On True Belief, False Mysticism, and Reading the Cosmos

Part III: The Moderns' Search for Meaning

Peter Moog, Christ taken down from the Cross with Pieta, from the Prinzhorn Collection.

Fideism – the will to believe against reason – is a problem for all, not just practitioners of religion, but it is particularly contradictory to Catholicism, because of the Church’s claim to religio vera and because of the genuine faith demanded by sacramentality. Where any sphere of human activity, much less religion, abdicates its responsibility to reason, it loses the ability to speak with the voice of authority.

Val:

A document entitled “Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life,” produced jointly by the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and written as a Catholic response to the New Age movement, states: “The fact that what were once central elements in society are now perceived as untrustworthy or lacking in genuine authority has created a climate where people look inwards, into themselves, for meaning and strength. There is also a search for alternative institutions, which people hope will respond to their deepest needs.”

The document offers an especially profound insight, or at least suggests it – namely, that the consumer mindset has fostered the notion that belief systems can be syncretized piecemeal, allowing for a bespoke faith particular to each individual as arbiter. The esotericism purporting to be super-traditional and more Catholic than the pope, upon closer analysis, generally exhibits just such a mindset; cafeteria Catholicism is less about mores (anyone can fail the standard while leaving it theologically intact) than about the absence of an obediential disposition on the level of worldview and doctrine.

I want to revisit a passage from Annie Dillard’s Living by Fiction which Paul addressed in a recent post; it’s germane to these present considerations, as it shows forth vividly elements in the modern mindset which are generally concealed by how easily they are taken for granted. Dillard writes of German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn’s self-declared ability to find meaning in the scrawlings of his patients, down to “the smallest loop.” Given this, she observes, “schematically we can see an asylum as a meaning factory,” but then goes on to question:

Why is it sane to find meaning in a doodle and insane to find meaning in a puddle of rain? Why is it sane to count the incidence of the word ‘murder’ in Shakespeare and insane to count the frost cracks in the sidewalk? Why is mathematics sane and numerology insane? Why is astronomy sane and astrology insane? Why is it sane to perform an autopsy and insane to read entrails? Why can we sanely inspect the clouds to learn tomorrow’s weather, but not the sex of an unborn child?

The theories of Prinzhorn as she briefly describes them, and the questions they raise in her mind, reveal quite a number of key presuppositions. Every single one of her queries could benefit from further parsing. Let’s start with the easiest: Why is it sane to perform an autopsy and insane to read entrails? The pathologist is examining for a posteriori physical evidence; every death necessarily presumes a cause of death. The haruspex approaches a sheep’s liver as a real-time communications platform with the gods. Right away, we see respect for the natures of things, together with a proper orientation to the temporal sphere, as indispensable to right reason. I’m not so sure that a civil engineer shouldn’t count the frost cracks in the sidewalk, nor that a preoccupation with murder, even as represented in high literary work, is optimally healthy.

But there is a larger issue still: What do we mean by “meaning,” and exactly what do we expect it to divulge? All of the things falling beneath the “insane” rubric typify divination, putting my interests at the center. It seems to me to involve a sort of spiritual narcissism. That is, I have no interest in the sheep as an autonomous entity, nor even as domesticated livestock, living in harmonious balance under human supervision, as a source of wool and food for many. No, its organs are to be a window to imagined knowledge, and for that I am willing to abide its slaughter (however much modern radiographic imaging could perhaps soften the impact to the sheep). But so too, the heavens, the rains, the clouds racing across the skies, are no more things of beauty or sources of wonder but informational utilities, to be exploited to ends which are purely my own. In waging the Battle of the Cremera, say, I consult neither justice nor tenability, but rather a victim small enough, disempowered enough, to speak directly to my needs, as tailored to my exact vantage point. I’ve shifted the axis of power from my being one among many, to my being absolute – to my being the very small god of a very limited kingdom. It was the same for Saul with the witch of Endor. He turned away from the relation to God which would have situated the battle in a larger salvation history, and made it about his own failure or success. His kingdom was dissolved, and his throne given over to one whom the Lord took from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over … Israel.

Returning to Prinzhorn, I have to wonder about his finding “meaning” in his patients’ drawings. Here, meaning seems to come down to accessing the subterranean realms of the unconscious, precisely from which the psychological disturbance of the patients is thought to originate. Little consideration appears to be given to the fact that the patients, too, possess rational natures, however the action or expression of their natures may be impaired by organic or environmental factors. This betrays a grave ambiguity. Does meaning reside primarily with the rational, however it is expressed, well or poorly, conventionally or divergently? Or are we to seek some other source of meaning?

For Dillard, as I think for most moderns, the search for “meaning” either effectively amounts to soothsaying, or at least accords a certain authority to the voice of the irrational. Where Logos – eternal creative reason – does not reign in all and through all, the cosmos is a very spooky place, as witnessed in Dillard's Total Eclipse. Absent Logos, chaos, randomness and entropy ground being every bit as much as creativity, beauty and evolution. Humanity then stands alone as the bearer of reason – and this, as we know, is problematic. Man is opaque to himself; we can see easily enough in daily human behavior the origins of psychological typologies like the id and the death drive. As Pope St. John XXIII was perspicacious enough to note, many take for granted that the laws which govern societal interrelation “are the same as those which regulate the blind, elemental forces of the universe.” As he writes, “People are living in the grip of constant fear.”

But an anthropomorphic God may ultimately be even more terrifying. An incarnate God casts us in his image; an anthropomorphic one is cast in ours. Freed from the checks and balances of a whole pantheon of immortal peers, a single supreme being – an inevitability, considering the historical curve of the past millennia toward monotheism – yields a spookier cosmos still, as the darkest elements of human psychology are projected onto the divinity. For such a god, control becomes the end of the power of governance, retributive justice the recourse where human freedom cannot be tamed – just as it is with us. The religious mind becomes conspiratorial, on the alert for any innuendo from the divine portending imminent doom and chastisement. The name of the game becomes appeasement and self-protection… and soon enough there arises a whole class of visionaries as indispensable-seeming to many Christians as the sacred chicken was to the Roman general.

I want to close by considering two statements from Ratzinger, the first from the Regensburg Address: “God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.” In other words, while God remains totally undelimited in both freedom and creativity, he cannot depart from his own nature: beauty, truth and goodness. He does not simply have logos; he is Logos... intelligible and discernible to us for our being analogically tapped in by virtue of our own nature, created in his image. Anything presuming a break in that chain of connectedness, an equivocation obtaining between the genuine human intuition of goodness and some supposed “higher goodness” attributed to God, fails the test of authenticity on that count alone.

Logos – reason – casts out darkness, just as love casts out fear. This brings us to the second statement, which I include given the preoccupation with apocalypticism so common to false mysticism: “[B]e certain that the Virgin does not engage in sensationalism; she does not create fear. She does not present apocalyptic visions, but guides people to her Son.” Cataclysm is not good; Jesus is. The divine goodness and its exemplars must be let to be just what they are: good, and consistently, abidingly so. Goodness is the ground of being; this ground must be firmly established before we can truly find meaning in being.

Paul:

I took the opportunity to look at some of the work that Prinzhorn collected. Much of it shows skill, inventiveness, insight, intelligence and, yes, rationality – however distorted in its formulation or expression by illness or trauma. Some of it is beautiful.

I think that a static idea of rationality is wrong. We all have rational natures, but rationality is something we do, however imperfectly, or fail to do. The privilege of clear-mindedness, the freedom to reason without impairment, is a gift from God. To choose to subside into irrationality out of boredom, laziness, or magical thinking is ungrateful. For those who can do so, to exercise reason is to glorify God by living out the imago Dei; I would contend that it remains so, even in those who, due to faulty information or false presuppositions, do not arrive at or even in good faith contradict the truth. For those who know and love God, this glory is multiplied a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.

We also need to recognize our own frailty and vulnerability. All of us can fall into error; an accident or illness or age-related dementia can take away so much of what we have. We should be treating our natural gifts as what they are – gifts. We should be doing all that we can to exercise them, to preserve them, and to dedicate them to the love and service of the Giver. We should compassionate and duly respect those consigned to the margins by their woundedness, like Prinzhorn’s patients, knowing that nothing we have is our own. The impulse of “othering” those whose vulnerabilities disturb, disgust or frighten us, cannot be pleasing to God.

Our faith should be a constant reminder of all of this. When religious activity degenerates into entertainment, spectacle, fantasy, irrational enthusiasms and hunger for manifestations, it is – whatever it may appear or claim to be, and worst of all if it makes claims on the name of Christ – a repudiation of religio vera and a dive into the darkness.

Val:

Paul's insight that reason is something that you do is really brilliant. Reason is neither merely a template nor an exterior standard. It is dynamic and creative, as it images Logos. Insofar as it is grounded in Logos, it is necessarily dialogical and relational – again, active. Reason is an act, therefore, every bit as much as being itself is. A pre-given faculty of reason detached from inquiry, questing, refinement, and growth is like an otherwise healthy physique that is not exercised – assuredly, both will atrophy.

Returning to “Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life”: if we pull a paragraph, substituting “Christian/Catholic signs-and-wonders spirituality” for “New Age spirituality,” we can see that both capitalize on all the same impulses. So many of these seers of whom it is dubiously claimed that their work carries the imprimatur (Maria Valtorta, former Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, and a whole army of others) rely on rapturous states and techniques akin to automatic writing. Piccarreta went so far as to teach of the nullification of the human will through absorption in the divine. If that's not a red flag, I don’t know what is – yet the modern malformation regarding meaning is pervasive, even among some in positions of high authority, from whom we would expect more.

The following text is from “Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life”:

One of the most common elements in New Age “spirituality” is a fascination with extraordinary manifestations, and in particular with paranormal entities. People recognised as “mediums” claim that their personality is taken over by another entity during trances in a New Age phenomenon known as “channeling”, during which the medium may lose control over his or her body and faculties. Some people who have witnessed these events would willingly acknowledge that the manifestations are indeed spiritual, but are not from God, despite the language of love and light which is almost always used.... It is probably more correct to refer to this as a contemporary form of spiritualism, rather than spirituality in a strict sense... Fusion with some spirits who teach through particular people is another New Age experience claimed by people who refer to themselves as “mystics.”

Spirituality is concerned with the soul. In man, that soul is rational, ordered to relationship with the one, transcendent God. To practice spirituality is precisely to engage the intellect, to be guided appropriately by meaning. Spiritualism implies commerce with the murky regions of the subconscious and the preternatural. An infinite distance lies between mystery and mere obscurity.

In Fides et Ratio, John Paul II writes of “a kind of spiritual heritage of humanity,” “an implicit philosophy.” The first universal principles of being are the endowment of all. Where conclusions are coherently educed in good faith, there is right reason – orthós logos, recta ratio. Now we can better see how respect for time, for nature, for causality, are implicit in right reason, as conscience and irreducible self-evident principles together place man in an ineluctable relation to the primal goodness of being. Right reason is the basis for unity in the human community, and the purification of which both religion and modernity stand ever in need. If indeed the “once central elements in society are now perceived as untrustworthy or lacking in genuine authority,” driving people “inwards, into themselves, for meaning and strength,” this impulse, I think, can be quite salutary if Logos is courageously put forward as compass and criterion, and as the impetus and telos of the quest. For the dissatisfaction, legitimate certainly in many respects, that prompts the search for “alternative institutions” must not lead us to divert Christianity from its mission as religio vera.

Stay tuned; many topics remain to be explored in this series, before it culminates in a catechesis on extraordinary graces, drawn from the perennial masters of mystical theology.