Milosz on my mind. (Speaking at the Milosz Year 2011 conference in Krakow)
Below is an excerpt from an interview with Nick Ripatrazone featured today on his blog The Fine Delight:
Artur Rosman’s site, Cosmos The In Lost, has become a daily read for me: sharp, smart, well-written essays ranging from Catholic theology to art to culture to literature, all delivered with a sense of humor missing from most other religious discussions. The panoply of subjects doesn’t result in slim reading: rather, the opposite. Rosman is able to introduce, elucidate, conclude, and educate; to open conversations rather than close them; to make me reconsider my assumptions about contemporary Catholicism in America and Europe. Here are some of his thoughts on the site, Milosz, Warhol, Nowosielski, American Catholicism and its political stains, and more.
1. Cosmos The In Lost is a rarity: a smart, entertaining blog about Catholic theology, literature, art, and culture. When and why did you start the site?
I started the blog out of desperation. I’m presently writing a doctoral dissertation on the poetry (and theology) of Czeslaw Milosz. This has proven to be tortuous when coupled with a several year writing block. I thought having to write posts almost daily might cure me. The blog-writing is fun; we’ll see about the dissertation.
2. What attracts you to the writing and thought of Milosz?
Milosz was right in the middle of everything. He saw the worst (and the best) of the 20th century firsthand. What’s more, as a poet and thinker with a profoundly Catholic imagination he wasn’t afraid to talk about the neuralgic points the faith still needs to address more clearly for our generation: scientism, totalitarianism, consumerism, and the problem of evil. I like to think of him as the prolegomena to any future Newman . . .
Hell ain’t what it used to be! (Hans Memling, Last Judgment, stolen by pirates & bought by the city of Gdansk, Poland. YESSS.)
When was the last time any of you (who don’t attend fundamentalist churches) heard a good and theologically sound hellfire sermon? The last, no the only one, I’ve ever heard was in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Here it is in its glorious entirety if you need a memory refresher (BE AFRAID!):
Over the last two centuries Hell has been banished from the Catholic imagination more effectively than Adam and Eve from Eden. I suppose the last blows came sometime during the long 19th century dominated by Napoleon, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Feuerbach.
The infernal trenches of World War I gave hellfire a slight rebound. The whole messy experience cast hell from oblivion back into our world, but not the underworld. It became a truism to say that people not infrequently make hell on earth. The concentration camps and gulags of World War II firmly entrenched hell upon the face of the earth.
Now, to some extent, we also still half-heartedly believe that sin is its own punishment. But why can’t Hell be both the state after life and a state in this present life? I’m all for a Catholic both/and here.
“Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.”
Four out of five is not a misprint as far as I know. It has unfortunately checked out on all the searches I’ve done so far. I’m still hoping it’s wrong, after all, this is supposed to be one of the richest countries in the world. Then again, our family of five has always been well below the poverty line, so it’s a little comforting to know we’re not alone.
Then this picture showed up on my social media radar as if to drive the point home:
“A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death–the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.” –Czeslaw Milosz
I also happened to be reading (because who doesn’t read five things at time?) the book-length dialogue between the then Cardinal Bergoglio and Abraham Skorka entitled On Heaven and Earth. There the future Pope Francis forcefully reminds us of the close tie between authentic religion and social justice:
“Hence the [classical] liberal conception of religion being allowed only in places of worship, and the elimination of religion outside of it, is not convincing. There are actions that are consistently done in places of worship, like the adoration, praise and worship of God. But there are others that are done outside, like the entire social dimension of religion. It starts in a community encounter with God, who is near and walks with His people, and is developed over the course of one’s life with ethical, religious, and fraternal guidelines, among others. There is something that regulates the conduct of others: justice. I believe that one who worships God has, through that experience, a mandate of justice toward his brothers.”
One should not forget that the mandate toward social justice is solely a Judeo-Christian invention. The pay raises of Caterpillar CEO Doug Oberhelman, coupled with the poverty awaiting most of us, signal a return to the much more cruel gods of Graeco-Roman religion. Whether we like it or not, we can look forward to a massive, but unintentional, experiment in comparative religion. It’s unavoidable, since I don’t foresee CEOs suddenly having epiphanies like this one:
Finally, these perfidies of American betrayal and greed bring us to my dissertation topic (what else?), the poet Czeslaw Milosz. After you read a passage from one of his works below you will agree he also happened to have a finely-honed feel for theological reflection. The following reflection, which comes from the section “The Discreet Charm of Nihilism” (props to Bunuel) in the collection Road-Side Dog, turns Marx upside down, or at least shakes up a well-known phrase of his real good.
“Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death–the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”
It’s a dog’s life.
You might object by saying that you can be a nice lad or lass (even point out Sweden as a sociological example) without the afterlife and the threat of judgment hanging over your head. But Sweet Viking Jesus would tell you otherwise. Swedish ethics are influenced by revelation through and through, as is the rest of the West, and everyone influenced by globalism, meaning… pretty much everyone.
What’s more, those who aren’t believers (Swedes aren’t the only ones. Jag är ledsen!), but hang on to the Christian ethic of protecting the weak and the victims, are probably the worst fideists of all!
They are embedded in something they can’t justify, something whose origins they’ve willfully obscured, but deep down they know that empty phrases about Gilgamesh, Odin, or Kant won’t get them anywhere.
So, given where the world is heading, our eviscerated public square, and who is at the helm… how about we pray that there’s a Hell?
There is a caveat: nobody gets a free pass.
The musical coda is a song from Bill Mallonee that first got me thinking seriously about these issues way back when.
This self-surrender demands proofs; the twisted and torn limbs of the martyrs, the bloody destruction of the great Victim on the cross, point out what kind. However, what is primarily necessary is the interior stripping indissolubly linked to charity: dispossession of the self; the remainders is, so to speak, added by way of superabundance. Jacques Maritain (1882–1973)
Rembrandt, Jeremiah Laments the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630.
I’m taking a bit of a break from my Catholiclandia series before I tackle the trends in Polish Catholic media and intellectual life. Part Iis an attempt to provide a differentiated picture of both homogeneity and diversity in Polish religious life. Part II briefly sketched the mixed legacy of Solidarity. There’s a little bit more on Solidarity here.
In an issue of ZNAK Monthly (557) from 2001 Czeslaw Milosz uses the following words from a Polish musician as the epigraph to his response (“Polish Snarls”) to Chantal Delsol’s article “God in Exile” in the same issue:
“Igor Markievich was disturbed by Penderecki’s texts, ‘But there are no more religious people these days. All that is behind us.’ Penderecki responded that it’s different for us [Central Europeans]. There are no texts more contemporary than the biblical texts: Psalms, Jeremiah’s Lamentations, the New Testament, or the Apocalypse. What’s more contemporary? You think Ionesco or Beckett? Igor didn’t respond to it, he just looked at me, searching for support. But he didn’t get it from me, because I also think that we have no more contemporary texts than the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Penderecki was right.” –Zygmunt Mycielski, Journal, Autumn 1966
Penderecki conducting his “Credo” at Skalka Church in Krakow. Milosz’s grave is in the crypt of the church. ⒸArtur Sebastian Rosman, 2008
As far as I know, neither Milosz’s “Polish Snarls,” nor this text from Mycielski have been previously translated. More on Milosz from Cosmos the in Losthere and in a post recently mentioned by the Book Haven right here.
Here’s Penderecki’s “Seven Gates of Jerusalem,” which includes passages from the Lamentations as you can see here.
Smoking! Lech Walesa leaves Gdansk’s Shipyard to meet with Pope John Paul II.
Yesterday kicked off a series of posts about the orientalization of Poland among Western scholars. The term “orientalization” denotes an image of a culture as “Eastern,” meaning exotic, backward, uncivilized, and possibly dangerous. The term has been used to describe Western stereotypes of Middle Eastern Muslims, but recent scholarship has expanded its semantic field beyond Edward Said’s original intentions in his seminal work Orientalism. The very notion of Poland belonging to “Eastern Europe” invites such analysis, especially since residents of the region have always insisted upon being called Central Europeans, residents of MItteleuropa, because that would, of course, allow them to orientalize the ever-threatening Russians.
Orientalism: the French think there are polar bears in Poland; the Poles think the Russians are polar bears.
My meditations on Poland are not meant to take Poland down a notch. Instead they’re meant to introduce the reader to a much more differentiated understanding of Polish Catholicism–its weaknesses, but also its strengths.
I should return to yesterday point about religious diversity, especially the part where I said “Polish tolerance toward the Radical Reformation showcased the country’s traditional tolerance until the Jesuits showed up.” There is so much of diversity, when compared with the relative homogeneity of Western Europe, that I forgot to mention the Eastern Catholic churches that emerged out of the Union of Brest. Of course Eastern Catholic frequently feel forgotten by the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, and, well, I unfortunately didn’t buck the trend.
Let’s fast forward to the 1980’s when Solidarity was breaking ground as a non-violent trade-unionist movement set against a totalitarian government. With this we’ll continue to explore Polish religious particularities that are too difficult for Westerners to understand. Although a few of them have written books about it, as we’ve noted elsewhere.
Solidarity: The left and Church came together.
3. Solidarity was both a Catholic movement and a somewhat secular movement. However, there is almost no doubt that it was politically the single most successful worker movement in history. It helped to topple, irony of ironies, a socialist regime. Granted, that regime had declared martial law, was armed to the teeth, and its tanks and guns were aiming at civilians.
Solidarity was composed of simple pious workers, leftist intellectuals (such as Michnik, author of The Church & the Left) who were fellow-travelers of the Church, and finally clergy. The Church played a decisive role here, because churches, thanks to the sweeping influence of Polish clericalism and papist internationalism, were the only place where free debate was permitted to everyone (including the non-believers).
Solidarity went through several phases until this mixture of diverse groups began to splinter under communist pressure and this only continued once power was transferred to them.
4. Consumerism: The unusual mix of intellectuals (not that they were all secularists) and the pious masses could not hold in Poland as the 90’s became a kind of Hobbesian free-for-all. The Gdansk shipyards, which anchored the whole movement, were precisely the sort of unwieldy state-run outfit most likely to collapse under the free market. Governments of both left and right cycled in and out, some out of of existence. The only constant was the austerity measures that caused misery for a decade and laid the groundwork for a relatively stable Polish economy, the spread of consumerism, and a creeping secularism.
This turn of events either demonstrates the power of consumerism as a natural opponent of religion, or it exposes the weakness of the earlier synthesis, or both. Either way, the seeds of destruction were probably planted in the movement of liberation that was Solidarity. Which is unfortunate, because the kind of collective communication, cooperation, and reconciliation fostered by Solidarity at its zenith is precisely the sort of thing snuffed out by an increasingly technocratic economy and style of governance in Poland.
Before our next installment of this series, take a look at yours truly trying to make sense of Krakow’s Solidarity past within the parameters permitted by capitalism:
For those of you interested in reading more about Solidarity and its legacy: there is a complete free issue of the Tischner Institute journal Thinking in Values devoted to those topics.
The Solidarity issue.
The third installment in this series will appearhere, The first installment can be found here.
There are plenty of stereotypes floating in the seas of religious punditry. The so-called pundits are usually anchored in quite a circumscribed set of prejudices they project onto Poland. Both liberal and conservative leaning theologians like to think of my home country, for very different reasons, as a kind of Catholic Disneyland. Upon closer inspection these flattened Western pictures of Poland mirror what Edward Said labeled as Orientalism. They paint a picture of an exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous culture. Poland as a mythical Catholiclandia is a haven for conservatives (where they have no NYT), while it’s a reactionary hell for liberals (possibly the only hell they believe in).
RJN singing the praises of Poland in Poland. The picture he presented was a bit fuzzy.
I remember seeing Richard John Neuhaus in Krakow (Summer 2007) and being pleasantly surprised by his Jack Nicholson voice. He spoke enthusiastically about Poland’s vibrant Catholic culture and its strong alliance with the United States against the secular-exception of Western Europe (in the context of a worldwide sea of religion) and added a few words in defense of capitalism. It was a (too?) bold reversal of the secularization thesis, which usually has Poland and the United States as the exceptions (in the tiny island of what used to be Western culture). I asked the poet Artur Grabowski what he thought of what Neuhaus said and he replied with, “I wish it were like that” (rough!). In retrospect it seems RJN was projecting a positively backward exoticism not only onto the homeland of Wojtyla, but also the USA.
Authors such as Hans Küng adopted different reductionist projects. Their Orientalist version of Poland was usually attached to an animus toward JP2 and an oversimplified picture of Poland’s past. They were convinced that someone who earned his chops in a black and white struggle against the commies couldn’t sees Poland as a place Church during the Communist era was clearly too simple. John Paul II didn’t connect with the complexities of the late modern West (questionable, but hey). My favorite example of this type of Orientalism was Peter Hebblethwaite who spent years hating John Paul II’s Polish stupidity. For years he was always the guy on CNN predicting who the next pope would be. The irony is he died before his book on the “next pope” was published, not to mention about a decade before John Paul II died.
With that quick setup let’s start with the reasons why Poland, like Brazil, is not a Catholic utopia (and that’s OK):
Fr. Jozef Tischner grasped Solidarity.
1) Clericalism: Fr. Jozef Tischner, Solidarity’s chaplain, Poland’s leading phenomenologist, spent the better part of his life fighting against Polish clericalism. The writings Poland’s leading literary figures, world class writers such as WitoldGombrowicz (atheist) and Czeslaw Milosz (Catholic), contain their fair share of anti-clericalism. With the help of phenomenology, personalism, and the mystics John Paul II put stress upon active lay holiness in ways unseen until his papacy. Poles (including Polish clerics as you can see from the examples above) have always been healthily suspicious of Catholic clerics. You can figure out some of the reason for it by continuing to read below.
It’s complicated.
2) Diversity: Until very recently Poland has always been a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country. This probably has something to do with the fact that for the better part of Poland’s history, pretty much since it came into existence in 986, the papacy usually sided with Poland’s enemies. This started with Rome’s favoritism toward the Holy [sic!] Roman Empire. Polish tolerance toward the Radical Reformation showcased its traditional tolerance until the Jesuits showed up. Poland also took in all the Jewswho were expelled by Western Europe right around the same time. Nineteenth century Polish Romanticism, a significant political/literary movement (one of JP2’s greatest intellectual influences), also tended antagonize the hierarchy with its tendencies toward socialism and resistance against authoritarian regimes. Kloczowski’s A History of Polish Christianity is a magisterial overview of the variety of Polish Christianities, its history of religious pluralism and tolerance, plus it also covers intra-Polish-Catholic diversity.
Mickiewicz to Pius IX about the 1848 Revolution in France: “God’s spirit is in the hearts of the Parisian people.”
Next I’ll tackle the following two interconnected phenomena: the collapse of Solidarity and the growing influence of Neo-Con inspired consumerism. [Catholiclandia II is now available here.]
It’s no surprise to be told that neurons fire inside your brain when you decide to pick up a banana and again when you actually pick up the banana. What might surprise some people is to be told that exactly the same neurons fire when you see somebody else reach for a banana and then pick it up. This was not the kind of thing neuroscientists were looking for or expecting to find. Like many of the most significant scientific discoveries, this one was the result of serendipity. An experimenter who was analyzing the firing of neurons in a macaque monkey left the probes in its brain while taking a short break to have a snack. When he picked up a banana, the monkey’s neurons fired the same neurons that fired when the monkey picked up a banana. So began the following up of an exciting discovery.
Publisher blurb: Two spirits preside over the book: Alberti, the Renaissance author on art and architecture, whose passionate interest in perspective and point of view offers a key to modernity; and Nicolaus Cusanus, the fifteenth-century cardinal, whose work shows that such interest cannot be divorced from speculations on the infinity of God. The title Infinity and Perspective connects the two to each other and to the shape of modernity.
You’ve no doubt encountered Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.” It begins with:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
I’ve stepped into a variation upon this theme. It appears in the remarkable work,Infinity and Perspective, by Karsten Harries (who seems to be a former student of Louis Dupre). Take in the full glory of my serendipity with this photo and caption tag-team :
” . . . God’s creative power is fully present in every thing: even in the tree we were considering, even in a dunghill, God is fully present.” –Karsten Harries
In some ways this statement makes Timothy Treadwell’s nature mysticism more palatable and orthodox than it seemed when I first watched Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man (“It’s her life!”):
Now, Infinity and Pespective roots the origins of (post-)modernity and its critique in the thought of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Harries notes how this is due to a shift in metaphor usage (one that encourages my mash-up above) that occurs in the writings of Cusanus (not Copernicus [Kopernik in the Polish original], not Galileo, not Bruno):
“But what about Cusanus’s transference of this metaphor [of an infinite sphere whose center is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere] from God to the cosmos? I suspect that to Cusanus it seemed only obvious. As a Christian thinker he believed that everything created has its origin and measure in God. As he puts it in book 2, chapter 2 [of On Learned Ignorance] “every created thing is, as it were, a finite infinity or a created god” (II.2, p. 93). Our tree, for example, is such a finite infinity. Like every part of creation it shares, if Cusanus is right, in infinity. It is a contracted infinity.”
Clerics: always up to no good. I recently read one of them also invented the fax machine. Anathema sit!
He continues:
“Similarly Cusanus understands the universe as such a finite infinite: like God in its infinity, unlike God in that instead of divine unity, we now have a multiplicity, a manifold spread out in space and time. If both oneness and difference are accepted, not only will the metaphor’s transference from God to the cosmos seem justified; but, since the metaphor joins extension and infinity, it can be said that it does greater justice to the cosmos than to God, who is beyond extension.”
How much more exciting is this than our heresy of the definite, bounded, and measurable? It is exemplified by words frequently attributed to Robert F. Kennedy (Eternal rest grant unto him!), “What gets measured, matters.”
All in all, I’d like to return to the Orientalization of Poland as Catholiclandia sometime. I’ve already gestured toward my native realm’s “finite infinity” in posts here, and in the comments section of a post here. Might as well start the endless hermeneutic, probably tomorrow.
Only the full experience of this capacity [for natality/forgiveness] can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, thosetwo essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.” –Hannah Arendt
I reluctantly watched the new Arendt biopic. The trailer seemed to offer the same bowdlerized version of history I hated so much in The Lives of Others and Life is Beautiful.
Agnieszka Holland is much more up my alley when it comes to dealing with World War II, because she puts all the rough edges of history up front and center, which is what I believe good historical cinema should be about. Her breakthrough biographical film Europa, Europadealt with so many twists and turns that it drove Lanzmann, the director of the classic documentary Shoah, into hysteric fits.
Reading The Human Condition softened me up to watch the new film about Hannah Arendt. The book spends a lot of time discussing the fragile practice of human freedom as it plays itself out in the plurality of the many networks of human relations that encompass us. Freedom is the quintessential obsession of the modern world, but Arendt thinks (this came out of nowhere for me) that freedom requires forgiveness. This is because freedom is by definition unpredictable. Furthermore, even with initial good intentions, as freedom gets channeled through the complex web of human relations, there is a high probably that it will cause harm to others.
This is where forgiveness comes in for Arendt. It also comes in a theological register for her. Her insight is so surprising that reading it felt a little bit like Christmas in July. Only when I read the following words did it become apparent she was telegraphing her intentions while talking about the natality of human freedom, its ability to give birth to totally unexpected, almost miraculous possibilities:
“The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense. It has been in the nature of our tradition of political thought (and for reasons we cannot explore here) to be highly selective and to exclude from articulate conceptualization a great variety of authentic political experiences, among which we need not be surprised to find some of an even elementary nature.”
Arendt goes on to comment upon the practicality of the various admonitions to forgive endlessly that issued from the lips of Jesus (7 times and so on):
“Crime and willed evil are rare, even rarer perhaps than good deeds . . . Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trust with so great a power as that to begin something new.”
How scandalous is this in a world where we’re constantly grinding old axes instead of starting anew? Is it possible to live this way? But is it possible to live otherwise?
These are questions I’d like to revisit sometime with regard to Poland, especially since the complexities of its history tend to be so frequently flattened out, I would say Orientalized, by Western scholars. (You can take a look at the comments at the end of this post for concrete examples of what I mean.)
Finally, in a Girardian vein avant la lettre, she contrasts the liberating freedom of forgiveness with the automation of vengeance (which is painfully familiar to anyone who has more than one kid, especially if their age differential is small):
“In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.”
What’s most disappointing is how Arendt wants to limit the act of forgiveness to small offenses, precisely the typical everyday stuff that happens seven times seventy times a day. She ignores Matthew 5:44 in the collection of Gospel quotations she uses to ratchet down the applicability. This can, in part, be explained by the fact that she is writing not long after the Holocaust, which tested the limits of forgiveness like no other event in history. On the other hand, the triviality of the acts she counts as forgiveness severely undercuts the ontological weight Arendt attributes to the creativity inherent in the act of forgiveness. It is a contradiction she does not work out in The Human Condition.
The film, more or less follows the same tracks. In the film she continually struggles to separate out the “banality of [Eichmann’s] evil” from the unforgivably monstrous end result of his acts. Besides the anonymous readership of her New Yorker articles, her (soon to be ex-)friend since their student days under Heidegger, Hans Jonas, is her most strident critic. He thinks her banalization of evil forgives monsters like Eichmann and he cannot stomach it.
Mehmet Ali Agca, the gunman who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, holds up an issue of Time magazine outside a military recruitment center after being released from prison in Istanbul on Thursday. Agca served more than 25 years behind bars in Italy and Turkey.
But what if Hans Jonas was mostly right, save for his disbelief in the power of forgiveness to cure us from vengeance even in situations of the most extreme evil? I’m reminded of the “Letter of Reconciliation of the Polish Bishops to the German Bishops,” where the bishops of a country that lost six million of its citizens (both Jews and Catholics) to the Soviets and Nazis were asking the Germans for forgiveness for the crimes Poles committed against the Germans during the war. John Paul II was one of the signatories of this document. He carried over its spirit into a papacy highlighted by apologies and attempts at healing age-old schisms that made so many decent people cringe (a bit like Hans Jonas in the film) and not enough people took seriously.
In all of this it’s important to remember that the line between victims and victimizers is very thin. It is not uncommon for former victims to turn into victimizers. Take the example of Hitler and Germany. Would the horrors of WWII have been possible without the punitive measures imposed upon Germany by France after WWI? In fact, the French were so vengeful that the Germans only finished paying back their reparations in 2010.
We celebrated Rembrandt’s birthday, the painter of the best known images of forgiveness, about a week ago.
I realize that what I’m exploring here is much more perverse than the shenanigans of Deleuze and Guattari. The shift I am tentatively proposing is akin to seeing the Parable of the Prodigal Son as the Parable of the Prodigal Father. I think this is what Philippians 2:5 might mean. I’m still trying to figure it out. It seems to make more sense of the rough edges of my own life, and the very rough edges of both my countries (Poland and the USA), than the “natural” culture of retribution.
There are ways of reading what I’ve written here as monstrous. Go ahead. I can’t stop you. Comfort yourself with vengeance and resentment, but don’t let me know how that’s working for you. It generally hasn’t worked very well for me.
The film hints at this too as it closes with Arendt, who wrote her thesis on St. Augustine, making the classical argument that evil is a privation (another way of saying that it is “banal”?) of the good, which is truly radical, because it is the creative root of reality.
Where there is no contemplation, there can be neither great art (save under the irrepressible form of suffering) nor great festivity, for without a contemplative openness to the mystery of being there can be no gratitude and joy in its gratuity. Where there is neither great art nor great festivity, there can be no “priority of man over things” and ultimately be no genuinely human and humane making, whether beautiful or useful. Where there is no priority of man over things, work ceases to be “for man”; man lives “for work,” and our instruments become our masters. . . . Read the full text.
Michael Hanby is assistant professor of biotechnology and culture at the Pontifical John Paul II…
Cosmos the in Lost 