Today's Lesson

Sermo Fratres Proboles in Dialogi Salvatoris excerpto.

If you don’t stand in the darkness, you can’t see the light. (NHC III 133, 25.)

I recently attended a lecture by an astronomer who talked about the origin of the universe as presently understood. One thing that I found interesting was his statement that about 95% of the stuff in the universe is not visible. This is the appropriately called dark matter and dark energy. The scientists know that dark matter and dark energy exist because they have gravity, and that can be detected by its effects, but otherwise there’s nothing to be seen.

To eliminate awkwardness, and since Dr. Einstein has shown that matter and energy are equivalent, I’m going to use the term dark matter to cover both dark matter and dark energy.

So, there is more dark than light in the physical universe. Now the lecturer probably doesn’t know this, but Gnostics were saying this a couple of millennia ago. The darkness in the physical world is what is prevalent, not the light. This is not just the invisible “dark matter” that the astronomers are puzzling over, but also the moral darkness that also is a large part of physical existence for humans.

Our negative feelings about the physical world are easy to justify just from the daily news reports. War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death. Every day is the Last Day somewhere in the world. No blaring trumpets, no angels fluttering around like butterflies wielding swords—I guess today there would have AKs or M-16s—no seven-headed dragons or other nightmarish monsters out of a Bosch painting. Just the hell of everyday existence, often inflicted not by natural disasters but by archonic actions, that is, by humans on the via Regis Mundi, the road of darkness.

As I said, the astronomers have no idea what this dark matter material actually is, and I’m certainly not going to try to guess, but I am going to use this as a metaphor to our situation here in the world.

So, 95% of the physical universe is dark, unseen, not light, either physical, nor, I suspect, spiritual. The astronomers and physicists may eventually tell us what this is, but what it also is, is a symbol for our predicament as spiritual people in the very non-spiritual physical world. The darkness is not necessarily the absence of light as a physical phenomenon, it is something that is prevalent in the physical universe, in its actual nature. It is not is specific spots and areas, apparently, but pervasive throughout the universe.

The darkness is almost everywhere, but the light is not. The spiritual being is, as it were, part of the small amount of light that is in the world. But this is to our advantage. We stand in the darkness of the physical world and look for the light, and, because we are actively looking for it, can—at least from time to time—actually see it. We see it because the light contrasts with the darkness. As the anonymous author of the “Dialogue of the Savior” says, we see the light because we are standing in the darkness. The light is so contrastive with the darkness that it is hard to miss, can only be missed by ignoring it, or by thinking that the physical world, the part pervaded by those who case their tails thinking that that which attracts their eyes is what will bring them salvation and knowledge of the Light. This is a deception created by the Rex Mundi, the master illusionist who would distract us from the true light which we should be seeking.

But this is the irony of our search. The light would not be visible if it weren’t for the darkness. We have to keep this in mind. The darkness is necessary to see the light. But we err, and we do so grievously, when we mistake anything bright and shiny in the physical would for the Light.

The dark matter hides from the astronomers; it is only detected by gravitational effects, not by direct observation. The Light can be this way also, subtle in its influence. But as light in the physical world is less, so much less, than the dark, we have to be careful not to give up. “Despair is a sin,” we are often told, and this is true. If we despair, even for an instant, we can be irretrievably lost.

So don’t despair. Look for the light that the darkness enables us to see.

Thomas Mann, "Doktor Faustus", and Hating your Job.

Last Friday most people commemorated the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of northern France. But it was also the 141^st birthday of German author Thomas Mann.

Like a lot of German intellectuals he spent the war years in the US; opposition to the Nazi regime and a Jewish wife made this a necessity. While here he wrote what is considered his magnum opus Doktor Faustus: the Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a Friend. Usually seen as a description of Germany’s descent into political madness in an allegorical retelling of the original Faust story, my slow reading of John Woods more recent translation has made me think that, while the traditional interpretation is a valid one—it was the one pushed by Mann himself—there is something else in the novel, something a bit more personal for the author, and that is his attitude toward writing and the creative process.

Stylistically this is a dense book, quite unlike Buddenbrooks, the novel which was the main reason for his getting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Long descriptive passages have replaced the dialog of Buddenbrooks, and the vocabulary is a lot more immense. I can read passages in the earlier novel in German without too many trips to the dictionary; not so with the later one—and that’s not including the “Pact Scene” with its faux 16^th century diction. As I said, a dense book.

But as I made my way through the story, I was getting a feeling that there was something else going on, that the grand allegory of Germany’s descent into the Hell of the Third Reich wasn’t all of it. A couple of things triggered this.

(1)  The admission by Mann that the narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, is a parody of himself. (One parallel: Mann played the violin; Zeitblom plays the somewhat archaic and obsolete viola d’amour.)

(2)  That to achieve the level of genus that he wants, Leverkühn deliberately sleeps with a prostitute that he knows has syphilis, and he knows because she told him. I found this part really annoying because it inverts the usual portrayal of a Muse as, if not chaste like Dante’s Beatrice, at least not at the opposite end of the moral scale. This prompted a rude marginalia at p. 166: “Fuck you, Paul Thomas Mann; the creative Muse is NOT a diseased whore!!”

I’m not about to claim that this is an original observation—the secondary literature on Mann and Doktor Faustus is pretty immense and I’m not about to even try to go through it—but if this be a correct observation, then it represents a peculiar situation for Mann: doing something for a living that he does well but doesn’t like doing.

There are no doubt other examples, probably a lot, of people in this situation, in all kinds of jobs. But not many have a Nobel Prize.

(Posted on 11 June for 6 June: besser spät als nie.)

Initial Post

At the moment I'm undecided what will be the theme, if any, of this blog. There are some links on the left to blogs which I enjoy, and which you might also. More will be added later.

 I'm hoping to have an actual post up tomorrow, if I can get it written in time. It will cover a non-military anniversary that falls on June 6th, although there is a connection to World War II..