Out in the Cold Rain and Snow
Just a wintery spring all in all in 2024 in San Francisco By the Sea
My first day with no job today. So I start fixing my flat. And browsing books as I box. De-clutter. Rearrangement. I am game for the task. I have casual work in May through November, and tax office re-hires in November. One more tax check before convention pays, I take time out to re-read as I loosely choose what to display.
Only two boxes free so I try. First though of course I have to sample what I put on a shelf. Browsing. First I consolidate my Berdyaev titles. Most of his I have read twice. Books about Berdyaev less.
Berdyaev sees modern history as the testing of human liberty. Humanism rebels against medieval subjection in affirming man's self-confidence, but it ends in debasing him through severing his celestial ties and in seeing him as but a part of nature. The Renaissance rediscovered natural man and antiquity, witnessed the clash of pagan and Christian principles, and saw their partial reconciliation in the great symbolic art of the age. The Reformation affirmed man's freedom from ecclesiastical compulsion, but it debased man by denying his primal freedom before God. The Enlightenment affirmed man's self-sufficient reason, but in denying any mystery it debased man's ability to know. The French Revolution affirmed man's ability to change history but ended in denying all human rights. Romanticism affirmed man's spiritual resources but denied his ultimate destiny. Industrialism affirmed man's liberation from nature but denied his integrity and dignity. Modern history by a fatal dialectic sees humanism paradoxically be coming inhumanism; the denial of God tending to the denial of man. Berdyaev sees the present as the beginning of a new barbarism the inhumanity of which is manifest in the total war system where human lives are regarded as mere means; in capitalism under which man is enslaved and oppressed by property; in collectivism where the organization becomes the end and man, the instrument; in a morality of bestialism which permits the use of man in any way to attain inhuman or anti-human ends; in cultural manifestations in literature, science, philosophy, and theology which interpret integral man in terms of a part; in politics with sham democracy's concern with only abstract, formal political freedom and the totalitarian's rejection of all freedom; in the dictator led masses in which all individuality is ruthlessly obliterated; in the intensification of racialism and nationalism which find the existential center in entities other than human personality; in the tyranny of Caesars who rule by appeal to instinct and emotion; and in a Christianity that largely conforms to the world. This barbarism may lead on to the new Middle Ages which Berdyaev sees marked by the end of humanism, individualism, and formal liberalism; a simplified material culture; political universalism.; religious collectivism; and a social order of the syndicalist type. Berdyaev rejects the progressive and cyclical notions of history. Though Western civilization is at a crisis, he postulates the possibility of salvation through religious transfiguration. This will take place only as Christianity and creation are combined, i.e. as a dynamic, creative conception of the Church becomes actualized and incarnated in all areas of life. Man's ethical task is one of creativity as in contemplation he acquires the intuitive insight of genius and in self-sacrificing love he actualizes his inspiration. Death signifies that there is no eternity in time and that an endless temporal series is meaningless. Man's role in this situation is to forsake the creation of temporary, transitory, and corruptible goods and to devote himself to the creation of eternal, permanent, and immortal values.
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The religions all seem to me to be a veil we created, and put on, to come between the animal and the world. They are all slightly different colors and patterns, these veils, and are in some cases full hairshirt blankets, but all are something put upon us in our youth in the name of protection, of shielding, some obfuscation of something. It is a veil we are born without, and I never have been quite able or willing to put on. Nothing sticks to this greasy duck.