Sub Ratione Dei

February Books

Incoming

Christopher Partridge & Eric Christianson (Eds.), The Lure of the Dark Side: Satan and Western Demonology in Popular Culture, Equinox, 2008.

Daniel Jenkins, Beyond Religion, SCM, 1965.

John D Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, Indiana UP, 2006.

Gabriel Vahanien, No Other God: Wording the World and Worlding the Word, Wipf & Stock, 2005.

Adam Kotsko, Zizek and Theology, T & T Clark, 2008.

John Darby, The Effects of Violence on Peace Processes, US Institute of Peace Press, 2001. 

Alison Brysk, Global Good Samaritans: Human Rights as Foreign Policy, Oxford UP, 2009.

Outgoing

Christopher Partridge & Eric Christianson (Eds.), The Lure of the Dark Side: Satan and Western Demonology in Popular Culture, Equinox, 2008.

Carole Spencer, Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism, Paternoster, 2007.

Steve Cohen et al (Eds.), From Immigration Controls to Welfare Controls, Routledge, 2001.

Brian Schroeder and Lissa McCullough (Eds.), Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J J Altizer, SUNY Press, 2004.

Keith W Clements, What Freedom? The Persistent Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bristol Baptist College, 1990.

Witness Against the Beast

E P Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge UP, 1993.

This was Thompson's last published work completed shortly before his death; how representative it is of his wider work I don't know (I have a recollection of having read is Making of the English Working Classes a few years back but can't be sure).

I did not purchase the book for it's main thesis, that of offering a reading of William Blake's dissenting thought but the work on muggletonianism and antinomianism that Thompson researched as a plank of his wider thesis on the radical spiritual influences on Blake by groups such as the Swedenborgians, diverse antinomians and, before them, the Muggletonians.

It is Thompson's discussion of the latter that interested me (I have mentioned the muggletonians on a few occassions, even warranting their own category). Without doubt the highlight of this book is the Appendix 1 in which Thompson recounts his discovery of the Last Muggletonian, Philip Noakes, shortly before he died in 1979 as the last living Muggletonian. Thompson was able to secure from Noakes the Muggletonian Archive for the British Library.

Thompson goes on to suggest that Blake, possibly through his mother, imbibed muggletonian influences that would influence his thought and work. The argument to my mind is certainly not conclusive but this is an interesting book that charts the antinomian impulses of much 17th and 18th century thought. As such, it is one of the key texts for understanding muggletonian thought as it outlived its first generation. 

Elsewhere ...

Muggletonian Beauties

On not Quaking like Quakers

Concerning Quakerism Chuck Fager writes:

When I hear or read of questions about such things as "normative Quakerism," or "authentic Quakerism" or "traditional Quakerism," it usually means one of two things: either a person or group feels very much confused and at sea, and is honestly looking for some certainty to cling to, some rock to stand on; or it often means that some person or group is looking for a club, with which either to beat other people into submission or to drive them away as interlopers and heretics.

Discussion of normative Quakerism is, in other words, often unhelpful and can represent a disruptive impulse. I'm currently reading Carole Dale Spencer's Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism. While I don't think it is quite the groundbreaking work some initial reactions suggested, it is an interesting read. Spencer does however talk about Quaker essentials and makes the argument that holiness can be seen as a consistent thread throughout Quaker history but that subsequent to the early Quaker experiment no subsequent epoch or trajectory of Quaker thought carried all such essentials.

Hence this passage on modernist contemporary Quakerism and the preeminence for (according to Spencer) the wrong reasons:

Silent meetings turned out to be the ideal vehicle for modernist Quaker worship because it enabled diverse individuals to come together in one place in apparent unity, even if they held vastly different belief systems and experienced in totally different ways. In silent worship each individual can pray to a different God, or to no God at all, or they can listen to their own voice (p. 242-243). 

In other words, I suspect one thing one can be reasonably be sure of if one were to attend a contemporary (UK) Meeting would be an absence of Quaking, that shared experience of union with Christ of which silence was a preparatory exercise (much like Tongues I guess). It is probably the primitivist in me (I am an ex-pentecostal and a current Anabaptist sympathiser after all) that makes me largely agree with Spencer's thesis but on a strict reading of Quaker history would mean that based on Spencer's own classifications quakerism ceased to exist after its first generation (Spencer suggests a realised eschatology -esp post-Naylor- was the first 'essential' to go. Here Fager has a point when goes on and seeks to question the eminence of essentialist characterisations: "I want to raise questions about the notion of a "core" Quaker theology as a metaphor. It suggests that Quaker thought is like an apple, which at the center has a few seeds that are its heart and hope for the future." Why must the early witness be the final witness?

Still, as I am seriously considering taking a few steps towards experimenting with Quaker worship I would be a less reticent were there a little more Quaking amidst the silence.

Altizer: A Twentieth Century Muggletonian?

Earlier today reading through Lissa McCullough's introduction to Thinking Through the Death of God I re-read a quote I have read a number of times before, this being Thomas Altizer's 'confession of faith' in his 1966 debate at the height of the Death of God debate with John Warwick Montgomery:

'God is dead' are words recording a confession of faith. Let me be clear in emphasizing that as far as our intention is concerned, we intend to be speaking in faith ... I think that, if any attention at all is given to these words, it will be seen that they do not represent ordinary atheism. The ordinary atheist, of course, does not believe in God, does not believe that there is now or ever has been a God. But we are attempting to say that God Himself is God, and yet has died as God in Jesus Christ in order to embody himself redemptively in the world. In saying that God is dead we are attempting to say that the transcendent Ground, the ultimate final Ground of the World, life, existence has died ... to make possible final reconciliation of Himself with the world (xvii).

I have said before how I have struggled to understands Altizer's project and a break-through for me was reading his autobiography/theological memoir. Truth be told it is still something I struggle to get my head around and, don't want to spent too much effort on it which is probably why i'm taking on a secondary text on the subject. It is the atheism of Altizer's christian atheism that is all to often focused on but, as a reading of Altizer makes clear eventually shows us what is central to Altizer's atheological project is a particular and absolutely final apocalypse. That apocalypse is the 'incarnation' that spelt the death of religion. Hence Altizer writes that "Christianity became a world religion only by negating its original apocalyptic ground, but if we can understand the ending of Christendom as an apocalyptic ending, that ending could then be understood as the renewal of an original apocalyptic ending, and therewith the renewal of apocalypse itself (2006: 177)."

It is here that Altizer offers a reading of the Christ event that he suggests transcends the Christian narrative, by interiorising the message of the incarnation and Altizer moves beyond the Christendom mindset and in so doing acknowledging God's death but also presenting a far more radical apocalypse than that offered by orthodoxy. As Raschke (5-6) puts it in interpreting Altizer's move "Christ's self sacrifice elsewhere in the New Testament characterized as God's self-emptying, or kenosis, is something far more profound than what is suggested in the Chalcedonian formula of God becoming "man". It points to what is suggested in Hegelian terms is the abrogation, the Aufhebung, of God's eternal self-diremption, the negation of the divine self-negation, which in turn fulfills the concept of the Son as hypostasis. The metaphysical conundrum of co-eternality of Father and Son now becomes explicable in terms of what the author of Hebrews calls "a new and loving way opened for us through the Curtain [of the Holy of Holies] that is his body (Heb 10:20)."

All this is by way of preface to an interesting parallel I noticed in reading the Altizer quote with which I began, namely the functional similarity of the apocalyptic Death of God with the absolute immanence of human God in Muggletonian theology. What follows is a summary of Muggletonian teaching on the incarnation/apocalypse and the absolute assumption of mortality from T L Underwood (15): 

Reeve and Muggleton claimed that the creator entered into the womb of the Virgin Mary, purified her nature, then died and shed his own mortality, quickened himself in pure mortality, and brought himself forth as the first born Son of God. Thus God the Father, who had been a spiritual man, became physical, mortal man, Jesus Christ ... With the crucifixion he died, both physically and spiritually, but then took on immortality again, yet with the same flesh and spirit.

And, this passible, and still absolutely immanent deity would, after the death of the death of God (so to speak) rule in heaven "in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, between five and six feet tall".Given E P Thompson's thesis on Muggletonian influence on William Blake and Blake's own documented influence on Altizer the relationship is not likely to be coincidental. In marked variance of the religious radicals both Altizer and the Muggletonians asserted a non-trinitarian high christology in which actual death of God presaged the Kingdom of God, albeit in the case of the Muggletonians drawing as they did on the Joachite Age of the Spirit this was a more conventional mode of heresy. I am sure more can be made of the social import of the two deaths of God but, I need to understand the Muggletonian context to a much greater extent before really passing comment.

References ...

Thomas J J Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir, SUNY Press, 2006.

Lissa McCullough, Historical Introduction, in Lissa McCullough & Brian Schroeder (Eds), Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J J Altizer, Suny Press, 2004.

Carl A Raschke, Rending the Veil of the Temple: The Death of God as Sacrificium Representationis, in Lissa McCullough & Brian Schroeder (Eds), Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J J Altizer, Suny Press, 2004.

T L Underwood, Editor's Introduction, in T L Underwood (Ed.), The Acts of the Witnesses: The Autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton and Other Early Muggletonian Writings, Oxford UP, 1999.

Related

Altizer, Apocalypticism and Modern Thinking (1997).

January Books

Incoming

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin, 2006.

Ian Kershaw, Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution, Yale UP, 2009.

Keith E Yandall & Harold Netland, Spirituality without God: Buddhist Enlightenment and Christian Salvation, Paternoster, 2009. 

John D Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Goods News of Postmodernism for the Church, Baker Academic, 2007.

Lissa McCullough & Brian Schroeder (Eds), Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J J Altizer, Suny Press, 2004.

Outgoing

Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults, California UP, 2004.

E P Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge UP, 1993.

David Haskell, Through a Lens Darkly: How the News Media Perceive and Portray Evangelicals, Clements Academic, 2009.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, Harcourt, 1959. 

Book Roundup, Mark One.

I have more books to post on that I will have a chance to post at any reasonable length and I have held back four (Gandhi & Jesus, What Canst Thou Say?, Sacred & Profane, and Witness Against the Beast) that I want to comment on a bit more substantively. So here's part one of the round-up - part two will probably be up tomorrow.

Mark Ames, Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion in America, Snowbooks, (2007).

Going Postal is an intriguing book to read, by that I mean it is compelling, well written, and nonsensical in equal measure. It is at times extremely difficult to take seriously -take one of the book's central contentions by way of example: the slave trade is a very good analog of life of the average worker in Post-Reaganite America. Seriously?

Notwithstanding the bizarre and lengthy tangents on slave rebellions the book is a well documented and perceptive history and analysis of instances of "going postal". Although beginning within the US Postal Service the instances of work place violence multiplied across US industry and also schools. Ames pins the plethora of such incidences on the rise of depersonalised managerialism that accompanied the Reagan era. Reading that argument in the introduction i was sceptical of the argument but surprisingly Ames does a decent job of making his case. As such, the phenomenon of going postal is, for Ames, a revolutionary one and of profound sociological import. While the argument is compelling I don't see it (generally speaking) as anything more than a sufficient cause. It seems to me evident that one necessary component of such instantiations of rage is the weapon with which murder is dealt out. Work practises are not unique to the US, but the predominance of instances of going postal are; surely, there may be another explanation in addition to reaganite economics? Surprisingly, Ames never seems to even countenance the thought that perhaps the availability of guns is a further factor in the murder rates.

Richard P Church, First Be Reconciled: Challenging Christians in the Courts, Herald Press, (2008).

One of the best books I have read in quite some time. On one level it is simply an examination of the Paul's prohibition of Christians suing other christians and hence an exercise in exegesis.But Church, who is a Methodist (not common for a Herald Press book), uses this as a means of analysing the Christian's relation to the State in creative dialogue with the Anabaptist tradition. In doing so Church offers a convincing articulation of the Church's relationship to Justice (and it's imperfect corollary - the Law). What interested me is how much of Church's argument can be expanded to other areas of Christian Ethics, such as theological reflections on work, particularly public work and attitudes to violence. Recommended.

Gerald J Mast & J Denny Weaver, Defenseless Christianity: Anabaptism for a Nonviolent Church, Cascadia, (2009). 

I had high hopes for this book but was pretty disappointed. It is not that the book is poor, in fact, as an exercise in anabaptist spirituality it is pretty good.However, while Weaver and Mast offer some pithy statements such as "Anabaptists did not become martyrs because they held on to standard theological formula. They became martyrs because they considered the standard theological formulas inadequate and developed statements that reflected their new understandings of ecclesiology and commitment to discipleship" (p. 55).

I have no interest in the lowest common denominator school of ecumenicism  but it seems clear that the authors are arguing for a radical break from fellow christians and, strangely, there is no discussion whatsoever on the relation to the non-anabaptist christian communion. Disappointing.

Madawi Al-Rasheed & Marat Shterin (Eds.), Dying for Faith: Religiously Motivated Violence in the Contemporary World, IB Taurus, (2009).

As with most edited volumes the quality of the essays vary but overall this is an interesting book. Generally focused on political and social scientific readings of religiously motivated violence and death, especially those in pursuance of terrorist ends. Where the book is interesting is in its treatment of violence within New Religious Movements with treatments by Melton, Bromley, Eileen Barker and Introvigne. There is more than enough implicit arguments within the text to show that the paradigm of the religious terrorist is not that divorced as the NRM 'martyr'.

Through a Lens Darkly

David M Haskell, Through a Lens Darkly: How the News Media Perceive and Portray Evangelicals, Clements Academic, 2009.

I was sent this book by The Theological Book Review to review. That I had to not only read the book but also, since its my first time reviewing for TBR also be fairly positive, is I take it payback for some heinous crime that I have unknowingly committed. In order words, that this is not a good book is a significant understatement, although should what i've submitted be published you may need to read between the lines to discern that.I have a post in my drafts which I may finish sometime outling one of the reasons I take issue with Haskell's thesis and his appropriation of Frame Theory.

Briefly put however, Haskellargues that Canadian evangelicals are discriminated against by the major Television news media in Canada with the result that Evangelicals in Canada are repeatedly presented in a negative light which he attempts to evidence on the basis of surveying a decade's coverage of evangelicals, together with a survey of news professional's personal responses to a questionaire. Being a Brit it will not come as much of a surprise that I don't spent much time watching Canadian news coverage so I don't know first hand the state of the subject in question but it seems clear to me that Haskell has made a bold accusation but has simply failed to provide the evidential base both in terms of empirical evidence and methodological approaches to justify this. In fact, I would not be surprised if evangelicals in Canada do get short shrift on occassion but Haskell has done nothing to convince me of an inherent institutional (aka liberal elite) bias, I'd be interested in some first hand experiences though so Frank (Freedom Log), Dave (Rattigan Writes) consider yourself tagged.

The Monocultural Myth

Review of Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Penguin, (2006). ISBN: 0713999381.

Amartya Sen is well known as a economist and political theorist and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1998. In this book Sen tackles the idea of identity and its link to violent conflict. Beginning on a more distinctly geopolitical level Sen discusses the potency of the clash of civilizations mode of thinking both on the more academic level (eg. Samuel Huntington) and on its more widespread appeal. The core of Sen's criticism is that such approach commit the reality of the practice of identity in the modern world is more complex than the monoculturalism the clash of civilizational paradigm assumes. While it is true that the world may be split into some major identity groups (Western, Islamic, etc) the ascription of singular identity for the millions of individuals that ascribe to these groups is naive. It is from this criticism that Sen derives his subtitle "The Illusion of Destiny", Sen convincingly argues that people cannot be boxed into a particular identity group, Muslim for example, and in doing so there beliefs about a particular issue (western decadence for example). Hence Sen writes:

In our normal lives we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups - we belong to all of them. The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, [etc] Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity. None of them can be taken to be the person's only identity or singular membership category. Given our inescapably plural identities, we have to decide on the relative importance of our different associations and affiliations in any particular context (p. xii-xiii).

We acknowledge this on a local level; therefore, why do we believe that on an international level these plural identities are not operative. Sen argues with reference to India how they do. It is clear he argues that the claims of a Muslim civilization are nonsense. Moreover, this idea of ideologically separate civilizations does not cohere with the known facts of history; there has always been global development and many of the so-called western developments (freedom, democracy, separation of Church and State) have not only been present elsewhere but have served as the impetus for their development in the West. Thus far the criticism Sen offers is fairly standard; Sen however makes an interesting development in his argument against monocultural mindset that is the foundation for the clash of civilizations. This error of ascribing singular affiliations to cultural groups is also present in those who praise other group's true essence. To take Islam as an example. Sen notes that one of the first responses to the rise in islamophobia was a rise in the "true Islam is a religion of peace" rhetoric. Sen notes that this, like the clash of civilizational approach, fails in asserting a singular attribute to a cultural affiliation that is in reality far from homogeneous. What makes Sen's argument more interesting is his later argument against what he labels plural monoculturalism. In a readable survey of the problems of multiculturalism. Whilst a discussion of tolerance and diversity is sadly kept on the periphery Sen does raise the issue that often plaques multicultural theory, that of group rights versus individual freedom. Plural monoculturalism is the theory that modern life (I was going to use the word society but for the plural monoculturalist there is no such thing) is made of of numerous cultures exist alongside but distinct and separate and sealed off from all other monocultures. There is no real interchange or dialogue, an intermutual sharing of life and learning. Instead one is left misunderstanding and a denial of that most precious right, the freedom of self-definition. Multiculturalism requires and appreciation and indeed valueing of diversity; monoculturalism can live in oblivion to it. While Sen largely dismisses multiculturalism (something I do not) his discussion is a useful criticism of some popular misconceptions of the multicultural approach. 

December Books

Incoming

Paul Lehmann, The Transfiguration of Politics: Jesus Christ and the Question of Revolution, SCM, 1975.

A C Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targetting of Civilians in War Ever Justified? Bloomsbury, 2007.

Steve Cohen (Ed.), From Immigration Controls to Welfare Controls, Routledge, 2001.

William Shawcross, Deliver Us From Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a  World of Endless Conflict, Bloomsbury, 2001.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, Yale UP, 1987.

Nicholas Fotion, War and Ethics: A New Just War Theory, Continuum, 2008.

John Howard Yoder, The War of the Lamb: The Ethics of Nonviolence and Peacemaking, Brazos, 2009.

Glen Stassen (Ed.), Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War, Pilgrim, 2008.

Kenneth Waltz, Man, The State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis, Columbia UP, 1959.

William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, Oxford UP, 2009.

William Stacy Johnson, A Time to Embrace: Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law, and Politics, Eerdmans, 2006.

Gary Bass, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, Doubleday, 2009.

Michael Newman, Humanitarian Intervention: Confronting the Contradictions, Hurst & Co, 2009.

Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Verso, 2009. 

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, Harcourt, 1959.

Gerd Ludemann, Paul: The Founder of Christianity, Prometheus, 2002.

Alan Gilbert, Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy? Great-Power Realism, Democratic Peace, and Democratic Internationalism, Princeton UP, 1999.

Gerald Prunier, The Rwanda Genocide: History of a Genocide, Hurst & Co, 1995.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Allen Lane, 2009.

Outgoing

Nicholas Fotion, War and Ethics: A New Just War Theory, Continuum, 2008.

Hans Jurgen-Goertz, The Anabaptists, Routledge, 1996.

Thoma Trzyna, Blessed are the Pacifists: The Beatidutes and Just War Theory, Herald, 2006.

Michael Graziano, The Divine Farce, Leapfrog, 2009.

Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Verso, 2009.

The Divine Farce, Or, On Not Finding God in Holes ** Contains Spoilers **

Michael S A Graziano, The Divine Farce, Leapfrog Press, 2009.

It is I think telling that Graziano's The Divine Farce features within its pages a multitude, and quite possibly an infinitude of bodies that eat, drink, and copulate with Sage (the novel's narrator) there are only three actual characters and even here the name's are Sage's own inventions.

I don't generally "get" fiction, this book being the first novel I have read in at least a year. In spite of this I did find this short book (only 125 pages) immensely compelling. Of the reviews I have read most seem to read this book as an allegory the human condition, and I am sure they're right. However, and I suspect this interpretation is a consequence of my own neuroses, I could not help but find in the text an allegory of the humanity's metaphysical search, it's search for the grand arche that, once discovered, makes the seemingly complex clear. While notions of deity are only implied the reference to the divine in the title seems to point in this direction. But before interpreting the text let me introduce it.

The novel opens with three people ensconced in a concrete cell, not enough room to stand or sit but instead three tangled bodies lumped together for time immemorial and, quite possibly, for eternity. A prison, with no knowledge of what preceded the incarceration, a living hell for no discernible reason. The only sustenance being a pear nectar that ran down the cell walls. Existence, to the extent that there was any existence, was hopeless - the narrator, Sage, opines:

We should have been grateful for the nectar, but it didn't succeed in mollifying us. We stamped, we shouted, we pounded on the walls. Of course we did. We felt sick with panic. We shook with rage. We sobbed. But none of it helped. If I hit the wall, slamming it with the soft part of my palm, lunging at it with my shoulder, I accomplished nothing more than a wet slapping sound, a dull ache, and a bruise that I could feel afterward for a while. None of us could hear any indication of a hollow space behind the wall. its solidity was so absolute that I lost the ability to imagine emptiness outside the microcosm. In my mind the the universe was filled up infinitely with concrete, and at its center was one tiny bubble in which our randomly assorted souls had been entombed (p. 9-10).

What is interesting about the text is that for all the anger and futility quite soon anger turns to resignation, and even contentment and the developing "mutual harmony" of the cramped conditions. And this is where, in my own neurosis God enters the fray. The mutual harmony is shattered when the previously impenetrable cell is revealed to be penetrable after all and in a cruel twist just as Sage is resigned to an eternity of horrid but not quite unbearable existence locked together with his two companions the wall begins to slowly show signs of degradation. At first this was just a gritty residue on the tongue after drinking the pear nectar that dripped down the walls but with the possibility that the hitherto impenetrable cell is in fact vulnerable Sage is left with an existential dilemma. The possibility of escape therefore becomes both intriguing, hopeful and terrifying. What the hole in the wall however indubitably showed that sooner "or later, the entire surface was going to wear away around [them]. [They] were evidently not in eternal stasis" (26). Despite protestations from his companions and the inherent terror of entering the unknown the hole "had to" be developed and the wall torn down so as to see what, if anything, lay beyond it.

It is here that I felt such empathy with the Sage character, for it seems an analog of my own feelings regarding religion/God. Life, however constricted and shitty, would seem so much more amenable without the "God Hypothesis", and yet I must still engage theology. It is both a matter of reluctance and compulsion.

And so Sage digs his way out of his heaven/hell (Graziano maintains a real ambivalence throughout the text). However, on escaping one prison even though he does with his fellow detainees Sage falls to a far more expansive prison. Even though he had been cramped, unable to cramp or stand, the cavernous expanse prefigures a more severe confinement as soon the "mutual harmony" of the three co-prisoners is shattered as Sage overcome by the need to explore becomes detached and although surrounded by a multitude of bodies there is no mutual interaction on a 'real' level - even sex is impersonal.

And yet the desire to question, to seek what lies beyond continues and Sage spots another hole high in the Cave's ceiling, another window into what could but probably won't be a portal to a better future. In this way the story continues. The metaphysical search continues but it would be easier to cease, and yet Sage continues to move beyond the result is a yet deeper level of hell/heaven.

In this way the novel reminds me of Camus' interpretation of the Myth of Sisyphus although inverted, there is always a search for an arche, it will never be found, we know it will never be found, the search for it is itself regressive but nevertheless the search must go on. To refuse is suicide. 

Highly recommended, it is definitely among the most thought provoking texts I have read this year.