Belonging to this being, called Dasein, is the temporal particularity of an I, which is this being. When we ask about this entity, the Dasein, we must at least ask, Who is this entity? And not, What is this entity? …The answer to the question of the who of this entity, which we ourselves in each instance are, is Dasein.

- Martin Heidegger (History of the Concept of Time)

Episode 9 of “Dollhouse” aired four Fridays ago on the FOX Network and all hell broke loose. One of the top hours of television ever, that was. “A Spy in the House of Love” was the episode’s allusive title and it packed as much punch as “The X-Files” at the top of its game. Then it went ahead and did it again, four more times in the same episode.

Yet the series appears doomed. Its ratings are too low, although critics have been realizing something extraordinary is happening at the dollhouse during in recent episodes. If only…. Joss Whedon had a five-year story arc in mind for these fascinating and increasingly complex characters, within a universe that is now primed with explosive possibilities.

After watching episode 9, I just couldn’t let this series go. I felt agonized and driven then, and I still do now. I feel compelled to try to express why I feel such awe and admiration for “Dollhouse” and such a fear of losing it. I couldn’t let it die without “doing something” to help (besides pre-ordering Season One on DVD from Amazon, because FOX might factor DVD sales into their decision).

So right away I asked Dan and he said yes, that I could post a tribute to the show here, where TLOU’s cohort of catholic-Christian philosophers, artists, mothers (and fathers), theologians, teachers, and lovers of difficult causes might possibly be interested in the show and sympathetic to its plight (or mine).

Now it’s a month later and I’m still pondering and scribbling. The season finale is airing tonight! I thought I was crazy to spend so much time on this, but I kept being drawn back to it despite myself. Eventually I realized how much joy I’ve experienced, contemplating what I think is great about this series. It’s been as satisfying as the show itself. I realized I was simply indulging in a very old spiritual practice, one that gives us a means of spending time with what we love. At this point I don’t regret one minute of it. But I’ve really got to post something now, before the series has ended and FOX has made its final decision.

Here goes. This series is first of all an amazing piece of artistic daring. It shows what a “purse-proud opulence of innate power” is being displayed by its creator, Joss Whedon. (As Coleridge once said, regarding another genius.) If only FOX would look at the iTunes downloads, and views at hulu, and DVR viewing numbers posted by people who have lives and therefore other things to do on Friday nights, in contrast to old retired professors like me. If only they would, then there might still be a slim glimmer of hope for future seasons.

 It’s appalling to be held captive like this by any network, while fluff with canned laugh-tracks easily accrues the necessary Nielsen ratings. Why is it so appalling? Because as I see it – going out on a limb here – Joss Whedon is our William Shakespeare and “Dollhouse” is his “Measure For Measure.” We ought to be treasuring this stuff.

Scripted television is the closest thing we have in our own day to Elizabethan drama: popular, generic entertainment that reaches into every segment of society and provides a space in which we collectively moot the issues of our day – all of it wrapped in the hide of an entertainment but with a tiger’s heart. Such work educates and exercises us; it can effect deep changes in social attitudes by helping us to process change and broaden our experience all the time they are doing what they do best, entertaining us: think “West Wing,” “NYPD Blue,” or Whedon’s own “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” with all the ways it shaped and empowered a generation of young women.

So what I’m focusing on here is how William and Joss first spectacularly proved themselves in their respective media, by inventing intelligent, spell-binding, and deeply poignant popular comedies that exercised strong appeal in all social constituencies. (Okay, the Puritans hated it, but not all of them.) Whedon’s proving ground was of course “Buffy,” along with his incomparable and utterly irreplaceable sci-fi Western “Firefly,” prematurely canceled by FOX in 2005… to the eternal loss of everyone, everywhere. (Now that’s a DVD to die for.)

But now here’s “Dollhouse,” and there’s NO comedy in it. Well, almost none – in the first few episodes at least. But as soon as the essentially deadly-serious dollverse and its unforgettable characters have had a chance to take on palpability and weight, the trademark wit returns, and by episode 9 the show’s mythology is fully working and its telling ironies are being realized so sharply that we are gasping or laughing out loud in our living rooms. What we’re laughing at or gasping over is going to haunt us for days, weeks, maybe a lifetime.

Like “Measure for Measure,” “Dollhouse” is a calculated venture into “dark comedy” – if we mean very, very dark comedy indeed, like Dante’s “Comedy” in the deepest reaches of Hell, where the betrayers of trust are situated. Or it’s Whedon’s venture into “problem comedy” or “tragicomedy.” All of these are labels applied so uneasily to “Measure For Measure,” of course, because in it Shakespeare chooses to give us a noble brother in prison, facing execution for a sexual misdemeanor, who begs his devout little sister to leave her convent and give her body to the magistrate (a man obsessed with her virginity) in exchange for his own life.  To put it in the modern vernacular, “you only have to do it once and then you can forget it ever happened/act like it never happened.” This is the dollhouse protocol too, only it’s for a five-year contract and you do it over and over….

In each case, the result is truly disturbing dramatic masterwork, created by a writer who’s got talent to burn and who understands how to garner popular appeal but chooses to do something else instead. Will and Joss choose to bring their innate power to bear upon sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

What do we really believe a soul is worth? At what point are the stakes high enough that the sacrifice of innocence is acceptable? What considerations are “enough” to make this okay? The answer today is the same as in Shakespeare’s time. All it takes to “justify” it – or trivialize it, and that’s effectively the same thing – is simply power, exercised with a bland matter-of-factness.

Tragic dramatic comedies are precious because they keep on confronting us with the truth of Hannah Arendt’s thesis about the “banality of evil.” What a great opiate it is, finally, the way banality and mundaneness can obscure the nature of things, so long as they are happening everyday and all around us. Audiences are strangely shown an alien world they nevertheless recognize, because it is their own world, only with the veil of familiarity snatched away, and the audience draws back in horror. (The real world goes on as if nothing’s the matter.)

You may be aware that the “dollhouse” is an illicit underground organization willing to provide very special services to “the wealthy, the powerful, and the well connected.” Its “actives” (or dolls) can be strikingly physically beautiful, and they’ve “voluntarily” signed five-year contracts to have their own memories and personalities “wiped,” so they can be “imprinted” with whatever personalities and life histories and “skill-sets” will suit them best for the assignments or missions they’ll be sent on. “We prefer to call them engagements,” states Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams), the icy executive-in-charge of day-to-day operations at the dollhouse.

Some viewers right away objected that the dollhouse wasn’t credible to them as a business venture, because “people with that much money could get anyone or anything they wanted anyway, so why would they pay the dollhouse for it?” This line of reasoning beautifully re-enforces the killer point of the show, while it also exhibits a touching naïveté – or is it a blissful ignorance? – about the subtlest and most cruel erotic pleasures of sado-masochism.

Besides, the other reason you hire the dollhouse is so that there will be “no consequences” coming back to haunt you in the future. No tearful reproaches or paternity suits or worse. If no one remembers it, it didn’t happen, as the (non)history of genocide teaches us.

After their “engagements,” these super-hot dolls (some are female, some male) will return to their “wiped” states, and we will watch them wandering serenely around the dollhouse from their massages to their Yoga classes to the communal showers. (Wiped actives are sexually innocent.) At night they are put to bed like the precious commodities they are, in pristine little containers whose lids slide closed above them. This constitutes a significant “ick factor” and drives viewers away in droves. It’s also sort of the point.

But just in case you haven’t been watching (like everyone else, who hasn’t been watching either) and you think you’d like to watch the series, there’s something you really need to know before you view the first episode. (It’s at iTunes. Recent episodes only are at Hulu and fox.com, but you want to start from the beginning.)

To enjoy the pilot episode to the maximum extent, you need to know that the executives at FOX nixed the original pilot, which had all the back-story designed to make us care about the central characters. Like the wonderful pilot that Whedon shot for “Firefly,” FOX found this pilot “too dark.” They asked for less dark and less “talking about relationships.”  They requested more in the way of exciting action sequences. Whedon quipped that FOX “wants a chase – and cut to it.”

What about the show’s treatment of sexuality? Enhance the sexy visuals, please, but just slip them in without overtly drawing attention to them. Whedon says that all the networks started displaying this kind of “prurience” after the Janet Jackson event. “It’s hypocritical.”

So it’s the new episode 1 you’ll be viewing, and it throws the titillation factor right in our faces. We get to watch Eliza Dushku dancing in a mini-dress that’s cleverly designed (and filmed) to appear to have no “bottom.” But when we finally get a closer look, heck, there’s a quite respectable bottom there after all – nothing to be outraged about. (How very small that respectable difference is, too, in millimeters.)

 Even more ironically, if that’s possible, the new pilot opens with a brief scene from the original pilot, in which Dushku’s character is carrying on a mysterious and highly charged conversation with Adele DeWitt about signing the dollhouse contract. Then, abruptly, we cut to a chase.

It’s a motorcycle chase, no less, and it roars all across the city and right into the lobby of a very swanky establishment….

This upping of the sex, action, and glamour indices in the new pilot did not draw in the wider audience FOX hoped for, however. Viewers felt distinctly queasy. First they were shown a sensational “dream-girl” – Dushku’s “Echo” looking like every girl in America wishes she looked – out on a sensational jet-set weekend date with a fabulous guy. (“How much fun can we have in three days?” the two challenged each other. “No strings attached.”)

Then viewers have to watch Echo, still the gorgeous, enviably slender, and nubile American dream-girl, returning to the dollhouse with her “handler” in a company van, and confiding girlishly to everyone she meets that she’s met “this guy” who “couldn’t tell a lie to save his life.” She hopefully feels like “he’s really into me.” She’s wondering if maybe “he’s the one, you know?”

“It felt like she was being raped,” viewers complained.  Well, yes it did.

Other viewers failed the ethical litmus test here entirely. In online comment threads they endorsed the rationales offered by corporate facilitators in charge of the dollhouse. “I genuinely believe the dollhouse is doing good,” says Adelle DeWitt. For some her apparent “sincerity” settles the issue.

Then too, there’s Topher Brink (Fran Kranz), the insufferable young computer-geek and genius whiz-kid with the beautiful eyes and an unbearably unctuous manner toward the dolls who are his helpless subjects. Topher presides over the dollhouse memory banks like an impresario, or like the Duke in “Measure For Measure” who’s pulling the strings unseen, and he waves his cyber mastery about like it’s Prospero’s magical wand. He’s the one who imprints the actives and wipes them afterwards, and his character alone is worth the price of admission. Programming Echo as a counter-espionage expert, for instance, he gloats: “She reads body language, knows advanced interrogation techniques, and she’s rockin’ a little bit of Sherlock Holmes.”

So what is Topher’s verdict on Echo’s “dream date” in the first episode? “We gave two people a perfect weekend,” he tells Echo’s handler Boyd (Harry Lennix III). There’s just enough ironic self-awareness in his voice to make me want to throttle him. “We’re great humanitarians,” he adds, drolly. And Echo? “She’s livin’ the dream, man.”

Besides, Echo doesn’t remember the dream, so where’s the harm? For a programmed active, the “tapes” that Topher selects and artfully blends and then downloads into passively waiting brains and bodies constitute the only lives they remember. Someone else’s memories become the major template for the only life they remember ever having lived – until they are wiped again and go back to remembering no life at all.

The ugly fact remains – hidden in plain sight – that these highly intelligent, well educated, and competent people, Adele and Topher and all the rest of the dollhouse staff, are collectively responsible for other people being raped on a daily basis. Some viewers get this picture and resent it fiercely. “Who wants to watch a show about sympathetic rapists?” Besides, they say, “the show is misogynistic.” 

So Whedon was right to worry that maybe this time he was pressing out onto ground that was entirely too iffy. “I’m scared,” he admitted before the episodes aired. Even if he could succeed in making the show’s off-putting premise work the way he envisioned it – a big enough “if” in itself – he would still be taking a chance. People weren’t likely to “love him” for this show, the way they had always loved him in the past.

Why did Whdeon pursue the project? And why at FOX, the network that had been so blind to the merits of “Firefly” – a show that had everything going for it.

Whedon says doing “Dollhouse” appealed to him as a means of looking at human identity. Well, if this is the case, it’s a ball he hits out of the park. If we go along with Heidegger’s analysis that human identity depends upon “the temporal particularity of an I,” then an active on assignment is a “Dasein,” because the active possesses a unique temporal history of human formation. It’s just that to us, the bystanders, the “I” isn’t located in the right body. But if we privilege the body instead, then we’ve got the right body with an alien “temporal particularity” dwelling inside of it. These alternative accounts are both equally accurate – but they are united in one “person,” who is standing right in front of us, and it’s a person who “sincerely” believes in their own genuineness. The various shades of dramatic possibility here are endless, and who better to exploit them than Whedon & Crew? That explosiveness is already staring us in the face in Season One.

The result? We are compelled – and this is also an enormous gift – to experience viscerally just how curious and precious is this cocktail of ingredients that constitutes a human being. Again and again we watch Topher as he orchestrates a “being there,” a Dasein of sorts, into existence before our eyes. We know that later on he will take it apart again. The issues dealt with every time are different; we are examining the mode of being we assume we know so well and finding it increasingly strange and new. It’s mind-boggling and it’s art.

“Who” are these unwittingly deluded “actives on assignment’? Or “what” are they? And what, if anything, does the particularity of the blessed body itself contribute to this frighteningly fragile mix. Is there something more to “the union of a body with a soul” than what we are seeing here? Is there something deeper, some “kernel” of selfhood, and where might it reside? How can it be liberated? How are we to recognize it? How might it come to find and recognize itself, from within?

If this show itself is any evidence, then our bodies contribute a great deal to the “mix” that is human identity. For me, the most poignant result of watching the early episodes was realizing the irreducible role our bodies play in establishing any coherent identity at all. We are made to see this, because if we want to recognize “Echo” and “Sierra” and “Victor” then we must rely on their strikingly distinctive bodies, because they have no consistent personalities within an episode or from week to week. Those names of theirs, by the way, are eerily taken from the NATO phonetic alphabet, underlining their anonymity. Underlining also that each of them can be replaced. We will even come to see that they can be substituted one for another as well.

But they aren’t anonymous. Disgruntled viewers complain that they shouldn’t be expected to care about central characters who are blank and faceless and have no personalities of their own. But they aren’t blank after all and we can care. In fact, we can even get a huge charge out of seeing them come striding unexpectedly into the action, sent to the rescue by the dollhouse. They have a new persona and they’re are on a new mission, yet they are endearingly and recognizably themselves. These individuals, I mean, who have no memories of themselves.

Gradually it is borne in upon us – at least it took me quite a while to figure this out – that we are used to this already, because it is the way we always experience various actors, regardless of the roles they happen to be playing. We recognize actors by. their. bodies. We are convinced that we know these actors, and that we learn more about them from every role they play. Not just about their acting, but about who they are. If this is an illusion, it is one we cannot avoid. We recognize people by their bodies, and then from how they play the roles they are always engaged in, whenever we see them.

 So it’s wild and insane and uncanny and wonderful when we find ourselves going through the familiar and cumulative temporal process of getting acquainted with new actors (Tibetan-born Dichen Lachman as Sierra and Albanian Enver Gjokaj as Victor) at the same time that we are getting acquainted with the dollhouse actives that these actors are playing. Especially when these are actives who are so busy be-ing genuinely and sincerely the persons they assume themselves to be. We are the assessing actors, who are “real people,” as they are must skillfully play the actives, who are only characters engaged in playing various roles (as though they were actors themselves) , but they believe themselves to be real people.

This is a veritable crash-course on how human personalites are constructed over time and come to be recognized by the self and by others through particular temporal histories of interaction, and always ambiguously. It offends our Anglo-Saxon roots in individualism and personal authenticity, perhaps, but it might also alert us to our own gullibility because of the way we tend to take these qualities for granted when sometimes roles are being played for insidious purposes.

The importance of the body doesn’t end here. It is intriguingly explored in other ways, too. It may be that the dolls carry within their bodies certain unconscious needs from their pasts, crying out for resolution. “Have you ever tried to clean a slate?” Dushku’s character had asked Adele back in that mysterious conversation that opens episode 1. “Some of the stuff underneath always sticks.”

Besides, there’s the truth that may belong to the body as a body. “Victor is having a man reaction,” Topher ejaculates suddenly, after he’s been observing the dolls via the in-house security cameras. The dolls are taking their showers and Topher’s almost hysterical; this isn’t supposed to be happening. Upon review of the films, it’s evident that the “man reaction” occurs only when Sierra’s in his line of vision. Nobody else. And so issues of human identity lead seamlessly into questions about erotic (and personal) love.

Besides identity, Whedon wanted “Dollhouse” to deal with “sexual exploitation and human trafficking and how compromised we all are.” Dushku, a buddy of his from back in the “Buffy” and “Angel” days, was wrapped up inside an exclusive contract with FOX. (Think about that.) By doing “Dollhouse” for FOX, he’d be providing a challenging vehicle for Dushku to star in. This same exclusive contract, though, seems to precludes the series being rescued by moving to another network or onto cable, or even making some sort of inspired transition onto the internet. The only hope for a future, if FOX cancels the show, will be in comic books. Whedon loves them; all his shows have had comic-book afterlives.

 So here we’ve got a show with a high “ick factor” built into its premise, and it deals with sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and how compromised we all are. Can we really wonder why its Nielsen ratings – on Friday nights no less – haven’t been good?

But this is where the flabbergasting genius of Joss Whedon comes in, and earns him comparisons to Shakespeare. By episode 9 he’s got “Dollhouse” up and running on a level that’s simply astonishing, enough so to win and keep an audience all its own just for the sheer verve of the thing. It needs time, but it will find an audience. Just as soon as Whedon & Crew have got these fascinatingly ambiguous  and surprising characters in place, along with all the mythology, they can begin to turn the dollverse inside-out and upside-down. We are suddenly transported into Joss Whedon heaven, and the show finds its feet with a vengeance, delivering jolt after jolt of shock and realization, and placing us inextricably inside of some of the deepest and most intimate moral dilemmas humans ever face.

From episode 9 on, we’ll be forced to question our previous estimates of every character. We’ll experience viscerally what we know others have had to endure. But we’ll also find ourselves realizing that the scene we were innocently watching a moment ago has metamorphosed wrenchingly into something more terrible and yet something we ourselves have lived through – and we didn’t see it coming. We’re not bystanders. The epiphanies start arriving non-stop. It’s time to hold your breath for 60 minutes, week after week.

The dilemmas that will be the hardest for us are the ones faced by good characters, and faced only because they are trying so hard to live up to being good. This same kind of tragic ambiguity haunts “Measure For Measure,” especially when the good Duke finally comes out of hiding and imposes by fiat a destiny and a “resolution” upon each of the other characters in the play. We realize that no one is simply free, not even the Duke. We recognize that under the circumstances, he did what he had to do. We know he did what he did for everyone’s own good. But that still doesn’t mean that it is good.

There’s plenty in the earlier episodes to intrigue and exercise your moral emotions, too. The set-up is essential, so you want to watch in order, even when the early episodes are uneven or you can feel the writers and actors straining to find the right tenor. The end result is just too good to mess up, by trying to jump into it at the end. 

Whenever I used to give my students the gift of that genuinely adult love story contained in four of the “Lord Peter Wimsey” mystery novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, I would urge them not to get that sequence out of order either. There’s not much higher praise I can give. Some things are just too good to accidentally blunder into.

So I’ll bring this swansong to a quavering end here, hoping that the beautiful source of the song doesn’t have to die yet, after all. I’ve written and thought a lot more about “Dollhouse,” but this needs to post – it’s now or never.

-William Desmond, Being and the Between

III. Created Ecstasy: Maximus’ Understanding of Humankind as Microcosm
Lars Thunberg, perhaps the most immanent living Maximian scholar, shows, in his magisterial study Microcosm and Mediator, that in Maximus there is an analogy between the unity of divine and human natures in Christ and the unity of body and soul in humanity.1 This image of the unity in Christ reflected by the unity of human nature points to constitution of humankind as microcosm. According to Thunberg the Confessor considers the constitution of created humanity “as an ontological preparation for the eschatological mystery of theandrism.”2 The task of humankind is a mission in the world and it presupposes the theandric, Incarnational schema we have been articulating in Maximus’ theological ontology and Christology for its total realization. According the Thunberg there are three key ideas or factors that propel toward the idea of the human as microcosm. They are
(a) His understanding of the relation between unity and multiplicity; (b) his christological interpretation of the created cosmos; and (c) the influence of the Cappadocian Fathers, who had already made use of this idea in a Christian sense. Furthermore, at this point a decisive influence should also be seen in Nemesius of Emessa.3

In Nemesius the understanding of humankind as microcosm is linked directly to a divine task given to humanity. This task is one of unifying through himself the opposing poles of the cosmos. So it is not only through his constitution of reflecting the world (the body-soul unity reflects the unity of natures in Christ as well as the permeation of the created world by the Spirit of God) but it is also through an act of mediation. Humanity has been placed by God in an intermediary position (he is the meeting of the spiritual and sensual) in order to carry out this act of unification of difference. Since the things of the world are reflected in humanity God gives him the vocation of gathering them all together for their and his final telos or goal, which is ultimately deification or a transfigured cosmos. He should integrate or harmonize opposite phenomena such as mortal creatures with immortal, non-rational with rational, etc. “In this way man should function as a world in miniature, and for this reason he was created as a reflecting image of the whole cosmos.”4
Maximus, along with Nemesius, highlights the active nature of this task of mediation. Ambigua 41is the primary text where Maximus works out this notion, but there are others. Another is to be found in Mystagogia chapters 5 and 7 and the Confessor’s interpretation of the Divine Liturgy. In chapter 7 Maximus develops the line of thinking that says that the universe should be seen as a makranthropos or a human enlarged. This is of course a parallel with the idea of humankind as microcosm. Just as the world contains both visible and invisible aspects, so do humans in that they are body and soul. This dual constitution of the cosmos and humankind is also mutually reflected in that the intelligible dimensions or things of the world represent the soul (one thinks here of Nyssen’s idea of the body as the ‘mirror of the mirror’ of the soul in On the Creation of Mankind), while the soul in humankind represents the intelligible things of the world. The sensible things of the world reflect or are a type of the body, just as, vice versa, the body is the reflection or type of sensible things. Just as there is only one human, who is constituted by the union of body and soul, so there is only one world, made up of its different elements.
Thunberg makes the point that
This analogy between man and the universe, however, is not only a static fact. The duality should be transformed into a unity, unthreatened by dissolution. This task of unification is attributed to man as microcosm and mediator, though this task is refused by man as sinner, who lets himself depend on the world (especially in its sensible element) rather than mastering it. Thus, only through God’s Incarnation in Christ can this task or active mediation take place. Thereby it becomes a fully theandric task. The Incarnation, which was foreseen as the perfection and fulfillment of the full task of mediation, becomes its only possible cause.5

So just as the ecstatic, cosmic ontology of love is only fulfilled and understood fully through the Incarnation of the Logos or second Person of the Trinity, so the role of humankind as mediatorial microcosm in the ecstatic economy of love can only be realized in the Incarnation of Christ. In this realization of the role of humanity of Christ the goal of a deified humanity and thus deified or transfigured cosmos is accomplished and made possible. In the unfallen mode (tropos) of being the lives of humans were destined for deification (theosis, divinization). This is the most intimate possible communion between the human and God, in which the human participates in the Love of the Trinity, through the Son, in the Glory of the Holy Spirit. Here all aspects of human lives are immediate revelations of God. Deification however, is not static, but an ongoing growth into this most intimate communion between God and humans. This is a deifying communion which leads to a transfigured cosmos constituted by ecstatic love.
IV. Deification and the Cultivation of Virtue
In the unfallen mode (tropos) of being the lives of humans were destined for deification (theosis, divinization). This is the most intimate possible communion between the human and God, in which the human participates in the Love of the Trinity, through the Son, in the Glory of the Holy Spirit. Here all aspects of our lives are immediate revelations of God. Deification however, is not static, but an ongoing growth into this most intimate communion between God and humans.
With the fall of humanity, and thus cosmic tragedy, humanity moves from philadelphia, the love of humankind, to philatuia or self love. This self-love is not simply loving oneself. It is essentially construing the cosmos as revolving around the self rather than the Trinity. As such self-love disrupts the hierarchy of being which is constituted by love (particularly participation in Triune Love). It disrupts the entire cosmos, which was characterized most accurately by love. This disruption results in the fragmentation of human relationships and this fragmentation from  philautia gives rise to what Maximus calls “tyranny” (turranos). Maximus characterizes self-love in this way for philautia seeks to order all creation toward our possession. The true doctrine of creation, however, in which creatures are ordered and harmonized around the love in and of the Trinity is replaced by the tyrannical gaze of self-love in which creation and others become viewed through the possessing desire of the individual, and ultimately this grows into systemic evils such as racism. Once the true doctrine of creation is lost humans tend to see themselves as masters of creation, and thus masters over one another, rather than stewards of creation in which relationships are understood as God’s gift to be cherished and stewarded in harmony with the Trinity rather than controlled for selfish ends.6
Maximus claims that being formed in the virtues is the way in which the Spirit unites the human to Christ and thus deifies humans. So I argue in the next section that the virtue of hospitality, while not covered often explicitly by Maximus, is one of the avenues of virtue that, through our practice of it, allows us as humans to be deified by the Spirit through Christ. It is in welcoming the other that we welcome Christ and thus return to the life of love (phila-delphia) rather than tyranny, which arises from self-love’s “fortress mentality” with its desire to possess and bring everything thing within its orbit rather than living out a true doctrine of Creation which places the self and all things within the orbit of the Love of God. However, I will first briefly highlight Maximus’ understanding of virtue, the participation of the human in Christ, and thus the divinizing life.
Lars Thunberg makes a crucial point in understanding virtue in Maximus when he claims that
…social life and virtues are seen by Maximus in the light of the nature (physis)
of man, the nature that is common to all men, and the principle of which (the
logos of nature) excludes any split or separation within the individual or between
different human beings. One could as well speak of an ethical-social dimension
… For Maximus morality and sociality are not isolated in the theological cosmos.
They are precisely a dimension of life as a whole. The decisive proof of this is the
supremacy of charity in his system, the charity of love in which the exercise of
virtues culminate, that charity which is the final goal of the contemplative life of
insight and also is the consummation of the mystical life.7

In other words, love being the height and goal of the virtuous life means that Maximus’ thought on the virtues cannot be separated from his theological ontology I have articulated above. In the end, the virtues are all about love that participates in the God-humanhood of Maximus’ Christ.
Maximus is the inheritor of the tradition of Evagrius Ponticus. As such he has inherited the Evagrian hierarchy of eight capital vices. The Evagrian-Maximian hierarchy consists of eight vices which are gluttony, fornication, avarice, grief, wrath, listlessness, vainglory, and pride. Along with Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus accepts the tradition of the soul as trichotomous (as opposed to tripartite), composed of the rational, irascible, and concupiscible dimensions. Maximus also sees the virtues in the virtuous human as positive substitutes for the vices.8 The virtues are of course dispositions which lead the human in the direction God has created them toward (their logos). The vices and virtues belong to their constitutive elements in the soul. What is most important for our purposes here, however, is to point out that the hierarchy of vices, which the virtues counteract, is viewed by Maximus as the showing forth of disobedience of the dual commandment of love toward God and neighbor. As we have explored above, this disobedience is philautia or self-love, while the life of virtue is understood as the manifestation of charity, of philadelphia.9
For Maximus the life of vice is one of disintegration. The abuse of the natural faculties destroys the unity of the human as a composite being which comes from separation from God. But, as we have explored in Maximus’ larger cosmic theology and Christology, not only is the human separated from God, who is the integrating and final goal of all of human life, but she is also separated from neighbor by the self-love enacted in vices. This results in tyranny toward neighbor. This occurs because all humans participate in the same nature and are called to unity in peaceful or harmonious difference by being guided by this principle and aim (the integrating goal that is God). In the separation from her brethren by vice, the human is separated from charity, for charity coincides with the divinizing goal set before humanity.10 “Separation from charity in this context means precisely this double separation from one’s own true aim and from the unity of humanity.”11 The practice of virtue counteracts this separation and thus leads one back into the divine life of love toward God and love toward neighbor.
For Maximus the practice of the virtues (humility as counter to pride, poverty as counter to avarice, patience to wrath, etc.), and ultimately the summit virtue of charity, leads one into the divinized life.12 The cultivation of love toward neighbor is seen in Centuries on Charity as particularly opposed to anger, which is connected to the irascible element of soul.13 Following Evagrius once again, Maximus believes that the cultivation of the life of virtue leads one toward apatheia. However, whereas for Evagrius apatheia is more of a passive notion, for Maximus it is a state of serenity in which one is divinized into a new life of plenitude in which one overflows with love equally toward all. Within this vein Maximus explores detachment, but again, it is not a passive notion. It is in the imitation of the Triune God whose goodness and detachment issue forth in His creation of all that is and His infinite love and care for all that is. In imitation of this Triune detachment human detachment should serve the end of love toward all humankind, without distinction. So virtue functions toward the end of freeing humans from vice so that they may love God and others, loving these others out of Christ’s plenitude and fecundity. There is thus a close link between detachment and charity toward the neighbor.14 In Centuries on Charity II:30 Maximus claims:
He who is perfect in love and has attained the summit of detachment knows no
difference between “mine and thine,” between faithful and unfaithful, between
slave and freeman, or indeed between male and female. Having risen above the
tyranny of the passions and looking to nature, one in all men, he considers all
equally and is disposed equally towards all. For in Him there is neither Greek
nor Jew, neither male nor female, neither slave nor freeman, but everything
and in all things Christ.15

It is here that I want to make a decisive turn toward the practice of hospitality, for hospitality is a practice through which this detached love may be cultivated. In other words, we can logically talk about hospitality as a practice through which deification can take place, given Maximus’ overall vision.
In the next section below I want to explore how the practice of Hospitality is a virtue through which humans are deified by the Spirit in and through the Son. Put differently, I want to show that hospitality is one of the practices through which we meet God in the stranger or “other.” This is the case for, as the quote just above notes, for the person being truly divinized vision is such that she sees“…everything and in all things Christ.” To truly meet Christ in the other involves the discerning of the logoi or logos of the other. Discerning the true reason for being of another person involves meeting Christ in them, thus meeting God. To truly discern this reality about another person involves transformation from our self-love, which creates barriers and causes tyranny against the other, to philadelphia, which shapes human love toward a true understanding of creation. The other can no longer be our possession or a cardboard character in our story. They must be seen in all their glory, that is, that they are the bearer of the image of God. Thus, tyranny is brought to an end through the practice of hospitality.16

This poem came out of studying The Cappadocians, three men and one woman who were 4th centery Eastern, Greek speaking xtians who had a huge part in the formation of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. They were affirming the goodness of Creation in the midst of all the muck and dung that we seem to endlessly make out of our lives and world. This has often been a great struggle for me. So there are Hebrew and Greek words referring to various human, social realities. Nietzsche has breathed in my ear in times of agnostic, nihilistic struggle in the past so he shows up dueling with Macrina. I wrote it during a rain storm outside the GF Java Cafe in my hometown of Jamestown, TN.

Like Mercy

“Sweet Rain…like God’s own Mercy…”

What exactly is the connection, the connection between a world of harmonic order and a world of suffering, decay…death?

The rain pours upon the earth, invading but belonging in every pore, awakening parched roots. Dry and dead now leap for joy, springing to the sky

Water pours upon the earth, dancing and splattering…splattering/dancing…dattering splancing upon the streets, rolling over pavement, falling over steps in the ever-moving niagra of spinning cosmos

Water…one of those fundamental elements…rolls over and into the pores of earth and…and thunder rolls, lightening strikes

Harmony or discord?

Walls fall, lifeless bodies collapse down the collapsing hills of collapsing houses of collapsing earth. Lifeless bodies of deer and cattle and dogs and cats and Adam and…and it would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam, ish and isha, man and woman, mother and son, son and sister and father and neighbor and polis and oikos and agora and oikonomia and…creation…and out of the Alpha Rhythms of participatory love bodies are enraptured, so babies are born in the midst of heroic words like “till death do us part.” Homes are built, gardens are planted. Games are played while laughter is shared. Songs are sung and enraptured bodies move to the rhythms of the dance

Pointing and jumping, laughing I scream “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order!”

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam and all the ways and webs of the knitting together of Adam and…and reputations fail, economies collapse as bodies collapse as families collapse as marriages crumble as children collapse as cities collapse and as lies are told lust takes over, giving forth torture and greed, hunger and rape, famine and coldness

All of a sudden that madman runing through the streets that night with the silly mustache shouting” God is dead and we have killed him” seems not so far from of right. Adam seems to care much more about power games than love games…and people are torn and lives collapse and…and it still would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish!

Harmony or discord? What is the connection?

This fish feels the jaws surround and the darkness elbow out the light

And in the darkness I hear Macrina sing, pointing, shouting, jumping up and down, “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order envelopes chaos. There is not beginning, no arche, without an end, a telos.” And her voice echoes

“Get up Lazarus”

“Shall these bones live?”

“Where oh death is thy sting?”

“The heavens are telling”

“He is not here, he is risen”

“Sweet rain…like God’s own Mercy..Mercy that upholds it because it is good. It is fallen but it is good…

Discord or Harmony?

Macrina I hope like hell you are right because…because the deaf want to hear, the lame want to leap, the dead want to live and…and I am just so fucking tired of wanting to be a fish…Amen

So here is how I hash out the failures: Ozymandias, which is pretty obvious, in that he sacrifices the city of New York, and its anonymous millions, for a supposedly secure peace on earth. It is peace based on a lie, but it is the best we can hope for: the logic of sacrifice. It is realistic. This is the failure of ratiocination.

Manhattan, even though he can meld and mold matter at will, ultimately agrees with the unconscionable act of Ozymandias, and departs, a lame duck of a super-hero to “create other galaxies” or some bullshit like that. He condones the murder of millions and departs never having known love. His departure seals the peace. His truth seals the lie. This is the failure of scientia.

The Silk Spectre, the only prominent woman, fails in a fit of sentimentality, for she actually weeps when Dr. Manhattan tells her he is going on his venture of creation without love. She is turned on by the idea of it, and this way, as she’s making love to Dan in their suburban hovel, she might think of these creations millions of light years away and work herself up to an orgasm. This is the failure of concupiscence.

Dan, Nite Owl, he is the big nerd who actually has big muscles, kind of like a boy ugly duckling. He has a fit of conscience when he sees what Ozymandias is doing, but he only gets angry for a little bit, and then realizes that what is realistic for him is just to settle down, fight crime on the weekends, and bone his wife in the ship on the way home. This is the failure of common sense.

Rohrshach. O, how close we came to a hero here. For he was the one who tracked down Ozymandias, he was the one who would never back down to a suburban existence, who would never let the truth be trampled by such a thing as peace. But in the end he is only seeking suicide. He is only seeking death as an escape from a world of people whom he hates. He holds onto the truth, but he has no love for it -  just as Dr. Manhattan has knowledge to create without love, so Rohrschach has truth but without compassion for his fellows.

There is no super-hero here, but its funny that we’re left with a pretty super movie. It was noted a couple nights ago that the best candidate for hero in this story is actually Rohrschach’s journal, which, because of the intractable rapacity of the media will have a chance to see the light of day, to open up the possibility of Ozymandias’ guilty, to re-introduce the threat of nuclear war between earthly enemies - but it is possible that Rohrschach loved his journal, and if he did, the truth there will most suredly see its day.

Bibliography

Copeland, Robert M. “The Christian Message of Igor Stravinsky” The Musical Quarterly. 68.4 (October 1982), 563-579.Stravinsky, Igor. Symphony of Psalms for Chorus and Orchestra. London: Boosey and Hawkes Inc.,1948.Taruskin, Richard. “Russian Folk Melodies in ‘The Rite of Spring.’ Journal of the American Musicological Society. 33.3 (Autumn, 1980), 501-543.Walsh, Stephen. “Stravinsky’s Choral Music” Tempo, New Series. No. 81 Stravinsky’s 85^th Birthday (Summer, 1967), 41-51.

 St. Maximus Confessor and Christian Hospitality

Introduction

St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662 A.D.) understands the cosmos through a theological ontology of Love. All creatures in creation are unified through participation in the ecstatic Love that is the life of the Trinity. Participation in this Love unifies the difference of creatures into a harmony. As such this love is the “reason” or “logos” of creatures. With the fall of humanity this love is disrupted cosmically. The fall of humanity is key in this “cosmic tragedy” for humanity is the microcosm (micros-kosmos or “little cosmos”), which participates in the sensuous, creaturely dimension of being and the rational-spiritual dimension of the hierarchy of being. Humanity, the microcosm, is the center or crux of the hierarchy of being as it co-inheres in the second person of the Trinity, the Logos. It is the crossing of the divine and the sensuous dimensions of the hierarchy of being. Consequently, when humanity falls the harmony of creation is disrupted. This disruption or discord is healed or re-harmonized in the Incarnation of the Second person of the Trinity. In the Incarnation of the Logos in Christ the Love which orders the cosmos is shown or made concrete and the healing of humanity, the ‘microcosmic mediator,’ is accomplished; thus the goal (telos) of Creation, which the Triune God has desired from the beginning, is realized and made possible.

In this paper I want to show that for Maximus the Confessor the Cosmos (creation) is a creaturely mode of ecstatic love which participates in and reflects the Ecstatic Love that is the Life of the Triune God. I also want to show how, in this economy of ecstatic love, humankind is, for Maximus, what Lars Thunberg calls ‘microcosm and mediator.’[1] Humankind is a little cosmos who is a unity of body and soul as well as the one who is given the task of gathering in himself all the sensual and intelligible aspects of creation and, through the Logos, taking them and humanity itself toward its God-given telos of deification, which leads ultimately to a transfigured cosmos. Within the exploration of these two dimensions of Maximus’ vision I will show how his Doctrine of Christ is central to his theological symphony. Finally, throughout the process of this exploration I want to give a basic overview of some of the primary themes in the thought of Maximus Confessor. I will then connect the Maximus’ theology of deification with the Christian tradition of the practice of hospitality. In doing so I will show that there is a mutual enrichment which takes place. Maximus’ theology of deification is made more concrete by showing it as enacted by the welcoming of the other, while the tradition of hospitality is enriched by articulating it as a Maximian deifying practice which enables humans to participate in the very life of the Triune God.

I. Maximus’ Theological Ontology as the Mystery of Love[2]

At the heart of Maximus’ theological vision is his conception of love as both a cosmic or ontological reality and a theological virtue. This, in a nutshell, is the confessor’s crucial contribution to the present argument, which will be articulated in this essay. Maximus says as much as he begins his letter On Love to John the Cubicularius.

You, the God-protected ones, cleave through grace to holy love towards God as your neighbor and care about   appropriate ways of practicing it…For nothing is more truly Godlike than divine love, nothing more mysterious, nothing more apt to raise up human beings to deification. For it has gathered together in itself all good things that are recounted by the logos of truth in the form of virtue…[3]

In this letter Maximus briefly, but powerfully, delves into love, which is defined as the essence of the life of the Triune God and what the Confessor calls the logos or fundamental principle of the existence of creatures. According to Letter 2, when human beings live in harmony with love, and thus in accordance with the Trinity who is love and from whose love creation arises, they live virtuously. In other words, they participate in the divine life. In a way similar to Thomas Aquinas Maximus acknowledges love as both a theological virtue and the supreme theological virtue. The failure of human beings to live in accordance with love results in what Maximus calls tyranny (turannos). The introduction of this tyranny into the world sets in motion a history tied to oppressive power. For Maximus the exercise of this oppressive power of tyranny communicates phil-autia, or self-love, rather than the love of humankind, or phil-adelphia.[4] But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Let us explore further the rudiments of the theological ontology of love.

As alluded to in the quote above, Maximus’ Letter 2: On Love considers the all-encompassing or cosmic nature of the virtue of love. All things fall within its scope and exist within and in relationship to love. This is true whether creatures live in accordance with it or in resistance to it. Living in accordance with love means creatures live in an orientation of reception of the world and the things of the world as gift. To live in resistance to love leaves creatures in a place of self-love in which, rather than reception of creation as gift, all is seen within the horizon of self and thus possessed. To be rendered intelligible all else must be possessed.

In either case, all things still exist in relationship to love (in accordance with it or in perversion from it). In a Maximian vein, one might therefore say that love grants being to all that exists. It is the proton and eschaton of all things and as such is the ultimate principle of existence.[5]

Everything, every good, insofar as it is good is but an inflection of love. God is Love and love is in a real sense the goal of everything. “Love is the fulfillment of these, wholly embraced as the final and last desire…”[6] So love is divine in character. Because of this divinity it elevates to the level of divinity or divinizes (deifies) whatever orients itself in harmony with it. Love is, for Maximus and the other ancient Greek theologians, the very principle of theosis or divinization. Thus love’s very character is transforming or divinizing.[7]

It should begin to become clear now that love is part and parcel of the locus of Maximus’ thought. It is so central that it is not only the core of his understanding of God, and therefore the touchstone of that intimate contemplation of God that is theology (theologia), it is also the fundamental basis of his anthropology.  He conceives his inquiry into the human as “theandric.” This means that the human is one for whom being oriented toward and united to God is appropriate and fitting to it. This fittingness arises out of love. Love is what causes the reality of God and God’s creation to fruitfully converge. Like Gregory of Nyssa, this convergence does not do away with the simultaneous dissimilarity between the creature and Creator at the level of nature. For Maximus the distinction of Creator and creature is not a violent division of a purely extrinsic or parallel relationship of competition. Rather, the love rendered concretely in Christ Jesus brings the modalities of being of the Creator and creature into the most intimate possible union.[8]

 And he does human things in a way transcending the human, showing, in accordance with the closest union, the human energy united without change to the divine power, since the [human] nature, united without confusion to [the divine] nature, is completely interpenetrated, and in no way annulled, nor separated from the Godhead hypostatically united to it.[9]

It seems that for Maximus it is precisely the distinction between Creator and creature which love guarantees. The unity between God and creatures realized through the incarnation of God as a human is actualized precisely by bringing about the union that simultaneously draws creation and God evermore closer together while yet always maintaining the distinction between the two. A collapsing of the one into the other would no longer be a union, but rather an absorption, which would of course do away with union. The purpose of the union is to perfect humans as humans and the creation as creation. So the preservation of the enduring difference in union by the Trinity’s love is the modus operandi and heart of deification. This deification in love is rooted in the Incarnation of God in Christ. The love that is concretized in Christ, therefore, is the locus of creaturely identity, particularly human identity and this identity is such that when it is conceived theologically can only be comprehended properly in relationship to God.[10

At this point we may profitably ask, along with J. Kameron Carter, what sort of vision of human identity and divine identity is being articulated by the Confessor? Carter helpfully addresses this when he claims, for Maximus, it is an ecstatic understanding of identity. That is, love names a twofold ecstasy (ekstasis) for him. On the one hand, it names the “ecstatic” relationship that God as the Creator has with creation. The “ecstasy” within God or the”ecstasy” constitutive of both the Triune relations and the divine nature, which the relations enact though they are not reducible to it, produces an ecstasy beyond the divine nature.[11]

Put differently, the ecstasy of Love of the Triune relations produces the many, the difference which has contained within it the potential or possibility of all other differences. The primary ecstasy that is God gives rise to the secondary “ecstasy of creation, the ecstasy of the many.”[12]

On the other hand, the love concretized in Jesus Christ also names the ecstatic, transcendent relationship that creation reciprocally has with its Creator. This second understanding of ecstasy is an image of the first ecstasy. The Confessor claims that the unity of these two aspects of ecstasy occurs in Jesus Christ. In other words the loving ecstasy which is proper to God and that is causative of its imaging ecstasy, creation, occurs in the incarnate Logos. So, ecstasy is finally another way of talking about how incarnation is a phenomenon particularly specific to Jesus Christ and, for exactly this reason, is a phenomenon which is indicative of creation as such. Incarnation is not simply a foreign entry of either a distant or competitive deity (competitive with our creaturely existence, as if creatures and God both lived under a common category of Being), but is indicative of creation as such. It indeed communicates to us the destiny of humanity.[13]

[11] Carter, 349. Carter’s reading of Maximus here is crucial for appropriating the (broadly) poststructuralist notion of “the other” in contemporary theology. It is crucial in that Maximus, in the Christian theological tradition, offers an ontology or metaphysic which makes such language ultimate coherent. Often poststructural renditions of “otherness” seem to disavow metaphysics while assuming an unsaid metaphysics in which the “other” and the speaking subject are seen to be in a situation of irreducible violence, in which we can only be the least violent possible. But surely such a notion requires on to make overarching statements which look an awful lot like a universal metaphysic. For a Christian critique of postmodern “ontological violence” see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) and David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Both these works follow a similar line of argument (Hart relies upon Milbank’s earlier version of his aforementioned work), though perhaps Hart offers a more accurate reading of individual “postmodern” philosophers. For a work that seeks to not only critique but dialogue with and affirm aspects of contemporary philosophy and its nihilism see Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002). Maximus gives a Trinitarian ontology which allows for peaceful difference and sees violence in the midst of difference as ultimately the rejection of the gift of creation from the gifting Trinity.

[12] Cater, 350.

[13] Carter, 350.

You all know that I don’t forward emails or post silly stuff here (I don’t know why I make these caveats, but I feel compelled to nonetheless), but I thought that those of you that are intentional about resisting certain rather unhealthy aspects of the seasonal buzz might find this bit encouraging. And I’m all about encouragement here.

From the Sojourners daily email.

Have Yourself a Peace and Justice Christmas

Have yourself a peace and justice Christmas,
Set your heart a-right.
Flee the malls and focus on Christ’s guiding light.

Have yourself a peace and justice Christmas,
Give your time a way.
Share God’s love, And serve “the least of these” today.

Here we are, as we pray for peace,
We’ll live simply and give more.
We care for those far and near to us,
Which brings cheer to us, once more.

God brings down
The haughty from high places,
And lifts up the low.
God cares for the hungry and the humble, so –
Forget the stress and let the peace and justice flow!