My dear friends, even though you are all basically agnostic or atheistic in your thinking and I am a Christian (and a pretty theologically conservative or orthodox one at that,) I do so appreciate and enjoy our discussions on the idea of transcendence and the philosophical categories involved in thinking about it, I would like to delve deeper into that conversation here.
You have quoted approvingly Wittgenstein's statement that "what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." [1] I would happily agree that there is an important truth in this statement not just for the atheist respecter of transcendence but also – or even especially – for the Christian. (Another part of me bristles at the presumption of Wittgenstein’s ‘must’. Whence comes his right to make such an authoritative claims? But I’m getting ahead of myself.) Since I have assumed that you are either atheist or agnostic [2] with respect to belief in god, but have this idea of an ineffable transcendence, I have decided to call you atheist respecters of transcendence. [3]
There are a few points I want to develop here. In this Part I posting, I will try to describe, as far as possible, the common ground we seem to share in our view of transcendent reality and the attendant difficulties that inhere in using finite language to talk about it. Then I will try to describe how postmodern thought – insofar as it undermines any strict dichotomy between faith and reason – makes religious speech, knowledge and thus the religious life, more not less tenable. In subsequent posts, I will address further outcomes of this paradigm change in epistemology.
First, in Part II, I will flesh out the argument touched on here that the only understandings truly troubled by the postmodern turn, are those based upon a purportedly neutral view of truth. I will look especially at the idea of atheism’s alleged ethical superiority using the arguments of the current crop of apologists for atheism: Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, as case studies.
In Part III, I will explain a possible Christian response to postmodern thought, namely, how the way past the impasse of the apophatic impulse is to be more, not less, open to tradition-based teachings, institutional understandings and in-credible stories of transcendence. Included in this, I will discuss the paradoxical nature of Christian teaching, arguing that it essentially always incorporates into its positive theological assertions, strong negative theological elements.
If I’m able to continue on to a Part IV, it will be on how, a trajectory parallel to that of the postmodern critique of modernity and resultant re-opening to tradition would be exactly the path required of any post/modern human commitment robust enough to undo the imprisonment of the self from its own bubble of narcissism.
Now, we have discussed the idea of transcendence but not what transcendence means. So before I explore how the postmodern outlook affects the discussion, we have to stake out some common ground in our views of the nature of transcendence. One of the difficulties with the conversation though, is that its very possibility is a big part of what needs to be discussed. I’m not assuming that everyone would immediately agree with the picture I describe, nihilism is still a live option, I am just trying to cautiously lay out a shared sense or intuition we, and many others, all seem to have. To pin down a reason isn’t my goal here, but just to give outlines of what we seem to share, experientially or phenomenologically, in order to move forward to the topic of how one could talk about any possible transcendent reality.
To explain my use of the word transcendence, I will use a few examples of ways or even degrees that something can be described as transcendent. To begin with the most mundane: as I look at a three-dimensional object, say a cup, the far side of the cup transcends me perceptually, but not essentially, I can simply turn the cup around and that transcendence is flattened. [4]
To skip ahead a little, there is a deeper way in which the past, even my own past experience, transcends me. It is not present to me for perception in any first-hand way, thus any views I have on it are at best theories and partial reconstructions. This transcendence is no longer accidental, able to be undone like the far side of the cup, but essential to the nature of what is experienced.
For my purposes, the really interesting step occurs when we talk about the experience of other persons. To encounter another person is to encounter some’thing’ which, no matter how familiar, or known or even studied, will always, and essentially exceed my comprehension. [5] Imagine the most brilliant psychologist in the world who also happened to be in possession of a machine which could scan an individual’s body and brain in a way as far beyond today’s MRI as an MRI is beyond an x-ray. Then make the person under observation the scientist’s spouse of 50 years. We would still say that, beyond the amazing amount of detail available, there is an essential something that cannot be grasped. As much as we might think the mind arises or emerges from the brain’s functioning and personhood from the interaction of the brain and the body, most of us would say that you or I cannot be merely reduced to these things. To put it another way: another’s stream of consciousness can never fully overlap with one’s own. We are always, irreducibly, mysteries to one another.
I think we are on common ground so far, but I also believe that we can go one step further. It also seems to me that we find ourselves believing that there is some type of existence or some quality of experience that is more essentially transcendent of us; something from which these other instances of transcendence derive their transcendence; something that is at the very least phenomenologically and ethically transcendent, but that also defies description in any human categories including, but not limited to, current scientific, philosophical or religious categories, but probably also any imaginable future category. Some might describe this as a god or God, but to others it might be a philosophical notion anywhere from a Platonic form like Truth or Beauty, all the way to Derrida’s idea of the undeconstrucible, in the name of which deconstructions are carried out (i.e. the Justice in the name of which all particular instantiations of justice are deconstructed). This would mean that whatever concepts one could bring to bear on whatever is behind this experience of transcendence, those concepts would even more so than for the above categories of transcendence, essentially and always fail to completely capture what they are pointing to. [6]
John Caputo (perhaps another atheist respecter of transcendence) wrote, in an intensification of Wittgenstein’s sentiment, that “by the time one has said that something is ineffable, that one cannot say a thing, one has already been speaking for some time and one has already said too much.” [7] On this view, not only is every interpretation of the absolute imperfect insofar as it misses something, the very act of predicating something to that which is beyond predication is a mistaken undertaking. Caputo notes the difficulty of remaining faithful to this insight in thinkers from contemporary philosophers to Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, who all want to insist on the absolutely indescribable nature of the absolute but who also spend gallons of ink and reams of paper saying exactly why this is the case. It feels a bit like the bind one finds oneself in claiming “the only rule is that there are no rules.” Is this just hypocrisy or paradox or both?
It’s clear that both atheist respecters of transcendence and Christian namers of the ineffable together, contra Wittgenstein and the apophatic impulse generally, seem to be compelled somehow to speak on this subject, even if it is only to make negative statements. My own wrestling with this issue has been specifically over whether this type of via negativa, can also incorporate any positive pronouncements on the nature of transcendence. If we agree that every truth claim made about the ultimate is wrong, I want to add that some are clearly more wrong than others, which means that some are more right. (See my earlier post on Deb Rienstra’s beautiful way of putting this.) So the question really becomes whether purely apophatic thinking is even humanly possible, leave alone desirable. I take it as a matter of deductive logic that any statement of the form “God is not…” or “the transcendent is not…,” if true, reveals knowledge of the transcendent. This might appear a simplistic conclusion, but the implications for how to think and speak of ultimate things are broad.
We all feel, not just comfortable in pointing to different social orders and saying “this is not just!” We would insist on it as a right, even perhaps a duty to do so. When asked to define Justice itself though, we are at a loss to do justice to it. (Try to imagine yourself as a character in a Socratic dialogue making this attempt and succeeding in a way that would compel the great gadfly to agree with you and you’ll know what I mean.) So too, I’m comfortable saying God is not the flying spaghetti monster, Thor, Zeus, myself, nature or even just the the Prime Mover. But in the name of what or whom do I say this?
It’s not fair to, on one hand, commit (or submit?) to a belief in a positive understanding of Justice through critiquing fallible instantiations of the ideal, and then on the other hand argue that it’s incoherent to believe there is a God, who is by definition conceptually transcendent, just because one isn’t able to provide a proper definition. I am not making the argument (at least at this point) that if you believe there is such a thing as Truth, you have to agree with me that there is a God who is the source of it. But, it is only fair that if you find it credible to set the bar at one level for thinking about one class of transcendent ideas you can’t suddenly jack it up for another. If we can muddle about making our provisional theories about the nature of Truth, Justice, Beauty, and Love, and even act upon them, then we are at least as justified epistemically to proceed in like manner with respect to the divine.
To insist on speaking about the unspeakable “is not a matter of ‘giving up the infinite’ but rather of giving up the assumption that the only way to ‘do justice’ to the infinite is to speak of it in its infinity - which, of course, is impossible.” [8] Perhaps it is a better service to Justice to make our best attempts at bringing it about according to our limited understanding than to just sit on our hands out of false humility, and perhaps it is more respectful of the transcendent to name it God and worship him, than to just feign absolute ignorance.
Thus far I’ve been trying to deal with the background of approaching the infinite with finite words. Now what does postmodernism have to do with this picture? First, let me provide some tentative definitions. When I use the word modern or modernism, I refer roughly to the period immediately following the Enlightenment, up to and possibly including today. The Enlightenment itself is of course at least as complex a phenomenon as postmodernism, but I will rely on a terribly simplistic working definition to function as a launching point: that of Hans-George Gadamer’s characterization of the Enlightenment as having a basic “prejudice against prejudice”. [9] The paradigmatic example is, as always, Rene Descartes and his 'discovery’ of hyperbolic doubt as the way to true knowledge. The idea is that we should doubt everything (again, says who?) until compelled to belief on pure, objective, rational grounds. Doubt, in other words, is given the benefit of, well, doubt. All beliefs are guilty until proven innocent. All prejudices are prejudicially swept aside. Descartes famously comes to all kinds of conclusions, including the existence of God, as if out of thin air, and while his success is not very accepted, his method and standard of what counts as success have stood as the ideals behind most of western philosophy ever since.
One of the key elements in the formation of the Enlightenment was its reaction to the confessional wars. The Catholics were fighting the Protestants, the Protestants were fighting Radical Protestants, all (apparently) over theological differences. So it made some sense then – since it seemed to be these stories and prejudices which were dividing us – to have thought that we needed to get beyond them in order to establish peace. It is no accident that the seeds of postmodernism, already perhaps sowed in the 19th century, began to sprout in the aftermath of the World Wars which were seen in many quarters as a signal of the failure of the Enlightenment project. The time period that saw the rise of postmodern thought was also defined by the Cold War, a conflict which, while threatening the very extinction of the species due to the facing-off of two superpowers, was carried out by the nations which were most thoroughly rooted in and defined by modernist philosophies. Both communism and capitalism can be easily described as different versions of the story that humanity is on a march of progress toward inevitable utopia. The nations that had the strongest beliefs about their representation of objective justice and morality seemed the most bent on killing each other with the real danger of taking the rest of the world with them.
To turn the discussion to this emerging postmodern thought, it is first necessary to distinguish postmodernism from postmodernity, the latter of which I take to be a cultural context while the former is more a philosophical sensibility. While the two inevitably have an intertwining cause-and-effect relationship, I limit my comments to postmodernism. Even cutting the matter down in this way still leaves a huge topic. But since I’m not attempting an exhaustive study, I’m just going to jump in head-first again and go with the definition used by Lyotard who described postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” [10]
The crux of this definition is obviously in how one defines a metanarrative. Many responses to postmodernism implicitly assume that religions like Christianity are metanarratives par excellence and thus, depending on who’s doing the reacting, either Christianity or postmodernism is to be rejected. I do not take this view. Christianity does have an explicit teaching on the past, present and future, not only of every human being’s life, but also of humanity, life and the world itself. If Christianity is true, then it affects everything.
So how can this not be a metanarrative? Maybe the misunderstanding arises from a lack of Greek vocabulary. The “meta” of metanarrative basically means beyond, so a metanarrative is beyond a narrative in a way roughly analogous to the way metaphysics (dealing with the nature of reality – determining what kinds of things exist) is beyond physics. The story goes that the librarians at the ancient library in Alexandria were categorizing the works of Aristotle and when they got to the philosophical works they didn’t have a word for, simply labeled them metaphysics, because they were shelved after, and were obviously different from, the works on physics. Now it would be nonsensical if a physicist felt he had to give up his understanding of the world gained from Newton, Einstein and Hawking because he read yet another philosopher declare the end of metaphysics. But this is the reaction that some Christians have, or others expect them to have, toward their beliefs in the light of postmodern thought.
Jamie Smith writes that in defining metanarratives, “what is at stake is not the scope of these narratives but the nature of the claims they make. For Lyotard, metanarratives are a distinctly modern phenomenon: they are stories which not only tell a grand story (since even premodern and tribal stories do this), but also claim to be able to legitimate the story and its claims by an appeal to universal Reason. On Lyotard’s account, the Enuma Elish, though telling a story that is universal or grand in scope, is nevertheless not a metanarrative because it does not claim to legitimate itself by an appeal to scientific Reason. On the other hand, Lyotard sees classical Marxism as a metanarrative insofar as it claims to be a system legitimated by Reason, and therefore to be universally accepted on that basis.” [11] So much for postmodernism.
To connect the two ideas, I take it that the Enlightenment began as a heightened suspicion of local narratives; any particular or historically-based tradition which claimed to connect to Truth. Postmodernism then is really a kind of extension of, or even hyper-modernity, as it turns suspicion toward the Enlightenment itself, seeing it as merely the tradition of being against traditions, or as just another story about the origins and ends of mankind. (Once upon a time, say the objective philosophers, there was the state of nature where there was a war of all against all. Since then, we have been steadily marching forward in progress – with the occasional setback - and we will one day live happily ever after.)
Enlightenment thinkers doubted faith in order to seek knowledge, postmodern thinkers have doubts even about doubt and either give up on attaining real knowledge of the world, becoming nihilistic, or recognize that some sort of leap of faith is the necessary beginning of knowledge. But it’s not so much that postmodern theories of interpretation imply one needs to make a leap of faith, but that even to hold out on faith is itself a faith-like commitment. What the break-down of the dichotomy between faith and reason entails is that any interpretive, hermeneutic commitment, including of course moral ones, are always already faith commitments.
When doubt is made the primary means of attaining knowledge, we should hardly be surprised when we only end up with more doubts. It seems like the path of doubt, once begun, works like a kind of Chinese finger trap: the harder one tries to free oneself, the more stuck one gets.
So there are really two moves going on here. The first is, in pointing to the fundamental faith commitments of all interpretations, postmodernism levels the playing field for all modes of discourse, whether they be scientific, rationalistic or religious. [12] The second is to point out the fundamental difference between self-consciously, narratively-based belief systems, like religions with a founding myth which they need not be embarrassed about unabashedly proclaiming, and stories whose very tale seeks conceal its basic narrative character, like modernist beliefs in Truth, Justice, Humanity and Freedom.
Another way to look at this is through the claim made in modern society and politics that what is needed is a naked public square. To extend the image, it is as if the emperor of modernity has mandated a neutral space where everyone must shed the clothing of their respective presuppositions and faith commitments before entering. Postmodernity is like the child pointing out, “The emperor has clothes! Everyone in this square is still fully clothed and just pretending to be naked.” The emperor, himself luxuriously clad, and his followers are all duly ashamed. [13] The Christian is not troubled by this, she knows, at least when properly reminded, that her belief in God is not arrived at from an objective standpoint but always and only through faith seeking understanding. If the Christian thought there were some basis on which to believe in God other than God himself, they would obviously be worshipping in the wrong direction.
In conclusion, though my Christian beliefs are not dependent upon postmodern philosophy, I do find myself compelled by some of its ways of viewing the world and ways of human knowing in the world. I find in postmodernism a peculiar kind of ally; a sort of enemy-of-my-enemy, contingent alliance. Insofar as I find myself in dialogue with atheist thinkers who are still wedded to modernist epistemological assumptions, postmodernism is a useful tool not only because it deflects some of their more strident criticisms of faith in general and Christianity in particular, but also because it ironically makes those criticisms seem even less tenable than ever on their own terms! I will turn to the question of how criticisms of faith commitments backfire on the more militant atheists in Part II.
For now, Adieu and Goodbye (God-Be-With-Ye)!
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notes
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1. Wittgenstein, Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 7
2. I’m taking up atheism as the more appropriate term. Agnosticism – without knowledge – is to me not an interesting middle ground between theism and atheism. Even vocal atheists admit the possibility that there could be a God, they don’t claim certain knowledge that there is no God, they just don’t believe in one, they lack theistic belief: a-theism. The orthodox Christian is really agnostic about God as her belief is based on faith and not the pure and certain knowledge to which the modern definition of agnosticism seems to oppose itself. It’s also important to remember the arch-enemy of orthodoxy in ancient and modern times, was and is Gnosticism. So it would make sense that orthodox Christian belief is in an important sense agnostic as well.
3. I apologize if this nomenclature feels limiting and I will happily refine it if you think it's a mischaracterization. But you see, I just can't help using labels, imperfect approximations of reality, as a means of moving forward. I also understand that I'm speaking to multiple people and that there are differences in your opinions. But I'm doing my best to address what seem to be common elements in your thinking.
4. I don’t remember which particular professor of mine used this analogy, it was probably more than one. (Maybe all philosophy professors use something like it.) I’ll just cite my reference as: Calvin College philosophy department, 2002-2004
5. I’m relying here on my understanding of Levinas & Derrida’s treatment of what they call the essential Otherness or alterity of human persons one to another.
6. Trying to describe the phenomenological transcendence of the four examples I’m dealing with is difficult because I’m trying to describe different levels of qualitative difference. A rough analogy would be to say that to go from black-and-white to color is one qualitative change, but to go then to 3-dimensional moving images is a greater qualitative change.
7. Caputo, Against Ethics, p. 75
8. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation, p. 129
9. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 273
10. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, xxiv
11. Smith "A little story about Metanarratives" In Christianity and the Postmodern Turn, p. 125
12. This leveling of the playing field does not mean an anything-goes relativism of interpretations.It just means there is no neutral or objective perspective on any class of knowledge. I guess a conclusion one could take is that “I’ll just think whatever ever I please”, and believe, for example, that the earth is in the center of the universe because the Bible says so. It’s true, this probably couldn’t be proven false. But this would be a silly conclusion. It would be to give up on the task of hermeneutic discernment, missing the other half of the statement that some conclusions are better than others.
13. I thought I made this up, but later (re)discovered that the source for this metaphor is from Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology, p. 182-83
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Notes for a Conversation with My Friends, the Atheist Respecters of Transencence, Part I
Friday, May 25, 2007
Gotta problem with your religion? Good.
"Just on a theoretical level there is a mistake in going from the background you come from to an entirely fresh background. The way you know that a religion is your religion is that you have problems with it. If you don’t have problems with it, it’s not your religion."
This quote is from an interview with Philip Groening about his new film Into Great Silence. I liked it so much because I think it succinctly addresses a topic that is often on my mind: the problem of shopping around for a religion, or for that matter, a denomination or congregation.
Lord, I pray that I will never cease having problems with the religion through which I find myself being reached by you.
Friday, May 04, 2007
Hermeneutical Headaches or, Why Libraries Make Me Dizzy
The root source of my impatience (let's call it what it is) arises from the combination of my wanting to read every beautiful, informative, clever, important, in short: every worthwhile book, while, having worked in bookstores for seven years, being pretty well aware of just how many worthwhile books are out there. It's a lot. But this is only the beginning. The main reason libraries (my shorthand for the sum of human knowledge) are prone to having deleterious effects on me is that not only do I want to read so many books, but I want to already have read them.
Mark Twain said that "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read". I take his meaning to be that people want the cachet of having-read the classics: showing off a degree of education, name-dropping esoteric authors and making highfalutin literary references (I think 'highfalutin' is the language Huck would use - [that was a shameless ploy to show I've actually read Twain]). I may be as guilty of this literary snobbery as the next person but that's not the real reason I want not just to read, but to have-read, well, everything.
The first reason is that what I enjoy even more than reading a book is discussing an already-read book with another. The opportunities for that are few and far between these days though, so that's not really it either. More than anything else, what makes my head spin around stacks of books is the hermeneutical circle involved in making one's way through them. The hermeneutical circle as applied to a particular work is the idea that one understands the work as a whole in terms of its constituent parts, and understands each part in terms of one's understanding of the whole. If we take a book like the Bible for example, we would obviously say that one doesn't understand it until one has read the whole thing. The concept of the hermeneutical circle would add that one can't have a full understanding, even of Genesis, till one has gotten through Revelation. But once we've done that, we have to re-read Genesis in light of our new understanding, which changes our view of everything else, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Suffice it to say that if we read through a book once, we've only just begun.
If this picture isn't daunting enough, we have to add in all the knowledge outside of the book that is required to read (understand) it more fully.( Notice I didn't say outside the text! [Oh shame on me, another "look-at-how-smart-I-am" reference.]) So let's say I want to read a certain novel I've heard great things about. So I read it. Then I read it a few more times, studying all angles, the beginning in light of the ending and vice versa etc. Then I think, I should read it in the original French. So I learn French and read it again. But the novel is set in the Sixteenth century, so I should read everything I can about that period. But the author wrote it during World War II, so I should read everything I can about that period to understand the author's context. But what if I'm not sure how this whole reading and learning thing works at all? I need to read books on linguistics, hermeneutics, the philosophies of language and interpretation, learn those work's original languages, historical contexts etc. etc. The rabbit hole goes pretty far down.
Tentative Conclusion:
Perhaps if one were able to fully read any one text, one would by definition have read every text; one would be - omniscient.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
The Sopranos: Science & the Meaning of Life
In season 6, episode 4 of The Sopranos, Tony's in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound and the resulting surgery. He's been reading a kid's book on dinosaurs, the only reading material around, when he turns to his nephew Christopher, and says, "Get this. It says here if the history of the planet was represented by the empire state building, the time that human beings have been on earth would only be a postage stamp at the very top. You realize how insignificant that makes us."
Christopher replies matter of factly, "I don't feel that way" gets up and walks away.
What a humorous lesson on how to elegantly deal with the tendency of some scientists and scholars to overinterpret the facts. Beautiful.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Kierkegaard on Monasticism
Soren Kierkegaard is quoted as the epigraph of Nancy Klein Maguire's An Infinity of Little Hours, as saying:
"Of this there is not doubt, our age and Protestantism in general may need the monastery again, or wish it were there. The 'monastery' is an essential dialectical element in Christianity. We therefore need it out there like a navigation buoy at sea in order to see where we are, even though I myself would not enter it. But if there really is true Christianity in every generation, there must also be individuals who have this need..."
I love reading Kierkegaard. He's not always the easiest on his readers, but the reward is always well worth the work. He is also one of the few philosophers that regularly makes me laugh out loud. I was surprised though to read him with anything like the above positive appraisal of monasticism in the light of his emphasis on the individual's conversion experience and his trenchant critique of Christendom.
Monasticism can be two different, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, things. On the one hand it can be an individual's path of intense devotion and zealous attempt at attaining perfection. This is the only thing most people picture when they imagine the life of a monk. On the other hand, at least in its oldest, largest and most influential form, the Benedictine tradition practices communal sanctification and communal salvation. It emphasizes what is true of Christian teaching in general: that there is no salvation for any individual apart from the body of believers.
I'm not sure which conception of the monastic Kierkegaard would have had in mind, but I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiment on its continued necessity to those within and without its cloisters.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Individualism Redux: Authority Part IV
I'm afraid I didn't do quite a good enough job painting a picture of the purely individualist view of the self, the view that rejects all authority other than its own. (Holders of this view would probably use different terminology.) So I can't resist adding a couple quotes from someone who does a much better job. I know there's endless material that would do as good a job or better than what follows, but since I've just shelved the book a week ago and it's fresh in my mind, I'm going to turn again to Cardinal Ratzinger (aka Benedict XVI). These are a couple of his takes on "tyranny of the self" in his book, Salt of the Earth.
"Man is conceived in purely individualistic terms; he is only himself. The relation that is an essential part of him and that is what really first enables him to become himself is taken away from him. This claim to be the ultimate and sole authority over oneself, and the claim to have the right to appropriate as much of life as possible, while no one has the right to stand in the way, is part and parcel of the sense of life on offer to man today." p. 167
"You are built for love, and therefore for giving, for renunciation, for the pruning of yourself. Only if you give yourself, if you lose yourself, as Christ puts it, will you be able to live. This basic option has to stand out in all its starkness. It is offered to man's freedom. But it should still really be made plain that to live by making one's own claims is a false recipe for life. The refusal of suffering and the refusal of creatureliness, hence, of being held to a standard, is ultimately the refusal of love itself, and that ruins man. For it is precisely his submitting himself to a claim and allowing himself to be pruned that enables him to mature and bear fruit. ... Somewhere deep down man knows: I have to be challenged, and I have to learn to form myself according to a higher standard and to give myself and to lose myself." p. 168
If the above descriptions don't hit the nail of 21st century American selfishness square on its proverbial head, then I don't know what would.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Not Whether but Which: Authority Part III
Any debate on religious authority usually takes the form of those in favor of authority versus those against it. Thus conservatives will argue for obedience to authority (Catholics stressing hierarchy, Protestants the scriptures) while liberals or progressives argue against it. But it's never really a question of whether or not one obeys an authority, but rather which authority one respects. [1] The mistake then is made by both sides in this debate. Indeed, the mistake is to have the debate at all.
Authority in and of itself is not inherently bad, nor is it inherently good. Authority is good when it is properly oriented toward good ends. Thus the progressive side of the debate, couching its argument in terms of liberation and freedom, is to my way of thinking, just substituting the tyranny of the self for obedience to an external authority. (I think the way to view this is in how celebrities clearly seem to be enslaved to the image of themselves that they propagate in the culture - genuine celebrities being just an extreme version of the average self-centered American ego.)
The conservatives do the disservice of granting the terms of the debate instead of pointing out that there is no rejecting of authority but only a switching of allegiances. Conservatives thereby come across as being against freedom instead of more fruitfully stressing the classic distinction between freedom-from (negatively defined) and freedom-for (positively defined).
If what I've said so far seems to be taking the 'side of authority', reneging on my claim that the debate over authority is a false one, it is only because in our time and place, 21st century America, we exist at an apogee of individualism (blogs themselves being an interesting manifestation of ego-extension) and so we really are in no danger of accidentally becoming overly submissive to authority. (At least as a culture. It should be noted that some individuals, because of personal psychological makeup, can be more prone than others to the abuse of authority.)
So while on the one hand the extreme individualism of our society makes anti-authority tendencies stronger and thus more in need of counter argument, on the other hand I do think it is the case that recognizing no authority other than one's own self, what I've called the tyranny of the self, is the more pernicious of the traps to fall into. There are two basic reasons for this.
One is that, because one whose only master is oneself imagines that they are without a master, they mask from themselves the nature of their enslavement and are in far greater danger of never achieving true liberation.
And two, while one who seeks to submit to some kind of external authority will always have their inherent selfishness and pride to call into question abuses of authority, submission to the self is self-reinforcing, a kind of feedback loop that has nothing outside itself to break the vicious cycle of pure self-servitude. We need something other than ourselves to call us out of ourselves.
It goes without saying that authority can be easily abused, though it is important to keep in mind the afore-posted distinction between authority and power. We might say that the mistake those in authority make is to rely on the exercise of power while the anti-authority mistake is to throw out the need for authority because of the misuse of power.
There is a sense in which the complete jettisoning of authority in our culture because of abuses has the positive outcome of opening space for submission to the Church to be truly free. Finally, nothing I've said so far assumes a conclusion to the necessary discussion on what form Christian authority should take in terms of ecclesiology or family life, etc. However authority is manifested in the Church it is always through mutual submission and whoever is in a position of authority need always lead in terms of service above all.
Another picture to reflect the distinction between the question of which authority versus the false debate for and against authority is in Jesus' claim that his yolk is easy and his burden light. The first thing to note is that there is no question in this statement (let alone the rest of the New Testament) as to whether or not becoming a Christian involves submitting oneself to Christ. The Christian is nothing if not a follower in the way of one who has gone before.
The other thing I've often wondered about this statement of Jesus' is what burdens and what yolks are being held up for comparison. I think a common tendency would be to assume the heavier burden alluded to is the Law of Judaism, especially of those legalistic Pharisees. There may be something to this, but while I have no exegetical basis for it, I think it is more useful (again, in our context) to see the heavier burden, the harsher yolk as that of subservience to ourselves.
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1. This writing is a riff along generally Hauerwasian lines. It isn't based on any work in particular but after writing it, I realize that the basic idea isn't any new insight of mine. In addition to various Hauerwas essays, it is probably most indebted to Jamie Smith's reading of postmodern thinkers such as Foucault. (See especially his chapter on Foucault in Who's Afraid of Postmodernism.) The usual caveat applies: the above authors get credit for any useful insights and I get credit for any mistakes, oversimplifications etc. etc.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Benedictine Authority Defined: Authority Part II
This is the second of a multi-installment 'series' on the idea of authority, both in general and as it relates specifically to theology and the Church. Call it, if you will, an attempt at conceptual rehabilitation.
Having begun to chew over a sense of religious authority, and reactions to it, in the last post by looking at the person of Pope Benedict XVI, I turn now to a reflection on authority as it is viewed within the community still responding to the authority of the first Benedict, the one called Saint, whose voice echoes down to us from the 6th century. In his book, Saint Benedict for the Laity, Eric Dean, a lay monastic associate writes that:
"Much of the domination we resent in our society is associated with power rather than authority. Clearly, we have largely lost our comprehension of the distinction, common to writers of the Middle Ages, that stands as one of the authentic achievements of the natural law tradition: the distinction between authority and power. Power is the simple exercise of force or the credible threat of force." (p. 14) Then, after some discussion of concrete examples of the exercise of authority vs power, Dean concludes, "It would seem that the authority persons have is inversely proportional to the amount of force they need to achieve compliance with their desires. Real authority needs no force." (p.16)
I'm not sure what the background to my thinking on the matter of authority is. Perhaps one could say that my interest in a rehabilitation of the concept is merely a psychological manifestation; a resurfacing of my relatively strict upbringing, especially as I am trying to stake out the right way to raise my own family. Be that as it may, two things have seemed relatively clear to me as long as I have been trying to wrap my head around the theological issues surrounding authority and obedience, freedom and submission.
One is that the path of a Christian life becomes almost unintelligible without some sense of both authority and its implicit companion, obedience. And two, that what people typically react to when they reject or repudiate these notions are at the very least caricatures of the concepts, or at most something different all together. It is on this second point that I find the above distinction helpful.
While Dean here doesn't provide us with a positive definition for what authority properly should be, by distinguishing authority from power, un-defining the former in terms of the latter, he does open up a lot of space, and brings us worlds closer to developing a proper positive sense of authority. (Dean further reflects on what the conflation of the two terms means in practice for everything from politics to parenting in a very illuminating fashion.) Registering the above distinction was kind of an "Aha!" moment for me. I always felt there was something missing from the conversation whenever the topic of authority reared its head. Dean puts his finger on precisely the problem. Sometimes a little argument over semantics isn't such a bad place to start.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Prefect Turned Pope: Authority Part I
I recently completed a book-length interview with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, entitled Salt of the Earth. I've also read his Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and his first Papal encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love). I first started browsing his books when he was elected Pope, out of an interest in Church current events, and then continued because I can't help picking up small, well written books of theology, especially the kind you can read in a handful of sittings, which is precisely Ratzinger's medium.
Philip Jenkins, in the title of a recent book, claims that Anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice. This might seem an extravagant claim, but also, on the face of it, bears a fair amount of credibility, depending on how you nuance "acceptable". (I'm assuming that this acceptability is determined, as usual in America, in very WASPy environs.) If this is the case, then certainly there is no element of Roman Catholicism that so rankles its detractors (anti-Catholic bigots?) as the office of the Pope. The Pope, it seems, is such a scandal, not only because as the symbolic unifier of Catholicism, he stands for everything thing else about Catholicism that one could object to, from crusades to confessionals, but also because of the intrinsic objectionable nature of someone, in this day and age, presuming to wield such an absolute authority. Indeed it seems like much of the Protestant reaction to Catholicism is basically anti-authoritarian in character.
With this as background, add to the mix the personal reputation of the current pontiff, Benedict XVI. The reactions to whose election, in the popular press at least, invariably employed words such as conservative or rigid, or included the obligatory reminder that in his most recent digs as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger was heir to the tradition of the much maligned Holy Inquisition.
So it was pleasantly surprising-like a breath of fresh air really-to read the thoughts of this reputedly reactionary example of an already 'authoritarian' tradition, and finding a very human, very open voice, full of patience and charity for interlocutors, and characterized throughout by a depth of humility that would be a welcome change in your average academic theologian.
Here are just a few examples of Ratzinger's mode of discourse on the topics of faith & doubt, change, institutionalization, the Enlightenment, and world religions.
"Faith never cuts off questions. ... It could also become rigid if it no longer exposed itself to these questions." p. 88
"There needn't always be universal answers. We also have to realize our limits and forgo answers where they aren't possible ... we don't find answers by forcing everything into a system." p 101
"I agree with Cardinal Newman, who says that to live is to change and that the one who was capable of changing has lived much." p. 116
"The great Churches of the Christian countries are perhaps also suffocating on account of their own over-institutionalization, of their institutional power, of the pressure of their own history. The living simplicity of the faith has been lost to view in this situation." p. 123
"In this sense, the development of the Enlightenment, with which the model of the separation of Church and state appears, definitely has a positive side. ... Here are opportunities for a more vital, because more deeply and more freely grounded, faith, which, however, must fight against being subjectivized and which must continure to try to speak its message publicly." p. 240
"The dialogue with other religions is under way. We are, I think, all convinced that we can learn something, for example, from the mysticism of Asia and that precisely the great mystical traditions also open possibilities of encounter that are not so clearly present in positive theology." p. 263
Do these sound like the words of a doctrinally rigid church dictator to you? Pope Benedict XVI doubtless speaks with a degree of authority, even to the secular world. With the above as representative of his mode of thinking, I for one would welcome his type of authority having more of an influence.
Monday, July 10, 2006
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.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
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.
Friday, July 07, 2006
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".
