Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 51

Poem 51

Every being in the universe
is an expression of the Tao.
It springs into existence,
unconscious, perfect, free,
takes on a physical body,
lets circumstances complete it.
That is why every being

spontaneously honors the Tao.

The Tao gives birth to all beings,

nourishes them, maintains them,

cares for them, comforts them, protects them,

takes them back to itself,

creating without possessing,

acting without expecting,

guiding without interfering.

That is why love of the Tao

is in the very nature of things.

Commentary

Dublin Bay from Clontarf, January, 2016

If spirituality is about anything, it is about the desire in each of us to be one with our own self, with others and with the significant Other, some of us dare call God.  In short, it is about forging connections. In a sense, spirituality is like a source of power into which we may connect ourselves in order to be enlivened or to come truly alive.  There is a plethora of definitions of spirituality given by all the various religions, but the one I have given here is the most general one I can give - one that embraces the multitude of other definitions.  The great contemporary Catholic Christian Meditator, Fr. Richard Rohr and Master of Contemplation describes himself in the following words on his own web page as "a globally recognized ecumenical teacher, bearing witness to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the Perennial Tradition.  He is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico...." (see HERE ).  This "universal awakening" is essentially about being aware or mindful that everything is part of the jigsaw of life, that everything connects and interconnects.  In other words, everything in the world, including most essentially us humans, connects or links together in one great spiritual or mystical union.  One of Fr. Richard's books is called succinctly Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (2003, New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company).  For the meditator or contemplator, everything connects up with us and we with them, that is, true spirituality is about working at our growing awareness of that connectedness and interconnectedness.

Boat on the River Vltava Prague, February 2016

Everything connects, or in the words of Fr.Rohr, "everything belongs," that is nothing is superfluous or left out of the equation of life.  Literally, everything is included, even pain and suffering.  This is the type of spirituality that is behind the above Taoist poem. In this sense, therefore, "Every being in the universe// is an expression of the Tao."   As one reads, ponders and meditates upon the words of this poem, one soon comes to appreciate the underlying nature of reality, that is, that essentially everything connects, that everything in the universe is part of a greater plan, part of a greater unity that lies beyond actual individual things, that a deeper connection, "a golden thread of connection," if you like (this blogger's phrase), exists between all things.  Every line in the above poem is about all things, including us humans, being buoyed up and kept in deep connection by an underlying unity that can either be called the Tao or God or the Meaning of Life or the Goal (Telos) of life.  No wonder, then, that everything is sustained by the Tao or by God and, therefore, love of this Tao or God is the most natural thing in the world: "That is why love of the Tao // is in the very nature of things."  Therefore, with our Taoist poet, we may pray or meditate or contemplate as a result of reading the following lines once again:

The Tao gives birth to all beings,

nourishes them, maintains them,

cares for them, comforts them, protects them,

takes them back to itself,

creating without possessing,

acting without expecting,

guiding without interfering.

That is why love of the Tao

is in the very nature of things.

Namaste, friends!

Thoughts on the Tao te Ching 39

Poem 39

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly repeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.

The Master views the parts with compassion,
because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged and common as stone.

Commentary

Pont des Arts, Paris, June, 2007

There are so many questions that any thinking and reflecting human being can ask about the world in general, about life as we experiences it and about how we might explain that meaningfully to ourselves.  Big and small questions like: Where does the rain come from? Where do I come from?  Is there more to these questions than the how of their physical formation? Why is there pain and suffering in the world? Is there a meaning to life?  Does Truth exist in itself?  What is reality?  Does God exist?  What is life about anyway?  Why does the world exist? Why do I exist? Who am I? What is identity? What is meaning? Why do we pursue meaning? What is love? What is colour? Why is there something rather than nothing?  

As I have just returned from the rather wonderful film Room directed by Lenny Abrahamson and written by Emma Donoghue, my mind is quite full of these types of question outlined above.  The screenplay is based on the book of the same name that Donoghue also wrote. As a result the film is particularly true to the original novel.  The plot is very simple: after having been held captive for a period of five years in a garden shed - called "Room" by the little boy  - a young woman and her five-year-old son finally manage to gain their freedom.  The film follows the attempts by both mother and son to cope with, in turn, their experiences of captivity and freedom. In this film, the imagination of both mother and son helps them cope with the complexity of their situation both inside and outside of the room.  Big questions crop up for the viewer as they undoubtedly do for the characters:  What is the real world? What is reality?  What is the imagination?  Where are the demarcation lines between reality and imagination? Do not imagination and reality overlap anyway? Indeed, what is the real world? Is not what's real for us the world of our perceptions anyway?  In other words, does reality equate solely with our perception of it?  Indeed, all literature, film, music or whatever cultural means we conjure up are essentially ways of creating meaning or structure so that we can survive in the world around us.  The mother (just a grown-up adolescent anyway who was kidnapped five years previously as a teenager) needs to create a world where her son can learn to live within a dreadfully confined space.

Compassion and care for the young: Work experience: TY 2003

Why this seeming wandering away from our given text?  Well, as I reflectively ponder the above Taoist poem, I am struck by the power of the human faculty of perception.  What are the ways we perceive the world? Are there different perspectives we can take?  If I look on my own life as a story I am writing or as a film I am directing then perhaps an author's or a director's viewpoint can be more objective and indeed more creative for me, and consequently I may be less likely to grow depressed and less likely to indulge in narrower and more restricted perceptions of any particular situation I might find myself in? Hence, the power of the following lines of the final stanza of Poem 39.  Let me quote those two powerful lines here:

The Master views the parts with compassion,

because he understands the whole.

There is one take on perception that has always appealed to this author since he first learnt a bit about rudimentary psychology as a trainee teacher, namely Gestalt psychology.  It is really a theory about how the human mind perceives and makes sense of the world. Its central contention is that the mind forms a "global whole" with self-organising tendencies. To my mind Emma Donoghue's book and Lenny Abrahamson's film illustrate this dynamic in the human being to make his/her world meaningful through imagining it as a "global whole" that has inherent self-organising tendencies.  The human mind is hardwired to form a gestalt or total or unified perception of its world as a whole or as an overall or over-arching unit.  This overall or over-arching perception has its own reality independent of its parts.  It is interesting to note that the original phrase used by one of the first Gestalt psychologists, Kurt Koffka is "The whole is other than the sum of its parts" and not its usual misquotation as "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."  There is a particularly important difference and nuance contained in "other than" that is not contained in the idea of "greater than." What Koffka wished to underline or stress is that the whole simply has an independent existence apart from its constituent parts, not that it was greater which is far too mathematical or quantitative a concept.

Meditation, no matter what its provenance in whatever religious or non-religious context, is always about attaining perspective, of retreating from the noisy world of conflicting parts, of centering self in some interior unity or one-ness or whole, of finding a still point of existence, of collecting or recollecting the self, of reassembling or re-member-ing or putting the self back together.  It is essentially about attaining and rejoicing in the view of the whole, in the unity of the totality while having complete compassion for the disjointedness and disunity for the parts.  It is in that disjointedness and disunity that evil, suffering and pain exist.

Journal of a Soul 61

Dealing with Pain 2

As Robert Frost once answered to the question of what he had learnt from life - "It goes on!"
The ships still sail no matter how sad we are!

It is always so hard to write something new, and certainly more difficult still to write something insightful and profound about the subject of pain.  This particular post will only attempt to continue to flesh out what I said in my last post, and try to tease out this subject from some other angles.  Qoheleth of the Old Testament, being a good skeptic, doubted that there is very much new under the sun.  However, he did not take into account the fact that while a problem or a particular issue may seem to be the same old thing yet again that there is a myriad of new and different ways of tackling that problem or issue.  I have quoted one of my favourite poets many times here (T.S. Eliot) as saying that while he might have treated of the same themes over and over again in his poems that he assuredly always said what he had to say in a different way.  In short, a different angle or a different perspective on the same old problem is always enlightening and always enriching.

A little Wisdom from the Fourth and Fifth Centuries

St Augustine of Hippo by Antonio Rodriguez

St. Augustine of Hippo 354 – 430, who straddled these two centuries, was a most erudite philosopher and theologian and one of the greatest scholars of his era.  He had a lot to say on the mystery of pain and suffering.  He wrote much on the topic of evil in the world, and his logical and insightful mind left us with some interesting insights. One which I like is that good is at all times logically prior to evil.  For example, when a piece of fruit, say an apple or an orange, rots, the putrefaction or the rottenness occurs in and inheres in the logically prior goodness of the fruit.  The goodness of the fruit or vegetable is there first. Likewise, take for example that you break your leg playing football or some other sport, the brokenness of the bone only occurs in the logically prior good bone.  St Augustine put this beautifully and succinctly in his eloquent Latin thus: "Malum est privatio boni" which translates as "Evil is the privation of the good."  For a fourth century thinker, who had just converted to the Christian Church, this argument allowed him to posit the utter goodness of God while a previous religion to which he had belonged, the Manichean sect, had always asserted that the godhead contained both good and evil principles.  Evil vitiates the good and all evil is either brought about by the Devil or by the evil actions of human beings who have been given their free will to act in any manner they wish by a loving God. For Augustine, such a loving God will not force human beings to act correctly under any circumstances as He values human free will so much.   In all of this, remember we are dealing with fourth and fifth century thought.

In another attempt to square the existence of evil with a good God, St Augustine also alluded to the Principle of Plenitude which he had learnt from Plato.  In a nutshell this principle states that the universe by its nature must contain all possible forms of existence, and this by definition means that it must also contain evil. For an article on this theory see HERE.

Western Philosophy and its Flaws

The wind and sea has battered this tree: Calabria, January 2014

One can see here immediately the emergence of one of the main flaws of Western Philosophy, namely a preoccupation with the cognitive and cerebral nature of thinking, and this flawed perspective would reign right down to our own time, viz., the supremacy of reason or rationality or the cognitive - to express the issue in as many ways as possible. There is no great weight given to the native psychology or inner feelings of the human person.  The strength of Western Philosophy, namely its pursuit of cognitive thinking and rational thought, is also its striking weakness if it is not balanced more by the affective considerations  drawn from a more holistic perspective as to what the human being is or may be in its fullness.  Western philosophy and theology built upon the foundations laid by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and they interwove Greek philosophy with Christian thought to a considerable extent.  However, as regards the question of evil, the contribution of the very early Christian thinker St Irenaeus can so easily be overlooked as the greats like St Augustine and St Thomas held so much sway for so many centuries.  Irenaeus showed a more lateral thinking process and allowed for development of the human person in a more holistic sense to use this term rather anachronistically.

The Thought of St Irenaeus, 130-202 A.D. : Wisdom from the Second century

The astute St Irenaeus of Lyons

I don't like introducing technical terms into what I describe here as a journal of a soul, but I feel for the sake of completion I will have to do so.  That term is Theodicy, and it basically means the attempt to answer the question of why a good God (Theos) permits the existence (or justice or Dike: hence Theodicy) of evil. Theodicy attempts to resolve the problem of evil by reconciling the traditional divine characteristics of  omniscience, benevolence and omnipotence with the occurrence of evil and suffering in the physical and human worlds.  Without getting into any complexities, this theodicy argued that human beings are born into a world in which they have to grow and develop.  The argument goes that we humans would never grow and develop unless there were problems (including pain and suffering) that would cause and help us to grow.  This second-century philosopher and theologian Irenaeus, after whom the theodicy is named, proposed a two-stage creation process in which humans require free will and the experience of evil to develop. Another early Christian theologian, Origen, presented a response to the problem of evil which cast the world as a schoolroom or hospital for the soul. It is interesting to note that the great Romantic poet John Keats saw the world as the "vale of soul-making" and his thoughts were very much in line with those of St Origen and St Irenaeus.*

Balances

Once again, as I have said in my opening paragraph, there is precious little insight that any of us can offer to this profound theme, but rehearsing the answers proposed by scholars and spiritual souls over the centuries of our civilization is a sine qua non for any thought on the subject.  T.S. Eliot, whom I am wont to quote and whom I quoted in my opening paragraph stated that he could not be a good poet, or even a poet at all, unless he could place himself within a tradition of poets writing over the long number of years our civilization has lasted.  Likewise, with any other study we care to embark upon.  

The most important lesson that I have learnt from my studies and from my reading over the years is that of the balance of opposites.  How would we know the good unless we knew its opposite, namely evil?  How would we know the light unless we experienced the dark? How would we know joy unless we knew sorrow? How would we know exultation unless we knew humility? How would we know happiness unless we knew its opposite? How would we know love unless we knew its absence?  How would we know hope unless we understood despair. These are all polar opposites that seem to exist in a healthy if strange tension.  The Romantics, especially Coleridge, spoke much about this phenomenon as the tension of opposites. Yeats called such a tension of opposites by the name "antinomies."  The Eastern Religions/Spiritualities often get around understanding, or at least accepting and appreciating, this balance of opposites a little better than the Western mind.  However, for an Eastern take on the mystery presented by the problems of pain and suffering we must wait for a later post and yet again some deeper reflection. Until then, dear reader, Peace, Shalom, Namaste, and may we be given the strength and courage to bear whatever pain and suffering is our lot!

End Note

* "(T)heologian Mark Scott has argued that Origen, rather than Irenaeus, ought to be considered the father of this kind of theodicy. In 1710, Gottfried Leibniz proposed that the world is the best of all possible worlds because it balances all the possible goods the world could contain. Friedrich Schleiermacher argued in the nineteenth century that God must necessarily create flawlessly, so this world must be the best possible world because it allows God's purposes to be naturally fulfilled. In 1966, philosopher John Hick discussed the similarities of the preceding theodicies, calling them all "Irenaean". He supported the view that creation is incomplete and argued that the world is best placed for the full moral development of humans, as it presents genuine moral choices. British philosopher Richard Swinburne proposed that, to make a free moral choice, humans must have experience of the consequences of their own actions and that natural evil must exist to provide such choices." (See WIKI for a more detailed account of this interesting Theodicy).

Journal of a Soul 60

Dealing with Pain

There are no easy answers to any of the big questions.  Indeed, as I have pointed out many times in these posts we engage in good philosophy when we set about questioning shallow solutions, indeed when we suspect easy answers as not alone being the easy way out but to be a simplistic twisting of and an undermining of the truth.  Life teaches us more than "is dreamt of in our philosophy," as Hamlet perspicaciously pointed out to his university friend Horatio.  In searching for meaning, life more often than not forces us away from neat cerebral and cognitive answers to our problems and throws us in at the deep end to either sink or swim in the murky waters of its mystery.

A Mystery to be Lived not a Problem to be Solved

Clontarf, Dublin, Sat 6 July, 2014

When I studied philosophy and theology back in the late 1970s the topic I chose for my 4th Year thesis was "The Mystery of Evil," and the title of this section of my post is one gem of insight I came up with from my reading.  Another gem of a quotation I vividly recall reading was one which goes, "a mystery is not a wall against which we bang our heads, but rather an ocean into which we plunge."  Life teaches us most assuredly, and bit by inevitable bit it knocks the corners off our initial egotistical take on life, chastens our hubris, challenges our certainties and sends us deep into our spiritual and cultural reserves as human beings simply to keep going.  If we are reasonably astute and wise human beings we will learn from our mistakes and from the problems and pains life throws our way so that when we reach twenty years at our job we will have twenty years experience, not one year multiplied 20 times.  Likewise with life - hopefully I have 56 years of cumulative wisdom and not just a few years multiplied by a fairly big factor.  Hopefully, we all will have grown and learnt and deepened and heightened our experience of life and reflected on its significance and meaning with the help of others by the time we age substantially.

When I was doing that thesis which straddled the border ground between philosophy and theology, a not-so-close friend of mine called Paulene O'Rourke was undertaking her thesis on a more personal take on the mystery of evil, namely the problem of suffering and pain. None of her classmates ever got to read Paulene's opus, which unfortunately never really saw the light of day as sadly she ended her own life at the age of 21, having gassed herself in her grandmother's home where she had lived.  This young student was one of the most intelligent girls I had ever met in life and was quite sophisticated and always appeared to me as being quite brave.  Unusual for women at the time, she even rode a small motorbike.  I was not close enough to Paulene to know that she suffered from clinical depression, compounded by the fact that her Doctor father had been killed tragically in Africa and that her mother had become an alcoholic as she had never gotten over the death of her partner.  Too many painful events in life apparently conspired to bring a very sensitive human being to the tragic conclusion of her life in a lonely kitchen, suffocating from gas poisoning.

I often wonder what exactly Paulene had written in her thesis.  I wonder did anyone dare look. That's probably a useless wonderment because presumably it was heavy with pain.  I remember one day Paulene stopped and got me to ride pillion on her motorbike into college.  I remember her being full of life that day.  And yet, and yet and yet? As the Irish songwriter and singer Paul Brady puts it in one of his songs, "Nobody Knows" the chorus of which runs:

Nobody knows why Elvis threw it all away
Nobody knows what Ruby had to hide
Nobody knows why some of us get broken hearts
And some of us find a world that’s clear and bright
You could be packed up and ready
Knowing exactly where to go
How come you miss the connection?
No use in asking…the answer is nobody knows
No use in asking…the answer is nobody knows

(Listen to the song: HERE )

Creativity

The real thing: Edvard Munch's The Scream

Creativity is just one possible doorway towards the assuage of pain and suffering. Once again, needless to say, it is no instant fix or panacea for pain or suffering.  Rather, it is one very valid coping mechanism that we can employ.  How many poems, paintings, pieces of music and sculptures have been created over the years of our civilization whose provenance have been the cruel crucible of pain and suffering?  We instinctively know that the answer must lie in the thousands if not multiples of that figure.  In the field  of music we might mention the suffering endured by Ludwig van Beethoven and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and in the field of art and painting Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch and in the field of writing and letters Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway.    Anyway, these are just names that occur to me of persons who have suffered from severe mental suffering and pain. The reader can add his/her own.  An interesting article on creativity and mental illness can be found HERE.  

Beyond Creativity

Howth Village by night - from the Harbour.  June 2014

I find all types of writing therapeutic, just like an artist finds all types of drawing so.  However, such escape through creativity is just one doorway out of pain.  As a sufferer from clinical depression, I know writing or creativity is simply not enough.  Here is where we need the help from the professional medical people - be they nurses, doctors or psychiatrists.  For some people their depression may be of the reactive variety, that is a consequence of their failure to cope with life's stresses.  For most of these sufferers, talk therapy of various varieties and/or CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) will treat the mental suffering.  For those of us who suffer from clinical depression medical intervention in the form of psychopharmacology (antidepressants, and other psychiatric drugs in other words) will be the only answer.  And yet, I have found that I have needed both in my personal medical history.  I have a deep suspicion of many who, no matter what their professional qualifications push for a single answer to complex mental issues.  Either/Or has never worked for me personally.  Both/And I have found to be a more balanced position to take.  It's a fact that no depressive can write or draw their way out of depression or even illness.  Once other supports have been put in place, creative pursuits of all kinds will certainly help in one's recuperation, or in at least providing supports along the way.

Balance

Life is so much about balance, about not "going over the top" on any one simplistic solution. For me my mental health includes the following: a reasonably balanced and healthy diet (at which I work as hard as I can, but often fall so far short), good healthy physical exercise, liberal doses of meditation and visualization practices, good solid reading, working at my relationships and getting out and about doing various things to keep my mind busy.  I know how easy it is to fall into   "the slough of despond" as John Bunyan puts it so graphically in Pilgrim's Progress (1678), so I employ as many helps as possible: medical, therapeutic, mental and physical exercise as well as more creative pursuits to "keep my head above water," to use yet another cliché. I switch off immediately when I meet someone who has the perfect answer to everyone's problems.  Such people are indeed a "vexation of the spirit." Like the proverbial drunk at a party they are to be avoided "like the plague."  Apologies for the surfeit of hackneyed phrases and colloquialisms in this paragraph.

Perspective

Arguing about Justice - Dept of Law UCD

I have mentioned this quality many times before.  The other day I went into our National Gallery and viewed some of our wonderful paintings on display.  To view them properly one needs to stand back, and, of course, that's why galleries have to be places with great space, or at least have a great feeling of space about them. Perspective can only be achieved at a distance.  Is it not the same with all the problems of pain and suffering that life throws at us all too randomly?  The perspective of time often heals them.  I love visualization techniques as they are so powerful in helping us through or coping with problems.  One such visualization that I like is to do, and which I find very effective in lifting my spirits, is to sit in what I call my semi-demi-lotus position (as I am so dreadfully poor at crossing my legs!).  I then unwind by using the usual meditation techniques like relaxing the body through a body-scan or concentration on breathing etc. When I am suitably relaxed I envisage myself sitting in my little spot on the ground with my back propped against the wall, then in my library, then my house, my street, my locality, my city, my country and so on up through a bird's eye view of my ever diminishing self, and up further till I have an astronaut's view of the world. This I call my visualization of perspective. When we are depressed we are self-obsessed.  Our little world becomes the only world. Perspective is a way of zooming out of self-preoccupation and self-obsession. We are one little creature on a very small planet in a very big expanding universe, one of some 7 billion plus inhabitants.  It is often good to realize in a very counter-cultural way, at least for a while, that we may not be that important at all in the great scheme of things.*

The Great Spiritual Teachers

Reading and listening to what many of the great  teachers and indeed founders of the various Religions and spiritual traditions have had to say is also important.  I strongly believe that going back to what many of them said cannot be squared with what the so called Institutions or Churches that followed them promulgated.  On this, I recommend a good thoughtful reading of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, especially the wonderfully powerful and imaginative scene where Jesus visits the Grand Inquisitor to tell him how far the Roman Church has strayed from what he was about when he was on earth.  So going back to what Confucius, Jesus, the Buddha or Rumi said can be very inspiring.**  One can find a lot of similar profound thoughts in each of these named above, and one can only be amused that it is so hard to find proof of such teachings in the works of the churches or organizations that were built on their foundations.***

Returning to the Music of Life

Let me in conclusion return to music by way of some further clarification or elucidation of a mystery which is truly almost beyond our understanding.  Firstly, let me recall for you some of the lyrics of one of the songs, Anthem, by one of my favourite singers, Leonard Cohen:

The birds they sang 
at the break of day 
Start again 
I heard them say 
Don't dwell on what 
has passed away 
or what is yet to be. 
Ah the wars they will 
be fought again 
The holy dove 
She will be caught again 
bought and sold 
and bought again 
the dove is never free. 

Ring the bells that still can ring 
Forget your perfect offering 
There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. 

(my italicization: You can here Leonard sing this song HERE )

Perhaps a trace or an intimation of an answer lies somewhere in these lyrics.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps!

End Notes

* The great thing about philosophy is that it trains the mind to ask all the most difficult and awkward of questions.  Not alone is this no harm, but it serves to deepen or to heighten our understanding and appreciation of everything.  On the one hand, we can undervalue human life as is exemplified in all the most horrific of wars we poor humans have been engaged in since time immemorial.  On the other we can over-value human life at the expense of our fellow animals and at the expense of the very environment which, unfortunately, we have almost destroyed. What a legacy we moderns have left for our off-spring!  In other words philosophically we can ask the twin questions: How do we undervalue human life? and How do we overvalue that same life?  Both questions are equally valid.

** Going back to the thoughts and/or writings of these early founders can be both enlightening and often surprising, so much so that one begins to question how far removed institutional and organized Religions have come from the vision or charism of their founders.  Confucius said much that is also found in Jesus Christ, viz., “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire” which corresponds very nicely to what Jesus said: " Do to others as you would have them do to you." (Lk. 6:31)  There is wisdom in many of their sayings which often should not be taken out of context and which should be balance by other quotations from the same spiritual leader.  Context and balance is very important if we are given to quotations.

*** As regards the foundation of Religions and Churches it is often a moot question as to whether a so-called founder actually founded a particular religion or Church because in certain cases these were established by their followers.  It is arguable that St Paul was the great founder of the Christian Religion while its Roman version could be seen as the child of the Emperor Constantine.  I have no great interest in many of these moot points, save that in questions of truth and spirituality we must progress by taking into account all the sides of a story, all the perspectives as it were.  For me no one Religion, Church or organization can have a manopoly on the Truth.