[annatar1914]

The wealthy and powerful are supposed to be stewards of the Earth, holding it in trust for God, its creator and ultimately its only owner, but they are despoilers of the Earth. And they are supposed to be shepherds of the flock, but they are ravening wolves, preying on those they should be protecting and nurturing. They think only of their own personal advantage, their own material gain. And no matter how much they have, it is never enough for them; and no matter how little others have, it is always too much. They are unfit to rule.

@Potemkin :

It is with this commentary by you my friend that the peculiar but ( for me anyway) enlightening inner dialectical process I have underwent here is exemplified or illustrated.

It's something worth living for, for fighting for, truth and justice. Because yes, they are unfit to rule. There is another way, symbolized by my neighborhood where there's an Orthodox Christian temple and meters away, a statue of Lenin always covered in red roses, same people. Nor are they schizophrenic: a man does evil, even great evil while doing good, holding the sovereignty on behalf of the people that poor man is to be judged by God. It was not the absolute abbatoir that the West believes and says it was, the USSR, for all it's numerous faults. Lies have been told, but that's another post, because lies are always told as part of the present human condition. Maybe now Christ Himself will have to come, but justice and freedom are still worth pursuing in this life right now and always.

Edit: interesting that as I write this, it's today the 31st anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union . God have mercy, but everything has been so wonderful since then, has it not?

With Leon Bloy I " await the coming of the Cossacks and the Holy Ghost!"

[annatar1914]

Some thoughts on Paganism:

(Nothing original)

I.

Paganism is impossible to understand without realization of the link tying fetishism in it's original sense of course, and commodity fetishism together. A materialistic but at the same time animistic point of view. As such I reject the numinous and pantheistic notions, the hylozoism, which I had previously fancied for some time.

II.

Paganism is essentially in origin a worship of the dead, especially the kings and warriors and heroes of old, the " Giants" and whatnot that form a centerpiece to my narrative in this thread, combined with a materialistic and naive cosmology which produces the planetary and celestial gods. Beings do exist, I believe, but they are all subordinated in a hierarchy under the Creator of All things.

III.

Paganism, given the materialism, the Atheism, the idolatry and ignorance of the present era, is going to hold sway very soon around the world. Anyone who watches the mythological nature of the modern entertainment industry with it's gods and superheroes and so forth, also knows that many of the world youth know more about the Marvel Universe and it's characters than anything in any Monotheistic religion scriptures.

Jews will remain, as will Christianity, but Paganism will triumph, in it's philosophical aspects perhaps more and more explicitly Luciferian/Promethean in teaching. So most Gentiles will be Heathen once more. And more innoculated against Monotheistic teaching from any source, an expended moral capital having already prepared the way.

Agreeing with the works of Tipler, Needham and Rodney Stark, I believe that Paganism will mean an overall decline in technology and science, which is only possible in an Judeo Christian framework. A decline in Progress and Civilization overall, even a reversal.

[annatar1914]

@Potemkin :

Watching Tarkovskys " Passion according to Andrei" again after many years. The Soviet movie about the life of St. Andrei Rublev. Have you seen it?

[Potemkin]

@Potemkin :

Watching Tarkovskys " Passion according to Andrei" again after many years. The Soviet movie about the life of St. Andrei Rublev. Have you seen it?

Yes. In my not so humble opinion, it's the greatest historical movie ever made. An unforgettable masterpiece.

[annatar1914]

Yes. In my not so humble opinion, it's the greatest historical movie ever made. An unforgettable masterpiece.

@Potemkin :

It kind of reflects the nature of the civilization fairly accurately, for better or for worse. It encapsulated that " civilizational code" that I've been talking about on this thread. But lately I've been going back, perhaps because of my illness, to my inspirations.

I think I'd go back to Leon Bloy, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Theodore Dreiser for renewed thinking about the West.

[Potemkin]

@Potemkin :

It kind of reflects the nature of the civilization fairly accurately, for better or for worse. It encapsulated that " civilizational code" that I've been talking about on this thread.

Precisely, and that is the source of that movie's greatness. It is like a spring of living water at the core of that movie. It never runs dry, no matter how often you watch it. The same can be said of Tarkovsky's Mirror.

But lately I've been going back, perhaps because of my illness, to my inspirations.

I think I'd go back to Leon Bloy, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Theodore Dreiser for renewed thinking about the West.

Good choices, one and all.

[annatar1914]

Precisely, and that is the source of that movie's greatness. It is like a spring of living water at the core of that movie. It never runs dry, no matter how often you watch it. The same can be said of Tarkovsky's Mirror.


Good choices, one and all.

@Potemkin :

I got back to the scene (right after reading your reply!) where St. Andrei is talking to Theophanes the Greek about the people, salvation, suffering, the nature of Russian mankind etc .. And Tarkovsky during the conversation has a Russian Passion scene, complete with the Russian Christ. Very moving because it is both universal and particular, like Russia herself, many deep and complex layers just in that one moment.

All the writers I mentioned about the West are good and I'll reread them, but the fact remains (and what we have not discussed before) is that it is Dante in his Divine Comedy who reveals the civilizational code of the West. It is not surprising to me what a critic he is or the nature of the things he is reacting to.

[Rich]

Joseph Conrad

Of course the Liberals won't even allow us to read Joseph Conrad uncensored.

[Potemkin]

Of course the Liberals won't even allow us to read Joseph Conrad uncensored.

One of his books has an unfortunate title, as I recall.

[Potemkin]

@Potemkin :

I got back to the scene (right after reading your reply!) where St. Andrei is talking to Theophanes the Greek about the people, salvation, suffering, the nature of Russian mankind etc .. And Tarkovsky during the conversation has a Russian Passion scene, complete with the Russian Christ. Very moving because it is both universal and particular, like Russia herself, many deep and complex layers just in that one moment.

This is the greatness of that movie , and why it is a genuine epic rather than a pseudo-epic (like Bondarchuk's War and Peace, for example) - the length of the movie allows it to slowly build up layers of meaning, layer upon layer, so that the final scene at the end, merely of horses standing in a field in the rain, is one of the most profound and moving images in all of cinema.

All the writers I mentioned about the West are good and I'll reread them, but the fact remains (and what we have not discussed before) is that it is Dante in his Divine Comedy who reveals the civilizational code of the West. It is not surprising to me what a critic he is or the nature of the things he is reacting to.

Indeed. If one believes Dante, most Popes ended up in the depths of Hell, and justly so.

[annatar1914]

@Potemkin , you replied to my estimation of Tarkovsky's " Passion according to Andrei" that:

"This is the greatness of that movie , and why it is a genuine epic rather than a pseudo-epic (like Bondarchuk's War and Peace, for example) - the length of the movie allows it to slowly build up layers of meaning, layer upon layer, so that the final scene at the end, merely of horses standing in a field in the rain, is one of the most profound and moving images in all of cinema. "

I agree entirely, I'll probably have a fuller commentary on it when I finish. Now Bondarchuk and his movie " War and Peace"... I might be rated a literary heretic but I think it was the source material and writer that were " pseudo epic". I'm sure you have been around to have some idea of what I mean: Tolstoy just doesn't have depth to me. Detail and observation out the wazoo, but not depth. He neither knew himself nor Russia, and resembled his character" Pierre Bezhukov" a bit more than anyone realizes. A dreamer, always searching and never finding, or wanting to find.

Now on Dante:

"Indeed. If one believes Dante, most Popes ended up in the depths of Hell, and justly so. "

I always noted when I read Dante's Inferno that he has Satan chewing on Judas Iscariot but two of Caesar's assassins. This never quite sat right with me, but then before we began talking, I was still of a mindset of refusal to see that the Classical Greco Roman Hellenistic civilization IS Western Civilization. Dante then was with Caesar and the Populates against the Optimates, Anti Oligarchy. As any reader of Monarchia might have thought anyway of Dante, or on his life history. He's the keeper of that tradition.

[Potemkin]

@Potemkin , you replied to my estimation of Tarkovsky's " Passion according to Andrei" that:

"This is the greatness of that movie , and why it is a genuine epic rather than a pseudo-epic (like Bondarchuk's War and Peace, for example) - the length of the movie allows it to slowly build up layers of meaning, layer upon layer, so that the final scene at the end, merely of horses standing in a field in the rain, is one of the most profound and moving images in all of cinema. "

I agree entirely, I'll probably have a fuller commentary on it when I finish. Now Bondarchuk and his movie " War and Peace"... I might be rated a literary heretic but I think it was the source material and writer that were " pseudo epic". I'm sure you have been around to have some idea of what I mean: Tolstoy just doesn't have depth to me. Detail and observation out the wazoo, but not depth. He neither knew himself nor Russia, and resembled his character" Pierre Bezhukov" a bit more than anyone realizes. A dreamer, always searching and never finding, or wanting to find.

I suspect you’re right about Tolstoy. He was a more naturally gifted writer than Dostoyevsky, yet his very facility and fluency as a writer was probably due to his shallowness as a thinker. Tolstoy never wrestled with ideas in the same way that Dostoyevsky did, and his novels are technically flawless and brilliantly depicted, yet fundamentally glittering and superficial. Which is why they are so popular with filmmakers like Bondarchuk, I guess. Lol.

Now on Dante:

"Indeed. If one believes Dante, most Popes ended up in the depths of Hell, and justly so. "

I always noted when I read Dante's Inferno that he has Satan chewing on Judas Iscariot but two of Caesar's assassins. This never quite sat right with me, but then before we began talking, I was still of a mindset of refusal to see that the Classical Greco Roman Hellenistic civilization IS Western Civilization. Dante then was with Caesar and the Populates against the Optimates, Anti Oligarchy. As any reader of Monarchia might have thought anyway of Dante, or on his life history. He's the keeper of that tradition.

It is no accident that it is Virgil - the propagandist-in-chief of the Emperor Augustus, and the national poet of Classical Rome - who guides Dante through Hell. Christianity began as a Jewish faith, but it ended as the spiritual expression of Rome and its empire. Christianity did not erase or contradict the classical pagan past of Rome, it incorporated and consummated it. Dante devoted his Divine Comedy to demonstrate this, to him, obvious and incontrovertible fact. And who was more with the ordinary, toiling people in their struggle against corrupt, oppressive aristocrats than Christ? Dante saw Brutus’ betrayal of Caesar as a foreshadowing of Judas’ betrayal of Christ, and as being on the same order of evil and worthy of the same punishment.

[annatar1914]

I suspect you’re right about Tolstoy. He was a more naturally gifted writer than Dostoyevsky, yet his very facility and fluency as a writer was probably due to his shallowness as a thinker. Tolstoy never wrestled with ideas in the same way that Dostoyevsky did, and his novels are technically flawless and brilliantly depicted, yet fundamentally glittering and superficial. Which is why they are so popular with filmmakers like Bondarchuk, I guess. Lol.


It is no accident that it is Virgil - the propagandist-in-chief of the Emperor Augustus, and the national poet of Classical Rome - who guides Dante through Hell. Christianity began as a Jewish faith, but it ended as the spiritual expression of Rome and its empire. Christianity did not erase or contradict the classical pagan past of Rome, it incorporated and consummated it. Dante devoted his Divine Comedy to demonstrate this, to him, obvious and incontrovertible fact. And who was more with the ordinary, toiling people in their struggle against corrupt, oppressive aristocrats than Christ? Dante saw Brutus’ betrayal of Caesar as a foreshadowing of Judas’ betrayal of Christ, and as being on the same order of evil and worthy of the same punishment.

@Potemkin :

Regarding Tolstoy, we have a Western style rise to fortune and fame and much praise, to the inevitable reactive but non productive and superficial guilt. Friend of mine toured his estate recently, she's ever more convinced the man was mad towards the end, and she paralleled his end at the train station to the end of the liberal gentleman in Dostoyevsky's " the Demons/the Possessed"....

As to Dante, the Roman Empire, and Christianity's response to it and any attendant loss of it's Jewishness:

It's something that I have given much thought to in these pages of course, any absorbsion of Christianity into a form suitable to the Classical civilization, I have a reply but I'm working on it as part of the larger breakthrough I am experiencing intellectually if not spiritually. There is a quick answer which would be that Christianity is sloughing off the detritus and being pushed back into the Magian basis which is it's foundations. It won't exist in the West where it does for much longer, nor will Judaism or Islam for that matter.

Dante was of course on to something about the treason against God and man represented by his placement of Our Lord's betrayer and Caesar's betrayers undergoing the same punishment. And yet, it still constitutes a sign of the dissolution of sorts of the barrier between the Classical culture and Christian thinking, but of that too I'll have to think more on this.

We're on to something here with Tarkovsky's work with the " The Passion according to Andrei" and " Mirrors" which I haven't seen. It's not something I can easily discuss because of a number of cultural notions, but I'm getting ahead of myself, watching the first mentioned film first, after decades.

[Potemkin]

@Potemkin :

Regarding Tolstoy, we have a Western style rise to fortune and fame and much praise, to the inevitable reactive but non productive and superficial guilt. Friend of mine toured his estate recently, she's ever more convinced the man was mad towards the end, and she paralleled his end at the train station to the end of the liberal gentleman in Dostoyevsky's " the Demons/the Possessed"....

Indeed. I’ve read most of what Tolstoy wrote after he gave up literature. It mainly consists of homilies, sermons and parables, and the moral behind each of them (and there’s almost always a moral at the end, like an Aesop fable) is usually of stunning banality. Tolstoy transmogrified from the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina into an English country parson. It’s bizarre.

It seems to me that Tolstoy, in essence, was an 18th century Rationalist. He seemed to take it for granted that all the problems of life and politics and society could be resolved if only people think and behave sufficiently rationally. There are no internal contradictions in reality, there are no irreconcilable political positions. All things can be made straight and can be understood just by applying human reason to them. Needless to say, by the time Tolstoy was nearing the end of his life, the inadequacy of this worldview had become painfully obvious even to him. He tried to ‘escape’ from the life had made for himself, but the journey he needed to make wasn’t on any maps, and he had missed the connection decades earlier….

As to Dante, the Roman Empire, and Christianity's response to it and any attendant loss of it's Jewishness:

It's something that I have given much thought to in these pages of course, any absorbsion of Christianity into a form suitable to the Classical civilization, I have a reply but I'm working on it as part of the larger breakthrough I am experiencing intellectually if not spiritually. There is a quick answer which would be that Christianity is sloughing off the detritus and being pushed back into the Magian basis which is it's foundations. It won't exist in the West where it does for much longer, nor will Judaism or Islam for that matter.

Dante was of course on to something about the treason against God and man represented by his placement of Our Lord's betrayer and Caesar's betrayers undergoing the same punishment. And yet, it still constitutes a sign of the dissolution of sorts of the barrier between the Classical culture and Christian thinking, but of that too I'll have to think more on this.

Dante was all about the dissolution of the barrier between the Classical culture and Christian thinking. Who, after all, is in the first circle of Hell, which Dante must pass through before he can gain his Christian understanding of the world? And Dante portrays himself being accepted into their ranks, his brow adorned with a laurel wreath like an honoured pagan Roman. He spells it out for us. Lol.

We're on to something here with Tarkovsky's work with the " The Passion according to Andrei" and " Mirrors" which I haven't seen. It's not something I can easily discuss because of a number of cultural notions, but I'm getting ahead of myself, watching the first mentioned film first, after decades.

I can strongly recommend that you watch Mirror, @annatar1914. It’s a masterpiece. In a sense, that movie is Tarkovsky coming to terms with Soviet history, making his peace with his own past. It’s unforgettable.

[annatar1914]

@Potemkin :

Thought I'd talk about Dante some more, you said:


"Dante was all about the dissolution of the barrier between the Classical culture and Christian thinking. Who, after all, is in the first circle of Hell, which Dante must pass through before he can gain his Christian understanding of the world? And Dante portrays himself being accepted into their ranks, his brow adorned with a laurel wreath like an honoured pagan Roman. He spells it out for us. Lol."

Pretty explicitly so. I am reminded of the friend of Bishop Cornelius Jansen at Port Royal, the Abbe du Saint Cyran, who told his students once (in a discussion on the Classics) that " Vergil is in Hell". Catholic theology had for some time speculated on what natural mankind without grace was capable of, and came to believe (with notions of Limbo and Purgatory) that the afterlife for" good Pagans" like their Classical worthies was quite decent after all.

So one could pretty much be a heathen anytime, even within " Christendom", without much trouble.

"I can strongly recommend that you watch Mirror, @annatar1914. It’s a masterpiece. In a sense, that movie is Tarkovsky coming to terms with Soviet history, making his peace with his own past. It’s unforgettable."

I watched the" Passion according to Andrei ", and am watching" Mirrors" now. I'll post again in a few days when I'm feeling better and have solidified my impressions completely. Thank you so much for the suggestions!

[Rich]

So I've long wondered why you @annatar1914 have the number 1914 in your signature. Is it a reference to that sickening atrocity of June 1914?

[annatar1914]

So I've long wondered why you @annatar1914 have the number 1914 in your signature. Is it a reference to that sickening atrocity of June 1914?

@Rich :

I had the larger catastrophe in mind of that whole year, but yes. 1914, the beginning of the war from 1914-1945 which heralded the Dark Ages we live in now, the beginning of the end of civilization.

As it is, I think that the Archduke Ferdinand was a planned would be prototype for Adolf Hitler , or rather that Hitler was a replacement for the Archduke, and that his passing (aside from the furious reaction that was WWI) messed up plans worse than what WWI wrought.

[annatar1914]

@Potemkin :

Still watching Tarkovsky's " The Mirror".

A personal Apocalypse.

What is Time? Not linear or cyclical, but a spiral circling around a fixed eternal point.

[Potemkin]

@Potemkin :

Still watching Tarkovsky's " The Mirror".

A personal Apocalypse.

What is Time? Not linear or cyclical, but a spiral circling around a fixed eternal point.

One of the most famous book-length studies of Tarkovsky’s movies is called ‘Sculpting in Time’. Which sort of sums up his approach to time, and to those strange things we call “movies” - pictures embedded in time, pictures which move…. A Tarkovsky movie is the meeting point of the Icon and of Time, the sacred image and the passing, temporal world….

[annatar1914]

One of the most famous book-length studies of Tarkovsky’s movies is called ‘Sculpting in Time’. Which sort of sums up his approach to time, and to those strange things we call “movies” - pictures embedded in time, pictures which move…. A Tarkovsky movie is the meeting point of the Icon and of Time, the sacred image and the passing, temporal world….

@Potemkin :

Well said, my friend. Would you say then that there's a different philosophy at work in the West? Can you compare or contrast for example not Tarkovsky and Michael Bay (lol...) or whoever, but similar scale of genius like Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick? I say this because I'm wondering if it leaves me in a similar position as we discussed with Tolstoy versus Dostoyevsky. This is the way I see it though:

I saw all the Kubrick movies, " the shining", " eyes wide shut", " Barry Lyndon", " Lolita", and " 2001 a Space Odyssey", and it was only with the latter in the final scenes of David with the Monolith that I " got" Kubrick: the Monolith is the Movie Screen itself, an object for looking into (the magicians mirror) at which man is given or made to consume a narrative of what reality is.

Tarkovsky is apparently on a whole other level