SUBVERSIVE SPIRITUALITY: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and other Christians in Disguise (Robert Inchausti), 2005.

What are the ‘wisest of the wise’ actually saying about the false wisdoms of the modern world? Here Robert Inchausti, English Professor and expert on Thomas Merton, selects and compresses the wisdom of Blake, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Kerouac, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, M L King, Schumacher, Wendell Berry, McLuhan, Northrop Frye, Ellul, Illich and Rene Girard. Phew! It’s a brilliant book, and essential reading for Modern Christian Literature 101 (where it all probably originated anyway).

Here’s my note-summary of the main points, with selected quotations from these masters here and there:

* Myth, rather than calculation, should be our master metaphor and method for human self-understanding. These are people who are critical of the dominant narrative, yet still capable of drawing connections between their faith and the realities of the modern world.

* G K Chesterton (‘Five Deaths of the Faith’) says Christianity was rediscovered five times in the history of the West – after the fall of Rome, then in the twelfth century at the end of the feudal era, again during the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment, and later in our postindustrial age.

* But now our 500-year fascination with calculation is withering on the lonely, dissipated vine of the postmodern ‘self’. In our era, just as in every transitional age, God seems dead, but it is really our Enlightenment culture that has died. God is always independent of our worldly scenarios.

* Eternal life is not life that lasts forever, not space-time life going on and on… but rather a life free from temporality. William Blake believes the church has lost its radical energy by giving up its apocalyptic vision for a more accommodating set of doctrines, and so the church became more hierarchical and tradition-bound. (Jerusalem): ‘The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated/ From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio/ Of the Things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities/ To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars’. Blake was the first major Western artist to rebel against the reductive rationalism of Newton, Bacon, Locke, and Descartes. Goethe was the first to fully describe the troubled psychology the New Sciences left in their wake.

* In the 20th century, when ‘bourgeois’ = mean-spirited wealth, narrow-minded technological know-how and a preoccupation with worldly success the cultural ideals of the knight, the monk, the philosopher, and the poet were all superseded by the cultural ideal of the businessman. Cf. Matthew Arnold’s critique of the modern Philistines in Culture and Anarchy – it signaled for Berdyaev the death of the spirit in the birth of the bottom line.

* The view of time as a commodity – indeed of life, spirit, health, and meaning as commodities – creates a new human type focused upon personal achievement. Organization is the death of the organism (Berdyaev).

* Don Quixote is the signature work in the genre ‘epics of homelessness’: a human being lost among commodities and social roles seeking beauty, truth, and justice – it became the master plot and template for virtually every novel written after it. The novel has been the primary vehicle for spiritual reflection in the West in the modern era. The theologians in their conversation with the scientists and philosophers have simply taken the wrong road home. Essentially the concerns of the novel are the same as those of religion.

* Most literary scholars agree that Dostoyevsky reinvented the modern novel as a unique philosophical genre: a form of thought-in-motion, life-in-thought, fiction as spiritual experiment – and thereby changed the way we read all narratives, including the Bible. The Brothers Karamazov is the single most significant work of spiritual direction written in the modern era, and at the same time perhaps, the single most telling critique of conventional religious piety ever composed. It’s the first full and successful articulation of Christian modernism (and the ultimate expression of orthodox avante-garde). In Alyosha, Dostoevsky finds a convincing champion of the faith who is neither a quixotic fool nor a tragic victim – but a living synthesis of Western realism and Eastern mysticism. By demonstrating Christ’s radical ethic of perpetual inward renewal, Alyosha models for us the full meaning of Dostoyevsky’s epigram ‘Without suffering, happiness cannot be understood.’ There is no other work – except perhaps Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison – that so accurately diagnoses the spiritual crises of our age or penetrate to the very essence of our moral blindnesses and self-destructive urges.

* Dorothy Day would have loved Jacques Ellul’s remark that ‘what constantly marked the life of Jesus was not nonviolence but in every situation the choice not to use power’ – this is infinitely different. Like G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, she embraced ‘distributism’ as an economic alternative to the industrial ethics of both the communists and the capitalists.

* Merton: One has to doubt and reject conventional and superstitious surrogates that have taken the place of faith. On this level, the division between Believer and Unbeliever ceases to be so crystal clear. It is not that some are all right and others all wrong: all are bound to seek in honest perplexity. Everybody is an Unbeliever more or less.

* M L King: Our willing acceptance of unwanted and unfortunate circumstance even as we still cling to radical hope; our acceptance of finite disappointment even as we adhere to infinite hope. This is not the grim, bitter acceptance of the fatalist, but the achievement found in Jeremiah’s words, ‘This is a grief, and I must bear it’.

* E F Schumacher (The Insufficiency of Liberalism): there are three stages of human development: first, primitive religiosity, then scientific realism. The third stage, which we are now entering, is the realization that there is something beyond fact and science. Problem: stages 1 and 3 look the same to those in stage 2. Those in Stage 3 are seen as having relapsed into magical thinking when, in reality, they have actually seen through the limitations of rationalism. Only those who have come to realize the theoretical limitations inherent to instrumental logic understand the need for ‘metaeconomic’ values.

* Divergent thinking (J R Guildford): creativity is the capacity to arrive at unique and original solutions by considering problems in terms of multiple solutions. ‘Convergent’ thinking narrows all options to one solution; it is orderly, step-by-step, and logical. Divergent thinking appropriates opposites. We need a more ‘inclusive’ logic. Einstein: no problem in science can be solved at the same level of consciousness that created it. Note much of our blindness to ecological issues, and prejudices in favour of economies of scale, nationalistic politics, and globalization. Institutions will always move in the direction of power and self preservation, not high principle.

* Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz compared what’s happened to Christianity in the West to taking the wrong subway train in New York. ‘You can go in a wrong direction somewhere. You go very far and can’t get off. Maybe you’ve been on the wrong train. Goethe had an intuition that something was going wrong, that science should not be separated from poetry and imagination. Blake also.’

* Marshal McLuhan (a Catholic convert): ‘I’m perfectly prepared to scrap any statement I ever made about any subject once I find that it isn’t getting me into the problem. I have no devotion to any of my probes as if they are sacred opinions. I have no proprietary interest in my ideas and no pride of authorship as such.’ (One of his ideas): When Western civilization shifted from an oral culture to print after the Gutenberg revolution, intellectual authority shifted from the wise man with experience and character to the expert equipped with logic and method. There’s a generation gap on a global scale as the largely literate educated classes come into conflict with the new orally oriented techno-peasants of the mass media. The religious universe of young people is something quite different from that of the literate church leadership. Today we are less interested in doctrinal or dogmatic disputes and far more open to experiential/mystical elements of the faith. ‘The medium is the message’ is another way of saying ‘The Word became flesh.’

* Karl Marx: ‘History always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’. Northrop Frye would add ‘and the third time as romance, the fourth time as comedy, the fifth time as tragedy again and so on ad infinitum in a repetitive cycle until the end of time’. Art is recycled revelation.

* Frye – like Blake, Dostoevsky, and Berdyaev (not to mention T S Eliot and James Joyce) – sees the Bible as the formulation and superstructure of the culture in which we are embedded: a culture that they worked to renew, setting its mythology against its ideology in an attempt to desacralize existing secular institutions and render holy a saving remnant of apocalyptic hope.

* Jacques Ellul: ‘You can’t relativize things except vis-as-vis an absolute, and this is a self-revealing absolute. What an admirable decision on God’s part: he does not reveal himself as a religious absolute, but as love, as powerlessness, as one who comes down to our level and thus devalues everything else’. Ellul has a skepticism toward human institutions: he sides instinctively with the outsiders, the oppressed, the victimized, and the accused – and yet nevertheless continues to engage in the all-too-human pursuit of justice in a world prone to political compromise.

* The most striking challenge to the modern imagination leveled by Christian mystics is their rejection of the notion that the scientific method is the best and only way of knowing. Outstanding Christian thinkers have very little interest in changing the world. They seek merely to see things clearly in the light of God’s hidden logic. They desire to live in the truth even more than they desire to be effective in the world. For these Christian critics, injustice is not something that can ever be defeated. It must be constantly combated. When it disappears in one place it reappears in another. What the Christian mysteries require from us is not that we construct a better world, but that we love and serve the one we are given. As one Parisian graffiti artist wrote in 1968: ‘the intellectuals have hitherto only changed the world; the point is to understand it.’ We must create the silent, contemplative spaces where individuals can experience the truth for themselves. To make certainty our highest intellectual standard, or success the measure of our ideas, is to still the dissenting wisdom of the heart and thereby blind the soul to alternative possibilities and life’s abiding ironies. The shift in perspective from epistemological certainty to transformational revelation turns the tables on modernism and reveals an alternative tradition within Western thought: a tradition keyed to what Boris Pasternak called ‘the history within history’. This emergent religious countermodernism offers an explicit alternative to positivist religion, science, literature, and ethics. These Christian thinkers are paradoxicalists by definition. At the very moment civilizations seem to be colliding our inner lives have begun an unforeseen return to sources, to silence, to humility, to asceticism, and to the deep listening that is known as contemplation.

Rowland Croucher

March 2010