Eyre Lines

Inasmuch as my various mystical experiences have given me any really clear picture, perhaps the clearest has been one of judgment. I saw judgment as, in reunion with God, becoming conscious (in a timeless moment) of all I had done in my life to that point from both sides, that is to say from my own part and from that of those with whom I had interacted. Needless to say, this was not a comfortable experience. It might have been an intolerable one had it not been for the simultaneous assurance of love and forgiveness, which might be called “salvation”, I suppose. The implication might be that this is an eternal consciousness, as it is God’s consciousness of me.

It links in well, I think, with Richard Beck’s concepts of purgatory. Prof Beck is an universalist, working from the point of view of theories about God and a close reading of scripture. I go along with all he says, but have also had this vision of that universal reconciliation; the only small caveat I have had is that I think for some few people the pain of the kind of vision I sketched out above, extended to a timeless eternity, might be too hard to contemplate, to bear, to accept. For them, perhaps eternal separation or annihilation may be the only answer. The Theologia Germanica says “Nothing burns in Hell save self-will; therefore it has been said ‘put of your self-will and there will be no Hell’ “. For some, there may not be anything but self-will left. This, incidentally, works well with twelve-step, in which “self will is at the root of all our defects of character”.

I’ve been listening over the last few days to a set of lectures by the late Rick Roderick, to which I was pointed by an article from 2009 on Homebrewed Christianity. One of these dealt with the “Eternal Recurrence”, which Nietzsche saw, I think, as an encouragement to reinvent yourself really well. The idea is that you are fated to relive your life, endlessly repeating it, exactly the same as you live this one.

If I needed a nastier concept than an eternal consciousness of my failings, this is it. Perhaps Nietzsche was describing a consciousness similar to mine, perhaps he had a glimpse further than I have had. I hope not, that we are not in fact fated to an eternal Groundhog Day, but without the slim possibility of breaking out of the cycle which the film offers.

I don’t think so; the ecstasy of union is probably enough to outweigh anything, and I think this picture requires a greater sense of self, of self-will than is possible. Self-will does, after all, burn…

In passing, is it just me, or could Rick Roderick be Slavoj Zizek’s long lost twin, brought up in West Texas?