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Error, Reality, and Religion.

17-Aug-10

“To follow It, you must be cleaned –

With mistakes that you do mean.”

Not long ago, I was speaking with a group of people about serious things, and the word “reality” was used.  The woman who used it, who had sampled the waters of the various religions, corrected herself: “What am I saying,” she said.  “There’s no such thing as reality.”

I did not object at the time, but I certainly observed the moment and thought about what her saying this meant.  I thought about the fact that in my own life, nothing seems so obvious as reality – an external that is indifferent to our command and invulnerable to our will – and similarly nothing so obvious as the fact that all my attempts to create my own reality end in suffering – at times, terrible suffering.  Perhaps this was not true for her – perhaps she did not feel the universe’s punishment for having her own version of things.  But I suspected her experience was more like mine than she might have admitted.

Let me start with something of a definition of terms.  I would call “reality” that external phenomenon, the object of our senses, which is either in accord or at variance with our perception.  Of course we can have variant perceptions, and of course at times these variances cannot be adjudicated to ascertain which is the more accurate.  But that there is something of which our perceptions are but a measure I think is repeatedly demonstrated to us, not always immediately, but certainly over the course of time.  The best demonstration of this is the simple fact that our measurements of reality are at times horribly inaccurate, and the results we achieve far from what we had expected.  In small and physical matters – such as measurements when building something of wood – the result of the error may be additional labor, wastage of materials, or maculate workmanship.  In emotional, personal, and business matters the results may be failure, pain, betrayal, divorce, estrangement, and other forms of suffering.  Error of either type is a constant companion to me; and each time it comes unexpectedly, when I am quite confident I am correct.  Time reveals the mistake; I am each time incapable of preempting it.  But now I do not let errors go without interrogating them: “Why did I misjudge that person so badly?”  “How could I have felt I could get this done?”  “Why did I think this was going to make me happy?”  “Am I the only one who believed this would be enough for me?”  “Why didn’t I see this coming?”  “What does it mean that I see these things that are not there?”  “Why did I hold on so long?”  “Why did I think she would laugh when I said that?”  At times even the slightest misperceptions can be baffling and significant: “Why did I think she had black hair?”  “Why did I buy a whole keg of beer for this party?”  “Why did I think his name was Ajax?”  (Perhaps the last one has happened only to me.)

At times of course the universe is terrifying in its harsh punishment of error.  Death is the result of seemingly minor lapses – a rock climber who believes that his rock will hold, or a driver who thinks the alcohol has not impaired him that much.  Adults are generally good at detecting danger and avoiding it, but the world is especially dangerous to children precisely because their judgement is so barely developed.  There is something horrible about the finality of these punishments – particularly with children, who have every excuse for poor judgement.

But there is room for hope.  To me the existence of an external standard against which we can measure our judgements – and I cannot see why such a thing cannot be fairly given the name “reality,” even to the most hardened Academic – is one of the real reasons for optimism in life.  At times the pain of life can be diminished by the mere thought, “Now I know.  Never again.”  (Similarly one of the greatest sorrows is knowing that in the moment when your wisdom was called upon, when all the things you had learned were measured in the balance, the sum of it was insufficient, and your failure irrevocable and permanent.)  And it appears that the accuracy of our perceptions can indeed improve, which is heartening.  Indeed nothing is sadder or more frustrating than to see the opposite – a person who makes the same mistakes over and over again, and suffers the same things over and over again, without learning.  It indicates some resistance to reality, some failure of the permeability of the person’s membrane with the universe, which in the end is the height of impiety.  Jesus called his followers mathetai – “learners,” disciples (itself from the Latin discere, to learn).

I will linger just a bit longer on the objections of the relativists.  They like to fasten on more subjective judgements which vary widely – such as beauty – and then they pronounce, “You see!  Everyone makes their own reality.”  But even these highly subjective judgements make a good subject for scrutiny.  “Wow.  She’s beautiful.”  “You think so?  Really?”  For two articulate, self-aware people, these variances in judgement can be the portals of discovery.  Perceptions, thrown against a more objective standard, reveal the shape of the perceiver’s eye.

The steady pursuit of questions such as the ones above – the true “examination of conscience” which is the prequel to confession (I will note that the Latin conscientia from which the phrase is transliterated is far richer than the word “conscience” in English, meaning all forms of interior awareness, and not merely moral scruple) – results in the conviction that there is a reality indeed, and further, that you habitually distort it in specific ways.  These patterns of distortion are discernible and can be taken into account, if not cured.  Just as when you are shooting at a target across a field, you may find that your aim has some bias; but you may correct for it.  When I place the crosshairs on my target, my bullets fall short; so I put the crosshairs slightly above, and hit it.  In Greek, the language of the Gospels, the word hamartia means “missing the target”: it is translated in every Bible as “sin.”  (Don’t get me started on whether or not you can really understand Christianity without knowing Greek, or at least being taught by someone who really knows what the Gospels say in Greek.)

I do not say this to make light of sin.  These patterns of distortion are in the fullest and truest sense vices or sins, and a great portion of the sadness of the world originates from them.  But I do want to say this: the most common cause of bad behavior – “sins,” the outcome of sin – is distortion of perception.  This becomes obvious when you investigate someone’s motives – “What were you trying to accomplish?  What do you want?” – you see always that the person desires not the result achieved, but something utterly different, something that could never be achieved by the means employed.  But a host of things stand in the way of accomplishment, each inclining the person’s actions away from their goal: sloth, acquisitiveness, deceit, lust, anger, fear, pride, envy, gluttony.  And their punishment is to watch themselves fail, over and over again, unless they correct it.

I will connect the dots here, to be obvious.  It is easy to see how pride can distort one’s perception of reality: a proud person will believe they can accomplish more than they can, in less time, and will often need to praise it more than it deserves; this leads to deceit.  We all know people who have to present their lives as happy, as they are unable to confront it in its true dimensions – also a typical distortion.  Similarly we know people whose fears corrupt the moment, or whose laziness robs them of what they could be, or whose anger alienates the allies they most need to help the causes they feel passionately about.  And there are people who hold on to things so long they cannot grasp reality anymore.  When people have photos up on their walls of loved ones, I am always curious to know how old the photos are – so often the photo is an image of a period held up as idyllic, but no longer corresponding to the way things are (and perhaps not to the way they were either).  For each of these distortions you are likely to pay a price.  I know an old woman who carries a photo of her young self in her wallet at all times.  “This is what I looked like when I was young,” she says, showing it to anyone who will look.  Who doubts that this is a kind of hell to be in?  She is not that anymore, it is gone.  And what suffering there will be, every day, until she accepts reality – it is painful to think on.

Indeed we see this often with old people, who often feel the punishment in the most elementary way possible: they attempt to do the things they once could, and find that they are not as nimble, not as strong, not as resilient as they once were.  You hope that the only consequences are bruises or broken bones.

And the thing you really hope for is some kind of breakthrough, some realization of how far you have gone astray, which Jesus called metanoia, another one of the endlessly fascinating Gospel words, meaning literally “alteration of mind” but having all kinds of other shades of meaning.  It is universally translated into English as “repentance,” and the command metanoiete, the one-word slogan of Jesus’s ministry, as “repent.”  There is reason for this: when you change your mind about something, you “repent.”  But in the end nothing can change the fact that these are terrible translations, and they managed to make it through the entire 20th century untouched, despite literally dozens of new Bible translations being done into English.  But the original word metanoia is a good term for the breakthrough of which I speak: a vision of your old way of thinking, and all the suffering it has caused, which alters you.  It is a conversion.  I have found that the most common sign of this breakthrough is tears – tears of contrition.  The symbolic coincidence is so unusual it seems even contrived – “the cleansing of the doors of perception” – but so it is when you ascend to the next terrace of self-understanding.  The saints speak of “the gift of tears.”  When you see how what you thought was your grief was your pride, when you see how you set yourself up for every failure, when you see how you yourself threw away the blessings you had – how can you not weep?  But as the tears dry you can feel the new level of awareness you have and the new clarity of sight, and you know that somehow your life is not over, but an opportunity for some new beginning has been given, one armed with new understanding.  “Blessed are those who weep.”

This is the contemplative life; its goal is ever refined power of perception.  The great mystics and teachers have often been credited with clairvoyance – habits of perception so sharp that it appears mystical.  Of course they pursue this: because “through him all things were made, and nothing was made without him”: what lover of the Maker would permit in himself ignorance of the things made?  We should beware of any teacher without this – for the spiritual life is meant to be not an escape, but precisely a closer intimacy with reality.  If this is not achieved, then why take upon oneself the burden of a religion?  If you take violin lessons and in the end cannot play violin, what good is that?  The stubborn memorizing and clinging to a system of doctrines is superfluous, if it cannot unlock God’s reality.  There is a problem if you have to salt your salt.  You know that you are on the path, when the things read are revealed in your life; when you have seen and lived parables; when the things you hear in your religion are not reverend and distant, but so near to your heart you feel they were written about you because your life itself has taught them to you.

But this also indicates another idea: that the errors of perception you have seen in your own life may exist in your religion as well.  The correction of these errors has been the work of the Prophets; and woe to the religion which admits of no prophecy and no correction.  They bequeath all their accumulated errors to individuals to correct.  But the statements of the religions may be tested by individuals for their truthfulness; many things will be found to be true, though in ways other than the obvious; and what old wineskins can take no new wine, have reached the end of their usefulness.  But this testing to find the true, needful as it may be, may itself lead to error: the things you tossed aside as useless at the beginning of your journey, may be by the end the one thing needful, and you may need to go back to get it; for God does not keep us from errors.

Harmony with reality is the goal; and the path to this place leads through many errors and corrections, like a circle being approximated by a polygon of many straight lines.  We are drawn off into tangents.  Eternal vigilance is required; but a rhythm develops. You begin to fear long straight paths without corrections.  But what bliss – as the poet says –

But already I could feel my being turned –

Instinct and intellect balanced equally,

As in a wheel whose motion nothing jars,

By the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

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Bear Gardening.

11-Aug-10

We were landscaping this week in Silver Hollow – a beautiful part of the Catskills, one I’ve known for awhile.  Today as I was finishing up – my colleague had just pulled out – I heard some weird chattering in the woods, almost like laughter, and the breaking of a large branch, which then came down the mountain somewhat.  I looked up and saw, about a hundred feet away, a medium-sized bear looking at me.  I presume it was him making the odd chattering, though I had never heard the like from a bear before.  He looked unusually bold and threatening – there was an unusual confidence in his eyes –  so I got up and started yelling, telling him to “get out of here.”  I also walked right toward him, but not for any other reason than the fact that the house was between me and him, and I wanted to head for some kind of cover.

He scampered off, crashing through the woods as bears do.  But he did not retreat back up the mountain – he kept on coming down it, though going around the house.  He must have had something specific he wanted downhill.  I yelled to some other workmen further down the mountain that a bear was approaching, and then got back to work.

There was also a beehive in the ground where we were planting for this job, which brought about the occasional comedy, as every now and again the bees would get upset at our work and cause an interruption.  It’s funny especially because they can’t really do us any serious harm, and we know that, but we human beings are much more afraid of pain than we are of harm, really.

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Summer Afternoon Baroque Clouds.

10-Aug-10

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A Little Plato for Pleasure (and Pain).

09-Aug-10

On entering we found Socrates just released from chains, and Xanthippe, whom you know, sitting by him, and holding his child in her arms. When she saw us she uttered a cry and said, as women will: “O Socrates, this is the last time that either you will converse with your friends, or they with you.” Socrates turned to Crito and said: “Crito, let someone take her home.” Some of Crito’s people accordingly led her away, crying out and beating herself. And when she was gone, Socrates, sitting up on the couch, began to bend and rub his leg, saying, as he rubbed: “How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they never come to a man together, and yet he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other. They are two, and yet they grow together out of one head or stem; and I cannot help thinking that if Aesop had noticed them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows, as I find in my own case pleasure comes following after the pain in my leg, which was caused by the chain.”

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Jung on Dreams.

09-Aug-10

“It is from the all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it ever so childish, grotesque, or immoral. So flowerlike is it in its candor and veracity that it makes us blush for the deceitfulness of our lives.”

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Cloisters.

08-Aug-10

I spent Saturday at the Cloisters, and achieved one of my goals of measuring the cloistered gardens there.  I was informed by the guard that the reconstructed gardens do not represent the original dimensions, but that was really no concern to me: what impressed me is that each one of the cloisters works as a garden space, and so its proportions are better than merely original, they are satisfying in themselves.

The covered walkways around the gardens all ranged from eight to eleven feet, and the eleven-foot ambulatory seemed cavernous.  Eight feet is quite satisfactory.  I’ve laid out twelve feet of space for my own garden, allowing me up to four feet of wall space, if I ever built in stone; the typical wall-enclosure in all the Cloisters’ gardens was two feet thick, which is perfect for sitting on.  If I never build in stone, I can fold the extra space into more garden.

The main thing that I learned is that the gardens are not really square: 42 (? I did get distracted while measuring this one; maybe 36) x 31, 59 x 48 (the most beautiful of them, the Cuxa Cloister), and 27 x 21 (there is also a square one which is not enclosed, 56 x 56).  Though I have been there several times, I never registered the elongation.  This makes me think that my own arrangement may be a bit too square (I’ve laid out a 72′ square, with 24′ of walkways and a 48′ square garden).  My answer might be to permit irregularities if they arise: it’s impressive how they certainly do not detract, and may even help, in architecture.

The Cloisters has a blog for its gardens, which is lovely and civilized.

It surprises me, in general, that this form – the cloistered garden – which is so satisfying to the senses, is now so rarely found in new buildings.  In the Catskills its return would be tremendously useful, because it provides outdoor space (which is what you want in a summer home) and protects plants against wild animals.

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On Native Plant Gardening.

07-Aug-10

Not long ago, when advising some friends who were about to start a garden, I told them to plant a state-of-the-art garden, meaning not a technologically complex one, but rather one in accord with the best knowledge we have of what constitutes excellence in a home garden.  This can be expressed on the smallest levels – get the best-bred cultivars and best-performing plants – but more important than that are two principles which are emerging as good guiding principles for small gardens.  The first is to plant edibles.  Every bit of research indicates that fresh, local calories represent the fullest development of arete–virtu-excellence in food.  While there are some crazies who hate any kind of “mess” like fruits or nuts when it comes to plants, people are generally amenable to this idea (and there are plants like blueberries and serviceberries and strawberries which create no mess).

The second principle is to use native plants.  This requires more persuasion and argumentation.  Many of the most desirable plants – which look good with no maintenance whatsoever through the entire year – are not native.  The classic Northeastern American garden is composed mostly of nonnatives: ivy, pachysandra, boxwood, yew, flowering cherries, hostas, daylilies, japanese maple, peonies, most roses, barberry, forsythia, rose of sharon, daffodils, tulips, lilacs, and so on.  Refusing to install these plants leaves you with a significantly reduced plant palette.  And while many nonnative plants are delicate, others like pachysandra and ivy appear to be made of iron and will grow beautifully where other plants will look spindly and miserable.  It is a sacrifice to give up such plants.

But the argument to stop using these plants is becoming increasingly persuasive.  The full argument has not yet been put together, because the reasons, which have to do with the health of the entire ecosystem, are extraordinarily complex, but the two books which put the case most convincingly are Sara Stein’s Noah’s Garden and Douglas Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home.

Stein’s book is casual in tone and serves as a kind of memoir of her garden career: she had purchased a large suburban property, admiring its abundance of life, and in the process of turning it into a well-tended garden, she managed to drive away precisely the charismatic fauna she had enjoyed.  She cleared a field of weeds that had been home to monarch butterflies, and put in perennial borders and shrubs which the monarchs did not visit.  Eventually she realized that monarch movements are keyed specifically to asters and (especially) goldenrod, which most gardeners treat as weeds, and of course they depend entirely on the presence of milkweed to feed their caterpillars.  In clearing these plants out, despite the fact that her property looked neater and did have flowers, she ended up killing any monarchs that might once have been nourished by her property.  This is but one of many stories from the book, which has as its general lesson: the native animals have all evolved to gather food from specific native plants at very specific times.  Even substituting a foreign viburnum for a native one in order to get blooms later in the year may mean that it can no longer provide berries for birds at the precise time they are in the area on their migrations.  The system is inimitably complex, and the best thing to do is to preserve or restore it as much as possible.  Stein describes her adventures remaking her garden with native plants, and seeing, with real satisfaction, the return of the animals that had been driven out by her pachysandra and daffodils and lilacs and forsythia.

Douglas Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home makes a more thorough and scientific argument (which I will detail shortly), focusing especially on insects.  Even North American insects show astounding beauty and diversity, and Tallamy’s book is one of the few nature-books photographed in Delaware – and in mere suburban gardens – which is legitimately beautiful.  However, even for an entomologist like Tallamy, the insect-plant relationship is hopelessly complicated, and so Tallamy focuses merely on “lepidopterans” – butterflies and moths – as insects that we can all agree are worth protecting.  Even with such a narrow focus, there are literally hundreds of species locked into highly specific life cycles utterly dependent on the presence of native plants in the Northeastern United States, and understanding or replacing the whole system of interrelationships is impossible.  Tallamy’s main conclusion is the same as Stein’s: plant natives.

It is worth taking a look at the basic argument, which is continually being elaborated as the state of the art advances.  It goes something like this: all life on earth (with only trivial exceptions) derives its energy from the sun via the photosynthetic process of plants.  All animals either eat plant-tissue or eat other animals which have eaten plant-tissue.  All ecosystems are elaborate modes of extracting energy from plants, and in every natural ecosystem every plant provides food for multiple other creatures.  If this interface is severed, then there will necessarily be less life on earth.  This is precisely what happens with nonnative plants.  Pachysandra looks good all the time in North America because almost nothing can eat it.  It is virtually a plastic plant.  Hence all of the energy it captures from the sun remains pachysandra, and is not converted into caterpillars or lightning bugs or deer or anything else.  Hence fewer butterflies and fawns and fireflies.

Of course the amount of solar energy the pachysandra by your driveway captures is insignificant, but of course the amount of petroleum you yourself consume is insignificant too.  No one has done a thorough census of these things, but a large percentage of the plant material in North America is now nonnative – supposedly around 40% in the New York City area, even worse in places like California.  Farmland of course contains few natives and no wildlife either, so much of the interior of the continent is now ecologically barren – supposedly around 2% of the prairie remains in a relatively natural state.  When your eyes become trained to recognize nonnative plants, it becomes slightly frightening to realize that you can drive for hundreds of miles without coming across a single undisturbed plot of native plants.  The scale of our alterations to the landscape is mindboggling.

What is more, the effect we have on plants has an exponential effect on the upper reaches of the ecosystem.  If you reduce, say, the density of native plants by ten percent, that may reduce the density of mice by twenty percent; which may reduce the density of owls, bobcats, and snakes by fifty percent, or eliminate them entirely.  This helps explain the seemingly impossible descriptions of North American wildlife by the earliest Europeans – we almost cannot conceive of an environment so fecund – but it may well have been like that, at one point.

The good side of this massive manipulation of the environment by human beings is that if we can manipulate vegetation in one direction, with some attention we can manipulate it back.  Not only that, but such a project does not require giant investment on a vast impersonal scale, like “the hydrogen economy” or things of that nature.  Almost any homeowner can make minor improvements which will enable his land to support more life; and there is room for eco-Johnny Appleseeds, to restore the landscape; there is increasing interest in nurseries and landscaping businesses of this type.  And the rewards can be quick and tangible: on many occasions as the landscaping company I work for has put in plants, we have found that by the end of the day, as we are cleaning up the site, the first bees and butterflies have found the plants we just installed.  And single gardens do make a difference: my mother’s garden was always noticeably different from others in the neighborhood, because she did less “gardening,” let things go to seed, composting all garden waste rather than throwing it away, etc.

Some of this requires a departure from traditional gardening, which I will call Selfish Giant gardening, after the figure in the Fairy Tale.  The Selfish Giant, for instance, will kill a caterpillar or beetle he sees eating a plant.  Tallamy reminds us that insects are utterly essential to life on earth: not only are they pollinators and seed dispersers and scavengers with a huge role in producing humus, but they are also the most efficient converters of plant tissue into animal tissue, and hence become the most important food source for predators.  Even large animals like bears and coyotes eat insects.  And almost all birds rely on insects as protein sources when feeding their young.  In short, plants are the interface between the sun and life, and insects are the prime interface between plants and the rest of Nature.  And most insects, we know, are so specifically adapted into niches that they can only survive with plants with which they share an evolutionary history (i.e., natives).  What is more, in cold climates they almost all die during the winter, and their eggs must overwinter somewhere, often in leaves or plant stems or seedpods; precisely the things that Selfish Giants clean up and burn (or bag and send to the dump).

It will be asked then, will this insect-friendly gardening not create endless pest problems?  The answer, in general, is no: a garden which is hospitable to herbivorous insects also thereby becomes hospitable to any number of animals which eat herbivorous insects, and if the system is complex enough, it will find a balance.  The biggest exception will be introduced pests which are themselves nonnative: these at times run amok.  But if you are planting a diversity of species, you will not find them all destroyed by insects.  Nature knows how to damage without destroying.

This is becoming the new gardening, not merely to find beauty in visual arrangement, but to take the perspective of Life itself: whatever nourishes the life around it, is beautiful; and whatever stays within itself, inert and ungiving, is ugly.  The pleasure you receive thereby, seeing not only your plants but the life your plants sustain, is like that of Adam in paradise; the other animals become your brothers, and admire your gardens with you, and you find God himself strolling through them in the cool of evening.

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A religious leader on music…

06-Aug-10

In my last piece I noted quickly that music tends to go with religion, as indicating a life of pure ornament without further purpose, like a wayside shrine or a stained-glass window – indeed like everything treated as holy as opposed to useful.  Here’s another perspective.

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Descending the Hierarchy of Being

06-Aug-10

“And he saw in his dreams a ladder standing upon the earth, its top touching heaven, and angels of the Lord ascending and descending on it.”

I recently spent a good deal of time with a group of Latin speakers, and had opportunity to observe one of the metaphors most dear to Latinists, the Platonic/Neoplatonic “hierarchy of being.”  The idea is that we see in the universe a continuum of complexity, beginning with the most simple elements and rocks; then progressing to plants, which have life; then animals, which have life and breath and sensation; then to human beings, who have life and breath and sensation and reason (or consciousness); and by the power of our fantasy we can conceive, whether truly or falsely, of higher forms of being than ourselves, the various types of angels, the whole hierarchy culminating in God, who has the Utmost of Being.  The Renaissance men like Pico della Mirandola made much of this hierarchy, and also of the central position of man: and that he could by his choices perhaps shift his position somewhat, and ascend or descend on what they called the ladder of being: he could be like the angels, arms and voices of the most high, or like beasts, or, in the most stupefied state, like vegetables.  The good man, according to this logic, ascends the ladder.

Latinists often refer to this reasoning, not only because they are likely to have read Latin writers like Pico della Mirandola, but also because the same hierarchy can be expressed culturally: nobility of soul, development of consciousness, theology and epic poetry (and ancient languages) represent the higher reaches of the human portion of the hierarchy of being, and human activities relating to things like sex and food, which we have in common with animals, are lower.  Not surprisingly, you meet quite a few Latinists who are thin and childless.  This is no surprise because the natural tendency of the human mind is to see opposition: you cannot study theology and also have children: the higher cannot go with the lower; they are opposed.

This reasoning is not entirely false.  In life we cannot do all; and hence at some point the presence of one thing means the absence of something else.  Highly successful people see these oppositions and ruthlessly pursue one thing at the expense of others.  But this is worldly thinking; it is not the religious view of the world.

Worldly thinking centers on achievement within a social framework: it looks to what is useful and utilitarian and honored; it looks to means.  Religion throws these goals into a different perspective; what difference does it make, really, if you throw a fabulous party, or run a marathon, or get the promotion, sub specie aeternitatis?  The religious answer is, not much; and perhaps more is done, religiously, if your party fails, or you break your leg during the marathon, or are humiliated at work.  For God’s purposefulness is of a different sort; according to traditional theology, God did not make fruits so that man could eat them, or oil so that we could have fuel for our cars (all examples of worldly thinking posing as religion), indeed not to serve any other thing, but, as Aquinas says, ut essent – “that they might exist.”  Being is higher than purpose.

Hence religious buildings have always been the least utilitarian of all buildings – shrines and pagodas and soaring cathedrals and stupas contain innumerable unnecessary elements.  They are, in fact, frequently entirely ornament – for this purposelessness is the religious mode of thinking, that things exist for no ulterior motive but merely that they might have being.  And religion is similarly the abode of music, which we make that it might exist.  The communism of the 19th and 20th centuries represents the opposite pole of thought: there everything was purposeful, nothing was ornament, and everything served; and hence, communism was opposed to religion and the monastic life (and skeptical of music as well).  But from the religious perspective, it is more important that a man be who he is, than achieve some notable thing; the saints are miracles of being, not men with long lists of achievements.  What a man achieves is his; who he is is God’s.

Hence we see in the monastic life, that in order to achieve this fulness of self, and to alter the mode of thought, that the most talented young novices are frequently put not to work on things of lofty purpose, but are given the lowliest tasks (usually in tales it is herding pigs).  The thinking is utterly different from the hierarchical mode: the goal is not to live on a diet of Thomas Tallis, Vergil’s Georgics, and the late Beethoven string quartets.  Dante asked the souls in the lower reaches of heaven, if they didn’t wish to be a little higher?  They said no, their happiness is being who they are, and not being better than they are.  That is the best infinity for them.  The reaching for the highest things, in fact, is Luciferian: the straining for the heights produces a counter-reaction in the depths, strengthening your lowest parts, which rise in revolt and bring you back to your proper place.  Time and again in bad religion we see this striving after an exalted purity code end in hypocrisy and depravity.

What is required, all in all, is both to ascend and descend the hierarchy of being; and not merely to push upward one rung at a time, and remain there.  People who attempt the latter always fall.  If you need to hold on that tightly, you are too high.  It is better to move down and master the rungs below, before you attempt the higher ones.

For in truth the ladder is like a pyramid, whose heights always presuppose broad foundations below.  The sign of the truly higher life, is that it contains all the lower.  For indeed the whole is knitted together, and one thing is the sign or symbol of another.  I have learned to read men by how they eat, or how their eyes move, or how they hold their spines; for the lower is the field of manifestation of the higher.  This is the Incarnation, and Christian theology and ethics: again and again Christ said to judge men’s opinions of God by how they treated “the least of them,” prostitutes and beggars.  Philippo Neri is said to have tested the famed sanctity of a nun, by entering her room, throwing himself on a chair, and sticking his muddy boot at her, for her to remove; when she looked at him aghast, he knew her “sanctity” was self-inflating purity and pride.

One of the goals of spiritual development, in fact, can be to comfortably descend, knowing that you will lose nothing, that God can bring you up again; that you may course through the forest looking for food like some wild animal, or float in the warm water of a pond like a lilypad, or lay on a mountainside and let the stars shine the way they do on innumerable rocks and asteroids scattered throughout the entire universe, and in all these things you can leave, even if for just a moment, your self-serving individuality, and find yourself slipping into some other mode of thought, where you are not observing God’s creation, looking always for advantage, but being it.  At times monastic discipline can have as its goal to reduce us to the nature of a rock, and to pure being, almost without life.  You do not need to hold on so tightly to what you have acquired in your life; you know the answer but do not need to say it; you know what you deserve but are no longer crushed when you do not attain it.  This is the freedom we acquire when we pass under and know the sign of Jonah.  You will love your neighbor as yourself because you will no longer know where he begins, and you end.

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Staten Island.

28-Jul-10

The book is stalled a bit, as we’re looking for the right paper for the edition, which needs a 19th c. feel; the papers looked a bit modern and slick and had to be changed.  I’ll keep you updated.

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