Being an engineer by training and probably born with a particular typology, I have been prone towards enjoying models and systems. But in the last few years, I do feel my mind going through some changes where I have become less analytical and methodical about life. In fact, I feel Reality expressing itself in a more poetic way through me. This doesn't necessarily mean I am becoming a poet, rather more poet-like.
Take my latest read: The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics by Michael Martin. Just the title alone gets me all giddy. So what is all this Sophia stuff all about? It's definitely hard to pin it down, but as the title suggests it has much to with bridging world and God more poetically.
Somewhere along the way, the Divine became split off as a spectator to creation (also known as Deism — or Pure Nature — which coincidentally is the faith some of our founding fathers aspired to). Blame can be placed on the Western Enlightenment and its progenitors (cough, Erasmus & Descartes). In the process, we lost our enchantment and the “mediate immediacy of God's presence in the world.”
Even Christian theology became rigid and dogmatic, and had lost its mysticism and magic. All this rationalization reoriented the hierarchy from God to man to man to God, therefore leading to a “culture focused on the nominalist human subject; self contained, self-absorbed, materialistic and subsequently calcified, impervious to metaphysics, and desensitized to the supernatural.”
As a counterpoint to all the rationalization, many theologians and philosophers on the fringes of the Church decided to explore the more Feminine expression of the Divine. Sophia became the the substantial reality that unites God with creation; a “figure as reflective, living, adaptive, simultaneously literal and figurative, as both person and principle.” For Boehme, She was seen as a cosmological change agent and a immanental and transformative sense of Being. (I even connected this sensibility to a recent experience I had with entheogens.)
Sophiology was not necessarily a movement that could ever be codified or institutionalized easily since it was founded on poetic expression. It was believed the Romantics never gained traction with it, “because they remained at an aesthetic, conceptual level without ever really becoming actualized.” Hence, so much of the lived experience the Church provided was missing from these ideas and expressions.
Other sophiologists were aware that religion should not only be a purely interior experience detached from symbolic expression: so much of the problem with the spiritual, but not religious ilk of the day. Folks like Rudolf Steiner offered a corrective with his concern for the common folk and "peasant wisdom". Steiner also saw Christianity as a “universal and defining spiritual-natural event for humanity” that healed the ontological breach between God and world. And sophiology became the “connective tissue, as it were, between the real and the ideal, between flesh and spirit, makes knowledge possible and, more importantly, makes the awareness of God's presence possible.”
For Boehme, the German Romantics, and Steiner, Sophia bridged the space-in-between, the unity of opposites, and the metaxy that we play in. The Russians also got in the game, giving Her more rigor. Bulgakov placed Sophia in theosis, not only of the human person but of the cosmos as well (a theme Teilhard de Chardin would run with years later).
Today, the Feminine principle of Divinity often gets co-opted as “personifying Wisdom as female as opposed to an assertion of a feminine face of God.” Nevertheless, Sophia becomes a necessary corrective to the hyper-masculine rationalization that overtakes theology, metaphysics, and philosophy. As Martin notes, “the poetic engagement with Creation offered by sophiology simultaneously opens the way to a science more concerned with care than domination, an art renewed and redeemed in the presence of the Beautiful, and secure return of cosmology to religion.”
In a future post, there is one sophiologist that I would like to spend more time with (whom Martin covers in his book): our Unknown Friend, known as Valentin Tomberg.
Marshall McLuhan coined the popular phrase The Medium is the Message to convey the idea it is impossible to separate the form of a medium from its content. While this mantra is often used to covey the power that media has in its messages, McLuhan understood medium in the broad sense: in that, any object that transmits can have a subtle impact on its final cause (purpose).
When we see how our values and norms have changed just through recent advances in technology, it should be self-evident that there are serious implications of the medium in our day to day lives. Heck, I almost bump into someone everyday who can't look up from their phone while they're walking. And every so often, I'm the schmuck.
So if the medium has such a strong influence, why should this be any different for persons? I was recently listening to the On Being podcast, where David Brooks makes this astute observation...
I was once writing in a newspaper column. I was griping about how hard it was to get people to be good by my lectures to them in my classroom, and I got an email from a guy named Dave Jolly who is a veterinarian in Oregon. He said, “What a wise person says is the least of that which he gives. What gets communicated is the small gestures and the whole totality of their being, that is to say the small gestures of kindness, of grace, of honesty, of hard truth-telling.” And then he says, “Never forget the message is the person.” And those words rang in — because we deal in the words all the time, but those sentences, “What a wise person says is the least of that which he gives,” and, “The message is the person,” struck me as profoundly true.
We seem to forget this, and place too much focus on the words that inspire us. When true inspiration comes from the people we meet in our lives that exemplify a way of being.
Maybe our utilitarian-focused culture doesn't have the moral language to articulate this or often lacks the subtlety to truly see it. But when I come across such a person, it's all there in its preciousness.
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On another note, it's so nice when I can keep a thread going around a particular idea. In fact, I believe this whole blog is one huge thread around an idea that isn't very particular at all. It all depends how you view it, but there is always some underlying coherence that I'm aiming at.
So we took on the atheists in a recent blog, and that was fun enough that I'd like to do it some more. What spurred me on is this fantastic post by Matthew Becklo on Why Does the World Exist? Becklo riffs off Jim Holt's book with the same name, and summarizes the metaphysical speculations from many academic thought leaders as to why us instead of no-thing.
Since most of these folks interviewed are clearly atheists/agnostics, none of them point to Spirit for the answer while at the same time giving some fairly unverifiable theories. The only exception is author John Updike, who takes a leap a faith that God made the world in play. Updike was probably Holt's attempt to get away from the academy to find an answer that was more fully human. Sadly, Updike died the following year.
In the end, Holt receives no satisfying answer to his existential quest. It is only when he receives news of his mother's death in the middle of writing his book that he brought back to the humanity and humility of it all.
In Blecko's review of this, he takes it a step further and mentions that Jean-Luc Marion, Director of Philosophy at Sorbonne, should have also been interviewed. Marion has done extensive work on how first philosophy should come from phenomenology, or the appearance of things, rather than metaphysics. His work builds on this notion of giveness: in what shows itself first, gives itself. (Coincidentally, I am currently reading a book by Marion, along with a friend and philosopher-in-training, so I am planning to blog more about Marion down the road.)
Blecko soulfully notes that, “As Marion argues, and as Holt's own account of his mother's death reveals, the knowledge of love—an image of the same love "that moves the sun and other stars"—must finally go beyond what analytic knowledge can subdue. Love's logic transcends formal logic—it even, in Marion's framework, transcends Being—and total love, not total explanation, is what Christianity is finally about.”
This brings us full circle, because Christianity has always said the Person is the Message (word made flesh). Why would God bother to become one other than for the purposes that we could become Him?
And to become Him, in essence, is total love.
We start the beginning of the year at the same place where we ended the year. Why should a calendar year matter when you're on the eternal cosmic timeline? I suppose we need markers to take inventory, but I am more compelled to see what's around the corner so I can build on that inventory.
I last left off on Spitzer and his idea of PED happiness. It all sounds nice, but I was wondering if a God-loving being can be anymore happier than some God-denying one? I know some religious people that I wouldn't want to have a coffee with, and I do have some atheistic friends that are quite a joy to be around. So if Spitzer is correct, then PED happiness can only come from someone truly called to Spirit.
I was reading Robert Barron's recent blog about the rapid rise of the irreligious. He discusses how those who deny the transcendent lose any sense of haste and fall into the "whatever" mindset. Moreover, without Spirit, there is little to be amazed, enchanted, or astonished by. You are locked in a world that serves you and your desire to control it. To counter this, Barron suggests that “those who are tempted to move into secularism, I say, don’t float on the lazy lake; rather, go in haste! Don’t settle for something less than astonishment; be amazed! Don’t fall into spiritual amnesia; treasure!”
Bob also touched upon to absurdness of atheism and its adherence to man for fulfillment. First, quoting Pope Francis: “Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires.” Bob then says, “You might say that desire becomes intrinsically dis-ordered, being that it is no longer ordered to its proper object -- the only object that can possibly satisfy a desire that is literally infinite.” And I suppose the infinite is the essence of pervasiveness, endurance, and depth. More PED, less dread.
Recollecting his time away from God, Bob notes, “I'm trying to think back to what motivated me during my atheistic phase. Hmm. A mixture of things: superiority, to be sure. Although "annoyed" by believers, there was a kind of perverse joy involved in skewering them with atheistic arguments to which they had no answer.” Been there, done that. Spiritual pride is bad enough, but manly pride is just stupid!
But then again atheists can't seem to answer some significant questions also: like what happened before the big bang?; or why do we have these superfluous transcendental desires that don't placate evolutionary biology?; or even how my subjective experience of consciousness manifests from my limited grey matter? But all this argumentation also reaps little joy. Who cares if I'm right? I'd rather be True.
Certainly there are atheists that have strong, moral character and can live a life with dignity and purpose. Dennis Prager notes that “these individuals (in the Western world, at least) have simply adopted the values bequeathed by centuries of Judeo-Christian values. They are living on what one author called cutflower ethics.” So these flowers can survive for a certain amount of time, until they don't. And if we don't nurture what we reap, it will all go to shite eventually.
Back to Spitzer. He notes that Jesus saw that correcting our outer lives is hopeless without “first attending to the thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and interior dispositions giving rise to them. Even if we could force ourselves to be on our best behavior, but felt nothing except stoic indifference, contempt for "inferiors", and anger toward "incompetents," our behavior wouldn't mean very much, because our interior attitude would undermine it.” The atheist can only go so far, because no finite desire would impel him/her to have their hearts be moved enough to transform their lives the way Jesus was pointing to.
If you could not cultivate a rich inner life towards Spirit, then there would always be a limit to your happiness. The atheist is always living in a small, conditional universe, while the only way to unlimited happiness is desire for the infinite.
We can't do it alone, because we're never alone.
Somewhere along the way, the Divine became split off as a spectator to creation (also known as Deism — or Pure Nature — which coincidentally is the faith some of our founding fathers aspired to). Blame can be placed on the Western Enlightenment and its progenitors (cough, Erasmus & Descartes). In the process, we lost our enchantment and the “mediate immediacy of God's presence in the world.”