The (divine) light that orients true love / the (divine) music that harmonizes true lovers

I read in Fr. Barron's article this month in "Christ is our Hope" ("The Acts We Perform; the People We Become", p.15), his reminder to young people (and all of us), that what we do in our lives makes us who we are. This Aristotelean/Thomistic idea of virtue is applied to sexual ethics, and in particular, the horrendous, practice of "hooking up" sexually, which is an ever greater part of our youth culture, says Barron. (I haven't seen statistics on this; I assume he is correct, but don't exactly know.)

This way of thinking of what we do in life is very valid. But I want to offer a complementary perspective drawing from Plato by way of Adriaan Peperzak. The two approaches are not in conflict, but reinforce one another.

In his book Platonic Transformations, at p. 10-11, Peperzak writes:

"Plato neither condems nor represses the life of desires, angers, hopes, fears, pleasures, and pains; on the contrary, he wants to save them . . . by having them concretize and express their dvine essence. Most often, this essence is hidden, underdeveloped, and more or less perverted. Well-guided askesis is needed to purify the emotions, to let them grow in association with other elements of a human life, and to cultivate them through appropriate modes of expression. When Aristotle appeals to 'that which has logos' (to logon echon) and states that no life can be good if it is not ruled by that element, he does not proclaim a new doctrine; but Plato was more outspoken about the nondiscursive 'light' that is necessary to give virtuous behavior its ultimate orientation.

"That Socrates' erotic strategy aimed at ultimate meaning shows how close he was to religion. Karl Albert has shown that Plato, notwithstanding his enlightened departure from popular mythology, continues a relgious tradition when he interprets the phenomenal world in the light of ideas, the Good, the One, admiration, immortality, etc. Since the modern secularization has taken hold of many minds, the protest against Platonic sublimation has not stopped. Ideas, immaterial principles, spiritual determinations, and reason as law have been indicted in the name of sensibility, the body, passions, Dionysos, and life itself. Plato's 'metaphysics' is said to be the source of oppression and alienation. According to Plato -- in company with Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel -- such accusations reveal an ungodly and unmusical mindset. Logos, reason, ideas, the Good, and essences are not hostile to the sensible, sensitive, and tasteful experience of material phenomena, emotions, world, and liberty. On the contrary, the corporeal world can and must be saved from chaos and wildness; it must be ennobled and made beautiful, but this will not succeed if we are unable to bring the different dimensions of our being into harmony.

"An illustration of Plato's approach can be found in the contrast between Aristophanes and Diotima in the Symposium. According to Aristophanes' tragicomedy, the erotic destiny of human individuals lies in their being only half of what they originally were and had to be. This fact condems them to a chase for the other half. Humans are not free for love and in loving; our true existence is realized only during short moments of sexual union. The rest of our lives is nostalgia and dissatisfaction.

"Diotima, however, teaches Socrates that an aristophanic love makes human lives unhappy. Fascination by one or many bodies cannot fulfill the desire that constitutes the human essence. A certain distance from infatuation -- a distance that is interior and does not exclude any erotic involvement -- is needed to be free in love. Freedom with regard to my own spontaneous eroticism can only be the effect of another, 'higher' or more profound dimension of eros. The most sublime eros, granting freedom, is a condition for freely loving another free and erotic person. While Aristophene's conception was presented as a poetic myth, Socrates' insight was the gift of a priestess. Philosophy refers to religion, but it tries to understand why and to what extent religion is right. Similar remarks can be made about the mania of the Phaedrus: only a flight toward the dimension of the divine can save us from the fascinations that make us crawl."

In my own experiences of love and my reflections on them, I acknowledge how essential it is to struggle to escape my lower desires, which I know, if followed, will inexorably result not in freedom but in "chaos and wilderness." I appreciate Peperzak's (and originally Plato's) insight that our thinking and doing (i.e. our lives) must be guided by something higher, a divine element. Levinas' thought similarly emphasizes our need to be servants to this higher Other. And I especially appreciate Peperzak's validation of the religious (the "light" that guides reason) as the end of our reflections on life's meaning (and, of course, of life itself). This is an essential counter-remedy for so much current thinking that sees our world as bereft of God. That illness, I believe, is ultimately behind the "hook up" mentality, a form of "despair" in which the inspiration, the light, the music, of the divine has left us.

How can we help our loved ones see that this is the opposite of "the way things are"?

Emmanuel Levinas

I had never heard of Emmanuel Levinas so I went to Wikipedia to find out. Some information from that site follows.

Emmanuel Levinas 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher and Talmudic commentator.

A sample of his thought follows, also from Wikipedia.

Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). In his view, responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth".

Much food for thought.

Ethics as the Call of the Holy

It's hard to describe Levinas' thinking in a few phrases, because he wrote hundreds (apparently almost 500) books and articles! But he was fond of saying that the entirety of his philosophy could be summarized in the simple words, "Apres vous, Monsieur". His reflection on the horrors of the 20th Century, including the loss of several of his family members in the Shoa, led him to appreciate how impersonal and deadening was what he called a "totalizing" viewpoint, in which other persons were captured in knowledge but not acknowledged for what they really are, beings who transcend our knowledge, and place a claim on me. He said, our first word as a person is not Decartes' "ego cogito" (I am, I think), but "me voici!" (here I am!). The first word of the subject arises in the response to the other's call, the word with which the prophet testifies to the presence of God. Another person, in his or her transcendence, exerts a similar call on me.

For Levinas, the ethical, not the ontological, is primary. Others are not to be corralled into our cognitive categories. "Ethics is not a spectator sport. Rather, it is my experience of a demand that I both cannot fully meet and cannot avoid." Simon Critchley's "Introduction" in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, p. 22.

Levinas goes even further. In his funeral oration for Levinas in 1995, Jacques Derrida recalled a conversation with Levinas in his Paris apartment. "You know," Levinas said, "they often speak of ethics to describe what I do, but what interests me when all is said and done is not ethics, not only ethics, it's the holy, the holiness of the holy (le saint, la saintete du saint)." Ibid at p. 27).

I think not only of the prophet's call/response ("Here I am, Lord"), but Jesus' call ("Come follow me"), and the mother's calling of her baby into being through the mother's loving gaze (as described in von Balthasar). In all these cases, another person is a sign of the transcendent, an image of God (as we heard in last Sunday's gospel about the Roman coin [man is God's coin]), a being that places a holy call upon us, and enables us to be somebody in holiness by responding. "Levinas prefers this word [holiness] to the Greek word 'ethics' for describing the highest human destiny, holiness meaning a life wholly for the other." Catherine Chalier, "Levinas and the Hebraic Tradition," in Ethics as First Philosophy, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, at p.6.

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.