Orthodoxy and the “Culture War”

Here’s a fine new essay from Second Terrace.

Pentecost: Byrhtferth

Come Holy Spirit, without thine aid

Thy praise will never be displayed:

Do thou the grace of tongues bestow,

To whom the gift of speech we owe.

A Thought from William Carlos Williams

The world was made to eat, not leave, so that the spirit be full, not empty.

Morning Poetry

Worlds Enough

Time sits on us like a brooding hen,
Making all things come to fruition,
And we, inside the ellipse of albumen,
A safe and closed frontier,
We live our lives in frantic haste,
Will not willingly see our small affairs
Come to an end of futile waste,
Knowing soon will come the cracking of the egg.

We fully know the smallness of our lives,
Know too, that it is death which sets us free;
Yet we sweat blood and gash ourselves with knives,
Calling on our gods to move both Earth and Heaven
Only to retard by a single hour
The step into the larger universe.
We would stay huddled, closely packed
If it lay at all within our power.

Nothing well done fails to bear fruit,
Extending beneficence into the greater Kingdom;
Nothing evil ever can take root,
Torn out, swept up, cast away with the stubble.
A World of rotten eggs is insufficient to pollute
The fragrant air of yet-enchanted Eden;
Earth’s highest virtue nothing to salute,
The greatest blessedness is but a good beginning.

-Don Comfort

(Taken from Earl Donald the Bewildered)

Even More on Involuntary Sin

Another thought: if sin is darkness, blinding not only the sinner but any human being (including the sinner) who seeks to make the sin intelligible, then perhaps the so-called Problem of Evil inherits the darkness of individual sin, at least in so far as the Problem collects the individual sins together? Of course, this would not make intelligible the full unintelligibility of the Problem, since the Problem traditionally not only collects individual sins but also non-agential tragedies like earthquakes, cyclones and mudslides. Still, it would shed some light on some of the darkness of the Problem. If individual sins are mysteries, so, too, I would think, is the collection of them. (Anyway, this doesn’t immediately strike me as a fallacious inference from a “part” to a “whole”.)

I’m reminded of Plotinus, who in his On the Descent of the Soul, struggles to render intelligible the soul’s fall from union with The One.  There, at least, Plotinus ends by treating the fall both as unchosen and as chosen.  St. Paul’s famous and famously difficult confessional at the end of Romans 7 structurally seems to me to look similar—a phenomenological description of the blending of the unchosen and the chosen.  Also:  “I believe, help my unbelief”?

More on Voluntary and Involuntary Sin

Can my previous post be right? Is choice the crux of sin? Can I sin where no choice is involved?

What about this sort of case? Imagine I am brought up in a family that is deeply racist. I stew in their racism from my earliest conscious moments. I soak it up without ever realizing that I have done so and certainly without ever considering it is as wrong or even as questionable. I grow into adulthood. I choose as a racist; I act as a racist; I live as a racist. Later, I come to understand racism and to see that I myself am and have been racist. Now, one thing I come to see about myself is that I have chosen as a racist. But I don’t think that when I repent of my racism that I am repenting only for those choices. Or am I? I became a racist without choosing to do so—but does that mean that I made no choices at all in becoming one (but nonetheless need to repent); or, does it mean that I became one by making choices under a description on which they were permissible, but that I have now come to see that the choices I made also fall under a description on which they were impermissible (and so need to repent)?

Let me hazard the following. Someone once said to me that there are two dominant models for sin: sin is crime, and sin is disease. Despite what this post and my last post may suggest primus visus, if I have to choose only one of the models, I prefer the second—sin is disease. But I wonder if the truth isn’t more complicated, more mysterious: sin is somehow both crime and disease. 1 John 1: 11 comes to mind.

He that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness has blinded his eyes.

Sin is darkness—a darkness which blinds. It blinds the eyes of the person who sins, who walks in darkness. But the darkness also, I’m tempted to say, blinds the eyes of the person who tries to peer into it so as to understand it. That does not mean that we cannot identify sins, in ourselves or in others. It does mean that we are not going to be able to come up with a satisfactory “hydraulics” of sin. And so it likely also means that we should be wary of identifying sins in ourselves or others by relying on a self-fashioned “hydraulics” of sin.

Voluntary and Involuntary Sin

We pray for forgiveness from sins, voluntary and involuntary. But what does that contrast come to?

Doing something involuntarily admits of at least two different understandings: (1) A person could be compelled to do something that he would not ordinarily voluntarily do because of an “external” cause: recall Aristotle’s example of the man who throws his goods overboard during a severe storm at sea. In such a case, the man knows what he is doing, and in a sense he is the agent of his action, but he nonetheless does what he knows he is doing under duress. (2) A person might do something without (fully) knowing what he does: recall Oedipus’ sleeping with Jocasta. He takes himself to know what he is doing—he is sleeping with his wife. And, while that is true, it is also true that he is sleeping with his mother–but he doesn’t know he is doing that. He doesn’t know he is sleeping with his mother, but do it under duress. He is under no duress; he is instead ignorant of a description under which his action falls. Note that there are a variety of ways in which such ignorance may occur, and the varieties each make a difference to how we understand and evaluate what is done and/or the doer of it. For example, a person may be ignorant of a description under which his action falls because he is so impassioned as to make no use of readily available time for deliberation (the person’s actions are like those of a drunkard); or, a person may be ignorant of a description because, even though it is in some sense in his mental purview, he only ‘half-recognizes’ it as a genuine description of what he is doing (such a person’s actions would, in some ways, resemble the “actions” of a somnambulant). Oedipus’ case is different still, since it is unclear how he could have come to know before acting the other description under which he acts. When he comes to know the description, he repents for what he has done (pardon the understatement); and that repentance helps shape the way we evaluate him, or should. (“Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” “Now when they heard this they were pricked in their heart; and they said unto Peter and the rest of the apostles: Men and brethren, what shall we do?”)

So when we pray for forgiveness for involuntary sins, we pray for forgiveness primarily for those things we have done, and done (in one sense) voluntarily (we knowingly chose to do them under a description), but in ignorance of (other) descriptions under which those things are sinful. Eve plausibly provides an example of involuntary sin. When she looks at the tree, plucking and eating fruit from it seems to fall under a description on which doing so is good: the tree looks good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and makes one wise. So she plucks and eats from it under that description. Satan’s wiles consist in getting this description to eclipse the description under which God presents the tree to Eve (and Adam): the tree is good for death.

I worry that sometimes we understand ‘involuntary’ to mean yet something else: (3) Doing something involuntarily means doing it without choosing to do it under any description. Imagine that someone overpowers me and then throws me from atop a building, killing an enemy below. My involvement would be involuntary: no choice is involved at all. But in (1) and (2) choice is involved. In (1) the person chooses but under duress; in (2) the person chooses but in ignorance of the description under which what is chosen is sinful. The presence of choice seems to be what requires repentance, where repentance is required. In (3), no choice is involved, and so it is unclear whether such a case could really count as an involuntary sin. As I said, when we pray for forgiveness for involuntary sin, it is primarily involuntary sin as in (2). Perhaps we may also occasionally pray for forgiveness for involuntary sins as in (1), but primarily it is for involuntary sins as in (2).

Gregory of Nyssa on the Life of Moses–Some Early Questions

I’m teaching the *Life* this summer. I hope to post here a series of thoughts, questions, and so on as I read the book. One question I have early is about the way Gregory articulates the book. The first part of the book is like standard biography—like standard biography, but it isn’t standard biography. (Not by the standard, say, of the *Life of Johnson*.) Gregory narrates Moses’ life, but he does so from a particular angle. He closes the first part by underscoring that he has narrated literally but also that he has amplified the narration so as “to bring out its intention” (emphasis mine). I judge this to mean that he has first followed the Scriptural narrative with one eye, as it were, but second always with the other eye fixed on the point of the narrative. Does that seem right? If it does, then how does the second part of the book relate to the first? Does Gregory shift eyes, so to speak, so that in the second part of the book the point of the narrative moves into the superordinate position and the literal narration into the subordinate? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Traditional, Consummate Prayer

Gradually there had come to Mr. Pierce a need for those very forms which had seemed to him to endanger worship; there had come an increasing feeling that, as man was both flesh and spirit, there were rituals which gave shape to worship, gave it the beauty of form, not emptily but with, indeed, beauty as an added act. He had begun to understand how traditional prayer was fuller prayer, how there was in it not only the plea but the meditation on the plea, how there was in forms not only the discipline which they imposed but the disciplined soul’s profound response to them, its freedom in their order to return again and again to an act whose meaning deepened with each return. He knew that they could become empty, that a consummate prayer could be droned or gibbered without a thought, but he was learning that the consummate prayer prayed was an act of worship beyond all of the desperate pleading of his life, was worship which not only sought God, but revealed Him. Charles Mills, The Alexandrians, pp. 33-4

If nothing else, this is an exacting bit of phenomenology: it seems to me to get exactly right the experience of coming to and of abiding in “traditional prayer”. And what a line: “…not only the plea but the meditation on the plea…”

Wittgensteinian Podvig

Here’s a discussion note I wrote for students last summer. Its topic is on my mind again.

We can read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as an example of an asceticism of cognition. I want to say more about this. To say more, I need a couple of terms, ‘prelest’ and ‘podvig’, from the vocabulary of Russian Orthodoxy. I also want a bit of Scripture:

And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. Genesis 3: 13

‘Podvig’: the nearest English equivalent is the phrase ‘ascetic struggle’ or, perhaps, ‘moral heroism’—but the meaning of the term is somewhat broader and more technical than these phrases, so I leave it untranslated. Here is a use of the term by Bishop Theophan the Recluse.

The true Christian tests himself every day. Daily testing to see whether we have become better or worse, is so essential for us that without it we cannot be called Christians. Constantly and persistently we must take ourselves in hand. Do this: from the morning establish thoughts about the Lord firmly in your mind and then during the whole day resist any deviation from these thoughts. Whatever you are doing, with whomever you are speaking, whether you are going somewhere or sitting, let your mind be with the Lord. You will forget yourself, and stray from this path; but again turn to the Lord and rebuke yourself with sorrow. This is the podvig of spiritual attentiveness.

‘Prelest’: the nearest English equivalent is ‘beguilement’ or ‘bewitchment’—but the meaning of the term seems to be simultaneously somewhat broader and more technical, and so it is best to leave it untranslated. Bishop Ignatiy Brianchaninov thematized ‘prelest’ as the corruption of human nature through the acceptance by man of mirages mistaken for truth. We are all in prelest. I hope the nearest English equivalents alert you to the suitability of the term for discussing Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein employs prelest-language throughout the book: ‘bewitchment’, ‘temptation’, ‘superstition’, ‘illusion’, ‘scruples’, ‘picture’, ‘haze’, ‘fog’, ‘chimera’, ‘sham’, ‘dazzlement’, ‘preconceived idea’, ‘false appearance’, ‘latent nonsense’, etc. Wittgenstein’s target is not spiritual prelest generally, but cognitive prelest specifically. (Cognitive prelest is a species of spiritual prelest—so I think and so I think Wittgenstein thought.) We are all in cognitive prelest.

What Wittgenstein demands of himself and his reader is the podvig of cognitive attentiveness. We must take ourselves in hand and learn the wiles, subterfuges, ruses and stratagems that (our life with) language employs against our intelligence. Wittgenstein knows we will forget ourselves, let ourselves slip out of hand: “…in despite of an urge to misunderstand…” He knows we will stray from this path, fail in our attentiveness or have our attentiveness deceived: “A philosophical problem has the form: I do not know my way about.” The point of cognitive podvig is the gradual cognitive self-perfection of the person undergoing it. Because that is the point, and so is the point of Philosophical Investigations, it is hard to answer someone who asks after the point of Wittgenstein’s teaching, and who expects the answer to take the form of a philosophical thesis. To learn from Wittgenstein is to undertake the podvig of gradual cognitive self-perfection via self-attentiveness, self-denial and self-discipline. It is above all to live a certain kind of life of the mind. It is not above all to advocate certain kinds of philosophical theses.

—But in that case we never get to the end of our work! —Of course not, for it has no end. Wittgenstein, Zettel 447