WHAT A RESURRECTION REALLY FEELS LIKE: Some thoughts about a particular moment in philosophical and spiritual struggle where many people seem to get kind of stalled. I hope I can write about this without sounding like I think this describes everyone who considers himself or herself to be seeking and not finding. This is more like, "What I describe here may resonate with some of you," not, "I know why you haven't Seen the Light yet."

So: Sometimes, especially when very philosophically-minded people talk about God or their hypothetical future-tense conversion, I think they may be confusing faith and spiritual consolation. They talk as if they accept the Catholic (I feel like I mostly see this with Catholic-symps) anthropology, the Catholic view of human nature and purpose. They talk, in fact, as if they're pretty sure that the Catholic picture of human life would explain and add to their understanding of the world in a way which no merely secular philosophy could match. And yet they don't "have faith," which, the more they talk about it, sounds like it means that they haven't had a direct experience of God's presence. They haven't had an encounter with the living God, at least not when they could recognize Him. So they are stuck, wandering around with this kind of zombie worldview, thinking maybe it will be brought fully to life one day by a bolt of God-lightning.

But a felt sense of God's close, tender, sublime presence isn't faith. I think the Catholic jargon for it is spiritual consolation, but I'm certainly open to correction there! A sense of total abandonment by God, total aloneness, is entirely compatible with unflinching faith. So is spiritual anomie or boredom or simple anticipation of a more visceral encounter with God.

I'd say that if you accept the Catholic anthropology, and you accept that if there is no God that anthropology doesn't make sense, then you believe in God, even if you've never experienced anything you recognize as His presence.

One difficulty, of course, is that Catholicism, or any actual existing Christian tradition rather than the Buddy Jesus I make up in my head, is an ornate, shaggy, thoroughly weird religion. Because the Church corrects everyone, even the saints, She doesn't fit entirely into anyone's preexisting moral beliefs. So you may believe what you consider to be the biggest elements of the Catholic anthropology but not all the details, or you may entirely accept some major aspects of that anthropology and reject others. I think the goal then is to figure out which parts of your worldview do in fact require God, if any, and go forward from there.

A related difficulty is that reason and introspection necessarily intertwine here, because you're often trying to figure out which of two or more alternatives you believe in most. To take an obvious example, I had to ask myself, in converting, whether I was more sure that gay sex was morally neutral or that the Catholic Church can teach authoritatively on matters of sexuality. Bizarrely, I was more sure of the second thing!, and so I accepted the Church's teaching even though I didn't (and often still don't) understand it. On a less brass-tacks level, you might be asking yourself whether you're more sure of your God-requiring anthropology, or that God doesn't exist. If you're more sure that God doesn't exist, something is askew in your worldview. Here's George Orwell on this very dilemma, though he tries to handwave it because for once he's insufficiently hardcore.

If you do this introspection and find yourself shying away from an anthropology (or metaphysics, etc) you thought you held really firmly, that may be a sign of fear of commitment. It might not! You'll know your own motives much better than I will. But I do think there's a certain attraction in being always almost Christian: always Quizás Quizás Quizás.

I should note that this isn't how I personally became Catholic. I did a lot of this "working on my underlying worldview through philosophy until I realized that the Catholic Church was scarily plausible," and then I prayed for a couple of weeks, and then I had, in fact, a strange and tipsy spiritual experience which was essentially an encounter with God the Creator. I had a felt experience of objects in the world as words spoken by God. This was what I needed in order to get serious about starting RCIA. It was a fairly ramshackle and humiliating spiritual encounter (probably past the legal BAC, going all T.S. Eliot over a stain on a Yale bathroom wall) but it was an experience of the created world as infused with God's presence.

So I do know that faith is more like a spectrum than an on-off switch, and someone can be moving toward deeper faith due to philosophy while still hanging back from full commitment because of uncertainty and a lack of felt experience of God. That's basically what I did for a time. But I want to clarify that you can have genuine faith even in the absence of an "encounter"-like experience. I mean, your thoughts are also things you experience! Your practice of philosophy is experience. God may be encountering you through your friends (since philosophy is always best practiced among friends) rather than burning a bush at you or something. Let yourself believe what you believe, even if you don't feel like a Christian.

To close us out, here's a poem by Denise Levertov, which I think speaks to the situation. Via Wesley Hill.

A FOOTNOTE on Spinoza and The New Jerusalem. And Unequally Yoked has one post on it so far. (In the latter case, linking is not endorsing! I would not frame most of these issues the way UY does.)

OCCAM'S RAZOR IS THE WORST RAZOR! Some thoughts on revisiting The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza, which has been revived at the DCJCC's Theater J and will play through April 1. My review of the original production is here, so these are just some scattered additional notes. (Oh, and here's a post about a Philadelphia production, over at The Groom's Family!)

First, the play is still fantastic, Alexander Strain is still ridiculously compelling despite playing a guy who is kind of a jackass (albeit a jackass under unbearable pressure), and they've toned down the cartoonishness of Rebecca a bit, which I doubt will pacify the people who didn't like her character the first time around.

I still don't understand why Spinoza is so in love with simplicity. Why is a belief, a God, a proposition, or an argument better because it is simpler than other possibilities? Why force a cube-shaped faith on a mountain-shaped world?

The focus on simplicity or unity, along with the strange, unsettling paeans to philosophy as a love with no beloved (or in which the beloved is totally unable to love you back), made me feel like this was all just backsliding into Platonism. Didn't we try this already?

Last time I'm not sure I noticed that both Spinoza and his Gentile Juliet, Clara, do the adolescent thing where they think they're in love with you because you deserve it so much. Everything about Spinoza's pedestal love of Clara is done so well--it's painfully endearing, it's totally wrongheaded, it's relatable, and it captures at least half of the problems with his philosophy. Plus Strain uses his voice really well, shifting perfectly from the ringing tones of the confident genius to a rougher, lower, more intimate register with Clara.

One benefit to the philosopher of having a definite, obligatory community is that he has to deal with everyone's questions, even the ones he doesn't like or see the point of. The Jewish community, because it includes so many people who are totally unlike Spinoza, can provoke and challenge him in a way that a community made up solely of his friends or equally-intelligent philosophers could not. (This, by the way, was one major failing of the "talk back" panel afterward, in which Leah Libresco very ably moderated two academic philosophy-types. We didn't get to talk back! It was insufficiently Jewish--specifically Jewish questions weren't raised at all, actually--and since the audience, full of feisty old Jews, didn't get to ask questions, the panelists were able to stick to their own preferred topics and approaches.)

Spinoza at one point comes very close to echoing this gnomic utterance of the squid!

I was weirdly reminded of this article about David Foster Wallace's use of popular self-help books and his fight against what in AA circles is called "terminal uniqueness" and which I think is called by Catholics spiritual pride. Spinoza by the end of this play has been through many shattering experiences: his father's death, his realization that he will die young of tuberculosis, and then the awful events of the play itself. But the thing is, none of the suffering or humiliation he undergoes happens because he's wrong, or in the wrong. That at least he's spared. And so in the end, when he thanks the congregation (aka us the audience) for what he's gained from what he's been put through, even this is not a gesture of full humility.

So. That's what the play made me think about. What about you?

"FOR AS LONG AS SPINOZA IS A JEW, HE SPEAKS AS A JEW, EVEN IF WHAT HE SAYS IS FAR FROM JEWISH." Fantastic blog post from The Groom's Family (Soviet Russia->Israeli Jewish->Orthodox Christian convert, you should be reading her already!) about David Ives's play about the trial of Baruch Spinoza. I wrote about it here. Ah, the interplay between control and powerlessness (in the face of the state, and in the face of the community) is so well-described in this post, and her closing thought is so ferocious. Fantastic stuff.

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. .... A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.
--Joseph Ratzinger, via Wesley Hill

"PHILOSOPHERS," 1917.

[Abba Nilus] also said, "Whatever you have endured out of love of wisdom will bear fruit for you at the time of prayer."
--Sayings of the Desert Fathers

THIRD VERSE SAME AS THE FIRST: In which I am interviewed about Gay Catholic Whatnot. This is a two-page condensation of a phone interview which I remember as being almost two hours long, so it sort of jolts around a lot; also, for "intimate" read "infinite"! (Freudian slip?) You might check out the "outtakes" as well. The interviewer was really good at persistently tracking me to my lair and making me justify my assertions, although again, you don't necessarily get the full force of that because of the length constraints.

ONE GOD, THREE OPINIONS: OK, unsurprisingly it looks like I can't get the more reviewy version of my take on The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza published for money before the play's run ends. But my wallet's loss is your wallet's... also loss, since I cannot let you guys go without telling you why you have to see this terrific play!!!

It's showing at the DC Jewish Community Center until July 25 and seriously, people, I can't tell you. If you like this blog and you live in the area, eat some ramen so you can afford this play.

Here you can find my somewhat more personal and somewhat less reviewy take on the play. I just loved it. Y'all, if you see it, link me to your thoughts and reviews!

(As always, Blogger is adding an extra "tail" to my posts, so be sure to use this link and not whatever happens if you just go to my main secondary site.)

INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF BEINGCAKES. Whoa. I was pacing anxiously just now and thought to myself, "Have I spent the past ten years obsessively arguing that language is the house of being, and that every attempt to understand that phrase without a Jewish or Christian theological grounding ends up in Heidegger's Rektoratsrede?"

This is what I think about after watching a lot of late '80s men's figure skating, apparently. The majestic hair must do something to my brain.

"I did study with Strauss, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm a Straussian. I haven't said I'm a Straussian."

Valkenburgh: You spoke about philosophy with a simple girl? About what Plato thinks and what Aristotle thinks?

Spinoza: No, about what I think and what she thinks. Plato and Aristotle? You start listening to them and before you know it you're believing in rabbits out of hats, or the Virgin Birth!
--David Ives, The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch Spinoza

Lines from memory, almost certainly wrong in several places, and I admit they come across as a bit on-the-nose on the page like that. But a) obviously you know why I had to quote this, given my own trajectory! and b) the lines totally work onstage, in Theater J's fantastic, standing-ovation-worthy production. GO SEE THIS NOW. More soon.

FEAST OF ST. JUSTIN MARTYR, patron of philosophers.

PHILOSOPHY WORKS IN PRACTICE, BUT NOT IN THEORY is my basic response to this discussion of "Great Books" propaganda. In theory yes, Great Booksiness is cultural relativism in cultural conservative wool. In practice, if you have a nexus of friendships and a structure for leadership, you can come to understand philosophy as eros, the self-changing love of truth. It's a practice which requires humility and desire and the longing for the glimpsed but (for an atheist) unnamed Beloved.

I still think this is the best way to understand me and how I think and what I care about. This and maybe even this might also be relevant.

I'm thinking a lot, right now, about the fact that philosophy requires both heightened arrogance and heightened humility. On the one hand you have to be willing to spout off about everything! You have to be willing to talk about subjects in which you have all the expertise of a journalist, i.e. a professional dilettante. If you won't argue about subjects beyond your knowledge, you can't lead and you can't grow. But at the same time you need to be radically aware of your own incapacities, willing to be utterly reshaped by other people and their descriptions of their experiences and the conclusions they draw from that experience. I don't have any especial formula for resolving this dilemma; I just think it's important that philosophers understand that their practice has spiritual downsides of pride and vanity as well as the perhaps more obvious spiritual upside of Socratean "I know nothing" humility.

I very much welcome you all's comments since I have no idea how to formulate general advice here, and while I accept that maybe there is no general advice to give, I'd still like a sense of how actual humans who aren't me attempt to negotiate the arrogance/humility aspect of philosophy.

Original link via PES.

RESOLVED: THE CONSERVATIVE CANNOT BE A PHILOSOPHER. So how many of the posts at Secular Right really boil down to rejections of philosophy as such?

Surely it is possible to be conservative, in love with Sophia, and--at least for a while!--atheist. I mean, lots of my friends are in that position, and I'm going to tentatively say that if something exists then that thing must be possible. So where are their allies?

A QUESTION WITH NO SATISFACTORY ANSWER: What does it mean that Nicola Karras's how-I-turned-Right post doesn't mention anything that might be called a "woman's issue"?

I'll note that she posted it on an all-lady blog, which sort of complicates the situation. But I'm trying to imagine a black conservative's similar "political autobiography" with no mention of race; or (I am nothing if not provincial!) a gay conservative's etc etc. Even on an all-black or all-gay blog, I think the "identity" questions would've been treated explicitly.

What does that mean?

I think it does mean something, despite the obvious problems of extrapolating from a sample size of NICOLA.