The Golden Ass

David Hering, in his review, “World-Wide Western: On Ari Aster’s Eddington” wrote that the film’s characters suffer from a constant “sleep of reason.” Major, key plot elements appear on the scene from the internet, are elements of social media ideological discourse, but have little to no grounding or bearing in the real, concrete, material world. Much of the acting, many of the decisions made by the characters and lines scripted into their voices, similarly, do not resonate well with every day, lived experience. I sense the film could work better as a comic book or graphic novel than as a film. See Sin City as a potential example of what I have in mind. This is, I think, why, for Hering, "Eddington feels somewhat anemic in its provocations, closer to caricature than true satire." I agree with him. As a sort of counterpoint of the film that makes Hering’s point for him, to end his review, he discusses the final frame:

“The most successful element of Eddington is the subplot concerning a data centre that is to be built on the outskirts of the town..It’s here that Aster’s film most deftly combines the Western genre with the material prevalence of the online world, its true form revealed in the film’s final – and best – image, a night-time vista of the completed data centre glowing, spaceship-like, in the middle of the desert, some distance from Eddington..This is such a great, rich image: the data centre’s unearthliness, its domination of the frame, its transformation of the traditional Western landscape into something peripheral and uncanny…what sets it apart from the film’s more facetious humour is that it’s a sincerely disturbing image, one that monumentally and materially reinscribes the threat on the landscape in a way that dwarfs the internecine conflicts of the town. I found myself wishing Eddington had leaned more in this direction. This is where the internet truly occurs: it’s material, and it’s terminal.”

The final frame of Ari Aster's Eddington

Again, I agree here with Hering. When says, “its true form revealed in the film’s final – and best – image,” though - with the term “it” - is he referring to the film itself, to the internet, or to the Western? I am not sure. It is clear, however, that the “unearthliness” refers to the data center itself. What Hering does not mention or discuss about this final frame is that it is from above. It is a three-quarter perspectival view of said data center. In this sense, there is a mirroring sameness taken up in, on the one hand, the subject doing the framing and, on the other, the object being framed. The unearthliness is framed from an unearthly place above it, and that is why I take the film’s final shot to be a recapitulation of the whole. Though the final frame is the best thing about the film, that is shot “from above” also itself betrays everything I take to be wrong with it. What do I mean? Glib caricature is only so precisely because of its “unearthliness,” its distance from “on the ground” direct action in which we all participate everyday.

FILM EVALUATION AND MONTAGE

Notably, my point here is something I never would have seen or given attention to if I had not been an architect. It is as an architect that I learned to pay attention to spatial relationships between architectural elements, said elements and the environment, and all with consideration of the human body and its own experience and set of relationships. This is to say that paying attention to relationships between sky and ground, earth and heaven, and to the place of architecture and its elements between them, was something I learned as an architect.

At what is this man smiling? (screenshot from here)

Obviously, architecture and film are different, right? One might just as obviously presume the extended implication that film and architecture should be judged by different criteria. After all, one of the key and central elements of film making is montage. As Alfred Hitcock explains in a famous clip about his own use of montage, the entire purpose of it is narrative movement through and in the content of the medium of film itself. If the director replaces one image with another in a montage, all that surrounds it totally changes in tone and meaning. The example Hitchcock gives is of an elderly man smiling in response to a cute baby playing as compared to in response to a woman in a bikini. He becomes a different character in a different story in each respective scenario. Montage – which, as Hitchcock explains, is the cutting and splicing together, or “assembly” of frames of film material - thus works to move a given narrative along its intended trajectory.

At first glance, the very nature of the medium of film might, then, seem to inherently exclude architectural considerations from our evaluative criteria of movies. Does Architecture tell or inhabit stories? What does the architectural lesson of the spatial orientation of the last shot of Eddington have to do with how we might evaluate the film’s entire narrative flow and direction? How many stories does a building have? How many does it tell or inhabit?

ARCHITECTURE, MONTAGE, AND THE BODY IN SPACE

The basic point of Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay, Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science is that our inhabiting of narratives and telling stories is crucially important to all human knowledge. Implicitly speaking to this question of stories, then, Dr. Ulrike Kuch wrote a piece called, Transmission of Knowledge: Eisenstein, Le Corbusier, and Montage as Image Practice in Film and Architecture. For those unfamiliar, Eisenstein was a famous modernist Russian film maker, and Le Corbusier was basically the most well-known architect of the 20th century. Towards the point of my lesson on the joining together of narration and spatial orientation, in Kuch’s piece, she quotes Russian avant-garde film maker Dziga Vertov:

[start quote] “»I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.

Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane. I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations.

Freed from the rule of sixteen – seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you« (Vertov 1923: 17f).” [end quote]

“Man with a Movie Camera,” by Dziga Vertov (screenshot from here):

Referring to a film Le Corbusier helped Pierre Chenal make in order to promote French modernist architecture, Dr. Kuch says it “asks us to see if we can find »truth« anywhere.” The key word here for my point is not truth but anywhere.

Kuch also refers to Eisenstein’s “understanding of images detached from their representative character and replaced by a sequence of images that work together to create a montage.” Kuch’s point is that, for both Eisenstein and Corbusier, “The idea [is] of an image that is no longer solely representative, but serves as a medium linking architecture, the viewer, and motion.” For at least Corbusier and Vertov, this displacement of the ghostly image is tied to and bound up with the “anywhere” of the machine’s frame. This is something Corbusier and Eisenstein seemed to see in common in each other’s work, as well.

Speaking of “images detached from their representative character,” V.F. Perkins, in his 1972 book Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies, compares two famous uses of montage by Hitchcock and Eisenstein, respectively:

"I offered the Psycho murder as an example of cinematic excellence, and the Potemkin lions as an example of the critically suspect. But that is not because Eisenstein infringed an aesthetic law on the proper content of a movie scene; rather, because his animals were inconsistent with the discipline which he had himself established. Unattached stone lions had no place in a film which undertook to convey ideas and emotions through the presentation of experiences believably undergone by a group of rebel sailors.”

Everyone reading this has seen Hitchcock’s Psycho murder scene. The “Potemkin lions” – seen here – refers to a series of three montaged clips of stone lions who appear in the middle of a battle scene in Eisenstein’s famous Battleship Potemkin. As Perkins explains, the lions are “so photographed that we seem to see a single sleeping lion awake and sit up in an attitude of surprise or alarm or anger or watchfulness.” Perkins says the lions convey “extreme imprecision of effect,” because of the “absence of connection, in terms of story, action, location – the absence of any connection at all” between surrounding images of Odessa steps, mutinied sailors, attacking battleship, and destroyed gates of the military headquarters. Perkins seems to indicate that their only purpose is the bravado of Eisenstein’s proclaiming his own film editing skill in the montage of images of lions into the scene.

We, of course, here notice that Perkins is raising the same question I addressed previously, that of the relationship between narrative content and orientation to spatial arrangement of bodies and objects by the camera’s framing. I submit that the detached “anywhere” of the Potemkin lions is precisely part of their point. I also want to suggest that they – precisely in and because of their startling displacement - point towards the “place” of the camera in not only the specific film in question but in the medium of film as such. Perkins seems to be missing this. I take it to be key.

Returning to Dr. Ulrike Kuch piece, it thus becomes relevant that, there, we also get the image of camera as machine taking up the tacit place of the human body moving in space according to rhythms and sequences invited and ordered, in turn, by architectural elements that present montaged images to us. Ulrich, referring to the works of Eisenstein, Corbusier, and Vertov, conveys a dynamic interplay of formation, identity, and orientation, of place, movement, and trajectory between self, camera, and environment.

THE CAMERA MACHINE AND HUMAN HISTORY

Me speaking now: this dynamic interplay is that of an architectural-cinematic space depicted well by Clockwork Orange. Whether a given film depicts the human body as a machine or not, and however implicitly or explicitly in the narrative - such as in films about cyborgs, or as in Avatar – the medium of film itself presents the very question of the place, role, and identity of the human body in a relationship between “the ghost and the machine.”

I thus bring Ulrike Kuch’s piece up only to point beyond it, really. I know Corbusier well enough to know that he was intentionally placing modern architecture, and cinema, as well, inside a larger trajectory of human history. The “kino-eye,” and the associated question of its relationship with the body and its limits are not simply or only about the technology of camera and screen. The technology doesn’t exist in a cultural, environmental, ecological, or historical vacuum. For Kuch to reference the machine (of the camera), and to bind it up with tacit knowledge of the human body moving through space, is to reference, comment on, and find some place inside modern displacement from – as Arendt says it - earth bound existence.

Artemis II (image take from here):

Architecturally, Corbusier was reaching back to the Acropolis and extending that ancient tradition into a modern context / environment. It’s easy now to go to the Acropolis and experience it “cinematically,” even though that’s not at all how it would have been proceeded through by ancient Athenians (Corbusier also took a bunch of photos while he was there).

To build a cinematic architecture for a body bound up in the view of a machine with a sequence and montage of images that are non-representational because of our displacement is to build in the wake of Galileo, Descartes, Newton’s mechanical, Clockwork Universe, and Kant (just to name highlights, particularly along shared ground of understanding for at least some of my readers). For Le Corbusier, it is to have been exiled from the earth and then attempt to both name and reconcile with that condition.

This also, for Corbusier, meant taking up the camera while also returning to helping the modern human person remember his or her place in relation to the earth and under the domus of heaven. This is difficult to convey over text or in conversation without familiarity with Corbusier’s work. I do so in my book, but it takes up a lot of print, a lot of space on the page. I hope the point here remains. This reconciliation or return isn’t something mentioned or discussed in Ulrike Kuch’s piece on montage, but it is central to Corbusier’s work in general. I see it in the cinematography of Battleship Potemkin, too, because that film very intentionally re-orients us, in ordered sequences, to sky and ground, earth and heaven, up and down, body and horizon or body and objects before it in space.

THE (LOST) POTENTIAL FOR POETIC RECONCILAITION IN EDDINGTON

Here’s the thing for me with Ari Aster. As soon as any film maker takes up a camera machine, they have found themselves inside that trajectory of human history in question. This is so, whether they realize it or not. The camera, thus, also exists inside a set of conditions. And, we’re all – whether giving attention to film or architecture - tied up together inside that set of conditions where the camera is both also bound up and has a distinct role (or roles).

Further, and more to my point, all of this is very related for me to the other elements of our commonly shared condition that Eddington deals with – namely, ideological antagonisms, and disconnection from reality. Ideology itself is tied to modernity. “Science of ideas” is a pretty preposterously presumptuous notion. And, it depends not only on modern, Enlightenment epistemic frameworks but their being extended from observation of “the natural world” into the political realm. Ideology thus depends on the human person taking up a very similar viewpoint as the camera machine itself. Ideology takes up the camera machine’s disembodied, transcended “anywhereness” (like Kant’s transcendent imagination, speaking of judgement and evaluative criteria).

Trying to find our place in the internet and its algorithms is a further extension of that modern condition – which we all share together. And, this is precisely why I find it so key that the final shot of Eddington is “from above.” Figuratively speaking, the “anywhereness” of the camera machine – no less than the viewpoint of detached, (essentially) non-representational content of ideology’s presumed “science of ideas” - is first and prototypically the transcended “aboveness” of Galileo’s mind that has come to dwell in outer space. Both camera and ideology are and can only be taken up by one who, as Hannah Arendt would say it, lives in the universe. No one who proceeded ritually through the ancient Acropolis owned a camera. The camera was never taken up by the embodied Phidias dwelling upon and bound to the earth and under the domus of heaven. As Vertov’s man-camera said it, “free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe…”

EDDINGTON AS SATIRICAL ABSURDITY

Ari Aster’s Eddington is obviously not like Thomas Malik’s The Tree of Life, nor Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. It doesn’t carry such gravitas, and nor does it intend to, exactly. As my friend and pastor Scott Crowder said: it is “nothing like Tarkovsky in its contemplation. It shouldn’t be cast in those comparisons to find merit.”

In this sense, as Scott did, one might suggest that Eddington works more like a Louis Bunuel film in its absurdity. Scott suggested that Aster’s “light-weight terror” is here like Camus and Sartre. Notably, I like Bunel. Or, at least, I used to. Maybe need to revisit. Either way, a Bunuel film is not glib, insincere, caricature, a sick joke, or self-assertive provocation. And, it can hardly be mistaken for any of those things, really (unless we arrive to it with moralizing). His “absurdity” is hardly random. It is not random at all, in fact.

Luis Bunuel dining toilet scene in The Phantom of Liberty, from here:

In so many ways, like Eisenstein, Le Corbusier, and Dziga Vertov, Bunuel is working through the historical trajectory inside of which the camera as such exists in the first place. Bunuel makes appear our disconnection from the body. And he is also thus intentionally working towards reconciliation with body and dust through his surreal absurdity. Take, for example, his inescapably comedic scene of a group of friends sitting around the dining room table to eat a meal while sitting on the toilet.

Bunuel’s cinematography is also very intentional about the (camera) machine’s “anywhereness.” Elsewhere in Bunuel’s oeuvre, the camera machine moving in an elliptical rotation around blatantly and obviously clashing collage of visceral functions serves as rather poignant cultural commentary on our relationship with the body. These depictions of visceral functions in planetary space are microcosmic examples within his larger oeuvre that reveals his particular intention to depict the machine’s historical trajectory in line with Galileo, Newton, and the Clockwork Universe. As in Bernini’s Baroque space, Bunuel’s camera machine moves in line with the elliptical turning of the heavens as models that give images of the human dwelling place as that of the universe. Bunuel’s cinematography inhabits the tension between universe and the human person’s relationship with dust and dirt. His camera inhabits this tension specifically between human dwelling place as outer space and human relationship with concrete and local places, bodies, and persons who appear on screen in the story he’s telling.

Bunuel is masterful with this tension between the body’s place and the camera’s elliptical, planetary anywhereness from above - or below, or eye level, or wherever makes sense in the narrative and spatial set of relationships. And, he pays detailed attention to these spatial relationships as they appear in ordered sequence. None of this is random for Bunuel. And, to again address the above question of shared evaluative criteria between architecture and cinema, this ordered tension is inherent to the modern person’s embodied relationship with his or her environment inside modern space and modern conditions, to which we are all bound together. In everyday practices he or she takes up, anyone who walks through any building or watches any film - from at least his or her earliest days of grade school - deals with this tension between our return to dirt and our dwelling in universal vacuousness.

And, I submit that, where Bunuel, for example, masterfully reveals and works towards reconciliation with this tension, Aster does the exact opposite. Each move Aster made in Eddington put the camera and narrative in line with the trajectory of our disembodiment rather than revealing it or tending to it. It seems to me he’s mostly just wallowing in it. Le Corbusier’s, Eisenstein’s, and Bunuel’s revelatory tension is missing from Aster’s cinematographic form and narrative content alike. Aster is more haphazard. At the very least, Eddington is not ordered by this question of the human person’s place between dirt and heaven. There is a reason why Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie ends with a group of friends walking along a path over the earth and under the domus of heaven in the middle of a grassy field.

Aster’s camera, like his story, is analytical. To make a movie, one must capture the scene. In this sense, the camera, for Aster, is merely incidental and “practical.” That Aster is not trying to find our place again in relation to the earth, I am here submitting, is part of why the story itself, the narrative, comes across to Hering and I as glib, insincere, caricature, as a sick joke, or as self-assertive provocation. It’s not “grounded.” By implication, I’m saying that, in any given film, the narrative and cinematography are inevitably interwoven. Bunuel’s camera machine – like Vertov’s and Eisenstein’s - ironically manages to speak in the poet’s voice. Aster’s camera is written analysis.

IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AND VIRTUAL PLAYTHINGS

Addressing this question of Nothing’s Anywhere, I find J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call, starring Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacy, and Simon Baker, to be a helpful and revealing counter point. What it is about is virtual and speculative playthings in relation to “on the ground” realities of embodied human lives in the financial industry. Explicit discursive terminology about markets and trading, however, is minimal – just enough to move the story along. What the film centers is the embodied, relational lives of the characters, their everyday burdens, goals, aspirations, and fears. The virtual numbers of markets are in the background…but no less at work in the embodied, visceral movements of places, stories, and characters in the film. I found this to be beautiful and profound.

Screenshot of climactic scene of Margin Call, from here:

Youtube’s @meeptop posted a 50-minute review of Eddington called, “We’re living in Ari Aster’s Nightmare." Meeptop’s review helps us see how and why, with this question of the proper place of the discursive explicitly in view, Margin Call is a counter point to Eddington. The review ends by juxtaposing Eddington’s presentation of cynical, fatalistic passivity against the hopeful notion that “meaning is something we have a say in.” For meeptop, Eddington supposedly invites us to have a voice in “what story we’re telling.” Interestingly, right before that (at about the 47 minute mark of the video), meeptop mentions that we share more in common than we like to believe. Of course, I’ve made that very point in this piece. Meeptop also - after mentioning it a lot prior - here discusses our shared vulnerability, that we are all looking for guidance and relational connection (and meaning). He then expresses lament of and fear for the lack of place for art “in this world” – because Eddington fell flat in theaters. According to @meeptop, the most Eddington could be said to have done was generate conversation:

“At best, it was a platform for more discourse, all because it didn’t pretend to have an answer. Eddington embodies a power of art that seems to be getting lost in a world of immediate solutions. The power to keep you questioning long enough that you lead yourself to a profound truth…Analysis of art, especially here on Youtube, has a terrible habit of encouraging you to engage with art the same way you do with the content you’re being served. It constantly teaches that meaning is rigid, that all art is allegory, morality tales with hidden, targeted meaning. The film is trying to tell you a truth about yourself or about the world. And you need someone else, anyone other than yourself, to tell you what that truth is. In a sea of answers and narratives, we lose sight of the fact that meaning is something we have a say in… (48:52)”

So, @meeptop’s basic point is that, where most film’s analysis, and by extension film itself, is typically trying to rigidly foreclose meaning by teaching narrow lessons, Eddington, implicitly, by contrast, invites its audience to take up that task for ourselves. As an examination of Eddington’s relationship with ideology, I want to offer a few comments. They will be tied to each other, and tied to what I’ve said already:

- I don’t take Eddington’s falling flat as evidence of the lack of art’s place in the world (which is not to say that our world is not artfully challenged). I don’t see Eddington as good art in the first place, really.

- Eddington was (merely) a platform for more discourse, because it was itself so tied to ideological discourse.

- I don’t think the film was good at all at leaving its audience questioning, curious, or “open.” Most of the 50 minutes of @meeptop’s review was - through the viewpoints, words, and actions of the characters - an account of the film’s own account of discursive answers to discursive questions posted by heated online discourse. As for opening us up, The Departed did that. A Serious Man did that. Killers of a Flower Moon also did that (pretty much). Lots of others have, as well. None of those films have been so tied to and bound up with ideological discourse the way Eddington is. In those other films, as in Margin Call, the ideological discourse instead stands in the background.

- Eddington is almost entirely organized around engagement with content exactly as it is served to us on social media.

- It is with precisely these observations in mind that I found Eddington to be so stiflingly rigid, way too literally allegorical, and forcing itself upon us as a morality tale with not so very hidden but definitively targeted meaning. A couple examples of this from the film that @meeptop’s review mentioned explicitly: 1. The cult leader guy representing the internet, per Aster himself; 2. The airplane the anonymous “ANTIFA” attackers flew in on having “something that looks like an internet browser” logo on it.

Perhaps @meeptop has a point, in that Eddington does not end by tying itself up in a neat, comfortable bow. It leaves its audience vulnerably uncomfortable. On the other hand, considering that @meeptop’s review also tours us through the film’s series of Joe’s poor moral choices that build on top of one another, where he otherwise had the choice to face and embrace our common vulnerability, can the fact that he ends up in such a helplessly frail state, and as a direct result of his choices, no less, not be readily interpreted as a common sense move made by a rigidly allegorical morality tale with a closed and hidden, though targeted, meaning?

Architect Louis I. Kahn said, “If it isn’t in wonder you needn’t bother about it” (in A lecture at Pratt University, Fall 1973, as recorded in Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews, p. 322). In Eddington, what is one left to wonder about? Where's the wonder? It has no such “opening,” precisely because the logic of every movement is foreclosed around ideological discourse. I thus find @meeptop’s commentary deeply ironic. Eddington “teaches that meaning is rigid, that all art is allegory,” and it presents as a “morality [tale] with hidden, targeted meaning,” precisely because what moves Eddington’s narrative along does so exclusively at the level of the discursive rather than at that of the tacit, the textural, the actual, or the visceral. Unlike what appears in the above screenshot from Margin Call, anything that appears viscerally or texturally in Eddington is the secondary byproduct of the discursive, of the ideological.

TO RETURN TO EDDINGTON’S FINAL FRAME

To tie Eddington’s ideological discourse to what I said above about the camera machine and modern conditions:

Ideology, or “the science of ideas,” is itself tied to the post-Galilean modernity of the Enlightenment. I mentioned the presumptuous preposterousness of this notion and its dependence on modern epistemic frameworks being extended into the political realm. Importantly for my point here, I also mentioned that ideological discourse depends on the human person taking up essentially the same viewpoint as the camera machine itself. To take up ideological antagonisms is to take up the same dismembered, transcendent “anywhereness” of the camera machine. To take up an ideological position over a body of knowledge is different from vulnerably taking your place in the Atheneum with your life and death at stake according to the words to which you give voice before a body of your peers.

Ending of A Serious Man, from here:

Interestingly, The Departed, A Serious Man, and Killers of a Flower Moon do well to “open us up” when they leave us face to face with our commonly shared vulnerability. That is precisely how they “open us up” “beyond” or “outside of” analytical discourse’s hidden but targeted meanings. Ideological discourse depends on transcendence of such vulnerability. That’s precisely why and how it forecloses and targets meaning in the first place, prior to and outside of any questions of the content of specific ideological discourse that eventually comes about. The whole purpose and trajectory of ideological discourse is presumption to foreclose the vulnerability of the unknown with a “science of ideas” (that has now taken shape as what we might call a science of entertainment, but the point remains).

Because the narrative movement of and in Eddington hinges on and depends on ideological discourse, if the film breaks open the fourth wall, it only does so discursively. It doesn’t break the fourth wall actually or viscerally. Or, to be more specific, I mean to say it doesn’t do so actually and viscerally the way The Departed, A Serious Man, or Killers of a Flower Moon do (among others). Yes, Eddington has generated discourse, but it does not actually place us in the action. And that’s because ideological discourse is itself so distant from direct action in the first place.

When I say the fact that Eddington’s final shot is from above serves as a recapitulation of the whole film, this is what I’m pointing towards. The camera machine’s view is firstly Galileo’s mind’s position held from outer space, which is also the view inevitably and necessarily “taken up” in ideological discourse in the first place. Figuratively speaking, this is, of course, an analytical view “from above.” It is here where the evaluative criteria of architecture and cinema share the same space together. It is here where someone in architectural and cinematic spaces, our identities and bodily perceptions having been shaped and formed in the same specific ways, give attention to the same things. In response to my own giving attention to the direction of our said attention in film, what does my reader now want: to, like the trajectory of Eddington, continue to rise above the fray, or, rather, to “enter inside” the direct action of a story or stories we all inhabit together?

The most important question about AI is not economic. Nor is it one of the accuracy of what AI generates. That is not to say they are not important questions. Moral questions are also obviously important – tied to AI’s ability to impersonate us. But are they most important? Are they central to the proper ordering of things? Our answer to this question depends on our image of what it means to be human.

I mean to say that the most important question of AI, by far, is of how it shapes us. AI’s question is of how it images the human person. Our guide to this is Incarnation.

I saw a study recently that compared student writing by those who used AI to a control group who didn’t. The conclusion was that kids who used AI lost their creativity. And, not only that, but, even after the student stopped using AI, their “creativity” was still gone 30-40 days later. The study was not longitudinal, so who can say what happens years after not using AI. But what is “creativity” in the first place?

Window Hang, drawing by the author.

One of the few drawings I did where my professor's only commentary was concise and positive. He saw it and exclaimed, "Now that is an elevation!" Of course, he meant something by that. And the direction of the elevation is from earth towards the heavens – in ancient and scriptural terms, the realm of divinity.

I learned a deep lesson about this from studying a Michelangelo drawing at London's National Gallery. See below for not that drawing but another of his that teaches us the same lesson. Keep in mind that the drawing was huge, probably about 2 ft. by 3 ft., on vellum. It was a portrait of a young woman. One line caught my attention. It gave form to her curly hair. It moved from the part in her hair, around the shape of the left side of her head, down to her shoulder, and then again down past her arm and to her torso, ending in multiple curls. Further, it didn't represent a single strand of hair. It set the contour of a section of hair, itself detailed by many other lines.

Why do I take the time to describe this line? What is my point? In order for Michelangelo to draw this line, he must have an image of that entire flowing body and section of hair in his mind. For that, he had to “see” this particular section of hair in relation to her whole head. To see this in his mind, he must also have seen the whole head of hair in relation to, well, her head – and then also in relation to her face and, not to mention, the rest of her body. Michelangelo had to “hold all of this together” in his imagination at once.

Study of a man shouting, also known as The Damned Soul, c. 1525-34, Uffizi, Florence, Italy, by Michelangelo (for reference, image from here).

This alone is beyond impressive, to say the least, and to the point of striking awe. It requires immense and intense energy, concentration, knowledge of the human body, and practice of the art of drawing. In order to make this line on paper, though, Michelangelo also had to translate what he "saw" in his mind onto paper. Or, in other words, he had to "draw" it out, onto the paper, or into the world of communal appearances, and with his pencil. The discipline, skill, practice, and gifting required to complete these two tasks to the perfection I witnessed is stunning. And, more to my point, it is beautifully edifying - of the woman imaged, of Michelangelo, and of the human person more generally.

Now – “holding it all together” – where else have we heard language like that? Paul tells us it’s what Christ does, right? And, he does so as our “head.” Through him, all that was made was made. This is not to say that Christ made Michelangelo’s drawing. Michelangelo did that. That, in turn, is not to say Michelangelo is God. That such questions arise, though, speak to the glorious wonder here…

AI, in this sense, too, is like a divinity. It holds together immense spans of information – basically all that has been made. And, from “all that has been made,” AI “creatively” generates artifacts – whether writings or AI art. And, if it imitates the human person to such a degree that we cannot know the difference, has our creation, in turn, created us? The question of divinity, and of relationship with divinity, is inevitable.

This was a parable. An opening – of the imagination, perhaps?

A parable of human agency, of passivity, and of humans – makers of AI - as self-ruled masters of our own destiny. Compare Michelangelo drawing to me prompting AI. Compare one BODY’s engagement to another. Compare the inter-relating of mind and body in one and the other.

If what AI does is basically memory and processing of human thinking in the form of writing, whether digital or print - if, when AI is used to generate art, the memory processing is just that of images, and interpretive words about them, rather than of printed words alone - then does the human who uses AI become information processing? Is a human a machine? Is the human body a machine? Is our humanity constituted in the consciousness or information itself?

Related Facebook post from friend Nick Freiling (who I often otherwise agree with and find to be extremely helpful).


What Nick doesn't point out is that actors are actual people. And there are interrelational and interpersonal dynamics between actors, and between actors and director. This is a question of what acutally appears before and among the communal world, and how. Is to flatten all that into "interface" to lose our very humanity or to drastically altar it? Is a person in, as the director says, "action," or is an information processing maching doing the work of said information processing? Does imaging the human person as information processing or consciousness elevate our image of the human person or altar it into a discarnate one?

Nothing elevates the human person like divinity. This is not to say that Michelangelo is a divinity. Quite the opposite. Is AI – made by the “Michelangelos" of our time - a divinity?

All of this is a matter of “creativity.” Because it is a matter of order – of the ordering of things. Of course, to order is presumably to elevate. And order is ultimately accomplished by divinity. The question of divinity, and of relationship with divinity, is inevitable.

Information spans further than the vulnerable human body and its creaturely limits can see or hear. So - to depict the human person as an information processing machine – or even as the disembodied information itself – is to elevate the human, right?

This was a parable – a body of writing as an opening…

It was a parable of what it means to be a person. The most important question about AI is not economic. Nor is it one of the accuracy of what AI generates. Moral questions are obviously important – tied to AI’s ability to impersonate us. But the most important question of AI, by far, is of how it shapes us. AI’s question is of how it images the human person.

The answer to the parable is, of course, partly determined by HOW we use AI. But, because technologies shape our environment, and our environment shapes us, the fundamental question remains. As humans build a building up from the ground, so too, it perhaps lifts up the human person. As the hand moves the pencil, so the drawing is moving for the one who beholds it. These moves are extensions of the humans who make that which moves. I mean to say that the most important question of AI, by far, is of how it shapes us. AI’s question is of how it images the human person.

To so thoroughly disengage the body, and to so expansively give ourselves over to information processing, is obviously to either shape our image of the human person or to lose it. Which is it? What is it to "prompt"?

The reason we know it’s important that we have bodies – that our bodies are part of and wrapped up in who we are - is not only that we are known by God incarnate but that, in Incarnation, God becomes human. This, too, is of course a question of order, and thus of "creation":

"We won't be able to live the strange way of life set aside for us if we can't believe that God in fact sees us as friends, as partners, and as co-regents...We are God's glory, and God is ours. As St. Maximus says, divinity and humanity are paradigms of each other. God is the lifter of our heads; the last thing he wants is for us to grovel. What he wants is for us to be his equals - loving as he loves, knowing as he knows. We are, remember, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone." - Chris Green, Being Transfigured: Lentin Homilies, pp. 75-76

Because God becomes human, we know God. To see is to know - to have been drawn out into the world of communal appearances. This seeing is embodied – incarnate. This is human elevation. And this is how we know what human elevation is.

If AI is like a god, then what does human elevation by AI look like? Is it economic? Is it moral? Is it human?

Professor and friend David Fitch read Part 1 of 2 of my blog series here and responded as follows: “Hey bro … this is thick bro … can you do this for me? Can you give me an abstract? One paragraph summarizing the thesis of the post? And three points substantiating it??"

I responded by explaining a few things I'm doing and addressing in my short blog series without being explicit. I figured explaining them to him, in particular, would probably be helpful, as he is an academic. The reason said explanations are here collectively named a “Postscript” should become clear through the course of reading them:


1. Inside / outside. I'm attempting to climb inside the story rather than observe it from outside and above. To actually move through the story of Gen. 22 through the course of reading the blog post / series. Hence imagery in the blog post that intentionally places the reader, and the characters in the story, inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven rather than in a transcendent position above the fray.

Obvious difficulties here:

A. As moderns, we're outsiders to the ANE [Ancient Near East] world, and to the ANE practice of ritual child sacrifice. Reliance on scholarly sources comes in here. In my blog series, I generally minimized that and relegated it to the endnotes.

B. To get inside the story is to give a taste and sense of it. That was my intention in the blog post(s). I gave an intro. But I can't explain the revelation from the jump (as I would in a thesis statement), the key on which the whole story turns. Because, from inside the story, the characters in it don't know the revelation before it happens. That's part of the point of the story - that revelation is required to renounce the world of "our" Babylonian ancestors and to enter into a new world (as articulated in Part 2, here). But that much I did say in the intro.

For clarity, the original intro of Part 1 jumped straight into the news story of collaboration between Steve Bannon and Epst&!n on a film production to clear Epst&!n’s name, followed by a quick summary of three reasons for the importance of framing our public story of the Epst&!n files as one of child sacrifice, three reasons I intended to articulate further in the rest of the coming two blog posts. What the reader would go back and read now is an added and edited intro that came about as a result of being spurred on by Fitch in this conversation with him – said new intro into the difficulty in facing reality followed by its necessity and inevitability if we want to experience life’s goodness, beauty, and truth.


2. My blog post is meant to be for the church rather than for academia. But everything I just said about the inside and outside of a story and its journey had loads of meta, academic mumbo jumbo attached to it, or in the background. And I can't say everything in a blog post.

A. Example - throughout my blog post, I hinted at the modern individual as our idolatrous fantasy as a contextualized extension of the figure of the ancient hero into the modern world. Language in Part 1 of my series that pointed towards the modern individual and his or her territory as a fantasy included “our choices aren't as free as we imagine,” and “we aren't in control of the globe as we imagine.” In Part 1, I also gestured towards the modern individual itself being imaged after Baal / Marduk in the first place.

B. Another example - the figure of the Tower of Babel. Fantastical reaching to and/or descending from the heavens is key here. Again, I can't say everything in a blog post or series, but I definitely hinted at this. I did so primarily with the art and with storied references to or associations with it. The referenced art was William Christenberry’s Dream Building Ensemble and his Portrait, which, taken together, articulate the Babylonian Tower and the modern person as one image taken up into the interwoven modern practices of capitalism, individualism, and racism (the sexism of the sex cult of child sacrifice was around long before modernity). These indicative artistic references, in and of themselves, are related to the goal of "entering inside," of imaging a character inside a story set inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven. With reference to the figure of the Tower of Babel, the image of identifying with life inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven is intended to be compared to having transcended from and above, and having mastered the globe. This is to say that “entering inside” the story is, in my blog post and series, meant to be compared to having reached the top of the Tower, as though having presumed to have completed said Tower. Obviously, that’s not how the script of Gen. 11 goes.

Taking these two sets of images in these two examples together, I'm addressing the modern individual as such. And I'm tying that image of the modern individual to the ancient figure of the Babylonian Tower. To have taken up modern identity itself is to have presumed that the Tower was completed, and that it not only reached the heavens but obtained a vantage point outside them. To be modern is to be meta, to have entered the post-script, to have taken up what Arendt, in The Human Condition describes as an "Archimedean point" outside the globe, with a view of it which is that of its Maker.^[1]
3. Because it sounds like it would be helpful to academics, and because I think readers who would care about the content of this postscript already sense or know this, and so for me to say it here is not to kill or ruin it…

The point I'm driving at is that the story of Gen. 22 is told from the vantage point of the ear of Abraham rather than that of the eye of God...

And so, if the original command (in Gen. 22) was a "test" or "trail"...we have to ask whether:

A. the story is told from a transcendent vantage point, under the assumption that there is direct, unmediated relationship between the "command" that God spoke and, in turn, what Abraham heard?
Or rather -
B. the hearing of the command as we have it recorded and handed down to us was how it was heard in the ear of Abraham, who had come from a place where the Master from above is appeased with blood sacrifices of representatives of vanquished enemies in order to obtain divine blessings?
And thus -
B.b. God was bringing Abraham along on a journey from Babylon to another world, and accounting for where Abraham had been to get Abraham to somewhere closer to where God really is?
My implied answer to that question – implied by my very taking up the task of “entering inside” the story in the first place - is precisely why the revelation of the divinity Abraham had encountered as One "who sees and hears" and who also "is seen and heard" is so radical and implies an alternative creation story of a whole other world from the one created or brought into order by Ba'al / Marduk (or by “handmade” idolatry of and in attentive devotion to Ba’al / Marduk). Finnegans Wake is here simply an analogical meta example of such "entering inside," after modenrs had already “exited,” and as articulated and celebrated from inside our Western tradition.

I address all this much more explicitly in my (yet unpublished) book than in my blog post(s), but my book isn't about contextualizing the story of the Epst&!n files in particular. In the blog series, I'm more trying to open closed doors of those trained inside fundamentalism to greater curiosity and wonder. I’m interested in invitation towards asking questions fundamentalists might otherwise not, in movement towards seeing things they might otherwise not - sans too much explicitly academic language. But, from the vantage point of an academic, I'm also interested in doing work to contextualize the ancient story into a contemporary one with which we're all quite familiar.

Of course, all of this is partly to say that “entering inside” is, for us now, itself a difficulty into which we must entrust ourselves if we are to embrace what it means to be human. It not only can be but is likely inevitably a form of suffering endurance for us moderns. To begin to move in this direction is inevitably to make a holy sacrifice of our fantastical idols of transcendence to the one true God of Israel. In both the story of the Epst&!n files and of the sacrifice of Isaac, entrusting ourselves to movement way from fantasies and towards reality appears to us in all of its necessity, however, because the reality of being human is not having transcended but is living inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven. This is also to say, then, that Gen. 22’s story of what happens on Mt. Moriah is a guide whose climactic revelation that - not with any sense of frustrated incompletion but, instead, with wondrous awe - necessarily invites or “commands” us in this inevitable direction. And, in this movement to “inside,” revelation on Mt. Moriah points towards the Incarnation.

Endnotes

1. Arendt, Hannah, 1998 (2nd Ed.), The Human Condition, pp. 11, 294-296.↩

Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you…You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you. – James 5: 1, 5-6 (NRSV)

In Part 1, I introduced this blog series as a difficult journey into reality with which all of us, if we want not only to embrace our humanity but to encounter beauty, goodness, and truth, are tasked. In keeping with the story at hand, I took this difficulty to be so pervasive and acute that it inevitably requires revelation. Of course, part of what makes reality difficult is that it so readily feels overwhelming. To wit, in Part 1, I presented the Epst&!n files as a presumed story of the creation of the world by a cabal of rich, free men who represent the true Master and control everything. And, I submitted that, as Christians tasked with immersion in and living out of the script for the world we call the scriptures, the properly ordered way to name and frame the story of the Epst&!n files is as one of child sacrifice. I argued that such a framing was important for three reasons:

First – the larger picture by which we understand who we are, and how we know our knowing in the first place. We are not the ground of our own being, and we are not left to figure out what’s going on by ourselves. To recognize the image of a cabal of free men who control everything as a shared fantasy is to properly order the relationships between mortality and divinity, and it is thus also to properly order our attention. This, in and of itself, is difficult.

Second - Theology offers explanations of things we’re otherwise left either curiously wondering or interminably and reactively furious about. “Why is nothing happening? What the h&ll is going on!?” “Why are they speaking as though this doesn’t matter?” “Why is no one hearing the voices of the women?” The very need for such questions is because of the story in which we’re all immersed together. Thousands were raped. We’re all immersed. We all live in a world governed by ritual sacrifice of the chaos-enemy by the victorious hero who is himself fashioned in the image of fantastical idols that depict an unknown, powerfully terrifying, and functionally divine Master from above. Not only that, but the body, blood, guts, and soul of the silenced and vanquished enemy is the constitution of this world created by human hands, in which we’re all immersed together. This is also obviously extremely difficult to face and bear.

Third – how do we respond? Is there a world made not by human hands? If so, what is it like? If the story of the Epst&!n files is one of child sacrifice that creates and orders our world, what do we do? Ironically, it is the sacrifice of Isaac that teaches us how to respond in this moment. We need guidance, and it actually requires revelation. And, the revelation itself invites us into our response. That response is movement from terrifyingly shamed silence to the hearing of the Silence of wondrous awe that responds to the Word spoken. Of course, this means we will then, in the end, find ourselves living in a new world, hearing voices we otherwise could not, speaking a new language, and walking a radically different path.

3.1. HOW DO WE RESPOND?

We have seen that the answer to the question, “What the h&ll is going on?” is ritual child sacrifice, and in the specific context of a sex cult. We have also seen that naming it this way orients us inside the ancient script we call the scriptures that name and characterize the world we inhabit and that script the action that happens in it. When faced with the horrifically terrifying reality to which the Epst&!n files point, many of us want not only a language that gives account but also actual accountability. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that’s what we want when and if we actually do take up the difficult task of facing reality rather than deflecting from, covering over, or ignoring it. And, we want the abuse to stop. We want sanity and liberation from the false Master. We all want accountability, but the story itself is a linguistic account. The question is, what story? To name it child sacrifice rather than simply or only “abuse,” or perhaps even r@pe, is to answer this question. It is to place and thus find ourselves inside the tradition with which, if we are Christian, we identify.

And, because we are not the authors of the script, because humans are not and do not occupy the central position of and in the cosmos – because we neither make choices as freely as we imagine nor control outcomes as our vain fantasies would have it - to name the story in which we find ourselves, to orient ourselves in it itself constitutes a response. To name our position as that of the responsive rather than presuming to take up or grasp for positions of either the generative mover or final authority is itself a response to what we see happening. We are thus left with the question of what happens inside that story we inhabit when the Master’s desire for victorious ascent comes to the moment and place of fulfillment.

Collage: Top two photos of artist Nick Cave’s “Soundsuit” (photos by author). Bottom Left Window of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, in Rome, Italy (credit mblage on IG). Bottom Right: Detail of Filippo Brunelleschi’s Cupola atop his infamous “Duomo” of Santa Maria del Fiore, in Florence, Italy (credit gogenevieve on IG).
When I visited Chicago’s Museum of Modern Art in Chicago in June of 2022 and saw Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, the curator directed my attention to Cave’s own story and response. It turns out to itself sound out to us as an echo and extension of the story we are here inhabiting and narrating. Cave’s Soundsuit is a kind of icon that helps us enter his story, to see the world he sees, put ourselves in the position of the character he plays, and to begin to learn the language he speaks. The museum curator teaches us that Cave’s Soundsuit came about as a response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King. As Cave was sitting in a Los Angeles park, doing the hard work of contemplating what happened, he started gathering sticks. As the curator tells Cave's story:

“He later sewed the twigs into a garment envisioned as a suit of armor: a means of obscuring his identity as a queer Black man for protection while paradoxically amplifying his radical otherness. The origin of the name 'Soundsuit' came from the experience of wearing the garment. According to Cave, 'Once I put it on and moved in it, I realized that was the protest - the sound it made. In order to be heard, you gotta’ make sound.'”

First, notice that the mirroring double images of protecting and making sound depicted by the “garment” are those of a person taking up a character in the action of a story set in a world characterized by sacrificial violence by presumed heroes with fantasies of ultimate victory. As Pete Hegseth said it: "The warrior who is willing to lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his Creator, that warrior finds eternal life.” Of course a warrior who twists the image of Christ into its opposite is also tasked with the sacrificial slaughter of shamed enemies.

By contrast, the sound of the twigs rustling with Cave’s movement is the sound of his existing. And, in the context of his story, of our story, this sound appears on the horizon as not that of his slaughter, his silencing, or his shaming. It is not the immobilized silent scream of the shamed child locked in the dungeon of a Tower and penetrated by a sequence of banal men who, by and in the very act of penetrative violence, presume to render themselves representatives of the heroically victorious Master from above. The sound of Cave’s existing is the mirrored double to the tearing apart of his flesh with the butcher knife Abraham raised to heaven before the angel spoke. Cave’s Soundsuit is not the sound of burning flesh bound to an altar constructed in devotion to a falsely honored divinity Abrham didn’t know was false until the moment he heard the sound of all existing speaking.

In the same way that one can “hear” Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, these Italian architectural details, when they appear before you “here,” “in person,” very clearly and viscerally register (also) to the ear. That is partly because of a vicarious, formal association with the ear of the hearer. The form of these seashells is analogically similar to that of the human ear. In each of these instances in which we are invited to receive the sound of the Word of what appears before us, our hearing draws us upward. It edifies us. Edifying speech starts with hearing. Here, to hear and respond is the opposite of reaching and grasping for ascent. Architectural wonders from the contingencies of our Christian history and tradition thus themselves also appear as edifying guides. When we hear the sound of the angel’s speech, mirror images of penetrating death and unbinding liberation meet in their true center together with the image of Isaac resurrected, with the sound of rustling twigs, with the seeing and hearing of a vanquished teenage girl decades later vindicated into a life of dignified speech that edifies.

Such miraculously wondrous turns towards life require revealed guides. Because we are not transcendent individuals whose choices are not as free as we imagine and whose desired outcomes cannot ultimately or finally be controlled, because the elite cabal who controls everything really is taken up in and by vain fantasies, we all need such guides. Though this is a difficult confession for moderns to make, Cave’s story appears here for us as a guide that directs us towards the story we need to guide us. Abraham’s “Here I am” is also Cave’s existing. Abraham’s naming of his presence in response to the angel’s speaking his name aloud is Cave’s hearing the edifying truth of God rather than the lie of shamefully dark fantasies who make empty promises. And, as Abraham’s “Here I am” refrain makes space for the angel to respond to Abraham’s response by inviting him to hear and see the truth in the silent cessation of a particularly terrifying form of sacrificial violence that is taken up in devotion to a heroic Master, so also has Cave heard the full sound of the Word of Life. To hear the truth that this place and moment when and where “the Lord sees” is at once also the place and moment when and where the child victim of ritual sacrifice is seen and heard rather than defeated and slaughtered is to turn from the shamed silence of her blood’s cries heard from the ground to the wondrous awe of silent adoration rising to the heavens.^[1]

3.2. IT IS REVELATION TO WHICH WE RESPOND WITH SEEING AND HEARING IN AND OF A NEW WORLD

To have made this turn is to have taken up the difficult task of facing and bearing the terror of a false creation made by human hands. To have responded to the speech of the revealed angel who reveals reality, then, is for the site and moment of sacrificial slaughter to appear instead as the site of new creation.^[2] This is to say that, for Abraham to go from having imagined the divinity who appeared to him as a terrifying Master from above who demands child sacrifice to obtain blessings of life and provision to, instead, seeing and hearing the true God of Israel who sees and hears, who is present with us in the appearing, is for Abrham to have been created anew. It is for Abraham to not make himself into a new person but to be created again. Because creation is the domain of divinity rather than of the mortally human, Abraham’s turn that is also his creation is for us the disclosure that we are not the creators but are vulnerably in need of a guide. “His creation” here, of course, has a double meaning. His own creation is not his own but is his having been created. As we share his story with him, it also becomes our own creation. It tuns out that the man who crafts girls into the image of a chaos-serpent vanquished by a heroically victorious Master was telling the wrong creation story.

In the wondrous awe of this place and moment, we are given the gift of seeing that the guide we so vulnerably need is actually the Lord who sees and is seen. Our given guides are thus extensions into and through the course of historical time of the first guide. If we might be swept up into the contingencies of history by an elite cabal who controls everything, the Lord appears before us at history’s climax as also said history’s beginning and telos. Inside this beginning and telos, all such contingencies appear and find their place. This is to say that even those of the elite cabal who practices child sacrifices finds their proper place in the world atop Mt. Moriah. We are all characters in the script, and we all have parts to play. The question is of which characters and which parts.

Christ’s history climaxed on the same Mt. as Abraham’s. In our sharing in the stories of history’s vulnerable contingencies, that place and moment becomes the crux of our story, too. In Nick Cave’s Soundings, and in edifying architectural echoes of hearing and being heard, we hear echoes of the angel speaking. The guide of guides gathers our other guides up into himself for the pleasure of helping us to see, for the delight of revelatory gift. We are given to see that the gift is pleased to reveal himself at the very site and moment of slaughter.

By “pleased,” of course, I do not mean to say that he is pleased with the slaughter. Quite the opposite. He is the reason for Isaac’s resurrection from death’s binding. I mean to say, then, that His love is revealed to be such that he desires presence with us even in and at the site and moment his own slaughter. The site of Isaac’s resurrection is, after all, also the site of the slaughter of God in the flesh. When he appears again, we thus already know how to recognize him. We know we hear his voice again as the Epst&!n files appear before all to see. We know this, because he himself has been pleased to have revealed it to us. “Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘Father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’” – Gen. 22: 7 (NRSV)

3.3. SACRIFICIAL CRIES OF THE VANGUISHED AS ECHOES OF THE VOICE OF GOD

As the logic and flow of Jesus’ brother James’ words implies, it is Isaac, yes, but also Christ himself who is seen and heard in “the cries of the harvesters [that] have reached the ears of the Lord” (James 5:4). The presumed Master is being tested in a trial (Psalm 82). The revelation is his trial itself. The girls victimized by penetrating shame are being vindicated by the true Master whose penetrated suffering is itself their endured purification. It is at this place and moment when and where we are given to see that he makes our sacrificial lifeblood his own. That it is He himself who is revealed here in the hearing of a sacrificed girl’s cries is why James’ very next words in chapter 5 of his letter – these particular words directed to the rich cabal of elites who fancy themselves the masters who presume to control everything - are: “You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you” (James 5: 5-6). Of course, this framing of girl sacrifice implies that it was not the Father who slaughtered the child on Golgotha. Instead, it was the fantastical idol of heroic victory by way of sacrificial blood.

If we are asking who plays which parts in the story, we do not see God’s solidarity with the oppressed. We instead are gifted with disclosure of God as the sacrificed child itself. In this version of the story, however, the central actor of the story does not slaughter another but submits to it. As Abraham and Nick Cave have responded to this image that appears as radically other in a world that seems to be constituted by the shameful silence of vanquished enemies sacrificially slaughtered by a heroic victor, so we, too, are invited. The invitation is life into a new world, one radically other from the world created by fantastical idols. For us to accept the invitation of life in a new world born of Revealed disclosure is to itself, like Abaham, respond as one created anew. And, to respond as one created anew in a new world is to have heard the voice of a God revealed to be radically other than the Master towards whom fantastical dreams reach and grasp.^[3]

3.4. IN A NEW WORLD, WHAT PATH FORWARD DO WE TAKE?

To know what this response is, we need only to read and hear the language of the story. And, in the story, we find the prophetic forbidding of child sacrifice. God’s act of gifted disclosure constitutes revelation of a divinity whose act of creation in the moment and place of his own sacrifice constitutes the end towards which all child sacrifice moves and in accordance with which all child sacrifice ceases. The divine language that speaks the creation of a new Abraham is also the creation of a new world. Abraham’s birth is not only of himself but into a different world. It is a different cosmos with a different cosmology. As Isaac was resurrected into the new world that had come into order by the voice of a newly-revealed divinity, so is the sacrificial girl who was bound up to horse stalls in the dungeon of the banal’s Tower, the child who had previously only heard shaming insults. As Abraham is born into a new world, so is she if she shares in his story with him. To wit -

In the story, we also find the creator’s divine command to live along a trajectory that makes appear the revealed Lord who sees and is seen rather than demands sacrificial slaughter in order to obtain blessings of life and provision. Accountability at a systematic, institutional level is not the answer but is itself a response. This is to say that, if we manage to find ourselves in a world and a moment when and where true accountability happens, then we can know it to be a revealed response rather than a free choice whose outcome any of us accomplished or made happen. We know this, because we’ve already been given the Revelation. Said Revelation constitutes the beginning of an account of a different cosmos, with a turn to a new cosmology. Epst&!n and Trump’s idolatrous fantasies that demand sacrificial blood not only give shape to but constitute a Mt. Moriah moment we are all now inhabiting. Many will of course blindly continue the slaughter. These devoted ones will continue to speak in confused languages as though they live in another world of their own making. As Abraham heard and responded in sacred awe that gives sight of a new world, we are also so invited. Who else will accept the invitation of and to wondrous awe? How about the vindicated girl?

We are all characters in the script, and we all have parts to play. The question is of which characters and which parts. Of course, then, the ceasing of slaughter on Mt. Moriah has profound implications for how we all relate to one another in everyday life. Adoration that rises to the heavens also takes up the form of devotion along a path. To inhabit a world created by the language of a divinity whose speech reveals his own caring presence of seeing and hearing is to relate to one another with the caring presence of seeing and hearing. And, if we ask about the ceasing of the ritual of child sacrifice in the specific context of an elite sex cult, then profound implications again arise, this time in everyday relations between men and women, or between men and girls. To inhabit a world created by the language of a divinity whose speech reveals his own caring presence of seeing and hearing among men and women, men and girls, means not only the cessation of ritual humiliation of the chaos-enemy but, instead, mutual relating in enactment of edifying care in response to the hearing and seeing of the One whose seeing and hearing creates a world made of faithful Love Incarnate. This is to inhabit the wondrous awe of Mt. Moriah. To simply love and dignify appropriately according to the decreed reign of properly ordered relating in mutual hearing and seeing in a given circumstance is not the final account. But it is itself to give an account of the story of the Epst&!n files. Who can give the final account? We expectantly await the Word again.

Endnotes

1. Robert Alter translates Gen. 22: 14 as: “And Abraham called the name of that place YHWH-Yireh, as is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord there is sight.’” Alter comments further: “The place-name means ‘the LORD sees.’ The phrase at the end means literally either ‘he sees’ or ‘he will be seen,’ depending on how the verb is vocalized, and this translation uses a noun instead to preserve the ambiguity. It is also not clear whether it is God or the person who comes to the Mount who sees/is seen.” (Alter, Robert, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 1, The Five Books of Moses, 2019, p. 74.) ↑
2. It may by now be obvious to my reader that I am not using the term “creation” in the way many of my readers likely take for granted as its meaning. I am not referring to creatio ex nihilo, to making material reality appear out of nothing. Rather, drawing from the work of John Walton, primarily in The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate and in The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate, when I say “creation,” I am referring to some storied version of the divine act of brining the world into order. ↑
3. To associate Nick Cave’s response to the beating of Rodney King with Abraham’s response to Revelation is not necessarily to bind what is articulated here as God’s “radical otherness” to Cave’s identity as a queer Black man. If I intend to “affirm” anything here, it is simply Cave’s dignity. If I intend to associate God with Cave somehow, it is by way of creation as an extension of and dependent on existing itself in and by the Word. To say more is to go beyond the purview of this blog post and to give answers I do not necessarily have. ↑

 

Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. 2 Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure during the last days. 4 Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you. 7 Be patient, therefore, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. 8 You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. – James 5: 1-8 (NRSV)

Facing reality is a difficult thing to do. If any of us are honest, we can attest to that fact without hesitation. On the other side of it, though, is beauty, goodness, and truth. This is the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac on Mt. Moriah. I would like to suggest, whether we realize it or not, that it is also the story of the Epst&!n files. This blog series is to be my articulation of what I mean by that.

As Rainer Maria Rilke said in Letters to a Young Poet: “it is clear that we must trust what is difficult…that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.” If any of us desire anything good, or simply to be human, facing reality is not only required but inevitable. In his encouragement towards this, Rilke does not name our Judeo-Christian tradition. Rilke’s message, however, is the eventuality of a beautiful fruit whose seed has been buried deep in the tradition in question. By “buried deep,” I mean to indicate that it’s been hidden. Living the Christian life is not possible without facing difficult things. In fact, facing difficult things is inevitable and required as one crosses the threshold into discipleship. That discipleship has been turned into something easy and cheap is what I mean when I say a seed has been hidden.

James’ words in the opening verses of chapter 5 are obviously difficult, and partly because they can sound harsh. But they are tied to a seed of gentleness and care without which they could never be uttered. And, not only that, our human journey towards that gentleness and care is precisely what renders James difficult. That seed was first planted on Mt. Moriah. The reality of the story of Mt. Moriah, however, is so difficult that the place where the story happened could not have possibly had its name until after said story’s climax. This is because the human characters in the story were utterly incapable of knowing where the story was heading from its outset. And that is part of the difficulty. Of course, that is the case in any story. But, it is not the case in every story that this is because what the characters are to come to face through the course of the story is too difficult for them.

I mean to say that Abraham had no idea what was going on when he started his journey towards and up Mt. Moriah in Gen. 22. Not only that, but he was so clueless that he thought he knew exactly what was going on, but reality turned out to be precisely the opposite of what he not only imagined but actually was capable of hearing. I also mean to say that the story, as we have it handed down to us, is told not from the eye of God but from the ear of Abraham. In this sense, it is a human rather than a divine story. In this sense, too, it is a story in which we all participate. And, as we all inevitably must face difficulty if we want goodness and truth, so also are we all, like Abraham, relatively clueless as we are in the midst of the actuality of our own story. As Abraham took for granted the land from where he had come, from the Land of Towers (Gen. 11), so do we.

Dream Building Ensemble, by William Christenberry, 2001.

And, as Abraham didn’t know where he was heading at the outset of Gen. 22, neither do we. As Abraham didn’t know where he was, neither do we. Mt. Moriah didn’t receive its name until after the divine revelation that was given in that moment and in that place. As Abraham didn’t know where he was going, we, in reality, also don’t. And, as Abraham didn’t know where he was, neither do we. We can all recognize Gen. 22 as a story of child sacrifice. We do not, however, all readily recognize our contemporary story of the Epst&!n files as such. I submit that our contemporary story of the Epst&!n files is a contextualized re-living of Abraham’s moment of child sacrifice on Mt. Moriah. And, as the ritual sacrifice of Isaac was Abraham’s participation in a creation story, so, too, is the sacrifice of girls in the story of the Epst&!n files. Trigger warning: to say what I mean by all of this will obviously require a telling of the story of the Epst&!n files. To begin, then -

One person who appears repeatedly in the Epst&!n files is Steve Bannon. One of the revelations there is their mutually bound relationship to shared goals. While Epst&!n helped Bannon shape our larger shared environment in the image of his far-right populist project, Bannon worked to rehab Epst&!n’s public image by means of a film production (ref. here). Do note the mirror images presented to us by, on the one hand, Bannon’s description of the media’s exposure of the truth about Epst&!n to public view as a “sophisticated op” and, on the other, the film projector extending Epst&!n and Bannon’s shared image for the world out into it.

What the doubling in that mirror presents to us is that, while thousands have been r*ped by Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epst&!n's sex cult of sacrificially ritual shaming, all of us are immersed in their environment of abuse and lies. Each of us is left to respond or react in some way, whether towards healing and presence in grace and truth or towards dissociation that mirrors the abusive violence. We are not all only witnesses to Epst&!n’s child abuse. We are immersed in a cosmos made by attentive devotion to sacrificially violent idols made by human hands.

I want to clarify and specify, however, that abuse is only one term for what's happening right now. Abuse is a psychological or neurobiological term, as well as a sociological one. In theological terms, however, the reason I referred to it as a sex cult of sacrificially ritual shaming is because what we're all witnessing by giving attention to the very public news of the Epst&!n files is child sacrifice. I take framing it in such terms to be important for a number of reasons:

First – the larger picture by which we understand who we are, and how we know our knowing in the first place. We are not the ground of our own being, and we are not left to figure out what’s going on by ourselves. Second – story and framing. Theology offers explanations of things we’re otherwise left either curiously wondering or interminably and reactively furious about. It helps us interpret what’s happening. Third – response. What to do? The sacrifice of Isaac teaches us how to respond in this moment. We need guidance, and it actually requires revelation. The revelation is of the previously referenced seed of gentleness and care. And, the revelation itself is an alternative act of creation that invites us into a response.

1.1. WHO ARE WE?

Metaphysics and epistemology. It is true that we're immersed in a patriarchal environment of male violence. But these men are not the evil. They are men, and they are utterly banal. Trump is literally sh!ttin in diapers in the White House on national television. The evil is not flesh and blood. The masks and gowns they wear carry a terrifying brightness, but the eye holes have always struck me as strangely disjunctive for a reason. It is merely a mortal man under the hood. The wrestling with which are tasked, however, is against principalities and powers. Yes, it turns out there really is an elite cabal pulling strings. But the cabal itself is governed and engulfed by vain fantasies whose promises only make for destruction. The scriptural name given to these fantasies is idolatry.

Portrait, by William Christenberry, 1983.

This is not to decleave the evil from the world we inhabit. It is not to separate soul and body, world and spirit. It is to properly order the things and categories to which we give our attention. It is thus to properly direct our attention. To wit -

2.1. WHERE ARE WE?

Why is our response to public disclosure of the Epst&!n files is so woefully insufficient? Why is nothing happening? What the h@ll is going on? How is this being swept under the rug!? Why does it seem like authorities are speaking as though they live in another world? Why are the regime’s supporters imitating their same language? Where are the voices of the victims? If it is true that we are immersed in an environment of male violence, it is also true that the truth is being actively covered up. If it is true that these men are utterly banal, they are also actively working to envelop their deeds in darkness. They have agency, and they are using it. Predominant secular categories offer pathologized explanations as to why, but I take these to be too neat and tidy, and with answers and solutions that are too easily and freely chosen. Secular political explanations of partisanship or ideology follow a similar pattern that churns out simplicity, ease, and free choices. These men have agency, but their choices are not the whole story. And, their actions are hardly "free." All who sin are bound to sin.

Abraham ascended Mt. Moriah to offer his only child to what he had understood since he was himself a child to be a powerful Master from above whose full truth was terrifyingly cloaked in darkness on the other side of the horizon of what can be sensed by humans. Abraham's offering was bound to the altar in order to obtain blessings of fruitfulness and life from this terrifyingly powerful Master. And, it was said by all that this Master brought the world into order by way of sacrificial slaughter of its enemy and rival, who was depicted as a chaos-serpent.^[1] This was the language of Abraham’s ascent up Mt. Moriah. The Master's Law was violent victory over chaos, and the means of victory was blood sacrifice. Not only that, but the language of the land from which Abraham sojourned decreed that the shamed and vanquished enemy-chaos was what the Master then used to make the ordered world Abraham inhabited. This is to say that the slaughter of blood sacrifice constituted the creation of the world, and to practice the child's immolation was not only appeasement of the Master but participation in said Master's original and ongoing act of creatively bringing order out of chaos in the world. This is obviously a difficult thing to bear but also, if you represent the heroic victor, a matter of reverent devotion and celebration.

2.2. WHERE ARE WE NOW?

If we frame Epst&!n’s, Bannon’s, and Trump’s banality inside Abraham’s ascent up Mt. Moriah, then, some key things come to light that are otherwise hidden. These men don’t know what they are doing. They have been on a trajectory towards appeasing an unknown and terrifyingly powerful Master since they were themselves children. As Abraham was born into, formed inside, and came from a land of figures towering towards the heavens, so, too, did Epst&!n and his cabal. That is why William Christenberry’s “Portrait” makes clear that the fantasies of bright light in which these idols clothe themselves take a similar form to that of the Babylonian Towers that dominate the horizon of the world we all inhabit together. Our character takes form in relation to the forms of our environment.

As Abraham was bound to terror of darkness from the other side of the horizon, so is the cabal of banality. Abraham was once a child in a similar position to Isaac’s. So were they. As Abraham sought blessings of fruitfulness and life – sought “the precious crop from the earth” (James 5: 7) - so do these banal men grasp for it in the only way they know. “The only way they know” is why the term “bound” is key here. They are bound to the only confused language they’ve ever known. They are thus also bound to the world that language decrees and references. As I said, their choices are not as free as we tend to imagine.

Why we imagine it that way is itself a difficult matter of our own binding, a matter of the language we speak in the world we inhabit. Many point to downstream effects of the US’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as key triggers to our current populist moment that’s characterized by fears of cultural loss attributed to mass immigration. Those wars being retributive responses to 9/11, it makes sense that our fears of loss are not at all exclusively but definitively from and of Muslim “sand n!**ers.” The story of the current moment, then, cannot be told without accounting for the fact that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too, were religious acts of child sacrifice enacted at systematic scale. Thus, that we imagine our choices to be less free than they really are is a matter of our own binding to a world and its storied language is precisely part of why this theologically storied framing of creation and cosmology is important. Brian Tyler Cohen posted: "BREAKING: Ghislaine Maxwell PLEADS THE FIFTH when asked about Donald Trump." To be clear, the specific question was whether Trump ever engaged in sexual activity with anyone introduced to him by Maxwell or Epstein. The presumably divine story by which St. Paul refers to our shared environment as “the world” was created and brought into order should not be a breaking surprise. The reason it is “breaking” is because the reality of it is difficult to face and bear. It can break us.

Besides the obvious need for accountability, part of why we are frustrated in this Epst&!n (and Trump) moment that “nothing is happening” is because we imagine that we freely choose everything that’s happening. If we are confused by the regime’s language, it is because the languages of this place in which we are all immersed together are themselves confused. I do not say this to downplay the need for accountability but to explain why it appears toweringly impossible. The language of Abraham’s ascent up Mt. Moriah is a confused language of the Land of Towers from which he is sojourning. Because the languages of this place are confused, the place’s purposed end can never see its completion. That’s why the handing over of Iraq to their own governing structures was not only so awkward but violent. It’s also why the story of withdrawal from Afghanistan was not only so confused but also characterized by contested stories told by warring parties who speak different languages. The current “sophisticated op” of the populist far right will likely see a similar end.

The terrifying Master from above, after all, resides at the unreachable head of the Tower. And, this divine, all-powerful Master is the first hero. His violence establishes the difficult way the world works. His is not the rule of law but Law and Order. The reason why 70% of those rounded up by ICE having no significant criminal background is irrelevant here in this environment is because of the story being told in the first place by that language of Abraham’s ascent up the mountain of the world. In their banality, Bannon, Epst&!n, and Trump are all seeking to ascend towards an ensemble of dreams closer to the Master. Like the rest of us, Epst&!n and friends want to know what is, if not for their cultic rituals, otherwise cloaked in the tempting brightness of terrifying darkness.

It is no wonder, then, that their deeds are mirrors to and extensions of their divinity’s sacrificial violence that brings order out of chaos in the world. It is no wonder that their wonder is consumed by images of enemy bloodshed, of sacrificial violence. As Tawny Dragon said it on Threads: “It's f*cking wild we need a dead man's emails to believe the testimonies of 1000 women.” The women and the dead man are not even speaking the same language. Interestingly, Ms. Dragon also posted this: "They don't care about child sacrifice because the god that they worship killed his own son and called it love." I, of course, don’t take that to be what happened at Golgotha. Ms. Dragon does, however, seem to know her role in the (creation) story the dead man tells about himself, about the world, and about her. I am confident she knows the dead idol’s story far better than I, in fact. To the point of her knowing, the chaos-serpent is often depicted as a Dragon. The story of St. George slaying the fire-breathing dragon to return the village to proper order didn’t appear out of thin air.

2.3. WHERE ARE WE? COMINNG AROUND TO SOME ANSWERS

The reason it seems “nothing is happening,” then, is because something is happening. There may very well be an “Epst&!n class,” but it was the children of the lower classes who were sacrificed among ancient Israel’s neighbors, too.^[2] To call it a class war is to place ourselves in a different story and to thus invite a different response. The story on which Gen. 11 and 22 constitute a commentary is that the shamed and vanquished enemy-chaos that the Master used to make the ordered world Abraham inhabited appear before all of us is being made to appear before all of us by those who are bound in devotion to the One who invites shaming humiliation of enemies. This invitation is commanded by the Master by not only doing it first but by creating the world with it. We seem to be enveloped in darkness, because the “sophisticated op” of a projected world we inhabit is constituted by the darkness of a sacrificially vanquished enemy’s shame.

Yes, this is to say that 14 year-old girls tied up and blindfolded, shamed and insulted in horse stalls in underground dungeons, bound ones who are expected to “perform” well enough to obtain the blessed privilege of instead being r*ped upstairs in a higher level of the Tower (ref. here) represent the shamed and humiliated chaos-enemy who the Master not only sacrificially vanquished but who constitutes the very world we inhabit. “Why is nothing happening? What the h&ll is going on?” “Why does the language spoken by authorities not seem to give a proper account of this?” “Why are women’s voices being unheard and distrusted?”

Here, we also have to remember that greed is idolatry. And, the victim is not the greedy one but their resource. To quote Alasdair MacIntyre, however, “Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.”^[3] The Greek term pleonexia, as it is used here, refers to the insatiable desire to not only acquire but accrue what is rightfully due to another. We are all tempted to such idolatrous blessings whose bestowal requires sacrificial violence. Abraham wasn’t the only one who desired ascent. We all inhabit and participate in the same world. We have from the beginning. This is a difficult confesion. The elites might be pulling the strings, but they are no more in control than you or I. Thousands have been r*ped. All of us are immersed. We are immersed in a world and the language spoken in it.

That’s why Bannon wants to envelop voting polls with ICE agents in November’s mid-term elections. As he said it: “You’re damn right. We’re gonna’ have ICE surround the polls come November. And, you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want. But we will never again allow an election to be stolen.” The Big Lie is not just a lie. It is participation in our collected testing by a fantastical idol that demands blood sacrifice. The lie is more than a lie. It is a whole script they tell, inhabit, and live. Their Master is Ba’al. Or, perhaps we can call him Molech. Bannon is his servant and prophet. Epst&!n was his priest. Trump is his kingly representative. These idolatrously deceitful fantasies cover over their banality. Their Master continues working. Bannon, Trump, and Epst&!n are not the only ones who theology frames as violently heroic victors and rule of law names criminals. But we are all immersed in the same world. It belongs to a cosmology. We are all intimately familiar with the language. It may very well be a system, but first it’s a story. Many refer to it as the scriptures.

The Epst&!n files suggest that a newborn baby was perhaps thrown off Trump’s yacht into Lake Michigan, and that a limousine driver was about to pull over, end the trip, and give Trump the beating the driver felt he deserved because he was so disgusted by hearing Trump, while talking to a “Jeffrey,” threaten to murder a girl he had r*ped. We’ve all seen potential evidence that Virginia Giuffre was threatened with binding not only herself but her family to the terror of death’s darkness *** like another girl who had been disappeared off the edge of the horizon beyond which humans cannot sense or know. These are not just the worst of what we know. They are not aberrations. Nor are they only data points that demand further investigation rather than cover in shame of darkness. They appear as graven images of the logical terminus of a linguistic script that shapes a world inside of which we’re all immersed.

"Quiet piggy" "You are the worst reporter. CNN has no ratings because of people like you. *turns away from the woman* You know, she’s a young woman. *turns back to the woman* I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. But I’ve known you for ten years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face…” Both were Trump’s responses to questions from female reporters about Epst&!n survivors. These can be said to be words of verbal abuse. But they are at least also the telling of a story of heroic victor’s shaming of the vanquished chaos-enemy. This is how we know that such acts of verbal shaming are not separate from the sacrificial slaughters of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The shared world we inhabit together is constituted by the darkness of a sacrificially vanquished enemy’s shame.

Being “graven” images, they of course make a strong impression upon us. It may be a system, or “a sophisticated op,” but first it’s a story. Whether the story is true or not, how would the image of a girl whose head had been blown off not make such a lasting impression? The reason it makes an impression is because we are all impressed with a sense of the story that governs and orders our mutually shared environment. Hence the difficulty of bearing and facing it. If the terror did or may happen in a whole separate world, to which we have no connection or in which we have no part, or if this were merely an academic exercise of objective observation, then we would be left unaffected. But we are all characters in the script, and we all have parts to play. The question is of which characters and which parts. The question, then, is of our response, to which we will turn in Part 2 (of 2) of this blog series.

Endnotes

1. Eliade, Mircea, 1981, A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1, pp. 70-72. Here, Eliade is simply summarizing the Babylonian creation myth / story. I am drawing from this story in much of what follows in this blog post. For a relatively short and concise essay on the Babylonian creation story’s cultural influence today, see Wink, Walter, 1999, The Myth of Redemptive Violence. The Bible in Transmission, Spring, 1999 issue. For a helpfully generalized and short summary of the differences and similarities of the Jewish and Babylonian creation stories, as well as the scholarly fallout in the wake of the discovery of the Babylonian one, see the May 18, 2010 blog post from Pete Enns from the BioLogos website, “Genesis 1 and a Babylonian Creation Story: Found among the ruins was a Babylonian creation story referred to today as Enuma Elish. How people viewed Genesis would never be the same again” (Enns, 2010). For a concise outline of the Enuma Elish, see Webster, Michael. (Unknown date). The Babylonian Creation Story (Enuma elish). [Class handout]. For a helpful summary of the Babylonian creation story, see Wink, Walter, 1992, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, pp. 13-17. ↑
2. Herr, Larry G., 1976, “Child Sacrifice in The Ancient Near East,” Ministry: International Journal for Pastors. https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1976/03/child-sacrifice-in-the-ancient-near-east ↑
3. MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1984, After Virtue, p. 227. ↑