Sunday, December 10, 2006
(6:10 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Believing stuff
Last year, I read a lot about demons -- like the demons who harrassed St. Anthony. It was interesting to me, the kinds of physical properties they have. They're not omnipresent, for instance, but they are extremely fast. I hadn't intended to do serious research on demons, but picked them up along the way of my guided tour of the history of Christian thought. Apparently for a long time, the "mainstream" of the tradition thought it very important to deal with demons, or as they say nowadays, really "believed" in demons. It was a topic that came up naturally, not an established theme that one must deal with for the sake of thoroughness.I'll admit that I can't get inside the viewpoint from which it was possible to talk, in all seriousness, of demons -- but I also can't get inside the viewpoint from which it is possible to contemplate moving out into the desert and hoping for the best. But on the other hand, I also can't get inside the viewpoint from which it is considered possible -- or even potentially interesting -- to talk about St. Anthony's experiences in terms of psychological states, etc. The reductive scientific viewpoint absolutely fails to grab me. Somehow I understand and am sympathetic to someone like St. Anthony, whereas I don't even know what a reductive scientist thinks they're going to accomplish or why it's desirable.
Yet this rejection of reductionistic scientism does not seem to have a positive counterpart -- I don't know what it would mean to really "affirm" traditional theism or classical Christian orthodoxy. I've said it many times before: I would formally affirm classical Christian orthodoxy in a situation that demanded it. It seems like as good a set of beliefs about God as we're likely to get, and I also find it to be intellectually interesting, perhaps the very strangest thing people have ever tried to say. It'll probably never come to that, though -- when will anyone ask me to sign a statement affirming the Nicene Creed or the definition of Chalcedon? Would I feel differently if it weren't hypothetical?
Perhaps I'm tired of converting. I do feel right about having left the Church of the Nazarene, and I'm glad that I chose to enter into something that would make me weird, instead of just becoming a boring secular liberal. Or more precisely: maybe I don't trust my "converting-to" instincts at this point. Maybe I don't want to try to get inside some other viewpoint, so I just stick with the last one I tried to arrive at, held somewhat loosely, unsure what function it's performing or even supposed to perform.
The pose of free-floating loyalty to "reason" as such -- reductive scientism, let's say -- strikes me as really obnoxious just on an aesthetic and interpersonal level. I mean, I like the English as much as the next guy, but I like the impractical traditionalistic side of the English much better than the industrious no-nonsense side. Not the Englishness of crystaline prose, but the Englishness of decadence and squalor -- more along the lines of the early T. S. Eliot.
Is this a good way to select "beliefs," aesthetic appeal?
Yes, yes it is.
