The Apocalypse, Descending Escalators, Calvin, Hegel and Wet Dreams

Mary Magdalene's remains were discovered

in Southern France in 1279

 Baxter adores the idea of my disorderly lusting, it's a solution for him, he can absolve himself from all sin by blaming me. He didn't like it, he was just doing as he was told, and it'll be I who enters Hades with an open mind.

It's odd and rather sweet that a substantial abdominal aortic aneurysm, a well photographed and much fondled giant of his kind, takes comfort from my attempts to emulate a chaotically entropic universe by maintaining a clock-like disciplined practice of concupiscence in an attempt to encourage Anti-Calvinist habits in others. The reality is of course, I should have gone all the way back to the errors our species made when the first Cock Robin picked up a stick and doodled an IOU into a clay tablet which accidentally got kiln fired when my creditors treasure house burned down and is now hidden away in a Dutch Museum.

We people in the Western Tradition do rather require the convictions of an End of Times to maintain a semblance of hope, and lo, please, pretty please show me the Western Mind that doesn't whisper the sweet nothings of : "Yes, it's just a feeling, but I definitely do think I go somewhere very nice when I die."

We have a damnation that convicts us at birth, it comes down the escalator spouting hatred unless we agree to behave thusly. Death is a blessed release. Here the Question Why is easily answered : "So we can escape the misery we have made for ourselves." As they say, the Apocalypse is the ultimate wet dream, it's the moment we reach the end of the line and stop "progressing."

It wasn't just Augustine or Calvin!! History is replete with goody-goody convictions drilled into us Westerners by the very best universities that saw a flow of inevitability, a predestination, which totally robbed us of our agency and handed the responsibility over to the Big One. Even bloody Hegel, and to a certain extent Kant saw the predestination of our species, none of it our choice. Hegel envisioned his phenomenology of spirit as a preordained process. The Owl of Minerva, Hegel quipped, spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. He meant we only understand reality and history when it's finished and too late to do anything about.

I hope you too find this as deeply offensive as Hannah Arendt did. She saw these holy trinity structures of thinking as a wide open route map for the malevolent minds that claim to understand the direction of history and this special, unique understanding justifying their use if violence today for a Synthesis tomorrow.

Anyway, and this is very, very interesting for anyone still interested in the moods of The Trinity. In 2016 Pope Francis elevated Saint Mary Magdalene's feast day to the same status as that of boy saints. For a gal who had struggled with Seven Demons, each demon representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins, until she met Jesus who wanted her to be an Apostle to the Apostles, follow him around and financially care for her so she could assist him with his ministry, even if it does sound as though Jesus adopted her as a corporate welfare officer, really does sound something like a Pope breaking a glass ceiling for someone who might have enjoyed life.

Socio-Biologists, Hobgoblins and their Spawn

Tree with White Stripes

 Over the last twenty to fifty years, we, or rather I, have been talking about the changes our answer to the Question Why have wrought on the way we people think. And over the years I've had this devotion to an understanding of life as a product of randomness that's more roundly described as a "slope in a random place" than any one of the many other definitions from the great cathedrals of learning.

One of the results of this navel gazing has been a private relationship loosely defined as "me and I" which we've shared with a primary other we can call the written word, which is a place that listens, pauses, tries to make sense of and then attempts to record what's being said.

In our recent campaign of rape and pillage through the meanings of concupiscence, original sin, Saint Augustine of Hippo and other monotheist interpretations of purpose I and my other parts find myself no more or less depressed than when in the 1980's Margaret Thatcher started referring to written words in Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Biology" a book that was written by Spencer in response to Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species." Spencer argued that Social Evolution mimicked Biological Evolution, and he introduced the expression "Survival of the Fittest" both in Biology and Society.  Thatcher and her conservatives were dominated by Spencer's conviction that "there was no alternative" everyone had to accept that government, regulation, handouts to the weak and sick, free milk for growing children interfered with the only true guiding light of humanity which as Spencer claimed in 1864 was survival of the fittest. Spencer was 83 when he died in 1903. Thatcher was 87 when a hundred and ten years later in 2013 she died a baroness of heart problems, cancer of the bladder and dementia in a Posh London Hotel.

I will remind us all of minds like the one represented by Homer and the Welsh Bards. They had a prodigious capacity to use memory. As a matter of course the Pharisees, including the Saul that became Paul the Apostle were obliged to memorize the first five books of the bible. These were not cruel and unusual obligations. Taliesin worked hard to become one with the community of Bards, their job was to remember stuff before getting their chance to contribute their own interpretations. The very fact of poetry had to do with the authority of the apprenticeship which was apparent in the curtain call that was the audible rhyme of spoken words. It's true you and I might have spent hours in detention being forced to memorize one of Blake's existence challenging poems because the English teacher was a frustrated sadist. All the same some lonely souls reveled in the possibility of having something to call their own. And Homer, if he was a bard, had never a need to write anything down, and even if he'd wanted to he probably couldn't write and if he could write he probably couldn't have afforded the papyrus.  No, those beauties carried the life of their poems in their minds, you chased them to the shade of a tree and said tell me a story.

 Then all of a sudden where has the body gone and the linear path of the elected few, those chosen by grace and enforced by the Holy Spirit becomes a cosmic law of the Father and his adoring son. A survival of the fittest if ever there was one masquerading as the hobgoblins of the Christian Church . And this is a reason to spend a lot of time with Hannah Arendt's idea of "Natality."

Concupiscence, disorderly lusting, Saint Anthony of Egypt, Calvin and Weber.

The Torment of Saint Anthony.

Michelangelo 1487-88

 OK, for those of us who share Hannah Arendt's view of Saint Augustine's understanding of "Original Sin" and "Love" today may have to be a day devoted to a sit down with Baxter and Ivan for a discussion on what "concupiscence" means and why Mathew claimed that Jesus thought lustful gazing was the equivalent of committing adultery in the heart, a verse in the New Testament that put the white meat on the bones of many a monastic order.

But first we have to meet the challenges of the question : "Why do professional groups demand an adherence to their own jargon and why do Theologians insist on using so many long, impossible to retain words that hardly anyone understands without constant reference to an unabridged dictionary." The answer to that question is from Proverbs 25:26 "A righteous man falling down before the wicked is as a troubled fountain, and a corrupt spring." In short "Muddying the Waters."

It wasn't the commandment to "go forth and multiply" that put the sin into Original Sin. It was "disorderly desire" or concupiscence, otherwise known as out of control lusting, and the thing was the Unmoved Mover had given specific instructions to observe the rules for living in Eden. Certainly Eve was very much at fault, but Adam should have known better than to give in to a disorderly desire. And worse, we're talking the Holy Trinity here, it was almost as though one leg of the milking stool had failed to love God with all his heart, soul and mind. Hugely disappointing for all involved. And we could go on to talk about success stories like the the ten year struggle the desert hermit Saint Anthony of Egypt had with perversions, sexual longings, female demons, but some of those accounts might threaten our own immortal souls.

Instead we should broach the subject of how John Calvin, who died when he was 54 in 1564, managed concupiscence. And here you can get the feeling that Calvin was dutiful son of a respectable middle class family who was inches away from being a 16th Century beatnik, waiting to be called to useful service.  His inward looking moments are really all about him and how he shouldn't allow his own access to the afterlife interfere too much with his intellectual life. His early years were spent in France in a flux of ideas that included a Catholic establishment bothered by waves from the Protestant reformation which washed new exciting ideas ashore, some more heretical than others. Calvin's father had initially wanted him to be a priest, but was persuaded that if he became a lawyer he'd earn more money, and here too, in the world of lawyers there were exciting moves being made one of which was referred to as "humanism" which put the onus on the classics as a source of legal precedents. Inevitably young Calvin chose a wrong side, he'd supported the opinions of a man who was burned at the stake, and he had to go into hiding.

Calvinism was a contribution to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century. It was all over the place, disputes, heresies, power struggles but as the world entered the 17th Century the Protestant movements had settled into the academically rather dull business of raising money and ministering to the flock. And here, I'm afraid to say we have to talk about the "Five Points of Calvinism" so that we might get a sense of what Max Weber called the Iron Cage into which the Calvinist Protestant Ethic herded much of Western Society, including most of North America.

Point One for Calvin was : Total Depravity and Utterly Perverse. We are all completely hopeless when it comes to sin, we were born concupiscent, disorderly lusting, disorderly desiring, our absolute sinfulness didn't go away and never would. The next three points are convoluted attempts to explain  the extent to which we could do anything about our depravity. The answer was was not much. You couldn't just ask Calvin, or the Holy Spirit or the Father for forgiveness. It was all somewhat predestined, you didn't have a lot to do with your fate, effort grades were recommended but fundamentally it was down to how the other two legs of the the milking stool were feeling about how you were representing yourself in your contribution to The Trinity. Frankly if you weren't the right sort then bye-bye-birdie. Part Five was about the Perseverance of Saints and how they couldn't really help but be Saints and sit up there with the Father himself, so your chances of achieving such an election were beyond remote.

And Yes! The Five Points of Calvin did very little to bring home a sense of well-being unless you were actively working on your appearance as a devoted member of the congregation. You couldn't spend your incomings on dance clubs, fancy shoes, or anything that suggested you were being disorderly in your desires, and god forbid you pine a little for your neighbor's ox. No, you put all those endless hours into maintaining the appearance of a dour, unhappy, hard working citizen who saved his resources in a sensible, possibly interest earning place for a rainy day in the vague hope that one day you'd know happiness 

Max Weber had a mental breakdown in the 1880's, he organized hospitals in the First World War, he supported democratization of Germany, he died in Munich  of Influenza in 1920 when he was 56 years old. His sociology argued for a rational interpretation of human behavior and his analysis of the effects Calvin's thinking, particularly Calvin's Five Points, had on the rapid progress of Capitalism via the Industrial Revolution. He wrote a book called "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."

The central argument in this book was that the general anxiety produced  by the Protestant reformations with their assertions that "There is not hope in us" had robbed people of any reasonable chance of forgiveness. As result the Calvinist motivation to be good had turned secular and an upright citizen, to become a mover and shaker in the world, henceforward had to judge his or her own worth and future security by their worldly success.

Monotheism, The Trinity and Linear thinking

Home of the twelve non-linear Olympian Gods

 You couldn't really have a god boffing a mortal and producing a demi-god called Jesus. That had all been done before, it was a little past tense, it was an entertainment and had never lasted as a real, genuine belief system that sucked people in dominated their attention and secured devoted followers.

When you're talking the One God, you couldn't suddenly decided to have two eternal gods, and if you wanted a central authority rather than some sort of democratic process obviously there had to be some sort of begetting so that authority would remain in the same general area in the way that things obviously passed to the eldest son.

After the fiasco, the basic embarrassment, of those early Canaanite roots any thing like two gods seemed a little risky even if you did call it the Holy Spirit who'd obviously be a boy. And yes it was all very convoluted but so much better than bringing back a Mithra and an Anahita or a familiar and comforting army of evil fighting Spentas and calling them "beings worthy of worship" or "emanations of the One God." But wait a minute, thinking of them as "emanations" could provide the three legs of a milking stool.....

I'm not sure I have the patience for a discussion of the tangle of string that's the foundation of the Christian Faith. It's always referred to as incredibly complex, requiring years of study and reflection that ideally was paid for by others. Which is probably correct, you don't get a mind around something like perichoresis or Hypostatic Union in a ten minute gossip after church on Christmas Eve.

It is fascinating the effort generations of increasingly decrepit old farts have put into justifying the theme of their mission on earth which is basically to discuss the merits and demerits of Jesus' use of blessed in his Sermon on the Mount. As a top-down command it quickly gets stale but as an area of discussion I see years and years of good company, 

First of all: Perichoresis, from the Greek for "rotation" or "making room for" is understood this way: "Describing the mutual indwelling and interpenetration of the three Persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), emphasizing their distinctness yet perfect unity and shared essence, as well as the union of Christ's divine and human natures."

It does sound a little like a poor excuse for being found in a nun's bedroom. What it means is that The Trinity just is and always has been the starting point for everything in the universe and because God had decided to reveal it to us by penetrating a mortal, it just showed how important we were to him, and how much he actually loved us even if occasionally we did get on his nerves and he on ours.

Second of all :  "Hypostatic" from the Greek for "pertaining to substance" in the context of The Trinity means relating to the underlying substance personified by the trinity. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost are personifications. In those days substance and being didn't have the distinction it has today. Substance and essence were pretty much the same thing, in Greek it was referred to as Ousia.  Hypostasis in this context are individual realities. Hence:  One Ousia, three Hypostases. 

When it came to the question "Is Ousia a physical substance?" There was doubt whether substance, the raw sediment, was essence. "Did what it was made of become its essence, or did it's essence become what it was made of?" Hypostasis in those days was not physical but it was Objective Reality. Ghosts, spirits, Gods, the panapoly was a fluid world of dreams and wonder. It was entirely possible for a genuine son of Zeus to stray with a mortal and produce an offspring with the mortality of a human and the powers of a God, but this wasn't actually the point, the fact that it could and might happen was the point. Do you see the beginnings of a ghost in the Ousia? The straightening of the line, the hunt for an end.

If you don't recognize the arrogance of the gigantic statement Trinatarians decided to make when in the interest of their one god, they chose to demand an adherence to a belief that declared God was a permanent unmoved mover, everlasting eternal structure, then lets add a dimension that asks "Why can't god and man go round and round in circles for ever and ever?"

My answer is power hungry megalomaniacal ass-wipes who demanded we engaged in a linear thought pattern by declaring a hypostatic union between a God and a man which put a Triadic Structure into our understanding of the universe which included us people as a central feature. In Hegelian Dialectic terms the thesis was God,  the antitheses was man and the syntheses was Person or Christ.

We people were a leg on the milking stool, we were a fixture with a time-line, it was all our fault, God was a long suffering "who" and all this time we had been responsible. In reality nothing had actually changed, but under the new top-down guidelines our sins had been forgiven our new straight line of existence required us to readjust our legal systems, we were required to stop observing the logic of the feud, we were required to forgive our neighbors not demand the restoration of damages. The King, the ultimate leader wasn't God, the King was a part of each one of us up there in heaven with the Father and the Holy Ghost.

And of course we have to have a look at the Holy Ghost, ask questions, make sure we're on the same page and be polite about his purpose. His job was to give life to the Triadic Structure of the Trinity. He allowed The Trinity to be free of the tripe ridden land, it was a real thing up there, a real place, a real country up there that each one of us, whether we were lord or lady, journeyman or serf properly belonged to.