In Cohen’s deliberately exaggerated expression, God’s being becomes actual in and through His correlation with man. “God is conditioned by the correlation with man. And man is conditioned by the correlation with God.” God cannot be thought properly as being beyond His relation to man, and it is equally necessary to understand man, the creature constituted by reason or spirit, as essentially related to the unique God Who is spirit. Reason is the link between God and man. Reason is common to God and man. But it would contradict reason if man were only the passive partner in his correlation with God. Correlation means therefore also and especially that God and man are equally, if in different ways, active toward one another. (Leo Strauss, “Introduction to Hermann Cohen: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism” 238)

It takes a lot of Scriptural twisting to identify rationality as the central link between God and man. A sharp distinction between reason and revelation is much more sound for the study of philosophy or Scripture. And yet Cohen uses this strange set of thoughts to get here:

Our fellowmen we do not know through experience pure and simple but only by virtue of the command that we love them. Only on the basis of this intrahuman correlation can the correlation of God and man become actual: in man’s behavior toward men, not in his behavior toward God, the distinction between good and evil arises. It is in the light of “the social love” of our fellowmen that we must understand the love that proceeds from God and the love that is directed toward him. (239)

It’s beautiful. We understand fully there is nothing particularly rational, erotic or even friendly about this. This is a moral vision and it seems to indicate that concerns about the beautiful are moral concerns. It places a higher love as prior to justice, knowledge and even divinely inspired order. One does not argue with such a vision. There is too much in its generality and universality at stake to lodge petty complaints. What one does is sketch the more complicated pictures elsewhere. We recognize fully the power of the declaration that started this reflection. Sight, memory and thought create another world from the emergence of reason from darkness. Cohen, in his original vision, may not be attuned to the whole as tragic (although, given Providence and the fate of peoples, he certainly is aware of tragedy).

References

Strauss, Leo. “Introduction to Hermann Cohen: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 238-9.

Shared this a number of times in a number of places. What strikes me is the composer’s emphasis on “admirabile sacramentum” (wonderful sacrament) and “animalia” (animals). Where is man in the Latin text? It bears repeating the chromatism of this work lends itself to a tenderness rarely heard. For that reason I’ve provided the link to the UST Alumni Singers’ performance. I might be imagining things, but they seem to have a vocal maturity that younger singers might not always have. I’m not really talking about something technical here.

A related point. Someone asked me earlier what I thought about all the commercialism surrounding the holiday season. I think it was because I was ranting about all the schlocky, bad Christmas music I was hearing everywhere. Must every place sound like an overcrowded mall?  I punted. I didn’t want to continue ranting, not when something different and interesting and thoughtful might be said.

I’m not sure I have anything of the sort at hand. I’m simply thinking “savior” and “redeemer.” In a way, our crass materialism has it exactly right. We need to be saved from ourselves (“redeemed”) and from others (“savior”/”Messiah”). The need for justice and the good is here and now. It is so overpowering it dictates the next life; we can’t have lived in vain. We make our highest desires almost abstract. This is not a bad thing at all. As was pointed out to me repeatedly the last few months, Luke aims at presenting a savior for the world, one not tied to a particular nation or its justice.

But again, we end up at that notion from a very real – particular – hunger for our needs to be met. The coming of Christ is God fulfilling a promise. That alone, independent of how or what it means, is the celebration. Is this simply wishful thinking? Not at all. We’re all giving each other gifts today, whether sacred or secular. The hope is we recognize each other’s need and act accordingly. That was always the godly wish.

Then he also said to his disciples, “A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, “What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.” The steward said to himself, “What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.” He called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, “How much do you owe my master?” He replied, “One hundred measures of olive oil.” He said to him, “Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.” Then to another he said, “And you, how much do you owe?” He replied, “One hundred kors of wheat.” He said to him, “Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.” And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.

“For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones. If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth? If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

2. The note underneath the parable says that we must understand the passage this way: stewards would routinely ask for more than their masters originally did. On that reading, all the steward is doing is reducing the amount due to the original cost and forgoing his take.

The trouble I have with that reading is that it seems to eliminate the full significance of friendship with “dishonest wealth.” What the servant did was throw away his dishonest wealth to keep his job. It failed him, he has a more permanent place now. But was “dishonest wealth” only the issue of the servants’ behavior?

3. Luke includes a story about an incompetent servant at 19: 11-27. A man about to become king goes off to another country. He leaves servants behind with his money to trade in the country he will return to. One of them fails to make any money as he simply kept it secure. That servant is given no portion of rule; he is asked why he couldn’t have put the money in the bank. Now the same nobleman who becomes king was opposed by some citizens. After returning and chiding the servant, he declares that those who opposed him need to be slain.

I am going to work with this assumption: we need to take incompetence or carelessness as opposed to outright vice seriously as at least a metaphorical problem in the passage from Luke 16.  The implication of the later passage seems to be that whatever the nobleman/king represents, it is fundamental to the good, so fundamental that neglect or hatred of it is fatal.

4. Let’s say the steward from the first passage was simply incompetent. His master may have been “demanding” (cf. Luke 19: 20-22). The debtors could not possibly have made good on their payments and it was the steward’s job to know this. If that is the case, then a too-strict honesty is unjust. Moreover, the standards of human justice – wealth is purely a means, in a way symbolic of all conventionality – are real and need to be addressed by us before we even think about what is higher. The “dishonest wealth” is the debtors getting away with less, the servant keeping his job, the master being pleased with getting something instead of nothing. “Dishonest wealth” is good for all; the problem was the master’s initial requests being turned into a system that produced nothing.

What does it mean to love wealth too much? It might mean to devote oneself to artifice for no other reason that it seems powerful. It more than likely means fear and worship of God because of His power, not because of what He stands for. These considerations take us to a place most theists do not want to go: haven’t we dismissed the good as absolute? We have: it looks entirely relative here. The spirit of the law is taking us far from law itself. Shouldn’t we insist on complete honesty? What happens when we weaken the law’s call to obedience? Aren’t we just deciding arbitrarily what God stands for?

5. The Bible ultimately responds to that by showing God acting in time with purpose. Instead of a rational account, we get a revealed order where we can trust our moral judgments made with the right spirit will work out. Trust in Providence, aka the Holy Spirit, becomes the key to the enterprise. The “incompetence” of servants, bridesmaids, bad party guests in the Gospels is carelessness, a lack of trying, a lack of taking risks, a lack of mercy. One can’t take the law and make it reasonable or take one’s own reason and make it the law. There’s some kind of “openness” which is, thematically, God and man working together. The law is pointing at what is right. And you’ve got your judgment.

Which, of course, threatens the problems we’ve mentioned above. Xenophon notes that attending to corruption is not vice (corruption is vice), but virtue. There may only be virtue because there is vice, good because there is evil. Keeping people obedient to the law and focused on what is right is a too delicate balance. Strict obedience is a good thing in many, many cases. The servant’s fear prompted him to be more merciful.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this topic – the arguments for the Christianity of America as a whole depend on a lot of dishonesty and cherry-picking. I realize for those of you sympathetic to the “argument” (it isn’t really an argument. It’s really the assumption “I’m religious and I read religion into everything, doesn’t everyone work that way?”) the case is “obvious” or “common sense:” Once upon a time, most people were more Christian (truish), and they mentioned “God” a lot in documents that are relevant to the Founding (true to a degree). Doesn’t that mean America is a Christian nation? (no) Doesn’t it mean we have a prophetic destiny? (oh hell no. You have to be pretty out there as a believer to hold that).

That’s the case in a nutshell – to get more specific, what I know a lot of homeschoolers and fundamentalists do is ignore and marginalize the entirety of the Enlightenment. I know this because I’ve seen this happen among some in graduate school, no joke. So in other words, what’s happening when the Texas School Board pushes something specific like the study of the Mayflower Compact is that they’re trying to push the Pilgrims (and their faith) as founders as opposed to the Declaration, which explicitly appeals to “nature’s God.” That God is anything but the Judeo-Christian God; the Constitution does not mention the word “God;” the settled law that founds the United States of America is secular. Period, end of conversation: there are no prophetic or apocalyptic fantasies to be legitimately had.

Now some of you know the picture is a bit more complicated than that, but it’s not so much more complicated that America becomes the most Christian place ever under reexamination. Rather, it’s like Jefferson’s First Inaugural: this place exists to avoid the religious warfare that defined Europe for centuries. When people bring up Enlightenment and democracy arising or finding sustenance because of a religious context, ala Tocqueville, that’s again a very complex set of claims about how what constitutes piety involves passions that are key to self-government. It does not become a basis for saying that Cleon Skousen is correct, or, as one Reverend Peter Marshall says:

“The Founding Fathers’ biblical worldview taught them that human beings were by nature self-centered, so they believed that the supernatural influence of the Spirit of God was needed to free us from ourselves so that we can care for our neighbors.”

That’s such an egregious misreading of the historical record that anyone who seriously thinks this should not only enroll in classes, but get their head examined. You’ll note that Marshall is one of those working on revising Texas’ curriculum in an official capacity. If anything, the reading of man as “self-centered” comes from a very secular worldview; one can trace back the principal logic behind Constitutionalism from Locke (“life, liberty, property”), who was preached by pastors during the revolution (yes, recognizing the difference between what is “atheist” and “theist” is not easy in a world where you’ll get your head cut off if you write “I hate God”) to Hobbes (where an emphasis on security came from) to Machiavelli (who said that Christianity wouldn’t last as long as the world would). You can argue against the very brief summation I just made (usually, the argument is that Locke isn’t that secular), but you’re not going to get as far as “America is Christian.”

It is true some Founders were Christian. It is true they were vocal. I’m not saying that secularism today doesn’t go too far in marginalizing the proper place of religion in the study of history or politics. But the contemporary study of history and politics in the academy, for all its faults, is absolutely more sound and thorough than this nonsense being spouted by cranks. Keep in mind that the purposes behind the rewriting of history are not evangelization so we all love each other or tolerate each other. The purposes that the “Christians” advancing this stuff are working toward are apocalyptic in many cases. The nytimes article does not get into this, but any of you who know fundamentalists know that this is not far off the table. You can see shades of the rhetoric here:

After the book came out, Dunbar was derided in blogs and newspapers for a section in which she writes of “the inappropriateness of a state-created, taxpayer-supported school system” and likens sending children to public school to “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.”

Richard Brookhiser’s statement in the article is a much better starting point for education and scholarship:

“The founders were not as Christian as those people would like them to be, though they weren’t as secularist as Christopher Hitchens would like them to be.”

That’s a good enough place as any to end this rant. The burden of proof is not on me, nor on any of us who work on the history of political thought or philosophy full time. The task ahead is for right-wing Christian fundamentalists who are engaged in rewriting history for their own purposes to show some humility and stop demonstrating that a strict wall of separation might actually be a really good idea.

“Why, do you not say yourself that the sky and the birds prove God?”

- “No.” -

“Does your religion not say so?”

- “No. For though it is true in a sense for some souls whom God has enlightened in this way, yet it is untrue for the majority.” -

There are quite a few religious bloggers who are quite shrill on the Internet, but my immediate complaint is with the number of pro-choice and atheist bloggers who seem to want to make any differing opinion a point of disgrace. I support attacks on Creationism and religious zealots who promote violence. When that abortionist was killed recently, a lot of people on Twitter said things that really should get one looked at with intense scrutiny by the authorities. I’ve also been clear that we’re happy to accept the practical benefits of science, while attacking the theoretical implications and the sense of wonder which accompany genuine learning: we can make education nothing but dogmatism if we like.

However, there are two major problems I see with the disdain for religion and the right to life online:

1. The attacks usually take extremes and make all believers accountable for them.
2. There is no acknowledgment that some people choose to believe in God because they already love, and want to be more loving.

Generally speaking, these two sorts of attacks reduce to one: there’s just a feeling I get from them that anyone who is religious doesn’t deserve to exist, that they should go kill themselves or something. Being pro-life also seems to mean that the only thing one wants to do is force values down other people’s throats – it’s simply not possible for someone to believe that children or a family is a good thing.

I realize that it is going to get harder to respect believers as the Right gets more problematic: I watched the opening of an episode of Glenn Beck recently where he was talking with “concerned Moms,” all of whom said that the Founders believed in God and were very devout and they seemed to argue the federal government now was a direct assault on God Himself. There, of course, is some truth to overzealous bureaucrats and political correctness finding new ways to offend those of us who are more traditional. But the fact that the principal Founders were deists and that the secular nature of the Constitution is simultaneously an assault on any given Church and a way of preserving everyone’s religious heritage seemed to be notions that were far above the ability of those crazies to grasp. Worse, they seemed emboldened by their sense of belief, and given that they were on television, one could even argue that they were empowered. In the face of all of this, it seems simpler to argue there is such a thing as “science,” and that it is in perpetual conflict with “religion,” and “science” should win this conflict.

But I know that philosophy and piety diverge partly because they address different aspects of the soul (or, if you like, “our natural proclivities:” I use “soul” without any necessary religious connotation). You can sort of see this in how someone can express wonder and love for Creation, and want to be grateful for all the beautiful things experienced. That wonder does not necessarily conflict with exploring new areas of knowledge, or one’s eagerness to learn something new. They sometimes seem to complement each other: we only have Plato and Aristotle because Muslims in the Middle Ages preserved those texts, and we all know Catholic monks worked very hard to make copies of ancient works and translate them when they could.

As sad as the scent of smoked fish
is up in the attic
as loving the chimney leans
against a tight sky,
an erratic ladder seeking a gap
in the stream of yellow cloud.
The wall holds up the sudden drop
of a branch, the flight
of sweet cherries is either mad – upwards -
or inconsolable – downwards.
The worst is when their flesh remains
there where it hurts – a shade
out of reach. I’ve seen you, father, fetch
the ladder as if it was
just another assumption, bleached and
blotted from your paint-jobs, the sheer
gumption of graffiti on concrete. The rot
always orbits the stone, less a
varicose vulture picking at your leg
than a worm of light rustling back
the soft leaves. Whether bad luck hit you
or a stroke of genius,
the earth always grieves its own gravity.

Comment:

I.

Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran [Genesis 11:31 for the significance of "Haran"]. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder [stairway, ramp] set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Issac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth [really God? "like?"], and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

So Jacob rose  early in the morning and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel; but the name of the city was Luz at the first. Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you.”

- Genesis 28: 1-22

I can only comment on this briefly: it has been a long while since I looked at Genesis, and there is a quite complicated poem meriting comment above. Obviously Jacob and Abraham have to be compared: what the Lord told Jacob sounds similar to Abraham, but why are we “dust” instead of “stars?” (Genesis 15:5, although we are like dust in terms of being counted at 13:16) Haran is hallowed because it is from where Abraham originated; it is already the “house of God,” no matter what Jacob may do later. Notice that Issac is skipped in Jacob’s vision: it is as if Jacob and Abraham are the only two in his family that matter; another word for “gate of heaven” is “Babylon;” is tithing something you do after God gives a lot, or something you’re supposed to do because you respect God in the first place?

Remember what happens with Jacob’s kids: they try to kill Joseph, being the nice people they are, and Joseph, being the not-so-arrogant guy he is, ends up bringing all of them and a bunch more to Egypt so they can be slaves to Pharaoh, who of course is a god. The distinction between “Bethel” – where the heavenly ascend and descend – and the city of Luz is everything: when did Jacob return to his father’s house in peace, exactly?

I’m not saying this is a moral comment on Jacob or his sons: there is a bit of that, but again, the Bible rarely shies away from serious questions or concerns. What’s really happening here is that all of us want to make something of our lives (establish cities, maybe?) – we each want to “wrestle with God” – but what binds us to the Law isn’t the continual renewal of covenant, but our actual obedience to the Law and our parents (i.e. “honor thy father and mother”). Jacob had this vision while being sent by Issac to go get a wife from where Issac told him to go get a wife.

II. Two similes introduce the “erratic ladder:” the smell of “smoked fish” and all the memories evoked trapped in the highest part of the house, and a chimney’s relation to the narrowness of sky around it. That latter “pillar” is loving, supposedly. From smell and touch we move to sight (“seeking”) – “stream of yellow cloud” is from Prufrock, but not quite: there it was the sulfurous fumes of early 20th c. Boston forming a fog, I think. Here it is merely sunlight giving dark(er) clouds a rich glow. Why the hell is Dad outside? Hasn’t he conflated enough issues already?

“Sudden drop of a branch,” against a “wall:” we know these are cherries; “sudden drop” explains us, though, all too well. We bleed and blush when we least expect it. Here is the break with the more traditional Scriptural teaching (i.e. everything Jacob did was holy): those cherries are sweet, our humanity is something achieved. It hovers, though, and that’s a trap: move towards it, engage its flight, and one is “mad.” Fail – perhaps to even try – and one is “inconsolable.” “Flesh,” “a shade out of reach:” we’re in an erotic realm now.

So what’s Dad up to exactly? He’s got his assumptions, and in (ab)using them, he may be erasing the writing on the wall or painting badly (“gumption of graffiti on concrete”). More important is the ladder itself: it could be splashed with paint such that it is the graffiti, but “bleached and blotted” emphatically indicates that these assumptions are brought up and then disappear while in use. In short: “Jacob” and “thinking things through” aren’t compatible propositions.

We don’t need to imagine Dad falling: misplaced assumptions mean that has already happened. The rot “orbits the stone,” it does not affect the foundation as much as the caretaker thinks it does: it affects the caretaker more. Dad focuses on his physical aging, that “varicose vulture” makes it harder to get at the cherries even as the cherries have been consumed. That’s exactly the wrong emphasis: the “worm of light” is what you want to fight – didn’t you want to remember before sticking that ladder up into the air?

Again, I’m sounding moralistic here, like there’s a character defect. There is and there isn’t: to be pure mind is to be “no one,” and the Biblical account I opened with that anchors this poem does not bother with problems of mind. Individuals are always “some one,” and they are erotic. The issue is how long one can try to run one’s family, one’s house, entirely. The answer is obviously “not long,” but Dad keeps plodding until he can’t do it anymore and is a literally sad irony. Properly speaking, the sort of knowledge that would establish a household well is not knowledge in the sense of knowing physics. In fact, it’s a kind of economics which is very difficult to term knowledge; it hearkens back nearly entirely even in Socratic dialogues to respect for the ancestral (Cephalus maintaining his wealth, same idea with Naboth, sort of).

Dad mistakes preservation with founding, and it’s a big mistake: turning one’s family into an existential cry isn’t what family is about. It is ultimately fortunate the earth grieves its own gravity: instead of falling outright in this poem, the days of ladder climbing are numbered, replaced by more appropriate past-times with those who would later mourn.

On the domed ceiling God
is thinking:
I made them my joy,
and everything else I created
I made to bless them.
But see what they do!
I know their hearts
and arguments:

“We’re descended from
Cain. Evil is nothing new,
so what does it matter now
if we shell the infirmary,
and the well where the fearful
and rash alike must
come for water?”

God thinks Mary into being.
Suspended at the apogee
of the golden dome,
she curls in a brown pod,
and inside her mind
of Christ, cloaked in blood,
lodges and begins to grow.

Comment:

The argument of the second stanza denies God’s paternity and thus does not see evil in the way God does, as only man’s invention. It denies the relevance of any account of evil’s origin and instead moves to an inventive relativity: we can shell the infirmary, destroy the house of healing we established. We can destroy the well we dug, and thus not only sidestep the problem of evil’s origin, but eliminate our origin completely. Medicine and water imply preservation, but there is an alpha/omega reference because of “well;” we can see a Sacrament of Healing – i.e. Last Rites – hiding within “infirmary.” The whole second stanza is a rash argument, used to create fear.

But “fearful” and “rash” can be said to underlie God’s thought, which surrounds that stanza. “Is thinking” is the progressive form of the verb; “thinks” is the simple. The emphatic seems to be missing. “Is thinking” is part of a lament: from above, yet within the church, we have two invocations of “made.” We are God’s joy; we were made to be blessed. But “making” contrasts with God’s own discovery. He sees our actions, knows our hearts and arguments. God as philosopher is nervous.

Hence, the third stanza. A perfect, sinless (human) being is conceived. If man wishes to use rashness to place fear in the hearts of others, God uses His own “fear” to act immediately. Mary is at the height of church, like a seed. Now since this is a mosaic, she is technically not the height of the church: one can imagine the cross that adorns all Orthodox churches from the outside growing from the seed within. But I like to think that while the cross grows upward as a symbol, there is a plant growing downward, from heaven toward us. The “mind of Christ, cloaked in blood” is affirmation that the church is not a building, and that the instruments of God’s grace are all around and not making stupid arguments to excuse slaughter.

AS a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells—
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life’s age.

Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.

Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest—
Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.

Man’s spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.

Comment:

“As” indicates a simile, a comparison, is in order. The human soul is not literally a skylark.

Still. The skylark dared strong winds, and now trapped, is “scanted:” it is not only limited, but dishonored, and probably not being treated adequately. The soul is experiencing all three problems to a degree within the body; the first one we are presented with corresponds to the bird’s “free fells.”  Just like the bird would ascend to great heights and swoop down, the mounting spirit within is just mounting. “Day-labouring-out” reinforces the “dull cage,” “bone-house;” it is always dark, always time to rest when one is limited in one’s tasks. Time “labouring” isn’t really one’s own; why even remember one’s freedom?

There are moments, though, when the bird or the soul can be recognized: “turf or perch or poor low stage.” The honors received are only merited: “sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells.” The repetition of “sweetest” reminds us that a bird isn’t the soul, and echoes a song itself. Honor that is only merited is a natural form of nobility, but also nobility that is a shell of itself. These are exhausting “opportunities,” for the environment is fundamentally against the full expression of the bird or soul. Instead of “free fells,” we are presented with “droop deadly;” offend what is higher, and the consequences are more than lost memories. “Fear or rage” exerted against some stupid bars would be comical, if it weren’t reality.

The difference between the human soul and the skylark is revealed, ironically through repetition. The bird’s sweetness and singing are near identical. All we can do is listen and keep listening when he is free to choose his nest.

But souls don’t choose their nests. What is adequate for the soul is that it is embodied, but “uncumbered.” This is not immortality simply; this is God’s promise (“rainbow”) that reverses the order of earth and sky. One wonders if a “rainbow footing” supports the meadow. The descent at the end is not that of a soul.

Note: I am working from the excerpts of this text in A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall, trans. David Swenson & Lillian Swenson. I cannot find the text as a whole online. The danger here is not only there could be a giant passage by SK [Soren Kierkegaard] saying “one day this guy named Ashok will make all these complaints about my stuff, here are the answers to all of them,” but also that I can’t tell you about the literary structure of the text or whether Kierkegaard literally means what he says in places. The complaints I’m going to make are less about SK and more about a particular conception of faith his remarks demonstrate.

Therefore faith hopes also in this life, but… by virtue of the absurd, not by virtue of the human understanding.

The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is truth as it exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.

- SK, “The Journals”

It is possible for things to be too well said. SK begins his sermon with a prayer:

From Thy hand, O Lord, do we receive everything! Thou stretchest out Thy powerful hand and takest the wise in their foolishness. Thou openest it, Thy gentle hand, and satisfiest whatever lives with blessing. And even if it seems that Thine arm is shortened, then do Thou increase our faith and our confidence, so that we may hold Thee fast. And if it sometimes seems that Thou dost withdraw Thine hand from us, oh, then we know that it is only so because Thou dost close it, that Thou dost close it only in order to conceal the more abundant blessing within it, that Thou dost close it in order again to open it and satisfy everything which lives with Thy blessing. Amen.

The movement of the hand is that of Providence. Everything God does is for a greater good, and this prayer is really the sermon that follows in short. What SK is going to talk about is why it seems at certain points are prayers aren’t answered, and he’s going to respond with “our hearts weren’t in the right place, and God actually put them in the right place when our desires weren’t fulfilled.” Note the last three motions of the hand: sometimes it is open and giving; sometimes it is shortened, not quite reaching out and giving; other times it is closed and withdrawn, because there are more abundant blessings to be had. The element that doesn’t quite correspond to this is that of the wise who are really foolish literally being “in touch” with God, and sped away from this life. In discussing Socrates and classical virtue, we have talked about moderation (not wanting) and that if one who is wise should want, their knowledge means what they want really must be satisfied, and any lack is a rationalization/justification. Here, SK seems to be saying all men want, that the wise are no different from anyone else. This will turn out to be the case in the sermon.

The sermon begins with James 1: 17-22 -

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: for the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.

After quoting this, SK repeats the first sentence, “Every good and every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither the shadow of turning,” at least four times in the sermon (it is four times in my excerpt). The first time he talks about them, he says they are “beautiful,” “eloquent,” and “moving,” so much so they can’t be blamed for not getting into our ears. So we have to “dare” three times: we “dare” to have “confidence” that they are “faithful and unfailing, tested and proved,” not just made up. The second dare is that we believe they don’t just “lift up the soul, but… sustain it.” Finally, we believe these words can help us prevent error. An apostle, a man we trust to have led a holy life, said these things, so they must have this much weight.

The second time SK brings up “Every good and perfect gift…” he says that the words are “repeated in the world, yet many go on as if they had never heard them.” This is of enormous significance, for when SK gets to those who have errant thoughts, their error and their redemption will be because they were “swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath:” the Scripture is just as descriptive as it is prescriptive. In this section, though, SK doesn’t talk about those who are in error. He depicts a bunch of people that are getting everything they want from God and are happy and precisely because of both those things, they cannot at all relate to Truth, the Scripture is pretty much meaningless for them.

Now this is risky for SK, really risky – we can’t conceive of anyone mature enough to have blessings but be reasonable enough to understand that people can really hurt, that they they can really hurt? From a standpoint in which all we consider is innocence/experience, this works: there is no innocence after the loss of Eden. But if we open up experience, we don’t even have to go outside the Christian tradition for the words “moral imagination.” At some point, God does have to give, or else Christianity isn’t really a religion: it’ll be just a code of ethics. You can argue this is dramatic buildup for SK, but I’m going to say that this is a deep problem for any serious believer – we have to give all the time; even those of us who are evil give. One has to believe that Creation does have the moral lessons within it, but if one makes that move, one can move closer to the classical conception of “nature” (the Bible never mentions this word in any way) rather than the revealed Law.

The third mention of “every good and every perfect gift…” brings up the real problems, where this sermon makes claims that either work or not. In it, SK talks about the sorrowing, who purposely limited their desires. They only asked for one thing, perhaps, and they worked to revere the truth of these words. Still, they were denied:

With humble prayers and burning desires you sought, as it were, to tempt God: This wish is so important to me; my joy, my peace, my future, all depend on this; for me it is so very important, for God it is so easy, for He is all-powerful. But the wish was not fulfilled. Vainly you sought rest; you left nothing untried in your unfruitful restlessness; you ascended the dizzy heights of anticipation to see if a possibility might not appear. If you believed that you saw such a possibility, then you were immediately ready with prayers, that by the help of these you might create the actual from the apparent.

Eventually “you” gave into “quiet longing,” and then finally gave up, and then you

…acknowledged in all humility that God had certainly not deceived you, since He accepted you, since He accepted your earthly wishes and foolish desires, exchanged them for you and gave you instead heavenly consolation and holy thoughts; that He did not treat you unfairly when He denied you your wish, but for compensation created this faith in your heart…

SK then goes through an example of somone with a bit more pride, who puts on less external begging and pleading and rather acts virtuously, but does wonder whether God tests us. That belief means heaven never listened to the prideful man’s prayers, because he was trying to “tempt” God, but lucky for all, the prideful one got humble and realized that life being “explicable” was something that would have to wait.

I’m not making these passages sound as insulting as they sounded to me when I first read them. We all know numerous people who pray for many things other than their selfish wants: in fact, I’d bet most people I know only pray for others. I also know this – because we desire to know more and love better, our prayers are intimately connected with what is right and what is moral. We don’t believe in God only because He is Providential: we believe in Him because we want to love. If the world would end in fire and ice and there was no redemption, some of us would still love and be virtuous. Providence stems from the fact that goodness is eternal, and that we make it manifest in the world. SK only depicts falling away from God in these passages as something that happens on an existential level, and we can psychoanalyze ourselves and get the exact right attitude and yay! everything’s perfect.

To his credit, it can be said that he is talking less about people here and more about the philosophical implications of Providence. On those lines, we can argue that this is a hopeful picture of humanity: we don’t let pride force us to make God give a rational explanation. We work for it ourselves and still try to be virtuous or moral. We also move beyond the things that, when not gotten, hurt us on a level that no one would want to see us hurt at. We have the strength to castigate ourselves even when we don’t deserve it, because we want to be wise rather than just satisfied.

Still: this is not an exhortation to wisdom on SK’s part. Far from it – he separates divine and human wisdom very sharply:

You wished that God’s ideas about what was profitable to you might be your ideas, but you also wished that He might be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth, so that He might rightly fulfill your wish. And yet if He were to share your ideas, then must He cease to be the almighty Father. You would in your childish impatience, as it were, corrupt God’s eternal Being, and you were blind enough to delude yourself, as if God in heaven did not know better what was profitable to you than you yourself; as if you would not sometime discover with terror that you had wished what no man would be able to bear if it came to pass. For let us a moment speak foolishly and with human wisdom… [SK goes on at length to discuss how if we conceived someone as wise, and we wanted him to change his mind about something we were nagging about, we'd eventually go "wait a second. That's really stupid of me if I believe he's wise."]

This passage is closer to the tone which made me really object to this sermon: I don’t remember Jesus being this brutal, partly because “image and likeness” of God, access to Scripture, the wisdom we receive from others if not revelation all mean we DO have ideas that were influenced by God, and not at some remove that means we are hell demons at birth. The unceasing demand in this sermon that we be humble when, in fact, being moral means at key moments having pride rightly informed and a trust in one’s own wisdom does not fail to stun me. When we’re talking about philosophy in this blog, notice how we’ll talk about trends or how people might act or potential motivations, but will not go so far as to psychoanalyze everyone to find which thoughts accept Providence and which ones are sin. God forbid anyone in this sermon of Kierkegaard’s actually sinned: would his passages be even more bullying?

Still, SK gets a lot right and is a master of figuring out how we stand where we stand. He ends his sermon with another prayer:

Every good and every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness nor shadow of turning. These words are so beautiful, so eloquent, so moving; they are so soothing and so comfortig, so simple and comprehensible, so refreshing and so healing. Therefore we will beseech Thee, O God, that Thou wilt make the ears of those who hitherto have not regarded them, willing to accept them; that Thou wilt heal the misunderstanding heart by the understanding of the word, to understand the word; that Thou wilt incline the erring thought under the saving obedience of the word; that Thou wilt give the penitent soul confidence to dare to understand the word; and that Thou wilt make those who have understood it more and more blessed therein, so that they may repeatedly understand it. Amen.

The argument against my comments is simple: SK has laid out the moral preconditions for wisdom, and now people are in a position to pursue pure Truth, i.e. “every good and perfect gift.” SK is really making a bunch of philosophic believers, and trying to eliminate the problem of believing the right thing for the wrong reason. As we are gracious, the last word and its hopeful “saving obedience” is his.

A nun takes the veil

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

Comment:

Take “heaven” and “haven” literally: the heavens are the skies, a haven is a sheltered port. The dash between the two suggests separation as much as linkage; are we moving from a heaven to a haven?

It seems there is a contrast. We can contrast “I have desired to go” with “I have asked to be,” and the imagery of the first stanza seems almost exclusively about the temperature and violence of the air, whereas the second stanza is about the temperament and violence of the sea. (I’m assuming a “spring” fails when it freezes or dries out).

But the “desire to go” sets up the eventual destination, whereas “asked to be” concerns the mode of transport. That crisscrossing – “desire” usually sets things in motion, “being” usually determines where something is at rest – alerts us that the relation isn’t as simple as contrast, even though there are points of contrast. The two stanzas are linked not just by the title, but also by the last line of the first stanza and the first line of the second:

And a few lilies blow. / And I have asked to be

Lilies were preceded by “where springs not fail,” where water and life are eternal. Around the “springs” are “fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,” where physical pain and prejudice are gone. The good in this stanza is defined by what it is not: the “veil” is implicit in the description. But there is one thing that stands in these fields which need not be perfect: lilies. They are still moved by the wind.

In the next stanza, again, the good is mainly defined by what it is not: no storms come. But “the green swell is in the havens dumb” – the green swell is there, there is some battle between Chaos and Order, but our speaker is out of the “swing of the sea,” culminating in a third “And.” That last sentence is ambiguous: it could be that the “green swell” is out of the “swing of the sea,” that the haven entraps the wave.

Either way, the poem leaves us, in meditating on the vows one makes in choosing the religious life, with two things that our speaker cannot negate: the “lilies” and the “green swell.” Our speaker sees that they are inescapably connected with her “desiring” and “being:” being is conceived in some relation to change (“green swell”), and “desiring” brings up the question of what we ultimately desire, the escape from failure and death.

Our speaker does not want to negate these things, though: the lilies are the memories we have of the dead and that – we hope – they have of us. Where she desires to go, those memories are still moving. In where she asks to be, the “green swell” is sidestepped. Creation is occurring, still. She has to stand outside of it not because her vows make her automatically holy, but because of the tension between “desiring” and “asking.” What she wants is not hers to have. It can only be given, and she is therefore in the most vulnerable of situations. The prayer is serene because the trust is complete.