Truth Enfleshed — In a Culture Against It

In my last post, I wrote that the only way to explain Truth is to be Truth. Great then, so how are we suppose to do that? 

It’s a good question that won’t be answered by just any-body, but only through your body. Because here again, the path to Truth is our goal and our goal to Truth is the path. So all we can do is live it, or practice it.

A friend of mine mentioned he came across Merton is saying something about how we need to stop writing (and reading) books about praying, and to actually start praying. So what am I doing here other than dancing with words around the Truth.

I recently came across this pretty good discussion with James K.A. Smith. He also makes the case that Truth is not about believing: it's about giving oneself over a set of psycho-semantic practices, rituals, and rhythms even on the days I don't believe in it or feel it or am suspicious of it.

We have to practice our way into a different way of being. And this requires habit forming heart shaping rituals, rhythms, and routines. This is truly incarnational where there is a particularity to the Incarnation, and an embodiment of it that is always ongoing. We are ensouled in a way that bodies can only grasp the metaphysical story.

So here again, we can’t think our way into being Truth. 

But as Smith acknowledges, we can choose to become intentional in giving ourselves over to a different community of practices which will then transform our heart habits so we can love something or someone else. But what this is is Truth: not ideas, but Truth enfleshed.

Even our postmodern thought(less) leaders, despite leaning on relativism, can offer assistance in pointing us to a Truth that can not be constructed, but only received.

Smith has a charitable take on postmodernism that many advocates of orthodoxy would not. In that, he argues that while postmodernism points us away from there being any relative truth, it does not necessarily point us away from the Absolute Truth and tradition.

For instance, Derrida’s phrase that “there is nothing outside the text” may challenge pure objectivity from the human perspective, but not necessarily from a transcendent view. We are finite beings, so our truth will always be limited by our finiteness. And while we may interpret and mediate many partial truths without ever reaching the apex of Truth, there may be vertical mediations that can impel the necessary conditions for a deeper Truth. For Smith, this Truth is revealed. 

In regards to Lyotard’s skepticism for metanarratives, Smith says this is more a critique of modernism in that the “incredulity of postmodernity toward metanarratives derives from the fact that modernity denies its own commitments, renounces its faith, while at the same time never escaping it.” So according to Smith, Lyotard is not against narratives, but suspicious that we can transcend them through modernity’s sensibility of autonomous reason without any ultimate commitments. We are all part of a grander story, so as part of that Truth we need to own up to it by acknowledging where we in stand in the particularity of that story.

Lastly, Foucault’s mantra that “power is knowledge” does not mean that all power is bad. While Smith acknowledges Foucault’s analysis that the mechanisms of discipline through institutions and society serve to form individuals, Smith also believes it is “wrong to cast all such discipline and formation in a negative light.” We are not purely autonomous agents, nor do we live in a vacuum. In order to surrender to something Higher and be transformed, we require a mature obedience to positive institutions that can facilitate this. Therefore, Truth can be cultivated through the practices we inhabit through institutions such as the Church and other contemplative communities.

This creative retrieval of tradition in a postmodern context can lead us to an embodied Truth without negating the culture we reside in. We can’t go back to a time of simplicity in regards to our options. To come to an end of ourselves and be Truth, we need to take on the complexity of our times head on! This isn’t a performative action of human will power, but the practice of truly seeing what is and letting be. 

To Be The Truth is The Only True Explanation of What Truth Is

We begin the title of this post with a quote from Kierkegaard. It’s the sort of quote that we can begin to unpack or unwind with words, but it can’t really be done purely with reason. Instrumental reason will help with relative truths, but never ultimate Truth.

Let’s say you’re trying to use the mind to come up with Truth. You may succeed at coming up with some disembodied notions of it, but it will eventually become unsatisfying. Consider the causal loop you can get into trying to come up with your own meaning and purpose to life:

(1) secular culture says there is no normative good or bigger narrative to live for —> (2) feels liberating! —> (3) but now, I have the burden to come up with this story for myself —> (4) feels exhausting, too many choices, lots that are not satisfying! —> (5) I've created a new prison for myself believing I can do this for myself —> (6) I become despondent, in need of deeper meaning/purpose again —>(7) go back to (1)

At best, we may come up with some helpful content to work with. But immersing yourself in the ego-drama of coming up with a narrative for yourself still places your life being about you on your terms. And we need to move beyond a you. 

Paul Tillich would say the seeking of Truth means you have already been seized by Truth. In some sense, the seeking is the finding; and as that deepens, the being of Truth is the founding of it. Yet, it can never be contained.  

The error is not unrelated to the mistake that C.S. Lewis (Surprised by Joy) acknowledges committing when he sought to recover the experience of "Joy" by focusing on the thoughts and feelings generated by the experience within him. He recalls how this discovery flashed a new light back on his life: 

“I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, “This is it”, had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed.”

David Walsh notes, “All that he [Lewis] could find in such introspection was the sediment or trace of Joy. The reality which had been enjoyed disappeared once his attention became wholly directed toward the inner event itself. ... There is no surer way of missing the reality of human self-transcendence than to focus exclusively on the processes, the techniques or the ideas in which it is expressed” (emphasis mine).

I can certainly relate to the intellectual quest, and at times we do have to dance with at least some of the words we got. But eventually the words need to be made flesh! And this can only come from a submissive attunement to the whole of the reality. 

Walsh says, “As human beings we are not closed in on ourselves, or enclosed within the instrumental reason of subject/object relationships, but rather engaged in the whole of reality long before reflection or instrumental reasoning begin, and able, indeed impelled by our deepest humanity, to engage in this wider reality and articulate our participation in luminous symbols that express our attunement to this embracing ordering reality.” 

Walsh concludes: “Ineluctably we are existentially embedded, and morally engaged in reality, as a part taking part in the whole, unable to see the whole, only ever able to see an infinitesimal part of it, and only ever able to see it from within.” 

Want Truth? Be Truth!