The crown of Earth is the temple,
and the crown of the temple is Heaven.
Stephan ran to get away from his pesky sister—if nothing else he could at least outrun her!
Where to go?
One place seemed best, and his legs carried him to the chapel—or, better to say, the temple. The chapel was a building which seemed larger from the inside than the outside, and (though this is less remarkable than it sounds) it is shaped like an octagon on the outside and a cross on the inside.
Stephan slowed down to a walk. This place, so vast and open and full of light on the inside—a mystically hearted architect who read The Timeless Way of Building might have said that it breathed—and Stephan did not think of why he felt so much at home, but if he did he would have thought of the congregation worshipping with the skies and the seas, the rocks and the trees, and choir after choir of angels, and perhaps he would have thought of this place not only as a crown to earth but a room of Heaven.
What he was thinking of was the Icon that adorns the Icon stand, and for that matter adorns the whole temple. It had not only the Icons, but the relics of (from left to right) Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint John Chrysostom, and Saint Basil the Great. His mother had told Stephan that they were very old, and Stephan looked at her and said, "Older than email? Now that is old!" She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she smiled. "Older than email," she said, "and electric lights, and cars, and a great many of the kinds of things in our house, and our country, and..." her voice trailed off. He said, "Was it as old as King Arthur?" She said, "It is older than even the tale of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table."
As he had kissed the relics, he had begun to understand that what made them important was something deeper than their old age. But he could not say what.
But now he opened the doors to the temple, smelled the faint but fragrant smell of incense—frankincense—and was surprised to see another Icon on the stand. (Oh, wait, he thought. There were frequently other Icons.) The Icon was Saint Mary of Egypt. (This Icon did not have any relics.) He looked at the Icon, and began to look into it. What was her story? He remembered the part of her story he liked best—when, very far from being a saint at the beginning of her life, she came to a church and couldn't go in. An invisible force barred her, and a saint, the Mother of God, spoke to her through an Icon. Stephan vaguely remembered Father saying something about how it was also important how after years of fasting from everything but bread or vegetables, she was discovered but refused to go back to places that would still have been a temptation to her.
She was very gaunt, and yet that gauntness held fierce power. When he had looked into the Icon—or through it, as one looks through a window—he kissed her hand and looked at the royal doors, light doors with a kind of wooden mesh (it was beautiful) and a tower of three Icons each. The royal doors were at the center of the low, open wall that guarded the holy of holies within the temple, a special place crowned by the altar. The top two Icons told the place, not of the Annunciation to the Mother of God, but the Annunciation of the Mother of God. He looked into the pictures and saw the Annunciation of the Mother of God: not when the Archangel said, "Hail, O favored One! The Lord is with you," but when the Virgin listened and replied, "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word."
The spine of Eve's sin was snapped.
Death and Hell had already begun to crumble.
After looking through these pictures—it was not enough to say that he simply looked at them, though it was hard to explain why—he turned around and was absorbed into the Icon painted as a mural on the sloped ceiling that was now before him.
If that was the answer to Eve's sin, this was the answer to Adam's sin.
The Icon was an Icon the color of sunrise—or was it sunset? Then he saw something he hadn't seen before, even though this was one of his favorite Icons. It was an Icon of the Crucifixion, and he saw Christ at the center with rocks below—obedience in a garden of desolation had answered disobedience in a garden of delights—and beyond the rocks, the Holy City, and beyond the Holy City a sky with bands and whorls of light the color of sunrise. Now he saw for the first time that where Christ's body met the sky there was a band of purest light around it. Christ had a halo that was white at the center and orange and red at the sides—fitting for the Christ who passed through the earth like a flame.
The flame made him think of the God Who Cannot Be Pushed Around. This God sent his Son, who was also the One Who Cannot Be Pushed Around. In his teaching, in his friendship, in his healing the sick and raising the dead, every step he made was a step closer to this, the Cross. And yet he did this willingly.
Stephan turned, and for a moment was drawn to the mural to the right, which was also breathtakingly beautiful. Two women bore myrrh (the oil that newly chrismated Orthodox have just been anointed with) to perform a last service—the last service they could perform—to a dearly loved friend. And yet they found an empty tomb, and a majestic angel announcing news they would not have dared to hope: the Firstborn of the Dead entered death and death could not hold him. Its power had more than begun to crumble. But then Stephan turned back, almost sharply. Yes, this was glory. This was glory and majesty and beauty. But Stephan was looking for the beginning of triumph...
...and that was right there in the Icon the color of sunrise. The Cross in itself was the victory of the God Who Cannot Be Pushed Around. However much it cost him, he never let go of his plan or his grace. Christ knew he could call for more than twelve legions of angels—but he never did. He walked the path the Father set before him to the very end.
Stephan stood, his whole being transported to the foot of the Cross. However long he spent there he did not know, and I do not know either. He looked through the Icon, and saw—tasted—the full victory of the God Who Cannot Be Pushed Around.
When he did look away, it was in the Light of that God. Everything now bore that Light. He went over to the relics of the patron saints of his land, and though they were much newer than the relics of Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint John Chrysostom, and Saint Basil the Great, that didn't seem to matter. It was like dust from another world—precious grains of sand from Heaven—and the Icon of Saint Herman of Alaska and Saint Innocent holding up a tiny building was richly colorful—"like a rainbow that has grown up," he heard one of the grown-ups say.
Then he walked over to the Icon of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, holding a scroll that was open partway, with his letter to the Romans: "Let me be given to the wild beasts, for by their means I can attain to God. I am God's wheat, and I am being ground by the teeth of the beasts, so that I may an"—but here the quotation stopped, leaving him wondering. That Icon itself was one of several old-looking, yellowed Icons—though not nearly the oldest around—held in a deep, rich brown wooden frame carved with grapevines and bunches of grapes, as many things in that room were carved (though some had intricate interwoven knots). Stephan said, "I want to be a martyr just like you, Saint Ignatius. Pray for me."
Then he walked over to an Icon that was much smaller, but showed a man standing besides a rustic settlement with an outer wall and turrets and doors and buildings inside. It looked medieval to him, and he wished he could enter that world. It was darkened and yellowed and had a gold leaf sky, and something was written at the top, but he couldn't read it because it was in a very old language: Old Slavonic.
Right by that Icon was Saint Anthony, the father of all monastics. He had a piercing gaze, and Stephan had the feeling he needed to confess something—but he couldn't think of anything besides his bout with his sister, and she had been a pest. He looked away.
Stephan looked at the Icon on the left of the wall, and saw the prince, Saint Vladimir, with buildings and spires behind him that looked like they were having a party.
Then Stephan stood in front of the main Icon of the Mother of God holding God the Son, though he stood some distance back. The background was gold, and this drew him in a different way than the Icon of Saint Vladimir. This more than any other did not work like a photograph. (Or at least he was more aware of this now.) It might look odd to people who were just used to photographs, but you could say that a photograph was just a picture, but to say this was just a picture would show that you missed what kind of a picture you were looking at. But he had trouble thinking of how. He didn't so much sense that he was looking inot the Icon as that the Mother of God and the Son of God were looking at him. He didn't even think of the Icon being the Icon of the Incarnation and First Coming.
Then he looked at the Icon of the Last Judgment, where Christ the King and Lord and Judge returns holding a book of judgment, a book that is closed because there is nothing left to determine.
He thought intensely. The First Coming of Christ was in a stable, in a cave, and a single choir of angels sung his glory. The Second and Glorious Coming he will ride on the clouds, with legion on legion of angels with him. The First Coming was a mystery, one you could choose to disbelieve—as many people did. There will be no mistaking the Second Coming. In the First Coming, a few knees bowed. In the Second Coming, every knee will bow, in Heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, some in bliss and rapture and others in utter defeat. At the First Coming, a lone star in the sky heralded Christ's birth. At the Second Coming, the stars will fall to earth like overripe figs and the sky recede as a vanishing scroll.
What were those chilling, terrifying words of Christ? "Depart from me, you who are damned, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, sick and in prison and you did not visit me, lacking clothes and you did not give me the dignity of having clothes to wear." Then the condemned will say, "Where did we see you hungry and not feed you, or thirsty or sick or in prison and not take care of you?" And the King and Lord and Judge will say, "I most solemnly tell you, as much as you did not do it for the least of these brothers and sisters, you did not do it for me."
Stephan looked at the Icon and said, "I wish Dad would let me give money to beggars when I see..." Then his voice trailed off. The words didn't feel right in his mouth. He looked at the solemn love in the Icon, and then his mind was filled with the memory of his sister in tears.
He slowly backed down from the Icon, feeling the gaze of the King and Lord and Judge. He turned to almost run—he was in too holy of a place to run, and...
Something stopped him from leaving. After struggling inside, he looked around, and his eyes came to rest on the Icon of the Crucifixion that was the color of sunrise. Now he had not noticed them earlier this time, but he saw the Mother of God on one side and the beloved disciple on the earth. What had he just heard in church on Sunday? "Christ said to the beloved disciple, who is not here named because he is the image of every disciple, 'Behold your Mother,' and to his Mother, 'Behold your Son.' Listen to me very carefully. He did not say, 'Behold another man who is also your son,' but something much stranger and more powerful: 'Behold your Son,' because to be Orthodox is to become Christ." Stephan started to think, "Gold for kingship, incense for divinity, myrrh for suffering—these are Christ's gifts but he shares them with the Church, doesn't he?" He looked up, and then looked down.
"But I need to go and apologize for hurting my sister."
Part of the books behind the title had a reviewer say, "It is, in turn, beautiful, frightening, wise," and possibly the same could be said of this dialogue, but it is laced with the spiritual poison of escape.
This title has its merits, enough so not to delete. However, I would warn that its spice is spiritual MSG.
The car pulled up on the dark cobblestones and stopped by the darker castle. The vehicle was silver-grey, low to the ground, and sleek. A—let us call him a man—opened the driver's door on the right, and stood up, tall, dark, clad in a robe the color of the sky at midnight. Around the car he went, opened the door for his passenger, and once the passenger stepped out, made one swift motion and had two bags on his shoulder. The bags were large, but he moved as if he were accustomed to carrying far heavier fare. It was starlight out, and the moon was visible as moonlight rippled across a pool.
The guest reached for the bags. "Those are heavy. Let me—"
The host smiled darkly. "Do not worry about the weight of your bags."
The host opened a solid greyblack door, of unearthly smoothness, and walked swiftly down a granite hallway, allowing his guest to follow. "You've had a long day. Let me get you something to drink." He turned a door, poured something into two iridescent titanium mugs, and turned through another corridor and opened a door on its side. Inside the room were two deep armchairs and a low table.
"This is my first time traveling between worlds—how am I to address you?"
The host smiled. "Why do you wish to know more of my name? It is enough for you to call me Oinos. Please enjoy our welcome."
The guest sipped his drink. "Cider?"
The host said, "You may call it that; it is a juice, which has not had artificial things done to make it taste like it just came out of its fruit regardless of how much it should have aged by the time you taste it. It is juice where time has been allowed to do its work." He was holding a steel orb. "You are welcome here, Art." Then—he barely seemed to move—there was a spark, and Oinos pulled a candle from the wall and set it on the table.
Art said, "Why not a fluorescent light to really light the room up?"
The host said, "For the same reason that you either do not offer your guests mocha at all, or else give them real mocha and not a mix of hot water, instant coffee, and hot cocoa powder. In our world, we can turn the room bright as day any time, but we do not often do so."
"Aah. We have a lot to learn from you about getting back to nature."
"Really? What do you mean by 'getting back to nature'? What do you do to try to 'get back to nature'?"
"Um, I don't know what to really do. Maybe try to be in touch with the trees, not being cooped up inside all the time, if I were doing a better job of it..."
"If that is getting back in touch with nature, then we pay little attention to getting in touch with nature. And nature, as we understand it, is about something fundamentally beyond dancing on hills or sitting and watching waves. I don't criticize you if you do them, but there is really something more. And I can talk with you about drinking juice without touching the natural processes that make cider or what have you, and I can talk with you about natural cycles and why we don't have imitation daylight any time it would seem convenient. But I would like you to walk away with something more, and more interesting, than how we keep technology from being too disruptive to natural processes. That isn't really the point. It's almost what you might call a side effect."
"But you do an awfully impressive job of putting technology in its place and not getting too involved with it."
Oinos said, "Have you had enough chance to stretch out and rest and quench your thirst? Would you like to see something?"
"Yes."
Oinos stood, and led the way down some stairs to a room that seemed to be filled with odd devices. He pushed some things aside, then walked up to a device with a square in the center, and pushed one side. Chains and gears moved, and another square replaced it.
"This is my workshop, with various items that I have worked on. You can come over here and play with this little labyrinth; it's not completely working, but you can explore it if you take the time to figure it out. Come on over. It's what I've been working on most recently."
Art looked around, somewhat amazed, and walked over to the 'labyrinth.'
Oinos said, "In your world, in classical Greek, the same word, 'techne,' means both 'art' and 'technology.' You misunderstand my kindred if you think we aren't especially interested in technology; we have a great interest in technology, as with other kinds of art. But just as you can travel a long distance to see the Mona Lisa without needing a mass-produced Mona Lisa to hang in your bathroom, we enjoy and appreciate technologies without making them conveniences we need to have available every single day."
Art pressed a square and the labyrinth shifted. "Have I come here to see technologies?"
Oinos paused. "I would not advise it. You see our technologies, or how we use them, because that is what you are most ready to see. Visitors from some other worlds hardly notice them, even if they are astonished when they are pointed out."
Art said, "Then why don't we go back to the other room?"
Oinos turned. "Excellent." They went back, and Art sat down in his chair.
Art, after a long pause, said, "I still find it puzzling why, if you appreciate technology, you don't want to have more of it."
Oinos said, "Why do you find it so puzzling?"
"Technology does seem to add a lot to the body."
"That is a very misleading way to put it. The effect of most technologies that you think of as adding to the body is in fact to undercut the body. The technologies that you call 'space-conquering' might be appropriately called 'body-conquering.'"
"So the telephone is a body-conquering device? Does it make my body less real?"
"Once upon a time, long ago from your perspective, news and information could not really travel faster than a person could travel. If you were talking with a person, that person had to be pretty close, and it was awkward and inconvenient to communicate with those who were far away. That meant that the people you talked with were probably people from your local community."
"So you were deprived of easy access to people far away?"
"Let me put it this way. It mattered where you were, meaning where your body was. Now, on the telephone, or instant messages, or the web, nothing and no one is really anywhere, and that means profound things for what communities are. And are not. You may have read about 'close-knit rural communities' which have become something exotic and esoteric to most of your world's city dwellers... but when space conquering technologies had not come in, and another space-conquering technology, modern roads allowing easy moving so that people would have to say goodbye to face-to-face friendships every few years... It's a very different way of relating. A close-knit rural community is exotic to you because it is a body-based community in ways that tend not to happen when people make heavy use of body-conquering, or space-conquering, or whatever you want to call them, technologies."
"But isn't there more than a lack of technologies to close-knit communities?"
"Yes, indeed... but... spiritual discipline is about much more than the body, but a lot of spiritual discipline can only shape people when people are running into the body's limitations. The disciplines—worship, prayer, fasting, silence, almsgiving, and so on—only mean something if there are bodily limits you are bumping into. If you can take a pill that takes away your body's discomfort in fasting, or standing through worship, then the body-conquering technology of that pill has cut you off from the spiritual benefit of that practice."
"Aren't spiritual practices about more than the body?"
"Yes indeed, but you won't get there if you have something less than the body."
Art sat back. "I'd be surprised if you're not a real scientist. I imagine that in your world you know things that our scientists will not know for centuries."
Oinos sat back and sat still for a time, closing his eyes. Then he opened his eyes and said, "What have you learned from science?"
"I've spent a lot of time lately, wondering what Einstein's theory of relativity means for us today: even the 'hard' sciences are relative, and what 'reality' is, depends greatly on your own perspective. Even in the hardest sciences, it is fundamentally mistaken to be looking for absolute truth."
Oinos leaned forward, paused, and then tapped the table four different places. In front of Art appeared a gridlike object which Art recognized with a start as a scientific calculator like his son's. "Very well. Let me ask you a question. Relative to your frame of reference, an object of one kilogram rest mass is moving away from you at a speed of one tenth the speed of light. What, from your present frame of reference, is its effective mass?"
Art hesitated, and began to sit up.
Oinos said, "If you'd prefer, the table can be set to function as any major brand of calculator you're familiar with. Or would you prefer a computer with Matlab or Mathematica? The remainder of the table's surface can be used to browse the appropriate manuals."
Art shrunk slightly towards his chair.
Oinos said, "I'll give you hints. In the theory of relativity, objects can have an effective mass of above their rest mass, but never below it. Furthermore, most calculations of this type tend to have anything that changes, change by a factor of the inverse of the square root of the quantity: one minus the square of the object's speed divided by the square of the speed of light. Do you need me to explain the buttons on the calculator?"
Art shrunk into his chair. "I don't know all of those technical details, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about relativity."
Oinos said, "If you are unable to answer that question before I started dropping hints, let alone after I gave hints, you should not pose as having contemplated what relativity means for us today. I'm not trying to humiliate you. But the first question I asked is the kind of question a teacher would put on a quiz to see if students were awake and not playing video games for most of the first lecture. I know it's fashionable in your world to drop Einstein's name as someone you have deeply pondered. It is also extraordinarily silly. I have noticed that scientists who have a good understanding of relativity often work without presenting themselves as having these deep ponderings about what Einstein means for them today. Trying to deeply ponder Einstein without learning even the basics of relativistic physics is like trying to write the next Nobel prize-winning German novel without being bothered to learn even them most rudimentary German vocabulary and grammar."
"But don't you think that relativity makes a big difference?"
"On a poetic level, I think it is an interesting development in your world's history for a breakthrough in science, Einstein's theory of relativity, to say that what is absolute is not time, but light. Space and time bend before light. There is a poetic beauty to Einstein making an unprecedented absolute out of light. But let us leave poetic appreciation of Einstein's theory aside.
"You might be interested to know that the differences predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity are so minute that decades passed between Einstein making the theory of relativity and people being able to use a sensitive enough clock to measure the minute difference of the so-called 'twins paradox' by bringing an atomic clock on an airplane. The answer to the problem I gave you is that for a tenth the speed of light—which is faster than you can imagine, and well over a thousand times the top speed of the fastest supersonic vehicle your world will ever make—is one half of one percent. It's a disappointingly small increase for a rather astounding speed. If the supersonic Skylon is ever built, would you care to guess the increase in effective mass as it travels at an astounding Mach 5.5?"
"Um, I don't know..."
"Can you guess? Half its mass? The mass of a car? Or just the mass of a normal-sized adult?"
"Is this a trick question? Fifty pounds?"
"The effective mass increases above the rest mass, for that massive vehicle running at about five times the speed of sound and almost twice the top speed of the SR-71 Blackbird, is something like the mass of a mosquito."
"A mosquito? You're joking, right?"
"No. It's an underwhelming, microscopic difference for what relativity says when the rumor mill has it that Einstein taught us that hard sciences are as fuzzy as anything else... or that perhaps, in Star Wars terms, 'Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on your own point of view.' Under Einstein, you will in fact not find that many of the observations that we cling to, depend greatly on your own frame of reference. You have to be doing something pretty exotic to have relativity make any measurable difference from the older physics at all."
"Would you explain relativity to me so that I can discuss its implications?"
"I really think there might be more productive ways to use your visit."
"But you have a scientist's understanding of relativity."
"I am not sure I'd say that."
"Why? You seem to understand relativity a lot more like a scientist than I do."
"Let's talk about biology for a moment. Do you remember the theory of spontaneous generation? You know, the theory that life just emerges from appropriate material?"
"I think so."
"But your world's scientists haven't believed in spontaneous generation since over a century before you were born. Why would you be taught that theory—I'm assuming you learned this in a science class and not digging into history?"
"My science course explained the theory in covering historical background, even though scientists no longer believe that bread spontaneously generates mold."
"Let me ask what may seem like a non-sequitur. I assume you're familiar with people who are working to get even more of religion taken out of public schools?"
"Yes."
"They are very concerned about official prayers at school events, right? About having schools endorse even the occasional religious practice?"
"Yes."
"Ok. Let me ask what may seem like a strange question. Have these 'separation of Church and state' advocates also advocated that geometry be taken out of the classroom?"
Art closed his eyes, and then looked at Oinos as if he had two heads. "It seems you don't know everything about my world."
"I don't. But please understand that geometry did not originate as a secular technical practice. You migth have heard this mentioned. Geometry began its life as a 'sacred science,' or a religious practice, and to its founders the idea that geometry does not have religious content would have struck them as worse than saying that prayer does not have religious content."
"Ok, I think I remember that being mentioned. So to speak, my math teacher taught about geometry the 'sacred science' the way that my biology teacher taught about the past theory of spontaneous generation."
Oinos focused his eyes on Art. "In our schools, and in our training, physics, biology, and chemistry are 'taught' as 'secular sciences' the same way, in your school, spontaneous generation is taught as 'past science', or even better, the 'sacred science' of geometry is 'taught' in the course of getting on to a modern understanding of geometry."
Art said, "So the idea that the terrain we call 'biology' is to you—"
Oinos continued: "As much something peered at through a glass bell as the idea that the terrain of regular polygons belongs to a secularized mathematics."
"What is a sacred science?"
Oinos sat back. "If a science is about understanding something as self-contained whose explanations do not involve God, and it is an attempt to understand as physics understand, and the scientist understands as a detached observer, looking in through a window, then you have a secular science—the kind that reeks of the occult to us. Or that may sound strange, because in your world people proclaiming sacred sciences are proclaiming the occult. But let me deal with that later. A sacred science does not try to understand objects as something that can be explained without reference to God. A sacred science is first and foremost about God, not about objects. When it understands objects, it understands them out of God, and tries to see God shining through them. A sacred science has its home base in the understanding of God, not of inanimate matter, and its understanding of things bears the imprint of God. If you want the nature of its knowing in an image, do not think of someone looking in and observing, detached, through a window, but someone drinking something in."
"Is everything a sacred science to you? And what is a sacred science? Astrology?"
"Something like that, except that I use the term 'sacred science' by way of accommodation. Our own term is one that has no good translation in your language. But let us turn to the stars."
"Astrology is right in this: a star is more than a ball of plasma. Even in the Bible there is not always such a distinction between the ranks of angels and the stars as someone raised on materialist science might think." He rose, and began to walk, gesturing for Art to follow him. In the passage, they turned and entered a door. Oinos lit a lamp next to an icon on the wall.
The icon looked like starlight. It showed angels praying at the left, and then the studded sapphiric canopy of the night sky behind a land with herbs shooting from the earth, and on the right an immense Man—if he was a Man—standing, his hand raised in benediction. All around the sapphire dome were some majestic figures, soaring aloft in two of their six wings. Art paused to drink it in.
"What are those symbols?"
"They are Greek letters. You are looking at an icon of the creation of the stars, but the text is not the text for that day; it is from another book, telling of the angels thunderously shouting for joy when the stars were created. So the stars are connected with the angels."
"Is this astrology?"
"No, because the stars and angels both point to God. The influences in astrology point beyond matter to something else, but they do not point far enough beyond themselves. If you can use something to make a forecast that way, it doesn't point far enough beyond itself."
"Why not?"
"One definition to distinguish religion from magic—one used by anthropologists—is that religion is trying to come into contact with the divine, and magic is trying to control the divine. God cannot be controlled, and there is something of control in trying to foretell a future that God holds in mystery. A real God cannot be pried into by a skill. Astrology departs from a science that can only see stars as so much plasma, but it doesn't go far enough to lead people to look into the stars and see a shadow of their Creator. To be a sacred science, it is not enough to point to something more than matter as secular science understands it; as the term is used in our language, one can only be a sacred science by pointing to God."
"Then what is a sacred science? Which branches of learning as you break them up? Can they even be translated into my language?"
"You seem to think that if astrology is not a sacred science then sacred sciences must be something much more hidden. Not so. Farming is a sacred science, as is hunting, or inventing, or writing. When a monk makes incense, it is not about how much incense he can make per unit of time; his making incense is the active part of living contemplatively, and his prayer shows itself in physical labor. His act is more than material production; it is a sacred science, or sacred art or sacred endeavor, and what goes into and what comes out of the activity is prayer. Nor is it simply a matter that he is praying while he acts; his prayers matter for the incense. There are many lands from your world's Desert Fathers to Mexico in your own day where people have a sense that it matters what state people cook in, and that cooking with love puts something into a dish that no money can buy. Perhaps you will not look at me askance when I say that not only monks in their monasteries exotically making incense for worship are performing a sacred science, but cooking, for people who may be low on the totem pole and who are not considered exotic, as much as for anyone else, can and should be a sacred science. Like the great work that will stay up with a sick child all night."
"Hmm..." Art said, and then finished his tankard. "Have you traveled much?"
"I have not reached one in five of the galaxies with inhabited worlds. I can introduce you to people who have some traveling experience, but I am not an experienced traveler. Still, I have met sites worth visiting. I have met, learned, worshiped. Traveling in this castle I have drunk the blood of gems. There are worlds where there is nothing to see, for all is music, and song does everything that words do for you. I have beheld a star as it formed, and I have been part of an invention that moves forward as a thousand races in their laboratories add their devices. I have read books, and what is more I have spoken with members of different worlds and races. There seems to be no shortage of wonders, and I have even been to your own world, with people who write fantasy that continues to astonish us—"
"My son-in-law is big into fantasy—he got me to see a Lord of the whatever-it-was movie—but I don't fancy them much myself."
"We know about Tolkein, but he is not considered a source of astonishing fantasy to us."
"Um..." Art took a long time to recall a name, and Oinos waited patiently. "Lewis?"
"If you're looking for names you would have heard of, Voltaire and Jung are two of the fantasy authors we consider essential. Tolkein and Lewis are merely imaginative. It is Voltaire and Jung who are truly fantasy authors. But there are innumerable others in your world."
Art said, "Um... what do you mean by 'fantasy author'?"
Oinos turned. "I'm sorry; there is a discrepancy between how your language uses 'fantasy author' and ours. We have two separate words that your 'fantasy' translates, and the words stand for very different concepts. One refers to works of imagination that are set in another world that is not confused with reality. The other refers to a fundamental confusion that can cost a terrible price. Our world does not produce fiction; we do appreciate the fiction of other worlds, but we do not draw a particularly strong line between fiction where only the characters and events are imagined, and fiction where the whole world is imagined. But we do pay considerable attention to the second kind of fantasy, and our study of fantasy authors is not a study of imagination but a study of works that lead people into unreality. 'Fantasy author' is one of the more important terms in understanding your world and its history."
Art failed to conceal his reaction.
"Or perhaps I was being too blunt. But, unfashionable as it may be, there is such a thing as evil in your world, and the ways in which people live, including what they believe, has something to do with it. Not everything, but something."
Oinos waited for a time. Then, when Art remained silent, he said, "Come with me. I have something to show you." He opened a door on the other side of the room, and went into the next room. The room was lit by diffuse moonlight, and there was a ledge around the room and water which Oinos stirred with his hand to light a phosphorescent glow. When Art had stepped in, Oinos stepped up, balancing on a steel cable, and stood silent for a while. "Is there anything here that you can focus on?"
"What do you mean?"
"Step up on this cable and take my hand."
"What if I fall into the water?"
Art tried to balance, but it seemed even more difficult in the dark. For a while, he tried to keep his balance with Oinos's help, but he seemed barely up. He overcompensated twice in opposite directions, began flying into the water, and was stopped at last by Oinos's grip, strong as steel, on his arm.
"I can't do this," Art said.
"Very well." Oinos opened a door on the other side of the room, and slowly led him out. As they walked, Oinos started up a spiral staircase and sat down to rest after Art reached the top. Then Art looked up at the sky, and down to see what looked like a telescope.
"What is it?"
"A telescope, not too different from those of your world."
Oinos stood up, looked at it, and began some adjustments. Then he called Art over, and said, "Do you see that body?"
"What is it?"
"A small moon."
Oinos said, "I want you to look at it as closely as you can," and then pulled something on the telescope.
"It's moving out of sight."
"That's right; I just deactivated the tracking feature. You should be able to feel handles; you can move the telescope with them."
"Why do I need to move the telescope? Is the moon moving?"
"This planet is rotating: what the telescope sees will change as it rotates with the planet, and on a telescope you can see the rotation."
Art moved the handles and found that it seemed either not to move at all or else move a lot when he put pressure on it.
Art said, "This is a hard telescope to control."
Oinos said, "The telescope is worth controlling."
"Can you turn the tracking back on?"
Oinos merely repeated, "The telescope is worth controlling."
The celestial body had moved out of view. Art made several movements, barely passed over the moon, and then found it. He tried to see what he could, then give a relatively violent shove when the moon reached the edge of his field of view, and see if he could observe the body that way. After several tries, he began to get the object consistently in view... and found that he was seeing the same things about it, not being settled enough between jolts to really focus on what was there.
Art tried to make a smooth, slow movement with his body, and found that a much taller order than it sounded. His movement, which he could have sworn was gentle and smooth, produced what seemed like erratic movement, and it was only with greatest difficulty that he held the moon in view.
"Is this badly lubricated? Or do you have lubrication in this world?"
"We do, on some of our less precise machines. This telescope is massive, but it's not something that moves roughly when it is pushed smoothly; the joints move so smoothly that putting oil or other lubricants that are familiar to you would make them move much more roughly."
"Then why is it moving roughly every time I push it smoothly?"
"Maybe you aren't pushing it as smoothly as you think you are?"
Art pushed back his irritation, and then found the moon again. And found, to his dismay, that when the telescope jerked, he had moved the slightest amount unevenly.
Art pushed observation of the moon to the back of his mind. He wanted to move the telescope smoothly enough that he wouldn't have to keep finding the moon again. After a while, he found that this was less difficult than he thought, and tried for something harder: keeping the moon in the center of what he could see in the telescope.
He found, after a while, that he could keep the moon in the center if he tried, and for periods was able to manage something even harder: keeping the moon from moving, or perhaps just moving slowly. And then, after a time, he found himself concentrating through the telescope on taking in the beauty of the moon.
It was breathtaking, and Art later could never remember a time he had looked on something with quite that fascination.
Then Art realized he was exhausted, and began to sit down; Oinos pulled him to a bench.
After closing his eyes for a while, Art said, "This was a magnificent break from your teaching."
"A break from teaching? What would you mean?"
Art sat, opened his mouth, and then closed it. After a while, he said, "I was thinking about what you said about fantasy authors... do you think there is anything that can help?"
Oinos said, "Let me show you." He led Art into a long corridor with smooth walls and a round arch at top. A faint blue glow followed them, vanishing at the edges. Art said, "Do you think it will be long before our world has full artificial intelligence?"
Oinos said, "Hmm... Programming artificial intelligence on a computer is not that much more complex than getting a stone to lay an egg."
Art said, "But our scientists are making progress. Your advanced world has artificial intelligence, right?"
Oinos said, "Why on earth would we be able to do that? Why would that even be a goal?"
"You have computers, right?"
"Yes, indeed; the table that I used to call up a scientific calculator works on the same principle as your world's computers. I could almost say that inventing a new kind of computer is a rite of passage among serious inventors, or at least that's the closest term your world would have."
"And your computer science is pretty advanced, right? Much more advanced than ours?"
"We know things that the trajectory of computer science in your world will never reach because it is not pointed in the right direction." Oinos tapped the wall and arcs of pale blue light spun out.
"Then you should be well beyond the point of making artificial intelligence."
"Why on a million, million worlds should we ever be able to do that? Or even think that is something we could accomplish?"
"Well, if I can be obvious, the brain is a computer, and the mind is its software."
"Is it?"
"What else could the mind be?"
"What else could the mind be? What about an altar at which to worship? A workshop? A bridge between Heaven and earth, a meeting place where eternity meets time? A treasury in which to gather riches? A spark of divine fire? A line in a strong grid? A river, ever flowing, ever full? A tree reaching to Heaven while its roots grasp the earth? A mountain made immovable for the greatest storm? A home in which to live and a ship by which to sail? A constellation of stars? A temple that sanctifies the earth? A force to draw things in? A captain directing a starship or a voyager who can travel without? A diamond forged over aeons from of old? A perpetual motion machine that is simply impossible but functions anyway? A faithful manuscript by which an ancient book passes on? A showcase of holy icons? A mirror, clear or clouded? A wind which can never be pinned down? A haunting moment? A home with which to welcome others, and a mouth with which to kiss? A strand of a web? An acrobat balancing for his whole life long on a slender crystalline prism between two chasms? A protecting veil and a concealing mist? An eye to glimpse the uncreated Light as the world moves on its way? A rift yawning into the depths of the earth? A kairometer, both primeval and young? A—"
"All right, all right! I get the idea, and that's some pretty lovely poetry. (What's a kairometer?) These are all very beautiful metaphors for the mind, but I am interested in what the mind is literally."
"Then it might interest you to hear that your world's computer is also a metaphor for the mind. A good and poetic metaphor, perhaps, but a metaphor, and one that is better to balance with other complementary metaphors. It is the habit of some in your world to understand the human mind through the metaphor of the latest technology for you to be infatuated with. Today, the mind is a computer, or something like that. Before you had the computer, 'You're just wired that way' because the brain or the mind or whatever is a wired-up telephone exchange, the telephone exchange being your previous object of technological infatuation, before the computer. Admittedly, 'the mind is a computer' is an attractive metaphor. But there is some fundamental confusion in taking that metaphor literally and assuming that, since the mind is a computer, all you have to do is make some more progress with technology and research and you can give a computer an intelligent mind."
"I know that computers don't have emotions yet, but they seem to have rationality down cold."
"Do they?"
"Are you actually going to tell me that computers, with their math and logic, aren't rational?"
"Let me ask you a question. Would you say that the thing you can hold, a thing that you call a book, can make an argument?"
"Yes; I've seen some pretty good ones."
"Really? How do paper and ink think out their position?"
Art hesitated, and said, "Um, if you're going to nitpick..."
"I'm not nitpicking. A book is a tool of intelligent communication, and they are part of how people read author's stories, or explanation of how to do things, or poetry, or ideas. But the physical thing is not thereby intelligent. However much you think of a book as making an argument, the book is incapable of knowing what an argument is, and for that matter the paper and ink have no idea of whether they contain the world's best classic, or something mediocre, or incoherent accusations that world leaders are secretly planning to turn your world to dog drool, or randomly generated material that is absolute gibberish. The book may be meaningful to you, but the paper with ink on it is not the sort of thing that can understand what you recognize through the book.
"This might ordinarily be nitpicking, but it says something important about computers. One of the most difficult things for computer science instructors in your world to pound through people's heads is that a computer does not get the gist of what you are asking it to do and overlook minor mistakes, because the computer has no sense of what you are doing and no way to discern what were trying to get it to do from a mistake where you wrote in a bug by telling it to do something slightly different from what you meant. The computer has no sense that a programmer meant anything. A computer follows instructions, one after another, whether or not they make sense, and indeed without being able to wonder whether they make sense. To you, a program may be a tool that acts as an electronic shopping cart to let you order things through the web, but the web server no more understands that it is being used as a web server than a humor book understands that it is meant to make people laugh. Now most or all of the books you see are meant to say something—there's not much market for a paperback volume filled with random gibberish—but a computer can't understand that it is running a program written for a purpose any more than a book can understand that the ink on its pages is intended for people to read."
Art said, "You don't think artificial intelligence is making real progress? They seem to keep making new achievements."
Oinos said, "The rhetoric of 'We're making real breakthroughs now; we're on the verge of full artificial intelligence, and with what we're achieving, full artificial intelligence is just around the corner' is not new: people have been saying that full artificial intelligence is just around the corner since before you were born. But breeding a better and better kind of apple tree is not progress towards growing oranges. Computer science, and not just artificial intelligence, has gotten good at getting computers to function better as computers. But human intelligence is something else... and it is profoundly missing the point to only realize that the computer is missing a crucial ingredient of the most computer-like activity of human rational analysis. Even if asking a computer to recognize a program's purpose reflects a fundamental error—you're barking up the wrong telephone pole. Some people from your world say that when you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. The most interesting thing about the mind is not that it can do something more complete when it pounds in computer-style nails. It's something else entirely."
"But what?"
"When things are going well, the 'computer' that performs calculating analysis is like your moon: a satellite, that reflects light from something greater. Its light is useful, but there is something more to be had. The sun, as it were, is that the mind is like an altar, or even something better. It takes long struggles and work, but you need to understand that the heart of the mind is at once practical and spiritual, and that its greatest fruit comes not in speech but in silence."
Art was silent for a long time.
Oinos stopped, tapped a wall once, and waited as an opening appeared in the black stone. Inside an alcove was a small piece of rough hewn obsidian; Oinos reached in, took it, and turned it to reveal another side, finely machined, with a series of concentric ridged grooves centered around a tiny niche. "You asked what a kairometer was, and this is a kairometer, although it would take you some time to understand exactly what it is."
"Is it one of the other types of computers in your world?"
"Yes. I would call it information technology, although not like the information technology you know. It is something people come back to, something by which people get something more than they had, but it does this not so much according to its current state as to our state in the moment we are using it. It does not change." Oinos placed the object in Art's hands.
Art slowly turned it. "Will our world have anything like this?"
Oinos took the kairometer back and returned it to its niche; when he withdrew his hand, the opening closed with a faint whine. "I will leave you to find that yourself."
Oinos began walking, and they soon reached the end of the corridor. Art followed Oinos through the doorway at the end and gasped.
Through the doorway was something that left Art trying to figure out whether or not it was a room. It was a massive place, lit by a crystalline blue light. As Art looked around, he began to make sense of his surroundings: there were some bright things, lower down, in an immense room with rounded arches and a dome at the top, made of pure glass. Starlight streamed in. Art stepped through the doorway and sunk down a couple of inches.
Oinos stooped for a moment, and then said, "Take off your shoes. They are not needed here." Art did so, and found that he was walking on a floor of velveteen softness. In the far heart of the room a thin plume of smoke arose. Art could not tell whether he smelled a fragrance, but he realized there was a piercing chant. Art asked, "What is the chant saying?"
Oinos did not answer.
What was the occasion? Art continued to look, to listen, and began trying to drink it in. It almost sounded as if they were preparing to receive a person of considerable importance. There was majesty in the air.
Oinos seemed to have slipped away.
Art turned and saw an icon behind him, hanging on the glass. There was something about it he couldn't describe. The icon was dark, and the colors were bright, almost luminous. A man lay dreaming at the bottom, and something reached up to a light hidden in the clouds—was it a ladder? Art told himself the artistic effect was impressive, but there was something that seemed amiss in that way of looking at it.
What bothered him about saying the icon had good artistic effect? Was the artistry bad? That didn't seem to be it. He looked at a couple of areas of artistic technique, but it was difficult to do so; such analysis felt like a foreign intrusion. He thought about his mood, but that seemed to be the wrong place to look, and almost the same kind of intrusion. There seemed to be something shining through the icon; looking at it was like other things he had done in this world, only moreso. He was looking through the icon and not around it, but... Art had some sense of what it was, but it was not something he could fit into words.
After being absorbed in the icon, Art looked around. There must have been hundreds of icons around, and lights, and people; he saw what seemed like a sparse number of people—of Oinos's kind—spread out through the vast space. There was a chant of some kind that changed from time to time, but seemed to somehow be part of the same flow. Things seemed to move very slowly—or move in a different time, as if clock time were turned on its side, or perhaps as if he had known clock time as it was turned on its side and now it was right side up—but Art never had the sense of nothing going on. There seemed to always be something more going on than he could grasp.
Art shifted about, having stood for what seemed like too long, sat down for a time, and stood up. The place seemed chaotic, in a way cluttered, yet when he looked at the "clutter," there was something shining through, clean as ice, majestic as starlight, resonant as silence, full of life as the power beneath the surface of a river, and ordered with an order that no rectangular grid could match. He did not understand any of the details of the brilliant dazzling darkness... but they spoke to him none the less.
After long hours of listening to the chant, Art realized with a start that the fingers of dawn had stolen all around him, and he saw stone and verdant forest about the glass walls until the sunlight began to blaze. He thought, he though he could understand the song even as its words remained beyond his reach, and he wished the light would grow stronger so he could see more. There was a crescendo all about him, and—
Oinos was before him. Perhaps for some time.
"I almost understand it," Art said. "I have started to taste this world."
Oinos bowed deeply. "It is time for you to leave."
Dexios:An article that tries to catch you by beginning, "They really should have put it into my contract: I, the undersigned, hereby agree to spend one-half to three-quarters of all class time explaining why watching Dawson's Creek and thinking vague thoughts about God is not a valid substitute for attending mass." The students weren't affected by the usual exhortations, until she happened on a visit to monastic worship.
Links: ...And?
Dexios: The students were perfectly welcome, but the monks were there worshipping God and the students were welcome to join the monks worshipping God. And that got their attention when a whole legion of ill-starred attempts to get their attention failed. One student said, "With all the other masses, it's like it was all about me or something. With this mass, I got the feeling it was about God." And that succeeded where words about "It's commanded," or "It's good for you," failed.
The students weren't really asking "Why should I go to mass?" at all; they said that because they couldn't form the words to ask what they really meant.
Links: And that was...?
Dexios: "Why should I go to that mass?"
Links: Wow. I'm surprised you're siding with a bunch of rebellious—how old are they?
Dexios: Students at a Catholic high school. And as to rebellious—teenagers are likely to rebel and be rebels without a cause if they have too much trouble finding a good enough cause, but there's something that has to do with spirit that isn't rebellious at all. They rejected counterfeit coin.
Links: "Spirit?" As in—
Dexios: Um, as in—[pause]
Links: —as in something you're thinking about?
Dexios: Yes.
Links: So you're saying these students were super spiritual?
Dexios: Yes. No. Saying that they're super spiritual is an answer to the wrong question. Sure, I'd love to bring two (or however many it was) busloads of kids to our parish and show them how Orthodox worship is taken seriously even if you're not monks, but if you're thinking of spirit as some special quality that has an incense rising up from the best people's heads, that's exactly what it's not. I would say it's natural, if people hadn't heard a million voices saying that appetite is the only thing that's natural about us. These kids weren't showing spirit because they were being urged to be spirit enough to want real worship and not a show—if anything, they were spirit enough for that despite people urging them that shows dressed up as worship were good enough for them. And the author of the article didn't say that every now and then she sees a kid with a halo and that kid wants a real worship service, and is so spiritually snobbish that only a monastic service will satisfy him. (She said the services were "relaxed, by monastic standards," whatever that means.) What she was saying was that everyday, normal kids kept asking her why they should go to mass until she showed them...
A real mass. Or rather, one where monks were there to worship God and other people were quite welcome to join them in worshipping God.
Links: [pause] In Spirit and in Truth.
Dexios: In Spirit and in Truth. And I realized just now that the article has more going on in it than just spirit. It has a million other substitutes for spirit that people aren't happy with. Maybe it wasn't just spirit that resonated with me.
Links: Where else?
Dexios: Maybe your art history education simply talked about different eras and cultures choosing different strengths to develop—
Links: —it did—
Dexios: —but in mine there was a story of progress: at first medieval art was crude, and then changes began in medieval art that resulted in art getting better and better at being like a photograph until eventually artists weren't an expensive substitute for a photograph. The history of Western art was a history of progress, starting with medieval art that didn't look like a good photograph up to Enlightenment neo-classicism that could give a good photograph a run for its money. Which is exactly right, except that it's backwards.
Links: Let me guess. You're going to say that the medieval art was spiritual, or spirit?
Dexios: Something like that, because the baseline for medieval art was similar to icons. They hadn't gone to such scientific lengths to get a scientifically correct rendition of the human body for the mirror image of why pastors get their science illustrations wrong. Pastors and theologians get their science wrong because their focus is on theology and just a little science is brought in to make a point—and the fact that the science is usually wrong shows that their hearts are in the right place. But scientific art, unlike medieval art but like "The Oaths of the Horatii" by Jacques Louis David, for which he sketched first skeletons and then muscles and then bodies and only then painted bodies complete with clothes, represents a fall from a spiritual center of gravity.
Links: But the material world is good, and understanding it is good.
Dexios: Um...
Links: Which of those do you want to deny?
Dexios: Do you believe I have to deny that the material world is good? Or, alternately, that understanding the material world is good?
Links: Unless you want to say some very strange things about science.
Dexios: Ugh, I was hoping to avoid saying strange things about science. But first of all, you seem to be treating "understanding the natural world" and "science" as interchangeable, so that it is inconceivable what "understanding the human body" could mean besides "learning scientific facts about the body."
Links: And how exactly would I learn about the body apart from science?
Dexios: Let's see, you could look Appreciate art that portrays the human form, or discover how your body behaves by playing Baseball, or have a Chiropractic massage, if there is such a thing, or Dance, or—
Links: —didn't you say something about "alignment of the stars, alignment of the bones..." yesterday?
Dexios: You interrupted me! I was hoping to work my way up to something profound. But let's put massage under 'M' and forget about the alignment of the bones. I don't want to get into alternative medicine, besides saying that it seems a hint that people have some sense that their bodies have to have more to do with spirit than the almost mechanical view of "Western medicine", which is powerful and yet considered narrow in some circles.
And now for something related to the other horn for your dilemma.
Having enough to eat is good. So is having clothing, and a roof over your head in nasty weather. But the Sermon on the Mount tells us not to seek after these things: yes, we need them, and the Heavenly Father knows this well enough. But we are to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and his perfect righteousness, making our center of gravity there, and making a spiritual center of gravity. Oh, and by the way, the other things will be given to us as well, even though that isn't the point. The point, if I may use slightly non-Sermon-on-the-Mount language, is to have a spiritual center of gravity.
Links: But aren't you changing the subject of the Sermon on the Mount? Unless you talk about being poor in spirit, the Sermon on the Mount doesn't use the word "spirit."
Dexios: Matthew's Gospel talks about the Kingdom of Heaven and John's talks about abundant or eternal Life. As concepts they are not identical but you cannot treat them as dealing with separate realities, which would make the crudest fallacy. The Sermon on the Mount barely uses the word "spirit," but nothing from the ages is a better resource on living as spirit. And the distinction between 'Spirit', big 'S', and 'spirit', little 's', is not what you think.
Links: What do you mean?
Dexios: The distinction doesn't exist in Greek, or at least is not forced in that if you write "spirit" you have to decide if it has a big or little 's'. A lot of people think they need to place a vast chasm between big 'S' spirit and little 's' spirit so that it's almost two different words. But body is not so much the opposite of spirit as where spirit unfurls, and our spirits, little 's', are not so much the opposite of the Holy Spirit as where God's Spirit unfurls.
But this is a minor point. Nitpicking about a little or big 'S' on "Spirit", I mean. Body is profoundly important. Far from being a mere enemy of spirit, it is a proper counterpart, and that means that when you know the proper meaning of body, you know that it is where spirit unfurls, and the difference between a holy icon and secular art is not that secular art takes a high view of the body in contrast to holy icons, but icons take a high view of the body by letting it get inspired by spirit. Literally and figuratively, body is meant to be where spirit unfurls, and the monk who lives a life of "contemplation" and the "secular" Christian who lives contemplation in the world are both spirit at work. But may I make a more concrete illustration of spirit? In social ethics, perhaps?
Links: What are Orthodox social ethics?
Dexios: "Our social program is the Trinity," as Orthodox seem to not be able to stop repeating. I'm not sure you have to say "Trinity" instead of, say, plugging in spirit, but what it is becomes clearer by contrast with Catholic social ethics. Catholic social ethics addresses a question that isn't addressed in the Bible, or at least looks at its question in a very different light.
Links: What did they see? A better way to solve an old problem?
Dexios: Well, that would at least be their interpretation, and when they present things their way, it's kind of hard to see any other way of seeing it.
Links: What is the basic question?
Dexios: The basic question they address is, "What should be done about the poor," and the way they interpret that question is, "What societal structures should be erected so that poverty isn't the same sort of issue?"
Links: But isn't that how the problem is approached today?
Dexios: Maybe, but its differences from how the Gospel interprets the problem are profound. If you look in the Bible, poverty looms large. Where the Old Testament theocracy had done things by force, the New Testament calls people to responsibility and generosity. "Give to the one who asks of you" and all that. But nowhere in the Gospel is there an agenda for societal reform. There are no quasi-statist outlines for how the government should take from the rich and redistribute to the poor: Christians are told what they should do, not how the government should approach things differently.
It is not, in terms of the Gospel precepts, an improvement to go from people learning to be sons of God and in their sonship exercising almsgiving and generosity as profound and powerful spiritual discipline, to coercion that transfers other people's resources while denying them the power to choose and all but snatching from their hand most opportunities to be generous. It is apparently perceived that by thinking in the terms of secular ideologies in imitation of various secular and anti-Christian movements, the Catholic Church is growing enough to take an effective approach that will make a real difference. Or perhaps it is not growth but a failure to understand what exactly is going on in Christ's movement.
Links: But the New Testament is not pure capitalism.
Dexios: Indeed not. I operate within a capitalist system because that is where God has placed me; but that doesn't mean that I have to make capitalism my God.
Links: I've read that in the ancient Church there were some rather communist people who were big into selling lands and liquidating property.
Dexios: Yes, and they are not a support for imposing communism.
Links: They seem pretty communist in what they chose to me.
Dexios: They seem pretty communist in what they chose to me too. The Bible has high praise for people who in their sonship choose to give away everything that makes them wealthy. I've heard today about one man who gave away his Ferrari to become a monk. That discipleship is singularly beautiful, and it is not the same thing as imposing a plan that takes away other people's wealth and the opportunity to even be generous in giving it away. There are few things a capitalist community needs more than the salt and light of people who show that there are bigger things in life than wealth.
But that does not mean that the high virtue of selling one's property and giving away the proceeds should be forced and have its virtue and power flattened out. The story of Ananias and Sapphira seems to have a clear point. Ananias and Sapphira owned their property and were under no obligation to sell it. When they did sell it, although they pretended to lay all of the money at the apostles' feet they were under no obligation to donate any of it, let alone all of it. Their sin was in lying to God and saying that they had given everything when they kept something back. For that sin alone God struck them both dead. Even if the story implies something deeper about selling one's property and laying the proceeds about the apostles' point, it gets to that point by explicitly saying that there is no obligation to give. Which perhaps suggests that giving at its best is not a matter of what is required but the deiform, Christian, flowing, free virtue of generosity which is infinitely more than duty.
Links: I think I am beginning to see what's wrong with thinking Acts encourages communism.
Dexios: I should hastily clarify that most of the Catholic social teaching I've read does not endorse communism; they take somewhat different positions but the general drift is that even though the encyclicals adopt features of socialism, socialism and communism were off limits to Catholics.
Links: Then why try so hard to show that the New Testament endorses voluntary giving rather than involuntary communism?
Dexios: Because people trying to get you to see things the Catholic social ethics say, in effect, "Why are you fussing so much about us asking for a few coercive measures to give from the rich to the poor? Can't you see that the New Testament waxes eloquent about the glory of Early Church communism, which goes much further than the modest and sensible measures we happen to ask for?" But it doesn't—perhaps Christians in their discipleship and giving went further than these social reforms would ask for; they went further in that. But the "communism" in the New Testament was a matter of voluntary discipleship and generosity, not coercion. And therefore the New Testament is a profound warrant to rising above greed and giving up possessions, but that passage at least is not a warrant for the kind of social reform it is used to endorse.
Links: If I can sum up what you're saying, you're saying, "Care for the poor in the Gospel is an aspect of spirit and discipleship, and by trying to institute compulsory programs that destroy the opportunity for voluntary generosity, you're destroying the opportunity for spiritual discipleship." Correct?
Dexios: That is correct.
Links: Then what do they say to that objection? Or do they not address it?
Dexios: Um... that is hard to unravel. Do you want me to try?
Links: At least try.
Dexios: Are you familiar with behaviorism? Behaviorism's fallen out of favor, but it is a psychological school that dealt with how people behave after reward and punishment—but with no acknowledgment of emotions, beliefs, or other internal states—
Links: How does that draw people?
Dexios: That's not clear to me, but it was influential. At any rate, and this is the analogy I'm trying to draw, that in behaviorist teaching, people do not say, "There is no soul," but they draw the student to look at things so that the possibility of a soul is never even considered. This was said to introduce Michael Polanyi, a philosopher who worked with tacit and personal scientific knowledge. Similarly, the Catholic social ethics sources I've read do not raise the objection of sonship and voluntary giving to explicitly rebut it, but rather frame things so that concept is never even thought of or considered.
There are a couple of ways of doing this, but besides not considering it, they quote Biblical and patristic praise for voluntary giving as a straightforward example for why we should support coercive social programs. No explanation is offered; no acknowledgment is given that giving as a matter of New Testament spiritual discipleship could be something other than a support for institutional and partly statist programs that work by coercion. Most readers, I expect, will look at things the way they're supposed to see, and think that New Testament praise of giving applies to giving through social programs.
One thing that did surprise me was that it wasn't just conservatives who were offering criticism. There were apparently some people on the left who were all for social programs and planning, but weren't entirely thrilled that the Pope was entering their domain. It might have come across as an intrusion from another domain, like advice to mathematicians on how to solve the 3x+1 problem.
Links: The 3x+1 problem? What's that?
Dexios: Take a counting number; if it's even, divide by two, but if it's odd, multiply by three and add one. If you get a calculator and keep doing this, you'll see that any number you try gives 4, then 2, then 1, then cycles back to 4, 2, 1, etc. But even though if you'll do this many times and the same thing keeps happening, it's proven obnoxiously hard to prove that the thing that happens every time you try does, in fact, happen no matter what number you start with. A lot of mathematicians have spent a lot of effort without solving it, but actually solving the problem has proven as elusive as designing a society without problems, or at least without major ones. Solving the problem will be an incredibly big deal, maybe the mathematical event of the century, should it ever be solved.
But can you imagine how the mathematical community would respond if the Vatican tried to advise it on the most productive way to try to solve the 3x+1 problem?
Links: Um... but the Papacy is not ordinarily associated with authority in mathematics. Isn't ethics a little less unusual of a thing for the Vatican to be talking about?
Dexios: It's not strange that a Pope was talking about ethics; the surprising thing is that the Pope was answering a question that has little in the way of spirit. Almost every little question and every specific answer in these encyclicals is about what is to be coerced. The encyclicals manage to talk about care for the poor without almost ever exhorting Catholics and the rich to be generous. The idea that caring for the poor could be an occasion for virtue has remnants here and there, but the basic substance of the answer was in terms of what coercive mechanisms should take of those who have, not how the rich should voluntarily give or how people should grow in virtue.
Spirit is not something abstract from daily decisions; it is present, among other things, in being generous to beggars and allowing your money and what you do with it to be progressively transformed into spirit. When the question of caring for the poor becomes something where one person's generosity is ridiculed and the question is framed as what should be coercively taken from people and made as a coerced gift without generosity, then an area that has much room for spirit to be manifest is drained of spirit.
Other criticisms came that papal teaching was Utopian, that it was a thinly disguised Marxism, and I forget what else—there was one encyclical entitled "Mater et Magistra", "Mother and Teacher", and one pundit said there was something making the rounds about "Mother, yes; teacher, no." Usually the critiques came from conservatives, but there were liberals who wished the Vatican would proclaim the Gospel. Maybe I'm being naive, but it doesn't seem impossible to me that atheists who are big into social planning, and who do not believe in the Gospel, none the less think that the Pope can give something by preaching the Gospel that they with their social plans cannot. I think there's a lot of respect in that. What I would suggest is running through most, if not necessarily all, is that once upon a time the Pope used his authority to make saints, and now he seems to be exchanging his birthright for something much less, making social blueprints.
Links: But you must acknowledge that society is better off for such efforts, right?
Dexios: There is a certain set of blind spots that accompanies those assumptions; it is blind spots, I suggest, that has people look at pre-Vatican-II Catholics living in terms of spirit, giving to the world as saints, and caring for the poor in their generosity, and treat that as something murky and confused that Catholics have outgrown in the progress since Vatican II.
One of the things that comes with the social prescriptions, alongside a coercive character that stunts generosity, is that whatever the solution is, the answer is an institution, perhaps a state organization or something done by it. And no one questions whether this is the best way to do things; one would think it was the only way conceivable. But in fact it is not the only way.
In the ancient world, a great many things that have today been transformed into big, impersonal institutions—charity, hospitality, medicine, what would today be insurance, manufacture and production, commerce, and so on and so forth—were handled by smaller and more personal institutions. I might comment by the way that it's lost on most people today is that when women were associated with the home that meant they were associated with the beating heart of charity, hospitality, manufacture, and many other things, so that the image of the depressed housewife with no company and nothing but housework to do is as anachronous to read into the ancient world as telephones or the internet: what feminism is reacting to is not the traditional society's place for women, but what is left of it after that place, and most of what is connected to it, is torn to shreds.
Even today there are some things we do not relegate to impersonal institutions—romantic love and friendship, for instance. And I don't know if there is a resurgence of home business due to the internet—perhaps certain modern changes cannot represent the last word.
But when Popes started to decide they needed a social teaching to fill out a deficiency, everything besides being coerced is filtered through impersonal institutions. And though one may see a pause once or twice to make fun of people being generous to beggars the way they did on the ancient world, the vision of progress does not stop to question whether filtering everything through a big institution was a big idea. I haven't read through all the sources, but I haven't read anything yet that stopped to explain "Here's why John 3:16 did not say, 'For God so loved the world that he formed a sanitized, impersonal organization.'"
Perhaps I am asking society to open a door that was forever closed; the earliest encyclicals tried to resurrect medieval-style guilds, and it is not clear to me why other sources mock this decision to try to resurrect a vibrant institution that worked long and well in one time in favor of speculation about institutions not proven to work in any time. My point is not that many things are done by impersonal organization today but that when the Catholic Church opens its mouth for social teaching, no one seems to consider that anything besides an impersonal organization powered by coercion could be desirable. By contrast, our social program is spirit: God so continues to love the world that he continues to send his saints, his sons, that whosoever believes through their life of spirit and their divine love might have eternal life from his only-begotten Son. (And a million smaller and less eternal changes, too.)
Links: So then another way to get at the point of "Our social program is the Trinity" is to say, "The Orthodox Church's approach to living socially does not need a Utopian blueprint for society."
Would I be correct in hearing queer quotes when you use the word "progress"?
Dexios: I usually hear "fashions" when I read a Catholic social ethicist writing about progress. It is progress given the assumptions of a particular perspective, and (usually) given a lack of understanding of what was moving away. Again to return to my example of depracating pre-Vatican-II days when Catholics tried to become saints and, I would say, benefit society by becoming spirit—and the "progress" to an activist approach to society—what we have is not a movement from the less advanced to the more advanced but a fashion shift from something that has fallen out of favor to something that will presumably fall out of favor. And in this case, a step back.
Links: What do you mean?
Dexios: To borrow an image which Catholic author Peter Kreeft borrowed from C.S. Lewis, ancient ethics asked three ethical questions while modern ethics answers one (usually, but maybe two). To visualize these questions with the image of a fleet of ships at sea, the first question is how the ships can avoid bumping into each other, and this question is shared by ancient and modern ethics. The second question is how the ships can keep shipshape and maintain themselves inside, and even though this question cannot really be separated from the first question, only some modern ethics addresses it. The third question, which is the most important one, is why the ships are out at sea in the first place.
If we look at the depracated, Orthodox model of becoming saints and being Heavenly minded enough to be of earthly good, then on a proper understanding that approach is something that says something to answer each of these questions; on that count at least, it is robust. If we look at the activist model, then things are reduced to one question, how the ships can be kept from bumping into each other, perhaps forcibly. It does reasonably well given that narrowing of focus, but it only answers that one question.
Now I would suggest that it is dubiously a moral advance to addressing three major questions to addressing one. Perhaps moral depth cannot always be settled by counting questions addressed, but this moral "advance" has been achieved by almost completely shutting off two out of three substantial questions. Which would appear to be not progress, but impoverishment.
Links: I think I can see how when you see the word "progress" you want to supply an English translation of "fashion". Or would you rather say "regress"?
Dexios: I don't want to analyze whether "regress" would be true, but I would rather speak of "fashion." When fashions shift, people go from emphasizing some things to others. People become sensitized to some things and blinded to others. And, perhaps, sometimes, there will be real regress some times and real progress others. But there is a tendency for a fashion to see its waxing popular as progress, and I wish people could have the ability to say, "Maybe this is progress, maybe this is regress, and maybe this is just a fashion shift that, like most fashion shifts, looks like genuine progress once you adopt its peculiar sharp sensitivities and its pecular blind spots." And no fashion shift is devoid of spirit, but if you are looking for where spirit is to be found, the house of fashion delivers less than it promises.
Links: It seems to me that Utopian dreams have never been fully realized but they have been realized somewhat, and that makes a big difference. You know that the wealthy nations may owe some of their wealth to oppression but some of it is due to the Utopian dreams of Adam Smith among others, who have discovered Midas's secret?
Dexios: Don't you mean Midas's curse?
Links: Don't you mean Midas's blessing?
Dexios: In the story of Midas, Midas gained the "blessing" of turning everything he touched to gold. And it was wonderful, or it seemed wonderful, to kick pebbles and watch gold nuggets fall to earth. But then food turned to inedible gold, and drink likewise, and if I understand the story correctly he embraced his daughter only to have her reduced to nothing but a golden statue. Then he began to be blessed, and spiritual gold was forged when he realized that maybe turning everything to gold wasn't such a good idea. Unfortunately, we haven't gained the same transformation to spiritual gold when we are bombarded by advertisements.
Malcolm Muggeridge said that nothing proves "Man does not live by bread alone" like discovering the secret of mass-producing bread, and we have not only enough bread for everybody but enough meat for most beggars to eat meat regularly. People say, "I'm not rich; I'm in debt," and have no idea that they can purchase a month's food without suffering real financial injury. Which, to a great many people who don't know where their next meal is coming from, might as well be the ability to buy a BMW without facing any real financial obstacles. It seems for many of us by definition rich means "having more money than us because we couldn't possibly be rich."
Links: What's the downside?
Dexios: One U.S. woman was visiting a woman in Central America, I forget where. They were having coffee when she looked around her hostess's kitchen and met a dawning realization... "There isn't any food on your shelves."
"No... but there will be... and it's a good thing that I don't have any food now, because if I had it, why would I need to trust God for? But I will have food later..."
Dexios: If even that. That woman is spirit. She is sonship and sainthood. She is the Sermon on the Mount, and if we patronize her when we patronize "those less fortunate than ourselves," we might also patronize St. Francis of Assisi for not knowing how to make a difference in the world. Not that I envy her poverty. But I envy her finding the Sermon on the Mount in her poverty, and it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to have what she has.
If capitalism is the most effective Utopian vision, it produces a Utopia for spoiled children. It may well deliver what the Utopian specifics in Catholic social teaching wouldn't get working, but what capitalism delivers and what much Catholic Utopianism tries to deliver does not make people better, or nobler, or wiser. In the particular classically liberal capitalist socities I know, most people have about as many creature comforts as we know how to make—air conditioning in Habitat for Humanity houses, meat for the homeless, television for everyone who's not homeless—and medicine and safety push back suffering and death so that you have a good chance of not dying young, and many, many people die segregated off in nursing homes so the rest of society does not have to be visibly reminded that people grow old and die. Utopia is not something that may someday exist if social planners someday get things right; it exists here and now because social planners got what they were trying to do right.
Links: But is suffering good? Does the Bible ever talk about wonderful suffering?
Dexios: Let me quote:
More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Rom 5.3-4. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. Rom 8.18-9. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort. I Cor 1.5-7. ...that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Phil 3.10. Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. Col 1.24. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering. Heb 2.10. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. I Pet 4.13.
At least for people like us who live in Utopia, you can think that all the things a spoiled child wants are your right and if you are really suffering—maybe you won't be so crass as to say that any suffering is God's punishment, but you'll still think it's an interruption that keeps you from the normal course of Christian life. But honoring God in suffering is the normal course of Christian life. Besides what I quoted, there's the book of Job where God lays his honor on the line based on what Job will do when he has miserable suffering. I don't know how to capture all the complexity of the Biblical views on suffering, but if suffering is praised as a sharing in the sufferings of the Son who was made perfect through suffering, then maybe it's not doing the world a favor to engineer away suffering, even if that is possible.
It's not just that the Gospel works best without suffering and now we may have good enough social plans to get the Gospel to where it works best. I fear Catholic social plans if they botch and have weird side effects like social plans sometimes do, but I fear them even more if they achieve what they want. Perhaps this is easy to say from Utopia, but having what Utopia provides, I have real doubts about whether it makes me spirit. In those things that most make me a mature man, I think Utopia is overrated. I may have some maturity through the discipline of going against the flow, but there's a way where comfort can make faith lukewarm where intense persecution would make it stronger.
Catholic social planning is trying to make good that is only available to a majority available to everyone. I wish they had a somewhat bigger version of good to be sharing.
Links: So you are suspicious of efforts to help the poor.
Dexios: I am suspicious of some efforts and participate in others. I try to feed the hungry, and besides directly showing kindness to beggars I support charities—but these charities provide more than a spoiled child would want. They support people's spiritual needs, like churches. I don't believe education needs to be put on quite as high a pedestal as some people give it, but I support education.
I guess I need to clarify. My point wasn't to say exactly what everybody in the world should have; when someone speaks to me out of pain, I rarely talk about pain as occasion for spiritual growth. But in Catholic social teaching people seemed to be saying "Wouldn't it be nice if people had this, and this, and this," and listed a number of things that for the most part do not make people better, or nobler, or wiser. There may be a discussion of duties alongside rights, but much of the encyclicals were about how much it would be better to have such things, and living in a society where most people do have those sort of things, I needed to say, "This is not what you think it is."
Links: Is there anything specific that you would say that you want for the poor, and that you would try to help them come to it?
Dexios: Absolutely.
I want them to become spirit in as full a sense as possible. I want them to glorify God and enjoy him forever. I want them to live the life of Heaven that is meant to be here and now and not just after our resurrection. I want them to be transfigured, spirit, soul, and body, into the likeness of Christ, and to be little Christs. I want them to become divine, partakers of the divine nature. I want them to own the Kingdom of Heaven and live the Divine Life. And maybe it would be nice if some of them could send missionaries to the first world, to share some of their riches. And I would like the world to profit from their wealth as the poor are chosen to shame the rich. And not just to follow the vogues of the first world.
Links: Question: What do you think about non-Christian texts, like the Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad-Gita, or Gospel of Thomas?
Dexios: Um...
Links: You're going to say something nasty about Eastern religions, aren't you?
Dexios: Asking what I think about non-Christian texts like the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Gospel of Thomas is like asking what I think about different forms of indoor exercise, like weightlifting, aerobics, and sticking your face in the fan.
The Tao Te Ching is spirit, and indeed words can be spirit, not just Christian words. So is the Bhagavad-Gita. From all I have heard, they are deep, deeper than a whale can dive, and they have taught healthy communities what it means to be human for thousands of years.
But a society that embraces Gnosticism sticks its face in the fan. Gnosticism unlike Hinduism and Taoism comes up again and again and each time it's a downward spiral that does not give spirit to a society that embraces it the way Hinduism and Taoism do.
Links: I've read some Gnostic sacred texts and they engaged my spirit like almost nothing else; they drew me in.
Dexios: I'm not surprised. Gnostic scripture is spiritual porn. Sorry to use that image, but...
Links: Are you just calling names, or is there a substantive reason for that unflattering comparison?
Dexios: Marriage is spirit, and it incorporates a number of things into its partnership, including what repeated studies have found is the best environment to enjoy sex. But no marriage that's lasted much longer the honeymoon has got there simply by sailing on pleasure; marriage is a crown of thorns, like monasticism, and part of the benefit it provides is not just an environment for children to grow up, but an environment for the parents to grow up. The best marriages are not a Utopia for spoiled children but a little Utopia for mature adults.
Marriage is like spirit and spirit is like marriage, including what can be misunderstood as the spiritual erotic, a haunting, exotic factor that belongs there even if it is ultimately beyond the erotic. But that doesn't mean that exotic haunting all day long is what you should be getting. It doesn't mean, in other words, that Gnosticism is the best way to be spirit.
Links: Have you read the Gnostic Scriptures?
Dexios: I've read a good number of Gnostic sacred texts.
There are a lot of people today who've heard that the Gnostic scriptures show the human face of Jesus, and the canonical Gospels make him seem so divine he's not human. I've heard some people say that the best way to rebut that is to actually get people to read the Gnostic sacred texts, because the Gnostic sacred texts give some people what other people try to get from LSD, and their Christ is exotic and spiritual and several other things that do not include being human, not like the Jesus who wept at Lazarus' death and prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane with sweat like drops of blood—something medical that occasionally happens when people are too stressed out to possibly describe and that we do not need to explain away.
Links: So if people actually READ the texts they'll stop saying "Here at last is the human face of Jesus."?
Um, from the look on your face, you don't like that question.
Dexios: Let me draw an analogy. There was one time when some art was displayed at a coffeeshop, and some people thought it was a big deal because it showed nudity. It struck me as... maybe I haven't always been chaste in looking at nude artwork, but I honestly didn't see what the big deal others saw. In a sense it wasn't any more exciting than a cartoonish schematic diagram; it didn't pose a problem to me because I didn't understand how the art worked.
Then... I had been looking at the art and not understanding it, and suddenly something clicked and I did understand it, and when it communicated to me... Other artwork can just celebrate the human form, if this was like a schematic diagram it was schematic and focused attention on the sexual. When it clicked, the artwork went from simply being weird to being much more seductive than what we're told a "celebration of the human form" is supposed to be.
And that is exactly what happened when I read enough Gnostic scripture. I read a little and it seemed weird. I read more and it clicked and I felt its pull. And I have been changed somewhat, and not entirely for the better.
Links: How could it change you?
Dexios: Once you have drunk from a well, you thirst for it.
Links: Do you really think that Gnosticism and The da Vinci Code are such a bad well to thirst for, such a bad spirit? There's more spirit in The da Vinci Code, though maybe not as you're using the term, than anything else to hit the shelves for a while. And it's well-written.
Dexios: I know it's well-written; after reading a bunch of Christian reports accusing it of being garbage literature, I feel its pull. I read it and to my consternation I want Mary Magdalene to be the Grail, and I seem to want to exchange a eucharistic Cup by which the Lord's blood pulses in believer's veins to believing that there is a very dilute royal bloodline alive in a few people I haven't met, which is an exchange of gold for copper, but still something the book left me wanting. There is indeed a lot of spirit in it; it makes a good lure.
Links: Calling the book's good points a "lure" is harsh, if the only real thing you're going to acknowledge it is—what is it that this "lure" points to?
Dexios: Despair.
I was quite struck when I read a book entitled Against the Protestant Gnostics, written by a Protestant, by the way, and it said that Gnosticism besides being an a-historical phenomenon entirely hinged on one mood: despair.
The hope Dan Brown offers in The da Vinci Code is a hope of despair. It's a hope that there's some sexy secret to be had behind appearances, behind the here and now, and whatever else he may have wrong about earlier forms of Gnosticism being lovely and humane, he's dead right about digging for something deeply hidden. You may have heard that some Gnostics taught that the world around us was made by an impotent, inferior, evil God and is evil. Even if not everybody said that in so many words the here and now that God gives us is something despicable. It is something to despair in and try to get around for some good that maybe more spiritual people can find. Is this good news?
Links: Hmm. I'd just assumed that the worst thing about Dan Brown was his anti-Catholicism. But you're pretty critical of the Catholic Church too.
Dexios: Indeed, because it misses the mark. It comes close in some ways, but it misses the mark. But Dan Brown doesn't seem hostile to the Catholic Church because of where it misses the mark, because of where it hits it. Whatever its imperfections may be, the Catholic Church has for about two thousand years been teaching people to be human and live lives of spirit, and live them in the here and now. Whatever other fussing I may make of the Catholic Church, it would be strange of me to deny that the Catholic Church offers something better than despair. Maybe I could wish they would do a better job of it, but the Catholic Church offers hope, and not just because a recent Pope had some very uplifting words about living in hope. Hope is a very deep root in the Catholic Church, and it lends shape to all sorts of other things.
Links: So maybe Dan Brown doesn't offer the purest form of spirit, or maybe people would be better off if they could get to spirit in not such a despairing way. But doesn't Dan Brown deserve credit for at least getting people to devote attention to matters of spirit?
Dexios: There's a story where a princess is having a dreamlike meeting with her fairy grandmother many generations removed. Her nurse doesn't believe the princess's extraordinary tales about the grandmother, and when the princess wants to know, "Is it naughty of Nurse to not believe in you?" the grandmother only says, "It would be naughty of you."
Quite probably there are people for whom Dan Brown is a step up, who move from unspiritual despair to spiritual despair. Quite certainly there are people learning from better sources, such as Taoism and Hinduism again, and are brought into spirit. And certainly I am glad that the high school students who ask, "Why go to mass?" can join monastic Catholic worship, not so much because it is monastic as because it is worship worthy of human beings. But I as Orthodox could not join them.
Links: Why not?
Dexios: Because however God deals with other people, it would be naughty of us.
God can move through non-Orthodox resources, and non-Christian ones. But when he places someone in full communion with his Church, the Orthodox Church, things that are permissible under partial communion are no longer permissible: though I am loth to speak of communion as a resource, God will work through other resources in a genuine way to people who only have those other resources, but when we have the opportunity to drink from the pure source we are not to take our substance from downstream. And it would be naughty of us, whether or not it would be naughty of others, to refuse to recognize the Orthodox Church of Christ as the fountain from which we drink.
Links: It would be depriving spirit of flourishing in body, wouldn't it?
Dexios: I know that I'd say that for Dan Brown and other people who think that being Gnostic is the hidden root of spirituality. Against these I say that spirit is a great banner that when it unfurls gives shade to people-watching, travelling, listening to music, Starbuck's—
Links: Starbuck's? Doesn't that, well—
Dexios: If you mean to purchase your identity at Starbuck's then it will run short. But if you learn to enjoy things in the spirit, if you know there is more to life than food and drink, then an occasional treat can include Starbuck's. Stewardship isn't tight-fisted, and if you don't need commercial products like some kind of sacrament, you are freed to truly enjoy them.
Links: But what if the way people are naturally led to approach Starbuck's is as a sacrament?
Dexios: What if? So we live in a wealthy society. So when someone asks, "Was economic wealth made for man, or man for economic wealth?" people just hit the snooze button. So advertising is an abominable manipulation to make people covet things they don't need. If you are to live a life of spirit, then that means living a life of spirit in this economy, living simply and generously, and not laying the reins on the horse's neck. Your responsibility is to let what you buy be body where your life of spirit is manifest, and if Starbuck's tries to sell you an identity, and that identity is inimical to living a life of spirit, your responsibility is still to life a life of spirit that unfurls itself in how you use wealth.
Links: This makes sense now that you say it, but where did you get that?
Dexios: That is one of the things that may, or may not, be added to us if we seek first the Kingdom of God, and it is not essential for everyone.
Links: Then what is essential?
Dexios: Spirit. Contemplation. Don't ask where to strike the balance between action and contemplation. Pursue contemplation, and don't be surprised if after a time the way God tells you to contemplate is to plant a tree.
Links: Where did you get "plant a tree" from?
Dexios: Martin Luther. When he was asked what he would do if he knew the Lord were returning tomorrow, instead of talking about praying long prayers or wailing about his sins, he simply said what he was planning on doing, which was to plant a tree. If it was really OK for him to plan to plant a tree, as he did, then there's no particular reason that if the Lord were returning the next day he should be suddenly embarrassed about legitimate, spiritual activity and try to be super-spiritual.
Contemplation seems to include a lot of planting a tree. It can mean entering a monastery, but it can also mean working a job, making friendships, shooting hoops, and playing with the neighbor's children. If we go to church, or try to cultivate a discipline of quiet, that means quite a lot of "secular" things, a "secular" body for spirit to be manifest in. And people who give up on doing big things for God often end up doing tremendous things for God as part of their contemplation.
Links: Huh? How does that work? Or are you just being down on activists?
Dexios: Ever hear about a Wesley boy trying to do serious work for God?
Links: No.
Dexios: One of the Wesley brothers believed that missionaries were the biggest super-Christians, and so got everything arranged to be a big missionary for God.
And then he hit rock bottom. He failed as a missionary, returned a failure, and then fell lower than rock bottom when, on the ship, there was a terrible storm, and he was afraid for his life and puzzled about why there were men on deck singing. When he asked them if they were afraid, they said that no, they were not afraid, because they believed in Jesus. That finished him.
Only after that happened did he become one of the biggest forces in American Christianity.
Links: You make God sound cruel.
Dexios: If you expect God to share an activist mentality then God looks very cruel, but God isn't a secular activist. This wasn't even a social justice issue; Wesley said "God, I'll be a really good hammer and do really impressive work," and if anything, God said, "I don't want a hammer. I want a son." People who try to be activists sometimes make the best sons after they fail as activists, but the reason God didn't endorse Wesley's plan about how he was going to make a difference was that God makes a difference through people, and however big and important the work is that needs to be done, God makes sons first and foremost, and never circumvents sonship to "cut to the chase" and get to the important part, because to him sonship is the important part, and he can equip people to do results once they fail as hammers if need be.
There's a big difference between "I'll do the best I can" and "I'll lay myself before God and work as he is at work." The difference is whether your power is a matter of spirit. There was a visiting African pastor who came to the U.S. and said, "It's amazing what you can do without the Holy Spirit;" that stinging compliment is one God's sons need not hear. The Sermon on the Mount says more about where our power should come from than what we should achieve; the Gospel is about trusting God, not just about the fate of our souls but getting things done here on earth. It's challenging and it becomes all the more challenging when you realize how broken of a world we live in.
And perhaps God also does things through people who think they know how mountains are moved here on earth and try to short-circuit God's call to become a son like his Son. God could still work with them if they more fully spirit. Spirit has its own power in God.
Links: Let me change the subject, or maybe I'm not changing the subject. Where do the seven sacraments fit into this?
Dexios: Baptism, Holy Communion, Holy Matrimony, the Sign of the Cross, reverently Bowing, the Holy Kiss, and the Blessing of Fruit—
Links: —that's a rather strange list of seven sacraments!
Dexios: It seems perfectly natural to me. If it seems strange to you, then perhaps there's something you don't understand about the usual list. Holy Communion, Baptism, Confirmation, Confession, Ordination, Marriage, and Unction for Healing are not the Seven Exceptions. They may be the biggest seven—but you don't understand them until you realize that there's either one sacrament or a thousand, and that a thousand little things in our piety are the same sort of thing as The Big Seven. Like blessing fruit to celebrate the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration!
Links: But why bless fruit then? Do you also bless candles to celebrate the Annunciation?
Dexios: I'd have to look up when we bless candles, but it does not seem strange to me to bless fruit. The Transfiguration is not just when the Son of God shone, but it is specifically when his body, the first of the material world to be drawn into spirit, shone. It was a first taste of the Transfiguration when the rest of his kingdom comes in force, and the Holy Transfiguration of Christ ultimately becomes the holy transfiguration of the whole Creation, and its fruits. Today people might pick something else to represent Creation's productivity, but grapes and fruit come from Creation and are a part of it, and in a sense by blessing fruit on the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration we know what it means, that it's not just something way back when that's only about Christ, but about something that is meant to expand through the whole Creation of which Christ is head. Just as Christ is to be the first of many sons and draw mankind into him, so his body is the first case of matter drawn into the divine, of body that is spirit, and his coming was the beginning of a shockwave that keeps reaching out.
Links: So is the Transfiguration a big enough deal that it's worth adorning with a sacrament, like many other holidays.
Dexios: That makes it sound like something external. The spirit of the Transfiguration is the spirit of sacrament, and of icons. I've said earlier that spirit transforms body, or should; now I'll go further and say that God makes us spirit through body. If you try to understand Holy Communion and ask the wrong questions, you're in danger of stopping at learning what happens after the priest has consecrated the elements, even though it's important that the bread and wine have become the body and blood of Christ they represent. That's only half the story. The rest of the story is when this bread and wine that have become the body and blood of Christ are partaken by the faithful, and the faithful are transformed. Our bodies are not a mere ornament as we partake of the divine nature; we partake of the Church and Creation, and the divine life, precisely when we receive what has been transformed that it may transform us. God makes us spirit through not only our bodies but his material creation: the Word became flesh, and the flesh became Word, and the Word keeps becoming flesh, and the flesh keeps becoming Word, and the shockwave ever reaches outward.
Links: And the Church has a lot of blessings, from a traveller's blessing to blessing Pascha baskets, doesn't it? And there are many sacred actions as we say our prayers, aren't there? I imagine if you counted all the sacramental rites and sacred actions you'd actually wind up with more than the figure of one thousand that you grabbed.
Dexios: But the nature of a sacrament doesn't really end up there. Ultimately the world is icon and sacrament. A man is the microcosm of the universe, but you have to understand that the "universe" is the spiritual as well as physical world, and that "microcosm" means that the spiritual and physical are all bound up in miniature. In a man who is spirit, they are more tightly bound together: you can look at most people's faces and if they're not masking then you can see into their spirit; spirit and body do not war against each other. And if you understand how our bodies are in fact the bodies of our spirits, and our spirits are the spirits of our bodies, then you understand that in "man writ large", the universe that is the opposite of man the microcosm, then matter is pregnant with spirit.
Perhaps the crowning jewel is the kind of rite over which a priest presides. It is a crowning jewel of the warp and woof of "mundane" life, if life is ever "mundane" properly understood. For one example, you may have heard of the clergy shortage in Alaska: something like a third of the state population is Orthodox but there are precious few priests. And a congregation asked the bishop what to do as they cannot often have a priest to worship. The bishop said only two things. One of them I will not mention. The other was to eat together.
Holy Communion casts a long shadow. Part of this means that a priest can bless fruit and anyone can partake of it, and maybe there's a blessing even if it's not a big deal as the Eucharist. But you're missing something if that's the only place you look.
A meal with other people is part of the Eucharist unfurling. It's not directly the Eucharist, but if you understand what the Eucharist is then a common meal stands in its luminous shadow. The bishop's advice was not simply a substitute for imperfect times; even when there is a priest it is good for the Eucharist to unfurl into a common meal, and however nice it is for the priest to bless the food that's not all that is going on. Table fellowship is common communion and "common" conceals a wealth of majesty. It's not a really different thing from the Eucharist.
Links: [pause] It seems like I want to learn it all. What else is there to learn?
Dexios: Not to learn everything. You can learn about the priest, whose role I haven't covered, but what I've said about us needing monks applies even more strongly to one person given over to be spirit in a way that helps others be spirit. There is spiritual discipline, which almost as many different shapes as sacrament—I haven't talked about fasting: the demons always fast but only someone like us with body and spirit can be transformed and have his body become spirit by fasting. I haven't talked about—
If you want to become more spirit, why don't you think of an act of spirit and do that?
I got up, washed my face in the fountain, and put out the fire. The fountain was carved of yellow marble, set in the wall and adorned with bas-relief sculptures and dark moss. I moved through the labyrinth, not distracting myself with a lamp, not thinking about the organ, whose pipes ranged from 8' to 128' and could shake a cathedral to its foundation. Climbing iron rungs, I emerged from the recesses of a cluttered shed.
I was wearing a T-shirt advertising some random product, jeans which were worn at the cuffs, and fairly new tennis shoes. I would have liked to think I gave no hint of anything unusual: an ordinary man, with a messy house stocked with the usual array of mundane items. I blended in with the Illusion.
I drove over to Benjamin's house. As I walked in, I said, "Benjamin, I'm impressed. You've done a nice job of patching this place since the last explosion."
"Shut up, Morgan."
"By the way, my nephews are coming to visit in two weeks, Friday afternoon. Would you be willing to tinker in your laboratory when they come? Their favorite thing in the world is a good fireworks display."
"Which reminds me, there was one spice that I wanted to give you. It makes any food taste better, and the more you add, the better the food tastes. Pay no attention to the label on the bottle which says 'arsenic'. If you'll excuse me one moment..." He began to stand up, and I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back down into the chair.
"How are you, Benjamin?"
"How are you, Morgan?"
I sat silent for a while. When Benjamin remained silent, I said, "I've been spending a lot of time in the library. The sense one gets when contemplating an artistic masterwork is concentrated in looking at what effect The Mystical Theology had on a thousand years of wonder."
He said, "You miss the Middle Ages, don't you?"
I said, "They're still around—a bit here, a piece there. On one hand, it's very romantic to hold something small in your hand and say that it is all that is left of a once great realm. On the other hand, it's only romantic: it is not the same thing as finding that glory all about you.
"The pain is all the worse when you not only come from a forgotten realm, but you must reckon with the Illusion. It's like there's a filter which turns everything grey. It's not exactly that there's a sinister hand that forces cooperation with the Illusion and tortures you if you don't; in some ways things would be simpler if there were. Of course you're asking for trouble if you show an anachronism in the way you dress, or if you're so gauche as to speak honestly out of the wisdom of another world and push one of the hot buttons of whatever today's hot issues are. But beyond that, you don't have to intentionally cooperate with the Illusion; you can 'non-conform freely' and the Illusion freely conforms itself to you. It's a terribly isolating feeling."
Benjamin stood up, walked over to a bookshelf, and pulled out an ivory tube. "I have something for you, Morgan. A pair of spectacles."
"Did you make these?"
"I'm not saying."
"Why are you giving me eyeglasses? My eyes are fine."
"Your eyes are weaker than you think." He waited a moment, and then said, "And these spectacles have a virtue."
"What is their virtue? What is their power?"
"Please forgive me. As one who has struggled with the Illusion, you know well enough what it means to deeply want to convey something and know that you can't. Please believe me when I say that I would like to express the answer to your question, but I cannot."
I left, taking the glasses and both hoping that I was concealing my anger from Benjamin and knowing that I wasn't.
I arrived at home and disappeared into the labyrinth. A bright lamp, I hoped, would help me understand the spectacles' power. Had I been in a different frame of mind, I might have enjoyed it; I read an ancient and mostly complete Greek manuscript to The Symbolic Theology to see if it might reveal new insights. My eyes lingered for a moment over the words:
That symbol, as most, has two layers. Yet a symbol could have an infinite number of layers and still be smaller than what is without layer at all.
I had a deep insight of some sort over these words, and the insight is forever lost because I cared only about one thing, finding out what magic power the spectacles held. I tried to read a cuneiform tablet; as usual, the language gave me an embarrassing amount of trouble, and there was something strange about what it said that completely lacked the allure of being exotic. Wishing I had a better command of languages, I moved about from one serpentine passageway to another, looking at places, even improvising on the organ, and enjoying none of it. Everything looked exactly as if I were looking through a children's toy. Had Benjamin been watching too much Dumbo and given me a magic feather?
After a long and fruitless search, I went up into my house, put the spectacles in your pocket, and sat in my chair, the lights off, fatigued in mind and body. I do not recall know how long I stayed there. I only know that I jumped when the doorbell rang.
It was Amber. She said, "The supermarket had a really good sale on strawberries, and I thought you might like some."
"Do you have a moment to to come in? I have Coke in the fridge."
I had to stifle my urge to ask her opinion about the spectacles' virtue. I did not know her to be more than meets the eye (at least not in the sense that could be said of Benjamin or me), but the Illusion was much weaker in her than in most people, and she seemed to pick up on things that I wished others would as well. We talked for a little while; she described how she took her family to a pizza restaurant and her son "walked up to a soda machine, pushed one of the levers you're supposed to put your cup against, jumped in startlement when soda fell on his hand, and then began to lick the soda off."
"I've got to get home and get dinner on, but—ooh, you have new glasses in your pocket. Put them on for a moment."
I put my spectacles on, and she said something to me, but I have no idea what she said. It's not because I was drained: I was quite drained when she came, but her charm had left me interested in life again. The reason I have no idea what she said to me is that I was stunned at what I saw when I looked at her through the spectacles.
I saw beauty such as I had not begun to guess at. She was clad in a shimmering robe of scintillating colors. In one hand, she was holding a kaliedoscope, which had not semi-opaque colored chips but tiny glass spheres and prisms inside. The other hand embraced a child on her lap, with love so real it could be seen.
After she left, I took the spectacles off, put them in their case, and after miscellaneous nightly activities, went to bed and dreamed dreams both brilliant and intense.
When I woke up, I tried to think about why I had not recognized Amber's identity before. I closed my eyes and filtered through memories; Amber had given signals of something interesting that I had not picked up on—and she had picked up on things I had given. I thought of myself as one above the Illusion—and here I had accepted the Illusion's picture of her. Might there be others who were more than meets the eye?
I came to carry the spectacles with me, and look around for a sign of something out of the ordinary. Several days later, I met a tall man with cornrowed greying hair. When I asked him what he studied in college, he first commented on the arbitrariness of divisions between disciplines, before explaining that his discipline of record was philosophy. His thought was a textbook example of postmodernism, but when I put my spectacles on, I saw many translucent layers: each layer, like a ring of an oak, carried a remnant of a bygone age. Then I listened, and his words sounded no less postmodern, but echoes of the Middle Ages were everywhere.
I began to find these people more and more frequently, and require less and less blatant cues.
I sat in the living room, waiting with cans of Coca-Cola. I enjoy travelling in my nephews' realms; at a prior visit, Nathan discovered a whole realm behind my staircase, and it is my loss that I can only get in when I am with him. Brandon and Nathan had come for the fair that weekend, and I told them I had something neat-looking to show them before I took them to the fair.
I didn't realize my mistake until they insisted that I wear the spectacles at the fair.
I didn't mind the charge of public drunkenness that much. It was humiliating, perhaps, but I think at least some humiliations are necessary in life. And I didn't mind too much that my nephews' visit was a bummer for them. Perhaps that was unfortunate, but that has long been smoothed over. There were, however, two things that were not of small consequence to me.
The first thing that left me staggered was something in addition to the majesty I saw. I saw a knight, clad in armor forged of solid light, and I saw deep scars he earned warring against dragons. I saw a fair lady who looked beautiful at the skin when seen without the spectacles, and beautiful in layer after layer below the skin when seen with them. The something else I saw in addition to that majesty was that this beauty was something that was not just in a few people, or even many. It was in every single person without exception. That drunken beggar everyone avoided, the one with a stench like a brewery next to a horse stable—I saw his deep and loyal friendships. I saw his generosity with other beggars—please believe me that if you were another beggar, what's his was yours. I saw the quests he made in his youth. I saw his dreams. I saw his story. Beyond all that, I saw something deeper than any of these, a glory underneath and beneath these things. This glory, however disfigured by his bondage to alcohol, filled me with wonder.
The reason the police kept me in the drunk tank for so long was that I was stunned and reeling. I had always known that I was more than what the Illusion says a person is, and struggled to convey my something more to other people... but I never looked to see how other people could be more than the grey mask the Illusion put on their faces. When I was in the drunk tank, I looked at the other men in wonder and asked myself what magic lay in them, what my spectacles would tell me. The old man with an anchor tattooed to his arm: was he a sailor? Where had he sailed on the seven seas? Had he met mermaids? I almost asked him if he'd found Atlantis, when I decided I didn't want to prolong the time the police officer thought I was drunk.
This brings me to the second disturbing find, which was that my spectacles were not with me. I assumed this was because the police had locked them away, but even after I was released, determined inquiry found no one who had seen them. They looked interesting, oddly shaped lenses with thick gold frames; had a thief taken them when I was stunned and before the police picked me up?
The next day I began preparing for a quest.
It filled me with excitement to begin searching the black market, both because I hoped to find the spectacles, and because I knew I would experience these people in a completely new light.
I had dealings with the black market before, but it had always been unpleasant: not (let me be clear) because I did not know how to defend myself, or was in too much danger of getting suckered into something dangerous, but because I approached its people concealing the emotions I'd feel touching some kind of fetid slime. Now... I still saw that, but I tried to look and see what I would see if I were wearing my spectacles.
I didn't find anything that seemed significant. The next leg of my journey entailed a change of venue: I dressed nicely and mingled with the world of jewellers and antique dealers. Nada.
I began to search high and low; I brainstormed about what exotic places it might be, and I found interesting people along the way. The laborers whom I hired to help me search the city dump almost made me forget that I was searching for something, and over time I chose to look for my spectacles in places that would bring me into contact with people I wanted to meet...
Some years later, I was returning from one of my voyages and realized it had been long (too long) since I had spoken with Benjamin. I came and visited him, and told him about the people I'd met. After I had talked for an hour, he put his hand on my mouth and said, "Can I get a word in edgewise?"
I said, "Mmmph mph mmmph mmph."
He took his hand off my mouth, and I said, "That depends on whether you're rude enough to put your hand over my mouth in mid-sentence."
"That depends on whether you're rude enough to talk for an hour without letting your host get a word in edgewise."
I stuck my tongue out at him.
He stuck his tongue out at me.
Benjamin opened a box on his desk, opened the ivory case inside the box, and pulled out my spectacles. "I believe these might interest you." He handed them to me.
I sat in silence. The clock's ticking seemed to grow louder, until it chimed and we both jumped. Then I looked at him and said, "What in Heaven's name would I need them for?"
Herodotus: And what say thou of these people? Why callest thou them the Singularity, Merlin?
John: Mine illuminèd name is John, and John shall ye call me each and every one.
Herodotus: But the Singularity is such as only a Merlin could have unravelled.
John: Perchance: but the world is one of which only an illuminèd one may speak aright. Call thou me as one illuminèd, if thou wouldst hear me speak.
Herodotus: Of illumination speakest thou. Thou sawest with the eye of the hawk: now seest thou with the eye of the eagle.
John: If that be, speak thou me as an eagle?
Herodotus: A point well taken, excellent John, excellent John. What speakest thou of the Singularity?
John: A realm untold, to speak is hard. But of an icon will I speak: inscribed were words:
'Waitress, is this coffee or tea?'
'What does it taste like?'
'IT TASTES LIKE DIESEL FUEL.'
'That's the coffee. The tea tastes like transmission fluid.'
Herodotus: Upon what manner of veneration were this icon worshipped?
John: That were a matter right subtle, too far to tell.
Herodotus: And of the inscription? That too be subtle to grasp.
John: Like as a plant hath sap, so a subtle engine by their philosophy wrought which needeth diesel fuel and transmission fluid.
Herodotus: [laughs] Then 'twere a joke, a jape! 'Tis well enough told!
John: You perceive it yet?
Herodotus: A joke, a jape indeed, of a fool who could not tell, two different plants were he not to taste of their sap! Well spoke! Well spoke!
John: Thou hast grasped it afault, my fair lord. For the subtle engine hath many different saps, no two alike.
Herodotus: And what ambrosia be in their saps?
John: Heaven save us! The saps be a right unnatural fare; their substance from rotted carcasses of monsters from aeons past, then by the wisdom of their philosophy transmogrified, of the subtle engine.
Herodotus: Then they are masters of Alchemy?
John: Masters of an offscouring of all Alchemy, of the lowest toe of that depravèd ascetical enterprise, chopped off, severed from even the limb, made hollow, and then growen beyond all reason, into the head of reason.
Herodotus: Let us leave off this and speak of the icon. The icon were for veneration of such subtle philosophy?
John: No wonder, no awe, greeteth he who regardest this icon and receive it as is wont.
Herodotus: As is wont?
John: As is wanton. For veneration and icons are forcèd secrets; so there is an antithesis of the sacra pagina, and upon its light pages the greatest pages come upon the most filled with lightness, the icons of a world that knoweth icons not.
Let me make another essay.
The phrase 'harmony with nature' is of popular use, yet a deep slice of the Singularity, or what those inside the Singularity can see of it, might be called, 'harmony with technology'.
Herodotus: These be mystics of technology.
John: They live in an artificial jungle of technology, or rather an artificial not-jungle of technology, an artificial anti-jungle of technology. For one example, what do you call the natural use of wood?
Herodotus: A bundle of wood is of course for burning.
John: And they know of using wood for burning, but it is an exotic, rare case to them; say 'wood' and precious few will think of gathering wood to burn.
Herodotus: Then what on earth do they use wood for? Do they eat it when food is scarce or something like that?
John: Say 'wood' and not exotic 'firewood', and they will think of building a house.
Herodotus: So then they are right dexterous, if they can build out of a bundle of gathered sticks instead of burning it.
John: They do not gather sticks such as you imagine. They fell great trees, and cut the heartwood into rectangular box shapes, which they fit together in geometrical fashion. And when it is done, they make a box, or many boxes, and take rectangles hotly fused sand to fill a window. And they add other philosophy on top of that, so that if the house is well-built, the air inside will be pleasant and still, unless they take a philosophical machine to push air, and whatever temperature the people please, and it will remain dry though the heavens be opened in rain. And most of their time is spent in houses, or other 'buildings' like a house in this respect.
Herodotus: What a fantastical enterprise! When do they enter such buildings?
John: When do they rather go out of them? They consider it normal to spend less than an hour a day outside of such shelters; the subtle machine mentioned earlier moves but it is like a house built out of metal in that it is an environment entirely contrived by philosophy and artifice to, in this case, convey people from one place to another.
Herodotus: How large is this machine? It would seem to have to be very big to convey all their people.
John: But this is a point where their 'technology' departs from the art that is implicit in τεχνη: it is in fact not a lovingly crafted work of art, shaped out of the spirit of that position ye call 'inventor' or 'artist', but poured out by the thousands by gigantical machines yet more subtle, and in the wealth of the Singularity, well nigh unto each hath his own machine.
Herodotus: And how many can each machine can convey? Perchance a thousand?
John: Five, or six, or two peradventure, but the question is what they would call 'academical': the most common use is to convey one.
Herodotus: They must be grateful for such property and such philosophy!
John: A few are very grateful, but the prayer, 'Let us remember those less fortunate than ourselves' breathes an odor that sounds truly archaical. It sounds old, old enough to perhaps make half the span of a man's life. And such basic technology, though they should be very much upset to lose them, never presents itself to their mind's eye when they hear the word 'technology'. And indeed, why should it present itself to the mind his eye?
Herodotus: I strain to grasp thy thread.
John: To be thought of under the heading of 'technology', two things must hold. First, it must be possessed of an artificial unlife, not unlike the unlife of their folklore's ghouls and vampires and zombies. And second, it must be of recent vintage, something not to be had until a time that is barely past. Most of the technologies they imagine provide artificially processed moving images, some of which are extremely old—again, by something like half the span of a man's life—while some are new. Each newer version seemeth yet more potent. To those not satisfied with the artificial environment of an up-to-date building, regarded by them as something from time immemorial, there are unlife images of a completely imaginary artificial world where their saying 'when pigs can fly' meaning never is in fact one of innumerable things that happen in the imaginary world portrayed by the technology. 'SecondLife' offers a second alternative to human life, or so it would seem, until 'something better comes along.'
Herodotus: My mind, it reeleth.
John: Well it reeleth. But this be but a sliver.
For life to them is keeping one's balance on shifting sand; they have great museums of different products, as many as the herbs of the field. But herein lies a difference: we know the herbs of the field, which have virtues, and what the right use is. They know as many items produced by philosophy, but they are scarce worse for the deal when they encounter an item they have never met before. For while the herbs of the field be steady across generations and generations, the items belched forth by their subtle philosophy change not only within the span of a man's life; they change year to year; perchance moon to moon.
Herodotus: Thou sayest that they can navigate a field they know not?
John: Aye, and more. The goal at which their catechism aims is to 'learn how to learn'; the appearance and disappearance of kinds of items is a commonplace to them. And indeed this is not only for the items we use as the elements of our habitat: catechists attempt to prepare people for roles that exist not yet even as the students are being taught.
Though this be sinking sand they live in, they keep balance, of a sort, and do not find this strange. And they adapt to the changes they are given.
Herodotus: It beseemeth me that thou speakest as of a race of Gods.
John: A race of Gods? Forsooth! Thou knowest not half of the whole if thou speakest thus.
Herodotus: What remaineth?
John: They no longer think of making love as an action that in particular must needeth include an other.
Herodotus: I am stunned.
John: And the same is true writ large or writ small. A storyteller of a faintly smaller degree, living to them in ages past, placed me in an icon:
The Stranger mused for a few seconds, then, speaking in a slightly singsong voice, as though he repeated an old lesson, he asked, in two Latin hexameters, the following question:
'Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why is the womb barren on one side? Where are the cold marriages?'
Ransom replied, 'Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned towards us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would he be who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side. On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursede people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.'
The storyteller saw and saw not his future. 'Tis rare in the Singularity to fabricate children 'by vile arts in a secret place'. But the storyteller plays us false when he assumes their interest would be in a 'cunningly fashioned image of the other'. Truer it would be to say that the men, by the fruits of philosophy, jump from one libidinous dream to another whilest awake.
Herodotus:Forsooth!
John: A prophet told them, the end will come when no man maketh a road to his neighbors. And what has happened to marriage has happened, by different means but by the same spirit, to friendship. Your most distant acquaintanceship to a fellow member is more permanent than their marriage; it is routine before the breakable God-created covenant of marriage to make unbreakable man-made covenants about what to do if, as planned for, the marriage ends in divorce. And if that is to be said of divorce, still less is the bond of friendship. Their own people have talked about how 'permanent relationships', including marriage and friendship, being replaced by 'disposable relationships' which can be dissolved for any and every reason, and by 'disposable relationships' to 'transactional relationships', which indeed have not even the pretension of being something that can be kept beyond a short transaction for any and every reason.
And the visits have been eviscerated, from a conversation where voice is delivered and vision is stripped out, to a conversation where words alone are transmitted without even hand writing; from a conversation where mental presence is normative to a conversation where split attention is expected. 'Tis yet rarely worth the bother to make a physical trail, though they yet visit. And their philosophy, as it groweth yet more subtle, groweth yet more delicate. 'Twould scarcely require much to 'unplug' it. And then, perhaps, the end will come?
Herodotus: Then there be a tragic beauty to these people.
John: A tragic beauty indeed.
Herodotus: What else hast thou to tell of them?
John: Let me give a little vignette:
Several men and women are in a room; all are fulfilling the same role, and they are swathed with clothing that covers much of their skin. And the differences between what the men wear, and what most of the women wear, are subtle enough that most of them do not perceive a difference.
Herodotus: Can they not perceive the difference between a man and a woman?
John: The sensitivity is dulled in some, but it is something they try to overlook. But I have not gotten to the core of this vignette:
One of them indicateth that had they be living several thousand years ago they would not have had need of clothing, not for modesty at least, and there are nods of agreement to her. And they all imagine such tribal times to be times of freedom, and their own to be of artificial restriction.
And they fail to see, by quite some measure, that prolonged time in mixed company is much more significant than being without clothing; or that their buildings deaden all of a million sources of natural awareness: the breeze blowing and the herbs waving in the wind; scents and odours as they appear; song of crickets' kin chirping and song of bird, the sun as it shines through cloud; animals as they move about, and the subtleties and differences in the forest as one passes through it. They deaden all of these sensitivities and variations, until there is only one form of life that provides stimulation: the others who are working in one's office. Small wonder, then, that to a man one woman demurely covered in an office has an effect that a dozen women wearing vines in a jungle would never have. But the libertines see themselves as repressed, and those they compare themselves to as, persay, emancipated.
Herodotus: At least they have the option of dressing modestly. What else hast thou?
John: There is infinitely more, and there is nothing more. Marriage is not thought of as open to children; it can be dissolved in divorce; it need not be intrinsically exclusive; a further installment in the package, played something like a pawn in a game of theirs, is that marriage need not be between a man and a woman. And if it is going to be dismantled to the previous portion, why not? They try to have a world without marriage, by their changes to marriage. The Singularity is a disintegration; it grows more and more, and what is said for marriage could be said for each of the eight devils: intertwined with this is pride, and it is only a peripheral point that those who further undefine marriage speak of 'gay pride'. A generation before, not mavericks but the baseline of people were told they needed a 'high self-esteem', and religious leaders who warned about pride as a sin, perhaps as the sin by which the Devil fell from Heaven, raised no hue and cry that children were being raised to embrace pride as a necessary ascesis. And religion itself is officially permitted some role, but a private role: not that which fulfills the definition of religare in binding a society together. It is in some measure like saying, 'You can speak any language you want, as long as you utter not a word in public discourse': the true religion of the Singularity is such ersatz religion as the Singularity provides. Real religion is expected to wither in private.
The Singularity sings a song of progress, and it was giving new and different kinds of property; even now it continues. But its heart of ice showeth yet. For the march of new technologies continues, and with them poverty: cracks begin to appear, and the writing on the wall be harder to ignore. What is given with one hand is not-so-subtly taken away with the other. The Singularity is as needful to its dwellers as forest or plain to its dwellers, and if it crumbles, precious few will become new tribal clans taking all necessities from the land.
Herodotus: Then it beseemeth the tragedy outweigheth the beauty, or rather there is a shell of beauty under a heart of ice.
John:But there are weeds.
Herodotus: What is a weed?
John: It is a plant.
Herodotus: What kind of plant is a weed? Are the plants around us weeds?
John: They are not.
Herodotus: Then what kinds of plants are weeds?
John: In the Singularity, there is a distinction between 'rural', 'suburban', and 'urban': the 'rural' has deliberately set plants covering great tracts of land, the 'suburban' has fewer plants, if still perhaps green all around, and the 'urban' has but the scattered ensconced tree. But in all of them are weeds, in an urban area plants growing where the artificial stone has cracked. And among the natural philosophers there are some who study the life that cannot be extinguished even in an urban city; their specialty is called 'urban ecology'. The definition of a weed is simply, 'A plant I do not want.' We do not have weeds because we do not seek an artificial envionment with plants only present when we have put them there. But when people seek to conform the environment to wishes and plans, even in the tight discipline of planned urban areas, weeds are remarkably persistent.
And in that regard, weeds are a tiny sliver of something magnificent.
Herodotus: What would that be?
John: The durability of Life that is writ small in a weed here in the urban, there in the suburban is but a shadow of the durabiity of Life that lives on in the sons of men. Mothers still sing lullabyes to their dear little children; friendships form and believers pray at church far more than happened in the age where my story was told, a story dwarfed by what was called the 'age of faith'. The intensity of the attacks on the Church in a cruel social witness are compelled to bear unwilling witness to the vitality of the Church whose death has been greatly exaggerated: and indeed that Church is surging with vitality after surviving the attacks. The story told seems to tell of Life being, in their idiom, 'dealt a card off every side of the deck'—and answering, 'Checkmate, I win.' I have told of the differences, but there are excellent similarities, and excellent differences. For a knight whoso commandeth a wild and unbridled horse receiveth greater commendation than a knight whoso commandeth a well-bred and gentle steed.
Herodotus: The wind bloweth where it listeth. The just shall live by his faith. Your cell, though it be wholly artificial, will teach you everything you need to know.
John: Thou hast eagerly grasped it; beyond beauty, tragedy, and beyond tragedy, beauty. Thou hast grasped it true.
This and two other works were written when I was half-drunk with Elder Thaddeus's Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives.
There is much that is true and Orthodox in that title, and there is something to its core point, but it is the most occultic book, with strange and awesome powers given to half-conscious thoughts, that I've seen yet. This post is retained for archival purposes but it is not particularly recommended as the author does not particularly recommend the book that furnished its inspiration.
(To the family who gave me my copy of Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives—You know who you are: you are appreciated and you are loved!)
1.1 Our life depends on the kind of thoughts we nurture. If our thoughts are peaceful, calm, meek, and kind, then that is what our life is like. If our attention is turned to the circumstances in which we live, we are drawn into a whirlpool of thoughts and can have neither peace nor tranquility.
In Christ the Eternal Tao, there is a work similar to the Tao Te Ching, but it is introduced not as a translation of the ancient Chinese classic, but as a New Testament building on and perfecting the original Tao Te Ching. The Christian understanding of the New Testament is that it fulfills and completes the Old Testament. Where the Old Testament mostly forbids toxic actions and says "Do not murder" and "Do not commit adultery," the New Testament forbids toxic thoughts and says "Do not hate" and "Do not lust," offering a greater healing and freedom from evil and pain, even better than freedom from evil actions. And I would like to suggest that The Secret, a book loved by many, can be seen as an Old Testament that reaches its fulfillment and completion in Elder Thaddeus's Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives.
The Secret offers a very attractive promise. On the book's account, the Secret is a Secret that can unlock youthful health at any age, spectacular and more spectacular wealth, professional success, romance, and more. But there is more one could want, much more. The Secret may offer a program to satisfy one's conscious desires, but not so much is there a program to transcend one's desires. Our unrefined desires, our common covetousness, may be for things which will not really satisfy us, especially not as much as some things we may not think to even covet in our present state. And having read and not accepted The Secret and its Law of Attraction which says (along with other New Age sources) that if you think of something your thoughts will become reality, I was blindsided by Elder Thaddeus in Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives, which had, if not a Law of Attraction in full, nonetheless something a lot like the Law of Attraction which said that our thoughts have a great deal more influence than we suspect. It said that if we have nastiness or conflict, it is rarely, or perhaps never, something that happens without our warring with others in our thoughts. Perhaps, as Elder Thaddeus does not specifically suggest, other people have contributed something, and perhaps some people start out with a chip on their shoulders. But they rarely, if ever, start warring against us, and continue their warfare, if we simply do not war against them in our thoughts. Others rarely remain hostile to us if we are gentle, respectful, and never strike back, not even in the most private recesses of our thoughts. And that is a Law of Attraction The Secret barely, if ever, even begins to hint at. It may be implicit, but The Secret never says that if you sow hostile thoughts, you will reap conflict.
Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives says more than this. It also talks about thoughts that are in fact neither healthy nor truly our own. The demonic is real and operative, and part of spiritual health is declining an ongoing flood of thoughts that are not to our best interest. And some of the things touted as benefits in The Secret may be less helpful than they seem, even if they are true. It talks about how "...The end of the story about my own weight is that I now maintain my perfect weight of 116 pounds and I can eat whatever I want." ThePhilokalia, by contrast, see the sin of gluttony as affecting much more than how one looks in a swimsuit: what overeating does to one's waistline is incidental to what it does to one's spirit, acting as a gateway drug to more serious sins.
Accept criticism gracefully and test it carefully.
I would draw something out of "Be defined and bound by God, not people," in particular. When someone opposes us and we accept the warring thoughts that come so easily to all of our hands, we are being defined and bound by the people we are resisting, and not, or at least not only, by God. The satyagraha or nonviolent resistance highlighted by Gandhi draws on the Sermon on the Mount and has its power close to the heart of the Sermon on the Mount that simply says, "Do not resist an evil person." If someone evil to you is hostile and you do not dish out hostility even in the secrets of your heart, that is powerful. If you are only "defined and bound by God, not people," and turn the other cheek, the roots of hostility begin to melt away. I personally do not know how my life would have been different if I had always shown the perfection of this teaching, but there have been some very rough situations that could have been very different if I had answered each and every hostility with unruffled meekness.
We tend to think that changes in our exterior life will make us happy, and this is part of why The Secret is such a runaway bestseller. It promises means to abundant success in various worldly concerns, and never asks the (at times terrifying) question of "What if I get the BMW SUV my heart is dying for now, and it does not deliver lasting satisfaction?" Someone who is a little bit sensitive to memories and experiences may note that sometimes getting some hot luxury item does not give us satisfaction, at least not for terribly long. ButOur Thoughts Determine Our Lives offers a Law of Attraction that recognizes that the transformation that we need, and the transformation that will yield lasting satisfaction, is much more a transformation of our interior lives than anything external. And in regard to the interior life, God wants to give us much better than a cost-of-living raise. He wants to give abundant interior riches, and part of why external circumstances sometimes do not change is that he knows we need something more. Something beyond what The Secret even pretends to offer.
One man's crown of thorns
It would be true, but deceptive by itself, to say that Elder Thaddeus was a clairvoyant elder who lived to see quite a following. The reason that is deceptive by itself is that that fruit gives an impression that his wishes were fulfilled, when in fact Elder Thaddeus had a much more painful life, with many more wishes not fulfilled, than most of us. The life of a saint is a difficult one with many more obstacles, not less, than your average Joe, and while I don't want to try to make Elder Thaddeus a saint speaking out of my own authority, his life was at least like that of a great many saints in seeing wish after wish simply denied. His own burden included serious health issues. It also included that his wishes in monasticism to simply be a lay monk, just praying in silence, never really happened. Instead he had, as a monk fulfilling the obedience of serving as an abbot, to take on himself the cross of addressing the great many cares and concerns of supporting the monks entrusted to him. Maybe some of us, in our worse moments, can covet offices and titles. The reality is different, and contains a great many things people coveting honor never imagine in connection with their coveting prestige and some office. If you ask how he was a clairvoyant elder, seeing into people's hearts and thoughts, the answer is surprisingly simple. Elder Thaddeus had a heart that was pierced again and again until things that the rest of us were oblivious to were enough to pierce his heart. Now it is not particularly hard to make some imaginings and covet a clairvoyant elder's abilities, but Elder Thaddeus was no fortune teller in the usual sense: when an author came to him and asked a prediction for how well his novels would sell, Elder Thaddeus said, "I am not a psychic!" (Now Elder Thaddeus may have had surprising insights when people came to him in faith seeking a balm for spiritual difficulties, but I insist that the pierced heart he knew was not in any sense what one imagines and fuels if one is coveting clairvoyance.) Holiness is taking up your cross and following in the footsteps of our crucified Lord, and the further you walk on that path, the less your life looks like fulfilling your wishes and desires.
Needless difficulties
I am choosing an example here to try to make my point strongly, as strongly as I see how. If this seems strange, hokey, or putting an unreasonable share of blame on myself, I apologize; you are welcome to skip to the next section.
I remember, to pick one of many examples, when a friend who helped me on my journey to Orthodoxy, decided on his own authority that there was something wrong with me and he was going to "fix" me (his term, with his quotes). I caught him in the act and firmly said, "No." He said I was sending mixed messages. I said, more forcefully, "No." He reiterated his claim and said that I was sending such mixed messages. I repeatedly said a forceful, "No," and he kept on telling me I was sending a mixed message, and then, "You can say what you want to say, but I will do what I want to do," meaning that he would continue trying to "fix" me after I said, "No." Then I sent a "cease and desist" letter (and he was not so bold as to continue his campaign once the Gmail Abuse Team was in on the conversation). Since then, I've briefly reached out, but we have only spoken briefly since.
Now I would like to ask what was going on here. A psychologist would speak of boundaries, say that he was possibly doing something wrong at the beginning, and he was definitely wrong to persist after I had expressed a boundary. And I was absolutely right to send a cease-and-desist letter after he repeatedly tried to push past the boundary I was expressing. But I would point out something else. Did he start it? That's not my concern. Was he in the wrong? Still not my concern, except perhaps as my replies exacerbated the temptations he faced. What really is my concern is that I met him with warring thoughts. And what is more, I spoke to him and answered him out of warring thoughts. Whether or not he had warring thoughts, or his warring thoughts came first, is not my concern. I wanted to have the upper hand as badly as he did, and I got what I really wanted, which was to have a scathing last word. And my warring thoughts (and words) did nothing to defuse the conflict, but only confirmed and agreed to being in conflict, and in fact an intense power struggle. (I had earlier given a cool reception to other attempts to help me out, perhaps part of why he decided that this time around, I wasn't allowed to say, "No." I may have been right to say "No," but I could possibly have done so with more respect.) Some people might say that I was right to send a cease and desist letter, but even if I was right, that only came after I had failed at making the encounter into one appropriate to friends, really failed to even try. And, though I am glad he stopped trying to "fix" me, it is hardly a victory for me that our conversation as friends has not really resumed.
I got my way, which is unusual for a situation like this, but I did not truly win. I couldn't, not with that attitude. Winning might have gently stopped the treatment plan, but it would have saved the friendship, and would have left me at peace instead of with an unhealed painful memory. I believe better was possible, or would have been possible if I had been more grown up.
(This kind of scenario is a good example of why Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye only ends by making the whole world blind.")
I hesitated on whether to include this or cut it out: more than anything else I have had, this has the most potential to repulse a good reader as not being devout Orthodoxy, but simply dynfunctional. But harassment has figured prominently in my life, and there have been perhaps half a dozen times I've had harassment persist until I copied authorities on a forceful "No." Usually the harassment has been from someone I regarded as a friend, and sometimes trusted a great deal. (If it is a friend who doesn't get that "No means no," starting the first time.)
This doesn't make the harassment my fault, but when I have faced harassment, usually I have done something preventable that already antagonized the other party. (I am trying to learn what I can from the experiences.)
4.5. If in each family there were just one person who served God zealously, what harmony there would be in the world! I often remember the story of Sister J. She used to come and talk to me often while I was still at the Tumane Monastery. Once she came, together with an organized group of pilgrims, and complained, saying, "I can't bear this any longer! People are so unkind to each other!" She went on to say that she was going to look for another job. I advised her against it, as there were few jobs and a high level of unemployment. I told her to stop the war she was fighting with her colleagues. "But I'm not fighting with anyone!" she said. I explained that, although she was not fighting physically, she was waging war with her colleagues in her thoughts by being dissatisfied with her position. She argued that it was beyond anyone's endurance. "Of course it is," I told her, "but you can't do it yourself. You need God's help. No one knows whether you are praying or not while you are at work. So, when they start offending you, do not return their offenses either with words or with negative thoughts. Try not to offend them even in your thoughts; pray to God that He may send them an angel of peace. Also ask that He not forget you. You will not be able to do this immediately, but if you always pray like that, you will see how things will change over time and how the people will change as well. In fact, you are going to change, too." At that time I did not know whether she was going to heed my advice.
This happened in the Tumane Monastery in 1980. In 1981 I was sent to the Vitovnica Monastery. I was standing underneath the quince tree when I noticed a group of pilgrims that had arrived. She was in the group and she came up to me to receive a blessing. And this is what she said to me, "Oh, Father, I had no idea that people were so good!" I asked her whether she was referring to her colleagues at work and she said she was. "They have changed so much, Father, it's unbelievable! No one offends me anymore, and I can see the change in myself, as well." I asked her whether she was at peace with everyone, and she answered that there was one person with whom she could not make peace for a long time. Then, as she read the Gospels, she came to the part where the Lord ´commands us to love our enemies. Then she said to herself, "You are going to love this person whether you want to or not, because this is what the Lord commands us to do." And now, you see, they are best friends!
And I have experienced profound respect from people I have shown profound respect. At times I've been caught off guard until I remembered the hand I stretched out.
The Orthodox Tradition has a great deal to say about our thoughts, and contrary to modern psychology, demonic influence actually contributes a great deal of thoughts we think of as "ours." The Secret says that admitting a little thought attracts others: if we think in kindness, it opens the door to more kind thoughts, and if we think in negativity, it opens the door to more negative thoughts. And it is right in this regard. Counselors have said in reference to addiction, "You have more power than you think," and while we can hardly win involved engagements with destructive thoughts, as fighting them may only give them more power, we can refuse entry when they first come to us as very small temptations. (If a candle is extinguished just after it starts to fall, there will be no house fire to fight.) This watchfulness is not easy; monks take years to learn it. But it is possible. Fr. Thomas's 55 maxims include, "13. Do not engage intrusive thoughts and feelings. Cut them off at the start." And this is advice well worth following. Put out the smouldering spark when it is a spark: don't wait to address the problem until your house is on fire.
Avatars and being divine
The Secret surges as it builds to its claim that You are God. It speaks of avatars, here meaning living and successful leaders whose words are highlighted in the book. (Note that this is a slight modification of how Hinduism understands avatars, who are essentially great lights from the past, and include the world's great teachers as understood in the West.) The core idea of an avatar is God come down in human form, the idea being that God, who is at the core of each of us, is not simply represented by avatars, but becomes them.
So how does this relate to Christianity? Orthodoxy may be distinctive here, but Hinduism looks surprisingly familiar here to Orthodox. There was one point in a theology course where the professor, a Roman, talked about a Hindu friend saying that he appreciated the Christian teaching of the incarnation, but asked, why only once? Why not an overflowing stream of incarnations or avatars? And I challenged him (perhaps not very Orthodox or very wise in this matter) and said that there was, on a Christian understanding, not only one. The incarnation is perfected in the Church, and every saint, every faithful Orthodox Christian, is a place where the incarnation unfurls. Now I do not understand saints on the Hindu terms for an avatar; I do not believe that they are, like avatars or the Christ I worship, divine by nature, but something happens to created men that makes that matter less than one might think. St. Maximus the Confessor described five great transcendings of differences, the last being a transcending of the distinction between created and uncreated matter. In other words, when the sanctifying God works such a great miracle that the fact that saints and faithful were created and were not divine from the outset is simply not the issue. God has transcended the chasm between created and uncreated: that all the saints were created is entirely beside the point.
Christians who find Hinduism's idea that God is at the core of each of us strange might wake up a bit. In the first chapter of the Bible, we read, "God created man in his image. In the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them." A person is by nature connected to God, something by which God's power operates, someone who breathes the breath of God. The image of God in us represents and embodies the Lord. This might be on slightly different terms from what Hinduism suggests, but the Hindu understanding is not strange and may be less different from Orthodoxy than it looks.
When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. Then the King will say to those at his right hand, `Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.'
Then the righteous will answer him, `Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?' And the King will answer them, `Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.'
Then he will say to those at his left hand, `Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.'
Then they also will answer, `Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?' Then he will answer them, `Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.' And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Human nature is so much powered by the divine nature that we cannot rush past a beggar without rushing past God himself. Every kindness shown to even the least of those around us will be remembered at the crack of doom. And of course we all fall short, but giving half a loaf is better than giving no loaf.
And that brings me to one particular and not necessarily pleasant point. One question I've thought about is, "If you had the chance to do it over, would you fall in love with yourself all over again?" I've been pretty narcissistic, and I don't think I can even imagine what my life would be like if I were more humble. I do know that the rest of the world has seemed a lot more interesting after I started to let go of trying to constantly stand awestruck at my "inner world." (As G.K. Chesterton said, "It takes humility to enjoy even pride.") If there is something about human nature that is deeply connected to the divine even among the worst of us, we would perhaps do better to think of our neighbor's genuine glory than our own. As C.S. Lewis said at the peak of, The Weight of Glory [PDF]:
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the most dull and uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet only, if at all, in a nightmare... There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal... Next to the Blessed Sacrament, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.
There's no time like the present
We live in rough times, but Elder Thaddeus, who wrote Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives, was someone who had been repeatedly imprisoned by Nazis. He lived in rough circumstances, too, and there is some confusion implied in believing that his words flow naturally out of an unspoiled paradise and do not apply to our world with its rough realities. They do, and they are for here, and now.
In my own story, I have great hope arising from this text. I've had some real difficulties and I've warred against other people in my thoughts. Part of me wishes I had seen this text when I was twenty, but another part of me is wondering at new vistas that may be open to me if I repent of warring against my neighbor in my thoughts. I'm excited at possibilities in interviewing, job hunting, and employment beyond my current contract. I'm experiencing more zest for life than I have had in a long time.
Alice in Wonderland
Programming expert Alan Perlis said, "The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman." And a word of caution is due here.
His Eminence KALLISTOS in The Orthodox Church wrote of Orthodoxy, "It is not something Oriental or exotic," and I chafed at those words, but they were very wisely chosen. My parish priest commented that people drawn in by the beauty of the liturgy sometimes didn't stick; it takes more than aesthetic pulls to stick with the liturgy, and as the priest who received me into confession said, "Orthodoxy is slog." I chafed at that too, but he was right. Nothing is permanently exotic, not Orthodoxy, nor anything else. And in that sense, I believe my treatment thus far is misleading; whatever of the Law of Attraction (or something better) may be present, it is much less exotic than my account of it; it is here and now, perhaps slogwork, and is no more exotic than the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy is in the West. And there is nothing tantalizing or exotic about an adult in the West seeing a self-fulfilling prophecy in a youngster's words about homework of, "I don't understand this, and I'm never going to get it!"
I may have read or at least skimmed through Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives before, but this time I stumbled on it, courtesy of some friends' generosity and modest praise of the book, as treasure in a field that was completely unexpected to me. However, however much I value it, Elder Thaddeus's basic claim is only one of many things God may say in drawing people closer to himself. This is only one of the thirty rungs of The Ladder of Divine Ascent (if even that). A great many wonderful classics do not make clear that our hostile thoughts can poison our interactions with others, and praying for others and stopping our warring thoughts can make a world of difference. This is only one flower from a field filled with many flowers.
This basic principle as I describe it sounds exotic, and that is a liability I don't see how to iron out. Its working out is mundane, or perhaps works in the mundane until we can accept the here and now. For me, it is loving the daily grind, in which regard I am fortunate. (I have a remarkably pleasant daily grind as far as external circumstances go.) It is loving God and my neighbor and working through my work and my dealings with others, as all of Orthodoxy is.
About your last letter, all that you say is true, but the way it is put together is missing something profound.
You say, "Are we not royalty?" Yes, indeed, and there is more to say. We will judge angels. To be human is to be made in a royal image. The oil we are anointed with is cut from the same cloth as the sacred oil anointing prophets, priests, and kings. In English we can say "Sir" and in koine Greek the same word means "Mister" and "Lord." The royal gifts of the Magi, gold an emblem of kingship, frankincense an emblem of divinity, and myrrh an emblem of suffering, are given to Christ and in him extend to the Church. We are indeed royalty, and we are more than royalty.
Now moving on to your second question, "Am I pushing this too far?" That question from you has a guilty-feeling fear to it, awaiting for me to give the real correction. And my answer to that is certain. You are not pushing it too far; you are not pushing it far enough by half. You wonder about being addressed as Your Majesty, and it is my duty to inform Your Royal Highness of something buried in the Ladder, when it says: "Some stand weaponless and without armor before the kings of earth, while others hold insignia of office, shields, and swords. The former are vastly superior to the latter since they are regularly the personal relations of the king and members of the royal household."
You stand weaponless and without armor, and wish for insignia, shield, and sword. You do not understand that you have more and pine for less. And I long for the day when you wish to be addressed, not as "Your Majesty," but as "you," with no insignia needed.
With love,
Your father, Oswald
My dear, dear son;
Regarding the question you raised in your last letter, I would remind you of the King of Kings.
Two of his disciples, who had been training for years, asked for as much royal honor as there was to have: to be seated at his right and left hand. And he tries to tell them that he doesn't get it. He, the King of Kings, will never wear royal purple on earth except when he is mocked and abused by brutal soldiers; he will never wear a crown except for a twisted crown of thorns. He asks them if they can bear the sufferings of his kingship, and they blindly assure them that they can. Then he holds an example up to them and says that whoever wishes to be great must be a servant and whoever wishes to be first must be the slave of all.
What people miss in their quest for honor is the greatest gem in the crown: humility. St. Dorotheos advises people to build up their spiritual houses with all different kinds of stone: a stone of prayer here, a stone of almsgiving there, a stone of courage still there. But humility is not one more stone; it is the slime which serves as mortar and cements everything together. And this royal dignity is the bedrock that people miss hoping for royal honors, for something to feed their narcissism. Real honor is not having your narcissism fed; it is humbly rejecting narcissism. Real, industrial strength royal honor is found in the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and God of Gods:
Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
If you want to know where the glory at the end comes from, look nowhere but the humility at the beginning. If humility is good enough for Christ, let us not consider ourselves too good for it.
Your dearly affectionate father,
Oswald
My dear son Basil;
Now I wish to show you a more excellent way.
St. Athanasios wrote of the dignity of man in On the Incarnation: "You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honoured, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so it is with the King of all..." Pay attention to how St. Athanasios proclaims the dignity of the human race! The King of Kings is the King for whom every King in Heaven and earth is named. If there is a measure of truth to say that man is the king and priest of Creation, this is because we are created in God's image, and it is the fullness of Truth to know Christ God as King and Lord. It is no accident and no error that the prayers of the Church address God as King, for such he is, incomparably more than any man on earth. Men and kings are as the moon with its reflected light; Christ God is the original Sun, shining in its full glory. If it is a wonder to know men as kings, incomparably greater is it to know Christ God as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
The Revelation to St. John tells of glorious creatures at the height of creature glory: "And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold... The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that lives for ever and ever..." My dear Basil, you are a king, and I hope that Your Majesty can throw his crown before the throne of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
Writing with deepest fatherly affection,
Your father,
Oswald
Socrates: And now, let me give an illustration to show how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! a human being in a darkened den, who has a slack jaw towards only source of light in the den; this is where he has gravitated since his childhood, and though his legs and neck are not chained or restrained any way, yet he scarcely turns round his head. In front of him are images from faroff, projected onto a flickering screen. And others whom he cannot see, from behind their walls, control the images like marionette players manipulating puppets. And there are many people in such dens, some isolated one way, some another.
Glaucon: I see.
Socrates: And do you see, I said, the flickering screen showing men, and all sorts of vessels, and statues and collectible animals made of wood and stone and various materials, and all sorts of commercial products which appear on the screen? Some of them are talking, and there is rarely silence.
Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Socrates: Much like us. And they see only their own images, or the images of one another, as they appear on the screen opposite them?
Glaucon: True, he said; how could they see anything but the images if they never chose to look anywhere else?
Socrates: And they would know nothing about a product they buy, except for what brand it is?
Glaucon: Yes.
Socrates: And if they were able to converse with one another, wouldn't they think that they were discussing what mattered?
Glaucon: Very true.
Socrates: And suppose further that the screen had sounds which came from its side, wouldn't they imagine that they were simply hearing what people said?
Glaucon: No question.
Socrates: To them, the truth would be literally nothing but those shadowy things we call the images.
Glaucon: That is certain.
Socrates: And now look again, and see what naturally happens next: the prisoners are released and are shown the truth. At first, when any of them is liberated and required to suddenly stand up and turn his neck around, and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the images; and then imagine someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is asking him to things, not as they are captured on the screen, but in living color -will he not be perplexed? Won't he imagine that the version which he used to see on the screen are better and more real than the objects which are shown to him in real life?
Glaucon: Far better.
Socrates: And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
Glaucon: True, he now will.
Socrates: And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and hindered in his self-seeking until he's forced to think about someone besides himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? He will find that he cannot simply live life as he sees fit, and he will not have even the illusion of finding comfort by living for himself.
Glaucon: Not all in a moment, he said.
Socrates: He will require time and practice to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the billboards best, next the product lines he has seen advertised, and then things which are not commodities; then he will talk with adults and children, and will he know greater joy in having services done to him, or will he prefer to do something for someone else?
Glaucon: Certainly.
Socrates: Last of he will be able to search for the One who is greatest, reflected in each person on earth, but he will seek him for himself, and not in another; and he will live to contemplate him.
Glaucon: Certainly.
Socrates: He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and is absolutely the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?
Glaucon: Clearly, he said, his mind would be on God and his reasoning towards those things that come from him.
Socrates: And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?
Glaucon: Certainly, he would.
Socrates: And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe what was happening in the world of brands and what new features were marketed, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, "Better to be the poor servant of a poor master" than to reign as king of this Hell, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?
Glaucon: Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
Socrates: Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness, and seem simply not to get it?
Glaucon: To be sure.
Socrates: And in conversations, and he had to compete in one-upsmanship of knowing the coolest brands with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went with his eyes and down he came without them; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would give him an extremely heavy cross to bear.
Glaucon: No question. Then is the saying, "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king," in fact false?
Socrates: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is crucified. Dear Glaucon, you may now add this entire allegory to the discussion around a matter; the den arranged around a flickering screen is deeply connected to the world of living to serve your pleasures, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the spiritual transformation which alike may happen in the monk keeping vigil or the mother caring for children, the ascent of the soul into the world of spiritual realities according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the Source of goodness appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.
Glaucon: I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.
As I walked through the gallery, I immediately stopped when I saw one painting. As I stopped and looked at it, I became more and more deeply puzzled. I'm not sure how to describe the picture.
It was a picture of a city, viewed from a high vantage point. It was a very beautiful city, with houses and towers and streets and parks. As I stood there, I thought for a moment that I heard the sound of children playing—and I looked, but I was the only one present.
This made all the more puzzling the fact that it was a disturbing picture—chilling even. It was not disturbing in the sense that a picture of the Crucifixion is disturbing, where the very beauty is what makes it disturbing. I tried to see what part might be causing it, and met frustration. It seemed that the beauty was itself what was wrong—but that couldn't be right, because when I looked more closely I saw that the city was even more beautiful than I had imagined. The best way I could explain it to myself was that the ugliness of the picture could not exist except for an inestimable beauty. It was like an unflattering picture of an attractive friend—you can see your friend's good looks, but the picture shows your friend in an ugly way. You have to fight the picture to really see your friend's beauty—and I realized that I was fighting the picture to see the city's real beauty. It was a shallow picture of something profound, and it was perverse. An artist who paints a picture helps you to see through his eyes—most help you to see a beauty that you could not see if you were standing in the same spot and looking. This was like looking at a mountaintop through a pair of eyes that were blind, with a blindness far more terrible, far more crippling, than any blindness that is merely physical. I stepped back in nausea.
I leaned against a pillar for support, and my eyes fell to the bottom of the frame. I glanced on the picture's title: Porn.
