Gadfly without Portfolio – as Ted Turner characterizes his role
I had thought at one point that Ted might enter the political scene as our “Philosopher King” – such as Plato portrayed in his “Republic”. Instead of his assuming such a political role, however, Turner exercised a vastly more rudimental role via the very unsettling questions he asked in various media as the presidential campaign rolled out: Socrates’ “gadfly” approach, a sting at the visceral level before cogitation reaches the point of philosophical reflection and becomes embodied in abstractions which are one - or more - remove from reality. The late psychiatrist-philosopher, Jacques Lacan, explores the psychological rationale behind it at some length (see below), and my own Spiritual Father, Dr. Herbert Schwartz, even before he studied Greek philosophy at Columbia, and then taught it at the University of Chicago, St. John’s Great Books at Annapolis, and elsewhere, was already known for his very Jewish habit of always answering a question – with another question.
By way of defining the terms of this methodology, I offer the following which I found on the site: www.hyattcarter.com/awaken_your_inner_socrates.htm
Many who came to Socrates with confident beliefs soon came to see, under the light of his incisive questioning, that these beliefs were built upon the sands of confusion, self-contradiction, and superficial misunderstandings. This way of questioning has become known as the Socratic Method.
For Socrates, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and, as the gadfly of Athens, he was committed to autonomy of thought guided by critical reason. He has been called “the ideal thinker.” But not only was he cerebral, he was also passionate in his pursuit of both the rational and the virtuous life....
As a teacher [Socrates functioned] as a “midwife” of knowledge,... his method of teaching was not didactic, but the way of skillful questioning, how to reason things through and think one’s own way into new insights, and the willingness to change or abandon beliefs when they are clearly shown to be in error....
“I am one of those,” [he said of himself,] “who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute— for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured oneself of a very great evil, than of curing another.” (Plato, Gorgias)Rare it is in our times to find anyone willing to deal – and openly, in public – with his/her own ignorance! But this is Turner’s way. He was not among those who at the outset condemned our invasion of Iraq, and this on “principle”! (I can’t forebear just a brief allusion to the inane controversy about a “just war” that filled the Catholic media – although, in the end, who can blame them for using this as a diversion from happenings within the Catholic Church that basically called into question their claim to anything “just” at all?) No, Turner asked the question: How can the President as Commander in Chief demand that we unequivocally back him when we are still studying and thinking and trying to make up our minds on this issue? And then as the whole war progressed from disaster to disaster, Turner’s media regularly offered yet more questions, notably via the practice
of actively soliciting questions and comment from bloggers. This has undeniably had its effect upon our national outlook. Is there at present anyone out there reading this who would still argue for Iraq as a “just war”, and would be willing to stand up in public and be counted on this score? No, I believe a climate of healthful, realistic, sanity is finally coming to replace the obsessively bigoted self- conceit that, for instance, drove the savage effort to destroy the Dixie Chicks for their prick to our national vanity.
I believe also, fellow Americans, that a return on the part of our major media to such a Socratic use of our minds is a crucial element in God’s providential plan for pulling us back from the brink of self-destruction at this crucial juncture. Doctors Schwartz and Turner both play the roll of midwives in an amazing re- birth of just plain common sense thinking in our times.
+ + + The history of our world viewed from the End Times + + +
And this re-birth accords altogether with the book of Revelation wherein God is saying: “I will make all things new.” This book – and our Bible itself - ends with “Maranatha”, meaning “Come, Lord.” Whether it is a plea for Him to come or a statement that He is coming is irrelevant, since His coming is in response to our desire for Him.
Amaranatha is the name of the city in India where by tradition Jesus lived and taught during the years he traveled to the lands of the Magi to thank them for saving Him from Herod and to teach the people, years not covered by our biblical text, with its 18 year hiatus which follows the occasion on which the 12 year old Jesus astonished the Jewish sages in the Temple, and, according to a translation familiar to me from my early childhood, explained his not joining the homeward trek with: “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”
Contrary to a prevalent misconception, God the Word, was not someone who, after being born a little baby, and raised up by his parents – St. Joseph was not Jesus’ father, but rather the Guardian of Mary and her child - then for 3 years
walked around his neighborhood with his disciples and taught them, and then was crucified, rose from the dead, walked around for 40 days more so everyone could see he was really resurrected, and then went back up to heaven to take his comfortable seat at the right hand of His Father. How, we must ask – initiating our Socratic inquiry - did Jesus the Nazarene get to be, in the western tradition, the one and only “real” incarnation of God – all the rest of us being insubstantial carbon copies reduced to asking: What would Jesus do? Would Jesus eat this cruddy food? Would Jesus drive this gas guzzler? Etc., etc.
Herbert Schwartz posed the question as follows:
EVOLUTION 1. God created the universe. 2. God gave us the commandments to spoil all the fun. 3. God sent His Son to make us feel guilty. Or isn’t that the way you really feel, even if you wouldn’t admit it? If it isn’t the way you feel, just how do you feel? I bet you don’t know!
How is it that western Christianity has fallen into such a slough of despair when in all forms of religion, all over the world and in all times – except in this time and place - the Deity is recognized as being concerned to share Himself with his creatures, whom, indeed, He created for this very purpose: the Creator wanted to share His being, even His divinity, with others. This is expressed in the important philosophical axiom: Bonum diffusum est sui – Good is diffusive of itself.
+ + + The role of EVIL in the Creator’s plan + + +
How does evil fit into this picture? I am sitting in a Starbucks as I write this, and for a while now we have been hearing Negro blues music – which is very calming, even soothing, I find myself unconsciously swaying with the gentle yet dynamic rhythm of the music. Although when the words come through – they are mournful in the extreme as is the characteristic of blues music. When – since we are dealing here with Socratic questioning – I asked myself why there should be this disparity, it came to me instantly: the African psyche still understands at least implicitly the necessity for contrast. This wisdom is embodied in the yin yang symbol depicting the highly dynamic process where the white (yang) and black (yin) areas are constantly changing and keeping the whole in balance.
And so God permitted sin – which is our separation from Him, the absolute antithesis of loving union with Him - precisely to inspire an absolutely incontrovertible hope in us!!! For it is not when we are complacently patting ourselves on the back for our good works that we are truly united with God; at such times we are rather united with our own ego. This is the burden of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. No, it is when we recognize not merely our sins, but the extent to which we are drawn to sin – Bernadette of Lourdes said, when she was grilled by the Inquisitors, that a sinner is not merely someone who commits sin, but one who LOVES sin, as is the teaching of all the greatest Fathers of the Church – so when we see ourselves hopelessly in the grip of our sinful impulses (Nota bene: this is the realization that initiates the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous as also the many other 12 step programs for other addictions that have derived from it because the 12 steps are so perfectly conformed to how, in God’s providence, our human nature works) – so when we thus come to recognize that we can do nothing in and of ourselves to save ourselves from this hopelessness, and we turn, with a converted heart (the process known in Greek as metanoia), to the Higher Being Whom by this process we are acknowledging, whatever name we use, God, Allah, Shiva, whatever, in this moment we know ourselves as so united with this Higher Being that nothing can separate us from Him/Her, not even our own evil impulses – and so the devil is utterly foiled, his hold on us irrevocably broken. Even should we fall again, as most surely we will, we will just start over with the first step, the step that launches the process of metanoia, so that our addictions, even if they continue to be operative, will never gain a hold on us, and, most important, will never separate us from that Higher Being upon whom we know ourselves to be dependent. Herbert used to tell us that if we lived our lives this way, then at the moment of death, we would go straightway to heaven, because there would be nothing separating us from God. The devil will be defeated precisely by his own tactics! Can anyone conceive of a more yin yang solution?
Anyone who studies religions other than western Christianity will discover that the experience of the divine which is part of the 12 steps, is, in fact, universal. I first became aware of how indigenous this is to our very nature when I read a book by the Yogi Sri Desikachar, who said that he had never taught any of his Yoga students anything about any higher being – but that nevertheless they invariably at some point in their yoga practice came to this realization.
+ + + The purpose of Christ’s Incarnation + + +
Jesus, then, did not come to earth principally to suffer for us, to die for us and make us feel guilty, or even to give us a good example of how to act, etc., the real purpose of His incarnation in our human nature was what the Fathers, from Irenaeus of Lyons onward (he being the earliest I know of, at least) say in season and out:
GOD BECAME MAN, THAT MAN MIGHT BECOME GOD
I had thought at one point that Ted might enter the political scene as our “Philosopher King” – such as Plato portrayed in his “Republic”. Instead of his assuming such a political role, however, Turner exercised a vastly more rudimental role via the very unsettling questions he asked in various media as the presidential campaign rolled out: Socrates’ “gadfly” approach, a sting at the visceral level before cogitation reaches the point of philosophical reflection and becomes embodied in abstractions which are one - or more - remove from reality. The late psychiatrist-philosopher, Jacques Lacan, explores the psychological rationale behind it at some length (see below), and my own Spiritual Father, Dr. Herbert Schwartz, even before he studied Greek philosophy at Columbia, and then taught it at the University of Chicago, St. John’s Great Books at Annapolis, and elsewhere, was already known for his very Jewish habit of always answering a question – with another question.
By way of defining the terms of this methodology, I offer the following which I found on the site: www.hyattcarter.com/awaken_your_inner_socrates.htm
Many who came to Socrates with confident beliefs soon came to see, under the light of his incisive questioning, that these beliefs were built upon the sands of confusion, self-contradiction, and superficial misunderstandings. This way of questioning has become known as the Socratic Method.
For Socrates, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and, as the gadfly of Athens, he was committed to autonomy of thought guided by critical reason. He has been called “the ideal thinker.” But not only was he cerebral, he was also passionate in his pursuit of both the rational and the virtuous life....
As a teacher [Socrates functioned] as a “midwife” of knowledge,... his method of teaching was not didactic, but the way of skillful questioning, how to reason things through and think one’s own way into new insights, and the willingness to change or abandon beliefs when they are clearly shown to be in error....
“I am one of those,” [he said of himself,] “who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute— for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured oneself of a very great evil, than of curing another.” (Plato, Gorgias)Rare it is in our times to find anyone willing to deal – and openly, in public – with his/her own ignorance! But this is Turner’s way. He was not among those who at the outset condemned our invasion of Iraq, and this on “principle”! (I can’t forebear just a brief allusion to the inane controversy about a “just war” that filled the Catholic media – although, in the end, who can blame them for using this as a diversion from happenings within the Catholic Church that basically called into question their claim to anything “just” at all?) No, Turner asked the question: How can the President as Commander in Chief demand that we unequivocally back him when we are still studying and thinking and trying to make up our minds on this issue? And then as the whole war progressed from disaster to disaster, Turner’s media regularly offered yet more questions, notably via the practice
of actively soliciting questions and comment from bloggers. This has undeniably had its effect upon our national outlook. Is there at present anyone out there reading this who would still argue for Iraq as a “just war”, and would be willing to stand up in public and be counted on this score? No, I believe a climate of healthful, realistic, sanity is finally coming to replace the obsessively bigoted self- conceit that, for instance, drove the savage effort to destroy the Dixie Chicks for their prick to our national vanity.
I believe also, fellow Americans, that a return on the part of our major media to such a Socratic use of our minds is a crucial element in God’s providential plan for pulling us back from the brink of self-destruction at this crucial juncture. Doctors Schwartz and Turner both play the roll of midwives in an amazing re- birth of just plain common sense thinking in our times.
+ + + The history of our world viewed from the End Times + + +
And this re-birth accords altogether with the book of Revelation wherein God is saying: “I will make all things new.” This book – and our Bible itself - ends with “Maranatha”, meaning “Come, Lord.” Whether it is a plea for Him to come or a statement that He is coming is irrelevant, since His coming is in response to our desire for Him.
Amaranatha is the name of the city in India where by tradition Jesus lived and taught during the years he traveled to the lands of the Magi to thank them for saving Him from Herod and to teach the people, years not covered by our biblical text, with its 18 year hiatus which follows the occasion on which the 12 year old Jesus astonished the Jewish sages in the Temple, and, according to a translation familiar to me from my early childhood, explained his not joining the homeward trek with: “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”
Contrary to a prevalent misconception, God the Word, was not someone who, after being born a little baby, and raised up by his parents – St. Joseph was not Jesus’ father, but rather the Guardian of Mary and her child - then for 3 years
walked around his neighborhood with his disciples and taught them, and then was crucified, rose from the dead, walked around for 40 days more so everyone could see he was really resurrected, and then went back up to heaven to take his comfortable seat at the right hand of His Father. How, we must ask – initiating our Socratic inquiry - did Jesus the Nazarene get to be, in the western tradition, the one and only “real” incarnation of God – all the rest of us being insubstantial carbon copies reduced to asking: What would Jesus do? Would Jesus eat this cruddy food? Would Jesus drive this gas guzzler? Etc., etc.
Herbert Schwartz posed the question as follows:
EVOLUTION 1. God created the universe. 2. God gave us the commandments to spoil all the fun. 3. God sent His Son to make us feel guilty. Or isn’t that the way you really feel, even if you wouldn’t admit it? If it isn’t the way you feel, just how do you feel? I bet you don’t know!
How is it that western Christianity has fallen into such a slough of despair when in all forms of religion, all over the world and in all times – except in this time and place - the Deity is recognized as being concerned to share Himself with his creatures, whom, indeed, He created for this very purpose: the Creator wanted to share His being, even His divinity, with others. This is expressed in the important philosophical axiom: Bonum diffusum est sui – Good is diffusive of itself.
+ + + The role of EVIL in the Creator’s plan + + +
How does evil fit into this picture? I am sitting in a Starbucks as I write this, and for a while now we have been hearing Negro blues music – which is very calming, even soothing, I find myself unconsciously swaying with the gentle yet dynamic rhythm of the music. Although when the words come through – they are mournful in the extreme as is the characteristic of blues music. When – since we are dealing here with Socratic questioning – I asked myself why there should be this disparity, it came to me instantly: the African psyche still understands at least implicitly the necessity for contrast. This wisdom is embodied in the yin yang symbol depicting the highly dynamic process where the white (yang) and black (yin) areas are constantly changing and keeping the whole in balance.
And so God permitted sin – which is our separation from Him, the absolute antithesis of loving union with Him - precisely to inspire an absolutely incontrovertible hope in us!!! For it is not when we are complacently patting ourselves on the back for our good works that we are truly united with God; at such times we are rather united with our own ego. This is the burden of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. No, it is when we recognize not merely our sins, but the extent to which we are drawn to sin – Bernadette of Lourdes said, when she was grilled by the Inquisitors, that a sinner is not merely someone who commits sin, but one who LOVES sin, as is the teaching of all the greatest Fathers of the Church – so when we see ourselves hopelessly in the grip of our sinful impulses (Nota bene: this is the realization that initiates the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous as also the many other 12 step programs for other addictions that have derived from it because the 12 steps are so perfectly conformed to how, in God’s providence, our human nature works) – so when we thus come to recognize that we can do nothing in and of ourselves to save ourselves from this hopelessness, and we turn, with a converted heart (the process known in Greek as metanoia), to the Higher Being Whom by this process we are acknowledging, whatever name we use, God, Allah, Shiva, whatever, in this moment we know ourselves as so united with this Higher Being that nothing can separate us from Him/Her, not even our own evil impulses – and so the devil is utterly foiled, his hold on us irrevocably broken. Even should we fall again, as most surely we will, we will just start over with the first step, the step that launches the process of metanoia, so that our addictions, even if they continue to be operative, will never gain a hold on us, and, most important, will never separate us from that Higher Being upon whom we know ourselves to be dependent. Herbert used to tell us that if we lived our lives this way, then at the moment of death, we would go straightway to heaven, because there would be nothing separating us from God. The devil will be defeated precisely by his own tactics! Can anyone conceive of a more yin yang solution?
Anyone who studies religions other than western Christianity will discover that the experience of the divine which is part of the 12 steps, is, in fact, universal. I first became aware of how indigenous this is to our very nature when I read a book by the Yogi Sri Desikachar, who said that he had never taught any of his Yoga students anything about any higher being – but that nevertheless they invariably at some point in their yoga practice came to this realization.
+ + + The purpose of Christ’s Incarnation + + +
Jesus, then, did not come to earth principally to suffer for us, to die for us and make us feel guilty, or even to give us a good example of how to act, etc., the real purpose of His incarnation in our human nature was what the Fathers, from Irenaeus of Lyons onward (he being the earliest I know of, at least) say in season and out:
GOD BECAME MAN, THAT MAN MIGHT BECOME GOD
This icon, written by St. Theophanes the Greek, the teacher of St. Andrew
Rublev, depicts Christ as God the Word dynamically sharing Himself, descending
right down into our very being, in order that we ascend upward into His. This is
one of the major theophanies recorded in our Gospel, when God the Father said:
“This is My beloved Son.” Moreover, the Transfiguration is not just God
“appearing” to the disciples; the disciples had to be themselves transfigured with
him in order to behold him in His glory. This is how God IS, and this is how He
works in His people: Good is diffusive of itself.
The story is told of Fr. Vasily, a very holy monk at St. Tikhon’s. A little boy was
curious about this ancient monk and one day he asked him, “Father, have you
ever seen God?” The monk replied, “Oh yes, I see Him all the time.” “You do?!”
the little boy exclaimed, asking breathlessly, “What does He look like?” Fr. Vasily
answered, “Why, He looks just like you!”
This is the teaching of the Fathers of the Church, and it is exactly what Herbert
taught us: that we have 2 natures, divine and human, as did Jesus Christ. The
difference being that Christ was God by His natural birth-right, and human by
“clothing Himself in me” – as we hear repeated over and over in our Orthodox
Pascal services - through His incarnation in our human nature. We are human by
our natural birth-right, but through Christ’s incarnation in our human nature we
become God by participation. St. Peter himself tells us this, in 2Pet 1:4. And St.
Paul repeatedly urges us to put off the old man, and put on the new man.
+ + + How the Oedipal Triangle turns everything wrong side up + + +
How, then, in our “civilization with its discontents” - to use the terms of Sigmund
Freud, who with such fidelity to the clinical evidence probed the ills of our age -
how has it happened that our craving to be united to God, even to BE God, by a
return to the source of our being, a craving thus native to all creation and most of
all to the human psyche, given our faculties of knowledge and love – how has it
happened that this natural craving was instead discovered by Freud to have
been replaced in our present day psychological make-up by what he called the
Oedipal Triangle, wherein the son is obsessed with getting rid of the Father to
possess the Mother?
This is not an exclusively modern dilemma, even though it does seem to have
reached a certain acme in our day. It goes back to the very beginning of time, to
Satan’s unwillingness to serve in heaven – for he willed rather to rule in hell.
And so Satan was able, by playing on the temptation to this same mentality in
our first parents, to ensnare Eve and sow in our first parents and in their progeny
the seed of enmity toward God.
Satan’s pre-supposition was that God did not want to share his divine
prerogatives with His creatures, as he said to Eve. “The serpent said to the
woman, ‘You will not die [if you eat of the tree], for God knows that when you eat
of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’”
(Gn 3:4f) Eve was immediately convinced by this line of argumentation, and as
we know ate of the tree.
+ + + The Creator’s yin yang solution + + +
But – predictably, in keeping with yin yang - what the serpent said was such a lie
that absolutely nothing could be more contrary to the truth, for God’s very divinity
itself, the most intimate inner Life of the Tri-Une Godhead itself, is already the
unique sharing of the divine nature by the three co-equal divine Persons.
Accordingly, God had already, and this from all pre-eternity, ordained that God
the Son should become incarnate in our nature in order to elevate us to share by
participation in His divine nature. This is the 2,000 years old teaching of the
Christian Church, and if ever the world needed just this hope of salvation, it has
got to be right here and now, today.
Moreover, it is not a difficult matter to lead the people to this truth, because some
understanding of God’s Tri-Unity is universally present in all religions everywhere
throughout time. Only in our own times, in the western European culture and
wherever it has spread, has the notion of God as a monotheistic male gained
large scale credence, and it is this notion of God as selfishly aloof and uncaring –
as were so typically Europe’s “divine right” monarchs, engendering the
implacable mistrust of all authority, especially of God, Author of Creation - which
brings a person to atheism’s point of departure.
So let us now trace how God’s Triune image and likeness in us reflects the
Communion of TriUnity among the Persons of the Godhead themselves, as
depicted in the renowned icon of the Holy Trinity by St. Andre Rublev – keeping
in mind that genuine icons are not pictures reflecting the idiosyncrasies of any
particular artist, but are rather “theology writ in color”, or, again, “scripture writ in
color” as is said by Eastern Orthodox. This is in line with Aristotle’s observation
that art is more truthful than history, for any event in history could have been
otherwise while any change to an artistic work makes it other than it was (my
favorite example of this being that we could have had Napoleon without
Josephine, but not Oedipus without Jocasta). Thus we find that the most
profound mysteries are better portrayed through icons, through the Church’s
theological hymnology, as also through the parables and sacred history of the
Bible than through dogmatic propositions.
In fact, I was somewhat amused when I read the doctoral thesis Pope John Paul
II wrote as a student in the Angelicum, on “The Object of Faith in St. John of the
Cross” to note his obvious frustration inasmuch as John of the Cross never even
considers dogmatic propositions as being an object of faith. All of St. John of the
Cross’ mystical writings are predicated on God Himself being the (one and only!)
object of faith, which is “dark” and “of things unseen” (Hb 11:1) inasmuch as
God’s infinity is so beyond the powers of our finite minds that it blinds them
similarly as the sun blinds our unprotected eyes. For a young priest who seems
to have early on had some premonition of the height he would in fact attain –
squaring this with the Catholic Church’s overvaluation of Vatican
pronunciamentos, and even, of course, the claim of infallibility given certain
conditions, this must have been disconcerting indeed! The future Pope found it
necessary to add an extensive appendix of quotations from St. Thomas Aquinas,
who, since he was compiling a Theological Summa was constrained to treat the
frivolous along with real thing. St. Thomas never wavered from his repeated
contention that dogmatic formulations are but the way in which our complex
processes of ratiocination are constrained to express our knowledge of God –
which is, however, simple as God is simple. This has been the Church’s teaching
from the beginning, known as apophatic or negative theology, the via negativa,
notably as taught by Dionysius the Aereopagite (I myself learned it from St.
Thomas’ Commentary on Dionysius’ treatise On the Divine Names), and also by
an anonymous spiritual classic contemporaneous with St. John of the Cross,
“The Cloud of Unknowing”. It is not clear that Pope John Paul ever resolved the
matter in his own mind – but it may be precisely this lingering and unsettling
ambiguity that moved him to take measures that are today leading us, however
few there may be who recognize it, out of our quagmire of discontent.
The tableau of 3 figures in this icon is taken from the visit of the three angels to
Abraham and Sarah, in the Old Testament (Gen 18:1-15) They are seen as
representing the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, and are seated around a
Communion table or altar.
In my searches for a copy of the icon to download and use here, I was appalled
and not a little distressed to discover that the interpretation of this icon which has
become widely definitive reflects rather the Oedipal Triangle as set forth by
Sigmund Freud, and therefore our civilization in terms of its discontents - than the
heavenly harmony of Godly Tri-Unity so needful to our world in this present
moment. All the efforts to explain the icon that I turned up tagged the central
figure as the Son, with the Father over to His left – reflecting precisely what the
Oedipal son desires, namely, to usurp the father’s role, notably in regard to the
mother, and take the Father’s place. (Or, if that doesn’t work, kill the father – as
in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s exposition of this aberration, leading,
however, to the brothers’ healing and re-birth through a Spiritual Father, the
monk Zosima.)
In Rublev’s icon, we discern a circular movement, originating with this central
figure. We see it rotating in a clockwise direction as we focus on his hand, for His
fingers are in the position significative of the incarnation of God the Word. The
two natures, divine and human, are indicated by the extended index and middle
finger – while the thumb joined with the ring and little finger signals that He is a
Divine Person, within the TriUnity of the Godhead. Herbert, whose music was so
central to our formation, had on his piano a replica of the famous statue of the
martyr, St. Cecilia, patron saint of music. She is lying limp on the ground, her
neck severed, her head twisted downward – but her arm extended with her
fingers in just this position, professing to her earthly end, and beyond, her Faith
in The Three in One, and in the two natures of God the Son who without change
to His deity was incarnated in our fleshly human nature. (St. Cecilia’s martyrdom
is dated shortly before or after the year 200 ad, so this had to be the teaching of
the earliest Christian Church.)
The central figure in the icon would thus represent the Father, honored in the
Orthodox tradition as the unbegotten “source”, hence as “royal”, the quality
signified by the garment of this figure, which is deep crimson or purple, the color
symbolic of royalty in the iconographical tradition. His overgarment is blue, which
signifies the heavenly.
The basic garment of the person his hand points toward is blue, appropriate for
the heavenly Person Who is the Son of God, with a green overgarment – green
signifying earthly fecundity, the Son having taken on and deified, divinized, our
fleshly nature.
The blue basic garment of the third heavenly figure is visible beneath the film of
his subtly hued red overgarment suggestive of celestial fire, or of the divine
breath, fitting for a depiction of the Holy Spirit.
In this clockwise circular movement originating with the Father as he points
toward the Son we see the Triune order of the Persons as they function within
the created order wherein the Father sends His Son to become incarnate for our
sake, and the Son, in turn, sends the Spirit, the Comforter, to dwell within us and
communicate His truth to us upon His ascension to heaven.
Christ’s ascension was actually the culmination of the mystery of the Incarnation,
as indicated in Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene who was the first person He
appeared to after His Resurrection: “Do not supplicate me,” He told her as she
reached out her hands to Him, “because I have not yet ascended to the Father.
But go to My brothers and say to them: I am ascending to My Father and your
Father, to My God and your God.” (Jn 20:17) It is because Jesus first said this to
Mary Magdalene and charged her with communicating it to the apostles that she
is known as Equal to the Apostles and even The Apostle to the Apostles.
Thus it was as Christ ascended to heaven and was enthroned – in His human
incarnation, whereby therefore He also enthroned our human nature and hence
US – at the right hand of the Father, that the machinery, so to speak, for God the
Word to incarnate Himself IN EACH ONE OF US was definitively set in place.
As we sing in our services: God the Word has clothed Himself in me! It’s truly
mind boggling when you consider all that that means – and Herbert was
persecuted within the Catholic Church because that was, in fact, the cornerstone
of his teaching – as also of the authentic Christian Gospel which is to this day
observed and lived in Eastern Christianity.
In the Rublev icon, then, we see in its clockwise revolution the Father sending
His Son as our Redeemer, Who in turn sends the Spirit to be our Comforter – to
cry out Abba when we do not know how to pray. (Rm 8:14-17; 25-27 et passim)
While, in the counter clockwise direction, the Father’s face is turned toward the
Holy Spirit, who in turn looks toward the Son – representing the Spirit as the
nexus amoris, the link of love, between the Father and the Son. The downward
gaze of the Son has the effect of directing this circular movement toward that
creative moment recorded in Genesis 1:26, in which God says: Let US make
mankind in OUR image and likeness.
+ + + Scientific psychiatric corroboration + + +
The late French psychiatrist/philosopher, Jacques Lacan, explored the way this
Trinitarian image is expressed in the psyche – although I doubt he was familiar
with the relevant Christian theology, since Herbert was persecuted for his
teaching of it here, and the only other person I know of who even touched on it,
the French Dominican, Fr. Ives Congar, was totally silenced for 10 years (and
very painfully, cruelly; in addition to being forbidden to teach, write, or speak out
in any way, he was totally shunned by ALL his brothers in religion, no one
wanted to be associated with him, calling down his plight onto themselves), and
while he was sufficiently rehabilitated as to serve as an expert at Vatican II, from
the writings of his that I have been able to read, I am pretty sure he was very
severely muzzled.
I will draw upon Lacan’s researches here because all of his assertions have the
backing of his own clinical research. Moreover, instead of taking, as did Freud,
the hatred of the father so readily observable in our discontented society as his
primary focus, Lacan – as did Herbert, and as also does Ted Turner, most
notably in the political arena - concentrates upon what we find lacking, and what
we so sorely need to restore: our union, one with another.
Another point of considerable interest and weight is that the organ Lacan
recognizes as significative of this union is accorded the same recognition within
Hinduism, a religion which these days I am myself actually experiencing in my
practice of yoga, and one which dates from such a distant past that my
researches didn’t turn up anyone willing to attempt a comparison of its antiquity
with other religions, which in any case are more alike the further they recede
from later civilization. And certainly to the untutored mind, this being the mind
that would be reached by any Socratic quest, the phallus is obviously what Lacan
with all his researched data says it is: the one organ which can give rise to
“jouissance” only as uniting us with another.
I will begin with a consideration of how the Tri-Unity of the Godhead is manifest
in the human psyche – and clinically discerned by Lacan.
Jacques Lacan was first and foremost a psychiatrist, a physician of the human
person, soul and body. And so, since we, from our very first beginning, are
created in the image and likeness of the Triune God – Who said, “let US make
man in OUR image and likeness” (Gn 1:26) – we should not be surprised that
Lacan’s clinical studies find this stamp of the Holy Trinity in the human psyche.
Indeed, the accurate science and healthful practice of psychiatry inevitably will
have as a basis this Trinitarian image and likeness as actually experienced by
us.
In the theological terminology worked out by the Church Fathers in the course of
the Seven Ecumenical Councils, the three Persons of the Trinity are said to be
“subsistent relations”, which is to say that the subsistence of each Person, that
whereby each is distinguished from the others, IS “relation”, and ONLY relation.
The divine nature they share belongs to all of them, without any distinction
among them. ONLY, therefore, that relation which most intimately unites them to
one another – also distinguishes them from one another. This is the fundament of
all religious belief, the difference being that the Christian Church worked out a
specialized terminology within its Greco-Latin tradition to transmit its
foundationally Semitic conceptualizations into terms familiar to the larger world.
Sanskrit provides a similarly specialized vocabulary within Hinduism. (All of these
being - need I say it? - apophatic formulations which our complex reasoning
process must perforce make use of to express the divine reality which is
altogether simple. None can, therefore, claim to be definitively apodictic.)
This radically relational mode of being is precisely what Lacan clinically observed
in the course of his psychiatric practice. The self IS, as he stated, it is
CONSTITUTED AS THE SELF, only in relation to some Other which is not the
self. Aristotle, acknowledging this reality, called a friend or lover our “alter ego”.
In the western philosophical context within which he writes, Lacan’s effort may be
said to “desubstantialize” the self, inasmuch as he recognizes the self not as
initially a fully constituted “substantiality” which THEN, subsequently, is placed in
relation, but as constituted a self only in and by this relation.
+ + + Yin yang finale + + +
In conclusion, it is worth noting that Lacan’s
opponent in the second half of the
20th century, dominated as regards philosophy
by these two thinkers, was
Jacques Derrida, who is even known as the
philosopher of onanism.
“Dissemination” is the name of his major work,
as also of the collection of three of
Derrida’s most central and seminal works for
which he is principally known. Total
clash of opposites, utterly yin yang. Need I say
more?
