Let's say the shadow of secularism is mechanism - materialist, amoral, in a mechanical void. The shadow of theism is totalitarianism - cult of personality combined with mind-control (sounds a lot like a war between them, in the vicinity of Ur of the Chaldees). Let's say the light of secularism is humanism, out of Athens : the notion of the divine as a principle of balance, about which no individual mortal or group can claim to formulate anything absolutely authoritative. Origins of democracy. Let's say the light of theism is a covenantal God of Love, out of Jerusalem : a kind of antithetical trickster-Yahweh, patched together out of Abraham's familial daemon & Moses' slave-liberator God - antithetical because a critical mirror-image of the authoritarian sacred kingship of the Middle East.

Both Greek humanism & Hebrew theism, then, can be said to integrate strictly human power & capability with an intervening divine principle (balance, Nature, justice, on the one hand; creator-Yahweh on the other). Greek tragedy images the choral nature of humanism : not a single voice, but many, in a wheel of nature. Hebrew prophets exemplify the poetic response - the lyric formulation - of the human relationship with divine justice.

If we think of divinity as an unaccountable conjunction of opposing forces - the Person & the Principle, maybe we can begin to grasp this notion of mediation that so fascinated Simone Weil. The Logos-Word-Person mediates between binaries, the many & the one. Weil (& Plato) calls this mediator "Love".

Think of democracy as a means of establishing the principle of balance among opposing interests (demos & oligarchy, private & public) - in other words, as a practical response to crisis, stasis ("conflict" to the Greeks), the dis-ordering of authority. Then think of the Christian Passion narrative in political terms : the crucifixion of a mock-king of Israel between an incited mob, a self-interested oligarchy, and an imperial power. This is a theatrical presentation of the collapse, or carnivalization almost, of political authority. Then think again of the characterization of Hebrew religion as a lyric-prophetic voicing of the human/divine relation ("covenant") : sacred song, song-authority. Then think of some earlier posts in this blog, back in the archives, where I was pondering the psychological impulse behind lyric poetry - as maybe originating in the crisis of late adolescence - the gap between the time of childhood (under parental authority) & adulthood - the time of "hieros gamos", sexuality, marriage. Of poetry as breakdown, epileptic fit, charismatic reaction to the shift of authority. Then think that the ordering principles of both "polis" & "theos" were formulated & systematized by men. Then think of the women - Mary, the Magdalen, Beatrice - waiting in the wings. Then think of the trickster-Yahweh & his Word as the iconoclastic knife-line between collective formulations of justice (words, icons, images) - formulated by men - in love with his equally-unaccountable Bride. Think again of the conjunction of opposites (many & one, image & imageless, male & female, yin & yang, law & liberty, demos & individual, private & public). Then go read a little Nicholas Cusanus (Of Learned Ignorance). Keep thinking.