Chehkovian Christianity?

 Michael Sean Winters on Cornell West:

West has styled himself a “Chekhovian Christian.” He wrote that he was inspired by Chekhov because his “magisterial depiction of the cold Cosmos, indifferent Nature, crushing Fate and the cruel histories that circumscribe desperate, bored, confused and anxiety-ridden yet love-hungry people, who try to endure against all odds, rings true to me.” What that has to do with Christianity is anyone’s guess – and West gives no clues. For the Christian, the Cosmos are not cold, they are created and Nature is not indifferent, it is infused with the love of the Creator. But, never mind all that. It sounds so authoritative, doesn’t it?

Michael Sean Winters quoting Cornell West:

“Despite my Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be human - a view that invokes pre-modern biblical narratives,” West writes. “I stand in the skeptical Christian tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard …My Chekhovian Christian viewpoint is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. My sense of the absurdity and incongruity of the world is closer to the Gnosticism of Valentinus, Luria or Monoimos ... My intellectual lineage goes more through Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Rilke, Melville, Lorca, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Soyinka, O'Neill, Kazantzakis, Morrison and above all, Chekhov ... And, I should add, it reaches its highest expression in Brahms's ‘Requiem’ and Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme.’”

-from The National Catholic Reporter, "Cornell West: Idiot-in-Chief."  Michael Sean Winters May 19, 2011.

I am not posting this because I believe in it.  Rather, it sounds rather contrary to the idea that all of reality is a positive.  (Luigi Giussani / Communion and Liberation). But it bears thinking about. 

Cornell West - A Love Supreme/John Coltrane

"All we can do as human beings is to try and inspire one another and encourage one another and enable one another, ennoble one another. And that in and of itself is what John Coltrane called a force for good.  How do I become, based on a love supreme, a force for good in a cold and cruel world?  And a love supreme is not love in the abstract. It's a love of beauty in its concrete forms.  It's a love of goodness in its concrete forms.  It's a love of truth in its concrete forms." 

-Cornell West (Joe Rogan Experience #1325)

On Experience

From, "Disciples Called to Witness," from the USCCB (2012):

Discipleship is rooted in human experience.  It is through human experience that one enters into a dialogue with modern culture.  The human experience provides the "sensible signs" that help us come to know ourselves, one another, and God.  It is through common human experience that the Word of God is revealed to us.  These sensible signs are not abstract metaphysical signs but the concrete actions of the Holy Spirit.