Why the Future Isn’t a Lost Cause

Our lodging for the conference

This week Esther and I spent several days in Montreat North Carolina at a Presbyterian small church conference. It was basically a youth camp for pastors. We stayed in what appeared to us to be a stone castle on the side of a mountain overlooking Lake Susan. Our first evening we sang hymns along with about two hundred Presbyterian leaders and pastors, and after singing hymns, we listened to a sermon given by a Ghanaian Presbyterian pastor currently holding a professorship at Columbia Seminary. His booming voice filled every corner of the conference hall. I don’t need hearing aids, and though many of the wise people around me may have been slightly hard of hearing, I doubt that a single ear in the room failed to hear the words of the sermon that night. His passionate call to gather and feed disciples was awe-inspiring.

During the following days we had the opportunity to glean insights from many lay leaders and ordained pastors. I spent some time talking with a novelist and pastor of a small membership church; he reflected on and explained the process he has endured writing nearly thirteen novels, and he said that unless it is burning inside you, unless it is trying to tear its way out of you, it probably isn’t very good. Esther and I met a Bible instructor who just so happens to have a Korean exchange student staying with his family for the year. Throughout the course of the three days, we also had the opportunity to attend three seminars. For the third seminar, we planned to attend a study on clergy health by Duke University; we entered what was a packed classroom. In fact we had to bring in extra chairs for the very back; however, once the speaker began, we realized that we had attended the wrong seminar. The rooms had been switched. We had actually attended a seminar on prayer. What followed was a beautiful and immensely edifying reflection on prayer that overflowed from the speaker’s own deeply personal spirituality. Esther and I were happy and thankful that God had drawn us “accidently” to the wrong seminar.

Inside that Montreat castle, Esther and I were surrounded by wisdom, humor, experience, and the love of Christ.

We met many other wonderful and insightful people, and in fact on our second morning the plenary speaker reflected on some of the cultural changes of the past fifty years and the consequences for church ministry. He recounted the “shift” from modernism to postmodernism – how many times have we heard people speak of such things? He was a compelling storyteller, though much of his cultural commentary was hardly innovative. However, more significant to me than his words was that everyone was so captivated by what he was saying. Why would that be so significant to me?

The institutional church is of little interest and is hardly attractive to many people my age, not least because in our eyes it has lost its credibility for more than one or two reasons. The older generations know this. It is no small piece of irony then that I am being ordained in and by the institutional church. In any case, the plenary speaker of the second morning challenged those present to rethink ministry and to learn the language of a new day. He used ample humor to ease the bullet, but even still I imagine if I were told that my ways are ineffective and need to be replaced with completely different approaches I would be a bit perturbed. But that is not the response to his words that I witnessed. Those present seemed to hang with excited anticipation on his every word.

The future of the church is not a lost cause. Why? Because many people my age (myself included) long for an authentic existence, which in my estimation involves bounds of faith everyday at least tacitly. And because the living generations that have come before us are not disinterested in us. Rather they want to connect with us, but for the most part they do not know our language; they don’t know where to start – it’s like a few weeks ago I realized that I am an old geezer when I asked one of my nephews if he was “having fun” (what sort of question is that when he is playing a video game?!).

The language and categories and liturgies of those generations before us are largely alien to us. And this is what everyone was so interested in. As the speaker of the second day described without holding back some well-placed humor, many people my age are speaking a different language. For example, we have not forgone the importance of “truth”; rather we are speaking about truth differently, with different categories as it were. Consequently, presenting “the gospel” in the same dusty, worn out ways that institutional churches have been for the past three hundred years will be less than useless and will at best be a lost cause. But. That everyone there was so transfixed by what the speaker was saying about the changing culture and the consequences for the life of the church indicates to me that the future is not a lost cause. The generations that have come before us are in fact interested, but they aren’t particularly sure what to do. And so they are doing what we would all do in their situation; they are doing what they know. But they appear ready to put their ears to the ground so to speak and hear what is coming, though in their case "what is coming" is already in their midst.

The future is not a lost cause, but both sides, younger and older will need to be open to each other. Easier said than done. We young folks look at the grey and balding heads, and we shake our heads because we naively think they are clueless. They look at us and suppose we have lost our map and compass. Collaboration will take a lot of willingness and effort on both sides. And as difficult as this may be, I was greatly encouraged when I witnessed and encountered the older generation’s interest in my generation. This interest is important because I and the rest of my generation need to be discipled. 

The older generations need to learn our language, and we need to cultivate patience. We need to cultivate patience that we might delve into the rich heritage of faith that has come before us. We younger people who suppose our advances in technology and tolerance set us above those who have come before us need to cultivate patience that we might glean from the immense treasure set before us. If we so disregard the older generations and the riches they have to offer us, it will indeed be as though pearls have been cast before swine.

The future is not a lost cause, but it will take sincere effort and patience on our part. Rather than fleeing tradition as though it is a thoroughly pernicious system of tyrannical authority, embracing it as ourselves without relinquishing any of the things that are in fact essential to us can be a path way not only toward collaboration between generations but also toward greater visible unity in the church universal, something that should be the business of every Christian.

What I saw with my eyes and heard with my ears this week at the conference was not a dead or dying church. It was a church with a future because it is a church that still rests its future with the future of Jesus. And with him there is always hope, even for generations that appear to be like oil and water. 

A Religious Spirituality

In one form or another, people seem hungry, thirsty for something, perhaps an encounter with something/someone perceived as transcendent. People often call this dimension of their lives “spiritual,” and in order to sate this aspect of their existence people search tirelessly for special experiences that they might deem those special experiences “spiritual.” These special experiences seem to be a mystery and a curiosity and an obsession in American churches.

My generation in particular seems to have grown disillusioned with institutional religion and seems to be on a hunt for something, something, something to supplant that tyrant called Christian religion, that empty institution of unspiritual routines. My generation speaks of authenticity and organic relationships and spirituality. We have grown sick of the clownish charades in majestic church buildings.

All this may be well and good, and indeed majestic buildings are unworthy substitutes for the sublimity of God’s presence. But with such words as “authenticity” and “organic,” have we paved roads for sloth and lethargy? We seem to believe that we have supplanted institutional religion for something more real. We seem to believe that we have found what we were looking for. We seem to believe that by rejecting institutional religion we have found the treasure of authentic spirituality. But are we a mob of individualistic milk drinkers believing ourselves to have grown up via so-called authentic experiences? Have we merely put sugar in our milk?

It would seem that we in this adolescent generation would do well to learn habits, granted we might be too lackadaisical for such things (in the name of authenticity!). We would likely do well to learn to bend a knee and bow a head, for we have forgotten reverence having grown narcissistic with our own individual “spirituality.” We would do well to learn the practices of the faith. We would do well to discover the profound reality of the Eucharist. Did we forget about Holy Communion when we supplanted institutional religion? If so, shame on us; it is our loss.

Are we a communion of saints or maundering particles each pretending to be unrelated and self-determinant? Have we fled the spires of institutional religion only to enter tents of capricious spiritual ecstasies? Have we grown nomadic? Have we grown isolated? We speak of community, but by that do we mean facebook?

We may never return to the spiraled cathedrals, or at least we may not return for a while. But in either case, we must not lose our faith. We must no lose completely the practices that we seem to have pretended are merely part of institutional religion. If we forget habit, if we reject routine, if we lose sight of the Eucharist, if we deem tradition an archaic relic of the dusty past all in the name of authenticity, we may find ourselves in a dark room without faith and with only a few tweets proclaiming the value of contemporary authenticity. God forbid that happen.

On Story: our world

No matter your trade, station, vocation, or hobby, at one point or another you will likely come across the opportunity to tell a tale or two, be it about the size of the fish you didn’t catch or the distance of the marathon you didn’t run. We all tell a tale or two given the occasion.

Our lives are storied lives; we live stories, and we live within stories. Stories make for us a symbolic world within which we may reside. Given this, I think not of stories to read “before I die” but of stories to read in order that I might live richly. Some stories are like an entire house, while other stories are like the furniture inside a house. I tend to think of my own life as a story similar to the latter and the biblical story as a story similar to the former. My story resides within the biblical story. The biblical story then creates a symbolic world within which I may reside. Sitting in a single room of the house will not, of course, divulge all the happenings in the rest of the house. Discovering other rooms then is half the fun, and discovering other rooms in the house provides more symbols with which I might engage life.

Needless to say, the bible is not the only story. There are myriads of other stories. Whether we realize it or not, we are furnishing our houses with the stories we watch, hear, and read. If this is the case, then we will surely be careful what sort of stories we involve in our furnishings. I doubt if anyone desperately desires to put a mud puddle in the middle of the living room. However, some stories are not pleasant, but they are important. Therefore, I do not suggest that anyone should furnish the house with only pillows. We need more than pillows, lest we make for ourselves a padded room – and those are for crazy people. Also, it might be said that it is quite easy to decorate your house without spending so much as a bead of sweat and a dollar. But those who are unwilling to do the work may find themselves in a house without windows, a house resembling a coffin.

Regarding stories in such a manner, it is then less about reading particular stories “before you die” and more about reading particular stories in order that you might live with them. Whether we like it or not, we live storied lives, and the stories we invite into the house will most certainly set the trajectory for the sorts of lives we will live and the sorts of stories we tell.

Artistry and Theology

I write this blog as a novice in almost every sense of the word, as one who is traveling through an M.Div. Nearing the end of my first year of three, it strikes me as quite peculiar that we in the arcane field of theology are not taught artistry. Any artistry we might have been taught is apparently supplanted by priority for truth. But I daresay, is not truth creative? And should we not consequently be taught to articulate truth creatively? Should not the spheres of the theologian and poet collide?

And that brings me to a particular person, who posed a particular question and who received a particular response.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

…

“And who is my neighbor?”

In response, Jesus proceeded to tell a parable. Why is it that Jesus told a parable in response? I don’t know. But I’d wager a guess that perhaps Jesus opted to tell a parable because he did not want to spend the next hundred years writing an arid discourse in response (he allowed for the next two thousand years’ worth of theologians with multiple PhD’s to do that). Of course, I am being facetious, but not entirely.

Theologians ill trained?

And so what have we with these ill trained theologians? Uninteresting dullards preaching from the pulpits to uninterested congregations in the pews. It’s a charade.

Are we to boil down truth to its “essence”? Are we to boil down truth until nothing is left? We are boiling down truth so that it evaporates into thin air in search of someone more interesting. And yet theologians boil down the truth so that it may be rearticulated “in more precise form.” Precise? Perhaps, empty and insipid. I do not contend that theologians have ill gotten goods but ungotten goods!

It thus seems to me that if an M.Div., and just about any theological education for that matter, is to carry any weight, then it must involve more of life. It must involve artistry. It must involve the poetic. Is not creation itself poetic? And if that is the case, then true theology is inherently poetic.

Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts.

Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by

Them be said,

The sky o’erarches, we feel the undulating deck beneath

Our feet,

We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,

The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of

The briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,

The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,

The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,

And this is ocean’s poem.

Will the rocks shout out? They already are.

Theopoetics

A single voice asks, “What is truth?” And thousands, millions, billions answer in response. In the east they answer with chants, dances, and riddles, and in the west they answer with analytic discourses, arid charades, and pseudo-theological chicanery.

My gospels professor said earlier this quarter, “People who read poetry will be better readers of the gospels…” I thought he was being facetious. As the quarter has progressed, I have realized he was serious and have realized the wisdom in his pronouncement.

A line of poetry or a paragraph of story cannot be matched by a volume of discourse, however well articulated it may be. It is poetry that plumbs the depths of truth and surfaces again without losing an ounce, an ounce of something true. And it is the person who reads poetry and it is the poets themselves who plumb the depths resurfacing in silence. In silence because it was in the depths that truth was spoken and having since resurfaced they are appropriately silent.

Much ink, sweat, and blood is spilled every generation answering the question, “What is truth?” But I say, “Let truth be truth lest it be dismantled into something else.”

“What is truth?” Ask a poet I say, ask a poet!

Narrative, Reduction, and Recovery

Complex systems theory suggests that a whole is more than the sum of its parts (or something of the like). Perhaps similarly, a narrative is more than the sum of its parts. A narrative may be “more” in so far as the narrative is distinct from being merely a grouping of its parts, distinct from being merely an unwoven string of people and events. Like an intricately woven tapestry being something other than threads lain side by side on a table, a narrative is “more.” This may be close to the truth, but the past two hundred years of critical hermeneutics suggests otherwise.

Operating in accord with an atomistic perception of language, the past few hundred years of critical method have considered the meaning of a given text to depend upon individual parts. The meaning of a text relies entirely on individual words and the grammar, syntax, etc. Thus, the synergy of the narrative is ignored and is reduced to individual parts. This ignores the possibility that the whole may “more” or something other than a mere disconnected grouping of its parts. This sort of reduction of a narrative is tantamount to the vivisection of what I have previously referred to as “synthetic philosophy.”

Hans Frei does more to explain the effects pre-critical and critical methods have had on narrative than I suspect I will ever do. But I shall offer an egregiously brief summary here. Pre-critical methods accepted the narrative and its world, and critical methods judged the narrative and its world according to how we presently perceive the world. This change in method raised as many new questions as it answered previous questions. To answer the new questions, a sort of polarization ensued. Some asserted that the language in Scripture referred to actual historical objects (and the actual meaning of referents could be determined according to grammar, as mentioned above), while others asserted that the religious language found in Scripture narrative is merely time-conditioned consciousness which does not necessarily refer to historical objects, people and events and geographical places. This polarization disregarded the nature of narrative and its world. In both cases, narrative was lost.

How might narrative and for that matter its meaning be recovered? This is a loaded question, which requires thorough attention. For now just a tidbit will do. First, narrative’s distinctiveness from its parts must be acknowledged. Perhaps, an example will offer some further assistance. If we consider, the opening sentence of Flannery O’Connor’s “Green Leaf,” we might see the synergy of parts forming a narrative distinct from its parts. “Mrs. May’s bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened – like some patient god come down to woo her – for a stir inside the room.” For the sake of brief analogy (and omitting the philosophy of language in which she is operating), let us pretend that each word represents a sentence or even a paragraph in a larger narrative. “Bedroom window,” floating apart from the whole may be interpreted to mean a myriad of different of things. Ah, but it is “Mrs. May’s bedroom window,” etc. In conjunction with its narrative, “bedroom window” has a specific meaning or use. This may seem to be a rather rudimentary observation, but this observation is distinct from saying only it has a referent or time conditioned consciousness. Allowing the narrative to shape and provide its own meaning is something rather different, and it is not simply giving preference to context (for that would atomistic). Letting the narrative retain its own world of meaning requires that we consider the narrative to be its own complex system, which has its own particular uses and meanings of words but also whose uses and meanings of words must be considered in light of the synthetic whole instead of its parts lest the meaning of the whole be lost. But alas this is only the beginning. However, at least, acknowledging narrative and its distinctiveness from its parts is a start. More of this later.

Who Am I?

Identity is curious and elusive. I do not claim to have a handle on it. We all want to say we have identity and know who we ourselves are, but how many of us can indicate our own identity and how might we go about doing so? Last night I went to a lecture by Stanley Hauerwas. He explained more eloquently than I shall attempt here: we get to know him through other people’s narratives about him; we learn who he is by discovering other people’s relationships with him. Conversely, we likely learn less about who he really is by hearing himself talk about himself. This may be an analog to the issue of identity. A person’s identity may be located by discovering a person’s relationships. Nietzsche furthers this point: “we are unknown, we knowers, to ourselves…of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto ‘each is the farthest away from himself,’ as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers.”

This may become clearer (or muddled further) with an example. Who is Raskolnikov? This question may be answered by saying, “he’s a muderer in one of Dostoevsky’s novels.” But who is it who is the muderer? And who was he before he murdered? And was he who was previous to murdering altered by murdering? (These questions may be answered in part by his dream in the first tenth of the story) Setting aside these such questions, we may then ask, as many people have done, “why did he murder?” This question strikes me as hilarious because so much ink has been spilled on that question, when actually it cannot be answered even by Dostoevsky. He explained definitively in a letter to his publisher why the student killed the old lady, and in a letter to a friend he said he is not sure why Raskolnikov killed the old “louse.” I assume Dostoevsky’s letter to his friend was a bit more honest. What does this have to do with identity? In relation to the aforementioned process of discerning identity in Hauerwas’ lecture, it has quite a lot to do with identity. Perhaps, one reason even Dostoevsky did not know why precisely Raskolnikov killed the old lady is because we meet Raskolnikov not long before he commits the crime and thereby have little resources for discerning who Raskolnikov is via relationships with other people. All we have is a rather isolated person who mumbles to himself and remains distant from other people even in conversations. This of course is indicative, but it is not what we need to acquire who he is exactly other than an isolated maunderer who is tortured by his economic situation among other things - Raskolnikov’s solitary entry may be modernity’s influence on Dostoevsky.

We have the Narrator’s narrative in relationship to Raskolnikov, which I originally thought might be needed in this conversation due to Raskolnikov’s origin being in the Narrator, which I thought might be analogous to God’s relationship to Augustine as indicated in Augustine’s Confessions. However, the Narrator does not posses an ultimate perspective on Raskolnikov as does God in relation to Augustine, for the Narrator (or creator of the Narrator, Dostoevsky) confesses ignorance as indicated in his letter to a friend. So as Hauerwas indicated last night, we are ultimately understood according to and within God’s narrative about us, but this is not analogous to the Narrator in relationship to Raskolnikov. Therefore, though the Narrator may be included in the many relationships with Raskolnikov, it is not required, so the Narrator need not be included in this discussion.

Ironically, there are many relationships throughout the story, though Raskolnikov is radically isolated. Two crucial relationships in the story, which may give insight into the identity of Raskolnikov, are Raskolnikov’s relationships with Razumikhin and Sonya. Razumikhin’s relationship with Raskolnikov is primary in the first portion of the story. Razumikhin is a voice of reason and mostly a good influence on Raskolnikov. Razumikhin is a faithful friend but to a narcissistic axe murderer. Did Razumikhin go wrong? Probably not because Razumikhin does not come into relationship with Raskolnikov in any prominent way until after the murder, and even when Razumikhin is prominent Raskolnikov remains rather distant from Razumikhin, especially considering Razumikhin is one of Raskolnikov’s only real friends at the time. This relationship may not be as helpful in identifying Raskolnikov, for Raskolnikov insulates himself in this relationship - though that’s a start.

It’s difficult to determine when precisely (good job Dostoevsky) Razumikhin drifts from primary to secondary friend, and somewhere along the way Sonya drifts into being a primary friend to Raskolnikov. This is crucial, for though Razumikhin is a portrayed as a mostly good person Sonya does something more. She is a prostitute that her family might not starve to death after her father died and left her mother with several children to feed. Thus, Sonya is at the bottom of the social latter, but she is somehow simultaneously a selfless saint who serves her family relentlessly. When she drifts into becoming a primary friend and confidant to Raskolnikov, we find her to be a penetrating voice of mercy and truth. She immediately empathizes with Raskolnikov’s burden when he confesses his crime to her, but she requires that he confess to the publicly. He refuses at first. Thus, we see need for confession, and his denial of that fact. Raskolnikov is thoroughly insulated, but then he melts and falls to Sonya’s feet. A murderer forgiven by a prostitute. A prostitute who urges confession and repentance. A dead man resurrected through confession and repentance. These snippets are merely snippets, but they may at least suggest the potential for discovering the identity of Raskolnikov by way of relationships with other people.

Unfortunately for us, we may never really see a clear picture of Raskolnikov because the narrator of Raskolnikov focused so exclusively on Raskolnikov - a rather individualistic, modern, way of seeking to thoroughly show who he is, which ironically does the opposite. But the isolation seems to be a correct diagnostic; the isolation should be expected to intensify after Raskolnikov murders. We know lots of what Raskolnikov thinks and does, but we know little of who is the one who is thinking and doing. When he confesses at the end, we get a glimmer of hope that maybe he will one day enter into vital relationships, vital relationships which may then reveal who this Raskolnikov fellow is. But the epilogue only suggests such a thing.

It seems then that, when we social creatures drift away from relationships, we may in fact lose ourselves. We may drift into evanescence, practically invisible to others and thereby to ourselves. “Who is Raskolnikov?” may be answered in the negative. We do not precisely know who he is. He thinks and does things, but we do not know who is doing the thinking and the doing. But this negative answer may provide at least some indication in favor of the converse. Relationships, other people’s narratives about “me,” may in fact provide a glimpse of “who” I am.

Postmodernism III: an Alternative?

What have I done? By denying Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus as proponents of postmodernism, have I gone off the deep end? Perhaps, though I do not think so. I mentioned before truncated explanations for this. If these folks are not genuinely postmodern but are criticizers of modernism, then who is genuinely postmodern? For modernism to be felled, someone must offer an alternative and then operate according to the assumptions within that alternative. Folks such as Kierkegaard and company have been associated with postmodernism previously, but I suggest that Kierkegaard and company did not offer an alternative to modernism, and they continued to operate according to certain modern assumptions. Furthermore, postmodernism itself had still not fully emerged and taken shape - though it continues to do so even now. If it had not yet taken shape and they never offered a genuine alternative, then how could any of them be associated with postmodernism? They were associated in generality because they critiqued and indicated the need for something other than modernism. But saying somebody is sick and writing a prescription are two different things.

I suppose we could say that postmodernism is merely a critique of modernism and therefore include the aforementioned folks. However, I think when we all use the term postmodernism we are referring to something other than modernism, thereby excluding the aforementioned folks.

Who then is postmodern? Is anyone? I think there are some folks who genuinely are.

Again, this inquiry is motivated by clarity seeking to answer the question, “what is postmodernism anyway?” It seems in fashion to refer to anything disliked or especially liked, off kilter or especially keen, hip or fancy, culturally alternative or muddled as postmodern. Just about any new shiny or unconventional thing is considered postmodern. But that seems rather silly. Thus, there’s a need to do some dusting. I shall trace briefly a few seemingly genuine postmoderns - I will be brief and be forced to use generalities, unfortunately making me a bit of a hypocrite. But, perhaps, sketching a few genuine postmoderns will distinguish postmodernism from Kierkegaard and company and common generalities.

Again, modernism is characterized by preference to reason, universality, individualism, autonomy, and foundationalism, among other things. These tenets involve all areas of thought in the optimistic modern era.

Nearly three hundred years after Descartes made his fateful declaration, there emerged a few folks who genuinely departed from the Cartesian tradition. To merely namedrop and not fall into thorough explanation ( I recently wrote a “school paper” involving some of these chaps, so I have little desire to recapitulate), Quine, Lakatos, and MacIntyre, among many others, give thorough and clear departure from the modern project - Wittgenstein may be grouped with these folks though he was nearly sixty years ahead of his time perhaps even a hundred years ahead of his time. They go beyond mere critique and reconsider previously held assumptions. Nancey Murphy indicates in several of her books the tectonic shift from modernism to postmodernism, involving changes in language and epistemology and “metaphysics.” More than critique is at play here. Epistemology (entrapment within the vague throne of "mind"), for example, is not “first philosophy” for postmoderns as it was for moderns (halleluiah!).

Postmodernism is not merely a critique but an alternative, a new canvas. Murphy regards epistemological, linguistic, and “metaphysical” holism as a postmodern alternative. For example, the epistemological holism requires not that we determine what is certain but what is “unsurpassable” so far and that we consequently appropriate whatever it is that is currently “unsurpassable” as part of our system.

To show the stark difference between modernism and postmodernism, a series of hypocritically general contrasts may give clarity. The moderns give preference to reason, and the postmoderns give credence to tradition/community. The moderns sought universality, and the postmoderns acknowledge locality. The moderns fell to individualism, and the postmoderns are communal - e.g. relationships are crucial for identity and social conventions are the determinate for language. If moderns’ theory of knowledge was something like a layer cake, postmoderns’ theory of knowledge is something like a fruitcake. I tend to like layer cakes but...

It seems that the modern foibles have lasted long enough and have been supplanted. I wonder if humans merely found themselves weary of Cartesian nonsense and decided to play a different game, one involving common sense, one in which we are able to affirm things such as interaction in the “external” world.

Postmodernism II: Another Thread, a Step Towards Something Else

Previously I mentioned Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche as three Davids who seemed to begin toppling the Goliath of modernism. However, this is only partly accurate, for they did less to topple him and more to indicate that he should be toppled, though they may have thought that they were toppling him. Sartre and Camus were similar to them in this sense. They also indicated the dilapidation of the modern project, but they did little to actually topple it. Indicating something as problematic and proffering a viable alternative to the problem are two different things. King Saul and David’s brothers knew that Goliath was a problem. In fact any ole bloke could have told you that. Sartre and Camus were in a similar situation. They expressed the results of the modern project, the dark mood pervading western culture. They were beacons that somewhere along the way something went wrong. Not to mention the severe tragedies of the World Wars were substantial evidence to indicate the guiltiness and incompleteness of the modern project. In fact Percy says that if he had to pinpoint the complete downfall of modernism, it would be the summer of 1914, “the year we began destroying ourselves.”

There grew a cloud of angst in the 20^th century. This angst is in part a modern germ. Sartre’s Nausea comments on this, though his short novel is, in my opinion, only a recapitulation of “Silhouettes” and various other passages from Either/Or volume one – “…this reflective sorrow…I call silhouettes, partly to suggest at once by the name that I draw them from the dark side of life and partly because, like silhouettes, they are not immediately visible.” In a similar vein, Camus’ The Stranger involves a disillusioned fellow who gets rapped up in an absurd murder and while in prison waits night and day for execution, for death. Individuals have been separated as parts of whole, isolated parts, estranged into the recesses of bewildered and lost autonomy. Sartre and Camus indicated, in part, the problem, the germ, the angst. But they offered little, if anything, as a distinct alternative.

Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche rebuked and scoffed at the modern notion of humanity. Sartre and Camus showed what the modern project left for humanity, estrangement and emptiness. None of these folks offered a completely different way forward apart from the modern project, for they each carried with them heavy modern baggage. Kierkegaard carried Descartes in his back pocket. Dostoevsky faithfully critiqued but did not formulate an alternative to modernism – his novel Demons (also translated The Possessed and Devils) epitomizes his critique of the modern isms sweeping across Russia. Nietzsche’s morality seems to have been an extreme example of conflated modern individualism – as a side note Tolstoy said Nietzsche’s claim regarding morality was analogous to someone standing up and with a serious expression on his face declaring to the world, “water is not wet.” Sartre remained bedfellows with Kant and Hume, among others. And Camus’ reaction to modern certainty and truth was that if there is truth to be known a person can probably not know it.

Thus, these brilliant philosophers indicated a problem; they showed contempt for the modern project, but they were only indicative. However, that’s not a bad thing. As Kierkegaard said, “it is an infinite merit to be able to despair,” for being conscious of the despair is to be onto something. And that is a step.

Postmodernism I: a Thread and a Dent

If you have asked yourself once before, “what is postmodernism,” you are in the same boat as the rest of us. The term “postmodern” is thrown around a lot these days often without qualifiers. It is assumed that you know what it means or perhaps that nobody really knows what it means – in that case it’s a rather useless term. For some reason, I thought we used words to convey meaning to another person – hence intersubjectivity, but I suppose with the term “postmodern” that does not apply. I have heard postmodern used, or seemingly so, to refer to a particular worldview, a historical current or era, and even used synonymously with relativity – another term that needs certain qualifications. In short it is used to refer to something that is other than and after modernism. So it seems that for postmodernism to be understood, what ever it is that immediately preceded it must be clarified first. Modernism is more or less generally understood, though I doubt if I could summarize it here in a few words. To decipher the meaning of postmodernism, it might be easiest to examine the tapestry thread by thread. But postmodern threads were once modern in color and must be considered accordingly.

Let’s think of modernism as a philosophical project and cultural attitude involving both certain optimisms and severe criticisms of the way things were. There was an optimistic press toward universal understanding and a critical reevaluation of religion, among other things. They sang their philosophic tunes with relish. “We can know what actually is! And we shall leave the archaic superstitions by the wayside at last!” Before I digress into sounding similar to an introduction to the history of philosophy, let’s leave modernism with these thoughts: modernism made certain assumptions – as do we all no matter when we are living – that were treated as essential. Their optimism perhaps clouded their already cloudy vision, and their arbitrary scrutiny of religion regarded religion as the dusty underpinnings of the uncivilized, uneducated, superstitious person. Perhaps, modern folks supposed that by exposing religion for what it is they might proceed past the impediment that is religion. “Religion has shackled people for long enough.” Thus, the moderns recreated. A person possesses reason; a person is good, and a person is autonomous. What then is stopping us from acquisitioning truth?

Though modernism – the ism that lives in the hearts of people and most notably the ideas of people that infect other people long after the original people have died – would not loosen its clutches on western civilization without a fight. But history has a way of being rather interesting, and just when a Goliath begins to seem unstoppable a little David comes along with a few pebbles and a sling. Only this time there were multiple Davids. I shall mention three.

The Melancholy Dane, Kierkegaard, wrote many things most of which I do not understand. He ridiculed cultural Christianity and nominalism. But what I find myself most interesting is his seemingly undying desire to sort out what it is “to be a person in the nineteenth century.” He indicated three spheres of existence and the pandemic of despair. A person is sick, and a person cannot be rid of it; this sickness only intensifies when a person tries to play doctor on himself and eradicate it.

Across the globe in the long winters of Russia, another David emerged, Dostoevsky. His writing career was marked and inspired by his cruel and cold exile in Siberia. Something happened there, and he was never the same. Resurrecting from the depths of exile, he showed a person to be a ghastly creature capable of the worst if given the opportunity; these images of sick humanity are in all of his novels. But in contrast, humanity is somehow also capable of some good – Raskolnikov is somehow a murderer and a charitable giver; Dmitri is a sensualist but he can see his own depravity. Oh but a person not only has the capacity for good and evil, but a person is more than a rational animal. “2+2 may equal 4” but “reason only satisfies the rational side of man’s nature.” A person is not a mechanism that needs only the proper modern oil; he is something else, something more, with the capacity for utmost corruption and good.

A fermenting devil who felt victory over the modern remnants was just a few pen scratches away, Nietzsche, steamed and scoffed at the world for its moral tomfoolery. I can imagine him saying, though more eloquently, “Those peons who speak of moral this and moral that are but picking their noses and winking at each other. That morality is the fabricated way of the weak. I shall rise above their inverted morality that was esteemed by their dead god. I am destiny...I am superman.”

I would not attribute the fall of modernism and the rise of postmodernism to any one of these fellows, though they each played their own part in their own way. These formidable revolutionaries, though revolutionaries they were, remained within certain modern assumptions. But they did dent or bruise certain modern anthropological assumptions. Humanity is more than rational; humanity is not ultimately good, and what is good anyway? What then is stopping humanity from acquisitioning truth?

So what is man? The paragon of animals? A freak? Something else?

This is a feeble description of an anthropological thread that ran through modernism and was countered by three Davids of the nineteenth century. But this is merely one thread. There are many others in the tapestry, but those are for another time.