Good Questions and Questionable Men

If Christ is the answer, what is the question? And what if you have a different question? Must you first have the "right question"? If that's the case, then the correct question is already a kind of answer.

Hmm. If you could ask one question, what would it be? Or, is there one question that would somehow subsume and answer all the others?   

We're still making our way through an essay called The Gospel and Culture, in which Voegelin cites a text called the Dutch Catechism, which "begins by asking what is the meaning of the fact that we exist?" Good question!

Meaning and fact. There's at least one buried premise in there -- that existence is a "fact." But facts are in existence, so how could existence be one of its contents? Is existence the set of facts, or the sum of facts? No, that can't be, because there are no facts in the absence of an intellect to observe and select them. 

We must always be ready and able to explain how our faith is the answer to the question of our existence (Dutch Catechism).

How can "faith" be the answer to any question? Questions have answers. It doesn't matter how much faith one has in the answer if the answer is just wrong, otherwise I would have done better in school.

Now, there is a kind of answer that is technically correct but existentially wrong, or at least incomplete. It is the difference between, say, knowing how to swim and actually diving into the water and doing so; the first is abstract, the second embodied.

I first thought about this question back down in grad school, vis-a-vis the difference between theoretical knowledge -- book learnin' -- and clinical experience of what the books could only try to capture in words. The former is primary, the words and theories secondary.

Except this relation can often be reversed, such that one begins living in the theory, so everything one sees is conditioned by the theory. 

For example, if you believe the mind is structured by id, ego, and superego, or that the Oedipal Complex is central to human development, then that's what you'll see. You have all the answers, but you've forgotten all about the question. That's me in the spotlight, losing my religion!

In this way, the Answer can even be a kind of existential defense mechanism, and this process is near-universal in those whom we flatter with the name intellectual. Show me a self-styled intellectual, and I'll show you a man living in a matrix. 

It may be a complex or eccentric matrix or (more likely) a stupid and collective one, but it will be just a secondary reality superimposed on the one-and-only reality (reminiscent of how ideologies are lodged in the LH, to such an extent that they can eclipse RH contact with reality).

What we call "dogma" is a quintessential case of true knowledge that can render itself "untrue" via this process of superimposition, thus, it inevitably cuts both ways. In the bOOk, I used the symbols (k) and (n) to distinguish between mere theoretical/factual and existential/experiential knowledge, respectively. 

Recall what was said in the previous post about

the Word's difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen.  

Now, on the one hand, this is no more difficult than it has ever been: just hand someone the Catechism, and you're done. But unless this book full of (k) somehow translights into a person full of (n), it's a giant Fail. 

Throughout this compilation, Voegelin alludes to one of his main ideas, which is that we deploy symbolism in order to capture and convey a more primary experience. Again, whatever the field or discipline, this relation can be reversed, such that the dogma "is" the experience instead of referring to one:

The believers are at rest in an unenquiring state of faith; their intellectual metabolism must be stirred by the reminder that man is supposed to be a questioner, that a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man (Voegelin).

Ouch! But we all know the type. The operative words are at rest, unenquiring, intellectual metabolism, and enigma of existence. As I explained in said bOOk, (k) can actually become (-k) if it is detached from (n).

And not just in religion! To put it mildly, and without insultainment. Yet. 

Again, (k) can essentially serve as an epistemological and existential defense mechanism against (n). It occurs, for example, 

where the character of the gospel as an answer has been so badly obscured by its hardening into self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it is meant as an answer can be suspect as "non-Christian attitude." 

You know the type. They may be perfectly nice people, and I'm thinking of one in particular who asked me, When were you saved? It was in the context of one of my typical spiritual flights of funzy, and I couldn't help noticing a twinge of suspicion, as if I were the sinister Reverend Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter, and she were the skeptical Ben Harper:

--What religion do you profess, Preacher?                  

--The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us. 

--I'll bet! (ma.com/movie_scripts/n/night-of-the-hunter-script.html)

Now, the intellectual metabolism mentioned above is none other than -- if you've ever read the mysthead at the toppermost of the blog -- the religion the Almighty & me works out betwixt us.

But hold on just a minute there Reverend Bob -- How come you got that stick-knife hid up in your blankets, Preacher?

Not mine! It's Dupree's. He smuggled it right in under the noses of them censors!

Clearly, everyone and anyone can and does have "spiritual experiences." The homicidal Reverend Powell even converses with God: 

Well now, what's it to be, Lord?

Another widow?

How many's it been? Six?

Twelve?

I disremember.

You say the word, Lord. I'm on my way.

You always send me money to go forth and preach your word.

A widow with a little wad of bills hid away in the sugar bowl.

Lord, I am tired.

Sometimes I wonder if you really understand.

Not that you mind the killings. Your book is full of killings.

Well now, what's it to be, Lord? Another post? How many's it been? 3,000? 

4,661?!

At any rate, you see the problem of mere untutored experience being the guide.

Nevertheless, there is the difficulty of restoring "the inquiring mind to the position that is his due" and of "regaining for the gospel the reality it has lost through doctrinal hardening."

We have to go back to the Right Question alluded to at the top, to 

"Man the questioner," the man moved by God to ask the questions that will lead him toward the cause of being. The search itself is the evidence of existential unrest; in the act of questioning, man's experience of his tension toward the divine ground breaks forth in the word of inquiry as a prayer for the Word of the answer. Question and answer are intimately related one toward the other... 

This tension of the "in between" is where both question and answer arise; and the very "life of reason" is 

This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer... 

Sounds a little tautological to me. 

You should talk! No, it all depends on whether or not one is an open system, vertically speaking:

Question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search. Man, however..., can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible.... 

The answer will not help the man who has lost the question, and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer...

Fair enough. Now what was the question?

To be continued....