Much of what I write here relates directly or tangentially to metaphysics and to my struggles with it. A lot of my reading as well. Metaphysical speculation seems endemic among the people I end up hanging out with. I referred to the “wash, rinse, repeat” cycle of metaphysical enthusiasm and disillusionment here:
So when I go down some theological rabbit hole and come up against the inevitable problems, after I shed some tears and spend some nights in confusion, walk around for a few days making my family wonder what’s going on, rack my brains, order a few more books for the pile, stand stony-hearted in the Liturgy — eventually I come back to the saints.
I want to take a step back from this, though, and reflect on the inner movements and gestures that precede an appeal to “the saints,” because honestly, that is a bit too strong, and doesn’t reflect the larger epoché with which I hold the Church as an exoteric institution and as a hierarchically structured body with historical flesh that purports to provide metaphysical truths demanding our assent.
There is something wider that contains this “sitting at the feet of the saints.” This latter is one enactment of a certain gesture of the heart as it encounters the world, and it’s this gesture that I want to try to put some words to — tentatively.
I have to say that with all honesty, faith as a creedal system is dead to me. As a modern person (I may hate it, but it’s true), I demand — I can’t but demand — that faith be found in experience, not in assertion. I demand to be led to see, and that at the end of the leading, which I have genuinely followed step by inner step, I do in fact see. Faith is inner vision, it is direct grasping, or it is false. I do not mean to see a concept or a structure of concepts. I do not mean some kind of rational or intellectual contemplation.1 I mean the knowledge I have of the sun’s warmth or of the fragrance of blooming jasmine. I mean the existential presence of what is known, its revelation to me.
Anything other than this is doubtful, and I mean that word literally; it is full of doubt. As a matter of rational assertion, I do not know whether the propositions of the Nicene Creed are true. Perhaps they are; perhaps I also wish them to be; but I do not know that they are, and it would surely be irresponsible and basically contemptible of me to maintain pugnaciously that they are or to attempt to “convince” others of the truth of what I do not myself really know. If this is true of the Creed, how much more is it true of any metaphysical system or argument?
It seems to me that so much religious discourse founders on (dis)honesty. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” This is why all the doctrinal wrangling, both within Christianity and among the world’s religions, is so crushingly boring and frankly adolescent.
Those who still suffer from the delusion that a proper structuring of rational argument will lead them and others to know are playing a game that in the last analysis they likely already know (ironic, isn’t it) to be pointless. But they continue for a few reasons. One, it is distracting, and life is difficult enough that distractions are not to be sneered at (though I think a good cup of coffee is undeniably better than metaphysics). Two, a certain kind of people (my kind of people) just enjoy the exploration. Three, more darkly, it presents opportunities for us to feel superior, to “win” arguments and “defeat” opponents.
This is not knowledge; it is ideology (and sometimes propaganda). Religion as it is practiced and proclaimed is much more ideology and propaganda than knowledge, and fundamentally, I have no interest in ideology, and outright contempt for propaganda.
So the question seems to me to be: if God cannot be “demonstrated” either to exist or to have the characteristics ascribed to “him” by traditional dogmatic religion — whether exoteric or esoteric — and if God also in all honesty seems absent, or in Nietzsche’s word, dead, in the historical experience of contemporary humanity: that is, if we do not know the truth of what the creeds tell us about God; and our contemplation of the world, its life, and the destiny of suffering human beings irretrievably casts all the once-mandated metaphysical certainties into an abyss of doubt: then where, amidst this absence of God, can we find a way to open ourselves in depth to the experience of God?
I emphatically do not mean, “so that we can finally build a new metaphysical system” — a metaphysical system that will at last be true, a dissident metaphysical system that will somehow succeed where all the old metaphysical systems failed — even though it exists on the same plane they did! As long as we are stuck in that quest, we’re still doing one of the three things I mentioned above: entertaining and distracting ourselves, enjoying the aesthetics, or preening ourselves in a fight with our “enemies.” In the face of our naked life, all the systems — even the most enticing ones (and what makes them enticing of course is a matter of taste and the current context of our life), seem external and arbitrary.
The gesture or stance I want to highlight is one of quiet waiting as we attend deeply and reflectively to the content of our experience, in the hope that there we will learn something about God that we can honestly say we know.
The feeling of this gesture: something like the silence that falls after an agony of grief, when the tears are, for a moment, exhausted. Something like the serenity of a morning on which we have no responsibilities (barely imaginable to me now) and any chronic worries are stilled; perhaps the first morning of a summer holiday when we were young. Something like being present with the world, whether in joy or sorrow, when there is nothing calling us to exercise our powers, and our sense of ourself and our own significance pales, and we have no need to assert or exert. I could almost say that we are “just present,” but we do have an intentionality. Our “mere presence” is empty of assertion and exertion, but full of attention and intention. We are allowing things to be; yet within that allowing there is not merely resignation, but tenderness. There is hope: even if it is a circumstance that seems hopeless, we are awaiting hope hopefully. We have our eyes open to see it. This is the kind of expectant, alert inner stillness I mean.
As an illustration, I want to take tradition itself: because the non-creedal attitude I am suggesting could be taken wrongly as fundamentally indifferent to Christianity, or to the distinctives that delineate (and separate) Christian ecclesial communities, or indeed to any religious differences at all. In this post-metaphysical and post-creedal existential situation — I even find myself wanting to say post-dogmatic — what is there to take from tradition in any of its manifestations? This question leads me to reflect on memory.
The tradition holds a memory: a memory, in the case of Christianity, above all of who it is that we are waiting for. It’s that holding of that memory that makes tradition matter — not a mechanical transmission of propositions about metaphysical reality. Tradition as such, as the transmission of memory within and beneath dogma, but also within a community’s mythic, artistic, and liturgical life, matters for this reason. And so the attitude of wakeful, quiet, intentional waiting and looking applies deeply to tradition. This is how to sit with tradition: without bringing to it our weight of desperate need, but to sit apart from it a little, to inquire within our heart what light is in it, the way we might sit with a cup of tea and study our little child at play with her treasures. (A thing, of course, which I love to do.) The who, by the way, should evoke all the concreteness, the inimitability, of every person you know and love.
The Church as tradition is thus a world of memory, a space of memory, of anamnesis (the use of the term should indicate that I am not wholly off the rails here). This anamnesis gives shape to our intention and our tenderness — but it does not at all mean subservience to the ideology of others or acquiescence to propaganda. And of course the anamnesis is first of all an anamnesis of Jesus. The process of conversion is the process of coming to dwell in this space of memory. This is what makes me a Christian, and incidentally, also what makes me Orthodox: that my attentiveness to the quiet coming of God in my experience, my listening and waiting for this quiet coming, is occurring where I have settled down in the house of this memory. Religious belonging is thus, in this sense, profoundly a matter of dwelling, and not nearly so much a matter of assent to a scheme of ideas.
When tradition really speaks, then, it speaks of a perception. It is sober; it is not intoxicated with the rage and pride of ideas (and therefore perhaps in its integrity should teach us to stop choosing sides in metaphysical and ideological debates). It offers to us a place to dwell and to listen; above all, it schools and directs our attention.
Rather like the fundamental witness of the saints.
Yes, I am familiar with the distinction made between these two in the tradition.
It's a weighty word, tradition. I wish we approached religious tradition like we do tradition in the arts: as a source of inspiration and of the very forms--which, yes, change over time--without which you can't do the thing at all.
Your footnote made me feel seen.