Asking questions

A couple days ago, I was flipping through Thomas Merton's little pamphlet on how to approach Scripture. He pointed out an example of the typical master-disciple exchange in Zen Buddhism: the disciple asks, "Who is the Buddha?", and the master replies, "Who are you?" The surface interpretation of this dialog is that you are the Buddha and I am the Buddha and everybody is the Buddha so let's all be happy hippies all together now. Merton explains it in a different way: the disciple goes to the master looking for facts, for doctrine to fill in the blanks in her spiritual worksheet. In reply, the master offers a question instead of an answer. Knowledge of the Buddha is not doctrine but experience, and therefore it requires a process of internal reflection and self-discovery ("Who are you?").

Interpreted a different way, this is what good advisors do with their students. If the answer to a question is known, it can be found in some journal paper or textbook. Instead, good advisors offer questions, because the process of scientific insight and discovery cannot begin without a good question. Long experience in a field develops the ability to ask the right questions, rather than the ability to accumulate knowledge. (Perhaps this is why among professors, good lecturers are much harder to find than good researchers!)

Bio of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin: following Beatrice?

Last weekend, while traveling, I read a biography of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin by Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas. It reads much like one would expect from a biography written by journalists in 1977: a lot of chronology, some of it not particularly interesting, and some sympathy. I've been dipping into "The Human Phenomenon" (formerly known as "The Phenomenon of Man") in a new translation, and finding it very insightful. Unfortunately, that kind of book is impossible to read in short bursts (for me at least!), so I have trouble making progress.

I learned two surprising things about the good Father from the biography. The first is his apparent failure to learn anything from China about humanity, after having spent so many years there. He observed the lack of interest in spiritual matters of ordinary Chinese people, and found it alien and disconcerting. The almost self-annihilating spiritual drive of many Hindus in India, in contrast, gave him a reference point against which he could argue: it said (according to him) that "matter is bad," whereas he said "matter is good." It didn't seem to occur to Teilhard to try to account for a cultural disinterest in "spiritualization" in his views on human development.

The second thing I learned was that Teilhard also had something to say about noncorporeal "sex magick," a topic which I've discussed on this blog before. The biographers considered Teilhard's work "The Evolution of Chastity" as mainly a reflection on his personal situation with Lucile Swan -- a woman with whom he carried on a long-term platonic relationship. What's interesting about the work is that he comes to many of the same conclusions as did Charles Williams and other male authors: from the male perspective, heterosexual expression should or will evolve away from the physical and towards the spiritual.

As I read this passage in the biography, it occurred to me that Teilhard, along with other male authors who had expressed these views, was making an implicit assumption of causality. We observe this: Men often experience "the feminine" as diffuse, rather than strongly individuated. These authors seem to associate diffuseness with abstraction, and like Plato, abstraction with moral elevation. By abstracting one's relationships, they seem to say, one can reach upwards towards "das Ewig-Weibliche," or "Yin," or whatever one chooses to call the Platonic form of Womanhood. They seem to neglect another explanation of the above observation: men could experience the feminine as diffuse, simply because the human male tends towards polygamy or polyamory. Men -- perhaps some more than others -- must consciously choose to make their experience of Womanhood concrete and singular.

It's interesting that men like Charles Williams and Teilhard felt how they did for women who were outside lawful monogamous bounds: CW, for one not his wife (Phyllis Jones), and Teilhard, despite his vow of celibacy, for an arguably spoiled dilettante artist with a childish fascination for the mysterious French Jesuit. Were CW and Teilhard projecting their diffuse desires onto their metaphysics? I shouldn't speculate into their motives, and I should also point out that both relationships were resolved with moral uprightness. Fr. Teilhard also was close friends with Lucile Swan at times when he had little support and needed a lot of friendship and love. Rather than judging these men harshly, we should look into the phenomenon itself and try to understand why they saw the direction of causality pointing one way instead of another.

Don't send me an MS Word form to fill out...

(here comes a rant, watch out)

...because I can't read it. Not because I don't own a copy of Windows and haven't run it for over five years. Not because I'm a "geeky Microsoft hater." It's because MS Word files aren't even compatible with past or future versions of MS Word on Windows itself, let alone on Mac. It's because there's no free .docx to .doc conversion service anywhere on the web, even though the 'softies bribed the ISO committee to get OOXML (hahahaha, OBJECT-ORIENTED XML?!?!? that's like "MS Visual Object-Oriented COBOL") accepted as a standard. It's because the lovely ad-hoc tables that you hacked up in MS Word between visits to Cute Overload collapse into an overlapping jumble of typography unless the margins are set to the exact same number of millifurlongs as yours, even though the margin setting doesn't happen to be a part of your document. It's because you e-mail me a form, then expect me to print it out, fill it out by hand, and FAX it (remember that lovely '80s all-caps trademark? oh wait, you were just a twinkle in your father's eye then!), complete with my credit card number all in plain-text, to some random phone number in another state.

You could send... ASCII? Unicode? a web form? a PDF even, which I could print out, fill out by hand, scan in, and send to you via encrypted e-mail (because you've put your public keys on the website, right?)? Alternately, if you happen to reject post-1950's technology, you could send a physical piece of paper via traditional physical mail, which I could fill out by hand and put in a paper envelope with a money order and send back to you?

Submission to rubrics is submission to God

Recently, on an e-mail list, someone asked for advice on how to help make an Office liturgy over which (s)he was presiding more prayerful. I've heard other people ask this question too -- someone in our schola, who is new to the 1962 Roman Missal liturgy, was asking how to make it more about prayer and less about frantically flipping through various books and guessing at the right tones for responses. It's easy to understand how a quiet, prayerful person might find it very stressful to fiddle with books and worry about what to do next during the sacred liturgy. Maybe I'm just hardened to it as someone who has been through a lot of different liturgies in the choir loft! I'm convinced, though, that the busyness required to provide music for the liturgy can be an act of prayer in itself. Something that helps me is to remember that liturgy is about submission to structure leading to submission to God. When one is bound to the rubrics, one is not free to say or do whatever comes to mind. This in itself already exercises one's humility and is a prayerful act. (Not that spontaneity doesn't have its place, but the liturgy is mostly about following and not about creating.)

When I cantor in our local schola, I am bound to blend in with the voice of the other cantor, and to help the other schola members come in at the right time. We am bound to follow the director, who is bound to follow the actions of the priest and to help the congregation do their part. The priest is bound to celebrate the liturgy in a fitting way, and the congregation is bound to offer fitting worship. All of us are willingly bound together to worship God, and the Christ whom we worship is also willingly bound. All of this binding is sweet, like the swaddling clothes with which Mary wrapped the baby Jesus (see this Office hymn), or the priest's vestments at Mass. It's tight sometimes (imagine you're a new monk, it's 4am in the dead of winter, and you have to find out on the spot whether it's a Greater Double of the First Class or the Second Class), but it's there to help us out.

In a way, any mistake a presider makes or confusion that the congregation has is an act of worship -- it confesses the desire of presider and congregation to follow. The fact that one can "make a mistake" says that one isn't just making things up as one goes along. The more complicated the rules, the more one has to submit oneself to them.

Cabbage heads

Wer Buergerblaetter liest wird blind und taub...

Feeding the body and the spirit

Today's Gospel reading (Sixth Sunday after Pentecost) was from Mark 8. I always remember how the commentators on this "feeding of the multitude" passage identify this crowd with the crowd that shouted, "Crucify him!" In their mind, the people who came to hear Jesus were too limited to see beyond the pressing needs of their empty stomachs. Once this new prophet couldn't fill their bellies, they bent easily before the propaganda of their religious leaders.

There is an undertone of dualist elitism in this interpretation. It suggests that the masses are only capable of understanding gross physical satisfaction, and only the disciples (barely!) can rise above primitive fleshly desires to consider spiritual matters. Furthermore, Jesus himself says that they [the crowd] "have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat." They don't seem to mind physical deprivation in order to hear the Good News -- unlike the disciples, who brought just enough bread and fish for themselves to hold out through Jesus' long-winded sermons!

One could say that Jesus' concern for the crowd echoes Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Jesus realizes that he can't make much more progress on their spiritual needs until he fulfills their physical ones. However, Maslow's pyramid can also serve a more subtle form of dualist elitism: those who are "self-actualized" have "ascended" through the levels of baser need-seeking to reach the top, where they have achieved contentness within themselves. The rest bumble around at varying levels of baseness -- either wondering where to find some scraps of food and a place to sleep tonight, fearfully casting their votes for the candidate who promises to be tough on terrorists, or trying to get their boss to respect their not-so-unselfishly-motivated hard work. There is a taste of the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election here: those who appear to be saved are saved, and those deprived are destined to various levels of eternal deprivation.

Jesus himself doesn't say anything of the sort. It seems he realizes innocently and perhaps even naively that he has talked for three days straight, and that those folks, who walked all the way out to the middle of nowhere to seek and listen to him, are in danger: "If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will collapse on the way, and some of them have come a great distance." Jesus isn't handing out the "bread" part of "bread and circuses"; he isn't interested in pandering to a disinterested crowd, but his audience here is not disinterested.

I heard a good sermon today explaining this passage as Jesus giving us a template for the form of the Eucharistic liturgy. The priest's arguments made sense, but I was thinking the whole time about what I wrote above: there probably really were a whole bunch of very hungry people whom Jesus fed, and that physical hunger is just as relevant as the symbolic, allegorical, or liturgical interpretations of the story. The key phrase is "just as relevant" -- not more, nor less. The demonstration of the structure of the Divine Liturgy is just as important as the exhibition of Jesus' practical compassion.

Beatrice or succubus? the male author's Muse

Many male authors, composers, and scholars in the Western canon took as their inspiration a spiritualized female figure. The Greeks gave us their Muses, with their corresponding mythology of creativity. For example, we refer to an author's "muse" interchangeably as either an actual woman who inspires him, or as an abstract spirit of inspiration. Dante Alighieri's Beatrice is perhaps the most notable specific instance. The author's "La Vita Nuova" and "Divine Comedy" detail the process by which an actual, living Florentine woman (Bice di Folco Portinari) was transformed from a passing fancy, into a spiritual guide who leads Dante to the very face of God. A lesser-known example is Sophie von Kuehn, the wife of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). After Sophie passed away at the young age of 16, she inspired the young philosopher and mining engineer to produce an entire body of unique verse, prose, and essays, by which he is credited as a father of early German Romanticism. Inscribed in Novalis' wedding ring was the phrase "Sophia sei mein Schutzgeist" ("Sophie, be my guardian spirit"), and he often played on the Greek meaning of her name: "Wisdom," frequently personified in the Judeo-Christian tradition as a noble woman.

This spiritualization of the Muse is a process, rather than a static attribute. It happens primarily in the mind of the creative male subject, rather than to the female object. The last line of Goethe's Faust summarizes this process: "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan" ("The Eternal Feminine draws us on"). Man first experiences love as concrete and sexual (whether consummated or not). Then, circumstances (unfulfilled love, separation, and perhaps even the death of the beloved) train him to disembody and spiritualize that love so that it becomes a spiritual guide. The lover is drawn on by the noble beloved to seek higher and more noble things.

The training of the lover by the beloved is a familiar theme from courtly love. This is particularly fitting since the troubadour often sings from the first-person perspective of the male lover: the unattained beloved inspires beautiful music, even as she draws out his weeping and sighs. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival," for instance, the protagonist's wife is named Condwiramurs, which means "love guide." Wolfram changes her name from Blanchefleur, by which she appears in his source material (Chr�tien de Troyes' "Perceval"), so as to emphasize how the thought of her guides Parzival on his many lonely journeys and eventually draws him out of religious despair and back to his quest for the Grail.

This name change also highlights Wolfram's deliberate and arguably awkward choice to desexualize her first encounter with Parzival, in which she convinces him to defend her town from a siege. Chr�tien simply has her seduce the naive young Parzival, who happened to be passing through her town during the siege. In contrast, Wolfram emphasizes her chaste intentions: She visits him at night specifically to convince him to fight for her home, but has no sexual intentions. It is nevertheless a sexually charged encounter: she crawls into his bed, clutches him, and weeps. One should also recall the habit of the time to sleep in the nude. However, "nothing happens," though Parzival had acted less than nobly with another woman before (he robbed her of her jewelry and nearly raped her). She asks him "not to wrestle" (i.e., not to exploit her vulnerable position so as to have sex with her), and Parzival honors this request. Here, it's the woman who drives the desexualization process; in other cases, circumstances drive it. For example, Dante rarely saw Beatrice, and eventually she married another man and passed away at age 24. Novalis lost his young wife after only three years of marriage. Parzival does eventually return to Condwiramurs, but only after finding the Grail.

Sometimes, men enter into this separation process deliberately, rather than letting circumstances bring it to them. For example, the New York Times recently interviewed a Buddhist couple who have taken an unorthodox vow of conjugal celibacy. Sts. Francis and Clare of Assisi form an analogous (though much less extreme) pair in the Western Christian tradition. Francis, himself first a troubadour, chooses a religious life of poverty and preaching, and ordains Clare into the religious life. Some stories even have the young Francis fall in love with Clare, and others depict him as dying in her arms. In a traditional Roman Catholic parish last weekend, the pastor defended priestly celibacy in his sermon by arguing that though priests in ancient times were allowed to be married, they were required to live apart from their wives after ordination. (Whether this is true or not is less interesting than the fact that he mentions it!)

Situations such as this exploit the tension between spiritual companionship and sexual desire. At times this tension has theurgical overtones. On occasion it finds expression directly in terms of the sexual act: for instance, Chinese emperors of the Qing Dynasty were taught that forestalling ejaculation whenever possible would magically add years to their life. More often, it takes a more abstract form as "courtly love" nonsexual relationships. Charles Williams, the 20th century English author and poet, was reputed to have followed this practice. Williams would have been well aware of the theurgical implications from his training in the Western esoteric tradition. In that tradition, nonsexual theurgical relationships later devolved into actual sexual practice (what many self-identifying neopagans call "sex magick"), as described for example in the novels of Dion Fortune. The fundamental idea in these nonsexual relationships is to generate sexual tension, and then by resisting its physical expression, "sublimate" it into a higher spiritual force. This makes the Muse a vessel for creative intellectual work, just as the female body serves (in arguably sexist magical thinking) as the vessel of creation in physical terms.

In his short story "Calliope," Neal Gaiman unites the intellectual and physical roles of the Muse: his protagonist author regains his creativity by magically enslaving and physically raping the Greek Muse Calliope. This illustrates the dark side of the spiritualized female figure: she remains Object to the male as Subject. He creates alone, without her cooperation, and projects an image upon her which obscures her actual identity and makes her ever more divorced from reality. She dies, lies unconscious in a coma (as described fictionally in Williams' 1931 novel "Many Dimensions," whose female protagonist some have argued was modeled after his lover Phyllis Jones), or is simply inaccessible and therefore ever more ripe for projection. Furthermore, Dante Alighieri and Charles Williams were married (not to their Muses), and Novalis was engaged to marry Julie von Charpentier the year after Sophie's death (though he died before their marriage). Keeping a Muse was for them a kind of intellectual (and actual, in Williams' case!) adultery.

Williams did, however, understand well the consequences of this projection process. In his 1937 novel "Descent into Hell," one of his male characters descends so deeply into a fantasized relationship with a particular woman, that his fantasies become a succubus that leads him to despair and suicide. While undergoing this process, he encounters the actual woman, and she is so taken with fear that she flees from him: he has detached the fantasy entirely from reality. Despite Williams' dabbling in the darker aspects of Muse-keeping, one need only read his collected letters to his wife Florence Conway ("To Michal from Serge") to learn the depths of his intense and very real love for her. Novalis may have transformed his first wife into a "Schutzgeist," but he still weeps at her tomb, as depicted in "Hymn to the Night." One also sees in the "Divine Comedy" how even the spiritualized Beatrice is still very much a woman who attracts Dante, whose shining eyes and half-mocking smile have a power over him which is chaste but by no means nonsexual. The examples of these three authors -- Dante Alighieri, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and Charles Williams -- show the moral tension of taking on a Muse, but also show the importance and value of staying grounded in the reality of the female person -- physical, spiritual, intellectual, intelligent, an equal Subject in her own right.