I was originally going to be a free subscriber, but the references to both Lewis Mumford and Philip Sherrard (two writers near and dear to me), convinced me I needed to upgrade. I look forward to seeing where this is going.
Speaking of Genesis as counterculture against the machine, I believe Mumford argued exactly this in his two-volume Myth of the Machine. That the prophets and the concept of the sabbath, for instance, were pathways by which the original Babylonian and Egyptian megamachines were defeated. But since Mumford couldn't abide Christianity in the present, he seemed unable to come up with a template for doing it again in the 20th-21st century.
My first thoughts go to the city we all live in, wherever that place may be, and then how it resembles Babylon...and then how we can change it. But looking outward to find things to change (or really, critique), seems foolish when I consider the power I already have to change my surround. And then that seems foolish when I consider what needs to change within me. Everything is created in our image, but unless and until I can find the way back to the likeness of God in my own heart, the things I change outside will reflect the distortions unchanged within. I see a dual process, however, in my life. Changing the obvious affronts to peace and beauty in my surroundings at home and in my relationships while simultaneously targeting the chaos and disorder within. Both evolve as a process. As I change, traveling back "to that ancient beauty of Thy likeness," as the Orthodox death hymn states, my micro world at home should take on more of that image of Eden that the machine has marred.
Incredible insight about Genesis. Bravo. Is this understanding of a microcosm of the story commonplace in Orthodoxy? I wonder if it is more or less the actual origin or just “symbolism happening”
Welcome aboard, Walker, and thanks for sharing your initial reactions! You know...I'm just doing my own little poetic thing, trying to stay faithful to the Orthodox ethos, while using words in a way that feels true to my own crazy little heart, rather than simply repeating tropes. I don't know to what extent anything I'm gonna do is going to be "commonplace in Orthodoxy" -- though I would say that the way I *feel* about the world is commonplace -- I'm just saying how I feel in a different way. As far as "actual origin" vs "just symbolism happening," my sense is that we'd say that's a false dichotomy; the logoi waterfalling out of our totally free, totally personal God, which embody themselves in an infinite variety of ways -- as things -- as creatures -- as patterns of history -- ARE their actual origin...
The Sunlilies: Eastern Orthodoxy as a Radical Counterculture by Graham Pardun is pretty alright. And Salt of the Earth by St. Paul Florensky really smashes. And The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clement is totally awesome.
Also fascinating how you are relating a proper relationships with nature as a part of growing closer to God, etc. I don’t think the relationship to nature as an ethical thing is really at all a thing you encounter in Western Christianity.
Something I’ll have to explore more. Maybe becoming Orthodox for me means spending more time in nature.
Beautiful. I guess this is this project next logical step for a lot of the Orthodox work out there (Dreher, Kingsnorth, etc.) and it seems that others are realizing this too after spending some time working on the necessary precursors.
I've been turning this over in my head, and thinking: it's certainly possible, as is often done, to read Genesis as (among other things) an anti-urban polemic. The life of cities is bad; the nomadic pastoral life, while having its own problems, is basically good, and the ideal is the primeval garden. (Even then, though, a garden is not a wilderness.) But the picture gets more complicated as things go along, especially in the New Testament where what's looked toward is not so much the garden of Eden as the Heavenly Jerusalem which, as described in Revelation, sounds a bit like garden and city at the same time. (There's an essay by Andrew Gould in which he makes the lovely observation that in the Heavenly Jerusalem there's no distinction between indoors and outdoors, and I'd add that this is also reflected in Orthodox iconography where inside and outside often become ambiguous.) So we're not just trying to flee the city for the garden, but trying to bring the human impulse of civilization-building into harmony with God and his creation, rather than letting it become the rebellion against God and destruction of his creation that we so often see. Just some thoughts.
It is an interesting take. In a way, perhaps it doesn't matter if there would have been some other form of city-building without the fall, because here we are after the fall striving (hopefully) toward the heavenly Jerusalem. When we think "city" most of us immediately think of something more along the lines of Babylon than the New Jerusalem, and that's reflected in the fact that in Genesis the actual origins of city-building are associated with sin and rebellion. That could be for the reasons you mention, or it could be because the descendants of Seth abdicated the work of building something beautiful and left the building and technology to Cain's descendants (or some combination thereof). I don't know. But as I said in a previous comment, I'm concerned about these things from a practical perspective, and the practical question seems to me to be: how do we build according to the pattern of the New Jerusalem instead of the pattern of Babylon? It's a big question, but I'm interested in this project precisely because I'm hopeful of getting at least some pieces of the answer.
Rev. Beardtongue, since you revealed in the other comment below that you are, indeed, a priest, let me first of all touch the ground and ask for your blessing!
Re: the city as fallen, then redeemed. I've been mesmerised by this question ever since reading Jacques Ellul's Meaning of the City maybe 15 years ago or so. The essay coming out tomorrow is going to sound very anti-city, but, deeply, it's not -- I hope to show you over the next X-many essays that I'm trying to take seriously the positive biblical-patristic alternative view of what a city might be, and will be, as God transfigures the Earth. One thing I hope to bring in sooner rather than later is Ezekiel's vision of a temple-like city out of which a river of life flows (this is the exact inversion of our cities now, which act as giant funnels literally sucking the life out of Earth's fields and oceans, turning them into wastelands). But this temple-like city is indeed a city, not a forest...( and yes, ultimately, I'm very interested in the practical stuff that happens on the ground, at the parish level...but what happens there, as you know, flows from the vision that the people share, and into which they are drawn ever more deeply by the liturgy...I see myself as mostly working in the visionary, poetic space -- BUT, out of seemingly nowhere, there will be very, very, very practical stuff -- as in, put this log here, not there -- that granular...so if it seems dreamy at times, hang in there...
The Lord bless you! There's a certain tension for me in engaging in these conversations: I don't really want to present myself as speaking here from a place of some kind of priestly authority, but at the same time my work as a parish priest is central to why and how I'm asking these questions (and, really, to why the option of just fleeing to the wilderness feels closed to me). So the clerical-but-whimsical pseudonym is an attempt at navigating that.
I look forward to your thoughts on that passage from Ezekiel, which is a favorite of mine and provides much of the imagery for the New Jerusalem in Revelation. I really like the contrast of the modern city as resource-sink versus the heavenly city as pouring out life into the world. Something I'll be pondering, for sure.
Certainly I don't mean to exclude the visionary-poetic from the practical, because as you say, having the right vision of the world is itself a practical step, and perhaps the first practical step, in all of this. Keep up the good work!
I'm really interested to see where you go with this. I'm an Orthodox parish priest in the Northeastern US (and, for various reasons, not planning to give much identifying information much beyond that), and so the question for me is always: how do we live this reality as actual parish communities? The Machine is working hard, and not without some success, to turn those parish communities into just more nodes of itself. The Church as theological reality is, I firmly believe, immune to that, but I don't believe any particular parish or church institution is. But hopefully you'll have some insights to guide us in all of that. I look forward to reading more!
I'm so glad I found your work via Paul Kingsnorth! It feels like the right time and place for this. I look forward to following you on this journey and being inspired by your work. I desire to disengage from the machine while faithfully stewarding my family. Suffering is okay and expected, but I've got to make sure it is done with careful intention.
Well said, Kent. As a father of three little ones myself, I resonate completely with the idea that suffering is to be expected, but must be done with careful intention! We're not going to just throw ourselves and our children mindlessly against the altar of Moloch...no way, not ever.
This comment was an almost creepy experience to read given some of the similarities with my own life along with having the same name! For anyone reading, I can heartily second the recommendation of the Lord of Spirits podcast (as well as obviously Tolkien, Berry, Kingsnorth).
If you ever find yourself in the UK, we should start a really niche convention of machine-disillusioned orthodox/anglican physics graduates...
Zac and Zach, you dudes have cool names and good taste in writing! I'll mention now something I forgot to mention to Zach with an h -- I used to be a physics teacher myself, so definitely feeling that future niche convention of yours of machine-disillusioned anglo-orthodox physics-heads....welcome aboard!
Zach, welcome aboard, brother -- and thanks for sharing your own story so eloquently. I think in a lot of ways our paths have been similar -- not just the natural progression, common for a lot of us nowadays, from Evangelicalism to Anglicanism to Orthodoxy, but also in coming to see that the essential problem with technological utopianism -- as alluring as it is (and it IS alluring; I grew up on computers and books about space, and have a certain very strong nostalgia for the old NASA posters imagining the luminous green worlds in the sky we were all going to create together, once we were almost done solving problems like world hunger and war on Earth -- and we were, back then, just about to be done with those) -- is the blindness at its core: Love is about reciprocity with the Other, but the expansion of technological control is driven, at its heart, by a desire to create total autonomy for the self. A few essays down the road, I'm planning to come at that problem in my own way -- comparing the vision of Saint Maximos the Confessor with that of Ray Kurzweil. And I hope, bit by bit, to suggest something of a new Orthodox vision of what science can be, what our machines could be, if only...I love your suggestion of a "Damascene" science. Certainly in Orthodoxy there is a spirit of curiosity about the world -- both inside and out -- which studies nature first of all with an attitude of worship, in honor of Messiah...
Ah, yes -- that's how it goes, also! As for me, ten years passed from the time I first went to an Orthodox liturgy, to when I actually decided to convert. And when I did finally decide to go for it, my priest took me for a walk, and said, "Look, let me tell you what Orthodoxy is really about: You're there, standing in the citadel of your mind, keeping watch over your thoughts, just feeling absolutely empty and dry as a wasteland as you search, seemingly in vain, for your inner heart...why would anyone want to spend their whole lives like that?" Good sales pitch, man! Sign me up! :)
As a butcher and someone who is endlessly fascinated by the connections between meat and man, flesh and reverence, I commend you for this liturgy! I've spent many years exploring the tension between a set of sacred values and the practical nature of feeding people. By the grace of God I've been in the position of working with small, independent producers who, though flawed like the rest of us, pursue a stronger standard of care for the land and animals. But I'm constantly aware of the ever present conundrum between loving life and taking it. Hyper aware of unbridled hedonism versus a reverential celebration of life and sustenance. My heart still tells me there is a right way to do it and I'm hoping to help others embrace something similar.
There's a moment I love in a movie that is overwhelmingly beautiful the whole way through, Beasts of the Southern Wild, set on the American Gulf coast, in the dark, tangled, flooded, deeply impoverished swamps. In the scene I'm thinking of, the teacher of a small group of children, jaws agape, gives this little pep-talk after a storm has devastated so much: "MEAT. MEAT. MEAT. Everything that lives is meat. I'M meat; Y'ALL'S asses is meat; we're all part of the buffet of the universe." -- so deeply true, so perfectly said. And there is also the other truth, that in the beginning, before Noah's flood, not Katrina's, humans and animals alike ate only plants, not each other -- a truth to which we will one day return, and in which Orthodox monks live all the time, and the rest of us laymen half the year, on fasting days. A friend of mine suggested that, the whole point of everything eating everything is communion; bit by bit, as time passes on our fallen Earth, everything is participating in the body of everything else, by sharing atoms...
I'm impressed that you have somehow made the word "empire" sound good, which I did not think could be done.
I was originally going to be a free subscriber, but the references to both Lewis Mumford and Philip Sherrard (two writers near and dear to me), convinced me I needed to upgrade. I look forward to seeing where this is going.
Speaking of Genesis as counterculture against the machine, I believe Mumford argued exactly this in his two-volume Myth of the Machine. That the prophets and the concept of the sabbath, for instance, were pathways by which the original Babylonian and Egyptian megamachines were defeated. But since Mumford couldn't abide Christianity in the present, he seemed unable to come up with a template for doing it again in the 20th-21st century.
Let's work on that template together, brother -- welcome aboard!
My first thoughts go to the city we all live in, wherever that place may be, and then how it resembles Babylon...and then how we can change it. But looking outward to find things to change (or really, critique), seems foolish when I consider the power I already have to change my surround. And then that seems foolish when I consider what needs to change within me. Everything is created in our image, but unless and until I can find the way back to the likeness of God in my own heart, the things I change outside will reflect the distortions unchanged within. I see a dual process, however, in my life. Changing the obvious affronts to peace and beauty in my surroundings at home and in my relationships while simultaneously targeting the chaos and disorder within. Both evolve as a process. As I change, traveling back "to that ancient beauty of Thy likeness," as the Orthodox death hymn states, my micro world at home should take on more of that image of Eden that the machine has marred.
Well said, brother! -- that's IT.
Incredible insight about Genesis. Bravo. Is this understanding of a microcosm of the story commonplace in Orthodoxy? I wonder if it is more or less the actual origin or just “symbolism happening”
Welcome aboard, Walker, and thanks for sharing your initial reactions! You know...I'm just doing my own little poetic thing, trying to stay faithful to the Orthodox ethos, while using words in a way that feels true to my own crazy little heart, rather than simply repeating tropes. I don't know to what extent anything I'm gonna do is going to be "commonplace in Orthodoxy" -- though I would say that the way I *feel* about the world is commonplace -- I'm just saying how I feel in a different way. As far as "actual origin" vs "just symbolism happening," my sense is that we'd say that's a false dichotomy; the logoi waterfalling out of our totally free, totally personal God, which embody themselves in an infinite variety of ways -- as things -- as creatures -- as patterns of history -- ARE their actual origin...
Thanks! Are there any Orthodox books you would recommend reading for a beginner?
The Sunlilies: Eastern Orthodoxy as a Radical Counterculture by Graham Pardun is pretty alright. And Salt of the Earth by St. Paul Florensky really smashes. And The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clement is totally awesome.
Also fascinating how you are relating a proper relationships with nature as a part of growing closer to God, etc. I don’t think the relationship to nature as an ethical thing is really at all a thing you encounter in Western Christianity.
Something I’ll have to explore more. Maybe becoming Orthodox for me means spending more time in nature.
Beautiful. I guess this is this project next logical step for a lot of the Orthodox work out there (Dreher, Kingsnorth, etc.) and it seems that others are realizing this too after spending some time working on the necessary precursors.
I've been turning this over in my head, and thinking: it's certainly possible, as is often done, to read Genesis as (among other things) an anti-urban polemic. The life of cities is bad; the nomadic pastoral life, while having its own problems, is basically good, and the ideal is the primeval garden. (Even then, though, a garden is not a wilderness.) But the picture gets more complicated as things go along, especially in the New Testament where what's looked toward is not so much the garden of Eden as the Heavenly Jerusalem which, as described in Revelation, sounds a bit like garden and city at the same time. (There's an essay by Andrew Gould in which he makes the lovely observation that in the Heavenly Jerusalem there's no distinction between indoors and outdoors, and I'd add that this is also reflected in Orthodox iconography where inside and outside often become ambiguous.) So we're not just trying to flee the city for the garden, but trying to bring the human impulse of civilization-building into harmony with God and his creation, rather than letting it become the rebellion against God and destruction of his creation that we so often see. Just some thoughts.
(I found the essay I was referring to: it's this one, part 8 of a 12-part series: https://orthodoxartsjournal.org/an-icon-of-the-kingdom-of-god-the-integrated-expression-of-all-the-liturgical-arts-part-8-vestments/)
It is an interesting take. In a way, perhaps it doesn't matter if there would have been some other form of city-building without the fall, because here we are after the fall striving (hopefully) toward the heavenly Jerusalem. When we think "city" most of us immediately think of something more along the lines of Babylon than the New Jerusalem, and that's reflected in the fact that in Genesis the actual origins of city-building are associated with sin and rebellion. That could be for the reasons you mention, or it could be because the descendants of Seth abdicated the work of building something beautiful and left the building and technology to Cain's descendants (or some combination thereof). I don't know. But as I said in a previous comment, I'm concerned about these things from a practical perspective, and the practical question seems to me to be: how do we build according to the pattern of the New Jerusalem instead of the pattern of Babylon? It's a big question, but I'm interested in this project precisely because I'm hopeful of getting at least some pieces of the answer.
Rev. Beardtongue, since you revealed in the other comment below that you are, indeed, a priest, let me first of all touch the ground and ask for your blessing!
Re: the city as fallen, then redeemed. I've been mesmerised by this question ever since reading Jacques Ellul's Meaning of the City maybe 15 years ago or so. The essay coming out tomorrow is going to sound very anti-city, but, deeply, it's not -- I hope to show you over the next X-many essays that I'm trying to take seriously the positive biblical-patristic alternative view of what a city might be, and will be, as God transfigures the Earth. One thing I hope to bring in sooner rather than later is Ezekiel's vision of a temple-like city out of which a river of life flows (this is the exact inversion of our cities now, which act as giant funnels literally sucking the life out of Earth's fields and oceans, turning them into wastelands). But this temple-like city is indeed a city, not a forest...( and yes, ultimately, I'm very interested in the practical stuff that happens on the ground, at the parish level...but what happens there, as you know, flows from the vision that the people share, and into which they are drawn ever more deeply by the liturgy...I see myself as mostly working in the visionary, poetic space -- BUT, out of seemingly nowhere, there will be very, very, very practical stuff -- as in, put this log here, not there -- that granular...so if it seems dreamy at times, hang in there...
The Lord bless you! There's a certain tension for me in engaging in these conversations: I don't really want to present myself as speaking here from a place of some kind of priestly authority, but at the same time my work as a parish priest is central to why and how I'm asking these questions (and, really, to why the option of just fleeing to the wilderness feels closed to me). So the clerical-but-whimsical pseudonym is an attempt at navigating that.
I look forward to your thoughts on that passage from Ezekiel, which is a favorite of mine and provides much of the imagery for the New Jerusalem in Revelation. I really like the contrast of the modern city as resource-sink versus the heavenly city as pouring out life into the world. Something I'll be pondering, for sure.
Certainly I don't mean to exclude the visionary-poetic from the practical, because as you say, having the right vision of the world is itself a practical step, and perhaps the first practical step, in all of this. Keep up the good work!
Wow..just wow!
I'm really interested to see where you go with this. I'm an Orthodox parish priest in the Northeastern US (and, for various reasons, not planning to give much identifying information much beyond that), and so the question for me is always: how do we live this reality as actual parish communities? The Machine is working hard, and not without some success, to turn those parish communities into just more nodes of itself. The Church as theological reality is, I firmly believe, immune to that, but I don't believe any particular parish or church institution is. But hopefully you'll have some insights to guide us in all of that. I look forward to reading more!
I'm so glad I found your work via Paul Kingsnorth! It feels like the right time and place for this. I look forward to following you on this journey and being inspired by your work. I desire to disengage from the machine while faithfully stewarding my family. Suffering is okay and expected, but I've got to make sure it is done with careful intention.
Well said, Kent. As a father of three little ones myself, I resonate completely with the idea that suffering is to be expected, but must be done with careful intention! We're not going to just throw ourselves and our children mindlessly against the altar of Moloch...no way, not ever.
This comment was an almost creepy experience to read given some of the similarities with my own life along with having the same name! For anyone reading, I can heartily second the recommendation of the Lord of Spirits podcast (as well as obviously Tolkien, Berry, Kingsnorth).
If you ever find yourself in the UK, we should start a really niche convention of machine-disillusioned orthodox/anglican physics graduates...
Zac and Zach, you dudes have cool names and good taste in writing! I'll mention now something I forgot to mention to Zach with an h -- I used to be a physics teacher myself, so definitely feeling that future niche convention of yours of machine-disillusioned anglo-orthodox physics-heads....welcome aboard!
That's the bit I had no relation to, you get to have some uniqueness!
Zach, welcome aboard, brother -- and thanks for sharing your own story so eloquently. I think in a lot of ways our paths have been similar -- not just the natural progression, common for a lot of us nowadays, from Evangelicalism to Anglicanism to Orthodoxy, but also in coming to see that the essential problem with technological utopianism -- as alluring as it is (and it IS alluring; I grew up on computers and books about space, and have a certain very strong nostalgia for the old NASA posters imagining the luminous green worlds in the sky we were all going to create together, once we were almost done solving problems like world hunger and war on Earth -- and we were, back then, just about to be done with those) -- is the blindness at its core: Love is about reciprocity with the Other, but the expansion of technological control is driven, at its heart, by a desire to create total autonomy for the self. A few essays down the road, I'm planning to come at that problem in my own way -- comparing the vision of Saint Maximos the Confessor with that of Ray Kurzweil. And I hope, bit by bit, to suggest something of a new Orthodox vision of what science can be, what our machines could be, if only...I love your suggestion of a "Damascene" science. Certainly in Orthodoxy there is a spirit of curiosity about the world -- both inside and out -- which studies nature first of all with an attitude of worship, in honor of Messiah...
Ah, yes -- that's how it goes, also! As for me, ten years passed from the time I first went to an Orthodox liturgy, to when I actually decided to convert. And when I did finally decide to go for it, my priest took me for a walk, and said, "Look, let me tell you what Orthodoxy is really about: You're there, standing in the citadel of your mind, keeping watch over your thoughts, just feeling absolutely empty and dry as a wasteland as you search, seemingly in vain, for your inner heart...why would anyone want to spend their whole lives like that?" Good sales pitch, man! Sign me up! :)
As a butcher and someone who is endlessly fascinated by the connections between meat and man, flesh and reverence, I commend you for this liturgy! I've spent many years exploring the tension between a set of sacred values and the practical nature of feeding people. By the grace of God I've been in the position of working with small, independent producers who, though flawed like the rest of us, pursue a stronger standard of care for the land and animals. But I'm constantly aware of the ever present conundrum between loving life and taking it. Hyper aware of unbridled hedonism versus a reverential celebration of life and sustenance. My heart still tells me there is a right way to do it and I'm hoping to help others embrace something similar.
There's a moment I love in a movie that is overwhelmingly beautiful the whole way through, Beasts of the Southern Wild, set on the American Gulf coast, in the dark, tangled, flooded, deeply impoverished swamps. In the scene I'm thinking of, the teacher of a small group of children, jaws agape, gives this little pep-talk after a storm has devastated so much: "MEAT. MEAT. MEAT. Everything that lives is meat. I'M meat; Y'ALL'S asses is meat; we're all part of the buffet of the universe." -- so deeply true, so perfectly said. And there is also the other truth, that in the beginning, before Noah's flood, not Katrina's, humans and animals alike ate only plants, not each other -- a truth to which we will one day return, and in which Orthodox monks live all the time, and the rest of us laymen half the year, on fasting days. A friend of mine suggested that, the whole point of everything eating everything is communion; bit by bit, as time passes on our fallen Earth, everything is participating in the body of everything else, by sharing atoms...