This post is the result of an animated discussion that took place between four o’clock and seven o’clock this evening (30 December) at Old City Hall in Oswego, NY.
I invite discussion of the following proposition:
The Left destroys everything it touches – including socialism.
Genuine Multiculturalism (From Left to Right): Lazar Sokolovski (Former World-Literature Professor, University of Moscow, Poet, Essayist; Max (Lazar’s Youngest Son – Occasionally my Student -Fine Essayist in English); Eric Schmitz (SUNY Oswego’s Jazz Master); Alla (Lazar’s Wife and Max’s Mother – Artist, Photographer); Natalya (Eric’s wife, from St. Petersburg, Linguist, Artist, Educator); Yours Truly (TFB); Richard Fader (King of Oswego – My Mentor in How to be an Upstate -New-Yorker). Not Pictured: George and Heike Koenig (George was my wife’s German Professor in the 1970s; Heike was born in Hamburg); Kestutis and Yelena Bendinskas (Kestutis, Lithuanian by birth, is Professor of Chemistry at SUNY Oswego; Yelena, his Wife, a Russian, is a talented Painter); Larry Klotzko (the Photographer – also Proprietor of the Old City Hall Tavern and Restaurant, Oswego, NY); Ana Djukovic-Cocks (Professor of German at SUNY Oswego, Serbian-born); Nicolas Cocks (Ana’s Son – Lead in every Production at SUNY Oswego during the Just-Completed Semester); Joseph Bertonneau – Geology Major, Master Clarinetist, Percussionist, Bell-Ringer, Chorister, Saint Paul’s Parish, Oswego, NY, and Clarinetist, Oswego City Band); Richard Zakin (Master Ceramist); Helen Zakin (Art Historian). Everyone brought a dish – wonderful Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian dishes. There were many toasts. We love life. I wish that all the Orthosphereans could have been with us.
Merry Christmas to the Orthosphere
& The Happiest of the New Year
I am particularly fond of the recitation (below) by Lena Willemark from Luke’s Gospel in the dialect of her native district of Sweden.
The dignity of each man qua man, ergo his liberty under his sovereigns – of nation, tribe, clan, family and household, each in his properly subsidiary domain – derive from the fact that all men are images of God, and may not properly therefore be treated as means, but only as ends; for, as God is not a means of some magic of our own intended for our own worldly aims, but rather the proper aim and intention of all means and magics, all arts and sciences, all acts of any sort, so likewise with his images: men.
Men may not therefore be simply used by their rulers, willy nilly, as if they were chattels. Their commands must rather find fulfillment in virtue of the free assent of their subjects (the ancients after all sought prior consent to sacrificial immolation even from the bestial victims of their rites – which is to say, from all the animals they slaughtered for meat). This pledge of fealty must be freely undertaken if it is to qualify as a pledge in the first place. Formally, it is a vow of sonship, of filial obedience to a fundamentally paternal authority. From this sort of free pledge, explicitly given at the inception of their terms of service and utter loyalty, derive the iterated pledges given by soldiers and sailors in response to the commands of their officers: “Yes, sir” or “Aye aye, sir” – both of which mean literally “Yes, sire.”
The phenomenological character of mystical experience is not that hard to understand, at least in principle, and as a matter of abstract theory. Withdraw attention from all particular things and their qualia – including oneself – as all mystical disciplines insist their students should do, and in the limit the only quale remaining will be that of sheer being. But to experience sheer being is to experience something of what being is like for God, who is Being as such. Being is the basic good, the good of which all other goods are portions; so the feeling of being as such is blissful.
While the situation of Christianity in The West is dire, whichever way you look at it, there are places in Africa, Asia (especially China) and in some Arabian countries where Christianity is growing fast and Christians are active, devout, energetic – to the point that the numerical decline of The West is approximately balanced by expansion elsewhere.
This is a litmus test issue, because of the nature of the churches that are growing – on the whole this massive growth is among what is termed ‘Renewalist’ churches – that it to say Pentecostal and Charismatic churches…
Is this growth of Christianity something to be celebrated by Western Christians, despite that it is happening among churches and people who – if they were located in the West – would be regarded with dismay, and indeed strongly disapproved of, by most Christian commentators from most of the major Western denominations?
In a phrase: is the actual worldwide growth of Christianity A Good Thing, or not? …
My impression is that people distinguish between a type of Christianity that is appropriate for African or Chinese in their own nations – and what is appropriate for the West, so they can celebrate growth of types of Christianity in other places that they would argue vehemently against in the West. But with unprecedented world population movements this attitude may not be viable – aside from the fact that it seems evasive to the point of dishonesty.
The question Western Christians need to ask themselves – from their perspective as devout and serious Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, Orthodox, or from being a Jehovah’s Witness, a Mormon or whatever – is whether they personally would approve of a Western Christian revival IF it was of the same type as actual recent and current Christian growth in other parts of the world?
If Pentecostal and Charismatic churches of many shapes and sizes began to spring up in The West with a focus on personal supernatural experiences – if these churches changed people’s lives, lent them enthusiasm, courage, energy… would you be pleased, or dismayed?
Because such a phenomenon could not be a matter of indifference. Sooner or later you, like everyone, would need to take sides and decide: Are such Christian churches to be encouraged, or suppressed?
Excerpted from:
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/a-litmus-test-what-do-you-think-about.html
My article on “The West’s Cultural Continuity” appears at The Gates of Vienna, here:
http://gatesofvienna.net/2015/12/the-wests-cultural-continuity/#more-38162
The article discusses the work of Henri Pirenne, Sylvain Gouguenheim, and Emmett Scott.
I offer an excerpt:
In addition to passing remarks, Gouguenheim devotes a separate chapter to the classicizing tendencies of the Syriac and Arab Christians, as distinct from their linguistic cousins and brethren in the Islamic faith. As part of Byzantium, of which their main region of Cappadocia was a province, Syriac Christians played a central role in constituting the Eastern theological discourse during the medieval centuries, continuing to do so even after they had fallen under the sway of the Caliphs, thereby assisting in the westward transmission of Attic and Alexandrian lore. Gouguenheim writes: “Insofar as one speaks of ‘Arabic-Muslim culture’ in the Seventh through the Tenth Centuries, one commits an anachronism… because the culture was at that time barely Muslim and was Arab only by displaced appellation.” Truly, “Syriac is closer to Hebrew than to Arabic,” and the elites of the Nestorian and Monophysite dispensations could generally boast bilingualism in their own tongue and the Koine of the Empire. The jolly idea of Muslim competence in classical learning, as Gouguenheim argues, rests on a misunderstanding: what Islam knew of Greco-Roman wisdom, which it possessed at no time extensively, it knew largely thanks to Syriac scholars. “The Syriac [Christians] were in effect the essential intermediaries of the transmission into Arabic of the philosophical texts of the ancient Greeks,” who generously gave far more than the reluctant takers took. Obtuse westerners betray their lack of discrimination and their poverty of real knowledge in failing to differentiate between Syriac culture and the Arabic-Muslim culture that, by means of the Jihad, conquered and cruelly stamped out Nestorian (and Coptic and Byzantine) society.
Unlike their Muslim beneficiaries, however, the Syriac Christians could assimilate the full range of Greek logic and speculation. The Johannine Logos stemmed from the Greek Logos and the Christianity of the Patres — whether Greek, Latin, or Syriac — therefore comported itself as a rational theology. Already in Late Antiquity, Cappadocians and Syrians stood out as the chief developers of Neo-Platonism; emperors both Pagan and Christian sought counsel from the professors of Antioch’s renowned Daphnaeum. In a chapter on “Islam and Greek Knowledge,” Gouguenheim notes that for Muslims, on the other hand, the Logos constituted an inassimilable scandal, subversive of the absolute submission to Allah’s commands, as articulated in the Koran, that the name Islam denotes. Islam kept of Greek thought “in general [only] that which could not come in contradiction with Koranic teaching.” Furthermore, “Greece — and so too Rome — represented a world radically foreign to Islam, for reasons religious, but also political”; and, unlike the Latinate and Frankish peoples, “Muslims did not interest themselves in the languages of those whom they had conquered” because “Arabic was the sacred language par excellence, and that of revelation.”
Thirty years ago, men who coveted a reputation for deep thinking were wont to discuss Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being. I was such a man and I remember such a discussion, sitting on the roof of a Boston apartment building late one night, in the company of an unemployed actor, who was connected to the sister of a woman with whom I was connected. As is so often the case with rooftop conversations, I remember the circumstances better than the substance. I clearly remember the John Hancock Tower rising up before us, against a backdrop of phosphorescent clouds; I clearly remember people below us, spilling onto the sidewalk before the Berklee College of Music; I clearly remember the roar of traffic on the Mass Pike and the earnest and sonorous voice of the unemployed actor. My memory of what the actor said is not so clear, but I believe it was in an existentialist vein, and that he laid considerable weight on such things as the “authentic life,” the “deliberate act,” and “the deed.” My memory of what I said is no clearer, which is just as well, given the sorts of things I said thirty years ago. Continue reading
I teach at a large, public university in the Bible belt. It has a reputation for conservatism, and there are said to be many Christians among its students. As a public institution it is, however, rigidly secular in its outward appearance and official pronouncements, so this is one place where it is not beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
We do have a thirteen-foot menorah on the principal public plaza, though; which was raised last night with the assistance of the President (a Mormon), and is presumably slated to remain in place for the duration of Hanukkah. As I was in the neighborhood, I strolled through the plaza this morning, to see the menorah, and to see any other symbols that might have been raised to mark the holiday season.
There weren’t any. Continue reading
Two of three parts of my essay on “Lewis Spence, True Myth, and Modernity” have appeared at Angel Millar’s People of Shambhala website. Part I is “The Atlantis Myth – Its Pedigree.” Part II is “Will Europe Follow Atlantis?” Part III, “The Table Round of Atlantean Eccentrics,” will appear next Saturday. The essay explores Scotsman Lewis Spence’s lifelong meditation on the meaning and probability of Plato’s Atlantis Myth.
Part I is here: http://peopleofshambhala.com/will-europe-follow-atlantis-part-i-true-myth/
Part II is here: http://peopleofshambhala.com/will-europe-follow-atlantis-part-ii-lewis-spence-and-the-occult-war/
Part III is here: http://peopleofshambhala.com/will-europe-follow-atlantis-part-iii-the-modern-west/
I offer an extract:
Spence resembles William Blake, William Butler Yeats, perhaps even Arnold Toynbee, a bit staid in style but hardly so in content, in his visionary proclivity to see local events in the largest possible context, as participating in the cycles of a Platonic Great Year, or something like it; and as boasting always and everywhere a metaphysical-eternal as well as a physical-temporal meaning. So too Spence resembles Joseph de Maistre on the French Revolution, who grasped the Jacobin uprising as an ultimately self-punishing recrudescence of idolatry and human sacrifice, as both insufferable profanation and sanguine atonement all at once. Spence, who referred to himself as a ‘British traditionalist,’ prefigures later Traditionalist figures like John Michell (1933 – 2009) and Geoffrey Ashe (born 1923), whose thought goes perpendicular to anything established. Michell’s View over Atlantis (1969) and Ashe’s Camelot and the Vision of Albion (1975) follow in the eccentric path first trail-blazed by Spence. Their eccentricity – and Spence’s – likens itself to the fortuitous topography of the Nile Delta according to the Egyptian priests in Plato’s Timaeus, sheltering the adytum of insight-in-eccentricity from the deluge of opinion in conformity. The discussion must return to this topic of eccentricity, closely related as it is to the opposition of myth and poetry to economics, and to the much-underrated value of eccentric people and their views under a conformist regime; but for the time being let Spence’s marvelous tome be to the fore.
PS. I would like to thank the thoughtful and charitable party who sent me the set of beer-mug coasters. Any other gift that I might receive during the Christmas Season will pale, I fear, next to them.
