I am thinking of sending a letter to Rowan Williams announcing my formal break with Anglicanism. The problem is that these liberal bishops are all such nice types. As Will Rogers said, its hard to hate a man you’ve met…and I had the fortune/misfortune of meeting the charming Canturbury prelate last year. But this anglian and anglophile stuff has to stop, and better sooner than later. The people who call themselves Anglicans in the US are really disgruntled Episcopalins, who have seen the light on the topic of theological liberalism. What that means is that they are either on the road to Rome or on the road to integrating themsleves with the Evangelical mainstream. What it doesn’t mean is Anglophile schmaltz. Probably it is good that the House of Windsor is now competing with Lindsey Lohan and Lady Gaga for prime time, or this issue would not have been forced in such a dramatic fashion.

Oh, and did I neglect to mention that it is Good Friday? So lets put this public…and our own private…foolishness away and meditate on the Cross!

I have made it clear in the past that I am not a hard-core fan of Sarah Palin.  Not that any of the trip-wires which touch off the orgy of hatred for her in the liberal press give me any trouble.  So what if she is a moosehunter?  So what if she is a small-town girl?  So what if she was a kind of baked Alaskan version of Ms. Prejean during her salad days?  I don’t even mind her being a Pentacostal-Evanglical.  If she were a Pentacostal-Evangelical theologian it would be one thing…but a Pentacostal-Evangelical politician?  We can live with that.  What we couldn’t have lived with is a Sarah Palin who had become a sock puppet for the neoconservative think tanks and lobbyists in and around Washington DC..

Possibly…just possibly, because the drama has yet to play itself out, Sarah Palin has done what libertarians always talk about but never do…she has resigned her membership in the political class.  Or, to be brutally frank, she as withdrawn her (rather stale) application form.  If true this would be an act of heroism, as heroism was defined by Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand.  The political class would never let “Sarah be Sarah”…and when it came time to do the sacrifice she yielded up her career rather than her identity.  With most politicians (Ron Paul and a few oddballs excepted) the decision is made early on to sacrifice values for power.  So two cheers for Sarah!

But only two cheers, not three.  The question is, what’s next?  I think her best option would be to start her own organization…there are many people who love Sarah Palin, and want to see her fulfill her destiny in the great scheme of things.  These people would be glad to become contributors and even staff members.  She has names and contacts…and yes, she also has a mind.

This latter needs to be emphasised because the mainstream press has done such a thourough smear job with its incessant portrayal of Mrs. Palin and her family as trailer trash of the most inferior breed.  Yes, candidate Palin said some pretty stupid things on the stump, but you  don’t have to be a Sigmund Freud to understand that smart people say the dumbest things sometimes.  The frequent informational gaffes were less an index of Sarah’s IQ than a subconcious contempt for the world outside of Wassila.  Well, we all have had to grow up, and Sarah Palin has done a lot of growing.  Her decision to take a sabbatical from politics is indicative of a high Emotional Q…which trumps IQ in everything but the hard sciences.

She needs to move to the east coast where she is not handicapped by time and distance, and then she needs to hit the books.  The international world has to become real to her…as real as it is to Barrack Obama who was born into internationalism.   If that means hitting the books like a schoolgirl, then that’s what I’d advise.  In fact I’d volunteer to stand over her with a birch stick until she remembered all the names of the countries, their capitals, and their heads of state.  After all Sarah, we are advocates of traditional values and education, arn’t we?

Fundamentally, Michael Jackson was no better or worse than any of the rest of us…well, he could sing a lot better.  Furthermore he was exposed to the rudiments of Judeo-Christian morality at an early age via a sect which many have theological objections to, but is known for its rigor.  But when too much money syndrome strikes all of that is likely to be swept away.  The problem becomes acute when you have enough money to isolate yourself from the rest of the human race, when you can live in a palace surrounded by walls and guards, and when your only contact with fellow bipeds takes the form of  those who are an extention of your personality.  It doesn’t matter who these people are, they could be agents, menials, prostitutes, children, or best of all those non-human friends we call pets.  The common denominator is that they offer no opposition to ones will.

Anyone, left to their own devices, could be seduced into such a lifestyle.  But whereas Presley and Jackson had the resources to indulge their whims, the rest of us have been saved by being providentially strapped for cash.  At this point you will see that I have handed the left yet another compelling argument for confiscatory taxation.  If money is bad for your health, like cigaretts, then the most compassionate way of dealing with the rich is to take the toxin away from them.  It would really be for their own good.

But faithful readers of this blog will be relieved to know that Pico Ultraorientalis still counts himself among those “low-tax liberals” who are proud to call themselves libertarians.  Still, I would like to see a less flipant view of wealth in libertarian circles.   Fortunately people arn’t going around wearing $ pendants the way they did back in the heyday of Ayn Rand and the Nathaniel Branden Institutes.  Being rich, like being selfish was once hailed as a virtue to tweek the Marxist pretention that “the wretched of the earth” had earned their proletarian dictatorship simply by virtue of suffering.  But the shelf life of this ironic rhetoric has long expired.

Yes, money kills, but that in itself doesn’t justify its probibition.  Like sex, it is a test of character, and a test that most of us are apt to fail.  We are saved by scarcity…and not just saved but made to use our wits to preserve ourselves.  If too much money provides a dangerous dose of  moral anesthesia…the reason isn’t in the earning, but in the use of it.  Libertarians can fortify themselves in the knowlege that confiscatory taxation is a two edged sword.  Yes, it might save the rich from self-distruction…but it shifts the toxin to society in general.

As sad as Michael Jackson’s end might be, the salient tragedy of our time is a political class with virtually unlimited access to money.  Society has been poisoned by the ability of government to tax, print, and borrow funds without limit.  Just as in the case of a super-rich individual, the effect of endless government expenditure is to destroy any principle of resistance to the whim of the moment.

Personally, if it comes down to sacrificing the rich or society in general to the curse of Mamon, I will choose the rich.  Let them keep their money, if only to prevent it from entering the bloodstream of the body politic.  I know this sounds like some sort of bizzare joke.  Indeed, it takes the death of a once-beloved celebrety like Michael Jackson to make people realize, if only momentarily, that it is no joke.

But is the curse always fatal?  Is that needle’s eye so small that the proverbial camel is doomed to stay outside its gate?  I don’t claim to know the answer to such a mystery…but my preference is for free will.  Knowing that money can distroy you is no excuse for abandoning your ambitions.  Perhaps the wisest money philosophy was enunciated three hundred years ago by John Westley (or was it Charles…I’m not a Methodist) who enunciated three principles 1) earn as much as you can, 2) save as much as you can, and 3) give away as much as you can.

And on that concluding note I’d like to mention that, in addition to his wonderful music, Michael Jackson endowed the world with many generous charitable contributions.  Whatever his faults, let’s pray that his camel squeezes through those pearly gates.

Let me first say that I never watch beauty contests.  Not that I have anything against young women of a pulchritudinous appearance.  But I am surprised that the latest theological battle between the beast of secularism and Christianity has taken the strange twist that it has.  A nice young lady by the name of Carrie Prejean made a perfectly sensible comment about marriage being a hetrosexual institution and was pilloried for it.  In my book that makes her a heroine  in the battle against political correctness.  End of story!

The problem is when people want to go further than that and make Miss Prejean into a heroine of Christianity.  Now I don’t doubt that she is a Christian, that she knows the rudiments of scripture,  has had a heartwarming conversion experience and is a popular figure in her local church.  I think she is totally sincere in the way that only  a young person of moderate intelligence can be.  I don’t want to go too far on the “moderate intelligence” bit…but perhaps A.A. Milne’s expression “a bear of very little fluff” would be most apt.  After all, there’s nothing wrong with not being Einstein, and we can be happy that Carrie Prejean will not be inventing weapons of mass distruction…apart from the mass implosion of the neo-evangelical mindset of chamelion like adaptation to every possible sub-culture in modern American society.  I suspect that the process was well underway before Miss Prejean hit the national scene…but hopefully she can speed it up a bit.

Eroticism

Christianity is the most sexy religion on the planet.  No that’s not a joke, I really mean it.  The trick is understanding what constitutes genuine eroticism.  Needless to say I don’t think I have this figured out myself yet…but my Pascalian wager would be that it is very far from the kind of activities which Miss Prejean allows herself to be party to.  Again, this is not a personal attack on Miss Prejean…and she has evidently embedded herself so succesfully in the modeling and fashion world that it would constitute what economists call a considerable substitution cost for her to do a career makeover at this point.  So she’ll simply have to live with it.  I don’t think it will deprive her of being a saint with a small ‘s’ if you get my meaning.

But for anyone to puff up this vulnerable young woman into a standard bearer for Christianity is truely vile.  True, what she said took courage, but was it courage on the level of what Bonhoffer called “The Costs of Dicipleship”?  A rhetorical question which anyone can answer.  The real message to neo-evangelicals is that now the cultural bar has been set even lower…and that you can involve yourself with the soft-porn of commercial fashion and still be a role model.

But what is wrong with being “cute”…one of Miss Prejean’s favorite words.  Nothing at all, except it is a kind of out-of-focus version of the carnal mind, the carnal image with various figleafs (mostly literal fig leafs in this case!) superimposed for moral cover.  In other words its admitting that the erotic=carnal.  It is another captitulation to paganism.

But even the better sort of pagans, at least Socrates and Plato as expressed in the Symposium, realized that eroticism was a propedeutic to sprituality…or rather that the best kind of spirituality is a kind of supra-eroticism which trancends the flesh.  Contemporary Christians generally baulk at this idea, in spite of the fact that it is well grounded in both scripture and tradition.  Even Roman Catholics, with their admirable respect for the Mother of God, are inclined to suborn the divine feminine to a kind of mommy image.  Protestants, with a few rare exceptions like the Moravain Bretheren, shunned the entire subject.  By the time we get down to contemporary Evangelical Christianity the soul is considered so compartmentalized that the notion of looking at religion from the standpoint of eros would be considered nothing short of demonic…in spite of the fact that Christ is universally acnowleged to have redeemed the whole of human nature.  It is as if the mention of sexuality in connectin with religion would cause  Shiva and all the gods of Indian tantrism to break into the cosmos and wreak their worst.

If the result were aceticism, as in the fourth century of Jerome or the eleventh century of Peter Damian, there might be something plausible in this pretended anti-eroticism.  But in fact the mainstream Protestants and the Evangelicals have in their own ways become fellow travellers in the sexual revolution, the former offering elaborate arguments based on situation ethics, and the latter under the simple expedient of doing everything, no matter how questionable, “…for Jesus.”  As society has become increasingly sexualized it has lost the capacity for that erotic intensity which was a propedutic for spiritual ecstasy.  Sex has become commericalized and trivialized.  In the words of Miss Prejean, it has settled for “cute.”

It was not always thus, the best advocate for Erotic Christianity lived in the 18th-19th centuries and his name was F.X.Baader.  Not a household word to be sure.  In Protestantism a tepid rationalism won out, and Catholicism went back to a highly imitative scholasticism.  What would Christianity look like today if Baader’s ideas had had more appeal.  Would we have “Tantric Christianity.”  Of course not!  Baader was a soundly orthodox mind who was alway vigilant against carnal and demonic subversion of Christian theological concepts…but some of his influence was retained by Berdayev’s existential Christianity and the Sophilogical movement in the Eastern Churches.

I hope to blog more on Baader’s philosophy of Christian Eros in the future.  In the meantime if your interested in pagent winners…seek elsewhere.

Hurd Baruch recently brought attention to the relevance of the work of Jacob Neusner to Christian apologetics in the traditionalist Catholic ezine New Oxford Review.   Baruch extablishes his importance (from a Catholic viewpoint) by the simple expedient of showing that the present pope, when he was still Joseph Ratzinger, took Neusner’s positions as the plumbline of Jewish theology which it was necessary to come to terms with when presenting the Gospel.  While all this is very interesting, it is not clear that Hurd Baruch has quite understood Neusner’s position, which would have been of importance even if it had never come to Ratzinger’s notice.  In the New Oxford Review article Baruch introduces Neusner as a scholarly orthodox rabbi and professor.  As shall be explained, the use of the miniscule in “orthodox” conveys more information than the typical reader of the magazine in question is likely to notice.  Neusner is in fact a Conservative (as in Conservative vs. Orthodox) scholar of Jewish religious literature.  From the point of view of Orthodoxy this makes him no more a “rabbi” than a Baptist preacher is a “priest” albeit that Neusner might be far more scholarly than most rabbis…or for that matter Christian priests.  Still, the question of truth always centers on whether you’ve gotten your answers right, not how smart you are.  My thesis is that, as far as human reasoning goes Jacob Neusner gets God and Man and Law (to borrow an old refrain from Bob Dylan) almost, but not quite, right.  This in itself makes Neusners philosophy important, being that penultimate rationalism which, if the Gospel did not exist, we would have to embrace to make the most of life in an imperfect world.

The shock line which Baruch quotes from Neusner is that “the conception of a Judeo-Christian tradition that Judaism and Christianity share is simply a myth in the bad old sense: a lie” (from Jews and Christians: The Myth of a Common Tradition, 2003).  One has to love Neusner for departing from the pieties of American civil religion and the false gospel of political correctness.  But in truth this statment (as Neusner himself would agree) doesn’t go far enough.  The conception of Judeo-Christianity suffers not so much from incoherence as from neologism.  Neither Judaism or Christianity stand for any coherent tradition either, as anyone can see from the divided nature of the church, but equipped with a bit more scholarship we can speak confidently of multiple  “Judaisms” as well.

Now it is by no means clear that Neusner can speak for all of these Judaisms, but the particular Judaism for which he does speak for, what might be called rational-historical Judaism, occupies an important place in the system of possible human ideologies.  One might call its place “essential” in the same way that Mattew Arnold called the thought previous to his own period, “our essential 18th century.”  Of course Arnold was a Victorian Christian Humanist, and as such in a relation of polarity to the salon culture of the Enclyopedists and Enlighteners, but it was precisely the polarity which made the relationship essential.

Likewise Neusner’s rational-historical Judaism not only provides the most plausible and humane alternative to the Gospel today, but a valuable foil for Christian self-understanding.  This is because Neusner’s Hebraic rationalism is  much more stable (or to use Merleu-Pointy’s term, much more “major”) than standard Greco-Western rationalism, or for that matter, rationalism without adjectives.  After all, it shouldn’t be necessary to explain, after Kant, that such rationalisms, incapable of providing their own premises, invariably self-destruct, or as in the case of Nietzsche, turn into their own dialectical opposites.  This is so well known that we could almost speak of standard Greco-Western rationalism as “hysterical rationalism” or “latent irrationalism” or “rationalism-romanticism”…the latter phrase, or something close to it, having actually been used by the celbrated Ayn Rand!

Now Neusner, like most unprejudiced persons of sound mind, understands that this hysterical rationalism won’t do at all for the purposes of establishing a prudent and virtuous human community.  What follows is my surmise as to his basic thinking out of a solution, the solution based on rational-historical Judaism.  My surmise is that Neusner knows that most, although not all, human insanity is based on carnal drives, or what Judaism likes to call the “bad impulse”…this is sufficient in itself to overthrow any battlements that Greco-Western rationalism is likely to put in its path.  So one must put in an admixture of religion, but not just any religion.  Paganism won’t work, for the gods of paganism turn out to be no more than archetypal human drives, so one is fighting fire with fire.  One must resort to the oracles of the Source of Being contained in the Torah.  But Neusner senses (again I am surmising, perhaps at the man’s expense) a  second, even more dangerous, source of human irrationalty…the whirlwind of contact with objective divinity.  Again, Neusner is not the sort of scholar who speaks a great deal about this sort of thing, it is simply an unstated premise hovering on the periphery of his work…but minds of a different turn call this kind of contact “numenosity.”

In short, I surmise that Neusner’s whole project hinges on adding a trace amount, a homeopathic dose, of numinosity from the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob to the matrix of rationality.  At any rate, the results are rather satisfactory.  One can imagine not just individuals, but entire communities, living their lives out within the framework of historical-rational Judaism.  Unfortunately there have never been any such communities, there have only been Orthodox Jews living under Talmudic law, or Jews (including Neusner) who, like the rest of us, live under secular law in secular communities.  Mysteriously enough, this dosn’t have much to do with the nature of the law, but with metaphysics.

The difference between Neusner on the one side, and both Orthodox Jews and most Christians on the other, is that the latter take metaphysics seriously and the former does not.  Again, I am speaking of the man’s scholarship, not of his private life, of which I know nothing.  For people accustomed to thinking in New Testement terms, Neusner is a kind of para-Sadducee.  This may seem terribly unfair, for Neusner has spent his entire life laboring to make Jewish tradition available to the modern public, while the Sadducees were the classical rejectors of tradition in favor of what Christains would call “sola scriptura.”  However the Sadducees were also rationalists, or at least metaphysical minimalists…rejecting spirituality as a distraction on the way to the just society.

Of course Neusner has a vast amount of material to deal with, all of which was produced by the successors of the Pharasees, not the Saducees.  His over 900 scholarly works are just the tip on an iceberg spaning the depths of rabbinical history from the end of the Second Temple to the closing of the Babylonian Talmud around 500AD.  But like any scholar’s work, the significant of Neusner’s  accomplishment isn’t the bulk of his resume…it is the simple idea at its core.  Neusner’s idea is the displacement of revelation by intellectual history.  As indicated above, this can never be a complete displacement…for a complete displacement would entale the collapse of the entire structure.  But what does result is a a series of paradigm shifts, based on rabinical insights, which reinterpret the basic matter of the Torah on which each of the hermenutic structures rest.  This Torah matter is reduced to the role of a passive media out of which a series of Judaisms are constructed.  The prime agent therefore becomes the collective mind of the Rabbinical community…and not whatever revealed itself in the whirlwind.  One might say that Neusner has done for Jewish theology what Hegel did for philosophy…he has made it march forward in time in the service of increasing rationality and justice.

The irony of the situation is that the remaining communities which abide by the Talmud on a day to day basis will have nothing to do with Neusner, and in fact consider him a secularist.  It isn’t that they are reading a Talmud which is any different from Neusners, it is that they, unlike Neusner, take metaphysics…or the whirlwind if you will, seriously.  Judaism didn’t stop where Neusner leaves off in 500AD, it continued with the redaction of the Zohar and other Kabbalistic texts which made spirituality, not leglism, the center of Jewish life.  Now it would be easy to think, in the hindsight of Scholem and other scholars of Kabbalah, that these Kabbalistic Orthodox Jews, like good progressives of the 20th or 21st centuries, thought that their spirituality was better than the moral insights of the Talmud because it was newer and more modern.  But of course this would be anachronistic.  The Kabbalistic texts were written in the form of midrash, that is to say as commentaries on the Torah.  They were true not because they were newer than the Talmud, but because they were more ancient than the Talmud.

But the most salient point of all is that not only Kabbalistic Jews and Christians, but Talmudic scholars throughout most of history made their claims not on the basis of novelty but antiquity.  The idea of moral evolution through which Neusner exposits Jewish religious literature is quite attractive, but it falls down on two essential points.  First of all it conflates the idea of revelation and intellectual history, a conflation which didn’t really become popular until the time of Hegel, and would have shocked most traditional communities of the past, certainly most Jewish ones.   Secondly it abandons the sphere of religion entirely because it sweeps the primal nature of numinosity  under the carpet…where all sensible secular people think it belongs.

In short, Jacob Neusner is an essential dialogue partner for Christianity, both in the sense of apologetics and Christian self-understanding.  But he does not represent dialogue between Christianity and Judaism so much as Christianity and Modernism…albeit Modernism in what is perhaps its most prudent, just, and sustainable form.  After all, even a trace amount of what Abraham received leavens quite a bit!

So far I havn’t gotten to the point where I think that anyone will be highly entertained by details of  my past erotic shipwreaks.  Those who arn’t satisfied with their own can have recourse to the National Inquirerer.  But in the case of my intellectual biography I think it is high time that I confess a few errors of my steamy (at least cognitively speaking) past.  Having been born at the mid point of the Twentieth century there are few intellectual errors of the last half of that century which I havn’t at least sampled, but there are only two which, in Goethe’s phrase I have “swilled with large goblets.”  Again, one can do other things with goblets, but even less than sex, these are hard to enjoy on line.  The two opiates to which I was mostly addicted were Culturalism and Objectivism, both excellent ideologies as ideologies go, and each presided over by a latter day embodyment of the Pallas Athena archetype, Margaret Mead and Ayn Rand respectively.

Margaret Mead I was actually able to meet personally, however briefly, while I was young and she was…to put it unchivalrously, entering into advanced decay.   Yet antique though she might have been, I got the definite impression that she was attracted to me, however on the occasion I was uncharateristically disinclined to act the jigolo, thus depriving myself of any deeper knowlege, Biblical or archeological, which might have ensued.  But even to glipse her from afar was a kind of epiphany, in her robes her beads and her forked staff…she was less a scientist than a shammaness.

That last point has been the entire point of anti-Mead criticism during the last few decades.  At the time I met her I was still an innocent (not sexually) and could hardly have guessed that Derek Freeman was rigorously at work in Samoa undoing Mead’s life work.  It would not have mattered much even had I known, since the criticisms of Freeman (and fellow New Zealander Roger Sandall) in a sense upstaged the criticisms of Culturalism which I felt to be salient.  Freeman discovered that Mead’s work was a hoax, although who was the hoaxer, Mead or her informants, remains a legitimate subject of debate.  However the attraction of Culturalism was never its scientific rigor.  At least in its Ruth Bennedict/Margaret Mead form it was tactily understood by its devotees as a kind of sociological poetry somewhat along the lines of, and ultimately inspired by, the poeticized philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The question in my mind was not so much whether Culturalism was scientific…but rather, was it good or bad poetry?  Granted that it was all a conspiracy, and that Mead was using the Samoans as a ventriloquist would use a dummy, to articulate the values that she would like to see acendent in a future world society…were the values themselves coherent or catastrophic?  I eventually decided that I couldn’t “stay with the program”…if only because the premises and the conclusions of the Culturalist program contradicted themselves.  The premise (for the benefit of anyone who happened to miss the XXth century runup to the multiculturalism of the XXIst century) was that all cultures developed in isolation and could not be judged by any common standard, but that when these cultures were inductively surveyed a posteriori, their very  incommesurability gave support to that atavism which is loosely termed “liberalism” in emergent world culture.  In the specific variation which Mead espoused, this meant that pan-eroticism gained an important butress distinct from previously existing naturalism (eg. Rousseau) in that post tribal Western Bohemians could (while still honoring the tribal, and perhaps thinking of themselves as tribal) choose pan-eroticism on inductive grounds, thus avoiding the appearance of being coerced by nature.  Thus culturalism provided the best of all possible worlds (at least for Western Bohemians) by conflating the ecstasy of instict with the autonomy of the free will.

At the time I certainly had no quarrel with the so-called “sexual revolution.”  What troubled me was the deeper logical contradiction implied by the program.  The classical notion of the “consensus gentium” was to be supplanted by a purely statistical/comparative study of cultures.  Yet when, as was inevitable, this comparason was used to support the default policies of progressivism and liberalism…ie. as pure potential unrestrained by the shackles of narrow tradition or an illusory “human nature”…then at precisely that point the chorus of the “consensus gentium” shouted out in a unanimity too loud to be ignored.  Against the background of the poly-form, pan-erotic global culture, or at least its Bohemian advanced guard, the traditional cultures started to look remarkably similar, with systems of sanctions and authority which all bore a striking family resemblance.

In short, the culturalists had argued for moral relativism (and hence “liberalism” as the default option) in bad faith.  I considered this far worse than any hoaxing or novelization of the ethnographic data.  At least the hoaxing could be justified on esthetic (not to say erotic!) grounds.  But the disjunct between the tribal base and the Bohemian concusions of culturalism involved trickyer matters of contradictory logic and values.  Something had to go, either the mystical group-mind of the tribes, or the rebellious individualism of the Bohemians.

Anthropology turned left (to the tribes) but I turned right…all the way right to Ayn Rand.  It struck me that Western liberalism had gone a bridge too far in the 1960s, when the classical bases of the Whig/progressive historical tradition were thrown overboard in favor of a world view based on existentialism and cultural anthropology.  As much as I was alarmed by the eroticism and anti-intellectualism of the Bohemians, I far prefered any defense of the individual against the prospect of a return to the tribe…which was the logical conclusion evisioned by the emergent ecological and counter-cultural movements.  (Nota bene: the earlier Bohemian denizens of the American academy were anarchic individualists, like Benedict and Mead.  As time went on and culturalism became the  ideological foundation of revolt, Bohemians became tribal…as in “counterculture” and the switch from self identification as “beatniks” to “hippies.”  For what it is worth, I was a kind of post-hippy.)

Against a sophisticated dialectical non-synthesis of Bohemianism and tribalism in Mead’s culturalism, the multiculturalism of the American XXth century tended more and more towards a fundamentalist culturalism.  This wasn’t, counter Sandall, primarily manifested in “designer tribalism.”  There were never that many hippies, and they died out pretty quickly.  But the forced analogy between a functioning tribal society and modern state tended to wedge itself into the sociological imagination, and turned “liberalism” which originally designated the rights of the individual, into a tag for  its polar opposite, social democracy.  In desperation I turned to “fundamentalist individualism”…which at the time people were calling libertarianism.

In those days libertarianism meant Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism.  Unlike Mead, I never actually met Rand in person, and indeed by the late 1970s when I started getting interested in the movement, the party was pretty much over.  Rand and her lover, Nathaniel Brandon, had split up in 1968, and the salad days of people prancing around in capes and sporting jewel-encrusted cigarette holders was pretty much (fortunately) over.  I did meet Brandon, who was by now married for the third time and synthesizing a new philosophy based around something called “biocentrism.”  Biocentrism sounded to me like naturalism, and I was still wedded strongly to the superorganicism which I had come by via the tuition of the culturalists.  If I had met Rand a few years earlier I would probably have wound up as a cult follower, since the pure conceptual quality of Objectivism appealed greatly to me, but the more Rand and Brandon (now at dagger points) claimed to be the first worthy successors to Aristotle in 25 centuries, the more I suspected that they were just “padding their resume.”  I also had the great pleasure of making first hand aquaintance with the philosophers of German Idealism at the time, and while I would be loath to defend Hegel, Schelling et al today, I got enough out of them to realize that the screeds Rand had written against him (lifted in turn from Popper) were written out of ignorance.

In short, I fell out of love with Rand even more quickly than I did with Margaret Mead, a process confirmed when I made aquaintance with the Austrian economists and learned that there was far more to libertarianism than Objectivism.  Many a year has elapsed from then to now, but at this moment, as I set down these words I can see connections which at the time escaped me between my two (now rejected) loves.  First of all, both Culturalism and Objectivism are poetry.  Second, I stand by the statement that there could be ideologies (perhaps saying “philosophies” is a bit much) which are legitimately poetic.  Moreover, not only could thought which is poetic be sociologically valid, but thought which is erotic (in the sense of Plato’s Symposium) could also be sociologically valid.  Not only Socrates, but Max Scheler who spoke of an “order of loves” in the human heart, would agree with me here.

The question which must be posed is not “can thinking about human society be poetic” but rather “is this particular thinking good or bad poetry”?  I found that ultimately both Mead and Rand were bad poets, however technically brilliant they might have been as novelists and thinkers.  To be sure, I would rather inhabit a dream-world ruled by the shamaness Mead or the romantic philosopher Rand than a world (as indeed our world increasingly becomes) ruled by cold technocrats.  But neither Mead’s tribal world or Rand’s heroic world represents that apex of the “order of loves” which all hearts strive for.  Furthermore, I have a hunch as to why this is, one that I should have figured out long ago…but that a slovenly combination of indecision and pride barred my way.

You see, Mead and Rand, who are seldom mentioned in the same breath anywhere in literature or cyberspace, these two women are progeny of a deeper, and darker thinker.  Yes, these two titanic women, who have probably had more influence on American (and hence world) popular culture than any two other individuals, are the obverse/reverse sides of  the same philosophical-philosophical coin, one originally struck by none other than Friedrich Nietzsche.  Both Mead and Rand covered their tracks somewhat, for the former wanted desperately to be the expositor of her beloved Samoans, as the latter wished to be the continuator of Aristotle.  But these were just masks for an unacnowledged oracle, one which pronounced the philosophy of moral inversion.

And that is why I call both Mead and Rand bad poets.  Not completely bad mind you, in fact both charming in their own way, as was Nietzsche himself.  It is a tribute to the great heartedness and then innocence of Americans in the XXth century that they couldn’t drink in their Nietzsche with frothing goblets, that, horn-rimmed academicians aside, they had to be spoon fed by two female social philosophers representing, as it appeared at the time, the diametrically opposite ideologies of tribal naturalism and romantic rationalism.  These were, of course, both transvaluations of Western Culture as it had existed up until that time…as it had been been informed (i.e., in the Platonic-Augustinian sense of “formed into”) by Christianity.

Which brings us to the ultimate question, what is “good poetry” in social philosophy, or in life generally.  If we are to follow the argument in Plato’s Symposium, then it is poetry which leads us from eroticism in the vulgar sense to some higher, and ungessed at, love.  This is precisely what the hot primitivism of Mead and the frenzy of heroism in Rand cannot do, indeed are not intended to do.  Love for Mead, however promiscuous, can at most lead to horizontle  bonding of the tribe in a participation mystique, one where the individual mind is effaced in the collective.  From there, events are allowed to take their course, perhaps in an orgy of passion, or perhaps (a la Rene Girard) in a climactic homicide.  Rand’s love is, in contrast, a jealously exclusive kind of love, the love of a hero…which is to say a man who is almost, but not quite, God.  Yet, if not God, such a man may at least succeed in becoming a type of god.  In Rand’s fiction a single act of love, or a single successful creative accomplishement, is enough to stand against all eternity.  Its the sort of stuff that we Americans just can’t get enough of, that is the heroism, not the eternity.  Nietzsche at least had the integrity to call this kind of heroism tragic.  Rand would have disowned any attempt at calling her fiction tragic…and it is probable that she wouldn’t have liked the term “comic” any better.  Perhaps, in spite of her vaunted “rationality” there were many things which she simply didn’t think out to their logical conclusions.

For all of that, I still have a warm feeling for both these fictive daughters of Nietzsche (as opposed to his very real and very evil sister).  All I question is whether the philosophy of love got very far in the secular world of the last century.  We must look elsewhere to find a poetry of eros which takes us from the world of vulgar passions to the sublimity of a love founded on truth.   Our souls testify to the impossiblity of a Jacob’s ladder which leads halfway up to heaven and then stops.  Yet all our attempts to break through into the emprean by violence have, in the last and all other centuries, come to what King Soloman rightly called “vanity.”  No, rather we must wait patiently at the bottom of the ladder and wait for our Lover to descend and take us into His embrace.  Then we shall say, with the Shulamite,

I was sleeping, but my heart kept vigil;

I heard my lover knocking:

“Open to me, my sister, my beloved,

my dove, my perfect one!”  (Song of Songs 5:2)

Then we shall find that Love that Plato could only dream of…a Love of which nobody shall tire!

I had the nicest Easter in recent memory today.   First of all, it was a glorious day all day long.  We are in the middle of cherry blossom season here in Japan, and none of the trees were stinting their blossoms under the bright cloudless sky.  Blue and pink!  Pretty nice Eastern Easter colors.

The pastor at the church I attended said that the church itself was a kind of miracle of persistance.  Attendence had dwindled down to the parabolic “two or three” neccessary for the Presence.  But as Pastor Schneburger said, it only takes two or three to witness a resurection!  There were three baptisms in the morning and by the time of the service there were ten members present.  That’s what the Jews call “a minyan” i.e. a quorum for worship.  Not a mega church to be sure, but a candle which is no longer flickering, but buring brightly.

What makes this church unique is its ecuminism.  Its order of worship is based on the Lima and Taize liturgies…i.e. Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant “fusion.”  Denominational affiliation?  Baptist!  Yes, High Liturgical Baptist.  As I said, the Lord still works miracles!

HAPPY EASTER!

I have a bone to pick with Creationists, and it has little to do with the age of the Earth, for I consider myself a Creationist myself.  Rather, it is that the Christian imagination sidetracks itself when it flees from the human into the natural sciences.  As its name would surely imply, Christianity is the religion which combines a Theocentric Anthropology, and an Anthrocentric Theology.    This is such a basic fact that people constantly loose sight of it.  Calvin famously took Ostiander to task for predicating a connection between the Logos and the human species even before the fall.  Yet surely Ostiander had a point, in that the expression “made in our image” is antecedant to the fall and redemption.

Even the most elementary survey of comparative religion will show that the Christianity’s claim to be the “human religion” is no idle boast.  Once, that is, we have extracted ourselves from the contemporary rhetorical quagmire which conflates “humanism” and “secularity.”  The philosophy of Yoga, for instance, seeks with great ernestness to reduce the human entelechy to the various elements constituent of the universe (in non-Brahminical sects) or divinity (in Brahminism).  Shamanism, a widespread and primal notion, seeks with equal ernestness to assimilate the human spirit to that of various animals.  On the other hand, the various non-Christian psychisms, spiritisms, and occultisms promote a commerce between the spirit of their practitioners and various preternatural beings.  It is only Christianity which holds out for humanity qua humanity as central to divine concern.

One would think that contemporary Christian thinkers would see in Anthropology the strong suit of any contemporary evangel.   All the more so in that the force which opposes Christianity is so blatently anti-anthropic (i.e., as epitomised in C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”) and one can usually chart a sure course by going in a direction opposite irrelgious resistance.

Yet sadly there is no movement in the cutural sciences which Christians have granted the kind of importance (before even coming to assent) which has been lavished on opposition to Darwinism in geology, biology, and that kind of anthropology which would be better termed “human zoology.”  This is what I consider the “crisis of Christian anthropology.”  This is not to say that there is no Christian (cultural) anthropology whatsover, indeed there are several, often noncommunicating, paradigms which might be called (and sometimes are called) Christian anthropologies.  To the best of my knowlege these can be grouped into the following five categories, which I have listed in acending rank of scientific promise.  Note that here scientific promise correlates to lack of respectability and to some extent presence of danger.

Five Possible Christain Anthropologies

1.  There is a kind of mainstream anthropology which is done by Christians as well as secularists.  So we find textbooks written by Christian authors largely for missiological purposes which in no way challenge the material basis of secular anthropology.  In this category one can also put several institutes which translate Bibles and mission literature into isolated and/or minority languages, and which sometimes do original research in the area of linguistics.  These people are generally bright and respectable, but are in no way challeging secularist presuppositions in culturology in the way a Creationist might (rightly or wrongly) challenge Darwinian geology.  (Which is not to doubt their physical courage, after all missionary-ethnographers are more likely to suffer martrydom than the theorists of the other categories!)

2. “Anthropology” as it is construed as a category in Scholasticism and Protestant Systematic Theologies.  This largely centers on pneumatology or the nature of “the soul”, its distinction, or otherwise, from the spirit and relation to the body.    In many respects this is a well picked over field which consists in numerous opinions on how to, or if to, baptize Aristotel’s “De Anima.”  The focus is so narrowly focused that much of what constitutes the human sciences (eg. the history of technology, art, language) escape it.  Still it contains a number of Christian classics which should be on everyone’s “must read” list.

3. Philosophical Anthropology in so far as it is Christian.  And indeed, philosophical anthropology tends to be Christian, not only because of the major premise stated at the beinging of this essay but because in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries this was the dicipline which sought to retain the realist assumptions implicit in the question “What is Man?” after the hyper-nominalism of empirical, secular anthropology had endeavored to render the idea of a common species-nature for humanity meaningless.  Perhaps the best example of this is Max Scheler’s value-based anthropology.  Also I am inclined to put Ivan Illich’s varied speculations into this category, rather than the subsequent one, even though Illich (no more than Scheler) was no realist or scholastic…none the less such thinkers attempted to fill the lacuna left by philosophy when it surrendered the idea of a unified human nature to the various empirical sciences.  The present consensus is that none of these systems were entirely satisfactory, and indeed, Scheler was finally unable to reconcile his ideas with theological orthodoxy.

4.  Christian Culturology, in the sense of anthropological speculations which subsist with the salvation history contained in the Bible as part of a single unbreached continuum.  To the best of my knowlege the only representative of this type is the mimetic theory of Rene Girard and sundary variations and responses thereto.  Girard goes beyond Freud’s notion of the primal murder as the foundation of all culture in “Totem and Taboo” and sanctifies the process, showing that the revelation of human cultural mechanism was made transparent through the passion and the resurection of Christ.  This is a purely naturalistic explanation of culture, which most Christians seem perfectly comfortable with.  What almost all Christians baulk at is the uncomfortable feeling, in spite of Girard’s reasurances, that it implies a naturalistic explanation of the atonement and justification.

5. Preternatural explanations of culture.  In my opinion this is the ultimate goal…nothing less than the restoration of the original Christian, and Biblical, understanding of culture.  It is also the most dangerous option, both professionally and spiritually.  The truth of the matter is that, apart from eschatological rhetoric, Christian thinkers want to have as little as possible to do with supernatural…or more precisely preternatural.  That is to say, while giving lip service to the notion that we live in a multi-storied world, they are unwilling to use this notion as a tool for understanding culture in anything but the most general sense.  Yet the Bible and many traditions clearly indicate that much of what we call “culture” is a gift, even if a treacherous gift, from preternatural beings.

I am glad to mention two European thinkers of the last century, who whatever their failings, were brave enough to speak of civilization and the supernatural in the same breath.  One was Rene Guinon, who converted to Islam, but wrote extensively on symbolism as a clue to the mysterious forces which have interfered with the development of civilization.  The other is Valentin Tomberg, who did yeoman service for the Roman Catholic faith, but is still viewed with suspicion for possibly importing ideas of his earstwise mentor Rudolph Steiner into Christian mysticism.  Tomberg did not shy away from using the concept of the “eregevor”…i.e., the cognitive and spiritual prenumbra cast by a preternatural being over a population or an institution.  In this view eregovors, rather than human interaction, are the source of much which we commonly designate as culture.

I am not saying that this last category should be used as an exclusive explanation of human culture.  Indeed, such a thesis would sugest to certain minds that all culture is demonic!  None the less, it is fitting that the Christian anthropologist  recognize “all truth” without being intimidated by either the prejudice of naturalists or the specter of the preternatural itself.  However slight the inflence of the preternatural might be on human cultures, the total exclusion of this influence as a possible hypothesis (under naturalist pressure) introduces a systematic bias into our understanding of human events.

Conclusion: A Possible Synthesis

If Christianity is the Anthropological religion, then its advocates should not only “be all things to all men” but should also have a coherent and comprehensive understanding about what we mean by “Man” (Or if you will “the human race”…but this is really a nominalist/realist issue rather than a feminist/antifeminist one!)

The following is the most simple, reasonable, and Biblical schematism that I can deduce at present, and as you can see, it really involves two anthropologies.

“Adamic” or Negative Anthropology

consisting of three components:

a. Undefiled creational nature: elements, corporal entity

b. Nature perverted on human initiative:

“Cainite” culture, murder/sacrifice

c. Preternatural “gifts” to human culture, language, and tools

by sundry genii forming group eregevorim

i. angelic

ii. demonic

iii. neutral or confused

“Deutero-Adamic” or Positive Anthropology

Christ as federal head of assenting logoi

I know that someone will say that this is all terribly simplistic, or that perhaps I have reinvented the wheel.  Come to think of it, could anybody reinvent the wheel without downloading the information from a preternatural being?  (Sorry about that, after this super-serious article, I have to lighten up a bit!)

First of course, I can’t say anything about the economic or political situation which has not been said better, or more hysterically than anyone else.  My only comment at this point is DON’T BLAME ME I VOTED FOR RON PAUL!  Beyond that, I can think of nothing particularly eloquent…except to say that things are going to get worse before they get better.

It is easy to loose track of that “…before they get better” caviat.

(From Edinburgh Review, 1830) “If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished to one half of what it then was, that the post-office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under Charles II, that stage coaches would run from London to York.” that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of £10,000 then living there would be five men of £50,000, that in 24 hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave Gulliver’s Travels

Thus a man of 1830 addresses himself to the hysteria surrounding the Panic of 1720.  The man was Thomas Babbington McCaulay,  the famous Scott Victorian writer and Whig politician.    The Whigs were the progenitors of the Liberals, who we in turn would call Libertarians today.  To be sure, not a “Raaaydical” as Murray Rothbard would say, but a kind of CATO Institute gentlemanly reforming libertarian.  Or perhaps a Victorian Voglinian, cautioning people to be on guard against “immanentizing the eschaton.”  After all, many people today would rather be vindictively right and live amid immanent crisis than see an upturn during Obama’s watch.  I understand the sentiment…but it is objectively rather perverse.  There is sure to be a morning after, with technology and economic institutions all the better for the shaking out.  Whether the present generations will live to see it is another matter entirely.

And while we are at it, a second nugget of wit from McCaulay on the futility of blogging in general.  Not that McCaulay would have understood what a blog was, or even thought  in terms of what contemporary economists call “oportunity cost”  but the principle of ars longa vita brevis has seldom been expressed better than in the following savaging  review.

(Review of a life of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley by Edward Nares, Edinburgh Review, 1832) “The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an ordinary preface: the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library. We cannot sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before us better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely printed quarto pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches cubic measure, and that it weighs sixty pounds avoirdupois. Such a book might, before the deluge, have been considered as light reading by Hilpa and Shallum. But unhappily the life of man is now three-score years and ten; and we cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr. Nares to demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence. Compared with the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is an agreeable recreation.”

The last  joke would have seemed as insensitive to Victorian Evangelical reformers (of whom McCaulay was one) as to the present politically correct lobby.

By the way, nobody seems to know who, if anybody, this St. Valentinius was.  Valentinius means “valorious one” in Latin, or something like that, so if you picture “Prince Valient” from the old comic strip you won’t go far wrong.  At one time I thought that it was a recrudecence of Gnosticism which had somehow been preserved in the Catholic calender, since there was a famous heresiarch named Valentinius who lived in Alexandria during the 2nd  century, but I have now come to doubt that hypothesis.  As it turns out there were at least half a dozen saints who had local cults named Valentinius in places ranging from Romania to France.  But this too, has become a dead letter, in so far as some pope or council a few decades ago, in a fit of rationalism, decided to dump the whole lot of them.  Needless to say this has never fooled the common people, who in their own cunning perspecacity know perfectly well who is and is not a saint, the genuine saints being, of course, St. Nicholas, St. Valentine, St. Martin of Tours, St. Martin Luther, and St. Martin Luther King.

And of course this blog also has its two patron non-saints, or perchance patron sinners, Pico della Mirandola and Valentin Tomburg.  Both of these are long shots, albeit not impossibilities, for sainthood within the cannons of the Roman Catholic Church, but as far as I am concerned here, few voices speak to the dynamics of modern spirituality as well as Tomburg.   This is slight commendation, since Tomburg’s modernity, like Mirandola’s renaissance, is a very dark place, spiritually speaking.  But we have to work with what we have, and it is better to light one taiper, however slender, than to curse the darkness.

This morning I drew the lover’s card from my tarot pack.  For better or worse I was working with the Connally Tarot, and as I explained in a previous post, Connally has bowlderized many of the spritual arcana of Christian Hermeticism.  It shows a naked man and woman tristing under cherub and a solar disc.  In other words, it is less an alegory of profane love than an indicator (as in the case of divination or meditation) of profane love itself.  This is only the first level of interpretation for the Arcana of The Lovers.  However it is not to be dispised on that account, since all further levels of interpretation are based on the literal.  In that regard, one must become a fundametalist before one proceeds to mysticism.  The Arcana of the Lovers would make no sense to some being (like the proverbial man from Mars) who had never experienced sexuality or gender differentiation.  Any sort of sexuality might do, since they are all permutations on the fundamental structure of male/female polarity…but it is inadmissable that a soul capable only of nongendered abstract thought could ever be initiated into the mystery of the Lovers.  Even Socrates, for all his brilliance and mysogeny, had to learn this secret from an Athenian prostitute, as  he recounted in the Symposium.

Needless to say, it is perilous to dwell exclusively on the level of sensuality, and so the next higher level of interpretation is that of moral alegory.  This is well illustrated by the traditional Marseilles Tarot decks (pictured below) and derivatives such as the Oswald Wirth tarot.  Significantly in these traditions the name of the mystery is rendered in the singular, “the lover” in so far as a single male has been interposed between two alegorical females, with the cherub menacing one with an arrow from his quiver.  The females represent profane and spiritual love respectively, with the male at the point of decision between the two.  A valuable meditation for anyone in any circumstance, but in particular for anyone on Valentine’s day who has had the (mis- ?) fortune of getting more than one box of chocolate!

However the moral interpretation, however essential, is only the anteroom to the higher mystical understandings of Hermeticism, which concern the alchemical wedding of the anima and the animus, or to put it in non-latinate terms, the higher and the lower self.  This is a tricky bussiness since there is much imposture within the human heart and what is “higher” or “lower” at any given time is a difficult matter for dicernment.  For example there is a stage in development when people assume an identification of “higher” with the reasoning faculties and “lower” with the emotional life, but this  is a gross oversimplification upon which many a soul has been ruined.  A great deal of ink (or rather electrons these days) has been spilled over the methodology of the alchemical wedding, and I, for one, have been back and forth through the Collected Works of Carl Jung on it.  But in the final analysis, Tomberg is right, one just has to pick an iconographic system (Tarot in this case) and start doing the meditations.

Finally, it is important to understand that progress in one’s meditations depend entirely on the operation of the Holy Spirit and not on any artificial time table or schematic one posits in one’s head.  To this end, it is none the less helpful to compare notes with wayfarers who have been on the path before, and I find Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot servicable in that regard.  In Tomberg’s treatment of this Arcana we find a fourth level of interpretation beyond the literal, the moral, or even the alchemical, in so far as he identifies the fourth, fifth, and sixth (lovers) tarot cards with the evangelical councils of obedience, poverty, and chastity.

Now for anyone to be meditating on chastity on Valentine’s day would seem, by the common standards of this world, to be a bit odd to say the very least, yet there is an irrefutable logic, or rather logos, which flows from profane love up through the alchemical wedding of the soul and then back towards engagement with the world,  not on the basis of desire, but of chastity.  This is the dialectic of the soul as it travels from secular time to the empream of the non-temporal and then back again into the Herecletean flux.  If you read Tomburg’s chapter on the lovers you will see that a mediation on the Lovers will solve any doubts you have about the created nature of the world, in so far as a vision of the  paradise described in the book of Genesis, validates the doctrine that the world was created through divine fiat.  None the less, one is not permitted to enter, in so far as postlapsarian humanity is forced to dwell not in that antechamber of eternity called paradise, but astride the horizontle pseudo-eternity of infinite linear time.  Tomburg shows a great measure of intellectual chastity in refusing to compromise the perpendicular infinities of the verticle and the horizontile worlds, in contrast to those forms of gnosticism which try to butress, as it were, the two infinities with a convenient mixture of creationist and perpetualist mythologies, a slanting plane which we generally refer to as “evolutionism.”

Thus we see that chastity can be raised the the level of an intellectual virtue, which is one of the reasons why it is considered a genuinely Christian and evangelical virtue, rather than simply the department of prudence having to do with avoiding sexual risk-taking, as in “she’s such a prude!”  This is because, rightly considered, chastity is the eroticism of concentration, as opposed to promiscuity which is the eroticism of dispersion.  Of course this involves turning down the importunities of fleshly lovers in favor of God, for monastics absolutely, and for the married through “Mary” to Christ.  For occultists it means that one must be warry of the intrusions of lonely entities, whether these be real or figments, who have wandered out of faery land in quest of impossible human love.  But most important of all, in our day and age, is the chastity that a spiritual warrior must have in the face of the terrible ideological constructs of the modern world, for these are precisely the “adulteries” of which the prophets and the apostles warned.  To resist these seductions is, in truth, beyond the powers of the unaided human spirit, and one can only pray for the grace of strength, the eroticism of concentration, and the mystery, sometimes called the arcana, of true love.

The Lover