Repentance

To look at something very unfashionable in the current era, with we’ll say true spirituality why is repentance so intrinsic to this. Entwined with that is of course the simultaneous aversion to the very idea of sin as something oppressive and limiting to our freedom. Well, this might sound superficially attractive but simply look at things like Auschwitz, and all kinds of evil phenomena through history. Were such actions of torture and murder sinful? Only a psychopath would deny this, though plenty misguided people will do everything possible to talk their way around this, for the purposes of dwelling in comforting self-delusion. And if we peel things right back, we see that this denial of sin fits perfectly with the very unfashionable doctrine of Satan and his followers’ fall through pride from dwelling with God in holiness. And the continuation of this pride is the denial of sin. “I didn’t sin. There was and is no sin! It’s all God’s fault. He’s the tyrant here.” And without self-humbling, this refusal to accept sin can only continue, and the inner world becomes very, very ugly. This then got infused into earthly life, and life has been soaked in it to the point that the spiritual path is practically a fight against gravity, or as Jesus says, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

 Regarding all this, a few days ago I watched an interview with contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer, who along with some kind of spiritual sense, seems very involved with historical concerns, such as Germany’s Nazi past and its unresolved psychic stain on that nation. Anyway he was talking of how, given our behaviours through the darknesses of history, he couldn’t avoid seeing mankind as deeply defective spiritually, that there is something deeply wrong going on. Well that’s fine, and maybe a large step towards truth, but he didn’t mention that all this is perfectly covered in the doctrine of the Fall! It’s not something we should be taken by surprise by! And from there then we don’t have to be lost in despair over this fallenness, but rather as the monk Silouan was imparted, “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” Purity or holiness is the true state, not the fallen, “defective” state. Thus we don’t abstract ourselves from the messiness of life, but we also don’t despair.

Below goes off on a bit of a tangent, and in so doing the font gets a bit messed up too. Alas I am but a poor fool stumbling helplessly amidst the confusing corridors of the technological realms.

Is atheism evil or simply somehow neutral or even possibly good? It denies sin. Again the implications of this are clearly evil. “All is permitted,” as Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov attested. And then such characters as Ivan, Stavrogin from Demons and Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment get to see the reality of this and its implications play out beyond abstract theorising into real life. And what they find is they are placed within a world of cause and effect, the “sins” they had questioned the very spiritual reality of are committed, such as murder and child abuse, and rather than an exalted freedom from false confinement within cowardly man-made moral constraints, these genuinely deep beings find a nightmarish inner hell ensues. And rather than being a higher person, the Napoleonic (the idea of whom attracts  Raskolnikov) or Nietzschean type who allegedly steps over the constraints of sin without feeling these consequences, is not some higher superman but rather a parody of a human, a sociopath, not beyond good and evil but beneath it, or rather so mediocre and so smothered by sin that he doesn’t even rise to the level of the conscience.

So back to repentance. One quick analogy to the world or our individual denial of it is like someone wearing clothes that are getting dirtier and smellier by the day but they refuse to accept this and get them washed,  and instead keep on wearing them. Anyone who might wish to point out the desirability of getting them washed  ore than likely stays quiet, as they will probably be lashed out at for having the awful ignorance to speak up!