"It is not too much to conclude that the future of the world depends upon the continued performance of this dialogue that resolvedly refuses closeure and buoyantly offers newness.

MORE OF WALTER BREUGGEMANN'S An Unsettled God as an Advent thought.

Regulation via Imagination

What we have in the biblical text is a human document, a product of daring, evocative human imagination.  But serious readers of this text of human imagination regularly are recruited, in the process of being addressed, to the conviction that what is surely daring artistic human imagination is, at the same time, an act of divine revelation.  There is something different here that insists always on being "strange and new."  What is revealed here is a Holy One who is undomesticatedly available for dialogic transaction; and because of dialogical transaction, what is revealed here, as well, is mature personhood that is commensurate with the undomesticated fidelity of the Holy One: "until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13); "It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ (Collosians 1:28).  I cite these texts (with their use of the word "mature" [Greek telos] not to tilt the discussion in a christological direction, but to notice that the fully formed human person, in this relationship, is one who is engaged in the dialogical transaction of faith and obedience.  Well before this particular epistolary formulation, Israel had understood that "maturity" as a creature concerns life congruent with the creator God.  I judge, moreover, that Israel would further claim that the same "maturity" (completeness, Hebrew tam) may well pertain to every partner of YHWH, every creature - human, nonhuman, Isreal, nations - for the creator God summons all creatures to maturity.

The reason I stress that the biblical testimony is revelation-as-human-imagination is that the text tradition fully delivers on adequate partners for YHWH, partners who are capable of sustained dialogic transactions of fidelity.  Israel, in its formation and transmission of the text, found itself drawn out beyond itself into this always lively, redefining transaction.  And while the framers and transmitters of the textual tradition lived a quite concrete human life - of family, of sexuality, of money and property - they also understood that life in faithful intentionality was a performance of an ongoing transaction that caused it to be different in the world.  Beyond its own performance, moreover, it also imagined (was led by the spirit to imagine) that all other creatures are also partners in the same God and so recuited into the same dialogic transaction.  Thus Israel could construe the life of sea monsters and birds and creeping things as YHWH's creaturely partners (see Psalm 148:7-10).  And it could in like manner discern Nebuchadnezzar as "servant of YHWH" (Jeremiah 25:9; 27:6) and the unwitting Cyrus as "YHWH's messiah" (Isaiah 45:1).  It could imagine in the sweep of its performance that all of life is drawn into this dialogic transaction.

The commensurability between dialogic God and dialogic partner is well articulated by Jurgen Moltmann.  In his thoughtful discussion, Moltmann has contrasted the apathetic God and the God capable of pathos.  Then he extrapolates:

"In the sphere of the apathetic God man becomes a homo apatheticus.  In the situation of the pathos of God he becomes homo sympatheticus.   The divine pathos is reflected in man's participation, his hopes and his prayers.  Sympathy is the openness of a person to the present of another.  It has the structure of dialogue.  In the pathos of God, man is filled with the spirit of God.  He becomes the friend of God, feels sympathy with God and for God.  He does not enter into a mystical union but into a sympathetic union with God.  He is angry with God's wrath.  He suffers with God's suffering.  He loves with God's love.  He hopes with God's hope."

The human person stands alongside YHWH in engagement with the tribulation and wonder of the world.  In the exposition that follows in this volume, we dare to imagine as well that YHWH's other partners are also drawn into the same dialogic structure of friendship, wrath and hope.  There is of course a great deal at stake in this dialogic interaction of God with God's partners.  The religious temptation to dissolve the dialogue into an authoritarian monologue is matched by the temptation to self-authorizing autonomy.  Both authoritarianism and autonomy are temptations that are everywhere around us.  The offer of technological solutions to relational problems is an encompassing temptation among us.  Continuing attentiveness to this textual tradition is an affirmative reminder that our God-given, God-engaged creatureliness is of another ilk.  It is not too much to conclude that the future of the world depends upon the continued performance of this dialogue that resolvedly refuses closure and buoyantly offers newness.

The first paragraph of this made me think of how many proud and arrogant atheists have declared that they rejected belief in God at the age of 6 or 9 or 14 based on their thoughts or experiences reacted to at that age or, in one case I read in William James's Varieties of Religious Experiences, the expressed disdain of his older brother at one of those ages, not even on his own thinking.  In a seasonal vein, the sometimes heard disdain of belief in God as being the equivalent of a belief in Santa Clause, I remember someone asking how many adults the mocker knew who came to a belief in Santa Clause as a mature adult.  

What Walter Brueggemann and Jurgen Moltmann are talking about is an entirely higher level of mature engagement than that puerile polemical pubescents issue.  As can be seen in the specifics of what they're talking about, it's a serious and adult level call to the kind of maturity that is the topic in this passage.  

But modernism is nothing if not a call to immaturity, certainly as it has devolved in the 20th and 21st centuries that's the case, certainly that has accelerated since the advent of television and the largest part of the internet.  In writing my political thinking online I've several times referred to the passage in Brave New World in which the director of the institute dresses down one of his subordinates for acting too mature and serious.  It's one of the reasons I think Aldous Huxley got a good part of the popular culture of the modern world righter than Orwell did, though the Orwell vision seems to be coming as a result of what Huxley saw coming about.  I don't think either of them had any real way out of that, but I think the kind of thinking presented here does.  But being harder than that of modernist imagination, it will be harder to persuade those damaged by the ambient culture to adopt it.

Anyone who has read the Scriptures and thought about them as deeply as Brueggeman and Moltmann have will come to an understanding of them arriving at a wholly more important and serious ground than those who never actually read them can.  Though, as seen in the Republican-fascist caucus of the house and so much "white evangelical" and "traditional Catholic" discourse, just reading it can get you, if anything, wronger than the mockers.  What the mockers mock, after all, is generally exactly that "literal, fundamentalists" reading of Scripture.  Though, really, it's generally some later church based doctrinal or dogmatic assertion that they find so much use for in their mockery.

The radicality of this view of God is seen in how universal God's scope of concern and activity in making covenants is.  As I've also pointed out, the Scripture says explicitly that God makes covenants with "all flesh" that God has had covenantal relations with many nations, some of them enemies of Israel, even with those who conquer and drive Israel into exile and who rule over Israel as despotic colonial exploiters.  God specifically told them that they would have to wait hundreds of years before they could inhabit the land that was promised to Abraham because the People who were living there had a covenant with God which would not lapse to the point of default for that time.  God also warned Israel that the covenant with them was only good for as long as they honored their obligations under it.  That should be a warning to anyone who is tempted to practice "self-authorizing autonomy," a product of "an authoritarian monologue."  In the section between where I left off and where I started on the comments on An Unsettling God, Walter Brueggeman quotes George Steiner as saying, "It is the Hebraic intuition that God is capable of all speech-acts except that of monologue which has generated our arts of reply, of questioning and counter-creation."  Which leads me to wonder if idolatry is a peculiarly human act based on such "authoritarian monologue" in which we imagine our imaginations are capable of containing God but only is able to come up with a metaphor for God that we, then, mistake as the reality of God.  I don't recall ever getting into a brawl over religion in which such an imagined complete God wasn't the focus of the disagreement.  It's possible to have an open-ended imagination of God, such a God will never be swept aside like a pubescent atheist will, though such a God will never be fully grasped and anyone who tries to is foolish.  I think that's the God that these two theologians are talking about.

I also think it's the God that Luke quotes Mary as presenting in the Magnificat.  Of course, the God she conceived of was the same God, that conception being based in the Hebrew Scriptures.    

I'm finding that practically every page of Walter Brueggemann's book is good Advent reading.

Hate Mail 2 - And I can't understand why they did it because they didn't get anything for it. The pensions they were promised, they were never paid,

IT MIGHT BE useful to start with something I remembered listening to from the historian and biographer Joseph Ellis, which I think sums up the situation I was referring to when I said the soldiers who fought the American Revolution had been betrayed and cheated by the United States Constitution and, in fact, they'd started to be cheated almost as soon as the ink was dry on the treaty that ended that war.  Ellis's remarks are in bold italics, the interviewer's interjections in plain bold

Washington isn't that good a tactician but he comes to an elemental strategic insight.  He doesn't have to win, the British have to win.  And if he can sustain the Continental Army and avoid annihilation of the Continental Army, eventually the British will decide it's not worth continuing.  And that's pretty much what happens.  And that's an elemental insight, it's called a Fabian strategy, after the Roman General Lucius Quintatus Fabius in the Punic wars, it's quasi guerilla tactics, it's not quite guerilla because he's got a regular, conventional army there.  But it's a recognition  that the strategic center of the rebellion or what we might call the insurgency isn't a place it's not Boston, it's not Philadelphia, it's not Charleston, they capture all those places, not New York.  The strategic center of the rebellion is the Continental Army.  And if he can hold that intact and avoid fighting except when he's got superior numbers and a strategic, excuse me, tactical advantage, then ultimately the British will eventually give up.

You know, we don't really win the American Revolution, it's the British decide to go leave.  And they have a lot invested in this war and the war it's most comparable with is the Vietnam war.  Only the British are the Americans, in this particular case, and the Americans are like the Vietnamese.  

And the British really come to the conclusion early on that this war must be won for reasons akin to the domino theory.  If we lose North America we lose the Caribbean, if we lose the Caribbean we lose Ireland, if we lose Ireland we lose India. And it's this notion that everything's at stake and therefore you're willing to spend enormous amounts of money and resources.  And they have a delivery system, a banking system, a logistical system, a military profession that's much more sophisticated than anything the United States has.  

One of the things I got out of the research I did for this book is how unbelievably fortunate the United States was because the States often refused to meet their quotas in terms of money or troops.  There's a hard core of three to four thousand young men who served for the duration.  A significant portion of them are African American, about fifteen percent.  It's the last war in which African Americans serve alongside whites not in segregated units until the Korean War.  That's an amazing thing.  

- Somehow that's a fact that's been hidden in American history.

Right, right, and that's . . . and it's also one of the reasons Washington starts thinking differently about slavery.  He's commanding a lot of African American troops that are fighting bravely.  

But these three or four thousand guys aren't representative Americans.  They're ex-slaves, they're  indentured servants, they're recently arrived Irish and or Scottish immigrants, they're fourth-sons that don't have any inheritance, they're not yeoman farmer types. 

And they won the war.  It's as simple as. . . if they hadn't stayed together and been the nucleus the Continental Army would have probably dissolved.  And I can't understand why they did it because they didn't get anything for it.  The pensions they were promised, they were never paid, they starved through out most of the war because they weren't provided with food on a regular basis.  They were in rags.  When the British Army marched out of Yorktown, they laughed at the Continental Army because they looked like a bunch of ragamuffins.

- Didn't they call that The World Turned Upside Down?

They say that but we're not sure that really happened.   There's different sources on that. And the British commander didn't want to turn his sword over to Washington and wanted to give it to Rochambeau the French commander, instead because they were embarrassed losing to these people that looked like they were, you know, bums.  And yet this is the group that won the war. And that story hasn't been told.  I mean Washington won the war by being the Commander in Chief that stayed the course for seven and a half years.  But these guys, the core of the Army, what he calls "the soldiery." He said it, he said at the end of the war that if someone ever tries to write the history of this, they will be accused of writing fiction because no one will believe that a group of poor young men, ill clad, ill fed sustained themselves for this long against a much superior force.  And they did, so Washington gives them credit.  

So much to point out, though the point that the soldiers who fought the revolutionary war, the ones that Washington, himself credited with winning the war were, undoubtedly, cheated of the equality they were promised in the Declaration of Independence, most of all the Black soldiers but also the ones who, as well, were cheated out of the pensions they were promised and the equality they were led to believe was the intention of the aristocrats and slave-owners who declared independence intended to be the result.  

The Jeffersonian ideal which is, interestingly, identified by many Jefferson scholars is rule by "yeomen farmers" explicitly held up those who held ownership of land as the rightful rulers.  Certainly Black People, especially those held in slavery by many such "yeomen" were excluded, probably the majority of free Black People and free men of any ethnicity were excluded from the lauded Jeffersonian ideal, the ideal which was achieved in giving land owners and owners of sufficient property the vote but which was extended only with enormous struggle, sacrifice in work, lives and even generations of struggle.  As the U. S. Supreme Court is seeing to it, what progress that was made in the 20th century is being turned back on the basis of the Constitution and the Court's own self-granted powers to nullify laws such as the Voting Rights Act and, though not admitting to that, the Civil War Amendments.

I would love to know what percentage of those who fought the Revolution had any actual vote that led to the adoption of the Constitution, what is known is that in many, perhaps all of the states, in some locations, the tactic of limiting the vote on the representatives who would ratify the thing would tend to cut most of them out due to the property requirements to vote.  Not even all propertied white males of voting age participated in that, in many cases by the design of those who wanted to ram adoption through.   The thing was entirely short of what the Declaration of Independence promised, the document which the Reverend Martin Luther King jr. called a "promissory note" which has never been honored as of 1963, it still hasn't been honored.  It won't be without facing the history of the Constitution and its adoption, the slave-power and financier-power rigging of it that has never been amended out of the thing, the very things that Trump and the Republican-fascists as the overt segregationists, the Jim Crow Senate, the Plessy Supreme Court, etc. have used to forever cheat us out of what was promised and the lie that those things were fulfilled in the Constitution.  

Hate Mail 1 - Why I Don't Trust Materialists Especially Those Who Pretend To Be Lefties

IN STUDYING the American left of which I am arguably a part,  I have come to distrust the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left" which I now see as no left at all but a variant of the same anti-democratic gangerism that fascism is.  Hardly a week goes by when I don't hear an ideological materialist claim that free-will is impossible and, needless to say, materialists don't believe there is any such a thing as sin or moral obligation, except as some kind of social convention.  No leftist who holds any such beliefs can be anything but an anti-democratic thug waiting to mature into full depravity.  

That wasn't always the case, though I was never a Marxist I was a socialist and think the tragedy of socialism is that it so early was co-opted by materialist-atheist-scientism, anti-Christianity and other forces that never would do what any real socialism should have been based in, admit to the spiritual character of human beings and human life.  There were some early Christian socialists and even some who persist till today but socialism as a category of thought and in any productive political sense was certainly ruined for the present by that early takeover by ideological materialism, atheism and scientism.  I do respect some socialists, including some who started out as Marxists such as Victor Berger but who, in the necessities of human life, chose for practical reality over academic and journalistic fantasy.  I don't know, if he had lived longer than he did, what his socialism would have been though, like the Marxism of the great legal scholar Louis Boudin.  He was an early critic of Russian and then Soviet Communism.  I suspect that seeing Marxism in reality instead of theory, he gave it up.  I like to think gave it up in disgust.  His change of heart contrasts with that of the Trotskyites who, once Trotsky was murdered by Stalin's agents, saw no prospect of their ideology taking power and converted to American fascism, both the corporate-academic type and, in some cases, the indigenous racist form of that, as well.  American conservatism to one extent or another is an inevitable accommodation to white supremacy as that elsewhere is an accommodation to their own indigenous fascism.  And that is absolutely relevant to my response to the objection to what I said about materialist-atheist-scientism and its anti-democratic tendency.  

I simply don't trust people who believe human beings, living beings, are merely objects without any durable and consequential moral obligations and responsibilities owed them or inherent rights endowed equally on us by God.  I might, at times, find some of what they say on some things has some merit, though much less frequently what they do - in my observation and experience they're not very big on the doing part of that - but I can say that I don't trust them in the end.   I think the history of that secular left warrants that refusal to trust them, I hold them up to a very high level of skepticism, as high as that which I hold anyone else to.  As I recently pointed out, I hold two recent Popes I didn't like at all and trusted not very much to that same level of skepticism though, as I admitted, I agreed with them on some specific points such as the moral depravity of considering human beings as a means to an end.  

I especially distrust the self-identified media of the left, by and large, with a few, a very few, exceptions to that rule.  I especially distrust those tiny organs of the American left who, after witnessing and experiencing Trump, Republican-fascism, the Bush II regime and the Reagan and Bush I administrations before that are sandbagging Joe Biden and Democrats.  I totally distrust In These Times, TYT, and a myriad of other impotent organs who never produce anything but undermining Democrats' chances of winning elections and gaining and holding offices and making real change in real law.  Joe Biden and the Democrats in his first two years made more change than all of the lefty media and all of the lefty "third parties" have in their entire existence magnified by any large number.  And that was even with a Senate not in actual Democrats control but with that once darling of the play left, the atheist Sinema and the corporate gangster Manchin in it.  I can report that even as I support the Democratic Party, there are a number of Democrats who I have blasted and wished to burn in hell - I don't hold back my skepticism of anyone who does wrong.  There are even Democrats I once admired highly, such as Barney Frank who I don't much trust now.

About actually doing things and producing things, the highest achievement of any socialist office holder in American history is Bernie Sanders' committee chairmanship in the Senate under Democratic control from where he has done some actual things, making him probably the highest achieving socialist in American history, even as his former dead-end supporters turn on him as he actually does things that they may have claimed to want.  I don't think the American secular-left, at least in its very large play-left faction, really wants to do anything but whine and pose and compete for attention and, in those parts of it that are actually money making, suckering the gullible into sending them money.   I am fully confident that some of them are on the take from Republican-fascists and other billionaire ratfuckers of American democracy.  I think in that they are not markedly different from the Trump crime family operation, just far more penny-ante.  I think the Greens are one of the bigger of those minor con jobs as well as just about any other "third party" effort.  I think RFJ jr. is perhaps even more vile than the Putin asset, Jill Stein.   Though she is plenty vile in herself.

If you want evidence, I've given evidence in scads here.  I'd suggest looking for "Marxism" "Green Party" "The Left Forum" "third party" and other such seach terms, individual MAS lefties, too, Lillian Hellman among so many others.  Look for "The Nation Magazine,"  "In These Times,"  "The Progressive," "ACLU."  I seldom wrote about them without presenting evidence, citations and links.  Look for "the civil liberties industry".  

The American secular left has pretty much nothing good to show for it's existence and anything it may claim to have achieved it has more than taken back in its usefulness to Republican-fascist and the corporate media use of them to discredit the real left, which, by the way, is often overtly religious in its character and motivation.  As recently as 2006 I believed the secular even anti-religious "left" was a vitally important part of making any real change, I now think that any good change it had a pinky finger in would soon be endangered by them and their ideological program and posturing.  In many cases the struggle to make change had to contend with bad publicity from their claimed involvement, The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. had that problem.   I more than loathe them, now.  I hold them in the contempt that I do a Max Eastman or Whittaker Chambers (who both started out on the materialist left) and former Trot-neo-cons and the organized atheism that the trust-fund Stalinist Corliss Lamont mounted and financed.  That last one is still is in existence, though much of it has abandoned any political lefty pretensions to push ideological atheism, Lamont's first and true and, really, only love.   I don't trust atheists much, not until they've consistently earned my trust but never if they hold their religious ideology above their claimed devotion to rights and the common good.  I hold the same suspension of trust for white evangelicals and Catholics who, I have to say, sometimes have proven to me that they can be trusted.  Far more than hard core atheists have.

The fact is, the secular left just isn't left enough, it's not even really left at all, as I've pointed out repeatedly about the Left Forum and the lefty magazines, they have to be left behind by the real American left, the left of the Reverend MLK, the left of Dorothy Day and Pax Christi and a myriad of other religious  based People and organizations that are the real, effective, productive left.   I'm many degrees farther to the left now as a Christian leveler than I was as an agnostic socialist.   There is nothing more radical than The Gospel, nothing anywhere.

Women's Voices Chorus - "Magnificat," Christine Donkin

 

Women’s Voices Chorus – 

"Magnificat," Christine Donkin (b. 1976)
Conductor/Artistic Director: Allan Friedman
Pianist: Deborah Hollis
Soloist: Kim McCorkle

Magnificat – Joanna Forbes L'Estrange | St. Thomas Girl Chorister Course 2022

 

On Wednesday, July 27, the Choristers of the Saint Thomas Girl Chorister Course were joined by the Gentlemen of the Choir for Choral Evensong.

This setting of the ‘Magnificat’ by Joanna Forbes L’Estrange from her King’s College Service was a chorister favorite.

Joanna Forbes L’Estrange is a British singer, composer and choir director. Having graduated from Oxford University with an MA (Hons) music degree, she began her career touring the world as Soprano/Musical Director of the five-time Grammy® award-winning vocal group The Swingles. Since then, she has continued to perform, write and record music in a huge variety of genres.

the God of Israel is unlike the God of any scholastic theology and unlike any of the forces imagined in any of the vague spritualities available among us

AS IS TRUE EVERY YEAR RMJ does the best Advent posts.   I'll leave what I was writing aside with the recommendation to read his, today and go with a few provocative quotes from, who else, Walter Brueggemann's An Unsettled God - he quotes, Jurgen Moltmann in this place and I'll riff off of that with other passages from other things:

God in Pathos

We may take one further step in articulating the categories through which we will understand "God as partner."  The general dialogic, relational quality of covenantal faith was given special and focused attention by Abraham Heschel in his exposition of YHWH's pathos.  While the notion of pathos, especially lined out by Heschel, may be taken specifically in the capacity of God to suffer, in fact the implication of Heschel's work is much broader.  It concerns the engagement of YHWH with Israel and with the world, and therefore YHWH's vulnerability and readiness to be impinged upon.  The particular focus of Heschel on God's hurt in the traditions of Hosea and Jeremiah makes abundantly clear that the God of Israel is unlike the God of any scholastic theology and unlike any of the forces imagined in any of the vague spritualities available among us.  The particular character of this God is as available agent who is not only able to act but is available to be acted upon.

I may mention two derivative studies that are primally informed by the work of Heschel.  On the one hand, Kazo Kitamori has poignantly written of God's pain.  Special attention may be given to his appendix concerning Jeremiah 31:20 QNE Isaiah 63:15.  Kitamori notes how discerningly both Luther and Calvin, without any sentimentality, were able to take  notice of God's pain.  The articulation of that pain, moreover, required the poetic imagination of ancient Israel to speak in terms of bodily upset and consternation, resisting any attempt to permit this God to float off as an ephmeral spirit.  The God of dialogic engagement is fully exposed to the realities of life in the world that we might most readily term "creaturely,"  except that those reatlies are, on the lips of the poets, the realities of the Creator as well.

It is obvious that this line of reasoning, so characteristically Jewish, has immense implications for Christian theology.  Jurgen Moltmann, informed by the work of Heschel,  has forcefully carried the issue of God's vulnerability in Christian theology:

"It was Abraham Heschel who, in controversy with Hellenism and the Jewish philosophy of religion of Jehuda Malevi, Maimonides and Spinoza which was influenced by it, first described the prophets' proclamation of God as pathetic theology.  The prophets had no "idea" of God, but understood themselves and the people in the situation of God.  Heschel called this situation of God the pathos of God.  It has nothing to do with the irrational human emotions like desire, anger, anxiety, envy or sympathy, but describes the way in which God is affected by events and human actions and suffering in history.  He is affected by them because he is interested in his creation, his people and his right.  The pathos of God is intentional and transitive, not related to itself but to the history of the covenant people.  God already emerged from himself at the creation of the world "in the beginning."  In the covenant he enters into the world and the people of his choice.  The "history" of God cannot therefore be separated from the history of his people.  The history of the divine pathos is embedded in this history of men. . . .

Abraham Heschel has developed his theology of the divine pathos as a dipolar theology.  God is free in himself and at the same time interested in his covenant relationship and affected by human history.  In this covenant relationship he has spoken of the pathos of God and the sympatheia of man, and in doing so has introduced a second bipolarity."

Moltmann has considered the way in which classical Christian theology has asserted the apatheia of God.  It has done so by acknowledging the suffering of the Son in which the Father does not participate.  Moltmann has shown, against this propensity, that in Trinitarian thought the Father as well as the Son suffers:

"To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms.  The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son.  The Fartherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son."

Moltmann's statement is completely congruent, in the categories of Christian theology, with what Heschel had already discerned in Israel's prophets.  The God of Christians, understood in the midst of God's revelation to ancient Israel, is a God deeply at risk in the drama of fidelity and infidelity in the world.  

----------------

Which leads me to this passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James in which Spinoza's mathematical materialism as an assumed oracle of what it cannot be shown to be relevant to comes into play.  

The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.” And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written: “Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel—quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform — menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold‐blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul’s vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.

No doubt there are more to the point passages in Spinoza to oppose against the Scriptural presentation of the pathos of God and our more banal reality but that's what I had available here on this Sunday morning.  

This footnote by William James, though not attached to this part of his text comes to mind, as well.

When I read in a religious paper words like these: “Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_,” I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the intellect’s pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every one should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New York, 1898, 1899, 1900).

I attempted to read Bowne, struggling with his "Personalism" for a few weeks and found it to be entirely arid and pointless.   I had problems with the later and quite different personalism of the French Catholic tradition but it wasn't as bad as that.   That school of personalism is relevant to the theology of JPII and Benedict XVI which I touched on here last week, which might be why I remembered the footnote. 

There's probably more to be found in listening to any setting of the Canticle of Mary than in such religion under the yoke of philosophy.