Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

Many times and oft upon these inter-webs have I treated the subject of authority.

It was the Winter of 1967-8.  I was completing a one-year internship — from The Union Theological Seminary, New York City — at my undergraduate alma mater, The University of Redlands, Redlands California.  My titles were: Assistant Chaplain and Men’s Dormitory Residence Director.

Union became my graduate alma mater in 1969: BD, now styled MDiv.  I prefer the BD (Bachelor of Divinity) designation, a second Bachelor Degree that was in fact a graduate degree that indicated by that designation the gravity of theological studies.  STM (Master of Sacred Theology) another two years.  THD (Doctor of Theology – gorgeous scarlet robe!) another five to seven years.  In those days one worked.  Theology was serious study because it is serious responsibility.  At the moment, it is unserious study at Union and throughout academe, especially Ivy League, but it is now and always will be serious responsibility.

Strolling with the Benedictine, Father Meloise Meehan, in a Spanish patio, with raised fish pool, of the Mission Inn, at Riverside, California, Graham said, ‘May I ask a very personal question?’ Meehan replied, ‘Of course, please do. It is my job to take such questions.’

‘Well, then,’ Graham continued, ‘where should I look for authority? What can I rely on as absolutely true?’

Looking at the ground and still strolling, Meehan began: ‘If you ask any Catholic theologian that question … and if you show him that you are really serious … and that you want him to tell you not what the doctrine says but what he really knows to be true … then, any Catholic theologian will tell you that authority rests in the hearts of the believers.  And that is the truth.’

The question of authority reappears insistently.  This is a good thing.  Next after the question, “Who am I?”, the question, “Where does authority reside?”, is the most existentially pungent question one can formulate.  Who asks it at some time will ask, “Who am I?”

Here is Professor Dr. Marek Chodakiewicz addressing a stupid avidity of Pat Buchanan’s regarding Vladimir Putin and Russia.  The underlying question is: where does authority reside, in a government or in an individual?  My thoughts are as follows:

I am glad Buchanan is called on this.  He is not a theologian.  No evangelicals, as we know them the USA, are.  Said evangelicals descend from the left wing of the Reformation, the anabaptists/antinomians, whom Luther and Calvin abjured.

Tillich makes the point that the traditional view of Latin Culture by Russians, whether Czarist or Communist, is: degenerates.  The difference between Latin and Greek Churches is their view of the residence of authority.  In the Greek Church: the state.  In the Latin Church: the individual.  Tillich dilates upon these phenomena.

They call us degenerates because we favor what they think is anarchy, namely, individual freedom.  That means we see authority essentially in the individual rather than essentially in the state.  To them, who see authority essentially in the state, we are just asking for chaos, disorder.  We are degenerates.  Their Active Measures (aktivnye meropriatia) routines really are to produce the chaos they are furious we do not have naturally and, by their accounting, should.

When sanity returns, we (USA) will hold Russians close to us, while toughly keeping them non-aggressive and do a bit of culture splicing to them, letting them experience that personal freedom is not, per se, chaos.

We will teach them the phenomenon of paradox, that the freest of men are those most bound by just laws of their own volition and making.

I think Russians do not understand paradox, fear it.  Latin culture grasps and accepts the phenomenon of paradox, is comfortable with the unexpected (which it what paradox is; it is not contradiction, even less irrationality).  In Greek/Russian culture, what we see as paradox is seen as tragedy, an occasion for sorrow.  We see paradox as an occasion for levity or at least droll acceptance.

All great evils that visit mankind rest upon a claimed coincidence of civil authority with spiritual authority. The New Testament could not be clearer that these types of authority  are not identical and cannot be made so.  So is the classical Christian tradition, mostly.  So especially is reason/experience. Whoever claims that coincidence is evil.  Pure and simple.

Russian government claims that coincidence, as does Greek/Russian Christianity generally.

The Greek Church knows the coincidence makes for great evil.  Its response is to foster a deliberate ignorance thereof — and acceptance of corporeal life as essentially tragic — in preference for a sublimation of emotion and morality into thoughts of eternal life, the ethereal.  This leaves the state, with its penal authority, license to raise merry hell.

Latin Christianity accepts corporeal life as the end of the ways of God, as Oetinger puts it.

In contrast to the Greek Church and its focus on post-corporeality, the Latin Church focuses on the problem of sin — which is the problem of freedom, liberation in/during corporeality — something for which neither Greek Christianity nor Caliphism has any interest.

Latin Christianity, in this way, works closer to the Bharathia archetype and its non-theistic Tibetan descendant than does either Greek Christianity or Caliphism, which derives from Arian Christian desert monastics and prophets. (I know.  A heap is claimed there, a huge heap. 🙂  )

Buchanan actually is a left winger in the sense of an antinomian.  Left wing of the Reformation.  Legalists always are antinomians at heart.  Just as tyrants always are cowards at heart.  Paradox, again.  I believe Buchanan counts also among those evangelicals who take the State of Israel as a sign of Imminent Eschaton, which is a croc, that is, the imminent eschaton bit, not the State of Israel.

And by the way, just who in hell is Pat Buchanan that he presumes to speak for God.

When it rains it pours.  Bob Belvedere today addresses the question of authority.  My thoughts are as follows:

“Leftism is a religion.” wrote a commentator.

The question in all of this is: where does authority reside?

In classical Christian theology, and The New Testament, there is a distinction between civil authority and religious authority.  Not a separation, for that is impossible — nothing is separate from anything — but a distinction.  And a distinction with very, very practical consequences.

Civil authority is the power to punish.  Religious authority is the power to free.  One occurs in the limitations of finitude.  The other occurs in the limitlessness of the infinite.

No one person or group of persons can serve as the repository of both authorities, both powers.  Not in The New Testament and not in classical Christian theology.

These are distinct authorities and powers.  They intersect continuously in common life.  They intersect.  They do not unite.  They are fundamentally different authorities, different powers.  Held in stewardship by entirely different people.  Different personality types.

When someone claims both authorities, either as an individual or as a group, merry hell ensues.  Death and destruction quickly appear and sweep forward.

All tyrannies rest on an assertion of joint civil and religious authority.  In the current case, the religious authority claimed is that of gaia-religion/eco-religion and, as back-up, race-religion.

Every tyrant creates or adopts a religion of nature in some form.  Fascists, Communists, Environmentalists, Racists, Caliphists — all create a worship of some aspect of nature.  That is, an idolatry.  And they demand obeisance: “throw climate-change deniers into jail;” “throw racists away from any ability to sustain life.”  These they consider compassionate responses to people they would like to exterminate.

The pattern is simple and predictable.  Join civil and religious authority, welcome tyranny, death and despair.  And revolt.

The big evil of claiming the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Good Samaritan mean taxpayers are obliged to hand their money to government officials to be redistributed to “the poor” is not the fraudulent biblical exegesis or even the lie about the actual recipient of taxpayer prosperity.  Rather, it is the assumption by a civil official of religious authority at all: the presumption of the authority and power of God by a civil servant, to call religious authority to support their civil authority.

There is the big evil of the day.  When a religious opinion is a criminal offense, Katie bar the door.

Civil servants are not clergy and clergy are not civil servants.  The two roles are two roles, utterly distinct, utterly different kinds of personality filling them.  They cannot be one.

Civil and religious authority are in different hands or they are monstrous tools of oppression which will precipitate effective revolt.

Every progressive claims to embody both civil and religious authority.  The religious authority they claim is idolatry of some aspect of nature — ultimately themselves — in some form or another.  In a word: irreligious.

The full answer to the question of authority, of course, is that given by Father Meehan: authority resides in the hearts of the believers.  Not just anyone.  Believers.  As anyone capable of operating a motor vehicle knows, this full answer bears meaning and power.  Authority is the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is authority.  The Holy Spirit individualizes corporeally.  An individual human being — even an unbeliever, though they know it not — is the power of Being Itself.  That is their authority.  Believers know it.  They are it.  Humans — including non-believers — are attacked by criminals not because they have authority but because they ARE authority: their nature is divine, whether they know it or not.

Christianity, like Hinduism, is the highest possible view of the nature and destiny of man.

Update 1: Dezinformatsiya

Update 2: Political correctness is disinformation (dezinformatsiya) (and here) to camouflage truth.  It descends from operations Cheka and its successors call aktivni meropriyatiya (Активные мероприятия, active measures).  From the phrase Latinate media take the designation activist.  An activist to them is a saint.  More political correctness.  A dissident, by contrast, as per Cheka indoctrination, is an enemy of the state/media — in which reposes ultimate authority — suitable for torture and execution.

Update 3: Goethe is reported to have said, When you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Update 4: On 04 February 2015, the 274th anniversary of the birth of Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko, Don Surber wrote appreciatively of General Kościuszko.  Theological Geography has honored the great Pole and American of Polish descent in several posts.  A friend of Theological Geography, Dr. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, sent these bits of color in the picture of General Kościuszko:

Kosciuszko freed his serfs before he came to the U.S.  So I doubt his reflex to help black slaves erupted suddenly because of the South.

The Kosciuszkos were from Merekowszczyzna outside of Minsk.  That was about 500 miles away from Mscislaw (Mstislav), outside of which my family sat at the time.

Update 5: An American Renaissance.

Update 6: What is Putin about?  And here.

Update 7: Waller R. Newell: Understanding Tyranny And Terror: From The French Revolution To Modern Islamism.

Update 8: Its inescapability gives tragedy its bearable or unbearable pain. There comes a moment and a place in life where one sees God determining whether one survives the pain of the tragic in life or succumbs to it. Warriors, more than any others, see the comradely dialectic of the heroic and the tragic in life and learn by precept and example to sublimate the silent dance.

Update 9: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on leftist social engineering in Europe and the USA.

Update 10: Glenn Greenwald, when he’s right, he’s right:

The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming.  Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both.  Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational.  In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory.  Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.  The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. . . .  Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently.

Update 11: Professor Roberto de Mattei: Resistance And Fidelity To The Church In Times Of Crisis

Update 12: Over the past two years the increasingly skeptical citizenry of the United States and Europe has been treated to a stream of op-eds and television appearances lamenting the looming collapse of the liberal world order, to be accompanied by a surge of illiberalism, nationalism, and fringe politics. Rarely, however, does such hand-wringing stray beyond shopworn comparisons of the “complex interdependence” of the glorious past and the parochialism and narrow-mindedness of the current era. In truth, we are not witnessing a dramatic systemic change driven by conniving external forces, but a meltdown of political authority in the West caused by the relatively straightforward indolence of its political class. Our troubles are less about liberalism’s decline or the ascendancy of left or right politics. Simply put, the citizenry in the West has been frustrated for decades with its elites’ inability to deliver workable solutions to the problems of slow growth, deindustrialization, immigration, and the overall decline of self-confidence across the West.

The legitimacy, and hence stability, of the international system rests to a degree on the ability of the leading powers to deliver at home—or, simply put, to govern. The increasing volatility of international politics is in part a byproduct of systemic dysfunction across the West at the level of domestic politics. Americans and Europeans alike are running out of patience with the governing class. In Europe, the government’s inability to control mass migration or develop effective solutions to domestic terrorism are two important drivers of the growing public discontent. In the United States the middle and working classes have been frustrated for decades with the government’s inability to remedy de-industrialization, urban decay, and declining economic opportunity.

Glenn Reynolds comments: And in both places, as the “elite” has grown demonstrably less competent and honest, it has also grown visibly more contemptuous of the people it purports to govern. That contempt is, I think, the most poisonous part of the whole equation.

My essays on the question of authority are here.

Update 13: As stated in the first sentence of this post, the question of authority and its location is the central one of this era.  Here from Glenn Reynolds is more evidence of the accuracy of that observation.

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA