Category: Religion

“We found it already in existence, and we shall leave it to exist for ever among those who come after us.”

tyler andersonLeave a comment

“[I]n the final pages Lamprias gets the chance to develop the argument that he has been hinting at all along. In brief, he contends that oracles are always situated in or near caves because from those caves issue “exhalations of the earth”; and that certain people with natural gifts and excellent training of those gifts may be sensitized to the character of those exhalations, and in that way come to some intuitive and not-easily-verbalized awareness of what the world has in store for people. It’s almost a Gaia hypothesis, this idea that the world as a whole acts in certain fixed ways, and those “exhalations” attest to the more general movements of the planet. But these processes are, like all processes in Nature, subject to change over time. As a spring might dry up, or a river after flooding alter its course, so too the conditions for such exhalations might change so that there is nothing for even the most exquisitely sensitive and perfectly trained priestess to respond to.

The first and overwhelming response to Lamprias’s explanation is: Impiety! One of the interlocutors comments that first we rejected the gods in favor of daimons, and now we’re rejecting daimons in favor of a purely natural process. That is, Lamprias’s position is fundamentally disenchanting. To this Lamprias replies that his position is not impious at all, because they had all agreed earlier that in addition to humans and daimons and gods, none of whom create anything, we also have, abobe and beyond all, The God, “the Lord and Father of All,” and He is he first cause of all things, including exhalations of the earth and priestesses.

But whether it’s impious or not, Lamprias’s account is disenchanting, because it removes power from spirits and gods and concentrates them in a single transcendent Monad. His monotheism is a big step towards the religion of Israel, which tells us in the very first words of its Scriptures that the sun and moon and stars are not deities at all, but rather things made by YHWH, who alone merits our worship. Lamprias’s position, like that of the Jews, looks to those accustomed to polytheism as a kind of atheism. And by their standards that’s just what it is.”

-Alan Jacobs

The idea that “the world as a whole acts in certain fixed ways”, that there are clear, distinct laws of nature (in this case the law of power, to “to rule whatever one can”) that precede or transcend the gods made me think of a scene we just read in the TCA book club.

A few hundred years earlier, Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, reproduces a dialogue (self-consciously dramatized) between the Athenians and the Melians. The Athenians had invaded the neutral island of Melos and demanded surrender or death. The Melians appeal to hope, fate, the gods, and eventually the aid of their relatives the Spartans:

“Melians: Yet we know that in war fortune sometimes makes the odds more level than could be expected from the difference in numbers of the two sides. And if we surrender, then all our hope is lost at once, whereas, so long as we remain in action, there is still a hope that we may yet stand upright.

Athenians: Hope, that comforter in danger! If one already has solid advantage to fall back upon, one can indulge in hope. It may do harm, but will not destroy one. But hope is an expensive commodity, and those who are risking their all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined; it never fails them in the period when such a knowledge would enable them to take precautions. Do not let this happen to you, you who are weak and whose fate depends on a single movement of the scale. And do not be like those people who, as so commonly happens, miss the chance of saving themselves in a human and practical way, and, when every clear and distinct hope has left them in their adversity, turn to what is blind and vague, to prophecies and oracles and such things which by encouraging hope lead men to ruin. 

Melians: It is difficult, and you may be sure that we know it, for us to oppose your power and fortune, unless the terms be equal. Nevertheless we trust that the gods will give us fortune as good as yours, because we are standing for what is right against what is wrong; and as for what we lack in power, we trust that it will be made up for by our alliance with the Spartans, who are bound, if for no other reason, then for honor’s sake, and because we are their kinsmen, to come to our help. Our confidence, therefore, is not so entirely irrational as you may think.

Athenians: So far as the favor of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have. Our aims and our actions are perfectly consistent with the beliefs men hold about the gods and with the principles which govern their own conduct. Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the first to act upon it when it was made. We found it already in existence, and we shall leave it to exist for ever among those who come after us. We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you or anyone else with the same power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way. “

 

 

Mary, Elizabeth, Hannah

tyler andersonLeave a comment

Some scattered thoughts:

1 Samuel 1:

“And Hannah prayed and said,

  • “My heart exults in the LORD; my horn is exalted in the LORD.
  • My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation…

 

  • The bows of the mighty are broken,
    • but the feeble bind on strength.
  • Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread,
    • but those who were hungry have ceased to hunger.
  • The barren has borne seven,
    • but she who has many children is forlorn.
  • The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.
  • The LORD makes poor and makes rich; he brings low and he exalts.
  • He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.
  • For the pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and on them he has set the world.

 

  • “He will guard the feet of his faithful ones,
    • but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness, for not by might shall a man prevail.
    • The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; against them he will thunder in heaven.

Luke 1:

“And Mary said,

  • “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
    • for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
    • For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
  • for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

And his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

  • He has shown strength with his arm;
    • he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
  • he [has] exalted those of humble estate;*
    • and brought down the mighty from their thrones
  • he has filled the hungry with good things,
    • and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever.””

*flipped with following line

In Mary’s song, structurally, we have two main sections, each capped by references to God’s mercy and faithfulness toward Israel. In the first, the focus is on the Lord’s strength and holiness, and on Mary’s place as the one experiencing the very social upheaval- the “humble” becoming “blessed”- described in section two.

And this blessing is itself a participation in the life and person of her unborn child. The reason the scattered are made strong and the humble exalted and the hungry filled is because the Lord himself becomes humble, hungry, and poor and is himself glorified. Mary’s blessedness is more an anticipation of her future union with her Son than her current union as his mother.

Mary clearly understands this is about more than her personal blessing. Israel cries out for mercy under the leadership of a corrupt priesthood (just like Hannah), among gentile oppressors (just like Hannah). The Lord, remembering his people, is fulfilling the promises he made to Abraham generations ago.

Peter Leithart:

Hannah means “favored one”…but her condition contradicts he name: How could the favored one be barren? In her barrenness, Hannah takes her place with the wives of the patriarchs. Sarah was barren, Rebekah was barren, Rachel was barren. In Genesis, the woman’s barrenness was not only an emotional or family problem but threatened the fulfillment of God’s promise of an abundant seed to inherit the land. Barrenness is significant ultimately because of God’s promise to raise up a “seed of a woman”  to crush the serpent’s head… as long as Sarah was barren, the promise was not being fulfilled. Without a son, there is no future for Israel… Israel was Hannah, the favored one, of Yahweh. How indeed can the favored one be barren?

How can the favored one be barren? Because, says Leithart, Israel was unfaithful.

Hannah knows that only Yahweh “kills and makes alive (2:6)”

If Hannah hoped to rejoice as a mother of children, she knew she had to appeal to the only one who could bring life from the dead… Hannah’s prayer was an admission of her impotence, an acknowledgement that she could do nothing to open the closed door of her womb.

Just as Elizabeth’s son John is the final prophet who prepares the way for his cousin, so Elizabeth is the last in a long line of barren Israelite women. But Mary, the favored one, is not barren, but a virgin. Mary’s pregnancy is miraculous for precisely the opposite reason of Elizabeth and Sarah – not because she is too old to bear a child, but because she is too young.

Whereas Hannah’s song completes and fulfills her earlier cry for a son, Mary’s song is the the overflow of unexpected grace.

Elizabeth and her son are the end of the Law, the end of silence, the end of the empty womb. In her we hear the echo of the barren women, feel the hunger, the poverty, the humility of Advent.

Mary and her Son are the beginning of a new age, a new covenant, a new life. In Him we experience the presence, the immanence, the light, and the glory of Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neanderthal Cave Art

tyler andersonLeave a comment

Red abstract markings, discovered in several Spanish caves, are old, and in fact were seemingly made by hominins long before H. sapiens moved into Europe. The red sinuous marking and system of squares and lines near the middle of this photo are purported to have been made by Neanderthals (other images, depicting animals and present adjacent to these markings, were seemingly created more recently by H. sapiens individuals). Image: (c) P. Saura.

HT: Tetrapod Zoology

The new pagans

tyler andersonLeave a comment

Some clear thinking here by Alan Jacobs.

It’s easy enough in the US or Europe to speak of something called “post-Christianity”. But to what extent can a culture re-paganize when it was never fully converted in the first place?

And I don’t just mean just the Majority World. Here’s Camily Paglia in a recent interview with Carl Trueman:

Yes, despite being an atheist, I remain (as I like to put it) Italian pagan Catholic—which has very little to do with Christianity as it first emerged from ancient Palestine.  The Northern European Protestant reformers were quite right to condemn how far the Church of Rome had strayed from the Bible.  My people of the Italian countryside never really surrendered their paganism.  They simply renamed their gods (the Roman Janus became Saint Januarius—San Gennaro) and re-crowned Isis and Magna Mater as the Madonna.  My mother’s baptismal church in Ceccano in Southern Lazio, Santa Maria a Fiume (“on the river”), sits on the foundations of a temple to the Empress Agrippina, which in turn replaced a temple to the goddess Minerva.

The world is odder, scarier, richer, more hostile, more permeable than we tend to think. After all, relative to the rest of the world and the rest of history, we’re the WEIRD ones.

I’m sure Lewis is right that it’s a “false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal”. As he says, “a post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce.”

But let’s strain that metaphor. What if she wasn’t ever married? What if she just had a long-term relationship, and instead of divorce it’s a slow, messy, breakup full of false starts, false recoveries, finally more with a whimper than a bang?

 

 

 

 

This is a power that could raise the dead.

tyler andersonLeave a comment

I remember the name Lazarus flashing into my mind, and the incredible thought: This is a power that could raise the dead.

This, from a remarkable essay by Patricia Snow. Snow, mother of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, describes her 1986 conversion, or more accurately her encounter with God. I can’t recall a more vivid, credible, sensory account of the experience of the supernatural. 

Another excerpt:

I was also convinced that there must be people like me: thirty-four years old and educated, not uninterested in religion or unversed in theology, and yet absolutely without a clue, in my whole demystified life, that there was a God who did such things in the world. A God not only real but approachable, and not only ­approachable but forthcoming—coming to meet me, on his own initiative, in a totally ­gratuitous, unlooked-for way

And one last striking passage:

It amuses me, in retrospect, to think how little I deferred to him at that point. I was like a child—I was a child—in my simplicity and boldness, finally understanding what was available, and asking, with great earnestness. Like Jacob with the angel, I wrestled with God that night and as much as said to him, I will not let you go until you bless me. I will not get up, or leave this room, if I have to lie here all night, until you come to me again and show me that searing love.

Jacob, struggler with God. Children. Persistent widows. The earnest, the simple, the bold.

To such belong the Kingdom of God.