Category Archives: Pantheism

When the artist Matthew Wong was just starting his painting practice, in 2013, he said in an interview that he had no fixed schedule for going about his workwith one exception. The only thing that takes place at the same time every day is when I get out of bed, I have to do an ink drawing before doing anything else, such as brushing my teeth or eating, Wong told the website Studio Critical. He sometimes experimented in a bathroom at his familys Hong Kong home, he said later, randomly pouring ink onto pagessmashing them togetherhoping something interesting was going to come out of it.

Wong kept making inventive ink drawings in the ensuing years, but it was his luminous oil paintingsvibrant, mysterious, melancholy landscapesthat would win him attention, and make him one of the signal artists of the decade. (Collectors now compete fiercely for them.) By the time Wong died in 2019, at 35, by suicide, he had created some 1,000 paintings and drawings. (His New York gallery, Karma, is readying a catalogue raisonn.) Only a fraction of that material has been seen publicly, and his ink works remain little known. However, that may be about to change.

On May 5, Cheim & Read will open an exhibition focused on Wongs efforts in that unforgiving mediumjust ink, water, and rice paperat its Chelsea gallery, which it shuttered in 2019 and leased out, moving to the Upper East Side. Matthew Wong: Footprints in the Wind, Ink Drawings 20132017 includes 24 pieces that have never before been exhibited. Its a collaboration with the Matthew Wong Foundation, a nonprofit founded by the Toronto-born artists parents, Monita and Raymond Wong, to preserve his legacy and pursue philanthropic work. Its mission is currently being finalized.

Wong famously honed his artistic approach in libraries and onlinehe maintained a blog, where he posted photos of some of the drawings in the upcoming show, and he liked to talk art on Facebook. Thats how John Cheim (Cheim & Reads cofounder) first got to know him. In 2015, Matthew and his mother Monita came to visit me in New York for the first time and brought along a tube of large black ink drawings, Cheim said in an email. Matthew was a striking presencetall, handsome, a shock of black hair and large black eyeglasses, all carefully considered. I found the ink drawings to be singular, intense. He bought one from the unknown artist, and they kept their conversations going.

As with Wongs alluring oils, his ink works invite comparisons to some giant names while still being unmistakably his own. They have the swirling energy of a Charles Burchfield, the dense, hypnotic patterning of a Yayoi Kusama, and the uncanny eeriness of a Ralph Albert Blakelock. Without the presence of color, they help reveal how Wong built up his beguiling canvases. In The Watcher (2017), hundreds of quick, short lines radiate from a giant sun as an enigmatic bird perches atop a rock, one eye staring out of the picture. In an untitled 2015 forest scene, at least three figures may or may not be looming amid a virtuosic array of diverse marks. There is always a lot to take in.

Last year, Wongs parents gave a sprawling ink 2016 workmore than six feet tall (and exhilarating even as a tiny digital image)to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Suggesting a free-floating world within another world, it is potently surreal, and yet tender and intimate in the way it emerges from just simple brushstrokes: black liquid on white paper. It is as if you can feel the particles in the air, Cheim said of Wongs ink works. The space between the interior and the exterior dissolvesa kind of psychological pantheism presents itself.

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Matthew Wong Ink Works, Never Before Exhibited, Will Alight in New York - ARTnews

A double-blind research study is one in which both the researchers and the participants are in the dark: since no one knows who is receiving the drugs and who the placebos, theres less risk of the result being skewed by prior knowledge. In an ideal world, the double-blind principle also holds good for fiction: every novel is a thought experiment with an unpredictable outcome. The difficulty a double-bind rather than double-blind is that prior knowledge invariably plays a part: the novelist knows what readers are hoping for, and the blurb and the dust jacket tell them what to expect.

What defined Edward St Aubyns quintet of Patrick Melrose novels was their bitter comedy and sadistic wit, and though his two subsequent novels (one a satire on literary prizes, the other a reworking of King Lear) were attempts to alter the template, their tone remained much the same. Double Blind opens in unfamiliar territory, as an earnest, unworldly young botanist called Francis wanders through a country estate, Howorth, where he lives off-grid and is employed as part of a wilding project. Seemingly purged of irony, the tone is more DH Lawrence than Evelyn Waugh and almost rapturous in its pantheism (He felt the life around him and the life inside him flowing into each other). Franciss pure-mindedness extends even to his drug-taking, magic mushrooms being his hallucinogen of choice: How could pharmaceutical companies, messing about for the last few decades, hope to compete with the expertise of fungi. Where Patrick Melroses trauma was childhood abuse and neglect, for Francis its abuse and neglect of the planet, for which a new interconnectedness with nature is the only cure.

Hes not the only one looking to build a brave new world. Theres his girlfriend Olivia, a biologist on the verge of publishing her first book, and her best friend Lucy, newly back in the UK to head up Digitas, the company founded by a rapacious venture capitalist called Hunter, who has also roped in his fellow Princeton alumnus Saul, now a professor of chemical engineering, artificial intelligence and the realisation of human potential. Whether from noble, careerist or mercenary motives, all of them are engaged in the advancement of human knowledge as indeed are Olivias adoptive parents, who are psychoanalysts.

The connections dont end there. An opponent of genetic fundamentalism, Olivia is exasperated that so much effort and money has gone to waste on the search for missing heritability and whether, say, theres a candidate gene for schizophrenia. As it happens, her father Martins latest patient is a schizophrenic called Sebastian, who like Olivia was adopted and who Martin comes to believe is probably her brother. The reader suspects so, too, since they share their names with two characters coupled together in Twelfth Night. And is it just chance, or a knowing literary reference, that the neurosurgeon who treats Lucy, when shes diagnosed with a brain tumour, is called McEwan (a neurosurgeon having been the central figure in Ian McEwans novel Saturday)?

Connections and coincidences drive the plot of Double Blind and inheritance is a recurrent motif. But its the connection (or lack of connection) between different scientific disciplines and the explanatory gap between experiment and experience that preoccupy the cast of talking heads. The entrepreneurial Hunter wants science to be a pyramid, with a unified vision of the world. Saul tells him its impossible, that science is an archipelago of specialisms with no bridges in between: Nothing they discover at CERN is going to shed light on EO Wilsons seminal account of life in an ant colony, let alone the other way round. The two of them have to get stoned together for the prospect of creating a single super-mind of top scientists to seem attainable.

With his addictions, risk-taking and manic energy, Hunter is the closest the novel comes to introducing a Patrick Melrose figure someone so ferociously driven and fucked-up as to dominate proceedings. In one passage he recalls an episode from childhood, when in an effort to solve a Zeno-like paradox how could someone sit in the back seat of a car travelling at 90 miles an hour and yet be motionless? he forced his parents to pull over on the hard shoulder of a motorway while he paced up and down beside the rushing traffic. Three decades on, despite his extravagant drug-taking and the lows that follow (he felt as if a mafia enforcer had thrown him out of a helicopter into a rat-infested landfill site, among shards of broken china and twisted metal, cushioned only by illegal hospital waste and bulging diapers), hes still intellectually curious part of a super-rich enclave, but with ties to scientists labouring away in academia, with its oppressive sociology of funding and peer review and publication and profit.

Its bold of St Aubyn to write a novel thats so much about science and about so much science: physics, genetics, epigenetics, botany, soil science, quantum mechanics, psychiatry, microbiology, neuroscience, immunotherapy and evolutionary theory (theology, too, if it counts). Science is mostly common sense with a lot of uncommon words snapping at its heels, one character suggests, but St Aubyn allows the uncommon words to stand: the level of resolution of these computational artefacts depended on voxels; in the extreme case of 22q11.2 deletion syndrome there were one hundred and eighty clinical associations. The science isnt smuggled in by way of extracts from learned papers; its there in the mindset of the characters (he was hearing exciting stuff about improved delivery systems for the health benefits of infrared light on mitochondrial cells) or how they speak: We call it personal haptic gap closure therapy, or PHGCT, said Hunter sagely.

Divided into three parts, and moving between Sussex, London, California and the south of France, the novel isnt lacking in narrative momentum. And as it unfolds, the tone shifts back towards the caustic satire of the Melrose novels. But too many passages consist of characters cataloguing what they know or hope to profit from. Its only Francis who gets his hands dirty, and he goes about his task itemising species and collecting soil samples in such a state of reverie (highlighted in the text by Sebaldian paragraphlessness) that you start to wonder how efficient he can be.

His occupation of the moral high ground is eventually put to the test when a dea ex machina shows up in the shape of Hope, a polyamorous Californian with a sinisterly flexible body, immense wealth (My family made a fortune in pretzels and Im laundering the money with philanthropy) and a desire to pierce Franciss ethical armour. What she sees in him is a mystery but what shes offering not just her body but the chance to make a difference in the Amazon is deeply tempting, even if it means abandoning Olivia, now heavily pregnant.

The temptation takes place at a London party, the kind of set piece we associate with St Aubyn, when he brings all his characters together and plays them off against each other. Theres a similarly swanky party earlier, as if he cant get away from his comfort zone. Its not through lack of effort and he cant be blamed for wrestling with issues he clearly cares about; ideas matter and so does the novel of ideas. If only the characters werent so cerebral and the prose wasnt so crammed with data. When you find yourself feeling grateful for phrases such as Olivia was chopping the vegetables or Lucy lay on the sofa you realise the experiment hasnt come off.

Double Blind is published by Harvill (18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn review in pursuit of knowledge - The Guardian

A response to some bad advice given by theologian Father Ermes Ronchi in a Vatican News interview

Catholics began Lent with a sacramental: the imposition of ashes. Ashes remind us of our mortality. The traditional formula for their imposition is, Remember man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The blessing of the ashes reiterates their symbolic value, that we are dust. Pardon our sins . The nexus between sin and death is clear. The need for repentance is accented. Death has a peculiar quality to focus the mind on the essentials.

One would think that, after a year when the deaths of nearly two and a half million people worldwide had some relation to COVID-19, we might start talking about mortality. Apparently, I am deluded.

Vatican News Feb. 16 highlighted an interview with a Servite theologian, Father Ermes Ronchi. Father Ronchi expatiates, among other things, on the meaning of [ashes] today (all translations mine).

According to Father Ronchi in a life attacked and crucified by the pandemic, ones gaze must be turned not so much to mortification as vivification, not fixated on the residue of existence but the fullness awaiting us.

Ronchi goes on to call ashes a symbol of inclusion that remind him of the natural rhythm of things, like the peasant who scattered ashes in his springtime field to make it more fertile.

Honestly, what is he talking about?

Ill admit Im no farmer, but charred carbon from the fireplace seems hardly the fertilizer most farmers would use especially raw to make the earth more fertile. You might have to mix those ashes with other compost to keep the raw residue from leaching too much lye and salts. The kind of trees you burned also affects the nutrient value. But some simplistic vision of the sower running through the fields as he sings, we plough the fields and scatter is probably more a library-bound theologians vision of organic sugar plums dancing in his head.

Why am I attacking Father Ronchis vision? Three reasons:

First, we need to talk about mortality in the liturgy. If you have to change the topic on Ash Wednesday from mortification to vivification, when are you going to talk about the reality of death? Post-Vatican II liturgy has been revised as if the Parousia has come and death no longer has its sting. Tell that to somebody facing death and the loved ones they have left behind. Revelation 21:4 assures us that, at the consummation of all things, God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, nor shall there be mourning or crying. Note the future tense.

But too often, our liturgies act as if the Second Coming has already come. Americans celebrate funeral Masses in white vestments (happily, many Europeans still use purple). The summation of a lifetime of Ash Wednesdays the rite of putting dirt on a coffin with the formula, Remember man that you are dust has disappeared. In Europe, mourners generally remain at the graveside until the casket is interred. In America, we cover the graves mud with Astro-turf, substitute carnations for earth, and everybody then disappears, leaving burial to the gravediggers. The sacramental sound of burial (listen to the burial scene in Dr. Zhivago, starting at 02:04) truly reminds all those present, remember, man, that you are dust . And, as French philosopher Damien Le Guay points out, we have utterly lost a social period of mourning grief is privatized while the world just moves on.

Father Ronchis excision of mortality and the penitential aspect from Ash Wednesday does no one a service, pastoral or otherwise, except by alienating the faithful from reality and its salutary effects on penance and conversion.

Second, Father Ronchi borders on the pantheistic. That man returns to the dust from which he was created (dust subsequently elevated by the infusion of a divinely-created soul) does not diminish the fact that this dust has until now been the Temple of the Holy Spirit. In a Church that now also recycles its temples by closing and selling them off, perhaps that action is not so shocking. It should be.

Father Ronchi cannot be oblivious to the fact that increasing numbers of people begrudge a human being two meters of ground in which to lie. I am not against green burial, in the sense of not embalming a body and using natural elements, like wood, to let decomposition occur. That what how centuries of Catholics were buried.

But there are lots of people wanting to hurry your carbon footprint along. From alkaline hydrolosis to dissolve the body into a fluid run-off to adding elements to accelerate decomposition so your humus can be shoveled into a row of vines [or] the vegetable garden, the uniqueness of the human body as the object of divine indwelling is in practice denied. (See here and here.)

Human flesh was so loved by God that he sent his Son to assume it. Jesus assumed his Mother to heaven so that corruption would not affect her when she fell asleep. She was not 5-10-10 rose food.

Third, Father Ronchis scattering in fact encourages one of the greatest abuses associated with cremation: scattering ashes. Its bad enough that cremation, which the Holy See permitted not as an equal alternative to burial but as a concession to limited land availability in certain circumstances where an anti-Christian motivation did not motivate it, has become commonplace even among Catholics. In 2016, the Holy See issued an Instruction on cremation that specifically prohibits scattering ashes. Part of the reason it prohibits that practice is that every appearance of pantheism, naturalism, or nihilism be avoided (No. 7).

Apparently, our Servite theologian didnt get the memo.

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How to Sound Like a Catholic When You Talk About Ashes and Death - National Catholic Register

READING philosophy is one of the ways of getting through times of darkness such as Covid-19. It's something which I have loved doing since my late teens, through good times and bad, through thick and thin; and its consolation is massive.

The word 'philosophy' scares or puts off a lot of people and there's a great deal of confusion about it; but at its best there is no higher knowledge and there is nothing more comforting. The Greek philosopher Plato believed that philosophy was the supreme consolation in our lives, providing a soothing balm for our minds during periods of stress, and I think he was right.

When you start broadcasting your philosophical beliefs to others, whether through print or in conversation, be prepared for some mixed reactions. People will throw their eyes up to the heavens as you opine about the meaning of life, or they will casually dismiss it as not being relevant to the real, material world.

Others will absorb your words with enthusiasm, thank you for sharing and thank you for providing some solace for their emotional worlds. Some, in response to your words, will express their inner thoughts and reveal their souls, reveal the beauty within.

Others will go off on some crazy tangent, making you wish you had never raised the subject in the first place. Some will be actively hostile, responding with aggression and harsh words, making you actively retreat. In my late teens and twenties I used to be something of a guerrilla philosopher, which meant that I brought up metaphysical subjects at the most inopportune moments; such as raising notions of love and forgiveness among drunken people with narrowminded, right-wing beliefs. I guess, dear reader, that you are now raising your eyebrows in disbelief, taken aback by my foolishness.

What can I say in defence? I was young, full of emotion and wanted to challenge stupidity. Today's Derek, the 49 year old Derek, is much more cautious; and like most sensible people I try to avoid danger and stress as much as is possible (without living in a cowardly cocoon).

In actual fact, there is nothing odd about you if you ask philosophical questions. Indeed, asking questions about the universe we find ourselves in is one of the most natural human activities; it is the sign of a healthy human mind. For example, let's take one of my favourite philosophical questions: Why is there something instead of nothing? Or, to put it another way, why is there a universe at all? When we think about it, it seems perfectly possible that there might have been nothing whatsoever no Earth, no stars, no galaxies, no universe.

In his great book A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson brilliantly describes the Singularity, which was the first object in the universe. He points out that the dot on this 'i' can hold about 500 billion protons (protons are tiny components of an atom). Having established in the reader's minds that protons are incredibly microscopic, he points out that the Singularity was so small that it was a billionth the size of a single proton. Packed into the Singularity was an ounce of matter. Out of this minuscule object, the first thing we know to have existed, came the universe. 13.7 billion years ago the Singularity suddenly began to expand (the Big Bang) creating space and time as it went. It moved at a staggering speed. In less than a minute the universe was a million billion (a quadrillion) miles across and growing fast; the temperature was ten billion degrees and nuclear reactions were creating the lighter elements including hydrogen and helium. In three minutes, writes Bryson, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be had been produced.

Some philosophers and scientists are of the opinion that there had to have been something prior to the Big Bang.Over the centuries some thinkers (who of course had no knowledge of the Big Bang because science hadn't yet discovered it) said that, for varying reasons, it would have been impossible for there to have been no creation the universe simply had to exist. The 17thCentury Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza stated that the entire universe, along with all of its contents, laws and events, had to exist, and exist in the way it does. Spinoza believed that reality, the material world, is identical with divinity.

The contemporary theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss in his book A Universe from Nothing (2012) speaks of a Quantum Vacuum existing before the Singularity. He describes the Quantum Vacuum as being empty space teeming with virtual particles that spontaneously pop into existence before disappearing again.

He says the Singularity was created because of the operation of gravity on the Quantum Vacuum. Krauss is arguing that there could not have been nothing because there has always been something: first there was gravity and the Quantum Vacuum, and out of that was born the universe as we know it. Other physicists agree that there must always have been something in existence from which our universe arose, such as strings or membranes. However, some contemporary thinkers very plausibly point out that the trouble with such scientific answers to the question of why there is something and not nothing is that it is not clear why we should think that there had to be gravity, or the Quantum Vacuum, or strings, or even a universe at all. It seems entirely possible that instead of these things there could have been absolutely nothing.

Some thinkers say there is no answer to the question. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said this was his opinion during a radio debate in 1948. Asked why he thought the universe exists, he answered, I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all. (This is what philosophers call a brute fact - something that does not have an explanation). Russell's viewpoint (that there is in fact no possible explanation) is quite popular nowadays. Some believe that our universe is part of a multiverse and neither phenomena have any explanation. The problem with these people and with Russell's radio comment is that their response is intellectually unsatisfying there's more to be said about the subject than it's just there, and that's all.

Some philosophers say there was no God, no divinity, no Prime Mover (Aristotle's phrase); that the universe simply lifted itself out of non-existence and made itself actual. Again, this is an intellectually unsatisfying conclusion for some.Personally, I have always gravitated to people like Spinoza whose Pantheism is very attractive to me (Pantheism is a comfortable fit for nature poets). I love Aristotle's idea of the Prime Mover, and I adore Plato who believed to deny our spiritual selves was to deny our potentiality as people. But I love the science as well contemplating the workings of the universe fills me with a sense of humility and awe (as well as being a welcome diversion to the mundane realities of our daily lives).

Ultimately, I agree with what the 17thCentury German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz believed. Leibniz bequeathed us the calculus and the binary system at the heart of modern computers. He thought that the fact that there is something and not nothing requires an explanation. The explanation he gave was that God wanted to create a universe (the best one possible) which makes God the simple reason that there is something rather than nothing. In our increasingly secular age many people are uncomfortable with Leibniz's conclusion, but from my point of view it remains a perfectly satisfactory belief.

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The consolation of philosophy during Covid darkness - Offaly Express

Recent focus on the deranged views voiced by U.S. Rep Marjorie Taylor (Marge) Greene has elevated QAnon to a household word.

Attempting to understand precisely what QAnon is, however, represents a slippery and elusive task, because this shadowy, nut-case umbrella term has no universally accepted description.

The best nuts and bolts description, in a grueling Calbuzz internets investigation, comes from the global crowd source scholars of Wikipedia, who write in part:

QAnon[a](/kjunn/) is a disproven and discreditedfar-rightconspiracy theory[1]alleging that a secretcabalofSatan-worshipping,cannibalistic[2][3][4]pedophilesis running a global childsex-traffickingring and plotted against former U.S. presidentDonald Trumpwhile he was in office.[5]According to U.S. prosecutors, QAnon is commonly called acult.[6]

the conspiracy theory began with an October 2017 post on the anonymousimageboard4chanby Q (or QAnon), who was presumably an American individual;[22]it is now more likely that Q has become a group of people acting under the same name.[23][24]

Astylometricanalysis of Q posts claims to have uncovered that at least two people wrote as Q in different periods.[25][26]Q claimed to be a high-level government official withQ clearance, who has access to classified information involving theTrump administrationand its opponents in the United States.[27]

Fair enough, but thats a lot to process, and yet barely scratches the surface in terms of the wakadoodle ideas that QAnon adherents believe to be true. Consider just one of those ideas known as, um, Frazzledrip as outlined by Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times:

The lurid fantasy of Frazzledrip refers to an imaginary video said to show Hillary Clinton and her former aide, Huma Abedin, assaulting and disfiguring a young girl and drinking her blood. It holds that several cops saw the video and Clinton had them killed.

Because: of course.

Digging deeper. Here are several other descriptions that a variety of credible writers have employed in bids to wresle the nature, scope and meaning of QAnon to the ground:

At its heart, QAnon is a wide-ranging, completely unfounded theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media: QAnon: What is it and where did it come from? BBC News Mike Wendling

Named after Q, who posts anonymously on the online bulletin board 4chan, QAnon alleges that President Donald Trump and military officials are working to expose a deep state pedophile ring with links to Hollywood, the media and the Democratic Party: QAnon: The alternative religion thats coming to your church (religionnews.com) Katelyn Beaty

baseless belief an anonymous person called Q was revealing secrets about a child trafficking ring orchestrated by Democrats and global elites: (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon conspiracy promoter, rose with support from key Republicans, The Washington Post Michael Kranish, Reis Thebault and Sephanie McCrummen

a wild conspiracy theory that alleges a massive global pedophile cabal: ( Tucker Carlson stands up for QAnon supporters, The Washington Post Aaron Blake

QAnon is the umbrella term for a set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles: What Is QAnon, the Viral Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory? - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Kevin Roose

Key, but mostly unspoken, point: QAnon is not an organization, like the Republican Party, the John Birch Society, Students for Democratic Society, the Catholic Church or the Black Panther Party, or others which the MSM has described at various times as extremist.

Rather, its an uncertain, inconstant and shifting collection of conspiracy theories: One doesnt belong to QAnon. Theres no sign-up sheet, list of members, leadership structure or regular meetings.

Saying someone associates with QAnon is like saying someone associates with pantheism: the belief thatrealityis identical withdivinity,[1]or thatall-thingscompose an all-encompassing,immanentgod.[2].

Delusion goes mainstream. To be sure, there always have been tinfoil-hat and survivalist weirdos who believe Elvis is still alive, the Moon landing was faked or that the Holocaust never happened. But inevitably they were fringe people, widely regarded as delusional, out-of-the-mainstream wackos to whom nobody paid much attention.

Now, however, significant portions of the Republican Party have defended and spread ideas common among QAnon theorists like the belief that the Clintons and George Soros killed JFK or that the Sandy Hill School shootings were a false flag operation by anti-Second Amendment haters.

Or as Marge Greene who holds a seat in the United States House of Representatives (and let that sink in) famously retweeted, that Jewish space lasers set off the wildfires in California. Because: of course

In short, delusion has gone mainstream, the culmination of the Death of Truth trend in politics and culture of which we are among the first to write more than a decade ago.

Of course, the Delusionist in Chief, Donald Trump, played a pivotal role in spreading ideas like this and others, including denial of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election or that Hydroxychloroquine prevents Coronavirus.

When the Commander in Chief, the Leader of the Free World the elected president of the United States holds, spreads and spins an entire alternative reality, the effect is like aggressive cancer consuming the country.

The bottom line change. For decades, crazy thinking, virulent racism, corrosive xenophobia and crushing misogynism all were part of the American political landscape. But all the flying monkeys, biting insects and snarling monsters were tamped down and stuffed into a box by mainstream politics, media and social decency.

Then along came Donald Trump, who not only unlocked forever our American Pandoras Box, but who endorsed, cheered and promoted virtually every one of the most dangerous and disgusting creatures and ideas that common sense had marginalized.

Now Qanon has become the unified theory of all the false and slanderous conspiracy stories. Which at least for the moment is being debunked, repudiated and de-legitimatized under the Biden-Harris administration.

That crazy uncle has been sent back to the basement. Whether or not he stays there is an open question.

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What Is This 'QAnon' Thing They're Talking About? - Calbuzz

FEBRUARY 7, 2021

FOR 15 YEARS Dana Gioia held down a day job as an executive at General Foods, successfully managing Jell-O and Kool-Aid. Meanwhile, he established a growing reputation as a poet that he concealed from his corporate colleagues. He was Catholic, like his working-class Mexican/Sicilian parents, and he had studied poetry at Harvard with (among others) the illustrious Elizabeth Bishop. Recently, this former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and founder of The Big Read, this poet laureate emeritus of the state of California, has published two new volumes of admirably finished essays, the first on his religious identity and some authors who share it, and the second on his early personal acquaintance with great poets and writers. In The Catholic Writer Today, Gioia does not turn to the contemporary church to find a renewal of arts and culture, instead looking to a rosary of Catholic writers who keep stepping into the center of the western tradition. In Studying with Miss Bishop, Gioia reflects, heymishly, often hilariously, on his coming of age as a poet in the company of poets.

These are not Gioias first major works of nonfiction. His essay Can Poetry Matter? made the cover of the May 1991 issue of The Atlantic, making it impossible for him to hide his writing life from his fellow execs. He opens that essay with the following assessment: American poetry now belongs to a subculture [] Like priests in a town of agnostics, [poets] still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible. This paradigm-shifting homily, delivered with the logic of a 13th-century Scholastic, marked Gioia as a meaning-maker on the national stage, a position he continues to occupy. Gioias most recent essays land far from the precinct of Limbo that coterie poetry and its criticism have come to inhabit. These memoirs especially endow otherwise mundane experiences with numinous significance. As he says in the poem The Stars Now Rearrange Themselves, Another world / Reveals itself behind the ordinary.

Dana Gioia has become increasingly a spiritual writer. The Catholic Writer Today describes close encounters with Catholicism both lived and represented:

Catholicism currently enjoys almost no positive presence in the American fine arts [Though] Roman Catholicism now ranks overwhelmingly as the largest religious denomination in the United States with more that 68 million members. (By contrast, the second largest group, southern Baptists, has 16 million members.) [] To visualize the American Catholic arts today, dont imagine Florence or Rome. Think Newark, New Jersey.

Yet, as Gioia continues, there is more to contemporary Catholicism than sociopolitics. By Catholic, for example, he means not only the immigrant peasant religion that many of us in Gioias generation inherited, but an assumption that there is a sharable language that transcends words. In Gioias work, small manifestations of higher meaning sunder time, like a breaking and entering of the divine into the earthly, like a blade of lightning / harvesting the sky (Prayer). In the essay Poetry as Enchantment, he explains that, in the creative realm, Catholicism foregrounds the larger human purposes of the art which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive.

My favorite essay in the book is Singing Aquinas in L.A., which begins, When I was a child in parochial school, we began each morning with daily Mass. [] The Mass, which was conducted entirely in Latin, meant little to me. I endured it respectfully as a mandatory exercise. As for the singing, he writes, Here is the hymn [in Latin]. If you dont know what the words mean, dont worry; neither did I. Nor do I intend to translate them now. That is the point of the essay. He means that the power of poetry transcends the words on the page, or, as he puts it in the poem Words, Words, Words, Words are the cards, not why the game is played.

The Catholic Writer Today seeks, above all, to acknowledge the continuity between the living and the dead, and advocates for a common redemption through literature without pedantry or the crotchets of the fanatic. The table of contents lists essays on St. Paul, Elizabeth Jennings, Brother Antoninus, Dunstan Thompson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and John Donne.

At 12 years old, Donne attended Hart Hall, Oxford (today Hertford College) as a Roman Catholic because they had no chapel and he could avoid common worship. His mothers great-uncle was St. Thomas More. When Donne was 21, his younger brother, Henry Donne, died of a fever in prison, where he had been sent for harboring a proscribed Catholic priest. His two maternal uncles, both Jesuits, were forced into exile. After these things, John Donne opened a massive division within himself, and became Anglican. Upon this matter, Gioia comments:

The Catholic cult of martyrdom troubled Donne as a sort of theologically assisted suicide. In his family the topic had been much pondered. His mother took pride in the familys legacy of martyrs. He had also begun to dislike and distrust Jesuit intrigues against Elizabeth I and the Anglican Church that so often occasioned the arrests and executions.

This, I think, underemphasizes the anguish Donne must have experienced in leaving the Catholic Church in whose defense his close relatives had suffered and died. Gioias commentary on Donnes anti-saccharine deployment of the English sonnet, however, is remarkable. Gioia never doubts, furthermore, Donnes familiarity with sin and its attractions, and highlights the consciousness of sin in his work. Gioia says, Donne took the song-like form of the Renaissance English lyric and gave it a quality of symphonic development. Donnes interior torment, especially as he faces death, gives rise to a baroque conversation between violence and salvation. Yet, as in Holy Sonnet 14, he never submits entirely to God I, like an usurpd town to another due, / Labor to admit you the constricted opening of a sinful soul cannot contain the divine.

Donne was a convert to the church which made him famous; the same is true of Gerard Manley Hopkins (184489), the other major poet included in this volume. Hopkins sacrificed much for example, a career at Oxford by converting to Roman Catholicism when he was an undergraduate. Catholics could not receive degrees at Oxford until 1911, a lively reminder of the survival of English anti-Catholicism. His parents disowned him. He abandoned hope of a major Oxford professorship to teach the equivalent of parochial middle school. He tried to give up writing; even after he began, under obedience, to write poetry again, he published nothing. His friends and religious superiors hated his work. Gioias essay on Hopkins acknowledges his eventual status as one of the most frequently reprinted poets in English. Gioia also recognizes his holiness:

If modern Christian poetry has a saint, it is Gerard Manley Hopkins. No other poet, at least in English, occupies such a lofty position in terms of both literary achievement and spiritual authority. [] His reputation transcends questions of purely literary merit. He is venerated as a figure of sanctity, redemptive suffering, and heroic virtue.

Its probable that Roman Catholicism taught Hopkins who was raised as a High Anglican amid luxury and learning more about being a devisor of major art than did private drawing lessons, prep school, or Oxford. His celebration of the nature he observed approaches but skirts the pantheism of his Romantic forebears. The preeminent detail about both Hopkins and his extraordinary body of writing is surely that he foregrounded theological considerations. For him, a world without a living God would have been unthinkable. Gioias essay put this into clear focus. This clarity of focus and of exposition are the chief merits and pleasures of every chapter in The Catholic Writer Today.

In My First Acquaintance with Poets (1823), William Hazlitt details his meetings with Romantic poets, especially Coleridge, and so reveals a great deal about his youthful self: My heart, shut up in the prison house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge. So too does Dana Gioia assign credit to his early literary influences in his newest and fantastically charming collection of essays, Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writers Life.

Gioia introduces the volume with an acknowledgment of six people whose examples helped me become a writer. He also makes clear that literary life is strange and that, given everything we will learn about the author in his first chapter, Lonely Impulse of Delight, the course his adult life took was unlikely. He quotes Goethe, who says that to be lucky at the beginning is everything. Growing up in a large, crowded apartment in Hawthorne, California, constantly surrounded by his extended family, Gioia had a lucky beginning because he inherited an enormous eclectic library from his late uncle, the proletarian intellectual Ted Ortiz. One observation from this chapter expresses Goias quiet pride in his background: Italians, he writes, admire any highly developed special skill carpentry, cooking, gardening, singing, even reading. The best skills helped one make a living. The others helped one enjoy living. And with the same practical humility, he reveals the origins of his autodidactic impulses: Kids had time on their hands. We had to entertain ourselves, which meant exploring every possible means of amusement our circumscribed lives afforded. I paged through every book on every shelf.

By the time we reach the title essay, Gioia, the first in his family to attend college, has reached the academic pinnacle of advanced study Harvard graduate school and has enrolled in a tiny seminar with one of the major American poets of the 20th century, Elizabeth Bishop:

Im not a very good teacher, Miss Bishop began. So to make sure you learn something in this class I am going to ask each of you to memorize at least ten lines a week from one of the poets we are reading. Had she announced that we were all required to attend class in sackcloth and ashes, the undergraduates could not have looked more horrified.

Since that moment, Gioia has famously memorized thousands of lines of poetry and can recite them with the skill of a Shakespearean actor (check out his son Michael Gioias project, Blank Verse Films, for a selection of Gioias recitations). Thus we glean one solid piece of advice for any young poet.

The essay Studying with Miss Bishop was first published in The New Yorker on September 15, 1986. To what greater Olympus could a young man of letters aspire? Some readers at that time, including me, had also studied at Harvard under Miss Bishop in the 1970s, and the essay struck us as so spot-on that it took our breath away. Gioias subject emerges as self-effacing, and in representing her so astutely, he effaces his own ego as well. She is a reluctant teacher, a shy performer, quietly meticulous. She is dizzy with relief when the semester finally ends and she need teach no longer in that drab subterranean seminar room in Kirkland House.

Gioia describes Miss Bishop as his favorite teacher at Harvard, and also writes that Robert Fitzgerald the acclaimed translator of classical poetry was his favorite. Gioias essay on Fitzgerald is the masterpiece of the collection. Fitzgeralds History of English Versification has proved so influential on certain young writers and through them on current poetrythat it merits description, Gioia begins, following up with his own mini-seminar. He also took Fitzgeralds Comparative Literature 201: Narrative Poetry, about which he comments:

Fitzgerald slowed down our reading not only by compelling us to take careful notes but also by forcing us to differentiate Ktesippos, Agelaos, Amphimedon, Antinoos, and Eurymakhos from one another figures we would otherwise have lumped together indiscriminately as Penelopes suitors.

The essay contains numerous extended punctilios (by the time Fitzgerald dismissed us with several handouts to scan, a hundred pages of Saintsbury to read, and two verse exercises [three stanzas in strict Sapphics and fourteen lines of Catullan hendecasyllabics], the class had become less crowded) and I wondered if Gioia had fully measured how very, very much he had himself been formed by the great Boylston Professor. Toward the end of the chapter, he delivers a wise and beautiful analysis of how Fitzgeralds teaching had driven home the immense difficulty of mastering the humane arts: They require a life of constant application. Also, Forty years later [] the extent of Fitzgeralds influence appears a verifiable fact of literary history. Also, He was the only professor I had in eight years of college and graduate school who was a practicing Catholic.

Thus, Gioias latest book, also proves his most self-revelatory. In it, one of our countrys best literary personages takes pains to position himself on the shoulders of such unexpected giants as his Uncle Ted Ortiz, merchant marine, killed in a plane crash in his 20s. He pays a characteristically Catholic obeisance of not just reverence but also homely affection to the process and people who helped him arrive at himself.

Peggy Ellsberg is a poet and scholar who teaches English at Barnard College. She is the author of Created to Praise: The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 1987) and The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual Writings (Plough, 2017).

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Manifestations of Higher Meaning: On Dana Gioia's The Catholic Writer Today and Studying with Miss Bishop - Los Angeles Review of Books -...

Mashrur Arefin's 2019 novel, August Abchhaya, is full of moments that evoke the blood-stained memory behind the language of conflict. One such moment arrives in the intense exchange between the narrator-protagonist and Sarafraz Nawaz, prominent local citizen and the head of the local Mosque and the Madrassah committees. The liberal, artistic protagonist knows that the conservative Sarafraz sahib disapproves not only of his uninhibited lifestyle, but more importantly, of the ideology that supports it. More than anything else, he despises the narrator's pantheistic belief of the manifestation of God in all reality, in the manner of Hindu and Buddhist tantric practitioners, not least because it draws in its fold the beauty of women and possibly helps to disguise his "immoral" desires.

"Glory be to God for dappled things

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim"

In mid-Victorian England, a Jesuit priest named Gerald Manley Hopkins fought the pangs of his religious conscience for writing poetry of such Keatsian beauty about the sensuous beauty of the universe. How can an ordained priest take such delight in the senses? His answer was Pantheism. Who else but God can create such beauty? Hence, "Pied Beauty", the poem which thus opened ended with these lines;

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;

Praise him."

Pantheism the perception of divine beauty in all reality has historically bridged religions to a range of aesthetic and philosophical visions and lifestyle practices. It involves a broadening of horizons that helps to keep a sense-loving Jesuit priest such as Hopkins in the fold. But it also evokes hostility in the upholders of traditional faith, as evident in Sarafraz Sahib's suspicions.

Is the suspicion about the pluralization of divinity? Of worshipping many embodied gods as opposed to The Great Abstract One? When Rabindranath wrote the line: "Ami roopsagore doob diyechhi orup roton pabo bole" "I have dived in the ocean of forms to find the formless treasure" his pantheism became a credo for polytheism. One worships a range of images as the formless God is to hard to imagine.

Artistic narration needs both kinds. In a famous chapter of Mimesis entitled "Odysseus' Scar," Eric Auerbach contrasts Homeric and Biblical narration: the former is externalized, sensory, digressive, while the latter is more obscure and abstract, directed unrelentingly toward a single goal. Unlike the Homeric epics, which take delight in sensory effect and lie and fabricate when necessary, the biblical stories lay claim to the singularity of an absolute truth.

Hinduism shares with Hellenism the sensory appeal of polytheism. It is the beauty of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, sitting with her book and her musical veena; the appeal of the blue Krishna, playing his flute and wielding his fatal weapon, the chakra; the terrifying beauty of the demon-slaying goddess Durga; even the violent rhythm of Shiva's dance of destruction that earns him the name "Nataraj," the lord of dancers. But the beauty of Brahminical Hinduism is also limited to its caste-beneficiaries. As the caste-oppressed intellectual Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd says in his memoir, as a boy in his village, he would wake up in the middle of the night to the nightmare of Saraswati as a ghost, ready to kill him as he nurtured dreams of education, unpardonable hubris for a lower-caste child.

The icons of polytheism can haunt as well as nourish, depending who you are.

***

But to identify religious faith with a conservative, even reactionary position might be a knee-jerk reaction for people on the secular left. This has repeatedly turned out to be a false instinct. There have been many progressive religious thinkers, even among those canonized as prophets. But writing in 2002, Ruth Vanita made an observation of curious but pointed significance unlike the continuing presence of the Islamic or the Christian left, which collaborate with the secular left in different parts of the world, there is no Hindu leftwing in India, none left any more the pun is unavoidable. Marxist thinkers and writers flock to Durga Puja celebrations on the streets and pray to shrines at home, but very few have tried to integrate leftist and religious thinking in the context of Hinduism. Thinkers like Ashish Nandy and Ramchandra Gandhi, who attempt to do so, are a tiny minority.

Why this lacuna? The reasons, Vanita argued, has much to do with the shame heaped on polytheistic Hinduism in the 19th century. This was essentially the work of British colonialism, which successfully labeled idol-worship as savage and backward. The British were confounded by Hinduism, which they found harder to understand than Islam which was, like Christianity, monotheistic and based on a single text. Hinduism, with its textual and iconographic plurality, was much more like ancient Greek and Roman religions that Christianity had wiped out centuries earlier. Though Hinduism, which proved resilient through many centuries of attack on its temples and idols, was not to be wiped out easily, the modern method of attack was quite insidious: it took the form of shaming English-educated Indians regarding Hindu rituals, especially those relating to idol-worship. "The best evidence of this shaming," writes Vanita, "is the way new Hindu organizations, such as the Arya Samaj, who rightly embraced such causes as women's education and the eradication of untouchability, felt compelled to also renounce polytheism and idol-worship." Liberal and educated Indians continued to internalize the shame of polytheism; not long after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, whom Vanita calls the last left-wing Hindu, the Hindu left got lost between the stridency of the Hindu right and the shame felt by the secular left regarding Hindu polytheism.

The literary intelligentsia, especially as it has been forged through colonial modernity and the resistance to imperialism, has gradually moved further and further away from religious iconography, donning a secular mantle. The disenchantment with faith that in Europe energized the Enlightenment and forged the secular form of the novel found its way to India too, through anticolonial movements no less than through movements of colonial modernity. From the Bengal Renaissance to the Progressive Writers' Movement in Urdu, Hindi, and other north Indian languages, this disenchantment has gained pace, nowhere more so than in the English language literatures of India, produced almost exclusively by the urban, English-educated bourgeoisie.

But it would be madness to deny the tremendous aesthetic and emotive power of religion. Literature, and all art, have lived ancient lives enabling and being enabled by the beauty, emotion, mystery and terror of religion till secular modernity pried them apart. Subsequently, this has become a reality all across the subcontinent, across all religions. We are left wondering: can Arefin's narrator and Sarafraz Sahib even find a common language in which to voice their differences?

Saikat Majumdar's novels include The Scent of God (2019) and The Firebird (2015).

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Arts Pantheon - The Daily Star

BY FRANCIS ANEKWE OBORJI

In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God The Word became flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that he has from the Father as only Son of the Father, full of grace and Truth Indeed, from his fullness we have, all of us, received one gift replacing another, for the law was given through Moses, grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ. (John 1:1,3,14,16-17).

In the first place, I begin this short reflection by wishing each, and every one of us, members of our respective families, friends, communities and the nation, a very Merry Christmas 2020, and a serene and prosperous New Year 2021. May the Child Jesus, the Prince of Peace and Lord of Lords, born in the manger at Bethlehem of Judea on Christmas Day for our eternal salvation, fill our individual hearts, minds souls and spirit, which is the indwelling place in us, of God Father, Son and Holy Spirit revealed in Jesus Christ, with His Truth, Love and Peace! Amen!

May the Spirit of the Child Jesus the Risen Christ, find his dwelling-home in us, and transform our individual hearts, minds, souls and redeemed human spirits, into his place of habitation! Amen! May he bless us with strong faith, grace, good health, sincerity of heart, strength of character and steadfastness, and with love of neighbor, singlemindedness, security of lives and property, and protection from every danger and the evil one, now and forever! Amen!

The Birth of Truth at Christmas at a Time like This!

This Christmas and New Year celebrations, my reflection centers on the theme of Truth at a time like ours today! It is a reflection on Jesus Christ as the Self-revelation of the Truth of God. That is, Jesus Christ himself, as the final and fullness of Gods Self-revelation to humanity and the world, the Truth of God, which took human flesh on Christmas Day at Bethlehem in Judea for our redemption and salvation! God, who, in his fullness and at the appointed time, revealed Himself to us, in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Birth of this Truth, who is Jesus Christ by name, and who was born in human flesh at Bethlehem, is what, we Christians celebrate at Christmas every year! Christmas is about this Truth, Jesus Christ, God-made-man for our salvation. Christmas time, therefore, offers us an opportunity to reflect on the Truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ, and on its relationship to the reign of the Kingdom of God in our hearts, inaugurated in Jesus Christ himself the Truth, born at Bethlehem on Christmas Day.

Some Basic Questions

One may ask, what has all these gotten to do with the reality on the ground today in the world in which we live? A world devastated by the scourges of COVID-19 pandemic that seems to have no end in view? A world in which ordinary citizens are increasingly losing confidence and thrust in their political leaders and institutions of governance? A world groaning under mediocrity of an increasingly declining visionary and sincere political leadership, while wallowing in the endless wilderness of globalized extreme capitalism and consumerism?

What has a discourse on Jesus Christ as the Truth of God born in human flesh at Bethlehem on Christmas Day, gotten to do with our world today? A world governed by neo-geopolitics and neo-colonialism supremacy of the powerful nations and the superpowers over and above poor peoples and nations of the world? That is, with their excruciating, exploitative and oppressive economic and political order, as well as religious, cultural and traditional institutions, that seemed to have relegated Truth and God, as well as things of God to the background, while extolling a kind of neo-humanism and world order devoid of Christ the Incarnation of the Son of God at Christmas?

A world where the gap between the rich and poor are on daily increase and the end is not in sight? A world that is nowadays, under constant threats of deadly virus and pandemics that often looked tele-guided, and in which the common-man looks confused about its origin, whether they are natural, or manmade! A world infested with political instability caused by corrupt regimes, totalitarianism, and of economic recession, exploitation of the poor, as well as wars, genocides, racism, ethnic-cleansings of the most vulnerable groups or nations, and continued religious fundamentalism and terrorism of the highest order!

What has a discourse on Jesus Christ as the Truth of God born in human flesh at Christmas gotten to do with the world of today held in sway by the Western hegemony the political, cultural, and moral crisis and secularism of the West that is immensely affecting all mankind? A world, where there is no generally recognized system of values on which to build? A world where even crimes against humanity are justified by pseudo-religious fanatics, ethnic-irredentism, racism, bigotry, cultural imperialism, severe anti-immigration laws, deceit of the devil, and ideological hegemony meant to force acceptance of their demand for totalitarian power and control?

Even in countries that claim to be practicing democracy and constitutional law, security of lives and human rights are being subjugated to whims and caprices of the privileged few, the most favored and powerful in the society, on a pretense of the latest majority decision in the Parliament that is anything but anti-people, lopsided, corrupt and devoid of human face! A world where the powerful, wealthy, and modern imperial centers of power, would privilege the conservation of nature (which is good), but downplays that of human lives? A world where environmental pollution of ancestral lands of poor countries with rich natural and mineral resources, through indiscriminate exploitation and mining of the Multi-National Companies, takes precedence over and above protection of human lives and environment of the local inhabitants! A world where billions of Dollars could be spent by the powerful for the depopulation of the poor countries in the Southern Hemisphere, but very little attention is paid to nursing, promoting and protecting the life of every human person, especially, the most vulnerable and the poor, from conception to natural death!

As one author rhetorically, puts it: In how many states are the fundamental human rights observed unconditionally in theory and practice? Someone who, for example, rejects the killing of a child in his mothers womb or assisted suicide because life is an inviolable gift of God, and considers the equation of marriage with sexual relations between persons of the same sex to be a degradation of the lifelong partnership of a man and a woman, can be prosecuted for alleged intolerance. (Gerhard Cardinal Mller, The Power of Truth, Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2019, 7).

Furthermore, one may also ask, what has our reflection on the Truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ gotten to do with our contemporary world where the modernists philosophy that questions the relevance of religion for the modern man appears to be on the rise again, even among our own intellectuals? At a time like ours today, when some of our own local intellectuals are blaming religion as the cause of our woes, of what use is therefore, a reflection of this kind on the Truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ at Christmas? At a time like this when some blame religion as the reason for some of the social violence and poverty in the society, and as the reason why majority of the poor masses lack courage to challenge their despotic rulers and dictators, of what use is a reflection of this kind at Christmas and New Year!

Modern Mans Denial of Truth

Our thesis in this reflection is that the above scenario of disaster in our world today, flows from modern mans subtle but strong denial of Truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ. It is a sign also that our seemingly manifestation of pomposity of religiosity in todays world, is not skin-deep. Things are the way they are today, because as creatures of God, we are running away from embracing the objective truth, and its transforming power, which is founded in God, the Creator of the world, and in the nature of things, and which becomes manifest in rational human thought.

For many today, religion is useful only if it could offer worldly consolation, strength, influence, physical healing and material wealth! The real encounter with the Truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ, the total transformation of the human person the encounter with God revealed in Jesus Christ brings about, is often relegated to the background in our religious beliefs and practices nowadays. This is the problem! It is as if religion is there only to offer consolation to people, or to serve ones personal needs. In other words, modern man has made truth of God, something subjective, self-serving, and as that which finds its criterion only in individual, selfish advantage and pleasure. By so doing, the modern man has himself refused to embrace fully the reality of Truth of God the kingdom of freedom, love and true peace revealed in Jesus Christ!

The modern man is thus, stranded in what theologians call the dictatorship of relativism the philosophy that believes that anything is as good as the other, and that anything can go, even if it is against the law of nature and God! This is the crux of the matter!

Modern man has, out of his free will, backed away from embracing fully, the new life of the Gospel of redemption, a transformation of human life shaped by the birth of Jesus Christ in human flesh on earth. It is as if modern man has decided, out of his free will, to run away from the redemptive acts of Jesus Christ, which we Christians celebrate, first at Christmas, and then, reenact at Easter in its fullest form!

As the Gospel of John, which we quoted at the beginning of this reflection, reminds us: What has come into being in him (Jesus Christ) was life, life that was the light of men; and the light shines in darkness, and darkness could not overcome it (John 1:1-5). In fact, what many are yet to appreciate is that Jesus Christ did not come on earth and took human flesh, because he wanted just to make us nice persons, as in the natural order of things, unredeemed human nature.

No. The Son of God did not take human flesh, just to make us nice persons. Otherwise, there is no difference between Christianity and other world religions like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, the Primal (Traditional) Religions, etc., or the natural law of nature! Rather, God in Jesus Christ took human flesh at Christmas to transform us from within, body and soul, heart and spirit! The Son of God took human flesh to make us better human beings, redeemed, renewed, and recreated, in the image and likeness of God, as adopted sons and daughters of God through Jesus Christ himself.

This is the mystery, which we celebrate at Christmas! Our adopted son-ship (or daughter-ship) in God through Jesus Christ, transcends our biological or any other type of birth in the natural order. Christianity, therefore, is not just about long life, or luxurious or nice living in this transitory world. It is about the offer of new life, the eternal life in God through Christ, the taste of which we are expected to bear witness to in this life, in the hope of the eschaton!

This is the new life in God inaugurated with the coming of Jesus Christ as God-man on earth at Christmas! Ours is therefore, a redeemed life through Jesus Christ. We are no longer living a life of the natural order, so to say, but rather in the supernatural order in this world, shaped by the redemptive acts of Jesus Christ through his Incarnation (Christmas), Passion, Crucifixion, Death and Resurrection!

In the old order, it was as if man depended wholesale on his own power as man to work out his own destiny, without God. In the ancient religions of the East, man thought he could reach God and things of God by himself, through personal contemplation (or yoga), and sometimes, by worship of nature and sky. The followers of Traditional Religions, on their own part, e.g., African Traditional Religion (ATR), sought God and things of God through ancestral veneration and mediation between the visible and invisible worlds, the world of man and that of the spirit-world. In each of these cases, there was no way man could reach God or even know God as God is in himself, by human efforts alone. Because, only God can make God known, and only him alone, can reveal his true nature and inner-life to man and other created reality.

Moreover, goodwill is not enough! Goodwill, itself, is part of the effort of man to know God all by himself and through his personal efforts or search (contemplation) of the divine. This is not enough! There must be divine grace, shaped by Christ-event, the incarnation (Christmas) and crucifixion on the cross, to make that happen! As traditional theology teaches us, grace does not destroy nature. Rather, it perfects and ennobles nature, to make it pleasant before God and man, for the greater glory and honor of God.

Nature, on its own, has no meaning without the Supernatural, enlightening the nature, giving it shape and meaning! Moreover, it is not the function of nature, to determine on its own, the origin and contents of the Supernatural. Explaining everything about the Supernatural on the basis of natural order alone, is like the barrister at law, who sees everything about man and human nature from legal point of view, forgetting that man is more than legal or things of human law! It is could also be likened to that psychologist (or even the psychoanalyst), who attempts to explain everything about man, human nature and behavior in terms of psychoanalysis or psychoneurosis.

These experts in various fields of humanity and human behavior often forget that man is larger than any field of their specializations. They forget the divine nature, origin and destiny of man is in God. Moreover, they forget that nature on its own cannot do much. Nature needs the grace of God to realize its essence of being and destiny! Without grace, nature is nothing! This is how the Creator, has made it to be from the beginning. It is also part of the reasons, why we have the incarnation of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, in human flesh, and not pantheism.

Pantheism believes that everything is supernatural and supernatural is everything. This is blasphemy! In other words, pantheism is a belief in and worship of nature as gods. Pantheism mixes nature with nature and calls it supernatural. The equivalent of which is magic. Pantheism does not distinguish between nature and the supernatural. Neither does it know of the grace of God, which nature needs to make itself pleasant before God and man. It is heretical, and theologically wrong, to speak of mixture of nature with the supernatural for one to create a new order! Rather the order of things is that the grace of God works on nature in order to renew nature itself and recreate it according to Gods original plan of salvation for man and the created reality.

This is because, the origin of nature itself is from the Supernatural and its final destiny, is determined by the Supernatural. It is the work of the Supernatural to reveal to nature the true meaning of what it is, its form and content, and not the other way round. This is the order of nature, of our relating with the Supernatural, and of our relationship and way of comprehending, in an objective way, the mystery of God, the Creator, who, in his fullness, at the appointed time, has been revealed to us, in Jesus Christ!

Such that the effort of man in all the non-Christian religions to reach God through mans personal effort, could best be described as providential way, God, in his divine wisdom used in preparing humanity the followers of those non-Christian religions for the coming of Jesus Christ. With the advent of Christianity, however, those non-Christian religions have served their purpose. In the new dispensation, therefore, the only true way to God the Truth about God, is Jesus Christ. Every attention now should be focused on Christ, in whom, is the fullness of Gods Self-disclosure to humanity and world!

Therefore, thanks to the coming of Jesus Christ in human flesh, humanity has now learnt the true way of Gods dealing with man and the created reality. It is not man going to God through human efforts, but rather God, in His Son, Jesus Christ, coming to man in human flesh. God comes to us. In creation, he came down and created man in his image and likeness, and called him to communion with himself in paradise. This was before the Fall of man through sin. Creation itself was Gods initiative, not mans.

For our redemption after the Fall of the first parents Adam and Eve, God, out of his own initiative, and according to his original plan of salvation, sent his own begotten Son, Jesus Christ for our redemption and salvation through the same Christ-Event. He came to us in his Son Jesus Christ, through which, we have been redeemed, and today he lives among us, in the power of the Holy Spirit, which is the Spirit of the Risen Christ himself, who died on the cross for our salvation.

Implications for Our Secularized and Globalized Society

What is the significance of this our reflection on Christmas as the feast of the birth of Truth of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, for our society today? The odd things happening in the society, in which we live and work today, have made some people, who by all standard should have known better, to turn religion into a business-like venture, and as a thing for economic enrichment and aggrandizement. The abuse of spiritual power by some religious leaders, especially, priests and pastors in the healing ministry, of which distress poor people are often their victims, is a great distraction to the peoples faith and understanding of the essence of religion and the Truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ!

Some others, especially, our local intellectuals, instead of challenging the corrupt and incompetent politicians at the seat of power as responsible for the mess and violence in the society and state, attack religion. Some of these intellectuals have even gone to the extent of calling for the taming of religion by the state. But they forget that religion is as victim of bad and corrupt leadership in the society as everything else! Because, religion is not the cause of violence or ineptitude and incompetent leadership of the politicians.

Moreover, one can ask whether the identification of religion or rather of Monotheism with violence and of modern mans near return to worship of nature and polytheistic spirituality with tolerance, holds up to empirical scrutiny? History tells us of different facts. Consider, for example, the persecutions the Jews endured on account of their loyalty to the One-True God and Maker of all. The martyrdom of the scribe Eleazar and seven brothers (2 Maccabees 6:187:42), is just one example. The same applies to the persecutions of Christians under the Roman Empire during the first three Christian centuries.

In our time, in different countries of the world, particularly, in Africa and Asia, each year thousands of Christians testify with their lives to the truth that Gods love is stronger than the worlds hatred. They are the martyrs of the truth, the truth that is God himself and that is founded in him. As Gerhard Cardinal Mller tells us, Whoever, in the face of the martyrs suffering and death, asserts that their monotheism [belief in the One-True God] and their confession of Christ is a source of violence, demonstrates a degree of thoughtlessness that holds people in contempt. Furthermore, the very allegation that belief in the One-True God revealed in Jesus Christ, implies a readiness to resort to violence is in itself an expression of mental violence, which in some civilized societies, leads to verbal aggression against committed Christians.

Again, the identification of belief in One-True God with violence is not found lacking only when it comes to empirical verification. It also contradicts basic logic. Violence is the one instrument the truth cannot use to make itself recognized. After all, truth aims at understanding, which comes about only when the truth is freely accepted by reason. Therefore, to help someone come to this understanding to help someone come to know the truth one cannot resort to violence but must rather make use of rational arguments that seek to persuade. Truth can be denounced as a source of violence only if one apodictically asserts that relativism is the only correct position that one can take before a truth that is ultimately unknowable.

What all these imply is that religion or rather the truth about the One-True God revealed in Jesus Christ cannot be a source of violence or anxiety to the world or to any individual for that matter! It is rather the lie, inasmuch as it cant prevail by force of argument, that necessarily gives birth to violence or the threat of it. On top of this, there may be the lure of worldly goods to entice the believer to fall away from the true faith. For instance, speaking to the last of the Maccabean brothers, the king appealed , not with mere words, but with promises on oath, to make him rich and happy if he would abandon his ancestral customs: he would make him his Friend and entrust him with high office (Mac 7:24).

In fact, this scene is relevant to current situation of things in our society, plagued by neo-feudalism, false democracy, dictatorship of the most powerful, and tyrannical regimes of highest order. The scene is about the tyrants reaction to the faithfulness of a true Israelite: The king fell into a rage, and handled him worse than the others, being exasperated at his scorn (2 Mac 7:39). Just as in later days, Jesus would not threaten his tormentors but pray for them while hanging on the Cross, here too we can recognize the nonviolent fruit of every martyrdom: So he died in his integrity, putting his whole trust in the Lord (2 Mac 7:40).

This scene reminds us about what caused the fall of totalitarian regimes and ideologies that sustained such a regime. Intelligent critics of totalitarian ideologies (such as George Orwell in Animal Farm, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, or Eugene Kogon in The SS State), have traced the collapse of extremely violent states, such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, to the lies on which they were built. For these authors, in those systems, solidarity with members of the same class or ethnicity counted more than truth and regard for our common humanity.

Erich Mielke, the minister for the state security in the German Democratic republic who was responsible for hundreds of deaths at the Berlin Wall, faced critical questions in the first democratically elected parliament after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Seeking to apologize for his misdeeds, he stammered: But I love you all.

Commenting on this, Gerhard Cardinal Mller says, Both experience and reason tell us that truth and love belong together and that truth and freedom are twin concepts, whereas lies and hatred, ideology and violence, form an ominous alliance. For instance, Israels primordial experience of Gods truth is connected with its liberation from the power of Pharaoh. The people are freed by God, who makes a covenant with them. The God of Mount Sinai, who revealed his truth by saying, I am who I am (Exodus 3:14), is also the God of Exodus, who liberates his people: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage (Exodus 20.2).

In Jesus Christ, the One who made all human beings also want to save all human beings. For there is one God, there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all (1 Timothy 2:5-6). God is not the overpowering heavenly dictator who demands blind obedience, but our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). And his apostles (and disciples) do not come as propagandists of a secular doctrine of salvation or power in lofty words or wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:1), but as ministers of the word (Luke 1.2), as his witnesses to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8), as preachers and teachers of the Gentiles in faith and truth (1 Timothy 2:7).

This implies that the truth of God in Christ and in his Church remains the foundation and the source of the love of God and neighbor, a love that is the fulfilment of the whole law.

Conclusion

In our society of today, devastated by various kinds of manmade problems, and controlled by the powerful and the rich, the only thing that the poor man holds on to survive and hope for better tomorrow and life eternal, is God. It is his faith in the One True-God, revealed in Jesus Christ. Take away God or religious faith from the common-man, he is gone as a human person, a finite being, dependent solely on God for survival and living.

This is why we should be wary of anybody, theory or ideology that tries to discourage man from believing in the One True-God and in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the only mediator between God and man. Religion or worship of One True-God (Monotheism) is not the problem of the world. It is not the cause of social violence, either.

Rather, human beings manipulation of divisive elements in culture and religion to cause violence in the society is the problem, not religion, per se! Thus, it is human being that needs to be tamed, not religion. Because to discredit or ban religion in the society in which we live, is to stop man from practicing and manifesting openly his faith in the Truth of Monotheistic God. This could be dangerous!

In fact, Plato was right when he subordinated his reverence for Homer to the truth about God, and Aristotle applied this principle to Plato himself, his teacher. Because as Aristotle affirms, Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas Plato is a friend but truth is a greater friend.

In our day, this aphorism of Aristotle on the supremacy of truth of God, remains in force!

Merry Christmas, and Prosperous New Year 2021!

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Christmas and the birth of truth on earth - TheCable

1 : a doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe

2 : the worship of all gods of different creeds, cults, or peoples indifferently also : toleration of worship of all gods (as at certain periods of the Roman empire)

Pantheistic ideasand most importantly the belief that God is equal to the universe, its physical matter, and the forces that govern itare found in the ancient books of Hinduism, in the works of many Greek philosophers, and in later works of philosophy and religion over the centuries. Much modern New Age spirituality is pantheistic. But most Christian thinkers reject pantheism because it makes God too impersonal, doesn't allow for any difference between the creation and the creator, and doesn't seem to allow for humans to make meaningful moral choices.

1732, in the meaning defined at sense 1

French panthisme, from panthiste pantheist, from English pantheist, from pan- + Greek theos god

Cite this Entry

Pantheism. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pantheism. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.

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Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

William Souder

Norton, pp. 446, 25

John Steinbeck didnt believe in God but he didnt believe much in humanity either. When push came to shove, he saw people as cruel, selfish, dishonest, slovenly and, at their very best, outmatched by environmental forces. Like his friend, the biologist Ed Rickett, Steinbeck considered human beings to be no better and no worse than any community of organisms: they might aspire to do great things, but they always ultimately failed.

In The Grapes of Wrath, the hard-working Joad family travel west, seeking a good life, and get taken apart by poor wages, malignant farm cooperatives and company stores. In Cannery Row, Mack and his boys want to repay their friend Doc for all his generosity, and end up burning down his lab after a drunken party. And while the paisanos of Tortilla Flat see themselves as noble knight errants right out of Malorys Morte dArthur (Steinbecks favourite book as a child), whenever it comes to a choice between doing good deeds and feeding their bellies well, spoiler alert, their bellies always win.

Steinbeck never wrote about heroes and villains; he was more interested in the ways individuals were shaped by their environments and their communities. In order to create characters, he wrote in Cannery Row (1945):

You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book to open a page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

For Steinbeck (as for Zola), fiction was a laboratory experiment. He reserved his greatest love for the natural world especially the mountains, valleys and surging shorelines of his beloved California. In one of his weirdest novels, To a God Unknown, his ranch-building protagonist, Joseph Wayne, makes love to the earth in one scene and, in another, speaks with his dead fathers spirit through an old tree. If any religion appealed to Steinbeck, it was simple raw pantheism.

Born in Californias Salinas Valley in 1902, Steinbeck was raised near and often returned to his home ocean of the Pacific. Unlike his slightly older contemporary Hemingway, he possessed a laid back California disposition. Rather than seeking out a lost generation in Europe, he lazed around with friends, wrote books in shacks and trailers, went crabbing and cooked food over driftwood campfires.

He preferred fishing to bullfighting; and rather than take a rifle out to bag big game in Africa, he financed a scientific research expedition to the Sea of Cortez, where he and his friends catalogued creatures in scientific notebooks. For Steinbeck, the world was so abundant with pleasures that there shouldnt need to be any Darwinian battle for survival (which is why the cruelties of the Associated Farmers made him so angry). For him, California was a vast plenitude filled with cheap wine and warm temperatures. In such a land, people could afford to be generous.

William Souders Mad at the World is the first significant biography of Steinbeck since Jackson L. Bensons much longer 1984 volume, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. It is readable, admiring and compact, and provides a narratively energetic look at a man who suffered many of the same weaknesses as his characters for booze, benzedrine, depression and bad marriages. But also like his characters, Steinbeck got up every day to test himself all over again, by writing a new book or embarking on a new adventure.

He spent many months visiting Californias migrant camps to research Grapes,worked as a war correspondent in both the second world war and Vietnam, campaigned for his liberal hero Adlai Stevenson and for publicly funded health care, wrote excellent movie scripts for Elia Kazans Viva Zapata! and Hitchcocks Lifeboat and never stopped doing good work until he died of heart disease at the age of 66. Even late in life, his restless nature compelled him to hit the road with his French poodle in a well-decked out three-quarter-ton truck to rediscover the monster land of America, and he produced his last bestseller, Travels with Charley. Like Orwell (the British writer he most resembles), he never stopped sending himself on expeditions to better understand the world he wrote about.

Over several decades of consistent and furious literary production, Steinbeck explored the history, people and geography of his native California just as powerfully as Faulkner did the South; but he never received the same critical accolades especially in his own country. He was often unfairly dubbed a one-hit wonder for The Grapes of Wrath; many of his best novels the short, comic ones such as Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row were unfairly dismissed as minor or non-serious and his failure to exalt the humanity of his characters made him unpalatable to those who felt that novels should elevate the idea of being human, and not reduce it to animal exigencies.

Shortly before Steinbeck received his 1962 Nobel Prize, Arthur Mizener condemned his work in the New York Times for its mystic sorrow; but what Mizener didnt understand was that mystic sorrow was exactly the point. Steinbeck always expressed great empathy for those sad, aspiring and doomed creatures that were so much like himself; and it always made him angry to see them taken advantage of by, as a more appreciative critic noted, an economic system that encourages exploitation, greed and brutality. The best any person could do was to keep trying and failing, and wake up to do it all over again. Mystic sorrow is all they (or we) could ever hope for.

Souder writes well, and this is a good place to start reading (or rereading) about Steinbeck. But Mad at the World sometimes feels a bit too terse and cursory, especially in the last 50 pages, and falls short of communicating a strong sense of the complicated, emotional life of a very complicated, emotional writer. For example, in his earlier, more extensive biography, Benson spent a full page describing the only meeting between Steinbeck and Hemingway (it was a disaster). At a Manhattan bar, John OHara showed Hemingway a blackthorn walking stick that had been passed down by Steinbecks father, and which Steinbeck had presented to OHara as a gift. In reply, Hemingway showed off his muscles by breaking the stick over his head and claiming the stick wasnt an actual blackthorn. Steinbeck never spent time with Hemingway again. Who could blame him?

Souders version of the same story is reduced to this: Hemingway had interrupted the otherwise dull evening by breaking a walking stick over his own head to prove he could. In such passages, something vulnerable and human about Steinbeck gets lost in translation.

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No writer was better suited to chronicle the Depression than John Steinbeck - Spectator.co.uk