Descartes, Eat Your Heart Out, or: Augustine's Thoughts By a Fireplace

Don't worry. This isn't going to be another rant against everybody's favorite philosophical whipping boy, poor old Rene Descartes. I came across the following quote a while back in The City of God by the eminent Aurelius Augustinus, otherwise known as St. Augustine. In the 26th Chapter of Book II, he says the following:

"I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the academicians: What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not cannot be deceived. And if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am, if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am. For it's certain that I am, if I am deceived. Since therefore I the person deceived, should be even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For as I know that I am so I know this also, that I know."

Now it's been a little while since my formal philosophy-studying days or since I've read any Descartes, but doesn't this sound uncannily familiar? Wasn't Descartes' claim to fame, or infamy, depending on your perspective, supposed to be his innovation in proving his own existence, his cogito ergo sum? I for one feel cheated. Not only does Augustine seem to accomplish the same thing as Descartes did, he did it over a millennium earlier and quite elegantly to boot. It's interesting though, to see how the two thinkers come to the seemingly same argument and what they intend to do with it. For Descartes, his cogito is his attempt to ground an unshakably sound philosophical system, the baseline from which he intended, and attempted, to go on to prove everything else that interested him, like the existence of God for example. For Augustine, the argument that, at the very least, he has no reason to doubt that he exists, comes across more like his way of making quick work of what seems to him like a rather silly line of questioning. One pictures the ever august Bishop swatting away, like so many bothersome flies, the arguments of a rabble of pestering academics who have so much time on their hands they've forgotten who, or even that, they are.

Continue reading

Attend to the truth: A Beginning and Mantra

I plan to use quotes or brief selections I come across in my reading to bounce off of in order to spur some incidental thinking. The first quote is from Debra Rienstra's recent So Much More: an Invitation to Christian Spirituality. There are of course countless beautiful and inspiring words to draw on from down through the centuries. The reason I'm giving this quote the role of launch pad and mantra for this blog is partially because it is so beautiful and so poignant, but partially also because of happenstance. It just happened to be one of the most interesting things I read in the 24 hours before starting this blog.

So without further ado, here's Ms. Rienstra:

"Perhaps, you might propose, all notions of the transcendent are equally far from an astoundingly incomprehensible truth. In that case you could indeed say that all religions lead to God or are equally mistaken about God. The other viable possibility is this: no matter how astoundingly incomprehensible the truth, some notions represent a more accurate perception than others. I live by this latter option, because it seems to me that the minute you grant any notion of truth at all, it follows as a matter of human dignity that we ought to pursue this truth as ardently as we can. Perhaps we stumble; perhaps we are limited in our perceptions; but we ought to try. After all, we live by various notions of truth whether we attend to them or not; better therefore to attend." p. 8

What struck me about this passage besides the obvious beauty of it (don't you think - even if you disagree with the substance?), is that it occurs within a sub-heading called "Spiritual but not Religious". The whole phenomenon, perhaps even movement, of religionless spirituality, and what motivates it, is something that I've wrestled with putting into words before. So, while on the one hand I was a little annoyed to find that someone had already dealt with the topic so thoroughly, and with such apparent ease - taking up less than two pages; on the other hand I experienced the excitement of that old familiar sense of recognition; of seeing laid out perfectly, thoughts which had banging around in my head but which I had not been able get nailed down. I could barely suppress shouting "Amen!".

If I can restate her point less elegantly, Rienstra seems to be arguing basically that it is more respectful of someone else's faith to disagree with them, than it is to just flippantly assume they believe the same things as you do. For many, disagreements over religious beliefs amount to nothing more than tasteless criticisms and useless arguments. Certainly inter-faith discussions contain many criticisms that are tasteless and many arguments that are useless, but there is a world of difference between charitable debate and fearful shouting matches. What those who want to discount, or at least down play, differences between faiths, fear above all is being judgmental. (As Rienstra also says, this fear does stem from some of the best human impulses.) After all, we are told to "judge not". What Rienstra seems to be saying though, is that it is ultimately much more judgmental of another's set of beliefs to not take seriously how it differs from yours and thus how at least one of the two of you has something wrong, than it is to say everything is in fundamental agreement. If someone were to tell me that Christian teaching consists of basically the same thing as all the other religions, I would feel a bit patronized. If you don't grant me the dignity to even theoretically choose wrongly, then you have taken away my ability to choose at all.

So while Rientstra is primarily addressing the age-old issue of religious pluralism, I'm interested in how her thought applies within the Christian community. If truth between religions matter then truth within a religion matters, and we should attend to it too. This is not to say that the only way to attend seriously to the truth is by formulating pure doctrine and excluding from the Church everyone who is in error. Obviously we are not able to do this, and probably shouldn't even want to. But that does not mean that the opposite is true and that no lines should ever be drawn. On what issues and how tightly to define these boundaries are always the trickiest issues, but that's not even what I'm getting at here. For me the mantra: "We all live by various notions of truth whether we attend to them or not; better therefore to attend." is relevant for those of us who feel that itch to pursue theological questions. Reading theology is for me a kind of devotional practice, and also a way of trying to live out at least one quarter of the Greatest Commandment. I say all this because I sometimes get the impression that some Christians look suspiciously at those of us who enjoy reading abstract or esoteric books of theology. As if we're needlessly complicating the simple faith of Jesus or even somehow heretically flirting with earning our salvation through the 'work' of study or contemplation. The important part of the quote is that we all "live by" different truths. As a professor of mine used to put it: "Ideas have legs." The fact is, obscure questions matter greatly to the Church and to individuals in their everyday lives because they affect in myriad unknown ways how we live out our lives together. Attending to that pursuit of truth in my own small way is what I aim to do with this space.

Continue reading

From nobody to writer in 3 simple steps

I'm nobody special. Nobody whose thoughts merit anybody else's attention, let alone the attention of complete strangers.

No, I'm just your average twenty-something, a number of years into marriage (I started early), a couple years into parenthood (also begun quite early), a couple years out of graduation from a four-year liberal arts institution, in possession of an expensive, yet-to-be-paid-for and yet-to-be-utilized humanities degree, and the kind of person who, when he dreams those late-night impossible dreams, the kind of dreams others might have of being a rockstar, moviestar, sportstar or some other kind of star, dreams of being a writer (though he doesn't write anything and though he apparently has no talent having never seen a run-on sentence he didn't like) or a professor (though he has nothing special to profess about) or some other kind of person who is paid for the privilege of interacting with books (though not in the way he currently does which is simply torture: buying and selling them all day, which is to say, being constantly tempted, even seduced, by the delights they hide between their covers but all the while forced into treating them primarily as ten-digit numbers not the soul-filled, life-changing, foundation-of-the-world-shaking things that they really are).

So where does a person like myself turn to begin becoming that dreamed-of future self? Where else but the hyper-democratic internet and its ever burgeoning blogosphere. Because I may be nobody special, but blogs are just made to make you feel special, they don't require any prerequisite specialness.

So now I have a blog, and that makes me a writer. On a blog one isn't just posting ones ramblings to be viewed by random passers-by or more likely, nobody at all - like so many messages in a bottle, futilely tossed into the stormy sea that is the world wide web. No my dear reader, on a blog one publishes. (I hope you don't find my claim to possessing you here to be at all presumptuous. After all, I have already established that I am, in fact, a writer. And since you are ... well, since you're there, then that makes you a reader. And since the words you're reading are mine, composed, written and published by yours truly, then that makes you my reader.)

So what's so important about this business of publishing you ask? Publishing is the yardstick we writers use to measure ourselves by. "What have you published?", "Where have you been published?" or more simply, "Are you published?" are all questions we writers like to ask one another. Publishing means that one's efforts are not in vain. Publishing means one is somehow contributing, nobody knows to what (though it probably falls under the general heading of: "The Great Conversation"), or how, but it's there just the same, all encapsulated in and guaranteed by the words every blogger clicks as the last step in sending the fruits of their labor off to the great reading public, the words: "publish post".

Continue reading