A year ago, I graduated from college. This year, I'm finishing my last class, one called God, Faith, and Reason. It was supposed to act as finish of sorts, a way to tie up the ends of what I'd wanted to learn. In the end, it's been only a bit of that but actually rendered what I'd learned both necessary and irrelevant. Two things, only one of which I'd wanted, but that desired thing not able to come to bloom without the one I didn't end up much needing after all. Go figure.
This is my final paper.
I’m not going to write a final paper. I’m writing a position paper instead, a kind of summary, a statement of what Philosophy looks like to me now. Maybe it’s a final position paper. Whatever. I’ve used Philosophy, you know. Used it as a tool to mine for something else. Not for itself, not for knowledge or for proof, not even for the meaning of life. I’ve use Philosophy to find the rest of God. And through grace and perfect timing, and prodding, I believe I did.
In the end, Philosophy doesn’t have as many answers as I thought it might. And Philosophy professors certainly don’t. Most Philosophers do an odd concentric dance that draws circles around the God I was looking for, ever expanding and contracting, around Him, but each stuck away from the center in their individual orbits of pet theories. I still blame Descartes more than anyone, who started with faith and tried to use logical progression to prove God and ended up only handing down a bloodless Thinking Thing. Yuck. After Descartes, most of them got lost in the Disneyland of Reason, systems, hermeneutics and dialectic. Even the best of the moderns – Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard – stopped short at the points of their own relative stakes in the ground.
The odd thing is that when you say that Kierkegaard is your guy, I get it. He has the awe and wonder, along with the angst that makes him relatable. In my mind, however, Kierkegaard’s angst is exactly what keeps him from going all the way in. He’s made the leap of faith, all right, but stopped on a ledge part way down the chasm at the place that demands he let go of the philosopher in him in order to grab onto the God in him. He won’t let himself be taken by the mysticism that has to be God. He mocks the philosophical logicians, but in the end, is still one of them.
I guess it happens to all of us. The leap of faith isn’t one and done. That’s why I liked John Caputo so much. What a great way to end this! He picks up all the pieces philosophy left ungathered, mashes them together, and then says effectively, ‘See how beautiful it all can be!’ Caputo saw what has happened to faith.
“Faith” now stood in much sharper contrast with “reason” than could ever have been imagined by the authors of the Confessions or Proslogion, who viewed their books as an exercise in fides quaerens intellectum. ….What had disappeared under the guns of modernity was the robust faith of the medievals where fides and intel-lectus, the love of learning and the love of God, went hand in hand. (Caputo, On Religion, 61)
In fact, as much as I enjoy him, Socrates might carry some of the blame for this, too. He, for all of his exalted forms, enjoyed slicing and dicing mankind and thought into categories that were, although not as remote and detached as Aristotle’s, were certainly elitist and divisive. After all, look where they led him…
For my money, the PreSocratics made the least mess of it all. I’ll take Thales’ “The world is full of Gods” as an appropriate entry point anytime. Spared the ability to disassemble reality into its sensible component parts, he assumed that the world and God were one and he was right. Caputo got it, too.
Human life has a dark center, an unlit core, a concealed depth, to which we have at best limited access. That is the ultimate condition under which we live our lives...as soon as we come to be, we find that being is already up and running. (Caputo, 77-8)
In other words, deep calls to deep. We live, we experience being, hidden from one another but together. The gathering of saints.
Now I am sliding near another cliff, bracing for another leap, this one into a mystic cavern whose occupants no longer need to know why. An orange cat is already there, and the rose, both of which instinctively live within what they were made to be without wondering what it might be like elsewhere. I have one advantage over them, though. I am warned. The cliff is sheer, and the road back no longer available, but I am not afraid.
It may be that I will haunt a classroom again, but I will probably not ask again to be graded or to earn a credential. A door is shutting, and I’m not sure yet where the opening one leads. There is a Cloud of Unknowing there, though, that I want very much to breach. You know what I mean. The woods were dark, but I’m coming out of them now and I have appreciated the company of my Virgil.
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