The Pilgrim Exiting Civilization on the Tiger

The Korean Christian culture requires some removal from normal Korean society and thought processes that are integral to the traditional culture. It is a culture where shamanism is extremely prevalent and it is easy to see its remnants throughout social practices and attitudes, but even when we are looking at life through a non-religious element we see certain attitudes towards sexuality that can undercut even Western secular concepts about it in a way that outright atheism cannot. Basically, there are so many aspects about traditional Korean thought that are rooted in outlooks based in Eastern religion that it being a Korean Christian means a separation from tradition. 

This morning I woke up and watched a Japanese Christian describing one of the biggest & greatest barriers to entrance into Christianity as the fear that Japanese have of not meeting community expectations and expectations of their ancestors to honor them, and it can also be daunting in general to hear that their ancestors may not be in heaven... it grinds too much against them. This is solved in Korea with many people having realized that replacing certain aspects of the traditions with Christian prayer fills the gap between Christ and the East and still fulfills cultural obligation. Probably the same can occur in Japan, but that threshold just has not been hit. 

Probably all civilizations have had issues like this which separate it from Christ, and this is also why even Jewish religion, with its monotheism, stuck out like a sore thumb to its neighbors. Rejecting the worship of traditional spirits, ancestors, etc., and the many deities that are thought necessary to maintain life and happiness, and eventually even replacing this with the very Christian idea that you can pray but maybe it's only going to bring you persecution, shows such a radical departure from traditional ideas about life. 

In a wonderful post on PoFo, #15,354,109, I was able to get grain inspiration from Annater who points out that civilization itself seems to have a pagan nature to it that is conducive to polytheism. This is in line with a lot of what we see in real life, how civilization propels people to eagerly worship things that are not God, whether that is mammon or lust. Call me crazy, but I affirm the traditional view - these things are presided over by demons, what the pagans call gods. 

Annater talked about how the West has a tradition of creating circumstance where Annater has the capacity to be a pilgrim, "to be in a civilization but not of a civilization." He equates this with... 

"To ride the Tiger and let Nature Flow as Nature does. Even somewhat "Chinese about it."

This is some of his most profound writing, in my opinion, perhaps the opus dei of his amazing posting career. 

I will have to return to the 'Chinese' part at the end of this post. But first, back to ideas about Western civilization...:

What makes the West unique is that their traditions have a history of exiting civilization. We should perhaps refer to the West of having a history that treats the soul as a pilgrim who defies secular and temporal realities. The individual does not feel boxed into certain pagan rites or obligations. I am not saying that pagan civilization did not previously have rebels who defied these norms and expectations, in fact, I think it is the case that pagan civilization frequently becomes decadent and incapable of fulfilling its traditional pagan rites, but the gods are indifferent about this. Why? Because the worship of fortune/money, fertility rites, and ancestor worship are just the worship of greed, lust, and pride, and many other things as the context provides for them in the practice of these rites. The gods do not need to disturb the decadence because the decadence feeds their hunger and serves their purpose as demons. 

Because we are based on the rejection of pagan civilization, modern Western civilization is liberal as it is liberating individuals of previous obligations and boiling religion down to a far more intimate, personal experience. Moreover, Western civilization is highly self-critical, and it encourages also the criticism of that which is around it as a means of separating oneself from the fallen world.  

Oddly enough, you could say that the Christian civilization is one that has a spirit of self-appraisal and critique baked into it, and so secular institutions which attempt to circumvent these things are doomed by the increasing literacy and naturally rebellious pilgrim spirit of Western civilization. 

Of course, it takes centuries to build up the necessary momentum to achieve the real blossoming of this we first see, the Renaissance, but real eyes would actually look to the monasteries of the dark ages and medieval world, and to also look at the way that Christianity always created a tension within government that emphasized legality and limitation of tyranny for the explicit sake of all people that is the deep roots of this liberalizing and progressive force. 

You could say that human rights are in the DNA of Christianity. After all, it abolished the slavery of the Roman world outright. Serfdom and other difficult economic relations that subsequently appear in the West would keep people arguing against my point, but remember that slavery was essentially reinvented in the West by Protestants when they went to the new world, and they promply abolished it again a couple centuries later.

You can also credit Christianity with making the West hyper-creative, even outright countercultural and revolutionary. For in Christianity, the worldly culture is not a definitive commentary on truth, the truth is something that transcends the world, and so disposal of conventional cultural understandings, of common "truths" and even common "sense" and traditions is seen as not just as excusable, but even praiseworthy.

The Christian is actually here to radically re-envision himself and the world so as to make room for Christ and to embrace his worldly neighbor, creating a completely new space in each generation in an attempt to perfect himself and be a light to others.  

In short, Western civilization was able to redefine what makes a civilization due to the influence of Christianity... It was able to create a whole new concept of governance and social ontology that is highly transient and contractual and noninvasive because Christ blew up the mythos surrounding power and redefined interpersonal relations, removing traditional emphasis on blood ties that was overly clannish and localized. 

Now, in regards to how this is Chinese... 

There is a distinct tieback into Eastern philosophy in riding the tiger. The East is obsessed with the world as an often arbitrary, domineering nature that eats us up but it has within it something that is also pleasing and defining. It erases particularity of the individual by emphasizing the interconnectivity (interpenetration) of the whole, and in this it actually can begin to subvert secular power and redefine relationships. 

Thus in a sense there are some notes from Taoism that are uniquely affirming to a Christian outlook on this... 

Modern Western Christians tend to not see this easily, but the Eastern Orthodox can in the sense that they emphasize the incarnation of God in earth and His Death on the cross as a final blood sacrifice that permeates the world, redefines our relationship with God, and allows for salvation. 

They also understand the concept of being a floating minority in a cruel world - the Eastern Christians have tragic relations with the world and emphasize historical saints that suffered and were martyred, and they see in them the highest glory. This affirms a sort of arbitrary, naked natural power that is lurking in the wilderness to eat us all... 

We refer to the world sometimes as the Desert, so even some of the monasteries on Mt. Athos where there is no desert can refer to the nature around them as a desert due to the symbolic meaning. Desert denotes wilderness, and that wilderness denotes the natural world and raw state of power that is out there swallowing everything. 

Western Christianity overemphasizes the individual, and the East emphasizes the whole of Creation, I feel, and thus tends to encourage self-erasure of the individual through emphasis of Creation as a means of producing humility and peace with the arbitrary, predatory state of nature... 

And who is then trying to create PARADISE, UTOPIA in such a world? 

It comes off as profoundly Chinese in terms of its spiritual dimensions because it emphasizes unity with the creation and ignores the Catholic and Protestant urge to conquer creation and build. 

Christians are not here to conquer anything but themselves, and they are no there to build anything but the church. 

Thus, it has its strong parallel with the spirituality of a Chinese peasant who is riding the tiger of unpredictability and upheaval, uncaring or even oblivious to the society that rages around him because he neuters it but calling it what it is: never-ending chaos that isn't even really my business. 

(This strain of thought is, of course, most clearly Taoist, but the assumption of a chaotic, uncontrollable reality is absolutely also a Confucian concept.)