Pious Fabrications

Another's stupidity is not my bigotry

2012-06-03T08:48:00.003-04:00

Fr. Seraphim the Infallible

2012-06-02T09:05:00.001-04:00

An Orthodox approach to evolution

2012-06-01T16:19:00.000-04:00

Short book review: Night by Elie Wiesel

2012-06-01T14:13:00.002-04:00

In Wiesel's account of his internment in Auschwitz, one can feel his sense of loss -- the loss of every member of his immediate family, the loss of dignity and of humanity itself, and -- the loss above all losses and the source of all other losses -- the loss of God. The theme of the loss of God -- or, to use Nietzsche's terminology, which Wiesel invokes as well, the death of God -- runs throughout this book. This is a story -- THE story -- of the dark night of the human soul that modern man has taken upon itself. God is dead -- but, as the author of the introduction eloquently tells us: there is a Resurrection.

God has a wonderful plan for your life!

2012-05-31T20:22:00.002-04:00

Short book review: God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization by A.N. Wilson

2012-05-31T18:50:00.002-04:00

Wilson's book is a tour de force of the unraveling of bourgeois Christianity in the English speaking world during the Victorian Era. He guides us through the minds of the great believers-at-all-costs and unbelievers, including both the at-all-costs and the because-I-must types, with skill, wit, and precision. In his own sympathy for the various figures of this period, he leads us to sympathize with the plight of those who wouldn't and those who couldn't believe. This sympathy, in turn, leads us to a great understanding of our own modern situation as we fall in at the tail end of the dismantling of bourgeois Christianity.

In spite of the excellence of this book, however, I have two complaints to lodge against it and its author. The first: as I mentioned twice in the preceding paragraph, this is a book about bourgeois Christianity and about those members of the bourgeoisie (and, yes, that includes Karl Marx) who came to disbelieve in it, and came to disbelieve in it largely because both it and they were (and are) bourgeois. What might have been a great credit to this book, or perhaps to another study as it might not have fit in this book, is the effect that, for example, Darwin's and Lyell's theories or perhaps the biblical criticism a la the Tubingen School had upon believers of other classes in society and castes of mind.

The other complaint is that A.N. Wilson seems himself to advocate a form of Christianity that is no-Christianity at all; while complaining – rightly – about the watered-down pseudo-religiosity of the Deists, Wilson seems very close to their ideas, especially in the conclusion of his book. Whether that is the effect he intended, I do not know, but it is the impression I received. A Christianity without the Resurrection, with a God who intervenes directly and is/can be experienced by mystics and saints, etc. – that is, a Christianity without passion, asceticism, and zeal -- is not Christianity at all.

The usual notion of prayer is so absurd

2012-05-31T18:38:00.000-04:00

The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less -- a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great "comfort" -- since they put no faith in the solace of the senses -- but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course "suggestion," say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgment, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!

This seems a very daring comparison. I apologize for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched the keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame.

But alas! We take the psychiatrists' word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light -- they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?

Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

The Round Table, Episode 4: Paganism, Neo-Paganism, and Wicca

2012-05-31T17:19:00.000-04:00

God: Idea or Idios?

2012-05-31T17:17:00.002-04:00

More than a dog

2012-05-30T16:44:00.001-04:00

For a long time during those frightful years [of the Holocaust and World War II] I waited for a great voice to speak up in Rome. I, an unbeliever? Precisely. For I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation when faced with force. It seems that that voice did speak up. But I assure you that millions of men like me did not hear it and that at that time believers and unbelievers alike shared a solitude that continued to spread as the days went by and the executioners multiplied.

It has been explained to me since that the condemnation was indeed voiced. But that it was in the style of the encyclicals, which is not at all clear. The condemnation was voiced and it was not understood! Who could fail to feel where the true condemnation lies in this case and to see that this example by itself gives part of the reply, perhaps the whole reply, that you ask of me. What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally. When a Spanish bishop blesses political executions, he ceases to be a bishop or a Christian or even a man; he is a dog just like one who, backed by an ideology, orders that execution without doing the dirty work himself. We are still waiting, and I am waiting, for a grouping of all those who refuse to be dogs and are resolved to pay the price that must be paid so that man can be something more than a dog.

Albert Camus, "The Unbeliever," in Jaroslav Pelikan (ed.), The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought

The Round Table, Episode 3: Documentary Hypothesis, Creationism, and the Old Testament

2012-05-28T13:08:00.001-04:00

Creationism is crap

2012-05-24T18:23:00.000-04:00

High culture vs. low culture

2012-05-24T18:21:00.002-04:00

God's silence

2012-05-22T09:39:00.000-04:00

Is God dead?

2012-05-21T16:58:00.000-04:00

Christianity & War

2012-05-20T20:17:00.002-04:00

Gifts of the Jews & the Orthodox Church

2012-05-20T20:16:00.001-04:00

Running a Marathon for the Hogar Rafael Ayau

2012-05-20T20:14:00.003-04:00

How to make sure your children never become Christians

2012-05-19T11:05:00.000-04:00

The Nazis & Christianity

2012-05-18T15:02:00.000-04:00

Book Review: American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

2012-05-17T18:51:00.000-04:00

While Friedrich Nietzsche has had a significant impact on my own life, I can honestly say that I had very little idea, until I read this book, just how great an impact he has had on the lives of so many others. Ratner-Rosenhagen does an excellent job of covering the history of Nietzsche's engagement with American thinkers, from Emerson's impact on Nietzsche through to Nietzsche's impact on modern American thinkers. I think the most fascinating part of the book is the “Interlude” in which she discusses some of the letters she discovered at the Nietzsche Archive written by American admirers to his sister, who took over the estate after Nietzsche's mental collapse and death. The only complaint I can leverage is that I don't think Ratner-Rosenhagen cast her net quite wide enough. While she does a very good job of covering certain figures whom Nietzsche has clearly had an impact upon, I would have liked to have seen a fuller treatment that included a greater diversity even if this necessitated that less detail be paid to each individual. I recommend this book for anyone with either than interest in American intellectual history and/or a love for Nietzsche; happily, I have both, which made this book a real treat.

The Demolition of Man (Book Review: Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity by Primo Levi)

2012-05-17T18:43:00.000-04:00

In his book Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi uses the phrase “the demolition of man” to refer to the process by which the Nazis attempted to, and largely succeeded in, stripping the inmates of the concentration camps of their humanity.^¹ This powerful phrase accurately summarizes the process of dehumanization concocted by the Nazi concentration camp authorities; theirs was a process of demolition that began immediately upon arrival in the camp and ended, for approximately 6 million Jews and an additional 6 million others, in death by starvation, gassing, or brutality. Levi's use of the phrase occurs as he describes his initial entry into the camp system. As he describes it, he and those with him had been stripped of all of their possessions to include even their clothes. Their hair had been shaved off. Finally, even their name was taken from them as they were instead given a number, tattooed on their arm, by which they were to be identified. Lacking any properly human identity, they had become nothing more than a number and a prisoner indistinct from the mass of other prisoners.

Clearly reflecting the importance of this point, the subtitle of Levi's book, featured only on the title page, is given as “The Nazi Assault on Humanity.”^² This image of “the demolition of man” or the “assault on humanity,” is one that recurs many times through Levi's book, as well as in other sources on life in the concentration camps.

One example that stands out from the many which Levi offers is the use of a German word, fressen, in reference to the prisoners' meal consumption, that refers to the feeding of animals rather than the proper word for human eating, essen. As Levi points out, however, the word is not used derisively but actually is descriptive of the way that the prisoners are eating, “on [their] feet, furiously, burning [their] mouths and throats, without time to breathe.”^³ This is notable because it seems to indicate that the prisoners had, through this process of dehumanization, come to, in some sense, accept their own inhumanity. This is one of the many indicators which Levi provides that the prisoners, after being stripped of their humanity and treated inhumanly, had come to see themselves as something less than or other than fully human. Such an outcome, surely a large part of the aim of the Nazi system, can only be seen as a success of the brutality which was imposed upon the inmates of the concentration camps.

However, there are, on the other hand, many events which Levi describes which capture an image of an enduring humanity that shines through again and again and refuses to be entirely demolished in spite of the inhumanity in which it is buried. One especially moving example is Levi's fight with his own mind to remember the words of Dante's masterpiece The Divine Comedy. As he goes about the daily activities which life in the concentration camps has forced upon him, Levi struggles to recall the lines of poetry that lay buried in his memory. Finally, he reaches a passage which makes him feel as if he had heard “the blast of a trumpet, the voice of God,” reciting:^⁴

Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.

The effect of remembering and reciting these lines causes him to “forget who I am and where I am” for just a moment. Remembering, however briefly, that he is a human being and that the circumstances which have been forced upon him are unbecoming of a human being seems to have been a moment comparable to a mystical experience for Levi.

Such religious allusions are sprinkled throughout those passages of Levi's book that focus upon a continuing humanity in the camps or express a desire to return to being a human being in the fullest sense of the word. In the passage on the German words used for eating, for instance, Levi contrasts the way the prisoners ate with the way that human beings are supposed to eat: “seated in front of a table, religiously.”^⁵

The person of Wachsmann, only briefly discussed by Levi, is also notable in this regard. Wachsmann, a fellow prisoner and a rabbi, is described by Levi as “thin, fragile and soft.”^⁶ Levi expresses surprise that such an unlikely figure has survived for as long as two years in the concentration camps and has even retained “an amazing vitality in actions and words.”^⁷ Interestingly, Wachsmann, in spite of the pared down language, exhaustion, and intellectual stifling that predominated in the camps, also “spends long evenings discussing Talmudic questions” with a fellow rabbi.^⁸ The humanly search “after knowledge and excellence” which is described by Dante in the verses quoted by Levi is here again embodied in religious language, this time in a person of religious significance.

This recurrence of religious language in discussions of humanity by Levi seems to point to a nearly divine significance to being human. For Levi, after having his humanity stripped of him, having any experience as a human being is colored in religious language as a sacred event.

This makes for a remarkable contrast with the ideology that led to the concentration camps in the first place. Nazi ideologues like Arthur Rosenberg had attributed a sacred significance one specific group of people: the so-called “Aryan” race. According to Rosenberg, in his The Myth of the 20^th Century, “a new faith is awakening today: The faith that blood will defend the divine essence of man; the faith, supported by pure science, that Nordic blood embodies the new mystery which will supplant the outworn sacrament.”^⁹ This, of course, necessarily meant that those who were non-Aryans did not partake in this “divine essence of man” and were, consequently, less than fully human.

Levi provides the reader with a contrast to the Nazi's limited and distorted view of humanity by exhibiting the ways in which such a system as emerged from their ideology both acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy and refutes itself through those small acts of humanity that persist even within such a system. As examples of the former, Levi offers the petty, daily cruelties which prisoners even inflicted upon each other, such as the theft of any unattended item or the withholding of food to those who need it by those who are stronger. Such cruelties are the result of the breakdown of normal social conventions within a dehumanizing system like the concentration camps. As examples of the latter, however, Levi offers figures like Rabbi Wachsmann discussing the Talmud, his own struggle to recite verses of poetry from Dante, and the unexpected kindnesses bestowed upon him by other inmates.

The Nazis, in their systematic “demolition of man,” did a great deal to strip a great many people of their humanity. Stripped of their last possessions and any personal identity, millions of men and women were forced to become numbers and to fall in line with a system that demanded absolute and unquestioning obedience and which forced them into a situation in which they had to struggle for their very existence against their fellow prisoners. A large portion of them died as a result of the brutality they incurred or were put to death in the gas chambers, by hanging, or by some other method. In spite of all of this, however, Levi offers a vision, sometimes faint and other times far more clear, of the endurance of humanity through any circumstances that are forced upon it. Levi's book, and his own life, are testaments to the impossibility of “the demolition of man.”

Notes

¹ Primo Levi, Survival In Auschwitz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 26.

² Ibid., i.

³ Ibid., 76.

⁴ Ibid., 113.

⁵ Ibid., 76.

⁶ Ibid., 68.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Arthur Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1931), 114. Quoted in Karl A. Schleuenes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933-39 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 52.

The Christian Ideal

2012-05-16T07:05:00.003-04:00

My life with the Saints

2012-05-16T07:02:00.003-04:00

dhaterz Raspons 2 Davidpwithuns vid on Gailelo

2012-05-16T07:01:00.003-04:00