On Evagrius Ponticus

Sometimes you just come across these great little gems in the desert.  I've been reading, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism of late, perhaps just to counterbalance the slow dread I feel when yet another example of Rome's fall in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy mirrors the current decay of my own nation.  It is a mixed bag.  I'm not Christian but I'm well-practiced in mentally "translating" works to view them in the best light I can... but it can be tough.  You want to, say, appreciate some of Augustine's good points yet trying to cut through his preoccupation with sexual purity, bizarre-bad arguments that assume their conclusion, and outdated cosmology to get at those gems can be a grueling task.  But then I came across Evagrius.

I'd never heard of this guy before.  He's an early Church member from the latter half of the 4th century who produced a fair number of writings but is apparently more popular in eastern Christianity than in the west (several of his original works in Greek are lost but preserved in Syriac and Armenian).  The selection in the book was from his Praktikos and it fully lived up to its name.

"Love [agape] is the offspring of apatheia; apatheia the flower of ascetical life."

Apatheia, or "without passions", is Evagrius' goal.  It sounds like the sort of idea he may have developed from the Epicureans or Stoics, but in his writings comes across more positive than negative.  That is, he isn't seeking an absence of all passions in order to simply live a peaceful life, but that one must first clear the mind of distracting passions before one can move onto the task of contemplating God and doing good to man.  It has a remarkably Buddhist ring to it, especially when he describes how to go about it:

If any monk wishes experience of the savage demons and to become acquainted with their art, he should observe his tempting thoughts and note down:

their intensification
and diminution,
and their interconnectedness,
and their timing,
and which demons produce what,
and which demon comes after another,
and which does not follow after which;

and he should seek from Christ the inner meanings [logoi] of these things.  They dislike those who approach the ascetic life with greater knowledge, for they wish to shoot in darkness at the upright of heart (Ps 10:2).

It's like an early treatise on being mindful of one's mental processes, and that gaining insight into them is part of the key to reaching a more enlightened state.

Now of course, the talk of demons jumps out.  Evagrius believes in them; they are his mode of explanation as to why we suffer from strange impulses that would lead us away from our goals.  But the thing about them is, he never relies on them for anything else.  For instance, Augustine believed that astrology was the work of demons.  Why?  Because it was actually "real" magic in his mind, but since it wasn't from the Church it couldn't be from God; therefore he had to explain how there must be demons who alter the appearances of the heavens, or bestow favors, in order that astrology sometimes works.  It has the flavor of explaining away a phenomenon, while Evagrius' demons are merely a stand-in mechanism behind genuine observations; it is trivial to mentally update them to mental phenomena.  I mean, just check this description out:

The demon of acedia, which is also called the noonday demon (Ps 90:6), is the most burdensome of all the demons.  It besets the monk at about the fourth hour (10am) of the morning, encircling his soul until about the eight hour (2pm).

[1] First it makes the sun appear to slow down or stop, so the day seems to be fifty hours long.
[2] Then it forces the monk to keep looking out the window and rush from his cell to observe the sun in order to see how much longer it is to the ninth hour, and to look about in every direction in case of any of the brothers are there.
[3] Then it assails him with hatred of his place, his way of life and the work of his hands; that love has departed from the brethren and there is no one to console him.
[4] If anyone has recently caused the monk grief the demon adds this as well to amplify his hatred [of his condition]
[5] It makes him desire other places where he can easily find all that he needs and practice an easier, more convenient craft.  After all, pleasing the lord is not dependent on geography, the demon adds; God is to be worshipped everywhere.
[6] It combines this with remembrance of his relatives and his former way of life, and depicts to him a long life, placing before his eyes a vision of the burdens of the ascetic life.

So, it employs, as they say, every [possible] means to move the monk to heave his cell and flee the racecourse.

No other demon comes immediately after this one; rather, after the struggle the soul receives in turn a peaceful state and unspeakable joy.

This is a remarkably clear-eyed description of those midday doldrums we all experience, when the morning's enthusiasm has worn off and all we can do is tick off the hours, distracting ourselves while knowing we aren't really getting anything done.  Add in the little bits of self-pity at one's frustrations and ruminations, as well as that rather clever observation of how rationalizations work in worshiping God anywhere, and he's nailed it.

You can also see how direct he is in his writing, not carried away by anything other than his goal.  I haven't read his other works to see if this is his style or a byproduct of the focus of this particular treatise, but it gives the writing a real genuineness.  He's here to give us practical tips.  It's like the long-time reader of r/desertascetics has compiled a useful guide for beginners to pin at the top of the subreddit.  "Having trouble with the demon of anger?  People have found that chanting hymns seems to be especially effective.  Self-pity and gloominess?  The word on the street is that serving the sick best dispels those."  Like other hobbyists, the main source of knowledge is not theory but experience, and that makes it incredibly practical:

Do not immediately pray when you are tempted [by other people]; first speak some words with anger to the one pressuring you for when your soul is acted upon by tempting-thoughts prayer cannot be pure.  But if you speak to them with anger you will confuse and utterly destroy the ideas that come from your enemies.  This is also the natural result of anger in the case of good ideas.

"Look, it's all fine that when you feel upset you want to immediately regain your footing via petitionary prayer, but if you're still arguing with that person in your mind it's not going to be very effective.  Sometimes you need to express yourself first in order to help clear your own head."  While not explicitly focused on self-knowledge, it is clear that this all arises from a lot of introspective experience.  Which really brings me to the last part:

We should not be disturbed by the demon that seizes and carries off the nous [mind] towards blasphemy against God and towards unspeakable fantasies that I have not even attempted to record in writing; nor should such things hinder our eagerness.  The Lord is knower of the heart and he knows that even when we were in the world we were not guilty of such insanity.

Where did this sentiment get lost?!?  Seriously.  How much of Christian soul-searching is useless hand-wringing over stray thoughts that we have no control over?  How much mental anguish could have been saved if people just said, "Oh, yeah, that thought randomly wandered in again.  It's a weird one but the Lord knows it means nothing."  Luther at the very least wouldn't have been such a screwball who ultimately needed to claim humans were unsalvageably broken just because he couldn't control every little day dream.  Or this:

A man who has established the virtues in himself and is entirely permeated with them no longer remembers the law or the commandments or punishment.  Rather, he says and does what [this] excellent condition suggests.

It's Augustine's, "Love God and do as you will" except less of the horrible capacity for misinterpretation.  In fact, I find in it a rather compelling positive version of Tao Te Ching 38:

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality,
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos.

Which to bring this to an end, he at times touches on points I find both practical and moving:

To love all the brothers equally is not possible, but it is possible to meet them all with apatheia by being free from memory of evil and hatred...

Toss out your idea of the saint as somebody who floats above it all and has no preferences or feelings.  Instead see the one who acts out of principle even toward those they dislike, for:

The proof of apatheia is that the nous begins to behold its [own] proper gentle radiance... and that it looks at matters calmly.

Powers of Metaphor

 

"Four electrons make up the outer shell of the carbon itself.  They appear in quantum motion as a swarm of shimmering points.  At ten to the minus ten meters, one angstrom, we find ourselves right among those outer electrons.  Now we come upon the two inner electrons held in a tighter swarm.  As we draw toward the atom's attracting center we enter upon the vast inner space.  At last the carbon nucleus.  So massive and so small.  This carbon nucleus is made up of six protons and six neutrons.  We are in the domain of universal modules.  There are protons and neutrons in every nucleus, electrons in every atom, atoms bonded in every molecule out to the farthest galaxy.  As a single proton fills our scene we reach the edge of our present understanding." - Charles Eames, Powers of Ten (1977)

"'The universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.'  Which reminds us that the universe so vividly described in the Book of Revelation is queer enough; but with the help of symbols not beyond description.  Whereas our universe cannot even be stated symbolically... [Artists] have always responded instinctively to latent assumptions about the shape of the universe.  The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art." - Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (book)

I am always on the lookout for good metaphors.  More precisely, good scientific metaphors.  By and large, science has failed to fuel the artistic imagination beyond a few spare images taken from space and of space.  The problem with so many comparisons that I have come up with is that they themselves are already arcane to the average person.  Take, for instance, two homemade metaphors that I've become rather fond of but which require explanation in themselves.

Oxidative metabolism - Panov et al. (2014)

The first is that of oxidative metabolism and capitalism.  Oxidative metabolism is the process by which complex molecules are broken down and some of the energy in their bonds converted into the modular chemical form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP).  It is a process present in the vast majority of multicellular organisms and is required for their functioning, yielding as it does approximately sixteen times as much energy as glycolysis alone.  Yet it has crucial downsides: in the process of splitting oxygen to use as a final acceptor for electrons it produces what are known as free radicals, or highly-reactive oxygen species that will cause damage to any nearby molecules, including DNA.  One of the primary theories of aging involves accumulated cellular damage as a result of this process.  There is no way to stop it entirely, but we do defend ourselves various antioxidant materials to help ameliorate the worst of it.

Right now capitalism's name is mud within many circles, identified as it is with rapacious greed and exploitation of natural resources.  However, so far as I can see, our entire civilization yet depends on it to also fuel are greater intellectual and moral endeavors.  In the last few decades it has managed to, almost against its will, lift a billion people out of poverty throughout China.  We just don't like the side effects.  This has led many people to suggest that it be replaced entirely, although with what I have no idea.  The parallel here is clear: I do believe corrective measures must be taken or else we will be thoroughly harmed by the byproducts, but to suggest that it be simply excised will result in extinction.

Kanai Glacier - US
National Park Service

The second is that of post-glacial succession and cultural accumulation.  Glaciers are one of the most ecologically devastating events, as unlike fires or floods they not only affect the topsoil but grind the surface layers down to the underlying bedrock.  This removes not only the life that was there but also the accumulated nutrients and structured soil.  After a glacier has retreated it takes an exceedingly long time for a complex ecosystem like a forest to reestablish.  The area must go through stages of first colonization by hardy species such as lichens and mosses, which along with the roots of some of the first plants begin to break down the exposed rock and release its nutrients.  Given thousands of years the combination of decomposed rock and organic detritus become full soil horizons with a complex structure that are capable of supporting large trees.

I see the efforts of the Twentieth Century as something like a cultural glacier.  We became disillusioned with everything that came before, believing nothing on faith, and so in a frenzy of deconstructive activity tore through our entire cultural heritage in an attempt to find the bottom of it all.  I believe this was necessary and do not bemoan it, but nonetheless I do believe the effect of this project was to also remove all the interwoven meanings, relationships, and ideas that nourish a civilization.  Since WW2 there has been precious little art that feels remotely important or timeless; instead it is, as one book I read once put it, exceedingly self-aware of its own arbitrariness and transience.  I believe it will be some time again before we are able to produce the cultural and spiritual loam required to grow large trees.

Now, as proud as I am of these two metaphors, the fact that they require paragraphs of explanation and likely strike most readers as utterly unintuitive means that they fail as tools of popular education.  That's the problem, really: science is the means by which we assess how the world is, but it has so far exceeded the default human perspective that to simply grasp it is a task, let alone use it to in turn interpret our experience once again.

However, when I woke up this morning I was thinking again on an issue of spirituality.  The sense I have, the metaphor that is most evocative to me, is that it feels like there are somehow layers to experience in traveling inward.  First we have our everyday experience, and it is a cluttered, frenzied sphere of activity.  It demands continual attention and yet also seems to have that quality of noise, an irregular sound that we want to find a pattern in but until we do it is vaguely irritating.

Underneath this one finds a strange ill-defined silence and depending on disposition it can mean many things.  If of a rational bent of mind, which is most of us, this space is completely terrifying.  It is the coming apart of all the conceptions, the realization that all that fuzz that you had been trying to sift through has no logical basis.  That the whole edifice of one's mind, the structure of it and the experience, floats like a castle in the sky and underneath it there was only a deep abyss waiting for it to realize it is impossible for it to defy gravity like that and fall.  But I also think that there is another way to appreciate this space, and it comes about in certain spiritual practices.  That, yes, everything has been stripped away and there is a sort of fundamental disorientation... but there is also a longed-for silence.  After we're done panicking (if we ever finish panicking) we realize that the noise is gone.

Then, at long last, somehow in the center of this infinite non-space, there is... something.  Don't ask me to define it because that is absurd; the only reason we're here is because we've found ourselves in a place where definitions have failed.  Instead I will simply quote what I wrote years ago for the conclusion of my Gnosis:

This is where the seeker's path leads
Beauty and compassion and divinity
Yet escaping these
For they are words
And are given rest
Before the holy

For now I pass by such things and return to the metaphor.  Without a metaphor, without a structure with which to somehow organize an event, it has a way of fading from most of our minds.  We often don't even know it has happened because it is so outside our regular experience that it blurs without conceptual aid.  Perhaps the Zen monks might disagree with me, but I think that a healthy religion requires these supports.  Which returns us to Powers of Ten.

As I said thinking this morning on this progression, I had this section of the film come back to me.  It is rather appropriate, for while I said that little art had been inspired by science, Powers of Ten is an exception.  While it is strictly educational, it has nonetheless captured in its simple progression of images a sense of scale, of staggering difference throughout the world, and, in just a small piece, its mystery too.  The words at the end, the sudden stumbling into describing the nucleus as, "So massive and so small" is almost a perfect religious paradox.  I think Charles and Ray Eames really did feel something there, and though it need be expressed through a scientific lens nonetheless conveys their own awe at the depths of the world.  It's the sort of skill that made Sagan such a figure; it wasn't his mastery of all science but the dimension to which he appreciated the world, and how science managed to fit into it in a way it fails to do so for so many people.

So I find myself thinking that the above portion of the film is perhaps one of those metaphors I have been searching for.  Unlike my attempts, the image of the atom is much more universal, and any human shown this film will forever have a visualization (albeit of the unvisualizable) of what this means.  And in its treatment, there is that same sort of breathless anticipation.  We have passed down through layers upon layers of the world, through our concept of the man, of his hand, of his cells, of his molecules, and now we are... where?  We have penetrated that last layer of electronic noise and there is simply nothing.  Is that it?  Is it just a vast nothingness underneath it all?  Was everything we just passed through an illusion?  There's a strange sound in the void that somehow emphasizes the space, a sort of breathing that replaces the cosmic Om yet nonetheless performs the same role of letting us know we are inside somehow.  

We wait.

We wait.

And then the nucleus comes into view, and it is what we were searching for.  We are in the realm of universals, and what we have stumbled upon is neither large nor small.  It is present here at the finest of scales and yet is self-same with that which creates the most unimaginably vast galaxies.  There was something underneath and it somehow united it all.

Adam Bede's Insufficient Sample Size

 

Thoughts on Adam Bede by George Eliot

"...the voices of the Methodists reached him, rising and falling in that strange blending of exultation and sadness which belongs to the cadence of a hymn." - Chapter 2

As somebody who has received scientific training first and artistic... well, not training, but exploration... second, I can't help but fall back on old patterns.  When you read a scientific paper the basic question is always: do the methods and results sufficiently support the conclusion?  Do I buy their thesis in light of the data they have shown me?  My experience in Adam Bede is, "No, but I think I mostly agree anyway."

From cursory notes in the introduction, as well as what is obvious in the book itself, George Eliot wants to prove the reality of morality and the edifying/sanctifying power of suffering.  In the first case she creates characters who may appear virtuous outwardly but possessing great flaws, such as Arthur Donnithorne, or those who may not fit our ideal but are nonetheless quite good, such as Rector Irwine.  Then of course there is Adam Bede himself, through whom Eliot expresses much of what she sees as the qualities of a good man - temperance, self-control, and an internal dedication to his own standards as exhibited by an outward dedication to his craft regardless of pay or importance.  Indeed, this yielded a series of my favorite quotes (in order of character):

"There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason - that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right." - on Arthur, Chapter 29

"[Mr. Irwine was of] sufficiently subtle moral fibre to have an unwearing tenderness for obscure and monotonous suffering." - Chapter 5

"My back's broad and strong enough; I should be no better than a coward to go away and leave the troubles to be borne by them as aren't half so able.  'They that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of those that are weak, and not to please themselves.' There's a text want no candle to show 'it: it shines by its own light.  It's plain enough you get into the wrong road i' this life if you run after this and that only for the sake o' making things easy and pleasant to yourself." - Adam Bede, Chapter 4

However, none of these characters hold a candle to Dinah, who is easily the most inspiring figure of the book.  Eliot had a falling away from Christianity, but nobody who reads her portrayal of Dinah can mistake her for an abject, nihilistic atheist.  It was perhaps a strange problem for me to contemplate that while I always wanted more of Dinah in the book, I can see how hard it would be to keep such a thing interesting; what is so powerful is Dinah's true dedication, and a chronicle of such a character would lack that tension which motivates novels.  But I digress.

But it is really the second point that sticks: the centrality of suffering in the human experience, even to the point of its spiritual necessity.  The modern world has fully entered a mindset of William James' "once born" spirituality: that evil, while it may be observed to exist, somehow does not play an essential role in the scheme of things.  It is an aberration, an accident, and soon through science, social reform, and general progress we will reduce it to nothing.  I think Eliot saw that coming and was revolted at it and revolted against it.  That it was a step backward from what Christianity had reached.

 

The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c1435

Religious Insight

"Infinite Love is suffering too - yea, in the fulness of knowledge it suffers, it yearns, it mourns; and that is a blind self-seeking which wants to be freed from the sorrow wherewith the whole creation groaneth and travaileth.  Surely it is not true blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there is sorrow and sin in the world: sorrow is then a part of love, and love does not seek to throw it off." - Dinah, chapter 30

Yet another aside: nowadays Buddhism gets all the credit and Christianity all the blame, it seems.  I think Buddhism appeals to the modern West, at least in its stripped-down version.  It started as a personal philosophy rather than a historically-burdened apocalyptic proclamation, which allows us to skim off the top and avoid its doctrines in favor of its practices.  Also in this form it appeals to our once-born sense and modern hunger for ideological simplicity: once can escape suffering simply by reframing life.  That's it.  We can get to the end goal and we don't have to worry about anything else.  Detachment wins.  Add in the East's syncretic tendencies which, on a surface level, appear an appealing multi-culturalism versus a monothesim's exclusionary nature and a general ignorance of its own strange history, and Buddhism seems like the clear winner over poor, misguided Christianity.

But the above quote captures something that I think Buddhism has always struggled to incorporate naturally, for when simply (and I suspect wrongly) interpreted, the logic of "Attachment causes suffering" -> "Cease attachment" -> "Cease suffering" leads one into all kinds of questions as to why compassion should be a virtue at all.  Why be attached to others?  And why regard any sort of suffering as anything other than a silly accident of misunderstanding?  I think it's why after developing the original Buddha and Arhat concepts, ideals of beings which had managed to entirely transcend this world by focusing on themselves, Buddhism was forced to invent the Bodhisattva: a being of mercy who chooses to stay behind on the Wheel of Samsara until all sentient beings are saved.  Ironically the less-transcended version strikes us as the more profound one, and while I am far from being a Buddhist scholar, I nonetheless find myself always regarding the Bodhisattva ideal as an awkward addition.  It is the result of greater insight trying to find its place in older doctrine.

But Christianity's God suffered.  Its doctrine of Trinitarianism is one that I have always found nonsensical, and from a logical perspective it is.  Any knowledge of its history immediately reveals it to be a doctrinal cludge, and I have long wished that the Arianism had won and established Jesus merely as a deeply enlightened man rather than God.  But as I get older, I'm no longer quite as sure on that, because what it does is enshrine suffering as part of human experience.  If God suffered then suffering is real, and if His suffering led to greater good then so can ours too.  While Buddhism too contains the recognition that suffering may in fact be ineradicable and that Enlightenment is actually to cease to try to change that, it has no equivalent of Jesus on the cross.  Buddha has a habit of always being on a mountain top or a cloud, offering blessings and merit, but not suffering with us.  And as Eliot observes:

"A patronising disposition always has its meaner side..." - Chapter 27

Not that I think the Buddha was patronizing, but that our very habits of thought as humans, reciprocal social apes that we are, finds something depersonalizing in a being for whom we can do nothing but which does everything for us (and Christianity certainly runs into this problem time and again, only to be saved by its image of human Jesus).  

This was a long place-setting, but with a return to Adam Bede I see Eliot striking at something central which Christianity managed to reach and which the modern world has lost: love involves suffering.  That a true depth of spirituality, which connects one to others, will always inevitably lead to caring about them.  And since they often suffer, whether one things that suffering can be theologically explained away or not, one will also experience a sorrow that they suffer.  But as the quote ends, if suffering is a part of that love, then love will no longer seek to throw it off.  It is deeply moving.

"And poor aged fretful Lisbeth, without grasping any distinct idea, without going through any course of religious emotions, felt a vague sense of goodness and love, and of something right lying beneath and beyond all this sorrowing life.  She couldn't understand the sorrow; but, for these moments, under the subduing influence of Dinah's spirit, she felt that she must be patient and still." - Chapter 10

Yet...the book cannot support such powerful sentiments.  It is simply not good enough a piece of art.  As I learned from some notes included with my edition, Eliot had imagined Hetty's redemption in prison as the centerpiece from the beginning.  That was what motivated her: that in the darkest dungeon, with a hard and lost soul, nonetheless the divine love, as exemplified by Dinah, can pierce through.  The second piece was also her image of Adam and Arthur, their relationship, and how Adam would eventually be deepened from boyish goodness to mannish wisdom through his loss.  So she nailed the two together, and after bestowing on Adam all of the keenness of mind and moral strength that she could she then forced him to fall in love with Hetty against all indications that she was a vain, self-absorbed kitten.  That Eliot even feels the need to aggressively defend this choice seems to me a case of protesting too much; it never worked from the beginning, and drawing on her authority after having demonstrated real psychological acumen she papers it over with a, "Trust me on this, I know better" lecture.

With this foundational unsoundness, Adam's suffering could never really reach the depths she needed it to.  This was to be a soul-shattering experience for this man, where his whole being was turned inside out as a result, and he was reborn anew in that furnace.  Instead it just felt like puppy love that wouldn't give up, and which could have no basis for being mortally distraught at the events (let alone the rabbit-from-a-hat quality of Hetty's pregnancy).  Even if I find Eliot's spiritual inclinations uplifting, so much so that throughout the book I was forced to pause and scribble them down, it was not in light of the surrounding passages that I felt so.  

It was also with a distinct disappointment that I watched the last few chapters unfold.  After Hetty's ordeal was over, the life goes out of the book, and Eliot dismally wraps it up with a series of chapters which are only redeemed by a few beautiful passages:

"It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it - if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness." - Chapter 50

Despite this powerful statement, she cannot help but show Adam much regenerated not a few months after his ordeal.  She must stop and tell us that he is suffering deeply this way, but does not display it.  The same way the final feast has us stop and observe the imperfections of the people at the table, so as to prove that she has not applied a bucolic Romanticism to her poor farmers.  But it is essentially the end of the book, and having neglected it the whole time her ability to address it as the last second is feeble.  

However, my greatest disappointment was centered on Dinah.  Aside from the lukewarm romance that she enters into with Adam as way of giving the characters a Happily Ever After (sorry Seth), Eliot fails to capitalize on one of the greatest conversations of the book: why Dinah won't marry.  If she were to do so, Dinah fears that her attentions to God and serving mankind would be diluted by the requirements of filial devotion.  Adam counters with a haphazard argument that love is love is love, and that therefore expression of love for him or love for her children would not in any way detract from her love of all mankind, and in fact would add to it.

Now, there is a certain logic here I agree with: love of one type can be a gateway to love of another.  We are so natively self-centered that it is often the love of friendship or family or partner which drags us out of ourselves, and for once forces us to value something more than our own wellbeing.  In this I have no objection.  But Dinah was far beyond that; she already exhibited a divine agape toward those around her.  There was no more need to draw her out of herself for she had already progressed far along that path, and the truth is that filial love is by nature exclusive.  

There is an awkward moment in the Bible when Jesus' mother and family are waiting for him, and when somebody tells him this he retorts, "Who is my mother, who are my brothers?"  Now, we take this passage as a sign of his universal love as he goes on to illustrate that he regards all of humanity as his family.  But that is also the point: there is something immiscible, and even inimical, in caring especially for a family and serving all of mankind equally.  That the Buddha also gave up his family seems to me to corroborate this point (although this may be a myth).  Monkish asceticism appears the world over as a spiritual approach, and I cannot help but think it is precisely because one cannot have it all.  

Returning to Dinah, then, I see her final choice to marry Adam as... I cannot say a step backward, but one undertaken with no reflection on Eliot's part.  For we also cannot be it all, and if Dinah truly found the life went out of her without Adam then one could say this was the best compromise.  But emphasis on compromise.  After a book full of the hard reflections of suffering and sacrifice, Eliot seems to lose sight of this and promise us that when it's all said and done, righteousness means we don't have to give anything we truly value up.

So that is my final analysis of the book: a tent with too few poles to hold the canvas up.  It has isolated high points, but the whole does not yet maintain its shape.  Yet in spite of this it is uplifting and thoughtful, demonstrating the quality of mind and sincerity of vision that was behind it.  Eliot just couldn't turn it into a great book yet, and it is with some enthusiasm with which I now eye The Mill on the Floss sitting next to me, intent on following the arc through Silas Marner to Middlemarch and seeing where she ends up by the end.

"It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium." - Chapter 34

What color are the six persimmons?

(Color wheel retrieved from https://blog.closetomyheart.com)

"Religion begins with experience… [and] because the experience is of things that are invisible, it gives rise to symbols as the mind tries to think about invisible things.  Symbols are ambiguous, however, so eventually the mind introduces thoughts to resolve the ambiguities of symbols and systematize their intuitions.  Reading this sequence backwards we can define theology as the systematization of thoughts about the symbols that religious experience gives rise to."
-Huston Smith, The World's Religions

I find on my hands this morning an old idea using an old comparison, but in nuance of the ideas feeling somewhat insightful.

An old metaphor for the difficulty/impossibility of describing novel experiences is the color red; that having seen red, nobody could really describe it, only say that others would have to experience it because ultimately it is irreducible to other colors.  Red is red, and who knows even if everybody's red is the same.  It's a good way to illustrate the problem, that experience seems to lie at the heart of our thought and is necessary to supply the pieces with which rationality can work... while also bringing up the problem of how experiences can exist without a framework.  

This morning as I was musing on how I would explain certain elements of my spirituality to somebody, I turned to a similar idea to help clarify.  One of those interesting occurrences is how across many cultures the same colors "came into being" in the same order.  That is to say, we see early words for white and black, followed by reds and browns, greens and yellows, and ultimately blues (there is some debate about this ordering, but it doesn't impact the point here).  If you show color pallets to different peoples who don't have a word for blue, they have a more difficult time picking out blue hues; conversely, many languages have nuanced words for colors like green that English lacks, and they are rather more adept at noticing when two shades of green differ.  

I believe that there is an import here that goes far beyond color perception.  Namely, if we do not have words-concepts for things then we have a tremendously difficult time noticing or thinking on them.  And more deeply, I suspect that this reflects that all of our mental models are just one of a very large (infinite?) number of patterns that could be drawn from the world; the ones we do extract are typically useful and in many cases are the result of evolutionary refinement.  Our folk notion of mass may be completely illusory, but it does retain value in referring to something.

Returning to the realm of spirituality, I believe this has several implications.  First is that I suspect many more people have had spiritual experiences than they are aware, but that without any sort of conceptual framework they find themselves baffled as to express these new hues, and so despite their power they nonetheless slides from the mind.  I would know, because I believe I had the same happen to me; that in 2011 I must have experienced something powerful and profound which forever shaped my feelings afterward, but that I could neither explain it nor even remember it happening.  I am only so lucky in that it was related to an event I could identify later, an encounter with a piece of art, and so reference that work to help me explore what must have happened.  I was an archaeologist in my own mind; how strange to think.

This is why I suspect that reports of spiritual experiences drop in secular ages.  The skeptical answer is that because people stop being superstitious and begin to attribute to proper sources the events; visions become hallucinations, spontaneous swells of feeling are just the subconscious, and nobody any longer thinks Jesus is talking to them.  And I don't doubt there is some truth to this; I have sat in many a religious meeting where people shared their stories and I could only think that it was a vast misattribution on their part (especially when it comes to the Devil and temptation).  But I think there is more to it, that when people are no longer educated in any sort of spiritual tradition they lose the words and ideas that help these ideas take form.  This to me is why the Huston Smith quote up top is so insightful (although it may have been drawn from T.R.V. Murti): without spiritual geniuses to plow the way by giving us symbols, the rest of us become stuck in the drifts.  Again, I know this from personal experience; I had spent six years in an expressible fog with my 2011 experience, but after several months of reading on religion it was only then that I was finally able to begin to get a handle on what even I was trying to describe.  One cannot really realize why the religious vocabulary was created until one has the phrase "Amen" come spontaneously to the lips and know what a sentiment of reverential assent it contains.

However, what really turned me onto this color-perception analogy in this circumstance was that I realized it would help my mental opponent/pupil (odd how those two show up as the same) understand certain oddities of mystical speech.  His name is Justin, an acquaintance from the internet whom I disagree with periodically, but who here served as a focal catalyst.  It just helps to imagine one is talking to a specific person, and I can see why Plato structured his treatises as dialogues.  In fact, I will do so here, in a world where most people had not seen purple:

Me: I have seen a new color.  It was strange, not quite like any color I have seen so far.
Justin: How do you know it wasn't simply a delusion?  Most people haven't seen this color so that seems a lot more likely.
Me: That's fair enough, but it was also so immediate... I truly have a hard time believing it was anything other than real.
Justin: Okay, so aside from that not being very convincing, can you at least describe somewhat what it is like?  I mean, it's a color so it has to be sort of like other colors.
Me: Hrm.  I'd say it's kind of like blue.  You know how blue has that sort of deep, soothing sort of effect; that sense of being awash but undisturbed.  Blue isn't really a violent color, and this wasn't either.
Justin: So it's just another shade of blue?
Me: No... not quite.  It was also like red.
Justin: Red... you mean the aggressive, bright color at the opposite end of the spectrum from blue?
Me: Yes, just like that.  It was blue and red at the same time, but wasn't really quite either one of them.  It was sort of like green too.
Justin: ...now you're making things up.
Me: No, really!  Blue and red kind of feel like "pure" colors, you know?  Primary colors.  But this new color doesn't feel like a primary color; it's more like green in that it is a mixture, a bit of hot and cold.  Also even though it seems totally opposite from yellow (Justin: yellow?) I feel that it would complement it as well, like a natural pair.
Justin: So in the end, you're saying that this color is like all the other colors but not the same as any of them?
Me: I'd say that about summarizes it.

My poeticism is not quite on Plato's level, but I think it gets the point across.  Rudolf Otto quips in his famous The Idea of the Holy that if truly nothing could be said about the ultimate then the mystics would be silent.  As they are rather characterized by voluminous output, it would seem that some comparisons, even if they all fall far short, can be made.  It is like nothing else but also like everything else, and that despite being paradoxical it is not nonsensical.  My own particular expression of this came as a realization that after years of alternatively describing it as truth, beauty, and compassion that it was somehow simultaneously all of these, or like all of these, and yet none of them at the same time.  In no originality, I christened it Holy, and as above there is no way to convey why it deserves its own religious word without self-experience.

Ultimately, however, my goal here isn't to set it apart entirely.  I feel rather that these spiritual experiences only lie at the end of a continuum of a kind, and that it is only their distinct lack of ready-made biological-physical metaphor that causes them to be regarded as so problematic.  In other words, and in a topic to be more fully explored another day, we are all given shared mental structures and concepts to work with by evolution because they were, and often still are, useful for not dying.  To pick the patterns out of the world that correspond to color recognition had great value in determining food safety and quality; picking out God, not so much.  It takes much time and effort by our greatest souls to help us see outside these habits, and the result is so often the same: it is all mysterious, colors as well as Holy, and it is only waiting for us to notice.