not native fruit

faith and reason ii, the role of baghdad

When I first began reading "The Ornament of the World" I was all caught up in the idea that Reason had been able to wriggle in to Christianity and secularize it because of the early Christian-Greek contact of the first centuries of the Christian era, so imagine my surprise to discover that the actual secularization impulse originated in the Christian-Aristotelian contact of the thirteenth century, and further, that that contact came by way of the earlier contact between Islamic thinkers and Aristotle, and their translations of the Greek philosophers into Arabic, a movement centered in Baghdad.

Do you remember that post I wrote about 'the place of reason?'   You probably don't.  I was all excited about the wonder of Reason, science, and the reconciliation of revelation-based faith with them, all of which I credited to Christianity.  Well, today I read passages that have changed my world.

Here are some of the relevant paragraphs and paraphrases: Frederick II set up an institution of learning and translation in Sicily (circa 1220's-1230's).  "The tradition of translations from Arabic was a vital...

reading on faith and reason

I'm reading Sam Harris' "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason."  So far, I haven't come across anything I didn't already know, but that's because I've been over this territory quite a bit myself.  I'm not an atheist, as he apparently claims to be, but I'm not a subscriber to any particular religion anymore either.  I've worked my way through a couple of 'em, based largely on reason and study but also on 'getting real' about my own experience.

I had help.  Francis Baur, the late Franciscan friar who taught theology's basics to all incoming students, insisted on applying historical critical method and any evidential sources from the sciences to the subject of our interest, namely, God, the Bible, church tradition and Jesus, not necessarily in that order.  This was done to off-set the natural religious bias against science that is very common in religious literature and communities, and which is seen perhaps most clearly and publically today in the debate between creationists and evolutionists. 

As soon as we got in the classroom, he demonstrated right away just how much faith we all place in science, in everything from driving our cars and flying in airplanes, to seeking modern medical care, enjoying media technology, and believing in the solar system.  Some of the priestly hopefuls quickly transferred to other schools.  My theory is that somehow their sense of identity and well-being was tied up in ignoring this split within themselves,  and identifying their 'beliefs' one-sidedly with the religious pole of their thinking.  Harris writes eloquently on the wedding of ignorance and knowledge in religious moderates.  I think Francis Baur would agree, because he was tough, he had 'tough-love' for christianty. For myself, I evolved an understanding of the bible as a combination of mythology and legend.  I love both of these, so I'm okay with that.  In my view, myth and legend are primarily telling us something spiritual about ourselves, and their historic interest is secondary to that.   

I've also been reading Edward F. Edinger's 'The Psyche in Antiquity' in two parts.  The first part deals with the greek philosophers as our 'cultural ancestors', and gets into each one's most representative concepts as parts of our earliest mapping of consciousness in the West.  His writing is terse and to the point, illuminating, and altogether quite wonderful. The fact that he can deal with all this material in two exceedingly slim volumes astonishes me. The second volume deals with 'Gnosticism and Early Christianity.' 

Anyway, reading Edinger and Harris in tandem have supported a train of my own thought that's been developing over the last year or so, about the importance of having some kind of 'measure' to apply to one's religious beliefs, ideas, principles, etc, that arises outside the religious dogma itself.  In the case of Christianity and the West, that would be Reason, which we acquired thanks to our late medieval rediscovery of the Greek philosophers. And the fact that Greek thinking is embedded in the New Testament, thanks to the letters of Paul.

Here are the relevant passages from Edinger that enlighten for me the origins of Christianity and the role of Greek philosophy in it right from the start:

stoic eudaimonia

i've gotten some insight into the stoic approach to happiness (eudaimonia).  Happiness is really only the feeling you get when you know you're participating in the life of 'God,' or of 'the way things are.'  They call this a 'good flow of life.'  Whatever happens in your life, as long as it is something that is reasonable to expect to happen in life, is evidence that you are participating in the life of God, even if whatever happened may have been thoroughly unexpected to happen in 'your' life. "Chysippus explained living in harmony with nature as 'living in accordance with natural happenings.' " (Stoic Studies, AA Long, p.206) So let's say something terrible happens, like your business burns down.  It's a terrible thing, and you, acting in accordance with nature, will express grief, but nevertheless this misfortune can't really touch your inner core of happiness, because reason tells you that this is one of the things that can happen in life.  One would greet extreme good fortune, such as winning the lotto, in the same way.  I would imagine that if one actually cultivated this attitude it would give one great equanimity of mind.

i think it's good to know where we are coming from.  stoicism was warp and weft of western culture for so many centuries.  and in fact it isn't really very different from eastern philosophical traditions of indifference / happiness either.  to forget all about it is like forgetting your elementary school chums, forgetting your childhood baseball diamond, or your parents or something.  i want to know about it, maybe try to cultivate it and see if i enjoy greater eudaimonia.

my birthday: happiness

On my birthday, I received an email from an old friend with this picture of us as kids.  I am ten, and the two girls next to me are eleven.  The children in front are nine.  What do you think, did I fit in?  This was my dilemna as a child.  I was shy, yet I 'stood out,' so to speak.

It rained all day on my birthday this year.  I went out for breakfast with a friend. We talk a lot about 'truth,' a very interesting subject.   I came home and found this photo in my email.  I spent the afternoon alone, embroidering to the sound of rain.  I am enjoying the colors so much.  This is something I used to do a lot in my twenties, when I was detoxing.  I would go on long walks, and then spend some time either writing or embroidering.  I liked Gerda Bengsston's botanicals from Denmark, and I still do.  I'm wondering, why did I stop doing this?  Well, I know the answer.  Because no one around here thought much of it, and, as in my old childhood quest, I wanted to 'belong' - in Berkeley, where the word 'belonging' is probably some sort  of anathema! But the reality of belonging is very strong.  I've grown a little bit wiser about the whole issue, and am finding my 'belonging' more within, and in the context of my own life, which is primarily about my marriage to Gary, my work and my volunteer work, and my writing and other 'creative' activities, including the practice of self-knowledge.  I'm enjoying the embroidery very much.

Anyway, I sat alone and embroidered to the sound of the rain and the soft crackling of a fire in our small wood-stove.  In the evening, Gary and I walked through a light rain to a little bistro in the neighborhood and enjoyed a delicious meal, and a good talk. 

A friend gave me an article on a new book entitled, "Happiness: A History" by Darrin M. McMahon.  The article was good (Wall Street Journal, Sunday, January 21-22, 2006, Books Section), and here is my favorite paragraph: "The idea was not to shut out but rather to embrace discontent, setting aside any happy-ending hopes.  The great Romantic poets mined the bittersweetness to be found in the depths of yearning.  Nietzsche declared struggle itself to be sublime.  Freud argued that an intimate acquaintance with our own anxieties can lead to a kind of mental equanimity.  And existentialists prized precisely those aspects of life that seem an absurd waste.  As for the letdown that follows a successful quest - Schopenhauer's post-achievement dissatisfaction, indifference and emptiness - classical thinkers seized on these feelings not as impediments to happiness but as portals to it.  Such emotions, (according to) Virgil, Lucretius and Seneca in Mr.McMahon's telling, should prompt us not to stage yet further quests but to minimize our desires and plumb the pleasures of a simple life of retirement and contemplation."

I would have to say that in my life-experiment I have found these words to be correct.  To be 'true.'

"As for the post-conquest sense that our best days lie behind us, classical mythology showed how a solitary achievement, even if long past, can suffice to give an individual's life its shape and purpose."  I actually feel this way about taking care of my parents in their old age, and about working through my problems and our working through 'our problems' in our marriage. These may sound like fairly simple goals, but I have to tell you, it hasn't been exactly easy.  There have been so many twists and turns on the path, but it seems as if we have found our way along our path pretty well so far.  Things may not look the way I expected them to look at this stage of the game, but they look pretty good.  So I guess we'll keep going.

the porch

By the way, 'the stoa' simply means 'the porch.'  So, the stoics were actually 'the porchists.'  Yes, I can see that: someone sitting on the porch, or in the shade of an arbor, thinking things over, simply reflecting, enjoying the bliss of pure being on a Sunday afternoon.  The 'early porchists' would agree with that view.

the stoa

When I was six years old my mother took me on a ride in a little two-car antique train, with worn red velvet seats and little curtained windows, up into the steep, curvy mountains of Pennsylvania to visit my cousins at home.  My 'cousins' were in their seventies and eighties at the time, seven of them, unmarried brothers and sisters, living together in the house where they grew up, across the street from the cemetary.

They were like angels: quiet and ethereal, silver-haired or white-haired, elven, small, with eyes that could really see.  What I mean by that is, that when I looked into their eyes, someone was really there, looking back.  Looking back without excessive caring (dispassionate), and with an unanxious, untroubled, serene quality (eudaimonia). I felt that it didn't matter that I was a child; to them, I was a human being. Their movements were quiet, modest, yet carefree and natural, like teenagers in a quiet mood, not rushed, yet active, just doing the ordinary everyday things of life that don't engender a lot of excitement. Observable in their natural habitat, unpretending.  These brothers and sisters shared the household tasks, cooked meals every day, kept the house spotlessly clean and neat, went out to work and came home again.

For fun, they took those old-fashioned wood-and-canvas lawn chairs over to the cemetary and sat under the trees reading the Stoics and the fathers of the church.  I remember the old-fashioned type-setting of their small books with their long Latin names.  I remember my Cousin Vincent showing his book to me, his clear gray eyes, serious and good-tempered, connecting with mine. 

They offered me a view of an alternative lifestyle.  It's certainly one that I've never forgotten, and it's pretty close to the lifestyle my husband Gary and I live, and we lived this way with my parents for twelve years.  I had no idea we were all part of a larger community: the stoa.

I've been reading about the Stoics lately....