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All knowing is adversely affected by the fall, yet people can—under the right conditions—attain reasonable beliefs on the things that matter most.

(Doug Groothuis, “The Christian Worldview in Classical Philosophical Categories“)

True enough. But “the right conditions” remain critical, and open to interpretation in lieu of an eschatological realization: crucial, a crux not merely of interpretation.

Coleridge’s problems did not only come from his laudanum addiction. Look at one of the poems we most obviously identify with the ill-understood effects of withdrawal, and see if you cannot see here in the beginning the reason Coleridge woke from sleep with terrors–or, rather, as those pangs were probably drug-related, why his reaction was a poem which ended with the plaintive “But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? / To be beloved is all I need, / And whom I love, I love indeed.”

His problem was hard enough; his efforts to compose himself, however, were seriously defective:

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees ;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication ;
A sense o’er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Pains of Sleep“)

“My spirit I to Love compose.” The “I” that is mine, the “spirit I” and not the gross one, the one that may be “compose[d]” by the efforts of the Imagination, “composed” by such efforts “to Love” as the concord of Will (which directs the Imagination) and Reason (which Coleridge cannot but identify with the Spirit speaking within “My spirit”) called Faith (conducing always to Love wholly thus defined), a concord identical with the indifference among “in me” and “round me” and “every where” that the “Eternal Strength and Wisdom” perdure in being. . . .

Yet do we not decompose when we see such action to “compose”? Read the rest of this entry »

Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest.
(Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking“)

then, to think “the culture” matters

or signifies

or has substance

or is

Pretty much everything in this letter, from the very end of The Count of Monte Cristo (the book, not the movie, which has half the characters and less of the plot), is philosophically false; and yet, in a younger year, this letter did more for me to mark the nature of our hope, through evil times, than many another, more useful thing. Dantes is, of course, more devil than God; and yet we hope our own visions are reflected more accurately in the ending, in the “Wait and Hope,” than in the course of the Dumas novel.

My Dear Maximilian, –

There is a felucca for you at anchor. Jacopo will carry you to Leghorn, where Monsieur Noirtier awaits his granddaughter, whom he wishes to bless before you lead her to the altar. All that is in this grotto, my friend, my house in the Champs Elysees, and my chateau at Treport, are the marriage gifts bestowed by Edmond Dantes upon the son of his old master, Morrel. Mademoiselle de Villefort will share them with you; for I entreat her to give to the poor the immense fortune reverting to her from her father, now a madman, and her brother who died last September with his mother. Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man, who like Satan thought himself for an instant equal to God, but who now acknowledges with Christian humility that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom. Perhaps those prayers may soften the remorse he feels in his heart. As for you, Morrel, this is the secret of my conduct towards you.

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.

Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words, — `Wait and hope.’ Your friend,

Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo.

I said philosophically false–and yet, on a very strict construction of “in the world,” the reduction of all to difference et ne plus ultra does not entirely miss the mark, either.

We choose between summum nihil est and consummatum est! daily, and in person; the person of Christ.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall:
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
(Pope, Essay on Man)

A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
(Pope, Essay on Criticism)