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| Gustav Dore La Selva Oscura (~1860) |
The contemporary immanentism that has rejected metaphysics has effectively shut the door to the supernatural. Religion consists of far more than blind belief or a civilising system of ethics. Although part of the religious sensibility may find expression in a realisation that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God", as the poet/priest Gerard Manley Hopkins reminded us, religion effectively seeks to re-connect us to a continuity that transcends our transient material embodiment.
Dealing with inertia remains one of life’s more difficult tasks. Both Yoga philosophy and Samkhya identify inertia as one of the constitutive principles of life and materiality. Tamas, or the tendency to darkness, gravity, or inertia is nominated as one of the three gunas, the three principles that condition phenomenality. The other two are rajas, the principle of energy, movement, and activity, and sattva, the principle of radiance, coherence, and stillness.
There are no equivalent frames within the Western understanding, though the elemental system of Empedocles with its four principles of earth, fire, water and air - and their association with melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic and sanguine temperaments - offer some parallels. Though largely hidden in conventional thought, the Samkhyan and the Empedoclean systems remain deeply imbedded in the psyche of both India and Europe and have served as deeply influential philosophic and interpretive principles for over two thousand years.
Such experiences as writer’s block or intentional paralysis partake of tamas on the one hand, and melancholia or phlegmatism on the other. There is, of course, much more at play in any attempt to describe - let alone understand - why we are as we are, why our tendencies incline in one direction rather than another, why we are disposed to one particular style rather than another. But a mindfulness of such maps or frames can be as useful as any psychological system or theory in navigating life’s inevitable - and occasionally protracted - impasses.
The Samkhya/Yoga system is probably more accessible than the Western traditional frame. It remains a living tradition with an articulated and accessible methodology - yoga practice. On the other hand, our contemporary Western mindset has effectively severed itself from its earlier historic roots in the wake of post-enlightenment “reforms.” Our own systems of psychological interpretation now range from the pragmatics of behaviourism with its near-complete abdication of mind, through the at-times insightful, but prescriptive, constrictive, and ultimately delimiting categories of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, to the mythically and mystically-charged analytical psychology of Carl Jung.
There are many explanatory systems available, but what life calls us to do is to move with the river, to engage with the constant flow of change given to us at moment-to-moment, situation-to-situation, and day-to-day levels. This is the shifting ground from which meaning, discernment, direction and purpose are to be derived in any given life. This does not mean that we are to obsessively swim with or against the current or - as Paracelsus put it 500 years ago - be consumed by our dailiness, although there is much to be said about burning as cleanly as a candle. Periods of silence and reflection can help cultivate the necessary presence of mind to remain centred even while the outer maelstrom rages.
Stepping into Nowhere
In a remarkable historic inversion, to actively seek out the meaning, the direction and the purpose of any given life now goes against the dominant cultural grain. The very notions of meaning and purpose have themselves been subverted by the secular and scientistic enblandments of postmodernism. I gave some small voice to this recent turn of mind a couple of years ago:
The forces that govern secular modernity have long sought to strip the world of its numinous essences. The miraculous has been relegated to the domain of superstitious folly while religion has been deemed an archaic and outmoded institution suitable only for the weak and feeble-minded. Christianity has, for many, become a faded repository of fundamentalisms that serve only to obstruct and impede the progression of "enlightened" liberal thought. Many of the rituals and practices that continue to serve those who remain within the fold of Christianity are seen as merely symbolic at best and deluded at worst. [1]
I find it curious to have been drawn deeper into such considerations through the passing years while many of my fellow travellers seem to either drift contentedly or rush frenetically from one day to the next benumbed by or in denial of what inevitably awaits. The reality of our mortality does not need to be front and centre of our awareness, but its very actuality would seem to call for some reflection on the whys, the whences and the wherefores. Meditation on death is an essential aspect of Buddhist practice. The final words of the Hail Mary prayer, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death, bring its reality to mind with each pass. In the recitation of a single rosary, one comes to acknowledge the transient nature of this life 50 times.
The tamasic way has become curiously emblematic of contemporary life. Within our incessant busyness, we are more often than not passive, distracted spectators in the midst of our endless engagements. Our days are often consumed by the ephemeral and the inconsequential. Both effort and sustained discipline are avoided unless they are for the purposes of augmenting one’s own power or status. Our cultural style becomes increasingly provisionary, where everything is provided for us, while we are urged to sit back and simply enjoy it. Such passivity does little for our capacity to discern. Both Nietzsche in his hubris and Heidegger in his disdain foresaw a time when technological “progress” would void the collective mind, and provide the means whereby the many would be willingly herded by those who would call the day.
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor views this as a “loss of freedom.” He writes:
But there has been another kind of loss of freedom, which has also been widely discussed, most memorably by Alexis de Tocqueville. A society in which people end up as the kind of individuals who are ‘enclosed in their own hearts’ is one where few will want to participate actively in self-government. They will prefer to stay at home and enjoy the satisfactions of private life, so long as the government of the day produces the means to these satisfactions and distributes them widely. [2]
So, what has been lost here? And at what cost? My thoughts run dry in the face of the immensity of both questions.
Re-orienting
Such considerations do, however, bring to mind a comment offered by John Caputo, one of the more prominent architects of American Death-of-God theology, during a lecture in Belfast in 2015.[3] At the close of his presentation, Caputo spoke about the sinking of the Titanic and recalled that while the ship was slowly foundering, the four members of the on-board string quartet held their composure perfectly and continued to perform while most of those around them became increasingly panic-stricken. Caputo commented: “What the hell would they do that for? They should have been running like hell to get off that ship! They kept playing the music!” He went on to describe this as an “unconditional affirmation of what is taking place in the moment of utter unthinkable tragedy . . . to which they add their music.” Answering his earlier question, he went on: “At a deeper level, it seems to me it is the very act of religion.”
Caputo has here reduced “the very act of religion” to sheer immanence and participation in what is immediately at hand. Religion here has somehow become a form of stoic resignation, a performance of one’s duty, a simple fulfilment of one’s allotted task in the face of chaos and uncertainty. Yet as Charles Taylor noted in a lecture at the Berkley Center at Georgetown University in 2008, “Religion is not a single thing.”[4] Taylor, despite his own immanentist disposition, is perhaps here alluding to the inescapably transcendental dimension of religion and religious experience.
Etymologically, the word religion derives from re-ligare, to re-tie, to re-unite, to re-connect. This clearly implies a pre-existing state of separation, a state of being disconnected from something deeply essential. In Caputo’s sense of religion, that from which one is separated is the immanent, the immediate circumstances in which one finds oneself situated. Caputo’s frame is totally within the physical. The metaphysical is dismissed as an uncertain conjecture. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God is accepted as a statement of the way things are.
The metaphysical position abides more in trust than in certainty. Etymologically, the term points to what is beyond the physical, the material, the immediate. The metaphysical is inherently ungraspable. As the first two lines of the Tao De Ching declare: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” The eternal and the immediate are as conceptual poles. Yet one of the many aspects of religion, of re-ligare, is the resolution of these opposites. As Blake sang in his Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour . . .
That to which we are to be re-tied, re-united, re-connected is beyond any simple - or complex - formulation but is rather the work of a life. The curious thing is that for some, this is a necessary and inescapable quest, while for others, it is a non-existent human construct, das Opium des Volkes, as Karl Marx put it in 1843.
Yet what Caputo may perhaps be offering is a metaphor of our present circumstances. We are living in an apocalyptic moment that has been growing for decades – if not centuries. The ship is going down and many know that to be the case. The band is keeping time, composed and collected even in midst of escalating and unavoidable danger. Caputo calls for composure and measure as a religious act even while all narratives, meanings, opinions and interpretations are thrown to the wind and as the forces of dissolution become increasingly evident in every human and environmental theatre imaginable.
This brings to mind a story I once heard about an incident that occurred during the Hokkaido earthquake of 2003. It concerns a traveller who was on the first floor of the Hokkaido airport lounge at the moment when the earthquake struck. People immediately started running everywhere in an attempt to get out of the building. In the midst of the pandemonium, the traveller was transfixed by the movements of an impeccably dressed businessman sitting opposite him. The businessman calmly put aside his brief-case, assumed a cross-legged position on the floor, and entered a deeply meditative state. The traveller simply watched him. When the building eventually stopped shaking, the businessman stood up, picked up his brief case, nodded to the traveller, and walked away.
According to Caputo’s frame, this too might be described as “the very act of religion.” But it is not the full picture, although it may reflect one of the possible consequences of living beyond the physical, of cultivating the less accessible aspects of mind, of attaining some small measure of equanimity in the face of apparent chaos. Religion involves more than simply remaining calm. Jesus sweated blood in Gethsemane knowing that Jewish and Roman guards were on their way to bind him and drag him to the courts of Annas and Caiphas. He asked to be delivered of the cup before him, yet fully accepted the fate called upon him by a mindless crowd urged on by their leaders.
Religion may indeed be seen as an act, but not in the sense that Caputo suggests. It is certainly an act of affirmation, but what is affirmed is not of this world. As the life of Jesus revealed, and as was further revealed many times after his death and resurrection as told in the Acts of the Apostles, the essence or “the very act of religion” is a sustained openness to the possibility of the irruption of a transcendental reality into our otherwise mundane dailiness. Jesus was not simply a persuasive speaker or rhetorician. In his presence, things were not as one normally expects them to be. Devils would take flight. The lost, the lame, and the blind would be found and healed. The seemingly impossible was made manifest at every turn. And this supernatural dimension has been maintained throughout the intervening centuries by the living presence of God and his intercessory manifestations in the lives of the saints ranging from St. Francis of Assisi to Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.
The contemporary immanentism that has rejected metaphysics as an archaic artefact of simpler times has effectively shut the door to the supernatural. Religion consists of far more than blind belief, stoic immanence, or a civilising system of ethics. Although part of the religious sensibility may find expression in a realisation that the world is charged with the grandeur of God, as the poet/priest Gerard Manley Hopkins reminded us, religion effectively seeks to re-connect us to a continuity that transcends our transient material embodiment. In this task, it is probably more helpful to draw upon the experiences of those who participate intimately in such realities, than those who would summarily dismiss the possibility of such experiences.
Vincent Di Stefano M.H.Sc., D.O., N.D.
Inverloch, January 2021
[2] Charles Taylor, 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. p. 9
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2nq8baHDFY&t=909s. Caputo recounts the experience that led him to reflect further on the Titanic and the fate of its passengers at ~ 19m. 15s.
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m95ck7A2Ooc. Taylor makes this comment in response to a question from the audience at 1h. 08m.
