I’ve never read anything like this. An examination of 1) grace and 2) the construct wherein the self relates to itself, implying despair, implying sinI’ve never read anything like this. An examination of 1) grace and 2) the construct wherein the self relates to itself, implying despair, implying sin. Many quotations below, as I’ll doubtless forget details quickly. Page numbers are from the 2008 Penguin print.
Part one
A. That Despair is the Sickness unto Death - The human being is spirit, which is the self, which is a relation that relates to itself. - If the self were self-established, we get questions of one form: not wanting to be itself, wanting to be rid of itself. - If the self were established by something else, we also have: wanting in despair to be oneself. ‘[This] is the expression of the relation’s (the self’s) total dependence, the expression of the fact that the self cannot by itself arrive at or remain in equilibrium and rest, but only, in relating to itself, by relating to that which has established the whole relation.’ (10) - ‘Where then does despair come from? From the relation in which the synthesis relates to itself, from the fact that God, who made man this relation, as it were lets go of it; that is, from the relation’s relating to itself.’ (13)
B. The Generality of this Sickness - ‘[There] is no one and has never been anyone outside Christendom who isn’t in despair; and no one in Christendom who is not a true Christian; and so far as he is not wholly that, then he is still to some extent in despair.’ (21)
C. The Forms of this Sickness - ‘The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude, which relates to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can only be done in the relationship to God.. The development must accordingly consist in infinitely coming away from oneself, in an infinitizing of the self, and in infinitely coming back to oneself in the finitization.’ (31) - ‘The believer possesses the ever-sure antidote to despair: possibility; since for God everything is possible at every moment. This is the health of faith which resolves contradictions. The contradiction here is that in human terms the undoing is certain and that still there is possibility.’ (44) - ‘For to be aware of his self and of God, a man’s imagination must whirl him up higher than the dank air of the probable, it must tear him out of that and, by making possible what exceeds the quantum satis (measure of sufficiency) of all experience, teach him to hope and fear, or fear and hope.’ (46) - Here, Kierkegaard assigns problematic, gender-stereotypical feminine v masculine labels to the two types of despair: of not wanting to be oneself (weakness) and of wanting to be oneself (defiance). I am not a fan of this labelling. - ‘But for repentance to emerge, a person must first despair with a vengeance, despair to the full, so that the life of spirit can break through from the ground up.’ (71) - ‘He thinks he is in despair over something earthly.. [The] fact that he ascribes such great value to the earthly, or even more, ascribes such great value to something earthly, or that he first of all makes of some earthly thing everything earthly and then ascribes such great value to the earthly, is precisely to despair of the eternal.’ (73)
Part two
A. Despair is Sin - ‘What one must look to is the fact that the self has the conception of God and nevertheless does not do what God wants, that the self is disobedient. Nor is it just now and then that God is sinned against, since every sin is before God; or rather, what really makes human guilt into sin is that the guilty person was conscious of being before God.’ (97) - ‘[Sin] is despair (since sin is not the unruliness of flesh and blood in itself, but the spirit’s consent to it).. Faith is: that the self in being itself and in wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.’ (100) - ‘Christianity also assumes that neither paganism nor the natural man know what sin is; yes, it assumes there must be a revelation from God to reveal what sin is. It is not the case, as superficial reflection supposed, that the doctrine of the atonement is what distinguishes paganism and Christianity qualitatively. No, the beginning has to be made far deeper, with sin, with the doctrine of sin, which is also what Christianity does.’ (110) - ‘If a person does not do what is right the very second he knows it is the right thing to do — then, for a start, the knowledge comes off the boil. Next comes the question of what the will thinks of the knowledge. The will is dialectical and has underneath it the whole of man’s lower nature. If it doesn’t like the knowledge, it doesn’t immediately follow that the will goes and does the opposite of what was grasped in knowing.’ (115) - ‘In Christian eyes, sin lies in the will, not in the knowing; and this corruption of the will affects the individual’s consciousness.’ (118) - ‘Christianity proceeds first to set up sin so firmly as an affirmative position that human understanding can never comprehend it; and then the same doctrine undertakes to remove this affirmative position in a way that human understanding can never comprehend.’ (124)
B. The Continuation of Sin - ‘Yet eternity is the essential continuity, and demands this continuity of man, that he be conscious of himself as spirit and have faith.’ (130) - ‘What has gone basically wrong with Christendom is really Christianity, that by being preached day in and day out, the doctrine of the God-man (safeguarded in the Christian understanding, be it noted, by the paradox and the possibility of offence) is taken in vain, that the difference in kind between God and the man is pantheistically revoked.. Never on earth has any teaching really brought God and man so close to one another as Christianity; nor could any other: only God himself can do that, every human invention remains only a dream, an uncertain conceit.’ (146) - ‘The category of sin is the category of particularity. Sin cannot at all be thought speculatively; the particular human lies below the level of the concept: one cannot think an individual human being, but only the concept “man.” That is why speculative philosophy promptly alludes to the doctrine of the generation’s superiority over the individual; for one cannot expect speculation to acknowledge the concept’s powerlessness in relation to actuality.’ (148) - ‘In Christianity God makes himself man (the God-man) — but in the infinite love of his compassionate grace he none the less makes one condition; he cannot do otherwise. Precisely this is Christ’s grief: “he cannot do otherwise.” He can debase himself, take the form of a servant, suffer, die for men, incite all to come up to him, offer up every day of his life and every hour of the day, and offer up his life — but the possibility of offence he cannot take away.. Unfathomable grief of love, that even God cannot — as in another sense neither will he, nor can he will, but even if he wanted to — cannot make it impossible for this work of love to turn into just the opposite for man, be the most utmost misery! For the greatest possible human misery, greater even than sin, is to be offended by Christ and to continue in offence.’ (158)...more
Argues that the foundation of society is mimesis, resulting in scapegoating, and necessarily resolving in violence. Humorously (but still densely) wriArgues that the foundation of society is mimesis, resulting in scapegoating, and necessarily resolving in violence. Humorously (but still densely) written as a dialogue between Girard and two psychiatrists and drawing supporting points from a huge range of sources (including Dostoevsky and Proust, both of whom are the LOML), this book was a pleasure to read. Centers a thorough reinterpretation of the death of Christ not as required sacrifice to appease deity, but as a result of humanity's mimetic desire. Also points out how the Judeo-Christian texts demonstrate a path out of this violent mimetic spiral.
My two complaints: 1) Girard tends to make large, daring statements that are only backed up with evidence later. Why not swap the ordering so I can have a less suspicious reading experience? 2) The last portion of the book on sexuality and Freudian impulses went over my head as someone unfamiliar with Freud. This portion also felt disjoint from the rest of the book.
A well-balanced look at secular and religious (mostly Christian) claims to epistemological validity. TL;DR both must assume presuppositions--re: the eA well-balanced look at secular and religious (mostly Christian) claims to epistemological validity. TL;DR both must assume presuppositions--re: the existence of evil, the structure of 'truth', the comprehensibility of the infinite, the normativity of language--and thus neither are ultimately provable. This book helps both the atheist and theist reader take a step back from their meaning-making framework to better acknowledge their own (tacitly assumed) presuppositions and understand how others validly arrive at differing conclusions.
A generous, expansive read written in a flourishing hand. Way more interesting than my philosophy of religion course at King's because Kołakowski excels at drawing natural arcs with his ideas and writes better than many of the philosophers he quotes.
Lastly, as a theist, I wish this sort of meta-level discussion could (should? must?) exist more in religious spaces, but that's an essay for another day. :')
rec: Rachel L
A well-trained sceptic may see with his own eyes all the miracles reported in Jacques de Voragine’s Golden Legend and remain as untouched as a stone in his incredulity. He may always plausibly state that any natural explanation, however unlikely, of the supposed miracles is more likely, after all, than an explanation in terms of God’s interventions. This is a quaestio iuris, not facti: the point is not that some inveterate sceptics might, in fact, foolishly turn their eyes away from the irresistible evidence, but that they would have a perfect right to do so in terms of the intellectual patterns of modern knowledge which simply cannot assimilate such an event as a ‘miracle’. Consequently one is bound, in terms of this way of thinking, to assume that any explanation from ‘natural’ causes, no matter how implausible, is better than a supernatural one. (76-77)
Throughout the history of scepticism and of empiricism the legitimacy of this concept has been questioned. It has been repeatedly pointed out that the signs whereby we recognize truth and falsity are governed by normative rules which in their turn require justification; these rules cannot be inferred from the empirical material which, precisely, is subject to epistemological examination. Therefore, in defining an operative notion of truth we face an unpleasant choice: either an infinite regress or a discretionary decision, and in the latter case everything is indeed permissible. Consequently an empirical epistemology founded on psychological or physiological investigation is in principle, and not just contingently, ‘inconceivable’; strictly speaking it is an absurdity. (83)
But seemingly analogous trends in modern times usually pursue the opposite end: to shield the Sacred from the rapacity of the Profane, to uphold the legitimacy of faith in its encounter with rationalist doctrines, to assert the rights of religious life within a culture which has canonized its own secularity… Apart from those who–like the Modernist thinkers just mentioned–drew a line of demarcation between two realms in the hope of their future non-interference, our saeculum illuminatum et illuminans has begotten more searching and rebellious spirits who realized that the clash was real and not merely the result of conceptual misunderstanding or logical sloppiness. They opted for God against, and not in addition to, the world. They did not try to appease secular Reason by finding a modest enclave sheltered from its voracity and by begging for permission to survive, they attacked its intrinsic inability for to cope with worries which are bound to be crucial in our life–unless they are concealed mala fide–and they expressed the revolt of faith, well aware of its status as a foreign body, indeed a fearful disease, in this civilization. The Russian Jew, Leon Shestov, and the Spaniard, Miguel de Unamuno, belong to this category; their way had been paved by the great nineteenth-century foes of Enlightenment–Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche–people who refused to negotiate with a self-satisfied rationalism and progress, who refused to patch up the antagonism. (135)
Thus the language of myth is in a sense closed or self-supporting. People become participants in this communication system through initiation or conversion and not through a smooth transition and translation from the secular system of signs. Whatever people say in religious terms is understandable only by reference to the entire network of signs of the Sacred… Whoever says seriously ‘I have sinned’ does not mean merely that he has committed an act which is contrary to a law, but also that he has offended against God; his words are not meaningful unless they are referred to God and thus to the whole area of faith, hence they are bound to be considered unintelligible by a consistent non-believer… This is not to say that the sense of such a sentence is purely ‘expressive, ‘exclamatory’ or ‘prescriptive’; it does include a ‘factual’ statement, an assessment of the ‘fact’ in the full context of faith, and a personal emotional attitude. These three aspects of meaning can be singled out analytically, yet they are not separated in the speaker’s mind, they are merged in one undifferentiated act of worship. To admit that the language specifically designed to express the realm of the Sacred cannot be translated without distortion into the language of the Profane does not suggest at all that the latter, as opposed to the former, is natural, genuine, objective, descriptive, presuppositionless and apt to convey the truth. First, everyday profane speech teems with words which are value-laden or refer to unverifiable facts, in particular to our ‘inner’ states. A strictly ‘empirical’ or behaviourist language has never existed, it is an artificial concoction of philosophers and psychologists… The moral qualities of human actions as well as their intentional background are not intellectual supplements to perception, they are perceived directly as aspects of a human sign system (my perception may be wrong, of course, as no perception is by its very content safeguarded against error). (178-179)
Everything goes back to the same anxiety: is the world of our perception the ultimate reality which people have embellished with a non-existent ‘meaning’ according to their various psychological and social self-defence mechanisms, thus preventing themselves, by those artificial adornments, from seeing the world as it is? Is the eternal reality a dreamy fabrication of our yearning after security? Or is the world more like a screen through which we dimly perceive a meaning and an order different from that which rational investigation can provide us with? Is the very quest for security, far from being a phantasmagoric sublimation of the natural and universal fear of suffering, a sign of our share in the eternal sense-endowed order, of our status as meta-physical beings, a status we may almost, yet never entirely, forget? Does a phantom-God blur our vision of things or, on the contrary, does the world veil God from our sight? (209-210)
An articulate, hopeful reminder of how good God is. Elicited the same reaction as being in nature, which is quite an achievement using only words.
We a
An articulate, hopeful reminder of how good God is. Elicited the same reaction as being in nature, which is quite an achievement using only words.
We are under no illusion that anything man can do can ever be an undertaking of supreme wisdom and final art.. Christian dogmatics will always be a thinking, an investigation and an exposition which are relative and liable to error.. Holy Scripture is the document of the basis. (1. The Task)
[God] who is in no way established in us, in no way corresponds to a human disposition and possibility, but who is in every sense established simply in Himself and is real in that way; and who is manifest and made manifest to us men, not because of our seeking and finding, feeling and thinking, but again and again only through Himself. It is this God in the highest who has turned as such to man, given Himself to man, made Himself knowable to him. (5. God in the Highest)
In [Jesus] He has from eternity bound Himself to each, to all. Along the entire line it holds, from the creatureliness of man, through the misery of man, to the glory promised to man. (13. Our Lord)
To have inner ears for the Word of Christ, to become thankful for His work and at the same time responsible for the message about Him and, lastly, to take confidence in men for Christ’s sake—that is the freedom which we obtain, when Christ breathes on us, when He sends us His Holy Spirit. If He no longer lives in a historical or heavenly, a theological or ecclesiastical remoteness from me, if He approaches me and takes possession of me, the result will be that I hear, that I am thankful and responsible and that finally I may hope for myself and for all others; in other words, that I may live in a Christian way. It is a tremendously big thing and by no means a matter of course, to obtain this freedom. We must therefore every day and every hour pray Veni Creator Spiritus in listening to the word of Christ and in thankfulness. That is a closed circle. We do not ‘have’ this freedom; it is again and again given to us by God. (21. I Believe in the Holy Ghost)
The Kingdom of God is coming, so you must not begin the flight to the kingdom of God. Take your place and be in your place as a true minister verbi divini.. So the Church, waiting and hurrying, goes to meet the coming of the Lord. (22. Church: Unity, Holiness, Universality)
A fascinating study of how politics and popular culture shaped Christian ideology in early 19th Century America: wresting authority from the old cleriA fascinating study of how politics and popular culture shaped Christian ideology in early 19th Century America: wresting authority from the old clerical tradition and giving it to the common, non-college-educated person; emphasizing personal interpretation of Biblical text over historical and traditional interpretation; the rise of camp meetings and impassioned audience participation (looking at you, last month's Asbury Revival).
Hatch writes in an engaging narrative style and uses plenty of fun adjectives, which I deeply appreciated as someone who does not read much straight history.
Borges writes art: precise; about complexity, language, and purpose.
My favourites are Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius; The Library of Babel; and The SecretBorges writes art: precise; about complexity, language, and purpose.
My favourites are Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius; The Library of Babel; and The Secret Miracle. Others I enjoyed, and others I did not really care for. Giving this collection 5 stars just for the three stories I've listed.
In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite--if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. (The Library of Babel)
On sexuality, family, and the hypocrisy of a Matthew 7:15-20 person; a beautiful, heavy novel. Instead of trying to describe how Baldwin writes, I proOn sexuality, family, and the hypocrisy of a Matthew 7:15-20 person; a beautiful, heavy novel. Instead of trying to describe how Baldwin writes, I provide a quote:
Oh, but his thoughts were evil--but to-night he did not care. Somewhere, in all this whirlwind, in the darkness of his heart, in the storm--was something--something he must find. He could not pray. His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man's descent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eye to wonder at, treasure and debris long forgotten on the bottom--bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearls that had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness all around him.
May 2020: Metaphor at its finest. Motifs that stood out during re-read: clarity and identity, justice and divinity, possession and love.
'Are the gods May 2020: Metaphor at its finest. Motifs that stood out during re-read: clarity and identity, justice and divinity, possession and love.
'Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But come and see.'
Aug 2018: Extraordinary and strange, how C.S. Lewis can write a story that is far removed from my life context and yet remains so resonant. Till We Have Faces is an examination of, among many other things, someone lost and then found, the sometimes silent omniscience of God, and the world’s rejection of grace it cannot understand with human love....more
Reading this anthology gave me the same feeling that hugging someone I love does, which was entirely peculiar because I was, in fact, hugging no one; Reading this anthology gave me the same feeling that hugging someone I love does, which was entirely peculiar because I was, in fact, hugging no one; I was reading....more