Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Why Humans Need Tradition - Loren Southern interviews Ron Dart

"The Gospel According to Hermes" by Ron Dart, Bradley Jersak, et al

New Book Release: The Gospel According to Hermes
Intimations of Christianity in Greek Myth, Poetry and Philosophy

by Ron S. Dart and Bradley Jersak

with Simon Oliver, Wm. Paul Young, and Abp. Lazar Puhalo

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Description

Tertullian famously asked, “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

Perhaps the title of this work will raise the question, “What hath Hermes to do with Christ?”

Quite a lot, as it turns out, by way of comparison, contrast, illustration, and prefigurement. Hermes, herein, represents far more than a particular figure in Greek mythology. Hermes functions as a placeholder, symbolizing the legacy of ancient Greek myth, poetry, and philosophy—and also the layered hermeneutics that classical Greek education contributed to both Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Scriptures, and the development of their theology, doctrine, and ethics.

Despite the unfortunate but popular assumption of a Jewish-Greek dualism among many scholars since Adolf von Harnack, the stubborn and happy fact is that the New Testament itself already demonstrates a profound integration of the Hellenized Judaism established in Alexandria. The first Christian theologians were not contaminating some imaginary pure Jewish Christianity with Greek accretions.

Rather, our authors will propose and demonstrate the confluence of both great streams in the development of the New Testament Scriptures, patristic theology, and hermeneutics. This collection of essays is but a faint echo of Simone Weil’s formidable work, Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, and is certainly inspired by her insights. 

Table of Contents

Preface: Bradley Jersak, “What hath Hermes to do with Christ?” / 7 

FROM HERMES TO PLATO 

1. Bradley Jersak, “Pushing Back: Greek Thinking vs. Jewish Thinking is a Dualistic Error” / 11 

2. Simon Oliver, “The Role of Plato in the Development of Christian Theology” / 25 

FROM HERMES TO JOHN 

3. Bradley Jersak, “Descensus: Hermes, Hades, and Christ” / 33 

4. Ron Dart, “Water to Wine, Johannine Hermeneutics, and the Alexandrian Tradition” (part 1) / 51 

5. Ron Dart, “Water to Wine, Johannine Hermeneutics, and the Alexandrian Tradition” (part 2) / 63 

6. Wm. Paul Young, “Fish Pi: Gospel of John (21) and Archimedes” (153)” / 75 

FROM HERMES TO THE PATRISTICS 

7. Ron Dart, “Heraclitus, Aeschylus, and the Jewish Zeus” / 85 

8. Ron Dart, “Augustine, the Inklings, Myth, and Hermes the Trickster” / 93 

9. Ron Dart, “Homerian Epic, Patristic Christian Tradition and Spiritual Formation” / 99 

10. Lazar Puhalo, “Nous: The Concord of Gnosis, Theoria, and Theosis” / 109 

FROM HERMES TO THE 20th CENTURY 

11. Ron Dart, “C.S. Lewis and Hermes: Greek Myth and Till We Have Faces” / 119 

12. Ron Dart, “Thomas Merton’s The Behavior of Titans – Sixty Year Review” / 127 

13. Ron Dart, “Owls, Hegel, Castalians, Classical Myths, and T.S. Eliot” / 134 

14. Bradley Jersak, “Pythagoras, Plato, and Christ: A Cruciform Cosmology of Consent” / 141 

BEYOND HERMES 

15. Ron Dart, “Servant Leadership in the Public Square: Four Markings” / 167 

Authors / 172 

Stephen Leacock: Walking the Tightrope Between Nationalism and the Market Economy - Ron Dart

"Stephen Leacock was part of that curious and perhaps indigenously Canadian species which has been given the name of “Red Tory”                        

- Alan Bowker     

"Many writers have asserted that there is a common ground between conservatism and socialism; perhaps the most frequently cited similarities are an organic view of society, distrust of pure individualism, and a willingness to use the state to assert the rights of society, as distinct from the interests of powerful individuals. When both ideologies have legitimacy within a political culture, a  hybrid known as the Red Tory may emerge."                

- Ian Robertson   

"At McGill, as at Ottawa Collegiate, I was blessed with exceptional teachers. Stephen Leacock, head of the Department of Economics and Political Science, was one of the most brilliant men I have ever known….He was an ardent Conservative (though, also, like Sir Sam Hughes, a fierce Canadian nationalist."

-Eugene Forsey 

"Leacock was a great writer—one of the greatest we have ever  possessed."

-Robertson Davies

Leacock’s Historic Context  

Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) lived through a period of Canadian political and economic history in which two economic theories dwelt both in tension and in a confrontational mode. Canada was still very much part of the British Commonwealth ethos in Leacock’s maturing years, the notion of free trade was waxing, Canadian nationalism was emerging and many were the Canadians that supported closer economic integration with the United States. Where did Leacock stand in these conflicting theories (and their application) and why?

Leacock is mostly remembered in Canada and beyond for his many compact books laced with humour, political commentary ever-present. But, Leacock taught in the Department of Political Economy all of his academic life at McGill University. The larger economic questions were front and centre for Leacock in his maturing years, hence it is quite apt and significant, when doing his PHD at the University of Chicago, his thesis was entitled The Doctrine of Laissez Faire and completed in 1903. Needless to say, Leacock’s use of “doctrine” made it abundantly clear, that the economic battle had become a new religion of sorts, forms of orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heretical positions the new sacred reality for many.

Tradition, traditions, traditionalism - Ron Dart

Tradition, traditions, traditionalism

Human Rights: Comedic and Tragic Realities

Problems with Tradition

Homer's Epic Poems, Classical Christian Tradition & Spiritual Formation - Ron S. Dart

Augustine, Lewis/Inklings, Myth & Hermes the Trickster - Ron Dart

"Herakleitos, Aeschylus & the Jewish Zeus" - Ron Dart

P.S. It is interesting that Herakleitos was from Ephesus and the notion of the "Logos" was front and centre to Herakleitos -- and then St. John and Mary the mother of Jesus settled in Ephesus. John begins his major book with the "Logos." There is, therefore, an obvious link between Herakleitos and John, with "Logos" as the core and hub for both of them. Even T.S. Eliot begins the "Four Quartets" with 2 aphorisms from Herakleitos. 

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, and Thomas Merton - Ron Dart

Part I

Joy and woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul divine…
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.

—William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

The year 2020 signals both the sixtieth year since Boris Pasternak died and the one hundred thirtieth year since he was born (1890-1960). There is much to the literary and political life in the midst of Stalinist Russia that Pasternak endured and wrote about, but this two-part article will focus on Pasternak himself, his epic novel, Doctor Zhivago, and Thomas Merton.                                

In the 1980s I was on staff with Amnesty International and for a time was chairperson of Group 1 Amnesty International in Canada. When Amnesty International began in 1961, the organization had adopted a variety of Prisoners of Conscience (POC) and one of the women highlighted in Persecution 1961 was Olga Ivinskaya (1912-1995). Ivinskaya has been seen by many as the Larissa (Lara) character in Doctor Zhivago, just as Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina, can be seen as Larissa’s daughter, Katya. The fact that Olga Ivinskaya played a significant role in getting Doctor Zhivago published in English in 1958 meant she was suspect by the Russian State and the KGB. When Pasternak died in 1960, Ivinskaya was arrested and given an eight-year prison sentence and her daughter a shorter sentence. Irina was released from prison in 1962 and Olga in 1964. It was not until 1988 that Gorbachev rehabilitated Ivinskaya’s reputation.

The ongoing relationship between the novel Doctor Zhivago and reality has been told from various angles, including Olga Ivinskaya’s own book, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak (1978), and in a more updated version, Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago by Anna Pasternak (2017). Moscow has Ears Everywhere: New Investigations on Pasternak and Ivinskaya by Paolo Mancosu (2019) is another treatment of the subject. There are decided points of convergence and overlap between Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak’s layered life. But to the novel I now turn.

CLICK HERE to continue reading
This article was first posted in Radix Magazine

Ron Dart - "Erasmus: Christian Humanist/Literary Primate of 16th century"

Ron Dart on The Absurdist Podcast - Culture Wars, Hierarchies vs Egalitarianism

In which Ron Dart reasons with a right-wing commentator, critiquing the ideologues' (right or left) oversimplification (gnostic) and misread of history for their own ends.

Jordan Peterson & Proverbs' Lady Wisdom - Ron Dart & Paul VanderKlay

Memoricide: Conservative & Progressive Amnesia - Ron Dart (with Brad Jersak)

Dr. Zhivago: Then & Now - Ron Dart

Dr. Zhivago: Then & Now - Ron Dart

The High Tory Position - Ron Dart on the Absurdist Podcast

Jim Forest's "Writing Straight with Crooked Lines" - Review by Ron Dart

Jim Forest, Writing Straight with Crooked Lines: A Memoir (Orbis Books, 2020).

I first met Jim Forest in the mid-1980s when he was still general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) and I was on staff with Amnesty International. We met, initially, the old fashioned way (letter writing). Jim and I have stayed in touch since then. Jim and I, working for two different Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in the area of peace and human rights, indeed, know what it means to be “Beggar-in Chief” (a chapter in Writing Straight with Crooked Lines). We are often expected to run like racehorses yet fed like beggars. But, to the book. The mid-1980s signaled a significant shift in the Cold War, March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in the former USSR. Who would have guessed the changes in the USSR and religion in Russia (an important topic and life changer for Jim and his wife Nancy) with Gorbachev coming to power? Many are the chapters in this Memoir of Jim’s trips to Russia, Orthodoxy, and Russian literature. Jim and I have had some lovely email correspondence recently of Boris Pasternak and Dr. Zhivago, 2020 being the 60^th anniversary of Pasternak’s death. Interestingly, as Jim noted in his missive when Nancy Reagan was in Russia with her husband, Ronald Reagan, she took the time to go to Pasternak’s grave. Jim sent Nancy Reagan a photograph of the grave and Nancy Reagan replied in a letter of gratitude. History is, indeed, replete with those small and often ignored acts of transcending the tribalism of ideological culture and political wars.    

Writing Straight with Crooked Lines, in the birthing chapters, dealt with Jim’s parents, parents immersed in Marxist thought and communism, and in McCarthy era America, knowing the paid price for such commitments. There is a poignant sense that Jim was gifted with parents who knew the cost of standing by convictions, convictions perhaps naïve and misguided, yet faithful to a vision. It was this underlying experience that, perhaps, partially, explains Jim’s turn, post naval job, to a form of public Christian faith that was also very much about faithfulness to Christian convictions (Jim’s father and mother, although Marxist, were not anti-religious or anti-Christian). The turn by Jim in the early 1960s to work with the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day certainly had left of centre tendencies, tendencies inherited from his parental past. Many of the initial chapters in A Memoir deal with Jim’s meandering journey (crooked yet moving in a discernable direction) to an Anglican then Roman Catholic ecclesiology with an engaged peace focus to it. Dorothy Day pointed the way, in time, to Thomas Merton (both significant models and mentors for Jim). Each of the insightful, fast-paced and anecdotal chapters in the autobiography are both a journey with Jim as he moves through time and history but also an overview of the terrain of the time, war, and peace ever at odds.

I might add that most of the black-white photographs in the book are keepers not to miss.

The 1960s-1980s brought Jim into contact with some of those most committed to peace but peace in a just manner: Dan and Phil Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, A.J. Muste, Joan Baez, Al Hassler, Jim Douglass, Adolfo Perez Esquival, Martin Luther King Jr. and many other women and men on the just peace train. The larger public and political issues of peace and unity, so the crooked lines go, took Jim to a variety of marriages that were not about peace but more discord and disunity, separations troubling and painful. It was the meeting with Nancy that brought, for Jim, solid and straight lines, a path to deeper life and love that shines clean and clear in A Memoir, in time, Nancy offering her kidney so Jim’s body could be more at peace.

The almost 70 short yet riveting chapters in this must-read beauty are more than worthy of multiple reads. Much is learned, of course, about Jim’s journey (and many of those he interacted with) but also the cost of being someone concerned for peace and acting on it. The transition of Jim-Nancy to the Orthodox church (given their trips to Russia in the Russian thaw) makes for a window into the glasnost-perestrioka years and, perhaps more importantly, dukhovnost (spiritual life of the people). It would have been interesting to hear Jim’s thoughts on Putin and the state of the Russian Orthodox Church these days. It was somewhat interesting how, in many ways, Henri Nouwen was a healing shepherd to Jim as he was living through a painful marriage crisis, and yet, when Jim/Nancy turned to the Orthodox Tradition,  Nouwen found such a move problematic. Jim’s reflections on this fuller ecclesiology are included in the autobiography with an oft-quoted passage by Merton on uniting the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity.

Writing Straight with Crooked Lines comes to an apt and fitting close with Jim tipping his grateful hat (replete with photographs) to his mentors: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, Daniel Berrigan, Henri Nouwen and Al Hassler-Joan Baez (certainly high-level worthies of the 20^th-21^st centuries peace movements and various types of activism). The final photo (peace fingers held in a joyful way and full-face smiles) is fitting of Jim and Nancy (his decades-long wife who has brought him much peace and many a straight line) on, appropriately, the feast of St. Martha.

Ron Dart             

Jim Forest's "Writing Straight with Crooked Lines" - Review by Ron Dart

Jim Forest, Writing Straight with Crooked Lines: A Memoir (Orbis Books, 2020).

I first met Jim Forest in the mid-1980s when he was still general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) and I was on staff with Amnesty International. We met, initially, the old fashioned way (letter writing). Jim and I have stayed in touch since then. Jim and I, working for two different Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in the area of peace and human rights, indeed, know what it means to be “Beggar-in Chief” (a chapter in Writing Straight with Crooked Lines). We are often expected to run like racehorses yet fed like beggars. But, to the book. The mid-1980s signaled a significant shift in the Cold War, March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in the former USSR. Who would have guessed the changes in the USSR and religion in Russia (an important topic and life changer for Jim and his wife Nancy) with Gorbachev coming to power? Many are the chapters in this Memoir of Jim’s trips to Russia, Orthodoxy, and Russian literature. Jim and I have had some lovely email correspondence recently of Boris Pasternak and Dr. Zhivago, 2020 being the 60^th anniversary of Pasternak’s death. Interestingly, as Jim noted in his missive when Nancy Reagan was in Russia with her husband, Ronald Reagan, she took the time to go to Pasternak’s grave. Jim sent Nancy Reagan a photograph of the grave and Nancy Reagan replied in a letter of gratitude. History is, indeed, replete with those small and often ignored acts of transcending the tribalism of ideological culture and political wars.    

Writing Straight with Crooked Lines, in the birthing chapters, dealt with Jim’s parents, parents immersed in Marxist thought and communism, and in McCarthy era America, knowing the paid price for such commitments. There is a poignant sense that Jim was gifted with parents who knew the cost of standing by convictions, convictions perhaps naïve and misguided, yet faithful to a vision. It was this underlying experience that, perhaps, partially, explains Jim’s turn, post naval job, to a form of public Christian faith that was also very much about faithfulness to Christian convictions (Jim’s father and mother, although Marxist, were not anti-religious or anti-Christian). The turn by Jim in the early 1960s to work with the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day certainly had left of centre tendencies, tendencies inherited from his parental past. Many of the initial chapters in A Memoir deal with Jim’s meandering journey (crooked yet moving in a discernable direction) to an Anglican then Roman Catholic ecclesiology with an engaged peace focus to it. Dorothy Day pointed the way, in time, to Thomas Merton (both significant models and mentors for Jim). Each of the insightful, fast-paced and anecdotal chapters in the autobiography are both a journey with Jim as he moves through time and history but also an overview of the terrain of the time, war, and peace ever at odds.

I might add that most of the black-white photographs in the book are keepers not to miss.

The 1960s-1980s brought Jim into contact with some of those most committed to peace but peace in a just manner: Dan and Phil Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, A.J. Muste, Joan Baez, Al Hassler, Jim Douglass, Adolfo Perez Esquival, Martin Luther King Jr. and many other women and men on the just peace train. The larger public and political issues of peace and unity, so the crooked lines go, took Jim to a variety of marriages that were not about peace but more discord and disunity, separations troubling and painful. It was the meeting with Nancy that brought, for Jim, solid and straight lines, a path to deeper life and love that shines clean and clear in A Memoir, in time, Nancy offering her kidney so Jim’s body could be more at peace.

The almost 70 short yet riveting chapters in this must-read beauty are more than worthy of multiple reads. Much is learned, of course, about Jim’s journey (and many of those he interacted with) but also the cost of being someone concerned for peace and acting on it. The transition of Jim-Nancy to the Orthodox church (given their trips to Russia in the Russian thaw) makes for a window into the glasnost-perestrioka years and, perhaps more importantly, dukhovnost (spiritual life of the people). It would have been interesting to hear Jim’s thoughts on Putin and the state of the Russian Orthodox Church these days. It was somewhat interesting how, in many ways, Henri Nouwen was a healing shepherd to Jim as he was living through a painful marriage crisis, and yet, when Jim/Nancy turned to the Orthodox Tradition,  Nouwen found such a move problematic. Jim’s reflections on this fuller ecclesiology are included in the autobiography with an oft-quoted passage by Merton on uniting the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity.

Writing Straight with Crooked Lines comes to an apt and fitting close with Jim tipping his grateful hat (replete with photographs) to his mentors: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, Daniel Berrigan, Henri Nouwen and Al Hassler-Joan Baez (certainly high-level worthies of the 20^th-21^st centuries peace movements and various types of activism). The final photo (peace fingers held in a joyful way and full-face smiles) is fitting of Jim and Nancy (his decades-long wife who has brought him much peace and many a straight line) on, appropriately, the feast of St. Martha.

Ron Dart             

Servant Leadership in the Public Square - Ron Dart

The Renaissance of Syriac Spirituality: the Forgotten Sibling - Ron Dart

See also Ron Dart and Abp Lazar Puhalo on "Syriac Fathers & Syrian Crisis" here:

John: Contemplative Theologian: John 11 - Lazarus, Mary, Martha & Caiaphas: Who are We?: Literalism and Allegory - Ron Dart