Philosophia

In the past few months, I’ve posted some new videos to my YouTube channel.

My series on the Odes of John Keats, following Helen Vendler’s interpretation (playlist here). Vendler believes Keats’ six great odes should be read in order as his, often meandering, journey toward a final affirmation of immanence and becoming—of life, nature, and existence as it is—Beauty and Truth finally united:

• The Ode on Indolence
• The Ode to Psyche
• The Ode to a Nightingale
• The Ode on a Grecian Urn
• The Ode on Melancholy
• The ode To Autumn

A video explaining Max Scheler’s Hierarchy of Values, including an introduction to material value ethics, how he applied the phenomenological approach to value, and a description of the ordered hierarchy of values that came from this.

A video on Justice and the Violence of Life. How do we reconcile our need for justice with the inherent violence of life? This is a development of this post on here. In the video, I explore various religious and philosophical approaches to the problem: Nietzsche's affirmation of violent life, the Christian idea of the fall of creation, the transhumanist desire to transform everything, the Hindu belief in the universe as God's play (lila), the self-sacrificial theology of Simone Weil, and the ethical thought of Max Scheler.

A conversation with Aron van Os, who wrote a thesis (The Pious Antichrist) on Nietzsche’s complicated and ambivalent relationship with Christianity. We discuss Nietzsche's inner conflict between the ideals of 'Dionysus' and 'the Crucified,' how this conflict eventually became one-sided and destructive, and how it could become harnessed as a productive and positive tension that embraces both this life and the transcendent.

A long and wide-ranging conversation with my friend ‘K.’, based upon my video on Justice and the Violence of Life. This was fascinating and, I think, incredibly fruitful. I can’t begin to summarize the topics we covered, but the timestamps are a good guide.

I hope to have some more videos up in the near future. I’d love to do some more interviews, and also hope to do another video on Scheler and a video (or series of videos) on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

To speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless; in itself, of course, no injury, assault, exploitation, destruction can be “unjust,” since life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character. One must indeed grant something even more unpalatable: that, from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general […] would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.—

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 2nd Essay, Section 11

Introduction

I was recently struck by this passage in Nietzsche, which briefly and powerfully states a position at once glaringly obvious and deeply uncomfortable. The violence of life is something that most modern people, it seems, have a very confused relationship to. On the one hand, we have jettisoned the Christian conception of God and the supernatural—all that suggests a different, deeper reality not ruled by the principle of violence; on the other hand, we have intensified the Christian concern for justice and equality into an unprecedented societal obsession. We know the natural world is all there is, and that nature is red in tooth and claw; yet won’t rest until violence and oppression are done away with. Assuming life is good, this presents a troubling contradiction. (Suspending this assumption, as Nietzsche’s concludes, this call for absolute justice is simply a call for life’s elimination.)

We might reframe this more generally as the tension between our ideals and what we are. By the latter phrase, of course, I don’t mean what we happen to be because we have not yet attained our ideals—but what we essentially and ineluctably are. We are, of course (whatever else we might be), living beings, a manifestation of life. Life predates upon other life—depends upon its injury and destruction. Of course, life also depends upon cooperation. Aside from examples of mutually beneficial symbiosis, we can see this within an individual organism itself: if a body was ruled by competition, it could not cohere (this is Nietzsche’s point about justice being needed within units of power). Yet even within a body, cells are constantly dying and being replaced—and often actively killed, if they present a threat to the body as a whole.

If violence is constitutive of our being, it’s schizophrenic to be universally opposed to it (that is, when it’s not simply suicidal). Such an endeavor is likely to drain away our vital strength and rejoicing rejoicing and cast a deep gloom over our existence, dooming us to forever despise ourselves. Nietzsche’s affirmation of power and violence as basic conditions of life is one way out of this. Another way is religious: the natural world is violent, but is not the fundamental reality. This is the Christian notion of nature as fallen, and the Christian promise of a perfected world to come. This makes the tension a war between worlds rather than between human thoughts and the biological brains that generate them. If our ideals are rooted in a transcendent realm that is more real and potent than the immanent world we live in, then fully pursuing our ideals need not undermine the conditions of our very existence.

There are, of course, problems with this position. What exactly is this other world we are positing, and how exactly could it be? While faith in it might relieve us of the sense that fighting ourselves is futile, it just creates a deeper level of self-conflict if it cannot convince our intellect. I’ll therefore explore a couple of other approaches to the problem—approaches that are at once religious and (so to speak) reconciled to the world as it is. In these, the transcendent and immanent are both real, but separate. Finally, I’ll offer a couple of suggestions as to how we might move past this present confusion.

Christianity

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. [...] They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Isaiah 11:6–9

There is something beautiful in this image of final peace and harmony. The Christian story goes like this: the world was made perfect, out of absolute love; but due to the willful disobedience of its most significant creature, it fell from this original perfection; God in his love will one day restore it, and it will have no more evil or suffering. Therefore, the world of violence we now behold is a temporary perversion of its true nature. Renunciation of violence may lead to our demise in the world as it is—but this is no matter, for the true life and the true world is to come. The story of Jesus encapsulates this: renouncing violence, he was crucified—but then gloriously rose in a perfected body, the very substance of the world to come.

In Doors of the Sea, David Bentley Hart writes powerfully about these two worlds (or two modes of the one world):

The Christian should see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another: one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish; and the other the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply “nature” but “creation”; an endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty, but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days. (p. 61)

He supports his account with the insight of Dostoyevsky (whose Zosima the Elder sees this divinized world) and the testimony of real saints and mystics. Personally, I am willing to credit these experiences. I don’t just assume they are delusions; they may be revealing some real aspect of being. And yet, not having had these same experiences, I am at a loss as to how this deeper and more glorious world relates to the world that we know. In the world that we know, the lion predates—is almost defined by its predation (not only in popular imagination, but by the evolutionary necessity for his particular shape, speed, sharpness of teeth, etc.). It seems that for the lion to lie down with the lamb (or the calf), it would not be a lion at all! Likewise, the human being truly free of violence—may not be a human being.

The problem of how God’s glorious creation relates to fallen nature is magnified by the myth of the fall itself: at one point, creation was perfect, and then it was corrupted. But we don’t have any knowledge of this prior world—not in the earliest days of humanity, of our earth, or of the universe itself (the very laws of physics guarantee destruction and decay). There is no continuity with the unfallen world in time as we know it. This gives rise to ideas about a different kind of relationship—between time and eternity, or fallen and divine time—but what does any of this mean, exactly? (The ‘time’ of our ordinary experience is ontologically baffling enough.) Actually, time is a good thing to focus on, as time (as we know it) and death are intertwined, just as we are shaped and defined by time.

The mystic insight opened up by burning love and asceticism may reveal an aspect of reality the rest of us, blinded by our fallen natures, cannot comprehend: the glorious, eclipsed essence of our presently violent world. This conception ennobles the natural world, without affirming her violence (a theme I explored more fully in my post on Christ and Kali). But there are, at the very least, rational difficulties with this approach.

Modernity

In any case, rightly or wrongly, we in the modern West have cast aside this whole notion as fantastical. We hold that the only world is this world that we can all experience and measure. And yet no civilization has been more obsessed with ideas like equality, love and justice. According to the dominant worldview, all violence and oppression must be done away with—at least among human beings, though increasingly also in our relation to the natural world. Ironically, this very sentimentalism is a luxury afforded by our incredibly effective domination of the natural world. (On a related note: the state that would eliminate violence could only do so due to a monopoly on violence.) We can afford to be soft—yet to what end? The Christian (who may at the same time be rather ascetically hard on himself) can say: for the sake of the world to come. We cannot.

Let’s say, charitably, that the aim is to establish ‘justice’ as far as it can be established, without undermining life itself. We will have a world where ‘justice’ flourishes, relatively speaking, while accepting that injustice must tragically continue to rage in the animal kingdom, in the fact of human mortality, in all the ineradicable inequalities between people, and in all our embarrassing, archaic urges to domination (which we will appropriately channel, where we cannot remove). Still—the question must be asked: where does this passion for justice come from, where this deep discomfort with violence? Ontologically, are we more than mere life or mere matter, after all? If not, why not just dismiss this obsession as a curious self-delusion? The status quo worldview about this is incoherent, and so it seems it must lurch into either Nietzschean life-affirmation (with all its violence) or life-denial. As it hovers between these, it is too often nothing but ressentiment: the resentful protest of weakness against strength, the progressive undermining of the conditions of flourishing life by those too cowardly, even, to end it at once.

There is a strand of the modern worldview that seems to escape this dilemma, however. One way to articulate this would be: there is only this world, yet we (and our ideals) are the unfolding or fulfillment of this world. Before humanity, nature needed to subsist by violence—but now that we have arisen, the intelligence that lay latent in nature is coming to conscious fruition. With this intelligence—using its tools, and in its image—we can remake ourselves and the world. For example, using technology we can extend our lifespan—perhaps indefinitely. We can enhance ourselves, cyborgize our brains and our bodies. We can hack our DNA, and that of other creatures—perhaps to finally excise our lingering aggression, perhaps to remove predation from the natural world. We can live in virtual worlds that are far more interesting and do far less harm. At the extreme end of this aspiration, perhaps our minds can merge, the destructive ego gone forever, finally harmoniously One.

I will call this strand of the modern worldview transhumanism. I say it is just a strand because it still makes most people uncomfortable, and I feel like most wouldn’t consciously go along with it, though history is tending in its direction. Obviously, enhancement by technology needn’t be wedded to an attempt to constrain or eliminate violence. (If we consider the technologies of war, the effect has generally been the opposite.) But this tends to be the case, because this strand of the modern worldview is quasi-religious: it strives to have transcendence within immanence. It suggests we can regain the religious hope for salvation without buying into fables of the supernatural. But the price we pay is twofold: first, the technological transformation of everything; and second, following from this, the loss of ourselves. For better or worse, transhumans will cease to be human.

And finally, after all this effort, the project will necessarily fail. We cannot rewrite the laws of physics. We will be left with a compromise, like the more tepid status quo referred to before. Perhaps, at best, one vast hivemind will subsist, lost in its own virtual world, sustained by some solar-powered sprawl of servers entwined with residual human brain tissue. Still violence will be constitutive of existence—an existence now extremely distant for this mind.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche would despise all this. Neither the Christian, modern–confused, or transhumanist approaches affirm and rejoice in life as it is. Though the transhumanist may seem an example of humanity’s triumphant will to power, I suspect Nietzsche would reject this. Is what triumphs here life, or intellect (and a certain kind of intellect, at that)?

Nietzsche loves life. And by directing our attention to what life is and does—namely, violence, the destruction of other life—he offers us an opportunity to embrace our own life forthrightly, without self-denial. This is not passive resignation—the sad awareness that I must harm and destroy, and be harmed and destroyed in turn. The life that I am is dynamic: it asserts itself, grows, reaches forth, conquers and rules. It is ever moving and striving, and there is joy in all this essential activity of life. Nietzsche’s vision is of life lived fully, and therefore joyfully, while fully recognizing the tragic (in the rich aesthetic sense of that word) reality that we must eventually be defeated and destroyed. This is the Dionysian vision—hot, ecstatic physicality rather than cool Apollonian ideals.

Yet this does not mean mere savagery. Culture and intellect are an integral part of who we are, and it would be ridiculous to try and abandon them—as it would generally be absurd to regress to crude physical violence to get whatever we want. Yet Nietzsche is clear about the hierarchy: culture and intellect are to serve life, to enhance the feeling and expression of it. They are not (flowing as they do, for Nietzsche, out of it) independent standards by which to judge it. Nietzsche is a vitalist.

(This, by the way, shines some further light on the difference between the Nietzschean and transhumanist—the transhumanist is a mechanist. ‘Life,’ like everything, is just a mechanism that can be taken apart and reassembled. For Nietzsche, life is fundamental, a self-organizing force.)

But would Dionysian existence really be a life fully lived? Is there not, after all, more to life than the lifeforce? Is there not something else that life itself is for? There is a sense in which the intellect, for example, flows out of life; but there is also a sense in which it is independent. It has its own standards, values, and aspirations. Its objects have their own reality (mathematics being the clearest example of this). And there are different kinds of intellect—from the contemplation of God or absolute being, down to the technical intellect that would take apart and reassemble the world. There are also moral values, the pursuit and realization of which make life worth living—justice being but one of these. In his Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Max Scheler argued persuasively for the reality of values and their arrangement in a hierarchy (we will return to this). The spiritual/intellectual values are intrinsically higher than the vital values that Nietzsche invokes. Yet that does not mean the latter should be neglected, or even impatiently borne with. They should be appropriately fulfilled and affirmed.

Hinduism

If Christianity holds that imminent nature will be transformed or restored to its transcendent origin, Nietzsche would have us wash our hands of transcendence completely. And yet this doesn’t seem possible—or if possible, it would be an impoverishment of the human experience. Is there a way to affirm a transcendent reality and the imminent natural world just as it is?

Some of the greatest examples of this can be found in Hinduism, a religion renowned for the most austere asceticism and uncompromising monism on the one hand, and the most scintillatingly vital panoply of deities and myths on the other. Even in the most monistic streams of Hinduism there exists a bold affirmation of the world as it is.

He who is attributeless also has attributes. He who is Brahman is also Shakti. When thought of as inactive, He is called Brahman, and when thought of as the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer, He is called the Primordial Energy, Kali. Brahman and Shakti are identical, like fire and its power to burn…

Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, vol. I, ch. 3

So said Sri Ramakrishna, the great 19th Century mystic and all-but-illiterate synthesizer of different Hindu traditions—who might therefore be taken as an authentic summation of that vast and varied religion. His goal was clear: liberation from the relative world, realization of God, moksha. He pursued this with singleminded intensity and never ceased spurring his disciples to do the same. “Renounce everything and seek God alone,” he taught was the one all-essential message of the Bhagavad Gita. And yet he uttered the quote above, and taught that when you have renounced all and realized God you will see that God is also everything you left behind.

The Hindu cosmos is vast in time, and endlessly cyclical. After the universe is destroyed, it arises again. There is no final salvation in time—no abrupt fall and no definitive restoration. To attain moksha is, in a sense, to step completely out of time. The universe exists in time; Brahman does not. There is no sense in the material world being redeemed from violence and suffering—these realities are constitutive of it. And yet it is not all there is: there is also, at the heart of this world, the transcendent being that ceaselessly gives rise to it, to whom it is possible to relate and, ultimately, to realize your identity with.

The Divine Mother is full of bliss. Creation, preservation, and destruction are the waves of Her sportive pleasure.

Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, vol. II, ch. 16

Why does Brahman, the supreme and only being, ceaselessly give rise (as Shakti) to this relative universe? The Hindu answer is lila, God’s divine play. This world with all its beauty and tragedy is God’s self-enjoyment, Shakti realizing all her myriad possibilities, the bliss of her creative self-expression. “But is that fair?” we might ask. “It is we who have to suffer for her enjoyment!” Yet the Hindu reply is perfectly self-consistent: “You are her! Who you think you are is only her playful self-delusion.” The basis of reality is bliss (God is conceived as Sat-Chit-Ananda: limitless being, consciousness, and bliss)—and as far as the the relative world is involved in this, the violence of life is essential.

Simone Weil

Necessity is the screen set between God and us so that we can be.

Limitation is the evidence that God loves us.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

This Hindu vision of the cosmos is sublime: it is, in all its beauty and terror, God’s blissful self-expression. Yet there is something lacking in this vision: something of the dignity of human being, something of love. The 20th Century French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil had a view that is quite similar, yet different. In accord with the Hindu position, she held that the universe is exactly as it should be. But as the quotes above suggest, God’s motive for creating it is somewhat different.

God, who is infinite and all, lovingly sacrifices himself: limits and reduces himself to create a space for us to be. (There is a similar idea, I believe, in mystical Judaism.) As Weil explains, “God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.” For “if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun.” As limited beings, we must be embedded in limitation in order to exist. As other than God, he must remain (in a certain sense) distant and hidden from us, for us not to be consumed by him. This limitation and absence of God is simply necessity, the very stuff of the universe: time and space, the laws of physics, change, suffering, death—and violence.

For this reason, for Weil, our very wretchedness becomes a way to experience God’s love for us and so to love him in turn. Although she was never baptized, Weil was powerfully influenced by Christianity, and reported having mystical encounters with Christ. This is perhaps why love, suffering, and self-sacrifice feature so strongly in her thought. As God sacrificed himself in creating the universe in which we could be, we must imitate his action and ‘decreate’ ourselves out of love for him. Briefly, this means allowing our ego to die completely. The universe, with all its violence and suffering, therefore becomes the indispensable scene for an exchange of love.

Weil did not believe in God until she experienced him, unexpectedly and directly. What God is is a question best left aside for now; but for Weil, at least, what she experienced was a reality far more real than the everyday physical world. If we accept with Nietzsche that God is dead in the popular imagination, we must nevertheless acknowledge that the phenomenon called ‘God’ remains extraordinarily powerful and transformative to those who do encounter it. It is not good enough to simply exclude it from our worldview.

Weil integrates God and the world exactly as it is. Her approach is perhaps compromised by a too intense asceticism: “But God can only love himself. His love for us is love for himself through us. Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being.” (Is this really an adequate description of love?). But the central claim that God’s universe is constituted by limitation (and thus violence and suffering) in order to be at all, is a compelling one. It has no need for a mysterious ‘Fall’ somewhere in the primordial mists of time. If we can speak about a ‘Fall’ at all, it is simply an ontological distinction: the sheer fact of not being God.

Reflections

The question of the relation between the violence of life and justice ‘in itself’ is a question about the imminent and transcendent. We can discern at least five clear positions on this.

First, the extremes:

1. The Nietzschean affirmation of life, including all its violence. (All imminence, no transcendence.)

2. The moralistic denial of life, due to its violence. (Imminence nullified by transcendence.)

And then the more nuanced positions:

1. The Christian belief that life is only violent in the fallen creation (i.e. violence is not essential to life), and that creation will be restored to just perfection. (Imminence infused with and transformed by transcendence.)

2. The Hindu (and Weilian) belief in both a transcendent God and the essential violence of life. (Imminence and transcendence, related yet eternally ‘separate.’)

3. The transhumanist endeavor to transform life using imminent means. (Transcendence projected into imminence; this may ultimately be more a confused than a clear position.)

The status quo in the modern West is unclear and confused regarding this question. We deny the existence of any transcendent realm and claim to celebrate imminence. This is largely true as far as, say, sexuality goes. But we condemn violence maybe more than ever before. In general, we tend sometimes to Nietzschean affirmation, sometimes to moralistic denial, sometimes to transhumanist transformation—yet we are uncomfortable with each of these. This situation is dangerous: it saps our sense of meaning, saps our strength, and fuels our tendency to ressentiment.

It seems to me that reintegrating the Nietzschean affirmation of life (including its violence) is indispensable to the health of our civilization. This is the most immediate remedy for the consuming sense of guilt about our—individual and collective—existence, excellence, and dominance. This is not to justify anything (declare it ‘just’), but to acknowledge necessity, and have gratitude for the necessity by which we benefit. Attempts to ‘justify’ invasions, colonizations, etc., in the sense of pretending they were inspired by impartial moral principles, are just as repugnant as a consuming guilt about one’s own existence. Yet the honest will to expand and rule, the honest joy in conquest—these are not, in themselves, repugnant. These are as natural as the desire for food and the pleasure of eating.

Note that I’m not saying there is nothing higher than these vital pleasures and desires; just that they must be affirmed on their own level, as the indispensable precondition for existing and thriving in the world we find ourselves in. They may perhaps be limited and channeled by a higher realm of values; but I’m suspicious of anyone who preaches these higher values without having passed through the lower—such a one is either simply preaching ressentiment, or too unintegrated to be a reliable model or teacher.

For my part, I do think there are higher levels. Scheler’s hierarchy of values is a good way of picturing this:

(Note: the above diagram is from Iain McGilchrist’s Master and His Emissary, so he gives it a brain hemisphere spin; use values are distinguished from pleasure values in Scheler, although not as definitely as the other levels.)

The lower levels are best pursued for the sake of the higher, though that doesn’t mean they are simply reducible to the higher. Utility is for the sake of pleasure; but it may be uncoupled from it, and be pursued for its own sake—generally a bad situation. Likewise, pleasure is ideally for the sake of vital values: the pleasure of eating good food conduces to (and is best enjoyed in the overall context of) health; but it may be pursued for its own sake, and thus ruin health. Likewise, the vital should be oriented to the spiritual (‘intellectual’): For what is all this strength and health and power to be used? In what way is it to be exercised? Power pursued solely for its own sake is as toxic as pleasure pursued solely for its own sake—and here I part ways with Nietzsche.

Note that pursuit of higher levels of value doesn’t abolish the lower levels. The question is not if we kill and dominate, but how and to what ends. Vital power is also, generally, the fuel by which we approach the higher level; and is in turn stimulated by the higher level. The pursuit of beauty, truth, and justice can give us amazing vital strength. In is book on Ressentiment, Scheler objects to Nietzsche’s characterization of Christianity as a religion of ressentiment. Yes, he says, it can be—but it isn’t essentially. Moving above the vital level can look very much like attacking it from below. The early Christians, he says, gave their lives away in agapic love out of an abundance of vitality, inspired by unlimited hope and the experience of God’s love. They were stronger than the merely strong—the ones who, though powerful, must always defend themselves. This is a very different phenomenon than that of resentfully railing against a power and strength one is not capable of.

To me, at least, this is all very instructive. We can affirm each level, while striving higher. The highest—the Holy—returns us to our basic problem of how the transcendent and immanent relate. If we posit an absolute God, what becomes of this relative world? Is it a mistake to be abolished or a fallen reality to be restored? Does it serve some greater purpose, or is it valuable in itself?

The Christian story of fall and restoration is the most beautiful and compelling to me—to a point. Even if we strip off the ‘fall’ aspect (let us say that is a metaphor for God’s intention for creation), we still have the apparently insuperable difficulty of imagining a world that is ours without obeying the most basic laws of ours. (And, on a higher level, there is the difficulty of imagining any physical world of which destructive change is not constitutive.) Everything appears interwoven—life and death, joy and suffering, identity and change.

In this respect, the Hindu approach resonates more with me. The universe must be exactly as it is, and is valuable as such (as an expression of God’s innate creativity—lower values gaining their full meaning in light of higher). Weil supplements this approach by bringing it more in line with the Western emphasis on agapic (self-giving) love. More than merely God’s creative self-expression, this world is his sacrificial self-limiting so that beings other than him may be. The blind and unchangeable necessity of the universe then becomes a sign of God’s love for us, and our amor fati becomes love of him.

The problem with this view, I think, is that the universe that we know through science isn’t utterly ruled by blind necessity. There is a basic, irreducible randomness in the quantum realm—and a curious enmeshment of it with observers. This, in itself, doesn’t prove much. But if we credit the consensus of human experience to date, that magic and miracles are real, then the picture changes dramatically. Then it seems that the physical world, on the human level, can be directly altered by the spiritual. (Obviously, this is the central claim of Christianity—a body devoid of life came alive again.) The work of Rupert Sheldrake suggests that nature operates by habits rather than ‘laws,’ and thus the ‘laws of nature’ can change. The Christian hermeticist Valentin Tomberg claimed:

Thus the ‘law’ of the struggle for existence that Darwin observed in the domain of biology will one day cede its place to the law of cooperation for existence which exists already in the cooperation of flowering plants and bees, in the cooperation of different cells in an organism, and in cooperation in the human social organism. […] This will be, because the new ‘law’—i.e. a profound change in the psychic and physical structure of beings—will replace the old ‘law,’ firstly in consciousness, then in desires and affections, then lastly in the organic structure of beings.

Meditations on the Tarot, Letter IX: The Hermit

For Tomberg, this is achieved spiritually, through the power of self-sacrificial love. And again, there is an abundance (a superadundance) of at least anecdotal evidence of this in the stories of saints and holy men. However, it is not achieved by the clever technological manipulation of the existing world which is the modus operandi of transhumanism. I believe this approach is a temptation we must reject. Perhaps the natural world can be fundamentally redeemed and transformed by the transcendent, working via the sacred magic of agape; this can never be accomplished by willful human engineering. In striving to have transcendence totally within the bounds of imminence, transhumanism may just be an intensification of the basic confusion that underlies our modern worldview. It would do boldly what we now do falteringly.

Where does this leave me? Without total clarity, perhaps; yet with more than before. In the only world we know, life and violence are inseparably intertwined. Unqualified justice ‘in itself’ is indeed hostile to life. And yet, at the same time, justice is one of those values that human life is valuable for. While Nietzsche notes that justice can help to make overall units of power more powerful, it is also true that justice is intrinsically valuable, and more deeply so than mere power. Individually and collectively, we ‘unjustly’ subjugate the world around us—in order to practice it! (Much could be said regarding precisely what justice is; I have ignored this question in order to pursue the larger one about the relation between spiritual and vital values in general.) We must look at this truth squarely, and embrace it. To neglect this easily becomes neurotic self-denial and ressentiment.

Nietzsche provides an antidote for this (just reading him can help us feel the power and exultation of the life we are). But we mustn’t go too far. Scheler reminds us of the whole hierarchy of values, and how they relate to each other. As far as a worldview around this goes, I am most aligned with Ramakrishna and Weil: we can affirm transcendent reality and the imperfect world we live in. Crucially, in both these cases, the world is affirmed in the light of the utmost value of the transcendent.

And yet, there are hints, here and there, that matter itself can be transformed by spirit—in isolated cases, if not unto universal paradise. If this world really can be, somehow, perfected by the divine, then our affirmation of the violence of life—while vitally necessary now—must remain ultimately provisional. Regardless, we must live fully human lives: without undermining life or attempting to impose paradise, we must remain open to what is above us.

Purity Ring are back, having recently released this stunning little EP ten years after they entranced my 2012–13 summer with the surging synths and potent-yet-dreamily-sung sensuality of their first album, Shrines. Sure, there were a couple of albums in between, but neither felt nearly as fresh or exciting as that original encounter. This feels different.

As the album art reveals, our revenants have brought seven lovely companions in tow: severed heads trailing exposed arteries and vertebrae, hair radiating ghostlike around them. The songs are a delicious combination of poppy and deranged. The music, in particular, feels at once more adept in danceability and more confident in weirdness—and positively relishes weaving the two together. The lyrics, delicately evocative in their poetry, are playfully enunciated with what I can only describe as a coy but all-consuming passion. Overall, everything has gained in power since the first album. Here beauty and death dance together; the sensuality of Shrines has grown succubic.

Let’s turn back to these gory apparitions on the cover, and hear what each has to say as we encounter the EP’s seven songs:

Our entrance is announced by a trembling, ghostly drone. We behold the first apparition (mouth open wide), who immediately begins to sow seeds of enchantment around us. “Shudder me / Flutter me / Cover me / Mutter me,” she sweetly commands. She sings about wishing for “weightless knees” (dark humor, we think, for a floating head). “What are you?” we ask, allured yet more than a little afraid. “Our heads are all ablaze,” she answers with exhilaration, as her hair billows like flame caught by a gust. “Where are you going?” “We’re running from our graves.” A shudder passes through us. Quivering tendrils of synthetic music stretch forth and begin to twine themselves around us, lulling us into a daze. For a moment, reality blurs... We realize what is happening, snap back to ourselves. “Take me, oh, take me,” we leave the first head imploring.

The second ghost–head flickers into focus and then conjures up a sunset scene at the seaside. We see her there, embodied, in the arms of her beloved. We feel with her the splendor of the sun upon the water: “How I cried when I tasted the liquid gold.” We feel her blissful adoration for her lover: “Washing it down with the words you spoke…” What happened to him? “You sailed away on a sunken boat”—the only dark hint she utters. The scene morphs before us: now darkness, save a female figure illuminated by a lone, old, flickering fluorescent light. We hear her thrashing about in grief and anger, battering the wall beside her and her own bruised body. We see a crimson tide receding… is this the sunset we saw earlier, or something more macabre? We recall her repeated refrain,—“Do it again, do it again”—as she fades out to begin the whole process over again, neverendingly reliving her love and anguish.

In horror, we run. The third head appears, mournfully singing something to herself. Her voice suddenly brims with power as she sees us. Dead trees sprout and grow around us as though abundant with life; their dry branches crowd and prick our flesh. It seems that, for a moment, the head felt—hope. And yet, moments later, her voice droops once more, the trees shrivel: “You know I know that nothing’s fine…”

The fourth (pupils fully dilated, mouth and nose obliterated) announces herself with giddy delight. Fireworks boom and ignite the dark sky behind her. We see a group of youths sprint through hotel halls, plunge in swimming pools, scramble, dripping wet, onto rooftops while security guards shout, dogs bark, and the fireworks continue to boom. “As we moved out, there was a sign in the elevator: ‘No explosives allowed’…” She gives us a wink. “But we never were sign-readers.” Suddenly, we see shattered, blood-soaked limbs twisted around shredded metal. “How lucky you are to be so unlucky,” she sings (mouthless) at the bloody scene.

We abruptly drop down into fresh darkness. As we cautiously gaze about us, the fifth ghost calls out: “Give me just a moment, or get me up and out of here...” The head floats closer, an anguished, pleading look on her face. As she does so, a powerful wind seems to rush against her, cast her hair (and neck-viscera) behind her, preventing her from getting closer than 10 feet. We see a coffin in a grave, dirt slowly but determinedly heaped upon it. As it tumbles in, little rocks in the soil click against the wood of the coffin, creating a disturbingly pleasant rhythm. A man weeps as he shovels. Beneath his sobs, the thud of the dirt, and the clicking of rocks we hear something else, incredibly faint—a gasp—a scratching—a stifled shriek. “And I could never get close enough to you.”

The sixth head glides smoothly toward us. “Just came to say goodnight,” she begins, sultry allure rippling beneath an innocent surface. A dim-lit bedroom appears; we see a man sit up on the side of a bed, first startled, then intrigued—then eager. “I was just so shy,” she sings to us in an aside, and smirks. We see her, now embodied, delicate hands grazing against his chest, wrapping around his waist. We see their lips touch, cautiously first then with mounting fervor. We see clothes fall to the floor, her lithe form recline on the bed, eclipsed beneath the mass of his muscled body. We hear a feminine whimper, a dull male moan of desire. “Sing me a la-la bye-bye…” she says with seductive self-composure. We hear a desperate, distorted male scream. Sharp teeth grind flesh as blood drips from the bedsheets. Some primal force pulls us closer; we resist—just—manage to wrench ourselves away.

The scene dissolves. The desire kindled in us lurches into disgust, settles slowly into sadness. In the darkness of whatever realm it is we’re stuck in, we descry the very back of a final, seventh ghost–head as she flees. Mournful–sweet music of farewell echoes about the place. We never see her face. A pure, serene silence fills the space. Shaken, seduced and strangely exalted by the journey, we emerge again into full reality.

Note: I didn’t do any research about Purity Ring or this EP before writing this post (nor do I know very much about music). I doubt much of this captures the meaning intended by the band. Consider this, therefore, merely a creative experiment in portraying my feelings and crafting a story in response to the art and songs.

I recently read Allan Bloom’s literal translation of Plato’s Republic, alongside his 130+ page ‘interpretive essay’ on the same. It was a fascinating experience. A typical translation tends to mix the interpreting and translating together: the translator tries to give us the meaning of the text, without straying too far from its apparent sense. This may be an effective strategy; however, it fails if the meaning of the original is hidden, and can only be found through hints in the surface text. In that case, the typical approach deprives us of the real meaning as well as the hints.

In his translation, Bloom lets the text say just what it says, while in his interpretation he really reads between the lines. The latter appears to be based on his teacher Leo Strauss’ belief that Plato deliberately ‘wrote between the lines.’ This leads to a remarkably less totalitarian Plato than is apparent upon a casual reading—the Plato, perhaps, who was sharply critized as an enemy of open societies by Karl Popper. I plan to read both Popper and Strauss to consider their very different perspectives.

But back to Bloom. His Plato is so anti-totalitarian that he can call the Republic “the greatest critique of political idealism ever written.” “Socrates,” he says, “Constructs his utopia to point up the dangers of what we would call utopianism” and to moderate “the extreme passion for political justice by showing the limits of what can be demanded of the city” (p. 410). In other words, Plato (speaking as Socrates) wants you to be apalled and incredulous about his city. This is just another form of Socrates’s famous irony. All through Plato’s dialogues, Socrates says one thing but implies the opposite—typically, in claiming he himself is ignorant while his interlocutor is wise. This dissimulation has a purpose: apart from adding lighthearted delight to the dialogues, it serves to draw the interlocutor out—to have them state their case with confidence, and then be forced to really grapple with it themselves (which they may never have done if directly contradicted). If we believe Socrates is a sincere lover of wisdom, then this irony is not merely combative—it must be educative. In the dialogues, we see through the more obvious examples of Socrates’ irony: we laugh with him, perhaps, at his naive interlocutors. But perhaps he is using irony against us too? Or rather for us—educating us to be real philosophers, by finding for ourselves—without being instructed—the holes and hints in his arguments.

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Bloom gives us a literal translation so that we have a chance of finding these ourselves and seeing where they lead. But in his interpretive essay, he gives his own opinion about the deeper argument. Here is how it looks, in brief (including some of the intriguing clues that led to it):

In Book I, the fractious Thrasymachus attacks Socrates for believing justice is more than merely “the advantage of the stronger.” Thrasymachus, who doesn’t really care about truth and loathes the back-and-forth of dialectic, attempts to overawe him with rhetoric. Socrates responds with a number of (according to Bloom) deliberately specious arguments, which Thasymachus proves incapable of refuting. The latter is shown to be an inferior rhetoritician, and blushes. At the end of that Book, Socrates then seems to disown all that he said (“So long as I do not know what the just is, I shall hardly know whether it is a virtue…”). If his arguments really were just an attempt to shame the otherwise shameless Thrasymachus, then Plato must have hoped that we, the reader, would see their weaknesses and recognize this. In other words, he must have hoped that we would do our own intellectual work rather than buying into them just because Socrates said them.

From that point, the conversation is primarily between Socrates and the two brothers of Plato, Glaucon and Adeimantus. Together with Socrates, they construct an ideally “just city in speech.” According to Bloom, Glaucon represents the man of forceful, excessive desires. Adeimantus, on the other hand, represents the cautious conservative. To cut a long story short, if it weren’t for Socrates’ influence in this dialogue, Glaucon would strive to become a tyrant and Adeimantus would have someone like Socrates killed. That Plato casts his two brothers and beloved teacher in this dialogue is superbly artful (especially if what Socrates says cannot simply be identified with what Plato believes). Plato is everywhere, and nowhere.

How does Socrates reroute the natural tendencies of each of these men? Glaucon, whose excessive eros would have him strive for political supremacy, must be led to something more glorious and desirable than politics. This is what Socrates does in Books VI and VII, through the famous anologies of the Sun, the Divided Line, and the Cave. He helps Glaucon to recognise the supreme importance of a life of philosophy—but more significantly, its supreme pleasure. The contemplation of the absolute Good is a bliss incomparable to anything the relative world can offer. As Socrates makes very clear, those who attain to this vision don’t want to come back. If they were ever to rule a city, they would have to be compelled.

But who would compel them? As Socrates makes equally clear, a populace would be extremely reluctant to empower philosophers as kings; they must therefore be persuaded to do so. But who would persuade them? Only the philosophers. This absurd situation suggests that the ‘just city in speech’ was never intended to be an actual city of men. Likewise, the very notion of philosopher–kings violates Socrates definition of justice earlier in the dialogue: that justice is “minding one’s own business” (pursuing one’s own specific role or task). What could be more different than contemplating the bright eternal realities and busying oneself with the management of changeable things in the shadowy depths of the Cave? The suspicion that Socrates/Plato is less than serious about his city comes to a head when he announces that in order to even establish it, all the citizens over the age of 10 must be sent out into the country (by whom? the philosophers they must be persuaded to compel to rule them?).

So why does (Plato have) Socrates construct this ‘city in speech’ in the first place? In addition to ultimately guiding Glaucon beyond politics, it serves to highlight the irreducible gap between reason and nature, soul and body, philosophy and the city. Bloom denies these dualities can be cleanly reconciled. He picks up on hints such as the comedic tone of Book V, which includes the proclamation of gender equality, the ‘community of wives and children’ (i.e. abolition of the natural family), and the declaration that philosophers must rule as kings. Although nowdays most people would simply agree with the first point, we can get a sense of the intended absurdity when Socrates insists that equality of the sexes means men and women must exercise together in the nude and that this could be totally unproblematic. Why this? Nude gymnastic was one of the finest activities for Greeks. In theory this mixed nudity should be fine; in practice, it would be a disaster, because bodily desire and bodily shame are simply not ‘rational.’ As Bloom suggests, “Socrates forgets the body in order to make clear its importance” (p. 387).

As for the austere and moralistic Adeimantus, Socrates’ city renders him moderate. Instead of seeing philosophy as a dangerous innovation threatening the stability of society, he recognizes the true philosopher as the legitimate leader of the most ancient of regimes. By describing all subsequent history as a necessary degeneration from this regime, Socrates undercuts any temptation Adeimantus might have to reestablish it by force. Instead of attempting the impossible, Adeimantus will focus on preserving the current regime (i.e. Athenian democracy), to prevent it decaying even further.

In discussing the philosopher, Socrates makes it clear that this life can be pursued whether or not a city exists for him to rule (indeed, such a city would be somewhat of a hindrance). In this absence of the perfect city, then, the best kind of life is a private life dedicated to philosophy. As Bloom points out, “While the best city exists only in myth, the best man exists actually” (p. 415).

Finally, Bloom has some fascinating things to say about Plato’s apparent opposition to poetry. It’s notable that the last Book of the dialogue contains two main parts: first, an attack on poetry, and then a poetic Platonic myth about the afterlife. In between, Socrates issues an invitation to poets to present a (philosophic) defense of their art, and declares how delighted he would be if they succeed. Bloom concludes that Plato isn’t really against poetry, but against the merely tragic, comic, and unconscious qualities of ancient poetry to that date. Instead, Plato inaugurates a “poetry that points beyond itself”, that Bloom sees epitomized later by people like Dante and Shakespeare.

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Thus goes Bloom’s argument. Rather than a fully developed response, I can only end with a scattering of questions and insights.

First: Is this really Plato’s argument, which the whole surface of the dialogue conceals yet subtly suggests? Honestly, I don’t know. Reading Popper and Strauss might help me in this. As outlined above, there are certainly reasons to believe this is the case. But why conceal it so subtly and in such a dangerous way? The reader who finds the hidden meaning may abandon politics for a private life of philosophy; the naive reader may become a Mao or Lenin.

Second: Is this the (or a) real meaning, even if Plato didn’t consciously intend it? Maybe all the hidden hints and tensions in the text are really there, though not deliberately developed by Plato. They tell a particular story about Utopianism precisely because Utopianism has particular flaws. This may be similar to interpretation of the Bible—which seems to contain real wisdom, even where it’s implausible that these were the conscious thoughts of the writers at the time.

Third: As I read through the Republic this time, I got a sense of how magnificent it is. I got a real sense of love for it; a sense that this really does deserve its place at the bedrock of our culture.

Fourth: The Republic is a dialogue in itself, but also a dialogue seed (I struggle to find the right metaphor). Its controversial and inspiring aspects both feed into this. You put it in the midst of a group of people and it immediately extends itself, as each of you question and respond to each other and the characters. It grows across time with commentators and responses to commentators.

Fifth: What is the Good? Plato leads us to this godlike being that all existence depends on yet which is so transcendent itself that it cannot even be said to exist. I cannot read those passages without feeling Plato is talking about a profound personal experience. Whatever else he is, Plato is a mystic (perhaps a jnana yogi, in Indian terminology).

Sixth: For Bloom (and perhaps for Plato), there is no resolution to the conflict between philosophy and the city. The city cannot be rationalized, philosophy cannot be civilized, and they cannot come to a fair agreement. Trying to rationalize the city becomes a Utopian nightmare, and trying to civilize philosophy simply denatures it. There is an especially insightful passage in Bloom’s commentary:

In acting as though the eternal tension between body and soul has been overcome by history, a society is constituted which satisfies neither body nor soul. Such a society creates one universal cave illuminated by an artificial light, for men have not made the sacrifices necessary to the attainment of true cosmopolitanism but have been robbed of those attachments which can give them depth. … Only by distorting or narrowing man’s horizon can the permanent duality in his nature be overcome. (p. 411)

Bloom suggests this universal cave is the world created by the Enlightenment. We have given up what is natural, particular, humanly dear—but the average person is no wiser for it. (We are in fact worse off in that, perhaps moreso than ever before, we think we are free, wise, rational.) We absorb the doctrines of the Enlightenment like we would have absorbed the doctrines of ancient Athens or Sparta, and in doing so get nowhere near the real freedom of mind (and true cosmopolitanism) that love-of-wisdom would lead us to.

Seventh: On a personal level, reading through the Republic this time gave me a strong sense of the passion or eros in philosophy. It is such a pleasure to read and attempt to understand, and its content continually encourages one toward these very pleasures. And my soul resonates with this. Like Glaucon, full of passion, I feel like I’ve been led to something higher (something I’ve tasted almost all my life but perhaps haven’t put to myself with such clear consciousness). So one resolution I take from this is to pursue philosophy wholeheartedly, passionately, stubbornly, delightfully, in tension with the city.

The point of Bloom’s translation and long interpretive essay is to force us to become philosophers. That is, not to simply accept what Socrates or Plato or Bloom himself says; even if Bloom’s interpretation were true, it would be false to its purpose if we didn’t question, challenge, deeply ponder, or read between the lines of it. This unsure individual way is the only passage out of the universal cave.

Note: page numbers refer to the 1991 Basic Books 2nd Edition.

Out of the mists of ancient history emerges a fascinating religion, one that may have shaped the development of Judaism and thereby Christianity and Islam. Its founding prophet (Zarathustra or Zoroaster) probably lived more than a millennium before Christ—and according to Matthew’s gospel, its priests (the Magi) came to pay homage at his birth. In a world of morally ambivalent paganism, this is a religion that acknowledged one supremely good creator God fighting to cleanse his creation of evil. It held that God will raise the dead at the end of time and that all will be judged based on their freely chosen deeds, to be rewarded or punished accordingly. Zoroastrianism was once the Persian national religion, but since the coming of Islam has been reduced to just over a hundred thousand adherents around the world.

There is considerable debate—both within and outside the Zoroastrian community—as to exactly what kind of religion Zoroastrianism is. It has elements of polytheism, dualism, and monotheism. That it believes in one supremely good and wise creator God would qualify it as a monotheism, but this God has an opponent. Ahura Mazda (the Wise Lord) is locked in combat with Angra Mainyu (the Destructive Spirit). Some emphasize the ontological equality of these beings, while others suggest Ahura Mazda should be seen as supreme above his adversary. It depends how you interpret a key verse from the scriptures of Zarathustra:

Now these two spirits, which are twins, revealed themselves at first in a vision. Their two ways of thinking, speaking and acting were the better and the bad. Between these two the wise choose rightly, fools not so.

And then when these two spirits first met, they created both life and not-life, and that there should be at the last the worst dwelling for the followers of Druj (the Lie), but for the followers of Asha (Truth/Right), the best dwelling.

(Yasna 30:3–4)

Traditionally, the “two spirits” are the good Ahura Mazda and the evil Angra Mainyu; that they are twins implies that the one did not create the other, and so the gods of good and evil are equally primordial. This is the dualistic interpretation of the religion. Some in the monotheistic camp claim that Ahura Mazda is not himself one of the “two spirits” referred to, but that it is rather his creation or emanation, Spenta Mainyu—the “Holy Spirit.” In this interpretation, Ahura Mazda gives rise to both spirits, of which the one chooses goodness and the other chooses evil. Problems with this interpretation include that it goes against what most Zoroastrians have historically believed, and that in fact Spenta Mainyu, while being somehow distinct, is very closely identified with Ahura Mazda in the scriptures (akin to the relationship between the Holy Spirit and God the Father in Christianity).

In their 1979 article, Is Zoroastrianism Dualistic or Monotheistic?, Boyd and Crosby proposed a middle way between these extremes, arguing that Zoroastrianism “combines cosmogonic dualism and eschatological monotheism”:

Zoroastrianism proclaims a movement through time from dualism toward monotheism, i.e. a dualism which is being made false by the dynamics of time, and a monotheism that is being made true by those same dynamics of time. The meaning of the eschaton in Zoroastrianism is thus the triumph of monotheism, the good God Ahura Mazda having at last won his way through to complete and final ascendancy. But in the meantime there is a vital truth to dualism… (p. 558)

This seems convincing, because as much as the religion emphasizes that God is locked in a real war with his evil adversary, it is confident in the outcome: God will be completely victorious and evil will be eliminated forever. There is even a strong universalist strain in the religion, suggesting that at the end of time the damned will be purified in a deluge of molten metal and freed to live in paradise; evil will not even be left with a hell to dwell in.

Zoroastrianism arguably also contains elements of polytheism, worshipping other beings besides the supreme Ahura Mazda. The most significant of these are the seven Amesha Spentas (the Holy Immortals), which may be seen as either emanations or angels of Ahura Mazda. Zoroastrianism arose out of the same Indo-European religion that also gave rise to Hinduism, and the Zoroastrian scriptures (the Avesta) have many linguistic and cultural similarities with the Hindu Vedas. There appear to have been two houses of gods: the ahuras/asuras and the devas/daevas. While in India the devas became the gods and the asuras became demons, in Persia the reverse happened. As in the case of YHVH and Allah, Ahura Mazda may have been a pre-existing deity that was ‘elevated’ to the position of supreme being. What’s particularly fascinating is the same thing later happened multiple times in Hinduism, with different devas assuming the status of the absolute God. Deva or Ahura—it doesn’t seem to matter much, for the True God to shine through. And the shining seems to cascade downward, in all religions: in Zoroastrianism, in the Amesha Spentas and lesser divinities; in Christianity, in Christ, Mary, the saints, and their icons; even ruthlessly monotheistic Islam developed veneration of saints, the doctrine that the Qur’an is coeternal with God, etc.

It seems that Zoroastrians introduced the notion of linear time—that history is one line running from an initial creation foward to a grand and final climax. It lacks both the notion of individual reincarnation and of vast recurring cycles of universal time, which are such a central feature of Indian religions. It seems that from the initial Indo-European religion, India went one way and Persia went another: India into the mystical (the outward world thus futile cyclicality), and Persia into the ethical (one life and one history in the real fight between good and evil).

To me, the most important insight of Zoroastrianism lies in seeing God as primarily Good. The problem of evil is eliminated: in no sense did God create it. The price paid for this is seeing evil as equiprimordial with good, but this may be ameliorated somewhat by the assurance that good will ultimately and absolutely prevail. The Wise Lord’s power is not (currently) unlimited, but nevertheless he will win the struggle due to his supreme goodness and wisdom, which the Evil One lacks. He can foresee and adapt to and turn to his own advantage all of his adversary’s attacks. Indeed, goodness and wisdom seem to be closely identified in the Zoroastrian concept of Asha, which is at once intellectual truth and moral righteousness. Likewise, the evil Angra Mainyu stands for Druj, deceit and falsehood. When I think about how a non-omnipotent but supremely good God might do battle with evil, I think of Christ who let all the forces of evil attack him and yet triumphed over them in the most unexpected way. The way Good fights doesn’t look like the way Evil fights, and the superior wisdom of goodness looks foolish to evil eyes.

Zoroastrianism may not have been merely the first monotheism, but the first messianic monotheism, believing a final savior (Saoshyant) will come to defeat evil and restore the world. Intriguingly, it was the Persians who freed the Jews from the Babylonian captivity. Early Judaism lacked many of the ideas that would later become so important: heaven and hell, bodily resurrection, and the coming Messiah. The God of early Judaism was also much more morally ambivalent, and Satan more of his servant. Is it possible that the Jewish exiles were inspired by the religion of their liberators to incorporate similar ideas into their own religion, which they reformed and developed as they returned to their homeland?

“For God so loved the world…”

In this post, I intend to lay out a ‘Christian’ interpretation of the Hindu goddess Kali, particularly in her most popular form standing upon the god Shiva. The word ‘Christian’ must remain in quotes, because what initially appeared to be Christianity may look rather different by the end of the attempt. My aim is not to explain away a Hindu image as really referring to Christ, but to point out a similarity that could inform and expand both traditions.

The image of Kali is incredibly complex, and many layers of complementary and contradictory meaning have built up around it. I will have to leave most of this out, and even most of Hindu theology, in explaining the resonance with Christianity. So bear in mind the following is somewhat of a simplification, and seek out fuller information.

In short, Kali is a form of Shakti, the Goddess who is the active and immanent energy of the trascendent God who is pure consciousness. This God is her husband Shiva, who in the image lies beneath her feet. As the story goes, Kali had just destroyed an army of demons. Yet she continued her rampage, intoxicated by her fury and the demons’ blood, threatening the existence of the very world she had just helped to save. No one could stop her but Shiva, who laid in her way and let her trample him. As soon as she stepped on the supreme God, her beloved husband, she came to her senses and ceased the carnage.

Compare this to the central Christian myth: God came as Christ, sacrificing himself to a grisly death at the hands of a corrupt and deluded world, to save that very world. The image of Kali standing upon Shiva can be seen as an icon of the Crucifixion. Implicit in both images or myths is the idea that only love can save the world; opposing violence with violence is futile, and worse than futile. In both stories, God submits himself to the out-of-control violence of the fallen world, and in doing so makes manifest his limitless self-sacrificial love for her, which awakens and redeems her.

Her—and here we move from the way Kali points to Christ and pick up on the way Christ points to Kali—or rather, that God loves creation as a whole. Traditionally, Christianity has held that Christ’s sacrifice only saves some of God’s creatures, and perhaps very few (i.e. those humans who believe). But this is untenable, because the whole of creation is interdependent and intertwined. This is particularly apparent in the webs of love and empathy that connect all human beings and make them who they are. To save one creature is to begin to save all; could God’s work end before the whole cosmos is liberated from evil and restored?

In the effort to find correspondences between the two traditions, Kali has been compared to the Virgin Mary (as the holy feminine) or God (as God is portrayed as violent and awe-inspiring in parts of the Bible)—that is, when she isn’t simply dismissed as demonic. But I think the real correspondence is between Kali and the world itself. After all, this is what she represents in Hinduism: shakti (energy) and prakriti (matter). The difference is that in Hinduism these are also divine; whereas within a Christian framework they tend to be seen as the inanimate background upon which the real drama of human fall and redemption is played out (although curiously entwined with their fate). For most, if not all Christians, the world itself is not a personal being.

And yet, there is a quasi-divine feminine being in the Bible. She is Sophia, or Wisdom, and in the Book of Proverbs she says:

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

[…] when he marked out the foundations of the earth then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

One way of interpreting this figure is as the personal essence of the unfallen world. God loves the world (indeed, loves it into being)—but love is personal. God created a personal universe to love and to blissfully return his love, and this is Sophia. A closer analogue to Sophia within Hindu theology might be Parvati, a beautiful and benevolent form of the Goddess (as Kali is the same Goddess’ terrifying form). To simplify a bit, Parvati could be considered unfallen creation and Kali the fallen world as we know it.

It is a tenet of Christianity that when we fell the world fell—we are intertwined. It was therefore not just human corruption that afflicted Christ, but the corruption of the physical world also (the flesh that was tormented and died; all the material conditions that pushed his killers to their act). In Christ we can say that God let the world trample upon him. And if the radiant love of this act transforms humanity for the better, it may also transform the very matter and energy of the world. Perhaps we glimpse the latter in miracles. And certainly, it seems at the very core of the Christian story: Christ rises in a perfected physical body.

In the image, Shiva is implicitly incarnated (how could Kali truly tread on him if he was still pure spirit?), and Kali is spiritualized as she wakes up to who she is and what she is doing. These tendencies are emphasized in another, somewhat different story: Shiva has retreated to a Himalayan cave and become lost in meditative bliss, heedless of the world falling apart around him. Only Parvati (not yet his wife) can rouse him. Initially, he cares nothing for her physical beauty, but she practices intense meditation and austerities to win his love. This is successful; he falls in love with her, takes her as his wife, and they produce (interestingly) the son who will save the world.

As the Church is to Christ (i.e. his bride), Sophia is to God. And as the imagery of erotic love has been used to describe love for God, it may be used to describe God’s love for creation. When Shiva sees Kali rampaging he doesn’t see a demon but his beloved Parvati. Likewise, God always sees the immaculately beautiful Sophia at the core of this raging, self-devouring cosmos. This is not to affirm fallen nature, but to confront it in the only way that might truly restore it—with love.