On True Belief, False Mysticism, and Reading the Cosmos

Part II: Send in the Clowns (written dialogically)

Val:

“It is certainly true that anyone who tries to preach the faith amid people involved in modern life and thought can really feel like a clown.” So writes Joseph Ratzinger.

Sometimes, I feel like a clown even to myself. The fantasia on the life of Christ mentioned in my last post – The Refugee from Heaven, a very heavily promoted book of now Servant of God Cora Evans (available here for free borrowing on Open Library; I encourage you to look for yourself) – weaves throughout an elaborate subplot involving magical singing pearls. I'll give you an example:

Mary wore no ornamentation of any kind, so I offered Rachel part of my pearl necklace. I broke the string and took off ten pearls and ten tiny gold nuggets, which I tied into a bracelet. Mary toyed with it and admired it on her wrist before she placed it on Rachel's and kissed her.

As we said good-bye, Rachel hoped fervently that we would meet again. Then she turned and hurried to the inn. A soft sigh escaped Mary and she said, 'We are visibly seeing and hearing [visibly seeing and hearing?-VJT] God's blessings given to the world as sacramentals. Rachel's pearls, for instance, are especially blessed. She can actually hear Heaven's music when she holds them to her heart. Many people will be drawn in this manner to Jesus, all through time, and not to the crib as we would imagine.

“Rachel,” one of Mrs. Evans’s many… imaginative additions, is said to be the wife of the innkeeper of Bethlehem; her story culminates at the foot of the Cross, where the Seven Last Words (for Mrs. Evans, more like the Twenty Last Paragraphs) are extended to commit to the care of the Blessed Mother not just the Beloved Disciple, but also Rachel and the magical singing pearls. Sometimes I feel like the patients are running the asylum.

Returning to Ratzinger’s words, he is referencing Protestant theologian Harvey Cox’s elaboration of Kierkegaard’s famous lines from the first volume of Either/Or: “A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”

In Cox’s version, the fire has broken out in a circus tent, pitched in dry fields of stubble outside a village. A circus performer in costume – yes, a clown – runs into town, to warn the villagers and to request help in putting out the fire – but the villagers take his mission to be a promotion for the circus. The more frantically he pleads, the harder they laugh; in the end the flames consume circus and village alike.

Where the witness of persons of faith is neither actual buffoonery nor taken as jest, it’s often apprehended as an anachronism, hopelessly out of touch, “like someone who, rising from an ancient sarcophagus, walks into the midst of the world of today dressed and thinking in the ancient fashion and can neither understand nor be understood by this world of ours,” as Ratzinger writes. I think this happens, perhaps now even more than when the first edition of his book was published in 1968 – which may as well be a past eon, given the pace of technological development. However, I do think that we are at risk of misattributing the incomprehension, which Ratzinger describes without by any means drawing it out directly.

I contend that the real challenge to genuine understanding does not come from seculars, but from religionists. The seamlessly woven-in presupposition that we are all speaking the same language, and all mean the same things when we do, makes the actual state of affairs that much harder to detect. The ironic truth is that the most anachronistic, modernity-tinged misconceptions and the shrillest accusations alleging modernism in others often come from the same set of religious believers – the very people who think of themselves as immune to modernity. Yet today’s atavistic primitivism is decidedly not that of our ancient forebearers. There is no going back; we are all moderns here.

Ratzinger continues in his analysis: “[A] new concept of truth and reality has gradually developed in modern thinking and living, a concept that holds sway, for the most part unconsciously, as the assumption on which we think and speak.” The contemporary mind (for better or worse, or likelier, better and worse according to different aspects) is hardwired such that adopting a belief verbatim from centuries past does not add up to an equivalence in meaning. Yes, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, but our own framing mechanisms are not. Should we fail to recognize the prejudice attendant on the perspective inculcated by our given historical situation (this is true for all peoples at all times), we risk distorting the Scriptures. But it’s good to consider: it was worn-in concrete cultural practice which blinded to recognition of the Messiah.

Of our own bias, Ratzinger continues that it “can only be overcome if it, too, is exposed to the test of consciousness.” He locates the decisive turn towards the modern era as having occurred with Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who is somewhat neglected compared to Descartes or Kant, but is in some ways the intellectual missing link between the two. Vico broke through the epistemological schema equating truth and being-as-such (verum est ens), having replaced it with the idea that we can truly know only that which we ourselves have made (verum quia factum). This radical circumscribing of the content of knowable truth shifted the emphasis from metaphysics to mathematics and history, that is, from cosmos to human product.

Over time, this anthropocentric thrust found further refinement. Referencing Marxism, Ratzinger puts it this way: “The truth with which man is concerned is neither the truth of being, nor even in the last resort that of his accomplished deeds, but the truth of changing the world, molding the world – a truth centered on future and action” (verum quia faciendem). Implicit therein is the absolute primacy of techne: “...in the final analysis all that man could really know was what was repeatable, what he could put before his eyes at any time as an experiment. Everything that he can see only at second hand remains the past and, whatever proofs may be adduced, is not completely knowable.” We will return to these ideas in a future post.

It is all too easy for modern religious man to presume on his own orthodoxy, all the while failing to see his preoccupation with techne – results and repeatable command of nature at his own will, as well as the “proof” of verifiable phenomena. There is to be no “re-enchanting” of the cosmos. No longer do we come to the world naïve of our empiricist bent, however much we deny it. These are not our ancestors’ superstitions that we harbor; it’s nothing so innocent as that. We dwell in an altogether different epistemic ecology. Although no one is talking about it, this has particularly seismic and far-reaching consequences for mysticism, and for how we, precisely as moderns, are prone to evaluate truth claims. All of this must be worked out in order to exercise a truly legitimate appeal to “tradition.” Modern man – religious and secular alike – risks reading into the measured, ordered, perennially consistent teachings of the Church the hysterics of a clown, all while the flames encroach.

Paul:

Years ago, I delivered a paper at LIU-Post, where I was teaching at the time, entitled “Method and Magic.” The epigraph for that paper was as follows: “Reason today has more in common with a cable television network than with Platonic ideas” – a citation from the French philosopher Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern – all of which might sound like contention against what you’re saying.

But no. What struck me the most about your description of the dominance of techne – which is quite real; witness the growing numbers of competent paraprofessionals who have been trained, even right where I teach at the community college, to know their work and essentially nothing else. But even more pronounced, I find, is the honor we see purportedly directed to the natural sciences, which is in reality a veneration of the power of contemporary technology as raw power, for its own sake. While I think I was a bit overboard at the time, equating the scientist to the magician in a primal society, dispensing at will mysterious and unknown powers, I do fault modern people, on the whole, for failing to take a healthy interest in the nature and meaning of the actual scientific work behind their technologies, while lauding “science” in near-mythical terms.

What never occurred to me at the time was how many contemporary religious people venerate techne the same way, but in specifically warped, religious ways – miracle-chasing, manifestations and visions and wonders, and the kind of thing that fills that Cora Evans book. You’re right, that contemporary people in a global society cannot simply incorporate magic as part of everyday realism; instead, magic (for the magical-minded modern) becomes not only techne, but its own species of technology. What we’re left asking is: on what does this technology rest, as modern technology rests on science?

The terrifying answer is: on nothing… which, while perfectly true, shows the bottomless pit which such playing around with the magical-mystical opens up before us all. Unbelievers increasingly fear out-of-control, unbridled religiosity – and not wrongly, although (unsurprisingly) few grasp the true nature of the problem, much less the proper response. Prudent believers, aware both of human sinfulness and of the fatal folly of presuming all spiritual phenomena are holy, avoid and abjure such religiosity wherever it is found. Yet what basis do such prudent believers have for their sound spiritual instincts?

Theology would be the science that reins in the magical impulse, which is one reason why theology is so important. Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, had a cringily nerdy anecdote of Oxbridge Common Room humour (sorry, I can’t omit the “u” in this context), of which the punch line was something like “Oh? I wasn’t aware that there were any such sciences as theology.” I’d be tempted to give him a pass here, given how many believers seem not to know, nor much care, that there is any such science as theology either… but this is too big an issue to be lax about. Theology – very much including mystical theology – offers the only guidelines (and guardrails) for religious practice. Given that any honest atheist must admit that religious practice isn’t realistically going to vanish altogether any time soon, atheists should be as eager to support theology as the most fervent believer, for without theology, religion can mean anything – and what it realistically tends to mean is enthusiasm at best. At worst?— charlatanism, magic, hatred, violence, and the diabolical.

To your points on anachronism and “modernism”: some years back, my old acquaintance Khaled Abou el Fadl, who is himself an imam as well as being Professor of Law and Islamic Studies at U.C.L.A., suggested in an interview that today’s Islam would benefit from a more rigorous and systematic approach to training imams – in fact, he definitely cited the seminary system of the Catholic Church as a possible model (though I do not imagine he would be encouraged in this by reading of Mr. Borba of St. Patrick’s Seminary and his account of “Granny Mary” and the Christ Child’s favorite cookies, as referenced in your last post). In fact, Islam has a lengthy and distinguished history of dialogical jurisprudence, but the contemporary world has eroded this greatly – in part through the wealthy Gulf states funding schools of ideologically motivated “house theologians,” but also in great part through fundamentalism, which I contend is a modern phenomenon across faith traditions.

For example, the Egyptian thinker and writer Sayyid Qutb, considered by many to be a founding father of contemporary radical Islam, was an academic administrator with a British-style education at the point when he chose to dedicate himself fully to the practice and promotion of his religion as he understood it. In his youth, he had scoffed at the traditional religious schools he saw in Egypt; later, he began his main work, Milestones, by claiming that in the early days of Islam the Qu’ran had needed no interpretation, as everyone could see immediately for themselves what it meant – an historical falsity and a rejection, indeed a denial, of the entire centuries-long tradition I just mentioned. To me, this seems the essence of fundamentalism: the superimposing of ancient sacred texts over a contemporary secular education without adequate mediation through history, tradition, philosophy, and theology. Although I hesitate to throw around terms like “Catholic fundamentalism,” I cannot deny that this pattern is repeating itself pretty regularly in the Church in our time.

Val:

You mentioned that, without theology, religion can mean anything. Such undisciplined, undifferentiated religiosity is not only at odds with the entire tradition, but even works against genuine ecumenism or engagement with the culture; mutual relationship is impossible when you don’t know who you are. One of the main purposes of the precision – down to the smallest enclitic! – fought for through the whole history of dogma was to understand who Christ is. If we do not constantly seek to clarify our identity in Christ, we sacrifice our faith in favor of empty “religion.”

A sadly neglected Apostolic Letter of Pope St. John Paul II, Inter Munera Academiarum, 1999, in which the title Doctor Humanitatis was conferred upon Thomas Aquinas, identifies “the greatest challenge of our age” as arising from “a growing separation between faith and reason, between the Gospel and culture.” As the pontiff adds, “[i]ndeed, the message of salvation encounters many obstacles stemming from erroneous concepts and a serious lack of adequate formation.”

Just the previous year, he had cautioned in Fides et Ratio against “the various kinds of esoteric superstition widespread today, even among some believers who lack a proper critical sense.” While he, charitably, notes reaction against genuinely untenable philosophical currents as an origin point, he also affirms the intervention of the Magisterium against “fideism and radical traditionalism, for their distrust of reason's natural capacities.” Already before the turn of the millennium, he had noted “signs of a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God.”

As I see it, these objectionable trends arise from ignorance of tradition, save for a few of its least intellectually sophisticated and most culturally riveted assumptions, existing alongside profound embeddedness in the secular modernity it presumes to be fighting. Such a hermeneutic towards the faith as a whole is dis-integrated; you end up with a “Frankentheology.” With the habituation to constant information glut and instantaneous communication wrought over the past twenty years, the climate for such theological disinformation is ripe, as much in the malformation of minds this habituation has occasioned as in the dissemination of incoherent thought it facilitates.

I seriously believe that the present is a moment of crisis for faith and reason alike. Despite his good will and the urgency of his message, the clown in the allegory has an unmerited but understandable credibility problem; after all, attention-getting is his professional schtick. Where religion (or, worse, theology) is willing to capitalize on peculiar sideshows to desperately garner hits, interest or imagined relevance, the resulting internal contradictions are going to make faith look pretty farcical.

More soon on this topic, including a return to Annie Dillard.