A Riverruns Through Us

On second thought, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to return to the enchanted worldview of that old time religion, in which faith is taken for granted and everyone unquestioningly believes the same doctrine. I can't help thinking that such metaphysical uniformity would be a little tedious. 

Living in our debased culture has its annoyances, but then again, at least it's possible to be counter-cultural. Moreover, it's fun to try to integrate all the things that secularists are convinced render God and religion utterly moot. What's the word, Jeeves?

Frisson, sir?

That's the one -- I like the frisson of taking this and taking that, and then combining the ingredients into a new recipe.

Happily, the world is inexplicable. (What kind of world would it be if it could be explained by man?) 

A boring one. No frisson for you! 

Along these lines, the essay we're discussing (on Josef Pieper's anthropology) touches on Charles Taylor's diagnosis of secularism, whereby he claims that it is not just a matter of "less religion," but -- in my words -- the replacement of one metaphysic with another. 

Taylor calls this implicit worldview the "social imaginary," and -- to put it mildly -- our secular social imaginary is no less imaginary than the religious. Which in turn accounts for the unhinged and obnoxious fervor of our progressive neo-Puritans.

The social imaginary is 

the way in which "ordinary people 'imagine' their social surroundings." In the classical world the social imaginary was such that atheism seemed an impossibility. In the twenty-first century it strikes many people as inescapable.

Thus the frisson that results from escaping it. I'm guessing it feels similar to what Renaissance or Enlightenment thinkers must have felt in escaping the religious social imaginary. However, it is anachronistic to characterize these thinkers as secular in the modern sense. 

Rather, most of them remained thoroughly religious but merely wanted to "expand" and supplement the religious social imaginary with discoveries from the new science. Few of the important thinkers were as credulous as our contemporary bonehead atheists.  

"Taylor defines this secular mindset as being primarily shaped by the gradual distancing of God," with the result being that "we can [now] rationalise the world and expel the mystery from it."

As if! 

Supposing the Mystery is still here -- and cannot not be here -- where does it go? Into what is it projected and/or tamed? Besides neo-gnostic political ideology?

Off the top of my head I can think of several, for example, over the horizon of the "scientific unknown," so to speak (AKA the scientistic godlessness of the gaps). It is also projected into the future, thus the plague of futurists babbling about some great singularity over the temporal horizon. Speaking as a recovering psychologist, it is also projected into the "unconscious," which serves as a kind of placeholder for everything mysterious, uncanny, and etherworldly. 

In any event, one thing of which we can be sure -- maybe the only thing -- is O. Being that it is infinite and we are finite, there is actually a kind of non-stop frisson between us and it. This is indeed Voegelin's biggest of Big Ideas -- that man qua man is situated in the space between immanence and transcendence. We can pretend to escape it in either direction, but the result will be either a private or social imaginary.

There is an important sense in which we cannot escape the social imaginary since we cannot escape our imagination. I've mentioned on Many Occasions that for me, a proper function of religion is to provide a kind of map of the unimaginable and inexpressible transcendent so to speak. Let Schuon explain:

We are here at the limit of the expressible; it is the fault of no one if within every enunciation of this kind there remain unanswerable questions.... [I]t is all too evident that wisdom cannot start from the intention of expressing the ineffable; but it intends to furnish points of reference which permit us to open ourselves to the ineffable to the extent possible, and according to what is foreseen by the Will of God (emphasis mine).

Which tracks with some of our favorite Aphorisms, for example, that religion essentially maps a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores. And

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary. 

Alternatively, one can simply deny the existence of the soul. Problem solved. But 

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries.

A soulless social imaginary for secular simpletons. Thus

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

Ultimately, 

The universe is a useless dictionary for someone who does not provide the proper syntax.

We could write a whole post on that one alone, for one can know all the words in existence, but if one fails to string them together with the proper syntax, one cannot express the meaning. And even then, semantics can never be reduced to syntax, rather, we use syntax to express a meaning that transcends the words. Otherwise, to hell with it.

This is all just a way of saying that semantics transcends syntax, and at every level of being:

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

For example, as someone once said, DNA is not the secret of Life, rather, Life is the secret of DNA. Or

Truth is in history, but history is not the truth. 

 Moreover, 

It is not true that things have value because life matters. On the contrary, life matters because things have value.

I.e., a transcendent meaning and value that are a prolongation of eternity into time. Any objective meaning or truth we discover is a function of this vertical dynamic between immanence and transcendence. 

Back to our essay. As Taylor writes, with the rise of secularization "we might say that we moved from living in a cosmos to being included in a universe" -- in other words, enclosed in immanence. Which is again a totally imaginary construct -- as if the Cosmos could be self-sufficient, i.e., the cause of itself. In your dreams!

Did someone say dream?

A riverruns through us. 

Thaaaat's right, Petey, a vertical riverruning right through Eve and Adam's, a commodius vicus of recirculation, or something. 

"Riverrun" is not a beginning, but a continuation -- a continuation among other things of the ecstatic, swiftly slipping and abruptly interrupted sentence..., [whereby] the last word flows into the first, Omega merges into Alpha, and the rosary of history begins all over again (Campbell & Robinson).

That's a good place to end and beginagain. Tomorrow.