Theological Musings, Summer 2012: #1
I’ve been obsessed with theological questions since early childhood, and I can’t picture that changing. In my 26 years I’ve made a great deal of explorations into religious matters, via reading, discussion and practice. I have had strange experiences that I will never be able to shake, and which have changed the way I see the world.
I’ve developed a rather broad view of things, and that view is hopefully getting broader. But sometimes I feel a kind of anxiety that I don’t have a systematic theology, and feel as though I ought to write one (primarily for my own use). Sometimes I’d like to be able to sum up, and gaze upon a solid edifice (when, usually, I feel as though I’m looking upon “words written with a stick in water”). It does sound attractive in a way, in no small part because I admire the great system-builders of history, from Plato to St. Paul to Marx; and it’s a little too facile, this post-modern laughter at their very impulse to search for truth, and their systematic approach to that.
Still, I’m basically eclectic and open. I see value in a lot of different perspectives, and I view truth (at a personal and larger social level) as proceeding along the lines of syntheses and ruptures, as opposed to self-containing edifices. And to be fair, I don’t think that Marx, for example, saw himself as creating a pat, closed system, as the worst of his detractors and supporters have often maintained. And I don’t think that the Inquisition, as “real world” arm of dogma, simply exists in St. Paul in seed form. These are vulgar readings of history and we ought not dally with them.
I’m struggling to stay on task. I’m trying to answer my impulse for system-building with a compromise: I’m forcing myself to at least write down my stray thoughts on religion so that I can get a better view of them. [This isn’t supposed to look like structured argumentation with cross references. This is somewhere on the spectrum of stream of consciousness, hopefully paving the way for future projects.] Granted, of course, we’re dealing with misty realms of the human experience, and because of the subject matter there is a greater disparity than in any other realm between the experience and the telling. Take caution on stormy seas, but thank God when we at least have a boat!
So what about theological systems, truth, eclecticism and all that? First of all, as I said above, I’m more inclined to mobile syntheses than to monolithic systems, but I don’t throw out the idea of basic orientation and direction. It’s the same in the realm of politics. I don’t go for some liberal version of “all positions are valuable” so we end up with a muddled, spineless outcome which somehow (against all logic and empirical evidence) claims that truth is just the middle point of whatever extremes are out there (when really this just means supporting the far right, because the spectrum of mainstream, legitimate politics is already far right). No. I am opposed to capitalism and to all forms of class society. I orient and ground myself in the idea of communism as a semi-open-ended goal (how we get there is problematic and convulsive, rater than a straight line; it also implies future possibilities that we cannot predict in advance, etc.). Within that basic orientation, though, I draw from all sorts of non-communist and diverse communist thinkers and experiences. In the realm of politics I believe in being ecumenical yet not liberal.
It’s the same with theology. I do agree that, in a certain sense, we are living in an age when “grand narratives” are increasingly problematic, if by that we mean closed systems that explain everything. Though, just read Thomas Aquinas to see that the closed systems of yore are mostly a myth. Christian Aristotealianism.
[We are certainly not living in an age that is post-ideological or impervious to belief. Today’s fundamentalisms, for example, exhibit continuities with the past but are precisely contemporary. Ideas have a transcendent dimension, but in other respects they are very much bound up with time and space, and today’s fundamentalist Christianity isn’t simply an updated version of medieval dogma. Don’t forget, we’ve already had late-Roman Christianities, feudal Christianities, capitalist Christianities and even the beginning of socialist Christianities with the highly-laudable phenomenon of liberation theology…]
Part of the reason that relying on monolithic narratives is increasingly problematic has to do with what Terence McKenna called the “Balkanization of epistemology.” I live in a medium-sized southern city, and yet, in my apartment building, there are families from Southeast Asia who are practicing Hindus. My room mate’s family is from Taiwan and are Buddhist, yet he is a devout Christian. Down the road there are people meeting to contact angelic beings in ceremonial magic rituals. Then I go and mix with my “political” friends and the majority of them are atheists and agnostics.
This is a fact of globalization. This intense mixing is a major feature of life on the planet today. It’s impossible to “simply” be a Christian, for example, because daily you are going to encounter ideas based in a secular scientific world view, Buddhism, or whatever else. Your “Christianity” is not a bounded system that exists outside the matrix of all these other influences. Antonio Gramsci is correct, I think, to make a distinction between someone’s “intellectual culture” (that ensemble of influences surrounding them) and the specific positions that they end up espousing (this is clearer with intellectuals in the strict conventional sense), but the two things are certainly related. Any Christianity today has to formulate itself in an environment that includes modern science and Buddhism. It can either incorporate aspects of them or formulate positions in opposition to them. And here we see how thoroughly modern both liberal, ecumenical Christianity and fundamentalism are.
"Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;
mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">This mixing is accelerating with contemporary globalization, which is a component of the evolution of capitalism on a world scale. But, when we look back in time, it is not as though there were “pure” doctrines as origins. Buddhism grew out of Hindu culture, and rather rapidly spread across Asia and mixed with all kinds of local religions and social contexts. Christianity emerged in a late-Roman milieu, and combined Hebrew messianism, Greco-Roman philosophy, aspects of the pagan mystery schools etc. Plenty of early texts were discovered in the 20th century which make all this plainer. There is a vulgar atheistic interpretation of all this which is mainly formulated against the equally-vulgar claims of fundamentalism. The line is, “See, the Christian doctrine was a worldly synthesis and it is therefore disproved.” As far as I’m concerned, yes, it disproves the fundamentalist line, but the multiplicity of origins is an exciting discovery and in fact vindicates Christianity, giving it new life for new generations!
And globalization doesn’t just indicate that ecumenicalism is the reasonable way forward because there is a mixing. That is, there are different ideas out there, they are mixing, and therefore we ought to deal with that fact. That’s true. But in an even more profound way, the problem has to do with what Marx and Engels called “universal history.” There are personal histories, family histories, regional histories and so on. Then there is a world history, and world historic events. This isn’t an oblique metaphysical concept. Just look at 2011. Rebellions broke out in Tunisia and Egypt. Things broke out in the U.K. and Greece, the U.S., Canada. One inspired another, and they had mutual interactions. We are integrated into a world economic system, with high levels of political integration as well. We experience economic crises on a global level, and we are seeing that rebellion and revolution have to be global, too. The ecological crisis is global, etc., etc.
More than ever before, we have to think in terms of humanity and a planet overall and in general. With epistemological Balkanization and the death of meta-narratives on the one hand, there is a need-again, more than ever-for forms of universality. And let me give my highly partisan position here: I think that means going back to some (properly historicist, of course) conception of perennial philosophy, as espoused by Renaissance thinkers like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. That means taking a generous view of all the competing doctrines out there, and synthesizing aspects of them in provisional ways that allow for meaningful conversation on a global level. That means being open to a certain flux, while still affirming a “timelessness” of deep mystical truth, and seeing affinities where, upon superficial inspection, there is only difference. It is time that we both think globally and act globally.
I’ve developed a rather broad view of things, and that view is hopefully getting broader. But sometimes I feel a kind of anxiety that I don’t have a systematic theology, and feel as though I ought to write one (primarily for my own use). Sometimes I’d like to be able to sum up, and gaze upon a solid edifice (when, usually, I feel as though I’m looking upon “words written with a stick in water”). It does sound attractive in a way, in no small part because I admire the great system-builders of history, from Plato to St. Paul to Marx; and it’s a little too facile, this post-modern laughter at their very impulse to search for truth, and their systematic approach to that.
Still, I’m basically eclectic and open. I see value in a lot of different perspectives, and I view truth (at a personal and larger social level) as proceeding along the lines of syntheses and ruptures, as opposed to self-containing edifices. And to be fair, I don’t think that Marx, for example, saw himself as creating a pat, closed system, as the worst of his detractors and supporters have often maintained. And I don’t think that the Inquisition, as “real world” arm of dogma, simply exists in St. Paul in seed form. These are vulgar readings of history and we ought not dally with them.
I’m struggling to stay on task. I’m trying to answer my impulse for system-building with a compromise: I’m forcing myself to at least write down my stray thoughts on religion so that I can get a better view of them. [This isn’t supposed to look like structured argumentation with cross references. This is somewhere on the spectrum of stream of consciousness, hopefully paving the way for future projects.] Granted, of course, we’re dealing with misty realms of the human experience, and because of the subject matter there is a greater disparity than in any other realm between the experience and the telling. Take caution on stormy seas, but thank God when we at least have a boat!
So what about theological systems, truth, eclecticism and all that? First of all, as I said above, I’m more inclined to mobile syntheses than to monolithic systems, but I don’t throw out the idea of basic orientation and direction. It’s the same in the realm of politics. I don’t go for some liberal version of “all positions are valuable” so we end up with a muddled, spineless outcome which somehow (against all logic and empirical evidence) claims that truth is just the middle point of whatever extremes are out there (when really this just means supporting the far right, because the spectrum of mainstream, legitimate politics is already far right). No. I am opposed to capitalism and to all forms of class society. I orient and ground myself in the idea of communism as a semi-open-ended goal (how we get there is problematic and convulsive, rater than a straight line; it also implies future possibilities that we cannot predict in advance, etc.). Within that basic orientation, though, I draw from all sorts of non-communist and diverse communist thinkers and experiences. In the realm of politics I believe in being ecumenical yet not liberal.
It’s the same with theology. I do agree that, in a certain sense, we are living in an age when “grand narratives” are increasingly problematic, if by that we mean closed systems that explain everything. Though, just read Thomas Aquinas to see that the closed systems of yore are mostly a myth. Christian Aristotealianism.
[We are certainly not living in an age that is post-ideological or impervious to belief. Today’s fundamentalisms, for example, exhibit continuities with the past but are precisely contemporary. Ideas have a transcendent dimension, but in other respects they are very much bound up with time and space, and today’s fundamentalist Christianity isn’t simply an updated version of medieval dogma. Don’t forget, we’ve already had late-Roman Christianities, feudal Christianities, capitalist Christianities and even the beginning of socialist Christianities with the highly-laudable phenomenon of liberation theology…]
Part of the reason that relying on monolithic narratives is increasingly problematic has to do with what Terence McKenna called the “Balkanization of epistemology.” I live in a medium-sized southern city, and yet, in my apartment building, there are families from Southeast Asia who are practicing Hindus. My room mate’s family is from Taiwan and are Buddhist, yet he is a devout Christian. Down the road there are people meeting to contact angelic beings in ceremonial magic rituals. Then I go and mix with my “political” friends and the majority of them are atheists and agnostics.
This is a fact of globalization. This intense mixing is a major feature of life on the planet today. It’s impossible to “simply” be a Christian, for example, because daily you are going to encounter ideas based in a secular scientific world view, Buddhism, or whatever else. Your “Christianity” is not a bounded system that exists outside the matrix of all these other influences. Antonio Gramsci is correct, I think, to make a distinction between someone’s “intellectual culture” (that ensemble of influences surrounding them) and the specific positions that they end up espousing (this is clearer with intellectuals in the strict conventional sense), but the two things are certainly related. Any Christianity today has to formulate itself in an environment that includes modern science and Buddhism. It can either incorporate aspects of them or formulate positions in opposition to them. And here we see how thoroughly modern both liberal, ecumenical Christianity and fundamentalism are.
"Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;
mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">This mixing is accelerating with contemporary globalization, which is a component of the evolution of capitalism on a world scale. But, when we look back in time, it is not as though there were “pure” doctrines as origins. Buddhism grew out of Hindu culture, and rather rapidly spread across Asia and mixed with all kinds of local religions and social contexts. Christianity emerged in a late-Roman milieu, and combined Hebrew messianism, Greco-Roman philosophy, aspects of the pagan mystery schools etc. Plenty of early texts were discovered in the 20th century which make all this plainer. There is a vulgar atheistic interpretation of all this which is mainly formulated against the equally-vulgar claims of fundamentalism. The line is, “See, the Christian doctrine was a worldly synthesis and it is therefore disproved.” As far as I’m concerned, yes, it disproves the fundamentalist line, but the multiplicity of origins is an exciting discovery and in fact vindicates Christianity, giving it new life for new generations!
And globalization doesn’t just indicate that ecumenicalism is the reasonable way forward because there is a mixing. That is, there are different ideas out there, they are mixing, and therefore we ought to deal with that fact. That’s true. But in an even more profound way, the problem has to do with what Marx and Engels called “universal history.” There are personal histories, family histories, regional histories and so on. Then there is a world history, and world historic events. This isn’t an oblique metaphysical concept. Just look at 2011. Rebellions broke out in Tunisia and Egypt. Things broke out in the U.K. and Greece, the U.S., Canada. One inspired another, and they had mutual interactions. We are integrated into a world economic system, with high levels of political integration as well. We experience economic crises on a global level, and we are seeing that rebellion and revolution have to be global, too. The ecological crisis is global, etc., etc.
More than ever before, we have to think in terms of humanity and a planet overall and in general. With epistemological Balkanization and the death of meta-narratives on the one hand, there is a need-again, more than ever-for forms of universality. And let me give my highly partisan position here: I think that means going back to some (properly historicist, of course) conception of perennial philosophy, as espoused by Renaissance thinkers like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. That means taking a generous view of all the competing doctrines out there, and synthesizing aspects of them in provisional ways that allow for meaningful conversation on a global level. That means being open to a certain flux, while still affirming a “timelessness” of deep mystical truth, and seeing affinities where, upon superficial inspection, there is only difference. It is time that we both think globally and act globally.