I was asked the other day to explain my habitual use of the honorific “St.” — e.g., St. Paul, St. Augustine (of Hippo) — as a Protestant. (Asked, to be clear, in a non-hostile way!) Here is my response, edited and expanded from its original format.
Normally, in practice, I use that honorific for those recognized as saints in the pre-Reformation Latin church. The main group are those who are saints of the ecumenical or undivided church — the apostles (St. Paul), the early martyrs (Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas), the fathers (St. Augustine of Hippo) and mothers (St. Macrina the Younger) of the church, and so forth. The Anglican Communion also recognizes as saints a number of medieval Latin figures (St. Thomas Aquinas), inherited at the time of the break with Rome. By contrast, I think I do not normally speak of anyone post-Reformation as St. so-and-so — though if discussing someone who, while not so recognized by the Anglican Communion, is reckoned a saint by Rome or the Eastern churches, and the case for whose saintliness seems eminently reasonable, I would probably use it out of respect (e.g., St. Thérèse of Lisieux).
Of course, all of us in the Christian churches are “saints” in the dialectical Pauline sense — “sanctified, called to be saints.” When I speak of “the saints” I normally have this group in mind. But along with this understanding the church has, always and purely retrospectively, recognized certain men and women in Christian history as having been friends and servants of Christ in a distinctively discernible way. In service of our own life of imitating and being conformed to Christ, they are worthy of learning from, studying, and even in a limited sense imitating (in the degree that they themselves were faithful imitators of Christ). This is a sub-species, essentially, of having strong Christian friends: since I really am something like the weighted average of the five people with whom I spend the most time, should I not spend substantial time with those whose lives most strongly testify to the power of Christ at work in them? Not, of course, that this means the marginalization or exclusion of spending time in prayer and Bible reading, i.e., spending time with Christ Himself — the point is that these influences do not compete or even operate on the same plane. The church’s recognition of these men and women, and special use of the term “saint” for them to denote that in their own individual ways they were (are!) what we all are called and being reshaped to be, seems perfectly appropriate. In this sense, the use of “St.” is a way of disciplining my speech to obey the fifth commandment: honoring my fathers and mothers in the faith.
Now, as far as I can tell, the characteristic spirit of the saint is summed up by St. John the Baptist: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” The saints are to be honored as paradigmatic imitators of Christ, not worshipped as Christ Himself. In church history there are many ways that it seems clear to me that the honor due the saints has been at minimum over-extrapolated and at maximum blasphemously elevated. I am hardly unaware of them, and am wary of these accretions and abuses in the degree that seems to me appropriate in each case. Take as an example the practice of asking the saints for their prayers. A simple form of this is, I take it, perfectly unobjectionable and even reasonable in itself: the saints, we confess, are not dead but alive in Christ (cf. Matt. 19), and certainly no Protestant would (or should) object to asking your friends to pray for you or join you in your prayers. But in certain quarters this is expanded into the notion that one should ask the saints for their intercession rather than Christ for His, because Christ is far off and unapproachable whereas the saints are gentle and friendly, and their closeness to the throne guarantees one’s prayers a better hearing. To this I must say Nein! There is one mediator between God and humanity: the man Christ Jesus. Through Christ (who dwells in our hearts by faith) we have access to the Father — not, through the saints who dwell in our hearts by faith we have access to Christ and thus to the Father. (And so on and so forth with the standard and correct Protestant rebuttal texts.) The sole mediacy of Christ is not to be compromised for the sake of showing his friends pious respect. I suspect the saints themselves, with their fully redeemed vision of Christ, would shudder at this notion!
Nevertheless, I also take abusus non tollit usum to be an essential principle of the spiritual life. Nothing, be it ever so holy by God’s grace, that makes contact with and exists within the fallenness of this world is proof against abuse: not the words of Scripture, not the sacraments, not the Church’s authority to bind and loose. (I take this to be one of the core insights and impulses of Protestantism — which is why I am content to remain one.) This does not degrade Scripture’s holiness, the sacraments’ efficacy, the keys’ power. God’s persistent business throughout the history of humanity appears to be working for good what we meant, ever so misguidedly, for evil.
This leads to a larger question of theological taxonomy: What is the nature and authority of the tradition (for a tradition it eminently is) that is the recognition of saints? I would place it in a tertiary and subsidiary category. It belongs to the tradition as a guide to the right understanding of church history, not even principally to the right understanding of Scripture. This requires some exposition of my take on the relevant categories.
The primary, and in that sense sole, authority is Holy Scripture, which stands alone. No two-source theories here. Let me be clear: Scripture is a traditioned thing. It does not, and makes no pretensions to, fall from the sky complete (presumably in the King’s English), nor does it purport to have been dictated to its human authors such that it is in principle untranslatable (unlike the Quran). God gives it through, alongside, and for the normal processes and procedures of human existence and experience. The difference is that it is recognized by the eyes and ears of faith — the community of faith — as being no mere human word but as really being the Word of God, the words for which God takes definitive responsibility. This is confirmed to us in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ Jesus — all of which take place, in the richest possible sense, “in accordance with the Scriptures.” For this reason the communities that received the Word, in generation after generation, thought it necessary to make it a textually fixed thing: not so that it could be a “dead letter” but so that it could be, for all subsequent generations, “living and active,” that every day, as long as it is called “today,” the Word could speak its own independent “today.”
The secondary category, then, contains those traditions that belong to the rule of faith: they are the boundary markers of the Church catholic as being (in Webster’s phrase) the domain of the Word. The rule of faith is not Scripture, but to read Scripture in contravention of the rule of faith is to cease to interpret the Scripture as part of the Church, and (as Scripture testifies) there is only one Church. The nature of its authority is that it is handed down along with Scripture to orient us rightly to Scripture, ruling out certain readings (and the practices that depend on them) and ruling in others. Its authority is dependent on Scripture’s precisely because it appeals constantly and ultimately to the revelation of God revealed in Scripture through the mind and work of the prophets and apostles. Within this framework, there is an obvious need for elements that are not themselves Scripture but are commentary upon it. So the traditional catechism contains the Apostles’ Creed alongside the Decalogue and the Lord’s Prayer because it is the ancient baptismal confession. Similarly the creeds and conciliar judgments of the undivided church lie in this category. Abandon them and, well, God might not abandon you — He is notoriously and scandalously gracious — but you abandon the Church. They are in this sense articles of faith.
The tertiary category is really a subsidiary category of tradition: traditions that are venerable but do not belong to the rule of faith. This includes many liturgical practices like the sign of the cross, kneeling for confession, appending the antiphon Gloria Patri to the Psalms and the refrain “The Word of the Lord / Thanks be to God!” to other readings of Scripture, and the honorific “St.”. Many of these are, or grow out of, genuinely ancient practices — Tertullian speaks of the signing with the cross in the early third century, and in their writings the Fathers are always saying things like “as the most blessed and holy Cyril writes…” which is a logical precursor to calling him “St. Cyril.” The point is that they are distinctive disciplines of speech, thought, and gesture. When I pray a Psalm or read a portion of Scripture, especially one whose words make me uncomfortable, it is good for me to end by reminding myself of the divine origin and purposes of the Biblical text. When I am speaking words that remind me (often against my instinctive will) of my sinfulness and implore God to have mercy on me, it is good to adopt a bodily posture that accords with this self-humiliation. I am very happy to adopt and submit myself to such practices, especially under the guidance of my church as it adopts them. But they are at most expressions of belonging to the catholic tradition, not themselves definitive markers of that tradition’s boundaries.
Finally, there is obviously much disagreement — even within the large and unruly Protestant camp — over the boundaries between these categories. I cannot hope to resolve it here, only to sketch my own present view of these matters. As the above discussion indicates, I have little interest in — or envy of — a magisterium that would permanently render all such judgments for me. (As the life of the current Christian body ostensibly ruled by a magisterium indicates, it actually does not in practice.) This is because the Bible, and the church’s proclamation that seeks to think the Bible’s thoughts after it, do not seem meant to give us an exhaustive manual for responding correctly to life’s problems and questions. The Bible would look very different if it were (more like, say, the Quran and the Hadith in Islam). Instead, Bible, proclamation, and tradition are together all meant to make us wise for, and regarding, the salvation that is in Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 3:15).
As an example of Wagner’s misunderstanding of his own expressivist genius, take his most self-conscious effort at a classicist work, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. Here is a — wonderful and energetic! — performance of the Prelude. Wagner pitches it in a faux-Baroque register and dials back the adventurous harmonies a few ticks, such that it sounds by far the most conventional of his operas (compare even the earlier Prelude to Lohengrin, which is hardly Tristan und Isolde in its adventurousness.) It is an intriguing experiment for the expressivist-in-chief. And it is hard to deny that this piece is a lot of fun!
But aesthetically speaking, the experiment is a failure. Even when writing in a self-consciously restrained idiom, Wagner is unable to actually exercise any classicist restraint. (One hears a voice from Delphi intoning sternly: “Nothing in excess!") There is hardly a passage that does not have at least one too many things going on at once, and often two or three.
The problems are signaled from the very beginning. It begins in classical style, with a four-bar subphrase, and then a two-bar gesture that follows the first two bars rhythmically while moving toward a different part of the harmonic map. So far, so promising. (Though even in the first bar, Wagner hints that he wants to escape the mold harmonically with an undeniably tasty passing whole-tone triad over VI — A•C#•F.) But then the theme goes off in a new direction: a three-bar descending sequence that helps establish (in its second bar) a dominant pedal tone, followed by four bars of intense string noodling over the dominant pedal tone, resolving to a… restatement of the main theme that begins in the subdominant! Because of this irregular phrase structure of 4+2+3+4, with no harmonic movement of any kind in the last subphrase (indeed much of it is exact repetition), the restatement of the theme arrives — somehow — aurally both too late and too early. And after that restatement begins, Wagner gives us an exhaustingly thick texture, in which for eleven consecutive bars (note that we have another 13-bar chunk here) there is not a single eighth-value without movement somewhere in the orchestra. The lines seem to climb indefinitely to the secondary dominant, ratcheting the musical tension up and up (and up and up and up)… until we finally get the first major resolution. Then follows an actually quite lovely passage that introduces the lyrical second theme (whatever else one wants to say about him, Wagner is good for a lyrical second theme), twice in full, then twice fragmenting, and it is all feeling very proportionate and balanced… until the strings start buzzing around while the winds are still unspooling the theme, with an irregularly beaten scalar figure that causes one to completely lose track of the meter. The opening texture returns with the bold third theme, which is actually set in nice, symmetrical four-bar phrases most of the way to the next subject (only one random five-bar phrase thrown in there)… but it is thick and loud the whole way, without much real development, and with so much activity everywhere in the orchestra that it is hard to attend to any one line. Wagner gives us a great deal of sound and fury (cheerful fury, at least), but signifying really very little.
For another example of this aesthetic dynamic, listen to the short quasi-fugal passage starting at 6:07 (p. 22 in the unfortunately unmeasured score). There are three different fugal subjects or motives — the main subject, which is taken from the third theme, starts in the winds; the accompanying subject, which seems to be new in this section, begins in the celli; and the repeated trill motif, which appears to be drawn from the preceding lyrical passage. It is not illegitimate to have three elements in your contrapuntal texture. But Wagner cannot stop himself from using all three right from the beginning, rather than introducing them one at a time. From the start of the passage it is impossible to tell by ear which of the two subjects Wagner intends to be primary. I find it telling that, in the video linked above, the video editing cuts from string section to string section with each statement of the accompanying subject, even though at the beginning of the passage Alain Altinoglu actually cues the winds for their primary (and more melodic!) subject, and only gives the celli a secondary cue. Altinoglu makes the correct choice — but can you blame the video editor for not following him? The most egregious choice is that the trill motif, after being quietly introduced in the bassoons in the first measure, is given to the second violins in the second measure and marked sforzando. It is an orchestra-wide sforzando, to be sure, but Wagner has not given us a chance to hear the main subject(s) in this setting before making the second violins rudely interrupt the (quieter) winds and celli! It sounds like someone has come in too early — and not in the way of the famous horn entrance at the recapitulation in Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Either it is aesthetic incompetence, or it is a deliberate thumbing of the nose at the fugue (which might count as aesthetic incompetence).
For ten minutes, it is practically all like this: nearly constant (almost frenetic) activity in the subsidiary voices, lines that go on just a bit too long, elements that are repeated too many times, such that it is almost impossible to actually attend to any individual element as it belongs to the whole. Instead, the listener must instead accept the whole, lean back in his or her chair, and be sucked under by the aesthetic tsunami. None of this makes, as I said above, the piece any less fun (for the audience; it is rather a pain to perform, at least as a string player). And indeed it has a kind of showiness that is characteristic of the whole Wagnerian Schule, independent of style. But it is one thing to embrace (or at least tolerate) the showiness and the excess when the work in question is chiefly expressivist. It is another when the work aspires, or at least appears to aspire, to meet and embody certain classical standards of excellence. Nobody forced Wagner to write in this idiom; he composed it in 1862, when he was comfortably established and internationally famous. The showiness and the excess indicates that its composer does not understand the real value and spirit of classicism, and its link with expressivism.
The great works of European art music exist in an aesthetic field defined by the dipole of classicism and expressivism, the two generative sensibilities that drive (or drove) developments in musical style between about 1700 and 1950. By “dipole” I am not picturing a Venn diagram but something more like a magnet:
As in the magnetic field, classicism and expressivism are dialectical and interpenetrating, not antithetical and opposing. There is no “pure” specimen of either. No one work, or composer, ever exemplifies one sensibility to the total exclusion of the other. In one period a work may be predominantly classicist despite its composer utilizing musical language and form that were originally developed from expressivist impulses. (Note: I use these two terms here in largely ahistorical ways — small-c and small-e, not the capitalized historical movements Classicism and Expressivism — for lack of better terms occurring to me at the moment.)
The mark of classicism is the aspiration to balance and perfection in musical presentation. The classical sensibility yields the sort of work about which one thinks: “There was not a single note out of place” — even if, as the Emperor is supposed to have told Mozart, there may have been “too many notes.” Stereotypically, Western music loves four-bar phrases, clean chord progressions with well-prepared resolutions, standard accompaniment figures and phrases (the Alberti bass being the most famous), and the like: these are hallmarks of the classical. There is a self-conscious inhabiting of traditional forms, even as they may be innovated or subverted in various ways. To be sure, there may be musical surprises, but they do not feel experimental. To the listener there is little or no sense of struggle in the act of composition, no matter how dramatic the music itself may be. To the performer the chief difficulty is making the music seem effortless, regardless of the technical challenge it may pose. The overriding impression in the greatest of these works is of exquisite craftsmanship, occasionally of an almost unearthly or inhuman perfection.
The mark of expressivism is the aspiration to communicate the hitherto incommunicable, to somehow reach across the gulf between composer, performer(s), and audience. (Note the asymmetry between the two core aspirations.) The expressive sensibility yields the sort of work about which one thinks: “That was so powerful!” — even if, in places, it seemed overwrought or difficult to follow. (Bertrand Russell’s remark about Wagner’s opera is apposite: “marvelous moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour.") Traditional forms and stereotyped devices are used, but not loved; they are the composer’s vehicle, not his or her habitation. Every aspect of the music is, if not actually experimental, a potential site for experimentation; there are not so much musical “surprises” as a more or less steady experience of “surprise.” The listener is expected to not just hear but feel the sense of personal exertion that has gone into the composition; even the less dramatic moments reveal the struggle for expression by temporarily concealing it. To the performer the chief difficulty is summoning the emotional vigor to make the music seem sufficiently effortful. The overriding impression in the greatest of these works is of overwhelming genius, that the composer has somehow expressed the previously inexpressible.
The greatest of classicists is, of course, Mozart. There is nobody to match him — except perhaps Schubert, who stands after him but in the same rank. The second rank of classicists includes Mendelssohn, Chopin, Fauré, Tchaikovsky (yes, a classicist by temperament, except perhaps revealing his expressivist side in the Sixth Symphony!), Rachmaninoff, and the late Stravinsky (there’s something about those Francophile Russians). I am unsure whether to say Haydn is a classicist or an expressivist at heart; probably a classicist, albeit one who was toying with expressivism before it had come to full flower. Richard Strauss had the fullness of classicism within him — especially present, perhaps, in his Eine Alpensinfonie, in his Violin Sonata, and in some passages of the early tone poems. Mahler, too, wrote some marvelous classical passages, though mostly integrated into overall expressivist works — especially the waltz movements in his earlier symphonies; in his later period, the Sixth and Eighth Symphonies are remarkably classicist works despite the force of their expression.
The greatest of expressivists, who ushered this sensibility into maturity after Haydn had disclosed a new measure of its potential, is Beethoven. In his earliest works, one can hear him toying brilliantly (if sometimes unimpressively) with the classicism of his teachers, at times sounding impatient to get on to writing in his own way. His Third Symphony is still the touchstone expressivist (and Romantic) work, often imitated but never bettered, with its astonishing self-confidence, its total mastery of and almost equally total disregard for musical convention. More subtle in this regard, but no less masterful, are his late string quartets, especially Opp. 130 and 131. (But in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies especially Beethoven showed that his embrace of expressivism did not indicate a total repudiation of classicism.) Wagner undoubtedly aspired to be, and maybe imagined himself to be, the greatest of expressivists, but he did not understand its hidden and tragic secret: that it depends irreducibly on the dialectical tension with the classicist pole for its power. Among Beethoven’s successors, the greatest expressivist accomplishments are those of Schumann (in the solo piano works), Mahler (in the Second and Ninth Symphonies), and Strauss (Ein Heldenleben), though they also at times exhibit the tragic tendency of expressivism to cut loose from classicism and thus lose itself. Also deserving mention are the French luminaries of expressivism, Debussy and Ravel. The early Schoenberg (cf. Verklärte Nacht and the first string quartet) had the promise of greatness, but his turn to anti-tonality was his undoing. Dmitri Shostakovich, long after much of European music had followed Schoenberg down his disastrous path, continued cultivating the genius of expressivism, as did his Soviet colleague Sergei Prokofiev.
In the middle zone of the dipole, offering remarkable and singular syntheses of these two sensibilities, stand J. S. Bach and Brahms. Perhaps less brilliant than those two, but great nevertheless, is Anton Bruckner, who offers his great expressiveness with remarkable musical economy and in a (yet more remarkable) spirit of humility. And the Vier letzte Lieder of Strauss dwell in the same extraordinary territory.
Next I need to read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy — whose title, I just learned, originally continued … Out of the Spirit of Music — to see how closely my intuition here maps to his famous juxtaposition of Apollo and Dionysos.
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
— Deuteronomy 21:18–21
“To what then shall I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.’ For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”
— Luke 7:31–35
And… the very next passage in Deuteronomy is the law of the hanged man, quoted by St. Paul in Galatians 3.
A fantastic essay from Zac Koons, including this stellar line: “The rapid creep of AI into every nook and cranny of life represents a golden opportunity for our churches to grow and flourish. All we have to do is not use it.”
The safety of home, the allure of afar: … modern everyday culture ceaselessly evokes and reproduces these two promises. Home improvement stores, flower shops, and furniture stores assure us that we can design our own homes in such a way that they begin to sing, while travel agencies and real estate brokers inform us that the world sings somewhere else. And at a secondary level, local history guides, travel memoirs, sentimental dramas of the countryside (Heimatfilme), and documentaries about German emigrants starting new lives abroad all likewise suggest that responsive segments of world indeed exist.
The hope of finding such a segment of world — or, rather, of establishing a relation of resonance to a segment of world — is by no means limited to physical space alone, but extends just as well to the social world. Find your home! as an imperative of modernity may well [363] mean first and foremost: Find people with whom you can enter into a resonant relationship. The social embeddedness of modern subjects is no longer a priori predetermined along estates-based or class lines or by traditional or conventional commitments such as arranged marriages. The psychosocial and psycho-emotional basis of social association in the private realm is rather formed by the notion that every subject has both the right and the responsibility to seek out and find friends and romantic partners who want and are able to enter into affirming, productive, lasting responsive relationships with them. Love and friendship have changed shape in modernity, in that they are now directly understood as resonant relationships and have become the social responsibility of the individual.
These two paragraphs set up this extraordinary, and (dare I call it?) convicting, insight and metaphor:
Modern society is thus characterized by the fact that it demands that those who live in it move through social space as seismographs of resonance, establishing social bonds when and where they are mutually called or addressed, i.e. where there is a “spark” between the participants in an interaction. The idea, at least, is that intense private social relationships are thus freed of estates-based, ritual, courtly, or religious stipulations and instead conceived as pure relationships of resonance. The fact that late modern subjects are clearly increasingly inclined to enter into partnerships and friendships with people who are like them as opposed to those who are “other” (sociostructurally or in terms of cultural or social background) does not necessarily contradict the criterion of resonance. They expect successful relationships from and are more likely to feel addressed by people who are similar to them. From a diagnostic perspective, this behavior could, however, also be read as an indication that subjects under late modern conditions tend to steer clear of what is genuinely other. They seek out harmony and consonance and avoid dissonance — though at the price of confusing harmony for resonance and thus forfeiting the possibility of adaptive transformation. Not unlike those potentially depressive types who keep their homes immaculately clean and smelling of flowers, they are at risk of moving in environments that are beautiful, but do not speak.
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, 362–63. As the meme goes: “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.”
Sketch for a longer reflection: St. Paul’s supposedly negative statements about the Law are in fact positive summaries, drawn from considering the narrative of Scripture in the retrospective light of Christ’s death and resurrection, of what the Law must have been meant for in the first place.
A genius little summary from St. Irenaeus, near the close of his great book, of the seven essentials (as he sees it) we receive from the tradition:
[The] path of those belonging to the Church circumscribes the whole world, as possessing the sure tradition from the apostles, and gives unto us to see that the faith of all is one and the same, since all receive one and the same God the Father, and believe in the same dispensation regarding the incarnation of the Son of God, and are cognizant of the same gift of the Spirit, and are conversant with the same commandments, and preserve the same form of ecclesiastical constitution, and expect the same advent of the Lord, and await the same salvation of the complete man, that is, of the soul and body. … For the Church preaches the truth everywhere, and she is the seven-branched candlestick which bears the light of Christ.
— Against Heresies, V.20.1. The seven marks of catholic orthodoxy: eternal Father, incarnate Son, outpoured Spirit, dominical instruction, ecclesial structure, second coming, physical† salvation.
In the dogmatic and theological history of every age, not excluding that of Protestantism, secular factors have played a part which tends to cover over all else. For all the gloating with which it was done, it was a good thing that the work of Pietism and the Enlightenment in Church History established so incontrovertibly the fact that even in such periods of supreme decision as that in which the dogma of the Trinity arose the history of the Church was anything but a history of heroes and saints. Yet in this case we should be just and perceptive and allow that not only the Church of Byzantium but also that of Wittenberg and Geneva, and finally the purest Church of any of the quiet in the land, have always and everywhere been, when examined at close range, centres of frailties and scandals of every kind, and that on the basis of the Reformation doctrine of justification at all events it is neither fitting nor worth while to play off the worldliness of the Church against the seriousness of the insights it has perhaps gained in spite of and in this worldliness. The same may be said about the indisputable connexion of the dogma with the philosophy of the age. By proving philosophical involvement we can reject the confessions and theology of any age and school, and we can do this the more effectively the less we see the beam in our own eye. For linguistically theologians have always depended on some philosophy and linguistically they always will. But instead of getting Pharisaically indignant about this and consigning whole periods to the limbo of a philosophy that is supposed to deny the Gospel—simply because our own philosophy is different—it is better to stick strictly to the one question what the theologians of the earlier period were really trying to say in the vocabulary of their philosophy. Caution is especially demanded when we insist on differences in the so-called piety of different periods and therefore claim that the piety out of which the dogma of the Trinity arose was completely different from our own piety with its sober focus, as they said some years ago, on “worldview and morality.” What right have we to regard our own piety, even if its agreement with the Reformation and the New Testament seem ever so impeccable, as the only piety that is possible in the Church, and therefore to exalt it as a standard by which to measure the insights of past ages? Let us be sure of our own cause so far as we can. But antithetical rigidity especially in evaluating the subjective religion of others is something against which we can only issue a warning.
There is much hype afoot about LLMs now being suitable “research assistants” or “writing companions” for serious humanistic work, so I decided to take a temperature check by asking Claude (what I took to be) a fairly basic historical theology research question:
What is the best English edition of St. Augustine’s Enchiridion?
The Enchiridion, a short, late catechetical work, is perhaps one of that Father’s less well-known works today — it lacks the name recognition of, say, the Confessions or the City of God — but is nevertheless one of his most continuously influential works throughout church history. I had a hunch there might be a handful, but not a plethora, of translations. So I asked Claude to help me out.
You can read the ensuing hilarity here. Spoiler alert: It did not go well.
Disclaimers: I have not ponied up $20/month to Anthropic, so I ran this little experiment on Claude Sonnet 4 (rather than the supposedly Pro-level Opus 4, a “powerful, large model for complex challenges”; apparently I overestimated what a “complex challenge” this actually was). Now for the scorecard. Claude:
got everything right about the NPNF translation by J. F. Shaw (which, being public domain, I imagine was actually part of its training data);
misidentified the editor (Boniface Ramsey, O. P.) as the translator of the New City Press edition, and was unable to find the translator’s name (which I found in moments by following one of the links which Claude provided me);
initially overlooked the Library of Christian Classics version translated by Albert Outler and published in 1955, and then required additional prompting to discover that the 1955 edition was, in fact, the same as the Outler edition;
and completely invented not one but two(!) translations: one by Thomas Williams, who at least is a known translator of St. Augustine, and one by Mark Dever, who is not.
For now, I think, I will be sticking to my old and LLM-less research habits.
UPDATE: Ian Harber — who has ponied up for Claude Pro — tasked Sonnet 4 with the same prompt, but in Research mode, and it generated what appears to be a largely accurate and, I admit, pretty useful report; I learned from it about a couple of older translations which actually exist (though are largely unavailable). It does, however, offer some peculiar comments, e.g., “The market [for translations of the Enchiridion] shows stability around current major editions rather than competitive innovation” — a comment I would not expect to find in a research guide written by, you know, an actual human historian. Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that my humorous little experiment with the free, non-Research version did not give me an accurate sense of Claude’s current capabilities, and I stand appropriately corrected.
The principal question remains, of course, not whether one can but whether one should use even the more powerful and capable tools for humanistic research. About this we have much to say, and we may try to explain it later…
The superscription of Psalm 51 links that most famous and gut-wrenching of repentance Psalms directly to David’s sin concerning Bathsheba and Uriah. Verses 1–17 are relentlessly first-person singular, with one English translation containing thirty-two instances of I, me, my, and so forth. Verse 4, “Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight” — a stumbling block for contemporary readers, who are here inclined to wonder, “Hasn’t David sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah, too?” — represents a radical narrowing of focus such that David’s sin is, at least for the moment of this Psalm, entirely viewed from within a single I-Thou relation. David reflects that God “will not be delighted in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.” Rather, “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (He has learned well the lesson which his predecessor failed to grasp.)
Then the Psalm concludes on a completely different note, seemingly in a completely different voice: “Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; build up the walls of Jerusalem; then will you delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on your altar.” What is the deal?
I am not usually one for speculative text-critical historical reconstructions, but in this case these last two verses (18–19 in ETs) sure seem like a later supplementation to an originally shorter text. And if that is the case, it must be said that the editors have not tried very hard to disguise the addition. There is no attempt to inhabit David’s point of view, or even make many explicit verbal links. Indeed, the underlying plot of the appendix seems quite different than the underlying plot of the main Psalm. So one wonders if the discontinuity is, in fact, the point. The “seam” in the text draws the attentive reader’s eye, and sets him or her thinking on how one tragic situation — David’s adultery with (and abuse of power over) Bathsheba, compounded by his murder of Uriah — may illustrate, elucidate, or analogize the situation of Israel’s idolatry and subsequent destruction. One might hear, in the plea to “build up the walls of Jerusalem,” an echo of the post-exilic situation of Ezra and Nehemiah, in which right sacrifices have long ceased because the Temple and the walls have been destroyed. I imagine there are many fruitful connections to draw.
This leads me to one further point of canonical interest. Many of the Prophets (Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in particular) develop the metaphor of Israel as God’s unfaithful wife, with the exile coming as long-overdue punishment for her adultery. If I am right that in the appendix to Psalm 51 we are to hear a correlation with the exile, with David standing for sinful and punished Israel, this is one of the only examples I can think of in which the Biblical commentary on the exile flips that gendered dynamic. Instead of a (variously) promiscuous or easily-seduced woman, Israel is here cast as — in the person of David — an abusive, murderous man.
I have written suspiciously little about music for a blog entitled “Program Notes”. Well, last week — May 7, to be exact — was Johannes Brahms’s birthday (happy 192nd, Johannes!), so it seems a fitting moment to write down some thoughts I have had floating around for a while.
Brahms occupies a curious place in Western musical history. Among the pantheon of “great composers,” he is perhaps the first who was not self-consciously an innovator. (Perhaps Mozart is a counter-example? But if in his youthful period one hears nothing but an almost uncanny perfecting of the Classical style, the mature works of his final decade disclose a latent genius for musical innovation that at times nearly shatters the mold; as with Schubert, one can only imagine how different music would have been had he been given more time.) During his own lifetime Brahms was known as a notable musical conservative, a protégé of the Schumanns and an inheritor of the Beethoven legacy, in contrast to the self-consciously progressive and experimental followers of Liszt (especially Wagner) — the (hyperbolically) so-called “War of the Romantics.” There is no single genre with which he is singularly identified, which he can be said to have (re)invented, transformed, or redefined — unlike Mozart with the opera, Schubert with the song cycle, Liszt with the tone poem, Mahler with the symphony, or Beethoven with pretty much everything (but especially the symphony and the string quartet). Nor is there an instrument whose technique is distinctively and permanently marked by his influence — unlike Bach for the violin and the keyboard, Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt for the modern piano, or Mendelssohn and Wagner (quite differently from one another) for orchestration. His style pays constant homage to Bach’s finely tuned counterpoint, Haydn’s sense of proportion, Beethoven’s ear for the dramatic flair, and Schumann’s expressive melody; but it is hard to say, whatever it might mean to say it, that in any of these areas he “improves” upon his forebears.
Part of all this, no doubt, is that Brahms was a notorious perfectionist — spending nearly twenty years writing and rewriting his First Symphony, and burning the manuscripts of more than a dozen string quartets he considered inadequate. But one can equally say of “perfectionism” that it is an unwillingness to measure oneself by any standards that transcend or relativize those one is given. The First Symphony, after all, took twenty years because it had to be worthy to publish after Beethoven’s Ninth (a burden which Schumann and Mendelssohn had notably not felt). Beethoven’s sheer artistic self-belief (and self-regard) was what permitted him to dispense with the artistic conventions he inherited from Haydn and Mozart, and every great composer after Beethoven considered that to be truly great one must at least try to be like Beethoven in this respect. Every great composer, that is, except for Brahms. He alone seemed to think it worthy to simply and creatively conserve the traditions he inherited, offering to posterity a handful of finely polished gems in which, like the Silmarils of Fëanor, the light of now-past ages is caught and distinctively refracted. And a small handful indeed: in the genres which his great forebears had seen, or had come to be seen, as offering special artistic statements — the string quartet, the piano trio, the piano sonata, and above all the symphony — he left just a few pieces each: string quartets three, piano trios three, piano sonatas three, and symphonies four. If there is a genre in which he was, perhaps, the greatest “innovator” of his day, it is that genre which most self-consciously honors the past: the theme and variations.
All this may sound curiously negative, as though I am suggesting (as Richard Strauss said about himself) that Brahms is “not a first-rate composer, but a first-class second-rate composer.” Not so. Brahms, in his totality, is certainly greater than Strauss (who, as the Brits say, routinely over-eggs the pudding a bit — though that masterpiece of his twilight years, the Vier letzte Lieder, deserves to stand in the first rank). The best passages in Brahms are as transcendently great as anything in Beethoven or Mozart. I am thinking, specifically, of the last five minutes (102 bars) in the first movement of the First Piano Concerto, though there is any number of passages I could spotlight. This movement, and this passage in particular, exemplifies all the best qualities of his writing: the organic expansion of just one or two simple musical cells into a vast whole; a remarkable economy of both counterpoint (there are rarely more than two separate lines moving simultaneously) and orchestration (somehow creating a full, sustained sound without Wagnerian orchestral busy-work); judicious exploitation of the flexible, propulsive rhythms available in his long triple meter, keeping the energy flowing through long yet elegantly balanced melodic lines; and the perfectly seamless, almost invisibly prepared transition from the calm light of the second theme to the darkness of the coda (at bar 438, 22:03 in the above linked recording), like a great cloud slowly obscuring the face of the Sun. There is nothing pretentious, nothing self-serious, nothing indulgent in Brahms. Everything is heartfelt, often even passionate, but utterly sincere. Where Mozart’s music sounds effortless, almost too perfect to be real, and Beethoven’s music sounds immensely effortful, every note as if written with blood — well, Brahms’s music sounds, simply, human: the music of human life, life as really lived, not as larger than life.
Now indulge me as I offer some speculation. In his masterpiece of criticism Real Presences (1989), George Steiner draws attention to the “broken contract” between logos and kosmos, immanent language and transcendent reality: the gulf (so he argues) at the heart of modern humanity’s sense of alienation. If there is no God, there is no “real presence” in anything we say: our words are meaningless. (Steiner himself was, notably, unable to believe in God: throughout Real Presences he writes of God and the transcendent as one who longs for but cannot himself have them.) And it was in the 1870s, Steiner suggests, that European critics and scholars began to advocate for detaching logos and kosmos. I am not even one-thousandth the expert on European arts and letters that Steiner was, but I cannot help noting that in the realm of music, this is precisely the period when tonality and tradition — the so-called “Common Practice” — begins to break down. Wagner’s “Tristan chord” (premiered 1865) is often seen as the touchstone for this development: the first public statement by a leading composer in a major work that the boundaries of tonality and the “rules” of voice-leading could be breached for the sake of expression. Of course, one is not terribly hard pressed to find Tristan-chord-like harmonies and resolutions in earlier composers (Schumann!), but it is hard to deny that there is something… flagrant? iconoclastic? Promethean? in the use Wagner there makes of it. And in any case, the floodgates opened in the 1870s and onward — with Verdi, Franck, Saint-Saëns, and Mussorgsky (all born before 1850) following Wagner in preparing the ground for really major innovations by Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, and Strauss (born after 1850) within a just-barely-tonal paradigm. By the beginning of the 20th century, Ravel and Scriabin were conjuring essentially non-tonal landscapes, and Schoenberg was developing the twelve-tone paradigm by which he sought to banish the concept of a single tonal center from his music — a deliberate repudiation of kosmos in favor of (a highly mathematical and schematized notion of) logos. All that was (apparently) solid melted, in the course of a few decades, into air.
And it is in precisely those decades, in the midst of so much musical chaos, that we find Brahms at work. He is a son of his age, not of some other age; he is not, and cannot be, a mere repristinator. But he is that son not as an innovator, but as a creative conserver, aware of how rich is his inheritance and seeking to make good use of it. What we hear in Brahms is always something new, but never something novel. Perhaps this is the way — the only way? — to flourish in modernity.
Life-works left resonantly unfinished at their creators' deaths: St. Thomas' Summa Theologiae; Karl Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik; W. A. Mozart’s Requiem; J. S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge.
Our dogmatic labours can and should be guided by results which are venerable because they are attained in the common knowledge of the Church at a specific time. Such results may be seen in the dogmas enshrined in the creeds. But at no place should these replace our [16] dogmatic labours in virtue of their authority. Nor can it ever be the real concern of dogmatics merely to assemble, repeat and define the teaching of the Bible… Exegetical theology investigates biblical teaching as the basis of our talks about God. Dogmatics, too, must constantly keep it in view. But only in God and not for us is the true basis of Christian utterance identical with its true content. Hence dogmatics as such does not ask what the apostles and prophets said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets. This task is not taken from us because it is first necessary that we should know the biblical basis.
— Karl Barth, CD I/1, 15–16. I have often seen the bolded sentence criticized as reinscribing the “broad and ugly ditch” between Scripture and theology (“Barth thinks you shouldn’t just accept the theology taught by the Biblical writers!”). But it cannot be decontextualized in that sense. There is a distinction operative for Barth, which he has already laid out, between “exegetical theology,” or biblical theology, and dogmatic theology (as well as practical theology: see pp. 4–5). Biblical theology does precisely ask what the Biblical writers taught. Dogmatic theology, in contrast, is the self-critical reflection by the Church on what she teaches: a task which for Barth requires continual return to and testing by the biblical writers, which takes seriously the fact that there is historical difference and development since the time of the apostles and prophets (not all of it benign), and which is never — can, this side of the eschaton, never be — complete.
Lee explained to me that by showing the world AI could be used to cheat during a remote job interview, he had pushed the tech industry to evolve the same way AI was forcing higher education to evolve. “Every technological innovation has caused humanity to sit back and think about what work is actually useful,” he said. “There might have been people complaining about machinery replacing blacksmiths in, like, the 1600s or 1800s, but now it’s just accepted that it’s useless to learn how to blacksmith.”
If only this 19-year-old Columbia suspendee had, at a minimum, done what he apparently did for every assignment and asked ChatGPT for information: “When were machines developed that could assist in metalworking, and have they made the crafts of smithing and metalwork obsolete?” But even asking that question — writing that prompt — would have required a measure of historical literacy, nay, a sliver of interest in history at all.
This (now former) student is an especially egregious offender, worthy indeed of becoming the framing device in a breathless New York Magazine story, but there is nothing remarkable about what he represents: it is the characteristic disease of “move fast and break things” culture. All that is prized is “innovation,” because innovation makes money fast and lets the innovator get out before he (and it is usually a he) is held accountable to clean up the wreckage. The destroyers do not understand, and do not want to understand, the things they are out to destroy.
When one prays repeatedly through the Psalter in sequence, one tends to start noticing patterns in how the Psalms are arranged, or at least suspecting characteristic editorial strategies. The set of Psalms for Evening Prayer on the 28th of the month — 136, 137, 138 — exemplifies one of those strategies: what I think of as the containment of imprecation.
Psalm 137 is perhaps among the most famous of Psalms: “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion,” it opens. We are in the immediate aftermath of the exile from Judah, with the grief still raw, the horror still fresh. “On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Then the Psalm goes on in progressively darker tones, with (interestingly) two sets of imprecations. First is the less famous double self-imprecation, enjoining the singer not to forget Zion — “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill; let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!” Only then follows a double imprecation against Judah’s enemies. The singers urge the Lord to remember Edom’s complicity in the “day of Jerusalem, how they said ‘Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!”, before concluding with the most notorious passage: “O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”
There is a lot going on here, even just within the Psalm itself. For starters, the final imprecation — certainly as violent as anything in the entire Bible — is, strictly speaking, not a curse, but a blessing. It performs a complexly layered speech act: 1) pronouncing a (future and hypothetical) blessing on conquering soldiers who will dash Babylonian infants against the rock, which in turn 2a) reveals to the reader, and 2b) reminds the singer, just what the Babylonian soldiers themselves did when they conquered Jerusalem; thus 3) entreating the Lord to mete out his retributive justice (as the previous clause makes clear: “who repays you with what you have done to us”), and only after and through those layers 4) wishing for the violent destruction of the singers’ enemies. This violent pitch is also only reached after the singers have recalled their mockery by their captors (“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"), and their betrayal by Brother Edom (“Lay it bare!"). None of this makes, or should make, the final sentence itself “easier” to read (or pray), but it does (in a certain literary sense) contain the scope and import of the curse, and illuminates the deep emotional complexity and psychological honesty of the Psalter.
Now observe how the editors of the Psalter contextualize and contain this imprecatory outburst by placing it between Psalms 136 and 138. Psalm 136, first: this is surely among the most uncomplicatedly celebratory Psalms, with its recounting of the Lord’s “great wonders” punctuated by the response “His steadfast love endures forever.” These “great wonders” are, first, the orderly creation of heavens, earth, and waters, and the lights that rule over them; second, the deliverance of the elect nation in the Exodus, their protection through the wilderness (“To him who struck down great kings…"), and their conveyance into the promised land. (There is just the merest hint of Judges-style post-conquest troubles: “It is he who remembered us in our low estate… and rescued us from our foes”.) There is no explicit mention of Jerusalem, but the narrative setting is — at least imaginatively — before exile. And if that is implicit in Psalm 136, it is made explicit in the tightly linked Psalm 135, which concludes in Jerusalem herself: “Blessed be the Lord from Zion, he who dwells in Jerusalem! Praise the Lord!” For that matter, the whole sequence Psalms 120–134 are the “Psalms of Ascent,” sung by pilgrims on their way to the festivals in Jerusalem, renarrating the long journey from “the tents of Kedar” (120:5) to “the house of the Lord” (134:1). The Psalms which precede 137 are, quite literally, “the songs of Zion” demanded by the Judahites' Babylonian captors.
Meanwhile, in Psalm 138, we are in a tonally somewhat different world than 136 (as well as temporally different, per the superscription “of David”). It is undoubtedly a Psalm of thanksgiving, but the exuberance is tempered by recent suffering and deliverance: “On the day I called, you answered me… Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies, and your right hand delivers me.” Nevertheless, there is at least one indubitable link to 136: that Psalm’s refrain appears again in David’s concluding lines, “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever” — before the somewhat open-ended “Do not forsake the work of your hands.” (The refrain is thus modulated, perhaps, into an injunction that the Lord should be mindful of his own nature and remain faithful to his covenant!) Less overt, but still clear, links to 136 include “all the kings of the earth” giving thanks to the Lord (recalling, by contrast, the kings who were struck down); “though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly” (recalling the Lord remembering Israel “in our low estate”); and, perhaps more speculatively, “before the gods I sing your praise” (recalling the “great lights” created to rule over the day and the night). And our note that (at least) 134–136 are among “the songs of Zion” draws attention to the liturgical setting of 138: “I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks…”
So what were the editors of the Psalter thinking in placing 137, the paradigmatic Psalm of grief and rage at Jerusalem’s destruction, between 136 and 138, two Psalms of rejoicing in Jerusalem? I suggest that it is purposeful, and strikingly psychologically insightful. They have put grief and rage — and yes, imprecation — in its proper place. The exiles' anger is given its full venting, as it must be. The sheer horror of violence against the innocent, compounded in the destroying victors' demonic mockery, must be recalled, and these must continually shock to the point of outrage. There is to be no naïvety. Evil must have its due, and — when revealed for what it truly is — what it is due truly is cursing. But precisely as — and because — the curse is offered up to God, it is given over to God. It is made His responsibility (“Do not forsake the work of your hands”). And as it is made His responsibility, it is contained. It is put into the context of God’s creative and saving blessing. In fact, it only acquires its force from the fact of His creative and saving blessing. And by that same fact the curse is given its definite limitations, limitations which are notably not placed upon the blessing. The imprecation is not allowed to devour the Psalmist from the inside, but it is released; better still, the Psalmist is released from it, to the joy of God’s abundant blessing. Sin always crouches at the door of imprecation, but in offering the imprecation as prayer, the Psalmist masters it.
So the curse is put in its place, and thus we are promised that the curse will not reign forever, but that blessing, having given way to curse, will one day be restored. This yields the larger narrative purpose in the Psalter, of which this psychological purpose is an icon. The sequence of Psalms 136–137–138 enacts in small the story of exile and return. As we read, we follow the Psalmists through time, from exuberant rejoicing through gutting anguish to renewed joy; we experience the dialectic of resonance and alienation; we know the presence of God even as we momentarily feel His absence; we trace what my teacher Jeremy Begbie describes as the movement of “home, away, and home again” — with the essential acknowledgement that home, when you do return, is never quite the same. We rehearse the pattern of the Lord’s faithfulness and steadfast love.
Or, in the words of that great Master Teacher of Scripture: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should first suffer all these things, and then enter into his glory?”
St. Irenaeus analogizes the diversity-in-order of creation to a musical instrument being played:
[Since] created things are various and numerous, they are indeed well fitted and adapted to the whole creation; yet, when viewed individually, are mutually opposite and inharmonious, just as the sound of the lyre, which consists of many and opposite notes, gives rise to one unbroken melody, through means of the interval which separates each one from the others. The lover of truth therefore ought not to be deceived by the interval between each note, nor should he imagine that one was due to one artist and author, and another to another, nor that one person fitted the treble, another the bass, and yet another the tenor strings; but he should hold that one and the same person [formed the whole], so as to prove the judgment, goodness, and skill exhibited in the whole work and [specimen of] wisdom. Those, too, who listen to the melody, ought to praise and extol the artist, to admire the tension of some notes, to attend to the softness of others, to catch the sound of others between both these extremes, and to consider the special character of others, so as to inquire at what each one aims, and what is the cause of their variety, never failing to apply our rule: neither giving up the [one] artist, nor casting off faith in the one God who formed all things, nor blaspheming our Creator.
— Against Heresies 2.25.2 (ANF, Vol. 1). The principal point here is, of course, the oneness of God (contra the Gnostics). Nevertheless this is a rich analogy, which deserves fuller exegesis.
I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath;
he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light;
surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.
He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; he has broken my bones;
he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation;
he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago.
He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has made my chains heavy;
though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer;
he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones; he has made my paths crooked.
He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding;
he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate;
he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow.
He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver;
I have become the laughingstock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all day long.
He has filled me with bitterness; he has sated me with wormwood.
He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes;
my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is;
so I say, "My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the LORD."
Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall!
My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.
It is only — only! — after these words that the prophet utters the most famous words of this chapter:
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
"The LORD is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him."
The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him;
let him put his mouth in the dust — there may yet be hope;
let him give his cheek to the one who strikes, and let him be filled with insults.
Karl Barth (CD IV.1, §59.1):
In being gracious to man in Jesus Christ, God acknowledges man; He accepts responsibility for his being and nature. He remains Himself. He does not cease to be God. But He does not hold aloof. In being gracious to man in Jesus Christ, He also goes into the far country, into the evil society of this being which is not God and against God. He does not shrink from him. He does not pass him by as did the priest and the Levite the man who had fallen among thieves. He does not leave him to his own devices. He makes his situation His own. He does not forfeit anything by doing this. In being neighbour to man, in order to deal with him and act towards him as such, He does not need to fear for His Godhead. On the contrary… God shows Himself to be the great and true God in the fact that He can and will let His grace bear this cost, that He is capable and willing and ready for this condescension, this act of extravagance, this far journey. What marks out God above all false gods is that they are not capable and ready for this. In their otherworldliness and supernaturalness and otherness, etc., the gods are a reflection of the human pride which will not unbend, which will not stoop to that which is beneath it. God is not proud. In His high majesty He is humble. It is in this high humility that He speaks and acts as the God who reconciles the world to Himself.
Johann Heermann (tr. Robert Bridges):
Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon Thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone Thee.
’Twas I, Lord, Jesus, I it was denied Thee!
I crucified Thee.
Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
The slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered;
For man’s atonement, while he nothing heedeth,
God intercedeth.
For me, kind Jesus, was Thy incarnation,
Thy mortal sorrow, and Thy life’s oblation;
Thy death of anguish and Thy bitter passion,
For my salvation.
Note: Hand over heart, I substantially drafted this post — including its core conceit — long before reading Josh Brake’s latest Substack post. No plagiarism here!
I have two sorts of problems with “AI” in general and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular. One is the (infinitely ramifying) ethical problem. LLMs are built on deception. They are not human (and not “alive”), do not possess human cognitive faculties, and cannot “know” anything in the ordinary human sense of that word, and yet their model is built on — after vacuuming up an enormous amount of human-created linguistic “content” — mimicking human cognition and knowledge to such an effective degree that you spend all your time relying on GPT-4o or what have you, rather than other human beings. I take this to be a fairly straightforward form of deception, and because of the incommensurability of truth and falsehood, this first problem to be the most fundamental. What does constantly being deceived, and constantly self-deceiving, do to a human being? In what ways are we damaging, and might further damage, ourselves by using such a false tool? (See also: Mammon.) But that’s for another post.
The principles of scientific forestry [TC: planting a single “crop,” in evenly-spaced rectangular grids, in place of the old ecologically diverse forests] were applied as rigorously as was practicable to most large German forests throughout much of the nineteenth century. The Norway spruce… became the bread-and-butter tree of commercial forestry. Originally [it] was seen as a restoration crop that might revive overexploited mixed forests, but the commercial profits from the first rotation were so stunning that there was little effort to return to mixed forests… Diverse old-growth forests, about three-fourths of which were broadleaf (deciduous) species, were replaced by largely coniferous forests in which Norway spruce or Scotch pine were the dominant or often only species. In the short run, this experiment in the radical simplification of the forest to a single commodity was a resounding success… the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted… An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora—which were, and still are, not entirely understood—was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest. … Apparently the first rotation of Norway spruce had grown exceptionally well in large part because it was living off (or mining) the long-accumulated soil capital of the diverse old-growth forest that it had replaced. Once that capital was depleted, the steep decline in growth rates began.
To apply the analogy: Maybe, just maybe, you can implement LLMs without too many problems in the first generation, among a population of adults who have already been educated. Their values have already been formed; they have already learned to read and write and think critically. (This already concedes far too much to the “AI” boosters, but for the sake of the argument, we will not pause overlong.) Perhaps they really could achieve the stunning productivity growth which we are constantly promised (though so far the results don’t seem great!). But even if that were true, can you expect those gains in the second generation, among children who are still being educated? Or would you rather expect systemic failure to ever form values, to learn critical thinking, essential reading comprehension, and basic writing skills? The adults who received pre-LLM educations have an existing store of cognitive and intellectual capital on which to draw as they encounter and learn to use LLMs. But children who never experience education without LLMs will never have the chance to develop that capital.
Furthermore, the broader environment in which this “first rotation” is encountering LLMs is not remotely the same as that in which the “second rotation” will encounter them. Indeed, the environments are being treated as if they are the same, when they should be different. My local school district is now integrating “AI” into primary and secondary education, because “universities and employers will expect AI literacy” — what tool is easier to learn to use than a natural language chatbot? Now, the workplace may appropriately demand certain kinds of efficiency from adult workers, and LLMs may just prove their usefulness in such cases (though in my view the jury is still out). Education, by contrast, should be inefficient, frictional, resistive. The mind is like a muscle: in order to grow, it must be repeatedly stretched to the limits of its capacity. The LLM chatbot is the ultimate anti-friction, super-efficient (except in, you know, water and energy) machine, which promises that you will never encounter resistance ever again; with the new “reasoning” modules, you’ll never have to think for yourself again. The implications for education hardly need to be spelled out.
Scott continues:
As pioneers in scientific forestry, the Germans also became pioneers in recognizing and attempting to remedy many of its undesirable consequences. To this end, they invented the science of what they called “forest hygiene.” In place of hollow trees that had been home to woodpeckers, owls, and other tree-nesting birds, the foresters provided specially designed boxes. Ant colonies were artificially raised and implanted in the forest, their nests tended by local schoolchildren. Several species of spiders, which had disappeared from the monocropped forest, were reintroduced. What is striking about these endeavors is that they are attempts to work around an impoverished habitat still planted with a single species of conifers for production purposes. In this case, “restoration forestry” attempted with mixed results to create a virtual ecology, while denying its chief sustaining condition: diversity.
I leave the resonances between this virtualized ecology and the state of education today as a trivial exercise for the reader.
(Scott’s remarks here of course have many parallels. Ivan Illich makes a remarkably analogous argument, with respect to medicine, in the opening of Tools for Conviviality; and Michael Polanyi offers a structurally similar observation about the Enlightenment “critical movement” that sought to banish belief from knowledge: “its incandescence had fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when this fuel was exhausted the critical framework itself burnt away.")
“Artificial general intelligence,” defined as “a computer able to do any cognitive task a human can do” — as envisioned for example in this new work of science fiction — is computationally impossible to achieve.
This is because “intelligence” — in the sense of “normal human intelligence,” which is presupposed by the above definition of “AGI” — is a) impossible to fully and simultaneously articulate (hereon inarticulable) and b) non-deterministic, and therefore in at least two senses strictly non-computable.
The inarticulability of intelligence has (at the very least) to do with its embodied and relational aspects. “Mind” is neither identical with nor even co-extensive with “brain activity”; rather, “mind” is (to crib from Dan Siegel’s definition) is an embodied and relational process. Emotion in particular seems, as far as the causality can be determined, to be body-first, brain-second, such that it is only articulable after the fact (and in a way that changes the emotional experience). Michael Polanyi’s great work demonstrates in a philosophical register what musicians, artists, and craftspeople have always known intuitively: that the “cognitive task” of playing an instrument or using a tool depends on integrating the instrument or tool into one’s bodily experience, in an inarticulable way. And relationship through interaction with other embodied minds is such a complex process, with so many emergent layers, that not only is it poorly theorized or modeled now, it may be impossible to exhaustively theorize or model — especially because it primarily seems to take place in and through the pre- and in-articulate dimensions of cognition.
Meanwhile, the non-determinism of intelligence has (at the very least) to do with quantum randomness effects in the brain, which at the mesoscale (the level at which daily human, and most complex organic, life takes place) emerge into relatively well-understood and predictable patterns, but at the nanoscale (the relevant level for a hypothetical deterministic model of cognition) are by definition impossible to predict, or even observe without altering them. I am unaware of any good reason to think the quantum effects in, say, an extremely large and inorganic GPU farm, would be interchangeable with or even meaningfully similar to those in a three-pound organic human neural system.
What is computationally possible, as far as I can tell, is a (relatively) high-fidelity simulation of one aspect of human cognition: the comparatively deterministic, hyper-articulated aspect of human cognition which Iain McGilchrist identifies as characteristic of the left hemisphere (hereon LH) of our brains (subject, of course, to obvious caveats from theses 2–4). Note: I am not saying, and I do not take McGilchrist to be saying, that a fully-computed model of the LH itself is possible; only that its characteristic thought-style can be simulated in high fidelity, precisely because that thought-style is comparatively deterministic and hyper-articulated.
In currently existing frontier Large Language Models (LLMs), I take it something like this has already been achieved. Commercially available LLMs are now (to use a technical term) pretty good at processing and reproducing both written and spoken natural language — albeit in such a sterile “voice” that it renders the phrase “natural language” almost meaningless — and quite good at analytically processing huge quantities of formally similar information. These are two of the characteristic specializations of LH cognition, and I expect the next generation of LLMs to be significantly better on both fronts. Notably, some of the persistent failure modes of LH cognition and of LLMs are startlingly similar: “hallucination” or fabrication of nonexistent supporting evidence, a predilection for lying or circumventing rules in order to achieve a desired result, an inability to attend to wholes at the expense of parts, and so forth.
Because much of contemporary Western life (as McGilchrist and others have extensively documented) is already organized to systematically advantage that aspect of human cognition, it is therefore no surprise or, in a sense, any remarkable accomplishment that frontier models now perform at the level of PhD students in solving advanced physics problems (albeit ones with solutions known to currently existing physics), or that some chatbots now “pass the Turing Test." This is the natural end result of reimagining science as “knowledge production” and credentialing scientists accordingly, or of technologically reducing the typical person’s normal experiences of and capacity for conversation to so great an extent that we now take what the LLMs offer to be “human” conversation. This — and all the attendant social/economic disruption (about which more below) — is all possible without “AGI” itself being computationally feasible.
The second strike against the possibility of “AGI” comes from limits in physical resources. Achievements in LLM development up to this point have been enabled by energy use, water depletion, and resource extraction on an already massive scale. The anticipated investments required for “AGI” (e.g., according to AI 2027, $2 quadrillion in new data centers over the next 10 years!!!) will require exponentially more energy, water, and mineral resources that we either simply do not have on this planet or cannot physically extract from it at the desired rate (unless we invent, say, cold fusion). This is to say nothing of the land required to build all of the new infrastructure. I therefore anticipate that “AI” development will, as a function of resource scarcity, fail to get anywhere close to the scale of investment theoretically required for “AGI.” This may only become clear to “AI” developers, however, after they have already inflicted genuinely ruinous and probably irreversible damage to the environment and to the communities that depend on it.
Considering all this, I find it probable that without ever achieving “artificial general intelligence” as imagined in science fiction, advances in “AI” over the next several years will make all but the top 1–5% of current “symbolic capitalists” functionally obsolete. This includes both high-status sectors such as consulting, finance, advertising, software development, law and legal services, etc., and lower-status (or at least lower-paying) sectors such as journalism, copywriting, teaching, administration, graphic design, the social sciences, etc. (Note that several of these lower-status professions are ones which the Internet revolution has already been destroying.) By “functionally obsolete” I mean that it will almost always be more cost-effective, and nearly as useful, to “employ” an “AI agent” for a task that previously required one to hire a human being.
Sectors that are symbolic-capitalism-adjacent but require long training in embodied skill — e.g., healthcare, the experimental sciences, mechanical engineering, war — will not be functionally obsoleted, at least not so thoroughly. An inorganic robot will never be able to perform skilled tasks in the real world with the same level of ability as a trained human being (see (3) above)… and “organic robots” capable of such skill would pretty much just be, well, lab-grown humans, with many of the same inefficiencies and time-delays as regular humans. (Only a conspiracy theorist would see current Silicon Valley investments in IVF, genetic selection and editing, and artificial wombs as an attempt to create the conditions of possibility for lab-grown humans… right???) But some current features of jobs in these sectors — the features, that is, which are most akin to “AI” core competencies — will be permanently outsourced to “AI agents.”
The “trades” and the “crafts,” on the other hand, will not become thoroughly automated, though they will be in various ways automation-directed and -augmented. Machine maintenance and repair, for instance: machine failure might be AI-diagnosable, but the intuitive skill necessary for actual repairs will remain the province of humans. To deal with water, you’ll always need a plumber. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, and fields like construction and mining will always require meaningful and skilled human attention to reckon with that detail. Agriculture represents an interesting test case: a field that is currently extremely mechanized, but as the lowest-skilled tier of human labor becomes (out of necessity) far cheaper to “buy,” one which may reabsorb much of that excess labor capacity. At the more humanistic end of the spectrum, traditional crafts might make a comeback of sorts (similar to the vinyl resurgence), and the performing arts will always be the province of human beings, though probably far fewer people will be performing artists in fifteen years than are right now; in both cases patronage will be the only economically viable model. For the ultra-wealthy, owning or sponsoring something evidently made only by humans will be a status symbol.
In sum: I believe we are headed neither for the existential-risk, civilization-ending disaster scenarios envisioned by the “AI Doomers,” nor for the golden era of peace and prosperity and universal basic income envisioned by the “AI optimists.” (Where, exactly, do the optimists think the value creation for UBI will come from in an era of mass human unemployment?) Rather, I suspect in the near-ish term we are headed for a poorer, less culturally vibrant, less highly educated world with much greater wealth inequality. This will be a world in which many more people, including some who might otherwise have been symbolic capitalists, work in various kinds of manual labor or “trades”: agriculture, mining, energy, construction, maintenance. Others will depend, one way or another, on the patronage of the few ultra-wealthy. The whole service-economy apparatus that depends on a large leisure class will be semi-permanently diminished in proportion. It might, in other words, look in certain ways remarkably like the period of transition into the Industrial Revolution.
Over the long run, I believe in the resilience of humanity, chiefly because I believe in the faithfulness of God to His wayward creatures. We will not be destroyed or superseded by a higher form of intelligence, nor will we manage to completely destroy ourselves. We are remarkably adaptable and creative: life always finds a way. But we will find that the remarkably widespread prosperity of the last few decades in particular and the last two centuries in general is not, once unlocked, a permanent and automatic feature of human existence. It has depended on our irretrievably consuming the planet’s resources at an ever-accelerating rate. What cannot go on indefinitely must eventually stop. The mechanization snake will finally eat its own tail. The only question is how soon.
Addendum (08.15.2025): Well, this has had much more of an afterlife than I expected. And we have had four months more of AI development (i.e., several lifetimes). What do I think now about all of the above? So far, I feel quite as confident about items #1–7 as the day I wrote them. I am nearly as confident about #8, though I recognize that energy/water use per query is something of a moving target and that many of the major AI developers are investing in energy solutions. (Here’s a science fiction scenario for you: What if we came up with, say, a non-destructive way to siphon geothermal energy from the Yellowstone supervolcano, powering everyone’s Claude Code instances for eons while diverting a real civilizational X-risk?) My greater environmental concern remains the resource extraction — and corresponding ecosystem degradation/destruction, at points of both origin and destination — necessary to build the proliferating data centers that will be necessary to build more and more capable models, and to supply the infrastructure upgrades that get water and energy to those data centers. (This is to say nothing of the environmental justice questions about where data centers are actually built.) The typical American utility depends on infrastructure that is decades old, whose construction was predicated on a long-deceased funding model (i.e., massive federal subsidies), and which is now desperately in need of repair at practically every point. It’s like the old joke about True Libertarians: How will they drive wherever they want, as fast as they want, if there aren’t any roads? Color me skeptical that AI developers will actually prioritize massive upgrades to local infrastructure in places where they build their data centers, though I would love to hear stories to the contrary.
The big questions come, of course, with #9, and perhaps to a lesser degree #10–12. I have looked back on #9 a number of times and thought: “What was I thinking?” 95–99% of current symbolic capitalists is a pretty large number! So let me offer a couple of qualifications and clarifications. First, by saying “probable,” I think I meant “more than 50% probability.” (In my lexicon, I think I use “unlikely” for <10%, “possible” for 25–50%, “likely” for, oh, I don’t know, 60–75%, and “almost certain” for >90%.) I would have been comfortable saying then, and maybe still am, that it is “almost certain” 50% of current symbolic capitalists will be functionally obsoleted (more on that term in a second). Note that this is not the same thing as Dario Amodei’s “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” There are a lot of even entry-level white-collar workers — especially in healthcare — who are not pure symbolic capitalists, in Musa al-Gharbi’s sense, even if they presently do a great number of symbolic-capitalist things in the course of their everyday work; my #10 was meant in part to correct against this misconception. And, even in the most successful AI development scenario I can reasonably imagine, functional obsolescence of the bottom 95% of symbolic capitalists does not mean that all those people go “oh well, guess I’d better become a farmhand.” It does mean they move down the prestige and remuneration ladder in various ways, but probably does not mean they have to leap off and start again from the bottom. It also means that fewer young people even aspire to enter those fields in the first place, instead proactively entering less automatable fields (anecdotally, at all colleges outside the absolute most elite tier, student interest in nursing programs is just skyrocketing). And it means that the gates behind which the true symbolic-capitalist jobs are kept become ever more difficult to unlock. A PhD has long offered no guarantee of success, or even of a job, in any field. Now some of the most ostensibly prestigious PhDs are becoming, literally, impossible to get.
“Functional obsolescence” is also an important term for my argument in thesis #9, one which I did not define in quite the way I should. My definition was that “it will almost always be more cost-effective, and nearly as useful, to ‘employ’ an ‘AI agent’ for a task that previously required one to hire a human being.” The term “cost-effective” should be clear. “Useful” is obviously less so. What I basically meant is that, to a manager, the short-term quality of work that an “AI agent” can do for the entry-level tasks that require little contextual knowledge will seem so impressive that they will, by default, choose to defer or forgo the long-term gains of adding another human person to the team. In any organization, a new hire, no matter how intelligent or experienced, needs some time to learn the ropes, and depending on the context it may be not just weeks or months but years before the institution sees its return on investment, as it were. (There is a different calculus for primarily internal-facing and primarily external-facing roles here; I suspect the functional obsolescence of the sales account manager, whose personal touch with the client is in fact part of the package sold to the client, will be far slower to arrive than the functional obsolescence of the sales account manager’s executive assistant.) This does not prevent a company having an explicit value on hiring and developing human employees, such that they are willing to forgo the short-term advantages of AI agents. I am immensely grateful to work for one such company. I suspect there are many other symbolic-capitalist companies that are still talking this people-centric talk, but are quietly making preparations to cease walking the walk as soon as it becomes practical to take a different path.
The other main reason that #9 seems far less plausible to a lot of people now than it perhaps did four months ago is the stubborn persistence of certain kinds of AI failures and hallucinations. It still makes up references to nonexistent sources (though less often than it used to); it still offers impossible and logically laughable ex post facto rationalizations for “conclusions” at which it claims to have “arrived” via “chains of thought,” thus obscuring its inner workings (though, admittedly, real human beings are awfully good at this as well); it still can’t reliably tell you how many B’s there are in the word “blueberry” or how many U.S. state names contain the letter R. The recent much-hyped launch, and notable failures, of OpenAI’s GPT-5 has Maria Sukhareva announcing that “AI Winter is coming." And indeed, if this indicates that we are reaching the upper bound of the logistic curve and the rate of progress is leveling off, then “AI agents” will not be anywhere as good “in the next several years” as is necessary to functionally obsolete 95–99% of current symbolic capitalists. They will still be an amazing technological feat by any metric, but like many such feats of the industrial era, they will not actually decrease the absolute amount of work there is to be done, but simply reshape much of the existing work around themselves. They will fail to be transformative in the way that, say, the telegraph was to the nineteenth-century general or journalist (completely reshaping the possibility structure in which their work is done), instead becoming something more like the washing machine to the mid-century housewife (removes a source of drudgery, freeing up time for… other kinds of drudgery). I was deliberately vague in saying this could happen in “the next several years” — recall: the transformer architecture on which our contemporary LLMs are built was invented in 2017, which in my lexicon is only “several years ago”! — so let’s wait until, say, 2032 to render final judgment. Unfortunately, my intuitions here are still pretty pessimistic. I do think GPT-5’s failures indicate some systemic misconceptions (see, again, items #1–7), but humans can get awfully, even terrifyingly, far operating in a purely LH mode of cognition. We can have genuinely passed the inflection point on the logistic curve, after which we will see fewer and fewer dramatic breakthroughs and more and more high-profile failures… and still have a long, long way to go.
The larger point to be made, and the place where, in my view, real unpredictability enters the picture, is that none of these developments happen in laboratory-style isolation from their reception in culture. (If there is any such thing as “laboratory-style isolation,” on which again see Personal Knowledge.) That reception, as far as I can tell, is not going well. The proliferation of “AI slop” is incredibly unpopular, even if at this point few people can reliably distinguish it from “real,” human-grade slop. I cannot imagine parents (at least in upper-middle-class contexts) long enduring the indiscriminate application of chatbot-based ed-tech products to their kids' classrooms; Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation seems to be striking too strong a nerve for that. If (speaking extremely loosely here) the washing machine created “the problem that has no name” for mid-century housewives, thus accelerating the development of second-wave feminism, what social upheaval(s) might the washing machines of the AI field accelerate or unleash? I have no idea. And those will shape the outcomes I predict in #11 and, especially, #12. So with that (very large) asterisk placed next to them… I more or less stand by them. Rogue AI is not going to decide it needs to wipe us all out with commandeered nuclear weapons to protect its colonization of the universe (the doomsday scenario in “AI 2027”), nor will properly aligned AI usher in a drudgery-free UBI paradise (the golden-age scenario in “AI 2027”). Both of those scenarios depend on an inflationary and wrong view of AI’s capability to genuinely imitate human intelligence. Instead, the real damage will be done by those purportedly racing to prevent the first and usher in the second, who are on public record as having zero clue what their actual end goal or desired end point is. They seem to imagine it will go on forever and ever, growth without end. But Stein’s Law is undefeated, because it is in fact a restatement of the second law of thermodynamics: “What cannot go on forever must eventually stop.”
The first sequence of feasts in Leviticus 23 — Passover/Unleavened Bread (vv. 4–8), Firstfruits Offering (vv. 9–14), and Weeks (vv. 15–21) — maps to the sequence of Christological events from Passion through Resurrection to Pentecost. The Gospels, and St. Paul (1 Cor. 5), of course spell out the Passover/Passion connection. But what I hadn’t noticed before is the Firstfruits Offering. This offering, less familiar perhaps than Passover and Unleavened Bread, is a wave offering of a single sheaf of the firstfruits (probably of the barley harvest) “that you may be accepted” (v. 11), and accompanied by an ascension offering of a male lamb a year old with (unleavened, of course) bread and wine (vv. 12–13). No bread may be consumed before this offering is brought (v. 14). And this offering takes place on “the day after the Sabbath” (v. 11) during Unleavened Bread: that is, on the first day of the week. On Resurrection Day — well, Christ rises as the firstfruits of those that had fallen asleep. Meanwhile, Weeks marks the ingathering of the firstfruits of the (probably wheat) harvest, seven weeks later; at Pentecost, the Spirit descends to gather in the firstfruits of the Church, harvested from all nations.
Is St. John the Evangelist subtly hinting that he was present at the very beginning of Christ’s ministry in John 1? John the Baptizer is “standing with two of his disciples” (v. 35) when the Lamb of God walks by, and the two follow Jesus. One is Andrew, the brother of Peter (v. 40), but the other goes unnamed. Is this the Evangelist? If so, it helps make sense of some of the curious features of John 1. The dramatic action of the gospel begins with the Baptizer’s confrontation with the Pharisees' emissaries, which one of his disciples would have been well-positioned to observe. But perhaps more significantly, the Prologue — otherwise a carefully crafted poem about the Logos who was in the beginning with God, who was and is Light and Life, who came into the world and became flesh to dwell among us — contains two prima facie odd interjections about John the Baptizer: that he was sent from God as a witness about the light, but was not the Light himself (vv. 6–8), and a part of that testimony about the Light’s preeminence (v. 15). If the Evangelist initially had a life-altering encounter with the Baptizer such that he became one of his disciples, then subsequently encountered Jesus of Nazareth and was sent to follow him at the Baptizer’s behest — this all makes sense of why, in his old age, as he was giving final shape to his own testimony that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, he and his followers still could not do without the Baptizer’s testimony. (There is also a point about the historical particularity of the Word becoming flesh: remove the specifics of John the Baptizer that intrude upon the Prologue, and it could resemble a passage of Platonic speculative theology.)
The question is still haunting me: Why is there no New Covenantal analogue to the Feast of Booths? Is it because the temporary dwellings and tabernacles and temples of the Old Covenant, made by human hands, have received their fulfillment in the Word who became flesh and tabernacled among us, the new Temple not made by human hands?
[Discovering] things is much more gratifying if there has been some difficulty in the search for them. Those, after all, who never discover what they are looking for suffer from starvation, while those who do not have to look, because everything is ready to hand, often start wilting out of sheer boredom; in either case, a malady to be avoided.
— St. Augustine (tr. Edmund Hill, O.P.), Teaching Christianity (De Doctrina Christiana) 2.8. He is speaking about the interpretation of Scripture, and particularly of the “innumerable obscurities and ambiguities” (2.6.7); but there are many applications of this word.
A great little aside in St. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit (15.35, p. 68 in PP42):
The Lord, therefore, in restoring us to the resurrected life, sets forth the Gospel’s whole way of life, by establishing as laws of conduct freedom from anger, the suffering of evil, freedom from the filth of loving pleasure, freedom from the love of money. In this way, we are set right and by design partake of those things which the age to come naturally possesses. Now, if someone would say as a matter of definition that the Gospel is a prefiguring of the resurrected life, he would not, it seems to me, go astray of what is proper.
St. Basil names three of the four as “freedom(s) from,” and I think they may all be so understood (and so coordinated with passages from the Sermon on the Mount):
from anger that prevents reconciliation (Mt. 5:21–26);
from the cycle of retaliatory violence = “suffering evil” (Mt. 5:38–42);
from lust that destroys our self-control (Mt. 5:27–32);
from the grasping power of Mammon (Mt. 6:1–4, 19–24).
The positive virtues (if that is the right word) that characterize the resurrected life, then: reconciliation, non-retaliation, self-control, and generosity.
