AtDtDA(28): The Unthinkable Possibility

[Mark Kohut]

What is that bit about masonry and "spiritual ease" .........until
  they see the rich brick-and-masonry homes in irkutsk?

Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
  "... the unthinkable possibility had been dawning that God had
abandoned Russia. What had been certain and mandated by Heaven was
now as loaded with uncertainty as any peasant's struggle with the day,
and all, regardless of wealth or position, must stumble blindly."
(pp. 779-80)


Razvedka

Russian: intelligence (in the military-political sense).

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_768-791#Page_779


"the naval defeat at Tsushima ...."

The Battle of Tsushima ... was the last and most decisive sea battle
of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. It was fought on May 27–28,
1905 (May 14–15 in the Julian calendar then in use in Russia) in the
Tsushima Strait....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tsushima


"... the unthinkable possibility ... that God had abandoned Russia"

Irony? I.e., ...

The Soviet Union was an officially atheist state. According to various
Soviet and Western sources, however, over one-third of the country's
people professed religious belief....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Soviet_Union

How did it happen that the country known as 'Holy Russia', with such a
long history of Orthodox Christianity, was in a very short period of
time turned by the Bolsheviks into 'the first atheist state in the
world'? How was it possible that the very same people who were taught
religion in secondary schools in the 1910s with their own hands
destroyed churches and burned holy icons in the 1920s? What is the
explanation of the fact that the Orthodox Church, which was so
powerful in the Russian Empire, was almost reduced to zero by its
former members?

http://en.hilarion.orthodoxia.org/6_8

Cf., however, e.g., ...

"'By the time of Columbus, God's project of Disengagement was
obvious to all,-- with the terrible understanding that we were to be
left more and more to our own solutions.'" (M&D, Ch. 50, p. 487)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0205&msg=66784

"Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the
Saviour." Isaiah 45:15

http://www.bartleby.com/108/23/45.html#S69

The term Deus Absconditus means "hidden God" in Latin (Isaiah, 45:15
in the Vulgate Bible), and refers to the view (shared by the
Protestant Luther and the Catholic Pascal) that God had become
inaccessible, hiding himself from the view of sinful humans, and
therefore demanding a challenging existential act of faith.
Predestinarian theology held further that most people were incapable
of perceiving the hidden God, whose gift of grace permitted the
minority of the "elect" to know him....

http://icg.harvard.edu/~laa72/glossary/deus_absconditus/


"What had been certain and mandated by Heaven was now as loaded with
uncertainty as any peasant's struggle with the day, and all,
regardless of wealth or position, must stumble blindly." (pp. 779-80)

Main Entry: with
Pronunciation: \ˈwith, ˈwith, wəth, wəth\
Function: preposition
Etymology: Middle English, against, from, with, from Old English; akin
to Old English wither against, Old High German widar against, back,
Sanskrit vi apart
Date: before 12th century

1 a: in opposition to : against ...

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/with



       
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