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I have recently found a worthwhile - albeit over-long, unfocused and rather distorted - biopic of JD Salinger (above) - worthwhile especially for some new details and discoveries, and a great mass of photographic documentation.

I have a tremendous love of several of Salinger's works - Esme, Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeam, Seymour - and have been reading (selectively) biographies on him for over thirty years (the best is Kenneth Slawenski's excellent A Life Raised High of 2010) - so I was very pleased to discover the above documentary from 2013.

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Salinger was a very religious man, and devoutly practised Vedanta Hinduism (indeed, this documentary claims that a posthumous 'manual' of Vedanta by Salinger is in the publishing pipeline); and it is striking how little difference this seemed to make to Salinger's two great personal flaws (of which I know): i.e. his relationships with women; and his tendency to abrupt, consuming and lasting hatred and resentment directed against any people who (apparently) let him down.

The main thing I took away from this film was a clearer sense of my condemnation of Salinger's 'sex life' - which for decades followed a stereotypical pattern of shallow, self-centred, selfishness; a series of relationships with teenage or teen-looking, gamine-pretty, precocious girls whom he would abruptly and coldly reject at the first suspicion of them behaving like grown-up women or real people.

For example, this documentary reveals that Salinger (against regulations) fell in love with and married a (presumed) ex-Nazi young women while he working in the de-Nazification branch of military intelligence in 1946 - a girl with whom he said he felt a literally telepathic communication, brought his new wife back to the USA, and then the marriage broke-up after a few weeks and was annulled.

An interviewee describes how, later, Salinger had courted her from the age of fourteen but ditched her five years later, suddenly and permanently, immediately after they had sex for the first time.

And his ludicrous and foolish and bilaterally-destructive shenanigans with the preppie freshman Joyce Maynard when Salinger was in his mid fifties, has been made the subject of a memoir.

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I have a theory that most seriously-religious modern (twentieth century) Westerners who embrace Eastern religions - such as Hinduism or Buddhism - often do so in order to be religious but also 'take advantage' of the modern sexual revolution, in a way that would not be possible for a similarly-devout Christian or Jew (Salinger's Father was Jewish).

From the Western perspective, Eastern religion offers a meaningful, aesthetic mysticism that downplays or altogether leaves-out the Jewish-Christian requirement for sexual virtue  (i.e. sex only in the context of a monogamous and permanent marriage).

Furthermore, from a Christian perspective, the Eastern religions leave-out sin; which sounds-like a liberation but actually is not; because they also leave-out repentance, and the possibility of being 'washed clean' from sin.

So the Western convert to Eastern religion (apparently) feels no need to confess his sins or feel limited by conventional (traditional) morality - a situation which he presumably likes.

But neither can he repent his wrong-doings and make a fresh start - which makes change difficult (and futile); and potentially leads the seriously religious person to a helpless conviction of accumulating 'bad Karma', or passively being punished for the wickedness of previous existences.

The Christian sin of Pride tends to be amplified - since pride becomes the primary motivation, the one thing that keeps an otherwise despairing person/ artist/ writer active and purposeful. And pride often leads to hatred, resentment, a sense of superiority and despising of others as inferior - and the rest of it.

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In Salinger I do not detect evidence of repentance. Regret, yes - but not repentance - which is what he so greatly needed (as do we all). Indeed, it does not look as if he resisted - but instead actively prosecuted for several decades -  the pathological and hurtful, and also both futile and self-destructive, cyclical pattern of his relationships with women. He does not seem to have recognized that his hair-trigger states of boiling anger, his abrupt and lasting rejections of friends who erred were primarily faults in himself.

(Even if he could not prevent himself doing these things and feeling these ways, it ought to have been straightforward for him to acknowledge the faults in himself, perhaps even to apologise.)

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The reason that I have come so late to these recognitions about Salinger is partly the perfectionism of his writing. A novella such as the (brilliant, wonderful) Zooey was multiply revised and edited literally a word at a time, over an extensive period (by Salinger in collaboration with the New Yorker editor William Shawn).

Such a process of revision and editing has the result of putting a tight barrier between the author and the reader - the author's 'real' self may be excluded, and an impenetrable authorial persona constructed.

Yet (paradoxically) the astonishing detail and internal-consistency of the writing creates the impression that we readers have a window into Salinger's mind; and are actually perceiving his thoughts as they arise, one at a time - we seem to 'know' the author better than we have ever known anybody in real-life!

And so there is this mismatch, this gulf between a Salinger the man; who in real life seems to have been shallow, immature, vindictive, fickle, and self-righteous; and the constructed literary persona who is wise, deep, compassionate, sensitive: a sage - indeed a spiritual master.

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Previous postings on JD Salinger:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=salinger

I have recently re-read JD Salinger's Raise high the roof beam, carpenters (1955), and a long, mostly oral, biography by Shields and Salerno (2013)*. Raise High is confirmed in my estimation as just about my favourite short story/ novella ever - only rivaled by the same author's Zooey (1957). 

JD Salinger (1919-2010) is famous for having spent the last 50-plus years of his long life in near total seclusion and privacy - and for not having published anything at all after 1965. At present several books are apparently being prepared for posthumous publication, although nothing much is known about their content. 

To say that Salinger's late stories are long-awaited and eagerly-anticipated by his fans, would therefore be a massive understatement! Many apparently hope for some more work along the lines of the novel Catcher in the Rye; or, at least some more short stories as good as For Esme, with love and squalor (1950) or Franny (1955).

But I am personally confident that there will be no good unpublished work by Salinger. Why am I confident? Because Salinger only published his best work for a very short period between Esme in 1950 and Zooey in 1957. His earlier short stories are often fine, but nothing special; being either clunky or contrived - and lacking depth. 

And, much as a love Zooey, its ending doesn't work, and is evidence of the beginning of a decline. This was confirmed by Seymour: An Introduction - which was published in 1959. And Salinger's final publication - Hapworth 16, 1924 is really, truly, appallingly bad - embarrassing, unreadable.    

So on the graph of decline, there are three data points; and the decline was steepening such that Salinger went from fascinating but very difficult and barely coherent with Seymour in 1959, to horribly terrible by 1965.

Given the brevity of Salinger's period of genuine excellence, and the mediocrity of work outside that period; I hold-out no hopes at all, that work written after 1965 will be any good. 

Indeed, I doubt if they will be worth reading, except for documentary purposes. 

 

*Note: The Shields and Salerno book is well worth reading for the significant new evidence they uncover, many good interviews and memoirs printed, and photographs. But the text by Shields and Salerno - their opinions, interpretations, lit crit - is really dreadful; especially that by David Shields. As so often with modern biographers, they dislike their subject and lose no opportunity to snipe and denigrate. As so often with modern people, they regard religion (any religion - in this case mainly Vedanta Hinduism) as evidence of psychopathology. The perspective from which the book is written is mainstream journalistic wokeness - and therefore the quality of thought is inevitably incoherent, materialistic, anti-spiritual, politically-correct (in a nutshell: actively evil). 

I have written before about JD Salinger's novella Zooey; and how it has fascinated me, off and on, ever since I encountered it in the summer of 1981. Well, I have again been dipping into it, and as usual it has triggered some associations and notions. 

Zooey struck me as a deep book, when I first read it - as if it might contain the "secret of life" somewhere embedded. It probably had this effect because this was the first time in my life that I had met with "spiritual stuff" that really interested and excited me. 

I was very taken by the way that some of the characters talked about spiritual and religious matters; in a personal and engaged way; this was obviously the most important thing for them (and implicitly the author). 

Maybe this was the first sense I got of the possibility of a personal and inwardly-driven spiritual/ religious quest for people of my broad type, people with whom I could identify. 

The Glass family did plenty of quoting and name-dropping, true; but clearly they were not just repeating what "other people" had said. 

And also, they were trying to use these insights in living their lives: giving it their Best Shot. 

My reaction was, I now perceive, a kind of recapitulation of the way in which, from the late-1800s and with the emergence of Theosophy; many Western people were attracted to the esoteric spirituality and religions of the East - mainly philosophical Hinduism and Zen Buddhism. 

(Mainstream Christianity was largely irrelevant to this quest - it simply did not address the driving motivations of such people.) 

And the way, also, that this Eastern perspective was then brought-back and applied to "Christianity" -  because Zooey (and the short story Franny that precedes it) is focused on the Jesus Prayer, and the Russian Orthodox book "The way of a pilgrim" - which is about the use of this prayer as the centre of a religious life. 

Zooey is permeated-by, and culminates-in, what I found at the time to be an appealing positive presentation of Jesus Christ - and that was something I had seldom encountered before.

(As a child and adolescent I had always found the character Jesus to be uninteresting, alien and irrelevant to my problems and concerns.)  

I can nowadays see that the version of Jesus Christ, the Jesus Prayer and "Christianity" that are featured in Zooey are primarily Hindu/ Buddhist/ Eastern. For instance; the Jesus Prayer is presented as a mantra, pure and simple; and Salinger's Jesus is a very different and almost opposite phenomenon from that of what I now regard as real Christianity. 

Salinger's Jesus is indeed much more like Buddha than the Jesus of the IV Gospel; and Salinger's Jesus's concerns and aims are in-line with Oneness spirituality; rather than being focused upon life after death, salvation, resurrection - and Heaven. 

But this understanding of mine is all retrospective. At the time of reading, my concerns and demands were much like those of the Glass family children. 

What, then, were these demands and concerns?

The big problem for the Glass children is that this mortal life on earth cannot live up to the aspirations and perceived possibilities of youth. 

This afflicts all the children we encounter in the main Glass stories: Franny, Zooey, Seymour, and Buddy (the author's persona) - and, implicitly the others too. They all seem to have a yearned-for ideal of what life could and should be - but later discover that whatever they do (and, between them, the children try a range of strategies)...

Whatever they try: life just doesn't match up with these intense hopes. 

Therefore, there is an underlying pessimism about the Glass family saga; even when the specific stories end in an upbeat fashion - upon what seems like an epiphany, an insight, an answer (as do both Zooey and Raise high the roof beam, carpenters) - the reader senses that it will be a very temporary and partial triumph.

This pessimism comes across primarily because the oldest child, Seymour, committed suicide; shot himself with a gun (in A perfect day for bananafish). 

Yet Seymour was (at least to his family) a spiritual genius, the best of the children - a man we are told was both far-advanced and deeply-into the actual practice of Eastern spirituality. 

Therefore, despite that Seymour, like Salinger himself, suffered from Combat Fatigue (true PTSD, not the watered-down modern usage) as a consequence of prolonged front-line participation in the World War II invasion of Europe - we feel that Seymour should, nonetheless - as a kind of saint, have been able to overcome whatever horrors life threw at him. 

The background - and deeply-sad - implication and conclusion; is that there is no answer to the problem of that between life-as-it-might-be and life-as-it is; because not even Seymour could find one. Seymor's failure in this mortal life casts across all the Glass stories a shadow of the inevitability of failure.  

The young Glasses may not grasp this, when they are still growing-up, extraverted, when life is apparently opening-out - and they have the delusional confidence that they will be the first to find this answer. 

But this will always fail; and will lead either to an abandonment of the spiritual quest (as with sister "Boo-Boo" - a socially-integrated housewife and family woman; or else to a frustration and dismay that increases with age (Seymour, and Buddy).

Then there is Waker, who is described as having become a Carthusian monk, vowed to silence for much of the time. It may be that we are supposed to infer that Waker has candidly acknowledged to himself the insufficiency of this mortal life; and looks therefore to the life beyond. 

My interpretation of Waker is that Salinger saw him more as an Eastern monk than a Christian. One who regards this life as suffering and an illusion, from-which we should seek to detach ourselves - awaiting a kind of re-absorption into universal and impersonal divinity. 

In other words; (IMO) Salinger had neither an understanding-of, nor belief-in, the Christian idea (well, some Christians believe it) that this mortal life and our death are real, necessary steps en route to a state of post-mortal divinity that is personal.  

So, I agree with Salinger that this mortal life is inevitably insufficient; and I agree with his implicit conclusion that there is no answer to this problem within the scope of Eastern religion.

(Since; to regard this mortal life as a tragedy of suffering and attachment is not a solution; and to cure our sense of tragic insufficiency with annihilation of "the self" and consciousness is to avoid, but not to solve, the problem.) 

In conclusion, I continue to regard Zooey as a valuable and honest - as well as interesting and exciting - "spiritual story" - but I no longer believe it contains "the answer" to this mortal life!

Rather, Zooey and the other Glass stories show us what are Not the answers... 

But more than just "showing"; through participation in these stories, we potentially live-out putative answers, and experience for ourselves their (noble!) failures; and they leave us to continue the quest for ourselves and in different directions. 

*

I have just re-read (for the first time since I became a Christian) JD Salinger's three most religious stories: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, Zooey, and Seymour: an introduction.

I enjoyed them all, but most appreciated Zooey.

RHTRC struck me as a perfect short story, but - in terms of Salinger's ouvre - transitional; Zooey is IT, a perfect short story that is uniquely and 100 percent Salinger; and Seymour crosses the line from short story into a kind of fictional essay.

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As well as its brilliant character delineation, dialogue, density and description; I was fascinated by the religious aspect of Zooey - and the light it shone on the big unifying question of the Glass chronicles: why did Seymour commit suicide?

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Zooey begins with Salinger's characteristic eclectic, syncretic 'perennial philosophy' New-Age-ish -type spirituality; and builds towards Salinger's most wholly-Christian epiphany - the famous Fat Lady parable at the end.

This trajectory is one which is - apparently - undergone by Franny, Zooey and Buddy; but not by Seymour.

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Seymour's suicide was - I believe - caused by what Walker Percy termed the 're-entry problem.

(see WP's Lost in the Cosmos and my earlier blog posting http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/03/re-entry-problem-for-artists-and.html )

This is intrinsic to any worldly spirituality - perhaps to any non-Christian religion - which does not include a heavenly afterlife with a process of theosis - or movement of the human towards becoming a Son of God.

Seymour seems to have had only a vague kind of transcendental belief (he does not quite seem to believe that Truth, Beauty and Virtue are objective, real - and to the extent he does he regards them as immanent - within nature - rather than supernatural).

Indeed, Seymour's spirituality is characterized by a belief in reincarnation rather than afterlife.

*

Yet reincarnation (even if true) is no answer to anything - or rather it is merely a superficial answer to specific questions (such as explaining a person's character and behaviour) not ultimate questions.

Reincarnation merely pushes the problems of life backward or forward, without providing any understanding of the human relation to The Good, to reality, to meaning or purpose.

*

Seymour argues (I think) that this worldly life here on earth is perfect - if only we looked at it correctly.

The fault is with people and their perspective.

But Seymour apparently couldn't get the right perspective and keep it. He could get himself into the correct frame of mind for periods, but would at some point have to re-enter the perspective which saw the world as mundane, painful, full of ugliness, lies, cruelty, short-termist selfishness.

And it was this re-entry which he found unbearable; and which (it seems to me) led to his suicide.

*

Seymour simply could not live up to his own ideals, his own aspirations - could not maintain his own temporary achievements.

And, lacking a conception of Original Sin, and lacking a belief in the possibility of Christian salvation - he had nowhere to go, nothing to turn to but (as he imagined) extinction and (he hoped) an end to his own suffering.

*

*

Ever since the summer of 1981 I have been periodically re-reading a trilogy of JD Salinger novellas: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, Zooey and Seymour: an introduction (supplemented by the linked long short story of For Esme - with love and squalor.

(At the time I also loved Catcher in the Rye, but have never felt inclined to re-read it since.)

Sometimes I think I have left behind the Glass family saga, but it turns out not; I keep returning.

*

The reason is probably somewhat related to my loving for Tolkien - the sense of reality, depth, detail - the impression that these are not fictions but windows onto a world.

*

I also revel in the precision and (yet) flexibility of the writing. Every re-read I seem to notice things I hadn't noticed before.

This corresponds to the way the stories were written. They were revised (and the last two were edited, by William Shawn - editor of the New Yorker) over many months and hundreds of hours, literally word by word.

While this minute obsessiveness would probably kill most authors (it would certainly kill me!), and would certainly kill their prose - it created something unique and wonderful in this instance.

*

My favourite sentence - from RHTRBC is the first in this passage:

It was a day, God knows, not only of rampant signs and symbols but of wildly extensive communication via the written word. If you jumped into crowded cars, Fate took circuitous pains, before you did any jumping, that you had a pad and pencil with you, just in case one of your fellow-passengers was a deaf-mute. If you slipped into bathrooms, you did well to look up to see if there were any little messages, faintly apocalyptical or otherwise, posted high over the washbowl.

*

Salinger was also a very interesting personality, and was last year the subject of one of the most impressive biographies of my experience: J.D.Salinger: a life raised high, by Kenneth Slawenski.

The most surprising discovery of which was to learn that Salinger experienced just about the most arduous conceivable frontline military campaign of the Western Sphere of WWII, from the D-Day landings, through the Battle of the Bulge and up to the surrender of Germany.

That fact is worth holding at the back of the mind when contemplating the jewelled fastidiousness of his fiction.

*

*

I have just been reading my favourite JD Salinger stories about the Glass family ^ - which focus on the life and suicide of their American-born fictional 'saint' Seymour; and I have just started a re-read of the biography of the first real life American-born Saint (of the Russian Orthodox Church) Hieromonk Seraphim of Platina + - born as Eugene Rose (and usually called Fr Seraphim Rose).

The comparison is interesting.

*

The fictional Seymour Glass was born in 1917, while Seraphim Rose was born in 1934 - half a generation later.

*

Seymour Glass was raised in New York City on the East Coast of the USA, was something of a child prodigy who was often termed a 'genius' (by his family), and attended the local elite university - Columbia.

Seraphim Rose was raised in California on the West Coast of the USA, was something of a child prodigy who was sometimes termed a genius (by his friends), and attended the local elite liberal arts college - Pomona.

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Both Seymour and Seraphim developed an intense personal and scholarly interest in Eastern religions, meditation, Buddhism, Oriental languages and the like.

*

In the end, Seymour developed a personal, eclectic, syncretic religion incorporating elements of Christianity, Hinduism (especially reincarnation), Zen, and a life dedicated to personal poetic creativity.

While Seraphim became a Russian Orthodox Christian of the most traditional kind, an ascetic monk, and led a life dedicated to attaining holiness (theosis) and evangelism via his writings and translations.

*

Seymour died young in 1948 at the age of 31 - shooting himself probably due to psychological war trauma and despair at living up to his own ideals.

Seraphim died young in 1982 at the age of 48 - from an acute medical illness.

*

After his death, Seymour became a kind-of saint to those who knew him personally, then to Western youth via the writings of JD Salinger and the (fictional) example of his life.

After his death, Seraphim became a Saint to those who knew him personally, and then to Eastern post-communist youth via his own writings and the example of his life.

*

Seymour Glass was a seeker; Seraphim Rose was a finder.

***


^ Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters; Zooey; Seymour: an introduction all by JD Salinger.

+ Father Seraphim Rose: his life and works by Hieromonk Damascene.

*

*

I think I first became fully aware of alienation - the meaninglessness, purposelessness, disconnectedness of mainstream modern life - in the summer of 1981 (a very similar summer and in the same place as this one, which is why I am reminded of it) when reading JD Salinger's 'Glass Family' novellas (Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, Franny, Zooey, Seymour).

*

What I got from Salinger, was that the escape from alienation was into Art - probably into being an artist (and thus living inside the process of creation); and this became as kind of 'hidden agenda' for me from that time and for many years.

(Salinger also talks much of Eastern Meditative religions and of a Christianity seem through this lens - but these are means to Art, rather than ends in themselves.)

Escape into Art didn't work - and probably it never really has worked^, except maybe with Goethe - although one can be misled into thinking it has worked by artistic recreations of an artist's life.

*

Around 20 years later I engaged with Joseph Campbell and began to re-re-re-read Jung from the perspective that alienated meaninglessness could be cured by escaping into myth - and that myth was actually a representation of humanity's shared inner reality.

Thus myth, heroic journeys and quests; stories from all kinds of places and cultures which seemed to have a special power, breadth, resonance; were perceived as symbolically depicting not merely the escape from misery, or the search for pleasure, nor even the pursuit of assimilating ecstasy... but an adventure or task undertaken for the well-being of other people, of the community.

But this simply kicked the can further down the road.

Because if my life would not be justified - wold not be meaningful or purposeful - by seeking comfort, distraction, and ecstasy - then why should things be different when my life is dedicated to enabling increased comfort, distraction and ecstasy for other people?

Somewhere, there has to be some-thing worthwhile in and of itself.

*

One response to my earlier desire to escape alienation into Art had been to leave medicine for science - which was supposed to sustain and advance medicine; then to leave science for Art, specifically the study and practice of literature - which I supposed to be the 'end' for which medicine and science provided the 'means'.

Yet Art turned out to be just another means, and not an end in itself.

*

What of mythology? I perceived mythology to underlie Art, to be even-more-fundamental than Art - such that the best Art was mythical.

Yet if myth was supposed to move us, I found that sometimes it did and sometimes (more often) it didn't - and although myth was asserted to be universal and powerful (The Power of Myth was the name of Joseph Campbell's popular PBS TV documentary) - in actuality myth often was not powerful, and no myth seemed to be universally powerful - such that most people preferred soap operas, sexual titillation and trashy news stories and never exposed themselves to actual myths or anything approaching such.

So myth turned-out to be as atomic, subjective and variable, and as alienated, as anything else in modern culture - not an answer nor an antidote.

*

Only after I had exhausted medicine, science, art and mythology did I finally turn to religion; and to Christianity, which I had previously always excluded from my search.

And there was the answer - the problem framed, described, its consequences delineated. Staring me in the face.

*

^The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion, by Gordon Graham

*
Having read the notes in addition to the novel, it is clear that Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (by Susanna Clarke) is one of the most real fictional subcreations I have ever encountered.

It is very difficult not to believe it really happened, because the world is so detailed, so consistent, so convincing. As I walked around Newcastle today, I kept thinking of the time when the Raven King ruled from here - I even saw a raven!

I was trying to the think of comparisons in the post-Tolkien literature.

The nearest fantasy I could come are the Alan Garner Weirdstone of Brisingamen/ Moon of Gomrath duo in which the magical events are sewn-into a lot of local and family history, folklore and neo-paganism. The ring of truth and believable - but the detail is much less than in JS&MN.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/review-of-alan-garners-weirdstone-of.html

The other example is the Glass Family stories by JS Salinger, which are also difficult not to believe, and similar in their detailed and deep and partly factual back-story (albeit in a different style) to JS&MN.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/zooey-wins-and-explaining-seymours.html


('Difficult not to believe', that is, with the exception of the last Glass story published - Hapworth 16 1924, which is simply atrocious).
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*

The lamest translation of the lamest poem ever written in the history of the world:

The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Plop!

Matsuo Basho translated (ahem) by Alan Watts

from

http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm

*

Are there any good Haiku in translation? I've read an inordinate number of the blimmin things, since I came across them heavily recommended by JD Salinger - and never found one that rose even to the level of mediocrity as a poem.

*

I suspect, or fear, this practice may turn out to be the core of real Christianity, the main means of salvation, in the future - if the mainstream Christian Churches continue their decline and corruption, and assuming the Eastern Orthodox Church does not have a resurgence in the West.

I heard of the Jesus Prayer first, many years ago, in Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger - and I would recommend reading the book discussed there - The Way of a Pilgrim, in the translation by R.M French.

This also is wise and helpful:  http://www.philokalia.org/on_the_prayer_of_jesus.htm

But the Jesus prayer was originated in Orthodox Christian societies, where a core knowledge of Christianity could be taken for granted - and that is certainly not the case now: ignorance and profound misunderstanding are the current norm; and erroneous or false teaching much easier to find than truth!

So (contra what is said in Franny and Zooey, and what is *superficially* implied by the Way of a Pilgrim) I do not think the Prayer of Jesus would 'work' (or even begin to work) unless the person saying it knew the essential meaning of the words.

For this, some prior teaching is necessary - which in our era may have to come from reading.

My own case is so very atypical that I really have no idea what would be right for other people - but I found this essay extremely helpful - Theosis: the true purpose of human life by Archimandrite George: http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/general/theosis-english.pdf.

However, for me it came after several years of wide-ranging and mostly misguided reading, reflection and discussion - so it may not mean much to someone jumping straight-in.

The point is that Orthodoxy provides a very clear aim - Sainthood - and a (relatively) clear definition of what this entails (ascetic struggle) and what success brings (living in heaven upon earth).

Theosis is a path on which all can and should embark, and it is being on this path that matters to salvation - although almost all will fail to reach the end of the path and most will advance only a few baby steps - the necessary start being repentance (a turning-away from the Kingdom of Man towards the Kingdom of God) and by effort obtaining only a *foretaste* of heaven on earth. Ultimately, it is enough.