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[ by Charles Cameron — in whose borrowed opinion, if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light ]
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Here’s another DoubleQuote that doesn’t fit my usual format, but sets up an interesting dynamic anyway. This just in, from Joel Rosenberg:

Mother Jones article: “Oh Magog! Why End-Times Buffs Are Freaking Out About Syria”: A friend ju… http://t.co/Witrm6gSkP

— Joel C. Rosenberg (@JoelCRosenberg) September 4, 2013

I find it charming that we can read the opening paragraphs of a Mother Jones piece about Joel Rosenberg on on Rosenberg’s own site. Here are the first paras — or grafs, as my friend Danielle would say:

In early 2012, bestselling novelist Joel Rosenberg came to Capitol Hill for a meeting with an unidentified member of Congress to discuss the end of the world. “I thought the topic was going to be the possible coming war between Israel and Iran,” Rosenberg explained on his website. “Instead, the official asked, ‘What are your thoughts on Isaiah 17?’”

For the better part of an hour, Rosenberg says, the writer and the congressman went back forth on something called the “burden of Damascus,” an Old Testament prophecy that posits that a war in the Middle East will leave Syria’s capital city in ruins—and bring the world one step closer to Armageddon. As Rosenberg put it, “The innocent blood shed by the Assad regime is reprehensible, and heart-breaking and is setting the stage for a terrible judgment.”

But Rosenberg and his anonymous congressman aren’t alone in viewing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s actions through a Biblical lens.

That’s my first shoe. And here’s Richard Bartholomew, the blogger at Bath’s Notes, dropping the second:

Isaiah: "Sorry, when I said Damascus will be destroyed, I meant 3,000 years from now. I've no idea about current Assyrian threat." #isaiah17

— Richard Bartholomew (@Barthsnotes) September 4, 2013

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Okay, here are some observations of my own, which I wrote a while back…

Which comes first: history or Revelation?

Just as nature and scripture can be “read against” one another, each perhaps illuminating the other at times, so in the case of one particular scripture — the Revelation — the book is “read against” history: there’s a long history of interpreters attempting to “translate” the book into contemporary political terms.

Luther is one who tried his hand at this:

Since it is meant as a revelation of what is to come, and especially of coming tribulations and disasters for the Church, we can consider that the first and surest step toward finding its interpretation is to take from history the events and disasters that have happened to the Church before now and to hold them up alongside these pictures and so compare them with the words. If, then, the two fit and agree with each other, we can build on that as a sure, or at least an unobjectionable, interpretation.

But Bernard McGinn makes a shrewd comment on Luther’s process, in his article on Revelation in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode‘s Literary Guide to the Bible:

Earlier interpreters, such as Joachim (but not Augustine), had also claimed to find a consonance between Revelation’s prophecies and the events of Church history, but they had begun with Scripture and used it as a key to unlock history. Paradoxically, Luther, the great champion of the biblical word, claimed that history enabled him to make sense of Revelation…

So: which direction should theologians “read” the analogy between Revelation and history in?

Should they, like Luther, start with history and try to “shoe-horn” the Book of Revelation to fit it, or vice versa? There are two very different processes here, and the results may be correspondingly different — but when people today read accounts of Revelation which propose that the “end times” are nigh, they seldom even ask the question: which came first in the interpreter’s mind?

[ by Charles Cameron — another exploration into forms of insight — in this case the Matrioshka effect, spiral staircases and the like, with a glance at holy winds and human fingertips ]
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Oh look! The Weekly Standard did a blog about the HuffPost blog on my blog item, http://t.co/1ixOTgZhly Original: http://t.co/ODrj0MG4Rv

— Carol Rosenberg (@carolrosenberg) August 23, 2013

A mention of blogs about blogs about blogs seems to me to qualify for the “nested serpent” category of forms that are worth watching out for, the nest (or spiral, from which I am guessing the nest is not entirely separable) being of particular interest because while seemingly simple enough, it all too often reaches at one end or both into the infinities, where paradox meets epiphany… as my second example will show.

But first, by sheer good fortune, I came across this verse from the book of Ecclesiastes as I was polishing this post for publication:

The winde goeth toward the South, and turneth about vnto the North; it whirleth about continually, and the winde returneth againe according to his circuits.

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That’s the pattern we’re looking for, and I ran across it recently in a comment my friend Allen Stairs made, and the response he received:

Imagine a Russian doll set isomorphic to the natural numbers. Bet that didn't work very well, did it?

— Allen Stairs (@AllenStairs) August 24, 2013

@haroldpollack Equipollent, perhaps…

— Allen Stairs (@AllenStairs) August 24, 2013

Okay, I didn’t follow — so I asked Allen for an explanation, and he wrote me:

Actually. “equipollent” was a bad choice of terms. “Equinumerous” wold have been better.

But the thing about numbers and those dolls: natural numbers have their identity intrinsically, so to speak. In set theory, one way to represent them is as the series

1 = {Ø}, 2 = {Ø,{Ø}}, 3 = {Ø,{Ø,{Ø}}}, etc.

In fact, we can even use the simpler construction

1 = {Ø}, 2 = {{Ø}}, 3 = {{{Ø}}}, etc.

So if we’re given the set, its structure tells us which number it is. I

Now a finite set of Russian dolls does much the same thing. We could count the innermost one as 1, the next as 2, the next as 3, and so on, and if you were given the doll, you’d be able to tell which number it represented. Or if we wanted, we could let the outermost doll represent 1, and work our way in. But if we take the set of all natural numbers, things get a little wonkier. The thing about a set of dolls is that there’s an outer one; the charm is in the fact that there’s a place to start opening them. So suppose we have an infinitely nested set of dolls. What number does the outermost one correspond to? It can’t be a natural number, because for any natural number, the nesting would have to be finite. It can’t be the infinite number Aleph-null because among other things, if the nesting is infinite downward then each doll has the same structure as the one that encloses it, and so it seems that there’s no way for the individual dolls to represent distinct integers.

Now if we’re given the whole set of dolls, there’s a sort of substitute: match dolls to numbers depending on how many “predecessors” they have. The outermost doll has no predecessors, so let it be 1; the next one in has 1 predecessor, so let it be 2. And so on. But we still have a problem: there’s nothing about the doll itself that tells us which integer it represents.

So my little point was that Harold’s joke was about “how many?” but the thing about the dolls is that they might seem at first to have the right structure to represent the natural numbers, and yet they don’t — at least, not the whole set of natural numbers.

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Did Ecclesiastes mention the winds? Here’s a discussion of wind spirals from David Avram‘s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World:

Although invisible, the Holy Wind can be recognized by the swirling and spiraling traces that it continually leaves in the visible world. The Winds that enter a human being leave their trace, according to the Navajo, in the vortices or swirling patterns to be seen on our fingertips and the tips of our toes, and in the spiraling pattern made by the hairs as they emerge from our heads. As one elder explains:

There are whorls here at the tips of our fingers. Winds stick out here. It is the same way on the toes of our feet, and Winds exist on us here where soft spots are, where there are spirals. At the tops of our heads some children have two spirals, some have only one, you see. I am saying that those (who have two) live by means of two Winds. These (Winds sticking out of the) whorls at the tips of our toes hold us to the Earth. Those at our fingertips hold us to the Sky. Because of these, we do not fall when we move about.

That last italicized quote is from James Kale McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy — a remarkable book for anyone interested in the holiness of spirit…

[ by Charles Cameron — peace making tells us that the goal of the activity is peace, conflict resolution tells us that this goal is not achieved in peace but on the field of conflict ]
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Michael Lempert‘s book, Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, has a somewhat harsh take on the practice of debate in the education of Buddhist monks. The Introduction begins:

Buddhist ‘debate’ (rtsod pa), a twice-daily form of argumentation through which Tibetan monks learn philosophical doctrine, is loud and brash and agonistic. Monks who inhabit the challenger role punctuate their points with foot-stomps and piercing open-palmed hand-claps that explode in the direction of the seated defendant’s face. I was curious about the fate of this martial idiom in which monks wrangle, curious especially about its apparent disregard for ideals like nonviolence, compassion, and rights that Tibetans like the Dalai Lama have promoted…

For a more “nonviolent” view, see Daniel E. Perdue, Debate In Tibetan Buddhism — and by way of comparison, John Daido Loori‘s account of the Zen equivalent, Cave of Tigers: The Living Zen Practice of Dharma Combat…

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For a comparable Christian form of debate, we can turn to the writings of Peter Abelard, the medieval scholastic (educator and lover of Heloise) who introduced his book Sic et Non — “Yes and No” — in which he selected what are essentially DoubleQuotes from the Early Church Fathers, setting them one against another to display their seeming contradictions, with the following words:

In view of these considerations, I have ventured to bring together various dicta of the holy fathers, as they came to mind, and to formulate certain questions which were suggested by the seeming contradictions in the statements. These questions ought to serve to excite tender readers to a zealous inquiry into truth and so sharpen their wits. The master key of knowledge is, indeed, a persistent and frequent questioning. Aristotle, the most clear-sighted of all the philosophers, was desirous above all things else to arouse this questioning spirit, for in his Categories he exhorts a student as follows: “It may well be difficult to reach a positive conclusion in these matters unless they be frequently discussed. It is by no means fruitless to be doubtful on particular points.” By doubting we come to examine, and by examining we reach the truth.

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The essence of both the above examples is conflict circumscribed, with the goal of enlightenment.

It’s my impression that Sura 49 verse 13 of the Qur’an implies a similar process, though here it is difference rather than conflict that is the starting point, and mutual understanding that is the goal:

O mankind, We have created you male and female, and appointed you races and tribes, that you may know one another. Surely the noblest among you in the sight of God is the most godfearing of you. God is All-knowing, All-aware.

That’s AJ Arberry‘s translation. Yusuf Ali‘s draws out more of the implications:

O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise (each other). Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is (he who is) the most righteous of you. And Allah has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things).

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In the second part of this post, I’ll present two extraordinary examples of conflict presented as art…

[ by Charles Cameron — food for thought, or empty calories? ]
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Sources:

Heart Sutra

Hezbollah

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Pondering.

There’s definitely a form here, a commutative form, and the Buddhist part is interesting because it asserts some kind of commutation is possible between a datum and its own absence — as though the “created” world of Genesis could be viewed as exactly mirroring the “ex nihilo” from which it arises.

But the Hezbollah identity? That should be of interest to the Europeans who just made a point of distinguishing between political and military versions of Hezbollah!

Beyond that, pondering.

[ by Charles Cameron — a powerful tale of “de-radicalization” as metanoia ]
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Munir

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Munir, by his own account, was drifting under the influence of various radical Muslim clerics, Abu Hamza al-Masri among them. One’s never too sure about the exactness of journo quotes, but here’s one media report to be going on with:

“Look who I ended up with,” he said.
“We had a fantastic relationship. It was a match made in heaven – his anger, my lack of self-esteem.
“He wanted me to die on the battlefield.”

It was, mashallah, not to be — Munir had a change of mind and heart, and now works to offer potentially susceptible British youth alternatives to the “al-Qaeda narrative”.

Here is his story in two brief tweets:

Sources:

Tweet 1: I once held a spoon

Tweet 2: That same spoon gouged

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That little double event — the holding of a spoon, the revelation of its invisible history — I am calling a dark sacrament. I draw the word “sacrament” my own theological background, but also from Joseba Zulaika‘s analysis of Basque terrorism in his fine book Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament, wherein he quotes GB Ladner:

The sacrament is altogether a very different kind of symbol: it not only signifies, but also effects what it symbolizes.

I call this passing of the spoon a dark sacrament in two interwoven but opposite senses. The one who gave Munir the spoon intended it as a gesture making and marking a symbolic connection between Munir himself and its history, a gift of intensification in the dark religion of terror which calls on Islam for its justification.

And yet it was also sacramental in another sense entirely from the one intended: it reached deep enough into that darkness to turn Munir himself towards the light — Islam rediscovered as the struggle of the soul to reorient from ignorance towards the Niche for Lights mentioned in the Verse of Light in the Qur’an, 24.35:

God is the Light of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp (the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star) kindled from a Blessed Tree, an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it; Light upon Light; (God guides to His Light whom He will.) (And God strikes similitudes for men, and God has knowledge of everything.)

Note those two last sentences: God strikes similitudes for men, so that each moment may be a signpost if we do but see it. And God guides to His Light whom He will.

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Professional writers naturally have an affinity for all kinds of form, from the epic epic via the novel, novella, short story, sestina and sonnet to the haiku, and Twitter has unsurprisngly engaged their imaginations. Thus the New Yorker Fiction account, @NYerFiction, has been running a short story in tweets by Jennifer Eagan, while Teju Cole, more to my taste, has posted Seven short stories about drones in a tweet apiece.

But those are prize-winning professional writers, which as far as I know Munir makes no claim to be: he is simply offering us his personal story, unvarnished — yet his effort effortlessly matches theirs. Here is a signal to myself and to the rest of us who try to understand radicalization, CVE and de-radicalization: that true epiphanies — sacramental signs, sacred moments — unleash a power into the system that no amount of calculation could predict.