bona fide

Czeslaw Milosz:

When I was, as they say, in harmony with God and the world, I felt I was false, as if pretending to be somebody else. I recovered my identity when I found myself again in the skin of a sinner and nonbeliever. This repeated itself in my life several times. For, undoubtedly, I liked the image of myself as a decent man, but, immediately after I put that mask on, my conscience whispered that I was deceiving others and myself.
The notion of sacrum is necessary but impossible without experiencing sin. I am dirty, I am a sinner, I am unworthy, and not even because of my behavior but because of the evil sitting in me. And only when I conceded that it was not for me to reach so high have I felt that I was genuine.

Road-side Dog

cultural proceduralism

John Halldorf:

It seems like churches that are at arm’s length from power and the cultural mainstream are in a better position to develop the Christian virtue of hospitality. As a majority religion intertwined with the state, Christianity often becomes more rigid, less hospitable, and at times hostile—even to other Christian minorities. Pluralism is seen as a threat, since it might mean that Christianity will lose its privileged position. In contrast to this, a minority can never expect to set the rules for any encounter. Instead they must find ways to negotiate and live with difference. Accordingly, they become well equipped to live as a creative minority in a pluralistic society.
This explains why Swedish evangelicals are less threatened by immigration, pluralism, and the growth of Islam than are their US evangelical counterparts, to say nothing of the Swedish secular majority. To a minority, pluralism is not the big threat. In this case, diversity is a step up from the traditional homogenous secular-Lutheran society. It levels the playing field, and makes clear that there is no neutral ground, only competing perspectives. The development of what Jürgen Habermas called the post-secular society is a welcome development to a minority. Swedish evangelicals are aware that any attempt to homogenize the culture would marginalize them.

a faith of unease

“Being Left Behind: The Discourse of Fear in Technological Change,” from Felicia Wu Song at The Hedgehog Review:

While one would be hard pressed to establish any direct relationship between the popularity of these Rapture narratives and the fear of being technologically left behind in business and global contexts, on several counts it is clear that they do share more than merely their semantic similarities. First, they share a crisis-oriented psychology. In Rapture narratives, the focal point is always the moment of crisis, when family members, neighbors, colleagues, and friends discover that an unexpected cosmic judgment has been made between those who were raptured and those who were left behind. Because these Rapture narratives aim to motivate individuals to prepare themselves to face a cataclysmic moment that determines the eternal fate of their souls, critics point out that these stories often encourage an implicit “theology of crisis, without much patience for peace and ordinary life.” The resulting preoccupation with being prepared for such apocalyptic crisis bears considerable likeness to the motivation underlying the consumption of technology by business executives, government officials, and individuals.

deep anxieties

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a sermon in Barcelona: “Both the most grandiose and the frailest of all human attempts to reach the eternal out of fear and unrest in the human heart is religion.”

To which, Jeffrey C. Pugh adds,

A cursory glance at humankind provides us with ample evidence that this is true, [that humans tend to create God, the gods, in their own image]. So much of what we label with the term ‘religion’ appears to be the hopeless attempt to root ourselves and all the extensions of self found in family, nation or state, within the absolute. Once religion is rooted there anything becomes possible in the name of God, even the death and annihilation of others who do not share our particular idea of the absolute. The gods are seldom found on the sides of our enemies after all.
Religion creates the conditions not only for individuals to wear the cloak of self-righteousness, but entire cultures to don it as well. Then everything becomes justified on the basis of transcendent command. God is easily employed for privileging my tribe, my community, my culture. Thus my society acquires the authority of the ultimate where life is rooted not in the vagaries of history, but in the solidity of the absolute.
In this sense, religion has the potential to construct the deepest part of myself, the core of my identity, for my identity is shaped and formed by the host of social arrangements I find myself within. The depth of this is so deep, the power of this so vast, that we accept the constructs of our culture as self-evident truths. When sociologists write of religion as constructing a ‘sacred canopy’ over society they are indicating that all the dynamics that go into shaping culture are shaping our deepest identities as well, and tying those identities to the transcendent. This identification can be so deep that any questioning of those identities of culture or self, either from within the culture, or outside of it, will elicit the strongest possible response, even unto violence and death. When we begin to question the most fundamental aspects of our lives, the ones that are so deeply held they are not even conscious to us, the resultant anxiety does spawn significant resistance.

But the question still remained:

“In this, he can agree with religions critics, but the issue for Bonhoeffer is can he find a way to escape this gravity? Is there a way he can secure his faith from the truth of this critique? . . . Was there any hope for a religion that had become so vacated of anything resembling the spirit of Jesus Christ? If there was such a hope it was going to emerge only when Christianity freed itself from religion.”

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