174. God's Presence

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God's Presence

This section of the chapter is almost exactly a page and I skimmed through it the first time because, blah blah blah. But, it is the core of this chapter and of all the chapters that have to do with religion (especially Day, but also Perkins and (Ida) Eisenhower and even Johnson. You can even add Eliot when you take into account her childhood.) 

p196 The second large observation [the first being "...though people are born with magnificent qualities, original sin had perverted their desires..."] that flows from Augustine's internal excavation is that the human mind does not contain itself, but stretches out toward infinity. It's not only rottenness Augustine finds within, but also intimations of perfection, sensations of transcendence, emotions and thoughts and feelings that extend beyond the finite and into another realm...

As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, Ausgustine's study of memory led him to the "understanding that the human spirit in its depth and heights reaches into eternity and that this vertical dimension is more important for the understanding of man than merely his rational capacity for forming general concepts."

The path inward leads upward. A person goes into himself but finds himself directed toward God's infinity. He senses the nature of God and his eternal creation even in his own mind, a small piece of creation... 

p197 ... Human life points beyond itself. Augustine looks inside himself and makes contact with certain universal moral sentiments. He is simultaneously aware that he can conceive of perfection, but it is also far beyond his power to attain. There must be a higher power, and eternal moral order.

As Niebuhr put it, "man is an individual but he is not self-sufficing. The law of his nature is love, a harmonious relation of life to life in obedience to the divine center and source of his life. This law is violated when man seeks to make himself the center and source of his own life."

This is the counter-argument to Voltaire and the Enlightenment. To the entire middle-class value system and world order. 

On the other hand, it isn't so different from early Greek, mystical, thought where the cosmos was not just atoms and the void. Or like any other form of pantheism. You could even plug in the Dionysian religious underlying order that Nietzsche argued for in The Birth of Tragedy. 

But then there's the sociological/cultural anthropological way of viewing this: We have evolved to have mystical (positively reinforcing) reactions to sharing religious feelings with our primary group. Since mystical states can be induced or inhibited by chemistry, we can only say what we experience without concluding much about an underlying reality as a basis for these experiences. Even so, it may still be true that true happiness for many, if not most, people requires we follow the conclusions of Augustine and Niebuhr. Not that that much limits our options, since this would allow for most any kind of mystical religion as well as the secular cults of National Socialism and Communism. The Aztecs (I'm guessing), Mussolini, and Mao were also good at selling this notion of not making yourself the center and source of your own life.

Martha Grimes, again

I was wrong about never having read The Lamorna Wink. I have read it, but probably 14 years ago and I'd forgotten most of the early details because I had been rushing through trying to find some plot -- never a good idea with Grimes.

I'm still, slowly, working my way through and something related to what I wrote last time, but very sad, struck me this evening. Richard Jury has finally shown up now that we're down to the final quarter of the book, so we had the first scene with Jury and Plant. The sad thought I had was that, when Martha Grimes dies (or stops writing) we, her readers, will lose not just herself, but all these characters she trots out every mystery plus the whole Emma and Hotel Paradise tribe. The shear number of cats and minor characters that depend on Ms Grimes for their continued existence gives one pause.  

Fortunately, what she's written can't be unwritten, so they will continue to live on in that sense. And, really, how much longer can Emma remain 12? But this does make me concerned for her health.

Next - 175. Agency