It occurs to me that much of that vagina monologue could have been founded on 1 Timothy 2:15, but since A. the Apostle's reasoning seems based on obligations created after and consequent to the Fall and B. the Apostle is fine with women staying virgins elsewhere, we must conclude that the Apostle means reproduction can be a soteriologically positive activity if it takes place amidst the cultivation of the theological virtues. Believe me, I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be having children. (No one has said I was, but I wanted to make sure we're clear and I'm honest about the voice of Scripture.) Thank you for your attention.
Of the Holy Ghost
The Holy Ghost...
Perhaps, no quirk of English usage in theology has produced more humor than the title of the Third Person of the Trinity. We really have two options in interpreting Ghost as translation of the Latin spiritus or Greek pneuma . One is to see the Spirit (Ghost) as the incorporeal part of God. This is rather problematic in a number of ways. First, God doesn't have a body per se as we have said. Second, even if the Spirit were some more ineffable animating principle of God (who doesn't have a body), the Spirit somehow would be higher (or lower depending on your feelings on the hierarchy of effability) than the other Persons.
Third, such a status would suggest the Spirit was chiefly potential or participated chiefly in tendencies or potentiality. (What I mean by tendencies is this: in numerical physical prediction, it is often easier to calculate the trend or rate of change over time in a particular quantity at one or more times in the past to predict what will occur in the future than predicting everything a priori, Aristotelian potentiality reminds me of a purposeful tendency. Note that I only depend on Aristotle here because the Articulators may have been conscious of Aristotle's actual doctrine of the soul and its implications.) But whatever the passive implications of being a spirit, the Holy Spirit is certainly active. At the beginning, the Spirit moves over the primordial Chaos while Creation is spoken by the Father through or as the Son. The implication and the probable Scriptural seed of the beloved and problematic Neoplatonic problematization of the order we believe divine is confirmed elsewhere. The 104th Psalm asks, "Send forth your Spirit, O Lord and renew the face of the earth." In the New Testament, we are told the Spirit blows where it wills, plays a key role in the baptism preached by Christ, and performs all kinds of mediation between man and God. To summarize and do homage: the Lord, the Giver of life doesn't seem like a tame and ineffable Spirit. If one Person can be said to more active than another, we would place on our bets on the Spirit except for those few years near the beginning of the Era when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. For the rest of the thirteen or fourteen billion years in which the worlds were made and continue in change and corruptibility, the Spirit seems to have been active.
So what's our other option? Well, we could see pneuma as wind and spiritus
as something different than the modern word spirit. We call liquor spirits in homage not just to the ineffable vapor of alcohol's volatilization but the very nature of its volatility. Liquor burns very well. The OED suggests blast as in storm-blast as an alternative translation of spiritus than ghost, and this seems like the sense of Ghost in ghost. Perhaps, the 1979 BCP by making fair linguistic concessions to modernity made quite a gaffe by talking about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when the doctrinal sense is neither carried by ghost or spirit as understood in modern usage. Perhaps, we ought to worship Father, Son, and Holy Blast or Father, Son, and Holy Blow (sounds a tad irreverent to me even if it might be more accurate.)
Perhaps, I might suggest another alternative. The Roman lawyers speak of the notion we call "Act of God" in terms of "irresistible or divine force ( vis divina ." In Greek law, they note this idea was captured under heading, "Act of God." But usually the lawyers talk in terms of rivers who overflow their common banks, unexpected landslides, great windstorms, and strong earthquake, a departure from past behavior which no prudent man can plan against and no work of man resist. As much as this is true of those acts of Nature that belong to God only insofar as Nature's author, this is true of the workings of the Holy Spirit in the worlds. The Spirit is a fire, a rush of wind, and all manner of other things, though the Spirit simply may be most deeply "a still, small voice" etc. of 2 Kings. Much more I could say on this, but I do like the ambiguity of the Spirit's nature in the story of the Samaritan Woman at Jacob's Well in 4:10. Christ offers the woman "living water." This is one of those moments where the poetry of the Bible seems present in the very realia of a conversation two thousand years ago. The Samaritan woman is drawing well water, which could be brackish and full of all sorts of contaminants. It was generally still and standing water (and less healthy). When the Samaritan woman asks about the living water she could mean two things, either she believes Jesus can give her some sort of special water or she believes that Jesus can give her inside information about a hidden river or stream in the area. "Living water" can mean in Greek water that is alive or a stream and river (in which the flowing water does seem to be alive). I've always read this story as a promise of the Holy Spirit, so I always thought it instructive to think of the Holy Spirit as a turbulent river. But if the Spirit is a turbulent river, we still might be able to drink it and never be thirsty again.
The problem with the analogies of the Holy Spirit with irresistible forces of nature is that they lose force when nature has been disenchanted. Whatever language of nature we use to name the Spirit and give worship makes the Spirit impersonal. The only other tack I can take is to see the idea of the Holy Spirit (or really matters spirtual in general) as effable through those times when our spiritousness is active. By our spiritousness, I mean our middle and mediating faculty between whatever part of the soul looks to the heights and whatever part of the soul looks to the ordinary. J-Tron blogrolls a fairly new blog called Expectations by a Rev. Mr. Grubbs in which he reviews a new book by Bret Easton Ellis. The novel presents a life of strikingly unredemptive immorality in a world in which it is not questioned (I have not read it, it's just the impression that I get.) He writes of
"the visceral reaction I had to “Less than Zero” which after almost a month after finishing the book I have barely come to shake off. I began this novel in an airport while waiting for a flight and finished it in mid-flight. And it was all I could do to keep from excusing myself to the lavatory in order to vomit. It was by far the first time a book had caused me to nearly physically react in such a violent way.".
I do not think there is anything that should produce a physical reaction of that type in the novel, so it is not particularly explicable on the materialistic half-space of the world. Nor is this anything commonly called "moral disgust," which often seems rather bound to matters of the materialistic half-space. Nor is this conviction of sin from having swam in a moral cesspool. "This visceral reaction" instead seems to be the activity of spiritousness, a queerness to the matter of the body as if the soul says to the body, "I do not want to endure in you." But the Gnostics misinterpreted it. The spirit really is saying, "Let us both not endure these things of depravity, misery, and hopelessness, which are very limited views even of the visible things." For in depravity, there is always opportunity for repentance and absolution. In misery, there is always the seed of joy. And the hopeless need not always be so. The Christian mind feels the viscerality of the spiritousness when presented with a worldview directly opposed to its own. The Holy Spirit ultimately instructs us in such a worldview. Thus the leading of our spirit in such a way is often the leading of the Spirit. The Spirit thus is the ultimate queerness in the materialistic half-space that draws us away from the narrowness of the focus common to the ordinary not only into the fullness of the visible worlds but also into the equivalent verity of the invisible.
Isn't this a little like saying of Christ, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed"? (See Pontifications . Well, sort of. But when language evolves in such a way not only to fail (which is bound to happen) but to mislead when describing sacred doctrine, you do what you can. So let's be clearer. The Holy Ghost is like a ghost in this way and this way only. If there are ghosts, they are said to create a chill in their wake. The Holy Ghost is like that chill if it were perfectly true, beautiful, and good and made you want to be that way, too.
...proceeding from the Father and the Son...
At the next Prayer Book revision, ECUSA has agreed to omit "and the Son." The trouble I see is this. On one hand, saying "Father and the Son" seems to imply the Spirit's inferiority, although Augustine supposedly found a way to avoid this. On the other hand, it recognizes the Speaker, Word, (Active) Hoverer trichotomy of Genesis more fully, though there are arguments from the other side that the necessary trichotomies are captured by the original Nicene formulae. We'll not even get into the issue of Westerners adding something to the Nicene Creed without Eastern consultation. It should be clear from our discussion why this is an improper thing to do. But what's in the Article (if it were to be a confession) doesn't need to be in the Creed, though it shouldn't contradict it. Whatever formula is proper should allow the mind not to diminish the Holy Redundancies of the Athanasian Creed. I prefer "proceeds from the Father through the Son" which I think reflects the original trichotomy, but sometimes I just wish we would stop quibbling about words and teach these doctrines as guided meditations. I'll say the Creeds. I'll believe the Creeds. I never will heap any ignominy on the Creeds. They're great. I will encourage others to do likewise. But I'll never say that any man or text outside of them can fully comprehend what they teach. Yipe, I think I've applied Godel's Theorem to the Creeds.
...is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.
Considering how much queerness of the materialistic half-space there can be in our lives, if we only dare to look, it is important that we not diminish the Spirit in our hearts and minds. The Holy Ghost is God. Accept no substitutes.
Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray that you may drink living water, be cooled by a mighty rush of wind, be warmed by fire from on high, and live in that still small silence at the heart of being.
6 comments:
reproduction can be a soteriologically positive activity if it takes place amidst the cultivation of the theological virtues. Believe me, I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be having children.
I hope I didn't imply such either. Children are a wonderful blessing and provide ample opportunities cultivating the virtues, and the children in my own life are dear to me, perhaps more so because there will never be fruit of my own loins. On the other hand, I am only beginning to a get a glimpse of how many "children" may come under our wings...I never knew blogging could minister to so many...
Whatever formula is proper should allow the mind not to diminish the Holy Redundancies of the Athanasian Creed. I prefer "proceeds from the Father through the Son" which I think reflects the original trichotomy, but sometimes I just wish we would stop quibbling about words and teach these doctrines as guided meditations. I'll say the Creeds. I'll believe the Creeds. I never will heap any ignominy on the Creeds. They're great. I will encourage others to do likewise. But I'll never say that any man or text outside of them can fully comprehend what they teach.
I too prefer "through the Son"; the agreement at Florence pointed out that the "and" of the Latin fathers was equivalent to the "through" of the Greek fathers. While we may quibble, and the historical point of adding in is clearly in the East's favor, might not both show us something of the Truth? And yet still fall short? Because our words cannot ever fully comprehend, nor can our minds, the Great Mystery? After all, if we get too caught up in quibbling over the filioque, what does it do any good to the man dying of AIDS before us, as a RC priest once asked me?
The Christian mind feels the viscerality of the spiritousness when presented with a worldview directly opposed to its own. The Holy Spirit ultimately instructs us in such a worldview. Thus the leading of our spirit in such a way is often the leading of the Spirit. The Spirit thus is the ultimate queerness in the materialistic half-space that draws us away from the narrowness of the focus common to the ordinary not only into the fullness of the visible worlds but also into the equivalent verity of the invisible.
I'm somewhat unfamiliar with this spiritousness concept though very interesting. I had to read and reread to get at it. It seems that in essence you are saying the Spirit draws us to an iconic vision of reality (visible and invisible) and leads us suchly? That it is our spirit agreeing with the Spirit that gives us direction? And that such is the ultimate queering of our worldview to G-d's own? I would say the Holy Spirit is in the business of person-making, and we in the process of becoming the faces of the Holy Spirit (as in Vladimir Lossky and most Eastern Christian theologies). Mary in such a view is the extraordinary face of the Holy Spirit by virtue of the Incarnation, being the very type of the Church and of the Body and of each of us as persons in our completion before the Father through Christ by the Spirit.
Elaborate on this concept more...
The original idea of spiritousness is that of Plato in the Republic, "
Yes, he said, we may fairly assume them to be different.
Then let us finally determine that there are two principles existing in the soul. And what of passion, or spirit? Is it a third, or akin to one of the preceding?
I should be inclined to say --akin to desire.
Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.
I have heard the story myself, he said.
The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire, as though they were two distinct things.
Yes; that is the meaning, he said.
And are there not many other cases in which we observe that when a man's desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself, and is angry at the violence within him, and that in this struggle, which is like the struggle of factions in a State, his spirit is on the side of his reason; --but for the passionate or spirited element to take part with the desires when reason that she should not be opposed, is a sort of thing which thing which I believe that you never observed occurring in yourself, nor, as I should imagine, in any one else?
In Plato's view, of course, the reason presents the world as it really is, everything else is shadow and appearance. Hence, the spiritousness is the kick in the pants to desire that makes it conscious of the dictates of the metaphysical order.
I don't think the world is that way. I think of the world as a loose but ultimately intimate union of matter and spirit, visible and invisible things. And when I say invisible I mean those things never investigable by the physical sciences. When I talk about materialstic half-space, I'm being witty. Materialism makes the visible things the entirety of space. I say that what we call the material world isn't space but only half-space like in a mathematics problem when you say you don't care what happens in negative space, so you set up the problem on a semi-infinite half-space.
Thus I wanted to get at the Spirit not by analogy with nature but the way spiritual things and the Holy Spirit become our way of understanding not only that there is some other invisible world, which turns into a perilously useless Gnosticism and the like, but as an invisible world that is parallel with our own that actually fleshes out what's going on in the visible world. In the same way, I imagine spiritual beings (such as angels) try to keep conscious of the material world so that the spiritual world is more intelligible.
To give you an example: A priest friend of mine once told the story of a church she was convinced wasn't quite right. There was something "off" in the sanctuary that seemed to make ordinarily well-tuned people go very much of out of tune, causing all forms of dissension. A Unitarian woman was present and pronounced this all nonsense, saying it must have been something in the air or the water. Now, I'm a geologist, I know all kinds of ways people's behavior can be affected by airs, waters, and places as the Hippocratics said. But sometimes, there's something just "off." People I know with more experience with non-Western cultures note that the world seems surprisingly enchanted when you're with folks still convinced the world is enchanted.
But the problem with interactions with such a world is that there is a lot of "weirdness" (which works better than "queerness" but somehow doesn't sound right) that isn't good for us. As C.S. Lewis points out in That Hideous Strength (though not in these words), you fuck with the neutrals you pay the price. Spirits by deceiving you as to the nature of their world can deceive you as to the nature of this one. I know this is something that those on the right of the Christian spectrum harp on (in some very inaccurate ways I may add), but I think we ought not to lose sight of this aspect of the world.
So yes, I think the Spirit or my own spirit's response to the Spirit is "queering" or "weirding" the world to the way God sees the world. The Prophet Joel as quoted by Peter at Pentecost talks about dreams and visions. And "would that all God's people were prophets!" Would sin be as easy if we saw the world as God sees it? Thus by shaping our perceptions, the Spirit does personmaking. The Spirit for me seems mostly in the business of seeing the holy, even in the strangest places and when it is most difficult. But orienting perception is only one role...
When you speak of personmaking, I suspect you are speaking of a complementary but not identical role. "The days are coming when you will worship in both spirit and truth." "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit." Presumably, we are meant to become the icon of that which we most deeply worship.
I really have nothing to say against that view, which seems coherent with my own understanding, even if it's tricky to live it. But I grew up with a lot of Quaker pneumatology in my life, which sees the Spirit as lifegiver as an Inner Light, a conscience and an aid which could make one's life into a seamless unity of the sacraments. "Mind the light..." "Let your light so shine..." Such a pneumatology seemed too easy to me. I was rather cautious and I remain cautious.
I'm not sure if this helps, but this and some of the entry were attempts to read my own experiences in the light of faith while avoiding the problem of disenchanted nature.
Caelius,
I think first what offsets all of this discussion for me is I don't live in a disenchanted world. I never have. That makes me queerer than being queer, I guess.
The langugage of icon and sacrament are for me a counter to any false materialism that sees only the material as all that is. Afterall, Christianity is a very materialist religion, it takes matter so seriously because matter potentially is icon or sacrament, a participation in the life of Christ by the Holy Spirit (using symbolist language of Neo-Platonism).
I have spoken before of having dreams, visions of things not yet happened. I always test those. And I have those "something isn't right" or "there is a spirit of ... on this place" moments. What we might call the gift of discernment. I tend to name this and speak a word in Christ to it. I think that sometimes Christians who get hung up on the spirit world are very akin to spiritualists, and give spirits and the demonic way too much power in their lives (not too mention naming everything as a demon even being angry for being abused!). This in my opinion actually invites such beings/forces. And frankly, "fucking with the neutrals" and not-so-neutrals is not something I find wise. But I have encountered evil in spirit form be it named fear or an oppression or dissension, and my response again is a word of rebuke in the name of Jesus Christ. But I don't go looking. Encountering such is a perilous and exhausting experience and requires being firmly rooted in daily practices of prayer. That may make some liberals laugh at how quaint and backwards I am, but I'm no liberal. Some conservatives may scratch their heads, at what is this gay guy talking about, but I'm no conservative. I do take the Tradition seriously that there is a created world we don't see operating around us. And there are spirits out for our ruin (to quote the famed Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel).
And of course, God, the true Reality, is working through, with, and in us shaping us to the Heavenly Vision.
Eastern Orthodoxy is actually most akin to Quakerism in many ways because its dogma and life are rooted in the mystical, the Desert Elders, the Hesychasts. We are meant to become sacraments; that is the point of the sacramental life, and I think Quakerism got that right. What I find troubling is a tendency (not always) toward nothing outward keeping a lid on going off the end. A pointing toward and partaking in Christ if you will, outwardly, as is found in the liturgical traditions.
An icon is of course a window onto Heaven, and we are most fully ourselves when we most show forth God, and God works to show forth Himself in many a queer place, much to our shock and suprise--bushes, whirlwinds, carpenters, the poor, children, gay men...
The caution I have to an overly inner approach is how does it show forth fruits for the community and for the world? How does it point toward Christ Crucified and Risen? I'm not into woowoo, and if a practice isn't leading you to be more Christlike, compassionate, forebearing, repentant, forgiving--the virtues, you're being deceived. God knows I've met enough Christians who pray this or that and are quite nasty people (while all the while pointing out the same woowoo in New Agers). (Sometimes myself included, but that's what Confession is for, happy day!) Any true Christian gnosticism, and the Eastern Church assures us that there is such a thing (they didn't let go of using that term), as does Holy Ireneaus, bears forth heavenly fruits in the flesh pointing to Christ. Perhaps something the filioque makes more clear (I know those in the West like Barth have argued as such).
Much of your last comment accords very strongly with my own experience. And I have known others with similar experiences. The deep pneumatological problem of our age is how we build up the church with the gift of discernment of spirits when people either are too rational and skeptical to hear or too "involved" to hear. Unfortunately, I try to ignore the problem, since I think discernment of any kind is far surer in community (and I usually worship among the skeptical and rational).
On a side note, an intellectual theologian raised as a Pentecostal by the name of Amos Yong published a book last year called, "Beyond the impasse : toward a pneumatological theology of religions," which tries to apply pneumatology to ecumenism...
Whew... My thoughts are a bit more mundane today. First, linguistically, the main difference between "Spirit" and "Ghost" is, of course, language. The standard Old English phrase is "halige gast"; spirit is Latin derived. We know so little about early Teutonic religion and folklore that it's hard to say if or how this mapped pre-Christian concepts.
Second, I read something last night that put the filioque into a slightly different perspective for me. It turns out that the *Te Deum* in its original (manuscript)forms also has the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. As best as we can tell its a fourth or fifth century Western document. Thus, the concept has been part of Western theology and worship for quite a while. We do need to think long and hard before monkeying with it in serious ways...
Depending on context, I might voice what I see in more neutral language.
Young sounds like he's doing work similar to Panikar?
Discernment can be best in community, and sometimes not. I have a much more jaded perspective on community, as you might imagine. Community can be demonic, even Church community, and by demonic, I mean willing to sacrifice or destroy one or another to keep the group together. So it depends. Sometimes our personal discernment given a community such as this is the best we have. After all, if we're Christians, we're always in community with the very Community who grounds us: Father, + Son, and Holy Spirit.
Well, derek, bring us back down to earth. The best works I've read on the filioque and such of late tend to see the Eastern and Western perspectives as complementary. I think we've overblown it sometimes. Although, adding it to the Creed outside an Oecumenical Council is a no, no, regardless of whatever theological virtues it might have...
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