14 Mar 12 Poetry Reading at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair

Poetry Reading at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair

I’ll be reading from the fifth draft of my epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, from 2:30 to 2:45pm.

My other books will be available at the Earthrise Press table from 12-6pm.

I’d be delighted to sign a copy for you. Hope to meet you there!

Author appearance, Saturday, March 24, 2012, 12:00PM — 6:00PM
Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, Porter Hall, 453 Porter Avenue in Buffalo, NY 14201 USA
http://www.buffalosmallpress.org/

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: 2012, Buffalo, Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Earthrise Press, Frederick Glaysher, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, March 24, NY, Parliament of poets, Poetry Reading

13 Mar 12 UNA-USA Members Day 2012

I was in New York for a few days at the United Nations Association Members’ Day, February 10, 2012, held in the General Assembly. The dozen panelists discussed a wide range of compelling global issues, including,

UN Peacekeeping: Its evolution and operations globally
The Security Council’s new assertiveness in peace and security
Rio+20: Pre-event expectations and potential impact
Millennium Development Goals: Post-2015: What’s next?
Family Care & Women’s Health and Re-productive Rights

UNA Members Day February 10, 2012

http://www.unausa.org/members-day-2012

View from Jamaica… in the UN General Assembly Hall, where I sat during the UNA Members Day, Feb. 10, 2012. My tweets are available on my Wall below, if interested in highlights.

 

 

 

 

UNA Members Day 2012

View from behind Burundi… in the UN General Assembly, where I sat during the afternoon, the UNA Members Day, Feb. 10, 2012. My tweets are available below, if interested in highlights. Susana Malcorra, UN Under Secretary-General of the Department of Field Support, on peacekeeping. An out-standing speaker…

My Twitter highlights follow…

“Millennium Declaration… unprecedented international compact” “signed by world leaders” #unausa #membersday2012 Corinne Woods –(@fglaysher)

“…relentless corporate propaganda” denies global warming. Jeffery Sachs #unausa Members Day — (@fglaysher) February 13 at 7:13am

JFK …make the world safe for diversity…. this small plant.” #unausa #membersday2012 — (@fglaysher)

Kofi Annan “No government has the right to hide behind national sovereignty.”… Ambassador Di Carlo #unausa

Israel, Palestinians….”need to come to terms.” Di Carlo #unausa #membersday2012 —  February 12 at 9:00pm

“Peacekeeping… the whole range… difficult command and control.” Ugo Salinas #unausa #membersday2012 — fglaysher (@fglaysher)

“…institution building so that the peacekeepers can withdraw.” Ugo Salinas #usauna #membersday2012

“Why has [peacekeeping] not really worked? …lack of speed is a political one.” Wolfgang Weisbrod-Weber #unausa #membersday2012 — fglaysher (@fglaysher) i.e., UN tends not to move fast enough to keep up with a developing crisis. The machinery is not in place to allow it to do otherwise.

“Countries don’t want the Secretary-General to have a rapid response force because he might use it.” Wolfgang #unausa #membersdY2012 — fglaysher…

“Peacekeeping …. is based on the willingness of member states.”

Tags: General Assembly, Members Day 2012, Millennium Declaration, Millennium Development Goals, Peacekeeping, UNA, UNA-USA, United Nations

08 Feb 12 In the Post-Gutenberg Stacks

My writing an essay on Rabindranath Tagore, three or four months ago, led to an interesting experience that I find myself continuing to think about. As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Michigan in the first few years of the 1980s, I would often study in the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library. My favorite places were deep in the catacombs of the stacks, 4 South, or the Sixth Floor humanities collection. Since Google digitized the holdings of U of M and those of other major libraries, along with the proliferation of classics online, Amazon and ebooks, and statewide inter-loan services, I, for some time now, have less frequently found myself needing to visit the Library, as I used to, for decades, two or three times a year.

In Tagore’s case, I discovered there were some books and sources I couldn’t obtain by other means, so I took a day last October for the sixty-mile trip to the Hatcher grad library. I started with 4 South, enclosed seemingly in the center of the old library, with very low ceilings, like the cellar of an old monastery. The floor has the bulk of the holdings in religion, especially Islam, Hinduism, and other non-Western faiths. I had on my Android Nexus S phone a list of books and articles related to Tagore and world religions that I wanted to check, complete with call numbers and so forth, from Mirlyn, the library Catalog, which I had accessed online from home. As usual, I was the only person on the floor. One or two might have wandered through that afternoon, cutting across on the way elsewhere. I found the sources in the stacks and piled them up on a desk, about twenty-five books or so.

Before combing through them, I booted my Netbook and turned on the Portable WiFi Hotspot on my phone, so that I could check U of M’s online Catalog, if needed. No reason to run downstairs anymore. I also took out my DocuPen portable wand scanner, so that I wouldn’t have to carry anything downstairs if I wanted to copy an article, which I did with several, emptying the memory, when it became full, onto my Netbook, in PDF format.

Scrutinizing chapters and articles, bibliographies, I found a few things I wanted to pursue further, so I obtained their call numbers with my Netbook, through the Catalog, went back into the stacks, dug around, loved every minute of it. And so it went. Since a few other sources were on the Sixth Floor, which houses mostly literature, having exhausted 4 South for that excursion, I packed up and changed locations, taking about another twenty-five books off the stacks upstairs, from the Tagore holdings of about three hundred books, and burrowed my way through them. I remember being reminded of my time on an NEH summer seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in 1995, and using the Perkins Library at Duke University, especially its excellent collection of Indian literature.

After some time, though, as the afternoon went by, I discovered I was developing a list of books that even the Hatcher Library didn’t have among its several million volumes. I fired up my Netbook again, and, while sitting in a study carrel, logged on to MeLCat, the State of Michigan’s library inter-loan system for the majority of universities, colleges, and local libraries. Working through my list, I found most of the books I needed at other state institutions and ordered them, right then and there, from a shabby old Harland Hatcher carrel, on the Sixth Floor, where over thirty years ago I had enjoyed so many fruitful hours of study.

A couple of books that I particularly wanted were not available at the graduate library nor through MeLCat.  I went online to the HathiTrust Digital Library, found one of them, and added the eBook to my account. The other was on Google Books. I downloaded it and later transferred it to my ereaders.

The MeLCat books began showing up at my local library in Rochester, Michigan, about a week later, when I was ready for them, having read the material I had taken home in digital format. An email notified me when the books were received and available for pick up. I read them in the comfort of my own library.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: books, ebook, Frederick Glaysher, Gutenberg, HathiTrust, Libraries, Library, Post-Gutenberg, Publishing, Research

02 Feb 12 Postscript. eReading and the Post-Gutenberg Age

Postscript: eReading and the Post-Gutenberg Age

I am highly conscious that Google Books made my discovery of Milton’s “Of True Religion” possible. Without Google’s digitizing much of the intellectual heritage of humanity, now available from anywhere on earth, I would never have found this piece by Milton, since modern scholarly editors thought they knew better than Milton what was worth writing and reading. I feel, therefore, it is incumbent on me to give credit where credit is due. Literary, intellectual study and scholarship have and will continue to benefit from what is clearly a Post-Gutenberg Revolution. As a writer and poet, I am constantly now, even for years, finding one thing after another impacted by the exponential transformation in the availability of knowledge and information, the most nuanced, substantive dimensions of literary and aesthetic study, classic works, books, and publications. The world has truly entered into a new age, properly called the Post-Gutenberg Age.

Less recognized is the fact that the requisite spiritual vision appropriate to sustaining it is evolving, has evolved, and is manifesting itself in lived experience. In time, the world too will increasingly awaken to that transformative recognition.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, ebooks, eReading, eBooks, Frederick Glaysher, Google Books, John Milton, Literature, Post-Gutenberg Age, Publishing, Sony Reader

01 Feb 12 Note on eReading and eBooks

Note on eReading and eBooks.

Almost all of the books and articles mentioned in my essay on Tolstoy, and many unmentioned,  were read in ePub and PDF editions from Google Books or elsewhere online.  I was often struck by the fact that I could obtain obscure works on Tolstoy that few libraries even have copies of today, including excellent early biographies, such as Alymer Maud’s two volume work, and many other books and translations. With the click of the mouse, I found myself reading some pieces that I haven’t read in thirty-five years,  previously available only through a university library. It’s shocking that there are still some people who seem to think that’s not good for literature and culture . They seriously lag behind in understanding the Post-Gutenberg Age.

Original publication in ebooks will only assure that every book may very well become a lasting part of the intellectual and cultural heritage of humanity, or at least never go out of print.

Corporate and putatively literary publishing do not constitute some kind of privileged system or means for identifying and promoting the “best” writers; in fact, they are self-serving, commercial enterprises that shore up both the nihilistic vision of life that has become endemic during the last 150 years and the monetary bottom-lines based on such received wisdom.

Little beyond the most predictable, secular, despairing visions of life that have made up the cliched canned goods of modernity can be found coming from most of the publishing industry today.

I stopped looking to them, and the so-called literary magazines, for anything worthwhile in the early 1990s, went into my study, and closed the door. I believe it’s the best thing I could ever have done.

I would argue that the publishing industry intentionally cultivates the notion that they alone are NOT self-interested, a complete falsehood, especially when one realizes they’re taking 88% or more of the profit from the sale of a book! They have no special right to it. Only writers who are gullible fools would give it to them in this age when it is now so easy for authors to reach readers directly by themselves.

It’s not merely a matter of money for writers. It’s also about the freedom of ideas and communication, censorship, who receives a hearing and who doesn’t, the free exchange of ideas. The gatekeepers imagine they know who and what and how society should be influenced and shaped, but, in reality, the cynical, decadent publishing industry, along with the university, has destroyed culture, literature, and poetry, marginalized it by driving it ever further from life, into the pathetic games of deconstruction, “language,” and so on.

One part of the Post-Gutenberg Age is that it has provided the technological means to reach, develop, cultivate an entirely new stage of human civilization, purpose, and meaning. The pathetic executives of publishing corporations aren’t even remotely interested in exploring anything substantively challenging to the received bottom-line they inherited… figuratively and literally.

The real shift in culture I’m arguing for isn’t about me. It’s about life outside my head… that is what would constitute an aesthetic revolution today. The Internet, eBooks, and social networks make that a distinct possibility.

Here is what every writer on the planet can now do for under a hundred dollars: http://books.fglaysher.com

The publishing industry has been downhill for decades. Jason Epstein is an enlightening source in that regard. eBooks already constitute, by objective industry account, 5 to 8% of all book sales. Within a few years, at present growth, it will be over 50% of ALL BOOKS SOLD. The “big publishers” will only have left about 25% of printed book sales, so “big” isn’t a word they’re going to be hanging on to.

Many publishers are delusional about the value they bring to the art. Nada… The self-serving justifications of the NY publishers and their ilk are pathetic and laughable. They should be worrying about ebooks because they indeed do spell “the end” for many of them.

Faber, Carcanet, New Directions, et al… Add in all of the major magazines and journals… Every one of them dedicated to a small, narrow, exhausted vision of life and poetry… All they guarantee is that there will be NOTHING unexpected in their pages. That’s a major part of the reason why the art and the academy have lost the community. They’re no different from the community… The arguments defending publishers are all the usual, tiresome ones, cliches. Speaking about them as ideas, they’re weak ideas in the extreme. It’s painful letting go of icons that become senile and sully themselves…

Banding together into coteries is ALWAYS a sign in literary history of exhaustion, imaginative, spiritual, literary exhauuuussstion… That’s what much of the problem is with the art. eBooks and eReading offer a way to go around the decadent and worthless way in which the art has been manipulated and controlled for decades, often by publishers and the self-appointed cliques. It’s a tremendously exciting sign of HOPE for the future.

A book or poem is something other than the way it is printed, cuneiform tablet, papyrus, vellum, etc. Poetry and writing are ideas, consciousness codified, constituting the true Platonic Book.

Codex or scroll, poets today can have either… It’s merely a matter of *coding.* Aren’t there already remedial html workshops for poets springing up all over the country? Now there’s an idea that probably somebody could definitely cash in on…

The middlemen have changed, as have the incentives that drive them. Many are, and have clearly been, catering to transferring the vanity press business to POD and ebooks. Others are seriously OPEN to new relationships with writers… So, publishing, ePublishing and otherwise, has become a complex picture, as life is, but has definitely emerged into a Post-Gutenberg Age… leaving many behind.

Every age has its Luddities. There are plenty of eLuddites about, moaning and groaning, while time passes them by. I believe many writers of the past would have welcomed the sheer opportunity and excitement of ebooks and seized the day…

Any writer or poet can now SURF across the lake and sell his or her books in the UK and almost anywhere else on the planet. Kobo Books

Any writer who can use a word processor ought to be able to create an ePub ebook, all of which will only become easier and easier…. Poets hawked their broadsides in the streets of London… There isn’t any reason why they shouldn’t on the information highway…

Poets need to get their heads out of the electronic sand on ebooks… before the entire younger generation is lost to the art.

Further reflections on epublishing at Post-Gutenberg Publishing.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: ebooks, ePublishing, eReading, eBooks, Frederick Glaysher, Google Books, Post-Gutenberg, Publishing, Sony Reader, Tolstoy

13 Dec 11 Catalogue of the Ships

While I had hoped for three more drafts by the end of 2011, I’ve only completed another one, for a total of three. Life, alas, placed many other demands in my way, intervening in the time and peace of mind I needed.

Yet I managed to write a thirty-page essay on Rabindranath Tagore, which I am told will be published this month in India in the journal Rupkatha.com. I began reading Tagore as a very young poet many decades ago and have often thought of writing about him, but dismissed the idea until prodded by the editor, giving me the determination to take a seeming detour into the months of  reading needed to shape my thinking into form. Actually, I had felt for the last year or so that I had to engage with Tagore at a deeper level before finishing The Parliament of Poets, and now feel he has opened further for me a perspective that is highly congruent with what I have already written.

Homer’s catalogue of ships at the end of Book II of the Iliad suggested the third draft of The Parliament of Poets. I was actually quite surprised by the development. As a young writer I had always had an animus against the form. Reading Melville’s Moby Dick, I found his chapters on the history and practice of whaling infuriating. At times I couldn’t control the impatience I felt with his method, wanted to throw the book across the room! A diligent student, I, nevertheless, wasn’t one who could skip chapters, ploughed through them, while salivating for the thread of the plot to return. As an older and perhaps wiser writer, I have made my peace with the form. The catalogue serves a literary and intellectual purpose I’ve come to respect, indeed, come to realize I need, for the good of my story and my reader, though there might be some out there someday annoyed as I once was. I hope they’ll come as I have to respect Homer and Melville’s practice, among other writers who have found similar devices necessary, and consider there are reasons and purposes that only the epic catalogue can fulfill.

Homer recounting in Book X the warriors of his epic, Agamemnon in Book IV reviewing his troops, Virgil in his catalogue of the Latin forces and the Etruscans, Milton that of the fallen angels, all tell us something very important about the epic drama under way. Such devices open out and broaden the scope and elevation of the poem. How much more needed in a global age when we have come to view the earth even from the moon. How much more necessary in an age that embraces so much in terms of human experience.

 Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Dante, Epic, epic catalogue, epic poetry, Frederick Glaysher, Homer, John Milton, Rabindranath Tagore, Virgil

04 Aug 11 Back from the Voyage.

Back from the Voyage.

August 4, 2011

I finished the second full draft of The Parliament of Poets a few days ago. It’s now a readable manuscript, entirely cast in verse.

For decades I really didn’t know how to begin, though I made notes and thought about the book endlessly. I had written The Bower of Nil as a book-length narrative poem thinking it would be a bridge to writing an epic. In my mind, the three sections were based on the Greek choric dance, which I didn’t actually make clear until the ebook edition in 2010. Nevertheless, the enormous amount of reading of philosophy that I had done for The Bower of Nil helped me to understand how to handle and structure a theme around a cultural story in dramatic, literary terms. That in itself was a considerable leap forward from the lyric poetry of Into the Ruins, at times a story told or suggested in lyric sequence. The universal epic scale proved far more difficult, even arduous. It was extremely difficult and challenging to absorb and synthesize the decades of reading, my whole life, truth be told, and beyond my own personal life, into a literary, epic form that might hope to speak to our global age.

It was Virgil who finally made me realize how to begin. He had written out the Aeneid first in prose and then worked it into verse. I thought of that for years. That opened the door for me. And then the time was right.

I know I can’t possibly be objective about the book. I’ve been completely wrapped up in it. It will be for others to judge if it flies as a universal epic. For me, after decades, since the early 1980s, I feel I’ve at last crossed a threshold and can look back, as it were, from earth to the moon, back at the earth from the moon, the physical manuscript on my desk proving I have made the voyage.

I have three more drafts planned which I hope to finish by the end of this year, each one working on smaller levels of detail, tying up the loose ends. And then perhaps a few more drafts for further polishing, like a cabochon stone.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Aeneid, Epic, epic poetry, Greek Choric Dance, Into the Ruins, The Bower of Nil, The Parliament of Poets, Universal, Virgil, Voyage

24 Jul 11 Tolstoy and the Last Station of Modernity

Tolstoy and the Last Station of Modernity

August 15, 2010

After seeing several months ago the movie “The Last Station,” by the director Michael Hoffman, based on Leo Tolstoy’s final year of life and his death at the train station of Astapovo in 1910, I found my thoughts often turning to him. I’ve had a long interest in Tolstoy and his work, having spent considerable time as a student reading large swaths of his journals and other more obscure books during the early 1970s and repeatedly going back to him during intervening years. While the acting of Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer was superb, the latter of whom I admire having seen Plummer perform live a couple of times at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, the movie left me with an uneasy feeling regarding the interpretation of Tolstoy. The film script was based on Jay Parini’s novel, The Last Station, which may be part of the problem, in turn perhaps tracing back to the unsympathetic biographies by Henry Troyat and R. N. Wilson, both derisively presenting Tolstoy as a religious crank and fanatic. Neither biography understands the full weight of who Tolstoy was and what he actually believed and why. Touching on the problem, fearing other biographers would repeat the errors of Troyat, Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra wrote in 1968, in The Real Tolstoy, that “Troyat . . . shows no respect for Tolstoy’s inner life. He speaks about it in vulgar, cynical expressions…. I fear that the errors in Troyat’s book will be repeated in other works.” Beyond the biographies, skewing also the movie, lies the pervasive nihilism and cynicism of modernity that has no respect or appreciation for any spiritual vision of life, including even a highly universal one, such as Tolstoy’s, for he had embraced, by the last decade of his life, the universal principles and teachings, not only of Christianity, but of all the great religions. To see or set him in a more limited context is to fail to understand him within his own stated terms and the plenitude and scope of his work.

Born of aristocratic lineage, Tolstoy inherited his elite position in Russian society, along with the enormous estate of Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow. At thirty-four in 1862, he married Sophia Behrs, when she was eighteen years old. By all accounts they lived a happy domestic life together for many years. After his crisis of faith, discussed in My Confessions (1878), while he found the answers for his spiritual and intellectual struggles in his religious studies and books, they began to experienced an increasingly strained relationship. Sophia’s personality was much given, as she described herself, to the lightness of the social world she had been born into, growing up in Moscow in the circles of the Tsar’s court. By her own recognition, Tolstoy had a much deeper inner life of the mind and sensibility. Their relationship was often strained for the rest of their lives. Torn between love and gratitude to her and a desire to bring his life and ideals in line with his beliefs, he and Sophia struggled on together. In a letter dated June 8, 1897, found concealed in his study after his death, published in Paris in Figaro, December 27, 1910, which Tolstoy apparently had never sent to Sophia, Tolstoy dreamed about leaving her and explained his motives better than he eventually did when he actually left her more than a decade later:

For a long time, dear Sophie, I have been suffering from the discord between my life and my beliefs. I cannot force you to change your life or your habits. Neither have I hitherto been able to leave you, for I felt that by my departure I should deprive the children, still very young, of the little influence I might be able to exert over them, and also that I should cause you all a great deal of pain. But I cannot continue to live as I have lived, during these last sixteen years, now struggling against you and irritating you, now succumbing myself to the influences and the seductions to which I am accustomed and which surround me. I have resolved now to do what I have wished to do for a long time: to go away. . . . Just as the Hindoos, when they arrive at the sixtieth year, go away into the forest; just as every aged and religious man, wishes to consecrate the last years of hislife to God and not to jesting, punning, family tittletattle, and lawn-tennis, so do I with all my strength desire peace and solitude, and if not an absolute harmony at least not this crying discord between my whole life and my conscience. (Tolstoy, Romain Rolland, p. 181)

Tolstoy similarly once wrote to his sister, who was a nun in the Russian Orthodox Church, “How fine for the Buddhist when he grows old—he goes off to the desert.” It was to his sister and the Shamardino monastery that Tolstoy first fled in 1910, though he quickly gave up on the notion of staying there and headed south towards his summer home in the Crimea. What is often lost sight of in our disbelieving age is that religious retreat in advanced years was an ideal that Tolstoy respected and wished to honor in fact and deed. Sophia, it should be noted, was diagnosed by more than one doctor as mentally ill, a fact recognized by his son Sergei in a letter to his father, after his flight in 1910, acknowledging that it would have been better had they separated many years earlier. The movie fails to do justice to this complexity, presenting Sophia as far too much the victimized realist of an impractical zealot of a husband. What has come to be a common interpretation of Tolstoy is completely false. That Tolstoy could continue to study and write under such conditions is a testament to the strength and integrity of his character and soul.

Like many writers, Tolstoy anguished, for years, over his inability to bring his life into balance with his ideals. Alexandra quotes from his private diary the following passage:

If I heard about myself from the outside, as of a person, living in luxury, with police guards, grabbing all he could from the peasants, putting them in the lockup, and professing and preaching Christianity, and handing out small coins, and hiding behind a sweet wife while I did all these base things—I could not but call him a scoundrel! And that is what I have had to submit to, so that I could free myself from human fame and live for the sake of my soul. (Tolstoy: A Life of My Father, 1953, p. 466)

On another occasion, he writes, “Help me, O Lord. Again I yearn to go away, and I dare not. Nor can I give up.” These passages demonstrate the extent to which he fought for years with the dilemmas of his own existence, seeking resolution, some way out and forward. His inheriting great wealth and position became for him a burden and contradiction of the sincerity of his religious beliefs, as they developed and evolved, and weighed heavily upon him. Eventually, seeking to free himself, he legally passed ownership of his estate and holdings to Sophia and the family. All his religious writings, several books and many pamphlets, plays, and short stories can be properly understood only when approached in the light of this struggle. It explains why he lived in such a simple way that many visitors to Yasnaya Polyana recorded their surprise upon actually meeting him and witnessing it for themselves. The only solution for Tolstoy was what it was and is for all great writers. He had to write his way through his dilemmas, create for himself the role and persona that resolved his deepest conflicts, and those of his time. That is what all the religious works are about. By the end of his last decade, he’s achieved it, and then, finally, he’s ready, to follow the way of the ancients, set an example, remind the world, in deed as well as word, of the spiritual journey of life, round out the fullness of his own life.

By Tolstoy’s own testimony, after the years of happiness with Sophia, after writing his early novels and stories, including War and Peace and most of Anna Karenina, he experienced a searing spiritual crisis, feeling his life had become meaningless, which impelled him on a search for meaning and purpose. As recounted in My Confessions(1878), during his early years prior to his marriage, he states,

I killed people in war and challenged to duels to kill; I lost money at cards, wasting the labour of the peasants ; I punished them, fornicated, and cheated. Lying, stealing, acts of lust of every description, drunkenness, violence, murder — There was not a crime which I did not commit, and for all that I was praised, and my contemporaries have regarded me as a comparatively moral man.

He further emphasizes that he reached a point where “life had no meaning at all.” Overwhelmed by the emptiness of his existence, he turned to the study of philosophy, but eventually came to believe that there must be more than reason:

From the beginning of the human race, wherever there is life, there is the faith which makes life possible and everywhere the leading characteristics of that faith are the same.

From his study of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, as early as 1879, Tolstoy arrives at the understanding that he is “a part of the infinite whole” and in “the answers given by faith was to be found the deepest source of human wisdom,” while rejecting “the unnecessary and unreasonable doctrines” that had crept into all of the great religions. Initially, he returns to the Russian Orthodox Church, but soon finds it suffered from many irrational doctrines, what he would call after his 1901 excommunication “sorcery,” leading to his quest for the truth of Christianity, and all religions, that lasted until the end of his life in 1910.

A hundred years later, part of the difficulty many people may have in understanding Tolstoy involves today the pervasive nihilism of the academic and cultural establishment, which since Tolstoy’s death, has continued to drain away all spiritual import and nuance, not merely from Tolstoy’s work, but from literature and life. Western civilization itself has become suffused with nihilism, identified with it, the ruling myth celebrated everywhere has become the ascendance and triumphalism of a gloriously secular nihilism, passing the disease around the world, to all countries and cultures, so that the remedy can now only be found and administered in a truly global context. Far beyond the confines of the literary, intellectual, academic milieu, East or West, the ethos of nihilism, inculcated into the young and the general culture, pervades, in its local variants, every region of the globe. Tolstoy himself was highly aware that the general direction of culture was set in a direction away from religious belief and understood his efforts as a response to it, as when he said of Nietzsche, “What savagery! It is terrible, so to drag down Christianity!” Similarly, Tolstoy rejected the applicability of a solely materialistic understanding of the human being, whether by Marx or Thomas Henry Huxley’s defense of Charles Darwin in his Romanes Lectures of 1894. Tolstoy states, “the law of evolution runs counter to the moral law: This was known to the ancient Greeks and Hindus. The philosophy and religion of both those peoples brought them to the doctrine of self-renunciation.” It was often against the decline of a spiritual and moral understanding of the human being that Tolstoy understood himself as writing and working, though even he underestimated the force of nihilism as manifested in 1917. In a preface to Tolstoy’s short novels, Philip Rahv observed, “Tolstoy resisted the catastrophic ruin of the traditional order by straining all the powers of his reason to discover a way out.”

As recorded in an often-cited journal entry, the idea had already occurred to Tolstoy when he was twenty-seven years old that the world needed a new religion, one purged of the false doctrines of organized Christianity:

A new religion corresponding with the present state of mankind; the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and mysticism–a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth.

After his religious crisis, as early as 1884, he took note of his intention of compiling the sayings of religious sages and thinkers into a single volume. During the last decade of his life, he finally began the compilation in earnest, resulting in several different versions of it, variously titled, Thoughts of Wise Men, A Calendar of Wisdom, A Circle of Reading, with the final edition in 1910, The Path of Life. Tolstoy spent much of his energy on the book, compiling and refining. He himself considered it as the most important work of his life, as he once wrote, “If it is granted me to finish this work, it will be a complete statement of my world outlook.” He continually simplified and revised the quotations and passages to the point that he advised translators not to look for the original pieces in Confucius, Buddhism, or wherever, but to base their translations on his own free-renderings. Near the end of his life, far ahead of his time, he couldn’t understand why people didn’t use The Circle of Reading more. While he understood that a writer cannot create his own religion, he was caught in the dilemma of finding all the existing forms unfulfilling.

Throughout the last thirty years of his life, Tolstoy was opposed to the violence in Russia advanced by the radicals, Marxists, and socialists of his time. In a journal entry he writes,

Socialists will never destroy poverty and the injustice of the inequality of capacities. The strongest and more intelligent will always make use of the weaker and the more stupid. Justice and equality in the good things of life will never be achieved by anything less than Christianity, i.e., by negating oneself and recognizing the meaning of one’s life in service to others.

His background in and experience of the ruling aristocratic class and ethos provided Tolstoy with an acute understanding of power and its endless corruptions. Far from being naive about power in society, he understood that human beings had to have a change of heart to influence society at the deepest level. The bombs and bullets of the revolutionaries were anathema to him and would produce only another tyranny, as they indeed did, one of the most horrible and blood-thirsty tyrannies in the history of humanity. Elsewhere, Tolstoy observed, “The object of socialism is the satisfaction of the lowest needs of man: his material well being. And it cannot attain even this end by the means it recommends.” Similarly, in “An Appeal,” “Even if that should happen which Marx predicted, then the only thing that will happen is that despotism will be passed on. Now the capitalists are ruling, but then the directors of the working class will rule.” In 1905 in “The End of the Age,” he wrote, “Nothing demonstrates so clearly the increasing enslavement of nations as the growth, spread, and success of socialistic theories.” By the last decade of his life, he had long since concluded that only a deep spiritual change could truly ameliorate the condition of humanity.

Arguing always against the violence of socialism and the Marxists, Tolstoy, unfortunately, interpreted the New Testament in such a way that non-resistance to violence prevented him from being sufficiently practical enough to recognize the value of a more democratic order, causing him to advocate a type of Christian anarchism and to repudiate Russian efforts to create a democratic body, the Duma, in the early years of the twentieth century. He also, unfortunately, aligned himself with much of the thinking of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin and the anti-tax thinker Henry George. Like Dostoyevsky, he really didn’t understand the West. As others have remarked, a few trips to Europe and England failed to take him deep enough into the social and political culture. Both he and Dostoevsky were too quick to resort to Catholicism as a whipping boy to explain every flaw of the West. I cannot but feel, given the subsequently bloody Soviet history, the country and people would have been better off had Tolstoy been more moderate and realistic about the necessities of life and government. Still, the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy was infinitely more gentle than what Lenin instituted in 1917. In the end, Russia has come full circle back to most of the issues that Tolstoy struggled with, as has the 21st Century.

Tolstoy significantly located what he believed the only way forward in universality—the recognition that the human being is a spiritual being, grounded in the necessity of moral choice and growth toward perfection, as in all the great religions. Our global, pluralistic age lives this truth even as it fails sufficiently to recognize and articulate it to the level required to help understand the nature of life in our time. Perhaps more than any other piece he wrote, published in 1902, Tolstoy explains the religious philosophy he came to hold in What Is Religion, and Wherein Lies Its Essence?

Religions differ in their external forms, but they are all alike in their fundamental principles. And it is these principles, that are fundamental to all religions, that form the true religion which alone at the present time is suitable for us all, and the adoption of which alone can save men from their ills….

Having by this time written several major books and numerous articles on religion, struggling with Christian history and doctrine, his own excommunication in 1901 by the Orthodox Church, Tolstoy was uniquely qualified by fiery experience and study to set forth his increasingly universal beliefs:

The principles of this true religion are so natural to men, that as soon as they are put before them they are accepted as something quite familiar and self-evident. For us the true religion is Christianity in those of its principles in which it agrees, not with the external forms, but with the basic principles of Brahmanism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hebraism, Buddhism, and even Mohammedanism. And just in the same way, for those who profess Brahmanism, Confucianism, etc.—true religion is that of which the basic principles agree with those of all other religions. And these principles are very simple, intelligible and clear.

In this sense, referring to the thinking of Tolstoy, as is often done, as Christian anarchism is a distortion of what the man really believed —spiritual universality, or Christianity universalized, might be better terms, represented best by the same universal spirit he labored to articulate in A Calendar of Wisdom (tr. Peter Sekirin, 1997). Defining universally held principles, he states,

These principles are that there is a God, the origin of all things; that in man dwells a spark from that Divine Origin, which man, by his way of living, can increase or decrease in himself; that to increase this divine spark man must suppress his passions and increase love in himself; and that the practical means to attain this result is to do to others as you would they should do to you. All these principles are common to Brahmanism, Hebraism, Confucianism, and Mohammedanism. (If Buddhism supplies no definition of God, it nevertheless acknowledges That with which man commingles, and into Which he is absorbed when he attains to Nirvana. So, That with which man commingles, or into Which he is absorbed in Nirvana, is the same Origin that is called God in Hebraism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism.)

Repeatedly and everywhere in Tolstoy’s writing, clearing away the debris of such ephemera as anarchism, one finds his emphasis on the Golden Rule as the essential teaching of all wisdom traditions and religions. Just as lucidly and consistently, Tolstoy understood the importance of reason and that true religion does not subvert it to “sorcery” and other irrationalities:

Religion is not a belief, settled once for all, in certain supernatural occurrences supposed to have taken place once upon a time, nor in the necessity for certain prayers and ceremonies; nor is it, as the scientists suppose, a survival of the superstitions of ancient ignorance, which in our time has no meaning or application to life ; but religion is a certain relation of man to eternal life and to God, a relation accordant with reason and contemporary knowledge, and it is the one thing that alone moves humanity forward towards its destined aim.

Tolstoy utterly opposed the caricatures of faith and religion by modern scientism, believing  as Ernest J. Simmons remarked that “one of the main calamities of modern life” was “the tendency to replace moral and spiritual progress by technical progress.” His trust in and search for rational truth enabled him to see through both the irrationalities and blind-faith of organized religion and of modern science to the universality of the human spirit. He was, in a sense, an early modern seeker of the spiritual unity of the great religions, preceding and akin to the Perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley and others, but less given to the esoteric, closer to the approach of Huston Smith, superior even to him, I would say, though admittedly their gifts are different.

When I think of Tolstoy’s spiritual journey and of earlier times and cultures, of writers struggling with what is universal in the human being, I think of Dara Shikoh in Mughal India, seeking unity of Hinduism and Islam, as in hisThe Mingling of the Two Oceans (1657), the universality of the Sufi poets, or of the Dali Lama’s recent book Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together (2010). As reported by Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra, almost his last gasping words were “To seek, always to seek.” In the sense of the psychiatrist Victor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he was one who never ceased searching for truth. Far from a religious organization and all that that implies, Tolstoy conceived of religious belief in rational, reasonable terms, opposed to organized Christianity, as when he wrote, “Men of our modern world who profess this perverted form of Christianity really believe in nothing at all. And that is the peculiar character of our time.” That is why he relentlessly argued against the distortions that he believed had come to exist in the doctrines of institutional Christianity, in favor of a more humanistic, open conception of faith. In “The End of the World,” putting aside “false Christianity,” Tolstoy looked forward to “true Christianity,” one freed from “sorcery,” universal in scope and outlook:

I think that at present—at this very time—the life of the Christian nations is near to the limit dividing the old epoch which is ending from the new which is beginning. I think that now at this very time that great revolution has begun which for almost 2000 years has been preparing in all Christendom; a revolution consisting in the replacing of false Christianity and the consequent power of one portion of mankind and the slavery of another, —by true Christianity and the consequent recognition of that equality and true liberty which are natural to all rational beings.

All the more reason why the caricature of Tolstoy in “The Last Station” jarred so incongruously against my understanding of who the man actually was, in and of himself, as articulated in his own writings, over the entire last half of his life, especially the last decade. It was also the real Tolstoy who meant so much to Ghandi, the one who emphasized spirituality, love, peace, and non-resistance to evil. “His secret is that he is the last of the unalienated artists,” Philip Rahv insightfully observed. Similarly, Saul Bellow remarked on the extent to which Tolstoy was “healthy,” far from the “adversarial” writers of Lionel Trilling.

Now more than ever, after centuries of falling down into the bottomless pit of nihilism, the world needs to recover the vision of universality, what the great religions and people of the various countries and cultures have in common. For all too long, humanity has been obsessed with what distinguishes and separates, what divides people from one another, setting up our little racial, nationalistic gods and idols. Tolstoy was interested in what we have in common, what unifies our vision, hoping thereby to elevate and improve, to whatever degree possible, our actions. It is long past time that the world re-affirm human unity. Tolstoy provides a significant part of the perspective required to achieve it.

Alexandra reports in her book Tolstoy: A Life of My Father (1953) that he had a visitor in February of 1909 who was a Bahai, a member of a faith that emphasizes what is universal in all religions:

“Actually, when you think of it,” Father said, “you are always astonished that such a simple argument does not come to your mind. Take an Orthodox Christian, a Catholic, a Buddhist—all of them believing in what they hold to be the truth. Yet if I cross a certain boundary—I think that the one is a lie, the other the truth. What doubts that arouses, what need to search out the religion which would be common to all!” (472)

Alexandra continues that her father had worked unrelentingly on The Circle of Reading precisely because he was seeking “what was basic to all religions,” trying “to lay the foundation for one religion.” It is important to stress that the Bahai faith that Tolstoy responded to was not what is known to many people today as the Baha’i Faith, the highly organized hierarchy located in Haifa, Israel, merely one of several Bahai denominations, which has become exactly the kind of exclusive religious organization that Tolstoy vehemently condemned in all his writings. Rather, Tolstoy responded to the open and inclusive association and movement that existed under Abdul-Baha, the son of the founder of the Bahai faith, Baha’u’llah, who died in 1892 in present-day Israel. Until his own death in 1921, Abdul-Baha brought his father’s vision into the Western, modern world, showing the way beyond its Islamic and Sufi heritage, emphasizing universality, “spiritual democracy,” the “oneness of religion,” and the freedom of the individual soul in self-less love and service to humanity, as in other persuasions. Tolstoy’s papers establish that as early as 1894, he had heard of the Bahai movement, which traces its origin to 1863, with many Bahai contacts extending until the end of his life, including his receipt of books, letters, articles, and visitors familiar with the Bahai teachings, along with the droves of other people visiting Yasnaya Polyana. Reported by Tolstoy’s personal physician, Dushan Makovitsky, in his diary, for May 15, 1910, Tolstoy observed in his presence that the Bahai movement was “Very profound. I know of no other so profound” (Vol. 4, p. 255). Honesty makes it incumbent on all trying to enlist him under their banner to recognize as well that Tolstoy is on record as writing, “I know the Bahai Teachings, and I am in agreement with its basic principles, except for the belief in the infallibility of its founders, and a few other details” (Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, Vol 81, p. 77).

Many people today still commonly think in terms of “your” religion, and “my” religion, as in “the” religion, “the” exclusive truth, while the deepest meaning of universality is “our” religion, not, to be clear, even “my” own personal Bahai persuasion, which is but one form of universality, conceived of as neutral territory, or “yours,” whether any type of transcendence, atheism, nihilism or whatever. Universality embraces all persuasions. That is its great challenge. And it is not relativism. The tendency always is to think of religion in terms of organized or institutional religion, which isn’t religion at all. True religion can only be personal, and as pluralistic as the Golden Rule. Take the person out of it and it is no longer religion. In the modern world, even throughout human history, true religion has never been organized. It is not the nature of spirituality to take over and dominate the communal, collective space. And it definitely can not ever be organized.  For it is, as Tolstoy understood so well, about the individual soul and his or her inmost relation to the Divine. The astonishing development of religious history, I want to say revelation, is that it is the Will of God that religion not be organized. Everywhere people are against organized religion for countless good reasons, as was Tolstoy. He and most people, if interested in religion, not the falsities and sophistries of exclusive institutional doctrine, want the true thing of the heart. That doesn’t mean oppressively organized religion, anathema to the soul.

The deepest insight of human experience remains, “Truth is One; sages call it by many names.” The Divine Being transcends all human conceptions. We truly need every human attempt to understand Him, Her, It, yet even then, in all humility, have the dimmest hope of fully understanding. It is precisely the defense-reaction of the cynicism of modernity, as Victor Frankl insightfully observes, that rejects the meaningfulness of life, believing all religions are false, delusional, contemptible fantasies. From Freud, Marx, sundry sociologists and many others, science debased to the substitute religion of scientism, the verdict and message is almost invariably condescension and contempt. As Julien Benda observed in The Betrayal of the Clerks (1927), modernity derides any spiritual vision, including Tolstoy’s. Benda, though, remained limited by the exclusivism of his own Catholic universalism, a limited form of universality. Far from such a limitation, Tolstoy arrived at the last station of modernity, universality, long before he arrived at the station of Astapovo, long before the rest of humanity began to catch up. Though we may still first blow up much of the world, global modernity is increasingly catching up with Tolstoy, however unknowingly, pulling into the last station of humanity.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Baha'i Faith, Christopher Plummer, Frederick Glaysher, Helen Mirren, Last Station, Leo Tolstoy, Russian Literature, Tolstoy, Viktor Frankl, Yasnaya Polyana

23 Jul 11 Leo Tolstoy. Hadji Murad.

Leo Tolstoy. Hadji Murad. 1911.

September 30, 2009

I recently downloaded and read from Google Books Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murad. It’s one of the very last pieces of fiction he wrote, finishing it in 1904, published in 1911, the year of his death. The short novel, about 200 pages on an ereader, has always been praised as an exquisitely crafted work of art. Tolstoy allows the structure and interplay of events to speak for themselves, eschewing nearly all temptation to explain to the reader his intentions and meaning. For precisely this reason, the book may be an especially challenging one. Before stating what I think of Hadji Murad, I must touch on my very long relationship with Tolstoy.

As a young undergraduate at Eastern Michigan University in 1976, I used to read Tolstoy when I was supposed to be studying more important things. I would go to the library and comb through the many feet of his Collected Works, devouring many of the more obscure, less-read books by him. While taking classes in Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the romantic poets, I reveled in his works What Is Art?, “Essay on Shakespeare,” and The Kingdom of God Is Within You. I well realized these works were anathema to most of the ruling academic establishment, whom I was beginning to realize even as far back as then were sunk in doctrinaire nihilism. I thrilled to read a writer who believed literature could and should have a spiritual dimension, as do our lives, if we are at all awake and sensitive to the Divine.

From,  What is Art?:

“Special importance has always been given by all men to that . . . which transmits feelings flowing from their religious perception, and this small part of art they have specifically called art, attaching to it the full meaning of the word. That was how men of old — Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — looked on art. Thus did the Hebrew prophets and the ancient Christians regard art; thus it was, and still is, understood by the Mahommedans, and thus is it still understood by religious folk among our own peasantry.”

“The business of art lies just in this, — to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible. Usually it seems to the recipient of a truly artistic impression that he knew the thing before but had been unable to express it.”

“Art is the transmission of feelings flowing from man’s religious perception.”

“So that good, great, universal, religious art may be incomprehensible to a small circle of spoilt people, but certainly not to any large number of plain men.”

How excited I was to discover Google Books now has, it seems, all that huge stretch of library shelf devoted to Tolstoy, available online. I eagerly downloaded all of it, including Hadji Murad, which I have thought of for years, sensing there was something in the book I needed to read, at the right time, now come, one of Tolstoy’s last artistic communications to the world.

As a young man Tolstoy had served in the Russian military in the Caucasus and in Crimea. His early stories and books reflect such experience. Late in life, he found himself recalling that time in the 1850s, while walking through a newly ploughed field in 1896, noticing a beautiful thistle that had been bent and broken by the plough. He tried to save it, but couldn’t, it was so damaged. The incident became a metaphor evoking the life of a local fighter Tolstoy had actually met, Hadji Murad, who was caught between the fanaticism of an Islamic war-lord named Shamil, who was intent on taking over Chechnya, and the Russians, who were extending their control into the area. Hadji Murad, as a man belonging to the more peaceful, local Sufi-like branch of Islam, known as Muridism, resisted the onslaught of Shamil’s jihad and fundamentalist fanaticism. Hoping to obtain troops from the Russians with which to fight off Shamil, Murad leads his band of men over to the Russians, ultimately being caught between the opposing forces. Tolstoy’s art lies in what he makes of and does with these facts of history. His perceiving sensibility and interpretation is subtle and attuned to the issues on all sides.

In the end, the Russians fail to provide Hadji Murad with the troops he needs to protect the Murid community from dominance by Shamil’s fanatics. He waits and waits while the incompetent and corrupt Russian political machine misunderstands what is involved and bungles the chance Murad has offered it. Tolstoy is especially insightful and scathing on the moral and spiritual corruption of the Russian elite and monarchy, contrasting its decline with the healthier vitality of Hadji Murad’s village simplicity, spiritual vigor, and self-less service to his community. Tolstoy’s art fully critiques both Western Christianity and the Islam of beheadings and the chopping off of hands. Murad’s values and beliefs, pure, unsullied, grounded in mystical prayer and communion, are crushed between the two. Finally despairing of Russian help, especially in time to rescue his own family, rendered pawns in Shamil’s intrigues, Murad decides to make a break from Russian confinement to save his family, an act misinterpreted by the Russian garrison which sends troops out after him, murdering his men and beheading him, no better than Shamil’s tactics.  Tolstoy allows the tragedy of Hadji Murad to resonate with the accents of art and vision, challenging the reader to understand.

It seems to me, though, that few have understood. For instance, Harold Bloom’s discussion of Hadji Murad overemphasizes the tragedy while neglecting the Islamic, Sufi resonance. Perhaps we have a larger context today in which we can begin to perceive the profundity of Tolstoy’s art, what with the collapse of Utopia in Power and the terrorism of 9/11. Despite some of his cranky personal flaws, mostly the result of his intense search for truth, his support of the anarchist Kropotkin, and so on, he was a tremendous artist of incredible vision and foresight, part of the tragedy of his time.

The ecopy of Hadji Murad that I read is in the epub format, which promises to become the standard for ebooks. After more than a decade of using numerous formats, I hope it does become the dominant one. There were only four to six minor errors in the text that I could detect without comparing it to a hard-copy. That’s down to about what one would expect to find in most published books, copy-editors seldom being up to snuff anymore. Other minor but annoying problems of formatting seem to be solved by the epub format.

Hadji Murad was a pleasure to read on my Sony Reader. The stage seems set for Google and other ebook publishers to make tens of millions of books, the knowledge and art of humanity, available online. I, for one, shall appreciate it.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Caucasus, Crimea, ebooks, ePub, Google Books, Hadji Murad, Harold Bloom, Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy, What is Art?

22 Jul 11 Of True Religion. John Milton.

Of True Religion and John Milton.

February 7, 2010

In 1673, a year before his death, John Milton published a pamphlet entitled “Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what the best means may be used against the Growth of Popery.” His great poems were all behind him, death before him. Oddly, this pamphlet is little known to the general reader of Milton. After looking through a number of textbook collections of Milton for university courses, published during the last several decades, I was surprised to discover none of them contained “Of True Religion,” yet it was the last piece the man ever wrote. All the more startling is that “Of True Religion” presents a portrait of John Milton significantly at variance with the Puritan caricature of him that is often promoted by scholars in the university. All too often Milton is torn out of his historical time and not seen to be in fact the liberal that he was, clearly headed toward the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which further limited the monarchy and prepared the way for the modern efflorescence of individual liberty and freedom. To distort Milton into a one-dimensional Puritan suppresses the complexity of his actual thinking and life.

Since I visited last summer Milton’s home in Chalfont St. Giles, where he had lived fleeing the London plague of 1665, he was on my mind in the fall, and I was browsing online to see what I could turn up about him. I stumbled onto “Of True Religion” when I had downloaded a 19th Century edition of Milton’s prose, published in 1826, from Google Books. There it was in the table of contents. I suppose it was still possible back then for “true religion” to exist. How curious. I looked in my 1977 college edition of Merritt Y. Hughes’ Complete Poems and Major Prose, first published in 1957. Apparently, not major. In his opinion. After transferring it to my Sony Reader, to my surprise, I found Milton talking about toleration, leaving alone the “Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Socinians” and Arminians, instead of persecuting them, harrying them out of the land, emphasizing what is held in common, versus sectarian. And how far should they be tolerated? “Doubtless equally, as being all Protestants.” He further stressed they should be allowed to preach and argue in their assemblies, public writings and printing. From our perspective, one might say, of course, but Milton was progressive and on the advancing edge of his day. To fail to recognize that fact obscures who he was.

Milton’s qualification is Protestantism. It’s fair to say Milton does not have much warmth of feeling for “popery,” or Catholicism in general, tending to vehement and even feverish denunciation. He’s concerned, like many in his time, with the grasping for “usurped” ecclesiastical and political power. He calls to mind for his readers England’s history under Catholicism when he writes that the pope “was wont to drain away the greatest part of the wealth of this then miserable land . . . to maintain the pride and luxury of his court and prelates.” Milton was not the kind of man to take lightly the “Babylonish yoke” of popery, or anything else for that matter. My English genes cannot but thrill in agreement and admiration for his spirited defense of liberty. However, it’s safe to say, I suspect, that while Milton was willing to extend freedom of conscience to fellow Protestants, which many of the time were not, he probably would have thought differently when it came to Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and people of other persuasions, lumping them all in there somewhere with popery—“idolatrous.” The ruined abbeys all over England stand witness to both the extent of Catholic exploitation and the fierce backlash it inspired. Milton is tame by comparison. But no universality for him. Milton was convinced he had the exclusive truth in Protestantism.

Similarly, some today, trying to revive or return to Christianity, as a dominant social organization, celebrate Milton, thinking he is the way back to an idealized past. But the past is past because it is past. There’s no going back in that direction. Why would one want to? The democratic pluralism of our time is much more dynamic and exciting, and, here’s the important fact, true. True religion, in our time, must recognize the non-exclusivism of religious truth—that all peoples, religions, and traditions taught and held, still hold and teach, to the degree they’re not atrophied or undermined by the nihilism of modernity, the same universal, spiritual insights, ideals, virtues, and truths. Far from exclusivism, far from the historicism and nihilism that attempted to discredit all religions and wisdom traditions, I aver, not that all religions are false, but that they’re all true.

With a nod to the long line of both Croatian Catholics and persecuted Huguenots that I also come from, I would say the great religions all provide a vision and understanding of the purpose of life, what it means to be a human being, that is deeply profound, non-utopian, non-quixotic, when properly understood, of how and why one journeys through this world. We need to know as much about the Unknowable Essence as possible, from every angle, every insight into Divine Mystery, that we might come to understand Him or Her or It, just a little bit more. I’m not willing to settle for anything less than the fullness of Being, striving for It. To relinquish the thousands of years of human meditation on the Divine Being would be too great a loss. What then the point of life? The Exclusive Truth is beyond all attempts to understand Him. I also argue for retention of all the nay-sayers, atheists, agnostics, and nihilists. They have an important part of the truth to tell, while having no more the exclusive truth than anyone else. Relax, there’s no reason to burn them at the stake or blow them up. Nor anyone.

While Milton urges Protestants, “who agree in the main,” to show forth “forbearance and charity one towards the other,” I would urge forbearance and charity for all, all the great religions and traditions, for this is what the logical, rational, reasonable development of modern democratic pluralism has already done, though we do not, I think, recognize and celebrate it for the highly significant achievement that it is. Too often, global society continues, in a sense, to think and act in terms of exclusivism, whether religious or secular, while more often in its lived experience rightly recognizing and respecting the multifarious ways and paths through life. To make our achievement more conscious and acknowledged, indeed, more than mere toleration, celebrated, is one of the challenges and goals of the 21st Century, all times, and a path toward universal peace and understanding. Understandably, the countervailing fear is usually about organization. But in the modern world people have increasingly come to realize that true religion is merely an “attitude toward divinity,” a frame of mind, a reverence for life, not an organization, best manifested as a distinctive quality of the individual.

Putting aside organizations and institutions, Milton writes, “True religion is the true worship and service of God, learnt and believed from the word of God only.” Unfortunately drawing from Paul of Tarsus, Milton embraces some of Paul’s more personal ideas and interpretations, and of the early Christian church, “to reject all other traditions,” instead of universality. Similar to the harm Paul’s teachings on misogyny have caused throughout the centuries, Paul’s bifurcation of humanity, into the “elect” and the “wayward,” has caused incalculable suffering and misery, all in the name of putative truth. All of the various forms in various traditions that have approached human nature in a similar manner have resulted invariably in analogous distortions and social dislocations, though his many good acts and writings conducive to cultivating love and community are timeless. Milton is at his best when he’s following what is universal in the Christian tradition.

Milton’s other prose writings helped disenfranchise the church from the state. He and the time understood well the threat and result of fanatical exclusivity in power, or grasping for it, as we do living now, as a result of the fanatical exclusivism of Islamist terrorism, reminding us of how serious all these issues really are. Separation of church and state is one of the undeniably great achievements of civilization, even, I would say, the Will of God. From lived experience, life just goes better when matters of conscience and belief are balanced with different viewpoints, consultation, people of various religious outlooks, and no religious faith or belief, the full range of human thought and belief; the great pool of humanity, swirling around, trying to make sense of it all, no one shoving the exclusive truth down anyone else’s throat, over the barrel of a gun, or with a bomb. What could be more obvious about our actual experience of what works, what produces a peaceful, harmonious society, or, at least, as close as we can get to one in this world? Even for Milton, the great fear was slipping back into popery or anything oppressive and tyrannical. Not liberal by our standards today, but he was, by those of his own time, and headed in the right direction.

Frederick Glaysher

 

 

Tags: ebooks, exclusivism, Google Books, John Milton, Of True Religion, Post-Gutenberg Age, Protestant, Religious truth, Universalism, universality