Saeculum

Reliquary

2011-11-26T07:45:00.001-08:00

P1060721-Edit-B&W, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

Reliquary in the form of a martyr's crown.

The Colegiata de Santa María da Alquézar.

I do not myself comprehend all that I am

2011-08-14T08:38:00.001-07:00

IMG_2865-400D B&W, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

Great is this power of memory, excessively great, contained in a vast and boundless chamber! Who ever sounded the bottom of it? Yet this is a power I have; it is part of my nature. Not only that, I do not myself comprehend all that I am.

Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X.

Adamantine Chains and Penal Fire

2011-07-09T23:48:00.001-07:00

IMG_3511-G10 Ek, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

The mind is its own place...

Alabaster

2011-04-24T10:55:00.001-07:00

_MG_8427-400D, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

Moses & the burning bush in St Ives Parish Church.

When Moses saw that a-burning bush, he walked it ’round and ’round.
And the Lord said to Moses, “You’s treadin’ holy ground.”

I saw, I saw the light from heaven
Shinin’ all around.
I saw the light come shining,
I saw the light come down.

“Dry Bones” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford

Oh my God, It's full of lights!

2010-11-23T10:47:00.001-08:00

Desire-IMAG0049 B&W, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

It's like an amusement park sometimes. Fantasy.

Childhood

2009-11-22T10:36:00.001-08:00

IMG_0461-G10, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

I think this has a timeless quality, right down to the way the children are dressed, and of course the imperial backdrop, the Mall dressed with flags.

It's worth looking at the large version, lovely light around the children, who are wonderfully posed.

White rose

2009-11-02T11:24:00.001-08:00

IMG_0953-G10, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

In sunlight.

Sea and stairs

2009-10-25T12:04:00.001-07:00

IMG_4353-400D, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

Quite impressively monumental and still for a wild and windy day in Blackpool.

Augustine on signs, magic & demons...

2009-07-19T07:48:00.001-07:00

IMG_3080, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

I've been reading around the issues that preoccupied me when I did my thesis, many years ago. It's nice to engage the material purely for the pleasure of it. And it's much better Tube reading than the propaganda n' gossip sheets.

A couple of days ago I read Robert Markus' 1994 essay 'Augustine on magic: A neglected semiotic theory' (Revue des Études Augustiniennes, 40 - also collected in his 'Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity' . It's a reading of Austine's well-known investigation of signs and communities, which also discusses the difference between magic and religion in terms of what we might call a demonology of meaning.

In Augustine's view, "signs mean something to somebody; the somebodies who agree on their meaning constitute a (linguistic) community". Typical of Augustine, a straightforward explanation where many would lay on the obfuscation and philosophising.

Markus is examining the statement that magical practices rest on 'pacts about certain meanings agreed with demons by contract' (pacta quaedam significationum cum daemonibus placita atque foederata). "The idea of such agreements is at first sight puzzling : magicians and soothsayers do not obviously make agreements with demons and then go on to use the conventions agreed on. But Augustine insists on this ' pact ' repeatedly, in language of almost legal precision."

Will and intent are key: "Crucial for Augustine's view of magic is this anchorage of sign systems inintentionality. Meaning is bound up with will."

Meaning that when we choose the meaning to give words, we a deciding which community we want to be part of - you might say, what attitude we wish to attach to the shared understood meaning. We do this all the time, and Augustine is aware of the way communities redefine words to define themselves ('punk' or 'queer' are the common modern examples, terms of abuse made acts of self-definition). The particular, convoluted shades of meaning deployed by the mighty and their running dogs to deceive the commons, I suspect are another.

"The community sharing a symbolic system is brought into being by the identity of intentions. It must be the intention to enter such an association that lies at the roots of the conventions which hold it together. It is as if a person entered the ' contract ' with the demons in the very movement of his will towards the demons with whom he associates himself."

Augustine explains these symbolic communities in the De doctrina Christiana: 'Men cannot be brought together in the name of any religion... without being associated by means of some shared visible symbols or rituals."

And "magic and the like are symbolic systems, a language of words, signs and rituals, which, in the first place, secure the association of men and demons ; and, in doing so, establish the cohesion of the group on which the magical efficacy of its rites rests." The agreed symbolic system is the bond of association, "valid only to the extent that they have been established
by presumptuous minds as a common language agreed with demons" (tantum ualent, quantum praesumptione animorum quasi communi quadam lingua cum daemonibus foederata sunt). "Like words", Markus reminds us,

So if you choose use those meanings, you are entering a community based in these pacts with demons. And this community was created by for selfish, private purposes, its rites and observances "not divinely instituted for the sake of the love of God and the neighbour, as it were publicly, but they dissipate the hearts of the wretched thiough the private desire of temporal things".

Markus quotes W.S. Babcock's 'Caritas and signification in De doctrina Christiana 1-3': "Far from joining person to person in genuine sociality, then, such a world-view actually caters to their private desires, reinforces their separate presumptions, and thus tacitly undermines the very social order that it appears to secure."

"To sum up: Augustine distinguishes two semiotic structures. One is authentically public, shared by the whole language-using community, and is used by its members to communicate with one another as well as with God ; the other is a 'private' code, restricted to some members of this community and used oniy by them, to communicate with demons. Magic is part of this second semiotic system".

So, perhaps the point is not whether we 'believe', but that we are joined in genuine charity and pursuit of the common good, not in pacts "of faithless and deceitful friendship".catering to private desires and presumptions.

Immanence

2009-02-08T09:56:00.001-08:00

IMG_0078, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

Hurry on sundown

Augustine’s theology of the saeculum

2009-02-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

"This, in short, is Augustine’s theology of the saeculum. The saeculum is the age where the two cities always interpenetrate..."

Brian Hamilton reviewing Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine by R. A. Markus.

False gods

2009-02-07T06:57:00.001-08:00

IMG_0617, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

Something archetypal about this one - approaching the sacred grove of the snow god, maybe.

Winter

2009-02-07T06:53:00.001-08:00

IMG_0511, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

A poorly marked track through a cold and wintry land.

Snow day, 2009, London.

Dawn

2009-02-07T00:39:00.001-08:00

IMG_8582, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

A ray of light

Pilgrimage of Hope

2009-02-07T00:33:00.001-08:00

IMG_9852, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

over Experience....

Narnia?

2009-02-07T00:31:00.001-08:00

IMG_0536, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

A glimpse of one of the other worlds packed tightly around our own.

Preparing to Fly

2009-02-07T00:03:00.001-08:00

IMG_7451, originally uploaded by stephen benson.

Feels slightly elegaic, melancholic, yet aspiring to the numinous. Seems to fit the theme...

In Saeculo

2008-10-19T05:41:00.000-07:00

Augustine is unflinching in evoking the misery and wretchedness of the present age. It is, for him, 'a kind of hell on earth' in which the members of both cities are inescapably captive.

Carol Harrison, Christians In The Saeculum Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity

Peregrinus in saeculo

2008-10-19T03:55:00.000-07:00

"Here he lives as a peregrinus — a foreigner — in a land where it behoves him to travel light, with ardent love for a distant country."

R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine

A stranger in a strange land. A tourist...