RSSRe-Paganizing the Church
James brought up pagans in the comments. Darryl mentioned that Lewis thought pagans were more ready to accept Christianity than moderns. Recently, Leithart had a short piece in First Things making basically the same point and arguing for a “re-paganization†of the west. This is an important discussion to have, I think, and it strikes me that, though not immediately obvious, this stuff is closely related to the phenomena of the FV (though perhaps not directly related to the specifics of FV).
Leithart argues: “Part of the trick is cultivating a healthy skepticism toward secularization theories. For Max Weber and armies of Weberian sociologists, modernity disenchanted the world, locking us all in the iron cage of rationalized bureaucracy. Even modern religion and music, Weber argued, submit to the tyranny of systematization and disperse the gods. Latour will have none of this. The world has not and cannot be disenchanted: ‘How could we be capable of disenchanting the world,’ he asks, ‘when every day our laboratories and our factories populate the world with hundreds of hybrids stranger than those of the day before? . . . How could we be chilled by the cold breath of the sciences, when the sciences are hot and fragile, human and controversial, full of thinking reeds and of subjects who are themselves inhabited by things?’ … Kant moralized and modernized sin, atonement, justification, and the Church to bring Christianity to Enlightened maturity. Perhaps we must reverse the process and primitivize the Enlightenment, so that the gospel can again speak directly to our not-so-modern society. Perhaps we must re-paganize the West as a prerequisite to its re-evangelizing it.â€
This is a sophisticated argument and I think can teach us something about the roots of FV. For example, in their deep readings in Latour and Girard. I have noticed this in Wilson as well. Readers of this blog will know that I do not give such short shrift to Weber as Leithart does here, and I am skeptical of the Girardians. But the Girardian/Latourian argument has merit as well. It is true that we have not and cannot escape completely from the pagan “world full of gods.†However, Weber was right that the gods have been dispersed.
To put it another way, our late-modern existence is characterized just as much as any age by “magical thinking.†Just look at the rhetoric surrounding Iraq. Or your local lottery ticket sales. The problem is in who people craving some magic turn to as witchdoctors. Armies of materialists: therapists, experts, politicians, scientists, etc.
But Leithart’s conclusion is wrong. What is needed is not a re-paganizing of the west (anyone who wants to see what that looks like need only travel a while in west Africa), but a repaganizing of the church. Let me explain.
There is a fascinating body of literature and study on tightly knit groups of people with closely held identities who are driven from their home land. For example, the “famine Irish†and “famine Russians†who emigrated to the North American plains in the 19th Century. For these two groups of famine immigrants to the Midwest, the stigma of being “emigrants†was large, and largely felt as a motif of self- and communal-identity. These folks talk and write about their lives, both formally and informally in letters and such, as if they are haunted by the “old country.†They are totally displaced and suffer a kind of disorientation that seems almost unique among human experience. One writer said that emigrants (his family) “never again feel at home any place in the world.†Once gone, they can never arrive, and they can never go back. Their writings are infused with a kind of limbo-esque existence in the borders or twilight, which of course contributes to this spiritual sense of haunting. This same writer says that “for those attempting a return, even for a visit, a break had occurred that could not be healed. And in the new land, few emigrants ever made a home that they knew for certain would be theirs. Once you leave home, your native land, no matter how tenuous your hold has been, you can never feel at home anywhere you live.â€
I think this is a powerful description of the church, raised up in the psycho-spiritual home of blood and sacrifice, etc., and then put on the trail of emigration towards the new heavens and new earth. This is the conundrum between conversion and tradition I spoke of earlier.
Modern Christians tend to feel this phenomena of being socio-spiritual emigrants, or “famine Christians†acutely. Not only have they been exiled from paganism, but they have also been exiled from what I will call the church’s “deal with paganism†which began to crumble with the enlightenment and onset of modernity.
There was a recent letter exchange between Matthew Lickona and Jody Bottum in First Things. Bottum observes in Lickona this phenomena which I think of as the “famine Christian†… “the hunger for culture, the sense of loss, the damaged world of those in rebellion against rebellion, the strangeness created when a tradition is chosen rather than inherited—combined with intellectual seriousness and a joy in the ancient Catholic faith.†The only thing Bottum left out is this inchoate foreboding of being haunted. I think the New England transcendetalists and Hudsonschool guys were onto some of this same phenomena—think Washington Irving.
Anglo-catholics like Lewis, Tolkein, Chesterton, Eliot, etc., all understood the Church as a crypt in which the essential and primary blood and soil paganism of Europe was embalmed and allowed to stare up at us out of the waters. Think Tolkien’s ghostly undead kings of the past coming back to help the heroes/true church at its time of need. I don’t know exactly what Tolkien meant by that, but they are a cursed and unfriendly lot. This isn’t really redemption but a lingering paganism that speaks to this not entirely appropriate collaboration and amalgamation between Christianity and paganism in the west, which Protestantism/enlightenment/modernity has tried to efface and now has completely forgotten. This forgetting has caused all kinds of problems which was the most basic point of Tolkein’s books. The foremost problem is that Christianity as a depaganized political religion is Liberalism, radicalized and out of whack with reality in which one must at times do evil and even commit mortal sins for temporal goods that are the charge of those with political power. And then seek absolution in the magical appeasement of the gods. The medieval church allows, or found a way to admit and cope with this. It is a deal with paganism. Take it away and you get a devolution from Protestantism into liberalism. You get the new American personal faith Christianity (evangelicalism) with the magical thinking of overbought homes on ARMS and credit cards and daycare and building democracy in Iraq and all the other delusional magical thinking of late-modernity in the capitalist-state. And you get a whole new class of materialist therapeutic witchdoctors rising up to give the newest incantations: “your best life now!†“your purpose driven life!†or whatever.
So now we see American Christianity “emerging†more and more into universalism. It is in the water. All roads lead to ruin as Eliot knew. And for those who see this, the desire for “tradition†or whatever you call that which is largely lost and haunting us is a partly sick desire to unearth the dead.
We are at a dangerous crossroads. Messing with the dead is dangerous stuff. But it must be done. But like Tolkein understood, it can only be done by the “true King,†by the church, and even this is not without debilitating and compromises. This is connected to what I have been arguing about being able, at least occasionally, to admit that the narratives of tradition and church history are to an extent myths that legitimize what I would call the “mojo†… or the magic … the authority of the church. The simple yet profound truth that at the very bottom, we have very little to go on other than “because the church says so.†So this is in part what I mean by repaganizing … that our churchmen need a hint of witchdoctor in them, or if you prefer, a touch of Gandalf or Merlin. They have “powers†as my kids would say. This is completely flattened out in a rationalistic modernizing deracinated disenchanted liberalizing protestant culture. And the inchoate need for magic and appeasement of the gods gets shifted in very unhealthy materialist directions which can be exploited by those who understand the psychology. Just read some of the high-end literature on advertising today.
To what extent is all of this relevant to FV? I’m not entirely sure, and I apologize for the rambling post, but my gut tells me that this stuff is very relevant.
James Jordan
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:21 am
Many of us FVers like Barfield, the shift from original to final participation. The shift in the NT is from land to city, a shift that is not just an idea but is reality, increasingly, in history.
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Here is a rather stunning passage from Lewis’s That Hideous Strength:
[BOQ]
During lunch Dr. Dimble talked about the Arthurian legend. “It’s really wonderful how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like Malory’s. You’ve noticed how there are two sets of characters? There’s Guinevere and Launcelot and all those people in the centre: all very courtly and nothing particularly British about them. But then in the background—on the other side of Arthur so to speak—there are all those dark people like Morgan and Morgawse, who are very British indeed and usually more or less hostile though they are his own relatives. Mixed up with magic. You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan ‘set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses.’ Merlin too, of coursee ,is Brithsh, though not hostile. Doesn’t it look very like a piecture of Britain as it must have been on the eve of the invation? Wouldn’t there have been one section of society that was almost purely Roman? People wearing togas and talking a Celticised Latin—something that would sound to us rather like Spanish: and fully Christian. But further up country, in the out of the way places, cut off by the forests , there would have been little courts ruled by real old British under-kings talking something like Welsh, and practicing a certain amount of the Druidical religion. One can imagine [Arther], a man of the old British line, but also a Christian and a fully-trained general with Roman technique, trying to pull this whole society together and almost succeeding. There’d be jealousy from his own British family, and the Romanised section—the Lancelots and Lionels—would look down on the Britons. That’d be why Kay is always represented as a boor: he is part of the native strain. And always that under-tow, that tug back to Druidism. And Merlin is the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fail because he died so soon? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He’s not evil; yet he’s a magician. He is obviously a druid; yet he knows all about the Grail. He’s the “devil’s son;†but then Layamon goes out of his way to tell you that the kind of being who fathered Merlin needn’t have been bad after all. You remember, ‘there dwell in the sky many kinds of wights. Some of them are good, and some work evil.’ I often wonder whether Merlin doesn’t represent the last trace of something the later tradition has quite forgotten about—something that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were either white or black.â€
[EOQ]
Notice what is going on here. Lewis is talking about the need for the pagan roots to be incorporated into the “later†Christian tradition. Of course, the novel itself is about the return of Merlin and the way that both sides–the holdover Christian side and the late-modern technocratic side–are fighting to “win†and use the ancient power of the druid.
Fascinating stuff.
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:35 pm
A further bit from Lewis’s HS:
[BOQ]
What exactly [Merlin] had done they did not know; but the had all, by various routes, come too far either to consider his art mere legend and imposture, or to equate it exactly with what the Renaissance called Magic. Dimble even maintained that a good critic, by is sensibility alone, could detect the difference between the traces which the two things had left on literature. “What common measure is there,†he asked “between ceremonial occultists like Foustus and Prospero and Archimago with their midnight studies, their forbidden books, their attendant fiends or elementals, and a figure like Merlin who seems to produce his results simply by being Merlin?†Ranson agreed. He thought that Merlin’s art was the last survival of something older and different—something brought to Europe after the fall of Numinor and going back to an era in which the general relations of mind and matter on this planet had been other than those we know. …There was no doubt in [Ransom’s] mind that the enemy had bought Bragdon to find Merlin; and if they found him they would re-awake him. The old Druid would inevitably cast his lot with the new planners—what could prevent his doing so? A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. Doubtless that had been the will of the dark powers for centuries. The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. … And now, all this had reached the stage at which the dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power.
[EOQ]
This again is remarkable for the ways Lewis understands the three-fold relationship of historical ages from pagan to Christian to modern and the ways “magic” or “power” runs through the ages, changing in each and changing each, and folding back on itself, etc.
It also fits very well with Voegelin’s extremely complex and sophisticated diagnoses of modern philosophy which he called “the magic of the extreme” and likened figures like Kant and Hegel to new sorcerers and figures who sought to place materialistic means in the service of alchemy.
Paganism keeps the church honest about this world. Christianity keeps paganism honest about the next. I still think FV fits in here somewhere, but admittedly I have wandered a bit!
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Here is Voegelin’s description of what happens when, in Lewis’s words, the modern materialistic powers are “bent back” to meet earlier kinds of “magical thinking.”
“The magic, of course, does not work–neither that of the thinkers of the nineteenth century who have expanded the progressivist magic of Enlightened Reason and the aesthetic magic of the Romantics into the intellectual magic of the System, the political magic of Schientific Socialism, and the psychological magic of the Extreme; nor that of their successors, the killers of the twentieth century, who by their action have revealed the terror at the core of the magic dream.”
Voegelin makes a diagnosis I think Lewis would approve of: he calls our modern situation one of “magical disorder.”
JMeyers
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:04 pm
How does any of this apply to the FV debate? I’m dazed and confused.
James Jordan
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:17 pm
I’m not interested in what you see as Lewis’s and Tolkein’s outlook, because all the good things they see in “paganism” are in fact in the Bible — they just don’t know it. They inherited the sterile intellectualistic post-Reformation Christian-ITY and didn’t know the symbol-rich environment of the Biblical worldview. They did not quite see that the true Archaic Religion is the Old Covenant. Like most Christians, they tended to read the so-called New Testament as if it dropped out of heaven without any prior context. Both worshipped in churches almost devoid of the tribal elements so important in Biblical worship.
We don’t need to repaganize the Church. We need to reBibleize her. The Church does not live in an historical tension between paganism and the New Creation. She lives in an historical tension between the First Creation as presented in the so-called Old Testament, and the New Creation.
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Jeff, I’m going to try to connect some of the dots. But I’m doing this on the fly, and this stuff really needs some scholarly treatment which I don’t have time to do, so forgive the shoddy writing and reasoning, such as it is. Also, please note that what follows is indebted to the work of Eric Voegelin. As this is a blog, not a scholarly journal, I am letting my citation practice become quite weak. Suffice it to say, the following exegetical work is EV’s, not mine, and I’m just trying to summarize. When I’m done summarizing, I’ll come back and try to synthesize the exegesis with my comments on magic/paganism, and then draw the connection to FV. If anyone is still reading by that point, then Chellis will owe me big time!
[begin EV summary – some is more or less direct quote, some is summary]
During the Israel-Syrian war of 734 Jerusalem was threatened and this became another opportunity for the development in Israel of what it meant existentially to be “faithful†to Yahweh. Could Israel rely on a king or army? Isaiah goes out at the command of God and says simply that the King should accept the counsel of God through Isaiah for God has said Israel would prevail. But if the King did not accept the counsel that comes through Isaiah, God says: “If you do not trust, you will not last.†(Chapter 7) Isaiah essentially advises Israel to substitute the spirit of God inside the prophet (himself) for armies and weapons. The prophet himself becomes the shield of the Lord which is “activated†by the passive faith of the people.
This is a development in the existential symbolization of faith in the OT from an older compact and primitive form to a new more differentiated form. To understand this, on must understand the earlier Israelite texts and symbolizations of warfare. In 2 Kings 2, when Elijah is taken to heaven, Elisha cries “My father, my father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!†again identifying the prophet of Israel with the military shield of Israel’s existential deliverance. This earlier compact understanding of the symbolization of prophet/shield was always accompanied by ritualistic actions either given or taken by the prophet. Think Elijah and the contest with the prophets of Baal. During the war with Damascus when Elisha was dying Jehoash comes to him (2 Kings 13) with the same words “My father my father!†and Elisha understands the code words that he is to once again function as the shield of Israel. He leads the king in the ritualistic acts which will secure God’s favor (and of course the Jehoash screws it up).
Voegelin talks about the earlier more compact experience of faith as being that of “sympathetic magic†wherein the people must take concrete acts to invoke the magical forces of Yahweh. The Isaiahic development secures a “spiritualization†of magic whereby no act is required but passive trust. This EV calls “subliminated magic†where trust along produces the desired results. With this we observe the correlation between piety and prosperity. This can become flattened into a “utilitarian faith.†But EV observes that the problem of magic cannot be put away so easily as this utilitarianism of the Isaiahic formula can be understood as a spiritualized magic or as faith that has sunk to the magic level. Still, the two experiences are different as the latter differentiates into an experience of trust in a transcendent God which the former more compact ritual translates a direct experience of divine presence which is accompanied by the magical substance of human power which can influence the divine power.
The efficacious trust of the Isaiahic prophecy seems to lie somewhere between the sympathetic magic of Elisha (we could call this pagan) and the complete flattening of a utilitarianism that severely represses and reduces man’s role in history to a trusting abnegation of action, to the point where magic itself disappears from the universe. The middle, Isaiahic way, must be protected both from falling back into pagan compact experiences of incantational magic whereby God is controlled by shaman, etc., and from the flattening utilitarianism of transactional faith which is devoid of any magical content whatsoever. EV comments: “The formula ‘If you do not trust, you will not last’ carries the implication that you will last, if you trust. In the counsel of Isaiah, we may say, the element of faith in a transcendent God (which is also contained in the compactness of magic) has differentiated so far that a practice of sympathetic magic, as in the Elisha story, has become impossible [i.e., Isaiah has departed from pure paganism]; and the sensitiveness for the gulf between divine plan and human action has even become so acute that all pragmatic assistance in the execution of the plan is considered a display of distrust. And yet, an aura of magic undeniably surrounds the counsel: It is due to the fact that the divine plan itself has been brought within the knowledge of man, inasmuch as Isaiah knows that God wants the survival of Judah as an organized people in pragmatic history [i.e., Isaiah’s faith still has pragmatic implications for his work in the world].â€
[End of EV summary]
I hope this long recitation has given some direction to my earlier comments about how this relates to FV. In the discussion above, one can see how issues of justification, faith, human works, apostasy, ritual, and magic are at the heart of the Judaic and thus Christian experience.
I think the suggestion I made earlier that the church must be repaganized is an attempt to protect the magic of the Gospel from the utilitarian flattening I sense FV people are reacting against. This is dangerous stuff though, messing with the dead, as I said before. Still, a totally disenchanted world is a flat world where eventually God is replaced with materialistic shaman and witchdoctors, commonly known as salesmen.
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:49 pm
For the record, I had not seen Jordan’s post above prior to posting mine.
James, you exhibit so little curiosity, and such a high regard for your own correctness, that not only do you miss paths of possible fruitful conversation, you are a royal bore.
JMeyers
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:11 pm
A royal bore? I sense that many critics of the FV on this blog find almost anything more interesting than biblical theology.
A high regard for his own correctness? And will you tell me with a straight face that this does not also apply to others in this discussion?
Believing one is correct is not necessarily arrogant.
James B. Jordan exhibits so little curiosity? Wow. That’s one I’ve never heard and it misses by a mile or more. You obviously don’t know Jim very well.
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:19 pm
I am just responding to what he writes. He summarliy dismisses what is likely a fruitful path of discussion for no reason other than that the precise wording he likes is not used. Isn’t this what you guys are all screaming about others doing to you?
If he would have shown a bit more patience or curiosity, he could have seen the subject open up in ways he may find felicitous.
So yes, I find his dismissal of Lewis/Tolkein incurious, to say the least.
James Jordan
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Actually, I thought I was mostly agreeing with you. At least I’m royal, anyway.
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Well, you had a funny way of putting it.
But yes, I suspected we might find some common ground on this topic. Or at least some fellow feeling leading to fruitful conversation. Which is why I was suprised at your dismissal.
James Jordan
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Look, my point is that there is no need to go to pagan sources for what we lack. It’s all in the OT; it’s just that we don’t know it. Of course, encountering pagan notions may send us back to the Bible to see how it deals with the same phenomena; just as the mythologies of modern science send us back to Genesis 1 to see if we’ve really read it aright.
I can relate an experience. I’ve had letters from Christian pastors I’ve never met in India who tell me that my book *Through New Eyes* is one of the most valuable things they’ve ever read. I know, I should not say that, but I say it for this reason: They tell me that for the first time they have something that directly challenges the “Old Creation” universe of Hinduism using the same language and ways of thinking.
I did not set out to write apologetics about Hinduism or any other pre-Christian order. I merely set out to try and understand the Biblical worldview on its own terms. But as it happens, a theology presented in terms of plants, animals, stars, blood, guts, hair, smell, water, etc. — which is how God does theology — turns out to be very useful in dealing with pagans who think in the same categories.
The way Reformed people read the Bible can be characterized, if not caricatured as this: First, read Paul as if you don’t need anything else and can make a system out of Paul, translating him into the language of philosophy. Then add in the epistles. Then the gospels, filtered through your Pauline systematics. Then go back to the “Old Testament” and get some footnotes and illustrations.
I’d rather read Paul last, for he is last. The other epistles are to the circumcision, so conceptually are pre-Pauline. We should start with Genesis and work forward. But of course, that’s not how we’ve done it over all these centuries, which is why I said that Lewis, etc., don’t really know what’s in the OT.
But, while it might be interesting to pursue this, I’m about to leave the country and must bow out soon.
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:49 pm
James, that’s fine for you to bow out. I understand. I agree with you that the whole pre-Christian world ought to be looked at more closely, including the OT and the Hebraic experience. Voegelin’s “Israel and Revelation” is a stunning work in this regard. I think Lewis/Tolkein got this as well, which is why I brought them up (they are popular enough for people to connect to, often unlike more technical sources like EV). I also think the historic amalgamation of Christianity with pre-Christian pagan Europe needs to be dealt with. I trust you saw in my follow-up posts some significant dealing with OT sources as well. I see no reason to limit ourselves to those sources; but I certainly don’t want to exclude them.
James Jordan
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Right. At the same time, history is a process of exorcism, since sin is so deceptive and so collective, enslaving people under principalities and powers of ideologies, that I think we need the OT as a means of sorting through the pagan world. That is, and I imagine you agree, when we look at what we might learn from “paganism,” the OT (or Old Covenant model) provides us a way to filter, correct, and discern. We don’t get that ability to discern from our ST categories, which are designed mainly to deal with errors in New Covenant thinking.
D Hart
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Not so fast, Caleb. Voegelin may be fine for the OT, but Christ changes things and makes the religion of the Bible less spooky. I mean, he defeats the kingdom of Satan and the rites of Christianity become much less gory. The gore becomes invisible and spiritual. Protestantism, I’d argue (and you’ve heard me do so before so forgive the redundancy) tried to restore or recover that invisible spirituality, whereas Rome and Constantinople tried to exhibit it. It may not simply be Kant or Mill who take the mojo out of Christianity. It could also be Christ. (I hesitate to submit this because, Caleb, you’ll likely hit us with a long post of Voegelin on the NT. I’m ducking.)
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:26 pm
No Darryl, I’ll spare you that!
And in fact, I agree with you quite a bit here. The Isaiahic prophecy is a prefiguring of Christ as our shield and how we are to receive Him; it stands between the compact pagan-istic “sympathetic magic” and the fully differentiated pure utilitarian transactionalism.
In other words, there is a danger of derailment in both directions here: the return to sypathetic magic of some forms of Romanism on the one hand and the advance to the disenchanted materialistic flattening of therapuetic deism on the other hand. There are also combinations of these derailments, as when compact magical thinking is linked with materialistic technical ends. This is what Lewis was writing about in That Hideous Strength.
Caleb Stegall
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Ok, one little bit of EV. When talking about Hegel and his “magical system” by which Hegel reads paganism back into secular rationalism to create the “magic of the extreme” and make himself God, essentially, who can “evoke the shape of things to come,” Voegelin wryly comments: “A shape is evoked indeed by Hegel’s program, the shape of the Christ who takes the conflict and suffering of this world on his shoulders and thereby becomes its redeemer.”
D Hart
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Okay, Caleb, I’ll bite. What did Voegelin think of the merits of Christ? Seriously.
Caleb Stegall
October 4th, 2007 at 5:59 am
There is no easy answer to that question. But in fitting with this thread, and not wanting to spill 2000 more words, the short answer is that throughout Voegelin’s work he regards Christianity and the Christ event as the pinnacle of differentiation of the truth of reality in human history. He regards the Christian revelation as the perfection of philosophy. That said, however, his work gives preference to Greek philosophy, especially in its accounts of history, meaning, consciousness, and the soul. In his book on Voegelin, Federici gives this explanation: “Voegelin is primarily concerned with building a philosophical foundation on which to support a spiritual revival. He believes that the preliminary task is to recover the meaning of experience. With this as a precondition, Voegelin hopes to restore the primacy of meaningful spiritual conversion.” Voegelin himself puts it perhaps more clearly in his work “The Gospel and Culture”: “[I]t will be necessary . . . to recover the question to which, in Hellenistic-Roman culture, the philosopher could understand the gospel as the answer.”
Thus, I think it can fairly be said that Voegelin considered the merits of Christ to be that Christ was “the answer” to the fundamental question of human experience. Voegelin was not an evangelist for the answer, however, because in these late days, he considered the project of recovering “the question” to be primary. Beyond that, things get murky.
D Hart
October 4th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Caleb, what was that question? It seems you could go two ways. What is truth, goodness and beauty? Or you could go who may stand on God’s holy hill? Isn’t that what the rivalry between Jerusalem and Anthens was all about?
Caleb Stegall
October 4th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Darryl, I, following EV, don’t accept the “rivalry” between Jerusalem and Athens. EV: “Christianity is not an alternative to philosophy, it is philosophy itself in its state of perfection; the history of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the incarnation of the Word in Christ.”
I will give you the full context of the Voegelin quote above. Sorry, you asked for it.
Voegelin is riffing off of the opening chapter of the 1966 Dutch Catechism which reads: “This book begins by asking what is the meaning of the fact that we exist. This does not mean that we begin by taking up a non-Christian attitude. It simply means that we, too, as Christians, are men with enquiring minds. We must always be ready and able to explain how our faith is the answer to the question of our existence.”
To this, Voegelin writes:
[BOQ]
The passage, though wanting in polish, is philosophically very much to the point. Its well-intentioned clumsiness sheds a flood of light on the difficulties in which the churches find themselves today. Note above all the difficulty the church has with its own believers who want to be Christians at the price of their humanity. Justin started as an inquiring mind and let his search, after it had tried the philosophical schools of the time, come to rest in the truth of the gospel. Today, the situation is reversed. The believers are at rest in an uninquiring state of faith; their intellectual metabolism must be stirred by the reminder that man is supposed to be a questioner, that a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a “good Christian†but is a questionable man. And we may supplement the reminder by gently recalling that neither Jesus nor his fellowmen to whom he spoke his word did yet know that they were Christians—the gospel held out its promise, not to Christians, but to the poor in spirit, that is, to minds inquiring, even though on a culturally less sophisticated level than Justin’s. Behind the passage there lurks the conflict, not between gospel and philosophy, but rather between the gospel and its uninquiring possession as doctrine. The authors of the Catechism do not take this conflict lightly; they anticipate resistance to their attempt at finding the common humanity of men in their being the questioners about the meaning of existence; and they protect themselves against all too ready misunderstands by assuring the reader they do not mean to “take up a non-Christian attitude.†Assuming them to have carefully weighted every sentence they wrote, this defensive clause reveals an environment where it is not customary to ask questions, where the character of the gospel as an answer has been so badly obscured by is hardening into self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it is meant as an answer can be suspect as a “non-Christian attitude.†If that, however, is the situation, the authors have good reason to be worried indeed. For the gospel as a doctrine which you can take and be saved, or leave and be condemned, is a dead letter; it will encounter indifference, if not contempt, among inquiring minds outside the church, as well as the restlessness of the believer inside who is un-Christian enough to be man the questioner. The Chatechism’s intent to restore the inquiring mind to the position that is his due, is a sensible first step toward regaining for the gospel the reality it has lost through the doctrinal hardening. Moreover, however hesitant and tentative it may prove in the execution, the attempt is a first step toward regaining the life of reason represented by philosophy. Both Plato’s eroticism of the search (zetesis) and Aristotle’s intellectually more aggressive aporein recognize in “man the questioner†the man moved by God to ask the questions that will lead him toward the cause (arche) of being. The search itself is the evidence of existential unrest; in the act of questioning, man’s experience of his tension (tasis) towards the divine ground breaks forth in the word of inquiry as a prayer for the Word of the answer. Question and answer are intimately related one toward the other; the search moves in the metaxy, as Plato has called it, in the In-Between of poverty and wealth, of human and divine; the question is knowing, but its knowledge is yet the trembling of a question that may reach the true answer or miss it. This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking of the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer, is the life of reason. The philosopher can only be delighted by the Catechism’s admonition to make “faith†accountable in terms of an answer to the questions about the meaning of existence. Question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search. Man, however, though he is truly the questioner, can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible. The gospel, to be heard, requires ears that can hear; philosophy is not the life of reason if the questioner’s reason is depraved (Rom. 1:28). The answer will not help the man who has lost the question; and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer, as the authors of the Catechism have seen rightly. It will be necessary, therefore, to recover the question to which, in Hellenistic-Roman culture, the philosopher could understand the gospel as the answer. Since the question concerns the humanity of man, it is the same today as it ever has been in the past, but today it is so badly distorted through the Western deculturation process that it must, first, be disentangled from the intellectually disordered language in which we indiscriminately speak of the meaning of life, or the meaning of existence, or the fact of existence which has no meaning, or the meaning which must be given to the fact of existence, and so forth, as if life were a given and meaning a property it has or does not have. Well, existence is not a fact. If anything, existence is a nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death. From the experience of this movement, from the anxiety of losing the right direction in this In-Between of darkness and light, arises the inquiry concerning the meaning of life. But it does arise only because life is experienced as man’s participation in a movement with a direction to be found or missed; if man’s existence were not a movement but a fact, it not only would have no meaning but the question of meaning could not even arise.
[EOQ]
Hope that helps folks understand EV better and also better understand where I’m coming from in discussions like these.
rej
October 10th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
“This is connected to what I have been arguing about being able, at least occasionally, to admit that the narratives of tradition and church history are to an extent myths that legitimize what I would call the “mojo†… or the magic … the authority of the church.”
You are basically arguing that it is good to be a putz pagan Catholic and follow whatever the priests say because supposedly like Gandolf in a fiction novel they have magical powers. I don’t see how you can get away with calling yourself Reformed in any sense of the word. What the church needs is not a re-paganization (one of the most blasphemous ideas I’ve ever heard) but a Restoration. That is, a true application of Sola Scriptura, to abandon church tradition COMPLETELY and follow Scripture alone. The reason that Protestantism limps around with one foot in the grave and has since the very beginning is that it never was willing to actually APPLY Sola Scriptura. Until it does that, it is twice dead, plucked up by the roots. Thank God for the church of Christ which follows Sola Scriptura.