Looking For Atlantis...

O! Thou Dangerous Dialectic!

2008-12-15T01:22:00.000-08:00

This is the big term paper I wrote for my class on the Philosophical/Theological Psychology of Soren Kierkegaard. I feel like a lot of good thought came out of this project, even if it was a beast to finish. Enjoy.

"O! Thou Dangerous Dialectic!:
An Analysis of the Relationship Between Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception Within Despair in The Sickness Unto Death"

In the introduction to the section of The Sickness Unto Death where he expounds despair as defined by consciousness, Kierkegaard directly relates the degree of despair in a person to the degree of consciousness in that person. He says, “The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to its increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair” (1). Consciousness and despair, then, are directly proportionate to each other; whenever they are found together (that is, whenever a self is not in faith, or resting transparently in the power that established it), one’s increase or decrease is marked by the other’s increase or decrease, respectively. To illustrate this point, Kierkegaard gives the example of the despair that is suffered by Satan: “The devil’s despair is the most intensive despair, for the devil is sheer spirit and hence unqualified consciousness and transparency; there is no obscurity in the devil that could serve as a mitigating excuse” (2). This point is well-taken, for it similarly seems true that—as Kierkegaard himself will quickly address in this section—one who is hardly conscious of being a self can hardly despair, at least in despair proper as defined by Kierkegaard.

But what is it of which a person is growing in consciousness as that person also grows in despair? Kierkegaard believes that this consciousness is that of his despair itself. He says, “To the extent that a person has the truer conception of despair, if he still remains in despair, and to the extent that he is more clearly conscious of being in despair—to that extent the despair is more intensive” (3). Thus, as long as one remains in despair (that is, as long as one is misrelating himself to himself and to the other), the more he understands despair, the greater his despair will be. Likewise, as one grows in despair, one grows in the knowledge of one’s despair. If this is true, and despair is the misrelation of the self to the self and the other (including God), then it appears that, as one becomes further and further despairing, one will come to a further knowledge of himself and the other (including God). This is so because in order to know how one is in misrelation to a thing, one must know how one ought to be relating to that thing, and in order to know how one ought to be relating to a thing, one must have at least some knowledge of oneself and that thing.

Thus, as one grows in despair, one will grow in the knowledge of oneself and the other. But how can this be? It seems intuitive to me that as one grows in despair, as one becomes further misrelated to oneself and to the other, one further skews his picture of reality—one further deceives himself. Further, after establishing that sin is intensified despair in the second main section of The Sickness Unto Death, when refuting the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance, Kierkegaard himself says, “That is why Christianity begins in another way: man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right” (4). Thus, when in sin, one is not only ignorant, but is himself willfully ignorant concerning the truth. Is it possible, then, that as one deepens in despair (sin), one grows in knowledge of self and other and simultaneously deceives oneself concerning this knowledge? What are we to make of the phenomenon of self-deception in light of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the different forms of despair? My project is thus to further exegete and analyze these different forms of despair as laid out by Kierkegaard, particularly in terms of how self-deception plays a role in them, hopefully in order to determine how it is that self-knowledge and self-deception relate both to each other and to the phenomenon of despair.

“The Despair That Is Ignorant of Being Despair, or the Despairing Ignorance of Having a Self and an Eternal Self”

It is here, in Kierkegaard’s treatment of what he describes as the lowest form of despair, that I hope to establish a model for how self-knowledge and self-deception relate in despair, and then later apply, test, and if necessary, revise that model in regards to the various, more advanced forms of despair. Being that this form of despair is firstly and primarily marked by the ignorance of being in despair, Kierkegaard begins this section with a treatment of ignorance in relation to what he calls “the obstinacy of truth” (5). He says,

"That this condition is nevertheless despair and is properly designated as such manifests what in the best sense of the word may be called the obstinacy of truth. Veritas est index sui et falsi [Truth is the criterion of itself and of the false]. But this obstinacy of truth certainly is not respected; likewise, it is far from being the case that men regard the relationship to truth, relating themselves to the truth, as the highest good, and it is very far from being the case that they Socratically regard being in error in this manner as the worst misfortune—the sensate in them usually far outweighs their intellectuality" (6).

Thus, the obstinacy of truth presents itself in truth being both its own standard as well as the standard of falsehood—truth insists on having its own way and will not accept anyone else’s. This is perhaps what Kierkegaard means when he says that this obstinacy is “in the best sense of the word.” He goes on to say, however, that this truth-imposed standard of truth is more than often not given proper respect—it is often ignored. Most men, says Kierkegaard, do not care enough about truth and their relation to truth to be properly related to it, primarily because they do not view being in relation to truth “as the highest good.” Further, he says that this is due to the disproportionate importance that these men place upon their sensual desires, rather than their intellectuality. Men ignore the truth and thus become ignorant to it.

Kierkegaard goes on to further describe the ignorant man’s relation to truth:

"For example, if a man is presumably happy, imagines himself to be happy, although considered in the light of truth he is unhappy, he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error. On the contrary, he becomes indignant, he regards anyone who does so as his worst enemy, he regards it as an assault bordering on murder in the sense that, as is said, it murders his happiness. Why? Because he is completely dominated by the sensate and the sensate-psychical, because he lives in sensate categories, the pleasant and the unpleasant, waves goodbye to spirit, truth, etc., because he is too sensate to have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit" (7).

This ignorant man, according to Kierkegaard, believes himself to be happy, but only because he is ignorant—that is, this man is happy only because he does not know of his despairing state. Truly, ignorance is bliss for this man. Were this man to stumble across the truth, or were truth to be forced upon him, he would more than likely do everything in his power to continue ignoring the truth, for “he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error.” Why? Why does truth and any truth-bearer become his enemy? It is because, as Kierkegaard says, “it [truth] murders his happiness.”

Truth is a category of spirit, and thus it calls the man beyond the immediate sensate categories of “the pleasant and the unpleasant”; it calls man to deny himself the immediate, the purely sensate pleasures, to “have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit,” and thus to suffer through the despair of consciousness. But as has been said, this sensate-driven man will do everything in his power in order to continue ignoring the truth. He will construct elaborate systems—systems “embracing the whole of existence, world history, etc…” (8) as if to be sheltered within these systems from the harshness of truth and reality. However, as says Kierkegaard, we are surprised on one level to find that this sensate man cannot live as though the systems he has created for his shelter are actually true. Thus, the man “himself does not personally live in this huge, domed palace but in a shed alongside it, or in a doghouse, or at best in the janitor’s quarters” (9). On another level, this behavior is not surprising at all, for we can see that as truth begins to impress itself upon him, and as his consciousness of despair may be beginning to grow, the ignorant man may no longer be able to hold up his façade of a palace. He may be no longer able to convince himself that the shelter he built for his protection and distraction from reality will actually protect and distract him because truth itself—the truth that is impressing itself upon him—is revealing to him that this shelter is only a figment of his imagination.

But still he must fight this increasing knowledge, this increasing violation of truth upon his ignorance, in order that he may protect his immediacy, or else his “spiritless sense of security” (10) will collapse upon itself. As Kierkegaard says, “when the enchantment of illusion is over, when existence begins to totter, then despair, too, immediately appears as that which lay underneath” (11). How can this champion of immediacy maintain his illusion so as to not have to come to terms with the emptiness, the despair that lies beneath it? Simply enough, he must will even more strongly to ignore the truth about himself. He must resolve even more firmly to deny the real as the real presents itself even more firmly to him. This, I believe, is the model of the relation between self-knowledge and self-deception within despair—that of the irresolvable tension between complete dialectical opposites. When one is in despair, as one grows in the knowledge of oneself and of the other—and in the knowledge of despair itself—one must simultaneously harden and strengthen one’s resolve to ignore those truths and deceive oneself.

A necessary condition for the growth of one’s despair, then, is the growth of the tension of the opposition between self-knowledge and the will to ignorance (12). It could be also that as one grows in the consciousness of despair, that growing awareness, that ever-growing feeling of despair, may in fact be a phenomenology of that very opposition. As one grows more despairing, one may feel the ever-increasingly grating tension between those things that one knows about oneself, and those things that one cannot accept as being true about oneself for fear that they, being true, will destroy the already fragile self-security provided by remaining within one’s false immediacy. Thus, in order to protect his immediate happiness, maintained through his sensate categories of “pleasant” and “unpleasant,” this man must even more fervently will his own ignorance—his ignoring of the truth—and thus continue to willfully deceive himself.

We can easily see what kind of monstrous dialectical trap in which this man has been caught by reflecting upon the doubly-antithetical nature of his situation. Not only is he dialectically caught between his increasing self-knowledge and his immediacy, and thus is resigned to having to “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (13), but this suppression is by nature self-defeating. The tension found within in this suppression, this self-deception, clashes essentially with the goal of the immediacy to which the suppression is in service, that of his happiness. So, in the attempted protection of his immediate happiness, this man actually sets it up in a dialectic of opposition with his own growing self-knowledge, potentially suspending the fulfillment of both of them infinitely. He is trapped in the limbo between the two, never able to attain either.

Here, for the sake of clarity, it will be helpful to consider a potential counter-argument to our present hypothesis. It might be argued that this dialectical tension is in fact impossible because it appears impossible to simultaneously come to self-knowledge and suppress that knowledge on the same level of consciousness (14). Fundamentally, this objection comes down to a simple affirmation of the law of non-contradiction, for it seems that one cannot know a proposition about oneself (affirming A) and simultaneously deny that proposition (affirming ~A). This is true enough, but this is not what occurs within this dialectic of opposition between self-knowledge and self-deception. Rather than both occurring simultaneously, the two interplay with each other in a coextensive, indefinite succession—that is, they incessantly dialogue. The person in this dialectical tension, in despair, is constantly torn back and forth between the inescapable truth and the necessity of its suppression. Thus, this counter-argument simply does not apply to our hypothesis.

“The Despair That Is Conscious of Being Despair and Therefore Is Conscious of Having a Self in Which There Is Something Eternal and Then either in Despair Does Not Will to Be Itself or in Despair Wills to Be Itself”

At this point, obviously, we will not yet be able to witness the full effects of how this dialectical tension plays out in the deeper forms of despair because we have still only dealt with despair that is unconscious of its being a state of despair—despair that has its immediacy still intact, that has not yet entered the dialectical opposition between self-knowledge and the will to ignorance. Technically speaking, then, we have not yet witnessed this dialectic at all for the same reasons; we have seen only the possibility of the beginning of this dialectic, as truth first begins to impress itself upon the man who has not yet come into any knowledge of himself as spirit. As a reminder, the present reflections upon this possibility have arisen from our reflections upon the indignation of immediate man toward any who would disturb his immediacy by presenting him with that which transcends his immediacy—truth. In order to truly see this dialectic at work, we must begin investigating the forms of the despair as defined by consciousness that are actually conscious of being despair, beginning with the despair that does not will to be oneself.

It is important to notice that in the short introduction to this subsection of the first part of The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard himself notes something like what we have explicitly labeled as the dialectic between self-knowledge and self-deception. He begins this introduction by describing how growth in despair in necessarily accompanied and aided by the growth in the knowledge of what despair is. As we too have noted, this is because, in growth in the knowledge of the nature of despair, one begins to understand the reality of despair as being a condition of the eternal self. However, the full understanding of this reality does not come immediately upon one’s first encounters with despair. On this, Kierkegaard says, “On the one hand, then, the true conception of despair is indispensable for conscious despair. On the other hand, it is imperative to have clarity about oneself—that is, insofar as simultaneous clarity and despair are conceivable” (15). Thus, from the language he is using, it appears that Kierkegaard himself believes that there is some dialectical tension between the clarity that presents itself as self-knowledge and the self-deception found within despair. Going on, he says of the despairing man,

"To some degree, he is aware of being in despair, feels it the way a person does who walks around with a physical malady but does not want to acknowledge forthrightly the real nature of the illness. At one moment, he is almost sure that he is in despair; the next moment, his indisposition seems to have some other cause, something outside of himself, and if this were altered, he would not be in despair" (16).

Here, it appears that Kierkegaard is implicitly assuming the kind of dialectic—that coextensive, indefinite succession of self-knowledge and self-deception—that we have previously described. The man with this despairing sickness has a moment of clarity; he understands that he is in fact sick with the sickness unto death, and that he himself is the continuing cause of this illness. This self-awareness, however, is quickly replaced by the thought that the illness, “his indisposition,” is not being and could not be caused by himself and the dialectical tension growing within him. He could not truly “acknowledge forthrightly the real nature of the illness”, being within his own eternal self, and act upon that, for that would require him to abandon his immediate happiness—it would require him “to venture out and to endure being spirit” (17). He must distract himself from the reality that his own self presents him with, by trying “to keep himself in the dark about his state through diversions” (18). Even more explicitly, Kierkegaard says shortly later in the section, “There is indeed in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing…” (19) that is, a dialectical interplay between coming to knowledge and willing to ignore or suppress that knowledge. Thus, the man in despair enters the tension of this dialectic of opposition.

Despair that does not will to be itself can be further broken up into the categories of the despair over the earthly or something earthly, and the despair of the eternal or over oneself, and it is here that this dialectic between self-knowledge and self-deception begins to rear its ugly head. This earliest form of conscious despair—that is, the despair over the earthly or over something earthly—is birthed out of the immediacy of the despair that is unconscious of being despair. Since in this self, there is yet “no infinite consciousness of the self, of what despair is, or of the condition as one of despair…” (20) Kierkegaard says that this despair “is only a suffering, a succumbing to the pressure of external factors; in no way does it come from within [the self] as an act” (21). Thus, the dialectic must be begun from the outside, since the self, being trapped in its immediacy, will simply continue in its immediacy; it is only from the outside that the self can be given dialectical inertia, since that which is at rest tends to stay at rest. Conscious despair—the dialectic of opposition between self-knowledge and self-deception—thus begins passively. In the same vein, Kierkegaard remarks shortly thereafter,

"Now something happens that impinges (upon + to strike) upon this immediate self and makes it despair. In another sense, it cannot happen at this point; since the self has no reflection, there must be an external motivation for the despair, and the despair is nothing more than a submitting. By a “stroke of fate” that which to the man of immediacy is his whole life, or, insofar as he has a minuscule of reflection, the portion thereof to which he especially clings, is taken from him; in short, he becomes, as he calls it, unhappy, that is, his immediacy is dealt such a crushing blow that it cannot reproduce itself: he despairs" (22).

As before, Kierkegaard here affirms the violent nature of the onset of this despair; something “impinges” or strikes upon the immediacy of the self, causing this immediacy to shatter, and throwing the self into despair. This despair is thus completely passive in its nature, as we have remarked. But what, then, is acting upon the self, shattering its immediacy?

I argue that this force is truth itself, both because truth is not a category of the immediate, but rather of the eternal, and because truth is obstinate (that is, it insists on entering center stage and setting the standard for all), and thus is not easily ignored. In revealing itself to a person of immediacy, truth, in its eternality, forces open the door on the happy illusions that distraction and complacency has allowed him to maintain, both transcending and crushing his categories of “the pleasant and the unpleasant.” As soon as this person’s illusions—“the portion [of his immediacy] to which he especially clings”—clash with reality, the truth concerning how he has misrelated himself to himself and to the other leaps into the spotlight, and if he is capable of any reflection at all, the self-presentation of this truth launches him into the dialectic of opposition between growing self-knowledge and growing self-deception. If the person is in fact incapable of reflection, if he is one of those “happy” few, then, as Kierkegaard says, he will simply suffer the duration of the despair, and once the immediacy in question is restored, he will return to his previous “happy” state, though nonetheless still unconsciously despairing (23). It matters not how large or small are the first steps onto this dialectical path, how great or insignificant the first inconsistency between illusion and reality, how blatant or subtle the first revelation of the misrelation; once the reflection upon the truth concerning oneself has taken hold, the dialectic also takes hold and begins to have a life of its own.

Once this first step has been taken, and the man begins to despair and reflect on his despair, he attempts to take measures to save his self from it. However, “his struggles are in vain; the difficulty he has run up against requires a total break with immediacy, and he does not have the self-reflection or the ethical reflection for that” (24). This man cannot simply will away his despair and transcend the despairing dialectic of opposition because he cannot transcend his need for immediacy, his need for the protective shroud of his illusion for the sake of his immediate happiness. Thus, rather than transcending the dialectic, he must perpetuate it by providing the response—he must will to suppress the truth about himself and deceive himself. He attempts to temporarily abandon himself, hoping that the problem will go away when he does so. As Kierkegaard says, “As long as the difficulty lasts, he does not dare, as the saying so trenchantly declares, ‘to come to himself,’ he does not will to be himself; presumably this will pass, perhaps a change will take place, this gloomy possibility will probably be forgotten” (25). This man wishes to escape himself because he has identified himself with the immediacy which has been called into question by the revealing of the truth of the misrelation of his self to himself and the other; thus, this man is in the despair to will to not be himself. If the truth about this man’s misrelated self does not further present itself to him—if truth never equally or superiorly answers his will to deceive himself—then it may be that he succeeds in suppressing this knowledge, and will actually forget that “gloomy possibility,” thus passing back into the immediate “happiness” of ignorance he once possessed (26). It is possible, however, that if he is never able to restore his former “happiness,” and thereby deceive himself back into immediacy, he will continue to despair over the earthly for the rest of his life. We ought to note, though, that if this is the case, the dialectic will be suspended, and thus this man will never slip into deeper forms of despair, just as if he were to pass back into his previously undisturbed immediacy. Before we think of this as a good thing, however, we must remember with Kierkegaard that this will also suspend this man’s journey to salvation.

When passing from the despair over the earthly into the despair over oneself (and of the eternal), the dialectic between self-knowledge and self-deception does not change in nature, but rather in intensity. While despair is technically always of the eternal, as Kierkegaard points out (27), there is indeed a shift in moving from the despair over the earthly to the despair over oneself in that the awareness—the consciousness—of one’s despair is fundamentally deepened. This shift is a further movement in self-knowledge because, for the first time, the object of despair—that is, the self itself—is recognized, and not merely recognized as such, but recognized as the source its own despair. For whatever reason, probably due to some monumental poignant failure of the person—a failure highlighting a fundamental weakness of the person—the person in despair comes to understand that he himself is the problem, as he misrelates himself to himself and to the other. Of this consciousness of one’s weakness, Kierkegaard remarks, “Consequently, there is only a relative difference, namely, that the previous form has weakness’ consciousness as its final consciousness, whereas here the consciousness does not stop with that but rises to a new consciousness—that of his weakness” (28). Before, in the despair over the earthly, the man in despair was certainly despairing in weakness; he simply did not yet know it. Following this previously mentioned failure, the man is finally made aware of his own weakness, and despairs even further in that awareness.

The poignancy of this failure and its corresponding weakness has made the growth in the knowledge of self-as-misrelation nigh impossible to avoid. This step is thus the next natural movement in the dialectic of opposition between self-knowledge and self-deception. For, once the truth concerning oneself-as-misrelation has been suppressed in the previous manner—that is, in separating from oneself until immediacy is restored—truth’s proper response in raising the stakes is to reveal that the thing from which we had attempted to escape is not only the problem, but also that it is in fact inescapable. Thus, upon reaching this level of despair, there is understandably an enormous intensification of the dialectical tension, such that whether one simply sits in this immediacy-smashing self-knowledge, or can somehow manage to find the strength of spirit within himself to continue the dialectic of opposition and will his own self-deception even in the face of such a revelation, he is miserable. On this revelation, Kierkegaard states, “He now becomes more clearly conscious of his despair, that he despairs of the eternal, that he despairs over himself, over being so weak that he attributes such great significance to the earthly, which now becomes for him the despairing sign that he has lost the eternal and himself” (29). We can see here that the self from which the despairing person previously attempted to distance himself was in fact his real self, his eternal self, which he rejected in favor of the false self in which he could preserve his immediate happiness. And now, fearing that he may have lost that which was eternal in him, he despairs. Of course, looking in from the outside, we can see that he does still have his eternal self, this being evidenced by the simple fact that he has had the strength and resistance of spirit to continue the dialectic and reach such depths of despair.

But what of the other option? Could it be possible to continue the dialectic of opposition still further yet, and summon up such strength of spirit as to will one’s own ignorance in the face of such blatant self-knowledge? This is possible only by standing truth on its head, by making oneself the standard of the true, and by judging the world according to this standard. This is precisely what occurs in the man, who, still unwilling to submit to faith, despairs to will to be oneself in defiance. Here, as Kierkegaard says, “If the person in despair goes one single dialectical step further, if he realizes why he does not will to be himself, then there is a shift, then there is defiance, and this is the case precisely because in despair he wills to be himself” (30). Thus, the man who in despair wills to be himself defies all of truth and reality because it will not let him retain that in which he finds his immediate happiness (those categories of “pleasant” and “unpleasant”). Further willing his own ignorance, he reassembles reality is a way that suits that which he wills himself to be. “On closer examination, however,” Kierkegaard says, “it is easy to see that this absolute ruler is a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing; his position, his sovereignty, is subordinate to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment” (31). We clearly see, then, that this man is truly the most deceived of all, even though he has had the most self-knowledge, become a stronger spirit, and participated in the eternal far more than those who are ignorant of their despair. In fact, it is precisely because he has seen more of the truth and continued to will to reject it (and not only that, but he willed to remake it) that he is the most deceived of all.

Thus, in examining how it is that self-knowledge and self-ignorance could exist together within the phenomena of despair, we have seen that the relationship between these two states within despair is one of dialectical opposition—a coextensive and indefinite succession of opposites. This dialectic is ever building, raising the stakes at every exchange. It begins with truth’s first appearance, breaking into the immediacy of ignorant despair, and culminates in the defiance and complete self-deception of the man who in despair wills to be himself, thus casting an image of reality in his own image. This man has perfected the despairing dialectic of opposition, rather than transcending this dialectic by submitting to his maker in faith, and thus fully given himself over to the sickness unto death.

Endnotes:

1. The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hong and Hong, pg. 42.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., pg. 48.
4. Ibid., pg. 95 (emphasis mine).
5. Ibid., pg. 42.
6. Ibid., pg. 42-43.
7. Ibid., pg. 43.
8. Ibid. Kierkegaard certainly seems to be referencing Hegel’s philosophy in saying this. This would imply that Kierkegaard believes that Hegel’s motives in doing speculative philosophy are primarily derived from his sensate-psychological need to repress, ignore, or perhaps to distract himself from reality. Whether this was actually the case for Hegel, I know not. However, if Kierkegaard is truly referring implicitly to Hegel in speaking on the repressive nature of philosophical systems, that Kierkegaard thought this was the case appears to follow.
9. Ibid., pg. 43-44.
10. Ibid., pg. 44.
11. Ibid.
12. Whether this is a sufficient condition for the growth of despair is another matter, and obviously remains to be proven.
13. Romans 1:18 NKJV
14. I am indebted to Michael Garten for his very astute thoughts, both in this specific counter-argument, as well as his valuable feedback and conversation in regards to this paper as a whole.
15. SUD, trans. Hong and Hong, pg. 47.
16. Ibid., pg. 48.
17. Ibid., pg. 43.
18. Ibid., pg. 48.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., pg. 50-51.
21. Ibid., pg. 51.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., pg. 52-53.
24. Ibid., pg. 55.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., pg. 55-56.
27. Ibid., pg. 60.
28. Ibid., pg. 61.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., pg. 67.
31. Ibid., pg. 69.

Love and Peace in Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Garrett

Spring '09 Schedule

2008-11-24T19:00:00.000-08:00

No emoting today; just my schedule for the last semester of my undergraduate career!

PHILOSOPHY
Symbolic Logic (PHIL 312); Monday 1:30-4:20 PM, Tom Crisp.
Philosophy of Religion (PHIL 414); Wednesday 1:30-4:20 PM, Tom Crisp.
Advanced Studies: Self Deception (PHIL 435); Thursday 10:30-1:20 PM, Gregg Ten Elshof.
Senior Thesis (PHIL 450).*

GEN. EDUCATION
Biola Chorale (MUSC 001); Monday/Wednesday 10:30-12:20 PM, Friday 11:30-12:20 PM, Shawna Stewart.
Beginning Basketball (PEED 110E), Tuesday/Thursday 9:30-10:30 AM, D. Holmquist.

* I'm most likely going to be writing on a phenomenological/teleological view of metaphysical objectivity (maybe throw some Quine on ontological relativity in there, etc.).

Unapologetic

2008-11-11T00:40:00.000-08:00

Once again, after a months-long hiatus of blogging, here I am. It seems pretty pointless at this point to make yet another resolution to blog on a more regular basis, as I think I may just not be cut out for that. Who knows? Whatever the case may be, it seems pretty clear that it simply is not a large enough priority for me to actually put the required time and effort into it when push comes to shove.

It's unclear as to whether anyone even reads this anymore, as I've really given the minute readership I may have once had no reason to stick around. As that seems the most likely case, I think any blogging I here do will be for myself; this will undoubtably be unapologetic in nature, to say the least - perhaps for the purpose of processing my thoughts on hard issues (probably spiritual in nature), perhaps for simply getting things off my chest.

If you're still here... well... thanks? I can't say you'll like what you see because, well, you may end up seeing nothing, as you have seen here for the past several months, as well as for the several months previous to that. If you do see something, it will may very likely be something that won't be pretty, well thought out, or even necessarily intelligent. I've got a lot of things on my mind, things that showcase my spiritual ugliness. Lord have mercy.

Daybreak of the Idols: A Psychological-Semiotic Examination of Hyperreality and Idolatry

2008-04-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

Here's my Torrey paper for the semester. I know it's a bit long, but it's worth the read (or at least I think so, haha). Also, I apologize in advance for the obtuse footnoting, but it was the only way I could figure out how to do it.

In this, our modern age, we pride ourselves on being an enlightened people. Clearheaded and freethinking, acceptant of new ideas, tolerant of our fellow man, and more in touch with the reality of the universe than we have ever been before—and for this, we congratulate ourselves. After all, are we not—we who, as of yet, have carried on our backs the cause of humanism far beyond its previously fervent limits—left deserving of a pat on the back? Truly, were this the case; were we truly enlightened, had we truly done a great service to the human race, I would be the first to offer congratulations. As it stands, however, we may have fallen into the very same trap that has ensnared our kind from the beginning of time. What—is this possible? Surely we have made some kind of progress over the many millennia of our existence; surely we have taken the Oracle’s wise advice, and learned to better know ourselves, in order that we could discover the means by which we might overcome ourselves. But were I to tell you that we have not; that we have fallen prey again and again to the oldest of stumbling blocks—the stumbling block of idolatry—would you believe me? “Surely not!” you would say. “Surely we are better off than those old sots, those ancient fools that deliriously bowed the knee to blocks of wood and stone!” How I wish that this were true, that we had surpassed such foolish behavior; however, in our present condition, we differ very little from those ancient fools. It is true—we no longer bow to blocks of wood or stone, but still we bow to idols of various shape and size. The more pertinent question to ask is not, “Do we worship idols even today, even with all the progress we have made?” but rather, “With all the “progress” we have made, why is it that we still worship idols?” I believe that an answer to this question can be reached in an examination of both the psychological and semiotic theory behind the phenomenon of idolatry. More specifically, in examining the concept of hyperreality as well as the psychological consequences of mankind’s fall from grace as is told in the Biblical narrative of Genesis, it will become more clear that mankind’s tendency to commit idolatry could be more accurately be described as the desire to create hyperreality—this being driven by what I have called man’s drive for safety. (1)

What is Hyperreality?

In order to explicate the concept of hyperreality as it relates to idolatrous behavior, a cursory discussion of basic semiotic theory will first be required. In simplest terms, semiotics is the study of signs and their relation to the objects which are signified by them. More broadly, the field of semiotics examines how meaning is derived from objects in the world, and how those meanings are formed in a manner that is communicable between agents. Here, even from the very outset of the semiotic project, a dichotomy is discovered, a dichotomy highlighting the very purpose of the sign—that of communication. There is the object being signified—which cannot in itself be communicated, as it is not in the mind, but in the world—and there is the sign (or “signifier”), which points toward and is used as a communicable (mental) placeholder for the signified object. The sign, then, fulfills at least three communicative qualifications: it is communally determined, it is conceptual (or formed by the mind), and it is referential to some object. In other words, the sign must have a communally agreed-upon conceptual and referential relationship to the object that is signified in order to act in a communicative manner. This is because information about an object can only be exchanged if the object to which the information refers is one that is commonly known; this communally determined conceptual/referential relationship between the sign and the signified is what is commonly referred to as meaning.

It is on the basis of meaning that every component of language and every item of knowledge are constructed. Language and knowledge thus have a symbiotic relationship, one based upon the communally determined conceptual relation between the sign and the signified. A language is, of course, a collection of words or symbols (which are themselves collections of vocalized sounds and written letters or pictures), but more specifically, it is a collection that has been communally determined to refer to various conceptual relations of signs to their referents for the purposes of communication—a collection that has meaning. Were a language not to have this communally determined conceptual/referential relationship, it would cease to be meaningful, and would therefore effectively cease to be language.

Likewise, knowledge consists of those communal conceptual relations between signs and their referents to which language refers. This is simply to say that an individual’s knowledge—that is, the set of those propositions that one knows—is given meaning by the conceptual relations between signifiers and their signified objects that have been established by their community for the purposes of communication. Was this not the case, knowledge itself would cease to be knowledge because it would cease to have any sort of meaning or conceptual relation to a referent—one could not know a proposition that had no meaning. It follows, then, that because both language and knowledge are conceptually driven into a state of meaning by the consensus of the community that uses them, that which is referred to and communicated by language and knowledge—that being reality—is in some manner also conceptually driven into meaning by the consensus of that same community. Regardless of whether or not there is an actual or correct metaphysical reality independent of our conceptions of it, the means by which we would have access to that reality, language and knowledge, depend fundamentally and irrevocably upon the meanings—that is, those conceptual relations between signs and their referents—that our community has assigned to it.

From this conclusion, we now have the necessary ingredients for what the French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard labels in his text Simulacra and Simulation as simulation. He claims that we have entered an era where signs no longer point to the states of reality which they originally signified, and that this has caused a lapse into what he calls the state of hyperreality. Within hyperreality, he claims, what we refer to as “real” and “imaginary” no longer exist because any meaningful difference between the two has ceased to exist. (2) But really? The real has ceased to exist? Admittedly, this concept appears somewhat obscure and far-fetched, and this is not helped by Baudrillard’s overly florid and eccentric prose, but I believe that, once examined properly, Baudrillard’s ideas and critiques are quite enlightening, particularly in regards to the phenomenon of idolatry. I shall therefore attempt to clarify the problem at hand with an analysis of simulation and the process of the creation of the hyperreal.

The first stage of the process of simulation is that of the disconnection between the sign and what it signifies. This takes place when a sign no longer refers to that which it used to refer. An example might be useful to clarify. Suppose I have a cat, and after studying my cat very thoroughly, I have learned how to mimic his meow so well, that one can no longer tell the difference between us simply by listening to our meows. Now, the sign of the meow, which used to point to or signify the cat, can no longer be said to be connected to the cat except in an arbitrary fashion, because the meow could just as easily point to me instead. This is what is meant by the disconnection of the sign and the signified. In theory, it is easy enough to say that this is the case, but could something like this actually happen? Make no mistake: it can happen, and—in my opinion—it already has.

Take, for example, the pornography industry. They and those on whom they have their hold have now vividly demonstrated to us that sex no longer need refer to love. What was once a sign of a deep mystical union between two beings can now just as easily point to just another form of masturbation—one that instead uses that other being as a sex toy. Similarly, with the dawn and rise of the age of the Internet and the cell phone, one no longer feels the weight of being in proximity to another person. A person could now easily live in the comfort of his home with the amenities of a king without ever having to go to the grocery store. He is enabled to sit on his couch playing any number of Internet role-playing games and never actually have to verbally speak to another person. Thus, now communication itself, even while attaining heights never before reached, has lost its referent—that of human relationship. No longer do the lines of communication require persons to enter into relationship with each other. Now, they merely serve as the means for the transfer of information, as a highway for ones and zeroes; when communication does still refer to personal relationship, it does so arbitrarily. These are just two examples of how signs become—and already have become—disconnected from their referents.

The next step on the road to complete simulation occurs when referents disappear altogether, and the above examples continue to serve as excellent models for this process. It does not seem ridiculous in the least to assert that it is likely, for most people in Western society, that personal relationships—that is, the actual spiritual connection between persons—are something absolutely unheard of. For most of our society, the referent of both sexual intercourse and of verbal communication, personal relationship, has disappeared. I believe this to be symptomatic of a larger neglect on our part, that being the neglect of the metaphysical and spiritual realms in general. To be sure, the metaphysical and spiritual may still “exist,” but as has been said, if we have ceased to be in relationship to them, either in our language or in our knowledge, how “real” could they actually be to us? They have vanished; to us, they have ceased to meaningfully exist.

At this point, we have effectively entered the state of simulation. Now, there is no metaphysical “behind” or “underneath” to support the infrastructure of signs that make up our picture of reality; these signs have no grounding to give them meaning. This infrastructure no longer points to a referent, it only points back toward itself. For, if there are no referents at which to point, what remains but an infinite regression of signs? Signs no longer refer to a signified object, they can only refer to more signs—and infinitely so. Because signs in and of themselves have no meaning, they have the property of being infinitely translatable. They can be created in any shape or form, and so, without any signified object to give them meaning, without a referent to delineate difference in value between them, they are rendered completely homogeneous.

The entire purpose of meaning—that conceptual relation of sign and signified—is to delineate differences of value between various ideas or objects. However, because of the aforementioned infinite translatability of signs, and the lack of a referent from which to derive meaning, the concept of difference is put to death and value is obliterated. Meaning is completely liquefied and homogenized into a fluid nothingness. There is now no “real” or “imaginary” because there is effectively no difference in meaning between the two—now there is only the hyperreal. We have thus come to definitions of the states of simulation and hyperreality, those being: simulation is the condition of any language code in which meaning has suffered a complete homogenization; hyperreality is, more specifically, the condition in which the signs “reality” and “imaginary” cease to have meaningful metaphysical referents (where the term “meaningful” is indicative of an actual delineation of conceptual value as is made possible by difference), and so are made homogeneous. In both cases, difference is not actual—it is merely simulated—and those signs that continue to feign difference are called simulacra.

Behind the Phenomenon of Idolatry

Now that we better understand the natures of simulation and of hyperreality, we can explore hyperreality in regards to the origins of idolatry. But how might a technical concept of postmodern semiotics relate in any way to the origin of a pseudo-religious phenomenon? I believe that the answer to this question lies buried deep within the human mind, and can be dug out by means of a psychological examination of the origins of man himself. Specifically, in turning one’s attention to the Biblical narrative of Genesis, one finds several particularly interesting passages linking man’s fall from Grace with what I believe to be behavior indicative of the tendency to create hyperreality.

At first glance, the narrative of the Fall is not at all complex. God creates man with the purpose of subduing the rest of the Creation, and gives him only one negatively prescriptive command: to not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If man does choose to eat of this tree (for man does have a choice according to the narrative), God says that he will most surely die. Along comes a serpent, who—being among the craftiest of the animals—tricks the woman Eve into eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. Eve, in turn, persuades her husband Adam to eat of the tree as well, thereby disobeying God and plunging man into the grips of sin.

Much has been said in regard to this event and its impact on redemptive history, but what of the psychological implications of this event? For surely, if one can better understand the psychological effects of an event—if one can better understand how it is that an event causes a person to think (especially an event so crucially informative in the history of humanity)—one would have tremendous insight into the behavior of that person, and would thus be able to track possible behavioral patterns arising from the psychological impact of that event. This is a formulation of a standard postulate of the practice of psychoanalysis, and this insight seems to hold true, regardless of the various controversial theories of behavior that have arisen from this practice (for these theories could simply have had incomplete data, or merely been drawn incorrectly with the data they had). With this in mind, we dive into the Genesis narrative, hoping to catch a glimpse into the patterns of thought behind man’s fall from Grace.

Beginning in the sixth verse of the third chapter of Genesis, we find a particularly noteworthy passage in regards to human psychology. It reads,

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, "Where are you?" And he said, "I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself." (3)

What is particularly striking about this passage is that the immediate effect of Adam and Eve’s transgression is their becoming aware of their own nakedness—their reaction to which is the desire to cover themselves, and subsequently, to hide from God in the garden. Many have suggested that this reaction is tantamount to the first experience of guilt. While this may be the case, the reason that Adam gives for his hiding is not guilt at all, but fear; and not simply fear itself, or even the fear of God, but rather a fear caused by his nakedness.

But why would nakedness be something that causes fear? After all, it seems a safe assumption to say that God created man naked, and therefore nakedness could not be something that is in itself evil, or even something to be looked down upon. Earlier in the narrative, it even says, “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” (4) It is my belief that, here, man first experienced the reality of his vulnerability, due to his self-imposed spiritual separation from God and His love, as well of the rest of reality. This, in phenomenological terms, was the creation of the Other—that entity (if I may use that term) that exists juxtaposed against the Self as the entirety of all reality that the Self is not. (5) Before the introduction of the Other, man had no reason to fear his state of nakedness because the thought that anything could have taken advantage of his vulnerable state would have been absolutely and completely foreign to him. Post-Fall, however, in becoming aware of his nakedness (coupled with his spiritual alienation from God and the rest of reality), man also became aware that there was something outside himself capable of affecting his own wellbeing. (6) Thus, man first became subjected to the state of fear of the Other. This state of fear results in what I have come to call man’s drive for safety, or, that primal instinct within man that drives him to hide and protect himself from the Other in its many manifestations. This drive is universal in its effects; in other words, there is no man in which the drive for safety has not caused him to seek refuge from the Other.

How might this take place? How might a shelter from the Other be built? The first option that one has is to make himself into a shelter—escaping into a fortress completely unto himself. This path was exercised by the Buddha, as well as the Stoic Sage; in the attempt to free themselves from evil, suffering and strife, they shored up the walls of the Self high enough to block out all effect of the Other completely. The Sage did this by placing an strong emphasis on what the Stoics called apatheia (root of the Eng. “apathy”), or a certain ascetic unaffectedness with which they approached daily life, which was accomplished by the cultivation of inner virtue and the adherence to reason. For the Buddha, escape from the Other was accomplished by the active retreat into and emptying of the Self through prayer and meditation. More contemporary examples of this extreme type of escapism in our culture (7) usually appear far less virtuous than these two ancient philosophies—much more like Narcissus than Chrysippus; not only utterly unaffected by the Other, but also completely unconscious of their spiritual separation from it. They have escaped so entirely that they are unaware that they have escaped, or that there was anything from which to escape.

Most measures taken for protection from the Other are not so extreme; most shelters built for the security of the Self are not as totalizing in their effects. There are, however, key similarities that, while witnessed in the most extreme cases of escapism, remain the same throughout all instances of behavior influenced by the drive for safety. The source of these similarities is an emphasis on familiarity—there is a particular degree of sameness between a person and the object in which that person derives his safety. The person has given this object the capability of causing him to feel not quite so “Other”, thus allowing the person to relax his guard over himself in the presence of the object. He is mistaken, of course; the familiar object technically remains just as much a part of the Other as it has ever been, just as alienated from the consciousness as has it has ever been, and just as unknown as it has ever been. How then can a person find safety and security in such an object? It is through the process of what I have chosen to call psychological assimilation that the Self abstracts and distills the phenomenon of the object into a security-potable phenomenon with which the Self is able to become familiar. In this sense, the person has imbued trustworthiness in the object by psychologically replacing the object with a more friendly and familiar version of itself, and fundamentally ignoring the Other-like nature of how the object actually appears. Essentially, the purpose of this process boils down to a simple matter of ensuring the ability to control reality—to tame the Other. Once this is the case, once the Other is controllable, the Self can rest easy knowing that its safety is also secure. As some have thought, this subjection of the real is not so much a matter of intellectual or psychological pride, or the result of a will to power; this assimilation, familiarization, and taming of the Other is rather the product of the human drive for safety.

Already, we can see the marks of hyperreality creeping in at the door to the human psyche. The Self has distilled phenomenological safety (8) for itself at the expense of the “pure” actuality of the phenomenon. It is important at this point to acknowledge that this act of psychological assimilation does not happen merely once, or even several times—rather, it takes place on a constant basis, at every junction in which the Self comes into contact with the Other. If the human psyche cannot help but view the phenomenon of the Real in terms of its own safety as a consequence of man’s fall from Grace, as I have hypothesized, then it must be the case that the entire phenomenon of reality itself is cast in the mold of the drive for safety of the individual into a coherent, holistic picture representing the specific felt needs for safety of that individual. In short, the Self begins the process of completely systematizing the Other through the lens of the drive for safety.

It is during the process of systematizing that the concept of knowledge is introduced. For, once reality (9) becomes systematic, stable, and static, it becomes able to be known—and once reality becomes able to be known, it becomes able to be controlled. The manipulation of reality through the means of knowledge ensures that the continued and immutable access of reality is made possible, which, in turn, ensures a secure environment in which the individual is able to feel comfortable. However, as was the case with actions of psychological assimilation on the individual level, the Self fools himself when he believes that his systemization of the phenomena that comprise reality has in any way made him safer, that his “knowledge” grants him security, or that the Other is any less unknown than it has always been. His processed and systematized picture of the real—his worldview—lacks any relationship to a referent because it exists entirely within his own consciousness; it has no meaning, and is therefore a hyperreality. Thus, that set of propositions which he calls his “knowledge” bears no conceptual difference of value from any other set of propositions—even from a set of propositions which he would claim to be utterly false. In truth, what he believes he “knows” is not knowledge at all, nor is it even anti-knowledge. (10) As is true for the entirety of the phenomena of his hyperreality, it is rather the simulacra of knowledge, because while it has given itself the semblance of being knowledge, any actual delineation of conceptual value it might have possessed has been liquefied—de-differenced by the homogenization of meaning. And, lest we forget, this has all been concocted out of the obedience to man’s one insatiable desire—the drive for safety.

We now have come to our first understanding of the nature of idolatry, that being: in obedience to the drive for safety, man creates for himself a hyperreality for the purpose of enabling the access of, familiarization with, and control over “reality.” What is truly remarkable about the phenomena of idolatry is that, by its very nature, it possesses an ability to be infinitely modally modified—one can make an idol out of absolutely anything, whether it be money, sex, cannibalism or conservative Christian family values. All of these can be used as a lens by which to subject one’s reality to the systemization caused by the drive for safety, as idolatry can be fitted to suit the felt needs for safety and security of any individual or community. (11) But as if this were not enough; as if the Other was not subjected adequately to the needs of men, idolatry in its truest form takes the process one step further. Man, in creating for himself graven images, uses these images not only to create security for himself, but also uses them to harness meaning for himself. Despite the critiques and arguments of some, man appears completely unable to live without an ideal, something external to himself that he uses to project meaning and value back onto himself, as if he himself could not give an adequate metaphysical justification for his own existence. Even the most infamous of all anti-idealists, Friedrich Nietzsche—he himself was unable to escape the trap of vicarious value! (12) Since his creation, man has required an object, whether it be conceptual or actual, that will grant him the justification for his existence and activity.

Scripture gives us an example of this idolatrous behavior as well in the book of Ecclesiastes. Here, the author describes numerous occasions in which he attempted to find a meaning for life—something that would make life worthwhile—but found that all things under the sun are vanity, nothing more than vapor. Whether one’s idol is one of the pleasures of self-indulgence, (13) hard work, (14) or even wisdom itself, (15) the author claims that (granting that we are honest with ourselves) none of them can truly grant man the justification to live, no matter how great our desire for them may be. The best that one can hope for with these vanities is to use them to psychologically escape our lack of metaphysical justification—to become drunk on wine, women, work or wisdom so as to not think about our deeper problem. Again, if one is truly honest with oneself, as is the author of Ecclesiastes, one cannot even hope for this. One can now easily see how this idolatrous phenomenon is also derived from the drive for safety. In protecting oneself from the Other, the Self must create an idol in which it is either able to escape, or which it can use to secure the reason for its own existence, as well as to ensure its own safety. In all cases, hyperreality is created because the worldview or the idol that has been created is only in relation to the infinite regression on signs—rather than to an actual referent—and it thus becomes subject to the state of simulation.

One need not think hard to see how this is the case. Take, for instance, the religious rites and rituals of a primitive culture of pagan men, and the gods which they worship. Why do they worship them? What do these gods do for their followers that makes them worthy of reverence? Precisely this: their pantheon of gods psychologically fulfills their felt needs for security. They believe that their gods protect them, and help them to prosper when they are obedient to them, but—even more importantly—that they have specially chosen them as the people with which they commune. This provides this community, as well as the individuals living within it, with an account of the metaphysical justification for their own existence. Not only did a community’s patron god(s) provide protection for this people’s way of life, their god(s) gave them a reason to exist—they gave them meaning. Of course, these people were mistaken in their beliefs, because the statues that they worshipped and the rituals that they observed had no actual referent, merely a psychological one. While differing in name, these gods differed in no way from any other deities worshipped out of the observance of the drive for safety, and were therefore only the simulacra of gods. There would have truly been no difference between the real and the imaginary for these people, and so any apparent difference between the two—between their “real” gods and the “imaginary” gods of another culture—would have been simulated.

The same holds true in the idolatry of the present. One man holds up monetary success as his security and existential justification; for another, his sexual exploits grant him value; another, his code of ethics; another, his theology—but all are equally meaningless. All are signs without referents, and are therefore lost in the cycle of the liquification of meaning. All are simply used by men to satisfy their felt needs for safety from the Other, and are therefore all equally idolatrous. Thus, we have come to an understanding of the nature of idolatry: it is the process by which hyperreality is created for the purposes of enabling the access of, familiarization with, and control over the “real”, as well as the metaphysical justification of the particular existence of a given person or people group.

Concluding Remarks

Hopefully, it has been made clearer the ways in which we, in the present, are still able to participate in the practice of idolatry, and the reasons for which we do so. Truly, we hardly differ at all from the pagans of years long past, for we continue to raise up altars on which we place objects of veneration and offer up the real as our libation. Still, we bow the knee to idols of various shapes and sizes—idols of wealth, idols of power, idols of various varieties of gratification, and any other means by which we can secure our security and existential justification. There is an odd and ironic beauty in the amorphous capabilities of idolatry—for an idol can be fashioned in literally any form. It is so easy to become seduced by an idol simply because it is able to appear in any shape for which we may have need, appealing to where we are weakest in spirit. How, then, can we avoid offering up our lives in service to an idol, sacrificing reality on its altar in exchange for safety? Put simply, we must find a way to break free from the cycle of the liquification of meaning; we must find a route that does not end in the death of difference, a path by which we may reach the Referent! How might this be done? How might we transcend our tendency to create hyperreality? We must dash our idols upon the rocks and be put into direct spiritual relationship with the referent of reality, God Himself. This is possible only through a spiritual relationship with His Son and second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. Only in this way can we escape the trap of idolatry—only in this way can we escape being forever doomed to wander about in the hyperrealities created by our own consciousnesses.

Endnotes:

(1) Here, I wish to make clear that I am in no way claiming my analysis to be the final word on this phenomenon. Rather, I have come to this conclusion based on my observation of human nature, as well as the analysis of both sacred (Christian) and secular texts, and I am more than willing to be corrected in my theories in those places where they require correction. In other words, I am in no way attempting to make my conclusions into dogma—they simply seem to be the case to me.

(2) Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

(3) Genesis 3:6-10 (All Biblical references are to English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted).

(4) Ibid., 2:25.

(5) It would thus follow that the Other had no existence before the fall of man because man had not yet spiritually separated himself from reality. This is a somewhat speculative conclusion, I’ll admit, but one that I believe can be supported here textually, as well as in other passages of Scripture by appealing to the state of the Church through Christ (see Jn. 17 and others).

(6) It should also be said that, in committing an act of disobedience toward God, man gave himself reason to fear the Other. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” 1 John 4:18 (emphasis mine).

(7) i.e. virtually anyone on an MTV reality television series.

(8) I say “phenomenological safety” both for the reason that the safety is found in the altered phenomena, and because the safety itself is phenomenological, that is, it at least appears to be safe.

(9) I should make clear that the term “reality” is used synonymously here with “the Other.”

(10) That which would negate, nullify, or be the antithesis to knowledge.

(11) The formation of a community is not the subject matter per se of this paper, and so I will not go into great depth as to my thoughts on the issue. However, it should at least be said that community formation has nearly has much to do with the act of psychological assimilation as idolatry does; that is to say, communities of men are formed with the goals of similarity, solidarity, and assimilation amongst their members. Ideals and imperatives are set in place based on the common understanding of how reality is to be tamed and made potable to security (i.e. various tribal/family gods and religious practices, community values of what behaviors are socially/morally appropriate, etc.). And who, above all, is excluded? The outsider, the foreigner, the aberrant, the lawbreaker—the unknown.

(12) While this is highly contested, it is my belief that, though Nietzsche attempted to account for the intrinsic value of life in the present without recourse to “something beyond”, he could not escape idealism. I would argue that even he required the concept of the eternal recurrence of all things—that idyllic imperative that radically affirms the value of the present over all other things, as if it were to repeat eternally—to justify his claim that the present earthly life was to be valued, though he claimed that the value of life was intrinsic to life itself.

(13) Ecclesiastes 2:1-11.

(14) Ibid., 2:18-26.

(15) Ibid., 1:12-18, 2:12-17.

The Same, Yet Different

2008-03-04T21:03:00.000-08:00

An essay I wrote last semester for a seminar class, in response to Thomas Morris' "The Logic of God Incarnate":

In this essay I will attempt a solution to the following problem: How could God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth be identical? I will argue that contra the approach using the theory of relative identity, a solution to the numerical identity of God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth can be found within the confines of the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals. I will first examine Morris’ treatment of several solutions to this problem, focusing on a solution from the theory of relative identity. After rejecting this approach, I will go on to argue that a solution to the problem can be found by restricting the domain of the sets of properties between God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth being called identical to those of personhood.

In the first chapter of his book The Logic of God Incarnate, Thomas Morris broadly examines the charge that the orthodox understanding of the doctrine of the Incarnation is logically incoherent. Many of those who claim that the orthodox understanding of this doctrine is logically incoherent do so on the grounds that the doctrine violates what we understand about the nature of identity. Many have thought that to say that the incarnate man Jesus of Nazareth is one and the same individual as the second person of the Trinity contradicts the very laws of logic, and some have even said that such a statement is actually meaningless. To combat this charge, Morris takes a look at several approaches to solving the problem.

After rejecting the idea that we should accept the seeming contradiction at work here as a sign of its supernatural descent, and thus devalue all of human logic, Morris next examines the case of those who would reject only those logical doctrines that would cause trouble for the doctrine of the Incarnation, most specifically the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals. The principle of the indiscernibility of identicals says that if x is identical to y, then x and y have all the same properties. To avoid certain logical contradictions within Christian doctrines, philosophers such as A. P. Martinich have argued for a relative theory of identity, in which the indiscernibility of identicals is denied. In summary of the theory, Morris says this: “Simply put, the relativity thesis is that identity is sortal relative. Every statement of the form ‘a is b’ or ‘a is the same as b’ is said to be incomplete. In every such case, we are told, it needs to be asked, ‘The same what?’” Morris then explains further that, under the theory of relative identity, a and b could be the same F but not the same G. Thus, Martinich (as construed by Morris) believes that, in the case of the doctrine of the Trinity, the Father and the Son could be the same God, but not the same person.

Morris expresses concern with this approach to a solution to contradictions found within the doctrine of the Incarnation, and with good reason – the theory of relative identity is, as Morris points out, highly controversial and tends to lend itself to more contradiction than it solves. Morris himself simply glances over the topic without much more than the brief dismissal in his book, but a much more in-depth treatment of the theory as proposed by Peter Geach is given by John Hawthorne in his essay simply entitled “Identity.” In this article, Hawthorne gives several potent objections to the relative identity theory, the most pointed of which deals with the absurdity caused by the theory when it is put into practice. As an example, Hawthorne deals with Geach’s use of the relative identity predicate ‘is a surman,’ where x is the same surman as y iff x is a man, y is a man, and x and y have the same surname. Under this predication, John and his father Patrick Hawthorne would be the same surman (John Hawthorne calls the surman ‘Bob’). However, Hawthorne argues that if this is the case, a myriad of logical problems and contradictions arise. For instance, if John has brown hair, but Patrick has black hair, then what color is Bob’s hair (if he indeed has hair at all)? To defend relative identity here, we would be forced to accept the two following contradictory propositions as true:

Bob has brown hair.
It is not the case that Bob has brown hair.

What are we to do with this? Suppose further that John changes his surname to ‘O’Leary-Hawthorne’ and then changes it back to ‘Hawthorne.’ Similar problems begin to arise here. Now, there are two surmen, Bob and the ‘O’Leary-Hawthorne’ surman (call him Sven). To which of them is John identical? If both, we are forced to accept the following syllogism as true:

If a = b, and b = c, then a = c.
If Bob = John, and John = Sven, then Bob = Sven.

If we accept this as true, as the relative identity theory would have us do, why make the distinction between Bob (‘Hawthorne’) and Sven (‘O’Leary-Hawthorne’) in the first place? What distinguishes each one from the other? These are just two of the problems that Hawthorne points out in the usage of the theory of relative identity. These problems as well as many others need to be worked out if relative identity is going to be a useful theory in metaphysics.

Still, a problem seems to remain in the logic of the doctrine of the Incarnation. However, because the theory of relative identity appears to be a bad solution to our problem, we must not assume that the reasons for attempting to use it were bad ones. Remember back to Morris’ exposition of Martinich’s solution to the seeming contradiction he found in the doctrine of the Trinity. Martinich believed that, in order to make sense of the doctrine, Christians must reject the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals (hereafter referred to as ‘Leibniz’s Law’), and he thus proposed a solution with the somewhat-faulty theory of relative identity. Though his proposed solution seems to cause more contradiction than it solves, Martinich might not have been so wrong to be wary of Leibniz’s Law. For, just as Martinich pointed out in regards to the doctrine of the Trinity, the Law seems to make trouble for the doctrine of the Incarnation as well. Leibniz’s Law states that two things are identical iff they share all the same properties. What then are we to make of God the Son, who before becoming incarnate was incorporeal, becoming the Incarnate Jesus of Nazareth? The two surely differ in at least one property, that of having a body. Morris, however, overlooks this problem completely. He says,

"The only purpose of denying indiscernibility would be to all that there are some properties Jesus had but God the Son lacked, and vice versa. It is hard to see how in the end such a view could avoid the condemnation of Cyril, bishop of Alexandria…. And of course it was the view of Cyril which become recognized as orthodoxy at Chalcedon."

It seems intuitive that the pre-incarnate Son of God and the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth do not share all the same properties, for it would surely be absurd to say that God the Son had hands, feet, nose, or eyes before he was incarnate. Even the Council of Chalcedon would not deny this fact. It must either be shown that they actually do share all the same properties (which seems doubtful considering the act of Incarnation), or Leibniz’s Law must be abandoned or sufficiently reworked to allow for this kind of status change. It is granted that Leibniz’s Law is meant to apply only to objects that are strictly numerically identical. This, however, should not change our perspective on its bearing on the doctrine of the Incarnation, as tradition has held that God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth have had that strict numerically identical relationship. But if this is true, then what are we to make of the fact that the pre-incarnate God the Son and the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth hold two different sets of properties, the difference between those sets being those properties that accompany being embodied? If Leibniz’s Law is true, a contradiction cannot help but arise between those propositions that affirm both the numerical identity and differing properties of Jesus of Nazareth and God the Son.

It is at this point that we must specify what it is exactly that is being identically preserved in the Incarnation between the pre-incarnate God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth. As has been said, it is obviously true that the sum total of all the properties of God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth differ greatly. However, if we were to restrict the numerical identity of the pre-incarnate God the Son and the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth to the person who is both, the contradiction found in subjecting the proposition ‘God the Son = Jesus of Nazareth’ to Leibniz’s Law disappears. No longer are we holding that the sets of the sum totals of all the properties held by the being that is the pre-incarnate Son of God and the being that is the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth are one and the same, but rather that the sets of the sum totals of all the properties of the person that is both the pre-incarnate Son of God and incarnate Jesus of Nazareth are one and the same. When this version of the doctrine is examined, one will find that it is exactly that which is affirmed by orthodoxy. In becoming the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth, the person of the God the Son took on human nature in addition to his divine nature, thereby acquiring those new properties of humanity while retaining those properties of the divine nature, as well as those of his person, God the Son. This is affirmed all while still affirming the truth of Leibniz’s Law and avoiding the pitfalls of the theory of relative identity, simply by restricting the set of identical properties in God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth to that of personhood.

I believe that Morris assumes something like this in this section of his book, but he does not explicitly state anything like it, thus leading to my treatment of what appeared to be a contradiction. Indeed, when he says, “The only purpose of denying indiscernibility would be to all that there are some properties Jesus had but God the Son lacked, and vice versa,” this must be the case, for such an obvious distinction between God the Son pre-incarnate and incarnate could not have actually escaped his careful and watchful eye.

Greedy

2007-12-14T15:33:00.001-08:00

I keep telling myself that the reason I never post on here is because I just simply don't have the time to. While that may possibly be true, my lack of time clearly doesn't stop me from doing much less productive things (such as play Halo 3 or BioShock), so as much as I might like to think my lack of blogging time is due to my diligence as a student, I won't kid myself.

I think the real reason that I don't blog often is that I'm greedy. Not greedy with money or for attention, but greedy with my ideas. I've got this silly notion that if I share one of my good ideas in anything less than a published book or article, some dumb schmuck will steal it, and then I won't get the credit for being the awesomely-smart philosopher who revolutionized the way in which the Western world thinks.

I'm silly.

The Man Who Loved a Harlot

2007-07-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

A beautiful bride, her pilfered pride brought to tears
By the Syndrome and his finest feature: an all-consuming fear.
Rape erased remorse and reason, too ravaged to recall.
"Is your phantom's love truly better than no love at all?"
We'd come to kill our hope by leaving childhood behind,
That very hope that ignites the lights in the hearts of humankind.

While he searched the streets and called her name, she'd been rendered paralyzed;

"Please don't run!"

She feared his wrath, yet he would have wiped the tears from her eyes.

"The dawn will come!"

And though she didn't understand, and lost her gift to give,

"Our hopes burn brighter than the rising sun!"

The man who loved that harlot would have died to see her live.

"I know what you have done has destroyed your peace,
But you must know that my heart pangs for your release.
I know these shadows, murky black, have dimmed your sight,
But my candle glows enough to melt this darkest night."

While he searched the streets and called her name, she'd been rendered paralyzed;

"Please don't run!"

She feared his wrath, yet he would have wiped the tears from her eyes.

"The dawn will come!"

And though she didn't understand, and lost her gift to give,

"Our hopes burn brighter than the rising sun!"

The man who loved that harlot would have died to see her live.

"Now dance with me, my Bride! Drink my Bacchic wine and play!
And all my Muses sing along as we dance the darkest night away!
Now sing with me, my Bride! Get lost in blood and joyous tears:
Our manifest eternal bliss in the blessed music of the Spheres!"

Irony

2007-07-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

Now you’ve gone away to hide yourself;
Afraid I’m like the spectres that used to appear.
But alone, even in the brightest room,
How will you see yourself without a mirror?

You said, “But doing this could kill us both
When we’re lost and trying to find our way.”
Then I looked into your eyes and said,
“But dear, we’ll both die anyway.

Why can’t we make this one last day
One that is worth remembering?
Why try avoiding all our pain
When it makes life worth living?
Dearest, I know that you’re afraid,
But this could be worth our blood.
The sanguine irony is this:
Your perfect fear casts out love.”

The Tension of Weightlessness.

2007-07-16T00:30:00.000-07:00

*jump*

I have this
Funny feeling that
I'm weightless.

Do you know the one?

It's the one where
You've let it all

Go.

It's the one where you've
Given yourself to gravity,
Stopped resisting the irresistible,
Quit trying to hold yourself up.

It's the one where you feel like you've
Surrendered to the wind,
Being okay with it blowing you
This way and that.

It's the one where you feel like you've left
Both your stomach
And your sanity
Back at the top,
And you hope to God that
You sprout wings

And fly.

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part V).

2007-07-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

Part V:
Theogony

Thus, it is through our God-given love made possible through Christ that Nietzsche’s mantra of man becoming “beyond good and evil” is made possible— since it is obvious that a man who acts in Christ-like love toward both God and his neighbor will always freely do what is best toward them without need for moral guidance. This conclusion is especially ironic considering Nietzsche’s view of Christianity, since Nietzsche said that himself: “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.” Nietzsche may have recognized the truth of this statement, but even if he did, he had no means to bring it about himself, since he clearly did not know Christ. In going beyond good and evil, Nietzsche claimed that one would be immoral, building up his own moral construct against the moral construct of his time and culture— he groups himself in saying, “We immoralists….” However, I would claim that, in going beyond good and evil in Christ, we are not immoral in the least— we are supramoral because we transcend the need for a moral construct entirely!

Our salvation in Christ, then, has at least two major effects on man. The first is that the will of man is actively transformed by his God-given love through the Spirit, so that he more and more displays the “will to love” of Christ. The second effect on man follows directly from the first: man’s “will to love” enables him to freely act in love toward both God and man, freeing him from the restraints placed on him by moral construct. Now, man can do more than just the good action— he can love! Irenaeus says this as well in his treatise On the Apostolic Preaching. He states,

"Therefore we do not need the Law as a paedagogue…. For no more shall the Law say, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ to him to whom even come desire for another’s wife; nor, ‘You shall not kill’, to him who has removed all anger and enmity from himself…."

Put simply, this salvation in Christ makes us Christ-like— makes us God-like— completely free to love.

If this salvation in Christ is making us more Christ-like, then this salvation is the restoration of man to what he was originally created to be— the image of God, since Christ himself is “the image of the invisible God.” Athanasius was very concerned with the fallen state of man in light of what he could have been. He says, “What was God to do in face of this dehumanizing of mankind, this universal hiding of the knowledge of Himself by the wiles of evil spirits?” We had “dehumanized” ourselves by marring the image of God that God had originally stamped on us in creating us. In our salvation, God makes us truly human again— that is, God makes us to be gods again, since to be truly human is to be godlike. Athanasius says,

"As, then, he who desires to see God Who by nature is invisible and not to be beheld, may yet perceive and know Him through His works, so too let him who does not see Christ with his understanding at least consider Him in His bodily works and test whether they be of man or God…. He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God."

As Athanasius says, Christ— acting like the Superman, acting as the God-man— gives us the example of what a human truly is in his fullest sense. He shows us a life lived in love, defying the set moral construct of the time and abolishing moral constructs embodied in the Law altogether, healing and giving life to man even in this earthly life, and destroying death once and for all, defeating nihilism through submitting himself to it.

As far as what being Christ-like means, Paul also gives us clues in his epistles. He says in Romans, “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed into the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” Christ, through this example, shows us, whom are called his brothers and coheirs in his kingdom, that men as we are now were meant to be like Supermen; free from the bonds of death and morality, we would be able to freely choose to love God and men in true freedom. Also, Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” Paul was not the only man of faith to give us insight in this area. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus said of the Christ-like life in his Five Theological Orations, “Walk like God through all that is sublime, and with a fellow-feeling through all that involve the body; but better treat all as God does, so that you may ascend from below to become God, because he came down from above for us.” Really, we Christians surpass even Nietzsche’s hopes for the continuing progression of man. Far from making man into a herd animal, as Nietzsche thought, Christ makes us into the men of true excellence that we were always meant to be. Following Christ’s example, we who are truly in Christ— and have thus received His Holy Spirit— are, through His ultimate sacrificial love, being remade to be like Christ, to be Supermen, to be gods; higher even than God’s angels, brothers to the only-begotten Son of God, coheirs to the universe! Immortality, eternal life, godhood, is ours for the taking, if we will only but receive it!

So often we make so little of humanity. Obviously, we are correct in saying that all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but in doing so, it seems as if we do not understand the glory for which humanity was really created. In understanding the greatness for which we were made, we can see our present depravity and rejoice all the more in our restoration to godhood through Jesus Christ. After realizing this, however, we must also understand that we are still underneath the God by whom we were created. We must realize that we are glorified only because He was, is, and will be glorious, and that though we are closer than brothers to the King of Kings, He is still King, and we are not. Between both of these represented extremes, we find humanity’s proper place. Christ, then, fulfills Nietzsche’s project better than Nietzsche himself ever could have. By restoring man to his proper place, Christ has restored the natural order of the universe, placing those who were meant to be strong back in a position of strength, excellence, and power. Through Christ, man is restored to where he was always meant to be: sitting at the right hand of God the Father, a god himself, crowned in glory, splendor, and majesty.

It may be that someone objects, and believes that this idea of human apotheosis as I have stated it— the idea of our Theogony— is absurd. After all, even as Christians, we still fall prey to sin and do “bad” things. In at least some real way, we are not truly free from morality. This objection would indeed present a problem for my argument, if I were arguing that, in Christ, we are made into perfect images of Christ immediately. However, this is not what I am arguing in the least. This is a simple objection to circumvent by simply arguing that our Theogony is another way of viewing our Christian sanctification. As the Holy Spirit, through the love of Christ, makes us into more perfect images of God, we are made more and more able to exhibit Christ-like love, thereby continuously lessening the hold of morality over us. C. S. Lewis talks about the surpassing of the moral construct by humanity in an essay entitled “Man or Rabbit?,” arguing that man was always meant for something much greater than our moral constructs. He says,

"The people who keep on asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a decent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up."

Since, then, as we are still unable to completely and totally exhibit Christ-like love at all times to both God and man, morality must govern our actions insofar as we cannot love as Christ did. This can be shown as a kind of inverse relationship. Less ability to act in love requires more moral control; more ability to love requires less.

Now surely, this imperative of love is much harder to live by than any moral construct, since it comes into direct conflict with our “will to power.” Now, instead of repenting of our sins— those actions that did not conform to morality— we now must repent of anything less than unconditional love for both God and man. Until our “will to power” is completely replaced by our “will to love,” this is indeed a difficult thing— surely, it is a complete paradigm shift. But thank God for His Grace, and for His Holy Spirit, who is continuously reforming and reshaping us, transforming our “will to power” into the “will to love,” making us more and more into the likeness of the Son of God and His Glory. We will love and be loved as He does and is; we will be free as He is free; we will be glorious as He is glorious. We will be gods, but we are not quite there yet.

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part IV).

2007-07-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Part IV:
The Death of Morality

But how is this even possible? As I have previously mentioned, and as C. S. Lewis aptly points out in The Abolition of Man, fallen man requires a Law— a moral construct— in order to keep from destroying one another and himself. This is why Nietzsche failed, so how is it that we succeed where he did not? We succeed in this endeavor simply because we have the Superman, Jesus Christ, the man who was “beyond man.” Paul tells us, in his letter to the Romans, of the restoration of man through the great actions of Christ, and likewise, of defeat of sin and the law:

"For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

In fulfilling the Law here on Earth and defeating death, Christ does what we cannot, and lifts up the whole of humanity in doing so. He makes us righteous, bringing us above the Law that could only condemn, giving us new life eternal here and now. Of our absolute freedom in Christ, Paul writes in Galatians:

"But what does the Scripture say? ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.’ So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman. For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."

Christ sets us free, and we are free indeed! To do anything less than live our new lives in Christ as truly free men would be to turn back to our slave masters, as the Israelites did in the desert when they begged to return to Egypt, rather than face the hardships their new-found freedom brought them.

But how is this new life brought about? How do the life, death and resurrection of the God-man almost two thousand years ago affect our lives in such a way as to bring us freedom, specifically, freedom from morality? Christ himself tells his disciples before he ascends back into heaven: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Once he has gone back to God the Father Jesus will send us the Holy Spirit who will come upon us in power to guide us in the ways we should go. Christ acted analogously to the Superman, doing what man could not do by himself; restoring man to glory, and, more importantly, restoring man to God. Once that restoration took place, Christ could then send God’s Holy Spirit to dwell within us. In the Spirit, we are set free from the Law in its many forms, as Paul tells us in Galatians chapter five: “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” This is true because since we are being guided and empowered by the Spirit, we no longer require moral constructs to curb and control our behavior. We no longer need the Law to act as our schoolmaster, as Paul says.

But what does the Spirit do within us to make us able to transcend our need for morality? Quite simply, He replaces our “will to power”— that product of the Fall that causes us to selfishly exert our own will for our personal benefits and happiness— with the even more powerful “will to love.” This “will to love” was first exerted by Christ himself, when, all for our sake, he made himself nothing, as Paul tells us in Philippians. Christ Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,” and, in the letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that, rather than let us suffer death, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Arguably, in making himself nothing, Christ relinquished his “will to power” (his right to exert his omnipotence in any way he desired). But what an enormous display of power this is! To forfeit one’s will to act as he wished (his “will to power”) out of love, only to gain back the power over death itself, as well as the restoration of man to God, through that same “will to love.” Christ’s “will to love” was indeed much more powerful than his “will to power!” Our selfless “will to love” is similarly even more powerful than our selfish “will to power.” In our “will to love”, we relinquish our “will to power”— that desire to enact change to benefit ourselves— in order to benefit another, only to gain back what we desired: the power to benefit ourselves, the power to flourish, the power to be happy— as well as the ability to live harmoniously in community with other men.

This is the reason that the Law can be summed up in Christ’s simple command: “‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,’” and “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Paul says something very similar to the church at Galatia: “For you were called to freedom. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” But what really makes love so much better than the Law? Why does acting in Christian love through the Holy Spirit transcend the moral construct and truly make us free? Within a moral construct, the goal, or the end, of the man that wishes to be “good” is to act in such a way that is considered to be good within that moral construct. This is generally in order to avoid its punishments. To do this he must conform to the construct’s standard of goodness; he must be moral.

Presupposing a man unable to exhibit Christ-like love (as we would have to do pre-Christ), the “good” man is being moral for the sake of being considered morally good within the construct. If the man wants to be good, and therefore remain unharmed, he must conform to the good action X as is defined by the construct. Nietzsche talks about this when writing about the taming of man by society and its moral constructs:

"Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments being among these bulwarks—brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the bad conscience."

It then follows that if he wants to be good, the “good” man is effectively coerced into committing X. Even if this man “freely” chooses to commit this action X, his freedom to choose his course of action has been removed for the sake of his desired end— being good so as to avoid punishment. These effects of the construct cause man to turn his “will to power” on himself, and thus Nietzsche believes man experiences guilt or “bad conscience.” Therefore, the pre-Christ man cannot be freely good— he must be coerced into being so.

The moral construct then acts as an electric fence that curbs man’s “will to power.” If he wishes to not be shocked, he must necessarily stay within the fence— but this is really all morality can do. Nietzsche says as much in his Genealogy: “That which can in general be attained through punishment, in men and in animals, is an increase of fear, a heightening of prudence, mastery of the desires: thus punishment tames men, but it does not make them ‘better’—one might with more justice assert the opposite.” In this way, morality is insufficient because it cannot reform the “will to power” and therefore it cannot allow us to be freely good. Why then does acting in Christ-like love transcend the moral construct? Because when we come to know Christ and receive the Holy Spirit as a result, our “will to power” is gradually remade into a “will to love” that continually reforms us into the image of Christ. Thus, the law is summed up and surpassed in loving God above all and our neighbors as ourselves. About this, St. Irenaeus of Lyons says,

"And that, not by the prolixity of the Law, but according to the brevity of faith and love, men were going to be saved, Isaiah, in this fashion says, ‘He will complete and cut short His Word in righteousness; for God will make a concise Word in all the world.’ And therefore the Apostle Paul says, ‘Love is the fulfillment of the Law,’ for he who loves God has fulfilled the Law."

The electric fences of morality are gradually removed because we begin to understand where it is beneficial for us to go, and we desire those places rather than the harmful ones. In Nietzsche’s terms, we are no longer guilty, because the “will to power” that was necessarily turned inward against itself within the moral construct, thereby inflicting the “bad conscience,” has been replaced by the “will to love,” against which “there is no law.” Therefore, in the love of Christ lies the death of morality.

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part III).

2007-07-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

Part III:
Jesus Christ: Superman

Therefore, the whole of Nietzsche’s project is a shout, nay, a scream of exhortation to mankind, saying, “Be excellent! Be excellent, and you will make us even more than this mortal man that we are now!” He believes that this will be achieved when mankind goes beyond good and evil by surpassing the need for a morality to control our actions. The man who is willing to destroy the ascetic ideals, willing to destroy moral ideals, and able to overcome nihilism—this man is the Superman. He spurs man on to a higher existence by allowing him to access his “will to power,” and through that, the excellence that Christianity and other ascetic ideals attempt to hold down. The rub: as previously stated, mankind requires a moral construct in order to be able to function without destroying itself because of the effects of original sin, man’s “will to power.” As long as man has the “will to power,” he is liable to destroy both himself and his fellow men.

C. S. Lewis, in his book entitled The Abolition of Man, discusses the dangers of the destruction of objective value, specifically dealing with the philosophies of those who, like Nietzsche, believed that the possession and exertion of power that is the most fundamental drive in man was a drive to abundant life, and should be embraced and encouraged, because it allows man to flourish and to conquer nature. In response, Lewis fully plays out the implications of their own philosophy and finds that those humans who hold ultimate power—and therefore those who determine ultimate value, if there are actually any such men—will be the least bound to any external force, including any objective system of value. These “Conditioners,” as Lewis calls them, will then be forced to determine new values completely from their own desires—their own natures. Therefore, Lewis says,

"At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man."

In Nietzsche’s abolition of moral value, we become more and more like his “savage cruel beast,” but instead of achieving a race of transcendent men, we cease to be men. We do not ascend into a higher existence, we slump into a lower one; we become beasts, machines, or as Lewis says, those who hold power will “envy us as eunuchs envy men.” Nietzsche, then, in wanting to affirm life in the here and now and the potential power held within the human race, succumbs to the very nihilism he so adamantly hated.

Then, if we are all truly depraved, no man has the strength to be like Nietzsche’s Superman, for no man can destroy both the ascetic and moral ideals and overcome our tendency for death. Our options are either to be controlled or to be destroyed. What then is to be done? Only a god could succeed where men’s strength fails. But what good would this do, if man too did not overcome himself? He would still be left in the dust, while this god did his work for him. What would be required would need to be a fusion between god and man, and who better for this task than Jesus Christ, the Word Who Became Flesh? Christ, in coming to earth, does what all other men cannot do for themselves— by “overcoming” and “going under” himself and making himself nothing, he becomes the Superman. Through Him, we have abundant life and we live life fully and joyfully in the here and now, not just in some transcendent life to come. Through Him, we live life freely, and are no longer bound by the Law. Through Him, we overcome death.

If Christ was really so much like Nietzsche’s Superman, then why was Nietzsche so opposed to Christianity? Nietzsche must have had Christianity misrepresented to him, if he was to miss this observation that, in retrospect, seems to stare us in the face. Christianity is not based on some ascetic ideal— a rejecting of our lives in the here and now as base and unworthy for the benefit of a life to come. In Christ, we have life abundantly here and now. Paul states as much in his epistle to the Colossians when he significantly downplays the importance of regulations and asceticism in the spiritual life. He says of them, “These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.” Therefore, we live here and now joyously and without shame of our earthly lives, and Nietzsche misunderstood our faith. Also, Christianity is not a system of law and punishment meant to keep us under control, nor a set of regulations to maintain, because in Christ, we are set free from the law. Paul tells us in his letter to the believers in Galatia of the absolute freedom we have in Christ: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” Therefore, the Christianity that Nietzsche was so vehemently opposed to because of its ascetic and moral ideals was not actually Christianity at all; it was merely sinful people misrepresenting the Gospel, as we so often do. Nietzsche completely misunderstood Christ, and therefore, his arguments against Christianity as it actually is are merely straw men.

It should be noted that even in the life to come, our new life will be lived bodily on this earth, when it too will be recreated as we are in Christ. The resurrection, then, should not cause us to live as always only looking forward to the life to come. The life to come will be better, to be sure, and looking forward to it is not necessarily bad, but the resurrection should cause us to start living that new life here and now, since we are in fact being recreated here and now. We Christians do not live nihilistically in the least, seeking after death, as Nietzsche thought. St. Athanasius tells us this very fact in his treatise entitled On the Incarnation. He says, “All the disciples of Christ despise death; they take the offensive against it and, instead of fearing it, by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ trample on it as on something dead.” Far from seeking death, as Nietzsche thought, we Christians laugh at it. But how do we do this? How are we to live in light of the resurrection of the dead, in light of the death of death? We live as Nietzsche suggests: free from any moral construct controlling us as far as we are able, free from the ascetic ideals that cause us to neglect the joys in this present life that we have been given, free from the guilt that comes from missing the mark of morality.

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part II).

2007-07-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

Part II:
Enter Nietzsche

Skipping ahead to late nineteenth century Europe, we have the entrance of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German poet, psychologist, and philosopher who was very interested in the fundamental nature of humanity and how it related to morality. Contrary to his contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that, most fundamentally, all creatures exerted a will for self-preservation, Nietzsche believed that, even more fundamentally, all creatures exert the “will to power.” This was the need of the self to wield and exert power over the self and others according to the self’s interests— a desire for ultimate freedom— and the will for self-preservation was only a product of that. He says as much in his book entitled Beyond Good and Evil: “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation….” This view is very similar to a Biblical perspective on the fallen nature of man— with the man pursuing his own interests, he will exert power to master both himself and others when it will gain him the freedom to do what he desires, benefiting himself at the expense of others’ subjugation and/or detriment. Nietzsche says earlier in the same section,

"Refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation and placing one’s will on a par with that of someone else—this may become, in a certain sense, good manners among individuals if the appropriate conditions are present…. But as soon as this principle is extended, and possibly even accepted as the fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is—a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay."

As he says here, instead of constraining individual “wills to power” for the benefit of the community, as Scripture would have us do, Nietzsche believed that it would be better for humanity to allow those who had strong “wills to power” to dominate and subjugate those who were weaker, because to do otherwise would somehow decay the hierarchy of social structure.

In complete opposition to traditional moral genealogists, who held that the value of “good” was originally developed as a measure of “unegoistic” actions, it was Nietzsche’s view that the value of “good” developed out of those who would be considered the aristocracy, the good people, of a particular culture, the “good” being their own happy condition. They “felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank.” He believed that this value judgment was made by these aristocrats when they recognized the advantage of their position over the “plebeian” classes, those considered commoners. Nietzsche deduced this from his studies in the etymology of “good,” in which he discovered that in many different languages, the word “good” had its conceptual roots in the same thought. “The basic concept from which ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’ ‘noble,’ ‘with a soul of high order,’ ‘with a privileged soul’ necessarily developed.” Likewise, his studies into the etymology of the word “bad” in various languages showed a very similar relationship to that word and the more common “plebeian” classes, and the terms used to describe them; a tribute to the aristocratic ancestry of social moral values.

Thus, for Nietzsche, the possession of both physical and, more importantly, social power played a fundamental role in the formation of social values. He says of the aristocracy, “They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as ‘the powerful,’ ‘the master,’ ‘the commanders’) or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority…” He believed, literally, that “might makes right,” and also in the one-to-one correspondence of the power of the social nobility to truth. This was especially true, as Nietzsche points out, in the society of ancient Greece, where

"They call themselves, for instance, ‘the truthful’; this is so above all of the Greek nobility…. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phase of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense of ‘noble,’ as distinct from the lying common man…."

The ability to assert one’s (or a group’s) “will to power” was therefore, for Nietzsche, the most essential factor in the formation of moral value constructs, the construct being based most essentially on those values that the aristocratic elements of the particular society valued most highly. Nietzsche coined this moral construct under the title of “master morality.”

Nietzsche goes on to argue that “morality” as it appears today— the “good” being called in general “unegoistic,” and being measured in selflessness— was a reactionary movement against the aristocracy by the common classes, who, wanting to believe themselves happy as well, effectively had to deceive themselves into believing their own wretched condition “happy.” He calls this type of moral construct “slave morality.” This took place most effectively through the priestly institution, who claimed that the weak and lowly were really those who were good, and, to combat the visibly obvious “good”-related happiness of the aristocracy, they convinced the common classes that their happiness lay hidden beyond death, in another more happy afterlife.

This denial of the good of the present life Nietzsche calls the “ascetic ideal,” and, because of their strict religion-based moral construct, he believed that the Jews were the most effective at inspiring it. He says,

"It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God)… saying ‘the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!’"

This grand subversive overthrow of master morality by the Jews and the triumph of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche believed, was completed by Jesus Christ, and consequently by what followed him: the religion of Christianity. A section later, he states,

"Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this ‘Redeemer,’ this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that ‘all the world,’ namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait?"

Nietzsche condemned this seemingly Christian kind of thinking as ultimately nihilistic and anti-human, because it seemed to him to rob man of the happiness able to be experienced in this life, as well as stifling the excellence of man by denying him the ability to exert his “will to power.” This thereby turned him into a kind of herd animal, a sheep to be led around, and Nietzsche was therefore highly antagonistic toward it.

Because of its embrace of the ascetic ideal and its denial of the “will to power,” Christianity causes those men who are naturally more strong to be suppressed into the herd, and as a by-product, they are kept from exerting their own “will to power” by what Nietzsche calls the “bad conscience,” or guilt—the bad feelings received by not conforming to the system’s conception of “good.” This guilt, as well as the fear of punishment by the system and, more importantly, by God, were the means by which Nietzsche thought Christianity held the world in a vice-grip. Therefore, Nietzsche believed that Christianity was the absolute bane of the existence of mankind, that it ruled mainly by means of fear and deception— much like the moral constructs used in ancient Greece and Socrates’ city in words— and therefore should be rejected at whatever cost was necessary. It is in rejecting this slave morality that has conquered the earth through its cleverness that Nietzsche believes that mankind will be able to progress to a higher state of existence. Man’s complete rejection of the ascetic ideal and its supposed nihilistic tendencies allows him to live fully in the here and now by exerting his “will to power.” This, in turn, will spur on excellence in the whole of humanity, and eventually will give rise to the Superman, a man who is “beyond man,” a man who transcends the moral imperative entirely, a man who goes “beyond good and evil.”

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part I).

2007-06-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

Part I:
The Need for a Law

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God….” This well-known verse from Romans has become somewhat of a mantra for many Christians when describing the present condition of humanity, and with good reason. St. Athanasius, in describing the state of humanity at present says,

"But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion."

God created humanity good, but when, in the Garden of Eden, we chose what we thought best rather than what God asked of us, we unalterably corrupted ourselves, marring what God had created in His very own image! Scripture is quite explicit in what form this corruption takes. We all have fallen short of what we were meant to be; we all selfishly go about our own ways, seeking things we thought to be good, all apart from what God had intended for us. King David of Judah said of man, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity; there is none who does good,” and Isaiah says of us, “All we like sheep we have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.” From this basic presupposition, it is not hard to see that, if left to themselves with no guide, humanity’s many members would soon find themselves destroying one another in the instances in which their self-interests conflicted.

Enter the moral construct: God, in His infinite mercy, gives humanity the concept of the Law: a system of rights and wrongs, goods and evils, that, when enacted, would help govern human-to-human and human-to-God interaction, allowing men to peacefully coexist. The Apostle Paul paints a picture of the law acting toward us much like a schoolmaster or jailer does in his letter to the church at Galatia— “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.” On the whole, it seems that most of these moral constructions were macrocosmicly very similar, perhaps owing to that part of man that still knew of God’s divine goodness and the implications thereof. Microcosmicly, however, these moral constructs tended to be culturally relative—that is, particular goods and evils tended to vary from culture to culture.

This, of course, is not to say that goodness is completely relative, but, just as one person can have a correct perspective on reality and another a false perspective due to his limited knowledge, so too can cultures have true or false perspectives on what is truly good, due to their limited knowledge base. Therefore there are possibly many particular “goods”, each varying from culture to culture. In regard to these particulars, the moral construct has indeed taken many particular forms in the history of humanity. Perhaps in tribute to its divine origins, it seems that it usually was created, enacted and enforced by means of local religious systems of belief, most notably in the classical Greek religion embodied in the prophecies of the oracle at Delphi.

Because of this religious connection, piety toward the gods of the particular religious system came to be regarded as the highest good. Likewise, blasphemy and undue pride against the gods and their laws— what, in Greece, was called hubris— came to be regarded as the worst evil one could commit. Thus, man’s selfish instincts came to be controlled mainly by fear— the fear of divine reprisal, inspired by religious tales and myths of men being punished in horrible and grotesque ways for their hubris against the gods.

Euripides, the Greek tragedian, gives a rendering of one of these myths in his play The Bacchae. In this play, Pentheus, the ruler of the city of Thebes, refuses to recognize Dionysus, an illegitimate son of Zeus, as a god. Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, and grandfather of Pentheus, plays the part of the traditional, unquestioning, pious Greek man, who continues to practice his religion because he will not take the chance of offending the gods who may or may not exist. He knows the gravity of offending the gods, and pleads with his grandson:

"My dear son, Teiresias has given you good advice.
Don’t stray beyond pious tradition; live with us.
Your wits have flown to the winds, your sense is foolishness.
Even if, as you say, Dionysus is no god,
Let him have your acknowledgement; lie royally,
That Semele may get honour as having borne a god,
And credit come to us and to all our family.
Remember, too, Actaeon’s miserable fate –
Torn and devoured by hounds which he himself had bred,
Because he filled the mountains with the boast that he
Was a more skilful hunter than Artemis herself.
Don’t share his fate, my son! Come, let me crown your head
With a wreath of ivy; join us in worshipping this god."

Pentheus, however, does not heed his grandfather’s warning, and for his hubris, Dionysus drives him mad, dresses him as a woman and directs him to the hills of Cithaeron, where Pentheus’ mother Agaue and her sisters Ino and Autonoe have been possessed and driven into the Bacchic rituals being held by Dionysus’ followers, the Maenads. At the sight of Pentheus, the Maenads, led by Agaue, are suddenly driven into a violent frenzy by Dionysus. As a result, Pentheus is ripped to pieces by his own aunts and mother as the punishment for his pride against Dionysus. What is the moral of this story? Clearly, it is that the gods take their revenge, and it matters not whether one is a vessel of their vengeance or the one receiving it; all who are prideful toward the gods suffer. Euripides summarizes this moral standard in a warning:

"Though blessed gods dwell in the distant skies,
They watch the ways of men.
To know much is not to be wise.
Pride more than mortal hastens life to its end;
And they who in pride pretend
Beyond man’s limit, will lose what lay
Close to their hand and sure.
I count it madness, and know no cure can mend
The evil man and his evil way."

Thus, the ancient Greek man is held down through the fear of his wrathful gods. Perhaps this is why a Greek tragedian wrote, “Count no man happy until he dies.”

In the City in Words in Books II through XI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors Glaucon and Adeimantus construct their own system of morality by which the city’s guardians will be governed. In order to convince these guardians that they must live by this moral construct, this system of control— which included a very regimented education, as well as the abolition of marriage and the family unit— replaced traditional tales of the gods with what Socrates called his noble lie:

"And yet I hardly know how to find the audacity or the words to speak and undertake to persuade first the ruler themselves and the soldiers and then the rest of the city that in good sooth all our training and educating of them were things that they imagined and that happened to them as it were in a dream, but that in reality at that time they were down within the earth being molded and fostered themselves while their weapons and the rest of their weapons and the rest of their equipment were being fashioned. And when they were quite finished the earth as being their mother delivered them, and now as if their land were their mother and their nurse they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the selfsame earth."

Once they accept the story they are told, Socrates believes that the guardians will live by the laws they have set down for them.

Similarly, in Book VII, Socrates likens the inhabitants of his city in words to people at the bottom of an enormous cave. According to Socrates, the inhabitants of the city are stuck at the bottom of an enormous cavern, shackled and facing a wall, their only means of sensory input comes from the shadows of images of men and beasts, cast onto that same wall they face by a fire that burns somewhere behind them. Socrates describes the men holding these images as “exhibitors of puppet shows.” The people of the city are completely placated by all this, because this life— though it consists of only the shadows of false images— is all they have ever known. They remain docile because they have no idea that there is more in existence than just their shadow-puppet realities. Thus, the inhabitants of the city in words are kept under control through deception— those in authority over them, the puppet masters, show them only the shadows of mere images of reality. Since the people cannot see anything else, what choice do they have but to accept the shadows as reality and live their lives accordingly?

Though his intentions are good to an extent, man’s best attempts at constructing a moral system of control are still quite imperfect. Traditional Greek religious mysticism had to inspire fear and false piety in men in order to keep their self-centered natures in check. Even Socrates’ attempts to prove that being in harmony with God and man is good and beneficial for men in itself— as well as being a means of maintaining order— first required that man be deceived into believing in shadows. The reason for these failures seems obvious: man is, by nature, finite, and therefore, his perspective and knowledge of reality is also finite. Man’s moral constructs will always miss the mark in some way because he cannot grasp the whole picture, and thus, man’s moral constructs will always be ontomoralities, because he takes what he thinks to be true from his limited perspective, and superimposes it onto the entire picture. Man is in no position to do such a thing.

An analogy may prove useful in illustrating this point. In order to have a truly correct knowledge of one line in a painting, one must be able to view that line in light of, and in relation to, the whole painting. One must be able to look at it from an objective perspective— from outside of the painting. I would argue that, likewise, man, by himself, can never come to objectively correct knowledge of what is good, because he cannot see the whole of the painting that is reality. This is simply due to the fact that he is necessarily inside of it. Therefore, the only being who could actually have a truly correct perspective on reality is God, and the only means that we, as humans, would have of obtaining truly correct knowledge is through divine revelation. We could know what is really good only if God told us what is really good.

In light of this, the only people to ever have a truly correct moral construct were the Israelites, because their moral construct was given to them directly by God! Since they had this correct perspective to reality (and God), they could live under this morality in devotion to God, rather than in fear or deception. Even so, the Israelites too were still under the dominion of the moral construct, because they still had the tendency to seek their own self-benefit, and therefore were not free. As Paul says it, they were still slaves to the Law.

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Prologue).

2007-06-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

Ever since he wrote in the late nineteenth century, people have been either glorifying or demonizing Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed Antichrist, not finding much middle ground for serious critical acceptance or denial for him. This is particularly true of Christians, who, for the last century, have tossed Nietzsche in their philosophical wastebaskets, simply ignoring his enormous contributions to certain modern and postmodern views on ethics and psychology. In doing this, I believe that we have been missing an extraordinary opportunity to reconcile an enemy of the Kingdom of God to ourselves, granting us yet another weapon for use against the forces of darkness. While we, as Christians, should obviously not accept a Nietzschean philosophy wholesale, I believe that adopting a Nietzschean perspective in certain ways is invaluable to a Christian understanding of ethics, as well as a Christian understanding of the ontology of man. This is because Nietzsche says some particularly enlightening things in regards to the relations between the nature of man, his “will to power,” and moral constructions that have much more in common with Scripture than most Christians would like to believe. In this paper, I hope to reconcile elements of this Nietzschean perspective on morality and man with a model of Christian soteriology, our doctrine of salvation, as seen in the writings of the Apostle Paul, as well as several patristic theologians. Christ, in becoming a man, makes it possible for us to become gods by replacing our “will to power” with a more powerful “will to love,” thereby removing the need for the constraints placed on us by the moral construct.

Repeat.

2007-05-25T02:30:00.000-07:00

Lather.
Rinse.
Repeat.

Eat.
Sleep.
Repeat.

Apollo.
Dionysus.
Repeat.

Head.
Heart.
Repeat.

Live.
Die.
Repeat.

Swim.
Sink.
Repeat.

Crash.
Dismantle.
Repeat.

Atrophy.
Theogony.
Repeat.

Fear.
Love.
Get out of the fucking shower.

The Unlikely Story - An Investigation of the Myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus: Part IV.

2007-05-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

This concludes my treatment of this particular view of the myth of Atlantis in the Timaeus. If we really are to treat this myth as a kind of case study of the victory of justice over injustice, it seems it is truly a very unlikely story. While one could still choose to view the myth in this rather nihilistic way, I would like to suggest an alternative view, one that is finds its basis in the character of Socrates.

Again, the dialogue of the Timaeus begins with Socrates and Timaeus recalling the conversation they had participated in the previous day, a conversation that sounds suspiciously similar to the conversation found in another of Plato’s works: the Republic. However, the conversation as found in the Republic is only partially repeated, and instead of continuing the entire conversation of Republic, Socrates insists that the city in words should be put to the test in battle, as war is said to be the truest test of a city’s mettle. When reading this passage while working on this paper, I was struck with how adamantly Socrates insists on seeing his creation in action, how excited he was to see his creation go through the adversity of war, and this puzzled and confused me. I began to think about why this notion, not being a particularly happy thought in itself, was so attractive to Socrates. I thought that, perhaps, if I could understand Socrates’ motivation for excitement for the myth, it would give me insight as to why Plato had included it. Thus, I began a character assessment of Socrates’ soul.

Knowing that Plato portrays Socrates as being a virtuous man, I quickly ruled out the option of his being some kind of sadist; it did not seem fitting with what I knew of Socrates to consider him a man who took pleasure in the pain of others. Similarly, I quickly eliminated the thought that this desire in Socrates was some kind of appetitive response to the glory of battle, or for mere entertainment, or of the self-righteous pride in knowing the greatness of his theoretical city. While we do see Socrates fall prey to his appetites, most pointedly in the first book of the Republic, this kind of fall is generally thought of as very uncharacteristic of Socrates, and the circumstances surrounding the conversation taking place in Timaeus seem much different than those found in book one of Republic. Another option as to the motivation for Socrates’ excitement that occurred to me was that of a father’s excitement in seeing his child flourish. Given what I knew of Socrates’ character, it being an example of virtue, this option seemed the most plausible. Yet, even if this were true, and Socrates was merely being proud of his children, it seems odd that he would remain excited over them when the story that Critias ends up telling really is not about them at all. Even if he could remain excited for his children in the midst of this abstraction, it seems even more odd that Socrates could be excited for his children even while the gods inadvertently end up destroying them, as was demonstrated above. Without other plausible alternatives, I was again pressed into agnosticism in regards to Plato’s motives regarding the inclusion of the myth of Atlantis.

It then occurred to me, however, that perhaps the reason that Plato includes the myth of Atlantis in Timaeus did not lay hidden in Socrates’ motivations for excitement, but in the excitement of Socrates itself. Stories are exciting. Stories move not only the head, but the heart as well. Stories take dry concepts and put flesh on them; they contextualize and personalize what would otherwise be considered by us to be esoteric and unimportant. Stories make us become a part of what they are attempting to tell us; they replace ideas with people, and appeal to the humanity within us to resonate with its characters, hoping that if we can understand why an idea matters so much to a person who is in the situation, we can understand why the idea really matters. Therefore, I believe that Plato did not include the myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus in order to communicate to us some deep metaphysical truth about the benefits of justice or injustice’s lack thereof. I believe that Plato uses the myth of the Ideal Athens in an attempt to get us to really resonate with the people of the ideal city. Once this happens, Plato can thereby make us understand that justice is not merely an ideal in the world of the Forms. I think that Plato, in using this story, would have us believe that actually having justice and living justice, for those Athenians who stood between the Empire of Atlantis and the rest of the free world, was truly a matter of life and death. I believe that once we can understand the gravity of that, we can really and truly understand Plato’s conception of justice.

The Unlikely Story - An Investigation of the Myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus: Part III.

2007-05-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it could be argued that the hubris of the Atlanteans caused the normal order and justice of their state to become diseased, but this observation fails to be very helpful unless it can somehow be textually shown that such a state of disorder would have a causal relation to the tsunami that engulfed Atlantis. This issue is not addressed within the text, and therefore I believe that any argument would have to rely too heavily upon speculation. This is not to say that parallels between the just and unjust city/soul and Athens and Atlantis cannot be made, or even that a loose analogy can be drawn between them, but merely that this kind of analogous relationship would be too weak to make any definitive claim about the fate of Atlantis in relation to the tyrannical soul. The same could be said about the feat of the Athenians. It does not seem like there is a satisfactory amount of evidence to suggest that the just man or city would triumph over injustice in the same way that Athens does over Atlantis, and, on the contrary, it seems that there is quite sufficient evidence to believe otherwise. Plato himself suggests in book II of Republic that the just man will be subjected to more injustice than any other man.

Also, it is interesting to note that, in the great earthquakes described by Plato and deluge following, it is not merely Atlantis that is swallowed up and destroyed, but also all the “warlike men” of the Athenian army (described as “in a body”) who “sank into the earth.” (25d) This textual observation causes a third problem for an argument stating that Atlantis was somehow analogous to the tyrant of Republic IX. It seems that not only was Atlantis not self-destroyed, but also that the god-decreed punishment for her hubris had direct consequences upon the very people that were defending the earth from her. Perhaps this consequence was an accidental effect of the divine retribution enacted upon Atlantis, but surely, if the gods were punishing Atlantis for her hubris, they could have done so without causing harm to the Athenians, those sole defenders of justice in the world. It seems wrong, or at least very impious, to implicate the gods as the accidental agents of destruction of the sole arbiters of justice on the earth.

This problem is further complicated by our in-class discussion of this myth. We had mentioned that just as the just man, without the help of divine intervention, would have to suffer many injustices, Athens would similarly have to submit to the sheer power of the Atlantean Empire eventually. To be sure, through the internal justice that they possessed, Athens beat Atlantis back past the Pillars of Heracles, but in all actuality, this must have been the equivalent to a slap on the wrist to the forces of Atlantis. Were it not for the utter destruction of Atlantis by the gods, Athens would have eventually had to succumb to Atlantis, merely because of the sheer power Atlantis possessed. The problem of the above paragraph is magnified when we claim both this and that the gods, at the very least, seem to be the accidental agents of destruction of the Athenian army. Even more pointedly, the worry is this: it seems antithetical to claim that in acting to protect the smaller forces of justice, the gods inadvertently cause their destruction. It could be true that I am making too much of this passage, but these observations leave me somewhat baffled as to how this myth is to be used as a kind of illustration of how justice is better to possess than injustice, if the myth is indeed to be understood this way. To be sure, to have a rightly-ordered soul seems intuitively better than to have a disordered soul, but what difference does it make when one is dead anyway?

Thoughts to Chew On. Part VIII.

2007-05-23T00:29:00.001-07:00

I wonder if anyone still reads this blog.

The Unlikely Story - An Investigation of the Myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus: Part II.

2007-05-22T13:01:00.000-07:00

As we have discussed in class, the recapitulation of the Republic in the dialogue of the Timaeus ends at the beginning of what would be book V, just after the group decides that the guardian women shall have everything in common, just like the men, and shall have the same education as the men as well. It is then in the Republic that Socrates suggests to his companions that the system they have created for the guardians of the city in words will “look ridiculous if our words are to be realized in fact.” Again, it is here that the recapitulation of the conversation of the Republic stops in the Timaeus. Here, Socrates describes himself as a kind of creator, someone who, in seeing his creation, wants to see it in some kind of struggle. Instead of continuing the discussion in the manner that the Republic takes, talking about the philosopher-king, the divided line, the cave, or the various diseased states, Socrates wishes to “hear someone tell of our own city carrying on a struggle against her neighbors, and how she went out to war in a becoming manner, and when at war showed by the greatness of her actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other cities a result worthy of her training and education.” Why this is the case for Socrates will be addressed later.

In light of this, it seems likely that, in light of the “ridiculous” nature of the conversation in books V-VII, Plato, rather than continuing the conversation of the Republic, which used complicated and abstract analogies, at the beginning of Timaeus, instead chose to give justification for his ideas in the form of a myth: the myth of the Ideal Athens. If Plato can somehow show that this perfectly just city, along with its strange, but virtuous guardians, is good enough to defeat the greatest military power on earth, then he really has defeated the arguments and ideals held by Thracymachus, and the just city/man really is better than the unjust city/man. Seeing the two cities in action would get rid of the need to theorize about them any longer. Under this view, the myth of Ideal Athens vs. Atlantis is simply meant to functionally replace books VI – X as a kind of case study. Ideal Athens would be acting as the perfectly just city/man (the philosopher-king), while Atlantis would be acting as the perfectly unjust city/man (the tyrant). This comparison would possibly give a muthos to the perfection of the perfectly just city/man, as well as to the various stages of diseased cities, ending in the tyrannical city/man of book IX.

If this view of the myth were true, the fate of Atlantis as recounted in this myth would mirror the account of the tyrannical man, as he destroys himself from the inside out due to the disordered state of his soul. It is here that problems begin to arise for this view: first, this state of affairs does not seem to be the case in the myth of Atlantis. The Atlantean Empire advances on the Ideal Athens, the last great haven of free men, and after being beaten back by this Athens, is destroyed by a tsunami created by a great earthquake. This fate was, it seems, a punishment by the gods, as is assumed in the Critias, and Atlantis is most certainly not destroyed from within due to a disordered soul, but from without by divine intervention. A second, related problem with this comparison arises in the character of the tyrant, who has a fundamentally disordered soul. The internal state of Atlantis is not treated within the Timaeus, and is left for the Critias, but even in that dialogue, this does not seem to be the case. In fact, as Critias describes Atlantis in detail, one gets the sense that there is almost a kind of hyper-order to the Atlantean society, to the extent that the empire begins to look less like a polis made of men, and more like a beehive: a very tightly-knit collective. Still, in my reading of Critias, I see almost nothing other than this that would cause me to really not want to be an Atlantean, but, of course, I am not an Athenian, as Plato’s intended audience most likely would have been.

But again, the text claims that Atlantis was not destroyed by its own injustice. Atlantis was not so tyrannical that it sunk itself into the sea. Rather, the kingdom of Atlantis was destroyed by the gods when the Atlanteans became too proud of the power and wealth that they had come to accumulate. Unfortunately, the dialogue of the Critias ends before Zeus can pronounce his judgment upon them, and as such, we don’t really know the actual state of affairs, as Plato would have told them. However, from what we textually know of both the anterior circumstances (that the Atlanteans were guilty of great hubris) and the end of the story (that Atlantis is engulfed by the sea, never to be seen again), it seems highly plausible that Zeus really would have pronounced some kind of judgment upon Atlantis, thereby causing their destruction.

Thoughts to Chew On. Part VII.

2007-05-21T03:03:00.000-07:00

"You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little."
- Zarathustra

The Unlikely Story - An Investigation of the Myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus: Part I.

2007-05-19T03:41:00.000-07:00

As we are inextricably caught in the world of becoming for Plato, change and motion are the most fundamental principles of physics. All is always in motion; everything is constantly changing. One can never have true knowledge of anything in this world of becoming, because again, everything is constantly changing, and thus the set of data from which we deduce truth is always different than it was, five minutes previously. As our data set is always changing, it is really only possible to have likely stories as to the nature of how things really are. We must create myths to fill in the epistemic gaps in our data, myths that change as our data changes. Therefore, mythic truth holds a very high place in Platonic thought, and as such, the investigation of myth within the Platonic dialogues becomes paramount if we are to understand what Plato is saying. Timaeus, being almost entirely comprised of myth, becomes a kind of bastion of Platonic opinion, where students investigate the likely story contained within the dialogue, as well as the likely story qua likely story.

Considering this, what are we to make of the recapitulation of books I – V of the Republic at the outset of the Timaeus, as well as the myth of the Ideal Athens and Atlantis that follows it? It seems unlikely that, in view of the importance placed on myth by Plato, that this story is merely a placeholder, or a herald for the story of the Critias, or something similar. I would suggest that the brief version of the story of Atlantis was placed in the Timaeus for a specific purpose, although what exactly that purpose is I do not know, and in a way this agnosticism seems fitting, considering that, for Plato, we live in the world of becoming. In this paper, my goal is to exegete the beginning of the Timaeus in hopes to come closer to the truth of why Plato included such a myth, and to examine the myth’s relationship to the Platonic idea of the justice in a city/soul—both in the abstract and in the character of Socrates. Hopefully, this endeavor will help us to create a more likely story for the purpose of the myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens as is found in the Timaeus.

Thoughts to Chew On. Part VI.

2007-05-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

"You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you..."
- Zarathustra

An Analysis of Gyges and the Cave. Part IV.

2007-05-04T19:15:00.000-07:00

This question, especially in examining the tale of Gyges and his ring, has bothered me for some time, and because of this, I have searched in the tale of Gyges and his ring for some defeater that Plato hid within this tale to show why he thought that Gyges would not be happy in reality, and in comparing this story to the Analogy of the Cave, some interesting observations can be made. First, it can be noted that both stories heavily involve caves or openings into the earth, which were commonly believed in ancient times to be passages into Hades. Here, differences in the stories begin to develop. In the Analogy of the Cave, all of humanity lives in this underworld, and the just man—the philosopher-king—must venture out into the light of the sun and bring that light back down into the darkness, first ascending to the Good, then descending back into the cave, bringing the light of the Good to the masses for the benefit of the masses. In the tale of Gyges, Gyges ventures from the light down into the chasm, then comes back up, ascending eventually up to the throne, bringing with him what he finds down there—descending first into the darkness, then ascending up into the light bringing with him a piece of the darkness. Instead of revealing, illuminating, and making known, as does the light of the Good, Gyges’ ring acts as the darkness does—it conceals who he truly is, allowing him to rise above the shepherd he was previously. I am unsure of this, but I do not believe that this necessarily means that Gyges would not flourish as the tyrant—it could, but I am not convinced by this alone. At the least, it merely casts a shadow on his means of attaining the throne.

What seems to me to be the best possible defeater of Gyges’ happiness in the tale is the description of how he came to find this ring of invisibility. Glaucon first describes Gyges finding a “hollow bronze horse with little doors.” I am unaware of the specific cultural context and significance of this, if there is any, but it sounds dubious at best—perhaps reminiscent of another nice-looking horse in Greek mythology. Glaucon continues recounting the story, saying that when Gyges looked inside this horse, he saw “a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature,” who wore nothing else but a ring on its finger. Whether “more than mortal stature” simply means the corpse’s height or general build was greater than a normal human’s, or the corpse still had about it the power of a demigod even after death, one would think that Gyges’ realization of this fact should have set off some bells in his head—not to mention the fact that this ring, though golden, is the only remaining possession of a dead demigod, a corpse who was even more than human. It does not seem ridiculous to assume that this could have served as a warning of the power that was present in this ring—a ring that could very well have been the demise of this demigod; a warning that screamed the Lydian equivalent of, “You can’t handle this!” and, “I am not good news!”

Therefore, the direct correlation of this ring to death and the underworld seems to be the strongest possible defeater that exists in Plato’s version of the tale of Gyges the Lydian. However, I am still not completely convinced that this defeater accomplishes I had proposed for it: to undermine the claim that a very unjust man and/or tyrant can be happy—can flourish as a tyrant, and at the moment, I am still unsure what to make of this predicament.

Thoughts to Chew On. Part V.

2007-04-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

"We're not half as bad as God is good."
- mewithoutYou

An Analysis of Gyges and the Cave. Part III.

2007-04-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

In contrast to the philosopher-king, who is the example of the perfectly just man, we have Gyges the Lydian, an example of the perfectly unjust man—a man who is unjust in every way possible, but appears to be perfectly just in every way possible. The telling of this story comes about when Glaucon and Adeimantus, being very unsatisfied with Socrates’ treatment of Thrasymachus’ argument—namely, that injustice is better to have than justice—in their dialogue in Book I, ask Socrates to really persuade them that justice is better to have in itself than injustice. They then proceed to make the absolute best case that they can for injustice, hoping that Socrates will be able to knock it down, proving that justice is truly better than injustice. In this defense of injustice, Glaucon says that those who hold the view that injustice is better to have than justice would claim that justice is merely a concession for those people who are too weak both to do wrong and to keep others from wronging them—“a compromise…” he says,

"... between the best, which is to do wrong with impunity, and the worst, which is to be wronged and be impotent to get one’s revenge. Justice, they tell us, being midway between the two, is accepted and approved, not as a real good, but as a thing honored in the lack of vigor to do injustice, since anyone who had the power to do it and was in reality ‘a man’ would never make a compact with anybody neither to wrong nor to be wronged, for he would be mad."

Therefore, Glaucon says that if one has the power to commit injustice freely and without having to worry about being wronged in return, there is no man who would remain just, because he could get away with anything he wanted.

To give evidence for this claim, Glaucon offers the story of Gyges, a shepherd in service to the king of Lydia, who, when after a large rainstorm and earthquake, found a chasm that had opened up due to those events. In this chasm, Gyges found, among “other marvels,” a hollow bronze horse. Inside this horse, he saw “a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature, and that there was nothing else but a gold ring on its hand, which he took off, and so went forth.” After some experimentation, Gyges found that this ring, when turned a certain way on his finger, turned him invisible, and using this ring, he seduced the king’s wife, and with her help, killed the king and took over the kingdom. Given this option, Glaucon—in proxy for those who favor injustice over justice—says that no man would continue to choose to be just rather than unjust.

Given that this story was told from the perspective of one who believes that injustice is better than justice, we probably cannot expect to see anything within this myth that explicitly says the exact inverse, but what appears to be really worrisome about this tale is the fact that, in the end, Gyges seems to turn out very well, and even better in histories and other tellings of the story. He bribed the Oracle at Delphi into confirming him as the rightful Lydian king, thereby stopping a civil war, and then proceeded to successfully conquer several other nations, including several Greek cities. He gained a kingdom and a queen, and was the founder of an entire Lydian dynasty, which prospered into its fifth generation—it seems that this unjust man, this tyrant, did very well for himself.

I am unsure what to think of this story, especially in light of our class discussions on the natures of the unjust man and the tyrant—they would be the most unhappy men because their souls are the most disordered of all men. But who are we to say that Gyges was unhappy, that he did not flourish? Perhaps, in gaining the power and glory of the kingship, his soul was satisfied and found its place; perhaps Gyges had a very correctly ordered soul, with his nous ruling his erotic nature by way of his chest, but perhaps his nous—his “little man”—was bent toward evil. Thus he would only act unjustly, and use his ordered soul for his own selfish purposes—to me, this does not seem improbable. But if this is true, if Gyges really was happy, or even if he could have been happy, then what are we to make of the perfectly just man—the philosopher-king—who, after reaching as far toward the Good as is humanly possible, is made to give it up in the name of justice and go back down into the darkness and ignorance of the cave, only to rule over the people of the city—a job he does not want over a people he can only pity? Is his happiness, his flourishing, if he indeed has it, really worth the hard work that justice requires of him, when it seems there is a much easier route to happiness available? Is it possible that some men flourish as—were meant to be—tyrants?

Thoughts to Chew On. Part IV.

2007-04-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

Any claim to knowledge is a claim of faith.

An Analysis of Gyges and the Cave. Part II.

2007-04-22T00:40:00.000-07:00

Once this has been established, Socrates describes something truly amazing. He says to Glaucon,

"Consider, then, what would be the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly if in the course of nature something of this sort should happen to them. When one was freed from his fetters and compelled to stand up suddenly and turn his head around and walk and to lift up his eyes to the light, and in doing all this felt pain and, because of the dazzle and glitter of the light, was unable to discern the objects whose shadows he formerly saw, what do you suppose would be his answer if someone told him that what he had seen before was all a cheat and an illusion, but that now, being nearer to reality and turned toward more real things, he saw more truly?"

Here, Socrates tells us of the beginnings of the first philosopher-king, and soon later goes on to describe how this man would have to be dragged out of this cave into the sunlight, and even there, that the man would first have to look at the shadows of the true things, and then into the reflections they made in pools of water, then at the things themselves, and finally, after much habituation, he would be able to look at the Good itself. Once this happens, our philosopher-king will have to be made to go back down into the darkness of the cave in the name of justice so that he may be able to rule over the men who remain ignorant, who would, in return, laugh at his wisdom, and eventually—if he were to attempt to bring another out of the cave—they would kill him , because though the cave is dark, it is familiar and comfortable.

One cannot help but notice how improbable this entire situation is made to be by Socrates. First, the man is inexplicably freed from his bonds and is somehow “compelled” toward the light—necessarily, it seems, by some outside force. But where is this force that frees the man, compels him to look at the light, then drags him out of the cave into the sunlight and eventually makes him to look into the sun? Then, somehow, the philosopher-king would have to be forced back down into the cave in the name of justice, into the presence of ignorant men, who, in all probability, would kill him, and at the very least, would label him a fool and ignore him. But, if somehow, against all odds, the philosopher-king is able to go back down into the cave and successfully rule the people, the city will be harmonious—the city will be just.

Thoughts to Chew On. Part III.

2007-04-19T01:03:00.000-07:00

Having trust in someone is not knowing whether or not he can be trusted--and trusting him anyway.

An Analysis of Gyges and the Cave. Part I.

2007-04-18T00:30:00.000-07:00

In this paper, I will examine both the account of the perfectly just man—as symbolized by the philosopher-king in the Analogy of the Cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic—as well as the account of the perfectly unjust man—as symbolized in the tale of the Ring of Gyges in Book II—in hopes to determine what exactly separates these two men in terms of their happiness, or their human flourishing. In other words, in looking at these two stories, I hope to see what makes the just man happier than the unjust man. I am unsure as to the exact relationship between these two stories since they are so far spread apart in the dialogue, but I believe that, even if they are not to be so closely related, the similarities and differences between them are such that a comparison between the stories would be beneficial to our understanding of justice.

First, let us look closely at the Analogy of the Cave, as told by Socrates in Book VII, and at his champion of justice, the philosopher-king, as seen in this tale. After discussing various analogies for how the Good can come to be better understood, such as the Analogy of the Sun and the Divided Line at the conclusion of Book VI, Socrates and the interlocutors come to discuss the state of man, and how he can come to know the Good. About man, Socrates says this:

"Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance behind them and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a road along which a low wall has been built, as the exhibitors of puppet shows have partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets."

Basically, it seems that man is in quite a wretched state. He is stuck at the bottom of an enormous cave, chained down and able to look only straight ahead—much like a horse with blinders on—at a wall on which is projected, by the light of a fire behind them, the shadows of images. These images are not what they play either, for they themselves are only false representations of what is true (for example, the man in the cave has never actually seen another man—he has only seen the shadow of the image of a man). These shadows of images are being presented to men by other men who, from Socrates’ description, seem to be a kind of puppeteer; they maintain the illusion that the cave-dwellers see and believe to be reality (this is, of course, not to say that the puppeteers are necessarily malicious, or that the illusion is necessarily evil).

Because of man’s wretched state—chained down and made to believe in the illusion of these appearances, it seems that he has no choice but to believe that this illusion is reality. Socrates confirms this, and says, “Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects.” Ultimately, what choice would they have, since because they are necessarily stuck in this position, it is impossible that they could have knowledge of anything other than the shadows at which they are made to look?

Thoughts to Chew On. Part II.

2007-04-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

"Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Thoughts to Chew On. Part I.

2007-04-12T11:49:00.000-07:00

To be human is to be uncertain.

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"Now, faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see."
Hebrews 11:1

The Insufficiency of Reason - A Pre/Postmodern Reading of Confessions VII.

2007-04-05T00:08:00.000-07:00

My project is to examine Saint Augustine’s account of his ascent to God by introspection and reason as told in the Confessions, Book VII, and to determine 1) whether or not Augustine actually reaches a saving knowledge of God in this ascent, and 2) if not, why his attempt to reach God with reason would fail. I believe that Augustine did not in fact reach a saving knowledge of God in this reasoned ascent, and the reason his attempt failed is that reason alone is an insufficient means of attaining salvation—one must be led by the Holy Spirit if one is to reach God, and similarly, salvation. First, I will closely examine several passages in Book VII of the Confessions to more closely determine from the text what Augustine himself believed about this experience. Then, from his observations, I will attempt to explain to the best of my ability why Augustine does not reach salvation in God in this experience, both Scripturally and in looking at postmodern literature, particularly James Smith’s commentaries on Derrida. Finally, I will conclude this paper with a very brief and more generalized argument about the pros and cons of reason and—more specifically—natural theology, using my conclusions from Saint Augustine’s experience as related in Book VII.

Book VII begins with Augustine relating his struggles with Catholic doctrine. Once he is informed that the Catholic faith did not actually believe that God the Father has the form of a human body—a thought which he abhorred—he began to struggle with the ideas of God’s incorruptible and immutable nature, and relatedly, the problem of evil. Looking back on this struggle, Augustine considered himself much like a blind man, though he also thought that he was becoming “a grown man.” He says of himself, “So my heart had become gross, and I had no clear vision even of my own self,” and, “But you had not yet ‘lightened my darkness.’” Since Augustine firmly believed, even in his dark state, that God was incorruptible in character and power , he was presented with the task of finding an alternative nature of evil, since, if evil was created by God, then he was not in fact incorruptible in character, and if evil was presented by a force of darkness other than God—as the Manichees described, then God was not in fact incorruptible in power. He says about this problem,

"But a problem remained to trouble me. Although I affirmed and firmly held divine immunity from pollution and change and the complete immutability of our God, the true God who made not only our souls but also our bodies, and not only our souls and bodies, but all rational beings and everything, yet I had no clear and explicit grasp of the cause of evil. Whatever it might be, I saw it had to be investigated, if I were to avoid being forced by this problem to believe the immutable God to be mutable. Otherwise I might myself become the evil I was investigating. Accordingly, I made my investigation without anxiety, certain that what the Manichees said was untrue. With all my mind I fled from them, because in my inquiry into the origin of evil I saw them to be full of malice, in that they thought it more acceptable to say your substance suffers evil than that their own substance actively does evil."

It was in this tension—a tension in which he recognized his fate would be decided—that Augustine began his inquiry into the origin of evil, and likewise his inquiry into the nature of God.

After searching for an answer to the origin of evil in created things and having no success, and rejecting astrology as a means of divination, Augustine tells us that he comes to read the books of the key Neoplatonic writers Plotinus and Porphyry, and it is in reading these texts that Augustine is encouraged to look within his own soul as a means of coming to the knowledge of the divine. Thus begins Augustine’s “ascent by introspection.” He tells us this of the experience:

"By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With you as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel, and was given power to do so because you had become my helper. I entered and with my soul’s eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind…. It was not that light, but a different thing, utterly different from all our kinds of light. It transcended my mind…. When I first came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being. And you gave a shock to the weakness of my sight by the strong radiance of your rays, and I trembled with love and awe."

Augustine’s language in this section clearly demonstrates that he experienced God in a very real way within himself. He recognized his own state as a thing who is still becoming, in contrast to the Being he saw, and by the help of God—possibly the Holy Spirit, since the person who guides Augustine is indeed referred to as a guide and helper—Augustine comes to a love and awe of this God, two things that at least seem to be characteristic of a follower of God. If this is indeed true, why does Augustine tell us he does not actually become a Christian until later in Book VIII, when he speaks of his conversion under the figtree? It seems as if, when the Spirit guides Augustine in this passage, He is guiding him to a knowledge of God’s ultimate transcendence and Augustine’s own inability to attain Him, not to a knowledge that saves. To confirm this, Augustine says, “But I did not possess the strength to keep my vision fixed. My weakness reasserted itself, and I returned to my customary condition. I carried with me only a loving memory and a desire for that of which I had the aroma but which I had not yet the strength to eat.” Notice Augustine’s clear—albeit poetic—language when he states that the only things he received from this vision were a memory and a longing for something that he could not yet have. Augustine was not saved in this vision.

But why? Augustine clearly believed he experienced God in this vision, and who are we to suggest otherwise, since we cannot see into his soul? What was Augustine yet lacking, that had he obtained it, it would save him? The answer to this question, when thought about for even a short amount of time, seems obvious. Augustine did not have Jesus Christ, and sure enough, he tells us as much immediately following his fall from the vision. In retrospect, he states, “I sought a way to obtain strength enough to enjoy you; but I did not find it until I embraced ‘the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus’….” Even though Augustine clearly experienced God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit in his vision, he lacked the correct perspective on which he could come to a knowledge leading to salvation. Without this perspective, which is found through faith in Christ Jesus, this vision of Augustine’s acted analogously to the Law of the Israelites; it could not save, it could only condemn and show Augustine where he did not match up to God’s supreme excellence. In order to have the ability to be guided by the Spirit to the knowledge of the Father and His salvation, one must have the correct interpretation of the world, and this cannot be reached by universal reason alone, since as finite beings, we are not omniscient, and therefore cannot have a completely objective perspective on the world. We must have the correct perspective or interpretation supplied to us by the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ. Scripture clearly says,

“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”

This view stating that the narrative of faith in Christ leading to our saving knowledge of God, while supported Scripturally, was also preemptively put forward by Augustine himself when he stated that he could not maintain his rational image of the glory of God without first coming to faith in Jesus Christ. Thus his mantra: faith leads to knowledge.

This idea of subjective interpretation of the world as a kind of text, while obviously not a new idea—as we can see in Augustine’s “faith leads to knowledge”—is an idea that is presently most commonly associated with postmodern philosophy, most noticeably in the writings of Jacques Derrida and others. One author in particular, James Smith, in his book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, attempts to show how Derrida’s doctrines of deconstructionism and interpretation of the “world as text”—which he also believes were much like Augustine’s views—mesh perfectly with the narrative of Scripture. He says this:

"Christians who become skittish about the claim that everything is interpretation are usually hanging on to a very modern notion of knowledge, one that claims something is true only insofar as it is objective—insofar as it can be universally known by all people, at all times, in all places. On this account, the truth of the gospel—that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself—is taken to be objectively true and thus capable of rational demonstration…. Thus the very fact that both the centurion and chief priests are confronted by the same phenomena and yet see something very different seems to demonstrate Derrida’s point: the very experience of the things themselves is a matter of interpretation. Even if we are confronted with the physical and historical evidence of the resurrection—even if we witnessed the resurrection firsthand—what exactly this meant would require interpretation. Only by interpreting the resurrection of Jesus does one see that it confirms that he is the Son of God."

and later, Smith states,

"What is required to interpret the world well is the necessary conditions of interpretation—the right horizons of expectation and the right presuppositions. But as Paul repeatedly emphasizes, these conditions are themselves a gift; in other words, the presuppositions and horizons that make it possible to properly ‘read’ creation are grace gifts that attend redemption and regeneration. This is precisely why we shouldn’t be surprised that not everyone we encounter immediately grasps the rationality of the gospel. In fact, we should expect that someone will not be able to properly ‘see’ creation or the crucifixion without the grace of redemption."

Like I have previously argued, and as both Augustine and Scripture suggest, Smith argues that the only way that one can come to a correct—and saving—interpretation of the events told in Scripture is through a gift of grace by God Himself, through the Holy Spirit. Reason, though being a useful tool to those who already believe for giving an account of our beliefs, cannot bring us to God, or to His salvation. This is why natural theology, or the branch of the philosophy of religion devoted to giving rational arguments for the existence of God, will never really work as an evangelistic apologetic without the Spirit. Quite simply, if the Holy Spirit is not moving in a person, no amount of rational argument will bring them to accept Christ, since only the Holy Spirit can supply the correct, divine means of interpretation needed for salvation. Only by first coming to faith in Christ can we be guided by the Holy Spirit to the knowledge—or the vision, as Augustine puts it—of salvation.

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In the meeting to discuss the first draft of my first paper for Medieval Philosophy, there was some debate as to whether the argument in the draft under discussion committed the fallacy of false alternative, creating a false dichotomy between the use only of reason as a means of knowing God, and the use only of personal experience of God as a means of knowing God, leaving no room for any “middle-ground” positions. These middle-ground positions would use some combination of both reason and our personal experience of God as a means of knowing God. In light of this discussion, I was asked to show how my paper did not actually commit this fallacy of false alternative instead of writing an actual final draft.

My paper was a thought experiment into the insufficiency of reason as a tool of obtaining the salvation taught by Christianity, using Saint Augustine’s accounts of his “Ascent by Introspection” and his conversion experience within the narrative of his Confessions, in Books VII and VIII, respectively. I was attempting to show that Augustine’s attempt to reach God and His salvation through reason alone failed because the Holy Spirit did not bring him to a saving knowledge to Jesus Christ, and I pointed out that Augustine himself says this in retrospect. In this sense, a certain perspective—that of the divine revelation of Christ—was first required before Augustine could use reason in the pursuit of God, since our reason—our philosophy—will only lead us to where we are already inclined to go. As Augustine said it, “Faith leads to knowledge.” I then continued to explore the implications of this insufficiency of reason in postmodern philosophical terms, using some of James Smith’s comments on Derrida and deconstructionism as a foundation. Building off of this, I argued that the Holy Spirit supplies us with our saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, which is the correct perspective (or interpretation of the world) that is needed before reason can be used in pursuit of the knowledge of God. I ended the paper with a brief section on the limits of natural theology in light of this insufficiency of reason, arguing that natural theology would never really work as an evangelistic tool, unless it is accompanied by the Spirit.

The section in my paper that was called into question was the section that moved into the postmodern implications of the insufficiency of reason. It was stated that in stating that reason/natural theology could not be used in evangelism, it seemed as if I had created a false dichotomy between faith and reason, making it seem like one could only choose one or the other, and leaving no alternative point of view. This would be to commit the fallacy of false alternative, since there are clearly plausible alternate points of view. After reviewing my paper, I have decided that my argument, as I intended it to be, still stands, but is in need of some clarity of wording at several points in order to steer clear of the fallacy of false alternative.

To clarify, I had meant to say that natural theology could only be successful in evangelism if the Holy Spirit was already working in the heart of the person being evangelized to. The Spirit could quite possibly use reason to bring a person to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, but only if the Spirit was already at work within that person, bringing him to the place where he could epistemically see that God’s revelation in Christ is truth, granting the person the divine perspective. This just seems necessary due to the finite nature of man. Because we are not omniscient, we are not in a position to objectively know truth, since there are just so many facts about God and the universe that we cannot know. Simply, man is finite, and being such, he can only know things from his finite perspective on the universe. Therefore, man’s reason can only get him as far as his perspective is limited, and seeing as how all men have slightly differing limited perspectives (since they are not all the same man), all men will come to different conclusions using the same ability of reason. In context of my paper, since finite man is not the infinite God, he cannot see all of what God sees. In particular, he cannot see God’s plan for the salvation of man through His Son Jesus Christ, and therefore cannot come to the knowledge of its truth. This condition of man would require God to supply the correct perspective to him, in order that he might see the universe through the eyes of God. This perspective change is done by the work of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, as I should have made more clear in my paper, to an atheist whose heart in which the Holy Spirit is not working, arguments for the existence of God—the work of natural theology—will simply never be convincing.

Therefore, my paper, being unclear, seemed to commit the fallacy of false alternative. This observation, however, was due to the lack of clarity in the final sections of the paper. Now, since I have supplied the correct perspective (or at least a better one) in which to see the argument, I believe that the observation no longer applies.

Excuses.

2007-03-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

How sad.

Instead of the click of frantic fingers on a keyboard, I can hear crickets chirping. Bummer.

What was once the site of fun and fruitful philosophical discourse is now mostly just collecting dust--the ghost of a boom town in the wilderness of cyberspace.

Hey, look.

A tumbleweed.

My apologies to all for my misuse of this space; what could have been used for good was neglected. I have many excuses--some good, some bad.. but they're all still excuses.

I will now be attempting to post on this page various papers that I have written, since I'm no good at coming up with completely original material on a consistant basis--hopefully starting soon--but don't get your hopes up. :)

On Beauty, Part II.5. An Apology.

2006-12-03T18:14:00.000-08:00

Hello all. I'm afraid I must apologize to you. Mostly due to my own irresponsiblity, I am exhausted and have much actual schoolwork to accomplish before finals and DonRags. Therefore, in order to focus on the things on which my grades hinge upon, I will not be blogging this week, aside from some possible personal reflections. I may pick up where I left off in this series sometime during finals week, but most likely not until after the semester is over. Again, I'm sorry for not being able to share my thoughts with you all.

On Beauty, Part II. A Matter of Taste.

2006-11-27T22:02:00.000-08:00

The definitional problem as presented by a Platonist view of Beauty is a hard one to tackle. Platonists will say that a thing is objectively beautiful simply because it somehow takes part in the Form of Beauty, which, being created by God, has an ontological status specific and separate to itself. As I stated in Part I of this series, this seems to force the Platonist into a circular regression—to begging the question as to the objective nature of beauty. This is far from useful, and really only complicates matters. Now, as I also stated in the previous post in this series, instead of having a useful criterion for recognizing beauty when I see it, I now have to ask, “What is it about the Form of Beauty that I can recognize in beautiful objects?”

While Dr. Reynolds would warn us away from the Socratic fallacy and tell us that one can know a thing without being able to define it, I would say that it is very easy to know that something is beautiful in the abstract, or in particular cases where the particulars are as night and day on the Beauty scale as are a rose and an ogre. I completely agree that we must avoid the Socratic fallacy and that there is some intuitive sense by which we, as humans, can distinguish what objects are beautiful without having a distinct criterion for what makes them beautiful when the degree of separation is so large, but the recognition becomes much more difficult when the lines are not as clear-cut. In these particulars, this notion of the intuition of beauty on which a Platonic view hinges is unsatisfactory, and we must find some sort of objective criterion by which we can recognize what is objectively beautiful.

An example of this difficulty in the particulars lies in the recognition of the beauty in music, particularly in the recognition of the beauty in not only classical music, but also popular music as well. Thinking about this problem in light of this particular context has really brought the problem close to home for me, as a classically trained musician feeling the Holy Spirit’s call toward the popular music industry. It is very easy to say that one of these types of music is beautiful and one is not, or even that one is more beautiful than the other in the abstract, but once closely examined, it becomes much more difficult to determine what ACTUALLY makes Beethoven’s 5th Symphony or Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings more beautiful than a popular song such as Eisley’s “Marvelous Things”, Muse’s “City of Delusion”, or Thrice’s “Red Sky”.

Again, our Platonist friend might be tempted to simply say that a particular sonata simply partakes in the Form of Beauty more than these popular songs do, but to that, I say again that that conclusion merely leaves us in obscurity as to what that even means. How would he know that that sonata clearly partakes in the Form of Beauty than these popular pieces of music do, since the lines are not quite as clearly drawn as night and day would have them?

Perhaps then the Platonist would say that he knows that particular sonata partakes in the Form of Beauty more because he perceives that it does, without any objective criterion by which to judge so—it just DOES. Does this not, while not only sounding obscure, merely result in the subjectivity of beauty which we wanted to avoid in the first place? If we have no OBJECTIVE means of recognizing beauty on this scale except our individual perceptions (which is a very non-Platonic notion, by the way, since, to Plato, perceptions cannot always be trusted), then how is beauty NOT in the eye of the beholder here? How is this Platonic view not AT LEAST functionally subjective?

If the Platonist is telling me that this sonata is just simply more beautiful than a song by Coldplay or Sigur Ros without any sort of criterion for anyone else objectively recognizing it as such, then how is that any different than him telling me that this sonata is just simply more beautiful than a song by Coldplay or Sigur Ros because he perceives it or believes it to be so? Perhaps I were to suggest that this Coldplay or Sigur Ros song is actually more beautiful than this sonata; without an objective criterion, what else CAN the Platonist say to defend his belief that the sonata participates more in the Form of Beauty other than that I simply have POOR TASTE in music, reducing the issue to a subjective matter of personal taste? How does our Platonist friend NOT fall into the relativity trap and dissolve his belief in the absolute Forms into the fallacy of subjectivism in function?

So you see, not only is a Platonic view of Beauty as a Form rather esoteric and rather unhelpful, as I attempted to at least partially show in the first post of this series, its obscurity and overly-mystic response to the problem of definitions push it past a REASONABLE appeal to the majority’s intuitive sense of the beautiful, and into the territory of subjectivity—the very ground we wished to avoid treading on in the first place.

More on plausible alternatives, mainly Divine Conceptualism, in explaining and recognizing the objective nature of beauty will be in another post soon to come.

On Beauty, Part I.5. A Clarification.

2006-11-26T01:53:00.000-08:00

"I should clarify as to my intentions in this and the posts on beauty to come. I am still NOT CONVINCED that beautiful is a subjective quality as post-modern thinkers would assert, nor do I wish to be, but I am also not convinced of the truth of the Platonic response that is so often thrown around as doctrine in Torrey. Therefore, still thinking of beauty as an OBJECTIVE quality, I am exploring the Divine Conceptualism view as a more defensable position than Platonism."

I hope this clears up what I am trying to get at.

On Beauty, Part I. An Exposition.

2006-11-25T14:01:00.000-08:00

I have been becoming less and less satisfied with the arguments I have heard for the conclusion that Beauty is an absolute, that "beautiful" is an objective quality that a thing can ontologically have. The conclusion that beauty is a subjective quality that we give to objects—a value judgment that we, as humans, place on things—is becoming more and more one that seems correct, and yet every fiber of my being doesn’t like this conclusion I feel myself being drawn to.

You might ask: Why does this even matter?

I feel very attached to the idea that Beauty is objective, mostly because of my dislike of post-modern thought, which my belief in the absolute truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ greatly conflicts with. Clearly, if beauty is something we humans prescribe to objects; a quality not distinctly present in the ontological status of a thing, but a quality exterior to the thing and placed on it by the viewer; then beauty ceases to be objective and truthful, and is merely subject to the value judgments of individual people. If this is true, then it seems that there is no sense of absolute truth, since it is all in the eye of the beholder, and modern thought, including Christianity, which suggests that there are things that are objectively good, true and beautiful, will die out, much like Nietzsche and others suggest that it should.

That’s not good. Our entire worldview, not to mention the view we have of our salvation, is at stake.

Many in the Torrey Honors Institute, including our own dear John Mark Reynolds, deeply influenced by Platonism, will say that Beauty is a Form; that Beauty, being created by God, has a ontological status specific and separate to itself, and that all objects that we call “beautiful” somehow take a part in the Form that is Beauty. I think I disagree with this, mostly because I tend to take a more Divine Conceptualist view: that Beauty derives its nature from the nature of the mind and character of the Triune God, who is the most beautiful being that could ever be, and that all things that are considered beautiful are so because they somehow reflect the beauty of his character.

A huge problem with the objective view of beauty as held by both Platonists and Divine Conceptualists—and the problem with this view that I have been struggling with—is a definitional one: what makes a beautiful object beautiful? What criterion do we have for knowing what is objectively beautiful? (Though it’s an older post, John Mastron does a pretty good job at looking at this definitional problem on his blog. (http://jmastron.blogspot.com/))

It seems to me a copout to say, as our Platonist friends do, that things that we call beautiful are so because they take part in the Form of Beauty, because this answer really doesn’t address the problem, it only begs the question, that is, it asserts the term it is defining as its answer. Now, instead of having a useful criterion for recognizing beauty when I see it, I now have to ask, “What is it about the Form of Beauty that I can recognize in beautiful objects?”

A similar problem is found in the Divine Conceptualist view, though I believe on a lesser scale. While originally I can’t seem to pinpoint what characteristic makes a beautiful object beautiful, I can say that this object is beautiful because it somehow reflects the beauty that naturally stems from the mind and character of God. This conclusion, I believe, does not leave one in the obscurity of the Platonist response, and instead gives one something concrete to build a definition of beauty off of. Now, once I say that the beautiful is seen in the character of God, I can look to the Scriptures to find what characteristics this beautiful God has and compare beautiful objects to them, hopefully to find what makes these objects similar to our beautiful God. This response also avoids begging the question, as it seems our Platonist friends must end up doing.

Pontifications on this, as well as further problems with the Platonist response are forthcoming.

Metaphorical Metaphysics. A Moral Dilemma.

2006-11-23T23:36:00.000-08:00

(I apologize in advance for being horribly esoteric… I’m just writing down what all this feels like in my head.)

As another celebration of the wonderful holiday that is Thanksgiving comes and goes, I feel faced with the greatest and simplest paradoxes—I’m wrestling with what seems to be an enormous metaphysical conglomeration of things much too close to home and much too far over the horizon to make any ordered sense of it all. One big fight is going on in my head, and the bout bill is so large, it feels like the in-laws who can’t keep their own family matters straight came over to my place for the long weekend and started making trouble here.

My thankfulness and humble gratitude to God for the countless wonderful things He has blessed me with battles with my depression and loneliness.

The love I have for my friends battles with my frustration over their hurtful actions.

The delight I take in the relationships I have battles with my fears of not being good enough and getting hurt again.

My excitement for recent opportunities to realize my life's dreams battles with my fears of failure and commitment.

My desire to abandon my philosophical studies and my dreams to devote my life to feeding the hungry battles with my unmistakable knowledge that there is something much bigger at stake than the immediate comfort of the downtrodden.

My awe and wonder at the mystic and metaphysical battles with my disgust for empty ideological sophistry and gnostic bullshit.

At the epic war game in my mind, simplicity battles complexity.
Earth battles Quintessence, and the aether swirls around them, goading them on.
Past and Future battle, and Present keeps yelling at them both to quit complicating the situation.

The universe battles with the bum who sits at the freeway exit.

…

“What is to be done? We’re drawn to the terrible fallacy that man is desirable, and there’s no escaping into truth.”

*sigh*

At the moment, I’m at a loss for what to do… I guess the only thing I can do is just to keep singing.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!
Praise Him all creatures here below!
Praise Him above, ye heavenly hosts!
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone… and may we always keep singing.

Amen.

At the Funeral of Our Generation

2006-11-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

At the funeral of our generation,
We mourn the loss of our own,
But lift high their pride in exultation,
And rejoice that they all died alone.
Their hearts had grown out of proportion,
Too big to fit inside their chests;
Unresponsive to defibrillation,
Lost to cardiac arrest.

And we all cry, “Hallelujah”?

At the funeral of our generation,
A hymn is sung for those few proud
Who, in secular sanctification,
Spilt their blood and died to win the crowd.
"All hail the Saints of our great nation!
They've given us our crutches back;
The pinnacles of pasteurization,
They've made our milk nonfat!

Hallelujah, hallelujah!"

At the funeral of our generation,
The eulogy brings us all to tears
Over the heathen proliferation
We've loved to hate for years.
In a grand miscommunication,
Sovereign stomachs rule minds amiss.
Destroyed by lustful fornication,
Just missed joy in coital bliss.

Why do we cry, "Hallelujah"?

At the funeral of our generation,
Somber smiles trade for happy frowns.
And our shepherd, in his mild frustration,
Throws his pulpit to the ground.
As the symbol of our desecration
Is smashed beyond repair or mend,
He's baffled why, like carnal duration,
The climax was our end.

"Hallelujah, hallelujah!"

Base Jumping Is Scary. A Joke.

2006-09-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

"We've lost our way,
And if we could only see us now...
The words of the dead ring in our ears,
But its only a lie.
The voice in your head brings you to tears,
But you don't know why.
Yes, it's only a lie...
Isn't it?"

"So Strange I Remember You"
- Thrice

I have this funny feeling that I get when I feel that an era of my life is over. Clearly and obviously, I'm only twenty years old, and life is just beginning, and there have been very few "eras" of my life that I have passed through, save junior high school (R.I.P. Five Iron Frenzy), and yadda yadda yadda. Still, the feeling of a coming completion haunts me.

Do you know the one? It's the one accompanied by that powerful scent of nostalgia noxious enough to knock over a cow (I realize this is an odd allusion at best, but I feel it works to give you a sense of the oddness of the previously mentioned feeling). The one that signifies that everything you've ever known is coming to a close, and leaves you wondering, "Where the crap did everyone go?" Yeah, that one.

And yet, while this funny feeling tells me that I'm sitting on the precipice of something incredible, I am for some odd reason failing to comprehend that I'm sitting on the edge of that incredible cliff. A good cliff, mind you, a wicked awesome cliff... but the fact that I can't seem to see an enormous cliff right in front of me bothers me. Although, I suppose my saying that completely negates the previous statement and the statement that I notice that I don't notice that I'm sitting on an enormous cliff itself is completely self-defeating... but yet I am still bothered. Humph.

So perhaps I do see the precipice, but am bothered by the fact that I can't see what treasure lies at the bottom of the canyon. This is a better proposal for certain. I suppose, then, that I can rule out that I'm NOT bothered by the notion that I might hit the ground and go splat; no, I'm more-than-fairly-certain that my parachute IS in fact inside my backpack and WILL in fact come out and open when I pull the cord. But, then I have to wonder: "Am I seriously bothered by the fact that I don't know if after having what could be the greatest experience of my entire life I'll land and not have a Nissan Xterra to take me right back to Suburbia and a Double Mocha Frappichino to sip along the way?"

One doesn't base jump in order to see what's down there, that's for horseshoes and hand gre--oh wait, wrong euphemism. Eh, maybe it still works...

Base jumping is done for the sheer sensation of falling. And you know what Van Halen says about it: "Might as well...JUMP!"

I have this funny feeling that I'm weightless.

Do you know the one?

It's the one where you feel like you've left both your stomach and your sanity back at the top, and you hope to God that you sprout wings and fly.

It's the one where you feel like you've surrendered to the wind, being okay with it blowing you this way and that.

It's the one where you've let it all go.

It's the one where you have this gnawing, ravenous feeling deep inside you.

No wait... I'm just hungry.

Two Follies of the Saints. A Question.

2006-08-02T22:14:00.000-07:00

"We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, light from light, true God from true God,
begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became truly human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen."

"The Nicene Creed"

I have not quite gathered my thoughts on this yet, instead, I'm coming to you guys for your thoughts--if you happen to have any and are willing to take the time to dialogue about them with me.

My question:

Why do we Christians have so much trouble reconciling having sound doctrine with being salt and light and loving the Lord our God with all of our hearts, souls, minds and strengths? Why do some of us feel we must abandon and ignore the doctrines that proclaim the truths that we believe in order to serve Christ, and others of us are content with having doctrine and merely watching while Rome burns to the ground? Why are some of us so afraid that doctrine will get in the way of serving and loving Jesus that we toss Truth by the wayside, while others think that if we have doctrine, we have Jesus? Why must we swing to these extremes, and what is characteristic of a true relationship with Jesus Christ, if Christ is Truth AND Christ is Love?

I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on this matter. If you are so kind as to engage in the dialogue here, please leave your name (first name and last initial) if you don't have a Blogger account and/or if I don't know you.

Thanks again to everyone for your thoughts and comments so far. I look forward to pursuing the Logos with you all, both here as well as back at school in a few weeks.

Love and Grace to His Saints,
Garrett

The Flesh Post-Mortem. A Repentance.

2006-07-25T19:04:00.000-07:00

"If Jesus Christ is Truth, then I am mostly lies.
If Jesus Christ is Love, then I have failed to try.
If Jesus Christ is Life, then please just let me die."

excerpt from "Eulogy"
- Five Iron Frenzy

I am so glad that Jesus is Jesus, and that I am not.
I am so glad that Jesus is Life, and that I get to die.

The Fate of the Pharisee. A Heart's Cry.

2006-07-08T23:06:00.000-07:00

"What can you do with a heavy soul,
When you dance but there's no rock and roll?
Where can you go if the sun doesn't shine?
You sing the words but none of them rhyme.

What would I have done if it wasn't for Jesus?

Where do you go when you've lost the keys,
When all is dark and you're on your knees?
And in a world where its love betrays,
There is a light that will save the day; don't go away.

What would I have done if it wasn't for Jesus?
And what would I have become if it wasn't for Jesus?"

"What Would I Have Done?"
- Delirious?

Maybe I'm just lazy or selfish, but sometimes I feel so bogged down in our church culture. Maybe I'm just insecure, but sometimes I feel a little bit crushed by the Christianese weight on my shoulders. It feels like there is always something holding me back from being a good Christian, whether it be I don't say, "Hallelujah!" enough, or I don't raise my hands in worship, or I swear too much, or I don't send enough money to missionaries or tithe often enough, or I don't go serve in soup kitchens enough, or I don't witness to non-believers enough, or I don't attend chapel or college group enough, etc, etc, you fill in the blank. It feels like my heart goes unheard because I don't volunteer at the church enough, or because I'm too young, or just because someone is attached to their own opinions about my behavior.

Amidst the talk and expectations of having proper church practices and of what doctrines to teach and of having "good" worship music and of "appropriate" behaviors for dating, how do I save my faith from becoming a checklist?

How do I avoid the fate of the Pharisee, whose proud hearts denied them the chance of healing because they saw fit to judge with planks in their eyes and because they were focused on the semantics of church-going rather than the condition of the heart before God?

It would seem that when we are acting out of REAL love for/submission to Christ, he will direct these lesser issues into their proper order… or have we forgotten that He works for the good of those who love Him, that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him, that He will direct our paths? Has He not set us free?

All this to say that for me, all of this seems to (pardon the misappropriated phrase) "beg the question":

Why can't I just love Jesus?

Checking the Mic. A Request.

2006-06-14T03:57:00.000-07:00

Howdy everyone. I was just wondering that for those of you who read my blog, if can you go ahead and leave a comment on here (if you haven't already), just so I can know who I'm talking to? Oh, it will also be helpful for adding friends to my links for networking purposes. Hooray. :)

Have a great night, y'all, and God bless.

Fighting the Cosmic Forces. A Dance of Death, A Call to Arms.

2006-06-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

"How are we ignorant of our hunger,
Inebriated by too much sleep?
How have we fallen into so deep a slumber?
How are we so deceived?
It's as if we starve to death at the wedding feast.

DO YOU NOT GET IT?! DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?!
THIS PRESENT DARKNESS SEEKS YOUR VERY LIVES!
WAKE UP, YOU SLEEPERS! OPEN YOUR EYES!"

excerpt from "Opiate"
- Looking for Atlantis

*cue Killswitch Engage*

As I sat in church Sunday morning and listened to an excellent sermon on spiritual warfare, I wondered if I'm alone in my desire to really eff up a demon, Iliad style.

We often sing of battle and the war in heaven and the victory we have in Jesus Christ, and so it boggles my mind how so many of us think we can just watch from a distance as spectators in a galactic coliseum viewing a play-fight of some battle that happened a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I see people nod and raise their hands and shout, "Amen!"--selfish people who are more concerned with catching up with friends than being equipped with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace, ignorant people whose belt of truth is conveniently missing and don't know any better, defenseless people whose shield of faith and sword of the Spirit are more fitted for a toy soldier--giving lip service to the god of church or the god of chapel; because those gods can't see the state of our decaying and decrepit hearts, they are far easier to please than Yahweh is.

How do I feel so alone in my desire to take the fight to the Enemy? Has our army fallen asleep?

I can honestly say that I sincerely hope that one day, I will stand on the field of Megiddo along with all His saints and take part in the bloodbath as the skies turn black and the stained fields burn red. I hope that His armies won't be exclusive to the angels, but that, though vengeance is the Lord's, He will share it with His saints. I hope that I will be able to charge the ranks and ramparts of the armies of the Evil One, and that I will take my share of demon blood. I hope that, before they are tossed into the Lake of Fire, He will allow me the chance to fight alongside Him in giving the death-dealers and the damned the death and destruction they so desire.

DO YOU NOT GET IT?! DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?!

I do not fear defeat or the fate of the armies of Light; I know we shall prevail.

THIS PRESENT DARKNESS SEEKS YOUR VERY LIVES!

I fear that you sleeping saints will be caught unawares by the schemes of the Evil One and crushed in the onslaught.

WAKE UP, YOU SLEEPERS! OPEN YOUR EYES!

I fear you will become a casualty.

PLEASE. OPEN YOUR EYES.

"Blessed be the Lord, my rock,
who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle;
he is my steadfast love and my fortress,
my stronghold and my deliverer,
my shield and he in whom I take refuge,
who subdues peoples under me."
- Psalm 144:1-2 ESV

"Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed... When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: 'Death is swallowed up in victory.' 'O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?' The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
- 1 Corinthians 15:34, 51, 54-57 ESV

"Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things."
- Romans 2:1 ESV

Sometimes I wish I could carry around a sword everywhere I went, if only for reminding myself that we are indeed at war.

Death by Plato. A Herald of Doom.

2006-06-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

Here's something happy. :) P.S. I am by no means a Plato scholar. This is just something to think about.

"We've found our meaning in a bottle of beer,
Diluted what's true to escape our fears,
And lost sight of the present using lens-less glasses.
Replaced our lives with a fantasy,
Because life isn't what we'd like it to be.
It's steadily becoming a brand-new opiate for the masses.
It's soma for our brave new world."

excerpt from "Opiate"
- Looking for Atlantis

Well, on my quest to be a "good" Torrey student, I've just finished book 5 of Plato's Republic, and after about two hours of intense reading and thinking, my brain has never been so enthralled and--for lack of a better term--so mushy. My brain literally (and I do mean LITERALLY) hurts from the pounding Plato just gave it, and every fiber of me that is still capable of coherent contemplation is frightened, again, out of its wits. I suppose it's not ironic that what sanity one has that Plato doesn't at least give a hard "tweaking" to from his depth of thought is completely driven away by the brevity of the actual content of his thought.

The Republic (at least through book 5) does exactly what Socrates sets out to do, at least on the surface level (I'm not willing to speculate any deeper, mostly because I don't think I have sufficient knowledge to concretely go any deeper than that); it describes the perfect city, a utopian society. Now, there is really nothing wrong with a utopia (irony intended), except for the fact that they do not exist, and this not because no one has ever tried, far from it. I think this brings up a situation where I could honestly say, "Many are called, but few are chosen," but what might be more appropriate is this: "No one was called, and those who actually try are stupid and fail miserably." :) Utopias do not and CANNOT exist on this earth because humans have been corrupted by sin and so cannot act out the laws put forth by Socrates and Co. in the Republic with the desired effect. This perfect society discounts the individuals living in it of just that: their individuality, and along with it, their individual free will (that will most likely seek what IT wants). This is probably the most problematic part of human nature for a utilitarian state.

The most frightening thing for me about all of this (for the moment anyway) is that, in this system, our problematic and self-seeking free wills would combine with Socrates' "laws" and the communitarian lifestyle of the city, creating a whole new Sodom, full of self-seeking individuals who, because of their communitarian lifestyle, will have every opportunity to take every advantage of the others in their community. Debauchery would run rampant as the sense of family and love for the individual soul is destroyed; this destruction of the love of the individual along with the repressed emotions he suffers under Socrates' laws will lend to a selfish search of the individual to find this love that he lacks, causing physical and emotional whoring of the worst kinds. This, again, would cycle around and further the lack of the sense of love for one's individual soul and, in turn, the selfish seeking to fill these deficits. It sounds altogether too much like Brave New World meets Equilibrium, for undoubtedly, Aldous Huxley and Kurt Wimmer found similarities SOMEWHERE, right? This vicious cycle--just as the Charing-T Tower and the Tetra Grammaton really would build EACH OTHER--would congruently build gratuitous immorality and emotional callousness, destroying the society in a maelstrom of self-service, self-pity, and SELF-destruction, instead of leading upward toward Grace.

In all honesty, I think I'm beginning to understand what Dr. Reynolds means when he says that this document is probably one of the most dangerous that has ever been written in the history of the human race. Pray that our rulers do not become philosophers a la Plato (or if Plato himself doesn't believe anything that Socrates is saying, pray our rulers do not read Plato and miss what he is really saying), else WE become worthy of perishing in a rain of fire and brimstone.

In short, be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Please.

The Irony of Drowning. A Picture in Words.

2006-06-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

Here's the first post. Yippee!

This has been something I've been thinking about over the past semester. I hope the thinking has been fruitful. :)

"I was swimming through the waves
For what must have been days, but could find no relief.
And when I started sinking down,
I thought for certain I would drown until I saw you in the ocean underneath.
All the the bright colored fish tell of a treasure in a dull shell:
'Such subtlety, so easily missed!'
You, my hidden pearl of pure and perfect love,
And I'm a living example of 100% the opposite of this!"

Excerpt from "Tie Me Up! Untie Me!"
- mewithoutYou

I find the human condition very ironic at times. WE STRIVE SO HARD; we work and we toil, all for things that we think will make us happy. This is obviously the case in our secular, uber-post-modern, materialistic society, where our chief export isn't cars or food or oil or electronics or even a service of some kind, but our culture and our lifestyle. People all across the world hate us for flaunting our money around and using it mostly on pleasurable things, and at the same time want so badly to be able to take part in our post-modern Vanity Fair. After all, isn't this desire to be "happy" the major motivation behind our entire capitalist system, for which we are so prosperous, and for which most of the world hates our guts? The thought, "I work hard so I can get a good job and make lots of money so I can buy things to make me happy," and other thoughts like it are pretty dang commonplace in America, after all.

I think Sigmund Freud nailed how Americans so often think nicely when he said, "They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word 'happiness' only relates to the last." While Freud is incredibly depressing for me to read, and while he completely discounts religious activities with faulty reasoning, he is also a brilliant observer of human nature. As he smartly points out, we want so badly to have these good feelings for ourselves, and so we strive--and strive hard--to keep our "good" feelings.

It even happens to Christians too, doesn't it? We want so badly to DO THE RIGHT THINGS, to read our Bibles and pray a lot, and go to church and serve people, and not sin and to be the "best" Christians we can and strive as to win the prize, because that's supposed to make us happy, right?

We swim so hard, don't we?

But what happens when we get tired? What happens when we can barely tread water? What happens when we stop swimming and start sinking?

We drown.

But it's a funny thing, really, that when we start sinking and start submitting to the ocean, when we feel like we're losing control, when we feel like WE'RE DROWNING, we also figure out that it's OKAY to drown in the Ocean of Grace, and when we do, we find the treasure we had been swimming after all that time.

Ironic, isn't it?