Seeking Wisdom

Season of Light/Season of Darkness.

I have been waiting to compose this message because I fondly hoped that I would be able to send to our friends who have been so supportive throughout the past year news that our time of trial is over. As many of you know I have been involved in another intense period of interviewing which has taken me from Indianapolis to Fond du Lac to Denver, to Dallas to Seoul. Unfortunately, most of these institutions have not yet completed their searches and we are still waiting to hear whether or not I will have a position in January and if so which one.

This has been a terribly difficult year but also, in many ways, a rewarding one. We have had almost no income and have been living off our savings and the –quite extraordinary– generosity of our family and friends. Since May we have been in Upper Michigan, deep in the Northern Hardwood Forest (or foryest, as Coeli calls it, with a Slavic e (ye) which she acquired I know not where). Summer was cool and rainy, with almost no sun. Since the beginning of November it has been dark and cold and I have been hauling wood to heat our tiny cabin. On one occasion I had to postpone an interview because I was unable to reach the airport through the blinding snow. There is only limited cell reception here and we cannot get internet access where we are living, but have to drive into town. We have learned the meaning of exile, continuing to write and hope (it is the word, after all, through which we access the profound truth and power which is the basis of all reasonable hope …) as darkness seemed to close all around.

But there have been moments of joy. Autumn was magnificent as the maples and birches returned to the cosmos the light they must of have been given in an earlier summer, long ago, when the sun actually did shine. Or perhaps they have learned to live off starlight. I have learned that birch bark has great endurance. The Ojibwa have birch bark scrolls containing their wisdom ferreted away all around this forest. Some are thousands of years old. When we leave here I will bring birch bark with me. Wisdom endures, even if we do not.

I have also had the opportunity to travel around the country –and once outside it, to Seoul– and to engage an enormous variety of institutions around this great spiritual and civic discipline which we call the liberal arts. Much of what I found was sobering. It has often felt as if the opening in which I have lived for the past 25 years, cultivating sapiential, civilizational, and civic literacy among students who did not know that they sought it, leading communities in reflecting on fundamental questions of meaning and value, is rapidly closing around me as “higher education” replaces the university and the “instructional delivery” replaces liberating education. It has been frightening. But then I will find myself in a place I would never have expected to be, at a school with very little professed commitment to liberal education, addressing a faculty drawn overwhelmingly from technical or business disciplines, and my talk on the liberal arts will awaken something, “stirring dull roots with spring rain …”

The people crave wisdom; it is the elders who are at fault, have ceased to teach it. Let us just hope that the people find a way to gather the resources and restore wisdom’s house (and give us a room therein) before there is nothing left but those birch bark scrolls …

This is, for us, still a season of darkness and of dark learning. I am hopeful that the New Year will bring proof of the sun’s return. But if not, we will learn to be like those maples and birches of Upper Michigan’s brilliant autumn, returning light received in darkness, a warrant of wisdom’s endurance and a sign and foretaste of what is to come.

The first question which skeptics ask of religious believers is “How do you know?” This question is closely followed by another: “Who decides?” These are both, in fact, excellent questions. There are many, many religious teachers who make entirely unwarranted claims, and much religion is, as its critics allege, a system of mystifications which serves to legitimate power which is exercised to exploit and dominate. We will look at specific doctrines and system of doctrines which serve such purposes in later posts. For now I want to establish that it is possible to have authentic knowledge regarding religious matters, to provide readers with a simple standard to use in distinguishing between valid and invalid claims (while leaving in between a substantial grey area) and to settle once and for all the question of “Who decides?”

My answer to the first question –that our knowledge in spiritual matters comes from reason– is likely to be unpopular. Our age has a complicated relationship with reason. Some –especially those formed in the sciences– take it as the sole arbiter of what is true and what is not. But they also so narrow the scope of reason that any answer it might give regarding claims on behalf of meaning is fixed from the very beginning in the negative. We will see why in a minute. Others blame “Western Rationality,” for the many evils of the modern world, from the destruction of the ecosystem and the transformation of human beings into batteries by industrial modes of production, capitalist and socialist, for the totalitarian dynamic at the heart of the modern state, and for the crisis of meaning and values –for the death of the spirit in the modern world. They propose instead to found spirituality on feeling or intuition or revelation.

What both positions share is narrow concept of reason, one which unnecessarily limits the truths to which it can aspire. Let me explain.

Most premodern philosophical traditions distinguish between different degrees of rationality. For purposes of this discussion, I will use the Thomistic terminology, but there are others which might serve equally well. Thomas argues that while all knowledge begins with the senses, we actually know what things are by means of abstraction. There are, furthermore, three distinct degrees of abstraction. The first is totalization. Here we abstract from the individual –Fido or Fifi– to the larger totality or category to which they belong: that of dogs. The category, at this level, is still ill defined: a list of shared properties at most. But it is enough to allow us to use language quite effectively for everyday ordinary purposes.

The second level of abstraction we call formalization. At this level we analyze the structure of a thing, making a formal model of it, and thus arriving at a rigorous definition. The most common way of doing this, and the way which defines modern science, is by writing an equation or some other mathematical formalism. This type of abstraction is especially good at providing us with a rigorous description of how things work. Thus the connection between modern science and industrial technology.

What formalization doesn’t tell us is why things are the way they are and what their purpose is. This is the province of the degree of abstraction which Thomas called the separatio, because it separates out from things their act of Being and which we prefer to call transcendental abstraction, because it points us towards the transcendental properties of Being: Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Oneness.

Transcendental abstraction is fundamentally a reasoning about purposes. This is the kind of reasoning which helps us address spiritual questions –indeed questions of meaning and value generally. And it does this quite simply. If we ask what a thing is for, its purpose, and follow this search through all intermediate purposes, we arrive ultimately at the fact that everything seeks Being. Minerals seek Being by conserving their form. Plants seek Being through nutrition, growth, and reproduction. Animals seek Being through sensation and locomotion. And we humans, rational animals that we are, seek Being by creating new and ever more complex forms of organization.

This means that Being is not just a principle. It is also a value. As the object of perception, it is Beauty. In order to exist things need to have harmony and integrity and disclose their principle. As the object of judgment, Being is Truth. When something exists either in itself or in something else we affirm its existence. As the object of desire, Being is the Good. It is what we seek. And in itself, it is One. Try chopping something up. It is no longer –at least no longer what it was before its encounter with our knife. These are the transcendental properties of Being, the properties that everything has in so far as they exist. Thus the term transcendental abstraction.

Notice here that we have taken the same facts used by the scientific detractors of religion –basic facts describing the material universe– and, by looking at them just a little bit differently, using the lens of transcendental abstraction, we have already discovered a powerful spiritual truth. We have discovered that the universe we live in is not just a mechanistic system, but a rich, dynamic, meaningful system, yearning for Being.

And we have done this without appeal to any claims which cannot, at least, be rationally defended. Nothing we have claimed is the result of private intuition or special revelation. While someone might reasonably raise objections to what we have said, we can answer those objections by an appeal to further arguments. Those participating in the debate or listening to it can decide for themselves what they think.

This does not mean, to be sure, that there are no good reasons for doubt. For now we are just trying to show how religious knowledge is possible, and have sketched out an argument for the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and for the existence of a first principle of meaning and value merely as an illustration. A more rigorous argument, which we will offer in later posts, would have to answer some very credible objections. One the one hand, advocates of a narrower scientific rationality will argue that the universe can be explained more simply and economically in terms of random variation and natural selection, without recourse to the level of discourse we are suggesting, which points towards Being as a first principle and final cause. Others, whose attitude is more typical of late modernity and postmodernity, will ask why, if the universe is ordered to Being, it is so full of conflict, death, and destruction. We will answer these objections at an appropriate point in our discussion.

Similarly, our argument in favor of reason as the ultimate arbiter of religious truth is not meant to exclude higher wisdoms, a knowledge of first principles which is nonconceptual and experiential and which sometimes, at least, speaks to others in the language of image and story. But we do want to maintain that even if these other wisdoms are in some sense higher, offering an experience of a principle to the existence of which reason attests, but which it cannot comprehend, our ability to rely on the authenticity of such experiences depends on the witness of reason. Otherwise we would not be able to distinguish between progress towards enlightenment and a degeneration into ever deeper illusion.

But all that will become clearer as our discussion proceeds. What we have done thus far is merely to establish that rational deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value is indeed possible. And this in turn suggests an answer to the question of Who decides? in spiritual matters: ultimately each individual decides for him or herself. Human beings are constituted by the capacity for transcendental abstraction and it is ultimately up to each individual to decide which arguments they regard as convincing or at least credible and which they do not.

This said, some people have developed their capacity for transcendental abstraction further than others, having mastered humanity’s ongoing deliberations sufficiently to teach others that history or even to make fundamentally new contributions to the discussion. It is this capacity which is the basis of religious leadership. It is the task of religious scholars to lead their communities in deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value. And it is the obligation of the people to seek out formation which can help them to develop the ability to make rationally autonomous decisions regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value, to listen and give serious consideration to claims and arguments from diverse perspectives, and to decide where they stand on the basis of these arguments. But it is still the people, individually and collectively (depending on the question at hand) who decide both which scholars they will consult and which their arguments the accept.

It is in this spirit that the claims and arguments made in this blog, and in Seeking Wisdom’s other work are offered, both to other scholars and to the people as a whole. Let’s look forward to enlightening deliberations!

Welcome to our new Blog.

Many of you have followed our journal, Seeking Wisdom, and its predecessor, Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society for nearly two decades now and have at least some idea of what Seeking Wisdom is all about. Others of you are joining us for the first time. So I thought that I would begin by giving you a little bit of a sense of who we are and what we do.

Seeking Wisdom emerged out of a crisis or, rather, out of three distinct but related crises. The first of these was the crisis of the postconciliar Catholic Church. Catholicism, like all of humanity’s great spiritual traditions, offers humanity a distinctive challenge: –to become fully human by cultivating the intellectual and moral virtues and struggling for a just society, and more than human by, in the process, being drawn into a cosmohistorical evolutionary process which lures us, often kicking and screaming, toward connaturality with God. For over a century after the collapse of the old papal states and its alliance with the ancien regime in Europe, the Roman Catholic Church struggled –unevenly and with many failures, to be sure, but also creatively and consistently– to build for itself a new base of support among the working classes and the peasantry and to find a pastoral and political strategy which would carry its challenge to humanity to a modern industrial society which had chosen a very different path of divinization, one centered instead scientific and technological progress or the creation of a collective political subject, the modern democratic state or Communist Party, which would make humanity the master of its own destiny and that of the universe. This process culminated in the Second Vatican Council and the advent of the new theologies of liberation which put the Church in alliance with the most progressive forces in modern civilization, all the while challenging them to look beyond innerworldly civilizational progress towards humanity’s highest, transcendental vocation. Then, in the late 1970s, with the election of Karol Woytila as Pope John Paul II, this process was abruptly halted and then reversed. The Church broke its alliance with the forces of civilizational progress and allied itself instead with the new neoliberal global regime being established by the United States and advanced a spirituality of authority and submission which, under the false cover of tradition, represented an abandonment of the whole Catholic tradition. This rightward turn led to the ascendancy of dangerous secret organizations such as Opus Dei, with roots in Europe’s fascist past, and eventually to the election of Joseph Ratzinger, who had himself been a member of the NAZI youth, as Benedict XVI.

The second crisis is that of the university. Product of a nearly 3000 years of spiritual maturation, a process with roots in what Karl Jaspers called the “axial age,” the university represents humanity’s recognition that engagement with questions of meaning and value are, in fact, what makes us human, and that such questions are both problematic and open to significant insight by means of rational deliberation. The universities, as they developed in the high middle ages, took on themselves the task of leading the communities they served in deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value and cultivating free human beings and citizens –people capable of participating in deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value.

The dominant, positivistic project of high modernity, which seeks to transcend finitude by means of scientific and technological progress, has effectively put an end to this. Our universities have become centers for scientific and technological progress, the great drivers of the high modern project. The humanities imitate the sciences by cultivating specialized scholarship which carefully avoids engagement with fundamental questions of meaning and value. And rather than cultivating free human beings and citizens the universities train skilled intellectual labor.

The third crisis is that of Left. Where positivistic high modernity sought to transcend finitude by means of scientific and technological progress, humanistic modernity sought, as we have noted, to create a collective political subject which would make humanity master of its own destiny and of the universe as a whole. This project was rooted in the older classical humanistic project focused on the cultivation of the intellectual and moral virtues and of free human beings and citizens and represented, at first, simply a democratization of that project, an attempt to extend to all of humanity what Plato and Aristotle had, for example, thought possible only for a few. Eventually, however, this project ran into its own internal contradictions. As the Left discovered to its chagrin, the sort of political organization which can act effectively as a collective political subject –centralized and disciplined– is incompatible with the cultivation of rational autonomy.

Much of our early work was devoted to simply thinking through these three crises and helping the organizations with which we worked –local congregations, colleges and universities, and popular organizations from the local to the global levels– do the same.
At the theoretical level we asked ourselves what was sane and whole in the traditions from which we had emerged and what needed to be discarded. At the practical level we helped the organizations we served and their members and constituents find ways to cultivate a mature spirituality, the capacity to make and evaluate arguments regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value, and to act effectively in the public arena.

Then came 9/11. Already, even before this event, we had become convinced that the realities of globalization meant that questions of meaning and value would have to be engaged not only within but across humanity’s great wisdom traditions. But 9/11 drew us deeply into the work of making this happen at both a theoretical and a practical level. At the University of New Mexico – Gallup, on the borders of the Navajo Nation, where I was teaching at the time, we began with a simple effort to promote mutual understanding between the Diné (Navajo) who had a strong military tradition, and the area’s large Islamic trader population between whom there were already intense economic contradictions. It became much, much more –the seed of a new kind of public arena, pluralistic and democratic, but constituted by deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value.

We have, at long last, left the “post 9/11 conjuncture” behind. The economic crisis of 2008, the election of Barack Obama, and the ascent of China and India to global leadership have, at least, set the conflict between the liberal and Christian Wests and Dar-al-Islam into a new and larger context. The contours of this new conjuncture are still taking shape, but it represents, we will argue, the next step in a deepening crisis of the modern project and of the emergence of a new global spiritual situation, one defined by globalization and the demand for sapiential literacy. Human beings no longer imagine that any one tradition has a monopoly on truth and we no longer accept on authority claims regarding questions of meaning and value. Rather, we engage spiritual questions across as well as within traditions and demand the skills to make our own decisions in spiritual as well as civic concerns.

As we enter this new period we come prepared to offer, like the wise scribe, both something old and something new. Our perspective remains deeply rooted in humanity’s millennia long quest for spiritual maturity and in the struggles of our own traditions and that of humanity’s other religious traditions to engage, learn from, challenge, and come to terms with the crisis of, the modern world. We remain deeply committed to the Axial Age project carried historically by the university. We belong to the party of meaning, but we believe that meaning is problematic and contested. And because of this we belong to the party of reason, which alone can adjudicate contested meanings and which thus defines a space which is both meaning and value laden and open and pluralistic –an authentic res publica. We are also democrats, in the ancient Axial Age and early humanistic modern sense of believing that the call to engage questions of meaning and value is universal: it is the patrimony of humanity as a whole, and not just of a priestly or professorial elite. We conserve, finally, the humanistic modern critique of capitalism and extend it to the whole industrial system which, as Marx pointed out, alienates humanity from both nature and from itself. But we reject the project, on which we believe the modern Left foundered, of making the construction of a collective political subject the center of our political-theological strategy.

That is the old. What about the new?

We offer to you first our Convivencia Theology. This is both a new way of doing theology –engaging fundamental questions across as well as within traditions– and a substantive theological position which we believe emerges naturally out of this approach. In the posts which follow we will engage such fundamental questions as the sources of religious knowledge and religious authority, the existence and nature of God, the ultimate meaningfulness and meaning of the universe, the nature, condition, and destiny of humanity, and the aims and means of spiritual development and civilizational progress. These posts are intended as informal statements intended to begin a conversation. That conversation will form the context in which we will write our next major work, The Ways of Wisdom: A Summa for the New Age.

Second, we offer you ongoing geopolitical-theological and socioreligious analysis. Those of you who have followed the journal are familiar with the distinctive way in which we approach the task of understanding the current situation, identifying material constraints and structural factors, but also taking seriously the ends to which human action is ordered, ends which we believe are ultimately transcendental. Our analyses identify what is at issue theologically and the material and structural conditions on which those issues are being engaged. And they suggest strategic, operational, and tactical directions for those who share our commitments to a spirituality of meaning and self-cultivation, to transcending industrialism and the market order, and creating a new kind of public arena constituted by deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value.

Finally, we will offer you both examples of how we work practically in various settings and proposals for further work. Here as well we will join old with new. We will work with existing local congregations to help them meet the demand for sapiential literacy in a globalized context, with colleges and universities to promote an authentic liberal education, with working class communities to find new models of economic development which promote human development while conserving the integrity of the ecosystem, and with all of the above to create a public arena which is pluralistic and democratic but also meaning and value based, constituted by deliberation around fundamental questions of meaning and value. But we will also be working to develop new models of pastoral leadership and religious community, new models liberal education, and new approaches to organizing and economic development. Hopefully this blog will help you decide if some of what we have to offer is right for you and to discover how you might work with us to help chart the next steps in the human civilizational project.

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