Understanding Our Epistemological Tools Have Been Bequest to Us by the Enlightenment

The following is my transcribing a talk in 2002 by Gil Bailie on René Girard's influence to modern thought.


In the Preface to his book, "Insight," Bernard Lonergan writes of the ideal detective story in which the reader is presented with all the clues yet fails to spot the criminal.

He may advert to each clue as it arises. He needs no further clues to solve the mystery. Yet he can remain in the dark for the simple reason that reaching the solution is not the mere apprehension of any clue, nor the mere memory of all them, but a quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of wine they bunked down for the night and went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his friend. “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”

Watson replied, “I see millions upon millions of stars.”

“So what does that tell you?” asked Sherlock.

Watson pondered for a minute. “Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Hierologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?”

Holmes was silent for a minute and then spoke. “It tells me someone has stolen our tent!” (Author unknown)


We live in a world where we employ the epistemological tools that have been bequest to us by the Enlightenment where they require us to think about the world in terms of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, etc. These tools do provide a certain amount of information but there are things going on right now which cannot be accounted for in those terms.

What René Girard has done is help us to understand how we came to know what we know and that there is something underneath these interpretive tools we have that has given rise to them and that thing is the biblical tradition.

There is a parallel between the tent in Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson joke and the veil of the temple that was rent from top to bottom at the death of Jesus on the cross. It is at “that” moment when something changes and forms of illumination are available and the human race begins to move into new territory of knowing.


On one level we can describe this as the “aha” moment for an individual, but on another level the human race begins to move into this cumulative “AHA” experience where a “quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective” has become available.

One more joke, this is a pulpit joke:

There is a story of a pastor in a small, rural congregation. For some years, the physical plant of the church had been deteriorating and he did not have in his budget nearly enough to paint the church. He remembered that one of the members of the congregation was a professional house painter, so he paid him a little visit. In the course of the chat the topic of the need of the church came up and a little while later this man agreed to paint the church for his cost when he had time. So that was agreed upon. Of course, he came in the middle of the week when nobody was there. He came and started to paint the church. He painted around the bottom and then he built the scaffolds up and then he thought to himself, I could reduce my cost if I watered the paint down a little bit and it would go on faster. This would allow him to get done faster and get to more paying jobs sooner. So as he went up the church he kept thinking that logic and higher he got he thought, now who is going to be able to tell this high, so he thinned the paint down more and more. He got up to the bell tower and he thins it down even more and it is going on very nicely and he gets close to the top when he looks for in the horizon and sees this huge dark thundercloud coming this way. He thinks I had better get this job done before it starts to rain. So he thins the paint down even more. But the storm comes quicker than he thought and suddenly there is lightning and rolling thunder coming out of these dark clouds. He gets very anxious, and suddenly the storm is right on top of him and he notices that he is at the highest point in town. He panics and he grabs the scaffolding and prays, God please don’t let me be struck by this lightning. Suddenly the storm calms and there is this voice from heaven that says, “Repaint and thin no more.”


There is a point to this as we are always repainting the church. We Christians are always trying to understand this thing that has happened to us (whether on the road to Emmaus or Damascus). We are constantly trying to get to the bottom of it. It is a journey and so we need to realize that we are always representing Christianity in the historical context of our age and the challenge that each age presents to us calls us to draw out of that inexhaustible reservoir of Truth, new things that we didn’t know or could not have known without of that challenge. That is why we should never complain about the fact that the world rejects Christianity, that’s what it is paid to do! Our job is simply to respond to that rejection in a way that embraces the ‘no’ that the world has uttered and bring it into the affirmation. And so we are constantly re-painting and we should stop thinning. The re-painting that has been going on in the modern world in recent decades has been a thin, thin, thin version. There is no need for that. One of the things that René’s work does is that it gives us a robust and ‘thickly’ theological understanding premised on and in many ways assimilated with an anthropological understanding of the cross and the Christian mystery.

Christians stubbornly clung to their language even when it could be said they really didn’t understand it. (And the sad thing is that, now when we are about to acquire the intellectual means for understanding the terminology, a failure of nerve has set in and many Christians are abandoning the terminology.) - John W. Dixon, Jr.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be the theorist who is needed to deal with it.

René is neither impractical nor absent-minded, but we have had airplanes smashing that have smashed not for mechanical reasons but because of human calculations. That is all the more reason the need to have someone to help us understand the nature of human conflict – violence.

MYTH & memory

Violence Unveiled by Gil Bailie: Chapter 2 starting on page 33.

MYTH

When the chorus in Agamemnon says, “The rest I did not see, nor do I speak of it,” it virtually defines myth. The root of the Greek word for myth, muthos, is mu, which means to close or keep secret. Muo means to close one’s eyes or mouth, to mute the voice or to remain mute. Myth remembers discretely and selectively. Myth closes its eyes to certain events and closes its mouth. The agencies for the muting and transmuting of the remembered past are the Muses, and the term muse is derived from the same root as the word myth. In Greek mythology the Muses are the daughters of Memory (Mnemosyne). The Muses make it possible to remember the past fondly or heroically, but they do so with fog filters. (The Latin verb mutare means to change.) The Muses bring into being music and museums, but not, in the first instance, for purely aesthetic or merely archival purposes. The cultural archive and anthems that the Muses preserve represent the mythological remembrance of things past. The poet Hesiod says of the Muses that “they are all of one mind.” As widely varying as the Muses’ artistic interests may be, beneath this variety, and behind it, lies something about which they are “all of one mind.” The Muses inspire poetry, epic, sacred music, tragedy, comedy, erotic verse, and history, but all these are permutations of the past events which, if Hesiod is to be trusted, they memorialize with one purpose. That purpose is buried in the etymology of their name. The Muses make culture possible by providing it with its myth — an enchanting story of its founding violence. But most myths contain at least faint traces of the violence they otherwise mask. By paying more careful attention to these traces, things mythologically remembered can be recollected with greater clarity.
In the New Testament, mythos is juxtaposed both to Logos — the revelation of that about which myth refuses to speak — and to aletheia — the Greek word for truth. Aletheia comes from the root, letho, which is the verb “to forget.” The prefix a is the negative. The literal meaning, then, of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, is “to stop forgetting.” It is etymologically the opposite of myth. The gospels tell of a perfectly typical story of victimization with astonishing insight into the role religious zeal and mob psychology played in it. Most importantly, and contrary to all myth, the story is told from the point of view of the victim and not that of the righteous community of persecutors. Thus the passion story breaks decisively with the silence and circumspection of the mythological thought. The Gospel truth gradually makes it impossible for us to keep forgetting what myth exists to help us forget. It thereby sets up a struggle between the impulse to sacralize, justify, or romanticize the violence that generates and regenerates conventional culture and the impulse to reveal that violence and strip away its mythic justifications. Fundamentally, human history is a struggle between myth and Gospel. Literature, as it has developed in Western culture, is neither myth (muthos) nor truth (aletheia), it is the textual arena in which the two struggle for the upper hand. What myth conceals, what literature alternately conceals and reveals, and what the Gospel decisively reveals are the social dynamics that produce what Girard calls “the essential complicity between violence and human culture.”
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Myth — and the primitive religious cosmology it narrates — mutes the victim’s voice. It fills the eyes and nose with incense, and the ears with incantations. When the myth is firmly in place, even those closest to the victims, the ones most likely to resist the myth’s intoxications, concur in the ritual. While the myth holds sway, those under its spell are unwilling or unable to recognize what they are doing. “The rest I did not see,” they say, “nor do I speak of it.” In return for making conventional culture possible, myth silences the victim’s voice and veils the victim’s face. In his book on crowd behavior, for example, Gustave Le Bon says this of the Jacobin ideologues of the French Revolution:
Dogmatic and logical to a man, and their brains full of vague generalities, they busied themselves with the application of fixed principles without concerning themselves with events. It has been said of them, with reason, that they went through the Revolution without witnessing it.

This is what myth and the associated structures of what Girard calls the primitive sacred do. They make it possible to participate in, observe, or recollect certain violent events without having to actually witness them in any morally significant sense.

The San Damiano Cross hanging over Athos

Charley

Aramis - Jeremy Irons in Man in Iron Mask

Man in black

Prayer - the consummation consists in wonder at God

Meditation of the Day

How to Make the Transfiguration Last

Evagrius says, “Prayer is purity of the mind, the movements of whose prayer are not interrupted except once the holy light of the Trinity has shone out in the mind. “ For he says, “prayer is cut off by means of wonder at the light.” Thus the consummation consists in wonder at God, as we have said, and not in the continual stirrings of prayer. The person who has entered the place of the Mysteries remains in wonder at them, and this is the true prayer which opens the door to the treasures of God, allowing those who seek to have their fill of all they need. “Freely have you received, do yourselves give freely” too to everyone you wish. How could anyone dare to say of those who have been given authority over wealth, to give it as if it were their own to everyone they wished, that they are knocking at the door like beggars asking for alms to meet their needs?

No; rather they distribute life, raise the dead, convey hope, give light to the blind; “you are the light of the world,” he said: “I will give you the keys.” You are no longer someone who asks, for you have acquired authority – as though over what belonged to yourself – to bind and to loose, in this world and in the age of ages. How can such a person prostrate himself at the door and beg like a vagabond, seeing that the keys to the treasury are already placed in his hands, enabling him to take and give, have life and provide life?

John the Elder ( + c. early eight century) was a monastic writer of the East.

h/t Doctors of the Catholic Church and Magnificat