Basketball and Astrophysics

After speaking with an astrophysicist Saturday afternoon concerning string theory, what already seemed an inevitability, turned into a certainty: I shall never grow into a proficient theoretical scientist; I shall never so much as graduate to the level a shoddy theoretical scientist. The tragedy of being human is to have only one life, one brain, and a disproportionate amount of curiosity.

Alas, I am forced to construct a hierarchy of interests by the use of a little formula: Life span + Brain Capacity + Taste = psychology, religion, and philosophy. If by now you have yet to conclude that these are my primary interests, then either you’re a lousy listener and I need new friends, or I’m a bad communicator and you need new friends.

Yet despite of my frustrations, I found, to my pleasant surprise, that the astrophysicist is a Christian. And the meeting reminded me of what I think contemporary apologetics ought to look like.

If I may be permitted to repeat the platitudes of a basketball coach: sometimes the best defense is a good offense. Apologetics, I think, can no longer take a defensive form and hope to be effective. It often goes unrealized that there is a psychology to apologetics, not merely a discursive philosophy. The Modern, defensive methodology succeeded because, being the children of the Enlightenment, Western man impulsively sought for a certainty principle via which he could feel comfortable with what he knew. When apologetics defended Christianity’s first principles, it likewise appealed to the Modern comfort seeking psychology—hence the popularity of Lewis, Chesterton, Craig, etc.

I am afraid this won’t work for much longer. We are no longer Modern, and the number of people harboring this mentality dwindles with each funeral. Our generation is a stranger and more adventurous breed. We prefer novelty and eclecticism. We are diverse and autonomous. We have known the world through our laptop computers, and no longer believe in certainty nor comfort. Our psychology will be sated by nothing less than everything. Thus, or so i think, Christianity must be everywhere.

So if ever there were a time to take “and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it” seriously, now is the time. Defense apologetics now tends to have the opposite effect of making us uncomfortable. For to constantly defend is to constantly undergo attacks. It makes one wonder whether what he believes is true. The world is too big now; there are too many possibilites. One man cannot defend against Freud, Nietzsche, Russell, Sagan, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, culture etc. etc. (the list is as grand as the world), for the simple reason that he is one man.

The idea now, I think, is to appeal to the new sentiments. We must Christianize secular interests, infiltrate and manipulate; turn Freud's truth into Christian truth, take Nietzsche's wisdom and mold it. After all, whatever the sciences find, whatever philosophy articulates are little else besides instantiations of God's creation and God's truth. We must "be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” To use Eliade's terms, we need to reintroduce the sacred into the profane.

This is why I liked my astrophysicist: here we have a Christian advancing the gospel one ridiculously complex quantum proposition at a time. We must take science and philosophy, life and culture, and resituate them under the auspices of Christ. And we can only do this by altering our reactive defenses into proactive attacks. We must no longer merely say that Christianity is right, but that the world is wrong.

the K.H.

A Christian Imagination?

I do not believe in beginning a post with the pronoun ‘I.’ It grates against years of formal training. If my 9th grade English teacher, who once dressed me up as a girl with balloon boobs and ribbons in my hair, would have found out while dressing me that one day i'd commit a grammatical schism like the one above, she'd unhesitatingly pop my perky plastic. But since my fear of her swift retribution has long since subsided, and especially since i have created this example of rebellion on purpose, i will keep it.

Breaking the rules is a longstanding, American tradition. If you like, you may consider my recalcitrance here an act of patriotism. Yet it is not for my country that I say what follows, but for my faith. Protestantism in general and Evangelicalism in particular are little else besides revolutionary institutions. Nevertheless, I like the idea—given certain provisos— of rebelling against rebels.

Only where we find the most severe kinds of naivety, in the carbuncle regions of lower Mississippi or upper Amish country, do we still see that breed of Christian who manages to think the fiction of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien evil. Contemporary psychologists will not let me get away with sweeping generalizations, so I mention these folk and their intellectual kin only so that I do not have to mention them later. I do not concern myself with blockheads for the same reason i do not concern myself with blocks: they're boring and bad listeners. But moving beyond this group, Evangelical Christians in general suffer from a poor view of the imagination.

There is an orthodox principle concerning the well ordered man that should, I think, be applied to the imagination. Moreover, one that could, if employed much like Lewis or Tolkien do, change lives. In City of God Augustine combines a little of the Stoic, Academic, and Peripatetic traditions under a Christian heading--Christianity in general may have a knack for intellectual conflation. I will not go into great detail of how he goes about this (mostly because I do not understand it myself), but the gist of it may be explained best in an example: If a child shoots me with a squirt gun, soaking me in water, I may be tempted to return the favor by throwing the rascal into the sea. On Augustine’s model, reason should control my desire to retaliate. In other words, the head dominates the impulses; it rules over them. And reason should rule because this is how God originally intended things to be. Let’s call this, as the ancients, did Justice.

This Justice principle, this ‘the way things are intended to be’ should be, i repeat, applied to the use of imagination. Pascal warns that the imagination is both the most powerful and wayward of human faculties. Chesterton recapitulates saying “we do not know why the imagination accepts an image before reason can reject it.” I think in my next post I will enter into the grittier parts of the psyche to give examples of just what happens with both proper and improper uses of the imagination. My desire at present is merely to communicate the possibility that contemporary Christianity fails to recognize the dangers and wonders of the imagination, the horror and beauty it can create. More importantly, i think Christianity has neglected the formulation of a just view of the imagination, of its proper or improper action.

It is the one faculty that can dominate the psyche more effectively than the mind. Like other parts of us, it should sometimes be kept in a cage, and sometimes set loose. When and where and how are wholly different questions. My point is simply that, yes, “the head rules the belly through the chest, indeed.” But like Plato’s Republic, like Plato’s whole theory of art, Christians have no satisfying account of the imagination, and it's time we come up with something a little systematic.

the K.H.

Horse Beating

In order to set the proper tone for this blog, i have provided what i take to be an accurate description of my feelings toward certain Christianisms.




I hasten to clarify that i do not believe that 'to the glory of God' or 'what a blessing' or phrases as such are in their very essence evil things. Neither objective claims nor universal proclamations concern me at present. My point is an aesthetic one, and by implication, an affective one.

As it happens, Walker Percy agrees with me, at least provisionally, if i am permitted to recast his offhanded remarks with my own, religious preoccupations. His principles are two-fold: 1.) The poet revitalizes the meaning of an object simply by renaming it. And 2.) we are not conscious of a thing until it has a name. Therefore, the better the poet, the better the naming.

Take John Milton's description of God the Father on his throne:

"from the pure Empyrean where he sits enthroned far above all height"

This phrase supersedes the normal phrase "God sits on his throne" because the eccentricity of the language commands our attention. To be overbearingly precise, our affective states reflect our tastes, and our tastes pique whenever the language employed creates meaning. Humans are, on Percy's view, meaning mongers. We are not homo-sapien, we are homo-symbolificus.

Now, we have all enjoyed listening to our favorite song. And, in the same tone, we have all experienced the disappointment of listening to our favorite song too much. There is this universal phenomenon whereby repetition ruins the qualitative aspect of aesthetic experience. C. S. Lewis gives the best treatment of this phenomenon i know of in Surprised by Joy, but my concern with it at present is not why it happens, only the fact that it happens.

So what on earth does all this have to do with Christianisms? My fear is that in communicating 'the gospel' 'to the glory of God for 'the salvation of the world' we are sometimes not communicating anything at all. I am not suggesting that we tell a different gospel, i am suggesting that we tell the gospel creatively. I do believe that through the foolishness of preaching people will come to Christ. I do not believe that through the foolishness of bad preaching that they will. The Bible does act as a two-edged sword, Christ is the word precisely because of the relationship between language and humans. God chose scripture as a primary mode through which to reach us because he knew in creating us, that through symbolic interaction with the text, meaning is infused (whether consciously or no) into our minds.

This post, then, is only cautionary. The simple truth of the matter is that we should take something like ''to the glory of God' as seriously as possible at all times, and not merely participate in Christian mention-making-isms. Say it when it means something, say it differently to make it mean something, or don't say it at all. Else, i suspect we may be in danger not only being boring but of taking God's name and actions in vain.

Home Coming

I’m as much a fan of catch phrases as I am of catching pretty girls. “Home is where the heart is” seems as true to me now as it did the first time I heard it. The difference today is that I no longer think of home as a place.

Paul liked the idea of home too. Christians must treat their stay on earth as temporal: that we are aliens waiting for Paradise, waiting for home. But there is something we forget about his analogy, and that is that it is just an analogy. Paul treats home solely as a place, when, or so we all intuitively (and rightly) believe, it is something much more.

For my part, I doubt Paradise will resemble the physical universe. The fact that we will have new bodies does not mean that we will have new physical bodies. These overtly literal interpretations of analogues lack imagination. A new body might occupy a new space in a kind of new quasi-universe—none of which we could even begin to formulate a meaning save through analogy. Our categories may be as such that, come Paradise, we may laugh at our former, literal dogmas. The point of analogy is not to produce dogma, but to stimulate the imagination. And it is stimulation in the form of guesswork, the use of analogy, employed by men like Daniel and John which show an exemplary use of imagination. What they saw, they did not write, for, as they say, no utterance exists of which can give an accurate description. They were limited to metaphor and simile. Why else do you think we find the duel office of prophet as poet? Prophetic literature contains as many artistic principles as apocalyptic predictions. Daniel and John were not only prophets but artists, the office of divinator as aethetictician. Modern Christians might be better off if, like our prophets, they learned to treat “above all we could ask or imagine” not only as a promise but a challenge.

All of this to say that we mustn’t depend on analogies for anything beyond a provisional theology. Upon returning to South Carolina for a visit, I realized that I missed neither my old apartment nor desired to return to my new one. Home is where I feel safe. Some people believe this to be the wood paneling or smell of their kitchen when in reality it is the sentiments attached to these things, an association with past pleasant experience. In short, home is safety and familiarity. Home is when I laugh at Colin’s antics, or cry in Susan’s heartache, or hear my Mom’s voice on the phone, so long as i am safe around these people. In that sense, i need not necessarily go home, but home may come to me. But not even this is the whole truth. For, “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” Somehow our souls remember, or at least know that they should encounter the bliss of “dwelling under the shadow of the Almighty.” Paradise will be home not primarily as a place, for we cannot know what we mean by place. Paradise will be home because we will be safe and familiar, intimate and truthful with Christ.The idea of home attaches itself to the word 'in' in the phrase 'in Christ.' And home, in this sense, does indeed come to us; grace come down one might say.

“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”—Faulkner

the K.H.

Lessons In Incoherent Intuitions # 1

The blogging audience is the forgiving audience. Neither grammar nor ideas require the exactitude one would except to appear in a publication or paper. The misplaced comma or immature idea deserve absolution based on, or so we all feel, the belief that informal mistakes aren’t really mistakes so much as instances of intimacy between reader and writer. We all realize that these things are written too quickly and too enthusiastically to be taken too seriously. I hope that merely by mentioning this, I may forego your criticisms, and, more to my wishes, retain your attention as I blather on about myth-theory and Christianity. Forgive me, likewise, for failing to translate, as it were, what I am about to say. Big words and mention-making of foreign names and Latin phrases do not, as is commonly thought, reveal intelligence; they only show that a clear formulation has yet to fully developed, and provide evidence for a case charlatanism.

In psychology and myth-theory, the previous generation of professors dismissed the possibility of universals—not to mention what philosophers thought. One could not, or so they thought, subscribe the particular religious phenomenon of the Australian shaman under the same categories which apply to the Catholic priest, nor especially to every religious person throughout space and time—including hypothetical space and time. Attempts at universalization never do justice to the particularity of an individual phenomenology or historical events. These particularist should not, I don’t think, go unheeded. Categories are only useful insofar as they cultivate the intellectual environ. Where seeds cannot grow, what’s the use?

Still, we should treat the value of caution cautiously; this methodology tends, at least in the classroom, to indulge in that kind of unhealthy skepticism present only in internalists approaches to epistemology or, even worse, within reductionism and positivism. After all, we all really do think that in spite of particulars, there is a thing called a human being—and that, of itself, is a universal claim. (I would like, if I had space, to juxtapose pernicious caution of this type with the Classical menos, e.g. the mean between fear and recklessness, also called courage. There is probably, at least on the Christian model, a mode whereby one ought to enact his imaginative powers to begin formulating paradigms capable of explaining the human condition. So somewhere between skepticism and naivety, say, a word which would marry curiosity to epistemic humility. But all of that is a side note to universality.)

Plantinga does some good work in Warranted Christian Belief on the sensus divinitatis, postulating that an innate, metaphysical, human organ recognizes God’s handiwork in, to be scandalously brief, all axiological categories. Plantinga, Calvin, and Aquinas are all, to my knowledge, unabashedly concerned with demonstrating—whether in de facto or de jure terms— the existence of God via this model. My provisional concern with it at present does, eventually, have import on questions surrounding the existence of God, but I’m more curious about the inherent content of this supposed metaphysical faculty, that is, I want to know of what the thing consists, what is the sensus divinitatis? If I look at the sun, and I begin to think in causal terms, Plantinga and company, not to mention Solomon and Paul the Apostle, would say that I have likely and unconsciously initiated the sensus divinitatis. Likewise with ethical phenomenon, we instinctively feel that there is something objectively right or wrong, and that if there is a source, it would be sensible if it were Divine—C.S. Lewis’ formulation of Natural Law seems to me to instantiate this claim. But what I’m wondering, on a wholly different plain, is whether psychological phenomenon, things such as archetypes—as represented primarily in myth, secondarily in art, and lastly in laicized society—are expressions, not of the unconscious, but of the sensus divinitatis. In other words, I’m wondering if the sensus divinitatis not only includes properties associated with cosmogony (Plantinga) and morality (Lewis) but also of psychology and phenomenology—Freud, Jung, James, Eliade. Specifically, affective psychological and phenomenological dispositions.

I am beginning to think that all this psychological talk about a collective unconscious, or a universal Spirit, or what have you, is really only a modern formulation of the Medieval Christian sensus divinitatis. In order to explain the commonalities between individuals, thinkers like Freud, Jung, and James have developed the collective unconscious—innate and universal—, like the sensus divinitatis, out of which man expresses his innermost desires, meanings, and needs. Like Plantinga and company, they don’t really explain what exactly this faculty is, per say, only that it’s epiphenomenon seem at play with something fundamentally and unequivocally human.

Nietzsche, in his way, talks along the same lines. He insists upon the despair of the ancient Greeks, and says that the aesthetic reaction—the invocation of what he calls the Dionysian— mollified the ‘souls’ of the Greeks via participation in an ecstatic, primordial state of consciousness and/or being. In less ridiculously vague Nietzschian terms, man feels better when he is—in more reasonable Pascalan terms—distracted by entertainment. But this need for distraction is itself a demonstration that we think that things ought to be otherwise, or of the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. This desire for the original Dionysiac state, in other words, may be a sign of the sensus divinitatis.

Likewise Freud with his, for lack of a better term, colorful ideas surrounding the Oedipus and Electra complexes. Freud is doubtless a quack in universalizing his select few therapy cases, but he rightly shows that there were under-girding, unconscious activity playing a pivotal if not primary role in human thinking. Moreover, and more to the point, he shows that this activity exists within the dream: both night and day dream. The rhetorical force inherent to the dream/myth analogue remains to this day equitable. We dream because we need to, because we are dissatisfied with the world: ennui or trauma are not preferable to psychological health. Man still needs his distractions, man still, to include Eliade in the discussion, looks for the illus tempus, or Eden, or the Golden age—a phenomenon that truly IS universal in empirical time and space, and, more remarkably, hypothetical time and space. The purity of Eden, or the pleasantries of the Golden age, in Freudian terms, is the pre-natal or pre-traumatic period, when the man was untainted by the world, pure, and unharmed.

I would be remiss not to include Aldous Huxley’s breath-taking and prophetic dichotomy between the two mutually exclusive value sets of 1.) truth and beauty 2.) comfort and stability as presented in Brave New World. American man watches his television, facebook booms, and Hulu dominate, because man cannot stand the thought of self-reflection, cannot “sit quietly in his room.” He must invoke a Jungian Hero archetype to occupy his consciousness, he must kill time at work, he must escape from the present, he must pretend in order to feel good. Plato too, insists upon a kind of return to an original good—via the soul’s recognition of the Beautiful, to the forms. After all his disparagement of myth, Plato curiously invents his own myth in Bk. 10 of the Republic, and there, the soul remembers the Good, and desires to participate with it.

All of this distraction, by the way, is why Tolkien’s Middle Earth dominated the 20^th century, and why, moreover, the gospel infiltrated American culture via the subconscious in the form of a preparatoria evangelica. Man, in trying to escape ‘the machine’ of Modernity, in trying to escape the dehumanization of the industrial and technological age, found himself with a predilection for Fantasy literature in it’s most extreme form. The only counter-balance to dehumanization was, and still probably is, a world within which to escape—not from the reality of work or of Starbucks, but of their unreality—out of the prison of a monotonous life and into the reality of the illus tempus, the traditional values, into Christianity. Frodo’s world is not fake, Frodo’s world is real, and the sensus divinitatis knows it.

All of this is highly confusing, and I could add names, and aggregate philosophies—I know nothing of Hegel, for example, but gheist seems to me--prima facie-- an facsimile (or just simile) of the collective unconscious. I wish only to mark the consistencies within the multifarious enterprises. Major psychologist, anthropologists, historians, philosophers, literarians etc all touch upon this remarkable phenomenon of affective dissatisfaction. The affective dissatisfaction seems to me, merely the negative logical equivalent of Classical Antiquities’ eudemonia. Man above all desires to be happy, BECAUSE he realizes that he is not!

But from where could a man recognize that he is unhappy if he did not have some notion of perfect happiness? One cannot logically infer immutable happiness from ephemeral happiness for the very same reason that you cannot infer steak from cake. The desire is specific to the object. From where could I know perfect happiness if I never had the experience? How can I have a desire for an object which does not exist within the peripheral of my experience when every other desire I have exists specifically because there are objects within my experience? I only desire cake because I have tasted it, I do not desire some tasty African dish for the very simple reason that I have no idea what it is. But how, and from where could I desire a perfect, immutable happiness if it lies beyond the bounds of my experience? Augustine was right, I think, and “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee”— simply because we are made that way. “You have made us to praise You” suggest in very clear terms the inherent quality of a sensus divinitatis. I am hungry because I have a stomach. I desire the Good because I have the sensus divinitatis.

But if this is true, then that thing we call the unconscious, those universal phenomenon we call archetypes, are either the sensus divinitatis in function or its by products. Right? And if the phenomenon is, indeed, universal, wouldn’t that further corroborate the Christian notion that the sensus divinitatis is universal? Of course, the very existence of the different mythologies, religions, and values demonstrates that, given this model, the sensus divinitatis, like all other human faculties is fallen in different ways and to different degrees. But it would also explain the phenomenon that certain people are more spiritually clairvoyant than others—Christians and non-Christians alike. If man is made in the image of God, and the sensus divinitatis in some way reflects the divine nature, then given that all men are made in God’s image differently than others, different ontological powers will be possessed differently by different people.