28. AUTHORIZED VERSIONS OF EVENTS

   The scientific method is designed to yield an authorized version of the story of an event.  Since it insists that scientists must carefully indicate the factors they can control in the construction of their experiments, it requires a story, and the story in question is presumably validated as the authorized version if the experiment can be repeated by other scientists.

    I have a great respect for the fruitfulness of the scientific method, but little respect for scientists who pretend that they alone seek knowledge.  This pretense found its classical expression in Laplacean determinism whose adherents insisted that, if we knew the present position and momentum of every entity in the universe, we could, in principle, predict every future state of the universe and retrodict every past state.  But the death knell of this pretension was sounded by Hume's empirical critique of rationalism.  Hume's argument was straightforward.  To know the existence of any entity, we must interact with it.  But any experience (or experiment) tells us only how this entity interacts with the prevailing conditions.  Since conditions are constantly changing, hypotheses and theories are ungrounded extrapolations.  Centuries later, Nietzsche encapsulated this critique in a penetrating question, "Is science a will to knowledge or to ignorance?"  In his usual provocative manner, he insisted that science is a will to ignorance, since scientists ignore conditions they cannot yet identify and control in order to master conditions they can identify.  Today, however, most philosophers of science suggest that scientific inquiries are governed by a criterion of falsifiability.  In this context, a bad hypothesis is better than no hypothesis at all, and an hypothosis which pretends to confer certain knowledge is best of all, since it offers more possibilities for revelatory falsifications.  As a consequence, however, scientists become specialists who end up knowing more and more about less and less.

    Most importantly, Nietzsche's suggestion that the scientific method encodes a will to power reveals why it is virtually useless in the exploration of person-to-person interactions between unique individuals marked by every event in their personal histories.  Any effort to control the interaction by either violates the personal dimensions of the experience.  As a result, they must learn to speak in a narrative voice if they hope to probe the formative influence of their personal histories on their interactions with one another and to share their discoveries in vulnerable self-revelations.

    Instances in which lovers find themselves at cross-purposes with one another provide paradigm examples of the difference between fruitful and destructive uses of stories.  Thus, an event which taps tangled feelings, buried memories and unresolved struggles plunges one or both into the grieving process.  And since imagination plays a crucial role in grieving, they engage in imaginary conversations.  These conversations have a narrative structure which allows endless retellings of the event in a futile search for the final word on the matter.  When the internalized storyteller co-opts the role of victim in the event in question, this version of the story automatically casts the other in the villian-role.  If the story is an obvious outcome of keeping score, the storyteller can admit to minor flaws, yet come out ahead on the final count.  If the storyteller hopes that the infliction of an equal pain may somehow evoke an empathetic response, the conversations may exploit vulnerabilities revealed by the other in previous interactions.  In short, the conversations may express what one feels and thinks in countless counter-productive ways.  But they can also create an empty space in which one can listen to the word of love voiced by the movements of the indwelling Spirit, let go of judgments and strategies, admit that there are no authorized versions of the event in question, and attempt to give voice to vulnerable self-revelations honestly.

    To be fruitful, these vulnerable self-revelations must function like scientific theories.  Since I am attempting to express honestly what I think and feel about the event at the moment, I must present it as the authorized version.  But I must also expect that your version of the event, by falsifying my understanding of your motives and intentions, will call me to revise my version of the story in ways that expose the previously hidden influence of past events in my personal history on my initial reaction.  And if I am honest, I will see that the exchange of vulnerable self-revelations has become possible because earlier interactions have fostered trust that we will both remain faithful as we transform misunderstandings into deeper understandings and cultivate the sympathetic imaginations that inspired the metaphors of intimacy projected by the great Hebrew prophets.

27. ORIGINAL SIN

    Doctrines are not simple matters of belief.  They are linguistic formulations designed to articulate experiences of God's activity in our lives.  (This is true also of the doctrine of the Trinity.  The doctrine is meaningless if it does not enable believers to discern how each of the three divine Persons is active in their lives.)

    Romans, 7 offers the biblical passage which best articulates the experience encoded in the doctrine of original sin:  "The good that I would do, that I don't;  and the evil that I would not do, that I do." 

    Working from this starting point, I welcome postmodernist readings of the Christian tradition which reveal that doctrinal formulations and moral judgments indebted to a metaphor of power and judgment are repositories of violence.  And I agree that, since a detached, god-like perspective on the formative power of language is quite impossible, language is inescapably a repository of violence.  In sum, as long as the formative power of everyday language goes unquestioned, a power-structure distorts the ways that we process interactions with one another.  Since everyday English incorporates intimacy as a form of life, transforming moments are possible.  But they are also needed, since we are not socialized to intimacy.

    From a theological perspective, the postmodernist judgment that language is a repository of violence identifies language, not Adam's transgression of a prohibition against moral discourse, as the original sin.  In this regard, Derrida's neologism, difference, locates the fatal flaw in the fact that languages are generated by an interplay of differentiation and deferral.  Concretely, desire reveals the Otherness of the object of desire, and the line of demarcation which marks the difference is designed to confer power to gratify the desire in question.  However, since desires are insatiable, the fulfillment is constantly deferred.   (Note the recurrence of the concern in the Hebrew narrative tradition that the fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham was constantly deferred.)  Moreover, since differentiations are arbitrary, they enshrine the will to power exposed by Nietzsche in and through the formative power they acquire in processing experience.  And since a god-like perspective on the interplay between language and experience is impossible, the language acquired through a pervasive process of socialization corrupts the interactions of all concerned.  The only authentic stance, then, is that encoded in a hermeneutics of suspicion.

    I have no quarrel with an analysis of the workings of language which identifies the linguistic ability of human beings as the original sin.  (If I so desired, I could argue that Yahweh's prohibition against moral discourse recognized that fact.)  The issue, then, is defined by the question:  Are transforming moments possible?  My answer to the question can be found in analyses which show that the language of intimacy enables individuals to learn how to interact passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully.  In so doing, they escape from an otherwise inescapable formative power of language.

        (A note in passing:  In Christian Ethics:  An Ethics of Intimacy, I suggest that Luther's protest against a theology which insisted that sinful individuals had access to God only through mediators was inspired by a longing for intimacy.  His metaphor depicting individuals standing naked before God is a metaphor of intimacy.  However, Luther's conviction that the corruption due to original sin was irreversible and inescapable is evident in his description of the results of justification by faith alone:  Totus simul justus et peccator.  I.e., one is simultaneously totally sinful and totally justified.  The doctrine of justification by faith alone is therefore an illusory promise of instant intimacy.)

    Consequently, I grieve over the fact that a hermeneutics of suspicion designed to ensure that subversions of authority do not re-inscribe authority in their critiques limits moral responses to a hollow voice of prophetic protest.  My protests against violence invoke the descriptive import of a language capable of showing that exercises of power and judgment do violence to anyone who dares to embrace the quest for intimacy as inseparable from the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.

    I am grateful, therefore, that a hard-won awareness that God's love is all-inclusive and ever-faithful enables me to face the hidden ways that I still exclude individuals who disturb my comfort-zone or threaten my self-sufficiency.  In short, I can now see that these cross-situations can be gifts for me as well as for them, and these gifts include a deepening involvement with Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

26. INTIMACY AS A FORM OF LIFE

    To make a point, I insist that I do not believe in God, and I suggest that a Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" violates personal and intellectual integrity.  With all sincerity, I have often stated that I encounter the immediate and distinctive activity of the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit in innumerable events in my daily life.  And though I usually take everything personally, I am not offended when my assertion is greeted with condescension by rationalists who suggest that I have not out-grown a childish need for imaginary friends.  But a compulsion to live with intellectual integrity motivates me to subject my everyday experiences to critical analyses.

                      Forms of Life

    When Wittgenstein undertook the analysis of the assumptions of the ideal language program in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, he was bewitched by the assumption that language was a formal system subject to the rule of reason.  When he recognized the sterility of an ideal language intended to picture reality precisely and comprehensively, he concluded this text with a passage which indulged his mystical bent:  "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

    In the following years, Wittgenstein wrestled with the realization that everyday language could say more precisely and comprehensively what an ideal language was supposed to say.  To explore a working assumption that ordinary language is all right, he replaced the supposition that language is a formal system with the suggestion that everyday languages incorporate many distinctive forms of life, each designed to transform a longing, insight, or aspiration into a realizable quest.

    From a philosophical perspective, this focus on realizable purposes differed radically from the focus of Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth, science's promise of certain knowledge, and Nietzsche's insistence that these versions of classical rationalism were propelled by a hidden will to power.  From a practical perspective, it replaced the picture-theory of language encoded in the Tractatus with an implicit analysis of the workings of metaphors.

    In this context, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions applied Wittgenstein's insight in a way that revealed the role played by metaphors whose reach initially exceeded their grasp in the history of science.  On my part, a fascination with the workings of intimacy as a form of life with a realizable purpose have led me to see that the process whereby a form of life first enters moral discourse as a metaphor which attracts adherents willing to subject its implications to tests in everyday life.  The languages which survive this extensive testing can then be used to process everyday experiences in ways which enable language-users to realize the purpose in question.  And they are effective because they enable those who dwell within a form of life to sort out the stimuli which confront them in ways that enable them to overcome obstacles to the realization of this purpose.

    As a form of life generated by a longing for deepening intimacy, however, it functions as a moral discourse without foundations.   The reason is obvious.  An understanding of the workings of the languages which transmit distinctive forms of life explains why any form of life lives or dies depending on its ability to attract individuals who value the purpose it is designed to realize.

             Intimacy as a Form of Life

    Over the course of centuries, the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's prophets generated a distinctive form of life which transforms an elusive longing for deepening person-to-person involvements into a realizable quest.  As the linguistic medium for these metaphors, the prophets drew on a language indebted to a distinctive literary form forged by authors who used a dialogue among stories to process Israel's historical experience.

    This literary form, the prose narrative, centered analyses of language and experience in interactions between an incomprehensible deity and unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  The metaphors of intimacy supplemented this vision with pregnant insights into moral discourse.

    The Deuteronomic strand of the narrative tradition insisted that the Mosaic Law functioned as a mediator between Israel's God and Israel.  To support this vision, storytellers invoked the power-structure implicit in Yahweh's reservation of authority over moral discourse to himself in the story of Adam and Eve.  Implicitly, the embrace of this power-structure was designed to lend authority to a moral discourse framed by a metaphor of power and judgment.  In marked contrast, the prophets replaced the belief that the Law functioned as a mediator with assurances that Israel's God was intimately involved with unique individuals.

    From an analytic perspective, the metaphors of intimacy replaced the Deuteronomic insistence that definitive answers to moral issues had been given by God in theophanies with a passionate insistence that God's moral voice spoke in and through the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized, silenced, outcast and stranger.  As a result, they fostered an awareness that tangled moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of every human action and assertion, and, in turn, this awareness subverted the assumption that prevailing norms and practices could yield definitive moral judgments.  But they themselves did not speak in a hollow voice of prophetic protest.  Instead, the protests they validated revealed that intimate interactions were the only way to transform the longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence into a realizable quest.

    In sum, these metaphors utilized the inner logic of seminal stories in the Hebrew narrative tradition which readings governed by a code derived from a metaphor of power and judgment ignore.  Thus, in the story of Adam and Eve, though Yahweh insists on reserving authority over moral issues to himself, he clearly does not understand human reality.  He is puzzled by Adam's loneliness.  His first response—to retain power over moral discourse while giving Adam power over animals—betrays a complete failure to understand that power-structures abort the longing for intimacy. His second response—the formation of Eve—was almost comic.  It indicates a dawning awareness that Adam longed for intimacy with another human being, but sets the stage for Eve's realization that, if she desired intimacy with Adam, she had to transgress the prevailing power-structure. 

    In Augustine's violent misreading of this story, Adam's transgression severed the natural relationship between Creator and creatures and no merely human being could offer the sort of reparation that would restore the relationship.  In marked contrast, the Hebrew narrative tradition used the covenant-theme introduced in the Yahwist's story of the call to Abraham to explore Yahweh's willingness to remain involved with Adam and his descendants.  In this vein, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah depicts Yahweh as an oriental potentate subject to eruptions of wrath.  And though Abraham approaches Yahweh with trepidation, he nonetheless dares to instruct him on the morality befitting a being of such awesome power in his dealings with human beings.  In Exodus, however, the categorical form of God's covenant with Abraham was replaced with a conditional form which virtually reduced the covenant to a contract laden with promised rewards and threatened punishments.  But when God threatens to destroy Abraham's offspring and begin again with Moses, Moses persuades him to change his mind by flattery, warnings that Israel's neighbors might judge him harshly, and a reminder of the irrevocable covenant with Abraham.

    At the very least, metaphors of intimacy utilize the inner logic of these stories to replace a rule of Law with the suggestion that God can speak in and through the cries from the depths of wounded individuals because he is passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with them.  And this is the way that an incarnational theology describes the intimate involvement of Jesus, fully human as well as fully God, with each and every human being.

25. ETHICAL THEORIES

     Theorists in the ethical tradition share the assumption that reason functions as a detached, disinterested, god-like perspective on language, experience and reality.  Implicitly, they assume that a literary construct functions as an arena in which critics attempt to forge a second level language about language capable of accrediting definitive judgments on all possible moral issues.  On its part, the arena defines moral issues as responses to the dictum, "Might makes right" and to the cultural relativity of moral notions.  And it promises that a theory which satisfies the criteria dictated by this conception of reason will triumph over all contending theories.

    Historically, the ethical theories which are still locked in contention attract adherents because they probe a distinctive dimension of human existence in depth and detail.  To justify the closure on questioning implicit in any judgment, however, they must ground moral discourse outside of human reality or in some limited conception of human reality.  (E.g., the will of God, the voice of reason, the autonomous individual, the inexorable march of history.)  Taken seriously, they are therefore dehumanizing and depersonalizing.

    Nonetheless, they have enriched the understanding of the workings of moral discourse immeasurably.  Consequently, in Christian Ethics:  An Ethics of Intimacy, I went to considerable lengths to show how theories which explored five dimensions of human existence enriched the ethics of intimacy.  Thus, through an ethical theory which focused empirical analyses of moral notions on the issue of character, Aristotle illuminated the hard fact that our actions are formative of the sort of person we become, regardless of our intentions.   Centuries later, Hobbes and Locke used naturalistic conventions forged by Aristotle to center their diverging conceptions of a purportedly primordial social contract in a theory which reduced human motivation to a natural desire for pleasure and for the avoidance of pain, with reason as the only escape from a perpetual war of all against all.  To replace the authority of political theories indebted to Hobbes and Locke with their own social concerns, Utilitarians focused instead on the social consequences of actions.  Then, to reject Utilitarianism in any shape or form, Kant used Hume's empirical critique of rationalism to argue that we can never know with certainty either the short-term or long-term consequences of actions.  In place of consequences, he focused exclusively on intention.  (In his Critique of the Metaphysics of Morals, the only valid moral intention is a willingness to do one's duty as that duty is defined by a categorical imperative one dictates to oneself.)  Then, in the twentieth century, Sartre both utilized and subverted Kant's conception of the autonomous individual in an analysis of a formless, unbounded consciousness which ensured that, in every conscious experience, individuals are confronted with a potentially infinite number of possible actions (responses) to whatever is presented in a contingent datum of consciousness.

    When I mapped this inter-textual dialogue onto the form of life which transforms the longing for intimacy into a realizable quest, I found that each of these theories illuminates moral issues in potentially fruitful ways.  But I also found that those who use a particular theory to rationalize their moral judgments clothe a hidden will to power in a narrowly focused theory generated by the rule of reason.

    I continue to hope that academic inhabitants of the ethical tradition will begin to appreciate the postmodernist insight that tangled moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of every human action and assertion.  If they do, they will see, starkly, that their use of reason as a detached, god-like perspective on the human quest generates rhetorics which rationalize the rule of a power-that-be.

    Since I analyze moral discourse from the perspective offered by Wittgenstein's analysis of everyday languages, I revise the metaphor which led philosopher in ancient Greece to privilege the political over the personal dimensions of experience.  This metaphor envisioned the city as the cradle and crucible of both culture and civilization.   My revision envisions everyday language as the cradle and crucible of moral discourse.  First and foremost, this language transmits a form of life which enables language-users to transform a longing for intimacy into a realizable quest.  The realizability of the quest is attested by all the tests which the implications of the metaphor of intimacy successful passed.  But everyday English also transmits forms of life indebted to the analyses of language and experience generated by the metaphor of power and judgment, and these forms of life also enable language-users to achieve distinctive purposes conducive to the quest for an ever more fully human and uniquely personal existence.  In the end, however, I cannot allow any of these purposes to stifle my elusive longing for ever-deepening intimacy with each Person in the triune God and with those I love.

    In short, given my intense longing to live with personal integrity, I cannot submit to a second-level language designed to accredit moral judgments or imperatives generated by a metaphor of power and judgment.  Those imperatives are voiced by the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized, silenced, outcast, and even by barbarians outside the walls, while judgments are always informed by a hidden will to power.  And in my everyday experience, I now see that such lapses are counter-productive, self-destructive, and wounding to anyone who trusts me.

     Since I analyze moral discourse from the perspective offered by Wittgenstein's analysis of everyday languages, I revise the metaphor which led philosophers in ancient Greece to privilege the political over the personal dimensions of experience.  Their metaphor envisioned the city as the cradle and crucible of both culture and civilization.   My revision envisions everyday language as the cradle and crucible of moral discourse.  First and foremost, this language transmits a form of life which enables language-users to transform a longing for intimacy into a realizable quest.  The realizability of the quest is attested by all the tests which the implications of the metaphor of intimacy successfully passed.  But everyday English also transmits forms of life indebted to the analyses of language and experience generated by the metaphor of power and judgment, and these forms of life also enable language-users to achieve distinctive purposes conducive to the quest for an ever more fully human and uniquely personal existence.  In the end, however, I cannot allow any of these purposes to stifle my elusive longing for ever-deepening intimacy with each Person in the triune God and with those I love.

    In short, given my intense longing to live with personal integrity, I cannot submit to a second-level language designed to accredit moral judgments or imperatives generated by a metaphor of power and judgment.  Those imperatives are voiced by the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized, silenced, outcast, and even by barbarians outside the walls, while judgments are always informed by a hidden will to power.  And in my everyday experience, I now see that such lapses are counter-productive, self-destructive, and wounding to anyone who trusts me.

24. FAITH AND REASON

    Wittgenstein's analysis of the workings of everyday languages shows (1) that words are like ropes woven from many strands and (2) that, as a result, the meaning of a word is determined by its use in a form of life designed to realize a distinctive purpose.  The use of "faith" in the Christian tradition illustrates both insights.  Here, I an concerned only with a limited cluster of concepts, belief, trust and faithfulness.

    Thus, in the Jewish Scriptures, the Exodus- and Covenant themes centered the meaning of "faith" in trust and faithfulness.  The story in which Yahweh called Abram, son of Terah, to leave his identity and security in his tribe to set forth on a journey into the unknown as Abraham of Yahweh is a typical example.  Yahweh's words did not convey a developed belief-system or moral discourse.  Rather, they invited Abraham to trust that God would be faithful and called for a corresponding faithfulness on the part of Abraham.

    Early authors in the Christian tradition referred to Abraham as "our father in faith."  But an obsessive concern with a distinction between orthodoxy and heresy soon shifted the emphasis from trust to belief, and that distinction, in turn, generated references to belief in the one true Church.  In the same vein, as the tradition evolved, the virtual identification of "faith" with "belief" was solidified by distinctions between faith and reason, reason and revelation, beliefs and knowledge.  Presumably, reason conferred knowledge and truth.  If so, what truth-value did beliefs have?

    At the dawn of the Modern Era, the emphasis on true beliefs provided the stage for the misplaced debate between Catholic and Lutheran polemicists.  In this debate, Protestants who accepted some version of Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone had to embrace three beliefs, (1), that an original sin had severed the natural relationship between God and humans and (2) that Jesus' death on the Cross made reparation for that sinfulness, and (3) that these beliefs could be found in the Scriptures.  (Luther's doctrine implied that true believers entered a restored relationship in which they were "totus simul justus et peccator" ("at once totally sinful and totally justified").

    Centuries later, to recover connotations of trust, Kierkegaard encoded his thought in a formula, "the leap of faith," and supplemented the formula with an argument designed to show that the leap in question is absurd from any human point of view.  In his works, then, the distinction between belief and knowledge is transformed into a polar opposition.

    In this context, I must question the thesis argued by Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Address.  I quote:  "At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma.  Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always intrinsically true?  I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God."  (He continues with his offensive reading of Scotus: "In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology that would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit . . . "  But anyone who understands that Scotus was searching for a philosophical framework capable of supporting an incarnational theology must judge that the Pope's ignorance of the history of philosophy reveals his determination to endow Aquinas's synthesis of faith and reason with a timeless authority.)

    My critique of the Pope's references to both "reason" and "faith" can be simply put.  Implicitly, the Pope embraces the strand in the philosophical tradition which assumes (1) that a literary construct, "reason", provides a detached, disinterested, dispassionate and god-like perspective and (2) has the power to compel assent to truths found in Scripture and consent to the moral judgments which reason uncovers in the natural order of creation.  Quite obviously, since the notion of reason understands the detachment as an interrogatory stance, a stance which endows reason with the power to impose closure on endless questioning, it must be situated in an all-encompassing metaphor of power and judgment.  Clearly, the influence of that metaphor is apparent in the Pope's insistence that God acts reasonably.  (Note well:  Every judgment is an exercise of power.)

    Since I read the Scriptures through a code derived from a metaphor of intimacy rather than a metaphor of power and judgment, I understand the call for faith as a call for trust and faithfulness.  And since reason is a useful tool but a harsh master, I regard the Pope's supposition that a synthesis between faith and reason was divinely ordained as pernicious.

                    _____________________

23. META-NARRATIVES

   

    Meta-narratives are governed by a literary form which requires their authors to weave narratives recording historical events into a coherent account of the entire course of human history.  On its part, the literary form provides the arena in which meta-narratives view for authority.

     Few authors intend to construct a meta-narrative.  But every reading of the western literary tradition enshrines a meta-narrative which guides and even governs the self-understanding of adherents of a particular strand in that tradition.

                    Nietzche and Heidegger

    Heidegger's use of a hermeneutical theory forged by Nietzsche to assert his authority over readings of the western literary tradition offers a paradigm example of the contention between meta-narratives.  Thus, to frame which own meta-narrative, Heidegger implicitly acknowledged that readings generated by Nietzsche's archeology of knowledge and genealogy of morals forced rationalists to admit that a literary construct, "reason", could not provide a detached, god-like perspective on language, experience and reality.  And the force of Nietzsche's critique was enhanced by his accusation that rationalism was propelled by a hidden will to power.  To counter Nietzsche without contributing to the assumption that "reason" spoke with authority, Heidegger centered his re-reading of the western literary tradition in a conviction that "reason" became conscious of itself in and through the notion of Being forged by an inter-textual dialogue among the so-called pre-Socratics.  As the god-term governing his re-readings of the transition from orality to literacy as the foundation of western culture, Being accommodated a metaphor which described languages generated by a literary tradition as abodes in which individuals dwell suspended over an abyss.  Since the abyss in question is clearly the Cartesian chasm between subjectivity and objectivity, languages function as vehicles for the revelation of the meaning of Being, and an authentic human existence is defined as a stance of open responsiveness to the creative and gracious activity of an all-pervasive Being.

    I suggest, however, that the depiction of the human quest framed by the pre-Socratic notion of Being cannot be reconciled with the delineation of human existence in the Hebrew narrative tradition.  The difference:  Since the pre-Socratics forged the notion of Being prior to the emergence of significant distinctions among language, experience and reality, Heidegger could use it to recover a participative existence from the sterility of reason's dispassionate, disinterested stance.  But the literary form of the prose narrative forged by the Hebrew narrative tradition rejected the distinction between a participative and a detached existence.  Its import is evident in the metaphors of intimacy designed to evoke the longing for intimacy on the part of unique individuals and to transform that longing into a realizable quest.

   

            Meta-Narratives in the Christian Tradition 

   

    Though the powers-that-be in Rome refuse to acknowledge the fact, the Christian tradition transmits two irreconcilable meta-narratives.

    The dominant meta-narrative continues to provide the stage for the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians.  For its starting point, it canonizes the harsh doctrine of original sin which Augustine extracted from the story of Adam and Eve.  According to Augustine, this story is an historical account which asserts (1) that God originally intended a purely natural relationship with human beings, (2) that Adam's sin severed this natural relationship and condemned his descendants to a self-centered existence, (3) that divine justice had to demand fitting reparation for this offence, and (4) that no mere human could make such reparation.

    For the transforming moment in the story, the meta-narrative invoked the understanding of the Incarnation inscribed in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo (which can be loosely translated as "Why did God become a man?")  Presumably, divine mercy intervened and, together, justice and mercy determined that the cruel and humiliating death of the Word made flesh would not only restore the severed relationship, but elevate those who are saved to a supernatural state of existence.  (The import of Augustine's description of Adam's sin as "a happy fault".)

    Note well:  This meta-narrative (1) implies that the Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned, (2) enshrines the hierarchical structure implicit in the metaphor of power and judgment in a theology of transcendence, and (3) places Jesus at the center of that structure as a mediator between God and sinful humans.

    Inexorably, the meta-narrative generated a sin-centered theology which reduced Jesus's saving activity to an emphasis on reparation to God and redemption for humans (or later, in Luther, on justification by faith alone).  Even worse, once Aquinas situated the meta-narrative in a baptized Aristotelianism, the metaphor of power and judgment which framed the western philosophical tradition led theologians to depict God as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge, and the language of redemption was burdened with the supposition that Jesus' sacrificial death merited something called "sanctifying grace."  In this context, this created grace was somehow conferred by the reception of the seven Sacraments or merited by good works or performance of the terms set for gaining Indulgences.

    COMMENTARY:  I cannot believe in a God who would demand the cruel and humiliating death on the cross of his own divine Son in reparation for human sinfulness.  Please do not remind me that God's ways are not our ways.  I would respond with the reminder that the stories in the Old Testament cannot be read as historical accounts of how God acted in the past.  And I would suggest that Jesus, fully God and fully human, reveals God's ever-faithful and all-inclusive love.

    The second meta-narrative frames the incarnational theology indebted to Scotus.  It begins with the vision inscribed in the Hymn in the Prologue of John and the Johannine formula which presents God simply as Love, not with Augustine's doctrine of original sin.  The understanding of these biblical passages awaited the emergence of the doctrine of the Trinity in the fourth century, CE.  And when this doctrine was interpreted through a code derived from the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's great prophets, it implied that the three divine Persons shared so intimately in the lives of one another that there was only one divine life.  (That life was also individuating.)

    Scotus' reading of the Prologue of John presented creation as an out-pouring of divine love.  In short, he insisted that love always over-flows.  (His formula:  Amor est diffusivus sui;  translated literally:  "Love diffuses itself.")  When this passage is read through a code derived from the doctrine of the Trinity, the eternal Word is central to life within the Trinity, the act of creation, the course of human history and the lives of human beings.  Quite obviously, then, the Incarnation was not a response to human sinfulness.

    According to this meta-narrative, therefore, the Incarnation reveals that each of the three divine Persons longs to be intimately involved with us on our journeys through life.  Jesus, the Word incarnate, reveals how the Father and the Spirit were involved with him in distinctive ways on his journey.  And on his part, he dwells among us as a tremendous lover and wounded Healer, not a mediator between God and us.

    In sum, Jesus' birth, life and death reveal that he loves us with a passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful love.  And since he is the revelation of the love of the triune God, so do the Father and the Spirit.

                            ______________

22. CONSCIOUSNESS OF SIN

    In an entry in the Third Installment of my reflections, I expressed my outraged response to the final pronouncement of a Conference convened to explore the failure of Catholics to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  The participants attributed the problem to the loss of consciousness of sin.  In response, I emphasized the tragedy that few priests are capable of making the Sacramental ritual a living encounter with Jesus, the Wounded Healer.  And I expressed the fear that, from the perspective of the Curia, the solution lay in preaching designed to re-instill "good old Catholic guilt".

     A few days ago, Fr. Joe's homily on forgiveness challenged me to revisit the issue.  From his sociological perspective, we no longer sin;  we simply make mistakes.  And, by extension, admitting a mistake is not a matter of seeking forgiveness.

     Almost immediately, I had to revisit my belief that we sin because we are wounded, not because we are wicked.  From this perspective, we mistakenly assume that gratifying desires, seeking power, acquiring goods, or the like will assuage the pain and fill our emptiness.  But these mistakes mask a refusal to enter the grieving process that yields forgiveness.  And it is that refusal which is sinful.

     The belief that we sin because we are wounded, not because we are wicked has many implications.  Thus, it rejects the supposition that we are naturally selfish.  (From a critical perspective, this supposition is the literary offspring of the Hellenic suspicion of passion and desire as disruptive forces which must be subjected to the rule of reason.  And reason, of course, generates judgments which in turn generate guilt.)  It also rejects the supposition that we are inherently selfish, not because selfishness is natural, but because, as offspring of Adam, we suffer the corruption which entered the world through his original violation of the natural order.  And both rejections are validated by experience with little ones who can be spontaneously caring and compassionate as well as eruptively self-assertive as they struggle to find their place in a family and a world.   

     In the end, therefore, I suggest, once again, that the point at issue is the definition of sin.  The powers-that-be in the institutional Church define sin as a violation of a natural law inscribed in the natural order by the Creator of or a Code of Canon Law which badly needs revision.  I insist that sin is a break with intimacy and a failure to live with integrity.

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QUITE OBVIOUSLY, I HAVE FAILED TO LIMIT THE ABOVE REFLECTIONS TO A SINGLE PAGE.  HOWEVER, SINCE THAT FAILURE TRIGGERS GUILT RATHER THAN SHAME, I AM NOT LIKELY TO ABANDON MY SELF-INDULGENT APPROACH TO WRITING.

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21. SHAME AND GUILT:

     The formative power of everyday language on our longings, passions, feelings, imagination, motives, intentions, judgments and actions has long been recognized.  But Nietzsche was the first to emphasize the fact that the formative power of languages generated by a dialogue of text with text textures experiences in distinctive ways.  Decades later, Heidegger incorporated Nietzsche's insight in a hermeneutical theory designed to reveal the historicity of these experiences, while Wittgenstein echoed it in intriguing ways in the passage which compares words referring to experiences (and entities) to ropes woven from many strands, with no single strand running all the way through.

     An analysis of the experiences of shame and guilt illustrates the validity of Nietzsche's insight and Wittgenstein's analysis of the workings of everyday languages.  As terms in the English language, shame and guilt refer to distinguishable experiences.  However, since there is considerable over-lap among the literary conventions woven into these rope-like words, an analysis which attempts to distinguish sharply between them succeeds only in showing that their meaning in any instance depends on the purpose for which they are used.

    My interest in the distinction was triggered by discussions with colleagues in the Theology Department at Quincy University.  They argued that guilt was a more positive experience than shame, since it voices a call for conversion.  My reaction was informed by personal experiences and by compassionate involvements with wounded individuals.  In my journey into the unknown, guilt was crippling because it called me to conformity to dictates of an interiorized committee in my head, while experiences in which I felt and owned a suffusive shame called me to live with personal integrity.

    As I reflect on these discussions, I turn once again to my reading of the Hebrew narrative tradition.  Quite clearly, when the story of Adam and Eve is read as literature rather than history or theology, it reveals (1) that an existence defined by a power-structure stifles communication between human beings, (2) that existence in a power-structure breeds loneliness and, in Eve's case, boredom as well, (3) that an eruption of self-consciousness requires a transgression of the dictates of a prevailing power-structure, (3) that this eruption evokes the sort of shame encoded in that passage which notes that Adam and Eve became aware that they were naked.

    This reading evokes a felt experience with universal application, yet defies any effort to abstract from the story a clear definition of the experience of shame.  Thus, efforts to imaginatively reconstruct the first time I experienced an eruptive self-consciousness lead me to suspect that it emerged as a resounding No.  If so, this No voiced a self-assertion which could only find expression as a protest against efforts of others to control my behavior.  As the other side of the coin, however, the experience was surely impregnated with a sense of total vulnerability, a feeling of helplessness and a fear of abandonment, since I did not know who I was, what I wanted, or how to respond effectively to the situation at hand.  And as it was repeated, it surely evoked the anxiety of authorship inseparable from a healthy urge to become the author of my own personal history.

    Here, again, the Hebrew narrative tradition generated stories which reveal common efforts to diminish the anxiety of authorship.  Thus, storytellers in the Deuteronomic strand of the narrative tradition posited the so-called Mosaic Law as a mediator between Israel's God and individual Israelites which would transform shame into guilt.

         (Aside:  This dynamic is repeated in marriages in which individuals marked by every event in their personal histories commit themselves to a shared quest for ever-deepening person-to-person involvements.  As intimacy deepens, interactions tap deeply buried feelings.  Since neither spouse can identify those feelings, both resort to judgments designed to express and evoke some emotional response.  But judgments cannot and do not evoke vulnerable self-revelations which alone voice their deepest longings.  And if the couple are to find their way through these misplaced debates, they must abandon the prescriptions and prohibitions voiced by the interiorized committee in their heads and experience the shame inherent in standing naked before each other, without self-protective defenses, socially acceptable rationalizations, and self-deceptive excuses.)

    In this regard, the recourse to a Law supposedly given immediately to Moses in theophanies resembles the restructuring of thought in the Hellenic literary tradition.  This tradition interiorized the detachment inherent in writing and reading as an interrogatory stance rather than an eruptive self-consciousness.  To justify the imposition of closure on endless questioning, its strong authors forged a metaphor of power and judgment which successfully transformed endless questioning into focused inquiries designed to reveal the dynamic operation of a finite universe and every entity in it.

    Here, I suggest that trust in the revelatory power of the metaphor of power and judgment is fruitful in probing forces which operate with a necessity of nature, but misleading when morality is centered in the person-to-person interactions explored in the Yahwist's story of Adam and Eve.  Tragically, an elderly Augustine's violent misreading of the story of Adam and Eve lent his authority to a conception of God indebted to the Hellenic metaphor of power and judgment.  In his earlier Confessions, however, Augustine had supplemented the eruption of self-consciousness recounted in the story with a revolutionary inward turn.  This inward turn served two purposes, one, to probe the glimpses of human beings endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom offered by the Yahwist's stories of Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs and, two, to set the stage for pleas that only God could understand the murky depths which led Augustine to do the evil he would not do.  In the doctrine of original sin which Augustine extracted from the story of Adam and Eve, however, the God who understood his inner turmoil was also a God of power and judgment.  And the tragedy was compounded when both Catholic and Protestant theologians used this harsh doctrine of original sin as a shared starting point for a misplaced debate revolving around a polar opposition between faith and works.  (In that debate, both sides assumed that an interiorized god-like perspective revealed the selfishness inherent in any inward turn.  And both framed that assumption with a theology of transcendence which decreed that one's longings and aspirations ought to be fixed exclusively on God.)

    Though this background material may seem to go far afield, it indicates some of the literary origins of the internalized perspectives which evoke guilt and shame.  The metaphor evoking guilt is quite straightforward.  It functions as an internalized judge who subjects actions to codified systems of prescriptions and prohibitions designed to promote some "common good." In everyday English, it clothes its judgments in a language of "should" and "should not," "ought". "duty" and "obligation".  And since it seems to speak from nowhere, it seems to texture its judgments with divine authority.  But, as Heidegger's analysis of the historicity of experience implies, this language is really the voice of a committee in one's head which activates memory traces of judgments imposed on us by significant people in our lives, and its formative power re-enforces their sad belief that a system of rewards and punishments will succeed in producing moral individuals.

         (Aside:  When I met with couples who were locked in futile struggles, I introduced a gimmick.  Whenever I heard a "should" or "should not", I would ring an imaginary bell.  The person who used the forbidden word had to begin again, this time with an honest effort to say what he or she was feeling and thinking.  Gradually, the couple would see how wounding their judgments were and how fruitful vulnerable self-revelations to loved ones can be.)

    Shame is also evoked by an internalized perspective, but formulating a metaphor which distinguishes between toxic and life-giving shame is more difficult than tracing guilt to an internalized judge.  Thus, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre offered an extensive analysis of self-consciousness which differs radically from that of the Yahwist.  As the champion of Cartesian rationalism in the twentieth century, he located the eruption of self-consciousness at the center of an unbridgeable chasm between subjectivity and objectivity.  To dramatize the unaccountability of the eruption, he traced it to a double nihilation which reveals that we are neither the immediate object of consciousness nor our initial response to that datum.  In his pregnant formulation, "we are not what we are, and we are what we are not."  On the one hand, we are pure and unbounded subjectivities.  On the other, the all-pervasive shame we seek so desperately to hide is triggered by the Look of the Other which objectifies us.  Forever thereafter, shame is an authentic, if toxic, sign of our inability to escape from such objectifications.  And the all-pervasive shame evoked by this sense of vulnerability is enhanced when we realize that we are futile projects to be God.

    Clearly, Sartre's use of the metaphor of the Look traces shame to sources outside the individual.  And I suggest that the metaphor can be used to expose insidious ways that shame can be toxic.  But my analysis of the life-giving thrust of shame locates the perspective entirely within myself.  To frame this analysis, I project a metaphor which enables me to witness the murky depths, tangled feelings, self-protective urges and massive self-deception which my customary excuses and socially acceptable rationalizations obscure.  And this metaphor implies that I have internalized a mirror that only I can hold before me when I dare to face me as I am.

    In recent years, I have found my ability to identify, feel and own experiences in which I am suffused with shame far more fruitful than efforts to conform to the dictates of an internalized Judge who burdened me with "good old Catholic guilt" or agreement with Sartre's more generalized obsession with a universal inability to live with absolute purity.  In sum, this witness exposes my occasional lapses into cowardly silence, my fear of being vulnerable and my craving for instant intimacy in a way that calls me to live with personal integrity.  And responding to that call plunges me into a far more challenging quest than the call to conform to Law (or to an objective moral order) could ever do.

    In the end, however, I cannot accept a moral discourse framed by a polar opposition between guilt and shame.  I identify with the analysis of the role of law in the developing awareness of my tangled depths found in Romans, chs. 7- 8.  In ch. 7, Paul invoked a Jewish tradition which presents covetousness as the root of all other evils.  In so doing, he implied that he regarded unrestrained desires as natural until he was confronted with the commandments, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods or his wife."  Immediately, desires became a source of inner turmoil.

         (Aside:  Today, many Republicans regard Capitalism as God's greatest gift to humans and view government regulation as human interference with God's activity in human history.  But their rhetoric justifies their refusal to listen to the cries of the poor and marginalized by disguising covetousness (in the form of greed) as a God-given imperative to act out of enlightened self-interest.)

    My experience of the value of law concerned the issue of violence, not the issue of covetous desires.  I am quite sure that I did not become aware that my treatment of my youngest brother hurt him whenever I treated him as other children (and adults) treated me until my mother made clear that she would not allow me to hit or torment him.  As Paul notes, however, this prohibition merely set me up for situations in which I did the evil that I would not do instead of the good that I wanted to do, but I tried to do so in ways that she would never notice.

    Initially, Mother's prohibition did not evoke more determined efforts to do the good or teach me how to listen to the movement of the indwelling Spirit in long-buried and crazily tangled longings and passions.  To learn that lesson, I had first to learn how to sort out these feelings, hear the voice of my longing for intimacy, identify and feel the buried feelings that distorted my person-to-person involvements, abandon the temptation to view myself as the innocent victim of villainous action on the part of others, and entrust myself to the love of a triune God.  But that process, I insist, bore fruit when I could embrace an elusive longing to live with personal integrity in my interactions with those I loved and those who entered by life as a priestly representative of God's all-inclusive love.     

                

    Addendum:  I had finished this reflection before a student came to talk with me.  A professor whom he admired and respected discovered that he had cheated on an examination.  As he talked about his inner turmoil, he blurted out:  "I'm so ashamed;  I violated a trust."  And I wanted to cheer.  The personal dimensions of the failure, not a confession of guilt for violating a moral norm or academic prohibition.

               This encounter evoked a comparison between a Kantian ethics and an ethics of intimacy.   In his Foundations for a Metaphysics of Morals, Kant located moral issues in the internal turmoil so vividly evoked in and through Augustine's Confessions.  To frame his analysis of this turmoil, he accepted the Hellenic assumption that reason must rule disruptive passions and desires, reduced passion and desire to natural motivations which could have no moral import, and invoked the conception of reason developed in his Critique of Pure Reason.

               That Critique was a determined effort to recover rationalism from Hume's empirical critique.  Hume's critique revealed that an analysis of a single experience cannot yield certain knowledge of how the entities involved would react to changed conditions.  To counter that critique, Kant accepted Newtonian physics as the paradigm example of the use of reason.  One feature of Newton's theorizing was especially influential.  On the foundational level, he grounded his mechanics in idealized Laws of Motion which enabled scientists to discover how gravity worked without knowing what gravity was.  In Kant's analysis of morality, a maxim (principle), "Always treat rational beings as ends, never merely as means," functioned in the manner of Newton's Laws of Motion.  Presumably, its application enabled rational beings to master passion and desire without the need to understand their tangled contributions to internal turmoil or to predict the consequences of their moral actions. 

               The analysis as a whole can be succinctly sketched.  Morality resides in disinterested, dispassionate judgments.  Indeed, since passion and desire are natural motivations, acting from compassion is immoral because it deviates from the impartiality dictated by reason.  As a result, a Kantian morality privileges guilt over shame and impersonal judgments over intensely personal involvements.  And the most that it can promise is a freedom consisting in mastery of an inner turmoil that effectively silences any call to sort out tangled motivations and assess possible consequences.

              Note, however, that Israel's prophets also invoke internal turmoil as the source of moral issues.  But they do so by centering the call to respond morally in tangled and often inarticulate cries of pain, rage, shame, care, concern, compassion, longing and aspiration.  Quite obviously, a moral discourse centered in these cries privileges a sympatric [sic] imagination over a fictive voice of reason and, by extension, shame over guilt as a motivation for a quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence that can only be realized through intensely personal involvements with other honest searchers.

               In sum, guilt is triggered by a fear of judgment, while shame is rooted in a longing to live with personal integrity,  (For the sake of completeness:  Individuals who are violated by another are plagued by a toxic shame.  This shame is triggered by a sense of helplessness which takes the inescapable vulnerability of human existence to an excruciating extreme.  As such, it is a distortion of the longing to live with integrity.)

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20. LITERARY FORMS: THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

    The postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion is often presented as a method of deconstruction.  The term, deconstruction, has linguistic roots in Descartes' use of a biblical metaphor which referred to a house built on sand  To set the stage for his methodical doubt, Descartes referred to Scholastic philosophy as a towering edifice grounded in sand.  Naively, he supposed that his methodical doubt could strip away vestiges of the past in a way that yielded his own myth of pure beginnings.  On their part, postmodernists begin with the awareness that it is quite impossible to escape entirely from the formative power of the language we acquired through the process of socialization or through an introduction to an academic discipline.  To subvert the authority of any such language, however, they used a reading code indebted to Nietzsche's archeology of knowledge and genealogy of morals to expose the literary conventions which structured the edifice and the literary foundations which supported it.  Metaphorically speaking, they used a hermeneutics of suspicion to deconstruct the foundations and structures of literary constructs.  (A paradigm example: The exposure of the literary foundations of the assumption that reason provided a god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and reality.)

    Though Thomas Kuhn is an historian concerned with the sociological nature of scientific inquiry, not a postmodernist critic, his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions illustrates the workings of Nietzsche's archeology of knowledge better than Nietzsche's own texts.  To target the pretense that the prevailing depiction of the physical sciences as a linear-progressive advance from ignorance to knowledge, he used Wittgenstein's insistence that languages consist of many distinctive forms of life to marshal evidence designed to show that science was in fact a communal enterprise which progressed by fits and starts.  In effect, it invited those who sought to understand the workings of the scientific method to view  traditional histories of science and contemporary understandings of the scientific method with suspicion, without denying the fact that knowledge acquired by scientific inquiries enhances our ability to harness nature to our purposes.

    Nonetheless, Nietzsche's archeology of knowledge has been influential in literary circles precisely because the critical apparatus it codified exposed the literary origins of the foundational texts of the western philosophical tradition and thereby revealed that languages generated by this tradition now texture the everyday experiences of those who dwell within western cultures.  But when Nietzsche's own archeology of knowledge is viewed from the perspective provided by his genealogy of morals, it is obvious that he forged this distinctive literary form because it enabled him to expose the workings of a hidden will to power in a rationalist tradition which assumed that the totalizing thrust of language promised comprehensive knowledge and definitive judgments.

    In this regard, the critical apparatus encoded in this distinctive literary tradition was indebted to previous instances in which the interrogatory stance at the core of a conception of reason was used to subvert the totalizing thrust of language.  (Elsewhere, I describe instances in which the constrictive rule of the totalizing thrust of language provoked recourse to the interrogatory stance as instances in which reason recoiled upon itself.)  I.e., Nietzsche encoded the exteriorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance in a hermeneutical theory designed to deconstruct the literary conventions and foundations of the assumption that the use of reason could generate a language which satisfied criteria derived from the totalizing thrust of language.  But he did so for his own purpose, and that purpose is evident in his determination to replace voices which endowed reason with the power to compel assent to its judgments and consent to its dictates with his own god-term, an all-pervasive will to power. 

    The workings of this god-term are obvious in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals.  In this text, his aphorisms target the insidious ways that rationalists obscure distinctions between methodologies designed to resolve epistemological issues and ethical inquiries which promise to resolve issues raised by the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, crippled, and marginalized.  Since he traced the moral discourse generated by the Christian tradition to the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's prophets, he implicitly contrasted this discourse with (1) the rationalist assumption that reason must rule passions and desires and (2) the natural law theory of ethics forged by Aquinas.  But he used his purposive reading of the moral discourse generated by the Christian tradition as a call for compassion for his own purpose. That purpose is encoded in his use of a distinctive literary form, the genealogy of morals, to endow his own analysis of moral discourse with a dialectical structure which he named "the transvaluation of values." For the first stage of this evolutionary process, he celebrated ancient nobles as life-affirming individuals who assumed that might makes right.  To introduce the positive contributions of the Christian tradition, he noted that the lack of a rich language of human interiority and human agency condemned these nobles to crude eruptions of passion and equally crude gratifications of desires.  For the second stage, he sought to impose his authority on readings of the Christian tradition by characterizing the moral discourse it generated as a necessary stage in the development of a language of human interiority. 

    I find Nietzsche's reading of the Christian tradition both revealing and amusing.  In revealing ways, it traces the development of moral discourse in the tradition to the prophetic proclamations that God's moral will speaks in and through the cries of the oppressed and dispossessed.  By implication, it exposes the will to power at work in arguments designed to ground moral discourse in the will of a God who is Lord, Lawgiver and Judge.  Most importantly, it gives due prominence to the role of the prophets in the emergence of a moral discourse which faces individuals with questions concerning their motives and intentions and nurtures a sympathetic imagination.  But I am amused by his insistence that priests are individuals endowed with the same massive will to power as the nobles they criticize, but differ from these nobles because they will the void rather than a fullness of life.  And I am also amused by Nietzsche's desire to present himself as the prophet who announces the third and final stage of the transvaluation of values.

    In this stage, Nietzsche suggests, the workings of an all-pervasive will to power are about to project supermen who will live beyond good and evil.  In effect, these supermen will be like the early nobles who give free reign to passion and desire.  But because they now dwell within the language generated by the western literary tradition, they can now texture their experiences exquisitely. 

    I use the literary forms of the archeology of knowledge and the genealogy of morals to generate readings which suggest that two metaphors, a metaphor of power and judgment and a metaphor of intimacy, have generated the many forms of life which enable individuals to transform an elusive longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence into a realizable quest.  And I also suggest that Nietzsche's reading of the Christian tradition accurately exposes the hidden will to power that perpetuates the misplaced debate between Catholics and Protestants.  Clearly, the debates' polemical structure holds participants captive to the massive self-deception inherent in any pretense that one's tradition tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

    Finally, if I were tempted to counter Nietzsche's suggestion that I will the void, I question whether he was even capable of committing himself to an ever-deepening person-to-person involvement.

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19. COMPASSION

    Whenever ecclesiastical authorities justify the harsh judgments they seek to impose as dictates of an objective moral order, I want to protest:  "Have you no understanding of the compassion so evident in Jesus' dealings with wounded individuals?"

    To expose the will to power in such efforts to justify judgments, I have sometimes brought up the devastating critiques of traditional efforts to justify the ways of God to unbelievers that abound in the Philosophy of Religion.  Recently, I realized that all these efforts seek to accredit the conception of God derived from a metaphor of power and judgment.

    One such argument can be simply stated:  If there is not a God who rewards and punishes human actions in the next life, human beings would have no reason to be good.  After all, the wicked often prosper in this life, while bad things happen to good people.

    The argument seems plausible to individuals who have been socialized to believe that Adam's original sin left his offspring inescapably self-centered (or, at best, motivated by enlightened self-interest) and that God is just.  To me, however, it is simply another attempt to disguise the immorality of efforts to justify an objective morality.

    In my now abandoned work on moral discourse, I centered moral discourse in the longing for an ever-more fully human and uniquely personal existence.  I grant that many individuals are not aware of this longing.  But the moral discourse generated by a metaphor of intimacy identifies the wounding interactions with other individuals which have stifled or stunted this longing, often in ways that evoke resistance to genuinely personal initiatives taken by others.  And when individuals become capable and willing to address this woundedness, they begin to understand that, without intimate involvements with others, the quest for a more-fully human and uniquely personal existence is doomed to failure.

   In sum, this ethics of intimacy voices a call for vulnerable and respectful self-revelations when intimate involvements tap deeply buried and hopelessly tangled feelings,  Individuals are free to respond to or silence the call.  But the ethics also reveals that feelings we bury in order to control them exert a hidden control over our interactions with others.

    At this point, a difference between the ethical theories advanced by Socrates and Kant and the ethics of intimacy deserves mention.  Thus, Socrates believed that subjecting face-to-face dialogue concerning moral notions to the dialectical structure enshrined in the so-called Socratic method would confer a self-knowledge that, in turn, conferred self-mastery.  Centuries later, Kant argued that the use of reason to generate categorical imperatives would enable human beings to harness passion and desire to moral ends and become free in the process.  Both grounded moral discourse in a metaphor of individuality indebted to the interiorization of literary as an interrogatory stance rather than a metaphor of intimacy designed to enable individuals to voice their tangled depths vulnerably and respectfully.

    In my encounters with wounded individuals as a priest and as a person, therefore, I remind myself that a call for vulnerable and respectful interactions includes a call to be present without judgments and agendas.  If I were challenged to offer theological justification for this conviction, I would invoke my passionate belief that Jesus is fully human as well as fully God, that he is a wounded Healer who comes to us through one another, and that the God revealed through the incarnation of the eternal Word is a God of love, not a God of power and judgment.

    By extension, if the challenge were formulated as an issue in moral theology, I would insist that my commitment to be a priest forbids me to judge or punish anyone.  If the person I encounter is a sociopath, any such reaction be a waste of breath or energy.  And so it is with the moral people who let me into their lives, since they are judging and punishing themselves more harshly than I could ever do.

    In sum, when I succeed in being present without judgments or agendas, I find that the indwelling Spirit moves in my wounded depths in ways that enable me to be vulnerably honest about what I think and feel, real or imagined, since I often cannot tell the difference.  And I find that wounded individuals hear what I think and feel as an invitation to trust me with deeper and more vulnerable self-revelations, not a judgment which has no interest in healing the woundedness that, in Paul's terms, prevents them from doing the good that they long to do.  And I find that the Spirit's love evokes a sympathetic imagination which enables me to respond with genuine compassion, and I now trust that this willingness to share honestly in the grieving process can bring new life out of cross-situations.