All comments by: mr

This will have to be my last post, because I’ll be away for a few weeks beginning tomorrow. I found it fruitful and enjoyable. Thanks for the posts, Katie.

I’ll only add something in reference to your original claim about intimacy without love or friendship being damaging to the spirit. This is a true statement, yes. Who would disagree? But how does one go about reversing this condition if one should begin to experience it? You identify a problem. What’s your solution for the person trapped in this condition or for the person who initiates this condition? I really want to know, because I am still yet to meet a single person on earth who is either not already in this condition or is a razor’s edge away from falling into this condition of a “damaged spirit.”

A lot of people need help. What do we do with the persons (or are they exempt from personhood?) who do this to us? What do we do with ourselves if we find ourselves doing to other people what we hate having done to ourselves?

Is it that you are impervious to having anything at all in common with the archetypal cold, hard, Calvinistic, tyrannical monster-husbands that you co-construct and knock down on your site? Of course there is “truth” in what the Bronte’s, what Dickens, what George Eliot, what Wolestonecraft have to say about the archetypal evil man they so easily build up to knock down. No one in their right mind would disagree with your/their images. But, is “truth” enough? As Alice Von Hildebrand says, truth or justice without mercy and charity is crippled.

The woman I know who “love” these authors and the “truths” they communicate hardly have an easy time loving men. There’s something about being in possession of merely natural truth that hardens the spirit. Supernatural truth, God willing we ever get to it, is another thing. As Aquinas reminds: mercy without justice is disillusionment; but justice without mercy is cruelty. This is something your radicals are yet to discover, and this is why their truths absolutely need to be qualified, supplemented, completed. Can’t really blame them, though, for offering partial truths: they had not read Dostoyevski.

Question: Is one always aware of one’s own capacity to draw out and make known previously hidden truths or does one come to an awareness of this capacity through a kind of metanoia?

You say “truth itself grows and is made manifest.” To whom? Newman, Hildebrand, Stein spend a lot of time with this question.

Another question: Does one pay one’s way through college to this capacity to be a pioneer of truth? Can my grandmother who never graduated high school achieve it? Also: Did Newman ever call himself a pioneer? Did Hildebrand? No. Because the mea cupla never left their sights, and because they never succumbed to the temptation of the tua culpa that drove the Frankfurt School.

Yes, Newman, as you say, elaborates a sense by which truth itself grows and is made manifest. But he over and over shows and insists upon the fact that truth reveals itself to a person in the right condition, namely “little babes—“unless ye be like this child…” 

Pascal and Augustine grew up and became like this babe-child when they in their own ways asserted with extreme humility that it is infinitely reasonable to known that there are things infinitely beyond the grasp of reason, things which we need and love but can only grasp by means of another muscle.

We can call Newman a pioneer. But Newman wouldn’t dare call himself or think of himself as one.

(Sorry, I had to take a phone call, and so I published my incomplete last remarks for fear of loosing them.)

Apropos of Newman and doctrine development, I was going to add that the subject, making room in his being for what his subjectivity had necessarily kept out of recollection, gets taken up into an objectivity that had always existed but was beyond his grasp. If what you mean by pioneer is he who transcends self as he makes room in himself for what he is inclined by error to keep out of himself, then we are in agreement. JP 2’s formulation is: Christ shows man to himself. (Although, this is not to say that I am in agreement with JP 2’s philosophical or theological emphases. Pope Benedict is worlds apart for JP 2 on matters philosophical and theological.)

On Subordination: see the usage in Pope Benedict’s last encyclical. I mean it exactly the way he means it.

Newman, you remember, does not think on the basis of an antithesis between subjectivity and authority, an antithesis between a dogmatic proposition and subjectivity, between “objective” neo-scholasticism and the thinking-feeling-groaning subject, between an authority which is a threat to my freedom and a subjectivity which expresses my freedom. This is why for Newman, the development of doctrine has nothing to do with being a pioneer, but a “rememberer” of what memory and reason had not caught site of previously, namely that which was ALREADY handed down in the original WORD but was missed due to errors or blindspots in man’s thinking and feeling.

For the devout Catholic, the model of love and intimacy par excellence emerges from the divine substance of the Trinity, the eternal and undivided (and un-suspicious) relation of subordination and love that exists between the Father and the Son. No one gets this “down pat.” It is an infinite mystery and calls us to ITS apparently impossible heights. One approaches this love on one’s knees. Are you sure the people you call devout are really devout? A devout person, it seems to me, would be so awed by such love as to not be able to speak about it in hackneyed terms.

BTW: I didn’t know that one can be a pioneer on the frontier of truth.

Thanks for your followups. I see what you mean: Yours is simply the humane practice of knowing what drives such modern thinkers and tracing their deep concerns, so as to be able to enter into a dialogue with them—and also to discover from them the places where human love seems to be impoverished and why and what solutions they offer.

Again, though, I mainly questions whether there exists in the “critic” or “radical” an openness and readiness to enter into the drama of love, to take upon themselves the tensions that necessarily attach to love and intimacy and which pre-exist lovers and call them to greater and greater senses of renunciation and self-offering. In other words, without this readiness, with the fullness of this “yes,” and without the fore-consideration of all that such a “yes” entails, there can be no human capacity to even identify and know and live truth and love. That is, how can the claim to discontent be credible and valid in the person whose feeling-centric expectations about love and intimacy already move beyond what can be expected of intimacy between humans on earth. That is, it may be that case that where idealists and romantics and moderns identify an impoverishment, the Christian identifies reality, the reality of the fact that love between creatures is not the “end” of intimacy, but an icon, a pointer to a greater invisible (but yet tangible) intimacy, which, if totally and finally and completely brought down to earth, would blow the human person to smithereens.

Again, moderns ought to be led out of the discussion about what love is not and into the discussion about what love is. This latter discussion is scary to most because the moment you come to know and agree on beingness, the is-ness love; the moment you adhere to the principle of non-contradiction and say love is this and it is not this—this is the moment most people bail, because it is at this moment they become accountable.

So, it’s easy to talk about what love is not, but the moment we begin to talk about what love is, we must look at and into ourselves for what needs to be fixed for love and intimacy to thrive: “I have not loved rightly. So and so does not need to fulfill x, y and z for me to love rightly. I either love rightly or not, love the lovableness of love or not, whether or not love exists apparently outside of me or not, whether I get love or not. I must love rightly and fully and I have not. Help me, God, to love better. Help me to love better the loveless and to love in spite of the ubiquity of lovelessness, so that the loveless see that they are gratuitously and not conditionally loved and, in this way, they may come to put love where love has never been.”

In short, the common denominator among radicals, I find, is their obsession with “what’s not” and their refusal to take up the hard work of discovering “what is.”

Perhaps my last comments were a bit harsh. I am sorry.

Yes, I indeed think it’s possible to appreciate the truth value of a person’s words, independently of that person’s presuppositions and practical aims.

I more question whether the “Enlightenment radicals” you (and Gornick) mobilize have any stake in the value of truth whatsoever, have any stake in what I assume you would regard as the true meaning of “intimacy,” “inner life,” “friendship,” “love.” I would not automatically assume when you cite them that they mean what you mean with these words.

Obama uses the word “dignity” in speeches about “persons.” But don’t we know about the nature of the qualifications that attach to his definition? Just as pragmatic presuppositions form the basis of his meanings, so too do pragmatic presuppositions form the basis of meaning for Gornick’s Enlightenment radicals, and so too do pragmatic presuppositions form the basis of meaning for any true Enlightenment thinker. 

That is, Truth—once upon a time conceived as the conformity of a proposition to reality—for Gornick’s radicals becomes functionalized: intimacy is true only when it achieves some “success.” The proposition of intimacy in the hands of a these radicals is true only insofar as it contributes to overcoming alienation, to liberating some alienated people or persons.

But what is intimacy in itself.  Do we define it by its effects, its fruits? Or does it have any value in itself?

Do we make it?  Is it what we feel or will to feel? Or is it what we are or aspire to be? Do we simply will intimacy into being? Or is it a gift?  Does Mary Magdeline simply will to be intimate with Jesus and get what she wants automatically? Or does she first will to predispose herself to that intrinsically right human condition which is right for the flourishing of the gift of a human intimacy that she, that no man or woman, can initiate? Doesn’t the flourishing of this gift arrive not because man insists on its arrival but because the conditions are finally right for it to arrive?

Humans can’t simply demand that man has a right to intimacy and then will it to be so. Intimacy arrives on ITS own terms and in ITS own time. We humans only have to predispose ourselves to learning the conditions for its arrival and praying that it will arrive. 
 
Does Gornick or did her radicals ever hold themselves accountable to knowing what human intimacy is in itself and with achieving this “right human pre-condition” for its arrival? Do they hold themselves accountable to anything? No. They simply demand intimacy, but do they accept (or even re-cognize, see, acknowledge and talk about) the demands that intimacy objectively demands as preconditions for Its arrival on the scene between two people?

BTW, in light of my claims, it wouldn’t take too much effort to make the case that arranged marriages between two receptive and open strangers have a better chance of achieving intimacy and of staying together than do non-arranged marriages between two people who believe they have a “right” to intimacy. Why? Because people who insist on the “right” to intimacy will quickly be bored and discouraged through periods of ITS disappearance, while the people who see IT as a gift will appreciate it when its around and then better (i.e., humbly) predispose themselves to it when its not. 

We are probably agreement with each other on the meaning of intimacy but the radicals are not in agreement with us. Read them and find out. Don’t take my word for it.  Intimacy and friendship for them are instrumentalized, functionalized, and therefore crippled and not “true.”

Did God will for us to possess holy intimacy or human intimacy? What is the difference? I believe the answer lies in Jesus’ statement: any publican can love, can be intimate with, someone who loves them back.  Are we not commanded to be intimate even with those who do not wish to be intimate back?  We are not only called to human intimacy; we are called to holy intimacy.

I agree with your diagnosis and your prescription for diseased arranged marriages (not all arranged marriages, by the way, are diseased) and the disease of hookup culture, but I don’t agree that Gornick’s radicals would agree with your prescription—unless, of course, you hold to a functionalized definition of intimacy. 

I personally think that Gornick’s radicals did not offer a solution to hookup culture; they created the conditions for it to thrive.  They were not “for” marriage; they were “against” bad marriages.  What, then, were they “for”? Answer: Intimacy without marriage, which is another way of saying love with no responsibilities or love with no vow. Or better: a love that loves love when it enlightens but hates loves when it accuses or becomes difficult.

Anyhow, you are right: we certainly “can” quote a particular “insight” without endorsing its author’s general philosophy. But ought we not first find out whether or not the insight we attribute to the author is really a disinterested insight, is really the insight we assume it to be, and not instead a self-interested claim masquerading as an insight?

I can only say that I think that it is too much to ask of your website readers to “set aside questions of divorce and marriage laws” (i.e., the quoted reformers’ role in them) when talking about people like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Robert Owen. These are people who outright condemned the institution of marriage; people, who, inadvertently or not, partook of the Lockean/Hobbesian/Machiavellian (i.e., Enlightenment) hypothesis that the institutions of marriage and family are voluntary and not natural, are a matter of what appeals to historical-man’s usefulness. 

The passage you quoted contains only apparently true insights, but not “deeply true” ones. How are we to know, for example, what the “English radicals of the Enlightenment” meant by “intimacy”? How are we to know that their conception of it did not partake of an eclipse of what Christian personalists define as “person”? 

They argue that “neutrality of feeling,” and “lack of intimacy” are the destruction of marriage, but how are we to know what they actually meant by these phrases? HOw are we to know that a subjectivism didn’t pervade their conceptions of intimacy and neutrality? In fact, how are we to confirm for sure that they simply weren’t just bored with their spouses (or projected this boredom onto the marriages they witnessed in their time)? How are we to know that they did not aim (unconcsciously perhaps) to reconstruct new meanings for intimacy that go well beyond the natural.

Does Madonna the pop star share the same conception of intimacy as Pope John Paul? We laugh and say “no.” But don’t laugh, because Madonna would have much much more in common with Wolstonecraft on the concept of intimacy than she would with Pope John Paul.

I will only suggest that anyone (i.e., the “radical thinkers of the Enlightenment”) who asserts that what follows from the historical prevalence of crippled marriages is the doing away of marriage is not thinking reasonably at all. For this reason, I would not trust that what Godwin, Wolstonecraft and Owen take to be intimacy is what a Christian personalist would take to be intimacy. 

Did not all three advocate free love? If so, can’t we assume that their notions of intimacy and positive (versus) neutral feeling are grounded in materialist and animalist philosophy and primitivism? They “seem” to speaking “for” the human person, but are they, could they if their atheist conceptions necessarily exclude the imago dei to which Christian personalism hinges?

I think that Christian personalists ought to be more careful about what spokespeople they use in a discussion about human intimacy. Unless, of course, one’s aim is to marry the aims of Christianity with the aims of the Enlightenment. The it would seem right to make such a move.