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~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: prayer

Not Praying in Auschwitz

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on Not Praying in Auschwitz

Tags

Adolf Hitler, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish, Jews, Nazi Germany, Nazism, prayer, Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Turin

Primo Levi

“Like Amery, I too entered the lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience in the lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my non-belief. It prevented, and still prevents me from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice: Why were the moribund packed in cattle cars? Why were the children sent to the gas?

I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death: when, naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go to the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working.

For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, not when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected that temptation: I knew that otherwise, were I to survive, I would have been ashamed of it.”

__________

From Primo Levi, succumbing to a null theodicy in his last book The Drowned and the Saved.

A few months after his liberation and return home to Turin, the twenty-six-year-old Levi wrote a poem titled “February 25, 1944,” the day he first walked through the iron gates marked Arbeit macht frei:

I would like to believe in something,
Something beyond the death that undid you.
I would like to describe the intensity
With which, already overwhelmed,
We longed in those day to be able
To walk together once again
Free beneath the sun.

The crux of the poem is, to me, that wrenching last word of the third line. In Italian, however, overwhelmed reads like “to be submerged” or “to be drowned” (essere sommersi). Free is more like “to be saved” (essere salivate). Hence the book’s title.

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Does Two Plus Two Equal Four?

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature, War

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

1984, Adolf Hitler, Albert Camus, Assignment in Utopia, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Don Juan, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyè, Eugene Lyons, French Revolution, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Orwell, God and the State, Hermann Göring, Ivan Turgenev, John Galt, La Peste, Mikhail Bakunin, Molière, Napoelon, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Notes from the Underground, peace, Poems in Prose, prayer, Stalin, stupidity, The Plague, Victor Hugo, violence, War, What Is the Third Estate?, Winston Smith

Albert Camus“When a war breaks out, people say: ‘It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.’ But though the war may well be ‘too stupid,’ that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves…

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness…

There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.”

__________

From Albert Camus’s The Plague.

Other Attempts at Two Plus Two:

In a display of ridiculous, zealous fidelity to Hitler, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring once proclaimed, “If the Führer wants it, two and two makes five!”

In Assignment in Utopia, Eugene Lyons near-surreal account of life in the Soviet Union, there is a chapter titled “Two Plus Two Equals Five”. This slogan was a favorite or Stalin’s and was frequently repeated in Moscow at the time; it refered to the dogmatically held belief that the Five Year Plan would be finished in four years.

In his collection Poems in Prose, Ivan Turgenev’s poem Prayer disputes the logic of petitions to the divine:“Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four.”

In being petitioned on his deathbed to return to the Russian Orthodoxy of his youth, Leo Tolstoy said, in what some claim to be his final words, “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.”

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith declares: “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy… If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”

In the opening of Notes from the Underground, an unnamed protagonist (The Underground Man) reasons for several pages about whether two pus two does add to four. Dostoyevsky makes clear that the purpose of this is not ideological, but rather an extension of man’s solipsistic desire for free will beyond the confines of time, space, and even hard logic. “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing,” admits the narrator, “but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”

In 1852, Victor Hugo was outraged by what he saw as a glaring hypocrisy in his fellow Frenchmen, who were so eager to endorse the liberal values of Napoleon III while overlooking the authoritarianism of his coup d’état. Hugo declared, “Now, get seven million five hundred thousand votes to declare that two and two make five, that the straight line is the longest road, that the whole is less than its part; get it declared by eight millions, by ten millions, by a hundred millions of votes, you will not have advanced a step.”

(This was borrowed from the Catholic clergyman Emmanuel Joseph Sieyè, who, writing in “What Is the Third Estate,” observed that, “…if it be claimed that under the French constitution, 200,000 individuals out of 26 million citizens constitute two-thirds of the common will, only one comment is possible: it is a claim that two and two make five.”)

In God and the State, Mikhail Bakunin described the Deistic worldview: “Imagine a philosophical vinegar sauce of the most opposed systems, a mixture of Fathers of the Church, scholastic philosophers, Descartes and Pascal, Kant and Scottish psychologists, all this a superstructure on the divine and innate ideas of Plato, and covered up with a layer of Hegelian immanence accompanied, of course, by an ignorance, as contemptuous as it is complete, of natural science, and proving just as two times two make five; the existence of a personal God.”

In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt says, “the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.”

In Molière’s play Don Juan, the protagonist is asked for a state of what he believes to be true. His answer is that he thinks two plus two equals four.

If anyone knows any more of these, send them as a message or post them in the comments section…

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“Nuclear” by R.S. Thomas

07 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

church, God, Nuclear, Poem, Poet, poetry, prayer, R. S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas

It’s not that he can’t speak;
who created languages
but God? Nor that he won’t;
to say that is to imply
malice. It is just that
he doesn’t, or does so at times
when we are not listening, in
ways we have yet to recognize
as speech

__________

“Nuclear” by R.S. Thomas. Find it in his excellent anthology Uncollected Poems.

Luke Coppen answered the question, ‘Was RS Thomas a Great Religious Poet?’ below:

“Was [R.S. Thomas] a great religious poet? Seamus Heaney thought so. He described him as ‘a loner taking on the universe, a kind of Clint Eastwood of the spirit’. You certainly can picture him entering a church like the Man With No Name bursting through saloon bar doors: tough and inscrutable, ready to do battle with the powers within. In his poems we see him kneeling hour after hour before a bare altar waiting for God to break his silence. But Thomas does not see this silence as proof of God’s absence.

It’s this sense of the difficulty of the search for God, of its cost, that makes RS Thomas a major religious poet. He challenges the tendency of modern Christians to offer easy answers to questions people are not asking. There is no cheap feeling in his poetry, no glibness. If you could measure smugness on a scale of one to 10, with Mother Teresa at one end and Jonathan Ross at the other, Thomas would be in minus figures.

Lesser religious poets do little more than set Chicken Soup for the Soul to verse. RS Thomas didn’t aim to soothe but to unsettle with an unflinching record of his inner life. He saw God in workaday things, such as a field lit up by sunlight.

RS Thomas was big enough to contain paradoxes. He was a ferocious Welsh nationalist who spoke with a cut-glass English accent. His poems alluded to advanced physics but he refused to install central heating. He was a devoted parish priest but admitted to a ‘lack of love for human beings’. And he seemed utterly humourless, but one journalist counted him among the three funniest men he had ever met (alongside Lenny Bruce and Ken Dodd).”

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“Kneeling” by R. S. Thomas

27 Monday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry, Religion

≈ Comments Off on “Kneeling” by R. S. Thomas

Tags

belief, church, doubt, God, Nuclear, prayer, preaching, R. S. Thomas

R.S. Thomas

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

__________

“Kneeling” by R. S. Thomas, which you can read in Collected Poems: R. S. Thomas.

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