Column 06/18/2024: Death of the Son, Episode Six: Interview with an Empress

Death of the Son, Episode Six: 

Interview with an Empress

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four; Episode Five]

"Is he awake?"

In his memory, the old woman approached the couch slowly, her hands trembling. The soldier, however, did not tremble, but stayed perfectly still, his eyes open, but hoping--somehow--that she would not notice. 

But the old man's strong hands gripped him suddenly by the shoulders--those gnarled hands somehow so much stronger than those of his trainer or the optio of his century or the other soldiers who grappled with him each morning; with them all, he had fought and struggled and often thrown off their arms, but with the old man, the very idea of resistance seemed absurd--and rolled him in a moment over onto his back, exposed, his eyes suspended without recourse beneath the great, dark ones of the old woman. 

But the hand on his shoulder now was not that of the old deacon, but of the bishop Hosius--and Theodotus shook himself out of his reverie to find that it was Hosius' brown eyes, many shades brighter than those of the old woman, that now looked intently into his own.

How long, oh Lord? When will my penance be complete?

"Are you ready?" Theodotus felt, unexpectedly, a flash of anger, though whether at Hosius or Christ he could not be sure. Must everything be a test?

But he was coming out of his reverie now, and the anger was quickly lost, as it always was, in a rush of understanding. Hosius is no longer trying to test me; he is afraid, and looking for reassurance.

After a moment, then, he put his hand awkwardly on the older man's shoulder--just as the old man would have done. "Don't worry: we are carrying out our Lord's business, and he will help us," he said--just as the old man would have said. He wondered if the words sounded as awkward and hesitant to Hosius as they did to him.

But Hosius seemed satisfied. He turned rapidly back to the little, black-haired slave-woman who had been watching them, not without amusement, from behind her strange blue eyes. "Take us to the Empress." She bowed, stiffly, and led the way through the labyrinthine corridors of the Empress' Palace. 

As they walked, Theodotus again found himself studying the decor carefully--and was again struck both by what he saw, and what he did not. He had only recently been in the Imperial Palace, decorated and prepared for the Emperor's residence--before that he had on a number of occasions set foot in the palaces and mansions of the Antiochene rich, investigating a crime or bearing some message from the Episcopal Court. Only once, early in his tenure as a deacon, he had visited the Widow's House, where those holy women prayed and contemplated and fed themselves and the poor at the bishop's expense. That had been a sizeable dwelling for its place in the city, a donation from some local grandee, but cramped and austere, like a military barracks, narrow corridors and innumerable small bedrooms bearing little decoration but the occasional gilded image of Christ or the Virgin. He understood that Eustathius had since built a new, larger residence for them, using the funds that Constantine so beneficently showered down upon the dioceses--but he could not imagine it differing overmuch from its original. 

Helena's Palace, though, resembled none of these models, but rather a strange melding of them all, a material imprinted indelibly with something that he gradually came to perceive as the personality of the woman who reigned within it. At first glance, the religious house loomed largest--in the darkness and austerity of the corridors, the gilded mosaics and paintings of Christ and martyrs prominently displayed in every room, and most of all in the women moving here and there dressed in the rough, dark cloth, sewn with crosses, that served nearly everywhere in the Empire as the badge of consecrated widows and virgins. A minute later, though, and the signs of prosperity began to assert themselves--in the size of the rooms and corridors, the colored marble floors, the impressionistic paintings, false windows and doors and gardens, covering every wall, behind and above and around the religious images, and the occasional niches bearing draped or missing pagan statuettes. 

So far, though, it might be any wealthy woman's house recently converted into an impromptu haven for ascetics--of which many had sprung up throughout the Empire, even in Antioch. It was only when he passed into a sitting room and found himself confronted with a life-size porphyry image of Constantine and Helena, both reclining on couches with their hands joined, that he found himself suddenly confronted with the fact that he was in a house of royalty. After that, though, he began to find the signs everywhere--in the labyrinthine size and extent of the palace itself, the verdant pleasure gardens, trees and vines and flowers in abundance, glimpsed through real windows and doors, and most of all in the images of the Imperial family found in nearly every room, carved into statue groupings or painted onto the walls. 

It was with an even greater shock, though, that he found himself, turning another corner, suddenly staring into the face of the woman he had seen in his dream--Fausta herself, the Emperor's recently-deceased wife, seated in arrogant, beauteous splendor above the doorway, next to Helena, and with another young woman on her mother-in-law's other side, black hair elegantly curled and a broad face drawn in a wide smile. 

He glanced at Hosius. "Crispus' wife? ...she...?" 

The old bishop's brows tightened; but a shake of the head was his only response.

This encounter soured Theodotus' already shaken mood. For the first time, his intellectual interest gave away to a sense of the uncanny about this strange house, an Imperial Palace filled with images of living Christs and dead women. Even the living women...further glances dispelled his initial sense of familiarity in the figures that inhabited this strange landscape. That young woman in the simple brown dress...was she in fact a consecrated virgin? Or was she, perhaps, merely a fashionable young women, of some wealthy family, playing the devotee for a day, or merely there to gossip and enjoy the Empress' pleasure gardens? That older woman in richer garb, busied with clearing a table...was she a widow? Or was she merely a slave, the well-dressed servant of a great lady? Even those two women with crosses sewn on their dresses...were they officially sanctioned ascetics, their vows received by the bishop, or were they merely pious, wealthy laywomen dressed as them: or were they some third thing, outside of his current conception of the Church? 

And of course, the central question itself: what was Helena herself? Was she a widow of the Church, or an ordinary great lady of Rome: or was she simply the Empress, infinitely exalted above all others by the wealth of the Empire and the devotion of her son? What was Helena?

Column 06/13/2024: Star Trek Discovery and the Unfathomable Profundity of Stupidity

Star Trek Discovery and the Unfathomable Profundity of Stupidity

"He's dead, Jim."

Star Trek: Discovery is over. Somehow, some way, it ended, lurched to a stop, was euthanized, put out of its misery, executed by firing squad, shot out of an airlock by a vengeful Admiral Adama, kicked over a cliff into erupting lava by Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. You pick your metaphor.

It seems, almost, beyond belief. How could Star Trek: Discovery end? 

A better question: how or when did Star Trek: Discovery begin? Did Star Trek: Discovery in fact take place? Jean Baudrillard, please answer your pager.

Here is a strong claim that I completely stand behind: watching Star Trek: Discovery for five (okay, four and a half) seasons has challenged me intellectually and personally as no other work of art has ever done before. It has tormented me, infuriated me, angered me, disgusted me, dispirited me, inspired me, filled me with joy and hatred and loathing and annoyance and, ultimately, love.

Let me start with a disclaimer. I am not someone who dislikes bad art; I am not someone who dislikes stupid art. I have long had a profound fondness for the unintentional humor and joyful creativity of many works of art that are, on the face of it, badly put together by artists in profoundly imperfect control of their artistic elements. 

Discovery is different, though.

To explain how, let me offer a strong claim: it is nearly impossible to comprehend Star Trek: Discovery as a work of art, the result of human intelligence and creativity and intentionality, at all. Star Trek: Discovery is not a substance, not even an artificial substance-by-analogy, the work of a demiurge human or divine. It is not an essence unfolding teleologically through time; it is not a story, a narrative with a beginning and an end; it is not even an event, an assemblage of elements held together by loose networks of simultaneity and cause-and-effect; it is not even  a Gnostic emanation, a failed attempt at conceptual realization birthing other abominations in turn. Star Trek: Discovery is, rather, most fittingly likened to the unintelligible forces of time and chance and matter themselves, contrary elements devouring one another in the dark, splitting and dividing without end in a chaos of Ovidian language, Plutarch's dark Typhon, Aristotle's potentiality awaiting act, the waters over which the spirit hovered before the beginning of creation.

It is, in other words, a really, really, really stupid television show.

As an obnoxious intellectual man, I have all my life believed strongly that intelligence--or rather, what intellectuals call intelligence, mental facility and speed in processing information and analysizing it and commenting on it and performing simple problem-solving tasks--is, in the grand scheme of things, not particularly important. Intellectuals are, by and large, self-deluding, self-aggrandizing bastards unable to see out of the boring detritus of their own minds and into the real world, even when it surrounds them and pounds them repeatedly into the metaphorical sand of reality like waves on a beach. In contrast, people colloquially described as stupid are usually prime exemplars of humanity, with their lack of internal preoccupations allowing them to simply accept and take stock of reality and respond to it in ways that are uniquely personal and so, by and large, both interesting and delightful, people adept at understanding and therefore intelligence in the true sense. In my experience, in this proper sense, stupid people are generally much more intelligent than smart people.

Nonetheless, stupidity is, as they say, said in many ways--and stupidity as a (relative) personal quality defined by intellectual receptivity and lack of speed in information-processing and verbal creation is quite distinct from stupidity in the sense of the total rational incoherency often found in intellectual objects and artifacts and beliefs. Human persons are always rational, even when they are unconscious, dreaming, or dead; receiving the world via the intellect is simply what they do. Concepts, ideas, and stories, however, are rational only by participation in human reason and its objects; and they can, to quite a large extent, fail to participate in that reason at all. Insofar as they fail to do so even minimally, they fail to exist.

Star Trek: Discovery is, in my limited experience, the work of art that most fails to participate in any form of human reason. Hence, it is, I would argue, impossible to analyze Star Trek: Discovery in any of the terms typically applied to human artifacts and narratives. 

Because of this, I aim to discuss Star Trek: Discovery not in terms of a unified work of art, a narrative, a set of characters, a plot, a set of themes. I will discuss it, rather, precisely in terms of stupidity, incoherence, and the roots of these stupidities and incoherences in the world around us--first in the stupid, incoherent shadow world of pop-cultural trends, then in the broader, incoherent world of American society itself, and finally in the real world as it actually exists. 

In the interests of fairness, it should be pointed out that Star Trek: Discovery's stupidity and incoherency is not, in fact, a bizarre, unique aberration in an otherwise pristine media landscape. In fact, the main note of popular culture in recent years has been precisely the same sense of fundamental incoherency found in a more extreme form in Discovery. Understanding where this incoherency comes from, is, I think, somewhat important for understanding where we are as a society, and for understanding how to prevent things from getting much, much worse.

For the very fact that Star Trek: Discovery exists at all, that it ever existed in even the most minimal sense, that it persisted, and that it ended tells us a great deal indeed about the world we live: and hopefully, what to do about it. 

To sum up Star Trek: Discovery, the stupidest work of art I have ever seen, I will make use of the stupidest format I know of. Here, then, in listicle format, proceeding from the most obvious to the most profound, are Ten Ways in Which Star Trek Discovery Illuminates the Profundity of Stupidity. 

Story: The Meeting

 [This story is based on real events.]

“Where is Jeanine? The meeting is about to start.”

The menu of the Rockhouse Cafe had changed again–an extra page at the front with seasonal specials. Minerva’s face twisted uneasily as she flipped quickly past it to Entrees. Her finger found the chicken with potatoes, rested there in reassurance for a moment–and then a spasm of energy drove it away, back to her cellphone.

“She said she would be coming–where is she? Don’t worry, we still have ten minutes before the meeting: more people will be coming.”

This last remark to the thin young man with bleached-blond, spiked hair sitting at her right hand, who was trying to occupy himself by looking carefully over the seasonal specials.

“If we don’t get five more people, the vote won’t be valid–we won’t have a quorum.” This remark to the plump, comfortable-looking woman on her other side, who was looking rather sleepy and had not opened her menu.

“Well,” the woman said. “I’m sure they’ll turn up soon.” She yawned.

Minerva’s thin face crinkled. “I don’t know why they keep those asparagus on the menu–it’s an embarrassment. Where is Jeanine?”

She grabbed the phone lying next to the red plastic glass of water and dialed the number again. Before it could go to voicemail, she thumbed it off and dropped it onto the table again. “Anne, do you have the Mitchells’ number?” 

The plump woman smiled. “No, I think Bob does, though. He should be here soon.”

“Tell Bob he’s going to be late!” Minerva barked to the thin, frightened-looking older man sitting across from her. He flinched.

“Um, honey…”

The door opened, and Minerva spun her head around; it was the Marvins, both thin and blond and frowning. They sat down at the other end of the table, as far from Minerva as possible.

“See? More people will be here.” She nodded to the young man again, who was in the process of drinking from his water cup. He coughed, spilling some water on the table, and she frowned.

“We still need three more people to make a quorum!” she hissed at Anne.

“Can I get y’all anything else to drink?” Minerva started: the waitress was back, a thin young woman wearing a black vest with a broad smile on her face.

She turned over the menu card: where were the drinks?

The young man at her right had already piped up, smiling as he did so. “I’ll have a Dr. Pepper.” The woman smiled back, and Minerva frowned as she glanced between the two of them.

“Anne, what are you having?”

“White wine, please.” Anne yawned again. “Cabernet.” 

“I’ll just have a Coke.” Bob had arrived, a large man with a round face and a well-groomed beard. He sat down heavily next to Anne and looked with interest at the young man. “So you’re the artist!” 

The young man smiled. “John,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” 

“Bob,” said Bob, looking down at his menu. “Do they still have the oysters special?” 

“No,” the waitress said. “I’m sorry. We do have oysters at our regular price, though. And the new special is Seafood Scampi.”

“Bob,” Minerva said, glancing over at him in annoyance. “Don’t you think we should wait to order food until everyone gets here?”

Bob shrugged. “Is anyone else coming?”

Column 05/25/2024: The Millennial Sovereign, The Real Story of Star Trek, and the Problem of Charisma

The Millennial Sovereign, the Real Story of Star Trek, and the Problem of Charisma

What is it that makes a human person more than just another human person?

This is a rather important question, to which many highly conflicting answers have been given. 

We are, most of us, surrounded by people day in and day out, both in person and through media and social and political structures. Most of these people we do not, really, know particularly well. Some of these people want things from us; from some we want things; and some of these people will not just want something from us: they will want us. So how do we decide, among all these people, who we will pay attention to or not pay attention to, trust or not trust, listen to or not listen to, obey or not obey? How do we decide who we give ourselves to, as friends, lovers, helpers, leaders, followers, servants? 

This is a crucial question when it comes to individual relationships and individual lives; but it is in many ways even more crucial when it comes to the lives and destinies of whole groups and peoples and nations and Empires. In our personal lives, we can (if we choose) exercise prudence and wisdom and take our time and think our way through who we trust and who we give to and who we give ourselves to. When it comes to the realms of public culture, political culture, especially mass-media culture, we frequently are under far more pressure, and have far less to go on. How do we decide who is telling the truth in a public war of words between two politicians or influencers or apologists or academics talking about something we know nothing about? How do we decide who to trust, to whom to give our money, our time, our attention, our vote, our obedience, our trust and love and devotion, when our choice actually matters, for ourselves and others?

There are many answers to this basic question, ranging from the rational to the romantic to the utterly insane. One common answer throughout history is charisma. 

Buy My Book!

Those readers of this blog who do not otherwise know me may be interested to learn that my first academic book, from Oxford University Press, has just been published.

Entitled Christ the Emperor: Christian Theology and the Roman Emperor in the 4th Century AD, the book aims to give a new, intertwined narrative of the dynasty of Constantine and the Arian Controversy, focusing on the political theologies espoused by both Emperors and bishops and by theologians on both sides of the controversy. 

You can order it from the Oxford University Press website here, as well as from Amazon here. It is also available at a number of other online retailers, including international ones. Amazon and Google Books both feature roughly ~50 page previews that you are welcome to check out even if you don't end up buying. 

This is obviously a work of academic historiography and so quite different from the sort of writing I do on this blog. However, if you can stomach my overly-long essays and are generally interested in the sort of topics I cover here, I would imagine you would enjoy and get something out of the book as well.

Godspeed!

Feast of Pope St. Martin I (April 13th)

Today is the feast of a saint that is very near and dear to my heart, and to which I owe a lot personally: Pope Saint Martin I.

While today fairly obscure, Martin's general claim to fame is that he is the last universally-acknowledged martyr Pope. He was taken from Rome by the Byzantine Emperor Constans II in the 7th century and done to death by starvation in what is now Crimea in Ukraine. Martin suffered this fate for opposing the Imperial heresy of Monothelitism, the belief that Christ has only one will and operation, and for asserting dogmatically the complete humanity of Christ and his possession of a fully human and free and sinless intellect and will alongside and in harmony with his eternal divine will. 

More immediately, he suffered for refusing to abide by a universal Imperial gag order declared by Constans to end the controversy, which autocratically forbade any discussion of the theological issue at all on either side. It was for breaking this silence to anathematize both the Monothelites and those who forbade public confession of Christ's two wills that he was killed.  

Martin was and remains a powerful bridge between East and West. While he was a strong asserter of Papal authority and infalliblity, broke communion with the Church of Constantinople, and refused to acknowledge the authority of the Byzantine Emperor over theology or Rome, he spoke Greek fluently and was deeply conversant with Eastern theology. During his short reign he received numerous refugees from the Byzantine Empire fleeing theological persecution and the rise of Islam, made copious use of their knowledge and skills, and distributed them and their cultural and ecclesiastical learning throughout the West--so that shortly after his reign a Syrian monk from Tarsus, St. Theodore, was appointed by Papal decree to the throne of Canterbury in England. He was a close cooperator and ally of Saint Maximus the Confessor, the greatest of all Byzantine scholastics, and is still venerated in the Eastern Orthodox churches today. 

He was also a thoroughly human and humane saint, who died in part because of his absolute refusal to countenance active resistance to the Emperor's armies and his insistence that "I have judged it better to die a thousand times than to allow the blood of even one person, anyone, be shed onto the earth." In this, he was a powerful witness and contrast to a century that was all but drowning itself in the blood of holy wars and persecutions. Likewise, in his few surviving letters written from his exile, he openly and movingly describes his bodily sufferings and his feelings of abandonment by his friends, allies, clergy, and spiritual children. 

In this humanity, his insistence on the importance of human will and freedom for salvation, his resistance to autocratic power, his refusal to allow the truth to be silenced along with error, his intercultural and ecumenical focus, his common condition with the oppressed and prisoners, and even in his death in what are today bloody and war-torn regions, I believe he is an important saint for our times. 

One of my goals in life is to spread devotion to Martin. Hence, you can find on this blog a novena to him I composed to him a few years ago, which I urge anyone who wishes to pray or spread or make use of for your own purposes. Likewise, I have done my own translation of the letter in which Martin describes his capture by the Emperor and the early period of his exile, as well as another letter shortly before his death describing his condition of starvation and lamenting his abandonment. Finally, here is a somewhat florid and imprecise account of his life which I wrote many years ago, but which contains a fuller description of Monothelitism and quotes from a contemporary document describing his sufferings and death. 

Ora pro nobis! 

Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, and the Loneliness of Disordered Desire

Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, and the Loneliness of Disordered Desire

"I left a woman waiting:
I met her sometime later.
She said: 'I see your eyes are dead.
What happened to you, lover?'"

"I'm fucking nothing. I'm not even a person."

The above quotes come from two extraordinarily different works of art, created by two extraordinarily different artists more than thirty years apart. They are, nonetheless, about precisely the same thing.

Let me start over. One of the primary purposes of art is to aid in the extraordinarily important process of reflection and processing of our lives and selves and experiences. We all live out of and based on what we receive of the world; yet before we can act truthfully, we must first understand truthfully what we have received. And this is by no means easy.

One of the greatest problems with the contemporary regime of mass-media in American life is that it renders this process all but impossible. It does so in the first place by simply deafening and overwhelming people with narratives and experiences that are totally foreign to their own lives, which they have no ability even to begin to process, and which thus leave them no space and time to process their own lives and selves and the world itself. It does so in the second place by giving them narratives of the world that falsify their own experiences, causing them to understand their own lives in ways that are false and harmful, and hence, inevitably, to act in ways that are false and harmful.

One of the primary realms where this is true is, of course, the domain of human relationships and desire, insofar as, as I have argued in this space, the primary form of artistic production of our civilization consists of the manipulation of human desires for the purposes of pornography and advertising. For this to be effective, people have to absorb and internalize a sense of their own persons and identities and desires that is maximally manipulable by media. This, while existing in different ways in different areas, is fundamentally a mode that is de-personalized, de-relationalized, momentary, intense, atomized, repeatable, interchangeable, quantifiable, and totally separated from any sense of truth or reality. The ideal subject of this type of desire is someone who responds with maximal intensity to any given stimulus, at whatever time, whoever it involves, whether it is in reality or only via media, does whatever that stimuli tells him or her to do (such as buy a product), and then is ready to respond in the same way a moment later to a totally unrelated stimulus.

A great deal of American mass-media, consequently, is dedicated to portraying this type of desire as supremely positive and affirmed and fulfilling, and the type of person who is defined by such desires as supremely affirmed and fulfilled and happy. 

And yet the reality, which we have all at some point in our lives seen plainly either in others or in ourselves or both, is that this person is definitionally and maximally unfulfilled and lonely and miserable and unhappy. Since most people in America process their own experiences of themselves and others largely or entirely through mass media, though, many people are entirely unable to grasp this obvious reality or acknowledge it or process it or derive any conclusions from it or take any actions based on it. Indeed, even people who are obviously and enormously unhappy for precisely this reason are, in my experience, almost totally incapable of actually seeing themselves as unhappy and hence of taking any steps, large or small, to remedy their situation.

The first step to ceasing to be unhappy is to recognize that one is in fact unhappy. This is trivially true, but in fact, in practical terms, is one of the most common obstacles to personal happiness in many contemporary American's lives. People are frequently driven to go very far into the depths of personal dysfunction and the Internet alike before they can find media that allows them to reflect on themselves to even this very minimal degree--and then frequently the sectarian or conspiracist or victimizing or pseudo-psychologizing Internet narratives they end up consuming about their own unhappiness are just as false and destructive and conducive to further unhappiness. 

Even more cruelly, perhaps, the reality of contemporary American life is that many, many, many people do in fact have the materials of fulfilling, meaningful, even happy lives, but live their entire lives in the shadows, ashamed, and made unhappy precisely because their lives do not measure up to mass-media fantasies of people who are in fact profoundly, deeply miserable themselves.

It is precisely because of that that there is an enormous need for works of art that clearly and effectively and truthfully portray the unhappiness of people who are in fact unhappy, in such a way that people who are not like these people can recognize them as unhappy and not try to emulate them or be ashamed they are not like them, and so people who are in fact like these people can come to see their own unhappiness and act on it.

This is yet another unnecessarily long-winded and philosophical proem to two works of art that I like very much, both of which center on the utter misery and loneliness of famous, attractive, successful, promiscuous men. So here goes.