Setting the Scene
A hilly plateau. Darkness, clouds, the wind blows furiously.
Gruesome witches and deformèd devils surround a sleeping peasant lad.
Fiery serpents appear on farther hills!
The Dark Sabbath begins and continues all the night-long.
Then the bells of
morning Matins ring.
Satan is vanquished and vanishes.
The lad awakens as the Sun rises.
Ecoutez
Dubious wrote: ↑Fri Jun 17, 2022 8:36 pm...but never mind. These conversations are so useless...and boring.
This affected me deeply! [::: snif, sob :::] So I decided to mend my ways by becoming far more entertaining. So let's get the ball rolling with today's
EnTeRtAinMenT . . .
A couple of notes for this useless conversation that no one cares about and which has no readership and may be simply a conversation I am having with
the denizens in my own mind (which when you think about it is more or less our condition, no?)
Be that as it may:
Avanti!
The Facts
For the Occident, in the Occident, for reasons that can be traced and known, religion and the religious impulse hit a brick wall. If Christianity was, in a manner of speaking, the ghost in the machine, meaning the motive spirit and impetus through which the edifice of the Occident was created, that ghostly spirit dissipated -- or more properly began a long, slow, strange and painful death. Sometimes fully disappearing, sometimes disappearing partially, fading in, fading out, nevertheless the long-range trajectory was toward fading away. The truth is that it takes a story-teller -- a Kafka -- to concoct the sort of imagery of all that the dying god does in his agony.
Now, what happened to the thoughtful class of persons who, substantially, saw all this first and reacted to it? I will name just the typical names: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Jung, just to give it some *context* (hello there Mr Can). Putting Marx aside for a moment let me focus on the others, but also speak a bit about the Common Man. If you suddenly lose your sense of forward motion, and in this sense if a Belief in God in a full metaphysical sense gives you a forward motion (in ethics, culture, in your building projects on Earth, and your eventual translation to 'the fruitful fields of Heaven), but then hits the Brick Wall I refer to, what will happen to you? That is you as a being in motion and with a trajectory?
The metaphor implies 'going splat', right? It implies having your forward motion stopped abruptly. What will happen to you and what will you do? Well, I think the answer is you will turn inward. You will be thrown back into your own self. If the External God disappeared (is erased or 'died' if you will) then it all turns back to you. That is, you will begin to see yourself as The Projector. You will have no choice but to see yourself as the author & director of the entire show. Here, I will insert Nick's favorite metaphor:
Plato's Cave. That's you behind you projecting stuff onto the screen of perception's
Inner Content! And you are suddenly responsible for what you are seeing and also believing to be Absolutely True.
But if you follow what I am getting at then let me introduce another aspect or element of what happens when the forward path is thwarted: You become desperate. I give desperation a special meaning of course. It is a general state that people come into because, consciously of unconsciously, they sense that the forward path is blocked. Desperation and reaction go together. See, you cannot stop going forward. Because life is all about forward movement. All life is impelled and propelled forward. If you cannot *embrace life* in this sense you are
f*^%cked.
Here I will have to mention that when clear, agreed-on, understood, logical, forward motion is thwarted a thousand alternative paths are opened. They become inevitable. You have to turn to something, right? You have to have a way to channel your energies. So my first suggestion is that, for intellectual Europe, the inward turn and naturally the psychological and the
therapeutic became necessary reactive movements.
So I will (with full consciousness of pretention) mention here two books I am working through. One,
The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand (G. Ronald Murphy, SJ) which is a sort of translation of the Gospels into terms that could be understood and accepted by those primitive, warrior-Saxons who refused for so long to 'bend a knee' before the Mediterranean cross.
Jesus Christ, the picture of Christ, the meaning of Chist, had to be described in terms that this Saxon could understand and relate to. So Jesus Christ was presented as a Noble Lord, a Great Ruler, a Great Warrior (against the 'darkness of this world') that a man could declare allegiance to and give his whole self over to (knowing it was
metaphysically right). The conversion of the Northern Tribes, and the Northern Man, is pretty essential to understand since, as we are seeing and I am proposing, what we are dealing with is
deconversion. There was conversion -- and a thousand years of forward-motion, building and constructing, then a Wall was hit, and now there is an on-going process of
DECONVERSION.
What? Dubious? Bored to tears again are you? Hmmmm. An intermission?
OK! I can adapt in order to hold my audience!
Deconversion is an intricate process. It does not take place merely in a moment of a man's life but goes on over various generations. So what formerly stood and existed as solidities that could be counted on, those solidities vanished, they were erased, or they *died*. But be not deceived! or to put it in another way do not remove your eyes from the enactment taking place right before you and in you! If there is a solidity that is removed, it really must be replaced. So here the notion of
substitution must be brought out.
[Middle English, from Old French substitut, from Latin substitūtus, past participle of substituere, to substitute : sub-, in place of; see sub- + statuere, to cause to stand; see stā- in Indo-European roots.]
Is all of this not at least somewhat obvious? Does everything have to be spelled out down to the last detail? If you think these things through they will become quite plain and evident. Play with it as you will and as you can. If God no longer 'stands' then God will have to be replaced and substituted. If the forward motion is arrested, then the inner motion, the turn inward, the being turned back onto oneself, becomes necessary.
Now the second book is
The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Phillip Rieff).
The dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it must be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run its course.
Oh?! What then!?!
The central symbolism of personal and corporate experience seems to me well on its way to being differently organized, with several systems of belief competing for primacy in the task of organizing personality in the West.
Suite à la prochain mes enfants!
Meantime . . .
