Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Face to Face with Ultimate Reality

I might have mentioned this a couple years ago. If so, forgive the 2020 hindsight, but one of the problems of retirement has been a disruption of the books-to-blogging ratio. 

What with the increased slack, the reading has jumped way out ahead of the blogging, such that I can never catch up with myself. Lately I’ve been trying to slow me down by gardening instead of reading. Would you like to hear about my vertical adventure cleaning out the gutters? Didn’t think so.

Next week the wife goes in for a new hip, which will also slow things down for awhile. I know -- how selfish of her to foist this on me! Caring for an adolescent boy is responsibility enough, but now I’ll have to deal with two.

Let me try to follow through with yesterday’s preliminary discussion of The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898The author’s thesis is in the title: that we underwent a religious revolution in the 19th century, and that this gave birth to the modern spirituality that afflicts us to this day. 

Sounds innocent enough: “spiritual but not religious.” But detaching the substance from the form is like… 

For starters, it is dualistic and ultimately incoherent -- like saying “gendered but not biological.” 

In other words, biology gives rise to binary sexes which then declare independence from their ground in biological reality. Might as well say “mental but not neurological,” or leaves with no branches. It doesn’t just put the cart before the horse, but claims the cart moves all by itself, with no need for a material or efficient cause. Gender-but-not-sex is like a smile with no face, and a face with no interior.

Come to think of it, Lonergan uses the phenomenology of smiling to explain intersubjectivity. What is a smile? A muscular movement of various parts of the face, but trying to analyze these one by one would result in a total loss of the meaning conveyed, not to mention be a tremendous buzzkill. 
A smile is perceived on the countenance of a person, in the movements of eyes, lips, facial muscles, head; and it has meaning….
Because it has meaning, a smile is very easily apprehended. Apprehension, human perception, is not simply a function of light waves, sound waves, and the rest…. a smile is something that can very easily be perceived precisely because it has meaning.  
I well remember my son’s first smile a couple weeks after he was born. Before that he was a blob, but he suddenly became a blob with an interior. 

To be perfectly accurate, the interior was always there, but now it was signaled to interiors outside itself. The smile is the outward manifestation of a meaningful link between interiors. In short, intersubjectivity:
we have to learn the meaning of words but we do not have to be taught the meaning of a smile; either you get it or you do not. If you do not, you are lost...
Now, some people don't get it, AKA those afflicted with autism. Autism is precisely a disruption of intersubjectivity. Such a person would have to be taught how to recognize a smile and deduce its meaning.

But it’s more complicated than that, because there are many kinds of smile, some of which convey contradictory states of mind -- for example, a smile of joy or a smile of bitter resignation. A smile of laughter, or a courtesy smile. A transparent smile or an enigmatic one. A sincere smile or an ironic one; one that reveals or one that betrays. Laughing with or laughing at the troll. 

Our point is that this meaning is prior to linguistic meaning, and is completely embedded in its matrix of flesh. They say speech was given to man in order to conceal his thoughts, and boy howdy is this true. You can’t be a forensic psychologist and not be able to distinguish between what a patient is saying and what’s really going on.  

Which reminds me of how the gaslight media treats gaslighting Democrat politicians: no skepticism, no curiosity, no effort to describe what’s really going on beneath the platitudes and obvious lies.

But when dealing with a conservative, not only is it the opposite, it is a kind of hypervigilant, paranoid negation of plain meaning. Any conservative knows how this works: if we say X, it really means Y. And Y always comes down to racism, sexism, transphobia, white privilege, etc. This is neither understanding nor misunderstanding, but a truly systematic disunderstanding.  

Okay, but what does this have to do with The Religious Revolution? I’ll tell you what, but let me first figure it out….

Got it: the Incarnation is very much like a smile, isn’t it? True, we can pull out our Bibles and try to comprehend all of Jesus’s words conveniently printed in red. But these are way downstream from the Incarnation itself. 

For to say that God assumes human nature is to communicate a transcendent meaning in flesh. Could it be we have stumbled upon the ultimate guffah-HA! experience? For, suppose we could see Jesus smile. What would it communicate and imply?

I guess this post is all over except for the Aphorism:
By unmasking a truth, one encounters a Christian face.

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