People Persons

One of the most brilliant ideas to come across in the history of western civilization is the idea of personhood. It’s the basis of our dignity and liberty; however, we take it for granted these days to the point where we have no issue with sledgehammering its foundations. 

There was no fated reason for this idea of personhood to take hold in the west. We certainly had other ideas about the person: some that arrogantly believed there was a grander to man (at least for some more than others), and other ideas that saw us no better than being animals, reinforcing our violent and selfish nature!  

But the Greeks and furthermore some early Christian thinkers saw it best to see man as a “middle being”. The notion of “middle being” balanced the person between time and eternity, matter and spirit, body and soul. Plato may have certainly emphasized the soul more than body. For him, the body was something to transcend with its fallibility and finiteness. 

Christian thinkers decided this needed to be better integrated. We would no longer be just a soul, but a whole human person, with body and soul together. We were embodied spirits!

Today you’ll see people who want it both ways, but in a way that is completely disjointed: humans are just pure matter, but able to act like gods.  

Materialists will note that we share 98% of our DNA with primates, but that other 2% is quite a qualitative difference. It should also be noted we share 25% of our DNA with dandelions, but I don’t find myself acting a quarter dandelion (at least not on most days).

But the embodied spirit leads us back to the purpose for man to exist. W. Norris Clarke remarks,

“Thus the union of matter and spirit in us is not an unnatural, forced one; God has deliberately created the human soul as the lowest of the spirits, one that by its very nature reaches down into matter to take on a body for itself, thereby lifting up matter into the light of consciousness and enabling the material world to return to God in the great circle of being (emanation and return: the basic structure of the whole Summa Theologiae)—through the mediation of the soul as embodied spirit, that is, through the human person as the natural unity of both worlds. Matter is made as gift to spirit” (emphasis mine).

As such, God was in all things, but in different degrees. There was a hierarchy of being, and the human person was ontologically in the center as the mediator between God and nature. This wasn’t pantheism which leveled everything to being the same. Nor was it a dualism of two different substances, but the “same richly complex substance” on different levels.

Clarke further elaborates,

“Saint Thomas resolutely rejected this doctrine of two natural faces of the soul, one looking down into the world of matter, the other looking directly up into the world of spirit. The structure of our natural human knowledge is far more humble, he believed. There is only the one face of the soul, which is turned directly toward the material cosmos around it only, as presented through the senses. Then, by the application of the basic inner dynamism of the mind, its radical and unrestricted exigency for intelligibility—which can be expressed as the first dynamic principle of knowledge: the principle of the intelligibility of being, ‘‘omne ens est verum’’—we can step by step trace back the intelligibility of this material world to its only ultimate sufficient reason, a single infinite spiritual Cause that is God. The human being is the lowest and humblest of the spirits, whose destiny it is to make its way in a spiritual journey through the material world back to its ultimate Source and its own ultimate home” (emphasis mine).

Clarke also makes a good point in that personhood gets further elaborated with later Christian thinkers who saw that personhood is always substance in relationship, and that ‘‘relationality and substantiality are equally valid primordial modes of the real.’’ We are authentically real not as solitary self-sufficient persons but as persons-in-relation. And we can act this out on two levels: “the level of [our] natural potentialities and the supernatural level—that is, act out Christ in [our] own lives.”

Brilliant stuff, but almost forgotten!

I'm Bored with (the Politics of) the USA

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy. — Thomas Sowell

There's an amusing song by Father John Misty that sums up the acedia and ennui of our times. But it seems much of this disenchantment of one's spirit gets channeled into politics these days. It's a bad form of idolatry that is really masked as pseudo-righteousness. I recently had someone tell me that to really get to know someone these days, you just need to know their political leanings. Really? Sounds like we're judging the book by how the author votes.

Douglas Murray offers this pointer in his recent book:

“One of the ways to distance ourselves from the madnesses of our times is to retain an interest in politics but not to rely on it as a source of meaning. The call should be for people to simplify their lives and not to mislead themselves by devoting their lives to a theory that answers no questions, makes no predictions and is easily falsifiable. Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder.”

I could not agree more. And whatever interest we have in politics should go beyond politics itself. Politics is always downstream from culture which is downstream from metaphysics. What is grounding all of this? should be the essential question we ask. In other words, there is a correlation to our interest in how we govern and what we believe to be True.

In his essay Democracy, Ethics, Religion: An Intrinsic Connection, W. Norris Clarke makes the key point that democracy requires more than just political leadership and institutions: 

“Our central claim is that democracy is not a form of government that can maintain itself effectively over the long term through its political resources alone. It needs rather to be inserted in a larger supporting web of human culture within which a normative code of ethics is accepted and practiced (for the most part) by a significant majority of its citizens, and within which some form of religious belief that transcends the human order supports this normative code with its own ultimate moral authority.”

But today we have splintered ourselves between hyper-individualism and tribal identity politics, therefore losing a civic, moral, and spiritual center. This has led to a discontent that politics could never cure.

It is much like how David Foster Wallace noticed a subtle suffering in many of his friends: “Something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. ... This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values.”

Today's moral and spiritual values are incomplete and incoherent, partly running on the fumes of a fading tradition as the secular left rises. The emphasis tends to lean on sentimental activism for tolerance of non-western values, “open-mindedness”, social justice, and political correctness. But that can't be the source for meaning, because it undermines ultimate meaning. It creates a world we where we are playing God and standing in judgement of others without any belief of God or an order to existence. Kevin Williamson notes, “That is one of the great ironies of our time: that the tribe least interested in traditional religious observance should have made its politics those of seeking the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in the present—to immanentize the eschaton.”

The subtle point the left forgets is our traditional faith was never to bring the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth through policies from the top-down, but first and foremost, through opening our hearts to God and our fellow man from the bottom-up!

Kenosis or Power?

There can be no vacuum in existence, so we are left with two metaphysical choices that can fill the void: Truth or Power. Truth, or more specifically kenosis, is a Relationship with the Divine that can only happen through our self-emptying. But relationships take time as we must build trust gradually in our all our interactions (vertical and horizontal). That’s probably why institutions, such as the Western Church, relied more on rules/ideas/rituals. These are more scalable for a culture; however, at a cost.

Unlike the late-Augustinian influenced Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church understood that Truth can be experienced genuinely in this life (and not the next). Eugene Webb makes an insightful point in his excellent book:

“Here we can see emerging in the different traditions of East and West two contrasting paradigms not only of authority but also of Christology, ecclesiology, and soteriology: one conceives the Church as the body of Christ, whose sonship to the Father is the true life in which all members participate, receiving the Spirit as Jesus himself did, and moved by the “Spirit of truth” (John 15:26) in their efforts to understand the Triune God from within by participation in Christ; the other conceives the Church as a society of obedient followers under tutelage, led by those who represent the various levels of authority in an official hierarchy under a God who is known from without through the mediation of that hierarchy. For the one, salvation consists of present participation in Christ’s life; for the other, it consists of the avoidance of punishment otherwise due for original sin and of the reward to be gained in return for obedience to God’s commands as relayed by the chain of authority.”

Things didn’t need to be grasped through legalism or rites, but “a mystery that can be approached through inward participation and the illumination of the Holy Spirit.” Yet, the Western Church was drawn more to its formalities around rules/ideas/rituals. While this scaled mimetically better than mysticism (often better suited for spiritual monastics and adepts), it also created a loss of a rich inner life for its laity. At best, the Church managed to offer a mirage of spiritual ascent through rote practices and sacraments, while keeping the laity bound to the material world. 

Not unexpectedly this approach allowed the Western Church to continue to fill much of the void with power, not just power of its dominating hierarchy which led to many historical transgressions, but also reinforcing the internal power dynamics we sinfully adhere to. This is not only taking on the power to stand in judgement over others, but to stand judgement over ourselves as well. While self-mastery requires constant discernment and repentance, it not about acquiring power for the self but preparing the self to receive a Relationship with God. 

For instance, believing yourself to be a good Catholic, spiritual person, or humanitarian because you’ve followed certain guidelines or acted virtuously can do more harm than good. You’ve hypnotized yourself into a kind of tunnel vision, ignoring some unconsciously repressed or negative feelings. As your positive self-regard grows, so does the negative (where one foot is in heaven, the other is in hell). Eventually this edifice collapses under its own façade. The control of one’s image (power) has not allowed one to see reality as it is in the image of God (kenosis).    

While the Eastern Church has affirmed kenosis over power more so than the West, Webb does not let either Church off the hook:

“A tradition of spiritual understanding and practice is not something that simply by its intrinsic merit can be a secure possession of the Christian East any more than of the West, and to the extent that its full depth and beauty become partially lost by either, they can also be regained, in the West as well as in the East—but only by self-emptying openness, serious intellectual labor, earnest moral and spiritual excavation, and perhaps painful repentance.”

In other words, no institution can save us. We must do the work for ourselves!