A Conversation with Fr. Probolé

A brief interview with Fr. Probolé, one of whose sermons I posted here. I've added  Wikipedia links to the technical terms.

You self-identify as a “Neo-Sethian”. Could you explain this a bit?

Of course. The Sethians were a Gnostic sect whose theology we know fairly clearly from the heresiologists and some of the Nag Hammadi texts.  They believed that the material universe—the Cosmos—was imperfect, if not evil, and the True God was totally separate from the Cosmos. The phrase “true god” is an  awkward term, and I use the word Pneute, which means “the god” in Coptic for the one god who is separate from the Cosmos. Pneute didn’t create the physical world. That was done by a lesser god or demigod, the Demiurge. Since he was imperfect, the Cosmos is itself imperfect, since an imperfect being could hardly create something perfect.  The story is too complicated for me to give a brief retelling here. You can find a good summary in Bentley Layton’s The Gnostic Scriptures.

But the major difference between the Sethian and orthodox forms of Christianity is in the person of Christ. Christ, because he came from Pneute, is completely a spiritual being, and there is no part of him which is material. Literally, it is not possible that he entered into matter as described in the orthodox belief in the Incarnation. The Jesus whom the apostles know was a completely spiritual being and he came to us to teach us how to transcend the material world. He did not enter into a physical body but assumed the apparent form of a man so as to be able to discourse with the apostles and other people. 

In the Gospel of John the idea that Jesus was a human sacrifice is always in the foreground. He is the “lamb of God”, a sacrifice for the sins of humans.

Correct. The belief that Jesus’ death was a human sacrifice “for the remission of sins” is really evil. It amazes me that more orthodox Christians don’t overtly reject this belief. The German theologian Rudolf Bultmann believed that the Fourth Gospel was written in response to a Gnostic teaching. We don’t know if this is true or not, but it seems reasonable to me. In the other gospels the crucifixion is an event inn Jesus’ life. In John’s Gospel it is the primary reason for his life.

Is there any way to get any good out of the bloody story of the crucifixion?

Yes. What is teaches us is that it is possible to transcend the material world, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, as Shakespeare puts it, and enter into the spiritual world. All the sufferings of Jesus, the public humiliation, the flogging, the hanging out in the hot sun, all are symbolic of the trials and work one has to do to transcend the limitations of the physical world. The apparition of Jesus at Pentecost showed the apostles the form of someone who had transcended the physical Cosmos by crucifying the world.

By “crucifying the world” do you mean physical austerities?

Yes and no. If by “physical austerities” you mean hair shirts and self-flagellation, that’s certainly been done in the past. But walking down a street whipping yourself will get you thrown in a mental hospital these days. There are, however, less abusive ways. The physical desires are controllable through self-discipline, prayer, and meditation. Most people have to live in society as a whole, and not in a monastery.

The thing that one has to realize is that that there is an existence beyond the physical, that attaining this is possible, and that this is what we mean by “salvation”, and that it is, in theory, attainable by all.

You don’t have a regular communion service like orthodox Christians, do you?

Correct. We had a yearly celebration that is similar to Pentecost of other Christians. It is a celebration of Jesus’ coming to us to show that we are not prisoners of the material world, and that we can free ourselves and return to Pneute. There is normal foodstuffs and wine, but it is still a religious celebration with hymns and rituals.

And you don’t have a Eucharist service like you find in orthodox Christian churches?

No, we don’t. Hannibal Lecter’s culinary tastes aren’t a part of the means of salvation.

That’s a witty but extremely harsh criticism of the Christian Eucharist.

Thanks. We’re living in the 21^st century, not the Bronze Age, and human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism should not be a part of our rituals, not even symbolically. 

In orthodox Christianity guilt is the Archons means of controlling people. They believe that people must be controlled because they—that is the Archons spiritual and temporal—only want to have power over others. This desire for power comes from the Demiurge, who wants to rule the entire Cosmos. The teaching that humans are basically sinful, perhaps evil, is the greatest means that have to keep humans impure. We become impure, however, by our actions, and not because we are humans. We begin with the handicap that we are spiritual beings living in material bodies, but we are able to overcome that handicap. The Archons, however, teach us that we are imperfect, and that there is nothing that we can do about it.

That is what the French theologian John Calvin thought.

Calvin was an extremist of this line of thought. This belief, however, is a basic part of Christian theology, and has been since Augustine of Hippo, from whom Calvin got this belief. There is no salvation that only comes through belief. One makes the soul pure through various exercises. It is only important to believe that salvation is possible, and that Jesus came to us a model of the means of salvation. The rest comes from one’s own efforts.

Is there salvation outside of your church?

Yes. One is able to find salvation in other organizations and churches—or on one’s own. Jesus is a model and key who came in a certain time and place. Only the arcontic churches say, “outside of us there is no salvation.”

I thank you for your time. Please come again.

Thank you. I will.

Administrivia--tags

I have added tags--called "labels" by Blogger and "Subject Headings" by librarians--to the posts to date. I will try to keep this up, but without too much kipple in the footer.

There has also been an update of the Profile.

Exorcising, not Exercising, Demons.

Funny how time flies when you're doing nothing.

Ignoring the antics of the polyticks helps; less stress on the system, more time for what really needs doing. Circumstances, and the intrusion of "well-meaning" individuals, however, tend to interfere if you're not a hermit.

Not being out in the Egyptian desert with St. Anthony, the unpleasantness of what Fr. Probolé might, in his more erudite moments call the mundus non ordinarius, the abnormal / unordered world, has the habit of butting into the reverie of of one's life. This can happen at the most unwelcome times.

"One's interior demons can be enough of a problem," he once observed, "but if the archonistsas do something stupid and destructive, as is their wont, and you start obsessing on that also, not only will this interfere with your interior work, the two can feed on each other and leave you in worse shape than before. Some people will knock the hermit's life, and living alone forever is not for most people, but for some things you have to be alone--and not like Garbo living in New York, either. If your trying to exorcize your own demons you don't need CNN adding to the infernal menagerie."

Fr. Probolé might be forgiven his cynicism, given his Neo-Sethian viewpoint, but then again, you don't clean your shirts by washing them in dirt.

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.)