For some reason, not sure why, a few weeks ago I started immersing myself in anthropology. Books on human prehistory, ancient kingship, ritual. Reading Sir James Frazer, A.M. Hocart, Rene Girard, Walter Burkert, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (very interesting novel), many other things.
Burkert and Girard both published their seminal works (Girard, Violence and the Sacred; Burkert, Homo Necans) in 1972. Their theories of violence and human origins are close parallels, but not the same. Burkert traces the origins of human culture & consciousness back to animal life, & the emergence of hunting (homo sapiens distinguished itself early as the "hunting ape"). Homo Necans : "man the killer". In Burkert's view, the violence involved in killing other large mammals - and the close proximity of hunting to "intraspecific" (man vs. man) killing - ie., murder, cannibalism - was the ground on which the rituals which structure later society developed. Even after hunting was displaced by agriculture and animal husbandry, the ritual patterns remained, imprinting human culture with traditions of awe and taboo.
Girard offers a more radical and astonishing - a global, or total - theory. (There is a fascinating book titled Violent Origins, edited by Burton Mack, which is a symposium of texts & conversations between Girard, Burkert, & anthropologist Jonathan Z. Smith, along with others). Girard builds his global explanation of human consciousness & society on a re-fashioning of Freud. For Girard, humankind is essentially the "mimetic (imitative) animal". Violence instigated by "mimetic rivalry" - "what he has must be good : I must take it" - proved unstoppable, without limit, in primitive human collectives. Rivalry and feuding threatened human self-extinction, until one day, the rival mobs united against a scapegoat. The victimization of the scapegoat is the very ground of human social concord, of the peace necessary for social order. But along with this act of mob violence went the "founding lie" : the human collective had to pretend 1) the killing was the victim's fault; 2) the victim actually initiated the violence; 3) the victim was therefore an alien being, superhuman, not one of us : that is, a god. Thus Girard sees mimetic violence as at the root of social order (with its laws, rituals & taboos) and of human imagination. The vast mythologies of divine beings turn out to be an elaborate ruse - a double displacement of responsibility for murder. First, violent death is displaced onto the scapegoat victim; second, the scapegoat is held to be responsible for - or, what amounts to the same thing, the rescuer from - the original state of violent collective chaos.
This is a dark, but powerful theory. Girard, a literary critic, draws his conclusions (as Freud was wont to do) from the evidence of myth & literature. He also reserves a special place for the Bible and Christianity in his schema. Judaeo-Christian texts are the antidote to the false consciousness of human culture (built as it is on the version of reality written by the victors, the scapegoat's persecutors). Biblical texts, especially the New Testament, are instruments of disenchantment : they reveal the scapegoat mechanism from the perspective of the victim.
There are many elements of Girard's theory which I find both shocking & enlightening. (One can read, for example, about the bear-hunting rituals of the Ainu of Siberia. When the Ainu killed a bear, they apologized to it, and then they announced - "We didn't kill you; the Russians did.") But I'm not yet quite convinced... I can't quite accept this total, global theory in toto. What gave me pause was a passage in Mack's symposium, where Girard, in conversation, states that "Man is the mimetic animal". In the end I find this to be a reductive formula. Human nature is not defined merely by the impulse to mimic that which strikes us as the source of what is powerful, desirable or necessary. I think that ultimately human nature is defined by a kind of freedom with respect to the "source" of reality itself. It is in this sense that we can define ourselves as "children of God". We are undetermined by everything except the spiritual source of all things.
(This view is closer, I think, to the writings of another remarkable anthropologist & theorist (of the prior generation), A.M. Hocart. Hocart views human society as structured by ritual. But ritual, for Hocart, is not primarily a mode of negative or false consciousness (a la Girard). Rather, ritual is the form(s) applied by the human pursuit of Life itself : Life understood (by early human cultures) as a gift of the divine in its totality.)
Now Girard, as an anthropologist & scientist as well as a self-defined Christian, might not disagree with this : but he would say that our very language of the sacred is shaped & defined by the victimage scenario which was "hidden since the foundation of the world" (as he quotes the New Testament). Unless we acknowledge this reality, we are "part of the problem" - we are merely continuing the false consciousness of a human culture structured on persecution. This, too, I can almost accept : you could say in a sense that my representation of basic human nature is that of the "redeemed" Mankind - redeemed precisely by Christ's enlightening message - whereas Girard's schema offers a kind of prophetic warning about the real status of "unredeemed" Man. They are two sides of the same coin.
Yet I guess I find something slightly oppressive itself about Girard's totalizing theory. Man is not merely the "mimetic animal" - but also the "inventive, changing, transformative, originating" animal.
Girard constructs his illustrations from the Bible on the primal story of Cain & Abel. And it is true that the Cain story implies the historical origins of urban, collective human society in Cain's murder of his brother - a murder spurred by envy (a frustrated mimicry).
Yet there is another story in Genesis, even more primal than Cain's : that is the story of Adam & Eve. In this tale, human error is not motivated by imitation - though Adam's immediate effort to shift the blame to Eve (telling God, "she offered me the fruit, & I ate it") seems like the very "earliest" example of scapegoating. But the point here is, Eve (& Adam after) are not motivated by mimicry, but by ignorant desire. The great irony is that their physical desire - the "desire of the eyes" - is for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge : the one tree in the Garden God forbids them to touch.
There is some special blend of ironic humor & pathos at play in this story... something infinitely complex. & oddly enough it suggests to me a return to the theory of Girard's "twin" in this field - Walter Burkert. Think of it like this. If anthropoid human culture was deeply shaped in its beginnings by the hunt, then there must be something "hunterly" about human language itself. The Bible, we are told, is the language, the Word, the message of the one invisible Most High God. So think of it as both a hunter's trap, and a trap for hunters. In a sense, the Genesis story of the garden of Eden represents a sort of hunter's trap set for mankind. Man is forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge - the knowledge that will make him "like God" (according to the serpent, anyway). Nevertheless, unknowingly & willfully, Adam & Eve eat from the tree. The fruit of the tree is the knowledge of death : of their own mortality, their infinite distance & alienation from the eternal living God.
The long lesson of Biblical monotheism here begins to be enunciated. When you choose merely the visible, the tangible, the timebound goods - the "desire of the eyes" - you simultaneously blind yourself to the ultimate source of such "partial" goods. As Jesus noted, much later (according to the gospels) : "First get right with God, then all these (material) things shall be yours as well."
God the hunter set a trap for Man - called the Word, the "tree of knowledge". (He set the serpent nearby, to attract Man to the bait.) Essentially, the Bible is the voice of the divine hunter, mollifying & healing the wounded animal in his trap.
So what we have represented in the first Genesis story is not so much a tale of mimicry, envy and murder, but rather a lesson of blind desire : of "lost sheep." Man is not inherently or necessarily violent; homo sapiens is not irreparably aggressive. Man, you might say, is the animal most capable of failure to imitate, to follow : Man is the animal who gets lost. Man is not only wolfish : Man is sheepish, too.
(p.s. I'm not a proponent of Biblical literalism, by the way, in any sense. I can accept that the scriptures were "inspired" by the spirit of God, as a whole, in general : but they were written by men. There are contradictions, mixed messages, many elements open to mistaken interpretation. Through the ages, the Bible has sometimes been abused for purposes of bigotry & scapegoating. This should never be forgotten. In fact it should be investigated : & Girard offers a powerful hermeneutic for such exploration.)
Showing posts with label Christianity3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity3. Show all posts
9.30.2014
5.19.2014
Poetry, religion, metaphysics, & all that stuff
I write about these cloudy subjects a lot. I brood 'pon them. It is what it is. I yam whut I yam, as Popeye so memorably put it.
The recent essay in Coldfront proposed a literary-historical contrast & a conflict between a skeptical/ironic/disenchanted mode of poetry (exemplified by Language Poetry), and mode with an ultimately spiritual basis (ie. the "New Gnostics"). Lots of people would object to this binary set-up itself, as well as to its terms.
Lots of people will insist that art & poetry get along just fine without spirituality & religion & all that mumbo-jumbo. Thanks but no thanks.
Those of us, however, who have some first or even 2nd-hand knowledge of what's called sin, or guilt, or bad conscience, or crime, or just plain blues & trouble, will have some sense of what moral & spiritual or psychological illness & sickness is. From experience. & by the same token they will have an inborn sense of the desire for relief, for liberation from same. This is the case, whatever your diverse scientific or religious or philosophical explanations for these conditions might be.
The longing, you might say, is a desire for healing. For wholeness. For happiness. For a return, perhaps, to a sense of innocence.
Some people may have not much experience with these kinds of "moral" suffering. It seems to me that such healthy & innocent people often have an unintentionally callous & superficial attitude toward life. But then, sometimes we need the lighter touch of vapid ignorance (& I mean that). Not everybody is as guilty as we may be.
It seems to me that if you're an American poet, and you do subscribe to some sort of spiritual or metaphysical basis or connection underlying art & poetry, then you face one major problem or theme. Of course I'm generalizing here : let me just say that I feel like this is a theme or a design which I myself as an American poet find important.
It's the contrast between Emerson/Whitman/Crane/Dickinson, on the one hand, and Eliot on the other. These are just the most iconic exemplars of the polarity. It's the divide between Transcendentalism and traditional Judeo-Christianity.
(Then you have people like Melville and Wallace Stevens : their deeper skepticism about the "spiritual" - their ironic searching orientation - puts them in a separate category.)
Emerson is the model of the Transcendental antinomian Romantic. These are just academic tags for a stance toward reality which claims an ultimate originality. For Emerson, traditional religion represents the primitive folktales of what has evolved into a more conscious relation between the free human mind & spirit and the "Over-soul" which is the spirit of God. The poet celebrates the New Day Every Day of this primal, creative ecstasy. Whitman himself was the great American poet of this generally rhapsodic state of mind.
Eliot stands for something else. For both Jews & Christians, the faith is, that underneath all the fables & allegories & fantastic (often literally unbelievable) twists & turns of Biblical testimony... something happened. Something metaphysical and historical happened. Underneath, that is, all the Freudian psychodrama and pseudo-Pharaonic baloney, there is the ineradicable and inimitable thumbprint of some inexplicable Presence. A sacrifice was made, for all time, for the whole race of mankind. A self-sacrifice by the ghost who said "I am what I am" or "I will be what I will be."
For the Eliotic traditionalist, the human predicament of sin and guilt & suffering cannot be thrown off so easily & heroically as the Emersonian Romantics would like to think. We are, as MLK famously put it, bound up in a seamless network of mutuality : there is a much-suppressed history which underwrites every person's most-distinct identity, their quiddity of personhood.
Knowledge, & the pursuit of knowledge, it goes without saying, is and will be the basis for any future global humane civilization. However, ironically, it is the pride we invest in our knowledge - our petty vainglory, our greedy chauvinism, our blind self-regard, our will-to-power - which corrupts truth into propaganda, and turns the tools of enlightenment into weapons of war. The issues facing Plato's Atlantis are still with us. There will be no peaceful & just civilization on earth without humility, mercy, mutual forgiveness, & reconciliation.
As you can probably tell, I am, at least on a conscious level, aligned more with the Eliot than the Emerson end of this spectrum. But I am also an American poet - & I think unless you, the poet, share some of the iconoclastic & searching mind of Stevens & Melville & Pound & Emerson & Crane & Dickinson, then you will not be able to interpret the inheritance of traditional metaphysical & religions concepts & notions & hobgoblins with the requisite salt of originality. You won't bring anything new to the table. Poetry at the core is visionary, exploratory, experimental, celebratory, creative, harmonic. It verges on the oracular. It is not, as often in Eliot, only retrospective lamentation. Thus we find the generative oscillation between these two poles.
So for me anyway, it's always been this nexus - this middle area of poetic thought & meditation - this uncertain no-man's-land situated somewhere in the midst of seemingly opposing States - that I find most fertile & valuable for my own mythongeries...
The recent essay in Coldfront proposed a literary-historical contrast & a conflict between a skeptical/ironic/disenchanted mode of poetry (exemplified by Language Poetry), and mode with an ultimately spiritual basis (ie. the "New Gnostics"). Lots of people would object to this binary set-up itself, as well as to its terms.
Lots of people will insist that art & poetry get along just fine without spirituality & religion & all that mumbo-jumbo. Thanks but no thanks.
Those of us, however, who have some first or even 2nd-hand knowledge of what's called sin, or guilt, or bad conscience, or crime, or just plain blues & trouble, will have some sense of what moral & spiritual or psychological illness & sickness is. From experience. & by the same token they will have an inborn sense of the desire for relief, for liberation from same. This is the case, whatever your diverse scientific or religious or philosophical explanations for these conditions might be.
The longing, you might say, is a desire for healing. For wholeness. For happiness. For a return, perhaps, to a sense of innocence.
Some people may have not much experience with these kinds of "moral" suffering. It seems to me that such healthy & innocent people often have an unintentionally callous & superficial attitude toward life. But then, sometimes we need the lighter touch of vapid ignorance (& I mean that). Not everybody is as guilty as we may be.
It seems to me that if you're an American poet, and you do subscribe to some sort of spiritual or metaphysical basis or connection underlying art & poetry, then you face one major problem or theme. Of course I'm generalizing here : let me just say that I feel like this is a theme or a design which I myself as an American poet find important.
It's the contrast between Emerson/Whitman/Crane/Dickinson, on the one hand, and Eliot on the other. These are just the most iconic exemplars of the polarity. It's the divide between Transcendentalism and traditional Judeo-Christianity.
(Then you have people like Melville and Wallace Stevens : their deeper skepticism about the "spiritual" - their ironic searching orientation - puts them in a separate category.)
Emerson is the model of the Transcendental antinomian Romantic. These are just academic tags for a stance toward reality which claims an ultimate originality. For Emerson, traditional religion represents the primitive folktales of what has evolved into a more conscious relation between the free human mind & spirit and the "Over-soul" which is the spirit of God. The poet celebrates the New Day Every Day of this primal, creative ecstasy. Whitman himself was the great American poet of this generally rhapsodic state of mind.
Eliot stands for something else. For both Jews & Christians, the faith is, that underneath all the fables & allegories & fantastic (often literally unbelievable) twists & turns of Biblical testimony... something happened. Something metaphysical and historical happened. Underneath, that is, all the Freudian psychodrama and pseudo-Pharaonic baloney, there is the ineradicable and inimitable thumbprint of some inexplicable Presence. A sacrifice was made, for all time, for the whole race of mankind. A self-sacrifice by the ghost who said "I am what I am" or "I will be what I will be."
For the Eliotic traditionalist, the human predicament of sin and guilt & suffering cannot be thrown off so easily & heroically as the Emersonian Romantics would like to think. We are, as MLK famously put it, bound up in a seamless network of mutuality : there is a much-suppressed history which underwrites every person's most-distinct identity, their quiddity of personhood.
Knowledge, & the pursuit of knowledge, it goes without saying, is and will be the basis for any future global humane civilization. However, ironically, it is the pride we invest in our knowledge - our petty vainglory, our greedy chauvinism, our blind self-regard, our will-to-power - which corrupts truth into propaganda, and turns the tools of enlightenment into weapons of war. The issues facing Plato's Atlantis are still with us. There will be no peaceful & just civilization on earth without humility, mercy, mutual forgiveness, & reconciliation.
As you can probably tell, I am, at least on a conscious level, aligned more with the Eliot than the Emerson end of this spectrum. But I am also an American poet - & I think unless you, the poet, share some of the iconoclastic & searching mind of Stevens & Melville & Pound & Emerson & Crane & Dickinson, then you will not be able to interpret the inheritance of traditional metaphysical & religions concepts & notions & hobgoblins with the requisite salt of originality. You won't bring anything new to the table. Poetry at the core is visionary, exploratory, experimental, celebratory, creative, harmonic. It verges on the oracular. It is not, as often in Eliot, only retrospective lamentation. Thus we find the generative oscillation between these two poles.
So for me anyway, it's always been this nexus - this middle area of poetic thought & meditation - this uncertain no-man's-land situated somewhere in the midst of seemingly opposing States - that I find most fertile & valuable for my own mythongeries...
4.18.2014
Breakdown, break through
Just after noon in Providence, Good Friday. Why "good"? Old medieval usage - like saying "Holy Friday".
Have been reading Eric Santner's interesting & concise book, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. An exploration of shared territory of Freud and Franz Rosenzweig (Star of Redemption) : offers a defense of Judeo-Christianity in terms of very contemporary, postmodern psychology (by way of Emmanuel Levinas, trendy thinker Slavoj Žižek, scholar Robert A. Paul, & others). The basic idea (greatly oversimplified here) is that this ancient monotheistic religious culture(s) is not, as some have argued, an ideological engine of exclusion and inter-cultural conflict - but rather represents a pathway to psychic liberation, working through the psycho-ideological complexes and learned/subconscious behaviors that trap us in patterns of alienation, dehumanization, objectification, etc.
(I come to this kind of study with some skepticism... often the refined and technical psychologizing seems to over-complicate matters which should resolve themselves in simplicity (how to love God, how to have faith, how to love others). Yet again, though... Santner's arguments are cogent, and these matters are inherently complex, as well.)
The center of Santner's thinking (as it seems to be of Rosenzweig's) is this tradition's welding together of the love of God with the love of neighbor. You can't have one without the other. But Santner, with Freud & Rosenzweig, looks beneath the obligatory, learned patterns of social ethics (the realm of the "superego"), toward a concept of the irreducible individuality, the singularity, of the person : rooted, not in some idealization of "personality", but in the self as a solitary embodiment - singled out, specifically, by death. Countering this condition, and its angst (the knowledge of death), Rosenzweig sketches a concept of God as intervening in the midst of present life : as bringing about a transvaluation of the terms of existence, through the force of love. Santner's/Rosenzweig's "love" is not some vague cosmic charity, but rather a passionate demand that we love God - personally - in the same way that God calls us by name : calls us in our singularity, by our proper name. In the same way, we encounter God personally - insofar as we encounter our neighbor in a condition of complete "soul liberty" (Roger Williams' term). That is, the encounter involves an acceptance of the other as completely other - as free, as strange, as idiosyncratic, as driven, as eccentric, as outcast as this neighbor may be. Santner replays Rosenzweig's sense that our relation with God and neighbor has to move beyond the "third person" formulae - the abstract systems - of traditional philosophy and theology.
The "folk tale" quality of much of the Bible lends itself, it seems to me, to a sense of God's "impersonations". This has often been interpreted as primitivism, as childish anthropomorphizing. We are supposed to look beneath the husk of the fairy-tale allegory of God's personal acts, for the hidden spiritual/philosophical fruit. This is one way to read the Bible, and it has its own venerable legitimacy and interest. But another way to read is for the inherent narrative/dramatic thrill itself - as a verbal approximation of an actuality which in itself is inexpressibly real, dramatically intense. (This, by the way, is also how I understand poetry in relation to other modes of discourse. It is our most vivid verbal approximation of living actuality.)
Santner, clearly, is re-interpreting issues that have been debated for thousands of years, both early and late. They are not new. And my rehash, here, does not do him justice (I make it sound too familiar). But as I read his summary of Rosenzweig's theology - the idea of divine "revelation" as something that breaks through (in a traumatic way) the patterns of the world and calls us personally, by name - I'm stirred by echoes of my own (traumatic) experience. It rings true for me.
I've written many times on this blog about my "Shakespeare event" of forty years ago. In Santner's psychoanalytic terms, it was a kind of breakdown, a surging up of unconscious forces. It was also a pivotal experience for me, a complete and lasting change of direction and consciousness. And it was an uncanny crisis of being called by name. (This earlier post touches on it... if you search the blog with "Shakespeare" & "sonnets" you may find more.)
Happy Easter, everyone...
Have been reading Eric Santner's interesting & concise book, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. An exploration of shared territory of Freud and Franz Rosenzweig (Star of Redemption) : offers a defense of Judeo-Christianity in terms of very contemporary, postmodern psychology (by way of Emmanuel Levinas, trendy thinker Slavoj Žižek, scholar Robert A. Paul, & others). The basic idea (greatly oversimplified here) is that this ancient monotheistic religious culture(s) is not, as some have argued, an ideological engine of exclusion and inter-cultural conflict - but rather represents a pathway to psychic liberation, working through the psycho-ideological complexes and learned/subconscious behaviors that trap us in patterns of alienation, dehumanization, objectification, etc.
(I come to this kind of study with some skepticism... often the refined and technical psychologizing seems to over-complicate matters which should resolve themselves in simplicity (how to love God, how to have faith, how to love others). Yet again, though... Santner's arguments are cogent, and these matters are inherently complex, as well.)
The center of Santner's thinking (as it seems to be of Rosenzweig's) is this tradition's welding together of the love of God with the love of neighbor. You can't have one without the other. But Santner, with Freud & Rosenzweig, looks beneath the obligatory, learned patterns of social ethics (the realm of the "superego"), toward a concept of the irreducible individuality, the singularity, of the person : rooted, not in some idealization of "personality", but in the self as a solitary embodiment - singled out, specifically, by death. Countering this condition, and its angst (the knowledge of death), Rosenzweig sketches a concept of God as intervening in the midst of present life : as bringing about a transvaluation of the terms of existence, through the force of love. Santner's/Rosenzweig's "love" is not some vague cosmic charity, but rather a passionate demand that we love God - personally - in the same way that God calls us by name : calls us in our singularity, by our proper name. In the same way, we encounter God personally - insofar as we encounter our neighbor in a condition of complete "soul liberty" (Roger Williams' term). That is, the encounter involves an acceptance of the other as completely other - as free, as strange, as idiosyncratic, as driven, as eccentric, as outcast as this neighbor may be. Santner replays Rosenzweig's sense that our relation with God and neighbor has to move beyond the "third person" formulae - the abstract systems - of traditional philosophy and theology.
The "folk tale" quality of much of the Bible lends itself, it seems to me, to a sense of God's "impersonations". This has often been interpreted as primitivism, as childish anthropomorphizing. We are supposed to look beneath the husk of the fairy-tale allegory of God's personal acts, for the hidden spiritual/philosophical fruit. This is one way to read the Bible, and it has its own venerable legitimacy and interest. But another way to read is for the inherent narrative/dramatic thrill itself - as a verbal approximation of an actuality which in itself is inexpressibly real, dramatically intense. (This, by the way, is also how I understand poetry in relation to other modes of discourse. It is our most vivid verbal approximation of living actuality.)
Santner, clearly, is re-interpreting issues that have been debated for thousands of years, both early and late. They are not new. And my rehash, here, does not do him justice (I make it sound too familiar). But as I read his summary of Rosenzweig's theology - the idea of divine "revelation" as something that breaks through (in a traumatic way) the patterns of the world and calls us personally, by name - I'm stirred by echoes of my own (traumatic) experience. It rings true for me.
I've written many times on this blog about my "Shakespeare event" of forty years ago. In Santner's psychoanalytic terms, it was a kind of breakdown, a surging up of unconscious forces. It was also a pivotal experience for me, a complete and lasting change of direction and consciousness. And it was an uncanny crisis of being called by name. (This earlier post touches on it... if you search the blog with "Shakespeare" & "sonnets" you may find more.)
Happy Easter, everyone...
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