Here's a theory I've been kicking around for a few weeks:
Religion and university education play enormous roles in shaping individuals. A strong religious background tends to create a certain type of person. A university education tends to create a different type of person. A combination of the two seems to create a third type of person. Finally, the absence of either tends to create yet another type of person.
How strong do you think these factors are in shaping a person's identity? If you believe that there is any truth to the basic idea, how would you characterize each of the categories I listed above -- I'm interested in seeing how other people's perceptions compare with my own.
I know this is very clumsy, but I just wanted to throw something out there to get the ball rolling.
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13 comments:
I don't necessary see the differences you perceive. To me, each person you describe is a student seeking knowledge. The only difference lies in what books you read to get that knowledge. Religious books focus accept the problems with the present world and promise transcendence after death while "university" books focus on changing the present world to meet some ideal which can be achieved and experienced during one's life.
You know, I think that this is really a lot more complex than either of us has suggested (but this is a great starting point). Your basic distinction between social activism vs. after-life salvation is clarifying, but I think that there are several exceptions: 1) the Catholic church is an enormous proponent of social activism, of teaching people to do everything in their power to improve lives in this world. 2)In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky talks a lot about the idea of finding paradise in this life, that our spiritual condition makes this life paradise or hell. This idea has deep roots in Orthodox Christian theology: the Orthodox belief is that transformation of the self and of the world begins in this life. 3) In recent years, many protestant churches have been increasingly politically active, focusing "on changing the present world to meet some ideal which can be achieved and experienced during [this] life". 4) I suspect that there is still a rather large contingent of university students that are studying in hopes of finding some higher truth, one which may or may not be linked to any kind of political action.
Part of what I am trying to get at is this: it seems to me that both the church and the university have the propensity to instill a certain dignity and character (only if each is taken seriously). Still, the form of dignity and character bequethed by each seems to be of a different nature. They do tend to create different sub-cultures.
However, one thing that I like about what you wrote is that it reminds me of some of the things that the Dali Lama has said about the universality of the human condition.
How do you like them apples?
I think of this distinction as two sides of the same coin. Western liberal education develops and uses one's intellect in an analytical way (things are broken into parts to study them). Spirituality develops and uses one's spiritual faculties (reverence, awe, and love for creation as an "unbroken field of being," to use a phrase I just read in Totem Salmon). These two ways of approaching reality are not exclusive, but complementary. Surely there are others that are pretty important as well. One should develop one's physical faculties through physical education (although I haven't done this nearly enough) as well as one's moral faculties through education in empathy. All of these things, and probably others as well, make one a more complete person.
The important thing is realizing the limits of each practice. My religion, for example, cannot tell me the best ways of managing Sudden Oak Death on someone's property or what the likely effects of global warming will be. Western science, on the other hand, cannot "explain" fundamental mysteries such as love, altruism, or death--although some of the more grasping scientists think that it eventually will. Science can't even explain itself; there are basic philosophical dilemmas behind the scientific method that can't be rationally solved. Fundamental to science is the faith that its inductive methods (i.e., learning from experience) guarantee truth. And faith is a mystery.
And neither religion nor science on its own is usually sufficient to teach ethics and morals. For that, we need literature and philosophy as well. I would never have been schooled in empathy had I not read Lord Jim, Great Expectations, The Wings of the Dove, Sula, The Return of the Native, Pearl, The Scarlet Letter, The House of Mirth, Sister Carrie, and so on. Most religions talk about compassion, and I'm sure that some religious texts inspire it. Saints radiate compassion. But I would bet Christian saints don't get it from reading the Bible.
Thank you both for your ideas. I feel like I'm learning a lot. One of my favorite things about this conversation so far is that both of you have been very quick to dispell the notion that the church and the university are in competition with one another. I think this clarification is very important.
Quercus talked about the two schools as being complementary and completing one another. I've been thinking about this idea for several days. I think the question now becomes 'what makes a person complete?' ("Mini-me, you complete me" ; )
I see two competing notions of what constitutes completeness, or maybe more accurately, I experience in my mind two competing notions of what constitutes completeness. The two ideas are as follows:
1) The development of mind, body, and spirit -- the realization of the full potential of the human creature in its various aspects and capacities, necessitating an extensive and rigorous cross-training leading to not only the athlete and the scholar, but rather to the athlete and scholar and mystic and philanthropist, a true rennaisance ideal of man in all his glory. I find this deeply compelling. However, at the same time, a very different ideal remains a constant presence in my mind:
2) The person who empties himself or herself in order to become a pure vessel of love, one who eschews the physical, "crucifies the intellect," dies to the self in order to truly live. Taoism speaks about the value of unlearning, of returning to the "uncarved block," the idea being that we are, at our core, naturally good beings that live in harmony with the whole of the created universe; we are corrupted and mislead by cleverness and too much learning. I think this relates directly to the Buddhist koan, 'What was your face before you were born?' Christianity talks about putting to death the false self, the ego self in order to become Christ-like. I recently read a sufi story about a man who came to learn from a shaik. In the story, after hearing the teacher, the man melted into a puddle of water on the floor -- the story said that the man melted into pure love. And so I wonder, if a person empties himself or herself and becomes a pure vessel of love, is that person not complete? Have they not attained the one thing needful?
I must admit that your former description of "completeness" is more compelling to me than the latter. The latter presumes some pure natural state, which I am doubtful one can ever achieve or would ever want to. Intellect, fear, anger, happiness, and love are all part of the human experience. To deny their existence or suppress them does not liberate you from human emotions or experience. As hard as you may fight it, in the end, we are all only human.
When I read your post, the first thing that came to mind was how lonely your definition of completeness was. While life does present its internal challenges, the times I have felt the most complete were the times I shared with another person or group of people, whether it was with my wife when I first told her that I loved her or with my country watching the horror of two planes fly into the World Trade Center buildings or being in a packed concert with everyone singing along with the band. It is at these times when true completeness can be experienced.
Chris, I think I must not have communicated very clearly what I meant by the latter concept of completeness. Let me try to clarify a bit:
To me, the idea of becoming a vessel of love is absolutely inseperable from community, family, and friends. Without a beloved, there can be no lover. Therefore, what I am trying to say, in more concrete terms is this: perhaps it is better to live for the sake of loving others rather than for the sake of self-fulfillment. For example, maybe I spend less time at the gym and more time reading to my kids; maybe I decide not to pursue a PhD in favor of more family time.
When I use the term self-emptying, I'm not talking about denial of those things which make us human. On the contrary, I'm talking about finding healing from those things that make us less human. Anger and fear are part of the human experience, but they are part of the human experience in the way that the flu or cancer is part of the human experience -- they are illnesses of the soul (I readily admit that there are some serious exceptions to this; I don't want to deny their validity; I'm just trying to make a general statement that I believe to hold true in most cases), and like cancer or the flu, to fight against them is not to deny life but to affirm it.
I'm not talking about liberation from human emotions -- that would be terrible -- I'm talking about fostering the most healthy and fully-developed human emotions so that we can live and love together as true human beings, experiencing more of the kind of connections you mentioned.
Here are some thoughts in no particular order:
I like what what you say about self-emptying, and what I read in your comments--and this may come from myself--is that such self-emptying really comes from complete absorption in the reality beyond yourself. I think that only from such absorption can you find the energy necessary to do work without effort, which expresses your spirit at the level it's meant to be expressed.
However, Orthodox monastic teaching notwithstanding, I don't understand how such absorption could involve either "eschewing the physical" or "crucifying the intellect." These phrases connote doing away with these parts of ourselves altogether. As Chris mentioned, doing away with an essential part of your humanity turns you into something else altogether. I can certainly understanding mortifying the physical or mortifying the intellect for a period of time so that neither of these things gets too big and dominates your personality, but I think it's risky to try to do away with them altogether. Even as Fr Seraphim Rose talked about "crucifying [his] intellect," he was pouring out tons of books. Many Orthodox monks who think of themselves as overcoming the physical--because they fast, for example--are actually living more physically healthy lifestyles because of their more modest diets and the physical work they need to do in order to live without modern comforts. (Not to mention that they all subscribe to the Orthodox teaching that the body is just as important, and will be redeemed at the same time, as the spirit.)
Maybe what I'm trying to say is that the act of becoming absorbed in the world beyond yourself, whether that means other people, the natural world, or any other ordinary thing in your daily routine, does not preclude your self-development. In fact, maybe one can't happen without the other. It's not that you divest yourself of self. It's that when you are delightedly absorbed in what's beyond you, that "beyond" is the same thing as your self. And then you make quantum leaps.
So I'm suspicious of the idea of "self-control." I'm suspicious of the idea that control in any form is what we should be trying for. It seems that if giving up the ego is what we need to do, then trying to control something is the least productive way of going about it. Instead, we need to jump into the otherness of what's around us. This is analogous in my mind to what Fr Porphyrios had to say about asceticism, that there's a brand of spirituality that concentrates on grimly controlling oneself, and then there's a brand that concentrates on the joy of learning to know God.
Anyway, I think that finding this joy, absorbing yourself in what's beyond your self, takes many forms. Some of those forms include the things I mentioned earlier: formal education, exercise, the life of the spirit, and suffering along with others. And there are many, many more. Contemplation of nature, or participation with nature, is an important one . . .
I realize I'm doodling in words here, so don't take my remarks as an organized, direct rejoinder to what you said. Take them as random remarks coming from my own preoccupation.
I love the way that this conversation continues to fold back over on itself, returning again and again to previous points, but each time returning with more depth and nuance. Thank you both so much for your thoughts.
Quercus’ most recent post is a like a stick falling on my meditating head – zen shock: reality. I see now the beginnings of a bridge in the fog, as it were, between what I described previously as my competing ideas of completeness. We are wooed into false dichotomies or slip into them out of laziness or convenience. But these convenient divisions lead only to psychological fragmentation – I held onto both competing ideas simultaneously, unable to rid myself of one or the other, unwilling to let go of the truth that I sensed in both. So, I not only sympathized with Chris’ understanding of completeness – I shared it, or at least half of me shared it. I come from a background of philosophical polarity that I still struggle to free myself from.
I found this same challenge to my polarized notions of good and evil in William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell a decade ago. I’ve always held onto Blake’s poem, but have never known exactly what to do with it.
So now you point to a bridge between self-development and self-emptying. I suppose what it all comes down to is restoration of the human creature, bringing all of the faculties back into calibration, both within the self and with the larger world. I particularly liked your thoughts about temporary mortification as a means of keeping faculties in check and functioning fully in their proper capacity, as opposed to the more radical idea of eradication of those faculties.
There is a great deal to think about.
Maybe we could continue this discussion in more practical concrete terms. What does a healthy life look like? What does it mean to study, to contemplate, to fast, to pray, to exercise, to know nature, to serve, to love, to live as fully human?
At one time people went to university in search of truth (Harvard's motto is Veritas). All truth: religious, physical etc. The word university meant whole, aggregate. I don't think that when universities taught a unified vision of the world and truth, that these schools created a third or fourth type of person. Those who attended university might have been a different type of person than those who did not attend, but I don't think the differences were as great as they are today. There was no dichotomy between religious and secular education. Of course, I am talking about universities in the west. I am unfamiliar with how higher education evolved in the east.
Welcome to the conversation, Juliana. I've been thinking about what you said. The following are a few questions that popped into my mind:
If the university has in fact moved more and more toward a positivist philosophy, does that put it at odds philosophically with the church, or does it merely strive to answer different questions? I inferred the latter from Chris' comments, and Quercus seems to state the same idea more directly, that the university and the church compliment one another because they operate in different spheres.
There seems to be a popular conception among current American political factions that the church and the university are opposed to each other, that each institution is producing people with radically different ideologies.
It seems to me though, particularly in light of this conversation, that when we strip things down to the bare bones, this is not true -- the university and the church are not competing but rather compliment one another.
However, at the same time, it is true that there are common mispercetptions that leave a lot of folks from each institution viewing folks from the other institution as enemies of truth. This is a shame. What can be done about this? Who is working to bridge this gap?
I have found one person working to bridge the gap, one of the unlikeliest I could have imagined: Stanley Fish, the well-known post-structuralist literary theorist best known for his brand of “reader-response” criticism. In a series of recent editorial pieces for the New York Times, Fish criticizes the torrent of recent books scornful of religion and of the concept of God in general by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Fish both laments the intolerant tone of the books and does his best to pick apart some of their arguments, but what’s most interesting to me is the way he enlists great literature in the service of his point of view. He shows how poems and books like Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost are already grappling with some of the arguments that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens level against organized religion, centuries before these latter-day critics come on the scene. These texts grapple with the problems with much more grace and energy than the critical trio, and they resist closure on them where the trio find simple black-and-white answers.
Looking at the blogged responses to Fish’s columns is fascinating: the vast majority of the responses willfully fail to understand his point that science is based on a kind of faith of its own. Part of the problem is perhaps the way that Fish used the word “faith” without bothering to explain what it means. I mentioned this issue in one of my posts above: science cannot philosophically explain some of the very foundations it rests on (such as inductive reasoning) and so requires some assumptions about the nature of observation and the nature of the way the world is made. This is the “faith” Fish is talking about, and it’s what the less nuanced scientific “realists” and “materialists” don’s seem to want to recognize.
More recently, Fish wrote another interesting column about well-known atheists and theists who are shifting their spiritual stances in their newest books. That column can be found here, http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com, and within it are links to those earlier columns too.
I'll check that out. Thank you.
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