end of the high-IQ community: that he is bright such as few people ever set eyes on. Characteristic of the reception of the CTMU is that its main page on Wikipedia was deleted, but its CTMU Wikipedia talk page is still there. Possibly the CTMU does not lend itself to experimental investigation: but we live in a time where superstring theory is very much in vogue, and where we are very hard-pressed to find a feasible or even infeasible experiment where superstring theory predicts a measurably different outcome from the best predecessor theories, and it is genuinely provocative to say "Physics is an empirical, hard science and as such is not validly practiced without claims being accountable to being tested by experiment." And maybe we should remember, "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." If we are going to join in the euphoria about superstring theory, perhaps we would do well to give the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe a fair hearing. The main reason I believe it is significant is that it is ridiculed well beyond the hostility that greeted my study of the holy kiss. He is consistently and repeatedly dismissed as a sheer crackpot, but people do not spend anywhere near that much energy dismissing genuine crackpots as crackpots. I continue to believe in the conceptual framework's significance even if I do not subscribe to it.
Not all clouds in the sky are tied to giftedness. I saw a major step towards Nazification in Amazon, and then Apple, drop anything bearing a confederate flag faster than a hot potato. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus made quite an opposite point in saying that if a Klu Klux Klansman wanted to injure black America, he could scarcely do better than promote Afrocentrism. Here, it may be said that white racism has had a bad name for quite a long time. That doesn't mean that it was ever nonexistant, but most whites at least tried to not be racist, or become less racist. Here it might be said that if you want "white nationalism" (great job on the layer of whitewash, but befriend a "white nationalist" on Facebook and your feed will have Nazi flags and news articles with comments fantasizing about "[insert alternate spelling of the N-word]" criminals being lynched) to attract droves of new followers, and make white racism respectable in many places where it is not at all respectable now, you can scarcely do better than to continue flipping the bird at white descendents of the Confederacy. The significance of Amazon dropping displays of the Confederate flag is not that some goods were delisted or that the censorship affected some people's income; the significance is essentially an announcement of a new direction in policy, as illustrated in a very first installment. I don't know who's safe as this enlightening policy goes; I have serious difficulties believing it will remain confined to black-white relations in race, or that purges will remain only in the South. I don't consider myself safe, and I honestly am not sure that even people trying to be politically correct are safe. At the French Revolution, there was serious scope creep in the public enemies who were sent to the guillotine, a monstronsity that at the end was killing cleaning maids and children seven or eight years old with people standing by the foot of the guillotine to be sprayed by the enemies of states' blood and eat their still-living flesh. And this happened in an educated Republic. The present removal of venerated public statues is not a final installment; it is if anything a reminder that the overhaul is just beginning. But there was a cloud in the sky the size of a man's hand when Amazon dropped the Confederate flag. I have come to believe some non-Southern perspectives, that yes, the Confederacy was fighting for States' rights, but the States' rights were chiefly the right to maintain slavery. But the moral I take is not that white Southerners are being asked to make a few adjustments; the moral I take is that we would be well advised to read "The Cold Within" and that those of us who are not white Southerners should not say "This does not concern us." The classic poem "The Cold Within" reads:
THE COLD WITHIN
Six humans trapped by happenstance
In bleak and bitter cold.
Each one possessed a stick of wood
Or so the story's told.Their dying fire in need of logs
The first man held his back
For of the faces round the fire
He noticed one was black.The next man looking'cross the way'
Saw one not of his church
And couldn't bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.The third one sat in tattered clothes.
He gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy shiftless poor.The black man's face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight.
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.The last man of this forlorn group
Did nought except for gain.
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.Their logs held tight in death's still hands
Was proof of human sin.
They didn't die from the cold without
They died from the cold within.
It's not often that I quote an ecumenist poem as authoritative. In this case the point is universally human, and while I believe in an Orthodox closed communion, I believe that nothing that is truly human should be foreign to me.
A change in experience
It was sometime in the past few months that I began asking pastoral questions about what to do with someone who is in awe of me.
The motivation and intended nuance, which I did not end up making clear, could be outlined as follows. Years back, my Mom invited neighbors across the street to some minor social function. They hesitantly said, "No," not because the suggestion was unwelcome but because it would create a scheduling conflict, and they wanted to know, in effect, whether their "No" had alienated her. She was pretty quick to answer, "This is valuable!" She explained that now that she knew they would be willing to say "No" to a suggestion that would be less that ideal for them, or a scheduling conflict, or... Now part of this was politeness or a gracious response, but I believe she genuinely meant what she said about knowing they would be willing to say "No" when they should say "No," and she was genuinely grateful for a safety-net of "I can extend an invitation and not worry about whether they'll give a 'Yes' they shouldn't be giving." And in that framework, I was motivated by a difficulty. Most visitors have and maintain boundaries. Not that everything is perfect, but my visitors have been willing both to say "Yes" and "No," and in general do not seem to worry about dealing a capital insult if they happen to say "No."
Boundaries matter, even if I've voiced serious objections to Cloud and Townsend, and I felt myself in the uncomfortable position of negotiating with someone who was defenseless before me, who was too far below me in his conception to express a boundary, who would only answer "Yes" no matter how destructive a "Yes" would be, and where any knowledge that I sometimes sin and I am sometimes wrong exists only on a purely academic plane. I know there are cultures where this kind of dynamic is normal and something people can deal with, but I felt really uncomfortable and really at a loss.
The pastoral advice I received was helpful, particularly in a reminder that people that, to a one, shout "Hosanna!" and spread palm branches are entirely capable of shouting, to a one, "Crucify him!" five days later. And in Christ's case the earlier accolades were accurate, and higher accolades would have been justified. In my case the "Hosanna!" is in fact not justified, and as I was reminded of the toxic nature of all human praise. (I am looking forward to the possibility in monasticism of being under the authority of an Abbot who treats everyone with deep respect, but might not give a single compliment, or at least not to me.)
And things like this, though varied and though I wish to refrain from providing thick description's details out of concern for others' privacy, have become a consistent fixture. Though varied in detail, the attempt is to place me on some minor pedestal, on terms that are unreal to me, and probably unreal to me because they are unreal to God. I regard it as very fortunate that the inundations of compliments have, by God's grace, appeared utterly unreal to me. Future temptations will probably be more subtle.
Clearing away a distraction: NF goggles
David Kiersey's Please Understand Me (I prefer the first edition to the more than the second) is one introduction to classical temperament theory. The book has hypocrisy as well as strengths; it is eminently nonjudgmental in describing one temperament's liability to promiscuity, or another doing whatever their system of ideas calls for, or another's doing what their spiritual path calls for, but when one temperament tends towards chastity or fidelity, it is described in language that is at once clinical, and the most degrading language in the entire book: metaphors are used as a basis to this temperament with seeing sex as basically a merely economic commodity, or something like being physically dirty or clean. Classic postmodern hypocrisy here.
However, there is one particular point that I wanted to pull: the "iNtuitive Feeling" or "NF" type, which is ascribed what might be the most striking characteristic in the book: they appear to other people, without any effort on their part to cause this, to be whatever the other person would most like them to be. People look at them through rosy "NF goggles," if you will. I think I can usually detect NF's, albeit indirectly: I am drawn to another person, especially women, to a degree that is out of step with that person's attractiveness and the social setting, even though there is very little I have directly observed as signs of what is going on (the one cue I notice is that about half the time they appear close to crying). My guess is that this boils down to a layer of nonverbal communication that is possibly very subtle, even if it is still very effective and does not apply, or applies far less, to email and other basic electronic communication that flattens nonverbal signals beyond emoticons.
A question might be raised of, "How little or much of an NF are you?" Before Orthodoxy I considered myself to be at the boundary between "NT" ("iNtuitive Thinking") and NF, called NX, and wanting to shift towards NF. In Orthodoxy I found that silence that I desired personally was not my particular personal trait, but something normative, and the Orthodox Church's hesychasm or silence is bigger than what I had. Similarly, the Orthodox Church out-NFed me by making normative observations like, "The longest journey we will ever take is the journey from our mind to our heart." In both cases the Orthodox Church's answer was to challenge me to go further. And that raises at very least the possibility that I am close enough to (or far enough into) NF territory that some people see me through NF goggles.
I admit this as a possibility, and furthermore a possibility I think is at least probable. There is always some ambiguity and I do misunderstand some social setting, but there have been face-to-face encounters where someone seemed to really like me as something I wasn't. I've worked hard to write well and I've received some very rosy compliments, but usually the reader and I are on the same page about what a particular work is doing. (Most strands of criticism are also usually something I can recognize as a response to something I wrote.) My writing is usually not taken to be whatever the reader would like it to be. So while I admit a likely NF layer to people drawn to me in person, the majority of the encounters where I've been offered a pedestal have been online, with people who have not met me face-to-face, or electronic communication that preserves nonverbal information such as Skype's offerings. So the question of whether my nonverbal communication is enchanting is largely beside the point. Whether the answer is true or false, the question is irrelevant.
A tentative conclusion
I remember thinking, "My website hasn't really changed; why is the response to it changing?" And then I came to a "Yes, but..." answer. Most of what I consider the best works are relatively old, at least a couple of years; the only one I would consider "inspired" (in a broad and secular sense) is Eight-Year-Old Boy Diagnosed With Machiavellian Syndrome By Proxy (MSBP), which I would genuinely place alongside Evangelical Converts Trying to Be Orthodox and Pope Makes Historic Ecumenical Bid to Woo Eastern Rite Catholics for quality. The previous Monasticism for Protestantsand this work itself I consider to serve a legitimate purpose not served by anything else among my posts, but they are not classics.
So why, if my website hasn't grown any major new features for quite some time, why would it be drawing fundamentally different response? The answer is simple, and one I should have predicted: I've run ahead of the Zeitgeist, whether I had the faintest intent of doing so or not. Whether or not it's the same article, some of what I wrote may draw people more effectively now than when they were fresh and new.
And the question of a pedestal weighs on my mind. Advertisements run repeatedly because people don't fall for a product the first time they see an advertisement targeted to them; they fall after repeated familiarity. Only humility can pass through certain snares: and I am scarcely humble. I see the possibility that, some time after I have seen five or so clouds the size of a man's hand, a deluge will break forth. And I would really prefer the storm hit me when I am on Mount Athos, as a novice under the authority of an Elder, who does not care how smart I am and who sees that I have the same needs as many other novices, such as humility and obediences that build humility. Possibly I will not escape the deluge by getting to Mount Athos before it breaks: but I'll take my chances with a loving Elder rather than my own wisdom.
