In order to appreciate what the sage is saying, a person must have already had a parallel experience of some sort.
After I was done writing the Russian monk piece last week, I pulled Sergius Bolshakoff’s Russian Mystics off the shelf. It’d been years since I read it, but I remembered loving it.
I quickly remembered why, though I was a bit surprised to see that I read only half of it (a nasty habit of mine), stopping in the nineteenth century. I can tell I stopped halfway because that’s when my copious underlining stops. I’m now looking forward to reading the rest, including the pages on the Optina monastery, which was so influential on Dostoyevsky.
Bolshakoff makes clear in the introduction that the Russian mystics were also theologians. In fact, he makes it clear that it can be no other way: mysticism and theology go together like bread and butter. Theology carries mysticism like bread carries the butter. Without the bread, the mysticism becomes a gooey mess. You get Shirley MacLaine’s Dancing in the Light instead of Staretz Ambrose advising Dostoyevsky.
It’s not an unusual concept. It’s the religious equivalent of putting your money where your mouth is. It’s the reason I don’t promote my writings locally: too many people around here know I’m a sonofabitch. It’s Plato’s observation that philosophy is a way of life, not a subject.
And it’s why we today laugh at philosophers and roll our eyes at mystics.
The massive works of Eric Voegelin can, I think, be broken down into two components: the way transcendence has informed human affairs and the way transcendence has twisted human affairs. The latter is known as “Gnosticism” and is a fascinating area of study (the best book, in my opinion, is Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium).
I don’t think Voegelin had a pithy term for the former (the way transcendence has informed human affairs), but I think he would’ve described it as an “existential consciousness” that is then taught to others, whether by wise statesmen (Solon, Edmund Burke), true philosophers (Plato, Aquinas), great writers (Dostoyevsky, O’Connor), or those Russian mystics.
Consider carefully the parts of the above paragraph.
sage-->communication-->others.
All three need to be present and active.
In order to have a shared experience of transcendence, we need someone with an “existential consciousness” and we need people to appreciate it. But in order to appreciate what the sage is saying, a person must have already had a parallel experience of some sort. There must, in other words, be something in the hearer that resonates with the statesman’s speech, the philosopher’s counsel, the writer’s story, or mystic’s utterance.
The person with existential consciousness speaks: he puts a “symbol” out there. The symbol then travels to the hearer, who must receive and process it correctly. If he doesn’t, the symbol will fall flat or, worse, be misapplied or twisted (which is where Gnosticism comes in).
In today’s world, the symbol falls flat or with a thud. We are existential skeptics. We scoff at the philosopher and roll our eyes at the mystic.
If by chance the symbols do resonate with people, they resonate in a twisted way and weapons for the Gnostics. “Tolerance” is a cudgel in the hands of Antifa. “Equality” an ice pick in the hands of BLM.
It’s why need the Church.
Return to the theologian and mystic. Theology carries the mystical experience like bread carries butter. If we broaden this a bit, we can say “language (our system of symbols) carries existential consciousness like bread carries butter. “
But we need another component. Something must hold the bread that carries the butter. Theology carries the mystical experience, but what holds the theology? Language carries the existential consciousness but what guides the language?
We could say that the hand holds the bread, but what holds the hand? Well, the wrist. Then what holds the wrist? The forearm, and so on until we go through the entire “Dem Bones” song.
The same holds for theology and language. We could come up with an entire network of interconnected things that bring it all together like a skeleton connects all dem bones, but that’s all it would be: a skeleton with no flesh or breath because it’s not ultimately connected to anything. This, quite frankly, is the entire philosophy of Jacques Derrida, who pointed out that language gets us nowhere because there is nowhere for language to get us to. Without a single word with real meaning (“presentness,” in the Derridean universe), nothing can take root and give meaning.
Enter the Church.
The Church is connected to all the parts of the skeleton, but on the other side, it’s connected to transcendence.
I envision a massive body, with a lot of hands working: liturgy, social justice, charitable outreach, missionary activities, politics . . . a flurry of earthly activity. But out of the back is a pipe jutting out from the spine and into heaven.
All the inner-connected parts that form a web — a skeleton, an array of symbols — come together in the body of the Church, which itself is then connected to transcendence.
It’s why Truth relies on the Church. The postmodern and other skeptical philosophers are right: there is no truth. It’s all a shell game with truth always eluding us, unless something is grounded in “existential consciousness.” It’s then that you run into permanence . . . things that stand true no matter what.
If you reject existential consciousness — if you scoff at the philosopher and roll your eyes at the mystic — you reject truth.
If you accept existential consciousness, or at least accept the symbols of it, you’re likely to botch the application and become a Gnostic or some other perversion (like the Sophists in ancient Greece). You can try to apply the symbols properly, but that requires a lot of effort and/or luck, and if you ultimately try to track your application back to solid roots, you’ll see you’re merely jumping from bone to bone on the skeleton, with nothing ultimately connected.
To guide the existential consciousness in a logical and orderly (reliable) manner, we ultimately need an institution that connects that existential consciousness to the earthly skeleton.
That institution is the Church, nothing more and nothing less.
