The Answer and the Betrayal (short film)

I'm still not sure exactly what Matthew, whose idea the film was, had in mind with this convoluted plot line. At first I thought he wanted it to be Kierkegaardian; an attack on reason to make room for faith and all that nonsense. Then I thought it could be Nietzschean, saying that this is the contradictory way we all live in order to sustain our species. But the original idea was conceived out of contempt for religious manipulations of the death drive. At any rate this film was created last October. It was much longer to begin with, but I was tired of the way the film ended before, which really made no sense.

The Journalistic Voices of Tom Hayden

This weekend I was in Los Angeles for the West Coast Youth Journalism Conference, sponsored by Campus Progress and The Nation Magazine. I stayed with a group of students who write the La Gente news magazine at UCLA.

One of the authors at the conference who really struck me was Tom Hayden, co-founder of the SDS movement at the University of Michigan. It was Tom Hayden who primarily wrote the famous Port Huron Statement in 1962, which popularized the idea of 'participatory democracy', argued against racial bigotry and nuclear armament. As a panel speaker along with big names like the publisher and editor of The Nation, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, professor of law Patricia Williams, and columnist Marc Cooper, he argued about how the 2008 election should be covered by journalists, what they thought about "objectivity" in journalism, and the issue of race and class in America. As time was running short, Tom wanted to stress that we are at war right now, and sustained the discussion for a bit longer than the organizers had in mind in order to dwell on war-time media.

Tom said that he had been able to cover a march Dr. King was involved in during the 60s in L.A. He was a student journalist in Michigan who was trying to glean quotes from Dr. King as he quasi-participated in the march, and said that he initially was trying to make some kind of big name for himself in covering the civil rights movement. When he finally was able to speak with Dr. King, King asked why Tom was not himself active in the movement and urged the young student to participate. When challenged about his own values, Tom decided that any kind of objectivity in reporting was a smoke screen.

These values are not universally observed, and hence striving for them is like holding up an image of a false god. For writers who think they can be detached and indifferent and know what is going on, Tom said they claim to know what is going on, but they don't really know. What Tom felt is important is what journalism calls the voice, which exposes the character, the advocacy and the value of the piece. In that sense the contribution that journalists make to society is by providing information and argument to force.

He continued to embed himself in the civil rights movement, but increasingly as an activist who told the stories of the 60s movement with force. I was able to ask him after the panel discussion a question which I was desirous to hear someone with a lot of experience as both a journalist, activist, and a politician answer.

I asked if he thought it was possible to flow in and out of various voices in journalism. Say, at one point you're telling the story from a first person point-of-view about an event, and the next you're writing a factual summary news piece about what the event is. That seems easy to say in writing, but is that practically possible and how, I wondered. Tom responded that yes, it's possible, but also very difficult. Successful journalists can be maladjusted. But journalists build a reputation, of course, and nuancing a reputation is often difficult to achieve. If one becomes a celebrity as an activist, or as an actor, or as a pop star, it seems that one often lives the rest of their life in the shadow of those events. Tom will always be remembered as a perennial activist, though he has many other voices. As Tom grew older, and became more active in drafting political documents for legislation, Tom's writing style changed, he recognized. His voice changed. His devices changed. He changed.

So, of course you can built different reputations over time. The question I was interested in was whether one can reputably commit oneself to several voices simultaneously and can be trusted to do each of them well. For example, if one begins to earn a reputation for advocacy journalism, can one make the switch when necessary to the mythical "objective" journalistic voice that field reporters are supposed to have. If I earn a reputation for covering youth activism with an certain advocacy voice can I also earn a reputation for covering, say, complex legal cases with a different kind of standard?

By way of response, Tom asked whether I had read the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I think Tom is absolutely right in bringing up the themes in this book, which have much to do with self-identity and self-denial. Siddhartha at one point feels that he is constantly trapped in a cycle of constantly losing and regaining the self, and decides that there is a better path to enlightenment. In Siddhartha’s lifetime, at various times he becomes suspicious that one path may lead to a dead end, and he quickly changes his course. He continues to follow whatever path makes itself available if he has clearly not yet reached Enlightenment. Siddhartha goes from place to place, experimenting with all sorts of teachers, philosophies, and lives their lives. Soon, he decides he cannot reach Nirvana their way and he leaves when the time is appropriate. Though Siddhartha's friend, Govinda, stays within the traditions of the Buddhists and Hindus, Siddhartha is even ready to deny the teachers and spiritual life altogether and search for Enlightenment in secular life.

Now, I don't consider myself a Buddhist - (though what Buddhist ever has?) - but I think the metaphor is apt. As one grows over time, you develop different voices and different ways of relating to society through writing. There may have been various aspects of my writing, and my views that fit with a kind of orthodoxy, but as Siddhartha was more open than Govinda, one must has to be willing to accept that the search for a "path" in the first place may be futile. The voices in journalism reflect varying sensibilities, and each place that Siddhartha went to, he had a different voice as a participant-observer in their communities. Yet all the while neither the communities, the secular world, nor does Siddhartha himself have something more than subjective truth. The wide open universe, to which there is no path, is not reducible to an enlightenment experience, so deliberate and aggressive pursuits of some kind of objectivity - while it has its place - leads us further from really experiencing the world and telling about the struggles it contains.

"Good luck with SDS," Tom told me, and then he disappeared in a sea of students.

Blessed are the Meek -- "The Kite Runner"

The Kite Runner is a pious film about an Afghan boy who escapes the Russian invasion and emigrates to America with his father. He returns to the country later to save his nephew from the Taliban and bring him back to America.

That the film is a sneaky justification of American values and interventionism, a straightforward response to the film, is probably too obvious. It's maybe obvious enough that it wouldn't slip under a critical movie-goer's interpretive radar. With the subject matter being "Afghanistan" how can the film not have obvious political considerations? So, I would like to critique the film in a way that most would not have considered. My interpretation is from the position that it is a justification of Christian virtues above anything else.

The most prominent theme is the master/slave relationship between Amir, the Afghan boy, and Hassan, his old servant. The film's tagline is "There is a way to be good again," which is indicative of the American obsession with its own appearance in the eyes of global civil society after so many mistakes. But in fact the way one becomes good again, the film shows, is to become like the old servant. Goodness is service; goodness is slavishness. It is not necessarily to intervene in another country's affairs.

Like Christ, Hassan's highest moral imperative is "to serve". A true disciple, as it says in Matthew 19, sells all of his possessions and becomes a follower and a servant. And there is one scene in particular that I would like to dissect.

The beginning of the film's tension starts during a scene where Hassan and Amir had won a kite-running contest, and Hassan -- in his unswerving devotion to Amir -- runs down the street to catch the kite that they had won in the contest. But Hassan is trapped in an alleyway and raped by three older Pushtan boys who see meekness in Hassan. The Pushtan boys say Hassan is simply one of Amir's dogs. And Amir, who watches the entire rape take place, does not stand up for his servant. Even though Amir already knows what happened, he covers up and asks "What happened?" to Hassan. Hassan also covers up and says nothing happened. At this point, the exposure of Amir's betrayal and Hassan's self-denial, we feel pity for Hassan and these moral sacrifices.

Later, Amir's anger towards his own weakness of will is displaced onto Hassan. In one scene, they are reading moral stories together, and Amir begins to throw pomegranates at Hassan, reddening his shirt. He screams "Why won't you hit me back?!" But Hassan is the ultimate embodiment of Christian-Abrahamic moral values. He 'turns the other cheek' as picks up a pomegranate and smashes it against his own head. Amir is paralyzed.

The problem is that Hassan is supposed to be morally superior to Amir, and Amir does not have strength in his will to overcome morality. Amir writes moral stories, and Hassan critiques them, and then Hassan critiques Amir himself. Hassan's critique of Amir's moral values seems to circumscribe any criteria that Amir gives. "Morality" is the only scheme of interpretation by which Hassan can endure himself. Amir needs some way to be better than Hassan, but morality is the overarching interpretive code, and Amir can't find a better one, so eventually he accepts the code and becomes a Christ-like servant too.

But the devotion to moral values like charity, piety, meekness and subservience that have formed Hassan's identity has made him into a Christ-like character who will eventually be publicly sacrificed in front of Amir's house. Hassan will be rejected by his own people. Amir's father, who is moral pharisee (radically reinterpreting "theft" as the only sin, and says that one has a "right to truth"), rejects Hassan because he is his own illegitimate child. The Pushtans reject him because he is a prophet of docile moral values. Amir rejects him because, like Judas Iscariot, he must betray his disguised master by turning him in to the authorities. (He cannot serve two masters.)

In fact Amir at one point frames Hassan and accuses him of being a thief in order to have Hassan seized by the pharisees. Hassan, while innocent, feigns guilt so that he can please Amir and be guilty. Yet when Hassan confesses, this only makes Amir more rambunctious. When Amir's father becomes like Pontius Pilate and pronounces Hassan innocent, Hassan and his father insist that they leave anyway. Hassan walks away like the quiet Christ, accepting false accusations while showing moral restraint and humility. Amir's father does not understand what has happened and he throws his hands up in the air as if to say "What is truth?"

Throughout the entire story, the audience simply accepts that meekness is a virtue, but what for? Meekness was never a classical virtue for the Greeks, the Romans, or the Persians. It was invented by Jewish slaves to justify their morality in imperial societies, as when they were captives in Babylon and subjects under Rome. It's a coping mechanism, yet it has subverted all other values and is accepted as universal. We are all Christianized. And now Hollywood has Christianized Islamic societies, subsuming other cultures and impressing on them their own values. We can turn the film's tagline into "How to be Christ-like again" and it would make just as much sense. Being an unquestioning servant with unconditional love for master and who is therefore brutalized is one of the highest moral qualities one can achieve, we are told, deserving reverence and pity.

"Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth."

This is one of the beatitudes found in the synoptic Gospels. It is interesting that it says the earth is the inheritable reward for meekness. When Jewish captives escaped from Egypt, they "inherited" the land of Israel, which means they had to kill everyone off who lived there before them. Yet slaves will never inherit anything except the earth they till for their masters, so long as they remain slaves. What this film shows us is how to become proper slaves. It is a projection of slave morality, the kind of morality that instructs us to become obedient, unquestioning, rule-abiding servants who sacrifice their will to the authority of their masters. Far from having a right to truth, as Amir's father says, there are truths that are fit only for slaves and truths fit only for stronger wills.

The Christian story is an odd mixture of pity and many other sentiments. The audience responds to Hassan's meekness just as they respond to Christ's meekness. Meekness is being quiet, gentle, and always ready to do what someone else wants without expressing one's own opinion. It is one of the seven virtues of Christianity. It is the embodiment of slave morality. Yet the value of those values are not called into question. They are simply part of our cultural interpretive code.

The Fall of Man Was an Inside Job!

Sinfest is great.

"Into Great Silence" (2007)

This film requires a tremendous amount of patience. It's about twelve or so monks inside the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery of the reclusive Carthusian Order in France. There's no score, except for when one monk plays an organ for about two minutes, and some nice chanting. Most of the film is silent, with very long periods of silence, sometimes broken by the occasional creak of floorboards or chanting or bells, and very little dialogue. There was also the sound of skittles smattering on the floor of the theater, or people chewing their popcorn, which does seem quite loud while watching this film by Philip Groning.

I could tell Mr. Groning felt each bit of footage he captured was profound. Each shot is like a photograph. A moving photograph. But it's repetitive, and he uses the exact same shots over and over again. He didn't know which ones to edit out. And some he liked so much he used them three times! I think that's boring, and shows bad spacing skills. I found it interesting that he placed each monk in front of the camera, and took a moving portrait of them, like a Warhol portrait. That was interesting, but unoriginal. I would have preferred more interviews with monks regarding what made these men choose to lead this life. But I think it does work better without any interviews--we consider the monks on their own terms, without too much interference with their lifestyle.

Altogether this film is a kind of portrait documentary. It's not the typical documentary. It's also not too original. I was reminded of Baraka one too many times, and Baraka had a much better handle on spacing and effects. The subject matter was deeply interesting, however, and that's what brought me to the theater. But Groning was unorganized and showed few intelligent filmmaking techniques. He over-extended his film. He didn't know where to cut. We got to learn about the characters by their portraits and their actions, which seemed slightly innovative, or at least had potential to be innovative. But some of the shots and the tasks involved seemed rather meaningless. Because the director didn't give us any interviews, or any bit of internal dialogue or narration, is it safe to judge the characters and their lifestyle based on what we saw? I believe it is, since all Groning gives us are some faces staring forward and some scenes of performing chores. We are safe to judge this lifestyle from the physiognomy, the character and the demeanor of the monks.

The monks, with their long faces, drudged around the courtyard with their backs leaned forward. A monk stands by a long rope, waiting, his long face looking downward, his eyes wandering meaninglessly. Until finally he pulls down with all his weight to ring the church bells. They ring, and then he lifts himself up again and stares ahead.

In fact, I think that's what I got out of the film: that this life is meaningless. Because our lives are so filled with signs--just like the monks discussed--that we try to escape them. We try to escape the meaningless signs of our mundane city lives. And yet even if you live with monks you must obey a strict order that you give your life to another set of signs, Christian signs. I had a tremendous sense of man's urge to create a meaningful set of symbols for himself, something to fix his consciousness on. The trappings of contemplative lifestyles are interesting and certainly rewarding. But does one have to be religious to obtain it? The monks seemed like rebels from the world of signs, yet they only created their own world of meaning inside those church walls. Lo, God is dead no matter where you turn!

Julian of Norwich: The Womyn Insyde the Hole

A monk lives in a community of monks. A hermit lives alone but may still make contact and be of influence on his society. But women lived as anchoresses, whose only contact with the outside world was through a small hole.

Lady Julian was an anchoress, one of many medieval women who enclosed themselves from the outside world, locked in small editions to local churches called "anchor holds". There was only one window through which people could ask for advice or tell news, pass waste and food in and out, and another hole that the anchoress could observe the priest performing the eucharist ritual. It was here in this anchor hold that the anchoress was betrothed not to a human husband, but to her Lord. Julian would have read a Guide for Anchoresses, published in the twelfth century to instruct anchoresses in their new lives, which reads:

"When the priest has consecrated the host, forget all the world. Be out of your body. Embrace, in shining love, your lover, who has lighted into the bower of your heart from heaven, and hold him tight until he has gratified all you have ever asked."

Julian recounts:

"But what place is there in me that my God may dwell? Who will grant that you will come into my heart and make it drunk, That I may embrace you? The house of my soul is too narrow for you. So that you may enter it, let it be made large by you. It is rude, repair it, it contains what offense in your eyes, I know and confess, but who will cleanse it? Or to who else but you should we cry?"

Julian would have meditated on her role as the bride of Christ as described in the prayer book The Wooing of Our Lord:

"Jesus, sweet Jesus, my beloved darling, my Lord, my savior, my drop of honey, my balm. Sweeter is the memory of you than honey in the mouth. Your lovely face, you're all shiny and moist. To look into your face is life itself to the angels."

The Wife of Bath and the Holy Maidenhood is a treatise against marriage written by women. This is also something quite interesting. It doesn't outright say that women should be wed to God, not a man. It seems concerned only with marriage as a social institution, and it even analyzes religious authorities in a negative light. Amid much of the anti-marriage treatises from men at the time, we find this treatise which is from a woman's perspective. Perhaps writings like this could have influenced women like Julian to live alone, away from the world and away from husbands. But this would not have been enough. The sexual impulse seems subservient to the spiritual impulse driving her thoughts.

Why did women like Julian wish to be outside of the world, and wished to be outside of their bodies? There is certainly a part of myself that would like to live away from communities, away from society, in a small place just for myself. I believe this instinct is shared by many other people. Something about other people disgusts us. But I feel that to genuinely do this, one must have some sort of faith, because living alone without a God would be perhaps too disturbing. But if one is truly religious, man is already alone when he is without God, so what makes the difference if he has no other men around him? It seems easier to live alone with God, than live alone without. For an atheist like myself, being without other men is the closest to solitude one can find. One is still bombarded with images of the world, yet this is the place where man and the universe must reconcile. The universe, however, is a cold, unloving place.

Julian's anchoritic cell is enclosed from her own will. She must have felt this impulse because of her God. And she began, defying prayer books like the ones she was given, talking about Jesus as the "mother". Of course, she spoke of this in the context of talking about the Church as mother. But it was a big step nonetheless.

Julian's theology about sin is that there's a part of the soul that would never knowingly consent to sin. Jesus, if he came back to save us from our sins, would not have thrown anyone into hell since there is that part of us that does not want to sin knowingly.

Julian's theology is certainly interesting, solving problems like the one about evil. Or at least it solves half of the problem. The most interesting thing about Julian is her solitude. Like Nietzsche I yearn for that, my creativity comes from that. We're not away from the world and on our own all that often, it seems. Whether we're talked to by other people, or bombarded with signs of the economy and the media, we're never really left in solitude. This is something I have longed for. And yet I receive my inspiration and ideas from films, it appears. To think of a space like Virginia Wolf's A Room of One's Own where your thoughts are your own, and your space is your own, is very attractive.

Give Me That Online Religion

How will we do religion twenty, a hundred years from now? Will buildings still be important? Or, perhaps, will there be e-religion that people practice at home, just as they e-shop rather than going to the mall? It's already here. I've been working on a short video about religion in Second Life, an online user-created-content space.

We ought to look seriously at how online religion has gotten its start in what humans will surely look back on as the most primitive days of the internet. There are more than a million sites of diverse religious affiliation, drawing believers as well as those simply curious. Perhaps this is just the new way of distributing tracts, but online religion is the most pretentious development for the future of religion to come out of the twentieth century and could become the dominant form of religious experience in the next century.

Those familiar with basic traditional religions will find that they have moved onto the Web without much change; perhaps the literal Bible, apocalyptic ones are over-represented, just as they are on TV. There are others in this book that any reader will find strange. Some sites are direct offshoots of IRL (In Real Life) religious practice, like online prayer chains and chat rooms where people can go for a more-or-less directed Sunday school. The site of EvilPeople, Inc., invites people to click on a button in order to sell their souls. (A soul was recently put up for sale on e-Bay.) There are memorials to many dead people; there are 8,000 one scholar named Brasher has counted devoted to Princess Diana alone. There are strange and comic religious sites, including the surrealistic site of the Church of the Subgenius ("The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!") or the subversively comic realism of the Landover Baptist Church ("Where the Worthy Worship and the Unsaved Are Not Welcome.")

But much of the religion on the web is suffused with over-the-top humor. There are "Celebrity Altars," devoted to some sort of worship of someone famous, and she gives extensive quotes from the site "Dudes of the Keanic Circle," devoted to finding, among other things, the esoteric meanings of the films of Keanu Reeves. Keanu as Christ-figure is very weird, and so is another site that holds Keanu as the Antichrist, confusingly enough. The Transhumanists are interested in the typical religious goal of eternal life, but intend to do so by uploading their brains onto the `net (undoubtedly Windows is merely withholding this software until their legal problems are worked out). There are many strange and intriguing religions on the net. There are some not so strange, as the cyber-seder, and the woman who was drawn to convert to Judaism because of it.

I am an advocate of watching with curiosity the way religion branches in cyberspace, and its development in the face of commercialization. It's true that those who grow up on the web may find the agrarian and pastoral images of inherited religion less credible than they find futuristic fiction.

God and Evil in Hegel

Hegel talks about belief, and as he untangles the notions of what we believe about ourselves and a possible a separate insight we have about ourselves, Hegel decides that we couldn't, ultimately, have a relation to ourselves that didn't find itself embedded in circumstances.

I couldn't be me, the same me, in a Romantic world as in a Medieval world. None of us can be anything other than we are in the world in which we find ourselves. As Hegel spins this out, we relate to ourselves in a context, and that context is a historical one. There are problems.

Hegel has the notion of "absolute spirit". That's his successor notion to God. Hegel understands God as being the unfolding of human history, and therefore he understands God as history itself. The unfolding of history is God's autobiography. This is very difficult. Awful things happen in history. Any time one looks around, there are terrible things happening. If history is God, God is evil.

For Hegel, if this is his argument, it is enormously flawed. However, some have said that Hegel was an atheist, who uses religious language to cover his tracks. After all, he was "Lutheran" professor. Robert Solomon says that his Lutheranism was his cover. If he was a Lutheran, then he has not solved the problem of evil. Even so, History is evil. Sometime later I will explore the "end of history" and whether history and absolute spirit can ever not be evil.

A Prolegomena to Any Future Cosmological Argument

Let's consider Taylor's cosmological argument for the existence of God seriously this time. I have heard it before many times. But this time, I will honestly consider it. I will start at the beginning.

First, what of the principle of sufficient reason? It states that for every positive fact or truth there is a sufficient cause or reason why that fact obtains or why that statement is true. I think we ought to accept this because not doing so would lead us to other undesirable problems. There is a sufficient reason for the universe existing. The prove that, suppose there is not a sufficient reason. If there wasn't a reason, there also would not be cause, and the universe would not exist. But the universe does exist, so there is a sufficient reason as to why. But we have to follow the principle all the way through. We cannot pick an arbitrary point to stop simply because the theists stops at an arbitrary point, or the non-theist stops at an arbitrary point. We cannot let the standards of the other position determine ours. That way, we're not taking it seriously, we're only trying to deface the other's position.

Arguing cosmologically, the theist says that the universe must have a cause and its cause is God. The theist stops after "Therefore God exists." We can ask, using the principle of sufficient reason, "Why does God exist?" He says, he always existed. Then we ask further, what is the sufficient reason for His existing always? Likewise, the non-theist says "The universe existed forever". But what is the sufficient reason for the universe existing forever? The argument stops there, as Russell says, because the theists stops shortly after that as well.

The crucial issue, then, with cosmological arguments is that the theist and the nontheist are going to accept different stopping-off points in their respective applications of the principle of sufficient reason. The nontheist then says that he explains the universe's existence in fewer steps, and does not multiply entities beyond necessity. Therefore God is not necessary. "I have no need of that hypothesis," as Laplace says.

I have not considered Taylor's argument yet, because we cannot get off the ground. Before I can get to that point, I have to settle the problem of sufficient reason. I haven't gotten very far! See what taking something seriously gets me! I referred to this in other posts about absurdity. I'm embracing the absurd at this moment. It is not a contradictory position, I contend. Pyrrhonism, ultimate skepticism, has always intrigued me. But I see it as something to at least try to escape from. I always end up falling back into it, however.

I think I'll stop there.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

By the end of Book 7 Augustine is approaching intellectual rapprochement with Christianity. He is convinced of the intellectual superiority of Christianity, and has decided to accept Christian beliefs. But, very paradoxically, he comes to this conclusion by reading, not Christian Scripture, but pagan philosophy. More specifically, by reading what he calls "the Platonist philosophers."

He never took Christianity seriously, he says, before listening to St. Ambrose preach. Before that, he only knew about Christian beliefs through a Manichean lens, which proved to have been a very biased lens after listening to Ambrose speak. He was already disillusioned with Manichean doctrine after being unimpressed with one of the Manichean rhetoricians. At that point, Augustine says, I was lucky enough to get my hands on some books that were "written by the Platonists."

He's not specific about which Platonist texts he actually read. It's even more difficult to figure out which Platonist philosophers he was reading because they are paraphrased instead of being presented directly. When he paraphrases what he read it sounds not only suspiciously like something other than Platonist philosophy: they sound exactly like something other than Platonist philosophy. That is to say, what he reads in the Platonists sounds exactly like the beginning of John's Gospel.

His paraphrasing of the Platonists begins this way, "In them I read, not that the same words were used, but precisely the same doctrine was taught, buttressed by many and various arguments, that, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God; He was God. He was with God in the beginning. Everything was made through Him; nothing came to be without Him."

Augustine uses this strategy--of saying "In them I read..."--four times in Book 7. Think about this is outrageous claim, and this outrageous strategy. Let me paraphrase Augustine's strategy: "What was in these works? The best way I can adequately summarize them is by quoting word-for-word, the beginning of John's Gospel."

Because he is becoming increasingly aware of his Christian identity, in them, he finds a way of articulating Christian belief, and a way of moving towards Christian belief. Platonists told him that Christian beliefs were what he was looking for.

The logic behind his psychological movement towards Christianity goes something like this. Because the Platonists have come to the same conclusion that the Gospel of John has, without Revelation, then this part of Christian Scripture is something that can also be discovered through the use of reason.

But if what he read in Platonist philosophy was the beginning of John's Gospel, why does he need Platonist philosophy? Why not just read John's Gospel?

What he seems to imply is that, since the Platonists have reached the same doctrine as the Gospel of John by reason, it provides an explanation for how one arrives at the Gospel of John. Augustine can see, reasonably, and "buttressed by many and various arguments," how the Gospel is evident to one who has not received the Revelation. After all, what John's Gospel does not do is give many and various arguments. Knowing that there is a rational basis for accepting some of what's in Scripture makes it much easier to accept what cannot be "buttressed by many and various arguments" in Scripture.

Augustine's psychological path to Christian belief, is an elaboration of the Pauline notion that there is a Natural Revelation available to everyone through reason. Paul uses it to say that no one claim ignorance of God. Augustine is simply updating this notion for his own people of his own historical time and people of his own particular intellectual experience. How do we get to Christianity? Well for somebody like Augustine--somebody educated in the pagan classics--pagan classics is going to be the most natural way to get to Christianity. Augustine suggests that, not only is this simply permissible, but there is something very interesting about the way in which Athens and Jerusalem complement each other.

What about the things the Augustine did not read in the Platonist philosophers? In fact, Augustine mentions what he did read in John's Gospel as opposed to what he did not read in the Platonists. This comparison is intruiging because it seems as though he's saying that, since the Gospel of John has proven to be something that one can arrive at using reason, then it must be some kind of shortcut through reason. In other words, he accepts the reasonability of Revelation. He then uses the Revelation as something with which to contrast against the things he did not read in the Platonists. The Platonists could not by reason prove that "God so loved the world...." so we must conclude that Platonism is, essentially, insufficient.

Augustine uses a somewhat obscure metaphor to justify this approach. It comes from the story of the Exodus: the paradigmatic story of the Jewish people. He takes a particular view of the Exodus. The Jews obviously left everything behind in Egypt when they left. But they also took the Egyptian gold with them. Augustine asks, what does this mean for me now in this situation of reading Platonist texts, and Christian belief and identity? This leads Augustine to say that, for him, the Platonists philosophers are the Egyptian gold. One can, and should, Augustine says, take those things with them on their journey out of Egypt. The Egyptian gold comes out of Egypt, other Egyptian things stay behind. It's a powerful metaphor in which Augustine can both understand and justify the use of and taking of the Platonist philosophy to his Christian identity.

The Egyptian gold becomes a kind of consecrated, shorthand way of describing anything from another culture which becomes valuable to Christianity. As such, Augustine is making an enormous contribution to the question Tertullian famously asked, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Enormous because of course, implied in this, if there is Egyptian gold, there is going to be a lot of things that we want to leave behind: such as idol-worship. For Augustine, he wants to leave behind stories about, for example, Zeus doing dirty things with nymphs. (But even then there's opportunities of reading the stories deeply rather than literally.)

What this means is that Augustine now has the opportunity to bring pagan culture and Christian culture together in a sanctified and meaningful way, and a way in which it isn't simply a luxury for somebody like Augustine. It's something that enriches the Christian community itself. Augustine is making the claim the Egyptian gold he brings to the table, not only allows him to become a Christian, but enriches the Christian patrimony once it's there.

We know more about who we are as a Christian community because Platonist philosophy has been let in. And in this sense he is making a fairly radical claim about what Athens has to do with Jerusalem.

Is God's Perfection Analytically Necessary?

Perhaps the most persistently misunderstood aspect of Leibniz’s thought is his principle of contingence. The theory is deeply rooted in Leibniz subject-predicate logic, and it is therefore not surprising, given the complexity of this philosophy, that he would be vulgarly misunderstood—most famously as Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide. What I have tried to do in this paper is to clarify Leibniz’ theory of contingent existence, to defend it against a criticism about moral perfection, and ultimately to show there is a legitimate place for this theory in Leibniz’ philosophy.

Leibniz theory of truth rests on a procedure that he terms “analysis.” This is the elimination of defined, complex ideas by making analytic use of their definitions. What Leibniz calls the “Principle of Sufficient Reason” is a principle asserting that, if a proposition is true, then it is possible to show that its predicate is contained in its subject by means of an analysis or demonstration which may or may not proceed infinitely, (and in the case that it requires infinite analysis, God alone can carry out the analysis fully.) Another important principle Leibniz calls the “Principle of Contradiction” is to the effect that if the analysis of a proposition shows its predicate to be contained in its subject after a finite number of steps, then the proposition is true. Such finitely analytic true propositions Leibniz says are “necessary truths” or “truths of reason.” On the other hand true but infinitely analytic propositions are “contingent truths” or “truths of fact” (M. § 31-33). It is clear that the Principle of Contradiction is the principle of necessary truths.

So, according to the Principle of Sufficient Reason every true proposition is finitely or infinitely analytic in the mind of God. However, according to the Principle of Contradiction every finitely analytic proposition is true. The converse of the Principle of Contradiction is every true proposition is finitely analytic, which is not the same as the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Neither of these principles guarantees the truth of infinitely analytic propositions, which is to say that contingent truths are by virtue of this not necessarily true, although accepting contingent truths as truths is not on this account irrational. And since the Principle of Sufficient Reason concerns truths, there must be a further principle where a supply of infinitely analytic truths can be of some use.
First, it is essential to remark that, with the exception of contingent propositions whose subject is God, contingent truths concern contingently existing things. For, on Leibniz’ account, a contingently true proposition must have a subject. Now, this subject cannot be an “abstract object,” since truths concerning these are necessary. And, propositions about God aside, the only remaining entities on the Leibnizian account are the contingently existing things. God’s mind, on this account, is where the possible-worlds semantics can be examined more closely. Of the infinitely-many possible worlds (contained with infinitely-many possible substances) God selects one, the best, and “actualizes” it, to use Alvin Plantinga’s Neo-Leibnizian phraseology.

Every possible substance is a member of some possible world, and its complete notion involves its entire history in the development of that possible universe (D.M. § 9). Now thanks to the “pre-established harmony,” there corresponds to every state in the development of a possible substance a state of every other possible substance of its possible world: a correspondence capable of varying degrees of closeness of agreement between its members (M. § 80-82). Thus within a possible world every substance “represents” every other substance more or less “distinctly.” In other words, it perceives the other substance with a greater or lesser degree of “clarity” or “confusion” in the plenum of interconnected monads. In this way, at each stage of its development every possible substance “perceives” or “mirrors” its entire universe, and moreover it does so more or less clearly according as the mean value of the degree of clarity of its perception of individual substances varies. Leibniz calls the degree of clarity with which at a given state a possible substance mirrors its universe its amount of perfection for that state (M. § 54). Now what Leibniz terms the “amount of perfection” of a possible substance is a measure of its amount of perfections of a possible substance is a measure of its amount of perfection for all states. So, every possible universe also has an amount of perfection: the sum of the total amounts of perfections possible in the substances belonging to it.
The principle by which God selects among the possible worlds the best of them—one with the greatest maximization of “order” and “variety”—call this the Best-Possible-Worlds Principle (Theodicy § 120, 124; M. § 58). This principle is a formulation of the thesis that in His decision of creation God acted in the best possible way: according to it the actual world is that one among the possible worlds which an infinite process of comparison showed it to be the best.

The Best-of-Possible-Worlds Principle specifies that in nature some quantity is at a maximum or a minimum. It requires mathematical techniques similar to those found in calculus. This principle enables us to understand what Leibniz means concerning contingent truths as analytic, but requiring an infinite process for their analysis. A given proposition concerning a contingent existence is true, and its predicate is indeed contained in its subject, if the state of affairs characterized by this inclusion is such that it involves a greater amount of perfection for the world than any other possible. So it is the infinite comparison required by the Best-Possible-Worlds Principle that in infinite process is imported into the analysis of truth dealing with contingent existence.

It will be made clear that Leibniz’ Principle of Contingence is his Best-Possible-Worlds Principle. And it is in virtue of this principle that infinitely analytic propositions can be truths. Leibniz writes to Arnauld that “a contingent existent owes its existence to [the Best-Possible-Worlds Principle], which is sufficient reason for existents.” Leibniz calls the “necessity” of contingent truths moral necessity as opposed to the metaphysical necessity of necessary truths, and he states that “moral necessity stems from the choice of the best.” In Section 46 of the Monadology Leibniz speaks of “the contingent truths whose principle is that of suitability or of the choice of the best.” And he maintains that “contingent propositions have demonstrations… based on the principle of contingence or existence… on what seems best among the several equally possible alternatives.”

Now, the Principle of Sufficient Reason demands exactitude. It states that a contingent truth is susceptible of an analysis which, though infinite, converges on something. But such exactitude could equally well have been gained had God chosen the worst of all possible worlds. The Principle of Sufficient Reason requires merely that contingent truths are analytic. The Best-Possible-Worlds Principle shows how this is the case. As Leibniz repeatedly said, the Principle of Sufficient Reason leaves open to God’s choice an array of alternatives for possible actualization—of which the best possible world is the only one. Therefore, though it is true that the Principle of Sufficient Reason requires some complementary principle of exactitude, Leibniz would have been the first to deny that this must be the Best-Possible-Worlds Principle.

So far we have been occupied with the theory of contingent existences. That is, the principle that all true propositions are analytic, finitely or infinitely (Principle of Sufficient Reason); that all finitely analytic propositions are true (Principle of Contradiction); and that all infinitely analytic propositions—and thus all propositions whose infinite analysis converges on some characteristic of the best of all possible worlds—are true (Best-Possible Worlds Principle). At this point we are faced with an objection which would rule contingence out from the system of Leibniz once and for all. The objection is that the contingence of God’s goodness and the necessity of His existence is a contradiction within Leibniz’ system, and in which the Problem of Evil seems to be at hand. On the Leibnizian account, either God’s goodness is contingent or it is necessary. Should Leibniz have held that both God’s existence and goodness are necessary, and succumb to a kind of Spinozistic determinism? (And what might “necessary goodness” refer to on the Natura Naturans thesis?) This thesis is quite attractive, although accepting it would collapse nearly all of Leibniz into Spinoza. In formulating a “religiously adequate” account of God as the necessary being, Leibniz was not prepared to affirm both and say that “God’s goodness is a necessary predicate of His existence as a necessary being.” Nor was he prepared to say that “God’s existence is contingent and therefore His goodness is too.”

Leibniz maintains the existence of God as the ens necessarium (“necessary being”) and invokes a modal argument to show that the ens necessarium exists provided only that its existence is possible. If the proposition “God exists” is possible on this account, then ipso facto it is rational to believe it is true, says Plantinga (Necessary Being, Free Will Defense). It remains for Leibniz to demonstrate that “God exists” is possible.

Leibniz’ own argument is one from causality, found in the Leibniz-Arnauld correspondence: if the ens necessarium is not possible, then no existence is possible. If the ens necessarium is possible, then He exists. If we say that ens necessarium does not exist, then it would follow that nothing exists. But something does exist. Hence the ens necessarium exists. In other words, God is a causally necessary condition of the existence of anything else, but whereas His own existence has no necessary conditions. Now the absence of a necessary condition of the existence of anything else is a sufficient condition of the nonexistence of that thing. And if a being has no causally necessary conditions, then its nonexistence has no causally sufficient conditions. And hence if God does exist, His going out of existence could have no causally sufficient conditions and is therefore causally impossible. If God has no necessary conditions, then it is analytic that His “going out of existence,” if it occurred, would be an uncaused event, since there are no causally sufficient conditions for that occurrence. Likewise, His “coming into existence” is causally impossible, since it is analytically true that God is not dependent upon anything else. He has no cause, and therefore His coming into existence would be an event which would have no causally sufficient conditions. So, if God does exist, He cannot cease to exist; nor could He have begun to exist.

But God’s goodness is not included in the above argument. Let me now put it in. Since God exists necessarily—His existence being contained in His essence—it follows that God has the highest possible degree of perfection. Perfection in this sense is His metaphysical perfection, containing “as much reality as is possible,” which Leibniz made clear in the Monadology and to Arnauld. But God is purported to be perfect not only in the metaphysical sense, but perfect in the moral sense as well. While Leibniz is certain of God’s moral perfection, he does not maintain it is necessarily true. He maintains that while His existence is necessary, His goodness as a creator, i.e. moral perfection, is contingent and the result of His free choice. And hence, being the good creator as He is, He freely chooses to be morally perfect.

We must cope now with the question of the relation between God’s necessary metaphysical perfection and His contingent moral perfection. In order to do this we must once more call to mind Leibniz Principle of Sufficient Reason. As we have already seen, this asserts that every true proposition can be show to be analytic by a (possibly infinite) process of analysis. Using this principle we can clarify the logical relation between the two types of divine perfection. Divine moral perfection has a sufficient reason, and this in turn another sufficient reason ad infinitum. But this sequence of sufficient reason converges on God’s metaphysical perfection, on His existence. Or putting it another way, we can say that God’s moral perfection is indeed a logical consequence of His metaphysical perfection, but a consequence which cannot be proven logically within a finite number of steps. In this way, as Leibniz insists, the proposition asserting God’s moral perfection is contingent. God is only morally perfect by free choice, not necessitation.

Thus it is precisely the infinite regress which naturally invokes a reductio ad absurdum response to God’s goodness being contingent. But Leibniz implicitly maintains that infinite processes are not ipso facto erroneous, since a kind of mathematical convergence is possible. To assert convergence is to say there is a limit to the infinite series, and may be itself unknown. Leibniz, after all, invented calculus independently of Newton. And it is his notation which is has been in general use since.

The philosophy of Leibniz rests on the three fundamental principles discussed in this paper. It is the Best-Possible-Worlds Principle, not the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which constitutes Leibniz’ contingency theory and his moral perfection theodicy. It is the Principle of Sufficient Reason which allows for the distinction between God’s metaphysical perfection and moral perfection, and enables Leibniz to maintain both the contingency of God’s goodness and the necessity of His existence.

The Tao is a Mysterious Female

"The Valley Spirit Never Dies
It is named the Mysterious Female
And the Doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth
Sprang.
It is there within us all the while
Draw upon it as you will, it never
Runs dry."

-- Lao Tse

So! The Tao is a mysterious female! No wonder I like it so much! What could be more enthralling than a mysterious female? A mysterious female is delightfully enchanting for two reasons: (1) She is female; (2) She is mysterious. Yes femininity and mysteriousness are certainly two of the most entrancing things in life. But combined! Good God, what could be more divine?

Speaking of mysterious females, I have never yet met a female who is not mysterious. To me, all females are mysterious! And l love them for all their mysteriousness and femininity.

But the idea of the mysterious female is, I think, a romantic fiction. As I see it, the mysterious female is not one person but something generic, nearly platonic, something embodied in all particular mysterious females. And the platonic mysterious female is something imageless and vague--just like the Tao.

At any rate, back to my homework!--which is also at times a mysterious female!