from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 14

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from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 13

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 12

There is always a Father toward whom we are being lead, a lord beckoning us , and a spirit leading us. The question is who are they?

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 11

You who question souls, and you to whom souls must answer,
do not cut off the soul of my son on my account. Let the strength
of his childhood lead him to you, and the joy of his body stand
him upright in your eyes. May he discern my prayer for him, and
to whom it is uttered, and in what shame. I received the living
waters and I held them in a stagnant pool. I was taught but Idid
not teach. I was loved but Idid not love. I weakened the name that
spoke me, and I chased the light with my own understanding.
Whisper in his ear. Direct him to a place of learning. Illuminate
his child’s belief in mightiness. Rescue him from those who want
him with no soul, who have their channels in the bedrooms of the
rich and poor, to draw the children into death. Let him see me
coming back. Allow us to bring forth oursouls together to make a
place for your name. If I am too late, redeem my yearning in his
heart, bless him with a soul that remembers you, that he may
uncover it with careful husbandry They who wish to devour him
have grown powerful on my idleness. They have a number for
him, and a chain. Let him see them withered in the light of your
name. Let him see their dead kingdom from the mountain of
your word. Stand him up upon his soul, bless him with the truth
of manhood.

Leonard Cohen

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 10

Catharsis – the warm up act for the Dionysian crescendo

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 9

Note: In this and the next post Gil refers to disturbing stories from popular culture. Some listeners may be scandalized by them. However, his motive is not to shock the listener into 'tsk, tsking' the depravity of elements of modern culture but rather to give current living examples of the effects of the Gospel's work in history as it undermines the old sacred system. And to the extent the old patriarchal structures were supported by that system the resulting dissolution of the notion of the 'father' with its symptoms of fatherlessness is the anthropological datum for the assessment of the ongoing cultural crisis brought on by the revelation of the cross of Christ. So important is the understanding or appreciation of what is ‘the father’ that when it is abandoned we become like lost children.

Many if not most people will it find it difficult to discern the relationship between the failure to appreciate the centrality of the Trinity and these phenomena. Just as René Girard says of the Cross, that there are countless ways to misinterpret what happened, but only one way to get it right, which is the Christian way. So it is with the Trinity. The Cross is the Trinity viewed from the ‘this worldly’ perspective of the profound depths of self-donating love of the Son. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit…”

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 8

If the old patriarchal system has been decisively undermined, is there a basis for the renewal of the role of the father in both family and religious and cultural life?

Hope lives on . . .

As I begin to dust off my modest writing skills, I have come quickly to realize how predisposed I am to long, rambling sentences, written in the forlorn hope of saying just a little bit about just about everything before being obliged to type a period and abandon the effort. Ah, but this sort of wan hope is revived on occasion by reading similarly ambitious sentences by one's literary and theological betters, sentences which come so close to achieving the elusive goal as to make it seem possible; the sentences below, for instance, from the pen of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), the Jamesian complexity and theological profundity of which are matched by their immense contemporary relevance.

The Christian faith, which carries within itself the great heritage of the religions and which opens up this heritage to the Logos, to true reason, could offer a new basis to them at the deepest level and could at the same time make possible a real synthesis of technological rationality and religion, something that can only come about, not by a flight into the irrational, but by opening up reason to its true height and breadth. Herein lie the great tasks of our contemporary historical moment. Christian mission will doubtless have to understand other religions far more profoundly and accept them at a deeper level than has been the case hitherto, but these religions, on the other hand, in order for their best elements to survive, need to recognize their own adventual character, the way they point forward to Christ. If in this sense we proceed on an intercultural search for traces of a path toward a common truth, then something unexpected will appear: Christianity has more in common with the ancient cultures of mankind than with the relativistic and rationalistic world that has cut loose from the fundamental insights of mankind and is thus leading man into a vacuum, devoid of meaning. (Truth and Tolerance, 78-79)

I want to write like that! Don't hold your breath; just keep me in your prayers.

But let me add this. Jesus made it clear that the Gospel will scandalize, all the more reason not to compound that real scandal with any unnecessary and extraneous ones. But the real scandal of the Gospel is the one to which Cardinal Ratzinger has eluded here, and, however, shocking it is to contemporary sensibilities, it is precisely this scandal -- that Christianity is the truth toward which all that is healthy and emancipating in the great religious traditions are moving -- this scandal, the scandal of particularity -- is the one that is so powerfully corroborated by the work of René Girard.

"Christianity," Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, "has more in common with the ancient cultures of mankind than with the relativistic and rationalistic world that has cut loose from the fundamental insights of mankind and is thus leading man into a vacuum, devoid of meaning." To which Girard would simply say amen.

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 7

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God

Under Ben Bulben - W. B. Yeats

Religion of Tolerance Alert

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi police raided a secret Catholic mass in Riyadh last week and arrested a dozen Filipinos and a Catholic priest, charging them with prosyletising, a local daily reported on Wednesday.

The raid took place as some 150 Filipinos were attending the mass in a Riyadh rest house on Friday, the second day of the weekend in Saudi Arabia, Arab News said. ...

Saudi Arabia bans the practice of any religion aside from Islam. However, small, low-key prayer services inside expatriate compounds and in Filipino gatherings are tolerated by officials.

There's more here.

Pre-disposed Obedience

Writing to fellow English poet Richard Watson Dixon, the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, penned this:

When a man has given himself to God’s service, when he has denied himself and followed Christ, he has fitted himself to receive and does receive from God a special guidance, a more particular providence. This guidance is conveyed partly by the action of other men, as his appointed superiors, and partly by direct lights and inspiration. If I wait for such guidance, through whatever channel conveyed, about anything, about my poetry for instance, I do more wisely in every way than if I try to serve my own seeming interests in the matter. … And if [he Lord] chooses to avail himself of what I leave at his disposal he can do so with a felicity and with a success which I could never command. And if he does not, then two things follow; one that the reward I shall nevertheless receive from him will be all the greater; the other that then I shall know how much a thing contrary to his will and even to my own interests I should have done if I had taken things into my own hands ...

Adding:

This is my principle and this in the main has been my practice: leading the sort of life I do here it seems easy, but when one mixes with the world and meets on every side its secret solicitations, to live by faith is harder, is very hard; nevertheless by God’s help I shall always do so.

Good advice.

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 6

Patriphobic fatherlessness

If patriarchal cultural arrangements prove themselves to be convenient host environments for the old sacred system, fatherlessness and the patriphobia of radical feminists and rock music nihilists function just as readily as self legitimizing, politically correct costumes for causing another generation to prostrate themselves before the ruler of this world, the father of lies.

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 5

Patriarchal Structures of Oppression: The Father

John W. Dixon: “Christians stubbornly clung to their language even when it could be said they didn't really understand it.”

Now when we are about to acquire the intellectual means for understanding the terminology, a failure of nerve has set in and we are abandoning the terminology. (e.g. Hell, judgment, the Trinity, the Father...)

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 4

Separating the wheat from the chaff....

from the Archives: The Trinity - Part 3

Troy, yet upon his basis, had been down,
And the great Hector's sword had lack'd a master,
But for these instances:
The specialty of rule hath been neglected;
And look how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain...[
] O, when degree is shak'd,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities.[
] But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking.
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward, with a purpose
It hath to climb. The general's disdain'd
By him one step below, he by the next,
That next by him beneath; so ever step,
Exampl'd by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation.
And 'tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,
Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length,
Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.

Troilus and Cressida Act 1 Scene 3

Mark Steyn is back . . .

Writing from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars conference in Baltimore, which is a wonderful gathering. I caught a glimpse of Mark Steyn this a.m. Here's what he had to say:

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in. . . .

When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for "respect" and "sensitivity" toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it.

Steyn's anti-sentimentalizing is at its best here, not all as quotable in public as the above.

from the Audio Archives: The Trinity - Part 2

In the 1985 movie "Back to the Future" the character George McFly introduces himself to his future wife, Elaine, by saying, "I am your density..."

In the excerpt below Gil Bailie, in his approach to a discussion of the Trinity, explores 'ontological density' and its fracturing in the modern world in the midst of what Rene Girard calls a crisis of distinctions.

Audio Archive: The Trinity - part 1

Today I am posting an excerpt from the beginning of a series of recordings Gil Bailie made in 1994 entitled, The Trinity. In a couple of quotes from theologians Gil offers a preamble to this discussion:

The more one reflects on the mystery of the trinity the farther one seems to move from any final understanding of it. What was closed opens up, what was once understood becomes unclear. Again and again one must begin anew. Consequently, the doctrine of the trinity remains unfinished. For those confronted by it, it is an unending process of learning and suffering. By the same token however, one cannot give it up, one is never free from it. For the theologian, an understanding of the trinity is the highest and certainly the most humbling task he faces. - Jurgen Multmann

Only with the doctrine of the trinity is the historical truth of the cross given theological illumination. - Norbert Hoffman

Gil notes that the reverse of Hoffman's thought is also true; with the help of Girard's anthropological prespective, the historical truth of Christ's crucifixion on the cross allows us to see the practical implications of the doctrine of the Trinity in a new and profound way.

Remembering September 11, 2001

In one of my first posts on Gil's blog some months ago I posted an audio recording from 2o02 of Gil Bailie introducing Rene Girard with a story from G. K. Chesterton about a 'white haired, absent minded old professor who is dragged from his laboratory to analyze an airplane with a serious indispostion'. This recording was made only a few days after the 1st anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks. So, when Gil mentions "airplanes crashing not from mechanical causes but from human calculation" the resonance was deep and clear.

On this 9th anniversary of the attacks I thought it would be profitable to hear this again and think of all the analysis that has been brought to bear on these events from every academic discipline and ideological perspective over the past years. Perhaps we need to hear again Prof. Girard's appeal to the truth of human relations based as he sees it on mimetic phenomena.

Note: Prof. Girard in his comments makes reference to an earlier metaphor used by Gil about a painting depicting Galileo inviting Catholic bishops to look through his telescope.

The Scriptorium Project

The Cornerstone Forum is introducing a new phase in our mission of bringing a wholehearted faith to a half-hearted world. The Scriptorium. We encourage you to look at the short 8 minute video below and even more to read or listen to Gil's in depth overview of this new project by visiting our NEW SITE. (You will need to log in to our new 'Friends of the Cornerstone Forum' site - please enter USERNAME: cf_friend PASSWORD: cf