Regaining The Inner-Worldliness of Being

In “Six Characters in Search for an Author” Luigi Pirandello writes a play within play. It opens on a frustrated manager who is attempting explain a script by “Pirandello.” Each of the actors complains about the esoteric nature of the script. While the play is strange it is also exceedingly humorous because Pirandello creates awkward moments where he writes critical things about himself. The awkwardness is felt by the reader or hearer due to the meshing of two worlds, the world of the play and the world of the author himself. Though there is no rule about the bifurcation of these two worlds it has become an assumption that they should not interact. This is the project of Martin Heidegger in “Being and Time;” making visible an assumption, which in the apex of modernity has been made invisible, namely that Da-sein exists within the world and is thus is not radically separated from it ontologically. Just as Pirandello through his play highlights the author- character distinction, Heidegger deconstructs the subject object distinction inherent within modern thought.
“Being and Time” seeks to recover the essence of Being, a quest to venture backward through time in order to recover a question asked by Plato and then forgotten. Not unlike a Platonic dialogue Heidegger uses words to grapple and play with the reader so that he or she loses the veneer of confidence in their objectivity.
In this essay I will hone in on a section where Heidegger deals with the father of modernity (Descartes). In this section Heidegger addresses the fundamental separation Descartes establishes between the subject and the object. Heidegger then relocates the vantage point from which Da-sein encounters the phenomenological.
Heidegger asserts that “One look at traditional ontology show us that one skips over the phenomenon of worldliness when one fails to see the constitution of Da-sein of being-in-the-world.” It is important to highlight the being of the world.
Descartes sees the world by extensio, and by this extension fundamentally spatial. The nature of the world is thus based upon the description of the multiplicity of things variant extensions. These things are objectively present, they have depth and length and “corporal substance we call the “world.” Thus Descartes view of the world predicates an assumed notion about it’s being, namely that it is inaccessible. To say that the world is round, or blue or any other adjective is to presuppose its existence. Thus being is attributed to the world and the description becomes that thing which is sought after. Kant who parrots Descartes says, “‘Being’ itself does not ‘affect’ us, therefore it cannot be perceived. Being is not a real predicate.” Thus Descartes completely avoids the problem of being, sidestepping it and attempting to express being in terms of “definite qualities of the beings in question.”
By establishing the search for being as impossible Descartes cements the distinction between the subjective being and the object it encounters. Because the void is mammoth we cannot do anything but look across this canyon and categorize those attributes, which are the expressions of being. The being who looks across this infinite distinction is thus not in the world at all, not a part of it but is objectively present and at the same time objectively distant from its existence.
To Descartes the world is like a play that the audience looks upon in total discontinuity. The actors play out the scene upon the stage, mere feet away, and yet those attending are not at all participants merely onlookers. They experience the play by their observations of its movements from this fixed vantage point. The audience member thus stretches out with their senses and mind in order to take the attributes and motions and sounds and order them cohesively. The narrative must be assembled from what is observed.
Descartes assumes this about the world’s being. It is this separation that is intrinsic within modernity. The concept of objectivity, mental displacement in order to more accurately measure variants, is most poignantly present within “Meditations.” Here Descartes supposes that to be most “objective” is to leave the trappings of ones body and operate by the purely logical, accepting only that which is indubitable. Here Descartes finds what is real by creating space between him and those things that he measures and observes. The underlying presupposition is identical to that which Heidegger destructures by recovering the inner-worldliness of Da-sein.
This assumption made by Descartes has been engrained within the fabric of modernity, and as this fabric unrolls the threads of this subject-object distinction become nothing but the way the world is by nature. Heidegger asserts “the problem [is that]…traditional ontology is at a dead end, if it sees it as a problem at all.” Descartes has been so persuasive and pragmatically significant that his ideas that were once revolutionary are merely societal assumptions. Those who attend a play do not wonder why they are not allowed on stage, it is simply a convention that seems normal and pragmatic.
Heidegger thus makes the assumption, that being is inaccessible, apparent and asks the question of being anew. He is concerned with the being of Da-sein as not merely an objective presence within the world, but rather as having existence in the world. It is not that Da-sein has a place statically appointed within the theater, but that it exists in the theater, as do the actors on stage.
Heidegger is that audience member who realizes that the discontinuity between the actors and the audience is artificially imposed. There is no physical wall between the stage and the seating only that wall which is presumed by a notion of proactive mental engagement. The play is not mere sense datum that is collected, ordered and categorized by the active working of the autonomous mind. Rather the actors and the audience are both within the theater; they are not radically distant but radically contingent.
Da-sein is that being which finds itself existent within the world and thus is able to passively receive the phenomenological. “The being that Descartes is trying to grasp…with the extensio, is rather of such a nature that can be initially discovered only through an inner-worldly being initially at hand.” While Descartes finds himself unable to access the being of the world, which is phenomenological, it is due to the fact that one only finds existence when one exists within the world initially. The question of being then can, and must be asked, and approached, not as chaos to be made sense of but rather as a story that one is taken up into.
Heidegger is able then to ask the question of things essential “thingliness.” It is not a question of its outward appearance, these are pre-phenomenological questions, but rather by the contingency of Da-sein to the things being Da-sein witnesses that which the thing reveals. It is a passive act of receiving revelation.
“In its familiarity with significance Da-sein is the ontic condition of the possibility of the disclosure of beings encountered in the mode of being of relevance (handiness) in a world that can thus make themselves known in their in-itself.”
Heidegger is thus saying that ones proximity to those things which one is inquiring is not a strike against objectivity, but is rather the very thing which enables Da-sein to encounter what Descartes deems impossible; being.
Descartes view of accuracy and precision is derived from the notion of space, of distance. In order to see objectively we must separate out mind from our bodies, and our being from the world, which is infinitely distant. In affirming the inner-worldliness of Da-sein being, Heidegger is critiquing the most fundamental assumption of modernity.
To Heidegger the audience, which thinks that they are fundamentally separated from the play as neutral onlookers, is deceived. Those watching are not safe, not actually distant from the narrative playing itself out but are rather a part of the act. They are able to reach out and participate in the play and in doing so the narrative is revealed to them, not as fragments of a puzzle to put together but as a whole.
Pirandello does not pretend that the play he writes is in some way different and distant from himself, but rather acknowledges that the lines of distinction are arbitrarily imposed. In like manner Heidegger affirms the inner-worldliness of Da-sein and rejects the Cartesian myth of subject-object distinction.

A Cross That Teaches us to Mourn and Rejoice

The beauty of redemption In the Cross is that in its bitterness and raw audacity we see a microcosm of our calling as the church.

The Call of Christ eluminates the most horrendous parts of that which lies within us. The death and decay that we shuffle away to the periphery of our recognition is collected and hung before us, embodied in the crucifixion. Yet the promise of the Cross does not give us an immediate evacuation from this present darkness, but rather drags us deeper into its folds. Just as Christ dove headlong into all that is fearful and decrepit; so we who cling to him dragged into those places the world forgets; The darkest alleys, the deepest dregs of our human hell. We who hold fast to Christ and his Cross drink in the death that surrounds us, mourning, weeping, and paradoxically rejoicing , because God as Made new in us what God will some day make new in all of creation.


We are called not to the abandonment of this hell which our humanity has built, neither by middle class pews, nor spiritual euphoria but rather by the recognition of Christ’s eschatological death we are called to be reconciled and in this way the world will know the Kingdom by those who have been

Compassion

To Love someone is to Bring yourself, in the profundity of your brokenness, into communion with an other's brokenness.


The blind man on the street with a tin cup does not need our pity, but our camaraderie in the fallenness of our humanity. It is not in abundance that we serve, but rather in total emptiness; so that we may be vessels, brimming with grace that calls us into a sober recognition of our own discontinuity with God.

The table of Gods eternal life, requires not our certainty in a treatise or statement of faith but rather our submission to God, so that in fear and trembling we may ne reconciled to life and painfully torn from death's grasp.

It is out of our conviction of humanities inadequacy that we can join together in mourning. Yet this mourning is not all that we share when reaching out to those in need, we can also be brought together in the Joy of the resurrection. We share in the knowledge that Christ has begun a great work in us that someday will be carried out to completion.

Together we must cry out for a mutual destruction with Christ on the cross, so that we may also be absorbed into his glorious resurrection and the life of the age to come.

A Wrath that is God's Love

Speaking about God is in itself an Irony. To say God is X or God is Y automatically puts God within the confines of our puny language. If God is Infinite than we are always going to grasping after something so profoundly Other that we will fail over and over and over again to describe it. In scripture we have various images of God. God as the father, God as the King, God as protector and redeemer. Each of them is not able to hold a candle to our God, yet in their multiplicity we are able to gleam some sort of collage that draws us towards who God is.

In this Blog I am going to toy with an Idea about the Wrath of God. It is going to sound foreign and maybe even heretical, but I would ask that as a reader you see it as a member of the afore mentioned collage of images.

What if the Wrath of God, as depicted in the Old Testament is not looked at as an attribute of God's character but rather as a description of what happens to those who do not walk humble with God.

The Prophet Jeremiah wrote:
Therefore thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, My anger and My wrath will be poured out on this place, on man and on beast and on the trees of the field and on the fruit of the ground; and it will burn and not be quenched."

In this verse as with many, the Wrath of God takes the image of fire, one that lays the unfaithful people of Israel to waste. Yet the images of Fire in the Old Testament are not all equated to Wrath. When God comes to Moses he uses a "burning bush."

The angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. - Exodus 3

Here the Flames represent the presence of God. Likewise when God takes Elijah up to heaven in 2 Kings, it is described as "a chariot of fire with horses of fire." God's presence is depicted as flame, yet God's wrath is not being invoked against Elijah, on the contrary he is being brought up into the heavens. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit is often given a very similar description, such as the tongues of flame that descended upon the disciples in Acts.

What if the Wrath of God is simply the presence of God? If the nature of God is such that all that do not find their sustenance in God are destroyed by the very nature of God's incredible presence. And at the same time that Presence that was destruction to one, is paradise to another.

The Wages of sin is death; because the Love of God is so fierce that anyone who comes before God, with their own Mortal fragility ceases to be. Darkness is not something, it is a lack. Namely the lack of light. Sin is a discontinuity with God, a separation from God who is Life. This lack of Life results in death. When a light is turned on in a room, darkness is dispersed, not because the light must "punish" the darkness, but simply because in filling the room with light there is not more room for darkness.

The same may be said of God's perfect Love. That when encountering the Love of God one either burns with the joy of redemption or is consumed by the their own darkness being filled with light.


As I said in the beginning none of these words could ever contain the Truth of God fully, but I believe this image helps us reconcile the God of Love we see in Christ with the God of Wrath we see in the Old Testament. These different views do not speak of a different God, but rather of two different experiences of God's powerful presence.

I go by the name Bathed in Grace because of this Idea. That like the bush that was engulfed in flame and not consumed, so God has covered us with his Love that slays everything within us. Yet this baptism is not our end, but rather by Grace is our beginning.

Hope

Those stairs creaked
The door was hinged ruggedly on the old frame

Standing in no sense of anticipation at all
Useless banter emanating around me

Yet with that creaking and the door so eagerly swinging
The room became new

Smiles were all the same, the laughter still echoing
And in some moments it settled into regularity

She was always there
But I never knew what to look for

I searched and came up bare
The search itself senseless.

Idle exploits led to idle ends
Rose by thorny Red Rose
Scattered in my wake

Forbiddances were written everywhere
Alongside amusing degrees of doubt

Humorous reactions to my overbearing hubris
And increasingly overbearing it became

Mixing a touch of obsession with determination
The sum of the parts equates insanity

the insane overpowers dignity
A reckless abandon towards inevitable demise

Healthy hearts know how to admit defeat
But insanity swirls in self-indulging agony

Her eyes now more valuable than anything else
Her laugh intoxication

And slowly the darkness takes it’s toll
The constancy of rejection setting in deep

A chase for the impossible
Forgoes all within reach

All humor now evaporated from doubt
Pity, in its place standing.

Agony is soil that births
Burning up , throwing out, tearing down

All the while solidifying desires
Intensifying that which is central to our want

Heavy-handed catharsis
Slowly assessing what remains

After flames wrought in the agony of rejection
The insane emerges as all that is left

And so what was once a touch of the insane
Now flows forth in torrents

But as the insane presses forth,
The line between it and sanity is made ambiguous

Eyes no longer impenetrable.
All words of forbiddance burned up like chafe

Insanity sparkles in new clarity
Understood for what it is.

Reckless Hope.

Reckless hope that possesses and transforms
Leaving the holder helpless

The blue and green in her eyes now inviting
The ring on her finger a beacon for hope

Georgia

I was just in Lithuania, a former soviet state with a very similar
relationship to Russia. I am irate, NATO had promised to protect
Georgia, but when the chips fall they walk away. The Rebel areas of
places like Georgia are often encouraged by Russia, who still sees the
former states sort of like ungrateful and rebellious Teenagers.

Russia is saying that this is a "defense" of their citizens, but they
have been bombing areas far away from the the Conflict regions.

I am Completely biased, but I think this was a very well planed
attack by Russia. They slowly escalate rebel forces in Georgia, arm
them and then just as the world turns it's attention to China for the
Olympics they snatch up the most outwardly westernized former soviet
bloc.

I have been to the KGB museum in Vilnius. It was like going to a
concentration camp, and what they did to Georgia was no different.
What these people have been through is unfathomable.


Yet the world watches the Olympics, as Georgia watches their freedom
and land stripped from them.

Godfather, or God the Father?

The early church was a group of people defined by their discontinuity to the Greco-Roman household system. The Christian Ecclesiae became an alternative household, in which allegiances shifted from the earthly pater to God the pater. This new community was sustained by repetitions of actions embodied by Jesus Christ, through the church as a sociological structure, martyrdom, the practice of Eucharist overseen by the bishop, and by the reading of early Jewish and Christian scriptures through the rule of faith. These foundational traditions held the community in sync with the life of Jesus and defined the Christian performance.
Jesus Christ was not simply a messenger; he was the message. His physical body was the actual incarnation of God and how he used his body and ministry redefined socio-political and theological paradigms in light of himself. The system in place was the Greco-Roman household, based on emperor worship and competition between different paters. The pater was the “man of the house” – one who asserted his power in order to gain social mobility. The system instigated violence amongst and within families by its own nature.
However, Jesus Christ established the Kingdom of God through which Christians could escape the internal follies of the household system. As the author of I Timothy writes, “You will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God.” Becoming a Christian was a profound political statement and caused much unrest. No Pater wanted to be shamed by his son’s, daughter’s, or even wife’s refusal to give honor to Caesar; it tarnished his own loyalty and therefore his social standing. Christians were not, however, trying to make an enemy of Rome; we see in I Timothy 2:1-6 that Christians were called to pray for the authorities, so that they could live peaceful and holy lives.
As the church grew it began to attract members of higher social classes. This was beneficial to the community because these members were able to offer a higher degree of safety for the community as a whole. In this process, however, the church adopted some performances from the Greco-Roman household system, such as the marginalization of women and slaves. The role of women still remained distinct, as seen in the stories of Martyrdom as we can see in the Acts of Thecela.
The highest expression of Christian devotion was to repeat the suffering and death of Jesus. The early church strove to live out the life of Jesus with their bodies. Their repetitions and practices were developed to imitate Christ. There was no better way to “take up your cross” than to share in the pain and suffering of Martyrdom. The act of martyrdom was not one of victimization, but faithfulness. The stories of the martyrs were told as the stories of heroes, almost as bedtime readings. In the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we see an old man brought before an angry mob, not unlike Jesus, questioned and given a chance to recant, not unlike Jesus, and finally we see him die a horrible death pressed against rough wood. This act was lived out of allegiance to Christ, and showed non-conformity to the repetitions of the Roman households.
Martyrdom was a central act of the Christian church until the Constantinian bifurcation. The bifurcation was the recontextualization of the Christian household after the conversion of Constantine. In the matter of a decade Christians went from being hunted down to calling the emperor a “brother in Christ.” This divided the Christian community into two different segments. Eusebius describes it in Demonstration of the Gospel, book 1, chapter 8.
“Two ways of life were thus given by the law of Christ to His Church. The one is above nature, and beyond common human living; it admits not marriage, child-bearing, property nor the possession of wealth, but wholly and permanently separate from the common customary life of mankind, it devotes itself to the service of God alone in its wealth of heavenly love! ... And the other more humble, more human, permits men to join in pure nuptials and to produce children, to undertake government, to give orders to soldiers fighting for right; it allows them to have minds for farming, for trade, and the other more secular interests.”

This bifurcation created a normative Christian life that no longer necessitated non-participation, but rather encouraged responsible participation in the Roman patronage system. In essence, this ended the function of martyrdom in the Greco-Roman household. Instead, the same performance could be lived out through another practice: monasticism.
In the Life of Anthony we see this new monasticism. A young pater, Anthony, turns away from the life of the household and takes on a life of discipline, a life in pursuit of perfection. He deprives himself of sex, food, sleep, and all other comforts. He lives among the dead and suffers his flesh so that he may nurture what is spiritual. He wars against the temptations of the carnal and does battle with his various demons. In doing so he seeks the same perfection as was sought by the martyrs that preceded him.
Yet before Constantine redefined Christianity’s role in the Roman world, the church was living out Christ through other practices. The most preeminent of these practices was participation in Eucharist. As Robert Wilkins writes, “before there were disputes about the teaching on grace, or essays on the moral life, there was awe and adoration before the exalted Son of God alive and present in the Church’s offering of the Eucharist.” It was a mode of acknowledging Christ’s presence in the ecclesiae and it was administered by the bishop.
The role of the bishop was established as a way to keep the church unified while under the great duress of Roman oppression. The position was elected by the local church body, and then was confirmed by other bishops. This maintained orthodox teachings of baptism and Eucharist. The bishop became an extremely important role in the church, in a letter to the Ephesians, Ignatius writes, “let us be careful not to oppose the bishop so that we may be obedient to God.” The bishop was seen as God’s direct acting agent in the community of believers. The role of bishop was also instrumental in the defense of Christianity from heretics.
During the second and third centuries Gnostics gained upward mobility, and this Gnostic “Christian” performance was based around a faulty interpretation of Christ, creation, and the early Christian scriptures. In order to keep interpretation unified, and to discriminate between true Christian repetitions and pseudo-repetitions, the Rule of Faith was created. This Rule of Faith was a lens for interpretation and was the “plot” or hypothesis of the scriptures and was the foundation of what would later become the Apostles’ Creed. “The Rule [itself] was not a creed, nor a formula, but an abbreviated body of doctrine wherein the genuine articles of the Christian faith were articulated.” The church reading the scriptures through the Rule of Faith solidified orthodoxy and fought off the primary dangers to the community. The first of these primary dangers was assimilation into the old patronage system, and the second was fragmentation from within.
In a profoundly ironic way, Constantine accomplished through inclusion what centuries of previous Caesars could not accomplish through oppression. Christians were effectively assimilated into the now “Christianized” Roman patronage system, and were fragmented by the bifurcation of early monks from the laity. While the bifurcation may have appeared to be a godsend to the community that one decade earlier had witnessed “…houses of worship demolished to their foundations, the inspired and sacred Scriptures committed to flame…” it may have actually been a cunning poison. It was a poison that was attempted to be absorbed by the early Christian monks.
The role of monks was to take on that which the multitude was no longer obligated to obtain: perfection. They challenge the laity by their example of piety, giving credence to the traditions and performances of the Christian faith. Their criticism of the patronage system is not stark. The monks of early Christianity acted as a counterbalance to the patronage system by remaining isolated from, yet not in total conflict with, it.
Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God, one who did not simply bring a message but was himself the message. His body, broken and resurrected, was the model for Christian performance. The ecclesia lived out his life with their bodies by joining God’s household, sharing in his death through martyrdom, partaking in Eucharist, and reading the Christian scriptures through the Rule of Faith. These central convictions were refined and challenged by Monks in the Post-Constantinian bifurcation. The Church, built upon the life of Jesus and strengthened by the blood of the martyrs continues these repetitions in her longing to one day be reunited with her bridegroom.