Thursday, August 11, 2011

Hmm ...

... Secularism and Its Discontents : The New Yorker.

... whether or not people did feel full or enchanted in centuries past, religion cannot be identified with the promise of fullness or enchantment. Both Christianity and Islam harshly challenge the self with an insistence on submission, sacrifice, and kenosis—an emptying out of the self, an exchange of the wrong kind of fullness for the right kind of humility—and Buddhism seeks to undermine the very idea of the sovereign, unified self. Revolutionary asceticism, which is what these religions in different ways embody, could be said to be hellbent on disenchantment.

I'm not sure about any of this. I've recently done a good bit of reading about Zen. One book in particular, D.T. Suzuki's Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, pretty much demonstrates that Meister Eckhart arrived at the fundamentals of Zen on his own, through his Christianity. And the transcendence of "self" has nothing to do with disenchantment. The idea is that the world, when seen by what for want of a better term I will call the "unconditioned self" -- the self you had the moment you were born and saw the world without the mediation of any ideas or beliefs -- that world is continuously enchanting. It isn't just secularists who have been disenchanted. By the time we are just a few years old, all of us have been.
Indeed, religion has contributed mightily to this by its attempts to rationalize faith. The doctrines and regulations are as disenchanting as anything secularism can muster, reducing God to just another idea and faith to a shopping list of beliefs. A living faith and a living God have little to do with any of this. That is probably why the secularists in the Catholic Church have so wanted to "revise" the liturgy, the Church's one spark of life.

1 comment:

  1. I agree that the terminology is problematic.

    Suzuki's book on Eckhart is essential. You may know the story of how Suzuki and Thomas Merton met in the early 60s, during an ecumenical exchange. Merton was struggling to understand Zen, and Suzuki recommended he read Eckhart, since Eckhart had understood it a long time ago. Merton read Eckhart, and that was what led to him maturing into the mystic he became over the next decade. This was the pivotal event.

    I also agree rationalization, whether of faith or of secular affaris, contribute greatly to disenchantment. But we live in a culture now that doesn't trust enchantment anymore. I've been researching the reenchantment of the world for some years now, reading and writing about it, and it's a groundswell movement closely associated with mysticism, including such contemporary teachers as Merton, Matthew Fox, Caroline Myss, Andrew Harvey, etc. I am particularly in the path of art as a means of reenchanting the world. I think a lot of artists never loose that sense of the world being alive and wonderful.

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