Integration and Presence

Still slogging my way through Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering. If it hadn't set me back thirty bucks, I would have given up by now. Why all the five star reviews? Maybe it's just me.

In fact, there's a chapter on why it might be me, called Narrative as a Means of Knowledge: Francis and Dominic. It seems that the book may be aimed more at the former than the latter: the Dominican approach 

is helpful for making clear distinctions, especially distinctions focused on details, about which argument is possible and often frequent. 

Conversely, 

The Franciscan approach is not much help with definitory details or crisp distinctions, but it can be evocative, memorable, and illuminating.

The first is more philosophical and metaphysical, the second more embodied in story, myth, and narrative. The Franciscan would say that There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, while I say Try me. 

The Franciscan type says 

that there are things we can know that are philosophically significant but that are difficult or impossible to know and express apart from stories.  

I appreciate the sentiment, but for me the narrative contains and expresses an implicit metaphysic that we can unpack and explicate, which goes to its value, precisely. For example, Schuon writes that 

Revelation is none other than the objective and symbolic manifestation of the Light which man carries in himself, in the depths of his being; it reminds him of what he is, and of what he should be since he has forgotten what he is.  

The Bible, for example, "expresses complex truths in a language that is indirect and full of imagery":

its source is neither the sensorial world nor the psychological or rational plane, but rather a sphere of reality that transcends these planes and immensely envelops them, while yet in principle being accessible to man through the intellective and mystical center of his being, or through the “heart,” if one prefers, or pure “intellect.”

The Bible itself is the multiple and mysterious objectivation of this intellect or Logos. It is thus by way of images and enigmas the projection of what we carry in a quasi-inaccessible depth at the bottom of our heart; and the facts of sacred history -- where nothing is left to chance -- are themselves cosmic projections of the unfathomable divine truth. 

The Franciscan approach is also more personal in nature: it is not knowledge that, but of -- of other persons. It is intersubjective, relational, and participatory, or knowledge by acquaintance. 

I get it, but for me the ultimate metaphysical principle is the intersubjective Person(s) -- i.e., substance-in-relation -- so my approach is able to handle the Franciscan with ease. For me, the two are deeply complementary. I would be the first to confess that we can know a great deal about God without knowing God. But I don't need a narrative to tell me that. 

The next chapter is called Narrative and the Knowledge of Persons, and it goes to the various pathologies that can interfere with this knowledge, especially autism, which represents "a disruption in the system of child-in-relation-to-others." 

We touched on this in yesterday's post, which comes back to the question of subjective openness, or of openness to other persons, which is to say, "the knowledge of persons and their mental states." To repeat:

To be emotionally connected with someone is to experience someone else as a person. Such connectedness is what enables a baby... to differentiate people from things.... It is through emotional connectedness that a baby discovers the kind of thing a person is. A person is the kind of thing with which one can communicate (Hobson). 

Now, if God is a person, then the same principle applies, only on the vertical plane. Simple as. Here again, no narrative is needed. I get it. As does Aquinas: "if real love has its way and is not somehow driven off course, it will eventuate in shared union with God" (Stump). It seems to me that this principle is embodied in a more narrative form when Jesus says  

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important commandment. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Vertical and horizontal, respectively, while anchoring the latter in the former. These are primordial complementarities, but the vertical is prior. 

Stump does have some interesting things to say about what interferes with this relation, mainly a failure to integrate, i.e., a subjective fragmentation in which we are inhabited by multiple wills at cross-purposes with one another. Aquinas, for example, 

thinks that there is no peace for a person who is internally divided in herself, since, if she is divided against herself, she will have some unfulfilled desire no matter which part of her conflicting volitional states she acts on. The good of the person thus requires internal integration (emphasis mine).

Which goes to what Jesus just said about all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind. What part of All do we not understand? Well, there is the little matter of our fallenness, which is the ultimate ground of this division, am I wrong? 

This is addressed later in the book, but here's a preview: "all human beings have a sort of latent disease in the will," and Thomas "takes this defect to be part of the universal post-Fall human condition"; "it follows that all human beings in the post-Fall condition lack internal integration to some degree."

This reminds me of something I proposed in the book -- that the objective measure of "cultural health" is the degree to which it facilitates both the actualization of our latent potential and of our subjective integration. Nor can these two be separated, since the more the person is integrated, the more they can actualize their potential, the ultimate potential being nothing less than union with God. For example, Stump writes that

Even God cannot be united to [for example] Jerome if Jerome is alienated from himself. Insofar as Jerome is resistant to internal integration, he is in effect also resistant to union with God. 

After all, God is omnipresent, while we may be more or less present to this Presence, again, because we are divided against ourselves and not integrated.

Good place to pause.