What is the point of raising awareness? When we received an email from our son’s high school requesting our consent for him to attend an “awareness class” for the second year in a row, we refused. My wife wrote them that he had already taken this class last year and that he didn’t need to hear it all over again.
When we asked him what kind of awareness they raised, he told us a bunch of stuff that was not easy to listen to. One might say, “But this is life. The child needs to know all these things to be prepared.”
Like many medieval thinkers, Dante sincerely believed that a person cannot see hell until they have seen enough Paradise. To be prepared to see evil, one must spend most of their time in Paradise.
In Divine Comedy, Canto 28, Dante, speaking of Beatrice, says: “She imparadised my mind.”
Quella che ‘mparadisa la mia mente.
It turns out there is no such word in Italian. Dante invented it to show what Beatrice did for him. She placed his mind firmly in Paradise — “imparadised” his mind. Only with Paradise imprinted deep in our minds are we prepared to face the Inferno.
We knew that the school wasn’t doing for our son what Beatrice did for Dante. They don’t imparadise his mind. The “raising awareness” idol demands that children be placed right into hell to be prepared for hell. There is no preparation for hell in hell. It’s a soul-contaminating mechanism.
The best way to be prepared for darkness is to have enough experience of light. The best way to be prepared for hardship is to have enough experience of joy. The best way to be prepared for the earth is to have enough experience of heaven.
That’s what Franco Nembrini, a famous Italian pedagogue and a director of a private school, told a father who kept telling his son that life was a bunch of bullshit. When Franco asked why he kept telling him that, the father was surprised: “Because it’s true! He must know that.”
Franco paused and said, “I agree. Life is often bullshit. But since, as you say, you are already there, it makes no sense to dive deeper into it. I can promise you that even if you are head and shoulders into this thing, you will see a speck of light if you only look up. Let it be your guide. Go up, not down. If you follow that speck of light, it will lead you out of that thing. Teach your son to look at the stars.”
We have forgotten what medieval thinkers knew instinctively — you must not look at evil until your mind is imparadised. Evil will break you and corrupt you. We believe in raising awareness about hell but not Paradise. Hell does not prepare you to face hell; it prepares you to become part of it.
When we find ourselves in BS, it’s time to look up, not down. One of the best metaphors for the power of looking up is the experience of ancient Israelites in the desert. They were in a bunch of BS of their own making after incessant complaining about eating manna every day. Poisonous snakes came out of nowhere and started biting people.
What led to the birth of the Renaissance? Huge movements that shape the course of history always start in a small group. In the mid-14th century, Europe was devastated by a plague known as the Black Death. According to some sources, one-third of the population of Europe died. At such a time as this, people always face a difficult choice — to despair and “die before you die” or to find a way to continue living while you are still alive.
Such times are unbelievably fruitful in terms of their history-shaping power. They birth individuals and small groups who want to bring heaven to earth in the midst of hell. That’s how Boccaccio’s Decameron was written. In it, ten people — seven women and three men — get together in a secluded villa to discuss a fundamental question: how do you continue living when you don’t know if you will survive one more day?
Scholars say that out of this impulse, the European Renaissance was born. Renaissance is not so much an interest in reviving classical antiquity; it is primarily, a desperate search for Meaning in total meaninglessness. People struggled with the thought: “Life is scary, but to live without meaning is scarier.”
Renaissance was an answer to the crisis of Meaning. It was an attempt to revive the only thing that could revitalize people in times of spiritual catastrophes. Boccaccio noticed that in times like this people lose the will to live. Renaissance began as an answer to a pressing question: where do you find a desire to live when you know you will probably die tomorrow?
That’s how Boccaccio discovered Dante — the “Poet of Desire.” He realized that the Divine Comedy was a better guide from Inferno to Paradise than Decameron. Eventually, he was hired by the mayor of Florence to publicly read and interpret Dante.
Boccaccio delivered his lectures at the Church of Santo Stefano in Badia and the construction site of Santa Maria del Fiore. He would read fragments from the Divine Comedy and explain them to common people who would pass through the site on their way to the market.
In Dante, hell is a frozen lake, Cocytus. It’s a place of no desire. Those in hell have killed their Desire — by burying it or by satisfying it with the wrong thing (the surrogate). The devil (from the Greek “diabolos,” meaning the divider) separates the person from Desire. He does it in one of two ways: either by making the person give up on their desires altogether (renounce them) or by satisfying them with surrogates. Both lead to the death of Desire. We end up frozen in Cocytus.
Surprisingly, the word for “desire” in Italian (desiderio) contains the root “sidere” (star). To rekindle Desire, we all need “sidere.” Our Desire comes from the stars — a symbol of being moved by the Divine love. When we don’t see “sidere,” we are deprived of desire — “desiderio.” When we don’t see the stars, we have zero desires. We die before we die.
Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, the archeologist Klaus Schmidt made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time — a temple complex Göbekli Tepe datingabout 11,000 years old.
The most striking thing about this discovery was that the temple complex dated before the advent of agriculture and a settled way of life. In other words, several tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers decided that they needed a temple and settled. Why?
In the traditional view of societal development (influenced by Marxism), economic factors always precede and predate culture and religion. Economy is the basis, the structure; culture is secondary — it is the superstructure. Culture and religion always flow out of the economy, not the other way around.
Schmidt came to the opposite conclusion. The main motivation for building Göbekli Tepe was not economy but religion — which was a huge blow to the traditional understanding of societal development. The hunter-gatherers settled because they had acquired some strong religious belief which substantiated building a temple.
This gave rise to the development of agriculture — they needed to feed all those people involved in the construction. And ultimately, this led to the creation of a “settled” way of life. How we live always flows from what we believe, not the other way around. We create an economy around our strongest beliefs, which are usually metaphors.
Metaphor is the structure; how we live it out is the superstructure. The further back we go in history, the more we find vestiges of metaphor-driven consciousness. That’s what Owen Barfield discovered in studying languages: the further back we go in history, the more metaphorical the language gets. Ancient consciousness was metaphoric. Modern consciousness is literal.
Man himself is a metaphor. Before the fall, Adam and Eve were acutely conscious of being vessels of the Divine — images of God. They were icons (“image” in Greek). Looking at each other, they saw God. They were walking metaphors — microcosms reflecting the macrocosm. After the fall, this metaphor-consciousness started disintegrating. Adam and Eve started taking themselves “literally.”
Over time, they started seeing themselves as separate beings — not as icons but as idols. An icon is a metaphor of God. An idol is a metaphor of nothing. It doesn’t show anything beyond the visible. Idolatry is the loss of metaphor-consciousness. Our gaze no longer penetrates the images; it is arrested by the images at the level of the visible and literal. This marks the rise of literalness-consciousness.
Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? The children of Adam and Eve always vacillate between metaphor and literalness. When we forget about God, we take ourselves literally. We idealize our earthly existence (economy) over the metaphor (religion). When we get fed up with the meaninglessness of the “literal,” we wake up to our true nature — we are metaphors of God. We experience a shift from an idol to an icon.
The moment we realize we are icons, we start building temples. We see everything as sacred. We take off our sandals for even the ground we are standing on is holy. We reconnect with God and ourselves as The Metaphor.
Is Winnie-the-Pooh wise? The two most sane characters in literature, Tom Bombadil and Winnie-the-Pooh, are poets.
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” G.K. Chesterton
They are poets to such a degree that they speak in rhyme about everything. They see poetry in everything. Sanity is all about seeing the world as a multi-layered nesting doll for you to open up and explore.
“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.” G.K. Chesterton
Poets don’t go mad. They don’t rely on their reason. They don’t try to get the heavens into their heads. They already have the heavens in their heads — that’s what poetry is. The presence of heaven informs their minds, which is the very definition of sanity.
Tom Bombadil is J.R.R. Tolkien’s absolute metaphor for pure poesis — the Divine making. The world was created through poesis — speaking Divine words: “Let there be light. And it was light.” This is poetry at its pinnacle.
Tom Bombadil, who calls himself “the Elder,” was the first one to see the first dust of the universe. He is the pure poesis, the speaking of the world into being. The world is still held together by poetry.
“He [The Son of God] holds everything together with his powerful word.” Hebrews 1:3
Tom Bombadil is unaffected by the One Ring. He is immune to insanity. He is like the awakened Neo in The Matrix who is able to see the code behind the world. The code is poetry. He sees it and speaks it — 24/7. He knows that the world is spun from words. He doesn’t look for words; words look for him.
Winnie-the-Pooh’s head is also in that word-heaven. He famously said,
“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.”
Winnie-the-Pooh is another paragon of sanity. His every sentence is just as silly and whimsical as Tom Bombadil’s and yet they reveal incredible profundity of perception.
“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”
Behind his hilarious puns hides a world of meaning. Obviously, nothing is not nothing, it is everything. It is something full of potentiality. It’s the womb of the world. That’s what poets do 24/7 — birth the world into being through speaking. Speaking out of nothing. That’s how God created the world.
Winnie-the-Pooh took words out of Heidegger’s mouth (or the other way around), who said that “nothing” is inextricably connected to being.
His “Das Nichts nichtet” means “The nothing nothings” — nothing is not merely the absence of something but an active force. A poet does nothing every day — because he does everything. Winnie-the-Pooh’s nothing is everything, just like Tom Bombadils silly songs are nothing, and yet they order the Old Forest.
Old Man Willow obeys Tom’s silly song because Tom is Master. He is Master because he knows how the universe is ordered and run. It is ordered and run through words. He goes around his realm, he picks flowers for Goldberry, he talks to the trees — he does “nothing.” Every day. He is too connected to being to waste his time on trifles.
Sanity is art. Sanity isn’t the thing you get; it’s the thing that gets you when you leave the trifles of the world and do the only productive thing in the world — the nothing of Tom Bombadil and Winnie-the-Pooh.
What does “swallow” mean in Greek mythology? In Ancient Greece, swallows were a symbol of the soul and were closely associated with the goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. Experts in the Greek lore say that if you look for an explanation of this metaphor in ancient Greek literature, you won’t find much. It’s just there. Without any explanations.
However, if we look at the swallow closely, we might deduce the answer. Swallows are the fastest birds in the world, flying at record speeds of up to 45 miles per hour. But what’s even more intriguing is that they are mostly aerial birds — that is, they spend most of their time in the air.
Landing is dangerous and landing on the ground is deadly. If a swallow lands on the ground it can’t take off. It is doomed. It must start its flight by falling from a high place. That’s why swallows build their homes in riverbanks so they can take off immediately after falling out of the nest.
In other words, a swallow can only fly if there’s a possibility of falling. If it’s impossible to fall, it is doomed. It must be at some elevation always, and this place should be high enough to make the fall possible.
The human soul is like a swallow. When it stops flying, it dies. It lives in the air. Its wings must be spread most of the time. For the soul to fly, there must be a possibility of a fall. However, the soul cannot land in a low place. Low places are dangerous and fatal unless the soul is lifted by an outside force.
It is dangerous for the soul to be in a place where no flight is possible. The soul lives in the air. When it knows that no flight is possible, it dies. The “low place” is when the soul realizes that it will never fly again. The soul must avoid low places for a good reason — that’s how it’s made.
The soul is made to fly. When it knows it can’t take off, it’s too depressing to continue living. What makes the soul fly is love and beauty. The soul must be in the presence of Aphrodite most of the time. Love and beauty elevate the soul. When it doesn’t see love and beauty, it risks landing in a low place.
The soul needs love and beauty like air. That’s how it’s made. When it doesn’t see Aphrodite, it shrivels up. It can’t fly.
We must build our nests in a high place. There must be some possibility of a fall there, otherwise there’s no possibility of a flight. But we must always have love and beauty before our eyes to remain in the air. We must never land. The soul can only rest on an elevation. When the soul is low, it’s restless.
Restlessness is a sign that the soul is low. It’s a sign that it needs to be elevated by love and beauty. Love and beauty lift it up and give it enough space to fall and soar. That’s when the soul is at its fastest. When the soul is full of love and beauty, it moves at record speeds. It becomes alive.
The soul’s restlessness is a sign of too much hate and ugliness. Hate and ugliness kill the soul. They bring it too low. The soul is not made to live in hate and ugliness. It instinctively looks for a riverbank where it can nest and rest. It wants to see the river, the sky, the clouds, the trees, the flowers. These things inspire it to fly.
It falls out of the nest and is carried by the wind across the vast expanse just like the newborn Aphrodite was carried by Zephyrus to the shores of Cyprus.
What was wrong with Lord Denethor? Denethor, the Stewart of Gondor, was sure he knew the future. He had one of those ancient seeing stones, Palantír. He looked into it regularly and was convinced that the battle against evil was lost. He saw too much to doubt it.
“Why do the fools fly? Better to die sooner than late, for die we must.”
When Gandalf told him to fight Mordor, he got enraged,
“Do you think the eyes of the White Tower are blind? I have seen more than you know.”
He thought he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what the future held. This “knowledge” drove him insane. The illusion of absolute knowledge is the best recipe for insanity. As Chesterton puts it, the mind of an insane person always “moves in a perfect but narrow circle.” The function of the Palantír was to draw the person into that narrow circle and lock him in it.
“If you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.” G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Denethor believed that Palantir was broadening his horizons but in reality, it was narrowing his field of vision. It showed only the things that aligned with the will of the one who ruled over the seeing stones. Slowly, Denethor’s “small circle of thought” became so small that he started suffocating in it.
Gandalf came to Gondor as a gust of fresh air and said, “Fight.” You don’t know the future beyond a shadow of a doubt. No one does.
“Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.”
Who knows what the next day will bring? You never know what forces are at work in this particular circumstance of your life. All you need to do is to recognize the necessity and take the next step.
“There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil.”
What do we know about the future? Nothing. To recognize it is wisdom. This realization helped Chuck, Tom Hanks’s hero in Cast Away, to remain sane on his uninhabited island for four years. After being rescued, he told his friend what helped him to go on day after day without any hope of getting out of this prison. He said,
“I just continued living, breathing, until one day, everything changed. The tide gave me a chance… So I know what I will do now. I will continue to live because tomorrow will be a new day, and who knows what it will bring?”
Day after day, he continued living not knowing… until one day, the tide brought him a piece of plastic that he turned into a sail. Now he could get over the huge surf waves.
That’s exactly what Gandalf said to Aragorn, Gimly, and Legolas when they met him in the woods after his unexpected resurrection,
“I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.”
We never know what the tide will bring today. That’s why we continue living and breathing. It is not folly, as Denethor thought. It is wisdom. We don’t see the end. That’s why we are waiting for the turn of the tide.
What is the psychology behind fairy tales? G.K. Chesterton’s ability to turn ordinary things into extraordinary things is extraordinary.
“For those who think that dandelions are only a nuisance, let us point out that they possess the pure gold of a fairy tale.” G.K. Chesterton
I watched a video once about him years ago where he was challenged to find something poetic about a mailbox. In minutes, he came up with an ode to the mailbox as one of the most magical objects in the universe.
When you stand in front of that slot holding your letter, you suddenly realize that you are entrusting your whole life to that “thing” and when you let go, there is no going back. Mailbox is the ultimate symbol of letting go and letting God.
Dandelions are a symbol too. Or rather the ultimate test of whether we can find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
“Through mere complexity of the earth, we may no longer see the dandelions; yet they have all the point of the stars, with none of their terrible distance.”
Modern life is complex; dandelions are simple. Modern life distracts us from appreciating simplicity. Dandelions test our ability to remember the stars in heaven.
In Genesis 4:17, the first thing Cain did after killing his brother Abel was build a city. Why would he even come up with such a strange idea? There were no cities before. Apparently, he instinctively sought protection from “those who might kill him.” Also, he was afraid of becoming “a fugitive and wonderer,” so he built a place that accumulates people.
Apparently, the city served two purposes — by accumulating many people in one place, you make life complicated. Complexity allows you to not notice simple things — like dandelions. Cain didn’t want to see simple things because they reminded him of the stars of heaven. You don’t see many stars in the city. You are too distracted to look up — or down.
In Russian, the word for “city” (город) is etymologically connected to the verb “to insulate oneself” (отгородиться). The city allows you to insulate yourself from everyone else even though you are literally among thousands. You have the illusion of being around people, but in reality, you are protected from them all. That’s why the cities exterminate dandelions — they are too simple and remind people of the stars.
They remind us of the pure gold of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are simple, and they rarely take place in the city (unless it’s an enchanted city). Fairy tales usually call us out of the city and lead us into forests, meadows, dales, and mountains. The function of a fairy tale is simple — return us to the original simplicity. Only original simplicity is powerful enough to re-enchant those who have been disenchanted.
What is the psychology behind fairy tales?
The doors to Narnia are many. In fact, they are everywhere. We don’t see them because our lives are too complicated. We weed the fairy tale out just like we weed out dandelions. However, the fairy tale still grows wherever it can find a patch of land. It can’t be exterminated. It is stubborn like all weeds.
How does Aletheia save us from the shadows of Lethe? The mythological river Lethe in the kingdom of Hades is the river of “oblivion.” Lethe means oblivion or forgetfulness. The river flows through hell, and whatever falls into Lethe is forgotten.
Surprisingly, Lethe is related to the Greek aletheia, truth. The prefix “a” means “the opposite of” and Lethe means oblivion. Truth is something that doesn’t fall into Lethe. In Greek, aletheia is something that doesn’t fall into oblivion.
Salvaged time is the time snatched from oblivion. It is aletheia.
“Yes, says the Spirit, they are blessed indeed, for they will rest from their hard work; for their good deeds follow them!” Rev. 14:13
Whatever we have done in chronological time to transcend chronological time remains. It follows us. It has been saved from Lethe. It is aletheia. It cannot disappear. Michelangelo said,
“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”
In aletheia, we turn shadows into glimpses of divine perfection. They cannot disappear. We do something “into the law in which we were made” – to use Tolkien’s vernacular. We become sub-creators.
We have glimpsed divine perfection, and we reproduce it within the confines of our shadow world. The only way to salvage the world of shadows from falling into the shadow of oblivion is to transcend the shadows.
Whether we bake bread, write articles, talk to a friend over a cup of tea, build a cathedral, or fix cars – if we glimpse and reflect the divine spark in what we do, we engage in aletheia. We transcend the shadow land.
Everything in the shadow land is a shadow until we see through it and infuse it with divine perfection. We can do it by virtue of our divine birth. We have that spark in us. We are that spark. We are but shadows transcending ourselves by pursuing aletheia every moment of the day.
How does Aletheia save us from the shadows of Lethe? When we pursue aletheia, it follows us. We rise above Lethe. We are timeless.
“Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.” James Huniker
Why is the frame important? Believe it or not, the most important thing in an artwork is the frame. Without the frame, it looks incomplete and undefined. However, if you have the right frame for it, it acquires some completeness — almost by magic. The frame allows the inherent beauty of a thing to come out.
If you take a few dry leaves and put them in an appropriate frame, you will get a herbarium. The frame limits the scope of your possibilities, and yet it reveals beauty. Beauty is revealed in and through limitations. Every piece of literature that has endured through centuries frames the hero’s adventures in some limitations.
The limitations allow the beauty to shine. Les Miserables, The Lord of the Rings, The Shack, The Brothers Karamazov, the Gospels — the more limitations the hero has the more this silent question arises in our minds, “Will he go through it beautifully or not?”
We know how our own limitations make us feel. We know they present obstacles to how much we can do. We wish them away. We wish we weren’t limited — or at least, less limited. We think without limitations, we will walk through life more beautifully. We won’t. We may get through life, but it won’t be a piece of art.
For a life to be a piece of art, limitations must exist. The question is not, “What will I do to get rid of these limitations? The question is, “What will I do within these limitations to reveal beauty?” The frame gives us the impetus to transcend our limitations without getting rid of them.
Of course, we can get rid of some of our limitations (thankfully). However, there will always be some that will stay. They are the frame within which we have the opportunity to rise above the frame. The frame is here to lead us out of our limitations. A framed piece of art doesn’t look limited. It looks boundless.
G.K. Chesterton once sprained his foot and used the opportunity to write an ode to his healthy leg. He reflects on the poetic pleasures of standing on one leg and appreciates the strength and beauty of his healthy leg. He points out that the isolation of one leg, similar to a single tower or tree, allows for a deeper appreciation of life. In conclusion, he says that to truly value something, we must realize the possibility of its loss.
“The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.”
And:
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
We are all artists drawing our lives within the constraints of our frame. What will I do with my limitations today? I can either bemoan them or try to rise above them. They can be either an obstacle or a beauty revealer. The question is, “Will I walk through this beautifully today?”
How do we understand what a text means? How do we know what Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, or Tolkien meant? Is it enough to read their books? How do we elicit meaning?
Isn’t it curious that God didn’t come to humanity with a book? He came with a body. The ultimate knowledge of God is enfleshed in the Son of God. He walked among us, and we saw his glory. The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen, touched, smelled, and heard, and tasted Meaning. It affected us bodily. We dwelt in its Presence.
Apart from the body, Meaning is impervious. It is ungraspable at the level of the mind.
As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht says:
“What we need is a form of thinking that is based on the possibility of presence and on the possibility of presence being related to meaning.”
Is meaning related to presence? It is. And our ability to perceive meaning arises from our contact with the Form. Meaning is read off of that Form in which it is embodied.
“That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”
The Logos must be incarnate to be perceivable. Knowledge without a body is misleading at best. We don’t arrive at Meaning through interpretation; we arrive at meaning through coming in contact with its embodied Presence.
Interpretation is misleading without Presence. It is a form of narcissism — we tend to reduce the Meaning to the lens through which we choose to see the world. When we see, touch, and taste the Presence, we don’t need to interpret. We grasp the Whole.
Interpretation is necessary when there’s no Presence. Interpretation is the child of absence. In the absence of the body, texts require interpretation. In the presence of the body, they come alive. They walk, talk, and dwell among us.
We see the text, talk with it, laugh with it, eat with it — we have a relationship with it. Meaning is what happens to us as we engage in that relationship. We know without interpreting. If we have to interpret, we don’t know.
“By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.”
To know God means to touch his flesh. When we touch the Body, we know, and all texts come alive. When we interpret the text without touching the Body, it is a dead letter.
The Spirit loves forms. It loves being in the body. It creates “felt presences.” Whatever we encounter in a text, whether it’s Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, or the Bible, already exists in this world as a Presence. Something that we can touch, see, and experience.
