The Hanged Man

I stood shivering under the stars
under the trees and looked
there was frost around the bowl of the earth
when i first looked up from the ground i saw only the night sky hung with gemstones
the earth was a hard cold
bed
and my fingers gripped it
as if knowing i might be thrown off and slip upwards at any time into that great cacophony

why did the stars sing?
high and chill their sound, I couldn't let them go
they had me
absolutely struck,
stricken for their sake
they caught me up
I ascended the tree and shook

waiting for their voices to end

nine days I hung
they took my entrails and replaced them with a belt of blood
my hands were pierced
Acubens took my left
Scorpius my right

I sung with terror
they placed a crown upon my head
a pathway for the sun

five wounds I received for their sake

know this they said:
you shall not go forward in the place of another
neither shall you retreat
you shall not take from another
neither shall you give

you shall not place yourself above another but
you will be lowest of all things

Father Christmas and the theology of the gift

Recently I watched a debate between Richard Dawkins and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks televised on the BBC. You can find it here

 There is an interesting discussion from 19.30 minutes about the story of Abraham and Isaac in the book of Genesis. Dawkins puts his usual case that the God of the Biblical scriptures is an abhorrent tyrant, arbitrarily demanding that Abraham sacrifice his only son to him as a burnt offering. This particular story is obviously a useful one for those such as Dawkins who want to argue against the rationality of believing in the Biblical God, and it has been controversial among philosophers and theologians for centuries. Kant for instance said of the divine command:
"It is quite impossible for a human being to apprehend the infinite by his senses, but in some cases the human being can be sure the voice he hears is not God's; for if the voice commands him to do something that is contrary to moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, he must consider it an illusion."

In the debate about reason and obedience in morality Kant argues that we can never be certain that an experience of God is genuine, and where it appears to contravene a moral law, it will always be better to go with reason and disobey the command. He believes Abraham fails morally in not questioning it.

Theists usually claim that this is a test, a demand of obedience by God, and is thus a good thing. Indeed, in the God Delusion Dawkins says that a teacher told him that too. In the debate Dawkins says that to test someone in this way is morally abhorrent. I believe Dawkins has a point! I know many teachers of religion explain it this way, and I think they could do better. I have seen firsthand how unsatisfactory a group of thirteen year old students find this explanation of the story. Who wants to say that a perfect, wholly good God would put such a clearly faithful man who has devoted everything to God through such a horrific test, let alone the trauma the innocent child underwent on his way to the death sentence.

 One explanation is that it was a record, a folk memory hidden in a story, of the early Jewish people's rejection of child sacrifice, which was a commonplace amongst the cultures of the middle east at that time. Ultimately, God commands Abraham to replace the child with a ram, sending a clear signal to the people of the covenant that the burnt offering must not be human. This would place Judaism within the context of a developing religion amongst others, and coheres with the Jewish people's awareness of their unique relationship with the one God.

Rabbi Sacks' answer to Dawkins challenge on this point in the debate is also essentially the one given above, that it is a rejection of child sacrifice, but he develops it. He mentions as well as the widespread practice of child sacrifice in the ancient world, the prevalence even into Roman times of a similar worldview expressed in the principle of patria potestas in Roman law, which makes a child the property of the parents to dispose of as they will.

Sacks believes the story is fundamental to Judaism, with its emphasis on the importance of children,
and explains that in this story Abraham has to disown the child he has spent so long waiting for, the most precious thing in his life, to give him up. In doing this, God gives the child back to him, but now Abraham is aware that the child is a gift, on loan, and is not his to own. This emphasis on the nature of the child as a gift from God, which can never be hoarded, takes the child-sacrifice model and turns it on its head, forever marking them as a people that realise their radical dependence on God.

Clearly this realisation is an essential part of Christian theology as well, in particular the thomistic emphasis on  God as Being, and creation as a free act of love in which the overflowing generosity of God's goodness results in creatures who have being themselves, but in a limited, contingent way. God as sustainer in Aquinas upholds the world of creation in each moment. Creation is a gift.

To me the story now made more sense, but things really fell into place when I read Alison Milbank's book Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians. In particular the discussion of gift-giving and Father Christmas.
For Milbank Father Christmas is a mediatory figure. Necessarily as he inhabits the world between the parent and the child, and in his way of entering into the house, down the chimney, being an opening to the realm of the sky, he embodies that which comes from beyond. As this third person in the parent-child relationship he can prevent the appropriating tendency of the adult from making the child into an image of itself. Father Christmas gives back the child to the parent as a gift because he reminds them that they and the child are themselves dependent on something beyond themselves for their existence. In Numbers 18:15-18 is found the origin of the Jewish custom of offering the firstborn son to God. Echoing this in modern culture the Father Christmas ritual seeks to express the sacredness of the gift-response relation in ways inimical to capitalist cultures, Milbank says. Father Christmas disallows the pre-modern absolute right of the father over the child that treats it as a form of property.
In the discussion I found many of the ideas that I had been thinking about in relation to Abraham and children taking on a new significance. In particular light was thrown on much of Tolkien's work as it related to what he called 'God and his sole right to divine honour'. This led me to reflect on obedience in the Abraham story and why many in the modern world have such an abhorrence of obedience to any authority other than the self.

The theft and hoarding of what belongs to the divine is a thread running through much of Tolkien. In The Hobbit Smaug the dragon coiled around his treasure hoard represents this monstrous appropriation. Gold in fairy tales is only valuable when freely passed on - as soon as it is hoarded it becomes cursed. In some sense Tolkien's diagnosis of our fallen condition is that we are tempted to do this epistemologically, to make the world we know ours and thus forget about it as it is in itself (Tolkien was aware of Kantian scepticism about the possibility of this and presents a novel answer to it), as a wondrous gift. This is explored in numerous ways in Tolkien's work, perhaps more obviously in his creation story the 'Ainulindale' and other stories in his Silmarillion.  The cure he offers for this tendency of habitual familiarisation and disenchantment is fantasy or fairy tale. Chesterton explains:

"That strangeness of things, which is the light in all poetry, and indeed in all art, is really connected with their otherness; or what is called their objectivity. What is subjective must be stale; it is exactly what is objective that is in this imaginative manner strange. In this the great contemplative is the complete contrast of the false contemplative, the mystic who looks only into his own soul, the selfish artist who shrinks from the world and lives only in his own mind. According to St. Thomas, the mind acts freely of itself, but its freedom exactly consists in finding a way out to liberty and the light of day; to reality and the land of the living. In the subjectivist, the pressure of the world forces the imagination inwards. In the Thomist, the energy of the mind forces the imagination outwards, but because the images it seeks are real things. All their romance and glamour, so to speak, lies in the fact that they are real things; things not to be found by staring inwards at the mind. The flower is a vision because it is not only a vision. Or, if you will, it is a vision because it is not a dream."

For now it will be good to finish with this:

"Tolkien is actually saying something quite radical: that fiction in the form of fantastic recreation of the world can give us access to the real by freeing the world of objects from our appropriation of them" - Alison Milbank.

Reflections on the Feast of John the Baptist - Sunday 24th June 2012

In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

John 1:4-5

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
John 4:13-14

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” 
John 7:37-8

The feast of the birth of John the Baptist can be one of those windows into the interior mystery of the Christian faith - this year as I sat in church and listened to the readings I became aware of the close link between the births of Christ and John the Baptist at opposite times of the year - one at the winter solstice and one at the summer solstice, as well as the words of John himself: "He must increase as I decrease" (John 3:30). So if the sun at the summer solstice will only decrease from that point on then we surely must associate John the Baptist with the withdrawal and interiorisation of that principle, whereas at midwinter the sun begins its long process of increase, so Christ is associated with that moving out and exteriorisation of the solar principle.
But what does this mean? What truth is this intended to convey? The link between light and dark is evident here - when the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not receive it. And Jesus and John are placed in the position of the Tanit lord of darkness and lord of light that would do battle with each other in the old pagan year. But who decided to put them in that relationship to each other? Was it really so there would be an easier transition for the pagan converts?

The good of the intellect

"We've reached the place I told thee to expect,
Where thou shouldst see the miserable race,
Those who have lost the good of intellect."

Dante, Divine Comedy, The Inferno, Canto III

When Dante is led by Virgil through the gates of Hell, before he is ferried across the river Acheron by Charon, he enters the Vestibule of Hell where the futile abide. Dorothy Sayers explains in the commentary to the Penguin Classics edition:

"The vestibule is the abode of the weather-cock mind, the vague tolerance which will neither approve nor condemn, the cautious cowardice for which no decision is ever final. The spirits rush aimlessly after the aimlessly whirling banner, stung and goaded, as of old, by the thought that, in doing anything definite whatsoever, they are missing doing something else."

Virgil explains that these people have "lost the good of intellect". In the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, the good of intellect is truth. It is for this reason that they cannot commit to any deed or judgement - they have no language which is able to even make sense of the word truth, and they live in a relativistic world where everything is as good as anything else. Why bother making any final decisions in such a world?

But why is the good of the intellect truth? We need to understand what intellect and good mean in an Aristotelian sense to answer that.

For Aquinas the faculty of the intellect is something different from what we would call reason - reason has to do with inquiry and proof, while intellect relates to the direct mental grasp of truths. It has a direct moral function, in that it is able to apprehend goods that are presented to the will. It is distinguished in this sense from a merely speculative function, and has a practical element.

The good of the intellect is truth, because by apprehending that truth the intellect will move the will to act in certain ways. People will lose this faculty if the will is turned continually away from the higher intellectual level. If they are willing to use only the purely speculative or rational part of the intellect, and deny that there is a moral element to truth, they will live in absurdity, like those in the Vestibule. This is one of the inherent dangers of living in this rationalistic age, dominated by the tyranny of relativism.

There is an excellent post on the intellect here

Da VInci on illustration

"And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.”

The Vow of Poverty

The vow of poverty is the practice of inner emptiness that is established as a consequence of the silence of personal desires, emotions and imagination so that the soul may be capable of receiving the revelation of the Word, the life and the light from above. Poverty is the active perpetual vigil and waiting in the face of eternal sources of creativity; it is the soul ready for what is new and unexpected, it is the aptitude to learn always and everywhere, it is the condition sine qua non of all illumination, all revelation and all initiation.
Unknown Author, Meditations on the Tarot

"Truly, truly I say to you:
Unless a grain of wheat falls in the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit."
John 12:24

 How might we remove the obstacles to this state of poverty? Perhaps the desire to be full is the greatest threat to this. Radical emptying involves a conscious decision but needs to work with the unconscious forces. Many of these will pull you back to the state of desiring fullness, the pride of self-reliance and the closed circle of comforting truths. These forces are powerful and will keep growing back. An element of the chaotic must be present for creativity. It is natural to want to consolidate but self-emptying is the path to God.

The Traditional Method

"The order of things that I ... deal with ... is that in which all materials
having a "historical" and "scientific" value are the ones that matter the
least; conversely, all the mythical, legendary, and epic elements denied historical
truth and demonstrative value acquire here a superior validity and
become the source for a more real and certain knowledge .... From the
perspective of "science" what matters in a myth is whatever historical elements
may be extracted from it. From the perspective that I adopt, what
matters in history are all the mythological elements it has to offer."

Julius Evola, Revolt against the modern world.