Esotericism and Community

One thing that can lead to esotericism among intellectuals (particularly, but not exclusively, young intellectuals) is a gnostic vision of community, according to which community formation is pretty much a matter of (your) agreement (with me). But, if I may borrow a distinction from arch-Wittgensteinian Stanley Cavell (which he doesn’t really use for this purpose), community is not a matter of agreement but attunement. This mutual attunement is a matter of common life (practice, desire, history, heritage, ‘culture’), of speaking the same language (literally and metaphorically). Think about what it’s like when something you find hilarious fails to move or even offends a friend. You don’t say you disagree about the joke, but that your friend just doesn’t get it. (If you did say you disagreed, you would mean that you disagreed about why it was or was not funny, or about what in general makes for a funny joke, etc. But the failure to find the same things funny is not registered in not agreeing, it’s registered in not laughing.) It’s the “get” and the “it” (each undefined and hard to put your finger on) that make for attunement. Agreement is a good thing, but it arises out of a prior attunement (at least logically prior); which is to say, agreement arises only within community. It does not create community, anymore than explaining a joke to your unimpressed friend brings about quite the same guffaws as come from someone who gets it the first time.

So much for why gnosticism doesn’t work. The reason I think it’s even important to talk about visions of community when thinking about esotericism is, I think, that the context in which we do the things that run the esoteric risk – discuss authors, bandy ideas, engage in dialogue; in short, be thinkers – is that of our relations to our communities. Our rationality, our ability to agree, disagree and discern reasons for one or the other - our ability to communicate - is a matter of attunement, which means, of community membership. This is why Descartes, when it’s time to begin a project of skeptically destroying all knowledge and building it up again himself (a rejection, warranted or not, of the community and its rationality), goes off alone and meditates. The gnostic, again, tries to build the community he desires (he tries to secure himself a place in a community) on the basis of agreement. He (rightly) feels the fracturing of community and wants to repair it (again, rightly), but in his disintegration (from others and thus from himself) he runs first to agreement, because putting ideas together is kind of like putting people together. Right?

The thinker desires the integration of community, and thus the integration of himself. That’s why he thinks. He doesn’t have to take that desire in a gnostic direction. The thinker is, though, constantly tempted by the gnostic in himself to make integration a matter of agreement. On the personal level, this will mean an insatiable quest for the acquisition of knowledge; on the communal level, it will mean a constant need to persuade others. But when agreement is made ultimate in this way, it becomes a coercive, intellectually violent endeavour. Facts are wielded, arguments marshaled, theses laid down as challenges. The thinker’s desire for the integration of Same and Different that is community becomes a quest to convert the Other into the Same. (Sorry for all the capital letters.)

This quest is hard work. An easier way for the gnostic to accomplish the goal of community is to move to a high level of abstraction, exclusivity and specialization – i.e., esotericism. This strategy is a good way for the gnostic to assure himself that he really is onto something, that the problem is with the others who can’t/won’t understand, that if they could/would bring themselves to think on this level (i.e. to become more like him), they would finally get it. In this way esotericism functions as a cheap knock-off of attunement, a way of creating a quasicommunity among the circle of intimates. An Inner Ring (as described by C. S. Lewis in his excellent essay of that name) precisely defines itself as the group that gets it, that knows (knows the way things are really run around here, knows the actual problems others ignore, knows the way to the top of the ladder, knows theology really well). But an Inner Ring is not a real community.

The way to avoid esotericism, then, is to avoid gnosticism. And we know how this is done: not by abstaining from being thinkers, but by immersing our thinking in the common forms of life that are community, by acting as members of what is, according to our gospel, the only true community, the church. And this is done by acting as members of the church through the means ordained by its Head: Word, Sacrament, the many kinds of fellowship with each other God has given us. And being part of this Body is the way God has given us for immersing ourselves in Christ the Head of the Body, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. And this leads us into immersion in He who is true community from all eternity, God in Trinity. So in being a community issue, esotericism is a gospel issue. The gnostic tries to create community by thinking; the Christian believes the gospel alone brings true community, and that we have (already/not yet) been given this community in Christ (through his Church).

So what I’m saying is, I don’t have any good strategies or bits of practical advice for avoiding esotericism. But I think a good way to find those ways is to take the sacraments, tithe, serve people, confess, pray together, sing together, get coffee (or beer) together. In other words, be a person in community, and that will lessen the gnostic temptation (the need) to create community by agreement – even and especially the sham agreement that is only the esotericism of the Inner Ring.

Vicarious Blogging

- Michael Pollan has an open letter to the next president of the US in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. Read it.

- Also in the Times today, David Brooks writes on the Republican Party’s self-defeating form of class warfare: anti-intellectualism. Here’s the conclusion:

Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

- NPR offers a free stream of the new Bob Dylan rare recordings collection, Tell Tale Signs. (HT: Ben Myers)

- Someone named Alex MacLean is doing surprisingly interesting aerial photography of American suburbs and suburban life.

Rights

One of the most telling questions in last night’s presidential debate was: “is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?” Of course neither candidate’s answer was very good, but what’s more interesting to me is how malleable this question really feels. Just what is the answer to this question tied to? Liberal thought, with its self-evident truths, equal individuals and inalienable rights has created such a nebulous concept of what it is to be human that we now have an environment in which it makes sense to ask questions like “is x a right?”. If being a person is just being an individual, an equal person in society, then rights are just things everyone has. And if being a person just means being equal to everyone else, then the most we can say about me is that I am equally equal as they are. And how are we supposed to discover what is or is not a right when this is all we have to work with? Maybe I was wrong a moment ago - maybe the environment we now have is one in which it no longer makes sense to say “x is not a right”. What would that even mean? That equality does not include it? But how would we know this? Equality means “just as human as others”, but humanity in the liberal state means “just as equal as others”. This isn’t only tragic, it’s vicious.

Eastern Orthodox Theology

For the past six months or so a group of students and professors (and an Episcopal priest) here has been studying Eastern Orthodox theology together. One thing that has stood out to me about EO theology is how differently centered it is from the Protestant theology I’m used to. Take, for example, this passage from Vladimir Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church:

The revelation of the Holy Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the basis of all Christian theology; it is, indeed, theology itself, in the sense in which that word was understood by the Greek Fathers, for whom the word theology most commonly stood for the mystery of the Trinity revealed to the Church. Moreover, it is not only the foundation, but also the supreme object of theology; for, according to the teaching of Evagrius Ponticus (developed by St. Maximus), to know the mystery of the Trinity in its fullness is to enter into perfect union with God and to attain to the deification of the human creature: in other words, to enter into the divine life, the very life of the Holy Trinity, and to become, in St. Peter’s words, ‘partakers of the divine nature’” (p. 67).

At least as Lossky presents it, EO theology is relentlessly Trinitarian in its every emphasis and dogma, so much so that Lossky’s book is the first place I’ve ever seen the term christocentric used as a term of criticism. As a consequence of western thought on the Trinity (which, according to Lossky, privileges the common nature or essence at the expense of the three distinct persons):

The personal relationship of man to the living God is no longer a relation to the Trinity, but rather has as its object the person of Christ, who reveals to us the divine nature. Christian life and thought become christocentric, relying primarily on the humanity of the incarnate Word; one might almost say it is this which becomes their [western Christians'] anchor of salvation (pp. 64-65).

Actually, I think that is what we would say. Isn’t it? And is that a problem? When I come across passages like this one in Lossky, I have to remind myself that he really does mean what he says as criticisms: often his pejorative language is my language of approval.

As foreign as this seems to me, I think Protestantism would do well to spend more time thinking about the Trinity. And I can feel the force of Lossky’s criticisms: perhaps in our emphasis on union with Christ (which I want to persist in calling a good emphasis) we have missed an equally life-giving emphasis on union with the Trinity. We ought not let Paul’s “in Christ” distract us from Peter’s “partakers of the divine nature” (or vice versa). Are the two mutually exclusive? (No, they can’t be, that doesn’t seem right.) Does emphasis on one union require subordination of the other? (As in, “we are united to Christ so that we can be united to the Trinity in his divine life”.) And if so, is that a bad thing?

In the New York Times

The New York Times has a story this weekend on my school’s philosophy department, focusing in particular on my professor, Kelly Jolley. Included in the article are criticisms of Haley Center, potshots at the Auburn Creed, and obviously uninformed praise of my performance in Intro to Logic a couple of years ago. The highlight is the picture of Jolley, who is the scariest man I know. Read the article.