The trouble with Anglicanism....

While it is a very wonderful, sane, healthy way to be Christian, it has no clue whatsoever why anybody should become a Christian.  I submit that Anglicanism does not itself know what faith is actually for, or why it's a good thing for human beings to pursue it.    It does know, I hasten to add, that one of faith's important roles is to "to give praise to God."  And that's great, I do acknowledge - but perfectly doable on one's own time, no?  And does worship - i.e., the famous "liturgy" - actually do much to help people just by itself?  Perhaps, for some people it does - those with a previous faith background and some understanding of faith practices (or those with a lot of patience - and a priest who uses the Prayer Book well) - but I'm not sure this idea is working very well these days.

The trouble with Anglicanism - and particularly the American version of it - is that it has no theology of human nature, and no particular thoughts - or perhaps rather  some trivial and at the same time contradictory thoughts - about the human condition itself (AKA "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" - plus "alienation from God").    It's the original "I'm OK, you're OK" religion - so how can it help anybody who isn't actually OK?  Answer:  it can't. 

If Anglicanism wants to discuss the human condition, it must borrow anthropological ideas from elsewhere - Catholicism has some well-developed ones, and Lutheranism has some more modern and psychologically interesting (and dramatic!) ones; the most interesting ideas, from our perspective, might be the Girardian ones - but it has totally forgotten that this is possible or desirable.   It simply doesn't speak of any of these things.

So, what you get are people who actually are OK (sounds unlikely to me), or who believe they are OK - or those who seem to be OK, or pretend to be OK.  And since everybody's OK, well:  there's nothing to see here, folks.  We have to hurry to get out there to help all the people who aren't OK - but only the actual poor and needy, please.  Let's just leave the troubled or addicted - and, for that matter, the "poor in spirit" - out of this, can we?  And remember:  it's just plain selfish to focus on your own problems!

Actually, though:  there is a tiny touch of reporting on the human condition in the 39 Articles:

IX. Of Original or Birth-Sin.
Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk;) but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the Spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God's wrath and damnation. And this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regenerated; whereby the lust of the flesh, called in Greek, p¢vnæa sapk¢s, (which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh), is not subject to the Law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized; yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.

X. Of Free-Will.
The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith; and calling upon God. Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.

XI. Of the Justification of Man.
We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only, is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

But, of course:  the 39 Articles?  What the heck are those?

And you do get a bit about the Ten Commandments in the Catechism.  But there's a bit of a problem - kind of a large gap, in fact - in the thinking, given the issues enumerated in the articles above, isn't there?    How does one, in other words, actually get from there to here?  Seems to be a mystery.

Q.    What are the Ten Commandments?
A.    The Ten Commandments are the laws give to Moses and the people of Israel.
    
Q.    What do we learn from these commandments?
A.    We learn two things: our duty to God, and our duty to our neighbors.
    
Q.    What is our duty to God?
A.    Our duty is to believe and trust in God;
     I       To love and obey God and to bring others to know him;
     II       To put nothing in the place of God;
     III       To show God respect in thought, word, and deed;
     IV       And to set aside regular times for worship, prayer, and the study of God's ways.

Q.    What is our duty to our neighbors?
A.    Our duty to our neighbors is to love them as ourselves, and to do to other people as we wish them to do to us;
     V      To love, honor, and help our parents and family; to honor those in authority, and to meet their just demands;
     VI      To show respect for the life God has given us; to work and pray for peace; to bear no malice, prejudice, or hatred in our hearts; and to be kind to all the creatures of God;
     VII      To use our bodily desires as God intended;
     VIII      To be honest and fair in our dealings; to seek justice, freedom, and the necessities of life for all people; and to use our talents and possessions as ones who must answer for them to God;
     IX      To speak the truth, and not to mislead others by our silence;
     X      To resist temptations to envy, greed, and jealousy; to rejoice in other people's gifts and graces; and to do our duty for the love of God, who has called us into fellowship with him.

We're also told that "It is required that we should examine our lives, repent of our sins, and be in love and charity with all people" before receiving Communion.   Well, that's certainly nice - but again:  how is one supposed to accomplish any of this, if we are "very far gone from original righteousness, and of our nature inclined to evil"?

If we've dropped the 39 Articles because we don't actually believe that  we are "very far gone from original righteousness, and of our nature inclined to evil" - well, what do we believe about any of this?  That we're all OK?  That people really have no deep sorrows or pains or lonelinesses or obsessions or addictions or frustrations or feelings of alienation or self- or other-destructive impulses or habits?  That we can just naturally accomplish, on our own steam, all the things listed in the Commandments section above?  And that there's nothing more to worry about, as long as we don't steal from our places of employment?

And if we can accomplish all those things on our own - then just what is it we are being "saved" from?

Inquiring minds want to know.....

Why prooftexting?

Because life is really complicated, the world is big and scary, and we no longer have any tradition of "passing down wisdom" from generation to generation, or much of any common metaphysical understanding of life.

And, in particular (and even more important):  Protestants have no Magisterium (which is a collection of "passed-down wisdom" of religious and philosophical claims about meaning and morality).

Proof-texting is the utterly predictable outcome of overthrowing the church's collection of teachings and striking out on one's own.   Everybody does it - because how else can a human being, born naked and with only a rather rudimentary system of instinct (it would appear) make sense of living, and make decisions that will affect their lives and those the people around them?   How can anybody respond to an event or situation of which they have no personal experience, except with some sort of script (AKA proof-text)?

Non-religious people seem to be taking their cues from various political platforms and points of view, which as far as I can tell seem to be taken as complete systems for understanding the world and responding to new data.  This is why people are not responding to reality, but to the script itself; they are enmeshed in "mimetic desire" (which is my own prooftext of René Girard!) and continue to respond according to their inner script, having forgotten what the actual issues are. 

Some go right to the Gospel of Ayn Rand, which comes complete with a highly dramatic metaphysical story - and an entire worldview  to go with it.

Proselytizing online atheists proof-text from RichardDawkins.net and their inner "I'm smarter and better than you" convictions.   I see the same phrases used in argument time after time:  "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  "Theism requires intellectual dishonesty."  "The flying spaghetti monster.  Ha Ha."

There is also the large-scale debate over behavior, online and via social media; these debates are establishing the standards for acceptable and unacceptable behavior according to a) gut reaction (AKA instinct) and b) political and culture-war opinion (AKA "proof-texting").  The process then appeals to the herd instinct, complete with worldwide condemnation and shunning.

We have no personal philosophical systems any longer, so these may be the only real options for people to create their own systems of proper morality - "meaning" seems to be entirely absent in many cases - and then to proof-text from them.

IOW instead of using an already-worked-out philosophical or religious system, we are  now all subject to ad hoc factions and their various religious claims and texts.   Which are, mostly, in the process of being made up on the spot, according to personal taste - and the herd instinct.

"Anthony Griffith on the Fool’s Fortune"

Mockingbird put up this stunning piece yesterday. There's nothing, really, for me to add or comment on; the video says all there is to say.

The comedian has been around a while. And comedians are always most funny because they are probing something true, and often painfully so. Shakespeare’s fools operated on this paradox very well, most notably in Lear. Jan Kott, a Shakespeare scholar, says this of the general role of the Shakespearean jester or fool:

He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward of good… But the Fool does not desert his ridiculous, degraded king, and accompanies him on his way to madness. The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize this world as rational.

Anthony Griffith is no exception to this rule, as you will see in this confessional, true-to-the-bone “success story.” A comedian who had “arrived,” Griffith made it to the benchmark of success, Carson’s The Tonight Show, and simultaneously received his laurels with ashes, as he got news of his young daughter’s cancer returning. He describes a moment in time completely bifurcated: the realization of personal ambition, and the utter shrouding of that realization with the present season of suffering. (Have we talked about suffering very much recently?) It is made all the more powerful because his life’s work is premised on packaging life into a humorously “tidy sitcom.”

He speaks of the blame-shifting that occurs in suffering, that when it always must be someone’s fault, you often think of what you’ve done to cause it; and then there’s the Denzel Washington voice within to “buck up” and see the world as it is. It is not a voice of compassion, but one of stark reality–which could be gracious in that it faces what is real, rather than what is wished or planned. All said, Griffith is here deconstructing the myth of the progress, dream-and-achieve narrative more than he is providing a qualifying ‘out’ for suffering. Suffering, while being an avenue for hope, is still suffering. The Moth presents “The Best of Times, The Worst of Times.” Viewers beware: if you cannot be seen crying at work, wait until you get home (ht JD).

"This Is Water: David Foster Wallace on Life"

From Brain Pickings today; my bold below.  There are some audio files at the link, too.

Four years ago today, David Foster Wallace took his own life, becoming a kind of patron-saint of the “tortured genius” myth of creativity. Just three years prior to his suicide, he stepped onto the podium at Kenyon College and delivered one of the most timeless graduation speeches of all time — the only public talk he ever gave on his views of life. The speech, which includes a remark about suicide by firearms that came to be extensively discussed after DFW’s own eventual suicide, was published as a slim book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (public library).

....

On solipsism and compassion, and the choice to see the other:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.


Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being ‘well-adjusted’, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

On the double-edged sword of the intellect, which Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Anne Lamott have spoken to:

It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

On empathy and kindness, echoing Einstein:

[P]lease don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

On false ideals and real freedom, or what Paul Graham has called the trap of prestige:

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

On what “education” really means and the art of being fully awake to the world:

[T]he real value of a real education [has] almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

‘This is water.’
‘This is water.’

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.

In the altogether excellent Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, Tom Bissell writes:

The terrible master eventually defeated David Foster Wallace, which makes it easy to forget that none of the cloudlessly sane and true things he had to say about life in 2005 are any less sane or true today, however tragic the truth now seems. This Is Water does nothing to lessen the pain of Wallace’s defeat. What it does is remind us of his strength and goodness and decency — the parts of him the terrible master could never defeat, and never will.