Tag Archives: existentialism

Bonheoffer, the Fall, & Time/Space Continuum

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(I posted this yesteday but forgot to include a title!)

 

Several days ago I discoursed re the time/space continuum and the human dilemma of being trapped (i.e. “lost”) therein. This is a very abstract notion and I recognize it probably sounds like a lot of non-sense to some. But I’d like to refer you to the work of Dietrich Bonheoffer who was one of the noted theologians of the 20th century; I think I could even safely place him in the evangelical pantheon of that era. In his book, Creation and Fall, he interpreted Genesis 1-3 and explained the extent of “the fall” in a similar vein to how I did in the aforementioned posting.

He posited the notion that the fall left mankind in this “time-space continuum” and that reason is itself a reflection of this fall and is intrinsically tainted by the experience. But mankind thinks he can “think” his way out of this existential predicament, not realizing that ultimately faith and hope have to have a role in the process if his rational quest is to have any ultimate meaning. Here Bonheoffer describes the circular reasoning that is the essence of this narcissistic endeavor:

…the thinking of fallen man has no beginning because it is a circle. We think in a circle. We feel and will in a circle. We exist in a circle. We might then say that in that case there is a beginning everywhere. We could equally say that there is no beginning at all; the decisive point is that thinking takes this circle for the infinite and original reality and entangles itself in a vicious circle. For where thinking directs itself upon itself as the original reality it sets itself up as an object, as an object of itself, and therefore withdraws itself behind this object again and again—or rather, thinking is antecedent to the object which it sets up.

Now I know this is convoluted. Let me try to interpret what he is saying. Bonheoffer is is echoing the words of Paul Tillich who said that “A religion within the bounds of reason is a mutilated religion.” And neither of them was disavowing reason (thinking); they were merely emphasizing its limitations. As long as mankind can keep his experience “reasonable” then he is safe in his illusion that he is in control. Spiritual teachers over the centuries have taught us that the experience of being “out of control”…momentarily, at least…is redemptive as it is in those moments that we can find an Anchor that transcends the mundane which is paradoxically immanent therein. But it/He is found only when we relinquish control and to the degree that we have done so.

And it is this “out of control” moment that teaches us the presence of a Beyond which graces the whole of our day to day life, a Beyond that gives meaning to all facets of human experience, including reason! Without this knowledge…and experience of this Beyond…we are reminded of the words of Goethe in Faust, “They call it Reason, using light celestial; just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

And again I am brought to a perfect object lesson in my country, the United States, and its current political impasse. We have so much confidence in “reason”, in “common sense”, in our political, military, and economic might. But we don’t pay any attention to this “Beyond” to which I make reference. If our leaders would pay the faintest attention to this Ultimate, they would at least be able to cooperate with each other well enough to address our issues like mature adults and not like two school-yard groups of thugs. Ultimately, our national issues…just like our personal issues…are resolved in the realm of the Spirit.

Is there “No Exit”?

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We are lost. Yes, just as the Christians teach us, we are “lost” though I differ with them on what that means. We have “fallen” into a world of contingency, the domain of cause and effect (time and space), and we are often at our wits end. We don’t know what to do. To cope with this tremendous anxiety, the vulnerability that comes from being a mere mortal, we have created culture (including myths) and we cling desperately to this culture to hide our nakedness. Yes, we cling to our fig leaves.

In the following poem Jessica Goodfellow so beautifully and elegantly describes this dilemma that we are in. We are always tempted by the hope of a “beginninglessness” or its counterpart, an “endlessness.” But either extreme is perilous. For, reality is merely that we are here, we are in the “in-between”; we are caught in this parenthesis of time and space. As Sartre noted, there is “No exit.” This realization is the point at which we can opt for faith, the belief (hope) that something Wonderful is underway in this void that we live in and that we are part of it.

Navigating by the Light of a Minor Planet

The trouble with belief in endlessness is
it requires a belief in beginninglessness.
Consider friction, entropy, perpetual motion.
And the trouble with holding to both is that
belief in endlessness requires a certain hope
while belief in beginninglessness ends in the absence of hope.
Or maybe it’s vice versa. Luckily,
belief in a thing is not the thing itself.
We can have the concept of origin, but no origin.
Here we are then: in a world where logic doesn’t function,
or else emotions can’t be trusted. Maybe both.
All known tools of navigation require an origin.
Otherwise, there is only endless relativity and then
what’s the point of navigation, in a space where
it’s hard to be lost, and even harder not to be?
Saying “I don’t want to be here” is not the same
as saying “I want to not be here.” It rains
and it rains and it rains the things I haven’t said.

Quelling our “howling appetites”

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Our life task is calming the savage beast that lives within, that dimension of life which W. H. Auden described as, “our howling appetites.” This is a battle that we fight individually and collectively. As a nation, for example, we should ask, “How can we satisfy our hunger without becoming rapacious?” And with our colonial past, we definitely have a history of rapacity as does most of the rest of the “developed” world.

The 8th century Indian poet Shantideva put it this way:

Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth?
But (just) leather on the soles of my shoes
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it

Likewise it is not possible for me
To restrain the external course of things
But should I restrain this mind of mine
What would be the need to restrain all else?
(Shantideva)

The writer of Proverbs captured the truth in these two verses, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls” (25:28); and, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city” (25:28)  Or, as someone else has said, “We can’t change the world, but we can change the eyes through which we view the world.”   And I conclude with my oft-quoted word from Auden, “We wage the war we are.”

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly, and “The Fall”

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When I first discovered D. H. Lawrence, my intent was pornographic! And, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” fulfilled that ambition and would do the same for any young man today of similar inclination! BUT, I’ve since then discovered that it is a fine piece of literature, reflecting DHL’s astute, elegant grasp of the human condition. Here is an observation he made in one of the early versions of “Chatterly”:

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table. It is a question, practically, of relationship. We must get back into relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and the re-awakening, the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water.

I think the detachment Lawrence noted here is one dimension of “the fall” of the book of Genesis. We fell, or were banished, from Eden and by the nature of life are cut off from our Source. Thus, one could say that we are “lost.” Being “found”, i.e. “getting saved”, involves rediscovering our body and nature and its connection the universe; and this whole experience is the process of relating again to our Source.

 

Intense emotions and surrendering

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E e Cummings said, “since feeling comes first, he who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” Adrienne Rich noted, “When we enter touch, we enter touch completely.”
These two poets knew a lot about intense emotion, intense feeling. They knew a whole lot more about it than I do which is the reason they write poetry and I can’t manage to do it. The best I can do is quote the poetry of others! When I met my wife, I was always quoting poetry everywhere I went, and at one point she quipped, “Mad Arkansas hurt you into other people’s poetry.” (She was alluding to a line from W. H. Auden about W. B Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”)
The following poem by Marriane Moore is about intense feeling also and she concludes that “he who feels strongly behaves.” So often intense feeling is associated with dissolute behavior and emotions run amok. And, that has its place. But, I do feel that “he who feels strongly (can) behave.”
And, another important point she makes, “in its surrendering, finds its continuing.” It is so important to surrender, to give up. And one of these days, perhaps, I will find the humility to accomplish this sublime task:
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, –
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,

Confirmation Bias and Emily Dickinson

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A friend recently introduced me to the concept of “confirmation bias” which refers to the human tendency to accept into his/her reality only that which is consistent with a pre-existent bias. In other words, we see things as we want to see them. We see only the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken). Decades ago I read someone’s observation, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”

Now, of course, being a mere mortal I would like to say that this no longer applies to me, that I have gone a step further and see things clearly, that I see things objectively. But I’ve afraid that I can no longer “lay that flattering unction to my soul” (Hamlet, to his mother). This is a human problem and we cannot escape it. We only see things through a prism, we do not see things objectively.

But, if we understand this notion, it can humble us a bit and we can be a bit less arrogant about our certainties, we can be a bit more accepting of people who are different than us. We might even be a bit more accepting of people who respond to this notion with a blank, bewildered stare!

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about this tendency to construct our reality and then shut out everything else:

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

We do tend to “close the valves of (our) attention like stone” and shut out any further feedback from the world. “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”  This is called insanity.

 

Auden on the Incarnation

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The Incarnation is the story of the Word being made flesh, the “enfleshment” of the Holy to provide us a model for our life. This incarnation has many dimensions. I like to think of it as the process of “coming down” from our head into our heart, dwelling in our flesh, the mind-body duality finding some degree of resolution. In some sense “coming down from on high” is coming down from our head into our guts, the Word being woven into the fabric of our day to day life. The Gospel becomes experience, no longer consisting of mere dogma that we have imbibed from our Christian culture. Read the following excerpt from W. H. Auden about this process, especially that powerful notion of “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

If…like your father before you, come
Where thought accuses and feeling mocks,
Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks
For their desiccation of your lust,
Thank the bitter treatment of the tide
For its dissolution of your pride,
That the whirlwind may arrange your will
And the deluge release it to find
The spring in the desert, the fruitful
Island in the sea, where flesh and mind
Are delivered from mistrust.
(W. H. Auden “The Sea and the Mirror)

“Climb the Rugged Cross of the Moment”

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One thing I love about being involved in the blog-o-sphere is that I learn from my followers. Just yesterday I discovered through one of them about Parker Palmer who I had not heard of before. Here is a note from Wikipedia about Parker’s views on faith:
Faith is not a set of beliefs we are supposed to sign up for he says. It is instead the courage to face our illusions and allow ourselves to be disillusioned by them. It is the courage to walk through our illusions and dispel them. He states the opposite of faith is not doubt, it is fear – fear of abandoning illusions because of our comfort level with them. For example, not everything is measurable and yet so much of what we do has that yardstick applied to it. Another illusion is “I am what I do …. my worth comes from my functioning. If there is to be any love for us, we must succeed at something.” He says in this example that it is more important to be a “human being” rather than a “human doing.” We are not what we do. We are who we are. The rigors of trying to be faithful involves being faithful to one’s gifts, faithful to other’s reality, faithful to the larger need in which we are all embedded, faithful to the possibilities inherent in our common life.

I think it was W. H. Auden who encouraged us to “Climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.” These “illusions” (or pretenses) are flotsam and jetsam we have picked up from the vortex of human culture, a veil we have spun to hide the void. They are essential dimensions of our human, ego identity but when they are the whole of what we know as our identity, then the words of Jesus become relevant, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul.” The teachings of Jesus tell us that there is another dimension to life that we need to access if our life, our ego life, is to have meaning. Having this access does not destroy our very necessary ego life; it merely gives it meaning.

Reason has its Limits!

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when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because (e e cummings)

 

This is another one of those poems that I cannot explain but completely love. It is so complicated and inexplicable. To some of you it will probably be nonsense. And it is about “non” sense in that it is about reality that lies beyond the grasp of reason. It is about reality that lies beyond the time-space (i.e. “cause-effect”) continuum.

And to take a quantum leap…as I am wont to do…it is about God for He lies beyond our paltry little world, our rational “dog-and-pony” show. And, yes, He was “made nigh by the blood of Christ” but that doesn’t mean we can apprehend Him with mere reason, with Christian (Biblical) syllogism. We apprehend Him only with faith which means we apprehend him in the context of a whole lot of doubt. We “have Him” only when we “don’t have Him”. This is to allude to the Zen koan from the ‘60’s, “First there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was.” God is present only in his absence.

(AFTERTHOUGHT: Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, only to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”)

(COMIC AFTERTHOUGHT—Quip from David Letterman, re cause-effect, “Mobile home parks cause tornadoes.”

 

Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow

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I share here with you one of my favorite poems but I can’t really tell you why I love it so much. I don’t really understand it. But, it speaks powerfully to me and I share it just in case it speaks to one of you.

It is about reality and its mysterious origin and nature. Reality is just mind-boggingly complicated and we cannot wrap our mind around it, try as we may. I love science and I am so glad we are trying to “wrap our mind around it” but I really thing we will find at the end of our pursuits what Einstein described as “a mystery.” And Einstein said that it was this mystery which gave rise to his “religious sentiment.”

I think we should always be thinking, exploring, hungering, questing but in the end we will have to recognize that mystery and, perhaps, bow down and sing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

HOUSE
By E. L. Mayo

House
Vast and ambiguous
Which was before we were

Did you
Build yourself and then grow populous
By taking thought, or

Did someone leave a tap on long ago
In You
Which with its spatter

Affirms at the very least a householder
Who will return at the last if only to
Turn off the water.