I’m trying to find a way to articulate the
underpinnings for everything that I write here to which any consistency
my writing this blog for the last four years is owed. That may or may not be interesting to readers who have otherwise found what I’m doing here worth their time to read. But if there has
been any reason to read this blog, I think that it’s not because of
the particular political opinions I express here, which are similar to
those articulated all over the blogosphere. Rather I would hope people come here on a regular basis because
there is an angle of approach to political and other issues that they
don’t find elsewhere.
This angle of approach is grounded in an
orthodox Christian understanding of the world which is the same time attempting to understand its radically subversive truth. I’m not saying that’s original–kindred spirits in the Catholic tradition from which I’ve learned it are people like Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, Walker Percy, Daniel Berrigan, and Thomas Merton–but I am saying that what I and these people represent is different from what is commonly perceived as Liberal Christianity. By Liberal Christianity I mean a range of Christian responses that distinguish themselves as accepting the presuppositions of Enlightenment Rationalism as the context in which to interpret Christian truth claims. Emerson, for whom I have high regard, is perhaps the prototype, and the kind of Unitarianism which he embraced as the extreme case in the kind of rational Christianity for which the assertions made, for instance, in the Nicene Creed, are impossible to believe. (I’m not interested to use the word orthodox in such a way as to define
who is in and who is out, but rather simply to describe the framework
within which I operate.)
So that orthodox frame is well defined for me by the essential elements in the Nicene Creed. Emerson and lots of people who are or who have been attracted to the Christianity through the gospels cannot accept the Christological statements in the creed. My problem lies not with them as individuals who are just being honest about what they can or cannot believe, but with the limitations of the Enlightenment rationalist framework that makes recognizing these creedal statements so difficult to comprehend.
To preempt some criticism here, let me be clear, I do not reject Enlightenment rationality as some kind of mistake that we must reject so that we can get back to the good old days in the Age of Faith. I am not an anti-modernist in the sense of pre-Vatican II popes (and the now current pope?) who saw modernity as heresy. I see it rather as a dialectical moment in the evolution of consciousness–an antithesis to the premodern thesis, so to say. I see the cultural phase into which we’re entering as one that will find its identity to the degree that it integrates premodernity and modernity in a postmodern synthesis. In other words, I do not see modernity as something to be rejected, but rather as a cultural mentality that we must move beyond. We’re already doing it, and while elements of the synthesis to come are in plain sight, they are lying like so many pieces to a jigsaw puzzle in which little clusters of pieces have been assembled, but not enough of them yet to see what the big picture will look like.
So I agree with rationalists who believe that moderns think about and experience the the world in a radically different way from those with a premodern mindset. But I disagree with them that they think about the world in a way that is superior–that premoderns are like children living in a fantasy world. It’s rather more a question of focusing on and being interested in the surfaces of things rather than what lies behind them. For more on this see my piece on the Hypertrophied Eye. The medievals and all premoderns live/d in a profoundly symbolic world in which everything signified something else by virtue of its participating in a profoundly connected world in which everything like a tapestry was interwoven with everything else. The moderns came to live in the same world of symbols, but they symbols lost their referents. This is the cause of the widely acknowledged disenchantment of the world. The world is disenchanted to the degree that humans have lost the capacity to cognize what lies behind the surfaces of things. We are living in a prison of surfaces, and freedom lies in breaking through to what lies behind them.
When I was writing about this last month, a couple of commenters said that there are parts about what I write about that they sympathize with, they don’t see why it has anything to do with Christianity, and that Christianity is more of an obstacle to liberation that a means for achieving it. The jigsaw puzzle metaphor might be helpful in formulating a response. I think there are lots of things going on that don’t seem connected to one another which we will sooner or later see as connected. I have no quarrel with anybody who is working to put together pieces of the puzzle that will form the picture, for instance, in its upper left quadrant. His preoccupation with his task might make it difficult to understand how what he’s doing is connected to someone working in the lower right quadrant. We all of us have a very incomplete picture, but I’m striving as best I can to be attentive to all the work being done which is an attempt to assemble the puzzle.
But whether people working on different sections can accept it or not, I’m advocating that the Logos provides the framework within which any such piecing together takes place. The puzzle fails as a metaphor because the Logos is a dynamic history driving force, which is better understood as unfolding over time. The pieces fall into place as the process unfolds. Trying to understand and explicate what that means is the task to which this blog is committed. If that doesn’t interest you, fine. I am open to your comments and criticism, but I have to tell you that very often they sound like somebody speaking French complaining that I’m speaking Russian: Why don’t you speak French? What’s the matter with you? More useful to me are the comments of people who speak Russian, even if with an accent. The point is that you can’t really say much that moves things forward unless you can with some degree of interest and sympathy stand within the frame within which I’m trying to develop these posts.
A final word about the creed. I see it providing a similar framework for believers as the Logos provides to the entirety of creation. It’s rather like a trellis on which fruit-bearing plants grow. The trellis itself isn’t important; what grows on it is. Or another way of putting it is that the Creed is like a musical score that provides a framework within which there are a wide variety of
improvisational possibilities. But the improvisations work only to the degree that they enrich and deepen the fundamental melodic line. The mistake that domagmatists and fundamentalists make is to see the trellis or the score as the important thing; it’s just not. It’s what we do working with them that matters. And I believe in the long run, it will be proven that people who work within such a framework can develop a strength and fruitfulness that they would not be able to do without them.
Leave a Reply