Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  In watching an episode of SOUTH PARK, years ago, we learned that the devil plans to give himself a big party.  This was Season 10, episode 11, back in 2006. I won't bother you with a plot outline, I only want to focus on one point, what seemed at the time a silly bit of word play that now, in 2024, seems positively a prefigurement. What it prefigures I will let you decide. But the plot has Satan planning for himself a big Halloween party on Earth on the analogy of the Sweet Sixteen parties that rich Daddies among humans throw for their girls, and that were the subject of a reality television series at the time. Satan's is to take place in the fancy ballroom of a  ritzy Los Angeles hotel.  Some time before the actual party, Satan visits that ballroom with a party planner. The party planner says that "Diddy" had thrown himself a birthday party here recently.  Also, when Satan offers an idea (something like, a big ice cream fountain in one corner of the room) , ...

 I'll all in favor of the new proposed club, but of course only if the Satan they have in mind is the one frequently portrayed in South Park. Goat horns, cloven hooves, a goatee, and a skull over his penis Any other Satan is conceptually confused and a school would be impugning its pedagogical mission by giving it any credibility. 

Following up on yesterday's observation. The original Hebrew word for Satan is a noun meaning obstruction or opposition. Likewise, the Greek "diabolos" means "slanderer." These are hardly terms one employs for a faithful employee. So the etymology would seem to pose a problem for the warden/functionary view I mentioned yesterday. But well after the origin of such terms, and well before Dante's time, Satan had taken on some of the contours of a functionary. The concept of a Great Chain of Being suggests, after all, a harmonious universe where everything has its place, presided over by God, so that the very concept of an active adversary of God on the cosmic level comes to seem absurd, and there is little left but room for a warden who is sometimes also a trickster. The Nicolas Cage movie DRIVE ANGRY comes to mind in this connection.

Yesterday I discussed an incident from my teen years when a neighbor lady (NL) interrupted my effort to provide an impromptu exegesis of Dante's Divine Comedy. Today I'll see if I can finish that exegesis. Well, Dante was writing at a time when the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor were engaged in a struggle for power. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take.... That's when I was interrupted. I'm not sure where I would have gone from there, or how effectively, at 14: but here is my effort to finish the thought more than 40 years later. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take on the power struggle. His take, roughly, was that the Church should renounce any claim to temporal power and be a more purely spiritual organization. It could do this by making clear its subservience to the Holy Roman Emperors in temporal matters. On a related point, Dante was not happy with the behavior of the Italian city-state...