A discussion about postmodernism (part 6)

(Continued ...)

Interlocutor:

I'm glad you picked up on the irony of my pedantically explaining Venn diagrams to a logician!

Blosser:

Don't get too ironic on my: I'm quite dull, y'know.

Interlocutor:

I agree with you in being skeptical of the ultimate value of these images, metaphors, etc. Venn diagrams are just Venn diagrams, and Lewis's hall-way metaphor is just a hall-way metaphor--what we're using them to talk about is something other, of course. I like Lewis's metaphor a lot--I hadn't known of it before. It better expresses what it feels like to be, or try to be, a religious person--I can relate to his reluctance to camp out in a hall-way somewhere.

Blosser:

My view of Lewis has changed over the years. Now I think he's really under-rated. I've learned a lot from him. He's very unoriginal, but helpful and putting very traditional ideas in often profound and accessible ways.

Interlocutor:

I feel as if we've reached what is for me a familiar impasse. You seem to be granting that there is what I have called the "violence" (and you have called ""violence"") of naming but denying that there is any way to avoid it. That is precisely the question, for me--is there? I think we leap too hastilly into the mode of making virtue of necessity, putting "violence" in quotation marks, etc. There is no other way if you assume there isn't. I understand the point--I have on a couple of occasions seen one of our own resident chemists fume and gesticulate and say, if there's one thing I hate, it's those damn Norwegians telling ME what it means to be Lutheran. It's amusing, of course, and also of course, I see his point. He's responding to the violence of naming with exasperation, as we all do. But I don't think saying that it's inevitable is either helpful or necessarily true--that would have to be shown. If it were true, we would be condemned to take all names and concepts as provisional and relative, and while most of us are so calloused that we take that cognitive hell for granted in our fallen world, I'm not sure it really is so. Accepting that everything is relative is one option. Tying everything back to the bedrock of Agios Petros is another. But there's a third, I think. At least, [Jacques] Derrida presents deconstruction as a viable third way.

Blosser:

All of this depends on how we define "violence," of course. At one end, there are some forms of labeling and categorizing that can involve genuine violence against another, and I want to avoid that. At the other end, there are things that are called "violence" that simply aren't, in my opinion. Take all those crosses for the aborted unborn put up around my church. I helped the Knights of Columbus put them up and paint them this past weekend. One of them told me he was in McGuires one Friday when a woman found out he was from St. Al's -- the church with "all those crosses" around it, and she hit the roof, turning beet red, and calling this the most "violent, hateful expression of discrimination" she had ever encountered. It turned out, as you might have suspected, that she had had two abortions and was probably feeling fairly conflicted about this. But where's the "violence" in this situation? On the part of a church that puts up crosses as reminders that we are killing 4000 human unborn every DAY in the US? Where is the violence?

Interlocutor:

It seems very ironic to me that deconstruction has been taken consistently as an act of violence, because Derrida has been quite plain from the beginning about it's not being such at all. People talk about the deconstruction of the self, and other people think there's this cherished notion of a coherent, unified self, and Derrida is ripping it to pieces, but that's just silly. It's really hard to find a philosopher who has not somehow complicted the notion of the self, and Derrida, re: the self and everything else, is always just saying things others have said before. Derrida says in "Demeur," "The self itself. Is there a witness who would dare say this? And yet is there a witness who must not say this, in all conscience, namely: 'At the moment of my attestation I am no longer the same as the witness who lived that and who remains irreplacable?'" (65). Which is a lot like the first paragraph of A Sickness Unto Death--it's not to be taken as an attempt at originality. But Derrida generalizes the phenomenon and names it. To meditate on the self is to become more and more aware of its constant stuctural disintegration, which is not just to say we're all dust in the wind (I used to could play that on a tennis racket, but never learned it on guitar). What he shows, time after time, is that everything deconstructs--all names, all concepts, all words, all things. We experience the deconstruction of the self, presumably, in a moment, so then he deconstructs "moment." At first, we may predict that the result of this awareness would send us off screaming and wailing into the night, but that never happens, in my experience. What happens is that people are struck by a sense that they are reading more closely and understanding more deeply than they ever have before. Rather than deconstruction being a violence that separates, it is instead a pattern that binds. It's not a theory that one applies to a text but something one suddenly starts seeing and reading in texts. (I realize I may have lost you miles back in this paragraph, but you'll tell me.) A reading and thinking based on the consistency of radical, structural difference cannot exclude anyone from anything, which cannot be said of the more conventional academic mode of category manipulation. And gone in deconstruction are the hypothetical, provisional nature of discourse that we're all used to taking for granted--all reading and thinking are immediate. In other words, we never have to say, with deconstruction, "we all know the term 'Christian' means something different to everyone, but for the same of argument, let's define it, provisionally, thus: ____________ ." What we do in deconstruction, instead, is read, reading texts and all their concepts and structures against themselves, in all their proliferating plurality, to see what emerges. I want to argue that all of this can be done without the voilence of naming, the violence that George feels when Norwegians talk about Lutheranism, and I feel when you talk about postmodernists, etc. It just seems to me a mode of discourse that is both more decent and polite and also more rigorous, since it doesn't involve manipulating categories we know are provisional at best and saying that the violence, since it is necessary, must be made a virtue of. Certainly, category manipulation is a valuable skill, one I'm practicing as I write this, perhaps without much subtlety, and one that we can be trained to do artfully rather than stupidly. But I don't think it's defacto the only way to think about things, and so I don't think its violence is inevitable.

Blosser:

First, when you state that deconstruction isn't violent or destructive, you touch on something we've addressed before. While I don't doubt the benign motives of some who engage in deconstruction (I know I sometimes do), I think the case remains to be made as to the overall impact of what has spiraled into a movement under that label (and there I'd doubt you'd disagree with me too strongly).

Second, when you say that Derrida has done nothing really that radically new in deconstructing the notion of the "self," you're right. Others before him have done so no less profoundly-- and I'm not only thinking of the skeptical Hume but Christian medieval thinkers who accept the notion of the soul while delighting in its mystifying elusiveness from a phenomenal point of view. I think I've acknowledged before in correspondence with you that Derrida, when read in one way, is really very unoriginal: he simply states more succinctly and artfully than many others have the implicit critique of finitude and temporality that the post-Cartesian Enlightenment project (especially) calls down upon itself. In other ways, though, I think he's remarkably original; but not in this respect.

Third, I would like to hear you play "Dust in the Wind" on your tennis racket sometime.

Fourth, when you say that awareness of the deconstrutive effects on our understanding of the self haven't usually sent us off screaming into the night, but have heightened our awareness of reading more closely and understanding more deeply, I have no doubt you are right -- so far as some readers are concerned. But different people understand and react to things in different ways. The first reports of the death of God brought expressions of relief and exhilaration among Enlightenment intellectuals. Nietzsche is sometimes read this way, which I think is mistaken: "Alas, grand me madness," he cries, rather, "for by being above the Law I am the most outcast of outcasts." Etc. And certainly Sartre scorns those who are too giddy over the prospect, finding it "embarrassing" that there is no God, because with His death comes the death of grounding any ethics in a "heaven of values." Etc. Perhaps you would dismiss as "sophomoric" the reaction of some you have encountered to Derrida and deconstruction. In any case, I think you may agree with me that reactions have not been uniform; and the reasons for that, in my view, are well worth exploring.

Fifth, I am sorry you feel "violence" in the way I talk about postmodernism. I don't suppose either of us would feel too badly about the "violence" a southern white racist felt about our way of describing neo-Nazi attitudes. The point, of course, isn't that you're a "white racist," but that I think I find a lack of intellectual integrity and rigour in certain writers (I'm not thinking here of Derrida or yourself) I can't find any way of classifying other than "post-modernist." The apparent strenght of these writers is their weakness; their weakness their strength. They capitalize on the inability of their opponents to achieve Cartesian certitude about their first principles, then leave the sophomores thinking that there are no certainties to be found. Richard Rorty, for example, left the Philosophy Dept. at Princeton because he concluded that truth is all fiction anyway, having defined "truth" as: "whatever your peers let you get away with saying." On the one hand, this appears "strong": Cartesian apodicticity is an impossible ideal for finite human beings. I don't know who wouldn't grant that. But this "strength" is the flip side of a weakness: it leaves the sophomoric hordes assuming that there is no truth or reality to be had at all, which is simply silly, as Plato proves countless times in his dialogues. I return to the crosses around St. Aloysius Church: I have no doubt that those exist who feel "violated" by that silent witness to the truth of what is occurring daily in this culture of death, but do these silent crosses in fact DO VIOLENCE to anyone? Aren't those who kill babies to the tune of 4000 a day in the U.S. alone involved in doing violence a bit more directly than those who have erected those crosses?

Sixth, you link doing violence with what you call "category manipulation." You admit: "Certainly, category manipulation is a valuable skill, one I'm practicing as I write this, perhaps without much subtlety, and one that we can be trained to do artfully rather than stupidly. But I don't think it's defacto the only way to think about things, and so I don't think its violence is inevitable." So then how would you avoid the violence of category manipulation if you think there are other ways of thinking about things? Would you stop short of ding ehskl slk'je- kjsl bl, whiek skljdk schleissnich tsiasll ? If words are to mean anything, isn't "category manipulation" not only unavoidable, but a great gift? Granted, there is a flexible semantic range of meaning that words convey. "Postmodernist" or "Christian" or "Lutheran" can mean a number of very different, sometimes even contradictory, things. But doesn't meaningful communication require us to try our best to say what we mean and mean what we say? Is there anything between that an jabberwocky?

Interlocutor:

Also, you say,

I appreciate the spirit and disposition of your statements here, I think; and I think anyone in or out of the academy ought to be about increasing his understanding, deepening his faith, and so on. No problem there. But I don't see how your second option avoids the denotatively self-eviscertating quality of "courtesy meanings" such as attach connotatively to "gentlemen" (as in "Gentlemen's club") or "ladies" (as in "Ladies' Room") or "Christian" (as in "good white English-speakin' Christian folk"). Doesn't it make far more (un-laughable) sense to talk about "Christianity" as denoting a set of propositions that anyone can adhere to regardless of the color of their skin, ethnicity, etc.? I'm against malicious name-calling as much as the next fellow, but what use are names at all unless they mean something?

I appreciate this--certainly, propositions do have the value of (potentiall, at least) crossing color lines, etc. (whether they do so in fact is another question). I didn't intend to say that my second option "avoids" the denotatively self-eviscertating quality of "courtesy meanings," exactly (unless I DID say it, which would be a different story), but rather that such "denotatively self-eviscertating" terms need not be said always to be used trivially. If Lutherans and Quakers work together in "Christian" collaboration to build a Habitat house, the term "Christian may be "denotatively self-eviscertating," since it might well turn out that the two groups could not agree on the truth and interpretation of a single proposition. Still, however, the house would get built, and both would think of the building of it as a Christian act, but in its furthering of the commandments to love thy neighbor, care for the poor, etc., and in its furthering of Christian unity. The term "Christian" might thus be an entirely unphilosophical term, and if it were used naively as if it were a philosophical term, it could easily become an offensive one. (If "Christian" means you should care for the poor, then "Christian" probably means "Muslim," a term that Muslims would perhaps understandably prefer, and they might expect us to recognize that.) But you know, the Lutherans, who are used to thinking of themselves as "Christian," would probably use the term with greater fondness and personal meaning after the experience, etc. Unphilosophical, but untrivial.

Blosser:

Quakers and Lutherans working together on building a Habitat house is a good example; and what you go on to describe, I think, underlines those areas where their mutual understanding of the term "Christian" and its call to love neighbor, etc., coincide. The fact that there would be differences of theological definition further down doesn't mean that there isn't agreement of theological definition further up. Lutherans and Quakers could probably even agree without disagreement in calling their joint effort a "Christian" project. But what do you do when Quakers join Lutherans for the explicit purpose of thinking through the requirements of Christ duiring wartime in light of their respective traditions, and George Fox is an amicable pacifist and Luther is a pugnacious hot head who counsels the German princes in his tract, Against the Murderous Thieving Hordes of Peasants, to "stab, smite, and slay the rebels" in the uprisings of the German peasants (who were by and large simple anabaptist folk)? While most Lutherans today would doubtless condemn Luther's attitude, they still have a hawkish tradition that would be very much at odds with that of the Quakers. How do Christians with different understanding of what it means to be "Christian" proceed? Probably no differently than professors with different understanding of what it means to be "postmodernist" proceed: by discussing and arguing, hopefully with charity and respect for one another. I don't see how "Quaker" can be made out to mean "Lutheran" any more than "Christian" can be made out to be "Muslim," though the latter two might be able to agree that their agreement at some point had to do with their being mutually "children of Abraham" in one sense or another.

A discussion on postmodernism (Part 5)

(Continued ...)

Interlocutor:

Now I beg your pardon, but you've caused me to have an idea. (I bet I'm not the first person to be so influenced.)

I wonder whether a literature/philosophy course might be built some time around the notion of sacramentality. You know a lot about it, of course, and I don't, so that would be a first stumbling block. But we could certainly bring in Hopkins on the sacramentality of the world, and I could test my developing hunch that Derridean deconstruction, precisely in its passivity, is a logic of opening up to that (what we might call) sacramentality (if we were not formerly-Algerian secular French Jews, which we're not). Perhaps you could bring in the existentialist (whom I haven't read much of in a long time) by way of opposition . . .? Just a thought.

Blosser:

I would hardly want to say that I know a lot about sacramentalism. My reading here is limited to that of a religious variety, and fairly marginal at that. But I do find it interesting. How Derrida would fit in is an interesting question, which I haven't thought about very much; but I have wondered from time to time whether there isn't a connection (as mentioned before) between his notions about "surplus of meaning" and those found in sacramentalism (there is perhaps this difference, that the latter presupposes a transcendental signified, even if the mode of signification is via negativia [in-finite, etc.] and/or analogical [like a father, etc.]). It sounds like it could be workable, something maybe to think about for the next time we can consider something like this.

Interlocutor:

And come on, now. I'm sure you laughing dissenters from inbred Lutheran establishmentarianism enjoyed that private moment of shared moral superiority immensely, and everything, but I'm also sure you know that, in distinguishing "Lutheran" from "Christian" the faculty members in question must have been distinguishing "Lutheranism" as a subset of "Christianity," not an alternative cult.

Blosser:

Well, but of course, but that hardly changes the irony of the statements!

Interlocutor:

One of these days I'm going to have to introduce you to Venn diagrams--they're very interesting and helpful, I think you'll find.

Blosser:

Oh, like those we use in logic? I'm a very visual learner and find them quite helpful. Apparently you do too.

Interlocutor:

Try a thought experiment: imagine a system of intersecting or overlapping circles. Each circle is a "Christian" denomination or faith system. Imagine there is one tiny core area that is included in every one of the circles--is that what we're going to call "Christianity"? Then imagine one great big circle that encompasses the entirety of all the littler circles--is that what we're going to call "Christianity"? "Christianity" can't mean either one, right?

Blosser:

Depends. C.S. Lewis describes his project in his opening pages of Mere Christianity (pictured right) as describing the broad hallway one enters upon opening the door into the house of "Christianity." He does a fairly good job of describing "basic Christianity" that would be shared by most branches of orthodox historic Christianity (those that accepted the content of the Nicene Creed, which even Fundamentalists do, though they couldn't recite it and may not know what it was). But Lewis goes on to state that one can't make his home in the hallway: he has to open one of the doors along the hall and go into one of those rooms along the side, because that's where he'll find the crackling fire, hospitality, and sustenance. This view is also sometimes called the "branch" theory of Christianity, I think, suggesting that the denominations come out of a common trunk-- though I think there are some limits to this kind of imagery. It all comes down to the question of authority (author's rights) and standards of judgment (more on which later).

Interlocutor:

... Because it would either be a set that contained nothing but the proposition "Jesus was a fairly decent human being" or it would contain a whole host of propositions, many of which contradicted each other. So if these two are the only possibilities, then "Christianity" (and thus "Christian" also) cannot be a meaningful term. We are thus left with two possibilities. First, we can argue for the exclusion for some of the little circles in the diagram on various grounds, sort of not really excluding them, exactly, because that wouldn't be nice, and Christians are nice, especially when they're excluding other Christians, but just sort of tolerating them slash ignoring them and having a great laugh about them when they're not around, because each time we do that to one, we make the common ground bigger (and of course also imaginary, since the circles haven't really disappeared) and "Christianity" "stronger." Or, second, we can just can the term, at least within serious conversation, and try to find unity and coherence in more specific (and thus more potentially meaningful terms) like Lutheranism, Catholicism, etc. The first way is violent, and the term "Christian," used according to it, seems offensive to me.

Blosser:

Well, first of all, I'm not sure you can avoid what you call the "violence" of the first option by means of your second one, since the problem would appear to be simply pushed back a step and you'd still have those arguing what constitutes true "Lutheranism" (as you do right here on campus among ELCA folk), authentic "Catholicism" (as you do among Catholics), etc. Second, I'm not sure that what yo call "violence" is avoidable at all. Take "Platonism." How do we define what "Platonism" is? There were many successor schools within Plato's Academy in Athens, lasting until the 6th century AD. Then there was Renaissance Platonism. Who's to say what "Platonism" is, some may ask? But it doesn't really strike me as such a difficult matter. One goes back to Plato, of course. Now that doesn't definitively settle all questions, since we human beings are a pugnacious and irrepressibly inquisitive and imaginative sort and one can float alternative interpretations of, say, Plato's "Theory of Forms," and whatnot. But Plato's text at least gives you some sort of benchmark or anchor or standard as a frame of reference, it seems to me. If someone claimed to hold "Platonism" but upon articulating his views was discovered to be proposing Aristotelian hylemorphism, one could say to him: "Well, you can call yourself anything you like. It's a free country. But if you think you hold a view that conforms in any way to Plato's views set forth in his dialogues, I think you're a trifle mistaken." Hylemorphism is simply not what one finds in Platonic dialogues. Similarly, it seems to me, one can make such judgments about "Lutheranism," "Catholicism," or "Christianity" without intending any sort of malice or entertaining any spirit of "violence." It's a matter of meaning what one says, is it not? We may find this challenging and difficult; but I don't see how this would make it meaningless or render it impossible.

Interlocutor:

The second seems much more in the spirit of academic dialogue: used in that sense, "Christian" would mean neither the whole entirety nor the tiny intersection in the middle (however artificually inflated by ignorance) but the orientation of occupying a position within one of the circles and looking around into some of the others in the hope of increasing one's understanding and deepening one's faith. "Christian" would not be a meaningful term philosophically, but it would function culturally like a handshake or a "top-o-the-morning-to-ya"--it would be an invitation to commune, not in the strictly sacramental sense but in the world's-all-sacramental sense. I find this use of the term a lot less laughable than the sense of "Christianity" as a proposition set that can't be intersected, which I think is the position of many of our students, particularly in their early years here.

Blosser:

I appreciate the spirit and disposition of your statements here, I think; and I think anyone in or out of the academy ought to be about increasing his understanding, deepening his faith, and so on. No problem there. But I don't see how your second option avoids the denotatively self-eviscertating quality of "courtesy meanings" such as attach connotatively to "gentlemen" (as in "Gentlemen's club") or "ladies" (as in "Ladies' Room") or "Christian" (as in "good white English-speakin' Christian folk"). Doesn't it make far more (un-laughable) sense to talk about "Christianity" as denoting a set of propositions that anyone can adhere to regardless of the color of their skin, ethnicity, etc.? I'm against malicious name-calling as much as the next fellow, but what use are names at all unless they mean something?

To return to your Venn diagrams, I agree that the all-inclusive circle lacks much definition. Yet I can allow for the fact that life is messy and one of my best friends is a Jehovah's Witness who believes in the infallibile authority of Scripture and loves Jesus Christ while rejecting any notion of Christ's divinity. Is he a Christian? Not according to any standard stemming from the Nicene tradition, which set forth its creed ("... true God from true God ...") in opposition to the declared heresy of Arianism, which denied Christ's divinity. I respect my friend's desire to call himself "Christian" according to the significance that has for him-- namely his respect for Jesus as a unique Messianic character, somewhat in the way that Muslims respect Jesus as an authoritative "prophet." But both of us understand where we stand vis-a-vis one another and that each finds the other's definitions of "Christianity" unacceptable in some way or other. I see this as a matter of "respectful dialogue" in which each respects the other while agreeing to disagree for the sake of intellectual (and spiritual) integrity.

At the other end, where the little circles overlap at one point, is no less problematic, as you point out. Evangelicals often like to point out that whatever their differences among themselves, they at least agree on "essentials." These usually include things like "justification by faith," "baptism," and "Lord's Supper." This may seem to lend support to the overlapping point theory. However, the problems surface as soon as you ask how different Evangelical groups understand these "essentials." For example, the moment you ask whether "justification by faith" means that observing the moral law is unnecessary or unimportant, you will find a spectrum of answers, some of which contradict one another. And so forth.

So it seems we have to reflect, like it or not, on our principle of authority (not power, but author's rights). Speaking as a resident Romish Papist, I can say that no matter how confused and conflicted individual Catholics may be in their opinions about things, there is no question where the Church's position on any issue can be found. One can always look it up in the Catechism. Where does the Catechism get it's authority? From tradition? And whence tradition? The Apostles, and so on, back to Christ. Of course this leads to excluding some from the category "Christian." But what else would one expect? As a sampling of this traditional view, here are the words of Peter Kreeft in Fundamentals of the Faith (pictured below):

"By Catholic standards, the religions of the world can be ranked by how much truth they teach. Catholicism is first [notice this doesn't assume an absolute monopoly on truth], with Orthodoxy equal except for the one issue orf papal authority. Then comes Protestantism and any 'separated brethren' who keep Christian essentials as found in Scripture. Third comes traditional Judaism, which worships the same God but not via Christ. Fourth is Islam, greatest of the theistic heresies; fifth, Hinduism, a mystical pantheism; sixth, Buddhism, a pantheism without a theos; seventh, modern Judaism, Unitarianism, Confucianism, Modernism, and secular humanism, none of which have either mysticism or supernatural religion but only ethics; eighty, idolatry; and ninth, Satanism. To collapse these nine levels is like thinking the earth is flat." (Fundamentals of the Faith, p. 75)

Obviously a secular humanist will have his own way of perceiving the hierarchy of truth, as does the Muslim or Satanist. What I find fanciful is the view of the secular relativist who thinks that all such distinctions can be done away, from the point of view of the truth of his relativist perspective.

Order the books cited above here:

A discussion on postmodernism (Part 4)

(Continued ...)

Interlocutor:

This is very helpful and interesting. I personally would want nothing more than to experience all life as sacramental, and I was not aware that that was a theologically Catholic notion. Certainly the past few years have meant an ever greater sensitivity to that sacramentality. That's what I meant when I was talking about listening before. Joining a church was only the beginning. Joining the Global Missions committee, brought greater sensitivity, and joining the choir recently has really jacked up the volume. Life is good these days. I would accept, I think, that private revelation cannot contradict public, but still, of course, there is the variable of interpretation to keep things murky.

Blosser:

Murky? Yes, of course; if you want to call it that. The way I see it, this is just a condition of human finitude. Even the Catholic Church, which proudly sets forth its dogmas (doctrines that have been officially "defined" by Ecumenical Councils and Popes, usually in response to controversy) as "irreformable" is faced with the fact that it's "definitions" are themselves subject to further interpretations. For example, we know that orthodox Christianity accepts that God is "three Persons" + "one Being" (substance, or nature); but does this mean that Jesus' human consciousness was independent of His divine consciousness, or that God the Father has a different consciousness than Jesus? Such matters remain open for speculation, for those who enjoy that sort of thing-- at least until the Church decides that a particular controversy has reached the point of perhaps leading the faithful into gross theological distortions and that it's time for a further "definition" to fine-tune her teaching.

Most Protestant denominations have what they understand to be "sacraments," of course, though not all (Quakers and Salvation Army folk have no sacraments, I'm told). And it's reasonable to assume that some of this understanding of sacramentality (as an "outward sign of an inward grace") infuses mainline Protestant conceptions, which, after all, emerged in the 16th century from Catholicisim (Peter Kreeft likes to say that Luther was a Catholic monk who rediscovered the Catholic Faith in a Catholic Book).

But the understanding that not only the two Protestant sacraments or the seven Catholic ones, but that all of life is "sacramental" I have not seen developed extensively outside of Catholic literature on the subject. It's quite a fascinating subject, I would agree. The idea that the world itself is a sacrament, which is saturated with meaning that points beyond itself, has implications that boggle the mind (not only in terms of "surplus of meaning," etc.), and sharply contrasts with the French existentialist view that the world is absurd and nothing means much of anything.

Interlocutor:

And I accept your distinction between a Christian prostitute and Christian prostitution. I always forget that you're a philosopher!

Blosser:

It's a professional hazard.

Interlocutor:

On lables, I guess I was trying to bring into our analysis a way of softening the violence of lables while still not diminishing their force. Postmodernism doesn't really require any further comment, but there are so many other lables. I have sometimes heard, from students and sometimes from faculty too, that such-and-such ought or ought not be done here because this is a "Christian" school. I disagree: it is a Lutheran school, and that has to mean something. I wanted to mention that because it gets us back to your original question: can there be Christian psychology, or whatever. I remember that you served wine at your faculty discussion of Lutheranism, which many would call un-Christian, for example, and if they did, we would feel the violence of the use of lables without the z-sub-1 clause I was trying to think about.

Blosser:

I agree with your mediating stance between softening the violence of lables while still not diminishing their force.

As to the "Christian" vs. "Lutheran" thing, a Baptist colleague of mine and I have a running joke stemming from early discussions between some campus evangelical Fundamentalist (probably Baptist) students and some Lutheran faculty members we witnessed. The Fundamentalists were saying something emphatically, like: "C'mon, we can't allow that here! Isn't this a CHRISTIAN school?" And the Lutherans answered, agog with horror, "Heavens, no! This isn't a Christian school; this is a LUTHERAN school!" Each time we recall that conversation, we nearly laugh our asses off. By God, don't call us CHRISTIANS, dammit! We're LUTHERANS!

Now I understand completely (I think) what animates this Lutheran response. The assumption seems to be that a "Christian" institution would be one in which we might see people in the cafeteria holding hands, bowing their heads, and singing "Kum Ba Ya" or preaching against inter-racial dating in the quad. There may be some humor in that, but there's humor in spades in the notion of Lutherans bending over backwards to deny that they're "Christian." I agree that being Lutheran has to mean something, but I think you would agree that it can't mean that Lutherans, in contrast to Fundamentalist "Christians," are willing to tolerate everything, because they quite surely do not wish to tolerate Fundamentalists.

What good Lutheran folk as well as Fundamentalists seem to lack in these parts -- near the buckle of the Bible Belt as we are -- are viable models of intelligent Christianity that is both faithful to the historic creeds and culturally engaged. Such models, in my opinion, do exist. In fact, I don't see any other options but to identify myself with such models. In my experience they are most readily found in Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) and various Catholic circles. But that's a story for another time.

A conversation on postmodernism (Part 3)

This conversation is Part 3 of a discussion with two previous parts: Part 1 (Sept. 2nd) and Part 2 (Sept. 10th).

Interlocutor:

You didn't strike a nerve with your post-before-lost, but I did get to writing about things I respond to emotionally.

Blosser:

Well, that's good to know! Passion's what makes the world go 'round.

Interlocutor:

1. On lables. You seem to want to devide their meaning into strict denotation and "courtesy connotation." Forgive me if that's a reduction of your position--I don't mean it to be. Which is one way to look at it, and a rather stark one. I would want to much more generous with certain terms--for example, I can readily conceive of a Christian prostitute and would not feel called to legislate the term "Christian" away from him or her. Of course such a person might be simply a hypocrit, but he/she might also be a drug addict, or mentally ill--the person's faith in ultimate redemption might be pure and genuine. I would distinguish between justifying the person's mode of earning as a "Christian" a living and denying the person a legitimate claim to the term "Christian". I see that it would be possible to use such terms more strictly, but I seen no reason to be stricter with them. I see nothing to be gained by the strictness, and lots to be lost.

Blosser:

I get paid to make distinctions, of course. Sometimes these can be annoying or even unhelpful. But hopefully they can also serve, at times, to clarify. Plato knew that the world is full of gray shades that suggest the absence of any absolutes to some minds, like those of Protagoras and his fellow sophists. But he also knew that absolute Forms exist, such as numbers, and insisted that mathematics comprise a ten-year portion of his Academy's curriculum in order to dispel the sophomoric assumption that nothing is absolute. But the largest portion of his curriculum was reserved for a 15 year internship in local administration, so that his best students might acquire practical experience in applying absolute black-and-white principles to the mucky shades of gray in ordinary life that require years of difficult prudential judgments to perfect. All of which is to say that I readily recognize an array of possible shades of meaning in my distinction between a denotation and connotation. But without that distinction where would we be?

As to the prostitution question, I see no problem in what you're suggesting—that a Christian woman (or man) could, under unfortunate circumstances, fall into prostitution. In that sense I'd be willing to refer to a "Christian prostitute" in the sense of a prostitute who happens to be Christian, even though her trade would hardly be condoned by her religion. But what I said was not "Christian prostitute" but "Christian prostitution." While I can't prevent anyone from physically uttering the expression, I don't see how it can be anything other than an oxymoron, like "married bachelor" -- unless you can see a way to be more generous with your labels here too. Life and language can get pretty murky sometimes, what with such things as virgin mothers and talking asses in Bible. But short of divine intervention, aren't there limits to some sorts of murkiness?

Interlocutor:

2. You quite rightly appeal to symbolic logic:

Well, first of all, if we define position 'p' as consisting in adhering to propositions 'x, y, & z,' then I don't see any alternative but to say than a person affirming 'x, y, & z' holds 'p.' If, in addition to 'p' a person holds another set of beliefs -- call them 'a, b, and c' -- this would not seem to change the fact that he holds 'p' -- unless 'a, b, and c' contradict 'x, y, & z.' Another wrinkle could be that the person holds only part of 'p' (say 'y & z' but not 'x'), in which case one would have to qualify what one meant when saying that he holds 'p'. I see no alternatives, unless you see another way out of the labeling cul-de-sac.

To this I would say that, while your logic here is of course logical, the logical rigor undermines (perhaps this is ironic) the usefulness the the lable (p). Which I guess is why you say you are only provisionally interested in lables, right? I would personally like only to be labled with a lable that means something to me, a lable that I would actually choose and with which I would identify. One could probably compose a fairly unobjectionable definition of a Baptist, and it is quite likely that Dick would fit that definition, but I would argue that Dick is also a Baptist because he says he is and because he has spent (I assume) much of his life saying he is. If our definition were too loose, lots of people who would fit our definition of a Baptist would probably not think of themselves as such. If it were too strict, it would exclude people from a category to which they are attached. It would probably exclude most undergraduates, for example, whose understandings of faith and theology are probably not very nuanced, and if we excluded them from the category, they would probably stay not very nuanced.

Perhaps all we need to do, then, is say that position p consists in adhering to propositions x, w, z, etc., with under the necessary condition that one of the propositions, let's call it z-sub-1, have the form and effect of "I hold position p." (There's probably a more scientific way to express that.) I would so augment your formulation of the use of categories and lables. No argument concluding that John Doe is not a Baptist could have any real force to John Doe or Baptists otherwise. (I would concede that z-sub-1 could not be the only member of the proposition set, even though some probably wouldn't.) My proclaiming publicly that I am a pickle does not make me one, but your argument that I am a pickle doesn't either. The only thing that makes me a pickle is my being a pickle, and if that isn't helpful, since it doesn't involve a definition, that's alright. As Sterne says, "To define----is to distrust."

Blosser:

Still, I think you clearly grant by your example of the "pickle" label that the acceptability of a label to the person labeled (whether by himself or by another) is hardly an essential condition of its accuracy. You are free, of course, to call yourself a "pickle," as others are free (for whatever reason, playful or malicious) to call you that. But as long as we're playing by the implicit rules of the ordinary language game, there are clear limits to the intelligibility of such an appellation. If you really thought you were a pickle, you'd be deluded. If you thought you looked like a pickle and called yourself a pickle in fun, that would signify (hopefully) something else. But however fluid and mucky words and meanings may be, they also offer a certain level of resistance as does our whole environment (whether linguistic, physical, or mental) in our ordinary experience, do they not? And this play between fluidity and resistance, it seems, it what permits us to communicate, to the extent that we are able.

Interlocutor:

3. You say,

Third, you say (above) that you've never asserted the death of all grand narratives as your own view. On the other hand, in your In Memoriam article, you write (on p. 72) that the "intense, almost cataleptic absorption into the moment" in section 19 of In Memoriam is "a profound experiencing of the deepest truth." This "truth" (your word, not Tennyson's) you describe as "not the loss of a friend so much as the structural collapse of every coherence-giving narrative about the world." This would seem to suggest that this is what you take to be true of the world and that Tennyson's crisis was precipitated by his insight into this truth. Or did you mean this was only subjectively "true for him," in spite of the fact that there objectively remains one or another coherence-giving narrative to be discovered that he somehow missed? Or is there some other alternative I'm not seeing?

First, I will always require my friends to make themselves comfortable somehow with the fact that my beliefs are always in flux, are sometimes half-baked, etc. That may be the case here. However, it does not seem readily apparent to me that a character's experience of the structural collapse of every available coherence-giving narrative a) could not be an experience of the truth or b) entails the "postmodernism" of the critic who points it out, even if he may coincidentally do so in an essay that also cites Derrida. The term would seem especially hasty, I should think, if said critic cited a clear and careful argument (Derrida's analysis of the instant) that has nothing to do with any investment in postmodernism, whatever that would mean. If the claim were made that "all narratives deconstruct" were made with blithe innocence and confidence, that would be different, and perhaps that's how you interpreted my text--if it is, fair enough.

Blosser:

Your first point puts you in good company with J.J. Rousseau, who declared (as mentioned before) that his readers could not expect him to be clear and consistent at the same time. But beyond the playfulness of that point, I'm quite sympathetic to the fact that our ideas undergo a certain development. So have mine -- politically, religiously, culturally, and philosophically. Thus it was, perhaps, that Hegel accused Schelling of carrying out his own education in public, for changing his positions so many time in print.

As to your published essay, the fact that your essay also cites Derrida is, I think, quite beside the point, as you seem to agree. The question centers on what your assertions regarding Tennyson mean. What can I say? I have only the words themselves to play with, and no access to authorial intent! But I suppose you must know what you mean. It just seemed evident to me that you were not merely pointing out that Tennyson experienced the collapse of meta-narratives but that this was also "true" (whatever that means here).

Interlocutor:

4. You say,

I would disagree, though, that theology or politics is a matter we ought to leave to the experts. We would do so, I would argue, only at our own peril. It used to be said that religion, politics, and sex shouldn't be talked about in polite company. How British! But the longer I live I begin to think these are the only things worth talking about. One thing I agree with Mortimer Adler on is his notion that philosophy should not be relegated to the province of an academic elite but rather be viewed as the common vocation of everyone. That's why he spent the last half of his career re-writing his academic books for popular audiences -- books like Six Great Ideas (on truth, goodness, beauty, justice, equality, and freedom), and Aristotle for Everybody (on knowing, doing, and making) -- subjects everyone would need to think through in order to fulfill the Socratic principle that the "unexamined life is not worth living." I would further agree with Adler -- who converted from being a secular Jew in later life to Anglicanism, then before dying to Catholicism -- that the same is true of theology, and politics as well. But I don't really imagine any huge disagreements between us on these points, at least as to general principle.

No, no disagreements at all. What I meant to suggest, as I vaguely recall, was something different, and perhaps, having read widely about such things, you can help me figure this out. What I wanted to safe-guard and distinguish from theology (and in saying so, I am doing theology, I suppose, though not necessarilly good theology) is the experience of faith. I would use this term to include the experience of liturgy, which is of course an experience guided and structured by theology, but also the experience of minutely observing changes in clouds, as Hopkins did, or the experience of watching your son sleep. Forrell somewhere says something about baptism as being kissed by God, and reading that had a profound effect on me at the time of my own baptism--it's still something I think of often. This may sound pretty namby-pamby from a philosophical standpoint--I don't know. What are the various church's positions on revelation, miracle, personal epiphany, etc.? Obviously, we often feel we're having an epiphany and then later, upon more sober judgement, decide we were just befuddled--the term, if it even is a real term (it was for Joyce), should be used carefully if it is to mean anything. But I would be suspicious of a theology that did not somehow allow doe the reality of being kissed by God, even though that's just a silly metaphor--it seems a metaphor for something, somehow. Categories like "Christian," if applied too strictly, would seem to me to deny that such things happen and are real, which seems heretical to me. Why can't there be a Christian prostitute? I say, sure, there can be, and I have not the slightest interest in legislating the term so as to exclude anyone who would be included within its folds. Do I remember Dick or someone telling me recently that the Anabaptists believe in such experiences and that others do not? Perhaps it was you. Anyway, if you could recommend something short I could read on this question, I might actually read it. The take I want to make on Derrida is that first of all, he's right: things deconstruct, and second of all, through the fissures of that deconstruction shine the miraculous. His approach seems to me to be quite the opposite of any theology that would proceed using definitions that function to exclude, even is that exclusion and those definitions are only provisional.

Blosser:

What you seem to mean by the "experience" here, which you wish to safeguard, strikes me as having a lot to do with the profoundly Catholic notion that all of life itself is in some sense "sacramental." Everything seems to point beyond itself to everything else in some very deep sense. The one writer who does the best at capturing this idea, in my opinion, is Thomas Howard, in his unlikely little book, Chance, or the Dance? (pictured left) It has a great deal to do, really, with some of the questions about signifiers and significations that Derrida and others like yourself write about. But this is only one dimension of the question you raise.

You also seem to want to protect personal experiences, epiphanies, revelations, etc. against what looks like the encroaching repressiveness of propositional theology and ecclesial decrees that might somehow exclude or declare invalid such experiences. On this question, it seems to me, there are a couple of things to be said.
First, it is not only traditional theology that is exclusionary. Nearly any position is exclusionary, none more so than that liberalism that wants to extend its liberality to all comers but traditional Judeo-Christian values. Michael Polanyi (pictured right) writes in his book Meaning (pictured below): "Here the inconsistency of a liberalism based on philosophic doubt becomes apparent: freedom of thought is destroyed by the extension of doubt to the field of traditional ideals, which includes the basis for freedom of thought." (p.10) J.J. Rousseau himself, the philosopher who inspired the French Revolution and its cries of liberty, declared that anyone opposed to the "general will" must be "compelled to be free." Sort of like the liberality of Simone de Beauvoir's statement that women must not automatically be permitted the traditional choice of becoming mothers and homemakers, lest too many women make that choice!

Second, you ask, "What are the various church's positions on revelation, miracle, personal epiphany, etc.?" The Protestant denominations all branch out of Catholicism, though they stand at different distances from that trunk of tradition. Some sectarian groups that most Protestants would not even accept as being Christian, such as the Mormons, reject the traditional consensus of the Catholic tradition that God's public revelation given in the apostolic deposit of faith is a "closed book." That is, Mormons believe new books, like the Book of Mormon, can be added to the Bible as having equal authority to it. Most Protestants would agree with Catholic tradition in rejecting that view.

However, most Protestants would reduce God's revelation entirely to the written record of that revelation deposited in the Bible ("sola scriptura"), whereas Catholic tradition would not. Catholicism distinguishes (there we go, a distinction again!) between public and private revelation. Public revelation (which resides in Scripture and whatever else has been passed down and safeguarded by the Church as essential to faith and morals) is understood as concluded, a "closed book"; but private revelation is regarded as an ongoing phenomenon of the Christian experience. The Bible itself offers examples of private revelation -- for example, in the dream Joseph had, in which an angel of God warned him to take Jesus and his mother and flee to Egypt from the coming butchery of Herod Antipas. Private revelations might also include personal epiphanies, even a sense that God is leading him to think or do certain things. Is there any test to know that my private revelations, or those claimed by anyone, are not simply delusional? The Catholic assumption is that private revelations must conform to (may not contradict) what is found in public revelation. Hence, if I felt that I had a spiritual epiphany in which God was telling me to take up the trade of male prostitution, I could safely assume that I was delusional, since such behavior is clearly condemned in God's public revelation. But beyond that, the sky is the limit.

Personally, I very much resonate to your metaphorical description of baptism. In fact, I've shared with others a similar description of my experience of receiving the Holy Eucharist. Thomas Howard is also very good on these issues (as are many other Catholic writers). He has a substantial book entitled On Being Catholic (pictured left) that deals with these issues, as well as a much shorter but excellent book, also with a very unlikely title, called Evangelical Is Not Enough (pictured right). The mystics themselves are the best, of course, like the Carmelite mystics -- like St. John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul, or St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle (both pictured below) -- but they're quite demanding.

I think you're right about the use of the word "Christian" in two ways. First, I think a harshly judgmental attitude is contrary to the spirit of Christ. Second, I think that Christians today have often drifted so far from their historical confessional moorings that it becomes very difficult to put any limits on how a person understands the term. The second point, however, I see as posing a rather serious problem, at least from the point of view of a Catholic for whom there are clear limits to what beliefs and behaviors can and cannot count as conforming to Christ's teaching.

On the epistemology of religious propositions

A colleague of mine recently asked me the question how we can know, if not all roads lead to the top of the religious mountain (to God), which ones do. The following is how I responded:

The question you raise is the one that has been the obsession of philosophers since the Enlightenment, the epistemological one: how can we know?! The only answer I know to that question is circuitous, because I don't think there's a direct answer that will satisfy a true skeptic on any question of certitude.

For example: "How do I know my mind is not a brain in a vat of formaldehyde?" "How do I know I'm not in the Matrix"? "How do I know there's an external world corres-ponding to my perceptions?" "How do I know my memory is even sometimes reliable?" "How do I know the world did not come into existence only five minutes ago with all the appearance of age?"

None of these types of questions can be answered in a way that would conclusively demonstrate an answer to it in a way that would convince a skeptic of its certainty beyond all possible doubt. And the problem is compounded when we enter the arena of personal knowledge-- about other persons, about moral quandaries, about religious questions, etc.

In some respects, I would say that there are personal dispositional prerequisites for certain types of knowledge. For example, the person who has fallen in love with another sees qualities in that person to which others are blind. It's not that love is "blind," but rather that love has opened the eyes of the lover to those qualities that an indifferent person or hateful person would be blind.

How do we know, for example, that we have come to know a person we love sufficiently to trust him or her, particularly where it counts, say, in an engagement, for example? Is there any algorithm one could follow in order to know when one could safely commit to marriage? Of course not. So how do you arrive at such a personal commitment? By an irrational leap? Not exactly. One would try to learn everything possible about the person in an ordinary rational way. But there are dimension to knowledge that surpass any scientific algorithm, such as the intuitions and insights furnished by love (no "scientific" way to measure that).

What about God? Should we expect God, if He exists, to have any interest in revealing anything about Himself to us if we are indifferent to the demands of moral integrity and intellectual honesty in our lives? There are armchair philosophers who declare, "If there is a God, why doesn't he open the sky over New York City and reveal himself and declare: 'The guessing game is over: Behold, I EXIST!'"? But that strikes me as somewhat similar to the Romeo who waltzes up to a pretty Juliet, unknown to him, and breathlessly declares through his drooling mouth: "Hey, baby! How about we get it on tonight ... y'know, the horizontal tango??" Why would a Romeo with any brains expect to acquire intimate knowledge of any good and decent woman through such a proposal? The fellow is not morally or spiritually disposed to be open to true intimate knowledge of a woman. Why should it differ with God, assuming He exists?

Blaise Pascal (pictures left) knew that he couldn't convince his gambling buddies of any religious claims in a direct way, so he offered the famous Wager of his own (as I offered the apostate student). His objective wasn't to directly change the beliefs of his buddies. He knew what we believe to be true is beyond our immediate rational control. Yet he also knew that there are other things, such as our moral behavior and dispositions, that are well within our control. By showing what is at stake in betting on the truth or falsehood of Christianity (something that most everyone is already doing, one way or the other, by the little choices they are already making in their everyday lives), he wanted to launch them into a direction of living where they began caring about things within their control. Do they really care about truth enough to honestly seek it? Are they being honest with themselves about their own moral lives, or are they excusing behavior in themselves they would condemn in others, etc. The objective, for Pascal, was to get them to cultivate a disposition of humility, because he knew that one's disposition can alter what one is able to see. Just as the lover sees in his beloved qualities to which others are blind, one who begins to humbly seek truth, live honestly and morally, begins to perceive dimensions of the world to which others (and perhaps he himself previously) have been blind.

As to that which is more unique in the Christian claims, here's what one author said about the "road" analogy (Peter Kreeft in Fundamentals of the Faith, pictured left):

"Christianity is not a system of man's search for God but a story of God's search for man. True religion is not like a cloud of incense wafting up from special spirits into the nostrils of a waiting God, but like a Father's hand thrust downward to rescure the fallen. Throughout the Bible, man-made religion fails. There is no uman way up the mountain, only a divine way down. 'No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.'

"If we made the roads, it would indeed be arrogant to claim that any one road is the only valid one, for all human things are equal, at least in all being human, finite, and mixtures of good and bad. If we made the roads, it would be as stupid to absolutize one of them as to absolutize one art form, one political system, or one way of skinning a cat. But if God made the road, we must find out whether he made many or one. If he made only one, then the shoe is on the other foot: it is humility, not arrogance, to accept this one road from God, and it is arrogance, not humility, to insist that our man-made roads are as good as God's God-made one.

"But which assumption is true? Even if the pluralistic one is true, not all religions are equal, for then one religion is worse and more arrogant than all others, for it centers on one who claimed, 'I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man can come to the Father but by me.'"

A lot more to be said, of course, but there's how I would begin addressing the sophisticated philosophical grilling that's coming from your Socratic self over there.

A conversation on postmondernism (continued)

Interlocutor:

What fun. The label thing still interests me. Suppose being a postmodernist means holding ten or fifteen opinions, and I hold all of them--I take it that you'd then feel justified in sticking that label on me, as if my protests could thus hold no logical force, which of course I deny, since I have also other opinions besides those on the list.

Blosser:

It seems I may unintentially have hit a nerve in my earlier exchange and, if so, I apologize.

But let's take a look at the import of what you've just said. First of all, if we define position 'p' as consisting in adhering to propositions 'x, y, & z,' then I don't see any alternative but to say than a person affirming 'x, y, & z' holds 'p.' If, in addition to 'p' a person holds another set of beliefs -- call them 'a, b, and c' -- this would not seem to change the fact that he holds 'p' -- unless 'a, b, and c' contradict 'x, y, & z.' Another wrinkle could be that the person holds only part of 'p' (say 'y & z' but not 'x'), in which case one would have to qualify what one meant when saying that he holds 'p'. I see no alternatives, unless you see another way out of the labeling cul-de-sac.

Interlocutor:

You suggest that a postmodernist believes the following:

1. a shift from the primacy of being (ancient & medieval) and knowing (modern) to meaning (post-modern) with a focus on the constitution of meaning in language.
2. the substitution of narratives (stories) for truth.
3. the assumption that all narratives conceal a play for power, and the assumption that any one narrative used as a meta-narrative is oppressive.
4. the assumption that human beings construct themselves and their identities exclusively through their narratives.
5. the assumption that ethics, like knowledge, is a linguistic construct, so that social good is whatever society takes it to be.
6. the assumption, then, that literary theory is the most foundational discipline, displacing the ancient role of philosophy and the medieval role of theology.

But I don't think the label fits me very well, anyway, just for the record (though I care a lot less what people call me now than I used to). All of these assumptions seem to me rather obviously childish bastardizations of [Michel] Foucault [pictured right], but I don't know--I haven't read much Foucault because I don't find him very interesting. Is your author here creating straw-men doctrines, or are these things people really believe? I find them quite uninteresting, either way. The thing about grand narratives, though, seems more interesting, especially from a sociological perspective, and perhaps worth thinking about. You cleverly imply that, for postmodernists, the death of all grand narratives is the grand narrative, and perhaps it is, but I've never said it is mine.

Blosser:

First, the list above was part of James Sire's attempt (in The Universe Next Door, pictured left) to define "postmodernism," not my attempt to label you. I shouldn't be surprised if, as you say, his list doesn't "fit" you very well; though the more interesting question for you personally might be whether it fits at all.

Second, if the term "postmodernist" comes to mind when I think of you -- once in a while it does (though not frequently) -- it's for several reasons: (a) as mentioned before, you've referred to yourself in the past, playfully, as our resident "orthodox postmodernist"; (b) you make no secret of your admiration for Derrida's writings; (c) and your stated views about the "truth" of what happened between Lancelot and Guenevere, as well as in (d) your statements about "iterability" and "fiction" in the copy of your Analecta Husserliana article you gave me entitled "Meditation and Mediation, Secrets and Seizures: [Lord Alfred] Tennyson's In Memoriam as Fiction/Testimony" [see my review here], fit the profile (and, yes, we all "profile" as an unavoidable by-product of trying to understand what we read and hear).

Third, you say (above) that you've never asserted the death of all grand narratives as your own view. On the other hand, in your In Memoriam article, you write (on p. 72) that the "intense, almost cataleptic absorption into the moment" in section 19 of In Memoriam is "a profound experiencing of the deepest truth." This "truth" (your word, not Tennyson's) you describe as "not the loss of a friend so much as the structural collapse of every coherence-giving narrative about the world." This would seem to suggest that this is what you take to be true of the world and that Tennyson's crisis was precipitated by his insight into this truth. Or did you mean this was only subjectively "true for him," in spite of the fact that there objectively remains one or another coherence-giving narrative to be discovered that he somehow missed? Or is there some other alternative I'm not seeing?

Interlocutor:

... And I'm not at all worried about your pointing out that my positions on things are those of most other academics. Perhaps they are. In other of my opinions, I'm probably unique enough to be unemployable at most secular colleges. I'm really not all that concerned about it either way--I don't think of the academy as some vast horde of endarkenment secularists from whom I need to distinguish and protect my thinking. I can hang with both camps. (The secular types now-a-days are mostly concerned with social justice, which I can get into.) The things I really care most deeply about and am most interested in have to do with students and teaching, not theology or politics, which I'm mostly willing now to leave to the experts.

Blosser:

This paragraph I find hard to track, either with respect to animus or substance. Since all I could do is speculate as to the former, I dismiss that an unprofitable exercise. But what as to substance? You suggest that you can "hang with both camps." If "endarkenment secularists" define one camp, what defines the other? I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

When I think of "social justice," I think of Pope Paul VI's motto, "If you want peace, work for justice." But the fact that a pope says this would seem to remove "social justice" from the special perview of "endarkenment secularists." Furthermore, when some people talk about justice today, I'm not sure they know what they're talking about: Aristotle distinguished between commercial, distributive, and remedial justice, and all three can be distinguished from the generic Hebrew usage which biblical writers apply to Noah or Job, for example, as "just men" in the sense of "righteous." What makes capital punishment "unjust," for instance, whereas killing unborn children (which we're doing in the USA at the breath-taking rate of 4000/day now) a matter of "justice"? But that, I suppose, is a discussion for another day ...

I admire your concern for students and your gift for challenging them to think, which I think is quite amazing, really. I would disagree, though, that theology or politics is a matter we ought to leave to the experts. We would do so, I would argue, only at our own peril. It used to be said that religion, politics, and sex shouldn't be talked about in polite company. How British! But the longer I live I begin to think these are the only things worth talking about. One thing I agree with Mortimer Adler on is his notion that philosophy should not be relegated to the province of an academic elite but rather be viewed as the common vocation of everyone. That's why he spent the last half of his career re-writing his academic books for popular audiences -- books like Six Great Ideas (on truth, goodness, beauty, justice, equality, and freedom), and Aristotle for Everybody (on knowing, doing, and making) -- subjects everyone would need to think through in order to fulfill the Socratic principle that the "unexamined life is not worth living." I would further agree with Adler -- who converted from being a secular Jew in later life to Anglicanism, then before dying to Catholicism -- that the same is true of theology, and politics as well. But I don't really imagine any huge disagreements between us on these points, at least as to general principle.

Interlocutor:

And I'm with you in finding Kerry laughable, though I don't know enough about him to really condemn him--his wife seems to have a lot more character, and I wish she'd run for his Senate seat, though I guess only a postmodernist would say that. I wish I could say, with others, that, well, at least Kerry's better than Bush, and I really can't, except maybe on some domestic issues--I suspect they're both war-monging thugs and the pawns of the corporations.

Blosser:

Yes, well, I think it was telling when Kerry admitted that he wouldn't have really done anything different than Bush as to the war in Iraq, even if there were no weapons of mass destruction found. His wife, Teresa, gave an engaging and thoughtful talk at the Democratic Convention, I felt, although my wife seems chagrinned for some reason that she apparently doesn't know how to bake cookies, a piece of info she picked up after reading, I think it was, her Family Circle magazine's comparison of Laura Bush's and Teresa Heinz-Kerry's ostensible cookie recipes. These things count big time, as you know.

There is doubtless truth in the assumption that politicians are (at least to some extent) "pawns" of the corporations. I would personally shy away from the assumptions of those, however, who view Bush (or Kerry) as comparable to Saddam Hussein, from those like Stanley Fish who said about 9/11 that "there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one," or those that insist that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." As William Bennett observed: "Last time I looked, there was a crystal-clear distinction between a terrorist and a freedom fighter, and it had to do with the morality of means: a freedom fighter doesn't massacre innocent civilians in pursuit of his ends." I explore some of these issues in a little more depth in my essay on "War and the Eclipse of Moral Reasoning" (Ratzinger Forum).

Interlocutor:

And I didn't mean to say that the church has nothing to teach us about how to live, at all, but rather that I don't think the church should dictate politics, which it is really doing when it takes it upon itself to dictate which legal unions to bless and which pastors to ordain and which people ought to live their lives in secrecy and which sex acts God intends us to engage in and such things. I go to church not for the politiking, which I would call all that sort of stuff, but for the liturgy, to which I try to listen, and for the song, and the eucharist, and the fellowship.

Blosser:

Although I am Catholic, I come from Mennonite (like Quaker's, pacifist) parents who were missionaries in China. One of the Mennonite theologians, now deceased, who I have come to admire exceedingly is John Howard Yoder, who wrote a book called, of all things, The Politics of Jesus (pictured left). While I don't agree with everything Yoder has to say from his Anabaptist perspective, the one central theme running through his book that I think is inescapably true is this: Christ is ineluctably, unavoidably, irrepressibly political. Hearing the suggestion that the Church shouldn't dictate politics reminds me of the saying I used to commonly hear during the mid-seventies: that "government shouldn't legislate morality." My question, by way of answer, would be: show me a piece of legislation that doesn't legislate someone's morality.

Likewise -- though this may possibly reflect a different understanding of "Church" than the one voiced above -- if God has established one Church as our homeland's embassy and deligated to it provisional authority for the on-going administration and eventual repatriation of this sojourning human family, then I would want to ask: what, if anything should the Church concern herself with if not with sex and politics? Many people -- even many contemporary Catholics, I'm sad to say -- don't see the Church as much more than a full-service Rotary Club with a feel-good floor show and coffee-hour. Nietzsche, of course, stands between the one understanding and the other. But if, ex hypothesi, there were in fact a God who actually created us for Himself and wanted to win us back from our self-indulgent sins as our divine lover, and if He had elevated the act of marriage itself to a sacramental image of His own love for us (which entails far more than can be said here), then why should it surprise us that the Church's much ridiculed traditional views of the "pelvic issues" should be central to her concerns? The irony here is amazing, though, I admit: the Catholic Church must appear to the world to be on her weakest footing precisely where, to an insider, she appears most profoundly insightful. But enough on that.

The other thing that must be asked, though, on a purely mundane level, is this: If the Church sees herself as guardian of a doctrinal tradition stretching back to the apostles and prophets, which teaches that abortion, homosexuality, and recreational sex are an abominable distortion of what God intended, what business is it of anyone (whether Church member or not) to tell the Church what she should or shouldn't be teaching?

Interlocutor:

You say,

... Sure, we prefer ice-cream to peas and potatoes when we're kids. But shouldn't we grow up? Of course part of growing up entails learning WHY our parents (or the Church or the Bible) told us what we "should" do. But discovering that involves getting over our assumptions that the Church and Bible have nothing to tell us that we don't already know. Forgive me, but in my not-always-so-humble opinion we moderns (or postmoderns) are such ignorant dullards.

Growing up also involves realizing that some of the things our parents or the church or people in the church or our teachers told us and did was insane, of course, too. All the things we were all told about how to dress, how to talk, who to be with and what to do with them--I don't know. I have my doubts. Of course, I grew up without any religion whatsoever--my parents thought churches were all cults, except the Quakers, for some reason--they were okay because they were "nice." So what do I know--probably a lot of people learn really helpful things growing up in a church about how to carry themselves and whatnot. But they also learn other things--at my church everyone (except me) knows who the homosexuals are, and everyone can see the mixed-race couples, and everyone knows the pacifists from the republicans, and if they listen, they learn probably which differences to make a big damn deal about, which to tolerate, and which to affirm as sacred. They learn this not by absorbing people's self-righteous notions about what God "intended" but by seeing human dignity modeled in a structured, faith-oriented community environment. That's what I've experienced at my church (perhaps because I arrived just as all the discontents were leaving in a huff). Sometimes, people listen and hear the wrong things. When my mothers parents divorced, no one in their church would talk to them, and my mother can't enter a church without anxiety to this day. They're all the same to her. All I know is what I hear, and I hear music. My pastor has been a great help to me in my spiritual doldrums of the last couple of years, mainly by listening (see, it goes both ways--we listen not only for our own betterment), and I cherish that.

Blosser:

Let's try to cut through some of this to some basics. Both your paragraph above, and mine above it, make judgments about what each of us takes to be good and bad. Unless either of us is a card-carrying relativist, which I seriously doubt, we each assume that what we take to be good is a real objective good. For me it might involve assuming that the Church's teaching on, say, sex, is true and good and beautiful. For you, it might be that the non-judgmental modeling of human dignity presented at your parish, by contrast those who seem self-righteous, have offered a model of what is objectively true, good and beautiful. What each of us assumes, unless I'm mistaken, is that he sees something that is true about the states of affairs in the world and that anyone who failed to see this would be missing something about the way things really are.

This suggestion is also supported by your assertion that some of the things our parents or churches or teachers may have told us were 'insane,' or at least pretty badly mistaken. In these instances, at least, they missed something about the way things really are, which perhaps we were better able to see than they. I grant this possibility.

In any case, the point I would want to stress is that if there is a real objective good of any kind -- something about which our parents or churches or teachers or you or I could have been mistaken -- then an unavoidable consequence of this is that there will be degrees of accuracy and inaccuracy in our judgments about states of affairs. Your judgment that some of your fellow parishioners are "self-righteous" in their judgments about pacifists or homosexuals or mixed-race couples might be right or wrong; and their judgments (whatever they are), if they wish to return the favor of judging you, might also be right or wrong. But whatever our judgments may be about pacifism, war, homosexuality, politics, education, the economy, or the future of the world community -- while it is possible or even probable that they may all be mistaken in some degree or other, it is impossible that they should all be completely accurate.

I abhor seeing people emotionally hurt in any circumstance, let alone like your mother was by some people at her church. It's especially painful, I think, in a context that commands love (as God does); which heightens the hypocrisy. At the same time, I think you will agree that not all that is perceived as unloving is in fact so, as any parent or teacher especially knows. I have found especially enlightening, in this respect, C.S. Lewis's exploration of the four Greek words for love (agape, philia, storge, eros) in his book, The Four Loves (pictured right). Sometimes the most loving thing may seem quite counter-intuitive, it would seem.

Interlocutor:

And I agree completely about the near-impossibility of knowing oneself--I tried to get a conversation going on this topic yesterday in one of my classes, but it was impossible because the freshmen were so confident in their self-knowledge--very interesting. In a sense, there's something impossible about that course, because one student in a hundred will even recognize the purpose of offering the course when it is explained, and if you really explain it, so that they do get it, they laugh out loud. One student said yesterday, after lots of badgering on my part, that it was very cure and sweet that the College wants to teach students and help them and what-not, but I mean come on--really. Her view was that college students are autonomous, self-aware, independent, and responsible for their own actions and deserve what they get. And of course also that all the corporations who are "out there" profiting from college students' insecurity and unhappiness are therefore entirely justified--open season on college students. Hilarious. I said, if you believe that, then you must be pretty mad about having to take this class. She said, no, not really. I like it. So that's good, I guess. Goes to show you how ineffectual explanations tend to be--these kids just need to learn at their own rate, the way things happen to them. Question is, how is a church or a course or a major to go about facilitating peoples' individual journeys toward (rather than to) self-knowledge? In my experience, not through explanations, helpful words of advice, commandments, etc. I say, give me something to listen to, not a lecture but a hymn. I'll never really know whether I've heard the right thing or all of it, and that's okay. (Oow--ya gat mee--pinned by your feathered shaft to the target, straight through the gut--convicted of the postmodern heresy, I . . . die . . .)

Blosser:

Ha-ha! I like your account about the relative "self-knowledge" (or self-oblivion?) of freshmen. Sophomores (the "wise fools") aren't much better. Of course we were there once. When we're as old as Socrates, maybe we'll actually learn something, such as that only the God is wise, and he is wisest, who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is (by comparison) nothing. Thus St. Thomas Aquinas, in his mystical encounter with God near the end of his career, left off writing and dismissed all that he had written, in comparison to what (or Whom) he had encountered, nothing but "worthless straw."

The really interesting question you raise in this paragraph, however, is one that was raised by Socrates in Plato's dialogues: Can virtue be taught, and, if so, how? (In fact, can anything be "taught" to another person at all? -- though that's a broader question.) How do you (or we as teachers, or pastors like yours) lead or nudge anyone toward embracing the good, the true, and the beautiful? This is Plato's project, of course; and the first task he undertakes (and the one he is spectacularly successful at) is the refutation of the relativist, which he undertakes repeatedly through debating sophists such as Protagoras. In other words, something like virtue can be taught only if "being" can be distinguished from "seeming," and "truth" from "lies," and "good" from "bad."

Having said that, I would agree with you on the ineffectiveness of those who try to teach us virtue merely by "talking at" us without listening or helping us to see what they're talking about. On the other hand, I think you would perhaps agree that "personal experience" isn't always a successful teacher either, as there are plenty of examples of people who never seem to learn anything from their experience. I think really good teachers, like well-respected officers in the military, have a certain charism for inspiring interest, confidence, trust, and even love.

And love is an interesting thing when it comes to perceiving what is. Max Scheler says that love opens our eyes to see that positive values and qualities that objectively subsist in another person. People say love is blind. Scheler says the opposite: only love enables someone to see in another those qualities to which others are blind who don't have that love. Which leads to an interesting conclusion: there may be moral or dispositional prerequisites for 'seeing' what is actually there, whether in a person or a place or thing. Interesting ...

You ask for a hymn, not a lecture; a piece of music, rather than a sermon. I like that. Try Vivaldi's motet, "Nulla in mundo pax sincera," or Allegri's "Miserere" (which wasn't permitted out of the precincts of the Vatican until Mozart heard it inside the Vatican, and copied it down from memory after leaving), or Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus." Hardly postmodern, any of them: but close to sublime when, as in the definition of a Sacrament, one sees them as outward signs of an inward grace.

Interlocutor:

And on implications: you say,

Certainly faith can't oblige us to hold as true something we think is not true. St. Thomas Aquinas insisted that it would be a sin for anyone to remain in the Catholic Church who believed Catholicism wasn't true. The maxim that "the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments" was a MEDIEVAL, not modern, maxim. Medieval thinkers-- Jewish, Christian, and Muslim-- were rational to a fault, while most modern philosophers since the Enlightenment have attacked reason in dozens of ways and exalted authority instead-- the authority of ideology, or politics, or passions, or power, or pragmatism, or positivism, or Romanticism, or Marxism, or Freudianism, or Existentialism, or even Deconstructionism in the hands of certain writers. So, no, the "implications" of a worldview (specifically Christianity) for a discourse, as I understand them, are not in any way "heavy-handed." Persuasion presupposes and respects in the other the divine gift of free will. In fact, C.S. Lewis would say that God respects the same in us when he says that there are, in the final analysis, only two kinds of people: Those who say to God "Thy will be done"; and those to whom God says "Thy will be done." The residents of Hell are not sent there against their wishes: hell is getting our way, where that choice turns us in on ourselves in ways that make us miserable.

What are the "implications" of a worldview for discourse, then? Well, as a matter of intellectual integrity, I would say that a Christian faithful to the Faith ("Santa Fe") could not in good faith utter the following proposition: "There is only one God and Mohammed is his prophet"; any more than a confirmed Platonist could in good faith utter the proposition of La Mettrie: "Man is a machine"; or an orthodox Skinnerian could utter the proposition of Sartre: "existence [utter unconditioned freedom of choice] precedes essence." So, in the first place, I would say the worldviews have "implications" for what it makes sense or doesn't make sense to say or believe.

... and I'm still not getting it. Seems to me what you're saying is that if you believe A, you can't also believe not-A, the law of the excluded middle. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but I don't think it goes very far. If I want to be a Christian English teacher, I have to do more than proclaim my faith and line up my opinions accordingly. Non-Christians will perhaps share all my opinions, in which case they cannot be called Christian opinions, and others who do not share them will identify as Christians (and probably also therefore identify me as non-Christian, too), so I'm still left with the same problem. (Plus, I don't see the connection between faith and opinions, anyway, since I don't see faith as the eager and enthusiastic affirmation of an hypothesis.) Sure, it's relatively easy to conceive of how one could be both a Christian and an English teacher, but what would it mean to be a Christian English teacher. Something much deeper, I should think. That one ought to be consistent is an implication of being an intellectual, I should think, not an implication of the worldview to which one makes ones opinions consistent. My question to any academic would be whether and how the discourse "professed" or practiced deepens faith for those who let it. Consistency is a basic requirement of the academy, and not even a necessary one, since we all hold opinions that at some level contradict other opinions we also hold. Let's say that a sincere yearning for consistency is a basic, necessary requirement. But it's a requirement of the academy, I should think, not of God, and it certainly doesn't in itself guarantee you access to the truth. It just allows you to talk with others.

Blosser:

I would want to distinguish the Christian Faith (capital "F"), which has a defined objective content, from a person's subjective "faith" (lower case "f"). The Enlightenment philosophes describe themselves as abandoning "faith" for "reason," thus falling prey to the ambiguity resident in the term "faith." What they actually did was withdraw their subjective "faith" from the Christian Faith and put their faith, instead, in "Reason" and "Science." Hence, when you say that your question to any academic would be "whether and how the discourse "professed" or practiced deepens faith for those who let it," I would want to know what "faith" you're talking about -- faith in the Christian Faith, or faith in oneself, or faith in discourse as such, or faith in humanity, or faith in faith, or what? A fair question. "Faith" in the subjective sense wouldn't seem to have much to do with opinions, as such, as you suggest; while "faith" in the objective sense (the body of teachings that constitutes the Christian Faith) would have everything to do with opinions. Would it not?

I think we agree on the ineluctable imperative of "logical consistency" (like personal integrity) in discourse, whether in the academy or everyday interpersonal relationships. Yet isn't it possible to have a worldview, on the one hand, that is logically coherent, yet wholly impracticable, like solipsism; and one, on the other hand, that is logically incoherent, but practicable, like Kant's or Rousseau's? You may recall the charming absurdity of Rousseau, who states somewhere in his Social Contract that "the reader cannot expect me to be clear and consistent at the same time"!!! The ideal, of course, is integrity -- the integration of an internally coherent (consistent) worldview with a practical life in which it can be concretely lived out. I agree with you, though, that this is an often unattained ideal, even if we feel its pull on us.

The difference between (1) what you call an English teacher who just happens to be a Christian and (2) a "Christian English teacher" is a profound one, I agree. But I'm not sure it's all that difficult to sort out. The former (1) would seem to accept the post-Kantian distinction between "private values" and "public facts" and feel no pressing need (or understanding of how) to integrate the two. He might view these as two independent compartments of his life, his private, "value-added" Christian life, on the one hand, and his public life as an English teacher dealing in objective, public "facts." The latter (2) would seem to feel the pull of integrating the two somehow. He might be concerned with questions like: "Does my having a Christian view of things make a difference in how I understand and interpret literature?" Whereas a positive answer to this question would seem nearly unintelligible to the former (1), it may not seem so to the latter (2). For one thing, literature is saturated with the values of those who write it and those who read it, as you eminently know. If literature is unavoidably freighted with value judgments, and if, as mentioned much earlier, judgments may be accurate or inaccurate (or even honest or dishonest) in their description of real states of affairs, then an English teacher who has 'faith' in the Christian Faith will have his work cut out for him, will he not? It won't be an easy task, surely, but an eminently challenging one -- just like this conversation: trying to sort out the good and the true and the beautiful from the veil of ignorance and spiritual confusion and stupidity and self-interest that besets each of us at some level.

A related question that might be worth discussing sometime is: what is Christian literature or a Christian novel? I don't for a moment assume it would necessarily involve explicitly "Christian" or "religious" subjects. But I would think it would have to deal on some level with the dimensions of experience that are perceptible in the Christian's life -- including the reality of the spiritual and moral struggle between good and evil (not only in external social forces, but within each individual soul), the reality of the transcendent or numinous, and phenomena such as sin and forgiveness, spiritual blindness and sight, etc. I can think of a number of novelists who, I think, pull this off quite well, in my opinion, including the likes of Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, but also Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Evelyn Waugh, for starters.

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