One kind of creativity is making unexpected connections. Wodehouse excelled at this kind of creativity. I just read where Fink-Nottle, on a vegan diet, started weeping at a sunset, because the color reminded him of a nice, underdone slice of beef.

Most of my creativity comes to me second hand. Providence makes the connections for me. “Look on this picture, and on this,” Providence says, and all I have to do is look, and think.

The concept of worship has been on my mind lately. That started back in July with Bruce Charlton’s essay asking why we should worship God. It’s hard to answer questions about worship without knowing what worship is, and I didn’t quite. I first tried to define worship. But the question lingered.

Last week at General Conference the brethren kept mentioning worship, mostly in passing, but as something obviously important and obviously good. Elder Eyring’s comment on hero worship particularly caught my attention. Elder Eyring seemed to define hero worship as “the feelings we sometimes have of admiring heroic figures.”

Then Bruce Charlton brought worship up again.

Taken all together, it was clear that in one hand Providence was holding out worship for examination.

This week Providence opened its other hand. Two links came in to the Virtue that Has No Name post. (Both links were from interesting essays in their own right. See here and here.) One of the links came from a blog I’m not familiar with, so I scrolled down a little. There was a post on . . . worship:

The one thing we must always do is worship God.

-thus the Cry in the Dark blog.

I took the hint.

The meat of the post

In large part, worship is the orientation we assume towards a being that is far above us in some capacity.  Hero worship has that orientation. So does worshipping God, naturally. It’s probably even true in the heady kind of knight-and-damsel romance, where you “worship the ground she walks on.” The lover’s adoration does not mean that his beloved is superior to him in everything. But it does mean that she has a quality, womanliness and femininity, which he respects and admires and in which she very much exceeds him.

The virtue with no name is the selfless quality of loving and respecting values that you don’t excel at. It is the cripple who admires athletic excellence, the sinner who condemns his own sins, the good loser who admits that the competition was fair, the fox who refuses to lie that the grapes were sour.

Juxtaposed, worship and the virtue that has no name are obviously in the same territory. Worship, in fact, looks like an application of the nameless virtue. The act of worship is intrinsically an acknowledgement of some goodness that you lack.

For some years I’ve been puzzled how all the parts of the modern structure fit together. Equalitarianism, relativism, deconstruction of heroes, and the cult of authenticity are all pillars of the great and spacious building. But why those pillars in particular? Was it just coincidence? One answer is that the modern structure is only secondarily a set of ideas. At root it was and is a myth or a story of pre-civilized life in a Garden of Eden setting where there no wants, no sins, and no social structure. The story connects the ideas.

But the nexus of worship and the nameless virtue reveals that the ideas are themselves connected. They are companion vices.

Here’s a diagram showing the nameless virtue and its linked vices.

The vice that opposes the nameless virtue is the cult of authenticity.   When authenticity becomes a cult it says you do whatever your inmost child says to do, because any mismatch between who you are and how you feel, on the one side, and what you advocate and claim to be good, on the other, is inauthentic.

When put that way, it becomes clear why the cult of authenticity leads to moral relativism. Any objective moral standard creates the possibility, really the certainty, that people will fall short of the standard. Which would make them inauthentic. So objective moral standards must go. But if objective moral standards must go, heroes must go too. What makes a hero a hero is some kind of excellence far beyond the norm. By definition, however, most of us will be at the norm. Therefore recognizing true heroism would recognize a yawning gap between what we value and who we are. That yawning gap is very inauthentic. So heroes must go. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that progressive Christianity tends to downplay Christ as a real person. If the atonement is more than a metaphor, it starts to look pretty damn heroic.) If necessary, heroes must be helped to go with a little subversion. Did you know Washington didn’t cut down the cherry tree? True story. Also he was gay.

No heroes mean no God.  God is manyfold what heroes are.  (Or, if there is a God, he is a buddy object, not an object of awe).  The cult of authenticity also demands equalitarianism. Any recognition that people aren’t completely equal means that some people are better than others. It entails the old mismatch between who we are and what we value. So meaningful differences must go. There can still be differences. They just can’t matter. In particular, the differences can’t lead to different outcomes on things people value, like status or prosperity.

The god within is a jealous god.