On Miracles

above: from the parish church in St. Martinville, Louisiana

Disbelieve nothing amazing concerning the gods or divine dogmas.

-the third Pythagorean symbol

Two blogs that I read, from two entirely different people, have had posts on miracles recently. The first comes from that rather snarky Lutheran blogger who says what all Protestants think but don’t feel they can say, Josh S. In his post on miracles, he basically takes the “minimalist” position: the miraculous only exists to sustain and establish the Word of God, which is faith in Jesus Christ; the only thing of any importance:

On Free Market Faith

Picked this one up over at Owen’s blog, from the editor of Commonweal, Paul Baumann. Some excerpts:

…Where once it was widely assumed that modernity and its handmaiden “secularization” would kill off religion, the reports of God’s death turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, Micklethwait and Wooldridge assure us, “the very things that were supposed to destroy religion—democracy and markets, technology and reason—are apparently combining to make it stronger.” Europe was wrong, and America right. Irreligion in Europe is the anomaly, and the “hot religion” (namely Evangelical Protestantism) of the United States is the future. “American-style religion” is very much here to stay, and on the whole that is a good thing—especially for business…

God Is Back traces this church model to the revivals or “awakenings” of the nineteenth century as well as the pragmatic outreach and organization of the Methodist Church, once the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. We follow Evangelical Protestantism’s ups and downs like a stock price, from Prohibition and the Scopes trial to George W. Bush and right up to the current moment. (The crestfallen reaction of conservative evangelicals and Catholics to Barack Obama’s election gets little attention, however.) Faced with the challenge of marketing faith in a postindustrial society, contemporary American “pastorpreneurs” have turned to sophisticated business models for inspiration and instruction. As God Is Back notes, Willow Creek Community Church, the famed Illinois megachurch, boasts two MBAs on its large administrative staff, and an operation that caters to virtually all the needs of its members, from food courts to addiction counseling. “Willow Creek,” the authors write, “is based on the same principle as all successful businesses: putting the customer first.” It is a principle they see being followed by Evangelical, Pentecostal, and even some Catholic churches around the world.

To the Muses

Daughters of Jove, dire-sounding and divine,
Renown’d Pierian, sweetly speaking Nine;
To those whose breasts your sacred furies fire
Much-form’d, the objects of supreme desire:
Sources of blameless virtue to mankind,
Who form to excellence the youthful mind;
Who nurse the soul, and give her to descry
The paths of right with Reason’s steady eye.
Commanding queens who lead to sacred light
The intellect refin’d from Error’s night;
And to mankind each holy rite disclose,
For mystic knowledge from your nature flows.
Clio, and Erato, who charms the sight,
With thee Euterpe minist’ring delight:
Thalia flourishing, Polymina fam’d,
Melpomene from skill in music nam’d:
Terpischore, Urania heav’nly bright,
With thee who gav’st me to behold the light.
Come, venerable, various, pow’rs divine,
With fav’ring aspect on your mystics shine;
Bring glorious, ardent, lovely, fam’d desire,
And warm my bosom with your sacred fire.

-Translated by Thomas Taylor

The Slave of the Koran

I am the slave of the Koran
While I still have life.
I am the dust on the path of Muhammad,
The Chosen One.
If anyone interprets my words
In any other way,
I deplore that person,
And I deplore his words.

-Jalalu’ddin Rumi

The above text came as a bit of a surprise to me when I found it. After all, this is Rumi we are talking about; well-loved by poetry fans, spiritual seekers, and agnostics everywhere. This is not some closed-minded mullah who demands obedience to religious precepts, but someone who talks about love, mysticisim, and the ultimate inability to know God through human knowledge.

Quote of the Week

From the Gregorian Rite Catholic blog:

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the then archbishop of Milan and future Pope Paul VI, went to that final meeting of the Central Commission and said that mercy, charity, and Christian witness — not anathemas and condemnations — were the way to reach the modern world. Realizing that Cardinal Montini spoke with the authority of the Pope, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, one of the Council’s more conservative voices and Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office (today called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), was heard to murmur: ‘I pray to God that I may die before the end of the Council — in that way I can die a Catholic’ (Vatican II: Forty Personal Stories, Twenty-Third Publications, 2003, 6).

I feel his pain. Seriously.

Pillar of Fire

The opening of the ballet by Antony Tudor

On Nature

Were one to ask Nature why it produces, it might- if willing- thus reply: “You should never have put the question. Silently, as I am silent and little given to talk, you should have tried to understand. Understand what? That what comes to be is the object of my silent contemplation- its natural object. I am myself born of contemplation; mine is a contemplative nature. The contemplative in me produces the object contemplated much as geometricians draw their figures while contemplating….. Within me I preserve traces and principles of my source and of the principles that brought me into being. They too were born of contemplation and without action on their own part gave me birth. But they are greater than I: they contemplated themselves and thus I was born.”

On consigning Vatican II to the dustbin of history

From Fr. Anthony Chadwick:

The good priest of St. Mary Magdalene’s comments on the idea behind Vatican II as it was back in the post-war period I knew as a small child. The idea then was that civilisation had defeated barbary, and this was necessarily a sign of man’s inherent goodness. On the other side, they were anxious times as it was the Cold War and the threat of nuclear armageddon, the spread of Communism and the libertine cultural revolution in the west. Therefore, it was time to bring the Church into the modern age. The Church of the early 21st century faces a different situation – a post-Christian world. The Church is no longer welcome in any form. We need a new ecclesiology, or perhaps the oldest one – the way the Church dealt with Nero and Diocletian – dig in deep and weather the storm, and be prepared to offer your life if the chips are down. The Church simply retreats to the Catacombs to await better days, and emerges all the stronger for the purgation she has suffered.

The writing on the wall is that Vatican II will be relegated to the history books as something no longer relevant, and a new era is coming. The Church is not about politics or social causes, but about Christian identity, the priesthood, the Mass and the other Sacraments, prayer and devotion, a personal relationship with Christ. Naturally, good works flow from faith and the life of grace. It would seem that Pope Benedict XVI is looking at pre-concilar theology and the experience of the Church under persecution.

As much as I don’t like talk of the “catacombs”, and as skeptical as I am that the present Pontiff does not have an irrational attachment to the Council, I think Fr. Chadwick’s analysis is right on point. Less than a decade after the documents of Vatican II were signed, modern society went into a phase that the Marxist theorist Ernest Mandel called “late capitalism”; the general economic and political shift that is at the heart of the postmodern malaise in the developed world. Such is the hazard of trying to read the “signs of the times”, or trying to re-package perennial dogmas to suit the fancies of a particular age. Those left trying to do so are attempting to fit square pegs into round holes. Those still trying to defend the relevance of Vatican II in the face of naysayers are akin to those who defend bell-bottoms or disco music as the latest fashion. We have all moved passed it… except them.

In the decrees of Chalcedon, Trent, or Vatican I, one has to be an expert in history to know that they are addressing the “signs of the times”. No doubt they have the mark of their historical period; they were councils held by men, not angels. But the most “current”, “relevant” way to address the “signs of the times” is to proclaim perennial truth to a society enamoured with change. It remains to be seen if the Catholic hierarchy has learned its lesson, or if will continue to be obsessed with innovations.

Enchanted Protestantism

On the “Incarnational Nature” of American Folk Belief

In our commercialized society, people can often be given to very distorted generalizations of ideological opponents. As I have said recently, the general course of American religion can be seen as having gone full circle. For many, such as the late John Richard Neuhaus, we are living in the “Catholic” moment in which the doctrine and general rhetorical trajectory of the Catholic Church is converging with the ideological aspirations of American conservativism. The mainstream Protestant denominations, including the former pillar of white conservative religion, the Episcopal Church, are defecting from both their conservative pretensions and orthodox Christianity itself. Not so long ago, we had an intellectually rigorous American Protestantism, committed to a “conservative” morality. This has been replaced since the 1960’s with the aforementioned liberalizing mainstream churches on the one hand, and the “Gospel frisbee”, hyper-personalistic Evangelicalism of the white suburbs on the other. Where else is an intelligent, cultured Christian to go but Rome? The irony of all of this is that a hundred years ago, Catholics were barely considered white, and they were certainly not considered Anglo. The white man’s burden used to extend to breaking the back of “Papist superstition”. Not anymore, apparently. Somewhere, someone is having a hearty laugh over all of this.

Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated

Above: The composer himself plays his magnum opus.

Description (taken from the Classical Archives):

Few composers have integrated their political views with their compositional practice in as thorough a manner as Frederic Rzewski. In fact, much of his mature oeuvre is devoted to the idea of unifying political and musical language. Nowhere is this impulse more poignantly articulated than his hour-long set of piano variations from 1975, The People United Will Never Be Defeated.

The theme of the work is drawn from the popular Chilean revolutionary song El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido, which was composed by Sergio Ortega and performed by the group Quilapayun just months before the 1973 coup led by Pinochet. Rzewski works out the song’s textual message within the compositional structure of the piece, executing the musical metaphor with incredible rigor. The theme is subjected to 36 variations, which proceed in six sets of six; each set follows a similar structure of “stages,” which the composer enumerates as “simple events,” “rhythms,” “melodies,” “counterpoints,” and “harmonies.” The last variation of each set serves to combine elements from the previous five stages. The sets themselves are connected in the same way across a different axis: the first set is generally the simplest, the third the most lyrical, the fifth the most homophonic, even though within each of these sets the six stages apply on the level of the individual variations. The sixth set of variations, then, represents a busy intersection of structural trajectories, as each of its variations sums up the previous five variations at that position within each set—so, for example, the first variation in the sixth set combines elements from the first variations in all the previous sets, the third variation recalls all the other third variations, and so on. The final variation, then—the sixth of the sixth set—takes on exponential duties, as its recollections of the previous five variations, themselves recollective in nature, make up an elaborate reflection on the entire monumental work. At two points the piece is structurally disrupted but semantically enhanced as Rzewski weaves in quotations from two other tunes, the Italian revolutionary song Bandiera Rosa and Hanns Eisler’s Solidaritätslied. Despite its episodic and variational nature, the piece as a whole thus assumes a trajectory toward greater musical and semantic integration and unity, the wide diversity of sonorities and styles compositionally combining in a manner exactly analogous to the unity espoused Ortega’s revolutionary song.