Vivienne by Emmalea Russo
Romantic mysticism against over-digitalization
In my review of Rachel Haywire’s National Futurist Gallery Launch party, I talked about “materialism” as a point of agreement between liberals and communists. This is a general point, obviously, and is useful in as far as it roughly indicates the foundation of belief within left-liberalism. In order to be more specific, I need to paraphrase R.R. Reno’s thesis from Return of the Strong Gods, which is roughly as follows. Contemporary Liberalism is a reaction to humanitarian crises during the World War II period. Many important thinkers felt that popular obsession with ethnicity, nation, class, and religion lead to the apocalyptic scenarios in Europe and Russia; therefore, society should reduce the relevance of these ideas in order to maintain peace.
Walter Benjamin wasn’t the only person attempting to reframe theory in terms that would be useless for “processing data in the fascist sense.” Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, was interested in a similar project. His original thesis was that for a theory to gain scientific acceptance, it had to be testable and ideally “falsifiable,” which is to say: a theory must make predictions that can be proved false. For example, the claim that water boils at 85 degrees fahrenheit is a falsifiable claim: you can test it and prove it wrong. In contrast, the claim, “God is love” is non-falsifiable: how can you test it? Popper’s “Principle of Falsification”–introduced in 1934’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery–follows from his critique of the widely held view that science is the process of accumulated inductive reasoning–i.e., observation: every fish anyone has ever seen lives in the water; conclusion: all fish live in water. Instead, Popper argues science is a process of making guesses and then rigorously testing those guesses. Much earlier, David Hume, in a number of written works, had drawn attention to problems in inductive reasoning–roughly: just because something usually happens does not mean it will always happen: just because the sun rose every day for the past million years doesn’t mean it will rise tomorrow. Therefore, philosophers and scientists were interested in an alternative model, one with a stronger foundation than inductivism, for scientific reasoning. As falsificationism gained credibility among scientists, it spread to associated communities: seculars, liberals, academics, leftists, etc. That latter group–leftists–is important for Popper, who then trained his crosshairs on Historicism, the belief–held by, among others, Hegel and Marx–that history behaves according to fixed, knowable laws.
It’s worth stopping for a moment to talk about problems associated with Historicism as interpreted by Soviet communists. In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, he describes the two moral poles.
There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community—which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb.
He further illustrates the Historicist moral paradigm in an interesting story.
“Why did you execute Bogrov?”
“Why? Because of the submarine question,” said Ivanov. “It concerned the problem of tonnage—an old quarrel, the beginnings of which must be familiar to you. Bogrov advocated the construction of submarines of large tonnage and a long range of action. The Party is in favour of small submarines with a short range. You can build three times as many small submarines for your money as big ones. Both parties had valid technical arguments. The experts made a big display of technical sketches and algebraic formulae; but the actual problem lay in quite a different sphere. Big submarines mean: a policy of aggression, to further world revolution. Small submarines mean coastal defense—that is, self-defense and postponement of world revolution. The latter is the point of view of No. 1, and the Party.
“Bogrov had a strong following in the Admiralty and amongst the officers of the old guard. It would not have been enough to put him out of the way; he also had to be discredited. A trial was projected to unmask the partisans of big tonnage as saboteurs and traitors. We had already brought several little engineers to the point of being willing to confess publicly to whatever we liked. But Bogrov wouldn’t play the game. He declaimed up to the very end of big tonnage and world revolution. He was two decades behind the times. He would not understand that the times are against us, that Europe is passing through a period of reaction, that we are in the hollow of a wave and must wait until we are lifted by the next. In a public trial he would only have created confusion amongst the people. There was no other way possible than to liquidate him administratively. Would not you have done the same thing in our position?”
The idea here is basic utilitarian moral philosophy: the life of Bogrov is not worth the confusion and disagreement he creates by continuing to live. The context, though, is the Historicist interpretation of morality: Bogrov’s interpretation of history was wrong; therefore, he was morally wrong. The route to this alternative moral paradigm, which Marxist economic ideas were simply in service of, is roughly social constructionism: morality has no basis in “eternal truth”; instead, it is the result of social conditioning–and can therefore be changed by changing society. This moral relativism, which is the unmooring of morality from truth, is what was objectionable to conservatives and Christians. For Popper, the problem was Historicists founded their own claims on unfalsifiable assertions.
Ultimately, Historicism–and the communist project per se–became discredited, for various reasons, in the minds of formerly sympathetic European and American intellectuals. In the place of the former communist-sympathizing tendency of progressives, the anti-dogmatic Liberalism of, say, George Orwell became more common: Communism, Nazism, and reactionary Christianity/Islam were all based on dogmatic, unfalsifiable premises. For instance, here’s
the other day on the subject of developing his own theory of fascism.But in order to remain a piece of viable intellectual work rather than something cooked up by a crackpot or demagogue, a theory must have certain empirical conditions where it could be falsified and abandoned.
Unless a claim is falsifiable, it is “cooked up by a crackpot or demagogue.”
The alternative to totalitarianism was Popper’s “Open Society,” in which an ethos of critical inquiry and freedom of expression would, at minimum, expose unfalsifiable claims to rigorous scrutiny. This kind of “open” culture would maintain an inherently Liberal frame and exclude dogmatic authoritarianism from gaining credibility. The sobriety of the scientific process, moreover, required incremental progress, rather than revolutionary change.
For the record, I think that there is a lot to like about this program; in fact, the thesis of this substack is basically to synthesize Catholicism and Popper. But, there are real problems with narrow falsificationism. For instance, something like 50,000-70,000 or more people–including communists, skeptics, journalists, scientists, government officials, and so on–were drawn to a field in Fátima, Portugal in 1917 by the promise of a miracle made by three children said to be in direct communication with the Virgin Mary. Apparently tens of thousand of these people–I haven’t read all of their interviews–reported that the sun danced and zig zagged, that it emitted brilliant yellows, blues, reds, and greens, which tinted the surrounding earth, and that the sun then plunged down towards the earth before returning to its position in the sky. The Catholic Church refers to this event as The Miracle of the Sun.
Here is a famous description of the event from eyewitness Dr. José Maria de Almeida Garrett, professor at the Faculty of Sciences of Coimbra, Portugal.
Suddenly I heard the uproar of thousands of voices, and I saw the whole multitude spread out in that vast space at my feet…turn their backs to that spot where, until then, all their expectations had been focused, and look at the sun on the other side. I turned around, too, toward the point commanding their gaze and I could see the sun, like a very clear disc, with its sharp edge, which gleamed without hurting the sight. It could not be confused with the sun seen through a fog (there was no fog at that moment), for it was neither veiled nor dim. At Fatima, it kept its light and heat, and stood out clearly in the sky, with a sharp edge, like a large gaming table. The most astonishing thing was to be able to stare at the solar disc for a long time, brilliant with light and heat, without hurting the eyes or damaging the retina. [During this time], the sun’s disc did not remain immobile, it had a giddy motion, [but] not like the twinkling of a star in all its brilliance for it spun round upon itself in a mad whirl.
During the solar phenomenon, which I have just described, there were also changes of color in the atmosphere. Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything was becoming darkened. I looked first at the nearest objects and then extended my glance further afield as far as the horizon. I saw everything had assumed an amethyst color. Objects around me, the sky and the atmosphere, were of the same color. Everything both near and far had changed, taking on the color of old yellow damask. People looked as if they were suffering from jaundice and I recall a sensation of amusement at seeing them look so ugly and unattractive. My own hand was the same color.
This event is non-falsifiable: we can’t run the experiment again, and I’ll never convince adamant skeptics that it happened. But, I will note two important points: (1.) there are innumerable reports of miracles and other spiritual events in history, and (2.) because it doesn’t have a rigorous process for interpreting, among many other qualitative phenomena, events like the Miracle of the Sun, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Kibeho, and so on, blinkered falsificationism is, like Historicism, impoverished; it is too closed in its posture to provide a compelling system for interpreting human life and history, and this has been a problem for a long time: qualitative reality has not stopped existing because leftists and Liberals began reducing it to a system of “social constructs.” The vibe shift you’re sensing is the release of strain as this foundational and false assumption is subducted in the minds of important Liberals.
The important question is, Why has there been a release of strain recently? Why not 20 years ago? My thesis is two-part. First, in the past 20 years, people have had glimpses of what a totally digital life (Ready Player One, Zuckerburg’s Metaverse, etc.) would be like, and revulsion to this possibility has triggered the search for a more natural seeming worldview, one that grounds man in nature instead of the computer. This over-digitalization has inflamed a Romantic tendency, which regards narrowly rationalist constructs with suspicion. Now, Popper’s “Open Society” Liberals find themselves exploring non-falsifiable claims via a Romantic turn away from over-digitalization: coders commune with backyard chickens; girlbosses follow tradwives on instagram, and so on. At the same time, widespread private uneasiness with transgenderism has revealed to many Liberals with progressive tendencies that mere social construction is an inadequate explanation for non-falsifiable propositions, like gender identity: that is, many people who approve of socially liberal ideas–like drug legalization, gay marriage, abortion, and anti-racism–are unconvinced by claims that gender is merely a social construct; this exercise has shown them that social conditioning is possibly not the source of moral, biological, anthropological, or metaphysical truth. To put the entire thesis succinctly, Liberals are now more open to exploring qualitative reality, and within this frame, they also see that there are wrong answers to non-falsifiable propositions, like gender. These Liberals are suddenly less alarmed by worldviews that take traditional, affirmative positions on non-falsifiable truth claims.
One piece of evidence supporting this thesis is
’s Vivienne, which explores mystical surrealism against a backdrop of over-digitalization. All of the ingredients are present: the artist as hero, reverence for Catholic spiritual practice, bloodthirsty social media cancellation mobs, inhuman life extension technology, and so on. But, Russo is a surprising candidate for reactionary fiction. Looking at her biography, one sees that she has published in a number of conventional (read: friendly to postmodern constructivism) arts and literary venues: Artforum, BOMB, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Granta. In 2018, she published a work of poetry through “Futurepoem books,” whose most recent guest editor describes “themself”(?) as a “poet from Brooklyn and a transsexual without direction”; her next book was published by “Book*hug Press,” which dutifully notes that it seeks “work by BIPOC writers, LGBTQIA2S+ writers, Deaf and disabled writers, and women, and we strongly support feminist writing.” Clearly, she’s familiar with the cultural climate of Ronald Brownstein’s “coalition of the ascendant.” What, then, explains her migration to Arcade and its promise of–at Sov House, the very pit of literary reaction–“something to offend everyone”?
I think the answer is her Romantic temperment, and in this review, I will show that Russo’s Romanticism puts her into conflict with the primary philosophical commitments of contemporary Leftism (politics over art) and Liberalism (blinkered falsificationism). Because these commitments are so fundamental to contemporary Leftism and Liberalism, Russo’s violations position her–maybe uncomfortably–on the right.
As I mentioned in my review of Haywire’s party, Walter Benjamin saw mysticism as an onramp to fascism; therefore, he turned to mechanical reproduction to decouple art from aura, defined as a work’s authenticity, its presence in time, place, and history, all of which create a kind of charismatic affect: looking up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is different from looking at the picture on the wiki. To me, aura sounds almost like the earliest inklings of transcendence, which Roger Scruton defines in a kind of not-specific-enough way, but a way that is worth bringing up.
[Transcendence] is the concentration on the empirical reality which at a certain point flips from mere sensory understanding to a vision…of its communicating something to me… It’s not just there as an inert object before you, and that sense of the transcendent is like discovering yourself in a mirror, seeing in the world as a whole that thing in you that you could never identify in words…the subject which is looking at it.
The important point is this idea of the brain changing over from “mere sensory understanding” to a “vision,” which implies a kind of transfiguration of consciousness, in which you see, in the art object, something more than canvass, paint, or even the image on the canvass, but “yourself” as if in a mirror for the first time. Of course, you don’t literally see yourself, but the experience is more than simply looking at a picture, and in the course of this aesthetic transaction, you have gone beyond the limit of empirical reality. Later in the same interview, Scruton rephrases his concept as, “When the world ceases to be a mere accumulation of facts and, as it were, addresses you.”
Benjamin’s aura is not Scruton’s transcendence, but both transcendence and aura are non-falsifiable qualia, and both are associated with art. For Communists and Popperites, aura and transcendence are problematic; they’re associated with fascism and totalitarianism: worst of all, they’re potent. So, the job is to excise or marginalize them.
Some of us object: not only are aura and transcendence important, but worldviews that exclude or reduce to frivolous social construction immaterial reality have a blinkered perspective. Russo, I think, shares this opinion, and I say that because of the moral paradigm I sense in her book. In real life, she’s an astrologer, and I’m sure she’s committed to astrology as an art and maybe even as a religion. But instead of Pagan moral ideas, I sense in Vivienne a Romantic moral system, which above all regards overly rationalist and materialist worldviews with suspicion. There are other components, too: high status awarded to artists, visionaries, and people who can form powerful relationships with animals and nature more broadly; also, there’s a fixation on dreams, suicide, and depression. In contrast, materialistic city people tend to be bad guys: they lack spiritual depth or vision. In this story, which is an internet novel with Romantic tendencies, we see that text-based internet personalities, who use and abuse artists, are another kind of anti-Romantic antagonist.
To get a sense of what I mean, I want to show how Russo renders internet people. The book begins with what I presume is a post on X.
MAUD
@Maudlin005
Disturbed to hear that @NATMUSEUM is includ-
ing the harmful work of Vivienne Volker in their
upcoming group show of Forgotten Surrealist
Women6:00am December 12
21 shares 553 likes
The next six pages contain a deluge of further commentary, some of which is inquisitive, but much of which is negative: “Volker is criminal,” “vivienne volker killed wilma lang,” “@NATMUSEUM address this…,” “vile artist,” “but now shes a HAG…” The eighth page contains an “Open Letter Concerning the Work and Life of Vivienne Volker,” in which the “Coalition for Artistic Harm Reduction (CAHR)” demands that the museum remove Volker’s name and work from the schedule of an upcoming exhibition. There is a list of unacceptable triggers associated with her work, which include “Abortion,” “Anxiety,” “Bones,” “Transmisia,” and “Violence.” In contrast to the Romantic love of intuition and dreams, the letter is precise and clinical; the list of triggers appears in alphabetical order, centered on the page: the mode of persuasion is logic. On the next page, there is more social media commentary; then on the next page, we read an excerpt from the museum’s announcement to “redact” Volker’s work from Forgotten Women Surrealists. Again, the prose is sober and logical, and it is followed by two pages of frenzied social media commentary. In the self righteousness of the multitude and the bloodlessness of the formal statements, we have a sense of the forces arrayed against Romantics.
Returning to Russo’s biography during the years 2018 and 2019–apex years for social media cancellation campaigns–one senses what might have transpired. Presumably, Russo had to promote her work during this period, which would have required engagement with social media; specifically, it would have required engagement with the circles targeted by progressive publishing houses. Even after many of the most worthy targets of #MeToo rage had been cut down, this cohort–progressive readers of small press poetry and fiction–remained roughly a feminist incarnation of the Glanton Gang, butchering anyone they could grab hold of. It’s easy to imagine a dedicated artist and Romantic–a poet and astrologer like Russo–identifying with harmless, aged artists–such as now-dead, but then-wheelchair bound portrait artist Chuck Close–whose lives and reputations were brutalized as this cohort celebrated. This phase of progressive internet mania was only a precursor to the George Floyd period, in which progressive activists and media targeted public, semi-public, and even private citizens on the thinnest of pretexts.
With these periods of cultural history in mind, it’s easy to imagine sensitive Romantics seeing the entire digital communications landscape as the enforcement mechanism of the larger techno-capitalist enterprise that seeks to homogenize global culture: kiss the ring of inclusive global techno-capital, or else. Indeed in Vivienne, the cancel mob targeting the protagonist appears again and again as a kind of Greek Chorus, commenting on the story as it happens, but also creating oppositional plot tension. To be sure, there are some interesting and supportive voices within the chorus, but largely there is a negative charge associated with this group. This negative characterization alone puts Russo into conflict with Leftists, especially postmodern constructivists, like Andrea Long Chu. A book like this–literary, internet-based, but in conflict with progressive politics–finding a market at all, I’d argue, is evidence of a vibe shift, but there’s more: Russo has been able to promote a book like this; she’s been able to speak in and around New York City without expectation of being interrupted or shouted down. If you’re me, a conservative Catholic interested in emerging literary fiction, these are tidal wave events, triggered by the release of strain as social constructionism and falsificationism are subducted–and subsequently melted–by a significant portion of Liberal opinion, which is no longer an ally to Leftist rampage politics. Those committed to postmodern constructivism will frame this shift as fascism or trans-erasure, but it’s not simple bigotry: it is the gradual development of a vague, but firm sense–among readers of, say, Pamela Paul, John Chait, and even Sam Harris–that there are roughly “eternal truths” that exist beneath social conditioning.
With Leftist rampage politics in mind, it’s worth introducing another villain: the edgy gallerist, “Lars,” who chooses to show Volker’s work in order to capitalize on her notoriety. Within the context of this review, he’s important for two reasons: (1.) he’s possibly an anti-feminist totem, and (2.) he and others approach ancient and medieval Catholic spirituality as an almost Oriental (in the Saïd sense) faith tradition, which I think is in sync with an element of the larger vibe shift.
First, let me introduce him–here he is on the way to meet Vivienne in Pennsylvania.
Cruising through the reek of a Jersey oil refinery, he takes his first swig of coffee and plays the podcast, a show called WAIT, WHAT?, where Brad and Charlie, two bicostal elites, talk about culture. As they gab about holiday plans and grooming habits, Lars imagines a pastoral meeting between himself and Vivienne wherein they sit for tea inside a mansion surrounded by rolling hills, an aged Great Dane snoozing at their feet, and Velour offering refills. In his detailed visualization, which he already played in his head once while pumping the pedals on the stationary bike, Vivienne agrees to do the show right away and he can get back in his car and return to New York. When he tells her he wants to ride the momentum of the internet debacle and do a livestreamed walk-through as soon as tomorrow, she accepts right away. He’ll visualize a few more times. He needs to manifest this show. His team has already started dropping hints to the public.
This is a portrait of–as far as I can tell–standard character within the New York City gallery scene: a kind of metrosexual podcast bro, who “needs to manifest this show.” He has an almost girlish misconception of what lies beyond the city, and thinks in terms of internet marketing. This whole chapter is funny because of the way Russo treats this character: he frets over his macros and considers how raw milk sold roadside will affect his microbiome and so on; you sense that she likes putting him into unexpected situations, like when he arrives and the Volker family are handling the leg of a neighbor’s chihuahua that had been eaten by a hawk. Still, he is a bad guy at first; he plans a headline grabbing stunt: when Vivienne appears at the opening, someone will throw a brick, shattering the plate glass window, which will create hysteria and grab social media attention: insane activist attacks cancelled artist at opening. Serendipitously, an actual activist appears and throws a brick through the window before their guy can do it–(another editorial intrusion, I’d argue). Vivienne is badly injured, and Lars joins the Volker family in the hospital where he seems genuinely contrite as he cries at her bedside. Crucially, Russo describes the following, from the perspective of Velour, Vivienne’s daughter and mother of Vesta, 7.
Back in the room, she observes Vesta reaching for Lars’s hand, their fingers lying entwined atop Vivienne. They remain like this for some time.
I highlighted this section of text and annotated with a question mark because, to my admittedly bourgeois sensibility, it borders on inappropriate: why is this adult male stranger holding hands with an unrelated seven year old girl? I would soon learn that this was foreshadowing: the next and final chapter, 11 years in the future, finds Vesta (18) and Lars (48) married. The reader is left to imagine the years before their marriage, and in my imagination, it’s impossible to make this relationship acceptable: even at the “legal” age of 18, I think a person is not mature enough to enter into marriage with someone 30 years her senior. I know I am not alone in this judgement: one of the more minor stars within the constellation of #MeToo offenses was the so-called “age gap” relationship. I bring this one up as evidence of my theory that Russo might have been shocked by cancel culture practiced as bloodsport by so many progressive and feminist literary personalities: if she appears sanguine about an age gap relationship like this one–and indeed, Vesta is the dominant partner–she, Russo, would be out of sync with many progressives, especially progressive women. Once upon a time, that was a dangerous proposition for a literary writer, but because of these deeper changes in Liberal opinion, the judgement of Left thinkers is in question: they seem wrong. Therefore, writers like Russo are freer to produce literary works that transgress Left–in this case, feminist–scruples. Once again: vibe shift.
Another important detail about Lars is his relationship to Catholicism within a broader array of Romantic anti-rationalist mysticism. Presumably, he’s not Catholic: he doesn’t pray rosaries and go to confession, and he apparently believes in New Age spiritual concepts, like “manifesting.” Early in the book, we learn that,
Ever since he’d read Marguerite Porete’s mystical book for which she got burned at the literal stake in fourteenth century Paris, The Mirror of Simple Souls, he hasn’t been able to shake the notion of growing a soul–a simple soul. He was immediately drawn to the book, its obscure, medieval instructions and stern words about annihilation of the self and direct union with the divine.
Within Vivienne, references to Catholic and Christian mystics, like Porete–and later, the desert fathers–sit apparently comfortably beside Pagan mystical ideas. For instance in another scene, Vivienne considers her upcoming art show in bed one morning. Looking at a statue of the Virgin Mary, she prays a Hail Mary. A few minutes later, she descends a staircase, seeing her granddaughter, and has the following thoughts.
Velour is earth. Little Vesta, on the other hand, is air. Her granddaughter has a way of seeming to be everywhere–vapor of Vesta fills the house and makes bearable the charged space between Vivienne and her daughter. Vesta is like Hermes, a quick and curious messenger sent to commune between them, between the house and the world, between this world and the other ones.
Immediately, there are the Pagan spiritual ideas of a person being “earth” or “air,” of a person being like Hermes; there is the idea of a person “seeming to be everywhere.” Russo ends this section with a kind of hypnotic meter and repetitive syntax, which suggests almost an incantation: “between them, between the house and the world, between this world and the other ones,” that final idea–this and “other” worlds–being clearly speculative, possibly spiritual. In the Romantic frame, Christianity, especially Catholicism, could appear as a set of strictures that bind the spirit; in techno-modernity, it becomes another stronghold in the war against the reign of rationalism. In this way, Lars finds Catholic mysticism almost as Psychedelic-Americans found Zen Buddhism: as a kind of Orientalist antidote to industrialism and “the machine.” In this way, Lars mimics another trend that I think is a part of the larger vibe shift: migration towards Catholicism (and Eastern Orthodoxy) as a shelter from relentless computational rationalism.
Finally, it’s worth remarking on some of the aesthetic qualities within Vivienne. Here’s an example one dream.
A clown dressed like her father hovers above a table, an erect cock shooting from its smooth exterior and dripping something–blood, paint, semen. Chairs are flipped upside-down on the table like someone’s about to clean. And a woman sits alone covered in bird feathers, a beak for a mouth. She runs her wings over the surface. If you looked in the window at Velour from the tree with the Lost Dog sign, you might see a mound of white muddy fabric slumped over a flat silver brick, a few stray feathers falling upon her like snow. The sun is low, only a few days away from the year’s darkest day, which Velour looks forward to. The day the sun stops.
In other dreams or visions, faces melt, piles of bodies block traffic, and so on, and then here’s a description of an art display.
On screen: an image of one of Bellmer’s dolls wearing a garment by Vivienne. A steel-hooped cage crinoline, naked. Tumorous protuberances and shiny rolls visible through the see-through exoskeleton. The crinoline extends the doll–making the form even more odd. Several intestine-shaped boas with real bird feathers and human hair wrap around the doll’s torso.
In order to write these reviews, I read the book and make annotations; then, I review the annotations and organize them into sections in a Google doc. Far and away, the category with the most annotations–26–is the “Bizarre/satanic/morbid” section, beating the 15 listed under “Dreamy/spiritual experience/intuition (flight from reason).” This book contains a lot of bizarre, grotesque, and/or almost demonic imagery, and I can’t shake the feeling that there is something spiritually sick at its heart. Because of these images, and their collocation with Catholic ideas, I feel like it’s important to distinguish Catholic and Pagan mysticism. In The Drama of Atheist Humanism, the book said to have inspired the Second Vatican Council, Henri de Lubac writes in his refutation of Neitzsche about the difference between what he calls Pagan myth and Christian mysticism. He says,
There is a sacredness of myth which, like vapor rising from the earth, emanates from infrahuman regions; and there is the sacredness of mystery, which is like peace descending from the heavens. The one links us with Nature and attunes us to her rhythm but also enslaves us to her fatal powers; the other is the gift of the spirit that makes us free. One finds its embodiment in symbols that man molds as he pleases, and into which he projects his terrors and his desires; the symbols of the other are received from on high by man who, in contemplating them, discovers the secret of his own nobility. In concrete terms, there is the pagan myth and the Christian mystery (91).
There is something sacred about nature and the cosmos, which, he later says is “full of ‘vestiges’ of divinity.” He affirms that there is a “mystique of the earth.” But, this mystique “needs to be Christianized. When it aspires to reign alone, it is no longer even terrestrial; the mark of the Spirit of Evil is upon it.” What he means is that one worships a bear because one worships strength and aggression and fearlessness, and one worships strength and aggression and fearlessness because one is scared of death, but this moral arrangement puts the weak and starving self at the center of morality; it puts passions at the center of morality, but passions and self are not human: animals have passions; reason is what distinguishes humans from animals. Therefore, what he means by Christianizing the mystique of the earth is that reason needs to govern passion, and reason needs to be subordinate to divine law. The question becomes, How can we be sure of divine law? C.S. Lewis answers this in Mere Christianity when he describes an interaction with a “hard-bitten” Royal Airforce Officer, who eschews theology. The man says, I’m paraphrasing, All of these formulas and laws about God are ridiculous. I’ve felt God: in the desert at night, and the experience of God is so much more powerful than this pedantic yammer.
Here’s Lewis’s response.
I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.
Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God-experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion — all about feeling God in nature, and so on — is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.
The sea Lewis describes here is unfalsifiable, but it is real: if you have ever had a transcendental experience, you know that there is a reality beyond the limits of empiricism, and for most people art and nature are the triggers for transcendental experience. But, instead of a crude Romantic or fascist reaction to people like Benjamin or Popper, who seek to eliminate or marginalize the experience of transcendence altogether, the goal should be to simply expand the recently narrowed conception of reason. Therefore, to respond directly to
, who worries—admittedly, with good reason—that the rightwing project is to reject modernity: that isn’t the case. Here’s Pope Benedict XVI on this subject in 2006.This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us.
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The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
We are interested in a more inclusive conception of reason. Is that too much to ask?
This is a fantastic piece