Understanding and accepting the human condition:thought experiment imagining ourselves as the Creator

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/understanding-and-accepting-human.html

[..]

So, when we begin to imagine ways of bringing our companions into our creative scheme in such a way that we can give to them their own reality, and give it to them in such a way that we do not dominate them, we realise what a subtle thing this process will have to be...

Such companions will eventually have to be given the same creative reality as ourself, the creator, but they will begin their lives in a condition of great potentiality - a potentiality which will be entirely unrealised by them.

CS Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters" An Infernal Correspondence

https://screwtapeblogs.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/the-screwtape-letters-by-c-s-lewis/

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

So you “have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away”, have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dulness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily good; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next week I will give you some hints on how to exploit them,

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

Every Ecclesiastic of any Authority has read GKC's 'Orthodoxy'

“FOR the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, “not” from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery not Puritanism not Socialism to hold them back….The madness of tomorrow is “not” in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan.” ~GKC: ‘The Next Heresy,’ in G.K.’s Weekly, June 19, 1926.

No Fault Divorce:Central Gov. Destruction of the Family

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/09/15739/

"In contract law, unless a contract has been improperly formed, only the party claiming breach is entitled to sue. Once breach is proven, the law provides remedies for harm in order to achieve fairness. No-fault divorce turned the tables on this basic premise of contract law by allowing guilty parties to sue for divorce, even when their spouses had not breached the contract. Isn’t that discriminatory against spouses who have honored their marriage contract? Isn’t our no-fault system a clear case of favoritism and preferential treatment for spouses who breach their contractual promises? The equitable legal doctrine of unclean hands should extend to marriage contracts, barring adulterous spouses from suing innocent ones."

Gerard Manley Hopkins and JRR Tolkien on Lucifer

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/09/tolkien-and-hopkins-the-devils-first-sin.html

But the song offered by Lucifer, like that of Melkor in Tolkien,

was a dwelling on his own beauty, an in-stressing of his own in-scape, and like a performance on the organ and instrument of his own being; it was a sounding, as they say, of his own trumpet and a hymn in his own praise. Moreover it became an incantation: others were drawn in; it became a concert of voices, a concerting of self-praise, an enchantment, a magic, by which they were dizzied, dazzled, and bewitched. They would not listen to the note which summoned each to his own place (Jude 6) and distributed them here and there in the liturgy of the sacrifice; they gathered rather closer and closer home under Lucifer’s lead and drowned it, raising a counter-music and counter-temple and altar, a counterpoint of dissonance and not of harmony. I suppose they introduced a pathos as of the nobler nature put aside for the higher and even persuaded themselves that God was only trying them; that to disobey and substitute themselves, Lucifer above all, as the angelic victim of the world sacrifice was secretly pleasing to him, that self devotion of it, the suicide, the semblance of sin was a loveliness of heroism which could only arise in the angelic mind; that it was divine and a meriting and at last a grasp of godhead.

T.S.Eliot A Rare Reflective Liberal

 T.S. Eliot: "That liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos."

STA "All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly".

The Elder Zosima, in The Brothers Karamazov, says:

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it. So I think.

Alastair Roberts: Women's Suffrage, Gender Ideology and Decline of Mediating Institutions

It seems to me that the most likely reasons why the vote was limited to men had to do with a society where the family was far more integral to societal structure and the realm of the 'political' far more closely bounded. While we often think of our relationship to the government primarily as detached individuals, the family would have been the more fundamental social entity in the past, performing many of the tasks now performed by the state (education, welfare, etc.). Men represented their families and their interests as their figureheads and voted accordingly, not as detached individuals in a private capacity.

Restricting the vote to men was a way of limiting the realm of the state, ensuring that the state didn't deal with individuals directly, but that it had to operate through the mediation of families. Where the state deals with individuals directly, it has the tendency to usurp or undermine the traditional functions of the family and other such institutions and form a society where mediating structures are eroded.              

Restricting the vote to men (much as the restriction of military service to men) was designed to protect a domestic realm from the agonism of politics and the business of the state as much as possible, ensuring that the antagonisms of the state didn't spill into all areas of life. As men had the duty to protect the domestic sphere, they were to represent it politically. Having women involved in politics would make them combatants and mean that men would need to attack and need to resist their urge to protect them in political discourse, a discourse whose integrity relies heavily upon confrontational dispute and critique. The agonism of political discourse was one of the reasons why it was for the most part restricted to males from the earliest Athenian democracy onwards.

On account of the changing understanding and configuration of the citizen, the political realm, the family, and the individual in their various relations, the old settlement and jurisdictional boundaries between family and state became unsettled, leading to the falling away of the original rationale for the restriction of the vote to men. Once that occurred, although some appreciated and spoke of the original reason for the limitation, a widespread tendency was to appeal to grossly sexist justifications to shore up the restriction when the social realities that once formed its foundations had largely collapsed. Of course, these are the reasons that we are most acquainted with today, reasons which tickle our sense of moral superiority. These secondary and reactive rationalizations should not be confused with the original reasons, however.

The clash of rights and jurisdictions between state, family, and individual provides an important background of the feminist movement that few really pay attention to. For instance, while we commonly speak of the entrance of women into the workforce (a significant term) as a victory for women in their individual rights, we also need to recognize how closely this breakthrough has been related in many national contexts to the desire of the state to mobilize entire populations for war and economy. Also we need to recognize the state's tendency to break down anything that would mediate its relationship to the individual, in this case breaking down the role of the husband and father in provision and representation, encouraging a greater direct dependence upon the state and the increased politicization of civic society.

Let me be absolutely clear: I am not intending to attack women's suffrage here, nor am I wanting to justify the old order, which is definitely not something that I want to return to. However, I think that it is important to recognize that women's suffrage is part of a far more complex reconfiguration of the social and political landscape and one that is not without its fair share of problematic dimensions, dimensions of which more Whiggish thinkers typically lack all cognizance. The movement from a differentiated society build around families and more stable relations to one built around more free-floating private individuals, a movement in which women's suffrage was a key stage, is one with huge ramifications, ramifications that we are continuing to feel today.

Our tendency to attribute all resistance to women's suffrage and its earlier non-existence to unenlightened sexism all too easily arises from a chronological snobbery (to borrow an expression from Lewis) and a failure to reckon with some of the larger social issues that were at stake in the question, larger social issues that we still haven't properly processed.

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/10/lets-stop-calling-it-complementarianism.html