Sunday, April 3, 2005
amen
Belonging In stillness
A boy fashioned a dramatist, who fashioned a philosophical priest,
who fashioned a great papacy. Curtain.
The Church is a child of evolution.
I think that a Heideggerian view of Christianity works best.
But that’s beyond the scope of this note.
Powers of nature, Being, God, Historicality, Event of Appropriation (evolutionarity?).
In the beginning, we gave face to eonic Time when we said “God”
(the concept, whatever the language). Unifying conceptuality made paradigmicity possible. Still, we long for the unifying Theory of Everything.
Whatever precedes a Big Bang certainly gives no note (to use an anthropic slant) to our infintesimally small piece of dust in a trillions-of-light-years-wide, ever-expanding universe that resulted from that more-than-light (among how many universes?). So, it’s good that we’re able to reconcile ourselves to incomprehensibility with images of our own longing for comprehension, an anchoring face of eonic Time for the so-called “eternity” of our “Being”, the existential infinity of eonic Earth in an eonic universe that we’re still learning to conceive, trusting in longing’s lastingness, which had evolutionary efficacy before modernity (and unwittingly still does for those you need it).
The Church was the first social welfare agency, the first corporation,
the first universalism, the conception of the university. The Church would speak for eternity—lastingness, Stillness of what is instilled to stay—(which we know to be the Timely “Being” of our evolutionarity), designating saints in the stemmings of our presence, ethical exemplars
in Our Flowering, like golden seeds for reinstillations of intelligence in nature. Now we have heros and laureates, paradigmatic theories and discursive formations.
Fatherhood in Mother Church, like paternial intelligence in nature, shepherding Westernity across generations in an intricately organizable garden, only to suffer conflict with adolescent modernity’s freedom of architextual improvisation, which outgrows the garden’s designs.
So, the garden goes south, portending new adolescences. An instrument of evolution evolves, and organized learning goes where it can.
The church evolved (subject of cultural evolution and leading actor in it) which, for all its misconceptions, still belongs to our organizing nature, our monumentality belonging across millennia to The Same eonic stillness, like children belonging to the city, developing humanity belonging to us all.
The church becomes cosmopoly, a pope becomes (in the U.S.) a Supreme Court, while, still, the rest of the galaxy seems lifeless, as if only on Earth gods are made.
