messy imaginaries

Taylor again:

Where the [“progressive”] Wendovers think their judgments are unproblematically scientific and rational, many of the orthodox of the day saw this kind of apostasy in equally stark terms as the simple fruit of pride. It is related that [Mary Augusta] Ward attended the first set of Bampton Lectures in 1881, at which the speaker, himself a nephew of Wordsworth, explained the abandonment of orthodox Christianity by a number of intellectual faults, including indolence, coldness, recklessness, pride, and avarice. It was this attack which spurred Mrs. Ward to write her novel [Robert Elsmere], which would show that this was a caricature. And indeed, what emerges from the novel is that good faith and honesty can be found on all sides of this controversy, even though the story awards the ultimate palm for courage and integrity to [the “Arnoldian”] Robert.

This is a place where I might clarify further my own understanding of these conversions and deconversions. I cannot accept the Whiggish master narrative that they are determined by clear reason. They look rational within a certain framework, indeed, but this framework attracts us for a host of reasons, including ethical ones. Among the ethical attractions is certainly that of the free, invulnerable, disengaged agent. Being one of these is something in which moderns take a certain pride. But to leap from this to saying, simply, that the move from orthodoxy is actuated by pride is quite invalid. In some cases, undoubtedly. But what we’re dealing with in talking of these frameworks is complex environing backgrounds of our thought and action, which impinge on our lives in a host of ways. In one respect, yes, this modern sense of impersonal orders can give us a sense of our dignity as free agents. But it also offers us powerful ideals, of honesty and integrity, as well as of benevolence and solidarity, just to name some of the most prominent. In the whole aetiological story of how these frameworks arose, pride has its place. But in individual cases, the stories can be as many and as different as there are people who inhabit them. In some cases, for a variety of reasons, the sense of an alternative was so far off the screen, that the principal response was determined by the ideals: say, honesty, integrity, and a sense of the human potential for moral ascent. This is what one sees with T. H. Green; and this is what Mrs. Ward shows us in her protagonist.

We are in fact all acting, thinking, and feeling out of backgrounds and frameworks which we do not fully understand. To ascribe total personal responsibility to us for these is to want to leap out of the human condition. At the same time, no background leaves us utterly without room for movement and change. The realities of human life are messier than is dreamed of either by dogmatic rationalists, or in the manichean rigidities of embattled orthodoxy.

muffled resonances

Charles Taylor:

To get farther with this, and bring out more what it involves, we have to venture on some phenomenology, and this is always hazardous. How to describe this sense? Perhaps in terms like these: our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.

This is the kind of lack which can show up with adolescence, and be the origin of an identity crisis. But it can also show up later, as the basis of a “mid-life crisis”, where what previously satisfied us, gave us a sense of solidity, seems not really to match up, not to deserve what we put into it. The things which mattered up to now fail.

This is just an attempt to give some shape to a general malaise, and I recognize how questionable it is, and how many other descriptions could have been offered here. But the malaise also takes a number of more definite forms, in terms of defined issues, or felt lacks.

One way of framing this issue is in terms of “the meaning of life”, Luc Ferry’s “le sens du sens”, the basic point which gives real significance to our lives. Almost every action of ours has a point; we’re trying to get to work, or to find a place to buy a bottle of milk after hours. But we can stop and ask why we’re doing these things, and that points us beyond to the significance of these significances. The issue may arise for us in a crisis, where we feel that what has been orienting our life up to now lacks real value, weight. So a successful doctor may desert a highly paid and technically demanding position, and go off with Médecins Sans Frontières to Africa, with a sense that this is really significant. A crucial feature of the malaise of immanence is the sense that all these answers are fragile, or uncertain; that a moment may come, where we no longer feel that our chosen path is compelling, or cannot justify it to ourselves or others. There is a fragility of meaning, analogous to the existential fragility we always live with: that suddenly an accident, earthquake, flood, a fatal disease, some terrible betrayal, may jolt us off our path of life, definitively and without return. Only the fragility that I am talking about concerns the significance of it all; the path is still open, possible, supported by circumstances, the doubt concerns its worth.

darkly through the glass

Christian Wiman:

HARD NIGHT
What words or harder gift
does the light require of me
carving from the dark
this difficult tree?
What place or farther peace
do I almost see
emerging from the night
and heart of me?
The sky whitens, goes on and on.
Fields wrinkle into rows
of cotton, go on and on.
Night like a fling of crows
disperses and is gone.
What song, what home,
what calm or one clarity
can I not quite come to,
never quite see:
this field, this sky, this tree.

freedom qua trust

Peter Marin:

When I have something partial presented to me as if it were true or entire, why should I listen with much more than just curiosity?
I have no trouble with belief systems, but what I really want to hear is the intimacy of someone’s individual encounter with the world. Then I begin to trust them. . . .
This is a complicated question. There’s a rhythm, like breathing in and out. For me, the ideal would be the losing of self followed by the return to self with a changed or renewed sense of connection, an awareness of the gravity of one’s existence, and, therefore, a fuller sense of responsibility.
Losing of the self may happen when we’re least conscious of ourselves. And we are most fully ourselves but least conscious of ourselves when engaged in the truest activities. Don’t you think that all ecstatic activity, which finally teaches us who we can be, takes place in the moment when the self is lost and therefore permanently changed, in ways that resonate later, by having been lost? I would say that in the moment when we’re not aware of being self, we are more deeply into being than at any other time. Then part of the self develops an awareness that grows around the knowledge of our capacity for what we might call “deep being.” A new kind of self grows out of this deep being. It’s the serious self that is aware of the significance and gravity of every one of its gestures, and yet it has enough trust in the world outside, in the plenitude of that world, to be able to laugh.

supra something or other

Rowan Williams:

And we need to recall that what seems to be a compelling reductive version is telling you nothing, except that this is an intrinsic element in a complex reality. Behind that reductionism, as again I’ve suggested, is what’s often an unexamined notion of matter. Daniel Dennett (a philosopher for whom I have a great deal of respect) has said that we have to bear in mind in any discussion of consciousness that there is only one kind of stuff. And while that’s very tempting, I want to know a little bit more about what he means by ‘stuff’. Because, of course, the world is not full of stuff; the world is a very complex set of interactions of information-bearing energy. And when you’ve said that, and recognized that the word ‘information’ is, as the professionals say, ‘analogical’ (that is, that it works on a number of different levels in interestingly different ways), it’s no longer particularly interesting to say ‘there’s one sort of stuff’. The world we inhabit is not a world where little solid things bump into each other and nudge each other around. It is a world in which information and instructions (interesting we use these nakedly intellectual metaphors) are conveyed through material exchanges of energy, and the more we analyse those material exchanges of energy, the less it looks like little bits of stuff.

C.S. Lewis:

No new discovery, no new method, will ever give a final victory to either interpretation. For what is required, on all these levels alike, is not merely knowledge but a certain insight; getting the focus right. Those who can see in each of these instances only the lower will always be plausible. One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn’t read. Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer’s ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say ‘This is the poem’. Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists.

neither disruption nor despisal

And finally, the working class and the proletariat of all parts of the world are distinguished from the Western bourgeoisie by the fact that they simply cannot turn their backs on the great traditions of humanity. Where the bourgeois class in the profusion of even its intellectual wealth can without serious reservations declare that God is dead, where it can “demythologize” and rationalize the Biblical traditions to make them suitable for bourgeois self-consciousness, where it simply emasculates and abandons dogma and dogmatics, at such points there lives in Barth as in the poor of this earth, who indeed cry out not only for bread, but also for spirit, a knowledge of the indispensability of every particular historical moment of truth. Precisely in the most alienating features of dogma, Karl Barth himself saw the most far-reaching promises for us persons. In that way as a theologian he was completely unbourgeois. He did not clear difficulties away; he broke them open. Precisely that is the hermeneutic of the poor. They do not disrupt, neither do they despise. They knock to see whether it will be opened to them and whether there is something there “for the present day.” And if not, they simply wait.

Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt

not nothing, and also almost everything

Part of a lovely reflection from David Ney.

There was more at stake than just conservative or progressive sensibilities. At issue was the very real empirical, philosophical, and theological problem concerning the relationship between sound and words. Wagner agreed with Brahms that instruments could speak. But he also believed that as they spoke they called out for a greater articulation which only human actors and human voices could produce. The question then becomes: Is music enough?
From the standpoint of catharsis, it probably is: the release of deep and hidden emotions has been associated with music since ancient times, and for good reason. Music has the power to draw out our emotions as it somehow draws us deeply into the mystery of existence. When dancers are added to the mix, a similar (though some would say even more profound) experience is forthcoming. The music (or the music and the movement) can be appropriately described as speech. Even without words it can say so much. . . .
When God, the Scriptures tell us, wanted to say that most profound thing, he said it in the form of a body as the Word made flesh. In this particular body, we see that though we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, our inarticulate sounds and searching steps are not nothing. . . . We are often tempted to boisterously assert ourselves through our words: “Here are two swords” we blurt out, even as we bumble about in the dark. Jesus stops us short: “It is enough,” he says (Lk. 22:38). It is enough because, as the Word made flesh, he has already said everything that needs to be said. And yet it is because he has already said everything that we find that we can say so much not only when we speak, but even when we say nothing at all.

justice is social

Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to Jesmyn Ward’s piece in Vanity Fair. It’s good, and it’s worthy of more attention than I’m giving it. For many reasons, the piece is beyond my ability, and maybe even my right to comment on. Some things should just be read, absorbed, and allowed to reverberate on their own terms. Ward’s story is one of those things. And for the parts of myself that would, in yesterdays or even today, find a reason or excuse to dismiss it, much has already been written that I am still learning to listen to—often learning to even want to hear.

It is not according to the quality of their “spirit” that persons are separated out to the right or the left. Rather, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” For “as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me”; and “as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me” (Matt 25:32–46). The spirit that has value before God is the social spirit. And social help is the way to eternal life. That is not only how Jesus spoke but also how he acted. If one reads the gospels attentively, one can only be amazed at the way it has become possible to make Jesus into a pastor or a teacher whose goal was supposedly to instruct persons about right belief or right conduct. . . .
I think we all have the impression that Jesus was someone quite different than we are. His image stands strangely great and high above us all, socialists and nonsocialists. Precisely for that reason he has something to say to us. Precisely for that reason he can be something for us. Precisely for that reason we touch the living God himself when we touch the hem of his garment. And if we now let our gaze rest upon him, as he goes from century to century in ever-new revelations of his glory, then something is fulfilled in us of the ancient word of promise which could also be written of the movement for social justice in our day: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

Karl Barth, “Jesus Christus und die soziale Bewegung,” (1911)

crazy holy grace

Buechner:

A crazy, holy grace I have called it. Crazy because whoever could have predicted it? Who can ever foresee the crazy how and when and where of a grace that wells up out of the lostness and pain of the world and of our own inner worlds? And holy because these moments of grace come ultimately from farther away than Oz and deeper down than doom, holy because they heal and hallow. “For all thy blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, we give thee thanks,” runs an old prayer, and it is for the all but unknown ones and the more than half-forgotten ones that we do well to look back over the journeys of our lives because it is their presence that makes the life of each of us a sacred journey. We have a hard time seeing such blessed and blessing moments as the gifts I choose to believe they are and a harder time still reaching out toward the hope of a giving hand, but part of the gift is to be able, at least from time to time, to be assured and convinced without seeing, as Hebrews says, because that is of the very substance and style of faith as well as what drives it always to seek a farther and a deeper seeing still.

The Sacred Journey

enchantment, or something else?

The strategy of the Psalmist is to close the infinite distance between God and humankind by confounding all notions of scale. If the great heavens are the work of God’s fingers, what is small and mortal man? The poem answers its own question this way: Man is crowned with honor and glory. He is in a singular sense what God has made him, because of the dignity God has conferred upon him, splendor of a higher order, like that of angels. The Hebrew Scriptures everywhere concede: yes, foolish; yes, guilty; yes, weak; yes, sad and bewildered. Yes, resistant to cherishing and rebellious against expectation. And yes, forever insecure at best in his vaunted dominion over creation. Then how is this dignity manifest? Surely in that God is mindful of man, in that he “visits” him — this is after all the major assertion of the whole literature. “What is man?” is asked in awe — that God should be intrigued or enchanted by him, or loyal to him. Any sufficient answer would go some way toward answering “What is God?” I think anxieties about anthropomorphism are substantially inappropriate in a tradition whose main work has been to assert and ponder human theomorphism.

Marilynne Robinson, “Psalm 8”