HIGHER BALANCE

    Original unity, as in Genesis and Big Bang cosmology, persistently haunts and inspires, in visionary thinkers (including scientific), a dream of its all coming together again. For Judeo-Christians, this is Eden regained—or, nearby, the “new Jerusalem”. Even a freethinking Blake envisioned a restored Jerusalem in England’s “green land”. Mallarmé, similarly independent, sacredly said “You can’t do without Eden”. Previously, Poe, whom he particularly admired, depicted the cyclic nature of the cosmos in Eureka, influencing Hugo, Baudelaire, and Valéry as well.
    Long before, the notion of a lost golden age obsessed Hesiod (Works and Days) as well as Plato’s doctrine of Reminiscence. His revenant universalism also gave us the myth of the androgyne, in The Symposium, and the utopian egalitarianism of The Republic.
    Judaic prophets like Isaiah preached an encompassing leveling vision which grew into Christianity’s social dimension and notions of world unity in Judeo-Christian thinkers like Bodin and Grotius.
Jean-Jacques Rosseau, akin to Plato in this, saw the advent of individual property—“This is mine”—as the source of social evil (in “The Origins of Inequality”), selfish separation. Mallarme’s “omnipresent Line” (in “Music and Letters”) and “the pain [or evil] of being two” (“The Afternoon of a Faun”) are further comment on this notion, which goes back to the immemorial one-many problem, (as well as theodicy, the problem of evil) implicit in the Creation (Genesis).
    But, wisdom tells us (as it had told Ecclesiastes, Job, Empedocles, Plato in certain passages, who not) that harmony and discord, like the white and black of the Zen wheel of the Tao, whole and part, globe (circle) and the line, tree and branch, female and male are in eternally dialectical relationship. Balance—a “higher balance” (Camus) between the polarized psychic dimensions of intuition (or faith) and reason—and derivative each-case judgments are called for. Alas, we are far gone toward a colossal imbalance driven by the presumption whose roots go back to the Fall in Eden, and/or first Big Bang centrifugality.
    Males are eternally, ab ovo, separated from females as birth-givers, though their common ancestry in a unisex creature (Plato’s androgyne), scientifically confirmed in many ways, is paradoxically also clear, though secondary now.
    Goodness knows that creates problems—the old much-sung “battle of the sexes”, with, deo volente, ecstatic reconciliations as well as equivalent lost-refound and exile’s return scenarios as in The Odyssey or Daphnis and Chloe or prodigal son dramas like The Jazz Singer.
    But, again, wisdom says, as Ecclesiastes and Job imply, that is the way of the world: on this earth we must accept, though secondarily—there is an all-important tilt toward faith—separateness along with the lost and dreamed-of “Edenic” unity.
    Ancient thinkers like Plato’s Callicles, sophists, cynics, later figures like the Gnostics, Machiavelli (at least in The Prince) were overly-impressed by the negative, the Mephistophelean “spirit that always denies”, brought by a particularly male, later-come, fragmenting, and revolted tree-branch, brain. Latterday absurdists and deconstructionists are in this uninspired, sterile pattern: Derrida, Paul de Man, even Harold Bloom somewhat. Along with the establishment neo-barbaric social-engineering gang who run and ruined our universities and media, they have almost destroyed the wholesome humanistic spirit, the family, cultured child-raising, and culture itself, in America and Europe.
    These old thoughts return to me now in connection with the knotty question of religious contention. The universalist aims of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam ran into differing versions of “ecumenical” tolerance despite fervent belief, and inward mastery of “higher balance” of selfness and otherness, a sort of mandalic two-dimensional pattern, should have prevailed. Alas, a separating, finger-pointing or scapegoating demonizing of the Jews (with recalcitrance on their part to reach out to their new-generation accusers) took over lethally in both subsequent and branching or derivative faiths as remorseful Christian leaders acknowledged after the Holocaust in Vatican II, while much of (radical) Islam grows in resentful ferocity and murderous intent.
    A distinction is in order: a universalist aim in all three religions is good, but the failure to overcome selfish fanaticism is not.
    Exclusivism based on achievement or skill makes sense for lower-level movements and groups: professions, academies, museums, sports. But transcending competitiveness and partisanship is the essence of religious transcendence and fitness for universal appeal. A proclamation by Dante or Cardinal Dulles that only in our way can one be saved, fanatic smugness and aggression in Jews and Christians, sets back these aims very clearly in certain figures like Meyer Kahane, Mel Gibson and his father, Franklin Graham, generally those who “use the cross as a club,” as John Carroll lamented in Constantine’s Sword.
    Pope John Paul II, with his beautiful understanding and hope, saw them as a diminishing breed. But radical Arabic and allied Islam is something else. With all due respect to Koranic faith itself, the lower-level concrete realities documented daily by the Middle East Media Research Institute are far more discouraging.
    Once again, we must deal with the world also as it is.