Here is the first paragraph of my paper for my myth-theory class. No one may ever again accuse me of cowardice. You name a synonym for courage, and i've got it: gumption, balls, and even the Hebraic chutzpah. I've never written anything quite like this in my life, nor, if it goes poorly on the grading scale, will i ever attempt to again. But heck, this is why im in grad school, paying more money for classes than one should pay for the salvation of his soul. I've earned the right to be overtly creative. I've been pushing busy work assignments for 24 years. It's time i get my own, even if it gets me a failing grade.
Affectivity in Christianity:
According to Micrea Eliade, all humans feel that in illo tempore (at the beginning) we existed in a perfect state, a Paradise or--more broadly--the illud tempus. He calls this impulse Nostalgia for Paradise, tracing instantiations of the phenomenon throughout religious and secular history. My concern with this Nostalgia lie with a how a religion, particularly Christianity, might explain the same phenomenon. That is, given that Eliade's formulation of Nostalgia for Paradise is accurate, how might Christianity explain its existence? To do this, i will draw an analogy between, on the one hand, the universality of Nostalgia for Paradise and, on the other, John Calvin's articulation of a universal belief in the existence of God--produced by the sensus divinitatis. Clearly, the primary relationship between Nostalgia and belief is their ostensible univerality. But the two likewise intersect at the general level of persuasiveness, insofar far as both cultivate religious thoughts and attitudes. The import of this comparison cannot but be apparent to those familiar with the natural theology debate surrounding the beginning of Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion. This paper acts as a thought experiment to see how Christianity might begin to integrate 20th century psychological theory--specifically affective experience--into its traditional theologies, in this case Reformed theology.
4 comments:
Kevin -- a very interesting project! Thanks for posting. That's about all I have to say. Do tell what evaluation this receives.
Question: do you think that this kind of nostalgia for a past golden age is really universal, pertaining to "all humans" per Eliade? Or is this just another case of the West reading its own experience of being human onto the Rest? I don't have a particular case in mind which defies the proposition, I'm just asking. Of course, the universality of Calvin's sensus divinitatis is similarly...dicey when it comes to describing real human life.
Here at Princeton we tend to cultivate a suspicious attitude towards these kind of correlations, wince a little at natural theology, because of our tutelage under Barth.
Collin my dear,
In short, yes. But i restrict the definition of universal to do it. I don't think its necessary to say that instantiations of nostalgia or SD belief exist in EVERY human. That sort of thing is empirically impossible to validate. But they do both appear in different geographies, at different times, within different cultures without anything but a biological connection. The question is 'how'?
And Calvin does offer reasons why some people's SD organ seems non-existent (they don't have a belief in the existence of God). It's a matter of function. Analogously, the function of other human organs fail due to the consequences of the Fall. I'd say much of the same thing concerning N for P. If belief or Nostalgia are missing, something in the psyche is fallen.
In other words, we here at Penn tend to ignore the suspicions of Princeton prudes. We're universalists to the core!
Kevvie Boy
Have you made any headway on this sucker? I just stopped in today for the first time in a long time and read your reply, to which I reply: Fair Enough. I thought you might trim the reach of your claims about the universality of the experiences you name in order to fit them around the (obvious) fact that not everybody everywhere articulates them. Also, naturally Calvin is clever enough to explain why not everybody senses the sensus; your little explication of his use of the fall to that end sounds a lot of like Aquinas' "dissolution of original justice." Well, now I have to read your newest post. Someday you should get around to reading Barth to find out why we at Princeton are so nervous about universal natural human experiences.
Collin, while doing a little bit of research for my paper, i ran across the Barth. Of course, i'm not going to pretend that i've grasped the full force of his argument. I do think that there is something to it--by which i mean the susceptibility of Natural Theology to secular infiltration.
But i am, on a personal level, disinclined to it, and thus, on an academic level, prone to side with those whose treatise align with my own experiences. I'm beginning to believe that inferences made about the character traits or causal acts of God are more readily perceptible to certain psychologies than others. Beauty implies something to me that it does not to the non-aesthetic individual. I take Plato quite seriously when he says that "beauty is light to the rational in seeing the Good." Natural Law--a thing i likewise and perhaps unsurprisingly attach myself to--implies to me a kind of source, that is, if we are to have an objective ethic. (See, Iris Murdoch "The Fire and the Sun" for a succinct and accurate description of my thoughts on this.)
But what fascinates me, is that the cosmological/causal Natural Theology fails to invoke any sort of intellectual or psychological response from me. And that very lack of a similar intuition which others experience makes me wonder whether i have certain "stock intuitions" different from others. In other words, Natural Theology may be intuitively less viable for many because something has either gone wrong in their wiring (i.e. the Fall) or they were never originally going to possess that sort of sense in the first place.
Of course, i'm speculating--perhaps a bit too much for 12:30 at night. But my point is that Natural Theologians take Natural Theology seriously because it aligns with the way they makes sense of the world: it's altogether...not to be punny...natural.
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