GUARDED BY MYSTERY -- Part 14

Meaning in a Postmodern Age

by David Walsh

Chapter 7 Cultural Transparence (conclusion)

and Bibliographic Note

[Editors' note: Professor Walsh and his publisher have given us permission to reproduce the entire meditation. We have kept available the two most recent preceding parts in addition to the current part.  Part 14 is the final part. The book may be obtained directly from the Publisher.]

Rediscovery of Tradition

In many respects this is the untold side of the twentieth-century story. We are inclined to regard ourselves as an era pre­cariously set adrift from all steadfast principles and traditions. But the wasteland is not all. While we may lack the spontaneous access to powerfully unreflective truths, that does not mean that we lack the reflective capacity to undertake a deliberate sifting of the remnants of tradition we can recover. This is the hidden side of our time which is full of significance for the future. Although it is little known or appreciated, we live in a period of momen­tous traditional rediscovery. The fact that it is the work of expli­citly historical research, that it seems to be motivated by an admi­ration for a vanished past, does not mitigate the undoubted appeal and eventually authority that such work of recovery exer­cises on us. We have a deeper understanding of the ancient and medieval worlds, together with the other great spiritual tradi­tions of mankind, than at any other time in human history.

 

Besides experiencing the scientific explosion, we are also living in the midst of an explosion of historical knowledge. The agnostic Stravinsky has expressed best the deep intuition that guides and sustains the work of historical recovery: "The more one distances oneself from the canons of the Christian Church, the further one distances oneself from the truth. These canons are as true for musical composition as they are for the life of an individual."

 

What remains is to find the means of making the profound in­timations that come to us from the past as well as from our own inner longing transparent for contemporary civilization. That is the challenge that defines the moment in which we live. Within the fragmentation of the modern world we have failed to con­struct our own meaning, and we are inclined to reexamine more respectfully the fragments of meaning we are left. Can the dried bones be made to live again? The question cannot be answered because it is not yet resolved. All we can do is point to the signs that indicate the direction of the struggle. The most significant such indication is the growing awareness that we cannot dispense even with the fragmentary and opaque elements of the traditions that come down to us. Even great artists are not great enough to construct everything anew and in every generation. They may enlarge and enrich a language, but they must begin with what is given to them, not seek to wholly invent their own. Looking back over the modern period we begin to recognize that even its vaunted assertion of independence from all traditional sources of meaning was an illusion. How could it define itself except in rela­tion to the tradition from which it sought to sever itself? The more we reflect on it, the clearer it becomes that we are not sim­ply unencumbered choosers of traditions, for who we are has al­ready been shaped by the traditions that have more or less chosen us.

We do not simply hold onto traditions, they also hold onto us. Intimations of the revival of traditional forms are, of course, not the same as their revival. We still have a considerable distance to go in the recovery of the symbols whose very opaqueness had been responsible in considerable measure for the lonely odyssey of self-creation that is the modern world. All we have is a new hu­mility before the mysterious depth of traditional meaning. The remark of Stravinsky points toward the truth of Christianity, but it is not yet an embrace of it. This we might characterize as the first stage of the revival process. It begins with respect for the tra­ditional depths viewed from the outside. There is enough of a disposition toward them to move toward utilizing the forms of expression bequeathed by them. It is not yet an entry into the substance of their meaning itself. That is the crucial second stage toward which the formal attractiveness prompts us, prepares us, and even draws us part of the way. The aesthetic can be the first step toward the spiritual reality it embodies. It is in the nature of things that there cannot be an impermeable barrier between the symbol and the symbolized. The whole point of the symbol is indeed to disclose the reality. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that a movement that begins merely with the aesthetic embrace of traditional spiritual forms ends up realizing an exis­tential participation in them as well.

 

The continuum between beauty and truth is, as the philoso­phers knew, seamless. To interpose an obstacle between them introduces a note of inauthenticity that threatens the integrity of the artistic enterprise. We cannot acknowledge the aesthetic truth of the spiritual movement without acknowledging its authorita­tive force in our own lives. Further, we are required to place our­selves under the guidance of the traditional sources of the mean­ing that discloses itself to us. That is the decisive turning point. It is no longer for us to make the traditions live again; rather, it is to allow them to work their enlivening effect within our lives. The resonances that still come to us, the intimations that disclose the transcendent mystery guarding our existence, can scarcely be known apart from the remnants of tradition still present within us. We realize that the exploration of mystery, far from being pos­sible by dint of our own creative efforts, would not even have a beginning without the fragmentary presence of traditional forms. It is not that the traditional sources of meaning have died so much as we have failed to awaken to them. Despite all its best efforts the modern world that sought to live outside of traditions now discovers that it has never really escaped their embrace. Without traditional forms there would simply be no meaning.

One of the risks of the artistic life is that it can lead to just such a deepening of the life of the artist. Accounts of religious conversion are in fact common among twentieth-century writers and artists. But it is the musicians who most dramatically em­body the shift because their work directly serves the spiritual cult itself. One of the astonishing recent developments has been the enormous popularity and success of explicitly liturgical works performed in the concert hall. This does not mean that they could not be performed in churches, but indicates that they have found a wider transparence that renders them accessible even in the nonliturgical setting. The pioneer of this kind of music is undoubtedly Olivier Messiaen, whose output is largely centered on a meditative unfolding of Catholic mystical theology. But more recently a new generation of composers led by Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki, John Tavener, and others have exploded on the public scene with works that are grounded in the musical traditions of their respective faiths. This is music that is different from the pre­ceding exploration of the established musical forms. It is not a mere borrowing of spiritual elements in the service of music. This is the real thing. Whatever the final judgment of artistic-merits, there can be no doubt that this is music that is seriously and unreservedly in the service of spiritual meaning.

 

That, it turns out, is the secret of its appeal. A work of such unprepossessing character as Part's Passion of Our Lord According to St. John derives most of its effect from the unwavering faith with which it is sung. The music itself is minimal, consisting only of variations on short sung phrases, thus virtually requiring the weight to be placed on the spiritual meaning itself. Something similar is the case with Gorecki's enormously popular Third Sym­phony, subtitled a Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The long first movement consists of a disarmingly simple canon that is never­theless varied profoundly to maintain our interest in the long meditative arc it unfolds. That leads us into the sorrowful songs themselves, which include a prayer scribbled on a Gestapo prison cell wall, a lamentation of Mary at the foot of the Cross, and a traditional Polish song about the loss of a child. It is music that probes the limit of human suffering but without a hint of protest at the injustice of the fate endured. What makes it a work of pow­erful spirituality is that the suffering, which is real, has been ut­terly transfigured through its redemptive surrender to God. It is faith in the divine mystery beyond it all that renders what would otherwise be a mere complaint into a work of transcendent se­renity. Its resonance goes directly to the human heart.

 

As with a work like Tavener's Protecting Veil, which powerfully evokes the protection of Mary by means of a cello voice and a string orchestra, it is difficult not to conclude that something new is in evidence here. The supposedly opaque traditions, previously perceived as the major obstacle to the transparence of meaning, now turn out to possess a depth beyond our imagination. By yielding to their promptings, by entering into the order they con­stitute, they disclose their riches to us. What could be no more than an object of admiration when viewed from the outside turns out to contain the fullness of reality once we yield to its ex­istential force. By thinking we could make the elements of tradi­tions serve our construction of meaning we had lost the only meaning available to us. But now the great discovery has been made that the opening of publicly authoritative meaning is pos­sible once we submit to its ordering influence in our lives.

The modern conceit had been that we could find our own way back to the illuminative center of meaning. We already possessed sufficient light of our own to reveal the path before us. The out­moded remnants of traditions could safely be discarded in the face of this limitless self-confidence. But then we discovered that without a point of reference in the givenness of the world that we could not even take the first steps anywhere. Having become in­dependent of all received sources of meaning we now were blown about without either an anchor or a compass to fix our po­sition. We had peeled away the last layer of the onion only to dis­cover our hands were empty. The illusion that we could from a superior vantage point critique all positions had proved a cruel self-deception. Thinking we could see through all things we ended by no longer having anything to see. Now we discover that we are creatures of time and space in which the limits of our vi­sion is what has historically been transmitted to us. There is no going back to a beginning before the beginning nor forward to an end that is outside of the whole. Even the effort to attune our ex­istence in relation to transcendent Being cannot dispense with the recognition that revelation occurs within a historically un­folded tradition.

 

This is what makes the artistic exploration of meaning the most open medium of inquiry. It is tied to the concrete experi­ence of reality, moving outward from the dimensions that imme­diately impinge upon us. Almost by its very nature art responds to the concretely symbolic pulls that tug upon us. This is why even for professed atheists art still resonates with transcendent mystery. Something similar occurs in the concrete struggle to build social and political meaning. It is a matter of indifference where we begin so long as we do begin. By entering on the first steps the dynamic of disclosure takes over and expanses of meaning are discovered that at the beginning were barely sus­pected. But in each case we must entrust ourselves to the rem­nants of meaning that remain. We cannot begin with the Carte­sian elimination of all traditional sources because we will then only be left locked within the loneliness of the ego. That has been the cruel illusion from which the modern world is only now be­ginning to recover.

 

We recognize that our existence is guarded by the mystery of transcendent Being which is the source of all vitality and mean­ing. And we have overcome the illusion that the miraculous hori­zon could be reached through our own efforts. Instead, we must place ourselves under its revelatory promptings, recognizing that this is the way of all human history and finding within the unsuspected depths of tradition the resources we so sorely lacked within ourselves. In this way the transcendent source of meaning is restored to modern civilization in a fully self-conscious way. Our errors have taught us that the transcendent horizon cannot be constructed through our own paltry efforts nor can it be re­duced to some mundane dimension of our social or political world. It is what guards the meaning of existence precisely be­cause it transcends all existence. We cannot penetrate beyond that mystery, nor can we dispense with the halting historical pro­cess by which the mystery reveals itself to us.

Only the traditions, albeit in fragmentary form, contain the true resonance of transcendent revelation. There is no other knowledge outside of them. By taking up the invitation they gently extend to us we begin to discover the only route toward transcendent illumina­tion that is possible for human beings. We accept the status we have been assigned in the order of the whole. Not being gods, we can acknowledge God and receive from him the gift of participa­tion in the divine life. Once freed from the impossible burden of providing our own meaning to ourselves, we can accept the sur­passing divine outpouring of reality. By accepting the gift of transcendent life as our goal we have at the same time received the gift of meaning within this life.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

As is evident, this book is more in the mode of a meditation than in that of a scholarly treatise. Its principal intent is to fol­low out the lines of reflection that discernably emerge from the chaos of our world. Scholarship is undoubtedly one of the tools that serve that purpose, but it is not the primary mode by which the transparence of existence can be apprehended and commu­nicated. Indeed, one of the implications of the preceding essay is that scholarship itself rests on a set of presuppositions that are far from self-subsistent. We tend to overlook the contextual dependence of the world of learning precisely because it is a world constituted by a common set of assumptions. This is of course why the different fields of knowledge often find one an­other incomprehensible: they may not share the same starting points. There is a need therefore for scholars to periodically step back from their disciplines, in order to attempt a freestanding formulation of their insights for the edification of that most elusive of all prey, the well-disposed general reader. Such has been my goal.

 

Having now completed the effort, fairness also obliges me and the interest of readers compels me to include something by way of recognition of the scholarly debts that underlie it. A medita­tion may stand or fall on its own merits, but no one arrives at its elaboration without the illumination extended by a great many others. Curious readers too will naturally want to know what an author has read, both from a general interest in understanding the arguments better and a more specific interest in pursuing it further on their own. Accordingly, I am happy to append this bib­liographic note by which the sympathetic might be further guided and the suspicious more fully confirmed. I make no claim to the originality of the reflections I have pursued, not only be­cause of the manifest limits of my own abilities, but more essen­tially because originality is not a particularly prized value in the search for truth.

 

What matters is not from whence an idea comes but whither it leads us. Does it bring us a step closer to a fuller ap­preciation of the reality in which we find ourselves? Toward a more adequate attunement to the order of Being? At the end of the day truth stands in judgment over authority, and whatever merit the latter possesses is entirely derivative from that subordi­nation. Like the scribe of the New Testament, we are charged with searching through treasures old and new in order to bring forth what is of value (Mt 13:52).

 

Among such contemporary treasures in the meditative recov­ery of meaning, few figure more prominently than Eric Voegelin. As a member of the European emigre constellation who arrived in America as a result of the Nazi upheaval, Voegelin, together with Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and others, brought about a rediscovery of the greatness of classical political philosophy as well as renewed respect for the revealed traditions.

 

Voegelin stands out from their broader efforts at the recovery of premodern sources of wisdom by virtue of his penetration of the experi­ential roots. His is a unique enterprise that finds its closest par­allel among the novelists and artists who put us directly in touch with the sources of ideas in life itself. His great work, Order and History in five volumes, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, Plato and Aristotle, The Ecumenic Age, and In Search of Order (Louisiana State University Press, 1956-1985), provides the most perceptive account of the experiential movements by which the ordering symbols of human history have emerged. Together with the other volumes of his Collected Works (all in publication from the University of Missouri Press [now also including Order and History]) it is by far the best educa­tion in the meditative and revelatory dynamics from which all meaning arises.

 

Other more recent approaches to the same prob­lematic of the prearticulate sources of order within human expe­rience include Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard Univer­sity Press, 1989) and a more popular version in The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1992).

 

The much larger literature on the crisis of meaning in the modern era includes particularly Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History (University of Chicago Press, 1953), Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (Vintage, 1968), Henri de Lubac's Drama of Atheist Humanism (New American Library, 1950), and Albert Camus's The Rebel (Vintage, 1956), as well as Voegelin's New Science of Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1952). They are all in one way or another classic midcentury statements concerning the bankruptcy of modernity in light of the totalitarian convulsion, and they are completed by the final demolition of communist legitimacy accomplished by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archi­pelago (3 vols.; 1974-1978).

 

Since then we have a more pervasive body of writing that ex­emplifies as much as it observes the collapse of all possible sources of meaning in the contemporary world. It is a mode of reflection perhaps best represented by Jacques Derrida in such works as Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (Vintage, 1973), and—with a more American flavor—by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989). I have sought to avoid emphasizing the obviously "deconstructionist" tenor of their reflections, in order to draw attention to the deeper quest for construction by which alone interest in the project of deconstruction can be sustained. Among the more interesting exemplars of a thoroughly contemporary mode of re­flection that goes beyond such self-imposed inhibitions I would mention Vaclav Havel, especially essays like "The Power of the Powerless" in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990 (Vintage, 1992) and Letters to Olga (Knopf, 1988). My own examination of such matters are contained in After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (The Catholic University of America Press, 1995).

Any attempt to grapple adequately with the crisis of meaning that has spawned the postmodern age must reach out toward the great thinkers of the modern era who struggled mightily with its ramifications. For this reason my text is sprinkled with references to Nietzsche, especially his Will to Power (Vintage, 1967) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Penguin, 1967). Equally we must refer to the only figure from whom Nietzsche admitted he had anything to learn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose searing exploration of the crisis of faith at the heart of the modern world is unrivaled. In contrast to Nietzsche, however, Dostoevsky sought to find his way back to Christ, most especially in the portrayal of "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" within The Brothers Karamazov. A parallel exploration is conducted slightly earlier by Søren Kierkegaard, any of whose works yield fruitful insight into what it means to communicate faith in a faithless world. In a still unrecognized way, Martin Heidegger is a curious heir to these great nineteenth-century explorers. It comes out best in his two volumes simply called Nietzsche (Harper San Francisco, 1979-1984). I am presently at work on a larger study of such pioneers whose struggles are ca­pable of yielding a fuller account of the transparence of the modern world.

 

The whole impact of this deepest reconsideration of the mod­ern world is to send us further back to the great and classic sources. We are directed to a rereading of classical philosophy, particularly Plato and Aristotle, in recognition that the philosophical mode of reflection is entirely their discovery and finds its preeminent expression in their hands. Equally, we are driven deeper into the word of revelation, the Scriptures that have been handed down, as well as the historical turning points of their ab­sorption. Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas are surely such mo­ments when all of the strands of the Western tradition, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian, are brought into conver­sation. Today we are at such a point of mutual engagement of the great spiritual traditions that now definitively includes the non-Western experiences. It is no accident that the most perceptive voices of the day are supremely conscious of the global reach of the conversation. Among such mediators I would certainly number Pope John Paul II, whose intellectual range is most fully evi­dent in his last three encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, and Fides et Ratio.

 

Having drunk deeply of the great spiritual traditions and their philosophical expositions, we cannot overlook the necessity of authoritative political forms for our world. The liberal consensual language of individual rights may be at the core of such constructions but their implementation requires a fuller explication of the sources and significance. A reconsideration of the liberal political tradition is an integral component of the broader reconsideration of the modern world. The classic liberal sources include among others the works of John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill, as well as the American Framers. In the contemporary setting the conversation is carried on most interestingly by the transition from John Rawls's Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971) to his more recent Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993). Those who are interested in my more extended study of such matters may consult The Growth of the Liberal Soul (University of Missouri Press, 1997).

 

Whether the search for meaning follows the narrower param­eters of political order or ranges through the depths of meta­physics, an irreducible dimension is constituted by the unmediated experiences of art. Some of the discussion in the text is derived from the particular strand of modern painting delin­eated by Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (Thames and Hudson, 1975). On the spiritual in modern art, see Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art (Shambala, 1988). For an approach to literary texts with wider implications for the philosophy of art, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin is to be highly recommended. Among writers, Walker Percy is surely of particular interest, not least of all for his short book of hilarious quirky meditations entitled Lost in the Cosmos (Washington Square, 1984). It is only one of the many instances of a genre I have had before me as an unattainable model for my own efforts. Short direct books that contain more than their simplicity belies include not only G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy but also C. S. Lewis's Abolition of Man and E. F. Schumacher's Guide for the Perplexed, to name but the most obvious candidates. Together with the preceding suggestions for further reading they constitute the royal road toward a wisdom to which I can only point.

 

[The end of the book]

Copyright©The Catholic University of America Press. The book may be obtained directly from the Publisher.]