This is the first time I write a blog, since I was 13. Not long ago, I started a Twitter account, thinking it would be a nice place for some random, casual writing. But after having experienced its rather toxic culture of vitriol, the embarrassment to expose personal musings on such a public platform, and the fact that browsing such a website sucks away one’s productivity like a black hole, I decided to resort to the the good ol’ world of WordPress. The genesis of this blog involves a series of opportune events, most importantly the advice from my new friend PW that I start to keep the seventh-day sabbath, in order to counter 1L-induced stress and anxiety. And I have wanted to write for a while—partly as catharsis, and partly to organize and keep record of my thoughts by spelling them out. Since the observance of sabbath has strong implications of faith, I guess I should start by telling the (ongoing) story of my journey in this regard.
I come from a strictly non-religious background; as far as I know, no one practices or practiced any religion on either of my parents’ side. My family has never been explicitly anti-religion, but spirituality has never played a part in my upbringing. Of course, like pretty much everyone else, we paid annual pilgrimages to Buddhist (or Taoist, or both) temples and offered incense and kowtowed with prayer, but the commitment stemmed more from utilitarian calculation (in the vein of Pascal’s bet: there’s nothing to lose, and potentially plenty to gain), than from an act of faith in any shape or form. One of my mother’s friends is actually intensely Buddhist, and she’s often talked about as a curiosity, if not some kind of oddball. Public school education, on the other hand, has been imaginably atheistic, and at least superficially deferential to the orthodoxy of historical materialism, but I doubt anyone in my school, including teachers and principals, understood the term. For much of my teenage years, appointed many times student cadre in the Class Commissariat, I took pride in being some sort of rationalist, à la Bertrand Russell. I was influenced by both (like Russell) my encounter with Euclidean geometry in seventh grade, and by the cult of high math and science grades the plagued many Chinese schools.
However, my contact with Christianity was an early one. My father used to work abroad for long periods of time, and I was raised by my mother. She is trained as an accountant, but she regrets not having studied Chinese Literature. She belongs to the generation of the so-called “Eighties’ Enlightenment”—a decade of post-Mao flourishing in liberal thought before Tiananmen. It was an age of unparalleled optimism and a thirst of Western culture. As a result, the bookshelf in our apartment was sprinkled by works by European and American authors, and primers to Western culture, on topics such as political theory, opera, and Greek mythology. There was a picture catalog from the Louvre that I loved most dearly. It was a large, magnificent book, filled with high-quality reproductions of the best-known oil paintings at the monumental museum, and close-ups on their sumptuous details. Many paintings left a strong impression in my mind: I still remember the knife lunged into a hapless concubine in Delacroix’s haunting Death of Sardanapalus. But before I was allured by the fair Gabrielle d’Estrées, or the writhing St. Sebastian, I saw the mystery, with my own eyes, of Christ and Virgin Mary; I saw apostles, saints, prophets, angels, clergymen in many robes, and worshippers from all walks of life, although I could not understand what they say.
My family moved to Africa when I was 15. I had a hard time adjusting to the new environment; I skipped a grade and changed classes, and struggled to make new friends. The cultural and linguistic hurdles barred me from meaningful social interaction, and drove my energy inward as I found an expression in classical music. It was something I could relish just sitting in my room, in front of a CD player. Throughout three years, I developed an eclectic taste for art music of all styles and time periods, and a significant portion of it was sacred. Thus I received a basic education in the tenets to Christian faith. Later, I grew to like baroque music in particular, because it is so predictably consistent, but also subtly diverse, so that one can never get tired of it. And the moments of beauty! What better solace could a forlorn, homesick teenager find? Just like I learned about worlds I could not have lived in through books, I learned emotions vicariously through music: as if they put words in a mouth that could not yet speak. Of course, since a lot of the music was abstract, the emotions more or less approximate religious feeling—be it the jubilance of “For Unto Us A Child Is Born”, or the deep sorrow of “Kommt ihr Töchter helft mir klagen”.
So, before I had met a Christian in person, I learned about the religion from art and music. My proper introduction to the religion, however, is by way of another detour, this time Ancient Greek thought. I took Latin by a happy accident in my quasi-gap-year after high school; one thing led to another, and I declared a major in Classics in my sophomore year in college. I liked the Greeks very much because of their exuberance, in every pursuit of life. I particularly enjoyed Plato and Euripides. In many ways, I found the Greek religion familiar, because it sort of resembled the kind of worship I see in China; not the sacrifice and communal feasting part, but the very decentralized and localized theology. Socrates’ philosophy put traditional ideas in the hot seat, and he attempted to prove that they are worthless compared to his true religion of eudaimonia, which is suspiciously monotheistic. Euripides, on the other hand, barely disguises his cynicism in religion and presents a chillingly account of a world ruled by capricious and tyrannical deities. Polytheism was in crisis: it is hard to imagine, as the age grew more brutal, how believers could cope with gods that were more and more sadistic.
The problem of ancient religion in literature became a persistent focus in my studies. The Romans fared even worse in this regard, because their empire was built on a much larger scale, and whatever societal turmoil meant more bloodshed and destruction. Once this anxiety had taken form, it could not be assuaged even by relatively peaceful and prosperous times, considering how much the world had changed from bronze age Greece. An interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid cannot escape the impossibility of perfect justice even with divine intervention. It all boiled down to one question: What to do if there are no just gods? It was a question that was left mostly unanswered, or, in my opinion, very perfunctorily answered by the Stoics. Not only had the traditional pantheon become largely a poetic device, some more ambitious poets, for example Lucan and Statius, essentially declared its total bankruptcy. Ages subsequent to Augustus knew the feeling of basking in the light of philosophy, but a missing piece—the absence of theodicy—left a spiritual vacuum that grew larger and larger, and was not filled again until Paul.
I talked a great deal about the intellectual aspects, but I think they are only preparatory in the sense that they opened up a door in my mind to the idea of “revealed truth”. But the revelation itself does not come from intellectual inquiry. I think no one converts through reading or discussing of theology; if anything, it causes one to apostatize. The key is always real connections with people. And that was the next episode of my story.
Feeding on the lotus 