speaking of Origen...

Here you go:

Father Sergius...

     Fr Sergius is indeed a kind of modern Origen - brilliant, combative, insanely erudite, visionary, occasionally daft, and intoxicated by Jesus. I don't know that either of 'em are heretics in the strict sense, though they do go rogue in the more speculative flights. Those flights, though, are offered in service to the Church of Jesus Christ, and thus motivated by love and not a desire to divide the Body. So, all in all, I'd say they're both great servants of the Church. When and if they erred, they did so for the right reasons. I wish all of us had the intellectual, moral, and spiritual courage and ardor these two Fathers manifest in even their minor works.

i can't work a cute reference to 'Hart' into the title...

     I know little enough of James K A Smith, except that he's at Calvin College and writes books on vaguely philosophical topics. To be completely open here, I've never been able to read more than a paragraph by the man without drifting into a fitful sleep punctuated by bad socialist dreams.

     I also have little concern with staying within the Reformed tradition. Of course, whether the positions taken by those at Calvinist International are fair representations of the Reformed Tradition in its fullness is debatable. In any event, they have of late gotten into what was at first an amusing tangle with one David Bentley Hart, a tangle in which they have the losing part. As a result, one Peter Escalante has doubled down repeatedly as he tries with more and more obvious vanity to win a rhetorical and philosophical battle that is beyond him. 

    I will not take up Hart's defense. Suffice it to say, I don't always agree with Hart, but in this case I think he has the better part. In fact, it's not clear to me that Hart isn't having some fun with this tempest in a thimble. He has obviously baited his opponents, offering the most exaggerated statements mixed in with his more cogent arguments, and those guys have just as obviously taken the bait. Escalante in particular seems to be witlessly and pointlessly misreading Hart.  
     Does Escalante really imagine that Hart would assert 'that apocalyptic theopanies are somehow required in order to understand that jumping off a bridge is a bad idea'? Or that jumping off a bridge is, in terms of discernment, the same as making judgments about fraught moral matters amongst communities that have received decades of false catechesis? (Make no mistake, one needn't go to any kind of church to receive catechesis in matters of morals and what we might loosely call theology, inasmuch as all people have their gods, whatever they call 'em). 

     Oh well. I offer the following rambling yet mercifully brief reflection on this now tedious affair.

     It's not so obvious that a narrowly construed Aristotelian-Thomist understanding of natural revelation, and thus natural law, is representative of the larger catholic tradition of thought in these matters. (Note well that I didn't say anything specific about Thomas or Aristotle; we're dealing with a specific school of interpretation here, one that is myopic and philosophically daft.) 

     This is relevant because the mission of Calvinist International implies that they seek to offer the broadest possible consensus in matters of doctrine and philosophy. Again, they explicitly assert that the Reformed tradition, at its best, represents this 'mere Christianity', a catholic consensus capable of uniting diverse Christians through an irenic approach to matters often made divisive. 

     Of course, it remains to be demonstrated by anything they've said or done that the Reformed tradition, and the particular construal of it they find convincing, is itself that consensus, that 'mere Christianity' all of us need. As an assumption it hardly holds water; it must be demonstrated through both historical and dogmatic argument. Without such an argument, folks like me who stand outside the Reformed tradition in general, and CI's particular place within that tradition, have no reason to listen to 'em. 

     Of course, here we get at the crux of their polemics in this running skirmish - on what ground of consensual 'reason' can we meet to hash this out? I don't agree that 'natural knowledge' and 'reason' are quite what CI makes 'em out to be. But of course, that's because I'm being unreasonable. Perhaps I'm even a Kierkegaardian who imagines that all truth is ultimately subjective (for the Dane, that was an attempt to salvage particular subjectivity from the ravages of the Hegelian system; whether he succeeded is another matter), and therefore an inward something not subject to public scrutiny and argument. Perhaps I delight in imaginary apocalypticalist phenomenologies. Maybe I believe in faeries in the forest. Certainly I deny the givenness of the transcendentals of being, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, and their convertibility. (The fact that I, like Hart, have spent years writing about that can not be allowed to play any part in the skirmish at hand.) 

     Perhaps I'm overdoing it, but I doubt it, because it's precisely such nonsense that has dominated the essays on CI.

     The fact is that Hart's position grows out of a larger construal of the truly catholic than the folks at Calvinist International seem able to grasp. This does not make Hart always and ever right in all his particulars; again, I would never say that. It does mean, however, that the assumptions and inferences and arguments he offers have sailed right past Escalante in particular. For example, at the end of Hart's latest piece, one can discern a deeply contested sort of Eastern Orthodox understanding of the relation between the creature and its Creator. 

     You see, there is more to the catholic tradition than is dreamt of by the editors of Calvinist International. Were they as truly interested in forging a consensus, a kind of mere Christianity that could unite more than it divides, they would have to reckon with this, however uncomfortable it made 'em. Instead, they attack it from a position poised on the most narrow kind of Reformed theology and philosophy. Again, that is their prerogative, but to build on that foundation is not to return to classical sources of Christian wisdom; it is to burnish a particular tradition that reads selected classical sources such as the Summa and the like in a particular, not to mention peculiar, manner. 

the progressive left...

     Has there ever been a more detailed, more rigid, more insidious code of behavior and speech than that used by the Progressive Left to manipulate others into submission? They're the most moralistic band of killjoys.
     I've also had occasion to note the Progressive Left's murderous embrace of eugenics and general Malthusian principles. Now it seems they are growing more militarist even as they embrace the nihilism of the agenda behind the movement for so-called 'marriage equality'. 
     This bothers me, as I have friends on that side of the divide. Those connections are difficult, because silence in the face of these horrors demonstrates tacit complicity.

     More and more it's my experience that those who say they want 'peace', 'concord', 'open conversation', 'reason', and the like are poseurs who only want to beat others into submission.

the communion of the saints...

     I just like this:

May Brigid bless the house wherein you dwell
Bless every fireside, every wall and floor;
Bless every heart that beats beneath its roof;
And every tongue and mind for evermore;
Bless every hand that toils to bring joy
And every foot that walks its portals through.
This is my wish today, my constant prayer
May Brigid bless the house that shelters you.

     Don't worry. It's not like I believe the saints are, you know, alive in Christ. Rank heresy that is! No, they're dead and gone, and it's best we don't try and talk with 'em or otherwise disturb their deadness.

nothing new under the sun...

Lamarck:Darwin::Pelagius:Augustine. QED.

a revision...

Wherein We Prepare for Another Apocalypse



I fear those who hope, on bended knee,
to reap an Eden sopped with morning dew.
Call it, year zero for the happy few:
against this dream how can we hold a plea –
the merely human’s worth less than a flea
when Utopia calls, so let’s come clean, we knew
all along that there could be no place
in that nice world for such a fragile race.

working, working...

     So, I just sent off a submission of poems to Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry via their website. Now the waiting begins. Over the next week, I have seven more submissions to variously send through the web or regular mail. For now, having written several lines of poetry, and done this one submission, I think a break is in order. Time for a walk.
     Peace out.

a poem...

Fortunate Fall



A faulty memory’s not fit to amuse
us, when we need a means to slip away
into a dream of all the good we may
or may not dare. For we yet hate to lose,
shambling and resentful of the news
that loss is woven into every play
we make. The sun yet burns us, as we weigh
the odds that love’s an everlasting ruse.
It's like a dream, this memory undone.
The hour's not as early as I thought,
yet I bear the remnant of our love
for a garden City lost, then won -
a fugitive law presses from above
that we might be more dearly bought.

a poem...

A Cordial Reply to Thomas Hardy

And it’s strange to say, my friend,
     that all that is is forged through chance
accretions, changes lacking all
     completion, formal happenstance - 

more likely, is it not, that chance,
     in all it’s variations, forms
return upon return, until
     each thing to its end conforms.

an untitled poem...

For now I haven't got a thing to say
with all this blank verse stretched before me,
so how about we set aside today
at least our passion for the kill, and flee
that coming wrath we all sense at our heels
while claiming that's just how oblivion feels.

working at poetry...

     Just spent a few happy hours revising poems, some of them quite old. One of 'em goes back to the Spring of 1998. 
     There is a simple satisfaction in knowing one has done the job at hand.

a ramble with no purpose...

     I'm over, inter alia, Mad Men; Game of Thrones; Iron Chef America, Top Chef, and any of their ilk; movies based on comic books; zombies; vampires (sorry Joss, but you're partly to blame); the new, super-popular Rush; the LCMS, PCA, OPC, ELCA, PC(USA), UCC, ACNA, LCNA, UMC, LCWS, ECUSA, REC, AAC, and I'm eyeing the OCA; Rand Paul (should have stayed On Message there big guy); Libertarians in general; Democrats, Republicans, and other Stupid Liberals; Peter Jackson; Wendell Berry.
     I still love Firefly, but wish the fans would get over it. And no, we're not Browncoats. 
     Justified is currently about the best thing on television. 
     Well, there's Top Gear, but that's a different kettle of widgets. 
     Yes, I still love television. There are more television shows in my iTunes rack than movies. I would love to write for television. Perhaps there's an opening for a slightly more Rightish Aaron Sorkin. 
     No, I didn't really think so.
     I would like to write a book on Hell entitled Love Wins. That would also be a fine title for a book about Augustine's fine-spun theology of predestination. Put a contract in front of me and I might just sign the thing.
     Rob Bell is an excellent writer of ad copy. I was going to say that he should be in marketing, but thought better of it for some reason.
     I'm both an Old Earth and a Young Earth Creationist. Sue me. 
     I've long had my doubts that there was ever anything like Feudalism. If we made up Feudalism out of our own pure brains, then I do much wonder why. Riddle me why we invented Feudalism, and you'll untangle the skein tightly wound in the last two and a half centuries or more. You might also win a grant.
     I'm tired, yet all I want to do is watch television and eat ice cream. 
     That would be stupid, so of course I would never do it. 
     Peace out.
     
     

psa...

     You know, 'Moon Mist' is as lovely as anything by, say, Stravinsky or Debussy. 

psa...

     Our music this evening is 'Mood Indigo' by one Duke Ellington.

so that happened...

Woke up with an overwhelming sense of mortality. Yes, dear reader, time was spinning faster and faster, and my own personal eschaton bore down impendent.

Well, I guess I'm awake now.

a poem, revised...

Time’s Arrow Yet Again

We beg the moon for alms in early Spring
as snow falls silent, deep, and slow throughout
the night, and not a person doesn’t fling
his imprecations at the sky in doubt -
for they might never hear a robin call
outside an open window, or feel air
warm and moist as flowers dying fall,
young mayflies rise, irresistible fate to dare.

This ancient earth seems like a silent rock
upon its pinions, fast held to depend,
and our impatient fiddling with its lock
distracts from all careening to the end.
Even now we find it helpful to distrust
time’s power to work all living things to dust.

a poem...

Time’s Arrow Yet Again

We beg the sun for alms in early Spring
as snow falls silent, deep, and slow throughout
this day, and not a person doesn’t fling
his imprecations at the sky in doubt
that they will ever hear a robin call
outside an open window, or breathe deep air
so warm and moist as flowers dying fall,
young mayflies rise their pendent time to dare.
Even now we find it helpful to distrust
time’s power to work all living things to dust.