This is very good stuff but I do wonder, the older I get, whether the sense of the ancient world finding evidences of kindly gods and inherent order in nature isn’t something of a projection we’ve inherited from Roman (and to a lesser extent Greek) antiquity and a reflection more of wistfulness for a lost era of shepherds and forest oracles than of the somewhat more chthonic, certainly less Apollonian image we more often get from much earlier survivals, or even the remains of Celtic, German, Slavic paganism, etc. Not to mention the practically miserabilist cosmology of the Sumerians, for whom a forest is a nightmare realm crawling with scorpions and a god is a parasitic being that swarms over sacrifices like a fly on a dropping. I wonder if, in the west at any rate, our sense of alienation from nature isn’t very ancient, I guess. And our sense of being alienated from a nature to which we were formerly close is also pretty old, much older than we sometimes assume. But I’m probably just being a donkey about this.
This is simply lovely. To appreciate what all of these modern stories are after, while not fully embracing it—and to be able to appreciate it properly, because one doesn’t fully embrace it—is so illuminating. Perhaps you will give us a few more sentences on Harold Bloom at some point, who was likewise engaged with the gnostic current in our culture, but wasn’t able (as far as I can tell) to distinguish it from Platonism, so that he lacked the distance from the current that would have enabled him to understand it, rather than being swallowed up in it. I wonder, though, whether the summons of transcendence “_must_ come to as us something more mysterious, tragic, and terrible than it once was”? Certainly it does often come to us in that way; this is totally clear. And yet we have Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, and Mary Oliver, for whom it seems far from mysterious, tragic, or terrible. Rather, it’s the most manifest and embracing feature of their experience. I’m not sure that the “scale of shining mediations” is entirely absent, for them or for us.
It seems to me that the loss of the transcendent has resulted in an inverted parody where human souls must navigate downward through echelons of ever increasing atomism in order to accommodate ever increasing demands of material particularization. We've become commodified to meet the needs of a social, cultural, and religious mechanization. All energy seems invested in maintaining one machine or other; hence there is no time to "love God with all we are, nor to love neighbor." And as you've said, our discernment of the loss has been all but obliterated.
The Little Prince and The Truman Show are two of my favorite things. The are both heartbreaking in the right way.
My grandmother gave me a copy of The Little Prince a million years ago. She and my grandfather were both agnostic and I was being raised semi-schismatic-Catholic(-ish), and she gracefully found common ground for us. She is one of the reasons I’m no longer an infernalist (another reason being TASBS) and am still Catholic, in spite of … everything. My agnostic grandparents were closer to God than anyone else I’ve ever met. Funny how these things work.
This piece made me feel morose, the pathos of The Little Prince. I have witnessed some events this week that have made me weep with despair. As Antonius Block says in The Seventh Seal, "Why can I not kill God within me? Why does He go on living in a painful, humiliating way? I want to tear Him out of my heart, but He remains a mocking reality which I cannot get rid of. "
On a different note, that picture of the charioteer (I assume from the Phaedrus?) hung in my home during my childhood. I had completely forgotten it until I saw it just now in your post.
Would it be fair to say that one of the reasons the Gnostics believed in a God so transcendent that only apophasis was appropriate, was that the Christian community of that time had not yet learned (or was just learning) how to read the Hebrew Scriptures allegorically through the lens of Christ? And so their impulse was to appropriate the good they saw in the Christ/logos savior figure of Christianity while dispensing with the harshness they saw in God in the Old Testament. And then the Western Christian further fueled Gnosticism by insisting that the God of Jesus was also the God of eternal torment. And so maybe gnostic impulses continue partly because the Western Christian tradition has succeeded in powerfully implanting the persistent image of a God who does not apper to be good. So, it’s not surprising that we would want to just “escape all of it” to a realm of such transcendence that it can’t even really be described. Just some ramblings.
This is very good stuff but I do wonder, the older I get, whether the sense of the ancient world finding evidences of kindly gods and inherent order in nature isn’t something of a projection we’ve inherited from Roman (and to a lesser extent Greek) antiquity and a reflection more of wistfulness for a lost era of shepherds and forest oracles than of the somewhat more chthonic, certainly less Apollonian image we more often get from much earlier survivals, or even the remains of Celtic, German, Slavic paganism, etc. Not to mention the practically miserabilist cosmology of the Sumerians, for whom a forest is a nightmare realm crawling with scorpions and a god is a parasitic being that swarms over sacrifices like a fly on a dropping. I wonder if, in the west at any rate, our sense of alienation from nature isn’t very ancient, I guess. And our sense of being alienated from a nature to which we were formerly close is also pretty old, much older than we sometimes assume. But I’m probably just being a donkey about this.
This is simply lovely. To appreciate what all of these modern stories are after, while not fully embracing it—and to be able to appreciate it properly, because one doesn’t fully embrace it—is so illuminating. Perhaps you will give us a few more sentences on Harold Bloom at some point, who was likewise engaged with the gnostic current in our culture, but wasn’t able (as far as I can tell) to distinguish it from Platonism, so that he lacked the distance from the current that would have enabled him to understand it, rather than being swallowed up in it. I wonder, though, whether the summons of transcendence “_must_ come to as us something more mysterious, tragic, and terrible than it once was”? Certainly it does often come to us in that way; this is totally clear. And yet we have Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, and Mary Oliver, for whom it seems far from mysterious, tragic, or terrible. Rather, it’s the most manifest and embracing feature of their experience. I’m not sure that the “scale of shining mediations” is entirely absent, for them or for us.
(Sorry, I mistakenly posted this to your email.)
It seems to me that the loss of the transcendent has resulted in an inverted parody where human souls must navigate downward through echelons of ever increasing atomism in order to accommodate ever increasing demands of material particularization. We've become commodified to meet the needs of a social, cultural, and religious mechanization. All energy seems invested in maintaining one machine or other; hence there is no time to "love God with all we are, nor to love neighbor." And as you've said, our discernment of the loss has been all but obliterated.
Jeff
Show quoted text
Exquisite. Thank you.
The Little Prince and The Truman Show are two of my favorite things. The are both heartbreaking in the right way.
My grandmother gave me a copy of The Little Prince a million years ago. She and my grandfather were both agnostic and I was being raised semi-schismatic-Catholic(-ish), and she gracefully found common ground for us. She is one of the reasons I’m no longer an infernalist (another reason being TASBS) and am still Catholic, in spite of … everything. My agnostic grandparents were closer to God than anyone else I’ve ever met. Funny how these things work.
Good article, thanks.
This piece made me feel morose, the pathos of The Little Prince. I have witnessed some events this week that have made me weep with despair. As Antonius Block says in The Seventh Seal, "Why can I not kill God within me? Why does He go on living in a painful, humiliating way? I want to tear Him out of my heart, but He remains a mocking reality which I cannot get rid of. "
On a different note, that picture of the charioteer (I assume from the Phaedrus?) hung in my home during my childhood. I had completely forgotten it until I saw it just now in your post.
Would it be fair to say that one of the reasons the Gnostics believed in a God so transcendent that only apophasis was appropriate, was that the Christian community of that time had not yet learned (or was just learning) how to read the Hebrew Scriptures allegorically through the lens of Christ? And so their impulse was to appropriate the good they saw in the Christ/logos savior figure of Christianity while dispensing with the harshness they saw in God in the Old Testament. And then the Western Christian further fueled Gnosticism by insisting that the God of Jesus was also the God of eternal torment. And so maybe gnostic impulses continue partly because the Western Christian tradition has succeeded in powerfully implanting the persistent image of a God who does not apper to be good. So, it’s not surprising that we would want to just “escape all of it” to a realm of such transcendence that it can’t even really be described. Just some ramblings.
Classic article. Interested to see what you add to it