Sunday, February 19, 2006
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Holes In The Soul
Among the more laughable conceits of American "intellectuals" is that it takes courage to publicly challenge Christian belief, or faith in a God of the Christian variety. In point of fact, given the propensities of the Old Media, what really takes courage is to publicly defend Christian belief and its God. The typical commentator would prefer to publicly split infinitives all day long.
Today's New York Times Book Review features a review of Daniel Dennett's recent book Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon. From the snippets provided by reviewer Leon Wieseltier, it would appear that Mr. Dennett, a professor of something or other at Tufts University, fancies himself to be an intellectual trailblazer, the inheritor to David Hume and the Empiricists of the early Enlightenment. At any rate, he's forthright about his position: he'll have no truck with this God business:
By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse, and yet I persist....In order to explain the hold that various religious ideas and practices have on people, we need to understand the evolution of the human mind....
The belief that belief in God is so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism has led the devout to "save" their beliefs by making them incomprehensible even to themselves....
Everything we value -- from sugar and sex and money to music and love and religion -- we value for reasons. Lying behind, and distinct from, our reasons are evolutionary reasons, free-floating rationales that have been endorsed by natural selection.
Huzzah! A hero has come to free us from our pre-rational superstitions! We believers only believe because it was once evolutionarily useful; now that we've reached our current high intellectual estate...well, some of us, anyway...we can easily do without this primitive notion of an originating Intelligence greater than our own, and equally may dismiss the suggestion that we are as we are because He has something in mind for us that exceeds the evidence of our temporal senses.
To which Francis W. Porretto, astrophysicist, engineer, novelist, philosopher, Catholic Christian, and Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web, deposeth and sayeth:
As reviewer Wieseltier notes with stunning power, to disprove a belief, it is not sufficient to show that it might have been evolutionarily constructive. One cannot disprove a belief without disproving its content.
Dennett is merely the latest of his kind, of course. One gets the sense that such persons are irritated, if not offended, by religious belief. As Wieseltier notes near the end of his review, Dennett appears incapable of imagining a thoughtful, intellectually capable believer. He'd be baffled by a Michael Williams, a Travis Corcoran, or a Fran Porretto. His taxonomy admits of no such animal. This combination of a willful determination to debunk theism with an inability to imagine how intelligent persons might differ has appeared many times in intellectual history.
But that's only peripheral to what I want to write about today. Today's tirade is a discourse on holes in the soul.
Of the many kinds of human suffering, the one to which Americans are most exposed is that of purposelessness. We've beaten almost all the physical challenges of life, though some, such as the debilitation of age, the persistence of cellulite, and the inability to endure rap music, remain to be conquered. What remain are the psychological challenges: identity, acceptance, self-esteem, self-improvement, and adjustment to intractable realities. All these challenges partake in some measure of the need for a purpose.
Human mental structure is such that we are not always aware of our reasons for our actions. Yes, Virginia, there is a subconscious, and it is a perilous and marvelous place indeed. Perilous, because it can impel us to act in ways we'll later regret; marvelous, because with only modest training, it can be trained to operate and safeguard the fantastic machines of our bodies, and to make most of our decisions as well, swiftly and accurately. Indeed, it is not too much to say that one's subconscious usually knows him better than he consciously knows himself.
Freud and those who followed his line of thought were disposed to see the subconscious as a dark and dangerous place, whose baser impulses must be held in check by consciously imposed disciplines. This, to my way of thinking, was a fundamental error. There are innumerable ways in which the subconscious acts as one's guardian, even in one who's never known the disciplining effects of civilization. More, with the formation of "casual" pre-sentient societies such as the tribe, the subconscious became able to acquire and store ever more sophisticated knowledge about opportunity and hazard, well before the human cerebrum developed sufficiently to support conscious thought.
It is no denigration of the subconscious to argue that a conscious mind can rationally comprehend why it works, or how it came to be. The conscious mind cannot supplant the subconscious; reason, the distinguishing power of consciousness, is not capable of reacting quickly enough to the specific developments, opportunities, and hazards to which the subconscious is attuned. Consciousness makes us human, but it does not free us from the need of a subconscious.
In one view, the development of self-referential consciousness -- the identification of oneself as distinct from the rest of the universe, most particularly from other selves -- was where the trouble started; it made it possible to conceive of gains for the self that would impose loss upon others. This, too, is a fundamental error. Selves may compete destructively, it is true, but they may also cooperate to mutual benefit. Such benefits and cooperation toward them are not comprehensible before the emergence of consciousness. Try to imagine a tribe of pre-conscious hominids conceiving of cooperating on the construction of a roofed hut, much less a two-story house.
Before the conscious mind, the world was ruled by force. When consciousness was born, trade became possible. As consciousness acquired power and perspective, abstraction, generalization, language, variant forms of expression, esthetic forms, and chronicles of history followed naturally in its train.
But neither the conscious mind nor its subconscious partner can adequately explain love.
Love is that condition in which one creature -- the lover -- elevates the interests and well-being of another creature -- his beloved -- to a plane equal to or higher than his own. In one sense, to love is to sacrifice part of one's individuality. In another, to love enlarges the individual, who, by loving, comes to see himself as a fusion of his "original" self and that of his beloved.
Humans love. About other species, we cannot be sure, but the evidence tends toward the negative.
Many philosophers have attempted an explanation of love. Most have failed miserably, usually by falling into one or another of the standard logical fallacies. The sole unchallenged statement about love to which no objection can be raised is the one above: humans love.
Love is sometimes treated as if it were an investment: that is, a risking of some asset in the hope or expectation of a return. This is a chancy path. There's no way to measure the return, and no agreement on what constitutes a positive or negative consequence. If love is an investment, it's the most problematic one ever made.
It cannot be denied that humans seek to love and be loved. It's not merely an artifact of our popular culture. It's a well-established pattern that runs throughout human history. But no one has explained by rational means alone why, given that loving is so often the ultimate cause of ultimate loss, the compulsion to love is so deeply implanted in Man.
Allow me to spend a few words on grace.
In Christian theology, grace is an elusive term. The sole point of agreement on it is that its source is God. No one I know of has succeeded in rationally illuminating what it is, what it is not, why it's desirable, what it costs or ought to cost, whether it's quantifiable in any way, or what the necessary connections are between grace and the various human virtues. In this way it's a lot like a point or a line in geometry. We use the word without assigning it an exact meaning. Yet we appear to have largely consistent notions about it, even if they fall short of defining it. In particular, we sense that it's there, underneath the rest of the spiritual universe, available to be tapped by an act of will committed from faith.
Our principal "clue" to the nature of grace comes from our sense for the theological variety of love: love of God, love of His Creation, and love of the gift of life itself.
We have both a sense of individuality -- partiality; separation from the rest of the universe -- and a desire to be united with a larger whole. But wholeness in the temporal realm is a matter of scale; all things and all creatures less than the universe itself are partial, albeit not necessarily individual. The desire to be united with greater wholes cannot be permanently satisfied by marriage, family, group affiliations, sports fandom, political parties, nations, or the human race itself. It demands the real deal: union with God.
But such a union must be acceptable to God. Our love and desire for Him must be met by an equal love and desire for us.
We who believe postulate that love. It's not provable; there's no evidence of the sort that would satisfy a Daniel Dennett. No one's private experiences are relevant to the subject, at least if we agree to respect the rules of objective evidence.
The nearest I can get to a definition of grace is that it is that commodity which, in flowing from God into His Creation and thence into His Creatures, modulates -- tames, if you will -- the unimaginable love that God must feel for His Creation to have bothered to make it at all.
But God cannot compel the acceptance of His love. The human mind and will are free, and always will be. Just as one man may spurn the love of another, every man will have the option of turning away from grace and from God.
Of course, there are consequences.
The conscious and the subconscious, working mostly separately, provide for the temporal needs of Man. But they are not capable, separately or in tandem, of dealing with a deficit of love.
A man's temporal purposes, whatever they might be, are subject to a rule of extinction. Purpose, like desire, dies when it's been fulfilled. The evanescent purposes of bodily pleasure, of worldly achievement, of triumph in competition, of acquisition and accumulation, are their own assassins. To sustain human psychological health, a purpose must be incapable of being definitively fulfilled, and therefore extinguished, in that way.
Any purpose whose metes and bounds are that extensive is indistinguishable from love.
In some sense, all love is of a single kind: the willed enlargement of self. The object of that enlargement will vary, of course. Sometimes it will be temporal and identifiable. Sometimes it will be a fellow human. Sometimes it will be an abstraction, such as freedom or justice. And sometimes it will be the whole of existence, including the Creator Who made it all possible.
In my experience, the commonalities of love give it a positive-feedback characteristic. From small loves come larger ones, and from larger ones come the truly great ones. Only he who is averse to all love will fail to fall into the clutches of the greatest love of all.
No, that's not the love of self. Love of self is the most minimal of starting points.
Purpose enough to sustain a life well lived must be undergirded by love.
A man without love develops holes in the soul. His mental health leaks out through those holes. As his temporal pleasures and achievements fade and fail on him, they leave him psychically ragged, progressively less able to exert or endure. Toward the end of his life, he usually succumbs to a bitterness that verges on nihilism. What was all the striving and suffering for?
It would appear that such holes have a positive-feedback nature of their own, just as a hole in a garment, if not promptly mended, will enlarge until it renders the garment unwearable.
To mend the spiritual holes that develop from a deficit of love requires the application of love. It's usually not possible for the afflicted one to heal himself. He needs to be loved, to notice that he's loved, to acknowledge the fact, to accept it, and to return it. Sometimes the therapy begins with a fellow man; sometimes it's weighed in upon him by an inner awakening to the love of God. But love is the key.
I'm no theologian. I haven't studied the mind of God. This essay is not an attempt to bring intellectual rigor to religious belief, or to God's plan, or to Divine love or the grace by which it reaches us. It's a personal exegesis on why these things all matter to me: why I consider them as real as I am, if not more so.
I haven't studied the mind of God, but I have studied love. Perhaps the Daniel Dennetts of the world would make more sense to me if I hadn't, but then, perhaps the universe and their place in it would make more sense to them if they had.
Ultimately, love is everything. -- M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Deus Caritas Est. -- Pope Benedict XVI
You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and your whole soul, and your whole mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. On these commandments hang all the law and the prophets. -- Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and the Redeemer of Mankind.
This essay is dedicated, with much gratitude, to Og the Neanderpundit, one of the finest men it's been my privilege to know.
May God bless and keep you all.
