AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
Upon occasion, in human affairs, it becomes necessary to remind the functionaries that they are not proprietors. This observation has reference to that Euro-American mélange of colossal dummies criminally insane who self-identify as the foreign policy establishment (FPE) and intelligence community (IC).
The United States has experienced what historians call Great Awakenings, two or four in fact, depending on who is counting what, and I believe another is in progress. The usual online sources — such as here and here — egregiously misunderstand and sometimes maliciously misrepresent the Great Awakenings, especially the First, which created the tones and forms used by later epiphanies of the phenomenon. Still, the usual online sources are worth consulting if one is interested in The Great Awakenings.
I had the privilege of knowing Dr. Edwin Gaustad as my freshman-year counselor and, for two years, my professor of Religion in America. He attracted renown while at my university, a private facility, and was soon lured to UC-Riverside, from where he consummated his academic career. Dr. Gaustad was a true teacher, a rarity in academe. A Christian man, he appreciated The First Great Awakening as well as the others, but especially so the First, the archetype. He looked into the heart of the phenomenon as a phenomenon, for what it was soteriologically, rather than as an ideology-driven social program. He found somethings good therein. Two of his works on Religion in America are here and here, and an exegesis of part of his work is here.
Phenomena related to The Great Awakenings are camp meetings and revivals.
There is no truth (Satyam) without goodness (Sivam); there is no goodness without beauty (Sundaram). Truth alone can confer auspiciousness, and auspiciousness alone is the real beauty. Truth is beauty; joy is beauty. Falsehood and grief are ugly because they are unnatural. The effulgence of Truth will reveal goodness; do karma that is approved by the higher wisdom, not karma that is born of ignorance. Then, all karma will be auspicious, beneficial, and blessed. A dog caught in a room whose walls are mirrors sees in the myriad reflections not itself but rivals and competitors, other dogs that must be barked at. So, it tires itself out by jumping on this reflection, and when images also jump, it becomes mad with fury! The wise individual, however, sees one’s own reflections and is at peace: the person is happy that there are so many reflections of oneself all around. That is the attitude you must learn to possess, this will save you from needless bother.
Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, November 11, 1966 (?).
My favorite Divine, from The First Great Awakening, the archetype of such happenings, is the incomparable Jonathan Edwards, A.M., Congregationalist Pastor of the Church of Christ, Northampton, MA (now a pool of sewage filled with ideology). I join a throng in being inspired by Edwards’ theological labors, to include one of our favorites, the famous sermon Master Edwards preached at Enfield, CT on 08 July 1741. The title is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (also here).
That picture so reminds me of this:
This sermon by Edwards helped ignite the American Revolutionary War for Independence from the British Throne, among other benefits.
Modern eyes and ears, accustomed as they are to scientocracy, may recoil in disgust from Edwards’ locution, and its theological supports, for placing man in a matrix of immanent and transcendent integrations, of finitude and infinity commingling beyond sense-based (mediated) epistemology. Scientocracy demands sense-based — and of late ideology-based — which is to say mediated, epistemology as sole appreciator and proprietor of facts. Whereas, the epistemology of direct experience also appreciates facts, and of kinds not available to sensory (mediated) experience.
To his auditors, Edwards’ furious barks, as some today put it, were in fact comforting. His purpose was not to frighten but to assure and console, not to blame, but to encourage and strengthen. To do this, Edwards deployed, effectively, Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination: some He destines for heaven and some for hell.
A modern asks, incredulously, how can this be? How can a rational, self-respecting person believe everything they think they are is really something God has already determined them to be?
The arrogant are shunned because they take themselves for less than they are. They elevate a fraction of who/what they are to be all that they are, and that makes them dangerous, therefore shunned. It also happens that arrogant persons never elevate compassion as all that they are, although typically they elevate compassion as all everyone else ought to be.
Humanism and its political face, Socialism, do not accept the world as it is. Definitionally they cannot because they are an ideology and ideology definitionally sets itself against the world, contra mundi, as better than the world and knowing better than the world knows of itself and is.
Humanists cannot suffer the great tragedies of life in quiet grandeur. They have to complain. They want to complain. Ideology, that horrible hag, drives them to ugly complaint and uglier dissent and descent. They want to argue with fate and their own destiny, which they themselves made for themselves, truth be told. Reality is a victimizer in the eyes of Humanists. We are better than that, they say, those are not our ideals, that is not who I am, and, that is not the God I know. But when they set out to prove it, they experience confusion and cause chaos.
Life comprises great tragedies, unavoidable, ineluctable, and often inchoate. If these cannot be born for what they are, as they are, ameliorated now and then by Divine Grace operating through willing human agency, the dignity of human birth remains a stranger even to ones fortunate enough to have it. Such a one does not experience their own grandeur. Such a loss. In the response to tragedy is the grandeur or degradation of the human birth.
The great ones let tragedy roll through them as acceptable, nay, redemptive, aspect of their destiny. The small ones cavil against tragedy and blame someone else if it arrives at their bedside.
Why is the doctrine of double predestination a comfort to Christians? An identical question is, why did Americans rush to hear Divines preach during The First Great Awakening and subsequent ones?
The answer is not obvious but it is monitory. The answer centers in the phenomenology of piety, or, what is sometimes called spiritual exercise, or, in India, sadhana.
The Latin (Western) Church, to include all but one (Bohemian Brethren) of its myriad denominations, focuses on solving the problem of sin. The Greek (Eastern) Church focuses on solving the problem of mortality. Both foci are Christian, and each produces discernibly unique embodiments in architecture, literature, music, and socio-economic and political priorities.
The Great Awakenings take place in The Latin (Western) Church, so, not unexpectedly, they focus on solving the problem of sin. This is Edwards’ subject in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
People rush to hear comforting news, not harrowing news. They rush to be encouraged, not to be condemned. This is natural. Humans want to hear what is true because their nature is Truth. They want to learn about themselves as well as about all manner of things and happenings because their nature is Consciousness. They want to be happy because their nature is Bliss. The devil has to seduce or cajole an audience to attend one of his productions. God only has to show up.
The doctrine of double predestination assures people that God has everything in hand, that the world has order, that they are not alone in the melee of a maelstrom called life. Moreover, it assures people of a happy ending to their lives because that is what God and creation want for them and freely provide grace and capacity for them to rely upon.
This is in fact the Gospel message: lift up your hearts and be ye lifted up ye everlasting one in God. And count on it. No message is more comforting. Moreover, confirmation of the accuracy of that message comes very soon and ever more insistently — in direct, non-mediated, experience — to one who puts it into practice in every aspect of their life.
People did not rush to hear Edwards and other Divines condemn them. They rushed to hear Edwards and other Divines urge them forward in the strength and happiness of so solving the problem of sin by relying on their own native proximity to its source, eviscerator, and evaporator: God Himself. That message is freeing, and that experience helped ignite the American Revolutionary War for Independence from the British Throne, among other benefits. Man’s essential nature is divine and the necessary embodiment of that nature is freedom.
There is no truth (Satyam) without goodness (Sivam); there is no goodness without beauty (Sundaram). Truth alone can confer auspiciousness, and auspiciousness alone is the real beauty. Truth is beauty; joy is beauty. Falsehood and grief are ugly because they are unnatural. The effulgence of Truth will reveal goodness; do karma that is approved by the higher wisdom, not karma that is born of ignorance. Then, all karma will be auspicious, beneficial, and blessed. A dog caught in a room whose walls are mirrors sees in the myriad reflections not itself but rivals and competitors, other dogs that must be barked at. So, it tires itself out by jumping on this reflection, and when images also jump, it becomes mad with fury! The wise individual, however, sees one’s own reflections and is at peace: the person is happy that there are so many reflections of oneself all around. That is the attitude you must learn to possess, this will save you from needless bother.
Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, November 11, 1966 (?).
Very nice, well-spoken, thank you. I detect tones of Barbara Thiering and Mark Durie. As you know, there is a tradition of Christian Humanism, so called, on now, off now, and back again. As I read the record, from that tradition we received Socialism — in two forms, Fascist and Communist, an apostasy and an heresy, respectively — as well as what, at its best, Tillich calls Religious Socialism.
In the late 60s, I associated with a British expat named Robert Theobald, father of the idea of A Guaranteed Income. Bob’s grandfather was a C-of-E Bishop and Bob was a Social Humanist, reared in India. His attraction to me was his high view of man compared to the Niebuhrian/Barthian and Anglican low view of man of my to-then heritage. But after two years I found Robbie’s high view of man (human potential, Maslow’s phrase) not high enough so we parted brass rags.
In the self-enforced isolation which followed for a decade and more, and as much as I love and owe to Paulus, I found his Religious[Christian] Socialism insufficient to denote what he and I were seeing in the record and in our own experience and, therefore, as our native view of man: that the divine in us makes us human, not the human in us.
There was/is a truly high view of man, one which easily and lightly sweeps away ideologies, which are, as we know, idolatries with all the violence, silly smugness, and inconsolable weakness appertaining thereto. May the same perish in tunnels, along with their spawn, chased after by dogs. It takes only resolve and courage born of faith in who one truly is to make that happen.
To wit, my suggestion: Humanism is Socialism and what we yearn for is most clearly denoted as Christianity of the Pauline, Hieronymian, Augustinian, Franciscan, Lutheran, Avilan spiritual lineage, or, Sanathana Dharma. In his final lecture, at Chicago, Paulus reaches for a grand but popularly DOA Germanism to denote this reality, which is really reality generally: religion of the concrete spirit. Meaning: have faith in your divine nature and live your life straight, strong, and happy from that self-confidence.
A Saint Laboring In The Vineyard
Well, we have The Great Awakening by Trump and The Great Scandal by Obama/Bush/Clinton, and conservatives exhibit interest in Decorum, a low view of man, rather than Dharma, a high view of man. I should think conservatism would want representation by manly and womanly counsel, who respect and have faith in the intrinsic divinity of their nature. What does imago dei mean, after all, if not that?
There were people in 2007-08 who noticed Obama’s intrinsic corruption and remarked its effects if ascending to the Oval Office. Then there were people who tut-tutted about decorum and not assuming things that have not been proven. Kind of like officers at Pearl who kept demanding confirmation of unpleasantness afoot until a non-com pointed out the window at Americans dying on sinking ships and yelled, Your want confirmation, Sir? There’s your confirmation!
John Gray: The technologists of power are today’s true rationalists. That superior intelligence is found among the practitioners of populism is a fact of our time. When liberals talk about reason they mean a mishmash of ideas they picked up at university. Scraps of Rawls, Dworkin and Thomas Piketty, together with a smattering of modish conspiracy theories, form the folk wisdom of the thinking classes. Rationality means deferring to this ragbag of ephemera and ignoring enduring truths about the deciding forces in politics.
Upon occasion, in human affairs, it becomes necessary to remind bullies that they do not have matters as sewn up as they represent to themselves that they do. Hurray for the genius of the species!
Βασιλεία του Θεού