Rich Bledsoe is a retired PCA pastor living in Boulder, Colorado. He’s got quite the fascinating project going on in his life now, as he seeks to revitalize the city by specifically targeting the mainline churches within Boulder. This St. Anne’s Pub interview series is well worth your time and should give you a good introduction into what Rich is all about. He’s also a connoisseur of Barfield and Rosenstock-Huessy with some significant pastoral and missionary experience to help put those ideas into real life scenarios.
Rich gave some great commentary on the whole question of myth and history, and he gave me permission to post those thoughts here. These are not aimed at the contributors to this blog nor even our recent conversation in particular, though I was motivated by those conversations to ask for Rich’s thoughts. Rich is thinking of intellectuals that he’s encountered over the years who have contributed to this larger discussion. I found his thoughts worthy of consideration.
Rich Bledsoe writes:
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It is true that “the ancients didn’t think this way.” A good deal of what we do call “modernity” is a gift of the Bible and Christianity.
Here is a homey story to illustrate: When we were in India, I heard more than one story of westerners (most of them were very kind-hearted Christians who had not been there long) who lent money to their servants. It was rare to be paid back, and the lesson finally was “don’t lend money to your servants, you will only come to grief if you do.” If you want, and it seems wise, give money, but do not lend. One fellow told me that he heard eleven different stories about the lent money, and none of them were consistent.
When we were in New Delhi, we used to visit with Rev Dorsey. Rev Dorsey was a very wise, old, Presbyterian missionary who had been in India for upwards of 50 years. I asked him about this seeming “phenomena.” His answer was most illuminating. No surprise here for Rev Dorsey. “You have to remember, these people live in a world of mythology. The idea of the truth hardly exists for them…” A fascinating answer. Lying was very, very commonplace. Except, it wasn’t like lying exactly. It was rather, that it had never occurred to most of these “common Indians” that such a thing as the truth existed. If they lied, it had an almost innocence about it. The point being that our bread and butter, common sense notion of everyday “truth” turns out to be a gift of the Gospel. If the world isn’t “real”, but illusion, if anything can be transformed into anything else at the whim of any god, “truth” does not exist either, even in terms of paying back X number of Rupees or dollars on such and such a date. Most of the world through most of time have not been very certain about even the reality of the world itself. That is a late gift of Christianity, and is one of the dawning realizations of the late medieval period.
I suspect that Aristotle comes closer to this sense than anyone in the ancient world, and I doubt that Aristotle could maintain much sense of “realism” for more than a generation or so. Then, ancient
thought devolves again to more obvious pantheisms very quickly (and Aristotle did not escape an underlying pantheism, which was always a threat to his realism and “common sensism”–Aristotle needed Christianity to redeem what was in him. Stanley Jaki points out that the Moslem world had Aristotle for 500 years, and “did nothing with him.” The Christians got him, corrected his underlying pantheism, and “made the breakthrough to modern physics in less than 100 years”).
If you leave men to themselves, the reality of the space / time continuum, will erode in only a couple of generations. The rebirth of Idealism in all of its forms is just such an erosion. Is the world “really real” for Confucius, or for Buddha, or for Kant or Hegel or any of the following Absolute Idealists? It is questionable.
I am not sure that most modern physicists have any great assurance of the reality of what is “out there”.
It is absolutely true that “the ancients didn’t think that way.” The Bible is sui generis, it is unique, and it is the source of almost all that we regard as “good” that is around us. But we are so surrounded by it, that we have almost zero consciousness of it. It is like water to a fish.
It is exasperating to me. The hip, cool, with it, in thinkers are often so utterly ethno-centric. They doubt the reality of the world (being children of Kant, but living on the capital of Christianity, therefore protected and insulated), so all they can see in the text is once again themselves.
The Enlightenment and the Renaissance were impure episodes within Christendom. No one could have exalted reason and scientific observation, etc, etc, unless Christianity had cleared the way. Should we just go back to full tilt Hinduism? But that is not possible. Jesus is the enormous road block that will not allow us to ever really go back to the ancient archaic world.
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(back to me)
So the concept is that Jesus brings in a new world and a new world structure. He throws down the elementary principles and the powers of the air. His kingdom has a new law, and the Church creates new republics. The world is changed- for everyone.
I’d love to hear Peter Escalante’s thoughts on this matter.
Steven,
I would say Jesus does bring in a ‘new’ world structure, but not new as in totally so, but rather renewed according to the fundamental teleology of creation. As for a new law, that would have to be further specified: what sort of law are we talking about? Strictly speaking, I do not think the kingdom possesses a new law; rather the kingdom is an eschatological reality mixed in our experience until the eschaton as such, and the kingdom is a reality in which the ability to perform the law ( which is given to those who trust and are united to Christ, by the Spirit) is present. But the law itself, the natural law, is not new, but the impediments of the fall are rendered inoperative in principle.
As for Bledsoe’s comments:
The Jaki quote is horrible. The muslims did quite a bit with Aristotle, and much of what the west did with aristotle was built upon averroes, avicena, al-farabi, and many others. I would agree that some Christian thinkers did correct some elements of aristotle, but this isn’t something that goes against the muslims in any real way, for these ‘corrections’ were only known as such in relation to certain problems, which the arabs identified, commented on, and drew attention to. The europeans then picked up on these discussions, but the line is one of continuity of analysis, despite changes.
The part about truth is honestly rather crazy. One has to remember than among the eastern philosophies and the ancients, there are many different camps. Some do seem to deny such things, but it would be false to label all as doing so. The use of absolute idealists is problematic and false, since it seems to work on the the modernist idea of ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ being different things, but this wasn’t so for many ancients, Plato and Confucius–among many others–included: Their sort idealism was understood as a realism, to use the terms, which would mean truth is a reality. Also and against the arrogant and naive condemnations of eastern philosophy favored among many a western thinker for quite some time, most eastern philosophies do in fact have something roughly equivalent to the law of excluded middle, though it is usually stated and presented in a way different than Aristotle and the west. Having such a thing is overwhelming evidence that truth was something believed in.
Also, his criticisms of
“Jesus is the enormous road block that will not allow us to ever really go back to the ancient archaic world.”
I love this. Now the only way forward is with Christ.
Regardless of what Rev. Bledsoe says about Idealism and the concept of maya in modern physics, skulking back to the Scottish Common Sense Realism view isn’t any more negotiable than a return to the Flux of Heraclitus. There is only information, will, and responsibility. Once you enter here, you are hemmed in by Christ on every side.
Apart from a willful escape into unreality, which I fear many of us will be tempted to take, as the days grow darker and the bottleneck through which our race is being pushed grows tighter.
Lest anyone reading this think I am using “Christ” as a shorthand for something else, I mean both the Christ of Nicea and Chalcedon and Jesus the Son of Mary.
Steven,
I wouldn’t want to endorse any of Bledsoe’s generalizations here, but I think I understand what he is trying to get at. Undoubtedly, the coming of Christ has made (and continues to make) the world a better place in many respects. But the concrete workings of the kind of causality operant here are extremely difficult to identify historically in anything other than the broadest way.
And we must be warned: when attempts to do this are made, they often subtly serve motives of pride hard to distinguish from nationalism and racism: the desire to see one’s own people as having something of a monopoly of cleverness or goodness or historical significance. The fact that one uses religious rather than biological metaphors for collective ego makes little difference. I know that Bledsoe isn’t at all doing this, but this sort of hasty discourse can very easily be put into its service.
And since the lines of historical causality here are very difficult to properly identify, the sort of history which can get told in such attempts is often very bad history. For instance, the Christianity-science thesis. It is certainly interesting to ask why Western Europe developed the method as we have it today, and not China (which was, as Needham shows, far in advance of Christian Europe technically for long stretches of time) or India. I will leave aside the question of whether the figures of Ibn Khaldun in sociology, ibn Hazm in method, or Ibn al-Haytham in optics falsify the typical claim regarding the Arabic-Persian world. Nevertheless, there is a phenomenon, and it gives rise to a real question.
But before one jumps to religious explanation- absence of established Christianity- one would first have to ask why Byzantium, Russia, Ethiopia didn’t develop modern science, or why Catholic Spain didn’t develop it. On the theory that Christianity necessarily issues in certain specific historical effects, including modern science, one would then have to postulate that the Christianity of those places was somehow defective and that those posited defects constituted an impediment to the posited normal outworking of effect.
And that is precisely what many Reformed apologists who coopt the Merton thesis do; but it is very unpersuasive. Many, many other more proximate and more persuasive explanations of the rise of modern science can be given: some of which help explain not only the development of modern research methods in NW Europe, but also the adoption of certain kinds of Reformed thought in those regions too.
And it’s an odd thing: when certain apologists are dealing with the inherently reductionistic and technocratic tendency of modern science, science as dark, it gets blamed on some supposed serpent in the garden of old Christendom called “humanism”. But when modern science is valorized by the audience, certain apologists are quick to claim responsibility for it. In short, if it’s good, it’s us; if not, not. I don’t think I need to comment on the irresponsibility of this tactic. I will only add that since the intent is apologetic, and the attitude toward phenomena rhetorically opportunistic (if it’s thought good, explain how it’s ours; if not, explain how it’s not), it is not the practice of history, let alone, the rigorous practice of history; and so God as author of history goes unglorified, because His work there goes unknown. I’m not saying that Bledsoe himself has done this (I can’t judge from a few unqualified passages), only that the tenor of his argument strongly reminds me of certain apologetical errors which are all too common among us.
A further point along these lines of mistaken cause: Bledsoe recounts some anecdotes of his own and some of Rev Dr Dorsey’s, about purported habits of Indian communication: they both take the opportunity to infer a religious explanation (both unaware, it would seem, of India’s long and venerable tradition in the arts of grammar and logic), when in fact, a social explanation would the most obvious one (if in fact the anecdotes record anything more than mistaken impressions). People (servants!) living under caste oppression, and then colonial and post-colonial conditions, might be expected to exercise all sorts of passive resistance; do the persons said to never return a loan behave that way to their peers? Or only to postcolonial Europeans? Would Rev Dorsey even know? Even some conservative Christian apologists would recognize this much, and say that with a good system of political rights, property law, and profit incentive, things would shape up in no time- the self-regard which comes from freedom and opportunity,and the habits of mind which come from planning and internalization of the spirit behind contract law, would amend the phenomena Bledsoe and Dorsey believe they observed. And in a certain sense, that might well be true. Do Bledsoe and Dorsey stop to reflect on the fact that the same things they are saying about Indians, the Christian European aristocracy and bourgeoisie used to say about the Christian European peasantry and early proletariat? And clearly, in that case, presence or absence of Christianity can’t be the explanation: unless one wants to define Christianity as whatever is bourgeois West European, or more generally, whatever is of the civic powerholder.
Historicism is inherently bad, and cannot be made to serve a good purpose. Apparently Christianized versions of it are no different; and might even be worse. I am very sympathetic to aspects of Barfield; and I think that Bledsoe is right, the fact of Jesus bars to the way to the archaic world; but this is not, pace Barfield, because Jesus is the actualizer of a morphologically predestinated phase of human evolution whose most striking characteristics are certain fruits of common grace as appearing in early modern NW Europe. No- Jesus came for sin. He bars the way to the ancient world because it was fallen, and He has overthrown the powers which ruled it; but He does not bar the way to the most archaic arche of all, Eden: He is rather the gate to it.
I might well be misunderstanding Bledsoe’s position; all I had to go on were the passages given, and I hope for further clarification. I am quite sure his heart is in the right place, and as I said, I agree that it is true that the coming of Christ has changed, and is changing, the world for the better- the church is not simply a life raft to the otherworld. But the glory of the church on earth is most properly found in, and traced through, holiness (and I mean real holiness, not bourgeois or any other variant of civic righteousness)- not most properly in phenomena of the civic or artistic order, though these too are subject to Christ, and the common grace by which they arise and are maintained flows from Him too.
peace
Peter
Peter -
I wonder sometimes if the novum of Cartesian scientific thinking is not a product of Protestantism (q.v. Schaeffer) but instead a flight from it. Cartesian geometrical thinking generates a great deal of power, most specifically over inanimate matter at our level of granularity, less so over living beings, even less so over humans. The imaginative constructs used by this mentality do not start to break down until you get upwards to macroscopic or to quantum granularities
Once that power manifested itself, it was difficult to keep it to keep it out of the realm of theology, which term I use more as St. Theophan would use it rather than as Karl Rahner would.
Mule,
I don’t know that Cartesianism was a flight from Protestantism, but it was certainly not a product of it. Melanchthon, whose philosophical and pedagogical contributions were very widely respected throughout the Protestant world, was an old-style natural philosopher. Calvin likewise.
Whatever one might think of Galilean/Cartesian/Newtonian developments in principle which constituted the early toolkit of instrumentalist approaches to nature (and the traditionally minded Protestant Bp Berkeley disliked the calculus), their reception and use had often had more to do with the needs of princes than any inherent connection to theology or even philosophy: Galileo is dealing with ballistics, after all. The instrumental approach to nature, which involves a figuration of nature under manipulable and predictable formal aspects, was driven largely by princely and mercantile ambition; which isn’t always a bad thing, since God can use it to create better living conditions. But it is hardly a direct effect of any theology. The question remains of what influence it had on theology later.
On that score, I don’t think you’re right that Cartesianism *as instrumentalism* entered theology, except perhaps in certain kinds of early modern magical theosophy. But what did enter theology were the Cartesian and Ramist notions of system and clear and distinct ideas-and this affected both Protestant and Catholic thought, especially since in the age of ferocious controversy the appeal of the vademecum full of stock answers all in order was almost irresistible. But Hooker inveighed against Ramism, and preferred the old rhetorical tradition of commonplaces, memoria, quick wit, and invention championed by Melanchthon and most vigorously, later, by Vico in his educational works; see Walter Ong and Ernesto Grassi on the history of this (my only caveat; Ong sometimes works with a very caricatured misconception of Protestantism). Donald Verene is also very good. And Tim Enloe has been writing some perceptive essays on the effect of systematization et c on the practice of theology, and these are well worth reading too. And there were always, on all sides, great exceptions.
But perhaps you meant that instrumentalism in theology was brought to bear on human thought, with the goal of system replacing wisdom, rather than on God (which would be sorcery). In which case then I would agree with you.
A side note: “theology” as Theophan uses it is signifies much the same thing as the old Puritan “theologia experimentalis”, I think; and the Protestants never lost the distinction.
peace
Peter
Well, you guys are waytoosmart for me. But just one point or clarification.
Nothing at all original here. This is just old fashioned GK Chesterton’s story in Orthodoxy (his own spiritual autobiography). Chesterton was not depressed for a number of years as a young man, primarily because he could not find God, but primarily, because he could not find the world. A correlary to the disappearance of God, is also, alas, a disappearance of a real world into which one can escape oneself. Chesterton did not find “materialism” to be the great modern bogey, but idealism. For him, his “common sense Thomism” had NOTHING to do with successful proofs for the existence of God (he never says one word about the proofs in THE DUMB OX). It had to do with the “intuition of being”, the presupposition of Thomas that “being” was really there (. Every sort of philosophy since Decartes has shut man up inside his own head, and the escape velocity out of oneself into a world out of oneself in any form of post-Cartianianism is too slow. One never makes the escape. The modern world is shut up inside its own head, and it is a very cramped place to be. A couple of generations of this, and suicide is a most welcome alternative.
Thomas Aquinas’s great discovery was his discovery of the world itself. Chesterton’s masterful chapter comparing Aquinas with Francis is what convinced me that Chesterton was a genius. The world awakened to its own reality, and Thomas and Francis were the great markers of that, doing the same thing with radically different temperaments, and methods, but the same thing. And, low and behold, a REAL WORLD with REAL STUFF was a consequence of Christianity, of Jesus, of the Old Testament come alive in the 13th century.
I love the famous quote from Maritain to the effect of, “If the being of a single fly were admitted, all of the fortresses of idealism would fall, all of which are intended to protect us from the Terrifying Hand That Made Us.”
The great foe in the 20th century against all of those “great fortresses” is Cornelius Van Til, the great theologian of creation. A clear Word from God can be issued to us because He has exhaustive and complete access to every iota of creation, being the Creator Himself.
Eastern and Western philosophy are both very accute and profound. Both in many forms obscure the world because the world is not a creation. Whether for ancient Greece, or modern (realtively so) idealism, or the many varieties and forms of profound Indian thought.
I find Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought the most profitable along these lines. But he has a well-developed sense of maturation in humanity. Jesus did not come only to deal with sin, but also to bring many sons to glory. Those who are justified are now also glorified. As the Nicene Creed says, and as Eastern Christendom never forgot, the incarnation was in the works whether Adam sinned or not. The ancient world was dark in sin, but also immature. That immaturity was a blessing, in that God is able to overlook sins of ignorance. The transformation of human consciousness that took place in the priestly nation of Israel is now to be extended to all nations. Idols must go, but they’ll tend to be replaced by icons. Icons must go, but they’ll tend to be replaced by ideology. Ideologies must also go. But, as recent events in the micro-presbyterian/Reformed world show, ideology is not going to go without a fight.
Peter wrote:
“And we must be warned: when attempts to do this are made, they often subtly serve motives of pride hard to distinguish from nationalism and racism: the desire to see one’s own people as having something of a monopoly of cleverness or goodness or historical significance. The fact that one uses religious rather than biological metaphors for collective ego makes little difference. I know that Bledsoe isn’t at all doing this, but this sort of hasty discourse can very easily be put into its service.”
This is a bit of a tangent but it sparked a thought relating Karl Barth’s form of universalism to his critique of Religion and the culture-Christ legacy of liberal Protestantism.
I wonder if orthodox Protestants can think of the cosmological effects of Christ’s work in terms that stretch beyond the Church or ‘Christendom’ without taking Barth’s soteriologicical route.
“And we must be warned: when attempts to do this are made, they often subtly serve motives of pride hard to distinguish from nationalism and racism: the desire to see one’s own people as having something of a monopoly of cleverness or goodness or historical significance. The fact that one uses religious rather than biological metaphors for collective ego makes little difference. I know that Bledsoe isn’t at all doing this, but this sort of hasty discourse can very easily be put into its service.”
Ohhhhhhh, I dunno. The Christian explosion now is with all the people who aren’t, by blood, color, or nationality, my people. Christianity is becoming a religion of the black, brown and yellow people. Europe, the hippest swingingest place on earth, has largely turned its back on Christianity, and unless it is renewed as a Christian continent, is headed to oblivion.
“If only we could be like Europe” is the cry of much of America now. A cry that sounds rather like many of the people on the face of the earth desperately wanting to be like the cool, hip, swinging, culturally advanced, French Aristocracy, in about 1780.
Jedidiah wrote:
I think the answer is: yes. We can and should think of the work of Christ as effecting real cosmological/historical change for all of humanity and life. On the cross Jesus circumcised the world by stripping away the old, dead flesh of human existence and rising again as a New Man with promise for the whole of humanity and history.
Now, of course, that is different than Barth’s brand of universalism. But in some quarters any talk of Christ’s work having universal significance is automatically branded as Arminian and/or liberal/neo-orthodox. Sigh. But it makes more sense of NT passages that speak of Christ’s dying for the world and of all the passages that explain the resurrection and ascension of Christ as the dawning of a new creation, a new start for humanity.
We live on the other side of that transfiguration of human culture in Christ and so often don’t appreciate the radical way that human life has been reorganized by the work of Christ through his church in human civilization.
Something like that anyway. . . And I think this fits with Bledsoe’s and ERH’s understanding of Christian history, to say nothing of Rene Girard’s interpretation of the influence of the cross in Christian civilization as well.
Richard,
I trust you didn’t take any of my remarks amiss. I suspect we would find ourselves in much greater agreement on principles than disagreement. But I also trust that you will understand my deep dislike of apologetic de facto conflations of common grace and holiness.
With regard to idealism: you and I would disagree about the significance of Van Til; to me, trained in old-school Thomism, he looks pretty obviously like a sort of Kantian; this topic was recently discussed here, in fact. And a word of warning about Chesterton: he is often profound when simply expressing his own insights into things, and too when he critiques his crazier contemporaries. But as a guide to almost any specific historical or philosophical topic, he is most often positively misleading. This is certainly true with regard to idealism; whatever one thinks of it, it does not at all necessarily imply being locked in one’s head; idealists from Collier and Berkeley up through Lewis (and he was one; see his introduction to Douglas Harding’s “The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth”) and Barfield positively insisted on the real existence of the world outside the finite subject; it is objectively extramental to us, but intramental to God, so to speak. Thomists such as Winckelmans de Clety saw little problem with it; being, after all, isn’t at root brute matter (materia signata quantitate). So although idealism has its problems, it isn’t or shouldn’t be the bugbear you seem to make it out to be. Subjective idealism is stupid to be sure; but not all idealism is of that sort. And in any case, the “out-thereness” of the world in Christian wisdom is a very different kind of thing than the “out-thereness” of the world in the scientistic picture of the world.
On pridefulness and the construct of “Christian culture”: I take your point, but the Christians (new and old) of the global South aren’t usually the ones going on about how Christianity gave us modern science and markets and Mozart and whatever other little goodnesses of the civic order one might be invested in. It is rather primarily alienated Euro-Americans, and secondarily, alienated Europeans doing so, in a discourse which is at once nostalgic for a fake golden age, and aggressively hopeful for a fantasy utopia to come, whose lineaments look very suspiciously like a Disney version of old Western Europe. The global Southerners however are, for now, coming in for the love of Jesus Christ, not rallying around what at best is a memory and at worst a fantasy of civic order (and someone’s else’s, in either case). My point, and it remains, is that is a grave mistake to seek the proper effects of Christianity in the realm of effects of common grace.
Jim,
Where in the Nicene Creed do you find the doctrine that the incarnation would have occurred regardless of sin? If it’s there, it was hidden well enough that those in the middle ages who held your position had to really fight for it, and never managed to get wide acceptance. Van Ruler is a very useful corrective here.
Jedidiah,
The best way to look at it I think is to see that a) Christ’s victory was cosmic in scope, and, as it were, objectively changed the atmosphere of the human spirit; and b) since common grace subserves special grace, though they are not on a continuum, as the Gospel resounds more widely and more loudly though the world we would expect an increasing providential change in the quality of common grace, as a preparatio evangeliae; this is not effected through the agency of the visible church, though it secretly prepares the ground for its settlement in any given place. Even Berkhof says more interesting and lucid things on this score than many of our contemporaries do; look again at him and Bavinck, and see what you think. Hooker’s discussion of the two regiments of the one King is extremely interesting in this regard also; as ever, WHT Kirby is the one to consult here.
peace
Peter
Peter wrote:
“But before one jumps to religious explanation- absence of established Christianity- one would first have to ask why Byzantium, Russia, Ethiopia didn’t develop modern science, or why Catholic Spain didn’t develop it. On the theory that Christianity necessarily issues in certain specific historical effects, including modern science, one would then have to postulate that the Christianity of those places was somehow defective and that those posited defects constituted an impediment to the posited normal outworking of effect.”
You know, the interesting and glaring context which unites all the traditions/nation-churches you mention is their proximity to Islam (to name just one similarity). Simplistic? Perhaps, but true. I say this with little of an axe to grind coming from way east.
Garrett,
Well, that wouldn’t be true of Russia; and of course, during the time when Byzantium and Spain were proximate to the Islamic zone, the Islamic countries were far in advance of Western Europe on technical matters. Oddly, certain Greek Orthodox like to *blame* the rise of Western “rationalism”and instrumental science on the influence of Islam via Spain; but clearly, the Arabs can’t be blamed both for “rationalism”/modern science, *and* the lack thereof.
But if you wanted to find one relevant similarity between all the old nations mentioned, it might be that they tended to grant either the institutionalized monks or clergy (or both) too much political power, to the detriment of the civic order.
And I should make it clear now that I am hawking no grand historical thesis of my own here – only saying that many apologetical accounts of history are absymal oversimplifications or just plain mistakes, especially if effects of common grace are fetishized and taken on principle to be a sign and direct effect of Christianity, as if, God forbid, they are somehow marks of the church.
Now this is *not* to deny that aspects of Christian theology, as developed in certain times and places, played any role in the rise of things such as modern method in natural research. But the rules of historical discovery and demonstration can’t be tossed aside for the sake of rhetorically inspiring generalizations.
peace
Peter
Once again, the Nominalist conception of Man rears its head in any consideration of the universal benefits of Christ. Tim Enloe correctly criticizes the self-contained proposition-bearers beaming language from brain to brain as the dominant paradigm of the dissemination of the Work of Christ.
I haven’t yet begun to digest St. Maximos, so the idea that Jesus Christ died to restore human nature, rather than salvage individual persons, is still a stretch for me.
Peter, I imagine the Creed can be read either way. At the same time, there is the use of “also” when we shift from incarnation to suffering:
1. Who for us men,
2. AND for our salvation
1′ Came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary and was made man;
2′ ALSO was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried.
I assume you don’t buy van Ruler’s temporary incarnation notion, so I’m not sure what you mean by a corrective from him.
The alternative, it seems to me, is the notion of a felicitous fall, which usually gets glanced at, rejected, and followed by a “well, it’s just a mystery.” I don’t see a mystery. The Father always intended the Son as a Husband for His daughter humanity. Being elevated over the angels was always going to happen as a result of the incarnation of the Son in human flesh. The death-resurrection-glorification at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was always destined to be experienced in its fullness by the incarnate Son, and was in His second death on the Tree, after He had finished His first death. The rites in Leviticus always involve glorification immediately after propitiation.
A final note. You are responding to Bledsoe and by implication me and others by thinking we’re doing apologetics. I’m not. Rich isn’t either. I’m just interested in understanding history. The Bible reveals a philosophy of history, how things move, how God acts. Seeking to see how that applies to our own history is of interest to me. If I say that anti-iconic Islam seems to’ve been raised up by God to be a scourge for iconodulistic Christianity, that’s not apologetics. It is an application of the kinds of things God routinely does in the Bible. It’s an attempt at wisdom, and hardly the final word.
Jeff and Peter,
Thanks for your helpful comments. What is helpful to me about thinking of the universal impact of Jesus Christ’s person and work in these terms is how fully biblical a way of speaking it is as opposed to the ‘common grace’ set of terms.
I will have to re-read Bavinck and Berkhof on this but the question. What stands out in my memory in regard to the little I have read on common grace is that it has usually taken God’s act in good creation as its primary reference point and not capitalized on Jesus’ act of powerful/good re-reation but that may be due to what I was paying attention to than what they actually said. Besides possibly neglecting to connect what we think of as common grace with Christ’s work, the terms common and grace just don’t make a good pair in my mind. Maybe nothing is common. Could that be what Paul meant when he claimed that we no longer regard anything according to the flesh?
Peter wrote:
“Well, that wouldn’t be true of Russia; and of course, during the time when Byzantium and Spain were proximate to the Islamic zone, the Islamic countries were far in advance of Western Europe on technical matters.”
You can’t dismiss this so easily. Not Russia? Are you serious? Where did much of the remnants of Byzantium go after the capture and destruction of Constantinople in 1455? Byzantium and Spain were “proximate” to the Islamic countries? No, they were both, from the 8th Century on, engulphed by Islam. My point is that all these Christian nations/traditions were not formed in a vacuum. Their long struggle with Islam influenced them heavily and I do believe Bledsoe’s thrust, contra yours, regarding the trajectory of blessing that Christemdom brings, explains reality. No amount hand-wringing about “colonialism” can change the facts.
Okay, so Islam was ahead of Christian nations in the Middles Ages…maybe in some areas. In architecture? I doubt it. Music…maybe. Science? Probably. Philosophy? I dunno. This is up to the time of the Reconquista. After that, we know what happened. In fact, for good or bad, it was Spain that defeated the Moors and discovered America in one generation. Islam was busy using more rudimentary sea-faring skills to transport slaves to Zanzibar.
Jedidiah, in my experience, commongrace and postmillennialism exist on a kind of psychological spectrum. Those of us who believe that Jesus is not going to fail in His intention to disciple all nations qua nations, also believe that the gospel (the Biblical gospel, not the Calvinistic ordo salutis!) is what leavens and transforms the world. And that the gospel (glorification by faith) does so powerfully. What is ascribed to commongrace (and Right Reason and Natural Law, etc.) in amillennial theologies is seen much more as ‘crumbs that fall from the Lord’s bountiful table’ in postmil theologies.
Whatever commongrace and/or natural law is/are (and there are many versions of each), they are not of much interest in the Bible. In fact, they are pretty much absent. The sun shines on just and unjust alike. That’s about it. It is the Kingdom that transforms the world. It is Biblical truth that sucks the magic and the mana out of the world and enables technological development, resulting in the shift of the world from Land to City. Men are no longer enslaved to the soil and to the seasons, and the “high culture” of the City is increasingly available to everyone, no matter where they live.
Leaven does not work with noise, but secretly. Something tremendous happens when the priests of the world (Christians) come apart into God’s presence during the Lord’s Day and confess sin, are absolved, hear the Word, sing psalms, bring the world before God in the Offertory, eat at His table. The Book of Revelation shows what really happens during this Lord’s Day event — we don’t SEE it, but we know it by faith alone. The world is changed.
Van Til spoke of “creation grace” that is gradually diminishing in the world. Cultures either come into the Kingdom of the New Grace, or lose out altogether. The race is developing in epistemological self-awareness, and hence the antithesis is gradually deepened and sharpened. At the end, the overlap of creation grace and Kingdom will be finished, the former totally absorbed and transformed by the latter.
I realised I left something untied. The Arabs did sea fare to the East Indies, but unlike the Spanish who traversed Oceans, they hugged the coasts.
I’ve no expertise here, but anyone interested in Islam and its “superiority” during the Medieval times should take into account J. D. Unwin’s work. He argues that Islam became advance during the time it was eating Christians and Jews into itself, acquiring temporarily the discipline of monogamous cultures. Once the conquests stopped, the cultural impotence of polygamy reasserted itself.
Grist for the mill.
James…yep. Hence the Blue Mosque which, surprise surprise, looks just like the Hagia Sophia.
Jim,
On Van Ruler: the whole of this thought doesn’t reduce to one unnecessary and speculative (and usually misunderstood) corollary which, you rightly guessed, I don’t affirm: certainly the main thrust of his thought is quite independent of it. And it was the gist of his thought I commended as a corrective: namely, the truth that redemption is not some actualization of what creation was secretly meant to be but couldn’t or wouldn’t otherwise have been without the Fall, but rather, that redemption means the reestablishment of man in his original track, because man was originally in essence, if not yet in act, above the angels. You might recall that this is a crux of difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholic belief. Too, the confusion of creation and redemption is the very formula of gnosticism: and that is why the church has steered clear of endorsing even the best-intentioned notions of necessary incarnation.
On history and apologetics: trust me, I appreciate the attempt at historical wisdom: I have already said that I think very highly of the work of Vico, Rosenstock, and Barfield in many respects. But a wisdom of history must begin with history; in both senses, as past human being and as the disciplined act of rigorously remembering that past. One must have a clear vision of the thing to be explained before assigning lines of cause. My concern is to keep the speculation tied inseparably to the object.
I do understand that neither you nor anyone else here are proffering your reflections as the final word, and I want to make it very clear here that I’ve never taken you to be doing so.
peace
Peter
Islam at its height was a great civilization, but I doubt it ever raised above the level of any archaic or ancient civilization. Europe by contrast was, at that time, backward, and yet a leaven was at work that would burst all the bonds of the ancient world and begin to produce something new, fresh and creative that had all the marks of “newness” about it.
Even with regard to Aristotle, I doubt that the Islamic trajectory ever raised it above the level of Greek and ancient speculation. That is not to say that what they achieved was not notable, but it was not a fresh outbreaking to something new. Jaki’s point is that Islam could not produce something new with Aristotle, and the Christians did. Within a hundred years, the Europeans had made the breakthrough to a new understanding of the laws of motion, which was the trajectory to modern physics. The utter arbitrariness of Allah was insufficient as a metaphysical backdrop to give a new understanding a lawful, but unnecessary cosmos. The Trinitarian background did give that.
Islam traverses back and forth between a renewed pantheism on the part of Sufi-ism, and the arbitrariness of the completely other Allah, who is unapproachable and unknowable. The two approaches in an unstable way, almost imply oneanother. No one can live with the unapproachable Allah for long, so pantheism is called up, along with a renewal of all of the friendly local gods, who are approachable, on the part of the common tribesman of the Islamic world. Trinitarianism is the healing of this instability and creates new kinds of worlds.
Garrett,
I’ll try to pick out the basic points in your somewhat overheated response.
Russia: Russia did not receive large waves of Byzantine migrants after the fall of Byzantium: the primary destination of the exodus was Italy, where they had such an influence as to be held by historians to be partly responsible for the Renaissance.
On Bledsoe: you may believe whatever you like, but you can’t expect me to agree with you when you give no argument, and simply assert that you like Bledsoe’s account better. And I will thank you to refrain from using phrases such as “hand-wringing”: you might think matters of civic justice are of little moment: I don’t. And you have completely ignored my point to Bledsoe that the sort of thing he and Dorsey say of Indian servants, was said consistently by Christian powerholders in Europe of Christian underclasses. If you’re going to argue, please attend to the moves of the argument. So to answer your question: when I argue, yes, I am quite serious; I expect you to be too.
Spain: I have no interest in diminishing the accomplishments of the Spaniards. I am descended from them, and my own ancestors were active in conquest and secured the conditions of missionary reception in certain places; they did not “wring their hands” about injustice, nor did they contemptuously ignore it: they rectified it as best they could, according to their lights. And the Spaniards of that age were a people whose King, attendant to his duties as such, could heed the “hand-wringing” of a B de Las Casas. But my ancestors, of all people, would not want me crowing pridefully about any of that: for them, it was a life of service and self-abnegation, not an occasion for self-glorification. If one wants to use their history as a pretext for collective self-glorification, then he doesn’t understand who they were at all.
peace
Peter
Jedidiah,
Your comments on “common” grace are spot on. Jordan’s are good, too.
The key text I always return to in discussions about common grace is Gen. 9:20ff. Common grace enthusiasts always ignore the sequence of events. The grace God extends to creation (“while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest,” and all that) is called forth by Noah’s special offering of every clean animal and bird! If we want to use the phrase “common grace” then we cannot think of it as existing alongside of, or even beneath “special grace.”
The special grace of Noah’s offering calls forth God’s common grace to the world. Based on THAT sacrifice, AFTER Yahweh smells the pleasing aroma, he promises that he would never again curse the ground! The blessings of regular seasons, etc. all flow from the memorial sacrifice of God’s special priestly man, Noah.
The grace proffered to all men through the Noahic covenant is not some generalized “common grace” but God’s changed attitude founded on the covenantal sacrifice of Noah. Whatever cosmic benefits accrue to creation and all men, they flow from the covenant God has with Noah and the redeemed. The cosmic reach of God’s new attitude is stated in Gen. 8:22, “seedtime and harvest, etc.” This sounds like a reference to “natual law” something that will apply to all men regardless of their relationship to the covenant. That’s not the case.
To put this in terms of the work of Christ, God renews and preserves the entire cosmos because of Christ and for Christ and the church, not “next” to the church as if unrelated to the church.
Richard,
Jaki is a serious writer, though not incapable of carelessness. Your points here following him are interesting, but again, your way of handling things runs the risk of turning to a grand narrative at every opportunity, rather than attending to the actual shape of events. And since they fly free of the facts, grand narratives can easily “make sense” of them in very different ways. For instance, take your first paragraph in #24. A Muslim apologist could easily take that line of argument and substitute “Byzantium” for where you have “Islam” and “Islam” for where you have Europe and voila! an apparently convincing account of rise and fall. Neither account would be historically persuasive on its own. My point, as I keep repeating, is that if you want a Christian wisdom of history- something I believe is both possible and desirable- you must first excel as an historian, which means closely attending to the shape of the past, and not fitting it into the prefab mold of a grand narrative at every turn.
On science: again, the social causes which allowed for Oresme et alia to begin the inquiry which would come into its own in early modern Western Europe can’t be obscured and simply replaced with “Trinitarianism”. As I said before, why not Byzantium? Syria? Ethiopia?
By they way, I’ve spent some time on your site with your essays, and think you’re doing very interesting work. I look forward to reading more soon.
peace
Peter
Peter, you wrote:
“the truth that redemption is not some actualization of what creation was secretly meant to be but couldn’t or wouldn’t otherwise have been without the Fall, but rather, that redemption means the reestablishment of man in his original track, because man was originally in essence, if not yet in act, above the angels. You might recall that this is a crux of difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholic belief. Too, the confusion of creation and redemption is the very formula of gnosticism: and that is why the church has steered clear of endorsing even the best-intentioned notions of necessary incarnation.”
It does not seem to me that what you write here intersects with what I believe. Adam was supposed to grow up. In Jesus, Adam has grown up. That’s not the same as redemption from the consequences of original sin. Jesus provides both of these things: redemption and maturity. (I don’t know if you’re familiar with my article on merit versus maturity in *The Federal Vision,* but if the matter interests you, more can be found there.)
Maturity comes through crisis. This is signified by the move from bread to wine in the Biblical history, and is seen more microchronically in the biographies in the Bible. This death&resurrection crisis is not merely the result of the fall. We see it in the days of creation, punctuated by periods of darkness. (Why?) We see it in the formation of Eve, while Adam is in “deepsleep” – tardema – a condition near death. (Again, why?) The gooddeath/sleep promised at the Tree of Knowledge was to be passage into fuller maturity and a ticket out of the (kinder)garden into the wider world.
I don’t see how this interferes with the fact of redemption through propiatory death. To say that creation has a telos and that it was always the design for the Son to enter creation to bring that telos about — well, what’s gnostic about that?
Jeff,
I am mostly in agreement with you on the matter of Noahide covenant and common grace; but my earlier remarks on the matter should have made that clear to you. I think further exegetical exposition of the sort you’ve sketched out here would be very useful.
Some questions for you:
a) You say that common grace does not exist alongside or next the church as if unrelated to it (I agree). What then would you say is the nature of the relation between common and special grace? Is common grace on a continuum with special grace? Or if not, how then, on your account, is it ordered toward it?
b) Does the distinction between common and special grace apply to a Christian or the church? Or is the distinction abolished there?
c) What would you say was the relation between Noahide nations and Mosaic Israel? Some old divines called the nations Noahide churches of the one catholic church, which had Israel as its true priesthood; would you say that, or would you reserve the name “church” for Israel?
peace
Peter
Peter,
Sorry if my response came across as heated. That was unintentional and I’m a passionate dude. ;)
You wrote:
“Russia: Russia did not receive large waves of Byzantine migrants after the fall of Byzantium: the primary destination of the exodus was Italy, where they had such an influence as to be held by historians to be partly responsible for the Renaissance.”
My point is not that Russia received waves of Byzantine immigrants at the moment of Constantinople’s fall but that they were in the sphere of Constantinople (which was fighting for its life against Islam for 700 years) and there was a long exodus north (Greece too). They accomodated and their thinking was heavily influenced by the Islamic worldview. Russia was also expanding at the time and struggling with Islamic inhabitants of the regions north of the Crimea. Islam also had a stronghold on their Western frontier in the Balkans. This was not the case of Central and Northern Europe and the results were different.
So, perhaps I was unclear. My argument is Islam did not advance the world in substantial and lasting ways. Eastern Christendom, sharing cultural similarities with their Islamic neighbors tended to track with them and fell behind. Western Christendom, which is now the ethos of the vast majority of the non-white evangelical church, continues to make huge strides in the betterment of the world as a whole: technology, justice, etc.
Peter,
I wasn’t really responding to your earlier remarks. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. I was just having a conversation with Jedidiah. But since you ask. . .
a) God graciously saved the world (the whole shebang and all of humanity living at the time) at the cross and resurrection. God is the Savior of all men, especially those who believe. What we call “common grace” is the result of the Noahic sacrifice, which, of course, was prophetic of Christ’s work. What we call “natural law” is now grounded in the cosmic redemption of Christ. Everything good and helpful in human culture and “nature” (i.e., every good gift of God!) is made possible because of the work of Christ.
b) Not sure what you mean here.
c) No, Israel was not the only “saved” people in the world. Noah, and later Abraham and Israel, were called to be priests to the nations. They were not the only people of God. The people of God in the old world were divided in two. That, of course, is no longer the case in the new world since Christ.
Garrett,
No worries, brother. We certainly need more passion in the ministry, not less! And please forgive me if my reply to you seemed too brusque.
I do understand what you’re getting at. But as I keep saying, my concern is that the practice of history not be subordinated to the recitation of grand narratives. We have a Story we know to be true and explanatory of the origin, journey, and destiny of man, but the manner in which the parts along the way fit with that Story can’t be forced at the expense of truth.
For instance, navigation: yes, Western Europeans did cross the ocean, whereas Arab navigators hugged the coast. But is this the direct result of the presence of the Church? I don’t think so: the peoples of the western coast were getting more and more daring since very early days (see Barry Cunliffe’s excellent “Facing the Sea” on the long history of the Atlantic coastmen), and the Vikings, not a very Christian lot, were the first Europeans to make long-range excursions and settle far away. And the Arabs hugged the coast because their port system was inherited from long antiquity, and subserved their land system of trade, which was largely closed to Europeans. Not to credit the exploded Pirenne hypothesis, but simply to say that in some respects the Atlantic Europeans were forced to go looking.
In all this, aside from the question of historical rigor, I have little trouble with saying that all good things flow from Christ; in fact, I will assert it. My concern arises when Christ and the visible church are too closely identified or even confused, and one starts attributing the effects of common grace to the mediation or agency of the visible church, and making those effects out to be, as it were, marks of the church. Christ is the Lord of history, but the visible church isn’t.
peace
Peter
At the same time, as I gather you may know, what we call classical music did flow mainly out from the claudula of organum, becoming church sonatas, and moving from there. Other things flowed in later on, of course. Also, without the invention of musical notation (the church did it), what we think of as composed music would not exist.
This has always seemed to me to be a good example of the streams flowing out from the garden to the rest of the world.
But, being postmil, I’m still in the early days of the kingdom!
Peter,
When you write:
“But as I keep saying, my concern is that the practice of history not be subordinated to the recitation of grand narratives.”
I ask why not? It seems the study of history has become the study of minutiae and thus, inaccessible to common folk. The study of history must go forward but a loss of grand naratives seems antithetical to a biblical worldview which is formed by grand narrative, right? Cohesion and perspective (optimism?) often seem lost in the micro world of history in the academy.
Garrett,
I’m not arguing for a loss of grand narrative: only for its inseparable relation to fact and historical method. And believe me, I am with you in your critique of micro-history in the academy.
As I’ve said, there is indeed a relation between the Story and any little story: but one must not do violence to the truth in trying to find it. I share Calvin’s dislike for the hagiographical sensibility.
Jim,
That’s an interesting point. But several things to think about: first, is it a given that baroque and classical music are a norm or zenith of music? I’m not sure I’d grant that (why Indian Christian culture wouldn’t keep the raga system I can’t see). Second, couldn’t the development of baroque and classical music as much a departure from centrality of chant as a supposedly natural development of it? The Byzantine-rite nations kept the primacy of chant (it shows even in the folksong), and didn’t develop modern Western music. Lastly, where would you draw the line? Is Wagner too a flower from the tree of church music? Or The Rolling Stones? Miles Davis?
peace
Peter
I agree with Garrett’s remarks above (34). We are have all but abandoned the sort of Baconian “look at the facts first and mostly only” approach in science, with the work especially of people like Polyanni, but now want to adopt it in history. Why should I believe that any academic historian, who is adopting a microfactual perspective, does not in fact have a whole series of “grand narratives” secretly at work in the background that determine what a “fact” really is? Why especially, should I have any confidence at all, that with what is likely to be a positivist, materialist, and even quasi-Marxist secret “grand narrative”, would he (or she) have even the slightest openness to the possibility that the religious beliefs of say sailors, and explorers, would have the slightest effect on their behaviour?
Peter’s own analysis of the social milleu of India, while chiding the local missionary as being rather benighted (in spite of 50 years hands on experience) evidences great confidence in his own analysis that pretty clearly has a class structure, economic, “meta-narrative” unadmittidly at work. The whole paragraph sounds like someone who just came from a Gunnar Myrdal seminar somewhere in Sweden. But, of course, we are getting “Just the facts ma’am” with no hidden metaphysics at all.
It strikes me that instead, what we are really getting is a perspective that on the ground, eliminates religious influences, but like the fish in water, is unaware of the thousand other western university positivist influences.
Richard,
I actually agree with you that there are too many unexpressed grand narratives in most people’s heads. But your move here is a common worldview-think one: hey, everyone else is irrationally biased and gets to screen the facts, so what’s wrong with me doing it too? I really detest this sort of appropriation of postmodern relativism. You rightly emphasize the Christian concern with objective reality: well, I’m defending it.
I am not arguing for microhistory as the only kind: I have expressly rejected it in conversation with Garrett above, and expressed criticism of the academy, which you were apparently in too much of a hurry to read. Neither am I arguing for a Baconian approach to history: I am simply arguing for history in the old style. The discipline of this might be inconvenient for those who wish to regard the past as simply a props closet for whatever agitpropaganda story they want to tell: but one must attend to reality, not use the past (or present) as a palimpsest for one’s idees fixes.
The fact that a missionary lives 50 years somewhere means little in itself: one can be physically proximate and never leave the parochial confines of one’s inherited little mental world. This is notorious, Richard. I don’t know Rev Dorsey, so I can’t judge whether that is the case with him; but I wasn’t impressed by his remarks as you quoted him. I know many, many Indians who are Hindu and have none of the truthtelling problems you seem to think are a necessary consequence of Hinduism. But since you’re wondering, my own analysis would have more in common with the Reformational political thinkers of the ICS in Toronto, and with Maritain, than with Swedish sociologists whose classes I am much to young too have attended. And further back, more in common with Thomas and Althusius than you might think. There is in fact no hidden metaphysics in what I said; my argument had to do with the more obviously proximate causes of the purported phenomena being very likely social rather than theological; and thus, was a point about order and method in explanation. I think it stands.
peace
Peter
Peter wrote:
Jim,
That’s an interesting point. But several things to think about: first, is it a given that baroque and classical music are a norm or zenith of music?
— I’m a postmil, Peter. So, no.
I’m not sure I’d grant that (why Indian Christian culture wouldn’t keep the raga system I can’t see).
— Well, there might be reasons. The influence of a Biblical view of time, moving Eliade-like from Cosmos to History, would, I expect, result in an appreciation for cadences, the sabbaths of music, as one example. I should not expect a music of hypnotic absorption to survive the end of pantheism. I’d expect transformation, but not annihilation; many things preserved, but subtly and notsosubtly altered over time.
Second, couldn’t the development of baroque and classical music as much a departure from centrality of chant as a supposedly natural development of it?
— “Natural” development is a bit of a trick. I’m just saying “development.” I don’t think the facts are in question: from plainchant to simple organum to slow-fastclaudula-slow organum to 13th c. motets, to motets play on instruments (church sonatas), etc. Also, the mass as a long concert before God, developing into a multi-movement work by one composer (Machaut, and everyone thereafter), gives rise to a form of the Long Line that has unity and diversity, cadences, etc. The symphony is another version of the same experience. Now, as it flows out, it can become secularized and has been. But Bruckner, Mendelssohn, and Messiaen kept the light burning.
— I think it is Bernard Lewis who points out that in Islam, and in other traditional cultures, you don’t move beyond simple song and dance. The development of a symphony orchestra, the perfection of instruments so that they blend, the creation of music involving dozens of timbres and multiple melodies, is a function of the deep-penetration of the Trinity and ideas of unity and diversity. I believe that this is true. Unity and diversity is inescapable, but it does not richly flower where the Spirit of Pentecostal diversification is not strongly at work — to wit, Christendom. The Gamelan orchestras only came into existence in imitation of Western orchestras. So did the orchestras of balalaikas and bayans in Russia 150 years ago. Now we have them, and it’s great.
The Byzantine-rite nations kept the primacy of chant (it shows even in the folksong), and didn’t develop modern Western music.
— that’s rite; er, right. But is that surprising? When the church is a department of the state; when theology tends toward mystical ascent and escape; when holy men are like Buddhist monks glowing in the dark on mountains and fed by the poor — well, you have quite a different religion-milieu from the church as a separate government wrestling with totalism; from theology as pointed much more into the world and the poor; from holy men as monks who help the poor and do not withdraw. I’m only touching on a few things. Additionally, the Russians at least did eventually draw over the West’s symphonic notions and the composition of Long Line liturgies. (We use a lot of Gretchaninov’s at our annual BH Conference.)
Lastly, where would you draw the line? Is Wagner too a flower from the tree of church music?
— Yes. Bruckner thought so anyway. Did C. S. Lewis ever stop thinking so? Shostakovich, though an atheist, is a flower from that tree. Remember, I’m not using a tree analogy (which would be more problematic) but a streams from Eden analogy. As the Edenic stream moves from sanctuary to outside soil, it leaves liturgy and becomes Christian symphonies and Christian operas. When it moves into poisoned soil, it can become Bernstein’s Mass — but apart from that original stream (about run its course now, I think), Bernstein would have no water to ruin.
Or The Rolling Stones? Miles Davis?
— Believe me, I have no idea. It is the case, though, that some 20th century music is written in self-conscious opposition to the entire stream of which I speak.
JBJ
Jim,
Thanks for the clarifications; I understand you better now. Given that you reject the idea of natural development in art and the tree metaphor, I think I would largely agree with your account of things, at least in principle; and in fact I think your exposition here is extremely interesting and suggestive, and I am grateful for your taking the time to lay it out.
Some minor points to consider, though: first, I think you might be overstating the raga system’s disregard for periodicity; they are, after all, supposed to be keyed to the rhythms of human time. But your point certainly doesn’t ride on your apparently tentative take on the structure of Indian music. Second, though I agree with much of your assessment of the Byzantine-rite nations (earlier in the conversation in #14, I said something much like what you say here), you might want to be careful with the point regarding the church as a dept of the State; that was *most* the case in Lutheran Germany (and the Russians got a lot of their rationale for their brand of it from Lutheran manuals), yet Lutheran Germany was perhaps the greatest matrix of music in Christendom; and it was the extreme Calvinists, with their notion of the church as a distinct visible government, who were as unmusical as could be.
Have you ever read the ethnomusicologist Marius Schneider? He had a theory of music, mind and history which bears a very striking resemblance to Barfield. He is unfortunately too little known in America.
peace
Peter
Thanks guys. This has been a very stimulating thread.
Peter: Richard,
I actually agree with you that there are too many unexpressed grand narratives in most people’s heads. But your move here is a common worldview-think one: hey, everyone else is irrationally biased and gets to screen the facts, so what’s wrong with me doing it too? I really detest this sort of appropriation of postmodern relativism. You rightly emphasize the Christian concern with objective reality: well, I’m defending it.
I am not arguing for microhistory as the only kind: I have expressly rejected it in conversation with Garrett above, and expressed criticism of the academy, which you were apparently in too much of a hurry to read. Neither am I arguing for a Baconian approach to history: I am simply arguing for history in the old style. The discipline of this might be inconvenient for those who wish to regard the past as simply a props closet for whatever agitpropaganda story they want to tell: but one must attend to reality, not use the past (or present) as a palimpsest for one’s idees fixes.
Richard: Yes, it was put up while I was in the midst of writing and I did not see it until after I had posted.
Peter:The fact that a missionary lives 50 years somewhere means little in itself: one can be physically proximate and never leave the parochial confines of one’s inherited little mental world. This is notorious, Richard. I don’t know Rev Dorsey, so I can’t judge whether that is the case with him; but I wasn’t impressed by his remarks as you quoted him.
Richard: In my experience, missionaries are amongst the least of those with a “inherited little mental world.” They are the people who have had to grapple almost heroically with living in several worlds. It is no mistake that someone with the cultural acuteness of Lesslie Newbigin, developed that acuteness and analytical vision, precisely because he was a missionary. And while it might be the case that some missionaries were tools of the colonial oppressors, again in my experience and from what I know historically, it has most often been the missionaries who have been the champions of the foreign underclasses against the colonialists.
Peter: I know many, many Indians who are Hindu and have none of the truthtelling problems you seem to think are a necessary consequence of Hinduism.
Richard: So do I. But they are not taxi drivers in New Delhi. Many of them are university students and computer engineers in America. They have absorbed the western ethos. They have made the leap from “original participation” to “final participation”. The burgeoning middle class in India are also absorbing an ethos that makes doing business a possibility. Indians are increasingly westernized.
It is not just the “servants” or workers who have this kind of difficulty. Westerners have no idea how rare honest civil servants are, or what price must have been paid in Europe and America for that to happen. You live in terror if the police are called. It is not Joe Friday interested in “just the facts ma’am.” You are liable to be terrorized, bullied, and robbed by the people westerners assume will protect you. Any dealings with virtually any bureaucracy will disillusion you about “civil servants”. They all live, and survive by demanding bribes. And “stories” change in the same way, when trying to get building permits, or whatever, as they do with domestic help. It is only a naive westerner who thinks that “a good system of political rights, property law, and profit incentive, (and) things would shape up in no time- the self-regard which comes from freedom and opportunity,and the habits of mind which come from planning and internalization of the spirit behind contract law, would amend the phenomena Bledsoe and Dorsey believe they observed.”
Good luck. I think you should try. You have a magic and easy formula. But you should start with something simple. Why not spend a few years organizing a good trash pick up system like every city in America and Western Europe have? I am sure you will have dazzling success in “no time.”
Peter: But since you’re wondering, my own analysis would have more in common with the Reformational political thinkers of the ICS in Toronto, and with Maritain, than with Swedish sociologists whose classes I am much to young too have attended.
Richard: Yes, I was aware of that. There was a bit of irony, which seemed to escape you, in my comment. Gunnar Myrdal was quite sure, with a whole generation of western planners, that utopia was only a plan or two away, and that smart Swedish planners could very easily change the world, solve poverty, and banish everything they regarded as undesirable.
Peter: And further back, more in common with Thomas and Althusius than you might think.
Richard: I wouldn’t doubt your intellectual committment for a moment.
Peter: There is in fact no hidden metaphysics in what I said;
Richard: You’re pretty easily dogmatic about that
Peter: my argument had to do with the more obviously proximate causes of the purported phenomena being very likely social rather than theological; and thus, was a point about order and method in explanation. I think it stands.
Richard: I am glad it is so “obvious” and “very likely”. What percentage would you put on “very likely”? 73%, 88%? I am just curious, it all seems so certain. Why is it so “obvious”? I don’t get it, unless maybe you can show the formula for figuring the percentage. When somebody tells me something is “obvious” either it really is obvious, and one cannot argue for it (yellow is yellow, or Plantiga-like, my experience of God is “obvious” and basic to me, and really does not need an argument), or it is an assertion designed to cover the fact that one really does not know. This does not seem “basic” to me, like yellow or belief in God. Do you have more to indicate why this is “obvious”? Where does this obvious dualism of “social” over against “theological” come from? Unless I am obtuse, “social” sounds like a western theoretical import of class and colonial exploitation, and economic motivation. It sounds like a mild version of Lenin’s COLONIALISM: THE LAST STAGE OF CAPITALISM. It seems “obvious” to you that at all times and places, the underclasses have reacted and responded rather as western Leftist social analysis says they will? I don’t get it. Plato and Aristotle didn’t get that memo when they regarded slavery as utterly normal. Hindus for generations didn’t get that memo when they accepted with no rebellion whatsoever that their birth was cosmically determined, and their sufferings were accepted. From what I could see in India, it was the missionaries who rebelled against that, and began to inculcate a different mentality in the populace. That Hindu and Islamic, and Mogul mythology and theology would not be far more obviously the proximate cause of how the castes and classes relate and behave is not one whit clear to me.
Thanks for the discussion.
Richard,
I am sorry if you feel injured by what were intended as merely mild criticisms. I confess that I am at a loss to understand the origin of your defensive tone- so you see, I am not quite so sure about causes in every case as you want to claim I am.
But a few things to note. I wasn’t criticizing all missionaries, only saying that it is notorious that someone can live as an expat and never leave the mental world he came from: and I even very clearly said (something you don’t seem to have noticed) that since I don’t know Rev Dorsey, I can’t judge whether that is the case with him. A man of my name was in part the reason why certain tribes in the northwest of Mexico are Christian now; I am certainly not lacking in respect for missionaries. On the other hand, Newbigin, and Ronald Allen before him, were arguing for *change* in missionary approach. Change from what, Richard? Weren’t most of those missionaries radiant with the noetic glow of final participation, and adept in all the comparative disciplines needed to convey that?
I earlier mentioned B de las Casas with praise, certainly a missionary who championed the oppressed: I might have also mentioned Motolinia and Peter of Ghent, just to cite examples from my own people’s history. Apparently this passed you by.
What also seems to have passed you by was the point of my remarks about contract law: you attribute to me utopian confidence and a magic formula, when in fact, as was obvious from the context, I don’t even really hold the position I was describing. Let’s look again at what I said, shall we? This time paying attention to what you skipped. The passage you cite actually begins with
“Even some conservative Christian apologists would recognize this much, and say that …”
the “this much” meaning, that there are social causes to be considered; and the “say that” introduces their formula, not mine. And the passage ends with:
“And in a certain sense, that might well be true.”
So then. That doesn’t sound much like utopian confidence or a magic formula, does it? In fact, it doesn’t even sound much like *my* formula. So I don’t know who you were hoping to hit with your unfortunate sarcasm, but it wasn’t me.
So let’s get back to the business at hand. Why couldn’t one attribute the “final participation” into which you say the Indian engineers of Silicon Valley have been initiated (leaving aside the fact that on Barfield’s historical schema, what westerners and westernized have presently got isn’t final p at all: but still the consciousness soul, in fact a hypertrophied phase of it) not to Trinitarianism, but rather to that dread monster that used to keep Reconstructionists up at night: Enlightenment Autonomous Humanism? Surely you don’t think that global capitalism is nothing other than the just social order of a Christendom redivivus? Or do you?
Again, I insist upon attending to reality, even when that means living with uncertainty: I find it odd, and perhaps telling, that you wish to attribute ready certitude to me, when I have been arguing steadily here for less haste in historical judgment. For instance, I have read plenty of Muslim apologetics which say exactly the same kind of things you do about Hindu India; and go on to point out that Islam abolished caste for converts; and so on. They could spin narrratives about themselves as final participation too, and mutatis mutandis, they do. And many of the things you say about Indians, were said by Christian powerholders in old Europe of the Christian underclasses (a point which you have consistently ignored), and are often said by Christian powerholders in Latin America of Christian underclasses even now. This suggests that presence or absence of Trinitarianism isn’t the first cause you’d want to reach for. The Holy Trinity is indeed the cause of all history; but Trinitarianism as such isn’t; though there is certainly a relation, it is much subtler. Imagining that it isn’t, and making common grace phenomena supposedly dependent on the mediation or agency of the visible church and constituting its marks, is a serious mistake indeed.
One of the things which did distinguish the West was the intellectual asceticism of rigorous historiography, and close attendance to causes and their order. I find it strange that you would want to defend the West through a method which isn’t very Western. I don’t see the telling of history as a frantic competition between hasty grand narratives to see who grab as many valorized historical phenomena and throw these into one’s own basket, and throw the bad stuff into the other man’s. That means, as I said earlier, that the actual shape of history then goes unrecognized; and God’s work there goes unknown; and God goes unglorified by us. I am not content with that; I would hope that you aren’t either.
I should say, once again, that I have had to deal with your remarks as cited and as you have yourself have made them here; but much of what is on your site is extremely interesting, and it is clear to me that you are a very thoughtful and original writer. I encourage readers to visit your site and engage closely with your reflections.
peace
Peter
Good discussions all, but a little unnecessarily feather-ruffling here at the end.
Let’s keep it nice. We’re all friends here.
I believe that discerning causality in history is next to (next to, nota bene) impossible. We don’t have the information to do it. History changes because of what everyone does, not just thinkers or politicians. History changes because of “natural” changes, like the Lisbon earthquake. History changes as a result of “morphic resonance” or “covenant” or “enkapsis.” But mainly history changes because the invisible and ungraspable Spirit does things in response to secret action of Christians, and what the Spirit does is unpredictable. The God who is new every morning does new things that cannot be anticipated and whose historical causes are difficult to discern.
I think what can be observed in very general ways is what has happened and the pattern of it. I’m convinced that the Bible reveals that pattern. I’m in debt to Rosenstock for some of it, but he does not go to the text. There’s enough in the Biblical triadic spiral pattern, however, to give us wisdom to look back over the last 2000 years and say, “Oh, yes, I hear the same general melody again.” I’m not sure it was very discernable until recently. One needs to be at the end of the triadic cycle to perceive it well. The meaning of the New Creation, in part, is that the history and historical music of the Old Creation is now applied to ALL nations, in continually evolving transfigured form.
And also, I think one can reason about the likely differences in psychology of pantheists and creational trinitarians; the differences in psychology between people with little sense of causality and time, and people who have absorbed the Biblical emphasis on chronology, development, and clock time. And if what seems rather reasonable turns out to be observable, then why not make the observation?
We’ve been over this before here, but the Bible has chronological information virtually on every page. Jesus comes at a certain time in this chronology, at a certain stage in the development of humanity. Jesus does not fulfill myths and stories, or even types. Jesus is the “man of the hour,” and only in that sense fulfills all of previous history (hence historical types). The Bible gives us a grand narrative that shows how God grew humanity to the point of Jesus.
Peter is right, of course, that we are not to ignore details. But Rich is right also that we can indeed observe historical contrasts and developments.
Jim,
I agree with most all of this: you have here made many of the crucial qualifications which need to be in place before attempting a Christian wisdom of history, and the end of your first paragraph is exactly right.
With regard to your third paragraph, I think you’re right in principle: my point with respect to that sort of observation is that one needs to pay close attention to proximate causes. The history of anthropology shows us how easy it is to proceed from dubious impressions; Levy-Bruhl’s account of tribal cosmology as participation mystique (a view on which Barfield was somewhat dependent), is countered by Levi-Strauss, who explains the same phenomena as something more akin to higher mathematics. Not to endorse either one particularly; only to say that the appearances can be saved a number of ways, and one must first begin by understanding just what the appearances are: which means having enough information to go on, being openminded enough to avoid confirmation bias and entertain counterexamples. One indeed can make reasonable observations and provisional judgements: but ought to bear in mind the distinction between opinion, which is the status most of those sorts of observations would have, and real knowledge.
peace
Peter
Yes. Appearances can be justified in more than one say. Would that the anti-creation science people would bear that in mind, and vice versa.
My only conversational comeback is that we DO have insights into human realities from the Word that put us in a better position than others. At the same time, we confess the ungraspability of the Spirit’s movements in history (beginning in Genesis 1:2), which should leave us open.
Jim,
Insights from the Word into human realities which in principle give us a more central vantage point: agreed, wholeheartedly.
P
Peter,
A stab at the question of similiar things that I said about the “underclass” in India, were often said in christianized nations by the ruling classes about underclasses.
This is where I have found Barfield’s general thesis to be so helpful. I am aware that the we in the West have not yet reached “final participation” in its final form. Indeed, the level of “final participation” reached in the west has produced an anti-christian virulence that may be unmatched by any opposition to be found in “orginal participation”. We have now reached the place where the entire cosmos has become a gigantic idol, and in reality, the cosmos is an idol that is created inside of one form or another of the Kantian transcendental ego. It is, in otherwords, a gigantic projection of what amounts to a divinized, or absolute ego, which of course it is not. Hence, modernity issues in the same sort of “emptiness” and “nothingness” that Paul says all the idols that his pagan converts were dealing with were involved in.
However, oddly, it was the incarnation that made this sort of modern idolatry possible. It does not seem likely that the Cartesian ego, or the Kantian transcendental ego, or any of the thousand other forms, would have been possible apart from the incarnation. The Incarnation lifted up humanity to a pinnacle that is unparalled. Apostasy never returns to ancient forms of apastasy, but now issues in the absolutization of humanity. The final form of “final participation” will not be reached until the final reconnecting point is not found in humanity, but “in Christ” (one of the commonest phrases in St. Paul).
Paul makes clear that the times of the law were times when the human race was “under a tutor” and the race was still in its “minority”.
I can only say that the time I spent in India was revelatory. It is true that we don’t “know what we see”, but rather “see what we know” (at least to a degree). I had read Barfield before going to India, and it seemed that all of India was a vast illustration of what he wrote about. India, even in the cities, but especially in the villages, is still an archaic country. One feels that one has traversed back 3000 years. It is 3000 years ago with cell phones and computers. And, it is true that things are changing fast in India. The upcoming generations are becoming very westernized very fast, and are beginning to have western psychic afflictions. It is depressing to see psychiatrists putting out their shingles.
Now, what makes this difficult to talk about is precisely that it is too easy to unconsciously leap to our modern sensibilities, and be sure that in so far as our sensibilities are not essentially egalitarian and individualistic, we are dealing with bigotry or racism, or all of the justifications for the exploitation of the lower by the ruling classes.
What I believed I experienced in India was precisely the afterglow, childlikeness, and “minority” of the human race.
It is very difficult to verbalize what I mean by this. Let me use a quick antechdote to illustrate. The great Roman Catholic medical missionary, Tom Dooley, said that in all of his years in Siam as a missionary, that he had “met many psychotics, but never a neurotic…” What he meant was that he had certainly met many people totally out of touch with reality (being psychotic, or demon possessed) but never someone, who is virtually a typical westerner, someone who has become partially christian. Enough christian to be unhappy, not enough to have reach holiness and contentment. A neurotic is someone who has linear expectations, and therefore hope, but has cyclical realities. I.e., he / she, over and over repeat in a cyclical ways, the conflicts learned and experienced in childhood, projecting them over and over unto the screen of the present and future. Hence, life goes in failing circles, but one is unhappy, because one expects progress, forward movement, and positive change. On the other hand, the ancient peasant has no expectation of progress or of change. His life is just like his father’s, grandfather’s, great grandfather’s, and back to Adam. He is content, in spite of hardship and difficulty. The odd happiness of the very poor in the 3rd world is now one of the things that is becoming commonly noticed, and found to be odd by westerners.
Hence, to be archaic is to be content because one has not even imagined that life can be different. Life is cyclical. Fish live in water. About the same. Likewise, the peasant lives in an atmosphere of what amounts to a background monism. Archaic people are not lonely. They are connected. It is one thing to read about this theoretically in someone like Barfield, but one “feels” it in many places in the 3rd world.
I think I understand why one sees the emergence of “childhood” as a sentimental category in, say, Britain in the 19th century. It is because, as Barfield says, original participation disappeared in the cities in Europe about 1890. It did not disappear with say, the French farming peasant, not yet. It is probably gone now. But, whole pychic world’s disappeared about the year 1900 in Europe and only a little later, in America. The sentimental Victorian Christmas for children, revived what was a disappearing world. To grow up is truamatic. One enters the conflict of adolescence, and a conflicted adolescent is not charming like a child who has a certain innocence.
The same thing is now happening all over Asia, and Africa. Westernization and Christianiazation have now brought an uncharming adolescence to vast parts of the world.
I said that the lying that one found with servants, had a certain innocence about it. It was like the lying of a child. It is almost as if it never occured to them that such a thing as the truth existed.
I doubt that to be unique to Hinduism. (indeed, all of ancient paganism had as its background a common monism, or even pantheism) It is a quality of childhood, and westerners would have been just as childish a thousand years ago. But, it is also not unique to underclasses. There is nothing more brutal than children ruling children. The novel, Lord of the Flies, of course is about just that. Corruption in the ruling classes is rife in the so called “third world”. Coming out of the childhood of the race and creating honest public servants in Europe has cost a great deal, and I do not know what primary influence could be greater than Christianity. Rulers were also childish in the ancient world.
Of course, levels of maturity no doubt differed greatly in the ancient world.
This also means that as adulthood is come into, one can be an adult criminal as well as a childish brat. To be an adult apostate is far worse than being a childish pagan.
Richard,
I think one has to proceed very carefully with schemes of historical development, most especially if one is positing (as Barfield does, and Spengler does not) humanity as a unitary historical subject following a single course of development. It’s not that I think such speculations are wholly illicit; only that, as Jim granted earlier, historical causality is extremely difficult to trace, and if one has a Big Picture, the temptation to make the phenomena fit through unwitting selection and premature judgment is very great.
And one has to make sure that the Big Picture, whether diachronic or synchronic, is complex enough to handle the phenomena, without having recourse to all sorts of epicycles, as it were. I think Barfield, for instance, has much too simplistic a schema: Gebser’s is more nuanced (just as Gebser was more profoundly learned), but one could consider Sorokin’s too. But I should point out again that even on Barfield’s scheme, final participation (or what Gebser would call “integral consciousness” would be incipient, and that barely, only in a very few sagely spirits; most westerners and westernized are merely in the consciousness soul phase on B’s account (what Gebser would call the “rational”, the hypertrophied defective version of the “mental” phase; similar to Vico’s “barbarism of wit”). Part of the problem with any of these schemata, of course, is the perennial problem of historicism: how can one tell where one is on the posited arc of development, since no one has ever seen the full-grown creature? And of course, although many Western philosophies of history assume that urbanization and psychosocial differentiation are inherently positive, though perhaps not the terminus of human development (since the numinous character of old participation returns after rationality in a kind of purified mental octave), the story can be told in reverse: tribal man, at his best, represents the form closest to Eden, and urbanization, division of labor, mental (dianoetic as opposed to noetic) elaboration, et c, are simply phases of degeneration: the story told by certain ancient Greeks/Romans and ancient Indians (the yugas are a downhill trip), and more recently, by writers as various as Rousseau and Guenon. And there are yet still other ways to read things: for instance, one might say that Barfield was on to something about “final participation”, but say that such a state is inherently personal and never collective, and thus, ever only para-political and para-historical. This would be something like the view of Aristotle, Plato, al-Farabi, and quite a few since. So my concern, as I’ve said before, is methodological: we have to hold our hypotheses lightly; and my point all along has been that the schema of Barfield’s “evolution of consciousness” might not be the one which best works to explain certain purported social phenomena.
In defense of my political analysis: I certainly wouldn’t want to reduce everything to class relations in a Marxist sense (I am closer by far to Vico than Marx). But on the other hand, if politics is the art of maximizing the conditions in which the good life is possible (and Aristotle defines the good life as something like Barfield’s final participation), then it might be that defective versions of “original participation” are inherently bound up with defects of justice. Earlier in the conversation, you pointed out correctly that Aristotle didn’t get the memo about slavery; true enough, but Aristotle’s relative endorsement of that can be shown to represent an accident of his thought, a consequence of his taking the biological model too seriously and thus overplaying the role of climate in the development of the human “mean”. Aristotle does say that tyranny leads to corruption of mind and morals: and he defines tyranny as despotic relation to those who are in fact one’s peers. Well, if one jettisons Aristotle’s climatological ethnology, and extends the notion of peer to all men (something later Greek philosophers in fact did), then all servility would a correlate of tyranny in some degree or another, and one would then attribute the sort of systematic social phenomena under discussion to inequity, a defect in the order of the commonwealth, rather than to the supposed fact of holding a certain place on a posited timeline of human development. Modern neurosis, too, might well be seen as resulting from systematic defects of order and equity in our present political arrangement.
An illuminating counterexample to consider: many nomadic tribes, though leading extremely simple lives, are known for their very rigorous habits of truthtelling and oathkeeping. But they haven’t gone through the Barfieldian phases.
Now, I do think that Christianity, with its doctrine of all men as being in the image of God, and its relativization of all political ordo in light of the Kingdom of God, did carry within itself the seeds of political rectification. But not because Christ catalytically actualized some morphologically predestinated phase of collective human evolution, but rather because its light removed some of the scales from our eyes regarding the coequal dignity of all men as images of God. An example of Jim’s “insights into human realities” from the Word (and interestingly, Vico’s whole canon of the integrally human and natural law, by which he measures ancient Gentile peoples, is derived from the Bible).
None of this is intended as a final answer to your reflections, only as part of the give and take of the conversation, which I am enjoying very much; and I think we might find ourselves in a great deal of agreement on first principles (and on many smaller matters too: I think your observations on Victorian childhood are very acute: that era also saw the development of the modern fairy tale and children’s books as we know them; it might well have been an interiorization of the externally vanishing gemeinschaft).
peace
Peter
Peter,
You have a great gift for the ‘counterfactual’! An abundance of which an always be found, unless one is dealing with a narrow deductive system.
Also, I am not assuming that we are doing apologetics. I am aware, for example, and as you point out, that there is a kind of Islamic Van Tillian presuppositionalism that can be practiced, and Islam can certainly bring its guns to bear on Indian civilization. (And indeed, it is true that Islam abolished caste, and limiting a man to only four wives can be an advance.–But I also find, I believe it was George Gilder’s contention, that the poverty of India over the last centuries is the result of the repressiveness of the Mogal Empire and Islam far more than it is the result of Hinduism–I only say I find that very plausible, I could not prove it tonight) But, I am here assuming the truth of the Bible, and then attempting to understand history in the light of that.
For the moment, lets jettison Barfield. Barfield was for me an aid to understanding what I thought I saw around me in India, and he illuminated some of what I read in St. Paul.
Some of your counter interpretations are more or less tweeking the general thesis, and some of them are moving in a distinctly non-Biblical direction.
As you point out, Vico’s archeology of history or of peoples is itself dependent upon the Biblical record. Indeed, what writer or theorizer in the “Christian era” can avoid that, even when trying to jettison the whole affair? (who is more dependent upon the Bible than, alas, Nietzsche, for example. Vico is trying to be in the Christian line.) The whole sense of linear time, development, and philosophy of history, or even of historicisms themselves are difficult to account for apart from the Biblical revelation. The rotation of govenments found in the Greeks is very acute, and as you point out could be purified, but we know what direction to purify because we must purify in the light of revelation. (I am not sure what later philosophers you are thinking of who theorized a more general equality, unless it would be the Stoics–but if it is the stoics, stoicism hardly provided any real impetus to change any of the accepted social order–but you can correct me here, you may have other better examples in mind) But classical and ancient thought is cyclical, and not linear.
As far as I can see, the Classical and Empire world viewed perfection as static reality to be achieved, and then never veered from. The sense of Grecian statuary form; perfect and static, timeless, was the ideal. Time eroded all perfection. For the Bible, time was the roadway to perfection, and time is not to be escaped, but traveled through. That is a large canvass, and creates a different kind of world. “Process thought” whether Hegel or Whitehead, can only come into existence as it parasites on Revelation. Heraclites is describing human despair. Perfection is longed for, but the flux carries all away. Hegel revels in the process and in movement and time.
The large canvass of Biblical revelation does in fact move from the primitive garden to the massive and developed city at the end of the Bible. As lots of commentators point out, the New Jerusalem is a “garden city” not some awful slum. But it seems to be a picture of a fully developed humanity. That simple arc of development means that we do not want to move in the directions of
“certain ancient Greeks/Romans and ancient Indians (the yugas are a downhill trip), and more recently, by writers as various as Rousseau and Guenon…” insofar as the “ideal” is seen as a return to a pastoral garden paradise. The Bible teaches otherwise.
Now, that is not to say that massive and terrible corruption is not associated with “urbanization”. There are changes in the law that indicate that the move to the city has many and massive degradations associated with it. Much of what is in the Prophets can only be understood in the light of the characteristic sins associated with urbanization. Everybody who has traveled in the “3rd world” cities, knows, for example, that prostitution is rife in those places as one of the concommitments to the massive move from the agricultural country side to the city. Prostitution, which has often been associated with various forms of idolatry and temple worship, is condemned in no uncertain terms in Deut. 23:17-18. The wages of a harlot are not to be brought to the temple. And yet, it appears that redemptive mercy is associated with the wages of harlots in city cultures in a passage like Isa 23:17-18, in the whole story of Hosea, and most notably in Luke 7:36-50. In those passages, the “wages of a harlot” are accepted in the Temple, with Jesus being the new Temple, and Jesus bringing redemption to one of the peculiar corruptions of the move to the city.
All of this, just to say that a broad direction is discernable from the Bible, and it gives me real clues as to how to read history. It is also the case, as you note above, that “the numinous character of old participation returns after rationality in a kind of purified mental octave”. Irenius’s “recapitulation” is at work here. All things are summed up in redemption, and nothing good is lost, but all given back at the end.
And just to take up one other point, it does seem to me that the move forward in Revelation expands human consciousness and reverses the direction of consciousness. Adam is formed from the dust. In the beginning, man is made a student of the world around him. The basic Barfieldian point of ancient man living from the outside in is, I think, vindicated Biblically. One of the points that Jim Jordan makes that is so luminous, and so obvious when seen, is that in the Old Testament, man is told to go to the animals to learn (all through the Proverbs). Man’s representative is repeatedly in the sacrificial system, represented by animals. Symbolically, men are animals. And Hebrew certainly bears the contours that Barfield generally makes about all ancient languages. It works from the outside in. We move from wind, to breath to spirit. Ancient philosophy is largely a participation in something outside of us. The forms are “out there, up there.” Man is formed from the dust, and is educated and cared for by the earth. But the second man is the spiritual man (I Cor. 15:46-49) The Law is a participation that is not entirely unlike the Platonic participation. If I participate in (obey) the law, then I will know both sin and righteousness. But now, in the new world, I do not participate in the earthly types of the heavenly, but I am in union with Christ. My participation is a heavenly participation. The Spirit, when He is given, comes out from me, rather like the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (John 4:14) . I now impose the heavenly imprint on all that is around me as a heavenly man. So, the modern world reverses the ancient, and places the “external, participatant” Platonic forms in my head, and I become a projecting Kantian (as a broad general consequence).
When Truncpa Rimpoche came to my town from Tibet in the 1970s, he was an authentic Tibetian sage. (the 53red gillionth incarnation of some line of teachers, just a step or so below the Dali Lama in stature). People found his presence disorienting. The current president of Naropa University (the school he founded here) described him as “space with clothes on” He was a god walking into the modern world. But he could not reproduce himself. He was still a participant in the Void, the Nothingness, and with an ancient consciousness, he tried to produce disciples. The Allen Ginsbergs and William Burroughs who wanted to bring Tibetian Buddhism to America through him, used Buddhism to express their own inward emptiness. They did not participate in the Nothing. They expelled the nothing that was already within them, and used Buddhist categories to give it shape. There is no Tibetian Buddhism in America, except for the immigrants, and in one generation, it is gone.
In the ancient world, we were children under the control of principalities and powers. We were under tutors. Christ, in principle, put the human race in control. But only in principle and with new idolatrous forms in deviation from him.
Now, when I read the Bible, these all seem like things, the outworkings of which I ought to be able to look for in the history that I see.
Enough. This is most stimulating, and I am enjoying it.
Richard,
I think I gave more counterinterpretations than counterfactuals, since it is the fact of cause which is in question.
We do agree, though, on the fact that there is a Great Story, and that the Scriptures reveal its outlines. But as I noted earlier in the conversation, the matter of relating the Great Story to all the local stories is not so easy a thing. In order to understand the local histories, we need to carefully attend to the shape of what Vico called the certa, the traces, and practicing that intellectual asceticism of withholding judgment until the criteria of proof have been met: that intellectual asceticism which is the hallmark of the Western method. My guess, though, is that you would agree with me here.
On narratives: as I said earlier, I wasn’t endorsing either the narratives of progression or of decline: I think both are true in different respects (and the Scripture, although it does describe the New Jerusalem as a city, is otherwise rather hostile to cities, division of labor, and non-familial political hierarchies: from Genesis, through Jeremiah’s praise of the Rechabites, through to the apocalyptic milieu of late Second Temple and New Testament times). But again, it is a question of attending to the shape of things with eyes as open as possible: and letting the shape of the past disclose itself.
I agree with your remarks on externality and interiorization: this is an observation which, in its modern clarity of formulation, we owe to Hegel. The question is whether one understands this historicistically, or classically. Historicism is in many respects a secularized version of the ancient “mundane astrology”, in which humans are collectively moved by a principle other than their free powers or God’s. My point above is that one can understand the schemata of modulations of mind- whether Vico’s, Barfield’s, or any other similar ones- as inherent in persons, and whose order in collective representation (which need not be understood idealistically- but as, say, in Cassirer’s account of “symbolic form”) has everything to do with politics, -how the common life is ordered so that the conditions of the good life, final participation, can be best secured- and with poiesis, how the world is represented. Thus, “history” in the sense that Barfield means it, wouldn’t be the predestinated morphological phases of a collective human nature developing over time (which was, I think, Barfield’s mistaken view), but rather would be inseparable from politics, the supreme *art*.
You seem to say that freedom is when the archaic cosmic exterior- the disjecta membra of Man as microcosm (and even as mikrotheos)- has been fully interiorized. I would agree that this is true of freedom in its best and highest state; but would also say that the whole process from start to finish is a political one, and that the work which goes into making for that state of fully actualized leisure (in Pieper’s sense) and human spirit’s relatively full self-presence in the built world, was always free work, not the result of any nature-like process. Hence, I can stand by the outlines of my political analysis of collective mentalities, as given above, and of the role of Christian doctrine in informing politics. But again, we might not be very far apart on this.
On ancient Mediterranean political thought: yes, I was thinking of the Stoics. They had more of an influence than you might think, but not the sort that the church had, to be sure.
peace
Peter
I see more “Final Participation”-like thinking in the much maligned Deep Ecology movement than I have ever seen among Christians of any stripe, present company excluded. Here is a quote from one such website:
By observing nature’s wisdom, permaculturists follow nature’s lead and use patterning, succession, edge, and cyclic opportunities to convert large pulses of energy into smooth generators of structure, harvest, and nutrient flow. Permaculture design inquires into the nature of some of these “large pulses” and shows how they can teach us to use their energy, aikido-like, to benefit ourselves and the larger ecosystem.
I would like to continue this discussion with the two of you, maybe somewhere else. I can be pinged at coimbreira AT yahoo DOT com
Mule,
It would depend on what you mean by “Deep Ecology”. Myself, I wouldn’t group Mollison et alia with either Naess or Earth First! ways of looking at things. Permaculture, like biodynamics, insofar as there’s anything to it, would be lore, what one might call landcraft or gardencraft. And insofar as it represents a recovery of country lore in and through critical-scientific and urban ways of thinking and working, it would have something of the character of applied “final participation”. But it would be very wrong to attribute such a character to what is usually called “Deep Ecology”: that whole way of looking at things is what Barfield would call idolatry, where the poietic power of the human is wrongly ascribed to the extra-human: culture is thought to be derivative of and parastic upon (reified and divinized) nature. For an incisive (and decisive) critique of Deep Ecology from a ecologically-minded secular perspective, see the relevant works of Murray Bookchin.
I did leave a comment regarding Barfield on your site some days ago; perhaps I didn’t leave my email. I’d be happy to have the conversation with you, and will write you at the address you’ve given.
peace
P