Monthly Archives: September 2016

Public-Personal

Another Interaction with Buddhism

In posting past scholarship, I’ve promised a few pieces that deal with Buddhism, which I’ve ended up discussing at various stages in my own cultivation.  Of these, this excerpt is the most technical, and assumes the most background.  I recognize that outside of the very (excessively) dense conversation I was having in my doctoral dissertation, some of this may make little sense.  I crave your indulgence, though, as it seems possible that something useful for one person or another may be buried in this or that fold of this reticulated and decussated edifice.

Herewith a portion of my doctoral dissertation, starting at page 111 (the beginning of Chapter Four):

CHAPTER FOUR
Being, Nothing, and the Text of Scripture

Absolute selfhood opens up as nonobjectifiable nothingness in the conversion that takes place within personality. Through that conversion every bodily, mental, and spiritual activity that belongs to person displays itself as a play of shadows moving across the stage of nothingness. [. . .] It is the field commonly seen as “outermost” by the personal self and referred to as the external world actually present in the here and now, ever changing. [. . .] The “outer world” emerges here as a self-realization of nonobjectifiable nothingness, or, rather, makes itself present such as it is, in oneness with nothingness.
The field of true human existence opens up beyond the outer and the inner, at a point where the “shadowy man” is in oneness with absolute selfhood. We have here an absolute self-identity. Thinking, feeling, and action are, on every occasion, entirely illusory appearances with nothing behind them, the shadowy heart and mind of the shadowy man.

Nishitani 73

It should, perhaps, be surprising that Zen practitioner and philosopher Keiji Nishitani, a chief representative of what has come to be called the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy, so neatly retraces the quintessentially modern and Western representation of the human subject as found in Coleridge’s corpus and the related interventions of Nietzsche and Artaud, along with the comments of Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida. Nishitani’s discussion of the “play of shadows” by which humans perceive as phenomenal the “bodily, mental, and spiritual activity” which originates in the human subject corresponds closely to Coleridge’s discussion of origination. Going beyond Nietzsche’s statement about art, Nishitani describes all “Thinking, feeling, and action” as “illusory” insofar as they are themselves phenomena with regard to the “shadowy man.” This “shadowy man” is another name for the self as absolute subject, prior to what Coleridge calls the “act of self-duplication” which founds the conscious being of the human subject. Nishitani describes a conscious retracing of this origination as the “conversion” which introduces “absolute selfhood” once again into the consciousness. Like Artaud, and with reference to Plato as well as Nietzsche, Nishitani’s practice is self-consciously theatrical, taking as the goal of Buddhist practice and philosophy the freedom of the human subject from prior representations. This convergence of thought seems to be of just the sort predicted in Coleridge’s discussion of the universal philosophical and religious affirmation (even underlying apparent denial) of original sin in Aids to Reflection. Nishitani’s remark therefore serves as a further example of the telescoping of global and social concerns at work in Coleridge’s thought. Perhaps more importantly, it also serves as a step in examining to what extent Coleridge’s representation of the human subject and his discussion of original sin may actually reach beyond a parochially Christian or Western discourse.

The correspondence of Nishitani’s text with Coleridge’s corpus is less surprising than it might be, as Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness throughout represents his Zen practice in terms intelligible to the Western tradition, with special attention to developments in Continental philosophy. There is in fact a steadily growing (though very uneven) interaction of Western philosophy with Buddhism throughout the past two centuries. Nietzsche’s Antichrist at one point addresses the relationship of Buddhism to Christianity under the very late Nietzsche’s critical reading of both religions. Significantly, Nietzsche compares the two in terms of the relationship between representation of the subject and the theology of sin: “Buddhism is the only really positive religion to be found in history, even in its epistemology (which is strict phenomenalism)—it no longer speaks of the ‘struggle with sin’ but fully recognising the true nature of reality it speaks of the ‘struggle with pain’” (17). Nietzsche (whose access to Buddhist works would have been extremely limited, likely to poor translations of derivative Sanskrit texts, and whose understanding of Eastern thought principally comes through Schopenhauer) does not have a particularly close understanding of Buddhism, but he does identify the difference in emphasis between Western philosophy and Buddhism reasonably well.

The case of Buddhism also occasions a considerable refinement in Coleridge’s analysis of the universality of original sin as a religious doctrine or philosophical exigency. “In that most strange phænomenon, the religious atheism of the Buddhists,” he says in Aids to Reflection,

with whom God is only universal matter considered abstractedly from all particular forms—the Fact [of original sin] is placed among the delusions natural to man, which, together with other superstitions grounded on a supposed essential difference between right and wrong, the sage is to decompose and precipitate from the menstruum of his more refined apprehensions! Thus in denying the Fact, they virtually acknowledge it. (188-9)

Coleridge’s understanding of Buddhism is very imprecise. What he grasps, along with Nietzsche, is that Buddhism completes what Coleridge’s “rhetorical self-containment” prevents in his representation of the human subject. This added perspective, in fact, helps to clarify the stakes in what Christensen calls “the infelicitous reliance of the absolute on the fall for its very manifestation,” and how Coleridge’s abridgement of the difference between creatureliness and fallenness complicates his strivings toward orthodoxy.

“Dependent Origination” and the Subject
The Zen-derived philosophy described by Nishitani, or the somewhat different Amida Buddhism (also called Jodo Shinshu) of Takeuchi Yoshinori, does begin with the insight that the desire through which the human self originates is moribund—the same insight encoded ambivalently in “Kubla Khan,” more clearly and personally in “The Pains of Sleep,” and confessed openly in Coleridge’s effort to articulate a Biblical theology of original sin. Takeuchi criticizes “neo-Kantianism—along with the liberal theology based on it” for being “fettered to the immanentism of human reason and hence [. . .] only impeding our view of that abyss of death and sin and nihility that opens up under our very feet as the fate of being human” (72-3). In Takeuchi’s writing, the “turn” toward what Derrida calls the “invisible interior” or Nishitani the “shadowy man” is represented as the subject’s becoming conscious of “dependent origination.” Takeuchi suggests that this conversion is often described in the “fundamental experience of artists and poets,” who in their self-conscious acts of representation may “experience an immediate embodiment of the dynamism of world and body, other, and life prior to the distinction of subject and object” (74). Takeuchi describes “dependent origination” as follows:

the subject that, seen from the world, is part of the world, constructs its own being-in-the-world co-dependently and correlatively with the world, and yet does so as its own activity. [. . .] We may liken it to dreaming: when we dream, we live in correlatedness with the world of the dream and, through the phenomenal identity of dreamer and dream, keep the dream alive; but as soon as we become aware of this correlatedness, we have already awoken. (80-1)

Takeuchi extends this similitude of “dreaming,” as though to accommodate reading with Coleridge, when discussing the consequences of a developed consciousness of “dependent origination”: “at the moment one awakens, the various sufferings that troubled the world of sleep are awakened to in the realization, ‘it was only a dream; I was sleeping’” (91). Takeuchi writes as though to suggest a Buddhist solution to the problem depicted in “The Pains of Sleep,” proposing that the conditions for the construction of world and self “are only grasped in their primary sense when their essential determination is sought in terms of their extinction, when they are seen as past essences, as things that were.”

Coleridge’s expectation (which he shares with the Western tradition in metaphysics) is that the erasure he calls “scientific scepticism” has for its goal “certainty”—just as Derrida suggests when describing the metaphysical work as that “break with the domain of empirical history [. . .] whose aim is reconciliation with the hidden essence of the empirical.” Takeuchi, on the other hand, sets forth a Buddhist practice whose retracing of the constitution of the self has in view, not a recovery of antecedent unity, but its more complete erasure; it seeks to obliterate the trace, also, by counting the subject, self, spirit, sin, all among the phenomena of causation. The subject having awakened to the understanding that something—the subject, the self, Coleridge’s “I AM” both personally and globally, as self or as deity—has originated through moribund desire, the practice of disassociation from such desire should cause, not a return to that self, but a ceasing from those very perturbations of spirit which Coleridge envisioned in the prose introduction to “Kubla Khan” as “images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast” (43). Where Coleridge exclaims “but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!” over his apparent incapacity to remember the historical, religious, and poetic vision which the dream-vision represents, and is tormented by the memory of dreams and his apparent incapacity to regain his self-composure in “The Pains of Sleep,” Takeuchi’s Buddhism attempts to describe everything except the present phenomenon not only as originating (conceived) within the human subject but as therefore essentially illusory, to be awakened from and not to.

The Convergence: Coleridge, Artaud, Mishima
From Coleridge’s representation of the human subject, in view of the unhappy coincidence of original sin (the origin of the fallen human) with origination through repetition of the “I AM” (the unity of human and divine creativity), two paths forward seem to become one: the Western path of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida as exemplified by Artaud converges with the Eastern path as marked by Buddhism, whose singular distance from the Western metaphysical tradition has yet to be rendered fully intelligible. Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, a product of the Shinto-Buddhist culture of Imperial Japan whose postwar writings were among the most read in the West, serves as a convenient reference point. Like Coleridge, Nietzsche, and Artaud, Mishima’s works place the self-representing work of the human subject in the foreground. In Sun & Steel, Mishima seems to echo Artaud’s anxiety over his body’s being stolen by the priority of text:

Interestingly enough, my stubborn refusal to perceive my body was itself due to a beautiful misconception in my idea of what the body was. I did not know that a man’s body never shows itself as “existence.” But as I saw things, it ought to have made itself apparent, clearly and unequivocally, as existence. It naturally followed that when it did show itself unmistakably as a terrifying paradox of existence—as a form of existence that rejected existence—I was as panic-stricken as though I had come across some monster, and loathed it accordingly. It never occurred to me that other men—all men without exception—were the same.
[. . .] Never dreaming that the body existing in a form that rejected existence was universal in the male, I set about constructing my ideal hypothetical physical existence by investing it with all the opposite characteristics. And since my own, abnormal bodily existence was doubtless a product of the intellectual corrosion of words, the ideal body—the ideal existence—must, I told myself, be absolutely free from any interference by words. (Mishima 11)

The “ideal body” in this passage corresponds to both Artaud’s “body without organs” and the “absolute subject” in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. It represents the hoped-for unity prior to the discursive formation of the self, the “act of self-duplication” which in Coleridge’s work is both creation and fall. The effort to construe the human subject in this way, in Mishima as in Coleridge, leads to “a terrifying paradox of existence” which leaves him “panic-stricken” in the face of a universal failing: “other men—all men without exception—were the same.” Mishima’s response to this, as revealed in his own political and personal preoccupations, has the Buddhist pattern set out by Takeuchi. As Shu Kuge has helpfully summarized,

The “body” in Mishima’s thought is a metonymy for “experience” that is not yet translated into discursive language. Mishima once clamored: Why don’t people realize the importance of the depth of the surface? The surface is the depth; in other words, the surface is not a representation or reflection of what is hidden beneath. The surface is everything. (Kuge 66)

For Mishima, the “terrifying paradox” of “the body existing in a form that rejected existence” (the very crux of Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity, and his critique of Buddhism, in The Antichrist) is ultimately resolved, beyond the naïveté of simple oppositions, by an insistence on the surface—on the very skin itself—as the phenomenal being, here, now, than which nothing else can be meaningfully represented. This ultimately meant, for Mishima, that only the act of ritual suicide by cutting into the skin with a sharp blade, only at the peak of physical perfection, and only at the historical moment when he (vainly) hoped his public political act would lead to revolution, could be meaningful.

The example of Mishima thus presses the urgency of the problems which plague Coleridge’s representation of the human subject. In collocating “Kubla Khan” and “The Pains of Sleep,” and in classifying each as a “psychological curiosity,” Coleridge broaches the subject of madness and the more serious problem of damnation. The moral and spiritual, as well as the epistemological, dimensions of his theorizing of the human subject are at stake. The discourse of Western metaphysics from Coleridge’s time forward is increasingly studded with what Derrida calls a “tradition of mad poets” such as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Artaud; and what is perhaps more significant (for, as Derrida says, “Artaud is not the son of Nietzsche. And even less so of Hölderlin.”) is the exemplary significance which the interrogators of that discourse have assigned to these works. Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, to name but a few, have extensive recourse to these “mad poets,” whose primary distinction is the radical pressure they bring to bear on the language of metaphysics in their efforts to represent the “terrifying paradox” that Coleridge has also found.

For Coleridge, however, seppuku is not an option; neither is the extremity of Artaud, for whom “God is [. . .] a sin against the divine” and “the essence of guilt is scato-theological” (Derrida “La parole” 185). Coleridge’s representation of the origination of the human subject through repetition of the “I AM” of God’s creation creates a challenge for him, and for his readers, precisely because it does clash with his representation of the origination of the human subject as sinful through moribund desire. That is, whether in the context of the post-Christian West or of Shinto-Buddhist Japan, it is possible to completely conflate the subject’s creaturely being with the subject’s moribundity. At one extreme of the modern Western tradition, one may join Artaud in rejecting the repetition intrinsic to the discursive formation of the self, especially as that repetition comes to be the basis for knowledge of God and to be associated with the moribundity of human desire. On the other hand, one may carefully disregard, as Mishima does, “what is hidden beneath,” and attempt to signify only by and concerning the surface, the flesh of human being. The two seem to meet, however, in the fulfillment of the horrible expectations described in “The Pains of Sleep.” Coleridge, who makes an intellectual effort to reconcile himself to a Biblically orthodox confession of Christianity, continues to represent within his works the consequences of conflating the Creator/creature difference with the creature/fallen difference, confusing the origination of the human being as creature with the origination of the fallen human self.

on Literature, Public-Personal

Goldsmith, Plato, and the Opiate

Here’s another undergraduate paper (senior year at TMC), this one a straightforward thematic reading of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield.  I remember being told, I believe by Dr. Hotchkiss, to enjoy those undergraduate days of such reading and writing, because from graduate school forward there would always be loads of criticism in the way.  He was not wrong.  There are certainly compensations; but there are costs, and the simple pleasure of reading, understanding, and explaining has often been obscured by many another concern for months, even years, on end.

Here, then, something simple, with a lot of little hints (often pretty unformed) of some of the key issues that would recur in my Religion & Literature work:  an anti-dualist theme, coded as suspicion of the “Platonic” here (the Vicar is nothing if not a Boethian, methinks); a very Milton-inflected insistence on “conscience” that provided a few more years of fuel for a misguided, defiant individualism; an interest in the temporal workings of Providence, and the integration of interior with public life.

The Vicar’s Dialectic
A Critical Paper Presented to Prof. John Hotchkiss
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of English Novel (E 405)
by Peter G. Epps
December 15, 1998

The hero of this book . . . is drawn as ready to teach, and ready to obey, as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity. In this age of opulence and refinement whom can such a character please? Such as are fond of high life will turn with disdain from the simplicity of his country fire-side. Such as mistake ribaldry for humour will find no wit in his harmless conversation; and such as have been taught to deride religion will laugh at one whose chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity (Goldsmith 305).

In The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith presents both an easy, comfortable novel—and an horrible picture of a Job scenario acted out in eighteenth-century England. The interesting progression of the Vicar’s reduction from affluence to debtor’s prison, from a happy family to a more-than-decimated one, is told with all the charm of a pious (if somewhat pedantic) rustic. The Vicar and his family, though in many ways caricatures, are at the same time well-developed and likeable characters. Thus the reader’s sympathies are directed to the Vicar, and the points the Vicar makes at the depth of his suffering are as direct and true as the points he makes before it are often fatuous. The Vicar’s progress from affluence to poverty to affluence again is more than just a story, however; it is a learning process, at the end of which the Vicar and those around him have “learned their lessons” and are fit for a Providential change of fortunes once more. Along the way, however, a view of God’s relation to man is presented which is an mixture of truth, error and good intentions. In allowing the Vicar’s theodicy to be the crux of his return to good fortune, Goldsmith sets before the reader an idea and leaves it up to his good judgment to learn from the example, as he makes clear from his own preface (quoted above).

The Vicar’s beginning state, that of unsuspecting and comfortable affluence, is best characterized by simplicity. With his wife and family, frequent visits from neighbors and relatives, and good prospects for the future, the Vicar’s happiness is real but untried. Perhaps the best description of the “good life” for the Vicar can be found in the catalog of “those little rubs which Providence sends”:

My orchard was often robbed by school-boys, and my wife’s custards plundered by the cats or the children. The ‘Squire would sometimes fall asleep in the most pathetic parts of my sermon, or his lady return my wife’s civilities with a mutilated curtesy. But we soon got over the uneasiness caused by such accidents, and usually in three or four days we began to wonder how they vext us (306,7).

The family living is resigned to the Vicar’s wife’s care, while the Vicar bestows his salary to the unfortunate as the family has sufficient wealth to be able to afford such gifts. Thus there is no criticism to be made against the Vicar’s state of affluence, except that in his simplicity the Vicar wants some prudence; which is no grave fault, he never having had need of much. The parson’s plan for managing his parish is charming in its simplicity; he “set a resolution . . . of being acquainted with every man in the parish, exhorting the married men to temperance and the bachelors to matrimony . . . it was a common saying that there were three strange wants at Wakefield, a parson wanting pride, young men wanting wives, and ale-houses wanting customers” (308,9). Surely there is nothing in this to criticize. There is already present, in seedling form, the message which will become the book’s theme: “those little rubs which Providence sends to enhance the value of its favours” (306) are here minor mishaps; later, as the trouble grows and the Vicar learns greater prudence, he will also deepen out this view into an entire theodicy—and an evangelistic message.

The Vicar’s troubles begin when his pedantic pursuit of a minor theological battle ends up barring his son’s marriage; immediately on the heels of this gap between his simplicity and necessary prudence comes the loss of his fortune. Still, in the face of his own principles, the Vicar is honest when he refuses to dissemble until after the wedding. Here a paradox begins to open up. It is obvious that the parson’s scruple over remarriage (after the death, not divorce, of a spouse) is spurious; at the same time, it is obvious that he is right to stick to his conscience, rather than prudential considerations which might press him to dishonesty. This upholding of even a meaningless scruple against strong motives to bend becomes one of the Vicar’s primary characteristics throughout the story.

The descent takes several stages. First, the family is financially driven down into middle-class living, compelled to move to a new parish and take up farming to add to their living. The Vicar presses the family to adjust their standard of living to the new situation, with some success. The temptation to press up to the level of affluence is subdued, and the simplicity of affluence is replaced by a readily discovered sufficiency. In learning to be content with enough, rather than to rely upon the comforts of wealth, the family becomes able to live within its means and to provide for itself well enough.

The next level of the decline is when the family begins to be torn apart by the struggles of maintaining their standard of living, with the various social agendas attached to bourgeois life. From portraits to horses, the family tries to live up to the imagined expectations of those who style themselves better—often over the protests of the Vicar, though he acquiesces in them when he believes they may have some practical benefit. These attachments which seem to have so much promise fall through quickly, and the family are left with only the struggles. As they descend below the middle class toward the lower class, the struggle to hold the family together becomes greater. The desires of each to be more than their present circumstances will allow is difficult for even the Vicar to deny; and a series of unwise attempts to improve their economic condition result only in further losses. The family dissolution continues when Olivia, the oldest girl, elopes with the profligate Squire Thornhill. In pursuing her (by a false trail carefully laid to deceive him), the Vicar exhausts his health and his resources, finds his son George who has been wandering the continent since the loss of funds to support his education, and sees him off to a commission in the Army. Returning home, he finds Olivia nearly dead in an inn near town; he brings her back with him just in time to see the house burn down.

With the burning down of the house, the Vicar’s family begins its slide from the lower class into the underclass. This is completed when the Vicar is cast in debtor’s prison and his family dispossessed of their lands by the Squire, when the Vicar refuses to withdraw his objection to the Squire’s marrying another woman. The social context is complex and largely irrelevant to this exposition: the key fact is that the Vicar is once more standing on a scruple that many would vacate to the prudential considerations that weigh against his stand. In this case, however, it is more than a matter of his beliefs in some arcane theological controversy; it is his daughter’s honor which is at stake. In taking his stand, the Vicar ends up imprisoned, burned from the fire and ill; Olivia is believed dead, Sophia kidnapped; George (the eldest son) is arrested on a capital charge (for challenging the Squire). The dissolution of the family is complete; though the younger sons remain, the underclass pattern of living disrupted by constant chaos and the seducing influence of lower characters has manifested fully.

However, the Vicar remains faithful, preaching to the prisoners until some actually begin to reform their lives; and it is in this context, on the occasion when the misfortunes have been capped by the news of George’s imprisonment, that the Vicar delivers at last the full message which has been weaving itself throughout Goldsmith’s dialectical narrative. In the message, the Vicar distinguishes between philosophical and religious modes of dealing with the pain in the world:

“philosophy . . . tells us that life is filled with comforts, if we will but enjoy them; . . . that though we unavoidably have miseries here, life is short, and they will soon be over. Thus do these consolations destroy each other; for if life is a place of comfort, its shortness must be misery, and if it be long, our griefs are protracted. Thus philosophy is weak; but religion comforts in an higher strain” (437).

The error, according to the Vicar, lies in the shortness of the view; the exigencies of this life cannot be stretched into anything like a fulfilling pattern. Rather, the Vicar advocates an Irenic view of the world’s troubles: “Man is here . . . fitting up his mind and preparing it for another abode” (437). Of course, the Vicar’s religion has more than a little Platonist philosophy in it; he speaks of the “good man” who “leaves the body and is all a glorious mind” (437). Therefore, “to religion . . . we must hold in every circumstance of life for our truest comfort; for if we are already happy, it is a pleasure to think that we can make the happiness unending; and if we are miserable, it is very consoling to think that there is a place of rest. Thus to the fortunate religion holds out a continuance of bliss, to the wretched a change from pain” (437).

It is at this point that the critique becomes applicable; to steal a march from the Marxists, this sort of religion is the “opiate of the masses” if not carefully tempered. It gives to those who are downcast hope in the hereafter rather than temporal hopes, and directs them to accept the exchange as for their benefit. It gives to those who are wealthy and stay within the bounds of religion no direct connection with the well-being of those around them; after all, their concern is with the way they are presently building toward their eternal happiness. However Goldsmith may shape the plot in The Vicar of Wakefield, teaching such as this tends to dull the daily activity of the poor in acquiring means of betterment and the rich in aiding them.

The dialectic is completed; having uttered the whole truth at last, the Vicar is soon delivered from his trials: he is released from prison, finds Olivia alive and Sophia rescued; George is freed; the family is restored to affluence; and Olivia’s honor is upheld. Sophia and George are married, and all is well. Though there is no causal link between the Vicar’s speech and the resolution which immediately follows, the thematic relation is too obvious; having realized the understanding necessary to his fuller appreciation of Providence, the Vicar is Providentially delivered and restored to that simplicity of life—but now with greater wisdom. Thus does Goldsmith, under the guise of a tale, take the reader through the entire development of a worldview; and thus does the Vicar end by saying, “I had nothing now on this side of the grave to wish for, all my cares were over, my pleasure was unspeakable. It now only remained that my gratitude in good fortune should exceed my former submission in adversity” (461).

Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield and other writings. (New York: Random House, 1955)

Public-Personal

Another Religion Theme

I want to continue this series of bits from my scholarship with a few excerpts that happen to discuss Buddhism (in one case, mostly as a quick stop on the way to Confucianism).

I hasten to point out not only that, being the person I am from the place I grew up in the years I grew up there, my inner sympathy with Buddhist or Confucian thought is a matter of intentional cultivation–cultivation that had just barely begun in the Fall of my senior year as an undergraduate.  I can tell you from a later vantage that half of my generalizations about Buddhism in this early paper are pretty inaccurate, though in a few relevant details they come close to making the point I intend.

Here, then, my undergraduate paper from Dr. Morley’s World Religions class:

THE VIRTUOUS SELF IN BUDDHISM AND CONFUCIANISM:
A COMPARISON IN CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE
A Research Paper
Presented to
Dr. Brian Morley
In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements of
World Religions (BMS 385)
December 2, 1998

The Western mind often conceives of all Eastern thought as a homogenous whole on the model of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is not, however, always so; a number of differing strains of Eastern thought may be contrasted to the Hindu/Buddhist mysticism. Among these variant movements, Confucianism stands in sharp relief against Buddhism; the Confucian concept of the ruler who wishes to “illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom” by encouraging bonds of filial and national piety is utterly antithetical to the Buddhist search for freedom by non-attachment. The Christian will recognize in the altruistic, public ethic of the Confucian a resemblance to the ethics of the Old Testament Scriptures and of Christ.

In the Buddhist view, the human self is illusion; the notion of self-existence is the barrier to understanding of the truth. Only by learning to reject the illusion of selfhood can a man begin to live in such a way as to become conscious only of truth; by being conscious only of truth, that man escapes samsara, the continuing cycle of death and rebirth occasioned by the karmic effects of desire.

Learn to distinguish between Self and Truth. Self is the cause of selfishness and the source of evil; truth cleaves to no self; it is universal and leads to justice and righteousness. Self, that which seems to those who love their self as their being, is not the eternal, the everlasting, the imperishable. Seek not self, but seek the truth (World Library).

The relationship between right action and self in Buddhism is antagonistic; only by learning to negate self does one achieve “justice and righteousness” which lead to non-attachment and, ultimately, to freedom. As Janwillem van de Wettering says,

Buddhism is negative. It will tell you what it is not. When you insist that it must be something it merely allows for an open space, which you can fill in as you like. It is only specific about its method (Comstock 160).

Because of this negativity, Buddhism in practice resolves into either a basic anti-rationalism coupled with various superstitions or a basic rule-based merit system. In either case, its primary ethical focus is on method; and despite appeals to compassion, it remains that compassion is a part of the method to achieve a given end, which is personal freedom. This internal tension–the desire for a compassionate, ethical life in a metaphysical system which must negate compassion itself–is one of the greatest vulnerabilities of Buddhist thought.

In stark contrast is the Confucian emphasis, which begins with the desire to cause moral excellence to abound:

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things (World Library).

Here the end to be achieved is not escape from the world of existence, but an abundance of virtue within it. The accomplishment of virtue begins with a virtuous ruler who knows that public virtue begins with private cultivation of right thoughts. Here Buddhism and Confucianism briefly meet: both agree that private knowledge of truth is the starting point; but where Buddhism seeks truth in negation, Confucianism seeks truth in “the investigation of things.” Where Buddhism sees self as the enemy of truth, Confucianism sees truth as an understanding of the self and of others which leads to sincerity and right relationships.

This concept of right relationships by self-knowledge and cultivation of virtue is reinforced throughout Confucian writings; it forms “the root” of Confucian ethics. Not only is it the ruler’s duty to pursue and exemplify virtue in his personal, family, social and political life, but all must do so together: “From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides” (World Library). As a result of this cultivation of the person, men are rightly related to others through all the various social roles they adopt. Referring to the respected ancient King Wan, Confucius notes that

As a sovereign, he rested in benevolence. As a minister, he rested in reverence. As a son, he rested in filial piety. As a father, he rested in kindness. In communication with his subjects, he rested in good faith.
When each knows his own heart, and by investigation understands the hearts of others, he is able to engage in right action. When men are given to understanding, they are able to trust each other; the result is rest, or reverence for the piety which makes for right relationships. The heart of this self-knowledge which makes for right relationships is integrity:
What is meant by “making the thoughts sincere” is the allowing no self-deception, as when we hate a bad smell, and as when we love what is beautiful. This is called self-enjoyment. Therefore, the superior man must be watchful over himself when he is alone.

It is interesting to note that this philosophy makes ethics an aesthetic phenomenon in a way which transcends specific legalities. The man who makes his thoughts sincere is the man who knows himself for what he is and tolerates nothing which is repugnant to his knowledge of the good. In order to carry this beyond the realm of rule-based morality, Confucius invokes the analogy of the “bad smell” which men recoil from and the “beautiful” which men love. This ethic engages the entire man in an effort to create superior moral worth–not simply the negative ethic of commandment-keeping, nor the self-negation of Buddhism or asceticism, but the moral excellence or virtue idealized by the imperial civilizations, by primitive Christianity and by the warrior cultures of Northern and Western Europe. Such an excellence transcends mere physical prowess or mere pristine purity; it is the positive presence of something worthy of admiration, something which ennobles both those who have it and those with sense enough to revere it. The creation of great art, the winning of noble battles, the defense of an honest man’s cause–these are the virtues which all civilizations not degraded by a low view of God’s image in man have sought to exemplify.

The result of this aesthetic ethic is the impulse of the great to “illustrate illustrious virtue” among the peoples of the world. Despite a general optimism, however, Confucius is not silent as regards the evil in man’s heart:

There is no evil to which the mean man, dwelling retired, will not proceed, but when he sees a superior man, he instantly tries to disguise himself, concealing his evil, and displaying what is good. The other beholds him, as if he saw his heart and reins;-of what use is his disguise? This is an instance of the saying -“What truly is within will be manifested without.” Therefore, the superior man must be watchful over himself when he is alone (World Library).

It is in truth not merely a prudent gesture, nor a means to a personal end–in order for public virtue to be worth anything it must be the honest end of private virtue. Confucius here gives elegant form to the old adage, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and you might even fool most of the people most of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”–or, in the words of Scripture, “Be sure your sin will find you out” (Num 32:23). A man’s reputation may in some points deviate from his true character, but those who are discerning will readily discover the discrepancies; and, generally, all men know at a very basic level whether they are seeing an honest man or a deceitful one.

The emphasis on true personal integrity is just one of several points where the Confucian ethical system coincides closely with Scriptural principles. This should not be surprising, however. Confucius, writing circa 500 B.C., never claimed to be original; rather, he was gleaning his knowledge from the ancients, the great rulers of the earth from times now obscured by millenia of conflict and a century of modern historical revisionism. Another great collection of historical wisdom of the ancients can be found in the works of Solomon, who “set [his] mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven” (Eccl 1:13). In the end, the Preacher attains a simple insight into the basis of all human wisdom: “Fear God and keep His commandments . . . For God will bring every work into judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil” (12:13,14). It is this direct theism which is lacking in Confucian thought; yet the basic patterns are the same, implying a common origin. Personal piety on a very basic level becomes the groundwork for right action and right relationships; and the “hidden” or private things will be judged as well as the public.

It is no surprise, then, when Solomon’s method for inculcating these virtues in his people–with a special focus on his own descendants–is similar to that of Confucius. Indeed, in Ecclesiastes Solomon makes clear that he has collated the wisdom of many into his books of sayings:

In addition to being a wise man, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge; and he pondered, searched out and arranged many proverbs. The Preacher sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly.
The words of wise men are like goads, and masters of these collections are like well-driven nails; they are given by one Shepherd (Eccl 12:9-11).

Much of Solomon’s wealth of collected wisdom has been lost to the ages, but one important collection has been preserved in the book of Proverbs. The variety of sources available to Solomon probably included some of the same sources available to Confucius 400 years later; it is tantalizing to consider whether Confucius may have seen Solomon’s writings (as Socrates almost certainly did, having studied Hebrews). It is known that some of Solomon’s proverbs came from others (as, for instance, Agur and King Lemuel); and older copies of virtually identical passages have been found in Egyptian texts.

If one accepts a recent flood, basing ancient chronology as strictly as possible on the Scriptural geneaologies and tables of the nations, then it becomes apparent why each of these collectors of ancient wisdom–and others like them–have such similar thoughts. Not only are these transcendent human ideals; they are also the core elements of a literature which was ancient even in the days of Confucius, Buddha and Socrates. The wise men, patriarchs and rulers of the second and third millennia B.C. would be to Confucius or Solomon as Plato or Aristotle or Cicero are to modern man, only greater. Not only were these ancients of the ancients great thinkers of past days, but they were the very founders of all the world’s civilization: they were the progenitors of all the races, inventors of languages, makers of laws and writers of songs for all peoples. In the post-diluvian patriarchs the earth’s kingdoms were at their fullest and most glorious; only the great apostasy of Babel prevented their creating the golden age of all humanity. Even so, men seeking the original truth which preceded the darkness which those who “illustrate illustrious virtue” wished to dispel would inevitably turn to the writings of those who had known that truth, and to their successors. It is the very similarities between the ancient writers which best confirms the constant presence of God’s revelation, even where the Bible preserves only a skeleton outline of things long past.

Confucian teaching and Solomon’s proverbs are quite congenial in many ways. The teaching on integrity, on the necessity of private virtue to the effective exercise of public virtue, sound very similar to Solomon’s words, when he says, “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life. Put away from you a deceitful mouth, and put devious lips far from you” (Prov 4:23,24). In addition, the efficacy of public virtue is attested repeatedly; one well-known example follows:

When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when a wicked man rules, people groan. A man who loves wisdom makes his father glad, but he who keeps company with harlots wastes his wealth. The king gives stability to the land by justice, but a man who takes bribes overthrows it . . . The righteous is concerned for the rights of the poor, the wicked does not understand such concern . . . If a ruler pays attention to falsehood, all his ministers become wicked . . . If a king judges the poor with truth, His throne will be established forever . . . Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is he who keeps the law (Prov 29:2-18).

on Literature, Public-Personal

An Inchoate Apocalyptic Aesthetic

Here’s one from quite some time ago–my junior year at The Master’s College, in fact. I’m going to offer it in as near to its “student paper” form as possible. Some of the very sketchy analysis here formed the basis for both my pursuit of Nineteenth Century Poetry as a field and my eschatologically-oriented approach to H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction in my master’s thesis.

Yes, at this stage I reflexively lumped all “seems evolutionary” lines of reasoning in the “reject” basket, much like at this point in my thinking “seems Catholic” would have been a reason to reject something. We are shaped by many things before we are fully formed, friends!

 

Peter G. Epps
Victorian Age
Dr. Pilkey
5/7/98
Tennyson’s Forward Glance

In Memoriam A.H.H. opens on a note of bleary agnostic resignation, but ends on a nearly apocalyptic affirmation of the glory of God’s rule of creation. In so doing, Tennyson reflects the fact that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” but that “the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of a faith unfeigned.” Therefore, while his beginning and end both acknowledge the superiority of God and the rightness of his goals, the beginning reflects the fearful insipidity of those who have not come to a right knowledge of God. The conclusion, on the other hand, reflects a fuller understanding of and submission to God’s ability to guide the universe.

The opening lines state flatly Tennyson’s agnostic view of God’s work, where he speaks of a God “Whom we, that have not seen thy face,\by faith, and faith alone embrace,\Believing where we cannot prove.” Further, Tennyson seems able only to acknowledge that God’s arbitrary crushing of man is accompanied by a like arbitrary raising of him; he seems unable to sense any purpose in this. Fear is the key here; it is precisely a lack of faith that makes it so necessary to constantly affirm one’s faith. That which faith truly apperceives is already seen as certain; it is that which one doubts that one must attempt to consciously affirm by faith. It is this state, however, of fearing the consequences of either accepting or rejecting the truth, that allows the Spirit fertile ground to work in men’s lives. In Tennyson’s case, it seems that such a work occurred on some level.

Tennyson acknowledges the need of such a work when he says,

    We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

The constant cry for forgiveness and the almost cringing tone is indicative of one who has not learned confidence in the love and promises of God, who still believes that God is too far beyond human thought to make any ethical standard applicable, or any final understanding possible.

Over the course of the work, however, Tennyson achieves a number of moments of clarity; the finest is in his epilogue. In closing, Tennyson speaks in glowing terms of a final marriage, one reserved for the end of time, which he sees typified in his sister’s marriage. The language is brilliant and full of hope, and the climax comes at the very last:

A soul shall draw from out the vast
And strike his being into bounds,

And, moved thro' life of lower phase,
Result in man, be born and think,
And act and love, a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.

Of course, it cannot be ignored that Tennyson is powerfully influenced by the growing evolutionary consensus of his day; nor can it be supposed that he had an unclouded vision of the future state. At the same time, there is a powerful image in these lines of the coming man—that which has been missing from the agnostic piety of the Christianity to which Tennyson weakly appealed in his opening lines. It is the same appeal as that which Nietzsche makes when he postulates Ubermensch, the same as the appeal of the Marxist utopian fantasies of the great socialist worker. It is the lost Christian hope of the race which God has spanned time and space to collect, of those whose faith has made them whole by their apprehension of the grace of God in Christ. In the end, it is the hope of the future Sons of God which Tennyson’s poetic fervor envisions; it is the Bride of Christ who meets the Lamb face to face for the first time who exclaims, “Worthy!” in his lines. Tennyson’s hope which subsumes his grief is the knowledge that somehow, in some way, God will raise men above their present pitiful state and make them one with His divine presence in their midst. Recognizing this, Tennyson shakes of his languor and exclaims, affirming in the feast his pleasure and the sense of Hallam’s final glorification.

“For by Him, and through Him and to Him are all things; to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Quotables

A Blast from the Past

OK, so in going through old docs, I found a small document called “MISC.TXT” and had to see what I’d left in such an odd little file. What I found was a transcript of a bunch of material from some of my earliest journals (started in my middle teens). In fact, some of the material in those journals, including at least a few of the items that follows, were first jotted on school book covers or clipped for my bulletin boards and later transcribed at least twice.

Anyway, if you really want to know a few of the things I thought were pellucid utterances that got at the heart of reality in my angsty teen years, here you go. I spared you the bad poem from the top of the page. You’re welcome.

If we will not die for freedom, we will die of slavery.

The hour of departure has arrived,
and we go our ways–
I to die,
and you to live.
Which is better, God only knows.

The Apology of Socrates

The duty of government is to defend the freedom of all of its citizens by
enforcing justice.

There is a limit, however, at which tolerance ceases to be a virtue.

Edmund Burke

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
for loan oft loses both itself and friend.

Shakespeare: Pollonius’ advice to Laertes; Hamlet

Depression is the hangover after a pity party.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.

Emerson

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a
favored few booted and spurred, by the grace of God.

Jefferson

Equal and exact justice to all men … freedom of religion, freedom of the
press, freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial
by juries impartially selected– these form the bright constellation which has
gone before us.

Jefferson

Yes, the un-cited ones are what I believe to by my own original apothegms. I shall probably rest uneasy in my grave, one day, until at least one of these has been popularly attributed to Churchill, Lincoln, Disraeli, la Rochefoucauld, or Talleyrand.

Credo, on Theology, Public-Personal

Timely Background Information

A lot of folks are not familiar with canon law, but knowing its background and grounding assumptions can really help you sift confusing matters:

THE OBLIGATIONS AND RIGHTS OF ALL THE CHRISTIAN FAITHFUL (Cann. 208 – 223)

Can. 208 From their rebirth in Christ, there exists among all the Christian faithful a true equality regarding dignity and action by which they all cooperate in the building up of the Body of Christ according to each one’s own condition and function.

Can. 209 §1. The Christian faithful, even in their own manner of acting, are always obliged to maintain communion with the Church.
§2. With great diligence they are to fulfill the duties which they owe to the universal Church and the particular church to which they belong according to the prescripts of the law.

Can. 210 All the Christian faithful must direct their efforts to lead a holy life and to promote the growth of the Church and its continual sanctification, according to their own condition.

Can. 211 All the Christian faithful have the duty and right to work so that the divine message of salvation more and more reaches all people in every age and in every land.

Can. 212 §1. Conscious of their own responsibility, the Christian faithful are bound to follow with Christian obedience those things which the sacred pastors, inasmuch as they represent Christ, declare as teachers of the faith or establish as rulers of the Church.
§2. The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires.
§3. According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

Can. 213 The Christian faithful have the right to receive assistance from the sacred pastors out of the spiritual goods of the Church, especially the word of God and the sacraments.

Can. 214 The Christian faithful have the right to worship God according to the prescripts of their own rite approved by the legitimate pastors of the Church and to follow their own form of spiritual life so long as it is consonant with the doctrine of the Church.

Can. 215 The Christian faithful are at liberty freely to found and direct associations for purposes of charity or piety or for the promotion of the Christian vocation in the world and to hold meetings for the common pursuit of these purposes.

Can. 216 Since they participate in the mission of the Church, all the Christian faithful have the right to promote or sustain apostolic action even by their own undertakings, according to their own state and condition. Nevertheless, no undertaking is to claim the name Catholic without the consent of competent ecclesiastical authority.

Can. 217 Since they are called by baptism to lead a life in keeping with the teaching of the gospel, the Christian faithful have the right to a Christian education by which they are to be instructed properly to strive for the maturity of the human person and at the same time to know and live the mystery of salvation.

Can. 218 Those engaged in the sacred disciplines have a just freedom of inquiry and of expressing their opinion prudently on those matters in which they possess expertise, while observing the submission due to the magisterium of the Church.

Can. 219 All the Christian faithful have the right to be free from any kind of coercion in choosing a state of life.

(source: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__PU.HTM)

on Literature, Public-Personal

From my First Published Article

In my first year in graduate school at Baylor University, I had the pleasure of taking a seminar in Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry with Dr. Mairi Rennie, of Oxford, visiting head of the Armstrong Browning Library.  Based on her suggestions, I extended and finished my seminar paper, which was published in Studies in Browning and His Circle the following year.

I’ve selected an excerpt which I am pleased with, in its working with texts and the insight it helps to establish (one I capitalize on later in the paper), and also—quite intentionally—one that reflects my prejudice, at the time, about “Romanism.”  I will point out that what I say in this excerpt is definitely true of Robert Browning’s attitude toward the Catholic Church:  he was reputedly a vehement anti-Catholic through much of his life, and had been reared in a radical dissenting sect (developing such an infatuation with the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley in adolescence that he declared himself an atheist for a couple years).  You will not fail to notice, though, that at the time I originally wrote this I reflexively adopted the same perspective.  I am most grateful that I have been afforded the time and gracious opportunity to thoroughly reverse that attitude!

Here, then, an excerpt from “Tipping the Scales:  Contextual Clues in Bishop Blougram’s Apology”:

“Healthy vehemence.”  The first issue in unravelling Blougram is, of course, its dramatic form.  Whether Browning’s use of the dramatic form is intended to insure an ultimate relativity of perspective or to engage the reader in an active, rather than passive, process of understanding, its immediate effect is to obscure whatever “truths” the poem may convey behind the limited and possibly suspect viewpoint of an artificial character.  The speaker’s coloring of the facts of experience will, of course, depend on his reactions to that experience.  It is especially interesting, then, that the narrator of the epilogue in Blougram characterizes Gigadibs’ final reaction to his dinner with Blougram as “healthy vehemence.”  The idea of “health” becomes a key reason to believe that it is the later Gigadibs of the epilogue, not the early Gigadibs seen through Blougram’s eyes, nor Blougram himself, that is the intended protagonist of Blougram.

The image of “health” recurs in a later poem of Browning’s, “Confessions.”  In this brief poem, a dying man recounts the view of life he derives from the memory of a secret love affair carried on in his youth.  The ending, “How sad and bad and mad it was– / But then, how it was sweet!” is a typical Browning affirmation of the beauties of love when acted on courageously.  The most intriguing image in the poem, however, comes in a passing phrase uttered by the speaker:  “is the curtain blue / Or green to a healthy eye?”  The speaker then gives his own perspective:  “To mine . . . Blue.”  The question and answer provide a key example of Browning’s use of literary and Biblical contexts.

The question concerning “blue or green” is a reference to the literal coloring of perception caused by jaundice.  More specifically, it echoes the line “all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye” from Pope’s Essay on Criticism.  A glance at the passage in which this line appears reveals the exquisite craftsmanship of the allusion:  Pope is defending the truly original poet against overzealous critics, and says,

Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice,
Will needs mistake an author into vice;
All seems infected that the infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

The plea, of course, applies equally well to the words of the dying man, whose description of the forbidden love affair gives the reader no real reason to believe it was an immoral encounter, and to Browning himself, whose critics persistently misread him.  The important statement, however, for both the dying man and (by implication from Pope’s context) the poet, is “To mine, it serves for the old June weather / Blue above lane and wall.”  The yellow cast of jaundiced perception would make the curtain appear green, but the speaker’s vision is healthy:  he sees blue.  It is those who censure him that are “infected” and “jaundiced.”

The charge of infected perception invokes a familiar Biblical context as well.  Paul, defending the believer’s liberty against external laws, says, “Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure.”  As is the case with Pope’s attack on “scandalously nice” critics, so Paul’s warning about fastidious religionists reverts the charge of immorality on those who do not have a fundamentally healthy perspective.  In this context, the dying man speaking to his minister (“reverend sir”) is able to level a substantial critique against superficial moralisms; not only are they the product of a “jaundiced eye,” but they reflect a heart that is “defiled and unbelieving.”

The identification of “healthy vehemence” with spiritual and mental clarity also occurs in Browning’s paradigmatic religious poem, Christmas Eve.  In the poem, the speaker moves through four major viewpoints:  the Zionist chapel, his own initial position, Roman Catholicism, and higher criticism.  In the end, the speaker rejects the mere dogma of Romanism and the mere data of criticism in favor of the most vehement expression of love for God, that of the Zionist chapel.  The transformation of the speaker’s perspective, though, is not a mere intellectual assent or mystical abnegation of self:  it is a healing.  While the speaker “cannot bid / the world admit [God] stooped to heal / My soul,” he is certain that (like Paul and Mary Magdalene) “he named my name”; like the woman in Matthew 9:20-22, he leaps out to seize “the hem of the vesture” for healing and springs “at a passionate bound” back into the chapel.  Having been healed, he is now able to make the affirmation “I choose here!”

The image of health in Blougram, then, should be taken as a serious indication of perspective.  Indeed, Blougram himself argues from the premise that health equates with affirmation when he asserts that the early Gigadibs’ skepticism must force him to “keep [his] bed, / Abstain from healthy acts that prove [him] a man” in order to avoid making any assumptions.  The argument is sound as far as it goes; Gigadibs’ apparent refusal to have any faith if he can’t have all faith is inconsistent with his own actions.  Blougram is more consistent:  he avoids such “healthy acts” as those represented by Napoleon and Shakespeare because he prefers to dine, / Sleep, read and chat in quiet.”  However, as the later Gigadibs’ reaction of “sudden healthy vehemence” illustrates, Blougram’s self-justification undermines itself by demonstrating that he suffers from a “jaundiced eye” because he is “defiled and unbelieving.”

on Theology, Public-Personal

Learning by Contraries

So let me dig back to 1999 for the first bit of Past Scholarship to post, here.

I will not be posting any links for this paper, and you won’t find it on any of my profiles or on my site (though if you search the Internet Archive you can find a *reference* to it).  I deliberately expurgated this document once I had matured enough to realize just how badly I had wandered into rank heresy in the middle of my explorations and controversies as I finished college.  This paper was originally titled “The Origin of Original Sin,” and was an attack on the Reformed understanding of Total Depravity that, in a terrible fit of overzealous argumentation, attempted to both attack that view as “too Catholic” and to demonstrate that there had been a swerve away from the true teaching that led to Augustine’s view of the subject.

As many of you will know was quite inevitable, I ended up having to start my criticism of what I mistakenly viewed as “corruption” in Church teaching with Justin Martyr, who was just barely too young to have known the last of Jesus’ own Apostles; and I more-or-less implicated almost all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church that I knew of in the “corruption.”  Somewhere in that process, someone less steeped in an anti-Catholic tradition might have realized that an interpretation of the development of Christian doctrine that supposed the Church was almost wholly overtaken in serious error on chief points of faith well before the canon of Scripture was thoroughly stabilized–before the Trinity and the relationship of Christ’s human and divine natures could be clearly defined–proved far, far too much.

In fact, eventually I came to see that this was too audacious–and, finally, that it was self-refuting. My return to a concern for confessional orthodoxy from this brief but intense period of error and excess took only a couple of years; my ability to move away from the dilemma of choosing one error or another on these matters, however, took longer to develop. My doctoral dissertation, completed in 2009, contains in part an extended meditation on original sin that is the recantation of these errors and the completion of the process of understanding that began with this Spring 1999 Independent Study and the deep dive into the Fathers that it occasioned.

Concilio_Trento_Museo_Buonconsiglio.jpg

I’ve carefully chosen an excerpt that does show my interaction with Scripture and my discomfort with what I understood of Reformed theology (which at that point was mostly American conservative evangelicalism overtaken by Dordtian Calvinism, the “TULIP” variety). I have quite deliberately avoided passages which contain obvious heresies, because there is simply no point in letting those arguments surface.

Here, then, a brief selection from “The Origin of Original Sin,” a polemical historical theology work of 100+ pages completed for an Independent Study course with Dr. Brian Morley at The Master’s College:

Chapter six of Genesis records the corruption of the antediluvian civilization. As humanity multiplied and those who walked with God (“sons of God”) intermarried with others, “the LORD said, ‘My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh'” (3). God here identifies the fact that sinful humanity is rapidly effacing the influence of His Spirit.[An alternate reading clarifies the action here: “the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not rule in man forever, in his going astray he is flesh” (NAS Gen 3:3 note) (emphasis added).] In keeping with His promise of an ultimate defeat for the serpent and a Redeemer for man, God averted the disaster of an total suppression of truth by destroying all humanity except righteous Noah, who “found favor in the eyes of the LORD” (8). By the time God spoke to Noah, He had allowed sin to run to its extremity: verse five records that “the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Had Noah not been “a righteous man, blameless in his time,” the entirety of creation would have been annihilated (6-9). This passage provides dramatic testimony to the universal sinfulness of mankind, and for the pervasive effects of Adam’s sin. Once again, however, it must be noted that nothing in the passage implies that the sins of the antediluvian world were an inevitable result of Adam’s sin. In fact, Enoch and Noah are identified, without prelude, as persons who “walked with God” (5:22, 6:9). Later Scripture testimony will clarify that even these men did sin, and that it was “by faith” that they were righteous (Heb 11:5-7). For now, it is sufficient to realize that their righteousness and daily walk with God are recorded about them as facts in their own right long before theories of imputation became popular.

In chapter fifteen of Genesis, the Lord (through Moses) records a simple statement which forms the cornerstone of Biblical soteriology. Paul and James center their demonstrations of man’s responsibility in salvation on the declaration that Abraham “believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness” (6). While Paul’s use of this verse in the Epistle to the Romans has made it a primary source of imputation theory, it should be noted that here, in its actual context, it is simply a statement of fact. God accounted Abraham’s faith as righteousness. Paul quotes this in the course of a proof that justification is by faith, apart from works of the Law. James quotes it in the course of a demonstration that faith is not passive but active in man—and that true faith produces a moral change which does eventuate in right action. In light of the teaching that the reckoning here is an artificial process, God recording Christ’s merit in the place of Abraham’s, it should be observed that there is no reason to believe that a just and truthful God keeps a double set of books. If God accounts faith in His promises as righteousness, that accounting must be intrinsically true; any difficulties in interpretation of later teaching must not be allowed to vitiate this premise.

One passage frequently used to bolster the Reformed view of original sin is a statement from the book of Job that “man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward” (5:7). Indeed, this passage does appear to bear on this view of man and God. Eliphaz claims to have heard in a vision, “Can mankind be just before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker?” (4:17) The ensuing revelation portrays God as arbitrary and beyond all moral standards, and man as too lowly to understand God’s purposes. Eliphaz continues in this vein on his own, arguing that suffering is universal and that God reduces man to helplessness before He will help him. Job is given no solution except to hope that God will finish inflicting pain on him and begin to bless him again. That this is all in accord with the Reformed view of man’s total inability and God’s absolute and arbitrary sovereignty must be admitted; that it is truth must be denied, based on the context. This is a recording of a false teaching arrived at on the basis of a vision that is at best a delusion; quite probably, it is in fact a demonic deception. Eliphaz relates the source of his insight as follows:

Now a word was brought to me stealthily, And my ear received a whisper of it. Amid disquieting thoughts from the visions of the night, When deep sleep falls on men, Dread came upon me, and trembling, And made all my bones shake. Then a spirit passed by my face; The hair of my flesh bristled up. It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance; A form was before my eyes; There was silence, then I heard a voice (4:12-16) (emphasis added).

Certainly, if one were to read this in a neutral context one would not class this as at all related to divine revelation; while God has used visions, there is no record of God revealing doctrine through nightmares! Some would appeal to the fact that Isaiah was troubled and trembled at the presence of God (Is 6:5). This can be readily dismissed, however; Eliphaz and his two friends are denounced as false teachers in the forty-second chapter of Job, where God says,

My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right as my servant Job has . . . and My servant Job will pray for you . . . that I may not do with you [according to your] folly, because you have not spoken of Me what is right (7, 8).

Whatever the source of Eliphaz’s vision, it was not divine. The teaching he expounds so clearly, of the helplessness of man before the arbitrary sovereignty of God, is identified as falsehood by God Himself.

Public-Personal

Launching a new series of posts

I’m going to start putting out posts that are segments of my scholarly work from the past twenty years or so, including even a few snippets from undergrad papers.  It occurs to me that one result of the pace of life I’ve lived, and the number of places I’ve been, is that almost no one in my everyday life has any significant exposure to what I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to study, learn, and teach.  When I sketch in what has changed in my thinking, or try to explain my hesitation about someone else’s approach to an idea or situation, I have noticed that I often find myself ransacking the loose ends of two decades of thought looking for a thread to pull–but that is why I have written, and why I write.  To create a record.

So I’ll put these out there, and I’ll make one of my rare uses of the “Tag” feature on the blog to mark these as Past Scholarship.  Where possible, I’ll link to resources or major sources of research (I apologize that documentation may be incomplete in some cases, particularly where I gave a talk and may not have written a proper Works Cited page–nothing that could not be firmed up for publication in a more formal setting).  I hope you’ll enjoy–and criticize.