God the Heretic, Part Deux

Well, this thing is long, repetitive, boring, and still unfinished. Enjoy!

It seems as though the "choice" complicit in determining our beliefs is not so much a positive as a negative choice.

We do not actually choose what we believe; our beliefs are only the most consistent available terminations to the foreground of our thinking at a given time. We do not have direct, volitional access to change the content of our beliefs (they are, to use a computer-term, "read-only"). Of course, by "beliefs" I mean earnest beliefs, not statements (which can be lies) or self-deceit.

On self-deceit: Self-deceit seems to be the closest that one comes to changing one's belief by sheer act of the will. However it is still not direct. Recall that I defined beliefs as the most consistent available terminations to the *foreground* of our thinking. What people know and what they believe are not always consistent. Often, knowledges are present, but have either never been made explicit (perhaps they are very subtle, like the truths that Socrates would bring to birth in his interlocutors), or have been "forgotten" - which is not to say that they have disappeared, but they have receded from the foreground of thought. It is possible for us to wilfully forget things, whether they are subtle points or unpleasant facts. These can be pushed into the background of thought where they have no appreciable effect on conscious beliefs. This is done either by neglect of mental attention to those points, or exaggerated mental attention on a peripheral point that, isolated from its ugly cousin, yields a pleasant outcome. But note that self-deception appears always to be a filter. We do not add an untrue thought to our thinking; we let the knowledge of its falshood slide into obscurity.

But back to beliefs. Beliefs are the most consistent available terminations to the foreground of our thinking. They do not rest high above, aloof from throught, but rather make up a substantial portion *of* that thought (though thought is not simply a sequence of beliefs). Beliefs make up the soft boundaries of the thinkable; thus thought itself is not entirely accessible to the will. What part of it is?

To the extent that we have any control over our daily experiences and inputs, it seems that choice enters here. Like the food we eat, the influences that we imbibe can arrive on our doorstep according to circumstance, impulse or strict planning. Of course the extent to which individuals can do this is wildly variable, and socio-economic class is a strong factor--whether one has cable, Internet access, transportation, a public library, liesure, and the education to know what kinds of influences are where, is strictly beyond anyone's control; those who have these things didn't normally earn them or earn the tools necessary to earn them. Don't tell a destitute Guatemalan villager he can be anything he wants to be. Yet even among the wealthy the breadth of this choice is tightly constricted: there is a grave disparity between the conveniently available, little province of viewpoints that satisfies most in a given 1st world country, and an authentic breaking open of the intellect. Of course I don't mean to draw a line and put myself comfortably on the favorable side of it (though that may be a necessary consequence of merely writing about it). But there is a spectrum, and unfortunately it is precisely a part of the "lower end" of the spectrum that those who belong to it imagine themselves to be at the "upper end". The market couldn't function if it couldn't persuade the masses that they are Inspired Independent Intellectual Individuals (and persuade each that he or she is moreso than most).

Yet perhaps this is looking at it the wrong way. Certainly people have unequal access to the breadth of data generated by the human species in its recorded lifetime. But individually each life can be said to be confronted with every possible choice, irrespective of complex or simple circumstances. No civilization is without its quarrels, its traditions, its wisdoms and its foolishnesses. In one shape or another the entire range of meaningful associations is accessible to every person. Acadamia is elitist; but human meaning is absolutely egalitarian. So we must personalize the question: not what are one's influences, but who.

Our chosen associations affect our thought and thus our beliefs. But how, exactly? It is not necessarily true that one's friends are also one's teachers; as mentioned, Pascal may have played dice with the godless, but not with his belief in God. Shared beliefs are but one of the possible bonds of friendship. Yet still nobody is impermeable to undesired influences; we are "porous", and Scripture frequently warns of associating with non-believers.

I mentioned before that self-deception occurs through the neglect of true thoughts (and these not need be religious thoughts; we deceive ourselves about the simplest and most mundane things). The mind is a bit like quicksand; left alone, objects will sink beneath the surface and disappear. Of course they are still there, but you wouldn't know it simply by looking.

How long can a person sustain the presence of true thoughts in the foreground of the mind? Alone, it would depend on his or her discipline and fervor for truth; yet even religious hermits depend on periodic gatherings and reminders of the brilliant yet subtle nature of their call. How much more necessary, then, would good associations be for those who also maintained associations indifferent to truth?

Again, I make a clear distinction: the danger is not that truth-indifferent associations would put dangerous or untrue thoughts in one's mind (it is scarcely possible today to avoid exposure to untrue thoughts; intellectual provincialism I do not believe is the friend of Christian communities anymore, if it in fact ever was). It is rather that, analagous to the self-deceiver who exaggerates a peripheral thought to forget the deeper thought, truth-indifferent associations exaggerate the presence of peripheral and ephemeral ideas, of zeitgeists, and true thoughts can recede into the background of the mind if they are not brought forward again by good associations.

In short (too late!), it is not the associations that one has, but the associations that one lacks, that have the most profound effect on one's ability to have a breadth of views and truths always in the foreground of thought. The "choice" which is most relevant is not the choice for this or that association but the choice against.

OK, the next installation of this thing should finish it off. I know this essay is kind of weak; but I hope profound insights are forthcoming!

God the Heretic

Whenever I have come across the word "heresy" in my studies, whether in lectures or books, authors of all theological strains are usually at pains to remind us that the word comes from the Greek αἵρεσις, hairesis, meaning "to choose" (yes, I did CTRL+C those words, italics and all, from Wikipedia). The word "choice" has an almost magical effect on some wistful moderns, inspiring them to become serious and far-gazing, receiving in to their trembling hands the golden tongs of the salad bar of eternity, as they solemnly utter, "Gone is the sweet fable of the past, when Truth was given; now there are many truths, and I must choose." A single tear rolls down the modern face. Cue Oleander's "I Walk Alone".

Indeed, Peter Berger's "The Heretical Imperative" argued precisely this, that whatever one's religion--from traditional Christianity to Mahayana Buddhism, it is a chosen religion and cannot be otherwise. He then proceeds to go on about plausibility structures as if this could be cheerful news for Christianity. Viva la heresy.

A point of analytic philosophy, a mere whisper among the enthusiasm for choice, is: can anyone be said to choose their beliefs at all? That was one of the first criticisms I read when studying William James' famous essay, "The Will to Believe". The very notion of a "chosen belief" seems self-contradictory. Presumably if someone believes something, it is believed for some reason--whether good or bad, or whether well-articulated or not. If I were conscious of having a belief because I have chosen to have it; i.e., that it is born out of sheer will, then I cannot actually be said to believe it, can I? I cannot choose to believe something which I know, or think, is false. And if I don't know, I might have a hypothesis--but the very word implies that it is less (hypo) than a real belief (thesis). One can have entertain contradicting hypotheses; one cannot hold opposite beliefs. Choice alone does not a belief make.

In fact, I recall reading that William James himself acknowledged that this was the case, and suggested that his essay would have been better titled, "The Right to Believe". But that does not change James' point that, even if we do not directly choose our beliefs in the manner I described above, still, desires and beliefs are mixed up somehow. A hint as to how is the bit of text from the Pensees that follows the so-called "Pascal's Wager":

Go, then, and take holy water, and have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples – Cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira.

Whereas some have accused Pascal of committing the error of "doxastic voluntarism", this single line actually vindicates him. Pascal never suggested that we choose our beliefs; we do not come to believe, rather, "belief will come." What we do choose is not our beliefs, but our surroundings, our influences--what we listen to, and what we do not listen to. In addition, it is notable, Pascal does not tell the reader what not to listen to, but suggests rather that one add to one's tributaries of influence one thing which might be lacking--exposure to worship. Pascal himself did not shy away from the company of his secularist peers; indeed, it was they, not he, who had constricted their scope of vision.

Blah, I've hit a block. I don't want to let this essaylet die; I do have a point. Need to take a break.

Indeterminate, overdeterminate?

In my Louvain philosophy days, I had the pleasure of taking a class, "Philosophy of God", by William Desmond, an unabashedly Catholic philosopher finely attuned to postmodern sensibilities and whose books bespeak an Irish poet's heart as much as they do a mind full of breadth and depth rivaling the Greeks. That might sound like a lot of blustering, but Desmond is something else. I'm not always certain that even he is always aware of the landscape of his own thoughts; he is not what one would call an analytic philosopher. But by golly, if an analytic philosopher had a problem with Desmond, it would be more like that he simply didn't understand, rather than that he would ever catch William in an actual contradiction. Sometimes I wonder whether Desmond has this in common with John Paul II--whether his writings contain the purest of truth like ore in a mine, too coarse and heavy for practical consumption, but if processed into convenient coins (such as Christopher West has done with "Theology of the Body", God bless him) would lose its more subtle value.

One of the distinctions Desmond made in the class, and that he makes in his books, is between speaking of God as "indeterminate" and as "overdeterminate". The error of speaking of God as "indeterminate" is the implication that the question of God languishes because of a hung jury and a certain poverty of evidence. One may easily--and positivists often do--speak of God as "indeterminate" in exactly the same voice with which they speak of aliens, the loch ness monster, big foot, and the living Elvis Presley. In fact, such indeterminacy is exactly the core of Richard Dawkins' atheism.

A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he though God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's.

Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.

The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so. *

Desmond grants, as any Christian grants, there is no determining of the question of God. Indeed, the very thought is a contradiction; de-termining, to have reached the end, the limit, the boundary; and having done so, speaking from that position. No doubt the word is very authoritative sounding. But to call something incidentally indeterminate is no great scandal. Science can't even determine whether redheads feel more pain or less pain than other people; it shouldn't arrogate to write a textbook on the Almighty.

Yet secularists of an evangelical strain see that the question of God is, as AJ Ayer would put it, nonsense in the most literal, and thus also the fuller meaning of that word. Theists, incidentally, agree. They just don't see why such niggling facts should stop them.

Anyway, the term "overdeterminate", as best as I understand, grants that God is nonsense, but takes a thoughtful stab as to why. It is not the "not-enoughness" of God, but the "too-muchness" of God. The intellect, like a man stranded on an island, dies equally from thirst as from a Tsunami. And it is precisely that God explodes so over-completely above and beyond and over, not only what we know, but what and why we are, that determinations are impossible, de jure.

To translate this analytically, the notion is really quite simple. Every science (in the broad sense of the word) is grounded by principles that lie outside of its purvue. Each science cannot question its own principle; it can only presuppose it. The historian cannot use the tools of history, no matter how vast they be, to examine whether history is true.

Well, extending this notion by analogy, the principle of everything is of its very nature outside of anything's ability to speak of it. Once we have gotten this far, there is nothing left in speakable nature to appeal to; nothing left available to pry the unspeakable loose from its awful necessity.

One might accuse me of saying too much about the thing I'm calling unspeakable, and to a certain extent they're right--I know as well as any theologian who takes the Thomistic oath that our words are offensive nonsense compared to God. But the thing about the unspeakable is that, for small systems as well as the System, the Universe as a whole, that the unspeakable is, is beyond question.

By conceiving God, who always exceeds our reach, as the horizon presupposed in the movement of knowing, freedom and love, Rahner provided a way for talking and thinking about God as "mysterious," that is to say, as a reality who is known, but only reflexively and indirectly—and perhaps not even consciously—as the ever receding horizon of the human spirit. *

So, Desmond's point is that God is as much the "ever advancing" horizon of the human spirit, as the "ever receding"; a horizon not so much as a line in the distance as the ground underneath our feet or the whatever beyond being and non-being. That is the over-determinacy of God.

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Yet what a friend of mine is mentally wrestling with right now is not so much the language of indeterminacy vs. overdeterminacy, as the business of the "hyper-real" of John Caputo.

For by allowing this name [of God] to fluctuate in all its undecidability and provocativeness, by releasing it from its servitude to being in order to free it as a promise, we free it from its service as the name of a res, even the most real of all real beings, but we do not deny thereby that it has any reference to reality at all. Rather, we enlist it in the service of a certain 'hyper-reality,' reality of the beyond, the reality of the hyper- or ueber. Accordingly, weak theology takes the form neither of theological realism nor of anti-realism, but of a magnifying hyper-realism of the event, one whose passion and existential intensity are correspondingly magnified by this very undecidability. By this hyper-realism I mean the excess of the promise, of the call, of the endless provocation of an event that calls us beyond ourselves, down unplotted paths and into unexplored lands, calling us to go where we cannot go, extending us beyond our reach. Hyper-reality reaches beyond the real to the not-yet-real, what eye has not yet seen nor ear yet heard, in the open-endedness of an uncontainable, unconstrictable, undeconstructible event. - "The Weakness of God, 11-12" Emphases mine.

My stomach needs to settle a little bit before I continue...

There.

If Caputo were making the relatively banal point that God is, in a certain sense, nothing; i.e., no-thing, (and is thereby released from "servitude to being"), this would be a nice intro to a 10th grade theology textbook. But for Caputo it is a crass superstition to suggest that God might ever reach beneath the beyond; even all of his works must be "freed" from the messy and mucky business of historically conditioned "being" (yuck!) He has a Buddhist reverence for the sheer Otherness of the Other, the "uncontainable, unconstrictable, undeconstructible event". And so, I suggest, Caputo makes himself even more pious than God; for it was always God, and never Caputo, who thought that being was worthwhile enough for divinity to inhabit.

What is not assumed is not redeemed; if God and God's works are quarantined by the "hyper-real", then the merely real has none of the hope that Caputo promises.

Thus today we stand somewhat baffled before this Christian "revelation" and wonder, especially when we compare it with the religiosity of Asia, whether it would not have been much simpler to believe in the Mysterious Eternal, entrusting ourself to it in longing [Caputoian?] thought; whether God would not have done better, so to speak, to leave us at an infinite distance; whether it would not really be easier to ascend out of the world and hear the eternally unfathomable secret in quiet contemplation than to give oneself up to the positivism of belief in one single figure and to set the salvation of man and of the world on the pinpoint, so to speak, of this one chance moment in history. - Ratzinger, "Introduction to Christianity" 55

Whether overdeterminate or indeterminate, the question Caputo refuses to ask or answer is whether the determinate - that is, us, our history, our particularity, our ordinariness - has a value of its own that God, the overdeterminate, has himself glorified in Jesus Christ. So far as this goes I believe it is not helpful to draw a sharp distinction between the Resurrection and the other miracles of Christ, as between the "important thing" and the "not so important things". All, together, are bound up in a singular mystery that the Infinite being not only permitted finite being to exist; Infinite being breaks into finite being. It does so in ways that certainly do not rob infinite being of its infinity (its hyper-reality), yet which do not leave finite beings unchanged or unsaved.

Believing in miracles is of one piece with believing in salvation. God bless the determinate.

Balthasar's Liturgical Aesthetic: Beauty and Glory in the Liturgy

A little charity covers a lot of theology.

This is my new slogan. Yep, I'm replacing "I did not create myself" and all of its variants (although 'notselfcreated' will still be my Instant Messenger handle) with this. But it bears a little explaining, just because it sounds a little cute and my long-time readers know me too well to suspect any vapid sentimentalism from this blog.

Charity - love - caritas - mercy is one of the names of God. And something I wish Christians would make more clear is that, when we say "God is love," this is not just good marketing. It's rock solid systematic theology. But to be sure, it would be false to believe that the love of God rests on a bedrock of rationalism; the truth is the reverse. Everything; and by that I mean everything, is a necessary and fitting deduction from this simple fact: that God is love.

Even the Incarnation is a deduction of this fact, but by this I don't mean to imply that Israel could have found it out with the precision of an atomic clock, if only their syllogisms had been refined enough. Because the "logic" of God is not a deterministic logic but a liberative logic. It's the logic of sin which is deterministic. In the Inferno, Satan is encased in ice.

But anyway, preliminaries aside, to be authentically spiritual; that is, to have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, to have found perfection of charity, is already to be a master theologian; is already to contain the very heart of the analogia entis, buried in one's soul in a way that the saint becomes a immanent hot spring of the ever explosive and expansive truths of the queen of the sciences. Doctorate schmoctorate. All saints, on and off of the canon, living and deceased, perfect and imperfect, inasmuch as they are saints, are doctores ecclesia.

This somewhat obvious truth came to me in the form of a young lady I've recently met. Alas, I fear that my seminarian and monastic friends will groan, "Oh God, we've lost him to a woman." Now hold on, my pious ecclesiastical friends. I'm not going to be proposing to anyone tomorrow. But I don't believe anyone will deny me the prerogative of exploring what I've been missing all these years. But nevermind such biographical details. This young lady perhaps couldn't recite the definition of the transcendental aesthetic or defend the illative sense or evaluate Balthasar's flirtation with apokatastatis. But when she was twelve, her mother started taking her to Eucharistic Adoration on account that 'God shouldn't be lonely'. And to this day it remains one of her favorite things to do; to tell the Lord about her day; to ask him questions; or just to say 'hi'. The rest of her time is spent interpreting class lessons for deaf students for whom she feels a personal love, and being a nanny for other children. And in just this sort of arcane discipline--of piety and merciful works--she is my new professor.