Here’s where we wound up:
“When you live in the knowledge that All is well, that Man is the measure of all things, that to understand it all, you need to remember As above, so below, and that All are one, many things sundered will be seen in their interconnection, and you will be able to live without having to fight a continual background sense of despair.”
And here’s how we got there:
Angel Capellan (in Hemingway and the Hispanic World) describes very clearly the difference in attitude between Spanish and Anglo-Saxon attitude toward death, hence toward life, but I don’t get it. I don’t identify with either the fascination with death or the studious avoidance of remembering it. Either way, it seems so out of proportion. You live, you die, so what? Why is something which is universal treated as if it were something to be dreaded, or ignored, or enshrined? It doesn’t make sense to me.
Why is life a tragedy because it ends? Why is it unendurable unless one shuts out of awareness the fact that it is going to end? Both attitudes are so strange. It is as if you were to say that the meaning of life is only Friday, say, or only 3 p.m., or the color orange, or the smell of citron, or the taste of ashes.
I suppose this must be what life looks like if you think of birth-to-death as if that were all there is to see: nothing before, nothing after. It is like looking at a train ride without reference to the place left or the place arrived at.
Guys, you care to help me explain this? (Not that I don’t feel you prodding me anyway.)
What was called Western Civilization began with the Greeks and Romans and their gods and their understandings of the way things are. Christianity supplanted that with a new sense of meaning. As things do, it grew, flourished, produced fruit, and declined.
And I do realize you are having to leave out all manner of side-trails like the continuing contribution of the Jews, the challenge of Islam, the perpetual thread of silent skepticism and atheism in practice. Broad strokes are broad strokes.
Of course. The civilization that could produce the Gothic cathedral is not related to your civilization except as ancestry. The Renaissance was a searching for a more permanent footing, a realer reality, than what the European civilization had declined to. We do not say that the Renaissance participants would have agreed with this statement, but nonetheless it is a productive way to look at it.
The Renaissance was naturally followed by the Reformation, and a century of intense warfare centered on the question of the human relationship to the divine. The belligerents wouldn’t have accepted this description of what they were fighting about, either. The Catholic theology and organization had become too one-sided. The various Protestant revolutions (each expecting to become the equivalent of the former Catholic hegemony) were counter-balancing that one-sidedness, and by their nature could not come to any pretense of universality. Understand, we are not talking about politics or even theology here. We are centered on a civilization’s understanding of the meaning of life and death.
The natural result of warfare plus the Renaissance was the gradual destruction of faith in the Christian scheme itself. Indeed, you could argue that the religious wars were a matter of “protesting too much.” We don’t mean that as a play on words involving Protestantism, we mean that the fanaticism on all sides was partly fear of the other, but was also refusal to see that they themselves didn’t quite believe in the way that, say, medieval man had believed. Hence, an age of skepticism.
But people can’t really live without belief, so when they cannot believe one thing, they grasp at something else: anything to avoid a vacuum. Thus came the ages of science, of economics, of social-engineering, of endless tinkering, of what is called science but is more like science-in-the-service-of-unbridled-technological-experimentation. Capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, scientific materialism, and on and on – what do they have in common but this? They all try to make sense of life by considering only what shows.
The coming of psychology came as an awful shock; so did the coming of scientific theories based on data showing that time, space, causality, material, energy, etc. are not what they had appeared to be.
So in your day religion is again having a last semi-hysterical upwelling, rooted in fear and even panic, but not rooted in the deepest reality. “Science,” so called, is more runaway than ever, and more enslaved to utility and less open to actual free inquiry than ever in its history. Politics, economic theory, ideology, inspire ever less widespread conviction. Philosophy has become a university major and a profession disputing fine points in learned journals, and is taken seriously nowhere but in its own closed circle.
Can you see that this is all one phenomenon? What is fueling it all, the one massive current, the irresistible tide rising, is your need for a more profound and satisfying sense of the meaning of life and death. Meaning cannot be snatched at; it cannot be imposed by political force. It cannot be overawed into you, to put it that way. It can only be recognized.
Well, Frank, now on the far end of so much reconceptualization, you find it almost impossible to understand those who are on the shore you left. There was a time when you too lived appalled at the meaninglessness of a life that would be blotted out by death, destroying anything but whatever you might leave as artifact.
I do remember, now that you bring it up. Hard way to live.
Well, there you are.
All right, I get where you have been going with this. I wouldn’t have thought to put it together, but it’s obvious at the moment. This is why I am immune to political or ideological panaceas, or religious certainties, or any of the things people grab onto – not (merely) because they are for herds rather than outliers, but because I do not have the need to fill an empty center.
Yes. Exactly that. It is that unfilled emptiness that drives people to find something to fill it. It may be ludicrously inadequate, but it is no laughing matter to people who are desperately in need. Rather than provide examples of inadequate solutions, let us say this about the adequate solution (which, of course, will not be adequate forever, but may prove to be a reliable and useful scaffolding): It will take account of life and death as parts of one reality. It will not concentrate on the things of life and consign “the afterlife” to the realm of the unimportant or the unfathomable. Neither will it pretend to know that there is no such thing. Neither will it say that “the afterlife” is all that matters, and 3D life is a dream or nightmare. It will deal with everything as if everything matters!
Neither, of course, will it live as if only the measurable exists, but that mistake is already dying naturally.
When you live in the knowledge that All is well, that Man is the measure of all things, that to understand it all, you need to remember As above, so below, and that All are one, many things sundered will be seen in their interconnection, and you will be able to live without having to fight a continual background sense of despair. You cannot expect to live without problems; life is problems. But you need not live as if there were no underlying sense and meaning.
Enough. Be well, and be confident.