2 MODERN MYSTICISM: Despair Beyond Despair
The despair of modern man takes many forms. It is despair in depth in that it tends to use formulations and forms which seem to give hope and yet in the nature of the case lead to more profound depths of despair.
Modern nihilism is the simplest form of despair. For example, it is transparently clear in Gauguin’s painting What? Whence? Whither? and in musique concrète. Nihilism accepts the conclusion that everything is meaningless and chaotic.
The second level of despair is the acceptance of the dichotomy we have been talking about:
To feel the force of this deeper form of despair, we must keep in mind that the “upstairs” and the “downstairs” of this dichotomy are in two totally watertight compartments. There is no interchange between them. The downstairs has no relationship to meaning; the upstairs no relationship to reason. Rationalistic man, having given up the methodology of antithesis (if a thing is true, the opposite is not true), has been forced to a nonunified concept of knowledge and consequently to a resultant monstrous total antithesis between rationality and meaning.
In the rational downstairs, man is only a machine. In the nonrational upstairs, he is less than a Greek “shade.” The films Last Year in Marienbad, Juliet of the Spirits, and Blow-Up put this latter point with force, showing man as he is upstairs without categories.
The dichotomy was presented as an answer to the despair of simple nihilism; but this dichotomy is really a more profound form of despair. It means that man has both divided any unified concept of knowing and also—and this is worse—divided the unity of himself, because rationality is a part of every man. The individual man cannot even communicate to himself in his own thinking except on the basis of antithesis. So he thinks, “I love her,” or “The blossom on that tree is beautiful,” but these are a quite meaningless jumble of words unless they stand in antithesis to the possibilities that he dislikes her or that the blossom is ugly. This means in practice that a man cannot totally reject the methodology of antithesis, however much his system leads him to it, unless he experiences the total alienation from himself brought about by some form of mental breakdown.
Therefore, those who have sponsored the modern dichotomy of reason and meaning have not been able to live with it. Jean-Paul Sartre quarreled with Camus because he felt Camus was not being consistent to their basic presuppositions. This was true, but then neither was Sartre consistent when he signed the Algerian Manifesto. When he did this, it was not simply in order to authenticate his being by a neutral act of the will (as in the illustration of the old lady we gave concerning Sartre in chapter two of section one), because then it would have made no difference if he had done the opposite. Rather, it was because he took up a deliberately moral attitude and said it was an unjust and dirty war. His left-wing political position which he took as a moral issue is another illustration of the same inconsistency.
As far as many secular existentialists have been concerned, from the moment Sartre signed the Algerian Manifesto he was regarded as an apostate from his own position and toppled from his place of leadership of the avant-garde.
What was true of Camus and Sartre—that they could not live with the conclusions of their system—has been true for men on every step of the line of despair, whether in philosophy, art, music or literature. The result of not being able to stand in the honest integrity of their despair on either level (that of nihilism or that of a total dichotomy between reason and meaninglessness) has led to modern thought being shifted yet one stage further into a third level of despair, a level of mysticism with nothing there.
THEOLOGY AND SEMANTIC MYSTICISM
Neo-orthodoxy at first glance seems to have an advantage over secular existentialism. It appears to have more substance in its optimistic expressions than its secular counterpart. As we have seen, one difficulty of the final experience is that no one has found a way to communicate this experience—not even to himself. But in the new theology, use is made of certain religious words which have a connotation of personality and meaning to those who hear them. Real communication is not in fact established, but an illusion of communication is given by employing words rich in connotations. Expressing the inexpressible existential experience in religious connotation words gives an illusion of communication.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) speaks of the collective unconscious which emerges from the race as a whole. I think he is mistaken in his thinking, especially in the evolutionary origin which he gives it. And yet there is a certain memory in a culture that is carried on in its language. Such a language-related memory, I suggest, is a better explanation for what Jung calls the collective unconscious.
THE USE OF WORDS AND SYMBOLS
Every word has two parts. There is the dictionary definition, and there is the connotation. Words may be synonymous by definition, but have completely different connotations. Therefore we find that when such a symbol as the cross is used, whether in writing or painting, a certain connotation stirs the mind of people brought up in a Christian culture, even if they have rejected Christianity. (Of course, the use of words in this way does not only apply to the symbols of Christianity, but to those of other religions as well.) So when the new theology uses such words, without definition, an illusion of meaning is given which is pragmatically useful in arousing deep motivations.
This is something beyond emotion. An illusion of communication and content is given so that when a word is used in this deliberately undefined way, the hearer “thinks” he knows what it means. The use of the word pantheism is a good example. Though it really speaks of something absolutely and finally impersonal, yet the theism part of the word causes a reaction of acceptance, since theism carries overtones of personality. Now suppose you were to substitute the word pan-everythingism (which is what it really means). The whole reaction would be different.
It is also important to notice that the new theology has tried to draw on the prestige surrounding the use of the word symbol in the scientific world, but with a totally changed concept of symbol. In science the use of symbol is valuable in that it is well-defined, at least for two people, the person who uses it and at least one other. It is said that when Einstein first propounded his theory of relativity, perhaps only three or four men in the world understood it at first sight. But he would never have written it in the form he did if at least these three or four had not been able to understand it as a well-defined communication of content. So the scientific symbol has become an important tool for writing increasingly lengthy formulae with greater accuracy. In other words, it has value according to the sharpness of its definition.
But the new theology uses the concept of symbol in exactly the opposite way. The only thing the theological and scientific uses have in common is the word symbol. To the new theology, the usefulness of a symbol is in direct proportion to its obscurity. There is connotation, as in the word god, but there is no definition. The secret of the strength of neo-orthodoxy is that these religious symbols with a connotation of personality give an illusion of meaning, and as a consequence it appears to be more optimistic than secular existentialism. One could not find a clearer example of this than Tillich’s phrase “God behind God.”
At first acquaintance this concept gives the feeling of spirituality. “I do not ask for answers, I just believe.” This sounds spiritual, and it deceives many fine people. These are often young men and women who are not content only to repeat the phrases of the intellectual or spiritual status quo. They have become rightly dissatisfied with a dull, dusty, introverted orthodoxy given only to pounding out the well-known clichés. The new theology sounds spiritual and vibrant, and they are trapped. But the price they pay for what seems to be spiritual is high, for to operate in the upper story using undefined religious terms is to fail to know and function on the level of the whole man. The answer is not to ask these people to return to the poorness of the status quo, but to a living orthodoxy which is concerned with the whole man, including the rational and the intellectual, in his relationship to God.
Whenever men say they are looking for greater reality, we must show them at once the reality of true Christianity. This is real because it is concerned with the God who is there and who has spoken to us about himself, not just the use of the symbol god or christ which sounds spiritual but is not. The men who merely use the symbol ought to be pessimists, for the mere word god or the idea god is not a sufficient base for the optimism they display.
Speaking rationally, the new theologians are in the same position as Pierre Schaeffer with his musique concrète. But it is as though they were asking us by a leap of faith to hear musique concrète as if it were the same as the unity and diversity of J. S. Bach. This is the kind of “believism” which is demanded by this theology. The optimistic jump is a necessity because man is still created in the image of God, whatever he may say about himself, and as such he cannot go on living in meaninglessness. The jump of the new theology is upon the basis of religious and therefore personal terms which give the connotation of personality, meaning and communication. It is no more than a jump into an undefinable, irrational, semantic mysticism.
Even here the new theology is not unique. There are many secular parallels for this use of the stratagem of connotation words to try to alleviate the despair caused by the loss of a rational meaning and purpose. We will now look at some examples in the different disciplines.
THE ORIGINS OF SEMANTIC MYSTICISM—LEONARDO DA VINCI
The best way to understand how modern man has been forced, often against his natural inclination, into these various levels of despair, which he has tried to alleviate by the use of loaded connotation words in the upper story, is by looking at one of the most brilliant men of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).
Leonardo died as the Reformation was beginning. Francis I, king of France, who took him to France where he died, was the king to whom John Calvin addressed his Institutes. As a Renaissance humanist, Leonardo gave an answer to life which was a complete contrast to what the reformers were giving.
The Reformation gave rise to a definite culture, particularly in Northern Europe, and the humanistic elements of the Renaissance (of which Leonardo was a spokesman) ultimately gave rise to the despair of modern man which is now destroying that culture. Listen to what Giovanni Gentile, known, until his death, as Italy’s greatest modern philosopher, has to say about Leonardo:
The unity of the inward illuminates the fantasy; and the intellect comes to break up this unity into the endless multiplicity of sensible appearances. Hence the anguish and the innermost tragedy of this universal man, divided between his irreconcilable worlds, leaves in the mind an infinite longing, made up as it were of regret and sadness. It is the longing for a Leonardo different from the Leonardo that he was, one who could have gathered himself up at each phase and remained, closed himself off either altogether in his fantasy or altogether in his intelligence.
What Gentile is saying is this—that Leonardo as the first real mathematician in the modern sense really understood the problem with which modern man is now grappling. He understood that if man starts with himself alone and logically and rationally moves through mathematics, he never comes to a universal, only to particulars and mechanics. The problem can be formulated thus: how can finite man produce a unity which will cover these particulars? And if he cannot, how can these particulars have unity and meaning for him?
Leonardo was a Neo-Platonist who followed Ficino, and he tried to resolve the dilemma on his canvas by painting the soul. The use of the word soul here does not mean the Christian idea of soul, but the universal. Thus, for example, he thought he could, as a painter, sketch the universal baby which would cover the particulars for all babies. But he never achieved it, any more than Picasso did in painting his abstractions. But there is a strong difference between these two. Leonardo was not a modern man and therefore could not accept modern man’s irrational solution. So Leonardo died in despondency, for he would never let go of his hope of finding a unified field of knowledge which included both the universal and the particular, both mathematics and meaning. Had he been willing to accept an irrational dichotomy, as those who have extended the thinking of Kierkegaard have, he could have been at ease. But for him this would have been an impossible answer; men of his day, humanists though they may have been, would never have accepted such an irrational solution.
So there is an unbroken line from the humanism of the Renaissance to the modern philosophy, but in the process modern man accepted the “leap” which philosophers of the past would never have accepted, and have moved into three areas of despair: (1) simple nihilism; (2) the acceptance of the absolute dichotomy; (3) a semantic mysticism based on connotation words.
This new mysticism does not expect to find a unified field of knowledge. It has firmly concluded that the awful contradictory situation whereby meaning and true rationality (the upper and lower story) are irrevocably separated is intrinsic to the nature of the universe. On the other hand, the old romanticism never gave up the search to find a rational unity between the upper and lower story. This is the fundamental difference between them.
NATURE AND GRACE
This difference exists between the new mysticism and the old formulation of nature and grace.
After Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274), men spent much time in seeking the relationship and possible unity of nature and grace. Before him, the emphasis of the Byzantine thinkers was all on heavenly things, while after him, as a result of Aquinas’s emphasis on Aristotle, nature also became important. This was given expression in the painting of Cimabue (1240-1302) and Giotto (1267-1337) and in the poetry of Dante (1265-1321), Boccaccio (1313-1375) and Petrarch (1304-1374). By the time the full Renaissance had flooded Europe, nature had all but overwhelmed grace. We can represent their thought in this way:
At first glance this might seem to be the same as the modern dichotomy:
But the difference between these two concepts is so fundamental as to be qualitative rather than quantitative.
The struggle concerning nature and grace was the struggle to find a meaning for these together, and philosophers always hoped for a unity between the two on the basis of reason. (In passing, one must add that this question of nature and grace can only be solved by the full biblical system, and it was because these men tried to find a rationalistic or humanistic answer that they failed.) But modern man has given up all hope of finding a unified answer to the question of nature and grace. Therefore he describes it differently, and the difference in his formulation indicates his despair. Modern man now formulates it like this:
To understand this at a profound level is to comprehend how completely modern man’s despair is despair. All the new theology and mysticism is nothing more than a faith contrary to rationality, deprived of content and incapable of contentful communication. You can bear “witness” to it, but you cannot discuss it. Rationality and faith are out of contact with each other.
Let us now change the horizontal line a bit and see it as a line of anthropology. Below this line is the area of man. All that the new theology has above this line is the “philosophic other,” a metaphysical infinite, which is unknown and unknowable. Like this:
The new theology is totally below the line of anthropology. It knows nothing of man being created in the image of God, nor of God revealing himself truly in the Scriptures.
The important thing to note is that while for them nothing can be known above the line, yet nevertheless they go on using the word “god.”
Probably the best way to describe this concept of modern theology is to say that it is faith in faith, rather than faith directed to an object which is actually there. Some years ago at a number of universities I spoke on the topic “Faith v. Faith,” speaking on the contrast between Christian faith and modern faith. The same word, faith, is used, but has an opposite meaning. Modern man cannot talk about the object of his faith, only about the faith itself. So he can discuss the existence of his faith and its “size” as it exists against all reason, but that is all. Modern man’s faith turns inward.
In Christianity the value of faith depends upon the object towards which the faith is directed. So it looks outward to the God who is there, and to the Christ who in history died upon the cross once for all, finished the work of atonement, and on the third day rose again in space and in time. This makes Christian faith open to discussion and verification.
On the other hand, the new theology is in a position where faith is introverted because it has no certain object, and where the preaching of the kerygma is infallible since it is not open to rational discussion. This position, I would suggest, is actually a greater despair and darkness than the position of those modern men who commit suicide.