audendi

Tell me who would win in a battle of wits, my friends (and my enemies, numerous as they may be on these internets). Leo Strauss or Ron Paul?

I’m not so concerned with the Straussians or Leo himself, but the totally crazed disciples of his that made one man’s philosophy a religion of death and destruction.

Essentially, I dare you to comment coherently in this blog. I’m sure you know I’m biased one way, and you know whom I would pick in this grudge match. Win, lose or draw, say your piece.

Your Internet Pal,

Daniel Greene

They deftly maneuver, and muscle for rank
fuel burning fast on an empty tank

Erik Prince, co-founder and owner of Blackwater USA, and a graduate of Hillsdale College, is in a lot of trouble right now. Blackwater is, in essence, the U.S. government’s biggest provider of non-uniformed soldiers (mercenaries) inside Iraq. Is he George W. Bush’s Remirro de Orca? His sacrificial lamb, if you will? What will happen if (more likely when) a Democrat becomes the next President?

An apophatic description of what god is not, from the Wikipedia entry on Negative Theology:

In Negative theology, it is accepted that the Divine is ineffable, an abstract experience that can only be recognized - that is, human beings cannot describe the essence of God, and therefore all descriptions if attempted will be false and conceptualization should be avoided:

• Neither existence nor nonexistence as we understand it applies to God, i.e., God is beyond existing or not existing. (One cannot say that God exists in the usual sense of the term; nor can we say that God is nonexistent.)
• God is divinely simple. (One should not claim that god is one, or three, or any type of being. All that can be said is, whatever God is, is not multiple independent beings)
• God is not ignorant. (One should not say that God is wise since that word arrogantly implies we know what wise means on a divine scale, whereas we only know what wise means to a man.)
• Likewise, God is not evil. (To say that God can be described by the word ‘good’ limits God to what good means to human beings.)
• God is not a creation (but beyond this we do not know how God comes to be)
• God is not conceptually definable in terms of space and location.
• God is not conceptually confinable to assumptions based on time.

Even though the via negativa essentially rejects theological understanding as a path to God, some have sought to make it into an intellectual exercise, by describing God only in terms of what God is not. One problem noted with this approach, is that there seems to be no fixed basis on deciding what God is not.

There is an alternate wiki entry on Negative/Apophatic Theology at Theopedia, an encyclopedia of Christian theology:

In negative theology, it is maintained that we can never truly define God in words. In the end, the student must transcend words to understand the nature of the Divine. In this sense, negative theology is not a denial. Rather, it is an assertion that whatever the Divine may be, when we attempt to capture it in human words, we will inevitably fall short.

In contrast, making positive statements about the nature of God, which occurs in most other forms of Christian theology, is sometimes called cataphatic theology.

Negative theology played an important role early in the history of Christianity. Three theologians who emphasized the importance of negative theology to an orthodox understanding of God, were Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, and Basil the Great. It was employed by John of Damascus when he wrote that positive statements about God reveal “not the nature, but the things around the nature.” It continues to be prominent in Eastern Orthodoxy (see Gregory Palamas) where apophatic statements are crucial to much of their theology, and is used to balance cataphatic theology.

It seems that apophatic theology is about as old as the church itself, manifesting around the same era when Constantine institutionalized and Romanized Christianity. Or maybe he Christianized Rome. In any case, there has been a long tradition in Western art and literature, expressing ideas about apophasis and the limits of human knowledge. Notably, there is a relatively obscure series of “mystical treatises” that deal with apophasis, called The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an anonymous Christian mystic in 14th century England.

These ideas also of course exist in many other forms, from elements of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism to Sufi philosophy. Formal theology has no answer for them, they are like ships passing in the night. Maybe this is what Aquinas was talking about when he said that the Summa Theologica, the towering work of theology in the Western tradition, was only “so much straw.”

Pity is damnation. Good men can’t last in this world. We didn’t kill God, God killed himself. He committed suicide.

These are just some of the themes I picked up on when reading Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. I finished it at about 5 am the other night. Once I got roughly half-way through the book, I simply could not put it down.

Then last night, I read The Destructors, one of his short stories, which was also quite good. If you’ve seen Donnie Darko, that is the story the English teacher played by Drew Barrymore has her students read, much to the chagrin of certain fundamentalist parents. You can pick it up in his selection of short stories, or in online form. Books were meant to be read on paper, but if you don’t have the means, go for the online version that I found via Google.

What is Bukowski?

A great Modest Mouse song from their new album.

Also, a writer who penned the screenplay for the movie Barfly.

Sounds like a mountain to me.

I would have written poetry. Perhaps if I act a bit more pretentious, people will proclaim me as the next Big Thing.

To quote a conversation from this evening, “Flannery O’Connor was a total badass.” Also, “She was a god that revealed.” and, “She was totally hot.”

Yeah. It’s amazing where drunk talk at 3 am will take you.

The Tower Light will be available to the public soon. Look for it, and shit.

Tom Wolfe, author of Hooking Up, A Man in Full, Bonfire of the Vanities, and other works of contemporary fiction and nonfiction and essays. Something of his I read a while back:

Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century “on the mere pittance” of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of “the total eclipse of all values” (in The Will To Power). This would be a frantic period of “revaluation,” in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not.”
- Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to see, to find, and not to yield.

Ulysses by Lord Alfred Tennyson