Words Into Stillness

2010-07-15T09:04:00.004-04:00

Reflections on Jung's "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man"

A few days ago I finished reading Jung’s “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man,” given as a lecture in 1928 and published in 1933. I probably read it many years ago, for it was included in Jung’s widely read Modern Man in Search of a Soul, which introduced many to Jung and his psychology. I have no recollection of having done so. Why read it now? Because of a chance reading of a chapter in Susan Rowland’s new book Jung and the Humanities in which “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” is one of two of his essays the author selected to describe Jung’s style as a writer. To make sense of her interpretation I felt I should read the essay.

Reading “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man ” was no mere intellectual exercise as it turned out. It was also an intense, emotional experience because Jung was writing about my world, now, in 2010. I took his message personally. And yet my world today is a much darker one than he described some eighty two years ago. And why? What Jung saw as the cause of that problem is as true today as it was then. Not only are we unwilling or unable to confront the destructive unconscious forces within us, we do not even recognize their dynamic within us as individuals or collectively.

Who then is this modern man then and what is his spiritual problem? I must say from the outset, that despite the impact of the essay on me as a whole, I found myself irritated at Jung’s stress on the modern as “man” although anyone reading today might assume he meant both man and woman. Well, both yes and no. In his “Women in Europe,” published in 1927 just a year before “The Spiritual Problem . . .” Jung wrote: “One thing, however, is beyond doubt: that woman today is in the same process of transition as man. Whether this transition is a historical turning-point or not, remains to be seen.” Although he had a keen awareness of their situation at that time, Jung saw the coming changes for women moving in a direction contradictory to his own concept of the woman’s role vis a vis the male and society, — “anima” /“animus,” Logos as male/Eros as female. Today Jung’s ideas about the feminine have been seriously challenged. The fact is that woman did go through “a historical turning point,” a process that is still ongoing. These changes are so profound and so far reaching for women personally and for society that we have scarcely begun to understand them.

But to get back to the spiritual problem of the modern man and woman. Jung introduces us to the modern person as someone who has already achieved an heroic stage beyond that of the ordinary person. (Since there is no satisfactory way of getting around this problem of the all inclusive “he” I will continue to use it when necessary, but certainly mean “she” as well). The modern person, Jung wrote, “stands upon a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of the future before him, above him the heavens and below him the whole of mankind, with a history that disappear in a primeval mist.” This person is “immediately present to the world,” he is “fully conscious of the present.” The consequence, however, is that he finds himself a solitary being, because the more his consciousness evolves the less he participates in the unconscious of the collective. He becomes increasingly estranged from his fellow human beings who still follow traditional paths. The modern stands “at the very edge of the world, leaving behind what is discarded and outgrown” and “before a void out of which all things grow.”

Jung was not quite comfortable with placing the modern on a peak. It suggests an achievement that in fact can never be fully realized. No human being can arrive at full consciousness on this earth. Jung confirmed this in concluding his essay on a personal note: “Indeed, I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope, my mind’s eye a mirror that reflects a small corner of the world, and my ideas —a subjective confession.”

By following Jung’s lead I dare to say I too am a modern person at the edge of things, present to the world only as I am capable of being and no more, facing that void in the hope that from it new life is emerging.

2010-05-10T15:11:00.000-04:00

The Scandal, A Cry From the Heart?

How should I describe myself? A Catholic? but I am not a “practicing” one. A “fallen away” Catholic? Although I stopped practicing many years ago, I have never been able, nor have I wanted to put the Church behind me. I was, after all, “born Catholic” as if being Catholic had been inscribed on my DNA. I am at odds with the Church, but I still love the Church. And so, I am more grieved than angry. Anger is justified on the part of those who were sexually abused by priests. I have no such justification, having been involved from adolescence to my mid-thirties, with some of the progressive movements

in the Church during this time, which led eventually to the convening of Vatican Council II. In retrospect, it was a time of hope for the Church, a time of renewal. But the years following Vatican II and with the election of conservative Popes, the governing Church became only more conservative and unwilling or unable to engage with a rapidly changing world.

I cannot help but think that this scandal is also a cry from the depths of suffering— Church! change or die. But does the governing Church of Pope, Bishops and clerics hear this cry? Trapped in its antique organization the responses reflected bewilderment as much as defensiveness, so isolated has it become, so out of touch. But can it change? I mean really change itself from within so as to become more open and accessible to the world without?

2010-05-07T11:43:00.000-04:00

The Imaginary Church

In following the seemingly endless revelations of the sex abuse charges against priests and bishops of the Catholic Church, it became painfully obvious that neither priests, bishops or the Pope have been able to grasp sufficiently why it became such an enormous worldwide scandal or worse, what to do about it. In great part, the reason for this is that the Church governs and functions within a culture of its own that is at odds with the dominant culture of the twenty first century. To adopt a term defined by the philosopher Charles Taylor, its “social imaginary” is premodern while the prevailing social imaginary, especially of the West, is modern. Social imaginaries are how groups of people and entire societies understand themselves, how they “imagine” their social existence, how they fit together with others . . . how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” Such an imaginary is the normal way of interaction within that society and how it deals with societies outside itself, with other imaginaries.

Taylor’s primary interest is in explaining the social imaginary of our modern, secular society and in particular its “moral order.” From the seventeenth century to the present there emerged in the West, a notion of a society based on “natural rights” of the individual, who also has obligations to other individuals of that society. Political authority is legitimate only with the consent of those individuals. The purpose of this society is to provide mutual benefits to all individuals of that society. Today’s modern imaginary is dominant not only throughout nations of the West, but its influence is evident through much of the world.

A social imaginary based on hierarchy, on the contrary, sees society as made up of different groups, who have complementary services to perform for the good of the entire society. Their relationship to each other, however, is not that of equals. It is a top down relationship in which those at the top have claim to a greater eminence and power. Taylor calls these imaginaries “premodern.”

Devout and patriotic American Catholics belong to two social imaginaries, which are, in effect, in opposition to one another. As citizens Catholic Americans take for granted that there is equality under the law for all its citizens, that political power is subject to the will of the citizenry, and exists to serve the rights and privileges all the citizens. At the same time, as Catholics, they participate in an imaginary which does not see itself as democratic, but hierarchical. In this imaginary, authority is centered exclusively in the Pope, the Bishops and the clergy. Differences of opinion, for instance, which question, deny or contradict the traditions and teachings of the official Church are subject to review and possible condemnation. As a lay person the American Catholic is a member of the faithful, who have no authority, although they are called upon to contribute to the mission of the Church. The religious orders of women fall into this same class, but carry out their mission under the immediate direction of the hierarchy. For most Catholics, most of the time, in the ordinary course of things, participating in two opposing imaginaries has been largely unproblematic.

When it was revealed that many of the clergy engaged in sexual abuse of children and adolescents over a long period of time, how did Catholic Americans react? In a poll conducted by the New York Times, (published May 5), 58% of American Catholics considered that the Vatican did a poor job in handling reports of sexual abuse by priests, and 54% consider the Church to be “out of touch” with the needs of today’s Catholics. Three out of four of the respondents said that it was not necessary to obey the Pope to be a good Catholic. At the same time, 82% most the respondents said that the scandal had not caused them to question whether they would remain in the Church or not. It appears that these Catholics have no trouble in occupying both imaginaries and are comfortable making up their own minds independently of the Church hierarchy.

During this long drawn out scandal, the Church seems to have been caught by surprise that the abuse should have been so widespread and that it involved so many young victims, even though cases had repeatedly been brought to their attention. Nor did it seem to have understood the depth of outrage over the preference gave to the abuser priests and to the Church's reputation rather than to the young victims. The scandal revealed to the world and to the faithful how “out of touch” the Catholic Church is. But does the governing Church really see that it is out of touch? And if it does, and seeks to overcome its isolation, what social imaginary might replace it?

2009-06-29T09:25:00.003-04:00

To what End?
The Evolution of Human Consciousnesss

Sometime ago, I wrote:

To compensate for our condition, alone as we are in the vast, mysterious, and ultimately hostile cosmos, we tell stories. Christianity is one such story but there are no end of others. Of course, we believe our stories to be true, otherwise they would not be functional. They would not assuage our radical loneliness but in fact, they do, at least for many. It is these stories that give meaning to our lives. Although we tend still to look beyond ourselves for meaning and purpose, it is we who invent or discover them. There are those who contend that meaning which does not come from a transcendent elsewhere can only be meaningless. We are told that such and such a story is not “true” is “make believe,” is “myth,” or “Meaning” (with a capital M). Some look for “evidence”, scientific, historical or otherwise. But if the story is experienced as true, it is, as Jung would say, psychologically true and therefore serves a human purpose. Meanwhile, we go on questioning our stories, comparing them to other stories, enhancing them or debunking them, confirming them or abandoning them to replace them with other stories. If that is the case, we then come up with still other stories, like this one—that there are only stories. When you think about it, there is something close to the infinite in human creativity. Why then is it not possible for us and indeed, logical and instinctual in us, that such creativity should find its own meaning or meanings.

Do I still believe what I wrote then ? Yes, except that I have come to believe there is a greater story in which our stories unfold, that embraces all of them, from those first uttered by our earliest ancestors or drawn by them upon the walls of their caves, to the stories now being told and those still to be told in the future. The story I have in mind is the story of human consciousness which evolves through time and which does so by means of our stories. Does this process direct us to a certain, ultimate goal? There are those who think so and those who doubt it. I find myself on the side who think so.

I believe that the course of human history is teleological; it has a purpose which unfolds in time and is directed, therefore, towards the future. This notion began in the West, with the Greeks and later affirmed by Christianity and (arguably) in its secular form with the notion of “progress.” But the purposefulness of human history, revealing itself as it unfolds in aeons of time past, present and to come would not make sense if it did not embrace the totality of human history and not only that of the West.

Contrary to what we thoughtlessly assume, the process of evolution continues, although so slowly over time that we are unaware of it. As we learn from our own history, which enables us to look back into the past, there has been an evolution in human consciousness. Although we don’t know in what direction it will continue to evolve, this evolutionary process says to me that we have been and continue to be agents in our own history. These two factors provide me with a Narrative which doesn’t explain everything, but gives a credible context to which particular and concrete experiences contribute.

I did not come to these ideas on my own, of course. There were many influences, Jung foremost among them. He had little to say about evolution, but his great theme was human consciousness both individual and collective in the unfolding of the history of humankind.

During a visit to a game preserve near Nairobi, Kenya, Jung had a revelation of what he called “the cosmic meaning of consciousness.”

From a low hill in a broad savanna a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog and so on. Grazing, heads nodding, the herds moved slowly forward like slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal being, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world. I walked away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savored the feeling of being entirely alone. There I was now, the first human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had first really created it. (MDR, 255.)

During that brief moment, Jung experienced an epiphany. He envisioned himself incarnated as the first human being who understood “that this was the world.” More mysteriously, he sees himself as the creator of that world. Jung is not taking God’s place here but affirming that the human being is the only species on this planet that is endowed with a reflective consciousness.

Wolfgang Giegerich was also a significant influence as well, for his insights into the evolution of consciousness, especially in his pivotal essay,”The End of Meaning” about which I wrote in this weblog.

In recent years, the idea of the evolution of human consciousness has permeated my thinking about almost everything else from religion, to politics, to death, our place in the universe. My initiation, however, began nearly fifty years ago when shortly after his death Teilhard de Chardin’s The Human Phenomenon became available in English. A Jesuit priest and paleontologist by profession, Teilhard was passionately committed to reconciling religion with science and with evolution especially. Teilhard envisioned as inseparable the unfolding of human consciousness—and Christianity — within the natural evolution of the cosmos. Not surprisingly, during his lifetime the Church forbade the publication of his writings. Quite soon after his death, however, they were widely translated and rushed into print, but none carried the imprimatur. In the Catholic circles in which I then moved, The Human Phenomenon ( titled in the first English edition, The Phenomenon of Man) was declared unintelligible. The Divine Milieu, published around the same time, caused a mild stir because it was more “religious.”

Although I was no more enlightened than anyone else, and for reasons I could not have explained then, I was attracted to his ideas despite the fact I had only the vaguest notion of what they were about. Over the years, I held on to these books, obscurely sensing that one day I would want to return to them. In the years that followed their publication, others followed, but on the whole Teilhard’s ideas were largely marginalized, ignored, denounced and even ridiculed. Today, as we celebrate the 200th birthday of Darwin, evolution is widely accepted, despite resistance among fundamentalist believers. We now know more about evolution and have begun to explore its implications not only for science, but in other fields as well, such as religion, psychology, ecology. Ahead of his time, Teilhard de Chardin may finally be coming into his own.

2009-03-07T15:11:00.002-05:00

“Age only defines one’s boundaries.”
“I grow more intense as I age.”
“Now that I have withdrawn from the active world,
I am more alert to it than ever before.”
Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Years

Well into my eightieth decade, I am aware of changes in my psyche that have to do with old-age. There are, to begin with, so many projects I start and do not finish, like reading Charles Taylor’s, monumental The Secular Age, a subject I am deeply interested in. It is not just the more than 800 pages that faze me, it is the density and subtlety of his thought that exhausts me after reading of few of those pages. But that did not help me resist tackling Jean Gebser’s monumental The Ever-Present Origin: A Contribution to the History of the Awakening of Consciousness, another equally complex work, about another subject that I ponder. 600 pages, smaller print, but it does take me into our present condition and arouses my curiosity. So I will give it a good try.

Reading is much more than a diversion. I still need to be nourished by the thoughts and imaginings of others. But it is still too easy for me to lose myself in someone’s else’s thought because (1) I am always looking for a new revelation I somehow have missed and (2) it is much more difficult to articulate one’s own thoughts, about which I have less confidence. And so having entered this side of old age, this is the goal I set for myself: to give form and clarity to these thoughts, bringing them forward into consciousness, so as to be able to say: Yes, this is what I think, this is what I believe. I cannot truly explain why I want to do this or of what use it will be. It is partly curiosity. What has been their trajectory during the course of my life time? Where have I come from, and where am I now? It is partly a need to bring things to a conclusion, tying up loose ends—it is that—but more. I believe with Montaigne that “each man [and woman!] carries the entire form of the human condition.” Each of us, in is or her own way, participates, not just passively, either consciously or unconsciously, in the history of the time in which we are destined to live.

2006-10-20T15:01:00.000-04:00

Death and Everyman

To pick up where I left off many months ago, motivated by two pieces which appeared in the October 23 issue of the Nation, Richard Goldstein 's "Death Trip" and Walter Mosley's "Cultural Famine: A Cycle." I don't know if the editors planned it this way, but they were were aptly juxtaposed. Walter Mosley, best known for his Easy Rawlins mysteries, is troubled by the disjunction between world-wide famine and "another kind of famine: a dearth in the human soul", " a spiritual famine;" "psychic anexoria." He writes of "the barren emotional landscape" which exists among " our people" as well as elsewhere in the world. For Mosley "our people" means Black Americans but not only, we're all included. He observes a cynical and hopeless apathy among us even while "we are surrounded by riches and blessed with potential unequaled in human history." What has gone wrong he asks, hoping to generate a conversation about it with his readers.

As if saying "Amen!" to Mosley, Richard Goldstein's "Death Trip" focuses on two celebrated authors, Joan Didion and Philip Roth, who, in their most recent books, exhibit, he says, the same "self-obsession" and "the self-enclosure" which afflict the rest of our nation. This was not always the case, for both are known for their nonconformist views. But when it comes to facing death they disappoint us, leaving us with the sense that death is an entirely private experience of no meaning or significance outside of or beyond itself. The rest of the world is shut out. In her memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking," Didion recounts the sudden death of her husband and the (ultimately mortal) illness of her only child. (See previous posting). Didion leaves the impression that she had at no time contemplated death, that of her husband and child, or her own. It is hard to believe that she did not, but if she had, we are never let in on what those thoughts might have been. Instead, we learn she turned to those who supposedly could instruct her on the subject—Freud, Sherwin Nuland, and Emily Post (whom she found the most satisfying). Although the book was hailed among her literary peers as "an act of consummate literary bravery", the ordinary reader will learn more about the lifestyle and stiff upper lip of a literary celebrity than of what it feels like or means (to her) to have lost a loved one in death.

As does every reviewer of Philip Roth's Everyman, Goldstein compares it with Tolstoy's masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In that story we have "still the most powerful account we have of death amid prosperity, the spiritual and the social come together at the moment when a moribund civil servant, filled with bitterness at his fate and family, realizes that living well means living for others." The closest Roth's Everyman (he has no name) comes to it, says Goldstein, is in his sentimental attachment to his mother and father, now long dead.

Although belatedly, Everyman tries to reach out to others. Realizing that his retirement had become a "self-generated form of confinement" he decides to do something about it. He organizes painting classes for the Jersey shore retirement community to which he moved after 9/ll. But his students are as obsessed as he is in their own declining health and thoughts of their own demise. "He tried to be generous to them all, even the hopeless ones usually those very ones who came in and said right off, 'I had a great day', I feel inspired today." He encourages and befriends one woman, the best of all his students, who unable to bear unremitting pain any longer commits suicide. He has a loving relationship with his daugher Nancy. As he grows older and sicker and nearer to death himself, he gets in touch with each of his old friends from the advertising agency where he had worked when he learns that they too are ill and perhaps dying.

But he has much to regret and is tormented with guilt especially about his first two wives. His sons by his first marriage, will not forgive his having abandoned them and their mother for another woman. His second, relatively content and stable marriage to Phoebe ends when she learns of his affair with a model, half his age. Envious of his older brother's good health, he spurns his brother's good will and attentiveness towards him. He feels guilty about this, but only as he gets sicker does he try to make amends.

But deeper than guilt is regret at the loss of his "male allure" that he is now no longer "capable of germinating the masculine joys." "No hocus pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. there was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it—he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write his autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body." As his health wanes, his isolation and loneliness intensifies. "There's no remaking reality," his daughter Nancy had reminded him, at the funeral of his mother. "Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes." Bleak advice, but what else is there to do to say? Or to think? Nevertheless, Roth's Everyman thinks about death a great deal and has done so since he was a child. He also has many questions, but they go unanswered and lead nowhere. There are no personal epiphanies, no consoling insights.

Unlike Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, Didion and Roth's Everyman have no spiritual resources to guide them through death and grief. In this they are not typical, but certainly not alone. There are countless individuals who do not have or want the comfort and hope that religion offers. Goldstein credits Roth and Didion for refusing to "gild the grief with any higher purpose." What he misses in them however is that there is no reflection at all on how "each death is situated in a suffering community" and no awareness of how every death "reveals the conditions of life." With Didion and Roth, the encounter with death is experienced as solely personal, self-enclosed. The idea, Goldstein observes, that "embracing life around you" in which you can find solace, doesn't seem credible to them. The only references, in Roth's Everyman, to the world beyond himself and his immediate family are, in passing, to the Korean War (in which he had served) and to September 11. It was that fatal day which made him decide to leave New York and move to a retirement community in New Jersey. But what his thoughts might have been about that day we are not told.

An awareness of death as our common human experience, and not just a personal one, as Goldstein suggests, may not bring the solace that religion brings to believers, but can be a means of transcending isolating, self -absorption. Ironically, it comes too late to Everyman. Roth seems to give a hint of this, if ambiguously. Going under anesthesia for his last surgical procedure, Everyman has a blissful, nearly ecstatic moment:

Oh, the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler's loupe engraved with his father's initials at the perfect, priceless planet itself—at his home, the billion-, the trillion-, the quadrillion-caret planet Earth! he went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up again. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

2005-12-18T14:19:00.001-05:00

Grief as a Best Seller

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

So goes Joan Didion's mantra in her best-seller The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she writes about the sudden death of John Gregory Dunne, her husband of nearly forty years from a massive heart attack and the terrible (and eventually fatal) illness of their only daughter, Quintana. This highly acclaimed work won the 2005 National Book Award and was named one of the ten best books of the year by the NY Times. It will be produced as a play to be directed by David Hare. The blurb for the book in a full page-ad in the New York Times tells us that it is ". . . about the power of grief to bring on a true madness. She writes of her strange and moving journey back to reality in the year of "magical thinking." The ad includes tributes from, among others, Michiko Kakutani ("an indelible portrait of loss and grief. . ."), Gideon Lewis-Kraus ("achingly beautiful"), John Leonard,("I can't think of a book we need more than hers"), and Lev Grossman, ("an act of consummate literary bravery.")

Who can fault such a book? Any person who not only has endured such loss, and who feels compelled to tell the story, deserves, at the very least, to be listened to without prejudice. Although I felt admiration for Didion, I was not moved by her story as I should have been. Why was this so?

Didion's story had been pitched by reviewers and publisher as a revelation of the highest order. But as I read the book (the second time as well) it seemed to me that her experience as painful and awful as it was, is experienced by thousands of people every day. What had been different about Didion's experience?

The difference cannot be in the feeling of disorientation which follows such a loss, such as wanting, even expecting, the dead to return.(Didion insisted, she tells us, on keeping her husband's shoes in case he may need them even though she knew he was dead. ) She calls it "magical thinking," but it too is not an unusual phenomenon. Surely her publishers stretch it quite a bit to translate "magical thinking" into "true madness."

Joan Didion is a highly regarded novelist, essayist, screen-writer and journalist. She is, in short, a celebrity. When something so devasting happens to a celebrity, it takes on a nearly archetypal significance. Even more so, when that celebrity is also a writer. Unlike the rest of us, she can give expression to what it was that happened to her. That is important to us, for perhaps there is something she can tell us of the meaning of that experience which on the surface seems to be so meaningless.

It is in this respect that the book failed, for me anyway. Not that Didion can be expected to provide meaning where she herself found none. But far from being caught up in magical thinking, Didion remains the journalist, recording the facts of the situation. She relies on the facts, the meticulous detailing of events to tell the story. And she does her research. She reads medical reports in the hope that they will enlighten her more than the doctors can about her daughters strange sickness. In long passages and quotes, she turns to the specialists on death, sickness, and mourning, citing Freud, Melanie Klein, Sherwin Nuland, Emily Post and others. What she doesn't do, is let us come close to her at all. She will only direct us and obliquely at that, towards what it is going on deep inside her. We are not allowed to feel anything with her.

In the book, Didion quotes from one of her novels: "The point is that Elena remained remote most of all to herself, a clandestine agent who had so successfully compartmentalized her operation as to have lost access to her own cutouts." And then adds: "I realize that Elena's situation is my own." She writes this in another context, but the remark is more telling than she realizes. Didion remains remote not only to us the reader, but, in a curious way, to her own story.

I was glad to learn that "The Year of Magical Thinking" will be made into a play. We can expect then that the story will be once again lived, and in that medium, come closer to the truth of Didion's story as she herself lived it, but which she could not in her book really share with us, her readers.

2005-12-05T09:47:00.000-05:00

The Fear of Extinction

Susan Sontag once took part in a panel discussion at the university I attended as a graduate student. I do not remember what the discussion was about, but I will never forget Sontag who was not only beautiful but brilliant. The combination was irresistible. She was just twenty-nine but a rising star in the cultural and intellectual world to which she belonged. I became an admirer and read much, although not all, of the books she eventually wrote which were always original and challenging.

Written during a time when she was herself fighting cancer, Illness as a Metaphor was one of her most widely read and influential works. In that book (and in a later one, AIDS and its Metaphors,) she sought to free the sick from the sense of shame, embarrassment and guilt which often accompanies a grave illness. Sontag died at age seventy, following her third and last futile fight against cancer. Her son, the journalist David Rieff, described her fierce struggle to survive in an article poignantly titled "Illness as More Than Metaphor" (New York Times Magazine, December 4).

Sontag was determined not to die, believing she could beat the odds. She insisted on submitting herself to brutal treatments which held out little hope of extending her life, much less curing her disease. The final treatment, involving a bone marrow transplant, Rieff candidly tells us, would not have been available to Sontag except for the fact that she was able to pay for it herself. Neither Medicare or her medical insurer were willing to do so. Although he was grateful that she was able to receive that treatment, he admits "I cannot honestly say that there was anything fair about it."

In this moving account of Sontag's last heroic struggle with her disease, her son tells us: "My mother, who feared extinction above all else, was in anguish over its imminence. Shortly before she died, she turned to one of the nurses'aides-a superb woman who cared for her as she would have her own mother-and said, "I'm going to die,"and then began to weep." Death, when it finally came, was merciful. "She simply went."

That Sontag "feared extinction above all else" is the most haunting revelation. Perhaps because it is the fear that gnaws at us all, consciously or not. It is too dreadful, for most of us, to contemplate. We cannot even imagine no longer being, no longer existing. The great religions of the world have offered their own myths to enlighten and console us about death but the mystery of death and our dread of it remains.

2005-11-14T13:52:00.000-05:00

A Little History of the World

If you would like to get some sense of how our history unfolded over time, I recommend E.H.Gombrich’s A Little History of the World. Gombrich was a great art historian, most famous perhaps for his widely acclaimed Story of Art. At twenty-six, with a PhD but no job, he accepted an invitation to write a history of the world for children. Finished in six weeks, the book became an instant success, translated into many languages, but only in his last years (he died in 1992) was it translated into English. His Little History begins with the time (as best we can imagine it) before human beings walked the earth and ends with the period Gombrich himself lived through —World War II and the atomic bomb.

A Little History is, as Gombrich says, not just any story, but our story. He tells it with great charm, moving sweepingly and seamlessly from one epoch to the next. As you might expect in a children’s story, the story is full of heroes and villains, but Gombrich is just as interested in how circumstances and events affected the lives of ordinary people, beginning with the men and women of the stone age.

Although the author keeps his children readers very much mind, I had the impression that Gombrich, in writing A Little History, had became deeply affected by the overwhelming evidence of history that we human beings are a murderous lot. As the story moves from generation to generation, country to country, epoch to epoch, what seems a constant is our cruelty to each other and our love of violence and of war. We will resort to them, given the feeblest rationale. And terrible to say, religion itself, instead of purifying those instincts, provides more often than not, their motivation and justification. One reviewer wrote that the book is “weighty, even gloomy at times.” Weighty, yes, but gloomy no. Gombrich is too much of a humanist for that. The book is not polemical, it is rather a work of grace as well as gravity. It is worth rereading from time to time to allow ourselves to be reminded that however far we think we have come from our stone age ancestors, we have a lot farther to go when it comes to confronting that dark side of our nature.

2005-10-25T11:50:00.000-04:00

What we struggle with is so small

"What we struggle with is so small,
What struggles with us is so great!
. . .
When we win it's with the small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small."

Ranier Maria Rilke, "Der Schauende," from The Book of Pictures.

Rilke is referring to the Angel who wrestled with Jacob and he tells us that to be beaten by this Angel, "that kneaded him as if to change his shape," is true victory. "This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings."

This is both true and untrue. We human beings have to wrestle every day with the small things, let's say, an out of control appetite for food or luxuries, or sticking with a job we find boring, but which we depend on for the sake of our family, or those ever so small, but ever so infuriating struggles such as with a balky computer, or trying to reach a human person on the phone. These are small things from the perspective of the eternal but have to be wrestled with nonetheless. And when we win (as we do occasionally) is it so small a thing? I think that with these varying degrees of small things we are wrestling our personal Daimon, as we must.

Rilke was contemplating the really big things, the things that are out of our hands, out of our control, the loss of a home and possessions because of a hurricane or the death of one's child. These are Angels we cannot wrestle with but only accept our defeat at their hands, says Rilke. The poet tells us this is our triumph, if we can do this "decisively." In trying to find a better translation of Rilke's poem I came across an essay written by Joseph McCaleb whose nineteen year old son committed suicide. He quotes Rilke's poem in full which offered him, he tells us, "a small raft."

2005-10-20T08:08:00.000-04:00

Making Myth Mythic

Novelist Jonathon Keats reviews in the British journal, Prospect, three books published by Canongate, inaugurating an ambitious project: the publication of "100 book-length myths, as reminagined by contemporary authors." Karen Armstrong provides the introduction to the series with her "A Short History of Myth." The first two retellings are Jeannette Winterson's "Weight," the myth of Heracles and Atlas and Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad," which relates the story of Penelope, Odysseus's long-suffering wife.

The review is available for free on the Internet so I won't attempt a review of a review. But there was one sentence which particularly caught my attention. Referring to the Canongate project Keat notes that the challenge of this series will be "the effort to make myth mythic again." He cites Armstrong who in her introduction observes how alienated we moderns are from myth. We treat myths the way we treat archeological artifacts, as something that existed in the past but has no meaning for us today. Keats adds to this by claiming that we not only do not understand myths, but are actually hostile to them, which he attributes to the influence of the scientific attitude which venerates fact to the loss of a capacity to wonder.

Myth is not something you can deliberately evoke or create. That is not what Winterson and Atwood are doing, of course. They are retelling ancient myths, not making up new ones. But is myth really revived for us, as Winterson tries, by relling the myth with "contemporary characterization" by using slang? Or when she describes Heracles holding up the world: "Heracles was more afraid now than he had been in his whole life. He could accept any challenge except the challenge of no challenge. He knew himself through combat. He defined himself by opposition." Keats notes that "for myth to work mythically, it must be integral to the culture, not an escape from it."

Can you really make myth mythic again by retelling these stories? Perhaps an even deeper cause of our failure to appreciate myth is to be found in our loss of the symbolic. It isn't just due to the influence of science. There is a widespread, insidious literal-mindedness which is so prevalent in religious and political fundamentalism. Our lives won't be enriched by myth unless we can come to recognize the value of the symbol, that which is not fact, or "the truth" or reality in itself, but which represents, stands for, leads to the meaning of and the mystery behind the appearance, the story, the myth.

2005-10-09T14:02:00.000-04:00

Not hubris but fear and trembling

In the posting for September 26 (Not Nature but a Human Failing) I commented on someone's remark that the hurricane disasters of the past months were seen not as a mindless act of nature but of our own failures. A couple of responses to this posting considered this attitude so much hubris on our part. And hubris it is, when that position vis à vis nature is exploitative. Another position, represented by environmentalists, is not exploitative but custodial and based not only on a respect for, but also on a sense of responsibilty for nature. But whether exploitative or custodial our relationship may be with nature, it cannot restore the original relationship with it that our early ancestors had. Some feel (and some do even achieve perhaps) a certain unity with nature, but this is an individual experience and does not fundamentally change the separation that exists between nature and human beings.

The fact that there even is a custodial attitude towards nature exposes the divide that has opened up between modern humans and nature. If we look at what remains of "nature" we see it confined more and more to museums called "national parks" and "wildlife sanctuaries." What is not confined to a designated "wilderness" area is treated as a global resource at our disposal to be tapped when needed. As James Hillman observed even our chickens and pigs are not animals anymore, but eggs and meat-producing machines. Once nature needs protection both from its being exploited and for its very survival, it is no longer the nature which our premoderns experienced.

The cultures which still retain something of that sense of being one with nature are to be respected and admired, but they are isolated and few and cannot be taken as models for us today. I believe we can never return to the participation mystique of our earliest ancestors, nor should we want to. But the more we learn about our origins and evolution, about the nature of matter and energy, the more we more we will appreciate how fundamentally connected we are to everything in the universe. But it is a connection with a difference—human consciousness—and with it responsibility for this universe, a godlike task, evoking not hubris, but fear and trembling.

2005-10-06T08:29:00.000-04:00

Apropos of a Pebble

A few months before her death in Auschwitz Etty Hillesum wrote this in her diary:

"I could live with nothing but a pebble for a long time and still feel that I was living in God's great world of nature. I really did not discover that pebble until the afternoon on the roof in the sun, it came straight from the Days of Creation, and my amazement at my sudden discovery of so many eternities in just one small pebble has refused to die down to this day."

Later, she made this entry: "And yet, and yet, my greatest adventure adventure this week: that pebble. I can still feel my surprise at it; that so mighty a slice of creation should have been lodged in one small pebble. Life is so beautiful--something that is only just beginning to dawn on me now. And perhaps one day I shall be able to put into words everything I have experienced with that pebble."

The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert had this to say:

The pebble/ is a perfect creature

equal to itself/ mindful of its limits

filled exactly/with a pebbly meaning

with a scent which does not remind one of anything/
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness/ are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse/when I hold it in my hand/
and its noble body/ is permeated by false warmth

- Pebbles cannot be tamed/ to the end they will look at us/
with a calm and very clear eye

2005-10-05T11:30:00.000-04:00

More About Dialectical Thinking

I said in the previous posting that every position has its dark and negative aspects. That is true, but this is also misleading or insufficient. Dialectical thinking is not always about good as opposed to bad, right as opposed to wrong, but also about alternative positions as possible options in widening one's horizon.

The chances, however,of dialectical thinking taking hold among adherents of a particular position are not great. Thinking is never purely rational or objective. It is accompanied by a lot of emotional baggage which can inhibit the kind of reflection which dialectical thinking requires. Emotions, however, need not be an obstacle, but a path into such thinking, because emotions arise from unconscious sources which probably tell us about why we hold to one position or another as much as rational thought will. For example, often a tenacious hold onto a particular position can be motivated by the powerful emotion of fear. We are afraid that our position will be undermined, even destroyed if we do not hold tight to it and fight for it against the opposing position. Dialectical thinking would urge us to go deeper than that and to reflect on causes of that fear which we have not allowed to surface. Do we feel threatened, for instance, because we suspect that there is a weakness in our position which we feel we cannot admit to because it would sabotage our position? Fear is a great stumbling block to dialectical thinking but it need not be if it is honestly confronted. There is even a good chance that it will be a step forward towards widening our horizon.

Exercising dialectical thinking is not confined to organizations or groups. It's also a way of engaging the inconsistencies and contradictions of one's self. We are a tangled web of thought and feeling, of the rational and instinctual which dialectical thinking may help to sort out, especially when we are forming our opinions or positions on difficult and complex issues.

2005-10-04T13:12:00.000-04:00

Dialectical Thinking

The term "dialectics" is most commonly associated with the formula "thesis, antithesis,synthesis, as attributed to the German philosopher Hegel and adopted from Hegel by Karl Marx. From the coming together of two opposing positions, a third, new thesis is derived. This is how conflicts are supposed to be resolved. Psychoanalyst and philosopher Wolfgang Giegerich (about whom I have written in earlier postings) begs to differ. First of all, he points out that Hegel has been misunderstood, for that philosopher never used those terms. Giegerich admits that conflicts (in politics, for example) can be worked out in a dialectical way, but, he insists, true dialectics cannot be understood in terms of conflict and resolution, that is, in terms of two positions which are opposed to and clash with one another. Dialectics or, as he terms it, "dialectical thinking" has to do, not with two, as we commonly think, but rather with one position. Every idea contains its own contradictions. True dialectics means a process of "turning back" onto this one position to uncover or reveal those inner contradictions. Duality also exists within the position itself and not only with two positions external to one another.

"Dialectical thinking" could be a useful concept especially when there is a clash of apparent opposites. (One example that comes spontaneously to mind because it is so much in the news these day, is the conflict between adherents of intelligent design and adherents of Darwinian evolution.) Probably each side gives some thought to its own inconsistencies and contradictions but only with the purpose of anticipating and being prepared for attacks from the other side. That thought is not intended to understand where the other side is coming from, but to rebut it and is therefore external and is not true dialectical thinking. Dialectical thinking is examining one's own position or as Giegerich puts it "a stepping backwards so as to widen the horizon before oneself."

To engage in this kind of dialectic with one's own position takes a willingness to admit that every position, how ever good and worthy is, has its dark and negative aspects. The effort to do this, however difficult, could result in making that position not only open to correction, but paradoxically more persuasive as well.

2005-09-26T14:42:00.000-04:00

Not nature but a human failure

I cannot remember where I read it, but, regarding the hurricane Katrina of a few weeks ago , an astute observer noted that we didn’t think of the devastation it left in its wake primarily as an Act of God, or even a mindless act of nature. (There were a few who did, of course, calling it punishment from God for our sinful ways, but no one paid attention.) We thought of it mainly as the consequence of our human incompetence and failure. Had we done everything right when we had the chance to do so—built up the levees to a proper height to avoid flooding, not built houses and industries on land below sea level, had we planned to evacuate all the citizens (not just those with cars and gas) in an orderly and rational way, had the various governments done their job, etc. we could have thwarted nature as it rampaged over the Gulf. This attitude is so commonplace that we didn’t even notice how radical and new in human experience this attitude is. Behind it is the notion that we human beings are in charge of nature. Sure, sometimes nature gets out of hand and causes problems we have yet to solve (like stopping hurricanes befofe they start). But we really believe that given time and the right technology nature will be entirely mastered. Meanwhile, we are exploring the cosmos with a view to colonizing it as well.

Although we can wax sentimental about nature and some of us want to save what remains of it, we have a fundamentally different relationship to it than our remote ancestors did. As a result of the evolution of consciousness, we humans recognize ourselves as distinct and separate from nature and no longer identify ourselves with it, as those ancestors did. The world, we are told, has become “disenchanted.” Nature remains a powerful force, but one to be conquered and transformed for our uses. It is no longer the home of the gods or even the instrument of divine vengeance. The worship of nature has been relocated in technology which is as an extension of ourselves.

2005-09-26T11:57:00.000-04:00

Dreaming a Catholic future

Pope Benedict XVI foresees the possibility that if the present secular trend continues, the Church may very well consist of a remnant of believers who, gathering in small groups, will keep the faith alive. His thought echoes that of the great modern theologian Karl Rahner who, he said, did not prophecy but dreamed of the Church of the future. In that dream he saw Christian, Catholic communities scattered throughout the world. These communities will be vibrant, living communities of faith, rather than of custom and tradition, and will be independent of institutional support. The institution will be found nowhere else but in their own hearts. “[That] Church will have been led by the Lord of history into a new epoch.” Rahner’s dream is far more radical than perhaps Benedict would like. (Rahner foresees, for instance, that in this new epoch Christians will be “unburdened” of all “dignity and all office” in the Church.)

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Cellular Church” (New Yorker, September 12, 2005), it struck me that the Catholic Church has a great deal to learn from the Protestant evangelical movement whose remarkable vitality today has it source in such small communities of faith. Gladwell notes: “Today, at least forty million Americans are in a religiously based small group, and the growing ranks of small-group membership have caused a profound shift in the nature of the religious experience.” These groups are not just organizations within the church, but as one observer noted, “they are the church.”

These faith-based communities are really small (some as few as six or seven members) and tend to bring together people of like mind and background. (Motorcyclists, for instance). There is no one leader. Coming together for prayer and worship, the emphasis is on sharing with each other, what they think and feel about their faith, but also about the issues they face in their every day life. The genius of Rick Warren, the founder of the megachurch Saddleback, was to recognize the potential of the small group and to build his church accordingly. There is nothing church-like about the building--no pews but comfortable chairs, no stained glass windows. During services no hymns are sung, but there is plenty of Christian country and rock music. His own preaching is folksy. He uses television and loud speakers to broadcast the service. (Note: Rahner in writing about the Church of the future, mentions that these small Catholic communities will “certainly freely make use of everything that the fuure offers them in means of organization, mass media, technology, etc.) Warren draws from these small groups thousands of volunteers for charitable and educational works.

In contrast there is the Catholic Church with its vast hierarchical structure with its impressive and aristocratic grandeur redolent, however, of European antiquity than of the twenty-first century. I would like to think, but I doubt, that this Church could be humble enough to listen and learn from the Christians inside the Church as well as those outside. But perhaps it is too late; It is too rigid, too defensive, and too closed in upon itself. Above all, it fears rather than embraces the groping of human beings, despite the terrible burden of history, towards a democracy in which faith can be continually revitalized. But it could be that within the institutional Church itself there is a longing, however muted and however much resisted, to realize Rahner’s dream in the the hope that it would usher in a new era in the Church’s history. Benedict saw the future of the Church in small communities as a defeat for the Church, but it could mean its renewal.

2005-09-23T16:01:00.000-04:00

Evangelicalism Catholic style

Reading Mark Lilla (see previous posting) on his experience as an adolescent evangelical struck a familiar chord. Like Lilla I was “born Catholic” and also never held a Bible in my hands while I was growing up. In the seventies, Lilla drifted from Catholicism into evangelicalism by way of Christian rock and a Pentecostal prayer group. More than twenty years earlier I also had my group which was, however, fervently, but definitely not mainstream, Catholic. We hung out at Monica House, a small store-front opposite St. Augustine’s church in Brooklyn. Instead of meeting for Bible Study, we gathered every week for Mass preparation, using the Father Stedman’s Sunday Missal, which at that time cost just 15 cents. The Missal was the Catholic substitute for the Bible and the only source for what we learned of the New and Old Testaments.

We did not know the word “evangelical.” Our word for it was “the apostolate.”We thought of ourselves as “lay apostles,” everyday Catholic women (and a few men) who wanted a share in the mission of the Church, along with the priests and nuns. We talked a lot about “secularism,” how it had taken God out of everything. To study the effects of secularism we used the “Inquiry Method” (observe, judge and act) adopted from the Communist cells. I remember an Inquiry we did on advertising, which, with its emphasis on glamor, offered models of womanhood which contradicted what a Christian wife and mother should aspire to. (We all aspired to be wives and mothers at that time. No career women for us. ) Unlike priests and nuns, however, it was our vocation to be Christians in the world and not apart from it. Our special task was “to restore all things in Christ”—family and work life, politics, education, the arts, everything. The idea of personal salvation did not enter into our thinking, however, as it did with protestant evangelicals. It was the whole world we wanted to save! But we shared with evangelicals that same youthful thirst for a deeper and more meaningful life which our mainline churches were unable to give us.

I was lucky enough to have lived my brand of evangelicalism during the decade leading up to Vatican Council II. For a Catholic wanting and needing more than could be found in the dry routines of the parish church, an exciting intellectual and spiritual ferment was also taking place in the Church at that time. It cannot be said of the Catholic Church then (as it may be said now) that it lacked great religious thinkers, philosophers, biographers, dramatists, poets, artists. Unfortunately most Catholics, including the hierarchy and clergy, were ignorant of them. They found their way however into that store-front in Brooklyn where they changed our lives.

Lilla’s life as an evangelical Christian ended as quickly as it had begun. It took me much longer, but ended also in my learning to doubt. I know what he means about skepticism and caring. Even as you go on doubting, you go on caring for the very things you left behind, like the Catholic Church.

2005-09-22T10:18:00.000-04:00

A new look at Protestant evangelism

Protestant evangelism, particularly the aggressive, politically-empowered sort, doesn't get a very sympathetic hearing in most liberal magazines and journals. Which is why two recent articles caught my attention. In "Getting Religion," (The New York Times Magazine, September 18) Mark Lilla reflects on his adolescent years in which he was a born again Christian evangelical. Malcolm Gladwell, in "The Cellular Church" (The New Yorker, September 12) describes the ministry of Rick Warren, author of the best-selling The Purpose-Driven Life Lilla writes from his own experience and Gladwell as an outsider. Both writers seem free of that antipathy towards evangelism which some secular commentators on the subject are unable to or don't wish to suppress. This doesn't say that Lilla and Gladwell have lost their critical acumen- on the contrary, - but their empathic attitude reveal aspects of evangelicalism which deserve more thoughtful attention than they have received.

Lilla, for instance, puts to rest the caricature we have of evangelicals as being "incurious and indifferent to learning." They are, on the contrary, "gluttons for learning - of a certain kind." Their "thirst for answers to the most urgent moral and existential questions" is so strong, that "they grab the only glass in the room: God's revealed Word." The problem is that, like most Americans, their range of knowledge is narrow. Lacking a strong intellectual and theological tradition, they are susceptible to the stratagems of religious leaders who themselves are poorly educated, are often politically motivated and who tend to offer up mere pious pap These sorry conditions are the breeding ground for fanaticism.

There are today, says Lilla, no religious of the caliber of a Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, John Courtney Murray, Thomas Merton, Jacques Maritain or a Martin Buber. If such exist, and I believe there must be a few (but who are they?), their message has not succeeded in reaching the ordinary truth seeking religious individual. But even if they did succeed how much difference would it make? The problem is endemic not to evangelicals alone but to American life as a whole and especially but not only, to our educational system.

Lilla describes how long it took him to acquire the education he has missed when he was young, not only in books, he writes, but also in his relationship to the wider world around him. From a true believer, he became a doubter. But he notes wryly that skeptics like believers are also proselytizers. When reading a skeptic he would think "Why do you care?" "The Greeks spoke of eros, the Christians of agape and caritas. I don't know what to call it. I just know it is there. It is a kind of care. It is directed towards others, but also, perhaps toward that young man lying on his bed, opening the Bible for the very first time."

More later on Gladwell.

2005-09-06T09:26:00.000-04:00

The shame of it

Shame is a word we don't often hear from Americans when speaking about this country. After all, we are the richest and greatest power in the world and take pride in our history and our achievements. We see ourselves as on the side of good as opposed to the forces of evil elsewhere in the world. But by Friday, following the devastating hurricane which hit Louisiana and Mississippi, we felt shame, for the first time, collectively,as a nation. We feel shame that our local, state and federal governments had been unprepared, had no plan in case such a hurricane occurred (which had been predicted often enough and the vulnerabilities of the cities in its path well known.) We feel shame that it took our president so long to respond to the disaster, and before the emergency relief efforts began in earnest. Most of all, we feel shame that thousands of the poor, many of them sick, children, old and dying (and almost all Blacks) had been virtually abandoned for days and left to rot in an arena without food and water, without toilets, without medical help. And all because they did not have the money or the means to get away like the rest of the population.

We felt not only shame, of course. There was also feelings of anger and outrage. But shame is a new feeling for us, made even more humiliating by the fact that everyone in the world knew about it. Among them were our enemies, as well as our allies, from whom came condolences and gestures of help, soured however with schadenfreude.

Shame is a complex emotion--the experience of humiliation, loss of self-esteem, disgrace, even dishonor. If we think of the times when we have felt ashamed, however, it is not only because we have done or said something wrong or harmful. That we can manage to live with that even if we feel private remorse for what we have done. We feel shame when we have been found out, when we are exposed to others as we know we truly are and not as we would like to be seen or thought of. Shame is felt in the loss of our protective persona. After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve realized for the first time that they were naked. Ashamed of their nakedness, they hid themselves from God and covered their loins with woven fig leaves.

It is a sorry thing that it has taken this abandonment of the poor, old, sick, and mostly black fellow citizens to arouse shame in us as a nation. Hard as it is to bear, however, shame forces us to a greater consciousness of our human condition. It awakens in us an unwelcome but salutary awareness of the evil we do and how we cover it up with comforting fantasies about ourselves. Shame shows us who we really are stripped naked of our pretences. We don't like what we see, which might just turn out, if we will let it, to be a moment of grace for us, a chance to do something about just exactly what it is we don't like about ourselves.

2005-08-29T09:38:00.000-04:00

No Empathy Here

Richard John Neuhaus is one of the most able of apologists for Catholic orthodoxy. I happened to listen to most of a replay of C-Span's TV three hour interview with Neuhaus (first presented on June 5). For three hours he suavely and courteously answered questions from the C-Span host and from individuals calling in or e-mailing from many parts of the country. A Lutheran minister for over thirty years, he became a Roman Catholic in 1990 and one year later was ordained a Catholic priest by the Archbishop of New York. He has written numerous books,and is founder of the neo-conservative Institute for Religion and Public Life, which publishes the monthly First Things for which he writes a column, "Public Square."

If you are interested in the doctrines and moral and social teachings of the Catholic Church or want to know where the Church stands on numerous issues such as abortion or a just war he will inform you forthrightly, unapologetically but also with a crafty nuance, especially on sticky issues such as the ordination of women or the sexual abuse scandals.

Neuhaus expressed regret that many Catholics erroneously concluded from the Council that they were now liberated from Catholic teaching and tradition and to practice a Catholicism of their own. (What Benedict XVI later called a "do-it-yourself" approach to faith.) He thought a great deal of "silliness" resulted, but happily, had been brought under control during the reign of John Paul II. Neuhaus is a devout admirer of John Paul, whom he often cited during the interview, frequently referring to him as John Paul the Great.

Neuhaus is known as a "philo-Semite," and was, he said, "privileged" to know and work with Martin Luther King. He worked for years to bring about a reconciliation between the Lutherans and Catholics. But when it comes to his fellow Catholics Neuhaus does not show a great deal of empathy. What Catholic traditionalists like Neuhaus will not acknowledge is the genuine spiritual turmoil experienced by many Catholics, priests and nuns included, in the years preceding the Council. For them the Council was the long-desired promise of a rejuvenated Catholicism. For many, however, the Council came too late and the promise of a genuine change was not fulfilled. Neuhaus and other traditionalists seem to believe that these people are guilty of bad-will or at best, simply misinformed about the Church, its teachings and practices. But this is a smug and false judgment, made with little attempt to understand what is actually going on in the hearts and minds of these Catholics, who love (or did love) the church as much as Neuhaus obviously does.

Why can't the Church extend its desire to engage in dialogue beyond the churches, beyond Judaism and Islam, and initiate dialogue with the so-called "secularists" and with (where it should have begun) with its very own members, who dare to ask questions, dare even to doubt? The Church unfortunately, is inhibited from doing so as long as it maintains its rigid top-down form of governance and there is no sign that this will change anytime soon. Neuhaus at one point cited John Paul II's well-known counsel:"Do not be afraid." What is the official Church afraid of and why should it be afraid of its very own?

2005-08-25T10:08:00.000-04:00

In Defense of Fantasy

In the last posting I used the word "fantasy" in a pejorative sense, as wishful thinking. I used it in the context of Bush's speeches defending the war in Iraq and also in the context of advertising in which we are provided with fantasies which are intended as substitutes for reality. But fantasy has another, more positive function, which can lead, not as an escape from, but towards reality. C.G. Jung saw fantasy as an "imaginative activity," a dynamic which can drive the psyche out of its unconscious sleep towards a truer awareness of ourselves and the world in which we are embedded. It does this not so much with our thinking as it does with our ability to imagine. We find this form of fantasy, for example, in works of literature and art which give us profound insights into ourselves and our world. But it originates not just within the artist or poet, but within the imaginative capability of each individual. In contrast, the fantasy we call wishful thinking is often stimulated by manipulative forces external to us.

2005-08-23T16:32:00.000-04:00

The Created Reality of Political Advertising

The most perceptive comment made about this administration of George Bush came from one of his senior advisers. It is a comment we should remember whenver we listen to George Bush or any other member of his administration.

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality-judiciously as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors. . .and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

What struck me about this statement that is that it corresponds with the world of advertising in which corporations push their own products by creating a fantasy for the rest of us. These drugs will cure your illnesses, these cosmetics will keep you from aging, possessing these automobiles will remake you into a desirable, sophisticated, envied, and powerful person and on it goes. You know what I mean. Advertisers learned a long time ago that what you have to do is repeat the fantasy costantly. By repetition the fantasies sink into our subconscious where they affect us without our knowing it. This happens usually because usually we receive them passively, in short, by abdicating our consciousness, our capacity to think for ourselves.

George Bush is pushing fantasies which his aide labels "creating new realities." But like advertisers he relies on repetition to get his fantasy across. The most recent evidence for this was in his talk at the convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Idaho in which he mentioned 9/11 frequently with the intent, as always, to connect spuriously the war in Iraq with keeping this country "secure." The fact that the war in Iraq served to intensify and broaden terrorist activity cannot possibly be allowed into this equation. There is seldom anything new or genuinely reality-based in Bush's speeches or press conferences, unless by reason of political expediency he is forced into some admission, such as in this speech in which he referred to the number of dead and wounded soldiers in Iraq.(Of course, the dead and wounded people of Iraq don't get counted.) Meanwhile, we are expected to believe that everything is "right on course" in Iraq and that our president feels the pain of those who have lost sons, brothers, sisters, lovers,fathers, mothers at the same time promoting the fantasy that "they left a legacy that will allow generations of their fellow American to enjoy the blessings of liberty."

There is a dangerous disconnect between reality and the "creative realities" of this administration which counts on us to accept the latter without question. More power than to Cindy Sheehan and all those others who have taken on themselves the responsibility of challenging the official "realities" which turn out, more often that not, to be just more lies.

2005-08-14T15:14:00.000-04:00

Saints for Our Time

Simone Weil had (as on much else) a provocative take on saintliness. We need, she wrote, a new kind of saint for our time. Although, she admitted, the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain had already pointed this out, he still was thinking in old categories of saintliness which were really out of date. He was insufficiently sensitive, she thought, to "the miraculous newness the saintliness of today" must be. Such saintliness she took to be "a fresh spring, an invention." It would be in effect "the exposure of a large portion of truth and beauty hitherto concealed under a thick layer of dust. More genius is needed than was needed by Archimedes to invent mechanics and physics. A new saintliness is a still more marvelous invention." "The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors." What does Weil mean in calling for this new sort of sainthood?

John Paul II canonized more saints that all his last eight predecessors, most of them obscure, known only in the region from which they came, or as founders of religious institutes. He himself is on the fast track to canonization. These are the saints recognized by the Church, the official saints, as it were. Are they saints for our time? Some would argue that John Paul is. Certainly he was the most widely known among modern Popes, a celebrity, a charismatic, beloved figure, particularly among the young, a truly heroic and holy man. On the other hand, it was also noted that when it came to some of the pressing problems of this time, his approach was to rely strictly on dogmatic and moral formulae of Catholic tradition, rather than to try and understand them from within, in an effort to bring to these problems a more creative solution. Perhaps John Paul lacked the genius which Weil thought was necessary for a saint in our time.

Weil does not explain what she means by genius, nor does she elaborate on what she means by calling this new saintliness "a marvelous invention." And yet she thought it so necessary that we should persistently beg God for it, just as a "famished child asks for bread." In French génie can also mean "spirit," "nature," "talent." One can also suivre son génie, follow one's genius, nature, talent.

Perhaps the best and maybe only way is to think of who, in our own time, could justly be called a genius of a saint. There aren't admittedly a great many candidates but there are some to be sure. I think of Martin Luther King, a towering figure who effected a profound, positive change in civil rights in this country. All right, he may have been a political or social genius but was he a saint? (It's well known that he wasn't always faithful to his wife.) I think Weil is asking us to rethink what we want in a saint. Is it someone who is a model of moral and spiritual perfection. This may be what we expected traditionally of saints but is this what we need now? Or is it someone, human and full of sin like any one of us, who nevertheless gives us a clear vision of what our moral choices ought to be and lives up to that vision with his or her whole being, even unto death if necessary?

Mother Theresa was widely beloved although even her followers were unhappy with her having taken money from quite dubious sources for the sake of her mission. But was she a genius saint in the sense that King was, someone who changed things for the better? Certainly she brought the attention of the world to the need of the poor and abandoned, but except for the work of her own sizable community, has it made much of a difference in India, or elsewhere? Mother Theresa will be, one day, a saint of the Church, but she perhaps was not the genius saint Weil meant.

What then does Weil mean with this "new type of sanctity?" She speaks of it having to be an invention, something creative. She went so far as to call it a "new revelation of the universe and of human destiny." Is it reaching too far? Are not saints born by the grace of God and not invented? But if we tried to imagine such a genius saint what would we expect from him or her?

Gary Wills said recently: "It's the saints who change us." In what way? Who are they and where are they? Or have they not yet been "invented?

2005-08-10T09:39:00.000-04:00

Beyond Empathy

Etty Hillesum's friends urged her to go into hiding to escape internment in a concentration camp. Because she had still too much to give to the world, they argued that it was her duty to avoid the clutches of the Nazis. She was exasperated by their arguments, calling them "specious." For every one trying to save himself, she recorded in her diary, there were huge numbers who were disappearing every day. She saw no reason that she should be an exception. "[I]t doesn't really matter whether I go or somebody else does, the main thing is that so many thousands have to go. It is not as if I want to fall into the arms of destruction with a resigned smile--far from it. . . But I know that whatever I may have to give to others, I can give it no matter where I am, here in the circle of my friends or over there, in a concentration camp. And it is sheer arrogance to think oneself too good to share the fate of the masses." Her worth as a human being, she believed, would be tested in her behavior in the most dire situations. If she should die, her death would show who she really was.
She followed through with these convictions to her death in Auschwitz.

Once having chosen not to go into hiding, Etty Hillesum did not have the options of Simone Weil in deciding how she would express her identification with the suffering masses. She was one among them and would simply share their fate. Her will to do so goes beyond empathy, which it seems to me, posits an I and an Other before there is a reaching out towards that Other. For Etty there were no Others in Westerbork, the transit camp where she was first sent nor eventually in Auschwitz. She was a suffering Jew among all her fellow Jews.

2005-08-05T15:54:00.000-04:00

Empathy in the Extreme: Simone Weil

Simone Weil may be best known for her essay "The Iliad a Poem of Force" but she was one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century, whose essays on a wide range of political and philosophic subjects are perhaps even more influential today than they were during her own lifetime. Today she is also known as a "religious mystic." Although born into an assimilated Jewish family, she was particularly drawn to Catholicism, although she refused to be baptized into the Church. In her "Spiritual Autobiography" she wrote that "I might say that I was born, I grew up, and I always remained within the Christian inspiration." She always adopted, she wrote "the Christian attitude as the only possible one." At the heart of her Christian belief was the passion and death of Jesus Christ.

Even as a child she was drawn to the sufferings of others. When she was five years old, she would not eat sugar because the soldiers at the front had no sugar to eat and later would not wear socks because children of the poor had no socks to wear. As a schoolteacher she disregarded class distinctions by marching with workers on the picket lines and refusing to eat more than those who were on relief rations and gave away the rest. At one point she decided to become a worker herself and took a job at a Renault auto factory, quitting only after she became ill with pleurisy. Barely recovered from her illness, she went to Spain to join in the civil war but succeeded only in getting herself burned through her own ineptness. During World War II, she proposed to the French resistance that she, together with a few nurses, would be dropped behind enemy lines to care for the sick and wounded. The idea was so absurd that nothing came of it. By refusing to eat only the food which her fellow citizens in France were rationed, she became ill and died at the age of thirty-four.

Leslie Fiedler in his introduction to a collection of her essays Waiting for God, says she was something of a "Holy Fool." But the reasons which prompted her actions came from her desire to share in the sufferings of others--a passion that, because it took her to such extremes, is hard for most of us to understand. In that same collection, in an essay with the somewhat off-putting title, "Reflections on the Right use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God," she expresses her intention simply and purely as giving one's "attention:"

The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.

In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail . . . belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, "What are you going through?"

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: "What are you going through?" It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled 'unfortunate' but as a man, exactly like us, who was only stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.

This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all its truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.*

*(From Waiting for God, Perennial Classics, G.P. Putnam, 2001.)

2005-08-02T12:40:00.000-04:00

When empathy doesn't work

Sometimes it is our own experience which enables us to have empathy towards another, that is, to feel with or feel as if the other. My friend mourns the loss of her mother. I too mourn the loss of my mother, and this makes it possible for me to share that sense of loss with her. Only her mother's death occurred recently, while my mother died nearly two decades ago. I mourn her still, but I have to admit, not with the immediacy I felt when she first died. I have to rely on my memory of what it was like during those hours and days following my mother's death. Memory serves to make it possible for me to feel empathy towards my friend, that is to share in some way in her own loss.

This situation is different when it comes to another whose experience cannot be shared. I have a cousin in her nineties who following a stroke is gradually but surely withdrawing from the reality of everyday life around her. She was found the other day in her room, putting articles of clothing, toiletries and food into a paper sack. She was going away, she said. Where? she was asked. She did not know, she said, but proceeded to leave her room and tried to leave the building until she was persuaded to return to her room. I know this cousin well. She was an orphan who lived with my family until she married. She has no children and except for my sister and I she has no other close relatives. Once she was no longer able to look after herself, we found a decent "assisted living" place for her close to my sister's home. It was my job to clean out and sell her mobile home, all the while she pleaded with us to let her return to it. This was a cruel act and to say it was necessary, which it was, does not mitigate the cruelty. We were doing what we knew we had to do, for to leave her on her own would have been a worse form of cruelty. But no rationalizing quite does away with the sense that in trying to do right, you can do a great deal of harm.

What does empathy have to do with this? I cannot draw on experience or memory to help me share with my cousin something of what it is she is going through. She does not complain but her attempt to "go away" speaks of a suffering which cannot be put into words. We can only guess what it is she wants or what she is experiencing. She cannot tell us. I can only try and imagine what it must be like. Memory is going. Remnants of a vivid personality surface once in awhile, and then are sucked down again into some black hole.

I have to admit that imagination does not take me very far. When I try to imagine what goes on inside my cousin, I can sustain it only for a few seconds let alone minutes. But if not empathy there is sympathy, or loving, or compassion which also mean a reaching out to the other, if not in the expectation of being able to identify with or at the very least, share in the experience of that other.

2005-07-28T12:17:00.000-04:00

A Spirituality of Empathy

Memoirist and historian Karen Armstrong believes that major religions of the world (Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam) teach what she calls a "spirituality of empathy" through which we can relate our own suffering to the suffering of others. She first adopted this approach in her biography of Muhammad, which was written in response to the bitter controversy over the novel Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie which resulted in a fatwa being issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini. Armstrong had no problem with Rushdie's novel which she found brilliant. Moreover, he had the right to publish what he pleased. What disturbed her was not only the "crusading certainty" of the Ayathollah Khomeini, but the egregious rhetoric of Rushdie's defenders which revealed an appallingly distorted view of Islam. Ignorant diatribes against Islam would only confirm Muslims in their belief that the Western world hated them which would lead in time to a radical backlash.

Armstrong's Muhammad is an attempt to set the record straight. She "angled it" as she says, to readers who were uneasy with Islam to begin with as well as being confused by the controversy. She describes how she had to "make a daily, hourly effort to enter into the ghastly conditions of seventh-century Arabia and that meant that I had to leave my twentieth-century assumptions and predilections behind. I had to penetrate another culture and develop a wholly different way of looking at the world. It required a constant concentration of mind and heart that was in fact a type of meditation...."

For Armstrong trying "to enter empathically into the experience of another" is a discipline which results in a kind of ecstasy. She does not mean, of course, that she heard voices or had visions. For her it means having transcended the ego in all its selfishness and neediness. In writing Muhammad "I was intent all and every day on trying to understand a man's search for santification. Even though I was not a believer, I had to think myself into a religious frame of reference, and enter the mind of a man who believed that he was directly touched by God. Unless I could make that leap of sympathy, I would miss the essence of Muhammad. Writing this life was in its own way an act of islam --a "surrender" of my secular, skeptical self, which brought me, if only at second hand and at one remove, into the ambit of what we call the divine."

Armstrong's discovery of the spirituality of empathy was a major turning point in her own life. Muhammad is a thoroughly sympathetic view of the founder of Islam, which won accolades from the Muslim community when the book was published. I think, however, it may have limits as a biographical or historical method.

Muhammad is an admirable effort to imagine oneself into the psyche of another. This imagining is drawn from her impressive research but, in the end, it struck me as an imagining. This does not make it untruthful. On the contrary, her own religious sensibility illuminates Muhammad's sense of his vocation, in ways that a more secular rendering could not. But what I felt, as a reader, is the lack of a certain distancing of the author from her subject. Armstrong gives us Muhammad up close but perhaps is too driven by her need to empathize with her subject that willy nilly the reader is given herMuhammad. Is it really possible to so forget one's self as to enter totally into the self of another? It is said that Jung wrote little about empathy because he saw that much of it was a projection of self into the other. He has been refuted on this, but there may be something to it. I suspect that no matter how empty of self we can become (if we can), we bring something of the self to a relationship.

2005-07-17T12:28:00.000-04:00

Empathy and Vacel Havel

In a letter to his wife Olga, written from prison, Vacel Havel describes an incident which occurred while he was watching a weather report on television. Something had gone wrong in the studio. Although the TV image continued without interruption, the sound was suddenly cut off. The woman giving the report was an employee of the Meterological Institute. Not being a professional announcer, she did not know how to handle the situation. "At this point," writes Havel,"a strange thing happened: the mantle of routine fell away and before us there suddenly stood a confused, unhappy and terribly embarrassed woman: she stopped talking, looked in desperation at us, then somewhere off to the side, but there was no help from that direction. She could scarcely hold back her tears. Exposed to the view of millions, yet desperately alone, thrown into the unfamiliar, unexpected and unresolvable situation, incapable of conveying through mime that she was above it all. . . drowning in embarrasment, she stood there in all the primordial nakedness of human helplessness, face-to-face with the big bad world and herself, with the absurdity of her position, and with the desperate question of what to do with herself, how to rescue her dignity, how to acquit herself."

Aware that he may be blowing up what is, after all, a passing event, Havel says he could not help but see in that woman's situation, "an image of the primal situation of humanity: a situation of separation, of being cast into an alien world and standing there before the question of the self." Havel's response, however, was not just intellectual. He writes that he actually experienced, however briefly, "an almost physical dread." He too felt overcome with embarrassment. He blushed, he writes, sharing her shame, and wanted to cry. "Irrespective of my will, I was flooded with an absurdly powerful compassion for this stranger . . . . I felt miserable because I had no way of helping her, of taking her place, or at least of stroking her hair."

Why, Havel wonders, did he feel such an irrational sense of responsibility towards this unknown person? Why should it have concerned him at all? Even allowing for his over-sensitive nature, he asks why was he so deeply affected by her plight, especially when he sees every day in prison much worse suffering?

Havel offers two thoughts. One is an idea he had gotten from reading an excerpt from a work by the philosopher Emmanual Levinas and with which, he says, he totally agrees. Responsibility for others, according to Levinas, is something "primal" and the means by which we transcend ourselves. It comes before everything else that is valuable to us even our freedom and will. This responsibility for others cannot be shifted on to anything or anyone else, and cannot be explained purely psychologically. It precedes even the "I."

At that moment however trivial the incident, Havel felt a responsibility towards that particular person. Although he was in prison, and she was obstensibly free, her vulnerability and helpessness at that moment claimed his compassionate response. Her vulnerability and helplessness is our own, the situation "that we all share, a common isolation, the isolation of humanity thrown into the world, and that this isolation injures us all the same way, regardless of who, concretely happens to be injured in a given instant."

To be continued. . .

2005-07-07T08:38:00.000-04:00

The following letter, from a friend, Kay Walsh Packard, came in response to the posting on Merton and Milosz. Kay also writes concerning a Vipassana Meditation retreat she made recently and an exchange we had on Buddhism. With her permission, I am posting excerpts from that letter.

I knew that Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz had corresponded and was always curious to know more about it. Your recent blog entry provided what I had wished for. . . . Before that I was taken with your entries on Milosz himself and his expressions of faith and doubt and the struggle of living with both. For me, Thomas Merton's deepest writing occurs in a treatise he called, "The Inner Experience." (Apparently on Merton's own directive it wasn't to be published, but made available to qualified scholars.) There are many excerpts from it in a book called Thomas Merton on Mysticism by Raymond Bailey, especially in his chapter entitled, "Desert of the Heart," in which he quotes at length from "The Inner Experience," (described as a compendium of the Rhenish, English and Spanish mystics, as well as existential philosophy and modem psychology- a synthesis of Merton's mystical theology.)

My retreat: it's hard to explain to myself what keeps me making them. Probably, for the most part, it's my attraction to mindfulness, the effort to make one's attention land on the present moment and stay there. While halting the disorienting chatter of the mind, at least periodically, it opens one's senses to seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling what's happening in the body, and noticing the random thoughts that constantly arise without being carried away by them. (At least, that's the intention!) It strengthens the ability to focus or concentrate in meditation which, over time, leads to certain types of understanding. Anyway, the process seems to align with my temperament and is just one of many ways to clarify one's experience and be drawn to the realization of connection with others at the same time. Since it's a practice so focused on one's own inner experience you'd think one could do it perfectly well by oneself. One tries, of course, but at times being with others who are committed to the same endeavor is a real motivator-- creating an atmosphere that promotes one's best effort.

I've never been fully able to comprehend how Buddhism, a non-theistic religion, promotes, or can conduct to what I'd call a deep spirituality for those who meditate as a means to personal transformation. (I've heard that about 3% of the monks in Buddhist monasteries in Asia actually meditate.) Some of what Karen Armstrong wrote in her final chapter of Spiral Staircase elucidated some of this for me. I copied: "....this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.... when people develop the kind of lifestyle that restrains greed and selfishness, they experience a transcendence...." "....what St. Paul called a kenosis, an emptying of self, would lead to an enlargement and an enhanced perspective." A lot more need be said about this, but to me she points in the right direction.

Though I heard an individual Buddhist scoff at the notion of individuation since Buddhists deny the existence of a separate, solid self, I don't really find the two contradict each other on an experiential level. I've always seen the Jungian meaning of the term as dovetailing with the way Buddhists see transformation. Seems to me that a fully individualized human being has undercut egotism, become more humble, and rather than dwell in an isolated state of achievement, feels a basic connection with others and, particularly, with those who have taken routes of many descriptions to the same understanding. The end product for a Buddhist who attains enlightenment is regarded as this sense of oneness with humanity and all Jiving beings which overflows into compassion, the wisdom achieved needing to couple with compassion for the spiritual attainment to be genuine. I see it also in Christ's true ideal for Christianity, "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples that you have love one for another."

I write all this with hesitancy--it's my personal take and I don't trust it as accurate in an objective sense.

2005-05-25T14:03:00.000-04:00

No ready made answers

Given the atmosphere of moral absolutism and religious righteousness which hangs heavily over this country, it's a salutary relief to turn to those individuals for whom uncertainty and ambivalence seem essential to their personal integrity and to their view of the world. Before and while judging others, such individuals are also inclined to judge themselves with an unflinching honesty, a rare quality. Thomas Merton, the Cistercian monk and the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz were two such people. Merton and Milosz wrote long letters to each other off and on over a decade.*The letters reveal their mutual admiration and trust as well as an eagerness to learn from one another. Together they give us a glimpse of deeply troubled men who find themselves at odds with the culture of their time and with the Catholic Church to which, ultimately, they were both committed. Whether in religion or politics they sought to find their way to the truth without succumbing to outside pressures to conform.

Merton initiated the correspondence after reading Milosz's influential The Captive Mind, which analyzed Communism's fatal allure for the European intellectual. He wrote to Milosz of the shallowness of Catholic writing (including his own) but noted that Milosz's book had aroused in him a new consciousness about his own responsibilities to "the rest of the human race and about the predicament of us all." In his response Milosz writes, among other things, about how in writing the book it was "impossible to avoid sinning by giving in to the very process." "In fact I love those people against whom I directed my anger much more than I show. I did not succeed in showing my love and my whole thought. How well I know that shame which comes from (perhaps unavoidable) elimination, from fear of being too complicated, too unaccessible, from your own rigidity."

The two poets exchange candid views on poetry--their own and their contemporaries--books written or underway, their literary and philosophical prejudices and preferences, the plight of the world which seems to them to be getting worse. Running throughout the correspondence is their shared concern as Catholics. Milosz writes to Merton "I cannot proclaim myself a Catholic, if I do not know whether I am one." At another time, he asks "What to do with one's Christianity? Why do I consider myself a Christian? Traditions, their pressure? But I feel strongly, as a poet, that all is futility except our striving towards Being." He tells Merton, "You know, in Poland the best intelligentsia is atheistic or agnostic, or in rare cases crypto-Catholic. . . ."

For his part, Merton admits to Milosz his discontent not only with the Church which he finds unresponsive to the realities of the time, but also with his religious community. "You are all too right," he tells Milosz, "about the sickness of this society." He himself feels helpless in this situation. His vocation should have given him just the perspective needed to see things clearly. "But at the same time there is so much confusion around me and in my own self. In monastic life there is a fatal mixture of inspiration and inertia that produces an awful inarticulate guilt in anyone who does not simply bury his head in the sand. You never know when you are right. . . ." He worries about the temptation to become "pure" thereby separating himself from others when really "we are all full of the same poisons."

Merton was drawn to Buddhism in the years before his untimely death. Milosz's uncertainty about God and about the Church, remained with him unto old age, as is evident in many poems collected in his last published work Second Space. Some will think this ambivalence towards the Church is a one-sided view of these poets and that is true. Their lives and their works were multilayered, subtle and rich. Their letters hint at more than they actually reveal of their inner lives. Yet for those of us who have also experienced doubt and ambivalence, especially where religion is concerned, can take courage and hope from them who had both virtues in full. What is sure is that reason by itself will not bring any resolution. No one understood this better than these two poets.

*Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997)

2005-05-12T14:06:00.000-04:00

On Doubt

As a Catholic I inhabited a universe in which doubt had no place. Truth was revealed and interpreted through the teachings of the Church Not only was doubt not possible, but neither was inquiry allowed which strayed outside the authorized boundaries. The windows which opened in the Church in the post-Vatican Council II years closed again under the reign of John Paul II and threaten to be locked under the reign of Benedict XVI.

But the Church cannot control the doubt that many Catholics experience. It is useless to castigate those who do doubt as if their doubting was, of necessity, maliciously intended. Doubt will come once the individual Catholic begins to think actively for herself as adults must do. She would rather it not be there, but can't ignore it. If she does it is at the price of her own integrity. Meanwhile, she feels a vague sense of guilt , of isolation and of loss. She finds it hard to admit to doubt, to even talk about it. For however estranged from the Church she feels, she still loves the Church and so doubt for her is something sad and painful.

In the preface to his Pulitzer Prize winning play Doubt: A Parable, John Patrick Shanley offers a different outlook on doubt. He shrugs off feelings of guilt and estrangement as mere nostalgia. It is precisely when we feel most uncertain, at a loss about what we know, what we have always believed in, that we are presented with an opportunity. We should think of doubt as that "tectonic power of your speechless soul" which enables you to break through "the dead habits of mind."

I don't think that religious faith is, or must become, a dead habit of the mind. The great Pascal had his doubts and chose to believe in spite of them. The poet Czeslaw Milosz struggled between belief and unbelief all his life, never more passionately so than in his extreme old age.

And if all this is only a dream
Mankind has about itself?
And we Christians
Are dreaming our dream within a dream?

He pleaded: "Treat with understanding persons of weak faith./Myself included." Milosz also wrote an "Ode on the Eightieth Birthday of Pope John Paul II." These two dominating figures of our time were compatriots and friends, who died within a few months of each other. One was a man of absolute conviction and faith, the other a man who wrote of himself: "One day I believe, another I disbelieve." John Paul II exhorted his followers "Not to be afraid." Milosz was not afraid to express the religious uncertainties he experienced all his long and fruitful life. He seems to me to be no less a Catholic for having the courage and intellectual integrity to do that.

2005-05-06T13:00:00.000-04:00

Secularism and the cultural psyche

We are confronted in this country with an upsurge of religious evangelism which repudiates the idea of "secularism" with the specific aim of breaking down the wall between church and state. Meanwhile, the nations of "old" Europe which make up the European union are under pressure from the Vatican to acknowledge Europe's Christian roots, most notably in the preamble to the EU's Constitution now being drafted. The chances of this happening are slim. There are political reasons for this resistance , namely, the debate over the admission of Turkey, officially a secular state, but in which there is a strong Muslim revival and the complicating presence in Europe of millions of Muslims. But even apart from political considerations, most of the EU nations are unwilling to incorporate religion of any brand into the making of a new Europe.

I do not argue for the inclusion of religion into national or EU constitutions, believing it would be a bad thing to do. Nor should Americans surrender to the evangelistic fervor of those who want to do away with the separation of Church and State. But whatever the outcome may be, those of us who stand on the side of secularism in public life would be unwise to ignore the fact that the roots of Western civilization are, whether we like it or not, Christian (or more accurately, Judeo-Christian, given than Christianity's own roots are in Judaism.)

According to the historian Carl Becker, the new religion of Nature and Reason introduced during the Enlightenment had its source in Christianity even though the philosophes sought to deny and replace them. Historian Christopher Dawson came to the same conclusion. "A civilization," writes Dawson,"cannot strip itself of its past in the same way that a philosopher discards a theory. The religion which has governed the life of a people for a thousand years enters into its very being and molds all thought and feeling. When the philosophers of the 18th century attempted to substitute their new rationalist doctrines from the ancient faith of Christendom, they were in reality simply abstracting from it those elements which had entered so deeply into their own thought that they no longer recognized their origin." In tracing the evolution of the modern Western concept of the self, the philosopher Charles Taylor argues that new concepts are drawn implicitly from older ones, from an 'horizon of assumptions,' or an 'inescapable framework' which contains the old concepts which are being explicitly rejected. A new concept may in reality be living on the spiritual insights of its predecessor which claims to have been utterly repudiated." This is "the great unsaid that underlies widespread attitudes to our civilization."

Even secularists have to acknowledge that Judeo-Christianity is an indelible part of Western culture. It is embedded in us, as individuals, but also in the culture as a whole, in what Jungian psychologist Joseph Henderson called "the cultural psyche," those " ...aspects of behavior, thought, and actions which have been inherited, learned and assimilated by a particular society or culture." We may deviate from it, disagree or repudiate it, but we cannot separate ourselves from it. It is as much inside us as part of our individual psyches as it is in the culture itself.

There is no returning, of course, to the Christianity of the past. Radical changes and transformations have occurred in Western civilization and in Christianity, from which there is no turning back. Nor should we want to. Instead of rejecting that past, however, we would do well to consider it with a little humility and with the expectation that we have something to learn from it. Who knows? It might even open up the chance that some common ground could be found with those who oppose secularism.

2005-05-01T14:49:00.000-04:00

Have we no shame?

The recent Schiavo spectacle as it erupted in the press, on TV and radio, in the churches, will be remembered, among other things, for its sheer indecency. The parents and siblings, their supporters, and certainly those church people and politicos who claimed to speak on behalf of a higher morality seemed not to be aware that their impassioned plea to save Terri's life was done at the expense of Terri's dignity and privacy. Or if aware, perhaps they thought it was less important than, or had to be sacrificed to, the cause they had undertaken supposedly for her sake. Or is it that in our culture the personal and the intimate are so blatantly and so routinely exposed that they have lost their worth for us?

In "On the Shamelessness of our Public Sphere," (New Republic OnLine, April 15), Rochelle Gurstein recalls (but how can we forget it, it was forced upon us so often? ) the image of Terri 's mother holding her "once lovely daughter's head with its now vacant eyes, slack, slightly opened mouth, and neck scarred from what appeared to be a tracheotomy incision." Although the parents believed that this and other video clips would prove that Terri was responsive, Gurstein writes that they had had an opposite effect on her, that "they also mercilessly invaded the privacy of this extremely vulnerable being as they delivered her body to the frenzy of the commercial "infotainment" industry."

Gurstein also cites a newspaper account of "a group of parents who traveled to Schiavo's hospice, pitilessly displaying before the crowds their own severely disabled, wheelchair-bound children, including one helpless child whose parents had uncovered his feeding tube for the whole world to see." And a photograph: "...members of the disability activist group Not Dead Yet, who had crawled out of their wheelchairs to lie next to one another on the ground outside of Schiavo's hospice, some with their feeding tubes brazenly on display for the reporters."An act, says Gurstein, of "willful self exposure." In flaunting their disabilities, Gurstein is quite aware, they are rejecting the need "to cover up what we are. Why should we accept your standards of 'normal?' " She would like to answer “ cover up so you maintain your dignity as a person,” knowing that those who are committed to the exposure of themselves or others also do so to resist discrimination and paternalism and even “outright oppression.”

Even so, Gurstein is honest enough--and I think she speaks for many, myself included--when she says she cannot overcome

the visceral feelings of mortification that I experience whenever I see the intimate details or vulnerable body processes of a person’s life paraded before complete strangers, and it makes no difference if such invasions of privacy come from the victims themselves--I immediately thought of the flourishing multi-billion dollar pornography industry, but also of the perpetual therapeutic confessions of the famous and obscure on talk shows, the various forms of self-abasement that ordinary people compete to endure on ‘reality’ shows, the endless flood of tell-all memoirs by celebrities. It seemed to me that our common world was awash in obscenity and small talk and that we had become so used to its low tone that few people could imagine anything different.

We are a nation of voyeurs.There is no getting away from it in a culture like ours in which what is most private and personal is so readily vaunted in public, even for what seem to be worthy causes.

2005-04-26T07:58:00.000-04:00

The dread of not- being

Those who were most vehement about preserving "the culture of life" and against the removal of the feeding tubes which kept Terri Schiavo alive, were Christians. Mr and Mrs. Schindler were Catholics. Many Catholics supported them, including Catholic clergy. They were supported (and egged on as well) by fundamentalist Christians and by a number of their religio- political organizations. Now, Christians, Catholic or Protestant, mainstream or fundamentalists, are said to believe in the immortality of the soul, in the resurrection of the body and eternal life thereafter. If this is the case, why did these beliefs seem to have no influence whatsoever among those who insisted that Terri Schiavo be kept alive artificially? It is curious that this belief, so central to Christianity, did not figure in somehow, at some time, in all the public agonizing over Terri Schiavo's fate. Why was there no one to remind us that for the believing Christian Terri's death would signal the beginning of her eternal life? In death, St. Paul wrote, the mortal body puts on immortality and the Christian can exult: "Death is swallowed up in victory! O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?" Why then, if Christians believe this, was it so impossible to let Terri go? Why was it insisted upon that it would be heinous crime, a murder, to remove the tubes which kept her artificially alive? For whose sake was she being kept alive? Terri's or ours?

Perhaps among all the reasons given for keeping Terri Schiavo alive there was one reason too threatening to allow it to surface into consciousness, much less think about or to express publicly. The frenzied behavior of so many of the participants in this tragic situation suggests that maybe a dynamic was at work, something deeper than belief, more primitive, instinctual: the fear of non-existence. We cling to "life" because the alternative is not -being. Maybe what we call "the culture of life" is really a culture of death-denying, a desperate resistance to our fate.

Our dilemma is that psychologically we feel ourselves to be immortal. As both Freud and Jung observed, the human psyche does not acknowledge death— or time, for that matter. It thinks of itself as ageless. As Ernest Becker put it in The Denial of Death. "[T]he idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human acitivity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying it in some way that it is the final destiny for man." Christianity, as do other religions, offers the promise, indeed, the certainty, that death is not the end of existence. That although our bodies will die, our souls live on eternally. But there are those rare occasions, as we so recently witnessed, when our dread of no longer being, of non-existence proves to be more powerful than religious belief.

The inmpassioned moralizing during those weeks showed little respect for Terri Schiavo's personal dignity or privacy. But it is possible to understand it also as an unknowing, blind cry from the heart which collectively erupted in protest against our own destiny. True, there is the hope and promise of Christian belief in the resurrection from the dead. But however strong our faith we never entirely can overcome that instinctual dread of non-existence.

2005-04-05T12:16:00.000-04:00

If only this could be said

"If only this could be said: I am a Christian, and my Christianity is such and such," wrote the late poet Czeslaw Milosz. Marilynne Robinson, (whose most recent novel Gilead has just been published to wide aclaim) asked the same question. (See posting for August 11, 2004 in Archives) As a firm Christian believer she thought the reason "it could not be said" was the intimidation of group consensus. If we are aware that our belief would not meet with the approval of the group, we will say nothing, rather than risk its displeasure and perhaps ostracism.

Milosz's group were his contemporaries who inhabit, as he described it, his own "cultural milieu."They are liberal in their attitudes, respect the religion of others and even take an interest in it. But religious belief is simply is not for them. The believer is always "the other." As a Roman Catholic, Milosz did not really see himself as an outsider among his peers. His problem as a believer is more complicated than that, because Milosz both believes and does not believe. His peers might envy him for his faith, but he finds it difficult to profess that faith to them. "After all, I am one of them, seeking, as they do, the laws of inheritance, and I am just as confused."

Even in old age, he was not able to resolve his questions, doubts, skepticism about much of his Catholic faith. Sacred and immutable doctrines, rituals and practices of the Church perplex him. For him the greatest mystery is Evil. "All my life I tried to answer the question, where does evil come from?/Impossible that people should suffer so much, if God is in Heaven and nearby."

Nevertheless, he is a believer, because he does not believe that human beings have the power to do good. We are slaves of our own passions which are manifestations of our self-love and which cannot be eliminated, even in the noblest of individuals. Instead there is nothing else to be done, but to rely "on the boundless freedom of the divine act or Grace."

He is at once disconnected from the communal side of Catholicism but at the same time when people come together to take part in something which "exceeds them and unites them" is, for him a great experience. In these moments we recognize "the frailty, the human infirmity, the ultimate human aloneness seeking to be rescued . . ." He is doubtful about the possibility of our overcoming our self-love, but at the same time, believes in the mystery of the resistance of tiny kernels of good. "Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually."

Milosz ends his essay by asking himself: "Ought I to try to explain 'why I believe?' "I don’t think so,"he answers, leaving us with his confusions, contradictions, and doubts still and never to be resolved. He could write (in his Treatise on Theology) "I am not, and I do not want to be, a possessor of the truth./Wandering on the outskirts of heresy is about right for me." And in that same Treatise he could also write: "To be human is to be completely alien among the galaxies./Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy."

2005-01-13T14:20:00.000-05:00

The Tsunami, A Challenge to Religion

The tsunami catastrophe, which claimed thousands of lives, raised the question for many about how it could be reconciled with a belief in a good and just God. If God allowed this tragedy to happen, as some think, in retribution for the evils which we humans have committed, why then were innocent children among the victims? Did God need to remind us, as others have said, that he created the world and he can destroy it? Or is it a sign that the last days are soon to come upon us, as still others believe? In the weeks after the disaster religious leaders of diverse beliefs from around the world felt obliged to give some sort of answer to these and other questions which the tsunami raised in the wake of its horrendous human toll. "It was a test from God to show our faith in him."Or, "I see God in the good that will come out of it." "This is an expression of God 's ire with the world." "The world is being punished for wrong-doing." And so it went.

To explain the catastrophe as an act of Nature was, it seems, not sufficient. No, God, Nature's creator, had to have a hand in it. Whether for our own good, or our punishment, it happened because of us. In ignorance or in pride we see ourselves as the all important center of the universe. God in his wrath or in his mercy towards us only confirms this. Which should make us wonder if we cling to God, because what we fear most is the idea that we might possibly exist in a world which is entirely indifferent to us. In such a world we would have no meaning or purpose whatsoever.

In the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal wrote about what it is to be human in such an cold and ruthless, incomprehensible world.

When I consider the short span of my life. . .The small space which I fill and even can see, swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which knows nothing of me, I am terrified and surprised to find myself here rather than there, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who put me here? On whose orders and on whose decision have this place and this time been allotted to me?

Surely, there are survivors of the tsunami who would recognize in these words the truth of their own experience, although they may not dare not speak of it themselves. Pascal, by the way, who did did not avoid asking such hard questions, was also a man of deep faith.

As one commentator noted, the tsunami tragedy may also be "an unsought opportunity to consider the largest of all human implications, its challenge to religion."

2004-12-19T08:09:00.000-05:00

From Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrows.
. . . .

With the slipping away of his many lives, the poet tells us, they are closer to him than before. He remembers "I was not separated from people, grief and pity joined us."

Ignoring our declining powers, there comes a gift, an unexpected buoyancy lifting us up out of chronic self-absorption. Mother and father dead for decades are more present to us now, as are our grandparents and the ancestors we never knew. And not only kin, and not only those we grew up with, played with, fought with, worked with, mated with, but those people who also inhabited this earth, today and yesterday. As we dwell in them, "they dwell in us, waiting for fulfillment."

I have felt this too from time to time, moments of grace and promise.

2004-12-18T14:31:00.000-05:00

I visit Esther about twice a week. I am told she does not know her own son when he visits her. I ask "Do you remember me?" She says "Yes." Maybe. She is very polite and knows what is expected of her. Most of the other patients in the room are asleep in their chairs but not Esther, who is always alert to what is going on. She said once "I am afraid to go to sleep."

Mostly I sit quietly by her side. From time to time she will ask a question, which not having understood, I cannot answer. She is slipping through an endless black hole, from which only words now and again still manage to escape. I try to catch them, but fail. Finally, the words will be gone too. A star curling in on itself until it is extinguished.

2004-08-18T16:05:00.000-04:00

Czeslaw Milosz died in his sleep on Saturday at the age of 93. I mourn him for he was, (and will remain) a presence in my life. These past few days I've been reading from his Collected Poems side by side with readings from Heidegger's Being and Time. It is Heidegger who helps me understand Milosz's poetry. Surprisingly, because Heidegger writes, as Camus noted, "in the most abstract language imaginable" while Milosz sticks with the immediacy and directness of experience itself. But for both, the poet and the philosopher, the thing in itself is what matters. The world in which we are only one among a multitude of beings is real, but it is given uniquely to us to be the ones who care about Being itself.

2004-08-11T12:14:00.000-04:00

Courage and the Need for Consensus

I am a guest sitting at a dinner table with others whom I know reasonably well and with whom I am on friendly terms. The conversation turns to politics which probably would not have been brought up at all except that it was more or less understood that the political orientation of the guests was conservative and Republican. Ah, but my position is that of a liberal and a Democrat. What to do? Even supposing that I am assertive and expressive enough to take on the challenge of an opposing view, something holds me back. Courage fails me. This is a common enough occurrence but we rarely think about it about it, preferring to make the best of it and leave it at that. No one wants to spoil the party.
In "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion" ( August Harper's )Marilynne Robinson writes that courage fails us in such circumstances because we have internalized what amounts to a taboo about expressing disagreement with the the group. We police ourselves and decide that to express contrary opinions would not be appropriate. The group would most likely not see it as an act that took some courage, but merely bad manners. The equivalent, Robinson says, of using the wrong fork. The reason that this kind of courage --moral or intellectual--is not so highly regarded as physical courage is because it threatens "to violate loyalty, group identity, the sense of comme il faut. They are intrinsically outside the range of consensus." And consensus is what groups foster to maintain their identity.
When it comes to her religion, however, Robinson admits that she is often reluctant to discuss her beliefs because they don't lend themselves to straightforward statements. I think that this may be more often the case than simply or only a failure of nerve when we decide not to upset the group consensus. In the background of every strongly held conviction there is a history, a set of assumptions and personal experience which cannot be easily communicated to others who do not share that background. It can be done, of course, but only under the the rare condition that the others are willing to be open to the viewpoint of the other as strange, illogical and distasteful that viewpoint might be.
In the late sixties I attended weekly meetings of a feminist group during which I never once opened my mouth. I was fascinated with everything they had to say, but I felt too wide a gap between their experiences and my own. The ease and lack of self consciousness with which they spoke about themselves and discussed their personal problems were somewhat shocking to me. After a few weeks had gone by I was informed that if I didn't speak up, I shouldn't come to the meetings any longer. Rising to the challenge at the next meeting I spoke at length about my sixteen years with The Grail, a Catholic lay women's organization and my decision to free myself of the constraints of that commitment both to the Grail and to the Catholic Church. Even as I spoke I was aware of how alien my experience must be to them. These, after all, were secular, sophisticated, younger women who were struggling with quite different issues such as freeing themselves from dead end marriages and work. To my surprise, they were not sympathetic in any condescending way which I half-expected, but truly had grasped what I was trying to convey. They even took it further, by making analogies with their own quite different experiences and with feminism itself. This brief encounter proved to be a liberating moment for me and a turning point in my life.
For all our differences we did share something in common: a heightened consciousness that we were women coming to grips with what it was that we wanted from life. It was a consensus of sorts, but that alone would not have done it without the willingness of the women to enter without prejudice into an experience so at odds with their own. This does happen, but rarely. (Think of the antipathy in the early years of the feminist movement between those embraced feminism and those who didn't.) In certain circumstances courage is needed not only to assert oneself against the group, but courage within the group to lay aside for the moment, the baggage of opinion, judgments, and the fearful need for consensus.

2004-05-14T13:27:00.000-04:00

My Myth, My Truth

After Jung concluded that modern man could no longer live by myths and that he himself did not live by his own, the Christian myth, he asked himself: "But then what is your myth--the myth in which you do live?" He was taken to task for having contradicted himself and for having, by his own admission, "stopped thinking" about it. But it seems to me it was logical for Jung to ask that question. If these myths had lost their power, what then can the individual do but ask what is it then which remains true for me? For Jung, who had spent much of his life studying the world's myths, it is not surprising that he should express this by asking "What is my myth?" Although he did not pursue this question immediately by means of conscious thought, he nevertheless did so in his way and at his own pace, by allowing the unconscious to do its work through dreams and fantasies. "Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only 'tell stories.' Whether or not the stories are true is not the problem. The only problem is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth."
More than a century before Jung, Kierkegaard struggled with the same dilemma as he confronted the decline of Christianity in his native Denmark. "The thing," he wrote in his journal, "is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die." He recognized that one must have and live one's own truth. My truth "must be taken up into my life."
If, after a prolonged struggle with yourself, you decide that you can no longer be faithful to the religion you grew up with or to an association to which you had dedicated yourself, the notion of finding your own truth or myth to replace them can have a great appeal. There are unintended consequences, you discover, for breaking away from what provided you with a shared identity, a sense of belonging and of worthwhile purpose. I had done both, separating myself from the Church and the Grail. Shortly after, while reading Jung's memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections and Martin Buber's Between Man and Man, I came across passages which seemed to address directly the new situation in which I found myself.
Jung spoke of the psychological fall out when you break with your group. Your psyche, for instance, can mischievously take on the role of the group you had left behind. Having escaped the multiplicity of opinions and attitudes encountered in the group, you experience your own "inner multiplicity." You find yourself in a turmoil of thoughts and feelings which leave you distracted, scattered, not knowing which direction to take next. You are on your own, responsible now for yourself, you have become, as Jung put it, "your own company." The order, coherence and assurances which came from belonging to the group are no longer yours. Instead you are left with uncertainties which can be resolved (if at all), Jung thought, only by confronting the opposing demands within oneself.
Jung spoke of an individual needing "a secret," to make the decision to take a stand against the group. Jung thought of this secret as a daimon, an "autonomous dynamism" within the unconscious. When confronted with moral dilemmas it is called "conscience" and for the religious it may be recognized as the voice of God. This inner daimon is secret because it is entirely personal and so cannot be shared with others. Moreover, the one who possesses the secret finds it impossible to express just what it is. In my circumstances, I was able to explain the reasons which led up to my leaving the Grail and the Church. Recalling these explanations today, they seem as valid and as compelling to me now as they did then. But they were the consequence of something else going on which had not been under my control and of which I was only dimly aware. That inner autonomous dynamic--my secret-- was in motion, shifting authority and responsibility from their accustomed locus in the Church and the Grail, to me, to my self. Without my quite knowing it, I had begun the work of having to differentiate between Truth and what is true for me.

2004-04-06T15:39:00.000-04:00

The End of "The End of Meaning" (in this weblog anyway)

During a short leave of absence from Wolfgang Giegerichís "The End of Meaning," I gained a better perspective on what I think Giegerich is trying to do in that essay. Giegerich writes, in a continuum with earlier essays and in his book The Soulís Logical Life, to offer a corrective to what he believes is the disastrous direction Jungís psychology has taken and for which he places the blame squarely on Jung himself. Jung, he claims, knew very well that Meaning (myths and religious tradition) had died for modern man and could not be resurrected. But instead of honestly confronting this inevitable transition to the modern, Jung attempted to save Meaning by locating it at work in the unconscious.

In the first thirty-one pages Giegerich describes, in his inimitable imaginal and convoluted metaphorical style, the emergence of the modern as a birth into a long delayed adulthood. We are now responsible for ourselves and for the world around us, with no God (or gods) in the heavens to answer to. Nature itself has been mastered and subdued to serve human needs. God the Father and Mother Nature have been banished. We are on our own.There is nothing original in Giegerichís thinking here. What he is describing is essentially existentialism, which came into prominence after World War II. Although it peaked in a few years, its influence is still widespread and no philosophy since has come along to replace it. Giegerich himself does not refer at all to existentialism except indirectly in his frequent citations of Nietzsche. He makes, however, a significant and even bold contribution to it as it plays out in the tenuous situation of Jungian psychology today.

In the last twenty-seven pages of the essay Giegerich mounts a harsh critique of Jung himself. Although Jung, according to Giegerich, understood clearly that this was the age of the Modern Man, for whom gods and their myths were no longer credible, he persisted in keeping them alive in the unconscious where they continue to exert their numinous power free from contamination from mind and consciousness. The consequence is that Jung and his psychology turned away from the challenge ìto unreservedly experience transformation, initiation[his italics] into the modern form of consciousness.î In a blistering aside, Giegerich claims this is why Jungís work "does not attract and inspire great minds, thinkers, writers, artists, in obvious contrast to Freudís work, and academically stayed a non-entity."That Giegerich is not far off the mark with his comment, consider the recent on-line forum sponsored by the International Association for Jungian Studies, in which negative reviews of Deirdre Bairís new biography of Jung sparked a heated discussion as to why Jung is not only not appreciated, but reviled and especially in academe? On the whole, the responses were more defensive than searching.

Do Giegerichís insights have a wider application beyond the boundaries of Jungian psychology? I am not sure and perhaps this was not his intent anyway, given his hate /love relationship with it. What I found of value and what compelled me to struggle through "The End of Meaning..." is precisely, I now realize, because it reawakened in me the the intuitions which seemed to flood my psyche during the first couple of years after leaving the Grail and the Church and which only after the fact did I discover were ìexistential.î With this admission I take leave of that formidable work, but grateful for its energizing challenge to intellect and experience.

2004-03-21T15:07:00.000-05:00

A reflection on turning 77

There is an expectation that if we spend a good bit of the remaining years of our life in reflection, whether it be on our personal history, on the state of the world today, or on the perennial questions such as God, life and death, it can be done in tranquillity, without upheavals of mind and emotion. We may have believed that now that we are more or less beyond the fray, we can take a more detached perspective on these matters. No doubt some lucky ones do manage to do that. But not all of us and perhaps not most of us.

In the past two years I have been reflecting on all of the above. I am inconsistent, more often distracted than not, jumping at any excuse, real or made up, to get away from it. I have learned that reflection is hard work which often leaves me tired, anxious, and depressed. I have gotten used to that reaction and I am learning just to live with it, not always successfully.

Reflection is not limited to sitting at my desk, reading and focusing my thoughts on these things. It may start there, but doesnít end there. I seem to carry it with me with during the day. It slips into consciousness wherever it will, while I am taking a walk, driving the car, reading, at a social gathering, or wherever. I know I ought to be giving what I am doing at a given moment my full attention. I try and sometimes succeed in doing this, but more often than not, the thoughts which reflection has stirred in me hover around, waiting to come to the fore. This may not however be entirely a bad thing. It suggests to me that when reflection is pursued with some seriousness, it isnít just an on and off incident, but needs constant attending to. It will seep in everywhere and when least expected.

Reflection as concentrated thinking, however, is hard and frustrating. It was much easier, for instance, when I was doing my dissertation because it had a structure. I had a defined theme and a certain point of view, could draw on relevant resources for the information I needed. I made notes on 4 x 6 cards from which I was able to organize my material and eventually write the dissertation. Reflection, to the contrary, is all over the place. The material for it is the accumulation of information gathered from memories, conversations, reading, work and activity, that is, a lifetime experience. Which does not lend itself itself to being organized in tidy categories. On the contrary it is diffuse, chaotic, undisciplined but it is what I have to work with.

There is another source of frustrationóthink just a little and soon I run up against complexity and ambiguity. What seemed simple or straightforward in my mind is now complicated, needing nuance, cannot be stated in black and white terms, fluctuates between negative and positive. And then there is my ignorance, there is just too much I donít know and never will.

But what ultimately prevents reflection in tranquillity is none of the above. It is reflection itself because it is never pure, detached objective thinking, but it is thinking which taps into my emotions, drags them up out of their hiding place, forces me sometimes to relive them. I face myself as I never was quite able to do before. And it does not leave me content with myself, nor with my times which is what old age seemed to promise.

Instead of distancing myself from the world around me and the events taking place in this moment of history, I find myself intensely drawn to them emotionally as well as reflectively. This surprises me and I don't understand why this should be so. But there is satisfaction, I have to admit, in discovering that old age does not mean the end of passion, but quickens it in new ways.

2004-03-08T15:48:00.000-05:00

Entertaining Giegerich

I am going to pause for awhile with these rather random postings on Giegerichís essay The End of Meaning Meaning. I would like to review them, and also re-read the essay, including Section 10. It is almost as long as the previous 9 sections and much more difficult. Originally I said it was important, but not essential, but I was wrong about that. But it will take some grappling with.

I already quoted James Hillman as a way of explaining why I read Giegerich with such intense interest. (See Posting for February 17, 2004). Here is another one from Hillman which expresses so well how Geiegerichís thinking has to be approached:

That word ìentertainî means to hold in between. What you do with an idea is hold it between óbetween your two hands. On the other hand, acting or applying it in the world and on the other hand, forgetting it, judging it, ignoring it, etc. So when these crazy things come in on you unannounced the best you can do for them is think them, holding them, turning them over, wondering awhile. Not rushing into practice. Not rushing into associations. This reminds of that: this is just like that. Off we go, away from the strange ideas to things we already know. Not judging. Rather than judging them as good and bad, true or false, we might first spend a little time with them.

In one respect I have not followed Hillmanís advice. I have rushed into associations. Off I went making a connection between Giegerichís ideas to what I ìalready knewî It kept me reading because I seemed to see in what I took to be the main thrust of his essay a verification of what I had first experienced on my own. I have now to do a little more entertaining of his ideas, jostling them from one hand to the next, articulating doubts, asking questions, attempting to come up with a more coherent view of his thinking than I have now.

2004-03-04T11:14:00.000-05:00

Humility or Hubris?

I would like to dwell a little longer on Giegerichís critique on the quest for Meaning. He criticizes Jung for blaming the loss of meaning on our having wasted the riches our own Christian tradition. For his part, Giegerich places blame on our high-mindedness, our unwillingness to accept our human condition for what it is and instead, arrogantly clamoring after, identifying ourselves withócall it what we willóthe absolute, the ideal, perfection, utopia, or best of all, being one with the divine.

Is this quest for a greater good, by whatever name, a recent phenomenon or has it been characteristic of human beings from the beginning? If it arises from the instinctual or if one prefers, the unconscious, then is it sufficient to blame it on a kind of hubris? Not necessarily. This drive to exceed oneís immediate limitations may have had biological origins, in the need for survival. And if this was the case, couldnít it have generated in time the impulse to seek something better which was always just a little beyond reach? Having shown one could survive to struggle still another day, why not go for it? Also, the propensity for mythmaking: was it not an acceptance of humankindís vulnerability before Nature and of the mystery of existence itself? It is hard to understand why what evolved instinctually should be treated as an act of pride. The Meaning provided by myth-making and ritual must have been just as necessary as shaping a more efficient tool. Isnít there also something inherent in us which drives us forward, to seek and to search for that something which at the time appears to be greater than ourselves?

But Giegerich, to be fair, is more concerned with hubris which occurs when we identify with or take our identity from that which is above us, which we look up to, refusing to accept our humanity, this thinking "clod of earth" that we are.

On the other hand, Giegerich is not worried about the possibility of hubris in modern manís rejection of Meaning. He sees no reason to fear that having renounced the gods, we will assume the mantle of godlike power through our science and technology with its power both to create and to destroy. It is this very power, he claims, which will induce humility and motivate us to ìbecome more humane.î

Kevin Kelly, an editor of Wired, and an influential writer on technology, believes we are gods and ìmight as well be good at it.î He points out, however, that humility is not enough:

I'm interested in becoming a good god, stepping up to the challenge and responsibility of godhood, without denying or trying to wiggle out of the fact that we are as gods. If we would acknowledge our god-like powers --making somethings out of nothings, birthing things that surprise us, creating forces that will create themselves -- and not back away from
these talents, then I think we could learn to be responsible for them. If
we pretend we are mere modest humans, our unacknowledged powers will
undermine us.

That is the big question, of course. Without the gods or God to keep us in line, what are we going to do with this power of ours? Without facing up to power (our form of hubris)--how we love it, lust after it, misuse it, we will fail utterly not only to achieve full adult consciousness but the possibility of becoming more truly human.

2004-03-02T15:33:00.000-05:00

What is lost?

Giegerich disagrees with Jung that the loss of Meaning is a real loss. Can it be considered a loss if one leaves childhood behind in order to become an adult? To talk of ìlossî is a misinterpretation of what is in fact ìa birthî into adulthood. Then he asks, ìIs it really so terrible to live without a higher meaning?î

Surprisingly for him, Geigerich becomes rather lyrical as he answers the question for us. Think of all the great thinkers, poets, artists, musicians the world has known. ìAre they not enough, more than enough?î What about the ordinary things we experience daily, he asks: ìWhat about the smile of the person who passed me this morning on the street; the rays of sunlight falling through the leaves of a forest; the happy events of a true meeting of minds, the friendship of a friend, the love of oneís spouse, are they all void, banal ëall mayaí compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful,í as Jung wants us to believe?î We might well respond: Sure, we all have had, what the artist John Berger called, these ìhuman consolations,î these unexpected, ìinstantaneous flashes of illumination.î But are these quite enough to satisfy in us that longing for Meaning which Jung says is characteristic of modern man? ìIs that all there is, my friends?îsang Peggy Lee.

But what have we really lost when life has lost meaning? Our need, thinks Giegerich, for something more, something greater than the stuff of everyday life is really self inflation. Our self importance reveals itself in our need to identify with what appears to be transcendent to ordinary life. What is lost, therefore, in coming into adulthood is only our pretension to being more than we really are. What is lost to us in Western Christian tradition is its ìnuminous aura,î which we considered to be our possession. But the content and substance of that tradition is still there. ìWe have only become conscious of it. . . .î, able to think about it, to understand it for what it is, without reference to its once ineffable attributes.

Jung thought that modern manís loss of meaning was an illness because it prevented ìfullness of life.î But Geigerich asserts that to experience loss of meaning or more precisely to feel there should be a ìhigher meaningî is itself an illness. He quotes at length from Jung who tells of the many men and women he met who continually were ìJust travelling, travelling; seeking, seeking.î He describes such a woman who seemed driven by devils in her search for meaning because her life seemed to her so empty, so banal.

But if she could say, ìI am the Daughter of the Moon. Every night I must help the Moon, my Mother, over the horizonî--ah, that is something else! Then she lives, then her life makes sense, and makes sense in all continuity, and for the whole of humanity. That gives peace, when people feel that they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya, compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.

Earlier Jung had given the example of the Pueblo Indians whose task to help their Father the Sun to rise every morning was their lifeís fulfillment. The Catholic Church, to this day provides its faithful with such a meaningful life. ìIf you take part in the Sacrifice of the Mass, and receive the Eucharist, you are repeating Christís sacrifice.î To those who truly believe, this means more than anything else in the world. ìIt expresses the desire of the soul; it expresses the actual facts of our unconscious life.î

To say, as Jung does, that sacred persons or events such as the Mass arise from the unconscious is to say that they manifest instinctual drives in humankind, both personal and collective. These instincts cannot be judged as being right or wrong. They simply exist, revealing what was latent in us, and have, therefore, their own validity and truth. But when consciousness enters into it, the situation is changed. Doubt and uncertainty surface, driven by another powerful instinct: to know. For Jung this results in the ìthe death of a symbolî and gave the Sacrifice of the Mass as an example. The ìtruthî of it cannot be accepted any more in that form. It requires a new situation or form in which it can become, once again, true.

Jung mourned the death of the symbol, blaming it on our having ìsquanderedî the wealth of our Western Christian tradition. For Giegerich, however, nothing has been truly lost, only transformed, but irrevocably so. Where is the new form then and how do we interpret its truth? He does not tell us. All he will say is that we must learn from the new situation itself how to understand and interpret it. As a matter of fact, he points out, ì. . .Most people living in the modern world show one can live quite well without meaning, just as the normal adult can live quite well without parents.î

2004-02-24T14:20:00.000-05:00

Adulthood: Without God or Nature

The pre-modernís containment in Nature was evident in the condition of his practical, everyday life. He was subject to its implacable rule, to its harshness and unpredictability as well as its beneficence in providing food and shelter. Resigned to his fate, the pre-modernís only recourse was ritual and sacrifice to appease wrath or to give thanks.

Modern man has overcome the power of Nature. True, he still must endure natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions, but even the effects of these are being mitigated by the increasing ability of science to predict them, if not to prevent them. Now, however, we are engaged not in supplicating but in ìsavingî Nature, or what is left of it. As Giegerich reminds us, a Nature which needs to be protected and preserved has lost its dominion over us. ìMan, nobody else, is now the one who is in charge and holds the responsibility for the existence or non-existence of the world, the continuity of life on earth, the protection of the environment. (By the ìworldî I assume he is speaking of this planet, for man is still helpless when it comes to the impersonal forces of the cosmos of which we are an infinitesimal part.) The power which was once Natureís has been transferred to technology, by which we utilize and manipulate the resources of Nature for our own purposes. Like Nature technology can be beneficent but also dangerous and destructive.

In the coming of modern man into adulthood, religion which bound us as ìupward looking creaturesî to the gods, and to ìGod the Fatherî had also to be abandoned. Whether this will be as thorough or as permanent an abandonment, as in the case of Mother Nature, still remains to be seen. But logically, according to Giegerich, it has happened. It is not that the truth of religion disappears, but that it attains a new form. What was once projected outward onto the heavens, onto the gods, is now absorbed by manís own consciousness. The truth of religion ìhas come home to consciousness itselfî as ìsugar dissolves in coffee.î Referring to Jungís idea of the death of symbol [see postings for January 6 and February 16], he writes: ìThe ëmeaningí that it once was pregnant with has been born out of it, the ëbetter expressioní has been found. Religion does not disappear altogether but remains as a memory, as history, but without its numinosity and authority.

I have an intuition of what Giegerich means, but again, the fuller meaning and the implications elude me. The intuition is based on personal experience which however significant and consequential it was for me, does not necessarily lead to a wider, universal application. My religion which was ìout thereî in the community of believers, in its liturgy, its sacraments and its dogmas, is to be assimilated into my own consciousness in its content, but without its form. I am not sure this is even possible because, in Catholicism at least, form may be inseparably one with content. If the form is abandoned so too is participation in the community of the faithful. There is loss there to be sure in being extra ecclesiam, but what has been gained? What is this "better expression" which replaces the dead symbol?

2004-02-23T12:48:00.000-05:00

Coming of Age

Modern man, according to Giegerich, has become an adult. Through a radical and irreversible evolution of consciousness, he no longer has the status of a child looking upward to an authority, to a mystery, or myth, or religion, or Nature, or to parents both natural and divine. Man is on his own. He exists in and for himself. (Again, he is referring not to individual men and women, but to humankind, or to put it in his words: ìman as human.î)

His explanation of how this transformation happened is, as he says, metaphysical rather than biological. Biological evolutionary theory, he believes, affirms his approach: ìthat consciousness has fundamentally comes of the in-ness in the waters. . . .î Turning to metaphors of the alchemical vessel, of the fish now become Aquarius, of the astronaut in his space suit looking down upon earth, of the embryo floating in amniotic fluid, of mansís knowledge (his know-how, his technology) clothed in mythical garments, of The Dream, the Sandplay , of the Orphic Egg and finally, language itself, Giegerichís metaphysics is highly imaginal. His thought-process goads the imagination as much as the mind, but is elusive, often frustratingly so. His conclusion is not; it is emphatic. Humankind has come of age, like it or not.

Not that the contents of Meaning, such as religion and myths gave us, have been rejected, but they now exist as memories, as history, even as a source of inspiration, but without their old numinosity. We canít even talk of God being dead, because that presumes that something or someone else would take its place. That wonít happen, says Giegerich, because now there is no God position to be filled. Fear that man with his technological and scientific power will replace God are ìungroundedî because it suggests that we humans are ìstill looking upwardî endowing ourselves with the same numinosity and sacred mystery once applied to God. On the contrary, whatever individual attitudes may be, manís consciousness of his technological power will be experienced as ìan un-heard of responsibility,î ìa burden that inevitably weighs him down in his soul, rather than leading to a sense of grandiosity or to hybris [sic].î It can even be depressing! But, would you really prefer to go on living as a child?

2004-02-20T11:34:00.000-05:00

Man the Unborn

In ìMan the Unbornî (section 6 )Giegerich distinguishes the birth of an animal from that of a human being. As soon as the animal is thrust into the world, protection and nurturing from its own kind, including its mother, is minimal and of short-duration. In order to survive it draws immediately on its instincts and begins to act on its own. (Think of the new born calf or colt struggling to get on to its feet minutes after its birth.) The animal is born into the world as an adult, by Giegerichís definition, that is, into a state in which it must now look after itself. To be fully adult, writes Giegerich, is to be ìfully mature: neither dependent on parents, but all on oneís own, nor shielded from the environment by any intermediary, but nakedly exposed to it. When this state is reached, then and only then has birth been concluded.î

Human beings, on the other hand, when we come into the world are not yet ìfully born.î Instead, we come into the world and remain as children, dependent and protected, not yet ready to take on the status of adulthood. (Giegerich cautions from time to time that he is not referring to specific human beings or individuals, but of ìMan,î of humanity as such.)

Human beings take much longer than animals do to develop into adulthood. What a young calf will do in a few minutes, takes a human baby some twelve months before it even attempts to stand on its own leg. How long it takes human beings to come to maturity also may also be relative according to the culture and customs of a given society. In this country, at this time, a young man or woman may be in their middle and late twenties before they become independent of their parents, living on their own and earning their own money. In any case, the prolongation of human childhood gives time enough and more for the culture of a society--its values, myths, religions, concepts, images-- to imprint itself on collective psyche of that society.

A human being, Giegerich notes, is ìborn first of all into and contained in myths, meanings, ideas, images, words, creeds, theories, traditions. They stand irrevocably between him and external reality. . . .î So even if one is considered to be an adult practically speaking (earning money, having a family, participating in public life, etc.), psychologically and metaphysically that adult retains the status of a child--still ìlooking upward to parents,î ìto the gods, his world parents, or to God, his Father, and contained in the fold of Mother Nature, Mother Church . . . .î The cult of ancestor worship is all about maintaining that status. Even initiation rites which presumably transfer a youth into the adult status of his society is really an initiation into what he calls ìmetaphysical childhood.î When man was born he exchanged the maternal womb, for a metaphysical womb, the womb of Meaning.î

Giegerich, however, does not refer to the developmental differences between humans and other animals. Instead, he gives us an imaginal scenario, the gist of which is that man surrendered his natural instincts and his own knowledge by allowing them to be ìenwrapped in mythical garments.î ìTools, weapons, things and events in nature, regardless of whether big or small, the activities of daily life: everything has its story about its primordial divine origin and cosmic significance, and thus its mythical or metaphysical reality is its primary reality.î In effect, man exchanged what was real, empirical, certain, and his own, for the uncertain and virtual world of concepts which belonged to humanity itself. In doing so he remained in the virtual womb of Meaning. Nonetheless, there was a reward in this, for another îincredibleî birth took place. Man is ìborn into his being mind and soul, that is, into the ìrealm of consciousness.î In effect, humans exchanged reliance on their own innate abilities for the gift of consciousness.

But this attempt at a capsule summary does not do justice to what Giegerich is explaining and in fact may be misleading. It requires his own words (pp 13-18) to be puzzled over and grappled with.

But Modern man has finally emerged from the womb, from ìthe ocean of Meaning.î Giegerich again emphasizes that it is not the individual man or woman he is referring to humankind itself.

2004-02-17T12:46:00.000-05:00

Why This Interest?

The challenge of Giegerichís essay is in grappling with thought which, at first reading, come across as dogmatic or with such authorial certitude so as to scare off doubt or argument. It also means dealing with ideas which are, if not always novel, are often novelly expressed.This is not entirely a bad thing, for it compels me to look more closely at what Giegerich is getting at, than if it had been articulated in a more conventional way. Reading Giegerich always gives me just enough of a mental shock to stimulate my own thinking. The truth is that I enjoy reading Giegerich for reasons James Hillman described so well. ìViable ideas, he said, contrary to what many may think, ìhave their own innate heat and their own vitality. They are living things too. But first they have to move your furniture, else it is the same old you, with your same old habits, trying to apply a new idea in the same old way.î

Having said that, it is also true that once in awhile I wonder if in reading Giegerich I may be losing my grounding in the everyday ìfactualî world which does not seem, at least on the face of it, to have much to do with what I am reading. Not to worry, of course, for the factual world can always be counted on to intervene and correct whatever imbalance there might be. Nonetheless, I do ask myself every so often, What am I doing in reading about such a highly questionable idea as ìthe end of Meaning?î We have had so many ìEnds of. . .î in recent years, but still the world goes unmerrily on its way as it always has, or so it seems.

This essay compels my interest because I recognized in it a correspondence with my own far less articulated and less assured thought which was, admittedly, quite personal, and yet which I hoped, was not entirely so. As I have written elsewhere, it has been important to me to understand my own individual history within a larger, impersonal context, which is nothing less, I believe, than than this historical moment (a "moment" extending of course into the past and into the future.)This does not take anything away from the worth of the personal especially as it is experienced in relationships with others. In fact, this need to place myself in a historical context has its source not only in myself, but equally in the existence of others, of human beings both known and unknown to me, living or dead, here in the place where I live, or anywhere else in the world, to whom I consider myself related in a profound, even primordial sense.

The essay speaks to me in a second way as well. I have gone through my own transformation of consciousness in which the urge to become my own person, to become, finally, an adult in the world led to my leaving the Catholic Church into which I had been born, to which I had quite literally dedicated myself, and which I believed to be the only way to truth and life. I had come to the end of my Meaning. I do not expect, however, that at some point during my lifetime, historyís alchemical vessel will spew out a new and utterly transcendent ìMeaning.î Meanwhile, an alchemist stewing in her own and historyís mess, I have a work to do, in discovering if I can and as part of it, the meaning (small ìmî) in meaninglessness.

So thanks to Giegerich not only for making this essay available, but for offering with it with an idiosyncratic vocabulary ("in-ness!"), apt metaphors and yes, ìmythsî which illuminate the ideas. Wolfgang Giegerich does not exclusively, and perhaps not even primarily, deal in abstractions. He is, above all, an imaginal thinker.

2004-02-17T09:25:00.000-05:00

From inside the whole world

Although Giegerich offers us a model in Jungís notion of the death of a symbol, he has no specific prescriptions for the approach we might take to the second option. Twice, however, he proposes: first, that we first acknowledge that we are historically in a new situation and secondly, to let ourselves by ìtaught by it about how to think.î We have ìto let ourselves be placed by the soulís process into the situation that is. It must teach us how to interpret our situation.î As I understand this, we cannot take a position from outside what is happening, but from within, from our participation and involvement in this transformation of consciousness.

First must come an all-out effort to understand what is happening without making judgments which have their source in assumptions drawn from the past, that is from the outside. It demands a way of thinking suggested by Hannah Arendt, to try to look at this new situation ìunburdened and unguided by traditions.î But how do we do this, partially embedded as we still are in those traditions? Is it the case that we must begin over and not draw from them what still seems valid and plausible to us? Arendt doesnít seem to think so. Even if we find the old values and ideas no longer credible, they were, as she reminds us, never arbitrary or senseless. Rather, we can learn even from their errors.

But this still leaves us with the problem of how to get ourselves to think from within our present historical consciousness. There are no directions on how to do this. But perhaps this is the point: we will have to learn how to do it ourselves as thinking human beings. We have to learn how to think and to live without recourse to a superior power or authority to tell us how. No longer can we look outside of, or above and beyond our human condition, but within it, within the crucible of history.

This is not, however, a matter of just our own personal, subjective concern as Owen Barfield makes clear in the following passage:

When we study consciousness, historically, contrasting perhaps what men perceive and think now with what they perceived and thought at some period in the past, when we study long-term changes in consciousness, we are studying changes in the world itself, and not simply changes in the human brain. We are not studying some so-called ìinnerî world, divided off, by a skin or a skull, from a so-called ìouterî world; we are trying to study the world itself from its inner aspect. Consciousness is not a tiny bit of the world stuck on to the rest of it. It is the inside of the whole world.

(From The History of Ideas: Evolution of Consciousness)

2004-02-16T11:36:00.000-05:00

Once again-- The Death of the Symbol

Those who choose the first option in favor of the past, Giegerich argues, do so chiefly because of fear of the void and arrogance. If the old traditions and values disappear the only alternative, it is supposed, is the abyss of nihilism. What makes it even more terrible is that it is our own fault. We blame ourselves for letting this happen. We are guilty, as Jung believed, for having ìsquanderedî our spiritual heritage.This self-blame is just another indication of the hubris of this position, of wanting to be greater than we really are. We cling to our myths and religions because they endow us with a star role in the eternal ìdivine drama.î Without them, we are convinced, life is not worth living. This position, however, will not work. ìWe have to turn to the second option, ìsays Giegerich, ìto let ourselves be placed by the soulís process into the situation that is. It must teach us how to interpret the situation.î[My italics]

In a posting on Tuesday, January 6, I wrote from a personal perspective about Jungís ìdeath of the symbolî but Giegerich offers it more broadly as a model of how we might interpret our new situation. Symbols (and by extension myths and religion) live, wrote Jung, so long as their meaning is as yet in ìembryoî form, that is, is ìpregnant with meaning.î But once the meaning ìhas been born out of it,î these symbols have only ìhistoricalî meaning. Therefore, this death of the symbol is in reality a transformation.True, there is loss in this death, but there is also gain, just as there is in a pregnancy which ends in a birth. The loss is that it loses its former mystique. ìIt has become demythologized and desacralized and now it is merely an ordinary content of consciousness. . . .î

The death of the symbol, or religion, myth and philosophy is in actuality a transformation of consciousness. We no longer view them from ìwithout,î as mysteries or powers closed to us or only partially revealed (or in embryo), but from ìwithinî our own heightened consciousness. This is what I believe Jung meant when he said he could no longer believe in the Sacrifice of the Mass. ìIt is no more true to me; it does not express my psychological condition. My psychological condition wants something else. I must have a situation in which that thing becomes true once more. I need a new form.î [Italics mine].

While for some this evolution or change in human consciousness may seem unbearably radical, it is an old story by now. In The Life of the Mind Hannah Arendt quotes Hegel who she says was the first to claim that ìthe sentiment underlying religion in the modern age [is]the sentiment: ìGod is dead.î And long before Hegel there were doubts and disputes among theologians about the truth of theology and metaphysicians about metaphysics. This does not mean, she says, that the questions raised were meaningless. It was rather how they were formulated and answered which ìlost plausibility.î

The "death" of God, Arendt notes, as well as of philosophy and metaphysics, are of such importance that they must not be the concern of an intellectual elite only, but the concern of everybody. We canít go on clinging to those older ideas that died long ago. Our historical consciousness has been so greatly expanded that the teachings and thought of the past are no longer convincing or even credible to us. Like Giegerich, she sees gain in this new situation. First of all, it would make it possible for us to look in a fresh and open way at the past (which she says whatever its fallacies was never arbitrary or nonsensical), ìunburdened and unguidedî by traditions. This would free us to turn our attention to what she calls ìthe tremendous wealth of raw experiencesî without being obliged to follow ìany prescriptions as to how to deal with these treasures.î Secondly, it would (or should) bring to an end the monopoly on thinking by the "professional thinkers.î If our ethical judgments depend on our ability to think, as she believes, we should all be capable of doing it. Whatever our state in life, and however much we feel we have lost with the passing of traditional values we still have the ability to think. We are, after all, thinking beings.

2004-02-12T13:34:00.000-05:00

Historyís alchemical vessel

To further explain the second option Giegerich adopts a metaphor from ancient alchemy. The purpose of the opus magnum of the alchemists was the transformation of raw materials into a pure form, such as gold or, on a more mystical level, the ìphilosopherís stone.î This involved a ìretortî or vessel in which this base material was broken down and otherwise changed, through a series of procedures such as calcification (intense heat), dissolution , fermentation, distillation, vaporization, solidification, putrefaction and finally mortification (death). Out of this chaotic mess, it was believed that a new, transcendent substance would emerge.

Jung wrote extensively about the alchemical process as a symbol of the psychological metamorphosis which the individual psyche must undergo in order to achieve wholeness of personality. As is evident in this essay (and in much of his other writings) Giegerich also adopts alchemy as a symbol but he is not interested in it from the individual standpoint, but as a metaphor for the what is happening in the world. It is not the individual but ì. . . we collectively [who] are the prime matter in this hermetically sealed retort and are transported through one phase of historyís alchemical opus after the other, each time finding ourselves in an entirely new world situation.î

Personally I find the alchemical metaphor a satisfying one, imaginally and aesthetically. To me it conveys the turmoil, the agitation, the uncertainties, the unpredictability, the risks, in a word, the chaotic mess of this time. It also suggests to me, as Giegerich intended it to do I am sure, what our response might be. We are now in a situation which is not of our own making, into a process, however, which as he says we have to learn how to think about, how to interpret--for ourselves--for there is no Meaning to guide us.

2004-02-12T09:06:00.000-05:00

What position do we take?

Giegerich defines Meaning ìwith a capital M; it is myth, the symbolic life, the imaginal, religion, the grand narrativesónot this myth or religion or grand narrative nor this meaning, but myth or religion pure and simple, Meaning altogether.î We have reached the stage in the evolution of human consciousness in which Meaning has lost its power and authority. Its truth is now merely historical truth. This is a claim so drastic that it arouses a certain repugnance mixed with fear.

A couple of weeks ago I was away from home, busy with matters which left me no time at all to ponder ìthe end of Meaning,î which in these circumstances appeared absurdly irrelevant. I could only deal with ìthe factsî of everyday reality pressing in on me from every side. Insinuating itself from time to time, however, was the threatening question ìWhat is my response?î It would float as a kind of mental marker into my consciousness for a few seconds and then in the distraction of the moment be lost again. Once aware of it, this unwanted, unlooked for claim will not let go, but demands a personal response.

But what response? There are only two possibilities says Giegerich. You can defend and commit yourself to the past or you can admit that we are now in a new situation and allow yourself ìto be taught by it about how to think.î Either way the position taken is dialectic.

He begins with the second option in which the old ìin-nessî is rejected as the condition both of the child submissive to its parents and to the control of nature. Following this rejection, however (if I understand this correctly ), we gain a new, real ìin-ness.îBut this in-ness is precisely and paradoxically one of ìmeaninglessness.î This in-ness is history as an ìthe soulís alchemical retortî in which we are the ìprime matter. . . transported through one phase of historyís alchemical opus after the other, each time finding ourselves in an entirely new situation.î In this new situation we remain in a state of in-ness, but which is now the opposite of our old state. Deprived now of the security of all-encompassing Meaning, we are psychologically thrust extra ecclesiam et naturam. We no longer ìbelong,î we are on our own. He quotes Jung: ìThe soul has become lonely. . . and in a state of no salvation.î

If, as in the case of the first option, one chooses to justify and remain faithful to the old state of in-ness, one loses that which one wanted above all, that is, to be contained by in ness. To reject this new in-ness is a loss ìof in-ness as an actual reality.î

In either case there is a sense of loss. But as Giegerich discusses at some length, for those who choose the second option, the loss is only apparent. Is this not rather a gain, he asks, ìTo have moved out of the fatherís house and become an adult, standing on oneís own feet?

2004-02-10T13:23:00.000-05:00

The End of Meaning

Meaning, according to Giegerich, is that in which the pre-modern was embedded. Articulated in myth, religion, and philosophy, it was above all a fact of every day life. Ethical and intellectual thought, for example, was inherited from the past.Individual identity was subsumed under the laws and customs of clan, the tribe, the family, the nation. Life depended not only on the mercy of nature but on unpredictable rulers and on the impenetrable ways of God or gods. Given circumstances such as these, it is not surprising that the private and public lives of the pre-modern centered in myth and religion which proclaimed that there was something more powerful than human existence and transcendent to it, demanding total devotion and submission.

This sense of in-ness is not just going, says Geigerich. Itís gone. If this is the case, what are we to think of of the rise of religious fundamentalism, not only in the Islamic world, but in large American populations as well? Nothing arouses resistance more than perceived attacks values, beliefs, and traditions not only cherished for themselves, but because they represent the only possible and acceptable reality. It can be argued, however, that this apparent strength of fundamentalism is a desperate, last-gasp struggle against the inevitable.

As only one example, Giegerich points to the profound change in sexual and other societal relationships.We are no longer certain of what it is to be a ìmanî or ìa woman.î If homosexuals are marrying, what is so sacrosanct about the heterosexual marriage? Womanís place is as much in the work place as it is in the home, but there isnít much of a home left anyway. More people are choosing not to marry, or marrying later with no intent to produce children. As many people divorce as marry. New technologies have made possible, as Giegerich puts it, ìsex without children and children without sex.î The fact that the Bush administration, prodded by fundamentalists, wants to promote the sanctity of marriage and is considering supporting a constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriages reveals how far marriage as a religious and a social institution has eroded, perhaps irreversibly.

True, as I have said in earlier postings, there is an overlap, but the outcome favors the modern over against the pre-modern. As the pre-modern retreats, the modern takes over with a rapidity and dynamic unknown to us historically.That does not mean, as I read the situation, that everything one values in the pre-modern mentality will be overthrown. What it does mean is that it has to be re-thought, and this time, as consciously as possible and without exempting those principles or ideals held to be certain and absolute.This is a hard and perhaps impossible task, for we hang on to our desire for in-ness despite evidence or reason or feeling to the contrary.

2004-01-06T14:38:00.000-05:00

Afterthoughts on 5. ìJungís idea of the death of symbolsî

When I was with the Grail and living in Paris, I stopped going to Mass. It was a deliberate decision. I had been uneasy about the Mass for quite some time, finding it no longer held much meaning for me. I also wondered whether in fact it ever had, a troublesome thought considering that the Mass was the center of the Grailís communal, spiritual life. But I ceased going to Mass without debating with myself whether I should or shouldnít. Nor did I experience any guilt about doing so. My tenuous link with this holiest of rituals had broken and I was not about to try to fix it.

Jung called this experience "the death of a symbol." He himself used the Mass as an example of what happens to a symbol when it ceases to be a living one.

Doubt has killed it, has devoured it. So you cannot go back. I cannot go back to the Catholic Church, I cannot experience the miracle of the Mass; I know too much about it. I know it is the truth, but it is the truth in a form in which I cannot accept it any more. I cannot say, "This is the Sacrifice of Christ," and see him any more. I cannot. It is no more true to me; it does not express my psychological condition. My psychological condition wants something else. I must have a situation in which that thing becomes true once more. I need a new form.( CW 18 "The Symbolic Life," para. 632)

Jung went on to describe how the death of a symbol may leave the individual with a sense of being cast outside the Church, extra ecclesiam. If there is no salvation outside the Church, there is no longer the ìAll-compassionate Mother" to save you from hell. The result is a loneliness which cannot be quenched.

You can be a member of a society with a thousand members, and you are still alone. The thing in you which should live is alone; nobody touches it, nobody knows it, you yourself donít know it; but it keeps on stirring, it disturbs you, it makes you restless, and it gives you no peace. CW 18, para. 632.

From my own experience I can vouch that this is psychologically true, although I donít think it drove me into any sort of neurosis (which was what Jung was talking about--people losing their faith and becoming neurotic). There is an aspect of this experience which may prevent a neurotic reaction: a sense of liberation from the burden of passive conformity to an ideal which you now recognize as being inauthentic. By inauthentic I donít mean living a lie, but rather suppressing oneís own thought and feelings for the benefit of a higher good, for example, the community to which you belong.

It is interesting to me, although I do not understand it fully, that Jung claims that there is truth to a once-living symbol ( for example, the Mass). The task is to find that situation ìin which that thing becomes true once more.î It requires a ìnew form.î The possibility that you might have given yourself to beliefs and practices which were fundamentally untrue is far worse than finding yourself alone outside the ecclesiam. I have not given much thought, I admit, to the truth of the Mass much less to what form its truth might have now. But intuitively I believe this to be true, just as I believe it to be true that the pre-modern vision of the cosmic order also had its truth. Not now, but in its time, circumstance and place.

For Jung, as Giegerich points out, the symbol is embryonic or unfinished meaning.Once there is a ìbetter way of expressing its truth, that symbol dies.î So the symbol (the cosmic circle, the Mass) does not die because it is untrue, but because its truth has found a better articulated form. Today that better form is not given to man externally from above, nor in the great narratives of myth and religion or from ritual. It will be found only within his own evolving consciousness.

The big question of course remains: what is the truth of these now purely ìhistorical symbolsî which have been as Giegerich says ìdemythologizedî and ìdesacralizedî to become the ìordinary content of consciousness? But this is a question which cannot be answered here and I am getting too far afield here as it is.

2004-01-05T13:00:00.000-05:00

Afterthoughts: The cosmic image

In describing the pre-modern condition Giegerich turns to ancient myths which tell of the cosmos and manís place in it in terms of a surrounding stream, serpent, wide girdle or band (the Greek Okeanos, the Germanic Midgard Serpent, the World Encircler of the Egyptians or Bitter River of the Babylonians). Human existence is enclosed within that space, from which there is no exit. Myths, such as the Germanic World Tree, which relate the separation of the conjoined world parents, do not change the situation. Human existence remains ìsandwiched in betweenî the parents Mother Earth and Father Heaven. Bound to the earth below manís worshipful gaze turns upward to the heavens.

The enclosed cosmos is represented not only in myth, but also pictorially, from the middle ages at least, right up to the modern era. Leaf through Alexander Roobís fascinating Alchemy & Mysticism and you will find numerous, stunning examples of an orderly universe with God and man, heaven and earth, good and evil, the natural and the supernatural assigned their proper place within the cosmic wheel. Although most of the images are from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, there are a few examples from the twelfth and thirteenth, with a splendid one by the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. According to the descriptive commentary, "The divine love of the son appears to her as a red, cosmic figure in the sky, dwarfed only by the goodness of the Father. In his breast appeared the Wheel of the World with the bright fire of light and the black fire of justice as the outermost bounds of the universe. The twelve animals' heads represent winds and virtues, which together produce the system of reference in which man can exist as the crown of creation."

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the human figure, limbs outstretched towards the circumference of the heavens, is seen more frequently occupying the entire space. A presentiment perhaps of the gradual transfer of attention from the heavens at the edge of the cosmos to the individual within. With alchemical images, however, something even more radical occurs. The circle or wheel is replaced by the alchemical vessel or retort which although round at the base, is open at the top, suggesting that, at last, the circle has been broken through. The alchemist's attitude towards nature, as Giegerich observes (in his book The Soulís Logical Life), was not submissive. On the contrary, experimenting with mercury and other material substances, he actively intervenes in nature in an attempt to transform it for his own purposesóa thoroughly modern ambition. Although he properly belongs to the pre-modern era, the alchemist is a bridge to the modern.

In our own time we will not find images of the cosmos and man's place in it, comparable to the contemplative, ordering image of the pre-modern. Films, television, advertising, and the arts swamp us with violent images of fragmentation and chaos. Although we still look to the heavens in awe, we know the gods have no place there, nor is it the dwelling of Our Father in Heaven. Instead we know them to be unimaginable forces of matter and energy, which confound our common sense understanding of time and space. The spectacle of the heavens that we see with our super- telescopes is astonishingly beautiful but utterly impersonal and indifferent. We humans exist isolated and alone in a terrifying cosmos without a center or without a circumference to give an ordering shape to our lives.

2003-12-18T12:11:00.000-05:00

Afterthought 1

I have a problem with such broad categories as "pre-modern" and "modern." Although they are unavoidable, they are abstractions. If I try to determine to which category I belong, I find that although I incline more to the modern, there is still much of me that is pre-modern. And that goes for our Western culture as a whole, which is profoundly conflicted about which direction to take. Can we go on living in the secure pre-modern container provided by traditional culture? Or to be fully modern, as Giegerich sees it, must we must acknowledge our adulthood without Father (God), Mother (Nature or Church) to provide for us with the in-ness of our previous condition? Or can we have it both ways. as Morris Berman advises, creating a new way of containment which will give us the advantages of the modern without surrendering the values of the pre-modern?

In the last forty years I have moved towards the modern as Giegerich interprets it but carry with me the baggage of the pre-modern. I have not been able to leave it behind, because I am not sure I want to, at least not all of it. Admittedly, nostalgia accounts for some of this. When I attend the quasi-secular, quasi-religious memorial services for the dead (Iíve been going to quite a few of them lately) or when I find myself resisting the "Christmas spirit" which is mostly commercial, but is also sincere and heart-felt for those among whom I live, unbidden nostalgia sets in. Although I left it behind me long ago, I yearn wistfully at these times for the Catholic liturgy, especially as I knew it during those years with the Grail. A few years ago I went to a friend's funeral held in an Episcopalian Church. The Mass was as far as I could tell, nearly identical with a Catholic Mass. I do not know how to express it adequately, but there was a certain aesthetic, emotional and yes, spiritual appropriateness to it in the face of the mystery of a life and a death. I confess to having had a feeling of in-ness. All of us, relatives and friends were gathered there as if contained in an invisible vessel which not only supported us but lifted us upwards towards something greater than ourselves. That apparent need for the transcendent is far from obsolete, even among the moderns, as David Noble, Robert Romanyshyn and Eric Davis among others have pointed out. Is nostalgia merely sentimental or does it tell us that we are not wrong in mourning such loss?

Not wrong, but there is wise advice in the Jewish saying that we must grieve deeply for the dead, but that the deepest grieving must also come to an end. Of course, for many the liturgical tradition, to give it only as one example, is far from being dead. But then there are those of us who are neither here nor there, not entirely pre-modern and not entirely modern, left somewhere in the uncomfortable, uncertain and confused middle.

But I have gotten (unfairly) ahead of Giegerichís story and so back to "The End of Meaning."

2003-12-16T10:22:00.001-05:00

2003-12-16T10:22:00.000-05:00

The Meaning of Meaning

In "The End of Meaning" Giegerich is not writing a philosophic treatise on the meaning of "meaning." You won't find in it a discussion about whether or not life is worthwhile or not, or has purpose and a goal. He is interested in the question of meaning and its loss in the context (as he specifies in the essay's title) "a state reached in the history of consciousness."

The commonplace response to the question "What does meaning mean?" is that it has to do with value or worth, or purpose or goal which makes life worth living. For many, perhaps the majority, religious belief endows life with meaning. For some it will be a noble cause to live and die for. It may be the love of another human being, the love between parents and children, the love of one's country. In truth, most of us don't ask this question except perhaps in times of suffering, disillusionment, or bereavement. We go through life taking for granted that somehow life must mean something.

First, Giegerich tells us what meaning is not. It is not something that can be possessed. One cannot have it. Nor is it a "content,"an "entity," nor "a creed, a doctrine, a world view, also not something like the fairytale treasure hard to attain." Secondly, he tells us what it is. Meaning is "an implicit fact of existence, it's a priori." As such it cannot be the answer to a question. Indeed, it is an "unquestioned and unquestionable certainty." "It is the groundedness of existence, a sense of embeddedness in life, of containment in the world--perhaps we could even say of in-ness as the logic of existence as such." Meaning is as "self-evident as the in-ness in water is for fish." This was the condition of the pre-modern human being who could not have questioned the meaning of his life anymore than the fish could have.

Others have described this pre-modern condition differently but come to similar conclusions. Anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl described the identification of the pre modern with his world as a participation mystique. Jung drew on this concept in developing his own theory of the collective unconscious. Owen Barfield refers to an original participation in which the consciousness of the pre-modern makes no distinction between his own mind and nature, between his inner world and the outer world of his environment (physical and cultural). More recently, Morris Berman writes of the participating consciousness of the pre-modern which, with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, evolves into a non-participating consciousness.

Owen Barfield makes a necessary distinction between the evolution of consciousness and its history. Evolution of consciousness is a natural, biological process in which man as animal is included. But unlike all the rest of nature, man is also "a doer" and "a knower," which of necessity implies a conscious process. As consciousness evolved historically, humankind could no longer be considered "simply a part of nature" but is, in fact, positioned "over against nature."

The world in which the pre-modern was "contained",Giegerich tells us, was interpreted for him by the religion, myths or metaphysics of his society. (Like Giegerich, Barfield thought that the metaphysics of pre-modern people "is implicit in what they take for granted about the world.") In sum, the pre-moderns were unable, even if they had wanted it, to live outside the box of given truths, or universals and of the laws of nature which made up their world. The moderns, on the contrary, climbed out of the box with consequences which would be regretted as well as acclaimed.

For the modern man a permanent separation occurred between himself and his world so that he could only, as Giegerich puts it, take a position towards that world (or as Barfield expressed it "over and against" it). How or why this occurred Giegerich has little to say, except to observe that "Man must have stepped out of his previous absolute containment in life, so that he now was both enabled and forced to view life as if from outside. . . .Man now for the first time had a position to the world per se." By the nineteenth century (and we could say into the twenty-first) modern man recognizes that a great price had been paid for achieving a more highly developed consciousness. He is no longer certain about the meaning of life which he had once taken for granted and must find or create that meaning for himself.

Giegerich does not discuss this explicitly, but there has always been and to this day there still is an overlap between pre-modern and modern consciousness, which accounts for much of the feeling of loss especially of old traditional values within an increasingly debased culture. The spread of religious fundamentalism is only one of the more prominent examples. Many moderns, Berman, for example, are nostalgic about the box. Mourning the demise of our earlier, participating consciousness, he calls for a new participating consciousness which would reunite us with nature and restore the "enchantment" of that lost world. But for Giegerich, the modern man cannot reverse the course of evolutionary consciousness, even if he wanted to and should he think he has succeeded in doing so, he would eventually find the box unbearable.

The intellectual, religious and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century are most frequently cited as the crucible from which modern consciousness fully emerged. But the achievement of the modern had logically to be preceded by the historical development of the notion of the self. Its origins, it is true, cannot be dated but probably go back further into our deep past that we might suppose. Erich Auerbach tells of one such critical shift which happened as far back as the twelfth century. In the early part of that century, heroes of the medieval epic (Chanson de Roland) functioned with a communal purpose-- to serve the interests of their family, religion or country. Only fifty years later the heroes of the medieval romance (the Knights of the Grail) had no such purpose in mind, but set out on their adventures motivated by a purely personal quest for self-realization. The history of consciousness is also the history of the human quest for individuality. Without it the inventions, discoveries, and other achievements of the modern era would be unthinkable.

Further Reading Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (1910, trans. 1926); Owen Barfield, History, Guilt and Habits (1981); Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (1981).

2003-12-01T12:26:00.000-05:00

Grown up and On Our Own

Some seventy years ago, C.G. Jung announced the emergence of "modern man as an entirely new phenomenon."* What distinguishes the truly modern man from the rest is his highly evolved consciousness. Unlike the mass of men (which includes those "up to-date," but false "moderns") Jung's modern man has separated himself from the collective unconscious. "Indeed, he is completely modern only when he has come to the very edge of the world, leaving behind him all that has been discarded and outgrown, and acknowledging that he stands before the Nothing out of which All may grow." His situation, however, has created a problem which is also new in the history of consciousness. Where now is psyche to be found? Psyche is no longer available to him in the culture as a whole, not even in in the forms such as religion once provided. "That age lies as far behind as childhood itself." As a result modern man realizes he has nowhere else to go but has been "thrown back upon himself." Psyche can only be found within.

To my mind Jungian philosopher-psychologist Wolfgang Giegerich is one such modern man. There are few who are more awake to the reality of this world in which we now live or who have done more to shake us free from the stale habits of thought and assumptions which keep up ignorant of this reality, (however much we think of ourselves as "up to date," "contemporary.") Once again he demonstrates this extraordinary ability in his recent essay (published on the C.G. Jung website). Typically for Giegerich, the title of the essay is a long, inclusive one: "The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man: An essay about the state reached in the history of consciousness and an analysis of Jung's psychology project." The essay confirms but also criticizes and revisions Jung's insights. As we have come to expect from Giegerich (also, writing as he does, seventy years later), he makes us re-think this phenomenon (no longer so new after all), taking us further and deeper than we may want to go, but where we must go if we are to be fully conscious of what it is to be human today in this twenty-first century.

The essay is demanding, but it is not obscure, nor is it too abstract. Giegerich employs clarifying examples,often from myths, and metaphors that are often as satisfyingly simple to understand as "fish in water" and "sugar in your coffee." There are ten parts to the essay. Part 1 brings into question a theme identified with Jungian psychology--that modern man suffers from a loss of meaning. It could be, Giegerich proposes, that this constant search for meaning is itself symptomatic of that illness. Parts 2 and 3: Pre-modern man did not suffer from meaninglessness. He was immersed in meaning which were articulated for him in myth, religion and in metaphysics. Through the development of science, technology, industrialization, and exploration, modern man has become conscious that he is no longer embedded in a world view which provides him with "meaning." The center of the universe is now the individual, who has no ready-made meaning to depend on but is responsible for himself. In Part 4 Giegerich discusses the possible responses to this situation: either by holding on to the truth of the past in denial of the new situation; or owning up to the situation and re-thinking it. (Interestingly, he does not say capitulate or accept the inevitable, only think about it) Part 5: Jung on the death of symbols (such as "meaning"). Part 6 and 7:The heart of the essay in which Giegerich claims that man remains "unborn" until he is fully adult, mature, no longer dependent on parents, but on his own. No more God as Father, or Church as Mother, or Nature as Mother.He is truly born for the first time when his consciousness is capable of integrating the contents of the past as historical and not as present reality or "mystery." In parts 8 and 9 the fate of God or Gods is discussed as is the feeling of loss and need and whether this feeling is even appropriate. A final Part 10, a lengthy critique of Jungian and Hillmanian psychology, adds much to the essay as a whole, but is not, I think, essential to it.

In the following postings, I want to sum up, if I can, my understanding of this essay as it unfolds part by part. But I also want to connect it with my own experience. I am at that time of life when reviewing that experience seems more useful and interesting than gazing towards the unknowable. So many of Giegerich's essays have had a deep influence on my thinking, but this one speaks to me with exceptional power because I recognize in it the course of my life's trajectory. Not that I am making any claim to being a "modern woman" or having achieved a fully developed consciousness. But there is something consoling, even inspiriting, about the possibility that our individual lives can reflect evolving human consciousness in however dim a mirror.

*"The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man" 1933 in Civilization in Transition, V. 10, pp 74-94. It is likely that Jung was not thinking at all of women or, if he was, only of those few whom he acknowledged "were in the same process of transition as man,"-- a situation he was not altogether happy with. See "Women In Europe" 1927, ibid., pp.113, 133.) In any case, I retain "modern man" because it is less awkward than juggling "he"and "she" and because I trust anyone who reads this will understand woman too must be included.

2003-11-21T13:46:00.000-05:00
What is so disheartening about the Catholic Church today is not so much its unrelenting defense of its teachings in the face of a world hostile to those teachings. Rather, it is the Church's refusal to try to understand the reality of that world as it actually is and why it is the way it is.This requires, however, engaging in a dialogue with that world which the Church will not allow itself to do. This would commit the Church to attempt to understand the world empathically, that is imaginally from within that world, rather than judgmentally from without. It would ask of the Church that it interpret, illuminate what it holds to be true, within the context of the cultural, political, and social dynamics of this time. But under John Paul II it has proved itself unwilling to do this. The Pope's populism made him "a road-show pontiff "(the phrase is Jane Kramer's*), a celebrity praised for his piety and moral fervor, above all for his unyielding defense of human worth and dignity. But despite this, an admiring world still goes its own way, fundamentally unpersuaded by his message.

The Church is itself a troubled institution which the canonization by this Pope of four hundred and seventy saints will do nothing to resolve. "The Church is exhausted, waiting for change," writes Kramer in her New Yorker commentary on the occasion of the twenty fifth anniversary of John Paul's papacy. A theologian tells her that as this papacy comes to a close, the issue now is: ". . .How to prepare the Church to respond to this world."

* Jane Kramer, "This World," The New Yorker, November 3, 2003, pp. 35-36.

2003-10-28T11:50:00.000-05:00

My thoughts still turn often enough to the Grail legends which provided the underlying myth of The Grail I belonged to. Along with my companions, I went in search of a "far off, remote spiritual good," which we interpreted as "the conversion of the world to Christ." Although that elusive Grail of ours was as vague as the Holy Grail of the many legends, our search never left the boundaries defined for us by the Catholic Church.We faithfully remained daughters of the Church, seeking nothing more or less than what the Church herself was in search of: the final, triumphant reign of Christ in the world.

Reflecting again on that myth today, I see that I lived it out without at that time, or long after for that matter, understanding what it had really been about. In leaving the Grail, I left behind as well the "conversion of the world", admitting that it never did have much reality for me. But I continued to believe that the Grail symbolized the pursuit of a far away, spiritual treasure, although I still could not give a name to what that might be.

As is the case with all great narratives, the Grail legends can never be pinned down to one interpretation.Yet at least from a subjective perspective, one interpretation may be more persuasive than another.One such presented itself to me several years ago but at the time, I failed to see its relevance for me. It seems now to have been so obvious, that, with some chagrin, I wonder how I could not have seen it. I can only conclude I just wasn't psychologically ready to accept it.

In a talk I prepared a few years ago on the Grail legends I wrote:

But among its many possible interpretations, there is a good case for claiming that the legend represents a quest for the self. This is supported by the literary genre to which it belongs, which is the medieval romance. Erich Auerbach,for instance, makes a useful distinction between the medieval epic (chanson de geste) and the romance. In both genres the heroes have a goal to achieve, but in the epic the hero's goal involves the defense of his family, or the defense and expansion of his country or religion by waging war. These heroes have a real function; they serve political and historical purposes, for example, the struggles of Charles against the infidel. They are exemplary characters, ideals or models, without an interior life of their own. The knights of medieval romance, however, serve no real function.Their goal is not a victory once and for all, but an ongoing one. The battles to be won are not so much military as they are personal, waged within the heart and soul of the hero. His problems are psychological and spiritual. His adventures exist not for any political or military purpose, but as opportunities for the hero to prove himself, for the purpose of self-realization.

The romance, observes the historian Penny Shine Gold , "is in its essence a story of an individual on his own, a story on a personal level of a man's development as he comes to understand his goals and attain them." What the knights of the Round Table discover, Georges Buraud wrote, is themselves. It is, he says, un elan vers soi, the hidden treasure of the self. For this reason, claims Pierre Gallais, the quest for the Grail is never completed, for the truth of the Grail is only that which one finds in oneself.

In its many variations, the story of the quest for the Holy Grail has its sieges, tourneys, bloody and, more often than not, mortal clashes between brave and skilled warriors. Indeed, there is enough violence and bloodshed to satisfy an audience which expected a full share of such thrills. But this is not what the story is about. Essentially these romances relate the spiritual and psychological journey of an individual, on his own, who in seeking to accomplish a task he scarcely understands is transformed from a puer, raw, ignorant, and superficial, into a fully realized individual. The coming of Perceval into sovereignty of the Kingdom is the fulfillment of this inner and individual transfiguration. self.

Now this notion of the quest for the self was very important to me; indeed, it was for this that I had left the Grail. I wanted more than anything to be myself, to be of this world, a part of it, an ordinary human being. I was smothering in the total embrace of the Church, however mothering and wanted nothing more than to free myself from it. I wanted to become an adult human being.

As it turned out, my quest for the Grail turned out to be a reversal of what I thought it was. Instead of this romantic aspiring toward the ineffable, transcendent, far away, unknown treasure, I was really in pursuit of the here and now, the day to day with whatever that brought, of belonging to the earth and to and with other human beings, no better nor worse.

But the pursuit of the self shouldn't be taken as something merely or exclusively concerned with the individual. It is a mistake to interpret the Grail legends solely in terms of the personal psyche. What is extraordinary about the legends is that they seem to anticipate, to signal a major shift in human consciousness, or at least, that of Western consciousness. When the story of Perceval was first told, the Middle ages had still to reach its apotheosis in the age of Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century. Certainly these legends show Christian influence and adapt Christian symbolism but for their own purpose. Not even the most Christian of them all, the anonymous The Quest for the Holy Grail is representative of Christian orthodoxy. (Note, for instance that priests are usually absent from the appearance of the Holy Grail, despite its identification, in some legends, with the Eucharist.)There is evidence of the influence of alchemy and gnosticism as well.

Joseph Campbell had it right, I believe, when he wrote about the Grail legends, having in mind particularly that of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, arguably the greatest of them all:

[T]he first completely intentional statement of the fundamental mythology of modern Western man, the first sheerly individualistic mythology in the history of the human race: a mythology of quest inwardly motivated—directed from within --where there is no authorized way or guru to be followed or obeyed, but where, for each, all ways already found, known and proven are wrong ways, since they are not his own.

2003-10-24T13:04:00.000-04:00

This has been a momentous week for Catholics around the world. John Paul II celebrated his 25th anniversary as Pope, Mother Theresa was beatified. More that four hundred new saints were canonized and thirty Cardinals from around the world were appointed to the Holy See. Whatever one thinks of the Church or of the Pope, it would take a stony heart not to have been moved by the sight of the man now slurred in speech, bent over as much by the weight of the Church and world as by his suffering body. Nor can one help but pay reverence to him (as I think the entire world did) for his fidelity to his calling. Whatever one thinks of his unwavering positions on political, social or religious matters, few would disagree that he is a truly holy man.

There is one image of John Paul which I caught briefly on a news channel which continues to haunt me. He appeared in a window of the Vatican, silhouetted against the light, recognizable only by the now familiar outline of his body. I had a momentary illusion of that figure becoming smaller and smaller and eventually disappearing into the surrounding darkness. The image sticks with me because it has to do, in my own mind, not just with his death which is certain, but with the diminishment of the Catholic Church itself, as we now know it.

The Church will not entirely disappear, of course. There will probably remain that dispersed remnant which the theologian Karl Rahner predicted of the Church of the future. When I see John Paul II as he has been constantly seen these past days, unable to raise his head, bent over his pre-dieu, clinging to it with what strength he has left, I see the Church as we know it today--despite its present splendor and apparent power--symbolically (and maybe in fact)at the end of its tether. The Pope is a man of saintly faith and hope, who has given himself up as a sacrifice to preserve the Church as it has been and is now and to hold back as long as possible what it may become.

The twelfth century medieval monk and visionary Joachim de Fiore comes to mind here. Joachim saw the Church as evolving, not static but moving, changing, dynamic. He envisioned three "stages"of the Church corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity. The first stage was that of the Father and of the Old Testament, the second was that of Christ and the New Testament, and the third and final stage was that of the Holy Spirit who would not only triumph over the coming of the Anti-Christ, but would usher in an entirely new purified Church-- a kind of contemplative utopia. (He was after all a man of his time.) Joachim expected the arrival of the anti-Christ within his lifetime and the final coming of the Holy Spirit not long after. We needn't accept Joachim's vision literally as he did, to see in it a metaphor for the course of the Church through history.

Joachim, however, was too much in a hurry. Although it is logical to say the Church is in the second stage characterized by the incarnation of the Son of God and the New Testament, the evidence we have of the present Church suggests it has not yet moved out of the first, patriarchal stage. There is an overlap between the stage of the Father and that of the Son. Another overwhelming image of this past week reinforces this: the throngs of the faithful who turn out to catch a glimpse of John Paul--so many loving children of Mother Church come to honor and to be blessed by the Holy Father. They have yet to attain the status of adulthood which presumably would have been achieved with the coming of Christ, who became one with humankind.

In this image of the dying Pope, which we see almost daily now in the newspapers and on TV, one could say that metaphorically we are witnessing the slow death of the patriarchal power of the Catholic Church. Certainly the Church in this immediate future will go on as it has for sometime, supported by its hierarchical structure, which however is not eternal in nature. It may be, however, that the end of the reign of John Paul II, which brought the patriarchal stage to an apotheosis, will signal the true beginning of the second stage in which Catholics grow out of their two thousand year old childhood to become fully mature, adult members of the Church in whatever form it will survive.

2003-10-08T12:32:00.000-04:00

I am thinking about thinking that is concerned with matters that are complex, which often require their own vocabulary, their own special expertise, which are, as the psalmist said of God, "too high and I cannot reach it." Thinking, in a word, which leaves you baffled and frustrated and disappointed, because you simply aren't up to the job. Why not leave this thinking to those who are more qualified?

And yet these matters interest you, concern you, deeply. And there is no end of them to fret about. There are more than enough to go around. Pick your own . But whatever you choose it all seems to come down to one fundamental issue: What does it mean to be human, at this time, in this world which we have made (not God.) You want to think about it in an intelligent way as possible, but knowledge today is so highly specialized it requires its own experts. There is no getting around our dependence on them. These specialists deal with information.They do the calculative thinking that Heidegger described. They are not inclined to concern themselves with the larger philosophic, ethical or political implications of their fields which do impact our lives more than we realize. Fortunately, there are those who are concerned and who do engage themselves in reflective or meditative thinking. These are the thinkers who ask the troubling questions, who seek to uncover the consequences intentional or unintentional of our numerous enterprises, who ponder their meaning and value to us as human beings. We need them and are dependent on them as well. In mediating for us the information that is otherwise inaccessible to us, they open to us the possibilities for intelligent understanding.

I learned this over the past few years as I engrossed myself in, of all things, technology. I was not interested in the products of technology, so much as technology as a phenomenon in itself, which has permeated and shaped our Western culture so thoroughly that we can accurately say of it that ours is a technological culture. I never expected I could or would do original thinking about this subject which is beyond my capabilities. Nevertheless, I compiled a small library and became acquainted with the prominent issues as well as the views of the true believers and of the nay-sayers. (Not all of the latter by the way should be labelled Luddites.) And there are the few like Wendell Berry and Steve Talbott who argue persuasively and passionately for greater consciousness and responsibility for what we have done with our technology and the direction it is taking us. The learning curve, however, has been steep.

Today I don't read or think about technology as much as I used to. Certainly, there is that old bugaboo--the sheer difficulty of the subject-- which still inhibits me. But if my original interest has waned somewhat, the effort it required opened up a great deal for me, taking me into realms of thought which at first glance would not seem to be connected, but which proved to be surprisingly relevant. No matter where you start with your thinking, it seems, if you go far enough or deep enough, you hit on the necessary and maybe only question worth thinking about: What does it mean to be human?

2003-10-06T09:12:00.000-04:00

Lately, I've been thinking about thinking. I am finding it very hard to do, that is, to think. How does one go about it? In his "Discourse on Thinking" * Martin Heidegger makes a useful distinction. There is thought, he says, that is "calculation"and there is thought that is "meditative." Both modes are necessary to us. Calculation is reasoning for the purpose of analysis or planning, problem solving, setting objectives and the methods and techniques for achieving goals. This is the thinking of the workaday world by means of which we run our institutions: business, hospitals, schools, churches, government and politics. Whether actual computers are used or not, calculative thinking computes. "It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself."
Meditative thinking, on the other hand, is thinking which contemplates the meaning and truth of things. As Heidegger describes meditative thinking, it becomes clear that it is an altogether different from calculative thinking. He speaks of it as a "waiting," leaving open what we are waiting for; as a sort of "primordial poetry" preceding all the arts; as thoughts which come to us (and not we to thought) ;as solitary and slow.
I prefer the term "reflective" thinking to "meditative" thinking, because I am not quite sure meditation is quite the same thing as reflection. Meditation is also associated with the aspirations and methods of ancient and modern religious traditions. To quibble a bit, reflection seems to me a somewhat more neutral, more open a term. In any case, both can be said to be about the search for the nature of reality, for meaning.
No wonder we flee from the burden of thinking. Because it is so difficult to do, because it is often so marginal to our everyday life, because we feel we are just not up to the job. Therefore it is easier to let others do it. Stephen Talbott refers to this resistance as the "abdication of consciousness." It amounts to a denial of what distinguishes humans from all other creatures. Thinking is becoming ever more conscious, more aware of reality both within and without, both in the world and in ourselves.

There are obstacles in the way, mostly of our own making. I am too lazy and don't want to make the effort it takes. I am too easily distracted.Let something I am thinking about resist easy comprehension and I can find something--anything--else to do. But, advises Heidegger, we can know what it is like to think only when we try to do so. In order to learn thinking we also have also to unlearn what has been conventionally thought of as thinking. Even I think I am thinking, I am learning what it is to think.

*For these comments by Martin Heidegger I am indebted to David Miller's

"Martin Heidegger on Thinking"

2003-10-01T15:47:00.000-04:00
I think of God as an Intelligence. However you define it or call it, and despite the Darwinians who insist all is the result of chance, there does seem to be an intelligence at work in the universe. That this Intelligence is to be distinguished, however, from the God of the Old Testament, Leon Kass, for one, would disagree. Writing as a moral philosopher and not as a biblical exegete, Kass claims, in effect, by his very works we know this God is Intelligence. We learn, he tells us, from the first story of creation that this God created "a supremely intelligent world."

In his exacting, almost word for word reading of the text, Kass discerns an ordered, comprehensible world brought out of primordial chaos. This world and everything in it came about through a rational process of "demarcation, distinction, separation:" the heavens above, the waters, earth below;the earth from water, light from dark;species divided hierarchically according to their distinct characteristics--vegetation, birds and fishes, animals and finally humans, male and female. Such a world we recognize and can reflect upon from our own experience. "This account," Kass tells us, "is accessible to all human beings as human that is, as rational."

The origin of the world as described in Genesis is mysterious; it cannot even be said with certainty that it came out of "nothing." It is clear, however, the world is temporal and not divine in nature. Therefore, there is no place or need for the worship of nature or of the sun, nor of the myths which purport to explain the coming into being of the world through the generative or combative actions of the gods. Not the gods, but human beings stand at the apex of creation, having alone been made in the image and likeness of God. But as Kass points out, we humans also entered into the world at a point in time and are subject to the temporality of all living things. Having been made in the likeness of God, we are, as morally unreliable beings, also the most problematic. (But this issue takes us beyond the the first few verses of Genesis.)

Kass employs a respectful, almost Talmudic method in interpreting the text. But his perspective is that of a philosopher in the original meaning of that term, a seeker of wisdom. As reader, I also need to give it my close attention, for it is richly, subtly and profoundly argued. It is not a quick read, but it is a very persuasive. The difficulty comes in accepting in the first place the notion of a divine intervention by which this world came into being. But as Kass himself suggests that perhaps creation should not be primarily read as a "historical or temporary story." Instead the story could be read as a way of articulating "the intelligible and hierarchic order of the beings that have come to be and are."

Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (The Free Press, 2003)
This book is the fruit of a graduate seminar he taught at the University of Chicago for some twenty-years.

2003-09-26T12:22:00.000-04:00

Until I reached my mid-thirties, my world was one of certainty when it came to what really mattered, that is, the meaning of life and of death. This certainty was rooted in the Catholic Church which it never occurred to me to question. It was the very air I breathed; it was my universe. By the time I reached forty, that certainty had entirely slipped away.There were certain moments during which I recognized that this was happening, a decision, for instance, to stop going to Mass. For the rest, however, it was more of a feeling of malaise. I went about my business more or less as usual, aware that things were not well with me. In fact, I was sick, soul-sick. That insight came to me abruptly one day when I found myself staring out of a window and knew I had come to an end--of what? My life up till then. but what next? For the first time ever, I could not imagine a future for myself. Nothing was going to be certain from now on, not even the meaning of life and death.

That was thirty years ago. Over the years since I have learned to live with uncertainty. I go about my business more or less as usual. I cannot say I feel any malaise, nor would I diagnose myself as being soul-sick. In some ways, I know myself to be relatively stronger, more self-possessed, meaning by that, more centered, less pulled and pushed by external forces, more directed from the self than from without. The questions have increased during this time, to which, however, I do not expect definitive answers. They are, after all, the same questions which human beings have been asking since we first walked the earth and which have never been answered to everyone's satisfaction.

Whereas in my youth and young adulthood I believed unquestioningly in the God of the Catholic Church and in his Son, Jesus Christ, I now hold to there being the possibility of a God. This possible God, however, is different from the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This possible God is an unknowable intelligence, which informs the universe and everything within it, including we human beings.This intelligence is not separate, from the universe (that is has no existence apart from the universe), but is nevertheless distinct from it. I do not have in mind a sort of pantheism, but what I mean by "distinct" I am not yet sure. What interests me is the connection this might have to scientific thinking today (origins and nature of the universe, consciousness, the potential for creation of life, as well as some science fiction, like Stanislaw Lem's Solaris.) And to Buddhism and to forms of Hinduism, which otherwise do not attract me.

As for Jesus Christ, he ceased to be meaningful to me even before the notion of God I had held became dubious. Christ, I concluded, had been a projection of my own subjective needs, the sexual among them. Now I am not so sure what to think about Jesus Christ. As a historical, pivotal figure in Western culture, I realize he cannot be put aside that easily.Wolfgang Giegerich's provocative, deeply disturbing article "The Burial of the Soul in Technological Civilization" in which his interpretation of the Incarnation is largely responsible for this new awareness, but also Teilhard deChardin, Joachim de Fiore, and others who speculate on the meaning of "progress" and human evolution in the Christian scheme of things.

I should like to explore these things and so much else (everything?) spinning off from them. more than I have done so far. At this time my "thinking" is little more sometimes than a fuzzy, nagging, restless feeling. I hope, however, that vague and amorphous as it is, if given attention, this feeling may develop into something more focused, rising more truly to the level of thought.

This from Owen Barfield's "The Force of Habit" comes close to what I mean:

"I believe it must be the habit of thinking actively; of choosing to think, instead of letting our thoughts just happen. You have to begin, as with forming any other habit, by performing, or trying to perform, the same action repeatedly; from time to time, and for short periods, doing nothing else except choosing what you will think about, and (perhaps even more important)what you will not think about, as long as the period lasts."

It is difficult and will take a long while, but immediately you will experience what Coleridge called "the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking."

2003-09-18T10:24:00.000-04:00
Two more on the Internet

I have just completed putting two articles on the Internet. Mythmaking Women is a consideration of how the women of the Grail in effect created their own myth giving to women power which in reality they did not have. My use of "myth" in this context is based on the Jungian idea of imagination or fantasy as a creative activity driving the psyche towards greater consciousness. So it is in no way meant be understood in the derogatory sense usually given to this word.

I discuss in
Anima Women of the Grail Legends the many women who figure in three of the legends: Perceval, or The Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes; Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the anonymous Quest of the Holy Grail. They can be seen as projections of the male psyche balancing its one-sidedness, but also as depriving women of their own identities.

Also note:

I divided The Conspiracy of Women into two parts, to make downloading them a little quicker!: Conspiracy of Women Part I ;Conspiracy of Women Part II .

To make it easier, you can link to either part and to the articles mentioned above from whatever site you have accessed.

2003-08-11T15:42:00.000-04:00

I looked up "the Catholic Revival" on Google, wondering if anything recent had been written about it. Two results: one, I was reminded that there have been many "revivals" in the Catholic Church going back three or four centuries. Who remembers them? Two, there was no mention (apart from one weblogó See Classic
Catholic.See Archive posting for July 21, 2002 ) of "my" Catholic Revival which roughly spanned the years 1920 to 1962, the year Vatican Council II convened. Other search efforts yielded the same result: nothing. Although it had seemed so vital a movement, ( admittedly known to relatively few Catholics, especially in this country), how could it have disappeared without a record of its substantial legacy to the Church? It was displaced with the arrival of Vatican II, but never replaced as far as I can tell. There have perhaps been outstanding theologians since then, Karl Rahner preeminently among them, but where are the poets, the playwrights, the novelists, the biographers and especially the historians? Where is the intellectual and creative energy now which was so evident then? If histories of the Council are written (probably in the works as I write) will it be remembered at all, much less acknowledged as a movement which, at the very least, prepared the way for the Council?

So many years later it is hard to convey to anyone who did not live through it, the intellectual and spiritual excitement the Catholic Revival generated. I was reminded of this reading again about our meditations with Janet Kalven.
(See Conspiracy of Women, "Schooled for Sanctity.")If we were unhappy with the culture in which we found ourselves, we had a remedy to offer which was great and beautiful. There was an incomparable luminosity, a radiance which emanated from a Church transcendent to the Church as an all too human institution. That glowing vision has since gone away, arousing sadness and nostalgia, but will never be recaptured again.

On the other hand, the "crisis of our time," the theme of Janet's talks, in its essentials, seems to me to be valid today as it was then. What I saw then about our culture, I see now, more deeply I hope, being better informed, a lot older, and with more experience of the world than I had at Grailville. I also allow for more ambiguity in my thinking óI have found that things cannot be so emphatically drawn pro and con as they were then. I am also more ambivalent about almost everything. I have lost the certainty that I had then not just about what the solutions should be, but about the nature of the problems. I would also describe those issues which Janet outlinedósecularism, integration, individualism, community, communism and capitalism, the decline of western civilization etcórather differently since I bring to them a different consciousness than I had at that time.

But a certain congruity, although not perfect and without contradictions, remains, bridging the unhappy gap between my thinking in my twenties and my thinking in my seventiesósome fifty years later. I had to see through the religiosity, naivete and ignorance of my younger self and redefine the terms to recognize that correspondence. Nonetheless, there is continuity, however much things change, even in essentials. We do remain the same even as we change, influenced by our experiences, our personal story and our particular moment in history.

To be continued. . . .

2003-08-08T14:34:00.000-04:00

"A Conspiracy of Women"
On the Internet

I spent a good deal of the eighties writing about my years in the Grail. ìA Conspiracy of Womenî was the result. There were a few unsuccessful attempts to get it published. After a few loyal friends had read it, I filed the manuscript away and there it remained for almost two decades.Recently I decided to put it up on the Internet. As I write, there are now three chapters posted with several more to go. You can find it at the website Conspiracy of Women

Although it is a tiresome job to transfer this 350 page manuscript to the website, it is proving to be a useful exercise. Adding HTML codes and correcting scanning and other errors takes time but also makes for a closer reading than I would have otherwise bothered with. I made some editorial changes and cut out passages which seem to me now to be of little interest. Otherwise I have left it more or less as it was originally written. In this third stage of my life, whatever latter day thoughts I have to add to the story, I will do so here, in this weblog.

2003-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00
Sorting Things Out
This spring I gathered together documents from earlier years: a manuscript of some 350 typed pages about my sixteen years in the Grail, entitled "A Conspiracy of Women, "; a decade of correspondence with Leo; journals written intermittently over the years; a collection of dreams and bad paintings; various commentaries, articles along with letters and personal (what shall I call them?) "Here I stand"statements, written during my last year or so in the Grail. Having stored this material for such a long time, I feel something of a duty to read through them and look at those pictures at least once before destroying everything, as I intend to do. But they are a material record of the past. I have organized most of the stuff in a hyperlink computer program with which I can make thematic or other connections from one item to another. I hope this will prove useful but I suspect I spent more time on it than was necessary to forestall getting down to actually reading through everything. There is a good deal of resistance on my part and yet I continue, not every day, but persistently.
Although I have not gone as yet very far with or deep into this detritus of the past, it did not take long before I noticed some consistency between ideas or thoughts I had back then and now. This surprised me.The intuitions, the emotional responses, the judgments I came to then seem not to have changed substantially over the years. At least not in the letters and statements I wrote during the last year in the Grail. Forty years later, it might have been otherwise.

(This week Leo and I will be with Mary Ann Holthaus at her home in Vermont, so there wonít be any postings until I return.)

2003-07-19T12:26:00.000-04:00

Beginning at the End

"To begin where I am"
Czeslaw Milosz
To begin with mundane facts: I am seventy-six years old, I am living with my husband Leo, in a retirement community in southeastern Pennsylvania. I am in reasonably good health. I have been here a year now and am still "adjusting," but doubt whether I ever will be adjusted. Finding myself in this secure, pleasant, friendly but somewhat alien environment is not insignificant and I try to deal with it from day to day. But this is not my main interest which is to answer the more essential questions about whom I am today and where I have come from to make me this person.
I am not clueless, of course. I have certain convictions about what is of value to me and what is not, what demands belief rather than certainty and what is left open to question. Nor am I entirely ignorant of my own character or the culture which helped make me who I am. But it is all of a buzz right now, an ambient noise, a cluttered background. I would like more clarity. I would like to be able to trace some of the threads in that background, pick out the themes submerged in the dissonance. It is something of an obsession which grows stronger as time becomes shorter.
When you get old, it is often said, you can begin to let things go, to become more peaceful with yourself and the world in which you no longer have a stake. This is a desirable condition to be in, I suppose, but I am not yet there.True, I have let some things go. I no longer worry as much as I once did about mistakes I make and am coming slowly to terms with my character and all its quirks. In reality, however, I am intensely aware of what is going on in the world, caught up in it and unpeaceful about myself. I donít think I am alone in this. For some it may happen sooner, for others later, but it is not uncommon. "Age puzzles me" Florida Scott-Maxwell writes, "I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age." I am an unfinished, an incomplete woman and will leave this life so. I try to accept that fact. All the same, I have this need to grasp to my own satisfaction what this life has been all about. To what purpose? To what end? I have this fantasy of being able one day to put my arms around it, hugging it and saying, yes, this is it, this is what it means.
I think about the end of life a great deal. Some would call this morbid, but I donít feel it to be so. I am curious about old age, not having been here before. Only the aged can truly speak for it. It is a pity to miss my opportunity to do so through avoidance, denial, fear. I see this final stage(or third stage as it is occasionally called) as the time left to trace the pattern in the tangled threads of the past. This is, as I see it, the real task of my old age. Everything else seems peripheral, although not necessarily unimportant for that reason. I take on faith there is a pattern and I will find it meaningful. This is what I want to find out. Perhaps this is what the poet Czeslaw Milosz meant when he wrote that old age is a vocation.
A transformation occurred, as it does for everyone, somewhere along the path my life has taken, so that I am not the person I was when I was a child, an adolescent, or an adult. But today at seventy-six I am that same child, adolescent and young adult. Something about me has remained steady and fixed while much has changed and evolved. There is a consistent pattern of behavior, thought, impulse which persists as the core of my personality, apparently immune to change. Oddly enough, I never thought much about my "character" except when it fell short, as it too often did, of perfection. But as a born Catholic, I assumed that given Godís grace and will power that character, whatever it is, was malleable, could change. It has taken me a lifetime to realize that the pursuit of perfection is futile and can harm. Character is not to be made over, but to be accepted andóas much as is possible, in any caseóto be reckoned with.
The catalyst for change came from the culture in which my lifeís history played itself out. This is only half true, of course, for I was never its passive victim but in one way or another, I was always in a state of reaction to it or engaging with it. Day in and day out, an ongoing dialectic took place, whether I was aware of it or not, between the culture and myself. This was the dynamic which brought about those transformations (or at least, modifications ) of self. This dialogue is in reality made up of many dialogues going on at the same time, from the familial to the political and at all the multiple intersections where culture and person meet. Our life is a narrative which is embedded in many other narratives. From my youth to mid-life, the most important of these for me was Catholicism, for it was primarily from within Catholicism that I looked upon and judged the world.
A few years ago someone whom I had just met for the first time, interrupted me in the middle of a conversation and asked: "What is your background?" "I am a Catholic" I blurted out. He was perplexed by this reply which was absurdly irrelevant to what we had been talking about. I was embarrassed. Why, oh why, I moaned to myself, did I say that? And what did I say that provoked him to ask? (I have no recollection of what we were talking about). I had been caught off guard and not being very good on my feet at such moments, came up with a slip of the tongue which said more about me than I realized at the time.
Being "born Catholic" is not a just a matter of becoming a member of the Catholic Church because your parents happened to be Catholic. To be born Catholic means, that the vital substance of Catholicism flows through you like blood through your veins. You might even reject Catholicism but you would know full well, you cannot undo your Catholicism. You canít help yourself because it is a part of your psyche, of who you are. I do not know if this is till true for younger Catholics , but it was certainly true of me and many of my generation at least until the advent of Vatican II.
My relation to Catholicism became more complex and conflicted beginning in the late fifties and came to a climax in the sixties, during the years of Vatican Council II. The Catholicism I knew and lived coincided with the Churchís most transformative period in modern times. And this is why I am interested in my story because in large part it belongs to this particular moment in the Churchís long history.

As I trace my lifeís threads, I fully expect to meet self-imposed resistances. Indeed, they have been with me all along. My reticence, to begin with. Even as a child when I shared too much about myself I felt remorseful afterwards, as if I had betrayed a sacred secret. That feeling of being disloyal to my self, has not entirely gone away and probably wonít. Telling oneís story also means reliving the hurt and pain of the past. When dredged up by memory, I discover they have lost none of their old power. Do I really want to put myself through that once more?
I am willing (so far) to overcome these and other inhibitions because overriding them is a compulsion greater than they may turn out to be. I would like, in short, to find out where the story of my life has fit in into the time in which it unfolded. My intentionóand hope óis to discover where in the course of this time (roughly from the late twenties to the present, a good three quarters of a century) my life has been implanted in it, in some significant way. I am more curious about locating myself somewhere in the happenings of this time than in "finding myself," as the clichÈ of pop psychology has it. Or to put it another way: "To know thyself" is "to know thy history," not only my personal history but that of the larger world into which I was born. How, so to speak, culture and character came together.

2003-07-18T15:05:00.000-04:00
BeginningóA Personal Narrative

BeginningóA Personal Narrative

Weblogs are mostly personal in nature. For proof, link into any one of the millions of them out there on the Internet. Not that there is a law which says it must be so and there are exceptions, but this is the way it has evolved. Younger bloggers (and they are mostly young) have no problem with this. Indeed, it is they who determined this would be what weblogs are all about.They have no qualms about sharing their spontaneous, most intimate thoughts and experiences with anyone who will bother to sign on. I have resisted this, not being young and being reticent by nature. But the time has come to be more more adventurous than I have been up till now. This weblog is an exercise in a personal narrative, albeit a rather fragmented one. It will not be, I promise myself, nothing as pretentious as a memoir or autobiography. It will not be chronological, not confessional and and not off the cuff like the typical weblog. What I want to doóif I can pull it offóis weave some threads of the past with the present and see what pattern emerges. As I get older, the desire to do this has intensified. But with age comes a lessening of energy so I donít know how long I can persevere.I will give it my best.
In a sense I am engaging in a conversation with myself, hearing myself out, finding out what I think. But as at the same time, I find I am also and always talking in my head to unspecified, unnamed others. Although I am not going public with it, the weblog seems the way to go, because what I write can be shared with friends (known and at the moment, unknown) who, if they should so choose, can respond. What I like to think might happen would be a real conversation rather than a dialogue with oneself.