Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-5 The Inferno

TS Eliot's Dry Salvages (one of the Four Quartets) is a running commentary on Canto 20 of the Inferno. Demolishing hope (with a small h) so that the theological virtue of Hope could come into its proper place.

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-4 The Inferno

The 'eleventh hour' is the temporal dimension that is appropriate to religious life, not the present, the past or the future. It is the 'eleventh hour' that is worthy of our religious longing and hope.

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-3 The Inferno

In the early nineteenth century G. W. F. Hegel introduced the 'divinization' of history and an intellectual concern to control or know the future. This is contrasted with Martin Buber's understanding of 'magic' - the attempt to have a religious life without having a relationship to God. Truth cannot be known, only encountered. William Stafford's poem "Glances".

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-2 The Inferno

The future is the only transcendental value for men without a god

Albert Camus

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-1 The Inferno

With this post we begin posting episodic excerpts from Gil Bailie's archival materials again. For the next long while these will be from Gil's 1984 24 cassette tape series on Dante's Divine Comedy which are being transfered into digital format. If you are interested in obtaining the complete MP3s finished so far please visit our webstore by following this link.

Those visitors who have shared contact information with us over the past years will likely in the days before Thanksgiving receive our annual Fall Appeal. We try to limit our fundraising appeals to once a year, and ask that you look kindly on our request for support for the coming year. If you are a new visitor to our weblog and want to learn more about our work please follow this link to our website.

In early 2015 Gil Bailie hopes to have the manuscript he has been working on lo these past four years in the hands of a prospective publisher. There will no doubt still be much work to be done. But when that happens we expect to see Gil back on the road. He has had to pass on numerous offers of speaking opportunities over the past few years in order to keep his focus on the manuscript. Next year that will change. If a publisher finds this manuscript worthy of publication we expect there will be some promotional trips involved following its debut. We will keep those interested in our work appraised of these events.

Thanksgiving blessings to all!

The Self and its Sources Revisited

For those who have availed themselves of the Self and its Sources audio materials posted on this blog, the June 2014 edition of The Atlantic has an interesting essay by William Deresiewicz entitled "How the Novel made the Modern World". This piece reviews two recent scholarly books on the novel. Considering that Gil Bailie's 'reflections on the art of the novel' were done over 20 years ago it is intriguing to read echoes of his analysis in this essay.

It also includes this humorous critique of academic prose:

Buell (the author of one of the books under consideration), whose careful terror seems to be the possibility of saying something politically incorrect—the book does so much posturing, you think it’s going to throw its back out—appears to have absorbed every piety in the contemporary critical hymnal. You can see him fairly bowing to them in his introduction, as if by way of ritual preparation. There they are, propitiated one by one—Ethnicity, Globalism, Anti-Canonicity, Anti-Essentialism—like idols in the corners of a temple.

Saying goodbye to Mary's month

This is the last day of May, Mary's month. While this web-log, "Reflections on Faith and Culture", has been dormant for the past while I have been working on bringing Gil Bailie's Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy into the digital age. This is a series of 24 presentations he recorded in the mid-1980's. It was made at a time when Gil first became aware of the work of René Girard and before his own thinking and work were transformed by that encounter. One of the things a listener to these talks will hear is Gil's use of the poems of other poets as a foil for the poetry of Dante. So, in this vein, I am offering a few poems that have been companions in my journey through this past month of May.

The May Magnificat

May is Mary's month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season-

Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?-
Growth in every thing-

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature's motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring's universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfed cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all-

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

Gerard Manley Hopkins


The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe

Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that ’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.
Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.
So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

VISITATION

It was still easy for her in the beginning,
only when climbing she would
be aware of her heavy womb, -
and then she stood, breathing,

on the Jewish mountains. But not the land
spread about her, but her fullness; and
while walking she knew: nowhere
was there such fullness as hers.

And she felt compelled to feel with her hand
the womb of hers who was further along.
Toward each other they swayingly stepped
and caressed the dress and the hair.

Each woman was filled with sacred life
and safe and at ease with the relative.
And though the savior was hardly in bloom,
the Baptist in the cousin’s womb
already jumped for joy.

Rainer Maria Rilke

From the Archives: Part 121 of The Self and its Sources

The end of the novel.

While Virginia Woolf was writing “The Waves”, TS Eliot was writing “Ash Wednesday”.

From the Archives: Part 120 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard: a man without a self. The little light of dawn, seen as the Nietzsche's "eternal return", elicits a new desire to be tantalized and thwarted. The romanticism of death and nihilism

From the Archives: Part 119 of The Self and its Sources

Charles Taylor’s study of the modern self: the modern self insists on a position of subjectivity exclusively, to the extent that one can only refer to one’s self in the third person.

From the Archives: Part 118 of The Self and it Sources

Bernard stands at the back of St. Paul’s cathedral ready to verify and inform curiosity. Unable to rise on the shaft of someone else’s prayer he returns to the bustling street, swinging his stick, flowing with the stream of consciousness.

From the Archives: Part 117 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard at St. Paul’s Cathedral. He has come to the right spot for Virginal Woolf to end the novel. Can she do it? Bernard’s knee-jerk antipathy for received truth. Compare to Kierkegaard’s ‘purity of heart is to will one thing’.

From the Archives: Part 116 of The Self and its Sources

Studied nonchalance – the appearance of disinterest – pretending that one is not pretending. Hiding our lack of self-sufficiency

From the Archives: Part 115 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf’s attempt to conclude the novel: Bernard seizes his chance. At rush hour he dashes to the barber. It is shriving time. The melodrama is played out in mirrors.

From the Archives: Part 114 of The Self and its Sources

The difficulty of concluding the novel.

From the Archives: Part 113 of The Self and its Sources

Great novels always spring from an obsession that has been transcended.

– René Girard

From the Archives: Part 112 of The Self and its Sources

After Percival’s death Bernard sees with disillusioned clarity.

From the Archives: Part 111 of The Self and its Sources

Will Bernard undergo a conversion, will the novel end coherently? Fixating on the details of Percival’s death renders Bernard unable to fully experience its effects. He again becomes entangled in the mimetic melodrama.

From the Archives: Part 110 of The Self and its Sources

Percival was structurally the ‘Lord’ in this novel and the resultant shock of his death provides an opportunity for a kind of conversion.

From the Archives: Part 109 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard’s attempt at stabilization via marriage; joining the throngs of people as competitors and comrades in the daily round of life, into which suddenly crashes death, the death of Percival.

From the Archives: Part 108 of The Self and its Sources

Can this novel be brought to a conclusion, can it come to an end, or is it just the last ripple of the waves, ‘petering out’? Virginia Woolf (in the voice of Bernard) is unable to find the “one true story, to which all of the other stories refer”.

From the Archives: Part 107 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard:

“The sound of the chorus came across the water and I felt leap up that old impulse, which has moved me all my life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of other people's voices, singing the same song; to be tossed up and down on the roar of almost senseless merriment, sentiment, triumph, desire.”

The difficulty of ending the novel.

From the Archives: Part 106 of The Self and its Sources

The longing to be part of a grand procession that leads to the search for a messianic hope.

From the Archives: Part 105 of The Self and its Sources

The centripetal, sacrificial force of gravity that breaks apart social cohesion only to instill an ‘itch’ to return to a galvanizing experience that brings everyone together again.

From the Archives: Part 104 of The Self and its Sources

Simone Weil: Gravity

From the Archives: Part 103 of The Self and its Sources

The metaphor of Bernard buying a picture of Beethoven in a silver frame ... Trying to make a symphony from cacophony...magnificence from craziness.

St. John of the Cross –

God gives himself to us truly without ever changing faith into knowledge.

From the Archives: Part 102 of The Self and its Sources

In the May 1993 New York Review of Books was published an article by Vaclav Havel entitled “The Post-Communist Nightmare” , this was the text of a speech he gave at George Washington University in April 1993.
NYRB link here.

This was replied to by Joseph Brodsky in personal letter published in NYRB a month later.

“… what you call “communism” was a breakdown of humanity, and not a political problem. It was a human problem, a problem of our species, and thus of a lingering nature. Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil—terminology, I should add, invented by evil to obscure its own reality. “

From the Archives: Part 101 of The Self and its Sources

From a 1993 book on Joseph Goebbels by Ralf Reuth
An example of the collapse of transcendence.

From the Archives: Part 100 of The Self and its Sources

The opposition of the conceptions of the success and perfection of the self and the escatological vision of history. An example from late 20th century China, Mao worship.

From the Archives: Part 99 of The Self and its Sources

The search for meaning in history by viewing history as a long procession of magnificent human beings. A preoccupation with personality. (article by Helmut Koester in the Harvard Divinity Review - October 1985 Volume 78 Issue 3-4)
An alternative to an eschatological view, that history is moving in a direction.

From the Archives: Part 98 of the Self and its Sources

The search for a centering principle, ordering the identities of the characters of the novel.

From the Archives: Part 97 of The Self and its Sources

Imitation: positive or negative. The relation to the mediator

From the Archives: Part 96 of The Self and its Sources

The madness of self-creation vis a vis the ‘other’. Girard: “It is the effort to leave the beaten path which forces everyone inevitably into the same ditch.”

From the Archives: Part 95 of The Self and its Sources

The story telling that takes place without a meta-narrative is designed to obliterate the one true story. Bernard, “I, who am always distracted, always make up a story and so obliterate the angles of the crucifix.”

From the Archives: Part 94 of The Self and its Sources

Over the course of Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, the internal monologues of the characters become shorter, and it becomes harder to distinguish who is speaking. In the end, only Bernard’s character remains speaking. He tries to sum up the story of the novel: “There are so many stories, stories of childhood, love, marriage and death; and none of them are true.

The agenda of literary or philosophical deconstruction: to rid ourselves of metanarratives – a story that operates as an interpretive key to all other stories. To rid ourselves of the idea that there could be one true story to which all the other stories relate and derive their meaning.

A René Girard Christmas Card...

Courtesy of National Review Online - Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson...


Every Christmas since the 2009 Peter Robinson interview with René Girard was first aired we have featured this excerpt. Like most of Girard's works, it only becomes more meaningful and moving with the passing of time. It is especially touching to see one of the preeminent scholars of our age comment on the nativity narratives in Luke with such gentle humility. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to René, not only for his extraordinarily insightful scholarly work, but perhaps even more for his friendship over many years and for the kindness and encouragement that he and his wife Martha have extended to us. René will celebrate his 90th birthday on Christmas Day, and we wish him our heartfelt best wishes. 

From the Archives: Part 93 of The Self and its Sources

Resentment: the disease of the modern age, continued.

From the Archives: Part 92 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf portrays a more advanced stage of the ‘disease’ that Dostoyevsky depicts in the character of the “underground man”. Nietzsche incorrectly saw Christianity as the source of the modern world’s resentments – when in fact the resentments are the source of mimetic entanglements. Christianity censured the taking of revenge. It is this prohibition that Nietzsche rejects. To the extent that people refuse the Christian call to conversion and repentance that can change the human heart and yet still renounce revenge, there will be resentments.

From the Archives: Part 91 of The Self and its Sources

Nietzsche’s “madman” & Dostoyevsky’s “underground man” – are reflected in the metaphorical prelude to the last section of the novel.

From the Archives: Part 90 of The Self and its Sources

The stigmata of mimetic entanglements; its bodily effects. The search for a non-sacrificial way to experience transcendence.

From the Archives: Part 89 of The Self and its Sources

Faith of any kind has mimetic consequences. St. John of the Cross: Love creates a likeness between that which loves and that which is loved.

From the Archives: Part 88 of The Self and its Sources

The vanishing of transcendence is like the depletion of the Ozone layer: the ozone layer is thinned, nobody notices it and yet people begin to develop skin cancer. The lack of transcendence will not keep us from being religious; it will only make us idol worshipers.

From the Archives: Part 87 of The Self and its Sources

The novel “The Waves” as a prayer book on transcendence: vertical and deviated transcendence. However, the prayers of these characters are all addressed to each other.

From the Archives: Part 86 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard, speaking of a possible religious ‘way out’ of the crisis:

“I, who am always distracted, at once make up a story and so obliterate the angles of the crucifix. I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all the phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story.”

From the Archives: Part 85 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf’s voice in the novel: Bernard -

“He joined the sensibility of a woman and the logical sobriety of a man…” “When I am alone I fall into lethargy; when Lewis is alone he sees with astonishing intensity and will write some words that will outlast us all.”

The solution to the mimetic crisis can only be religious; can only be found in true transcendence.

From the Archives: Part 84 of The Self and its Sources

TS Eliot haunts the novel as the focus of a negative imitation.

From the Archives: Part 83 of The Self and its Sources

Detachment, repose, composure

From the Archives: Part 82 of The Self and its Sources

The 'satellites' of Percival: attracted to his ‘monolithic gigantic repose’
Dandyism: striking the pose of being the one who doesn’t care about what others think. You must not look into the lens…

From the Archives: Part 81 of The Self and its Sources

Echoes of the poetry of TS Eliot in Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”...and Robert Hughes comments on Andy Warhol.
In Warhol’s world the hunger for approval and forgiveness was satisfied by publicity.

From the Archives: Part 80 of The Self and its Sources

Using sexuality as a semblance of transcendence will inevitably tend toward violence.
The image of the nightingale – in mythology it is the transformed victim of rape.

From the Archives: Part 79 of The Self and its Sources

Paul Tillich: “Personality is impossible without faith.”
Denis De Rougemont: there are two religions vying for ascendancy in the west, Christianity and passionate romance.
Sexuality simulating transcendence

From the Archives: Part 78 of The Self and its Sources

The hysteria of trying to define oneself vis a vis others.
Our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.

From the Archives: Part 77 of The Self and its Sources

Percival – the center of everyone’s attention. The others are like soldiers in the presence of their captain..
Order and disorder: Like the rays around a star in the middle of a smashed window pane
The need for order is also the need for transcendence, whether true transcendence oriented toward God – or false (deviated) transcendence oriented toward someone human, idolatry

From the Archives: Part 76 of The Self and its Sources

St Paul: “I live now, but no longer I, but Christ lives in me.”
Everybody is somebody’s fool. Whose fool are you?

From the Archives: Part 75 of The Self and its Sources

Read the Bible until it takes root in you. The only alternative to prayer is madness

From the Archives: Part 74 of The Self and its Sources

The myth of the spontaneous origin of desire.

From the Archives: Part 73 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard’s and Neville’s attempts to stabilize their selves.
Influence from Dostoyevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’

From the Archives: Part 72 of The Self and its Sources

Rhoda says, “I have no end in view”, “I have nobody to follow”, “I have no face”. She yearns for ‘lodgment’.

St. Augustine’s phrase, “...we are restless until we rest in God”

From the Archives: Part 71 of The Self and its Sources

The image of the open door - the possibility of an escape from the current crisis.

From the Archives: Part 70 of The Self and its Sources

The image of the ‘drop’ as a picture of the instability of the self. It begins to swell until its weight causes it to fall. The characters transition from one crisis to another.

From the Archives: Part 69 of The Self and its Sources

From this point on all the characters in the novel are trying to deal with their instability.

The sacrament of marriage

From the Archives: Part 68 of The Self and its Sources

The characters in Virginia Woolf's novel "The Waves" are now older – “the sun risen bared its face and looked over the waves…they fell with a regular thud.”

The disintegration of the self.

From the Archives: Part 67 of The Self and its Sources

Girard’s sources & precursors: Homer, Shakespeare, novels, the Bible

György Lukács' essay: ‘Ideology of Modernism’

Bronislaw Malinovski: Desire and counter desire

From the Archives: Part 66 of The Self and its Sources

Mirrors...I have no face

From the Archives: Part 65 of The Self and its Sources

The Sun rose...the fixation on Percival.

From the Archives: Part 64 of The Self and its Sources

The brute menaces my liberty when he prays…

From the Archives: Part 63 of The Self and its Sources

Deconstruction: To extricate ourselves from the past is a bourgeois idea of liberty that is still very much at work in modern theory. Simone Weil had a hunger for determination

From the Archives: Part 62 of The Self and its Source

The scene of the boys entering the school chapel: Lewis (the T S Eliot character) in procession, rejoices.

From the Archives: Part 61 of The Self and its Sources

Negative imitation: a way of showing that we are not imitators.

From the Archives: Part 60 of The Self and its Sources

Composure (continued)…

The ‘Möbius strip’ of mimetic contagion

From the Archives: Part 59 of The Self and its Sources

The wave as a gesture of departure - leaving the past (childhood) behind and moving into the future diaspora.

Composure: How to be in the presence of others without being drawn into mimetic entanglements.

From the Archives: Part 58 of The Self and its Sources

The Biblical image of ‘pairs’ or doubles: e.g. Adam & Eve, Cain & Able

From the Archives: Part 57 of The Self and its Sources

The consequences of this mimetic drama begin spreading like ripples on water...like waves.

"Abortion has been called 'atheism in action;' contraception, the doorway to abortion, should be called 'the denial of Divine Providence in action." - Anne Barbeau Gardiner, Professor Emerita, John Jay College of the City University of New York.

From the Archives: Part 56 of The Self and its Sources

The children are in the garden. The plot begins with one spontaneous expression of desire, Jinny comes dashing by and kisses Lewis…, which sets the whole mimetic dynamic in motion. This event is surreptitiously viewed by Susan. The Fall...

From the Archives: Part 55 of the Self and its Sources

The mimetic chirping of the birds…

From the Archives: Part 54 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf introduces each section of the novel with an italizied phrase referring to the position of the sun in the sky. Section one: "The sun had not quite risen; the sea and sky were indistinguishable." Mythological imagery. The sun comes up…its light striking the leaves in the garden making them transparent.

From the Archives: Part 53 of The Self and its Sources

The dramatis personae of the Waves. The story is comprised of a series of internal monologs of a strange kind. The more you know about a character’s internal life it seems the more undifferentiated they appear to every other character.

From the Archives: Part 52 of The Self and its Sources

"The Moths" or "The Waves" – alternative titles to novel.

The moth drawn to the flame; drawn to the light but not so close as to be destroyed. The Waves – crashing on the shore, one following the other in endless repetition.

From the Archives: Part 51 of The Self and its Sources

Raising the coefficient of illusion to the next power.

From the Archives: Part 50 of The Self and its Sources

A short overview of Virginia Woolf’s life and the Bloomsbury group. Her novel, the Waves, provides an insight into the social and psychological drama of the modern world. It is based on the experience largely that she had while at the center of this literary circle called the Bloomsbury group.

From the Archives: Part 49 of The Self and its Sources

Among the symptoms of the demise of systems of sacred transcendence: failure to comprehend the modern crisis, failure to appreciate the Biblical role in the cause and cure for this crisis.
René Girard discovered this process by reading novels.

From the Archives: Part 48 of The Self and its Sources

Simone Weil:

“Wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent everything is obedient to mechanical laws as blind and exact as the laws of gravitation.”

From the Archives: Part 47 of The Self and its Sources

Max Picard notices about the modern world, that the first person pronoun is overused.

From the Archives: Part 46 of The Self and its Sources

Gabriel Marcel: “The subordination of the self to a superior reality, a reality at my deepest level more truly me than I am myself”.

In an introduction to Max Picard’s The Flight from God (now out of print), Gabriel Marcel says Picard is "among the few who appear capable of redirecting the thinking elite toward an awakening of reason, without which it is impossible not to despair of mankind.

From the Archives: Part 45 of The Self and its Sources

There is a mystery about identity that goes to the heart of personality itself.

Personality is not possible without faith

– Paul Tillich

The only true self is the converted self

– Renè Girard

From the Archives: Part 44 of The Self and its Sources

Continuation of a contemporary example of the novel as autopsy: Avant-garde and madness

“When I came to know her better, I thought of her as a new disease…”

From the Archives: Part 43 of The Self and its Sources

A contemporary example of the novel as autopsy: Avant-garde and madness

From the Archives: Part 42 of The Self and its Sources

The imperative of the novel is autopsy....it is documenting a slow death.

From the Archives: Part 41 of The Self and its Sources

The novel has run out of subjects…it has lost its subjectivity.

From the Archives: Part 40 of The Self and its Sources

The novel is a chronicle of the collapse of transcendence in the modern world and the rise of internal mediation.
Ortega y Gasset:

“When we are fascinated by a novel it is not because we a curious to know what happened to Mr. So-and –So. The subject of any novel can be told in a few words and in this form holds no interest. We want the novelist to linger and to grant us good long looks at his personages, their being and their environment until we have had our fill. The interest in the outer mechanisms of the plot is today reduced to a minimum. All the better. The novel must now revolve around the superior interest emanating from the inner mechanism of the personages.”

From the Archives: Part 39 of The Self and its Sources

Caiaphas: “It is better that one should die than the whole nation be destroyed” - the economy of violence in the old sacred system. Primitive religion was indeed the opiate of the people…

From the Archives: Part 38 of The Self and its Sources

The social leveling which is the inevitable product of the Biblical revelation can only take place without catastrophe in a world that has discovered another way of experiencing transcendence. This is why the "Greatest Commandment" - to love the Lord your God with all you heart, soul, and mind - is so essential. A graphic example from the French Revolution.

From the Archives: Part 37 of The Self and its Sources

The crisis of distinction or the crisis of degree: From Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida Act 1, Scene 3...the speech of Ulysses: “Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows!”

Pascal: Whom shall we choose as ruler of the state…?

From the Archives: Part 36 of The Self and its Sources

Is this about the ‘novel’ or anthropology? The imitator and the model: Girard's concept of 'internal' vs 'external' mediation. This is exemplified in Shakespeare & Cevantes who were late 16th century contemporaries. Every Shakespeare play deals with, in some way, what Kierkegaard described concerning resentment. Cf. speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida

From the Archives: Part 35 of The Self and its Sources

Sacrality is on the wane…and with it transcendence itself. Fascination is now only with the human order. But as the Hebrew prophets knew so well…we will either worship God or we will create idols. We will have an object of ultimate concern – the only question is, ‘who will it be?’ Kierkegaard announces the beginning of this process in the mid-nineteenth century: Resentment is the constituent principle of the modern age. “Resentment happens when the world moves from the happy love of admiration to the unhappy love of envy”.

From the Archives: Part 34 of The Self and its Sources

Kingship participated in the distinction between the sacred and the profane. The old sacred system is compromised by the effects of the Gospel. The novel as an early symptom of modernity reflects these effects.

From the Archives: Part 33 of The Self and its Sources

Anthropological field studies of kingship…continued: Affection for the king?

From the Archives: Part 32 of The Self and its Sources

Anthropological field studies of kingship…continued. Kingship is an extended sacrificial ritual…the king is the victim with an extended sentence.

From the Archives: Part 31 of The Self and its Sources

The sacred system comes into being when the crowd gathers around the corpse of the victim.
All cultural structures are generated from that event. And one can read the traces of that event in cultural aftereffects. An anthropological case study from equatorial Africa.