Not Seeing Facts that Stare Us in the Face

The "hidden dimension" is only accessible to eyes that see. Alasdair MacIntyre in a recent article (his address to the Am. Cath. Phil. Assn. "On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture") commented on the absence of such eyes in secular culture:

"The [secular] philosopher might say that if there is indeed such a thing as genuine awareness of the presence of God, then the question of whether or not God exists should have been settled to everyone's satisfaction long ago. To which the only possible response is that of C.S. Pierce, in his reply to the objection posed to his own personalist theism, that 'if there is a personal God, we must . . . be in personal communication with him. Now, if that be the case, the question arises how it is possible that the existence of this being should ever have been doubted by anybody.'

"To which Pierce replied that 'facts that stand before our face and eyes and stare us in the face are far from being, in all cases, the most easily discerned.' ('The Law of Mind' in Philosophical Writings of Pierce, ed. Justus Buchler, New York: Dover Publications, 1955, 352). To discern them we need not argument, but to be open to those facts as Newman was open, when he perceived his own existence and that of God as 'luminously self-evident.'"

Incarnation's "Hidden Dimension" Is Seen "Without the Grid of a System"

A member of the School of Community, Giorgio, reflected on the recent session by commenting:

"Today, while thinking about last SoC, which I enjoyed a lot, this thought came to my mind:

We are made for the infinite,
but we are stuck in our finitude.

Thanks God, the Word (the infinite) became flesh,
so ... we have a chance! "

To me that means that when we, who are finite, awaken in our life to the infinite, we meet Christ, that infinite being, who has become finite (emptied himself) in order to be with us.

The nature of incarnation (the spirit in flesh) is at the heart of religion, for that is how we experience our faith. Here is what the translator of Emmanuel Levinas' Nine Talmudic Readings (her name is Annette Aronowicz) says about Levinas' understanding of religion:

"What strikes me as central to Levinas's perception about the nature of religion is his insistence upon the utter ordinariness of what we are accustomed to call the transcendent. We have just seen this in Levinas's translation of the word "God," which always derives its meaning from ordinary human activity, as, for instance, in his statement in "Judaism and Revolution" that the love of God reveals itself in the employer's negotiation about the wages and working hours of his employees. [Levinas says:]

'As little as I have ever understood the exact meaning of the expression 'the opening up of the soul in its love of God,' I ask myself, nonetheless, whether there isn't a certain connection between the establishment of working hours and the love of God, with or without the opening up of the soul. I am even inclined to believe that there are not many other ways to love God than to establish these working hours correctly, no way that is more urgent.'

Aronowicz goes on:

"This statement should certainly not be taken to mean that one's love of God results in moral or ethical behavior. Rather something else is going on. 'The ethical is not merely the corollary of the religious but is, in itself, the element in which religious transcendence receives it original sense.' [cite omitted] In other words, it is in our interactions with our fellow human beings as such, quite independently of any love of God these individuals may or may not profess, that the love of God may appear or lie hidden. The remark 'Man would be the place through which transcendent passes' should remind us that the ordinariness ot which Levinas draws our attention, the ordinariness of saying 'after you' as we sit at the dinner table or walk through a door, is, in the end, not that ordinary, for it is the potential passageway of that which is most extraordinary.

"Unlike Rudolf Otto, the famous theologian and historian of religions, whose Idea of the Holy has had tremendous impact on our perception of religion in this century, Levinas refuses to situate the transcendent, what Otto called the 'Wholly Other' in some realm apart from our daily interactions, in a privileged experience accessible only to a few. For Levinas, the transcendent is part and parcel of our most taken-for-granted activities. It is not something 'extra' that occasionally intrudes upon our world. Levinas quotes Franz Rosenzweig (whose view of religion is reflected in all Levinas's Talmudic commentaries, as well as in his philosophical words) as saying that 'the division of men into those who are religious and those who are not does not go far. It is not at all a question of a special disposition that some have and others do not. . . .' Rather, for Rosenzweig, as indeed for Levinas, religion is a matter of the living relations that all human beings engage in.

"I have italicized the world 'living' because Levinas here and in his second essay on Rosenzweig associates life with the moment in which the specific person overcomes 'the immobility of concepts and frontiers' to come into relation with what is other, infinite, and transcendent. This happens when he interacts with other human beings in their specificity, without the grid of a system. Thus, 'life in this precise sense, living -- is religion.' The realm of religion, then, is 'neither belief, nor dogmatics, but event, passion, and intense activity.'

"Levinas's formulation of the religious dimension may seem to many to be irreligiousness itself, for here, as elsewhere, his approach is thoroughly secular. There is no 'other' world besides the one we all live in, and there is no eternity outside time. Yet one cannot emphasize enough that this secularization is not a claim that, in the end, there is 'merely' the world and 'merely' history. For this world and these times contain, in Levinas's view, a hidden dimension, something infinitely more than we might expect, which remains hidden even when it reveals itself, and the relation to which makes human life what it is. It is this play between the ordinary and the extraordinary -- or, perhaps better put, this ability to extract the extraordinary from the ordinary and to point to the ordinariness of the extraordinary -- that the reader can expect to see in the Talmudic commentaries."

"In this redefinition of religion, Levinas is, of course, not alone. Various thinkers of the last centuries -- Pascal, Kierkegaard, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Buber, and Rosenzweig himself, to mention just a few well-known names -- have, each in his own way, sought to convey the full scope of the religious dimension. Levinas resembles some in this list more than others, but all, I think, share in the effort to redraw the lines separating sacred from secular and, thus, to point to the relation with that which is transcendent in the midst of our most banal activities, even if this relation is not immediately visible to an eye interested in surfaces or, as Levinas often says, in the letter."

Levinas, a Jew, and Christians, I think, are close in thinking of incarnation as an experience of the sacred in the singularity of each moment of the secular. Jewish faith sees the infinite, the transcendent, in the secular as its hidden dimension, observable to eyes that see. We agree, seeing in our day to day world our meeting place with Christ. This is Christ's perennial incarnation, in our ordinary, finite, secular/sacred lives.

Daughter Zion, Daughter Truth

One more comment on how we experience truth (referencing previous post).

From Lamentations 1:

The Sorrows of Zion

¹ How lonely sits the city
That was full of people!
She has become like a widow
Who was once great among the nations!
She who was a princess among the ^[a]provinces
Has become a forced laborer!

. . .

⁶ All her majesty
Has departed from the daughter of Zion;
Her princes have become like deer
That have found no pasture;
And they have ^[j]fled without strength
Before the pursuer.

From Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition, Stephen J. Bennett. at p. 205, 209:

"Bergant has noted the significance of the personification of Jerusalem as a woman (widow, queen). The city walls enclose the population as a mother's womb encloses a child. But the city-mother is no longer full of children, bereft like a widow."

"The translation "daughter of Zion" is misleading because it gives the impression that a subset of Jerusalem is in view, when in fact it is a term of endearment signifying the population of Jerusalem as a whole. The phrase is used 20 times in the book, sixteen times in Jeremiah, and about 10 times elsewhere."

From the Levinas quote in earlier post: "Truth, the daughter of experience . . ."

Comment: "Daughter Truth." Can we say the same thing about an experience of truth as we say about Daughter Zion? Certainly our faith tells us that our truth embraces us as a mother her child. So ultimately (i.e. when we are close at hand) our experience of truth should settle us in God's (truth's) embrace, not keep us off-balance?

Experience

Seeing Emily Dickinson's poem prompted me to try to pull together some ideas on what constitutes "experience." Certainly it is much more profound than we usually consider it to be. Ultimately it is about truth, which is religious, our finiteness knocked off-balance by the infinite.





Levinas:

Truth implies experience. . . . For experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature. Genuine experience must even lead us beyond the Nature that surrounds us, which is not jealous of the marvelous secrets it harbors, and, in complicity with men, submits to their reason and inventions; in it men also feel themselves to be at home. Truth would thus designate the outcome of a movement that leaves a world that is intimate and familiar . . . and goes toward another region, toward a beyond, as Plato puts it. . . . Truth, the daughter of experience, has very lofty pretensions; it opens upon the very dimension of the ideal. In this way, philosophy means metaphysics, and metaphysics inquires about the divine.
"Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite," from To The Other, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, at pp. 88-90.

[In Totality and Infinity, Levinas prefers to call "the beyond" the infinite. Id. at fn.9]

Gadamer:

"[E]xperience . . . inevitably involves many disappointments of one's expectations and only thus is experience acquired. . . . Every experience worthy of the name thwarts an expectation.

[Aeschylus found in experience "learning through suffering" (pathei mathos).] "What man has to learn through suffering is not this or that particular thing, but insight into the limitations of humanity, into the absoluteness of the barrier that separates man from the divine. It is ultimately a religious insight -- the kind of insight that gave birth to Greek tragedy. Thus experience is experience of human finitude. The truly experienced person is one who has taken this to heart, who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future. . . . In it all dogmatism, which proceeds from the soaring desires of the human heart, reaches an absolute barrier. Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. The genuine result of experience, then -- as of all desire to know -- is to know what is. But "what is," here, is not this or that thing, but 'what cannot be destroyed.' (Ranke)." Truth or Method, pp. 356-57.


Guissani:

If it is human nature to indomitably search for an answer, if the structure of a human being is, then, this irrepressible and inexhaustable question, plea - then one suppresses the question if one does not admit to the existence of an answer. But this answer cannot be anything but unfathomable. Only the existence of the mystery suits the structure of the human person, which is mendacity, insatiable begging, and what corresponds to him is neither himself nor something he gives to himself, measures, or possesses." The Religious Sense, p. 57.


Emily Dickinson:

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch --
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.

From a Bargain Book at Borders

MY POEMS ATTEMPT

 All

 of what

 I would want my child to know

 my poems attempt.

We are infants before each other, are we not,

so vulnerable to each other’s words and

movements.

A school I sat in cured me of hurting others.

I have come to see that all are seated at His table, and I

have become His

servant.

Sometimes God is too shy to speak in public

and He pinches me.

That

is my cue –

to fill in the blanks of your

understanding

the best I

can.

Rabia of Basra (c. 717 – 801)

Progressing the Church into the Modern Age

I read a book review sent to me by Albert. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/books/review/book-review-absolute-monarchs-a-history-of-the-papacy-by-john-julius-norwich.html?pagewanted=all How long are those critics of the Roman Church going to lament the Church's failure to bring the Church into the "modern age"? It gets to be a tired argument, especially from those not immersed in the spirit of Catholicism. From the book review:


“It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their church bring itself into the modern age,” he writes. “With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day — on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed.”

What is the modern age? Where do the "progressives" want the Church to go? The following is a description of "modern" culture written by David Bentley Hart in a recent issue of First Things.:

" Late Western modernity, especially in its purest (that is, most American) form, certainly values the available and the plentiful, but not necessarily the intrinsically pleasing. As far as the actual senses are concerned, ours is in many ways a culture of peculiar poverty, evident even—perhaps especially—in its excesses. The diet produced by mass production and mass marketing, our civic and commercial architecture, our consumer goods, our style of dress, our popular entertainments, and so forth—it all seems to have a kind of premeditated aesthetic squalor about it, an almost militant indifference to the distinction between quantity and quality.
...
Today it often seems as if truly aesthetic values have been moved out of the social realm altogether, into ever smaller private preserves. Certainly they are not central to our concept or experience of the common good, even though we may occasionally make a public pretense of caring about such things. Our culture, with its almost absolute emphasis on the power of acquisition, trains us to be beguiled by the bright and the shrill rather than the lovely and the subtle. That, after all, is the transcendental logic of late-modern capitalism: the fabrication of innumerable artificial appetites, not the refinement of the few that are natural to us. Late modernity’s defining art, advertising, is nothing but a piercingly relentless tutelage in desire for the intrinsically undesirable."

Is this where the progressives want the Church to go? For a change we should put away our addiction to immediate gratification. Let's look at the Church seeking the beautiful in it with gratitude for the gift that it is and with an appreciation for the monumental battles it has waged against the excesses of human nature and still managing to retain its essence.

Carrying a Heavy Load?

Of course we all reflect on our youth and the freedom from cares we enjoyed then. Taking on life's responsibilities, however exciting it might be at first, eventually can weigh us down. When it does, we begin to look forward to the day we can slow down or retire. When that time arrives our bodies begin to malfunction, our parents, if we are lucky enough to have them with us, need us and even our adult children might need our help. I think in the passage below Moses expresses very well how we might feel.

from Numbers chapter 11

The children of Israel lamented,
“Would that we had meat for food!
We remember the fish we used to eat without cost in Egypt,
and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks,
the onions, and the garlic.
But now we are famished;
we see nothing before us but this manna.”


When Moses heard the people, family after family,
crying at the entrance of their tents,
so that the LORD became very angry, he was grieved.
“Why do you treat your servant so badly?” Moses asked the Lord.
“Why are you so displeased with me
that you burden me with all this people?
Was it I who conceived all this people?
Or was it I who gave them birth,
that you tell me to carry them at my bosom,
like a foster father carrying an infant,
to the land you have promised under oath to their fathers?
Where can I get meat to give to all this people?
For they are crying to me,
‘Give us meat for our food.’
I cannot carry all this people by myself,
for they are too heavy for me.
If this is the way you will deal with me,
then please do me the favor of killing me at once,
so that I need no longer face this distress.”

Poor Moses! When he arrived (or will arrive?) in heaven, he'll be glad to realize what a future generation of Israelites heard first hand from Jesus, that the yoke is easy and the burden light.