Even in a Savaged Landscape…

If a Lutheran impulse lurks within me, as I noted yesterday, I also have, you might say, a marginally existentialist temperament. When looking for a starting point for making sense of life, I find that point anchored in personal consciousness (with all of its powers included, of course). Before thought, there must be a thinker; before experience, there must be someone to have it. But my position does not extend to affirming what authentic existentialists do, namely that “existence is prior to essence.” For the hard-core existentialist, each human essence (“what we are”) is created by the person’s voluntary action. Curiously, as I grasp this—to the extent that I do—the existentialist’s “existence” is what Aristotle seems to have meant by potential. Potential is a devil of a concept. It must be there, but yet it isn’t—yet. In any case, for me, the core self has “features,” right out of the box, thus something that we are—long before we’ve done anything at all. We are a power of awareness and of will.

Been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Anxiety. It is an admirable, brief summation of Sartre’s philosophy from the perspective of “the eternal feminine.” I owe Brandon Watson for pointing me in that directed quite some time ago. The book is inaccessible to people who’ve never grappled with Sartre—in whose Being and Nothingness the various core concepts de Beauvoir uses are first defined with plentiful examples; de Beauvoir does not bother with definitions: she is addressing other existentialists. But once those notions are firmly renewed, de Beauvoir’s work is helpful. Reading it came the thought: “Lord, that twentieth century! An absolute desert, a ravaged landscape. And yet spirituality rises from that wreckage nonetheless.”

Reorienting myself in this arcane world of thought and feeling born of ruin, I came across a wonderful short paper by Gordon R. Lewis, of the Conservative Baptist Seminary (Denver, CO), titled “Augustine and Existentialism” (link). Lewis traces the essence of existentialism back to Augustine (354-430). Augustine’s view is only marginally existentialist; he would also have found problems in putting essence second. He, of course, lived in a time of disintegration—that of the Western Roman Empire. The cultural landscape might have been similarly savaged.

I’ve come to think, reading another existentialist, Hans Jonas, in his The Gnostic Religion (link on this blog) that the same spirit, minus philosophical machinery, also inspired Gnosticism, a phenomenon that predates Augustine (say second century AD), with the Hellenistic order coming unraveled. The same phenomenon sprouting, each time, from a landscape of cultural chaos.

Remembering Garner Ted Armstrong

A couple of days ago a long-forgotten memory surfaced—specifically of listening to a radio program in the 1960s, usually while driving home for lunch in Kansas City. It was a rather vivid memory, once it returned. But I could recover neither the name of the preacher nor of his organization; the name of the program, I was sure, had the word “world” in it. I was also sure that I would instantly recognize the name if only I saw it. Google. Now the world of religious radio broadcasting is vast—albeit it is almost buried under Religious TV Mountain that had risen in the decades since. Dozens of web sites later, I gave up. But Brigitte, in about five minutes, sent me a link to a list of television evangelists; I’d skipped that, focused, as I’d been, on radio. Well! Right there, under the As, right on top, was the name I had been looking for: Garner Ted Armstrong (1930-2003). The program was The World Tomorrow. And the organization, founded by Garner Ted’s father, Herbert W., was the Worldwide Church of God.

The World Tomorrow was my first-ever exposure to fundamentalist Christianity. I’d heard such programs briefly before, but never stayed to listen. Garner Ted Armstrong, however, caught my attention by his eloquence, by the power of his rhetorical skills, and the peculiar angle on reality that the Worldwide Church of God offered. Apocalyptic. Hence the program was strongly sprinkled with current world-wide news, the news themselves used as evidence of the prophecy that the elder Herbert W. preached. The world would soon be ending. But this end was being preached with a very high level of sophistication by Garner Ted. Quite wonderful if, for me, only as an illustration of what you could do with biblical material if you were diligent and, well, that word again, sophisticated.

What Garner Ted Armstrong taught me was the power behind a certain kind of firmly held belief—Biblical inerrancy—thus taking it as unquestioned truth that the Bible was literally the word of God. Ours was only to understand it and, then in turn, using only the Bible itself as our resource, to explain all modern knowledge so that it came to harmonize with the literal sense of the Word.

The fact that explanation, of that Word, was necessary—the authenticity of the other claim (It is the Word of God) not really questioned by Christian believers—the question that arose next in my mind was: whose interpretation is to be believed? There is an institutional explanation, held in Catholic doctrine for example, slowly hammered out over a couple of millennia. Garner Ted’s view on evolution sharply disagreed with that of Catholic teaching, for example. One man’s, or a father-son pairing’s, versus that of an institutional collective? Difficulties arise in either case. The collective transmission had begun to bother me long before the 1960s arrived. Garner Ted, therefore, helped me to modify my own views still further. Whatever the inspiration behind the Bible, was doctrinaire exposition of it really necessary? (A Lutheran impulse lurks within me.)

I was, to be sure, quite immune to Garner Ted, but pleased by his stance against modernity—and the joyful pleasure with which he deployed it—absolutely certain, as he was, of his own Biblical righteousness. Much harder sledding was still ahead for me, one who, taking “world” to be much larger—and likely to remain in place much longer—had to discover truth without an unfailing, written guidebook. The 1960s seem very long ago…

Change Your Mind

I was reminded today of an old post of mine on Ghulf Genes, “Silent in Siloam” (link). There I quoted a passage from Luke 13:2-4 as follows. The passage comes when some people approached Jesus and told him some news about the execution of some insurgents by Pilate. He answered them thus:

“Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No: but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?”

Brigitte and I got to talking about this—and soon we were focused on one word, repentance. We wondered about its origin, thus what word was used there in the first edition of Luke, you might say. I was reluctant to make the effort, but finally succumbed. Luke was written in Greek, and the word used was metanoeo. I also discovered that it is a key word throughout the Gospels. Now that Greek comes apart into meta and noeo, a form of noos. The first, used as a prefix, can mean “beyond,” as in metaphysics; it can also signal “movement,” and therefore “change.” Noeo stands for mind—and survives in English in “noetic,” thus pertaining to the intellect. Metanoeo thus means “change of mind”—which, while it certainly encompasses repentance, also carries a wider meaning. “Repentance” narrows the meaning unnecessarily, but—and this is true generally of all revelation—there is more there than at first meets the eye.

Repentance signals a quid-pro-quo sort of rule. Sin and its punishment—unless sins are repented. But in metanoeo one senses something more fundamental that simply stopping sloppy or criminal behavior. It signals something more fundamental, a change in the very character of the mind itself, one might view it as an ontological change. Jesus’ brief reply also holds two different meanings for “perish.” There is death in that word—as by execution or the accidental collapse of a tower. And there is in that word, as well, a more fundamental loss than merely the loss of a body.

Late Learning

In advancing age come insights almost intended to be private—or to be shared only with one’s life-long mate—not because they shouldn’t be shared but because they require experiences that humanity only achieves in its advancing years. One has to be adequate for such knowledge—and it cannot be shared with those who haven’t gotten there yet.

In this category belongs the notion that conceptual intellection is merely a tool, an artifact, developed principally for practical purposes—and because, within these bodies, we cannot communicate directly with others mind to mind. Another is that all life is intelligent, in the higher sense—but cannot communicate that state to us because it lacks the artifact of conceptual language. Vast aggregations of habit—especially if one has lived largely in a conceptual world—make it almost impossible to believe that one can communicate, not least great complexities, without using abbreviations, tokens, which is what language is.

This came to mind today, again, reading a post on Laudator Temporis Acti (“Almost too Pitiful to Bear”) where one John Buchman hears the anguish of the trees as a grove is felled. We assign that sort of thing to the imagination—but even if we think we know a lot, in advancing age, it is obvious that we have a whole lot more to learn—and that that learning will come when we have passed.

Orientation Toward the Future

		Alles Vergängliche	All passing things
		Ist nur ein Gleichnis;	Are merely symbol;
		Das Unzulängliche,	The unattainable
		Hier wird’s Ereignis;	Here turns event;
		Das Unbeschreibliche,	The indescribable,
		Hier ist’s getan;	Here it is done;
		Das Ewig-Weibliche	The Eternal Feminine
		Zieht uns hinan.	Draws us along.
		[Goethe, Faust]

In Viktor Frankl’s meaning-oriented psychotherapy—he called it logotherapy—the highest level of the human being is the spiritual; it strives for meaning. The lower levels, the somatic and the psychic, represent forces that push us to achieve physical and social ends in the here and now, but meanings exerts a pull on us. And in the process of following our innate perception of something beyond us, we look to the future.

It struck me this morning that using one of the time dimensions (thus past, present, and future) does not express the longing for meaning that we feel adequately. To the extent that it does, future must be understood as something that we never actually achieve while we are on this plane. The future acts on us in a mysterious way, but it disappears precisely as it arrives. It turns into the present. And as the present fades with the same mysterious diminution into the past, that which has been and that which is yet to come can both be viewed under the species of eternity. Quite consistently, Frankl views the achievement of values in the present; and once realized, they are permanently saved in the past—which is immune to the forces of the flux in which we actually live, the Now.

The notions—these contrasts between what we are, what we seek, and what we actually achieve—reward the effort to contemplate them. Flickers, glimmers, bright sparks of intuition arise in us that we are not really time-bound creatures at all but beings of another order experiencing here and now a novel process in the experience of which we grow as souls.

Steadiness

I note (with what I hope will soon be sang froid) that a state of steadiness is only present when hormones do not flood the body. Some dreams produce emotional states, indeed the most complete, because in dreams awareness does not mitigate experience. I awoke from one of those emotional dreams this morning. A hard look showed that my dream arose from a more or less routine reflection on the state of our collective life—a reflection which, when no one’s present to stare it down, can indeed flood the body with anxious emotions. I feel for animals. In them such states must come and go unobstructed, awake or asleep. It is the order of nature: the inner always reflecting the outer—but the outer is not just the inorganic, the winds, the temperature, the skies, the dry, the wet. It includes also the living creatures and their agitation or lack thereof.  Steadiness is being above, meaning beyond, this lower realm, even while within it. But bodies are physical, they need their sleep. The self goes away on long perambulations in heavenly landscapes. It is on returning to the body (no doubt with a sigh) that it encounters psychic states brought about by recent memories, just surfacing again, which flood the tissues with hormonal discharge. And then it’s time to calm everything down. Such observations lead to the notion that beings in bodies have a three-fold nature: body, soul, and spirit. Only the spirit is steady because it isn’t influenced by the endless flux of this dimension.

Ignorance and Knowledge

It struck me this morning that at bottom major religious movements rest on the contrast between ignorance and knowledge. In the Hindu and Buddhist faiths, the human problem is produced by Ignorance, our mistaking the insubstantial mirage produced in this dimension by matter and all that is connected to it. Ignorance is bliss? No. In these faiths ignorance is suffering. The Gnostic faiths, which left a footprint in the century before and in the century after our current calendar changed from BC to AD, emphasize Knowledge as that which helps us to escape from this dimension of Ignorance. In Gnosticism this world of ours is the false creation of the Demiurge, spreading confusion and thus capturing the free beings that we are. The same “knowing” is rendered as Enlightenment by the Hindus and the Buddhists.

The Western religions (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) are based on the actions that center on The Fall. That story is incoherent unless taken as a parable of how human consciousness arose. In effect it says, When Consciousness arose among humans, the world fell. Incoherent? Yes. Eve took the forbidden fruit. But to disobey God in any meaningful sense, she had to have had “knowledge of good and evil” before she ate of the fruit. To emphasize this, to understand what “forbidden” means, one has to understand good and evil already. Yet that knowledge only came, supposedly, after eating the fruit.

East and West, therefore, it seems to me, take their religious insights at different points in human development. The Eastern view already assumes the presence of a conscious humanity, but one that still lacks a crucial insight—unlikely to be acquired except by suffering. The Biblical account records, and labels as disobedience, a point in time when the knowledge of good and evil actually arose. The higher insight, in the West, comes when consciousness is expanded by Revelation—and Revelation is unlikely to motivate humanity in the absence of—suffering.

Another way to see this is to say that the East emphasizes the power of cognition, the West the powers of the will. Both are powers of the human soul—alongside feeling, intuition, and imagination. All of these powers, however, are one. They cannot be teased apart in actual living. They are all present in all decisions—to act or not to act in certain ways. But religious faiths can, and have, laid their emphasis on one or the other of humanity’s supposedly different powers. In truth they are the same single power. And it works—if we work.

The Will to Meaning

The phrase is most closely linked to Viktor Frankl’s psychotherapy, but it was first articulated, in his own usage, by Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the Christian existentialist. In this context meaning translates into value, belief, and purpose—all viewed as individual, internal, subjective achievements. The will to meaning is the inner striving for something altogether absent in objective reality—out there. Meaning, in this existential sense, is the very core of Frankl psychotherapy, which he calls logotherapy. The affirmation of meaning, in Frankl’s work, is about as close as one can get to an affirmation of human transcendence in secular terms—but even a superficial reading of Frankl reveals that he means just that. Human beings cannot be adequately described when ignoring the deeply felt will to meaning present in us. We have a soul.

The particular formulation here derives from competing schools of psychotherapy: Freudian, the will to pleasure, usually rendered as the pleasure principle, and the Adlerian, the will to power. Freud’s work was centered in the sexual drive, the Adlerian on the inferiority complex. Frankl does not deny that drives exist but classifies them as on a lower, biological level, than the quest from meaning, which rises above this level. Even the person most adequately adjusted sexually or in status will experience neuroses arising from life’s seeming meaninglessness. Indeed, in Frankl’s view that state, which he calls the existential vacuum, was the dominant neurosis of his time, the twentieth century. Does it continue to loom large today?

Meaning is transcending, in Frankl’s view, because it can illuminate and overcome even the greatest suffering, not least terminal suffering, by the vital acts of endurance and affirmation of the individual. All of his books are quite accessible. A good example is Man’s Search for Meaning. Do not, however, expect to find “the meaning of life” explained, chapter and verse. That remains an individual responsibility—another important word in Frankl’s thought.

Reminders Mild and Harsh

Nothing works as effectively as a reminder of mortality than the abrupt interruption of our habitual way of life. The mild form of that, just at the present, is the failure of our Internet connection; a more telling nudge is a power-failure; in the summer; in winter it’s a much more potent wake-up call. Living in habit’s warm embrace we are protected from the awareness of our current quandary: we exist in what, for humans, is an alien environment. Then there are the serious events: blood in the urine, the tight band across the chest. The world seems to stop. Everything is in the air.

Curious business, habit. If the upheavals last long enough, we get used to them. New habits form. If the ailments do not kills us, we learn to limp or to take our medications; routine visits to the doctors, to the clinics become…routine. The lens gets adjusted; we forget how blurred our vision has become. We also find it easy to recall adaptive habits. After the fourth or fifth recurrence of something unpleasant, we just dust off learned routines and resume them—until the lights are back on again or that pain across the chest gradually diminishes.

At its deepest levels, organic life seeks equilibrium—a word that nicely approximates the feeling we have when we are just living our habits. It was Freud, I think (and I cannot check this, what with the Internet down), who spoke about the death instinct in man, derived from the fact that organic life has a secret wish to reach, again, that state of total equilibrium present in inorganic matter. Matter has neither wants nor wishes. But the death instinct may also signal something else—the wish to be entirely free of matter which, stirred up by energy, is ever in motion and ever undergoing change. Plato well knew this. The soul has no parts hence cannot decay.

An examination of this situation suggests a paradoxical solution to the ever-looming dread of unwished-for change. A genuinely awaked person knows that one must be detached from all of that—“all of that” being precisely what we call “life” here. He or she should, like a good Scout, be semper paratus for anything, attached to nothing. But a vast gulf separates knowing from being. Being attached to our daily life is virtually unavoidable. Practicing detachment is a good thing—until, chuckle, it becomes habitual. In which case, sure enough, it no longer works.

All this, to be sure, will come to an end. In the meantime, when we fall, we must promptly get up again, brush off, grit our teeth, and soldier on. And, paradoxically again, the reminders, mild or harsh, are actually a blessing. They are reminders. Your work on earth is still not done.