pay the debt without fail

mostly just thoughts on things I read

[pure-dove]

Something I'm very much enjoying about Tollefson (he's doing a lot of work to make Palamas palatable) — the idea that the qualities of God (love, etc) are energies and therefore not just metaphorical (cf Gregory of Nazianzus, when he talks about how any description of God is necessarily metaphorical due to the transcendent nature of the divine) means that when God is said to be something, that's a very real something, something more real than we can possibly say, but not real in a way which prevents us from saying it — which really emphasizes how essence/energies distinction is doing a lot of work for Palamas to reconcile Patristic urges with coarser theologies

[pure-dove]

And of course, one could make the argument that Palamas was perverting a sense of the divine by introducing this very methodical, nearly base distinction into something which ought to transcend that — which I suppose is why he fights so hard to advocate for enhypostasization — and I don't think it's wrong to completely think Palamas was wrong (I think he was, often, about many things), but I think the ideas he names do a lot more for us and it does to ignore them — it's fundamentally a linguistic problem which became a theological one

[pure-dove]

Something I'm very much enjoying about Tollefson (he's doing a lot of work to make Palamas palatable) — the idea that the qualities of God (love, etc) are energies and therefore not just metaphorical (cf Gregory of Nazianzus, when he talks about how any description of God is necessarily metaphorical due to the transcendent nature of the divine) means that when God is said to be something, that's a very real something, something more real than we can possibly say, but not real in a way which prevents us from saying it — which really emphasizes how essence/energies distinction is doing a lot of work for Palamas to reconcile Patristic urges with coarser theologies

[pure-dove]

I do have to wonder if the treatment of Palamas is due to a language shift in the meaning of the term 'energies' — Tollefson certainly thinks so, Russell perhaps as well. It definitely changes the reading of Palamas to interpret him as saying that we interact with God through his activity — which I think is broadly correct, and moreover necessarily true if we operate on classical conceptions of divinity

[pure-dove]

Those who wonder at the rapid and apparently inexplicable propagation of Christianity should consider that, when paganism was destroyed by philosophy, and philosophy by the philosophers, there was no scope for anything but a belief which would take root, not in the form of symbols by then outworn, but in the form of a ray of idealism piercing and setting aflame. And those who are horror-struck at the bloody holocaust of innumerable martyrs should consider, that just as the death of Christ was a condition, prophetic, essential, necessary and complementary of the teaching of the Gospels, so likewise the martyrdom of many Christians was the one efficacious method of propagation. Without the sacrifice of Christ, He would have been just one more moral teacher; without the sacrifice of the martyrs, Christianity would have been one more moral system added to the many which have existed and now exist without any visible influence.

Ganivet, Spain: An Interpretation

[pure-dove]

Meyerdorff's treatment of Palamas is excruciating but it makes sense by the last chapter of his study because as an interpreter of Palamas he's awful but he's doing a great job of reifying east-west relations, which is a very neat political goal. Considering that ANW considers Meyerdorff to be primarily responding to homogenizing tendencies in Catholic thought (see Jugie et al) it makes sense that Meyerdorff is interpreting Palamas in the most bizarre, polemical way possible in order to say, "here's what he really thinks!"

[pure-dove]

I think people misunderstand Palamas tremendously because he's not a theologian. If you think of him as a theologian, you either have to do backflips to keep him internally consistent (AN Williams; Meyerdorff) or acknowledge him as flawed in some way (probably Rowan Williams, but I can't find his paper anywhere). But he's not a theologian. He's an orator (derogatory) trying to reconcile primary experience with theological orthodoxy.

[pure-dove]

[said with the voice of someone who hasn't looked into the discussion formally] I wonder if anyone has pointed out the relationship between John's status as "The Theologian" and his identification as the "Beloved Disciple" in a Platonic sense — how a theologian ought to be Godlike in nature as a requirement for their knowledge of God (cf Gregory Nazianzen, perhaps based off Aristotle's epistemology in De Anima (I think? wherever it is he talks about the eye becoming like the thing it sees)) and so John's Theological nature is a result of the love from Christ (cf Phaedrus, the Beloved gains the attributes of his Lover), which lends John the authority to make the statements he does.

[pure-dove]

re: the personal/political life

I think that this is one of those strange artifacts from a modern time, perhaps not so much a post-modern one. People are (justifiably) critiquing it because yes, there really isn't as much divide as sometimes we are sometimes taught — I'm guessing it's a holdover from a different type of political self-articulation wherein there is a strict divide between the politic and the populace, and the idea that someone exists qua the individual self-sustained.

Reading a lot of the self-articulation philosophy from 19th c Russia (Westernizer vs Slavophile debate) helps me with this because the personal/political divide was a surprisingly large point of the discourse. Rather interestingly, it's not so much critiqued from the 'socialist' perspective since Belinsky et al probably thought that the personal needed to be liberated even though they were certainly more than aware of the dependent nature... but if I remember correctly, Khomyakov has a pretty scathing critique of the personal/political since he views it as an intrusion from secular/Western thought and it interferes pretty severely with the sobornost' model he's committed to. I've been coming around to sobornost' lately (at least theologically — esp in the vein of Kireevsky, which I might talk about at another time) and I think Khomyakov's critique holds reasonably true: the personal/political makes no sense when personal actions interfere with the political, and, in Khomyakov's model, the religious public. I think a lot of Khomyakov's critique can be sourced within his commitment to the archaic social/economic model he benefited off of, but I don't think it's worth dismissing him outright.

[pure-dove]

also — just a cute moment between Evelyn and ANW

How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade.

and

Like all lovers, those who love God bewail the poverty of language to praise the beloved, and yet cannot but speak in praise. Like all lovers, Gre­gory both praises and quarrels with the medium of praise, his images.

[pure-dove]

I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book as self-consciously antiquated as Brideshead Revisted — I think my mind jumps to Oblomov (<3) because both deal with the failures of desire + the dissipation of the aristocracy but even with Oblomov the vision is always forwards –> going “what is going to happen to the Russian aristocracy, how will our visions of Arcadia change with industrialization, what does it mean to exist not purely off the backs of the serfs but on the labor which we ourselves carry out?” But Goncharov, writing in 1859 was looking forward — the changes were evident, but not yet enacted — in some way, Oblomov is an exploration of the failures in the future. But Brideshead Revisited — this novel, always looking backwards, to the past, where the only true experience lies — already sees the failure of the aristocracy, it already sees the clash of old and new love, and even while anticipating the death of the empire knows that the Second War has changed everything — and all it can do is reminisce about what has been, not what could happen. So even with very similar subject matter, Oblomov is documenting the changes of the present and Brideshead Revisited is documenting the existence of the past. And thus — the major conceit of Brideshead — that we, the disgraced and brutish people of the present — looking back on the life of even just twenty years ago — and that life (so different now!) engages with very different standards of love, passion — for better or for worse (Waugh clearly thinks worse).

[pure-dove]

Two more passages from Brideshead Revisited which I find work cutely together

“I have left behind a world of illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses”. I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car turned out of sight o the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.

pg 169

And

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced on wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard’s with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.

pg 175

Interesting to contrast this with his declaration (at the start of Book II? I can't remember, I'll probably sequester it myself later) that memory is the only thing which we hold certain possession of — in some sense, the present is only as real as it will be constructed within memory

[pure-dove]

I mean, you gotta be doing some pretty weird things if you cast Mary as Eve and Jesus as Adam. Like theologically I understand why you would but it creates some strange undertones

[pure-dove]

Reading Brideshead Revisited:

And she meanwhile keeps a small gang of enslaved and emaciated prisoners for her exclusive enjoyment. She sucks their blood. You can see the tooth-marks all over Adrian Porson's shoulders when he is bathing. And he, my dear, was the greatest, the only, poet of our time. He's bled dry; there's nothing left of him.

And it made me think of this passage from Wings:

Like the girl in the fairytale, with every word she has a mouse or a toad leaping out of her mouth. Absolutely! … And she won't let him go, he'll forget Blonskaya, and his talent, and everything on earth for that woman. He is perishing as a man and, especially, as an artist.'

Not very far into Brideshead Revisited but the articulation of love and art seems interesting — the relationship between desire/eroticism and art, especially with the character (Blanche?) who’s articulating it. Curious to see if Waugh brings in Catholic eroticism into it — cf Aquinas, love as a unifying force [lacking the language to articulate my thought here]. I strongly doubt Waugh read Wings — I doubt it was translated into English — but it’s a curious comparison.

[pure-dove]

Thomas’s deification is convincing if only because it’s an epistemological effort ab Aristotle — ie compare Thomas’s “become like the thing to know it and thus godlike” to Aristotle’s “perception through similarity” from De Anima. I think the main problem for me still comes about from how Aquinas is reliant on deification as a natural extension of the intellect rather than a specific work of fulfillment — I mean, it’s a very limiting way to view God. Though perhaps I am uncharitable to Aquinas. I’ve read very little of him, after all. Williams doesn’t comment on this but I have a specific issue with the fact that he places God much more as an intelligible than something beyond being — if we were characterizing this as a Plato-Aristotle debate (I am not so sure!) then it’s down to the Unmoved Mover versus the Form of the Good Beyond Being.

[pure-dove]

Despite the difficult of assessing the acceptance of any philosophy in Byzantine society, some commentators have characterized the intellectual turmoil in Byzantium as a clash between Platonists and Aristotelians. Among these numbers [Phillip] Sherrard: “The anti-Latin elements in Byzantine intellectual world saw in Platonism, already associated with the ideas of a non-Christian Greek society, an ideological weapon with which to oppose the Christian Aristotelianism of the West.”

AN Williams, The Ground of Union, pg 20

It’s a very curious divide to make, especially in light of the views of the Neoplatonists — ie the reconciliation between Plato and Aristotle, once again reified as a sort of distinction in philosophical methodology. I don’t think Palamas was very reliant on Plato — in fact, I think Palamas was quite anti-Plato, mostly through his claims around the role of intellect. I think Palamas could be aligned with Plato if you interpret the hesychasm debate to be primarily centered around the theological significance of direct experience.

[shihlun]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

- Eyes of the Spider

1998