The Sarabite: Towards an Aesthetic Christianity

I have jumped ship!!!!!!

2008-02-17T03:01:00.000-08:00

I continue my blogging misadventure at the following link:

Reditus: A Chronicle of Aesthetic Christianity

Please adjust your links accordingly. Thank you.

Catholic Traditionalism as Fundamentalism

2008-02-16T08:52:00.001-08:00

From SI.Com:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Kansas activities officials are investigating a religious school's refusal to let a female referee call a boys' high school basketball game.

The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary's Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game.

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs.

If you have spent any time around the SSPX orbit, you know that St. Mary's is sort of like the Lefebvrist Mecca. It is the place where you may still be a kook, but at least you are surrounded by hundreds of other kooks just like you.

While most traditionalist and conservative Catholics don't go nearly as far as our buddies from Kansas, this same thinking is also present in many ways in much of their discourse. More to come on this later...

Difunta Correa

2008-02-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

Add this to the religious freak show pile...

From this site:

Until very recently, Roman Catholicism was Argentina’s official faith, and it still permeates daily life. When the shepherd fails the flock, though, the people seek help from popular saints like the Difunta Correa—whose shrine draws upward of 100,000 Semana Santa pilgrims to the desert hamlet of Vallecito, about 60 kilometers east of San Juan. More than just a religious experience, it’s an economic force, and even nonbelievers will find plenty to contemplate in the mixture of the sacred and the profane.

According to legend, María Antonia Deolinda Correa died of thirst in the desert while following her conscript husband—a small land-owner—during the mid-19th-century civil wars. When passing muleteers found her body, though, her baby son was still alive, feeding at her breast. While it seems far-fetched that any infant could survive on milk from a lifeless body, the legend had such resonance among local folk that the waterless site became a spontaneous shrine. The Difunta (“Defunct,” as dead people are known in the countryside) became a popular “saint,” despite limited proof that she even existed.

In the 150-plus years since the Difunta first colonized the consciousness of poor sanjuaninos and other Argentines, millions have come to regard her as a miracle worker. She is not a saint, though, and at best the official church regards belief in her as superstition; at worst, it has denounced her as contrary to its dogma, and has even installed its own priest and built its own church to combat the heresy...

Writing in the 19th century, Domingo F. Sarmiento—himself a sanjuanino—expressed what the official church still privately believes about rural religious practices like the Difunta Correa:

Christianity exists . . . as a tradition which is perpetuated, but corrupted; colored by gross superstitions and unaided by instruction, rites, or convictions.

Believers, for their part, see no contradiction between their formal faith and their devotion to the Difunta. That devotion has spread throughout the republic, as shown in roadside shrines—some of them astonishingly elaborate—from the Bolivian border at La Quiaca to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. Their marker is the water-filled bottles left to slake her thirst, but there are also banknotes (from the hyper-inflationary past), low-value coins, and miscellaneous auto parts (truckers are among her most committed adherents).

Note: Not that I think this is true. Just interesting.

For AG

2008-02-14T06:31:00.000-08:00

You are my prayer

In the painless sunset
That has not yet set,
And in the mist that veils
The splendor of the
Noonday sun,

I have uttered a word
Incapable of longing,

It passes through the grass
And is silent in noise.

Painting the day a
Dull shade of light,
Fading all sorrow into
Shadows of fog-

It is you I have uttered:
That face, those eyes,

Eternal filling of tireless space,
The universe folded up,
A deep pant, a smile,
The embrace and the sighs.

I have heaven here in my hand,
A dizzying state-
A thousand feet of falling
Into a pit of song
Arm in arm-

High Mass in a floating cathedral,
A hymn,
This gentle rustling of beads
In old hands,

As if God pulled up a new Law
Out of a basket of flowers,

A new Faith where everything is you
And you are all,
The muted passing of
Waves and birds.

The night is so far away
In the distance.

You are the scriptures,
The temple, the second coming,
And the empty tomb.

You are my prayer
Uttered at the gates of paradise:

The key and the throne,
And the tree of life.

-Arturo Vasquez

The Dignity of Man depends on the Dignity of Christ

2008-02-12T18:25:00.000-08:00

Just as man is the absolute perfection of all lower things, so Christ is the absolute perfection of all men. If, as the philosophers say, all perfection in each class is derived by the other members from the most perfect one as if from a fountain, no one may doubt that the perfection of all good in men is derived from Christ as a man. To Him alone the Spirit was given without measure, so that we might all receive it from His fullness. So how without any doubt this prerogative is due to Him as God and man, which also, so far as He was Man, was peculiar to Him and became Him as a legitimate privilege.

-Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Heptaplus

Pious Impiety

2008-02-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

...Or: How some would say that religion is bad for virtue, and the sense in which they are right

As I have mentioned in a previous post, I am hacking my way through Matthew Stewart's book, The Courtier and the Heretic on the philosophical journeys of Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz. My philosophical studies have been very informal, and I have a distaste for meticulous arguments. As always, however, there are certain aspects of philosophy that do stimulate the hamster wheels turning in my brain, and one of them is the relationship between religion and virtue in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. In my opinion, this philosopher helped to found a spiritually deadly anti-pious piety that even contaminates religious people to this day often without their knowing it. I should know, because I too was affected by it once.

As you may know, Spinoza was born in the Netherlands to a devout Jewish family that was exiled from Portugal. His upbringing was very devout, and he was expected to become the next great rabbi that that Jewish community was destined to produce. The young Baruch, however, had other plans for himself. Living in the relatively tolerant Netherlands which allowed all sorts of creeds and ways of life to flourish, the young Spinoza felt he had to articulate a philsophical point of view that could define and encompass the new liberal order of things. Breaking out of the shell of the Hebrew schools, he began to study and subsequently discard all of the philosophies of the past. His iconoclasm ultimately resulted in his excommunication from the synagogue and his exile within an exile from the community of his birth.

As you may also know, Spinoza created a liberal system of mystical pantheism that discarded all of the philosophical foundations that had come before it, and can even scandalize the modern ear to this day. In Spinoza's system, God and Nature are really the same, and the "spiritual" and material have one and the same identity. The mind has no more of an exalted existence than a chair or a blade of grass. Nevertheless, even for Spinoza, the mind is immortal within the philosophical exercise since, according to Stewart, immortality is for Spinoza, "the union of the mind with ideas that are themselves timeless." This immortality is the contemplation of the order that is Nature/God.

Like the Stoics, then, accepting one's rather limited space in the cosmos is the true path towards hapiness. Spinoza thus pits contemplation against religion and virtue against tradition. As Spinoza himself so poignantly puts it:

Hence we clearly understand how far astray from true estimation of virtue are those who, failing to understand that virute itself and the worship of God are hapiness itself and utmost freedom, expect God to bestow on them the highest rewards in return for their virtue and meritorious actions as if in return for the basest slavery.

Here we see the emergence of the idea that religion is contrary to reason since religion is self-interested, if not so say selfish. Real happiness does not lie in reward, and virtue, for Spinoza, is a reward unto itself. As Stewart puts it in explaining the apostate Jew's axiom, He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return:

Spinoza's God... will make no exception to its natural laws on your account; it will work no miracles for you; it will tender no affection, show no sign of concern for your well-being; in short, it will owe you nothing that you do not already have.

Anyone who has ever read St. John of the Cross or any other Christian mystic can easily recognize some of the language and the tone that our pantheist uses. Indeed, that is why I have always personally been weary of reading any mystic and I would endeavor to say that I try to be anti-mystical. (To the popular refrain, "I am a very spiritual person", I will intentionally say that I am a religious person, with all of the superstition, wrathful Gods, and "mumbo-jumbo" intact.) It is a very pride-building thing to say that one is fundamentally disinterested in what happens to you as long as "God's will be done", but that seems more Stoic than Christian. I couldn't help but think on this passage from Scripture:

For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

For me, Christianity is an inherently interested religion. And yes, that means that it can look selfish. In the higher realms of mysticism and the soaring heights of charity, things can become a bit ambiguous. But in our day to day lives, we ask God for very childish things. That is the way it is supposed to be. And we shouldn't be ashamed of it. We should not be ashamed that we offer up our sufferings here on earth in order to be happy in Heaven. If there is any supposed moral inferiority to this sentiment, than so be it.

It is this same impulse, however, that is responsible for the colorfulness of Catholic Christianity, and the Western religious imagination in general. If the Reformation fought against anything, it was "superstition"; the idea that we can "manipulate" God with indulgences, scapulars, dead helpers, etc. It is the very condescenion of God in the Incarnation that makes this self-interested "superstition" possible. It is precisely because the purpose of God's coming down to earth is to uplift mankind and not to supress it that Catholicism can seem like Voodoo sometimes. A little bit of holy water and some brown cloth go a long way...

There is a deadly asceticism and an pious impiety that is at the heart of any many atheistic ideologies of modernity and postmodernity. It is the idea, as I have expressed it before, that man is alone in the universe, tossed about by its brute laws and deserted by the cosmos. In this world, one can have the stiffist of upper lips: we must be brave in the face of a universe that will swallow us up again as it randomly as it spit us out. As my exposure to Marxism in particular dictates, man must fight for justice as much as possible in this split second in the wasteland of cosmic eternity before he perishes like everything else. It sounds rather romantic, doesn't it? It also sounds much more heroic and rational that the Christian alternative. But it is still wrong, and in the end it still breeds barbarism.

I would argue that many of the crises in modern religiosity result from an unjustified moral inferiority complex that religious people often have. We think that the idea that we are behave ourselves in order to go to Heaven as someting childish and almost shameful. We often wish to resort to higher explanations, thinking that virtue is an "end unto itself", even though to be virtuous as one should be is out of the reach of simple human powers. Virtue is not a human thing, but rather a divine thing. And it has a reward, and it is the only thing that matters. As one Spanish proverb has it, he who save himself knows all things, and he who doesn't knows absolutely nothing.

There is also an ontological asymmetry going on, one which Iamblichus elaborated on in De Mysteriis when speaking of the divine mania:

This, therefore, is a difference the most manifest of all others, because all the works of divine natures differ [in a transcendent degree] from the works of other beings. For as the more excellent genera are exempt from all others, thus also their energies do not resemble those of any other nature. Hence, when you speak of divine mania, immediately remove from it all human perversions. And if you ascribe a sacred "sobriety and vigilance" to divine natures, you must not consider human sobriety and vigilance as similar to it. But by no means compare the diseases of the body, such as suffusions, and the imaginations excited by diseases, with divine imaginations. For what have the two in common with each other?

Does man know, then, what is truly virtuous, truly sane, and truly selfless? Again, this is the hubris of modernity, and it is the same hubris that is slowly dissolving the spiritual, liturgical, and historical imagination both within and outside the Church. An idea of virtue or an idea of rationality separated from divinity itself leads only to darkness, destruction, and ignorance. In trying to purify religion and the human mind of self-interested irrationality, Spinoza's ascetical atheism destroys man himself.

Let us rejoice, then, in our dark, medieval and life-giving superstitions.

The Church turned in on itself...

2008-02-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

Fr. Richard McBrien reflects on how a section of the Vatican bureacracy has always resisted the Vatican II liturgical reforms from California Catholic Daily.

My comment: I don't know why people who write about the Catholic Church focus so much on liturgy as a means of lay empowerment. It seems to me that if laity have a vital role to play in the Church, it is outside the walls of the church building itself. The purpose of a theology of an active laity is not so that Grandma can hand out Communion every Sunday, it is to take Christ into the world that doesn't know Him. "Empowerment of laity in the Church" seems to be a profoundly masturabatory proposition; sort of like divvying up the spoils of a city reduced to rubble, or vultures pecking at a carcass.

Amruta Amrutaa Bhakti Songs

2008-02-05T17:19:00.001-08:00

Catholicity

2008-02-03T12:59:00.000-08:00

To see in Catholicism one religion among others, one system among others, even if it be added that it is the only true religion, the only system that works, is to mistake its very nature, or at least to stop at the threshhold. Catholicism is religion itself. It is the form that humanity must put on in order finally to be itself. It is the only reality which involves by its existence no opposition. It is therefore the very opposite of a "closed society". Like its Founder it is eternal and sure of itself, and the very intransigence in matters of principle which prevents its ever being ensnared by transitory things secures for it a flexibility of infinite comprehensiveness, the very opposite of harsh exclusiveness which charactarizes the sectarian spirit... The Church is at home everywhere, and everyone should feel himself at home in the Church. Thus the risen Christ, when he shows himself to his friends, takes on the countenance of all races and each hears him in his own tongue.

-Henri Cardinal de Lubac, Catholicism : Christ and the Common Destiny of Man

This is one of my favorite quotes in Catholic theology, and I think it best exemplifies the call to universalism to which only the Roman Catholic Church can truly respond.

There is a danger in many circles to mistake certain traditions for things that are given universally at the point of the propagation of the Apostolic tradition. It seems that many would have a certain age, phraseology, or style of art as constitutive of the essence of Christianity. For de Lubac, such prejudices are untenable. There are not certain times where the ethos of Christianity is entirely under the assured guidance of the Holy Ghost, and other times when the Holy Ghost abandons average Christians to their own devices. The wrestling between Divine Grace and human nature is a constant phenomenon that requires discernment on our part as thinking Christians. There is no point in apotheosizing one part of our past while rejecting another.

There is also a temptation to read more into certain parts of the past than is actually there. Again, I must posit again my simple formulation of the essence of historical romanticism: to read into the past agendas of which our ancestors were unaware. Our own crises of meaning in postmodernity do not give us license to manipulate the past to our own whims, nor can we pit the past against the present for our own purposes. It is in the here and now that the Church is made, built primarily on the foundations of our immediate past.

Otherwise, what we will do as Christians is to make the Gospel into an ideology. And ideologies do not open the mind and the heart, they close them. And to be open, to be truly Christian and human, is to remain open. The key to this is the philosophical tool of mercy. We must look on historical and cultural situations not to judge them in the ways in which they fall short, but rather on how they can be used as vehicles of grace. And we must refuse to squeeze things into boxes, even if this means that we must think and define things rather sloppily. That is the essence of Catholic thinking. It is not ready made, it cannot be fit into neat slogans, and it will always look unpolished and unfinished. But that is the first step to our transformation in Christ.

The haunting of the the past

2008-02-01T09:17:00.000-08:00

HOY ERES MENOS

Alguien que ha estado tratando de olvidarte,
Y a cuya memoria, por eso mismo,
Regresabas como la melodía de una canción de moda
Que todos tararean sin querer,
O como la frase de un anuncio o una consigna;
Alguien así, ahora,
Probablemente
(Seguramente) sin saberlo,
Ha empezado, al fin, a olvidarte.

Hoy eres menos.

-Roberto Fernández Retamar

******

TODAY YOU ARE LESS

Someone who has been trying to forget you
And to his memory, for that reason,
You always returned like the melody of a popular song
That people croon without knowing it,
Or like a phrase from an announcement or a saying;
Someone like that, now,
Probably,
(Certainly) without realizing it,
Has begun, finally, to forget you.

Today you are less.

Religion by the Book

2008-01-31T15:45:00.000-08:00

An interesting post at the South Bend Reliquiae blog on Catholicism and apologetics. Well worth a read.

Laudate Pueri - Domenico Zipoli

2008-01-30T11:46:00.001-08:00

So, you think you're so damn smart...

2008-01-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

(I usually only write normal posts so that some of you will read weird ones, like this one.)

I read with much delight the recent post from Ecce Ego, Quia Vocasti Me on Paganizing Christianity. You should all read it. I like this in particular:

In the enlightened post-Vatican II world, such stories are seen as far from the pristine Christianity of the Early Church, and one that is envisioned by the Council. I know one man who was a devotee of the Holy Child in his younger years, but altogether stopped believing when he came to realize the full extent of 'paganizing' elements in the cult of the Santo Nino. But how does one exactly define paganism? Is it rising from the dead, or turning water into wine, casting out demons, or speaking with forces beyond our reach? If we are to apply this frame of thought to the Gospel, then it would seem as if the Gospel itself were Pagan; indeed, such a radical framework would almost invariably filter out any hint of the supernatural, leaving only the natural-- cold, lifeless, historical, dry.

This is somwhat apropos of the book I am currently reading, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart. In the figure of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Stewart finds one of the founders of the modern, secular perspecitve of thought. Here are a couple of enlightening quotes from his work:

[Spinoza] adopted as his guiding maxim the words of [Rene Descartes]: "That nothing ought to be admitted as True, but that which has been proved by good and solid reasons." It wasn't long before he concluded that this maxim ruled out most of the Bible, not to mention Descartes' own philosophy....

The most impious man of the century transparently took himself to be the most pious. He rejected the orthodoxy of his day not because he believed less, but because he believed more.

...which is very much a sentiment that underlies much of the discourse in even conservative Christian circles. How many times do we hear of the necessity of purging of certain elements from religion that are unsavory to modern man? How many times are we asked, even by some legitimate ecclesiastical authorities, to make sure we have a "mature faith"? I would contend that such exhortations have the danger of slouching slowly towards the modern agnosticism founded by our apostate Jewish philosopher. And I would rather be put in a category with pagans and idolaters a million times rather than be lumped in with "civilzied" and "rational" atheists and agnostics.

And speaking of pagans, our favorite pagan hierophant and philosopher wrote something very pertinent to this discussion. When addressing the problem of evil when it comes to divine incantations, Iamblichus wrote the following:

For those that are good are the causes of good; and the Gods possess good essentially. They do nothing, therefore, that is unjust. Hence other causes of guilty deeds must be investigated. And if we are not able to discover these causes, it is not proper to throw away the true conception respecting the Gods, nor on account of the doubts whether these unjust deeds are performed, and how they are effected, to depart from notions concerning the Gods which are truly clear. For it is much better to acknowledge the insufficiency of our power to explain how unjust actions are perpetrated, than to admit any thing impossible or false concerning the Gods...

-De Mysteriis, emphasis mine

So here we have our solutions to the problem of evil and all the other doubts about whether God could make a meal for thousands out of a few fishes and loaves, among other things. The beautiful thing about Iamblichus, in spite of the fact that he was a staunch pagan in the early Christian era, is that he knew exactly where his place in the cosmos was. (A common thing to say in Argentina when someone is asking something impertinet or stupid is: ¡ubicate!, which sort of means, "wake up and realize where the hell you are!") He knew that, being a mortal, rational animal, he had to defer more often than not to beings that were higher up on the cosmic food chain than he was. This does not mean that one sinks into fideism or intellectual sloth, as is evident in the mind-boggling systematic rigor of late Neoplatonism. But it does mean that we should realize that our dianoia (our discursive thinking) is a means of union to that which is higher and not an instrument of ultimate power. This sentiment was also passed on to the Church through that famous figure of St. Dionyisus. But now it is becoming a voice and a warning that is increasingly faint.

In my own life and my own family, as you may know, the Holy Infant of Atocha is the manifestation of the Christ Child that most revered. I leave you, dear reader, with part of his story, from this website:

The statue that came from Spain had the Holy Child sitting on the lap of His Mother. At one point, the statue separated itself from His Mother. No one knows exactly why this happened. The people had a throne built for the Santo Niño, where he sits even today. He is also to be found in His own Chapel in the Santuario de Plateros.

Many mornings, the Sisters that care for the Shrine find the Infant’s shoes all dusty, from being out all night caring for pilgrims. Many people who have seen Him during the night confirm that His basket is always full of food and His gourd is always full of water, yet the statue itself has an empty basket and gourd. At times, He is referred to as the "Night Walking Infant of Atocha". Many miracles are attributed to His Presence and the Shrine is filled with acknowledgements of these.

Just in case you didn't know...

2008-01-27T15:43:00.000-08:00

In the Spanish tradition, after a priest is ordained in the traditional rite and his hands are anointed and bound by the bishop, he goes to the altar rail, and if his mother is there, she unbinds the pieces of cloth and keeps them as a sign that she has given a son to the service of God and the Church. When she dies, they are put in her hands and she is buried with them where they remain until the Second Coming of Christ. Here is a photo from the Society of St. Pius X seminary in Argentina showing this. I am pretty sure that this is only a Spanish tradition.

Image source

How the other half lives...

2008-01-24T18:58:00.000-08:00

Our field trip to a Mormon temple, part 2

So anyway, back to the old guys.

What really pissed me off about the spiel of the Mormon elders was just the amount the gall they had when talking about their church's history. I suppose I don't have to explain it to most of you; how Joseph Smith brought forth a new revelation that he translated from some books that an angel gave him, etc. That wasn't at all shocking. I guess what struck me most was how bizarrely logical their position is in the context of the Protestantism in which it emerged.

Since the Reformation eliminated all real authority in the church, it was only logical that someone at some point would try to resurrect a religion in which God is present in all senses of the word, that is, not just "spiritually". And yes, our cadre of middle aged men had the audacity to claim that THEY were indeed successors to the Apostles, invested with their powers to bind and loose. Just like Catholic bishops. Except in this case, they threw out Nicene orthodoxy in the process. And they were wearing some very well-tailored suits.

I don't need to elaborate too much that I found this very insulting. When the Mormons and their more orthodox Protty counterparts speak of the degeneration of the Church, I find myself so indignant that I almost have to laugh. I mean, we were dying in the Colosseum and shedding our blood for Christ back when these people weren't even a twinkle in their great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother's eye. But of course, we were already idolaters and Mary-worshippers... Whatever. You can't make everyone happy.

AG has already commented that there were photos of the interior of the temple at the center, since you couldn't really go inside. And as someone else commented, it looks like the lobby of a Marriott hotel. Go figure. The spaceship actually looks like a normal conference hall inside. One wonders why they went to the trouble to make it so strange on the outside.

As we were about to leave, my rather child-like (childish?) curiosity couldn't help but look inside a door that had some sign like "God's Plan for Your Family" on it. We walked in and saw a screen and some rather strange objects lurking in the shadows. I thought that we had strolled into a closet, so we decided to leave. Just then, however, one of the Mormon girls emerged from the shadows and asked if we wanted to see the video presentation. We gave our lukewarm yes, and she explained how the exhibit worked: there were a series of exhibits that we would have to walk through in order to view the Mormon ideal of the family. Once one finished, we would have to get up to view the next one. It would take approximately half an hour. It was the theological equivalent of the "It's a Small World" ride.

After the introductory screen, we moved on to our first exhibit: a baby's nursery. A screen on the back wall began to play a brief movie in which a young couple were kept up at night by their newborn infant. (They were standing in a nursery exactly like the one we had in front of us. Creepy.) The woman said in the course of the conversation, "Just think, a week ago she was still in Heaven with God..."

Excuse me?! But I thought she would have been in her mother's womb. But as in all of the rest of the presentation, theological absurdities were presented with a kind smile and the assurance that such bizarre doctrines were perfectly normal. After all, such a clean-cut, cute, white middle class family couldn't possibly believe anything strange or abnormal, could it?

The main theological point of the presentation, however, was that the family was eternal. That is, the family is such a sacred institution that it continues to exist after death. So much for, "in Heaven, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be like the angels." It's almost a rather sly one-upmanship in the culture wars: not only do we value the nuclear family more than others, but we deify it!

However, at the very end, we were supposed to be given the coup de grace. We were placed in a viewing room apart and were prepped by our handler that this was her favorite part personally. I should here describe her: she was not your typical Mormon. She was from New Zealand, probably either of indigenous or mixed racial background. And you could tell that she was as sweet as syrup. She told us that she was on mission and could only call her parents on the other side of the world twice a year. The rest of the time, she could write them once a month. This broke my heart, since even in seminary, I was allowed to call my family once a month for ten minutes, and could write them all I wanted. With tears in her eyes, she rolled the film.

This was supposed to seal the deal: the young family, their loving grandparents, the sacrifices of time and energy parents take to raise their children... it was the Gospel of Joseph Smith that moved it all up a notch. In presenting the story of salvation history, the short film emphasized the theme of darkness. Man was in darkness who was once in light, and man kept trying to extinguish the light. Finally, God the Father sent His own son, but men even extinguished this light. (Funny, at this part, they mentioned the Crucifixion of Jesus, but skipped His resurrection. I looked at AG and whispered, "Didn't He rise from the dead after that?") Only Joseph Smith and the Mormons restored the light to the world. At the end, with the representation of the apotheosis of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, the dimmed portrait of Christ emerged luminous to the right of the screen. Queue the music... A Hollywood finish.

We thanked our hostess, told her in the course of a brief conversation that we were Roman Catholics, and walked out into the afternoon sun.

After reflecting on this day, it all made me really sad. I remembered one time, again in Argentina, where I saw another Mormon church. On a dirty, impoverished road about an hour and a half outside of Buenos Aires, that Mormon church looked exactly the same as all the Mormon churches I had seen growing up in the States, all the way down to the immaculate lawn in the front of it. (An immaculate lawn anywhere in Argentina is a rare occurrence.) And then I realized that the Mormons are not peddling a religion; they are peddling a way of life. More precisely, they are substituting the American suburban dream for the Logos: and the subdivision became flesh and dwelt among us. Good clean living. Peppy young women in skirts. Lots of healthy smiling kids. And affluence. And cleanliness. To be spread to the four ends of the earth... I think I am going to be sick.

Mormonism is the highest form of American Puritanism with the Christianity ripped out of it. It is everything that is pleasant and nice about Christianity without the doctrine. And America sits up above the nations, a new Zion to be converted to Mormonism, and that parade of saints will march until it reaches the ends of the earth, until it proves, once and for all, that to be white, attractive, middle-class, and clean cut is to be made in the image and likeness of God.

Yes, I do feel sorry for that poor girl who showed us that movie. Please say an extra prayer for her. I leave you with the opening of an old post from the Undercroft that for me embodies what the real Church looks like:

MGR RONALD KNOX, somewhere, illustrates a salient difference between Protestantism and Catholicism by means of an “umbrella test”: if a man leaves an umbrella behind in a Catholic or a Methodist chapel, in which of these can he be confident of finding it, just where he left it, on the following week? We know the answer – or at least we used to: if you leave an item of property behind in a Methodist chapel, it will remain untouched until you retrieve it, except insofar as some kind soul may have set it aside for safekeeping until your return. Anything left in a Catholic Church will be nicked - full stop...

Puritanism is not Catholic. It is not even human. Prudery is not purity. Respectability is not holiness, but if anything, an actual impediment to holiness. The Church of Christ is home to saints and sinners; the merely respectable are quite welcome to shift for themselves.

How the other half lives...

2008-01-23T21:08:00.002-08:00

Our field trip to a Mormon temple- part 1

If you have ever been in the Bay Area, you will recognize the other side of the building pictured above. Among the buildings that sit atop the hills that hem the cities of the East Bay into their pocket next to the sea, the most familiar is this space ship-looking building. It is, of course, the Mormon temple for the area. And as I have stated from having passed the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City and having heard the stories of people who have toured these imposing structures, they are like the Vatican if redone by Disney.

I have known Mormons all my life. In all of my honors classes at my public high school in California, Mormons were well represented. (And Mexican Americans were not, even though they constituted 60% of the student body, but that is the subject of another griping post entirely.) The Mormon kids were almost always blondes and very light complected; they were often the best students and athletes. They were almost pitied by others since the Mormon church in Hollister was right next door to the high school, and it was known that they had to go to their Mormon religion classes before regular classes started.

Fast forward to my renegade Lefebvrist seminary years: on the plane going to Buenos Aires that I took in order to become a crypto-fascist integrist seminarian, most of my travelling companions were bubbly, all-American Mormon missionaries ready to spread the Gospel of Joseph Smith in the Southern Cone. One of the first structures I saw in Argentina was the Mormon temple for Buenos Aires. It was right off the airport. How convenient...

Anyway, there were actually a few freakish incidents involving Mormons during my time in South America. Everywhere I went, the only Americans I would see were Mormons. Mormons riding bikes in the suburbs of the Capital. Mormons in front of the National Shrine in Lujan. I nearly got a group of fellow SSPX seminarians into a fist fight with a group of blonde Mormon kids right next to the obelisk on the Avenida 9 de Julio. And I saw Mormons on dirt roads in the countryside outside of Cordoba...

But that is worlds away now. Finally having a bit more time on my hands to do frivolous things, I finally decided to visit the people I have tormented so much on their own territory. And I decided to take AG with me so that I would control myself and play nice.

First of all, I have to say if you are ever in the Bay Area and are tired of snapping photos of the Golden Gate Bridge for the millionth time, this temple is well worth the visit. Pray particularily for a clear day because the view from it is gorgeous. The grounds are well kept, the fountain is beautiful, and the structure itself is, well... something to see.

After touring the grounds on top of the Oakland hills, we finally decided, with some forboding, to enter into the visitors center for some informative attempts to learn Mormon doctrine. We skipped the part where the statue of Jesus "talks" to you. (Again, the Vatican if done by Disney.) We went over to the reproductions of Christian religious art and the model sized replica of the city of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. (Which was kinda cool.)

Next, we went to the large doll house looking structure where an interactive video presentation was given of Mormon children answering such questions like, "who is God?" and "what happens after we die?" All very cute to be sure.

Next, we saw an "original" copy of the Book of Mormon, all the way back from 1830. I'll give it a two and a half out of five stars.

Next, we went into a little room where we were presented with photos of the Mormon hierarchy: a bunch of smiling white men in nice suits. (I think I whispered to AG: "Our hierarchy are much snazzier dressers.") In another interactive video presentation, each one explained a part of Mormon history and doctrine and swore that they were completely sincere and could be trusted to be telling the truth. ("I'm white, middle class, and have nice teeth. And I kinda look like your Uncle Bill. So what I am saying is true...")

But what they said, well, that really got my goat...

But for that you will have to wait for part two. This post is too long as it is.

Terry Riley's Music of the Spheres

2008-01-22T20:45:00.000-08:00

See this review of Terry Riley's 2002 work for chorus and string quartet, Sun Rings, by AG.

The only thoughts I had were more to put the piece in context of Terry Riley's opus. His collaboration with the Kronos Quartet has went on for more than a quarter century, and he has admitted that it has been the Kronos Quartet that has led him to re-explore more conventional means of composing other than the improvisations that characterized his output of the 1960's and '70's.

Riley's music is at once avant-garde and accessible, other-worldly and and at the same time almost banal. He can have in the same piece examples of great lyricism and dissonance; he can seem so familiar and strange in the same work. Styles of music that he has become proficient in, from romanticism to minimalism, from Indian raga to jazz and bebop, all come together in his music fluidly and create a voice that is at once unique, organic, challenging and soulful. The presentation at Stanford last Friday night was no exception to this.

I must say that after this multimedia presentation of our small place in the cosmos, it made me feel quite small. But it also affirmed a principle that is near and dear to the thinkers that I am studying now: the music of the spheres. While these sounds from outer space were probably not what Ficino and Pythagoras were imagining in their fantasies about the heavens, it is nevertheless wonderful to know that the heavens indeed do sing. And it could only be a composer with the depth, vision, and audacity of a Terry Riley who could sing along with them. In the song, then, we become just as large as the stars.

But the soul receives the sweetest harmonies and numbers through the ears, and by these echoes is reminded and aroused to the divine music which may be heard by the more subtle and penetrating sense of mind. According to the followers of Plato, divine music is twofold. One kind, they say, exists entirely in the eternal mind of God. The second is in the motions and order of the heavens, by which the heavenly spheres and their orbits make a marvellous harmony. In both of these our soul took part before it was imprisoned in our bodies. But it uses the ears as messengers, as though they were chinks in this darkness. By the ears, as I have already said, the soul receives the echoes of that incomparable music, by which it is led back to the deep and silent memory of the harmony which it previously enjoyed. The whole soul then kindles with desire to fly back to its rightful home, so that it may enjoy that true music again.

-Marsilio Ficino

Human Nature

2008-01-21T21:19:00.000-08:00

O men, when you consider the universe, you are comprehending your own nature!

-St. Gregory of Nyssa

In other words...

2008-01-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

Some people like the Roman Catholic Church because it teaches you the truth.

Maybe. But I don't think that this is comprehensive enough.

I love the Church because it teaches you how to be a human being. And for me, at least, that is more important. (The truth, certainly, is part of it.)

Love as Message

2008-01-18T10:27:00.000-08:00

or On Poverty, Potatoes, Persecution, Fumie, Compassion, the SSPX, Porcelain Angels, Mournful Prayer, Mountain Dew, and Why We Should Love Jesus

What are the Japanese peasants looking for in me? These people who work and live and die like beasts find for the first time in our teaching a path in which they cast away the fetters that bind them. The Buddhist bonzes simply treat them like cattle. For a long time they have just lived in resignation to such a fate.

Thus writes the main character in Shusaku Endo's novel, Silence, about two missionary priests who enter seventeenth century Japan to minister to the persecuted Christians there. In this passage, the young priest, Sebastian Rodrigues, meditates on why these clandestine Christians went to so much trouble to preserve their Faith in spite of cruel persecution. In describing their way of life in which all they had to eat were meagre vegetables and potatoes, where they had to eek out a living in some very harsh and ruggid conditions, and where they were taxed almost to starvation by the Japanese nobles, the young cleric came to only one conclusion on why they were embraced by the peasants: because the foreign priests actually cared about them, and no one else did.

(For more insights into the novel, one can read AG's book review of it starting here.)

The strength of this Faith outlasted the persecution of the Japanese feudal hierarchy. In spite of having to step on Christian religious images called fumie (one is pictured above) to prove that they had no allegiance to the Christian religion, these abject people kept the memory of the compassionate Christ in their heart. When the priests returned, they found they were still thousands of clandestine Christians still practicing after centuries of persecution.

In knowing many converts and "reverts", I have found that there is in many a great temptation to "cerebralism". I have discerned this in myself when I first entered the sphere of the Society of St. Pius X: in spite of all the prejudices against them as being fundamentalist, closed-mided, and cold, they were some of the nicest, compassionate, and dare I say it, most Christian people I have ever met. I don't think I would have gone as far with them as I did if they weren't. But even there, I was at first consumed with the fervor of argument. I loved the SSPX and being Catholic because it meant that I had all of the right answers. And they were well-conceived and rigourous answers, answers that absolved me from the errors with which the rest of our society is affected. Only later did I encounter such figures as Dan Monary and Fr. Álvaro Calderón (who, by the way, is still the holiest priest I have ever met). People like them and other Catholics I have met made me think that even with the intellectual rigor and argumentation that surround Roman Catholicism, one has to ultimately be convinced of its truth not just because one sees the logic of it all, but primarily because one sees holiness and compassion in it. In a word, it is because you see Christ in the Church that you believe.

AG has responded to a meme here on why she loves Jesus. Her first reason is very simple: Because my mom taught me to. This reason could be considered a cop-out that we children from pious families can use, but this is not the case. For Mrs. G, AG's mother, does not just pay lip service to her Faith; she didn't teach it by words in order to make sure her children turned out to be "decent members of society". She taught it by deeds:

...when she came back from Communion, and then I’d watch her and she’d kneel down, place the first and second fingers of both hands on her temples, cover her face with the rest of her hands, and bow her head. She would go on praying like this for three minutes or so, and I’d wonder what she was thinking or saying. Then her head would lift and she’d gaze at the tabernacle...

How in the world could my mom clean the house of an ornery elderly woman who was given to making nasty statements about blacks (unware of my mom’s race), and then even come home and make cookies for this woman because she thought the woman would appreciate a homemade treat? What could move her to do that?

Answer: Because she loves Jesus.

Having met Mrs. G., I can say that she is one of loveliest people I have ever met. Even her vast collection of porcelain angels makes her all the more endearing. And I can honestly say that if you want to learn what Christianity is all about, don't just read a theology book or go on Catholic blogs at three in the morning while eating Cheetos and drinking a Mountain Dew. You won't learn real Christianity there. You will only know it by learning from and loving like Mrs. G.

In the end, if we are to be looked at as the light of the world, it is going to be for the exact same reason that the Japanese peasants looked to the Portuguese clerics from a far away land. Our society is so big and cold at times, and many people think that no one cares about them. If only people saw us Catholics as being the most caring, the most compassionate, and the most Christ-like, we probably wouldn't need apologetics. Like the situation in Japan, our Faith could outlast the cruelest assaults. So what then is stopping us? What is stopping us from proving that we can love the more than anyone else?

Andreas Scholl - Rodelinda - Aria - Vivi Tiranno

2008-01-17T21:26:00.001-08:00

That's right, some Handel. Because I can!!!

In the Eyes of a Plaster Saint

2008-01-16T00:00:00.000-08:00

When I visited the shops around the National Basilica of the Virgin of Lujan in Argentina, I couldn’t believe some of the kitschy statues I encountered. Some were badly painted and of poor quality. Others were just outright grotesque. Since we do not live in a Catholic country, religious art is monopolized by the official Church or reputable companies. In traditional countries, street vendors often sell religious art to make a living on the sidewalks in front of shrines or in random places in a city. My former abbot told me that in Greece, you can even buy your icons and pornography from the same stall…

After my encounter with these poorly made statues, I was overheard to say, “no wonder people become Protestant!” My aesthetic snobbery was unable to tolerate these poor examples of sacred art. Now I am beginning to see the error of my ways once again.

The main problem for me when approaching orthodox Catholic discourse in this country is that it all seems so “by the book”. (Liberal heterodox discourse also seems by the book, just a different book.) The Church in its hierarchical function has always tried to formalize and codify what is allowable, appropriate, and pious, and what isn’t. They are the shepherds, and we should follow them in what they say, or at least acquiesce when they make a decision. But that does not mean that they have to micromanage everything and that they are infallible in all of their decisions. The development of the ethos of the Church was not a top-down exercise in obedience, but rather a constant give and take between a hierarchy that was often detached from many concrete conditions of life and a laity that often had to face these brutal and nasty living conditions head on. This I think is the reason behind all of the devotions and practices that Protestants and not a few Catholics think of as superstition and idolatry. As I have said, Marian devotion and the cult of the relics did not begin because the bishops thought that they were a good idea. They were rather an expression of what people felt they needed out of the Church.

So when I read many examples of Catholic writing in this day and age, often I only see a preoccupation with being approved of and “official”. The treasures of our Faith were often not the result of official proclamations, but rather spontaneous reactions of simple folk who had to adapt to the conditions of life in which they found themselves. When I read “Catholicism by the book”, then, it’s not that I find it merely to be boring (I get the feeling that I have read all of these books before), but I also find it lifeless and quite stale. There is a great danger for fundamentalism on the one hand, and party-line posturing on the other.

The problem then, as one person put it, is that there are times in the Church that it doesn’t seem “real” anymore. That is, either people openly doubt the supernatural nature of the Church, as is the case of the heterodox, or people do violence to their modern sensibility viz. assent and consider it an act of Faith. (It very well may be one.) In the latter case, while we are universal skeptics and rationalists in all other matters, when it comes to Faith, we become die-hard believers. While this could be considered admirable, it is hardly sustainable in my opinion. The asymmetry between life and Faith, between society and Church, will not be able to hold out for long. Something, in my opinion, will have to give. The dissonance cannot sound indefinitely.

That is why I simply don’t see the “crisis” as many ecclesiastics and observers see it. I don’t see it as an issue of relativism vs. "absolute truth". When we are swimming in our daily lives in theory and praxis that are diametrically opposed to hierarchy, tradition, enchantment and order and are expected to take them up again in the pew on Sunday morning, something is not going to click in the minds of many of the faithful. And unless we are prepared to become crypto-fascists, monarchists, or New Agers, we will never be very consistent about how we integrate our lives. Can we really look at the eyes of a plaster saint in the same way, in supplication and devotion? Will this ever again feel natural to us? Will this ever again be a "bottom-up" phenomenon for people in the "developed world"?

I do not have the solution. All I know is that the path is steep and the way difficult. All I know is that despite my grandmothers’ questionable uses of eggs, traditional Christianity made much more sense to them than it does to us. That is because they really did feel that they owned the Gospel, that God really listened to them, either in turning water into wine or multiplying loaves on a mountainside. At times, I think we now feel that it’s only on loan to us.

Noise

2008-01-15T12:27:00.001-08:00

Thang Dao Dance Company dances the second movement of Philip Glass' Violin Concerto...

Or a bunch of noise, as one reader of this blog has put it.

De auxilio divino

2008-01-14T14:04:00.000-08:00

For since it is not possible to speak rightly about the Gods without the Gods, much less can any one perform works which are of an equal dignity with divinity, and obtain the foreknowledge of everything without [the inspiring influence of] the Gods. For the human race is imbecile, and of small estimation, sees but little, and posseses a connascent nothingness; and the only remedy of its inherent error, perturbation, and unstable mutation, is its participation, as much as possible, in the divine light. But he who excludes this, does the same thing as those who attempt to produce soul from things inanimate, or to generate intellect from things unintelligent. For without the cooperation of a cause, he constitutes divine works from things which are not divine.

-Iamblichus, De Mysteriis

By the way, I just got confirmation from my mother that both of my grandmothers were witches. Well, not really. They both used tricks from what is known in Mexico as "curanderismo". One of their prefered ones was used in particular when a child could not stop crying due to fever. The woman would say a Pater Noster over the child while rubbing her down with an egg. After the prayer, she would crack the egg and put it in a bowl under the crib. The baby would immediately sleep soundly through the night. In the morning, an eye would appear in the middle of the yoke. My mother claims to have seen this personally...

Another prefered egg-utilizing activity was rubbing an egg yoke on the back of the knees of an infant in order to help it learn to walk...

Anyway, call it quaint or call it superstition. But they claim that it worked.

All of that gooey, wholesome Catholic goodness...

2008-01-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

The devotees of the Black Nazarene are mostly male; they range from thugs to politicians (the Philippine vice president is a devotee) to businessmen, but in the gigantic blur created by the reds and yellows, social rank and privilege are cast into the wind: one is either favored to have been able to get near the carriage or not. Marching bands, dancing girls, circus acts-- fire-breathers, stilt-walkers-- as well as tributes from the police and the military all hail the Lord in his passing. The noise is deafening, but at the same time mysteriously calming, and the furious swishing of white towels, held aloft and waved by fevered hands, all make the scene seem like it was transplanted by some freak of the supernatural from the 17th century. A curious calm descends on the mind when the Nazarene comes into view. His devotees desperately, madly, cling or try to cling to him, never mind the sweat and heat beating down upon their backs. They see the image as some sort of scapegoat, banging their foreheads in shame and sorrow at its carriage, touching the image's feet and hands in the hope of passing their sins onto him.

from Ecce Ego, Quia Vocasti Me

Being now on an unforeseen vacation, I can now comment on some various converging themes that are coming into my mind. (If you are not on vacation, please don't read this. You won't be any wiser afterwards. You can make an exception if you are in your cubicle and you are so bored to tears that you want to commit suicide by stapling yourself to death.)

First of all, I have discovered that Immaculate Heart Radio has a new station in the Bay Area at 1260 AM. You can listen to it on-line by going to this site.

Even though I have become addicted to this station for the moment (mostly due to the insatiable thirst in my life for novelty), the Catholic media in this country in general seems to be very much its own animal. That is, it seems to me at times more to make a culture than to merely reflect it. Maybe because we devout Roman Catholics are few and far between, and listening to news reports involving the Pope and our bishops seems to be a little bizarre after having come out of a store where Britney Spears or Maroon 5 was being blasted over a loudspeaker. Do these type of phenomenon serve as a refuge from the world rather than a reflection of a society we should be living in? Or to put it another way, is Catholic radio/television/media a bubble we put ourselves in, albeit a necessary bubble?

That's a little what it feels like to me. Having spent months of my youth in Mexico and two years of my adult life in Argentina, I have actually experienced a society where there were shrines to the Virgin on the side of the road, and where most people knew who you were when you were walking down the street in clerical garb. I have been told by AG that one of the shocks of moving from Catholic New Orleans to Houston as a girl was the absence of Catholic statuary in public places. Are we as Catholics in the U.S. so used to being strangers that this can reflect on the tone of our rhetoric, even amongst ourselves?

I get really bored reading most Catholic sites. A lot of them are done by either converts or Catholics whose exposure to religion was little to non-existent as children. This I think often reflects in their writing and how they view the Church. There is a hollowness in it, one that is by no means insurmountable to fill, but is still there. The Church does not have to be re-created in this country, it has to be rediscovered. This is not just through such high-brow activities as restoring Latin to the liturgy or reading the writings of the Holy Father, but also practicing traditions that formed our fathers in their daily lives, such as praying from old prayer books, having statues, and other somewhat kitsch goodies.

Catholicism will not become robust again until it can be conceived as independent from authority. On one of the programs on the above listed stations, they were talking about what Catholic college should a Catholic parent send their child to. First of all, I would think that the idea of a "Catholic college" is itself problematic. Ideally, there should be no such thing as a Catholic college, there should just be a college. A "Catholic college" only exists in a Protestant country, or in countries that have secularized governments and often times histories of anti-clericalism, such as France or Mexico. Secondly, I believe St. Basil and St Gregory the Theologian studied at the Academy at Athens, which was by no means a Christian place. The key to the question at hand is the situation of the latter. Maybe it would be best to send your children to places that may not be necessarily Catholic, but have a strong orthodox Catholic presence, such as Texas A & M.

If Catholicism was a spontaneous, organic phenomenon where everyone from the lowest layman to the Pope himself agreed on the fundamentals of the Faith without having to be scolded by a higher authority, then we would have far fewer problems than we have now. The problem is that there are only two alternatives in many cases: either you don't care about the traditional teaching of the Church to the point that you pick and chose what you believe, or you become a "Papal fundamentalist" who hangs on everything the Pope says/does. A creed cannot be based on a constant exercise of authority. If it can't go on "auto-pilot", if it can't exist outside of the exercise of this authority, then in a real sense it only exists on paper. Even if the Papacy is essential to the Catholic ethos, it is not equivalent to that ethos. There has to be something more there.

The very first paragraph is a quote from a blog that I read by a young man from the Philipines. If anything, the Philipines is still a Catholic country. I think the passage above best summarizes what a Catholic society looked like up to very recently. Catholic societies were not wholesome, edifying places to live in. At worst, they accentuated the hypocrisy ever-present in our fallen condition even more. We can almost thank God that we can sigh to ourselves constantly: "if only this society lived by the Gospel like in the good ol' days..." This probably gives us some excuse: we can turn on our Catholic radio, listen to programs expounding on the attacks of the "culture of death", and shake our heads in dismay. It makes us all the more righteous. But it probably won't make us very holy.

And yes, I will keep listening.

In the Depth of Winter

2008-01-10T14:43:00.000-08:00

¡ALELUYA!

A Manuel Machado

Rosas rosadas y blancas, ramas verdes,
corolas frescas y frescos
ramos, Alegría!
Nidos en los tibios árboles,
huevos en los tibios nidos,
dulzura, Alegría!
El beso de esa muchacha
rubia, y el de esa morena,
y el de esa negra, Alegría!
Y el vientre de esa pequeña
de quince años, y sus brazos
armoniosos, Alegría!
Y el aliento de la selva virgen,
y el de las vírgenes hembras,
y las dulces rimas de la Aurora,
Alegría, Alegría, Alegría!

-Rubén Darío

Pink and white roses, green branches,
fresh corrollas and fresh
bouquets, Joy!
Nests in tepid trees,
eggs in the tepid nests,
sweetness, Joy!
The kiss of that blonde
girl, and that of the dark girl,
and that of the black girl, Joy!
And the belly of that small girl
of fifteen years, and her harmonious
arms, Joy!
And the breath of the virgin jungle,
and that of the virgin girls,
and the sweet rhymes of the Dawn,
Joy, Joy, Joy!

Please don't eat the baby Jesus

2008-01-08T13:47:00.001-08:00

...and some thoughts on not belonging

Over Christmas, AG and I went to visit her family in New Orleans. One of the attactions that her father brought me to on the North Shore was St. Joseph's Abbey and its beautiful church. Its frescoes were done in the early 1950's by Dom Gregory De Witt, and are awe-inspiring. More photos of the church and the grounds can be viewed by going to this site

There was among the frescoes an image I had never seen before. It seemed to be a version of the Byzantine Deisis, but the figure of St. John the Baptist was shown with wings and holding a chalice with a small child in it. My first reaction was, "St. John the Baptist has turned into a monster and is going to eat the baby!" After AG researched it on the Internet, we found that this is actually a traditional image in Byzantine iconography, which is odd since it was the first time I had ever seen it. (Of course, I've see the Forerunner portrayed with wings, but not with a cup of baby cocktail.) Here is one Russian example of the same image:

The more you know...

Changing gears entirely, since I am somewhat "between things" right now, I had this rainy and dreary California day off. So what does the modern 21st century individual do with a day like this off? That right, surf and surf and surf the Web. It is sometimes rather disturbing for me to think that much of my own religious formation took place because of the Internet. Coming back to the same websites and groups that I was allied with over eight years ago now is a rather bizarre experience. When I shared their opinions on many things, I was an entirely different person. Going back to the sites of many traditionalist Roman Catholic groups, I see just how crazy and surreal some of their views are. But somehow, I still sympathize with them, even if I am fully aware now that what they think is not reality.

I think the problem is that we like to put ourselves in bubbles, and the people who are right are the ones that are the best at thinking that the bubble is all there is. I can no longer do that. Once you have spent half a night praying with Coptic monks in the middle of the Mojave Desert, for example, you are never again going to see the liturgical wars that go on over the Web in the same light. The truth is much broader than we can ever imagine, though in some ways it continues to be very, very narrow. (Strange paradox.)

I am not a traditionalist by persuasion. At best, I am a fellow traveller. I don't belong to that movement since I think it is a lost cause. It will in the end lose since the tides of history are flowing the other way, and God does not particularily care about humeral veils, birettas, and the "dominos and biscuits" (read: Dominus vobiscum) But I will still be a liturgical snob until I die. I just know that this snobbery will die with me, and part of me thinks that this is not all that sad.

In Reply to Critics

2008-01-06T15:15:00.000-08:00

If you don't want to waste your time with mere words, use poetry.

traditions

2008-01-05T00:10:00.001-08:00

Reading Hans Urs von Balthasar is a little like eating flavored rice cakes. You might like the experience while you're doing it, and you might think it's quite good, but you never really take anything away from it afterwards. You never really feel full. There is too much of him in it, and not enough of the voice of the Church. So far, of the books that I have read or tried to read by him, only Cosmic Liturgy is the one I would ever own, and that is because it has some cool quotes and summaries of the thought of St. Maximus Confessor.

But the real point of this post is not to bash von Balthasar or to post once again the famous picture of him with Mickey Mouse. It is to write about the foreword to his book that I am reading now, Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philsophy of St. Gregory of Nyssa. While I love St. Gregory of Nyssa, and his influence on how I think I have written about here and here, it is von Balthasar's approach that I care to focus on. It has much to do with the approach to tradition in the Patristic resourcement of last century, which I think has left us rudderless in the face of Church history and praxis.

Von Balthasar begins by stating correctly that one cannot merely transpose the thought and concerns of one epoch, (in this case, that of Greek Fathers) to another epoch such as our own. He also writes that tradition cannot be conceived as passing a baton in a relay race; the light of the Spirit is not flawlessly passed from one generation to another unchanged. Then, however, he begins to drift off into talk about more "spiritual" approaches to tradition, and how in order, "to be faithful to her mission, the Church must continually make the effort at creative invention." In this sense, our German theologian wishes the Church to read St. Gregory of Nyssa as an adult would read her diary that she wrote as an adolescent: not directly pertinent to her circumstances, but rather providing inspiration for her life that is so completely different now:

Let us read history, our history, as a living account of what we once were, with the double-edged consciousness that all of this has gone forever and that, in spite of everything, that period of youth and every moment of our lives remain mysteriously present at the wellsprings of our soul in a kind delectable eternity.

Now, dear reader, you know that I am not the most reactionary person when it comes to liturgy, Church governance, theology, etc. My more reactionary sentiments often come from my counterproductive desire to be a curmudgeon, and I really don't care where people attend Mass or what prayers they say, as long as they're in the pews saying their prayers. But the old traditonalist flame ignites again whenever I read things like this. I think there is a tremendous hermeneutical hubris involved here that plagued much of the Patristic resourcement leading up to the Second Vatican Council. From Chenu, Congar, de Lubac, von Balthasar, etc. we find simultaneously a sense of wanting to return to the roots of tradition and a contempt for many things that came before them. For simplicity's sake, I will break this down into numbered objections.

1. Why are we so different? In all of the ideas that bubble to the surface, there seems for the Vatican II peritus a sense that the sky is falling, and that this has just begun to happen. That is, our epoch is in drastic crisis, and drastic crises call for drastic measures. I'm sorry, but especially in reading a St. Gregory of Nyssa or a St. John Chrysostom, the sense I get is that things haven't really changed a bit. Even down to people being more concerned about sports than they are about what's going on in church. (Chariot races, anyone?) So why do we have to frantically start putting up new drapes and throwing furniture out the window (or in this case, adding or subtracting things from the Mass or the rosary) under some pretense the we are "different"? I don't get it.

2. Does the Church have to increase her calcium intake? Is the Church older? Middle aged? Concerned about her 401-K plan? For all we know, these end times after the first coming of Christ could last another 2,000 years. So where's the fire at?

3. It's okay. I'm a doctor (of theology). All of those years in a Jesuit novitiate, knowing six languages fluently, and even being well versed in all the jargon of modern philosophy make you perfectly competent to diagnose and treat all the things that "ail" the Church? Seems like you better think twice before you pick up the saw and start amputating, doc.

4. Caught in a head trip. Most importantly, what really irks me about the advocates of the Patristic resourcement is their disregard for small "t" traditions in favor of a supposedly neglected big "T" tradition. That is, it is the idea that the former have somehow clouded and eclipsed the vitality of the latter. In other words, since the Middle Ages and the Baroque era, we have been doing it wrong, that is, up to 1962 when they started to have their say in the Church.

Maybe we can blame it on Aristotle; that whole accident vs. substance distinction has got us all into heaps of trouble. For one could envision the folks at Vatican II getting together and saying: "okay, guys, what is essential to the Mass? And what can we change to make it more relevant?" That is, what is accidental? What is essential to the Gospel, and is that getting across, or is it being clouded by Gregorian Masses for the dead and novenas to St. Jude? Is a drunken procession of Indians in Peru really what the Church Fathers had in mind when it comes to liturgy? And so on and so forth.

There are philosophical presuppositions to all of this, ones which I feel are highly questionable. For they all assume that in matters of Faith, we are the ones who are active in the signifying: that is, we must create a medium that expresses perfectly a clear and transparent message. It is a well defined process of transmitting information that is best left to predetermined planning and meticulous composition. I would contend, however, that we are much more passive in this process than we would care to admit. The stained glass windows, the burning candles, the statues, and the priest mumbling with his back turned to you all transmit things that we cannot express in mere words, things that are far from "accidental" to use the Peripatetic term. That is why the Church in the past, if it did intervene to change liturgy or praxis, did it slowly and almost imperceptibly, ultimately not feeling confident enough to radically alter a system that, if it didn't work well, at least worked.

(One can thus see why the historical liturgist's job can be so difficult since he has to trace small changes over an immense amount of time. One can speculate that a liturgist studying our own time would be utterly bored since everything is so variable that it would spark little interest for a keen investigator.)

In those details then lie small sparks of divinity; in those solemn and seemingly superstitious actions lie the very life blood of the Gospel as it has been read for centuries. My greatest fear is that the periti behind Vatican II unwittingly deprived the following generations of the formation in "small things" that they had as children but in their mature years deemed inessential and detrimental to the Gospel. We do not form Tradition, the devotions, processions, and mumbled prayers; they form us. Our resourcement theologians extracted Tradition out of life and made it into a mental construct.

Even if I can live with the Pauline liturgy, the new church buildings, and the priests walking around in lay clothing, I cannot help but feel that the "hermeneutic of continuity" is a rather hollow phrase. If it doesn't look the same, it isn't the same. And no amount of "spiritual" explanations about the "signs of the times" can silence the lament of the eyes, the ears, and the soul.

St. Joseph's Cord

2008-01-03T20:20:00.000-08:00

AG, as you may well know from reading her blog, is from New Orleans. Her family hails from a small city some ways away called Opelousas. You can read more about her memories of going to this place here, as well as on other parts of her fine blog.

Her parents were recently in the Bay Area, and her father regaled us with many tales of growing up in a sharecropping family in the Louisiana countryside. Being Creoles, they grew up speaking both French and English, and now having met his mother, I can say that I really don't know when that gentle woman is speaking English and when she is speaking French. (She makes a fine gumbo, though.) And of course, they are Catholics to the core.

Mr. G told one story in particular that intrigued my sense of the unusual and the extraordinary. As in other places in rural communities, doctors were few and far between. People then had to rely on other means of healing in order to cure their ailments, sometimes even in emergencies. Mr. G. thus told me about "treaters", people who could pray over people and make them better. One story in particular highlighted the role of these people in that community.

The G. family had an old dog that had the useful habit of attacking and chasing away snakes. Usually, it was quick and agile enough to get out of the way of a snake's path when it would strike. One time, though, it was not quick enough, and a poisonous moccasin bit the dog in the face. The dog's face began to swell up and it became mortally ill.

Not wanting to lose the dog, the family called the grandfather who was known as a treater. One of the main tools of a treater in that community was the St. Joseph's Cord, the image of which you see above, and prayers that go along with it can be found here. After this treater recited the prayers of the St. Joseph's Cord, the dog became a little better. After three days, the dog's face returned to its normal size and he was up and about again as feisty as ever.

I thought this story was quaint and uplifting for a variety of reasons. I have always been puzzled in the Gospels as to why Christ could not perform miracles in places where there was little faith. I don't think an easy answer can be given to this question. Maybe this is why the miraculous is also so scarce in our day and age. For the miracle is often is the result of faith sown in love, and love is the bond of all things, and it can do all things. As we see in this story, it can even cure a lethal snake bite. In this sense, then, loving prayer can be considered magical.

being to timelessness as it's to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land

(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy's
a universe emerging from a wish)

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

-do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools,all's well

-e.e. cummings

Messiaen, "Les Bergers" from "La Nativité du Seigneur"

2008-01-02T18:41:00.001-08:00

On Ugliness and Catharsis

2008-01-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

There is a sense in many conservative cultural circles that all forms of modern art are somehow decadent or contrary to traditional ways of looking at the world. Beauty, in simple terms, seems to be under siege for many, and the weapons that are attacking it are hard rock, Webern string quartets, Joyce novels, Dylan Thomas poems, Picasso paintings, and the sculptures of Richard Serra, to name a few. For many conservative Christian theorists, to portray the ugly, the subconscious, and the dissonant is a very modern obsession that forms part of the anti-Christian revolution started at the Renaissance. It is deemed that such obsessions were not part of a classical and more human aesthetic.

Upon reading some texts of the fourth century Neoplatonic pagan philosopher, Iamblichus, it would is necessary for me to revise this view in saying that in many circumstances, the ancients viewed the representation of disorder as a fundamental part of their religious and philosophical conceptions of the world. Those familair with the thought of Frederich Nietzsche would recognize this as the balance between the Dionysian and Apollonian realms of expression and consciousness. An explanation of the thought of Iamblichus can further shed light on the German philosopher's suppositions.

Iamblichus in his work, De Mysteriis, writes an apology for the pagan cult against the accusations of another philsopher, Porphyry. Like the early Christian writers, Porphyry was uneasy with various unseemly forms that pagan religion took. Iamblichus at one point addresses one of his concerns, that of the establishing of large phalli in cultic rituals, and from there expounds the idea that the invoking of the base and unpleasant is a fundamental part of philosophical liberation and catharsis:

But I am of the opinion that the obscene language that then takes place [at the erection of phalli], affords an indication of the privation of good about matter, and of the deformitiy which is in material subjects, prior to their being adorned. For these being indigent of ornament, by so much the more aspire after it, as they in a greater degree despise their own deformity. Again, therefore, they pursue the causes of forms, and of what is beautiful and good, recognizing baseness from base language. And thus, indeed, the thing itself, viz. turpitude, is averted, but the knowledge of it is rendered manifest through words, and those that employ them transfer their desire to that which is contrary to baseness.

In the Iamblichean system, then, the representation of the base in art and religion reflects the longing of matter for the immaterial and the infinite. The only way to conquer the aethetically unpleasing is to confront it by showing what it is.

This exposure to the unseemly also can prove as a vaccine against the passions, as Iamblichus further writes:

The powers of the human passions that are in us, when they are entirely restrained, become more vehement; but when they are called forth into energy, gradually and commensurately, they rejoice in being moderately gratified, are satsified; and from hence, becoming purified, they are rendered tractable, and are vanquished without violence. On this account, in comedy and tragedy, by surveying the passions of others, we stop our own passions, cause them to be more moderate, and are purified from them. In sacred ceremonies, likewise, by certain spectacles and auditions of things base, we become liberated from the injury which happend from the works affected by them.

Thus, the bias of the Platonic system against matter is in a way nuanced, for it is not through escape from the unpleasant results of materiality that brings liberation, but rather their use in a type of catharsis that longs ever for the things beyond physical appearances. Even though many modern artists do not have this conception while conceiving their creations, we can view them ourselves in this manner. Whether it is listening to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, reading a Sylvia Plath poem, or viewing a Jackson Pollock painting, we can see how far things have fallen from the beautiful, and how in their ugliness, they long for it again.

For me, there is also very much a cultural aspect to this unwillingness to accept the darker side of humanity in our own religiosity. As I wrote in another post, there seems to exist the idea in the Anglo-Saxon world that the best way to deal with existential catastrophes is to either ignore them or deal with them in a sterile way that never really accepts the human condition as it is. This may be due to the more affluent state of the faithful in these parts of the world, and also to the idea that the expression of suffering and pain is inappropriate for the public sphere. That is why religious art in churches here can be so clean and often without the feeling of a Spanish saint or a Baroque crucifix.

This is also the reason that I have criticized the idea that Byzantine iconography or medieval relgious art is somehow superior to other religious art forms because they are more "objective" and "sober". To exclue the reality of what occurs in the world under the guise of wanting to "transfigure" it can be escapist in the wrong cultural context. In the context of Ottoman Greece or Czarist Russia, such religious art may have avoided these pitfalls. (Though most of these places also adopted the "Italian" style alongside more traditional Byzantine forms, so speaking of distictions here is very complicated.) Thus, in our American religious culture that has no roots in apostolic Christianity, to argue for primitive iconography as purer and less scandalous to the eyes could merely be taken as aesthetic Protestantism carried out by other means.

I am not arguing here that one religious style is superior to another. What I am arguing is that some cultures may approach the world in a more wholistic way, and ours may not be one of them. That which is ugly, unseemly, and causes us discomfort may in the end be good for us. It may stir in us a longing for something that transcends this vale of tears. In religious art, especially in such forms as the Spanish baroque, it can inspire us to realize how much God emptied Himself in becoming man, and it can remind us about how people continue to suffer in our human condition, and that the most beautiful moment is when this suffering is overcome and transformed into redemptive love.

Homo Viator

2007-12-20T06:35:00.000-08:00

On Wanderers, Chili Peppers, Rolled Cigarettes, Bakeries and a Small Cave in Palestine

I have never driven more than when I was a monk. That is an ironic situation, but it's true. Without getting into details in order to protect the guilty, I ended up helping to run the monastery business about an hour and a half from the monastery itself. (It was a bakery.) So every morning, it was up at a quarter past four for Matins, stay for about ten minutes, hop in the bakery van, and then we were off. It was tiring. I hardly got any sleep. And little else got done in my life other than making tea biscuits and cakes.

That must have made me pretty holy, right? Wrong! I was probably one of the most bitter people I could have possibly imagined. I hardly had any time for anything other than baking, and even the little time I actually spent in my cell, all I did was sleep. But the whole time I told myself that this was God's will. Maybe it was, but I didn't accept it with gratitude. And truth be told, I think that there are very few people who could have.

One day, after a long day of baking and the hour and a half trek back to the monastery, a man was sitting on the monastery porch. He had unkempt hair, a long beard, and looked as if he hadn't seen the sight of a bed for weeks. Nearby was his bicycle, packed with a pile of rather worthless belongings: clothes, rags, books, and a few icons. When I saw the icons, I knew he wasn't just another inhabitant of the run-down desert community looking for a hand-out. And his mannerisms and his manner of speaking proved that he was definitely someone who had led life on his own terms.

As the evening unfolded, his story only got more and more interesting. His adopted name was Obadiah. He had been a spiritual wanderer from monastery to monastery since 1972. For the last few years, he had lived in an Orthodox Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and decided that it was time to move on. He had crossed the desert from New Mexico to the Mojave in California on his bike in high summer. It had taken him almost two months. During that time, he had begged for food, went to religious sites, and slept in the open air. His bike broke a few weeks before he had arrived at the monastery, and he had been pushing it ever since.

The abbot gave the blessing so that he could stay on the monastery grounds overnight. That's all Obadiah wanted anyway, since his real destination on this leg of the trip was the Coptic Orthodox monastery about ten miles away. He had been to plenty of Orthodox monasteries, so ours was nothing new.

We went into the trapeza for dinner. I remember that it was an informal one since no one had had time to cook that day, and all we were having were leftovers. I remember that there was a particularly spicy dish that was probably left over from the Sunday potluck. I warned our guest that this dish was spicy, so he had best try it before he served himself a lot of it. He tried the dish, and a delighted smirk appeared on his face. He removed from his bag a small jar of dried chili peppers and liberally sprinkled it on this "spicy" dish. As a man with a Mexican palette, I was impressed, and dare I say it, a bit humiliated.

After dinner, we went on the porch again and continued talking. He rolled a cigarette and began to give me the in and outs of his way of life. Usually, he said, he slept outside. Sometimes he would be given a helping hand by people, other times he would be run out of town pretty quickly. He slept in ditches, fended off wild animals from his belongings, and endured all kinds of weather. He had a number of books with him: the Ladder of Divine Ascent, stories of the Father of the Desert, and other staples of the monastic tradition. Also, he said, he had started at his last home doing his own translation of the Prophecy of Isaiah with the little Hebrew he had picked up here and there. He told me that he would be heading north since he had never been there before. There were a few churches he wanted to see and people he wanted to talk to.

The next day, I got up at the same time and saw Obadiah for the beginning of Matins. By the time I got back that evening, he had already left. He was setting out for the Coptic monastery and hoped to spend the night there. Once again, my life returned to the same old routine of baking and little sleep.

About two weeks later, I was making some cakes on a rather hot and sunny day in Big Bear Lake. The room I baked in would get so hot that occasionally I had to go into the shop area in order to cool off a bit. The shop opened up on the main boulevard in the small valley between the mountains. As I entered the empty shop area, I saw a man walking by with a bike headed into the downtown area of Big Bear. It was Obadiah! "What the hell!?" I thought to myself. "Did we tell him we had a bakery in Big Bear Lake? What the hell is he doing here?"

He continued to walk by completely oblivious to being near the bakery of the monks he had visited a couple of weeks before over 90 miles away. I stood incredulous for about thirty seconds, trying to verify to myself if it was indeed him. Finally, I opened the locked door and cried out, "Obadiah!"

He turned around very meekly, recognized me, and walked toward the bakery.

At that point only Sean (Br. Spyridon) and I were in the building. We were so glad to have our visitor again since he broke the monotony of ovens, flour, rolling pins, and sugar. We began to offer him any bread and goods we had available to take with him. I even heated up some microwavable burritos, wrapped them in some paper, and reassured him that they would still be good in a few hours if he wanted to have them for dinner.

He had explained that he had come up to Big Bear after receiving a cold reception at the Coptic monastery, pushing his bike on the five thousand foot climb up the mountain. It took him a week and a half. He had been staying at an evangelical Christian retreat center, witnessing about the Spirit and seeing many baptisms in the lake. He said that he knew some people in San Bernardino and that he was going there. (I explained to him that he was pointed in the wrong direction.). He also explained how he wanted to go visit a convert bishop to the Syrian Orthodox church in Fresno. I jumped on the computer and tried to give him directions from Big Bear. Who knows if he followed them?

Having rested with us a while again, we saw him on his way. I looked at him vanish going over the hill on Big Bear Boulevard: a man and his bike, and the hardest working guardian angel that any mortal has been priveleged with.

Everytime I think of Obadiah, all I can think is that there exist in this world some very heroic people , and then there are just the rest of us schmucks. I had nothing on this guy! So what I dropped out of Berkeley to go to study for the priesthood?! So what I was withering my youth away on a monastic business venture that was making no money!? Have I ever slept in a ditch for the love of Christ? Did I really give up a sense of security like Obadiah had? I was nowhere near as real as this guy, nor will I ever be.

It is people like Obadiah that make me tire quickly of what passes for religion among most people. You can talk and talk and talk about the things of God, but until you have actually seen them, until you have actually seen a man who is totally dependent on God's love, then you in reality know absolutely nothing. Truth be told, I hesitate in writing ANYTHING that passes for theology on this blog, since I have seen the real deal, and no matter what I write I will always fall short.

But then again, that is the real reason for the season, isn't it? The main message of the Gospels for me has always been that we do not know the ways of God. And the more we guess them, the wronger we will probably be. Just as the Son of God was born in a manger in Bethlehem, so we will continue to be suprised by God. Let us get used to getting it wrong, then, in joy and in wonder.

Sometimes, while on the highway or looking out on the street late at night, I think that Obadiah may once again go by. Just as that small family from Nazareth went from door to door looking for a place to rest, so my friend wanders in the cold and the heat, through the rain and the glorious days of spring, towards the final destination of all flesh, towards our Father's house. If you see him, please open the door and give him a bit of rest for his weary head.

Two Years...

2007-12-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

Three Cities, Two Names, Two and a Half Christian Confessions, 550 Posts, Lots of Delusions, and A Number of Faces Later

I have seldom given myself occasions to celebrate personal milestones on this blog. And personally, I think most of you could care less about what I am reading, what I like to eat, what I do when not blogging, the ins and outs of my relationship, etc. (And if you do, your life must be really boring.) But I just realized that I am reaching two years of doing this without any end in sight, so I might as well point this out.

Personally, I don't know why bloggers sometimes get so melodramatic and stop blogging, as if there is an unheard tortured voice in the background saying: "That's enough! The waters have dried up and the Muses have gone silent! Goodbye, cruel blogging world!" I guess there are lots of people who are just too busy to keep it up. But thankfully I have not hit that wall. I have run this little page even with some rather demanding time constraints, and truth be told, I really don't know how I have posted so much. Maybe I just feel I have a lot to show / say. It helps to be an egomaniac, I guess.

I refuse to give here the typical discourse about the benefits and pitfalls of blogging. I write and you read. And sometimes you comment (thank you for that, by the way). But this is a rather innocuous relationship. I would write even if you weren't reading anyway. The evil Arturo in me likes the fact that you do read. ("They really, really like me!!! I must be really cool!") Then I realize that I don't get paid for this, and the immediate benefits are few and far between.

The greatest reward of this blog is to actually meet and correspond with people I meet through this blog. For crying out loud, I met my significant other through this blog! But I have met enough people through this blog alone that it is well worth it. It is great to finally put a face to the people who read and comment. I would encourage you to e-mail me privately from time to time just so that I could know in a limited way who you are. And if you live in the Bay Area, I don't have many friends. Would you be my friend? I promise not to climb onto too many soapboxes.

And from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for reading. Please say an extra Hail Mary for me. God bless and Merry Christmas! Tommorrow, dear reader, I will post your Christmas present. Here, however, is another one, for those of you who like cheesy music in Spanish.

-Arturo

P.S. After tommorrow, I won't be posting until about next year. I am going out of town.

De Verbis

2007-12-18T08:31:00.000-08:00

Hay palabras que tienen sombra de árbol
otras que tienen atmósfera de astros
Hay vocablos que tienen fuego de rayos
Y que incendian donde caen
Otros que se congelan en la lengua y se rompen al salir
Como esos cristales alados y fatídicos
Hay palabras como imanes
que atraen los tesoros del abismo
Otras que se descargan como vagones sobre el alma
Altazor desconfía de las palabras
Desconfía del ardid ceremonioso
Y de la poesía
Trampas
Trampas de luz y cascadas lujosas
Trampas de perla y de lámpara acuática
Anda como los ciegos con sus ojos de piedra
Presintiendo el abismo a todo paso

-Vicente Huidobro, del primer canto de su poema, Altazaor

There are words that have the shadow of a tree
Others have the atmosphere of stars
There are syllables that have the flame of lightening
And set fire to where they fall
Others congeal on the tongue and break when they come out
Like those fateful and winged crystals
There are words with magnets that attract the treasures of the depths
Others that unload like a carriage on the soul
Altazor does not trust words
He distrusts ceremonial artifice
And poetry
Traps
Traps of light and decadent cascades
Traps of pearl and the underwater lamp
He walks like the blind with his stone eyes
The abyss forshadowed with his every step

The Painting as Talisman

2007-12-15T13:54:00.000-08:00

On the far right side of the painting the wind of spring, Zephyr, blows and pursues the earth-nymph Chloris. Frances Yates quite properly sees this wind as Ficino's own spiritus mundi, the spirit we have been trying to explicate all along. From the breath of Chloris come forth flowers, as she is transformed into Flora, in a kind of photographic stop-action in oil. Flora is the herald of spring, the season of Venus. On the other side of the canvas the three Graces do their round dance - Chastity in the middle with her hair close-bound and a wistful look on her face; Pleasure, to the left, has snakelike hair and loose garments; and close to Venus is Beauty, moderately dressed. The three deities are; first Venus herself, pictured with heavy breasts and swelling belly. Rather maternal in appearance, she seems to be giving her approval for what is taking place around her. Blinded Cupid is above her, taking aim with his burning arrow. And Mercury stands at the far left, pointing to the clouds.

Concerning love and the process of life Ficino had written: "There is one continuous attraction, beginning with God, going to the world, and ending at last in God, an attraction which returns to the same place where it began as though in a kind of circle." The painting shows this three-part circle, one of the circuits of the soul: the spring wind blows in the beauty of the earth as it brings forth its vegetation; the Graces dance in enjoyment of the world, blessed by the fond gaze of a motherly Venus; and Cupid aims his arrow at Chastity, who is already attracted by Mercury. There is a strong feeling of movement from right to left. One can imagine that music is an element in the Graces' dances and in the movement across the canvas.

-from The Planets Within: Marsilio Ficino's Astrological Psychology by Thomas Moore, explaining the philosophical significance of Botticelli's painting, Primavera

Jean-Philippe Rameau: Zoroastre

2007-12-14T15:30:00.001-08:00

The Problem of Evil (Briefly)

2007-12-13T07:56:00.000-08:00

AG and I had another encounter with my favorite atheist last night, and I should say that I proved once again that I will do almost anything for a good bite to eat. So this time around, I had to listen to some of his objections to a theistic universe. One of the main issues that he has is the problem of evil, which you can read all about right here.

While driving home, what struck me again is how much of a distaste I have for most philosophical conversations. When you arrive at the discussion, you have to assume that your interlocutor is making the same assumptions about the world as you are, and this is infrequently the case. Once you get into the thick of it, you will find that all you are doing is flinging polemical if polite phrases at each other, and both sides of the conversation only build on the assumptions that they started out with in the first place.

Argue all you want about the problem of evil, but the main assumption of the one posing it is always the expectation that the universe does not live up to his expectations. In other words, he thinks that he deserves better. I think that if I were dictator of the universe, the only people who would be allowed to pose the problem of evil would be the saints. Everyone else has no excuse. If we would just look at the disorder within ourselves, we would understand completely the disorder outside of us.

I do not mean to belittle tragedies such as genocide or the deaths of children. These are tragic, and no barrage of syllogisms can ameliorate the pain that these events cause. But there is a modern smugness about posing the question on why God created this universe where evil things happens. When the people who pose it are members of the most powerful, prosperous society in the history of the world who have no fear of getting their lap-top snatched in a violent assault, this exercise for me seems to be pure mental masturbation. No sufficient answer could ever be given anyway since he could always pose a universe that is better than the one he is living in now. Things would spiral into a sort of inflation of expectation that even God could not pay out this side of the eschaton.

But what else can you expect in trying to look for an answer inside yourself for these things? If I want one thing for all that I come across, it is not necessarily that they agree with me on anything important. I would rather that they break out of the molds that they have sealed themselves in so that they can see things in a new light. And for me that means stepping out of yourself and into the skin of the Other. As I have said before, the Truth is not within, it is outside of you. Only when you leave yourself and detach yourself from your own assumptions about the world can you finally return to who you really are, and then give yourself over to the Truth. Anything else, in my opinion, is merely a self-serving rhetorical exercise.

I have the feeling that my session over the plates of dim sum was the latter, not the former.

Just because I have a lot of time on my hands...

2007-12-12T11:49:00.000-08:00

The genesis of this blog comes out of my commenting on the traditionalist Angelqueen forum. Once I realized that I wasn't really a classical traditionalist, and once my Internet perusing became more and more limited, I stopped hanging out at this bastion of reactionary thinking. Recently, however, with a slow-down in posting on many of the blogs I actually take the time to read, I began to go back to my old vice of posting on Angelqueen. And things haven't changed much around there.

Traditionalists really piss me off. They go on and on about the degeneration of culture and learning as it parallels the degeneration of Western liturgical consciousness, and yet they often end up as exemplars of the very things they condemn. Many clamor on and on about Latin, and couldn't even decline "puella, puellae" to save their lives. Many complain about the music of the Mass, but most couldn't tell you the difference between Palestrina and Monteverdi, and if they could sing a decent "Et cum spiritu tuo", that congregation might as well be the Vienna Boys' Choir. I guess this has a lot to do with the "Fox News / South Park conservatives"; that is, conservatives who are rude, brutish, and have absolutely no class. (I used to love watching William F. Buckley growing up when he was on late night on PBS. Those were real conservatives that you could respect because of their stodginess.) These conservatives are just as much the product of postmodern liberalism as the "politically correct" ideologues they condemn.

This time around, that which incited my ire was the dismissive attitude these cyber-trads had towards traditional Aztec dances done in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The only response of these posters was that this must obviously be an example of modernist enculturation, or at least be of very poor taste. And of course, it was assumed that these dances were done as a result of the "liturgical dance" craze. Never mind that these dances have been performed for centuries in villages in honor of the Virgin, and this tradition goes back longer than the existence of this country.

The people on this forum are significant examples of an unfortunate double standard. They can deck their houses with Christmas trees and Advent wreaths, even though these are clearly remnants of "devil-worshipping" pagan rituals, while they can ridicule devout dances performed for the Brown Virgin, saying that they are remnants of a culture that practiced human sacrifice. (And here they fail to mention that our own religion in based on human sacrifice, or rather, One Human's sacrifice, and that this practice also existed in pagan Europe.) The only difference is that of race; the pagan rituals of the Teutonic countries are acceptable because these were civilized peoples, while Mexicans will always be savages. And of course, they also fail to realize that "good old fashion American values" are a result of all of the "civilized" countries in Europe falling into heresy. Mexico, last time I checked, may have had problems with Masonic governments, but never with heresy.

This same mentality is also behind the "it's cute to be a brute" approach to scholarship and history. The fact that the people in the Valley of Mexico at the time of the conquest practiced human sacrifice meant that the ends justified the means in bringing this practice to an end. Many scholars now say that the Valley of Mexico had ten million inhabitants when Cortes arrived in 1519. By the end of the century, the population was a mere two million. Eighty percent of the inhabitants of that region was wiped out due to disease, enslavement, or outright slaughter. The capital of the empire, once larger than any European city, was reduced to rubble. But all of this was alright since the survivors converted to Catholicism!

And it is not as if the Spaniards didn't know what they were doing at the time. Even Fray Bartolome de las Casas expressed that the indigenous peoples should be evangelized by friars who preached the Word without coercion rather than by an invading force. Many argued about the morality of the invasions, and many were doubtful that any justification could be given. In the end, the practical interests of the Spanish won out, and the indigenous peoples were conquered with the reassuring thought in the back of the conquistadores' minds that their subjects may not be humans at all.

In our interlocutors' version of history, however, a concession to any type of moral ambiguity in this situation is an example of muddle-headed "political correctness". The Spaniards are the "good guys" no matter what they did, and the indigenous peoples were the "bad guys" because they had the misfortune of not having had the Gospel preached to them yet and of not being comfortable with the idea of being enslaved. But even when the indigenous people converted to Catholicism and used dances that were performed in a false religion in order to now honor the true God, they were still in the wrong, even if in some cases their ancestors have now been Catholic longer than those of these traditionalists.

I am certainly not naive about the history behind these events. Mesoamerica before the arrival of the Spaniards was no Shangri-la, and this conquest was a war, even if an unjustified one. And whatever happened happened and we cannot change it. This conquest by bad Catholics produced some of the best Catholics on earth. But God does not smile on the means by which this was done. It is quite shocking to me how those who consider themselves the most Catholic can persecute people who have been loyal children of the Roman Church for half of a millennium now. By watching Lou Dobbs and promoting anti-immigrant hysteria they are more in bed with white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism than the liberal liturgical reformers who promote "liturgical dancing".

For me, it is profoundly hypocritical for Catholics in this country, traditionalist or not, to celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe and at the same time mock the dignity of Mexicans on both sides of the border by regarding them as some sort of uncivilzied "brown horde". They may be a brown horde, but they are a devout horde. And last time I checked being civilized doesn't necessarily save your soul, but being Catholic certainly helps. Especially if you are a Catholic and devoted to the Most Holy Mother of God, which are traits that the Mexican people have always shown.

Some Notes on Science, Mystery, and Ancient Philosophy

2007-12-11T14:33:00.000-08:00

For how shall we account for those plants called heliotropes, that is, attendants on the sun, moving in correspondence with the revolution of its orb, but selenitropes, or attendants on the moon, turning in exact conformity to her motion? It is because all things pray, and hymn the leaders of their respective orders; but some intellectually, and others rationally; some in a natural, and others after a sensible, manner. Hence the sunflower, as far as it is able, moves in a circular dance towards the sun; so that if any one could hear the pulsations made by its circuit in the air, he would perceive something composed by a sound of this kind, in honour of its king, such as a plant is capable of framing. Hence, too, we may behold the sun and moon in the earth, but according to a terrene quality; but in the celestial regions, all plants, and stones, and animals, possessing an intellectual life according to a celestial nature.

-Proclus, On the Hieratic Art

Recently, a commenter mentioned how many intuitions of Renaissance philosophers constituted "bad science". While I respect the opinion of this commenter on many things, here I have to disagree.

For people who are quantitatively challenged like myself, it is always a good idea to have someone close to you who understands the ins and outs of scientific discourse. In my case, my significant other is a professional scientist. So here I will try to duplicate what she told me in a recent conversation, and add some of my own thoughts if deemed appropriate.

The project of the Renaissance thinkers cannot be considered science because it can neither be proven nor disproven by quantitative analysis. However, science is not able to supply us with a complete world view, nor can a philosophy be extrapolated from scientific analysis. Not only that, but certain scientific theories, such as the theory of relativity or string theory in physics, are often reached by intuitive hunches about the world or a particular set of observations. In the case of string theory, there is still no concrete evidence that it is an accurate description of the physical world (in its smallest or largest scales), only an intuitive idea that things would make more sense, mathematically speaking, if it is.

In this way, we can see that my commenter was using a certain theory of "scientism" in order to create a dogmatic idea of what science should believe, not actually what it claims to be able to prove.

The Renaissance philosophers were also trying to reach some sort of theory of the world by trying to explain certain types of observations, often trying to explain phenomenon that we to this day cannot explain. Why are birds able to migrate across entire continents after only having been to a certain place once or twice? Why do sunflowers turn towards the sun in their budding stage?

How affected are we human animals by these phenomena?

Another example is the ancient intuition that the universe is composed of a ratio of numbers, going back to Pythagoras and beyond. What is the nature of this order that surrounds us? Why is it that there is a poetry built into creation, a sense of patterns that occur over and over again in all things?

Recently, I have read an interesting excerpt from Pope Benedict's recent encyclical, Spe Salvi. In it, he writes:

In this regard a text by Saint Gregory Nazianzen is enlightening. He says that at the very moment when the Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ. This scene, in fact, overturns the world-view of that time, which in a different way has become fashionable once again today. It is not the elemental spirits of the universe, the laws of matter, which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the stars, that is, the universe; it is not the laws of matter and of evolution that have the final say, but reason, will, love—a Person. And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we are free. In ancient times, honest enquiring minds were aware of this. Heaven is not empty. Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love.

I can accept that Christ conquered the demons of the air by His ascension into Heaven. I can accept that the universe is governed by a personal God who cannot be manipulated and not supernatural forces that are to be read into all events. But do these conclusions thus silence the cosmos forever? Does this make the idea of God as a detached watchmaker far more palatable for the Christian imagination?

It is arguable that the goals of many Renaissance Neoplatonists was not to advance the march of secular philosophy, but rather to detain it. The Middle Ages created the dilemma of the existence of two sometimes opposing truths: one for theology and one for science. These philosophers sought a way to reconcile this dualism that they did not create but was already there. Sometimes it took the form of natural magic, such as Ficino's astrology or the famous experiments of many now respected scientists concerning alchemy. Sometimes it was in recovering ancient texts, such as those of Plato and Hermes Trimegistus. But through all of it, there was a sense that the goal of human thought, to cite Nicholas of Cusa, is not to define but rather to invoke. We do not own the truth, but we rather witness its manifestations and behold its splendor.

And for me, that is a profoundly Christian, and dare I say, traditional project.

Philip Glass' Early Days

2007-12-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

From a 2005 documentary

De Musica

2007-12-09T16:44:00.000-08:00

But let us return to the proposition that music consists first in the ratio, second in the fantasy, third in speech, followed by song, making music with the fingers, the music of the whole body in gymnastics or in dance.... The Pythagoreans, the Platonists, Mercurius, Aristoxenus - they all say that the soul and body of the world and of all animals consist in musical ratios. Even the sacred writings of the Hebrews hold that God disposes all things in number, weight, and measure.

-Marsilio Ficino, De Vita Coelitus Comparanda

2007-12-08T18:46:00.000-08:00

Si ociosa no, asistió naturaleza
Incapaz a la tuya, oh gran Señora,
Concepción limpia, donde ciega ignora
Lo que muda admiró de tu pureza.

Díganlo, oh Virgen, la mayor belleza
Del día, cuya luz tu manto dora,
La que calzas nocturna brilladora,
Los que ciñen carbunclos tu cabeza.

Pura la Iglesia ya, pura te llama
La Escuela, y todo pío afecto sabio
Cultas en tu favor da plumas bellas

¿Qué mucho, pues, si aun hoy sellado el labio,
Si la naturaleza aun hoy te aclama
Virgen pura, si el sol, luna y estrellas?

-Luis de Góngora y Argote

On Vision, the Finite and the Infinite

2007-12-06T21:34:00.000-08:00

Cusanus proposes that man must first accept the fact that no overlap can exist between the finite and the infinite. Accepting this separation allows the possibility of seeing the One in the many and the many in the One. In De Visione Dei, Cusanus sees the resolution of universal and particular exemplified in Rogier van der Weyden's self-portrait. The eyes of the sitter, following both stationary and moving observers, are coinstantaneously fixed upon one viewer and all others, taking part, in synchronous fashion, in the movement of one and all. Cusanus says that we can know the divine when (in a manner similar to the self-portrait) we begin to approach God from infinitely multiple points of view, collecting these views in a unified vision, a visio intellectualis. True knowledge then, lies in accepting particularity and "allowing it to unfold in all its richness." But even all this does not mean that we have mediated the difference between the finite and the infinite. Cusanus believed that any process beginning in the empirical would end in the empirical. To overcome this, we must replace the empirical with the spiritual, the spiritual universal content of humanity. Cusanus saw this universal content embodied in Christ, a natura media encompassing the finite and the infinite.

-Robert D. Huerta, Vermeer and Plato: Painting the Ideal

Fragments from Recent Correspondence

2007-12-05T21:06:00.000-08:00

...I really enjoyed my time as an Anglican (if I could use that word). After the whole religious roller coaster ride of my youth, it let my mind air out a bit. But that is all that I really felt that I got: air. There was never anything really substantial there, and maybe I was doing all of it for the wrong reasons (a potential vocation, perhaps?) I just really needed a place where I could think things over, and distance myself from an institution (the Catholic Church) that I felt had "burned me" in a manner of speaking. Now I am fine with it. I suppose that if you're English, Anglicanism has a different feel. Since I was raised in a culturally Catholic enviorment, it was always going to be odd, so I "went home".

Truth be told, I enjoy now going into churches and knowing that whatever happens, the Church is no longer "my business". It must be that way for people who manage restaurants. If they go into another restaurant to eat, they might be too preoccupied about the running of the place to enjoy the dining experience. I used to feel that way about church, and maybe that is why I liked small venues. Now, however, I am comfortable just being a "pew warmer", one who merely gets what he needs out of church and then leaves...

Only once in a great while do I feel nostalgia for the religious life. Usually it's when I'm alone or riding the bus. I really can't connect any of those things to what my life is like now. I guess in a manner of speaking I just hide these things in my heart. I don't wish for such silly things as "more time for prayer" since having had periods in my life where I could pray for hours, I know that I will just squader them. I suppose even now all I wish for is a thankful and loving heart, and that can be obtained anywhere.

It is a funny creature, this eternity of ours. I used to wish that I would make an impact on history by becoming a great theologian, priest, or spiritual father. But now I realize how small everything is. And fleeting. "And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing." This condition of creaturehood, this coldness, this helplessness, this searching for warmth and a kind smile in the sea of life is my only consolation now. If anything, in some small way, I wish to evoke this thankfulness in everything I write, say, and do. And I hope that when the sun sets on this little universe known as "Arturo Vasquez", I will be able to thank all who I have loved and who have loved me, and with a glimmer in my eye, to exit, until at last all of these little universes connect into the heart of the Most Holy Trinity.

Oh well, I just felt like being gushy...

El Justo Juez

2007-12-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

Does anyone have any knowledge of the history of this particular image of the crucifixion, known in Spanish as the "Justo Juez" or the Just Judge? I grew up seeing it, but I don't really know where it came from or the symbolism behind it. Any info would be appreciated, even tangential, anecdotal stories. I am especially relying on my readers who have some knowledge of Spanish/Filipino Catholicism.

Stravinsky - The Rake's Progress

2007-12-03T18:52:00.001-08:00

On Saturday I went to see the San Francisco Opera production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. His first opera and a masterpiece of his neo-classical period, this production was set in 1930’s America and not seventeenth century England, and was full of entertaining special effects (such as an inflatable movie set trailer). Robert Lepage must be commended for the mise en scene and Donald Runnicles for the superb musical execution.

Above you can see and hear Dawn Upshaw’s performance of Anne Trulove’s famous aria from this opera. It was sung superbly on Saturday by Laura Aiken. William Burden was also competent in his portrayal of the protagonist, Tom Rakewell.

The actual theme of The Rake’s Progress combines comedic and Faustian overtones. Basically, the story is that boy meets girl, boy wins fortune and goes to the city, boy loses girl, boy loses fortune, boy almost loses soul and does lose his mind, and gets girl in the end when it’s too late (whew!) The moral is that idle hands and quick fortunes are not the surest way to prosper in life. The work is a collaboration between Igor Stravinsky and W.H. Auden, who wrote the superb libretto. Both were trying to return to a simpler classicism in a fresh and pleasing way, and the work is a delight throughout.

In the program notes, I thought this quote by Stravinsky was especially illuminating:

In fact, these great [musical] progressivists sought to abolish or transform the very clichés I had tried to re-establish, though my restitutions were by no means intended to supersede their now conventionalized reforms.

Indeed, one can make too much of revolutions and innovations. I feel much sympathy with being a “curmudgeonly contrarian” as Auden is described in the program notes. If there is a problem with art these days, it is that it is too ideological and too obsessed with being “original” or “transgressive”. In Stravinsky’s music or Auden’s libretto, one feels the simple delight of unpretentious creation, without the self-consciousness of being an “innovator”. That attitude would be a healthy one in many facets of our lives.

A Comment

2007-12-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

I sometimes hang out at the Reformed Catholicism blog. Tim Enloe recently wrote this piece about the Pope being God in some medieval writings. Read the original post. Then you can read my comment, which I reproduce in its entirety here. (Hey, I gotta post something.)

I found this post very interesting, particularily since I have read many books on Neoplatonism lately. I would like to think that it is clear for most Catholics that Jesus Christ is the One to which all must return, and it is the Pope’s duty to facilitate that return. I don’t think the whole balance between the One and the Many can be adequately obtained in real life; many Orthodox theologians claim that this is the reason they do not accept the modern Papacy as well. But all of the jurisdictional squabbles, moral ambiguity, and ethnocentrism in Orthodoxy often mean that plurality often wins out over unity. The Neoplatonic categories are too neat to apply to everyday life.

As a Roman Catholic, I will say that I DO NOT believe that the Pope is God on earth. The Church as the Body of Christ is God on earth, and the Eucharist is the image and the promise of that presence; the Church as a whole is the light of glory and the pillar and the ground of Truth. I think the equation of God’ presence to the Pope’s authority is limited to a very few individuals during certain polemics with you Protestants. If anything, the Catholics I admire would think that their crucifix or their image of the Virgin of Guadalupe represents more the presence of the Divine in their daily lives, not the Pope. I think that the slow receding of “superstitious popery” (rosary beads, statues, novenas, etc.) facilitates a Newman-like scenario where one tries to justify doctrines and beliefs one is not really comfortable with, such as the intercession of the saints or purgatory. A son of a farmer in the Mexican countryside who becomes a priest and a theologian would have never formulated the development of doctrine because for him, the Church had always been one.

(My mother, when she first came to this country, used to make the Sign of the Cross everytime she passed a church, even if it was Protestant, since she did not know that there was any other church other than the Catholic Church.)

Authority, then, becomes the ultimate arbitor of what is Catholic. Since one is not comfortable with praying a Hail Mary or kissing the hand of an ecclesiastic, one has to justify it to oneself by saying that it’s somehow okay since the authority of the Church says it is. As if it was the Church hierarchy that invented these things. I am beginning to think this is untenable for a variety of reasons. Authority only becomes a refuge when daily life, the ethos of how the Gospels are historically read, comes into crisis.

I have been thinking recently that many of the things that you Protestants find objectionable were not the inventions of Popes or bishops, but rather practices that emerged in the lives of average layfolk that the Church hierarchy only approved of ex post facto. I can’t see how the intercession of the saints, for example, emerged from some sort of scholarly debates about Scriptures, but rather from our Catholic and very human habit of talking to dead loved ones. This happened with certain individuals, mostly martyrs, and the prayers worked. (That is what is often left out of these apologetic conversations: when we pray for the intercession of the saints, they respond. Just last month, I prayed to St. Joseph, and he came through.) The hierarchy saw some precedent in the Scriptures, and deemed it was okay to do this.

Sometimes authority has to step in and say what the layfolk are doing is not okay, like the recent condemnation by the hierarchy in Mexico of the cult to “la Santa Muerte”, the Grim Reaper, which is just unjustified superstition. But as in the approbation of Marian apparitions, the hierarchy only says that it is permissible to believe in them, and they prove no harm to the Faith. Again, I reiterate, the hierarchy does not create our religion; it regulates it. I like our current Pope, for example, since he is trying to give more deference to organically evolved liturgical practices over the practices created in the 1960’s by panels of “experts”.

In the end, I am not an enthusiastic advocate of the development of doctrine since I don’t think history is all that neat. If anything, I understand it more as “punctuated equilibrium”: new understandings and practices emerge all of a sudden, with some gaps in “development” and may (emphasis on “may”) look radically different from what came before. (Though one would have to ask to what extent historical imagination plays in all of this.) I don’t think this is particularily scandalous since this is how life is. In this case, one has to trust the “authority” of the Church, the whole Church, and defer to the way of life it passes down to us, from dipping our hand in the holy water font when we enter a church to listening to the Urbi et Orbi speech on Christmas and Easter (though that is far more recent). For me, that is the way to “read” the Gospel; in the context of the greater historical and spatial reality of the Body of Christ, not in the illusion of my own ideal of what the Church should be like.

My main problem with Protestantism, then, is also one of authority. You feel yourselves free to re-invent the wheel everytime you deem it convenient or desirable. Up to very recently, we Roman Catholics were quite conservative bunch in this regard. (I think it was the “devil incarnate” himself, Blessed Pius IX, who when it was suggested that St. Joseph’s name be inserted into the Canon of the Mass, objected that he could do no such thing, since he was only the Pope.) I don’t object to “private judgement”; I object to private judgement when it is accompanied by absolute authority to negate and destroy. That is why I find Protestantism so unappealing, and dare I say it, irrational.

And that is why, even if I have a thousand difficulties with Church, I would never leave it, since that would mean I would trust myself over and above the cloud of witnesses that has shined throughout history. And in my book, that is making me God over and above them.

Now listening to...

2007-11-30T14:36:00.001-08:00

A Handful of World by Lisa Bielawa

Mi espejo

2007-11-29T15:34:00.000-08:00

image credit

Bolero

Qué vanidad imaginar
que puedo darte todo, el amor y la dicha,
itinerarios, música, juguetes.
Es cierto que es así:
todo lo mío te lo doy, es cierto,
pero todo lo mío no te basta
como a mí no me basta que me des
todo lo tuyo.

Por eso no seremos nunca
la pareja perfecta, la tarjeta postal,
si no somos capaces de aceptar
que sólo en la aritmética
el dos nace del uno más el uno.

Por ahí un papelito
que solamente dice:

Siempre fuiste mi espejo,
quiero decir que para verme tenía que mirarte.

-Julio Cortázar

What vanity it is to imagine
that I can give you all, love and hapiness
trips, music, toys.
That certainly is the case:
I give all that I have to you, it's true,
but all that I have is not enough for you
as it is the case that you giving me everything
is not enough for me.

That's the reason why we will never be
the perfect couple, the post card,
if we are not capable of accepting
that only in arithmetic
is two born from one plus one.

Over there somewhere is
a paper that says only:

You were always my mirror,
I want to say that in order to see myself
I had to look at you.

Fr. Maximos in America Magazine

2007-11-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Father Maximos of Holy Resurrection Monastery who had an article published in the current issue of America magazine. Though I am not a great fan of this magazine usually, it is found in churches and libraries all over the country. This article is well worth the read.

Pictured above: the monks of Holy Resurrection at a traditional Pontifical Requiem Mass in San Diego, found via the New Liturgical Movement site. As our deceased Pontiff would say, we see here the two lungs of the Church together.

Bhakti by Maurice Bejart

2007-11-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

I hesitated as to whether or not I wanted to post this but Bejart died last week at the age of 80 and I found some aesthetic merit in this dance. It is interesting to compare it with the previous (more traditional) dance of Shiva that I posted earlier. As you can see this is very much a product of its time (1969). Hope you enjoy it.

Homo Desertus

2007-11-26T00:00:00.000-08:00

With its transcendental orientation, however, the Phaedrus does not serve as the best starting point for examining the soul's links with the material world, or, collaterally, with the immanental aspects of the Godhead. The polarities of transcendence and immanence both exerted their fascination on Ficino, while, simultaneously, he refused to be polarized. Even when transcendental material comes to the fore, he picks up passing phrases to offset it, to restore the balance. The chariot's flight is not only a mystical ascent from darkness into light but a cosmic ride through the hierarchy of being, inpsired by love for the whole. The soul wishes not merely to flee to the One but to reach the One by way of a graduated ascent that takes her from one end of creation to the other and thus into all things.

- from Michael J.B. Allen's The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino

The main idea that has triumphed in modern thought is the absolute independence and subjectivity of every thinking subject. Knowledge, perception, and truth are deemed to be activities that we do and achieve on our own. No matter if you are a neo-scholastic, an existentialist, or a post-structuralist, all things must be proved from "the bottom up": from the lone subject, cut off from the world in some primordial epistemic cataclysm, to the illuminating reality outside of him. Following Cicero, the paradigm of man that determines our everyday lives is the "homo desertus": the man abandoned. This is the basis of our modern order: political, economic, philosophical, and theological.

Thus, the State never guides us on how to act, on what constitutes virtue and what vice, but rather lets us know what is permitted and what is not. The main protest of any citizen is always: "You can't tell me what to do". In the end, however, no one can. All decisions are, in the end, my decisions, without reference to cultural, political, or cosmic contexts. The subject is thus defined as being by himself, without external influences, and thus somehow inviolate.

In religion, this often manifests itself in the moment of the leap of Faith. One has to recapitulate the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac in every single individual circumstance. In the Kierkegaardean moment, man confronts the abyss, the cold and uncaring universe, and affirms the existence of a personal god at all costs, come what may. The ultimate absurdity of this always remains, just as uncertainty continues in the Cartesian "de omnibus dubitandum" even after one has re-constructed the rational universe in one's head. The religious man thus tries to nurse himself with certain aspects of religiosity to dull this ennui, whether it be historical legitimacy, liturgical aestheticism, or merely a sense of greater belonging. This has ceased to be religiosity properly speaking. It is a life-style choice among life-style choices. And God is not at the beginning of this process, but rather at the end, or rather an adornment, the "icing on the cake" that is never quite achieved.

In case you haven't noticed, there is a methodology to all that I write and post here. Two years after I have begun, the same questions have consumed me in all of my avatars. Whether or not I have written as a Catholic, an Anglican, an aficionado of the Orthodox Church, or anything else, I have always had one concern at heart: is God real anymore? Can absolute truth survive in a pluralistic society? And is there a "natural" basis necessary for belief?

At this stage in the game, I am beginning to conclude that in Christianity itself lies the seed of its own destruction. This is not surprising, since it is a faith of human beings and fallen human beings are often repulsed by the truth. At the dawn of the Church, Christians had to contend with paganism and a world where gods and demons were omnipresent. After we had destroyed all of the idols, many posit that we began to make new ones, and thus we had the flowering of sanctoral cults and cathedrals, legends and hymns that began to fill the void that the death of the old gods left in the human psyche.

With the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, however, we woke up and realized that such practices were contrary to "the Gospel", that we had slipped far from the monotheistic perspectives of ancient Judaism. So once again, in many places, we crushed the idols or at least regulated them, we expunged the legends from our collective consciousness, and we began to subjugate our "man-made" traditions to a higher scrutiny. For me, the ultimate triumph of this point of view came with the Document of the Second Vatican Council on Liturgy, where it reads:

To whatever extent may seem desirable, the hymns are to be restored to their original form, and whatever smacks of mythology or ill accords with Christian piety is to be removed or changed.

In this way, man becomes the supreme arbiter over all things divine. It is also very symptomatic of the idea that the visible ecclesiastical hierarchy is the only conduit of divine intervention in the world, the only thing that can be trusted. In the Roman Catholic Church at least, religion must be guaranteed by a legal authority in a universe devoid of the sacred.

Thus, in this age, the idea most corrosive to Christianity is not the old paganism (though it is still amusing to see Protestants accuse Catholics of idolatry), but rather a soft atheism, or even worse, an indifferent agnosticism. Man today likes a cold, insignificant universe since it will always allow him to behave according to his own devices. At the bottom of it all, such a world kills the imagination and ultimately the human spirit. Life becomes increasingly dis-integrated to the point that even the most sublime ideas and facets of our lives are compartmentalized and marginalized into the realm of fancy, hobby, and personal choice.

If we have forgotten one truth, then, it is that we are not alone in this universe, that the supernatural is very much all around us, and the sacred lies not at the end of knowledge, but rather at the beginning.

We can make an analogy to medicine, we can say that it would be akin to the effect antibiotics can have on the body. Many times, they can kill the dangerous viruses that harm us. But in the process of killing these dangerous organisms, it can also kill many of the organisms beneficial to us. Thus while having been saved from one particular form of illness, we are then afflicted with worse illnesses and our immune system is too weak to fight them. For our purposes here, what has been killed off is the imagination, religiosity and spirit of pagan polytheism and popular Roman Catholicism, and the anti-biotic was scientific and theological rationalism.

A similar phenomenon to the medical one conceived above is one which hits particularly close to home having grown up in rural California. When we would cut apricots as children, we noticed that the fruit would be covered with lady bugs. Normally, farmers don't want any critters crawling around their fruit. Lady bugs, however, ate aphids, and aphids ate apricots. It was better to have the fruit crawling with a benevolent parasite rather than a noxious one.

Renaissance Neoplatonists are often accused of being revivers of paganism in the West. The man who brought the works of Plato to the West was a Greek scholar by the name of Georgios Gemistos Plethon, a man who probably was a closet pagan in spite of being part of the emissaries sent by the Byzantine emperor for the Council of Florence. The indirect disciples of this mysterious Greek figure, such as Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandolla, often refer to Greek gods as if they were real. In truth, however, these gods were seen as paradigms that revealed the recesses of the human soul. They also revealed the interconnectedness of humanity with the cosmos, how we both influence and are influenced by the stars, earth, and spirits that we cannot see. The process by which we begin to know is thus the greatest ars memoriae, the remembering of Ideas and Forms that are present in all creation and yet transcends it.

Recently, I have written about some mischaracterizations that popular writers make about Platonic thought. Many think that Platonism is anti-corporeal and despises physical beauty as transitory. Nothing can be further from the truth. As Plato scholar Paul Friendlander puts it, in Plato, everyone taking the right path must first love one beautiful body and generate in it "beautiful words"; then recognize the one beauty in all beautiful bodies, becoming a lover of all. No one may omit these preliminary stages, beyond which leads the soul's path to beauty and upward. In the Platonists of the Renaissance, this concern for climbing the chain of being, from the smallest blade of grass to the apex of the divinity was both created and then left behind by a world seeking another form of control over the universe.

I am not recommending here a return to the astrology or use of amulets that the priest Ficino advocated during the Renaissance. As in all human endeavors, we have the gift of hindsight and we know now that even these things did not do much to fix the problem but rather made them worse. Nor am I advocating outright idolatry or an abandonment of orthodox theological practices. Perhaps what I am most advocating here is a particular attention to those parts of Catholicism that are being lost with the passing of the years. As we become more educated, as we become more theologically informed about the universe and history, we must never forget that we know very little in the great scheme of things, and perhaps our ancestors knew things that we have since forgotten. In my own mind, I am thinking that such things as posadas, bloody statues, strange family devotions and other aspects of Mexican folk Catholicism contain a wisdom that most theologians overlook. Catholicism may have an official "party line" theology on the surface, but at its roots and in its soil are beliefs and practices that seem almost "pagan" but in the end are necessary for the health of the Faith in the face of postmodernity.

But most of all, like the late Neoplatonists, I am perhaps asking all of us to consider that the perhaps the truth is not so much something that must be "understood" but rather re-enacted. In other words, our liturgy and doctrines are not so much catechetical tools in the modern sense, but rather re-capitulations of the Church as the transfigured cosmos. Our life in God resembles more a dance and less a lecture; our theology must be more like a hymn and less like an instruction manual. As in the philosophy of the pagan Iamblichus, these hymns and these dances are what call the graces of the Divine down to us, not our own cleverness or eloquent arguments.

I realize that these arguments must be very strange to most of the people reading this. I am, however, at a loss on how to break the solipsistic obsessions that plague the fields of knowledge in our society. It is no wonder that the human being, so mortal, weak, material, and alone, cannot obtain real certainty about anything; only a god, to quote Heidegger, can save him. The Word became flesh, and we are saved only through sanctified matter which allows us to climb back to the Heaven from which our minds have figuratively fallen. Religious ritual and piety are not the result of a clear philosophy of reality. They are, rather, at its origin. Only then will man be rescued from his modern malaise: through beauty, ritual, culture, and Faith.

Overture

2007-11-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

Contact with divinity is not knowledge. For knowledge is in a certain respect separated from its object by otherness. But prior to knowledge - as one things knows another - is the uniform connection with divinity, which is suspended from the gods, and is spontaneous and inseparable from them.

-Iamblichus, De Mysteriis

On the Virgin of St. John of the Lakes, a popular devotion in Mexico.

The First Miracle:

According to legend based on eye witness accounts, a family of circus performers was passing through the region of St. John of the Lakes on its way to the city of Guadalajara. They brought with them many circus acts, including one in which a girl leaped on a trapeze over a bed of daggers. She lost her balance and fell to her death. Right before the burial, an Indian woman by the name of Ana Lucia, wife of Peter Andrew, the man who was in charge of taking care of a small chapel, upon seeing the grief of the family, implored her husband to take to them a small image of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. She had given it the Nahuatl name, the Cihualpilli, or the Great Lady, since she claimed it was miraculous and would even get up and walk from the sacristy to the altar on various occasions during the night. The parents in their grief allowed Ana Lucia to place the image over the chest of the small girl, and her life was returned to her.

Below: a painting of this occurence

The Philosopher's Stone and the Virgin Mary

2007-11-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

I will propose you a similitude of gold. The ethereal heaven was shut from all men, so that all men should descend to the infernal seats, and be there perpetually detained. But Jesus Christ opened the gate of the ethereal Olympus, and has now unlocked the kingdoms of Pluto, that the souls may be taken out; when by the co-operation of the holy spirit in the virginal womb, the virgin Mary did by an ineffable mystery and most profound sacraments conceive what was the most excellent in the heavens and on the earth; and at length brought forth for us the saviour of the whole world, who out of his super abundant bounty shall save all who are able to sin, if the sinner turn himself to him. But she remained an untouched and undefiled virgin: whence mercury is not undeservedly compared to the most glorious saint the virgin Mary. For mercury is a virgin because it never propagated in the womb of the Earth and metallic body, and yet it generates the stone for us; by dissolving heaven, that is, gold, it opens it, and brings out the soul; which understand you to be the divinity, and carries it some little while in its womb, and at length in its own time transmits it into a cleansed body. From whence a child, that is, the stone, is born to us, by whose blood the inferior bodies being tinged are brought safe into the golden heaven, and mercury remains a virgin without a stain, such as is was ever before.

-from the treatise on the alchemical art attributed to Marsilio Ficino, found on this site.

Couperin- Leçons de ténèbres

2007-11-21T12:24:00.001-08:00

Fr. Maximos on Recent Polemics

2007-11-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

From the Anastasis Dialogue:

And there we come to the final, though probably the most long winded of the Ochlophobist’s post: his over-iterated apologia for Orthodoxy’s essential perfection. The central idea here is that Orthodoxy has no need of other Christians (can we call them that?) because she really has no need of anyone else. She has the Cross. She has Jesus. What more do you need?

Lurking behind this ecclesiology (and yes, that’s what it is—and not an “undefined” one, as is argued, but an ill-defined one) is, in my view, a kind of crypto-protestant “me and Jesus” attitude. Not everyone who cries, “Lord, Lord” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The Church does not exist solely in relation to Christ; it is also the means by which Christ extends Himself through the Spirit to all creation.

I was going to post something of my own about all of these things, but why bother? Fr. Maximos stated it much better than I ever could. Read the whole post here.

The Beginning of Vespers of the Dormition

2007-11-20T10:32:00.000-08:00

St. Elias Church, Brampton ON (Ukrainian, Greek-Catholic)

I admit it. Sometimes I regret not being Byzantine anymore.

I got this off of the Philadelphia Roamin' Catholic blog, now on my links list.

You can also read this, one of my old posts, if you haven't already.

De Vino

2007-11-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

Onians informs us that in classical Rome it was believed that wine was the very sap of life; indeed, in the words of Petronius, "Vita vinum est" - Life is wine. Onians also observes that wine was believed to go to the head, literally, where the genius or daimon resides. Therefore, wine was not only the source of physical longevity, it was also the nourishment of the soul. The Romans had a curious custom of smearing wine on the temples, a practice Ficino recommends in The Planets. He also advises drinking wine twice a day and taking each day equal portions of wine and light, a mysterious prescription the meaning of which might be apparent when we have considered the Apollonian elements of the soul.

-Thomas Moore, The Planets Within: Marsilio Ficino's Astrological Psychology

De Corpore

2007-11-17T14:39:00.000-08:00

Part I- This Body of Death

Recently I have read some rather interesting articles on the supposed belittling of the body in the modern world. One article in particular, The Theology of the Bawdy by Richard & Elizabeth Gerbracht in the most recent issue of the New Oxford Review (you know, the magazine that is like, "we're so reactionary it's cute and hip") puts it in rather drastic and dare I say apocalyptic terms. There is a sense the the human body is being devalued, that we are on the verge of an anti-human age. I have heard this from many circles, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox, and while I agree with many of their concerns, I cannot condone some of their errors in thinking and rhetorical exaggerations.

I guess this article in particular struck a nerve since it laid part of the blame on the divine Plato. And since Plato is the shot caller in my philosophical belief system, it is almost a knee-jerk reaction on my part to raise an objection. For according to this article, the genius of the Peripatetic system is the distinction between matter and form that Aristotle formulated supposedly against the Platonic idea that the material world is nothing but a shadow of the spiritual one. To put it bluntly, with some Christian corrections the Aristotilian system is seen as more incarnational and Platonists and we wannabe Platonists are seen as crypto-Gnostics(though Plotinus fought against the Gnostics in the Enneads)since we think that the body is all but dross.

To the extent that this intersects with that "theological time-bomb" set to go off any second now called the theology of the body, I don't know. Truth be told, I started reading John Paul II's talks on this, got about half way through, and all I could think before I finally stopped was, "where is he getting this from?" Granted, these were less than formal catechetical talks, but Patristic citations were few and far between, and I found the prose far too muddled to get any definitive answers out of it. I am willing to concede that I may just be a poor reader in this regard.

When I passed on the above article to someone much more intelligent, this is the response I got:

The author is missing a further explanation here - we are of course not united (at the final Resurrection) to our bodies as they are now, but to some "perfected" version of our bodies, whatever that may be. That again does suggest some separation (perhaps permanent) between our souls and bodies here on earth, even if after the Fall, we now have a bad copy of our bodies...

If I were him, this is not the way I would have argued for this point - there are two major problems. Problem 1): He contends "we will have these bodies after the resurrection, in order to perfectly see God, therefore we cannot separate mind from body" and yet we can safely say we do not have THESE bodies to do that. I'm probably not going to need to breathe oxygen, have sufficient amounts of vitamins and minerals, etc, to keep my resurrected body functioning properly. And if my body isn't going to be made up of cells as we know it, then what is it? Christ's resurrected body certainly seemed to have strange properties unknown to our earthly, human bodies. One can too easily argue the gnostic point with his statements. Problem 2): He is ignoring the multitude of choices that can be made about artificially extending the life of the body. E.g., Schiavo would have been dead a long time ago if not for modern medicine. What does it mean that the body can go on without conscious control/a soul?

So when the authors blame Platonism for somehow denigrating the body, I think it is an acceptable criticism precisely because the body is a less than pleasant thing in this fallen world. There is a theology when it comes to "flesh", but there is nothing theological about warts or mucus, other than the fact that they are results of a fallen world.

I guess my main problem is that of privileging one metaphor about union with God without greatly nuancing that metaphor. It is true that in the Patristic and medieval mind the Song of Songs, an erotic book, was the song of union with God par excellence. But notice how every classical Christian author is quick to allegorize everything in that book, from breasts, to hair, to eyes, etc. Marriage is and is not a symbol of our union with God, precisely because, in the Dionysian tradition, all things participate in God's glory but not in His Being. Everything is an imperfect symbol, and to think that the actual carnal act that we do in our bedrooms has a lot to do with the mystery of the Trinity is slightly off in my opinion. Even Aquinas in the Summa said that we would procreate and defecate in the same way we would not if there had been no Fall, but all of the unpleasantness would have been taken out of it.

What seems most unsettling to me about the theology of the body as advocated by some, however, is not any of its theoretical components, but rather its attitude on the necessity of "re-packaging" the Christian message for the postmodern man. Christianity does not need a "sexy makeover". In my opinion, what made Christianity triumph in the first place was the conquering of the body, that is, the witness of martyrdom. From my own experience with the texts of the Byzantine liturgy, the fact that women and children could stand up to torture and be triumphant, or that everyday men could live without sexual intercourse profoundly astounded many of the ancients. I remember an anecdote we were told about the life of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre as a missionary in Africa, where men and women of the villages would try to sneak up on the missionary priest's hut thinking that they were finally going to see the wife that he was hiding. They were astounded by the fact that she never materialized.

While it is important to point out that the sexuality of the twenty-first century is greatly disordered, I don't think it very believable for us Catholics to tell this society how to be "authentically sexual". I think what has worked in the past will work again. The problem is inherently supernatural: Christianity will not be proven right by rational or utilitarian arguments, but rather by the showing of its other-worldly nature. Christianity is neither useful, nor better, nor necessary for a society. True, if everyone behaved like Christians, things would be a lot better. At the core of our beliefs, however, is one which says that such a thing will never happen. Only the Parousia, the coming of Christ in glory, will solve all of our problems. This does not mean that we can have no social doctrine in the Catholic Church, but it does mean that we can't expect a whole lot from the application of that doctrine. The world is fallen, and it will continue to be so.

(I must say here that even the dreaded "same-sex marriage" is not a new thing. As another article in the New Oxford Review put it, such things occurred in Rome under Nero. Cabeza de Vaca witnessed it among American Indians during his years wandering through what is now the southern United States. And of course there is that rather odd ceremony in the Orthodox Church's liturgical books called the Adelphopoiia Rite, which Nicodemos the Hagiorite in the Pedalion implied was used as a rite of same-sex carnal union.)

But back to the real issue at hand: what then are we to think of the body? Is the Platonic tradition really that denigrating of the body? And what is the real meaning, the real symbolism behind our fallen carnality? That is the subject of Part II of this post.

A Blog You Should Read

2007-11-16T06:21:00.001-08:00

With all the other crap on the Internet, more people should be reading Love and do what you will. After all, how many apologetics and "theology" pages can you read in a day anyway? Do you really want to spend your valuable time arguing with Protestants over justification (dialogue of the deaf... hello!?)

And how much do YOU know about Spanish poetry and literature? Well, here's a great place to learn. And the author's funny too.

Do yourself a favor. Read this blog.

Chance Encounter

2007-11-15T22:29:00.001-08:00

by Lisa Bielawa

A taste of the contemporary avant-garde.

On the Church and Language

2007-11-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

Or: On Pizza, Beer, Machine Guns, Transliterated Greek Words, Argentine Sedevacantism, Taxi Cabs and Other Attractions of My Theological Freak Show

Sometimes I think that there is no such thing as Roman Catholicism. Rather, there are Roman Catholicisms. My religious experiences with Mexicans and Argentines seem so far removed from any conversations about religion that I have in this country among "non-Latins". There is an antiseptic, dry quality to everything that is said in the United States about the Roman Catholic Church. This quality even penetrates to the fringes and extremes of any Catholic phenomenon in this country.

When we were occasionally let out of seminary in Argentina, I would sometimes be able to go into the actual city of Buenos Aires to see the sights and take a break from the usual diet of gruel and water. A few times, I went out with my best friend Nico, another bohemian who had no business being an SSPX seminarian, to spread clerical terror in the land of the porteños. One of my favorite things to do was to go to San Telmo, the old part of the city, and have some beer and pizza. Now, Argentine pizza is different from the pizza we have here: it is much less greasy, the crust is thicker, and it has less of a sense of being a type of fast food. And it goes wonderfully with a nice Argentine beer.

During many of these conversations, Nico would fill me in on all of the ins and outs of Argentine Roman Catholic traditionalism. One thing you have to understand is that Argentines become traditionalists for an entirely different set of reasons than Americans do. For them, it is more an issue of political ideology than anything else. Nico would tell me about how his family had a friend who though always a civilian, still found a way to participate in all of the coup d'etats from Peron's first fall in 1955 onward. (I think he said that this man had a jeep with a mounted machine gun on the back in his private garage.) These were the type of people who became traditionalist: people who thought the Patria was going to hell in a handbasket and that the Masons and those hijos de p%#a leftist bishops were spreading Marxism in the pews.

Like all Catholic traditionalism, there were factions, and among those factions, there were many sedevacantists. (Indeed, the seminary at La Reja divided in two during the early 1990's, with the old rector and many seminarians who held the sedevacantist position leaving in order to form their own seminary. They are still kicking around somewhere at the foot of the Andes.) Nico told me once that there was a type of sedevacantists who often never went to Mass at all, sort of like the Old Believers in Russia:

"Son disandristas", he said.

Disandrists, he explained, are followers of the great Argentine classical philologist Carlos Alberto Disandro (pictured above), and unlike the vast majority of sedevacantists, his objections to the legitimacy of the Roman Church coming out of Vatican II centered not just on Thomistic arguments, but on his readings of the Greek Fathers of the Church. Admittedly, this was all just a cover-up for his pseudo-fascism and anti-Semitism, but some of the reasons he gave were rather fascinating. And, hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And while I was there, I read the polemics of the SSPX against Disandro saying that his ideas bordered on Gnosticism and crypto-paganism.

Being a nosy inquirer into all things strange, recently Disandro has been on my mind. To my surprise, the library here in Berkeley has a few of his works, mostly on classical Greek poetry. But there is one book that I found in storage of Disandro, a compendium of three works he put together under the title, The Judeo-Christian Heresy. I have recently read through much of it, and I will comment here mostly on the second essay, "Saint Stephen, Protomartyr: A Reply to Cardinal Danielou".

The book begins with a bold statement in the introduction:

Firstly, the founding base of the Church is the Mysteric Cult, the Sacred Act, not the Bible. The Bible is the least significant level of the Mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos, and therefore cannot govern the life of the Church.

Thus, a Biblical philology that is of Jewish inspiration, or Judeo-Christian, such as the one that the Sacred Councils neutralized and unseated up until the eight century and beyond, as well as the Holy Fathers in the same vein, is a powerful poison against the life of the Church.

The central essay on St. Stephen was a response to a visit of Jean Cardinal Danielou, S.J. to Argentina. For Disandro, Danielou was one of the major representatives of a new Judaizing tendency that had taken over the Church. The compelling argument in the essay was that, unlike the ecumenical talk of the validity of the Old Convenant coming out of Vatican II, the recounting in the Book of Acts of the first martyrdom of St. Stephen represented a much more radical break from the Synagogue than many contemporary theologians care to admit:

...in the interpretation of St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine the martyrdom of the Hellenic deacon Stephen posits itself as a theological paradigm and announces the profound mystery of the metanoia of all men, especially of the obsolete fate of Israel, whatever it might be. That announcement prefigures the attribute of katholike for the Ecclesia that has no need of an Israel, nor of a Zarathustra, a Socrates or a Gandhi, since it has another principle of historical growth that is not corrupted by a decadent priesthood, a ridiculous and abject eroticism, nor the cultic fornication with all the demons of the vast and awe-inspiring air.

In the convoluted prose of the Argentine scholar, an indictment shines forth of modern approaches to looking at the world. If one can only cut through his reactionary posturing, one sees a man who has profoundly thought about what it means to think, act, and believe. Although there are all sorts of problems with his arguments (he's a sedevacantist for crying out loud!) there are many passages that challenge our views of things in his rather pithy and polemical book. One such long passage I will translate here for the sake of my American readers:

Such as there exists the absolute Incarnation of the Logos or the Son of Man that cannot be substituted, nor completed, nor perfected, and even though it occurs in human history, it overflows, fulfills, and transfigures anothen(as St. John says), thus there exists a holy semantic model that cannot be substituted, or completed, or perfected, and even if it occurs in the heart of linguistic history, it assumes that meaning of the highest level of concrete sacredness. This Greek semantic model is congruent with the trinitarian mystery and is manifested in the cult... and since the New Testament is the light of the Old, Greek sacredness is superior to that of the Hebrew, insofar as the latter corresponds to the ministry of the angels and the former corresponds to the reality of the abyss of celestial Theantropia... No language can be of greater sigificative profundity than Greek and none can express better the trinitarian depth of Revelation.

So much for that, Origen! But our Argentine sedevacantist has a profoudly Neoplatonic view of what it means to know. Doctrine is not just a series of lessons to be learned, but an initiation into a series of transfigurative truths. So it is not just about what is said, but how it is said. And in that sense, some means of communication are much more privileged than others. You will have to excuse me, but I must include as well one final long quote:

...the Church as Sacramentum Trinitatis is not founded on the letter, nor does it need the Letter; but insofar as the Logos is the vicarial assumed event that incorporates the semantic breath of man, it assumes all of its concrete structural instances. The letter of the Gospel is thus a sacramental sign of the theandric breath, a sacred respiration from its divine bridge, a holy semantics from an inviolate Greek that reassumes according to the capacity of the letter the mysterious movements and shadows of the Trinitarian life. Before this text we fall in worship not to adore nor to Judaize the letter as the fount of Life, but rather to listen to the breath, to journey in its ways, live in its dwellings, and to recognize the celestial sound of the humanized Logos.

No wonder he's a traditionalist: he has just undermined the entire epistemological base for the Vatican liturgical reforms of the 1960's. The Word is not Letter. It is not something to be "read" and "understood", but rather it is something that must be heard and worshiped. Thus, why not chant the Word in Latin or Greek rather than try to understand "what it says"? The idea of a "Liturgy of the Word" as opposed to a "Liturgy of the Eucharist" is a reversion to the letter, to the simulacrum and to the shadow. For the letter:

...is also to be transfigured, and for this reason the inviolate Church receives the inviolate letter, in expectation of that mysterious creature that contains in a perfect manner the abyss of divine-humanity.

(Of course, what I don't understand about his argument is why he would defend the Mass in Latin. While he praises the Hellenic mind, the "cult" he advocates is not in "theandric" Greek. Maybe, in another context, he would have become Orthodox, but that would have opened up another can of worms.)

What I find interesting is how these arguments could be applied to some of the Catholic blogs that I read. Most of them are involved in the rather Sisyphean exercise of trying to convince Protestants that Protestantism is not Scriptural. But, if we consider the premises of our sedevacantist philologist, the Christian Faith does not have its primary basis in Scripture: it resides rather in the "Mysteric Cult", the Eucharist, and the power of God. Indeed, it has been refered to me several times that primitive Christianity may have spread not primarily through the persuasive preaching of the first followers of Christ, but rather through all of the miracles of the early Church. Early Christianity may have been more shamanistic than we would like to concede. Indeed, as Disandro points out, the primary presence of God in Israel during its Golden Age was not the presence of God in the Torah or the word, but rather in the Shekinah of the Temple, the Light of Glory:

Quam dilecta sunt tabernacula tua, Domine virtutum...

Thus, trying to persuade people that Catholicism is the true "religion of the Book" is a bit like trying to make an atomic bomb out of gum wrappers and rubber bands. The real foundation of our religion is elsewhere. (And not, as I would say, in ecclesiastical authority either, as some would wish to believe, but that is the subject of another post entirely, and it is past my bedtime.)

It's funny to read a sedevacantist who sounds more like a porteño Alexander Schmemann than Cardinal Cajetan's mentally handicapped cousin. But those are just the people you meet. What do you expect from a country whose middle class intelligentsia has few ambitions to use their book learning for anything useful? As my friend Nico once told me when he left seminary at the same time I did:

I can either study something I like and end up driving a taxi, or I can study something useful and still end up driving a taxi.

Last time I heard, he was going to law school just to have something to do. I wonder if he's a good driver...

Charpentier: Magnificat for 3 Voices

2007-11-13T08:33:00.001-08:00

New Link

2007-11-12T19:06:00.000-08:00

Nevermind reading what I write. Read something edifying.

Like this:

I’m afraid that for many of us “seasoned” Christians, beneath the masks of our concern about orthodoxy, erudite arguments about theology, zeal for traditionalism, criticisms of hierarchs and hostility toward “the godless world,” lies secrets and layers of selfishness, each to our own, that we are either unable or unwilling to acknowledge. What would happen if I finally owned up to God? What about my life might change? How might this affect the Church and the world for which I have been appointed a witness of truth?

On Definitions

2007-11-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

Sometimes your problems do not end by defining something. They only begin.

When the sages had reassembled in Yavneh after the destruction of Jerusalem they said: "The hour will come when someone will seek a word from the Torah or tradition and will not find it." They decided to collect all the discussions and preserve them, together with the names of those who handed them down. Binding decisions should then be made by the majority. But why, they asked, are the minority voices preserved, even if it be the voice of a single sage? One thought that it was in order to deprive them of their influence by recalling and refuting them. But Rabbi Yehuda said: "they are preserved so that one may be able to rely on them when their hour has come."

-quoted in Klaus Schatz's Papal Primacy, p. 175

Due to our fragile condition as rational animals, the process of obtaining the truth cannot be conceived of simplistically as the Triumph of the Right crushing the Wrong. Our own limitations as mortal and sinful creatures should make us wary of making absolute statements that bind all people to belief in this generation and for generations to come. In every error on this side of death there is a seed of truth. And in every truth there is the seed of its own destruction. To want to consider something as absolutely right and another as absolutely wrong can thus cause all sorts of problems.

I am not saying that we must not have firm convictions. I am saying that we should be aware of ourselves as bearers of these convictions and of our own place in history and in the world.

Editorial Note

2007-11-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

If anyone would like to post frivolous comments on this blog, I now reserve the right for myself to delete them. Some have used my leniency in this regard to turn this blog into a place to vent their own strange tastes in music and culture. That will now cease. You are all welcome to post whatever you want, but I am now the sole arbiter as to whether it will stay posted or not.

And that's why we can't have nice things.

Immortality

2007-11-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

But the soul's immortality- the eternity, that is, of the Phaedrean charioteer- is not merely a consequence of arguing that Soul is the principle of motion: it is absolutely necessary to the sustaining of the world. Without the perpetuity, without the immortality of every soul... the motion and therefore the life of the world would cease...

-Michael J.B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino

Is is funny how we, so weak and so passing, can uphold an entire universe...

Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company

2007-11-08T17:34:00.002-08:00

Don't just say, "everything is theological".

Show that it is.

To say it means absolutely nothing.

Pulcinella - Igor Stravinsky

2007-11-07T19:28:00.001-08:00

In Thanksgiving to St. Joseph

2007-11-06T04:44:00.000-08:00

Ben over at the Undercroft prayed to St. Joseph for his own employment woes, and apparently his prayers were granted. I thought that this was a great idea in my own job search, so I did the same. And I got a job! Hooray! So I am offering the Foster-father of Jesus this humble poem:

To you, O blessed Joseph
Such praises I will proclaim,
That are worthy of both
Your tenderness and might,
That are worthy of your name.

To you, O blessed Joseph,
Whose shoulder was tired and strong,
Who defended Jesus and Mary so sweetly
Through nights so dark and trails so long.

For this day you have shown me
Your power and grace
And you have looked upon me
With those eyes
That comforted Jesus' infant tears
And silenced with love His mournful sighs.

For now, like you, I will earn my bread
And for a family too I will provide,
Into the Kingdom may I be kindly led
To eat the supper by the Lamb's side.

Sancte Joseph, ora pro nobis.

(And no, you may NOT know what job it is...)

On the Periphery of Roman Catholicism

2007-11-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

At the Margins of Theology

In the process of codifying a certain system, the silences can be deafening. That which is considered imperfect, neither here nor there, nor worthy of belief can be discarded in the quest for purity, sobriety, and reason. It is always those who have the power of expression who silence those who have very little of that power. And before we know it, the many colorful things that we had we end up losing, and we substitute them with supposedly ancient visions of the world that are in reality very new creations. That which was in the margins no longer remains in the margins. It is merely erased.

In my own particular family, I have found that my own approach to religion has changed from how my parents and grandparents conceived it. Just I am much more literate and cultured than my parents, so is my faith much more "formed" in a matter of speaking. I have assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon First World culture of the United States, and this fact is not to be lamented. It is inevitable, and to pretend the contrary is at best a patronizing romanticism. The real hubris would be to somehow think that the way I believe is superior to that of my ancestors. In many ways, I think that it is far worse.

One of the ways that I tried to revive this more primordial religious sentiment was to search East, to Byzantine Christianity. Somehow I thought that this pilgrimage East would inspire me with its strangeness and primitive beauty. However, I soon learned that it was just as "Western", just as "modern", just as "rationalist" as modern forms of Western Christianity. The real primitive Christianity, the real "Church of the Fathers" is the Church of my fathers: it is a church of imperfect sinners, always in crisis, and always struggling.

Juan Soldado

Above is pictured the "saint" that my deceased grandmother used to venerate that I spoke of in this post. His name was Juan Castillo Morales, a Mexican soldier from the state of Jalisco convicted and executed for a brutal child rape and murder in Tijuana in 1938. He is known to Mexicans in the borderlands as "Juan Soldado", John the Soldier, and his cult used to be quite prominent all over northern Mexico. After his swift execution three days after the murder under the Fugitive Law in which he was told to run for his life while a firing squad shot him to death, blood began to emerge from his grave and signs began to emerge to ask for prayers for his soul. Some protested that he was framed for the crime by a commanding officer in spite of his confession, and some said that he was an "anima sola" which in Spanish Catholicism is a soul in Purgatory most in need of prayers. Nevertheless, in spite of warning from the official Church, people began to pray for his intercession and these prayers worked, as the below photo testifies:

Above: The chapel of Juan Soldado in Tijuana

Also: This is a rather interesting segment on this subject on YouTube.

As I said in a previous post, when I was growing up, I remember that in my grandmother's shrine in her bedroom, aside from Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe, there was also a small altar to a picture of a soldier. A freak encounter with Paul Vanderwood's book on Juan Soldado in a completely random place in the university library sparked again the memory of that mysterious portrait. When I asked my mother about it, she said that my grandmother had small rooms in her backyard she used to rent mostly to men who had come straight from Mexico. When my father went off to Vietnam, these men told my frightened grandmother to pray to Juan Soldado that my father would come back alive. And he did, barely. But from then on, it would appear, my grandmother felt that she had an obligation to the soul of Juan Soldado. And for her, if it weren't for this questionable devotion, I wouldn't be here typing this.

As James S. Griffith puts it in his book, Folk Saints of the Borderlands:

The Catholicism of the upper and professional classes of Mexico probably comes closest to the international norms of the Catholic Church. As we move downwards on the Mexican socioeconomic scale, we also move farther and farther from the formal teachings of the contemporary Church, and we enter a system that, though fully Catholic in its basic values and narratives, seems to have as a primary purpose survival in a hostile world. Another world, however, occupied by potential helpers and potential enemies, is also close at hand. Supernatural help is freely called upon, and dangers such as witchcraft are real and can be dealt with. Much of this emphasis would not seems so strange to mainstream Catholics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century...

It isn't that people are against the Church and its official teachings. Rather, traditional folk or popular Catholicism, with its daily and seasonal rituals, its multitude of saints upon whom one may call, and its means of coping with the results of human nastiness, provides many working-class people with what they feel they need. (pg. 11)

Letting Silences Speak

Whether or not one agrees with my deceased grandmother's devotion to this questionable figure, one cannot dispute the orthodoxy of it. One can pray to a soul who one thinks is in purgatory and even ask it for favors, supposedly once she reaches Heaven. Perhaps it appears superstitious, perhaps it gives us Catholics "a bad name". Part of me is starting to dispute the wisdom of automatically assuming that the best way to practice Roman Catholicism is to make it conform as closely as possible to the tastes of Protestantism. While perhaps this is a matter of aesthetics and not theology, I would ask why in the back of our minds "real Christianity" conforms more to the tastes of Calvinist Geneva than it does pagan pre-Columbian Mexico. Why is it that the fantastic, the superstitious, and the grotesque are automatically silenced to be replaced with something much more defined, safe, and sterile? This is all the more pressing since the life of most people on this planet does not conform to these values, and I would even say that perhaps it falls under the strong assumption by many European Christians that people of color will never really be able to accept the Gospel fully.

As I have written in another post:

My professor in the history of Brazil class that I am taking has done a great amount of field work in the Brazilian Northeast, and she has lived there for extended periods of time since the 1970’s. She has befriended all sorts of people there from all walks of life, including the clergy.

Many of you are aware of the inroads Pentecostalism is making in Latin America. In a discussion of this phenomenon, my professor contributed something that many members of the Roman Catholic clergy in the Northeast told her. These priests said that much of the pull of this new Protestant phenomenon came from the vacuum caused by the rationalization of Roman Catholicism since the 1960’s. That is to say, the fact that Vatican II wanted to make Catholicism into a religion of “grown-ups” (getting rid of certain devotions, “questionable” saints, etc.) has made people leave the Catholic Church, and it is many of the members of the clergy on the ground who are saying this, not just crazy traditionalists.

The greatest threats to Roman Catholicism, in my opinion, are not any arguments that an agnostic society can throw at it. It is the lack of belief in the miraculous, the wondrous, and the "strange". The Divine must be present not just as a detached watch-maker, but truly as a participant, and sometimes an odd participant, in our day to day lives. If we cannot see it, we are no better than atheists. For this is truly the eye of Faith; it is Faith that works miracles. This does not mean that we need a "name it, claim it" attitude towards our Faith. It does mean that we must conceive of the universe as a much more fascinating and unpredictable place than our unbelieving neighbors.

True, these things will never be defined or even approved of by the Magisterium or any other authority. They do not need to be nor would it be appropriate if they were. But the sum of what we believe is not simply what we have to believe; it encompasses much more than that. In the end, one of my intellectual ambitions is to let the silences of Catholicism sing, the silences of the everyday life of Faith as lived by people like my grandmother. It is about not just reading what is in the letters, but also what is in the margins.

On Forgetting

2007-11-03T15:58:00.000-07:00

Poema LXXI

Hasta en tu modo
de olvidar hay
algo bello.

Creía yo que todo
olvido era sombra;
pero tu olvido es
luz, se siente
como una viva luz…

¡Tu olvido es
la alborada borrando
las estrellas!...

-Dulce María Loynaz

(Even in your way
of forgetting there is
something beautiful.

I used to believe that all
forgetting was shadow;
but your forgetting is
light, it feels
like a living light…

Your forgetting is
the dawn erasing
the stars!...)

Fr. Maximos on War

2007-11-01T06:59:00.000-07:00

"You came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first." Echoing St. Paul (1 Timothy 1:15), we remember this truth at every Divine Liturgy in the prayer before Communion. Petru Rares did not show his people the fall of Constantinople to remind them of the sins of the Greeks more than a century earlier. He did it to remind them of their own sins in their own time.

There is a great mystery here. It is too simplistic to think that divine justice functions according to the laws of Newtonian physics. Every action does not have an equal and opposite reaction. The guilty are not always punished in proportion to their wrongdoing, and the innocent are certainly not spared according to the measure of their purity.

Read the rest here.

Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass

2007-10-30T07:36:00.001-07:00

I'm not crazy about the choreography, but Dance no.3 is one of my favorite pieces that Philip Glass composed duing his "golden age".

Rosary Fragments

2007-10-28T20:41:00.001-07:00

Note: The following was written some weeks ago but abandoned. Since I am out of ideas, and the month of the rosary is almost over, I decided to publish it in its raw form. Please forgive its unpolished prose.

Por tu limpia Concepción, o soberana Princesa, una grande pureza te pido de corazón.

My battle with the rosary closely parallels my various destinations in a long and arduous process of procession and return to my Catholic Faith. As a youth, I used to love praying the rosary, and often would pray all fifteen decades (and for me, there will ALWAYS be fifteen!) at a time. My first rosaries were the cheapest ones you could possibly find: plastic and of not very good taste. (If you want to pray the rosary often, buy about a dozen cheap plastic ones so that you always have one in your pocket. If you lose one, it’s no big deal, and maybe someone else will pick it up who needs it more than you.)

As I have said before, I was very much formed by my time with the Legion of Mary, and I was an auxiliary member during my youth. (I would be again now if my prayer habits were more consistent, but I digress…) This was coupled with the folk uses of the rosary in the Latino community (here in California, many Mexican immigrants have rosaries dangling from their car mirrors. Since many here drive without a license, I have been given to calling this practice, “Mexican insurance”. Take that, Geico!). Growing up, the rosary was omnipresent. The rosary even governed our everyday lives. My family still prays it every night. Whenever someone dies, the whole extended family gets together for nine consecutive nights to pray the rosary. My family passes on old beat-up rosaries from generation to generation that have sentimental value.

Growing up Catholic in this country, especially in a specialized enclave, one can divide one’s religious life between religion as custom and religion as belief. I once knew a young man of Mexican ancestry who had never gone in a church since his baptism but still crossed himself whenever he passed a Catholic church. That is religion as custom, and that, for better or for worse, is what I was raised with. Catechism wasn’t necessarily emphasized; my mother only finished high school and I have to correct my grandparent’s spelling when they write IN SPANISH. Only later, as I have said, did I actually begin to study my Catholic Faith. At first, as I said above, I began to pray the rosary with some knowledge of what I was doing. Then the prayer books started…

Fast forward to the year before I entered seminary. Though I had instinctively loved the traditional Mass in Latin as a teenager, I really did not understand it. It was only during this year with the SSPX that I finally began to discover what one reader of this blog calls “Mass and Office Catholicism”. (I still am somewhat amazed by people who are so fundamentalist about the Latin Mass who do not have even a lick of Latin. Do you actually know what they’re saying up there?! You might be unpleasantly surprised.) I became more and more involved and enchanted by the liturgy itself, and devotionals began to move more and more into the background. One of the reasons why I became so enamored with Eastern Orthodoxy was because I thought the West was not liturgical enough. But that is whole other post entirely…

By the time I entered seminary in Argentina in 2001, I didn’t like praying the rosary at all. When we prayed it together, it seemed to drag on and on and on…. When I had to pray it by myself, I prayed it as quickly as possible (which is pretty darn fast). It is no wonder that when I finally left seminary, I ceased to pray the rosary by myself altogether. (I was living with my family at the time, so I prayed it with them.)

I took up praying the chotki/komboschini (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”). Now I still have these Byzantine prayer ropes around here somewhere, but praying them was never the same as praying the rosary. I have gotten a lot of flack from some Orthodox readers when I have said that Eastern Christian practices will never really embed themselves into the soul of the West. Perhaps this is imposing my own experiences on others, but I still stand by this position.

After the spectacular failure of my Byzantine experiment, I at first steered clear of the rosary. I was doing the Little Office of the Virgin Mary for a while, along with other things. But the longer I have been away from home, the more solace I have taken in the rosary. After I finally decided to give up on the whole Anglican experiment, one of the first things I began to do was pray the rosary again. Not in Latin. Not in English, the way the Anglos do it and the way I learned it in the Legion of Mary. But in Spanish, like my family has passed it on to me. The Spanish version is a little different from the English, but I won’t go into details about this.

Now, at least, recitation of the rosary is pretty much the bulk of my prayer life. Now, almost every morning, I walk to the bus stop and say my rosary. I don’t meditate on the mysteries, and I don’t always say it perfectly. But occasionally, I will realize, walking through the city streets with the cheap blue plastic beads in my hand, that I am summoning forth the events that have wrought salvation for all that I meet, that have renewed the world from its state of darkness. And then the rhythm of those fingers, those beads, sinks into some place deeper, through the steps that pound their way closer to the cares of the day before me, and they plant in the ground hope, a new life and a new beginning with each Ave…

Dios te salve María Santísima, templo y sagrario de la Santísima Trinidad, Virgen concebida sin la culpa original... Dios te salve reina y madre de misericordia…

Lully and Molière: Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

2007-10-26T06:02:00.001-07:00

Good nostalgia.

Reply to Concerns (Briefly)

2007-10-26T05:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's post resulted in some questions that are tough to answer. Nevertheless, the fact that I am up particularily early gives me a chance to address them.

1. I realize that an absolute condemnation of torture could be considered relativist or "taking things out of historical context". In judging morality, however, one needs to make such judgements. Absolutely speaking, torture is NOT a good thing. The fact that it happened sometimes in a supposed "defense of the Faith" does not make it a positive good. In Christian morality, the ends can never justify the means. Perhaps it is this attitude that brought Christendom down. This society is a direct product of that intolerant one. If one would like to argue that the only reason things fell apart was because we didn't torture enough heretics and burn enough people at the stake, be my guest. The fact is, Franco's Spain was proceeded by La Movida Madrileña, in which people threw off the restrictive mores of "Catholic Spain". And all the laws in the world couldn't have prevented this.

2. Connected to this is the fact that coercion is not a means to convince someone of your point of view. The idea that their is a spiritual good that transcends the material good of some people is not Christian:

What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. (James 2: 14-17)

To destroy the body of someone in order to save his soul is foolishness. Yes, I am passing judgement on the past. But if you want to argue the contrary opinion, be my guest. Just don't whine about it when you end up on the rack.

3. Yes, we live in a bad society. One absolute abomination is the ease by which women destroy their babies in their own wombs. One of these days, we are going to have to answer for this. Remember, every nation has an angel according to the Fathers of the Church. What must our angel think?

However, unless we are prepared to lynch homosexual couples in the street, ban artificial birth control, and force women to stay home to raise the kids, we are just going to have to deal with it. If we are to sow the Kingdom of God here and now, we have to do it by persuasion and example and not by force and counter-productive nostalgia. I am glad that our Church in this day and age does not have to use instruments of violence in order to get its way. There are many things that are wrong with this society, but also many things that right. Let us just be thankful that we are where we are.

For AG

2007-10-25T11:39:00.000-07:00

First Antiphon

...The labor of days.

You are the dew
That burns this longing,
Frightened blinks of
The sun through leaves-
Perilous depth
So fragrant and luminous-
The sweetness,
The scourge,
The beckoning of morning.

Opened up
Like a bitter bottle
Of wine,
The flow of grass
Red:
The drowsiness
Of the sky.

Certain notes I have
Hummed
Softly
That conjure the fairness
Of your eyes,

Your hair spilling
Like dusk
Over the folds
Of the pillow;

That which spells, grows,
And dreams
The remnant of a kiss,
The shell of joyful
Slumber
That fills this room
With bliss.

-Arturo Vasquez

Why I don't read many Catholic blogs

2007-10-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

The Internet is not the best place to express one's indignation. The ability to self-publish your thoughts quickly and having perfect strangers read them is not a healthy thing. At least in older forms of publishing, the difficulty of printing something physically meant that "gate-keepers" were always present to calm the hottest heads, revise the most impertinent comments, or even just correct grammar and orthographical errors. This, however, is not the place to lament the loss of a mandatory imprimatur on whatever one writes. Nevertheless, one must at times speak one's mind about things, at the risk of perhaps alienating some people.

I found the above picture on this site which I will not give the dignity of naming. To think that someone could depict the torture of a human being and the Cross in the same painting is completely lost on me. Granted, Pius V was an Inquisitor before he was a Pope. And, granted, the individual who manages this site did not paint this image. If anything, it probably hangs in some august gallery, even a church, inspiring horror to all but the most sadistic minds. So why post it again in a public forum? Why celebrate it? Why this need by some circles to celebrate our bloody, intolerant past?

I will say this right now: I much prefer to raise my children in a society with "gay marriage", relativistic morals, and secularism than a society that threatens its citizens with torture. This image is not funny. It's not even cute. It is thoroughly disgusting, and if we celebrate it, we deserve every accusation that an atheist like a Marx or a Christopher Hitchens can throw at us about religion being "the oppium of the people" and "barbaric".

But there is a deeper issue involved, one that I think the Catholic hierarchy gets but not some more zealous Catholics. The argumentative and triumphalist tone that many Catholics take towards their Protestant and other non-Catholic neighbors is a direct result of this bloody discourse. It may have been cleaned externally of the blood, but it is still very much a product of the time of the rack, the stake, and the auto-da-fe's. Vatican II, in spite of its unwarranted capitulation to the modern world on many issues, aimed at the very least to heal this overly-militant discourse.

It is good to correct your neighbor, especially if one does it out of love. But to appoint oneself as a instrument of correction is something that someone should think twice about before embarking on a one-man crusade. Whatever happened to dialogue, real dialogue, which in spite of my thinking that it can be a four-letter word at times, is still very necessary?

Notice that this blog does NOT have a maximalist Roman Catholic identity. I will sometimes slam Protestantism and agnosticism, but I don't want the people who hold these views to stop reading. The label "Roman Catholic" is a necessary one; it invokes the fact that I belong to the Church that the Apostles founded, and that I am far more certain of my own membership in the Body of Christ than of someone's who is not Roman Catholic. But it is a distinction that I still very much lament. For I would have it that all men were members of the Body of Christ in the fullest possible sense, but I cannot say that this is the case. It is the vocation of all humanity, indeed the entire cosmos, to be grafted into Christ. The necessary label, then, makes it an issue of "us" vs. "them", and that is an ethos that the Roman Catholic Church is trying to move AWAY from. This ethos is ineviatbly a result of sin, violence, and injustice. And I would a thousand times prefer to live in a society where the Truth was the minority than to have obtained hegemony by violent means that contradict that Truth.

It will always be the case that we Christians are apart from the world in a fundamental way, but, as in all of the dichotomies that we Christians must balance, this does not give us license to de-humanize the other. We are still engaged members of this pluralist, postmodern society, like it or lump it. To flaunt our differences without necessity is the ultimate form of counter-cultural navel gazing. And this is why I don't read many Catholic blogs. I am just not very fond of "rooting for my team" especially when that "team culture" is the result of a non-Christian attitude. I am a member of this all-too-human society. And you have to be a human being before you can be a Christian.

Viendo para arriba...

2007-10-24T06:30:00.000-07:00

Sinfonía en el cielo del alma

¿Llegaré a tu montaña?

Se hirió la lágrima
por correr a tus ojos.

Sin vidas sauces y los pinos quejosos

No hay más voz que la sorda
Mudez de mis pupilas.
Traeré risa de un lis de noche verde.

Voy a prender los fuegos.
Mi tierra… mi estrella. En la sala del viento
Van a caer luceros.

Reiré, donde tu risa tiene
Un lecho de cristal.

-Aída Cartagena Portalatín

(Symphony in the Soul Sky

Will I reach your mountain?

The tear was wounded
By running to your eyes

Without sallow lives and complaining pines

There is no voice but the deaf
Muteness of my pupils.
I will bring the laughter of a green night iris.

I will ignite the fires.
My land... my star. In the room of wind
Stars will fall.

I shall laugh, where your laughter has
A crystal bed.)

On Writing

2007-10-23T11:37:00.000-07:00

The problem with having a blog is that any random event can spark a reflection in your mind, and then people from many parts of the globe end up reading about it. (That is, if I haven't lost most of my readers yet through my eccentricities.) One such random event happened yesterday when I saw a particularly interesting truck on the street.

It seemed to be a perfectly normal truck shipping vegetables or some other product, but on the side it said in both Spanish and English, "Read the Most Glorious Koran!" First of all, I wish that we Roman Catholics had that much audacity, though some Christians do put exhortations to read the Bible on their commercial vehicles. And then I began to think how in Islam the Koran really should be read in Arabic since the actual message of God in Islam was written in that language. Ataturk in Turkey got into lots of trouble trying to make people read the Koran in Turkish, and Muslims throughout the world, from Paris to Djakarta to Miami, learn classical Arabic in order to read the Koran. So is our truck sign exhorting people to learn Arabic in order to truly read the Koran, or does it want us to read it in Spanish or English?

I have commented before on the pitfalls of phonetic writing. Since Plato, there has been a warning against the use of writing and its abilities to corrupt memory and truth. Jacques Derrida made a whole career out of inverting this dichotomy. But in what sense is writing iconic, and to what extent is that icon transmittable to other languages?

Origen believed that Hebrew was a sacred language, but not Latin or Greek. I have read that even the manner in which a Torah is made for a synagogue has to follow certain guidelines that transcend the mere transmission of information.

From all this it is quite clear that, in the view of our Plato, the divine cannot be discovered by us but is revealed to us from above; that the substance and nature of the divine cannot be understood by the mind or explained in words or writings. These things should therefore be discussed and described with the hope that we may give encouragement through our words and writings and prepare souls for things divine, rather than offer proof.

This is why Plato writes nothing about the definition of the divine substance and the divine nature. He does, however, write a great deal which, through negations and narratives, exhortation and instruction, will one day lead to that state of mind to which the halls of almighty Olympus will open their gates.

-Marsilio Ficino, found in the compilation, The Gardens of Philosophy, pgs. 157-158

Ficino then goes on to say that to write things down is to put the truth in danger of being cast to the dogs and that the real meaning of the text in the Hebrew and Greek traditions is transmitted non-discursively.

In the Information Age, this might make us uncomfortable. But this is the danger of some forms of catechetical and apologetic argument, as I have often said. It is not that most people have to be ignorant. It is rather that it is necessary to realize a very important point:

Information is about usefulness and power.

Truth is about surrender and love.

The role of written discourse in the latter case is to aide in the unfolding of the process by which the soul returns to herself and becomes united to the One, in the image of divine simplicity. Thus, how we write and learn are not just issues of "what", but also issues of "how" and "by whom". Going back into the pre-history of Greek philosophy, we return again to Socrates' crusade against the rhetoricians and the Sophists: real truth is about the surrender and purification of the intellect, in contrast to those who would make discourse another instrument in the arsenal in a struggle for power. If we recast the instruments of the Truth in the image of the aims of the latter, we may just as much be corrupting the truth as any heretic or non-believer.

In this way, we must consider discourse based on phonetic writing as a step to acquire something much higher:

Hermes attributes all else to the sacred silence of the mind; for God, he believes, is known by the mind by His silence rather than by His words.

-ibid, pg. 159

Let us be attentive, then, to these silences.

Untitled #4

2007-10-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

I have come such a long way, but sometimes it feels like I am just chasing my tail.

Or...

If you decide to change your mind numerous times, try not to leave an electronic paper trail. It'll just jump up to bite you.

Or...

28 and still has a lot to learn.

On Intoxication

2007-10-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

At night we fall into each other with such grace.
When it's light, you throw me back
like you do your hair.
Your eyes now drunk with God,
mine with looking at you,
one drunkard takes care of another.

-Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks

Good Morning

2007-10-19T06:47:00.000-07:00

The Sun Never Says

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth

"You owe
Me."

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.

-Hafiz
translated by Daniel Ladinsky in The Gift

Bishop Williamson Redux

2007-10-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

I've had some close calls in my life. Like most young men, I have done some REALLY stupid things that I thankfully survived without a scratch. This is neither the place nor the manner to reveal them to you; none of you are my father-confessors, and I am not proud of them. Some of them are not that shameful, and some of them... well...

One close call that I really am thankful for is one of timing. I entered the Society of St. Pius X seminary in La Reja, Argentina, at the beginning of 2001, and left at the very end of 2002. During that time, our rector was still a stiff if eccentric Frenchman by the name of M. l'abbe Dominique Langeau. Like all religious orders, the SSPX liked to shake things up from time to time, and the good Padre Langeau had been at his post for more than ten years down in the Southern Cone. Last I heard, he is somewhere in his native France being shot-caller at an important priory. His successor, who was milling about the seminary at the time that I left, was the pugnacious and even more eccentric Englishman, Bishop Richard Williamson.

Even though we seminarians did not know at that point that Monsieur l'abbe was on the way out, I think most had a hunch. One such hunch was the last series of spiritual conferences given by the British prelate himself. Characteristic of all of his discourses, written or otherwise, is his knack for exponding conspiracy theories and other rather pessimistic visions of the Church and society. His heavily accented Castillian rang out with the words "Anti-Christ", "modernism", "Freemasonry" and the like. Maybe the real Pope is being kept in a broom-closet in the Vatican. Maybe a super-computer in Brussels is sending out invisible waves making our minds susceptible to the Judeo-Masonic plot to topple Western civilization. True, he never says or writes this publicly, but I wouldn't put it past him.

Anyway, as in the movies where one escapes in a helicopter from a bunch of bad guys shooting at you, I was whisked away from South America on Christmas Day, 2002, and I have not returned since. Eight months later, the good bishop was officially installed as rector of the rat-infested, mildew-wracked edifice in the Argentine countryside. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed. The only other person who spoke English in the whole seminary was a Filipino seminarian who is now a priest, and he didn't even speak Spanish when he came. (He probably still has my rather spiffy grammar book.) So would he have made me, the perfectly bilingual and somewhat cultured American, his personal secretary? Would I have often had tea with the only other native English speaker in the place, reminiscing about the joys of Anglo-Saxon culture and the First World? (Although friends have told me that he has adjusted well, he can't possibly be all that comfortable being that the Argentines are still rather attached to the whole idea that a few islands of disputed name off their coast are theirs.)

Some things I am glad I missed. One was the whole idea of a humanities year that tacked on one more year of formation to the six year seminary process. In principle, I think that this is a good idea. But the idea of me, a cultural snob, having to look at Western culture through the lens of a bunch of traditionalist dilettantes... the idea is just too much to bear! I am glad that I at least escaped that.

But most of all, I am glad I escaped the integrist reign of terror that must have ensued after my departure. Not that we weren't paranoid before, but the idea of some eccentric Brit running around and not being able to vent his controversial ideas in his monthly newsletters or to his cabal of followers here in the U.S. is quite a frightening prospect under which to live day in and day out. Part of me feels sorry for him because it must be really lonely down there. Part of me thinks that the SSPX exiled him to that place, though his sphere of influence still continues to be a force within the Lefebvrist movement. Then again, maybe that is just because I feel that they exiled me down there.

I should have said at the beginning that the catalyst of this post was finally stumbling across his blog that someone else probably maintains for him. Vox clamantis in deserto... I am pretty sure at this point that all of his eccentric positions, from feeling that women should not wear pants, go to college, or have shoes (okay, I made that last one up), to thinking that watching the Sound of Music is the equivalent to listening to a Black Sabbath album or smoking crack, are just the flip side of postmodernity. In order to get his message across, he feels that he has to shock. His letters from Winona were often graphic and disturbing and caused much controversy in traditionalist circles when they were still monthly occurrences. (Since Father Peter Scott and the good bishop have left the States, SSPX publications just haven't been as much fun to read.) The Roman Catholicism of this British convert is the ultimate expression of who he is; he is just like the gutter-punks on Telegraph Avenue here in Berkeley with pins in their noses. Back in the 1960's, he decided to find something that expressed his personality, and not even the Vatican itself can change his mind about the Judeo-Masonic plot to destroy everything that's good.

It is hard sometimes to believe that he actually believes in all of that crap. He looks intelligent enough to actually have some form of dialogue with reality instead of just sticking to his conspiracy theories. Part of me hopes that at the end of the day, he is just joking. If not, he has reduced Roman Catholicism to a freak show. And anyone who has read Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, or any other chique theorist, knows that this is exactly what postmodernism does.

(Incidentally, this is partially what I think Fr. Seraphim Rose has done to Orthodoxy in this country, but that is another post entirely...)

Still, I can't help but fantasize that his presence down there must be like something out of a Borges short story. I can see him drinking his four o'clock tea, watching a storm coming in over the pampa, with cows passing by in the lazy afternoon. It would have been nice to accompany him at least once during such a surreal moment.

But then again, I am glad I can spend time with my significant other, who has a doctorate, wears pants, and even some very nice pairs of shoes. (She can also sing all the songs from the Sound of Music.)

William Forsythe's In the Middle Somewhat Elevated

2007-10-17T14:54:00.001-07:00

Pas de deux by Sylvie Guillem and Laurent Hilaire

William Forsythe's In the Middle Somewhat Elevated

2007-10-17T14:52:00.001-07:00

Solo by Sylvie Guillem

Cleaning Up the Cosmos

2007-10-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

Or: How a woman, who is so big, penetrates the eyes, which are so small;

A Reading of Ioan Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance

Tu Desnudez

La rosa:
tu desnudez hecha gracia.

La fuente:
tu desnudez hecha agua.

La estrella:
tu desnudez hecha alma.

-Juan Ramon Jimenez

(Your Nakedness

The rose:
your nakedness made grace.

The fountain:
your nakedness made water.

The star:
your nakedness made soul.)

Souls descend into the bodies of the Milky Way through the constellation of Cancer enveloping themselves in a celestial and luminous veil which they put on to enter terrestrial bodies. For nature demands that the very pure soul be united with the very impure body only through the intermediary of a pure veil, which, being less pure than the soul and purer than the body, is considered by the Platonists to be a very convenient means of uniting the soul with the terrestrial body. It is due to that descent that the souls and bodies of the planets confirm and reinforce, in our souls and our bodies respectively, the seven original gifts bestowed upon us by God. The same function is performed by the seven categories of demons, intermediaries between the celestial gods and men. The gift of contemplation is strengthened by Saturn by means of the Saturnian Demons. The power of the government and empire is strengthened by Jupiter through the ministry of the Jovian Demons; similarly, Mars through the Martians fosters the soul's courage. The Sun, with the help of the Solar Demons, fosters the clarity of the senses and the opinions that make divination possible; Venus, through the Venereans, incites Love...

-Marsilio Ficino

There is great presumption amongst Catholic intellectuals that the Renaissance is the beginning of the end of "Christendom" and the beginning of all things nasty about the modern world. As it was put to me in seminary in a very curt and self-assured manner, Luther revolted against the secularization of the medieval mind by those lascivious Italians, but in the process, he began the long march to postmodern agnosticism. Luther wanted Christ without the Church. The Enlightenment wanted God without Christ. The nineteenth century wanted morality without God. And the postmodern world doesn't even want morality. But it all began with the deification of man by those decadent Italians. They began the whole historical process that has led to modern science, rationalism, and revolutionary humanism...

Like all myths, this one has its very romanticist appeal. It looks at the inexplicable past through the lens of its own presumptions on how people thought and acted centuries ago. And it can give its adherents the confidence that they themselves have been saved by their perfect faith in their absolute difference from the modern world. As long as they can stay in their mountain sanctuaries, listen to sacred polyphony, decry any type of painting after Fra Angelico, and read St. Thomas Aquinas like the Talmud, they are safe from the contemporary contagion. It is only with very meticulous scholarship such as Ioan Couliano's that we clearly see that this attitude is only the other side of the postmodern coin.

Couliano is not a Christian scholar. One could even call him "anti-Christian" in his perspective. A protege of Mircea Eliade, he is an observer of all traditions and an adherent of none. His aim, then, is neither to refute nor confirm Christianity directly. Of the three figures that loom the largest in his book, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandolla, and Giordano Bruno, the first was a priest, the second a latter-day follower of Savonarola, and the third an unrepentant heretic. What we wish to address here is not whether Christianity was weakened or strengthened during the Renaissance. It is, rather, what version of Christianity won out, or in other words, how would Christians subsequently change how they believed and how they viewed the world.

Central to Couliano's book is the idea of phantasm. According to traditional ancient epistemologies, man perceives the world through the creation of phantasms in the imaginative faculty. To be very simplistic about it, man perceives the world like he falls in love: an image is engraved into his mind like the figure of a beautiful woman is engraved into the heart. One thus falls in love with the object, one becomes a slave to the phantasm.

The lover carves into his soul the model of the beloved. In that way, the soul of the lover becomes the mirror in which the image of the loved one is reflected.

-Marsilio Ficino, De Amore

Renaissance culture was a culture of the phantasmic. It lent tremendous weight to the phantasms evoked by inner sense and had developed to the utmost the human faculty of working actively upon and with phantasms. It had created a whole dialectic of Eros in which phantasms, which at first foisted themselves upon inner sense, ended by being manipulated at will. It had a firm belief in the power of phantasms, which were transmitted by the phantasmic apparatus of the transmitter to that of the receiver. It also believed that inner sense was preeminently the locale for manifestations of transnatural forcers - demons and the gods.

-Couliano, pg.193

Magic, then, is the manipulation of phantasms in order to acquire a certain end. Magic has more to do with love and less to do with any idea of magic we have nowadays. One of the greatest feats of magic for Giordano Bruno, for example, is what we would now call the manipulation of mass media. For Bruno, you can manipulate phantasms not just to do a party trick, but also to make entire societies do what you want. It is from here that we get ideas of white magic versus black magic present in the Renaissance. Love is a magician, according to Ficino since,

the whole power of Magic is founded on Eros. The way Magic works is to bring things together through their inherent similarity. The parts of this world, like the limbs of the same animal, all depend on Eros, which is one; they relate to each other because of their common nature. Similarly, in our body the brain, the lungs, the heart, the liver, and other organs interact, favor each other, intercommunicate, and feel reciprocal pain. From this relationship is born Eros, which is common to them all; from this Eros is born their mutual rapprochement, wherein resides true Magic.

-Marsilio Ficino, De Amore

Love, then, was the way to manipulate the universe. The magician performed certain rituals in a dispassionate manner in order to coax things into becoming a certain way, or rather, to reveal how things really were. One such manner was the famous Art of Memory. Another was hieroglyphics. As Couliano writes,

Ficino...conceived of philosophy as an initiation into mysteries, consisting of a gradual rise in intellectual loftiness receiving in response from the intelligential world a phantasmic revelation in the form of figurae.

Through the "performance" of these hieroglyphic figurae,the eye of the soul would open up and thus be able to see the reality not visible with the naked eye. Another gadget was the Iynx, a golden disk with various graphic symbols that such historical figures as Proclus claimed to use to produce rain and other phenomena. Even the abbot of Wurzburg, Trithemius, was rumored to have practiced magic, when he made appear the ghost of the wife of the Emperor Maximilian.

Now, dear reader, you must be thinking that I have totally gone off my rocker. "Does he give any credence to any of this rubbish?" is something that you might be asking. You might think this is all the work of the devil or simple superstition. There is, however, a very rigorous and comprehensive vision of the universe at play here, one that we have long since renounced. For many Renaissance Neoplatonists, the soul fell from the heights through the various spheres of the planets, and that is why the zodiac has any power to predict our tendencies and even our actions (without totally denying free will). We are, at least in our souls, consubstantial with the stars since we fell through them. In this sense, in the Renaissance cosmos, all things are connected and influence each other. That is why even important clerics watched the stars and believed in alchemy. They had a vision of the universe where the default presupposition was that everything meant something, whereas we think that all things are meaningless unless proven otherwise.

The innocence of the "magical" point view can be best described by the following quote from Henricus Cornelius Agrippa:

It is possible in a natural way, removed from superstition and without the intercession of any spirit, for a man to transmit his trend of thought to another man at no matter what distance and location, in a very short time. It is possible to estimate the exact time it takes, but all that takes place within twenty four hours. I knew how to do it myself, and I have often done it...

What Couliano is formulating is that what occurred at the time of the Renaissance was not the birth of the modern scientific mind, but the flourishing of ancient, other-worldly arts. And these were not necessarily demonic or hostile to the Christian view of the universe. They were, rather, a different way of doing things and seeing the world than what we have now. What was prevalent was a belief that the universe was a very enchanted and interconnected place.

For Couliano, then, we did not inherit the world that the Renaissance made, but rather actively broke with the frame of mind that the Renaissance and the time before it had. The Romanian scholar gives the analogy of a wingless fly that only survives in the Galapogos Islands. Genetically, wings of flies aide in their being able to survive and thrive, except in the windy conditions of some South American islands where having wings would make mobility a lethal disadvantage. Thus Couliano characterizes in this way the point of view of modern science where,

people had lost the habit of using their imagination and thinking in terms of "qualities", for it was no longer permitted. Loss of the faculty of active imagination naturally entailed strict observation of the material world revealed by an attitude of respect for all quantitative data and suspicion of every "qualitative" statement.

-p.183

Because modern science was deemed more innocuous to what was perceived as a Faith in the process of reformation, it was allowed to flourish, while the other arts were suppressed as overly sensuous and even demonic. Of the Protestant Reformation, the massive iconoclasm and rejection of "medieval superstition" speak volumes for the case of the censorship of phantasms and the imagination. But even in Catholic countries, the rationalization and codification started at the Council of Trent of the liturgy and clerical discipline were also indicative of the same reformation. After all, one of the things the Council of Trent did was ban all books on astrology. Couliano also points out how even women's style of dress changed. Women tried to hide their more sensual features, to the point that the style of dress in Catholic Spain was just as repressive as in Calvinist Geneva. As Couliano put it,

The Catholic faith and the Protestant denominations have drawn as close together as possible without being aware of it. Henceforth it is no longer a question of Reformation or Counterreformation... Side by side, they build a common edifice: modern Western culture.

-p.197

"What is the big deal,then?" you might be asking yourself. To be brief, I would say that the ultimate danger of this modern Western culture is that in warring against eroticism, phantasms, and superstition, it made the universe a dead and vacuous place. From a perhaps overly imaginative vision of the cosmos that was full of angels, demons, and other spirits, we obtain a perspective of the universe as a bunch of randomly floating dead rocks. This has little to do with science and more to do with "scientism": a refusal to look past quantities and the idea that the world is a giant cold grid of numbers. And this effects how we philosophize, theologize, and contemplate our world. Couliano expresses this by the following:

To read in the "book of Nature" had been the fundamental experience in the Renaissance. The Reformation was tireless in seeking ways to close that book. Why? Because the Reformation thought of Nature not as a factor for rapprochement but as the main thing responsible for the alienation of God from mankind.

-p.208

Citing the Catholic figure of Blaise Pascal, Couliano puts it all quite succinctly that in the Reformed universe there was only "the silence of God exiled from nature".

We, then, are not children of the Renaissance, but rather children of the Reformation, regardless of our creedal affiliations. What has led to our much decried modernity according to Couliano is not the victory of one form of Christianity over the other, but an attempt to purify the cosmos of wonder and magic. It is this destroying of the power of imagination and enthroning of the quantified, dead cosmos, that has given birth to secular society, not the victory of "subjectivism". We killed God because we killed nature. This has meant not the enthroning of man in God's place, but rather the dissection of man to the point where he is nothing, an accidental speck in the meaningless universe. Renaissance humanism, on the other hand, viewed man as the microcosm and image of God, a king in a wondrous and vibrant Creation. This of course is a provocative thesis, but one worthy of much consideration.

I do not expect you, the reader, to buy into what I am saying without further consideration. That is not the point of this essay. What I am saying with Couliano is that our idea of the world is also based on many flawed assumptions and to people in the Renaissance it may have appeared as absurd as alchemy and astrology do to us. Our vision of the world is just as much a product of evolution and historical accident as any other, and it inevitably will change. What I would like you to take away is that maybe our vision of the world is even more toxic to the Christian Faith than the pagan "superstitions" that were being revived in fifteenth century Italy. Maybe in our cleaning up of the cosmos, we threw out the baby of the noble imagination with the "pagan" bathwater.

One Correction

2007-10-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

In Saturday's rant, I made it seem that I like the Pauline Missal or the Mass in vernacular. That is not entirely accurate. I am glad that people now have the option to attend the Mass in our vulgar tongues if they so chose, and I am not one to complain about this. I sometimes wish that the hierarchy would translate the liturgy into elegant language, but I am unapologetic snob, and even I do not have the audacity to pretend that this is a good thing.

However, I do think that vernacular liturgy has its own dangers and pitfalls. The idea that liturgy only exists to transmit information is a sad yet prevalent idea. That is why the Pauline Missal tries to put more actual Scripture reading into the rite thinking that this gives more importance to the "Word". But the transmission of this "Word" is not primarily through reading, but rather through preaching. One can read the prophet Habakkuk out loud until one is blue in the face and still understand nothing. Scripture, for the vast majority of people, is only understood through mediation and hierarchy; only those who are commissioned by the Church are reliable interpreters of what the Word is. The rest is just opinion, even if it is pious and even well-founded opinion. That is why perhaps all Apostolic liturgies reduced the readings in the Eucharistic synaxis to two rather than three.

A more personal reason for loving the old liturgy is perhaps selfish and very much in the eye of the beholder. When I go to church, I want to be inspired and awed. I have said before that to like the old liturgy without knowing Latin or without knowing its real roots is a bit disingenuous, and I stand by that assertion in one sense. Hence, I can understand the relief of my grandparents at not having to attend the old rite anymore. On the other hand, the sense of awe at entering a church building, of viewing a silent or sung rite in an unchanging language, with all the trappings that accompanied it, was something that even illiterate peasants could understand. That is why the vestments were so ornate, the churches so decorated, and the ethos a bit mysterious.

When I go to church, I want to step out of the world of Oprah, supermarket check-out lines, and city hall meetings, just as the peasant wanted to step out of the world of muddy roads, stubborn oxes, and hard days in the fields. The idea of stepping out of our everyday language and actions to dance with the angels is something that the ethos of the Pauline Missal does not seem to appreciate. It is the ultimate idea of otium, "make-believe", or play that is invoked here. This is why I think Pope Benedict XVI is pushing the old Mass so much. Maybe by having the old rite always in mind, the new can be brought up to a greater level of transcendence (though I am skeptical about this).

Of course, this is my opinion, so feel free to hit me with your best shot.

(P.S. I am working on a very looooooooooooong post, that will probably be up by tomorrow. Please be prepared.)

An Overture in the Form of a Small Rant

2007-10-13T12:05:00.000-07:00

I read very few blogs on the Internet. I just don't have the time, and people seem to always say the same thing over and over and over (and over) again. But even amongst people I admire, or used to admire, there is some sort of bizarre sense that to be a real Christian one has to be nostalgic for an earlier, holier time. So as a prelude to my next more "theoretical" post (which I hope to finish in the next few days), I would like to go on record by saying the following:

I am glad that I can get on a bus and not have to worry about where I sit due to my or anyone else's skin color.

I am glad that my significant other could get her doctorate in the hard sciences and is now able to pursue a career path that will lead her as far as her talent will take her.

I am glad that my grandparents do not have to sit through a ceremony they do not understand, even if I do understand Latin.

I am glad that any children I might have will probably not die in the first three years of life, nor is it likely that my wife will die in childbirth,.

I am glad that people in this society are not forced into insincere belief and can worship as Protestants, Hare Krishnas, worshipers of the Grand Poomba, or of no one at all.

I am glad that I live in an age where people have enough time and energy to bitch about the modern world from the comfort of a soft chair, in a warm house, in front of a glowing screen.

I am glad that the world is the way it is, since I think to be otherwise would be an immense demonstration of ingratitude towards God. Even if we may decry certain aspects of our society, there are other aspects that make this a really cool time to live. Like YouTube. And running water. And convenience stores. And Netflix. Deo gratias.

And for those people who insist on an "o tempora, o mores!" attitude, careful what you wish for.

Shiva Dance

2007-10-11T07:17:00.001-07:00

The Nataraja, or the dance by which the world is created and destroyed in Hindu mythology.

Hiatus

2007-10-08T11:51:00.000-07:00

...until at least Friday. Please don't bother stopping by here. Thank you for your readership.

-Arturo

Piazzolla Caldera - Paul Taylor Dance Company

2007-10-03T07:11:00.001-07:00

Just Thought This Was Interesting

2007-10-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

Religion has very little to do with “belief”; it is an indivisible package of aesthetics, ethics, social-emotional commitments, and transmission of κηρύγμα, a set of customs and rituals inherited from the elders. Indeed the complication of “belief” is mostly a Western Christianity type of constructed problems, and a modern one at that: ask an Eastern Orthodox monk “what he believes”, and he will be puzzled: he would tell you what he practices. [I discussed the “amin” in an earlier note]. Orthodoxy is principally liturgy, fasting, practices, and tradition; it is an ornate religion that focuses on aesthetics and requires a very strong commitment. “Belief” is meaningless; practice is real. What we now translate by “veneration”, προσκυνει is literally bowing down to the ground a very physical act...

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

tip to Visibilum

Mark Morris' Mozart Dances

2007-09-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

The great choreographer George Balanchine created only a handful of dances set to the music of Mozart. His reason for this was the excuse that Mozart's music is too perfect. And indeed it is. If one stops to listen to anything of Mozart's, from a chamber piece to a symphony, from an aria to a Mass, one will realize that Mozart is always dancing in his music. There is a lightness there, a celestial playfulness, that marks all of his work. As one very astute reader once commented on this blog:

When the angels play before the Throne of God, they play Bach, but when they play for their own pleasure, they play Mozart ... and God eavesdrops.

Mark Morris then, has tried to chase this divinely inspired sound with his new work, Mozart Dances, which received its West Coast premiere last week at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. While Morris is definitively one of the most prestigious choreographers working today, his newest work does not quite grasp the spirit of Mozart's music. This is by no means due to the fact that he is a bad choreographer or that he does not understand the dynamics of human movement. Many of the moments in his newest work were filled with elegance, grace, and style. At points he did meet Mozart's piano concerti and sonata right in the realm of Platonic Beauty.

Playfulness is indeed at the center of Mozart's music, but it is a very serious, very solemn playfulness. It is the playfulness of a traditional village feast, of a royal court, and of the most solemn liturgies of the great cathedrals. It is one that knows what it is but aspires to more. It knows its limitations yet continues to carry itself with much gravitas. It is like an altar boy dressed in an oversized cassock, fidgeting with the candle in his hands and trying not to giggle.

Morris' playfulness is far removed from this traditional world. Watching Morris is a bit like reading Jacques Derrida: you don't quite know what you're looking at. The godfather of deconstruction at times can write very serious passages analyzing the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and then right in the middle of it drop an untranslatable pun that would make a high school locker room blush. Derrida could be considered philosophy, literature, poetry, gossip column and social critique all at the same time, which is to say that he is in reality none of these things. In a universe where meaning is constantly being created and fluctuating, everything is possible, which ultimately means nothing of substance ever really exists. The last thing that one could do then is to take oneself seriously.

And that I believe is at least vaguely being hinted at in Morris' aesthetic, and I would not be the first in pointing this out. If there is a problem in his work, it is that there is too much that can be considered gratuitous. In one gag, the dancers formed two singal file lines, one male dancer being at the end of them. Then another male dancer runs through them and jumps into the male dancer's arms as if he were a child jumping into his father's arms. Everyone chuckled. It was genuinely funny. But what did it have to do with anything? What did the emergence of the women do in the second part of the piece; an emergence of about ten minutes that for me ruined the mood and balance of the dancing?

Like all postmodernists, Morris likes to subvert dichotomies. In the first portion of the three part work, only the women dance. As AG pointed out after the performance, there was barely any chemistry between them, not even of the camaraderie that can be found on the playground. This was be followed by the second portion, where the men carried each other, moved, and interacted in an almost sensual manner. (Indeed, the only notable pas de deux of the night took place between two of these gentleman.) Hanging around the artisitic community, one should expect this type of subversion of sexual mores. And I do, if it has a point. Morris' subversion, however, just made everything disjointed and out of place. By the time the women and men finally interacted at the end of the piece, the mood was already spoiled. The fact that he failed to "end with a bang" also did not help matters.

I may very well be in the minority in my observations. The house was at times roaring with approval. This of course is the Bay Area, and as many have observed, if Morris has a fundamentalist stronghold, it is definitely here. His kind of thinking is in line with the cafes filled on Sunday mornings with people chatting and reading the culture section of the San Francisco Chronicle. They are smart but not serious, cultured and wearing flip-flops, passionate about the important issues but not dogmatic. These people need entertainment too, and Morris shows them who they are in their deepest psyches. But even when his "number one fan" sitting next to me couldn't stop chuckling for half the piece at all of the choreograpic gags, one should really ask how much transcendent value this type of art really has.

I wouldn't be so harsh on Morris' new work if I didn't think it had potential. God knows that I have sat through much worse. That is why I am even taking the time to think about it: if it were complete garbage, I would just ignore it. As with all other examples of postmodern art, there is a fear of uniting, self-giving, and following through. There are elements of beauty, elements of passion, and longing for that which is beyond, but it never goes far enough. It is always disjointed, ephemeral, and unable to make an unabashed profession of faith in Beauty. Mozart's playfulness made him one of the greatest theologians of this Faith. Morris has a great deal of potential, if he would only say "yes" to the Beautiful, without gags or agendas.

Untitled #2

2007-09-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

Vinculum quippe vinculorum amor est.

-Giordano Bruno

(For the bond of bonds is love.)

A Near Hiatus

2007-09-26T07:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Finishing up school, work, looking for a real job, and other considerations are forcing me to cut back on the attention I pay to this blog. Please only expect two or three posts a week from here on out. Once I land a job where it looks like I won't have to wait tables right after I finish my degree, I expect to be able to pick up a more desired pace to my posting. God bless and keep me in your prayers.

Sincerely,

Arturo Vasquez

On the Occasion of a Wedding...

2007-09-22T16:01:00.000-07:00

For F. and R.

Renaceré Yo

Renaceré yo piedra,
y aún te amaré mujer a ti.

Renaceré yo viento,
y aún te amaré mujer a ti.

Renaceré yo ola,
y aún te amaré mujer a ti.

Renaceré yo fuego,
y aún te amaré mujer a ti.

Renaceré yo hombre,
y aún te amaré mujer a ti.

-Juan Ramón Jiménez

La estación total
(Canciones de la nueva luz)

(I Shall Be Reborn

I shall be reborn a rock,
And still woman I shall love you.

I shall be reborn as wind,
And still woman I shall love you.

I shall be reborn as wave,
And still woman I shall love you.

I shall be reborn as fire,
And still woman I shall love you.

I shall be reborn a man,
And still woman I shall love you.)

More Reflections on Indigenous Cultures

2007-09-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

What most worries daykeepers about people from Europe, and specifically about missionaries, is that they confuse the Earth, whose divinity is equal to that of the celestial God, with the devil. As daykeepers put it, "He who makes an enemy of the Earth makes an enemy of his own body."...

At one end of the Popol Vuh the gods are preoccupied with the difficult task of making humans, and at the other human are preoccupied with the equally difficult task of finding the traces of divine movements in their own deeds...

In theory, if we who presently claim to be human were to forget our efforts to find traces of divine movements in our own actions, our fate should be something like that of the wooden people in the Popol Vuh. For them, the forgotten force of divinity reasserted itself by inhabiting their own tools and utensils, which rose up against them and drove them from their homes. Today they are swinging through the trees.

-Dennis Tedlock, from his introduction to the Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life

Some thoughts:

1. It's a pity that the Maya sage mentioned above does not realize that the Christian God is both Lord of Heaven and Earth, but perhaps that is the Christians' fault. Christianity was imposed on them as the religion of the conqueror and the religion of the Other. As I mentioned in this post, however, our ties to the Earth may be more than we care to acknowledge. We may be living (and thinking) unnaturally and therefore, un-humanly. Of course, please don't ask me to elaborate, since it's just a question.

2. The Popol Vuh was originally transmitted as a book of hieroglyphs that were "performed"/interpreted by "daykeepers": older sages who knew the meanings of the signs. Only with the Spanish conquest was it finally written down phonetically. Sacred texts in the ancient world always passed through someone who was older and wiser; reading was always communal. One can reason then that this is the nature of all sacred texts according to how we human beings act. To argue the text against the community is thus a very new and strange phenomenon.

3. The Quiche Maya in Guatemala are described as still practicing their pre-Columbian devotions to their gods. However, they often begin even these rites with a Pater Noster or Ave Maria. This type of syncretism should of course be discouraged, but what type of syncretism do we moderns take part in that is imperceptible to our eyes? How many times do we pray before the altar of secularism, pluralism, and universal skepticism? Maybe the Maya do not perceive the contradictions in their religious practices. Then again, maybe we do far worse. We tend to not, in many cases, see the hand of God in all creation. Maybe in that sense, our society is de-evolving.