Thursday, January 14, 2016
A Case of Case: A Thought on A Grammar of Relations and the Verticality of Experience
As you no doubt recall, the nominative case is case of the subject, the accusative the case of the direct object, the dative the case of the indirect object, and the genitive the case of the multiplicities in subjects and objects (direct or indirect). There are special cases for these cases, but let it suffice for now to note these four. In phenomenology, and in post-structuralist approaches in general, the accusative gets some attention. It is the case of the "I" called, or called out, pointed to, seen, and even, of course, accused.
A little confession: I still like Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film always struck me as a fairly obvious allegory of the theophany on Mount Sinai, and the calling of a people to an encounter with the divine. As you no doubt recall, the film depicts an alien visitation, a 'scheduled' visitation, on Devils Tower, the first declared national monument in the US. The aliens have sent a thought, a mental image to whomever can receive it, and the receivers are moved to all sorts of behaviors, mostly artistic endeavors that represent the mental image, which is of the famous monument in Wyoming. Roy Neary, the troubled protagonist in the film, is driven nearly insane by the image in his mind until he makes the visual connection between his sculpture of Devils Tower and its appearance on TV. He goes to Wyoming to learn if it's all real.
Just as Roy is called, we are all potentially open to an anonymous call, a call that pulls us into a relationality with something. Roy is driven by his accusation toward an image, a voice. Is Roy Neary a mystic? There is a wonderful scene in the film in which the communication between human and alien, a musical dialogue, a tonal conversation, takes place in a crescendo of notes. At first, single tones are played on a keyboard, and then a particular melody. finally the alien craft responds and answers the musical provocation, by completing the musical phrase. Then the music becomes increasingly complex, and the human keyboardist struggles to keep up, as the complexity emerging from the alien taxes his abilities. Finally, the alien takes over, and the keyboard is shown playing itself, being played by the alien, as the fantastic communication continues.
A theme shared by mystical traditions of monotheistic faiths is a graduated experience of the divine. This theme is magnificently described in Anthony Steinbock's Phenomenology and Mysticism (Indiana Univ. Pr.: Bloomington, 2007) and these comments are indebted to his presentation there. Whether Neary is a mystic or not is really not the point: what is important is that the accusative case is not only the case of being called, seen, or accused, but also of being chosen. I read the musical dialogue in Close Encounters as the gradations of verticality as one moves from the natural, human-directed efforts to ascend into a new relationality, toward the divine, where divinity itself directs the ascent---where the keyboard plays itself, where something other than the human takes over and lifts the human toward itself in a very close encounter.
Neary, like some of the mystics in the monotheistic traditions, is accused, called, seen and chosen. He acts in his world (as St. Teresa of Avila, Rabbi Dov Baer and Ruzbihan Baqli do in theirs) as part of his hineni, his 'here I am.' Perhaps 'everyday mystics' are potentially open to the kind of gradual (which is not to say hierarchical) approach to the divine insistence. Accusation and chosen-ness is the case of a grammar of relationality that releases the event of religious verticality. The less we try, so it seems, the more effortless our approach to the divine becomes, because we are seen, not because of our own will to be seen, but because the givenness of another will takes over, brings us over to another place. The shifting of grammatical cases plays out as 'subjects' become 'objects' and objects and subjects become multiples, in countless encounters as we find status before and after the Word, that is, the 'verb.'
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ReplyDeleteJoseph Charles wrote: "You always use stories and movies to talk about religion, which makes sense. That's all you have. When you turn to events, history and reality, well, religion, as you've said yourself, breaks down.
ReplyDeleteThe Christian of the future WILL be a mystic or nothing because only in such nonexperience can Christianity make sense."
Steinbock's book, _Phenomenology and Mysticism_ uses the experience of 3 mystics, each from a mystical tradition within the 3 monotheistic faiths, to demonstrate a pattern of experience and produce evidence for such experience. Somehow, I doubt that approach would be any more palatable to you (I hope I am actually wrong about that, and recommend the book to you). As you note, I tend to use scripture 'stories' and parables to demonstrate religious ideas (hardly a radical approach in itself) and this approach is also inadequate for you. I rarely use a film, as a manifestation of American culture, to clarify religious ideas from time to time, and this approach still leaves you unsatisfied. Even when I write about a version of Islam to demonstrate religious ideas as they appear on the stage of current events and history, and this approach also is wanting in your view.
I would ask you just how the experiences I write about are in fact 'non-experience' as you have asserted. I agree that the experience of a fictional character such as Roy Neary does not pack the same punch as that of Dov Baer, but I am not offering that experience in the same way Steinbock offers the Rabbi's. Is that the problem here, or is nothing apart from disaster or theodicy the proper context for religion?
I never denied mystical experience. Does Steinbock prove those experiences are of God?
DeleteYou use stories from a religious culture to illustrate religious ideas. I know, I know what you do. It's neither argument nor demonstration nor evidence for anything.
Picking a story which is friendly to your belief and then using that story to illustrate it is not an argument nor a demonstration. I get the goddamn idea already. I don't need you to illustrate it, YOU need to defend believe in it.
The proper context for everything, Dr Joseph Calandrino, is REALITY. Like it or not, that's unavoidable. Disaster, evil, pointless suffering, harlequin babies, people burned on the stake, children sodomized by parents and priests—this is part of reality.
Reality is the context. Again, I say, contextualize it if you can.
I never suggested you 'denied mystical experience.' Steinbock demonstrates that mystical experience itself contains its own checks and balances of logic and evidence, and while he certainly 'proves' that such experiences are 'of God' his purpose is not to prove that such experience is 'from God.' The mystics themselves 'prove' that their experiences are 'from God.'
DeleteAgain, you write: "You use stories from a religious culture to illustrate religious ideas. I know, I know what you do. It's neither argument nor demonstration nor evidence for anything."
Yes, I know that you know that I know what I do; why you keep saying it is a bit mysterious. I often but not always use such texts to present an 'argument' and 'demonstration' for religious experience; and while over the last year my 'theology' has taken a phenomenological turn, it was not always turned in that direction. My arguments, demonstrations and illustrations are either compelling or not. I accept that state of affairs.
Clearly for you the issue is one of hermeneutics. I certainly agree that I 'choose' texts in a way that is already interpretive, already in anticipation of a certain hermeneutic, but that is not the whole of it.
You have so far declined to provide examples of the 'nonexperience' you identified earlier in my work, non-experiences that you have suggested I pass off as 'experience.' That would be more productive than merely positing the litany of evils that you seem to think shuts down religious experience as part of reality. Would it help if we call religious experience 'hyper-reality'? Even the mystics come 'back down to earth' to take care of business, and they do so in light of their prayers, ecstasies and visions.
You know already that I could never say that God's will, a greater [even mysterious] plan, a higher good can be located in Omayra Sanchez's eyes, or in any horrific event, so why do you continue to invite me to do so?
The religious experience of some people is just as real as the events in your litany of horrors. Why should I defend belief---that's apologetics. This blog is not about apologetics, but about how religion, religious experience, the texts of such experience 'works.' This blog is about the encounter with the sacred, the holy, and how that encounter might be productive or generative.
You can make it a better blog, as you've often done in the past, by sticking with the blog's agenda. There's plenty of non-theodical space here for that.
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ReplyDeleteI do not have Steinbock's PM in front of me now, but there is a remarkable and troubling passage where he suggests that mystical experience might entail the "irreal", and goes on to remind us that Husserl himself warns us that we must not confuse what is "actual" and what is "real." Yet, he is perfectly clear that what he is describing as "verticality" is all tied up with "personhood:" that wherever persons, selves, are, they are open to or oriented toward the "vertical."
DeleteI think he is right about this, and while he champions epistemic perceptual experience and the givenness of objects as "presentation" within the 'horizontal,' he identifies *Idolatry* as any foreclosure of verticality. This is an important point of Steinbock's work, because he offers NO critique of the horizontal as such, the natural attitude as such, of science, empirical knowledge as such. He does indeed critique, as I have and continue to do so, the modern gesture (or at least the modern gesture after 'romanticism' injects its version of subjectivity) that takes the horizontal as the ONLY plane of reality; that is, when the gesture becomes so dogmatic, as to deny swaths of truth, especially as they relate to the human person, personhood, the self, the self that gives itself to the Myself.
to continue:
DeleteThe horizontal plane has a natural boundary, which in its integrity cannot transgress or otherwise violate. When that boundary is set as the limit beyond which there is only nonsense or nothing, then "personhood," which is itself beyond the scope of science (unless 'personhood' is reduced to epiphenomena of biological processes---this is impossible and essentially denies "personhood" any meaning at all), becomes simply nonsense.
To deny "personhood" in this manner is to privilege the horizontal as the negation the possibility of verticality as being constitutive of personhood. This is 'idolatry'.
The reality of "personhood" properly understood demonstrates the inadequation of psychology, biology, symbolic logic, etc., and far from being nonsense or nothing, is already lived in the horizontal plane and points to something outside it: the vertical, where it is oriented and finds its orientation. There if finds experiences quite different than those of mere presentation, of the empirical, for example.
There is nothing new or even radical in finding valid experiences in the vertical orientations. The mystics never claim to physically "go" anywhere even though they describe their experiences as gradations of an 'ascent,' or movement toward the divine. For our discussion, let's keep 'religion' and 'religious experience' separate. "Religion" is too thematic and therefore present particulars that introduce as much consonance as dissonance. If Steinbock is right, then the patterns of religious, or more pointedly, mystical religious experience, tend toward a stark unity.
You mention Job: theodicy as you define it so narrowly as "finding an explanation for suffering" is not the problem. But that does not describe the complete theodical maneuver, which is analogous to the apologetic maneuver: once I get you to see the inadequacy of the explanation of suffering, then I can tell you that "God" does not exist(theodicy); once I get you to see that "God" is a rational concept, then I can show you how [pick you religion] is 'true.' both these gestures are commonly known as apologetics. One seeks to prove atheism, the other theism. Neither approach gets us anywhere, and that's why I don't do 'apologetics' properly so called.
I would use the Book Of Job as a way into the relationship between the human and the divine, and even how such a saturated phenomenon, or verticality points to "personhood." I have suggested in this blog that Job does not ask for a "why" for his suffering, but "how" is he responsible for it: how can this be since I've done no wrong? That's a better question, as it is embedded in the mystery of creation itself, which Yahweh presents to him and orients him toward.
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DeleteAccording to Steinbock in his _Phenomenology and Mysticism_, "verticality is the vector of mystery and reverence." Mystery and reverence here should not be taken as a detour into the sentimental, but as dimensions of experience that are irreducible to perceptual or epistemic 'presentation' (to the way objects are given---the way, for example, objects under scientific investigation are given as phenomena coming before the scientific gaze). Steinbock does not privilege verticality over object givenness on the horizontal plane of human experience.
DeleteYet, where there is verticality there is the human person and where there is the human person there is verticality. Verticality does not so much 'preserve personhood' as much as it constitutes it.
While Steinbock gives a thorough analysis of mystical experience as the structure of verticality, as a philopher/phenomenologist and NOT as theologian, he points to personhood and the 'interpersonal' and how these are used and abused in social/political/economic structures, ideologies, power gestures, etc. His phenomenology is no more about 'religion' than Levi's onticology is about his blue cup. It is about the outcomes and dispositions of the human person and her personhood through what he calls the 'social imaginary.'
Because his understanding of holiness and the sacred is so very broad, Steinbock is able to locate these in the interpersonal (sometimes the interpersonal, with that upper-case "P" pointing to any "other"), and within the "Myself" itself. For Steinbock, verticality does not entail religious experience---epiphany, but also morality as the encounter with the other as 'revelation' and ecology as the world as aesthetic ground in 'disclosure.'
It could very well turn out that Steinbock's phenomenology relates in some way to the preservation of humanity, but then in the way it points to the personal, the person, what I call 'personhood'---my interpretation of how he deploys person and personal. The word 'vector' is very effective in this context because it has directionality and momentum---it is no 'scalar' quantity.
Obviously for Catholicism, the connection between personhood and the sacred is much more robust, but, for now we are keeping 'religion' separate from 'religious experience.'
As far as your Job interpretation, I am much closer to you in the 'grasp' but if Job has no 'right' to ask 'how'---that's one helluva response to a wrongful question. For me it's something like saying to a stranger 'you have no right showing up at my doorstep, and then inviting him in and showing him your library and wine cellar.
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DeleteI think the most important thing to remember about the Book of Job is that it's a comedy. I might have been a bit ebullient in my "In the Merry Old Land of Uz" but my thoughts about the book haven't changed much since then. I completely agree with your judgment of God's "posture" as "ironic." I would simply say that the irony runs all the way down the comic structure of the story.
DeleteRahner's "Christian 'pessimism'" (always in scare quotes in his (_Foundations of Christian Faith_) is what I have called Christian or Catholic Realism. When Rahner writes about such 'pessimism' he means to capture the *hope* of the person of faith in the face of her thrown-ness, facticity and finitude. Heidegger haunts every corner of Rahner's discussion of Christian life. In this sense, realism is indistinguishable from 'pessimism.' In this sense, too, I think your presentation of Rahner's pessimism is too pessimistic.
So, on the contrary, neither you nor I, neither Rahner nor Job, is 'nothing' to God, even the Yahweh in the story; instead, we are the object of God's desire, and as we all know from Lacan's "insistence of the letter in the unconscious," all desire is metonymy. So, your use of the word (via Chesterton) 'justified' is justified because, while no direct answer to Job's complaint can be found, Job and God, God and creation, Job and Creation are all aligned on the same side, as it were. That's the only kind of justice one finds in Job. But that is a great justice.
While we can plainly read that God permits, or even wills, the satan to ruin Job's life, it's all part of the 'gag', the irony of the story. It is all 'posture,' all posturing: Yahweh isn't really the callous dunderhead we meet at the beginning of the story. He just plays one on TV.
In our lives, lived out in the Catholic Realism indebted to Rahner's notion of 'pessimism', we see suffering all around us, and while suffering itself might be wrapped in 'mystery' *we* don't need to wrap that up in the 'absolute mystery' that is God. Admittedly, Rahner himself seems to suggest that these are somehow related; but I don't think he would say that suffering is willed by God, not in the same breath as he says that God's love is for us, and that we hope in the face of the starkness of our lives.
Regardless, your bringing Rahner into the discussion at this moment is perfectly timed, and provides a provocative lens through which to look at these issues. Do you really think it is a matter of 'comfort' or is it possibly about a Realism that dares to hope in the face of the Real? Obviously I think it's the latter, and I take as my point of departure that wonderful chapter at the end of FCF. Still, 'comfort' doesn't sit well as we've framed the problem.
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DeleteChesterton also ends his intro to Job by alluding to Christ, the best of all who suffer the most. Of course, I have such difficulty taking this seriously, as Jesus was a miracle-worker who supposedly reveals in those miracles that God does not want people to suffer; God wants us to be whole. This miracle-working was an essential part of communicating this kingdom of God. Yet, where is it now? Catholic realism also believes God continues to work miracles through other figures like Mary and the saints, but these are apparently rare exceptions. Interesting to note that the church does believe miracles can occur through the intervention of people who have died—yet the crucified and resurrected Jesus, now glorified, hasn't made such healing and saving events less rare.
DeleteYour ongoing characterization of the love of God revealed on the cross as "stupid, weak, useless love, good for nothing love," a love with "no sovereignty in the world" does not seem like a love that can work biological, physiological and so-called "nature" miracles (not to mention greater events like incarnation and resurrection). Since you do not a priori reject the reality of miracles and you seem to believe in some of Jesus' miracles, at least, I think this is a huge, unresolved problem.
Your reading of Lazarus is a perfect example: Jesus worries and suffers and weeps with Lazarus' friends and family, all very human, but then ends the whole thing by doing something no human could ever do. Jesus weeps and then restores what was lost; God's love motivates God's power and life is returned to Lazarus. Unless you think that miracle was an afterthought, a mere illustration, or something that, if removed, leaves the whole story relatively untouched, then you have to come to terms with a God of love who is then moved to act with a power or energy that eclipses all others, even for a single moment.
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DeleteThese several comments are astounding and passionate, and I will have to take some time to consider them more fully, but I can give you at least an initial response to them.
DeleteFirst, the matter of 'alignment.' Justify, in the sense of alignment, is the effect of the comedy. Yahweh gets Job 'in line,' aligns him with Creation, gets him on the 'same page,' as it were, and finally restores (re-aligns) Job to greater life, not merely the same life prior to his experience of forces not in his control. The genius of the inspired author is his great comic sense, his stark juxtapositions, his '3 stooges' and his very human Job, who backs down in complete capitulation even before things get started. Perhaps if you read it more like a comic book, or opera libretto, these textures would become more apparent, thereby enhancing your enjoyment of the story, and inspire another interpretation, one more edgy and discordant with the traditional reading, as exemplified by Chesterton's (I had completely forgotten about his commentary).
Faith, hope, charity. These values, and they are not simply or exclusively Christian (though they are 'cardinal' for the Christian), are at the very heart of the religious attitude. Faith is not simply 'belief in God;' hope is not simply 'wishing;' charity is not simply 'giving.'
Let's just take *hope* for example. You might remember our recent whimsical discussion about hope as we pondered hoping for the power of flight. I responded that I didn't *hope* for it, but *expected* it, and then I gave the example of the hover board (before we discovered their incendiary tendencies) as potentially really giving us the power of flight.
"For," "in" problematize hope for me, as in phrases like "I hope for the relief of suffering," "I hope my patient does well", etc. Expecting, wishing, desiring, willing, are not examples of hope, it seems to me.
When I *hope*, I *hope* religiously, and this is a quality or emotion outside the economy of my own self. It is always directed (poor word?) outside of myself, to an 'other' and has its ground in another "other." When I hope I hope "from a place" other than my own self, my own power, will etc. "Hoping" effects the place of the other as a *hope*. It's a strange phenomenon, because while it occurs in my finitude, it is grounded elsewhere, as out of my power, out of my facticity. I think Rahner is talking about precisely this conundrum.
Needless to say, the point of departure is the 'makes no sense' on the horizontal plane. Hoping and hope has to do with 'personhood,' as only the human person hopes, and she hopes just askance of the horizontal, in verticality.
Hope would be a 'finger trap' if we reduce it to expectation, wishing and desire. But, somehow, I mean 'hope' to be other than those experiences.
Steinbock (as you can see I am taking him very seriously as our phenomenological thinker in English) speaks of 'hope' in a language that is productive. I am amazed at how much I am on the same page as he is: I don't think he is saying anything new to me about such things, as this blog has been feeling its way in the dark about so many of his concerns. He's just so articulate, precise, expansive about these 'matters' and his successes puts phenomenology in the best position to be *the* philosophy of 'experience.' Perhaps in 5-10 years I could have written his chapter on hope and despair (in _The Moral Emotions_), but, turns out, he's been there and done that with a clarity and persuasive that I could only dream of (notice I didn't say "hope for").
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DeleteSorry if I implied that human persons are not also about expectation, wishing, etc; of course these are very human qualities. The distinction is simply that moral emotions like hope have their ground in the other, and are rooted in the 'interpersonal' and inter-Personal (again that upper case "P"). When I 'expect' or 'wish' I do so with calling the fundamental emotion, *pride*, the hub around which other emotions evolve, into motion. It is simply all coming from me, myself alone, as self-grounded. Moral emotions of otherness are by definition not self-grounded. This does not mean that expectation or wishing is wrong, but it is open to gradations of deceit in ways hope simply is not. Steinbock calls this "self-dissembling" a wrong turn in the creative gesture of *pride.*
DeleteMorality is found on the vertical because it has its basis in the other as other, and not simply in the reduplication of the self, as if the self, the Myself, were 'self-grounded.'
So while there is no judgment against wishing and expectation, these are merely self-reflexive. I am in control of the content and ground, I can or cannot think or perform them. With *hope* I am neither the ground nor in control, and hope calls *pride* into question, as they cannot occupy the same emotional locus.
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DeleteHope is everything everyone thinks it is, but more than this, it is future-oriented, grounded outside the 'hoping' self, not under my sway or control, interpersonal (and therefore intrinsically 'social') and akin to trusting, loving. I hope always in humility (not pride), even for the impossible. It is like love because it needs no object though it often has one.
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DeleteHad I known her, and hoped for her becoming a fulfilled women, my hope would have been dashed, disappointed by her horrific death. I can no longer hope for her place in the world.
DeleteDeath can still inspire a 'hope' for its fulfillment, and even its place in the world.
Though my blog is not a facebook page where I disclose my most private self for the predation of others, it is a place where ideas, however general, emerge. I choose to remain a private person even the context of a public blog. I do not share here my deepest hopes, fears and heart.
Though my hope is not always of a religious nature, I do indeed have religious hope, which places me in relation to a church, a community, a body of shared beliefs (however diversely experienced), morality.
My hopes for death are not Dante-esque. They are for the here and now; that death is the transformation of being, that it be seen as the closure of life, that it be permitted to be (as opposed to shunned like a spider or snake), that it not be denied, that it not be an embarrassment.
Nothing about those hopes belittles grief and bereavement, the loss of self, the loss of time, history, of what might have been.
'No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind'---John Donne, Med. 17
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ReplyDeleteJoseph: Welcome back and thanks for these comments. I hope you'll leave them up long enough for me to comment more fully. But for now, let me simply outline a few thoughts.
ReplyDelete1. I think your presentation here of a synopsis is a bit tendentious, though the blog provides enough text to justify your summary. Rather than re-argue what we've discussed in the past, we can move on from here.
2. Responsibility, freedom and evil: there is a relationship among them, especially between responsibility and freedom. Evil might indeed be an expression of the misalignment of the these characteristics, but my main thrust has always been to present responsibility as freedom ordered to God, the creation, truth, beauty, justice, etc. Otherwise, freedom crassly reduces to mere license deployed willy-nilly on purely subjective judgments.
3. You are right to say that I have a minimalist interpretation of the Marian dogmas. I do not question the Church's decision to declare the dogma, but I assert that the dogmas only make sense 'for us' if Mary is an exemplum in a way that Christ cannot be. We should be able to "become" Mary, and therefore nothing in the dogma can mean that would be impossible. That does seem to be at odds with the language of the IC.
4. The mystics do indeed use the language of their religions to describe their experience, but the transformation is in *them* not their religion. In fact one of the measures they use to determine the validity of their experience is not that their religions are changed, but that the change within them manifests as love, the good, service, etc. Steinbock's _Phenomenology and Mysticism_ provides better answers to your questions about mystical experience than I could. I invite you to peruse that book: it is pure philosophy, and any religious commitments Steinbock might or might not have are irrelevant and particularly absent from his work.
5. Apologetics: Christina M. Gschwandter has written an excellent study of what's happening in the philosophy of religion, _Post-Modern Apologetics?_. There, she qualifies what she calls 'apologetics,' post-modern, and that "?" is itself the post-modern gesture of the *peut-etre*. This is a highly readable book and the thinkers she presents there are all demonstrating the possibility of religious experience.
If I am doing any kind of apologetics, it is not about the "why" but about the "how". You are right, I am trying to do theological writing in a way other than metaphysics.
6. I do not agree that I have said that the Church has 'misunderstood' nearly everything. I would say that the understanding of things in the past no longer speaks to us today, and we are responsible for writing our own understanding, and that sometimes takes the form of reading what is hidden between the words and lines of what has already been written.
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ReplyDeleteJust to be clear about the Tradition, evil might lead to a good greater than the evil (religiously one might consult the Joseph cycle), but no evil can be performed that some greater good can result (one might consult the matter of Simon Magus).
DeleteOne need not trust the mystics at all; the Church inquisitions more of these than it lionizes. Mystical experience is not paradigmatic of religious experience in general, but of de-limitation, of the structure of 'verticality' and saturated phenomenality. The opposite of 'de-limitation,' the freeing of phenomenal reality to appear somewhere, is the imprisonment, the foreclosure of phenomena, 'anything' not within the horizontal, within 'presentation,' is 'delimitation' and idolatry, to use Steinbock's terms.
If you would, just for a moment substitute Jesus for Omayra in your remarks, you would face the possibility of God's presence in the face of both. Will? Preposterous and obscene. Providence? Define 'providence' in terms that would make sense to anyone today interested in knowing what that might mean. Presence. Yes. God's presence as inhabiting but not originating in the world is constitutive of how God loves. Did he 'abandon' Jesus on the Cross. Yes. But what does 'abandon' mean when referenced to God? Someone might object, 'if this is love, you can keep it...I want rescue---keep *that* love as far away from me as possible.' Yet, that was not the response from the Cross. What was that response? Human love. "Forgive them..."
The God we have left is a God we can know only in our finitude. We must start from our finitude. Metaphysics pretends to posit something within God that is analogous to 'us.' The proper disposition is to posit something within us that is analogous to God. Is this an inverted metaphysics? Perhaps, but in such inversion there can be no God of the 'omni's'; just a God of love; stupid, weak, useless love, good for nothing love. Such a God can have no sovereignty in the world, but the divine love calls with an unconditional call.
I see death nearly every day. I am heart-broken over such death, such loss, such suffering. What surprises me is that while I expect emptiness in death, meaninglessness in suffering, a dead-ness in death, I am shocked instead to experience the sacred, the holy in the death of the human person. Presence? Yes. How might one be present to such death, suffering, loss, sacrality and holiness.
Finally, one cannot 'add' the world to the uniqueness of Omayra and determine a 'sum.' One Omayra is already the sum of the world, and it gives me a hope against hope.
I suppose here is as good a place as any to comment on your 'evolution' remark. Though the emergence of 'freedom' is a provocative sign-post in evolution, I cannot recall speculating on God 'guiding evolution' to that point, and then, presumably, *letting go*. I don't particularly care for that idea, and I am disappointed that I said it, though I cannot find such a theme in this blog, either in the main entries or in the comments. I suppose, as such a thing relates to 'personhood' it might have some value as a point of departure, but I'm really not interested, however "pressed," into pursuing it as a line of speculation. I am not happy even at the possibility that I could have been so arbitrary---if it actually turns out that I mentioned such a thing. I guess it was at a very uncritical, unguarded moment.
DeleteAnyway, moving on:
I do not belittle, categorize or otherwise demarcate anyone's 'agony.' Certainly not the agony of an innocent child, and certainly not to 'carve it out of the world.' Such agony, such suffering, is a focal point for me. Because I bracket the theodical attitude (not because it's not there, or unimportant but because it hides agony in a mantle of empiricism) so that agony and suffering can make an appearance of and from themselves. The givenness of agony calls me to myself, and situates me before the suffering of the other, where I am able (or not) to locate such suffering in the 'flesh'; and while I take a misstep if I relegate the agony of the flesh of the other to simply an 'agony' of my flesh, I am open now to the accusation of that suffering to myself. "I" stand accused in a way that is completely shut down in the theodical attitude. In the release of the event of suffering, I give my self to myself before the other, before the suffering and agony of the other. The uniqueness and value of the other remains untouched by Myself, but given to Myself by such suffering and agony, and the place of the Other, I become involved in such suffering. I am struggling to say that better each time, because therein is the holy and the sacred: there is the holiness and sacredness in the uniqueness of Omayra, her suffering and her death.
I do not mean this to sound mystical: I have never had a mystical experience. I mean it to sound analytical, and a description of the giving of sense and meaning to something that does not mean or have sense in the theodical, the horizontal, the natural sphere.
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ReplyDelete"Does God's presence reappear in the photographs taken of her, seen by all the world, reprinted in countless Time Life books, one of which ended up in front of me and changed my life forever?"
DeleteBecause you delimit your experience of Omayra's death, and the images of her death, you only seek answers offered in a particular sphere of experience, in this case, empirical experience, of perceptual and epistemic givenness that is permitted to give itself in 'presentation' *only*. You have stopped there because the methods and tools available to you on the horizontal plane of experience maintain the event of Omayra's death as confined to her all-to-brief life, and the despicable circumstances surrounding her death. Your life has indeed been changed by such a profound experience, the profundity you deny the mystics, but also anyone who might experience her death in a different sphere.
Your experience of Omayra is every bit as real as anyone else's profound experience. It would be delimiting and therefore idolatrous (immoral too?) to invalidate your experience of her death because it is not 'my' experience of her death; it would unreasonable as well. You reserve for yourself the right to experience the event of Omayra's death as a common phenomenon, and there is nothing in that decision that is wrong, but are you not denying that right to others whose lives are changed in a different way? Perhaps someone else saw that picture, and had a profound experience that led her to serve indigent people, or enter politics to make the world a slightly better place (bad example, politics?), or become a physician or social worker giving of themselves in underserved areas of the world, or joining doctors without borders? None of these responses is necessarily 'theological,' 'religious,' etc., but what privileges the change that took place in your life over against these others'?
Putting aside the profundity of your experience, most mystics would discount it as an 'authentic' experience of the *divine*, mainly because of its outcomes, the most important one here the denial of the divine and the assertion that religious experience is so much nonsense; the mystics, using the criteria of genuineness as it is structured in the sphere of such experiences, would rule it as an experience of something coming from someplace else entirely.
Deconstruction, phenomenology, even Lacanian psychoanalysis are tools and methods that can be productive in elucidating experiences just off the horizontal, outside the natural attitude. We both, for example, admire Zizek, and while he is not interested in a verticality of religious experience, he most certainly is interested in morality, and even ecology, both of which share in the kind of verticality Steinbock has suggested to us.
If you want a bibliography of resources, you can take a peek at Thomas Merton, St John of the Cross, Dov Baer, the bible the Qu'ran, any sacred writings and the writings of the mystics in and out of the Abrahamic tradition, John Caputo, Catherine Keller, Jean-Luc Marion, Anthony Steinbock, Emmanuel Falque, Michel Henry, Richard Kearney. There are many other, albeit different (but apropos the sphere of experience) tools and methods in these works and authors. Again, this approach would not locate God in any old 'here' but a here in the verticality that has to do with human persons.