Read Us Elsewhere

The Reverend Uncle blog is returning soon, but until then, exciting news.

Isabella's stories, "An Art Thief," and 'The Last Temptation of Tasya," are being published by SubtleTea and Relief, respectively. You can access the SubtleTea story here and pre-order Relief issue 3.1 here

Cash-for-amendments?

According to the Times, four Labour peers have been caught in an undercover operation offering to amend legislation in return for cash. This is of course highly disturbing and if these allegations are true I hope all four of them are expelled from the House at the very least. I'm not sure under what heading they might be guilty of a criminal offence; nobody was convicted the last time this happened, though both MPs involved retired in disgrace. I hope there's something, because I don't see what else you can do to a Lord other than kick him out. You can't even confiscate his pay, because he doesn't get any.

Also, one has to wonder about the names of those involved. The mental health of a Defence procurement minister called Moonie must be in question ('a dangerous and secretive cult', equally applicable to the Unification Church or the defence lobbyists' association). On the other hand, how can one not feel sorry for a Whip named Snape? His children must give him a terribly hard time.

"No, We Can't!"

I recently came across an article in the New York Times that surprised me - in the best of ways - by managing to combine a culture piece on "evangelicals," that curious and exotic breed, with some specific discussion of doctrine. Pastor Mark Driscoll and his "New Calvinists" may not be to everyone's taste, but they do depart radically from both mainstream happy-clappy evangelism and smells-and-bells High Church formality. The punks and rockers that make up Mark Driscoll's ministry embrace pre-destination, not the most palatable of doctrines to modern sensibilities, even as they scorn so much of the "feminized" over-the-top clean-living standards that characterizes the watchdog groups and Christian-rock concerts that make up what has become the religious right.

I'm not sure what I think of Driscoll. I'm instinctively put off by predestination, but it does make some philosophical sense, and for all my affinity for "smells and bells" it is nice to see a church that can combine populism with strict adherence to some form of doctrine - one cannot accuse the New Calvinists, at least, of hypocrisy.

But what I'm most curious about is not Driscoll himself, but his context. The article discusses a resurgence of Calvinism among American Christians. But it fails to answer the perhaps unanswerable: why? Why now? It seems like a conscious rejection of the human power of the will - that "can-do" attitude that makes up so much of American culture. Is it a discomfort with the Pelagian uber-humanism of American culture contrasted with the recession, where the American dreams of opportunity and self-improvement are dashed against the tragic inevitability of the system-at-large?

Perhaps, in recognizing the limits of human capacity, the New Calvinists are challenging 2008's optimistic mantra "Yes, we can."

No, they reply. "No we can't." At least not without grace.

Uni-Lateran Decisions?

We're back from the Christmas and New Year's holidays, having missed a great deal of affairs of international importance, and looking forward to all 2009 brings.

Something worrisome, however, has popped up in the Italian news section of the BBC. The Vatican has done something quite interesting and reversed the statutes of the Lateran Treaties - from now on, the Vatican - as a nation - will no longer automatically pass Italian law. What I find disturbing is not the Vatican's actions, however, but the sheer lack of coverage this is getting in the mainstream media (I myself only found it when specifically searching for Italian news.)

The implications of this are momentous. This is not only a subtle dig at the inefficiency of the Italian bureaucratic system, nor is this a sheer act of reactionary defensiveness against the possibility of Italy legalizing gay marriage or euthanasia, which the Vatican state would have been required to do as well under the old accords. Rather, this is the Vatican - the sovereign state, as opposed to the Church - asserting its political as well as ideological independence from Italy at large.

Does this herald the return of the Borgias or Medicis of powerful popes using their office for political purposes? Most unfortunately for aspiring Michelangelos and Raphaels, it does not. But it is a powerful act - one that asserts that the Vatican is more than the Church, it is a sovereign state in its own right, and one that is unafraid to challenge the status quo if need be. It requires discussion, debate. Sadly enough, the coverage of this story has been meager at best, and seems to be limited to a summary judgement that "the Church wants to prevent gay marriage."

This is so much more than that.

Sonnets for the Viennese

I have grown up in so many cities that I find it difficult to distinguish between homesickness and wanderlust. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that my first entry in a series of travel-writing posts concerns the one city that I love, but to which I attach none of the nostalgia of childhood - the Roman Forum, for me, was a playground before it became a ruin, New York's Metropolitan Museum was the site of an annual children's Christmas party, and the Parisian Invalides was near the outdoor market from which we bought our Sunday morning bread. All these cities will I treat in due time, with perhaps undue familiarity towards them - but it is easier to begin with writing about Vienna, which was never anything but a city.

The summer before my freshman year of college, I did a mad thing and moved to Vienna for a month, living in a rented room off Nestroyplatz, on the memory of two surreal days there the year before. I sought in Vienna a particular brand of conservatism - the sort that belonged to Metternich rather than McCain - a hushed antechamber for dead Habsburgs. And in some sense Vienna is, far more than any other city, a playground for such anachronistic aristocracy; its subtlety welcomes fantasy.

For all Vienna is hushed; all Vienna is ritual. It is a city of old men - of sweeping palaces and lamp-lit boulevards that even in the height of tourism are never quite crowded enough. The buildings - whether the creamy excesses of the eighteenth century in the Innere Stadt or the floridly dark art nouveau houses along the Linke Weinzeille, overlooking the Naschmarkt - overshadow the city and its inhabitants like no other city I know. In New York, the people stare down their skyscrapers. In Rome, inhabitants laugh and smoke and drink scattered around ancient monuments with an apparent obliviousness that comes only from such subtle surety in these household gods. But in Vienna, these ghostly remnants still reign over the city long after the death of kings. The Viennese themselves - walking eyes downcast, participating in courtly formalities, wishing "Gruss Gott" upon visitors in shops and restaurants- are still the subjects of a vanished empire. The attendees of the Staatsoper - from student standing tickets to the private boxes - dress in black tie. Indeed, I once witnessed a sale of drugs in the infamously sleazy Karlsplatz metro station between two dreadlocked goths, in which the two participants bowed to each other upon completion of the transaction.

All this does indeed lead to melancholy. The Innere Stadt, the imperial and cultural heart of the city, is bounded by the Ringstrasse - a graceful nineteenth-century tree-lined boulevard that swoops past the Staatsoper, palaces, and grand hotels; this may well be the most salient metaphor for a city strangled by memory. So much beauty of the city comes from this very sadness, from the memory of something lovely and and ghostly and half-forgotten - a promise that can be consummated only by the unreachable reversal of time.

It is taxing to stay too long in the city. The silence of a morning cafe melange at Cafe Sperl, on Gumpendorferstrasse, the unencumbered echoes of horseshoes from the carriages that circle the gothically haphazard St. Stephen's Cathedral, the lingering scent of fading September flowers filling empty gardens at Belvedere Castle and Schonbrunn, all these things become overripe, stifle the soul in self-indulgence. Perhaps this is to be expected from a city balancing its post-war regret alongside the recipe for Sachertorte. Vienna's suicide rate is one of the highest in Europe; this is a city governed by the supremacy of the dead.

Such post-mortem imperialism is not uncontested, particularly by the young - twenty-somethings unconscious of either war except in history, seeking to reclaim the city for the living. Far out by Erdberg, dreadlocked punks smoke drugs in the company of shaggy stray dogs in the converted warehouse of the Arena, a decrepit rock venue. Swarms of pan-European youth descend on the Donauinsel for the annual music festival there. There is a willful, angry defiance about this scene - rage against a city whose rulership, nevertheless, will remain in the hands of the dead. In the better-heeled, trendier areas of Mariahilf and Neubau, in newly popular Asian fusion restaurants and cafes like the retro bookshop-cum-record-store-cum-cocktail-bar "Phil," on Gumpendorferstrasse, the hipsters - and this writer - spend long hours on shiny macbooks. So did I spend Viennese days.

But after Phil closed, the walk home led me across the Innere Stadt: through deserted streets, beneath deserted buildings. The palaces and moon alike appeared stark and white against the canvas of the sky, as if their shapes had been sliced from the heavens.

And nightly in that oppressive emptiness, I succumbed to the tyranny of Vienna's ghosts. They had preserved the city for their own.

The Resurrection of the Fall

Again I am a fair bit behind the times in covering this article, but as I am still in Oxford and my topic is the Catholic Church, to engage any sort of timeliness and relevancy would be to defy my geography and subject. On the eminently useful Vatican blog Chiesa, Sandro Magister draws attention to the resurgence of focus on the part of Benedict XVI on the doctrine of Original Sin, one of the Catholic Church's less fashionable doctrines of date among a host of outmoded dogmas. Passé is, however, by no means a condemnation.

And so Benedict XVI brings the subject of Original Sin out from its embarrassed confinement, and proposes to defend its extended relevancy. In a December 3 catechesis entitled "Adam and Christ: from original sin to freedom," Benedict cleverly separates two areas of evidence for original sin - the empirical and mysterious. The empirical evidence for man's conflict, he says, is within man himself: it is the tendency to, to quote Paul, to "will what is right but...cannot do it. [To] not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want." (Romans 7:18-19). To argue this notion as "contemporary" would be foolish; this is not a first century or a twenty-first century malaise but rather a universal one - explanations of biology, Pandora's boxes, or fruits of knowledge are all etiologies of the same general condition. Indeed - to "miss the mark" - as the Hebrew word (het) for sin would have it, is perhaps the most fundamental action of the human condition.

But there are multiple explanations for this phenomenon, Benedict continues. There is existential dualism - the belief that good and evil are two equal, contrary principles - leading in turn to the monistic nature of man: a tangle of good and evil unified as "man" from the beginning. This model is the atheistic model, the cynical one, a rational neo-Montanism. And then there is the explanation of the Church - that man's pure, good nature was corrupted by sin, but that evil itself is perpetually subservient to God.

There is certainly historio-Biblical credence to this explanation in the Old Testament alongside the New - this is not to be taken for granted; so much of the Old Testament is divorced from context and through that its meaning. However we take the author of Genesis 1, in whatever context, he is divorcing the creation acts of The Lord from several cognate Ancient Near Eastern creation stories. There is no epic battle between forces of order and chaos, as takes place between Marduk and Tiamet in the Enuma Elish. There is no divine struggle. Rather, God can command and shape with a word the de-mythologized primordial chaos of Genesis 1; he names, and thus assumes power over, not only the light but also the darkness, the echo of that chaos - he is not the sometime victor of a struggle but the single source of divine strength (with the exception, it must be admitted, of his curious sometime heavenly court). 

But exegesis can only convince the believing; Benedict, perhaps wisely, ascribes the "mysterious" proof for Original Sin - that distinguishes its worldview from that of the dualists - to faith and faith alone. The sole practical explanation he gives is teleological: his view, in contrast to so much of what is wrongfully said about Original Sin, is at its core a positive assessment of the basic human nature, far more humanistic in its way that those who wish to insist against the proof of our natures that we are eternally the perfect and unblemished children of God, a hubristic falsehood. But I am wary of any explanation that rests in whatever part on "doesn't this sound nicer?" - whether it comes from the New Agers or from Benedict XVI's decrying of the cynicism inherent in believing evil to be on a cosmological par with good. 

Benedict's portrait of Original Sin - of pure humanity redeemed from its history and biology by purer Christ - is one to which I subscribe, and his use of "empirical" proof of the human condition brought his argument, at least, beyond those who criticize the "harshness" of the doctrine in insisting on the inherent flaws in the human soul. It is faith, Benedict, that takes us to the next step. But his arguments against dualism are here curiously incomplete from an intellectual standpoint, particularly coming from a man of such acknowledged intellectual ferocity that one imagines he would be capable of doing so if he so chose.

They succeed, however, emotionally: the Catholic Church's doctrine is positive and humanistic; the secular worldview cynical and full of despair. Perhaps Benedict's concern - an admirable one, to be sure - is to defend Original Sin's relevancy and plausibility in a modern world, not necessarily its existence. This is a public relations move for the doctrine, not an ontological defense. But first things first. Perhaps justification - if the pun can be pardoned - is exactly what Original Sin needs at this point in time.

From Here To Eternity

Last month, L'Osservatore Romano -- known informally to the world-at-large as the Pope's newspaper -- published a feature write-up by one Khaled Fouad Allam, an Italian citizen by way of Algeria. His article, entitled "The religions and the fate of the world", sounded routine enough. However, run-of-the-mill it most certainly was not! For it was the first piece written by a Muslim to appear on the front page of the Vatican's unofficial digest. Whilst Allam's holistic aspirations may be highly suggestive of his underlying idealism, what he had to say in his column was pertinent; his message forward-looking; and his tone undeniably poetic. One can only hope that this quietly momentous event was a step in the right direction, both for L'Osservatore, and humanity in general. 

The news story, which explores the issue of the contemporary divide between Christianity and Islam, may inspire many a reader to wonder which is the greater hindrance to peaceably progressive communication: radical religious fanaticism, or a fundamentalist mentality that stubbornly refuses to accept the idea that it might, on occasion, better elucidate itself by stepping out of its own light, and into that of another? For this habitual reader of the Holy See's newspaper, the issues raised by Allam brought to mind the image of Dante encountering the poet Bertram dal Bornio (the infamous "lantern man"), in Hell -- illuminating himself with his own decapitated head. Yet, it also managed to take that disheartening image and counter it with one of eventual optimism.

In the article, Allam argues that we are living in an era of global crisis, a bedlam that he believes is the result of a "divorce between history and eternity." Granted, one cannot help but note that this rather cataclysmic worldview has been common throughout the history of mankind; but, there you have it. He goes on to say that, due to this crisis, the dialogue between Christianity and Islam should be approached from a more philosophical -- as opposed to a purely religious -- point of reference. An important observation, particularly when one considers the all too likely probability that interreligious communication between the two will continue to fail until such time as their differing cultural philosophies are properly addressed in their own right. Benedict XVI seems to support this notion, as well. He, too, has publicly expressed the urgency of initiating intercultural dialogue as a means of sustainable discourse between the different faiths. The success of this type of secular communication, according to Allam, would nevertheless require that Islam liberate itself from the strictures of tyranny and radicalism, whilst Christianity (and all of the West) must address the problem of its increasingly confused Janus face...which appears to be suffering from a dreadful case of tunnel vision on both its left- and right-hand sides. It would seem that we've quite the Herculean task before us!

However, Allam infers that it is not an impossible undertaking, as times of international crisis present humanity with the unique opportunity to approach a collective dialogue from a more universal perspective; that to do so "is in a certain way connected to 'salvation,' even in its profane version, which must illuminate the darkness of our time."

Whilst such a redemptive notion is evocative of many sentiments familiar to both Christians and Muslims alike, it is the lingering message of philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas that springs to mind as this particular commentator meditates upon Allam's words. In Humanisme de l'autre homme, Lévinas suggested that our humanity is found in the recognition that the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the self. Wouldn't it be something if Christianity and Islam could come to terms with one another in this way; if, in this time of conflict and uncertainty, they could at last truly accept and embrace their similarities? Surely, if they could somehow find a way to see the one in the other, mightn't they ultimately come to appreciate their shared responsibility toward the destiny of mankind as a whole?

Ah, but how easy it is to get swept up in Allam's great (utopian) expectations!

Still, a successful dialogue between Islam and Christendom certainly has the potential to bring spiritual subjectivity vis-à-vis with a syncretizing sort of Cartesian consideration -- reformulated out of necessity from an ethical standpoint -- however unlikely such a situation may seem in the presence of our Western rationalism. If Khaled Fouad Allam can make the front page of L'Osservatore, then I daresay that one can harbor a little hope for the future of humanity.

__________

Allam's article may be read via the online archive of L'Osservatore Romano (in Italian only), or here (in English) via Sandro Magister's e-zine, Chiesa -- the feature is reprinted in its entirety beneath Magister's brief commentary.