Apocalyptic mysticism, the shapeshifting nature of "the world," and us

With an appended video lecture

Not very long ago, I posted on social media a quotation from the writings of St. Isaac the Syrian. It was an exhortation to show kindness to those who fall (“covering” their sins, if possible), to refrain from playing the judge, and to avoid engaging in character assassination. Pretty straightforward, pretty basic, I thought, with ample support from Christ’s commandments. It received a good many “likes,” and only one comment. It was the comment — by someone, a professed Christian as it happens, who didn’t “like” the post — that I found curious; it went something like this (as reconstructed from memory, since I deleted it): “That’s easy to say if one’s a hermit, isolated from the real world. Hermits hide from the problems of the world and don’t get involved, and they don’t add anything valuable to society and… something, something and… Donald Trump.” I’ve forgotten bits of the ramble, I confess, but it did end with that resounding thump on Trump. What I got out of the comment was that, in this man’s judgment, the mere fact of “Donald Trump” somehow trumped the validity of the eremitic vocation and, it would seem, even the dominical commands to show mercy to sinners, not to presume to condemn others, and to guard one’s tongue. That it was a 7^th-century bishop-turned-hermit who had repeated these rudimentary gospel principles seemed only to make them appear more suspect to him, possibly hypocritical. Why? Well, I guess, because, as he put it, “Donald Trump.” Now, I’ll concede that the world today is looking grim; its most powerful political “leaders” and wealthiest oligarchs, both East and West, look and sound alarmingly like the insane supervillains I grew up watching in movies and on TV in the 1960s (Putin and Xi, for instance, were caught only the other day on mic, privately conversing about achieving literal immortality or, at least, vastly prolonged longevity – a vampiric obsession shared by the elite everywhere these days, regardless of their national and ideological differences). The global situation appears, we can justifiably say, downright apocalyptic – about which more in due course. Here’s an incomplete list of what we see in our newsfeeds on any given day of the week currently: in addition to natural catastrophes, we have wars and rumors of wars, engineered starvation with virtually no international intervention to stop it, projected mass losses of job employment, AI fears, climate fears, terrorism fears, immigration fears, a conspicuous turn toward authoritarianism, polarizing political ideologies from the Left and the Right (each lusting after its own version of totalitarian regulation of thought, word, and deed), conspiracy theories that look much too plausible to be dismissed out of hand, and – moving either into the realm of the sublime or the ridiculous (your call) – occasional breathless bursts of anxiety emitted by pundits in the media about all that undisclosed UAP stuff. Maybe my interlocutor was just feeling overwhelmed by virtually everything (and especially by the existence of Donald Trump), and thus the quote from St. Isaac struck him as irrelevant at best. After all, he might well believe along with many others, that what’s urgently required of us right now, right this very instant, for the sake of justice and humanity and the planet, and putting all lesser considerations aside (including such Christian trifles as loving one’s enemies and keeping oneself unspotted from the world), is immediate action.