This is something I can agree is a possibility. Among the Orthodox I've found a few people who think that the western Marian apparitions, at least the one's whose "messages" appear to denigrate "Orthodoxy", may be demons masquerading as the Theotokos (I offer no opinion of my own on that one).
I also have no opinion, but I'd add that *demons* seems to be going a little far. I think of djinni as like desert faerie; there's a range of spiritual entities known to be not evil per se, but volatile and michievious.
I've agreed with you before as to the possibility of spiritual beings who are neither of Heaven nor Hell. But the fruit of Gabriel's "revelation" seems to be well beyond the merely mischievous. IMO, it has a scent of Hell about it.
Well of course I am monotheistic, but I don’t know that I agree that the god worshipped by our Islamic brothers is the same god Christians worship. Maybe He is. I’ve never thought much about it.
If the God worshipped by Muslims exists at all, and if there is only one God, then of course it must be the same God. Otherwise, either there are multiple gods, and we, their adherents are fighting Team Our God against Team Their God, or, they are worshipping a nonexistent nonentity. You have thought about it -- you told us that Maronite Catholics open their prayers in veneration of the Virgin Mary in Arabic with Ya Oum al-Lah. There is no other word for God in Arabic. (There are also no capital letters, a Sunni friend pointed out, but there are in English usage.)
They are worshipping a nonexistent nonentity. Allah is the opposite of the Christian God. He is not engendered and does not engender. He has no Son. He is One, not Three.
That the word allah means god in Arabic means that Arabic-speaking Christians refer to God as allah. Of course, just as Spanish-speakers refer to Him as Dios. It does not mean that when a Christian Arab says allah he means what a Muslim means when he says Allah.
The Muslim image of god is, as the French historian Alain Besançon once wrote, the idolatry of the Jewish god.
Well, English "god", or that matter, Greek "theos" started out referencing pagan gods and I'm pretty sure those are non-existent beings, at least as gods (some are anthropomorphic representations of natural or civilizational powers which do exist)
The great French historian Alain Besançon once wrote that Allah, the god of the Muslims, is the idolatrous version of the god of the Jews. Ponder that.
Allah is the opposite of the Triune God. He cannot engender, and is not engendered. He is One, not Three.
Jon, by the time Jesus came on the scene, influences within Judaism, along with Hellenism to some degree, had Jews talking about something like "a second person" that was somehow divine or connected to the LORD in some divine fashion. This discussion was going on for +/- a century before and after Jesus. Not only N.T. Wright and other Protestants have called attention to this, but Jewish scholars as well. Also, there is good academic work at the site marquette.edu/maqom/ (Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism) regarding this. That site was started and compiled by a post-grad studying under +Alexander (Golitzin) when he was a professor at Marquette. It has been updated in the intervening years with whatever "the latest" on the subject has been published. Not all the authors are Christians, but it is all rigorous research. Jewish thought had space to entertain the idea of something like "the trinity".
As Fr Tom Hopko has said, he has asked Jewish scholars if, on the basis of their understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, God could ever be without his Word or his Spirit. Evidently, he never received a "yes" to that question.
Allah is simply the arabic word for "God" (technically "the God" as Arabic requires the article in many places English does not). My Antiochian Orthodox church uses snippets of Arabic in its liturgy. When we sing "Qudsun Illah..." ("Holy God...") we are no more referencing a "different god" then when we also sing in Greek "Hagios ho Theos...".
Allah is God, just as Batihah is Watermelon, khubbas is bread, and Min Fadlak is Please. You can say that Islam has a totally mistaken view of who God is, but you can't say that Allah does not mean God, without sounding totally ignorant. Jon is absolutely correct here. Praising God in Arabic, regardless of religion, will mean praising Allah. Now, asking for yogurt in the Arab world can sound a little different, depending on what country you're in, Leban, min fadlak, wala Haleeb, min fadlak . . .
I can accept that Islam was a heresy inspired by demonic forces, to prevent Christianity from spreading far and wide-- and setting it on the path to being a chauvinistic faith of Europeans. But God is still God.
They are not the same God. This is blasphemous. The one true Triune God has nothing to do with the false god of Islam. God demands repentance and belief in His Son Jesus as Lord and Savior. He enters into a loving eternal relationship with us who believe but exacts eternal damnation on those who reject Him. Allah is not triune and does not offer a free gift of salvation to all who believe. How can you say these two deities are the same? Islam is rooted in a theft and twisting of Christianity into a religion of works-based salvation. Satan is always trying to twist the gospel into being something that is works-based. I’ve long thought he tried to copy his success with Islam in the eastern world here in the west with the invention of Mormonism, but that he was not as successful. They both had leaders who claimed new revelation was given to them by angels, most likely Satan himself, in my opinion. But Mormonism was peaceful whereas Islam conquered by the sword.
Yet more reason for me to believe that women are some of the best evangelists. Thank you, Mary. Thank you for saying unbashfully things which must be said but which I can't be confident I know any Christian male besides me would say. ( I can be confident I would because I have. Provoking people to rage and disgust with me isn't temperamentally innate to me, but proclaiming Truth is exhilarating, isn't it? And there are enough of my own personal qualities which will provoke them to rage and disgust with me, anyway.
I'm especially grateful for your words about Mormonism. Haven't they gotten even more deceitful in recent years with their churchofjesuschrist.org ?
There are well meaning people associated with this Substack who list LDS along with genuinely Christian groups, and every time I see it, metaphorically I rend my garments.
Well, I couldn't say it (except maybe the part about some demoniac entity masquerading as Gabriel) because it's irrational and illogical. Yes, I'm the first to affirm that reason alone cannot lead us to Divine Truth. But we also cannot toss reason away in the ditch.
I can say simply that Islam (and Judaism, and the Mormons too) are in error, without positing that those errors somehow create other gods.
They don't create "other Gods," but in positing a God who is not the actual God, they are doing the work of demons, and according to the Bible, leading people to damnation. Remember the New Testament warning against "other Jesuses."
All this celebrating of converted pagans with moonbeams in their eyes is deeply charming, but if it weakens our commitment to propositional truth, it's diabolical.
I agree with this approach interpersonally (as I alluded to above).
In my interior spiritual life, though, I took a big step forward when I accepted Jesus as historical fact (at least I think it was a big step forward). This step has simultaneously made it harder and easier to accept my friends from other faiths. Harder in that I can't help but think "that's not true" when my LDS friend talks of Christ. Easier in that I can let it go and believe with certainty that God will guide them to the historical Jesus I now know.
There is too much in the Bible which militates against that idea. Consider only the verse which refers to people who didn't have a love for the truth, which prevented their being able to discern truth when they heard it preached. A person does have to want to know God before he can. The Bible is not complimentary to humanity: we've all gone "out of the way." There is no one who naturally wants to know truth.
I'm not a Calvinist because I cannot imagine anything less glorifying to God than determinism, but it's undeniable that The Holy Spirit must crack a person open before the person can want to know truth.
Wow! So, everyone who doesn’t believe the exact same things as you is diabolical and damned. This is the kind of perspective that leads to things like the Inquisition and religious wars. And a perspective that is greatly at odds with Jesus’s teachings.
Well, of course, that's nonsense, but nonsense which every faithful Christian has thrown at him. First, the exact same things? You really don't know Christianity at all. Our enemies like to point to the several big divisions among Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. Why do these divisions exist? Because the people in each of them believe significantly different things about the practice of Christianity. But all of them believe that salvation is only through Jesus Christ. All of them believe in the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith.
For example, there is no such thing as a genuine Christian who doesn't believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, that He died for us, that He was raised from the dead, and that He is coming again. These things I've told you are not MY insistences. They're every Christian's insistences.
There is no getting around the exclusive claim of Christianity: all Christians believe that Jesus is the fullness of the revelation of God, God Incarnate, that He fulfilled the law of God on our behalf and died to make atonement for our sins, and that no one comes to the Father but by Him.
You say that what I've written is greatly at odds with Jesus’ teaching. Really? Find me a passage in the New Testament about Jesus' ministry in which He does not at some point proclaim Himself as the only begotten Son of God and the only way to the Father. It's also likely if you read through the particular event, you'll find that He will tell his enemies that they are dead in trespasses and sins. Himself and how others relate to Him is essentially all he does talk about! Jesus is either the most depraved narcissist in history or the only begotten Son of God.
Human errors of theology do not create alternate gods! That's modernist subjectivism, raised to a high power.
Islam is (I believe) in severe error by not recognizing Jesus as God incarnate and Messiah. And also in not recognizing the Holy Trinity. But those are the same exact errors the Jews make too.
Are the Jews worshiping a "different God". You cannot logically maintain the one without also affirming the other.
"Human errors of theology do not create alternate gods!"
I'd add that the muslims 100% believe Allah is the same God of Abraham and Christ that Christians and Jews worship. This is a helpful thing to hold on to when one tries to understand their faith.
What I am saying is if someone insists the Muslims worship a different God because of their theological errors, then the Jews too must worship a different God because they have the same errors.
Thanks - that’s more clear. I agree with you. And highlight the absurdity of that perspsective, since Jesus worshipped the Jewish God, and his teaching were all about how to be closer to that God.
These days, I almost don't even feel like hearing about the thing called "Christianity". There's just Jesus and His Gospel, standing as an anarchist sign of contradiction of the Kingdom against this world, just as much in the Year of Our Lord 2024 as it did in Year 30. And yes, the Gospel is the fulfillment of all paganism and legend and myth, from Odin hanging on a tree for nine days to gain wisdom for his people to Orpheus descending into Hell in search of his true love. A dimensional shift where the dream became reality. The Gospel is true because of poetry, and because it is the one point where poetry intersected fully with history.
I feel that you sometimes qualify these things more than necessary, or feel intellectually threatened by a more porous border between "pagan" and "Christian". And at some point, who cares if Orthodoxy is the "truest" form of the faith?—and I say that as a Maronite as you once were, and likely to go Orthodox sooner than later. What's most true is a phenomenological and not ecclesiological matter: it is where He comes most to life for any given person, in His full enchanting power. The Holy Ghost blows where He will, and the likes of us don't get to tell Him where He goes or doesn't.
Well, "truest" in the sense that its doctrinal judgments are accurate, and it tells us the surest "way" to God. But I of course don't believe that God/Jesus is not present in other forms. That said, it is not the case that the Christianity taught by, say, the Yale Divinity School, has much at all to do with the real thing. There is a reason it's called "Orthodoxy" (= right belief). I do think the boundaries are porous. I forget who said it, but we can identify where the Church is, but it is harder to say where it is not.
That's fair. And well, I guess in some cases, it's pretty easy to tell where the Church is not. I sent a photo to my Orthodox friend of some church on the UT Austin campus that had rainbow-colored doors spelling out, "Our doors are open to everyone." And she said, "That's such a waste of perfectly good doors." For my part, I made the sign of the Cross on instinct while passing it—for protection. Who knows what could be lurking behind those doors?
IMO< one must reject tribalism, which can lead to an abattoir. It suffices to say certain groups with whom we disagree are in error-- one need not say they are wicked because of that. We are all in error in some ways.
Certainly there could be people in there who are seeking God to the best of their current understanding. But as I've said before, I consider that kind of signaling to reflect allegiance to an altogether anti-Christian ideological cult. We're probably not gonna agree on that point.
For my part I don't find myself competent to judge what's in people's hearts, save perhaps a little by their deeds. The happy-clappy stuff is often quite infertile-- it yields no viable fruit at all, but that's not the same as yielding poison fruit.
"What's most true is a phenomenological and not ecclesiological matter"
The Fathers would disagree with you here; the two are inextricably related. To think otherwise is to be a Protestant, with Luther's invention of the "invisible church."
Sure—I guess I'm a heretic like that. I would just suggest that your own view is also based on a phenomenological judgment (i.e. something in your life experience led you to take *this* seriously as authority), so that gets into an irresolvable disagreement at an axiomatic level.
In a sense that's correct, but then it's true about everything, and thus uninteresting. It's like Van Til's "all reasoning is circular." It's true as far as it goes, but not helpful.
Yes, but then I'm saying I don't appeal first to the Fathers; I'm more inclined to appeal to Magdalene's first witness to the Resurrection, which I believe is still available to us all. And that's an independent phenomenological basis of direct verification of what the faith is. So you may call that a sort of Protestant, if you want, or something I think the Protestants got right.
Actually it's not independent, because without the Fathers we'd have no record of Mary Magdalene's witness, or the Holy Spirit's explanation of it. The Scriptures are the Church's book -- they weren't delivered to individual believers in isolation.
I believe the nexus of revelation itself is unconditioned and independent, operating in a vertical dimension that has no need of historical transmission. But would we know wiithout any historical or cultural context that what we see is the risen Jesus, or that Magdalene saw Him first?—of course not. Those are two separate questions. But I think the original thing in itself—the event—is antecedent of any institution in this world that calls itself the Church. In a way, they claim an awful lot of authority for just delivering a newspaper.
Rob, I'm not a theologian, and I hope at least one person who is will drop by to say substantially what I can say only primitively:
Luther didn't "invent" the invisible Church. The Church is invisible. Throughout The New Testament, we are presented with references to "those who went out from among us because they were not of us." These apostates had given every appearance of being Christian. No doubt they had professed faith, been baptized, taken communion, but they were not genuine. Other Christians had thought they were brothers or sisters in Christ. They had mastered what Francis Schaeffer called "godtalk," ecclesiastical word salad.
Such people weren't limited to that first generation. I know someone like that. I'm sure many others do, as well.
There's always been the belief that the Church has an invisible component, but Luther was the first to argue that the Church was primarily/fundamentally invisible. Bill Tighe has discussed this quite a few times on here.
Whether it was an invention or a revelation, we will only know for sure after we get to the other side. I expect we will all be surprised, and God will be merciful that none of us really got it right, because, how could we?
There is a middle ground: the Church is the visible institution, but we have no idea how many apparent members are outside or apparent non-members are inside.
I think this type of Paganism is appealing to many as a reaction to the Gnosticism of modern Protestantism in the West. Men don’t want to sing love songs to Jesus and be lectured to about being nice winsome fellows whose greatest battle is being a parking lot attendant at the local mega church.
Part of the appeal of the Orthodox Church to me is the emphasis that yes, the world is enchanted and we are actually at war, but not with our fellow humans, but with the powers and principalities of the world, i.e. the demons. Christ calls us to be warriors in that battle against them.
But I have to ask. Doesn't the film "The Northman" and do series like "Vikings" portray a world in which people were more aware of enchantment than it seems like most Christians, at least Western Christians, ever were? Wasn't that the draw of the film? That was why my comment ending "I've heard God in the thunder" was about. And I think we should hear Him in the thunder. (maybe not in a 100 percent literal sense, but in a significant sense).
I could be off in my perspective - maybe there was a time most Christians thought this way. Yes? No? And of course I agree with you that at one time Christians did inhabit., as they saw it, a much more enchanted world and can't wait for your book on it.
(Oh, and just wait until you make it to Iceland where a large number of people believe in the Huldefolk, and some will tell you of seeing them as children.)
I think that medieval Christians were immersed in a natural world bursting with symbols that pointed back to God. St. Francis of Assisi, author of "The Canticle of the Sun" is a good example. But he didn't love animals for their own sake but as signifiers: every lamb was like the Lamb of God.
A beautiful book showing how that operated in Anglo-Saxon society is Winters in the World by Eleanor Parker, who blogs at A Clerk of Oxford.
"Folk religion" with European roots preserved such attitudes, mixed with a lot of superstition and magic. For a pure and orthodox sensitivity to heaven's touch in the world, see Victorian Catholic poet Francis Thompson's "Kingdom of God:"
It's maybe hard to convey what I'm asking. Yes, I agree, Francis and the Franciscans were exceptions. I was asking about most. I guess some medieval people did think lightening was caused by evil spirits, which is a superstition. When it comes to superstition, I've always thought Christians less superstitious than pagans. Maybe that belief is weighing on me here even regarding actual enchantment. I am not really sure.
St. Francis was just an easy example to cite. Pre-Reformation Catholics did live in a world where plants, animals, the weather, the seasons could carry religious significance. Ronald Hutton's The Stations of the Sun shows how this worked in the English ritual year but there were parallels all across Europe. Celebrating Italy, a cookbook by Carol Field, covers contemporary survivals in seasonal festivals, some of which look more than a little pagan. A weariness with the excessive materiality of late medieval religion contributed to the Reformation.
I don't know how one would quantify degrees of "superstitiousness" but pre-modern cultures are generally superstitious. Then this erodes as examined in Religion and the Decline f Magic by Keith Thomas.
If you'e using the word figuratively, sure. If you mean it literally, then no. The path of bloodshed is never consonant with Christian virtue. I should also add that there is of course a struggle to be aged within us., all of us. I mentioned Mother Teresa above. For her that struggle against a barren inner darkness within took the form of heroic charity without. There are other paths too: while not popular at all today, asceticism like the way of St. Anthony of the Great or st. Seraphim of Sarov.
I don't wish to speak for Jon F., and I'm not even formally a Christian, but...
Healers are warriors of the spirit, and warriors of the spirit are warriors. Not metaphorically. The martial virtues are demanded, and fighting that was makes them flourish.
Not Gnosticism as much as being at ease in Sodom. A wish not to be thought weird and fanatical. And this pathology in the American psyche has cast a terrible pall on our witness.
It's natural men, that is, the unconverted, who don't want to sing love songs to Jesus. What are most of the Psalms if not love songs to Jesus? I understand what you mean, and you know I am giving you a bit of a hard time. We both despise banality, sappiness, treacle. But the great hymns, like the Psalms, arouse the instinctive disgust of the unredeemed. Let's be careful with that thar language, son. It's loaded.
I've never not been a Protestant, and the other men in my church would join me in snickering at your caricature of us. Your experience of Protestant churchgoing may have been limited to mainlining, and mainlining can certainly kill a Christian life.
I do object to your scorn for church parking lot attendants. It's disrespect to brothers in Christ who have that unglamorous but indispensable spiritual gift without which in its multiple forms, the worshipping Church could not continue to worship together, the gift of helps. It's a cheap, easy, and thoroughly unspiritual shot to make slighting remarks about such people. The tenor of the things which Jesus said and the Apostles wrote inclines me to suspect that church parking lot attendants and others of their prosaic appearing status will be among the most richly rewarded Christians in Eternity. Hey, I am in favor of all Christians selling their cars and buying horses, instead. It would certainly bring us closer to the Christianity of centuries ago. Still, there would always be a need for someone to hold the horses during the service.
I was raised a Baptist but have spent most of my adult life in Evangelical non-denomination churches. All of the worship in the latter involved pop-rock praise bands with emotional women on stage singing with their hands raised to Jesus like he is some teenage heart throb. Psalms they are not.
And it’s not that I have scorn for parking lot attendants, it’s just that for many men it’s seen as the most masculine thing you can do at church. I get it, someone has to carry the chairs and I’m sure quite a few young ladies have been courted by their future husbands through those types of “acts of service”, but that’s not all men are wired to do.
Just to be contrarian. Psalm 118:24 has been put to music in a beautiful, pop manner which at times I can't seem to get out of my head. I'm not sure which protestant put it to this particular melody, but I am very grateful they did.
I think when Jesus returns, He will cast the memory of "praise music" into the Lake of Fire. Most of what my church sings are Psalms which have been refashioned into prose and set to music, some of it new, all of it having dignity. The rest of what we sing are hymns, many if not most of which were written by and for traditional Anglicans.
We have ad hoc musical accompaniment. In a lot of the kinds of churches you allude to, our pastor would also be "the worship leader." He plays guitar and sings quite well. We generally have a pianist. One of the pastor's sons is attracted to instruments few sane people want to learn, such as tuba and bagpipes. Usually, he stands with the little ad hoc band, adding tuba fills where appropriate. We have a member who is learning guitar. Occasionally, he stands in. And we have a percussionist, a young black man who is so post race conscious that he doesn't hesitate to refer to himself as "your little drummer boy."
I am by far the worst singer in a congregation filled with good to excellent singers. ( I cannot include the dear lady who is tone deaf as one of our singers for the same reason you can't say that a disabled person is a poor athlete. )
I think that one of the great failings of American churches is in "talent scouting," for lack of a less vulgar term. Elders should be persistent in trying to elicit from members whether there is anything the members think they could contribute to the life of the church. Each believer is supposed to "stir up the gift" which is in him, and it certainly helps to have church leaders who encourage believers and try to guide them in it.
The church I have been a member of for a decade has failed utterly to do this with me. I understand why this is so, but am disappointed in them nonetheless. And I go ahead and do what I know I am supposed to do.
My son is about to turn 14. I have enormously appreciated the men of this community as much as I’ve appreciated the men at our church for telling it like it is with boys.
He’s (in his mind) going to be a major league ice hockey player and in the off-season race Formula 1. In fact at dinner tonight, we all had a good laugh that he wants to dedicate a mass to Max VonSteppern (something or other too tired to look it up, races for Red Bull, I’m fairly certain). We told him, if he’s got $10 and is willing to go to the parish secretary, go for it. He kinda wants to in his contrary little mind. We loved it! Way to be contrary!
I’m SO much more calm about it now.
I draw the line at jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, but, I’m so much more relaxed and able to encourage him.
The men in our parish are great! He’s told to stand up straight, get your hands out of his pockets, stop picking at himself, stand still, and it’s SO VITAL that it’s not coming from me!
As soon as I really started experiencing the proper way of men, I’ve kinda told myself, I (somewhat - it’s not over, ever, as a parent) did my job and delivered him to men to teach him how to be.
The other half I still have to work on is civilizing him enough to get a girl so she can complete the job. We have a joke in our house when he’s being particularly teenage “someday, some girl”. When he complains about us, we just tell him that someday he can have the privilege of embarrassing his own kids and regale him with stories of stuff we’re still living down.
Re: In most cases it seems there was no making peace with the Vikings
Historically there was. Alfred the Great (who was "Great" for more reasons than just his military victories) insisted on the Danes he defeated converting to Christianity and while it took a generation or two that generally did the trick. Likewise on the Continent: Charles the Simple (I think that's who was king of Francia) gave Normandy to the Vikings, but also demanded they convert-- and voila! the Normans. Who kept their military prowess but were less into wanton pillage and rapine.
Modern neo-paganism seems to me, from the outside, to be closest to the sort mystery cult that was prevalent in the Roman Empire: an individualist religion, not so much a communal one.
They surrendered land (Danelaw) in order to be left alone. That sounds like conquest to me, even if it did eventually come with conversion. It counts as making peace as the losing side.
But the Danes came back in the form of Sweyn Forkbeard & Son. Canute made England a part of his Danish empire. Even though Edward the Confessor was once again an “Anglo-Saxon” king, his mother was a Norman, whose second marriage was to Canute. The Normans were Danish, too. In the end, England was in fact conquered utterly by the Danes.
Canute was a Christian monarch, well thought of by his contemporaries, including the Pope whom he visited on pilgrimage in Rome. He was definitely a huge improvement over the feckless Ethelred the Unready. It was Ethelred who provoked the war with Canute's father Sweyn by ordering a a general massacre of Danes in England. Happily his order was not carried out very thoroughly; unhappily its victims included Sweyn's sister and her children.
He united England. He didn't reunite England, as it had never been united.
In addition, the Danes mostly settled in Anglian territories, and were in fact very closely related to the Angles, probably closer than the latter were to Saxons like Alfred. The thing is that this was all a war between cousins, and the Danes were referred to as "the Great Heathen Army"; the distinction was their religion, not their ethnicity.
In addition, Denmark converted to Christianity quite early, round about 1000, much earlier than the 12th century that Rod quotes, which was the Swedes.
The Danes assimilated to Englishness-- they lost their language, their pagan religion and many of their customs. and yes, Alfred and his heirs insisted they recognize the kingship of the king of Wessex, which as Derek says below became the monarchy of all England.
All true. But the Normans ended up with the lot, and they were Danes, regardless of religion or language. The remaining Anglo-Saxons ended up out back feeding the pigs.
That there remained some Anglo-Saxon elites and that there were—as any society has—Normans on the lower end of the pecking order hardly dents the directional reality that the Normans were Danes and that 1066 was the last Viking assault, effectively.
This is a good reminder that multiculturalism is rubbish along with the idea that all religions are good and should “coexist” as that vapid bumper sticker says.
Oh it’s fine but not much . Why would you brag about it? If you’re unwilling to coexist with people you don’t agree with , that is a bad thing.What are you going to do , murder them? Unfortunately that where the human race often goes.
A left-wing Quaker in my community sports a COEXIST bumper sticker. Obviously I'm not going to kill him and I would treat him respectfully if I ever met him. But I'm not in a hurry to meet him. The silly man is a member of the Democratic Central Committee in our 79 % Trump county. He's got an uphill fight politically.
But the woke left are the one's with the COEXIST bumper sticker.......this can't be true. LOL. The friend I talked about yesterday with the "F--- Bush" t-shirt, also had a "COEXIST" on his Volvo. I bite my tongue quite often with this fellow.
Of course we should, Jon. But the sort of person with a COEXIST sticker on their car bumper are leftist. Religious belief puzzles them at best. Most despise any sort of religion. Deep down, most hate Christians, especially Republican Christians.
Oh - happy day. Before this, other than Kristen Lavransdatter, I'd not seen the love of the North in Rod. I love it dearly. In a Lewis and Tolkien way, and in many ways. I've been weeks in Iceland, and a couple of year back, I arranged 11 days each in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
If Dale Nelson were still posting here, he could say a lot. He set me onto a wonderful series of books the "Saga of Erling Skjalgsson" by Lars Waker- I read all six - about a renegade monk turned priest (long story) who is kidnapped and lives among Vikings. They are definitely Chritian books - it is set in the year 1000 as Vikings choose to convert. Not preachy at all. I loved it - especially the first book "Erling's World", now combined with "The Year of the Warrior". which is among my favorites. (One
Now, more than half of you will disagree with me but that's OK. I love the mini-series "Vikings'. It does just what Rod talked about here - puts us in a world where people believe in Enchantment . The first few seasons were the best. For me, that was because of the character of Athelstan, the kidnapped priest who is allowed to live among the Vikings. We Christians see their world through his eyes Oh...I just love it. I liked "The Northman", but I liked "Vikings" even more.
And why? Male vs. female thoughts about my love for this stuff? The answer is uncertain. I'm definitely female, I do not fantasize about going to war - though I can be a bit of an Eowyn at times, but otherwise, no. So why? I don't like the raiding - I wish it was not there. I do like women in Viking times. One large piece of this: I think the stories are very beautiful. I love myth. And really, Yes! just as Rod is describing here - it's the Vikings who lived as if so much was true. **"I've heard Thor in the thunder"** says Athelstan at one point when he struggles.
We don't think as often of medieval Christians hearing God in the thunder.
It is not uncommon for people to be repelled by norse mythology, as compared with Greek. Count me among them.
Rod mentioned the Nazis. You know who didn't buy the return to paganism bit? Hitler himself. He used to make fun of Himmler, who was way into it--behind his back, of course. I can't think of somebody more disenchanted than Hitler. He was modern.
Is that it? I could never get people, men and women, to explain why they did not like "Vikings" except my sister who said, "They're dirty", meaning literally not bathed, greasy hair. That's not a good reason. - - Very interesting about Hitler! I knew the higher up Nazi's were into non-Christian things, and as a keyboard person, I'd been forbidden to play 'The Wedding March' as a wedding musician by priests of course - but I don't know enough about it.
There's no statute, but there's an agreement not to play Wagner publicly in Israel. He was certainly antisemitic, and Hitler's favorite composer. There's nothing antisemitic about Lohengrin, which is where the Wedding March comes from--the villainess worships "Wodan". It's funny, the wedding Recessional is by Mendelssohn, who was of Jewish heritage, although the family converted.
Barbarism? I gotta challenge disliking the Norse and Vikings on that. Look at us. We conquered our lands in the USA (Yes, I know, attacks were mutual). The north people could not farm well, they had to do something. The Norman conquest (OK, many of those had Norse ancestors). Just....war...why are Vikings always supposed to be the most brutal?
Contemporary to the Norse were the Magyars who were also pretty awful back then. while the Vikings raided by sea, the Magyars raided by land until Otto the Great put a firm stop to that at Lechfield-- and also required the Magyars convert to Christianity.
I had a music theory professor way back in the day who was an Israeli. I remember him telling the class that he was disappointed when he found out that Brahms was antisemitic. Someone in the class asked him about Wagner, and he replied that for him Wagner’s antisemitism was merely one facet of an overall awful personality.
That's interesting. I don't know that about Brahms. I do know that Hitler used to bang on about how Brahms was the darling of the moneyed Vienna Jews in comparison to local-boy-makes-good Bruckner (whom I can't listen to).
Two stories about Brahms. Hans von Bülow (he later recanted, handsomely, to Verdi himself) wrote that Verdi's Requiem was trashy. Brahms was intrigued, went out and bought the score and said, "Von Bülow has made a fool of himself. It's a work of genius."
Once on holiday in Italy his train passed through Pesaro and he made the men in the compartment stand and bare their heads. It's Rossini's hometown.
Dear Theodorus Iacobutius, those are your Latin roots calling from down deep!
The difference between Classical paganism and Norse paganism is that Classical paganism has been immensely fruitful, and brought along concepts such as pietas and religion, as well as the basic belief in the natural equality of all men, as Cicero said so well.
Norse paganism, on the other hand, was a blind alley, as the Germans - the Goths especially - themselves easily realized when they converted in droves to Christianity.
Norse mythology is a curiosity, and even funny to read, but at the end it never produced anything good.
There is something to be said about Norse religion's eschatology:" that the gods are doomed to fail, but one must fight for the good cause anyway. And the descrip[tipn of Fimbulwinter is, er, chilling:
I loved Vikings, too! Though not so much after they killed off Ragnar, I wasn’t terribly interested in his boys. I certainly wouldn’t have liked being a woman back then.
Spoiler Warning !!! - - - I liked it after Ragnar died, but I really liked while he was alive, and of course I adored it when Athelstan was alive. Sigh. Such great characters. The boys were OK except, despite being portrayed by a good actor, Ivar was just never an interesting character to me. I liked how the sons were all so different. Lagertha did not appeal much to me nor did contrast, 2nd wife Aslaug. Only Sigi and Judith (English) seemed to be interesting as a females, oh and maybe Bjorn's last wife, and Floki's wife was OK. But actual women in Viking times sound interesting.
Could be part of being heterosexual. I'm like that. But also, yes, males are just written in a more interesting way. Fiction writers who do well with this - C.S. Lewis' Orual in "Till We Have Faces" is perhaps the greatest female character of all time, I think. And I think George RR Martin is wonderful with the female characters, they are just as interesting as the males. And I aforementioned Eowyn. Arwyn and Galadriel are boring compared to Aragorn, Boromir, Frodo and Sam - and even Eowyn is not near their equal.) For film/TV...hmm..not since Emma Peel, and that is a very, very long time ago. - Oh yes, I know you don't like it, but Carol in The Walking Dead is a very good and interesting female, I think. Great, iconic friendship, just friendship, with Daryl. (Oh, and heh...reminds me..Scully is not bad...a good contrast with Mulder.)
I forgot about Carol. She had a really good story.
Tried to watch X-files, but, there’s something about Gillian Anderson’s voice that sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.
You’re probably right about it coming from being heterosexual, also, growing up with a very possessive parent who’s never had anything positive to say about anyone.
I think James Cameron has created some great women characters in film. Sigourney Weaver's Ripley from the Alien series is badass, beautiful, smart, and feminine. And she was doing it long before it became trendy or woke to make women the focal point of action films. I'm also partial to Rose from Titanic. So beautiful, feminine and strong.
Two cheers for The X-Files. Only two because it went so badly off the rails after the first few seasons. The episode with the suburban Satanists has a line I've often quoted: "Did you think you could call up Satan and make him behave?"
The X-files was yet another case of a show lasting too long. The attempted revival was a five star disaster. "Trust no one"- iespecially not networks looking to milk a bit more from an old, tired cash cow.
I thought it was well acted but I found its general view of things nihilistic and dark (in all fairness due, probably, more to the nihilism of the series’ modern writers and directors than to that of the old Norse). I found particularly tiresome the wavering between incomprehension of and contempt for Christianity (in their superficiality and ignorance much more reflective of the standard among, again, modern writers and film directors than the old berserkers) and their general portrayal of the Anglo-Saxons as military incompetents and wimps. True, the Vikings did catch the English off guard at first, but as time wore on the invaders found to their chagrin that they were up against a formidable foe. Take one of Alfred’s battles:
There's a Japanese comic called Vinland Saga, that shows the world of King Cnut (despite the name it's not focused on Vinland for the first ~100 volumes) with amazing respect, beauty, and soul.
Highly recommended (at least those first ~100 volumes).
I wouldn't recommend the animated show. It doesn't do justice to the beauty of the comic's art work, and the violence will naturally feel much more graphic.
That being said, the effect of that violence on the main character is the narrative driver of the story. It goes interesting places.
Kristin Lavransdatter is my favorite novel. Undset's other great book is The Master of Hestviken (newly re-published as Olav Audensson in a Tina Nunally translation). It has a male protagonist and is set a generation before Kristin. Undset's less known--and shorter!--Gunnar's Daughter is grim as the grimmest saga.
An excellent fantasy where the Old Gods of the North are real is Poul Anderson's THE BROKEN SWORD, inspired by Volsungasaga and Hervarrarsaga The best science fiction treatment of Norse mythology I know of is David Drake's Northworld Trilogy, which is as authentically brutal as the films mentioned above.
All the sagas and other Norse literature are readily available in modern editions. For the Norse culture, see Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm or his more academic The Viking Way. Noted Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey examines Norse mentalité in Laughing Shall I Die.
I speak in bibliographies, folks, I can't help it.
The Blood Eagle and Uppsala episodes of Vikings are some of the best television made in the last few years. The half here who deride the show (save the last two seasons) are just wrong.
I disagree about Blood Eagle (interesting but gratuitous, I thought - my doctor told me how much he liked it thought, heh). Uppsala was just wonderful, possibly their best episode. Ragnar "becomes a Christian" was awfully good too.
"I believe that Christianity would not be in retreat as it is today if there wasn’t something deeply lacking in the life of the Church. That something is what I call enchantment. It is that sense that God — the God of the Bible — is everywhere present, and fills all things. That we can and must know him, not only with our minds, and not only with our hearts, but in our bodies too. That the thread connecting heaven and earth, God and men, now and forever — that we can come to see it and feel it, and hold onto it like a lifeline keeping us from perishing beneath the waves of liquid modernity."
This post made me think of the current controversy over the Anglo-Saxons. It is rather incredible that British universities have begun removing the term "Anglo-Saxon" from their vocabulary in order to "decolonize" their own history. Of course, there would be no Britain today, and no British culture as we know it, without the Anglo-Saxons.
It is a miracle that Alfred the Great, and the kings thereafter, were on the precipice of total annihilation before fighting bloody wars, decade after decade, to retake their lands from the vikings and preserve their heritage.
And that included the preservation of Christianity. Strangely enough, many norsemen became converts on English shores, which often brought peace.
Not all vikings were expelled. Many stayed and, in essence, became Anglo-Saxon, much like people immigrating to the U.S. become Americans. Same with the Norman's. Ironic, isn't it?
Jesus's teaching cannot be separated from the Old Testament, especially if you accept Jesus's claims that He is God. He is the same being that visited judgement upon whole civilizations. Some look on that in horror, but in doing so, fail to consider a Holy God and the true depths sin can, does and will take both an individual human life and whole civilizations. God has judged whole nations, including those of Central/South America, and either will act completely on His own or use the same flawed humans He always has.
Jesus never dismissed or reputed the Old Testament. He was here to offer the way for humans to reconcile themselves to God, to escape the pit of sin, and to be absolved of the judgement of a Holy God.
One should reflect on God's mercy, in that He withholds such judgement for a very long time, and sends repeated warnings along so many mediums the price to be paid for such. His patience is long, but it is not infinite. Somewhere, a clock is ticking.
And this encapsulates the OT rather perfectly, as it illustrates the cycle of human nature: Israelites are saved by the Lord and are grateful for a time, but lapse into sin which disappoints God and ultimately leads to their downfall, upon which they cry out to the Lord and He rescues them.
Ah, Marcionism isn't all bad; none of the so-called heresies are. Almost all Catholics and Orthodox are at least a little Marcionist in practice. And in light of current and ongoing church scandals, perhaps consider Donatism, which posits that a corrupt priest auto-nullifies his own Holy Orders. Well, that sounds pretty good to me.
Years ago in the TAC comboxes a woman posted, "You can say ex opera operato until you're blue in the face, there is no way I'm taking Communion from a rapist."
Okay, but the whole point of rejecting the heresy was to reassure people that when they found out at a later date that the duly ordained priest who administered their sacrament was in fact a bad guy, that the sacrament was still valid.
We could square that by saying it's the faith of the believer that is the true authority behind the sacrament, not the status of the priest. The guy just does a job.
I’m not a theologian and only play one on TV but I don’t think that’s correct . A priest isn’t just doing a job even if he’s corrupt. That’s part of the whole point of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The recipient of communion doesn’t make the sacrament valid via his state of mind . The priest is a priest not some regular guy doing a job. He can’t escape it . By the way , this is one of the reasons - what I’m going to call classical Satanist not the modern humanists or the Anton Le Vey performers- treasured renegade priests.
Even in the ancient Church, Judaic ritualism was rejected. We read about the beginning of this in Acts when the Apostles rejected a requirement that Gentile converts must be circumcised. The first named heresy was "Judaizing"-- the notion that one must follow the Judaic Law in all things to be a Christian.
Right—so Marcionism ultimately devolves into a matter of hermeneutics. It's just a word for when people think you're not ignoring things politely enough.
No. It doesn't. It says that the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New. It's halfway to Manichaeism. Simone Weil was shocked by the Old Testament, and it was Eliot who pointed that she was flirting with Marcionism. But I don't think she ever got there.
It’s a fine line between the ontological claim of “It’s not the same deity” and the hermeneutic claim of “It’s still Him, but they got Him all wrong”—and I would say in practice, a vanishing line. I prefer the approach of radical hermeneutic reappraisal, though, in line with St. Paul.
That said, there are vast swaths of the OT that are never mentioned across the liturgical year, and I would deem that a sort of practical Marcionism: “Yeahh, just don’t worry about that part.”
I knew someone who was Jewish who never converted but attended Catholic mass for awhile because she rejected the Old Testament as harsh. She later went into Chabad . Go figure!
Not quite but yes I think you’re right on this . She was a strange one. Unfortunately I had a whole collection of work by her that I also lost in my Ida flood.
The genocidal commands in the OT relate only to that time and place. There is no nation now of which one can say they are Amalekites and must be destroyed utterly.
I agree that the Aztec and Mayan societies were particularly horrible, and I think their destruction at the hands of the Spanish was a great benefit for humanity (of course I wish the Spanish had been better Christians themselves), but I don't believe the Spanish doing that were acting in accordance with OT genocidal commands, but, at their best, in accordance with moral and pragmatic judgments. I think more or less the same about the defeat of the Nazis. I mean that sometimes fighting and killing is the lesser evil, but one is fighting against fellow sinners.
If one believes the OT genocidal commands are applicable today, that gets one into very dark places. The Puritan settlers in New England thought that, and used it for their genocide of the natives. To be sure, the Native Americans there were not Disney darlings, but they were not Aztecs either.
The OT genocides were wars for Israel. I believe Israel is now the Church, and the war is taking place in each human heart. The little ones that must not be spared are our smallest sins. I know that you, a Dispensationalist, believe that Israel is the Jewish people, or even the state of that name perhaps. I disagree, but that is not the point here.
If you believe the genocidal commands can still be applied, how do you identify those situations?
That's your opinion, of course. That's not the Lord's. If such judgement came about today, it would be just as clear as it was in one of the OT accounts. It would not be just some human with a wild hair.
How can they be identified? Again, it would be the Lord who would make that clear.
Yes, we just discussed the Central/South American situation. Also, Israel being scattered was such a judgement. Christ has not changed, God has not changed and there is nothing Scriptural that shows He has changed that policy. God's holiness and judgement is still a part of things. The glorious thing is Christ being involved now, and that does give both individuals and civilizations an out.
This is good stuff, Rod! You should write about movies more often. Particularly, I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of my favorite Terrence Malick films: The Tree of Life, The Thin Red Line, The New World. I’ve seen you mention A Hidden Life before.
"The Old Testament is the most realistic, truest, and most authentic expression of the truth about the heart of man. When he is still uncouth, and not very docile, far from a God of mercy and pity, when he has not yet been transformed,...he is violent, barbaric, and pitiless towards his enemy." - Cardinal Robert Sarah
What I thought of when I read the Book of the Judges the first time, and what Rod's description of "The Northman" reminds me of.
If there were any justice in the world, we would have a Pope Sarah by now.
To my knowledge, there is no significant extant corpus of myths of the Celts, Huns or Gauls as they were so completely overwhelmed by Christianity and so early that little passed down as having value. In contrast, Scandinavia converted relatively late and it was drawn out over about 300 years, so much more survived, relatively speaking. There's some interesting stuff in their myths and sagas e.g. Njal's Saga
A big factor there for the Celts (the Gauls were of the same group) was that they had runes, but very little literature. Their oral traditions recorded by outsiders is the best we have of their traditions and stories. Most of it is Geoffrey of Monmouth, Mallory, and a few Christian monks.
It didn't help that Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, burned every pagan manuscript he could get his hands on. Thank God the libraries of Byzantium were safe from him.
For those less apt to watch a blood-and-guts film like The Northman, I'd recommend some of the Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. All present a specifically Japanese understanding of "enchantment." Heck, even Stephen Chow's comedic fantasy Journey to the West offers up an interesting (and ultimately serious) Chinese take on the subject!
I'm glad there's another Miyazaki fan here. In "Spirited Away" he really does catch the enchantment. There's layer upon layer there. I prefer the Japanese name: "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi" - "Sen and Chihiro [the same girl] hidden by the gods".
Miyazaki is very Shinto. I wonder what a Christian Miyazaki would look like? I try imaging a Studio Ghibli version of Narnia.
I believe the lack of religious enchantment in modern life is caused by two historical changes. First is the rise of Darwinism, natural selection and evolution. If it is drilled into you that all you are is an evolved ape, why bother with religious enchantment. Second is the affluence of modern-day life. Materially, most people in the West live an enchanted life filled with goodies like hot showers, flush toilets, automobiles, televisions, automatic dishwashers, football games, Taylor Swift concerts and the like. Why even bother with religion? Instead, why not have a good time, neglect religion and live until your body gives out. If there's a God, you've been pretty good so God will take you into heaven. Hell is only for bad people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Jeffrey Dahmer and Jack the Ripper.
Read about it over a plate of red clam sauce for lunch. Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian are going to the see the same God just in different ways. Just as Malachi Martin made fun of. You're going Route 22 and I'm going route 21 and we'll both get there.
Cmon, be fair. It was an awkward statement of the truth that all non Christian religions have an inkling, a sparkle, of the truth, the whole of which is the Logos. He’s an old sick guy during an exhausting trip.
You give an excellent summary of what Rod refers to as MTD, moralistic therapeutic deism.
While we rightly criticize the effects of "pure" science on religion, there's an ironic twist from the social sciences: it is posited (as in hypothesis, not theory) that human instinct is exactly why we have religions, and religion is at some level a survival behavior. I, for one, believe that there is a reality beyond our everyday perceptual reach, which we do experience (if with great difficulty) at times, and that science has a very long way to go to observe and measure this interaction.
William Cavanaugh has referred to the "migration of the holy." Our enchantment is still there, it's just moved from religion to the state and the market.
It is possible to see enchantment in evolutionary processes, just as we can in all natural processes. By and large we haven't gone that route (although Teilhard de Chardin made the attempt) but there nothing in evolution that rules out transcendence any more than there is in atomic theory.
Valid point, Jon, but most people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that. As you know, Walker Percy agreed with Teilhard de Chardin on the point you make.
That’s correct but the effect was to weaken religious faith in general and I think that was because of a tendency towards a narrow literalism that wouldn’t hold up in the context of evolutionary theory. That says more about people than the theory.
Darwin's theory also showed up against a cultural background where the optimistic cult of progress was in full swing, bolstered by the new technologies and discoveries which were transforming everyday life. The old message of the world as a veil of tears and humanity as sinful in need of God for salvation was no longer playing well.
A lot of what gets blamed on the Enlightenment in these parts was in fact 19th century in origin.
“the effect was to weaken religious faith in general and I think that was because of a tendency towards a narrow literalism that wouldn’t hold up in the context of evolutionary theory. That says more about people than the theory.”
True. That “narrow literalism” shouldn’t have held up, however, in any context - at least as far as literature is concerned. It inevitably distorts the meaning of any literary work - including the Bible. Would that folks approaching the Bible remember William Blake’s warning:
"If it is drilled into you that all you are is an evolved ape, why bother with religious enchantment?"
Well, when a certain ape evolved to a certain point, God breathed into man's nostrils and man became a living soul. Its true that Darwinian theories have been used to deny God any role, just as Social Darwinism has been used to crush unions and tell the starving masses that wealthy people are wealthy simply because they are a superior breed.
Its probably true that after a life of taking hot showers in a well scrubbed tub, stepping into a waterfall in a shaded pool deep in the forest loses its enchantment -- yuck, its so unsanitary. But perhaps the most enchanting moment of my life was rounding a bend in the trail to Pictograph Point as Mesa Verde, hearing a breeze echo through a shallow cave on the left with a line of pines on the right and a view across the open spaces to nearby mesas. Nothing pagan about it, just enchanting.
A Lutheran pastor devoted to prison ministry was once asked "Do you really think Jeffrey Dahmer can be saved? His immediate response was "Well, can you?"
Similar prayers were collected in and around Scotland in the 19th C by Alexander Carmichael. A lovely collection of the best examples is Celtic Invocations from Vineyard Press. The full collection is Carmina Gadelica which preserves some pagan material, too. But be aware that Carmichael edited and "improved" his examples.
I read Kirstin Lavransdatter in the older translation and loved it. The newer translation has been pushed so strongly here I decided to look into what other readers have to say.Now occasionally when a new translation comes out , it’s all but universally accepted as superior to what came before. I think this is the case with Zenos Conscience as opposed to Confessions of Zeno. Here , that doesn’t seem to be the case. Some prefer the older translation and actually say it’s truer to the original language and point out that it came out soon after the original , that Undset knew the translators and was fluent in English. Others say the new translation is better. Still others who’ve read both, like both. So my guess is the reader will do ok with either translation.
On God and Allah: obviously Christians , Jews and Muslims interpret God differently. But I don’t know how you could establish that one group worships a God that’s different from another. You can say - they- whoever they may be have it profoundly wrong.
This has been true in the translations of Dostoevsky, which have caused some controversy. Some prefer the literalness of Pevear-Volokhonsky, while others say that in being overly literal they lose the "poetry" in FD's work.
As I said in another comment, I'm of the small party that actually prefers the older translation of Kristin. But I don't dis-recommend the newer one. It's really a matter of taste. As you say, the reader will do ok with either.
Is it, though?
Well, you can't be a monotheist and posit there are different gods.
There is one God and countless gods. For my part, I believe that Muhammed's "Gibreel" was a djinn and not the angel.
This is something I can agree is a possibility. Among the Orthodox I've found a few people who think that the western Marian apparitions, at least the one's whose "messages" appear to denigrate "Orthodoxy", may be demons masquerading as the Theotokos (I offer no opinion of my own on that one).
I also have no opinion, but I'd add that *demons* seems to be going a little far. I think of djinni as like desert faerie; there's a range of spiritual entities known to be not evil per se, but volatile and michievious.
I've agreed with you before as to the possibility of spiritual beings who are neither of Heaven nor Hell. But the fruit of Gabriel's "revelation" seems to be well beyond the merely mischievous. IMO, it has a scent of Hell about it.
Well of course I am monotheistic, but I don’t know that I agree that the god worshipped by our Islamic brothers is the same god Christians worship. Maybe He is. I’ve never thought much about it.
Well, anyone can just *say* things.
If the God worshipped by Muslims exists at all, and if there is only one God, then of course it must be the same God. Otherwise, either there are multiple gods, and we, their adherents are fighting Team Our God against Team Their God, or, they are worshipping a nonexistent nonentity. You have thought about it -- you told us that Maronite Catholics open their prayers in veneration of the Virgin Mary in Arabic with Ya Oum al-Lah. There is no other word for God in Arabic. (There are also no capital letters, a Sunni friend pointed out, but there are in English usage.)
They are worshipping a nonexistent nonentity. Allah is the opposite of the Christian God. He is not engendered and does not engender. He has no Son. He is One, not Three.
That the word allah means god in Arabic means that Arabic-speaking Christians refer to God as allah. Of course, just as Spanish-speakers refer to Him as Dios. It does not mean that when a Christian Arab says allah he means what a Muslim means when he says Allah.
The Muslim image of god is, as the French historian Alain Besançon once wrote, the idolatry of the Jewish god.
Are you saying that Jesus's father (the Jewish God) is an idolatrous image?
Does a Baptist mean the same thing as a Copt when he says "God"? The theologies of the two groups do differ too. And again, what about the Jews?
Well, English "god", or that matter, Greek "theos" started out referencing pagan gods and I'm pretty sure those are non-existent beings, at least as gods (some are anthropomorphic representations of natural or civilizational powers which do exist)
The great French historian Alain Besançon once wrote that Allah, the god of the Muslims, is the idolatrous version of the god of the Jews. Ponder that.
Allah is the opposite of the Triune God. He cannot engender, and is not engendered. He is One, not Three.
True, but then the same must be said of the God of the Jews. At that point we are n the road to Marcionism. Or maybe even Gnosticism.
Jon, by the time Jesus came on the scene, influences within Judaism, along with Hellenism to some degree, had Jews talking about something like "a second person" that was somehow divine or connected to the LORD in some divine fashion. This discussion was going on for +/- a century before and after Jesus. Not only N.T. Wright and other Protestants have called attention to this, but Jewish scholars as well. Also, there is good academic work at the site marquette.edu/maqom/ (Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism) regarding this. That site was started and compiled by a post-grad studying under +Alexander (Golitzin) when he was a professor at Marquette. It has been updated in the intervening years with whatever "the latest" on the subject has been published. Not all the authors are Christians, but it is all rigorous research. Jewish thought had space to entertain the idea of something like "the trinity".
As Fr Tom Hopko has said, he has asked Jewish scholars if, on the basis of their understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, God could ever be without his Word or his Spirit. Evidently, he never received a "yes" to that question.
Dana
No, Nora, Allah is not God. Islam is a demonic blasphemy.
Allah is simply the arabic word for "God" (technically "the God" as Arabic requires the article in many places English does not). My Antiochian Orthodox church uses snippets of Arabic in its liturgy. When we sing "Qudsun Illah..." ("Holy God...") we are no more referencing a "different god" then when we also sing in Greek "Hagios ho Theos...".
It does not matter what it is the word for God makes it clear who He is. And it is not the stuff pushed by Mohammed.
Allah is God, just as Batihah is Watermelon, khubbas is bread, and Min Fadlak is Please. You can say that Islam has a totally mistaken view of who God is, but you can't say that Allah does not mean God, without sounding totally ignorant. Jon is absolutely correct here. Praising God in Arabic, regardless of religion, will mean praising Allah. Now, asking for yogurt in the Arab world can sound a little different, depending on what country you're in, Leban, min fadlak, wala Haleeb, min fadlak . . .
No, he is not. He is a demonic heresy. At least what Muslims observe.
Keep telling yourself that...
I can accept that Islam was a heresy inspired by demonic forces, to prevent Christianity from spreading far and wide-- and setting it on the path to being a chauvinistic faith of Europeans. But God is still God.
They are not the same God. This is blasphemous. The one true Triune God has nothing to do with the false god of Islam. God demands repentance and belief in His Son Jesus as Lord and Savior. He enters into a loving eternal relationship with us who believe but exacts eternal damnation on those who reject Him. Allah is not triune and does not offer a free gift of salvation to all who believe. How can you say these two deities are the same? Islam is rooted in a theft and twisting of Christianity into a religion of works-based salvation. Satan is always trying to twist the gospel into being something that is works-based. I’ve long thought he tried to copy his success with Islam in the eastern world here in the west with the invention of Mormonism, but that he was not as successful. They both had leaders who claimed new revelation was given to them by angels, most likely Satan himself, in my opinion. But Mormonism was peaceful whereas Islam conquered by the sword.
Yet more reason for me to believe that women are some of the best evangelists. Thank you, Mary. Thank you for saying unbashfully things which must be said but which I can't be confident I know any Christian male besides me would say. ( I can be confident I would because I have. Provoking people to rage and disgust with me isn't temperamentally innate to me, but proclaiming Truth is exhilarating, isn't it? And there are enough of my own personal qualities which will provoke them to rage and disgust with me, anyway.
I'm especially grateful for your words about Mormonism. Haven't they gotten even more deceitful in recent years with their churchofjesuschrist.org ?
There are well meaning people associated with this Substack who list LDS along with genuinely Christian groups, and every time I see it, metaphorically I rend my garments.
Well, I couldn't say it (except maybe the part about some demoniac entity masquerading as Gabriel) because it's irrational and illogical. Yes, I'm the first to affirm that reason alone cannot lead us to Divine Truth. But we also cannot toss reason away in the ditch.
I can say simply that Islam (and Judaism, and the Mormons too) are in error, without positing that those errors somehow create other gods.
They don't create "other Gods," but in positing a God who is not the actual God, they are doing the work of demons, and according to the Bible, leading people to damnation. Remember the New Testament warning against "other Jesuses."
All this celebrating of converted pagans with moonbeams in their eyes is deeply charming, but if it weakens our commitment to propositional truth, it's diabolical.
Its much easier for me to believe that humans are all stumbling around in the dark trying to find the truth, and all of us coming up short.
I agree with this approach interpersonally (as I alluded to above).
In my interior spiritual life, though, I took a big step forward when I accepted Jesus as historical fact (at least I think it was a big step forward). This step has simultaneously made it harder and easier to accept my friends from other faiths. Harder in that I can't help but think "that's not true" when my LDS friend talks of Christ. Easier in that I can let it go and believe with certainty that God will guide them to the historical Jesus I now know.
There is too much in the Bible which militates against that idea. Consider only the verse which refers to people who didn't have a love for the truth, which prevented their being able to discern truth when they heard it preached. A person does have to want to know God before he can. The Bible is not complimentary to humanity: we've all gone "out of the way." There is no one who naturally wants to know truth.
I'm not a Calvinist because I cannot imagine anything less glorifying to God than determinism, but it's undeniable that The Holy Spirit must crack a person open before the person can want to know truth.
Wow! So, everyone who doesn’t believe the exact same things as you is diabolical and damned. This is the kind of perspective that leads to things like the Inquisition and religious wars. And a perspective that is greatly at odds with Jesus’s teachings.
Well, of course, that's nonsense, but nonsense which every faithful Christian has thrown at him. First, the exact same things? You really don't know Christianity at all. Our enemies like to point to the several big divisions among Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. Why do these divisions exist? Because the people in each of them believe significantly different things about the practice of Christianity. But all of them believe that salvation is only through Jesus Christ. All of them believe in the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith.
For example, there is no such thing as a genuine Christian who doesn't believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, that He died for us, that He was raised from the dead, and that He is coming again. These things I've told you are not MY insistences. They're every Christian's insistences.
There is no getting around the exclusive claim of Christianity: all Christians believe that Jesus is the fullness of the revelation of God, God Incarnate, that He fulfilled the law of God on our behalf and died to make atonement for our sins, and that no one comes to the Father but by Him.
You say that what I've written is greatly at odds with Jesus’ teaching. Really? Find me a passage in the New Testament about Jesus' ministry in which He does not at some point proclaim Himself as the only begotten Son of God and the only way to the Father. It's also likely if you read through the particular event, you'll find that He will tell his enemies that they are dead in trespasses and sins. Himself and how others relate to Him is essentially all he does talk about! Jesus is either the most depraved narcissist in history or the only begotten Son of God.
Human errors of theology do not create alternate gods! That's modernist subjectivism, raised to a high power.
Islam is (I believe) in severe error by not recognizing Jesus as God incarnate and Messiah. And also in not recognizing the Holy Trinity. But those are the same exact errors the Jews make too.
Are the Jews worshiping a "different God". You cannot logically maintain the one without also affirming the other.
I think this is one of your smarter comments:
"Human errors of theology do not create alternate gods!"
I'd add that the muslims 100% believe Allah is the same God of Abraham and Christ that Christians and Jews worship. This is a helpful thing to hold on to when one tries to understand their faith.
I’m not clear on what you are saying. Are you saying Jews worship a different God than Christians?
I think Jesus might take issue with that, being Jewish and all.
What I am saying is if someone insists the Muslims worship a different God because of their theological errors, then the Jews too must worship a different God because they have the same errors.
Thanks - that’s more clear. I agree with you. And highlight the absurdity of that perspsective, since Jesus worshipped the Jewish God, and his teaching were all about how to be closer to that God.
This is the kind of thing that gives Christianity a bad name and drives so many people from the church.
These days, I almost don't even feel like hearing about the thing called "Christianity". There's just Jesus and His Gospel, standing as an anarchist sign of contradiction of the Kingdom against this world, just as much in the Year of Our Lord 2024 as it did in Year 30. And yes, the Gospel is the fulfillment of all paganism and legend and myth, from Odin hanging on a tree for nine days to gain wisdom for his people to Orpheus descending into Hell in search of his true love. A dimensional shift where the dream became reality. The Gospel is true because of poetry, and because it is the one point where poetry intersected fully with history.
I feel that you sometimes qualify these things more than necessary, or feel intellectually threatened by a more porous border between "pagan" and "Christian". And at some point, who cares if Orthodoxy is the "truest" form of the faith?—and I say that as a Maronite as you once were, and likely to go Orthodox sooner than later. What's most true is a phenomenological and not ecclesiological matter: it is where He comes most to life for any given person, in His full enchanting power. The Holy Ghost blows where He will, and the likes of us don't get to tell Him where He goes or doesn't.
Well, "truest" in the sense that its doctrinal judgments are accurate, and it tells us the surest "way" to God. But I of course don't believe that God/Jesus is not present in other forms. That said, it is not the case that the Christianity taught by, say, the Yale Divinity School, has much at all to do with the real thing. There is a reason it's called "Orthodoxy" (= right belief). I do think the boundaries are porous. I forget who said it, but we can identify where the Church is, but it is harder to say where it is not.
That's fair. And well, I guess in some cases, it's pretty easy to tell where the Church is not. I sent a photo to my Orthodox friend of some church on the UT Austin campus that had rainbow-colored doors spelling out, "Our doors are open to everyone." And she said, "That's such a waste of perfectly good doors." For my part, I made the sign of the Cross on instinct while passing it—for protection. Who knows what could be lurking behind those doors?
"God is in all places and filleth all things".
IMO< one must reject tribalism, which can lead to an abattoir. It suffices to say certain groups with whom we disagree are in error-- one need not say they are wicked because of that. We are all in error in some ways.
Certainly there could be people in there who are seeking God to the best of their current understanding. But as I've said before, I consider that kind of signaling to reflect allegiance to an altogether anti-Christian ideological cult. We're probably not gonna agree on that point.
For my part I don't find myself competent to judge what's in people's hearts, save perhaps a little by their deeds. The happy-clappy stuff is often quite infertile-- it yields no viable fruit at all, but that's not the same as yielding poison fruit.
Jon, a satanist flag is a clear sign. What else do you need?
I think that was Bishop Kallistos, riffing on Augustine's "How many wolves there are within, how many sheep without!"
There's also Karl Rahner with his notion of the anonymous Christian—a similar concept, but probably not that specific line.
"What's most true is a phenomenological and not ecclesiological matter"
The Fathers would disagree with you here; the two are inextricably related. To think otherwise is to be a Protestant, with Luther's invention of the "invisible church."
Sure—I guess I'm a heretic like that. I would just suggest that your own view is also based on a phenomenological judgment (i.e. something in your life experience led you to take *this* seriously as authority), so that gets into an irresolvable disagreement at an axiomatic level.
In a sense that's correct, but then it's true about everything, and thus uninteresting. It's like Van Til's "all reasoning is circular." It's true as far as it goes, but not helpful.
Yes, but then I'm saying I don't appeal first to the Fathers; I'm more inclined to appeal to Magdalene's first witness to the Resurrection, which I believe is still available to us all. And that's an independent phenomenological basis of direct verification of what the faith is. So you may call that a sort of Protestant, if you want, or something I think the Protestants got right.
Actually it's not independent, because without the Fathers we'd have no record of Mary Magdalene's witness, or the Holy Spirit's explanation of it. The Scriptures are the Church's book -- they weren't delivered to individual believers in isolation.
I believe the nexus of revelation itself is unconditioned and independent, operating in a vertical dimension that has no need of historical transmission. But would we know wiithout any historical or cultural context that what we see is the risen Jesus, or that Magdalene saw Him first?—of course not. Those are two separate questions. But I think the original thing in itself—the event—is antecedent of any institution in this world that calls itself the Church. In a way, they claim an awful lot of authority for just delivering a newspaper.
Rob, I'm not a theologian, and I hope at least one person who is will drop by to say substantially what I can say only primitively:
Luther didn't "invent" the invisible Church. The Church is invisible. Throughout The New Testament, we are presented with references to "those who went out from among us because they were not of us." These apostates had given every appearance of being Christian. No doubt they had professed faith, been baptized, taken communion, but they were not genuine. Other Christians had thought they were brothers or sisters in Christ. They had mastered what Francis Schaeffer called "godtalk," ecclesiastical word salad.
Such people weren't limited to that first generation. I know someone like that. I'm sure many others do, as well.
There's always been the belief that the Church has an invisible component, but Luther was the first to argue that the Church was primarily/fundamentally invisible. Bill Tighe has discussed this quite a few times on here.
Naturally. Luther was challenging the legitimacy of the "visible" church.
True but immaterial. It was still an invention 1500+ years after the fact.
Whether it was an invention or a revelation, we will only know for sure after we get to the other side. I expect we will all be surprised, and God will be merciful that none of us really got it right, because, how could we?
There is a middle ground: the Church is the visible institution, but we have no idea how many apparent members are outside or apparent non-members are inside.
I think this type of Paganism is appealing to many as a reaction to the Gnosticism of modern Protestantism in the West. Men don’t want to sing love songs to Jesus and be lectured to about being nice winsome fellows whose greatest battle is being a parking lot attendant at the local mega church.
Part of the appeal of the Orthodox Church to me is the emphasis that yes, the world is enchanted and we are actually at war, but not with our fellow humans, but with the powers and principalities of the world, i.e. the demons. Christ calls us to be warriors in that battle against them.
I wish I could give this more than one like, or a gigantic “(highly usable word that begins with f) yeah!”
YES! THIS!
But I have to ask. Doesn't the film "The Northman" and do series like "Vikings" portray a world in which people were more aware of enchantment than it seems like most Christians, at least Western Christians, ever were? Wasn't that the draw of the film? That was why my comment ending "I've heard God in the thunder" was about. And I think we should hear Him in the thunder. (maybe not in a 100 percent literal sense, but in a significant sense).
I could be off in my perspective - maybe there was a time most Christians thought this way. Yes? No? And of course I agree with you that at one time Christians did inhabit., as they saw it, a much more enchanted world and can't wait for your book on it.
(Oh, and just wait until you make it to Iceland where a large number of people believe in the Huldefolk, and some will tell you of seeing them as children.)
I think that medieval Christians were immersed in a natural world bursting with symbols that pointed back to God. St. Francis of Assisi, author of "The Canticle of the Sun" is a good example. But he didn't love animals for their own sake but as signifiers: every lamb was like the Lamb of God.
A beautiful book showing how that operated in Anglo-Saxon society is Winters in the World by Eleanor Parker, who blogs at A Clerk of Oxford.
"Folk religion" with European roots preserved such attitudes, mixed with a lot of superstition and magic. For a pure and orthodox sensitivity to heaven's touch in the world, see Victorian Catholic poet Francis Thompson's "Kingdom of God:"
"O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible we touch thee. . . ."
It's maybe hard to convey what I'm asking. Yes, I agree, Francis and the Franciscans were exceptions. I was asking about most. I guess some medieval people did think lightening was caused by evil spirits, which is a superstition. When it comes to superstition, I've always thought Christians less superstitious than pagans. Maybe that belief is weighing on me here even regarding actual enchantment. I am not really sure.
St. Francis was just an easy example to cite. Pre-Reformation Catholics did live in a world where plants, animals, the weather, the seasons could carry religious significance. Ronald Hutton's The Stations of the Sun shows how this worked in the English ritual year but there were parallels all across Europe. Celebrating Italy, a cookbook by Carol Field, covers contemporary survivals in seasonal festivals, some of which look more than a little pagan. A weariness with the excessive materiality of late medieval religion contributed to the Reformation.
I don't know how one would quantify degrees of "superstitiousness" but pre-modern cultures are generally superstitious. Then this erodes as examined in Religion and the Decline f Magic by Keith Thomas.
I don't know
"Warrior" is a good metaphor but historically humans have tended to take that too far into some very dark places.
The world does not need any more warriors lest it lead down into an atrocity that would render all former horrors trivial.
The world need healers.
True Christian Warriors ARE healers Jon F.
If you'e using the word figuratively, sure. If you mean it literally, then no. The path of bloodshed is never consonant with Christian virtue. I should also add that there is of course a struggle to be aged within us., all of us. I mentioned Mother Teresa above. For her that struggle against a barren inner darkness within took the form of heroic charity without. There are other paths too: while not popular at all today, asceticism like the way of St. Anthony of the Great or st. Seraphim of Sarov.
I don't wish to speak for Jon F., and I'm not even formally a Christian, but...
Healers are warriors of the spirit, and warriors of the spirit are warriors. Not metaphorically. The martial virtues are demanded, and fighting that was makes them flourish.
And that war has casualties.
Wish I could edit on my phone...
I meant speak for Leonore.
Not Gnosticism as much as being at ease in Sodom. A wish not to be thought weird and fanatical. And this pathology in the American psyche has cast a terrible pall on our witness.
It's natural men, that is, the unconverted, who don't want to sing love songs to Jesus. What are most of the Psalms if not love songs to Jesus? I understand what you mean, and you know I am giving you a bit of a hard time. We both despise banality, sappiness, treacle. But the great hymns, like the Psalms, arouse the instinctive disgust of the unredeemed. Let's be careful with that thar language, son. It's loaded.
I've never not been a Protestant, and the other men in my church would join me in snickering at your caricature of us. Your experience of Protestant churchgoing may have been limited to mainlining, and mainlining can certainly kill a Christian life.
I do object to your scorn for church parking lot attendants. It's disrespect to brothers in Christ who have that unglamorous but indispensable spiritual gift without which in its multiple forms, the worshipping Church could not continue to worship together, the gift of helps. It's a cheap, easy, and thoroughly unspiritual shot to make slighting remarks about such people. The tenor of the things which Jesus said and the Apostles wrote inclines me to suspect that church parking lot attendants and others of their prosaic appearing status will be among the most richly rewarded Christians in Eternity. Hey, I am in favor of all Christians selling their cars and buying horses, instead. It would certainly bring us closer to the Christianity of centuries ago. Still, there would always be a need for someone to hold the horses during the service.
I was raised a Baptist but have spent most of my adult life in Evangelical non-denomination churches. All of the worship in the latter involved pop-rock praise bands with emotional women on stage singing with their hands raised to Jesus like he is some teenage heart throb. Psalms they are not.
And it’s not that I have scorn for parking lot attendants, it’s just that for many men it’s seen as the most masculine thing you can do at church. I get it, someone has to carry the chairs and I’m sure quite a few young ladies have been courted by their future husbands through those types of “acts of service”, but that’s not all men are wired to do.
Just to be contrarian. Psalm 118:24 has been put to music in a beautiful, pop manner which at times I can't seem to get out of my head. I'm not sure which protestant put it to this particular melody, but I am very grateful they did.
"Wired"? people aren't robots.
As a believer in intelligent design, I would argue that God programmed us to do the things he intended us to do.
He endowed us with moral freedom. We might have tendencies and inclinations, but not all of them are good or even, at times, appropriate.
I think when Jesus returns, He will cast the memory of "praise music" into the Lake of Fire. Most of what my church sings are Psalms which have been refashioned into prose and set to music, some of it new, all of it having dignity. The rest of what we sing are hymns, many if not most of which were written by and for traditional Anglicans.
We have ad hoc musical accompaniment. In a lot of the kinds of churches you allude to, our pastor would also be "the worship leader." He plays guitar and sings quite well. We generally have a pianist. One of the pastor's sons is attracted to instruments few sane people want to learn, such as tuba and bagpipes. Usually, he stands with the little ad hoc band, adding tuba fills where appropriate. We have a member who is learning guitar. Occasionally, he stands in. And we have a percussionist, a young black man who is so post race conscious that he doesn't hesitate to refer to himself as "your little drummer boy."
I am by far the worst singer in a congregation filled with good to excellent singers. ( I cannot include the dear lady who is tone deaf as one of our singers for the same reason you can't say that a disabled person is a poor athlete. )
I think that one of the great failings of American churches is in "talent scouting," for lack of a less vulgar term. Elders should be persistent in trying to elicit from members whether there is anything the members think they could contribute to the life of the church. Each believer is supposed to "stir up the gift" which is in him, and it certainly helps to have church leaders who encourage believers and try to guide them in it.
The church I have been a member of for a decade has failed utterly to do this with me. I understand why this is so, but am disappointed in them nonetheless. And I go ahead and do what I know I am supposed to do.
I'm with you about the parking attendants. The church-cleaners always get forgotten.
To me the way the members of a fellowship treat those who have humbler assignments is close to a test of just how good that church is.
My son is about to turn 14. I have enormously appreciated the men of this community as much as I’ve appreciated the men at our church for telling it like it is with boys.
He’s (in his mind) going to be a major league ice hockey player and in the off-season race Formula 1. In fact at dinner tonight, we all had a good laugh that he wants to dedicate a mass to Max VonSteppern (something or other too tired to look it up, races for Red Bull, I’m fairly certain). We told him, if he’s got $10 and is willing to go to the parish secretary, go for it. He kinda wants to in his contrary little mind. We loved it! Way to be contrary!
I’m SO much more calm about it now.
I draw the line at jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, but, I’m so much more relaxed and able to encourage him.
The men in our parish are great! He’s told to stand up straight, get your hands out of his pockets, stop picking at himself, stand still, and it’s SO VITAL that it’s not coming from me!
As soon as I really started experiencing the proper way of men, I’ve kinda told myself, I (somewhat - it’s not over, ever, as a parent) did my job and delivered him to men to teach him how to be.
The other half I still have to work on is civilizing him enough to get a girl so she can complete the job. We have a joke in our house when he’s being particularly teenage “someday, some girl”. When he complains about us, we just tell him that someday he can have the privilege of embarrassing his own kids and regale him with stories of stuff we’re still living down.
Re: In most cases it seems there was no making peace with the Vikings
Historically there was. Alfred the Great (who was "Great" for more reasons than just his military victories) insisted on the Danes he defeated converting to Christianity and while it took a generation or two that generally did the trick. Likewise on the Continent: Charles the Simple (I think that's who was king of Francia) gave Normandy to the Vikings, but also demanded they convert-- and voila! the Normans. Who kept their military prowess but were less into wanton pillage and rapine.
Modern neo-paganism seems to me, from the outside, to be closest to the sort mystery cult that was prevalent in the Roman Empire: an individualist religion, not so much a communal one.
They surrendered land (Danelaw) in order to be left alone. That sounds like conquest to me, even if it did eventually come with conversion. It counts as making peace as the losing side.
Alfred's grandson, Athelstan, ended up taking Danelaw and re-uniting England.
But the Danes came back in the form of Sweyn Forkbeard & Son. Canute made England a part of his Danish empire. Even though Edward the Confessor was once again an “Anglo-Saxon” king, his mother was a Norman, whose second marriage was to Canute. The Normans were Danish, too. In the end, England was in fact conquered utterly by the Danes.
True. Alfred, Edward Elder and Athelstan rejuvenated England. And it only took Ethelred the Unready and Edward the Confessor to lose it all.
Canute was a Christian monarch, well thought of by his contemporaries, including the Pope whom he visited on pilgrimage in Rome. He was definitely a huge improvement over the feckless Ethelred the Unready. It was Ethelred who provoked the war with Canute's father Sweyn by ordering a a general massacre of Danes in England. Happily his order was not carried out very thoroughly; unhappily its victims included Sweyn's sister and her children.
Atheistan, like a Pakistan for atheists?
He united England. He didn't reunite England, as it had never been united.
In addition, the Danes mostly settled in Anglian territories, and were in fact very closely related to the Angles, probably closer than the latter were to Saxons like Alfred. The thing is that this was all a war between cousins, and the Danes were referred to as "the Great Heathen Army"; the distinction was their religion, not their ethnicity.
In addition, Denmark converted to Christianity quite early, round about 1000, much earlier than the 12th century that Rod quotes, which was the Swedes.
Of course you are right. I wrote sloppily.
The Danes assimilated to Englishness-- they lost their language, their pagan religion and many of their customs. and yes, Alfred and his heirs insisted they recognize the kingship of the king of Wessex, which as Derek says below became the monarchy of all England.
All true. But the Normans ended up with the lot, and they were Danes, regardless of religion or language. The remaining Anglo-Saxons ended up out back feeding the pigs.
Ed West has a good couple of posts up about Anglosaxon and Norman names
That there remained some Anglo-Saxon elites and that there were—as any society has—Normans on the lower end of the pecking order hardly dents the directional reality that the Normans were Danes and that 1066 was the last Viking assault, effectively.
I still wonder whether had Harold Harefoot lived longer and had children England would have turned out much different. His death was tragic.
The Normans brought to England their own brand of French which was a great addition to the English language. It gave the English language depth.
Yes, beef/cow, mutton/sheep, pork/pig, etc. but they were still Danes.
This is a good reminder that multiculturalism is rubbish along with the idea that all religions are good and should “coexist” as that vapid bumper sticker says.
Those COEXIST bumper stickers are useful. They always tell you that the driver is a lefty.
"Coexist" is a pretty low bar. It doesn't sound loving or even hippie-dippie. A boring proposition.
Oh it’s fine but not much . Why would you brag about it? If you’re unwilling to coexist with people you don’t agree with , that is a bad thing.What are you going to do , murder them? Unfortunately that where the human race often goes.
A left-wing Quaker in my community sports a COEXIST bumper sticker. Obviously I'm not going to kill him and I would treat him respectfully if I ever met him. But I'm not in a hurry to meet him. The silly man is a member of the Democratic Central Committee in our 79 % Trump county. He's got an uphill fight politically.
Two religions don't particularly like COEXISTING. One are the Muslims. The second are the woke-left and even they won't kill their opponents.
But the woke left are the one's with the COEXIST bumper sticker.......this can't be true. LOL. The friend I talked about yesterday with the "F--- Bush" t-shirt, also had a "COEXIST" on his Volvo. I bite my tongue quite often with this fellow.
That's a strange combination.
I always try to remind people that tolerance is for people that you would otherwise not tolerate.
We shouldn't coexist with other people?
Of course we should, Jon. But the sort of person with a COEXIST sticker on their car bumper are leftist. Religious belief puzzles them at best. Most despise any sort of religion. Deep down, most hate Christians, especially Republican Christians.
I know the guy that originated the "Coexist" bumper stickers. The earliest versions had a 559 area code on them.
Oh - happy day. Before this, other than Kristen Lavransdatter, I'd not seen the love of the North in Rod. I love it dearly. In a Lewis and Tolkien way, and in many ways. I've been weeks in Iceland, and a couple of year back, I arranged 11 days each in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
If Dale Nelson were still posting here, he could say a lot. He set me onto a wonderful series of books the "Saga of Erling Skjalgsson" by Lars Waker- I read all six - about a renegade monk turned priest (long story) who is kidnapped and lives among Vikings. They are definitely Chritian books - it is set in the year 1000 as Vikings choose to convert. Not preachy at all. I loved it - especially the first book "Erling's World", now combined with "The Year of the Warrior". which is among my favorites. (One
Now, more than half of you will disagree with me but that's OK. I love the mini-series "Vikings'. It does just what Rod talked about here - puts us in a world where people believe in Enchantment . The first few seasons were the best. For me, that was because of the character of Athelstan, the kidnapped priest who is allowed to live among the Vikings. We Christians see their world through his eyes Oh...I just love it. I liked "The Northman", but I liked "Vikings" even more.
And why? Male vs. female thoughts about my love for this stuff? The answer is uncertain. I'm definitely female, I do not fantasize about going to war - though I can be a bit of an Eowyn at times, but otherwise, no. So why? I don't like the raiding - I wish it was not there. I do like women in Viking times. One large piece of this: I think the stories are very beautiful. I love myth. And really, Yes! just as Rod is describing here - it's the Vikings who lived as if so much was true. **"I've heard Thor in the thunder"** says Athelstan at one point when he struggles.
We don't think as often of medieval Christians hearing God in the thunder.
It is not uncommon for people to be repelled by norse mythology, as compared with Greek. Count me among them.
Rod mentioned the Nazis. You know who didn't buy the return to paganism bit? Hitler himself. He used to make fun of Himmler, who was way into it--behind his back, of course. I can't think of somebody more disenchanted than Hitler. He was modern.
Is that it? I could never get people, men and women, to explain why they did not like "Vikings" except my sister who said, "They're dirty", meaning literally not bathed, greasy hair. That's not a good reason. - - Very interesting about Hitler! I knew the higher up Nazi's were into non-Christian things, and as a keyboard person, I'd been forbidden to play 'The Wedding March' as a wedding musician by priests of course - but I don't know enough about it.
There's no statute, but there's an agreement not to play Wagner publicly in Israel. He was certainly antisemitic, and Hitler's favorite composer. There's nothing antisemitic about Lohengrin, which is where the Wedding March comes from--the villainess worships "Wodan". It's funny, the wedding Recessional is by Mendelssohn, who was of Jewish heritage, although the family converted.
I have a horror of barbarism.
Conductor Daniel Barenboim played Wagner in Israel in 2001. Upset some folks, naturally, but it happened.
Barbarism? I gotta challenge disliking the Norse and Vikings on that. Look at us. We conquered our lands in the USA (Yes, I know, attacks were mutual). The north people could not farm well, they had to do something. The Norman conquest (OK, many of those had Norse ancestors). Just....war...why are Vikings always supposed to be the most brutal?
I'm not getting into this. But I know barbarism when I see it.
OK, thank - you probably spared me. The chicken fight description was hard for me yesterday.
Contemporary to the Norse were the Magyars who were also pretty awful back then. while the Vikings raided by sea, the Magyars raided by land until Otto the Great put a firm stop to that at Lechfield-- and also required the Magyars convert to Christianity.
I remember reading about some part of France that within about 10 years was ravaged by the Vikings, the Arabs, and the Magyars.
I had a music theory professor way back in the day who was an Israeli. I remember him telling the class that he was disappointed when he found out that Brahms was antisemitic. Someone in the class asked him about Wagner, and he replied that for him Wagner’s antisemitism was merely one facet of an overall awful personality.
That's interesting. I don't know that about Brahms. I do know that Hitler used to bang on about how Brahms was the darling of the moneyed Vienna Jews in comparison to local-boy-makes-good Bruckner (whom I can't listen to).
Two stories about Brahms. Hans von Bülow (he later recanted, handsomely, to Verdi himself) wrote that Verdi's Requiem was trashy. Brahms was intrigued, went out and bought the score and said, "Von Bülow has made a fool of himself. It's a work of genius."
Once on holiday in Italy his train passed through Pesaro and he made the men in the compartment stand and bare their heads. It's Rossini's hometown.
As in the one from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Mendelssohn?
Yes--or rather, that's the recessional.
One of my favorite ballets.
You mean the Balanchine? It's great, yes.
Didn’t know that about der Adolph. But he was certainly a passionate devotee of Ricky Wagner.
There was no stereo, but evidently his sound system at Berchtesgaden was the best in the world at the time.
😁
Goodwin's Law.
Dear Theodorus Iacobutius, those are your Latin roots calling from down deep!
The difference between Classical paganism and Norse paganism is that Classical paganism has been immensely fruitful, and brought along concepts such as pietas and religion, as well as the basic belief in the natural equality of all men, as Cicero said so well.
Norse paganism, on the other hand, was a blind alley, as the Germans - the Goths especially - themselves easily realized when they converted in droves to Christianity.
Norse mythology is a curiosity, and even funny to read, but at the end it never produced anything good.
There is something to be said about Norse religion's eschatology:" that the gods are doomed to fail, but one must fight for the good cause anyway. And the descrip[tipn of Fimbulwinter is, er, chilling:
Brothers will fight together
And become each other's bane;
Sisters' children
Their sib shall spoil.
Hard is the world,
Sensual sins grow huge.
There are ax-ages, sword-ages---
Shields are cleft in twain,---
There are wind-ages, wolf-ages,
Ere the world falls dead.
I'm not saying that there's no beauty, and nothing to learn from it.
But, at the end of the day, it's just quaint. An object of reflection and curiosity for the intellectually and poetically inclined.
But Yggdrasil is awesome.
Truth and beauty are orthogonal to materialist utility.
Invoking Goodwin's Law
I loved Vikings, too! Though not so much after they killed off Ragnar, I wasn’t terribly interested in his boys. I certainly wouldn’t have liked being a woman back then.
Spoiler Warning !!! - - - I liked it after Ragnar died, but I really liked while he was alive, and of course I adored it when Athelstan was alive. Sigh. Such great characters. The boys were OK except, despite being portrayed by a good actor, Ivar was just never an interesting character to me. I liked how the sons were all so different. Lagertha did not appeal much to me nor did contrast, 2nd wife Aslaug. Only Sigi and Judith (English) seemed to be interesting as a females, oh and maybe Bjorn's last wife, and Floki's wife was OK. But actual women in Viking times sound interesting.
You got me thinking…..at the moment, I can’t think of a single female character in anything that I actually do like. Weird.
Could be part of being heterosexual. I'm like that. But also, yes, males are just written in a more interesting way. Fiction writers who do well with this - C.S. Lewis' Orual in "Till We Have Faces" is perhaps the greatest female character of all time, I think. And I think George RR Martin is wonderful with the female characters, they are just as interesting as the males. And I aforementioned Eowyn. Arwyn and Galadriel are boring compared to Aragorn, Boromir, Frodo and Sam - and even Eowyn is not near their equal.) For film/TV...hmm..not since Emma Peel, and that is a very, very long time ago. - Oh yes, I know you don't like it, but Carol in The Walking Dead is a very good and interesting female, I think. Great, iconic friendship, just friendship, with Daryl. (Oh, and heh...reminds me..Scully is not bad...a good contrast with Mulder.)
I forgot about Carol. She had a really good story.
Tried to watch X-files, but, there’s something about Gillian Anderson’s voice that sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.
You’re probably right about it coming from being heterosexual, also, growing up with a very possessive parent who’s never had anything positive to say about anyone.
Carol's great! She should have won an Emmy.
I think James Cameron has created some great women characters in film. Sigourney Weaver's Ripley from the Alien series is badass, beautiful, smart, and feminine. And she was doing it long before it became trendy or woke to make women the focal point of action films. I'm also partial to Rose from Titanic. So beautiful, feminine and strong.
But I'm a man so I'm not sure my vote counts :)
"Scully is not bad"
Two cheers for The X-Files. Only two because it went so badly off the rails after the first few seasons. The episode with the suburban Satanists has a line I've often quoted: "Did you think you could call up Satan and make him behave?"
The X-files was yet another case of a show lasting too long. The attempted revival was a five star disaster. "Trust no one"- iespecially not networks looking to milk a bit more from an old, tired cash cow.
I thought it was well acted but I found its general view of things nihilistic and dark (in all fairness due, probably, more to the nihilism of the series’ modern writers and directors than to that of the old Norse). I found particularly tiresome the wavering between incomprehension of and contempt for Christianity (in their superficiality and ignorance much more reflective of the standard among, again, modern writers and film directors than the old berserkers) and their general portrayal of the Anglo-Saxons as military incompetents and wimps. True, the Vikings did catch the English off guard at first, but as time wore on the invaders found to their chagrin that they were up against a formidable foe. Take one of Alfred’s battles:
His martial prowess Edington could tell,
As many a long-haired Dane learned all too well.
"The Battle of Maldon". That's all.
There's a Japanese comic called Vinland Saga, that shows the world of King Cnut (despite the name it's not focused on Vinland for the first ~100 volumes) with amazing respect, beauty, and soul.
Highly recommended (at least those first ~100 volumes).
There’s an animated adaptation on Netflix, I think. It looked very violent.
I wouldn't recommend the animated show. It doesn't do justice to the beauty of the comic's art work, and the violence will naturally feel much more graphic.
That being said, the effect of that violence on the main character is the narrative driver of the story. It goes interesting places.
Kristin Lavransdatter is my favorite novel. Undset's other great book is The Master of Hestviken (newly re-published as Olav Audensson in a Tina Nunally translation). It has a male protagonist and is set a generation before Kristin. Undset's less known--and shorter!--Gunnar's Daughter is grim as the grimmest saga.
An excellent fantasy where the Old Gods of the North are real is Poul Anderson's THE BROKEN SWORD, inspired by Volsungasaga and Hervarrarsaga The best science fiction treatment of Norse mythology I know of is David Drake's Northworld Trilogy, which is as authentically brutal as the films mentioned above.
All the sagas and other Norse literature are readily available in modern editions. For the Norse culture, see Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm or his more academic The Viking Way. Noted Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey examines Norse mentalité in Laughing Shall I Die.
I speak in bibliographies, folks, I can't help it.
The Blood Eagle and Uppsala episodes of Vikings are some of the best television made in the last few years. The half here who deride the show (save the last two seasons) are just wrong.
I disagree about Blood Eagle (interesting but gratuitous, I thought - my doctor told me how much he liked it thought, heh). Uppsala was just wonderful, possibly their best episode. Ragnar "becomes a Christian" was awfully good too.
"I believe that Christianity would not be in retreat as it is today if there wasn’t something deeply lacking in the life of the Church. That something is what I call enchantment. It is that sense that God — the God of the Bible — is everywhere present, and fills all things. That we can and must know him, not only with our minds, and not only with our hearts, but in our bodies too. That the thread connecting heaven and earth, God and men, now and forever — that we can come to see it and feel it, and hold onto it like a lifeline keeping us from perishing beneath the waves of liquid modernity."
This post made me think of the current controversy over the Anglo-Saxons. It is rather incredible that British universities have begun removing the term "Anglo-Saxon" from their vocabulary in order to "decolonize" their own history. Of course, there would be no Britain today, and no British culture as we know it, without the Anglo-Saxons.
It is a miracle that Alfred the Great, and the kings thereafter, were on the precipice of total annihilation before fighting bloody wars, decade after decade, to retake their lands from the vikings and preserve their heritage.
And that included the preservation of Christianity. Strangely enough, many norsemen became converts on English shores, which often brought peace.
Not all vikings were expelled. Many stayed and, in essence, became Anglo-Saxon, much like people immigrating to the U.S. become Americans. Same with the Norman's. Ironic, isn't it?
Jesus's teaching cannot be separated from the Old Testament, especially if you accept Jesus's claims that He is God. He is the same being that visited judgement upon whole civilizations. Some look on that in horror, but in doing so, fail to consider a Holy God and the true depths sin can, does and will take both an individual human life and whole civilizations. God has judged whole nations, including those of Central/South America, and either will act completely on His own or use the same flawed humans He always has.
Jesus never dismissed or reputed the Old Testament. He was here to offer the way for humans to reconcile themselves to God, to escape the pit of sin, and to be absolved of the judgement of a Holy God.
Thank you, Lord Jesus.
Yes, rejecting the OT is the early heresy of Marcionism. Darryl Cooper is a Marcionist.
One should reflect on God's mercy, in that He withholds such judgement for a very long time, and sends repeated warnings along so many mediums the price to be paid for such. His patience is long, but it is not infinite. Somewhere, a clock is ticking.
And this encapsulates the OT rather perfectly, as it illustrates the cycle of human nature: Israelites are saved by the Lord and are grateful for a time, but lapse into sin which disappoints God and ultimately leads to their downfall, upon which they cry out to the Lord and He rescues them.
Amen.
Ah, Marcionism isn't all bad; none of the so-called heresies are. Almost all Catholics and Orthodox are at least a little Marcionist in practice. And in light of current and ongoing church scandals, perhaps consider Donatism, which posits that a corrupt priest auto-nullifies his own Holy Orders. Well, that sounds pretty good to me.
Years ago in the TAC comboxes a woman posted, "You can say ex opera operato until you're blue in the face, there is no way I'm taking Communion from a rapist."
Amen.
Okay, but the whole point of rejecting the heresy was to reassure people that when they found out at a later date that the duly ordained priest who administered their sacrament was in fact a bad guy, that the sacrament was still valid.
I don't say I endorse what she wrote. But it was what a lot of us were feeling at time.
We could square that by saying it's the faith of the believer that is the true authority behind the sacrament, not the status of the priest. The guy just does a job.
I’m not a theologian and only play one on TV but I don’t think that’s correct . A priest isn’t just doing a job even if he’s corrupt. That’s part of the whole point of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The recipient of communion doesn’t make the sacrament valid via his state of mind . The priest is a priest not some regular guy doing a job. He can’t escape it . By the way , this is one of the reasons - what I’m going to call classical Satanist not the modern humanists or the Anton Le Vey performers- treasured renegade priests.
Even in the ancient Church, Judaic ritualism was rejected. We read about the beginning of this in Acts when the Apostles rejected a requirement that Gentile converts must be circumcised. The first named heresy was "Judaizing"-- the notion that one must follow the Judaic Law in all things to be a Christian.
Right—so Marcionism ultimately devolves into a matter of hermeneutics. It's just a word for when people think you're not ignoring things politely enough.
No. It doesn't. It says that the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New. It's halfway to Manichaeism. Simone Weil was shocked by the Old Testament, and it was Eliot who pointed that she was flirting with Marcionism. But I don't think she ever got there.
It’s a fine line between the ontological claim of “It’s not the same deity” and the hermeneutic claim of “It’s still Him, but they got Him all wrong”—and I would say in practice, a vanishing line. I prefer the approach of radical hermeneutic reappraisal, though, in line with St. Paul.
That said, there are vast swaths of the OT that are never mentioned across the liturgical year, and I would deem that a sort of practical Marcionism: “Yeahh, just don’t worry about that part.”
I knew someone who was Jewish who never converted but attended Catholic mass for awhile because she rejected the Old Testament as harsh. She later went into Chabad . Go figure!
Not quite but yes I think you’re right on this . She was a strange one. Unfortunately I had a whole collection of work by her that I also lost in my Ida flood.
Theologians distinguish the ritual, moral and legal components of the OT. This seems fuzzy to me, but I haven't really read enough about it.
The genocidal commands in the OT relate only to that time and place. There is no nation now of which one can say they are Amalekites and must be destroyed utterly.
I agree that the Aztec and Mayan societies were particularly horrible, and I think their destruction at the hands of the Spanish was a great benefit for humanity (of course I wish the Spanish had been better Christians themselves), but I don't believe the Spanish doing that were acting in accordance with OT genocidal commands, but, at their best, in accordance with moral and pragmatic judgments. I think more or less the same about the defeat of the Nazis. I mean that sometimes fighting and killing is the lesser evil, but one is fighting against fellow sinners.
If one believes the OT genocidal commands are applicable today, that gets one into very dark places. The Puritan settlers in New England thought that, and used it for their genocide of the natives. To be sure, the Native Americans there were not Disney darlings, but they were not Aztecs either.
The OT genocides were wars for Israel. I believe Israel is now the Church, and the war is taking place in each human heart. The little ones that must not be spared are our smallest sins. I know that you, a Dispensationalist, believe that Israel is the Jewish people, or even the state of that name perhaps. I disagree, but that is not the point here.
If you believe the genocidal commands can still be applied, how do you identify those situations?
That's your opinion, of course. That's not the Lord's. If such judgement came about today, it would be just as clear as it was in one of the OT accounts. It would not be just some human with a wild hair.
How can they be identified? Again, it would be the Lord who would make that clear.
Do you think there have been any such occasions since Christ?
Yes, we just discussed the Central/South American situation. Also, Israel being scattered was such a judgement. Christ has not changed, God has not changed and there is nothing Scriptural that shows He has changed that policy. God's holiness and judgement is still a part of things. The glorious thing is Christ being involved now, and that does give both individuals and civilizations an out.
This is good stuff, Rod! You should write about movies more often. Particularly, I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of my favorite Terrence Malick films: The Tree of Life, The Thin Red Line, The New World. I’ve seen you mention A Hidden Life before.
And since we're discussing religion AND Anglo-Saxons...Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Ironically, there are at least two blackface scenes in it.
How it floats below the PC radar is a little mystery.
I think Rod hit most of those films in his TAC days.....definitely The Tree of Life.
Yeah, I thought that might be a possibility. Oh well.
"The Old Testament is the most realistic, truest, and most authentic expression of the truth about the heart of man. When he is still uncouth, and not very docile, far from a God of mercy and pity, when he has not yet been transformed,...he is violent, barbaric, and pitiless towards his enemy." - Cardinal Robert Sarah
What I thought of when I read the Book of the Judges the first time, and what Rod's description of "The Northman" reminds me of.
If there were any justice in the world, we would have a Pope Sarah by now.
Cardinal Sarah is too Catholic to be elected pope.
And a damn shame that is.
To my knowledge, there is no significant extant corpus of myths of the Celts, Huns or Gauls as they were so completely overwhelmed by Christianity and so early that little passed down as having value. In contrast, Scandinavia converted relatively late and it was drawn out over about 300 years, so much more survived, relatively speaking. There's some interesting stuff in their myths and sagas e.g. Njal's Saga
Oh, yes. There are thousands of pages of Irish saga extant. Evidently it would take a lifetime to read through all of them.
A big factor there for the Celts (the Gauls were of the same group) was that they had runes, but very little literature. Their oral traditions recorded by outsiders is the best we have of their traditions and stories. Most of it is Geoffrey of Monmouth, Mallory, and a few Christian monks.
It didn't help that Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, burned every pagan manuscript he could get his hands on. Thank God the libraries of Byzantium were safe from him.
For those less apt to watch a blood-and-guts film like The Northman, I'd recommend some of the Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. All present a specifically Japanese understanding of "enchantment." Heck, even Stephen Chow's comedic fantasy Journey to the West offers up an interesting (and ultimately serious) Chinese take on the subject!
Studio Ghibli is the absolute best.
See also my film recommendations to Rod. In the Ghibli canon, I would add Porco Rosso. Miyazaki had, in my opinion, a deeply spiritual inspiration.
Oh, don't forget Nausicaaa of the Valley of the Wind.
I'm glad there's another Miyazaki fan here. In "Spirited Away" he really does catch the enchantment. There's layer upon layer there. I prefer the Japanese name: "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi" - "Sen and Chihiro [the same girl] hidden by the gods".
Miyazaki is very Shinto. I wonder what a Christian Miyazaki would look like? I try imaging a Studio Ghibli version of Narnia.
I believe the lack of religious enchantment in modern life is caused by two historical changes. First is the rise of Darwinism, natural selection and evolution. If it is drilled into you that all you are is an evolved ape, why bother with religious enchantment. Second is the affluence of modern-day life. Materially, most people in the West live an enchanted life filled with goodies like hot showers, flush toilets, automobiles, televisions, automatic dishwashers, football games, Taylor Swift concerts and the like. Why even bother with religion? Instead, why not have a good time, neglect religion and live until your body gives out. If there's a God, you've been pretty good so God will take you into heaven. Hell is only for bad people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Jeffrey Dahmer and Jack the Ripper.
You see the Pope over in Singapore? He's jumped into that with all four feet.
Bergoglio never fails to surprise.
I wish for him to surprise me. But never happens.
Read about it over a plate of red clam sauce for lunch. Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian are going to the see the same God just in different ways. Just as Malachi Martin made fun of. You're going Route 22 and I'm going route 21 and we'll both get there.
Never liked the red.
God tells the same story in many ways.
Cmon, be fair. It was an awkward statement of the truth that all non Christian religions have an inkling, a sparkle, of the truth, the whole of which is the Logos. He’s an old sick guy during an exhausting trip.
If you want to be a peacemaker you magnify similarities not differences.
Oh, he's sick, all right.
You give an excellent summary of what Rod refers to as MTD, moralistic therapeutic deism.
While we rightly criticize the effects of "pure" science on religion, there's an ironic twist from the social sciences: it is posited (as in hypothesis, not theory) that human instinct is exactly why we have religions, and religion is at some level a survival behavior. I, for one, believe that there is a reality beyond our everyday perceptual reach, which we do experience (if with great difficulty) at times, and that science has a very long way to go to observe and measure this interaction.
William Cavanaugh has referred to the "migration of the holy." Our enchantment is still there, it's just moved from religion to the state and the market.
And like living things exposed to radioactivity it has mutated into some dire forms there.
It is possible to see enchantment in evolutionary processes, just as we can in all natural processes. By and large we haven't gone that route (although Teilhard de Chardin made the attempt) but there nothing in evolution that rules out transcendence any more than there is in atomic theory.
Valid point, Jon, but most people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that. As you know, Walker Percy agreed with Teilhard de Chardin on the point you make.
That’s correct but the effect was to weaken religious faith in general and I think that was because of a tendency towards a narrow literalism that wouldn’t hold up in the context of evolutionary theory. That says more about people than the theory.
Darwin's theory also showed up against a cultural background where the optimistic cult of progress was in full swing, bolstered by the new technologies and discoveries which were transforming everyday life. The old message of the world as a veil of tears and humanity as sinful in need of God for salvation was no longer playing well.
A lot of what gets blamed on the Enlightenment in these parts was in fact 19th century in origin.
And evolutionary theory was routinely used to bolster a world view that didn’t necessarily have anything to with it.
“the effect was to weaken religious faith in general and I think that was because of a tendency towards a narrow literalism that wouldn’t hold up in the context of evolutionary theory. That says more about people than the theory.”
True. That “narrow literalism” shouldn’t have held up, however, in any context - at least as far as literature is concerned. It inevitably distorts the meaning of any literary work - including the Bible. Would that folks approaching the Bible remember William Blake’s warning:
“This life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.”
"If it is drilled into you that all you are is an evolved ape, why bother with religious enchantment?"
Well, when a certain ape evolved to a certain point, God breathed into man's nostrils and man became a living soul. Its true that Darwinian theories have been used to deny God any role, just as Social Darwinism has been used to crush unions and tell the starving masses that wealthy people are wealthy simply because they are a superior breed.
Its probably true that after a life of taking hot showers in a well scrubbed tub, stepping into a waterfall in a shaded pool deep in the forest loses its enchantment -- yuck, its so unsanitary. But perhaps the most enchanting moment of my life was rounding a bend in the trail to Pictograph Point as Mesa Verde, hearing a breeze echo through a shallow cave on the left with a line of pines on the right and a view across the open spaces to nearby mesas. Nothing pagan about it, just enchanting.
A Lutheran pastor devoted to prison ministry was once asked "Do you really think Jeffrey Dahmer can be saved? His immediate response was "Well, can you?"
The arguement is NOT that we are an "envolved ape". The argument is that we share a "common ancestor".
That is very different.
Dunno, if you heed Spengler, he says that every civilization, in its withering years, becomes hedonistic and materialistic. So is ours.
Thank you for the prayer, St. Patrick’s Breastplate. We need more prayers like this. Keep sending them along.
Similar prayers were collected in and around Scotland in the 19th C by Alexander Carmichael. A lovely collection of the best examples is Celtic Invocations from Vineyard Press. The full collection is Carmina Gadelica which preserves some pagan material, too. But be aware that Carmichael edited and "improved" his examples.
I read Kirstin Lavransdatter in the older translation and loved it. The newer translation has been pushed so strongly here I decided to look into what other readers have to say.Now occasionally when a new translation comes out , it’s all but universally accepted as superior to what came before. I think this is the case with Zenos Conscience as opposed to Confessions of Zeno. Here , that doesn’t seem to be the case. Some prefer the older translation and actually say it’s truer to the original language and point out that it came out soon after the original , that Undset knew the translators and was fluent in English. Others say the new translation is better. Still others who’ve read both, like both. So my guess is the reader will do ok with either translation.
On God and Allah: obviously Christians , Jews and Muslims interpret God differently. But I don’t know how you could establish that one group worships a God that’s different from another. You can say - they- whoever they may be have it profoundly wrong.
This has been true in the translations of Dostoevsky, which have caused some controversy. Some prefer the literalness of Pevear-Volokhonsky, while others say that in being overly literal they lose the "poetry" in FD's work.
Yes and I admit to liking Constance Garnett
As I said in another comment, I'm of the small party that actually prefers the older translation of Kristin. But I don't dis-recommend the newer one. It's really a matter of taste. As you say, the reader will do ok with either.
I haven’t read both but I was fine with the earlier translation.