[Using a Pentax K20d camera and a Pentax 18-55 II lens]
From my study window I couldn’t see the mountains, and even when I went down to the river I couldn’t see them clearly, but the fog stayed up the mountain and didn’t interfere lower down where we walked.
Although Raggedy Ann told us it was okay to go on, we heard some gunfire up ahead. The girls stopped in front of me; which told me they wanted to go back. So we did.
On page 82 of The Barbarian Conversion, from Paganism to Christianity, Fletcher writes, “Patrick is famously difficult for the historian. It might be easiest to start by indicating some of the things which he did not do. He did not expel snakes from Ireland: the snakelessness of Ireland had been noted by the Roman geographer Solinus in the third century. He did not compose the wonderful hymn known as ‘Saint Patrick’s Breastplate’: its language postdates him by about three centuries. He did not drive a chariot three times over his sister Lupait to punish her for unchastity: the allegation that he did first occurs in a life of Patrick which is a farrago of legend put together about 400 years after his death. He did not use the leaves of the shamrock to illustrate the Persons of the Trinity for his converts: true, he might have done; but it is not until the seventeenth century that we are told that he did.”
I have read other accounts of the establishment of Christianity in Ireland, but Fletcher’s account takes into account the latest scholarship (at least as of the time of his book, copyrighted in 1997) and his approach is refreshingly modern. Here is his description of Patrick’s knowledge of Latin: “Patrick wrote in Latin, but of a very peculiar kind; indeed, his Latin is unique in the whole vast corpus of ancient or early Christian Latin literature. He had received little formal education – it was to cause him shame all his life – and he did not handle the Latin language with any facility. He longs, passionately longs, to make himself clear to his readers but has the utmost difficulty in so doing. His Latin is simple, awkward, laborious, sometimes ambiguous, occasionally unintelligible. It follows that there is a large latitude for debate about what his words actually mean, a latitude of which Patrician scholars have shown no bashfulness in liberally availing themselves.”
Patrick (c. 340 to 440 A.D.) was born in England and captured by Irish raiders when he was fifteen. He lived in Ireland for six years, after which he escaped and returned to England. He tells us what happened next in his Confessio: “Again a few years later I was in Britain with my kinsfolk, and they welcomed me as a son an asked me earnestly not to go off anywhere and leave them this time, after the great tribulations which I had been through. And it was there that I saw one night in a vision a man coming from Ireland (his name was Victoricus), with countless letters; and he gave me one of them, and I read the heading of the letter, ‘The Voice of the Irish’, and as I read these opening words aloud I imagined at that very instant that I heard the voice of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea; and thus they cried as though with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk again among us.’ And I was stung with remorse in my heart and could not read on, and so I awoke. Thanks be to God, that after so many years the Lord bestowed on them according to their cry. And another night (I do not know, God knows, whether it was within me or beside me) I was addressed in words which I heard and yet could not understand, except that at the end of the prayer He spoke thus: ‘He who gave his life for you, He it is who speaks within you,’ and so I awoke overjoyed. And again I saw Him praying within me and I was, as it were, inside my own body, and I heard Him above me, that is to say above my inner self, and He was praying there powerfully and groaning; and meanwhile I was dumbfounded and astonished and wondered who it could be that was praying within me, but at the end of the prayer He spoke and said that He was the Spirit, and so I awoke and remembered the apostle’s words: ‘The Spirit helps the weaknesses of our prayer; for we do not know what to pray for as we ought; but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with unspeakable groans which cannot be expressed in words.’”
Fletcher adds, “No one can doubt the authenticity of the experience or fail to be moved by the writer’s efforts to describe it.” Or, Fletcher might say if pushed, Patrick really did have a dream but it was probably caused by friends and unfinished commitments he had made in Ireland. A modern-day Charismatic and possibly most orthodox Christians will believe, as Patrick did, that the Holy Spirit really did inhabit Patrick’s dream and inspire him to return to the Irish with what success we are aware.
I recall the arguments of modern Christian orthodoxy that Charismatic gifts ended during the Apostolic age. There was a need for them early on, but once the New Testament Scriptures were readily available there was no longer any need for these gifts. But most of the writings that Fletcher quotes clearly imply that these gifts were present, or at least believed to be present by those who witnessed and wrote about them. Also, it is interesting to note that it is only the Orthodox Protestant Church (by and large) that has declared these gifts to have ended. The Roman Catholic Church still looks for miracles in the lives of men and women they are investigating for possible sainthood. And the Eastern Orthodox Church looks for similar miracles. I once listened to a long narration by a member of the Russian Orthodox Church of Los Angeles describing the “miracles” associated with the death of his priest.
I am an orthodox Christian and not an atheist; so I have no need to explain such accounts as Patrick’s in modern scientific terms. An atheist would find everything he needed to account for this event in Patrick’s psychology and credulity. However, an atheist presupposes that only which meets the standard of the Scientific Method can be accepted as true. (from Wikipedia: "Modern science owes its origins and present flourishing state to a new scientific method which was fashioned almost entirely by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)" —Morris Kline”) Therefore, the atheist would argue, since Patrick’s visitation cannot be verified in the laboratory, it is ipso facto a mere dream – his belief that it was more notwithstanding. While the Scientific Method has produced many wonderful things, it is presumptuous it seems to me for its adherents to argue that it is the only path to knowledge and truth. Early adherents did not so claim. The scientific method was merely a way to understand the natural world which had been created by God. Wittgenstein would have said much the same thing. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus described a world that Galileo or Bacon would have understood, but at the end of it he writes, “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
“He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
Those of us who are orthodox Christians, whether Protestant, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, accept the idea that the Holy Spirit works in our lives. This is a Christian presupposition that doesn’t conflict with the Scientific Method. It does conflict with the Atheistic assumption that the Scientific Method is the only way of knowing.
Eusebius didn’t believe in the separation of Church and State. He was a prominent member of the “little circle of court clerics who helped to school Constantine in Christian ways and to shape an image of him for contemporaries and for posterity.” [Fletcher’s The Barbarian Conversion, from Paganism to Christianity, page 22]
Eusebius dates, c. 260 to c. 340, overlap Constantine’s rule, c. 306-337, surely one of the most important times in church history. In our modern times it is anathema to advocate the combination of Church and State, but if we attempt to put ourselves back in Eusebius’ situation we probably would have agreed with him. Christians had been hounded, persecuted and martyred off and on since the time of the apostles, but now the most powerful person in the world had become a convert. If we had an opportunity to mold him, what would we do? It wouldn’t do to tell Constantine that Church and State should be separated. That wouldn’t have meant anything to him. His conversion from all we know was genuine. He wanted to help the Church grow, so why not let him?
“. . . his adhesion to Christianity from 313 onwards was not to be doubted. Its most enduring manifestation was in open-handed patronage. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, though this is often said of him. What he did was to make the Christian church the most-favoured recipient of the near-limitless resources of imperial favour. An enormous new church of St. Peter was built in Rome, modeled on the basilican form used for imperial throne halls such as the one which survives at Trier. The see of Rome received extensive landed endowments and one of the imperial residences, the Lateran Palace, to house its bishop and his staff. Constantinople, begun in 325, was to be an exclusively Christian city . . . Legal privileges and immunities rained down upon the Christian church and its clergy. The emperor took an active part in ecclesiastical affairs, summoning and attending church councils, participating in theological debate, attempting to sort out quarrels and controversies.” [Fletcher, 19-22]
And if we somehow had an opportunity to talk to Eusebius during this period, could we talk him into a belief in a separation of Church and State? I doubt it. Eusebius was an historian. He knew how bad the Church had it during earlier times and how good Constantine was making it for the Church during the time in which he lived. We would have no evidence to present him of the evils we would be trying to warn him against.
It was Augustine who would make the argument for this separation, but not the argument we moderns might expect. When we read his presuppositions they are hard for a modern Christian to accept. He was influenced by Monasticism. “Monasticism offered, or demanded, a manner of life in which individualism had to be shed. To be ‘of one heart and of one soul’ within a community, to have ‘all things common’, was not simply to follow the example of the apostles commended in Acts iv. 32: it was also to be liberated from the insidious temptation of private cares, selfish anxieties. Such liberation offered the possibility to humans of building a heavenly society upon earth. The monastic vocation was a call to a new way of apprehending, even of merging into, the divine.”
Augustine, if he could be brought forward in time, would be appalled at our definition of the separation of Church and State. Why bother to separate, he might ask us, since he could see so little difference? The Reformers were influenced by many of Augustine’s arguments, but not this one. They found no justification for Monasticism and no reason not to influence the State if they could. Augustine’s arguments can’t easily be set aside, even if we reject Monasticism, but the separation of Church and State that we recognize today began with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. One might say that we in the West learned how to be tolerant of each other’s religion the hard way. We fought each other for thirty years and got tired of it. That’s not quite the same as saying that we suddenly became enlightened, but it will do.
There are Christians today who worry that we in the West have gone too far in the other direction, that is, that whereas in the past the church had power over the State, now the State is assuming an inhibiting power over the Church. Organizations, especially the ACLU, are going through State and Church activities much as Rudolf Bultmann went through the New Testament, rejecting this and that as they see fit. The Western Civilization and the Christian Church grew together as an integral unit, but some now feel they can pull the Church out and cast it aside. Most of the time (at least here in the U.S.) most of us know how to be both Christian and citizen. The two don’t need to be in conflict. Of course most of the Church in the U.S. isn’t resisting ACLU inroads. They may complain a bit, but that are too used to getting along with the State to make a fuss. Would we “make a fuss” if the State went too far, whatever we might mean by that? I think so. The “Spreading Flame” may have grown dim, but it isn’t out.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1022&message=38593258
Alisande writes, “I have a small show at the library this month, most of the images taken with my E-520 and the 35mm macro. Some were processed with Topaz. I can remember when it wouldn't have occurred to me to exhibit "photoshopped" photography, but times have changed. Any why not? If an image is presented as art, anything goes. And my Topaz adjustments aren't exactly over the top.
“In any case, they're getting a lot of favorable comment. Some viewers think I simply shot the hydrangea twice--once in color and once in black and white, even though the Topaz version is much more purple and green than B&W.
“I'm happy to have this positive experience right now, because following cataract surgery a couple of weeks ago I can no longer use my left eye at the viewfinder. I suppose I'll get used to making the switch, but so far it's a struggle.”
The above site provides an oblique view of some of her photos, enough to get an idea of what she is about. While I am not interested in anything like an exhibition, I have her early prejudices against “photoshopping” -- sort of. That is, I photograph scenes from my hikes and they either come out the way I want or they don’t. If they don’t, when I look at them later on my computer, I simply delete them. But I do have Adobe Photoshop 9 on my computer and have played with it a time or two. Perhaps if I took an unusual photo that had a flaw that was not due to my photographic inadequacies, say a bit of “cotton” floating down from a cotton-wood tree, I wouldn’t see anything wrong with deleting it. I did delete some “orbs” and spots caused by sensor dust on my Pentax K20d and didn’t feel any guilt. (I do have the camera she refers to as well as the lens. I can sympathize with her difficulty with the viewfinder; which is one of the reasons I prefer an E1 when I am shooting Olympus and one of the reasons I bought a Pentax K20d.)
On the other hand, if my current photographic approach on hikes becomes boring, I may do some “experimenting” which would require my storing my photographs in “Raw” rather than in “JPEG” – something of a nuisance because one must “do something” with them in order to make them useable. Also, a Raw file is much larger than a JPEG file. I may indeed do that at some point, but I may still doubt that whatever I produce, even if it is as good as the photos of Alisande, is art. On the other hand I don’t feel critical of her or her photographs. I’m probably only a bit more ambivalent than she is.
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