Steven Parmenius

            This is another question there is no point trying to answer. [1] One thing that DOES seem to be shrinking in North America is confessional affiliation particularly in reaction to the politicization of confessional Christianity in the United States among other factors. This could reflect one of two things: the disappearance of religion or the escalating privatization of it. I think the latter is far more likely and the reason I think this is that I am a scholar of religion by trade. This means I am trained NOT to make any simple connection between ‘religion’ as a category of behavior and institutional affiliation with churches or explicit belief in a particular deity or deities. Once this semantic adjustment is made about the word ‘religion’ it is plain that there is probably as much of it about as ever if not more. It may even be the case that religion CANNOT disappear as it is structurally basic to the conduct of human society. Some mythic, th...

     Some questions are so ill posed that there is some merit in working out why, as questions, they fall limply to the floor. One of these is the ‘who is smarter and more moral than who atheists or Christians’ question. One of the things I have spent a good deal of my life observing is people. I have observed many types of people from many backgrounds and I have come to one clear conclusion about them. People, as Jim Morrison said, are strange. They are puzzling and contradictory both in their capacity for goodness and their capacity for mischief and harm. I have also noticed that the good qualities in people can sometimes be difficult to untangle from the bad. As a result of all this I look on human foibles with a broadly tolerant eye and certainly have no interest in separating the sheep from the goats beyond what is strictly necessary to maintain basic standards of civilization. Nonetheless there is a certain species of moralizer who cannot leave the question there....

  Of course one question I did not address in my previous piece was who the audience for the human drama could be. I recall some Stoic or other (I can’t remember who) who said that the sufferings of the just were a spectacle for the gods. We might, however, ask whether they are really so satisfying to the harassed and abused actors. If theodicy works, then I suppose Hamlet exists for the sake of Hamlet as he is who he is and realizes whatever value he realizes through playing his part in the story. Plus, there is no scenario in which I can realize any end or good for myself without partaking in the drama of the world. I need a story of some sort to be in and some of those stories will be set in medieval Denmark. There are of course other options. One of those options is the Gnostic myth. This is the myth according to which the actors are trapped in a play they did not write. Moreover, the script is bad and the direction inept. The actor, the individual, is trapped in someone else’...

  So says Jacques in As You Like It and, in a remarkable passage in his treatise on providence, the philosopher Plotinus. Now I spend a fair bit of my downtime reading plays and thus I have had occasion to wonder how far we might press this metaphor. What happens if we think about the world through the analogy of theatre? Does that analogy at some point break down? Are we all in a sort of play? If so is that good or bad? Should we decline our role or, as Plotinus suggests, play it to the end because the play is worth it? After all, the gods are the authors! Of course providence and theodicy is precisely the arena to which this metaphor is apt. Above all, a play requires evil. The one thing that will infallibly kill a play is a lack of conflict. Without difference, strife and antagonism the peculiar splendor of drama cannot manifest itself. If we are to think of the world as a play we then have to posit negativity or strife as the principle of its development (as the modern notion o...