Infinite in Relation to the Finite

Kari Martin: Outside Reading
September 27, 2016

In Martin Heidegger's essay, "What is Metaphysics?" he discusses the necessity of irruption, particularly anxiety as a form of irruption. He first distinguishes fear from anxiety. Fear or stress is in relationships to something, namely circumstances. But anxiety displays itself in a calm, "one feels ill at ease," the realization that we have no control over the world around us, and the world, existence, everything we know to be true could simply fade away or intensify or drift and we have no say over any of it. Heidegger write that anxiety "robs us of speech...the nothing crowds round" (101). Anxiety is what reveals what is nothing and, through nothing, transcendence. Thus, anxiety is key to this transcendence.

Heidegger's explanation of anxiety seems to be the natural reaction to a finite being coming into contact with an infinite being. As long as man (as a finite being) stays within the finite world, comparing himself to other finite beings, he can never experience this anxiety - and perhaps he does not want to. But when man attempts to grasp the infinite, he understands the nothingness of the finite world around him. It shakes the very foundation of understanding, turns everything solid into crumbling ground. And yet, it is this very understanding of anxiety that man can transcend.

As Lewis uses the Chronicles of Narnia to develop this character of Aslan, a tangible, visible image of the infinite, he creates situations in which the infinite and the finite come into contact each other. Each character understands him differently and at different time they experience different facets of him. Even those who claim to not believe in him, are "ill at ease" by his the idea of his presence. They are scared of the sea where he said to have come, scared of the woods his followers used to rule in. And at many times this anxiety shakes us out of stupor and into being.

Martyrs

Danielle Benedict: Outside Reading (1)

Tertullian-To the Martyrs

Prison is typically for wrongdoers, Tertullian calls it the “devil’s house." However martyrs were imprisoned unjustly these good people were in jail because of their belief systems. Tertullian asserts that one’s physical location does not determine one’s actions or quality of thought. Yes, it is a major influencer but not the ultimate deciding factor, which is more likely the human will. Abraham Lincoln said it best when he stated “folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.” People in war zones can reach spiritual epiphanies and others who live in the lap of luxury are depressed. The mental and spiritual states are more powerful than the physical state of being. He believes that his fellow Christians are no longer children of this world but children of God therefore “it is of no consequence where you are in the world—you who are not of it.”

The point of prison is to restrict and prevent a person from enjoying worldly pleasures. The martyrs never wanted those pleasures to begin with because most of them are sins. Prison guarded martyrs from physical temptation in many ways and he put it eloquently when he wrote that “the spirit does not gain more in the prison than the flesh loses.” Real battle in prison is a spiritual one, of not losing hope. This “noble struggle,” of preserving through imprisonment, is likened to a soldier going to war for a significance cause. Our earthly life is a training ground where we may be tested by hardships which develop us into improved moral beings. Trials are not the point of an epic story, but rather the personal outcome that stems from that original conflict show us the resistance of the human spirit. Does losing a loved one or having your rights taken away lead you to rely on something greater than yourself or crumble into despair? These philosophers we are reading tell stories about characters overcoming unsurpassable odds and I would argue that this is possible. The real fight is in our hearts and minds.

Interacting with Nature

Chronicles of Narnia:

The creation of a new world offers a fresh perspective on the notion of progress. When Uncle Andrew interacts with Narnia, he is uncomfortable and transactional. He views this new land as a place for him to profit, a place for him to take and not give. In the modern world, land and creation is viewed similarly. It produces resources, creates power, provides spaces for humanity to live, interact, build, work, raise a family. As America began to spread westward,  land became a commodity to be given away, something that produced money. Progress became an attempt to control nature, control what existed long before humans stepped foot on it.

The change of the creation song as Narnia forms is important because it highlights the foreign, "other" aspect of nature which is not meant to be controlled and understood by man. The song evoked passion, adventure, running, jumping, fighting and ultimately paradox. It evoked a feeling that Digory could not understand in himself and was not rational. This world was not built for man. Narnia was formed by Aslan, a character inconceivable to everyone else and yet still in close relationship. Perhaps the relationship the characters have to Aslan is similar to the relationship they should have with Narnia. Narnia (and nature by extension) should be inconceivable, leaving man in awe of its greatness, terrified of its power, overwhelmed by its beauty. But that does not mean man has no relationship with nature. Narnia becomes a place that Digory fights to protect. The Cabby and his wife become the king and queen over the land. And in it, one becomes a better person or a truer version of ones' self.

Progress relies on man controlling and understanding nature. However, nature was not made for man and its sole purpose is not to serve man. To believe so would be to discredit the maker.

Poetically Man Dwells

Poetically Man Dwells

Outside Reading: Martin Heidegger/Language, Poetry, Thought

September 20, 2016

  An authentic response is always a poetic response. If we are to look at what it spoken we must look to what is spoken most purely. Martin Heidegger turns to poetry as the most pure form of speech. Taken from a Holderlin poem, Heidegger further extrapolates language through the phrase, “poetically man dwells.” Poetry is not a more advanced mode of speech, detached from everyday speech, rather it is everyday speech. As Henry David Thoreau says, “ Poetry discloses the obvious.” It is not a fantasy-driven impulse to escape this world but is the very thing that grounds us in this world. “Poetically man dwells” because he is always engaged in measuring himself against the dimensions between the skies above and earth below. Poetry, then, is a kind of measuring, not against the sky itself but the unknown God, for whom the sky is merely an image. The unknown God’s presence is simultaneously guarded and made manifest in the sky. In speaking about what is, poetry uses images of what is familiar to speak of that which is unknown. 

Language Speaks

Language Speaks

Outside Reading: Martin Heidegger/Language, Poetry, Thought

September 20, 2016

One of the most trivializing and intriguing philosophers of the 20th century, often associated with the existential movement, Martin Heidegger was obsessed with the issue of Being. Throughout the history of western philosophy Heidegger observed how Being was either addressed indirectly, improperly, or missed altogether. He believed the notion of Being to be so fundamentally and intimately part of a thing that it is nearly always missed and obscured. Finding no adequate grounds upon which to base his arguments in the history of philosophy, Heidegger was forced to come up with his own language for the issue.  His writings are riddled with etymological analysis and new terms that bring new and refreshing light to the hiddenness of Being. Heidegger’s persistence to plumb the depths of Being led him to brilliantly create language for things that had never before been articulated. 

According to Heidegger, language is an essential existential category of humanity. We live in an articulated world that becomes open and revealed to us through language. “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”(144) This is a broad reaching statement that gives ascendency to the power of language. 

In his essay, Language, Heidegger seeks to understand the essence of language by phenomenologically observing how language manifests itself as language. He does not seek to ground language in anything nor is he attempting to prove language as the grounds of something else. The goal of the essay is to understand “language as language.” Heidegger critiques traditional approaches to language not by proving them wrong but by proving them insufficient to account for language as language in it’s most essential, primordial form. Throughout history philosophers have merely attributed language to the phenomena of expression rather than looking at language on it’s own terms.

When looking at language as it is, on its own terms, we find that language speaks. So what then does it mean to speak? Speaking is a human activity that externalizes an inward thought through expression and presents and represents the real and unreal. The speaking of language must be sought in what is spoken. Words call forth, disclosing what was previously concealed and giving presence to the thing being spoken of. Speaking does not divide world and things into a subject-object dialect but illuminates the process on penetration between world and things as inseparably one. If language speaks then human speech is a twofold response of receiving and replying to language. By anticipatory hearing, in the “peal of stillness,” man hears language speaking and responds. 

Theology Through Story

Theology Through Story

Outside Reading: Thomas Merton/The Seven Storey Mountain

September 20, 2016

The 20th century mystic, Thomas Merton, became a prophetic voice for restoring contemplative practice in the modern church. Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, follows the course of his spiritual journey, from unbelief to his “four walls of freedom,” as a Trappist monk. In Merton’s story we find a theology of sin and grace that emerges through a coherent plot. Story shows itself to be a highly effective mode of theological disclosure that includes the all the complexities of lived experience so often missed in a strictly philosophical approach. Through presenting a theology of sin and grace in Merton’s story, my aim is to show how narrative provides a more engaging, comprehensive way of dealing with theology.

By taking the form of story, theology does not become less itself but more itself. Likewise, by including theology, story does not drift away from story but comes closer to story. Theology, when understood as themes in a story, takes on a new life that can speak to the imagination as well as the intellect. Story, when it includes theology, becomes more substantial and able to speak to the soul as well as the emotions. In Merton’s story, we find the theological themes of sin and grace as the guiding structure that proves meaning and coherence to the narrative.

It is one thing to simply state that Merton holds sin to be the deliberate rejection of disinterested love; that sin is an arbitrary, autonomous attitude that places self at the center. It is quite another thing to paint the image of a little five year old boy who stands off in the distance, hands by his side, with fraternal longing in his eyes. His very nature tells him he should join in the fun of building a hut with his older brother; yet the hurling stones and insults keep him at bay, confused and heartbroken by a cruelty that defies all understanding. Of all he does not understand, he knows a great injustice has been committed; he feels the full weight of wrongdoing; some terrible break in relationship has occurred that seems to go far beyond “me and my older bother.” The particular experience leads us to a universal pattern of sin. 

Recapturing Story

Recapturing Story 

Personal Choice

September 18, 2016

The Enlightenment was a time of intellectual awakening in Europe in which certainty was sought through science and reason. Finding itself under attack from these developments, the church needed to respond to the spirit of the age. In their response, the church disowned her true identity as the mystical body of Christ, using the same rational methods of the philosophers to defend themselves. By adopting the rational approach as their own, the church undermined the very cause it sought to defend and put the nail in it’s own coffin! It’s no surprise that since the Enlightenment the church gradually lost it’s place in culture and society. In adopting the rational approach, the church began to demystify faith. God became a concept and faith in him became a matter of certainty. The Bible became a textbook to be defended and upheld rather than a story. The essence of Christianity was lost and the gospel became small and unimpressive. 

Today we live in the wake of these failures. There is just as much to be hopeful about as there is to shake your head about. Recapturing story is what I believe it will take to transform the church and make it culturally relevant once again. What are all the major religions but grand stories? And yet we have lost the power of story by presenting the gospel as a set of facts, making faith left-brained and antagonistic. When I read the Bible as story, I have no need to defend the historical or scientific soundness of it because thats not the point of story! These things become small. What truly matters is the significance that story has on my lived experience. A scientist could disprove all of Christianity tomorrow and I would still hold fast in faith because my faith is not grounded in scientific soundness but in story. 

Every story contains three parts: structure, style, and content. Since the Enlightenment, the church has over-emphasized content. Often, it’s all we care about. Thats why you see people bringing their Bibles to church to fact check the pastor. All contemporary worship songs sound the same because all they focus on is having the right content. Has the church become an institution that restricts the artist rather than empowering him? I’m afraid so. No longer do the stories of Scripture shape and inform our culture. It’s now the movies of Hollywood. Why? Because Hollywood understands story. They are far better at incorporating beautiful style and structure into their stories than the church is. Until the church comes to see this, they will continuously remain irrelevant and insubstantial. 

Story Our Limit

Story Our Limit

Personal Choice

September 18, 2016

We live in a world of limits and it is within these limits that we are free to move about. Paradoxically, without limit we have no freedom. Paul says that the law of liberty of life has set us free. How can a law, which by its very nature binds, set us free? Because freedom is always freedom in something. Without the “something” freedom ceases to exist. Our problem is that we have been trained to only look inward for our truth and authority. We have all become addicted to our own way of thinking and until we break out of this egotistical cycle we will never be able to love anything other that ourselves. Ironically, what modern man wants - complete autonomy - is the very death of freedom. In becoming a law to yourself you have bound yourself to a story smaller than that of a two year old infant. By making yourself the ultimate limit, you rob yourself of all freedom outside yourself. Thus, in looking only to the self, the individual undermines his own egotistical objective. For what he wants - complete freedom - is an illusion. Freedom, by definition, must emerge within a limit. To be free from everything is to be unable to do anything. Therefore, the man who truly wants freedom will not deny all limits but search for the largest limit; the biggest story in which he can move about. 

In story we live and move and have our being. To try and escape story one must create another story, only to find himself back where he began in story. Story is the fundamental way in which humans process and communicate their lives. We first encounter life through our own small stories with ourselves as the protagonist. Our conscience filters everything that happens to us in relation to ourselves. The human mind organizes everything through story, taking the sum total of fragmented experiences that make up the totality of one’s life and forming a coherent plot that draws all the stings together into a meaningful tapestry. We can easily forgive, and perhaps applaud, a child when he makes himself the center of attention. The tragedy is that when the child becomes a forty year old man and has never grown out of his own small story. Our problem is not that we begin at the center but that we never break out of the center. The world is full of adolescent adults running around in madness, all living under the delusion of being life’s protagonist.

The Kingdom of Heaven

Kingdom of Heaven

Personal Choice 

September 18, 2016

We live inside a narrative. Without myth, there is no culture. The stories we share inform the way we communicate and act within society. In the 19th century, country became the ultimate story. The hordes lost themselves in the cause of king and country, as nationalistic fever swept across Europe with fury. All it took was one event - one nation to take offense at another - for all the dominos to fall at once. Nationalism became the front door by which every country stepped into World War I. Finding fault in their fathers, the 20th century began to tell a new story in which ideology would become the ultimate narrative, doing what nationalism could not. The focus shifted from Russia to communism, Germany to socialism, Italy to fascism, and America to democracy. Desperate people of the world unite! And the 20th century did indeed outdo their fathers, leading the world to a Second World War whose destruction was even greater than the first. The stories became larger and larger until this point in history. 

After World War II we figured we had better make the story as small as possible. We reverted back into ourselves, creating an age of individualism. 

Our schools have only encouraged this kind of individualistic, narrow living. From a young age, children are taught to find ultimate fulfillment in their own small stories. We have dressed up this twisted philosophy with cute catch phrases such as “whatever makes you happy,” “to each his own,” and “be yourself.” Such appeals to the ego are like feeding a monster. The system creates kids that are comfortable and complacent in themselves and then becomes upset when they resist change and growth. We teach kids to make their own truth and become appealed when they do it. We treat creativity as institutional rebellion. The ones who have a larger than life vision that goes beyond their own small story are the most dangerous. The system exists to suppress uprisings of the soul.

Down the corridors of history one story has replaced another. Will we ever get tired trying on so many different stories? More importantly, will we ever find the right fit? What we need is a story that is able to include all others - always expanding -while maintaining the integrity of it’s identity. I believe that this is what Jesus means when he refers to the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s the larger story, in which we have the freedom to move about. It trumps nationalism because it is able to unite all tribes and tongues and defeats ideology because it tells us truth is a person not a concept. If this is true then salvation lies in breaking out of my own story and becoming part of this one story that is always breaking out of itself: the kingdom of heaven. 

Creation of Narnia

Danielle Benedict: Narnia (1)

At this point, I have read both the Magician’s Nephew and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I was initially excited to start reading the Chronicles of Narnia and found myself genuinely invested in these books. They are such a simple writing style and they are not lengthy but remain rich, vibrant narratives. I appreciated the Christian themes and allegories I saw throughout both books.

In reading the Magician’s Nephew, I realized this was the only other creation story I had ever read besides the account in Genesis 1. I want to compare the two here. In the Bible the creation of Earth is described as: “in the beginning, when God created the universe, the earth was formless and desolate. The raging ocean that covered everything was engulfed in total darkness, and the Spirit of God was moving over the water. Then God commanded, “Let there be light”—and light appeared. God was pleased with what he saw.” Similarly, Aslan is the god and sole creator of Narnia, who sang the world into existence from darkness and nothingness. Diggory, Sally, and their companions witnessed the transformation from empty space to a flourishing world. The birth of animal species as well as plants were described as land boiling like water until it burst where an animal would scurry out. In Genesis 1:20-26, God makes animals in the sea and on land.

These accounts made me realize that people want to have a starting point. Humans desire to know that this is point A, from which everything else came, whether it is your religious conviction or a story that you read to your children at night. We know someone created us and we keep repeating that story.

Myth and Parable

Myth and Parable 

Outside Reading: John Dominic Crossan/The Dark Interval

September 12, 2016

In his short work, The Dark Interval, John Dominic Crossan presents a spectrum of story that consists of myth, apologue, action, satire, and parable. Myth and parable lie at the opposite outskirts of the spectrum as two extreme narrative paradigms. If myth constructs a city, parable is the invading army that breaches the walls and levels it. Myth gives us a world of stability and security whereas parable undermined firmly held assumptions and enacts change. The purpose of parable is to overturn mythic expectations. Parables undermine our shared system of values, opening us up to a transcendent order of values that our own mythic stories were blind to all along.

We are in constant need to be grounded in myth and uprooted by parable. The sequence follows a pattern of death and rebirth that is characteristic of all life. Thomas Jefferson proposed the radical idea that the American government should come up with a new constitution every twenty years. I think we should take the same approach to our own cultural myths. The goal is to never get to a point where tradition is never blindly accepted for traditions sake but always being tested anew and proven good in each generation. So it is with our own stories as individuals. There are times in life where it seems as if we are stuck living in the same chapter over and over. What we so often need and so often resist is not “peace, but a sword.”(Matthew 10:34) We need a parable that jolts us out of our complacency, overturns our tables, and shakes us to the core of our being, causing us to reconsider all we hold to be good and true. 

A NIght's Walk

A Night’s Walk 

Outside Reading: Alister McGrath/C.S. Lewis: A Life

September 8, 2016

In his brilliant biography on the life of C.S. Lewis, Alister McGrath retells a pivotal conversation in Lewis’s spiritual development. It was the evening of September 19, 1931. Lewis was hosting Hugo Dyson, an English professor at Redding University, and J.R.R. Tolkien for dinner at Magdalen College at Oxford. Still a pleasantly warm night, the three friends decided to take a walk along the River Cherwell. Their conversation became centered on the nature of metaphor and myth. As the conversation ran long, the men returned to Lewis’s place and remained there late into the night, Tolkien leaving around 3am and Dyson an hour later. In a subsequent letter to his dear friend, Arthur Grieves, Lewis testifies to the profound significance this conversation had on him. From Surprised By Joy, we know that Lewis had yet to accept many of the core Christian doctrines. His conversion, thus far, had been one from atheism to theism. The conversation with Tolkien and Dyson  was an important step in his conversion from theism to Christianity. 

In the conversation, Tolkien showed Lewis that his true problem was not a rational failure to grasp dogma but an imaginative failure to see the significance of story. Tolkien himself, held a deep belief in the power of story to reveal the nature of reality. To him, Christianity was a grand narrative shedding light on all things; the universal context in which all particulars are understood. Myths do not teach us what to see but how to see. Since he was a boy, Lewis had viewed his imaginative life as completely severed from reality. In Surprised By Joy he shifts back and forth between giving an account of his imaginative life and real life, presenting the two in a dualistic manner. In story, Lewis came to see how everything belongs, how reason and imagination can be synthesized, providing a complete presentation of reality. 

Epistemology in Existentialism

In Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, he discusses how most modern thinkers "all go further" than doubt in an attempt to explain it away. Rather than acknowledge that truth can be discovered in capacities other than the mind, these thinkers are stuck in what Walter Fisher calls: "a rational-world paradigm" (3). Kierkegaard believes that individuals must confront this doubt and at some point take a leap of faith in order to discover new truth. Although maybe not to the same extent, this is also true for myths. If one does not step out of his or her analytic mind and into a new tale of awe, wonder, and enchantment, then that person is limiting their knowledge of truth.

Kierkegaard speaks of a double movement that happens when one takes a leap of faith. The first movement is an infinite resignation. In this movement, one renounces his passion for the material world, and this gives him an eternal consciousness. The same thing happens in myth. In order to step into a narrative, one must similarly removal himself from the primary world and commit himself to the secondary. In the second movement, one believes that somehow he will regain everything that he lost against all odds. For the man of myth, this is far easier than the man of faith. The man of myth is merely throwing his life into a whole new universe but gets to return to the primary world. The man of faith, on the other hand, may not have this same luxury. He is obedient to his call, even if it turns the world against him and costs him his life.

While myth may not be the exact same as this faith that Kierkegaard is describing, it still requires one to open himself up to truth that is outside of the rational-world paradigm. It takes faith to trust in myths because if they do not bear epistemological significance, then we are wasting our time. But, they do. This is one of the major reasons for embarking on a study of them.

Religion v. myth?

One line Lewis' writes does not make sense to me "I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed." (Lewis, Myth Became Fact) I understand the point he is trying to make in context of his writing. His friend Cornelius is basically saying religious people can be a bit soft or weak. He appears to be rolling with that idea and saying that if a person is not following a set of principles within a religion at all but still calls them self religious, can they get anything at all out of that. Where maybe someone who has not been exposed to religion can hear a myth and be more edified in that then the first person. Granted I understand that Lewis' mentions 'sometimes', I still read this and really just can't see it. If we use Christianity, let's look at a very sinful man who lives a life of partying and not going to church. When talking about religion though he claims to be Christian. Well is he getting much out of that religion? No... yet maybe he can. If he calls himself Christian and has been properly exposed to Christian beliefs. Within those Christian beliefs he can come to find truth and faith, if he were to hit a low point and turn to the faith he claims. Now if a person who does not have much religious exposure hears a story like Narina. That is an incredible story to them, but are they edified if they don't understand or have an explanation about what the story represents. What would that mean to them? It can't be spiritually fruitful without an understanding. I can't understand but this is a new idea, the idea of myth that is.