Testament of Belief

Testament of Belief

[I apologize for doing so little writing on here, as I have been both rather busy and also my creative energies have been directed towards (1) fiction, and (2) academic writing, neither of which is yet polished enough to post here. I have several pieces in various stages of construction, however, which should be appearing on here soon enough. This is not really any of those pieces, but an impromptu decision to say something about my belief and its bases, inspired mostly by my thoughts as I was going to bed and written in about an hour and posted in honor of Pope St. Gregory the Great on his feast-day. His writings are much more worth reading than mine.]

Every one, I suppose, has their own function when it comes to the Church and the life of grace; which is another way of saying their own testament, a thing to which they are able to witness. One of mine, I suppose, is to give the lie to the basic idea that faith is essentially a form of wish-fulfillment, that it is bound up with thoughts and emotions and beliefs and doubts and moral hypocrisies, in short something entirely other and opposed to reality in the sense believed in by scientists and engineers and so-called practical mean. 

To that, I can only say, for better or worse, that my belief, in its foundation and inceptions, has nothing really to do with the former, and everything to do with the latter. 

I sometimes envy people with what I would call a natural belief, or even a natural disbelief: people who find it difficult, if not impossible, to see where their own minds end and the reality to which all these things refer begins. Belief is natural to human beings: it is a necessary corollary of having a mind. Believing, and disbelieving, are simply things that people do, all the time, without much in the way of thought or even necessarily interest; and these acts of believing and disbelieving are naturally intertwined with all the other operations of people's minds, emotions and hopes and desires and fears and traumas and loves and hates. Among these beliefs, and disbeliefs, are mental states referring to God, or Christianity, or the Catholic Church--beliefs which may be important, but are not fundamentally different from any other similar mental state. Hence, even the most honest believer or disbeliever may, and should, ask themselves: am I sure that my beliefs (or disbeliefs) are accurate, that they refer to reality, that they are not unduly influenced by my own emotions? After all, it is so tied in with me that it may turn out to be all me after all. 

Alas, this is not how I relate, or have ever related, to God or the Catholic Faith. My relationship with God is in this sense based more on experience than belief: and it is not an experience, even, of having an idea confirmed by observation, or a hypothesis advanced by testing, or even a desire fulfilled by fruition. To the extent the experience may be analogized to other types of experience, it may be compared to any sudden, unanticipated physical reality: the step you miss while walking and thinking of other things, the car you collide with while listening to music, the pain you feel suddenly from the beam you did not see. It simply and undeniably asserts its reality precisely by its utter heedlessness, its utter lack of relation, to everything in your head and your heart. 

There was, and is, simply no proportion, no real relation, between my ideas and beliefs and hopes and fears and desires about God, and the experience of God I came to in and through my entrance into the Catholic Church. I did not anticipate it; I did not in any straightforward sense seek it out or ask for it or desire it. It was simply there. 

To the extent beliefs about God or Catholicism emerged from this experience, they are in no sense, really, beliefs about me. I do not believe that I believe in God; I do not believe that I experience God. I believe in God. God is; and the interesting (psychological) truth is that since that time period I have not really been capable of doubting the existence of God. That God exists is simply not something that is in any sense dependent on me, and so it is not something I have any straightforward capacity to challenge or occlude or disbelieve. 

Of course, to say this is not to make any particular claim about my own positive virtue or fidelity or indestructibility. Psychologically and physically speaking, I am certainly capable of denying that God exists, or even coming in some sense to believe it; as I am capable of being lobotomized, or decapitated, or losing all my memories, or coming through some strange series of freakish accidents to believe that I am a shoe. But as I said, this is not really something that has anything in particular to do with the fact of God's existence or my belief in it.

Or rather, if I am being completely honest, the truth is that not only does my belief in God, or in the Catholic Faith, not have anything in particular to do with any belief in my own intelligence or virtue or correctness; it is positively correlated with the opposite, which is to say, with my stupidity and sinfulness and incorrectnesss and lack of existence. This is, I suppose, something in the same sense in which the strength of a hammer striking my skull is positively correlated with the weakness of my skull, or the strength of gravity and a gravel road is positively correlated with the weakness of the small hay wagon out of which I was flung when I was ten years old, and of the skin of my leg as it was dragged across said gravel at high velocity. I have generally become aware of God's reality precisely through my own lack of reality, so closely that they could be said to be nearly one and the same reality.

All this may well seem extremely negative, if not cold and unfeeling. I cannot help that, I suppose. Yet it is worth saying that by no means was my experience of God solely or primarily an experience of divine wrath or power or judgment or any of those things--that it was, emphatically and overwhelming and in its totality an experience of divine mercy, benevolence, and indeed love. 

Yet if it is true that our lack and nothingness may be demonstrated to us by something opposing or overpowering us, it is no less true that our lack and nothingness can equally be demonstrated to us by something giving to and loving us. Perhaps a metaphor would help here. The more water is poured into a cup, the higher the proportion of the cup that is filled, the more the cup's prior emptiness is necessitated and demonstrated. The more that is given, the less that there could have been before the gift.

There were in fact dimensions in which my experience of God was one of my own will, my own self, being checked and overruled from without. Yet the more fundamental experience even in these instances was of something giving to me, giving to me so much of my self that it necessitated and demonstrated that before that gift I could not have had a self at all. I experienced being given everything that I was and had and have and will have--will, thoughts, desires, fears, emotions, losses, victories, defeats, doubts, acceptance, resistance, sins, life, death, moment to moment existence--and even more; much more; infinitely more. This was at one and the same time and for the same reason and in the same degree an experience of divine love and of my own nonexistence.

For this reason, I find it impossible, generally speaking, to doubt not only that God exists, but also that he loves me. After all, my own moment-to-moment experience of my own existence is, quite simply, the experience of divine love. Yet as with God's existence, so too with God's love; my belief is not really, for better or worse, a belief about me. For whatever it may mean, there is a real sense in which I find it habitually easier to doubt and deny my own existence than to doubt that God loves me; or at least that God loves.

Before I close this odd rambling, I should also add, briefly, what all this has to do, for me, with the question of belief in the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church as opposed to other religious bodies or beliefs Christian and non-Christian, a question that preoccupied me a great deal when I was younger. I am, or have become, very familiar with the bases for intellectual belief in all the above, and do my best to communicate them and live them out. 

Yet the simple truth is that my belief in Catholicism, and my entrance into the Faith, is not ultimately based on any of those things, but again on an experience of what appeared to me, and appears to me still, simply as reality: indeed, precisely that same heedless, overpowering, proportionless reality spoken of above. My experiences of the Catholic Church have, without exception, been simply experiences of God. Hence, in the most immediate sense, my experience and principal belief about the Catholic Church is simply that it is God; or rather, to weaken and perhaps make comprehensible the claim, that the experience of God I discussed above came and comes entirely and solely in and through and with reference to the Catholic Church, her words and deeds and saints and clergy and monks and laypeople and liturgy and Sacraments. The latter statement, though, is a rationalization of my actual experience: which is, as I said, simply that God and the Catholic Church are one and the same thing. 

(I may also say parenthetically that in about the same way, my experience is that God and the poor and suffering people are one and the same thing.)

I have now spent many years of my life reading and writing theology in an attempt to work out what I believe that experience reflects; which is, put in correct theological language, the mystery of the Incarnation, of God become man, tangible and material and natural and historical, and of his union with the Church his inseparable Body and Bride, and his consequent presence and activity in the authority of the clergy and the Sacraments and above all the Eucharist. This theological thinking-out is much more mixed with my own thoughts, has proceeded much more naturally, by hypothesis, thought, trial and error; and I consequently believe it in a different sense from the above. But that God is in the Church, in the Eucharist, in Catholic words and deeds and saints and doctrines, I believe not for these reasons, but because I have experienced it--like a blow to the head.

I am quite conscious that all this may well seem insane, incomprehensible, fanatical, or what is worse, fundamentally unappealing and even frightening to people. As I said, I cannot really help that; at least without dishonesty. From this basic set of experiences, I have striven very hard to understand and to integrate the various aspects and dimensions of earthly faith, including personal piety and religious emotion and social and communal life and institutional functioning and historical tradition and all the complex and amusing byplay of belief and doubt, proof and evidence and argument, thought and claim and counterclaim, so necessary for the life of the human beings and the Church on earth: and I have come to love and appreciate them all. 

Yet for all that, I have no choice but to finally acknowledge that the fundamental thing that is the basis of my faith, the fundamental thing that I have, I suppose, to testify to, is different from all this. 

This is my (very poor) attempt to express a little of that.

Poem: Holodomor

 [I wrote this poem many years ago after reading through a large number of oral-tradition accounts from survivors of the Holodomor, as well as a more abstract book on the same topic. 

The word Holodomor in Ukrainian means "death by starvation." This event, for those who have forgotten or never heard, took place in 1930-1933, when about eight million people starved to death, in Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union, due to entirely man-made famines. These events took place as the result of Stalin's five-year plan to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union. They were entirely caused by Soviet authorities and to an extent weaponized by those same authorities to break the traditional peasantry and nascent resistance and independence movements. The primary cause of starvation was not an absolute lack of food, but the mass collectivization of agriculture (designed to transfer labor to industry) and the forcible mass requisition of grain by Soviet authorities. This grain and other agricultural products was then exported overseas to earn the money and parts and expertise desperately desired to fund new, ambitious industrial projects.

In these events, the Western world played an absolutely necessary role, including the United States, which incredibly chose the year 1933 to recognize the Soviet Union and open trade with it. This rapprochement between the Stalinist Soviet Union and the West was made possible largely by the efforts of (ironically) Western capitalists eager for trade opportunities, as well as numerous writers and journalists producing pro-Soviet propaganda from Moscow and elsewhere and who denied either the existence or extent of the famine or explicitly justified it in the broader interests of Russia's progressive advancement and modernization. The most famous of these journalists was Walter Duranty, whose dismissive quote about breaking eggs opens the poem below. The poem also features numerous other paraphrased quotes from Duranty, contemporary sources, and above all survivors of the famine. 

In the first instance, I offer this poem today as a statement on the present state of the world, and in particular in the face of the unconscionable violence against innocents being carried out throughout the world today: among others in Ukraine by the Russian military, and in Gaza by the Israeli military. In particular, it is offered in response to Western apologists for Israeli war crimes, who in their mix of indifference to suffering innocents, moral cowardice, perverted ideology, and brute self-interest eerily echo their predecessors of the 1930s. In all candor this poem was forcefully brought back to my mind by the remarkable experience of watching Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress.

Regardless of the particular details, and regardless of all copy-book debates over politics, propaganda, fact-checking, geopolitical alliances, nationalism, racism, colonialism, self-determination, self-defense, military policy, international law, existential threats, and/or "moral equivalency," the overall point made by the poem is a deliberately universal and theological one: that every murdered, brutalized, or starved innocent is Christ; and that to be ultimately indifferent to his death is as much as to kill him yourself.]

Holodomor

Murder by starvation

a simple phrase,

a simple tune,

to be glossed over and forgotten.

Making an omelet

takes breaking a few eggs—

so a man said

once upon a time.

The well-coiffed, comfortable people

with their dreams of tolerance and salvation

their love of expediency

their adulations and their triumphs

they have seen You dying on the streets,

your body swollen, your fists clenched,

your eyes glazed over like an animal's,

they saw you, my Lord, and they did not do you the honor

of turning away, denying, or condemning.

They did not say

that you were guilty.

They did not say

that you were not there.

They just said

you were a broken egg

to be spoken of

glossed over

and forgotten

forever.

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?

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?”

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!