“For all, whether they know it or not, the problem of life is a question of metaphysics, of morality and of science all at once.”
Maurice Blondel, Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice (1893)
What is the nature of the world, and what is our rightful place in it? Indeed, why is there anything at all, and what, if anything, gives human life any particular value?
While our technological, hyper-specialized Western culture has consigned such questions to the remote chambers of academia or the discreet musings of individuals, it is the contention of this venture that these questions are as much front and center in our cultural life as they have ever been. We just happen to wish they weren’t. Whether as individuals, tribes, or societies, the decisions we make invariably reflect the “things we hold dear,” or at least the ideas we value above all others. And, one way or another, those decisions ultimately trace back to those foundational questions.
As a political philosophy, liberalism attempts to get around those questions by deeming the individual the prime bearer of the right and responsibility to answer them based on one’s personal preferences, goals, or values, limited only in so far as one person’s answers don’t clash – or perhaps just clash too harshly – with another person’s. Consequently, to one degree or another, depending on where one looks, and both consciously and unconsciously, we have eliminated or severely limited the extent to which transcendent ideas may be used to explain or justify social decisions.
The name of this venture is taken from a distinction made by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. In his book, “A Secular Age,” Taylor attempts to outline what he dubs “the buffered self” of contemporary Western society and “the porous self” of the bulk of our collective history. “For the modern, buffered self,” Taylor explains, “the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined in my responses to them. . . By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions are outside the ‘mind’; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense.”
For Taylor, “the porous self is vulnerable, to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. And along with this go certain fears which can grip it in certain circumstances. The buffered self has been taken out of the world of this kind of fear.” The appeal of considering oneself somehow separated from one’s surroundings is the “self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it. . . .The buffered self can form the ambition of disengaging from whatever is beyond the boundary, and of giving its own autonomous order to its life. The absence of fear can be not just enjoyed, but seen as an opportunity for self-control or self-direction.”
The idea of “self-direction,” of course, aligns perfectly with contemporary liberalism rooted in the ideal of the autonomous individual. But how far does inner direction actually get us? After all, in the modern West, there’s no small amount of competition for a person’s attention, particularly with myriad understandings of “freedom” and an ever-expanding universe of “rights.” Add to those often vague intellectual notions our personal experience – the effects of our individual upbringing, the culture near and far of which we are a part, and the education that is, in principle, supposed to help us make sense of it all – and the flow of influences through our psyches, along with the demands of simple survival, constitute a veritable cacophony of “voices” clamoring for priority and preference.
And then on top of all that – or perhaps buried deep beneath in our collective memory – there’s that foundational question of “Why?” From a traditional monotheistic perspective, arguably the most historically dominant answer to that question, nothing is more real and omnipresent, both within and outside existence, than the God who created everything. Moreover, nothing is more important in the human experience than paying homage to that God and heeding the wisdom, revelation, and, particularly in Christian terms, the Love that is the source of all creation.
So there would seem to be a fundamental, perhaps insuperable, conflict between liberalism as a philosophical system and religion in general, and perhaps even with Christianity in particular, given its call for self-sacrifice, as demonstrated most thoroughly by the God made Man, Jesus Christ. After all, liberalism clears the landscape for the buffered, inner-directed individual free to set a course of one’s choosing through life. Predicated on an understanding of Divine Love as the “source and summit” of existence, Christianity argues, “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” (John 15:13) The contrast, it would seem, could not be more stark.
But it may not be necessary to decide for or against any specific religious tradition to appreciate the significance of the religious impulse throughout history, as well as its inevitable impact on culture. In “Confession,” his memoir of his own conversion to Orthodox Christianity, Leo Tolstoy wrote of what might be called a way station along his spiritual journey. “Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before,” the literary giant noted, “but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it makes life possible.”
Despite our best efforts to convince ourselves otherwise, the “questions of life” are still very much with us, and so, too, are the replies made possible by faith. The perspective I bring to The Porous Self is that of one who also converted – to Catholicism – after a long period of study, reflection, and, yes, prayer, but one of the unexpected consequences of my conversion has been to encounter time and again the seemingly intractable nature of the assumptions of secular liberalism that have influenced my outlook and attitudinal habits for as far back as I can remember. It’s one thing, I’ve learned, to grant intellectual assent to any religious claim; it’s another thing entirely to live accordingly.
My aim, then, is to explore – perhaps “think my way through” is a more accurate description – the challenges and insights that invariably arise from the effort to live, as both an individual and a citizen, according to faith in a culture that increasingly and dogmatically looks the other way. My hope is that readers might find something valuable, perhaps even useful, for their own purposes.
There is nothing new, of course, to the relationship between faith and culture, and one of the more interesting examples, it has long seemed to me, was in medieval Spain when Christianity, Islam, and Judaism combined, clashed, and co-existed to shape the culture of the Iberian peninsula for centuries. My interest has led to a novel, Song of Toledo, the first in a series of Andalusian Tales that will take place over the course of the 8th-12th centuries. Consequently, in addition to reflections of a personal and contemporary nature, The Porous Self will also include periodic excerpts along with considerations of how that period still informs and impacts our own.
“For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe,” Anselm of Canterbury, the 11th century Benedictine monk and theologian, famously explained, “but I believe in order to understand.” As Exhibit A of how contemporary culture shapes our thinking, I confess that for years I thought the estimable Doctor of the Church had it backwards. After all, in popular terms, out of the Enlightenment came the still-dominant conceit, based on a blinkered understanding of “reason,” in which “facticity” or “rationalism” is assumed to be the only, or at least the best, pathway to some sort of truth. Don’t I have to understand, then, before I can agree to believe?
In the end, however, there is no clear boundary between faith and reason. Indeed, you might say the boundary between them is rather porous, as is whatever boundary - or perhaps better yet, whatever boundaries – exists between our perception and beliefs about existence and our place and efforts within it. Whatever shape it takes – cultural, biological, or theological – life is ever within us and ever around us. It is, in other words, constantly coming at us, no matter how hard we might be trying to go the other way.