Toward Attention

Funneling the Cattle

Several years ago: in the aftermath of the ordination of the divorced, partnered and openly gay Gene Robinson to an episcopal seat in the Episcopal Church USA, an evangelical radio station with two or three hosts was airing call-ins to their station. The outward and apparent goal was to allow people to air their grievances, but it was just an example of typical evangelical theatrical opportunism: they wished to steer the herd of disaffected into the ranks of approved evangelical meeting-houses. It was obvious that these herders could not imagine any option but Secularism and Evangelicalism for the disaffected, and wanted to save them.

One woman called in, after several earlier "successful" re-directed call-ins, and said that she became Catholic, "because the Catholic Church will never ordain women or partnered homosexuals." The radio hosts were completely caught off-guard, and with their emotional defenses down they fully consented to this fact, and seemed bewildered by their own agreement with this rather plain woman of no remarkable intelligence (in another context they might have geared up to be hostile to such affiliation with Catholicism, but in this context they were forced to agree with her choice according to the logic of their own setup -- the drama of the options diminishes when you add third choices like "Catholicism" to Secularism vs. Evangelicalism for the disaffected -- play actors like to keep it simple, because it helps the drama.

Nominalism and Ideology

Nominalism is a movement within the late Medieval (Western/Latin/Roman) Church that stressed the priority of will over intellect (or mind). It is usually associated with the names of William of Occam (famous for Occam's Razor: "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity") and Duns Scotus. It is called Nominalism because the names used to signify thins and qualities are just that -- names. These common names for qualities and things do not refer to universals (i.e., there is no transcendent idea of blue unifying the multitude of differently blue things, there is no transcendent idea of color to unify the multitude of different colors, etc.). It was supposed by earlier Medievals (following the pagan Platonic tradition) that there must be a transcendent idea of color, otherwise the unity of the many intelligible colors would fall apart: what is the ground of calling all these colors colors if they are not unified in a timeless intelligible idea of color-as-such? For Nominalists, "color" or any other so-called "universal" is simply a name, something we do with our tongue and vocal cords and air: the names are convenient shorthands for organizing our experience into unities that only exist in our minds and in our speech -- these unities do not exist out there.

This also applies to the concept of the Good.

In terms of what that means for what things are (ontology), this means that there are no common natures -- you and I do not share a common human nature, but are rather radically individual bodies; politically speaking, this means that there is no common good: the vocalization "good" is simply the name we give to certain kinds of external conformities of will: if the will of the king is that you rise at five AM to offer incense to an image of him, then doing that is good, and not doing that is bad (unless there is a higher, divine will that trumps the king's). 

Now, this means that the mind cannot discern what is good transcendent of positive wills involved. There is no transcendent Good independent of the wills of men and the Will of God. God, in this model, can even will to hate Himself, and will that His creatures do the same, and then change it -- because there is nothing above God, in this model, and there is no idea of the Good internal to His Nature.

One can see how this leads to a horrible kind of Nihilsm. It also, I think, means that there cannot be philosophy in any classical sense of the term, but instead there can be only ideology. 

Under such a conception of life and human wills, the only option, for those whose wills are set to peace, for those whose appetite is for traquility rather than conflict, is to admit that there are multiple ends that variously satisfy and fulfil many different people, and that there is no singular end of human life that is natively the good of human life as such that can be thus commended to ("foisted on") others, and to recommend a kind of pluralism.

Nominalism + Appetite for Peace = Liberalism.

Atheist For Secularism and Against Political Atheism

With Western Easter fast approaching, you can be sure that there will be many people who wail about those Christian elements that remain in the public square, those others who actively seek to promote and enlarge the non-Christian elements of the "holiday," and yet others who aren't interested in complaining or re-emphasizing but in actively militating against eliminating and ridiculing every element of the Christian faith. I don't think it will necessarily be as bad as all that, but as with every year, there will be some of it. Anticipating that, here is a video below:

Factories vs. Things That Grow

The performative requirements of the academy are so often disruptive, if not abortive, to the processes of being educated.

I wonder how often education is really on the minds of those who design and run classes -- I wonder how often, when they say "education," they really mean something closer to uploading data or even grooming. 

In these cases we are machines or hardware, clay or stone -- what we are not is alive, not even on the vegetable level, which one needs to be recognized as in order to be educated, or which one needs to feel in order to learn -- to educate is literally to draw out.

On Reduction

Sometimes it feels like everything important to the world around me is either essentially political or else has been reduced to politics (prattle about "values," anyone?). The rest, it seems, is just treated as therapy at best.

And I find that depressing.

Freedom and Nihilism

Whatever comes after Modernity is not a paleo-whatever: it is something new that no one can now dream. Yet we have such weak imaginations that we cannot conceive of this.

I recently shared, with some friends, the quote from David Bentley Hart that I cited here several posts ago. I did not cite the quote to attack Modernity or Secularism or Secularity: I simply sought to describe its contours.

It is interesting that, for some reason, laying out the features of our Modern notion of freedom immediately provokes a kind of theatrical display of Jews, women, gays, and scientists as threatened by any return to "Christendom," which apparently is the only thing that a somewhat-pious person could possibly be interested in if he were to challenge the modern notions of freedom and law as intrinsically nihilistic, for the notion of the Good that they assume is generated from the appetites of men. One can criticize our modern idea of freedom without attacking our modern freedoms (they are not the same thing, even if closely related -- still, the modern freedoms may need a better home than the modern idea of freedom).

It seems that, to critique the modern notion of freedom as license cannot but prompt the alarms of Byzantine Emperors exiling the enemies of their preferred theological parties and Totalitarian regimes annihilating ethnic groups and persecuting those who engage in homoerotic acts. These do not lie behind my complaint, however: the inappropriate use of coercive power by past governments should not be confused with a criticism of the nihilistic tendencies in our modern Liberal polity.

The move to immediately consider women is apparently that they were not free -- not truly free -- before our modern Liberal polities.

The move to immediately consider Jews is apparently that they are always a remainder, and so any polity that does not make room for them is too homogenizing and Totalitarian.

The move to immediately consider homosexuals is apparently that whether or not homosexuality is legally allowed is a real test of whether our modern liberties are real or not.

The move to immediately consider scientists is apparently that science challenges authority with reason and is publicly verifiable, and that we should be critical of all authority, for it is so often private, irrational and arbitrary.

I don't know that any of these cases are as simple as the positions I've here described (I've only tried to sketch an outline of why these four are brought out on stage when the Modern notion of freedom is questioned), and I'm quite sure that in questioning Modernity I'm not pushing for a return to a religio-political model that yokes religious institutions to the State, giving them access to the sword. That works for Paganism just fine, and for Islam, and maybe even for Judaism (though less so): I don't think it can work for the Church. Christianity can't really be a very good religious backbone for an Empire.

It is interesting, though, how political academia is. It's not the place to go for free and open enquiry: it's the place to go to train for war.

Peter Berger on One Element of Protestantism's Contribution to Secularism

"If compared with the "fullness" of the Catholic universe, Protestantism appears as a radical truncation, a reduction to "essentials" at the expense of a vast wealth of religious contents. This is especially true of the Calvinist version of Protestantism, but to a considerable degree the same may be said of the Lutheran and even the Anglican Reformations. Our statement, of course, is merely descriptive -- we are not interested in whatever theological justifications there may be either for the Catholic pleroma or for the evangelical spareness of Protestantism. If we look at these two religious constellations more carefully, though, Protestantism may be described in terms of an immense shrinkage in the scope of the sacred in reality, as compared with its Catholic adversary. The sacramental apparatus is reduced to a minimum and, even there, divested of its more numinous qualities. The miracle of the mass disappears altogether. Less routine miracles, if not denied altogether, lose all real significance for the religious life. The immense network of intercession that unites the Catholic in this world with the saints and, indeed, with all departed souls disappears as well. Protestantism ceased praying for the dead. At the risk of some simplification, it can be said that Protestantism divested itself as much as possible from teh three most ancient and most powerful concomitants of the sacred -- mystery, miracle, and magic. This process has been aptly caught in the phrase disenchantment of the world." The Protestant believer no longer lives in a world ongoingly penetrated by sacred beings and forces. Reality is polarized between a radically transcendent divinity and a radically "fallen" humanity that, ipso facto, is devoid of sacred qualities. Between them lies an altogether "natural" universe, God's creation to be sure, but in itself bereft of numinosity. In other words, the radical transcendence of God confronts a universe of radical immanence, of "closed-ness" to the sacred. Religiously speaking, the world becomes very lonely indeed."

    "The Catholic lives in a world in which the sacred is mediated to him through a variety of channels -- the sacraments of the church, the intercession of the saints, the recurring eruption of the "supernatural" in miracles -- a vast continuity of being between the seen and the unseen. Protestantism abolished most of these mediations. It broke the continuity, cut the umbilical cord between heave and earth, and thereby threw man back upon himself in a historically unprecedented manner. Needless to say, this was not its intention. It only denuded the world of divinity in order to emphasize the terrible majesty of the transcendent God and it only threw man into total "fallenness" in order to make him open to the intervention of God's sovereign grace, the only true miracle in the Protestant universe. In doing this, however, it narrowed man's relationship to the sacred to the one exceedingly narrow channel that it called God's word (not to be identified with a fundamentalist conception of the Bible, but rather with the uniquely redemptive action of God's grace -- the Sola Gratia of the Lutheran confessions). As long as the plausibility of this conception was maintained, of course, secularization was effectively arrested, even though all its ingredients were already present in the Protestant universe. It needed only the cutting of this one narrow channel of mediation, though, to open the floodgates of secularization. In other words, with nothing remaining "in between" a radically transcendent God and a radically immanent human world except this one channel, the sinking o the latter into implausibility left an empirical reality in which, indeed, "God is dead." This reality then became amenable to the systematic, rational penetration, both in thought and in activity, which we associate with modern science and technology. A sky empty of angels becomes open to the intervention of the astronomer and, eventually, of the astronaut. It may be maintained, then, that Protestantism served as a historically decisive prelude to secularization, whatever may have been the importance of other factors."

Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1967), 111-113.

DBH on Modernity

"Modernity is secularization. It is, in its essence, a project of detaching moral, legal, and governmental reasoning from any authority transcendent of the state or the individual. It is the project of an ethics conformed not to divine justice but to human reason and popular consensus; of a politics authorized not by divine ordinance but by the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state; and of a model of freedom based not on the perfection of human nature but on the unconstrained liberty of individual will."

Religion, History, Science Truth

I thought that this article by Ward was a simple, good, superficial overview.

Charles Taylor

"What can Orthodoxy learn from the Catholic intellectual tradition, and what can Catholics learn from Orthodox, specifically in light of the Secular cultural condition we find ourselves in, and given the vast heritage that we share?" --this is the question I asked Charles Taylor after his recent appearance at BC, making a straight line to the podium as soon as the Q&A session was over. Unfortunately I was late to the talk, and so I only got the Q&A.

His answer was interesting: he said that modern Catholics were very good at the active life, going going going, but that they often forget that it's not all there is (the way he said this almost suggested to me that he may have been inclining, at least in that moment, toward suggesting that the active life was somehow properly subordinate to the contemplative life) to the Christian life. He seemed to be suggesting that Orthodox should learn the active life better. I replied that "when it comes to works of charity and social justice, you have us beat there hands down." He laughed, seemingly charmed, but also seemingly in agreement. Contemplation, he continued, especially as this is seen in Iconography, is something that Catholics need to recover. He pointed to Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov as two models for how this should be done. He said that Roman Catholic thought is perhaps too juridical, and that we Orthodox can enrich it by emphasizing this organic and contemplative dimension. I could not tell if he was suggesting the opposite was true, but I didn't get that sense.

He seemed to suggest, if I understood him correctly, that we must not react to the secular world we live in by seeing our faith as somehow separate from our secular life, or the vision of our faith as separate from our secular vision, but that the two should overlap, and by synchronous. He again mentioned Florensky and Bulgakov in this regard.

Unfortunately, some priests peeled us away from each other before I could continue to ask him questions. I then cornered him again at the end to get him to sign a copy of Sources of the Self that I bought at the book-display case.