Forthrightness as a condition of personal freedom

Peace to you all who continue to check up on this blog!  I am happy to resume writing, as things have somewhat returned to 'normal'.  In addition to our construction, we have had to spend time assisting our Br. Augustine, who has been hospitalized for the past 18 days with a variety of ailments.  He will undergo his fourth operation today as a precaution against pneumonia, but there is talk of him being strong enough to leave intensive care this weekend.

Today's reading from the Rule of Saint Benedict urges brothers to come forward when they make a mistake of some kind or otherwise commit a fault.  At first glance, this chapter, as well as the entire 'disciplinary code' of the Rule, has the appearance of strictness, and perhaps strikes us as being overly authoritarian and suspicious of the possibility of monks achieving personal maturity, needing overseers and Correctors for all the details of life.  

If we take it this way, I suggest that this reveals about ourselves an anthropology that is not entirely compatible with that of the Early Church, and possibly with Biblical Christianity as a whole.  As I never tire of pointing out, our anthropology takes its default stance in line with modern thinkers like Rousseau, who believed that children are faultless and it is society that corrupts them.  The ancient anthropology, and I believe the better one, holds that children, while morally not culpable, are in fact very much in need of socialization in order to become mature adults.  Left on their own, children will not develop past self-centeredness and an infantile need to have all desires met.

What this means is that all of us need help from others to discover our faults and weaknesses.  If we do not discover them, we will make decisions based on hidden agendas and undisciplined desires.  Perhaps worse is the common situation where we excuse our faults and assume that others should just put up with them because "that's who we are."  Of course, part of the atmosphere that allows us to confront personal faults is the sense of love and acceptance, that invites us to correction rather than threatens us.  I believe that this is the atmosphere presumed by Saint Benedict to be in the monastery.

Thus the invitation to admit faults, to apologize forthrightly and seek advice for correction, is an invitation to maturity and freedom.  If we excuse our faults on the premise that others should leave us alone, we more or less admit that we are in thralldom to said faults.  On the other hand, frank admission of our failures manifests a desire to be free of the control of our desires and hidden agendas.  When I firmly admit that losing my temper is wrong, I can begin to ask what it is about myself in certain circumstances that brings anger out of me.  Then I can ask whether I want to be that sort of person and, with the help of others who love me even if conversion is slow, or even proves to be ultimately impossible in this life, I can begin to reclaim true freedom to act in accord with reason and charity, and to counteract selfishness and blind passion.

"I Thank Thee, O God,"

"The soul looking at the crowd of other offenders does not, in the first place, have time to become aware of its own sins and to afflict itself by penance for its errors; on the contrary, by comparison with those who are worse, it takes on, besides, a certain deceptive appearance of righteousness."

The Long Rules of St. Basil the Great, Q.6

There, in a nutshell, is my problem with most brands of liberation theology or other 'advocacy' theologies. They tend to devolve into politics, in which the faultline between good and evil is no longer the battleground of every Christian heart, including my own, but is rather between those in power and those needing empowerment. Without neglecting the need to work for justice, the withdrawal of the monk addresses the deep injustice that each of us harbors internally. Every Christian is, of course, called to this same conversion. In today's West, politics so frequently replaces religion as a bearer of meaning, and in these cases, it is no great accomplishment to point out the failings of politicos. As St. Basil points out, this can be a cheap way of feeling pretty good about myself. Would we perform any better if we were the politicians, and actually had the power to make grave error and cause great good or harm? Speaking for myself, I can say with assurance that I could not.

Spiritual Direction and Stories

First, an update from yesterday. An anonymous reader asked about my claim that we can "grow out of" spiritual direction. In fact, the claim is not mine, but that of Blessed Columba Marmion. I had also qualified what I wrote by saying that this was part of the Benedictine tradition. There are other, more recent spiritualities in which spiritual direction plays a major, ongoing part. However, given the fact that good spiritual directors are rare, I would not want to place on the lay faithful a burden that cannot be carried, namely to suggest that authentic discernment cannot take place except in the context of spiritual direction. In the monastic tradition, particularly today in the Carthusian tradition, the emphasis is on the indwelling Holy Spirit. This is a gift to all the baptized, and not merely the religious. This may sound risky to say in public in an age when people too uncritically accept their own authority, but I also, I hope, reasonably clear in saying that our consciences needs formation. It is not so much a matter of 'trusting your feelings' as it is developing a sense and taste for the things of God, so that we almost naturally choose the Godly course.

On to another comment:

Amator Catholicarum said...

"I would be interested in a discussion of how this tension between
conversion and epistemological continuity manifests itself in many Catholics. It
seems that many of them do not seek for the continuity within the context of the
faith, but rather their own lives. That is to say, the result is that the
conversion becomes an isolated part of their lives, but does not convert the
whole person."

It would perhaps be presumptuous of me to attempt to speak of Catholic experience as a whole in this area. I believe that religion in general today tends toward personal and compartmentalized expression, and so we might naturally simply read only our life story in order to find God's presence. The two major correctives for this problem are the liturgy and Scripture. Catholics who regularly attend Mass and other paraliturgical devotions (attendance at the Divine Office is still pretty rare) tend to pick up a sense of being part of a much larger story, the story of the whole of creation and its redemption through the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Catholics probably lag behind Protestants in terms of filling out this sense of the cosmic story by attention to Scripture. In either path, God will eventually touch every part of our lives, if we are listening.

What I am putting forward here perhaps needs a summary, in order to remind readers entering in mid-conversation what exactly is on the table. I have been claiming that A. MacIntyre's idea of an 'epistemological crisis' (a crisis in understanding the world and one's place in it) can illuminate the Christian understanding of conversion. In fact, Scripture and the liturgy should provoke ongoing 'crises' of understanding, such that faith continually moves us to a deeper change of heart and a deeper sense of God's dominion and love, and a profounder determination to give the whole of our lives to God as a gift. A part of this involves the challenge to understand our own lives as falling in the midst of the cosmic story and thus requiring public confession and witness of some kind (just as, say, living in post 9/11 America requires us to take responsibility for political debates about security, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth, whether we feel like it or not). The Church's story should open us up more and more to concern for the whole Church and the whole creation.

In terms of our own lives prior to conversion, we can learn to see them in Biblical/liturgical terms (where we might be inclined toward psychological or sociological terms). Thus, instead of finding that Jesus Christ has allowed me to actualize my full potential in life--this understood as doing the things that I really want to do--we instead are persuaded that we are like the Israelites in the desert, being rescued by God, and yet complaining about what we had to give up. Or we see ourselves like David, blessed and yet pronee to the worst sorts of sins of pride and self-will. We see that God treats us in ways similar to the Biblical persons, with corrections, warnings, and such, but ultimately with knowledge of Him and communion with all that is good in creation.

We can take a cue from St. Augustine, who definitely read his own life in a Biblical sense in order to narrate his conversion, but from there, he went on to reading the Bible. He concludes Confessions with a three-chapter incomplete commentary on Genesis. Many have puzzled over this, but perhaps this is just St. Augustine's way of indicating that our personal narratives, important as they are to each of us, are best understood within the cosmic story.

Conversion: the Importance of Community

I have stressed in previous posts the necessity of continuity in a person's life in order to make sense of a conversion experience. Of course, certain areas of discontinuity are necessary as well, without which conversion appears to be merely a cumulative effect of previous efforts. At root, conversion means 'turning around', even going a way opposite to that which I had been going. I will return to this observation after a note on community.

In After Virtue and elsewhere, A. MacIntyre puts forward the idea of the 'goods of excellence' as being something that human beings naturally strive for. For suspicious moderns, this immediately generates the question: Who determines what is 'excellent'? It is to MacIntyre's credit as a professed Christian that he does not take a fideistic way out and simply say, "Well, excellence is what virtuous people naturally desire." This would un-invite him from most philosophical discussions going on today. At the same time, he does therefore leave unchallenged the dominant postmodern notion that there is no truth and therefore no standard of excellence.

Instead, he appeals to the idea of community. Excellence in painting is determined by those expert practitioners of painting who will or will not accept new members into their community based on whether the new members accept the same standards of excellence. We might speak of 'schools' of painting in this way. When I was a performing musician in what posed for a kind of avant-garde in Chicago in the mid-90's, a goal that my group of friends and I set for ourselves was creating a 'scene', the idea being that like-minded improvisational artists would benefit from mutual support and critique. We could hone our craft and push it to new levels of expression by committing in some way to a community of shared standards of excellence.

Today, none of those friends are in that particular 'scene' anymore, but have gone on to adopt the standards of other musical communities. In a sense, this requires a conversion. Our drummer now fronts a classic rock cover band. If he held those musicians to the standards we used to have, they would face a crisis; either they would have to part ways or one or other side would have to agree to the others' standards. Similarly, our violinist has returned to her roots in classical/Romantic music, and so has laid aside the standards of psychedelic electrified fiddling. This requires a fairly difficult conversion: she had to 'unlearn' much of her classical technique in order to play in our ensembles. Now she must relearn the disciplines of classical technique.

When we experience a conversion to Christ, it necessitates adopting the standards of virtue of a community, the Church. This requires us to let go of certain behaviors and standards that we may have had before, some of them in and of themselves perfectly good standards. For example, when I began cantoring at my parish, expecting the parish choir to adopt the standards of the Robert Shaw Chorale would not have been helpful, and probably not even appropriate. Indeed, this is the cause of much tension in church music: musicians are trained to standards of excellence that prevail at Carnegie Hall (not a church community), and then must adjust to the standards of the liturgy, where excellence in to be found in a larger context than musical precision and compositional artistic merit.

Other conversions require us to drop entirely previous standards of excellence as being opposed to the gospel. Much of what makes for a good mafioso will not be accepted by the Church community. In such a case, the sense of conversion as 'turning around' makes more sense, even if it not wholly absent from the musical example I used above.

MacIntyre might stress at this point that what both types of conversion have in common is a search for actual truth. A conversion is not simply 'adopting a new lifestyle', as if to imply that when we get bored of this lifestyle, we reinvent ourselves. Rather, conversion draws us closer to apprehending the truth; if it did not, it would lack the compelling sense that genuine conversions do. [This is where M departs from Thomas Kuhn: scientists don't adopt new theories simply because they solve problems better or have aesthetic appeal; they do so because they strike us a true. Ptolemaic astronomy was a very good approximation of how the solar system seems to work, but Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and Einstein have provided a much more comprehensive description of observed reality, and therefore have the force of truth to them].

The importance of community is that we do not have to reinvent the wheel, and we do not need to rely solely on our own observational powers to find the truth. We can be pointed to it by a community that we trust, but this will require us to adopt their standards of excellence, proof, and behavior. I also suspect that the postmoderns have a point with their reluctance to embrace 'truth', but that this point is addressed by community. No human being (we Christians would except Jesus Christ) has the fullnes of truth, and anyone who claims to is probably best described as an idealogue. Yet, certain communities are oriented toward the truth more precisely, as Einsteinian astonomers are closer to the truth than Ptolemaic astronomers. When we claim, as Christians that truth is found in the Church, we are claiming that this community will orient you to truth (Jesus Christ), not that you will know the answer to everything. Yes, this will require us to let go of some of our personal ideas of truth, but if these are all that we have, we run the risk of insanity, which is hardly a mark of embracing the truth.

Conversion and Continuity

In previous posts, I have suggested that Alasdair MacIntyre's thoughts on 'epistemological crises' can help us to understand something of the psychology of conversion. He contends that these crises--when our worlds are turned upside-down by the revelation of new facts--require a re-evaluation of the view we previously held of the world, and that a successful resolution of this crisis builds a new world view that has marked continuities with the old one. He is arguing against modern ideas that posit a complete break with the old. "Not only incompatible but incommensurate," to use Thomas Kuhn's approving formulation.

In my last post on this topic, I suggested that the encounter with Jesus Christ risen from the dead is just such a world-inverting moment for most of us, even those of us who have grown up Christian and who suddenly wake up one day to the recognition that we hadn't properly accounted for the ramifications of the Resurrection. How we view our lives before this has much to do with how lasting and coherent our conversion is.

Let me begin exploring this idea with the early Church itself. The first great heresy, that of Marcion, insisted on a radical break with the past, which meant dispensing with the synagogue and the Torah. What the advent of Christ meant for Marcionites is that the God of the Old Testament, previously thought to be good, is in fact a 'demiurge' who had fooled everyone up until now.

Orthodox Christianity rejected this as an incoherent narrative. The Father of Jesus Christ is the same God as the One Who saved the people of Israel from Pharaoh and initiated a covenant with them, Whose abode was the temple on Mount Zion. This, of course, set in motion a need to demonstrate the continuity of the Old Testament and the New, a project that has always had its detractors.

As I was thinking through this post, it seemed to me that a feature also of Gnosticism is the claim that the 'orthodox' narrative is incoherent. Gnostics, like Marcionites, adapt the coming of Christ (not necessarily including a death and resurrection, which is important to note) to some history other than the Jewish one that the Church held onto. While I had intuited this, I couldn't quite muster the argument to persuade myself that it was true. Then, in the most recent issue of First Things (sadly no longer available to non-subscribers online), Gary Anderson did it for me, in his review of Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews by Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson. The thrust of the book is to demonstrate that while explicit mentions of the resurrection of the body in the Hebrew bible appear to be rare, at least in a form that modern Christians and Jews would recognize, nevertheless, it is clearly in continuity with the earliest Biblical witness about the nature of the God of Israel. Resurrection of the body (carefully distinguished from immortality of the soul) is not an intrusion of foreign elements into Second Temple Judaism, but is the end of a trajectory that can be traced back even to Adam and Eve, in the story of the death of Abel and birth of Seth.

Anderson writes in his review: "When God intervened to raise Jesus from the dead, the categories for understanding this event were already well situated in contemporary Judaism.

"It is truly surprising then that contemporary 'pluralists' like [Elaine] Pagels are so positive in their assessments of ancient Gnosticism. Had the Gnostics won the day, the Church's ties to the synagogue would have been greatly impoverished. What is desirable about that?" [FT June/July 2008, p. 41]

To sum up: the world view of the Apostles in the Upper Room with the Virgin Mary was that of Second Temple Judaism in some form or another. When the Risen Christ entered that room, showed them His hands and feet and ate and drank with them, their worldview changed, but only in ways recognizable through the language and other cultural tools that were a part of the chosen people's worldview. Hence, Christians, to be true to the faith, owe it to themselves to take the Old Testament seriously, and, significantly, even (or especially?) the inter-testamental "Apoocryphal" or "Deutero-Canonical" literature, which sets the stage for the revelation of God's Son. For pioneering work in this area that is relevant to our post-modern West, I can do no better than to recommend (Anglican) Bishop N.T. Wright's magisterial series The New Testament and the People of God.

Catholic disclaimer: I would like to note that Wright's work, which is, in my opinion, the most significant work of its sort and is likely to be that for some time, could use one corrective. So all you ABD theology students, give ear! Wright's project is to produce work on Pauline theology and Jesus in His historical context. Had I anything like the chops of Bishop W, I would add a sixth volume to the work and write it on "Peter" understood in terms of the historical context of the early Church and its theology as indicated in the non-Pauline epistles of the NT and the Johannine literature. In my humble opinion, and writing as a Catholic, I believe that this would do greater justice to Bishop Wright's title for the work, as well as to the historical record.

Psychology of Conversion, 3

Ive changed the title of this series, dropping 'epistemological crisis' for reasons I hope are fairly obvious...

In commenting on the first of these posts, Bob makes a very reasonable criticism of my charge that fundamentalists undergo conversion and then stop being converted. After more thought, I recognize that I had in mind two separate phenomena, and that I could have more carefully worded the charge. I agree with Bob that in what is termed 'fundamentalist Christianity', conversion can be ongoing just as much as it can for Gregory of Nyssa. Before I parse the two phenomena behind my critique of certain forms of conversion, I would like to emphasize one important point of MacIntyre's reading of 'epistemological crises'.

In his essay Epistemological crises and dramatic narrative, MacIntyre takes issue with a series of thinkers: Descartes, Burke, Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn. In his opinion, what they have in common is an approach to truth that neglects the role that coherent narrative plays. To use the most famous example, Descartes, faced with the crisis of philosophy in his day, imagined that he could reduce himself to the radical doubt of all previous traditions (narratives), and start, a priori, with a brand new one. To use a more subtle example, M questions Burke's critique of the French Revolution. Again the question is not whether the Revolution represents a good or an evil, but whether it can be understood coherently as part of ongoing French history. Burke saw a rupture, but according to MacIntyre, thinkers as diverse as Peguy and Belloc (!) "were able retrospectively to see the great revolution as reconstituting a more ancient France, so that Jeanne D'Arc and Danton belong withing the same single, if immensely complex, tradition."

The key word I wish to suggest in this context is 'continuity'. MacIntyre goes so far as to suggest that traditions actually require revolutions 'for their continuance'. The successful resolution of an 'epistemological crisis' requires narrative and dramatic continuity. So, too, I would suggest that a genuine and lasting conversion requires the same for the same reasons. I mentioned this in the first post with a reference to late medieval Nominalism. Can we claim that Descartes' radical doubt is best seen not as a rupture, but in continuity with Nominalism? God willing, I will take up this loaded question at a later date.

Today, I would like to conclude with a response to Bob's correction. What I had in mind there, as I said above, is a mixture of two different phenomena. The first is what I understand to be a derivation of certain tendencies in Calvin, in which acceptance of conversion is seen as a once-for-all proposition that guarantees salvation (no matter what happens in the narrative before or after?). As Bob correctly noted, this in fact does not match with the experience of the genuine experience of Christians, but it can create tension with the received theology. As I understand it, the movie "Unforgiven" plays this out, where the lead character, unable to make a coherent narrative out of his life after his faltering conversion, decides to force the narrative into coherence by committing one more act of (vigilante) murder. This seems to him to be 'more in character'. Therefore, in retrospect, his conversion appears as a mirage and the grace of God unavailable. So this failure of the narrative of conversion is one problem I meant to present.

The second has more to do with the label 'fundamentalist' that I used. In this case, the fundamentals of the faith are understood to be disclosed by the Bible and not in any way by natural philosophy. Again, I submit that this impulse, highly principled though it be, weakens personal narrative in crucial ways. For one thing, it can only provide an explanation for what a person previously believed (if that person subscribed to natural philosophy, e.g. some form of belief in evolution) by positing radical deception. There can be no dialogue between the person's former and current selves, at least it seems to me. What happens in fact is that continuities of unexamined sorts pop up (analogously to Descartes' unintentional echo of Augustine in his famous Cogito ergo sum). I would point to things like Christian rock and multi-media megachurches as instances of unintentional continuity between the world and the saved Church. Be that as it may, my principal concern here is to contend that the rupture envisioned between life before conversion and life after can create real problems.

In concluding and anticipating the next post, we should be clear that Christianity does present us with a radical choice that requires a renunciation of life 'according to the flesh' or 'in the world'. How does our encounter with Jesus Christ risen cause us an 'epistemological crisis', and how is it resolved? I will hopefully try to tackle these questions in subsequent posts.

The Psychology of Conversion, cont.

DFB has given me permission to quote the following email exchange between us:

He writes:
"Father Peter:

Professor MacIntyre makes what for me was a startling observation in "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science" that an "epistemological crisis is always a crisis in human relationships." Including the word "always" suggests that this holds for "traditions" and "cultures" in epistemological crisis as well as individuals. I wonder if MacIntyre at the time he authored this essay would agree that "conversion" is necessary for the resolution of an epistemological crisis? The paragraph below makes the process of resolution sound more tentative than conversion:

[MacIntyre writes:] 'When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them. The narrative in terms of which he or she at first understood and ordered experiences is itself now made into the subject of an enlarged narrative. The agent has come to understand how the criteria of truth and understanding must be reformulated. He has had to become epistemologically self-conscious and at a certain point he may have come to acknowledge two conclusions: the first is that his new forms of understanding may themselves in turn come to be put in question at any time; the second is that, because in such crises the criteria of truth, intelligibility, and rationality may always themselves be put in question (as they are in Hamlet) we are never in a position to claim that now we possess the truth or now we are fully rational. The most that we can claim is that this is the best account which anyone has been able to give so far, and that our beliefs about what the marks of _a best account so far_ are will themselves change in what are at present unpredictable ways.'"

My response to this was as follows:

"Dear David,

I will hazard a quick response which may be helpful: I would instead argue that what we consider 'conversion' as committed Christians ought to be understood as more provisional than what is often averred, especially by 'born again' fundamentalist types. God being infinite, and ultimately unknowable in His fullness therefore, we are in a position, as Gregory of Nyssa recognized, to achieve human perfection only by constant growth in holiness, a growth that comes about by the ongoing effort to discover in ourselves the need for profounder conversion. To put this in the language of relationship: 'we are never in a position to claim that now we possess the truth [about God] or now we are fully rational [precisely because we do not yet possess the full truth that is God]. '

The witness of John of the Cross seems to me significant here; the only way forward at certain crucial points in the spiritual life is the negative way of denying whatever we think we know about God and admitting that our present rationality is an obstacle to God rather than a vehicle to God. In more familiar terms, we often learn more about God when He seems absent, precisely because our previous idea of what it was like to have God 'present' actually limits God unacceptably."

Conversion and the Paschal Mystery

In my previous post, I suggested that Alasdair MacIntyre's insights on conversion (what he might prefer to call 'resolution of an epistemological crisis), based on the writings of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos, have interesting implications for the Christian life. This is not surprising, given M's clear self-identification as a Catholic (he begins The Tasks of Philosophy with reflections on Pope John Paul II's encylcical Fides et Ratio, "Faith and Reason").

In a previous series of posts I developed a distinction between the modern ideal of autonomy, which prizes self-determination, and Christian freedom, which emphasizes the ability to choose good over evil. One of the great difficulties of living a genuine Christian life today is that we must constantly be converted from 'autonomy' to a fuller understanding of Christian freedom. That sounds easy; but in fact it produces in us a never-ending series of 'epistemological crises', if we truly believe that our goal is God and that God is infinitely greater than we are. We should expect, in other words, to be confounded regularly by our encounter with God and His invitation to discipleship.

So far, I doubt most Christians would have qualms with that. On the other hand, practically speaking, this is far more difficult than most people would like to admit, especially living as we Americans do in relative security and wealth. Let us demonstrate with an example from Monday's gospel, Mark 10: 17-27. A rich man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to be saved. It is a funny question, really. The fellow, judging by the fact that 'from his youth' has followed all of the commandments, seems already to have a pretty clear idea of what is required for salvation. At first, the Lord seems to affirm his present worldview.

And then Jesus throws this in (because he 'loved him'?), "You lack one thing...[only one! this shouldn't be too bad!]...go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."

"At that saying his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions."

It turns out that the fellow had a completely opposite worldview, as did the apostles. They too were shocked by Jesus' teaching. For heavens' sake, if the rich can't be saved, who can? Here is an epistemological crisis. Will we be converted to a totally new view of righteousness, or will we reject it?

All of us who wish to follow Christ will be called upon to make these conversions. As I suggested above, we are never through with them. The Bible is full of commandments and teachings that, if taken seriously, force us to confront our limited provisional and personal view of the world with God's Truth.

At times, this will feel 'all wrong'; let me give an example now from the pope. During his visit to the United States, he said this of 'individualism' as a destructive American trend:

"In a society which values freedom and autonomy, it is easy to lose sight of our dependence on others as well as the responsibilities that we bear towards them. This emphasis on individualism has even affected the Church, giving rise to a form of piety which sometimes emphasizes our private relationship with God at the expense of our calling to be members of a redeemed community....If we are truly to gaze upon him who is the source of our joy, we need to do so as members of the people of God. If this seems countercultural, that is simply further evidence of the urgent need for a renewed evangelization of culture."

How often does our personal piety shield us from conversion instead of contribute to it? The pope basically says in the last sentence (as I read), "If changing your personal piety doesn't feel good, that's no excuse!" If the culture makes a sense of communio difficult, well, get out there at convert the culture! And Pope Benedict XVI is not someone we can credibly claim to be saying this with a hidden agenda for the Kumbaya Mass!

Now let us return, very briefly, to MacIntyre. Part of his argument is that for a new worldview to be personally credible and intellectually coherent, it needs to be continuous with our previous worldview and help explain why we previously thought differently. This fundamental continuity is, in my humble opinion, another idea requiring conversion. Many today tend to see conversions as things requiring a loss of narrative, a total revolution and negation of what went before. What follows from this, if I am right, is of weighty import:

We fear conversion because we fear losing our selves and we fear losing our selves because we believe they are bound up with autonomy, which deludes us into thinking, "I am who I say I am, and not who God says I am."

When God calls us to conversion, what we lose is what Fr Thomas Keating calls the 'false self', the one we have autonomously constructed with our very limited knowledge of how things really are. While it may feel like annihilation, with God we can be confident that it is actually 'resurrection': a re-constitution of our true selves, rid of previous imperfections. We will not annihilate or negate our memories even: they will be purified so as not to cause us to sin out of old hurts. Jesus' resurrected body bears the same wounds as His dead body, but now they are sources of life and healing.

So conversion is a call to resurrection. Resurrection requires death, but, ironically, does not break the narrative of our lives. We continue to be the same person, as Jesus was after rising. The 'epistemological crises' brought on by the gospel can be embraced in faith.

How can we be sure that these crises are leading to God and not away? I will take this up with some thoughts on the spiritual sense of Scripture next time.

Notes on Conversion of Life

I promised a while back to present some thoughts on the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and how his insights offer some material for contemplation in the area of conversion of life, which ought to be dear to Christians.

MacIntyre, today considered a 'traditionalist' Thomist Catholic, underwent a 'conversion' experience around 1972. After having cut his teeth on Marxism and Freudianism, he came to what seemed like a dead-end in his inquiries into moral philosophy. In a recent collection of essays, The Tasks of Philosophy, he writes in the introduction that the problems he was facing in, "were bound to remain intractable so long as they were understood in the terms dictated by those larger assumptions which I shared with many of my contemporaries [x.]."

This led M to embrace the Aristotelian synthesis, especially as handed on to posterity by St. Thomas Aquinas, as a vantage point from which to make sense of the apparently intractable problems of modern philosophy. This in turn culminated with the publication of his best-known book, After Virtue, already considered a classic a few years after its appearance in 1981. He famously ends After Virtue with a call for a 'new Saint Benedict', which has endeared him to some members of my Order.

Underlying this waiting for a new Benedict is a consideration of the importance of culture in any kind of systematic thinking. Philosophers are not the only ones who need this; all of us think systematically when we speak, make plans for the future, and arrange our days. We undertake these activities as members of one or more cultures that provides us certain foundations that we take for granted. In the essay Epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science, M points out that when Descartes attempted to doubt everything, he was not able to go without the Latin language in order to pronounce, "Cogito ergo sum," and that writing in Latin already assumes a huge amount of cultural baggage. Experts on Descartes can point out how much of his language is indebted, for example, to St. Augustine, including the famed 'cogito' itself.

So M sets out to critique modern liberalism (and by 'liberalism' I don't mean what is usually meant in political journalism, but rather the enthroning of 'autonomy' that I have been posting on for the past two weeks), by stepping outside of this culture, embracing the cultural assumptions of Aristotle and Aquinas, and then offering his own view of modernism. I find his writing scintillating to say the least. One might immediately object that we can't go back to Paris of 1222, much less Athens of 370 B.C. MacIntyre is no simpleton about such objections, and lacking the means to defend his thesis in the cramped medium of the weblog, I will leave it to readers to discover for themselves how he reasons his way through this dilemma.

What I hope to post on over the coming week or so is this idea of 'conversion'. As M sees it, this requires not merely adapting new information into an existing system (which is what most of us do most days), but opting to be changed by moving into a totally different system, a new system that requires us to re-think the the meaning of the whole of our past, in new terms.

I gave as an example last week the idea that Christians ought to be converted away from 'autonomy' toward 'Christian freedom'. This constitutes no less than a total 'renewal of our minds [Romans 12: 1]', for so much that we take for granted in modern times assumes that autonomy and personal authenticity is a greater good than, say, the salvation of our souls by living the virtuous life. Certainly, entering a monastery ought to provoke some sort of conversion this way: the fact that we do not watch television, that a higher value is placed on mopping the floor according to customary practice than on 'self-expression', that we spend hours a day reciting words of long-dead Hebrew poets; these assume a world-view very much at odds with what exists outside the cloister.

This however does not mean that my life experience before I entered the cloister in meaningless. MacIntyre writes that he was inspired by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to see that the whole 'paradigm', world-view or cultural stance needs to be questioned in order to move forward at times in systematic inquiry. However, he is also highly critical of the either/or implications of Kuhn's thinking; that embracing a new paradigm necessarily makes the old one completely obsolete. Rather, M wants to show how a coherent human life requires a coherent story or narrative, and that a conversion, in order to be coherent, must not only account for the world according to a new paradigm or world-view, but must also explain how the person could have reasonably held the previous world-view.

My sense is that today, 'conversions' are often suspect because we assume that the person who undergoes one has to repudiate what had gone before, rather than explain it. The Fathers of the Church were less certain of this--they expressed a variety of opinions, but I would point out that the view that was eventually embraced as something of a default, at least in the West, was the Benedictine view, one that integrates what is best in the cultures converted by the gospel. Jean LeClerq, in The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, demonstrates that the Benedictine way of life, while professing to leave the world behind, in fact was able to purify 'worldly' knowledge and rhetoric by placing it at the service of a comprehensive Christian worldview.

I will end this post today by addressing a comment made by Ascending Incense two weeks ago (and let me insert here that I repent of my infelicitous language that claimed that infants are 'infected' by Original Sin--perhaps I could change this to 'subject to' so as to assert their innocence before God). He noted that Karol Berger located the beginnings of modernism with Rousseau, whereas he thought that Descartes was more normally given that dubious distinction. Berger is operating within a very specific frame of reference, and Rousseau mirrors the changing sensibilities in musical composition in mid-Eighteenth century that separate Bach from Mozart. I agree that Descartes is more typically seen as the breaking point. However, my own personal point of view is that the break begins with Nominalism, the late scholastic philosophy that claims that the objects we encounter in the physical universe do not tell us anything meaningful about the nature of things. Thus, we would not be able to abstract a concept called 'human nature' from observing individual human beings. This sets up what I have long called a 'disjunctive universe', in which things are not related to one another, except in the minds of those who decide to call different things by the same name (hence 'nominalism'--it's all about naming things).

The effects of Nominalism have taken a long time to play out, but I would venture to say that they have reached a certain maximization today. How often are we scolded for trying to generalize about the world by those who wish to be left alone to make their own generalizations, to 'define the mystery of life' according to their own lights rather than by things-as-they-really-are? Postmodernism is defined by just this sort of disjunction, leading people to assert that there is no truth, or at the very least that any claims to truth are ideological and therefore violent and out-of-bounds (we normally say 'offensive' or 'insensitive').

The Thomistic view, which I take to be the Catholic one, rather exercises discretion to 'baptize' pagan cultures, adopting what is good, while defining, explaining and excluding what is bad. Thus there is an emphasis on the fundamental continuity of persons and cultures, even through a conversion experience. On this, MacIntyre interestingly takes issue with Burke's criticism of the French Revolution (note for political junkies).

So I locate the wellsprings of modernism with Scotus and William of Occam, which seems about right for a monk. It happens to coincide with the claims of so-called Radical Orthodoxy, though for somewhat different reasons. At the same time, both Descartes and Rousseau are owed a certain credit/blame for advancing the cause.