EC 419 / God’s War
© Eso A.B.

IT Absents Itself from ITS War

As the following clip proves, the archbishop of Canterbury http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU6LOn-FTlE has doubts about the existence of God and speaks about it from the pulpit http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29258631 . While such doubts are not a disaster for God, it appears that it should be a disaster for my theory that the undeclared war currently being fought in Ukraine is “God’s War”.

Justin Welby decided to become a priest, which is to say, he decided to interject himself between you and me and God after the death of his daughter in a car accident. I can appreciate the trauma which the man experienced at the time, yet over a time, it appears that the trauma has lost its sting and Welby’s daughter has lost her bodily form.

Yet for those of us who are not iconoclasts and who do not leave their loved ones to evaporate into the thinnest of mists, but hold on to their reality even when they are no longer present, the icon http://www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org/articles/iconography/barrow_iconoclastic_crisis.htm remains a reality of ‘It’. As I wrote in blog 417, Leo of Chalcedon, too, failed in his defense of the icon and left the iconoclasts claim victory, because he failed to claim for himself “…such bodily form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold enameling ” (W.B. Yeats). In effect, he failed in nerve it takes to become an “…artifice of eternity” and sing from a golden bough “…to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past, or passing, or to come.” Archbishop Welby is but the latest incarnation of such a failure, even though being of a Catholic form of Christianity such self-iconoclasm comes naturally of the doctrine he subscribes to.

The paradox of self-denial is that it leaves reality to assert itself through the ‘insubstantiality’ of the word. Archbishop Welby’s word—in spite of the assertion of John 1:1 that ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….’, the assertion does not assert that God IS Word. Welby ducks the waters of the IS of baptism like a duck that shakes its tail after a swim. He does such ducking on the authority of the priests who have gone before him, and who, when all is said and done, genuflect before the priesthood of secular authority which subscribes to taxation and vests eternity in finite life that impresses itself by being able to build rockets to the moon. A nice sandbox we have!

Thus, while the war in Ukraine at this time signals the opening shot of God’s War, it is at the same time a wholly human war. What drives it is the unholy history of longue durée that has taken a seat not in the mind of God, but in the mind of a Catholic government owned by a collective of oligarchs, formerly known as lords, princes, or boyars, wealthy enough to have themselves daily deodorized by an incense burning chalice.

By labyrinthine paths and a socialist hiatus two hundred years long, the latter meant to support life among cities built of concrete, the Holy City of Byzantium lies sunk to the bottom of the sea. There are at this time few such that would come and raise the Holy City.

The call to doubt God by the Archbishop of Canterbury is a call to further the doubt among those of us who have been mesmerized by the teaching of the floating empty Word, the fish turned into a beautiful girl “Who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air.... (W.B. Yeats).

Though the war is bloody and kills more innocents than men at arms, I declare it with sentiments no less traumatized than those of the poet, when he wrote that he as much as I

…will find out where she has gone, / And kiss her lips and take her hands; / And walk among long dappled grass, / And pluck till time and times are done, / The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.

Not least: I doubt that either Mr. Welby, or Pope Francis, or the Patriarch of Moscow Kirill will ever be among those who will march with anyone of us to stop the war their words bring.

For a related perspective see http://www.alt-market.com/articles/2326-when-war-erupts-patriots-will-be-accused-of-aiding-qthe-enemyq