I receive your musing as a musing, which is to say, as a stream-of-consciousness kind of reflection on where your thinking is presently going. And as such, I hesitate to seem to take issue with any part of it. A person is surely allowed to think, no? And what sort of a killjoy would carp about a person musing his or her way through an issue -- would insist on every part of it coming out fully formed and declarative? Such a reaction would be unreasonable. Yet to sit in stony silence risks that the speaker will perceive the hearer not to be listening, and will not know that the hearer is being reflective and respectful of the content. So something must be said, somehow...but not contentiously or by way of objection.
Before I respond, may I offer something by way of a musing of my own?
It's a pleasure to speak with somebody in this manner -- reflectively, patiently, through a process of reasonable and polite exchange. I wish that all exchanges were so civilized as this. And I very much appreciate your thinking, which is not superficial, not unforthcoming, and clearly not driven by any perverse desire to "win" points. Too few conversations here are of this type.
So I will perhaps just offer a few such musings of my own, in response to yours...and we shall see where things go from there.
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Dec 15, 2021 1:49 pm
On one hand I have no choice really, as a person who lives in our world, to believe and hope that improvement and betterment are possible. Yet there are times when it seems to me that it is larger, prevalent
systems which will determine the larger part of all outcomes. But yes, I have felt associated with and perhaps *linked to* certain ideas that have to do with renewal, renovation, recovery as these pertain to *Occidental Civilization*. But of course any perspective that recognizes decadence or decay in linked, in one way or another it seems to me, with traditionalist and I think (essentially) religious viewpoints.
That is fair. Of course, the issue, I think is not whether or not the world needs improving -- I think everybody knows it does -- but on what terms improvement is possible. My own conviction is that, to quote the great agnostic/Atheist writer, Thomas Hardy,
"...if way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst."
That is to say, if the world is going to improve, the first thing we must be is honest about the present state of it. And not merely of the world, but of the agency (ourselves) toward which men urge us to look in order to improve it. Both the problem and the instrument of its recification must be seen in plain day. And I think that when we do, we realize that very much of the badness in our world is our own doing -- we are so often the cause of our own misery, and of the misery of others. And that obvious fact raises the question: what sort of creatures are we, that we could do this? How could we created the Inquistions, the gulags, the
Shoah, the nuclear waste, the corruption that starves people in Africa, the torturers, the vandals, the thieves and pyromaniacs, the envious haters, the gossips and the liars...
And we see that we are not merely the solution to the problem: we are its cause. That is, we are deeply involved ourselves in the problem we live with. We both created Western civilization and morals, and we now pull them down with our own hands.
And when we look at the problem honestly, like that, it raises another important question: how can we look to ourselves, who are the cause of so much misery and vice, for the solution? How do we prevent our worst impulses from wiping out our best yet again? And it seems to me evident that what we must first do is
clean up The Human. We need to
become better people before we can expect ourselves to
do better.
But how shall we become better people? We are what we are; and Lord knows we're often at the mercy of our own worst dispositions. That's the problem: an unregenerate mankind will not fix mankind's problems. But to where do we look for a new nature, a new disposition toward the world, such that we can look to humanity as some sort of remedy to the ills of the world, so many of which mankind itself is the cause?
This is where the genuinely Christian solution becomes urgent. When we know what we are, when we see ourselves honestly, we realize that however much goodness we might think is resident within humankind, there's enough toxins there to destroy it all. Without ourselves being changed, we shall not change the world. But we cannot change ourselves.
Hence, the urgent need for God to intervene. As Isaiah wrote,
"We continued in our sins for a long time; yet shall we be saved? For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; and all of us wither like a leaf, and our wrongdoings, like the wind, take us away." (Isaiah 64:6)
Given global plague, the environmental crisis, geopolitical turmoil, economic disaster, and today's massive technological overreach, shall we survive what we are? That's a real question a lot of people have, and legitimately so: the human race is at a level of technological development and civilizational reach that we can literally end ourselves with one bad decision. The need for a change is crucial.
But will a return to a christianesque morality, all by itself, be sufficient? Apparently it wasn't, the first time we did it; for we ended up abandoning it when we created the present. So what next?
So for example I could reference here René Guénon (The Crisis of the Modern World)
I confess my ignorance about him.
I disagree strongly when you say such goals are 'instrumental and arbitrary'
Sorry. Perhaps I was unclear about what I meant.
What I mean is that the idea of using "christianesque" values to restore the Modern world makes those values arbitrary, because they are no longer grounded in an actual belief in their truth value. And it makes their application "instrumental" in the sense that one is looking to "christianesque" values not as an expression of truth but as a means to an end one sees as desirable, i.e. the "saving" of civilization.
And my question is, "Can people who do not really believe Christianity muster enough belief in Christian values to empower them to save civilization? And I think, given what has actually happened in history, the answer is "no." For once, as you have said, Western civilization was indeed "christianesque," but that veneer of morality proved too thin the last time; what would give us assurance it would be any better now?
You want to draw a distinction and a contrast between, let us say, the outcome of a Christian moral project (a good person capable of making moral choices and also well grounded in social and spiritual reality) and that person who has been, according to your definitions, 'saved' and 'born again'. I do not agree that you (here I refer to you-plural as Man and as men) have any say in the matter.
I can only say that Christ does say that they do, and that human choice indeed gives us a "say in the matter." But it is not a "say" we can have on our own, without reference to Him. He is
"the way, the truth and the life." (John 14:6) And without Him, nobody comes to the Father, He says.
But I do not mean to say that your opinions, or your interpretations, are invalid or that I dismiss them. If there is a Deciding (judging) God and if there is some process that we face at the End, what that is is entirely between the person, the soul, and that supreme being (and whatever hierarchy of being and of beings has been or is established -- if indeed there is such a thing).
That is true. In the Judgment, all answer for only themselves. Nobody answers for anybody else. But too few of us give thought about what answer we will make to God when we stand before Him.
I am not sure if I make myself clear. If one has an existence after death, and if in that existence one comes face to face with the Creator (or his hierarchy) it seems quite possibly to me that one could live entire lives within a mere Earth-second, and in that process be guided through one's own intuitive, internal moral processes, to other possibilities. So I have uncertainty about how *Hell* and infernal realms should be viewed.
Justifiably so. We have little information about the afterlife...only the assurance that it exists, and that there are two sorts of it: one is too wonderful for words, and one is too awful to contemplate. But we do have more details about the latter than the former, and a few of them are as follows. "Hell," (though we must be careful how we use that word) is a place people decide to go. They decide it on the basis that they do not want God. But God is the Source of all light, life, health, goodness, happiness, blessedness, joy, truth, faithfulness, relationship, love and so on...so what they are asking for is a place of their own, which turns out to be one in which all these qualities (which they refuse to identify with gifts of God) are no longer present.
This then presents to us the existence of a place of separation, resentment, darkness, pain, spiritual deadness, illness, and isolation. This is what they are craving, when they crave not to know God. And because of the surpassing value of persons freely being able to choose to love God, God has to grant to those who do not love Him the destiny they crave; for there is no possibility of choice where there are not live options. To choose God is one choice that will be honooured. To reject God is the other choice that shall be honoured.
As C.S. Lewis put it, "all who are in Hell choose it."
I do understand the *logic* (such as it is) that defines Hell as necessary, and as an expression of cosmic and metaphysical Justice.
That's another aspect of the necessity of Hell. If God is truly good, righteous and fair, He must reconcile the debt we are running up against goodness, light, truth and fairness with the proper count. That's what true justice is. Were God to overlook these things, He could not, by definition, be just at all. He would be a corrupt judge.
And is this not the very thing Judaism says about the
Shoah? How could
HaShem not call the monsters who did it to account? As Elie Weisel said, such a God could not be believed in or trusted at all. One's faith would " die at Auschwitz." But there have been many kinds of "Auschwitz" since the dawn of time, and there are many accounts to be reconciled...not least, yours and mine. No wonder, then, that Isaiah exclaims,
"and shall we be saved?"
Hence we throw ourselves on the mercy of the Court, pleading what sacrifice
HaShem may receive, and not pleading our own innocence. And this is deep in Judaism, within the system of sacrifice itself. For there is no remission of sins without a cost; and that cost is the death of the perpetrator, or else the death of his sacrifice. The cost of balancing the scales of sin is the loss of the life.
"The soul that sins, it shall surely die." (Ezekiel 18:20)
Finally (insofar as anything is final!) it is at this point, and to some degree as a result of our conversation in late 2021, that I am really quite uncertain how even to define 'Christ'.
Well, it's a Greek word, of course; but it means "anointed one," which you will recognize as identity with its Hebrew equivalent,
"Messiach." That is the claim that is being made in the name, "Jesus Christ": that Jesus is the Son of God, the
Messiah of Israel and Saviour of the world.
Obviously, what one faces is the fact that -- soon enough -- we will all venture, against our will as it seems, into the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns (nor even sends messages back!),
Well, Hamlet's wrong, of course.
Even in the
Tanakh, did not Samuel speak to Saul from beyond the grave? And in the New Testament, were not men raised from the grave...Lazarus, I mean, and the widow's son, among others. And consummately, Jesus Christ Himself returned from that "country." Hamlet was a good Catholic-Anglican boy...he should have known better.
so there is an imperative to make all efforts to get clear about what one is, and what one is not, doing here and now.
I cannot possibly disagree with you there.
