Simulations & Spouses

Poster of “Bride and Gloom” (1918), Public Domain.

The popular philsophical writer Alain de Botton recently published an article in the New York Times outlining the ways in which, in the end, everyone marries the wrong person (a longer version of this essay can be found here) While this is often a cause for despair, de Botton chimed in with an encouraging note, as well as a note of caution with the words:

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person…We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

This observation of the effect that that what he calls the “Romantic idea” of marriage is an important one, for it would seem that the current environment of image-saturation, creating a condition that the Marxist philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s called “hyperreality”, exacerbates the “Romantic idea”. This is because conditions of hyper-reality – where images are deemed more real than reality itself – bear the potential to generate, and indeed have generated, simulations of a spouse that cement themselves into the mind’s eye to the point that actual, embodied spouses are constantly coming up short, whether it is in terms of appearance, temperament, abilities or delivery of lifestyle. The actual spouse is constantly exposed to be nothing like the sweeping movie scene, the checklist or the airbrushed photo on Pinterest. It is in love that the death of actuality at the hands of an overpowering potentiality are most viscerally experienced.

On the other hand, what the article by de Botton, and indeed the Theological work on marriage in the tradition of St. John Paul II and Marc Oullet highlight, is that the taking of a spouse is always a taking in of a mystery that is gradually and constantly unfolding before you. Marriage is that context within which the embodied reality of the spouse acts as an abrasive to grind back the simulations that the conditions of hyperreality have encrusted onto us. An important task of the spouse then is twofold, to resist the simulations of the spouse delivered by movies, music videos and social media, but also develop a disposition of active waiting for the unfurling of one’s actual spouse.

Prayer After “The World Spins Madly On”

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Almighty God,

You moved your servant to listen to “The World Spins Madly On” by the Weepies, that short, beautiful song of unfulfilled longing, broken promises, and utter helplessness in the face of this barbarian called life that you have let loose on us.

In this song you remind your servant that of all the contingencies of life, people, days, places, memories, words are just that – things that pass by us and are not meant to stay with us. You make us reflect on the only perennial thing in this contingent universe, mankind’s need to say goodbye to these contingencies. All these things, they come by our lives for but a moment.

But in the words of our father Augustine, we desire these temporary things to last an eternity. And in our efforts to make our own heavens on earth with the temporary things of this earth, we only render our heavens into foretastes of hell, creating glimpses of that separation that awaits those who, like those angels in ages past, declared their refusal to serve you, knew what it meant, and meant it with their hearts.

And in this song, O Lord, you cause us to ponder how the world does not care as these hells multiply, in our own lives and in lives all over its continents. Little wonder that we are jaded, O Lord, as our cries of agony of loss, small and large alike, are just met with the world simply moving on. Our world is so cold, and our search for comfort in this world for the pain of our loss only seems to compound this pain, as the sheer contingency of all things tears away our comforts that we have band-aided over our wounds.

But in your wisdom, you deign to heal our wounds borne from our bindings to those that would only leave us. And indeed, you deign to heal them with these very contingent things to which we cling, but in so doing you create your own portals to a truly eternal life. With water, oil, salt, bread, wine, bodies and words, you put together a vault of the sacramental life to immerse us in, thus showing viscerally to our own senses that our longing for the eternal can be fulfilled. Our recurring pain need not be the only eternal – nay it was merely an illusion – experience in this mad world, nor do they need to be meaningless knocks of fortune. Let these portals you have created, O Lord, take up these temporary things of this world gone absurd, such that they do not just get meaninglessly lost in the passage of the moments.

May it please you that, in the moment when moments march no more, you would in your mercy show us how every instance of loss and being lost in this life of ours – and yes, even the end of that life when we shall lie motionless in bed for the last time – forms the threads in this cosmic tapestry of your saving work.

For our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

Praise be the name of the Lord, both now and forever.

 

Meaty Souls & the Death of Prince

 

People die everyday, sometimes in great numbers at a single time, from wars, genocides, domestic violence, stabbings, shootings, prenatal dismemberments and natural disasters. We are so bombarded by death and the notifications thereof that the avalanche of bodies cascading down into the meat-grinder of history has almost become a kind of cultural white noise, the backdrop to everyday lives punctuated by the beholding of more virtual deaths on television shows, games and movies.

In light of this, it seems somewhat jarring to read on social media that 2016 is only now being singled out as a year of death, following with the deaths of Prince (and the less noted death of the female wrestling star Chyna) earlier this week and David Bowie a couple of months before.

Putting to one side the asymmetry of ascribing greater significance to the deaths of a handful from the world of North American entertainment (compared to the hundreds of deaths of more ordinary folk in South America, Europe and the Middle East in the same period), what one senses from the recent lamentations is the idea that with the loss of these bodies, a certain spirit of the age has gone with them. We the fans of these entertainers feel that a part of our identity – childhoods, adolescences, key stages in our lives – has been lost with the disappearance of these bodies. There seemed to be something more to these bodies than mere flesh, and clearly gets a sense of this from the obituary to Prince by Rebecca Bratten Weiss.

What this sense of loss of a communal geist that accompanies the loss of these particular bodies demonstrates is a phenomenology of the body outlined by the likes of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Graham Ward and St. John Paul II (and well before him, Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle before him still). We feel the sense of loss of a communal geist because, Ward tells us in his Christ and Culture, bodies are not mere flesh, isolated objects that are just there. Bodies are tied, sometimes biologically, to communal relations, and as such they are infused with the weight of the symbols that form and sustain that community. Lose that body, and you lose a node to those symbolic strings that were stretched and held taut across peoples, ages and places, held in place simply from that bodies presence.

What is more, bodies are not merely flesh because, as Aristotle once suggested, flesh is ensouled. Ward reminds us of the German designations of the word “body”, namely körper (to designate dead bodies) and leib (to designate living bodies). Ward notes that Leib was not just an expression of life as mere locomotion. Leib put the body as “the seat of the soul”. Put this way, soul and body are not the separable, independent categories that we imagine them to be. As Merleau-Ponty wrote in his The Structure of Behaviour, soul and body “can never be absolutely distinguished without each ceasing to be” since, as he noted elsewhere in his Phenomenology of Perception “man’s body and ‘soul’ are but two aspects of his way of being in the world”. The movements of the body, to paraphrase Aquinas’ de Veritate, are but movements of the soul, and the movements of the bodies of the entertainers that captured our collective imaginations, are simultaneously movements of their individual souls and the semiotics of the communities in which we belong.

Catholic Social Dispatches

 

With all the intense hypervigilence and dissection of the recent Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Letitia, and equally intense online sabre-rattling over whether the Catholic faith has been transformed beyond recognition because of it, a lot of other stories in the Catholic social media landscape have received scant attention. Deliberately or otherwise, directly or indirectly, the theme of Catholic Social Teaching has figured rather prominently in these more marginal threads.

What jumps out is the way in which ecclesiology seems to undergird these seemingly diverse nods to Catholic Social Teaching. More specifically, these stories the attempts to position the Church as a crucial waypoint between the periphary and the centre, the hospital waiting room bridging the wounded and the well, the secular and the sacred and the ladder between the transcendent ideal and the less than ideal temporal situation.

Chief among these was the Pope’s recent visit to the island of Lesbos with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I. Both the Patriarch and the Pontiff focused their visit on those itinerant peoples who, for whatever reason, seek to relocate to Europe and found themselves stranded in that part of the European continent (other pockets of stranded are found in other parts of the Europe, mostly in the south and the east). Having concluded that visit, it was also announced that the Pontiff had also taken twelve individuals – those whose papers are in good order but remain stranded – onto the papal plane back to Italy. It is one of the more dramatic moves of a papacy characterised by highly symbolic moves.

While this story unfolded, it was also reported that the American Democratic presidential hopeful, Senator Bernie Sanders, addressed a conference at the Vatican at the invitation of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences. His paper, “The Urgency for a Moral Economy”, can be found in full here.

A third story can be found in a story (dated 14^th April), in the Jesuit magazine America, which was a write up on Solidarity Hall, a group of writers who have converged in an online space started by Elias Crim, and has slowly evolved into a publishing venture under the management of Daniel Schwindt. Solidarity Hall now features its own contribution to the Patheos platform with The Dorothy Option. In the interview with one of its authors, Mark Gordon, the article spoke of the focus of the venture’s contribution to the development of the Catholic Social tradition by negotiating a “radically Christian life in the space between the state and the market” and the “polarities of left and right”, by reclaiming the “whole teaching of the church, unalloyed by the ideologies and false identities of party, class, even nation”. As a footnote, the article also mentioned by name the Divine Wedige‘s Matthew Tan, him being an Australian voice in an otherwise dominantly American project, contributing to the Solidarity Hall website on pop culture and total war, and a chapter on the migrant in their flagship publication Radically Catholic in the Age of Francis.

Catholic Social Teaching is not just about teaching or a space called the social, but also the bodies that occupy that space and live out the teaching. With this in mind the fourth item, a post from Rebecca Bratten Weiss of Franciscan University of Steubenville, deserves mention here. In it, Weiss draws our attention to the way in which a Church and a theology should not not only speak to and about the perfect or respectable bodies, but also those who enter its doors with bodies broken and violated from violence, illnesses or defects both intended and unintended, maladies that we try to shield our eyes from in our quest for the comfortable bourgeois Christianity. Weiss suggests that such imperfect bodies ought to be part of the story of the Body of Christ.

Hangry Eyes: Our Ravenous Seeing

 

Eric Carmans Hungry Eyes is an awfully corny song which, combined to the dance moves and fashion statements of the movie Dirty Dancing, form the quintessential signpost to the overall corniness of the decade that was the 80s. Corny though it may be, is there some ancient truth buried beneath the refrain, especially the line which goes “One look at you and I can’t disguise I’ve got hungry eyes”?

Gifts Glittering and Poisoned, authored by Chanon Ross and referred to in last week’s post, seems to indicate as much. The book makes the less than subtle claim that part of the religious aspect that ties the act of seeing to worshiping, mentioned in a previous post, is the consumptive aspect that ties seeing with consuming. Moreover, this kind of consuming far from passive and far from tranquil. It is tied with domination and aggression.

Ross refers to a passage in the Confessions, where Augustine recalls his friend, Alypius, and his addiction to the spectacle entertainments of the Colosseum in ancient Rome. Ross makes much of a line in the Confessions, in which Alypius’ addiction to spectacle was expressed in consumptive terms using the words:

he saw the blood and gulped the brutality, he fixed his gaze there and drank in the frenzy.

Another example used by Ross is the Roman theologian Salvian in his On the Government of God. In it, Salvian similarly makes a link between the gaze and eating. Commenting on the consumption of victims by wild animals in the Colosseum, Salvian imputes guilt on those that watch this violence, saying that

…the victims seem devoured almost as much by the eyes of the audience as by the teeth of beasts.

We may excuse ourselves by saying that our gaze is not fixed on anything so visceral or overtly violent. Nevertheless, the consumptive logic of our seeing persists, and Ross suggests that it is Christ who, in giving of himself as a spectacle to be raised up, takes in our consumptive gaze and redeems it by turning it into the gaze on a gift freely given.

Changing Sex & Living Forever

 

The editor of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, Ken Myers, recently released some bonus material under the title “Possibility or Potency?“. The materials include two stimulating interviews, the first being with Dr. Mark Shiffman, Associate Professor Humanities at Villanova University. The second interview is with Gilbert Meilaender, a senior research professor at Valparaiso University.

The unifying arc of these two interviews is the topic of transhumanism, the radical strands of which seek to technologically enhance the human person and overcome the limitations that come with having a body. These can include matters of sexual identity on the one hand, and death on the other . What was commonly observed by interviewees is that in an age of technological hyper-advancement, the body has come to act as a prosthetic to the will or a brake on the ability of the will to get what it wants. This runs up against the cultural zeitgeist that has normalised an attitude of “mind over matter”, which ends up metaphysically connecting two seemingly unconnected cultural phenomena of transgenderism on the one hand, and the transhuman attempts at immortality on the other (as an aside, it is interesting that Herve Juvin praised the capacities of transgenderism in embodying the unlimited possibilities of the will, aided by medical technology, in his The Coming of the Body).

Shiffman’s interview is particularly interesting, because it identifies the root of this transexual and transhuman assertion of the primacy of the will in a medieval theological move by Bl. Duns Scotus to preserve the omnipotence of God. This omnipotence was protected by Scotus’ claim that the structure of nature cannot be explained by anything other than the will of God. What this did, says Shiffman, is to remove the ability of the material world, including bodies in that world, to say anything meaningfully about God. This had the secondary effect of reducing God to an absolute will, and in turn reduced the conception of the human person – who is made in the image of God – to be primarily a will that just so happens to have a body, rather than the Aristotelian idea of the body being a person, with predetermined potencies set by God as a means of helping man understand heavenly realities.

When the body becomes an accidental category to what makes up a human person, it is not hard to conceive of the will, unfettered by any limit imposed on the body, to expand its capacities or self-identity that does not have any material anchor. A person is exactly the same regardless of whether he or she has a biological body, a surgically enhanced body that looks like any gender imaginable, a computer chasis or freely floating in cyberspace. All these phenomena, the two interviewees suggest, find their root in the uncoupling of embodiment with personhood, which is found not only in the most radical edges of transhumanism, but also in the minutiae of consumer culture.

Fundamental Joy

It finally happened. In an interstate flight, the Pixar movie Inside Out was watched and, oddly enough, it was quite the charmer. Even more surprisingly, Inside Out proved to be rather philosophically and theologically astute.

Whether conscious or not, whoever conceptualised the movie has rather deftly brought together elements of Augustinian theology, as well as an appreciation of Terrance Malick’s Tree of Life, in which interior states folded outwards to form landscapes that were inhabited, rather than mere heremetically sealed feelings, giving the sense that one’s psyche is a cosmos very similar – and very connected – to the natural universe in which we live.

Of particular interest, however, was the sequence at the beginning of the movie in which the girl whose emotions are the main protagonists, Riley, is born, and her emotions gradually come into being. Interestingly, it is Joy that makes the first entrance. She smiles in wonder at everything she beholds, and it is her presence that marks Riley’s most fundamental orientation to the world, marked by the construction of largely happy core memories as theme parks. Her absence, while a key driver in the plot, is also portrayed as an abnormal development.

What is interesting about this very short but very fetching sequence is that it gives an optical statement concerning not only the fundamental orientation of the human creature, but also the fundamental structure of creation. In David L. Schindler’s book Ordering Love, the point is made that order in the universe is not only a dry abstract structure, but also a statement about the amount of care and concern shown by the Creator for creatures. Love, Schindler boldly states, is the metaphysical bedrock of the universe.

This bedrock of love then demands a proper response, a response is gleaned in the second creation account in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis. In an interview on his book Acedia & Its Discontents, R.J. Snell made the point that the first words that Adam spoke came out in a cry of delight, an exclamation of joy. This exclamation of joy, however, is not just a delight at the sight of Eve. As John Paul II’s work on the Theology of the Body makes clear, Adam’s first cry is also a statement of the fundamental nature of the human creature. It is joy, not sadness, that forms the fundamental makeup of the human person. It is for this reason that the sight of so much sadness in our world evokes the conviction that something abnormal has taken place.

Being Someplace Else: The Theological Virtues & the Anime of Makoto Shinkai (Podcast Now Available)

In a previous post, mention was made of a presentation at the Caroline Chisholm Library in Melbourne entitled “Being Someplace Else”. 

The talk explored how the animated films of Makoto Shinkai can act as a useful guide to consider the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Love. The paper then went to put the films of Shinkai with two German theologians, Josef Pieper and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. It concluded that Shinkai’s constant exploration of the longing to be in other places can provide a good launch point to see in a new light these otherwise ancient theological virtues. Be that as it may, the parallels are far from complete, as becomes apparent in the exploration of Hope. 

Thanks to the help of the good people of the Sydney-based online radio station Cradio, the podcast of that presentation is now available, and readers can listen to the presentation in full by clicking here. 

Crunchy-Conservatism, Migrants & Pope Francis

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“Crunchy-conservatives” in the United States have started organising against the neoliberal and faux-conservative status-quo, and one outlet for this organisation is the online thinkerspace known as Solidarity Hall. Whilst having run a website for a number of years, the Folk at Solidarity Hall have launched their publishing arm, Solidarity Hall Press, with the release of their first book Radically Catholic in the Age of Francis, edited by Daniel Schwindt.

This book is an edited text with a number of short essays which, from a variety of perspectives and stations in life, the theme of what it means to be a radical and Catholic is explored and what the relatively new papacy of Francis would mean for this intersection. By extension, the contributions of the book explores possibilities for Catholics in America – outside the media-manufactured slogans – to relate to their nation, democracy and modernity.

Though not American, the Divine Wedgie is glad to be associated with the work of Solidarity Hall, with its blogger at large being invited to make an Australian contribution to Radically Catholic, in a chapter entitled “The Migrant and the Latin Church“. A contribution has also been made to the Solidarity Hall website with the online essay “Pop Culture and Total War“, which is a more condensed version of the conference paper presented in Germany for the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, entitled “War by Other Meangirls: Pop Culture as Total War“.

Radically Catholic in the Age of Francis is available in hard copy and on Kindle.

Dexter’s Conversion

 

There are a number of themes that are constantly explored throughout the television series Dexter, from the constituents of authenticity, belonging, definitions of justice, even sin and redemption. One under-explored theme in the literature concerning the series is the theme of conversion. This can be taken at a literal level, in which Dexter hints at a conversion to an explicitly Christian faith, particularly in season 6, in the course of his troubled friendship with Brother Sam, the convict turned mechanic turned Christian pastor.

But there is another level of conversion, explored by Rene Girard and in the series itself, which concerns a turning away from former ways of life and worldviews. This is explored in a book chapter by the Divine Wedgie’s Matthew Tan, entitled “Conversion in Dexter“. The book in which this chapter features is entitled Mimesis, Movies and Media, published this year by Bloomberg and edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming and Joel Hodge. This book, the third in the Violence, Desire and the Sacred series, has various contributions which apply Girardian analyses and his famous theory of mimetic desire and violence to various forms of visual media, particularly movies and television.

The chapter looks at the degree to which Dexter’s process of conversion from his violent double life and even to Christianity can be considered as such by Girard’s mimetic theory as applied to that form of literature we call the novel. Put simply, Girard suggests that in the classic novels, processes of conversion can be detected which in many ways reflect a similar process of conversion in the novelist that created the protagonist. The chapter then explores the degree to which a novelistic conversion can reveal new materials about Dexter. The justification for this is that the main character, Dexter Morgan, can be taken to be a novelist within the show, in light of the frequent audio journaling that takes place throughout the series. The question is then asked if Dexter as novelist undergoes a conversion as described in Girard’s work on novels.

The chapter can be accessed in full here.