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August 15, 2007
Hello everyone,
Some time ago, I took a course in political philosophy that has since proven illuminative in many ways. The professor of that course had published some of her pre-doctoral work online as well as an introductory essay to her dissertation. I printed what was available and read the introductory essay, but the others were placed in the “to read” stack. This summer I have finally gotten that stack slimmed down significantly and am currently reading (though have not finished) her essay entitled Cynicism and Self-Reliance: Discerning Emerson’s Democratic Faith. Of particular interest to me is the way the paper traces, in part through the eyes of Emerson, the similarities, differences, and shortcomings of both the cynic and the idealist.
Our friend from two issues ago who saw most persons as vermin, simply consuming through one end and depositing the waste out the other would have very much fallen into the category of cynic. Such a person has a dismal outlook on life and regards with scorn the possibility—certainly the probability—of any productive change. Yet as we have suggested many times, the cynic is simply a disillusioned idealist: a person who secretly believes the world ought to be a better place and grows resentful when he finds that it is not to his liking. As Dr. Dutton’s essay bears out, Emerson saw the cynic, in her words, “as an unmitigated materialist”; in his words, such a person “estimates man by the pound.” She continues, culling much of this background sketch from Emerson’s Representative Men: Seven Lectures (which can also be read online at EmersonCentral.com):
Judging man so, the cynic reduces man to no more than “an ass being lead to market by a bundle of hay.” He lives his life blindly focused on his physical comforts, thoughtlessly obeying his creaturely desires. Man’s freedom, in this estimation, amounts to no more than licentiousness; man’s life, governed by something so common that it can be likened to a bundle of hay, possesses little value; and the cynic, perceiving this, falls into “indifferentism and then to disgust.” Seeing in the world such “meanness,” the cynic bitterly concludes that “’tis hardly worthwhile to be here at all.” And since it is hardly worth being here, the cynic excuses himself from any effort to be better himself, or to make things better generally. Because “mankind is a damned rascal and lives by humbug alone,” the cynic rationalizes living by humbug himself. He excuses his own selfishness, justifies his resignation, abdicates the possibility of personal moral reform to the meanness of a life in search of the satisfaction of animal desires, and scoffs at those who labor for a life of principle.
The caustic criticism of the cynic—“people are vermin”—can in its own way provide a valuable critique of society. The difficulty, however, comes in at the level at which the cynic is effectively immobilized by his stance, an inactivity that adversely affects both himself and his ability to truly better the world. Yet Dr. Dutton’s essay implicates not only the cynic for this kind of debilitating stance, but also the idealist. Again culling from Representative Men: Seven Lectures, she writes:
The indifference and despair promulgated by the scoffing cynic arise not only from materialism’s one-sided perception of existence, but also from men disposed to the opposite perception, the abstractionists. These “men of genius and faith,” focus on identity rather than difference, and on unifying ideas rather than disparate facts. Focusing on ideas divorced from their presence in reality these men become arrogant; they “affirm disdainfully the superiority of ideas” to “the heavy and faulty” works they see. Too sure of and too enveloped in the superiority of their ideas, idealists speak “like dreaming beggars . . . as if these values were already substantiated in the world.” Blind to facts and so deluded by ideas, these idealists fall into an irrelevance that parallels the materialist’s indifferentism, and a paralysis that closely resembles the cynic’s despair. “Destitute of all energy of will to embody and vitalize their ideals” these men exhaust man’s capacity for truth and justice—to the same detriment as the materialist’s dismissal of it. While the idealist does not explicitly abdicate man’s liberty or morality, or his potential to be free and moral, they effectively curtail it. Rendering their ideals more real than life itself, they cease to be able to labor in this world to realize those ideals. The resulting error of their excess is less repulsive than materialism’s culmination in cynicism, insofar as abstractionists preserve the idea of principles and man’s potential. But their error is no less detrimental. Indeed, insofar as idealists deceive themselves about their own accomplishments, shirk moral responsibility even as they claim to champion these values, and divorce those ideals from real circumstances, the effects of their excesses might be considered far worse. Albeit on different grounds and often unintentionally, the idealist justifies resignation toward life and a disdain for man.
Both cynics and idealists, then, tend toward a view of the world that isolates themselves from it, rendering them powerless to effect any real change. And, given that we have said that a cynic is a disillusioned idealist, perhaps the one is simply the mirror of the other, just as an utter skeptic who denies everything is in reality a dogmatist who claims that we cannot know anything. As the essay continues, Dr. Dutton wrestles with these figures and with Emerson’s attempt to bring about some resolution with the “wise skeptic” who impartially mediates between the contestants.
I see in myself tendencies toward both the cynic and the idealist. Certainly given that the spiritual life is my dominant focus, it is rather easy at times to grow discouraged and disheartened. On the other hand, it is easy to present lofty ideals, that, however much they might inspire others, leave my own day-to-day interactions with others hanging in the balance. The problem is not that the idealist envisions a better life—pragmatically speaking, that is the great value of ideals—nor that the cynic sometimes sees the unpleasant aspects of present-day reality with startling acuity (for indeed, it is invaluable to effecting change on the one hand to see what actually exists and on the other to envision the possibilities that could be). Rather, it is as these forms approach either extreme and stop communicating one with the other that paralysis settles in.
“The ministry of reconciliation,” as I term it, sits at the heart of the spiritual life, and its conception is quite straightforward. Human beings are fragile creatures living in an often broken world. We are dependent on the earth, on each other, and upon our Heavenly Father. We desire independence; we long to be free. Somewhere between the independence and the freedom that we crave and the dependence that is our lot, a disconnect has formed. What we need, then, is reconciliation: what we need is healing. We need reconciliation in our relationship to God, we need reconciliation in our relationships with our fellow human beings and within ourselves, and we need to be responsible as we strive to live in harmony with our earth: it’s our home and it is our duty to care both for it and for our children’s children. We have, then, the reality of our brokenness on one side that offers fuel for the cynic; on the other, we have a great yearning for redemption which becomes self-righteous fodder for the idealist living in beautiful unrealities that safely keep his feet from touching the earth.
With this idea of the ministry of reconciliation in view, we can see how idealism could threaten to swallow us: how we could easily bask in a beautiful idea that sees none of the sweat, blood, and tears that often are required to actualize it. To say that my brother and I are one is beautiful; to embrace the immigrant and the homeless and the outcast quite another idea altogether, particularly when they stink, particularly when their manners are abhorrent and their social skills lacking, particularly when we think they deserve what they got, particularly when it is just easier to think beautiful thoughts and walk the other way. Yet if we can see Christ in others, in this we will find our own comfort, happiness, joy, even salvation. In our own way, we have been created for each other and neither the dim view of the cynic nor pie-in-the-sky idealism are appropriate responses.
I can only partner with God myself, just as I can only eat for myself and drink for myself: no one can do those things for me. Nor can I do those things for you: the most I can do is spoon food into your mouth, hold a glass to your lips, or split your vein with an IV tube. The nourishment still has to enter into your body, not mine, and there be appropriated to strengthen the sinews and fibers that knit together your fabric. The spiritual life begins and ends with ourselves and God and from this quiet place reaches outward. Without this inner renewal, we simply do not have the necessary resources to minister to others and no amount of guilty feelings will make up for the balance. Collective Soul’s song “Breathe” from Hints Allegations and Things Left Unsaid even gives us a metaphor to conceptualize this process: I cannot very well breathe out love, healing, transformation, reconciliation, and all that is good, right, true, and positive if I have not first breathed it in: I cannot effect transformation without myself being transformed. Breathe in, breathe out.
Breathe in. Yet I do not live for myself alone. Breathe out. I am reminded of a Buddhist aphorism by Wei Wu Wei in Why Lazarus Laughed: The Essential Doctrine, Zen—Advaita—Tantra that poignantly sticks in the mind:
When you give a shilling to a beggar—do you realise that you are giving it to yourself? When you help a lame dog over a stile—do you realise that you yourself are being helped? When you kick a man when he is down—do you realise that you are kicking yourself? Give him another kick—if you deserve it! (32)
Most Buddhist thought is pantheistic and while I have theological and philosophic reasons for doubting such a view as being complete in itself (Wei Wu Wei, for example, would probably not have reacted too kindly in his lifetime if we had taken him at his word and applied our boot to his backside—smile), I have also asked myself the pragmatic question as well: “In terms of practical reality, how would the conclusions of such a view play out in contrast to your own view as God being at once transcendent as well as immanent?” Now certainly if I believe that God is Wholly Other than creation, yet I also believe that he is intimately connected with and concerned for his creation, that can afford me a level of strength and comfort as I learn to trust in his grace and provision. Yet many of the insights a Buddhist might draw from a pantheist belief will not in practicality be that much different from my own. And what of a view that is even closer? If I believe, for example, as Emmet Fox appears to do in our citation from the previous issue, that we are discrete manifestations of God’s consciousness—a form of panentheism—and that we should cast our cares on the “inner Christ”—how is that different in its practical ramifications from someone like me who believes that God and humanity remain distinct and ontologically separate and yet that God lives within me and that he has instilled in my heart desires and a conscience that are basically reliable, particularly as I subjugate my baser desires to his will, consciously partnering with him in the process? Theologically and philosophically there is a subtle disagreement in our beliefs—we disagree on the level of ontological reality—but on a practical level, the effect and resultant personal discoveries could be very much the same.
As I consider how much of the spiritual life we take on faith and how little we truly know of the actual nature of reality in the large (no matter how passionately we hold our beliefs or how firmly convinced), it strikes me that what we do with what we believe must count for an awful lot. That is, I think the man who pursues God with his full heart, even if he does not know all there is to know theologically, is in a much better position than the man who knows all there is to know theologically and does not pursue God with his full heart. The first man will learn as he goes of the nature and character of God, even if he still gets a few of his details off at times. That is forgivable. But the second man does not make good even with what he does know, and while that may very well be forgivable as well, it is surely not the essence and import of the spiritual life. Proper knowledge, then, is only a part of the spiritual life and perhaps even the lesser part. I am reminded of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” which we first cited in Smorgasbord at the Junction of Faith and Reason:
Now when the problem is to reckon up on which side there is most truth, whether on the side of one who seeks the true God objectively, and pursues the approximate truth of the God-idea; or on the side of one who, driven by the infinite passion of his need for God, feels an infinite concern for his own relationship to God in truth (and to be at one and the same time on both sides equally, is as we have noted not possible for an existing individual, but is merely the happy delusion of an imaginary I-am-I): the answer cannot be in doubt for anyone who has not been demoralized with the aid of science. If one who lives in the midst of Christendom goes up to the house of God, the house of the true God, with the true conception of God in his knowledge, and prays, but prays in a false spirit; and one who lives in an idolatrous community prays with the entire passion of the infinite, although his eyes rest upon the image of an idol: where is there the most truth? The one prays in truth to God though he worships an idol; the other prays falsely to the true God, and hence worships in fact an idol. (Qtd. in Ten Essential Texts in the Philosophy of Religion, 317–318)
If our heart is set on serving the God who lives, we will in time find our way. Certainly a moment’s reflection will reveal that none of us are at the place where we started, or, if we are, that place looks much different because we are not the same. Sometimes it seems as though we move backward in this life: sometimes it seems we have to unlearn things we had to learn: sometimes it seems that we have to relearn things we had to unlearn. As I have said in another place, “What we learn today must often be torn down tomorrow—the mountain height that looms before us today, tomorrow becomes the path trodden under our feet.” Such, I suppose, is necessary if we are ever to fully apprehend the truth, for we are constantly in danger of letting truly good and noble things stand in the way of the one thing that is best. As a recent conversation on the forum suggests, “Sometimes I think that God removes from us all of our dependencies, including knowledge, because they stand in the way of a deeper and more childlike union with him.” It would seem, as this life progresses, that its end goal is one of increasing unity and simplicity: that its desire is not for us to know the message, but to become the message.
Certainly knowledge alone cannot be our mandate, for many are the times we wander in the dark, in spite of our most sincere prayers for light and guidance. But the spiritual life has never been about knowledge per se; it has always been about trust. It seems as though trust is at once the simplest and most difficult task to which we are called on our spiritual journeys. The timetable at which God operates can be exasperatingly slow and, if we are to be honest, downright disappointing at times when things do not turn out as we had hoped. That is not to say that God is not good to us, for indeed he is. It is to say, however, that sometimes the divide that separates the infinite mind from our own can seem very great, particularly when answers are not readily forthcoming. There are many things in this life we simply do not understand, and we should not act as though we do. But there is reason to hope, for deep inside we know that God’s ways are wisest and best, even if we would personally like to be reassured a lot more often than it seems sometimes we are. I really do not know why God is sometimes silent and why he allows things to happen that break our hearts. I do know, however, that he is good: I know he is good and during such times I must content myself with that knowledge. When I do not feel him near, he is still near. When I do not understand the reason why, he is still in control. When my heart breaks, he still loves me just the same.
Feelings of sadness happen to us all. Sometimes a tinge of sadness can make life seem more sweet; at other times, we feel alienated and alone and there is little to suggest any reprieve. During such times, we are forced to walk not by sight—for indeed, what we see is at times nothing but confusion, heartache, and death—but by faith. I wish I could tell you why human beings are called to travel this road: sometimes the load seems too great to bear. The best answer, I suppose, is that we live in a world that is not our true home, in a world that is still in need of redemption, healing, and restoration.
Pastor in Chief, the cover story in the latest issue of Time (August 20, 2007), is a feature on Billy Graham, adapted from his new biography entitled The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House. On page 46 and 47 is a brief inset in which he speaks about his wife Ruth’s death and how at times it is almost unbearable to him: “Suddenly I’ll be reminded of her, and I’ll find myself almost overwhelmed.” She was, in his own words, his soul mate, his life’s companion, and his best friend. When they were apart, it was his custom to call her around five, and now he suddenly realizes that he cannot call her when his impulse is to reach for the phone. Yet he believes that she has gone on to a better place to be with their Father; he believes that he will join her there soon. In the meantime, he thanks God for the many years that they spent together and finds in his heart gratitude even in the midst of sorrow that is at times overwhelming.
Why do we have to die? That question is a telling one. At some seasons in our life the answer to death may be satisfied by theological or philosophical explanations. Yet at other seasons, it seems there is little of consolation in those answers and we are left wondering, often alone and feeling frightened. Why does it have to be this way?
Of all the theological truths, the only ones that really matter when life takes on this hue is that God is good, that he loves us, and that he is in control of the events of the world. If we can keep this trio of truths in mind, trusting God becomes easier, though it is never truly easy during such times. And, like many things in life, grief and sorrow are like waves that ebb and flow, at times crashing in on us and at others mercifully subsiding, though during such dark seasons often leaving a low-level residue behind even in moments of relative quietude. Very often in the spiritual life, there are no longer answers, only questions. No, the spiritual life is not about knowledge or answers, but about trust. We can—indeed, we must—trust the God who is good. The one theological truth that can sustain us, then, is that God is good.
In a recent moment of serendipity, a particularly appropriate metaphor presented itself as I was corresponding with a woman responding to The Subconscious Knack. Like most of us of on this journey, she seemed interested in perfecting herself and overcoming her tendency, among other things, toward procrastination. Given that I had recently re-encountered the idea that we often think in terms of a rigid “all or nothing” and that such thinking can often be overcome simply by helping the troubled person see additional alternatives, this combined with the idea I had read long ago that the tendency we call “procrastination” is neither good nor bad but rather it depends on how it is appropriated. If our strengths and our weaknesses really are one in the same, then that tendency we call procrastination when seen in its undesirable manifestations is also potentially a virtue that helps us resist temptation and rushing off into those things that are unhealthy for us. Not only does this avoid the typically black-and-white thinking we hold, it also further suggests that each one of us is created uniquely and distinctively different with all that we need given us at or before birth, merely awaiting further development. It is as the Psalmist suggests in Psalm 139: “For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” and as the LORD told Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.”
So then, if we do not live for ourselves alone, we must conclude that the uniqueness with which each of us is formed must in some way find its purpose and fulfillment even as it accentuates the whole. Toward this end, the metaphor that came to mind is not a new one, but fits (no pun intended) particularly well here: it is the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle. There are different kinds of puzzles, of course, yet in most instances, even if two pieces should happen to be the same shape, they are rarely the same color or size. Every piece of the puzzle is unique and if it were to lose that uniqueness and its identity it would not serve any useful purpose to itself or to the puzzle as a whole. No, the individual pieces are unique precisely so that they can come together, each taking its own place and interlocking together to form the collective whole. Even as we deservedly pride ourselves in our uniqueness, thankful to the God who created us so, we simultaneously find our proper purpose and place as we come together in unity with our fellows. Each piece is deservedly proud, yet no piece can boast of being any more valuable or any less dispensable than the rest. The analogy is a simple one, likely not unique to me, but it is one that I think has great power and a certain beauty as well. Further, some pieces may be rather dark, others warmer, some even dominated by the light. Some are cooler and some, in themselves, appear to have very little to offer at all. When the ministry of reconciliation is completed, however, and all creation—a new heaven, a new earth, and all that is above, below, and in between—is made new, it will take precisely all the pieces and not one less to roll out the resplendent tapestry and proclaim the glory of God throughout to all the tribes and nations.
God bless,
Eric
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