A response to Ron Rolheiser's "A Shining Horizon"

 Please note: In the following, the text from "A Shining Horizon" is in red and my responses are in black.  Quotes are in the order they appear in the essay.

“Reality was seen to be deep, rich, and full of hidden dimensions. Mystery was the operative word vis-a-vis human knowing.”

Reality is still deep, rich and full of dimensions.  Hidden presumes a process of discovery rather than some sort of unattainable sleight of hand.  Mystery is still the operative word vis a vis human knowing but the locus now is the probing and explanation of those mystery rather than their superstitious acceptance and the erection of taboos.  Three gods in one may sound like a mystery until it is seen as a way to reinvent a polytheistic religion as monotheistic.

Reality was seen to be full of all kinds of qualities - colours, textures, ghosts, spirits, demons, fixed features which caused predictable patterns, and unpredictable things which could cause arbitrary changes.

Reality is still seen as being full of all kinds of qualities – colours, textures, fixed features which cause predictable patterns (determinism) and unpredictable things which cause arbitrary changes (chaos).  Only the ghosts, spirits, and demons have been exorcised.

INTELLECTUS (the power of insight, the power to simply perceive meaning without any reasoning process being involved) and RATIO (the power to reason logically so as to induce and deduce new truth.) Prior to Descartes, the human mind was understood to possess not only the power of logical thought, discursive reasoning, analysis, and synthesis (RATIO), it was understood to possess as well the power to "listen to the essence of things", to be "effortlessly aware" of the essential meaning of things . . . INTELLECTUS.

These two sorts of knowing are not nearly as out of balance as is implied.  Intellectus, when shorn of its Latinity, is merely a priori knowledge extended to include religious ‘truths’.  Ratio, uncloaked, is a posteriori knowledge or knowledge that comes from experience.  Both the terms ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ have been integral to the investigation of knowledge from the time of Euclid and Plato and do not constitute some secret ecclesiastical handshake.  This is both pre and post Cartesian.

“. . . prior to Descartes, someone standing before the world, hoping to know that world, knew at the same time that this world was not really so separate from herself . . ..”

Descartes had much less to do with separating man/woman from the rest of the world than Judeo Christianity.  He is responsible for the famous mind/body split but is hardly culpable for separating man from nature.  The mere fact of the distinct creation (and, therefore, fragmentation) of aspects of reality from light, to the firmament, to the world and plants and animals, culminating in humanity, is the greatest of separations. 

Philosophy, and education in general, saw the primary purpose of learning as the acquiring of wisdom. 5 The ultimate purpose of knowing, it was felt, was for its own sake and not as a means to acquire or attain something pragmatically.

This is presented as proof of the departure of modern education and philosophy from a classical construct that never was.  Philosophy and education used to be exclusive to the rich, the royal, and the priesthood.  Philosophy still has wisdom and understanding as its goals but education has knowledge and understanding as its goals.  Wisdom has, arguably, never been a goal of education because wisdom is difficult if not impossible to teach.  Wisdom, from the time of antiquity, has been associated with age.  To posit that we have experienced some sort of erosion of the quest for wisdom is simplistic at best.  It is not that we have a smaller pool of wise men/women, but a larger pool of educated and knowledgeable people than ever before.  The “masses’, if I may use the term, when they have acquired wisdom, have commonly acquired wisdom through osmosis and longevity.  These masses have always seen knowing as “a means to acquire or attain something pragmatically.”

Must you be able to count something, measure it, or otherwise empirically establish it? But how could you then establish that someone loved you, or that you trusted someone? Prior to Descartes, Western epistemology (in the universities and on the street) allowed for moral as well as empirical proof, you could be sure of something on the basis of a certain trust in it as well as on the basis of measured observable facts.

Prior to Descartes, people also burned witches and thought that human beings developed from homunculi which men planted in the soil of a woman’s body.  Things change and evolve, including epistemology.  How can you establish that someone loves you or whether you trust someone?  You can’t.  You can’t even establish that you love them or that you trust yourself.  There are repeated references to love in this paper with no differentiation between romantic love, physical love, love of parents for children and vise versa, etc.  It is interesting to note that romantic love is a fairly recent phenomenon and a lot of our ideas concerning love are collateral to the age of chivalry.  

When moral certitude was given fair play then mystics, priests, poets, lovers, wise persons, soothsayers, sorcerers, people with common sense and intuitive hunches were also given a chance to help establish what was considered normative.

This is an interesting list of persons with moral certitude.  I don’t know how poets, wise persons, and people with common sense get lumped in with mystics, priests, soothsayers and sorcerers.  Everyone is invited to help establish what is normative in relation to the credibility they are afforded by the society they inhabit.  As a side note, I wonder why, in this essay, poets and poetry are so often included in lists together with priests and mystics.

Prior to the shift in Western thought that will begin with Descartes, the idea that we, despite our individuality, are part of one body, a corporate entity that somehow has physical, moral, ecclesial, societal, and familial dimensions and brings with it concomitant responsibilities in each of these areas, was more part of the mindset of a person standing before the world and trying to understand it than it is today.

This one body is the social being who, despite its individuality sees itself as part of one body with physical, moral, spiritual, and familial dimensions that brings with it concomitant responsibilities in each of those areas.  It is precisely the apprehension of the individual as part of a collective that gives rise to moral, spiritual, and familial dimensions.  The feral human, devoid of society, lacks the synapses and connections requisite for language and higher mental functions.

Language which deals with realities beyond what science can talk about is restricted to church circles, poetic circles, esoteric circles, and a few arts faculties.

If we are judged by the company we keep, churches are in pretty good company here.  The thing that disqualifies church circles from this list is that the other components are not predicated on limits but the removal of limits.  Although religions fancy themselves as providing freedom for humanity, they are all about imposing limitations on human inquiry and the quest for wisdom.

E.A. Burtt, already more than a generation ago, described the change from an earlier mindset to our own:

"The world that people had thought themselves living in - a world rich with colours and sound, redolent with fragrance, filled with gladness, love and beauty, speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals - was now crowded into minute corners in the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world hard, cold, colourless, silent, and dead; a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motion in mechanical regularity."

How bleak.  Except for the ‘redolent with fragrances’ part the world is still the same rich place with colours, etc.  Beauty is still in the world and in people’s appreciation to the extent it always was.  I try to think of how wonderful the world was during the Black Plague or the Cortez invasion of the new world and figure it’s all relative.  There will always be those who quest for beauty just as there will always be those who yearn for an earlier time or a time of ascendancy.

. . . if there is a greater uncertainty about even the physical realities that science deals with, how much more is there skepticism about anything beyond that?

How is this a bad thing?

Today, while this is not explicitly denied (and is taken for granted in ordinary day to day living), this power of insight, INTELLECTUS, is given little status theoretically. RATIO, especially as it works through scientific research and mathematics has the centre stage and, often times, the whole stage.

As addressed earlier, a priori knowledge is self limiting – there are only so many things that are a priori and, since they are a priori what value is there in investigating them.  Take the a priori statement “My mother’s brother is my uncle.”  This is something that we don’t need experience to know.  An a posteriori deduction that comes from this, “Peter is my mother’s brother; therefore, Peter is my uncle” provides information that places Peter within my family group.  If god were a priori, as the religious posit, then it would be knowledge for everyone.  The classical ontological argument for God (from Anselem of Canterbury in the 11^th Century) is that anything we imagine has existence in reality.  Anselem defined God as the most perfect being imaginable by man.  A posteriori for this would be, “God is the most perfect being imaginable by man; therefore God is god.”

The common sense idea is that we are detached observers in knowing, subjects standing over and apart from what we perceive. As well, we do not see ourselves as part of one eco-system with what we know. Rather we see ourselves as set apart from, and above, the world we know.

How is this different from the Bible’s assertion that we have dominion over nature or the church’s assertion that man is different in kind rather than degree from other animals?

Our knowledge is more fragmented, even as it is more clear and precise because, in our understanding, we understand things more and more in isolation from each other.  . . . . . . Analysis is strong, synthesis is weak. The general practitioner has died and the specialist has been born.

As complexity increases, the need for specialization also increases.  It has been said that Aristotle was the last man who was an expert in everything knowable.  Imagine what a modern Aristotle would have to know to be in the same position today.  There will always be room for generalists as a stabilizing force.

Our fall from the pursuit of wisdom is evident too in the fact that, both at the level of academic philosophy and at the level of common sense, we are less concerned with ultimate questions, questions of the why of things, than we are with the simple functioning, the how, of things.

This is simply not so.  Perhaps the pursuit of the primary ‘why’ as in “why are we here” has a lesser place simply because it is irrelevant.  ‘Why?’ is the question that drove the angels mad along with the parents of four-year-olds.  In its other manifestations ‘why?’ is still a question for those who believe in causality, which some philosophers and physicists don’t.  ‘Why?’ is commonly an adjunct to ‘how?’

For us, today, the very word "fact" carries with it the connotation of "empirically verifiable". Arguments are settled by measurement and counting or they are not settled at all. There is no status in mainstream thought for moral certitude or moral argumentation.

I would venture to say that “fact” also carries with it that same denotation.  Logical arguments are not settled by measurement OR counting.  They are settled on the basis of validity.  Moral certitude is subjective but still has a huge status in mainstream thought.  One simply can’t apply logic or science to it in the same way one can to the objective.

We have little understanding of, and even less patience with, what another generation called "dark knowledge", namely, knowledge which is real but which we cannot conceptualize or articulate.

Perhaps our patience is waning because, with time, it is becoming less and less ‘real’?  Dark knowledge used to be so ‘real’ that people thought that practitioners could turn them into a newt.  The reason that “dark knowledge” has faded is because “lit knowledge” is increasingly shining into its shadowy corners.

In contrast to the time before modern philosophy and the scientific method, reality has less to offer and the mind has less range and ability to know what reality does offer. In this mindset there is little left of the ancient instinct for astonishment.

The last sentence is predicated on astonishment being an ancient instinct.  Astonishment is a reaction to novelty.  Novelty still exists as a feature of life.  Because reality has been expanded through knowledge and growth, it has more to offer than ever before.  I may know that a rainbow is some distortion of light but it doesn’t make it any less beautiful or astonishing.  I may have lost the urge to seek the pot of gold at its end but, as a foil for materialism, that’s a good thing.

Suppose some experience (aesthetic, cosmic, intellectual, sexual, mystical) ruptures our everyday experience in an ecstatic way so that, in the literal sense of ecstasy (EKSTASIS), we end up "standing outside" of ordinary reality. In this case, the return to normalcy is not judged to be a return to reality, but a return to a world which now appears as flat, emaciated, impoverished, illusionary, and less real than the world we just came from.

The argument here is that conscious mind is only one of the many realities including dreaming, the unconscious, ‘getting lost in a piece of music’, etc..  I have had some of these experiences and have found that they enrich my ‘normal’ conscious reality rather impoverishing it.  If one leaves the trance of a good movie or a good book, it is not to transition back to a world that is “flat, emaciated, impoverished, illusionary, and less real than the world we just came from.”  It is returning to a reality that has been brightened by an esoteric illusion.  The only regret would be experienced by someone who confuses dreams with reality or has so little regard for the normative world that they prefer the illusion.  We lose ourselves in our books and movies, dreams and music, but most of us find our way back. 

Poetry, fidelity, and the supernatural all belong to zones of reality like dreaming or aesthetics. From them, we return to reality. What is real is what is empirical, the pragmatic, the technological. Only a deviant cognitive minority asserts a reality beyond these.  Moreover, the cognitive majority considers this reality, as established by the one zone of consciousness, to be absolute.

If someone hurts me when I am in one of those other zones of reality, I quickly return to consciousness.  It doesn’t work the same way with consciousness; I can’t have someone punch me in the nose to return to dreaming, bliss, or the supernatural.  Our realities are subjectivized by the filters of our senses and experience so to say that we are limited to the empirical is to misunderstand human perception.  It is the mitigation of our senses and experience that allows us try to understand the external world, not to make our reality an absolute but to establish a context for our paradigms.

When this (a reduction both in the depth and mysteriousness of reality and in what is considered valid and real within human experience) is constantly reinforced by a massive cognitive majority, the human faculty for astonishment severely atrophies. Like a person who does not exercise her legs for such a long period that eventually she can no longer walk, our failure to exercise our more contemplative faculties leaves us, at last, no longer able to apprehend those dimensions of reality which are beyond the immediate here and now. Reality is now known in such a manner that it becomes incapable of surprising us. Consequently, supernatural, aesthetic, mystical, and even romantic reality-ruptures become less and less frequent. In that, contemplation dies - as does the collective capacity to believe in God.

There’s a lot here so bear with me.  As previously addressed, astonishment is not a faculty but a response.  A lot of our responses, including astonishment, are involuntary so the idea of atrophy, such as happens in unused muscles, seems unlikely.  A second premise is that, as a result of this atrophy, we can’t perceive reality beyond the immediate.  On the basis of these two false premises, the conclusion is reached that ‘supernatural, aesthetic, mystical and even romantic’ episodes will become rarer.  In other words, love and mysticism will disappear because they are part of a common reality that is being pushed aside by conscious reality.  Romance and mysticism aren’t linked in my world since I’ve experienced an abundance of the former and none of the latter.

Finally, the statement, “In that, contemplation dies - as does the collective capacity to believe in God . . .” appears as some sort of logical consequence.  The chances that contemplative activity will become extinct in man is a huge reach and to link that extinction to the death of the capacity to believe in God is tenuous.  It is in the nature of man and his capacity for reflective thought to contemplate so it is hard to imagine one without the other. 

For the religious-ascetic personality, the institutions which carry values are family, church, nation, school, and political party. For the therapeutic personality, values are carried by theatres, malls, the entertainment industries, health and therapy books and centres, and other "how-to" books.

This is based on the work of Philip Rief, a footnote American sociologist whom posited that there were two personalities, the religious-ascetic and the therapeutic.  He sees these basically as spiritual as opposed to materialistic.  Unfortunately, not even Catholic publications take his idea of ‘present goods/absent gods” seriously.  Again, the arguments advanced here are simplistic.  Although it is apparent that materialism is flourishing in the current western world, the diminution of religion is not borne out by the growth in religious community and commitment in North America, particularly the Southern United States.  How school and political party become the concern of the religious-ascetic personality, I don’t know.  These sweeping generalizations add nothing to my knowledge base.

In a therapeutic culture, therapists and analysts (of every kind) replace the priests of religion and poverty and inherit the functions of dispelling panic and chaos, structuring reality, defining ethics, and demanding commitment. 28 

How is this a bad thing?  How, exactly, does one dispel chaos?  What does ‘priests of religion and poverty’ mean?  This is an interesting reflection of what the writer believes the function of priests to be.  Defining ethics?  Historically the priestly class have had serious ethical deficits.  Demanding commitment?  Definitely!  And burning those who didn’t toe the party line.

For Rieff, the religious-ascetic lives under a false pretence, assuming that he is divinely willed, uniquely created, and destined for a meaning beyond this life. Hence, he sets out for himself expectations and develops desires which, ultimately, are unattainable; for example, a heaven beyond this life. The therapeutic lives his life "with a minimum of pretence to anything more grand than the sweetening of time." 30 For him, there is "no other purpose than the greater amplitude and richness of living itself."

Again, how is this a bad thing?  If an appreciation of the richness of living is truly internalized, it extends to existence for everything and every one.  It means valuing life over tradition.  It means knowing that depriving another living being, including non-humans, is to be avoided at all costs.  The implication of hedonism contained in the words “sweetening of time” is misleading.  I more lean towards Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

Aristotle states in his Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, that “Happiness is the highest good because we choose happiness as an end sufficient in itself. Even intelligence and virtue are not good only in themselves, but good also because they make us happy.”   He and Aquinas both see ethics and morality springing from an ordered system under god who, in his perfection, is the source of the Natural Law on which they depend.  The best exposition on Natural Law I have seen are in lecture notes at http://www.mel-thompson.co.uk/lecture%20notes/Natural%20Law.pdf  and I refer anyone interested in delving into the issue to visit there.

For the therapeutic personality, the means to fulfilment lies in "deconversion", 34 in an anti-creedal analytical attitude which enables the person to become "permanently engaged in the task of achieving a gorgeous variety of satisfaction." 35 This model personality seeks release. There is no commitment to so-called higher values that necessitates ascetical renunciations. On the contrary, this type of personality seeks for a permanent disestablishment of any deeply internalized moral demands in a world which can guarantee a plentitude produced without reference the rigid maintenance of a particular "interdictory and counter-interdictory system". For the therapeutic personality, the means to happiness and self-fulfilment lie precisely in "deconversion" from the values and ideals which restrict enjoyment, erotic release, and indifference to community. Rejected is the culture of denial since the renunciation of attainable pleasure is seen to lead not to health but rather to "disease".

I think what is being described here is hedonism, which is hardly a prevalent mode of being that I see practiced around me.  There is a huge disconnect between seeking happiness and seeking pleasure although pleasure is a component of happiness.  An obsession with pleasure is as much of a “disease” as its renunciation.  Maybe human beings have an ecstasy quotient that is drawn down by ecstatic experience, be it religious rapture or sexual activity.  Sexual activity, to me at least, seems a more shared and fulfilling use of apportionment.

. . . according to the analysis of the mystics in virtually all religious traditions, this (the pursuit of happiness/pleasure) creates a narcissism which in turn creates a "veil" that blocks the purity of heart needed to conduit God in ordinary human experience.

It seems self evident that a healthy human being have balance.  Scourging oneself, whether literally or figuratively, seems to go contrary to that balance.  If one has to sacrifice one feature of fulfillment that is real (happiness/pleasure) for one that ephemeral (god), then there is something wrong with the construct.  Why would a god give us the capacity for pleasure so that we could deny it in ourselves?  Is it a test?  Is it a booby trap that the ‘weak’ fall into?  As for narcissism (and this is my bias against organized religion and its befrocked bag-men) isn’t it the ultimate in self-aggrandizement to posit yourself as being the closest thing to god?

I may finish this response in the future but I’ve had my fill for now.  I noticed in my last paragraph  that I was losing objectivity so it’s probably time to give this a rest.