Mystical Poetry and Mental Postures
25th September 2010
Eric S Raymond asymptotically approaches Christianity without realizing it.
One of the regulars at my Friday gaming group is a Greek Orthodox priest, but an educated and broadminded one with whom I get along surprisingly well considering my general opinion of Christianity. A chance remark he made one night caused me to recite at him the line from the 2010 portion of the Loginataka that goes “The way of the hacker is a posture of mind”, and then when he looked interested the whole four stanzas.
He laughed, and he got it, and then he articulated the reason that I write about being a hacker in this form so well that he made me think about things I hadn’t considered before and probably should have.
Orthodox priests tend to have that effect, yes.
The problem of how to induce valuable mental stances in human beings when explanation is insufficient is not a new one. All religions and mystical schools face it, and all have solved it in broadly similar ways. One way is direct mimesis: you imitate the behavior of an initiate rigorously, hope for the behavior to induce a mental state usefully like the initiate’s, and a surprising percentage of the time this actually works.
Well, duh. Christians call it prayer, and have been doing it for 2000 years.
The priest understood this immediately, even though he’s never written a line of code in his life. His branch of Greek Orthodoxy has a strong mystical tradition, and when I said “the way of the hacker is a posture of mind” his eyes widened.
Well, duh. Christians call it metanoia, and have been striving for it for 2000 years.
Keep on truckin’, ESR. You’ll be saved before you know it.
September 29th, 2010 at 15:19
You’re deeply confused. There’s nothing specific about Christian priests that makes them competent to get this – and, in fact, most wouldn’t. (I used to have daily contact with a lot of Christian priests when I went to Catholic school, which is how I know this.)
What’s required is someone who is (a) in touch with a live tradition of mysticism, and (b) broadminded enough to recognize the functional apparatus of mystical induction operating outside his own tradition. Being Christian (or more generally, monotheistic) makes the second condition less likely rather than more.
Furthermore, I know my Christian theology well enough to know that “prayer” and “metanoia” are an extremely poor fit for what the priest and I were discussing. There’s no element of supplication or repentance in the hacker posture of mind, nor in the process of inducing it. And you can identify mystical induction with prayer only by ignoring the most important psychological features of both.
I’ve been staring at this text box trying to think of a Christian analogue of the hacker posture of mind, and I really can’t. Christianity is so impoverished in this area that some Christian contemplative orders have experimented with meditation practices borrowed from Buddhism in an attempt to fill in the hole. There are some strains of Christian pietism (George Fox, Meister Eckhardt) that I can identify as being closer to it, but even there the distance is large.
Which also explains, by the way, why I neither require nor expect to be “saved”. Your categories about mystical experience are, frankly, laughably primitive. With a few laudable exceptions like Thomas Merton, Christians have neither the language nor the concepts to get anything but wrong answers – actually, can’t even bring themselves to pose the right questions.
September 29th, 2010 at 18:30
Eric, one of the least charming aspects of your personality is your intellectual arrogance. I have mentioned this to you in times past. You might consider putting your ego on a bit of a diet. It would do you no harm.
I may or may not be deeply confused, but you have given no evidence of being qualified to render an informed opinion on the subject. Like most of those raised in the Western European tradition, your ‘knowledge’ of Christianity is deeply distorted, as witness your superficial characterization of prayer as ‘supplication’ and metanoia as ‘repentance’. You really ought to inform yourself concerning Orthodox Christianity and its intellectual traditions — I guarantee that you’ll be surprised. Ask your Greek Orthodox priest friend for some suggestions; mention the names ‘Schmemann’ and ‘Lossky’ and he will be able to point you in the right direction.
September 30th, 2010 at 22:01
>I may or may not be deeply confused, but you have given no evidence of being qualified to render an informed opinion on the subject.
Right. My understanding of Christianity is defective because it doesn’t match yours.
You’re a religious believer. You’re fundamentally insane. But I repeat myself…