Charles Victor on Religion

As the Bhagavad-Gita seemingly moves towards its zenith in a great battle, Arjuna’s companion and friend suspends the near cosmic momentum with a revelation. He is the Lord God Krishna. The astonished Arjuna worshipfully announces his intention to leave behind his worldly concerns and reside in contemplation of the divine. Krishna objects, and then gives a teaching on life and holiness. There are many ways to oneness, holiness, wholeness. They share a singular essence: the surrender of ego-centricity that the self become free to the divine within, allowing, thus, its power to freely flow. This involves learning not simply a mindlessness of self, but a mindfulness of the world about oneself. Anger, ignorance, and self-sanctification are the three great impediments to this state of being, this state of mind and heart, this wholistic presence with-in the world. One need not go off into solitude, for even in the devotions of the simple-most of mind and heart God is to be found. One must accept one’s position and vocation in this world, and for Arjuna, a prince, it is to lead and to care for his people wisely and well.

Christianity has, in the sundry times and places it has found itself, asked how wisely and well to focus, find, and maintain a mindlessness of self and a caring mindfulness of the world God has not only made but redeemed in his Word and continuously calls to its wholeness in his Holy Spirit. This tract is a brief consideration of the major currents evidenced in that pious pursuit. Continue reading →

The fallacy of the immutable centre

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold” wrote Yeats[i] as he portended the Western world slowly falling from faith both in itself, and its vesture of Christian cult. As with all brought face to face with the blunt factuality of our finitude—be it as individual, or some greater or lesser configuration of community—Yeats’ poem is permeated with a type of mourning, with melancholy, pessimism, resignation. It is a prescient work presaging the whereto a great cultural loss of communal vision and hope lead. It is a deathwatch for a civilization in extremis. The centre, however, never holds. The centre is an illusion, a transcendental ideal about, not immutability, but continuity. Continue reading →

As in many times past, the phenomenon of angels is upon us again as common religiosity looks to the heavens for some succor the visions of God and Jesus and saints have, for sundry reasons, ceased to provide. They appear as individually pliable succendanea for the traditionally defined icons of the holy. In Christianity, angels have customarily been pictured as members of the minor clergy, as the acolytes, canters and deacons at the heavenly altar. In concert with that ministerial role, they are seen today, with the panoply of its unmet pastoral needs, as avatars of the sacred and caring, supernal medics buoying humanity to well-being of body and soul as their “fallen members”, those denizens of hell, taunt and torment “fallen humanity” to irrevocably sink to their despicable spiritual destitution, their denial, not of God, but of his loving plan to sanctify humanity and all his work. Angels, both the heavenly and hellish, present the mind potent icons for those forces into which the moral mind divides reality–good and evil. Continue reading →

The spurious rupture twixt spirit and matter is anciently rooted in the divide between the pragmatics of rationalizing and manipulating the world, using the world, and the embracing of the world as at-one with man, man and world as sharing of one life, one soul: God. We find this psychic problematic embedded in tales that pre-date both Abraham and the glories of Greek civilization, specifically those of Dionysius. Continue reading →

Over lunch one day an elderly cleric, an erudite and cultured man, confided in me that he was uncomfortable with eating for the act of ingestion reminded him that he was an animal. I admit I can be a wee world-weary before my morning coffee, but I have no desire to off my mortal coil and fly into the aether, to be other than member of the species, and I declare that cognizant of the serene imperturbability that must reside in being the celestial equivalent of a well written computer program. I am a rational animal, and I deem it hubris to crave negate myself in the hope of becoming another species or some mere distillation of this species. Thus, the problematic aspect, to my mind, is that spirituality, with its talk of transcendence, is too often not taken as a process of synthesizing human powers, a step by step integration, but a preclusive fixation upon one power, and the step by step negation of all others. It becomes thus, not a process of man becoming fully actualized, fully man, but of man seeking to negate man so the human can become an angel, a disembodied mind, psyche, soul. Continue reading →