The Mystic and the Muse

The Mystic and the Muse:

Mr. Douthat, whom I first encountered only last week, has a most interesting piece on mysticism.

Mysticism is dying, and taking true religion with it. Monasteries have dwindled. Contemplative orders have declined. Our religious leaders no longer preach the renunciation of the world; our culture scoffs at the idea. The closest most Americans come to real asceticism is giving up chocolate, cappuccinos, or (in my own not-quite-Francis-of-Assisi case) meat for lunch for Lent.

This, at least, is the stern message of Luke Timothy Johnson, writing in the latest issue of the Catholic journal Commonweal. As society has become steadily more materialistic, Johnson declares, our churches have followed suit, giving up on the ascetic and ecstatic aspects of religion and emphasizing only the more worldly expressions of faith. Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

Yet by some measures, mysticism’s place in contemporary religious life looks more secure than ever. Our opinion polls suggest that we’re encountering the divine all over the place. In 1962, after a decade-long boom in church attendance and public religiosity, Gallup found that just 22 percent of Americans reported having what they termed “a religious or mystical experience.” Flash forward to 2009, in a supposedly more secular United States, and that number had climbed to nearly 50 percent.

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever.
He starts thus, but ends better: because his ending has a notion in it of what a mystic might really be.
...that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.
What would that mean? None other than that "the heaviest hind may easily come silently and suddenly upon me in a lane," as Saint Mary is reported to have said to King Alfred. It has its clearest expression in the myths of Arthur, where a knight hears a bell deep in a forest, and follows its sound to whatever adventure it leads; or he sees a white stag, and takes the chase to whatever destruction or rebirth it brings him. The mystic is at the root of the tales of Arthur, more than elsewhere.

It is, in other words, that singluar devotion to the chase: to the quest. It is that which leads you beyond the fields that you know, and to strange places that may remake you. That way lies Elfland; or stranger kingdoms, yet.
...the Red Cross Knight climbed with the hermit to the top of the hill and looked out across the valley. There against the evening sky they saw a mountaintop that touched the highest heavens. It was crowned with a glorious palace, sparkling like stars and circled with walls and towers...
To which St. George, in service to the Faerie Queene, might not yet ascend: for he had deeds to do in this world.

People scoff at these stories, as they do -- a bit -- at C. S. Lewis when he wrote in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe of a professor who chided the children to use "logic!" when presented with the impossible. Lucy, the honest child, was the one who spoke of something that could not be; and her honesty should be a guide to the value of her testimony in the face of impossible things as well as with possible ones. In other words, we might yield up our ideas of what is possible in the face of the word of an honest woman, or even a very honest girl.

Last week I attended a lecture on metaphysical modal logic by Dr. E. J. Lowe, who is a fine man and a learned. Modal logic treats what is necessary and what is possible in the world. The good doctor asserts that what is possible and necessary can be understood by grasping the essential truth of the thing being examined; if you know what a thing essentially is, you will know what is necessary for it to exist, and what it may possibly do.

He mentioned bronze sculptures as an example. A sculpture is different from a lump of bronze in several ways; one of them is that its form may not change much if it is to continue being a sculpture. He contrasted a sculpture of Socrates, versus shooting two cannons full of bronze so that -- for an instant! -- they happened to form a similar picture of Socrates in the air.

I had a chance to question him. He agreed to my suggestion that one of the essential qualities of a sculpture was that it was put into a form by an artist (or, if you follow Aristotle, that a form was put into it). I asked him to imagine a case where the two cannons were full of hot bronze, being fired by Jackson Pollack. He takes the largest fused piece, and puts it on a pedestal, calling it his sculpture.

Randomness is not form: it is, logically, the opposite of form. Therefore, we are either mistaken in our definition of what is essential to sculpture... or our modal logic is lying to us about what is necessary and possible in this world.

The good doctor argued that we should simply refrain from calling this "sculpture," in order to preserve the definition. That is the one unsatisfying answer. Both of the alternatives proposed are true: human definitions cannot really capture the world, and therefore a logic based on human definitions cannot tell us what is necessary, nor what is possible.

Besides, Pollack's proposed definition of sculpture is contained within the definition: if sculpture means "having form," then it doesn't mean "without form." Pollack could draw the meaning from the negation of the definition. Modal logic, then, becomes not a proof, but a dare. "We say this cannot be done: prove us wrong." And so we ought to, if we can!

Preserving the concept at the expense of our actual experience is a lie. It is what Edward Abbey called "Indoor Philosophy": it defies the world, because the world won't live up to our ideas about how the world should be. Yet the world remains: and the very honest girl is honest whether she reports the mailman, or an angel.



UPDATE: Related is this article on certain philosophers versus Darwin's evolutionary biology. Philosophy is very powerful, and I'm sure all of you know how devoted I am to the art; but you should always start your philosophy with experience and evidence. You should never start simply with concepts, and then instruct the world that it is wrong to behave differently than your reason says it ought to do.

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