"Flesh and Blood": Harry Potter and Country Mystics
I just put up a comment on Pauli's Granger link post but thought it might not get read as much there: so the gist is: Granger's work (in this article) is great because it points to one main principle: Christian Alchemy can be summed up in 1 word, "Incarnation". This also happens to be what art is about: the artist puts into "flesh and blood" truths which transcend the realm of "factual history." Now, I am also a huge fan of Johnny Cash. Cash (whom I believe to have been some sort of phenomenon of a country mystic) happens to have recorded a song entitled just that ... "Flesh and Blood." I happened to be listening to it more than a year ago while preparing and memorizing essays for a set of comprehensive exams and it hit me how appropriate the term was for some of the things I was studying, in particular for an essay on what I was referring to as "The Incarnational Principle of Scripture." What is the Bible? Is it a "textbook of the history of the scientific/material development of the world" (as fundamentalists, unfortunately, fall into thinking about it) or is it "merely metaphor for Faith events" (as the "scientific Christians" of our day would have us believe)? It seems these are the only 2 options given. It seems that both sides of that debate accept a common principle: that Scripture must be focused in one of two opposite viewpoints, it is either focused on historical facticity, or it is so focused on "spiritual" reality that any historical reference is completely metaphorical. The term I myself adopt for saying that this is a false dichotomy, and that Scripture does not have to be one of these extremes, is "Flesh and Blood" ... a thoroughly human term. It is not even "natural beauty," (cf the link to Cash's lyrics above) let alone natural science ... but it is the lives of human beings who are spiritual being living in a physical world. "Flesh and Blood" is the real grittiness of our physical and psychological existence, but informed (and redeemed) by God who is Spirit, through the Incarnation. This is, I believe, the real meaning in a passage from Burckhardt quoted by Granger in this article: "gold is bodily consciousness transmuted into spirit or spirit fixed in the body" ... the Incarnation, fully human and fully divine at the same time, "And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us." Good article. |
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