We have all lived with animals, human and other. Based on experience with animals, it seems that all of us use language. In living with animals, we need to know their language. Some people expect others to know their language (dog, cat, wife, husband…), but in fact each of us must be attentive to the other’s language.
Enough of the general point. Rummy, Zoe, and Moses each has had some language common to them (“dog speak” in general), and each one has had his / her particular ways to communicate. Zoe was always direct with me, and knew how to get the result she wanted. If she wanted to go out, she would go to the desired door, and let out one not-obnoxious bark to get my attention. It worked. If Zoe wanted me to go out with her, she would bring me one of my shoes. Then I would say, “Good, but where is the other one?”and she would trot off to retrieve it, and invariably would drop it at my feet, as if to say, “Okay, big boy, let’s get moving!” Moses is more subtle. His most common way to communicate to me is to lie down in front of me and look me in the face. He expects me to know what he wants. Sometimes I need to ask a serious of questions. When I ask for what he wants, he tells me “Yes, that is it,” in his way. Some human beings would miss it. Moses does not use words, need I say? He has a gesture which means—depending on the context—“yes,” “good,” or even “thank you!” I have observed it for years. What does he do? He sticks his tongue out about an inch for me to see it. That is all. And it works. “Moses, do you want to go out?” Nothing. “Do you want something to eat?” Out comes the tongue. Just now, after sharing a small bowl of ice cream, I said to him, “It is your turn to lick” (a left-over from having two dogs, as they rotated in who got to lick the bowl). So Moses put out his tongue immediately when I said, “your turn to lick.” It is his way of thanking me. Yes, I have seen the pattern. One other “word” from Moses. Unlike Zoe, he will not go to a door and give one bark for me to let him out. He just goes to the door and waits, as if I know where he is, and what he wants. But if I do not catch on, he comes back up the stairs, walks in front of my line of vision to get my attention, and then leaves the room. That means, “Okay, let me out, please!” It works. If he comes into the living room, where I am sitting, and lies down, it means that he wants to be near me (less often than Zoe did), or he is waiting for the next course. After licking the ice cream bowl a few minutes ago, he lay on the floor in front of me, glancing into my face. It meant, “Something more.” I gave him a small milk bone (called “a bony”), he ate it, and put his head down to sleep. A very important part of living with animals is to learn their language. Some people expect them to learn ours. And that is all. I have read some articles on training dogs, and seen a few short videos, but I have not seen a study on learning to read them. It is very important. I want a companion, not a canine version of a Stepford Wife. And, I utterly enjoy letting my dog friends teach me their ways of communicating. They have things to teach humans. I have never seen a Lab in a bad mood, or ticked off, or complaining. They speak this lesson day in, day out: ACCEPT whatever comes, and make the best of it. And be HAPPY, and help others to be happy, too. Always think of others rather than of yourself. Basic dog speak. |
06 June 2015
Dog Speak
01 June 2015
Some Untimely Thoughts, or Why I Am Doing What I Am Doing
(1) Why write?
By writing I can do better, or perhaps more easily, than what I can do in my mind: I can think. By thinking in this context I mean raising questions and pursuing reasonable answers to them. Although it is possible to do some serious thinking within the confines of one’s silent thoughts, the process of writing forces one to keep a question or set of questions in mind, to pursue them in a relatively rational order, to consider more fully the choice of words used, and perhaps most importantly, to review one’s thoughts by reading over what has been written, and making necessary or desired changes. Inevitably some sentences will need further clarification, some connections must be more carefully drawn, and some words must yield to others. Furthermore, in reviewing paragraphs written, one can decide what to do with the thoughts brought forth. If one does not bother writing, the thoughts begun in silence, remain in silence, pass away into silence. That may often be the better case, but not always so. “There is a time for everything, and a place for every matter under heaven.”
Why am I writing on this occasion? I sense that I ought to write, that there are thoughts in my mind which need to be realized, to be expressed, to be worked out. Something seems to be urging me towards writing now. I am not writing for publication or for money, so my goal is not likely to be fame or fortune! I write because I need to write, because some as yet unknown force, feeling, thought, presence is urging me towards writing. Admittedly, I enjoy the process of writing, and usually find some thoughts emerging as I write that had either lain dormant, or had not even yet come to light. Writing is, or can be, an adventure of the mind, of the spirit. Writing is a way of life.
(2) Why am I writing now?
Recently as I finished my little piece on “the imprisoning world of academia versus mental and spiritual liberation” (an overly complex title), I recalled an experience during my first quarter at university as an undergraduate about which I have not thought for a number of years: the experience of thinking about the campus commonplace, “Everything is relative,” and how on one I occasion I suddenly asked myself, “Relative to what?” And with that question that emerged into consciousness, I glimpsed in a moment that everything that exists in any way, and all that exists, is relative to God. In writing, I recalled an experience, a question, and an insight that ought to be remembered, that ought not to be let pass away into oblivion. So unexpectedly, I remembered the experience, but have I truly understood it?
In the past forty-six years or so, that clear insight—that everything is relative to God—has served in my thinking as a means to measure various claims to truth, to certainty, to completion, to perfection. Had I consistently applied this insight, I would not have in any way dabbled with biblical fundamentalism or religious orthodoxies in my twenties. Fortunately, I left such things behind, and with giving up a belief in the Bible as “the word of God,” “Inerrant,” and so on, I had to remove myself from my Lutheran church. Then I entered the Catholic Church, whose best thinkers have been more modest in making absolute claims to certainty or knowledge; of course, many of the devout members often think and speak as though the hierarchy is infallible, and not to be questioned. This mental condition is unhealthy, and has often been at least passively encouraged by clergy, as they claim or imply that “church teaching” is unquestionable truth. Such explicit or implicit claims are not only false and misleading, but they are damaging. They violate the truth that no truth is absolute or certain, and that no human being or institution has a monopoly on truth. Again, the insight into the unseen measure that measures all things remains operative in me, and sets my mind free from undue attachments to books, clergy, churches, teachings, dogmas, countries, creeds, and the like. Each has its proper place, but each is eclipsed by the Sun that never sets: the divine Mind, the Measure compared to which all things are indeed relative and passing.
My present task must go beyond measuring things—even those deemed sacred—and finding them wanting, or pointing out what makes false claims to be absolute truth. I, too, am relative, and have no ultimate being in myself, but derive my being from that which simply is. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says Yahweh.” And that formulation is true and meaningful, and a good reminder that no human being truly knows the mind of God. Man must be the seeker of truth, not the pretended possessor. Incumbent upon each human being is to live in response to what we call God, conceived in many and various ways, but ever beyond our limited understanding, and surely beyond our control. Each of us forever stands measured by what Solon of Athens termed “the unseen Measure.”
Yes, I can break into a preaching mode, but that will not suffice on this occasion. I must examine myself before the divine Partner: Am I truly seeking God? Have I given up the search? Do I presume to know what in truth I do not know? Am I leading others towards a deeper union, or away from God? Am I doing harm, or good? Or both? What can I do to benefit myself and others spiritually? Do I contribute to building up justice in human beings and in society? Let me consider a concrete example. This week-end the Church celebrates Trinity Sunday, and I will in some way “preach on the Trinity.” What can I say to help these men, women, young people, and not harm them? What can I possibly say that is meaningful, true, and also upbuilding?
Finally, once more I ask: Why am I writing now? What I experience that urges me to write I vaguely sense, and so am unable to put into intelligible words. At times it is as though I hear a fluttering of wings behind me, and then I imaginatively hear the command, “Write!” This experience and its interpretation may be engendered from some words remembered from Marvell’s famous poem, “To his coy mistress.” It is possible that the thought took root in me, and at times gets activated by I-know-not-what-but-wonder. And what are Marvell’s familiar words? “Behind my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” The end in time is ever near, or at least the End is near. As for the mysterious I-know-not-what-but-wonder, I do indeed wonder, What is this strange force? And so I ask, “Is it you, LORD?” The cause remainsunseen, but guessed. I sense, I think, and so I write.
(3) On having various vocations or callings
Sometimes one hears among Christians that someone “has a vocation,” or “a calling.” Often enough, among Catholics, the phrase shows up when considering if someone may “have a vocation” to the priesthood or religious life. I have long thought that there is something mistaken or misleading here. One does not “have” a vocation; one is his or her vocation. One's life is one’s vocation, having a human soul or psyche is one’s vocation. A human being has but one life, and one ultimate vocation: to live that life as well as possible. But in living out one’s life, he or she has a number of less complete vocations or callings simultaneously. I shall use myself here as a concrete case to illustrate the point: one’s life is one’s vocation, and one has or is a number of complementary vocations within that one.
Among my “vocations” or “callings” I should include the following: to become a good human being (a Mensch); to be a man; to be a father; to be a good member of my family or families; to study philosophy; to be a Christian; to be a preacher of the Word; to be a Catholic Christian; to serve as a priest within the Catholic community of faith; to pursue certain arts, and especially writing and photography; to love and to care for the little creatures in my care (presently, my dog, Moses); to appreciate beauty in nature, art, music; to be a friend to friends; perhaps most essentially, to seek the truth about “what is called `God,’ about the ultimate cause and ground of all that was, and is, and will be; to participate in God now and forever.
I have, I am, a number of God-willed vocations simultaneously within my one life. There are creative tensions among them. For example, time and effort devoted to active priestly ministry conflicts at times with the study of philosophy and writing. What I must do is to try to keep these callings in balance. The day may come when for the sake of some of these callings, I must give up the pursuit of others. In particular, in time it may happen that I will need to retire from active ministry in order to concentrate during whatever remaining time I am granted to seek God through prayer, study, and writing.
A good part of the adventure and joy of life comes from seeing what emerges, what possibilities present themselves in a person’s life. And a good part of the skill in living well is making good on the possibilities that emerge: choosing wisely, having the courage to change course when necessary, and following through on one’s higher or more pressing callings.
(4) On experienced tensions between philosophy and priesthood
For much of my life, I have felt and been aware of tensions between being a Christian and being a lover of divine wisdom in the form of philosophy. For most of my adult life, I have experienced in my soul tensions between the call to philosophy, and the call to share in the ministry of the word in service as a Catholic priest. At the same time, these two callings are complimentary, for the study of philosophy nourishes my openness to God and his word, and priestly work increases my desire to love to and help brings others to God. For philosophy as intended here aims at truth about reality, and one pursuing philosophy must sacrifice all else to the love and pursuit of truth, that is, of reality. (In Greek, `truth’ and `reality’ can both be symbolized and expressed in the one word, aletheia). Faithful discipleship of Christ also requires one to pursue truth at all costs, and to pursue the love of God and of neighbor. Out of discipleship, I have sought to serve as a priest in order to help bring God to fellow human beings, and to help ground them in the truth of God. My interest in philosophy has surely served priestly ministry.
On the other hand, a primary part of the clash between philosophy and priesthood comes in the handling of traditions. As members of the hierarchy, priests are guardians of Church traditions, as well as agents to help bring particular human beings to God. A problem is that at times, traditions do in truth get in the way of the larger duty of helping to ground ourselves in God. Catholic traditions—teachings, Scripture, creeds, Sacraments, hierarchy, liturgy, and so on—are often sufficiently open to the truth of God and the pursuit of union with God that a tense conflict with the philosophical or genuinely human life does not arise. There are times and ways, however, in which Catholic traditions can be a stumbling block to genuine human life and development, and to seeking God “with all one’s heart, mind, and soul.” The problem is not primarily the traditions themselves, but the ways in which some members of the hierarchy and some of the faithful expect one to adhere to the traditions in a rigid, hide-bound, sometimes strangling way. The Spirit is free, and “blows where it wills,” and there are times when Catholics (and other Christians) allow traditions to become deadening to the life of the spirit in openness to God.
As a priest, I must struggle to keep alive to the Spirit during liturgies, and not allow myself to fall into routine, into mindlessly mouthing words, as in readings, creed, prayers, preaching, or speaking with the faithful. The heavy hand of the Catholic Church can push one towards playing roles, in bad habits such as reciting prayers at the altar without thinking about what one is doing, and why, and concentrating on the meaning of the words. Not only lay persons, but priests as well, have admitted to me that they in effect have given up even trying to be attentive at Mass to what they experience as lifeless words being recited by the priest. As a human being, and as a seeker of truth, I resist these tendencies, and want to avoid them, lest I wither in spirit, and become a living fossil. Churches often collect fossils, and have a way of making fossils or even mummies out of human beings. I repeat: every one of the faithful must resist such mindless existence to the extent possible. Other than direct experience of God, the study of philosophy is the best medicine I know for keeping the mind and heart open to the spirit, alive to God, not only as he revealed himself in the past, but more importantly, as God is present and working here and now.
Tensions between my callings to be a priest and to study philosophy may continue to play out in a kind of balance, but I can foresee a gradual “parting of the ways.” The issue that may force a decision could arise from approaching retirement. At 64, I do not have many more years of active duty as a priest; but it is possible that I could continue in later years studying philosophy and writing. At present I see several possible scenarios emerging in years to come: I could retire from active priesthood because I find the duties too strenuous for me in declining years; I could be dismissed by the bishop at any time, for any reason, in any way he would choose to do so; or I could find that I must retire from active ministry in order to give my due to Athena, to the goddess of wisdom, so to speak. The love of study and of writing is a way of seeking and serving God, and in time it may become obvious that this is the primary way for me to live out my remaining years. In the meantime, I shall seek to be true to God, to Christ, to the faithful to whom I have been sent to bring Christ’s Word, and to the Catholic Church and its traditions—to the extent possible while seeking to be true to God above all else.
(5) When to retire?
Presently I see several possible causes that could induce me to retire from active duty: (1) incapacity through accident or serious illness; (2) gradual wearing down from aging or disease, making full-time work too difficult; (3) dismissal by the local ordinary or by monastic superiors; (4) genuine need to retire, based on an unforeseen event or development in my life, or in the life of a family member; (5) an internal need to retire, because I will long for more time and opportunity to study philosophy and to write. Without these or similar developments, I should think that full-time work until my late sixties would be reasonable.
The issue of where to live in retirement will largely depend on, or at least be related to, reasons for retiring. Unforeseen health problems, for example, could heavily influence my choice of place to live. So could family needs. And practical, financial needs will no doubt play a role as well. From research done online, it appears that living in various areas of the country would be considerably less expensive than living in Montana. The problem with moving in retirement is that in time one has become rooted in the lives of a number of others. One can, of course, perform services such as ministerial duties in many parts of the country, or elsewhere in the world.
(6) Why should I study philosophy?
Why should I continue to make the effort to study philosophical works? Why not just do my priestly and domestic duties, perhaps have a hobby or two on the side, and be content with such a life?
It may be that given my age, abilities, education, and ministerial duties, the time for serious study of philosophy has passed. Perhaps I should not study the best minds I have met over the course of my lifetime. Perhaps I should consider philosophers and spiritualists as no longer of relevance for my life. Perhaps I must close the books on my friends in the spirit who have nourished me: Moses and the prophets; the Apostle Paul and the evangelists; Hindu and Buddhist classics;Greek poets and pre-Socratic philosophers; Plato and Aristotle; Stoics, early church Fathers, Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine; the greats works of St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure; Shakespeare and many poets who wrote in our language; Descartes; Hegel; American political thinkers; Nietzsche; Whitehead; Voegelin; and others. But then, I have discovered a pattern over the years: when I turn away from closely studying works of philosophy, my mind withers. More fully, when I devote all of my energies to the active life, and especially to teaching and to ministry—with a little time allowed for prayer and spiritual reading; for manual duties (such as domestic chores); for hobbies (photography, study, writing, care of my dog, walking, investing, gardening)—but neglect devoting time and effort to more serious thinking and study, then I am less happy, more restless, less focused. Studying philosophy and writing are not done because they are required by my present employment as a priest, nor to accomplish necessities of life (such as domestic chores or providing financial resources for retirement), nor for physical health. Philosophy has its own purposes.
What do I gain from studying philosophy? Enjoyment, inner peace, a sense that I am doing what I ought to be doing, mental and spiritual health. Studying philosophy, as I do, is a form of spiritual exercise, related to wonder, to questioning, to seeking God in prayer, to a living union with God. For my part, I do not see how one has a spiritual life without seeking to develop the life of the mind, and using one’s mental abilities actively in the search for God. What I am calling “philosophy” is closely related to the quest for God, for a more true and deeper communion with God. The kind of philosophy I study, the minds to which I am attracted, are those who explore and articulate well the study of reality, and especially of what are called “experiences of transcendence.” Philosophy is not just curiosity about anything and everything, but a desire and effort to be open to, and to understand more fully, the presence of God in the human soul. In the sense in which I am using the term, philosophy is indeed the love of wisdom, and as Plato wrote, “Philosophy is the love of wisdom; God alone is truly wise; philosophy is the love of God.” The particular form of love that is philosophical employs the intellect, the divine-human light of understanding, in the responsive quest for God. The divine breaks in, and one desires to respond—nay, one feels compelled to respond. The response is not only one of obedience and gratitude, but also of seeking to understand the divine Partner. Such is the life of philosophy as I understand it and seek to live it.
As I have recorded elsewhere, when given a particular strong sense of divine presence during a Lutheran church service in my early years, the sudden illumination ended with the word arising into consciousness: “Your lifework is to have such experiences and to seek to understand them.” And in reflective distance over time I understand that having experiences of transcendence and seeking to understand them is the proper work of philosophy, including what can be termed “philosophical theology.” It is not doctrinal or dogmatic theology, or mere religious observance or ritual. Nor is it investigating any matter that chances to come before the mind. Rather, the mind of one called to philosophy seeks to do what St. Augustine described so beautifully in his early work, On true religion: “In the study of creatures, one should not exercise a vain and perishing curiosity, but take steps to ascend towards that which is immortal and ever-lasting.” Such is the philosophical life, couched by St. Augustine in terms perhaps influenced by the wonderful mystical philosopher, Plotinus. In any case, this “taking steps to ascend” into the divine is the spiritual-mental (geistliche) core of philosophy. And this is indeed a sacred calling.
There is much more I could write, and wish to write, about the life of philosophy, as well as consider why I wish to keep kindling my studies in this art of seeking the God who alone is truly wise. It may well be that I lack sufficient intellectual ability, education, and discipline to engage in philosophical study. On the other hand, there is an old monastic saying to be borne in mind, especially by anyone who could become crippled by perfectionism: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” Better for me to attempt to study and to write in philosophy, even given my intellectual deficiencies and weaknesses of character, then to spend an excess of time in religious duties, money-making for retirement, or in some of the mental-spiritual diversions rampant in American culture. Diversions, such as wholesome entertainment, have there place when done in moderation, but one should not permit them to become the main course of one’s life. For many of our contemporaries, diversions constitute a means to escape from our human tasks: doing one’s necessary duties; looking after fellow human beings and other creatures; and giving time and effort to loving God in ways that are suitable for one’s abilities.
In addition to responding to the God seeking me, there is a secondary and essential reason to study philosophy: to free the mind from its chains and clutter.The work of philosophy must ever be both positive and negative; the search for truth necessarily entails wrestling with, and breaking from, all sorts of untruth. As Voegelin has written so well, “The search for truth begins with a man’s awareness of his existence in untruth.” Ultimately, to philosophize, one must admit and come to terms with the truth that one does not know what one ought to know, and seek to know why one does not know the truth about God, self, reality. The mental-spiritual poisons of untruth—mental drugs—are for ever rampant in one’s society, in other peoples with whom one comes in contact in our amazing age of communication, but worst of all, right within the chambers of one’s own pervious mind. All of us have at work in our souls various opinions, beliefs, false conceptions, untruths and partial truths, problems of intentional unconsciousness or willful blindness, of forgetting what ought not be forgotten, and simply hardening of the intellectual arteries. We fail to rise when the alarm sounds. Had it not been for my youthful study of Plato, for example, I would never have known or understood what a cave I live in, and what cave-images fill the human soul. Had it not been for Hebrew prophets, I would not know the various kinds of idolatry to which the human spirit is liable, and how to act justly. Had it not been for the study of spiritual experiences, such as those of the Apostle Paul, I would not understand well at all the truth of Christ, nor would I feel or understand the ill effects of doctrinal rigidities rampant in the churches. Had it not been for St. Anselm, and my study of his magnificent Proslogion, I may not have understood that and why the mind must pursue the presence of God with loving questioning. After all, some forty years ago, as a young man, I took as my motto St. Anselm’s words to describe so well my intellectual and spiritual pursuits: the life of fides quaerens intellectum, of faith seeking understanding. And to this I willingly accept Professor Eric Voegelin’s necessary addition: philosophy is also a life of intellect seeking faith. By this addition I mean this: that living faith grows dull, stale, flat, and unprofitable—in a word, lifeless—unless one uses the mind and heart to help rekindle genuine and loving openness to that which we call God.
Finally, there remains another reason to study philosophy: Not only to ascend into God, not only to free the mind from false beliefs and images, but to help, in a very modest way, in the healing of the age from its illnesses. Again, Voegelin describes this task better than anyone I know, but it was surely present in Plato’s motivations. He experienced the spiritual decay in Athens—not only the breakdown and loss of religious tradition—of faith in the gods—but the spiritual disease of the clever-minded, money-seeking, power-loving Sophists, who became popular educators and professors, and who poisoned the minds of the young. The disorder of the age, in brief, compels a response. One can pretend that the serious disorders in one’s society do not exist. Or one may see and feel the disorders, and try to hide from them. Or one can respond to disorder and grave injustices by revolutionary action and violence. Or one can contribute to the diseases by engaging in more mindless thinking and unjust actions oneself—a path often taken by the intellectual and media elites in America, who are truly corrupting our young people. Or one can try to sift through the rubble, search for what can be salvaged, and in a small and humble way, help to reground the decadent society on a more solid foundation. In this regard, I recall the words of Dostoyevsky written perhaps in the 1880’s: “The West has lost Christ. That is why it is dying. That is the only reason it is dying.” Well, our civilization has lost Christ and God—and in some cases, we have sought to evict God from public and private life through the educational establishment, the mindless media, through spiritually diseased elites, through corrupt and corrupting politicians. Philosophy is, then, not only a means to return oneself to the truth of reality, but may help serve as a light to shine on social ills, and perhaps in some very small ways, contribute to a gradual recovery of well-being, order, public and private happiness. Such is the task especially of that branch of philosophy known as political philosophy, or political science in the sense practiced by Plato and Aristotle. I did not earn a doctorate in political science to sit quietly by and to “watch things pass away as in a dream.”
(7) On forms of faith: belief, gnosis, genuine faith, and blindness
Religious belief may or may not open a soul to God. There are varieties of religious belief or “faith” that surely do not bring one into contact with God, but in effect serve to seal the soul off from divine communion. Such persons become at least partially blind to the reality of God; ome rays of light may filter in through their traditionalistic blinders. Mere religious beliefs, often accompanied with sharing in rituals, may be accompanied by underlying love of God, but they may also be forms of self-immersion, of ego-centered self-love, and more especially, of mindlessness. Among Christians in various denominations, I have often observed that people may hold all sorts of dogmatic, credal, scriptural, or other sectarian beliefs, and not evidence souls genuinely seeking God. What shows up? They fail to question. At least in some cases, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools,” as the Apostle writes. In all cases, they prefer their doctrines and rituals to the truth of the unknown God.
There is another set of phenomena that may be called “faith,” but appear to be essentially forms of gnosis, of a kind of “saving knowledge.” In my youth I remember reading in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion a passage in which this learned man explicitly claims that faith in God is a knowledge of God and a certainty of one’s salvation. Having read some ancient Gnostic texts at the time, I was struck by the similarity in experience and language between Calvin and the Gnostics. Calvin’s “faith” was far removed from genuine Christian faith, to be considered below. Although Calvin employed Christian language, the essential experiences and his core beliefs (such as souls be “elect to damnation”) were a form of Gnosticism. Gnosis or “saving faith” is a claim to special knowledge, often based on an “experience of being saved,” or experiences which give one “certainty” regarding some “truths.” “I know when I was saved” would be a common Gnostic “Christian” exclamation, and utterly removed from the uncertainty of genuine faith. When small children stand up in an LDS service and declare, as I have been told they do, that “I know Joseph Smith is a true prophet,” such words are quite meaningless, given the age of the children. They are just mouthing what others have told them to say. When an adult claims that “I know Joseph Smith is a true prophet,” he or she is probably exhibiting gnostic certainty, which has nothing to do with genuine Christian faith. Again, real faith leaves one wondering and loving, not knowing. Again quoting the Apostle, “Gnosis puffs up, but love builds up.” An evangelical, Mormon, Catholic, Muslim, or other person, who claims that they know that they are “saved,” or “elect,” is self-deceived, inflated, and exhibiting a lack of genuine, self-effacing faith.
Faith in God is not certainty or knowledge, but a self-surrendering and loving trust in the God beyond what one may experience. One may have various spiritual experiences, but such experiences do not constitute “salvation,” or holiness, or any kind of certainty. Rather, genuine spiritual experiences increase one’s awareness of the presence of God in and to consciousness, but at the same time, always point beyond themselves towards the unseen, unfathomable, unbounded sea of divinity. Such experiences are humbling, and do not inflate the ego. By genuine faith, one is, as it were, swimming in an ocean of unknown and unfathomable depth, and yet one trusts. Faith in this sense is a form of opening of the soul, and is related to genuine love, and perhaps especially to awe and wonder. Genuine faith leads to questioning, to a search for the God who has in some way broken into consciousness, and turned one around from mere beliefs towards a loving response to the one now experienced as alive and at work in the human being. Faith does not possess God at all, gives no absolute certainty of salvation, but incites one to long for divine communion, “heart to heart.” In a word, real faith is not knowledge. Once again in the words of the Apostle Paul, “We walk by faith, not by sight.”
Another distinction needs to be made. Christian faith begins as distinct from Jewish faith, or Hindu faith. God communicates with the soul in many and varied ways, and if one is part of a living spiritual tradition, such as parts of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, then one’s movement into God is colored by the beliefs, teachings, practices of that tradition. But as one grows up, matures in faith, loves more truly, and in effect draws closer to God, then one must necessarily realize that God is One, and that all beings share in this One, before whom all human beings are equal, and each is loved. As one grows in this quiet wisdom, one’s rigid attachment to his or her original Christian, Jewish, Hindu associations and colorings weakens, so that one feels more at home with mystics of any tradition, than with devotees or devout persons living within the confines of his or her original religious tradition. In other words, genuine faith keeps leading consciousness out of particular attachments, including an identification with various beliefs and rituals. By “out of attachments,” I do not mean that the person may not practice and observe his or her religion devoutly; but they are not rigid, traditionalistic, moralistic, or certain in their attitudes. Genuine faith moves one increasingly into the unbounded sea of divinity, in which “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Real faith lives by love, and the man or woman with genuine spiritual faith feels at home with any human beings who love God, goodness, truth, beauty, regardless of the culture or religious tradition.
Finally, a word must be said about those who are consciously unconscious of God in any form. They may deem themselves to be agnostics or atheists, or just plain “nothing.” What they exhibit is a willful blindness to the reality which by tradition is called God. As St. Bonaventure writes in his Journey of the Mind into God, “Strange, then, is the blindness of the intellect, which does not consider that which it sees first and without which it can know nothing” (chapter 5, section 4). God is ever present in many ways, is the Ground of all that exists, and only by strange blindness can one convince himself or herself that “there is no God.” Some self-described agnostics are mentally and spiritually lazy, and do not make the effort to see what is evident before their minds. Some sense or know well the reality of God, of that which simply is, but deliberately, willfully refuse to participate in God, or hate God, and seek to lead others into their night of spiritual mptiness. An example of this self-deceived game of deception can be clearly read in the works of the brilliant and destructive German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The same attitude shows up in the writings of the young Karl Marx. These thinkers knew well the reality against which they were choosing to rebel, and yet they persisted in their assaults on God. Their mental tricks remain stock-in-trade in millions of self-blinded “unbelievers” in our day.
(8) Epilogue: giving back to God
Writing is for me a form of seeking the One moving the mind to search. As such, it is a form of prayer, of love, of gratitude. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are God’s.” All comes from God and returns to God. Writing of the divine-human encounter is a way to acknowledge the One, and to give back to him his due.
Through writing, more questions arise in consciousness. Part of a healthy mental and spiritual life is discerning which questions to explore, and which ones to let go, at least for the time being. In this little essay, I wanted to become clearer about that unknown stirring moving me to write. That I have not sufficiently clarified the process of God’s working on the mind, I do not doubt. And yet I am grateful for the courage to set forth a few thoughts, and to be open to further exploration. A mindless, thoughtless, routine religiosity is simply not “my cup of tea.” And I am quite convinced that mindless religiosity is one of the illnesses of the age needing divine healing. And so is the mindless irreligiosity so common among the elites in our culture. Mindless traditionalists and mindless unbelievers are not giving back to God what is God’s: one group gives God lip service, and the other just turns and walks away. If I did not have hope for both traditionalists and consciously self-blinded agnostics, I probably would not bother writing. On the other hand, I do not underestimate powers of resistance to the life of the spirit of which we are all capable.
By writing I can do better, or perhaps more easily, than what I can do in my mind: I can think. By thinking in this context I mean raising questions and pursuing reasonable answers to them. Although it is possible to do some serious thinking within the confines of one’s silent thoughts, the process of writing forces one to keep a question or set of questions in mind, to pursue them in a relatively rational order, to consider more fully the choice of words used, and perhaps most importantly, to review one’s thoughts by reading over what has been written, and making necessary or desired changes. Inevitably some sentences will need further clarification, some connections must be more carefully drawn, and some words must yield to others. Furthermore, in reviewing paragraphs written, one can decide what to do with the thoughts brought forth. If one does not bother writing, the thoughts begun in silence, remain in silence, pass away into silence. That may often be the better case, but not always so. “There is a time for everything, and a place for every matter under heaven.”
Why am I writing on this occasion? I sense that I ought to write, that there are thoughts in my mind which need to be realized, to be expressed, to be worked out. Something seems to be urging me towards writing now. I am not writing for publication or for money, so my goal is not likely to be fame or fortune! I write because I need to write, because some as yet unknown force, feeling, thought, presence is urging me towards writing. Admittedly, I enjoy the process of writing, and usually find some thoughts emerging as I write that had either lain dormant, or had not even yet come to light. Writing is, or can be, an adventure of the mind, of the spirit. Writing is a way of life.
(2) Why am I writing now?
Recently as I finished my little piece on “the imprisoning world of academia versus mental and spiritual liberation” (an overly complex title), I recalled an experience during my first quarter at university as an undergraduate about which I have not thought for a number of years: the experience of thinking about the campus commonplace, “Everything is relative,” and how on one I occasion I suddenly asked myself, “Relative to what?” And with that question that emerged into consciousness, I glimpsed in a moment that everything that exists in any way, and all that exists, is relative to God. In writing, I recalled an experience, a question, and an insight that ought to be remembered, that ought not to be let pass away into oblivion. So unexpectedly, I remembered the experience, but have I truly understood it?
In the past forty-six years or so, that clear insight—that everything is relative to God—has served in my thinking as a means to measure various claims to truth, to certainty, to completion, to perfection. Had I consistently applied this insight, I would not have in any way dabbled with biblical fundamentalism or religious orthodoxies in my twenties. Fortunately, I left such things behind, and with giving up a belief in the Bible as “the word of God,” “Inerrant,” and so on, I had to remove myself from my Lutheran church. Then I entered the Catholic Church, whose best thinkers have been more modest in making absolute claims to certainty or knowledge; of course, many of the devout members often think and speak as though the hierarchy is infallible, and not to be questioned. This mental condition is unhealthy, and has often been at least passively encouraged by clergy, as they claim or imply that “church teaching” is unquestionable truth. Such explicit or implicit claims are not only false and misleading, but they are damaging. They violate the truth that no truth is absolute or certain, and that no human being or institution has a monopoly on truth. Again, the insight into the unseen measure that measures all things remains operative in me, and sets my mind free from undue attachments to books, clergy, churches, teachings, dogmas, countries, creeds, and the like. Each has its proper place, but each is eclipsed by the Sun that never sets: the divine Mind, the Measure compared to which all things are indeed relative and passing.
My present task must go beyond measuring things—even those deemed sacred—and finding them wanting, or pointing out what makes false claims to be absolute truth. I, too, am relative, and have no ultimate being in myself, but derive my being from that which simply is. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says Yahweh.” And that formulation is true and meaningful, and a good reminder that no human being truly knows the mind of God. Man must be the seeker of truth, not the pretended possessor. Incumbent upon each human being is to live in response to what we call God, conceived in many and various ways, but ever beyond our limited understanding, and surely beyond our control. Each of us forever stands measured by what Solon of Athens termed “the unseen Measure.”
Yes, I can break into a preaching mode, but that will not suffice on this occasion. I must examine myself before the divine Partner: Am I truly seeking God? Have I given up the search? Do I presume to know what in truth I do not know? Am I leading others towards a deeper union, or away from God? Am I doing harm, or good? Or both? What can I do to benefit myself and others spiritually? Do I contribute to building up justice in human beings and in society? Let me consider a concrete example. This week-end the Church celebrates Trinity Sunday, and I will in some way “preach on the Trinity.” What can I say to help these men, women, young people, and not harm them? What can I possibly say that is meaningful, true, and also upbuilding?
Finally, once more I ask: Why am I writing now? What I experience that urges me to write I vaguely sense, and so am unable to put into intelligible words. At times it is as though I hear a fluttering of wings behind me, and then I imaginatively hear the command, “Write!” This experience and its interpretation may be engendered from some words remembered from Marvell’s famous poem, “To his coy mistress.” It is possible that the thought took root in me, and at times gets activated by I-know-not-what-but-wonder. And what are Marvell’s familiar words? “Behind my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” The end in time is ever near, or at least the End is near. As for the mysterious I-know-not-what-but-wonder, I do indeed wonder, What is this strange force? And so I ask, “Is it you, LORD?” The cause remainsunseen, but guessed. I sense, I think, and so I write.
(3) On having various vocations or callings
Sometimes one hears among Christians that someone “has a vocation,” or “a calling.” Often enough, among Catholics, the phrase shows up when considering if someone may “have a vocation” to the priesthood or religious life. I have long thought that there is something mistaken or misleading here. One does not “have” a vocation; one is his or her vocation. One's life is one’s vocation, having a human soul or psyche is one’s vocation. A human being has but one life, and one ultimate vocation: to live that life as well as possible. But in living out one’s life, he or she has a number of less complete vocations or callings simultaneously. I shall use myself here as a concrete case to illustrate the point: one’s life is one’s vocation, and one has or is a number of complementary vocations within that one.
Among my “vocations” or “callings” I should include the following: to become a good human being (a Mensch); to be a man; to be a father; to be a good member of my family or families; to study philosophy; to be a Christian; to be a preacher of the Word; to be a Catholic Christian; to serve as a priest within the Catholic community of faith; to pursue certain arts, and especially writing and photography; to love and to care for the little creatures in my care (presently, my dog, Moses); to appreciate beauty in nature, art, music; to be a friend to friends; perhaps most essentially, to seek the truth about “what is called `God,’ about the ultimate cause and ground of all that was, and is, and will be; to participate in God now and forever.
I have, I am, a number of God-willed vocations simultaneously within my one life. There are creative tensions among them. For example, time and effort devoted to active priestly ministry conflicts at times with the study of philosophy and writing. What I must do is to try to keep these callings in balance. The day may come when for the sake of some of these callings, I must give up the pursuit of others. In particular, in time it may happen that I will need to retire from active ministry in order to concentrate during whatever remaining time I am granted to seek God through prayer, study, and writing.
A good part of the adventure and joy of life comes from seeing what emerges, what possibilities present themselves in a person’s life. And a good part of the skill in living well is making good on the possibilities that emerge: choosing wisely, having the courage to change course when necessary, and following through on one’s higher or more pressing callings.
(4) On experienced tensions between philosophy and priesthood
For much of my life, I have felt and been aware of tensions between being a Christian and being a lover of divine wisdom in the form of philosophy. For most of my adult life, I have experienced in my soul tensions between the call to philosophy, and the call to share in the ministry of the word in service as a Catholic priest. At the same time, these two callings are complimentary, for the study of philosophy nourishes my openness to God and his word, and priestly work increases my desire to love to and help brings others to God. For philosophy as intended here aims at truth about reality, and one pursuing philosophy must sacrifice all else to the love and pursuit of truth, that is, of reality. (In Greek, `truth’ and `reality’ can both be symbolized and expressed in the one word, aletheia). Faithful discipleship of Christ also requires one to pursue truth at all costs, and to pursue the love of God and of neighbor. Out of discipleship, I have sought to serve as a priest in order to help bring God to fellow human beings, and to help ground them in the truth of God. My interest in philosophy has surely served priestly ministry.
On the other hand, a primary part of the clash between philosophy and priesthood comes in the handling of traditions. As members of the hierarchy, priests are guardians of Church traditions, as well as agents to help bring particular human beings to God. A problem is that at times, traditions do in truth get in the way of the larger duty of helping to ground ourselves in God. Catholic traditions—teachings, Scripture, creeds, Sacraments, hierarchy, liturgy, and so on—are often sufficiently open to the truth of God and the pursuit of union with God that a tense conflict with the philosophical or genuinely human life does not arise. There are times and ways, however, in which Catholic traditions can be a stumbling block to genuine human life and development, and to seeking God “with all one’s heart, mind, and soul.” The problem is not primarily the traditions themselves, but the ways in which some members of the hierarchy and some of the faithful expect one to adhere to the traditions in a rigid, hide-bound, sometimes strangling way. The Spirit is free, and “blows where it wills,” and there are times when Catholics (and other Christians) allow traditions to become deadening to the life of the spirit in openness to God.
As a priest, I must struggle to keep alive to the Spirit during liturgies, and not allow myself to fall into routine, into mindlessly mouthing words, as in readings, creed, prayers, preaching, or speaking with the faithful. The heavy hand of the Catholic Church can push one towards playing roles, in bad habits such as reciting prayers at the altar without thinking about what one is doing, and why, and concentrating on the meaning of the words. Not only lay persons, but priests as well, have admitted to me that they in effect have given up even trying to be attentive at Mass to what they experience as lifeless words being recited by the priest. As a human being, and as a seeker of truth, I resist these tendencies, and want to avoid them, lest I wither in spirit, and become a living fossil. Churches often collect fossils, and have a way of making fossils or even mummies out of human beings. I repeat: every one of the faithful must resist such mindless existence to the extent possible. Other than direct experience of God, the study of philosophy is the best medicine I know for keeping the mind and heart open to the spirit, alive to God, not only as he revealed himself in the past, but more importantly, as God is present and working here and now.
Tensions between my callings to be a priest and to study philosophy may continue to play out in a kind of balance, but I can foresee a gradual “parting of the ways.” The issue that may force a decision could arise from approaching retirement. At 64, I do not have many more years of active duty as a priest; but it is possible that I could continue in later years studying philosophy and writing. At present I see several possible scenarios emerging in years to come: I could retire from active priesthood because I find the duties too strenuous for me in declining years; I could be dismissed by the bishop at any time, for any reason, in any way he would choose to do so; or I could find that I must retire from active ministry in order to give my due to Athena, to the goddess of wisdom, so to speak. The love of study and of writing is a way of seeking and serving God, and in time it may become obvious that this is the primary way for me to live out my remaining years. In the meantime, I shall seek to be true to God, to Christ, to the faithful to whom I have been sent to bring Christ’s Word, and to the Catholic Church and its traditions—to the extent possible while seeking to be true to God above all else.
(5) When to retire?
Presently I see several possible causes that could induce me to retire from active duty: (1) incapacity through accident or serious illness; (2) gradual wearing down from aging or disease, making full-time work too difficult; (3) dismissal by the local ordinary or by monastic superiors; (4) genuine need to retire, based on an unforeseen event or development in my life, or in the life of a family member; (5) an internal need to retire, because I will long for more time and opportunity to study philosophy and to write. Without these or similar developments, I should think that full-time work until my late sixties would be reasonable.
The issue of where to live in retirement will largely depend on, or at least be related to, reasons for retiring. Unforeseen health problems, for example, could heavily influence my choice of place to live. So could family needs. And practical, financial needs will no doubt play a role as well. From research done online, it appears that living in various areas of the country would be considerably less expensive than living in Montana. The problem with moving in retirement is that in time one has become rooted in the lives of a number of others. One can, of course, perform services such as ministerial duties in many parts of the country, or elsewhere in the world.
(6) Why should I study philosophy?
Why should I continue to make the effort to study philosophical works? Why not just do my priestly and domestic duties, perhaps have a hobby or two on the side, and be content with such a life?
It may be that given my age, abilities, education, and ministerial duties, the time for serious study of philosophy has passed. Perhaps I should not study the best minds I have met over the course of my lifetime. Perhaps I should consider philosophers and spiritualists as no longer of relevance for my life. Perhaps I must close the books on my friends in the spirit who have nourished me: Moses and the prophets; the Apostle Paul and the evangelists; Hindu and Buddhist classics;Greek poets and pre-Socratic philosophers; Plato and Aristotle; Stoics, early church Fathers, Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine; the greats works of St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure; Shakespeare and many poets who wrote in our language; Descartes; Hegel; American political thinkers; Nietzsche; Whitehead; Voegelin; and others. But then, I have discovered a pattern over the years: when I turn away from closely studying works of philosophy, my mind withers. More fully, when I devote all of my energies to the active life, and especially to teaching and to ministry—with a little time allowed for prayer and spiritual reading; for manual duties (such as domestic chores); for hobbies (photography, study, writing, care of my dog, walking, investing, gardening)—but neglect devoting time and effort to more serious thinking and study, then I am less happy, more restless, less focused. Studying philosophy and writing are not done because they are required by my present employment as a priest, nor to accomplish necessities of life (such as domestic chores or providing financial resources for retirement), nor for physical health. Philosophy has its own purposes.
What do I gain from studying philosophy? Enjoyment, inner peace, a sense that I am doing what I ought to be doing, mental and spiritual health. Studying philosophy, as I do, is a form of spiritual exercise, related to wonder, to questioning, to seeking God in prayer, to a living union with God. For my part, I do not see how one has a spiritual life without seeking to develop the life of the mind, and using one’s mental abilities actively in the search for God. What I am calling “philosophy” is closely related to the quest for God, for a more true and deeper communion with God. The kind of philosophy I study, the minds to which I am attracted, are those who explore and articulate well the study of reality, and especially of what are called “experiences of transcendence.” Philosophy is not just curiosity about anything and everything, but a desire and effort to be open to, and to understand more fully, the presence of God in the human soul. In the sense in which I am using the term, philosophy is indeed the love of wisdom, and as Plato wrote, “Philosophy is the love of wisdom; God alone is truly wise; philosophy is the love of God.” The particular form of love that is philosophical employs the intellect, the divine-human light of understanding, in the responsive quest for God. The divine breaks in, and one desires to respond—nay, one feels compelled to respond. The response is not only one of obedience and gratitude, but also of seeking to understand the divine Partner. Such is the life of philosophy as I understand it and seek to live it.
As I have recorded elsewhere, when given a particular strong sense of divine presence during a Lutheran church service in my early years, the sudden illumination ended with the word arising into consciousness: “Your lifework is to have such experiences and to seek to understand them.” And in reflective distance over time I understand that having experiences of transcendence and seeking to understand them is the proper work of philosophy, including what can be termed “philosophical theology.” It is not doctrinal or dogmatic theology, or mere religious observance or ritual. Nor is it investigating any matter that chances to come before the mind. Rather, the mind of one called to philosophy seeks to do what St. Augustine described so beautifully in his early work, On true religion: “In the study of creatures, one should not exercise a vain and perishing curiosity, but take steps to ascend towards that which is immortal and ever-lasting.” Such is the philosophical life, couched by St. Augustine in terms perhaps influenced by the wonderful mystical philosopher, Plotinus. In any case, this “taking steps to ascend” into the divine is the spiritual-mental (geistliche) core of philosophy. And this is indeed a sacred calling.
There is much more I could write, and wish to write, about the life of philosophy, as well as consider why I wish to keep kindling my studies in this art of seeking the God who alone is truly wise. It may well be that I lack sufficient intellectual ability, education, and discipline to engage in philosophical study. On the other hand, there is an old monastic saying to be borne in mind, especially by anyone who could become crippled by perfectionism: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” Better for me to attempt to study and to write in philosophy, even given my intellectual deficiencies and weaknesses of character, then to spend an excess of time in religious duties, money-making for retirement, or in some of the mental-spiritual diversions rampant in American culture. Diversions, such as wholesome entertainment, have there place when done in moderation, but one should not permit them to become the main course of one’s life. For many of our contemporaries, diversions constitute a means to escape from our human tasks: doing one’s necessary duties; looking after fellow human beings and other creatures; and giving time and effort to loving God in ways that are suitable for one’s abilities.
In addition to responding to the God seeking me, there is a secondary and essential reason to study philosophy: to free the mind from its chains and clutter.The work of philosophy must ever be both positive and negative; the search for truth necessarily entails wrestling with, and breaking from, all sorts of untruth. As Voegelin has written so well, “The search for truth begins with a man’s awareness of his existence in untruth.” Ultimately, to philosophize, one must admit and come to terms with the truth that one does not know what one ought to know, and seek to know why one does not know the truth about God, self, reality. The mental-spiritual poisons of untruth—mental drugs—are for ever rampant in one’s society, in other peoples with whom one comes in contact in our amazing age of communication, but worst of all, right within the chambers of one’s own pervious mind. All of us have at work in our souls various opinions, beliefs, false conceptions, untruths and partial truths, problems of intentional unconsciousness or willful blindness, of forgetting what ought not be forgotten, and simply hardening of the intellectual arteries. We fail to rise when the alarm sounds. Had it not been for my youthful study of Plato, for example, I would never have known or understood what a cave I live in, and what cave-images fill the human soul. Had it not been for Hebrew prophets, I would not know the various kinds of idolatry to which the human spirit is liable, and how to act justly. Had it not been for the study of spiritual experiences, such as those of the Apostle Paul, I would not understand well at all the truth of Christ, nor would I feel or understand the ill effects of doctrinal rigidities rampant in the churches. Had it not been for St. Anselm, and my study of his magnificent Proslogion, I may not have understood that and why the mind must pursue the presence of God with loving questioning. After all, some forty years ago, as a young man, I took as my motto St. Anselm’s words to describe so well my intellectual and spiritual pursuits: the life of fides quaerens intellectum, of faith seeking understanding. And to this I willingly accept Professor Eric Voegelin’s necessary addition: philosophy is also a life of intellect seeking faith. By this addition I mean this: that living faith grows dull, stale, flat, and unprofitable—in a word, lifeless—unless one uses the mind and heart to help rekindle genuine and loving openness to that which we call God.
Finally, there remains another reason to study philosophy: Not only to ascend into God, not only to free the mind from false beliefs and images, but to help, in a very modest way, in the healing of the age from its illnesses. Again, Voegelin describes this task better than anyone I know, but it was surely present in Plato’s motivations. He experienced the spiritual decay in Athens—not only the breakdown and loss of religious tradition—of faith in the gods—but the spiritual disease of the clever-minded, money-seeking, power-loving Sophists, who became popular educators and professors, and who poisoned the minds of the young. The disorder of the age, in brief, compels a response. One can pretend that the serious disorders in one’s society do not exist. Or one may see and feel the disorders, and try to hide from them. Or one can respond to disorder and grave injustices by revolutionary action and violence. Or one can contribute to the diseases by engaging in more mindless thinking and unjust actions oneself—a path often taken by the intellectual and media elites in America, who are truly corrupting our young people. Or one can try to sift through the rubble, search for what can be salvaged, and in a small and humble way, help to reground the decadent society on a more solid foundation. In this regard, I recall the words of Dostoyevsky written perhaps in the 1880’s: “The West has lost Christ. That is why it is dying. That is the only reason it is dying.” Well, our civilization has lost Christ and God—and in some cases, we have sought to evict God from public and private life through the educational establishment, the mindless media, through spiritually diseased elites, through corrupt and corrupting politicians. Philosophy is, then, not only a means to return oneself to the truth of reality, but may help serve as a light to shine on social ills, and perhaps in some very small ways, contribute to a gradual recovery of well-being, order, public and private happiness. Such is the task especially of that branch of philosophy known as political philosophy, or political science in the sense practiced by Plato and Aristotle. I did not earn a doctorate in political science to sit quietly by and to “watch things pass away as in a dream.”
(7) On forms of faith: belief, gnosis, genuine faith, and blindness
Religious belief may or may not open a soul to God. There are varieties of religious belief or “faith” that surely do not bring one into contact with God, but in effect serve to seal the soul off from divine communion. Such persons become at least partially blind to the reality of God; ome rays of light may filter in through their traditionalistic blinders. Mere religious beliefs, often accompanied with sharing in rituals, may be accompanied by underlying love of God, but they may also be forms of self-immersion, of ego-centered self-love, and more especially, of mindlessness. Among Christians in various denominations, I have often observed that people may hold all sorts of dogmatic, credal, scriptural, or other sectarian beliefs, and not evidence souls genuinely seeking God. What shows up? They fail to question. At least in some cases, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools,” as the Apostle writes. In all cases, they prefer their doctrines and rituals to the truth of the unknown God.
There is another set of phenomena that may be called “faith,” but appear to be essentially forms of gnosis, of a kind of “saving knowledge.” In my youth I remember reading in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion a passage in which this learned man explicitly claims that faith in God is a knowledge of God and a certainty of one’s salvation. Having read some ancient Gnostic texts at the time, I was struck by the similarity in experience and language between Calvin and the Gnostics. Calvin’s “faith” was far removed from genuine Christian faith, to be considered below. Although Calvin employed Christian language, the essential experiences and his core beliefs (such as souls be “elect to damnation”) were a form of Gnosticism. Gnosis or “saving faith” is a claim to special knowledge, often based on an “experience of being saved,” or experiences which give one “certainty” regarding some “truths.” “I know when I was saved” would be a common Gnostic “Christian” exclamation, and utterly removed from the uncertainty of genuine faith. When small children stand up in an LDS service and declare, as I have been told they do, that “I know Joseph Smith is a true prophet,” such words are quite meaningless, given the age of the children. They are just mouthing what others have told them to say. When an adult claims that “I know Joseph Smith is a true prophet,” he or she is probably exhibiting gnostic certainty, which has nothing to do with genuine Christian faith. Again, real faith leaves one wondering and loving, not knowing. Again quoting the Apostle, “Gnosis puffs up, but love builds up.” An evangelical, Mormon, Catholic, Muslim, or other person, who claims that they know that they are “saved,” or “elect,” is self-deceived, inflated, and exhibiting a lack of genuine, self-effacing faith.
Faith in God is not certainty or knowledge, but a self-surrendering and loving trust in the God beyond what one may experience. One may have various spiritual experiences, but such experiences do not constitute “salvation,” or holiness, or any kind of certainty. Rather, genuine spiritual experiences increase one’s awareness of the presence of God in and to consciousness, but at the same time, always point beyond themselves towards the unseen, unfathomable, unbounded sea of divinity. Such experiences are humbling, and do not inflate the ego. By genuine faith, one is, as it were, swimming in an ocean of unknown and unfathomable depth, and yet one trusts. Faith in this sense is a form of opening of the soul, and is related to genuine love, and perhaps especially to awe and wonder. Genuine faith leads to questioning, to a search for the God who has in some way broken into consciousness, and turned one around from mere beliefs towards a loving response to the one now experienced as alive and at work in the human being. Faith does not possess God at all, gives no absolute certainty of salvation, but incites one to long for divine communion, “heart to heart.” In a word, real faith is not knowledge. Once again in the words of the Apostle Paul, “We walk by faith, not by sight.”
Another distinction needs to be made. Christian faith begins as distinct from Jewish faith, or Hindu faith. God communicates with the soul in many and varied ways, and if one is part of a living spiritual tradition, such as parts of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, then one’s movement into God is colored by the beliefs, teachings, practices of that tradition. But as one grows up, matures in faith, loves more truly, and in effect draws closer to God, then one must necessarily realize that God is One, and that all beings share in this One, before whom all human beings are equal, and each is loved. As one grows in this quiet wisdom, one’s rigid attachment to his or her original Christian, Jewish, Hindu associations and colorings weakens, so that one feels more at home with mystics of any tradition, than with devotees or devout persons living within the confines of his or her original religious tradition. In other words, genuine faith keeps leading consciousness out of particular attachments, including an identification with various beliefs and rituals. By “out of attachments,” I do not mean that the person may not practice and observe his or her religion devoutly; but they are not rigid, traditionalistic, moralistic, or certain in their attitudes. Genuine faith moves one increasingly into the unbounded sea of divinity, in which “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Real faith lives by love, and the man or woman with genuine spiritual faith feels at home with any human beings who love God, goodness, truth, beauty, regardless of the culture or religious tradition.
Finally, a word must be said about those who are consciously unconscious of God in any form. They may deem themselves to be agnostics or atheists, or just plain “nothing.” What they exhibit is a willful blindness to the reality which by tradition is called God. As St. Bonaventure writes in his Journey of the Mind into God, “Strange, then, is the blindness of the intellect, which does not consider that which it sees first and without which it can know nothing” (chapter 5, section 4). God is ever present in many ways, is the Ground of all that exists, and only by strange blindness can one convince himself or herself that “there is no God.” Some self-described agnostics are mentally and spiritually lazy, and do not make the effort to see what is evident before their minds. Some sense or know well the reality of God, of that which simply is, but deliberately, willfully refuse to participate in God, or hate God, and seek to lead others into their night of spiritual mptiness. An example of this self-deceived game of deception can be clearly read in the works of the brilliant and destructive German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The same attitude shows up in the writings of the young Karl Marx. These thinkers knew well the reality against which they were choosing to rebel, and yet they persisted in their assaults on God. Their mental tricks remain stock-in-trade in millions of self-blinded “unbelievers” in our day.
(8) Epilogue: giving back to God
Writing is for me a form of seeking the One moving the mind to search. As such, it is a form of prayer, of love, of gratitude. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are God’s.” All comes from God and returns to God. Writing of the divine-human encounter is a way to acknowledge the One, and to give back to him his due.
Through writing, more questions arise in consciousness. Part of a healthy mental and spiritual life is discerning which questions to explore, and which ones to let go, at least for the time being. In this little essay, I wanted to become clearer about that unknown stirring moving me to write. That I have not sufficiently clarified the process of God’s working on the mind, I do not doubt. And yet I am grateful for the courage to set forth a few thoughts, and to be open to further exploration. A mindless, thoughtless, routine religiosity is simply not “my cup of tea.” And I am quite convinced that mindless religiosity is one of the illnesses of the age needing divine healing. And so is the mindless irreligiosity so common among the elites in our culture. Mindless traditionalists and mindless unbelievers are not giving back to God what is God’s: one group gives God lip service, and the other just turns and walks away. If I did not have hope for both traditionalists and consciously self-blinded agnostics, I probably would not bother writing. On the other hand, I do not underestimate powers of resistance to the life of the spirit of which we are all capable.
30 May 2015
The Trinity And The Magnolia Blossom
1 Experiences of divine Presence pointing towards “Trinity”
In the Imitation of Christ we read, “I would rather love the Trinity than define it.” Indeed, the love of God is, with the love of our fellow human beings, our highest and most noble duty, and the main source of happiness. As for “defining” the Trinity, any attempt to do so seems foolish, and reminds me of St. Augustine’s famous insight that he gained on a beach, watching a small boy dig a hole in the sand. As I recall, St. Augustine asked the boy, “What are you doing?”and the child said, “I am digging a hole, and then I will put the ocean into it.” Although the quotation may not be exactly correct, one gets the point, and so did the saintly bishop: Trying to define God is as foolish as the boy’s attempt to put the ocean into a hole. Indeed, it is more foolish, for the hole can more easily contain the entire ocean than a verbal formulations could “define God,” or the human mind could comprehend the mystery we call God.
For the past twenty years or so, on the rare occasions when someone has asked me about “the Trinity,” or I must preach on Trinity Sunday, I have referred to certain concrete experiences, which over the centuries provoked theological reflection, and by which the dogma of “the Trinity” gradually emerged. For one can discern that the ancient and medieval Trinitarian doctrine of the Orthodox and Catholic churches contains within it a variety of spiritual experiences; these experiences helped to induce some of the Church Fathers to develop the dogma of the “Trinity.” Over the years I have sought to summarize the experiences, trying to help parishioners understand them, but given the lack of response, I doubt that what I said has made much of an impression. I have explained that the earliest Christians, including the Apostle Paul and the evangelists, experienced God as personal and dwelling in them, and they identified this divine Presence as Christ, as the Risen LORD. And these men had numerous experiences of impersonal divine Presence—of love, joy, peace, forgiveness, communion; of fervent prayer, visions, dreams, gifts of prophesy and of preaching, of speaking in tongues, and so on—and they identified these spiritual phenomena as “the holy spirit.” At the same time, textual evidence shows that the Apostles and evangelists were aware that there was far more to God than they experienced. In other words, their experiences opened them to divine Presence, rather than close off their minds in self-satisfied certainty. In other words, they were spiritualists, but not Gnostics. The faith-awareness of God beyond all experiences of divine Presence—beyond Christ and his pneumatic presence—they called “Father,” presumably borrowing Jesus’ primary symbol for the God with whom he communed, about whom he preached, and whom he embodied in his life and death. Out of these experiences, and similar ones in countless Christians in the first several centuries after Christ, intelligent minds coined the term “Trinitas” (Three-One, Trinity) to pull together the rich variety of spiritual experiences at work in disciples of Jesus.
Presently I still think that this account of the meaning of the symbol “Trinity” makes sense, and it is empirically verifiable on the basis of our best sources, namely, the earliest writings of Christians: the letters of the Apostle Paul, the four canonical Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and various other letters and documents contained in the body of work known since about the third century as “the New Testament,” that is, “the New Covenant,” grounded as it is in God’s covenant to Moses and the Chosen People. Good sources exist that pull together early reflections on these and similar experiences, and one can follow, if one is so inclined, the gradual emergence of the dogma of the Trinity through the writings of the Fathers.
After centuries of using the symbol “Trinity” to speak of God, the symbol achieved perhaps its clearest account by the finest systematically theological mind of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, as the great teacher discoursed on the Trinity in his major writings. One should note, however, that in his comprehensive Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas first explores the reality of God analogically—with his famous “five ways” that God is known in reality, with his clear presentation of God as “the sheer act of to be,” as “to be subsisting through itself,” with accounts of God’s simplicity, eternity, and so on, before introducing the questions on God as “Trinity.” And so well embedded has the symbol of the Trinity been in Christian consciousness over many centuries, that even the Protestant Reformers—mainly Luther and then Calvin—insisted that their adherents accept the dogma of the Trinity. For although these Reformers rejected Church authority and much of its highly accomplished theological developments, and claimed to base their teachings solely on the Bible (sola scriptura), the post-scriptural dogma of the Trinity was maintained and even vehemently insisted upon, despite the fact that the symbol occurs nowhere in “scripture alone,” but clearly emerged in and through the life of the early Christians outside and beyond the confines of a book.The point here is that the Trinitarian dogma had been inculcated for centuries, and remained active in the thinking of those who deliberately rejected much of the centuries-old Catholic teaching. For example, despite his claims to be biblically grounded, John Calvin permitted a man, Michael Servetus, to be burned at the stake as a “heretic” for rejecting the Trinitarian dogma. As Calvin wrote, in dealing with such heretics, one must “forget all humanity when fighting for God’s glory.” This attitude no doubt reminds one of other religious fanatics and ideologues, including some active in the world today. And lest one think that I am singling out the Calvinists for persecuting “heretics,” Catholic church authorities were simultaneously seeking the same physician-theologian, Michael Servetus, for persecution for “heresy.” The quality of the man’s thought may have been poor, and his thinking on the Trinity may have been confused and misleading, but one would think that stupidity or foolishness do not justify burning someone alive at the stake.
2 Lack of interest in the “Trinity”
Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant teaching on the Trinity is commonly accepted Christian dogma; the “Trinity” is not en empirically verifiable truth. I dare say that no one can experience God as “the Trinity,” although, as noted above, Christ as the risen LORD was experienced by disciples; a rich variety of religious experiences were reflectively ascribed to the “holy spirit;” and the early Christians sought to preserve their awareness of God beyond what could be experienced personally or impersonally by the use of the symbol “Father.” Employing the logical part of reason, Church Fathers deduced that “the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, and yet there are not three gods, but One God,” as stated in the so-called “Athanasian Creed.” Although the Trinity as such is not known through experience, there have been some occasions in history—quite rare, as far as I know—in which someone claimed to have “seen the Trinity,” or had some special communication with Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. A relatively well-known example of this claim is that of the child, Joseph Smith. As he wrote about an experience in his childhood, three men, identified as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, appeared in Joseph’s bedroom, standing around his bed. Such an encounter, real or imagined, would more fittingly be term “tri-theism,” or a belief in three distinct gods or divine beings, than remotely compare to the meaning of “Trinity” in Catholic teaching. The notion of three separate beings (however divine) is distinctly not part of the dogma of the Trinity. Young Joseph Smith’s “experience” illustrates, if nothing else, the way popular imagination, including that of a child, can misunderstand the Christian symbol of “Trinity.” Based on years of pastoral ministry, I can say that it is not only children in the churches who misunderstand Trinitarian teaching as Tri-Theism, with three separate “persons” (more or less human in every sense) called “God.”Frankly, it can be embarrassing, more than illuminating, to hear ways in which “the faithful” can misunderstand the dogma of the Trinity. But then, the symbol seems to lend itself to misunderstanding, unless one has undergone considerable philosophical and theological education. Few of the faithful with whom I have spoken over the years, however, has expressed a desire to ground himself or herself in philosophy and theology, let alone engage in a study on “the Trinity.” Trinitarian symbology fails to ignite interest.
Given the difficulties in communicating to the faithful a reasonable understanding of the meaning of the dogma of the Trinity, it may well be the better part of prudence not to speak about it. Then again, the ancient Creeds often recited in Catholic and many Protestant churches employ distinctly Trinitarian language, as derived from the fourth and fifth century Church Councils at Nicaea and later Ephesus. In the Creed, Christ is unmistakably identified as “God from God, light from light, true God from true God,” and the Spirit is identified as “proceeding from the Father” in the original and Orthodox Creed, or “proceeding from the Father and the Son” in the western Christian creeds (Catholic and Protestant). As noted, rarely have I heard a Christian ask, “What is meant by the term `Trinity,’ or why did the dogma develop originally? Given the lack of questioning—nay, the silence of boredom—perhaps one ought not to try to throw light on that which does not attract intellectual or spiritual interest. Even more broadly, we wonder: Is not a lack of questioning about the things of God a common characteristic of life in the churches in recent decades? Do not many Christians display more interest in entertainment, sports, and making money than in seeking God? Perhaps we fail to engage the minds of the faithful in ways that truly inspire them to “seek God and live.” We in the churches have done a good job, it seems, of making God boring.
3 Experiencing God as present and beyond
Although one cannot experience God as Trinity directly, one can experience God. And a man or woman can surely have experiences similar to those of the earliest disciples of Jesus: One can discover by faith the presence of the living God in Jesus; one can feel uncaused peace and joy, and ascribe such experiences to “the Holy Spirit;” and one can have sufficient humility to realize that beyond anything experienced of God’s Presence—however good and beautiful—there remains far more to love and to know in the God beyond all experience, and one can call this transcendent reality “Father,” employing the term sanctified by the use given it by Jesus himself.
And a man or woman who is open to the reality of God, and not content with mere credal beliefs, dogmatic teachings, ritualistic worship—and far more deadening, contemporary forms of self-absorption—may have diverse experiences of God. And these experiences, if they are genuine and not spurious, should lead one to wonder and to seek, to gain flashing insights, and to love the unseen One called “God.” There are, I submit, two primary tests of genuine experiences of God: that one becomes more open to loving God and to seeking more avidly the truth about God; and that one is inspired to love one’s fellow human beings, and indeed, all creatures, as sharers in the One Divinity. If further seeking of God and genuine charity do not result from one’s “spiritual experiences,” I submit that they are not truly of God, but egophanies—manifestations of the self. Jesus gave us the simple test of truth: “By their fruits you will know them.” A human being who does not seek God actively reveals a soul that is spiritually dull, more or less anesthetized; self-imprisoned; and one who does not live a life of genuine love to one’s fellow beings “does not know God, for God is love,” as the evangelist John tells us in his first epistle.
God comes as and when God wills. In early Christian terms, this coming of God is called His Parousia, meaning God’s Presence. Among more fundamentalistic Christians, the Parousia was thrown out into an imagined future, sometimes imagined as the “Second Coming of Christ.” Even the Apostle Paul dabbled in this apocalyptic conception according to his earliest extant letters. But as one sees from Romans, II Corinthians, and Philippians (not to mention evidence from still later “Pauline” texts, such as Colossians and Ephesians), the Apostle’s earlier expectation of the Parousia of Christ in the future was strongly toned down, even replaced, by his expectation to die and “be with the LORD” before the End. More importantly by far, Paul and the writers of the four canonical Gospels clearly experienced Christ’s Presence, his Parousia, in their own souls, and in brothers and sisters “in Christ Jesus.” St. Paul’s letters are replete with evidence of his experiences of God’s Presence in him, which he often symbolizes or interprets as Christ: “God was pleased to reveal His Son in me” (Galatians 1); “Am I not an Apostle? Have I not seen the LORD?” (I Corinthians 15). And in a fuller passage: “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the LORD, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; [this comes] from the LORD, the Spirit” (II Corinthians 3. God shines into Paul’s soul in the person of the Risen Christ. The experiences of “God’s spirit,” or “the holy spirit,” are sprinkled throughout the New Testament documents, with frequent appearances in the letters of Paul, the writings of Luke (Gospel and Acts), and the Johannine writings. To give but one clear example: “No one can say `Jesus is LORD,’ writes St. Paul, "except by the holy spirit.” In even more familiar words from St. John’s Gospel, “The flesh is useless; the spirit gives life,” and “Those who worship God must worship in spirit and in truth.”
God appears as and when God wills.Our task is to behold the glory of the LORD, as it is revealed to us. And the recipient of such experiences of divine grace must not to forget what one is given, but think about the experiences “with thanksgiving.”
It was early April of 1979, I believe, when I was summoned to the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., to interview for a position teaching political philosophy in the university’s Department of Politics. Early one morning I was walking on the campus, in a large open area between several buildings and the immense and imposing Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on the west side of campus. I had been in the church, and found it quite impersonal and unappealing. Although a Christian, I was not a Catholic at the time, and perhaps was unable to appreciate the kind of authoritarian Jesus portrayed in a huge mosaic inside the dome of the upper church. Inside the cold stone church I felt enclosed and humanly diminished, and so it was with a sense of release and quiet joy that I escaped from the tomb into the land of the living outdoors. The air was misty, as a light rain had been falling. A dim light filtered through the heavy air. I was vaguely, probably nervously, thinking about my upcoming presentation on my doctoral dissertation. I had written on “The Experiential Foundation of Christian Political Philosophy,” and was unsure of the kind of reception to expect. From the moment on the previous day when I first saw the campus of Catholic University, I felt heartsick, as I found the place so utterly unappealing, standing as it does in the midst of a busy, run-down, and quite ugly American city. Coming from Santa Barbara, California, “the nation’s capital” looked and felt all the more unnatural, congested, run down, and just plain ugly. With the monumental and authoritarian Shrine behind me, I walked slowly through the lush, green grass, admiring as I walked several magnolia trees, which at the time were blossoming. It has been many years since I have seen a magnolia, but as I recall, the leaves had not yet appeared, but only the white blossoms, or so I remember them.
One blossom caught my attention, and I wanted to see it more closely. Slowly I approached the tree, and looked at the flower, which was just below my eye level. With my poor vision, I drew near to the blossom, and looked at it. What happened in this one moment came to mean more to me than anything else that happened during the visit to Washington—including getting offered the teaching position. Positions come and go. But what I experienced was worth far more than any job, or a church building, or everything I have ever seen in institutional religion.I looked at the flower, and thought, “It is beautiful!” All at once, in a sudden burst of insight, I glimpsed the Beautiful itself. In this moment, I saw not just the beautiful flower, but in and through the single beauty, I beheld with my intellect Beauty Itself, which I recognized or interpreted as God. Divine Beauty was incarnated in that magnolia blossom. In its openness, purity, simplicity, that single blossom at once contained and pointed to the Beautiful, or what by long tradition we call “God.”
I was filled with awe and joy. In that moment, my spirit was opened up, and I beheld the glory of God as if I had seen Christ himself. “Everything transitory is but a likeness,” as Goethe declares at the end of Faust. The flower was transitory—and not transitory. In the visionary moment, it was eternal, beyond change and the ravages of time. In the moment, the blossom was eternal, and a door of vision into the living and true God. What I did not find or feel in the churches, I saw and felt in the eternal beauty of the one lone magnolia blossom.
4 Some further reflections on the Magnolia Blossom
As written, I have recalled the experience of seeing divine Beauty in one beautiful blossom, in one “thing” that was more than a “thing,” a divine creature, filled with grace—that is, divine Presence—and leading the beholder to glimpse eternal Beauty. In this recall, I have already allowed some reflections to emerge, because the context of the experience may have been significant: that as I had not felt anything of God in the lifeless stone edifice, the overbearing Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, I immediately and unmistakably beheld divine glory in the simple flower. The contrast is significant, I believe. We often look for God in the wrong places. Perhaps to some, God will appear even in the lifeless church. Indeed, some months later, while serving as an assistant professor at Catholic University, I would enter into the basement of the Shrine, and pray in a small chapel with several icons—one of the Virgin, one of St. John the Baptist. And I felt “the peace of God that surpassing all understanding” in this small, seemingly insignificant chapel. (I never experienced anything but poor acoustics and annoyance at the muscle-bound, Fascistic conception of Jesus in the huge upper church. De gustibus non disputandem. “Matters of taste ought not be disputed.”) To this day, I am grateful for the vision of God granted me in that April morning—God’s incarnating Presence in that single magnolia blossom. The softly white, delicate blossom, was as pure and lovely as Mary, and accomplished for me here and now what the Virgin has done for millions of human beings through the ages: bringing forth Christ to a longing, loving soul. The God seen is the God that becomes incarnate in the man or woman gracefully sharing in the divinely-given vision.
What do such experiences teach about God, and about symbols such as “the Trinity”? For one thing, the experience of God’s Beauty is humbling, and awe-inspiring, and reminds one how little and weak our human understanding is. The vision of Beauty opens up the heart, and in time, leads one to reflect with some gentle sorrow on the transitory quality of beauty in this world. But the vision also fills one with awe towards the never-fading Beauty whose vision is eternal life.
Comparing the doctrine of the Trinity (at least as presently heard in the churches) with the vision of Beauty, one can tentatively say: What human beings construct intellectually, with elaborate and complicated doctrines, can be communicated more effectively and immediately by the sheer gift of God’s Presence breaking in right now, in a single moment, “in the twinkling of an eye,” even in a flower. Human beings develop the doctrines. Natural processes bring forth the flower. But God gives the vision in which the blossom or flower is not only what it is in space and time—a “thing,”a lovely creature—but also simultaneously a bearer of the eternal, undying God. How such experiences can be rationally linked with the symbol of the Trinity, I do not know for certain. One could piously say that “the Holy Spirit moved me to see the flower, and to behold God,” and that may well be true. I would say: God revealed God to me in and through the magnolia blossom. Or perhaps more precisely: God revealed God’s eternal Beauty to me in and through the magnolia blossom. This is equally important, and to be borne in mind: In revealing divine Beauty present in and through the blossom, I had no doubt that the beauty of the flower was only an incarnation, an instant, of the unbounded sea of divine Beauty. The Unbounded was present in the seemingly bounded. Nothing contains or holds God in a definite way. Nothing holds God unchangingly: not a blossom, not a dogma. The Beauty and the Mystery of divine reality is boundless. And this vast sea of divinity is forever beyond human grasp or control; one may behold lovingly, but not contain or arrest. God flows on.
Each soul must long for the vision of God, and prepare for it, if preparation is indeed possible. Perhaps the best preparation is a longing to love and to know God as God is, and not allow one’s conception of God to be confined to a book, to a dogma, or even to a God-given vision in a blossom. Hence, I suggest that to the symbol of the Tri-une God, one must add many and various experiences of divinity realized in time. Many human beings have glimpsed the divine reality somewhere—in something, in a quiet grove, on a mountain, in their soul, in a gardener. The world is indeed full of divinity, of the God who is at once both present and ever beyond our boundaries. “Quick now, here now, always—a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)…”
To the God beyond all formulations, beyond all beliefs, beyond all that can be known or conceived or felt, I give heartfelt thanks. For allowing me to have such experiences of divine Presence, as I was granted on this one day in April, while looking at a Magnolia Blossom, I feel humbled and truly grateful. And to this prayer of thanks I add words I heard perhaps a year or so before this vision was granted: “Your life-work is to have such experiences, and to seek to understand them.” This is the life of philosophy, so well embodied in Socrates and Plato; and this is also the life of the Benedictine, St. Anselm, with his fides quaerens intellectum—“faith seeking understanding.” Would that each of us had the faith to seek the One seeking us.
26 May 2015
The Imprisoning World Of Academia vs. Mental And Spiritual Liberation
Why is it that in reading so much of modern philosophy and more popular thinking from Descartes to the present, I have often felt as though my mind were being imprisoned? As enlightening as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and others can be for a searching mind, these and many writers restrict their own consciousness, and through their writings and teachings, export these restricted conceptions of reality to others. Rather than engaging in philosophy as an act of mental and spiritual liberation, they seem imaginatively to create mental constructions that restrict their own and the readers’ consciousness. In effect, by their own obscured views and visions, they obscure that of their readers who uncritically imbibe their thoughts.
This experience of imprisonment at the hands of modern philosophers has been even more intense when reading twentieth-century derivatives from modern philosophy, and especially the writings of social scientists. It is not only professors such as the Harvard psychologist, B. F. Skinner, who openly seek to close off the human mind—to destroy the “soul of man,” as Skinner wishes, but so many so-called “political scientists” and “social scientists” who engage in mental games that make the attentive reader feel divorced from reality as he or she reads them. For years as an undergraduate and graduate student, I studied political science at universities; for years I read the works assigned to the extent that I could bear doing so; and for years these writings made me long for far richer pastures of the mind, far more open territory for exploration. Is it surprising that so many young persons become restless and seek to break out of the mental prisons being imposed on them? The mental disorders being inculcated in the young show up in waves of anxiety and depression; in escapes into fantasy worlds of alcohol and drug abuse, and mindless video games; in various political and social activisms; in pornography and promiscuity; in open rebellion and violence; in rape, murder, suicide. Campus life in America often has the distinct and disturbing smell of a cesspool. The American educational establishment, aided by mindless mass media, as well as by diseased and very low quality mass-produced music, has been wounding or killing the minds of youth for decades, and the resulting diseases show up to anyone with eyes to see.
I detest mental prisons. How I survived in social science, earning a doctorate along the way, took considerable perseverance. Often I felt like throwing down the books to flee their restrictive horizons—their nonsense, foolishness, blindness, spiritual sickness. I endured the mental and spiritual agony in part to earn a doctorate for employment, but also to try to understand something about reality. Against the restrictive mental tortures of social science and modern philosophy, I was forced to question, to challenge, to seek out far better guides for the life of the mind than these shrunken souls could provide. Never will I forget the joy of liberation I felt when I first read Plato’s Republic in its entirety in a graduate course in the history of political theory. This joy was intellectual and spiritual, a sense of being liberated from the bindings of mere opinions, and being guided by a first-rate intellect into far more open pastures. Socrates-Plato led, and I willingly and joyfully followed, engaged in a quest which seems to have no end, but grows clearer and more joyful along the way. Plato introduced me, not to mere opinions and mental prisons, but to the joyful quest for the truth about reality, moved by openness to the vision of the Good, and inspired by the example of Socrates.
In tasting spiritual-intellectual freedom, one does not want to be re-bound in the prison-caves of human verbiage. Human beings desire to know the truth about the reality in which we find ourselves. In Aristotle’s famous words opening up his study of “first philosophy,” “All human beings by nature desire to know.” We want “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” to use courtly language. If that is true, why then are so many of our contemporaries content to stay within constricting “world-views,” or simply give up the search altogether? Mental drugs have their appeal, and evidence of refusal to search for the truth is all around. In my twenties, I noted how so many fellow students seemed not to care about seeking truth, but “having fun” now, and making money later; and the way to find employment was to accept without challenging whatever the professors spoon-fed down their throats. American academia breeds mental midgets who are cut off from the open fields of reality. But the students themselves all-too-willingly play the game, because they want the goodies: better grades; good recommendations; making connections; getting along with their peers; employment at more prestigious colleges, or in better-paying jobs. Little by little, a fairly inquiring mind can let itself become tied up, bound by the chains of received opinions and highly restrictive mental horizons.
Recalling what I experienced during many years in the American educational establishment, elementary and secondary education do not feel as restricting or as destructive as was the so-called “education” delivered up at universities as an undergraduate and graduate student. Indeed, as a youth I had some excellent teachers in elementary school, and some good ones in high school. Although I had the privilege to study with a few professors of high quality, most of the professors I encountered in “higher education” seemed oblivious to reality as a whole, boxed in by ideological world views and by habits of refusal to open up to divine Presence. The ultimate truth of reality, the truth of the divine working in and through everything that exists, was never mentioned, never acknowledged. Most of the professors gave the impression of living in their own egos and thoughts, in their own more or less self-imprisoned worlds. If they engaged in openness to divine Presence, they kept this essential part of reality to themselves, and hence gave the students one loud lesson: God is irrelevant for human life. Although campus life was often very noisy, the silence on God was deadening. The one taboo was to admit that one was open to the truth about God—not as a “true believer” might be, but as a human being desiring to know reality.
In short, the years spent at universities were experienced as more mentally deadening than was high school. On the other hand, my questioning of what I was being taught became more developed, more acute, during my late teens and twenties. A crucial turning point for my own mental life occurred during my first term at the University of Washington. The watch-word on campus in the late ’60’s was “everything is relative,” and this slogan was used to disparage anything and everything to aid in so-called “human liberation.” During my first quarter, in the summer of 1969, fresh out of high school in Montana, I took an anthropology course in which the professor inculcated in her students the truth that there is no truth, that everyone’s opinions are as true as everyone else’s, and therefore we must tolerate others and different “ways of life.” One day, as she had us sit in class and peel an orange for “the experience,” the professor spoke excitedly of her experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, with LSD. And of course, she assured students that “everything is relevant,” that there is no right or wrong in themselves, but only what one thinks is right or wrong. And students repeated her words outside of class in a chorus of approval, because it meant that they were autonomous—free from all rules, all laws, from all authorities, from parents, from any so-called “god.” With gratitude I recall the afternoon when I sat in my dormitory room, in what I recall as a darkened room, and kept pondering in my mind the assertion, “Everything is relative.” Into my thoughts came a question: “Relative to what?” I did not dismiss the question, but let it stand. Then suddenly, at once, my mind glimpsed something that I cannot truly put into words, but to which I can refer: I saw with the intellect, in a single moment, that everything is indeed relative. Everything is relative to the One, to what is called “the Absolute,” or God. Suddenly I saw and understood in a flash that everything that exists is dependent on, caused by, that which is called God. This single insight was the beginning of my intellectual conversion, and for it I am truly thankful. It did not come from what I was taught, but from searching for the truth about a relatively mindless slogan: “Everything is relative.” After this flash of insight, I have seen everything as relative to God, and I understand clearly that there is no other absolute and unconditioned reality in this world: not self, ego, law, government, church, clergy, professor, bible, dogma. Everything is relative to what simply is.
Once I experienced some mental liberation, then I realized how imprisoning and deadening mass education is. For those who do not question the fundamentals of what they are being taught, education feels acceptable and reasonably beneficial. But if one begins to experience inner liberation, and undergoes what Plato called the “turning around of the soul,” the perigoge, then one knows how truly bound he or she is and has been. Before the turning around, I may have considered my education fairly mediocre (although I fortunately had some very good teachers), but I did not realize how utterly restricting these mental worlds were. Tasting freedom in the spirit, one experiences bindings and mental drugs for what they really are.
What can or should be said about my years in Christian churches? After all, it is not only the American educational establishment that binds up students and makes them mental midgets. The churches have surely played a role in restricting spiritual and mental horizons. Fortunately I was not raised in a fundamentalistic church, nor in an authoritarian church, so the dead weight of “the Bible” or “the Church says” was not dumped onto my little shoulders. I was spared such deadening weights. In time, however, I entered a highly restrictive Lutheran church, with its “sola scriptura” and with Luther’s attitude towards “that whore, reason,” and with the damaging creed recited every week, “Man is by nature sinful and unclean.” Fortunately I sensed real spiritual and intellectual problems in such nonsense and got out of the box before my spirit was killed. I entered the Catholic Church in part because I considered it far broader and more liberating in its teachings. And generally, it is, or can be. But in time I also learned at close quarters how authoritarian an institution the Church can be and often is, and how Catholics in relatively higher places often squelch the Spirit lest the boat be uncomfortably rocked. As I recently wrote, Catholicism (that is, “Roman Catholicism”) is largely a static religion, and many Catholics—at least in the hierarchy—do not encourage genuine questioning, and restrict “the faithful” to the confines deemed fitting and comfortable to an aging clergy. And yet, within the churches—Orthodox, Catholic, some of the Protestant communities—one finds men and women who long for truth about God and reality, and who develop lives of prayer, loving service, and genuine meditation. So all in all, the churches are “mixed bags.”
No institution can liberate a human mind. Each person must ultimately learn to question, to seek, to think for himself or herself. Either one keeps tuning into the Spirit, to the divine Presence ever flowing in, at work in all that exists, or one is self-enclosed. In openness to the divine, one lives; in self-enclosure, one dies. This principle applies both to individual human beings, to groups, and to institutions.
I detest mental prisons. How I survived in social science, earning a doctorate along the way, took considerable perseverance. Often I felt like throwing down the books to flee their restrictive horizons—their nonsense, foolishness, blindness, spiritual sickness. I endured the mental and spiritual agony in part to earn a doctorate for employment, but also to try to understand something about reality. Against the restrictive mental tortures of social science and modern philosophy, I was forced to question, to challenge, to seek out far better guides for the life of the mind than these shrunken souls could provide. Never will I forget the joy of liberation I felt when I first read Plato’s Republic in its entirety in a graduate course in the history of political theory. This joy was intellectual and spiritual, a sense of being liberated from the bindings of mere opinions, and being guided by a first-rate intellect into far more open pastures. Socrates-Plato led, and I willingly and joyfully followed, engaged in a quest which seems to have no end, but grows clearer and more joyful along the way. Plato introduced me, not to mere opinions and mental prisons, but to the joyful quest for the truth about reality, moved by openness to the vision of the Good, and inspired by the example of Socrates.
In tasting spiritual-intellectual freedom, one does not want to be re-bound in the prison-caves of human verbiage. Human beings desire to know the truth about the reality in which we find ourselves. In Aristotle’s famous words opening up his study of “first philosophy,” “All human beings by nature desire to know.” We want “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” to use courtly language. If that is true, why then are so many of our contemporaries content to stay within constricting “world-views,” or simply give up the search altogether? Mental drugs have their appeal, and evidence of refusal to search for the truth is all around. In my twenties, I noted how so many fellow students seemed not to care about seeking truth, but “having fun” now, and making money later; and the way to find employment was to accept without challenging whatever the professors spoon-fed down their throats. American academia breeds mental midgets who are cut off from the open fields of reality. But the students themselves all-too-willingly play the game, because they want the goodies: better grades; good recommendations; making connections; getting along with their peers; employment at more prestigious colleges, or in better-paying jobs. Little by little, a fairly inquiring mind can let itself become tied up, bound by the chains of received opinions and highly restrictive mental horizons.
Recalling what I experienced during many years in the American educational establishment, elementary and secondary education do not feel as restricting or as destructive as was the so-called “education” delivered up at universities as an undergraduate and graduate student. Indeed, as a youth I had some excellent teachers in elementary school, and some good ones in high school. Although I had the privilege to study with a few professors of high quality, most of the professors I encountered in “higher education” seemed oblivious to reality as a whole, boxed in by ideological world views and by habits of refusal to open up to divine Presence. The ultimate truth of reality, the truth of the divine working in and through everything that exists, was never mentioned, never acknowledged. Most of the professors gave the impression of living in their own egos and thoughts, in their own more or less self-imprisoned worlds. If they engaged in openness to divine Presence, they kept this essential part of reality to themselves, and hence gave the students one loud lesson: God is irrelevant for human life. Although campus life was often very noisy, the silence on God was deadening. The one taboo was to admit that one was open to the truth about God—not as a “true believer” might be, but as a human being desiring to know reality.
In short, the years spent at universities were experienced as more mentally deadening than was high school. On the other hand, my questioning of what I was being taught became more developed, more acute, during my late teens and twenties. A crucial turning point for my own mental life occurred during my first term at the University of Washington. The watch-word on campus in the late ’60’s was “everything is relative,” and this slogan was used to disparage anything and everything to aid in so-called “human liberation.” During my first quarter, in the summer of 1969, fresh out of high school in Montana, I took an anthropology course in which the professor inculcated in her students the truth that there is no truth, that everyone’s opinions are as true as everyone else’s, and therefore we must tolerate others and different “ways of life.” One day, as she had us sit in class and peel an orange for “the experience,” the professor spoke excitedly of her experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, with LSD. And of course, she assured students that “everything is relevant,” that there is no right or wrong in themselves, but only what one thinks is right or wrong. And students repeated her words outside of class in a chorus of approval, because it meant that they were autonomous—free from all rules, all laws, from all authorities, from parents, from any so-called “god.” With gratitude I recall the afternoon when I sat in my dormitory room, in what I recall as a darkened room, and kept pondering in my mind the assertion, “Everything is relative.” Into my thoughts came a question: “Relative to what?” I did not dismiss the question, but let it stand. Then suddenly, at once, my mind glimpsed something that I cannot truly put into words, but to which I can refer: I saw with the intellect, in a single moment, that everything is indeed relative. Everything is relative to the One, to what is called “the Absolute,” or God. Suddenly I saw and understood in a flash that everything that exists is dependent on, caused by, that which is called God. This single insight was the beginning of my intellectual conversion, and for it I am truly thankful. It did not come from what I was taught, but from searching for the truth about a relatively mindless slogan: “Everything is relative.” After this flash of insight, I have seen everything as relative to God, and I understand clearly that there is no other absolute and unconditioned reality in this world: not self, ego, law, government, church, clergy, professor, bible, dogma. Everything is relative to what simply is.
Once I experienced some mental liberation, then I realized how imprisoning and deadening mass education is. For those who do not question the fundamentals of what they are being taught, education feels acceptable and reasonably beneficial. But if one begins to experience inner liberation, and undergoes what Plato called the “turning around of the soul,” the perigoge, then one knows how truly bound he or she is and has been. Before the turning around, I may have considered my education fairly mediocre (although I fortunately had some very good teachers), but I did not realize how utterly restricting these mental worlds were. Tasting freedom in the spirit, one experiences bindings and mental drugs for what they really are.
What can or should be said about my years in Christian churches? After all, it is not only the American educational establishment that binds up students and makes them mental midgets. The churches have surely played a role in restricting spiritual and mental horizons. Fortunately I was not raised in a fundamentalistic church, nor in an authoritarian church, so the dead weight of “the Bible” or “the Church says” was not dumped onto my little shoulders. I was spared such deadening weights. In time, however, I entered a highly restrictive Lutheran church, with its “sola scriptura” and with Luther’s attitude towards “that whore, reason,” and with the damaging creed recited every week, “Man is by nature sinful and unclean.” Fortunately I sensed real spiritual and intellectual problems in such nonsense and got out of the box before my spirit was killed. I entered the Catholic Church in part because I considered it far broader and more liberating in its teachings. And generally, it is, or can be. But in time I also learned at close quarters how authoritarian an institution the Church can be and often is, and how Catholics in relatively higher places often squelch the Spirit lest the boat be uncomfortably rocked. As I recently wrote, Catholicism (that is, “Roman Catholicism”) is largely a static religion, and many Catholics—at least in the hierarchy—do not encourage genuine questioning, and restrict “the faithful” to the confines deemed fitting and comfortable to an aging clergy. And yet, within the churches—Orthodox, Catholic, some of the Protestant communities—one finds men and women who long for truth about God and reality, and who develop lives of prayer, loving service, and genuine meditation. So all in all, the churches are “mixed bags.”
No institution can liberate a human mind. Each person must ultimately learn to question, to seek, to think for himself or herself. Either one keeps tuning into the Spirit, to the divine Presence ever flowing in, at work in all that exists, or one is self-enclosed. In openness to the divine, one lives; in self-enclosure, one dies. This principle applies both to individual human beings, to groups, and to institutions.
23 May 2015
Notes On The Holy Spirit
It is a joy and a privilege for me to write anything about the Holy Spirit, but I also feel as though I should cover my face as I dare to speak on such a holy and sublime subject. We are considering God, and any words about God are always humanly limited, and pointing to the awe-inspiring divine mystery that transcends all understanding. If words on the Holy Spirit have any truth to them, they have that truth only from and in the Holy Spirit. If one reading these words does not already participate in the Spirit, then these words sound empty and meaningless. By the Spirit are words understood that speak about the Spirit; without the Spirit, there is only darkness, emptiness, an icy void that chills the heart, and makes one long to die. Without the Spirit, we grope in endless night, a condition experienced and described so well by Friedrich Nietzsche. In his case, he reveals the Spirit by its absence in his soul, for those with eyes to see. Without the Spirit, we are not “Supermen,” but savages ruled by the will to power.
The Spirit is love and truth at once. Love without truth is deceitful and self-centered; truth apart from love is lifeless and deadening. In the Spirit, a human being communes with the living God, the One beyond all words, beyond all knowing. The Spirit is the Presence of the unknown God in the soul. This Presence cannot be controlled or possessed, but must be welcomed, enjoyed, followed. Although ever present, it comes as and when it wills. None of us is always conscious of the Spirit’s presence. If we were, we would be enjoying the “beatific vision,” the loving-seeing of God as He is. And yet, thanks be to God, there are moments when one knows, “It is the Holy Spirit:” a new understanding, a sudden impulse to goodness, a renunciation of vengeance, a most delightful peace, a seeing with the heart, a renewal of true love for the beloved. It is the Spirit that opens up the soul and mind to love reality in and for that which brings forth all out of nothing. In the Spirit, one experiences a most delightful joy, a lifting up, moments of ecstasy (“standing out” of oneself) that nothing else can deliver.
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