One has only to appreciate Locke’s personal involvement with Newton’s experiments with light and his (still half-baked) attempts to draw out the philosophical implications of those to see that his interest is in education and “the truth which sets you free”. This includes the truth that “will” (surely an Augustinian rather than Christian invention) is not a faculty, while “freedom” from expoitation by others is a “power” which is normally acquired during the programming of our own mind. “So far as a man has power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of HIS OWN MIND [my emphasis], so far is a man FREE” (Essay Bk II ch XXI). It follows that a human mind is not TRULY free which is not adequately informed about or appreciative of the state of reality, being enslaved to learned preferences or erronious directions.

Locke’s objection to monarchy is, let us note, to Filmer’s “own bare words … For however [he] seems to condemn the novelty of the contrary opinion, yet I believe it would be hard for him to find any age or country of the world but this which have asserted [enslavement to] monarchy to be ‘jure Divino’” (Two Treatises, Bk I ch I). In other words, he is objecting to an English Protestant doctrine premised upon the Fall and not the Resurrection of the Word of God.

In short I agree with Dan. I will add, would-be commentators should read originals in context, not slavishly follow other people’s misunderstandings.

One point about Christian hermits: The “world” they turned away from was the corrupt social world of late antiquity, not the created order. This is quite clear in Evagrius’ “Chapters on Prayer” which is to my mind the best expression we have of the spiritual itinerary of the desert fathers.

Firstly, Gnosticism of the first and second centuries itself was hardly just one unmistakable entity. True, there were some of them who were Manicheans. But there were many other trends. The idea that the created world is good is the full view of Christianity, as the Gospel of John teaches us: “the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” The idea of the spirit being imprisoned in the material body is not foreign to Christianity either; wasn’t it the Christ who taught us that the people in Paradise are made of pure spirit?

In a way, the emphasis modernity puts on will is the exaggerated and deviated form of the orthodox Christianity (it being the religion with the most emphasis on Will), rather than a renewal of ancient heresy. The ancient heretics might have misunderstood and misinterpreted the notions of inherent truth (“The kingdom of God is within you”), or the evil of the world (from which the true hermits, saints and monks would flee). But for most part regarding them as the predecessors of modernity is superficial.

I would actually dispute every claim you make about Locke, but this would involve us in a detailed examination of his writings. That will be for my individualism book. What I will say now is the following. You have to look carefully at what Locke means by all these things (like God and human dignity) and ask yourself whether he is at all talking about them in anything like the sense in which the Christian tradition does. Your first claim I would dispute most strongly. Does Locke believe in the goodness of creation? I think much of the answer lies buried in the Essay on Human Understanding, and that would be where our argument would have to venture. The Second Treatise is a political work and makes a lot of rhetorical accommodations to his audience that do not, I think, accurately reflect Locke’s own point of view. But even in that text, the assertion that he makes in chapter two that our dignity is grounded on our being “God’s property” is undermined when he comes to examine property more minutely in chapter five.

Come now.

Locke believed in the goodness of creation. Locke believed in God. Locke believed the created world was redeemed through Jesus Christ. Locke believed in innate human dignity. Marx did not believe the world was created. Marx was an atheist. Marx did not believe this world was redeemed. Marx did not believe there was any special value attached to human life.

I am not likely to take your arguments seriously if you include these kinds of statements.

Mark, William Blake fits the bill of one of my favorite Ed Abby quips :”Only the half mad are wholly alive”

As to Empedocles’ query to Shiffman about the possibility of Congregationalism…….be careful what is wished for as demonstrated by the following yuletide parable:

The Wife and I hold an annual Christmas Eve party for some of what we like to call the local Orphans…or people who don’t have family close at hand. Well, it is an ecumenical affair with my wife the Jewess cooking a pork roast and when the timing is right, lighting the menorah next to the giant 18′ Christmas tree she makes me, the Half-bred near-Mormon heretic erect …..and another Jewish guest circumcises the roast while the dominant Christians , both Catholic and Protestant enjoy the Christmas Music and Hootch Table. One year, we completed the circuit and had a young Muslim exchange student from Uganda present and when the Yule tree keeled over in the crush….a longstanding tradition……and I erupted into a very unholy stream of picturesque invective threatening to launch the infernal pagan vessel off the back deck …the Ugandan lad smiled and said one of the few english words he knew how to pronounce perfectly:”NASA!”. This, of course cheered my passions despite the devastation. For a moment, I considered holding a Christmas Eve countdown and duct-taping the incessantly shedding family cat to the top before firing it southward but…., I digress as usual. Well, it seems that the local Congregationalist contingent who struggle in from the white church on the Green after the Christmas Eve service were unusually somber one year. A first round of drinks would not even lift the atmosphere of confused melancholy and after I asked what might possibly be wrong, I was amazed to hear a summary of what the Congregational Minister had told the assembled….. on Christmas Eve of all days: She told them that the Virgin Birth was not confirmed scientifically and that the Three Wise Men were, (and this part really added to my sadistic pleasure in the story) “Zoroastrian Wizards”. Well, I’m all for intellectual skepticism and the exploration of competing historical narratives as the spirit may move but on Christmas Eve? Only after I hatched a plan to sponsor the printing of a hundred bumper stickers asking “Who Boi*ked Mary? ” (Cheeks, you can start praying for me now please) and inaugurating the run by sticking one on the Minister’s car during a night raid did they relent from the dismay of hearing one’s Beautiful Christmas Story pedestrianized so. The Congregationalists would seem to have an awful lot of ministers who have a poor sense of timing and like to mix in the trendily temporal a tad too much. This aint Cotton Mather’s Puritans by any stretch of multicultural reveries. Needless to say, the Congregationalists at one time in New England made the Reverend Creflo Dollar look unenterprising. Nothing…and I mean NOTHING was done without sanction and a proper notation in the book of taxable property. Separation of Church and State , that thing they had fled England to enjoy, lost its charms once their religion enjoyed exclusive occupancy.

I’m with D.W., which is why I think two of the best things I do as a teacher are 1) make students confront William Blake and 2) make students spend time every week staring at a tree or pond. Confronting reality means experiencing the exquisite tension between the perfection of form and the excess of presence and promise that shines through that form. This is the experience of beauty and goodness, both in what IS in nature and what promises or proposes to be in poetry and visual art. Technology flatters the love of dominion and control by framing experience in accord with the narrowest limits of our desires. Poetry and nature demand that we acknowledge the farthest and most difficult to articulate reaches of our desires, and thus they confront us with the otherness that beckons us out of the selves that we can delude ourselves are “safer”. This is part of what Ratzinger describes as the humility of being.

Dude!
You are a terrific writer and thinker! Apostate? I don’t think so. More the poet than philosopher? Maybe, but you see the horizon and that makes you a philosopher, yet its all about free will and that messy business with Augustine and his “peccatum originale,” coined in his best selling “Ad Simplicianum.”
I do read you in much the same manner I drink Buffalo Trace; slowly and deliberately, with much the same effect! You are the Vietnamese Rat Sauce (I pour it on everything)of the Front Porch Republic, alway adding flavor and zest!
Now on to serious matters: Could you possible ask Ms. Dalton, one more time, for a story? YOU should ask because your writng is so poetic (I think she likes that!) and I don’t want her mad at me. If this works out, we can ask Bill Kauffman for a story too!
In closing, I should tell you I’m going to put you on my prayer list (I pray for people!), if you don’t mind. And, if you do mind, I’m going to pray for you anyway.
Yours-in-Christ(or the Logos, if you prefer),
Bob Cheeks

Stewardship demands that one actually love that which one is attempting to conserve. Unfortunately, Loathing still appears to be raining down out of the bombay doors of the improver’s air force so the liberation of violence and fear marches on. Titanic Man finds an enemy to embrace in himself and given his predilection for energetic aggrandizement, the enemy in the mirror becomes greater than expected. Perfection would appear to have a principle occupation called suicide.

As an apostate, I’ve always enjoyed the manifest beauty contained within the messy poetry that has come since a random stellar purportedly body deep-sixed an epoch of gargantuan Reptiles. The dance of continents across the globe and the waxing and waning of ice and shallow seas possesses an awesome pageant that makes telos seem somehow besides the point because with energy and life like this, who needs perfection? However, that the ordered anarchy of biologic evolution, in concert with a benevolent if vigorous troposphere could create such a remarkable garden as ours…well, it beats a certain and undeniable mysticism into chance. One is forced to ponder the fact that If chance had no underlying divinity, poetry would be unnecessary and it cannot be that poetry is merely a mechanistic product of a randomly clinical intellect in service to chance. Without poetry, mankind is merely a slave digging a grave. Technological progress, in this age would appear to be a race to escape poetry by a process of distraction and busy hands and so it would seem that when all has come under the knife and all we have left is our poetic urges as life ebbs away, that grave we stand in has earned the appellation “Terror”. For me then, uncertainty becomes a portal into the possibilities of the divine. The Crunchy Pope hands my skeptical relativism back with a wink from the ages of both past and future.