The always insightful and inspiring Bioluminescences blog offers a reflection (not unflavored by the customary proportion of rosemary) on the situation of idolatry and demonism in the derivation of evil presented in St. Athanasius' On the Incarnation. The familiar Platonic structure of imitation subverting original suggests that we should expect that these two forms of imitative divinity would automatically take pride of place in this derivation. Instead, we find the Doctor of Deathlessness (you can use that one, everybody) thoughtfully developing the imitative impieties in the context of a narrative of descent:
The last paragraph of Chapter 11 traces out a particularly striking picture of that path down through rings of Hell on Earth – a set of dominoes crashing down, one after the other, inevitably. But that idolatry and blatant sinfulness we come to expect are found in the middle of that path. They are neither the first causes nor the final effects, but rather the inglorious unfolding of a tragedy whose root is ingratitude and whose fruit is ignorance.
If ingratitude is the ground from which every impious turn begins, is gratitude a guarantee against impiety? Or are there limiting cases in which the most earnest gratitude would still devolve through demonism into a disappearance of piety? How should we read W. B. Yeats's poem, "Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors?"
What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.
What is there to be thankful for in this instruction? I wonder with a shudder at the identity of these instructors. There is the cold, unpitying savor of tragic joy in this precipitous dependence of all things upon... what remains--when all things are said to hang--for them to hang upon? Nothing. Can we be grateful for nothing?
I believe that the possibility of a redemption of Yeats's poetics hangs upon the answer to this question.
I was writing a response to your concluding question but it turned out that its length made it more suited to a post on my own blog than a response on yours. At any rate, many thanks for posting this remarkable poem; I don't recall having seen it before but there is something I love about it.
ReplyDeleteYou wrote, "but we must ask whether it is after all through some studied intellectual ascent that the original becomes discernible as such." I agree that we must ask it, that is, I believe that we should, but I would also draw attention to who we are. We seem to correspond to those for whom studied intellectual ascent "makes sense" or "is appropriate"--argh, catch-all phrases that my housemate and friend respectively bank on so often.
ReplyDeleteI have two examples of what likely does not make sense for universal studied intellectual ascent, that is, idolatry and demonism. I take it that sia is not idle, or at least, not if it is interesting. I can see two purposes for sia that avoid idleness: first, understanding for the sake of action (supposing that action should be taken, definitely or indefinitely), and second, understanding in immanent exercise of our humanity (which I would compare to the feelings had in relation to art, when these do not serve action).
Rarely is it that no action should be taken. This is especially apparent when one considers the goodness of pursuing virtue, even when no known events demand action, in the medium, one might say, of imagination if not reality. (...Because meaningfulness is not limited by the bounds of responding to events.) Virtue is always real, is it not?
I mean to say that there are those who would not gain from employment in sia with respect to action or immanent exercise of nature.
As always, I love the tightly-stitched intricacy of your thought, with its use of leitmotif, concision, plenitude, metaphor, strictness of thought, and poems.
I do not know whether gratitude stands as a sure guard against descent or whether it, too, may yield (to) it. But if the gift bespeaks the giver, and the gift it good, then the giver is good; and if we have gratitude for what is good, then so long as we have gratitude, we shall have it toward something good (or someone good) and therefore not nothing nor any demon.
ReplyDeleteIf knowing the giver, however, guarantees understanding the gift, then one more easily imagines a dimunition of gratitude, according to a dimunition of knowledge about the giver, even given constancy of gifts and gratitude for them.
Error during redaction: I meant to say that one more easily imagines a dimunition of gratitude as piety, and gratitude itself, according to the dimunition of knowledge about the giver, even given constancy in the giver's gifts and gratitude as enjoying them with perhaps the wish to have gratitude toward a giver.
ReplyDeleteRolf, I wonder what you mean by "ascent," if you concede that it is not ascent to knowledge of God which could be secured by intellectual application. What other ascent is there that does not render "studied intellectual ascent" pleonastic? You suggest that SIA (I still need to know what sense this term has for you; for my part I only brought it up to deny it) makes sense as the basis of real or imagined action. But does action found itself on the transparency of an original?
ReplyDeleteI think you have described pretty well how in general the limit on the guarantee of gratitude would have to be drawn. But this limit seems to reduce the guarantee to nothing, unless there is a way of discerning, not in retrospect, but in advance, the goodness of the source.
Sebastian, I did see your post on the poem. I really must reply to it soon.
ReplyDeleteSIA might not only lead up to knowledge of God. It might also be one of the two parts of philosophy, the other part being studied intellectual descent. On this supposition and in the simplest of successful cases, SIA yields knowledge of some one truth, and SID yields knowledge of the relation of that truth to some other one seemingly in tension with it. In more complex cases, they involve many truths, perhaps subordinated to one another or in some other relation, and images of an original.
ReplyDeleteI do not know that SIA is the only way to attain knowledge of God. It seems to me, rather, that it provides a situation in which a person may attain the knowledge that others have without the labor of study, the intellectual removal of reflection, or the trek of ascent--then again, perhaps everyone who attains knowledge about God does so in this way, only without reading books classified as philosophy. Just ask: what is a person doing who attains knowledge of God while reading a book with a different classification or without any book at all, hearing someone talk or thinking alone?
I regard as rhetorical, but therefore not illegitimate, St. Augustine's doctrine that the pagan gods are demons.
It would make sense if he meant by pagan gods those bodiless persons that are evil or do evil, including the evil of giving gifts to humans that, themselves perhaps good, produce evil among humans. I add that one disqualifier for an alleged apparition of Jesus, a saint, or an angel, with regard to the Catholic Church condoning belief in the apparition, is if it yields evil fruit.
St. Augustine's doctrine does not make sense if he means that pious pagans are not pious. Idolatry, I am told, consists in paying to a creature the piety due to God, that is, transferred piety. But can the composite of something with something else (transferred piety) be an image of that first something by itself (original piety)? The strangeness of this might be the result of the clash between metaphor and strictness of thought.
The irony is not lost on me that my sympathies lie less with Augustine than with an Augustinian. Kierkegaard, or rather his pseudonym, Climacus, explains religiousness as simultaneously relating absolutely to the absolute end and relatively to relative ends. The absolute end only comes into being for a person when the person relates absolutely to it; the person who relates relatively to the absolute end does not relate to it, and no one can relate absolutely to an relative end.
Climacus does not explain how one goes about knowing what the absolute end is or how to relate absolutely to it--whether it is innate knowledge or whether it comes from hearing an authority, seeing the invisible nature of God in nature, or SIA... Instead, he retorts about the impertinence of proving the existence of someone who is present, God being present everywhere.
If one cannot determine the direction of knowledge (from the gift to the giver or from the giver to the gift) before one attains the knowledge of God, then perhaps one must wait upon that knowledge as upon a gift of inspiration.
ReplyDeleteBut if there is only one source of what is good, and if one has gratitude only for what is good, and if one has gratitude only to the source of what is good, then one should not need to worry, even if gratitude can only be had to a personal source (since gratitude can only be had for gifts and gifts can only come from a personal giver), so long as the source of what is good is personal.
I think it is remarkable that the very way in which you explain the possibility of evil givers is identical with the way in which traditional theodicy (including St. Augustine's) shows that God did not give man a poisoned present in making him free, knowing that this freedom would produce evils. How do you explain this likeness?
ReplyDeleteThe rule for the discernment of spirits needs more clarification than you've given it if it is not to condemn the whole Creation as a false apparition.
I would love to answer you, but I do not understand you.
ReplyDeleteI will say more about how one knows the giver (particularly whether the giver is good or evil) if you say more about how one knows the gift (particularly that it is a gift).