Waking v. the Witching

Attendant to the all-encompassing shroud of night is the license to serenity and repose. A bedimmed periphery conduces one to focus their gaze inward and reflect upon themselves or upon whatever avocation best attains that salutary relaxation naturally sought after the labors of the day have ended.

More significant than this though is that the coming of vespers intrinsically empowers the individual, for under the shade of night one assumes an authority that the hours of the sun reserves exclusively for itself and the heavens. With the sanction of darkness it is left entirely to the wish and whim of each what radiance, if any, their surroundings appear in. From this perspective the individual is but a vulgar slave during the waking hours and an absolute sovereign during the witching.

Frightfully though if one accepts that humankind is permeated by corruption in its most basic nature, the advanced license of the dark of night can only be understood to necessarily be a sanction to perpetrate that corruption. Why else would the hours of the sun's absence be labeled, among other things, as "the witching hours"? When the sun is shining all is laid bare by the heavens; under the cloak of darkness the depravity of mankind has immunity to do evil and to enshroud that evil as much as it desires.

In the obscurity of the shadows the witches doth rein.

Under this principle it becomes self-evident why the Judeo-Christian tradition has so often equated God with light in its teachings. Under the guise of darkness human evil is empowered and so the evils of the temporal easily become equated with darkness. By the light that is God that darkness is extinguished and the way to salvation is illuminated.

Evil is darkness, God is the light and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

The Premise of Christ & Eternal Sin

In Mark 3:28-29, Jesus declares that "all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemies against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin."

Martin Luther elaborates upon this, asserting that, "Whoever despairs in his sin or relies on good works sins against the Holy Spirit and against grace."

Theologically this coheres perfectly with what is written in John 3:16-19, the cornerstone article of scripture to the Christian Faith:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment…

The import of this is clear: Christ was sent from God for the sole purpose of saving mankind. Whoever believes in Christ is saved – they will not perish but have eternal life. That Christ was sent to save necessarily implies that Christ was needed to save mankind and that therefore only through believing in Christ as one's savior is grace and salvation possible. According to the Christian faith, to deny this is to deny the entire point of Christ and is therefore to deny Christ himself.

One does this when they believe that they can do for themselves – save themselves through their own works – what Christ was sent to do and what, a fortiori, Christ was needed to do. Through such an individual commission one elevates their self above Christ, declaring through their beliefs if not through their words that they can save themselves by their own deeds, no Christ needed. After all, one who holds in their conscience that they can save themselves by themselves necessarily denies that they need a savior and, ergo, simultaneously declares that Christ is not their savior. The only purpose for which Christ was sent is thus refuted and so Christ himself is thus refuted. Once this is done scripture is absolutely clear: he that "has not believed in the name of the only Son of God" is condemned.

What else could be the "eternal sin"? Christianity holds nothing else if it does not hold that to accept Christ – and to not deny Christ – each individual must accept that the only thing they can do is to accede to the reality that there is nothing they can do. It must be done – and is done – through the sacrificial grace of Christ.

Review: A Short History of Byzantium

A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

The deep and comprehensive knowledge Norwich has of Byzantium -- borne out in the three volume history he has written on the topic -- is only confirmed with this abridgement. If one is looking for a comprehensive yet brief history of the world's longest standing Christian empire this book is ideal.

With that said, I experienced a considerable level of frustration while reading this. In order to condense three volumes into one Norwich had to sacrifice much of his own personal analysis of the history being covered for the history itself. The upshot is an often dry and unyielding catalogue of names, dates and geographic locations buttressed by a sentence or -- at most -- a paragraph of Norwich's provocative commentary. For this reason I can hardly wait to delve into the complete three volume version. Norwich's deep understanding of Byzantium adds a considerable level of gravity to his opinions and to his ultimate assessment of the Byzantines.

Review: Lost to the West

Lost to the West by Lars Brownworth

Brownworth at least proves the thesis of this brief history: the Byzantine Empire did, in fact, hold the line for the West for nearly a millennium. Not only did it preserve the classics of Greece and Rome lost to the West in the centuries that elapsed between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, but it also – just as, if not more, importantly – managed to prevent the soldiers of Mohammed from swarming west and devouring a fractured, sub-developed Europe. "The great walls of Constantine's city…delayed the Muslim advance into Europe for eight hundred years," Brownworth points out, "allowing the West the time it needed to develop" (p. 302).

This is all that can be fairly said for it though. The annals of Byzantium offer very little distinct from the late Western Roman Empire. Both were plagued by ceaseless cycles of political, economic and social instability. With an admittedly fair share of exceptions, an individual would usurp the crown of the basileus, murder/blind/tonsure him and any other potential rivals, and then, sooner or later, suffer the indignity of a similar fate himself.

Beyond that which it preserved from the Ancient Greeks and Romans it is a struggle to come up with anything distinctive of the Byzantines' that would serve to guide and inspire posterity. When the minds of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment looked back it was to the Classical Age, not to the Byzantines, that they found something worthy.

The Byzantines' contribution was to ensure that the fruits of the Classical Age were still there. Byzantium essentially served as a bridge between that epoch and the modern one to which we today are a part. Without them not only would our earliest heritage have been (in keeping with the spirit of this history's title) completely lost to us but the West itself would have fallen beneath the conquering sword of Islam.

No Byzantium, no Western Civilization.