Faith without Works

How does mortification of the flesh lead to holiness? This is a really interesting question to me, as I can see the implications going in a couple of directions. I think it’s important to avoid the Gnostic tendency — ever-present in Christianity — to mortify the flesh out of a response to the idea that flesh is inherently sinful. I think it is important to understand that Paul is using an unfortunate metaphor when he breaks us down to flesh vs. spirit. That sort of asceticism is just as much an error as the hedonism which comes out of taking your Gnosticism in the other direction.

I think that mortification of the flesh can be good when it serves to remind us that we are in the world but not of the world — that is, when, like fasting, it reminds us that there are things more important and more lasting than creature comforts. It is a discipline to make us stronger, more focused on the eternal than the ephemeral.

The easy distinction would be spirit overcoming flesh, will overcoming desire, but mortification becomes fetishistic when it is about sin and punishment. I see two models for this: 1) the damned, who suffer for their sins in hell — when mortification is punishment, it is a tiny picture of hell on earth. 2) the martyrs, who endured terrible pain for communion with Christ.

It should go without saying that communion with Christ has some specific external markers without which it is pointless. The discipline of self-inflicted suffering does nothing unless it frees us from the cares of this world to an extent sufficient to do the corporal works of mercy. These require resources which we might otherwise spend on ourselves.

The understanding is not: “we do these works, the discipline and the good works, that we may be saved.” It is, “we do the discipline that we may be made holy; having been made holy, we are expected and empowered to do good works.”

In closing, a piece of doggerel from some ten years back:

Mixing your aestheticism
in with your asceticism
can only lead
to fetishism.

gauche
28 Jan 10

In the darkness.

Pajiba has an article on the second Alien movie. I was struck by some prose:

There’s a moment of understanding near the end, in the depths of the hive, when Ripley shoots the flamethrower into the air and then points it at the piles of eggs. The Queen nods then, her warriors backing off into the shadowed tunnels, two mothers understanding each other, my child for yours. But Ripley is too far gone to retreat in peace, seen too much blood and horror. She burns the eggs anyway, pumps the grenade launcher all around the nest, not content to let the ticking reactor bathe it all in atomic fire in a few minutes. It has to be fire Ripley uses, that first discovery of ours, the first symbol distinguishing us from the animals. It’s not just a weapon, it’s the light that keeps the darkness at bay.

The closer is beautiful, too.

There are three great fears in a technological society, embedded in the great science fiction horror franchises of the eighties. The Terminator echoes the fear that technology will turn on us, the blade twisting to stab the wielder, the dark child growing to smother its parents. The Predator echoes the fear that superior technology will come along, that all our brains are for naught if we stumble across someone with better toys. The Alien is the ultimate nihilistic fear though, grounded in the horrific notion that the technology might not even matter, that lions and tigers and bears are grinning in the darkness beyond the campfire.

gauche
08 Jan 10

Claiming the Center

In an extended aside to his excellent piece on the writings and speakings of Jonathan Franzen, my friend Daniel Silliman writes:

If you’re on the political fringe in America, you find yourself weighing two possible rhetorical moves. The first is to defend extremism, almost abstract extremism, extremism for its own sake. You deride the democratic majority, calling them “sheep,” unwitting pawns of powerful forces. Thus your fringe status is a sign of the value of your ideas, marking you yourself as one of the few, the chosen, those who really understand. This is the move of anyone quoting Barry Goldwater on extremism in defense of liberty. The other possible move is to attempt to redefine everything, to re-frame the picture so that you are actually at the center. Everyone else is on the fringe, the real crazies. This is what libertarians do with their World’s Smallest Political Quiz, wherein, through “just the honest magic of truth and common sense,” libertarians fall at the center and top part of the map, while mainstream Republicans are a dot on the far right, along with fascists. (Liberals and anyone who doesn’t think the government should be shrunk by 50 percent or more is out on the left with the commies.) The move is actually kind of brilliant, in that the reframing appears natural, and it’s hard, while looking at the redrawn Bell curve, to notice immediately that the terms being used aren’t quite the common, accepted ones. [Emphasis added.]

This seems right to me, and I would add only that the second move — to play with terms until one’s own position is in the center — can play into the former in dangerous ways. Silliman rightly understands the World’s Smallest Political Quiz as a trick intended to open the quiz subject to libertarian ideas. I suspect that a lot of the people who make the first move have made the error of falling for the trick of the second move, first. It would be easy to define libertarian, or conservative, to include anyone who has a beef with the government. Indeed, that is the handy shorthand a lot of even very smart people operate under.

The problem with Silliman’s second move is that, once you forget it’s a trick, you set yourself up for an epistemological crisis. If everyone who had a beef with government were a libertarian, the libertarian party might, for instance, appear on this chart, and libertarian policy initiatives might tend to be laughed out of the room with less frequency. Of course, many people do forget it’s a trick, or fail to appreciate the trick in the first place. If you think everyone who, say, wants to defend freedom is a conservative, you’ll be confused and disappointed when conservative issues and politicians don’t get elected.¹

You can resolve this epistemological crisis neatly by one of two means: 1) re-examine the premise that everyone who has a beef with the government is a libertarian (or, more relevantly, a conservative); 2) explain the absence of libertarian policy success by reference to an outside entity, either the State or something beyond the State, which in fact controls policy outcomes. That is to say, you can de-legitimate your own trick, or you can de-legitimate the political process that does not lead to the outcomes you want. MacIntyre:

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 enlarged narrative is the narrative of the tea parties and the far right. It is an article of faith for the tea parties that the nation (“Real America” — note again the redefinition of terms) overwhelmingly agrees with them. However, the nation has elected someone who is in some ways diametrically opposed to their beliefs and opinions. It could not be that they are mistaken about what “Real America” is. It must be that their opponent is illegitimate, an interloper and a phony. In some cases, it must also be that he is being controlled by the shadowy powers that be, who are able to stymie at every turn the will of the people which is unified in its conservatism.

Whence, the paranoid style in American politics. The two moves Silliman identifies turn out to be tendencies competing and complementing one another within the same body.

¹ I remain confused about whether “conservative” is best defined as an overweening emphasis on “freedom”, as the rhetoric implies, or an overweening emphasis on “order” as the policies tend to imply. Neither “freedom” nor “order” are necessarily bad things, and as used here, perhaps they are content-free, if value-laden, terms. It is certainly perplexing to me that the party that fears government control on the one hand is the party of law and order on the other. Lest you think, dear reader, that I am overly criticizing the political right, let me defend myself by saying that I believe I can give you a definition of “liberal” that is fairly consistent across both time and geography, in the sense that it would predict policy responses to particular issues within broad lines. I can conceive of no corresponding definition of “conservative” and invite the reader to supply one.

gauche
06 Jan 10
Was ist Aufklärung?

thanksgiving

for the undeserved graces
that cover well-deserved scars
the great injustice
that saves us from justice.

that there is something
rather than nothing.

that man is put here
even if he is only put here
to suffer and die
here is where he was put.

gauche
28 Dec 09

Excerpt from a Letter

The other thing that I think is interesting — and I haven’t really teased this out into an argument yet — about Natural Law theory is the use of the term “law” to describe the body of knowledge that natural law theorists believe they are discovering. It is a kind of “law” very different from any other sort of jurisprudence, in that it is a “law” about which — and sometimes, they will even admit this — an honest observer can be mistaken or fail to apprehend. It is a law without authoritative interpretation or resolution of ambiguity or enforcement. As a kind of knowledge, the stakes are honestly quite low. Natural law is, at best, a sort of reference draft upon which “real” law might (and some would say ought) be based.

A cynical person might argue that “natural law” is an attempt to attach the authority that inheres in the term “law” to something which is remarkably un-law-like. I am more attracted to the argument that the use of the term “law” to refer to the “natural law” body of knowledge commits the natural law theorist to the understanding that no law is truly and immovably fixed, not even “real” law like the U.S. Code. It is all contingent on our understandings, our values, and the way we parse the world. That is to say, to the extent that the term “law” can encompass both “real” law and “natural” law, it is not an acknowledgement of natural law’s strengths but of real law’s weaknesses.

Of course, the natural law theorist is often committed to the idea that his knowledge is not contingent but objective, but this is not a problem unique to the natural law theorist. There are any number of people and philosophies which are willing to argue that their perspective is the view from nowhere. Why is it so important to couch opinions as facts?

This brings me back, again, to my great perplex: why are foundationalists so eager to do 99% of the work of nihilists?

gauche
21 Dec 09