Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2024 12:27 am
You were quoting a play you don't understand.
There is a telling line in the Hamlet play:
Duller ... than the fat weed
That roots itself at ease on Lethe wharf.
In Greek mythology Lethe was one of the rivers of the underworld in Hades. It was also known as the
Ameles potamos (river of unmindfulness), and further that Lethe flowed around the cave of Hypnos (sleep), permeating the Underworld where all who drink from it experience complete forgetfulness. Lethe is also the name of the Greek spirit of
forgetfulness and
oblivion with whom the river was also identified.
[Lethal: Late Latin
lēthālis, alteration (probably influenced by
Lēthē, Lethe) of Latin
lētālis, from
lētum, death.]
What most interests me in these (bizarre) conversations on this forum is the degree to which all who write here, including you Immanuel, seem to enact endless rehearsals that deal on that dire event that Nietzsche prophesied as deadly (lethal): the loss of horizon. That is, the loss of an intelligible metaphysical explanation about life here in this world. When a map is lost there is only wandering.
Taken at the level of a Mystery Play -- a play with a deep metaphysical dimension that is profoundly Christian -- it is pretty obvious (once it is pointed out) that Queen Gertrude represents the fallen Eve. But Hamlet and Gertrude -- again when seen in a certain light -- represent not two persons but one person with very different tendencies. On one hand Gertrude participated in and was complicit in her crime, while on the other Hamlet is called to *set it right* and even to cure the metaphysical sickness that had fallen like a miasma over the entire land of Denmark (i.e. our world).
The ailment of Hamlet is that he is a man deeply sunk into a spiritual crisis. It is in his crisis of *melancholy* that the ghost of his father appears to him and reveals to him the depth of the problem he faces. But obviously we as watchers and listeners of the play participate in it and are drawn into its *inner dimension* which is certainly a crisis that drives Hamlet to the very edge of madness: he has a task set before him which is simply too much for him. Though he is called to *set it right* he does not have the spiritual power to do so.
What most interests me about you Immanuel is that you pretend to be situated within a real and genuine spiritual problem -- and it is my view that Hamlet, for us, and for the age we live in, is likely the best psychological picture of what we all face -- but you cannot really
discern the situation we are all in, that Occidental man is in, and for all the rhetorical force and admonition you have at your disposal you are incapable of reaching anyone on any level! This is why I say that as a Christian apologist -- or as an apologist involved with a deep spiritual calamity -- you are a complete failure. You destroy the possibility of a *concept-pathway* to understand a clear (and I submit a real) turth that can be extracted and realized when the mystic dimension of the Christian picture is understood.
In order to understand the *problem* and the *calamity* in which we all live now there is required a sweeping psychological, intellectual, philosophical, religious and historical grasp of what we (our civilization) has just recently been through. Dixon who I quoted earlier said:
Times so remarkable as those in which we are privileged to live brighten the intelligence. They are more than remarkable, they are revolutionary. Since the Renaissance there has been no such upheaval of thought, no such revaluation of values as in the century upon which we have entered. Now as then, within about fifty years, within the span of a single lifetime, all the old conceptions, the previous beliefs in science, in religion, in politics, have been wholly transformed; a change has taken place, we might almost say, in the inclination of the earth's orbit. We might fancy our planet had passed through some zone of cosmic disturbance.
The interesting thing, though it is a strange thing, is to notice the degree to which *people* (a reference to most or all who write here) have fallen away from and out of the grip of the more intense questions that have bothered and plagued Occidental man. Here I will mention again Lethe and the drink that wipes away the memory of (shall I say) what we are all up against. We can erase the memory of the problem, which is profoundly existential, but what we cannot do away with or free ourselves from is the
anxiety in which man lives. So what is most curious about your (Christian evangelical) preaching is that you propose that you have and that Jesus represents the *cure* to the entirety of man's spiritual problem, but when one looks really squarely at both what you preach and the problem itself, you have no cure at all. In fact the *cure* that you are involved in is, overall, a manifestation of the core condition: the loss of horizon.
So it seems to me that what you propose is not a confrontation with *the problem* -- which I link with Hamlet's spiritual problem -- but a retreat from it into a false-redoubt where one (you in this case) believes oneself to be safe (saved) but in fact are not saved, are not well situated, are not secure, and really are not even dealing with the problem.
I would illustrate what I try to point out about *our condition* by referencing the denizens who are so united with the Problem but who demonstrate, so clearly, their incapacity to resolve the discordant notes that resound so vitally in them. Take Gary. Take Iambiguous. Take even Dubious. (And I place you here too). What does one notice? It is a sort of manifestation of insanity but by that I mean really
neuroticism: to be stuck within a place where one's wheels turn perpetually in the mud. Week after week, month after month, year after year, until one finally expires and shuffles off the mortal coils.
But there is no resolution. There does not seem even to be a fulsome awareness of the width of the problem.
So you declared "You were quoting a play you don't understand". But I retort by saying that, hold on a second, I think I do understand the play at a level which you cannot grasp. But that is really only a starting-point for the necessary critique of you and your shtick: You in fact do not really understand the depth of the problem that we all face. You are a preacher who does not even understand the problem in which you yourself are deeply subsumed. And much less
the problem of those you try to preach to.
Forever, it's a very long time, I'm not capable of thinking in such categories.