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Tag Archives: God

Remembrance: Anamnèse

05 Friday Mar 2021

Posted by michelinewalker in Creation

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Anamnèse, anamnesis, Creation, God, Sacred Text, the Bible

William Blake’s Newton (1795), depicting him as a divine geometer. Image Credit: William Blake Archive/Wikipedia (universetoday.com)

No, you have not been forgotten. You are precious to me. I have been occupied and preoccupied. So, I do not have an article ready, but I would like to mention the concept of anamnesis, anamnèse, in connection with the Bibles moralisées. I will, however, exclude the word moralisées. I do not have a facsimile of one of these Bibles, which means I have not read them.

Anamnèse is a term used in medicine primarily. A doctor researches a patient’s history to make a correct diagnosis and choose the appropriate treatment.

However, an anamnèse may occur elsewhere. In Catholic liturgy, it refers to a prayer which, in the Mass, follows the Consecration and evokes the Redemption (une “[p]rière qui, dans la messe, suit la consécration et rappelle le souvenir de la Rédemption). This prayer is relatively recent. I could not find it in my ageing missal (See Anamnèse, CNRTL.fr. and Parts of the Mass.)

In the New Testament, we read that Jesus was incarnated: « le Verbe s’est fait chair » (John 1:14). God the Son, of the Holy Trinity, a mystery, was made flesh. He is the Word, la parole, or logos, but He is God the Son and incarnated. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit from the forbidden tree and were driven out of Paradise. They were redeemed. That is the Biblical account and it is also John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Catholics added an anamnèse to the Mass, referring to the Redemption.

Jesus was born to Mary in a humble crêche where He was visited, first, by the shepherds and, later, by the Kings of Orient. He was crucified and died, but he was resurrected and remains the Redeemer. For many Christians, although Jesus is invisible, He is still among us. Christians pray to him and they pray to his mother, Mary. The Virgin Mary is viewed as a kind woman who may speak to her son Jesus and ask Him to help us in times of grief, such as pandemics, wars, or social upheavals.

I asked theologians if Jesus had left a message. Jesus Himself did not. He did not write a text. Jesus’s disciples told his parables and that He taught unconditional love. The Sermon on the Mount, however, was told by his disciples, Matthew to be precise. Moreover, Jesus did not found a Church. Christianity was founded by Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (CE 306–337).

Icon depicting the Emperor Constantine (centre), accompanied by the bishops of the First Council of Nicaea (325), holding the Niceno–Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As for our thirteenth-century Gods, they may have satisfied the medieval mind and my rather childlike mind, but they border on Paradox literature. Not only does God use the compass, which has yet to be invented, but he also looks like the human beings he is creating. He created us in his image. This history called for other accounts of Creation, such as the Big Bang (le Grand Boum). But the Bible, the Quran, Epics, Mythologies, Sacred Texts, and the disputed Totemism are anamnèses that explain the human condition somewhat naïvely at times but also beautifully. These provide proof that we need to know where we come from and that we wish to ennoble ourselves.

So, there was a great deluge, but Noah’s Ark saved humanity and its animals. Jonah, a prophet, was inside a whale that protected him. Moreover, although there was no compass before man[1] was created, humans themselves have created extraordinary machines. Man has travelled to the moon and man has created works of art, works of literature and music we call divine. We cannot create an autonomous human being, but we have been creators.

There is a measure of godliness among mortals.[2]

____________________
[1] Man includes women.
[2] This discussion is to be continued.

Love to everyone 💕

Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci

Micheline Walker
5 March 2021
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Happy Easter

08 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Music

≈ 629 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Easter, Flickr, God, Holiday, Jesus, Religion and Spirituality, Wikipedia

 Pâques©mw

Pâques, by Micheline Walker

I would like to wish all of you a very Happy Easter.  To the left, you will find a fanciful and unfinished painting.  I did it without a model and it is poorly photographed.  But, it is colourful and depicts Easter in a humble way.

Today, I hope to go to Mass at Saint-Benoît-du-Lac.  I am privileged in that I live a short drive away from a Benedictine Abbey.  Two of the Monks are excellent organists, so I sit near the organ and I listen to Gregorian Chant. 

May this Easter be a joyful celebration.

J.S. Bach – Easter Oratorio, BWV 249  

 (please click on the title to hear the music) 

Saint Benedict Abbey, Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, tak...

Saint Benedict Abbey, Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, taken on June 8, 2008. Uploaded to Flickr by its author, colros (Colin Rose), under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Français : Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

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God punished Washington or Michele Bachmann and Natural Disasters

01 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by michelinewalker in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on God punished Washington or Michele Bachmann and Natural Disasters

Tags

Angst, Democrats, French enlightenment, God, Leibniz, natural disasters, punishment, Republicans, Voltaire's Candide, Washington

So God punished Washington! Could that be? I suppose there has to be a way of making sense of the senseless, i.e. natural disasters.

However, there is a problem. Just which Washington did God punish? A Republican Washington or a Democratic Washington? And to make matters worse, which God meted out this punishment? I was raised to think there was only one God, but I have since realized that people pray to different Gods.

French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) wrote his masterful Candide ou l’Optimisme in 1759, shortly after Lisbon suffered an earthquake and a tsunami that killed between fifty to one hundred thousand persons. Candide, the main character of Voltaire’s witty picaresque tale (picaresque because of its forever-travelling and motley characters) is a naïve young man.

Candide was raised in the Castle of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, in Westphalia, Germany, and is probably the illegitimate son of the Baron’s sister. One day Candide is chased out of Paradise, the Castle Thunder-ten-tronckh, when he is caught kissing Mademoiselle Cunégonde, the Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh’s beautiful daughter.

At one point in the novel, the naïve Candide just happens to be in Lisbon with his mentor, Pangloss, on the very day, November 1st, 1755, Lisbon was devastated by an earthquake and a tsunami that claimed nearly one hundred thousand lives.

Candide and Pangloss survive, but Candide cannot understand why such a disaster has befallen the citizens of Lisbon. Fortunately, his beloved mentor Pangloss, a disciple of Leibniz (1646-1716), reassures him by saying, as he always does, that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds: “Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles.”

It is unlikely that Lisbon’s Great Earthquake and Tsunami alone, if at all, moved Voltaire to write Candide. Voltaire was the most prominent among the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, and philosophers usually discuss philosophy, not current events. However, the earthquake had to be on Voltaire’s mind or it is unlikely he would have led his characters to the site of the disaster at the very moment said disaster occurred: kairos, or time in its vertical and opportune dimension, rather than chronos, the unaging and horizontal dimension of time.

Although he was a lumière, Voltaire was also a deist, albeit unconvincingly, and very much aware of the human condition. Late in his relatively long life (he died at the age eight-four), Voltaire wrote that he was “slowly nearing the moment when philosophers and idiots suffer the same fate.” “J’approche tout doucement du moment où les philosophes et les imbéciles ont la même destinée.” Death was the equalizer.

But unlike Pascal, a believer who tended to fear reason, Voltaire was a “philosophe” guided by reason alone. So it was as a “philosophe,” i.e. he felt no angst, that he accepted, humorously and with considerable wit, that humans were mortals who knew they were mortals. Moreover, he undoubtedly did so while dining at the table of some great aristocrat or prince. He loved luxury.

Voltaire was nevertheless an outspoken advocate of equality, justice and tolerance and was emprisoned for his views. He is therefore considered as a precursor of the French Revolution. But not for one second, however brief, would he have understood the “terreur,” or the year 1793, when both Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were summarily guillotined.

Yet, although he places Candide and Pangloss in Lisbon on the day of the Great Earthquake and Tsunami of 1755, it is unlikely Voltaire would have seen this enormous disaster as a manifestation of God’s disapproval of anything or anyone.

As for last week’s earthquake and hurricane Irene, these were natural disasters and natural disasters cannot be prevented nor do they take sides. Because meteorologists can now follow the path of hurricanes and measure their velocity, the rich could flee from Irene, which would not have been possible before satellites were built. But God could not have discriminated between Republicans and Democrats as both are temporary denizens of Washington. Besides, if there are several Gods, they are probably fighting among one another. Godliness is in trouble.

When, after trials and tribulations galore, Candide is reunited with his beloved Cunégonde, she is no longer the beautiful Cunégonde of yesteryear, but literally repulsive. Candide marries her regardless, but has learned that all is not for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that he had better stick to cultivating his garden: “il faut [we must] cultiver notre jardin.“

So my question remains. Just which Washington did last week’s earthquake and hurricane Irene punish? Furthermore, just which God (money being the mightiest) held the rod?

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