Imperative Stem Beauty! And!
This essay works with what we have been studying, Garden of
God, and what we will study this next Lord’s Day, Logos of Beauty,’ by
attempting to follow and integrate certain Biblical patterns, so that we may act
more in the Biblical pattern of imago Dei.
1—Dress and keep.
2—Psalmodic response.
3—Redemptive history (Garden, example),
4—Revolutions of the West (Rosenstock), 5—Law, Lyric,
Evaluation, Fact, unto New Torah [Instruction] (Jordan ), 6—Comprehensivity of going
forward by going backward,
Creation Week as an overture, and more
Lead with the benefits, follow with the proof.
In addition to studying, we will be doing.
Doing what?
Discipling the nations and the eras.
Rosenstock (Rosenstock-Huessy, ERH) claims, in ‘Magna Carta
Latina,’ that Latin verb forms are derived from an imperative stem. That is, the imperative comes first in
language.
This fits in with what the Bible tells us of creation: God
spoke and it was so.
In the image of God, we, too, make things. We by speech and hands, He by speech.
There are at least two more instances of imperative in Creation Week.
One is that God put Adam in the Garden to ‘dress it and keep
it’. Genesis 2:15. This can be translated also as beautify and guard. Adam named the animals as part of this
beautification, as was given Woman as liturgical helper (Jordan on
Trinity House Institute website writes of this liturgical helper in
‘Deaconesses’). And ‘dirt’ became ‘fire’-glorified, says Jordan , a pattern
for acts of future covenants, when God lights a fire on the altar (of dirt).
Adam was supposed to guard the Garden, including Woman. He
failed on the 7th Day, but was redeemed in some way, and named
Woman, ‘Eve,’ then. There’s more to
this.
My point (‘pont’ in French, ‘bridge’) is that
FOR ADAM, BEAUTY WAS A COMMAND.
Add this ‘beauty as command’ to the Rosenstock/Jordan view
that revolutions/new covenants begin with a command (Imperative for ERH, Law
for JBJ), and add that verb forms (interrogative, declarative, etc.) in
language (Latin), if ERH is correct, start with the imperative and we see the
importance of the imperative.
Further, according to the paper ‘The Logos of Beauty,’ Jesus
Christ is Beauty personified. We are to
be ‘in Christ,’ and thus ‘in Beauty,’ you see, Lord willing.
The Son, the Trinity, created. We are to be in the image of
God. That’s a command. Therefore we are to …
Imperative Stem Beauty!
That is, we are to make beauty the stem from which grow
the rest of the covenant processes.
We are Called in to worship—that’s a command.
We are Commissioned out of worship—in order to command, to disciple.
One could say that in order to be commissioned best, God,
seeing/judging the end from the beginning, calls us in, so that we can and will
be transformed by His service/our service (Meyers: Gottesdienst) through the
liturgy (service).
[In addition to the patterns of sequences in history
mentioned above, both JBJ and ERH have more patterns, and so does North, and
Arthur Kay, and Mike Bull. Jordan
sees a parallel in successive respective emphases (not modalistic or
subordinationalistic) of The Father, and then The Son, and then The Holy
Spirit—Tribes, Nations, Cosmoplolitan before the Incarnation, and Church, Christian State , University {and now Jeremiah,
Waiting}. This is in ‘Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future’.North sees
THEOS (‘Crossed Fingers’) which has become Transcendence, Hierarchy, Ethics,
Oaths and sanctions, Succession—think the first 5 Words. ERH sees a chiasm of Tribes,
Empires, Israel, Greece and after the Incarnation, Greece a companion, never an
Order {we’re far too Greek today}, Israel is glorified in the Church by getting
rid of exclusion, ERH says, and Empires are glorified in the nation-state by
getting rid of slavery, and now we are in the struggle (see ‘Universal History
1954’ lectures) to glorifiy the tribes by keeping the small enthusiastic
groups, and getting rid of perpetual warfare.
Sayers has ‘parrot, pert, poet,’ if I recall correctly. Jordan adds ‘cuddle’
and ‘story’ to the front of this. And
there are many others, in fact, any meeting has people coming in, being
confronted with problems, moving on to discussion, then resolution, and then
leaving to do. Liturgy, Scientific Method, The Symphony of History all follow
this pattern, and by the respective emphases of these latter 3 on Heavens
Above, Waters Under The Earth, and Earth Beneath [names, numbers, words: ERH]
history since the Resurrection could be seen as something in a part of Psalm
Tone D.]
So, Imperative Stem Beauty! So, And!
You
don’t think a conjunction can be used as an imperative, meaning ‘guard’?
This all has been a Psalmodic
Response. What is a psalmodic response?
A psalmodic response is what God
wants us to do. He wants us (I got this
from JBJ) to take the essence, the Spirit, the Geist, the gist of what He says,
and then to apply this to the new maturational experiences He sets before us,
so that we can be better equipped (have all our furniture) to fight the Holy
War against the devil (God’s devil: Luther) and the devil’s angels, in
redemptive history.
[I
can’t get rid of this line!]
Going backward by going
forward. We’ve seen ‘the end from the
beginning’ We used it all the time. When we want to arrive in Chicago by a certain date, and it takes 5
hours, we go backward to the time we must leave, 5 hours before, to start. Thus: A:
Arrive at Chicago, B. Takes 5 hours, B’ Start 5 hours before, A’ Arrive
on time at Chicago.
ERH sees the history of Europe as going backward as we go forward. Thus, Aquinas and Aristotle, Dante and
Vergil, the Renaissance and Plato, Erasmus toasting ‘St. Socrates,’ Nietzsche and
the pre-Socratics, Schliemann and Troy …and
now we go further back. [Variations in order may be a tune in the making, as I
limn The Tune Of The Twelve in the Strawbridge Conference one-pager}.
One More VERY Strange Thought
This is about ‘imperative stem’.
Imperative stem may be in the very first word, and word-letters of the
Bible. It is said that each letter of Hebrew is also a word. A list of these is at the end of Rethinking
the Order of the Old Testament, by Jordan, here: http://www.biblicalhorizons.com/biblical-horizons/no-80-rethinking-the-order-of-the-old-testament/
As I understand it, the first word of
the Bible (‘In the beginning’ is one word in Hebrew, again, if I remember
correctly) is composed of these letters, which I write forwardly: B, R, SH,
T. Jordan’s paper says that these mean,
respectively, House, Head, Fang/Eat, Cross.
Were that so, and were we to have discovered some patterns from the rest
of the Bible that we can use to figure out more of what happens earlier (this
seems to be done frequently), if ‘House’ is in the imperative, we are commanded
to be a house, build a house, come into the house, etc. Then, liturgically we bow to and listen to
the ‘Head,’ ‘Eat,’ and are commanded to bear our ‘Cross’ as we go out. [Fit these into the JBJ and ERH and other
patterns of the liturgy/symphony of history?]
And!
Is the time from Creation to Consummation run in a parallel way, or is
it chiastic? That is, is the pattern of
history Beauty, Guard, Guard, Beauty? Is
it Beauty, Guard, Beauty, Guard? If the
latter, after we have beautified, that is, after the Spirit has led us to all
truth, and the Bride is ready for Her Husband, then the last words of
Revelation are spoken. But, could it be
that the Son/Guard comes at last to finish the Beautification? Could it be
both, as JBJ’s paralleling and ERH’s chiasming both seem to work in
multi-perspectival harmony? Could it be something else?
Another pattern, the
Victory/House-Building pattern may fit in also.
How does the V/H-B work? God defeats the enemies of his people. With the spoils, His people build Him a
House. He moves in and lights the
fire. His people administer the
conquest. This is seen in Exodus very
clearly, and the spoils of David from the Philistines were materials in the Temple , and then there’s
Esther, and, I say, The Revolutions of the Christian Era (ERH).
[I
can’t get rid of this line either!]
Ite! Missa Est!
Go! You Are Sent Out!
[And it could be: ‘Be the road, you are
sent out’ for Bonaventura, I’ve read, wrote that we are the bricks who lay
themselves down on whom others travel. Violence Unveiled.]
These are the words used, if I have read
correctly, at the end of the Latin Mass.
I pray that, Lord willing, they are an
imperative stem among imperative stems.
This is an attempt to summarize a beginning of a next
revolution: http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=277956081470729384#editor/target=post;postID=5763330214447787916;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=postname
(Has names of parts) (For ERH, see Stanford Encyc. of Philos.) http://tinyurl.com/nn9unae
This is a use of Imperative Stem, re: Strawbridge
Conference: http://chuckhartmanhistoryconductor.blogspot.com/2013/10/use-imperative-stem-rightly-reform.html Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/kzhu7lj
I attach a Chapter of Gardner’s ‘Beyond Belief’ that
well-summarizes the Revolutions of the Christian Era. My summary of his summary is here: http://chuckhartmanhistoryconductor.blogspot.com/2013/03/revolutions-of-west-gardner-summarizes.html Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/m6afr7d
Charles Howard Hartman
November 21, A. D. 2013
EphesumCoram861