From: Sam Norton (elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk)
Date: Sun Mar 13 2005 - 17:25:19 GMT
Hi DMB, (also Wim)
As you say, we've gone over this many times before. But as we're in the
business of swapping quotations, let me give another one from Nicholas Lash,
when he's discussing James' understanding of religious experience:
"Although it is James' account of the personal, of what it is that
constitutes _personal_ experience, which I want to keep centrally in view,
it is more important to bear in mind that that account was not offered as a
merely theoretical proposal (or he himself would have fallen into the very
intellectualism against which he was struggling). In his view, it is not
merely a matter of saying that institutions and ideas form no part of the
essence of "personal religion pure and simple" but, more practically and
more urgently, of arguing that they distort and threaten such religion.....
"The contrast between the 'personal' and 'institutional' aspects of religion
is first spelled out in the lecture, to which we keep returning, on
"Circumscription of the topic": "At the outset", he says, " we are struck by
one great partition which divides the religious field. On the one side of it
lies institutional, on the other personal religion." The essence of the
"institutional branch" of religion is said to consist in "worship and
sacrifice," which are construed as "procedures for working on the
disposition of the deity." In contrast, the "center of interest" of " the
more personal branch of religion" is said to lie in "the inner dispositions
of man himself." The energies of institutional religion are directed toward
manipulating the deity whereas, in personal religion - which is concerned
with the relation that "goes direct from heart to heart... between man and
his maker" - the structural element, "the ecclesiastical organisation, with
its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether
secondary place." Thus, personal religion issues in "personal" acts, whereas
institutional religion finds expression in "ritual" acts.
"There is nothing that is original in this picture. Any student of
post-Enlightenment religious thought is familiar with the contrast between
priestcraft and prophecy, between "religions of authority" and "the religion
of the spirit", between materialistic religion with its structures of
mediation obtruding between finite and infinite spirit, and religions in
which the human individual enjoys a relationship of pure immediacy with
whatever is taken to be the divine. And if, to many nineteenth-century
thinkers, the elements for this contrast seemed to be simply supplied by the
data, objectively _given_ in the history of religions (and especially in the
history of Judaism and Christianity), the twentieth-century reader of
nineteenth century texts is better placed to notice the influence of more
subjective factors. Not to put too fine a point on it, the contrast between
material and spiritual, or "external" and "internal" religion, as that
contrast was persistently drawn in the dominant narrative of both Liberal
Protestantism and its secularized successors, expressed deep-rooted
anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic prejudice."
To me, there are all sorts of echoes here in what Lash is describing from
what Pirsig describes and what Northrop describes (again, suggesting a
common inheritance from James) and the sort of argument that you come out
with. What I find difficult to get across is how partial a view this is. In
other words, the perspective that, it seems to me, you all hold in common,
is one that bears no relation to how the Christian faith was understood
prior to around 1800 (the father of Liberal Protestantism is Schleiermacher,
by the way). Maybe I am unfairly maligning Northrop, but a statement like
"The divine object in the West is an unseen God the Father" just reminded me
of Pirsig's comment in ZMM when he starts to read Aristotle: "That just left
Phaedrus aghast. Stopped. He'd been prepared to decode messages of great
subtlety, systems of great complexity in order to understand the deeper
inner meaning of Aristotle, claimed by many to be the greatest philosopher
of all time. And then to get hit, right off, straight in the face, with an
asshole statement like that! It really shook him."
Which is how I reacted to that quotation from Northrop. As I said, taken as
a simple sentence, it is straightforwardly false - it's "an asshole
statement". In other words: it is NOT the case that "The divine object in
the West is an unseen God the Father". Maybe there's some interrogation to
be done about what counts as "West" here, but given the language of 'Father'
I imagine that Christianity is at least part of it. And Christianity claims
that God is visible in human flesh, part of the Trinity. God is tangible.
Therefore, for Christianity, the divine object (in so far as that language
makes any sense at all) is a visible God the Son, and an experienceable
Spirit, both in relationship with an unseen God the Father. So Northrop
either has to unpack and qualify that statement or be convicted of a basic
mistake (ie claiming that 'the West' denies the Incarnation).
Thing is, these doubts of mine aren't just the result of my own
peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. I'm not a great academic expert in the
area. I just see that there is a severe tension between what I have
discovered or been taught and what Pirsig is putting across. It's quite
possible that everything that I've been taught is wrong, but I'm not going
to be persuaded of that if I don't feel the basic points I'm trying to make
have been understood or acknowledged.
Anyhow, I'm sure this will run for a while.
Sam
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