We need more saints

a little response to Matt

Think about what metaphors we use for theology.

We seek to grasp knowledge. We grab hold of it, yank it loose from its context, and make it ours. We might hoard it, or we might share it. But we have made knowledge into a “thing” that we can remove from its context, acquire, and retain. Think even of the syllabi that we compose for our theological classrooms- “students should acquire knowledge of x, demonstrate this knowledge, and show mastery of it.” Our expectation is that we might create environments where concepts are made into things. These thing-concepts can then be traded with each other as we seek to refine, analyze, and improve them.

The work of theology in this way goes on like a sort of trading-card game, as we acquire rare and valuable tokens, shine them up, and put them out into the market of ideas. We become the salesman, marketer, and dealer of these tokens. They come to belong to us- and in some circles we even use these abstracted concepts to elevate our reputation, to gain employment, or to gain status. We use, employ, and manipulate these conceptual-tokens for our own advantage.

Or we might speak of retrieving knowledge. Retrieval has been a primary mode of theological work in the last few decades, but the idea reveals a significant right-hemisphere bias. In retrieval, we are “mining” for ideas. We go back into earlier times and places to find ideas that have been most. We choose the ones that are useful to us- no one is retrieving views of hygiene, for instance- and seek to employ them for our problems. We retrieve things that we can do something with. The task, again, is to identify, manipulate, and use concepts as we see fit.

Our we might seek to construct something with concepts. Construction is building language. This metaphor seeks to take concepts and build on them in order to enlarge existing categories. It finds concepts that are usable to manipulates them to add credibility or significance to existing concepts. Construction also rips ideas from their contexts in order to serve other purposes.

This language is so common as to seem uncontested. It is difficult to imagine other language functioning. But indeed, according to Ian McGilchrist, “all understanding, whether of the world or even of ourselves, depends on choosing the right metaphor. The metaphor we choose governs what we see…(179).” He goes on:

“The paradox of philosophy is that we need to get beyond what can be grasped or explicitly stated, but the drift of philosophy is always and inevitably back towards the explicit” (179).

McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary has been widely reviewed and discussed, especially among students of religion. I read it for the first time in April and could not put it down. I remarked so often, and so loudly, to my husband about its charms that a woman came over to me at the pool and said, “I must know what you are reading!”

According to McGilchrist, the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere struggles with a perception of its own superiority. Because language and logic belong to it, it has power close at hand to grasp concepts. For this reason it comes to “speak for” the whole when provoked. But its tendency toward assertiveness and preference for linear logic and conceptual clarity means that it is limited when it seeks to speak of experience.

But its preference is to speak of everything in terms of information.

McGilchrist speaks of experience “happening” locates it as a right hemisphere phenomenon. It occurs like water comes to a landscape. He is worth quoting at length here:

The river is not only passing across the landscape, but entering into it and changing it too, as the landscape has ‘changed’ and yet not changed the water. The landscape cannot make the river. It does not try to put a river together. It does not even say ‘yes’ to the river. It merely says ‘no’ to the water- or does not say ‘no’ to the water, and, by its not saying ‘no’ to the water, wherever it is that it does so, it allows the river to come into being. The river does not exist before the encounter. Only water exists before the encounter, and the river actually comes into being int eh process of encountering the landscape, with its power to say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’. Similarly there is ‘whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves,’ but ‘whatever it is that exists’ only comes to be what it is as it finds out in the encounter with ourselves what it is, and we only find out and make ourselves what we are in our encounter with ‘whatever it is that exists.’ (emphasis mine)

The river does not exist before the encounter.

Belief in God is not an answer but an attitude or a disposition. It is not a deficit of “information”. It is the river that exists after the encounter.

Theology should train us for an apparition, or teach us to see. Religion’s “other languages” have always been poetry, story, and most of all song. Beware Bad Poetry, sure, just like you beware of saccharine music. But what Matthew Lee Anderson is after in his critique of my call for stories is this sort of difference between what the object of Theology is, and how best we might reach it. Its a left brain instinct, when what I’m after is a right brain beholding.

“Reintegration” of the hemispheres is inadequate when the goal is more saints. Being a saint is more than following a set of rules or agreeing to doctrines. All this to say, I think if we can regain our taste for poetry and art, we might have a better chance of making saints. And we desperately need saints.

(This is a little snippet from a book I am writing. I’m sharing it because it is what is behind my recent engagement with story. So, what do you think?)