Wake Up, For the Kingdom of Meaning Is At Hand

Of course, Jesus is not a (mere) philosopher, but nor is he not a philosopher. I suppose he is philosophy itself, both the wisdom (sophia) and the love (philos), and the love of wisdom. Not to mention the wisdom of love, I suppose. 

But that's not my point, except to say that there aren't many philosophical non-starters worth refuting between Aristotle and Augustine. Why waste our time with the cynics, the skeptics, and the epicureans? The stoics are sound, but all the good bits were yoinked and assimilated into early Christianity by contemplatives such as Origen, Evagrius, and Maximus.

So Jesus it is, but from what we hope will be an angle that is both timely and relevant. As usual, nothing is worked out beforehand, rather, it's just an idea for an idea. Or two ideas, rather.

The first idea occurred to me during a long walk. I was thinking to myself about how ineffective it is to confront some random stranger by telling him he's a sinner and needs to repent right now. People need the truth as much as ever, but perhaps there's a better way of going about it.

Then I thought about the Ten Commandments. I'm just a regular guy, and yet, it isn't remotely difficult for me to avoid, oh, murder, idolatry, stealing, bearing false witness, etc. So if someone tells me I need to stop my sinnin' ways, that may not be the best way of going about it.

The problem here is that I and millions of other civilized members of Christendom have so assimilated the Christian message that we may no longer feel ourselves to be in need of it. For we are already the end-product of a couple thousand years of cultural leavening. 

Pursuing this line of thought, I then wondered what people are most in need of these days. We are constantly told about the crisis of mental health, especially among the young. And what is the nature of this crisis? It antedates the current crisis, and has actually been growing for over a century. 

Let's call it the crisis of meaning, or of identity and purpose, AKA cosmic alienation. It was first diagnosed by Nitetzsche (or rather, perhaps he was the disease he diagnosed), but he had little influence at the time; it was later belaborated by various existentialists before the postmodernists came along and destroyed any possibility of meaning besides raw power. And ate all our steak. 

And here we are. 

When a person is clinically depressed, life seems meaningless. But if life is truly meaningless, how could this not provoke depression? Yes, you could simply be an idiot and not care. Or, one can always turn to drugs, or ideology, or political activism. These converge with what are known as the manic defenses,

the tendency, when presented with uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, to distract the conscious mind either with a flurry of activity, or with the opposite thoughts or feelings. 

A general example of the manic defense is the person who spends all her time rushing around from one task to the next, unable to tolerate even short stretches of inactivity. For such a person, even leisure time consists of a series of discrete, programmed activities that she must submit to in order to tick off from an actual or mental list. 

Anyway, if I'm Jesus today, instead of leading with the sin business, I might say something like Wake up, for the Kingdom of Meaning is at hand. This would perk up my ears and make me curious. Oh? Tell me more.

Then I remembered John Paul's first encyclical, the central theme of which is nothing less than

the centrality of Jesus Christ in human history and as the answer to the human search for meaning and identity. [It] was a reflection on the situation of humanity in the mid-twentieth century that constantly returned to Christ as the true meaning of humanity, the one who reveals us to ourselves. Redemptor Hominis takes up this theme and develops it as the charter of John Paul II’s pontificate. 

So, it seems that the Whole Point of both the encyclical and of John Paul's pontificate was to address this crisis of meaning -- as if to say what we said above: Wake up, for the Kingdom of Meaning is at hand.

Then my walk ended and I settled back in the sanityreum for some *totally unrelated* reading, chapter five of Richard Landes' Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, entitled The Premodern Mindset: Zero-Sum Honor, and it all came together, or rather, came full circle.

I know what you're thinking:

But hear me out: postmodern and premodern converge in what we are seeing on our streets, newsrooms, and university campuses, especially among the alienated young with skulls full of indoctrination.

I should probably save the details for the next post, but let's lay some groundwork. Landes writes that "Perhaps the most difficult thing for Westerners, raised in a positive-sum culture" to appreciate "are the dynamics of cultures that embrace zero-sum values."

Now, Christ must be the first and last word in positive-sum values (this is me talking, not Landes). 

To be continued...