Heidegger

This post is on Heidegger, therefore it is already over my head.

But I want to address the question of what it is I like about Heidegger. Not that I really know Heidegger, first of all. I've read a few things by him, and a few things about him. Often I have no idea what he's talking about, really. In some of his later stuff, I roll my eyes at the pomposity of his language and the sense of cleverness he has in his homebrewed mysticism. [does one "brew" mysticism? it seems like a little too intoxicating to be baked or stewed...] So please do keep that disclaimer in mind. I am not speaking about HEIDEGGER as such but my (embarrassingly simple) impressions of Heidegger according to our limited contact.

And second as a disclaimer, Heidegger is not my favorite. Yes, I do tend to go by the username HeidegGURL but that is only because it is such a silly name, transposing to a wholly nerdy dimension all the "SephirothGIRL777" and "MrsTimberlake0806" screen names you will find out there. And I hate having to add numbers at the end, so I do need a screen name like this that is never already taken. And SocratesGURL really doesn't work. End of story.

Those disclaimers in mind, let begin with a commercial that keeps popping up on hulu:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOowgs4F1Gc
"Because what are you without your stuff? Or better yet, who are you?"

Very philosophically provocative for a commercial. Your first instinct might be to say, "I am a human being with intrinsic worth, whether I have stuff or not." I will tell you to get off your Cartesian soapbox. This is the first thing you have to do to understand Heidegger. The subject/object divide is one way of looking at the world, but it's not a very helpful one. In fact, it blinds us to the way things actually are. Think more carefully. I dare you to find me a human being without stuff. Better, a human being who has no interest in stuff. Such a person would not be psychologically healthy. The fact is, humans are not isolated individuals who decide to step out of their interiority to enter into the world, and who then decide to get involved with things. we always already are in the world and we always are involved with things, whether we like it or not. We are relational beings, and we're involved in very complicated webs that tie us to things. Sure, maybe Norton is pushing a little hard on the idea that electronic records of your stuff are the most important thing to you, which might be going a little far. but still, we are the kind of being who doesn't just survive like an animal, we live, and not just that, but we carve out a space for ourselves. We appropriate things to our own use. We personalize our environment. Taking a raw world and cultivating it is what we do. Heidegger talks about this in his later works (but with a lot more weird mysticism) as "dwelling," which is a very different thing than simply surviving.

This is what I think Heidegger does really well - give an everyday phenomenological account of what it is to be human. Not just in an abstract sense, "we have reason and free will" and all that. But what it looks like to be a human, which for him involves being-with-others-in-the-world. Blah blah, big German words, whatever, Heidegger. But to be a human means precisely to be in a world where we live and interact with things, and he describes this a lot in Being and Time. One of the most primary ways we interact with things is as tools. A good tool is essentially invisible to us until it stop working. This is brilliant - and there was another commercial that captured this well, but I can't find it. What we want in a pen is something we don't have to worry about - we want it to work so flawlessly we don't even have to think about it at all. We just need to write something and it's available at our desk to do precisely that. Of course, we can change the mode in which we think about tools. We can, as we're doing right now, consider the pen in itself. What is it, really? Who came up with the idea, how does it actually work? That's a different mode of being than the being of the tool. This is the mode of objective being, but notice how it doesn't come at the beginning, it only comes when we decide to think of it this way (or when it stops working, etc). This means that there are all sorts of other things that we may not be able to objectify right now just because we're never going to get to the end of what we're taking for granted. (Once again showing how Descartes is inadequate.) Also, a tool is not by itself. Tools are a part of networks of use organized according to the things we concern ourselves with. To put it in a different way, we are driven in life according to our particular concerns, and these concerns will make other things appear to us in particular ways.

He also has a good description of authenticity and inauthenticity of relating to others. We most easily slip into "the They," the anonymous sense of public opinion and culture that we live in. Heidegger calls the kind of autopilot existing this leads to "fallenness", not in the sense of sin, but in the sense of gravity. We slip into it. In order to resist it, we have to take the effort to really think authentically, according to "our ownmost possibilities" and not just be a sheep. This idea of gravity is absolutely fascinating to me. But we should save that for another post, because it moves beyond just Heidegger anyway.

Heidegger also links our concerns to a greater sense of uncanniness, that the world is not quite our home, and ultimately a fear of death. But to live authentically, you have to deliberately live towards death as the moment which is most essenitally yours and no one else's. This is kind of where Heidegger gets problematic for Christianity. In Being and Time he's not trying to make the world friendly and happy - it is kind of scary and foreign, but there's no possibility for anything better. In his later works he moves past that to a more welcoming place. Again, neither really suits Christianity.

Finally, to be even less precise, Heidegger's later works spend a lot of time talking about space. He goes into some really weird things I don't fully understand, but at at the same time, his mode of consideration really influences the way I think. My goal is no longer just reading and comprehending, but I am led to deep reflection on thinking, and how to be open to the right space for thinking. He's not the only thinker who does this. But he is certainly one of them. Sometimes metaphors can open up new possibilities for seeing things as they are, and I think this is certainly the case in Heidegger, the fruit of his constant struggle to think in an originary manner, instead of easily falling back on old patterns. I find him at times confusing, at times annoying, at times completely wrong, and not a thinker I want to specialize in uniquely, but still one who opens many new horizons of thought for me. These are the kinds of thinkers worth entering dialogue with.

In conclusion, he has an awesome theme song.

Death and Thinking, part 2

Last year I was thinking a lot about distance and thinking. It seemed so clear to me that to think about something is to remove yourself from it, abstract away the beating heart of the world to consider the colorless ghost of its idea. For this reason philosophers were in danger of removing themselves from life, and becoming cold, calculating robots. Thus graduate students should be rightly afraid, because a life of pure thought is a life tainted with death.

I still think there are dangers to thought, but I realize I've been taking the wrong angle. Instead of asking how thinking makes us distant from the world, I should have asked: what is the most human way to encounter the world?

It is certainly not to try to step out of the world and view it from a disembodied Cartesian way - even if we do view systems at times in such a theoretical way, that's not really the best expression of the "most human" approach to the world. (There is a reason we don't place mathematics under the "humanities".) Nor then again does a human encounter require us to plunge headfirst into immanence, mute our reason, and live like an animal. When we do this, we are also distant from the world, because even if our bodies are immersed in it, our minds aren't really there in their truest capacities - the only way we can even do this is to repress our deepest faculties.

So it seems that some kind of thought is necessary to live in the world in a human way. But what kind of thought? Or maybe we should be careful about the word "thought", because we don't want any Cartesian connotations sneaking in - we still haven't talked about what "thought" means.

Four small paragraphs and I'm already in over my head. I'm not really going to solve anything, just propose an idea. Perhaps the most human way to encounter things is not to know individual things or isolated systems of properties, but to recognize their real value. By recognizing an object in the way that it is good, we can't just strip it down to properties in a system. The good isn't just a concept in our minds we can consider or ignore without consequence, but a powerful, living force that draws us - it is our deepest desire. By seeing the the good in whatever we study - numbers, cave paintings, acids, the theory of theories, or even God - we don't have to be so alienated and distant from it. When we recognize the good, we are naturally drawn into love, and I believe this is the most human - and most divine - way of encountering the world.

Apothegmata Patrum

I've been reading the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. When we think of the ascetic athletes of Skete, we think of austere men hardened by fasting and vigil and battle with the demons, keenly aware of their own sins, and intolerant of nonsense in others. Yet, when we read these stories we see nothing of what we might expect from a constant self-negation born of hatred, as the secular understands self-denial to be. Instead of judgment and pride, we see an otherworldly abundance of mercy, humility, and peace. The presence of such fruits, reaching far beyond the limitations of their culture and time, are the strongest proof the Spirit in their midst. As I read these stories, I wonder, what would I have done in these situations? The Fathers' actions are a constant surprise to me, like Christ in the Gospels, by the way they transcend the norms of the social order in service of love.

Here are two of these stories, both of Abba Ammonas.

8. ...Abba Ammonas advanced to the point where his goodness was so great, he took no notice of wickedness. Thus, having become bishop, someone brought a young girl who was pregnant to him, saying, "See what this unhappy wretch has done; give her a penance." But he, having marked the young girl's womb with the sign of the cross, commanded that six pairs of fine linen sheets should be given her, saying, "It is for fear that, when she comes to give birth, she may die, she or the child, and have nothing for the burial." But her accusers resumed, :Why did you do that? Give her a punishment." But he said to them, "Look, brothers, she is near to death; what am I to do?" Then he sent her away and no old man dared accuse anyone any more.

10. Abba Ammonas came one day to eat in a place where there was a monk of evil repute. Now it happened that a woman came and entered the cell of the brother of evil reputation. The dwellers in that place, having learnt this, were troubled and gathered together to chase the brother from his cell. Knowing that Bishop Ammonas was in the place, they asked him to join them. When the brother in question learnt this, he hid the woman in a large cask. The crowd of monks came to the place. Now Abba Ammonas saw the position clearly but for the sake of God he kept the secret; he entered, seated himself on the cask and commanded the cell to be searched. Then when the monks had searched everywhere without finding the woman, Abba Ammonas said, 'What is this? May God forgive you!' After praying, he made everyone go out, then taking the brother by the hand he said, 'Brother, be on your guard.' With these words, he withdrew.

Thought, Creativity, and the Good

"We are by nature creators, not just consumers. We are creators because we think. And because our thought (our rational nature) is also the basis of our personalities, one could say that we are creators because we are persons.... When we act in a manner proper to a person, we always create something: we create something either outside ourselves in the surrounding world or within ourselves--or outside and within ourselves at the same time. Creating as derived from thinking is so characteristic of a person that it is always an infallible sign of a person, a proof of a person's existence or presence. In creating, we also fill the external material world around us with our own thought and being. There is a certain similarity here between ourselves and God, for the whole of creation is an expression of God's own thought of being.

Although thought is the basis of the creativity in which we express ourselves as persons, this creativity neither ends nor culminates in thought. That which is most characteristic of a person, that in which a person (at least in the natural order) is most fully and properly realized, is morality. Morality is not the most strictly connected with thought; thought is merely a condition of morality."

-Karol Woyjtyla, "Thomistic Personalism" in Person and Community, 171-2


This made my jaw drop.


I need to read more of this guy.

Ochre Serenity

"Let me return to the mediocre painting that I earlier had my eye on: how can I describe it in its own phenomenality? A generic scene so ordinary, displaying a house, a servant at the window, the animals and a man outside, vegetables and fowl, etc., cannot be analyzed as such. First, because strictly speaking it is impossible to identify it with and by its characteristics as a real being (size, mounting, etc) which would suit so many other objects--it's not a question of a subsisting being. The same goes for the objects it represents intentionally, objects that can be confused with an infinite number of similar ones on similar canvases. And for that matter, its first function is not to instruct us about these objects; as a painting, it has no utility--it is not a question of a being ready-to-hand. What remains once these two identifications have been reduced? For some element does indeed remain--by which it keeps precisely the rank of a painting.

But what do I see when I see with phenomenological rigor? Not the framed canvas, nor the country objects, nor even the organization of the colors and the forms--I see, without any hesitation, the ruddy and ochre flood of the day's last light as it inundates the entire scene. This luminosity itself does not strike me as a fact of color; rather, this fact of color strikes me only in that it makes me undergo a passion: that, in Kandinsky's terms, of ochre tinged with gold--the passion undergone by the soul affected by the profound serenity of the world saved and protected by the last blood of the setting sun. To see the painting, to the point where it is not confused with any other, amounts to seeing it reduced to its effect. The effect of serenity defines the visibility of this painting--its reduced phenomenality. Its phenomenality is reduced--beyond its beingness, its subsistence, and its utility--to this effect: ochre serenity.

Painters look for this phenomenality when, the painting having been completed (or almost so), they wonder to themselves, "ce que cela donne, what [effect] it gives off." What more does a painting give besides what it shows in showing itself as object and being? Its effect. What more does the painting offer besides its real component parts? Its effect. But this effect is not produced in the mode of an object, nor is it constituted or reconstituted in the mode of beings. It gives itself. The painting (and, in and through it, every other phenomenon in different degrees) is reduced to its ultimate phenomenality insofar as it gives its effect. It appears as given in the effect that it gives.

Thus is defined the essential invisibility of the painting, which we can pass by because there is nothing objective or ontic to see in it. In the end, for every reduced being, all that remains is the effect, such that in it the visible is given, is reduced to a given. The painting is not visible; it makes visible. It makes visible in a gesture that remains by definition invisible--the effect, the upsurge, the advance of givenness. To be given requires being reduced--reconducted--to this invisible effect which alone makes visible. Nothing has an effect, except the phenomenon reduced to the given."

--Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given, 51-52

Skeletons, I

Everything that is, from the beginning, is caught up in order. The blossom only appears through the support of the stalk and leaves - a coherent, functional system that supports - and yet somehow is unlike - the unexpected burst of beauty it produces. Words too, of writers, of poets, flower with layers of meaning unfolding to infinity, yet are supported in their weight and order by the syntax underneath. Yet the external is always the flesh, the surface we touch with our hands and eyes; the syntax is buried underneath, as the skeletons hidden beneath our flesh. A humble job, to synthesize and support with no acknowledgment or recognition. Indeed, a skeleton we touch, that acts as a surface frightens us - it is death, torture, mortality. Syntax by itself, and the rigid methodology of the philosophers, is death when touched by and for itself. Not all death is permanent, of course - sometimes to analyze a poem can later help it to come rise again to new and deeper life. Still, sometimes it merely crumbles to ashes. Many a good syntactician has lost the ability to enjoy a novel. Regardless, the philosophers and linguists touch these skeletons all day, some with the caress of love, many with the cold detachment of a surgeon about to operate on yet another object to take apart.

What does it mean, to caress death, structure, abstraction, to ignore the flesh? Cloaked with these words it sounds like a perversion of thought (must we then strip off this flesh to reveal and judge its truth on the naked ribs?). Certainly it will be morbid perversion if fills the whole of one's activity. And yet these skeletons have an important role that cannot be neglected. They make up an intrinsic part of bodies, the literal human body, the spiritual body of Christ, or the intellectual body of a text. Form and content, Balthsar says, are two poles, not two opposites - for the skeleton supports the flesh and the flesh keeps the skeleton alive. Bones are alive - it is funny to think of, for they are alive precisely when we do not think of them, when we do not see them, when they are properly hidden beneath the flesh. We osteologers, logicians and academics, do a valuable service in studying the skeletal systems, and indeed, knowing the skeleton guides one's ability to bring health to the body, one's own or those of others. Yet we must be careful not to make the living body into a corpse through careless extraction.

Spirit and Life

"Human bodies are circular."

When a friend of mine made this comment, I thought at first he was making an Origenist joke - as Fr. Peter explained in a Lumen Christi lecture, that we all will inhabit perfectly spherical bodies when we die (and I still remember Thomas following that with one of his best retorts, "Some of us are already becoming that way!")

But my friend went on to explain it in a more metaphysical way - almost everything about us seems to be built on cycles. Metabolism, blood circulation, nervous system, reproductive system (especially for women!), and even the birth and death of every individual cell. It's not only at the internal level, but the external level as well - the seasons change, the sun rises and sets, animal and plant life grows and dies - birth, life, dying, death, and a new birth to begin again. We have become so used to thinking in linear, scientific terms, to Hegelian philosophies of determined development of the consciousness, to narratives that have a beginning and an end (if we even think about the final end at all). And yet, while development is real, "The Circle of LIfe" is not just a song from the Lion King, and it is not just an outdated mythology of tribal civilizations - there is very real truth to the fact that human beings are circular creatures.

This is not only built into our environment or our bodies, but our spirits themselves - we get up, we work, we sleep. We go to school, we wait for summer. We get bored of summer, and wait for school. We wear down grooves in our consciousness that diverts the flow of energy directly to certain thought patterns and actions - the very philosophy of virtue depends on our circular nature! How do we become virtuous, or gain excellence at anything? By practice, by entering the circle and repeating over and over until this circle is absorbed into the fabric of our being, whether this practice is the virtue of patience, acquiring a foreign language, or developing the musical sensitivity and muscle memory to play guitar.

There is something so beautiful about this. We are not a monad, nor is life a collection of objects that happen to lie near each other. There is always a return to the start, a going out and coming back, exitus and reditus as we artfully craft each circle around us, weaving in the motion of the external world into the free desires of our internal world like the invisible dynamism of each atom, our own personal solar system. And yet at the same time, this circular nature seems to be the source also of mankind's biggest enemy, or one of them. Boredom.

Indeed, boredom can lead us to make more of ourselves, to challenge us to press beyond the easy, cowardly limits we might set for ourselves to dare something greater, the echo of our desire for transcendence and infinity despite the limits imposed on us by our corporeality. Yet all too often boredom comes almost immediatley - we want to pursue our circles as long as they are enjoyable. Once it becomes too difficult, we want to move on to something we feel will be a greater thrill to us. This restlessness makes us dissatisfied with our circles, unhapppy with familiar grooves, itching for something new and exciting. And yet it can't be radically new and unlike the past, or we are frightened - it must be at least familiar enough that we can understand it. Thus, there is a balance between which satisfaction lies - completely new is terrifying, completely old is mind-numbingly dull. Different people find different balances in acclimation and boredom, yet this cycle of novelty and boredom is a cycle shared by all. And almost invariably, unless the focus is survival itself, boredom is a deep enemy to our futures. Its damage is seen in hobbies and friendships, careers, marriages, families, and lies deep at the heart of the consumerist culture we live in, which pursues novelty and entertainment above all else.

The fact is, cycles die. Scientifically we know that no energy is ever truly lost, but have we ever found a truly closed system on this earth? There is a slow decline of energy loss in all things that move, breathe, or participate in the remotest scrap of being. Decay, rot, the gradual slow as all things naturally move towards the stagnant equilibrium of death. And so with our human cycles. We become sick of those same faces, the same sections of the city or neighborhood. We loathe the routine of our obnoxious jobs and our irritating professors. Enough of the same, it is time for something new! Abandon this circle, start a new one, or at least try to find a way to infuse life into this old, dead circle.

Yet how to rescue or revive it? We can try to run away, start new circles, but the more circles we start, the quicker we get bored with them. We try to distract ourselves by being workaholics, or devoting our lives to cheap entertainment, but this does not help. Nor can we run for ever - we are meant to have roots, and so we will either be unhappy without nourishment, or settle them down only to find ourselves trapped in the same old circles, bound by the dependence of others, our own lack of energy, our lack of health, or fear of new things in this familiar but dreary pattern.

"Vanity of vanities, says Qoholeth, vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

"What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun." (Eccl 1:1-11)

And yet, the plea for newness is at the very heart of man, and it does not go unanswered - "Behold I make all things new!" Hear again, wonder anew at the marvels the Lord has done for us, for he will refresh our weary hearts! Christ promises this - "Behold I make all things new... for the former things are passing away.!" (Rev 21:5) He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death, the death of our lives and the death of the cycles which ground them, will be no more. But that is then - and this is now. There is a long gap between here and eternity, where we may shed our tired circles like dead scales to enter the eternal circle of the beatific vision, where we may gaze ever deeper and deeper on God.

Yet this precisely is the message of today: even now the kingdom of God is at hand, even now the world may be renewed and these tired old circles inrupted with the infinity of the Divine to shatter our narrow conceptions of familiarity and routine - "Send forth your spirit and they shall be created, and you will renew the face of the earth." (Ps. 104:30) We are often mystified by the Holy Spirit - Fathers we know, the Son of course lived as one of us... but what is this third extra person who fits in no easy category? The Holy Spirit is precisely the one who dwells within us and loves through us, who renews us!

In light of the mysteries of the Spirit we see that life is not truly a circle, but a spiral - an ever deepening spiral upwards and inwards. We come around to the same point again and again, but if it appears the same it is only an illusion - we are never the same, we are alive and constantly growing - either acclimating ourselves flatly upon the earth or breathing the life of the Spirit who will take us deeper and deeper. The mysteries of faith we celebrate over and over, the three year liturgical cycle, the cycle of the week, the cycle of every Mass itself, birth, death, and rebirth, ending not with death or even a different birth from the same ashes, but Resurrection, the revival of the dead into a new and impossible life, followed by the commission to participate in the Spirit's mission to go and bear the news to the ends of the earth. As we live ever more in the Spirit, we come to the same truths again and again, and find in them an inexhaustible source of newness. This is because the true newness is not really cheap novelty - newness, the truth and refreshing newness we all seek is the life of the Spirit breathed into us, the breath of existence perfumed with that second breath by which we become one with divine nature, the new cycle, the exitus which proceeds from the Father through the Son in the Spirit, and the reditus catching us all up together in the Spirit to return through the Son to the Father.

Veni, Sancte Spiritus! Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of your love! Send out your spirit, and renew the face of the earth! Revive our dead bones with the consuming fire of divinity, let us live this mystery that is never changing and ever new!

Holy Spirit, Lord of life
From your pure celestial height
Your pure beaming radiance give

Come, O Father of the poor
Come with treasures that endure
You, O light of all that live.

You of all consolers best
Visiting the troubled breast
Most refreshing peace bestow

You in toil are comfort sweet
Pleasant coolness in the heat
Solace in the midst of woe

Light immortal, light divine
Visit now this heart of mine
And my inmost being fill

When you take your grace away
Nothing good in us will stay
All our good is turned toward ill

Heal our wounds our strength renew
On our dryness pour your dew
Wash the stains of guilt away

Bend the stubborn heart and will
Melt the frozen, warm the chill
Guide the steps that go astray

Grant to us who evermore
You confess and you adore
In your sevenfold gift descend

Give us comfort when we die
Give us life with you on high
Give us joys that never end

Amen. Alleluia.

Life of the Mind, Part III

Evagrius Ponticus was a late 4th century figure, trained in the theology and politics of big city ecclesial life under the Cappadocians, who ended up as a monk in the remote Egyptian desert. He was often criticized for being too intellectual, and indeed his theology did have very systematic theory behind it, unusual in the midst of often uneducated Coptic monks who focused more exclusively on the practical monastic experience, and often held anthropomorphic beliefs of God. Yet his theology also had a very practical side, for he gives a keen psychological analysis and develops battle tactics against the eight logismoi, or tempting thoughts, that attack a monk learning to pray.

From him come the very well known words, "the one who prays is a theologian, the theologian is one who prays."

And yet, this phrase is not so simple to unravel as it might appear. To understand them, you need to have a specific understanding of anthropology, epistemology, and the ascetic life, and how these all link together. Evagrius had a very particular idea about what a knowledge of God is, and the way it can be reached based on the kind of minds we have, and the way that body relates to that. Because of his Origenist creation account, he believed that we are all created originally to be minds contemplating God. But then we got distracted and fell away, cooling our fiery spirits into bodies. Those that fell the least were given angelic bodies, those that fell the most were given demonic bodies, and we are somewhere in between. Although bodies are not evil, exactly, they are not a full reflection of what we were meant to be - we were meant to contemplate God in undistracted unity. This is exactly the goal of monastic life, to return as far as possible to this contemplation.

This is prayer. But this itself is also theology.

How do we know something? Well, we can kind of get knowledge encountering things in this world of multiplicity, but we can't really know a thing until we grasp its nature. This is very much like Plotinus (who was a contemporary of Origen, Evagrius' biggest theological influence) - there is the knowledge you get through discursive reasoning, but a higher knowledge comes through immediate intuition of truth (like angelic knowledge). But this is still not the greatest kind of knowledge, because it is still in the world of multiplicity - this is not yet the unity of God himself. So there are three stages - discursive reasoning, intuitive knowledge of natures, and intuitive knowledge of God himself. But God does not come to just anyone, and it's not something we can do on our own. We have to first clear our minds of distractions (again, what caused us to fall away from our original bliss) by battling the logismoi until we reach the state of apatheia, a sort of unshakable peace. THEN we are in a place that God can show himself to us. This is theology.

The way Evagrius sees it, theology does not involve active thinking. Theology is conceptless prayer in which God reveals himself to us.

Again, note the connection this has to Plotinus. The highest form of philosophy was conceptless union with the One - to approach its utter simplicity required one to "close the eye of the intellect". Of course, Plotinus saw this mainly as a human activity, rather than a gift of God - his One remained unremoved from everything, as opposed to the Christian God who became incarnate. God is a goal rather than a means. However, interestingly enough, Plotinus himself was considered to be a fairly severe ascetic by his Greek peers (though nothing compared to Christian ascetics).

So there seems to be a relationship between different kinds of knowledge and access to truth, and how the body affects this.

For Greeks, knowledge WAS the access to truth - askesis was to prepare for this, and even the philosophers did this to some extent, although most of them fairly moderately.

For today's culture, if there is truth, it is an scientific, academic pursuit, with lots of computers and data, and no askesis is necessary to attain it. If there is truth, it doesn't really pertain to what we do. The skepticism about truth is combined with a strange dualism, in which we see no need to act in particular ways because our body is whatever our minds want it to be (since there's no objective truth) - asceticism is pointless. (Again, recall the lack of asceticism for those who theoretically need their minds most.)

What should we say as Christians? Well, there is certainly access to truth through scientific knowledge, but this is not everything. There is also through the infused wisdom of the Holy Spirit, able to be received only by those who have purified themselves from disordered attachments - ascesis is to prepare for the second kind of knowledge, unless these stages are not at all distinct. If they are not distinct, then you need to practice asceticism and virtue to be a good physicist, and I am very skeptical of such claims.

This leads into a further question: what kinds of truth really requires ascesis or holiness to understand? I think probably the deeper the knowledge penetrates to the natures of things, the closer to God it comes, the more purity of heart is necessary to understand it.

So is the theologian the one who prays? Supposing we don't espouse an Origenist anthropology, and supposing we think that knowledge comes both through science and infused wisdom, instead of the more singular divine illumination epistemology of Neo-Platonism... does Evagrius' statement about theology become meaningless? It seems you can do theology without prayer, at least to some extent. But if you take the scholastic route which allows for scientific knowledge, is there a place for contemplative prayer? If it is not to gain knowledge in the way Evagrius has it, then what is it for?

I think in order to really answer this question, we would need to first examine more carefully these two different kinds of epistemology - divinely infused knowledge, and then natural knowledge... but really, I think "natural knowing" is a broader concept than a single identical kind. It seems that way. An artist knows truth in a different way than a philosopher, even if they are knowing the same truth. There are different facets to be had with different approaches.

Second, we would need to find out how knowledge is related to union. Likeness is a principle for knowing - "like knows like," and so the more we are like God the more we know him. We become like God through union with him. We are in union with him the more we love. So Evagrius says to pray is to be a theologian... where does love enter this equation as well?

Nope, I'm not going to answer those questions. I don't know enough yet. They are familiar points in a trajectory that reaches many years into the future, at which point I may have answers more clearly laid out.

The Life of the Mind, Part II

Note, in the above post - there are ways to strategize about using your mind well. Sleeping well, moderating diet, being cautious to how caffeine intake gives you that big lack of energy if you drink too much, being careful what kinds of music you listen to and the quality of environment around you - finding out quiet places, or thinking places, not distracting your mind too much with lots of images and movies all the time...

That sounds suspiciously like the ascetic life.

Yet, surprisingly (?) it does not seem any graduate students follow the above advice for keeping one's brain healthy. As a general rule, grad students don't sleep enough, and overload on caffeine, or illegally obtain prescription drugs to concentrate longer (especially in high pressure schools), get drunk on the weekends (I know of someone who insists he writes best hungover), eat junk food, don't exercise, listen to what we feel like, although some music is just too distracting, study in noisy coffee shops (which, granted, are also good thinking places - I wonder why?), and as a general rule, although we may think about the short term effects of our actions on our mind, we rarely think of the long-term ones.

But the Greeks did, and not with a simple utilitarian desire to maximize their brainpower:

"In his masterful study of ancient philosophy, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot has called our attention to the intensely practical character of philosophy in the Greco-Roman world. Far from being a merely academic, intellectual exercise of asserting and demonstrating "cognitive claims," all the schools of philosophy in the ancient world were forms of training—of askêsis—that sought to reshape the student's basic sensibilities and attitudes so that he or she could not only come to know the highest truths but could also actually live in light of them. Conceived in this way, ancient philosophy can be seen to have concentrated on what Hadot calls "spiritual exercises" which had as their purpose cultivating the student not simply as a "knower" but in his or her total existence: "We can perhaps get a better idea of this spiritual exercise if we understand it as an attempt to liberate ourselves from a partial, passionate point of view— linked to the senses and the body—so as to rise to the universal, normative viewpoint of thought, submitting ourselves to the demands of the Logos and the norm of the Good. Training for death is training to die to one's individuality and passions, in order to look at things from the perspective of universality and objectivity." (94-95) [-a description from an article by Ligne]

[RIP, Pierre Hadot - February 21, 1922 – April 24, 2010]

So, asceticism seems profoundly linked to seeking and trying to live the truth.

Philosophy today is not about truth. It is about either what other people have said, or whether their arguments were valid (as in, sound, not true), and maybe their applications to political issues sometimes. I have spoken to several philosophy graduate students here who switched from English to philosophy... because the tools for arguing were much more refined. Not because they wanted to get to something after their arguments.

Why we are in the place we are today is a long story, and involves names like Duns Scotus, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre. The list could go on. Perhaps that will come in a different post, perhaps not.

My interest here is simply to point out that there seems inherently a friendship between philosophy and asceticism, which bridges right into the question of the medieval debates about the theologian, and whether his proper identity should be a scholastic (Abelard, Aquinas, etc) or a monk (Bernard). Tied up in this question is prayer. What is the relation between philosophy, asceticism, and prayer?

To be continued: Evagrius and Plotinus.

The Life of the Mind, Part I

Graduate school is a very interesting thing.

I have come to realize first, that it's not just about learning things. That's an undergraduate's job: absorb, learn, expand, wonder at the beautiful and marvelous world we live in! But real scholars do not simply listen - they speak and produce. That is for PhD students to worry about, mostly - producing journal articles and dissertations and conference papers.

At the MA level, you are caught in between. You must be open and listening, to get a broad base, and yet you must start to turn towards production. But in order to do so, there are many new frameworks one must take in; it is not just theology I am learning.

There is the framework of my discipline - theology is subdivided into fields, and these fields all have their own ways of speaking and thinking. I cannot speak like a systematician in a historical class; I must be sensitive to the approach and the questions that are being asked. (more on this for another post) So what kinds of questions must I be asking, what kinds of answers will people find helpful within the context of this field?

There is also the framework of my own mind. Many jobs are about simply doing things, and perhaps finding small ways to streamline your tasks to the ultimate goal, but the things you are modifying are tasks, protocols, stages, actions. To understand the process of graduate study is to come to know what this instrument is, this mind of mine, and how I can use it, and how I can't use it. There is first of all finding out how I think - in theology it is astonishingly easy to find one's sub-discipline simply by examining the nature of one's mental tools - what kinds of questions do you ask? If you want to know what culture this idea came from, be a historian - I want to know what it means and what we can take from it, and how it connects to everything else - I am a sytematician, and of a very philosophical variety. Yet how must I balance the analytic tools with the intuitive sensibilities, considering the view that I have on the nature of truth? This is a question that I must constantly attune myself to, so that I can be making the most of these tools I have, keeping the blades sharp, and perhaps shaping new tools for myself if possible.

But there is also the framework of pragmatic use - one's mind does not function at its best at all moments. This involves a whole new set of questions: when I can use it - what times of day, where I can use it, how to make it carry on when it wants to shut down, and when to give up and relax for a time before trying again. Little things can become critically important - fasting days in Lent by necessity turn into days of fasting from work as the day goes on, for as my body does not receive its proper nourishment my mind turns to water. Sleep is enormously important for keeping a sharp edge to my thought, to swim with the current instead of being buried under ideas. Diet probably is important too - but ask Lisa about that, that's not my expertise. To be at my peak requires discipline in the activities I do - I know that starting the day with a passive entertainment form like a TV show will ruin my concentration for perhaps the whole day; I know that dawdling on the internet divorces me from this deeper mode of thought and concentration - a certain quality in the environment that is the deepest wellspring of thoughts. Of course, this place of deepest thought involves a steady pace and a concentration unhindered by what needs are being pressed upon me from the outside - this is often unhelpful for times when I need to be writing papers, for I must adapt myself to the needs of the day, not simply what I wish to think about.

I use myself almost as a third person, but in a way graduate studies can make of it a commodity, a detached objectification of your being - it is not only me, but my livelihood. But you see my point - the MA level is in part to get a preliminary understanding of the subject of theology, but it is largely to learn about yourself, whether you are capable and willing to move on to a doctoral program and devote the rest of your life to studies, to brave the risk of failing and having to start your life completely over if you find you can't be hired. This is a very real possibility that graduate students must face in this market. Graduate school is a real challenge to one's very self - we find how sharp our mind is, how far we can push ourselves, how much discouragement we must weather, and what kind of reward at the end is necessary to keep us going - if it is something outside of the joy that comes through learning and discovering both inside and outside of class, it probably is not enough to get us through. We're all asking ourselves, "Do I have what it takes to make it?" We all look up at our famous professors with a mix of awe and envy at times, hear success stories and hope that ours will some day sound the same. It can almost become a slavery - to ideas, to work, to this box that we are expected to fit inside.

It is a system we must understand and cooperate with, and yet keep ourselves detached and untamed by its easy categorizations. For, like all human structures, it bears the deep wounds of the fall, and can become a force antithetical to the dignity of the human person - ourselves, our peers, or those "outside."

"It's all in the balance," they say - find that balance. We must learn to be excellent teachers, excellent researchers, excellent writers, and excellent networkers. We must have an excellent grasp of the generals, and a solid specialization in particulars. We must work hard, but keep our sanity. We must work with the system, but never let it dominate us. I cannot help wondering if "balance" means to them "absolute perfection in everything we do" - but this is only another balance - to resist the vain pull of the spectral scholar-you-wish-you-were against the under- or overrated scholar-you-are-now, to find the scholar you may truly hope become -- and yet to not be too attached to this notion either.

Above all else, there is one aspect, one balance of this system in particular that greatly concerns me, especially in the field of theology or philosophy. But I will have to save this for another post. My paper is calling.

Trinity and Creation

A sketch of thoughts touching upon earlier posts on mediation and multiplicity...

"It is not possible to overemphasize the positive value of the multiplicity of creatures: Thomas conceives of the plurality of creatures as a partici­pation in the Trinity. Personal relation - the principle of distinction within the Trinity - is seen to be the ultimate source of creation and the principle of all plurality in our world."
-David Burrell

The multiplicity of existing things didn't make sense for Neo-Platonism. The One, the goodness beyond being, "the One in no way many," was perfectly self-sufficient, unchanging, and so perfectly simple that any proposition attached to it was nonsense - to say "The One is true" is to posit the One as both "The One" and "true", now two and not one, destroying its simplicity. Even to say "The One is One" is to posit similarity in the One, thus making it both "The One" and "similarity". (This is because for Plato, a thing participates in the forms to receive its nature - something is beautiful because it participates in Beauty, etc. saying the One is true is to say the One participates in the form of Truth. No, Plato does not put the forms as ideas in the mind of God - the One doesn't have a mind... as the One. Hold that thought.)

This utterly simple One, therefore, could not have a will, so solely through the superabundant nature of goodness, it emanated forth in Nous, or Mind, which "unrolled" from the One "as if in a drunken stupor." But Nous did not create the world directly either - when Nous turns back to the One in thought, it thinks the multiplicity of ideas in the world (the Forms), which gives rise to the world soul (where our souls exist). The world soul, finally comes to rest and give order to the undifferentiated (pre-existing) matter. (Creation ex nihilo is an original Christian idea.) So I become me when the world soul gives a heap of undifferentiated matter the forms of Human and Woman and Nerd, etc. (More or less, this is the Neo-Platonic system.)

But the Trinity is not a "One in no way many": the Trinity is a One in Three Persons. Not only does this differentiation in God allow creation to be an act of free will, but it also is responsible for diffracting this triune-unity into the multiplicity of creation.

So MULTIPLICITY is a fundamentally Trinitarian phenomenon.

MEDIATION, however, is also Neo-Platonic. Hmm... I wonder what that means. But this is nothing new - Stoicism took up the idea of Nous, but named it Logos, and this is precisely what John had in mind when he wrote his gospel, and what tripped up Arius and many early Christian thinkers - isn't the Word just an inferior mediation of God? Etc. etc.

But in Neo-Platonism, in which every emanation is a further removed diffraction from its source - the farther removed you get, the more multiplicity you get. To return to the Nous you abandon all discursive reasoning, but to get to the One you have to "close the eye of the intellect" altogether - this is to abandon the mediation of things, of words, of reason, even intuitive knowledge - just to be utterly silent.

For Trinitarian theology, on the other hand, Christ as Logos means that he is not only the mediation, HE IS THE THING ITSELF.

When I say a word to you, you hear the word, and then process the idea to get the truth of my revelation of myself.

When God says a word to you, he GIVES HIMSELF.

The mediation of Christ is special.

In fact, I think we can talk about it in three, or maybe 4 ways, depending on whether you think the Incarnation is necessary to metaphysics (Bonaventure) or not (Aquinas).
1) Creation through the Logos.
2) Historical Encounter with the person who is Incarnation of the Logos.
3) the Incarnation's transformation of creation
4) our mediation with each other after deification (by which we come to union with the divine nathre)

(1 and 3 would be the same for Bonaventure - Creation was always through the Logos who would be Incarnate. It might be the same for Aquinas too... this gets into the different kinds of necessary actions of the Trinity - was Logos eternally going to become Incarnate since God is outside of time, even if he didn't necessarily HAVE to become Incarnate? That gets complicated. So maybe 1 and 3 are the same for Aquinas too in practice. In theory, though, they could be separated: what would creation be like if the Logos was not to-be-Incarnate? How does that change once the Logos was Incarnate?)

Next step of exploration, specifically through 1/3: Analogia entis - the analogy of being.

Death, a Footnote

Central what I am trying to say is this, I think:

Truth cannot be separated from goodness and beauty. They are three faces of the same thing.

If I knew more von Balthasar I would be able to say more about this.

And now a brief patchwork of quotes:

In modern scholarship, "analytic philosophers had defined the central task of philosophy as that of deciphering the meaning of key expressions in both everyday and scientific language" -Alasdair MacIntyre


Compared to a more full understanding...

"In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us. We should never cease to marvel at these things."
-Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate

"The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.... It is the part played by joy in our studies that makes of them a preparation for spiritual life, for desire directed toward God is the only power capable of raising the soul. "
-Simone Weil, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies to Love God

“Poetic knowledge does not in itself tend toward love, any more, for that matter, than scientific knowledge; but… all knowledge which is not finally turned toward loving is by that very fact a source of death.”
-Raïssa Maritain, The Situation of Poetry

No conclusions, just a few more thoughts.

Death

I haven't been blogging. I have for too long been suffering from a kind of "theological aphasia" (to quote a thinker more clever than I). Well, not suffering, exactly - having an overabundance of ideas is a good thing, right? Thoughts upon thoughts, which, when grasped, lead to even more thoughts and more - never ending tangles of vines with no clear beginning, and through my studies I have learned just enough to see that I have not learned nearly enough - I have neither the tools, the time, nor the energy to harvest any fruit. (And thus I apologize in advance that I am here writing to find my problems rather to answer anything.)

But more recently, dense vegetation of thoughts upon thoughts has given way to strange expanses of a much sparser, scrubbier underbrush. I don't see any signs of disease or plague, exactly, no violence or force - yet the creativity of dense thoughts seem to be dying out, weakening, becoming thin and scrawny.

I think I know the cause - it is a very strange thing, something I never saw coming. Philosophy, it seems, is a source of death.

Strange, I know. And strange that I of all people should say such a thing. But somehow, it stands true - philosophy, among its relations to many things, stands within a strange, dark shadow.

Where do I begin to unpack this strange impression? Perhaps right from our common definitions.

Death is the separation of soul from body.

Philosophy is a separation, an abstraction (from the latin ab-straho, to cut away) of form from matter, universal from particular, an intelligible from sensible.

Other epistemologies would alter this definition, of course, but I do not wish to question how we know, but the fact of what does happen when we know, or reason very carefully - that essential principle which remains the same. There is a certain separation that goes on whereby we take an sense experience and drain its vibrant color away into an abstract ghost of its former self.

In a way, once again, this all returns to mediation vs. immediacy - to be a human being, to live a rational life, we must operate through mediation - we must distance ourselves from the world in order to make sense of it. (and what is that, anyway? sense? Really, what does meaning mean? But I will never find my way out of that labyrinth). If we didn't, we would all be infants, as Lonergan observes, unable to distinguish ourselves from any other object in the world.

But philosophy is not just an "ordinary" level of mediation - it is a reflection on a reflection on a reflection, removing itself from reality in fractal spirals. (I said reality. I don't really mean that. Reality is too ill-defined of a concept when speaking generally - perhaps I mean here experience.) This is more than a normal exercise of human reason, which stands apart from the world just enough to appreciate and understand it. Philosophy removes the intellect from the sensible experience; the soul operates as far apart from matter as it can. A gradation of death.

I have stated my case strongly, but now I must qualify: "as far apart from matter as it can." The anthropology of Aquinas is the one my mind most often slips into - the one I understand best. So according to Aquinas, an intelligible is something immaterial, and therefore must be grasped by an immaterial faculty. This is none other than human intellect, although it cannot operate except through the use of the senses to gather this information, and helps knowledge with imagination and memory. (Tangent: the soul needs the body to form images - even memories, yes? I always thought we would have only our memories when we die, even if no way to gain more knowledge until we have our bodies back. Hm. This is a problem.) We might not want to take this all the way, but at the very least, we would say that the soul is farthest removed from the body when it is focused on very abstract ideas that make little or no use of images or memories.

I will also add: emotion. The soul is farthest removed from the body when there is no emotion acting, since all emotion has a physical component.

Why do I say all emotion has a physical component but that thought does not? Really, I am cheating now, and using modern science for one thing and medieval metaphysics for the other. Maybe scientifically all thoughts need a physical platform too. But no - we must have some kind of thought, with emotion or not, that is possible without a body. Or at least such a thing is possible in angelic reason. However I am disturbed if I have just made angels to be products of pure thought. This sounds way too Kantian and Reason-worshipping to be true. Angels MUST be moved by beauty somehow - e-motion, ex-motus - "having been moved out" - love cannot be complete without this. Love is not pure agape - it is agape and eros. They don't need to have bodily emotions in the same way - but they need to have some irresistible draw to the Beautiful, whose other name is the True or the Good.

Or could it be that the farthest apart a soul can be from matter is not abstract thought, but contemplative prayer. Can I say that? I might be wrong. But many saints do have ecstatic appearances, no longer notice the passage of time, fail to notice or have control over their body, they have infused knowledge or grace (like the angels immediately intuit truth I might add), etc - it seems that God is directly touching the spirit. (This would seem to find a rough harmony with Neo-Platonism and its two flights of contemplation, of philosophy and mysticism: the goal of first being to free the soul as far as possible from the concerns of the body and even all discursive reasoning to a level of pure concept in communion with the Nous, the Intellect; the goal of the second to rise beyond this to commune in a truly apophatic and mystical way with the One Beyond All Being.)

This leads to a problem: why would God, if he intends the resurrection of the dead, only touch only the spirit and leave the body out of glorification? I am not an expert in contemplative prayer - but now I remember something else. St. Teresa of Avila does assure some of her spiritual directees that they should not be disturbed if they experience sexual pleasure during contemplation - whether this is common or rare I do not know, but the fact that such a thing exists means that the body can also participate in the pure joy that comes through contemplation, so it is, in the end, a HUMAN, EMBODIED, and not angelic experience (and therefore no longer Neo-Platonic dualism). So perhaps contemplative prayer is not, after all, a death.

Then again: it is an enormous sign of death to self. It is participation on earth in union with God - it is a death to the old self and a rising again in Christ. Is the death of crucifixion a death as well? Separation of soul and body? Certainly, our bodies are fallen, and we must separate from the sinful passions. (With Paul we often cry "Who will rescue me from this body of death?") But our souls are fallen as well - pride, the root of all sins, is primarily a spiritual evil, more grave than imprudently obeying the pull of a natural instinct. So let's not become Manichean. Perhaps then we need to alter our definition of death. We need to die to ourselves, not our bodies - we need to be separated from all that is not God.

So what have I gotten myself into?

Death: the ultimate separation of soul from body.
Death: the ultimate separation of our whole selves, soul+body, from all that is sinful in us; also, the ultimate union with God and only God though and in all things.
Death: abstraction of intelligible thought from sensible data? removing the self from experience? Philosophy?

Aphasia. Too much to say. I don't know how to express it except in these stuttering tangential pieces that do not cohere and I know they don't cohere - there must be a coherence somewhere. Perhaps the more pieces I stutter out, the more things will slowly unfold. Or perhaps not.

I will say this: I used to think that it was a coincidence that very cold, rationalistic people became philosophers (Immanuael Kant). Now I think that philosophy can make one to become that way.

This seems harsh. But when Pilate's question, rings out, so human, so disillusioned, yet so childlike, "What is truth?" philosophy would hand him a snake: "And this, then is three True: the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself," says Hegel. (A far cry from Plato and his analogy of the cave - but that will be for another post - that philosophy used to be a way of life, and trying to make it into a scientific, academic discipline seems to have neutered it and cut out its heart.)

Not philosophy alone, either - linguistics is also a death - we strip away the meanings, strip away the words, strip away the endings, all to a bare abstract skeleton of the living language - we gut it, neatly arrange its intestines, drain the excess fluid - although we never are able to view its beating heart. And the more linguists study, the less they are able to see language alive - they kill it, analyze it, whenever they come across it. (There are always so many former linguistics majors - they want to learn because they love the language alive, but they find that they cannot bear the science of its constant death.) Some of my old professors confess they no longer enjoy novels because they can't stop themselves from dissecting every sentence.

Is there an escape? Is this the way it must be? Linguistics is one thing - it is just a human science after all. But ought this to be the case in philosophy? Perhaps if your philosophy is firmly rooted in the WHOLE human person - body and soul, reason and emotion. But can philosophy, as a science, deal with emotion? Or does reason necessarily have an emotional component? Of what kind of relation? Perhaps the same relation as concepts are supported by words?

This is the huge problem in Lonergan. This is a huge problem in Kant. This is a huge problem in very many philosophers, and it is a very huge problem for me. My thoughts are dying when I try to become too philosophical - when I want to become precise and exact and pin things down in reason that is precisely when they all slip away from me and become shadows and ghosts of the reality I want to describe. I think part of it has to do with the isolation of reason from emotion - this distinction is not really human, and doesn't really describe life. Ought we really to be training ourselves to think in a way that does not confront our real experience, but only a ghost of it?

But what else ought philosophy to be? Thomas Aquinas says "Philosophers and poets are alike in being big with wonder" - well, if one thinks coldly rational, abstract thoughts all day, this kills wonder. So there are two options: either a scholar must be careful to supplement this in his life with poetry or this is not philosophy.

Is it that philosophy deals with the whole human person, as a being of body and matter, reason and emotion while using ONLY reason as a tool?
Or is it that we really can't do human philosophy if we fully separate reason from emotion, just like we can't really be human and fully separate soul from body?

The implications of this could cause major problems, I know. Classical philosophy wants to escape from the body. Phenomenology might or might not have the equipment to deal with it. Analytic philosophy assuredly does not.

I don't know if I succeeded in expressing my point, and with the continual shifting of my underlying assumptions, I'm sure I've gestured at many wrong many paths in the above… I do not mean to say that scientific thinking is evil or that we should return to a naive simplicity; philosophy is hard work, not bouquets of roses, and even if tainted with death I do not see death as the ultimate evil. I am merely trying to capture, in broad impressionistic strokes, something I think is very real, and, whatever its real name or ultimate solution may be, it is a great danger for those thinkers whose minds do not come with an "off" switch.

Advent

We all think of the truest kind of love as a self-gift to others.

I wonder if it might be truer, at least for us human creatures, to say even before this, the a more fundamental love is to freely accept the gift.

What gift? Any gift? Any true gift - any true outpouring of anther's self, WITHOUT exchange, WITHOUT repayment, or even the possibility - yes, even WITHOUT the ability to truly express your thanks. To simply receive the gift.

To accept this kind of gift: this is love. Perhaps the most difficult kind.

We do not want to accept this gift. It is too hard for us. We turn it down saying others need it more, we make it into an exchange or try to pay it back--anything to cast it on to someone else, anything to hide from the fact that the gift is FREE, that it is not based on any merit or action of ours. The truth is, deep down inside, it is not about responsibility at all; that is a mask of "adultness" we wear because we are too ashamed to face the real reason: because we believe we are failures. The gift gazes deep into the darkest parts of our soul, sees who we are not yet should be; we are not worthy that another person should give to us their love. And so we plead with Peter, "Lord, depart from me, for I am a sinful man!" But here is the truth: if this is where we start, we will never be worthy. We cannot spend our lives waiting to be worthy.

So. Now. The gift is near, the greatest gift beyond all hope, beyond all imagination. He does not ask us to prove our devotion, to run spiritual marathons to merit him; if this were the case the world would be lost in the dark winter of sin forever. All he asks is that we let him come to us; he is the radiant warmth of dawn, and he will become our love, if we only let him; he will join the tiny ungrateful trickle from our hearts with the surging ocean of the divine. Will we receive him? Will we let his light wash away the cobwebs from our hearts? Will we let up our own need for worthiness to accept this freest gift of love?

Thoughts from the East

As I have pondered these issues, my assigned reading over the past few weeks has seemed directly aimed at their answer, through John of Damascus, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas, three great saints of the Eastern Church, in addition to good old Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. You will have to forgive, one again, my scattered musings - If I try for anything more I become too daunted by my task, realizing I am not uncovering mere human concepts, but divine fractals spiraling outward and inward for all of infinity!

First of all, I realized my problem was really a simple one, if I traced it far enough: if the issue is mediation through finite creatures, the question is really not "Why do we not have direct access to truth and God?" but "Why is there a multiplicity of forms to begin with?" Or less philosophically, "Why have creation at all?"

For now I will merely say a little about these theologians. Perhaps my own opinion belongs to another post.

St. John of Damascus is most famous for his contribution to the philosophical foundations of Scholasticism, but also for his defense of icons against the first iconoclastic controversy in the eighth century. And really, a defense against icons is not about preserving a perfectly innocent tradition from unjust condemnation, or the illicit role of the emperor in trying to control the Church; the real agenda of a philosophy of iconoclasm is summed up in a two part question: "Why should the material world be an avenue for knowledge of God or of our sanctification?" and "What is the importance of creatures at all?" (Now, I am no iconoclast: I asked my questions of earlier posts not to say that I felt that mediation is necessarily a bad thing; I was simply wondering why it should be that way.) The first question deals with the human being as being an embodied soul, and the second deals with the importance of saints as intercessors and especially as examples. As bodies, we need the material to communicate - self-explanatory enough. But interesting that St. John should place so much emphasis on the glory due to saints - the glory due to saints is due for the sake of Christ, who dwells in them - creation, at its most perfect, especially though Mary, becomes a dwelling place for God. So somehow the fact that there even is a multiplicity of forms at all, which was not necessary, now demands then that we should need mediation, not just one of communicating an understanding through bodily matter, but that God mediate himself through conscious matter; there is a different between the way a piece of carved marble and a thinking mind communicate God's presence; God dwells in each, but through the Incarnation, God took on man's nature so that man might take on God's - we truly participate in divine nature, "deification", as it is called in the Greek tradition.

Symeon and Gregory Palamas speak extensively of this, but in a particularly contemplative vein. They both come from the Eastern Mystical tradition, the "hesychast" movement, which seeks union with God in inner stillness of heart, a state reached usually by repetition of the Jesus prayer. Symeon says that if we purify ourselves, through the gift of divine grace, we can *really* have experience of God on this earth - it will not just be the gathered vestiges of his touch in creation, but we will *really* experience God. (Part of this is only possible through the Eastern understanding of the Trinity which keeps the Divine Essence a mystery, but allows us to fully understand his Energies acting in the world, as opposed to the Western knowledge, which says any "Energy" or attribute we can give to God (Love, Goodness, etc) is fully undifferentiated from "Essence", and so complete knowledge of God is only possible through beholding his Essence, something that can happen only in the beatific vision... but that's really beyond the scope of what I am able to discuss here.) As Fr. John pointed out in my philosophy class, observe Rublev's icon here of the Transfiguration: the light on the mountain was not mere created light, as shown in Raphael's painting (fully consonant with the Western method of reaching God through natural epistemology); the light is a divine, uncreated light, illuminating all and casting no shadows, even while Christ himself is also surrounded by a cloud of mystery. Defending Symeon, Palamas adds that we do experience the divine through our own senses, although not through any power of their own; God grants them additional supernatural powers so that the divine glory may be perceived through the eyes, as the disciples *saw* Christ becoming transfigured before them (although not that he changed; simply that their eyes were opened to the glory of God by supernatural gift).

This is the highly condensed form of part of my thought on part of the issue. Questions left that still need whole books to answer:
-why something rather than nothing? why should things spill over, from nothing into something, from our thoughts to others, charity itself being a spilling over and gift of our very self - what can we say about this Divine fruitfulness that leaves its traces in all creation, and in what ways?
-the way humans communicate through matter
-the ontological differences of mind and matter
-the way that a mind participates in mediation, both receiving and sending forth
-how the Incarnation, as God's word to us, gives us some license to mediate*
-what happens to non-human minds (i.e. angels) whose nature God did not assume
-what constitutes divine illumination, such that purification should be necessary to receive it (if it makes sense to talk about that)
-how Western mystics, without a distinction between Essence/Energies, can talk about union with God
-how what the mystics say is related to us "ordinary people," who either are not called, or not listening their call to such union
-what is meaning in general, anyway?

I could think of so many more. Do you understand how difficult it is to even look at such a dazzling saturation, much less blog on it?

*You'll notice I did not, in fact, write on the Incarnation in this post. That is too daunting and hard.

Mediation of Beauty

So what about beauty? Is beauty mediated?

First of all, what is beauty? I don't really know, so I think I'm going to go with (Pseudo-)Dionysius: "καλός καλεῖ" - "Beauty" (kalos) "calls" (kalei). Beauty is that which draws us. Or, more properly, something that moves us as rational/spiritual creatures, since animals aren't called by beauty. (and the draw of beauty is something deeper than the draw a hungry man feels for a steak.)

But I think the way that beauty calls to us is only through a form of some kind. Beauty is itself a mediation. You can't have access to a pure beauty apart from its form! (in a non-loaded way - whether you think like Plato that beauty comes from participation of the Form of Beauty or like Aristotle that it's in the mind of the perceiver, you will have to admit that beauty does not come without some sort of "body").

Consider art. Remember when I talked about media as being opaque or translucent? I think the project of art seems to be trying to use a medium in the most transparent way possible. Think about literature: we can use volumes of words to describe concepts in philosophy, but the words can seem to be partially a hindrance to the meaning being conveyed, even while they're revealing other things. In poetry, however, you are using words specifically through their individual veilings and unveilings, to optimize their concrete character as words, to create a harmonic structure from their inbuilt network of meanings and senses. (for more on this see the later part of this post from the old blog.

I think this applies to visual arts and music too; we can use sound (voice) to communicate, or pictorial symbols to indicate things, but in normal contexts we use them in an abstracted way, just getting away with the bare minimum, as if we're constricted by the medium. But again, through art, we really focus on that particular medium and really focusing on using it as matter according to all the things it hides and reveals.

Let's illustrate with the example of sound. The sound of a human voice is a pile of sine waves of sound bouncing through our vocal tracts that add to each other to give the unique but periodic squiggle-wave of the individual human voice (since waves don't exist on top of each other, they meld together to make one wave: the peaks and valleys adding and canceling each other out until the pattern eventually repeats again). And, as intelligent beings, we use this combination of sound waves to communicate intelligible words.

Now, in music, we do not just take these waves as they are, and how they've added up their random periodic squiggles; we optimize the resonances - we put extra focus on the resonances of the different waves together until that they add up together into periodic *sine wave* motion; the result being that instead of just a spoken word, it is a sung word, it has a unified pitch with a series of harmonics within it. (Until we optimize the resonance, all the individual component waves kind of cancel out each other's order).

If you were able to follow my analogy, I congratulate you (and I grossly simplified it because I am only pretending to remember phonetics). What I am trying to say is that we have "media" floating around in the world, whether that be sound or matter or anything. Then we as human beings endow it with intelligibility, make it into a word, or a stop sign, or something, where its being-a-word or being-a-stop-sign is largely secondary to the meaning it is pointing to. In art, however, we put extra focus on how we can communicate through the particularities of this word, through its being-this-word, with these particular connections or this particular pronunciation; we find a way to make our meaning optimally resonate through this particular medium, so to speak. Or, perhaps we can phrase this better: something is art to the extent that it focuses on how the medium as a medium can optimally communicate to us (because a philosophical work can be artistic - von Balthasar, Marion, and Nancy are all very poetic, and so their form is rather artistic, even while this form is more secondary to their projects than it would be for someone with the primary intention of writing poetry).

One more fundamental distinction with this analogy: "finding the optimal resonance" of the medium isn't an intellectual calculating process - just like we don't calculate when we sing, it's more an intuitive connection that when these waves add up right, we sense it. There is hard intellectual work to be done in art, certainly, but the artistic thinking is more to sense or intuit where these resonances are strongest, because it's not something we have the ability to calculate.

So this was a lot of rambling: what have we said so far?
Art is a mediation that optimizes the mediating, or that makes the medium as transparent as possible by taking full advantage of the particularities as a medium. Art is a way of conveying beauty, truth, and goodness that is not even conceivable without a form - mediation is most proper to it.

And where were we going?
Beauty is fundamentally through mediation.

Let's throw it our test case: angels? Do angels appreciate beauty? Do angels know form? I don't know how to answer. Only that form must be more than physical - I know for myself I often find ideas quite beautiful (even like pure math - things that have no physical form). Thus, presumably, angels can have an appreciation of the beauty of non-corporeal form. But I don't think they would have art - art is still related to incarnation, and the enfleshment of ideas in some kind of physical form. Art relates to beauty, but not all beauty is art. (abstract mathematics can be beautiful, but it is not, strictly speaking, art)

Don't go looking for logical proof of this here; I am just exploring and sharing what seems right to me. But it seems to me, once again, that access to pure beauty without mediation of some kind if nonsensical.

Next up: the Incarnation (if I feel bold enough to speculate on something I am wholly unqualified to talk about...).

Mediation of Goodness

At first, this seemed to me a natural conclusion of being embodied: since we are not pure spirit, we must then cloak all access we have to truth on the spiritual level with the flesh of words... (although, again, cloak gives a connotation that makes it sound like merely an obstruction - but yet access is only possible through the particular nature of words as entities which hide and reveal at the same time.) When angels know, they intuit the truth fully and completely, as far as they are able, without the need for words or discursive reasoning.

And yet, truth is not the only thing that is mediated. The angels, specifically, made me begin to wonder about the mediation of the Good. (Pseudo) Dionysius the Areopagite states in his Celestial Hierarchies that the nine choirs of angels are the medium through which God's grace flows to us - it is not an obstacle, according to Dionysius, but merely the proper medium through which God's grace propagates.

First reaction: what a beautiful thing, that God's goodness is so personal he has so many persons bring it to me, both human persons and angelic persons. I know how clearly I can experience the love of God not only through the created world, but especially through my friendships with certain people, who are unique images of God - I never thought of the angels like this, but it makes sense that I should be able to experience his love in non-embodied people as well.

Second reaction: any finite creature is still only a creature - does this mean we can never have access to God himself?

I don't know the answer to this question. One answer is: God can work how he pleases, so probably, we have access to God both directly and through other people (is this more or less common than the infused knowledge of truth (without concepts) through the Holy Spirit?)

A second answer: Can we ever really experience God himself on this earth, at least until we are saints? God is simple, and so we couldn't have a part of him, and yet infinitely far beyond our ability to take in - it really is a miracle for us to be able to experience GOD in any way (as in any Christian authors, including Jean-Luc Marion: if finite man were to be able to experience God, that thing would not be worthy of being called God, God being by definition outside of our experience). Through the Incarnation God has elevated our nature to a supernature (deification, as the Fathers would say), but due to original sin we do not start in full union with God - this is only possible through grace and hard work as we grow in likeness to him. So perhaps saints, in full union with God, are able to experience him, somehow, on earth.

But for the rest of it, maybe it is the role of the angels to "break down" an "experience" of God somehow so that we can get something of a connection with him... and yet already I've plunged into a kind of crazy cataphatic speech that starts bracketing concepts left and right - first of all, angels are finite creatures, as we are - so how would they be able to experience God, unless through a supernatural miracle? (This might not be so big of a problem: we believe that the good angels are already participating in the beatific vision, right? So perhaps their supernatural knowledge has already been bestowed.) Second, what would it mean to "break down" God, if he is purely simple? How could any piece have any relation to something that is fundamentally without pieces?

Perhaps it is because God's simplicity is a rich simplicity. The Neo-Platonists believed the One was beyond all being, a monad that has no relation to the created order, something we can't attribute anything to - we can't even say the One is One, or it would no longer be purely one, since we would be attributing Sameness to it and now it contains multiple forms within itself (think Plato: a thing is what it is through participating in forms, and for Neo-Platonists, even Sameness is a form that one must participate in). But our God is a Trinity, first of all, and when we say God is simple, we do not mean we can attribute no quality at all to him, like the One, but that we somehow attribute everything to him, fully - God IS goodness, God IS mercy, God IS love... (imagining Heidegger's surly German frown, I feel compelled to add "whatever we mean by IS, of course")

I am sorry to post with such a lack of cohesion - but this problem is something that cannot be grasped so easily, at least not yet - I do not have the proper set of concepts, so must struggle through all these words (and here we have illustrated something about the mediation of truth finding a concept is not just correspondence to an individual "thing" out there, but a framework, or a certain viewpoint).

So once again, the question: the Good - seems to be mediated.

And I don't think this is a consequence of embodiment now: angels, as finite beings, cannot have a full experience of the good in itself either, without the supernatural gift of God.

Also, perhaps the mediation of truth is not a consequence of embodiment either: angels may intuit the truth simply, but Aquinas talks about how the higher angels are able to understand more than the lower angels, and so they constantly teach the lower angels by breaking down these concepts to levels fitted for their understanding (not breaking down temporally, or in discursive reasoning, but simply taking a seraphim-sized concept and cutting out a archangel-sized piece which the archangel will comprehend immediately).

Mediation, then, seems to be simply a result of being finite. Because we are creatures, we cannot have access to the unlimited, the Truth, the Good itself.

(Yes, I alluded to it briefly, but where does the Incarnation come in? Well slow down! I am not only finite and constricted by words, but I am constricted by the two-dimmensional character of discursive reasoning - - haha, as scattered and four-dimmensional as my disorganized thoughts appear above. Perhaps we shall say I am limited by the two-dimensional medium of communication that is writing.)

So, a recap:

PROBLEM: If a concept or essence is simple, how can it be broken down into understanding?
Even moreso, If God is simple, how can anything about him be broken down into understanding?

PROBLEM: If we don't approach God directly, how is that not an obstacle, ultimately, to God's love? If you love someone, you want to be with him directly, you don't feel that his love is magnified if it always coming through messages from other people - that seems less direct.

Next up: Beauty.

Mediation of Truth

This is one of those questions: I thought it might be small, but its roots stretch deep into everything that I do. I don't have an answer; I don't even have the question, really. But I can point at its general direction, in three (or more?) rambly parts - I apologize this is far less polished than most things I blog about.

It first occurred to me, as I was writing a history paper: why should it be that I spend all this time reading so many different words that other authors invested so much time and energy to write, just to break down and unlock a handful of the concepts they disclose? Oftentimes if we were to try to summarize what we learned from a book it could be done in less than a tenth of the size we've read, and that's a generous estimation. Then, further, if I want to convey very simple concepts to someone else, I must write them in pages and pages for this reader of mine to have a reduced understanding of my reduced concepts gleaned from the author himself (who himself reduced his conception in writing).

I am no physicist, but this is hardly a closed system! Where does all this energy go? Why do we need all these words dedicated to the purpose to unlocking a concept that, once known, is quite clear and simple?

Wouldn't it make more sense if we could have access to the concept itself? And if, once grasped, we could communicate it to others in a few simple words, words proportionate to the simplicity of the truth we have grasped?

And yet it seems that in order to have access to the truth, it must be mediated. Truth may come to us, but not in itself. And so we need words, volumes and volumes of them. We need analysts, we need interpreters, we need historians, we need synthesizers, all to get at a simple concept.

Some words are better than others; some descriptions are better than others. Language can be an opaque medium, as when authors stumble over word choice and lack any sense of subtlety for grammar.

Or, language can be translucent - I don't think any medium can be crystal clear (but more on this later). An author can use words and images (a secondary kind of medium within the medium of language itself that also helps us understand a concept!) in a way that captures quite well the meaning he is trying to convey.

But apart from the infused knowledge of the divine, which we have no agency over, concepts in ourselves are alienated from us except through media of some kind.

(Yes, we will get to art... but not quite yet.)

invocatio

Psalm 131

O Lord, my heart is not proud
My eyes are not raised too high
To occupy myself with great things
With things that are too wonderful for me

But I have calmed and quieted my soul
Like a child quieted on its mother's breast
Like a child quieted is my soul

O Israel, trust in the Lord
From this day forth and forevermore!