แดเนียล @atom1zed

Al hilo del anterior post, un par de aforismos de Juan Ramón Jiménez, sobre esa ya antigua querella entre antiguos y modernos.

Juan Manuel Macías @Juanmanuelmaci

a day ago

Se suele incidir a menudo en la "modernidad" de la Odisea (añadiendo "para su época"), por ejemplo en relación al uso de tropos como la analepsis (el "flashback" del cine, pues este arte popularizó, gracias al concepto de montaje, los saltos temporales) o como el apóstrofe

5 15 82 3K 16

"The power of the Cross and Resurrection is God's love, which acts 'with God before the world was', in the creation and direction of the world, before the incarnation, during the incarnation, before the sacrifice on the Cross, during the sacrifice on the Cross and after it. It is the loving energy of God, which 'does not seek its own' (1 Cor. 13:5) and transcends every created category and every experience of men and angels, whether perceptible by the senses or the nous. It is also, however, a punitive power that destroys sin and the power of those opposed to God's will, and perfects, as far as this is possible, even the unrepentant enemies of God through their punishment." Father John Romanides Empirical Dogmatics of the Orthodox Catholic Church (p. 219)

«En mis manos han puesto una navaja, y delante de mí, un cesto con una especie de zanahorias blancas muy grandes que resultan ser nabos. Yo nunca los había visto al natural, tan grandes... y tan fríos. ¡Qué le vamos a hacer! No hay más remedio que pelarlos. El tiempo pasa lento, y mi navaja también, entre la corteza y la carne de los nabos que estoy, lindamente, dejando pelados. Los diablillos me siguen dando guerra. ¡Que haya yo dejado mi casa para venir aquí, con este frío, a mondar estos bichos tan feos! Verdaderamente, es algo ridículo esto de pelar nabos con esa seriedad de magistrado de luto. Un demonio pequeñito y muy sutil se me escurre muy adentro y, de suaves maneras, me recuerda mi casa, mis padres y hermanos, mi libertad, que he dejado para encerrarme aquí entre lentejas, patatas, berzas y nabos. El día está triste... No miro a la ventana, pero lo adivino. Mis manos están coloradas, coloradas como los diablillos; mis pies, ateridos... ¿Y el alma? Señor, quizás el alma sufriendo un poquillo... Mas no importa; refugiémonos en el silencio. Transcurría el tiempo con mis pensamientos, los nabos y el frío, cuando de repente, y veloz como el viento, una luz potente penetra en mi alma. Una luz divina, cosa de un momento. Alguien que me dice: "¿Qué estás haciendo?". ¿Qué estoy haciendo? ¡Virgen Santa, qué pregunta! Pelar nabos... ¡pelar nabos! ¿Para qué? Y el corazón, dando un brinco, contesta medio alocado: "Pelo nabos por amor... por amor a Jesucristo". Ya nada puedo decir que claramente se pueda entender, pero sí diré que allá adentro, muy adentro del alma, una paz muy grande vino en lugar de la turbación que antes tenía. Sólo sé decir que el solo pensar que en el mundo se pueden hacer de las más pequeñas acciones de la vida actos de amor a Dios; que el cerrar o abrir un ojo hecho en su nombre nos puede hacer ganar el cielo; que el pelar unos nabos por verdadero amor a Dios le puede a Él dar tanta gloria, y a nosotros tantos méritos, como la conquista de las Indias; el pensar que, por sólo su misericordia, tengo la enorme suerte de padecer algo por Él, es algo que llena de tal modo el alma de alegría que, si en aquellos momentos me hubiera dejado llevar de mis impulsos interiores, hubiera comenzado a tirar nabos a diestro y siniestro, tratando de hacer comunicar a las pobres raíces de la tierra la alegría del corazón. Hubiera hecho verdaderas filigranas malabares con los nabos, la navaja y el mandil.» San Rafael Arnaiz, ahuyentando diablillos

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

🎦🧠Information Warfare via Cinema Propaganda surrounding the upcoming Odyssey film continues through the systematic distortion of the ancient Hellenic epics. The actress cast as Helen recently declared that the story is “not history but a mythological tale.” This claim is misleading. While the narrative certainly contains mythological elements, it fundamentally recounts the history, ethos, values, and customs of a specific people: the ancient Hellenes. Helen of Troy was a Spartan queen. She was not a neutral or universal figure her identity, heritage, and cultural context were clearly defined. The Trojan War itself was a real historical event, the core of which has been corroborated by archaeological evidence. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are foundational works of Hellenic civilization, deeply rooted in the geography and culture of the Eastern Mediterranean. They are not African, Near Eastern, or universalist myths detached from their origin. They belong to a specific time, place, and people. This is a clear case of information warfare. Certain academic circles, particularly in American universities, driven by ideological agendas and what appears to be a deep-seated inferiority complex toward classical Western civilization, are attempting to downgrade and deconstruct Greco-Roman antiquity. Their goal is to sever these works from their Hellenic roots and repurpose them for contemporary political narratives. We are not obliged to apologize for our heritage. Whether the epics appear problematic, patriarchal, or insufficiently diverse to modern sensibilities is irrelevant. The Iliad and *Odyssey are ours. They do not require external validation or permission to exist as they are. Hellenic civilization has endured for over 3,500 years. It remains here and it will continue.

Two hands emerge from behind the clouds. Both are left hands**. Together, they grasp the same staff. A snake is coiled around the staff, its tongue darting out. This small woodcut printer's mark was stamped on the title pages of hundreds of books in the 16th century, and it managed to pack three biblical references into a single image. Look at the shape of the staff. It isn't a straight stick; it has a horizontal crossbar at the top. It's drawn in the shape of the Greek letter tau, meaning a T-shape. The early Christian theologian Tertullian wrote as early as the 3rd century AD: the Greek tau and the Latin T are identical in form, and this is exactly what the execution cross looks like. So the cross here is a T-shaped cross, known as the crux commissa or tau cross, which differs from the Latin cross. In chapter 9 of the Old Testament's Book of Ezekiel, God has this mark drawn on the foreheads of those who are to be saved. In the Christian interpretive tradition, this 'mark' has been read as the tau/tav and a prefiguration of the cross. Actually, this symbol is a motif associated with protection and salvation even before Christianity. Now, let's get to the snake. The Book of Numbers, chapter 21. The Israelites rebel against God in the wilderness. As punishment, the camp is struck by a plague of snakes, and people die. God commands Moses: make a bronze snake, set it on a pole, and raise it high. Anyone bitten by a snake will look at it and live. Here's the paradox of the story. The very thing that heals is a representation of the thing that kills. The image of the poison becomes the antidote. The Greek word pharmakon is ambiguous enough to evoke this paradox: it can mean both poison and medicine. The exact same image. Much later, in the Gospel of John, chapter 3, verse 14, Jesus tells a leader named Nicodemus: 'Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.' So, with this single sentence, the bronze snake in the wilderness transforms into a prefiguration of the crucified Christ in Christian typology. The mastery of the printer's mark lies here: it carries three references at once in a single object. The tau/tav evokes the mark of protection in Ezekiel; the snake, the bronze snake in the wilderness; and their combination, the cross. The Old and New Testaments overlap in a single depiction. Let's return to the hands holding the staff. They aren't human hands; they reach out from behind the clouds. In the manus Dei tradition of Christian art, a hand emerging from the clouds signifies the intervention or approval of God, who isn't directly depicted. **The catalog record maintained by the US National Library of Medicine for the Valgrisi edition specifically notes this: 'two left hands.' collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nl…

"Me voyez-vous, moi, Léon Bloy, passant entre deux rangées de voyous à pieds sales pour aller déposer un papier dans une urne, par-devant un cocu ceinturonné de tricolore ! Votez ! mais pour qui ? Je vote pour Dieu." Léon Bloy, Journal, 19 mai 1897

Me gusta esta imagen de la santidad. Vivir en este mundo terrenal en la dulce presencia de Cristo y Nuestra Señora, y en compañía de los ángeles y jerarquías celestes y todos los santos del Cielo. Esta miniatura medieval de Santa Catalina de Siena lo refleja muy bien

“Everything, in fact, is false, theatrical, and artificial in desire except the immense hunger for the sacred.” — René Girard

Girardism @Girardism

2 months ago

“Denial of God does not eliminate transcendency, but diverts it from the au-delà [the beyond] to the en-decà [the near]. The imitation of Christ becomes the imitation of one's neighbor. The surge of pride breaks against the humanity of the mediator, and the result of this

3 16 110 33K 29

Paolo Veneziano, Coronation of the Virgin Polyptych (detail) ca.1330

Francisco de Holanda, The First Day of Creation - Let There Be Light, c.1545

Como sucede con el símbolo de la cruz, que representa la unión entre lo vertical y lo horizontal, así sucede con la mandorla. Es esta figura el resultado del cruce entre dos esferas, representadas como dos círculos que simbolizan el mundo superior y el inferior, el cielo y la tierra. La figura geométrica que resulta de esta intersección es la «vesica piscis», denominada en iconografía como mandorla. El espacio que se engendra con la unión de estas dos esferas es una región intermedia, que es tal en tanto que comprende la subsistencia intermedia entre la esencia indivisible del ser y la naturaleza divisible de los cuerpos, siguiendo los conceptos empleados por Platón en el «Timeo» al describir la creación del «Alma del mundo»: «En medio del ser indivisible, eterno e inmutable y del divisible que deviene en los cuerpos [el demiurgo] mezcló una tercera clase de ser, hecha de los otros dos [...] compuso de la misma manera una tercera clase de naturaleza entre lo indivisible y lo divisible en los cuerpos de una y otra» [35a]. Como indica Juan Eduardo Cirlot en el Diccionario de símbolos, la mandorla «comprende las antípodas de todo dualismo». Pues la naturaleza de este símbolo, como cruce, es la de mediación entre mundos y, por ello, es el lugar donde se produce el encuentro, en ese cruce de niveles donde lo manifestado participa de la Unidad. La mandorla es umbral ontológico: lugar de participación. Ese umbral al que Henry Corbin denominó mundus imaginalis», mundo imaginal: la tierra de las visiones, el espacio visionario del alma, el punto de unión entre micro y macrocosmos. No es otro el símbolo que mejor concentra las coordenadas de este camino que comienza, pues es en este espacio liminal donde se sitúa «El hombre y lo divino»; en ese punto de fuga entre el mundo visible e invisible, en el umbral que es también un centro, un punto de mediación, al decir de María Zambrano: un claro de bosque. @scardanelli__ @quijotesancho78 @missluss @qumnre

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

Mikhail Nesterov, The Annunciation, c.1911

“Visionary power Attends the motions of the viewless winds, Embodied in the mystery of words: There, darkness makes abode, and all the host Of shadowy things work endless changes there, As in a mansion like their proper home. Even forms and substances are circumfused By that transparent veil with light divine, And, through the turnings intricate of verse, Present themselves as objects recognized, In flashes, and with glory not their own.” —William Wordsworth, The Prelude

'The Bolshevik leadership genuinely hated and despised the thing they sought to destroy. A fair example of the league’s later propaganda is a 1929 issue of Bezbozhnik showing two smirking workers dumping Jesus Christ, open-mouthed and goggling, from a red wheelbarrow onto a garbage heap, along with some empty wine bottles. Behind them a third proletarian is energetically smashing a church bell with a hammer. In the background, vast factory chimneys – the spires of Communism – pour soot into a vacant socialist heaven. The caption urges workers to abandon the old, allegedly drunken religious holiday of the Transfiguration, and instead celebrate ‘Industrialisation Day’. Much more offensive and sometimes obscene imagery was often used by this organisation, whose pornographic and shocking parodies of religious ceremonies were an echo of the ‘Worship of Reason’ in the French Revolution, when prostitutes dressed as Reason were paraded in churches.' Peter Hitchens

The many eyed monster, Argus Panoptus, is slain by the ear of Hermes. "For a person to become a Christian he must have a poetic soul. He must become a poet. Christ does not wish insensitive souls in His company. A Christian, albeit only when he loves, is a poet and lives amid poetry. Poetic hearts embrace love and sense it deeply." St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

“Each year the Passion ended on Good Friday, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, with a deathlike trance into which flashed the thrust of the lance. Then, shortly thereafter, began the “descent into hell” (which lasted into the early morning hours of Easter Sunday) about which Adrienne gave detailed accounts year after year. It was here, by the way, that her eminent gift for precise and full formulation was decisively important. These descriptions, which are always similar and yet each time introduce a variation of the theme, circling around the profound mystery from all sides, have been collected in volume 3 of her posthumous works (Nachlasswerke) under the title Kreuz und Hölle I (Cross and hell, I); only the main theme can be outlined with a few words here. It is Christ’s final act of obedience toward his Father that he descends “into hell” (or “underworld”, Hades, Sheol). Because hell is (already in the Old Covenant) the place where God is absent, where there is no longer the light of faith, hope, love, of participation in God’s life; hell is what the judging God condemned and cast out of his creation; it is filled with all that is irreconcilable with God, from which he turns away for all eternity. It is filled with the reality of all the world’s godlessness, with the sum of the world’s sin; therefore, with precisely all of that from which the Crucified has freed the world. In hell he encounters his own work of salvation, not in Easter triumph, but in the uttermost night of obedience, truly the “obedience of a corpse.” He encounters the horror of sin separated from men. He “walks” through sin (without leaving a trace, since in hell and in death, there is neither time nor direction); and, traversing its formlessness, he experiences the second chaos. While bereft of any spiritual light emanating from the Father, in sheer obedience, he must seek the Father where he cannot find him under any circumstances. And yet, this hell is a final mystery of the Father as the Creator (who made allowances for the freedom of man). And so, in this darkness, the Incarnate Son learns “experientially” what until then was “reserved” for the Father. Hell, seen in this way, is, in its final possibility, a trinitarian event. On Good Friday, the Father hands the “key” to it over to the Son. These remarks are only intended to give a first impression; they certainly do not exhaust the wealth of this theology of Holy Saturday. What Adrienne experienced is actually more horrible than the hell depicted for us by medieval imagination; it is the knowledge of having lost God forever; it is being engulfed in the chaotic mire of the anti-divine; the absence of faith, hope, and love; the loss as well, therefore, of any human communication. It is the metamorphosis of thought into a meaningless prattle of lifeless logic. Her experience of it was so real that, in view of it, it would be ridiculous and blasphemous to speak of the nonexistence of hell or even just of apokatastasis in the “systematic” sense. Adrienne’s experience is unique in the history of theology; it moves us beyond the Either/Or of Origen and Augustine. It justifies the exaltation of Christian hope over fear and yet, through its trinitarian interpretation, gives the whole problem an altogether Christian seriousness, perhaps never before known.” - Hans Urs von Balthasar

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

One day the king encountered on the road a wretched fool, hideously disfigured, his face marred beyond recognition. Moved with pity, the king asked: “Where have you come from, man?” “From hell, O king!” the fool answered. “And what were you seeking in that place of torment?” “I went looking for fire - just a spark - to light my pipe and draw a puff.” “Did you find it? Did you light your pipe and smoke?” “No, sire. The prince of darkness himself told me: ‘We have no fire here.’” The king laughed in disbelief. “No fire in hell? Impossible!” The fool nodded gravely. “I too was astonished. But the master of that abyss answered me with chilling clarity: ‘Here there is no fire of our own. Each soul brings its own fire - and that fire burns him eternally!’” Brethren, hear this and tremble! The passions you refuse to uproot now - while you still dwell in the flesh - will demand fulfillment in eternity. But there, without a body, without matter, without the means to satisfy them, they become undying torment. The craving rages on, unquenchable, devouring the soul from within like an eternal furnace. This is the fire that never dies: • the burning thirst of drunkenness that finds no wine, • the insatiable lust of fornication and uncleanness that embraces only ashes, • the endless hunger of gluttony that gnaws on emptiness, • the ceaseless fury of anger and malice that hates without end, • the corrosive poison of envy that consumes its bearer while the envied rejoices forever, • the slavery to tobacco, drugs, greed, pride, vainglory, and every other chain forged in this life… As the holy Fathers teach: the fire of Gehenna is not an external punishment sent by an angry God. It is the very presence of God - the consuming Fire of His Love and Light - experienced as agony by those whose hearts have become hatred, whose wills are fixed on sin, whose souls cling to passions instead of Christ. In Paradise the same divine Flame warms, illumines, and deifies the saints. In Gehenna the same Flame scorches and torments those who have made themselves enemies of love. You carry the kindling now. Every unrepented passion is fuel you heap upon your own pyre. Repent today! Cut off the members that offend (Matt. 5:30). Confess, fast, pray, receive the holy Mysteries, struggle with tears against the old man. Uproot the weeds before the harvest, lest you yourself become the burning sheaf. For when the soul departs the body, the contest is over. The fire you have nurtured will then burn without cease - and there will be no escape, no relief, no end. “Remember thy latter end, and thou shalt never sin” (Sirach 7:36). Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner - before the fire I myself have kindled consumes me forever. Amen.

En Áyax de Sófocles, los vv. 684-685 dicen: τοῦθ' ὑμὶν Αἴας τοὔπος ὕστατον θροεῖ, τὰ δ' ἄλλ' ἐν Ἅιδου τοῖς κάτω μυθήσομαι. («éstas son las últimas palabras que Áyax os dirige/el resto, en el Hades, a los que están abajo, se lo diré»). Dos poetas modernos, Cavafis y Karyotakis, entablaron un diálogo irónico con estos versos de Sófocles. Les dejo sendos poemas, de mi traducción de la Poesía completa de Cavafis y de 'Elegías y sátiras con cuatro poemas póstumos' de Karyotakis (ambos publicados en Pre-Textos). Por cierto, que Áyax/Ayante fue el único héroe del cual Odiseo no se ganó la elocuencia en su bajada al Hades. Por el resentimiento del juicio de las armas, dice Odiseo. En todo caso, es devastador ese momento en que Ayante le da la espalda y se marcha. Pocos silencios pesan tanto en la poesía. Les dejo ese pasaje, de mi traducción de la Odisea (La Oficina 2024).

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

«Con indiferencia religiosa se carece de frenos morales, sin estos las pasiones se desbocan, y produciendo la licencia, acaban por un monopolio que confina la libertad; sin frenos morales la corrupción lo invade todo, el oro petrifica los corazones, rompe las leyes» Jaime Balmes