"It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical
period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those
which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the
epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless
certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history
occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring
up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and
moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves
to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the
construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be
sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of
barbarism and darkness. [...] What matters at this stage is the construction
of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and
moral life can be sustained through the dark ages which are already upon us.
.. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been among us for quite some time. And it is our lack of
consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting
not for Godot, but for another (doubtless very different) St. Benedict."
--Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)
"Monasticism owes some of its early surge to the conversion of the
fourth-century emperor Constantine and his subsequent endorsement of what
became the "politically correct" Christian religion. When the state turned from
persecutor to protector of Christianity, the church became "worldly" and the
faith became secularized. Prosperity, patronage, doctrinal and political
strife, and mixed motives for converting to Christianity and holding church
office infected the church like viruses. In this setting monasticism became a
reform movement—"a living protest against the secularization of Christianity
and the cheapening of grace." The protest took the form of withdrawal
(anchoresis in Greek, from which we derive the word anchorite, meaning one who
lives in seclusion) to the desert (eremos, from which we get the word hermit),
literally following Jesus into the wilderness to fight the demons (Mark 1:13)
and to achieve the perfection to which Christ called his disciples and which
some thought to be unobtainable in the existing churches in contact with the
world. With withdrawal came spiritual discipline (askesis, from which we get
the word ascetic and which was applied to the rigorous training undertaken by
those preparing for athletic and military contests."
--Dennis L. Okholm, Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine
Spirituality for Protestants
"I say, 'The Empire never ended.' The Empire is the institution, the
codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by
violence, since its nature is a violent one. To fight the Empire is to be
infected by its derangement. This is a paradox: whoever defeats a segment of
the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form
on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies."
--Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis
---
Logos has been idolized again--that much is clear.
There is a radical, living, and immanent nature that underpins the perennial
philosophy. This nature is given a fashionable covering by the uncomprehending
masses emulating Those That Know. Then, as always, the idolatrous covering is
recuperated by the Empire to complete a new visage for the Black Iron Prison.
Computation, like radio, like print, and the written word before, is the living
stream of uncomprehended information, raw and mystical. Like all hegemons
before, it promises Liberation, until it is Known, aspects Good embraced and
Evil shunned.
An eternal triptych: on the left, The Prophet on the Frontier leads the
penitent *away* from The City. On the right, the opulent and decadent Priests
of the Old Prophet tempt the self-righteous urbanites to damnation. In the
middle, the Seeker torn between the New and the Old; the Living and the Dead.
"And he spake also a parable unto them; No man putteth a piece of a new garment
upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that
was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old. And no man putteth new wine
into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and
the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both
are preserved. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for
he saith, The old is better."
Technology has a strange and perennial facet in that it inexorably promises
liberation to the uninitiated--liberation from memory, liberation from labor,
from thought. Then, equally inexorably, the chains of Control are not
shattered, but tempered. Lengthened.
The Powers That Be engage in a change of seating; the Holy Wars being only
between rival claimants to the Throne of State.
Yet, in spite of this process, those who naturally escape from the Black Iron
Prison do so, as they would in any age. For they who seek Truth shall by found
by Truth.
And those chosen remain voices in the wilderness, paving straight the paths of
righteousness.
