Keep the obtrusions of memory and perception and anticipation at mental arm's length. Practice the 'step back.' Rather than 'go with the flow' of centrifugal mind, examine whither it tends. To a place worth visiting? Harder still, well-nigh impossible, is to examine whence it comes. Swimming upstream to the hidden Source of the stream is much harder than impeding the outward flow. Content yourself for now with mental continence, an analog of, and probably impossible without, sexual continence. The practice of non-attachment is recommended by the major wisdom schools in the East and the West.
Category: Spiritual Exercises
Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati
Vito Caiati writes,
. . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such a view. I find it troubling that the necessary grace would be restricted to a relatively small portion of humanity, while the rest of us remain “lost in the diaspora of sense objects.” Is it your assessment that few are called to a higher state of consciousness, or is it that the call is more generally available but drowned out by the distraction fits to which the human mind inevitably falls prey?
What I want to say is that no one is likely to commit himself to a serious meditation practice with all that it entails unless he has had certain experiences which, phenomenologically, exhibit a gift-character and that point to a depth-dimension below or beyond surface mind. By that I mean experiences that seem as if granted by a Grantor external to the consciousness of the meditator whether or not, in reality, they are grantings or vouchsafings of such a Grantor. (One example of such an experience is that of a sudden, unintended, descent into a blissful state of mental silence.) This formulation is neutral as between the Pali Buddhist denial of divine grace and the Christian affirmation of it.
But even on this neutral formulation, Caiati's problem arises. Small is the number of those who are capable of having these experiences, and smaller still the number of those who actually have them. And among those who actually have them, still smaller is the number of those who set foot on the spiritual path and keep it up. And among the latter only some of them, and maybe none of them, attain the Goal. We cannot be sure that Prince Siddartha attained it. It would seem to be a very bad arrangement indeed if salvation were to be available only to a tiny number of people.
I think that this is a really serious problem for Buddhism. I have met met many a Buddhist meditator, but none of them struck me as enlightened. And the same goes for the Stoics and Skeptics I have met: none of them struck me as having attained ataraxia. The vast, vast majority of Buddhist meditators will die unenlightened. Unless you believe in rebirth, that's it for them.
The same problem does not arise for Christianity. In Christianity, unlike in Buddhism, there is no salvation without a divine Savior, the agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The Savior doesn't do all the work, but the work that remains to be done can be done by any ordinary person who sincerely accepts Jesus Christ as his savior and who lives in accordance with that acceptance. Faith is the main thing, not knowledge, insight, or realization. There is no need for special experiences. Perhaps we can say that the soteriology of the East is noetic, that of the Middle East pistic. But I should immediately add that contemplative practices and mystical theology play a large role in Christianity with the exception of Protestant Christianity.
As I see it, faith is inferior to knowledge and any knowledge of spiritual things we can acquire here below can only serve to bolster our faith. Speaking for myself, given my skeptical mind, philosophical aptitude, and scientific education, I would probably not take theism seriously at all if it were not for a range of mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that I have had. They, together with arguments for theism and arguments against metaphysical naturalism, incline me toward theism to such an extent that that I live as if it is true. 'As if it is true' does not imply that it is not true; it signals my not knowing whether or not it is true.
But you may be of a different opinion and perhaps you have reasons that justify your opinion. No one KNOWS the ultimate answer. Toleration, therefore, is needed, the toleration of those who respect the principle of toleration, and therefore, not Sharia-supporting Muslims or other anti-Enlightenment types such as throne-and-altar reactionaries. What is needed are toleration and the defense of religious liberty which along with free speech and other sacred American rights are under assault by the Democrat Party in the USA. This hard-Left party needs to taste bitter defeat. And so, as strange as it may sound, if you cherish the free life of the mind and the free life of the spirit, you must vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020.
Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation
There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique. You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now. You have to assume something like what St Augustine assumes when he writes,
Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.
The problem, of course, is that few if any will assume that truth dwells in the inner man unless they have already experienced or sensed the self's interiority. For the intentionality of mind, its outer-directedness, conspires against the experience. Ordinary mind is centri-fugal: in flight towards objects and away from its source and center. This is so much so that it led Jean-Paul Sartre to the view that there is no self as source, that conscious mind just is this "wind blowing towards objects," a wind from nowhere. Seeking itself as an object among objects, centrifugal mind comes up with nothing. The failure of David Hume's quest should come as no surprise. A contemporary re-play of this problematic is found in the work of Panayot Butchvarov. The Bulgarian philosopher takes the side of Hume and Sartre. See my Butchvarov category.
Ordinary mind is fallen mind: it falls against its objects, losing itself in their multiplicity and scattering itself in the process. The unity of mind is lost in the diaspora of sense objects. To recuperate from this self alienation one needs to re-collect and re-member. Anamnesis! The need for remembrance, however, cannot be self-generated: the call to at-one-ment has to come from beyond the horizon of centrifugal mind. One has to have already some sense of the Unseen Order, a natural and innate sense, not an intellectual opinion, a sense of "the existence of a reality superior to that of the senses." (Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, p. 43.)
My conclusion is that no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of a certain grace, a certain free granting ab extra. (Here I go beyond Pali Buddhism which leaves no place for grace.) He must be granted a glimpse of the inner depth of the self. But not only this. He must also be granted a willingness to honor and not dismiss this fleeting intimation, but instead center his life around the quest for that which it reveals.
I would say that this also holds for the Buddhist whose official doctrine disallows grace and 'other-power.' Supposedly, the Tathagata's last injunction as he lay dying was that we should be lamps unto ourselves. Unfortunately, we are not the source of our own light.
I conjecture that what Buddha was driving toward in a negative way with his denials of self, permanence, and the possibility of the ultimate satisfaction of desire (anatta, anicca, dukkha) is the same as what Augustine was driving at in a positive way with his affirmations of God and the soul. Doctrinally, there is of course deep difference: doctrines display on the discursive plane where difference and diremption rule. But doctrines are "necessary makeshifts" (F. H. Bradley) that point toward the transdiscursive. Buddhists are famously open to the provisional and makeshift nature of doctrines, likening them to rafts useful for crossing the river of Samsara but useless on the far side. Christians not so much. But even Christians grant that the Word in its ineffable unity is not a verbal formulation. The unity of a sentence without which it would be a mere list of words points us back to the ineffable unity of the Word which, I am suggesting, is somehow mystically one with what the Buddha was striving for.
The depth of Buddha is toto caelo different from the superficiality of Hume and Sartre. For one thing, there was no soteriological/therapeutic intent behind Hume's reduction of the self to a mere bundle of perceptions. Secondly, it is arguable that the denial of a substantial self on the samsaric plane presupposes the Atma of the Upanishads, as Evola convincingly argues. More on this later.
Double Cultural Appropriation!
Before this morning's session on the black mat, I read from the Dhammapada. I own two copies. The copy I read from this morning has the Pali on the left and an English translation by Harischandra Kaviratna on the right. I don't know Pali grammar but I have swotted up plenty of Pali vocabulary over the years.
My point, however, is that I was feasting on insights from a tradition not my own. I am not now, and never have been, Indian. I am of Northern Italian extraction, 100%, and that makes me European. So what am I doing appropriating insights from a foreign tradition? I am feeding my soul and doing no wrong.
To appropriate is to make one's own. To appropriate is not to steal, although stealing is a form of appropriation, an illicit form. If I appropriate what you own by stealing it, then I do wrong. If I appropriate what you own by buying it from you in a mutually consensual transaction, I do no wrong. Libertarians speak of capitalist acts among consenting adults. I am not a libertarian. I merely appropriate their sound insights while rejecting their foolish notions. Critical appropriation is the name of the game. 'Critical' from Gr. krinein, to separate, distinguish, discriminate the true from the false, the prudent from the imprudent, the meaningful from the meaningless, the real from unreal, that which is conducive unto enlightenment from that which is not, and so on.
One can also appropriate, make one's own, what no one owns. I appropriate oxygen with every breath I take. I make it my own; it enters my blood; it fuels my brain; it is part and parcel of the physical substratum of spiritual production. Who owns the air? Who owns the oxygen in the air?
Who owns sunlight? I appropriate some every day. Who owns the sky, "the daily bread of the eyes"? (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Before the session on the black mat and after my reading I walked out into the Arizona early November pre-dawn darkness to gaze with wonder at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). Who owns Orion or Ursus Major?
Who owns truth?
Some races are better at finding it and expressing it, but no one owns it.
There are truths in the Dhammapada and no one owns them. Since no one owns them, they belong to all. Belonging to all, they are no one's property. They cannot be stolen. Their appropriation cannot be illicit.
My appropriation of Asian wisdom — which is Asian in that it is from the East, not Asian in that its essence is Eastern — is made possible by a SECOND form of licit cultural appropriation, namely translation. Translation is cultural appropriation! If done well, it is good.
ONE WAY TO MEDITATE. Start discursively with a verse from some noble scripture from the East or from the West, for example, verse 150 from the Dhammapada:
Here is a citadel built of bones, plastered with flesh and blood, wherein are concealed decay, death, vanity, and deceit.
Run through it, but then whittle it down to one word, death, for example, and than ask yourself; Who dies? Answer: I die! And then inquire: who or what is this 'I'?
Virile Ascesis
Julius Evola (Doctrine of Awakening, 233) preaches a virile ascesis which is neither renunciation, nor worldflight, nor inaction, nor quietism, nor mortification.
Ascesis requires detachment, but one can be both detached and active in the world. The vita activa is possible without contemptus mundi. One can even be a warrior like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita whom Lord Krishna commands to do his duty and slay the enemy but with detachment from the fruits of action. Imagine slaughtering a fellow human being with equanimity! An impossible ideal? (An ideal impossible of realization is of course no ideal at all.)
In the world but not of it. In the thick of it, but without anything sticking to you, like the lotus flower that floats on the water without getting wet.
The Trick
The trick is to maintain one's equanimity in the face of the samsaric storm. It's easy to be a monk in a monastery, but difficult ex claustro. The trick is to be in the world, and active in it, but not of it. Not easy, and perhaps impossible. Withdrawal and Weltflucht are perhaps all that some of us can ever achieve.
Post-Session Fruits of a Formal Session
The fruits of a formal meditation session sometimes come after the sitting. I sat for only about a half-hour this morning, trying with little success to let go of every thought as it arose, in search of the state void of thought at the source of thought. After I arose from the mat, however, unsought unearthly calm descended. Call it Grace. Grace graciously granted ab extra. Its coming is an advent from Elsewhere. Pali Buddhism, magnificent as it is, makes no place for it. A defect, I'd say. A point for Christianity. These are the metaphysically deepest and richest religions. They can and should learn from each other.
Companion entry: Grace
Prayer over Meditation?
This from a reader:
As a theist who meditates, would you prioritize prayer over meditation or vice versa? For example, I'm a theist; I like to run, meditate, and pray before work every day. If crammed for time, would you say that one or two are more worthwhile or more important, or that its just a matter of preference?
Also I'm using Sam Harris' Waking Up app to meditate. I generally like it but he is unrelentingly determined to get listeners to realize the illusion of the self. Would you recommend using a different resource? The app just helps me stay consistent.
One difference between prayer and meditation is that prayer can be performed instantly by the invocation of a divine name — Lord! — or very quickly by the use of a short phrase such as 'Lord, give us light!' or by the use of the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy, 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' Of course, one can repeat the Jesus Prayer as a sort of Christian mantram. If one does that, then one is engaging in a form of meditation especially if one whittles the phrase down to one word in order to achieve mental onepointedness.
Meditation, on the other hand, takes much more time: location, posture, breath, and the control of thoughts. Reining in the wild horse of the mind might consume twenty minutes or more. One can pray in any place, in any posture, and in any mental state and in any bodily condition, even under torture. Jesus prayed on the cross. Not so with meditation. So if you are pressed for time you can always pray.
Which is more important, prayer or meditation? The answer depends on what exactly is meant by these terms and what your final metaphysics is. Here, as elsewhere, terminology is fluid and a source of misunderstanding. As I understand prayer it always involves the I-Thou relation and the duality of creature and Creator. To pray is to presuppose that there is Someone who hears and can answer prayers. In petitionary prayer one addresses a petition to another Person. One asks for a mundane or spiritual benefit for oneself or for another. Inner listening, too, is a kind of prayer in which the I-Thou polarity is preserved. This listening is a kind of obeying. To hear the Word of God is to obey the Word of God. Horchen (hear, hearken), gehorchen, Gehorsam (obedience).
Meditation is an excellent propadeutic to prayer as inner listening because one cannot listen unless one is in a quiescent and receptive state. Mental quiet is the proximate goal of meditation. It is good in itself but it is also good for inner listening. No theology is required for meditation up to the point of mental quiet, but once it is achieved one can bring one's Judeo-Christian theology into it.
In classical Western theism as I understand it, Duality always has the last word and is never superseded or aufgehoben. The individual soul is never absorbed into the Godhead. The Eastern systems, by contrast, tend toward Ultimate Monism. "I am the eternal Atman." The Self of all things is who I am at bottom, and one can realize through meditation the ultimate identity of the individual self (jivatman) and the eternal Atman = Brahman). How this differs from the nirvanic obliteration of the individual self in Buddhism is a matter of dispute. Early Pali Buddhism with its anatta/anatman doctrine denies that there is any self at all, little or big. The ego or I is accordingly an illusion and the goal of meditation is to penetrate this illusion.
To answer your question, prayer is more important for a convinced orthodox Christian than meditation.
I avoid all electronics early in the morning before and during prayer and meditation. They have absolutely no place there.
As for Sam Harris, see Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion.
“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”
This is another topic that it would have been great to discuss with Dale Tuggy during his visit thereby bringing my supposed 'gnosticism' into collision with his supposed 'spiritual materialism.' The problems are very difficult and I do not claim to have the answers. The first thing and the main thing, as it seems to me, is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the issues and their difficulty.
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I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or for another, as in the case of intercessory prayer. In many of its forms petitionary prayer borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the person who prays to win the lottery. Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival. When Paul Tibbets, Jr. took off in the Enola Gay on his mission to Hiroshima in August of 1945, a Catholic priest blessed his mission, petitioning God for its success. I'll leave you to think about that.
Perhaps not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable. Some of it simply reflects, excusably, our misery and indigence. Did not Christ himself engage in it at Gethsemane? But much of it is objectionable. What then should I say about the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse petitionary prayer for material benefits?
The other five petitions in the Pater Noster are either clearly or arguably prayers for spiritual benefits. In a spiritual petition one asks, not for physical bread and such, but for things like acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity, or at least with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others.
The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.
At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural, beyond all sublunary substances, and beyond all creatures. To ask for this heavenly bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive.
For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence. So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.' A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread.
But one morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian. The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical. 'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30) What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day. On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.*
This reading also has the virtue of cohering nicely with Matthew 4:4 according to which man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Man lives, not by physical bread, but by meta-physical 'bread.'
"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day. And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it? Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian. The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance.
Addendum on the Literal and the Metaphorical
Here is a question that vexes me. Are there literal truths that cannot be stated literally but can only stated or gotten at metaphorically? Can we state literally what a man is if he is more than an animal? Or must we use metaphors?
"Man is spirit." Isn't 'spirit' a metaphor? "Man has a higher origin." 'Higher' is metaphorical. "Man is made by God in his image and likeness." Aren't 'made,' 'image,' and 'likeness' metaphors?
I once heard a crude and materialistic old man say that if man is made in God's image, then God must have a gastrointestinal tract. I tried to explain to the man that 'image' is not to be taken in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense. But I got nowhere as could have been expected: anyone who doesn't understand right away the spiritual sense of 'made in God's image' displays by that failure to understand an incapacity for instruction. It is like the student who doesn't get right away what it means to say that one proposition follows from another, and thinks that it refers to a temporal or a spatial relation.
The question is whether the spiritual sense can be spelled out literally.
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* For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without 'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.
Prayer
Do you pray for worldly benefits and boons such as bodily health and material wealth, whether for yourself or for others? Or do you pray for spiritual goods such as detachment?
Do you pray that your desires be fulfilled and your aversions avoided? Or do you you pray to get beyond desire and aversion?
I should have pressed these questions in my dialog with Dale Tuggy over the weekend. His spirituality is more 'materialistic' while mine is more 'gnostic.' I readily admit that there are problems on both sides.
Equanimity
It is quite a moral challenge these days to maintain one's equanimity while doing one's quotidian bit to battle the lunacy of the destructive Left. It's easy to be a monk in a monastery. It is rather more difficult to be one in the world.
Apologia Pro Vita Mea: A Reply to a Friendly Critic
Vito Caiati responds to yesterday's Could it be like this?
In yesterday's post, you write, “So I say: if you have the aptitude and the stamina, you live best by seeking the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters with your whole heart and mind and soul, with everything else you do subordinate to that quest and in service of it, and you keep up that quest until the hour of death, always a little out of breath, with no comfortable lounging in any dogmatic edifice, whether atheist, theist, or agnostic.”
The "always a little out of breath" bit gives my statement of a personal credo a perhaps excessively romantic and needlessly literary accent. But the questing life is the highest life for me, and not just for me. That I sincerely believe. I will add, however, that integral to an examined life is a critical examination of whether the highest life is indeed the examined life. So I am aware of the danger of erecting a dogmatic edifice of my own.
While I appreciate the intellectual and spiritual sentiment that underlies this assertion, I am troubled by two things: First, the fact, which you have acknowledged in the past, that only a minute portion of humanity possesses either the “aptitude” or “stamina” to engage in [the search for] “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.” That this is the case is beyond dispute, but why should it be so?
It is indeed beyond dispute and is further evidence that the human condition is a predicament, and a nasty one, a predicament to which there may be no good solution.
I find the question very troubling. Historical demographers estimate that between 80 and 100 billion human beings have lived and died since the origin of our species. The figure is staggering, but as staggering is the fact that all have met their ends in complete ignorance of ultimate truth.
But we don't know that, Vito. It is after all possible that when Thomas Aquinas had the mystical experience that put an end to his writing, he veridically experienced the ultimate truth and enjoyed an earthly foretaste of the Beatific Vision. And if the angelic doctor's amanuensis, Reginald, never had any such experience but believed what the master taught, and if what he taught was true, then Reginald too was in contact with the ultimate truth, not in propria persona, but "through a glass darkly," that glass being faith. And the same holds for all the millions of Christians, not to mention adherents of other religions, throughout the ages who have believed without verifying glimpses into the Unseen and also without being able to give good reasons for their belief. It may have been that all these folks were in contact with ultimate truth even if they can't be said to have known such truth in a manner to satisfy exacting modern requirements on knowledge.
Disease, hunger, violence, physical or mental infirmity, and indigence have precluded even the notion of such a search for most. The lack of a philosophical or religious inclination has precluded it for almost all of the rest. Thus, a gross and general ignorance of final matters has been and remains the lot of mankind. Something is profoundly wrong here, and the conviction that a few might have the means and inclination to diverge from the norm is, at best disquieting, and at word [worst?], questionable.
So even if an ultimate, saving truth could be discovered by a proper search, circumstances and personal inadequacy have prevented and will prevent the vast majority from ever finding it on their own. Something is indeed "profoundly wrong here." But of course this is just one more goad to the seeker's seeking.
Second, the search, whether it has taken a religious or philosophic form, has endured for thousands of years and produced no definite or even probable answers, so why continue to engage in it? The assumption appears to be that if pursued with the right attitude, sufficient dedication, and intellectual honesty, it will yield something of this “ultimate truth.” But is it not the case that all the evidence weighs against this belief?
The problem is not that no definite answers have been produced, but that there are too many of them, they contradict one another on key points, and that this is good reason to be skeptical of any particular answer. To add to the trouble, what I just said will be denied by many intelligent and sincere philosophers. They will insist that their worldview is either true or more likely to be true than any other, and that the plethora of mutually incompatible worldviews is no decent argument to the contrary. But this too is just part of the predicament we are in, a predicament that the spiritually sensitive find intolerable and seek a way out of.
I am not saying that one is not entitled to devote oneself to this search, but I do not understand the conviction that it a worthwhile pursuit. All sorts of scientific questions remain unresolved, some for hundreds of years, but in approaching them, we are encouraged by the signs of small progress that have been made. We have no such intellectual incentives in the matters of which you speak. Now, I understand that we have not been able to reach any sort of agreement on a host of other matters, from politics to morals, but in such cases, we at least understand the rough givens with which we are dealing. Of “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters,” we lack such an understanding. This is hardly encouraging.
This is the nub of the matter. I said in effect that the best life for a human being is a life whose dominant purpose is the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. (By the way, this search does not exclude politics and morality which rest on controversial philosophical assumptions.) And of course I mean a truth that one existentially appropriates (makes one's own) and lives. There are several ways of objecting to my thesis. Some will claim to have the truth already, and see no point is seeking what one possesses. There are the dogmatic atheists for whom God and the soul are no longer issues. There are the dogmatic theists who have an answer for everything. There are the dogmatic agnostics who are quite convinced that nothing can be known or even reasonably believed about ultimates (God, the soul, the meaning of human existence) and who think bothering one's head over these questions is simply foolish and might even drive one crazy such that the best way to live is to focus on the easily accessible foreground objects in the Cave and to make friends with finitude, accepting whatever mundane satisfactions come along until death puts an end to it all.
Vito may be flirting with the agnostic camp. He wonders how what we may as well call The Quest could be "a worthwhile pursuit." One of his arguments is that very few are in a position to pursue the Quest. The other is that the Quest, although pursued by the best and the brightest since time immemorial, has arrived at no solid result acceptable to all thinking people.
To the first point, I would say that the value of the Quest does not depend on how many are in a position to pursue it. To the second point, I would say that no serious quester give up the Quest for the reason Vito cites. The Quest is his vocation; he is called to it even if he cannot explain who or what is calling him. He finds deep satisfaction in the searching and the momentary glimpses of insight, and his satisfaction is reinforced by his conviction that the paltry objects pursued by the many are relatively worthless. He sees the vanity, the emptiness, of the world that most find most solidly real. Name and fame, property and pelf, are to him bagatelles. The Quest is his spiritual practice and it is satisfying to the quester even when there is no tangible outcome. He likes to pray, meditate, study, reason, think, write. This is all underpinned by a faith that there will be a favorable outcome, if not here, then Elsewhere.
On Corporate Prayer and Institutionalized Religion
Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of P. B., vol. 12, part 2, p. 34, #68:
A public place is an unnatural environment in which to place oneself mentally or physically in the attitude of true prayer. It is far too intimate, emotional, and personal to be satisfactorily tried anywhere except in solitude. What passes for prayer in temples, churches, and synagogues is therefore a compromise dictated by the physical necessity of an institution. It may be quite good but too often alas! it is only the dressed-up double of true prayer.
Where would we be without institutions? We need them, but only up to a point. We are what we are because of the institutions in which we grew up, and natural piety dictates that we be appropriately grateful. But their negative aspects cannot be ignored and all further personal development requires those who can, to go it alone.
We need society and its institutions to socialize us, to raise us from the level of the animal to that of the human. But this human is all-too-human, and to take the next step we must tread the solitary path. Better to be a social animal than a mere animal, but better than both is to become an individual, as I am sure Kierkegaard would agree. To achieve true individuality is one of the main tasks of human life. Spiritual individuation is indeed a task, not a given. In pursuit of this task institutions are often more hindrance than help.
For some, churches and related institutions will always be necessary to provide guidance, discipline, and community. But for others they will prove stifling and second-best, a transitional phase in their development.
For any church to claim that outside it there is no salvation — extra ecclesiam salus non est — is intolerable dogmatism, and indeed a form of idolatry in which something finite, a human institution contingent both in its existence and configuration, is elevated to the status of the Absolute.
But now, having given voice to the opinion to which I strongly incline, I ought to consider, if only briefly, the other side of the question.
What if there is a church with a divine charter, one founded by God himself in the person of Christ? If there is such a church, then my charges of intolerable dogmatism and idolatry collapse. Such a church would not be just a help to salvation but a means necessary thereto. Such a church, with respect to soteriological essentials, would teach with true, because divine, authority.
But is there such a divinely instituted and guided church? To believe this one would first have to accept the Incarnation. And therein lies the stumbling block.
If the Incarnation is actual, then it is possible whether or not we can explain or understand how it is possible. Esse ad posse valet illatio. Necessarily, what is, is really possible, whether or not conceivable by us. It is not for our paltry minds to dictate what is actual and what is possible. On the other hand, if the best and the brightest of our admittedly wretched kind cannot see how a state of affairs is possible, then that is evidence that it is not possible. If, after protracted and sincere effort motivated by a love of truth, the Incarnation keeps coming before the mind as contradictory, and the attempts at defusing the apparent contradiction as so much fancy footwork, then here we have (admittedly non-demonstrative) evidence that the Incarnation really is impossible.
And then there is the ethical matter of intellectual integrity. (Beliefs and not only actions are subject to ethical evaluation.) One can easily feel that there is something morally shabby about believing what is favorable to one when what one is believing is hard to square with elementary canons of logic.
This then is the predicament of someone with one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem. The autonomy of reason demands insight lest it affirm beyond what it is justified in affirming. At the same time, reason in us realizes its infirmity and helplessness in the face of the great questions that bear upon our ultimate fate and felicity; reason in us is therefore inclined in its misery to embrace the heteronomy of faith.
How are we to resolve this problem? Are to accept a revelation that our finite intellects cannot validate? Or are we to stand fast on the autonomy of finite reason and refuse to accept what we cannot, by our own lights, validate? (By 'validate' I do not mean 'show to be true' but only 'show to be rationally acceptable.')
My answer, interim and tentative, is this. The ultimate resolution involves the will, not the intellect. One decides to accept the Incarnation or one decides not to accept it. That is to say: the final step must be taken by the will, freely; which is not to say that the intellect is not involved up to the final step. The decision is free, but not 'arbitrary' in the sense of thoughtless or perfunctory. No proof is possible, which should not be surprising since we are in the precincts of faith not knowledge. One who accepts as true only what he can know or come to know has simply rejected faith as a mode of access to truth.
"But if the doctrine is apparently contradictory and an offense to discursive reason, then one's decision in favor of the Incarnation is irrational."
I think this objection can be met. What is apparently contradictory may or may not be really contradictory, and it is not unreasonable to think that there are truths, non-contradictory in themselves, that must appear contradictory to us in our present state. This is a form of mysterianism, but it is a reasoned mysterianism. Human reason can come to understand that human reason cannot validate all that it accepts as true.
Spiritual Practices and Metaphysical Dogmas
It would be foolish to let the dubiousness of metaphysical dogmas dissuade you from spiritual exercises and the good achievable by their implementation. Don't let the weakness of the three pillars supporting the Buddhist edifice, anatta, anicca, dukkha, keep you from a long and salutary session on the black mat.
Related: A 'No' to 'No Self'
Spiritual Practices versus Theological Dogmas
It would be foolish to let the dubiousness of theological dogmas distract you from spiritual exercises and the good achievable by their exercise. Don't let the apparent absurdities of the Chalcedonian definition stop you from saying the Jesus Prayer.